I Lost My Love in Baghdad (19 page)

I spoke to Andi from the airport, telling her I was stuck but okay.

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you already.”

The next morning, Ahmed and his father told the security I was a VIP. (I was wearing a blue blazer with flannels, after all, having realized before that if I wore that outfit I wouldn't get searched as much.) Ahmed escorted me to the front of the line. I got on the plane. There was not much of an adrenaline rush, no thrill like I'd felt a year ago. I was just leaving—and for the first time, Andi would be in Baghdad without me.

DUBAI, SAIGON, JERUSALEM, AMMAN

After leaving Baghdad, I spent a few days of downtime in Dubai. I checked in with my friend about his diamond connection—he showed me the ring he'd bought his fiancée. It looked nice, but I wanted to wait before I made the purchase. I knew Andi had very specific tastes, and I wanted to take my time and get it right.

The week before I left Iraq, I'd planned a trip to Vietnam to write a piece comparing the two wars. After a week in Vietnam, I was supposed to head to Cairo to set up an apartment, where I thought I'd be staying when not in Baghdad. But before I left for Vietnam, I got a phone call from Scott, who was in Mexico at the time. He was planning the upcoming rotation schedule for reporters, he said, and he wanted
Newsweek
's Jerusalem bureau chief, Kevin Peraino, to go to Baghdad in November. Would I be interested in covering Israel for the month Kevin was in Iraq? I said yes, and discussed it with Andi, who started making plans to visit me in Israel on her break.

I arrived in Vietnam at the end of October. I spent a few days in Ho Chi Minh City, staying at the Continental Hotel, made famous in
The Quiet American
. It was where Fowler first met the idealistic Pyle, on Rue Catinat (changed to Freedom Street when the Americans took over the city, renamed Dong Khoi by the Vietnamese after the U.S. left). The hotel, which had once been a haven for spies, diplomats, and journalists, still maintained its French colonial design. I visited old battlefields in the jungle, crawled through the tunnels of Cu Chi that the Vietcong had dug. I looked at exhibits of the booby traps and equipment the guerrillas had used: punji sticks, punji pits, grenades set to invisible trip wires, rubber-soled sandals, black pajamas. I took a sampan down to the Mekong Delta. I ate dinner atop the Rex Hotel, looking out over a peaceful city where thirty-five years earlier American military officials and journalists watched the war get closer and closer to Saigon, closer and closer to the end. I stopped next in Hanoi, where I reported a story about Vietnam's economic recovery, pegged to President George W. Bush's scheduled November visit to the city for a regional economic summit, which would make him the second American president to have set foot in Vietnam since 1975.

The country was booming. It had the second-fastest-growing economy in Asia after China. The students and businessmen I spoke to seemed optimistic, and not resentful of Americans at all. In fact, they idolized the U.S.—in an opinion poll taken of teenagers in Vietnam in 2000, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton ranked as popular as Ho Chi Minh.

Could Iraq possibly turn out this way? Would I be able to visit Baghdad in thirty years with a copy of the Lonely Planet tourist guide? “Stay in the Paul Wolfowitz suite at the Al Rasheed Hotel, the room that was hit by a rocket in October 2003 during the deputy defense secretary's visit…Take a bus to Fallujah for an overpriced soda and a look at an exhibit of IEDs, the honorable resistance camouflaged in the trash…Here's the infrared sensor, garage-door opener, and 60mm mortar shell; on the left is the EFP, or explosive formed projectile, supplied by Iran, that could pierce even the toughest American armor; up above is the famous DBIED, or donkey-borne improvised explosive device.”

It was hard for me to imagine Iraq turning out like Vietnam; we'd be lucky if it did.

I arrived in Jerusalem in November. I spent my first days going to the Palestinian territories. I talked to a one-armed Hamas commander in Gaza, black flies buzzing around his head, who told me he wished all his seven children to be martyrs.

