ONE

AL-SADR’S BOOKKEEPER

SERVICE TO COUNTRY.

I love the sound of those words. We all serve: not just the heroic men and women in uniform but each and every one of us. We do it by caring for our families, our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors, our America.

Those three simple words mean that ideas you cherish, people you love and admire, hopes you harbor, and values you respect can all live and thrive in a safe, free environment. It means that the honest industry of any citizen has a place to grow; and, growing, can benefit the country and the world.

I love the sound of the following words, too, and they’ve served me well in more than a half century of life: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”¹ They were written by an eighteenth-century Irish statesman named Edmund Burke, and I can tell you firsthand that truer words were never written. I’ve seen that in action during twenty-three years of active military service here at home and also in the tortured landscape of the Middle East.

Yet there is a flip side to what Burke wrote: those who do know history can learn from the mistakes and triumphs of those who came before.

Case in point.

In 1987—shortly after I’d been assigned to SEAL Team One in Coronado, California—I saw the movie The Untouchables, which starred Kevin Costner as Prohibition-era treasury agent Eliot Ness. What an inspiration: talk about a special operations team, a bunch of G-men working on their own against one of the most powerful criminal enterprises in American history. Ness’s assignment was to bring down crime kingpin Al Capone, but the bootlegger-extortionist-murderer was too smart to be caught with blood on his hands. So the government agents took another tack to get him: they dove into his shady accounting practices.

That’s right: one of the most notorious thugs ever to walk the streets of Chicago was put away for tax evasion and sentenced to an unprecedented eleven years for this white-collar crime. Capone literally lost his mind while incarcerated.

Justice served.

Capone has a moral counterpart in Iraq, a so-called cleric by the name of Muqtada al-Sadr. I say “so-called” because he’s the kind of religious figure who makes a mockery of the word “religious” by spreading hate as well as lies like “The United States is targeting Islam, the Muslim and Arab states in the Middle East and beyond. It wants to control the world.” That statement is as ignorant as it is inflammatory since we can’t control our own deficit, let alone the world.

But back to Capone and Sadr.

By 2004, the hot-tempered, black-garbed Iraqi was certainly capable of causing a lot of trouble, and he did. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find him. Intelligence indicated that he was frequently in Iran, which was going to make him difficult to spot and take out. Iran was known to be pumping weapons, explosives, and training to the Shia anti-coalition forces. It was clear even in 2004 that Iran wanted to re-create Persia and expand its brand of Islamic terrorism. Iranian explosives used to make improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other tools of terrorism were responsible for at least five hundred US deaths. Make no mistake, Iran is the enemy of liberty and our values, and no agreement or settlement with evil will deter Iran from continuing its global jihad of killing the American infidels.

Sadr was Iran’s chief surrogate and operations officer in Iraq. While we could not find him through informants and methodical intelligence collection, we did find his accountant—whose name we will leave blank, given current conditions in Iraq—in Najaf, one of the more religious cities in Iraq, in the southern part near al-Hillah.

And accounting practices offered a vulnerability into Sadr’s operations, just as was the case with Capone in the 1920s.

Our hope was that, like any good accountant, Sadr’s man would have with him the Sadr files that would detail Sadr’s organizational network of terrorism. If we could get our hands on his books, the chances would be good that we could follow the money trail and bring down his whole organization. Even criminals like to know where their money is and how it is being spent. We were hoping he had a good accountant who liked to know too. Thus, we began to run surveillance on the accountant, employing tactics we had successfully used before.

When, after several weeks of observation, we had a tangled profile of the man, we assessed what force package was necessary and how much support would be needed. We were pretty confident that he kept his books at his house, which would mean a compound raid. A SEAL task unit from Camp Posey, a small SEAL camp base at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP), was picked for the mission. They had been in country for nearly six months and by this time had conducted hundreds of combat operations. They also had a detachment of Polish GROM (Poland’s elite counterterrorism unit) with them and the first ever Marine Special Operations Force. They were well led and ready for another mark on the wall.

