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  As John, the case officer, stood up to greet me, Abu Muhammad jumped out of his seat and stood in rapt attention. His eyes followed me intently as I crossed the room.

  It’s hard to act natural when you know that everything about your appearance and behavior is being carefully catalogued. Nothing gets past these guys. They size you up from every angle. They use every opportunity to take in the very thing that is haram (forbidden) in conservative Islam. Here I was—a decent-looking female who was not wrapped up in a black cloak—sent to engage with him. It was his lucky day.

  Establishing rapport is one of the most critical parts of any debriefing. The importance of trust cannot be overstated; if a terrorist was going to consider putting his life in my hands by becoming a mole and ratting out other members of his group, he needed to know I had the operational know-how and savvy to protect him and his information. Given the years I’d spent studying, living in, and traveling around the Middle East, I was keenly aware that my gender put me at an immediate disadvantage. In the source’s mind, I couldn’t protect him because I could never be a player in the dangerous worlds of terrorism and espionage. At this point, I was nothing more than a sexual object.

  The best intelligence officers know how others perceive them and understand how to manage these factors. Proper self-assessment is key. Without this, it would be impossible to surmount the obstacles between me and my source and to capitalize on my God-given strengths. How could I connect with or manipulate a source if I didn’t understand how he perceived me when I walked into the room? My male colleague who was six feet three and weighed 250 pounds was going to be assessed very differently than I was, standing five feet four with a small frame. Regardless of how distasteful it might be, I had to fully grasp and be prepared to confront this person’s stereotypes about me.

  Communications specialists say that you have only a few seconds to make a first impression. I believe that in asset meetings, intelligence officers face the same challenge. Once that first impression is made, they have only a few minutes in which to either cement those assumptions or introduce other variables into the equation. I had about a five-minute window in which to establish my bona fides. That’s all the time needed for any terrorist to decide whether he would respect me or not. I had seen several officers fail in these first few minutes of assessment and never regain control of the relationship. And intelligence is all about control.

  As I read Abu Muhammad’s body language and watched him carefully, it became apparent that this hardened terrorist was more focused on flirting than on getting down to business. Therefore, I had to redouble my efforts to exude professionalism and tact, while also being friendly and approachable. To maximize the impact of the introduction, I had to tap into all that I had ever studied about Arabs and the Middle East. If I didn’t do this properly, his mind would be forever fixated on me as a female rather than as a professional officer he should trust with his life.

  As the case officer was making the introductions, I shook Abu Muhammad’s hand. If I’d allowed it, he’d have stood there holding on to me, using the handshake as an excuse to linger a little too long. (I’m not a fan of the let-me-stand-here-and-caress-her hand-as-long-as-possible trick.) So after the firm shake, I carefully extracted my hand from his grip, and we sat down in our respective chairs. My nervousness began to dissipate as I intensely focused on how to connect with him on my terms.

  In my first debriefing with Abu Muhammad, I struggled to strike a balance. The terrorist and I were doing a dance of dominance, and I had a very fine line to walk. I didn’t sit too close to him, lest he think I was trying to be inappropriately cozy. But I didn’t sit too far away to avoid appearing intimidated or aloof. I looked him carefully in the eyes when I spoke, but I couldn’t hold his gaze too long or he would assume I was flirting (eye contact speaks volumes in the Middle East). At the same time, insufficient eye contact would indicate that I was scared or being dodgy. Though still nervous, I squared my shoulders toward him and sat up as straight as I could. My body language exuded the exact opposite of what I was feeling at that moment: confidence.

  My friendliness and welcoming demeanor are often mistaken for a lack of sophistication or intelligence. Because of this, I had to front-load the conversation with Abu Muhammad in a way that indicated I was well-read and knowledgeable. He needed to know that I had done my homework; I had read the case file and was fully updated on his background and reporting record. Just as important, he needed to know that I understood the crazy and complicated world that was Iraq and that I got him as a person. If I didn’t appeal to his sense of justice (however warped that might be) and his ego, then I would fail.

