These strictures led the force to adopt a standard practice that summer and fall that looks farcical in hindsight. After the teams in Mosul or Tikrit or Ramadi digested what little they could from the captured material, they filled emptied sandbags, burlap sacks, or clear plastic trash bags with these scooped-up piles of documents, CDs, computers, and cell phones and then sent them down to our base in Baghdad. Some bags started the trip with a yellow Post-it note on the outside explaining their origin; others didn’t. Detainees thought to be important made the trips with the bags.
Fundamentally, the senders and receivers, in this case the forward team and its higher headquarters, had neither a shared picture of the enemy nor an ability to prosecute a common fight against it. This inspired territoriality and distrust. Outstations rarely saw the benefits of the raw intelligence they collected, which often disappeared into a black hole once they sent it up. Equally frustrated, the analysts on the receiving end often had little context for the bags’ contents or the detainee’s identity—even when the sticky notes didn’t fall off in transit. They had little indication of whether the hard drives or documents came from a mansion owned by an old Baathist or had been found underneath prayer rugs at a jihadi safe house.
When I inspected our intelligence-processing facility at BIAP later that month, I opened a door to a spare room to find it filled with piles of these plastic and burlap bags stuffed with captured material. They appeared unopened.
I returned to Baghdad that evening itching to put my thoughts down on a whiteboard and to hear what everyone else had observed. This is how I do my best thinking, and it was the first of many such collaborative sessions. Talking with Scott Miller, I drew an hourglass. The top triangular half represented a forward team, the bottom was the rear headquarters. They met at a narrow choke point, allowing for only a trickle of interaction between the two.
“Would removing this half affect the forward team?” I asked, putting my hand over the bottom triangle.
From what Scott had seen, he said it wouldn’t. The rear headquarters were not relevant to the forward teams, as each was fighting an independent campaign. At the very least, targeting a terrorist network was both tedious and violent; starving the teams of information, as we were in the fall of 2003, made the fight sluggish and excruciating. The hourglass diagram portrayed a simple defect in our force’s structure. I copied the sketch to a legal pad and left Iraq for Afghanistan with the rudiments of the vision that would drive TF 714’s change for the rest of my command.
* * *
On October 27, two days after we left Baghdad, Zarqawi’s group ushered in Ramadan with the latest in a line of its strategic bombings. That morning, an explosion outside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) building killed two of its staff and ten Iraqi bystanders. This was the latest in a pattern, although its significance was not then apparent. It began on August 7, when a bomb in a car parked outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad exploded, killing seventeen and wounding forty. Two weeks later, at 4:30 P.M. on August 19, a suicide bomber driving a KAMAZ flatbed truck laden with military-grade munitions breached the front gate at the United Nations headquarters in Iraq, detonated the cargo in front of the facade, and collapsed part of the three-story building. Among the twenty-two victims who died was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission in Iraq and a famed expert in postwar reconstruction. The blast also killed Arthur Helton. I had known and liked Arthur from my year at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1999, when I was a colonel and he was the new director of its peace and conflict program. After a second bombing targeted the remnants of the mission on September 22, the U.N. withdrew all but a handful of its staff to Qatar. They wouldn’t return in force until late 2007.
Although it was unclear at the time, these attacks against humanitarian organizations proved to be part of Zarqawi’s incipient strategy to isolate the Americans and shape the battlefield. Zarqawi clearly hated the Jordanian government, so unalloyed vengeance may have been at play. He blamed the U.N. for giving Palestine “as a gift to the Jews so they can rape the land” and, according to one of the operatives responsible for the attacks, he sought revenge against Vieira de Mello for having helped dismantle an Islamic nation through his work during East Timor’s independence. But the real logic to the violence was less histrionic. With the U.N. and ICRC gone, Zarqawi eliminated two organizations that had the experience and niche capacity to help reconstruct Iraq. Perhaps more important, as the war became one of perceptions, by scaring away the U.N., the Red Cross, and other international organizations, Zarqawi ensured that Iraqis increasingly saw only American troops in the streets.