See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (23 page)

Over the next two weeks the general gave me the names of the four commanders and their unit designations. He drew family trees for me and explained the relations among the officers. He also named the officers who would be in the transitional military government. Three of them knew nothing about the coup or even that they had been chosen to serve. They wouldn’t be told until the colonel’s tanks were on the road. It was all part of compartmentalizing information and keeping the coup secret.

After each meeting I sent a message to headquarters. The names of the key participants checked out with the databases at CIA headquarters, but Washington still hadn’t said what it wanted to do about the coup.

In late February the general came over to our house, discouraged by my masters’ silence. At our last meeting he had asked if one US fighter, on a given date at a given time, could fly over central Iraq as a signal to the committee that the US supported the coup. I hadn’t even bothered relaying that one. If Washington wasn’t going to acknowledge the coup, it would ridicule the idea of an air force flyover.

After tea was served and we lapsed into our customary silence, the general finally turned to me, putting his hand on my arm.

‘The Kurds are about to wreck everything. Please arrange a truce between them. A truce will signal that the US is serious about removing Saddam.’

The general had a point. Although the Kurds had no role in the coup, at least in the beginning, they definitely had the potential to spoi1 it. By mid-February, their civil war had spread all over the north. Iran and Turkey were about to intervene, and the temptation for Saddam to stick his snout under the Kurdish tent was quickly becoming irresistible.

The origins of the Kurdish conflict go deep into time, history, and character. By late February 1995, though, the ancient rifts had come down to two main factions: the Kurdish Democratic Party, or KDP; and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK. They had fought each other to a near standoff, but rather than just call a truce as any group in its right mind might do, they continued to battle on. Worse, as their desperation grew, both were separately considering inviting Saddam and his despised army to intervene in the north - the same Saddam who had gassed the Kurds in 1988, killing thousands of civilians.

Any appeal to Saddam would be a disaster for the coup plotters. Committed troops couldn’t refuse orders to go into in Kurdistan: Saddam would immediately and ruthlessly crush even the hint of a mutiny. The general made it clear to me from the beginning that the committee needed the status quo to hold up until the last minute, but it was more than just the committee’s coup at stake. The Iraqi army back in the north, even for a day, would be an irreversible symbolic victory for Saddam. Steeped in conspiracy theory, Iraqis would immediately assume that the United States had secretly given Saddam the green light to go in and that they had been right all along in believing that the Americans wanted to keep Saddam in power.

Forget the truth of the matter, or even the logic that under-girded the assumptions. If Saddam was ever going to be thrown out, the Iraqis were going to have to do the job and not us. It was their perceptions that counted, not ours. If they were convinced the US secretly kept Saddam in place, they would conclude that it was futile to act against him.

The Kurds weren’t the only desperate ones. Ahmad Chalabi understood as well as anyone just how fragile the situation was.

Chalabi was head of the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi opposition umbrella group based in Salah al-Din. When I first met him in Washington one muggy August afternoon in 1994, it was difficult to imagine someone less likely to unseat Saddam. Marching across the lobby of the Key Bridge Marriott in his Saville Row suit, $150 Italian silk tie, and hand-stitched calfskin oxfords, he looked more like the successful Levantine banker he once had been than like someone who was going to ride into Baghdad on the top of a tank. Short and overweight, his body showed the side effects of too many long business lunches at first-class European restaurants. When he shook my hand, I picked up the faint smell of scented soap.

As incongruous as Chalabi’s appearance was, his resume offered even less promise that he might one day lead a successful Iraqi opposition. First, he was a member of Iraq’s lowest caste - the Shi’ a Muslims, who had never ruled Iraq and weren’t about to anytime soon. Second, Chalabi’s family had been forced to flee Iraq for Lebanon in 1958 when the Hashemite monarchy fell. Thirteen years old at the time, Chalabi had grown up abroad, exchanging his Iraqi accent for a Lebanese one. Chalabi was further tainted when he attended graduate school in the US While picking up a master’s degree at MIT and a Ph. D. in numbers theory at the University of Chicago, he had learned to speak American idiomatic English. No matter what Chalabi said about his Iraqi nationalist credentials, Iraqis looked at him as a stateless exile. Finally, a bank that Chalabi had owned in Jordan, the Petra Bank, collapsed in 1989, losing hundreds of millions of depositors’ dollars. Although no one was sure who ended up with the money, Chalabi was blamed, and a Jordanian court convicted him in absentia of embezzlement.

