Black Flags (12 page)

The one analyst who knew Abu Musab al-Zarqawi the best had reasons to be skeptical. Nada Bakos, a newly minted thirty-three-year-old officer who had just landed at the intelligence agency office two years earlier, was quickly becoming the CIA’s top expert on the Jordanian. In later years, this rancher’s daughter from central Montana would help lead the hunt for the terrorist, working for weeks at a stretch in dusty Iraqi military bases a few miles from where Zarqawi was presumed to live. She would track his known movements,
interrogate his captured fighters, and even accompany U.S. soldiers on midnight raids on suspected safe houses. She dug into his personal history and habits with such intensity that co-workers teased her about her Jordanian “boyfriend.”

But something about the rush to blame Zarqawi made her uneasy. It was conceivable that Zarqawi had ordered the hit, she allowed, but it would also be quite convenient. The Jordanians would be eager to show that the crime was a deliberate act by international terrorists, and not mere random violence of the type that could damage the country’s reputation with the tourism industry. Moreover, the few officials in the Bush White House who knew Zarqawi’s name had lately shown a strange fascination with the Jordanian. Bakos’s division at the CIA was constantly fielding queries from Bush appointees about rumored connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president now at the center of the administration’s crosshairs. If Iraq had played even a minor role in supporting al-Qaeda’s September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the case for an invasion would be clear-cut. The CIA was able to knock down most of the rumors about Iraqi links to 9/11, but the Zarqawi case was murkier. Hadn’t the Jordanian been seen in Baghdad, getting medical treatment in one of the city’s state-run hospitals? Wasn’t he the same Zarqawi who had been given cash and land by al-Qaeda to set up his own training camp in western Afghanistan? After the start of the Afghan offensive, didn’t he flee to Iraq instead of joining Bin Laden at Tora Bora? A still more disturbing question: did the Ansar al-Islam camp’s rumored poisons laboratory suggest a link to Saddam Hussein, whose interest in chemical weapons in the 1990s was well documented?

Bakos and her colleagues dutifully fielded the questions and tried, within the confines of the limited intelligence on Zarqawi in late 2002, to answer them.

Now there would be many more questions. A U.S. diplomat had been shot, and the best evidence so far suggested that the deed had been ordered from Iraqi soil, by a man with clear connections to al-Qaeda.

To most Americans, and even to most CIA analysts, Zarqawi
remained an unknown figure in an obscure cul-de-sac of the global jihadist movement. But at senior levels of the Bush White House, he had just catapulted to the top of the terrorist heap.

—

There were times during Nada Bakos’s tumultuous first two years at the Central Intelligence Agency when history seemed to hurtle straight at her, like random shrapnel, or a brick crashing through a windshield. One such moment came early on the morning of September 11, 2001, when Bakos and other young analysts crowded around a TV monitor in time to see the second airliner pierce the aluminum skin of No. 2 World Trade Center and explode out of the building’s northern side. Amid the gasps and tears, a single name—al-Qaeda—rippled through the ranks of officers as they watched the black smoke billowing over Lower Manhattan. Co-workers began streaming out of the building under a general evacuation order, but Bakos, then a rookie analyst, with honey-blond hair and soft brown eyes, couldn’t bring herself to leave.

“
I kept wondering, ‘What can I do?’ ” she said afterward. “I hope they ask us to do something.” Indeed, minutes later, the CIA counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, rallied a group of two hundred officers who had stayed behind, issuing what would become the first orders of the agency’s years-long campaign to find, destroy, and defeat Osama bin Laden. “We’re at war now,” Black said, “a different kind of war than we’ve ever fought before.”

Another moment came just over a year later, when Bakos found herself in a small conference room with the vice president of the United States. The country was edging closer to war with Iraq, and Dick Cheney, then the salesman-in-chief for the Bush administration’s war strategy, had decided to pay a highly unusual visit to the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, campus to query the agency’s top terrorism experts in person. Cheney’s office had been prodding the CIA for months over possible links between the September 11 attacks and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi had emerged as an intriguing figure, but the CIA’s reports on the man were far more cautious than those coming from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, the shadow intelligence service set up by Defense Undersecretary Douglas
J. Feith, an Iraq hawk and a Bush appointee. What did the agency really know?

