Drone Warrior Read online

  We kept our eyes on the roof. On the surrounding streets, neighbors had started to spill out. The scene had the potential to get ugly.

  Suddenly in the black and white of the infrared, we noticed three men on the flat roof of the house. “Z in on them,” I said.

  All three had pistols and were huddled up, as if trying to make a choice between fighting it out or surrendering.

  Seeing more than two dozen burly SEALs with assault rifles pointed straight up at them like one big arsenal ready to blow them to the moon made the decision an easy one.

  Only a few seconds more and the SEALs would have lit the entire house and rooftop up, violently ending any chance the targets had at survival.

  I was personally hoping they chose death. I wanted them not to return alive. If these guys were even remotely responsible for the bombings, they deserved their instant execution on that very rooftop.

  What was it going to be?

  Finally, their hands went up, their guns thrown down in the process. They chose to live for the time being, though again I was disappointed in their choice. It was over.

  When the operators swept the house later, they found hundreds of pipe bombs, fertilizer, guns, and mortar rounds. The men had been using the house to construct various smaller explosives. They confessed that the pipe bombs were going to be used during the upcoming Iraqi elections, distributed at different polling sites to create havoc during the new democratic election process.

  We brought them back to the Box and it didn’t take long before they admitted their roles in the previous nine bombings. None of them, however, mentioned Dark Horse. Maybe they were scared shitless of him or maybe they just had no idea. In the end, it didn’t matter.

  A few days later, Dark Horse made his own mistake.

  19

  DARK HORSE

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Mark and I were at our desks in the Box, scanning reports, watching the drone feeds on a mission in progress when the intel about Dark Horse came in.

  “This doesn’t seem right,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The intercept I just got says he’s been captured at a checkpoint.”

  “It’s probably a rumor again,” Mark said.

  It was March 2010. Mark and I shrugged the report off at first. We had known for years that Dark Horse had a twin brother and intelligence services and even other terrorist leaders within his same network regularly mixed the two of them up. But we happened to have the less barbaric brother in custody, so this time we figured it was simply bad intel.

  Yet soon after, our resident source handler, Tom, came rushing in with the same news. “It’s true,” he said. “They got him!”

  A zap of electricity hit me. Captures never happened this way. Checkpoints were usually for the minnows, not the sharks. At this point Dark Horse was one of the most wanted men in the country. Photos of him had been posted nearly everywhere in Baghdad by Iraqi forces looking for information on his whereabouts. It wasn’t like him. He must have gotten sloppy. Being on the run for nearly eight years did that to a man. But perhaps it had just been us, our doggedness. We had spent so much time and resources on smoking him out.

  Dark Horse had not only been captured, but captured alive. We were the only U.S. military group that seemed to know they had him; even the rest of the coalition forces spread throughout the country had not picked up on it yet. I should have been happy about that—he could give us so much intel—but there was one potential wrinkle. He was now in the hands of an Iraqi death squad who had grabbed him up at a random checkpoint when he presented a fake ID.

  The squad was an ultrasecretive, extraterritorial strike force controlled by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and tasked with hunting Al Qaeda and ISI figures. Many saw them as Maliki’s personal hit squad, designed to target political rivals with force. None of their captors stayed alive for long . . . hence the hit squad.

  I had no idea if we would even be able to get to Dark Horse. Was he even still alive? The Iraqis could easily tell us to fuck off and kill him.

  We needed to move fast. I braced for fierce pushback as we kitted up, jumped in our up-armored vehicles, and headed into the city for a visit with the Iraqi general behind the squad.

  It was me, Mark, Jason, and the source handler Tom. Tom was CIA trained and played a key role with many of the targets we took down. He had an office just behind the Box and his job was to recruit sources on the ground and squeeze them for information. As a full-fledged case officer, he was as good as they get.

  The general’s office was on the other side of the city in a government building. We’d called ahead to let him know we were coming and that we wanted to talk about Dark Horse; that way we didn’t have to beat around the bush. One of his staffers met us at the front and led us inside to a room of dark brown couches and a big oak table. Steaming tea was served.

  When the general came in, he acted like he knew nothing at all. He sat down at the head of the table in a brown leather chair with gold trim. It seemed higher up than all of us, like a judge in a courtroom. His military uniform was like a Christmas tree, it had so many medals.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, we don’t have him,” he said, sitting back in his chair with a wide smile that suggested he knew exactly what we were talking about.

  Tom wasn’t having that, though, and laid it all out. “Listen, General,” he said, leaning across the table. “The men in this room are the best in the business. You should trust we know what we are doing.”

  The tension was high. The general was definitely more curious about us than ever now. He was used to lying to the regular military units, but he had never come across guys like us. He looked at us like he was feeling us out, making silent calculations about what to do. I got the feeling he was playing with us. Tom did most of the talking, but I spoke up when the general wanted to know if we understood who Dark Horse was. “What do you know about him?” he asked.

  “We’ve been tracking him for years,” I said, ticking off a bunch of his close associates that we’d either killed or captured recently. I told him Dark Horse was likely one of a few left who had contact with Manhattan and Brooklyn. “He could be the key to the extinction of the entire ISI network.”

