See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (25 page)

‘I knew that was going to be your answer. ‘Talabani laughed, crushing my hand in his iron grip.’ Let’s go tell the others.’

There were just enough chairs in Talabani’s dining room, the largest room in his house, for everyone to sit on. I looked at Talabani’s field commanders as they filed in and took their seats around the table. They were an odd lot. Half were unreconstructed Marxists who had spent most of their lives in Europe and came back to Iraq in March 1991 only to fight Saddam. The rest were hard-as-nails guerrilla fighters whose sole interest was slitting the throats of Saddam’s soldiers.

Standing at the end of the table, Talabani waited patiently for the room to go quiet. Even after it did, he stood silently for a good minute. Then, with ‘It’s time to turn our guns on Saddam,’ the room exploded into clapping and shouting. Talabani went on for another fifteen minutes in Kurdish. By the end, his commanders would have run through the wall if he’d asked.

As soon as Talabani sat down, his pech merga swept into the room bearing enormous platters heaped with lamb, rice, and Persian nan, the waiters handsomely accented by bandoliers and sashes.

When it was time to go, Talabani walked Tom and me to our car. Just as I was about to climb in, he took me by the elbow and pulled me aside so no one could hear us.

‘You know, I can’t do this alone. What is Washington going to do when I attack?’

‘Washington wants Saddam out. ‘That wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but there was no point in telling him that Washington was simply ignoring him, me, and Iraq. It hadn’t even responded to the message I had sent in mid-February on the day and hour Chalabi’s uprising would begin.

No question, I was operating on the edge of my orders, out where the bright fires burn, but so far as I knew, I was telling Talabani the truth.

yet seen Tony Lake’s cable. Even after I did, it would take some time for all its implications to sink in. I had no idea that while I was running around Kurdistan trying to find some way to help Saddam Hussein’s enemies drive him from authority, Washington had forgotten to care whether he stayed in power or not.

‘Jalal,’ I said again, by way of emphasis, ‘I assure you Washington wants Saddam gone.’

Chalabi read Tony Lake’s message and collapsed on the sofa.

‘Does this mean we have to stop everything?’ he asked me, almost inaudibly.

‘Ahmad, you read English as well as I do. It says it’s up to you to go ahead or not.’

‘Have you given it to Masud?’

I knew where Chalabi was heading. He was right, too. The major general who had defected from Saddam’s army was forced to fold his plans into Chalabi’s as best he could thanks to Washington’s refusal to respond to his coup proposal. Even though Chalabi wasn’t to be trusted with the fine print, the two had made common cause. Barzani, though, had watched Chalabi’s preparations for the March 4 uprising with undisguised anger. He couldn’t simply refuse to participate - doing so would cost him too much face with the Kurds - but he expected me to stop Chalabi. It infuriated him when I stuck to the position that the US believed all Iraqis would be better off without Saddam and that we would thus encourage any opposition group that was serious about changing the government in Baghdad. Chalabi and I both knew that Lake’s message was a heaven-sent excuse for Barzani to sit out the action.

‘Has Mr. Lake never heard of the Bay of Pigs?’ Chalabi asked, standing up, his face a bright scarlet. ‘As soon as Masud sees this message, he’s going to screw everyone. I guarantee you that.’ He wadded Lake’s message up and threw it in the corner. ‘Fuck Lake. He might be able to scare Masud into not doing anything, but not me. I’m going through with it.’

Chalabi walked me to my car and opened my door.

‘Lake could not have picked a worse time to pull out ‘Chalabi said, now brooding. ‘I’m just afraid that at the end of the day, it’s going to be our blood on the floor rather than Saddam’s.’

Just as Chalabi predicted, Barzani dropped out, even before I could show him Lake’s message.

When I pulled up in front of Barzani’s Sar-i Bash palace - the eagle’s nest above Salah al-Din where I had met him so many times during the last month - it was obvious he had decamped. The windows were shuttered; the cars, gone. The two guards at the front gate said they had no idea where he could be found.

