Drone Warrior Read online

  A former FBI agent came in and showed us videos of suicide bombers. One opened with the grainy image of a crowded market in a city somewhere in the Middle East. The terrorist’s associates had videotaped the scene from a rooftop nearby. Soon a seemingly innocuous truck pulls up next to a crowded café as if it is going to drop someone off. After a couple seconds, the vehicle explodes, killing dozens. “This is the evil that exists in the world,” the agent told us. “These are the people you’re after.”

  I began to feel hate inside my heart for them, their way of life threatening America’s very existence. The hatred was unsettling, but it emboldened me.

  A FEW MONTHS LATER I WAS HEADING OFF ON MY NEXT DEPLOYMENT, THIS TIME TO Iraq. It was a September night when my C-17 transport plane circled down fast in a steep approach, headed for the Baghdad runway. Insurgents were known to shoot planes out of the sky, so we wore full body armor, weapons in hand, locked and loaded, helmets on. I was ready for the worst.

  Two thousand five had been a deadly year in Iraq. The insurgency had produced a full-fledged bloodbath: at least 844 American service members were killed, about half of them by homemade bombs planted on the roads. Many more were wounded. It was sometimes hard to keep track. Saddam Hussein had been captured two years before and the United States had trusted the country to an interim Iraqi government. But the place was still a murderous thunderdome of nationalist and Muslim groups fighting for supremacy.

  Each group wanted a piece of Iraq, fighting each other and U.S. forces spread across the countryside. Saddam’s Ba’athist party had its own gang. Shia Muslim gangs with connections to Iran were sometimes deployed to fight against U.S. forces. Radical Sunnis formed their own gangs and others still were simply warring in the name of jihad—the mujahideen. Al Qaeda in Iraq was winning that war, out of sheer brutality. They believed they were killing for Allah, and even fellow Sunni Muslims wouldn’t stand in their way.

  As our plane settled down on the runway, I imagined bunkers of bad guys lined up with RPGs and automatic weapons waiting for the doors to open. Brace yourself, I thought, gripping my M4 carbine assault rifle.

  But the plane landed without incident. And when the tailgate came down to let us out, there was no one firing. There weren’t even armored trucks on the runway. Four or five white buses, caked in dust, pulled up to take us off the plane. We threw our bags underneath. What the hell is this? It was like some kind of chartered adventure.

  It was bizarre, and it only got weirder. Our buses pulled out of the airport and I watched as the city streets passed. The streets looked barren and almost ghostly, fully lined with barbed wire and three-foot-tall cement barriers to protect unauthorized civilians from entering the camp.

  Why isn’t the driver at least driving fast? What about snipers?

  “Are you kidding me?” I said to the soldier next to me as a strip mall came into view. A Pizza Hut passed. Then a Burger King. And a Cinnabon. A sign in front of one building advertised salsa dancing lessons on Friday night.

  “Isn’t this supposed to be a war zone?” I asked, incredulously.

  He shrugged.

  This was Camp Taji, a huge base built at the site of one of Saddam’s old chemical weapon facilities. The Army had retrofitted most of the buildings and built its own as well, so little was left of the old palace. It might as well have been Toledo.

  ABOUT TWENTY OF US INTEL GUYS WORKED OUT OF A SMALL HOT ROOM IN ONE OF the newer buildings on campus. I built target packets on the enemies—basically, digital folders containing documents our special forces teams had gathered from the field on local enemy leaders or militia groups we wanted captured or dead.

  Some targets had files hundreds of pages long, while others were more mysterious, with just a few pages. The elaborate packets included everything from an enemy’s personal and terror history, to maps of the area where he lived or operated, and any notable physical characteristics, such as a prominent mole on the neck or a nose that had been broken ten times.

  Most of the targets were not well known and often it was unclear what role they actually played in the larger terrorist world. Sometimes I wondered if they were actually even bad and if sources were feeding us flawed intel. But there were few ways to tell.

  Even at this stage of the war, there was no real rhyme or reason to how we did anything. Pretty much anyone whose name was mentioned in the field went into some sort of packet.

  You can imagine all the reports. We became basically an intel factory. And for what? The problem was that few of our reports were actually acted on in time. Many commanders just waited and waited after we’d sent files, saying they needed time to prepare for an actual mission. They’d spend three days just talking about the mission without action. Did they think any of these terrorist fanatics worth their salt in street cred would actually stick around long enough in one place to be captured?

  We had a name for this kind of self-defeating work: “the self-licking ice cream cone.” It meant creating intelligence for the sake of creating it. Busywork. And over time, we probably lost dozens of guys because of this.

  Nightly, I sat on my cot, itching to go somewhere else. You couldn’t do real intelligence work from a computer room behind the front lines. It made me question my self-worth—had I gone through years of training to let it all go stale while the terrorists plotted their next attack?

  Days passed and soon I couldn’t take it anymore. I blew up.

  I was on the phone with a special forces captain in the north of Iraq when things turned heated. Our analysis section had the exact location of a bad guy’s house, which was a Humvee ride away from this commander’s group.

