Drone Warrior Read online

  The shooting stopped and about fifteen minutes of nothing passed. The assault force moved slowly back into the hut, their guns pointed forward. Groaning sounds were coming from the toilet hole.

  One guy pointed his laser down the hole and called out, receiving groans in return. A few moments later there was silence again: the groaner was dead.

  When the battle ended, the quiet persisted and the night sounds of the desert returned. The rubble was cleared from the hole and one of the biggest surprises of the mission came to light.

  Four men were found dead: Manhattan was in there. And so was Brooklyn. They must have been hiding in the hut together. Wrong night to be together. Both had detonated their vests. Along with Brooklyn was his twelve-year-old son, who was killed when his father detonated. Another senior ISI operative had also died from the grenade dropped in the hole.

  Later, when the body of the senior operative was transported back to our main base, the doctors would find a live grenade lodged into his armpit from the blast. They had to call an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team to remove it.

  The official call finally came over the radio from Jason miles away, sealing the night: “Jackpot, Manhattan and Brooklyn EKIA.”

  I didn’t know what to say at first. I couldn’t find words. I turned around from the screens and looked at Mark. He was one of the first guys I had met and he, Bill, and Jack had trained me from the start. He nodded his approval.

  Lisa, one of the Pink Mafia girls, jumped on my back, hugging me from behind. It was one of the first times I had seen the room snap out of their serious professional stance and lose a bit of their cool.

  It was hard not to celebrate that moment. We had just been a part of arguably the most devastating blow to the network since the war began, and everyone in the world would know it once it hit the press the next day.

  Brooklyn in particular was largely regarded by ISIS as the original founder and to this day is still celebrated as the original leader, his photo regularly sent out in propaganda. We had just killed him. When we showed his dead photo to Dark Horse later, he collapsed to the cold cement floor in his holding chamber and just asked for a Koran, clutching it as he rocked back and forth on the ground. It was over and he knew it.

  But any celebrations, such as they were, were short-lived. This wasn’t the World Series. This was war. All any of us cared about was the next target—not a party for the last.

  It would be a few days before the assault team got back to base. They spent hours pulling up debris and collecting whatever was leftover: documents, laptops, DNA, and identifiable body parts. Once everything was gathered, it would be sent back to another secret site for others to analyze. And then weeks and sometimes months of debriefings would follow, with all the new information—newly found associates, safe houses, money trails—layered into our files.

  I sent the drones home.

  I wasn’t tired so I headed for a shower. I stunk because I hadn’t taken one in probably weeks. There was a designated trailer with ten stalls and sinks and mirrors to shave. It was probably four in the morning and I had the place to myself so I turned on the hot water and stood there for a long time under the steaming stream, just enjoying the momentary calm. It was probably the greatest shower that I’ve ever taken. It was like the water was washing away years of anxiety, fatigue, all the emotions of hunting these guys.

  I slept that night deeper than I’d slept in months. I needed it. Of course, it was never long enough. My pager started buzzing before the sun rose. HQ was on the line.

  21

  DOGS OF WAR

  HQ called an urgent meeting within hours after we took out Manhattan and Brooklyn and all stations jumped on a teleconference. You’d think we would have been given time off for killing the most wanted men. But there were never breathers. As the video screen of the others flickered live, my team and I huddled around the long table. This had to be important to bring us all together.

  The night before had been a lot of ups and downs, the high of taking down Manhattan and Brooklyn running through my veins, and the low of losing a man in the chopper crash. The early morning had dragged a bit, like I was pulling a weight behind me. Sitting there now, I had never felt so tired. My bones ached. My neck felt like it was being dragged down by a fifty-pound weight.

  To fight the fatigue, I slugged one energy drink and another, just as the overall commander came online. There was no hello or celebration over the night before. He got straight to the point. “We need to keep the network on the run,” he said. “I want you to take down all the targets you’ve been following, every target you have in your back pocket, all the low-hanging fruit, even if you don’t have much on them.” At this stage we had taken out twelve of the twenty on our original list of leaders.

  I looked over at Mark. Both of us knew what this meant. My chest tightened.

  It was the equivalent of unleashing one giant Hellfire on our enemies. The commander had just set us free, weapons cleared hot. With Brooklyn and Manhattan dead, the most dangerous terrorist network in the world was headless and unraveling—and we needed to keep it that way. We were being told to bring them to the brink of extinction.

  I edged closer to the table, gripping my drink. The fan spinning away behind us didn’t seem like it was working and the air felt hotter than ever, thick with the stink of too many bodies.

  “Tell me what we got,” the commander said.

  We went around to the different intel heads across the country, each one going over who was left, who could be taken out.

  Jack was first. “Sir, I’ve got two we can go on.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Roger that.”

  “We have a few we can immediately take action on at our location as well,” said Travis, another team leader in the north.

  “Sir, I’ve got one big target and a bunch of lower-level guys we’ve been sitting on,” I added.

  The meeting was quick and to the point. I could feel the anticipation of things to come, as if a grenade pin had just been slipped out. There was no time to think now. Our deployment was coming to an end and the United States was moving out of Iraq. It was time to finish things.

