“See, I disagree with you, sir. Everybody is connected to somebody, but you’ve got to find the right guy and draw a line. I think Rahman’s it.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I’ll let you go with it.”
* * *
So far, we had seen what Mubassir said we would, and he had told us that every seven to ten days, Abd al-Rahman met with Zarqawi. J.C. and his team had been monitoring, mapping, and patterning Abd al-Rahman’s movements for almost that long. One day, as they watched Abd al-Rahman, swells of dust obscured the ground and Abd al-Rahman with it. They switched the cameras to infrared, but in doing so the picture went from color to black and white. Abd al-Rahman became a small, dark figure inside a crowd of small dark figures, and they lost him.
They still had eyes on Abd al-Rahman’s family, and after a couple hundred hours of watching his movements, the team was convinced he wouldn’t leave them. They also had eyes on the man who had driven with him that day, later thought to be Abu Ghadiya, a young Anbari who helped run the foreign-fighter pipeline. They watched Abu Ghadiya go north of Baghdad and stop. After a few uneasy moments when they wondered what Ghadiya was doing, a car bomb went off nearby. Now we had a strong reason to move on Ghadiya—who had likely been there to film the bombing. But picking up Ghadiya meant moving on Abd al-Rahman’s house, where Ghadiya was staying. J.C. made the case that picking up Ghadiya would spook Abd al-Rahman—and we potentially could lose our trail to Zarqawi. We gritted our teeth and waited for Abd al-Rahman to reappear.
Two days passed without any sign of him. On June 1, Tom D. arrived in the country as the new commander of J.C.’s squadron, replacing Joe. It had been seventeen months since I had flown with Tom D. and Tres from Afghanistan to Balad after the suicide bomber destroyed the mess hall in Mosul and I asked them to stand up JIATF-West. Tom D., like all commanders, held strong opinions about how best to hunt. He preferred to develop targets and err on the side of running less frequent missions if it meant fewer “dry holes.” This made him inclined to support J.C.’s program. But, Tom D. told J.C., realistically, if Abd al-Rahman didn’t come back in another two days, they would have to give up monitoring his family and house. They couldn’t burn assets if Abd al-Rahman had fled the city.
J.C. nodded. “He’ll be back.”
Two days after they spoke, and after four days gone, Abd al-Rahman returned—fresh, many assumed, from having seen Zarqawi.
* * *
Around this time, the leadership above J.C. again shifted. As all commanders did periodically, Scott Miller returned to the States, and Steve, his deputy at Green, came to lead TF 16. (As commander of TF 16, Steve was my subordinate and Tom D.’s commander.) Steve’s inclination, like mine, was to act on targets rather than cultivate them. He knew the task force expected him to arrive and make them move on Abd al-Rahman and the rest of the targets. But Steve let the process play out, and his arrival bought J.C. a few more days of watching Abd al-Rahman.
The tension over whether to watch or strike a target was a recurring one and increased at the beginning of June. Watching a target often held the potential for a bigger payoff, mostly by revealing valuable connections to other targets. This slow work was popular with law-enforcement people who served as augmentees in the task forces and with intelligence analysts who looked to unravel the enemy network. But prolonged target development was less popular with the action-oriented operators. Striking targets rapidly had put tremendous pressure on AQI in the two years since TF 16 had accelerated its tempo, and these operations had yielded countless troves of intelligence. We would never have been where we were in June 2006 if we had taken an overly deliberate approach. Moreover, leaving targetable AQI operatives undisturbed as they continued their reign of violence on Iraq was a difficult moral judgment.
Well before Steve’s arrival, every day in their forcewide VTCs, TF 16 debated whether to arrest Abd al-Rahman or leave him under surveillance. Tempers began to flare during the early days of June. Green drew opinionated and often vocal men and women, and the unit’s ethos held that if you shied from speaking your mind, you shouldn’t be in the unit. On top of this, everyone in the room had spent long years chasing Zarqawi. During that time, I had sought to breed a sense of ownership that demanded everyone be interested not only in their small part but in the big decisions. Everyone was expected to be a strategist. So by June 2006, the men and women under me wanted to win—and thought they knew how. J.C. and M.S. were both highly respected and were absolutely convinced we should not move on Abd al-Rahman. Tom D., who was a strong, vocal presence within the unit, supported them. Steve’s more conventional army background made him disposed toward a more direct approach, and he shouldered an immense burden: No colonel had ever run anything as large and complex as TF 16, which was what Steve was doing at its most critical juncture. Meanwhile, he spent his days only paces away from me, a demanding three-star general (I had been promoted three months earlier, in mid-February) who, by personality and explicit guidance, was inclined to strike more than to sit and watch. But I respected the intelligence assessment of people like J.C. and M.S., and so, ultimately, did Steve, who allowed the process to continue to play out.