  Therefore, I took an authoritative approach.

  “Abu Muhammad,” I began in English, “I am so happy to meet you. I have been following your case closely and have been impressed with what you have accomplished in such a short period of time working with John. I very much appreciate your actionable intelligence and your effort to get it to us before attacks were carried out. It is not an easy thing to do, but obviously you are well connected and smart.”

  I could see the compliments were working. Abu Muhammad was beaming.

  He responded in heavily accented English.

  “Thank you. It is very nice to meet you, Layla.” (Layla was the name I chose to use with Abu Muhammad because it translated nicely in both English and Arabic and was a name he could easily remember.)

  I said, “Shukran, shukran, tasharrafna!” (“Thank you, thank you, I’m honored to meet you!”)

  Abu Muhammad was shocked. “Bititkalami ‘Araby?” (“You speak Arabic?”)

  “Na’am, bas ana batkalam ‘Araby shwaya bass. Darast fil al-Qa’hira wa lakin la atathakar kitir min al kalimat.” (“Yes, I speak Arabic, but only a little. I studied in Cairo, but I don’t remember many words.”)

  “Darast fi Misr?” (“You studied in Egypt?”)

  “Na’am, ana bahab Misr. Darast al-‘Arabiyah, al-thaqafah, al-deen, wal-tarikh hinak.” (“Yes, I love Egypt. I studied Arabic, culture, religion, and history there.”)

  Abu Muhammad looked at John and chuckled. He could not believe what he was hearing. Although I had forgotten much of the Arabic I’d learned at Georgetown, my pronunciation is pretty good, which gives people the impression that I am far more proficient than I really am. Because of this, Abu Muhammad’s head was spinning as I kept changing his impression of the woman who had walked through the door. Now that I’d shocked him with some Arabic, he didn’t know how to categorize me.

  Understanding this and wanting to keep the meeting flowing in the right direction, I quickly got down to business.

  “Abu Muhammad, I’m concerned with what’s been happening in the Mansour district of Baghdad with the uptick in sectarian violence and increased attacks against Coalition Forces there. The number of IEDs being deployed in your neighborhood is ridiculous, and they’re not just killing our troops, they’re killing innocent people. In fact, last week’s IEDs mainly injured Sunni civilians, not Coalition Forces.”

  He nodded his head. Meanwhile, I could see surprise flicker in his eyes with the incredible realization that I actually knew what I was talking about.

  I continued. “We need your help now more than ever if we are going to stabilize your neighborhood. The insurgent groups can continue these random and haphazard attacks, but as John noted, your real problems are much bigger than us. Iran’s intervention in Iraq is much more harmful to the Sunnis than Coalition Forces are.”

  He vigorously nodded, and I could sense he was trying to grasp how a Western woman could know all of this and speak intelligently about such topics.

  As this revelation hit him, I sensed a sea change in his perception of who I was. He had quickly arrived at the place I needed him to be: He had decided that I was more than a woman, that I was an officer whom he could trust. I had successfully recruited him to be my friend, and now he could think of me as a counterterrorism partner. And what a feeling that was. In
that moment, I could sense the release of tension in the room (not least of which was my own). The change was so palpable; the whole atmosphere shifted from sexually charged excitement to respect. We could finally get down to business. When Abu Muhammad was not only eager to work with me but anxious to answer my questions and fulfill my requests, I knew the tide had turned. Abu Muhammad wanted me to understand that he could deliver, that he was “the man.”

  Without him even realizing it, I’d used Abu Muhammad’s flawed assumptions about me to crack him open, and now I would be able to get more intelligence out of him than just about anyone else would. I’d started the meeting from a place of being less than human, but I would be leaving with the information our CIA team had been desperately trying to extract: critical intelligence on the identities of the terrorists who had attacked and killed the US diplomat and her security retinue in Baghdad.

