Breaking Cover Read online

  Fedayeen Saddam was a deeply secretive paramilitary force drawn from the tribes most loyal to Saddam Hussein. These men killed, maimed, and tortured to protect Saddam from his real (and imagined) foes. Having groups like the Fedayeen at his disposal was one of the ways the tyrant maintained an iron grip on the Iraqi people. He employed them much as Iran’s revolutionary leadership did with the Basij or as Bashar al-Assad has done with the Shabiha militias in Syria. The group enforced loyalty and maintained control of the population through violence and intimidation.

  As a student of human behavior with an insatiable hunger to understand people, I was extremely curious (and a little nervous) to see what a former Fedayeen Saddam looked like—up close and personal.

  What makes a guy like that tick? I wondered.

  I’ll never forget my first impression of Mansur. The driver and I pulled up to the CPU (car pickup) site, and the person who emerged from the shadows was not at all what I expected: Instead of being a stocky and imposing figure, Mansur was skinny as a rail. He appeared so fragile that I thought, I could take that guy down myself if I had to. I quickly admonished myself for underestimating this twig of a man.

  You know better than that, Michele. Never judge a book by its cover. Give the guy a break. He probably didn’t expect to be met by a girl either.

  We swung the door open and Mansur climbed into the backseat. He immediately slouched down so no one could see him in the car. I turned around in my seat and was surprised to see fear in his face. I stuck out my hand and greeted him in Arabic.

  “Sabah al-khayr. Ahlan wa sahlan.” (“Good morning. Welcome.”)

  Mansur hesitantly shook my hand while muttering the appropriate response.

  “Sabah al-nur.”

  His hand was cold and clammy, and his handshake was limp.

  But there was no time for pleasantries or conversation. We needed to get back to the meeting site as quickly as possible. The vehicle dodged in and out of traffic as the driver and I checked the rearview and side mirrors to be sure we were not being followed. We were in the Green Zone, but one could not take safety for granted anywhere in Iraq. We needed to remain attuned to our surroundings—and know what was beside, behind, and in front of us.

  Trained to be aware of our vulnerabilities at all times, we drove in a manner that minimized our chances of being ambushed. We also took care not to venture too close to MNF-I Humvees that bore signs warning, “Maintain distance from this vehicle or deadly force will be used.” When we reached the meeting site several minutes later, we breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  Once we were settled inside the meeting room, Mansur relaxed. He launched into his prepared brief. I madly scribbled notes as Mansur revealed al-Qa’ida’s latest plans for an attack in a west Baghdad neighborhood. There was no time to breathe. Mansur was so full of information that I could barely keep up. By the end of the meeting, I had scribbled about ten pages of notes that I’d have to decipher later in the office.

  Writing up intelligence reports and operational notes from asset meetings is the least stimulating part of being an intelligence officer, but it is essential. Although the process of typing up the details of a personal meeting is extremely time consuming, as we say in the CIA, “If you don’t write it up, it never happened.” I had to find a way to communicate the substance and tone of a meeting to the legions of people at headquarters following and assisting with the case.

  In addition, I had to be sure to capture all relevant details of planned terrorist operations for the benefit of intelligence consumers. Every detail was important to Coalition Forces and US military analysts and operators who used those reports to stop attacks before they occurred. One thirty-minute debrief could require a day’s worth of research and report writing.

  Operational meetings are a whirlwind, making three hours feel like five seconds. Because I had to focus on so many things at the same time, it felt like the ultimate juggling act. I had to listen carefully; take notes; ask appropriate follow-up questions to clarify confusing or incomplete information; be aware of counterintelligence red flags; maintain rapport; be aware of changes in the source’s behavior, reporting, or general attitude; review communications plans; conduct training; and prepare for the next meeting.

  Because it took so much energy to do all of this, by the time we were finished and had driven Mansur to his drop-off location, I was completely wiped out. All I wanted to do was return to my tiny little trailer and crawl into bed. Instead, I made my way back to the office, knowing I had to not only type up my report but generate several cables to communicate the results of the exchange.

  I should have felt a sense of accomplishment for running a safe and productive debrief, but I soon realized that I felt something else—unease. I couldn’t understand why. Something was bothering me, and it continued to hang over me like a shadow the rest of the day. I kept trying to shake it, but the weird feeling would not go away. In fact, it nagged me for days. I kept wondering, What is wrong with me? Though I didn’t want to acknowledge it, something about Mansur disturbed me, but what?

  That persistent, unshakable feeling of angst was an indication something wasn’t right, though I could not articulate what the problem was. I pondered this over the course of a week until the reason for my temporary insanity slowly came into focus. I finally told the handler, “I don’t think Mansur is who he says he is.”

  I felt a bit foolish saying this because I had nothing to back it up. The handler loved Mansur and told me that CMOs and branch leadership back at headquarters had a very positive impression of the source and his production. He further reminded me, “Mansur has done so much for us! He is the reason why al-Qa’ida is no longer in his village. All the intelligence he gave us on the group there checked out.”