I went to look for Nicherwan Barzani, Masud’s nephew and second in command, to give him Lake’s message. Nicherwan invited me over for dinner, and I was able to get a good look around his house. The Italian designer furniture, the Persian rugs, and other finery screamed money. Clearly not all the revenues from the smuggled oil were going into the KDP’s war chest. The Barzanis, Nicherwan and Uncle Masud, certainly had come a long way from their dirt poor, one-mule village hanging on the side of Kurdistan’s barren scarp to their Sar-i Rash estates and virtual country in the north. The oil business was good. The last thing they needed was a dustup with their business partner, Saddam.

‘Masud already knows,’ Nicherwan said sulkily, speaking through the grille of his door. ‘He already heard from our guy in Washington.’

He only shrugged when I asked him what his uncle was going to do about the March 4 uprising, but I had a bad feeling we were in for trouble. Later that afternoon, Chalabi confirmed my suspicion: Barzani was on the Turkish border, in Zakhu, ready to hop across and take refuge with the Turks if things turned out badly. I just hoped it wasn’t too late for the colonel to pull back and try another day.

Chalabi didn’t change his mind overnight. As reliable as a Swiss clock, the show started on March 4. By about eight that evening, the former school that served as the Iraqi National Congress headquarters was lit up like an amusement park. Somewhere Chalabi had found an enormous generator. Trucks filled the parking lot, waiting to load up INC recruits and head to the Iraqi lines. Toyota Land Cruisers pulled up in front, collected messages, and left with a squeal of tires. Inside, it was pure circus: ringing telephones, shouting aides waving paper in the air; everything, it seemed, but the one thing the Kurds needed most - the support of the United States.

The general was sitting alone in an empty office when I walked in on him. He wore a newly pressed major general’s uniform. A shiny officer’s saber lay across the desk in front of him. He stood up and weakly shook my hand. In another hour, he said, an escort would take him to the Iraqi army lines, where he would be met and taken to Tikrit to link up with his colleagues. The general’s arrival in Tikrit would be the signal for the coup to start.

The general didn’t mention Lake’s message, even though I had given it to him the day before. Like Chalabi, he felt it was too late to turn back. The colonel from the tank school who was to lead the assault had already armed his tanks with stolen shells; there was no way to return them and not be found out. I could do nothing to help. The general was either going to make it across the lines or he wasn’t; his uprising was going to succeed or fail. I shook his hand, figuring I would never see him again, and set out for home. As I walked back, someone in the distance fired an illumination flare into the night sky.

I went to bed expecting Chalabi to wake me with news, but the night passed without a word from him. At around nine the next morning - by now it was March 5 - I set out to the INC headquarters. Even if the fight was going poorly, I thought, the place was sure to be a beehive of activity. Wrong. The building was completely abandoned. The generator was gone. There wasn’t a car in sight, not even a guard to tell me where everyone had gone. The front door was banging open and shut in the wind. Inside, the offices were bare, stripped clean - computers, file cabinets, furniture. I remember being half surprised that the radiators hadn’t been unbolted and taken off the walls.

As I trotted back to the CIA house, I started to compose in my head the message I would write to headquarters. Dear Langley : I write with the sad news that last night I carelessly misplaced the Iraqi opposition.

One of Chalabi’s aides was waiting for me at the house when I got back. Barzani had had the general arrested a little after midnight, just as he was about to cross the lines to go to Tikrit. Although Barzani released him six hours later, the Iraqi army had used the time to seal its lines in the north. About the time of the general’s arrest, Barzani called Chalabi to say that not only were his troops not going to participate in the uprising, but no one else was, either - at least from his critical patch of Kurdistan. The message delivered, Barzani’s troops, under Nicherwan’s command, promptly arrested every INC member it could find who carried a rifle. Barzani, the aide told me, placed the blame squarely on Washington’s shoulders. The intent of Lake’s message was clear: He wanted the general stopped as well as Chalabi. Faced with such massive betrayal, Chalabi had pulled up stakes and moved on to Irbil. Talabani, who controlled the city, hadn’t moved on March 4, but at least he still was paying lip service to action on Saddam.

The following morning, March 6, I awoke to see the general’s car pulling up in front. He’d exchanged his major general’s uniform for a cheap plaid sport coat. Even his mustache seemed to droop.

‘Sir,’ he said quietly as soon as he sat down on the sofa. ‘I must leave now. I must go to Damascus to put my children in school.’

