AN ASSASSIN COMING AFTER US

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars:
see that ye be not troubled: for all these things
must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

—Matthew 24:6

 

 

 

 

 

 

The incessant work was wearing on me. I decided to take my first day off since my arrival. I drove for hours and hours through an empty landscape of hills, faded fields, and more and more baked stones and earth, to get away, to be alone, to immerse myself in the local culture, to become what the locals were, to shed being an American, to forget about interrogation, and CAPTUS, and cables, and “fahimt?”

I finally stopped at a far-off town and wandered through a medina with kilometer after kilometer of narrow pedestrian alleys. Burros were the only means people had of moving anything heavy. Thousands and thousands of people jostled together. I walked among countless spice shops, herb and scent shops, former harems, tanners’ quarters, pottery ateliers, and mosques. The alleys were only an arm’s span across, with high walls, the temperature many degrees cooler than just beyond the walls. I enjoyed having an endless series of urchins approach me, peddling themselves as guides, or curious what a Westerner was doing in their midst. I was charmed by the scenes of local life—a wedding procession weaving on foot through the thousands of pedestrians in the narrow alley, flowing by on both sides of me, the bride and groom looking about seventeen years old, slightly pimply, and nervous. My colleagues came to know me as the guy who always enjoyed going off alone, and to tease me about this idiosyncrasy.

I returned to the office refreshed, as I always did from my solitary explorations. “It’s Lawrence, come back among us!” my colleagues would greet me after my trips. I half-smiled at these remarks but said little.

Shortly after my return we learned that the American diplomat Laurence Foley was assassinated in Amman, Jordan. Initial reports were that either one of Saddam’s operatives had killed him, or more likely, one of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s operatives, crossing into Jordan from their base in Iraq. At the time, some parts of the CIA thought Zarqawi’s links with Usama Bin Ladin and . . . . al-Qa’ida might be tighter than we subsequently learned to be the case, and the administration, of course, was fully convinced of this (and remained so despite overwhelming subsequent intelligence that Zarqawi had nothing to do with the Saddam regime). This was a detail, in any event. Zarqawi was a rare, charismatic, competent, and aggressive sociopath, committed to jihad, which for him served as a means of becoming an important man, of justifying his hates, and rendering heroic his sadistic pleasure in killing. Over and over I would find in the coming years as I worked on the jihadist threat that most jihadists were actually ignorant punks who found imaginary justification for their sullen resentments and social hatreds, but who mostly used the rhetoric of jihad, without understanding, or caring, about the doctrines that so exercised Western analysts; or they were idealists and zealots, not unlike Robespierre, Lenin, or Pol Pot, who in good conscience could kill large numbers of people for an abstract “greater good.” But whatever the doctrinal motivations or assessments, the fact was Zarqawi had just assassinated a fellow American official. Like all Americans, we were disgusted and angered.

We were electrified, however, after Foley’s death, by an urgent cable that arrived at the station. It cautioned us to take all possible security measures. We were under imminent threat, too.

.

. We redoubled our attention to our surroundings, to the extent we could. We were careful going to and from the office. I tried even more than normal to be aware of my surroundings . I thought often as I drove or walked about the city and its environs about the first time I had detected surveillance on me, many years before during my first tour abroad. My stomach had fallen, then risen to my throat . It was one of the few moments in my career when I felt physically ill with tension. I had successfully avoided a problem in that instance; I wondered how I would react if I detected something unusual now that we had apparently reliable reports about two assassins or terrorists coming for us . We all carried on, a bit more on guard, but otherwise focused on our work.

The reporting had been excellent. Our allies were active in our behalf.
. The dénouement was anticlimactic: Jordanian officials detained several men and charged them with the assassination of U.S. diplomat Foley. The brief surge of tension dissipated, and we returned to our normal moods and thirteen- to fifteen-hour days.