Andi took trips to IRI's office in the Red Zone. “Our private security guards almost shot someone,” she told me over the phone. She watched an Iraqi man, working in the Green Zone, get taunted by an American soldier. “These poor people, these poor people,” she said.

I interviewed a Palestinian rocket maker in Khan Younis, a town in the Gaza Strip where three journalists had been kidnapped in the previous six months. The kidnapping threat was still high. The interview went well. A masked Palestinian gunman stood guard in an abandoned concrete building as a twenty-year-old showed me how to pour explosive powder into a rocket tube.

Andi worked in the Iraqi parliament and experienced another close call. She was in the Convention Center when two car bombs were found just outside, part of an assassination attempt against the man whose staff she was training. The Green Zone was locked down, and it was getting dark—she led a group of people on foot back to her compound, a few mortars falling along the way. “Well, baby,” I said, “now you have a war story.” The story about the assassination attempt appeared on the front page of the
New York Times
the next day.

Was any of this real? The stress, the drama, the concern—it all felt too much sometimes, too much to actually be our lives. Andi worrying about me in Gaza, me worrying about her in Baghdad. The two of us arguing and threatening to break up, then threatening to get married, then deciding on the names of our kids (Hayden Gray, girl, Emerson, boy). When are you coming to Jerusalem and when are you getting back to Baghdad, everything so intense and desperate and insecure and then absolutely sure, all of it expressed over bad phone lines and emails and Skypes. We try to stay close, we try to stay connected, we look to the future. “I have a five-year plan,” I tell her. “That's so long,” she says. “This is the long run we are in for, right?” “When will we have a normal life?” “We don't want a normal life now. We'll have time for a normal life later.”

A month passes, a precious month, a useless month—November ends. Then there's a change of plan. Andi's contract with IRI ends much sooner than she expected, so she switches jobs to the National Democratic Institute. She leaves Baghdad. What relief I feel now that she's out safely. It dawns on me for the first time how deeply worried I was, and it surprises me to realize how capable I was of putting it so far back in my mind. She comes to visit me in Jerusalem for one week, Sunday to Sunday. On Monday, we walk in Jerusalem's Old City, getting lost in the crowds and tunnels of the Arab quarter, seeing the most important Muslim shrine—the Dome of the Rock—and the most important Jewish shrine—the Wailing Wall—and the spot where Christ was crucified. On Tuesday, despite State Department warnings for Americans to avoid it, we go to the West Bank. In the town of Nablus, in a valley between the Mountain of Blessings and the Mountain of Curses, we visit with Samaritan mystics, and get our fortunes told. As we leave, we pass Israeli Army vehicles that have closed off a road because of a stone-throwing incident. On Wednesday morning, we go to Ramallah and interview Fatah activists. Andi spends the afternoon with our Palestinian fixer, Nuha, looking at jewelry and running errands for her children. (She picks up Nuha's son, Abdul Nasser, from school. His teacher wants him to sing “O Come All Ye Faithful” he is a Muslim!) I interview the mayor of Jerusalem and write a story for the international edition about Iraq's economy. On Thursday, we plan a trip to Bethlehem, and I get a haircut. (“He cut your hair way too short,” she tells me.) Friday night we relax at the American Colony Hotel, eating room service and watching movies on my laptop. The week is almost over.

On Saturday, we drive to Amman. We drive around the Dead Sea, across the King Hussein border crossing. We hire another car, and drive as the sun is setting over the ancient hills. So much history, so much bloodshed. The Romans were here putting down revolts in Jerusalem two millennia ago, leaving ruins in Jordanian towns, crumbling forums and aqueducts. The Israelis and Palestinians fought along these winding roads three decades ago. There was a shooting in the West Bank just last week. The hills and valleys are burned orange, baked, worn down, beautiful. I pass Andi a bottle of water and I drink a Pepsi, and we fall asleep on the ride to Amman, back to the Four Seasons.

