Eric Maddox: Mission: Black List #1

“What does your schedule look like this week?” the admiral asked me when the spontaneous ceremony was over. “The SECDEF is going to want to talk to you as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, having no idea what or who the hell the SECDEF was.

“That’s the secretary of defense, hero,” Lee whispered, coming to my rescue.

Two days later, when we arrived at the Pentagon office of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, we found that the audience had grown to include Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and four-star Marine General Peter Pace, who would later be named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Jacoby was also on hand.

The biggest oak desk I had ever seen dominated the secretary’s inner office. He was behind it as we entered, his arms folded across his chest, flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He had his trademark scowl on his face, but as we approached, he came out from behind the desk to greet us personally.

“Mr. Secretary,” said the admiral, “I would like to introduce you to Staff Sergeant Eric Maddox. He is an Army interrogator and has just returned from Iraq.”

“Staff Sergeant Maddox,” the secretary repeated in a matter-of-fact tone. He squinted at me from behind his rimless glasses, taking my measure. I liked the fact that he was all business. He wasn’t there to hand out compliments. He wanted an actual intelligence briefing.

After introducing Lee, Admiral Jacoby continued. “Mr. Secretary, I would like you to hear Staff Sergeant Maddox’s brief firsthand.” I had been told I’d have twenty minutes to do my thing. I started in immediately, moving at a fast clip through my last five months in Tikrit. I could tell the secretary was keeping up with me, so I didn’t worry about slowing down or repeating key pieces of information. At the twenty-minute mark, he was still listening intently, so I continued, bringing the brief to an end after another ten minutes.

“How close are we to getting the final members of the insurgency?” he asked when I was done.

“Sir,” I replied. “I think we are very close.”

He finally stopped staring me down and looked over to Admiral Jacoby. “Jake, what the hell is he doing here?” he asked. “He has to go back.” I realized that he thought I had come back simply to be awarded for my accomplishments.

“Mr. Secretary,” the admiral replied, “their tour is up. Sergeant Maddox’s last day was the day that Saddam was captured.”

“God,” he said, now giving Admiral Jacoby the stink eye. “We’re that close to finishing this thing and these two are allowed to come home. I need them back out there.”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” the admiral responded.

“Sir,” I chimed in. “Our bags are packed and ready to go.” For Lee and me, the war was the most natural place to be. We were interrogators. That was the only place where we could do our job.

At that moment, an aide entered and whispered something to General Pace. “Sir,” the general announced to Secretary Rumsfeld. “I’ve just gotten a report that eleven million dollars was found in a raid on Muhammad Ibrahim’s farm.”

The secretary looked me straight in the eyes and stood up. The rest of the room fell silent as he began to applaud. It wasn’t just the news of the money or even the capture of Saddam. As soon as I had walked into his office, I knew he was sizing me up. What he wanted to determine for himself was what kind of soldier I was. Meeting with his approval was one of the proudest and most meaningful moments of my military career.

It turned out that our rounds in Washington were just getting started. Later that day we were taken to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to brief George Tenet, the head of the CIA. Unlike our meeting with Secretary Rumsfeld, the hour I spent at the CIA was more of a courtesy call, a chance for us to get a pat on the back.

It had only been a few days since Saddam had been rolled up, but I was beginning to realize that there were more than a few people who wished it had happened differently. There had been a lot of intelligence personnel from a lot of different agencies who were assigned full-time to find Saddam. And there were many interrogators and human intelligence collectors who had wanted in on the capture. I could understand their attitude, and their suspicion that I had just been in the right place at the right time. It’s a very competitive field and professional envy comes with the territory

But George Tenet was a friendly, easygoing man who basically wanted to add his congratulations as a fellow member of the intelligence community. It was only after I’d finished the briefing and he’d left that a member of his staff leaned over to me and asked, “You want a job, Eric?”

“Don’t even think about it,” Admiral Jacoby interjected.

He was only half kidding, as I quickly found out. “What are your plans, Sergeant Maddox?” Admiral Jacoby asked me on our way back from Langley.

“He needs a job, sir,” Lee interjected. “But he’ll never ask you for one.” No matter where we were or whom we were with, Lee never had an unspoken thought.

“Sir, I’ll be getting out of the Army in April,” I explained. “I’m thinking of sending in my application to the CIA and the FBI.”

“What about the DIA?” he asked.

“Of course, sir,” I replied.

“Go home and relax, Sergeant Maddox,” he said. “When you’re ready to make your next move, all I ask is that you give me the right of first refusal.”

“I will, sir.” I paused, then asked the question that had been on my mind since that morning. “Sir, Secretary Rumsfeld mentioned something about Lee and me being sent back to Iraq.” I turned to look at Lee, wondering if he was thinking the same thing I was.

He was. “Sir,” he told Admiral Jacoby, “as Sergeant Maddox told Secretary Rumsfeld this morning, our bags are packed and ready to go.”

When we got back to the admiral’s office another briefing request awaited us. This one was from General Alexander, the head of intelligence for the entire Army. My presentation to him began like all the others, until he interrupted me by pulling out a newspaper clipping from the New York Times . “What is this article referring to?” he asked me sternly. I glanced at the headline: “4th ID Gumshoes Track Down Saddam.”

I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t just that someone else had rushed in so quickly to claim credit for capturing Saddam. It was that the head of Army intelligence was relying on a newspaper for his information. It made me wonder about the bureaucratic infighting that seemed to run rampant among the various agencies and branches of government.

“I’m sorry, sir, but that story is totally wrong,” I told General Alexander. “The media was not allowed anywhere near our operations. Whenever we got a big catch in Tikrit, we would turn it over to the 4th ID. They would brief the press. But no one in the 4th ID had anything to do with getting Saddam.”

Maybe I was too direct in my explanation of the 4th ID’s lack of involvement. No doubt a three-star general wouldn’t be overly impressed by a staff sergeant’s opinion. But I was telling him the simple truth; maybe not enough soldiers were asked—or most likely even allowed—to come back and talk honestly about the situation in Iraq.

If I kept my mouth shut, nothing was going to change. But as it turned out, the military actually was interested in what I had achieved and how I did it. Shortly after the whirlwind stop in Washington, D.C., Lee and I received word that General Alexander was sending us on a tour to give intelligence briefings of our time in Iraq. For the next three months we visited bases around the United States, as well as overseas, sharing what we had learned and accomplished in Iraq.