And why not, I thought? His couriers, the secret committee, the colonel had all been arrested. There was no way Saddam was going to spare them. The general saw no point in keeping a morbid vigil in the north, waiting for an assassin’s bullet.

I could tell he wanted to say a lot more. He had put everything on the line - his country, his family, his life. He had trusted us, trusted the CIA, and we had let the coup go forward, right up until the very end when the White House pulled the plug without warning or a decent explanation. He kept his own counsel, though, and the two of us sat in silence, finishing our tea. In truth, I still don’t know what I might have said. That Washington in the end just hadn’t wanted to commit? That even though I had kept my masters fully informed, they had dithered and dithered and, in the end, finally decided that too much was at stake to upset the status quo in Iraq? That, faced with a choice between sins of commission or omission, Washington had chosen the latter and left good and brave men twisting in the wind thousands of miles across the ocean? All of it seemed beyond expression. Instead I walked the general out, shook his hand, and waited until his car disappeared around the corner at the end of the street.

Back inside, I told Tom to raise the CIA’s relay station in northern Virginia. The debacle was looking more and more complete, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I wanted to see if the satellites had picked up anything, like a division, a company, or even a single tank out of place.

The news was about as bad as it could get. By noon on March 5 - on what was supposed to be D Day for the dissidents - the Iraqi army was off high alert. The armor that had been patrolling the streets in Mawsil and Kirkuk since February 28 was gone. There was no sign of movement in the garrisons of the 76th Brigade, the 15th Infantry Division, and the 5th Mechanized Division, the three units that were to have joined the coup. But what I was really interested in was the colonel’s garrison near Tikrit. Shit. Nothing out of place. If his tanks had moved out of their sheds on March 4, they were back now.

At 10:22 that night, the secure telephone rang. It was Bob XXXXXX, my boss in Washington. Since I had been in the north, he’d called me only once.

‘What’s happening out there?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. We’re just sitting here around the pool sipping frozen daiquiris.’

‘Cut the crap. What I’m going to tell you, you can’t repeat to anyone. Do you understand?’ he said. His voice had gone cold.

After I assured him I did, he asked,’ Is anyone on the team using the alias Robert Pope?’

‘Never heard the name.’ Everyone on the team was using an alias except me, but no one was using Robert Pope.

‘You’d better be right, because you’re skating on thin ice. I can’t tell you what’s going on. I shouldn’t have even asked you about Pope. So this conversation never happened. Copy?’

There was no point in asking what he was talking about, because Bob would have told me if he could have. A retired marine colonel who had joined the CIA in his late forties, Bob followed orders. He may not have liked or agreed with them, but he followed them. If he said he couldn’t tell me, I knew he wouldn’t.

‘You’re to come back to Washington as soon as you can. When you pass through Ankara, don’t tell anyone anything. They could be potential witnesses. And when you get home, don’t call anyone. Especially don’t call anyone from Iraqi operations. They could be witnesses, too.’

Witnesses? The word definitely had a bad ring to it, but it was something else I couldn’t do anything about from 6,192 thousand miles away.

‘Bob, I can’t come back now. The opposition’s in the toilet, but it’s not hopeless. Give me a couple weeks and I can put things back together.’

‘You didn’t hear what I said. You’re being pulled out. End of story.’

‘I’ve got people spread across the north. I can’t pick up and leave just like that.’

‘Okay. You can take up to four days if you have to. But not a day longer.’

Only when Bob hung up did I realize that he hadn’t said a word about either the diversion or the coup. It was all the confirmation I needed that Washington intended to label both frauds. I knew enough about the way Washington worked to know that when it didn’t like some piece of information, it did everything in its power to discredit the messengers, which in this case were Chalabi and the general. So the corporate line in Washington was that nothing had happened in Iraq on March 4, nothing at all. Frankly, at that point, I wondered if Washington wasn’t right.

I found Tom on the roof of our house, looking through binoculars toward the south, in the direction of the Iraqi lines. He listened silently as I told him about ‘Robert Pope’ and our recall. Even as I spoke, I was running through a mental checklist of what we had to do to leave the north.

