To Be a Friend Is Fatal (9 page)

Mack the driver used his turn signal even though every car pulled off to the side of the road at the first sight of us. Riding shotgun with a Colt rifle, a South African sat nearly sideways in his seat with his weapon at the ready. Everything on the road elicited a warning over his mic to the backup vehicle trailing us.

“Parked. Five hundred meters.”

“Parked, door open. Three hundred meters.”

“Carcass. One hundred meters.”

“Two trucks merging left. Two hundred meters.”

“Donkey crossing upcoming bridge.”

We roared into the Kirkuk power plant. Before I could open the door, a private security detail materialized by the window. When I stepped out, he said, “Please stay close.” Four other mercenaries formed a circle around me. I stood there, confused. After a few beats, I started walking toward the rickety bus that had been dispatched to collect the angered journalists, and the covey of PSDs moved fluidly with me. “Pacing west,” I heard in the earpiece of the closest guard. When I stopped, they stopped. I tried to apologize to the journalists from within my protective halo but found it difficult with my guards' rifles pointed at their kneecaps.

USAID's manager of the Kirkuk power plant led the journalists on a tour like a carnival barker, reciting the dramatic story of MOAG's journey. “Two hundred sixty megawatts! Seven hundred tons! Six hundred
forty miles! Three hundred marines!” But the journalists, especially the Iraqis, knew that hardly any power came out of their outlets, MOAG or not.

What they didn't know was that during the costly years of delay, nobody had bothered to train the Iraqi plant workers in the proper operation and maintenance of the state-of-the-art turbine. Within months of finally going online, the generator was broken. USAID quietly spent millions to bring in a Siemens repair team, which needed expensive private security while it worked on repairs.

A few puff pieces came out of the media junket, which surely cost the US government tens of thousands of dollars, factoring in the cost of mercenaries and the military's Blackhawks. “Great stuff, guys, this is big!” the public affairs chief said excitedly in the next meeting at the embassy, holding up a printout of a short
Washington Post
article buried on page sixteen. My boss at USAID was thrilled with my work, and the mission director started to bring me along to high-level meetings.

The Iraqis on the other side of our blast walls didn't appear to have read the article. The insurgency worsened as the power plants sputtered.

Yaghdan picked his way along the crumbling, trash-strewn sidewalks of his neighborhood, periodically stopping to take in the changes. Boarded-up windows, char marks, and rubble. The August sun ovened out molten light so intense that the frames of his glasses grew hot. For the first time, he thought seriously about quitting his job with the Americans.

In the beginning, Yaghdan thought that the world inside the Green Zone would eventually lose its blast walls and expand to cover all of Iraq. When he first set foot in the buzzing fortress of the Green Zone, Yaghdan thought,
This is what American life looks like! This is what they want Iraq to look like. This is how comfortable it's going to be if we continue working
hard
.

He and his colleagues made the decision to work for USAID during the innocent early days of the war, when those who stepped forward as informal interpreters were thanked by their neighbors who had no other
means of communicating with the Americans. Back then, their sense of optimism allowed them to overlook the daily indignities of working beneath the Americans. In his first week on the job, a mortar traced a parabola into the USAID compound as Yaghdan and his boss walked toward the cafeteria. They both dove to the ground; only she was wearing armor. That made him uncomfortable, but the work was too important to make a fuss over a helmet and a flak jacket. Yasser, a brilliant Iraqi in the procurement office who was prone to quoting Shakespeare if anyone bothered to talk with him, spent hours each week scouring dangerous neighborhoods in search of a particular type of low-fat strawberry yogurt for his American boss, who disliked the cafeteria brand that was trucked in from Kuwait by KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary managing billions of dollars' worth of contracts for logistics support for the US military. Tara, an Iraqi woman from Sadr City working to help USAID refurbish health care clinics, was too polite to register her disgust when a semiferal Iraqi cat taken in by her boss would jump up on her lap while she worked at her desk.

