I FOUND TOM on the roof of our house, looking through binoculars toward the south, in the direction of the Iraqi lines. He listened silently as I told him about “Robert Pope” and our recall. Even as I spoke, I was running through a mental checklist of what we had to do to leave the north.
“I can feel it,” he said when I finished. “Talabani’s going to attack tonight, and Washington’s going to have a lot more to worry about than someone named Pope.”
Tom handed me the binoculars. All I could see were a few shimmering lights in the plains below Salah al-Din. Then, toward the south, the faint tail of a flare shot up into the sky. It burst and hung there, giving off a spectral glow. A few seconds later there was a single, bright flash, maybe from an artillery cannon, although I couldn’t be certain at this distance. A minute, maybe more, passed in silence before an artillery battery opened up and explosions began reverberating through the foothills around Salah al-Din. Suddenly, the night sky turned into a light show of artillery, flares, and tracers.
My first thought, to be honest, was an old one: Damn, the Kurds are at it again. But the explosions were all coming from south of Irbil, nowhere near Talabani’s and Barzani’s lines. Tom was right: Talabani had decided to attack V Corps.
Taking two steps at a time, I ran downstairs to call Paul, the paramilitary officer I had stationed at Talabani’s command center in Irbil. Paul managed to shout over the confusion that about two hundred of Talabani’s guerrillas had just encircled a brigade from the 38th Division at Guwayr and were about to overrun it.
Paul called in reports all night. With only two wounded, Talabani’s pech merga annihilated the 38th Division’s 848th Brigade, capturing its headquarters. They also captured the attached 601st Battery. About eighty Iraqi soldiers were taken prisoner, including the brigade commander, Colonel ’Abd-al-’Aziz Namuri. Talabani’s men dynamited the battalion’s bunkers and destroyed its 152mm and 130mm artillery, looting what ammunition and small arms they could carry back in their Toyotas. Then they turned back a relieving force of Republican Guards, destroying an armored personnel carrier and several troop transports. The ferocity of the Kurds’ attack stunned the Republican Guard’s commander. He abandoned any attempt to relieve the 848th and ordered his forward units to take up defensive positions. It was a crushing victory—the first time the Kurds had inflicted this much damage to the Iraqi army since the March 1991 uprising.
As soon as Washington was awake, I called Iraqi operations.
“Yeah. We’ve read your report.” It was the pasty-faced reports officer with stringy, matted hair who thought I was a cowboy. Before I left Washington for the north, she had made a point of telling me she believed it was silly for the CIA to have a base in Iraq. “We picked up some collateral intelligence,” she went on.
“Some?”
“It looks like there may have been some sort of fighting in the V Corps area last night. Rocket-propelled grenade and machine-gun fire. It stopped about oh-six-hundred this morning, your time. There was a report of about thirty prisoners moved to Irbil. But we can’t confirm it.”
“What do you mean you can’t confirm it? We watched an artillery battle go on all night.”
“We don’t have any imagery to back it up.”
“Yeah, of course. The attack went down at night.”
“I’m just telling you what they think back here.”
“You mean you think Talabani faked the whole thing —all that artillery—just to amuse us.”
I hung up. I should have known better than to argue with headquarters. You never got anywhere. Worse, it was considered bad form, possibly even a sign of warped objectivity. As far as Washington was concerned, if the big eye in the sky didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.
I had more faith in my own eyes and wanted to see the war for myself. “Tom, pack up,” I told him. “We’re going to the front to look for Talabani.”
A dozen jerry cans of gasoline and water, two AK-47s, a couple boxes of rations, a compass, a ground positioning system, an air navigational map of Iraq, and our LST-5 tacset were about all our old two-door Nissan Patrol pickup could hold. I decided not to bring our bodyguards. A convoy would attract too much attention.
Between Salah al-Din and Irbil we didn’t see another car. Even the fields, normally dotted with brightly dressed Kurdish women planting spring seed, were deserted. As we crossed the Irbil plain, we could see that Talabani’s trenches, artillery emplacements, and bunkers had been abandoned. Irbil was wide open to an attack if Barzani dared.
In Irbil we picked up an escort to take us to Sulamaniyah, a good-size Kurdish town near the Iranian border in northeast Iraq. Along the way, we ate lunch in Dukah, at a shish kebab stand on the lake. A rusted sign hanging by one nail advertised sailboats for rent. I wondered what had happened to the boats and how many years it would be before anyone would sail there again. We were below the thirty-sixth now, fair game for Saddam’s gunships.
It was dark when we drove into Sulaymaniyah. The streets were deserted, and there wasn’t a light on in the city except at Talabani’s headquarters. A mob of young and old men surrounded it, trying to push their way in.
“Volunteers,” said the guard as he cleared a path for us.