  I lived for these moments. Jumping through cultural hoops, confronting stereotypes, and establishing dominance in such a short period of time was a real challenge and an amazing accomplishment. I couldn’t help that I was playing with a handicap, but in the face of those challenges, when I was able to accomplish what others could not, success was doubly sweet.

  This debriefing marked a turning point in my career. I discovered skills I didn’t know I had. In addition to my own surprise, colleagues and managers were fairly shocked. I was such a “nice person,” they assumed this meant I wasn’t crafty, sophisticated, or capable of rocking it against such challenging targets.

  Because of my success in the debriefing room, I was finally recognized for having a solid operational mind, a facility for collecting hard intelligence, and an incredible intuition that helped me untangle tough cases.

  Yep, I could finally tell myself. I’ve got this.

  In the movies, secret agents face their adversaries with guns, weapons, and flashy cars. And they’re so proficient in hand-to-hand combat that they can bring enemies to their knees with the right choke hold or take them down with a well-placed aimed shot. As much as I’d like to think I was that cool, in reality, life in the CIA is much more pedantic.

  What most people don’t know is that the CIA is really a massive sorting agency. Intelligence officers must sift through mountains of data in an effort to determine what is authentic and useful, versus what should be discarded. We must consider the subtleties of language and the nuance of the nonverbal. We must unwind a complicated stream of intelligence by questioning everything. In the counterterrorism realm, this process has to be quick; we have to weed out bad information with alacrity. We can’t afford to make mistakes when it comes to the collection, processing, dissemination, and evaluation of terrorism intelligence. As we say in the CIA, “The terrorists only have to get it right once, but we have to be right every time.”

  Contained in that massive flow is an incredible amount of useless, inaccurate, misleading, or fabricated information. The amount of bad reporting that is peddled, not only to the CIA but to intelligence agencies all over the world, is mind-boggling.

  That’s precisely why one of the greatest challenges we faced as counterterrorism experts was figuring out who was giving us solid intelligence and who wasn’t. And when we were dealing with terrorists, getting it wrong could mean someone’s death.

  In early 2007 when Iraq was awash with violence, many Iraqis who had formerly counted the United States as the Great Satan for occupying their country switched sides and were willing to work with Coalition Forces against Iraqi terrorists. Brave locals were rebelling against al-Qa’ida’s brutal tactics and were doing whatever they could to take back the streets from these thugs. This was a turning point in the war. Our counterterrorism efforts became wildly successful, fueled by accurate and highly actionable intelligence.

  In one such case, we were contacted by one of our established sources, who was extremely agitated. Mahmud had come from his village claiming that he had seen something that sent chills down his spine. As Mahmud was driving not far from his home, he saw an unknown person exit a building that one of his cousins owned. The building was supposed to be empty and unoccupied. For reasons Mahmud could not explain, he thought that something bad was going on and that maybe the man he saw was a member of Al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI).

  Up until this point, Coalition Forces had found Mahmud’s information extremely reliable. Of course, they did not know his name or personal details, but they made sure we knew that his information had checked out. They contacted us on numerous occasions to praise us for the source’s reporting, explaining that it had allowed them to disarm IEDs and detain insurgents who were causing problems in his village.

  Mahmud had a solid track record. But the bits he provided this time were sketchy and lacked sufficient detail. You can’t just disseminate intelligence reports saying that a location “feels wrong,” “seems wrong,” or that some random dude you just saw “looked like a bad guy.” That kind of information does not meet the threshold for dissemination by the CIA. In this case, however, the handling case officer and I went against protocol and put the report out.

  Within the hour, we were contacted by one of the MNF-I (Multi-National Force–Iraq) units with responsibility for that AOR. They regularly executed counterterrorism operations in that village and wanted to know more about the sourcing. They were interested in taking a look at the abandoned building because they had been trying to locate terrorist safe houses they believed were somewhere in the vicinity of the building mentioned in our report. They had a feeling that nearby safe houses were being used to store large amounts of weaponry and a few had been turned into VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device) factories. But there was one big problem: Military units had acted on similar intelligence reports before, but the reports had been setups—the alleged safe houses were wired to explode when the soldiers entered.

