Black Flags (23 page)

Berg’s initial scouting visit to Iraq was sufficiently encouraging that the young entrepreneur returned in March 2004 to try to land his first real clients. Working on his own, he drove around the countryside, looking for communications towers, and offered to inspect and repair any that were damaged or broken. He climbed rickety steel masts, created prospect lists, and wrote more cheerful e-mails to friends at home. It was slow going, but Berg’s enthusiasm never flagged, right up to the day when Iraqi police in the city of Mosul noticed a strangely dressed foreigner prowling around a radio tower outside of town.

The Iraqis had no idea what to make of the bespectacled young man with his tool kit and notebooks filled with sketches of communications equipment. Convinced that Berg was a spy—Israeli, perhaps, if not Iranian—the officers arrested him. He was taken to a Mosul police station on March 24, 2004, and placed in detention, ending abruptly the young businessman’s Iraq adventure. Or so it seemed.

—

The plight of a solitary American civilian who runs afoul of Iraqi authorities is normally a matter for junior consular officers at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. But the strange case of Nicholas Berg soon commanded the attention of more senior officials at the State Department and the Pentagon. Eventually, queries about the businessman made their way to the CIA’s counterterrorism division in Langley, where Nada Bakos was then the principal analyst in charge of the Zarqawi file.

Reports afterward showed that the Iraqi police quickly deposited Berg with U.S. forces in Mosul, who were just as baffled as the Iraqis by the earnest young man and his story about traveling across Iraq prospecting for business opportunities. By chance, Bakos happened to know one of the American military policemen who were present when Berg was taken in.

What are you doing here? Berg was asked. And asked again.

“
No one could figure out what his deal was,” Bakos recalled. “Why was he wandering around Iraq by himself, looking for something to do? No one could believe he was just going around looking for a job.”

Meanwhile, background checks turned up another oddity. Three years earlier, a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist had used an e-mail address and Internet password that had belonged to Berg. There was an explanation, albeit a bizarre one: The ever-trusting Berg had once loaned his laptop computer to a stranger during a bus trip, and when the man had trouble accessing his e-mail, Berg had given him his personal log-on information. The stranger turned out to be a friend of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker,” who was arrested while undergoing pilot training to fly one of the planes in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

With so many questions swirling around the young businessman, army officials in Mosul were reluctant to let him go. In the end, they had no choice: Berg’s family in Pennsylvania had been anxiously telephoning State Department officials, asking them to investigate their son’s disappearance. When they learned, in an April 1 e-mail, that Berg was being held by American forces against his will, they were furious. The family filed a lawsuit accusing the military of false imprisonment, and a day later, on April 6, 2004, Berg was released.

Berg spurned an offer for a seat on a military plane back to the United States, opting instead to travel to Baghdad to sort out his own arrangements. He checked into a hotel on the day of his discharge and made a few phone calls. Then, on April 10, he vanished completely.

Again the family pressed for answers, and again the U.S. Embassy sent out queries to detention centers and military posts. But there was not a scrap of news about Berg all that week, or the next.

Finally, on May 8, a military patrol spotted an object hanging from a highway overpass. Pulling closer, they were horrified to see a human torso in loose orange clothing, dangling from a rope, with its hands and feet bound. Beneath the corpse, on a bloodstained blanket, was the severed head of a young white man with a scruffy sandy-blond beard.

Nicholas Berg had been found.

—

Two days later, the video containing one of the Iraq war’s most disturbingly iconic images began streaking across the Internet. Bakos had no desire to see it, but in the end she forced herself. The viewing took place in a CIA conference room with two other analysts present.

On the screen was Berg, trussed and seated on the ground in his orange jumpsuit, his expression blank. Five hooded men in black stood behind him against a light-colored wall, and the man in the middle was reading from a script. She knew the voice and recognized the familiar stocky build, even with the mask. It was Zarqawi.

