The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War

Preface

On my wall hangs a photo. In it are three people standing on the banks of the Tigris: Citizen, my senior reports officer; me; and Hans, my deputy. We are all wearing bullet-resistant vests. We are all carrying weapons. We are all standing in the middle of a city disintegrating into chaos.

In 2004 I went to Headquarters for an awards ceremony. Everyone who had been in Kurdistan during the period of 2002–2003 was to be recognized. With my colleague Tim, who commanded one of the CIA teams in Northern Iraq, I had put together the list of officers in our bases who should be decorated and what decorations they should receive. We agreed that everyone who had been in country should be decorated and also chose two officers from each base to be singled out for special recognition above everyone else.

Standing in line at that awards ceremony, I noticed a couple of things. First, there were at least a hundred people being given medals who had never spent a day in country. Second, there were people who were not being recognized at all—Citizen was not present.

After the ceremony I asked about Citizen and some other officers. Eventually, reluctantly, I was advised that the list I had provided had been lost, so Headquarters had built a new list including those names that they could recall from the teams in Iraq. Some people were left off the list inadvertently. For some time thereafter, I corresponded with Headquarters from my new station in the Middle East, attempting to get them to rectify their error and recognize those officers who had been inadvertently omitted from the list of honorees. Eventually, I received a not particularly subtle message from the Chief of the Near East and South Asia Division telling me the matter was closed, and that I should discontinue my efforts to have someone address the situation.

Shut up. Move on.

The issue was no longer open for discussion. Iraq was in flames. The US’s legacy, the direct result of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s bad decision making, had been civil war. Headquarters had no interest now in talking about our operations in Iraq in 2002–2003, or in the men and women who so bravely and exceptionally carried them out. They wanted to put it all in the rearview mirror and forget about it.

This book is my effort to make sure that never happens.

Introduction

On December 30, 2006, Saddam Hussein, onetime ruler of Iraq, was hanged by the neck until dead on the orders of an Iraqi tribunal. The specific crime for which he was executed was the mass murder of 148 Shia men and boys in the village of Dujail in retaliation for the attempted assassination of Saddam in 1982.

In the larger context of what Saddam did throughout his reign, the Dujail murders were hardly of note. No one knows how many people had been killed under Saddam’s regime, but estimates run as high as half a million. One mass grave alone is estimated to hold the remains of 15,000 people.

No one paid a higher price under Saddam or more completely refused to abandon the fight to depose him than the Kurdish people.

The origins of the Kurds are not completely clear, but they have inhabited the area of Northern Iraq for a very long time. When Xenophon, the Greek general, made his famous fighting retreat out of what is now Iraq and back to Greece, he had to cut his way through the Kurds to do so. His account of that march leaves no doubt as to the ferocity of the warriors he faced.

During the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in the mountains of Northern Iraq allied itself with Iran in the hope that it could leverage Iranian support to achieve independence and form a free Kurdish nation. The Barzani clan, which under Masoud Barzani formed the bulk of the leadership of the KDP, paid dearly for this betrayal. In 1983 Iraqi forces acting under the direct orders of Saddam Hussein rounded up more than 8,000 Barzani males—many just boys—executed them, and bulldozed them into mass graves. The first of their bodies were not found until 2005. Most remain unaccounted for to this day.

In the face of this atrocity, the world did nothing.

Far worse was yet to come. In 1988 Saddam launched what was called the Anfal campaign. Between February and September of 1988 Iraqi forces conducted a systematic genocidal campaign against the Kurds in Northern Iraq involving sustained aerial bombardment and the widespread use of chemical weapons. Under the command of Saddam’s cousin, General Ali Hassan al-Majid, Chemical Ali, 100,000 Kurdish men, women, and children were killed. This included the slaughter of over 5,000 people in the town of Halabja in a single day with a combination of nerve agents and mustard gas.

Survivors of the widespread chemical attacks during the Anfal campaign were captured and interrogated. Males between 15 and 70 were then shot and dumped into mass graves. By the time the campaign ended in fall 1988, 90 percent of Kurdish towns and villages had been wiped from the face of the earth.

The United States, more fixated on the threat posed by Iran than Saddam, took no action to stop the slaughter.

