CHAPTER 22

Baghdad and Amman, 2008

For several months after I left Baghdad, my thoughts kept returning to Iraq. When I finally did return, a year later, the civil war was ending. My editors had asked me for one more tour. I was given the assignment of investigating the origins of the insurgency. Why had it happened? Who had propelled it forward? We knew the generic answers to these questions, but they wanted me to dig deeper.

Car bombs and death-squad killings had all but disappeared. Tareq and his brothers, save one who had fled to Europe, were still in Baghdad, but they seemed more relaxed. They were once again going out to restaurants along the banks of the Tigris; their children had returned to school. City parks had reopened and there, on lazy afternoons, families gathered cautiously. Worry had melted away, replaced by sanguine acceptance.

I knew what I was looking for this time. I had been trying to work my way into the assignment, getting close to people who knew about the insurgency, who had fought against it or participated in it. I knew I was getting close when I met Pete.

Pete worked for an American intelligence agency as a kind of jack-of-all-trades. He spoke Aramaic, the language of Christ. He was an Iraqi by birth, but his parents had fled to Michigan in the 1970s and raised him there. Detroit and its suburbs were filled with Iraqis, most of them Christian, who had fled Saddam Hussein’s regime. He graduated from an American college, married an Iraqi woman, and had two children. He had come back to Iraq around the same time I did — during the invasion in 2003, or shortly thereafter — and, also like me, he had been there on and off (more on than off) ever since.

We spoke regularly, often late into the night, going through packs of Marlboro Lights and glasses of whisky, or juice and tea. I queried him about his work, his life. I tried to get close to him, to make myself accessible and trustworthy. I followed my father’s advice and tried to be someone whom Pete would eventually trust. Sometimes during our conversations he grew quiet, answering my questions with nothing more than a yes or a no, or stopped talking altogether. He was twitchy and nervous, but his gaze was intense, and when fixed, it transmitted a measure of the anguish he endured.

One day a couple of weeks into my trip, Pete and I were having lunch at a chicken restaurant. Pete took off his sunglasses and reached for his cigarettes. He lit one and blew a stream of smoke between us. ‘Those guys, you know, our friends?’ he said, and paused as a skinny waiter set down two glass cups of black tea, half-full, with sugar. Then, ‘They’re a legal criminal organisation, man.’

American contractors and Iraqi security guards sat at nearby tables mowing through huge plates of rice and chicken, kebab, pillau, raw onions, and warm, diamond-shaped Iraqi bread. Pete looked at me sideways and carefully fashioned another horn of smoke as he cradled a pair of mobile phones. He leaned in close. ‘They can do whatever they want,’ he said. ‘I could never work for them.’ He paused and spun his wedding ring.

Our friends. Sometimes he said it with a nod of his head in this direction or that, as if they might be just around the corner, or sitting at the next table. Sometimes he called them the ORA, the Office of Regional Affairs, or the OGA, Other Government Agency — formless euphemisms for the CIA, words I thought only called attention to it more. Sometimes he just said ‘them’.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because I can’t lie, I can’t lie. Man, I’ve got so much stuff in my head I can’t sleep anymore. I’ve been here too long.’

He took a long drag on his cigarette and rubbed his temples. Then he glanced at me quizzically. ‘You journalists, you always want to know more, and more. There’s this curiosity.’ He paused, as if this fact was somehow antithetical to the very idea of survival — which it might have been, in his case. Or maybe it just felt grotesque, since so often journalistic curiosity could appear to have no real purpose. Either way, it was incongruent with the necessity of having to lie about what you did know to those you loved. Withholding became, at some point, a fabrication all its own.

‘I used to have that curiosity,’ he said, ‘but I’m not curious anymore, you know? Not at all. I just want to forget now. I want to erase what I already know. I want to fucking erase it all, man. I haven’t talked to anyone in years. I don’t tell my wife, my family. They don’t even know what I’m doing over here. She doesn’t know, and I’m not going to tell her.’

The most that Pete could do, it seemed, was to withhold information. And this was a problem because Pete had fantastical plans for saving Iraq, plans in which he played a leading role — as a broker, say, between two warring communities, or the middleman to a gathering of tribes who couldn’t agree on the rights of passage through disputed territory, or a saviour to his own beleaguered Christian people in the north, persecuted and threatened every day. Hanging over all of the daily chaos of Iraq were the plans to make Iraq an oasis for businessmen, to put a McDonald’s in every province, to kick the Kurds out of the federation once and for all. The vision of a peaceful Iraq was out there on the horizon; he knew it, and could see it. But now we were talking about how you got there.

‘So that’s all you do?’ he asked me, because my role must have seemed so inadequate to him. ‘Write stories? About what?’

I paused. Then, ‘So, your family,’ I said, deflecting. ‘Not even when you’re old?’

He shook his head. ‘Not ever.’

He didn’t know what to do with the cone of silence he had created, or brought into existence, and what effect it had had or was having on the people who lived in its shadow. Should he extend the protective coat he wore to everyone, he wondered, or maybe just warn them away from himself? He felt compelled to help, but he didn’t want his mission to include any more lost lives.

