Tradecraft
If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
—Khalil Gibran
The GID was first and foremost a domestic counterintelligence and counterterrorist force. The mission of safeguarding the country, one surrounded by threats and instability, was challenging. Jordan was historically squeezed by outside conflict and the wars always managed, in one form or another, to seep into the kingdom. The country’s 870 miles of frontier were desolate, porous terrain. The border areas were hellish under the desert sun where only the Bedouin and men with violent intentions dared cross.
Jordan had its share of homegrown extremists to contend with, as well.
To monitor subversion from within and from across its borders, the GID entrenched itself in most facets of daily life in the country, monitoring those who plotted to harm the country.186
There was a mystique of sheer cunning and unflinching ruthlessness surrounding the execution of the GID’s internal security mission. That reputation was enhanced by the rumor mill and romanticized in fiction and in film, such as the movie Body of Lies starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe and based on the novel of the same name by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “Fear became its own currency,” a former GID psychologist explained, “and the GID spent it wisely.”187 The GID always viewed counterespionage and counterterrorism as a cerebral exercise designed to seize the initiative and gain the advantage on the psychological battlefield.
The GID utilized foresight, force and manipulation to detect, deter and disrupt plots against the kingdom through displays of cleverness and manipulation that could have filled a dozen John le Carré novels. One famous operation targeted Palestinian terror mastermind Abu Nidal, and his organization in the 1990s. The GID knew that Abu Nidal was paranoid about traitors in his ranks and that he obsessed about which of his top lieutenants might be on the payroll of the CIA or the Mossad. The GID took advantage of this debilitating paranoia and established dummy bank accounts in the name of key operatives inside his organization. When details of these financial portfolios were strategically made available to Abu Nidal, his response was predictable and dozens of his top men were executed after kangaroo-court trials. Without firing a shot and without risking the life of an asset, the GID compromised the very fabric of one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world and rendered it ineffective.188
The Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War stretched the GID’s operational capabilities. The Western intelligence services estimated that there were thirty-six thousand foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq in early 2015. They came from eighty-six nations across the Middle East and around the world to fight for the Islamic State. The largest number of volunteers came from Tunisia; three thousand young men from the North Africa nation that gave birth to the Arab Spring trekked to Syria to participate in the holy quest for the Caliphate. Some, no longer able to venture to Afghanistan or Pakistan to fight the United States, traveled north toward Damascus to take up arms; some, many in fact, headed to Syria for a sexual romp and some ballistic excitement before heading back to their countries so that they could say they were there and boast of their combat prowess to family and friends. These thrill seekers were known as jihadi tourists.189
There were an estimated twenty-one hundred Jordanians who traveled north toward the Syrian frontier.190 They were mostly middle class and educated; most had at least a bachelor’s degree. They came from good families.191 The GID knew many of them, and more important, knew their friends and associates, whom they corresponded with on chat apps, as well as on social media. Their mobile numbers—most had more than one phone—were easy to monitor, and the communications provided the GID with a telling look into what life was like on the ground—sometimes in real time—inside the war zone. The images and news the fighters exchanged with loved ones filled up gigabytes worth of memory in GID—and, ultimately, friendly intelligence services—databases. “If you wanted to know about any suspicious character in the region,” a retired Middle Eastern intelligence officer commented, “you dialed +962, the country code for Jordan!”192
The homegrown jihadists were sloppy when it came to tradecraft. They communicated openly on their mobile phones and displayed even fewer filters when going on social media platforms. Names, locations, and small and seemingly insignificant comments were shared in phone calls, emails and text messages between the men in the trenches and their contacts back home and became an invaluable and seemingly endless source of intelligence for the GID; contact lists alone helped the GID assemble an elaborate and far-reaching quilt of information. The information became a gold mine for the coalition intelligence officers targeting high-priority targets inside Syria and Iraq. The material would be essential in the hunt for Moaz al-Kasasbeh’s killers.
The GID had another invaluable reservoir of information on Syria inside the country. There were close to one million Syrian refugees in Jordan. Most were more than willing to assist the GID in its mission.
Jordan had a long history of receiving refugees. The Palestinians came in 1948 and then again in 1967. Kuwaitis—and Palestinians who lived and worked in Kuwait—came during and after the First Gulf War. The Iraqis who flooded into Amman in 2003 fleeing the Second Gulf War didn’t come into the country carrying all that they owned on their backs like those before them but rather driving Mercedes and Bentleys across the borders, bringing cash and whatever else they could carry from Iraq. Yemenis arrived fleeing oppression, war and poverty; Eritreans, Darfurians and Sudanese came fleeing war and ethnic cleansing. Jordan didn’t have the resources to accommodate all these refugees, and the influx of poor and desperate people pushed the country’s weak economy to the edge of collapse. But the national policy was to never turn people away. The Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War made an already precarious situation become a full-blown emergency.
