had to talk to him right away. Swearing under my breath, I settled in for a long night of work.
Nasir made an immediate impression. A couple of inches under six feet, he easily weighed two hundred fifty pounds and had been roughed up pretty badly by the Iraqi cops who had arrested him. But he didn’t seem intimidated by the situation and showed no fear or the slightest trace of nerves. My first impression was that getting anything from this guy was going to be a chore.
It was. For the first several hours, he had his story and he stuck to it: He claimed he had no contact with his extended family and friends and was living peacefully at home with his wife and kids since the war began. I did everything I could think of to shake his self-confidence, but he wouldn’t break. Finally, with Adam the terp getting hoarse from echoing my yelling and screaming, we took a break. I went back to the house to get something to eat. A group had gathered around the television. The game was in the last five minutes and Texas was getting their asses kicked. Go Razorbacks!
The prospect of the Sooners’ mortal enemies getting trounced provided fresh motivation. I knew Nasir could give me invaluable information on the inner workings of the Hamaya. I just didn’t know how to get it out of him. I returned to the guesthouse and started again, this time asking general questions about his life and his job. I was fishing for something, anything, that might point me in the right direction.
Slowly, over the course of the next few hours, the prisoner began to open up. Obviously he wasn’t going to tell us where we might find any of his family members who were still in hiding or overseeing the insurgency. But the details of his everyday life were not out of bounds. Answering simple questions would give him the appearance of being honest and innocent and doing his best to cooperate.
What Nasir confided was a blueprint to the operation of Saddam’s bodyguards. At any given time, he explained, there were thirty-two inner-circle Hamaya, divided into two sixteen-man teams on separate shifts. Each team had a leader—the Marafiq—and he provided me with their names. He also gave me the names of twenty-nine of the thirty-two inner-circle bodyguards along with their ranks. It was interesting to note that rank didn’t necessarily convey power within the inner circle. Rank was based solely on time of service. Power was about family connections and proximity to Saddam, and a major with good connections could carry more authority than a full-bird colonel.
I may have missed an important game, but at the end of my session with Nasir, I had learned two crucial things. First, we finally had a way into the inner circle of Hamaya, the ones most trusted by Saddam. It was no longer about an endless fraternity of relatives popping up at random intervals. Since my arrival, I had been working off the list of two hundred bodyguards of varying importance that Jared had given me. I could now concentrate on just thirty-two of them. While I still wasn’t sure where those thirty-two might eventually take me, at least it was a manageable number.
The other important takeaway was that it wasn’t always necessary to break a prisoner in order to get good information. I was never able to frighten or intimidate Nasir into telling me what I wanted to know. But just by talking with him about his life as a bodyguard, I learned more than I had from a dozen other interrogations. The fact was, Nasir was a prime example of a prisoner whose guilt or innocence didn’t really matter. I was in the business of getting information and it didn’t matter if the source was good, bad, or indifferent, as long as he had what I needed. And I could find a way to get it out of him
It was shortly after OU whipped UCLA in late September that Sergeant Olsen approached me again about some other sources he had been developing.
This time it was a trio of guys who lived east of the Tigris not far from Al-Alam. Olsen called them the Three Amigos. He wanted me to talk to them because they claimed to have knowledge about the Al-Muslits, specifically Radman Ibrahim.
Radman was the cousin of Nezham, whom we’d been after on the raid the night I first arrived in Tikrit. I’d since found out that Radman had been an administrator for the inner circle of Hamaya and was considered one of the most powerful members of the bodyguard elite. Olsen’s three sources claimed that this high-ranking Al-Muslit still occasionally visited a farm he owned in the area north of Tikrit. They were offering their services to let us know the next time he showed up.
“Why are you willing to help us capture him?” I asked them after they’d been brought over to the guesthouse.
“We want to work for the governor of Tikrit,” the self-appointed spokesman replied. “Maybe you will put in a good word for us.” The fact was, these three didn’t really have much of a connection to Radman. All they had was a vague idea of his whereabouts and his role in the insurgency. But at least their enthusiasm counted for something.
“But we will need vehicles, weapons, and telephones to do the job,” added another amigo.
“What for?”
“When we have a car we will join the insurgency,” the spokesman explained. “We will protect ourselves with weapons. And when we find Radman, we will call and tell you.”
I stifled a laugh. “Let’s get this straight,” I said. “You help me get a bad guy and maybe I can help you. But not until then. In the meantime, find out what you can about Radman and let me know when you get something we can use.”
They didn’t like it, but they didn’t have a choice. We agreed to meet again in ten days to see if they had found out anything. I had my doubts.
But I did have the feeling that things were beginning to move, even though I had no idea where they were going or how to get out ahead of them. Working with the THT sources hadn’t produced much in the way of results, but neither had most of my interrogations. I was still looking for patterns, networks, or a string of simple coincidences that might add up and get us somewhere. The Three Amigos would probably produce nothing, but I couldn’t afford to ignore any possibility, no matter how slim.
Through constant interrogating, I was slowly beginning to get a better picture of insurgency activities in Tikrit itself. Some of it was being conducted by young Iraqi men who had formed loose-knit gangs to kill Americans. There was little difference between them and any Crip or Blood in a U.S. inner city. The ones who actually did the shooting or set off the IEDs became the leaders, while others joined purely because of peer pressure.
One of the most notorious of these gangsters was a kid named Munthir. He controlled three small but deadly insurgency cells. In late September, his house was raided. Munthir wasn’t there, but four of his brothers were captured and brought in for interrogation. The information they provided was of limited usefulness. But the hunt for Munthir did provide me with an important new source of intelligence about what was happening on the streets of Tikrit.
We called this new source Fred. He had been working with Chris as one of his informants and had given him Munthir’s supposed location. As a street criminal, he was adept at infiltrating these teenage insurgency groups. When Chris finished debriefing him, I began talking with him as well. He was a fountain of information, providing details about specific neighborhoods in Tikrit, who operated where, and whether they were part of a bigger organization.
But I still needed to find a way to bring it all together, to link the suspects and sources and separate players. Maybe it was all nothing more than a freelance network of insurgents working on their own. But maybe not. Maybe someone was running the whole thing.
Chapter 8
CHANGING THE GUARD
By early October, the team’s tour of duty in Tikrit was coming to an end. As they prepared to leave, I naturally thought back over the last nine weeks. Even though you couldn’t call it a full-on success, I still felt that we had accomplished a lot. We had captured several bad guys and helped to identify dozens of others. We had helped to maintain a strong American presence in a part of the country that had been intensely loyal to Saddam. Most importantly, we were beginning to make progress in unraveling Tikrit’s network of power and influence.
I was sorry to see the team go. I had gotten as close to them as they would allow anyone to come. It was an honor to have served with such a group of elite soldiers. I was especially going to miss Jeff. Without question, he
