The wait was grating. Every day that we watched Abd al-Rahman, other targets went undisturbed. I was worried that if he was a wash—and we had seen other seductive leads go cold—we would have allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq weeks to heal and strengthen. The days that Abd al-Rahman relaxed at home and out of sight were excruciating.
Meanwhile, outside the field of view of the ISR feed, Baghdad was on fire. In the weeks after the Samarra bombing at the end of February, the violence was carried out in impulsive spasms. Now, by the end of May, three months after the bombing, the sectarian killing programs were accelerating. Armed militias of Sunni and Shia led systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad. By the end of May 2006, more than eighty thousand Iraqis had been uprooted, seeking shelter elsewhere in the country. Meanwhile, Baghdad’s central morgue had taken in 1,398 bodies during the prior four weeks, the most since the invasion. And yet this was only a portion of the real death toll in the capital city, as the morgue didn’t perform autopsies on victims of the city’s bombs.
During these tense weeks, I went down to Baghdad to meet with J.C. and his team as I had on each of his previous rotations. I wanted to show them my support and interest. Given the stakes, I also wanted to know more about their thinking. I met J.C. at the squadron’s Green Zone villa during daylight, when most of the assault teams were still asleep from the previous night’s operations. J.C. left the monitors under the watch of his team and joined Mike Flynn, Joe, the commander of J.C.’s squadron (headquartered at Baghdad), and me on the couch in the next room. We cradled Styrofoam cups of coffee as J.C. ran through what he had been watching.
Every morning, normally at around 9:00 A.M., the silver sedan showed up outside Abd al-Rahman’s house. Abd al-Rahman came outside to the street, said good-bye to his wife and family, and got in. The driver always opened and closed the front passenger door for him. They drove around the city, stopping for meetings, until dinnertime, when Abd al-Rahman returned home. He repeated the routine each day, varying only the locations throughout the city. They mapped and logged each location in a database—from the gas station at which they filled the tank to where Abd al-Rahman bought bread to his regular, sketchy meeting places.
But it was J.C.’s eye that made the difference. When Abd al-Rahman emerged from Friday prayers, which are very busy, J.C. picked him out of the crowd almost instantly. Abd al-Rahman made it slightly easier by wearing similar outfits, but J.C. could spot him based on his distinctive demeanor. He walked, J.C. explained, as a Westerner would walk in the Middle East. He seemed to float with arrogance. When he got out of his car, he did so deliberately, snapping his lapels down to straighten his jacket. Of greater consequence, J.C., steeped in Iraq for years, could decode Abd al-Rahman’s intimate relationships. He knew, for instance, how important the brother-in-law’s house would be if Abd al-Rahman ever left town and needed his wife and family to be with a trusted male relative.
As on most visits, I wanted to hear about the granular details of his work, but I also liked to push and prod the premises underlying their targeting philosophy. How can we think more outside the box? Are we too far afield? Are we overthinking or underthinking? J.C. and his boys enjoyed debating targeting philosophy, and although his eyes were ringed from lack of sleep, he was animated when I pushed him on his contention that we should watch Abd al-Rahman rather than capture him now.
“Why not police up Rahman now and use what we have to get him to tell us where he meets AMZ?”
“Sir, Rahman’s a true believer. Even if we got him in the booth,” J.C. said, referring to the interrogation rooms, “I don’t think we could get him to talk. If we move on Rahman, and what Mubassir’s saying is right, it could spook AMZ.”
“Rahman obviously knows we’ve had Mubassir for a while now. What if he has stopped seeing Zarqawi? Or what if he disappears?” I asked. “Why would Zarqawi give Rahman regular access? He hasn’t survived this long being careless. I don’t think that you can draw a direct line between Zarqawi and any one person.”