Amy turned back around in her seat and looked at Mubassir squarely. Across the small molded-plastic table from her small five-foot-four frame, Mubassir’s bulk hid much of the white plastic chair. “You need to talk to us,” she said. “You need to tell us what’s going on. We’re going to be able to tie you to those bombings, and at that point, it’s going to be out of our hands.”
“I don’t have anything,” he said.
Behind her the guards knocked on the wood door. The weeks of rapport now tugged at him. His only meaningful interactions since capture had been with Jack and Paul and Amy, sitting in front of him. They were now his best and only advocates in this bizarre world he increasingly wanted to escape, and the surest way to make it be over for him. The knocks on the door threatened to upend all of that. The knocks meant a new prison, new interrogators, new uncertainty.
“Wait,” Mubassir said, “I have something to tell you.”
| CHAPTER 13 |
Hibhib
May–June 2006
At around 10:00 A.M. on May 18, 2006, an interrogation report was on the desk of J.C. when he entered the operations center. T.S. and T.C. had convinced Mubassir to talk the day before, and the result was stunning. Midmorning was normally dead time at the Baghdad compound, the squadron’s central headquarters. J.C. had gone to bed only a few hours earlier, when the raids had finished and the assaulters called in “objective secure.” Those operators were now asleep in the bunk beds berthed throughout the house, one of a row of identical villas Saddam had built for favored supporters. The villa sat inside the Green Zone and backed to the Tigris River. It had at one time been nice, with stucco patios and verandas. After five years of heavy use by the seventy-man squadrons that rotated through for ninety days of breakneck operations, the amenities were neglected and in disrepair. Most of the pools out back were covered in a film of algae. The interior was austere and practical. Plywood shelving had been built into the walls. A TV went rarely watched, and a gym was heavily used. Former living and dining rooms had been converted to operations centers with monitors and workstations. The rooms and hallways were crowded and had a hodgepodge look, but it was anything but casual. In these slow hours of the morning, and into early afternoon, a few operators scrutinized intelligence and quietly coordinated necessary support. But by late afternoon it would become tense with focused activity in anticipation of the night’s raids.
J.C. had sat there many mornings before, studying Mubassir’s interesting but still inconclusive interrogation. Up until then, each had normally been a couple of pages in length. Today’s report, from Mubassir’s fifty-first interrogation, was eight pages of commentary from a man who seemed to be unburdening himself. The day before, after Mubassir had told Amy to wait as she rose to answer the guards knocking on the door, she and Jack had deftly pulled out of him all the details they knew J.C. and his team would need. It was all now in the report, which J.C. quickly skimmed: Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser, Mubassir said, was Sheikh Abd al-Rahman. He lived in Baghdad with his family. He had a wife and three kids. Two daughters and a boy. The boy was the youngest. Abd al-Rahman never drove himself. He had a chauffeur.
And, Mubassir claimed, Abd al-Rahman met with Zarqawi regularly, every seven to ten days.
Reading Mubassir’s full portrait of Abd al-Rahman, it was almost too good—perhaps bluffs from a desperate detainee. But the address Mubassir had provided for Abd al-Rahman in Baghdad was a way to start to verify. At this point the squadrons and troops—two and three levels below the TF 714 headquarters—had control over the task force’s ISR flight paths. Not needing to go through the higher headquarters, J.C. turned to a team member.
“Hey, fly over to that address. Tell me when you’re there.”
As the aircraft flew toward the house in Khadra, Baghdad, J.C. continued reading the report. When the UAV arrived overhead, the house was quiet. By Baghdad standards, the neighborhood was upper-middle class, and oddly, given Abd al-Rahman’s supposed connections, the house was in a Shia area. This might be a waste of time, J.C. thought. But after a few minutes, the image on his screen stirred. A silver sedan pulled up in front of the house. The driver got out, disappeared under the roof of the house, and came back out with another man. Both got in the car and drove off.