The Perfect Kill (14 page)

Getting wind of the twelve tanks on Tikrit plan, Chalabi decided his face card in the game would be to forge a letter making it appear as if the National Security Council had enlisted him in the plot against Saddam. The forged letter helpfully laid out the specifics: An “NSC assassin” by the name of “Robert Pope” was on his way to northern Iraq
to carry out the deed. And—surprise, surprise—he couldn't accomplish it without Chalabi's help.

As we'd later determine, Chalabi had forged the letter for the benefit of two Iranian spies who'd crossed over the border to pay him a visit. Leaving the letter out faceup on his desk, he arranged to be called out of his office, giving the two Iranians the chance to read it. After having read the letter (upside down), the Iranians raced back to Tehran to report that the NSC was about to put a limit to Saddam's days. As far as anyone was able to determine—Chalabi denies the whole thing—Chalabi's ploy was to make himself appear in Tehran's eyes as an indispensable player.

As we also found out later, the Iranians were never fooled. But what did happen was that the Iranian military went on full alert, moving armored units to its border with Iraq. Saddam followed suit, putting his army on full alert. (It was the first time he'd done so since the Gulf War.) Joining the party, Turkey put its army on full alert and closed the border crossing into Iraq. I knew it was only a matter of time before Washington finally stirred itself awake.

As my little house of cards started to come down, it occurred to me that Hajj Radwan would have blindfolded Chalabi, marched him out into the main square, and executed him without ado or ceremony—for everyone to take note and pay heed. But of course, unlike me, Hajj Radwan didn't have a flock of know-nothing neocon chicken hawks sitting on his shoulder. Nor, for that matter, did he have to answer to a moribund institution like the CIA.

Not that I'm without guilt in any of this. Even at the time, I knew I should have sat down the rogue officers for a face-to-face meeting. Since they couldn't cross the front lines into the Kurdish north, I should have insisted we meet in Amman, Jordan.

I should have also made the generals take some concrete action that would demonstrate that they, in fact, were prepared to harm Saddam—
mortar his Baghdad palace or something. It's just elementary gang wisdom that you don't trust anyone until he's made the enemy bleed. Blood in, blood out, as they say.

What it all comes back to is you can't make something like assassination work by remote control. Not from a comfy office on the Potomac, not from a café in Europe, and not even from the mountains of Kurdistan. It's just another sine qua non that you see the guts of it with your own two eyes, get out on the field and sweat it out with your guys.

But none of this changes the fact that if I couldn't get an answer out of Washington about the Tikrit plan, even a simple yes or no, there was no way I was ever going to get them to let me go to Amman to meet the generals. So I was left to wait in grim anticipation for this little baby to run off the tracks.

At four in the morning on March 1, there was a knock at my door. I opened it to find my radioman. He said: “Want to read a message from the White House?”

In my long, checkered CIA career, I'd never seen a piece of correspondence sent directly from the White House to a CIA station, let alone to a pissant unit like mine. I found a flashlight and sat down at the end of my bed to read it.

It was a curt message to all of the plotters, including Chalabi. It said something about how the action “you have planned” had been “compromised,” and “proceeding” would be at “your peril.”

To be sure, the White House's prose was nuanced and businesslike, but by the time I got to the end of it, I didn't need to decipher Linear B to get the drift:
Knock the fucking assassination thing off.

It wouldn't be until I got back to Washington that I found out that Chalabi's fabrication—the tale of the faux “NSC assassin” aka “Robert Pope”—had reached the White House's ears and set its hair on fire. The White House knew for a fact that it hadn't dispatched this Pope to Iraq to assassinate Saddam. Who else could it be other than the CIA?

It also didn't help that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had called
Clinton's national security adviser in the middle of the night, demanding to know what in the hell was going on in Iraq. From where he sat, it looked as if the three largest armies in the Middle East were on an apocalyptic collision course. And by the way, if there really was a plan afoot to assassinate Saddam, shouldn't he know about it?

In the fog of bureaucratic battle, the White House called the acting CIA director, who mumbled he didn't know anything about a Robert Pope. Now panicked, the acting director called the FBI director to investigate. Ignorant of the facts, the FBI opened a criminal investigation. (It's what they do for a living.)

A platoon of FBI agents beat the bushes up and down the Potomac looking for Robert Pope. But since he didn't exist, they couldn't find him. By default, they turned their attention to my team and me. Which was how we became the first American officials criminally investigated for an assassination attempt on a foreign leader.