The vice president had arrived that morning with a handful of aides, all scowls and dark suits, for what was to be the second showdown with the agency over its Iraq files. The first meeting, chaired by CIA director George Tenet, had gone badly. The senior managers who attended had no ready answers to Cheney’s questions about suspicious contacts between alleged al-Qaeda operatives and Saddam Hussein. His questions implied serious gaps in the agency’s knowledge about the Iraqi leader and his support for terrorists, possibly including Bin Laden himself.

Tenet convened a second meeting to bring in the more junior officers who knew the file best. And so it was that Bakos, in her third year as a CIA officer, was invited to participate in the education of the second-most-powerful man in the country.

The meeting was in the headquarters building’s seventh floor, near the executive suites, in a room overlooking the dense woodlands that provide an extra security buffer between the spy agency and Washington’s crowded Virginia suburbs. Cheney and his advisers sat on one side of a long table, facing a row of midlevel managers armed with files and notes from a practice session—dubbed a “murder board”—the day before. Bakos, who was among the youngest intelligence officers in the room, took a seat behind her boss. Her job was to serve as the backup, fielding any questions that slipped past the front line. Nervous at first, she eventually relaxed and watched with fascination as Cheney personally led the questioning. He peered skeptically over his glasses at the CIA’s experts, and his tone was polite but insistent, like that of a seasoned prosecutor breaking down a reluctant witness.

Nada Bakos sat silently in her chair against a far wall, listening but not entirely believing. There were plenty of good reasons for going after the man who had helped facilitate the Millennium Plot in 1999. But a cabal including the radical jihadist and the fiercely secular Iraqi leader—a man who routinely tortured and killed Islamists in his country? Was Cheney serious?

Cheney was more than serious. In the weeks that followed, his aides would react furiously to a top-secret CIA report—which Bakos
had helped write—all but demolishing allegations of operational ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and al-Qaeda. The stories circulated by Bush aides about secret contacts between the two longtime foes “
appear based on hearsay,” the report said, with “no substantiating detail or other information that might help us corroborate them.”

The answers Cheney sought did not exist; yet, the more the CIA pushed back, the more insistent the Cheney team became. At least once, a Bush aide telephoned Bakos directly at her desk to quiz her about a line in one of her reports. The call violated long-established protocols that barred political appointees from directly contacting individual analysts, a rule intended to protect CIA employees from political influence. Bakos quickly hung up and complained to her boss, who phoned the White House, incensed about the breach.

“They were asking us to prove a negative: to prove to them that Zarqawi wasn’t part of al-Qaeda, and wasn’t working with Saddam,” Bakos said. “And even when we tried to do that, the answer would be: ‘So what? All those people have the same agenda, so who cares?’ ”

—

It was hardly the role Bakos had imagined for herself when she applied to the spy agency just over two years earlier. The application had been a lark, a casual bet she had placed with herself. Long after she was hired, relatives back home still believed Bakos was an administrative assistant of some kind, answering phones and opening mail. No one from tiny Denton, Montana, had ever done anything as glamorous as tracking terrorists for the CIA.

Bakos once dreamed of being a veterinarian, work that seemed well suited for a young woman who grew up around horses and spent long summer days in solitude, roaming the ranch with a favorite stallion. Her horizons as a girl were framed by her tiny high school, with its graduating class of nine students, and the cop shows she loved to watch on television. But even then, Bakos knew she wanted more.

A car accident during her freshman year at Montana State nearly snuffed her ambitions. But Bakos was eventually able to return to college and channel her energy into a new major—economics—and a vague plan to work in international relations. She married, and
worked briefly for a cement manufacturer and a mining company. Then, a few months before her thirtieth birthday, she packed her belongings into her Ford F-150 pickup truck and drove across the country to Washington, D.C. She was newly divorced, and had neither a job nor firm prospects, but she had been urged by her stepfather, a Vietnam War veteran, to try the intelligence service. He had seen an advertisement in
The Economist
and figured Bakos was as capable as anyone.

