I think I was having a very pleasant dream, something to do with Spring in central Virginia. Soft, warm, humid air was caressing me as I sank into an emerald meadow dotted with tiny, delicate violets. Then a cell phone rang, yanking me into semi-consciousness and the sensation that I was trying to climb up from the bottom of a deep, dark well. Somehow I managed to jerk my head up, fumbled for the phone on my nightstand, and deciphered two unpleasant facts from the display: it was 6:22 a.m., and my second ex-wife, Jane, was calling from her home in Costa Mesa, California. Christ.
I met Jane in the mid-80s in Chad, where she was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Marriage was her idea. Jane told me later that her heart melted when she saw me playing with a little Anglo-African girl who reminded me of Émilie, and she thought I’d make a great father for her own future children. I didn’t put up much of a fight. I was feeling lonely and on the rebound from the split with Marguérite, and I actually thought that a relationship with a middle-class suburban white girl, raised on the same jokes and t.v. shows and movies as myself, would work better than my marriage to an African had. What it really meant was that Jane wasted little time in seeing through my pretensions of being a sensitive, different sort of guy--saw the intellectual arrogance, the diffidence, and the fundamental selfishness--and that she was the one who initiated divorce proceedings after only three years. Jane did get a little boy out of me, Mathias, now a tall, skinny, shy teenager, but not much help from me in raising the kid.
“Whaddya want, Jane?” There was no point in even pretending to be polite.
“I just spoke to your mother, and even she’s losing patience with you. You forgot Émilie’s 21st birthday? I knew this was important to her and that she’d been planning her party for months. Don’t feed me some bullshit line about war zone and duty and all that other crap. I know you. It’s just pure self-absorption. If you don’t have your nose in some damned books, it’s because you’re out drinking and chasing women. It’s all about you and your needs, all the time.”
“Yeah. Okay. I’m a piece of shit. I appreciate your taking the time to remind me of that at six in the fucking morning. Is there something in particular you want me to do about it or something you need from me? I’ll do what I can, but I just had a guy I was working with die, so things at work really are kind of busy.”
“Will, cut the sarcasm and the self-pity. You’re in a fucking war zone, so of course people you know are likely to die. You’d think that fact would have sunk in through your self-absorption a few months ago. No, I just called to warn you not to pull the same stunt you did on Émilie with Mathias when he turns 16. We’ve got a new lawyer who says under California law, forgetting birthdays can be construed as proof that a parent is disengaged from a kid’s life and can be used to terminate any sort of custodial relationship. Legally writing you out of your son’s life would make things a whole lot easier for all of us, but I thought I’d give you fair warning.”
This was bad. I liked both my kids, when I thought about them and could arrange to be around, and I didn’t think Jane was bluffing about cutting me off from my son. Barry, Jane’s current husband and former high school sweetheart, had made a killing in real estate in Orange County and I was sure he knew every crookedly creative lawyer in greater Los Angeles.
“Listen, Jane,” I pleaded. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. I messed up with Émilie’s birthday, but there really is a lot of shit happening here now, and trust me, I’m going to make it up to her. You know I’ll do the right thing by Mathias in the end.”
“I didn’t say cutting you out of Mathias’s life would be the right thing, Will, just that it would make life easier for us. But I’m warning you, the kid needs you in his life, and if you let him down on the birthday, well, we’ve got options. Oh. That’s Barry coming up the driveway. He just got the new Lexus and I want to see it. Gotta go. Do be safe out there, your son loves and needs his father.” She hung up, and the display on my phone went dark.
So long as the phone was in my hand, I figured I should try to make amends to my family on the other coast. I tried Marguérite at the house in Falls Church, and then Émilie’s cell phone; neither answered; both were probably screening out calls from the ex-husband and nearly estranged dad--and who could blame them?
Another day was off to another great start. I tried as hard as I could to go back to sleep but of course failed. My brain was racing, first with the unfairness of not being able to hide in a war zone from my failed family life, then with plans for a ski vacation or trip to Key West with Émilie to try to make things right, and finally with Herb’s death and how it had happened and why.
By nine I reached the conclusion that I could neither hide from sleeplessness nor run from dealing with Herb’s death. I dressed and decided to head over to the Information and Analysis Service--IAS--at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. I couldn’t imagine that Herb had done anything there that was even remotely related to his death, and figured it would be easier to eliminate this possibility before looking into anything else.
Our job with the IAS was to help the senior Iraqi officers at the Service evaluate what type of information and analytic reports they were capable of producing, then figure out what were the intelligence needs of the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister, and finally match up the capabilities and the needs. This was no more than the application of common sense and simple social skills. We were to be a subtle presence that, after observing and listening to the Iraqis, would be able to nudge them away from the old, brutal, inefficient way of running an intelligence agency and toward a kinder, gentler, and hopefully more productive American model. (Our Iraqis were always too polite to ask for lessons learned from our experiences in assessing their former President’s possession of weapons of mass destruction or the information extraction tactics being used at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.) Like nearly all their countrymen, our IAS colleagues had been deformed by the lies, paranoia, mistrust, and brutality that had been Iraq’s daily bread in 50 years of dictatorship, civil unrest, foreign war, and invasion. Their needs were basic, and it was the simplest advice that yielded the best results. Family therapy--getting the IAS officers from different offices and different backgrounds to sit and talk with each other--often produced near-miracles. Yes, Mr. Hamid, I know you aren’t getting the support you’d like from the people in the Terrorism Section and you think it’s because so many of them worked for the Intelligence Service--the Mukhabarat--under Saddam. But they are your colleagues and from what I’ve seen they’re patriotic Iraqis too. Why don’t you and I go upstairs and visit them, and then you can chat about the issues?
Herb, though, wasn’t satisfied with being a gray eminence who whispered a few well-chosen words behind closed doors. He had made his career in Washington by making important people notice him as the guy who got wheels spinning--although these high rollers rarely checked whether Herb’s efforts actually produced forward motion. The wheels he revved up were attached to bureaucratic forms and procedures, and it was immaterial for his career whether there was any gearing that linked them to substance or external reality, in either Washington or Baghdad. Herb thus sought complication and involvement and a directing role in every detail of how the IAS operated. His complete lack of prior experience dealing with foreigners or the Middle East or anything to do with Iraq was an advantage for his style, since he had no idea just what type of mess he was getting himself into. He weighed in with suggestions on type font, even though he couldn’t read a word of Arabic, and pushed on his second day in country to have the customary opening Bismallah (in the name of God) removed from IAS documents because of church-state separation concerns. (Mercifully, I was able to over-ride this disastrous suggestion quietly and in my usual passive-aggressive manner but forgetting to follow up with the translators.) The Iraqis’ deep-seated cultural acceptance of aggressively stupid micromanagement aggravated Herb’s petty grandiosity; they accepted this type of foolishness as the most natural thing in the world. After all, for 5,000 years, from the rise of Sargon the Great to the fall of Saddam Hussein, this was exactly the type of dictatorship that had always lorded it over the people of Mesopotamia. Worst of all, from my narrow bureaucratic perspective, Herb compounded this pointless hyperactivity by the practice of withholding information. He hoarded nuggets until the appropriate time to drop a “Did you know that” bomb on the Iraqis or his colleagues at RAG. With his dangerous combination of ignorance and ambition, it was just possible that Herb had stuck his nose in some sensitive, dangerous place where it didn’t belong, and that somehow this had gotten him killed.