The first time I was introduced to the GROM was when I was still attached to the Naval Headquarters in London. As the NATO naval commander, the US Navy would host and coordinate a naval exercise called Baltic Operation, or BALTOPS for short, that included the participation of our European allies. In 1994, BALTOPS would include a new participant, Russia. The Berlin Wall had come down a few years earlier, and grand ideas of an integrated Europe gave promise to greater cooperation and peace. As the unconventional warfare officer, I decided to be unconventional and pitch the idea of a SEAL platoon rendezvousing with a Russian warship at sea by parachute. The proposal was simple: simply give the location and time to the Russians, and we would drop the SEALs and boats out the back of a C-130 and hitch a ride with them into the Polish port of Gdańsk. No problem. To my utter amazement, my plan was approved. Be careful what you ask for.

We gave the Russians the radio frequencies, the time and coordinates, and a description of how to position their small craft for personal recovery at sea. They acknowledged receiving the plan with only one comment—a request for personnel and equipment manifests. The equipment was not an issue as we weren’t going to bring any new toys with us, but the manifest was problematic. We decided to provide them a generic list by giving positions rather than names and see what would happen. They once again acknowledged receipt and made no comment. On the morning of the at-sea rendezvous, we confirmed that the Russians were still going to play ball and loaded the C-130 bound to drop us off in the middle of the Baltic Sea. I was handed the name of the Russian frigate, the Neustrashimy, and a distress beacon should they decide not to let us board. After a couple of hours in the air, the back ramp was lowered and we prepared to jump. A small Zodiac boat filled with gear and with its own larger parachute attached would go first, and we would immediately follow. We made a low pass to confirm the Neustrashimy and her boats were lined up per our instructions. I could see her below exactly as planned, but we could not reach her on the radio frequency assigned. We made another pass without communications, and I made the decision to go. We had made it this far, and now was not the time to retreat. We climbed to 1,250 feet and exited the C-130. When you jump out of a plane over water you focus on three things: pulling your rip cord so you don’t die, steering for the boat so you don’t get lost, and making sure your fins are on and ready so you don’t drown. Before you hit the water, it’s best to be ready to cut your parachute away, so if the surface winds kick up you don’t get dragged away. Even a SEAL can find his way to Davy Jones’s locker by being dragged or pulled under by a parachute at sea.

The splash into the Baltic Sea was refreshing, and getting the platoon organized and onto the small boats was uneventful. We easily motored over to the accommodation ladder alongside the Russian frigate and climbed aboard. The captain and a man dressed in a polo shirt, khaki pants, and Top-Siders were at the top of the ladder waiting to greet me. I asked for permission to come aboard. My request was answered by that man standing on deck wearing the khaki pants, Top-Siders, and a polo shirt. He looked and dressed exactly the way I used to while assigned to my previous command. He greeted me by name and knew exactly who I was and where I came from. This was my first introduction to Petoskey, the man who protected Lech Walesa during Poland’s solidarity and was one of the hardest men I ever met. He was at least sixty-five and still chiseled like a rock. His forearms reminded me of Popeye the Sailor Man. I would not mess with him. My instincts were right, as I later found out he also led the Ministry of Interior’s successful Russian mafia eradication program in Warsaw. He was tough and introduced me and arranged a meeting with his favorite unit, the Polish GROM. They operated out of an old German U-boat facility outside of Gdańsk. While their equipment was Russian hand-me-downs, there was little doubt they were tough and hungry to be a premier fighting force. They would not have to wait too long. To this day, I don’t know how he knew who I was, but the fact that he did know deserved my respect.

Back to the accountant.

Unlike The Untouchables, we would take the accountant and his family.

First, though, some context.

“FIND ME SADR.”

While we were in Fallujah, I would hear this, or something very much like it, almost every day from General Ricardo Sanchez. I’m pretty damn certain that Sanchez would have strangled Sadr with his bare hands if he’d had a chance.