The Sulamaniyah commander showed us into his office and served us tea. He pointed at a map behind his desk with a ruler and attempted to explain what was happening on the front. But he seemed to know only where the Iraqi army was. Finally he gave up, shrugged, and suggested we leave right away for Talabani’s camp. A guide sent by Talabani was waiting to take us there.
We drove up into the mountains south of Sulamaniyah, following a packed-dirt, unmarked road with our headlights off. Saddam’s gunships were firing at anything that moved. A little after midnight we turned off a side road and descended into a clearing. In the middle of it was a squat, one-story cinder-block building, seemingly deserted, but as soon as we pulled up in front and turned off the engine, a dozen pech merga materialized and silently helped us unload the car. They wanted it moved away from the building as quickly as possible.
Talabani came barreling out of the building like a bear out of his cave, grabbed me around the waist, and lifted me off the ground. “It’s about time you got here. You’ve been missing all the fun,” he whispered. “And in your honor we will not sleep in the fields tonight but in my palace.”
He hooked his arm through mine and guided me into the pitch-black building, a school that had been abandoned during the 1988 fighting between the Kurds and the government. Only Talabani, Tom, and I would sleep there. The pech merga were scattered in the surrounding hills and caves, where Saddam’s helicopters would have trouble finding them. Talabani’s room at the end of the hall was empty except for a half-dozen boxes filled with papers and books and a few blankets on the floor. The only light was from a single battery-powered camping lantern. We sat down on a rug on the cement floor.
“We’re going again tonight,” Talabani said as he rooted around in a huge humidor for three fresh Cuban Cohiba cigars. “We are going to hit Karablakh tonight. My guys should be infiltrating across the lines as we speak.” Since I had never heard of Karablakh, Talabani rolled over to get a map and show me where it was.
Stoked on his own adrenaline, Talabani ranted about how bad off the Iraqi army was; about his plans to capture Kirkuk, the center of Iraq’s oil industry and, he assured us, the rightful property of the Kurds; and about the democratic future of Iraq. He would have gone on all night if my eyes hadn’t started to close.
“Go to bed,” he said. “But first, where is the cavalry?”
“It seems to me you’re doing fine without any help.”
“I’m running out of ammunition.”
“Don’t worry, Jalal. Washington is just waking up to what you are doing. It’s the same game plan: Get rid of Saddam.” That much, at still thought to be true. 
And Tony Lake’s cable hadn’t ordered Talabani or any of the others to scrap their plans to overthrow Saddam. It had simply advised that “any decision to proceed will be on your own.” Talabani understood that, and he knew as I did that Iraqis would never be able to live in peace as long as Saddam was in power.
Talabani fished two more cigars out of his humidor. “Here, take this and go call Washington.”
“Jalal, there’s one other thing.”
He looked at me.
“We’re leaving, but a new team is going to replace us.”
Talabani handed me my cigar without responding.
“Go to bed. We’re all tired,” he finally said.
About ten minutes later he tapped on my door, came in, and handed me a faxed report on Karablakh. His troops had just overrun a battalion there.
“See,” Talabani said, his mood brighter. “The army is crumbling.”
I got Bob’s deputy in the Iraqi operations group on the tacset and told him about Karablakh. Unimpressed, he asked, “Where are you?”
“Singaw.”
“Where?”
“It’s a little village south of the thirty-sixth—Indian country. I’m with Talabani.”
The deputy gasped. “You’re out of your mind, and they’re going to string you up as soon as you get back.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard him and told him, as I hung up, that I would be joining Talabani’s pech merga in an attack on Kirkuk.
I was just falling asleep when Talabani knocked on the door again.
“Saddam’s panicking. He’s started shelling all along our lines.” He closed the door gently. I could hear him chuckling back to his room.
Talabani was clearly going to be up all night, reading reports coming in on the fighting, but for me there was nothing like numbing exhaustion to induce sleep. I didn’t care that there was only a thin wool blanket to sleep on, or that Saddam’s helicopter gunships were out there somewhere in the night looking for us.
About six the next morning, Talabani woke us to inspect the troops. They were clustered all over the fields around the school, cleaning their weapons, loading up their Toyotas, preparing for more raids that night. As Talabani moved among them, they surged around him, bowing and kissing his hand. An aide brought us a tray of sweet tea to drink while we walked around.
Talabani pressed me to stay with him, but time was running out. We had to be in Ankara in a day and a half. A lightning tour of the front was all Tom and I had time for. Talabani hugged us good-bye and we promised to meet soon.
“In Baghdad.” Talabani laughed.
The road to Chamchamal, a town a few miles east of Kirkuk, was paved and in good shape. Again we were the only car. It was a clear day, and we expected to be in Chamchamal in less than an hour. Then we saw it—an Iraqi Mi-24 gunship hovering over a ridge about three miles away. It wasn’t moving or turning. It was fixed in the sky, watching. We could only hope that it hadn’t seen us—there wasn’t a rock, tree, or hollow to hide behind—and that Talabani’s pech merga had splashed enough Kurdish mud on the Nissan to camouflage it. In less than a minute, the Mi-24 could have turned, flown into easy range, and vaporized us and the Nissan. We waited for what seemed like hours until the helicopter dipped behind the ridge, and then we drove away as fast as the Nissan could go.
