See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (24 page)

In the months before the Gulf War, the United Nations had imposed a total oil embargo on Iraq, cutting off all exports, including oil. Almost immediately, though, the embargo had sprung leaks. First it was barges in the Gulf, running the blockade at night. Soon an overland route to Turkey opened up. Vegetable trucks transported the oil from Kirkuk in jerry-rigged tanks welded to their undercarriages. By 1995 some estimates put the quantity as high as a hundred thousand barrels a day crossing into Turkey. To get there, the oil had to pass through a large tract of Kurdistan controlled by the KDpand Barzani took his cut from each truck. The smuggled oil was also a lifeline for Saddam, who used the money to fund his intelligence services and Special Republican Guards - the forces that kept him alive. Indeed, everyone seemed to profit from the smuggling except Talabani, who wasn’t getting a penny because no part of the smuggling route passed through his corner of Kurdistan. With Barzani accumulating money in his war chest, smuggled oil began to dangerously destabilize the north.

You only had to drive a few miles into the north to understand the dimensions of the smuggling operation. Trucks carrying oil were lined up bumper to bumper, often for as long as twenty miles, waiting to cross into Turkey. One Kurd told us that when there was a spike in Turkish oil demand, the trucks stretched all the way to the Iraqi lines beyond Dahuk, about seventy miles. Over the months upon months of smuggling, so much oil had leaked from the trucks that the road was dangerously slick to drive on.

Washington knew all about the smuggling but pretended it wasn’t happening. As far as I know, neither the State Department nor our embassy in Ankara ever challenged Turkey, which could have shut down the whole operation with a single telephone call. Part of the problem was that the Turks were already unhappy about the Gulf War’s aftermath. We’d promised Turkey a quick, decisive war but never mentioned the possibility of an open-ended embargo and the long-term damage it would have on Turkey’s economy. But there was also a bureaucratic roadblock to enforcing the embargo: Our embassy in Ankara fell under the State Department’s European Bureau. Smuggled oil, Saddam, Iraqi dissidents, the fractious Kurds - they were the Near East Bureau’s problem. All our Ankara embassy cared about was keeping the Turks happy, and if the Turks said they needed cheap oil for their refineries, well, that was good enough for Ankara.

What I couldn’t understand was why the White House didn’t intervene. All it had to do was ask Saudi Arabia to sell Turkey a hundred thousand barrels of discounted oil. Turkey certainly would have stopped the smuggling for the right price. It was almost as if the White House wanted Saddam to have a little walking-around money.

For Iraqis, of course, the arrangement made perfect sense. By turning a blind eye to the smuggled oil, the US managed to turn the Kurdish opposition against itself even as it helped Saddam pay for his praetorian guard, just what you’d expect of a clever superpower that was secretly supporting the local despot.

My own relations with Masud Barzani went sour from the start. Whenever I met with him at his Sar-i Rash office, a former government guest house about a five-minute drive from Salah al-Din, Barzani would begin to shift uneasily in his seat as soon as I raised the subject of the ongoing fighting between the Kurds. It wouldn’t be long before he would sit bolt upright, straighten himself to his full height (his feet still wouldn’t touch the floor), and start cursing Talabani. This would be my signal that the meeting was over. Once, when I told him the US was fed up with the Kurds and would abandon the north one day, Barzani lost his temper. He walked over to where I was sitting, pointed his index finger at me, and hissed through clenched teeth: ’Don’t threaten me.’

It didn’t seem possible, but as the fighting picked up, my stock with Barzani sank even lower. On February 171 asked him about his relations with Iran. Angry as ever, he flatly denied that he even had a channel to Iran, let alone the ability to attack the PUK from Iranian soil. The next day, when I visited Talabani at Qolat Cholan, his camp near the Iranian border, he told me that he’d just learned Barzani had cut a deal with Iran that would allow him to transport artillery across Iranian soil so he could attack the PUK from the east. The axis of the assault would be Panjwin, a PUK-held town on the Iranian border.

A little before six AM. the next morning, Talabani woke me to tell me that, just as he had predicted, Barzani’s forces were shelling Panjwin from the foothills on the Iranian side of the border. If true, it had the makings of a catastrophe for the US: Iran had to be kept out of Iraq at all costs. When I called Barzani on the satellite telephone, he swore his troops were not in Iran and he wasn’t shelling Panjwin, from Iran or anywhere else. Someone was lying. I decided I had to take a look myself.