The Jordanian border crossings with Syria were closed once the civil war began. Those fleeing the carnage had to find various spots along the separation fence where they could sneak through. Jordanian watchtowers positioned along the border were spread out at intervals of a couple of miles from one another. The frontier was dotted with military towers and isolated garrisons; each was issued with a numerical designation. One of the most popular places to cross was the Jordanian military tower located due south of the city of Daraa in southwest Syria, just five miles from the border fence on a hilltop in between Irbid and Mafraq in Jordan.
The tower south of Daraa was an isolated and sleepy outpost where hapless soldiers pulled guard duty. When the refugees came, Jordanian troops at the border were both ill prepared and ill-equipped to process the human swarm of desperate Syrians who streamed across the frontier bearing only what they could carry on their backs. Unlike their Iraqi counterparts years earlier who had applied for refugee status having driven to government centers in their air-conditioned luxury sedans, the Syrians walked across the desert and mountains in brutal heat, bone-chilling cold, monsoon-like rains and quicksand-like mud. Government forces were known to fire upon the long lines of men, women and children walking slowly on an attempted exodus toward freedom. “They used us for target practice,” a thirty-year-old Syrian refugee who only gave his name as Salim explained from his corrugated tin hut of a house inside a refugee camp. “There were old men and women in our group. Assad’s men are barbaric.”193
Government snipers, the refugees knew, didn’t want to simply kill those fleeing for the border—they wanted to maim disloyal subjects who sought a better life. The sharpshooters who preyed on the long line of escapees often aimed for the back, hoping to hit their targets in the spine. They went specifically after children. “If you want to kill a man, or you want to kill a child, you put a bullet in his head or his heart,” a doctor treating the wounded along one of the Syrian frontiers commented. “They purposefully put the bullet in the lumbar [lower] spine so that the child would suffer. I don’t have any other explanation.”194
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (ICRC) and an army of NGOs set up shop along the border to care for the refugees. Hollywood celebrities and international soccer stars came, too, wanting to show their concern for the millions of displaced persons. The Syrians needed urgent medical care, food, water and shelter. Army tents were trucked in to set up ad hoc camps. The army provided emergency food and care—the intelligence case officers were the ones who provided the authorization to stay in Jordan. There was great concern that militants from al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist forces would smuggle operatives inside the throng of humanity pushing through the fence, so screening protocols were established along with GID and army intelligence officers deployed to the watchtower areas to interrogate the arrivals. Names and ID numbers were cross-referenced against databases and reference requests made to friendly intelligence agencies in the United States, Great Britain, Germany and France. GID liaisons to Iraqi and Saudi intelligence checked on Syrian men who might have crossed the border during the Gulf War to fight the Americans, or anyone known to have attended a madrasa—or training camp—in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
CIA officers from Amman Station, British specialists from MI6 also took the occasional two-to three-hour drive to the border crossing to interview special persons of interest.
There wasn’t time to conduct lengthy interviews at the watchtowers—the area was flooded with humanity in dire need of permanent shelter, proper hygiene facilities and three meals a day. The weather was either skin-scorching hot or bone-snapping cold. The ICRC and the UNHCR1 refugee assistance program did all they could to process the refugees and tend to the wounded and the sick. Buses were brought in to ferry those cleared for entry into Jordan as refugees to their temporary homes.
Whoever coined the phrase “if you build it they will come” must have had the Zaatari refugee camp in mind. Zaatari was named after the small farming village that had sat on an inhospitable patch of rock and earth for centuries and was located ten miles east of the city of Mafraq—an inhospitable plot of earth in the middle of Jordan’s northern desert sixty miles north of Amman; Mafraq was a transportation hub connecting the kingdom to Iraq and Syria. The patch of land ten miles east of the city of Mafraq at first handled a few hundred people housed in tattered military canvas tents. Soon tens of thousands of people would flow into the sandy square. Prefab huts with corrugated tin roofs were hastily assembled; water was trucked in and sewage lines were hastily dug. Babies began to be born inside the camp.