‘I can feel it,’ he said when I finished. ‘Talabani’s going to attack tonight, and Washington’s going to have a lot more to worry about than someone named Pope.’

Tom handed me the binoculars. All I could see were a few shimmering lights in the plains below Salah al-Din. Then, toward the south, the faint tail of a flare shot up into the sky. It burst and hung there, giving off a spectral glow. A few seconds later there was a single, bright flash, maybe from an artillery cannon, although I couldn’t be certain at this distance. A minute, maybe more, passed in silence before an artillery battery opened up and explosions began reverberating through the foothills around Salah al-Din. Suddenly, the night sky turned into a light show of artillery, flares, and tracers.

My first thought, to be honest, was an old one: Damn, the Kurds are at it again. But the explosions were all coming from south of Irbil, nowhere near Talabani’s and Barzani’s lines. Tom was right : Talabani had decided to attack V Corps.

Taking two steps at a time, I ran downstairs to call Paul, the paramilitary officer I had stationed at Talabani’s command center in Irbil. Paul managed to shout over the confusion that about two hundred of Talabani’s guerrillas had just encircled a brigade from the 38th Division at Guwayr and were about to overrun it.

Paul called in reports all night. With only two wounded, Talabani’s pech merga annihilated the 38th Division’s 848th Brigade, capturing its headquarters. They also captured the attached 601st Battery. About eighty Iraqi soldiers were taken prisoner, including the brigade commander, Colonel ‘Abd-al-’Aziz Namuri. Talabani’s men dynamited the battalion’s bunkers and destroyed its 152mm and 130mm artillery, looting what ammunition and small arms they could carry back in their Toyotas. Then they turned back a relieving force of Republican Guards, destroying an armored personnel carrier and several troop transports. The ferocity of the Kurds’ attack stunned the Republican Guard’s commander. He abandoned any attempt to relieve the 848th and ordered his forward units to take up defensive positions. It was a crushing victory - the first time the Kurds had inflicted this much damage to the Iraqi army since the March 1991 uprising.

As soon as Washington was awake, I called Iraqi operations.

‘Yeah. We’ve read your report.’ It was the pasty-faced reports officer with stringy, matted hair who thought I was a cowboy. Before I left Washington for the north, she had made a point of telling me she believed it was silly for the CIA to have a base in Iraq. ‘We picked up some collateral intelligence,’ she went on.

‘Some?’

‘It looks like there may have been some sort of fighting in the V Corps area last night. Rocket-propelled grenade and machine-gun fire. It stopped about oh-six-hundred this morning, your time. There was a report of about thirty prisoners moved to Irbil. But we can’t confirm it.’

‘What do you mean you can’t confirm it? We watched an artillery battle go on all night.’

‘We don’t have any imagery to back it up.’

‘Yeah, of course. The attack went down at night.’

‘I’m just telling you what they think back here.’

‘You mean you think Talabani faked the whole thing - all that artillery - just to amuse us.’

I hung up. I should have known better than to argue with headquarters. You never got anywhere. Worse, it was considered bad form, possibly even a sign of warped objectivity. As far as Washington was concerned, if the big eye in the sky didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.

I had more faith in my own eyes and wanted to see the war for myself. ‘Tom, pack up,’ I told him.’ We’re going to the front to look for Talabani.’

A dozen jerry cans of gasoline and water, two AK-47s, a couple boxes of rations, a compass, a ground positioning system, an air navigational map of Iraq, and our LST-5 tacset were about all our old two-door Nissan Patrol pickup could hold. I decided not to bring our bodyguards. A convoy would attract too much attention.

Between Salah al-Din and Irbil we didn’t see another car. Even the fields, normally dotted with brightly dressed Kurdish women planting spring seed, were deserted. As we crossed the Irbil plain, we could see that Talabani’s trenches, artillery emplacements, and bunkers had been abandoned. Irbil was wide open to an attack if Barzani dared.

In Irbil we picked up an escort to take us to Sulamaniyah, a good-size Kurdish town near the Iranian border in northeast Iraq. Along the way, we ate lunch in Dukah, at a shish kebab stand on the lake. A rusted sign hanging by one nail advertised sailboats for rent. I wondered what had happened to the boats and how many years it would be before anyone would sail there again. We were below the thirty-sixth now, fair game for Saddam’s gunships.