So I resolved at mid-morning to see if I could learn anything at the IAS. From the slice of weather that filtered into the narrow alleys between the residential trailers at the RAG compound, it appeared that the day was off to a gorgeous start--dry, dust-free, and just a touch cool under a cerulean sky, as good as it got in Iraq. Hoping that the skies were a better portent of the hours ahead of me than the ungentle wake-up call from Jane, I headed off to the parking lot. Unlike many mornings, I remembered where I had parked the vehicle early Friday. Once I got in behind the wheel, my interior auto-pilot kicked in, and the armored Mercedes snaked along the rows of HMMVs festooned with smoking and sleeping soldiers on their hoods and headed right out of the lot. The road dog-legged right and then left along the edges of the Embassy compound. A chain-link fence on my right blurred drearily into concrete blast walls; the ring of security around the Embassy oozed grays and browns, smothering the faint greens of the sparse, scraggly bushes and dulling the blue above. On my left there were still no signs of repairs to the bombed-out façade of the Believers’ Palace, built by Saddam to mask the entrance to a warren of tunnels that in the end provided him neither escape nor shelter. There was no speeding past these unlovely sights because the U.S. Air Force Military Police in their infinite wisdom had installed speed bumps--eight-inch wide bands of steel with joints at painfully acute angles--that kept all traffic to a crawl close to the Embassy. After some 500 yards of crawling, bumping, and rocking along, I passed the last official American building and turned left up the broad, empty boulevard that took me past the Kurdish party headquarters and the British compound, a smaller and less lugubrious version of the fortress housing the U.S. Embassy. I was in luck--no convoys of soldiers or VIPs clogging the road with guns, armor, and attitude on this morning.
After a mile or so, I took the usual right at the intersection by the monumental parade ground that Saddam had ordered to celebrate his famous victory over Iran in the 1980s. As I passed I indulged in the guilty pleasure of admiring the splendid awfulness of the place’s art and architecture, which suggested the esthetics that the love-child that Albert Speer and Elvis Presley might have had. Monumental replicas of Saddam’s hands brandished colossal scimitars that were as helpless warding off dust as they had been in defending the regime. A nearby small rise was topped by the harlequin colors of an indescribable roundish structure--extraterrestrial wedding cake? Sunday go-to-meeting hat for a superannuated acid head?--that Saddam had had built as a tomb for the myriad unknown soldiers killed for his glory in his war with Iran. As I always did when driving past this monument alone, I mouthed the obvious lines from Shelley:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
I quickly approached the next set of checkpoints. At the first, I got a desultory stare and wave-through from three bored, homesick soldiers from Georgia (ex-USSR, not ex-CSA). Fifty yards ahead, my best white-man-in-a-suit mien could not keep the Gurkhas posted at the Rashid Hotel from applying all the rules. Although smiling and bowing, they still insisted on carefully scrutinizing my identity card and on scanning the underside of the car before waving me into the Rashid lot. There, I went to my usual shady spot in the far corner to park. I grabbed my briefcase and strolled through the last obstacle of HESCO barriers around the five-storey pale gray slab occupied by the IAS, calling out a cheerful “As-salaam alaykum” to the IAS guards--the first Iraqis I had seen in two days.
Closer to the building I joined the trickle of IAS employees heading to work from their parking lot on the Red Zone side--our euphemism for Iraq--of the compound. As always, it was a sight that both inspired and baffled me. From the stories the Iraqis had told me, all of them were putting their lives at risk every day they came to work at the IAS. Terrorists, ethnic militiamen, religious extremists, and common criminals were on the hunt for Iraqis suspected of cooperating with us. My IAS friends said their neighborhoods were under constant surveillance by unknown gunmen and that somewhere in Baghdad, just about every night, men wearing masks and bristling with weapons would cordon off an apartment building or street, invade homes and scrutinize their residents’ faces and ID cards, and execute or kidnap the unlucky, who were chosen because they were secular or religious, Sunni or Shi’a, holdovers from the old regime or anti-Saddam activists. Then, if they were able to wring any sleep from the restless night, the Iraqis faced the commute from hell. The main arteries of Baghdad were clogged with shifting clots of security roadblocks, some manned by the US Army, some by the Iraqi army, still others by the local police or party militias or outright gangsters. The only constant in the rules for getting through these checkpoints was change, with no prior notice or predictability. After hundreds of detonations of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices--VBIEDs to use the unlovely military jargon--any Iraqi in a car was presumed guilty until proven innocent, and there was no appealing the arbitrary decision of an angry corporal. On a good day, driving the 10 kilometers from a residential neighborhood, in Mansur in west-central Baghdad or al-Adhamiya on the left bank of the Tigris, could take an hour, but good days were rare, and on the really bad days, when car bombs exploded or the Iraqi Prime Minister or U.S. Ambassador was moving in the city, all movement froze. Despite all this, the Iraqis arrived at work as punctually as any group of civil servants, in at least passably good spirits, and with dedication. Why, I would ask the Iraqis, why do you accept this risk to work here? Mr. William, I will not hide the fact that jobs are scarce and the IAS pays us well. But this is my country, and my family’s home, Mr. William. Will America give me a visa so my children and I can live in your house? I don’t think so. We cannot let things get worse, and that means I have to do my job. It is not much, I am afraid, Mr. William, but insh’Allah, God willing, it is all I can do.
At the IAS, my first stop that Saturday morning was in the office of the head of the legal section, Mrs. Aliya. I always thought it was a peculiarly American conceit that one of our first steps in trying to set up a working intelligence service in Iraq was to get lawyers involved. Damn the substance, we seemed to be saying, let’s get the procedures and paperwork in order. My initial meeting with Aliya, several months earlier, had appeared to bear out my skepticism. A petite 30-something woman with what I appraised to be a thousand bucks worth of gold bangles on her wrists, she greeted me with a small, piping voice. Her desk was so cluttered with every type of official and personal paperwork--legal files, a week’s backlog of the garish headlines and hyper-colored photos that passed in Baghdad for newspapers, medical prescriptions, phone message pads, copies of the Official Gazette of the Laws of the Republic of Iraq--that there was hardly any space to set the inevitable cups of sweet strong tea. As I outlined what I hoped to work on with her--regulations to keep the IAS from spying too overtly on Iraqi political parties and a framework for helping the new National Assembly come up with appropriate legislation governing intelligence activities--she smiled, nodded, and batted her dark eyes at me from behind blonde-highlighted bangs. I took in a pretty face--long and narrow with smallish features--and a trim, attractive figure. The Weekly Standard-reading part of me sighed inwardly at having to work around the Iraqis’ pretense of gender affirmative action, and I started plotting tactics for getting results out of this soft, disorganized female.
My second meeting with her, two or three days after the first, left a different impression. From the hall outside Aliya’s office I heard a sharp soprano voice explode in a stream of a consonant-rich Arabic that communicated displeasure and command the way a nuclear explosion radiates light and heat, and I then saw two of her male staffers slink out, heads down and arms full of legal-looking folders. When I stepped in, she flashed the same girlish smile as before, but her voice had taken on a complex and decisive timbre. “Sabaah al-khayr, good morning, Mr. William. Tafaadhl, please, sit down. How are you today? Good. The boy will bring us some tea in a minute. Now, about what we discussed the other day …” And Aliya riffled through one of the stacks of paper on her desk, pulled a few sheets of paper out of a folder, and in 20 minutes gave a masterful, logical, and concise briefing of proposed regulations for keeping the IAS out of Iraqi politics, as well as her suggested strategy for the organization’s relationship with the new parliament. She left me speechless, an adviser with no advice to give.
“Saïdati, my dear lady Mrs. Aliya,” I said. “I really don’t have much to add to your very thorough presentation on these issues. It’s impressive. You must have been spent most of the past couple of nights working on this.”
“Well, you see, Mr. William, this is not exactly new for me. I had a lot of time to think about these issues, about how we should make democracy work in Iraq and the type of institutions we need, when I was in prison.”
“Prison? During Saddam’s time? Why? What were the charges? Were you involved with the opposition? Good Lord, it must have been awful.”
“Yes, Mr. William, it was under the regime, but they did not put me in jail for anything courageous like trying to overthrow him, only for trying to do my job. In 1995 I had just completed my law degree at al-Mustansiriyah University here in Baghdad. My parents down in Basrah were so proud. Do you know that my mother cannot read and that my father only finished primary school? Well, I had opened my office and was eager to use my degree, to take any case where I could apply justice. And one of the first people who came by was an older gentleman with a big house in Mansur, you know, the rich neighborhood just to the west of here. Mr. Hussein, that was his name, he had rented his house to one of the judges who worked for Saddam’s special court for crimes against the state. The house was well-built and spacious, and the judge’s wife loved it and decided she wanted it to be hers. So she had title papers forged, claiming that she and the judge were the house’s rightful owners. And that was so typical of these people, the Baathists, especially the ones from Saddam’s town Tikrit; they acted as if the laws applied only to us Shi’a and to the Kurds. Because the judge was so important and close to Saddam, no experienced lawyer would take Mr. Hussein’s case, but you see, Mr. William, I became a lawyer because I believed I could help find justice, even in a country as unjust as Iraq. So I took the case, and I used everything I had learned at school to prepare it, and I argued it as well as I could, and when I won I surprised everybody--except for me, of course, because I always expect to win.
