And I already knew exactly how I wanted to focus the new resources. I didn’t waste any time. Meeting with my old friend Sergeant Olsen, who commanded one of the most conscientious of the 4th ID’s THT teams, I debriefed him on everything I had learned about the Al-Muslits. The implication was clear: these were the guys we were going after now. Olsen returned the next day with the Three Amigos in tow. I hadn’t talked to the trio of informants since I’d sent them off a few weeks earlier to see if they could find Radman. Now they were back, claiming they had a lead on Farris Yasin instead. They still wanted weapons, vehicles, and cell phones. I wasn’t sure about these guys but still thought they might be useful.
“Farris Yasin has two friends,” I told them, recalling what Ahmed had revealed. “One of them is Shakir and the other is Abu Qasar. Where are they?”
“Shakir is the leader of an insurgency group in the north,” the spokesman replied.
“What about Abu Qasar?”
They looked at each other, grinning. “Mister,” the main amigo continued, “you can find Abu Qasar yourself. He is always at the teashop in town. He is too old to fight.”
“Is he a friend of Farris Yasin?”
They all nodded.
“So go get him.”
“We will soon get you Farris Yasin,” the spokesman insisted. “Abu Qasar is nothing.”
“Good,” I replied. “Then you shouldn’t have a problem bringing him to me. You do that and I’ll give each of you an AK-47. Hell, I’ll even throw in a car.”
It wasn’t until early November that we finally got a break in the search for the top tier of Al-Muslits. The problem was, I didn’t recognize it when it finally showed up.
The information had come from a source that the 4th ID military police had been developing. His name was Izzecki, from the northern city of Kirkuk, and he was in his early twenties. He’d been brought to me in the first place because he insisted that he knew exactly where Farris Yasin was and would take us to him immediately. But I had the feeling that something wasn’t lining up with the kid. He claimed to be Farris Yasin’s best friend. That seemed unlikely since there was at least a thirty-year age difference between them. He also couldn’t tell me much about the family or prewar activities of this powerful Al-Muslit. Then he drew a blank when I asked him to name some other friends of Farris Yasin. He had no knowledge of either Shakir or the old man Abu Qasar whom I knew were close to Farris.
It was pretty much downhill from there. Izzecki insisted he had no prior knowledge of his supposed friend’s insurgent activities. It was only when he learned that the Americans wanted Farris that he decided to turn him in for the reward. There would be a fight to the death, he warned, when we tried to arrest Farris. He insisted that we should bomb the house where he was hiding.
I wasn’t worried about a fight to the death. I knew the team would be in and out of the location before anyone could react. What really bothered me was the fact that this kid had come out of nowhere with valuable intelligence on a dangerous insurgent leader and wanted us to hit him with everything we had. At the same time, he refused to go on the raid or to pick out Farris from a lineup if we captured him alive.
Who was really at that site? Was it Farris Yasin or someone Izzecki wanted out of the way? Maybe this was all about using the Americans to do his dirty work and pick up some quick cash in the bargain.
After a couple of hours, I took Kelly aside and recommended that we definitely not raid the house that Izzecki had identified as Farris Yasin’s hideout. But the 4th ID military police battalion commander didn’t see it that way. And he had the power to give the raid a green light. Behind every one of these hazardous sorties was a political reality that made them even more risky. The task force in Baghdad was keeping a close watch on everything that happened in the regions where teams had been assigned. Tikrit was no different. We had had our share of dry holes and while the difficulties of procuring actionable intelligence was understood, every one of those failed raids had a name attached to it. Get enough black marks next to your name and they’d get someone else to do your job.
But it wasn’t even as simple as that. There were degrees of failure. If you raided a house in search of a target and couldn’t prove he had ever been there, you got written up for a completely dry hole. If you could establish that he’d been there within the last forty-eight hours, you got away with what I called a damp hole. Not as bad. If the guy had actually been there within the last two hours but you just missed him, you’d pretty much done your job.
The worst thing that could happen was approving a hit that turned out to be an ambush. I didn’t think that was what Izzecki was leading us into, but I was pretty sure it was a completely dry hole and I didn’t want it in my file. I just didn’t trust the guy and didn’t want to take a chance on what I considered to be, at best, questionable information.
I went with Kelly to break the news to the battalion commander, a colonel with whom I’d worked before. He’d made it clear he was after big fish and believed that he had an instinctive knack for sorting good information from bad. “It just feels right,” he’d say. I knew it was about more than just feeling. My gut might be telling me something, but that was never enough. I had to prove it, tie up the loose ends, and fill in the blanks. Even then, it sometimes wasn’t sufficient. Men would be putting themselves in harm’s way based on my best guess. I had to make sure it was as educated and objective as possible.
“Sir,” I told the colonel, “there is a ninety percent chance that Farris Yasin is not going to be there.”
Those were odds he was willing to take. With a hard-edged stare he told us, “I just want to make sure you realize that if you don’t want it, then we’ll do this hit ourselves.”
We returned to the house. It was the day before the Sooners’ game with Texas A&M, who had ruined our chances of an undefeated season the year before. I was more nervous about the outcome of that game than whether or not I had made the right decision about the hit: there was just no way that kid knew Farris Yasin. After another long night of interrogations, I finally crawled into bed. A few hours later, Bam Bam was shaking me by the shoulder.
“Eric,” he said. “I need you to go over to the MPs and pick up Farris Yasin.”
I wasn’t sure whether I was dreaming. I hoped I was. Aside from recommending a raid that becomes an ambush, the second most serious screwup is turning down a solid hit. I sat up in bed with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t sure what was worse: preventing the team from capturing one of the most wanted Al-Muslits on my own list, or having to face the colonel who had actually done the job against my advice.
Kelly offered to go over with me to the 4th ID compound to pick up the prisoner. “What am I going to say to the colonel?” I wondered as we made our way through the checkpoint.
“Don’t look at me,” Kelly replied. “I’m not the one who told him ninety percent.”
From then on, things only got worse. Farris Yasin was one of the hardest and most frustrating interrogations I’d ever conducted. I knew he was a hardened criminal, a street thug, and a gangster. I knew he was probably responsible for the deaths of more Americans than anyone I’d interrogated in that guesthouse. And I knew he had a wealth of information about the insurgency and the men who led it. He also knew that I knew who he was and what he was doing. He had absolutely zero motivation to cooperate.