Pete told me about a time when an Iraqi soldier he thought he had befriended later tried to kill him by giving out his GPS coordinates to a group of insurgents. Pete found the man and called him in, putting the question to him directly. The guy denied it — swore on his life that he wasn’t a traitor. Several Iraqi colleagues held him down in front of Pete and said, ‘Do you want us to cut his head off? Just say the word and we’ll do it.’ Pete declined, but he told his men to take him away and ‘set him straight’, and after that nothing was heard from him again. Pete didn’t know if he had lost his head or not, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

‘These guys are going to be loyal to us until it doesn’t work for them anymore, and then they’re not, and we won’t be, either,’ he said. I asked what the idea was in the meantime, when all of those allegiances were being sorted out, when people were figuring out what they really believed and who they could really trust, and who they’d go to in their moment of panic. ‘The idea?’ he asked. ‘The idea is that in the meantime, things will get better, the situation will improve, people’s lives will improve.’ He shook out his cigarette with a dismissive motion, and the ash fluttered onto the floor. Looking around at the assortment of men in the bar, and then at me, and his eyes went soft. His mouth curled into a question because he wouldn’t let a smile bloom, and he twitched his head. ‘That’s got to happen, because if it doesn’t, then think of all the collateral damage we’ll have then. You see where I’m going with this, huh? Do you?’

I said I thought I did.

We sat there in silence for a while. One of his phones rang and he answered it, speaking fast Arabic for a few minutes before hanging up. I picked up his sunglasses and tried them on for fun, and he grinned and generously offered them to me. I handed them back, excusing myself. I remembered everything he said. I went to the bathroom and scratched it out quickly on a notepad, stared at myself in the scarred mirror, and then slunk back into the room, water on my face, relieved.

‘What about our friends, anyway?’ I asked, nodding vaguely toward the door. ‘You work with them much?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to.’ He looked around. Then he leaned in again with the half-smile. ‘They do whatever they want here and they get away with it.’ He was talking quickly, his hands crossed in front of him. ‘They run around this place like they own it — and they do, in a way. It’s all about deception. You never know who they are. Some contractor. Some guy who says he’s with KBR or CRG or whatever. You just never know.’

‘I’ll never talk to them, will I?’ I asked, and added as an afterthought, ‘Or I guess they’ll never talk to me.’

But even as I said it, as I looked at Pete, I thought about my father. Maybe I’ll tell Pete, I thought; I’ve been withholding long enough now, too. He could know. What should I say? My father was — well, he was one of them, I’d say, he was one of our friends, you know, the Office of Regional Affairs. I might even tell Pete a thing or two. Hey, I’d say, you know what the guys and girls inside call it sometimes? Christians in Action. I know them well. I grew up with them and played with them; I loved them. Pete would get a kick out of that, I thought.

But, damn, he looked scared.

Then Pete interrupted my thoughts. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, and you don’t want to. Because if you say the wrong thing, you’re gonna attract the attention of people whose attention you don’t want, and they’ll have ways of getting back at you. Suddenly you’ll have troubles with your finances. Or they’ll destroy your reputation. Or something else will happen. You see where I’m going? You don’t want to screw around with these guys. You can’t talk to them, but you don’t want to talk to them, okay? You see? You see where I’m going with this?’

And I said I thought I did.

Iraq was such a lost place, he said. It just wasn’t simple, and it never had been. People had switched roles. The killers wanted to come in from the cold. They were tired, besieged, and betrayed. In some cases, they wanted to work out deals for themselves. Others had seen the errors of their ways, renounced the fascist ideologies of the death squads, and come to terms with the occupation that had stripped them of their families. Many had simply drifted towards ambivalence as the chaos grew and dwarfed them.

Pete had already been in Iraq for several years by the time I met him. He had only been home to Michigan a few times to see his wife and child. He kept most of what he knew and had seen to himself and the people with whom he worked. He knew he was damaged, he told me — he could feel it. He wasn’t the same man. He hadn’t seen it coming, but had felt the change once it was upon him. He wanted to go home, but couldn’t draw himself away. And he was constantly being called upon — by his American colleagues, by Iraqi friends and acquaintances, by almost anyone who felt some measure of his alienation — to help out in some way, and in every case where he could, he did.

I sometimes asked him questions I knew he couldn’t answer, such as the real name of an informant or the details of an interrogation, just to hear him say no. I felt satisfied that he was telling me the truth because he was so obviously struggling with it. He began sentences and ended them abruptly halfway, realising he couldn’t say more.

I thought about my father when I spoke to Pete. I sometimes replaced the image of one with the other. I realised I wanted my father to tell me that he felt the same way as Pete: that it was difficult to be so isolated, that life down inside the rabbit hole was a kaleidoscope, and that if I had trouble, sometimes, believing him, he understood.

‘I wish sometimes I could just erase it all,’ Pete said to me one day while we were having tea. ‘But I know I can’t.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

Pete wanted to help me and himself. He told me that I needed to meet a man he knew, a prominent tribal sheikh from Al Anbar province in western Iraq, where the Sunni insurgency had been born and flourished. Pete told me this sheikh would be able to tell me what I wanted to know about the insurgency. He lived in Amman, Jordan, now. ‘He’s your man,’ Pete said.