Talabani loaned me four Toyota Land Cruisers and a Toyota pickup with a .50-caliber machine gun bolted on its bed, and we drove about four hours through snow-patched mountains. Descending the valley into Panjwin, saw no immediate sign of a bombardment. At the town’s edge, I was met by the local PUK commander and the mayor, who showed me around. On foot, you could see the smoking craters. I picked up the fragment of a 107mm base plate. It was warm. The mayor explained that the shelling had stopped once the rumor circulated that the ‘American ambassador’ was on his way.

As we walked through the town, the villagers slowly started to come out of the ruins and follow us. One man was so furious that he picked up a boulder and threw it at an unexploded shell, cursing Barzani. I sped our little inspection tour on, right up to the Iranian border. By now I was close enough to clearly see that the gunners manning the 107mm rockets on the far side of the border were Barzani’s pech merga. Behind them stood khaki-clad soldiers from Iran’s Pasdaran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

As soon as I got back to Talabani’s camp, I called Barzani to tell him what I’d seen at Panjwin.

‘You betrayed me ‘was his only response.

Granted, I had gone to see for myself what was happening, and I’d used Talabani’s equipment and men to get there, but only in the Middle East could you betray someone by refusing to accept the lie he had told you in the first place.

Barzani’s Kurdish nemesis, Jalal Talabani, was not only genial and urbane; he was also a first-rate actor and a world-class politician. Built along the lines of a double-wide fireplug and with a smile as broad as the Euphrates, Talabani enjoyed the role of a likable rogue. When I would confront him after he’d made some unprovoked attack on one of Barzani’s positions, he’d laugh, hand me a cigar, and promise not to do it again. And the next day, of course, he’d start attacking all over again. Truth suffered with both men, but at least with Talabani, there were some good times in the bargain.

Talabani was an Iraqi nationalist. He believed that the Kurds should have a degree of autonomy, but he didn’t want to see Iraq partitioned among its ethnic groups. Unlike Barzani, Talabani seemed to genuinely want Saddam gone and was ready to make any sacrifice necessary to accomplish that aim. Talabani even had his own plan for getting rid of Saddam.

He first told Tom and me about it at a meeting in Kui Sinjaq, his native village, on March 2. Talabani ushered us into his bedroom, out of earshot of the political bureau and military commanders who waited in his cramped living room. Books and papers were everywhere - on the bed, under the bed, stacked against the walls. With the lights off and curtains drawn, the room smelled of sleep. The three of us sat on the edge of Talabani’s unmade bed.

‘I am at a fork in the road,’ Talabani said in his fluent but heavily accented English.

There were two choices staring him in the face, he said, neither of them safe. He could continue fighting Barzani, as he had for the last year, but it had become a war of attrition and he was unlikely to be able to inflict a decisive defeat. In the meantime, the dirty oil money was giving Barzani an insurmountable cash advantage. At the present level of conflict, Talabani wouldn’t have anything left to fight with in a week or two. Or, he said, he could launch an out-and-out offensive - a do-or-die effort against Barzani and his KDP before the PUK’s stocks of weapons and ammunition ran out completely. Apart from its finality, the latter plan ran the risk of sucking in an outside power, like Iran or Turkey, or encouraging Saddam to step in from the south.

‘And that is what is worrying me now,’ Talabani said.

He had received information from a spy inside the KDP camp that Barzani was panicking and ready to make common cause with Baghdad. Using the same channel he employed for his oil business, Barzani had promised Saddam that if Talabani were to launch an uprising, he wouldn’t participate in it. In return, Barzani expected Saddam’s help in expelling Talabani from Irbil, the administrative capital of Kurdistan, which the PUK had seized the year before.

‘He’s a weak man,’ Talabani said of his rival,’ prey to a narrow tribal view of the world - someone who doesn’t give a damn about the opposition or Chalabi’s uprising or even overthrowing Saddam. He cares only about the Barzan clan and would make a pact with the devil to protect it.

‘So I could do nothing, keep my fingers crossed, and hope Barzani and Saddam don’t make a deal. But I have another choice. Simply turn over the card table.’

Talabani spread out a map of Iraq on the bed, pushing a stack of books onto the floor.