Outside Iraq, Chalabi was a felon; inside, he remained almost completely unknown. But what he lacked by way of credentials, he made up for in brains, energy, and a practiced political touch, all qualities that were tested daily by the Iraqi National Congress. The capos of the opposition who made up the congress were a sack of fighting alley cats. Shi’a clerics, Bedouin chiefs, royals, communist apparatchiks, ex-military officers, ex-Ba’th Party officials, Kurdish chieftains - they hated one another as much as they hated Saddam. What’s more, each one of them thought he was more qualified to head the group than Chalabi.

Chalabi had been elected president of the INC at a 1992 meeting in Vienna, and for two years he had managed more or less to hold it together. By the time I met him in mid-1994, though, his authority had come under serious challenge. The main Shi’a Muslim groups had dropped their anchor in Tehran, where Chalabi was seen as a tail-wagging CIA dog. A more serious threat came from the Iraqi National Accord. One of the important constituent groups of the congress, it was threatening to bolt from the organization even as it was trying sub-rosa to unseat Chalabi. By early 1995 Chalabi was running what was in effect a rump INC - the Kurds. If Saddam invaded the north, Chalabi would lose even the Kurds, not to mention his base of operations. Most likely, he would be forced into exile again, and Chalabi knew better than anyone that Saddam wasn’t going to be overthrown from a European cafe.

For a guy with virtually no internal support in Iraq, Chalabi knew how to get things done and especially how to nudge people where he wanted them to go. He had produced a lengthy position paper entitled ‘End Game,’ on how to jump-start the March 1991 uprisings, when the Shi’as and Kurds had taken advantage of the end of the Gulf War to try to wrest power from Saddam and his Sunni supporters. The paper had been well shopped around Washington by the time Chalabi presented me with a copy - at a sushi restaurant in Georgetown, two days after our first meeting - but if the thinking wasn’t particularly new, ‘End Game’ did help him stand out in the crowd. Besides, it wasn’t like we were being overwhelmed with other plans to get rid of Saddam.

Chalabi would call me occasionally on a secure telephone from Salah al-Din, where he spent about half the year, to entreat me to set up a CIA base in the north. The Kurdish fighting was getting out of hand, he would say; only an official American presence there could stop it. Since the State Department still refused to establish its own mission in northern Iraq, the CIA was the next best thing. I thought Chalabi had a good point, but it wasn’t until the general defected from Saddam’s army and crossed into the north that I was able to convince my bosses to let me put together the team and head to Kurdistan.

I had been planning to keep my team in Zakhu, along the Turkish border. The general who had defected would be returning there after his meeting with Turkish authorities, and at least for the moment, Zakhu was out of the way of the warring Kurds. Headquarters wasn’t anxious for us to venture to Salah al-Din in the middle of the fighting. Chalabi, though, would hear none of it. About an hour after the general finished telling me about the coup, Chalabi was on the telephone, urging us to move forward to Salah al-Din.

‘You absolutely must be here for Litt’s visit’ Chalabi hollered over the static on the line one morning. ‘Don’t wait in Zakhu for the general. The Kurds won’t understand why you’re not in the Litt meetings.’

Litt was David Litt, the director of the State Department’s North Gulf Affairs and the de facto ambassador to Iraq. He traveled to the north once or twice a year, staying no more than a few hours each time. Unlike CIA personnel who had to drive to the north, he traveled in US military Blackhawk helicopters, which cut the trip from days to hours.

I’d briefly met Litt in Washington and found him humorless. I had the further impression that he disliked the CIA. Still, after I started working in the Iraqi Operations Group, I called him and offered to drive down to State to brief him on what the CIA was doing about Iraq. He never returned my call. I tried a few more times before giving up, but I did learn before we left Washington that Litt intended to visit the Kurds about the time we were due to arrive, so I called up State and asked what was on his agenda. The State desk officer wouldn’t even tell me what day Litt was supposed to visit the north. Now I was being invited to the party, albeit from the other side.

Chalabi must have sensed my hesitation over the phone. ‘Don’t worry. The shelling has stopped. I’ve just talked to the Kurds. They’ve promised to be on their best behavior.’

We arrived in Salah al-Din a little after one and went straight to Chalabi’s house. The street was jammed with vehicles and guerrillas toting AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Chalabi’s aide told me that Litt had already met the Kurdish leaders and was just finishing up with Chalabi.

Litt was speechless when he saw me walk through the door. Without even a nod in my direction, he turned to a distinguished man in a charcoal-gray suit sitting next to him and whispered in his ear. They both stood up, shook Chalabi’s hand, and headed for the door. A few seconds later I heard their cars start up and leave in a blare of horns, and the shouting of the Kurdish fighters, known as pesh merga. Not long after, the whirr of Blackhawk rotors passed above the house.