Meantime, back in Iraq: The general showed up in front of our house in an ancient Russian jeep driven by a very old Kurdish
peshmerga
warrior. The general was decked out in the elegant full-dress uniform of an Iraqi major general, a sword clanging at his side. With a gleam in his eye, he told me he was about to march on Tikrit, meet up with the main force, and deal with Saddam. But as soon as the general drove off, a Kurdish militia arrested him. (The Kurds later told me that they'd done it because of the White House's message to them that “my plan” had been “canceled.”)

There was no sign that anyone had moved at the appointed time on March 5. And now with the general hors de combat and my only conduit to the putschists lost, there was no way to find out what had happened to the colonel and his tanks. It left me with the unhappy thought that Saddam had decapitated us instead of the other way around.

When I got back to Washington, two FBI agents badged me and read me my rights. The charge? Crossing interstate borders to commit murder, to wit, Saddam Hussein's. The two agents were genuinely curious
about what exactly had gone on in Iraq. Was there a reason one of my guys had an injury from a sniper rifle? Any lingering doubts I still had that not everyone in Washington shared my enthusiasm for the attempt on Saddam now completely evaporated.

It took the FBI about a month to decide that there hadn't been an NSC assassination plot, that Robert Pope was Chalabi's invention, that we were all innocent of murder and attempted murder. Why they decided to overlook the twelve tanks on Tikrit plan, I don't know. I imagine they realized it would look ridiculous prosecuting CIA operatives for an attempt on America's number-one enemy.

Cleared, we went back to our lives. Or sort of. Like I said, I had a lot of time to think about the folly of it, how I'd flagrantly violated every rule in Hajj Radwan's book. Had I learned nothing in Beirut? Or, for that matter, anything about life?

Actually, Mother taught me a lot about life, that things like having a mouth full of straight white teeth, owning at least thirty-six button-down dress shirts, and not marrying a tramp were important. But not the least of it, she taught me that when it comes to a nasty fight always pick the time and the terrain.

When Mother was in graduate school, she lived in a generally sedate apartment building, but on the other side of one wall from her was a middle-aged man with a taste for younger women. He'd stay up late into the night partying, music radiating through the wall. When it became apparent a polite knock on the wall wouldn't do it, Mother moved to act.

One afternoon she called the local hospital to find out the name of the doctor on duty that night. Waiting until the music started next door, she called the morgue, evoking the doctor's name. There was a stiff that
needed to be picked up, she said in a businesslike manner. She gave the name and address of her partying neighbor.

When two morticians showed up at his door, asking for him by name, his little soiree came to a quick end. Although Mother's neighbor couldn't pin down the identity of his foe, he accepted defeat gracefully and moved out. Mother went back to her studious life.

“Know what fights to pick,” she told me. “And never, ever let your enemy pick the ground.”

Too bad Mother wasn't in Iraq with me.

—

H
ere's why my Saddam plot failed:

One: The Iraqis are not wired to conspire with outsiders. For lack of a better explanation, I blame it on the Mongol invasions, which turned them—this is another unfair but serviceable oversimplification—into possibly the most xenophobic people in the world. It translated into the truth that if there were any Iraqis inclined to assassinate Saddam, the last thing they'd do is share their thoughts with the CIA.

Two: The CIA didn't possess anything like a friendly tribe in Iraq, nothing close to Lebanon's Christians. Even the Kurds didn't like or trust the United States, as I figured out when they arrested the general on D-day. Did they do it at Saddam's behest or as a matter of caution? I don't know. But looking back on it now, what's clear is that I'd have been lucky to find a Kurd agreeable to driving down to the local 7-Eleven to buy me a tub of ice cream.

Compared with Hajj Radwan's experiences in Iraq, our isolation was all the more apparent. When his cell showed up there in 2003, it quickly recruited a large pool of young men prepared not only to undertake murder at Hajj Radwan's direction but also to risk their lives. We saw it in the attack on Karbala and the execution of five American soldiers.

Three: In spite of my best efforts, there was nowhere for us to hide
in the north, certainly nothing like Hajj Radwan's Palestinian refugee camps. There were some hollow-eyed Christian visionaries in a village near ours, but it was strictly a no-no borrowing them for cover. If I had tried, Congress would have repealed EO 12333 as a one-time exception to come after me for endangering the Christian base. Left to the elements, we were like squids in a snowstorm.

