Elsewhere in the screening facility, Amy, Paul, and Jack gathered outside Mubassir’s room. They had agreed they would do this part together. They entered, closed the door, and told Mubassir about the strike. The information he had provided, they said, was correct. Zarqawi had been killed. What about Abd al-Rahman, his friend? Mubassir asked. They told Mubassir and stayed with him in the room as he sobbed.
In the early morning, as we waited for the FBI to call, I sat down with Mike and Kurt and Jody at our horseshoe desk in the SAR. The farewell ceremony for Bill McRaven had been planned for that evening at Fort Bragg. After three years as one of its assistant commanding generals, Bill was preparing to move on to become the commander of all special operations forces in Europe. But tonight he was at Fort Bragg, where they were holding a dinner for him. As we often did for ceremonies we couldn’t attend, we cued up our VTC cameras so we could participate from afar. A projector screen at the front of the auditorium at Bragg showed us from the front, sitting at our horseshoe desk. From our side, we could see a wide angle of the room, with rows of tables and people. After scanning the figures, I saw Annie, sitting toward the front. In the public venue, I didn’t try to speak to her, but I caught myself staring.
No one in the audience knew about the strike. Annie watched on the screen as every few minutes someone walked behind our chairs, leaned down, and whispered in my ear. Each time they said, still nothing back from the FBI. We grinned as teams at various outposts, connected by VTC, performed skits, and friends and colleagues in the auditorium at Bragg gave toasts as part of Bill’s farewell. A few minutes after 3:30 A.M., a member of the task force staff walked briskly over and leaned in.
“FBI’s come back, sir,” he told me, “It’s a match. PID.” This was the abbreviation for positive identification.
As the audience watched one of the skits, Annie saw me get up and walk out of the frame. I went a few paces to my office and called George Casey again. The FBI had confirmed it, I told him. The man lying in our screening facility was Zarqawi.
Down at Baghdad, J.C. was still up. He would be for a little while longer, until all the teams called in “objective secure” near 4:00 A.M. Only then did he retire for his first real night of sleep in weeks.
* * *
Just before noon the next day, June 8, George Casey, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prime Minister Maliki held a press conference in Baghdad announcing Zarqawi’s death. Prime Minister Maliki began, speaking in Arabic in front of a glossy wood-paneled wall. In a scene that evoked the Saddam announcement two and half years earlier, members of the audience broke out in cheers and clapping, eventually together in unison, clap, clap, clap. But the triumphalism on the podium was far more muted this time around. “Although the designated leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is now dead, the terrorist organization still poses a threat,” said General Casey. “Iraqi forces, supported by the Coalition, will continue to hunt terrorists that threaten the Iraqi people until terrorism is eradicated in Iraq.” Shortly after the press conference ended, dueling factions in the Iraqi parliament dropped their vetoes and approved Maliki’s outstanding cabinet nominations, putting the ministries of national security and interior under Shiites and the ministry of defense under a Sunni.
Later that day, Steve gathered everyone inside the JOC in our Balad hangar and gave much-deserved awards to five members of the task force screening facility—the three interrogators, Jack, Amy, and Paul, as well as two analysts who had worked side by side with them. The three interrogators continued to deploy back to Iraq for the rest of my time in command.
That night, I went from Balad down to meet with Tom D.’s squadron at their villa. A small group of us gathered in their conference room, a few paces from where J.C.’s team had spent the past few weeks watching Abd al-Rahman. Inside, I gave J.C. a bronze star medal. Everyone in the squadron liked and respected J.C. They knew how much he had contributed and how much he had staked his considerable reputation in the process. In many ways, his work and all the operations leading up to the strike was the culmination of what Steve and Wayne Barefoot had begun two years earlier in the lead-up to Big Ben, when they sat analysts and operators together to patrol the skies over Fallujah. He accepted the award in his typically humble, subdued way, speaking immediately of his team—who were at that moment riffling through the unprecedented trove of intelligence we had collected from the safe house in Hibhib and the seventeen other targets.