Chamchamal was oddly quiet. People were shopping at the open-air market, but as soon as we turned off the engine, we could hear the boom of heavy incoming artillery. In the foothills east of Chamchamal, puffs of gray-white smoke hung in the air.
We continued right up to the front lines, to one of the crossing points between Kurdistan and Iraq. A group of Talabani’s fighters milled around the makeshift border post. They didn’t have any idea what was happening on the other side. All they knew was that the Iraqi police had abandoned their post and the border was wide open.
Our last stop before going back to Salah al-Din was Irbil. As soon as we cleared the gates of Talabani’s main military garrison, we drove into a sea of Iraqi prisoners: maybe four football fields of them, standing, sitting, lying down. Outside the compound, alongside the road, were captured artillery pieces, Kamaz trucks, rocket launchers, crates of AK-47s, anything the pech merga could carry back to Irbil from their raids. The line of equipment stretched as far as we could see.
The PUK officer in charge met us at the duty room, assuming we’d come to interrogate his prisoners. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we didn’t have the people—and wouldn’t ever—to interrogate his prisoners, but I did want to talk to at least one. He brought me into a room where a dozen Iraqi officers sat on benches along the wall. I picked a captain at random. He looked to be about thirty years old and exhausted. Early that morning, a little before two, he told me, he got up to check on his company’s pickets and was surprised to find the first position abandoned, as well as the ones on each side. He was on his way back to the company’s command post to find out what had happened when automatic gunfire exploded all around him. He waited for his troops to respond, but no one did—not a shot. Almost simultaneously, Talabani’s pech merga were everywhere. It was as if they had dug a tunnel and just popped out of the ground. He had no choice but to surrender. I thanked the captain and gave him my last pack of military rations.
Before leaving, I saw the Irbil commander. He briefed me on the latest attack. His troops had overrun the 847th Brigade. Kirkuk was now vulnerable, and Talabani could take it if he had enough ammunition.
On the drive back to Salah al-Din, Tom described the Iraqi equipment he’d examined. There was little doubt, he said, that it had recently been captured. Based on long experience, he knew the guns could have come only from Iraqi units.
Back at the house, I sent a message to headquarters about the 847th and followed up with a call.
“We’re still not picking up anything from overhead about the attacks.” It was the pasty-faced reports officer again.
“You can’t be serious. Do you really think there’s a phony war going on up here? I’ve just come from Irbil. We saw thousands of Iraqi prisoners with our own eyes. And there’s the captured artillery.”
The prisoners, the artillery, Tom’s assurance that it was real, my assurance as the senior officer in the field that this wasn’t a game—none of it made any difference to her.
“Fine,” she said. “I believe you, but the rest of the community doesn’t—especially the Pentagon.”
I knew she was talking about the CIA and had mentioned the Pentagon only to deflect my annoyance, but none of that helped my mood.
“Well, tell those jerks to put up their platforms and they might see something other than the martinis planted on the bar in front of them.”
“I’m just telling you what they’re telling me.”
“Yeah, I’m star ting to get it. If it’s not in The Washington Post or The New York Times, it’s not true. Should one of their fancy Washington byline correspondents get on the wrong airplane and end up in Kurdistan, I’ll be sure to point him to the front.”
Silence.
“Give me Bob,” I said, “please.”
She did, but he wasn’t impressed. “Give it a break,” he said as soon as he got on the telephone.
“Bob, listen to me a second. There’s a real live war going on up here. In another week there will be no V Corps.”
“No one here gives a shit about the Kurds. You got it? The next thing I want to hear from you is that you’ve crossed the border into Turkey.”
“You’ve got to understand that at least in the opposition’s mind, I’m personally associated with what is going on —the collapse of V Corps. If you pull me out, the offensive will stop.”
“And sir, you had better understand that Tony Lake wants your scalp. You have an appointment with Fred Turco at oh-nine-hundred on March 15. You’d better fucking be there.”
AS PREDICTED, Talabani’s offensive petered out and V Corps did not collapse. Talabani survived, though, with enough of his pech merga intact to go back to fighting Barzani in what seems to be a never-ending Kurdish civil war. Chalabi, for his part, wandered around for a while, then returned to Salah al-Din. Barzani, probably under Saddam’s orders, eventually evicted him. The general whose defection had brought me to northern Iraq did go on to Damascus, and from there to London. And Saddam Hussein was only moderately discomforted by it all.
Not long afterward, Saddam started trading oil for food, which eased the suffering inside Iraq just enough to stem the tide of defections from his army. So if we want him out now, it will probably take a war, not a coup.
As for me, I had orders to report to Langley, Virginia, at 0900 on March 15, and so I did.