“But Mr. William, I think you know that every good thing has a price, and that was true when I won Mr. Hussein’s case. The judge and his wife were unhappy at losing, and they blamed me for keeping them from having that beautiful house in Mansur, and so they brought a charge against me for cursing Saddam’s name. And, you know, there was no defense against that in those days. Especially not for somebody like me, because one look at my name and where my family was from, Basrah, would tell them that I was Shi’a, not one of the Sunni people who got nearly all the good jobs and money and everything else under the regime. Well, any way, I was called back to the court, where they said I needed to finish some paperwork, but instead they read charges against me of defaming the president, and they found me guilty, and they sent me right to prison, and they said I would probably be executed because showing disrespect for the president and his name was a capital crime. Mr. William, for anybody who was raised right, the way my parents raised me, you will never be ready for prison. My first night I was in a common holding cell, and I could not believe what I saw: girls kissing other girls in front of everybody; girls lifting their skirts in front of the guards to get some more eggplant and tomatoes in their stew and an extra blanket to lie on; there was even a man who thought he was a girl and who was wearing the prettiest floral-print jumper and who the guards just didn’t know what to do with.
“It got worse, Mr. William. After a day they put a bag over my head and tied my hands and took me to a jail for political prisoners, I never knew where or what its name was. Physically, they didn’t hurt me too much. A few times they put electrodes on my ears and shocked me, and it made my nose bleed, and I tell you I never cried like that, and I still don’t like to wear ear-rings any more; but that was just a few times, and it was over soon. What was strange about when they shocked me is that they didn’t interrogate me or ask any questions. I guess it was just what they did to a new prisoner, like copying the identification card and taking fingerprints. No, Mr. William, the worst was that they put me in a cell by myself, with no light and no company and no books and nothing to do, and always the threat that they would come for me and kill me. The only contact with other people was when they brought my food, twice a day, and when I would hear other prisoners scream as they were tortured. I thought I would lose my mind, and at first I rocked and beat the back of my head against the wall just so I could feel something. But after some days, maybe a few weeks, something gave me strength, Mr. William. Maybe it was God, maybe it was the good training I got from my parents. I told myself: if I let Saddam and that evil judge and his awful wife beat me down, if I let them grind my soul into dust, then I would be dishonoring all the love and kindness and decency I had been lucky enough to receive during my life. So I resolved I would think--I would think about a new Iraq, one without Saddam or his sons or any Ba’athists. And I wrote a book in my head, with all the laws to make a democratic Iraq, and that included the way the Mukhabarat should work. And that’s where my ideas came from.”
Aliya’s story had left me more than speechless. The brain-freeze induced by her logic and intelligence was now deepened by the enormous lump that had risen from my gut and lodged in my throat. I could not square the calm, articulate young lawyer in front of me, dressed--schoolmarmishly for an American woman, daringly for an Iraqi--in a long black skirt that hinted at lively, shapely legs and an almost demure gray sweater, with this story of greed, injustice, torture, and dark, dank, solitary confinement. I had known intellectually, of course, that Saddam based his rule on cruelty and brutality, but now for the first time the facts I had absorbed from intelligence reports and newspaper articles had taken on flesh and a face and a soul. With my education at the University of Virginia--still steeped during my time there in the 1970s in the mythos of gentlemanly behavior and Southern chivalry--I was especially discomfited at hearing a young, vulnerable-looking woman recount having suffered such torments.
Swallowing hard and struggling to maintain manly control over my voice, I said, “Mrs. Aliya, I have been lucky enough in my life that I just cannot imagine what you went through. I don’t think my sanity would survive an experience like yours. But how did you get out? Didn’t you say that you had been found guilty of a capital crime?”
Aliya smiled and batted her eyes at me again. “Mr. William,” she said. “I told you that I always expect to win, and if I hadn’t survived in that prison I would have lost, and I would not be here now working to make sure that Saddam and his followers and other evil people are never able to kidnap and torture Iraq again. Surviving was nothing special.
“But how I left prison is a more interesting story. Did I tell you that I spent almost two years--23 months, one week, and four days--in prison? Every now and then the guards would tell me that my file was being reviewed and that when the process was finished, I would be led away and killed. I knew that I was already dead, but I continued to write the book on democracy in Iraq in my head, because I thought it would be interesting to talk about this in Paradise with my father and with Imam Ali and Imam Hussein.
“Then one day it seemed that the end had really come. The door to my cell opened, and two guards that I had never seen before came in. They put a bag over my head and bound my hands and led me out, and I thought they were taking me to the prison basement, where I had heard the executions took place. Instead, I was surprised to be taken outside and then into a car. After all the time in my cell, and even with my head completely hidden, the sun was blinding, and even with my head lowered and my eyes shut, I could feel the sun burn my eyes, and I had never felt tears run down my face like that before. Nobody said anything to me, and I said nothing because I had learned to keep quiet unless spoken to. I don’t know how long we were in the car. I know we finally stopped in deep shade and we then walked into a building with marble floors and walls that echoed with every step and scuff of our feet. I heard a heavy door open in front of us and close behind us and then felt carpet under my prison slippers. Then the bag was taken off my head and I saw him in a big chair behind an empty desk. Saddam Hussein. When you see him up close, Mr. William, he really looks like any other middle-aged Iraqi man, with the thick moustache and the big jaw and the black dye in his hair. His real evil is in his voice, because it is calm and reasonable, like a favorite uncle telling a naughty little boy to be good, and it goes gently up and down for hours until you agree with the most evil or stupid things--that we must kill the traitors among us or that war with Iran or Kuwait or America is a good thing.
“And that voice spoke to me. He said, ‘Young lady, you know you are in a lot of trouble. Your file says you cursed my name. Under our law, the usual punishment for that is death. Your case is unusual; because you are a woman and so young and so well-educated, none of the cowards and imbeciles who work for our courts would approve your execution, so they sent the decision to me. And as you and all Iraqis know, I am an honest and fair-minded man, so I wanted to interview you myself before deciding for life or death. I have one question for you, young lady: did you curse my name as the court says you did?’ I said, ‘No, Mr. President, I did not do that.’ Saddam looked down at some papers on the desk and then he stared at me again. ‘Young lady,’ he said. ‘This is very important. Your life depends on it. Tell me the truth. Are you guilty or not?’
"And, Mr. William, I looked him in the face. At first I was scared, because everybody said that Saddam had the eyes of a devil or an angel and could look into other people’s souls and find the truth or falsehood of what they were saying, but I did not blink, and I looked into Saddam’s eyes, and I saw that his eyes were no darker or deeper or wiser or more penetrating than any other man’s, and I thought, since I was already dead, the truth was the important thing, much more so than pleading for my life. So I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, I would like to address you as a lawyer. Under Iraqi law, if I curse God’s name, I can go to jail for one year, but if I curse your name, I can get executed. What is the reason for this difference?’ Saddam held my gaze for a few seconds, broke it off, and finally without a word signaled the guards to take me away. They returned me to my cell, and I was certain they would kill me that day. But a week later, with no explanation other than the usual court document noting my crime and the time I had served in prison, I was released. And now I have no fear as I work for my country and try to work for justice, Mr. William, because every day I walk under the sun and breathe free air is a gift to me. Nobody can kill me again.”
The lump in my throat had melted into an alloy of shock and awe, purified of any Rumsfeldian dross that might have attached to these words. I had left my safe, predictable bureaucratic world for a parallel universe of myth and legend. The smart young lawyer with the bangs over her eyes and bangles on her wrists was Sheherazade keeping the sultan and death at bay for the 1,002nd night; she was Daniel deciphering “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” on the walls of King Belshazzaar’s banquet hall; she was Esther out-witting Haman; she had stared a basilisk in the eye and walked away without turning into stone. More prosaically, I realized that Aliya possessed a rare combination of smarts and steel, and that I had found an invaluable if unlikely ally in my new job.