  The commander moved close to the screen. His face blown up in front of all of us, like he was too close to the camera.

  “Crush everything,” he said, right before signing off. “We go now.”

  THE SAME AFTERNOON OUR MISSION TO CRUSH EVERYTHING BEGAN. I SENT UP three drones and our operators began to hit the streets.

  We grabbed one guy out of a taxi full of stunned people in downtown Baghdad while he was on his way to work. We snagged another as he left a market where he had been distributing propaganda videos. Another was hunkering down at home. Our strikes were more brazen; we were sending them a message in broad daylight in some cases. We wanted the network to know we had been unleashed.

  There were more than a dozen missions playing out on multiple screens at once—some drones watching targets, others watching captures and kills. The command center was at full staff, everyone ramped up and ready to help.

  It was as if the dogs of war had been let free. Each station was doing its own missions. Night after night. Sometimes two or three at one time. No more patience or hand-wringing from above. The more missions, the more the network was unsteadied. We pored over our list, anyone we had leads on. That first day our teams killed eight targets. By the end of the week, we’d grabbed more than double that.

  We even had the Air Force pull the Hellfire missiles off our drones so they didn’t weigh the aircraft down as much. That gave each bird an extra few hours in the sky to hunt. More drones were brought in from other battlefields to support our teams. We had them stacked on top of each other in the sky, blanketing major cities across the country.

  The scramble led to our last major hit, but it also led to our last major mistake: killing an innocent.

  One night we were following a target in an old white Toyota Corolla around the city when I decided
it was time to take him out.

  We didn’t have time to keep following him because we had bigger missions to deal with. The guy was a small-time emir in the network—low on the totem pole of terror—and hiding out in a southern suburb of Baghdad. I didn’t have a photo or even know much about what he looked like. Instead I had only one source who had led us to the white Corolla and eventually to a mud house.

  As the drone orbited overhead, my gut felt something was off, but I didn’t listen to it. I watched the man get out of his car and go inside the hut. The village was well outside Baghdad and made up of a cluster of huts, all of them in complete darkness.

  Soon after, I watched a SEAL team show up. Our team’s operators had been pulled away for another mission. We thought it would be a quick and easy raid—in and out in a few minutes—and we watched them get to work.

  Wearing night-vision goggles, they climbed out of their vehicles and spread out enough to cordon off the outer perimeter of the village. That’s where things went wrong.

  As they moved in, a man stepped out from one of the other huts and began firing in their direction. The SEALs killed him almost instantly. “Contact!” the commander yelled over the radio, indicating that they had taken fire.

  They then proceeded at lightning speed to the actual target’s hut. We expected more firing, but the SEALs’ commander radioed back within seconds with disturbing news: “Dry hole.”

  They’d checked his ID, swiped all the information from his cell phone, and talked with others in the village. The man we’d been following was just a regular guy. No connection to the network.

  My stomach fell out. It was the worst phrase one could hear in my position. It was basically another way of saying, “You fucked up, Intel.”

  To make matters worse, the man who’d come out of his hut shooting was also a civilian. He had a family and was just protecting his house, worried that the men were coming for his wife and kids. Now he was dead.

  We should have spent more time confirming the target. But we didn’t have the time. The network was changing fast, with new, unknown people replacing the guys we’d killed off. There were a lot of things we should have done differently. But we were scrambling to wrap things up.

  In the moment, I didn’t think much of his death, though. Mistakes happened and we considered it collateral damage. The thing about a drone-related kill is that there are a lot of people involved in the operation and it is easy to distance yourself from any mistake. The SEAL who shot the guy could say, “Well, the intel guy put us there so it’s his fault.” And I could say, “Well, I didn’t pull the trigger.” Same thing with a Hellfire strike. These are the new realities of networked wars. Success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan.

  But the truth was, I could not escape it then, and cannot escape it now: His death should not have happened. And I’m responsible for it.

  22

  THE ONE WHO

  GOT AWAY

  There was always one elusive target on every tour. One guy we hunted and chased but somehow kept slipping away. Every team had its archnemesis. Mine during the summer of 2010 was a man we called Abu Dua.

  We hunted Abu Dua for months, pressured sources and captives, put more drones in the sky for extra eyes that never blinked. Maybe it was luck. He’d probably call it divine intervention. Something Allah did for him as thanks for all the mass killings he called holy.

  In the spring of 2010, Abu Dua was one of the most wanted men in our covert world—at the top of our target list—but he was largely unknown to the public.

  Abu Dua was connected to everyone at the top of ISI and he had his own fiefdom. Among thousands of brainwashed followers, he was known as the Wali of Walis, a title usually reserved for the top three ranks in the network’s broader hierarchy. After we killed Manhattan and Brooklyn the month before, we kept hearing that he was taking over. And soon he did.

  Not only did he take over the ISI network, but he would help them eventually become ISIS, morphing into an even more murderous and twisted offshoot, swallowing up parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014. He was probably the smartest terrorist I ever hunted.

  Most people know him these days as the most wanted terrorist in the world: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.