We were quiet for a time. Pete twirled a cigarette around his fingers, playing with it. He looked outside, and back at me. ‘He works with our friends,’ he said quietly.

That was in winter, when Amman can be cold — snow falls occasionally and children run into the streets to have snowball fights. Next door in Baghdad it will never snow, and sandstorms turn the skies red and black at high noon. But it was arid and pleasant in Amman when I arrived. The plane banked in low over the desert wadis, and a weak winter sun scratched in through the windows.

The sheikh sent one of his drivers to meet me the next morning. He took me to a spacious downtown office space where I waited in a smoky lobby. An assistant eventually led me into a large, well-lit room where I saw a robust man in his mid-40s sitting behind a desk cluttered with papers, and an ashtray where a cigarette burned.

We exchanged pleasantries for a while, and then I told him what I was after. He smiled and dismissively waved his cigarette, which he smoked through a telescopic holder. Then he spoke for almost an hour: about his home in Anbar, his frustrations with the Americans, and his efforts to work with victims and men who had been wrongly imprisoned. He denied having anything to do with the insurgency. He told me he was a businessman. And then we both sat back.

Pete had told me that the sheikh worked with the Americans, but now the sheikh was denying it. I decided to press him. I asked him what his relationship with the Americans was like.

He shook his head. ‘No …’ he said. He was quiet for a while, and then went on talking about the same things as before.

Eventually, I interrupted him. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I thought that you …’

The sheikh shifted in his seat to quiet me. He looked at me for a long time while he smoked his cigarette. ‘This is a very difficult time,’ he said. ‘Very dangerous.’

I nodded.

‘Many of my people are getting killed, you know. Very many.’

I kept quiet. But he didn’t say anything else, so I said, ‘I know. I’m very sorry.’

We sat there in silence for a while longer. An assistant brought in a glass of orange juice for me, as well as some candied dates and an ashtray.

Eventually he smiled. ‘How can we trust you?’ he finally asked.

‘You know Pete,’ I said. He nodded. ‘Pete is watching me.’

But for the sheikh the situation was not lighthearted. ‘It’s very difficult,’ he said. ‘Very difficult, very complicated.’

‘I understand that.’

‘Now is not the right time.’

I told him there might never be a right time. He just shook his head.

I sipped my orange juice and ate a date, waiting. I didn’t intend to leave without getting what I had come for. And I felt the sheikh was softening. I heard my father’s voice again: Be the kind of person who, when he defects, comes to you.

Eventually he pushed a button and said a few words in Arabic, and then sat back, sipping on his cigarette holder the way an asthmatic might — with quick gasps, holding his breath on the uptake as if he was reluctant to let too much of anything go. A few minutes later, a young man walked into the room and sat down quietly in a chair directly across from me. He was wearing jeans, a blue shirt and red sweater, and loafers; he was clean-shaven. I stood up and we shook hands. The sheikh pointed to him. ‘This man,’ he said. ‘He might talk to you.’

I still don’t know his real name. But the one he used that day, and every day that followed, was Abu Ahmed.

Abu Ahmed and the sheikh spoke quickly in Arabic, and then the sheikh turned to me. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, nodding toward the young man.

I turned to Abu Ahmed and told him I wanted to know how it all began, how we wound up here, and why he was now sitting across from me. Abu Ahmed looked at the sheikh and said something. They both smiled. ‘He says he’ll tell you if I say it’s okay,’ the sheikh translated, and smiled at me. ‘What should I tell him? That he should put his life in your hands?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, tell him it’s okay.’

The sheikh sucked at his cigarette for a few moments and watched me. Then he said a few words and nodded to Abu Ahmed.

That morning, Abu Ahmed began to tell me his story. It continued over the next several days. Sometimes we met in luxury hotels — always at corner tables that I deliberately chose to be as far away from prying eyes as possible. Jordanian intelligence was always watching him, he said, and he had to check in with them all the time. He didn’t like to stay in any one place for too long. Once he took me to a smoky teahouse and led me to a back room, far from the other patrons, until he got uncomfortable that we had been there too long and we had to leave. We also had a few conversations at the sheikh’s office. Another time, we just sat in a darkened SUV parked on the side of a busy road, and talked as the traffic roared by. Later on, I met up with him in Iraq, with Pete, and the three of us sat for several hours at a candlelit table and drank tea and Coke. Pete and I smoked as we listened to the story of Abu Ahmed’s life.

Abu Ahmed was a terrorist. That is, he was a radicalised Islamist with ties to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — the name that Al Qaeda had given to its organisational structure in Iraq. Abu Ahmed had once belonged to that vast and amorphous violence. Broken down, the past was much more nuanced. The fighters he had known and helped comprised nationalists, Baathists, criminals, Islamists, Wahhabis, Al Qaeda Takfiris, foreigners, mercenaries, and — most miserable of all — those men and women who, because of American aggression, accidents, or circumstance, were simply out for revenge, hellbent on making the sadness that the war had brought into their lives go away by returning it in kind. All of them were fighting. Many were dying. Many more were rotting in jail. Only a few of them were the planners, the organisers, and the thinkers. Abu Ahmed was one of these. That’s why he was so dangerous.