Muqtada al-Sadr is a prominent Shia leader, and at the time, the different militias that were forming around us were also Shia. The Shias were the ones who had borne the brunt of abuse from the Sunni majority—the group from which Saddam Hussein had pulled the members of his ruling Ba’athist party. Incidentally, Ba’athist means “renaissance” in Arabic, and when the party was first founded in the early 1950s, its stated goal was “unity.”

To which I say: “Bull.”

Once we toppled Saddam, the Shias were looking for big-time retribution after several decades of often brutal Ba’athist repression, which compounded the ever-present internecine family disputes and clashes over property. As a result, there were regional conflicts based on religion, politics, and ancient blood feuds, and we were (and still are) in the middle of it.

Incidentally, it was with a snickering reference to Muqtada al-Sadr on his lips, on the scaffold, that Saddam Hussein died.

At the time the Shias had pushed the Sunnis west, into the desert, into Ramadi, and into the Anbar Province. (Many of those refugees are still there, by the way; only now we have another name for them: ISIS.) The Shias themselves were consolidating their power in Karbala, Najaf, Hillah, and Baghdad—central and southern Iraq—and the Kurds were solidifying their strongholds in the north. Iraq was and is a mess, and it’s dangerous to think of any specific Shia or Sunni faction as being our friends, even if we continue to work with individuals from that failed nation. The Iraqi Kurds are another matter: they’re generally aligned with Western values and for the most part bravely challenge the barbarians who are trying to destroy us and them. They are deserving of our help and our arms, and what we have given them most recently is lip service and limited support administered through the Shia-controlled government. Vehicle and material support intended for Kurdish forces gets redirected and sold before it ever reaches the front lines. We know it, they know it, and our enemies know it.

Back to Muqtada al-Sadr. His militias were primarily made up of local thugs and anti-coalition insurgents funded by a number of sources, including the siphoning off of US government contracts and the dangerously theocratic Iran to gain influence and control. I bring that up because Sadr and his principle minions were spending a lot of time in Iran. He would come into Iraq, talk to key people, and then leave for the safety of his adopted Shia home. We couldn’t establish a pattern regarding where he would be.

But Sadr was a strategic guy, a big-picture guy, which meant he depended on an operational staff to handle day-to-day matters. Terrorists and insurgents rely on money to complete their missions, and someone has to collect, distribute, and track funds, just as with any other organization. We figured that if we could get a sense as to how the money flowed, we could gain a lot of insight into Sadr’s operations and how to disrupt them.

General Sanchez was our own big-picture guy, and the Iraqis knew it. They targeted him, and at one point SEALs served as his personal security detail. There was a week in which convoys Sanchez traveled in had been hit a couple of times with IEDs. At the daily Battle Update Brief, or BUD, his chief of staff, whom I had known in Kosovo, came up and asked for our help. He had just returned from the Green Zone and had narrowly escaped death by another IED. He was pale and clearly shaken.

As it so happened, a couple of my former team members were passing through. Both had experience in Personal Security Detachment missions dating back to protecting Admiral Boorda in the early ’90s. They were pros. I asked them to kick the tires on the general’s security team and give me their thoughts.

They came back to me with a disturbing report: “Sanchez is going to die,” they said in a serious but matter-of-fact tone. Sanchez’s security detail lacked the right training and had internal leadership issues, they discovered. Half the time they didn’t even do route assessments or have the general’s schedule. They would take Sanchez along the same route in the same vehicles when he shuttled back and forth along the eight-mile road between Baghdad International Airport and the Green Zone. Often their only defense was an electronic squawker that was designed to disrupt an electronic firing device. There was little doubt that Sanchez’s movement and routes were being watched, and it was only a matter of time before the enemy would get him. Sanchez’s security team did not know what they did not know and did not have the right training considering the task before them. They were not bad soldiers; they just had no idea what they were doing. They were tasked with protecting the theater commander against a determined enemy, and it was only by luck and God’s grace that Sanchez was still alive.