  The target was a notorious weapons maker, deft at making and planting the improvised explosives that were killing so many of our guys.

  Three weeks had passed since we’d given the commander the packet on the bomb maker. And I was pissed.

  “Why are you sitting on this guy?” I said. The commander outranked me, but I didn’t care. “What’s taking you guys so long?”

  “You got to slow down,” he said, explaining that they were still planning an assault, but there were a lot of moving pieces. “You don’t understand how these things work.”

  He was cordial about it. But I knew what the commander was really thinking: You’re at headquarters with those nice air-conditioned offices, while I’m sitting here in tents with no showers. Stay out of my business and go back to your fucking Pizza Hut.

  5

  SPY GAME

  I would have done anything to get out of Camp Pizza Hut, so when a secret intelligence unit came calling in late 2006 I jumped at the opportunity to see a different side of the intel world.

  I flew back to the States from Iraq that winter before the deployment officially ended. A couple of planes later I was at a classified base in the Northeast. I threw my bag down on a twin bed in a three-story building. Even though my head was still spinning from the trip, there wasn’t much time to catch my breath. I headed to some orientation events that day and then to the common bar on campus, where fifty of us drank. Many of us only knew about the life of spies from the movies.

  I had been recruited by a special organization within the military that sends a small group of U.S. military members from different branches every year to spy training. The specific details around my recruitment are classified. I was being trained and certified as an operative, a case officer as they are known in our circles. This was the doctorate of spy training.

  “It’s very rare for someone to get this opportunity,” one of the instructors told us that first night, crowded among dozens of recruits or students in a mess hall. “You’re the best and brightest of your generation, but this is a very difficult course.” Most of the instructors were civilians, but some were military intelligence officers. They were there to break our asses and teach us spy tradecraft. We were about to become part of an elite and clandestine class of men and women. “You are the next generation of spies,” he told us. “Welcome to th
e Farm.”

  That’s what they called this place: the Farm.

  When I got back to my room that night, I worried about cameras. I looked behind the mirror on the wall and along the edges of a landscape painting. I was sure that they’d begun to watch me—and judge every move. I was being a little paranoid, but that’s the feeling the camp created inside all of us.

  For weeks the camp was just like one big game of spy versus spy, played out across a midsize U.S. city around us—with the local population often in the dark about what we were doing. Our missions involved spotting, assessing, and recruiting foreign assets who could provide the United States with important information.

  I wore a lot of disguises. Makeup artists taught me how to appear a lot older than the twenty-two-year-old I was at the time. They gave me wigs with gray hairs, taught me how to alter my walk and posture to appear older, how to color and trim fake mustaches. After practice, I had a couple of different disguises that I could put on within about ten minutes of prep and even my own mother wouldn’t have recognized me.

  Still, the disguises took some getting used to. Every time I looked into a rearview mirror on a mission, I felt a bit ridiculous in a colored wig, like I was a grown-up playing Halloween out of season. But locals didn’t seem to notice. I walked into a convenience store and paid for a cup of coffee and the guy at the register didn’t take a second look at my hippie ponytail. I ate lunch at a local diner and the waitress looked at me like I was just another dude with a handlebar mustache.

  The Farm opened my eyes to a kind of invisible world that unfolded around us. When you were inside of it, it felt a bit like the Matrix, where only a lucky few truly saw what was going on behind the daily routine of the world. Ever notice a chalk mark on a random wall in a shopping center? Or a group of cars all of a sudden breaking formation with others in a crowded intersection and driving erratically? I would never be the same after the Farm.

  I was taught for the first time how to tie a tie, tailor my suits, and order a glass of Scotch for a particular occasion. In some ways, the Farm taught me what my father never did growing up, which was how to become a man.

  At night I attended mock cocktail parties where I learned to “bump” foreign personnel who had special access and placement in different levels of government—a general, a foreign ambassador, a socialite. It wasn’t much different than a typical businessman trying to make connections at a social event.

  Human intelligence, or what we called HUMINT, was all about figuring out another’s weakness—and then being able to turn that weakness to your advantage. Did the source need money? Did he have a weird sex habit? Did he want to help his country?

  The reports were the worst part. I had to write them up after any interaction: who I talked to, what streets I drove down, exactly what the source said, what he didn’t say, what I thought he was thinking, my plan for the next meeting, descriptions of any people or cars I thought were following me. There were nights that I was up until well after midnight writing about some meaningless interaction.

  I knew it was a big deal for me to be at the Farm. At twenty-two, I was the youngest there.

  BUT AS THE WEEKS PASSED, I BEGAN TO REALIZE THAT THE FARM WASN’T EXACTLY James Bond. Before arriving, I wasn’t stupid enough to think that all I was going to be doing was driving fast cars, dining beautiful women, and assassinating people. But I was twenty-two. And I thought I would at least enjoy it.

  The thing I began to learn, though, was that life as a spy was incredibly boring.

  About 10 percent of it was sexy, with cool gadgets you’ve seen in the movies, like water-dissolving paper, hidden compartments in briefcases, and plenty of fake documents like passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards. But the other 90 percent—driving around all day masking your trail, and document writing—completely sucked. This started to nag at me after a while. Did I really want to be a spy? Was there something different out there?