Abu Ahmed had grown up in central Iraq in the 1970s. Those were tough years in the country, and he had turned to religion at a young age. Saddam Hussein frowned on too much religiosity among his people, justifiably concerned that it would lead to the undoing of his power. But Abu Ahmed was undeterred, and at 13 he became a Salafist — a member of a fundamentalist Sunni sect with origins in Saudi Arabia that preached close adherence to a strict interpretation of the Koran, much like fundamentalist Protestants cleave to the strictest interpretations of the Bible. In due course, he became a teacher. Sometimes he went on road trips with the most promising of his young students, into the backcountry of southern Iraq, visiting with desert Bedouins and living as itinerant travellers. But trips like these aroused the suspicion of Saddam’s brutal secret police, and when he was 17 Saddam imprisoned him for seditious and undesirable teachings.

Abu Ahmed told me about his father. He was kind, and he supported his son through the long months spent in captivity. The father came to visit the son in jail every week. He brought him fresh clothes from home. He smuggled in money so that his son could bribe the guards occasionally to save himself from the prison’s weekly mass punishments. In Saddam’s Iraq, they both knew, no one was spared. ‘His injustice filled us,’ he told me. Three times the young man went to jail for his beliefs, and three times he emerged righteous in his anger.

The American invasion of Iraq was both the end and the beginning for Abu Ahmed. No longer would he ever have to endure the dictator’s punishments and humiliations. But the invasion presented new challenges. Like other Salafists, he believed it was sacrilegious for foreign forces to occupy Muslim lands. Another Salafist, Osama bin Laden, had opposed American troops being based in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. In May 2003, around the same time I was settling into Baghdad as a reporter, Abu Ahmed attended a meeting of about 50 Salafist imams and religious scholars at a safe house a few kilometres south of Baghdad. The men agreed on a plan for war against the Americans. They would gather arms from storage depots, collect money left behind by the regime, and steal intelligence files from government offices.

Later that month, on 20 May, the fledgling insurgency struck its first blow against the Americans, ambushing a US military unit in Baghdad.

Over the next several years, Abu Ahmed rose through the ranks of the insurgency. At first he focused on logistics: supplying and transporting weapons and supplies, organising safe houses, and coordinating operations between different cells. His wife drove when he had weapons to deliver because American troops were less likely to search a car with women or children inside. By 2005, he had become one of the senior strategists for the 1500-strong Army of the Faithful, a Saudi-funded group that was responsible for some of the most spectacular attacks against American forces. He lived like a hermit for the most part, he told me. The only people who knew where he lived were his two brothers and his father.

But his world began to unravel in the beginning of 2006, when a gang of men blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam, the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra. The bloodbath that followed was what I had spent most of my time in Iraq documenting. Those years were far and away the worst the country had endured, perhaps ever. Abu Ahmed’s world was turned upside down, like practically everybody else’s. ‘We lost control of our people,’ he told me late one night in Amman, as we were sitting in a dark corner of a hotel. When the group’s bankrollers realised what was happening, they cut off funding and supplies. ‘They wanted to prevent a sectarian fight,’ he told me. They had experience in Afghanistan — they remembered the factionalism that had torn apart the Afghan mujahideen after the Soviet withdrawal, and they wanted to avoid a repeat in Iraq. But it was too late. The civil war unfurled with a mightiness and savagery that no one could control.

Abu Ahmed was a steady, quiet man. He had a slight stoop and delicate hands. He looked like a graduate student. He wore thick glasses. When we spoke, he usually placed both elbows on the table and leaned in close, with his hands under his chin. He looked either directly at me or down at the table. Now and again he peered around, but for the most part his attention was directed solely, unflinchingly, at me. He spoke quietly, urgently, but every now and again he laughed and his eyes crinkled up at the sides, and the mirth spread broadly across his face. He seemed a man full of emotions: compassion, rage, love. And sadness, because soon after the Al-Askari Mosque attack, Al Qaeda approached him, he said, and asked him to carry out a special recruiting and fundraising mission outside Iraq. For whatever reason, Abu Ahmed refused. A few days later, Al Qaeda responded by kidnapping his father, taking him to a secret location, and decapitating him.

Abu Ahmed told me this the night we sat in the dark corner of the hotel. ‘My dad always stood up for me,’ he said. He was leaning on the glass and looking down at the table. He met my gaze and then lowered his head. His eyes were full. ‘He stood up for me during Saddam’s time, when I was imprisoned three times. It was difficult for a father to stand up for a son during those times, when the son is a political prisoner.’ He looked around at this sinister luxury. ‘It was tough for him to say, you know, he’s my son, this is my son.’

He looked away. He coughed, twisted a ring on his finger, and adjusted his glasses. ‘Families are …’ he started, and then just said, ‘We are very close with our fathers.’