The camp defined paradox. Although intended as a temporary fix, it had the feeling and all the trappings of being a permanent landmark. To many of the close to one hundred thousand residents inside the concertina fencing, Zaatari became a hopeless dustbowl of agony. The UNHCR did its best to provide an array of services and benefits to help the refugees, but the challenges were daunting. Mohammed,2 a UNHCR liaison officer and former battalion commander in the Jordanian military, was one of the few permanent staffers who were to make sure that the needs of the camp residents were met. Children had to be schooled, the sick needed care and people needed to make money. Some were permitted to work outside the camp; others were able to leave the barbed wire and find work and housing in Amman, or in one of Jordan’s other cities.
The Syrians camouflaged the scars that were etched on their psyches with remarkably stoic resilience. The refugees refused to succumb regardless of the hopelessness. A mercantile boulevard ran down the center of the camp where everything from pots and pans to wedding gowns were sold; there were toy shops for the kids, and stalls that sold amusements for the adults. The shopping promenade was sarcastically called the Shams-élysées (Shams being the Arabic for Syria).
The smell of falafel or honey-glazed sweet treats frying was inescapable. But so, too, was the smell of overflowing sewage and human waste. Sometimes, because fate always dishes out new challenges to those in the greatest need, vicious sandstorms swept across Zaatari and turned the patchwork of huts into an airless hell of dust and sand. The walls and barbed-wire concertina around the camp were, of course, a permanent reminder to the refugees that their status was precarious and uncertain. Jordanian police and gendarmerie forces patrolled the perimeter and had the final word on who got in and out. Zaatari was far from home, but each man and woman held inside the fencing realized that they were still alive, and as Syria ripped itself apart and thousands died each day, that was all that mattered.
Ultimately close to half a million refugees would pass through Zaatari.195 It remains one of the largest towns in the country. Two other camps—Mrajeeb al-Fhood and Azraq—had to be built to handle the overflow at Zaatari. Babies were born in the camps, couples were wed and the elderly died. Confinement, isolation and hopelessness could not stop life and death.
The refugees were grateful to be in Jordan, and they were eager to do whatever they could to help Jordanian intelligence when summoned for information. Some of the refugees cooperated as a sign of gratitude. Others were rewarded with money or an offer of employment. Some simply did it for a weekend in Amman or Aqaba with their wives and a chance for an hour or two of the kind of adult intimacy that made them feel human and that was impossible to find inside a one-room shack with their children and extended family.
There were also Syrians inside the camps who peddled information. Being an informant was a thriving profession in a secret-police state, and once in Jordan, the old hands found new customers. The names and faces of suspect men fetched a top price in the intelligence market, and there were always those willing to pay. The GID was wary of such transactions because the crafty ones sold overhyped or inaccurate information. These assets were expelled from the GID list of suppliers, outcasts in a society where a reliable personal reputation took years to build, and word of one bad tidbit spread at hyperspeed.
The mobile telephone was the lifeblood of the intelligence business, and it was a psychological and physical lifeline for the refugees. The fighting in Syria demolished ancient wonders and turned cities into wastelands, but cellular towers managed to survive the constant combat. When the refugees arrived in Jordan, most brought whatever they could carry along with ID of some kind; property owners brought deeds with them. But everyone had a phone, either a Chinese-made smartphone or one of the many higher-end options from Apple or Samsung. The smartphone was the only way for the refugees to stay in touch with those still in harm’s way. It was a way to maintain family ties, preserve photos and keepsakes, and share news of the day with loved ones torn apart by the fighting. The refugees feared that the SIM cards from the two Syrian carriers—Syriatel and MTN—were monitored, so they switched to one of the many Jordanian GSM mobile carriers—Zain, Orange Jordan and Umniah. It was good for the GID. Those calls were relatively easier to monitor and the SMS and phone logs easy to acquire.
There were very few refugees in Zaatari from Raqqa—the zip code that the GID was most interested in. Those fleeing the butchery in Raqqa or Aleppo made their way fifty miles north toward the Turkish frontier, or they tried their luck westward, toward a port in Syria and the hope of a rickety ship to take them to somewhere in Europe where they could find safety for their families; according to the UNHCR, close to a million Syrians made their way to the nations of the European Union.196 The refugees in Jordan primarily came from Daraa, where the Syrian Civil War began, from as-Suwayda in the south and from Palmyra and Deir ez-Zor closer to the Iraqi frontier, but many had family and friends in Raqqa and Aleppo, and they knew people who could be useful to the coalition intelligence services.
