“Where?”
“They played dominoes at a store. It is owned by a man named Thamir Al-Asi. He has two sons. They help him.”
“Who else was there?”
“Basim Latif. He is the driver for Muhammad Ibrahim. They are always together.”
“You’re going to take me there.”
“Muhammad Ibrahim is gone,” he wailed. “I have told you everything I know.”
“Don’t ever say that again!” I shouted, getting into his face. “You don’t know what I want to know. You don’t even know what you don’t know. I’ll tell you when you’re done.”
But, in fact, we were both done. It was 0600 the next day. I had been interrogating Abu Drees and his two sons, Akail and Ahmed, virtually nonstop for thirty straight hours. Leaving Akail to think over his options, I made my way back to the house and crawled into bed. It wasn’t until my head hit the pillow that I realized that I forgotten to question the helicopter guy. By then it was too late. I was sound asleep.
Chapter 11
THE DRIVER
It turned out that the guy who was supposed to be shooting down our choppers with RPGs was completely innocent. His only crime was being our source’s landlord. Fred just didn’t want to pay his rent and figured that the Americans could solve his problem for him. I had to hand it to Fred. He really knew how to work the angles. And despite the fact that the hit he sent us on had been total bullshit, it had gotten me Abu Drees. And that had gotten me one step closer to Muhammad Ibrahim.
By now I was convinced that the Al-Muslits had graduated from being Saddam’s elite bodyguards to being the leadership core of the insurgency. I may not have been able to prove my theory absolutely, but nothing had disproved it either. In fact, I continued to get good intelligence that told me I was on the right track.
Several key pieces of information had come together to point me in the direction of Thamir Al-Asi. He was the same friend of Muhammad Ibrahim whose name I first heard from the son of Abu Drees. Thamir and his own two sons, Amir and Ahmed, ran a small cement store in Tikrit. Muhammad Ibrahim had occasionally dropped by to play dominoes. From my interrogations of Abu Drees and his sons, I discovered that Thamir was more than just a friend. He actually served as the proprietor for properties that he owned jointly with Muhammad Ibrahim, including the cement store. Several nearby residences were also part of Thamir Al-Asi and Muhammad Ibrahim’s extensive real estate holdings. More interesting still was the fact that he apparently owned the house where his former driver Basim Latif lived. The network of Al-Muslit associates and beneficiaries was now coming clear. Muhammad Ibrahim had three cronies, Abu Drees, Basim Latif, and Thamir Al-Asi. I had learned of their existence from my interrogation of Baby Radman and they had since made a quick move up our link diagram.
More valuable intelligence surfaced in mid-November when Shakir, who along with Abu Qasar was one of Farris Yasin’s closest associates, turned himself in to the local police. I immediately interrogated him and he proved to be a very informative subject. At first he refused to admit any connection to Farris Yasin or to have any knowledge of his activities. But after several intense hours I was finally able to break him down. He then went on to detail for me the authority structure that held the Al-Muslit operation together.
“I was working for Farris, and Farris was working for Radman,” he explained. “I never saw Radman. Only Farris, I swear.”
“And who does Radman work for?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But I heard it was for his brother, Muhammad Ibrahim.”
“When was the last time you saw Muhammad Ibrahim?”
“It has been many months. Since before the war.”
“Are you a friend of his?”
He laughed, as if the idea was absurd. “I was friends with Farris,” he replied. “I knew Radman a little. But Muhammad Ibrahim is different.”
“How different?”
“Mister, aside from Abid Mahmood, his personal secretary, there was no one Saddam trusted more that Muhammad Ibrahim.”
It was exactly what I wanted to hear. Everything we’d done since I’d arrived in Tikrit—focusing on the bodyguards, tracking down the Al-Muslits, constructing a link diagram one suspect at a time—all came down to a single goal: finding Saddam. Shakir’s information was another vital part of the puzzle.
The problem was, I was running out of time. My tour of duty was coming to an end and I was scheduled to return to the States no later than December 15. With the out-processing factored in, that meant I had about three weeks left in Tikrit to get the job done.
To me the next step was obvious. I had to talk to Basim Latif, who had been identified by both Baby Radman and the son of Abu Drees as Muhammad Ibrahim’s driver and close friend. I wanted to get him as soon as possible. But that was easier said than done.
“We already hit the helicopter guy,” Kelly protested when I brought up the subject of bringing in Basim. “We’re probably not going to get approved for another nobody.”
“Basim isn’t a nobody, Kelly,” I replied. “He could take us to Muhammad Ibrahim. And Muhammad Ibrahim could lead us to…” I paused. The last thing I wanted was to create expectations I couldn’t fulfill.
“Look, Eric,” Kelly said with an exasperated sigh. “I told you. We have to move
Now it was my turn to be exasperated. “If Muhammad Ibrahim is our next move, then we don’t have a next move. I don’t know where he is and I don’t know how to find him. Basim can tell us. He knows where to find him. We have to bring him in.”
It was a hard sell. Nobody else grasped the potential importance of Basim. I had already found that out through my connections with the 4th ID’s tactical HUMINT teams and the 4th ID military police battalion. Part of their job was to keep tabs on the actions of low-level thugs and insurgents throughout Tikrit. They had compiled long lists of names, often followed by a one-or two-word description of the suspected activity: IED maker, financier, etc. I had been looking through these pages one afternoon when I came across Basim Latif’s name. “Cousin of Chief” was the notation that followed it. Basim, it turned out, was the nephew of the powerful chief of security for the governor of Tikrit.
“What do you know about this Basim Latif?” I asked the MP lieutenant.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “He was arrested by the local police. His uncle arranged to get him out of prison if he would become a source for us.”
“Are you getting information from him?”
“We haven’t talked to him yet. The battalion commander has been working to maintain a good relationship with the chief. This may have just been a way for us to do him a favor.”
“Listen,” I replied. “You’d be doing me a favor if you can arrange for Basim to come in so I can talk to him.”
Three weeks after his arrest, Basim Latif was suddenly on our side. And that was going to make it even harder to get what I needed out of him. As a source working for us, Basim would have no incentive to reveal what he knew. For that to happen he would have to be a prisoner with the threat of open-ended incarceration hanging over his head. That was my primary reason for wanting him to be in my custody. But it was a sensitive situation. There was no way I could just arrest a close family member of the governor’s security chief. As the lieutenant had told me, the brass at the 4th ID had spent a lot of time building an alliance with the governor of Tikrit. They were not about to allow that relationship to be compromised.
I could understand why. The governor of Tikrit was just about the only Sunni friend we had in the whole Sunni Triangle. Pissing him off could conceivably lead to complaints passed up the line to the highest military and political levels. My only option was to talk with Basim on his terms and hope I could work around his built-in immunity. Since