  I got my answer one day.

  An instructor brought us into a dark room and flipped on a video. “This is for motivation,” he said. The video was shot from a drone, which was orbiting an Al Qaeda training camp in some deep, hidden corner of the Middle East. The camp was dusty and Spartan, with dozens of men with weapons walking around. At one point the trainees sat down and appeared from the drone camera to be listening to the instructor talk.

  Then out of nowhere, a Hellfire missile came blasting down from the drone. In one great flash of whiteness, the missile obliterated the camp—and everyone in it. There had to be more than a hundred people there. Pieces of the main hut within it were thrown up in the air, almost floating up in slow motion as the drone camera changed angles to view the full devastation. When the white receded, we could see that there were bodies on the ground.

  I had never seen a drone attack.

  Up until then, I’d felt ambivalent about what I was going to do in the intelligence world. But seeing the drone video focused me. Those were terrorists, and they were dead. I wanted to be a part of that.

  But I had no idea how to get there. What I did know was that the agency was probably not going to work out. I had three more years of my contract with the Army. Which meant that anything I did for the agency had to be through the Army. The agency didn’t fly its drones through the military; they did it alone. So I’d never get to work with drones through this path as far as I could tell. What I was destined for instead at the agency was a life of recruiting sources and gathering human intelligence for the military, probably stuck at some embassy. Which meant writing reports. Lots of them.

  When I told one of the instructors that I wanted to leave, he looked at me like I had two heads. In the Army we’re trained not to quit anything. It isn’t in our blood and even thoughts of quitting make you feel weak. The head instructor came in to see me that night. “Why go now?” he asked, telling me that I was making a big mistake. “You have two weeks left before you graduate.”

  He spent the next two days trying to convince me to stick around. His final attempt came early one morning at an Italian restaurant on the bottom floor of a high-end hotel. It was in the middle of one of our last spy games. I was staying at the hotel under a cover identity, in the middle of sourcing and gathering intelligence on a plot against a foreign country.

  The spy took off his overcoat and hat, then sat down. He was an old-school, Cold War spy, with a thick mustache. He’d been at the job for decades.

  He didn’t waste any time. There were few others around. “Not many people get this chance,” he said in a low voice that he’d clearly cultivated over his years in the service.

  I nodded, because I knew it was true.

  “You’re meant to do this work and we think you need to reconsider. Why don’t we give you a few more days’ rest to think it through? We’ll keep this all between us.”

  We talked for about thirty minutes. But I had already made up my mind. I knew what had to be done, where I wanted to go. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The last thing I remembered was him shaking my hand. He stood up from the table, put on his overcoat and top hat, and walked straight out toward the sunny foyer. He never looked back.

  I got on a plane that night and checked into a shitty motel in Maryland.

  I waited there for my next assignment in a haze of uncertainty about what would come next. Beer bottles and pizza boxes were scattered everywhere. I had the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door for over three weeks.

  6

  THE SHITBOX/

  GARBAGE CITY

  I woke up on a musty old cot to the sound of screaming.

  “Incoming, incoming!” a soldier yelled from somewhere in the four-story building. I blinked awake. Dust filled my nostrils from the early morning air. Before I could sit up, a mortar slammed into the roof.

  The building shook with the blow, followed quickly by twelve more, each whistling in before it hit, which I counted out like the long seconds on a clock.

  Around me were twenty other s
oldiers laid out on rusty cots. Some, like me, had been having trouble sleeping and were just lying there, eyes open, staring up at the plywood ceilings as the dust fell from between the cracks with each mortar impact, and probably wondering when it was all going to come sinking down like a cake.

  It was only 6 A.M., another whole day of mortar rounds ahead of us. The local residents turned enemy had been hitting us all week, one after another, surrounding us like sharks, with little that we could do to retaliate. And even though our men could have struck back, the military rules of engagement at the time didn’t allow it. A nice gift to the enemy from headquarters faraway from the fight, who worried that the militants were firing from houses occupied by innocent civilians. But we took comfort in knowing that these mortars weren’t strong enough to break through the building. At least not yet.

  Three months before, I’d gotten the call in that Maryland motel that I’d been assigned to do intelligence work for the 82nd Airborne. Now I was just outside Baghdad’s Sadr City, northeast of the Green Zone—combat outpost Callahan.

  The rooms we lived in stunk of mold and sweat and somedays it was like being stuck in a shitbox, the smell so bad at times that it pinched your stomach and bunched up your nose. It was like prison—or worse. Our cots were thin and lumpy and the pillows were about what you get on an airplane. There were no working lights. When we wanted to see what we were doing at night, we flipped on our headlamps. Just like miners.

  Our building was about the size of a Walgreens and originally designed to withstand dust storms and heavy winds, not enemy fire. About four hundred soldiers were jammed in across four floors. Before it was abandoned, the building had been a mall. When the Iraqis leave a building behind, it’s not a place you want to be. Dried shit had been smeared across the interior walls by the squatters who’d called it home before us.