Aliya's amazing personal history remained fresh in my mind as I approached her office. Because it was a Saturday morning--the second day of the Iraqi weekend--Aliya was the only member of the legal section in their second-floor office when I walked in. There was a somber cast to her features, which seemed to deepen in the quiet calm of the empty office.
“Mr. William,” Aliya greeted me. “Good morning. I hope you are well. Please, I heard yesterday about Mr. Herbert’s death, and I am so sorry. Please, tell Mr. James and the other friends you work with at your Embassy that we will miss Mr. Herbert, and please, let his family know how sorry his Iraqi friends are.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Aliya,” I said. “That’s very kind of you. I will certainly share your condolences with the other friends in our office and with Mr. Herbert’s parents. His death will be sad for all the people who will miss him.” This was a nice performance on my part. I managed to mouth the common courtesies concerning Herb’s death but without giving the lie that I was among those who would miss him.
“I heard that Mr. Herbert died in a fall,” Aliya continued. “You Americans will of course say it was an accident. But you know us Iraqis by now, Mr. William; you know that for us there are no accidents. Do you think somebody murdered him?”
I smiled in spite of myself. “Mrs. Aliya, will I have to lecture again you about the smartest William who ever lived?” This elicited a wan smile from her. In many of my meetings with Aliya and her IAS colleagues I would mount a hobby-horse called William of Occam and from the saddle preach the 14th-century Franciscan’s gospel of logic and parsimony in reasoning about the world. Numquam ponenda est pluritas sine necessitate. Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. The simplest answer is usually the correct answer.
“Mr. William, you always want us to believe that nobody is smarter than somebody named William, even if he died 700 years ago. But as I always tell you, this William of Occam was English, and that is almost like being American, and so he could not of course understand the way the world works in Iraq. Nothing just happens here. Nothing is simple. Everthing that takes place here is because somebody wants something.”
I didn’t think either of us wanted to renew our long-standing debate on epistemological matters, so I returned to the facts at hand. “Well, I was there when Herb died, Mrs. Aliya. He fell from the roof at the Australian house, and there were no signs that he had been pushed. It sure looked to me like an accident.”
“You know what you saw, Mr. William,” Aliya said. “But I worry because of what I discussed with Mr. Herbert on Wednesday, the last time I saw him. Of course he told you about it.” Damn. Here was a new twist in how Herb was haunting me from beyond the grave. At least, I thought, this should be the last of his “did you know that” bombs.
“No, I’m afraid that this time he wasn’t able to,” I said, trying to keep irritation with Herb out of my voice. “I’m certain he was planning to tell me about it. What was this about?”
“This was something that came up in the inter-agency security contracting committee, where I sometimes represent IAS and the Ministry of Defense. They meet every Tuesday, and this week there was only one item on the agenda, a $100 million contract to buy seeds, tractors, fertilizers, and other agricultural goods on an emergency basis for al-Maghribiya Province, out west along the border with Syria. The provincial government said they needed money for the project from the Americans. It was presented by the Prime Minister’s aide, Dr. Jibril, who said this was very important. Dr. Jibril told the committee that the project had come from governor of al-Maghribiya, who had worked on it with the general of the U.S. Marines there and with the political representative of the American Embassy. The governor and the American general and the others all think that if they can make it easier for the people in al-Maghribiya to be farmers, to grow cucumbers and wheat, then they will not want to be terrorists and they will stop trying to kill American and Iraqi soldiers. Dr. Jibril said this was so important and we had to approve the money and the contracts right then.”
“It sounds to me like just about every other civil-military operation that’s ever been dreamed up,” I said. “It’s got a somewhat bigger price tag, but that seems to be what’s most different about it.”
“Mr. William, what was that expression you taught me last week? ‘Smell test?’ I do not think this project passes a smell test. Something is wrong. First, the papers we got did not look Iraqi. Everything was written in English, and that is against Iraqi law because our language is Arabic of course, and all contract papers must be in Arabic. Then, why is there so much hurry? As you said, one hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and this should be looked at carefully. It would be normal to give more time to make a decision about it.
“But there is an even bigger problem,” Aliya continued. “The whole contract, for buying all the seeds and fertilizer and tractors and other products for the farmers, is supposed to be given to the Al-Saba’a Company, which is owned by a man named Muhammad al-Latif. This man is smart and rich, but he is also evil, Mr. William. He was at the law faculty at Mustansiriyah University, two years ahead of me. He was a Ba’athist--of course we all went to party meetings, we had to or we could not study law--but everybody said he also worked with the secret police. He reported on who made jokes about Saddam, who went to mosque too much, who drank alcohol, who didn’t drink, everything we did. When he finished his law studies, Muhammad kept himself useful to the regime, and he also made the regime useful for him. They let him set up a company, the Al-Saba’a Company, and he went into business with people in Lebanon and Jordan to import food for Iraq under the United Nations program. He bought rice in Thailand and wheat in Australia; he paid bribes and took bribes; he made a lot of money. And Mr. William, Muhammad al-Latif also was very lucky. Some time in 2002 he had an argument with one of Saddam’s boys, I can’t remember if it was Uday or Qusay, and he had to leave the country. Of course most of Latif's money had left Iraq before him. So Muhammad al-Latif made his way to London, where he told stories that he had to leave because he was working against Saddam and where he paid enough money to be believed. And after the fall of the regime in April 2003, Muhammad had friends who told him to come back, and he set up his Al-Saba’a company again, to get a share of all the money the Americans were going to spend. And I think that the $100 million for agriculture in Al-Maghribiya is one of these big contracts he wants to get with the new government and with the Americans.”
“Well, this does sound fishy, and maybe it smells that way, too,” I said. “But what could this possibly have to do with Herb’s death?”
“When I spoke of this to Mr. Herbert, he took very careful notes and he asked me many questions,” Aliya responded. “He told me he would ask at the Embassy and elsewhere about the Al-Maghribiya project. And that included the Prime Minister’s office, he said, because that day, Wednesday, he was going there to meet with the American military working with the Prime Minister’s staff. I told Mr. Herbert to be careful about what he said and who he said it to, because Muhammad al-Latif is an evil man who knows many bad people and who can make bad things happen. Maybe Mr. Herbert was not so careful and asked questions of the wrong people, and they are the ones who had him killed. Please remember, Mr. William, this is Iraq, and bad things happen here all the time.”
“Maybe there is some sort of connection to Herb’s death,” I said after a little reflection. If the forging of a possible link between this hare-brained agricultural scheme out west and Herb’s demise had come from anybody other than Aliya--especially from any other Iraqi--I would have dismissed it out of hand. Paranoia and conspiracy theories were even more common in Iraq than acts of violence, but I respected Aliya’s smarts and judgment. “Mrs. Aliya, I will see what I can find out about the Al-Maghbribiya project and this guy Muhammad al-Latif. Maybe Herb left some information in his files or on his computer; maybe my friends at the Embassy know something about it. And even if his death really was just a stupid accident, getting to the bottom of all this corruption and influence-peddling might be worth doing for its own sake.”
I stood up to leave. Aliya got out of her chair, edged around her desk and its ziggurats of paper, clutched my outstretched right hand with both of hers--had they become softer and warmer since the last time we had shaken hands?--and fixed her eyes--did her deep brown pupils always have those gold flecks in them?--on mine with a worried look on her face. I felt a strange loss of words, an aphasia rooted in my gut rather than my head. Aliya’s hands kept lightly pressing mine; something--I hoped it was tears from an allergy--was making her eyes shine. An urge welled up in me to fold her in my arms and kiss her. The voice of reason was fading, and I was losing consciousness of its warnings about getting involved with a married Muslim woman and an official of a foreign intelligence organization to boot. Somehow, reason found enough voice to shout a last warning over the cacophony of emotion and lust. I eased Aliya’s hands out of mine, dropped my gaze, took a small step back, and cleared my throat.
“Mrs. Aliya, you must forgive me,” I said. “In all this talking about Herb’s death, I haven’t asked how you are. I hope things are better with your family.”