I informed Sanchez’s chief of staff that the problems were serious enough that a “tweak” would not be adequate to the task. I recommended that Sanchez’s security detail be taken offline for training and some changes in leadership. And then I made a mistake: I offered up a SEAL platoon to temporarily fill the gap until his assigned team was ready. A new rotation of SEALs had just arrived in theater and could be assigned to the task. As luck would have it, it was led by the same hero who had saved my son’s finger years before. While his team was not typically tasked with PSD missions, I knew they would excel at the assignment. That is both the curse and the blessing of the SEALs and, for that matter, all Special Operations Forces. The blessing is they are extraordinarily talented, highly trained, and motivated. The curse is that their success has made them the force of choice for almost every mission and the solution for almost every problem. Give them a task and they will find out how to do it better.

In this case, the chief of staff readily accepted and never gave the SEAL detail back. After his assigned security guys were trained and ready to go, Sanchez said, “Hell no.” I don’t blame him. I would have wanted SEALs around me too!

I’m biased, of course. I knew the SEALs would keep Sanchez alive and would excel at this or any other task. You must always keep something in mind: SEALs look at the enemy’s mission (to take us out) as if it were their own in order to determine how to defeat it. In this case, bad guys wanted to kill Sanchez, so a SEAL would think, If I were the bad guy I would do it like X, Y, or Z; so I will devise a plan to defend/defeat all of the above. And once Sanchez’s regular security force was ready to return to work, you could argue that there were better uses for those SEALs. But Sanchez was a four-star general and he wanted to live. He told me I could not have that detail back. Rank has its privileges.

Now, I actually wasn’t reporting directly to Sanchez: my immediate superior for day-to-day operations was the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Commander, Colonel Mike Repass. Repass was the Special Force 10th Group Commander and a great American, dedicated, hardworking, and loyal to his men. Aside from conducting as many as twenty operations a night, he also had the challenge of keeping all of his bosses happy. He reported directly to Sanchez as the theater commander but also took direction from the theater Special Operations commanding general. There were also the generals commanding every Multinational Division sector. Keeping them happy was important. Then there was the plethora of home-front generals within the army and Special Operations Command structure. All of them would come into theater and offer either advice or direction or both. Repass was one of only a few Special Forces group commanders and no doubt would be looked at for flag officer. I don’t think it drove every decision he made, but he was a man being pulled in a lot of different directions. I did not have any illusions of being a four-star admiral and had less of an issue trying to satisfy a thousand masters. The one person I did pay attention to was General Sanchez. He said he wanted Sadr and anything that we did to get him was pretty much a go.

So, back to the accountant.

The mission to snatch our guy—we’ll call him Mahomed—was a classic planned, as opposed to an in extremis, somewhat improvised operation. A planned operation doesn’t have the urgency of running out the door to conduct an in extremis operation. The mission is defined, the time is determined, and the probable outcome is a calculated risk, given the right force is assigned to the task. When a mission is deemed “in extremis,” it means someone has determined that not doing the operation now would result in greater risk of harm, significant damage, or death. In an in extremis mission, you rely heavily on inherent skill, innovation, and leadership to win.

With a planned operation, there’s more of a calculation of value versus expenditures. Intelligence and situation drive options for mission planning and force composition. Commanders make judgment calls regarding the type and amount of resources, supporting assets, and appropriate rules of engagement. Commanders coordinate and develop the plan of attack and what the likely payoff will be of each option. There is always tension between those who want to continue gathering intelligence and those who want to strike when the iron is hot. I have been in arguments with senior intelligence officers over when is the right time to hit the target or destroy the enemy. When you find the location of your target, do you strike now or monitor for a while in an attempt to identify additional associates? All operations have risk. The art is to mitigate risk as much as you can while striking as soon as you can. A well-planned strike early is better than a perfectly planned strike too late.

Believe it or not, that transition from intelligence gathering to making the decision to engage is the toughest part of any undertaking. It’s when the rubber hits the road, when you don’t get any do-overs, when many lives and limbs are on the line. You can’t—and don’t—think about how it will impact your life or career or the war or the nation. It’s like a clock has started running and there’s nothing you can do, nothing to focus on, other than to run with it. Worse, unlike as it was with the drills, adrenaline is really flowing during the mission, coloring everything, adding variables to your own actions and to the actions of your warriors. Whether the operation is planned or in extremis, there is nothing so frightening, and at the same time so thrilling, as the “execute” order.

