As the task force began monitoring Karim, Paul traveled from Balad down to the Baghdad outstation with Mubassir in tow. While there, Paul lived in the same small hooch with Mubassir, leaving him unshackled the whole time. He sat together in the small room with Mubassir, listening to Iraqi radio, or allowed Mubassir to lecture him on religion and Iraqi culture. Paul brought him the same food the operators ate, including ice cream. It was all about trust.
Unfortunately for both Paul and Mubassir, Karim spooked. Around May 3, roughly twenty-five days into Mubassir’s detention, Paul and the Baghdad team watched Karim, as they had for a few days. But his demeanor was ominously different that day. They watched as he walked briskly up his street, talking on his cell phone, then went up to his home’s rooftop, where he burned a pile of documents and material. At midmorning the next day, Karim drove to his sister’s house and entered the front door, and that was the last we saw of him. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he fled out the back door of the house, out of view of our cameras. He confided in a sheikh, who told him to confer with Abu Ayyub al-Masri himself. When Karim met al-Masri outside Baghdad, al-Masri gave him one thousand dollars and told him to flee to Syria, which he did.
The task force was steamed. They were not alone. When Paul returned from the operations center to their shared hooch and told Mubassir his brother had fled, Mubassir was crushed. This left Mubassir with no more leverage, as everything else he had offered us was worthless. Karim was his lifeline.
Meanwhile, more new captures came in, taxing the capacity of the screening facility. Mubassir increasingly appeared to have nothing more to offer, and it was nearing the time when we would need to submit a request to extend his stay in our facility. During the first few days of May, the screening facility team proposed sending him off to Camp Bucca. But when C.M. brought the recommendation to M.S. that night, she vetoed it. She knew Mubassir was the only detainee with a connection to al-Masri’s courier network and wanted the interrogators to keep mining.
On the same night M.S. vetoed the suggestion to move Mubassir, one of the other interrogators not normally assigned to Mubassir got him to admit a piece he had been holding out on: Karim was not the only connection to al-Masri. Mubassir had met with al-Masri a few times over the past two years, after first hosting the Egyptian at his house in Ahmadiya in the spring of 2004, as the insurgency was materializing.
As M.S. sensed Mubassir could give more on al-Masri, she and the intel teams working for her came to me for approval to continue holding him. I had already written to CENTCOM for permission to keep him this long, but I wrote again seeking Secretary Rumsfeld’s approval. As always, an extensive intelligence package was required to justify the request. By this time our credibility had been built on a strong record of getting it right, and the extension was approved.
* * *
“This has been, and will be, a long and serious war,” I wrote to all of our task forces that spring, posting the message on our portal. “Although initial structures and TTPs* have evolved tremendously from where they were even two years ago, we are still operating with manning and operating processes that need to be improved to be more effective and professional.
“We must increasingly be a force of totally focused counter-terrorists—that is what we do. . . . This is as complex as developing a Long Term Strategic Debriefing Facility that feeds out in-depth understanding of the enemy, and as simple as losing the casual, ‘I’m off at my war adventure,’ manner of dress and grooming.
“In every case it will not be about what’s easy, or even what we normally associate with conventional military standards. It will not even be about what is effective. It will be about what is the MOST effective way to operate—and we will do everything to increase the effectiveness even in small ways.
“If anyone finds this inconvenient or onerous, there’s no place in the force for you. This is about winning—and making as few trips to Arlington Cemetery as possible en route to that objective.”