Her eyes were still shining and fixed on me. “Mr. William, you are always too nice to me, and I wish I could tell you something happy. But nothing changes. Haydar”--Aliya's husband of five years--"is getting worse. He goes to the same meetings at the husseiniya, that is our Shi'a mosque, two or three times a week with the other engineers from the Ministry of Transportation, and his head gets fuller and fuller of the foolishness preached by Muqtada al-Sadr and those other angry idiots who call themselves imans and who hate you Americans and everything you stand for. For six months Haydar hasn’t been the man I married. He hardly comes home to our apartment any more, he sleeps at his office or the husseiniya. And now he says he’ll divorce me if I don’t wear a veil and take off my make-up and keep quiet unless spoken to. Worst of all, he tells me that we haven’t had a baby because God is punishing me for talking to men, especially American men, and for dressing the way I want. I don’t care any more if he divorces me and I don’t care how sad and angry it makes my mother. What is important to me now is this job at the Ministry, where I can contribute to Iraq, and where I can meet with my friends and Iraq’s friends, like you, Mr. William.”
Damn her eyes, I thought. They were glistening now, probably from tears that my thoughtless attempt at politeness had brought on. I managed to stammer, “It-it-it, ah, it's so sad that Haydar can’t see how lucky he is to be married to you, Mrs. Aliya. You deserve nothing but happiness.”
“Thank you, Mr. William, thank you,” she said. “In my whole life in Iraq, I never met a man like you. You listen to me, you treat me the way you want to be treated yourself. And look at you: tall, almost two meters I think, and with no belly hanging over your belt”--I unconsciously sucked in my gut--"and no cigarette smoke on your breath. Where, Mr. William, where in Iraq will I meet a man like you?”
“You’ll meet someone,” I tried to reassure her. “I know that it is only in Iraq have I found a woman with your strength and courage that is bundled in such a pretty package. I don’t think I’d meet a woman like you in America, and that’s America’s loss. But you wouldn’t really want someone like me, any way. It's not just that I'm old and tired. You know I’ve tried marriage twice, and failed at it twice. My ex-wives would be only too happy to tell you what to avoid in a man like me. No, Mrs. Aliya, you’ll find the man and the happiness you deseve, and you’ll do better than an old loser like me, I know it.”
I glanced at my watch and started fiddling with my bag. “I really must excuse myself now. You’ve got a lot of work to do, like always, or you wouldn’t be here today. And I’ve got to help sort out Herb’s things for his family. Thank you for your help.”
We repeated the farewell gesture. Aliya took my right hand with both of hers, still soft and warm, and again fixed me with her glistening, gold-flecked eyes. This time she spoke first.
“Please, Mr. William. Please be more careful than Mr. Herbert,” Aliya said. “Money and influence are everything in Iraq now. People’s lives mean nothing to the evil people here, but you are my good friend, and I could not stand to lose you.” Her hands gently pressed mine to punctuate the advice.
“Of course I’ll be careful,” I answered. “You know I’m a man of words and ideas, not action. I’m no hero and I am not about to start doing stupid things now.” I patted her hands, set them down and left her office.
As I walked down the second-floor hallway and then up the stairs to the third-floor, thoughts of gold-flecked eyes and soft hands and of a web of corruption and murder linking Herb’s death to the Al-Maghribiya project gave way to the more prosaic consideration of where to place my feet. RAG had paid for a complete renovation of the IAS building in late 2003, but two years later, the entropy and chaos of Iraq had infiltrated the clean and orderly facility that Americans had envisioned. The indoor-outdoor hallway carpet had come untacked on most floors, leaving ridges and depressions that shifted like the windswept dunes of the Syrian desert; although the Iraqis navigated these hazards with no difficulty, the iregularities had already claimed two sprained ankles and one badly twisted knee among the American advisers. Trash cans overflowed with food--carried in because the Iraqis didn’t want to risk lingering in the kabob shops and sandwich stands in the Red Zone--which fed the building’s thriving colony of rats. Because of the rats, the Iraqis welcomed a rapidly multiplying clowder of cats as a counter-measure. In the absence of kitty-litter boxes, the felines emptied their bladders and intestines on the stairway landings between floors. Nobody had slipped yet on a cat turd in the building, and I had so far had the good fortune of not even soiling my shoes on the feline feces. My lucky streak continued this morning, and I celebrated by stopping at the head of the stairs on the third floor and liberally dousing my hands in disinfectant lotion.
The third floor housed the office of my other principal client at the IAS, Brigadier ‘Umar al-Jaburi, who headed the Service’s Analysis Section. The Brigadier was smart, lucky, and slick. He had prospered in a 25-year military career under Saddam, wangling a spacious house near the river, accumulating enough cash to be able to buy a new Mercedes for his family, and earning the trust to travel abroad, to Europe as well as Arab countries, nearly every year. A fighter pilot trained on both Soviet MiG-21s and British Hunter Hawkers, he had survived decades of rough weather: Saddam’s purge of Air Force officers held responsible for allowing the 1981 Israeli air strike on the al-Tuwaitha nuclear research facility, eight years of sorties during the 1980s war against Iran, and the American-led annihilation of the Iraqi Air Force during the 1991 war. Jaburi had been an enthusiastic and vocal member of the Ba’athist Party, but after April 2003 the scales fell from his eyes and he became an impassioned advocate of democracy and human rights. He favored dark suits with a trim military cut and kept his hair cropped and free of undyed gray; he limned his upper lip with a pencil moustache. Jaburi was vain about his appearance--undoubtedly motivated by the mistresses he was said to keep in various flats around Baghdad--but it was a healthy vanity that led him, unusally for an Iraqi man, to watch his weight and routinely engage in physical exercise. The Brigadier sytled himself an intellecutal and filled our meetings with disquisitions on the nature of organizational behavior and the history of intelligence. Jaburi's smarts, acute political barometer, and strong survival instincts made him uniquely useful.
When I walked into Jaburi’s office this morning, I at first thought I had somehow stumbled into a heroin shooting gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Three members of his staff were sitting in front of his desk with bloody needles in their hands and embarassed expressions on their faces as the Brigadier lectured them in Arabic. Jaburi smilingly broke off when he saw me enter, and he waved me to a chair.
“Please, Mr. William, have a seat,” he said. “You see I am taking advantage of this Saturday to help my colleagues with their health. Mr. Hamid, Mr. Kamal, and Mr. Dulaimi will not listen to me when I say they need more exercise and not so many cakes, so I thought that testing their blood for glucose and for diabetes would help them understand. Mr. Hamid and Mr. Dulaimi had glucose levels of almost 200--and a fasting glucose level of 126 milligrams per decaliter of course means you have diabetes--so maybe now they will think more about exercise and less about kabobs and sweets.”
By the look of things, Jaburi was right to worry about his staffers’ health. Hamid was a chain-smoking ex-cop shaped like Humpty-Dumpty. He couldn’t walk from his office to the elevator without working up a wheeze worthy of a public service announcement on black lung disease. Dulaimi wasn’t overweight, at least not by Iraqi standards, but I could discern no muscle tone under his skin, and his face had the sallow skin and sunken eyes of a man who made up for lack of sleep with a surfeit of cigarettes. Although Kamal carried a healthy gut over his belt, his pancreas probably wasn’t his organ at greatest risk of failure; the web of burst capillaries on his nose bore witness to multiple postings to Moscow during his career as an intelligence operative for the old regime, a fondness for Russian culture, and an affliction with the Russian disease--alcoholism--that probably had already scarred his liver. But typically for Iraqis, the three paragons of ill health were more worried about public, open discussion of their woes than any effort to turn it around, and my arrival in their boss’s office gave them a way out of Jaburi’s shaming session. Their faces beaming with relief, Hamid, Kamal, and Dulaimi eased out of their chairs, shook my hand in greeting, and waddled back to their own offices.
“They do not want to listen to me,” Jaburi said after their departure, shaking his head with paternalistic concern. “They will get fatter and fatter and unhealthier and unhealthier, and they will die before their time, and we will have to pay pensions to their widows and orphans. We all of couse die when God wants us to, but I do think that He wants even us Iraqis to do a little sport and exercise and to be careful about what we eat. Our Muslim imams and mullahs tell us that Paradise is full of virgins for us believers, but I have not yet heard that it has diabetes test kits or insulin.
