After we sent him back to his cell, Walt and I conferred. “I think this uncle’s house is as good a target as we’re going to get,” I said.
“You think they really might be there?” Walt asked.
After everything that had gone down in the last forty-eight hours, the last thing I wanted was to make another bad call. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I think it’s worth a shot.” What I didn’t say was that it was probably going to be the last shot, at least on my watch.
Walt nodded. “I’ll run this by the commander. I’m pretty sure he’ll go along with it. He’s as aggressive as they come.”
I paused, picking my next words carefully. “Thanks, Walt,” I said sincerely. “You know, I always assumed you were kind of…a dick.”
He laughed. “Same here,” he replied. “I always assumed you were trying to get Kelly on your side and discredit our input on Tikrit.”
That’s because your Tikrit intelligence was always wrong, I wanted to tell him. But I figured I’d said enough. I needed his help. Whatever was going to happen from here on out was going to happen without me. I needed someone to finish the job.
But, as it turned out, my usefulness had not quite come to an end. Later that evening, as I was winding down from the intense session with the fisherman, Lee asked me to come down with him to the flight line. A recent raid had gathered some detainees and he wanted me to help get them in-processed.
As we were standing at the runway, waiting for the choppers to set down, a full-bird colonel approached. He was on a first-name basis with Lee and after a friendly greeting I was introduced.
“Staff Sergeant Maddox,” Lee said, “this is Colonel Walker, the J-2.” That was impressive. J-2 meant that the colonel was the senior intelligence officer for the entire task force. He out-ranked every other intelligence official, analyst, and interrogator in the task force. Theoretically, Colonel Walker would have known about every information gathering operation that the task force was involved in. But it didn’t work that way. I knew from direct experience that intelligence gathered in Tikrit, for instance, pretty much stayed in Tikrit. The intent was to keep the decision making as local as possible. Kelly and other analysts elsewhere knew better than anyone what the situation was in their part of the country. They tried to keep oversight from task force headquarters to a minimum in order to avoid unnecessary interference. It was for that reason that I was not required to write lengthy reports of my work. It avoided complications.
But now that I was face-to-face with the man in charge of task force intelligence gathering, I was beginning to have second thoughts. He was obviously interested in what had been going on in Tikrit. And it was just as obvious that he was pretty far behind the curve.
“How long have you been up in Tikrit, Sergeant Maddox?” he asked me.
“Five months, sir,” I replied.
“What have you been doing there?”
“Just trying to get rid of the bad guys, sir.”
“Any luck?”
I paused. Could I even begin to explain how close we’d come? “We did all right, sir.” I answered.
“How come I haven’t seen any of your interrogation reports?” he continued.
I swallowed hard. “Sir,” I answered, “I was told not to worry about writing them up.”
“I don’t know who told you that,” he said, clearly irritated. “We need those reports. Especially after that pile of money you all found. Can you write up a quick summary of what you’ve been doing in Tikrit?”
“Certainly, sir,” I responded. “But I don’t know how clear a picture a written report might convey. It’s a complicated situation. I do have a link diagram that I can provide. And I can brief anyone who might be interested.”
“Excellent,” Colonel Walker said. “When are you shipping out?”
“Sunday the fourteenth, sir.”
“I’m having an analyst’s meeting on Thursday. I’d like you to be there. And bring your link diagram.”
The colonel left and, watching him disappear into the darkness, I turned to my friend. “Lee,” I asked, “anyone ever want to know anything about Tikrit before we found that money?”
“Eric,” he replied. “We’re in Baghdad. We stay focused on Baghdad.”
We stood in silence for a long moment. “Do you think Saddam is in Baghdad?” I finally asked.
“I have no idea,” he replied. “Why? Do you think he’s in Tikrit?”
I thought back once more on all the mistakes I had made and all the dry holes I had turned up. In spite of it all, there was a feeling I just couldn’t shake. “Yeah,” I said to Lee. “I think he is.”
I arrived at the briefing room at 1400 to find about a dozen analysts and intelligence officers slumped in their chairs waiting for me. It was clear from the moment I walked in that this was the last place they wanted to be. I was an unknown interrogator from a provincial backwater whom no one believed had any further significance in the ongoing hunt for insurgents. Everyone in that room shared the belief that whatever was happening in Iraq was happening in Baghdad. Everything else was a waste of time. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Colonel Walker in the front row, I doubt they would have bothered to show up at all.
Standing at the front of the room, I considered starting off by telling anyone who wasn’t interested that as far as I was concerned, they could take off. But I wasn’t running the show. Colonel Walker was, and he expected a full briefing with his whole staff in attendance. They were obligated to at least stay awake.
Taking a deep breath, I unveiled a blowup of the link diagram I had prepared the night before and launched into a rapid-fire summary of what I had learned over the last five months. Muhammad Haddoushi and the Al-Muslits, Radman Ibrahim and Farris Yasin, Thamir Al-Asi and Abu Drees, Basim Latif and Baby Radman. As I spoke, I thought back on each one of them. It seemed as if I had spent half a lifetime trying to get inside their heads and discover their secrets. In some ways it seemed that I knew them better than my own friends and relatives. I had matched wits with them, confronted them in a contest of wills and pushed them, and myself, to the limit. Some had broken, some hadn’t. Some had told me what I needed to know and some would go to their graves without betraying their loyalty. They were foot soldiers in a cause that a few of them were willing to die for. I couldn’t help but acknowledge that reality, even if their cause meant the death of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. They were, in their way, dedicated men. In order to stop them I had to be just as dedicated.
I didn’t realize how deeply I had entered their world until I tried to explain it to others. I had interrogated over three hundred people during my time in Tikrit. I had put everything I discovered, along with all the conjectures I had made, onto that link diagram. I knew every person on it, and what his connection was to every other person. I knew who had given me the information that had enabled me to fill in each square on that diagram. And I knew who I had cross-checked to confirm that information. The end result wasn’t just a graph of bad guys; it was a four- dimensional map of the insurgency. I knew it like the back of my hand, like the streets of my hometown.
But even while I spoke, painstakingly reviewing the time line and the cast of characters, I couldn’t get away from the fact that they had won and I had lost. For all my determination, Saddam was still at large. The most wanted man in Iraq had eluded me and had lived to fight another day. My only hope was that the men and women in front of me would somehow continue the search and complete the mission.
It didn’t seem likely. It wasn’t just their bored expressions that made the debriefing seem so pointless. It was the fact that, in all likelihood, by the end of the week most of the information I was presenting would be forgotten or lost. Even as I left Tikrit, I had hoped that I’d somehow manage to buy the team another week or two to continue the search for Muhammad Ibrahim. They were deployed there for another month, but after they left, everything that Bam Bam, Kelly, and I had in our heads would be gone forever. That was one of the hardest parts of going home. If the mission wasn’t completed, the intelligence that someone else might be able to use to finish the job would be lost.
And that wasn’t just true for our particular situation in Tikrit either. A lot of valuable information was simply carried inside the heads of the soldiers stationed everywhere when they returned home. It was true that some commanders had made a concerted effort to preserve intelligence and pass it on. But what usually happened was that incoming case officers and analysts opted to develop their own leads and sources. Every time there was a change of personnel, it was like having to invent the wheel all over again. What had come before, no matter how valuable, was often discarded or ignored. It would be even truer in my case. Why should anyone listen to an interrogator with some dumb theories about the insurgency that he hadn’t been able to prove? Running through the link diagram, I might as well have been making it up on the spot. Of course, the $1.9 million added some credibility