The GID was also Jordan’s primary foreign intelligence service working to protect the national interests. Most countries split the responsibility of internal security and overseas espionage between two agencies—the United States had the CIA and the FBI, Britain had MI6 and MI5, and Israel had the Mossad and the Shin Bet—but not the GID. Splitting the spy services into two separate but equal components was viewed as prudent to many who feared that one agency in control of too much information would become all-powerful. But when the GID was formed in the nascent days of the country, King Hussein wanted to keep the spies under one roof, under one centralized command: a singular service with an all-reaching mission inoculated from the interagency bickering and miscommunications that rival services had to contend with. The JAF’s military intelligence arm was the GID’s only true competition in the espionage business, and its focus was on the military capabilities of neighboring states and not the hybrid warfare threats from enemies near and far. Former CIA director George Tenet, when interviewed for the documentary The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs, illuminated the operational dilemmas involved in the espionage game when, reflecting about 9/11, he said, “If you can’t make the swivel between foreign and domestic, you’re gonna get hurt.”197
The GID spearheaded the intelligence-gathering effort against the Islamic State. Iraq was historically of major importance for Jordan. Iraq and Jordan shared a common history and often referred to each other as cousins. The Iraqi kings were Hashemites, after all. Iraq’s King Faisal I and Jordan’s King Abdullah I, who led their new mandates after the First World War, were brothers; King Faisal II, killed in a coup in 1958, and King Hussein of Jordan were cousins. And, historically, Jordan was an easy—and frequent—intelligence target for Saddam Hussein’s intricate army of spies and saboteurs. In 2003 the GID arrested a network of Iraqi spies who had plotted to poison water supplies used by American forces stationed near Zarqa; the Iraqis also planned to firebomb luxury hotels in Amman where American officers and government officials stayed.198
The GID officers who analyzed developments in Baghdad and who ran agents in the provinces were true subject-matter experts in all things Iraq. The Americans and allied services relied on the GID’s expertise and cultural intimacy with the men that now swore their allegiance to al-Baghdadi and the Caliphate.
The tribal connection was key to the GID’s ability to penetrate al-Baghdadi’s terrorist underground. The tribes in Jordan all had connections that transcended national boundaries and blended into Iraq. The tribes that shared connections across frontiers were known for the martial skills, their code of honor and their loyalty. “The tribal bonds are more important than religion and nationality,” a military intelligence officer named Nasser3 explained, “and those bonds certainly override any affiliation to any terrorist organization, even one that promises an Islamic State stretching to the four corners of the earth.”199 The tribe protected one another and, should a GID officer need shelter behind enemy lines or access to someone connected to the Islamic State inner circle, he knew that his blood brothers would never betray him.
The GID’s Baghdad Station operated with the tacit support of the Iraqi government.200 GID officers cultivated assets, established networks of informers and recruited reliable sources to be the service’s eyes and ears. For the first time in the service’s history, the GID went on the offensive.
Alexis Debat, a former French defense ministry official, was quoted saying that “any network the GID puts its mind to destroying is gone.”201 It was an overly simplistic compliment made in the backslapping euphoria that followed the joint Jordanian-American operation that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The pursuit of Zarqawi took close to three years and about sixty Jordanians and countless Americans and Iraqis were killed in the many months that Zarqawi remained free. Good old-fashioned human intelligence sealed al-Zarqawi’s fate. Jordanian officers used informants, dead drops, and the cloak and dagger that was essential in running an agent to pinpoint the precise location of the safe house five miles north of Baghdad where Zarqawi was hiding out.
The network that Zarqawi built was constructed on a Kevlar foundation of fanatics and powered by an unquenchable thirst for violence, but it lacked the organization to shield the principals from outside penetration. In the days following the creation of a council of clerics that would serve as the seed for al-Baghdadi’s future Islamic State, the first order of business was to create a counterintelligence force that would hunt down and exterminate all enemies foreign and domestic.202
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi was the name of the man who built the Emni, the Islamic State’s counterespionage and counterintelligence apparatus, from a few scribbles on a notepad into one of the Middle East’s most effective and brutal secret police forces. Al-Khlifawi was tall and soft-spoken with a gaunt appearance and a mild manner about him; a white beard concealed a boney jawline. He had been a colonel, a counterintelligence military officer in Saddam Hussein’s Directorate of General Military Intelligence, who was schooled by the best spy hunters in the former Warsaw Pact and the most vicious minds in Iraq’s Baath Party to ferret out traitors, saboteurs and scapegoats, and to make examples of them and their families. An Iraqi patriot, he had been indoctrinated into the belief that extraordinary and inhumane measures were necessary to preserve the state and its leader.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi lost his state and his leader following the American-led invasion. Paul Bremer’s foolish decision to disband the Iraqi military and civil service denied al-Khlifawi a pension and a future. Bitter and vowing revenge, al-Khlifawi managed to meet Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and became a key officer in al-Qaeda in Iraq. Once underground, al-Khlifawi was known by the nom de guerre of Haji Bakr.203 Even utterance of his name was forbidden, though. As an intelligence officer for Zarqawi, he held one of the most secretive posts in the terror group.