I should also mention that there are other considerations, albeit lesser ones, that factor into any operation. Between Mahomed the accountant’s work and the role of a commander, there’s actually a lot of financial calculation that goes into intelligence work. Everything has a price tag that has to be justified and evaluated. Our accounting has to factor in intangibles. For example, given the cost of a mission, what is the net good one operation might yield over allocating those resources to another? We actually have to ascribe a value to that. In this case, given that taking the accountant would not only get us closer to Sadr personally but would offer a significant disruption to his field operations, our calculus made the mission a top priority.

Often, too, those calculations contain a strictly humane element. Collateral lives matter. We decided to take Mahomed’s immediate family when we snatched him. Doing so offered two benefits. First, yes, we would be able to question his wife and corroborate Mahomed’s information against what she said, so we could establish a baseline for Mahomed’s truthfulness. Typically in Iraq, the wife ran the home and would have knowledge of at least who visited and when. We could ask about simple stuff (“Have you ever seen this person?” “No.” “That’s not what your wife said.”) and corroborate some of his information that way.

But second—and this was important to obtaining and holding Mahomed’s goodwill—we would be able to provide safety for his family and leverage if needed. There was a pretty strong possibility that if we didn’t take them, Sadr’s men would, and they wouldn’t hesitate to hold them as a bargaining tool or worse. That meant they would possibly die, likely by a single gunshot to the back of the head.² Even with the decision to take both the accountant and his family, we had an ugly calculation to make. Mahomed lived on the outskirts of Najaf in a small compound house that had multiple windows on the second story. The logistics of doing a multi-member grab complicated the task, and we would have to make sure the risk of extending the time on target was mitigated by precision and perfect execution. We just hoped that Sadr’s network of armed militia took the night off.

The SEALs at Camp Posey were given the green light along with selected members from the Army Special Forces. Just as we did when we took down Todorovic, patterns were established, go/no-go criteria were set, and rules of engagement were reviewed. This time the on-scene SEAL commander was given more latitude as the sheer volume of operations being conducted by Special Operations Forces exceeded the ability of the top brass to micromanage any single event. In the preceding month alone, we were averaging more than a dozen missions a night. The pace was to pick up soon.

On the day of the actual grab, the team left their base at Baghdad International Airport and headed about eighty miles south to a location between Karbala and Hillah. The forward surveillance teams kept an eye on the target and local militia hangouts for any indication of armed activity. I continued on to our Forward Operating Base near Hillah to coordinate any additional Quick Reaction Forces or support if needed. In this business, you never know and it is always best to be prepared for the worst. Once everything was set, the team waited for nightfall, as the plan called for a midnight raid. From Hillah, we readied the Quick Reaction Force and moved them to within minutes of responding. If we had to fight our way in, we did not want to fight far.

The location of the house gave us confidence that a vehicular Quick Reaction Force would be tactically better than one coming from helicopters. We were going into what was basically a bedroom community, and rotary wing support would give the operation a bigger signature, which is basically a fancy way of saying choppers are noisy as all get-out and we’d wake everyone in the neighborhood up, to say nothing of alerting our potential targets. We had helicopters in the area already in the air for support if we needed them.

The SEAL plan called for a Humvee convoy to bring the force to the target to carry out the operation. Mahomed lived on the edge of town in a compound with a courtyard, which meant traffic would be at a minimum outside his door: no problem pulling right up there. The specially designed Humvees had a winch on the heavy bumper that could be used either to pull a gate open or act as a battering ram and drive through it. The team were experts in explosive and manual breaching techniques, so they were going to get into the compound and house one way or another. Even the roads—both coming and going—had an intelligence threat component: snipers and observers were known to hide themselves on rooftops, and we weren’t going to take any routes that had a recent history of firefights above or on the ground.

IEDs were always a concern along the route when entering the vicinity of a high-value target. IEDs were easy enough for the anti-coalition forces to lay out but difficult for our forces to detect. Even with aerial support and constant patrolling along the main routes, cars packed with explosives parked along the road or even suicide drivers looking for military convoys to ram were all too common.

