I jumped up, feeling a huge surge of adrenaline. “Hell, yes, I know him. Why?”
“That was Walt on the phone,” the interrogator replied. “They got Muhammad Khudayr and a few other guys. He said you’d know what he was talking about. They’re bringing him in now.”
“What about Muhammad Ibrahim?” I asked.
The major shrugged. “Walt said they didn’t get him, only Muhammad Khudayr.”
It was good news, but not what I’d been hoping for. If Muhammad Ibrahim had been at the target, Walt would have known. Muhammad Khudayr was my only link to the former bodyguard. But I was running out of time to follow up the lead. I had needed Muhammad Ibrahim to be at that house.
But one Muhammad was better than none at all. I turned to Lee. “You want to work tonight?” I asked him.
“Do I have a choice?” he replied with a grin. He nodded to the night shift interrogator. “We’ll take the new detainees coming in.”
I was finally going to interrogate Muhammad Khudayr. It was a name I had first heard from Thamir Al-Asi’s son, who had identified him as the brother of the dead insurgent leader Abu Sofian. He was closer to Muhammad Ibrahim than anyone else on the link diagram. And Muhammad Ibrahim was one step away from Saddam himself. The two Muhammads weren’t just ghosts or figments of my imagination any more. We had one of them. Now we just had to get the other one.
It was 0200 before the shooters showed up with the four new prisoners. They were hooded and handcuffed. Muhammad Khudayr was one of them. The others were unknown. I immediately asked the team commander, but was told Muhammad Ibrahim was not at the site. The shooters had been given a photo of him. It was the same blurry black-and-white snapshot I had carried around in my wallet for weeks. They knew who they were looking for. But they hadn’t found him.
I had only a few hours left to question Muhammad Khudayr. But despite the pressure, I felt calm and totally in control. I was in my own personal zone, a place of complete confidence and self-assurance. It’s a strange sensation, almost an out-of-body experience, like a batter at the plate, when the ball is as big as a grapefruit and impossible to miss.
As I prepared for the interrogation, I realized that I had been in that zone for a while now. It had started in mid-October, when I had questioned Ahmed Yasin. He had verified that his family was heading up the insurgency. That key interrogation had confirmed my theory. It gave me the incentive to look for this specific family of bodyguards even when the official hunt was focused on High Value Targets. More important, it had given me the ability to intensely focus on my job. A really good interrogator can usually get one out of twenty-five detainees to break and provide actionable information. An average interrogator might get one out of a hundred. Now I only had one to break and one night to do it. I wasn’t worried. I was in the zone.
0218 13DEC2003
On my way to the interrogation cell, I ran into Lee’s terp John, with whom I would be working for the night.
“I thought you were leaving, Eric,” he said as he hurried alongside me.
“I’ve still got six hours,” I replied. “I’m really going to need your help, John.”
“Of course.” I could see he was picking up on my energy.
We got to the prison where Lee was handling the in-processing. I pulled him aside. “This is going to go fast,” I told him. “I need you to get a few of the prisoners I brought with me from Tikrit. I might need their help.”
“Give me the names,” Lee replied. He had his game face on. “I’ll have the guards round them up. They’ll be sitting out in the hallway in three minutes.”
“Will they be able to hear the interrogation from there?” I asked. I only wanted them in on the questioning when it suited my purpose.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lee assured me. “I’ll have them wear earplugs. They won’t hear a thing.”
“Great.” I told him who I wanted: my most reliable collaborators, Basim Latif and Sabah’s brother Luay.
We headed for the cell where the detainees from the hit were being held, still handcuffed and hooded. The guard pointed out Muhammad Khudayr. John and I walked him to the interrogation room. It was coming up on 0400.
The last thing I wanted him to know was that I was in a hurry. I needed him to think that we could go on all night and day if necessary. I started, as usual, with the basics.
“What’s your name?”
“Muhammad.” From his first answer I knew that he wasn’t going to cooperate willingly.
“Muhammad what?”
“Muhammad Khudayr.”
“Where do you live?”
“I live at the house where your soldiers came to get me.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Since the fall of Baghdad.”
“Where else do you live?”
“My family lives in Samarra. I visit them when I am not looking for work.”
“How long have you lived in the Baghdad house?”
“About two months.”
At that point I took a calculated risk. This game of cat and mouse was eating up time I couldn’t afford. I had hoped to get a feel for whom I was dealing with and what he wanted to hide from me before getting to the important questions. But this was no ordinary interrogation. Muhammad Khudayr wasn’t going to give me the time of day, much less the time I needed to break him. I was going to have to speed this up and to try something new, something I would come to think of as the “brutally honest” approach. I had no choice.
“Muhammad,” I said, keeping my voice pitched low so that he had to work to hear me, “I want you to look at me and listen carefully. I know exactly who you are and what you have done. I have captured and questioned many people who have worked for you. They’ve told me everything. You have to stop thinking about how you’re going to get out of this situation. You need to stop thinking about what you are and are not going to tell me. I am going to explain exactly what you need to do. The only way you can help yourself is to help me. And the only way you can help me is to tell me where I can find Muhammad Ibrahim Omar Al-Muslit.”
He stared at me defiantly. “I do not know this person.”
“Let’s try this again,” I said in the same measured tone. “I know that you are personally responsible for the deaths of many Americans and Iraqis in Samarra and Baghdad. I know that you work directly with Muhammad Ibrahim Omar Al-Muslit. I know that you have been with him constantly since your brother Abu Sofian was killed a month ago.” I leaned forward. “I know everything you’ve done.”
“I don’t know the man you are looking for.”
I stood up and motioned for the guards to take the prisoner to the back of the room and gag him. I ducked into the hallway, where Lee was waiting with the detainees from Tikrit. As he had promised, they were wearing earplugs. I blindfolded Luay, the brother of the Samarra insurgent leader Sabah, and brought him into the interrogation room. Sitting him in front of me, I removed his blindfold and earplugs. He hadn’t seen or heard Muhammad Khudayr, who was watching from the back of the room. I was improvising now, hoping I could pull off this last-ditch attempt to break the prisoner.
“Luay,” I asked, “how many meetings did you sit through with your brother and his group when they planned attacks to kill Americans?”
“Too many,” he replied.
“When was the last one?”
“About two weeks ago.”
“Who was at that meeting with your brother?”
“Muhammad Ibrahim and Muhammad Khudayr.”
“Were they at every meeting?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Turn around, Luay,” I told him.
Fear flashed on his face when he realized we were not alone. He pivoted in his chair to see Muhammad Khudayr, gagged and glaring at him. He had witnessed Luay give incriminating information.