CHALABI READ Tony Lake’s message and collapsed on the sofa.
“Does this mean we have to stop everything?” he asked me, almost inaudibly.
“Ahmad, you read English as well as I do. It says it’s up to you to go ahead or not.”
“Have you given it to Masud?”
I knew where Chalabi was heading. He was right, too. The major general who had defected from Saddam’s army was forced to fold his plans into Chalabi’s as best he could thanks to Washington’s refusal to respond to his coup proposal. Even though Chalabi wasn’t to be trusted with the fine print, the two had made common cause. Barzani, though, had watched Chalabi’s preparations for the March 4 uprising with undisguised anger. He couldn’t simply refuse to participate—doing so would cost him too much face with the Kurds—but he expected me to stop Chalabi. It infuriated him when I stuck to the position that the U.S. believed all Iraqis would be better off without Saddam and that we would thus encourage any opposition group that was serious about changing the government in Baghdad. Chalabi and I both knew that Lake’s message was a heaven-sent excuse for Barzani to sit out the action.
“Has Mr. Lake never heard of the Bay of Pigs?” Chalabi asked, standing up, his face a bright scarlet. “As soon as Masud sees this message, he’s going to screw everyone. I guarantee you that.” He wadded Lake’s message up and threw it in the corner. “Fuck Lake. He might be able to scare Masud into not doing anything, but not me. I’m going through with it.”
Chalabi walked me to my car and opened my door.
“Lake could not have picked a worse time to pull out,” Chalabi said, now brooding. “I’m just afraid that at the end of the day, it’s going to be our blood on the floor rather than Saddam’s.”
Just as Chalabi predicted, Barzani dropped out, even before I could show him Lake’s message.
When I pulled up in front of Barzani’s Sar-i Rash palace—the eagle’s nest above Salah al-Din where I had met him so many times during the last month—it was obvious he had decamped. The windows were shuttered; the cars, gone. The two guards at the front gate said they had no idea where he could be found.
I went to look for Nicherwan Barzani, Masud’s nephew and second in command, to give him Lake’s message. Nicherwan invited me over for dinner, and I was able to get a good look around his house. The Italian designer furniture, the Persian rugs, and other finery screamed money. Clearly not all the revenues from the smuggled oil were going into the KDP’s war chest. The Barzanis, Nicherwan and Uncle Masud, certainly had come a long way from their dirt poor, one-mule village hanging on the side of Kurdistan’s barren scarp to their Sar-i Rash estates and virtual country in the north. The oil business was good. The last thing they needed was a dustup with their business partner, Saddam.
“Masud already knows,” Nicherwan said sulkily, speaking through the grille of his door. “He already heard from our guy in Washington.”
He only shrugged when I asked him what his uncle was going to do about the March 4 uprising, but I had a bad feeling we were in for trouble. Later that afternoon, Chalabi confirmed my suspicion: Barzani was on the Turkish border, in Zakhu, ready to hop across and take refuge with the Turks if things turned out badly. I just hoped it wasn’t too late for the colonel to pull back and try another day.
CHALABI DIDN’T CHANGE his mind overnight. As reliable as a Swiss clock, the show started on March 4. By about eight that evening, the former school that served as the Iraqi National Congress headquarters was lit up like an amusement park. Somewhere Chalabi had found an enormous generator. Trucks filled the parking lot, waiting to load up INC recruits and head to the Iraqi lines. Toyota Land Cruisers pulled up in front, collected messages, and left with a squeal of tires. Inside, it was pure circus: ringing telephones, shouting aides waving paper in the air; everything, it seemed, but the one thing the Kurds needed most—the support of the United States.
The general was sitting alone in an empty office when I walked in on him. He wore a newly pressed major general’s uniform. A shiny officer’s saber lay across the desk in front of him. He stood up and weakly shook my hand. In another hour, he said, an escort would take him to the Iraqi army lines, where he would be met and taken to Tikrit to link up with his colleagues. The general’s arrival in Tikrit would be the signal for the coup to start.
The general didn’t mention Lake’s message, even though I had given it to him the day before. Like Chalabi, he felt it was too late to turn back. The colonel from the tank school who was to lead the assault had already armed his tanks with stolen shells; there was no way to return them and not be found out. I could do nothing to help. The general was either going to make it across the lines or he wasn’t; his uprising was going to succeed or fail. I shook his hand, figuring I would never see him again, and set out for home. As I walked back, someone in the distance fired an illumination flare into the night sky.
I WENT TO BED expecting Chalabi to wake me with news, but the night passed without a word from him. At around nine the next morning—by now it was March 5—I set out to the INC headquarters. Even if the fight was going poorly, I thought, the place was sure to be a beehive of activity. Wrong. The building was completely abandoned. The generator was gone. There wasn’t a car in sight, not even a guard to tell me where everyone had gone. The front door was banging open and shut in the wind. Inside, the offices were bare, stripped clean—computers, file cabinets, furniture. I remember being half surprised that the radiators hadn’t been unbolted and taken off the walls.
As I trotted back to the CIA house, I started to compose in my head the message I would write to headquarters. Dear Langley: I write with the sad news that last night I carelessly misplaced the Iraqi opposition.
