Black Flags (11 page)

By late 1999, al-Qaeda had built a powerful support network in Afghanistan, in North Africa, and across the countries of the Persian Gulf. But it lacked a comparable presence in the countries of the Levant. Al-Qaeda’s great goal was the eventual destruction of Israel; yet it never managed to put its cadres in place in Jordan or the Palestinian territories to prepare the ground for such a blow, starting with the necessary step of overturning Jordan’s pro-Western government. Perhaps Zarqawi, with his Jordanian roots and deep ties to Palestinian Islamists from his prison days, could help fill a critical gap.

“How could we abandon such an opportunity to be in Palestine and Jordan?” al-Adel asked. “How could we waste a chance to work with Abu Musab and similar men in other countries?”

Zarqawi’s trustworthiness remained in question, so al-Adel proposed an experiment: Let the Jordanian run his own training camp, specifically catering to Islamist volunteers from Jordan and the other countries of the Levant as well as Iraq and Turkey. Al-Qaeda could provide start-up money, and then watch from a distance to see what Zarqawi could accomplish. The “distance” in this case would be a separation of some 350 miles: the camp for Levantine fighters would be “somewhat remote from us,” al-Adel acknowledged, located near the Iranian border in Herat, a city on the opposite end of Afghanistan from al-Qaeda’s base. Zarqawi would not be obliged to swear allegiance to Bin Laden, or to sign on to every point of al-Qaeda’s
ideology. But there would be plenty of cash from wealthy Gulf patrons, as well as what al-Adel described as full “coordination and cooperation to achieve our joint objectives.”

Zarqawi considered the proposal for two days and decided to accept.

His first training base was initially made up only of a handful of close friends from Jordan, along with their families. But Zarqawi sent invitations to some of his old mujahideen comrades and prison contacts, and soon others were making the trek to western Afghanistan. When al-Adel stopped by weeks later to check on Zarqawi’s progress, he counted eighteen men, women, and children. In another two months, the camp’s population had swollen to forty-two people, including Syrians and Europeans. One of the Syrians, Abu al-Ghadiya, a trained dentist and comrade from Zarqawi’s mujahideen days who spoke four languages, served as a kind of travel agent and logistics chief, in a preview of the role he would assume years later, when he ran the Zarqawi network’s supply pipeline through Syria and into Iraq. For the moment, though, the most reliable route for recruits headed for Afghanistan passed through Iran. Although Zarqawi disliked Shiite Muslims and viewed Iran’s leaders as heretics, he managed to link up with several helpful Iranians who ran safe houses and smuggled men and supplies to the Afghan border.

The camp’s leader, meanwhile, had turned into an enthusiastic commanding officer. He had taken a second wife, Asra, the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of his Palestinian campmates, discomfiting some of his al-Qaeda sponsors, who viewed the marrying of children as unseemly. He spent his free time reading books, learning basic computer skills, and polishing his speaking ability, trading his habitual Zarqa slang for the classic Arabic of the Koran. He supervised his recruits’ instruction in everything from firearms to Islamic history and religion.

“They were establishing a mini Islamic society,” a proud al-Adel declared.

But it was not to last. Back in Kandahar, Bin Laden had given the final approval for the September 11, 2001, attacks that would draw the United States into war against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. According to al-Adel, Zarqawi was kept in the dark about
al-Qaeda’s plans until after the strikes against New York and Washington were carried out. But Zarqawi’s Herat base would be targeted by the Americans along with Bin Laden’s in the weeks of fighting that followed.

Zarqawi’s disciples and their families eventually organized a convoy of vehicles and traveled across Afghanistan to join al-Qaeda in the defense of Kandahar. The U.S.-backed Northern Alliance, supported by American commandos and air strikes, had already captured Kabul, the capital, and were preparing to march on the Taliban government’s final stronghold. But soon after the Herat group’s arrival in Kandahar, a U.S. bomber struck a house where senior al-Qaeda leaders were meeting, wounding several of them and burying others, including Zarqawi, under debris. The Jordanian was pulled from the rubble with serious wounds, including several broken ribs. He was still undergoing treatment when Bin Laden fled, deserting the Taliban and stealing away to his private sanctuary in the eastern mountains, the fortress known as Tora Bora.