In 1991 Saddam invaded Kuwait, which he considered to be a historical part of Iraq. His army quickly overran that small nation but was subsequently crushed by a coalition consisting largely of American military forces. Encouraged by the defeat, and by the rhetoric of President George H. W. Bush, who seemed to be calling for Saddam’s ousting, the Kurds once again rose in rebellion.

Once again the Kurds were crushed, along with Shia forces which similarly rose against Saddam in the south. Twenty thousand more Kurds died as Iraqi artillery, armor, and helicopters slaughtered those seeking Saddam’s ouster. Two million Kurds fled into the mountains to escape certain death. The US and its coalition allies stood by and watched.

Then, in mid-April 1991, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, appalled by the slaughter, imposed a no-fly zone over Northern Iraq. Buoyed by the knowledge that Iraqi air power could no longer be brought to bear against their forces, the Kurds stabilized the battlefront and imposed a de facto border between what was now for all intents and purposes an independent Kurdistan and Saddam’s Iraq. The so-called Green Line ran generally southeast, from a point near Zakho in the northwest to the Iranian border. Irbil, the largest city in Kurdistan, lay just north of the line. Kirkuk, a city with a mixed Kurdish and Arab population, lay just below it within the area under Saddam’s control.

And so the situation stood until 2002.

CHAPTER 1

9/11

I found out about the 9/11 terrorist attacks the way everyone else did: I watched it on TV.

I was sitting in my office at CIA Headquarters in Langley riding a desk and hating life. I had been back in country for 60 days, and already I couldn’t wait to go overseas again. No real case officer wants to be stateside. He wants to be in the field where the ops are.

It was morning. I was reading traffic coming in from field stations around the world. Outside my office at the entrance to our group area there was a television mounted on the wall. I heard a number of people crowding around the television. I heard them say something about a plane striking the World Trade Center in New York. I got up and walked out of my office to see what was going on, and just as I did so I saw on the television screen a second aircraft hit the World Trade Center.

It was instantaneously clear to me, as it was to everyone else watching the broadcast around the world, that what we were seeing was not an accident but a deliberate act of terror. It felt like I had been punched in the gut, not just because of the loss of life and the brutality of the act, but because I knew it was all so preventable.

I had been working for CIA for 13 years by the time 9/11 happened. I had spent all of that time as a case officer. From day one I had spent the overwhelming majority of my time working counterterrorism and weapons of mass destruction. I had—like everybody else that I knew who was working the problem—by the late 1990s an overwhelming sense that the terrorist threat to the United States was increasing daily, and we were doing virtually nothing to combat it.

One case will illustrate precisely what I mean.

Three years before 9/11 I was assigned to a Middle Eastern station. Station is the CIA office in a particular country. That’s old terminology borrowed from the British, like virtually everything else that pertains to our human intelligence collection apparatus. I was a case officer in the station. That meant it was my job to handle assets and produce intelligence. But it also meant, more than anything else, that it was my job to hunt for new sources. Case officers are like sharks; they have to swim and hunt continuously. In the trade everybody knows how to write an intel report and securely handle an asset. If you don’t know how to do those kind of baseline things you get sent home.

What defines case officers is their ability to bring on new blood. In the trade they say, ten percent of the officers recruit ninety percent of the sources. Some people can do it. Many can’t. Some can but don’t, because the ethical baggage is too heavy. Sometimes sources you recruit end up dead. Sometimes they end up in jail. If you can’t handle that fact, you need to find another line of work. Bottom line: if you want to be a case officer and get promoted, you hunt.

I made contact one day with an individual who was an Islamic extremist and who was heavily involved with ongoing Al Qaeda activity and terrorism. I won’t go into the details here of exactly how I made contact with this individual. That’s the kind of stuff that, no matter how you spin it, comes down to sources and methods that can’t be talked about. In any event I was successful in making contact with this individual. He had by this point been involved in Islamic terrorist activity for many years. He had attained a relatively senior position wherein his primary function was moving money and support to those individuals actually doing the fighting.

His next assignment was to go to Africa and work on establishing infrastructure there. This was less than a year before the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

My contact was ferociously anti-American. He was absolutely convinced that Western materialistic influence was destroying the Islamic world. He had, however, by this point begun to have some serious misgivings about the amount of blood that was being spilled, the justification for violence, and the taking of innocent life. His experience had led him to believe that Al Qaeda’s methodology could not be justified under the teachings of Islam. He was torn. He was willing to talk. He was not sure what he needed or wanted to do now.