Finally: I was a finch imprisoned in a bureaucratic cage. I had to ask Langley for all things small and large. If I wanted to recruit a new informant, I'd have to go through a long song and dance to get an okay. It could take weeks or months. Hajj Radwan never had to ask for permission for anything. Either the mission was on or it wasn't. Either he could do it or he couldn't. He lived in a binary, unencumbered world I sorely envied.

At bottom, my problem was I was playing in Saddam's backyard. His spies were everywhere, and no part of Iraq was out of his sight. He personally knew every important player in the country. Who drank too much, who had a hernia, who was sleeping with whom, etc. For one year he'd sat across a conference table from the general, my cutout to his would-be assassins. He also knew the Kurds like the back of his hand, namely that they wouldn't support the twelve tanks on Tikrit plan; that they were perfectly happy in their crappy little enclave; that they lived by the homespun wisdom that you don't try to fix something if it's not broken. I'm all but certain Saddam wasn't surprised when the Kurds balked and arrested the general. Saddam's understanding of Iraq and its people was one I could never come close to replicating.

Adding to it, Saddam was in undisputed control of his rump state, he was his own man. He alone decided who deserved it and who didn't. He didn't have to put up with the likes of Langley's bureaucrats or EO 12333.

The United States, of course, was no more clairvoyant than I when it invaded Iraq in 2003. No one even entertained the possibility that Iraq might be worse off without Saddam. With nearly a half million killed at
this writing, clearly his murder wasn't a good social bargain for all. But when does blindly thrashing around in the exotic parts of the world ever make things better for the locals or, for that matter, the thrashers? As Sun Tzu put it, war can neither be avoided nor won without knowledge of the enemy.

Immerse yourself in your enemy's world before deciding whether to act or not, especially in those places where truth is determined by power. And definitely don't take any blind shots.

K
host, Afghanistan, December 30, 2009: Forty-five-year-old Jennifer Matthews, mother of three, was the unlikeliest of assassins. Or for that matter, of targets. Born to a strict evangelical family from suburban Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she was raised and remained a believer her entire life. She attended Ohio's Cedarville University, an evangelical college where Bible study is mandatory and creationism is taught to the exclusion of Darwin. She married a devout boy from the same school, and their first child was soon on the way. Like a lot of people from small-town America, Matthews felt a strong pull to raise a family close to home. But she decided there had to be more to life and applied to the CIA.

Hired in 1989, she and her family moved to Washington, D.C.; they bought a home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Like all new émigrés, they had to learn to cope with the high cost of living and the shitty traffic that comes with northern Virginia's unremitting vinyl-sided suburbs. But working for the government had its attractions—steady employment, regular pay raises, good health insurance. So northern Virginia was where they'd settle down, she making a career at the CIA and he as a chemist.

At Cedarville, Matthews had majored in television journalism, so it made a certain sense that the CIA would turn her into a photo analyst, someone who typically spends a career poring over stacks of glossy black-and-white satellite photographs. She'd do well if she could learn to write succinctly and quickly, churning out a regular stream of finished intelligence reports. Promotions would come with predictable regularity.

Matthews entered the CIA near the end of the Cold War, an era when a lot of people thought it was high time to cage the beast. The CIA had never gotten over its 1961 half-baked “invasion” of Cuba, the Bay of Pigs. Or its half-baked attempts on Castro's life. So when it came time to arm and train the mujahideen to fight the Red Army in Afghanistan, the CIA gladly handed the task off to the Pakistanis. No new Bay of Pigs equaled no wrecked careers.

In the same spirit, a great cultural shift started to sweep across the CIA, the bureaucrats triumphing over the field operatives. Things such as modern management, cost-benefit analysis, and balancing budgets were prized over classic espionage. It wasn't exactly thought through, but the basic idea was that a corporate sensibility would file the rough edges off the CIA, clean it up enough so it could go out and mix in polite company.

Soon enough, the writing was on the wall: If you wanted to get to the top, you'd better punch your ticket behind a desk at Langley. And sure enough, it wasn't long before manicured, deskbound bureaucrats started
to be promoted faster than field operatives. The notion of rubbing shoulders with foreigners and parachuting into foreign jungles was now as quaint as a top hat.

Soon people who'd never served in the field were put in charge of the field, allowed to call the shots in a country they'd never laid eyes on. The analyst who oversaw the CIA teams tasked with tailing people around the world was confined to a wheelchair from a boyhood accident. Although he himself had never tailed anyone, he was expected to advise people who did.