  The general just nodded, not giving up much. That went on for more than an hour. At one point he waved his hand, calling in for more tea.

  Finally, Tom had enough. “We know you have him,” he said. “We want to meet him. And we can help you in return.” We offered up years of intelligence on Dark Horse and promised access to drones on missions we worked on together going forward.

  A few seconds of silence passed. I remembered the general scratching his chin and staring at all of us as if he were about to make a big poker bet. He turned to his aide, who had been standing silently behind him the whole time, and talked quietly to him in Arabic.

  When he turned back to us, the feeling in the room changed, the tension suddenly gone. “Okay,” he said, smiling, as if he were the one who had won and we were now all friends. “You will go see him today.”

  NO ONE IN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAD EVER SEEN DARK HORSE IN PERSON, BUT later that afternoon I was on my way to meet him.

  The prison was about thirty minutes away from the general’s office, hidden at the edge of an old, unused Iraqi airport and inside a run-down set of buildings that looked like military barracks. Our government didn’t even know the place existed.

  An Iraqi officer who worked for the general met us at the gate and walked us in. It was just me, our interpreter, and Tom. The others had stayed behind at the Box.

  The place was heavily guarded by Iraqi military personnel, but you couldn’t tell until you walked into the compound. Guards appeared out of nowhere as we walked into the main courtyard, some of them coming in to look out windows in the one-story building rising above us. It felt like an old western where the out-of-town cowboys walk into a bar and the piano player stops, with ev
eryone turning around looking.

  A few guards stepped out of doorways as we passed, lighting up cigarettes, smoking and gesturing toward us as they talked among themselves. It was clear that Americans were never brought here. The prison was their version of a black site, where they hid detainees. The people who were brought here were meant to disappear.

  We walked inside, down a long, dimly lit hallway. The Iraqi officer didn’t say anything and our feet were loud on the concrete floors. Doors were closed as we passed, as if most things were off-limits and they didn’t want us to know the war crimes that lay behind them. We came to a stop and the Iraqi officer turned around and spoke to our interpreter.

  I couldn’t keep still, all these anxious thoughts flooding my mind. Finally, the officer made a sign with his hand and we crossed another courtyard and walked into another building. The place was a maze of concrete floors and walls. It was darker and damper and dirtier, and I felt in my gut like we were stepping into the worst kind of haunted house.

  The lights began to flicker along the way, the open air-conditioning in the hallway dripping water onto the ground. Peeled white paint was everywhere. Handprints of dried blood on the walls from who knows what. The floors were covered in dirt and muddy boot prints from people coming and going. Behind one door I could hear a man screaming in pain. He was clearly being beaten. The air was hot and stale and smelled like death. The screaming echoed around the halls until it was just our boots again.

  We walked down one hallway, past doors that were shut up with more prisoners. It seemed like they had dozens of people locked up. The officer finally stopped and opened a door. He nodded, as if to say, This is it.

  When we entered, the room was surprisingly nice, considering the hell we had just walked through to get there. The room was large and windowless with a glass wall unit full of old weapons, medals, and photos on one side. Deep leather couches ran the full length of the room. Behind a large dark wood desk was another Iraqi officer, who gestured for us to sit down.

  I pulled out a key chain with a secret pinhole camera built into it and laid it on the table next to me. Through our interpreter we talked back and forth with the officer at the desk. He was in charge of the site and there was something oddly cold about him. I didn’t think too much about it then, though, because I was anxious to meet Dark Horse. I still didn’t believe he was actually there, that the general was telling the truth—and that I was about to meet him.

  The Iraqi government officials we worked with over the years were notorious liars. When you listened to some of them talk, you would think the entire war had already been won by them, that we could all go home. For the last decade of the war, I couldn’t recall one single instance where the Iraqis had ever captured or killed a senior-level terrorist figure without the direct help of U.S. forces. So the fact that they had captured Dark Horse on their own was still a bit shocking to me. I didn’t believe it. All I kept thinking was, I’m about to meet a guy we’ve been chasing for years. The five or ten minutes of waiting condensed, as my mind flipped through all those years of hunting, the horror this guy had inflicted on the world, the families he’d destroyed, the U.S. soldiers he’d killed, and how the hell he’d managed to elude capture for so long.

  When Dark Horse finally walked in, I clicked the key chain and the camera began to record.

  I expected him to enter the room in handcuffs and an orange prison suit with armed guards, like any prisoner in the United States. After all, this guy had murdered thousands of innocent civilians over the years. But it wasn’t like that at all. Dark Horse didn’t have any guards walking with him and he wore street clothes—a black and white Adidas tracksuit and an untucked long sleeve shirt underneath. It was strange. No handcuffs. He seemed to move as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  I made a quick glance over at Tom sitting next to me, as if to silently ask him if he was seeing what I was seeing. His reaction was the same as mine. You got to be fucking kidding me.