  In discussions with US military colleagues, the handler learned that most al-Qa’ida members in the source’s hometown were either detained by Coalition Forces or killed in counterterrorism operations enabled by Mansur’s information. This was amazing feedback to get on a case. It doesn’t get more solid than that. But for reasons I did not yet understand, I could not suppress the doubt that continued to push its way up like a geyser in my mind.

  It certainly would have made my life easier to reject this intuition, but I felt compelled to explore what was driving the sense that something was wrong. Over the next few days, I was able to pull small bits of information out of my subconscious, to slowly reveal what I had “known” in the first few seconds I met him.

  This man was not behaving like all the other terrorists I had met. He did not project the persona of a terrorist leader or amir. He was terrified to get in the vehicle and shook like a leaf for several minutes after crouching down in the backseat of the armored car. In fact, I remembered thinking, This guy is about to wet his pants!

  The other terrorists would walk into a room and immediately fill it up. They were some of the most arrogant, ego-driven people I have ever met. They had strong personalities, and Iraqi terrorists, at least, acted as if they didn’t fear for their lives in the least (or maybe they just believed they were invincible). They would regularly do things we Americans were certain would get them killed. They acted with a kind of pride that suggested they were either really smart or really stupid, or had a death wish (or some weird combination of all of the above).

  One particular Sunni insurgent was the poster boy for bad guys and the perfect example of someone whose ego preceded him. He was turned by the CIA to work against other members of his terrorist group. He provided good insights into their plans and intentions, enabling us to thwart attacks against Coalition Forces soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad. For this cooperation, the CIA paid him handsomely.

  The only issue was that the bonus he received had to be paid in cash. On one particular day we handed him a bag full of US currency in hundred-dollar-bill increments. Unfortunately, due to a couple of deadly car bombs that rocked the city that day, an early curfew was enforced throughout Baghdad. There wer
e no taxis in sight that he could use to get home. We suggested that we hold on to the money and give it to him at the next meeting when he could arrange for a safer way to transport the cash.

  Despite our supplications, the insurgent decided to take his bag of money and walk home, straight through a Shi’a neighborhood. (Remember, this guy was a Sunni insurgent.) To do such a thing was to tempt fate. If an Iraqi accidentally wandered into the wrong Sunni neighborhood with a name on his driver’s license that clearly identified him as Shi’a, he would never be seen again, and vice versa. The lines were drawn in the sand, and both sides of the conflict knew which areas to avoid and which ones were safe zones.

  But the Sunni insurgent could not be dissuaded. He decided to walk all the way home, right through the middle of his enemies’ neighborhood. We weren’t sure how, but he arrived home safely and in one piece. Maybe it was his fearless attitude that convinced local residents that he was not out of place. This could possibly be attributed to his swagger and cocky demeanor. His attitude was what kept him safe. Only a few people in the world could get away with such a thing, and he was definitely that guy.

  Mansur’s behavior had been quite different. He had trembled in the back of my vehicle and nervously fidgeted when I asked him certain questions.

  Somehow, my brain had compared Mansur’s behavior and personality with the other terrorists I had met and knew instinctively that things weren’t adding up. He did not fit the profile. It had taken my cognitive brain several days to unravel the clues that I had processed in the blink of an eye. Once I was able to tease these details out of my subconscious brain and make sense of those jumbled thoughts, I could finally discern what my gut had been trying to tell me.

  “I hate to say it,” I told my colleagues, “but I think Mansur is a fake.”

  Now, nobody wants to hear that his or her baby is ugly. And nobody wants to think that he or she has been wrong about a case or has been misled for more than a year. That’s why it’s important to be able to confirm or deny any misgivings about a case. We had to determine whether this theory was correct (or not). We needed to dig into Mansur’s access and position, as those details are the foundation of every operational relationship. We began to review his production and realized that while he had provided actionable intelligence in the first six months of the case, the value of his production over the last year had not been clear.

  During the ensuing debriefs, I was attuned to the details of Mansur’s stories, which allowed me to spot inconsistencies in his information. In addition, I carefully monitored his nonverbal behavior for clues that he was uncomfortable discussing certain topics. I noticed that he shifted in his seat and appeared very nervous when I asked detailed questions about his position in the group and queried him about group dynamics.

  If you are an accountant, you will be able to tell me the details of your daily tasks, such as balancing ledgers and preparing financial records. If you are a teacher, you will be able to spell out in great detail what you teach, where you teach, who your students are, and what the teaching experience is like. If you are an active member of a terrorist cell that plans and executes operations but can’t tell me what goes into the operational planning process—i.e., how you choose your targets, who cases the targets and recruits suicide operatives, where you acquire weaponry and build the IEDs, and where you hold planning sessions—then one of two things is occurring: Either you are withholding information, or you are lying and don’t have access to the information. And Mansur wasn’t just claiming to be a member of the group, but one of its leaders. He should have known the group better than anyone else.

  It took us several more meetings to flesh out Mansur’s claims, but when all was said and done, we were able to prove that he was definitely not an amir. Furthermore, he wasn’t even a member of al-Qa’ida.