Haji Bakr was ultimately captured by Iraqi and American forces and was a prisoner at the Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib incubators of terror, teaming up with the likes of al-Baghdadi and Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi. Haji Bakr escaped prison along with the men who would form the foundations of the Islamic State in 2010 and began to blueprint the design of what internal and external security inside the Caliphate would be like. The civil war in Syria was an opportunity to fast-track the ambitious plans of turning a religious idea into facts on the ground.
Haji Bakr considered himself to be a masterful spy chief and modeled himself on Markus Wolf, the legendary East German Stasi head who became the inspiration for Karla, John le Carré’s KGB mastermind in the Smiley trilogy. In fact, Bakr designed his police state’s infrastructure as a carbon copy of the East German Stasi. The Stasi, after all, was a close ally of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service and instrumental in helping the Baath leadership transform Iraq into a police state.204 Haji Bakr called this force the Emni, from the Arabic word emniyyah, which meant trust, security or safety.205
The Emni was an all-powerful force inside the Caliphate responsible for everything involving the organization’s security. It was the Islamic State’s military intelligence arm, providing fluid battlefield intelligence gathering to commanders in the field, and advanced espionage operations inside Middle Eastern countries where the Islamic State was strong and intended to conquer. The Emni also maintained active espionage operations to undermine and deter coalition capabilities, as well as an active effort against the Syrian regime. But because nothing in Middle Eastern wars was ever defined by logic, Emni agents also maintained covert ties with President Assad’s spies, the Iranian MOIS and Hezbollah’s security arm.206 There was also an Emni liaison desk that maintained contact with rival Islamic fundamentalist groups around the world. “The bad guys always found a way to talk with one another,” a GID officer said. “They were pragmatist above all else.”207
The Emni ran networks of agents inside Turkey to make sure that the pipeline of arms, equipment, cash and fighters flowed continuously into the Islamic State. They also sent operatives posing as refugees into the camps in Turkey and Jordan to make sure that vital information was not being leaked to enemy intelligence services. The Emni recruited and deployed foreign fighters in the Islamic State ranks for intelligence-gathering and special operations missions in their home countries.208 The Emni also oversaw all thefts of oil, food and antiquities to make sure that the foot soldiers of the fight weren’t tempted to take anything for themselves; anyone who stole from the Islamic State coffers was summarily executed. The Emni weaponized all the Caliphate’s propaganda—to use it as a weapon of fear and to prevent anyone from even thinking of betraying the cause.209 And, of course, the Emni was responsible for all aspects of the sex trade inside the Caliphate. The clerics and the religious wise men on the ruling councils might have found Koranic verses to justify the systematic rape of girls and women of all ages,210 but the administration of the mass rapes, abductions and slavery fell to the Emni. “And, like any criminal organization,” a GID officer named Omar explained, “those at the top satisfied their own perversions first.”211
Most of all, the Emni was a dreaded, fanatic and barbarically minded internal security and counterespionage force. Each foreign volunteer traveling to the ever-stretching frontiers of the Islamic State was vetted by Emni investigators. Men who flew on the European low-cost carriers into Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen city airport and then made their way into Syria to fight, find a bride and earn a mercenary’s wage were questioned for days by Emni specialists; the Q&A was done in Arabic, even though many of the men coming from France, Belgium and elsewhere could muster only a few words of the language that they had picked up at home or in prison. Referrals—a good word from a local Islamic State recruiter, or from a local imam, or even a copy of their arrest records—were examined with great care to make sure the volunteer was either a jihadi tourist or a religious mercenary and not an enemy plant. All volunteers were quarantined while questioned and checked out. The interrogations were thorough and harsh and often involved beatings.
Deep-cover Emni agents overseas carried out secondary background checks in the home countries. Haji Bakr was wary of the Belgian General Intelligence and Security Service or France’s Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure attempting to insert a deep-cover plant among those flocking to fight for al-Baghdadi.
