Authors: Joby Warrick
Faddis quickly grasped the stark differences between the Afghan
exiles—mostly Arabic-speakers with at least rudimentary education and knowledge of the world—and the simple Kurdish farmers and goat herders who filled Ansar’s ranks. Yet the two groups shared the same ideology and a common interest in the tradecraft of terrorism. Together they had set about creating a miniature Afghanistan in the Iraqi mountains, an Islamic theocracy whose harsh codes were enforced by the gun and the blade.
It was true, he learned, that the militants harbored a deadly secret: a stockpile of poisons they were testing for possible use in terrorist attacks abroad. Through the CIA’s interrogations, and with additional help from well-placed spies, the nature of Ansar’s poisons fixation became clear. The group had managed to acquire dozens of gallons of deadly chemicals, including cyanide, and a small supply of castor beans for making highly lethal ricin. Each of the ingredients could be purchased easily and legally—potassium cyanide is used in film developing—and there was no sign that Ansar’s militants possessed the equipment or know-how for making real chemical weapons. Still, the experiments seemed serious enough. Inside their makeshift lab, amateur technicians mixed cyanide with skin cream and other cosmetics. Their rumored experiments on stray dogs were later confirmed in videotapes that were discovered in the fort’s ruins.
“Their abilities are crude, but their aspirations are huge,” Faddis remembered thinking at the time. “They are out for blood, and they are no joke.”
The other question preoccupying the White House—whether Iraqi forces were somehow helping the Islamists—was even easier to unravel. Faddis’s team picked up the trail of suspected Iraqi operatives in the area near the Ansar camp, and confirmed that the men were members of Saddam Hussein’s feared intelligence service. But Faddis soon discovered that the Iraqis were doing exactly as he was: trying to collect intelligence on the militants. The Iraqis watched from afar and tried to recruit informants—a risky proposition, given Ansar’s history of poisoning suspected spies and displaying their severed heads on stakes outside the fort. Far from colluding with the Islamists, the Iraqis appeared fearful of them.
Still, the Bush administration had promised to hunt down al-Qaeda-allied terrorists wherever it found them, and to Faddis, this bunch fit the definition perfectly.
The United States had a “golden opportunity,” Faddis wrote in one of his cables to CIA headquarters in Langley. Ansar al-Islam was a terrorist organization with an ambitious international agenda. It was harboring dozens of Arab militants with known links to al-Qaeda. More disturbingly, it possessed chemical poisons that could potentially be used with horrifying effect in the cities of Europe or the United States. But the threat in its entirety could be erased, Faddis wrote, with a single well-placed blow.
“We knew exactly where every one of these Islamist terrorists slept,” Faddis said afterward, describing his detailed accounts to CIA headquarters. “We knew where each gun was, literally down to every machine-gun position and mortar tube.”
Best of all, he added, “None of them knew we were there.”
As Faddis hoped, his cables created a stir in Washington. At Langley, and later at the Defense Department, a series of meetings was convened to discuss what to do. At the Pentagon, a forty-eight-year-old brigadier general named Stanley McChrystal—soon to rise to prominence as the head of special forces in Iraq—was asked to come up with options for attacking the base. One idea was to hit the Islamists with a missile barrage, followed by a helicopter assault by teams of American and Kurdish commandos, who would scoop up any evidence of biological or chemical weapons production.
The plan was deemed workable, but the Bush White House split sharply over whether to order the raid. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld favored the strike, but other senior aides, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, advised against it. The administration was already deep into the planning for an invasion of Iraq, opponents said, and any strike on Iraqi soil carried the risk of an escalation that could start the war prematurely. Other critics of the plan simply worried that McChrystal’s proposal was too sprawling. “
It’s big enough to be an invasion,” one of the brigadier’s superiors complained. “You were in special operations. Can’t they do anything small anymore?”
Bush decided to nix the plan, for now.
“It was like getting punched in the gut,” Faddis said later. “We were all putting ourselves at risk. When the mission was sidelined, you knew right then and there what it meant. We weren’t going to pull the trigger now. And when the time came when we did pull the trigger, the important targets will no longer be here.”
