McCraven’s personal bird. I had to convince him that I wasn’t bullshitting. We ended the day at a restaurant that had been opened at BIAP for U.S. personnel. It was surprisingly good and I tried my best to enjoy the food. But the fact that I was actually leaving was just beginning to sink in. One of the most significant parts of my life, professionally and personally, was coming to an end. Looking back, I was proud to have worked with so many dedicated men, especially the team in Tikrit. We had tried to stop bad men from doing bad things. We were part of the greater good and had come very close to accomplishing what we had set out to do. Unfortunately, by this time tomorrow I would be on a plane with Iraq far behind me. It wouldn’t matter how close we had ever been to capturing our target, Black List #1. We’d tried and failed.
When I got back to my tent, I lay down and closed my eyes. But I knew it was pointless. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep on my last night in Iraq.
I got up and headed over to the prison. It was where Lee and the rest of the interrogators were hanging out. I was looking for someone to talk to, but I had to be careful. Aside from Lee, the rest of these guys were going to be staying behind for weeks or months to come. The last thing they wanted to hear was somebody talking about what it felt like to be going home. It was just good to be around fellow interrogators. I sat down and picked up an old magazine.
After a few minutes, a major came in and spotted me. “Hey, Maddox,” he said. “Now that they sent your fisherman out on a recon, does that mean we can get rid of him tomorrow?”
I sat bolt upright. “What recon?” I was fully alert now.
“You didn’t hear?” he replied in a deliberately disinterested tone. “They took him out yesterday.”
“Did they find the target?”
“Yeah. In fact, they’re on the hit right now.”
Suddenly we were back in the game. I had a whole new admiration for Walt. He had been willing to risk failure if it offered even the slightest possibility of accomplishing the mission. I had underestimated him and now, at the eleventh hour, he had come through.
The phone rang and one of the interrogators picked it up. After a short conversation he called over to me. “Eric, you know someone named Muhammad Khudayr?”
I jumped up, feeling a huge surge of adrenaline. “Hell, yes, I know him. Why?”
“That was Walt on the phone,” the interrogator replied. “They got Muhammad Khudayr and a few other guys. He said you’d know what he was talking about. They’re bringing him in now.”
“What about Muhammad Ibrahim?” I asked.
The major shrugged. “Walt said they didn’t get him, only Muhammad Khudayr.”
It was good news, but not what I’d been hoping for. If Muhammad Ibrahim had been at the target, Walt would have known. Muhammad Khudayr was my only link to the former bodyguard. But I was running out of time to follow up the lead. I had needed Muhammad Ibrahim to be at that house.
But one Muhammad was better than none at all. I turned to Lee. “You want to work tonight?” I asked him.
“Do I have a choice?” he replied with a grin. He nodded to the night shift interrogator. “We’ll take the new detainees coming in.”
I was finally going to interrogate Muhammad Khudayr. It was a name I had first heard from Thamir Al-Asi’s son, who had identified him as the brother of the dead insurgent leader Abu Sofian. He was closer to Muhammad Ibrahim than anyone else on the link diagram. And Muhammad Ibrahim was one step away from Saddam himself. The two Muhammads weren’t just ghosts or figments of my imagination any more. We had one of them. Now we just had to get the other one.
It was 0200 before the shooters showed up with the four new prisoners. They were hooded and handcuffed. Muhammad Khudayr was one of them. The others were unknown. I immediately asked the team commander, but was told Muhammad Ibrahim was not at the site. The shooters had been given a photo of him. It was the same blurry black-and-white snapshot I had carried around in my wallet for weeks. They knew who they were looking for. But they hadn’t found him.
I had only a few hours left to question Muhammad Khudayr. But despite the pressure, I felt calm and totally in control. I was in my own personal zone, a place of complete confidence and self-assurance. It’s a strange sensation, almost an out-of-body experience, like a batter at the plate, when the ball is as big as a grapefruit and impossible to miss.
As I prepared for the interrogation, I realized that I had been in that zone for a while now. It had started in mid-October, when I had questioned Ahmed Yasin. He had verified that his family was heading up the insurgency. That key interrogation had confirmed my theory. It gave me the incentive to look for this specific family of bodyguards even when the official hunt was focused on High Value Targets. More important, it had given me the ability to intensely focus on my job. A really good interrogator can usually get one out of twenty-five detainees to break and provide actionable information. An average interrogator might get one out of a hundred. Now I only had one to break and one night to do it. I wasn’t worried. I was in the zone.
0218 13DEC2003
On my way to the interrogation cell, I ran into Lee’s terp John, with whom I would be working for the night.
“I thought you were leaving, Eric,” he said as he hurried alongside me.
“I’ve still got six hours,” I replied. “I’m really going to need your help, John.”
“Of course.” I could see he was picking up on my energy.
We got to the prison where Lee was handling the in-processing. I pulled him aside. “This is going to go fast,” I told him. “I need you to get a few of the prisoners I brought with me from Tikrit. I might need their help.”
“Give me the names,” Lee replied. He had his game face on. “I’ll have the guards round them up. They’ll be sitting out in the hallway in three minutes.”
“Will they be able to hear the interrogation from there?” I asked. I only wanted them in on the questioning when it suited my purpose.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lee assured me. “I’ll have them wear earplugs. They won’t hear a thing.”
“Great.” I told him who I wanted: my most reliable collaborators, Basim Latif and Sabah’s brother Luay.
We headed for the cell where the detainees from the hit were being held, still handcuffed and hooded. The guard pointed out Muhammad Khudayr. John and I walked him to the interrogation room. It was coming up on 0400.
The last thing I wanted him to know was that I was in a hurry. I needed him to think that we could go on all night and day if necessary. I started, as usual, with the basics.
“What’s your name?”
“Muhammad.” From his first answer I knew that he wasn’t going to cooperate willingly.
“Muhammad what?”
“Muhammad Khudayr.”
“Where do you live?”
“I live at the house where your soldiers came to get me.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Since the fall of Baghdad.”
“Where else do you live?”
“My family lives in Samarra. I visit them when I am not looking for work.”
“How long have you lived in the Baghdad house?”
“About two months.”
At that point I took a calculated risk. This game of cat and mouse was eating up time I couldn’t afford. I had hoped to get a feel for whom I was dealing with and what he wanted to hide from me before getting to the important questions. But this was no ordinary interrogation. Muhammad Khudayr wasn’t going to give me the time of day, much less the time I needed to break him. I was going to have to speed this up and to try something new, something I would come to think of as the “brutally honest” approach. I had no choice.
“Muhammad,” I said, keeping my voice pitched low so that he had to work to hear me, “I want you to look at me and listen carefully. I know exactly who you are and what you have done. I have captured and questioned many people who have worked for you. They’ve told me everything. You have to stop thinking about how you’re going to get out of this situation. You need to stop thinking about what you are and are not going to tell me. I am going to