“But Mr. William, I am being rude here and forgetting about the terrible news,” Jaburi continued. “I heard that Mr. Herbert died on Thursday night, and we are all so sorry, because he was our good friend. It is very sad, but you know that my colleagues, Mr. Hamid and Mr. Kamal and Mr. Dulaimi, will say that being skinny and taking sport did not save him because it was God’s will. I understand he died in an accident?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A fall from the roof while we were visting the Australian house, on Thursday. It looks like he just slipped and fell. The security people at our Embassy are investigating and we should get the official word in a few days.”
“All very sad, very sad. But we cannot stay here on this Earth any longer than God wants us to. At least you Americans have the luxury of accidents. Even here in Baghdad, where so many terrorists and criminals want to kill you, you are protected. It would be very difficult for al-Qaida to get past the checkpoints and plant a car bomb by your house, and those murderers from the Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Mahdi Army militia that that angry young fool Muqtada al-Sadr is leading and that those bastards in Iran are funding, even they would have trouble finding you and shooting you. But as for us ... Well, Mr. William, you know this is a different story.” I resigned myself to hearing the umpteenth iteration of the persecutions suffered by Jaburi and the other officers and officials of the former regime.
“We former pilots, for example, are at great risk. And for me it is even worse because, as I always tell you, I am from a tribe that everybody knows to be Sunni. Never in Iraq, never was this business of Sunni or Shi’a or Kurdish important. We were all friends and neighbors and we married each other. Saddam and his regime were terrible, but back then we were all Iraqis first and member of our tribes or factions second. But after the regime fell, those Iranians or Persians were able to come here during all the confusion, and they are the ones that are setting us all to hating each other. And this is our problem, Mr. William, too many of the Shi’a people here in Iraq are really Persians. Of course, many good Iraqis are Shi’a, that has always been the case, and these ones are victims of the Persian plan, just like we Sunnis are. But too many of the others, they are Persians, not Iraqis, not Arabs, not even Kurds. Listen to their names--Sistani, Sharistani, istani-this, istani-that, they don’t even try to hide where they come from. But, as I always tell you, the Persians think long-term. The mullahs in Tehran and Qom have a 50-year plan to take control of Iraq, and I am afraid it is working. They know we Iraqi men like the ladies too much. So, if a bus brings 100 Iranian pilgrims to the holy imams’ tombs in Karbala, maybe five or 10 will be beautiful girls. And they will stay, and marry Iraqi men, who have such a weakness for pretty ladies, and they will have many children. And of course the women will raise the children to be Persians and not Arabs or even Kurds, and that is just one of the ways that the Persians will overwhelm us. I tell you, they are the ones who invented chess, and they are always thinking ahead.
“And again, as I always say, it was so much worse for us pilots and other military men who simply did our duty in the 1980s. And this, I tell you, Mr. William, this is because the Iranians are Persians, and the Persians never forget anything done to them. After the end of Yugoslavia, they say the Iranians would not deal with the new republic of Macedonia. And why was that? It was because they did not forget that it was Alexander the Great, from Macedonia, who destroyed their Persian Empire. And if they are still angry about that after 2,500 years, then how do they feel about their war with us from 20 years ago? Like I have told you too many times, Mr. William, the Iranians remember that it was our Air Force that bombed their cities and killed their soldiers and stopped their invasion. And they want revenge. One of the first things they did in that confusion after Saddam and the regime fell was to buy our names and files that were looted out of the Defense Ministry--and I am sad and almost angry with your American Army, that they did not control the building and the files back then--and now the Iranians are hunting us down like rats. I told you about my friend, Major General Daud al-Halaby, who trained on the MiG-21 in Russia with me, and how he was shot like a dog in his garden, while drinking tea with his neighbors and his daughter was serving cakes. And there are at least a dozen others who have been killed just like that. And that, Mr. William, that is why I am almost jealous that your friend Mr. Herbert was able to die in an accident. But I am still sorry for him and for his family and even for us, because now we no longer have his advice."
“Brigadier,” I said. “Thank you for your kind statements about Herb’s loss. He will be missed.” As with Aliya, I managed to be polite without stating an untruth. “And you know Herb, like me, tremendously respected all the sacrifice and courage that you and all your colleagues display every day. I will admit that you are right that we are lucky to have the luxury of dying in accidents. Whatever the cause, it’s a sad business.
“Brigadier,” I continued. “If I may be direct in an American kind of way, may I ask what the last issues were that you worked on with Herb? I need of course to follow up and make certain that nothing gets loss in the wake of this tragedy.”
“You know the answer to that, Mr. William,” said Jaburi. “I last met with Mr. Herbert and you together on Tuesday this week. We were discussing the latest letter from the the Prime Minister’s office, with the suggestions for the issues they want us to cover in our weekly reports. We agreed that we would write a letter to the Prime Minister’s assistant, Dr. Jibril, saying that we will first focus on the threat from the Al-Qaida terrorists in Al-Maghribiya Province, because that is where there is the biggest threat, and then we will deal with Baghdad and Ninewa and the other provinces.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I remember,” I said, flipping through my notebook and hoping that I had jotted down something legible during that Tuesday meeting. Then something stopped me short. Dr. Jibril--wasn't he the guy Aliya had identified as the big advocate of the Al-Maghribiya project? I figured there’d be no harm in fishing for more information.
“What I can’t remember, Brigadier, is whether we talked much about Dr. Jibril. Since he’s the gentleman who’ll see your reports before passing them on to the Prime Minister, his style and his interests are at least as important as his boss’s.”
“Well, Mr. William, I don’t think I have said very much to you about Dr. Jibril. I meet him several times a month, at meetings of the National Security Committee. Dr. Jibril is of course a member of the Prime Minister’s party, the al-Da’wa, and like the Prime Minister he is a Shi’a and was born in Karbala. But what makes Dr. Jibril different from many of these Shi’a politicians is that he spent most of his life here in Iraq, living under the old regime. Dr. Jibril did his doctorate in law at Mustansiriyah University, I think in the early 90s, and did not leave the country until 2000. They say he got in trouble somehow with Uday Hussein, and that Dr. Jibril left Iraq with just the shirt on his back. Dr. Jibril then spent some time in London, where he joined with the opposition. He is a very well-connected man, and he knows everybody. What is very good is that he is becoming a good friend for us here at the IAS.”
“That is very interesting. I agree with you, Brigadier. Dr. Jibril does sound like a good friend for the IAS.” I hoped I was able to show something close to a poker face as I tried to match Jaburi’s information with what Aliya had told me earlier. This guy Jibril was a key figure in the Prime Minister’s office; he had contact with my friends at the IAS; and his career timeline--graduation from law school in Baghdad in the early 90s and the feud with one of Saddam’s boys and flight to exile in 2000--dovetailed with the life of Muhammad al-Latif, the dubious businessman that Aliya had linked to the al-Maghribiya project.
“Oh, and there’s one more element about Dr. Jibril that is very good, very good indeed,” Jaburi said. “He is a true Iraqi nationalist. Unlike many of members of the Prime Minister’s party, who care only about the Shi’a and the people in the south and who have sold their souls to the Iranians, Dr. Jibril has a vision for the entire country. He told me after the National Security Committee meeting last Monday that he and the Prime Minister are now advocating for an important agriculture project for Al-Maghribiya Province out west, worth $100 million, even though the people there are Sunnis and do not support the Prime Minister or his party. Dr. Jibril sees that if these people can grow crops and sell them, they will be too busy and too rich to support the terrorists. And you as an American, Mr. William, will be happy to know that Dr. Jibril wants to use this project to develop private sector companies here in Iraq, too. The purchase of all the seeds, tractors, and other things that the farmers need, this will be done by a private Iraqi company called Al-Saba’ah, and that means ‘morning’ of course. The owner of this company is a very clever man named Muhammad al-Latif. He used to have the contracts to buy wheat and vegetables and meat for the Air Force when I was serving under the old regime, and I always thought he was very efficient and very honest, one of the best. I think this project for the farmers in Al-Maghribiya is a good one that has good people working on it, and I hope that your American Embassy will support it one-hundred percent.”