It's our last night together. I'm scheduled to take a flight from Amman to Baghdad on Sunday. Should I stay another day? Yes, I should, but I need to get back to work, back to Baghdad, that's the schedule, that's the plan, so I go.

Another goodbye. Fuck, this doesn't get easier.

Andi spends a few more days in Amman and then flies to D.C. via Paris to go to NDI's head office on K Street. We want to spend Christmas together—we're going to try.

Andi flies back to Baghdad on Christmas Eve; she is no longer in the Green Zone, though. NDI's compound is at the Ramal Hotel, in the Red Zone, which poses some serious difficulties. There is a security gulf between the two of us now. You can't just drive over whenever you want. I want her to come to the
Newsweek
bureau; we are having a Christmas party. Munib has decorated the house with pink and yellow balloons and purchased a three-foot-high plastic tree that you can plug in and it rotates. “Scott and I made eggnog,” I tell her. “My laptop is playing Frank Sinatra Christmas carols, Baby, it's cold outside. Your friends from the U.S. embassy are going to be here.” But for her to get to me, she has to get a security detail to bring her, and it's too short notice to arrange it. She just got to Baghdad that day, and again she's starting a new job, and taking a security detail for personal reasons is frowned upon. I have the same problem—whenever a
Newsweek
reporter leaves the Green Zone, we follow strict security procedures, whether we're going to the airport or to an interview, or in this case, to visit a girlfriend. For me to get to her, I need to have three cars of Iraqi guards, who have to know at least a day in advance that a trip is planned. The guards and driver have the day off, our security manager would also need to go with us, and we're still busy working on a cover story. So close to spending Christmas together! She's a ten-minute drive away, but there's no getting to her. It's too much of a risk to be together on Christmas this year, and so we text: Merry Christmas, Mog. Merry Christmas, Cub.

New Year's Eve is the same story. Andi has to stay in her compound; I have to stick around the bureau. Happy New Year, Cub. Happy New Year, Love.

Celebratory fire goes off around the city. The tracers light up the sky.

Andi sends me another text message, at 12:04
A.M.
: baby I almost just got shot!

I call her, and she explains she heard a bullet whiz by her head.

She takes a picture of herself smiling and sends it to me.

I go out that night for a few hours. I tell her I tried to get into the CIA bar in the Green Zone—it's called Babble On or Babylon—but I don't get in, I'm not on the list. She asks if I am going to the BCC—the Baghdad Country Club, a white house with a lawn that's been converted to a bar and restaurant and is frequented by mercenaries and contractors. I tell her no, and instead I find myself in the back of a Pajaro sport utility vehicle with a drunk American official behind the wheel yelling, “Happy New Year. Let's go over the bridge and see some Iraqis!”

Pop, pop, pop, more gunfire in the air.

The year 2006 has come to an end. Thirty-six thousand dead Iraqis, 822 dead Americans, $50 billion gone. Bodies and dollars, bodies and dollars.

I go back to the bureau and we talk on the phone until 5
A.M.
“I'll come to see you as soon as I can,” I tell her.

BAGHDAD

I plan a trip to visit Andi at the National Democratic Institute's compound in Karrada. To get there, I have to follow
Newsweek
's security procedures. The planning started with X, our new security manager.

X, or the X-Man, as he likes to be called, used to be in the Special Forces. He's in his early forties now, with a goatee and silver and black hair. He did a tour in Iraq at the beginning of the war, and then went home and worked as a bouncer in a Nevada casino. That job ended, he tells me, because he beat up a man who was harassing a female customer at the casino. The beating was justified, he wants me to know that. But it was also caught on tape by the security cameras. The video was shown at his hearing; he was not allowed to continue his work as a security guard in Nevada after the incident. Earlier in his life, X had started a business as a bail bondsman, but it didn't last very long. X is divorced. He likes his job now. He likes being in Iraq. He has a white business card that says “X-Man” he writes his Iraqna number on the back of the card.