I nodded. Then we were silent for a long time. I was thinking hard. After a while, I noticed that I was holding my pen in a vice-grip and staring at Abu Ahmed. I realised that I wanted to tell this man — a virtual stranger — more than I have ever wanted to tell anyone else, that my father was a spy. There was a sudden urgency to the conversation — urgency about who my father was, and who I was, and what this man sitting before me could tell me. It seemed to me that my world and my father’s world had converged in him. It felt to me like Yevtushenko’s ‘frank moment at the party, when the enemy crept up’. Only the enemy wasn’t an enemy at all; he was a friend.

And suddenly all the years of my father’s lessons flowed into a kind of coherence. As a journalist, I wanted to tell Abu Ahmed’s story. But I realised that I also felt, for the first time, the thrill of what my father’s work had been. I wanted to recruit Abu Ahmed to my side; I wanted us to be allies. I wanted to be the one, as my father had told me so many years before, to whom he would come when the time was right. Further, I wanted to wrestle from him the kind of information that only a spy should be able to summon. Who did he work with? And how did they work? What were his motivations? I wanted Abu Ahmed because I desired, however briefly, to slip into my father’s skin. I wanted to touch that wall, put my hands on it, feel its contours and smell its construction. I wanted to lean against it, feel what heart beat on the other side.

Before I had a chance to speak, Abu Ahmed continued with his story. It didn’t take long for him to respond to his father’s killers. Within days he had tracked them down. He killed them, or had them killed. He did it summarily, without the slightest doubt. Beheaded, unflinchingly. An eye for an eye. ‘Everything was out the window after that,’ he told me.

Some senior Al Qaeda figures contacted him personally to apologise. But Abu Ahmed didn’t believe they were sincere, and refused their offers of compensation. ‘They told me, “If you hadn’t killed your father’s killers, we would have,’’’ he said, ‘but I was convinced they had planned this.’

His revenge was complete, but now he was on his own. Fatherless, being pursued by the Americans, and no longer able to trust the insurgency’s strongest supporters, Abu Ahmed was a hunted man. He was all alone.

This was when people like my father stepped in, I thought.

I went back to the sheikh repeatedly in those days in Amman, in between meetings with Abu Ahmed. As usual, he sat behind his desk, and the desk was as much an illusion as anything else. He was who he said he was, partly, the same way Abu Ahmed was, or my father was, or I was. All of our identities become muddied to some extent: you are what you need to be, or what other people need you to be, at any given time. You pull from yourself the thread of some other man’s life and weave it into your own. That’s how you protect yourself.

The first time I went back, the sheikh greeted me amiably. ‘So,’ he said, ‘now you know.’

‘Hardly,’ I said, and we both laughed.

The sheikh told me how he had come to know Abu Ahmed. As a tribal leader, the sheikh had been working with the war’s orphans and victims for a long time. But he also knew and, to a certain extent, sympathised with the insurgents. He recalled the first time he saw American and British troops enter the town of Al Qa’im, a dry and desolate smugglers’ outpost far to the west, on the border with Syria, where many of his tribesmen were from. ‘A lot of resistance came from my tribe,’ he said. ‘They were living between us. We didn’t even know their names, but we knew.

‘I remember there was a meeting in my uncle’s house, and we learned that the British were coming to Al-Qa’im. My tribe asked them not to enter the village, but to stay outside. We are conservative; we didn’t want to see outsiders. Then on the second or third day, they did the opposite — they entered the town. I remember when the fighting started. I was going to my house and it just started, a really big fight. All the women started to clap their hands and make the helahel sound [a high-pitched screech], supporting the resistance because they had warned the British: we don’t want you inside. The image is still in my head — you just saw people running, all the young people running, taking their Kalashnikovs to fight. No one organised them — no one said to them “you should do this or that” — they were just fighting the way they thought they should. Honestly, I was proud. That image will never leave my mind.’

But as time went on and he watched the insurgency rage out of all control, he began to have doubts. Iraqis were killing other Iraqis. The Americans weren’t leaving — and the violence was only making them angrier, which meant they would stay longer, and kill more of his people. Very shortly after the invasion, Al Qaeda fighters entered the sheikh’s town. ‘It happened immediately,’ he told me. ‘This really started the distortion. When you saw these people — they don’t have shoes; they were stupid, ignorant. They started coming in all over.’

The cycle of violence had begun, and he realised that he needed to do something. An Iraqi friend told him that maybe he should start working with the Americans. Long before the tide of cooperation between Sunni tribal sheikhs and American forces began, this sheikh started seeking out his own partnership. It wasn’t easy going. Because he was a Sunni from a troubled province, the Shiite-led government harassed him regularly, and even jailed him twice for alleged ties to terrorists. The Americans helped to bail him out of jail on both occasions. The sheikh, in turn, began working with the Americans to build up a network of people who could successfully penetrate the hardcore elements of the insurgency and weaken it from the inside. ‘Yes, the Americans help me,’ he told me, ‘and it’s not because I have blue eyes, it’s because I’m fighting terrorists. We’re fighting these fucking stupid people — we’re trying!’