Emni detachments followed the fighting units into battle, and into each town and village that the Islamic Station captured. Emni specialists pored over captured documents and records from the local Syrian secret police stations to assemble a loyalty profile of everyone who lived under their control. And just like every fanatic organization before them—from the Khmer Rouge to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard—the Emni targeted rich and powerful families, seized their homes and assets, and administered harsh treatment to the family heads as an example to everyone else. Thousands were executed without due process, trial or reason. Fear was everything.
Fear deterred anyone from thinking about trying to assassinate the Islamic State’s leadership. Emni agents served as a Praetorian guard to al-Baghdadi and all the top religious leaders and military commanders who sat on the ruling councils. The Emni also hunted spies. And enemy intelligence operatives—real or imagined—were everywhere.
Haji Bakr was killed in combat, caught in the middle of a firefight near the Syrian town of Tall Rifat, some thirteen miles due north of Aleppo in January 2014.212 His position was so secretive that the Islamic State propaganda machine made no mention of his death. Bakr was replaced by Abu Mohammed al-Adnani.
Haji Bakr had been an old-school spy chief. The organization was defined with a specific hierarchy. Emni operations were carried out locally, along the battle lines, and regionally, deep inside the Middle Eastern nations that were at war with the Islamic State. Structure ensured success. In this capacity, the Emni functioned like East Germany’s Stasi or one of Saddam Hussein’s many spy services—a cumbersome yet functional bureaucracy that successfully safeguarded the state. Al-Adnani had no use for structure or for the Iraqi intelligence service veterans that Bakr recruited to lead the Emni’s various departments. He sacked many of the men from Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib and replaced them with Tunisians and Moroccans, Chechens and Turks—men banished from their native lands who could never return home unless it was as a member of the Islamic State. The North Africans and Chechens were desperate. Al-Adnani was brilliant yet psychopathic. Together they created a lethal combination.
Al-Adnani rightfully saw enemies everywhere. He knew that he was in the crosshairs of the CIA, MI6, Assad’s air force intelligence, the Russian GRU and, of course, the Arab services led by the GID. He was obsessed by the dreaded aljasus, or spies, operating inside the Caliphate, and he took measures to hunt them down. Emni agents were always stationed alongside the hisbah, or police, at impromptu checkpoints to examine fighters and civilians passing through territory the Islamic State controlled. Anyone found carrying large amounts of cash was suspected of being an enemy agent and taken to be interrogated. Anyone caught with a GPS device was suspected of being a spy. Mobile phones were confiscated and examined. Anyone found to have a brand-new model smartphone was immediately taken in for questioning, torture and likely execution. If a smartphone was found to be empty, or recently reverted to factory conditions, the suspicion was heightened. The Emni even employed children to eavesdrop on conversations in the street213 and to look at which family bought a new car or spoke about plans to travel to Jordan or to Kurdish lines as a possible sign that they had sold information for cash. Emni agents had even infiltrated both the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds. “Most of the Da’esh security officers were veterans of the game,” a GID officer explained. “They were either in the security services of Iraq or somewhere in North Africa or they were in a prison learning the trade one interrogation at a time. They were a formidable foe.”
Emni personnel had remarkable autonomy in the territory they controlled. They were judge, jury and executioner of anyone they suspected of treachery. Informers were everywhere: in the market, in the mosque and even in the ranks of the men at arms—in their barracks, their mess halls, and even the homes they established for themselves with child brides and other women seized at gunpoint. Taxi drivers and merchants were recruited or forced to cooperate; virtually anyone who had contact with the outside world was always cast under a menacing veil of suspicion. In such instances it was quite common for people to fabricate information on the innocent or those with whom they had scores to settle, anything to avoid a bullet in the back of the head or a beheading. “Everyone was in a constant state of fear about being spied on,” a former militant admitted. “It was impossible to discuss anything, even with members of the same ethnic group, out of worry that the conversation was being recorded.”214
Anyone that the Emni suspected of working for a foreign intelligence service paid the ultimate price—guilt mattered little in matters of Islamic State justice. The executions always followed lengthy interrogations and torture, and were always held in public. The condemned were brought to the main squares. Ordinary citizens were forced to watch as the unfortunates were bent forward and pushed to their knees before an Emni executioner disposed of them. Being shot in the head was preferred to the other more gruesome forms of murder the henchmen sometimes dished out to the untrustworthy. Terrified citizens called Raqqa the “butcher’s block.”
