I also wanted to drop Haddoushi from the list, even though he remained a number one priority for the 4th ID. I’d been chasing this guy since I got to Tikrit and was beginning to have my doubts about his value as a target. The reason he had been singled out was because his nephew had been killed in the shoot-out with Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay. The assumption was that because they were involved, so was he. But as time went on I was less and less convinced that Haddoushi was active in the insurgency, much less that he could take us to Saddam.
To my way of thinking, I wasn’t being prejudicial in the preferences for the link diagram, just selective. I was still talking to dozens of people a week, from low-level detainees to walk-ins to sources. The questioning, in turn, produced hundreds of names of people who might or might not have been worth pursuing. Some of them, no doubt, were bad guys. Others may have been totally innocent or an enemy someone wanted us to get out of the way. It was my job to sort through it all and select targets whose capture would decapitate the insurgency. I had already decided who those targets were.
When Kelly and I finished the link diagram, he warned me to keep it out of sight if any top brass should drop by for a visit. The priorities I had established were definitely not the same ones being worked everywhere else in Iraq. What was important to me was that Kelly and Bam Bam didn’t reject them outright. Kelly just didn’t want anyone else to know what we were doing. It was a legitimate concern. We might get shut down before we got started.
I was in a unique position. When I’d first arrived in Tikrit, I had no say in the targets we went after. They had been established before I got there. But in the months that followed, as the raids kept producing dry holes, it was clear our intelligence capabilities were coming up short. We needed a new approach and I was in the right place at the right time to provide it.
Yet even with the arrival of the new team, I didn’t have the authority or influence to take the hunt where I thought it should go. I was still just one link in an intelligence-gathering team that weighed and evaluated information from many sources. The information gathered from prisoners was still considered of less value than what came from the sources developed by case officers.
That situation changed one afternoon in late October. Rod, the case officer who had arrived with the new team, was a former Navy SEAL. He occasionally joined the operators at the shooting range; it was as much to try to establish a rapport with the elite soldiers as to hone his own skills. But something had gone wrong and he’d been wounded by a stray fragment from an M-203. An M-203 is a grenade launcher that attaches to the bottom of an M-4 rifle, and under normal circumstances should have exploded a safe distance from the shooter. The freak accident had sent a small piece of shrapnel into Rod’s stomach and, although the wound wasn’t serious, they couldn’t locate the piece and would have to perform exploratory surgery. He was immediately out of commission and was shipped off to Germany for medical treatment.
I liked Rod. We’d had the beginnings of a good working relationship and I was sorry to see him go. On the other hand, the accident presented me with a chance to organize our intelligence operation in a whole new way. By the next day, I had been informed that Rod was not going to be replaced. I was being handed his sources and was to guide them as I saw fit. Rod’s boss was going to handle all the logistics with the sources, but it was up to me now to decide which targets they would go after. Rod’s misfortune had been a stroke of luck for me. I was suddenly in charge of all human intelligence for the team. Along with interrogating, I would now be running the source meetings. It no longer mattered whether it was from prisoners or informants. There would finally be a coordinated effort to gather actionable intelligence in Tikrit.
And I already knew exactly how I wanted to focus the new resources. I didn’t waste any time. Meeting with my old friend Sergeant Olsen, who commanded one of the most conscientious of the 4th ID’s THT teams, I debriefed him on everything I had learned about the Al-Muslits. The implication was clear: these were the guys we were going after now. Olsen returned the next day with the Three Amigos in tow. I hadn’t talked to the trio of informants since I’d sent them off a few weeks earlier to see if they could find Radman. Now they were back, claiming they had a lead on Farris Yasin instead. They still wanted weapons, vehicles, and cell phones. I wasn’t sure about these guys but still thought they might be useful.
“Farris Yasin has two friends,” I told them, recalling what Ahmed had revealed. “One of them is Shakir and the other is Abu Qasar. Where are they?”
“Shakir is the leader of an insurgency group in the north,” the spokesman replied.
“What about Abu Qasar?”
They looked at each other, grinning. “Mister,” the main amigo continued, “you can find Abu Qasar yourself. He is always at the teashop in town. He is too old to fight.”
“Is he a friend of Farris Yasin?”
They all nodded.
“So go get him.”
“We will soon get you Farris Yasin,” the spokesman insisted. “Abu Qasar is nothing.”
“Good,” I replied. “Then you shouldn’t have a problem bringing him to me. You do that and I’ll give each of you an AK-47. Hell, I’ll even throw in a car.”
It wasn’t until early November that we finally got a break in the search for the top tier of Al-Muslits. The problem was, I didn’t recognize it when it finally showed up.
The information had come from a source that the 4th ID military police had been developing. His name was Izzecki, from the northern city of Kirkuk, and he was in his early twenties. He’d been brought to me in the first place because he insisted that he knew exactly where Farris Yasin was and would take us to him immediately. But I had the feeling that something wasn’t lining up with the kid. He claimed to be Farris Yasin’s best friend. That seemed unlikely since there was at least a thirty-year age difference between them. He also couldn’t tell me much about the family or prewar activities of this powerful Al-Muslit. Then he drew a blank when I asked him to name some other friends of Farris Yasin. He had no knowledge of either Shakir or the old man Abu Qasar whom I knew were close to Farris.
It was pretty much downhill from there. Izzecki insisted he had no prior knowledge of his supposed friend’s insurgent activities. It was only when he learned that the Americans wanted Farris that he decided to turn him in for the reward. There would be a fight to the death, he warned, when we tried to arrest Farris. He insisted that we should bomb the house where he was hiding.
I wasn’t worried about a fight to the death. I knew the team would be in and out of the location before anyone could react. What really bothered me was the fact that this kid had come out of nowhere with valuable intelligence on a dangerous insurgent leader and wanted us to hit him with everything we had. At the same time, he refused to go on the raid or to pick out Farris from a lineup if we captured him alive.
Who was really at that site? Was it Farris Yasin or someone Izzecki wanted out of the way? Maybe this was all about using the Americans to do his dirty work and pick up some quick cash in the bargain.
After a couple of hours, I took Kelly aside and recommended that we definitely not raid the house that Izzecki had identified as Farris Yasin’s hideout. But the 4th ID military police battalion commander didn’t see it that way. And he had the power to give the raid a green light. Behind every one of these hazardous sorties was a political reality that made them even more risky. The task force in Baghdad was keeping a close watch on everything that happened in the regions where teams had been assigned. Tikrit was no different. We had had our share of dry holes and while the difficulties of procuring actionable intelligence was understood, every one of those failed raids had a name attached to it. Get enough black marks next to your name and they’d get someone else to do your job.
But it wasn’t even as simple as that. There were degrees of failure. If you raided a house in search of a target and couldn’t prove he had ever been there, you got written up for a completely dry hole. If you could establish that he’d been there within the last forty-eight hours, you got away with what I called a damp hole. Not as bad. If the guy had actually been there within the last two hours but you just missed him, you’d pretty much done your job.
The worst thing that could happen was approving a hit that turned out to be an ambush. I didn’t think that was what Izzecki was leading us into, but I was pretty sure it was a completely dry hole and I didn’t want it in my file. I just didn’t trust the guy and didn’t want to take a chance on what I considered to be, at best, questionable information.
I went with Kelly to break the news to the battalion commander, a colonel with whom I’d worked before. He’d made it clear he was after big fish and believed that he had an instinctive knack for sorting good information from bad. “It just feels right,” he’d say. I knew it was about more than just feeling. My gut might be telling me something, but that was never enough. I had to prove it, tie up the loose ends, and fill in the blanks. Even then, it