Zarqawi collected his followers and a few al-Qaeda stragglers and made a dash in the opposite direction, toward Iran, where he sought safety in the border towns through which his recruitment network once ran. There the refugees huddled in small groups, as al-Adel recounted later, to consider their dwindling options. In eastern Afghanistan, Bin Laden’s mountain redoubt had fallen under heavy U.S. bombardment. In Iran, government officials who had initially granted entry to the al-Qaeda refugees had shifted course, arresting dozens of the newcomers, including most of the Herat contingent. Where on earth could al-Qaeda’s men find a haven that offered both physical safety and a chance for the organization’s surviving members to rest and regroup?

In Iraq’s northeastern mountains, there was one such place. Just a few miles from the Iranian border, a handful of Kurdish villages and towns had attained a precarious autonomy outside the writ of the Iraqi dictatorship. These Kurdish provinces were protected under the U.S. no-fly zone established at the end of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, and within their boundaries a number of wildly disparate political factions had taken root. One of the Kurdish groups was a Taliban-like movement that included scores of Afghan war veterans
and called itself Ansar al-Islam, or “Helpers of Islam.” Its leaders were Sunni Muslim extremists who quickly imposed harsh Sharia law in the villages they controlled. They banned music in all forms, forced women to cover their faces in public, and outlawed schools for girls. They also developed a fondness for experimenting with poisons, building a crude lab in which they exposed stray dogs to cyanide and homemade ricin.

Beyond these charms, northern Iraq offered other advantages for a Jordanian on the run. Zarqawi could blend more easily with the local population than he did in Afghanistan, where he spoke none of the local languages. And the region’s extreme isolation offered a chance to recuperate without interference.

After reaching the Ansar al-Islam base, Zarqawi moved into primitive quarters in the tiny village of Sargat, a cluster of stone hovels on a dead-end road leading up into the hills. With a handful of his Herat followers and a few thousand dollars of leftover al-Qaeda money, he set about re-creating the training camp he had established in Afghanistan. There would be important differences, starting with the absence, this time, of any significant al-Qaeda influence now that Bin Laden was in hiding more than two thousand miles away. He would have new allies and supporters, including sympathetic Islamists in Baghdad, who sheltered him when he traveled there in secret to obtain medical treatment for his broken ribs. In addition, Zarqawi was beginning to think more broadly about the targets of his jihad. Until 2001, Zarqawi’s two great hatreds were Israel and the government of his own country, Jordan. Now the pain from his cracked ribs provided a constant reminder of his wish to inflict harm on the United States. He said as much to al-Adel one day shortly before leaving Iran to join Ansar al-Islam’s forces. It was the last time the two men would meet.

“When he came to say goodbye before he left Iran,” al-Adel recalled, “he underlined the importance of taking revenge on the Americans for the crimes they committed during the bombardment of Afghanistan, which he witnessed with his own eyes.”

Zarqawi’s rough character had been thrice remolded: by war, by prison and by the responsibilities of command at the helm of his own Afghan training camp. He had come to regard himself both
as a leader and as a man with a destiny. And now, in al-Adel’s view, his energy and thinking had been altered again, honed this time by “hatred and enmity against the Americans.”

In the West, newspapers were beginning to speculate about whether America’s government, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, was preparing for a possible second war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi, for one, believed the stories. In conversations with disheartened Islamists in the bleak months of 2002, he talked of the epic conflict still to come, and how he had been steered by destiny to precisely the right place for engaging the great enemy of Allah, according to Fu’ad Husayn, a Jordanian journalist who met Zarqawi in prison and later penned a biography about the terrorist leader’s early years. At that moment, Bin Laden was on the run in Pakistan, and the Taliban’s rear guard was being chased by U.S. commandos across the eastern mountains of Afghanistan. Yet the real showdown still lay ahead, Zarqawi predicted, in a country that had had no history of serious religious militancy in at least a hundred years.

“Iraq,” Zarqawi told friends, “will be the forthcoming battle against the Americans.”