X is the fifth Western security manager we've had in a year. It's been getting harder to find well-trained security professionals (or, as one of my colleagues referred to them, “well-trained psychopaths”) to come to Iraq. My friends who work in the security business say quality control has slipped. At the beginning of the war, most of the guys were legitimate ex–Special Forces or veterans of other conflicts. But the demand for PSDs—private security details—remains high and the supply of qualified pros is low. Now companies are hiring guys who look the part of the mercenary—bouncers or retired cops or ex-soldiers from developing countries—but who don't have the training.

In October,
Newsweek
switched security companies to a firm called CTU (the name taken from the organization Jack Bauer works for in
24
). Our old security provider, the company Jack Tapes worked for, was too small to handle the magazine's growing needs. CTU was better established. They had a number of contracts with the military, including one to add extra armor to Iraqi Humvees, and they could provide
Newsweek
with the setup we preferred: a Western security guard to live with us at the house, whose responsibilities included planning trips and making the bureau safe by installing security cameras, sandbags, sniper screens, bunkers for the guards.

We plan the route to NDI the day before I'm supposed to go. X loads on his computer a Google satellite map of Baghdad, zooming in on the neighborhood, marking the path we'd take to get to Karrada. He looks at the attacks in the area over the past week; nothing significant nearby. During heavy traffic hours, the main road we'll be on has been hit by car bombs, but not recently. An okay neighborhood, relatively safe, and traffic shouldn't be that bad if we leave in the afternoon. When we get close to arriving, X will call NDI's security chief to let him know.

Thirty minutes before we are scheduled to leave, X-Man gives us the briefing. We go through standard operating procedures in the living room. If A happens, what do you do? If B happens, how do you react? What about C? When do you return fire? When do you keep going? What are the SOPs? The Iraqi guards, sitting on the couches in the living room, listen and answer the questions. Checkpoints—these are tricky. Do you stop at a checkpoint? If you get to a checkpoint and you think it might be illegal, you turn around if you can because there have been attacks and kidnappings at illegal checkpoints. But then it's also a risk to disobey legit Iraqi police. Best to try to avoid checkpoints, try to avoid the Iraqi Army and Iraqi police, and if worst comes to worst you drive through it, keep driving, don't stop. I sit there, trying to stay awake as he talks. X likes it when we sit in on the briefing; he prefers his client to know what's going on.

I'm bringing along two large black trunks full of Andi's stuff that she had left with IRI. Clothes and new supplies—a few crates of Ocean Spray cranberry juice, Pringles, microwave popcorn, peanut butter, jam, a new mug for tea. X, who picked up the supplies for me, even got a bottle of perfume. (“You should give this to her,” he says, “give her this perfume.” And then he tells me that his girlfriend, whom he told about the mission, thinks it is terribly romantic—to go through all of this because of love.)

It is the first free weekend for Andi and me since she came back to Baghdad. Andi was settling into her new job, and I was swamped with reporting. The two weeks after Christmas were extremely busy for news in Iraq; Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30.

 

Hussein was captured by the Americans in December 2003, and they had held him in custody at a U.S. base called Camp Cropper near the airport. In October 2005, he went on trial in a renovated courthouse in the Green Zone for “crimes against humanity,” at a cost to the U.S. taxpayer of over $100 million. The first case against Saddam and eight other codefendants dragged out over ten months. Three of Saddam's defense attorneys were killed, another was seriously wounded and had to leave the country. The chief judge resigned in the middle of the trial, saying there was too much “political interference.” Throughout, Saddam and his codefendants made a mockery of the trial, shouting insults at the judge (“daughter of a whore”) and the Americans, sometimes refusing to show up in court, and other times getting thrown out by the judge. It made for good TV.