He and I spent many days together. We debated. We philosophized. I worked overtime to help him reach the point at which he could accept that cooperating with CIA was justifiable and that it would mean saving lives. In the end he remained in many ways an enemy of the United States, but he agreed to a clandestine relationship with CIA and became an asset of ours. He agreed to provide us information on the plans and intentions of the group to which he belonged. He agreed to work with us against his former associates.

I set up follow-on meetings with him outside the country in which he had been recruited. It was, I thought, an extremely important case. I had barely finished the write-up on the recruitment, however, when I received a devastating series of messages from Washington. They had reviewed the case. They had decided that since this individual was technically a citizen of an allied nation they did not believe we should continue the relationship with him. They had made the determination that it was more important to avoid offending this Middle Eastern government than it was to have a spy inside Al Qaeda.

Those messages almost floored me. They weren’t completely out of character with what I knew already about Headquarters and our counterterrorism efforts; nonetheless, to have brought on a source with that degree of access and then be told to cut him away was completely demoralizing.

Just to complete the picture, a few days after 9/11 an officer from CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) came to find me at Headquarters. We were now in a desperate rush to recruit penetrations of Al Qaeda. Somebody had done a file search and tripped across my case. The officer from CTC wanted to know if I knew where my old source was now and whether I could help them make contact with him.

It was one of those moments when you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I reminded the officer from CTC that the source in question was a highly dangerous, anti-American Islamic extremist. I reminded him that I had met with the source, always under a false name and only in very carefully controlled meetings. In short, I reminded him that we had not kept in touch, that we did not exchange Christmas cards, and that I did not have him over for family barbecues. I had no idea where he was, although I was very confident that having been cut loose from us, by us, he was still out there working to our detriment.

After 9/11 CTC went into overdrive. Nobody in Washington had a plan for what to do next. The Department of Defense locked up.

The bureaucracy spun in circles, useless. It fell to a handful of individuals in CIA, like Hank Crumpton and Cofer Black (true names), to craft a strategy, sell the White House on it, and start deploying teams.

At Headquarters I was still going crazy. I was pushing paper and attending meetings and working issues nobody cared about. Meanwhile my fellow case officers, my peers, began choppering into Afghanistan, organizing native forces, and taking the fight to the enemy. I was in agony.

Then the rumors started. This would have been around January 2002. We were going into Iraq. The decision had been made by the White House that we were going to do what we had threatened to do for years: we were going to take out Saddam. Step one in that plan was for CIA to put a team into Northern Iraq to work with the Kurds and prepare the battlefield for the subsequent deployment of American military forces.

I went upstairs to the floor where Iraqi Operations Group was located. I walked into the office of the chief of operations, who was a friend. I didn’t volunteer for the job of leading the team that would go into Iraq—I demanded it.

I had by this time in my career more experience in Kurdistan than virtually any other officer in CIA. I can’t and won’t go into all the details of how I acquired that experience. Many of those are operations we still can’t talk about, even in general terms. Suffice it to say that I knew the area and the people well.

I had led a number of different small teams on operations in the area over the course of several years. I had spent significant time in the mountains and villages of the area. I had worked with and knew the Kurdish people.

I had spent years working the Iraqi problem as well. I had run assets cross-border into Saddam’s Iraq, collecting on all of the top intelligence priorities. I knew well the history of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) efforts and had personally written hundreds of intelligence reports on the topic. I knew all too well how difficult an environment Kurdistan could be and how formidable the Iraqi security apparatus was. A great number of our Iraqi assets over the years were captured, tortured, and killed. Some of those had been men I recruited and sent into harm’s way.

Going into Iraq was not just getting back into the fight; it was personal. If we were finally going to finish Saddam and make him pay for his atrocities, I was not going to watch from the sidelines.

I also knew the Turks and spoke Turkish. I had worked with them in the field closely, often deploying to remote areas for months at a time with Turks and special operations personnel.

Any deployment of personnel into Northern Iraq was going to go through Turkey, and having experience in dealing with that nation would be critical. The Turks can be great people, and they are fierce fighters. They are not always the easiest to deal with. More than once in the field I had butted heads with Turkish commanders who wanted to dictate terms to me rather than work with the men on my team as partners and allies.