For a long time, the sheikh had been eyeing Abu Ahmed from a distance. He knew the young man by reputation, and knew that he was dangerous. So he set about on a slow course to persuade the fighter to switch sides. They met for the first time in 2005, when Abu Ahmed was ‘still stuck in the fighting’. But the sheikh worked on him. ‘It took a few months,’ he said. ‘I started making him meet people affected by the violence. I gave him money to help widows and poor people. He started to do humanitarian work, and he could see the effects immediately. He could see how they got better. I told him the wheel was running — time was running out.

‘It took about a year. Then his father was killed, and his face started to change. I asked him, “Why did the parents of these orphans die?” I said, “We don’t want the Americans to stay forever as the occupying force, but who will lead us when the Americans go?” This was not a jihad. Iran was going to run Iraq. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, I told him, for the time being.’

One day in mid-2007, the sheikh sat down in Baghdad with a group of Americans in civilian clothes — CIA case officers — to talk about getting rid of Al Qaeda in Iraq. ‘We started to discuss the future and our talk came around to names,’ the sheikh said. ‘The Americans knew who Abu Ahmed was, and they were interested in him, but they were more interested in capturing him than working with him. They asked what I thought. I said, “We can’t kill all the terrorists.” They knew I knew Abu Ahmed. I said I would convince him. They said, “He’s a terrorist.” And I said, “No, don’t judge him. You can use him as a spy.”’

A few weeks later, the terrorist met the American spies. A few weeks after that, they began to work together in hunting Al Qaeda.

Abu Ahmed wore a leather jacket on most days that winter. Whenever I saw him he was unfailingly polite and courteous. He was gentle, but also brutal. One night when we were talking at a hotel, the lobby was suddenly filled with music: drums and the wailing of women. We walked to the lobby just as a wedding procession was making its way into the restaurant. Beside the bride was an older man, thin and bearded, and he was holding a small video camera, filming the scene with a benevolent smile on his face. Abu Ahmed’s eyes locked on the man. I was sure he was the bride’s father. When I looked over at Abu Ahmed, he had a smile on his face and his eyes were wet with tears.

I thought about him hunting down his father’s killers. He was a father himself, and he had a son. Was he in the room when his father’s killers were killed? Did he cut their heads off himself, and just not tell me? I looked at his hands. They were thick and strong. It seemed possible. I wondered why he was talking to me.

I spoke to my father one night after meeting with Abu Ahmed. ‘I’m speaking to someone from your world,’ I told him, without going into too much detail, as was our wont.

He laughed. ‘Be careful,’ he said.

So this, too, was part of my father’s America — this grey, in-between world, where the killers come when they come in from the cold, and where the men who wait there to greet them bide their time. And where people like me can visit, for a time, if we’re lucky, or good, or patient, or because it’s where we feel the most comfortable, too. Things sometimes fall apart, and this is where we might start to put them back together again.

It was after ten o’clock one night, when we were sitting having tea, that Abu Ahmed explained his motivations to me. ‘It’s the thoughts, the ideas, that are dangerous,’ he said. ‘It’s the thoughts that will bring the men to jihad, not the other way around. The people we are trying to kill are the ones who make the thoughts.’

I wondered if his CIA handlers saw things the same way.

‘I’m still in the resistance,’ he told me, ‘but it’s a new tactic, a new strategy. Al Qaeda is the harm in our way now, so we have to remove it. But the road ahead is still jihad — there are just more enemies now.’ He smiled.

‘What are they like?’ I suddenly asked.

He looked askance at me.

‘The Americans,’ I said. ‘The CIA? What are they like?’

I felt like he knew what I wanted to know, maybe more than I did. I had come with questions about the insurgency, but I had been led to men like Abu Ahmed, and to the men who control Abu Ahmed, men like my father. Is there a spy behind every insurgent? Within every insurgency, are there legions of men like my dad, trying to keep the scales tipped to the right balance? Too mean, and it all goes belly-up; too light, and the war goes on forever.

I thought I might get something spectacular from Abu Ahmed, some secret admission, some shard of knowledge that I didn’t know. But when he spoke of the men he worked with, ‘our friends’, it was as if he was talking about his own children, or mine, or the parents we could have shared in some other life. ‘They’re very respectful and understanding,’ he said, ‘very smart. They know about our heritage, our culture, and our behaviour. They have talents and curiosity.’

I thought about Abu Ahmed sitting around a table with my father, just like this, and the questions each would ask. There would be mutual fascination. They both shared the same aim because men like them didn’t get together like this, the way that we were now, just to tell stories. They got together to act. They were men of action.

‘The ones who need to be killed,’ Abu Ahmed said, ‘are the ones who create the thoughts, and the ones who need to be killed are the ones who give justification for these thoughts, and the ones who need to be killed are the ones who write for publishing the thoughts, because then he has reached a point of no return.’ He looked at me. These two worlds, then, his and mine, were not mutually exclusive.

‘If there are still thoughts, there is still Al Qaeda,’ he said. ‘The insect is still there. She can always rebuild and create another. If you kill the group and leave the queen bee, you’ve done nothing. They will keep regenerating. The brain of the insect lives.’

