My Share of the Task(134)

                Aware of the mounting pressure to move on Abd al-Rahman and anxious to buy even more time, the squadron decided to try to positively identify Abd al-Rahman. Until then, J.C. and his team hadn’t been able to say for certain “their” Abd al-Rahman was the right guy. Many remained unconvinced he was: He was much younger than we expected AQI’s religious scholars to be, given the credentials needed.

                Two dedicated analysts working for the task force recovered a good-quality picture of the real Sheikh Abd al-Rahman that they could use. The squadron decided to see if he was the man being followed by J.C. when he went to the mosque that Sunday, June 4. A two-man team, part of the squadron’s specialized reconnaissance troop, dressed up in Iraqi clothing and planned to drive through Baghdad in a nondescript sedan and see Abd al-Rahman in the flesh as he emerged from the Sunday-morning services. This was highly dangerous. Now, three months after the Samarra mosque bombing, the ethnic contest for Baghdad had turned the city into a maze of checkpoints manned by militias who stopped cars and checked ID cards. If the ever-more-brazen and paranoid militias decided the occupants’ names indicated they came from the opposite sect, they often simply pulled the riders from their car and shot them in the street.

                Nonetheless, the reconnaissance made it to the mosque, parked half a block away, and waited. They planned to drive by just as Abd al-Rahman walked to his car door, so they could see and photograph his face. As the crowd emptied out of the mosque, Abd al-Rahman made it to his car, parked right out front, faster than the reconnaissance team had anticipated. He got in and started moving as our team was still down the street. From the air, J.C. and the squadron watched as the two cars—al-Rahman’s and ours—drove toward each other. On the ground, for only a moment as the noses of the two cars were almost abreast of each other, our reconnaissance team and their camera lens got the right angle: From the diagonal, Abd al-Rahman’s windshield lost its glare and his face was visible through the glass.

                They sent the photograph up to Balad and placed it, along with five or six pictures of other men, in front of Mubassir. They asked him which one was Abd al-Rahman. He put his fingers on the photograph taken that day: “That’s him.”

                Upon returning to the Baghdad compound, one of the reconnaissance operatives came to see J.C. He had studied the picture of Abd al-Rahman before venturing into Baghdad that day and told J.C. the man he saw on the road was him. Having seen the cars whip past each other on the screen, J.C. pushed him. How could he be sure?

                “Hey, look,” the operative said, standing there in the Iraqi garb. “It’s him. I’m one hundred percent on this.” There was no one better at the craft than the reconnaissance team that had gone out that day, and J.C. trusted his judgment. It was the same trust the task force had placed in J.C. Without it, our complex machine would have seized up.


* * *

                Two days later, just before sundown on Tuesday, June 6, J.C. and his team were in place in the JOC when they saw a moving van pull into the frame and park in front of Abd al-Rahman’s house. Almost nightly during the weeks before, the intel and operators had been refining the plan for a move on Abd al-Rahman when or if the time came. Based upon what Mubassir had explained of his routine and Abd al-Rahman’s pattern and regimen observed over the past nineteen days, the operators and J.C.’s intel team had determined certain movements that would trigger a raid. One was moving his family.

                They watched as the van, similar to a big, thirty-foot U-Haul, was loaded with packing boxes. It was dusk just as the last boxes were put in the back and the hatch closed. That night we had in the sky a brand-new, hard-won set of manned surveillance planes. The van was now theirs to track. But in the difficult lighting as dusk grew quickly darker, they lost the van as it made its way through Baghdad. Tracking targets from the sky was not automatic, not done with simple flicks of the joystick. The men in the manned surveillance aircraft overhead sat in their seats for hours on end, following targets through their cameras but also relaying what they saw over the radio. It was a finicky process in which even a van could get lost.