Print reporters covered the trial using a pool system, with news organizations sharing the responsibility of going to the courthouse and filing daily dispatches that everyone had access to. As the trial dragged on, it became a tedious duty—it was hard for the pool's organizer, the veteran journalist Larry Kaplow, to find reporters willing to go. Especially after Saddam was found guilty in the first of the cases against him (massacring 146 residents from the Shiite town of Dujaili), and the second case started (a genocidal campaign against Kurds in 1988 in the northern town of Anfal). It was a foregone conclusion that Saddam was going to get the death penalty, so the daily mechanics of the courtroom were only newsworthy when Saddam would go off on a tirade. And even that soon got old. The trial seemed like another bad joke. Amnesty International called it “deeply flawed” and “unfair.”

I went to the courthouse once in October 2006. I was excited to be there. After seeing pictures of Saddam on television since I was ten years old, after writing about his country on a weekly basis, I would finally get to see the man in person—assuming he decided to show up. The morning of the trial, I joined the State Department official who was in charge of taking the media to the courthouse and a small group of other reporters at a bus near the Convention Center. The bus shuttled us to the courthouse, a new and heavily defended building, renovated just for the trial. Security was extra tight—no tape recorders, no metal at all, no notebooks or pens. Writing materials would be provided for us once we were inside. I walked up three floors to the media viewing chamber, which was like a darkened home theater, a few rows of seats in front of a large and thick bulletproof glass window looking into the courtroom. The red curtains on the window were drawn and they would be opened once the trial started. (They were often closed when events got out of hand in the courtroom.) I put on a headset to hear the translation.

The curtains opened.

Saddam walked in. There he was, in a dark suit and tie with a red handkerchief in the pocket, a thick gray beard. The tyrant, the man America had fought two wars against, the man who was once the most feared dictator in the Middle East, a man who'd ordered the executions of thousands. He took a seat fifteen feet away from me. He had the look of a depressed businessman, a former CEO in a corporate fraud case, resigned, circles under the eyes hinting at long nights in his cell, awake in disbelief: Could this really be happening to me? Could I have fallen this far?

I filed a pool report on the testimony of the day: Kurdish women describing how the town of Anfal was gassed with poison, how they barely escaped and their families were killed, disappeared. “Anfalized”—the new word used to describe it.

A month later, the court announced Saddam's penalty: death by hanging.

The only remaining question was when?

On December 26, the court denied Saddam's appeal and confirmed the sentence. On December 28, I got a phone call from a U.S. military source. “Keep your phone on Saturday morning,” the source told me. On December 29, the “Saddam death watch” was in full effect—the cable news shows were giving it wall-to-wall coverage—but where he would be killed and at what time was still a secret. The best guess was Saturday morning, December 30, at first light.

Scott and I were up at 5:30
A.M.
on Saturday, after only a few hours of sleep. We figured if the execution was going to happen, VIPs in the prime minister's office would be involved, and they lived in the Green Zone. There were also rumors that the execution might take place somewhere inside the zone. Scott suggested I drive around to see if anything was going on. X volunteered to drive, I rode shotgun.

We drove down to the Convention Center. Nothing. We drove past the parade ground at the Crossed Swords monument. It was deserted. We swung by the courthouse but didn't see a thing.

Since we were out, I suggested we might as well get some coffee at the Green Bean in the U.S. embassy. As we approached the embassy, I saw a long line of SUVs parked on the street outside of LZ Washington. At least thirty Iraqi guards stood by the cars, smoking. This was something.

X parked in the lot across from the LZ Washington. He went to the embassy to pick up coffee. I walked across the street to see what I could find out.

I offered a guard a cigarette. He took one.

“Saddam,” I said, and pointed to the line of cars.

He smiled, and nodded. I chatted with a few more guards.

I returned to the car and got my coffee, then I called Scott and told him that we'd found the security detail to the prime minister's advisors and other court officials waiting at the helicopter pad. The guards were waiting for their bosses, those who'd gone to the execution, to return. Scott told me to stay put.

