My Share of the Task(155)
“Hey, sir,” John B. called into our JOC. As usual, I had him on speakerphone. “We’ve got Qais.”
It was an interesting moment. Although we hadn’t been targeting him, Qais’ presence wasn’t all that surprising, and his role as a Special Groups leader was something we already suspected. TF 17 was still relatively young, and some of the fallout from the January capture of the Irbil Five was still fresh in our minds. But given the other men on the target, we knew we had to hold him and quickly passed word to Dave Petraeus.
Soon after returning to the airfield in Basra, the teams gathered all the detainees—Laith and Qais, as well as an Arab who appeared to be both deaf and mute—and the sizable intelligence haul and flew north to Balad. Upon landing in the early morning, our teams spent hours feverishly triaging the material. As they pored through the seized computers, a young Marine captain who spoke fluent Arabic came across a twenty-two-page document. The document appeared to link Qais persuasively to the attack on our outpost in Karbala, with details of the planning as well as postoperation assessments. Included in the material were the military IDs taken from the Americans left to die anonymously in the desert.
While the contours of the relationship would become clearer from subsequent interrogations of the Khazalis, the document showed clear support of their network from the Iranian Quds Force. Specifically, the Iranians had supported the Karbala assault by providing Khazali’s men with details of life inside the camp. We had long suspected Iranian involvement, but never had it been laid in such bare, unmistakable terms.
On previous raids, we had been forced to let well-linked detainees go, and I expected strong and immediate pressure to release Qais. But I saw the twenty-two-page document as a smoking gun that made releasing Qais impossible. To argue our case, we sent one of our best analysts, a young army captain named Sara,* down to Baghdad in a helicopter to give the book of material and her analysis of its importance to Petraeus. In the rush to relay the material, the intelligence team had time to translate only parts of the document. Sara arrived in Baghdad, gave the material to Dave, and then, at his request, went with him to the palace to see the prime minister. Immediately upon sitting down, Petraeus decided to roll the dice. He handed Maliki a copy of the original document, seized only hours earlier. When he stuck the paper in front of the prime minister, Dave did not know everything it contained.
Dave steadily raised his voice as he explained to Maliki just what he should make of the document. We are here, he seethed, to help you, and these people are killing Americans. They are not on your side, Dave said, and you need to cut ties to them.
Maliki began to absorb the document and blanched. It showed clear disdain for him and his government. Its contents made painfully clear to the prime minister that the Khazali network, as a proxy for Iran, was undercutting him.
“Where did you get this?” he demanded.
Dave explained it had just been pulled off of the Khazali brothers, who were being held.
“We have to keep them; we have to hold them,” Maliki said emphatically.
The meeting ended, and Sara and Dave got into the SUV outside. Sara was shaken from the confrontation. The doors of the Suburban closed, and Dave turned to her.
“Well, I thought that went pretty well,” he said jauntily, and smiled. “Don’t worry. That’s the way it works.”
It was a gutsy move on Dave’s part, and one that I respected. Barely a month into his tenure, he had seized an opportunity to begin changing the paradigm of the man—Maliki—who stood at the center of Iraq’s future. A Shia prime minister after generations of Sunni dominance, Maliki walked a tightrope of ethnic, religious, and political complexity. The last thing he wanted was more pressure from Shia groups or their Iranian supporters. But we had Qais, and the evidence was damning.