He told me about the operations that he and his new American friends had mounted. Sometimes he gave them information for targeted strikes, air assaults, and other covert operations. Sometimes they worked together to intimidate the thinkers and organisers into believing that they were about to be killed, which provided enough incentive for them to leave the country, where they might be arrested or make some other fatal error. Sometimes he wrote screeds lambasting their ideology that he posted on the internet. He and the Americans had a list, he said, of people that needed to be quieted. There were 63 names on it. Five of those had to die.

‘Sometimes, I used to get jealous of the Americans,’ he said. ‘Every little thing, whether it is important or not — they analyse it, they find out what it means. They never throw anything away because they know they might need it at another time. They even work on holidays.’

I nodded. I thought about my father’s scanning eyes, aware. ‘Is it strange,’ I asked, ‘to go from wanting to kill them to working with them?’

He nodded. ‘It is. Yes, it really is.’

One night, after talking for a long while at a teahouse, Abu Ahmed said he wanted to go to my hotel. It was good to change locations now and again, he said. He wasn’t worried about safety; he just didn’t want to linger too long in one place. That was fine with me. We got to my hotel and went to a corner table in a dark part of the lobby restaurant, and ordered more tea and water.

I asked him about Al Qaeda. He said that from a purely religious standpoint, there wasn’t all that much that separated him from them. They both believed many of the same things. Then he talked about the divisions in the movement. The wing that supported the Egyptian cleric Ayman al-Zawahiri was in a feud with Osama bin Laden. Abu Ahmed subscribed more to bin Laden’s view, which he said was the more moderate of the two.

The new reality was one kind of Al Qaeda versus another, less tolerable, version. There were always going to be bad men, and then men like this, living in the in-between space. They couldn’t really feel comfortable anywhere else. Someone had to talk to them, engage with them, bring them in from the cold. Someone had to be there waiting for them when they were ready. That was what men like my father did — what few others wanted to do.

And what if it changed, I asked. What if the long-term interests started to diverge? What if the Americans eventually found they no longer had any use for him, or what he was in a position to provide? It had happened before, and probably would again.

But Abu Ahmed understood this perfectly. ‘I am still in the resistance,’ he told me again. ‘I am on your side, but just for now.’

For now, but never forever. Forever was only for the initiated, like me, because I had taken the oath my father gave me and never broken it with strangers, not with Omar or Tareq or Abu Ahmed. They only needed to know what I decided was right to tell them, and nothing more.

Pete thought he knew what was coming. What was it he had told me? I thought back: ‘These guys are going to be loyal to us until it doesn’t work for them anymore, and then they’re not. And we won’t, either. In the meantime, things will get better. They have to. Because if they don’t, then think of all the collateral damage we’ll have.’ And Abu Ahmed was, Pete had said, the CIA’s ‘ace in the hole’.

The last time I saw Abu Ahmed was in Baghdad. We met at a hotel near the Green Zone. Uniformed Americans and Iraqi sheikhs in dishdashas meandered through the long hallways together. He had told me he was going to organise some more meetings for me. But I didn’t have time, I told him. I was going to leave. I wanted to leave; I had to.

‘Did you get what you wanted?’ he asked me.

I nodded. ‘I think so.’

He shook my hand. He looked at ease, like a man who believed in what he was doing, whose heart was still.

I never told Abu Ahmed about my father. I almost did, once, and then I stopped myself. Instead I just said, ‘You’re a very interesting man,’ and he smiled.

But I told my father about Abu Ahmed.

‘What have you done to protect him?’ my father asked, and I wondered, what are you telling me here?

‘Have you been careful? It’s important that you protect him,’ he said again. ‘It’s the one problem I have with journalists …’ and trailed off, because he knew that I knew what he meant. What can seem like betrayal can have honour, while the supposed virtue of truth-telling can become a vulgar and exploitative tool.

I suddenly understood what Chris had been talking about in Paris so many years before. The betrayal in journalism came the moment when you sat down, alone, to put forth to the rest of the world what you had learned. The people you had spoken to — those who had trusted you with their most intimate secrets — could very well feel betrayed by what you would do then, no matter how noble your intentions or pure your instincts. At that moment, your aims and theirs took divergent paths.

And it went further. Your subjects weren’t the only victims; this was the moment when you left behind that other you — the questioner, the seducer. The feelings you had: the sympathy, the urge to empathise and understand, the need to bond; so much of that got left behind, too. The abandoning of a part of one’s own self to the page, the self that had connected with the world, was perhaps the ultimate betrayal.

So had I been careful with Abu Ahmed? Had I been careful with my father?

I said I thought I had.

I had tried my best with the assignment. I tried to see Abu Ahmed for what he was, as I had been taught, and I also tried to see through him to the reality that lurked beneath. I tried to see him as a journalist would, and as a spy would, too. I didn’t know if I had succeeded. I didn’t know if there was anything there. I thought there was, but I wasn’t sure.

‘Good,’ my father praised me, when I sent him the story. ‘Good job. It’s a wonderful story.’