Faddis tried again, suggesting a less ambitious campaign that would rely on local Kurds to do most of the fighting. With a little air support, a few 150-millimeter mortars, and some logistical help from the CIA team, the local guys could destroy the base on their own, he argued.
“For the love of God, just give us two B-52s, or just the mortars, and we’ll get it done,” Faddis pleaded. “Give it to us tomorrow, and we’ll get it done the day after. Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam don’t have a clue we are here. Total stealth.”
The response from Langley was the same.
“I hear you, Sam,” came the reluctant reply, according to Faddis. “All I can tell you is, that’s the way it is. The last time I checked, the president outranked you.”
Faddis and his team remained in northern Iraq with orders to continue their surveillance. Zarqawi, meanwhile, was free to build his network without fear of attack or interference. CIA officials at the time understood that the Jordanian was becoming increasingly dangerous. As Tenet, director of the spy agency, later noted, Zarqawi was clearly on the move in those prewar days, training his recruits at the Ansar al-Islam camp while dispatching envoys to Middle Eastern and European capitals, seeking money, volunteers, and allies. “
He was able to forge ties between Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Libyans and other Arab extremists located through Europe,” Tenet would write of Zarqawi in his memoirs. “Over several months of tireless links we identified Zarqawi-connected terrorist cells in more than 30 countries.”
Apprised of this, the Bush administration held one final debate on the possibility of a strike against Zarqawi and the Ansar al-Islam camp. It happened in early January 2003, just two months before the start of the Iraq war, and weeks before then Secretary of State Colin Powell was to give his now famous speech to the UN Security Council, outlining the rationale for invasion. By then,
White House
officials were reluctant to take any action that might detract from the all-important battle for public opinion, according to an account of the meeting in
Days of Fire
, the journalist Peter Baker’s acclaimed history of the Bush White House. A strike on the militant base now would undermine one of the pillars of Powell’s upcoming speech: the existence of terrorist networks on Iraqi soil.
“That would wipe out my briefing,” Powell said, according to Baker’s account. Besides, he added, “We’re going to get [Ansar al-Islam] in a few weeks anyway.”
—
The administration was still debating a possible strike on Zarqawi’s camp, when, on January 23, 2003, a delegation of U.S. generals arrived in Amman for a visit cloaked in unusual secrecy. Reporters were kept far away when General Tommy Franks, commander of the Pentagon’s U.S. Central Command, landed at the airport, and the palace imposed a blackout on details of his meetings with Jordanian officials, including whether King Abdullah II had participated. Later, anonymous military sources revealed the purpose of the visit in carefully worded leaks to the Western press: with a war against Iraq just weeks away, the United States was preparing to offer Jordan its advanced Patriot missile-defense system, in hopes of securing the Hashemite kingdom’s support when the shooting began.
“
We are considering it,” one of the members of the U.S. team told a Jordanian journalist during the visit. In fact, the missile batteries would be shipped to Jordan within days, along with six new F-16 fighter-bombers, bolstering Jordan’s defenses in preparation for a possible war next door.
But the U.S. assistance came at a price. For months, the Bush White House had been pressuring Jordan to get behind its plan to topple Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The squeeze had begun in the late summer, when the king met with Bush and his top deputies during an August 2, 2002, visit to the White House. The usually charming Texan was cool and stiff, as Abdullah recalled later. Aides warned the monarch that the president was upset over comments he had made to a British newspaper, accusing the Bush team of being
“
fixated on Iraq” and determined to start a war that would “really open a Pandora’s box in the Middle East.”
Bush, crunching on ice cubes as the two men sat in the Oval Office, said he hadn’t yet decided whether to invade Iraq. “When I do, you will know,” he said. He called Iraqi president Saddam Hussein a “thug” who had to be challenged. “I don’t want people to think, 20 years from now, that I chickened out on confronting him,” he said.
Later that day, Bush brought up Iraq again, this time framing the standoff with Saddam as a moral, even religious obligation.