Bakos noted the orange jumpsuit, so familiar to anyone following the still-unfolding scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American military guards. Zarqawi had never been accused of subtlety or sophistication in his few previous attempts at public statements. Was he sending a message to Muslims, inviting them to witness an act of symbolic revenge for the humiliation of inmates at Iraq’s most notorious prison?

He was.

“Is there any excuse left to sit idly by?” the man with the script was saying. “How can a free Muslim sleep soundly while Islam is being slaughtered, its honor bleeding and the images of shame in the news of the satanic abuse of the Muslim men and women in the prison of Abu Ghraib. Where is your zeal and where is the anger?”

The screed continued for several minutes, with more appeals to Muslim pride and numerous Koranic references, including a nod to the Prophet Muhammad as “our example, and a good role model,” for having ordered the beheadings of prisoners after a revolt by Jewish merchants in the city of Badr. Then, addressing the U.S. president directly, he delivered a warning:

Hard days are coming to you. You and your soldiers are going to regret the day that you stepped foot in Iraq and dared to violate the Muslims….We say to you, the dignity of the Muslim men and women in the prison of Abu Ghraib and others will be redeemed by blood and souls. You will see nothing from us except corpse after corpse and casket after casket of those slaughtered in this fashion.

With that, Zarqawi then pulled a long knife from a sheath and pounced on Berg who, tied as he was, toppled onto his side. As the other men held the prisoner, Zarqawi grabbed Berg’s hair with one hand and with the other began to cut at his throat. There was a brief, terrible scream, and then a frenzy of movement as the other hooded men held Berg’s legs and shoulders while Zarqawi continued to struggle with his grisly task. More seconds passed of thrusting and sawing, as the camera wobbled and jerked. And still more seconds.

Bakos felt the nausea starting to build.

“Just get it over with,” she found herself thinking. But it wasn’t stopping.

Bakos finally excused herself and left. “There’s no utility in watching this,” she thought.

She missed only the final frames, in which one of Zarqawi’s companions, a tall figure in a white hood, lifted the head, now free of its body, and held it aloft like a trophy, then set it gently on the victim’s back.

—

Zarqawi’s message to the world was five minutes and thirty-seven seconds of grainy video shot with a shaky, handheld camera, depicting an almost unimaginable act of cruelty. It was an instant global hit.

Countless thousands of computers downloaded the images, from North America to South Asia and across the Middle East. Some viewers cried out in disgust. Others reacted with sadness, despair, or rage. But they watched.

To ensure proper credit for the deed portrayed, the video helpfully included a title: “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an
American.” The man who had longed to eclipse Osama bin Laden as the Islamist world’s daring man of action had done just that, at least for the time being.

Other terrorists had beheaded their victims. Two years earlier, the
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl had been murdered by al-Qaeda operatives in a similarly public fashion. But Pearl was a seasoned journalist who had traveled to Pakistan looking for a story about al-Qaeda. Nick Berg was targeted and killed simply because he was an American. And the video of his execution hit at the very time when millions of Americans were connecting to broadband, and when support for the Iraq war was plummeting.

Even the White House, which earlier in the month had been promoting business opportunities in Iraq, was forced to confront Zarqawi’s brutal deed.

“
Their intention is to shake our will. Their intention is to shake our confidence,” President Bush said, speaking to journalists in Washington about the terrorist act witnessed by so many Americans, in such excruciatingly intimate detail. He defended progress in Iraq but declined to take reporters’ questions.

Other U.S. politicians, including some in the president’s Republican Party, could sense the shift in the public’s mood, even before opinion polls confirmed it. The Abu Ghraib scandal had, for many, ripped away the last tattered remnants of moral rectitude underpinning America’s war with Iraq. The popular image of a high-tech U.S. military machine delivering shock and awe to Iraqi forces had also been tarnished, replaced by video clips on the nightly news of IED attacks and flag-draped coffins. And now Americans were witnessing in their living rooms a new kind of savagery.

“
If you had your thumb on the pulse of America, that pulse beat changed when Americans heard about the beheading of Nick Berg,” Representative Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, told
The New York Times
in an interview. “It jolted everybody’s memory again about why we were there in Iraq and who we’re dealing with.”

