He looked from Jeff to me and back again. I could see him squirming, his mouth gaping like a fish out of water, trying to form the words. “Two men,” he said at last. “They work at a car wash. They hate Americans.”
Once he got over that hurdle, it turned out that Rafi had more information. He claimed that there were, at most, only three men remaining in Tikrit who had been connected with the regime. Rafi also knew their jobs, their family members, and where they had lived. As interesting as this was, I was getting increasingly frustrated and so was Jeff. During a break he told me that the men Rafi had named were insignificant during the regime and were likely to be even more insignificant now. According to Rafi, every other important person he knew had either fled or already been captured. He kept insisting he had no idea where we could find any active insurgents. I was beginning to wonder just how helpful this prisoner could be. Wouldn’t it already be well known that he was in American custody? Wouldn’t the insurgents have already changed their locations and routines as a precaution? Even if Rafi knew where they were, wouldn’t they be long gone? But I kept my doubts to myself. I wanted Rafi to think that he was giving us what we wanted, to keep alive his hope of being freed.
It was midnight before we finished with Rafi and took him back to the prison. Back at the house, Jeff and I compared notes on the interrogation.
“What do you think?” Jeff asked me. Behind the simple question was another test. I was the professional interrogator. He wanted to hear my “expert” analysis.
“I don’t think there’s any way that guy doesn’t know something,” I said. “He’s a former bodyguard and a nephew of Saddam. But three former low-level guys in the regime who are now working at a car wash aren’t what we’re looking for.”
“Yeah,” Jeff agreed. He sounded as tired as I was. “That shit was weak. But I’ll run it by Matt and Jack and see what they think.”
I headed to the dining room for something to eat. I needed to think over what had just happened. On one level the interrogation had been a failure. We hadn’t gotten actionable intelligence, at least as far as I could tell. Maybe Rafi really didn’t know anything. Or maybe he did and I just hadn’t pried it out of him.
But, in another way, I was exhilarated by the experience. For the first time since I’d signed up for the job, I realized that I had an innate capability to be an interrogator. I may not have known exactly how to do it yet, but I knew I could do it.
As I sat alone at the table, I reviewed all the mistakes I had made over the last several hours. I had asked unnecessary questions; let Rafi see where I was going before I got there; lost my temper when I should have stayed calm and vice versa. I now had firsthand experience in some of the many ways to screw up an interrogation. I couldn’t tell myself that I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, but at least I knew what the mistakes were. Slowly I was beginning to learn how to keep the details straight; how to close out the paths of evasion and how not to let a prisoner see the traps I was laying for him. I was beginning to understand not just how to ask questions but
At the same time, I had begun to painstakingly put together a picture of Tikrit. Rafi had his version of the city. The next guy I interrogated would have another version, with maybe a little overlap. If they let me stay, maybe I’d eventually find the way it all fit together.
I had no reason to think they’d keep me. My original assignment had been for forty-eight hours and that was almost up. The only reason for me to stay on was if I proved myself useful and, so far, that hadn’t happened.
I started going over the fifteen pages of notes I’d taken during Rafi’s interrogation. I was hoping there was something I might have missed, something I could point to in the report I would write the next morning. I’d wanted to make it lengthy and detailed to demonstrate my added value to the mission. But after scanning my almost unreadable scrawl, it was depressingly clear that it could all be summed in a few sentences: Rafi Idham Ibrahim Al-Hasan Al-Tikriti is a nephew and former bodyguard of Saddam. He provided no actionable information. It was determined that he was not honest during questioning. He should not be released until hell or Tikrit freezes over. By the way, this team might need a better interrogator.
Chapter 5
THE ROUTINE
I wasn’t sure whether anyone noticed that I had overstayed my assignment in Tikrit, or if anyone even cared. In the days following my interrogation of Rafi, I was still hoping to convince the team to keep me around.
When I approached Rich for advice on how to extend my stay, he smiled. “So you like it out here in the shit,” he said.
He was right. I did. But it was more than that. “I like doing my job,” I replied. “And you’ve got prisoners here, lots of them.”
“Mostly we just ship them back to Baghdad.”
“I know. But they aren’t getting interrogated down there.” As I had seen during my short stay in Baghdad, detainees arriving from outside of Baghdad were being sent to the back of the line. “You’re not their top priority,” I continued. “They don’t know what to ask Tikrit prisoners, anyway. Let me stick around, Rich, and I’ll interrogate everybody you bring in. You all won’t have to depend on Baghdad. And they’ll be happy because they will have that much less to deal with.”
“How long do you want to stay?”
I shrugged. “I just started a six-month deployment.”
He gave a low whistle. “We’re only here for three. Tell you what. I’ll talk to Matt and Jack. They’ll make the call.”
I figured that talking to Rich was as good a place as any to make my case for staying in Tikrit. But Jeff saw it differently. “You run that shit by me first!” he told me angrily when I informed him that I’d approached Rich. I was quickly finding that you had to tread lightly around Jeff. He had a hair-trigger temper and it didn’t help that, like the rest of the shooters, he had no use for the intelligence personnel. I’d just gotten another lesson in the task force hierarchy. I knew my time was limited. Now I feared I had widened the hole in the hourglass.
I waited nervously to see how badly I had screwed up. But it seemed that I’d been granted a reprieve. Days went by with no one asking why I wasn’t back in Baghdad. Meanwhile, I kept interrogating the detainees that the team brought in from their frequent raids. The yield of good intelligence was low, but at least I was getting an opportunity to prove my worth.
Jeff and I did many of the interrogations together, and I gained a lot of admiration for him. He seemed to recognize what I was trying to get done, sometimes even before I did, and gave me the freedom to do it. Sometimes the shooters would drop by the guesthouse to watch me at work. Most of them got bored and drifted off after an hour or two. But Jeff would hang in, watching patiently while I developed my strategy and asking questions of his own that were right on target. We were a good team.
I was kept very busy and in the process, I established a procedure to deal with the long interrogation sessions. My off hours were spent going over my notes, absorbing what I’d learned, if anything, from each detainee. Since I didn’t really have any place I was supposed to be, I mostly hung out at the dining room table. There were occasional visitors, primarily intelligence analysts in for debriefings on the local situation. Otherwise the house was divided into rigid categories: those of us who slept downstairs and those who slept upstairs.
The shooters had a regular rhythm to their days, too, consisting of exercise, video games, weapons maintenance, and time spent at the firing range. Then came the intense energy and adrenalin of the nighttime raids.
I had my own job to do, although how I was going to get it done was an open question. When I first arrived, I spent a lot of time going over the list of bodyguards that Jared the terp had given me. Since there was no background information or rankings of importance, it was of limited use. But I did take notice of how the names were grouped into separate clans.
For instance, Nezham, the guy we had gone after my first night, was one of over thirty Al-Muslit family