“You and I have two great fathers, and we both believe in God,” Bush said, as Abdullah later recalled. “We have an opportunity to do the right thing.”
Abdullah was stunned. He despised Saddam, and he knew America’s vast military could quickly destroy the Iraqi dictator’s army. He had offered, without public acknowledgment, support for the U.S.-led assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and even volunteered Jordan’s help in tracking down Osama bin Laden. Yet he was convinced that war against the Iraqi tyrant would be a colossal mistake. An attack by U.S. troops on an Arab leader—even one as unpopular as Saddam—would inflame the region, putting Jordan at risk. But it was clear that Bush had made up his mind. Back in Amman, the monarch told his aides to get ready. “This war is going to happen,” he said.
Through the late summer and fall, the war drums grew increasingly urgent, and so did the appeals to Jordan to back the administration’s war plan. A steady stream of American politicians and generals visited Amman, pressing the king to allow U.S. forces to stage along the country’s border, or to fly sorties through Jordanian airspace. Vice President Dick Cheney phoned Abdullah personally to ask for permission to use Jordan as a springboard for the assault on Baghdad. Against the intense wrangling over war preparations, the shock over the Foley assassination quickly faded.
Abdullah ultimately claimed a middle ground. His father, Hussein, had famously opposed the first Gulf War, a stance that set back the country’s relations with both Washington and key Arab
allies. Abdullah likewise would maintain a posture of opposition to a conflict that Jordanians overwhelmingly rejected as unjust, and he refused to allow significant numbers of U.S. troops into the country. But he did agree to offer the Americans behind-the-scenes support, mostly in the critical arena of covert operations involving small groups of U.S. commandos.
The decision to accept the Patriot missile batteries was a last-minute concession. Publicly, the monarchy could claim that the missile-defense system would shield Jordanians from any errant Iraqi SCUDs that might threaten Jordanian territory. In reality, the Americans wanted an additional safeguard against a possible Iraqi attack on Israel in retaliation for the invasion. It was yet another sign that war was coming.
“I tried to walk the tightrope of opposing the war and staying out of it,” Abdullah acknowledged afterward. “
But I was certain of one thing: the longer the war lasts, the more terrible the consequences would be.”
7
“Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world”
The world’s introduction to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came on February 5, 2003, in the sixty-first minute of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council making the case for war against Iraq. It began with a declarative sentence that, like many others in the seventy-five-minute presentation, was technically true but widely off the mark.
“
Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell began, just before Zarqawi’s bearded image appeared on a large screen behind the council’s circular table.
Nada Bakos, watching on a TV monitor at work, heard the line and cringed. Yes, Zarqawi lived in the remote mountains of northeastern Iraq—in an area off limits to Iraq’s military. To suggest that Saddam Hussein was providing sanctuary to him was contrary to everything that Bakos, the Zarqawi expert, knew to be true. It was like claiming that America’s twenty-second president, Grover Cleveland, had “harbored” Geronimo, the famed Apache chieftain of the frontier West who attacked settlers and Blue Coats from his base along the U.S.-Mexican border.
She continued watching, transfixed.
“Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al-Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible,” Powell continued. “Last year an al-Qaeda
associate bragged that the situation in Iraq was, quote, ‘good,’ that Baghdad could be transited quickly.”
True enough. But were the terrorists gaining passage through official Iraqi complicity, or because of weaknesses in the country’s notoriously corrupt and inefficient border security?
To those who knew the subject matter best, the speech was an extraordinary performance, an artful rendering of a selective set of facts that favored invasion. Powell later described the presentation as one of the biggest blunders of his career, a mistake he would attribute to sloppy intelligence and wishful thinking at senior levels of the Bush administration. In reality, every word of the Zarqawi portion of the speech had been written by senior officials of the CIA after weeks of rancorous debate with White House officials over what should and should not be left out. To his credit, Powell rejected out of hand an earlier script written by White House aides, one that included much stronger claims about terrorist links gleaned from untested informants and unconfirmed rumors picked up by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.