It was dark when we drove into Sulaymaniyah. The streets were deserted, and there wasn’t a light on in the city except at Talabani’s headquarters. A mob of young and old men surrounded it, trying to push their way in.

‘Volunteers,’ said the guard as he cleared a path for us.

The Sulamaniyah commander showed us into his office and served us tea. He pointed at a map behind his desk with a ruler and attempted to explain what was happening on the front. But he seemed to know only where the Iraqi army was. Finally he gave up, shrugged, and suggested we leave right away for Talabani’s camp. A guide sent by Talabani was waiting to take us there.

We drove up into the mountains south of Sulamaniyah, following a packed-dirt, unmarked road with our headlights off. Saddam’s gunships were firing at anything that moved. A little after midnight we turned off a side road and descended into a clearing. In the middle of it was a squat, one-story cinder-block building, seemingly deserted, but as soon as we pulled up in front and turned off the engine, a dozen pech merga materialized and silently helped us unload the car. They wanted it moved away from the building as quickly as possible.

Talabani came barreling out of the building like a bear out of his cave, grabbed me around the waist, and lifted me off the ground. ‘It’s about time you got here. You’ve been missing all the fun,’ he whispered. ‘And in your honor we will not sleep in the fields tonight but in my palace.’

He hooked his arm through mine and guided me into the pitch-black building, a school that had been abandoned during the 1988 fighting between the Kurds and the government. Only Talabani, Tom, and I would sleep there. The pech merga were scattered in the surrounding hills and caves, where Saddam’s helicopters would have trouble finding them. Talabani’s room at the end of the hall was empty except for a half-dozen boxes filled with papers and books and a few blankets on the floor. The only light was from a single battery-powered camping lantern. We sat down on a rug on the cement floor.

‘We’re going again tonight ‘Talabani said as he rooted around in a huge humidor for three fresh Cuban Cohiba cigars. ‘We are going to hit Karablakh tonight. My guys should be infiltrating across the lines as we speak.’ Since I had never heard of Karablakh, Talabani rolled over to get a map and show me where it was.

Stoked on his own adrenaline, Talabani ranted about how bad off the Iraqi army was; about his plans to capture Kirkuk, the center of Iraq’s oil industry and, he assured us, the rightful property of the Kurds; and about the democratic future of Iraq. He would have gone on all night if my eyes hadn’t started to close.

‘Go to bed,’ he said. ‘But first, where is the cavalry?’

‘It seems to me you’re doing fine without any help.’

‘I’m running out of ammunition.’

‘Don’t worry, Jalal. Washington is just waking up to what you are doing. It’s the same game plan: Get rid of Saddam. ‘That much, at And Tony Lake’s cable hadn’t ordered Talabani or any of the others to scrap their plans to overthrow Saddam. It had simply advised that ‘any decision to proceed will be on your own.’ Talabani understood that, and he knew as I did that Iraqis would never be able to live in peace as long as Saddam was in power.

Talabani fished two more cigars out of his humidor. ‘Here, take this and go call Washington.’

‘Jalal, there’s one other thing.’

He looked at me.

‘We’re leaving, but a new team is going to replace us.’

Talabani handed me my cigar without responding.

‘Go to bed. We’re all tired,’ he finally said.

About ten minutes later he tapped on my door, came in, and handed me a faxed report on Karablakh. His troops had just overrun a battalion there.

‘See,’ Talabani said, his mood brighter. ‘The army is crumbling.’

I got Bob’s deputy in the Iraqi operations group on the tacset and told him about Karablakh. Unimpressed, he asked, ‘Where are you?’

‘Singaw.’

‘Where?’

‘It’s a little village south of the thirty-sixth - Indian country. I’m with Talabani.’

The deputy gasped. ‘You’re out of your mind, and they’re going to string you up as soon as you get back.’

I pretended I hadn’t heard him and told him, as I hung up, that I would be joining Talabani’s pech merga in an attack on Kirkuk.

I was just falling asleep when Talabani knocked on the door again.

‘Saddam’s panicking. He’s started shelling all along our lines.’ He closed the door gently. I could hear him chuckling back to his room.