One of Chalabi’s aides was waiting for me at the house when I got back. Barzani had had the general arrested a little after midnight, just as he was about to cross the lines to go to Tikrit. Although Barzani released him six hours later, the Iraqi army had used the time to seal its lines in the north. About the time of the general’s arrest, Barzani called Chalabi to say that not only were his troops not going to participate in the uprising, but no one else was, either—at least from his critical patch of Kurdistan. The message delivered, Barzani’s troops, under Nicherwan’s command, promptly arrested every INC member it could find who carried a rifle. Barzani, the aide told me, placed the blame squarely on Washington’s shoulders. The intent of Lake’s message was clear: He wanted the general stopped as well as Chalabi. Faced with such massive betrayal, Chalabi had pulled up stakes and moved on to Irbil. Talabani, who controlled the city, hadn’t moved on March 4, but at least he still was paying lip service to action on Saddam.
The following morning, March 6, I awoke to see the general’s car pulling up in front. He’d exchanged his major general’s uniform for a cheap plaid sport coat. Even his mustache seemed to droop.
“Sir,” he said quietly as soon as he sat down on the sofa. “I must leave now. I must go to Damascus to put my children in school.”
And why not, I thought? His couriers, the secret committee, the colonel had all been arrested. There was no way Saddam was going to spare them. The general saw no point in keeping a morbid vigil in the north, waiting for an assassin’s bullet.
I could tell he wanted to say a lot more. He had put everything on the line—his country, his family, his life. He had trusted us, trusted the CIA, and we had let the coup go forward, right up until the very end when the White House pulled the plug without warning or a decent explanation. He kept his own counsel, though, and the two of us sat in silence, finishing our tea. In truth, I still don’t know what I might have said. That Washington in the end just hadn’t wanted to commit? That even though I had kept my masters fully informed, they had dithered and dithered and, in the end, finally decided that too much was at stake to upset the status quo in Iraq? That, faced with a choice between sins of commission or omission, Washington had chosen the latter and left good and brave men twisting in the wind thousands of miles across the ocean? All of it seemed beyond expression. Instead I walked the general out, shook his hand, and waited until his car disappeared around the corner at the end of the street.
Back inside, I told Tom to raise the CIA’s relay station in northern Virginia. The debacle was looking more and more complete, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I wanted to see if the satellites had picked up anything, like a division, a company, or even a single tank out of place.
The news was about as bad as it could get. By noon on March 5—on what was supposed to be D Day for the dissidents—the Iraqi army was off high alert. The armor that had been patrolling the streets in Mawsil and Kirkuk since February 28 was gone. There was no sign of movement in the garrisons of the 76th Brigade, the 15th Infantry Division, and the 5th Mechanized Division, the three units that were to have joined the coup. But what I was really interested in was the colonel’s garrison near Tikrit. Shit. Nothing out of place. If his tanks had moved out of their sheds on March 4, they were back now.
AT 10:22 THAT NIGHT, the secure telephone rang. It was Bob 
, my boss in Washington. Since I had been in the north, he’d called me only once.
“What’s happening out there?” he asked.
“Nothing. We’re just sitting here around the pool sipping frozen daiquiris.”
“Cut the crap. What I’m going to tell you, you can’t repeat to anyone. Do you understand?” he said. His voice had gone cold.
After I assured him I did, he asked, “Is anyone on the team using the alias Robert Pope?”
“Never heard the name.” Everyone on the team was using an alias except me, but no one was using Robert Pope.
“You’d better be right, because you’re skating on thin ice. I can’t tell you what’s going on. I shouldn’t have even asked you about Pope. So this conversation never happened. Copy?”
There was no point in asking what he was talking about, because Bob would have told me if he could have. A retired marine colonel who had joined the CIA in his late forties, Bob followed orders. He may not have liked or agreed with them, but he followed them. If he said he couldn’t tell me, I knew he wouldn’t.
“You’re to come back to Washington as soon as you can. When you pass through Ankara, don’t tell anyone anything. They could be potential witnesses. And when you get home, don’t call anyone. Especially don’t call anyone from Iraqi operations. They could be witnesses, too.”
Witnesses? The word definitely had a bad ring to it, but it was something else I couldn’t do anything about from 6,192 thousand miles away.
“Bob, I can’t come back now. The opposition’s in the toilet, but it’s not hopeless. Give me a couple weeks and I can put things back together.”
“You didn’t hear what I said. You’re being pulled out. End of story.”
“I’ve got people spread across the north. I can’t pick up and leave just like that.”
“Okay. You can take up to four days if you have to. But not a day longer.”
Only when Bob hung up did I realize that he hadn’t said a word about either the diversion or the coup. It was all the confirmation I needed that Washington intended to label both frauds. I knew enough about the way Washington worked to know that when it didn’t like some piece of information, it did everything in its power to discredit the messengers, which in this case were Chalabi and the general. So the corporate line in Washington was that nothing had happened in Iraq on March 4, nothing at all. Frankly, at that point, I wondered if Washington wasn’t right.