But whom, exactly, were the Americans dealing with? To many viewers, the men in the video were al-Qaeda, one black hood indistinguishable from another. Three days after the release of the video, another message seemed designed to answer the question.

On May 13, 2004, jihadist Web sites posted a message announcing a new terrorist organization that called itself “al-Tawhid wal-Jihad,” or Unity and Jihad. It was to be a kind of Islamist super-group: a merger of smaller factions of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters under a single umbrella, with Zarqawi as leader. The statement referred impressively to a “decisive historic turning point.”

“This merger is a strength for the people of Islam, and blazing flames for the enemies of God, where they shall burn until the retrieval of the stolen rights, and the establishment of God’s religion on the Earth,” the message read. “It is a ticket and an inducement for the groups and sects to rush for the fulfillment of this legitimate duty and factual necessity. We give our word [to] the Islamic Nation that we shall not betray or retreat, and we shall keep our promise until we reach either one of two aspired outcomes: victory or martyrdom.”

The communiqué listed two co-leaders, with Zarqawi—the “sheikh”—taking top billing. Just over three months earlier, in a letter to Bin Laden, Zarqawi had asked for a partnership with al-Qaeda and said that, in any event, the world would soon be hearing from him. That moment had arrived. With the release of the Berg video and the announcement of a pan-insurgent group with himself at the helm, Zarqawi had staked out a spot at the forefront of the global jihadist movement. No longer was he merely the leader of a particularly violent terrorist faction in Iraq. He was now a rival to Bin Laden himself as the terrorist that the West feared and young Islamists most wanted to emulate. Yes, Bin Laden had his videos, too: the Saudi appeared in his golden robes and dye-blackened beard, delivering ponderous sermons from behind a desk. Zarqawi’s showed a vital, charismatic young man in ninja garb, killing an American with his own hands.

CIA analysts studying the video and communiqué wondered if the young Jordanian had overreached. Zarqawi was an upstart who lacked formal education and had never been regarded as having the vision or brainpower to run a large organization. He also lacked the kind of institutional support that had helped make Bin Laden successful, including backing from recognized Islamic scholars whose fatwas gave spiritual cover to such violent deeds as killing unarmed civilians or employing suicide tactics. Zarqawi sought no
such approvals, and he had taken upon himself the responsibility of deciding how jihad against U.S. forces would be waged.

Nada Bakos wondered if Zarqawi’s main achievement had been to elevate himself as a priority target, and not just for the Americans.

“
Zarqawi jumped the shark,” she mused afterward. “Even al-Qaeda tried to abide by principles, using its theologians to interpret Sharia law. But Zarqawi interprets the law however he wants. He creates his own rules, like a cult,” she said. “He is becoming the megachurch.”

There would be a backlash, surely. The high priests of al-Qaeda and the other established jihadist networks would not look favorably on such exuberantly heterodox behavior, especially when it offended the sensibilities of the wealthy and pious Arabs who supplied the organization with most of its cash.

But many ordinary Muslim men lined up to join Zarqawi’s swelling congregation. In Iraq and elsewhere, admirers had begun to refer to the Jordanian by a new nickname that had come into use in the days after the Berg video first aired.

Bin Laden would remain the respected figurehead, the man who years ago had fought the Soviets and planned the attacks on New York and Washington. But Zarqawi was now hailed as the “sheikh of the slaughterers,” a terrorist for a brutal new age when broadcasting butchery on the Internet would be used as a tactic to win support among hardened jihadists and to sow fear among everyone else.

13

“It’s hopeless there”

On June 23, 2004, diplomat Robert S. Ford tossed his bags onto an armored airport bus and took his place for the final leg of a journey he had tried to avoid. In twenty-five minutes he would be in the Green Zone again, navigating its mazes of blast walls and trailer villages, breathing in the city’s hot, sweaty air with its accents of diesel fuel and rotting garbage. Six months after swearing off Baghdad for good, he was back, just in time to see the country’s fortunes careen sharply toward the worst.