Eric Maddox: Mission: Black List #1

I stepped back as they drove away. I’d had a good run. I’d learned more about interrogating in the time I’d spent here than anything they’d taught me at school. But it still felt like a kick in the front of the shorts. I was just getting up to speed, feeling my way through the labyrinth of the city, following leads wherever they took me. Now I’d be going back behind the wire of the BIAP where it didn’t really matter what I did or how well I did it.

It had to have been close to 120 degrees when we finally left the compound for the Haddoushi roundup. It felt even hotter in the back of the armored Humvee where I was sitting. The scorching wind blowing in my face felt like a blast furnace and I was relieved when we reached the objective within five minutes. Grateful as I was to have the wind out of my face, I didn’t have time to think about what we might be driving into. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

The team I was with, which included a terp we had borrowed from the 4th ID, took up positions at opposite ends of a street where one of Little Saddam’s houses was located. Our job was to move along both sides and link up in the middle, emptying out all the houses along the way. Two blocks over, another team, using Adam as their terp, was deployed the same way.

The 4th ID terp was given a bullhorn to order everyone onto the street and my job was to interrogate as many as possible, to either identify the bad guys or find out where they were. As the shooters jumped out of the Humvees and took their positions, the terp starting barking commands into the bullhorn. The only problem was, the bullhorn did not work. Unsure what to do, he just kept talking into the dead mouthpiece while everyone waited for something to happen. Standing next to him, I tried to get things moving.

“Just yell,” I told him. “Get up and yell as loud as you can.” He looked confused but did what I told him. Nobody was coming out onto the street. “Louder!” I urged him.

It was then that I caught of glimpse of Matt staring at me from the front of the Humvee. If a look could have blistered paint, that would have been it. I immediately understood that I had made a serious mistake. I was attached to the finest military unit in the world and I had taken it upon myself to intervene in a contingency situation. We were in the middle of a large-scale hit with a lot of moving pieces and the distinct possibility of shots being fired. It was not my place to make a decision on the raid. I was way out of line.

Fortunately by this point people were starting to emerge onto the street, so I began interrogating them. The task force rounded up the adult males and brought them to me. We’d moved as a group to the next house and after about a half hour, we met up with the second half of our team in the middle of the block.

We had about a dozen detainees by then, handcuffed and blindfolded, gathered in a backyard. Adding the men captured by the other team, we formed a lineup. We quickly questioned them until we found one who admitted to knowing Haddoushi and his family and had him identify as many of the prisoners as possible. We had netted a couple of Little Saddam’s brothers-in-law, some cousins and a nephew. But no Muhammad Haddoushi. I wasn’t sure what the other teams would turn up at the remaining houses, but as far as I was concerned, we’d hit another dry hole.

By 1730 that afternoon the raids were over. We were back at the compound conducting an after action review (AAR). A lieutenant colonel had come from Baghdad for the raids. Even though we all had our doubts, the officer proclaimed the operation a success. The reason was simple, if not exactly on point. Haddoushi may have eluded us, but the roundup had netted four other wanted men. They weren’t the HVTs from the deck of cards, but instead were on another list of three hundred former regime members and Saddam sympathizers.

I understood the value of these targets, but still wondered how the roundup could be considered a success when the guy we were after hadn’t been nabbed. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that there was a flaw in our approach. Taking one-time government and military personnel off the streets wasn’t getting us any closer to the HVTs who were our real objectives. Those three hundred names were part of the old order in Iraq, the one we had already overthrown. There was a new network now, the one tasked with hiding Saddam and killing Americans. Maybe these guys were part of that network. Maybe not. But instead of just arresting them and congratulating ourselves on a job well done, we needed to go deeper. We needed to focus on anyone and everyone who could tell us the names of the real bad guys. That’s why we’d gone after Haddoushi in the first place, not for what he’d done. He hadn’t even been a full-fledged member of the regime. It was the intel he could provide that made him a prime target. Because Haddoushi’s nephew had been killed with Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, we thought he might be privy to Saddam’s current whereabouts.

Not that my assumptions made any difference. I was just the interrogator. The brass were satisfied with the results, with a few exceptions.

“Listen,” the lieutenant colonel concluded, “I’m not sure what to say about the AD that happened out there today. I guess we just have to remember the simple rules: selector switch on safety and finger out of the trigger well.”

I bolted upright. An accidental discharge? Someone had unintentionally fired his weapon? That was unheard of among the task force and easily one of the most serious infractions one could commit. As the meeting broke up I hurried over to Jeff. “What happened with the AD?” I asked.

He pulled me aside. “It was Allen,” he told me. “That interrogator from Baghdad.”

I could hardly believe my ears. Allen the arrogant was now AD Allen.

“How did it happen?”

“He was talking to some ladies and shot right at their feet.”

“And that means?”

“Eric,” he replied. “If an operator has an AD, he’s out. Period. Sorry, but your pal is history.”

As it turned out, the day wasn’t a total loss. Allen’s quick trigger had inadvertently plugged the hourglass.

I had been in Tikrit for just over two weeks, working a constant schedule of interrogations. There were valuable lessons to be learned every time, as much from my failures as my successes. Except that in my situation, success was hard to define. Since I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I wouldn’t have recognized it if I had found it. So I just kept plugging away, piling up information and trying to make sense of it.

For every prisoner who gave me a piece of valuable information, there were ten who gave me nothing at all. Maybe they didn’t have anything to begin with. Or maybe I just didn’t know how to get it out of them. It was trial and error, hit and miss. But I was definitely developing my own approach.

I compared what I was getting from detainees to what was being supplied by the informants to the case officers. I was more inclined to believe what the prisoners were telling me. For one thing, I knew what their motivation was. I was providing it. I had control over their lives: their freedom and their future. That gave them a real incentive to tell me the truth.

But there was also a definite disadvantage to the intelligence we gleaned from interrogations. From the moment they were captured, there was a time limit on any information a prisoner had. Once news traveled that he was in custody, the clock was ticking. After forty-eight hours at the latest, whatever bad guys he knew about would have gone into hiding or changed up their daily routine. For that reason I had to get what I was after as soon as I could and pass it along to Jack and Matt.