The Emni’s lust for blood was matched only by their unbridled greed. The Emni controlled much of the cash that flowed into the Islamic State from black market oil sales, smuggling, extortion and sex trafficking. The Emni controlled the weekly stipends of cash handed out to the men in the trenches; those who made the pilgrimage to Syria and Iraq might have dreamed of the glory of jihad, but they fought for a paycheck.
GID psychologists assessed that Abu Mohammed al-Adnani was a psychopath. Counterterrorism Division analysts who wrote reports that were shared with the Friends in Amman Station and with the British hypothesized that the beatings he endured while in prison turned him into a mental defect who was unable to control his impulses; if the clinical evaluation was correct, al-Adnani wouldn’t have been the first man—or the last—to lose his moral compass after being tortured by the secret police. The same reports diagnosed al-Adnani as being a paranoid schizophrenic. Al-Adnani thought that enemy spies were everywhere. So, too, were Syrian agents, and Iranian operatives. Al-Adnani was a byproduct of the political penal system that produced victims who suffered from countless psychological ailments and mental scar tissue. However, al-Adnani was correct inasmuch the spies were all around.
The French took control of Syria following the First World War. French—not English—was the country’s second language, and the nearly two million souls who lived in the confines of greater Damascus, the oldest inhabited city in the world, identified more with the chic sparkle of Paris than with the romantic Bedouin attachment to the desert. Syria was also cut across religious and clannish lines that were foreign to the tribal culture that existed inside Jordan and Iraq. The GID couldn’t summon common contacts among the tribesmen and clans in Syria as it did with its connections in Iraq in Syria—those natural and blood links simply didn’t exist.
Syria was a beguiling and frustrating espionage target for the coalition intelligence services. Somehow the Syrian population managed to survive forty-plus years of life inside Syria before tempers and hatreds erupted into full-blown civil war. Seven different intelligence agencies spied on virtually every aspect of Syrian life to locate and make examples of anyone brave—or foolish—enough to voice dissatisfaction with the regime. Government spies were everywhere. They listened in on phone conversations, intercepted the mail and even planted microphones inside the bedrooms of married couples; informants were recruited from all walks of life to point a finger at their neighbors, coworkers and even spouses. Paranoia was beaten deep into the collective Syrian soul; a late-night knock on the door was feared more than a cancer diagnosis. People were often taken away in the middle of the night only to be never heard from again. Keeping quiet and trusting no one became part of the Syrian molecular structure; the Western spy agencies—even the GID—found these traits, beaten into the national psyche over generations, difficult to overcome.
But Syria was the target. Mosul and other stretches of territory that abutted the Kurdistan Regional Government lines heading south along the Tigris River in Iraq might have been the Islamic State’s banking and territorial epicenter, but Syria was the Caliphate’s soul. The Islamic State command structure was based in Syria, and the men who led the lightning-fast military assault across the Levant felt safe in Raqqa and in the Aleppo vicinity. The shadow battlefield of Syria was unlike anything that the GID had ever encountered before.
On paper, Syrian terrain controlled by the Islamic State was impenetrable to spies—the Emni was too entrenched in the miserable reality of day-to-day life under the black banner control. But misery spawned animus, and those who suffered at the hands of the Islamic State needed no cajoling to assist those hunting for information. There was no shortage of men whose wives had been raped, women whose husbands had been executed on a whim in the name of the Prophet, and too many children killed in the indiscriminate fighting. Revenge was the most powerful—and reliable—reason for someone living in Raqqa to be recruited as a spy.
Spying against the Islamic State was all about the up close and personal: the eyes on a target and the one-on-one rapport between asset and case officer. Being a good case officer required being tough yet considerate and even kind, asking the right questions and not stopping until the right answers are given. A good case officer never wondered if he’d be able to extract information from an asset but rather how.
A good case officer was paternal. He worried about a source’s safety, health and family’s welfare even though if the source was captured, there was nothing that the intelligence officer could do to save him or his family. “How many kids do you have that Allah will look after?” was the kind of question a GID officer would ask of a man he recruited. A case officer who spoke the same language as his source and who prayed to the same God knew how to gain the trust of a source with cultural keys that provided a sense of brotherhood and safety even inside confines as dangerous as Syria under Islamic State control. The cultural keys also provided psychological insight into running an agent. Fear, weakness and hardship were to be manipulated with the proper religious connections and family assurances. Pressure was always easy to exert on people who were desperately afraid for their lives. But knowing how to talk to a man who was pious and who believed that Islam was being harmed by the khawarij, required finesse and cultural and religious intimacy. An agent had to lie and deceive to survive, but when reporting to his case officer, the agent had to be straightforward and honest for the information he supplied to be believed by those higher up in the chain of command. Spying was a dirty business.