I laid all of this and more out for my friend the chief of operations. He confirmed what I had heard. The White House had made the call. We were going to invade Iraq, and we were going to do it soon. It was January 2002. The White House wanted a CIA presence inside Iraq by March. A few officers from Headquarters had already made a quick visit to Iraqi Kurdistan and met with senior members of the Barzani and Talabani clans. The Kurds were generally onboard.

The plan was to arm the Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan forces in the north and then bring in Special Forces to work with them and train them. Eventually, conventional US military forces would flow in as well, but the Kurds would be the force multiplier that, once armed with modern weapons, would tie down the Iraqi military in the north while the American military launched its primary invasion from Kuwait in the south.

My friend the chief of operations said he would talk to his boss, the group chief. A couple of days later we met again. I had the job. I was now the head of the team that would spearhead the invasion of Iraq. The team itself did not exist yet, but it would be formed up as fast as possible. Some of the likely members were already on hand at Headquarters. Some others would be coming in shortly. Members of 10th Special Forces Group from Fort Carson would be included.

I was psyched. I had a real-world mission, and I would be in on the ground floor of a massive, and in my opinion long overdue, military effort to unseat one of the world’s most horrible and sadistic rulers.

Only then did I ask what should have been one of my first questions. Since the key to this operation was arming the Kurds, since all arms to the Kurds had to transit Turkey, and since the Turks and the Kurds hated each other—what did Ankara think about our plan to send state-of-the-art weapons into Northern Iraq?

The response was not encouraging.

We have not told the Turks yet, but we don’t think it will be a problem.

I sat dumbfounded. All I could think was, Then you don’t know anything about the Turks.

CHAPTER 2

The Plan

Just before my first meeting with the chief of operations of the Iraqi Operations Group, CIA sent a small team, no more than four individuals, into Northern Iraq. They were in country for a matter of days, just long enough to have meetings with senior Kurdish leaders.

These leaders included heads of the two principal Kurdish factions that had control of the Kurdish area in Northern Iraq. These were the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). These two parties had divided Northern Iraq into two roughly equal areas, which operated effectively as independent nations.

In the wake of the First Gulf War (1990–91), the United States imposed a no-fly zone over Northern Iraq, which roughly corresponded to the mountainous northern part of the country historically inhabited by the Kurdish people. With the US flying air cover, the Kurds effectively governed Northern Iraq. On a map it was still Iraq. On the ground it was Kurdistan.

In the simplest possible terms, the KDP was built around the Barzani family, and the PUK was built around the Talabani family. The Barzanis were based in a family compound in the mountains above Irbil. The Talabanis were based in a similar compound in the mountains near Sulymaniah.

Both families prized loyalty. Both families operated every day with the sure knowledge that they had to fight to survive and that, as the saying goes, their only friends were the mountains. Both families could be decisive and deadly when necessary. It was a tough neighborhood.

When the Headquarters team met with members of the Barzani and Talabani families in Iraq in the winter of 2002, they faced a great deal of skepticism. The United States did not have a great track record with the Kurds. We had on multiple occasions made noises about taking out Saddam and then walked away, leaving them to face the consequences. The Kurdish leaders who met with our team members posed some very direct, and very pointed, questions. They wanted to know if we were serious this time.

To their questions, the Kurds received some very direct responses. Unfortunately, for American foreign policy in general and for me in particular, many of the responses they received were at best misleading. We wrote a great many checks. It would remain to be seen whether or not we could cash all of them.

The most immediate concern of the Kurds was armament. If the United States started making noises about taking out Saddam there was a very real chance Baghdad might preemptively move into Kurdistan. The Iraqi Army was large and heavily armed. The Kurds were a light infantry force. If they had to stand against the Iraqis on their own they were going to have to head for the hills, literally, very quickly.

In short, the Kurds wanted to see something concrete from us. Words were great, but they didn’t kill Iraqis.

The Headquarters team assured the Kurds we understood. They told them we would give them all the arms they could handle. In particular, they promised to give them Javelin anti-tank missiles. These were state-of-the-art weapons. Giving them to the Kurds would dramatically enhance their ability to stand up to Iraqi armor and hold their own.

The Kurds asked all the predictable questions. Specifically, they wanted assurances that we would handle the Turks.