In April 2004,
60 Minutes II
ran a report detailing the extensive use of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. By the end of the first year of the occupation, whatever goodwill America had earned by toppling Saddam Hussein had been squandered on a spree of endless checkpoints, wrongful detention, incompetent reconstruction efforts, and now torture. Before long, a stigma germinated and surrounded the Iraqi “traitors” who worked alongside the Americans.

Instead of spreading across Iraq as Yaghdan once dreamt, the Green Zone contracted, a prison into which he and the others sneaked each morning. By 2005, their optimism was tattered. They were trapped: there was no hope of finding a job elsewhere if it ever became known they'd worked for the Americans.

But as their countrymen came to see them as traitors, we came to see them as possible insurgents. As the insurgency developed, American civilians ventured outside of the blast walls of the Green Zone less and less. The only part of the Red Zone that appeared each day, other than
an occasional mortar, were Iraqis like Yaghdan, who looked more and more dangerous to the bunkered-in eyes of American civilians.

At some point in 2005, someone in the embassy filled out a requisition form for polygraph examination machines. Then someone drafted a policy memorandum requiring all Iraqis working for the United States in the Green Zone to submit to lie detector tests. Then somebody filled out a requisition form for a bomb residue spectrometer, which came with little fortune-cookie-sized slips of white paper that the Nepalese mercenaries guarding the AID compound rubbed on Yaghdan's arms once he had finally made it past the militiamen searching for traitors like him at the outer checkpoints. The paper was fed into a slot in the machine, and a smiling man with a rifle stood in Yaghdan's way until the large green light blinked.

Three months into his job, he emerged from a Green Zone checkpoint and found a white Opel idling, with two bearded men watching him. As he walked, it shifted into gear and trailed him. He sprinted up a narrow alley, hoping to lose the Opel, which had earned a reputation as an assassin's car. He ran through his own streets like a fugitive, and then realized that his safest option was to return to the Green Zone, so he bolted down another alley toward the Assassins' Gate and flashed his USAID badge at the guard. He emerged from another exit an hour later and sneaked home to Haifa.

He was promoted and assigned to the cubicle next to mine, managing a contract for the agency that examined USAID projects throughout the country and ensured quality. This gave him access to a sensitive database that listed the GPS coordinates of thousands of projects, an insurgent's dream. He was proud of his position. He had reached a higher level of responsibility than all of his Iraqi colleagues and even some of the Americans. He felt valued, trusted by the agency.

Still, the indignities mounted. In the first week of his new position, he stepped outside the front gate of the USAID compound for about thirty seconds to greet and escort two American contractors who were reporting to him. They were waved through, while the guards rubbed the paper slips on his clothing to feed into the bomb residue machine; he had never stepped out of their sight. Frustrated though he was, he enjoyed the new job too much to resign over it.

Yaghdan left for work earlier and earlier each morning. He and other Iraqis like him were called spies by their countrymen during Friday sermons at mosques throughout Iraq, in newspaper editorials, and on television. Now, in order to get to work on time each morning, they had to act like spies. He carried a bag with different articles of clothing: a
shemagh
to wrap around his head, a hat, a light jacket, sunglasses. He changed his shape, wearing baggy clothes, grew and then shaved his beard, and hid his USAID and Green Zone access badges in his shoes. Although it would normally take only twenty minutes to head directly to the Green Zone, he took a bus in the opposite direction. And then another bus to a different neighborhood. And then a taxi, and another taxi. Every day, a different route: sometimes from his home in the Jihad neighborhood to Baya, and then from Baya to Bab al-Sharji, where he entered through the gate on the bridge. Or from Jihad to Nafaq Shurta, and then a bus to Allawi, and from Allawi to the Assassins' Gate entrance.