“That is interesting,” I replied. “It’s good to hear that there are people in the government worrying about all Iraqis, and not just their own tribe or family. I’m sure this important project in Al-Maghribiya will get all the support it deserves from your governnment as well as from the American Embassy. Brigadier, I must ask you to excuse me now. I have to return to our office to deal with Herb’s papers and help get his effects ready to send to his family.”
“Mr. William, please excuse me. I get so involved in the work we have that I forget my manners. Please, do what you must. This accident that happened to Mr. Herbert is so sad, and I know it must be weighing on you like it does with all of his friends. Let me know if we can help. I hope I will see you again soon.”
With that, Jiburi got up and walked me out of his office and down the hallway to the stairs. On the way down I managed once again to avoid the cat shit on the carpet, and my trip out the building, through the security checkpoints and into the parking lot was equally, mercifully uneventful.
An unpleasant surprise was waiting for me in the lot. Because it was daylight and because somebody else from the RAG office might see me, I decided to perform the vehicle sweep that our security people required and that I avoided as much as possible out of a combination of laziness and fatalism. I was unsurprised to find no telltale wires sticking out of the engine or grease stains on the pavement, since I didn’t flatter myself that I merited a car-bomb, but I was irritated to see that the front right tire had gone flat while I was at the IAS. After closer examination, irritation became unease. The tire didn’t look like it had suffered a slow leak; rather, there was a six-inch slash mark in the sidewall, strongly suggesting deliberate intent. Who? Why?
My nerves joined forces with the right side of my brain and rushed forward with explanation: this was the work of the same people who had killed Herb; these people are somehow tied to the $100 million Al-Maghribiya project and its well-connected backers; I’ve just been warned to keep my nose out of this. Slower on the draw, the left, rational side of my brain insisted that there was no plausible link among all these events: Herb’s death gave every appearance of being no more than an accidental fall; I didn’t know everything that Herb may have learned about Al-Maghribiya or what he planned to do with this information; and the Al-Maghribiya principals' history of corruption didn’t necessarily mean that they were plotting murder. I was rooting for my left brain’s logical, analytical approach to win the debate, but the right brain wouldn’t budge from its position. So, unsure of what exactly was happening and what it meant, I got into the Mercedes, pulled out of the parking lot, headed back to the RAG compound, and gratefully noted that the drive-flat tire was performing as advertised.
After the five-minute drive to our compound, I left the vehicle at the contract garage to have the tire changed. Greaseman, the chief mechanic, shot me a sour look after inspecting the damage.
“What the fuck did you do here, man? I know you always bring the vehicles back with little dings and scratches, but I never seen anything like this. It looks like that Freddy Kruger guy from the movies ripped it up with one of his claws.”
Although suspicions of foul play were still haunting my thought process I decided to downplay them with the mechanic. “Grease, if I knew what it was, I’d’ve avoided it. You know all the shit on the roads and the parking lots here. Maybe I was dragging razor wire or something.”
“Razor wire wouldn’t cut so deep or so long or along the sidewall,” Greaseman observed. “Lots of strange shit here. Well, I oughta get this fixed in a coupla hours. And then, to make my life and yours easier, I hope you’ll pay more attention to where you drive this son-of-a-bitch.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I promised.
After this exchange and a quick lunch, it was nearly three when I got to the RAG office and updated O’Dwyer on what I had learned from Aliya and Jaburi. He listened quietly, and his face stayed at a constant mid-point between red and pink, making it hard to read. He didn’t react until I described the slashed tire and the unease this had caused me.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Will,” Jim said. “How long have you been here? Four months maybe? It sounds like you’re getting even more paranoid than the Iraqis, and they at least really do have people trying to kill them every damned day. Do you know for a fact that the tire was slashed? You don’t think there’s the least little chance that you caught a curb or the edge of a pothole somewhere? I’ve seen you in that Mercedes--you drive exactly like the four-eyed fucking analyst that you are.
“And as for the Al-Maghribiya project. I know you like that lady lawyer, Aliya, and you respect her brains and her cojones, but don’t you think it’s kinda far-fetched to think that some dipshit scheme to sell over-priced seeds to dirt farmers has evolved into a shadowy conspiracy capable of murder inside the Green Zone? Not to mention the question of whether poor dumb dead Herb would have been worth killing to begin with. Do you really think he found out anything more than what your girlfriend told him? Herb was a fucking whiz kid back at Headquarters. But c’mon, you know that his taste for French-kissing bigshots’ assholes and the way he really cared for the sort of idiot detail that gives big hard-ons to all those pricks at the White House--those are the skills that produce zero results here. Herb wouldn’t’ve recognized real intelligence information if it was rubbing him between the legs, and there’s no way he’d’ve been able to elicit anything from anybody. No, if he was murdered--and I’ll bet you your next paycheck he wasn’t--it's because of some dumb-ass thing he did at that party, like spitting in somebody’s beer or pinching the ass of some other guy’s girlfriend.”
“I hope you’re right, Jim,” I said. “It would make things a lot easier if you were. But I do trust Aliya, and I’ve not seen her so worried before. And there was also something weird in Jaburi’s smarmy enthusiasm for the Al-Maghribiya project. He only gets that worked up for somebody with a lot of wasta, with the juice and connections to make good things happen for him.”
“Will, Will, Will. Didn’t you tell you you’ve read The Lord of the Rings something like two dozen times? I bring this up because you seem lost in some realm of heroic fucking fantasy. At least you’re not not saying it was the man on the grassy knoll who shot Herb as he passed through Dealy Plaza--not yet any way. At any rate I’m glad you got this info from the Iraqis which suggests to me, at least, that that poor son of a bitch wasn’t doing anything worth getting killed for. Now have you seen anything in his paperwork or on his computer files? Don’t even open your mouth. Your face says you haven’t done a fucking thing on this, so get off your ass and at least pretend to do what I’m asking.”
Jim’s words were harsher than his tone or demeanor. His face had had lightened by a shade or two in the direction of pink by the time he dismissed me, suggesting that I was getting the details surrounding Herb’s death sorted out to his satisfaction. I was less sanguine. Evil Iraqis with checkered pasts were maneuvering to profit from a fraudulent contact; Herb had been killed; somebody had slashed my tire. I was sure there was some kind of connection.
I spent most of the afternoon stuck in a loop between Jim’s office and the communications vault. In order to have a look at Herb’s computer files, I needed the commo people to give me access to his password and account. Commo cited regulations showing why and how they couldn’t do this until I had approval in writing from the chief, namely Jim, to access a specific list of files. However, I couldn’t know which files I needed to get into until I could browse through Herb’s account. I finally had to take Jim’s secretary, Marcia, by the hand into the commo vault and engage in direct negotiations with the commo technicians on the bureuacratic niceties involved in this delicate case. It was early evening by the time this shuttle diplomacy yielded tangible results.
After all that, I found nothing in Herb’s soft folders on our Intranet that seemed to have anything to do with the Saba’ah Company, Muhammad Al-Latif, Dr. Jibril, or the Al-Maghribiya Project. His e-mails did provide some interesting reading of a more personal and prurient nature, though. First, I saw that the sneaky bastard had been sending weekly updates to his former boss, who ran our Director’s personal office back in Washington. It was nauseating enough to read his onanistic odes to how “I straightened out that mess at IAS” or why “Brigadier Jaburi really appreciated my suggestion”, much less the periodic encomiums to the “visionary leadership” and “imaginative reforms” being enacted by our highest leadership back home. It was unsurprising that he lavished praise on the “outstanding operational judgment” that Jim used to run our RAG office in Baghdad, since there was always the chance that his messages might get forwarded to local management. No, what most disturbed me was the evidence of just how good Herb had been at bureuacratic infighting. He never directly slammed me or my judgment, preferring to damn with faint praise. His best shot was to comment on how helpful I’d been in putting out one of the monthly updates because “Will Purdew is the best proof-reader I’ve seen in my 15 years of U.S. government service.” He took other subtle shots at my appearance and style. “Perdu’s got a great sense of humor, especially about himself. Yesterday he pointed out the weird set of clothes he was wearing--button-down dress shirt, cargo pants, and sandals--and said his nick-name should be ‘Grape Nuts’ . . . Will has done so well getting to know the small number of women here that he says he sometimes forgets he’s just another overweight balding middle-aged white guy with a bad attitude.” These toxic-keyboard notes painted a vivid portrait of me as a female-obsessed space cadet who could be relied on in a pinch to back up the spell-check function in MS-Word. Wonderful.