‘Look here. This is the V Corps line,’ he said, running his finger along V Corps positions south of Irbil. V Corps was the main Iraqi force in the north facing PUK and KDP lines. ‘What do you see?’

‘A reinforced Iraqi army corps,’ answered, refusing to believe he was about to propose attacking it.

‘That’s what it says on your Pentagon’s maps, with all of those little flags standing for divisions and brigades. But what I see is a demoralized, vulnerable, beatable army.’

Talabani grabbed my hand to make sure he had my full attention.

‘What I’m going to do is simply pull back my troops off the Irbil line - just abandon it - then march them south and hit V Corps here, here, and here,’ he said, jabbing his thick finger at three V Corps divisions. ‘And you’ll see. Entire companies, even divisions, will surrender at the first shot.’

‘And if Barzani attacks you from the rear?’ I asked.

‘If he does, everyone will know him for the traitor he is, and he will not survive a day. His own people will squash him like a bug.’

‘And what happens if you defeat V Corps?’

‘That’s where you come in. We’ll see how badly Mr. Clinton wants to get rid of Saddam.’

On the face of it, a band of Kurdish irregulars attacking an Iraqi army corps head-on was like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute: a thrill ride destined to end in a splat. V Corps wasn’t the finest fighting unit in the Iraqi army, but it had plenty of armor and artillery, and its forward positions along the Kurdish lines were dug in behind berms, razor wire, and concrete bunkers. In addition, it was backed up by a fully manned and equipped elite Republican Guards Division, and it was positioned well below the thirty-sixth parallel, where Saddam’s Mi-24 Hind gunships were allowed to fly. Harassing V Corps was one thing; engaging it in a battle, quite another.

As for his own forces, Talabani had no more than two thousand lightly armed pech merga to throw against V Corps. The few tanks he had captured from Saddam in 1991 had been sold to Iran. While he had some artillery, he was critically short of ammunition. Toyota Land Cruisers, his troops’ only transportation, gave him speed and mobility but nothing else. The Land Cruisers would be sitting ducks for Saddam’s gunships.

But Talabani was neither crazy nor reckless. He had fought Saddam’s army before, and he understood its vulnerabilities as well as anyone. If Talabani thought he could take on V Corps, there had to be something to it, at least to my thinking. The critical question, as I saw it, was just how bad off the Iraqi army was, and bits and pieces of evidence suggested it was in real trouble.

Handfuls of Iraqi defectors had been slipping into the north ever since the Gulf War. Now the trickle was turning into a river, and they carried tales of a defeated army: scarce rations, no ammunition, no fuel. The elite Republican Guards were only slightly better off, the defectors said.

In late 1994 Saddam had ordered the ears of captured deserters cut off, another sign of rising discontent. Every night Iraqi television ran grotesque pictures of young men with missing ears, blood running down their necks.

In short, the stars seemed to be aligning against Saddam, even if no one could be certain his army was on the brink of collapse. The problem was that no one - not I or Chalabi or Talabani, certainly not anyone back in distant Washington - could tell what and whom the stars were aligning around. Talabani’s war plan threw a third ring into the circus, along with the general’s coup and Chalabi’s ‘End Game’ attack. Could attacking V Corps work? Was Talabani serious about pulling the trigger, or was he just playing politics with me and, through me, with Barzani and all the others? I really didn’t know. The only beacon I had to go by was what I understood American policy to be: that we would support any serious movement to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Those were my orders as I understood them, the reason I had brought my team into northern Iraq. And I took my orders seriously.

‘So, what should I do?’ Talabani asked when he finished. ‘What choice do I make? Fight Barzani or Saddam?’

‘Make a truce with Barzani.’

‘It’s too late for that. Barzani is desperate. At any minute he will sign an agreement with Saddam, and when he does, we will all be finished - the Kurds, the opposition, and you.’

‘What about his promise to join Chalabi’s insurrection on March 4?’

‘Barzani is sitting up on his mountain just itching to betray it,’ Talabani said. ‘If he really cared about the opposition and uniting the Kurds, he would have agreed long ago to share the money from the oil.’

I hesitated before speaking. I wanted to choose my words carefully. ‘Jalal, if the choice conies down to Saddam invading the north or you attacking V Corps - and those really are the only alternatives - you know which side I come down on.’