But when the lie detector machine arrived in the compound, he'd had enough. Iraqis who had worked for the agency for years, since the first hours and days of the war, through mission director after mission director, through countless arrivals and departures of Americans, were summoned into a room with a polygraph machine and asked about their loyalties. Sometimes they were asked if they had ever had an affair or slept with someone of the same sex. One long-serving Iraqi emerged from the test with an armed guard behind him. He wasn't permitted to gather his belongings at his desk before he was escorted out. Others resigned before submitting to the test. The security officers saw this as a confirmation of the polygraph machine's value: it was weeding out untrustworthy Iraqis. Why else would they resign?

Even though he wanted to quit, Yaghdan knew he was bound by a contract that was inescapable and unalterable, penned in American English and signed at another time in another Iraq, one that was now at the bottom of a swamp of insurgency, wrongful detention, errant targeting, and an unholy marriage of mistrust and codependence. Despite the polygraphs, the bomb machines, the lack of body armor, the attempted assassinations of his Iraqi colleagues, he was wed to America and knew that it was not a marriage of equals. His unease climbed
whenever the executive officer or someone else in management called him Mohammad.

In July 2005 Suhair, the friend who'd helped Yaghdan find the temporary job when he was recuperating from the shooting, hurried into the USAID compound and asked for a meeting with the mission director. She and her two sisters worked for the agency. The night before, someone pulled up to their home in a black BMW and unloaded several AK-47 clips, raking the walls and doors and windows with gunfire. Suhair and her family had been visiting friends, so when the armed men jumped over the fence and shot open the front door, they found no one inside. She came home to bullet slugs lodged in the walls of her living room and bedroom.

The mission director and the executive officer said there was nothing they could do to protect Suhair and her husband, who also worked for the agency. When she pushed them, they told her, “Your safety is not our responsibility.” She fled the country a few days later, and her sisters moved into different neighborhoods. Not long afterward, the home of another Iraqi, named Talal, was fired upon. Yaghdan never told Haifa about the Opel or Suhair or Talal or any of the other dangers. He didn't want to scare her.

These dangers were known to US government officials. Iraqi employees requested special access badges which would allow them to enter the Green Zone more quickly, rather than waiting in long lines which were routinely sniped at by militants. Request denied. They asked for permission to move into the Green Zone so that they would have some security. Request denied.

In the fall of 2005, an internal State Department cable about the worsening situation for the LES—USGspeak for Locally Engaged Staff—was leaked to Al Kamen of the
Washington Post
: “Two of our LES employees have been gunned down in execution-style murders, and two others barely escaped a similar fate in August. Our LES employees live in fear of being identified with the Embassy of the U.S. . . . The reality is that the embassy can offer them little protection outside the International Zone (IZ) and is not in a position to grant their repeated requests to house them and their families within the IZ.”

Rather than divert any of the massive resources flooding the largest
American embassy in the world to provide even a basic level of protection for its Iraqi employees, the US government came up with a different solution: hire Jordanians to do the Iraqis' jobs. The complications with housing our Iraqi colleagues in the Green Zone did not apply to these new hires, as Jordanians, under the classification of Third Country Nationals, were permitted to live in the Green Zone.

I heard about the attack on Suhair's house the morning she requested help from the mission director. We all gossiped about it in the cafeteria that day, and that was the end of it. I had an uneasy feeling about how the Iraqis were treated in the compound, but the news of her flight filtered into my mind in macro terms: Iraq was going to hell, and we weren't doing a lot to stop its descent. I didn't think much about what her situation meant in personal terms. Could USAID have done more to help her? How would she get to where she was going? After a few weeks, someone else had replaced her, and apart from an email bounced from her now-defunct agency address, her service faded from memory.

Four months into my work, my boss was fired. He had chased enough mortars with whiskey and slipped up, allowing T. Christian Miller of the
Los Angeles Times
to poke around an unfinished water treatment plant without doing any advance work. (Such is the term for a public affairs officer's scouting of a place to anticipate any potential scandals.) Miller found millions of dollars of unused parts and most of the plant absent or asleep. An embarrassing but accurate report about the total lack of operations and maintenance training that had contributed to MOAG's swift demise appeared in April 2005, prompting a flurry of meetings within the agency with the pointless goal of damage control.