It was not uncommon for the lead vehicle conducting compound raids to drive past the house. When hearts are beating fast and adrenaline is rushing, the houses and gates in the tight quarters of the neighborhoods go by pretty fast. In this case, when the convoy reached Mahomed’s gates, they drove past it a few yards. No matter, they had rehearsed for that contingency and entered the compound as if it were planned.

The gate and house were quickly breached, and the compound was secured. Within minutes the operators had secured all floors, separated and secured family members, and identified Mahomed, and most of all, the treasure trove of books. Everything was tagged and bagged: they were looking for anything that might prove useful or informative, such as computers, printed records, weapons, and the like. They even went through the vehicles in the compound, from trunks to glove compartments with all stops in between. With every item found, the SEALs recorded what it was and where they found it and affixed reference tags.

The accounted, selected members of his family and his books and computers were loaded into the waiting vehicles outside. The Quick Reaction Force closed in and prepared to ensure the route out was secure should the militias be alerted.

The team had finished the sensitive site exploitation (SSE) sweep and was off the target in less than an hour, hardly long enough for the local militias to be notified and react with any organized opposition. No need for medevac, no need for additional firepower—and we had plenty at the ready, including an AC-130 gunship from the air force’s Special Operations Wing that was on standby to assist with ground attacks all the way from the target to home base. We did not want to have to detour through the city of Karbala if we were attacked: it would have been another Black Hawk Down scenario trying to move through roused local fighters eager to have a shot at Americans.

We got lucky, and the team’s ride back was smooth. The “precious cargo” was met immediately by interpreters and interrogators and hustled into our temporary detention facility. It was important to sort through relationships and get statements during the initial confusion. Separate, isolate, and interrogate. Just a few hours before they were safely tucked away within the walls of their compound, and now their lives had been changed forever.

Mohamed, who had consumed so much of our time and energy, was a confused little man, the sort you might walk by on the street and never give a second look to. He was neither aggressive nor notable in any way. He appeared to speak little English, but he understood enough to know what we wanted. He also knew what the book contained and the danger that he now faced. I don’t know whether he thought of us as more of a threat than Sadr; it did not really matter. He had absolutely no training in being a terrorist—he couldn’t fight, and he didn’t offer any resistance whatsoever. The one concern he had wasn’t any grand ideal: it was for his family, especially his children. Between his kids and the rest of his extended family still in Najaf, he knew they were all vulnerable.

We let him know—and this was the truth—that we had left a surveillance team in his neighborhood to keep an eye on things. Of course we did: not only did we want to keep them safe, which would keep Mahomed happy, but we wanted to monitor who came to Mahomed’s house after the news about his abduction got out.

Mahomed may not have been much good as a terrorist, but he was an excellent accountant. Once we got through the initial interview—the one in which we determined that he couldn’t point to Sadr’s immediate whereabouts—we started to delve into what he could tell us about Sadr’s operations.

I may as well confess here and now that those are the situations where you want to have the freedom to interrogate your prisoner using any method possible. I know it’s wrong; I know it’s probably immoral; I know all of that. But there’s that calculus again: when you weigh the cruel discomfort of one individual versus the benefits of saving lives, the morality gets shady. Real shady, real fast.

Still, we were restrained throughout. Quiet, even. We didn’t get a location for the head man, but we got something almost as good: a fairly in-depth look at the signal intelligence and communication intelligence.

We snatched the accountant on a Thursday: by Monday, we knew everything he did. We had a much better sense of who was connected to whom and how and where money was coming from and going to. In the end, there was no need to use any enhanced interrogation at all. He couldn’t give us anything time sensitive that would require immediate action, and he wasn’t holding back what he did know.

Here’s something I learned, though.

Political scientist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to reference rank-and-file Nazis—the eager little bureaucrats who weren’t grand theorists but who shuffled their papers and filled out columns in ledgers that, miles away, meant death for innocent people.