  A spate of these types of explosions had occurred east of Baghdad in Diyala Governorate, and while we had not yet seen this happen out west in al-Anbar Governorate, one could never be too careful. Basically, the military wanted to know: How good is your source? Do you trust him? Do you think he could have turned on you? Could this be a setup?

  This was one of the hardest parts of my job. While I had to protect the identity of our sources when passing on intelligence, I had to balance this with the need to share pertinent details that would allow the military to do their job. It was critical to give them appropriate context on the sources, their access, and their reporting records, and to give them a sense of how good the report may or may not be. Given our positive track record with these military units, I knew that they would trust my judgment, and therefore, I needed to get it right. Lives were at stake.

  My mind was spinning.

  What do I think? Is this a setup? He’s usually such a good reporter, but what if someone discovered he was the mole?

  Even if Mahmud was “on our side,” the insurgents could turn him against us by threatening the lives of his wife and kids. Similar things had happened before. I prayed, “Please, Lord, give me wisdom.”

  The bottom line was, I didn’t know anything for sure, and I told the military commander that. But I also remembered that just the week before, Mahmud had provided a report that MNF-I units said was amazingly accurate regarding the location of an IED in his village. They found the IED and dug it up before the Coalition Humvee rolled over it. So as of then, he was definitely good, and I told the commander that as well.

  The next day, the case officer came to my desk and said, “Did you hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Mahmud’s information was spot on!”

  “Really?” What a relief, I thought. “What happened?”

  “When the soldiers entered the abandoned building, they found seven Iraqis tied up on the floor, barely clinging to life. It was more than a safe house. It was a torture house. There were piles of dead bodies in the next room.”

  Mahmud’s intuition about the stranger he saw exiting that building had been cor
rect. Something about the unidentified man’s behavior or appearance—the look on his face, the posture of his body, the way he walked or the way he dressed—had hit Mahmud as being “off” or “wrong.” It turned out that local AQI affiliates had commandeered the building and were using it as a base to terrorize the local population.

  My colleague pulled out copies of the military’s photographs that captured the unbelievable scene. The first images showed the battered bodies of the young men who had just been saved from certain death. According to the soldiers, when they entered the building and found the prisoners on the floor, the young men were in shock. Emaciated and trembling, they kept saying, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” They could barely stand, so the soldiers steadied them as the young men lifted up their bloodstained shirts for the camera, revealing torsos covered in welts and bruises. If that unit hadn’t shown up when they did, those men would have been dead by the next day.

  I swallowed hard as I flipped through the photographs of the horrors in the next room, and my eyes welled up with tears. The terrorists had discarded the mutilated bodies of other villagers in the adjacent room, leaving them to rot in a twisted mound. I could hardly accept what I was seeing. It reminded me of Holocaust photos that were so inhumane one could not process the depth of the depravity: men and women . . . battered and bruised . . . lives stolen . . . eyes frozen open in emptiness and horror.

  My stomach began to churn, but I made myself look at the pictures. I had to understand what we were fighting for, what our soldiers faced every day. As much as I wanted to dig a hole and stick my head in the sand, I needed to see what was really happening outside our cozy encampment in the Green Zone.

  They say war is hell; they don’t know the half of it.

  Granted, not every source I dealt with was as reliable—or altruistic—as Mahmud. Take Mansur, for example. Mansur was not your average terrorist. He was the amir (leader) of an al-Qa’ida cell in western Baghdad. Even more interesting was the fact that he claimed to have been a member of Fedayeen Saddam prior to the US invasion of Iraq. Fedayeen Saddam can be translated into English as “Saddam’s Defenders,” or “Saddam’s Men of Sacrifice.” The root of the word in Arabic, fedaya, refers to the willingness to sacrifice yourself for others, even unto death. This is the word used in the Arabic version of the Bible to describe Jesus’ willingness to be put to death on the cross for the redemption of humanity.