Chalabi walked back into the room, smiling.

‘Who was the suit with Litt?’ I asked.

‘A Turk. He’s in charge of Iraqi affairs at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.’

Chalabi was savoring the irony: The Turkish government was privy to what the State Department was doing in Iraq, but the CIA wasn’t.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘Mr. Litt had a splendid pair of meetings, first with Talabani and then with Barzani.’

Jalal Talabani was head of the PUK; Masud Barzani the KDE ‘I suppose Litt demanded they knock off the fighting or we pull our air cover,’ I said. In Salah al-Din, it almost passed for humor Chalabi laughed. ‘Litt told them - you’re going to have to sit down for this - the US intends to pay for a force to separate the Kurds. He promised two million dollars.’

‘Whose money?’ I asked, knowing State didn’t have it.

‘Yours. The CIA’s.’

Chalabi was nearly beside himself with joy. There was nothing he liked more than watching the US government trip over its own feet.

That night I got on the telephone to Washington. No one had heard about the $2 million. An hour later, headquarters called back. Not only had the CIA never agreed to fund an interposition force, doing so would be flat-out illegal. The damage, though, was already done. The Kurds didn’t distinguish between the State Department and the CIA. Litt had made the promise. I was the one who would pay the price.

When it finally became clear in a few weeks that there would be no money for Litt’s army, the fighting picked up. Talabani’s PUK was down to the bottom of the barrel. It could either launch one final offensive against the KDP or spend its last nickel on a call to Saddam in Baghdad. Something had to be done.

‘The clock is running out,’ Chalabi said over dinner one night. ‘Litt has destroyed your credibility. The Kurds will never listen to you now. Only a preemptive strike can save the situation.’

Chalabi was right. I considered telling him about the general’s secret committee and its coup, but knowing about it would have frustrated Chalabi more.

‘What will Washington do if I organize an uprising?’ he asked. ‘It’s the only way to stop Talabani from attacking.’

I knew that no one in Washington would put credence in Chalabi’s uprising, just as no one really cared if the Kurds quietly shelled each other into smithereens. PUK and KDP were acronyms that the national security cognoscenti threw around to keep the uninitiated off-stride. Washington’s only real interest was to keep the Kurds out of the front pages of the leading newspapers. In the dank swamp that Iraq had long since become, no news was very good news. Still, I thought, why not let Chalabi propose his uprising? At the least, it might force Washington to deal with the secret committee’s coup.

‘Schedule one and then ask,’ I answered.

Chalabi did just that. The next day he asked me to inform Washington that he would lead an uprising on March 4, to begin exactly at ten PM. Boiled down to its bones, it called for Talabani’s and Barzani’s combined guerrillas to launch small-scale, simultaneous attacks along Iraqi army lines in the north. A Kurdish fifth column would provoke disturbances in Kirkuk and Mawsil and sabotage government facilities all over Iraq. The Shi’a groups in the south would start attacking the Iraqi army at the same time. Within twenty-four hours, Chalabi predicted, the army would revolt and join the uprising. It was pretty much the same plan Chalabi had described in his ‘End Game.’ Although neither Talabani nor Barzani had agreed to participate, Chalabi felt that once he threw down the gauntlet, they would - especially if the US were to offer some sign of support.

I wrote a message to Washington about Chalabi’s plans, specifying the day and hour. Knowing Washington’s opinion about Chalabi and his shopworn ‘End Game,’ I was fairly convinced that a message would come back with the return mail ordering him to call it off, or at least postpone it. Silly me.

When it came to convincing the Kurds to join the up rising, the hardest nut for Chalabi to crack was Masud Barzani.

Barzani was the son of the noted Kurdish rebel Mustafa Barzani, or the Red Mullah, as he was popularly known in the US Mustafa had led a sporadic guerrilla war against Saddam in the early 1970s, but after the Shah of Iran and Henry Kissinger pulled the plug on him in 1974, Mustafa was forced to give up. He moved to the United States and died a broken man in his bed in McLean, Virginia. Not without reason, perhaps, Masud distrusted the US government and, in particular, the CIA. Only grudgingly did he allow the US -backed Iraqi National Congress to keep its headquarters in Salah al-Din, a town under Barzani’s control. To make matters worse, Barzani was doing fine with the status quo. After spending most of his life in exile, he enjoyed having his own country, even if it was only a virtual one. Operation Provide Comfort, the air protection provided by American planes, came free of charge - the US almost never attempted to interfere in his affairs - and by late 1994 Barzani had a nice little business in smuggled Iraqi oil.