The CIA War in Kurdistan by Sam Faddis

Author:Sam Faddis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Iraq War (2013-2011)
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Fishing for Assassins

Our base never had more than a relative handful of personnel assigned to it. At its peak our complement was not much more than a good-sized infantry platoon. We were moving very fast, however, and we were kicking up a lot of dust in a place where outsiders are few and far between.

It was not long before Iraqi intelligence knew we were there. It was not long thereafter before it became a matter of personal interest to Saddam Hussein that we be punished for having the audacity to think we could take him down. He put bounties on our heads.

Fortunately, with the assistance of our Kurdish brothers, we had a lot of eyes and ears inside and outside of Kurdistan. Also, while most Iraqis continued to sit on the sidelines in the sense of being afraid to act directly against Saddam, with increasing frequency we were identifying individuals who wanted to hedge their bets. They weren’t willing to come out in the light of day and bet their lives we would win, but they were willing to provide information in exchange for the expectation that we would remember them kindly when and if Saddam did fall.

The office of Iraqi “muhabarrat”—intelligence—in Mosul, which had responsibility for the “north,” was given the ball by Saddam in regard to the bounty. He wanted an American spy, ideally alive, to parade in front of cameras, but dead if capture was not doable. All other requirements in regard to our presence in country were apparently secondary to this objective.

The methodology the Iraqis decided to use was pretty straightforward. A source would be run against us, introduced to us by an intermediary, or walked in to a Kurdish outpost if necessary. The source would offer intriguing intelligence, much of which would be true and verifiable. The source would meet us multiple times, building up, according to the plan, our trust in him. Then, the source would offer us some extremely valuable information that would be attainable only if we agreed to meet him at a location designated by him.

For example, our new-found friend, the Iraqi double agent, would reveal that he had just acquired information regarding the true hidden location of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or other valuable items. He would offer to take us there or to meet us at another location and then take us there. According to the Iraqi calculations, lured into a false sense of security by our boy’s previous reporting, we would drop our guard, trust in our new friend, and allow ourselves to be positioned in time and space so that Iraqi agents could grab us and spirit us away to Baghdad for some sort of show trial and protracted torture.

When it comes to intelligence work, there is no such thing as trust. You stay alive through cold-blooded calculation and decisive action. We were forewarned and forearmed, and we acted accordingly.

The first few double agents run against us were easily identified. We met them, debriefed them, and sucked them dry of information.

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