  The U.S. government had placed a $10 million bounty on his head.

  He didn’t know me, but he definitely knew my work. Through my deployment, our team conducted more than thirty-two raids that specifically aimed to uncover him. Most were chasing leads to his whereabouts or capturing people in his inner circle, attempts at tightening the noose around his neck. He had to see some of the closest people in his inner circle, people he met with every day, getting picked off around him. We would get word that he was running around with some target of ours during his daily terrorist duties, meeting at a gas station or some safe house somewhere, then, boom, that other guy with him was suddenly gone, in our custody or dead. Imagine everyone in your circle of friends and family that you always met the same time every week, slowly disappearing one by one over the course of a couple of months. His tight-knit group of the most brutal animals within the network slowly vanishing around him. I forced him underground and got closer to ending his reign than anyone else. But we were always just one step behind him.

  There were a lot of reasons that he probably escaped our team’s grasp. He was surely better at hiding than any other man on our list. His operations security—OPSEC—was the best in the business. He was paranoid that we were getting close. He would be somewhere and then disappear without a trace, like a weather pattern. He knew, one little slipup and we had him. No doubt our team made him the security-obsessive psychopath he was today. Paranoia kept him alive.

  Usually we got the guys we hunted. Maybe not that first tour, but eventually we got to them—and if I didn’t, another team did. My team was always followed by another team, which was followed by another, all of us hunting around the clock. But this time was different. With U.S. troops pulling out of Iraq, with fewer of our guys likely to be looking for him, I wasn’t so sure there would be another chance to get Abu Dua.

  When we first started hunting him, it was because we needed a path to Manhattan and Brooklyn and we were worried that Dark Horse was dead and wouldn’t pan out. Abu Dua was one of the only other commanders who knew their whereabouts. So we hunted them both.

  Abu Dua was a big fan of an ice cream shop in downtown Baghdad that had an outdoor seating area where many locals socialized all day long. Our sources told us that he met his fighters there on Thursdays and used it as a letter drop for couriers. He didn’t seem afraid of being recognized by locals at the time, only because they didn’t know about him then.

  One summer day we got intelligence that he was going to the ice cream shop for a drop and we put a bird up to check it out. We watched the shop for days and days.

  “What a sick joke,” Megan said as the monitors streamed back images of families eating ice cream cones. “A terrorist who loves a good ice cream sundae.” I imagined him talking to his hired killers about the next massacre over strawberry milkshakes and getting the ice cream foam on his beard.

  We had our local informants—the Cobras—on the street, casually mulling around and looking to snap pictures. But nothing stood out. Just families coming and going for dessert. They must have snapped thousands of photos that we sorted through back in the Box. But none of them were him. He never came. Or maybe he did and we just didn’t see him.

  Pursuing Abu Dua was mostly like that.

  I never understood how he rose to the top so fast. Typically, it’s hard to climb the ranks because of how Al Qaeda and ISI structured their networks, favoring the rise of longtime followers. My guess was that it had to do with his stretch in prison (for fighting U.S. troops during the second Fallujah war in 2004), the jihadis he met there, and the fact that we were destroying the bigger network so quickly, which forced leadership gaps to be filled. He also seemed to have this oddly close connection to former mil
itary officers in Saddam’s Ba’ath Party. Many of the guys who had worked with him had similar backgrounds and filled senior officer ranks within former Iraqi intelligence circles.

  Usually ISI was mistrustful of newly released prisoners, fearing they had been turned into spies. They kept them on ice for months before bringing them into the mix. But Abu Dua was different. He came right out of prison and was soon one of the top commanders.

  Few knew this history at the time. Before the spring of 2010, no one outside of our team knew much about him at all or where he came from. Even the Iraqi government was in the dark.

  When we had first started to hunt him, all we had to go off was the nickname Abu Dua. That changed one night when Megan was digging into some old files and his secret history suddenly opened up like a book.

  “Look at this,” she said. Megan had a bunch of files open on her desktop. We had two drones up over another target that we were about to take out.

  She discovered Abu Dua’s real name in an old prison file: Dr. Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim ‘Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai.

  “This is gold,” I said, excitedly. “You hit it.”

  That name for us was a key to his past. From his name, I could tell that his father was Awwad Ibrahim, and that he was from Samarra and his subtribe was al-Badri. He had a daughter named Dua.

  The Box shot into action. Plugging the names into our databases, we were immediately able to trace his lineage to al-Jabriyah, al-Thaniah village in the Iraqi city of Samarra. He was probably in his early forties, had three brothers and five sisters.

  As we pressed on, more of his history began to shake out and a picture emerged.

  Abu Dua received a doctoral degree in Islamic studies from Baghdad and preached at numerous mosques, including some in al-Anbar and Samarra. He had multiple wives, Asma, his current wife in the north, and Sumayah, the wife he had met while studying at the university in Baghdad. His mother was Ali Husayn. At first I went after his wives, sending birds to watch over his first wife Asma’s parents’ house in the middle of Fallujah. But after a few days there was no sign of her there and I quickly decided that she’d probably gone off with Abu Dua before we could find her.