Talabani was clearly going to be up all night, reading reports coming in on the fighting, but for me there was nothing like numbing exhaustion to induce sleep. I didn’t care that there was only a thin wool blanket to sleep on, or that Saddam’s helicopter gunships were out there somewhere in the night looking for us.

About six the next morning, Talabani woke us to inspect the troops. They were clustered all over the fields around the school, cleaning their weapons, loading up their Toyotas, preparing for more raids that night. As Talabani moved among them, they surged around him, bowing and kissing his hand. An aide brought us a tray of sweet tea to drink while we walked around.

Talabani pressed me to stay with him, but time was running out. We had to be in Ankara in a day and a half. A lightning tour of the front was all Tom and I had time for. Talabani hugged us good-bye and we promised to meet soon.

‘In Baghdad.’ Talabani laughed.

The road to Chamchamal, a town a few miles east of Kirkuk, was paved and in good shape. Again we were the only car. It was a clear day, and we expected to be in Chamchamal in less than an hour. Then we saw it - an Iraqi Mi-24 gunship hovering over a ridge about three miles away. It wasn’t moving or turning. It was fixed in the sky, watching. We could only hope that it hadn’t seen us - there wasn’t a rock, tree, or hollow to hide behind - and that Talabani’s pech merga had splashed enough Kurdish mud on the Nissan to camouflage it. In less than a minute, the Mi-24 could have turned, flown into easy range, and vaporized us and the Nissan. We waited for what seemed like hours until the helicopter dipped behind the ridge, and then we drove away as fast as the Nissan could go.

Chamchamal was oddly quiet. People were shopping at the open-air market, but as soon as we turned off the engine, we could hear the boom of heavy incoming artillery. In the foothills east of Chamchamal, puffs of gray-white smoke hung in the air.

We continued right up to the front lines, to one of the crossing points between Kurdistan and Iraq. A group of Talabani’s fighters milled around the makeshift border post. They didn’t have any idea what was happening on the other side. All they knew was that the Iraqi police had abandoned their post and the border was wide open.

Our last stop before going back to Salah al-Din was Irbil. As soon as we cleared the gates of Talabani’s main military garrison, we drove into a sea of Iraqi prisoners: maybe four football fields of them, standing, sitting, lying down. Outside the compound, alongside the road, were captured artillery pieces, Kamaz trucks, rocket launchers, crates of AK-47s, anything the pech merga could carry back to Irbil from their raids. The line of equipment stretched as far as we could see.

The PUK officer in charge met us at the duty room, assuming we’d come to interrogate his prisoners. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we didn’t have the people - and wouldn’t ever - to interrogate his prisoners, but I did want to talk to at least one. He brought me into a room where a dozen Iraqi officers sat on benches along the wall. I picked a captain at random. He looked to be about thirty years old and exhausted. Early that morning, a little before two, he told me, he got up to check on his company’s pickets and was surprised to find the first position abandoned, as well as the ones on each side. He was on his way back to the company’s command post to find out what had happened when automatic gunfire exploded all around him. He waited for his troops to respond, but no one did - not a shot. Almost simultaneously, Talabani’s pech merga were everywhere. It was as if they had dug a tunnel and just popped out of the ground. He had no choice but to surrender. I thanked the captain and gave him my last pack of military rations.

Before leaving, I saw the Irbil commander. He briefed me on the latest attack. His troops had overrun the 847th Brigade. Kirkuk was now vulnerable, and Talabani could take it if he had enough ammunition.

On the drive back to Salah al-Din, Tom described the Iraqi equipment he’d examined. There was little doubt, he said, that it had recently been captured. Based on long experience, he knew the guns could have come only from Iraqi units.

Back at the house, I sent a message to headquarters about the 847th and followed up with a call.

‘We’re still not picking up anything from overhead about the attacks.’ It was the pasty-faced reports officer again.

‘You can’t be serious. Do you really think there’s a phony war going on up here? I’ve just come from Irbil. We saw thousands of Iraqi prisoners with our own eyes. And there’s the captured artillery.’

The prisoners, the artillery, Tom’s assurance that it was real, my assurance as the senior officer in the field that this wasn’t a game - none of it made any difference to her.