The patently unqualified were sent out to the field. In the middle of the hunt for bin Laden, the CIA sent a career logistics officer to Islamabad as the boss. No one bothered to ask how, with absolutely no understanding of South Asia, he was supposed to comprehend one of the most opaque countries in the world.

An analyst was appointed as head of all CIA clandestine operations. His first and only act of significance was to sever all CIA connections to the dark side—swindlers, dope dealers, mercenaries, religious fanatics, assassins, forgers, the mob, or anyone else who didn't share America's ideas of decency and propriety. For the old-school operatives, it came as a neck-wrenching, 180-degree reversal from a practice of keeping in touch with the world's scum, if only to keep a pulse on it. Arms dealing, money laundering, and all the other black arcana now became terra incognita for the CIA. It was as if the Mayo Clinic had stopped seeing sick people.

The CIA also decided it would make itself as politically correct and vanilla as the rest of America. It introduced things such as “off-sites,” management gurus, and casual Fridays. For the adventuresome, there were Outward Bound–like “bonding” weeks on the Pecos River—hikes, singing around the campfire, rappelling off cliffs. Cultural barriers came down too. When America stopped looking at homosexuality as moral turpitude, so did the CIA. It even introduced LGBT seminars. Could transgender bathrooms be far behind?

In the great leavening, operatives were expected to spend the bulk of their careers in Washington learning the bureaucratic ropes. It all worked out nicely. While the ambitious, smart operatives came home to fight on Langley's bureaucratic battlefields, the analysts could go overseas to get their tickets punched. It was the CIA's version of the World Is Flat.

There was an undisguised sigh of relief when the old-school operators who knew their way around guns and explosives finally decided to shuffle into retirement, taking along with them the oddballs who'd spent their careers in the exotic parts of the world and spoke exotic languages. Who needed some sad bastard whose only talent was to speak fluent Baluchi? The new mantra was if a foreigner couldn't speak English, he wasn't worth knowing.

—

A
ct Two: The CIA would have been completely out of the rough trades if it hadn't been for 9/11 and drone assassinations. Never mind that EO 12333 was never rescinded. The way I read it, the same lawyers who'd ignored me in Iraq finally got off their asses and, rightly or wrongly, conjured up the semantics to authorize political murder.

Before I get any further, I need to make it crystal clear that I separated from the CIA in December 1997 and haven't read a piece of classified information since. In fact, I've steered well clear of my still (serving) ex-colleagues in order to keep CIA security off their backs. In other words, what I know about drones and the Khost tragedy I've learned as a journalist (i.e., you're getting my opinion). Whether it's more worthy than Main Street's, I leave it up to the reader.

I also should add that from what I've gleaned over the years, the people doing most of the targeted killing is the Pentagon rather than the CIA. After all, it's the military that pulls a drone's trigger rather than the CIA. I'm told that thanks to the military's “waived special access programs”—i.e., no congressional or judicial oversight—we don't hear
much about Delta Force and the Seal assassinations. It's a detail, though, that doesn't matter for this book. Again, it's a rulebook rather than a survey.

It's been reported in the press that CIA drones killed more than two thousand people, mostly in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The unit responsible for them, the Counterterrorism Center, became the CIA's fixed center of gravity. If you wanted into management, an assignment there was a de rigueur rite of passage. But it didn't mean the old-school operatives were brought back. Thanks to brand-spanking-new technology, drones are flown and monitored remotely, from even as far away as the continental United States. Anyone who could work a mouse and had the patience to sit in front of a flat-panel screen for hours on end could get into the drone assassination business.

The CIA's analytical side was completely swept up in the drone craze. Overnight, analysts went from paper pushers to high-tech assassins. According to
The Washington Post
, twenty percent of them were turned into drone “targeters.” With godlike powers of life and death, they were now the CIA's new operatives.

Drones came as a nice fit for the CIA, seamlessly folding into its tight-lipped and cloistered little world. Targeters could send out for Chinese takeout and lattes, and never have to take their eyes off their screens. The most dangerous part of their day was the drive to work and back home. As for the grunt work, it was left to the contractors in the field who repaired and armed the drones.

One side effect of drones was that an overseas career pretty much became irrelevant. A six-month stint in a war zone such as Iraq or Afghanistan was enough to classify you as a seasoned field officer. Never mind that these tours amounted to being locked up in fortresses like Baghdad's Green Zone.