  At the beginning of his relationship with the CIA, Mansur had provided critical pieces of intelligence that significantly advanced the counterterrorism cause in his village. Mansur had done a very honorable thing: He had the courage to contact authorities and offer to reveal the identities of local terrorists and the locations of their safe houses. This provided counterterrorism forces with the intelligence they needed to rid Mansur’s village of al-Qa’ida, which had taken control of much of al-Anbar Province in western Iraq.

  However, Mansur’s access to this intelligence didn’t come from being one of the bad guys. The village was small enough that everyone in town knew who the terrorists were. It was no secret. Mansur’s five-year-old son could tell you who the al-Qa’ida fighters were and where they lived. In addition, Mansur had never been a member of Fedayeen Saddam. He had initially grabbed the CIA’s attention with this tantalizing claim. Mansur had been right: Being approached by an al-Qa’ida cell leader and former Saddam loyalist certainly got our attention. But these were just Mansur’s fabrications.

  After the village was released from the grip of the terrorists, Mansur wanted to maintain his relationship with the CIA. He didn’t want to lose his only source of income. I couldn’t blame him. He had many mouths to feed, and in the withering economy of a war zone, he wanted to keep a good thing going. Mansur was the sole breadwinner for his large family. That’s a lot of pressure for a young man who had no education and no discernible skills. That’s when Mansur started making things up. He parlayed a tiny bit of access into a full-time job working as a source for the CIA. Incredibly, he kept up the ruse for a year.

  If I had to feed a family and had no job, I might be making up intelligence to put food on the table too. The point is, it wasn’t always easy to figure out who was telling us the truth and who had ulterior motives at play.

  Such was the case with Ahmad. Ahmad was one of many people working against AQI. Not only did he provide intelligence to the CIA, but Ahmad’s fighters had been battling al-Qa’ida for months to push remnants of the group out of their city. AQI was desperate to take the town back.

  For some reason, Ahmad never set right with me. Even though he had been providing information for many months, I did not trust him. Every time I got a report from Ahmad, I combed over it carefully. It’s not like he was “worse” or more hard-core ideologically than other sources. Several of the men we dealt with were far scarier than he was, and although I detested their ideology and worldviews, at least I knew why they were collaborating with us. The CIA could work with a variety of motivations, but we had to know what they were.

  I preferred the straightforward admission of some sources who said, “I hate you, but I will work with you because of X, Y, and Z.” Fine. At least they weren’t pulling our chains. We knew exactly where they stood and why. But with Ahmad, I didn’t know where his loyalties lay or what his justifications were for engaging the Americans.

  Ahmad seemed slippery. I kept wondering whose interests he was really serving. I suspected that Ahmad was a gun for hire, a hustler and swindler loyal to nobody but himself. Whoever was the highest bidder, or whoever appeared to provide the best package, was the one whom Ahmad collaborated with that day.

  In order to keep AQI at bay, Ahmad’s group had erected a checkpoint to control access to the village. Ahmad and his men checked identity cards to ensure that only members of the local community were able to come and go from the town. Ahmad kept asking for more and more resources to hold the checkpoint and to assert the group’s control over the area. But his entreaties seemed too demanding. It sounded to me like Ahmad wasn’t heading up the neighborhood watch efforts because he hated terrorists or cared about the city, but because he wanted to build up his own resources and street creds.

  Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Most of the time I could not tell, and I didn’t believe that he was working with us for the benefit of the local community. He knew how to talk the talk, but I didn’t buy it. I was even worried that he was shaking the local townspeople down for money to “protect” them from AQI.

  Then Ahmad contacted his handler at the CIA with urgent information. He said, “We’ve just had a m
ajor battle at the checkpoint. My fighters have been holding AQI back for days, trying to keep them out of the city. There were explosions everywhere, and I lost many men in the fight. AQI deployed five VBIEDs against us. They also used automatic weapons, killing hundreds of people at the checkpoint. It was really bad, but in the end we were successful, al-hamdu-lil-allah [thanks be to God]. My men held the line and prevented the terrorists from coming back into the village.”

  After relating the details of the villagers’ bloody battle with al-Qa’ida, Ahmad requested additional funds to support his counterterrorism efforts. But something about the story didn’t feel right. AQI often attacked villages and towns in this manner, but five VBIEDs at the same time? This seemed like overkill given the size and strategic value of the location they were allegedly fighting over.

  Verifying information is supposed to be basic protocol for intelligence officers, but in a war zone, the press of business and the lack of sleep meant that time and energy were precious commodities. They were a luxury most of us did not have. We were pulled in a thousand different directions with caseloads and information management requirements that were untenable.

  I could have let it go—that certainly would have been the easier route—but I knew that the more time we spent on bad sources the less time there was to focus on the most pressing business of identifying and disassembling the AQI networks. I racked my brain trying to figure out whether there was a problem with Ahmad’s report. I went back through the notes from the meeting and carefully reviewed his description of the bloody battle on the outskirts of that village.