We stood in silence for a long moment. “Do you think Saddam is in Baghdad?” I finally asked.
“I have no idea,” he replied. “Why? Do you think he’s in Tikrit?”
I thought back once more on all the mistakes I had made and all the dry holes I had turned up. In spite of it all, there was a feeling I just couldn’t shake. “Yeah,” I said to Lee. “I think he is.”
I arrived at the briefing room at 1400 to find about a dozen analysts and intelligence officers slumped in their chairs waiting for me. It was clear from the moment I walked in that this was the last place they wanted to be. I was an unknown interrogator from a provincial backwater whom no one believed had any further significance in the ongoing hunt for insurgents. Everyone in that room shared the belief that whatever was happening in Iraq was happening in Baghdad. Everything else was a waste of time. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Colonel Walker in the front row, I doubt they would have bothered to show up at all.
Standing at the front of the room, I considered starting off by telling anyone who wasn’t interested that as far as I was concerned, they could take off. But I wasn’t running the show. Colonel Walker was, and he expected a full briefing with his whole staff in attendance. They were obligated to at least stay awake.
Taking a deep breath, I unveiled a blowup of the link diagram I had prepared the night before and launched into a rapid-fire summary of what I had learned over the last five months. Muhammad Haddoushi and the Al-Muslits, Radman Ibrahim and Farris Yasin, Thamir Al-Asi and Abu Drees, Basim Latif and Baby Radman. As I spoke, I thought back on each one of them. It seemed as if I had spent half a lifetime trying to get inside their heads and discover their secrets. In some ways it seemed that I knew them better than my own friends and relatives. I had matched wits with them, confronted them in a contest of wills and pushed them, and myself, to the limit. Some had broken, some hadn’t. Some had told me what I needed to know and some would go to their graves without betraying their loyalty. They were foot soldiers in a cause that a few of them were willing to die for. I couldn’t help but acknowledge that reality, even if their cause meant the death of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. They were, in their way, dedicated men. In order to stop them I had to be just as dedicated.
I didn’t realize how deeply I had entered their world until I tried to explain it to others. I had interrogated over three hundred people during my time in Tikrit. I had put everything I discovered, along with all the conjectures I had made, onto that link diagram. I knew every person on it, and what his connection was to every other person. I knew who had given me the information that had enabled me to fill in each square on that diagram. And I knew who I had cross-checked to confirm that information. The end result wasn’t just a graph of bad guys; it was a four-dimensional map of the insurgency. I knew it like the back of my hand, like the streets of my hometown.
But even while I spoke, painstakingly reviewing the time line and the cast of characters, I couldn’t get away from the fact that they had won and I had lost. For all my determination, Saddam was still at large. The most wanted man in Iraq had eluded me and had lived to fight another day. My only hope was that the men and women in front of me would somehow continue the search and complete the mission.
It didn’t seem likely. It wasn’t just their bored expressions that made the debriefing seem so pointless. It was the fact that, in all likelihood, by the end of the week most of the information I was presenting would be forgotten or lost. Even as I left Tikrit, I had hoped that I’d somehow manage to buy the team another week or two to continue the search for Muhammad Ibrahim. They were deployed there for another month, but after they left, everything that Bam Bam, Kelly, and I had in our heads would be gone forever. That was one of the hardest parts of going home. If the mission wasn’t completed, the intelligence that someone else might be able to use to finish the job would be lost.
And that wasn’t just true for our particular situation in Tikrit either. A lot of valuable information was simply carried inside the heads of the soldiers stationed everywhere when they returned home. It was true that some commanders had made a concerted effort to preserve intelligence and pass it on. But what usually happened was that incoming case officers and analysts opted to develop their own leads and sources. Every time there was a change of personnel, it was like having to invent the wheel all over again. What had come before, no matter how valuable, was often discarded or ignored. It would be even truer in my case. Why should anyone listen to an interrogator with some dumb theories about the insurgency that he hadn’t been able to prove? Running through the link diagram, I might as well have been making it up on the spot. Of course, the $1.9 million added some credibility to what I was saying. But the bottom line was the same: Saddam was missing. And no one in that room seemed willing to follow the clues that I was laying out.
But it turned out that there was one person who had been paying very close attention. After I had finished the briefing and the analysts had asked a few halfhearted questions, Colonel Walker took me aside. “That was impressive,” he said and I felt a flicker of hope. Maybe I’d gotten through after all, and to someone whose opinion counted. “Tomorrow you’re going to give the same briefing to Admiral McCraven. Do you know the admiral, Sergeant Maddox?”
“I know he is currently the task force commander, sir,” I replied, not quite believing what I was hearing.
“That’s right,” Colonel Walker said.
I had never spoken to anyone before with a star on his epaulet. Now suddenly I was being asked to meet with the man who oversaw the most elite military unit in the world. My last days in Iraq had taken an unexpected turn. It wasn’t over, I reminded myself, until it was over.
“In the meantime,” the colonel continued, “I want you to sit down with an analyst and go over your link diagram in complete detail. I don’t want to lose this information when you go home. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.” Not only was it understood. It was deeply appreciated.
Chapter 17
THE ZONE
I was looking forward to briefing the head of the task force. If I could convince him that my theory of the insurgency leadership was right, maybe the work we had done in Tikrit would continue.
Colonel Walker’s response had been encouraging. But I had my doubts that anyone else could really step into my role in the mission. It wasn’t that I thought I was indispensable. What was indispensable was the information I had put together over the last five months. It didn’t matter how many briefings I gave to analysts. There was no way I could effectively pass on that information on. Not in the time I had left.
I was still hoping to hear from Walt about the raid on Muhammad Khudayr’s uncle’s house in Baghdad. It seemed like this was the last best chance we would have of rolling up the two Muhammads. But by the morning of December 12, two days before I was scheduled to fly home, I had received no word from him. I knew that he understood the importance of capturing Muhammad Ibrahim. I just wasn’t sure how committed he was to pushing for a hit that seemed like such a long shot.
The situation had changed radically since I left Tikrit. There the decision to go on a raid was made only by Bam Bam. It was based on his belief in the intelligence I provided. We had a great working relationship. There was no formal reprimand if a hit turned up a dry hole. But there was always the potential for other, more serious, consequences. If I sent the team out on too many bad hits, it would reflect on my reputation and credibility with the whole team. Maintaining their confidence had been one of my prime objectives.