I probably wrote five such messages during my years commanding TF 714, but I made many of the same points in the O&I VTC almost daily. A leader must constantly restate any message he feels is important, and do so in the clearest possible terms. It serves to inform new members and remind veterans.
TF 16 increasingly pushed to be ever more effective, and that spring, even as Al Qaeda in Iraq wreaked havoc, we had been pummeling the organization. I stressed the importance of pace, or “OPTEMPO” as we called it, as key to maintaining pressure. Where we’d executed eighteen raids per month in August of 2004, by that month in 2006 we were up to three hundred. I also felt that we were closing in on Zarqawi himself. Many in the task force shared the feeling. We looked for every way possible to provoke him or someone near him to make a mistake and appear on the grid.
That May, one way we thought we could flush him out was to manufacture discord between him and Abu Ayyub al-Masri. Egyptians like al-Masri were to a degree the dominant aristocracy within Al Qaeda, and Zarqawi had displayed a fixation with his status in the movement. So we aimed to diminish Zarqawi’s stature while raising al-Masri’s profile. We petitioned to reduce the reward offered for information on Zarqawi—which had been at twenty-five million dollars since 2004—down to five million, while simultaneously raising the money attached to al-Masri to the same amount. From my assessment of Zarqawi, any diminution of his status would sorely upset him.
At about the same time, we obtained a video taken by Zarqawi’s propaganda team of him shooting a U.S. M-249 squad automatic weapon, or SAW, in a bermed desert area somewhere inside Iraq. The footage was meant to be grist for a propaganda film showing a macho-looking insurgent leader demonstrating his warrior skills. We intercepted that footage, as well as the full, unedited version, which revealed the supposedly pious Zarqawi ignoring a call to prayer from a muezzin off camera and lacking even rudimentary proficiency on the weapon. As Zarqawi and his team swaggered back to their trucks after firing, one of his aides achieved buffoon status when he took the SAW from Zarqawi by grabbing the barrel, still hot from being fired. The hot metal seared his hand, and he dropped the weapon. It was amusing to watch and also an opportunity to undercut the terrorist leader’s mystique. So we arranged for it to be released by MNF-I on May 4, nine days after AQI’s edited version hit the Internet. We felt we were closing in—and it was worth making every effort to provoke his vanity, threaten his standing, and hopefully cause him to make a fatal slip.
By Wednesday, May 17, after two more weeks of interrogations, Mubassir’s flippant attitude had increasingly given way to weariness. His family was now completely on its own, without his brother to watch over them. The screening facility team sensed they could make his desperation more acute. Again working together, the analysts and interrogators had put together a time line of Mubassir’s travels to Jordan. Amy and Jack saw that Mubassir had been there prior to bombings in Amman the previous November. He had admitted a connection with al-Masri, who, along with Zarqawi, was closely linked with the Atrous family, which had yielded the female suicide bomber for the attack. Knowing this, they saw a chance to play on his self-preservation instinct and goad him into revealing something they thought he was holding back.
Now, several weeks after Mubassir’s capture in Yusufiyah, Amy, the young female interrogator, and her partner, Jack, sat down again across the table from Mubassir. They told him they knew of his trips to Jordan and his connections to al-Masri and top status in AQI. They presented these as dangerous secrets they had uncovered.
“We’re trying to hold on to you, but if the word gets out that you are tied to this, it could be really bad,” the interrogators said. Mubassir sensed how significant the hotel bombings were.
“I can’t give you anything,” Mubassir said. “I don’t have anything.”
Jack, pretending to get mad, got up and walked toward the door. He passed a knowing glance to Amy over his shoulder. She understood. He stopped in the doorway. “I’m going to get a guard, we’re done with you,” he said to the detainee, and slammed the door.