X and I waited in the car, warming up with caffeine. I heard helicopters, and then the guards started to move around, firing up the engines on the SUVs. As I walked back across the street, two helicopters landed inside LZ Washington.

The gates to the helicopter pad opened and about ten Iraqi men in suits came through. The guards rushed to meet them, and they all started shouting and jumping with excitement. One man was holding a camera phone up in the air, and the men flocked around him. Saddam was dead, Saddam was dead, Saddam was gone. They were hearing the news for the first time. Another man was holding a Sony HDTV camcorder. He was being congratulated by his friends. An Iraqi man pointed to the guy holding the camcorder: “He was the one who filmed the execution.”

His name was Ali al-Massedy; he was the official videographer for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He had shot the official film of the dictator's death. I tried to get as many details as I could—what did he look like, what were Saddam's last words, what happened when he died? I scribbled notes. I was the only journalist there. I talked to him for five minutes before he got in an SUV and rushed off.

My adrenaline was high as I rushed back to the bureau.

I wrote the story in thirty minutes—I had just enough detail—and it went up on the website at around midnight New York time.

The story headline:
“I SAW FEAR, HE WAS AFRAID.”

It was an exclusive interview, and one of the first published accounts of Saddam's death. The story got a link on the Drudge Report. I was asked to do phone interviews with MSNBC, calling in on the satellite phone throughout the day.

But the scoop was fleeting. By noon, a small portion of the video Ali had shot was released to the press. It showed Saddam walking to the gallows, then the video froze right before he dropped to his death. There was no sound on the video. Iraqi officials who'd witnessed the execution said it was a dignified event. Mowfak Rubaie, Prime Minister al-Maliki's security advisor, told the BBC he was “very proud” of the hanging, that Saddam was given “respect” and it met “international standards.”

By that afternoon, though, another video version of the event leaked out through an Arab TV channel. It was taken from a camera phone. (I suspected it was probably from the other guy the guards swarmed at the landing pad, but I didn't know who he was.)

The camera phone version was much more disturbing. It did not look like a respectable execution. There was sound, and you could hear the people assembled taunting Saddam. You got a good look at his executioners: two men in leather jackets wearing black ski masks. They looked like thugs. They looked like a death squad. After Saddam fell through the gallows, the unknown man holding the camera phone rushed in to get a closer look, while others in the chamber started to dance around the dictator's body.

The video didn't play well with the international media. The U.S. military tried to distance itself from the event, embarrassed by the lynch-moblike display. The U.S. had captured Saddam, paid for and orchestrated his trial, kept him safe in jail, and now their triumph had ended in humiliation. The military did not respond to questions about the execution that day. Finally, at a press conference a few days later, the U.S. military spokesperson said the Americans played “no role” in the execution. That was a lie. The U.S. had brought Saddam to Camp Justice (a joint U.S.-Iraqi base in Baghdad where the gallows were located), handed him over to Iraqi custody, and flown twenty Iraqi officials to witness the execution. When the execution was completed, the U.S. flew the top officials back to the Green Zone, along with Saddam's body. Technically, the Americans turned custody of Saddam over at 5:30
A.M.
; the execution took place at 6:05. And what had happened in those thirty-five minutes? What happened after Saddam was turned over completely to the new Iraqi government? It was time for insults and old-fashioned revenge. One executioner taunted Saddam: “Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada.” Another told him to go to hell. At least two witnesses filmed it with their camera phones. I saw it as a window into the new Shiite government—given the responsibility of executing Saddam, a longtime enemy, they fucked it up. They made a spectacle of themselves. They somehow made Saddam appear dignified, while they looked like a bunch of criminals in black ski masks and leather jackets. This was the new face of Iraq. This was “an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy,” as Bush would say in a statement on the day of the execution. The democratic course of the new Iraqi government: executioners in hoods and officials with camera phones and bloodlust. It reinforced the worst fears of many Iraqis, especially in the Sunni community, that while one evil found his fate another was eclipsing the future.