5

“I did it for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi”

Laurence Foley was never a flashy man, but there were certain things about the Boston native that stood out, even in a city as cosmopolitan as Jordan’s capital. He was big by Amman standards, with an ample midsection that had grown to accommodate the many diplomatic dinners and lunches required of a midlevel official at the U.S. Embassy. He wore a fringe of snowy hair that stood out like bleached cotton against his freckles and ruddy Irishman’s complexion. He liked to take long strolls with his golden retriever, Bogart, in neighborhoods where the sight of a human walking any kind of pet still attracted stares. More striking, to friends, was his refusal to succumb to fretting over security, as so many Westerners did in the anxious months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “Jordan is a safe place,” the sixty-two-year-old assured family members who saw the reports about rising threat levels for Americans and became worried for him.

In the weeks and months after the attacks, as hostility toward Americans soared, some families retreated to gated enclaves near the embassy, which also sprouted new security fences and heavily armed military guards. But Foley, who had served in far more dangerous places during three decades of overseas work, elected to keep his two-story villa in West Amman, with its promise of an expat’s version
of Jordanian normality behind the wrought-iron window grills and rosebushes. In the evenings, he and his wife, Virginia, continued their walks with Bogart along Abdullah Ghosheh Street, greeting neighbors with a wave and a phrase or two in simple Arabic. Each morning, Foley rose early to drive himself to the embassy in his used Mercedes, a burgundy-red 280-Class with diplomatic plates, which he kept on a small carport behind an ornamental gate. He kept to his schedule—deliberately, defiantly—even as new warnings were quietly passed in the early autumn of 2002 of a plot to kidnap Americans in Jordan.

His job at the mission—arranging financing for clean-water projects and business partnerships for Jordanian entrepreneurs—was not particularly prestigious, but it was important, and Foley embraced it with energy and passion. He liked working in Amman’s refugee settlements and drawing the residents into conversation. His endless questions about life in the camps prompted some to suspect that Foley was a CIA spy, though most were charmed by the portly American with the disarming grin. His bosses were so impressed that they decided to present him with a special award, and so, on the evening of October 27, 2002, the embassy honored Foley with a plaque and a dinner party that continued late into the evening. He came home tired but ebullient, as Virginia recalled afterward.

“
I am where I want to be,” he told her, “doing what I want to do.”

The next morning, he rose at the usual time, dressed, and headed for the carport at 7:20 a.m. He was reaching for the door of the Mercedes when a figure rose suddenly from the far side of the car. The man’s face was swathed in a black-and-white-checkered head scarf, or keffiyeh. His right hand held a small handgun tipped with a silencer.

Pip. Pip.

Foley staggered. The gunman stepped forward and emptied the entire clip.

Pip. Pip. Pip. Pip. Pip.

Foley crumbled to the pavement, shot in the face, neck, shoulder, and chest. The man in the keffiyeh scrambled over a low wall and sprinted toward a car and driver waiting a block away. The incident
had played out in less than a minute, with so little commotion that no neighbor heard the shots or saw the body sprawled in a bloody pool between the Mercedes and the rosebushes.

But someone, many miles from West Amman, did happen to be listening in an hour later, when the gunman telephoned a contact somewhere in northern Iraq.

“Inform the sheikh,” the gunman said. “Everything was done properly.”

—

The snippet of intercepted conversation between the shooter and his contact had been a routine grab by the National Security Administration, or NSA, the spy agency that operates America’s vast global surveillance network. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the NSA had been methodically sweeping up prodigious amounts of data, concentrating on regions of the world that might conceivably be harboring Osama bin Laden or any number of other al-Qaeda operatives. In the summer and fall of 2002, the northeastern corner of Iraq was one such place. Soon officials at the highest levels of the White House and Pentagon would be intently focused on a handful of mountain villages so remote they did not register on many maps of the region.

A United States diplomat had been assassinated—an exceedingly rare event, even in this turbulent part of the world. And the early suspicions, based on the initial analysis of the shooter’s phone call, pointed to al-Qaeda, generally, and specifically to a man whose name still had not penetrated the consciousness of the majority of analysts in the CIA’s counterterrorism center.