No surprise, drones did wonders for cleaning up the CIA, wiping away a lot of the Bay of Pigs stain. After all, interacting with the world with a mouse is pretty much risk-free, sort of like fishing in a septic
tank with a mechanical arm. Even better, it was the White House and the bloodless lawyers who slavishly do its bidding that made the final decision on the “kill lists.” The moral hazard of assassination was on its back rather than the CIA's.

In a town that feeds on hard power, the CIA's sudden rehabilitation was easy to gauge. A CIA tech could run a drone video feed into the White House's subterranean Situation Room and offer the president and his cabinet a front-row seat on a “kinetic strike,” as they're so quaintly described. It has probably occurred to Langley that it is more relevant today than it ever was during the Cold War.

I'll get deeper into drone assassinations in Law #12, but the point here is that when the CIA sent Jennifer Matthews to Khost, Afghanistan, it was pretty much a bureaucratic exercise—a ticket-punching. Never mind that she was just as unprepared for the shit mist she was shoved out into as I was in Kurdistan. And as I've come to realize, there but for the grace of God go I.

Samuel Johnson: “Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.”

By that measure, getting to know the Pashtuns isn't possible. They neither want to drink nor eat with us, and most definitely they don't want us wandering around their backyard. Throw in the fact that these people have no fixed addresses, no fixed telephone lines, and that they behead people like pollsters and marketers and are all seemingly named Khan, and the chances of an outsider's ever getting to know them is zero. Which translates into the related truth that the chances of ever conducting a successful campaign of political murder against them is also zero.

Political murder in Pashtunistan is all the more impossible because
there's no one Pashtun head to lop off. The one-eyed Mullah Omar is only a public face, pretty much disconnected from the thousand-headed hydra that runs the Pashtun resistance, or as it is commonly referred to, the Taliban. The only people in history who've ever been able to make the Pashtuns properly submit were the Mongols, and that was only thanks to genocide.

Adding to the complexity, rural Pashtuns have a reputation for being unfathomable, primitive, and superstitious people. They imbue time with mysterious properties. Such as believing that in the winter at midnight, witches will call to them with voices stolen from someone they know. During the last two hours of daylight, a Pashtun will refuse to loan milk from his cow for fear it will leave a curse on the cow and cause it to go dry.

Pashtun society is dominated by low technology, small landholdings, small workshops, and trade carried out on the street. Most houses aren't hooked up to the electrical grid, and their only source of light is kerosene lamps. Water is drawn from wells; there's scant medical care; goats and sheep are the main source of protein.

People who have the misfortune of going to war against the Pashtuns characterize them as an unforgiving and belligerent people. Seemingly, a man will sire a large family because he knows he stands to lose half his boys in war. When the Pashtuns don't have an outside enemy to fight, they fight one another. Like the ancient Greeks, they find self-worth in killing other men.

Pashtun politics are pretty much indecipherable to outsiders. Strictly organized along tribal and kinship lines, all power is personal and contingent. A patriarch or a militia commander often will have no public title or position.

Important decisions are made in what's called a
loya jirga
, an impromptu congress. No minutes are taken, and a very rough nonbinding consensus prevails. Its proceedings are invariably opaque, with even
participants unsure of why or who made a particular decision. It's as if Congress debated and voted blindfolded in a mosh pit.

Pashtun politics are all the more complicated because there are nearly four hundred Pashtun tribes, each occupying a place with stable boundaries. Within them, there are hundreds of important clans and extended families. As I said, there's no preeminent leader of the Pashtuns, often not even in a particular district. Ties between distant tribes and clans are irregular and sporadic, or sometimes there are none at all.

The British Raj spent nearly a hundred years attempting to subdue the Pashtuns, alternating brute force with bribery. During tribal uprisings, the British conducted punitive raids in an attempt to put them down, blowing up houses and often destroying entire villages. They called it “butcher and bolt.”

Like Julius Caesar in Gaul, the British marched up and down the Pashtun tribal belt desperately trying to put down one revolt after another. Although some British officers spoke Pashto and were familiar with the Pashtuns, they never discovered a way to convince them of the benefits of empire. In the end, unlike Caesar, the best the British could hope for was a truce, a temporary and fragile one at that.

Between 1919 and 1947, the British Royal Air Force relentlessly bombed Pakistan's tribal belt in hopes of forcing the Pashtuns to submit. It was a strategy founded on nothing more than the untested hypothesis that a spectacle of force would do the job. The British would have accepted symbolic submission for the actual act, but they didn't even get that. When they finally gave India its independence, the British left the Pashtuns as ungovernable as when they arrived.