  At first, I had my hand on my Glock sidearm, thinking Dark Horse might lunge at me. He’d spent his life trying to kill Americans and wouldn’t think twice about trying to kill us. He was clearly surprised to see Americans, too. He did a double take as he walked past us, stopped for a second, and then glanced over at the Iraqi officer behind the desk as if to seek direction on what to do. The officer gestured to him as if to say, Go ahead and relax. “Hello,” he finally said with a smile and sat down in a couch across from us.

  He had black eyes, black hair, and his eyebrows were thick and overgrown across his forehead. A thick mustache curled downward slightly at the ends but was just short of a handlebar. His hair was messed up, as if he’d been sleeping. He didn’t look at us at first, just stared off at the wall or down at his knees.

  I watched him for a few minutes, trying to catch his eyes as they darted like cars around the room, but he eluded me. He had a nervous tic of running one finger across his mustache.

  “What is your name?” I asked him.

  He wouldn’t answer me right away. He looked back at the colonel behind the desk, seeking approval to speak. He didn’t quite understand what was going on. The colonel and he went back and forth in Arabic before he finally answered.

  “I am Manaf al-Rawi.”

  We spent three hours there that first day and he didn’t say much. We didn’t tell him our names and he didn’t ask for them. We came back the next day and the next and he mostly fed us things we already knew, things that he knew we already knew. He was messing with us.

  It wasn’t until a few days later that he began to open up and talk about Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  Who knows why he started talking a bit more. Maybe he thought it was a way out. Maybe he heard the screams from the other prisoners dragged through the halls. Maybe he wanted to prolong his own inevitable death.

  “The last time I saw them in person was 2006,” he said. He told us he only communicated with Manhattan and Brooklyn by letters via a courier system.

  Dark Horse eventually provided a basic understanding of the courier network, which, although lacking in any significant detail, became very important later. His notes to Manhattan and Brooklyn were passed along through a series of people, who made their way north. Days or weeks later a response would come back through the same system. The couriers were also switched out regularly to confuse security services from picking up a trace.

  For a minute, I thought we had them. “Is that where Manhattan and Brooklyn are? Up north?”

  He smiled, blocking us again. “I don’t know anything more.”

  He didn’t budge on that. Perhaps he thought he’d given us enough about the leaders and we’d be satisfied and that he could now wait us out. But the Iraqis hovered. They had their own ways of questioning and we preferred not to know about them. There would be a time and place for enhanced interrogations. From what I’d witnessed, that kind of pressure had directly led to the capture or killing of numerous high-level targets.

  Not long after, he had a surprise. “Do you really want to know something?” It was followed by that smile again. This was one of the only times he looked directly at me. He said he’d put into motion four separate operations before he’d been caught. “Believe it or not,” he said. He crossed his legs and sat back on the couch, like he was in Club Med. He was clearly ready to die for his cause.

  Suddenly talkative, he happily detailed the operations. His hands made large gestures as if to signal a big explosion, as our interpreter quickly translated the Arabic for us. He smiled as he talked about the destruction he had put into play, like a serial killer laying out his master plan. I could tell he was enamored with himself, as if he weren’t even in prison, like he still had full control over his sprawling network.

  He said a plane was going to crash into an Iraqi government building; Iraqis turning out to vote would be killed by hundreds of small pipe bombs laid out in the city during the upcoming parliamentary elections; and four different foreign embassies in Baghdad
would be attacked.

  This was as specific as he’d get; he left out any information that would have allowed us to stop the attacks, and he refused to help anymore. He was bragging, letting us know the man we were dealing with and that there was nothing we could do.

  Other teams scrambled to decrypt what he said, but soon it was too late. Three of the four attacks ended up occurring, including a multipronged suicide car bombing at the Egyptian, Iranian, and Syrian embassies as well as the German ambassador’s residence. Hundreds of people were hurt.

  “You see,” he said when we saw him after the attack. “I wasn’t lying.” Then he didn’t tell us anything else for a long time.

  FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I CONTINUED TO HUNT DOWN OTHER TARGETS WHILE TOM and other members of our team returned daily to visit Dark Horse.

  We picked up a guy whose fingerprints were on an exploded car bomb; another who was about to begin flight training in the United States; two more who had been distributing ISI propaganda videos showcasing their horrific attacks on U.S. forces. Another night we killed a leader within the network’s military cell called the “special groups.” Then one of the cell’s finance heads. We were running through the key fighters fast. Collectively we had already picked off eight of the top twenty targets in the country from the list we started with.

  When our interrogators started talking to them after capture, most played dumb. “What are you talking about? I don’t know any bad people,” one said. Another said, “You have the wrong guy.” This was typical, but I did run into one at the time who seemed to be refreshingly honest. He was a midlevel player in ISI, more of a soldier than a planner. “Sir,” he said, straight-faced, “I don’t know anyone who isn’t Al Qaeda.” Then he told us all he knew and led us to a few more.

  There was a stretch where we did two or three new missions each night—and everything began to click.

  This was the first time that I felt in total control, that we could find anyone we wanted, even starting with the most insignificant morsel of information. That control made me feel like our team couldn’t be stopped. I loved every minute of it. It was just a matter of time before we uncovered that one crucial lead that would take us straight to the top.