I wasn’t sure if it was or not. But I knew that a story was all it was, or would ever be. This was as close as I was going to get to being a spy, to recruiting someone, to seeing his life from the inside; I knew that. And it was okay. My father and I saw things so similarly, but we acted so differently. He was a spy. And I was a journalist. He was a father, and I his son.

I would have liked for the two men to meet. They would have understood each other. Although, who knew? Maybe they did.

I knew my father was struggling with the discrepancies between the oaths he had taken to the Agency and his own moral imperatives. For so long, I realised, I had been trying, and failing, to find that moment with my father when the curtain would collapse and his authentic self would peer back at me. For so long, I didn’t believe I was seeing it, and I wanted to. I had wanted to see him as the spy or the journalist sees its prey. But my father, the man, wasn’t in hiding at all; he wasn’t cached in some dark corner of the world waiting for me to find him. He was staring back at me, waiting for me to see that he had always been there for me, and had always loved me.

The blindness of others is so readily apparent, but rarely do we recognise the blindness within. Until, suddenly, we do. I wanted to run away from myself, and I did, but I ran away from my father as well. I couldn’t always find, or adequately fuel, the love he wanted me to have for myself. I started running, and I never really stopped, because I was too afraid of what I might see if I turned around and looked at myself. The enemy that Yevtushenko talked about, the enemy that crept up — that enemy had sometimes been me. Because as much as my father ushered me into a darker world, he also never left my side.

The idea of seeking out the truth in other people’s lives, in this country or that, or in this war or that, was one way to avoid looking for it where I knew it would be hardest to find — or once found, hardest to bear — and that was inside myself. I had tried to get into my father’s head, searched for the telling detail and the moment of frankness. But it doesn’t always work that easily, for I couldn’t shine a light on him and remain in darkness myself. Yes, there was betrayal in journalism, broken promises, untold or unkempt truths and half-truths, lies small and large, and I trafficked in them with as much flair as any spy did — even more, some might say. But I didn’t want to hide from myself anymore, or betray my own life.

But now, on this rocky shore, there was silence.

For many years, my father nurtured a fantasy about the end of the world. It was a dream he cultivated as a means of escape when he was driving across the country alone, or on long walks with his dog. In this fantasy, a new dreaded disease or famine or some other ungodly horror had befallen humanity, but somehow my father had survived. Perhaps there were other survivors, somewhere, but only small bands of them, and they were as yet unconnected to him. For now, my father was alone in a pristine wilderness. He imagined himself piloting a sturdy plane and flying from one large city to another, unlocking the gates of zoos and freeing captive herds of wild animals to roam the avenues. From there he would travel across the country by road, attaching the ends of fences to tractors, tearing them out of the ground post by post — a lengthening latticework of ruined walls. He would free herds of bison and cattle, and horses, opening up the barricaded spaces of the world.

He had also worked out the details of this apocalyptic scenario into a neat and orderly series of staged devolutions. The mystery of the human vanishing was left aside. But there would be billboards to rip down, buildings to topple, and dams to burst. These were acts of great and anarchic liberation, in which he would set free entire populations of imprisoned animals and plants to roam and grow in peace, in a world of boundless possibility. Natural decay and erosion would also play their part. What seemed to contain a semblance of stability, such as the nearly finished roof on a house, would quickly fall apart. Great sheets of rain would enter the smallest holes and make them large. Wood and iron would be turned to moss and rust, and his kitchen would become a patchwork of colourful hives and mould. In this new forest, televisions might flutter for a time, like butterflies twitching on the ends of tree stalks, and then shutter themselves in darkness. Lights all over would stand down. Institutionalised luminescence would cease to exist.

For a period, ants, cockroaches, and insects of all sorts would flourish. Then larger animals would eat them. In time, he would feel changes in the air; temperatures would cool. The sun would come to have an additional identity; so would the moon, the trees, and the stars. By night, alone, he would marvel at the beauty of the world.

It would be a place free of sin, and even the possibility of sin. It would be beautiful and breathtaking, my father’s song against the world. The whole idea was inhumanly eerie.

‘Wouldn’t you be lonely?’ I had asked my father after he had told me this during a visit home.

He just smiled.

‘Do you wish you could have that world?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes,’ he said.

There had been times I was afraid to think at all, afraid to allow myself the freedom to peruse the valleys of my mind. I feared that if I did, I would fall into an abyss from which I would never be able to climb out. But here was my father’s imagination so openly on display. His world was a tapestry of devotion, nurtured in his mind; and like a child, he could conjure it forth whenever he was lonely. In a way it was a picture of the life he had actually lived, only it was cast in a vivid and dreamy solitude. His life and this dream shared one key element — the profound uncertainty that there is anyone out there who is truly on your side. My father’s imagined world was masterful, and though I could imagine the dream, I could not fathom enduring the existential loneliness of the dream’s twin reality the way my father had, and for that I was awed, and kind of tired, and ultimately simply glad to be awake.

‘You know,’ he had said, and put his arm around my shoulder as we walked, ‘We don’t always have to believe the same things.’