That was our Mahomed. He gathered money and recorded transactions—mostly from Iranian sources—and kept meticulous records of every transaction. He also provided payments to fund the materials the operational terrorists needed, such as bomb-making equipment, small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, things like that. It is likely that even Sadr didn’t know what this money was buying a lot of the time either: the way insurgency cells work is that low-level commanders are given a lot of latitude regarding their operations.

This is exactly why we talk about being in a different sort of war. In a conventional fight, combatants are uniformed and identifiable and follow a rigid chain of command from the top. But combatants in terrorist cells are embedded in the population. Some have day jobs—even the combatants. A terrorist network consists of more than those who pull the trigger or strap themselves in explosive vests. A network also consists of those who turn a blind eye to violence, provide early warning, or deliver logistics support. In the case of the recent bombings in Brussels, a network provided safe haven by renting an apartment, or in the case of San Bernardino a neighbor provided guns and ammunition. Unless you catch them with an IED in their backpack, there’s no way of telling them from anyone else, and we didn’t have the assets to look at every street corner, every bazaar, every market and determine who was who.

But we did have some terrific accounting records, and they proved to be the Rosetta stone for identifying and connecting the dots of the terrorist network. We knew who was getting money and how much. Knowing how much gave us a sense of the recipient’s role in the insurgency: the greater the payment, the greater the amount of activity and damage the recipient was being counted on to do.

The entry that was notably absent in Mohamed’s books was payments for the families of jihadi bombers who had committed suicide. These payments were probably made through the local mullahs or imans. All I know is Mohamed didn’t track them, unless he was hiding them under “Administrative Expenses.”

It didn’t take Sadr’s people long to find out that we had Mohamed, and of course they figured out what he was telling us. We had this confirmed because in 2004, just after we grabbed Mohamed, insurgent activity around Karbala and the rest of the Shia-held territory went from moderate to off the Richter scale. It was as if everyone who had been compromised wanted to empty the gas tanks before they were targeted. Karbala basically exploded. Sadr City, which is right near Baghdad, exploded. The number of IEDs placed in roads and the number of direct assaults on our patrols skyrocketed. Areas that had been relatively safe to patrol became dangerous.

What was also disturbing was that all that activity led to an increase in recruitment for the insurgents. It was as if the surge in terrorist activities initiated by Sadr’s forces was seen as victories, or at least building momentum. We’ve seen the same dynamic with ISIS: it’s a lot easier for ISIS to recruit new dupes when there’s a lot of activity. That is one lesson learned in fighting in the Middle East: local forces follow momentum and momentum is difficult to turn.

I was back in Baghdad when Sadr’s forces initiated the eruption of violence. We still had roughly half the deck of cards’ worth of targets to catch along with other high-value individuals, and we were constantly rebuilding our intelligence network and looking for weapons of mass destruction.

The primary ground forces under the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, Arabian Peninsula, consisted of a Special Forces Battalion that had Forward Operating Bases throughout Iraq; a couple of smaller SEAL Task Units, one in northern Iraq and one based in Baghdad International Airport (BIAP); the Polish GROM; and the first US Marine Corps Special Operations Detachment. We also had a company of soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division as security manning the compound. On multiple occasions, they kept the bad guys from penetrating the perimeter defenses and no doubt saved my life. The air support was from a mixed bag of talent from a number of commands that provided helicopter, gunship, signal intelligence, and special mission support, and even the Navy’s Black Hawk squadron that cut their teeth in successful desert operations. Combined with the assigned foreign forces and support staff, the force was about thirty-five hundred personnel with capability unequalled in modern warfare. Even with that force at hand, we were not prepared for the wave of violence that spread across Iraq because of the insurgent rise. While the reasons can be debated, there is no debate that the rapidness and scale on which it occurred caught us off guard. Even though Sadr and his Iranian-supported militia were Shia, it became clear quickly that ground zero was in a city at the heart of Sunni territory—Fallujah. As fate would have it, I was assigned to deploy to our FOB in Fallujah just when the fuse was lit.

And let me tell you, that city exploded when the insurgency started.