I took some solace from personal issues revealed in another e-mail thread. Herb had given full power of attorney to his fiancée--whom he wince-inducingly referred to as CINCHOUSE, Commander-in-Chief-House, aping a term widely used by uniformed military--but was apparently having second thoughts. He noted to the recipient of this thread, who from the context appeared to have been Herb’s best friend back at headquarters, that “CINCHOUSE” was running through his savings “like Patton’s Third Army through France.” Herb asked his buddy to have a look at his house and see whether “CINCHOUSE” was really making the improvements she had claimed--and whether “some other dude’s truck is parked in the driveway.” I knew it was none of my business, but I couldn’t stop reading it, and the more worry and insecurity I saw, the better I liked it. An inquiring mind like mine always wants to know.
It was nearly ten by the time I had a look at Herb’s paper files. All of us were supposed to keep no more than one inch of paper holdings, to minimize the time needed to burn or shred them if the bad guys ever came over the wall. Reflecting his inflated sense of self-importance, Herb’s paper files were two inches thick. Printed copies of his e-mail correspondence with headquarters and of his earnings-and-leave slips made up most of the file. There were some hand-written notes from the past week, including one sheet dated November 9. It contained just a few names: Alliyah-Muhammad Lateef--al Magreb project--Saba company. Attached to it was an article printed from the web-site of an Australian newspaper.
Perth Commercial Appeal
Company in Iraq Payments Scandal Keeps Going Strong
By Katie Llewellyn
October 12, 2005
Local suppliers linked to kickbacks for Saddam
A Lebanese-Iraqi company that covertly funneled hundreds of millions of US dollars to Saddam Hussein’s government from the Western Australia Wheat Association (WAWA), the principal grain marketer and exporter in our state, is looking for new business despite its role in helping the ousted Iraqi regime evade UN sanctions.
According to a UN report, the Saba’ah Company--incorporated in Lebanon but effectively owned and controlled by Iraqi nationals--extorted kickbacks from international companies seeking lucrative contracts with Iraq under the now-defunct humanitarian Oil-for-Food programme (OFF). Australian farmers sold more than US$1 billion worth of wheat to Iraq between 2000 and 2002 as part of this UN-monitored operation.
OFF was designed to ease the impact of broad economic sanctions on Iraq’s civilian population by letting the Iraqi government sell oil and use the proceeds to buy food and other humanitarian goods. Revenue from oil sales was paid into overseas accounts supervised by UN officials in order to keep the funds out of the hands of the Saddam regime. Companies seeking to do business under OFF therefore negotiated deals directly with the regime while billing for payment from the UN-controlled account.
The Saba’ah Company was at the center of the Saddam regime’s scheme to subvert international controls over the proceeds of oil sales. Like all companies selected as commercial intermediaries by the Baghdad government, Saba’ah told WAWA and its other overseas suppliers that they had to cover the cost of transporting goods not only to Iraq’s borders or ports but also--purportedly unknown to the UN and its employees--to points of distribution within the country.
The foreign companies were then told by regime representatives that they had to give onward transport contracts and costly “post-commercial relations” contracts to selected companies. These firms, later found to be shell companies owned by the Iraqi regime and by members of Saddam’s inner circle, added surcharges to the OFF-approved contracts that boosted the cost of these procurement contracts at times by as much as 50 percent.
Saba’ah was one of the principal middleman firms involved in these transactions. Because it was registered and legally domiciled in Lebanon rather than Iraq, it was exempt from the UN sanctions against the former Iraqi regime.
Saba’ah served as the main purchaser of Australian wheat in the 2000-2002 period covered by the UN report. It is estimated that of the US$1.2 billion worth of wheat sold by WAWA and other Australian suppliers, more than US$200 million were paid for the bogus transport costs and similar apparent kickbacks.
Unlikely company for Saddam
Although Saddam Hussein and most of his inner circle were members of Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority, they turned to a company run by a man from the country’s traditionally downtrodden Shiite majority to handle many of the kickbacks under the OFF programme.
Muhammad Wasim Isa al-Latif al-Trabelsi, 41, is an Iraqi-educated lawyer described by business contacts in Beirut and Amman as “brilliant” and a “ruthless deal-maker.” He was born in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, about 100 kms southwest of Baghdad, into a family that was descended from a 19th-century Shiite religious scholar from southern Lebanon and that still maintains ties to Lebanon.
Taking advantage of his dual Lebanese-Iraqi nationality, Latif registered Saba’ah for Trading with Lebanon’s Ministry of Commerce in 1993. He gave a 49.9-percent share in Saba’ah and its profits to an Iraqi company known to have been used as a cut-out by the Iraqi dictator’s brutal older son, Uday.
“Muhammad knew he was doing business with very bad people,” says a Latif associate based in the Jordanian capital of Amman. “The money was just too good, and he justified it by saying he was able to buy wheat and rice to feed the poor people in Iraq. For a number of years he just didn’t care.”
Falling out
Latif and his company lost their access to the former regime’s golden goose in 2002. The reasons are unclear.
In a late 2004 interview with the Lebanese newspaper les Actualités de l’Orient, Latif claimed that Saddam’s secret police had uncovered his long-standing provision of financial support and information to opposition parties abroad and that he “fled Iraq just a minute ahead of the death squad and wearing only the clothes on my back.”
Some of Latif’s business associates recount a different story. Banking circles in Beirut told us that Latif was forced to end his relationship with the regime after Uday Hussein discovered that Latif had cheated the Iraqi government of its full 50-percent share of the profits, worth hundreds of millions of American dollars.
Whatever the reason, in September 2002 Latif arrived in London, where he began cultivating personal and political ties with opposition groups, including the Al-Da’wa Party of Iraq’s current Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari.
Rehabilitating a country and a company
Since mid-2005 Latif has been actively trying to re-energize his company. In response to written questions from this newspaper, he said “Al-Saba’ah has unmatched business expertise and international contacts that can work for the benefit of all citizens of the new Iraq.”
He added, “Agriculture and rural development are the real future of Iraq. Oil makes money for the government, but farming creates jobs and grows food for the people.
“It was because of their ability to use water from the two rivers and the rich soil of our Iraqi homeland that our Mesopotamian ancestors invented agriculture and civilization. I look forward to using my business skills to help rehabilitate this critical sector for the development of the new, democratic Iraq.”
When asked for specifics, Latif told us that Al-Saba’ah was particularly well positioned to furnish the seeds, fertilizer, and farm implements that are in short supply in Iraq. He added that Australian farm input companies have high quality products and interesting prices.
No helpful pattern had emerged here. I didn’t know whether that was because of fatigue or because I had just poked around through the dirty socks and soiled undershirts of another man’s psychic laundry basket. I hadn’t learned anything important that I didn’t know before. Herb was a self-serving shit--albeit wielding the stiletto of character assassination with more finesse than I had been willing to give him credit for--and Aliya had spoken to him on Wednesday about the odd deals surrounding the Al-Maghribiya project. The article from the Australian paper corroborated Aliya’s concerns about the shady past connections of Muhammad al-Latif and his Saba’ah Company, but it didn’t establish either a capability or a desire to murder an American in the Green Zone in order to protect a few million dollars. I needed more information--and also a full night’s sleep uninterrupted by either a dead colleague or an unhappy ex-wife.
I went back to my room, poured a couple of fingers of Jim Beam into a glass, settled back on my bed, switched on the television in time for the kickoff of the Virginia-Georgia Tech game, snorted myself awake in the middle of the third quarter to find my pillowcase half-soaked in drool, and remembered to switch off the tube before returning to the pleasures of oblivion.
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