“They’re never going to hire me,” she had told him. “Why would they hire me?”

“Just apply,” he said.

She couldn’t shake the idea. She had been thinking about working as an economic analyst for a government agency, perhaps the State Department. The CIA sounded like an adventure.

“Why not?” she finally asked.

Bakos filled out an application and took an exam, and, to her amazement, an agency recruiter called back to set up an interview. Five months after that, she was walking through the agency’s iconic entrance, past the sixteen-foot seal of inlaid granite bearing the agency’s logo. She worked at first as a technical specialist, deep within the agency’s bureaucracy, but quickly made the jump to intelligence analyst, a demanding job that combined sleuthing skills with an ability to process vast amounts of data from the CIA’s electronic and human spy networks. Bakos’s economics background landed her on a team that tracked Saddam Hussein’s financial crimes, including his rampant cheating on UN trade embargoes. But soon the job was expanded to include other intelligence on Iraq, including the dictator’s support for terrorist networks—which, in turn, led her to Zarqawi.

Slender and blond, she attracted notice in a workplace that remained predominantly male, particularly in the leadership ranks. But what stood out most was her astonishing command of the subject matter. Not only had she absorbed every scrap of available data about Zarqawi and his top deputies, but she also possessed a remarkable talent for picking out patterns from the mountains of seemingly random detail. One of her supervisors at the time called her “
simply one of the best analysts I’ve ever met.”

“She reminds me of someone who counts cards at Las Vegas,” the now retired senior CIA officer said. “She understands all the permutations that come from each particular draw. That’s something you can’t teach.”

Bakos would tell her friends that the job was the first that truly seemed to fit her. “It’s the center of the action,” she would say. Yet, for the first time, she also was being confronted with unpleasant truths. One of them, demonstrated repeatedly throughout her career, was that political leaders tended to choose selectively from a menu of classified material in order to present a skewed, self-serving version of reality to the voting public. All presidents had indulged in the practice, though some perhaps more than others.

And now the lesson was being learned again. The Cheney visit had ended with sour looks all around. The vice president and his team left for Washington without a single addition of consequence for their Iraq file. For some of the CIA analysts in the room, the visit was deeply dispiriting. The White House was clearly preparing for invasion, and Cheney and his team seemed unfazed that the available evidence undermined the administration’s case.

“In my opinion, we didn’t know nearly enough,” Bakos said. “But I was completely naïve about the process for going to war.”

Years later, Cheney would insist that his focus on possible Iraqi ties to terrorism was appropriate. “
I asked tough questions,” he acknowledged in his written account of his visits to the CIA. In surveying possible threats to the country in the wake of September 11, Cheney concluded that there was “no place more likely to be a nexus between terrorism and [weapons of mass destruction] capability than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

“With the benefit of hindsight—even taking into account that some of the intelligence we received was faulty—that assessment still holds true,” Cheney wrote.

Justified or not, the White House clearly wasn’t finished with Zarqawi. The intense interest in the Jordanian’s possible ties to Iraq would continue up to the start of the invasion, and, indeed—to Nada Bakos’s dismay—for years after that. The murder of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan had only dialed up the pressure even more.

—

The daylight shooting of Laurence Foley in one of Amman’s safest neighborhoods set off something akin to panic at senior levels of the Jordanian government. No American diplomat had ever been seriously harmed, let alone assassinated, in Jordan in the country’s history. King Abdullah II took charge of the official response, meeting with CIA and State Department officials to coordinate the initial investigations. He and his wife, Queen Rania, paid a call on Foley’s widow to offer sympathy and assistance in preparing her husband’s body for return to the United States. Meanwhile, the police and the Mukhabarat began rounding up scores of Islamic radicals for questioning in Foley’s slaying. Within forty-eight hours, more than one hundred people were jailed, and yet intelligence officials had no clue who was behind the killing, or why Foley, out of the thousands of Americans living in Amman, had been targeted. Who would go to the trouble of stalking and executing a midlevel bureaucrat whose main duty was improving Jordan’s drinking-water supply?