The best information always came from a mole, someone planted deep inside the targeted group, but it was nearly impossible to tempt someone who swore allegiance to the Islamic State to betray al-Baghdadi. “They were untouchable with the sort of temptation an intelligence officer usually used on someone he wanted to recruit or turn,” a GID officer named Marwan4 explained. “We couldn’t offer safety in another country to any of the foreign fighters because they had come to Syria from other countries in the first place. We couldn’t offer the operatives money, because those psychopaths stole whatever they wanted to. They had weapons and could rifle through anyone’s pocket anytime they wanted. We couldn’t blackmail the fighters by uncovering acts of personal perversion, because they were proud of their sexual crimes. They abducted and raped girls as young as seven and women as old as seventy. Everyone has a vulnerability, a soft-spot, or even a self-defined resolve that can be exploited, but how does an intelligence officer tempt someone who has abandoned his soul? These men already considered themselves dead and waiting for their spot in the afterlife. They were incorruptible and virtually impossible to compromise.”215
The CIA pledged its official support for the GID mission to eviscerate the Islamic State leadership, but they had other missions and interests in Iraq and Syria. The CIA had a reputation of overpaying for information—the expression “a trailer load of cash,” a former State Department agent commented, originated from somewhere in the Langley dictionary. CIA case officers working with the Inherent Resolve task force, in northern Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East all had interests to try to recruit human assets inside the Islamic State. It would not have been a stretch for Syrians and others to be working for multiple intelligence agencies—sometimes from the same country—at the same time. The staging areas of Turkey, northern Jordan and the Kurdistan Regional Government were full of men and women speaking different languages, wearing 5.11 Tactical khaki trousers, eating power bars and looking for sources.
The CIA, the DIA and the NSA all had separate operations going on inside the Caliphate. Shipping containers full of cash were useful when searching for friends in the war zone and the Americans always came with money. When cash couldn’t buy assistance or information, weapons were the preferred currency. But here, too, the covert confusion diluted the allied effort. In northern Syria, in Azaz, Marea and Aleppo, rebels supported by the CIA were fighting rebels who were armed by the DIA and the Pentagon; the bloody battles were fought between the Fursan al-Haq, or Knights of Justice, that Langley supported and the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces who were the benefactors of the soldier-spies at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling at the DIA.216 The war—let alone the intelligence-gathering effort—was virtually impossible to coordinate and control, especially since the battle lines changed daily, sometimes hourly. The map of the Caliphate shifted with each firefight.
Clandestine officers from the CIA did not venture out to war zones with a small entourage. The lessons from Beirut, Khost and Benghazi were clear: Agency officers traveled under heavy guard—specialists and shooters—when debriefing a source inside war zones. Security was everything, and the Agency and the other American intelligence services preferred technical means such as satellite imagery, drones and cyber warfare to the shoe-leather-slugging work of a case officer behind enemy lines.
Every espionage training course anywhere in the world always instructed future intelligence officers that the recruitment of human assets traditionally happens in conquered territory when individuals could be pressed and sometimes squeezed for information. HUMINT efforts were always easier in countries engulfed by war where the central government was weak or nonexistent.217 Or at least they were on paper. The HUMINT end of the manhunt for Kasasbeh’s killers fell on the GID.
Prior to each mission, senior GID commanders would meet with the intelligence officers before they departed on their assignments into harm’s way. Operations were meticulously planned in order to not only achieve results, but to make sure that the men returned home safe and sound. Enormous care—and countless man hours of preparation—were invested to make sure that each assignment was planned in such a way that maximum security was assured. But even though the GID went to great lengths to train and prepare its officers for the dangers of the work, there were never any absolutes in the espionage business—especially when facing off against an enemy like the Islamic State and the trigger-happy Emni henchmen that were employed as counterespionage spy hunters. GID commanders were confident in the ability of their men, but supervisory officers worried when their officers were out on operational assignments; the bosses spent long sleepless nights on their sofas at headquarters nourished by a diet of nicotine and caffeine as they monitored communications with their forces in the field who faced unimaginable peril. The commanders hoped that they would remain invisible and silent throughout, recalling the Bedouin proverb that “only in complete silence will you hear the desert.”