Chapter 4: The Source
This is the latest chapter of The Ice Man, my book about the Navy SEAL platoon in Iraq that took the blame for a CIA homicide. The book is available only to paid subscribers.
The mission wasn’t over. Not yet. There was still one more job to do.
The Humvees carrying Cerrillo, his teammates, and the two prisoners stopped at a four-way intersection that was 280 meters away from the apartment complex. A few Humvees were there waiting for them. These other Humvees carried members of the Polish GROM. The GROM had not been part of the assault force that captured Jamadi. They were tasked with a second mission that was about to begin.
Before that mission could begin, the CIA and the SEALs needed to ensure they had captured the right guy. The intersection was the pre-designated spot where the CIA’s source would make the “PID”—positive ID of the target. The problem was one of the CIA vehicles had gotten lost. The black Suburban was on the road to Baghdad. The minutes ticked by. The Humvees sat at the intersection, the exhausts from the V8 Humvee diesels visible in the cold desert night air. The SEALs were about to go after them when the CIA realized its mistake and returned within radio range. Lieutenant Ledford gave directions back to the rendezvous point.
Two SEALs got Jamadi out of the Humvee and marched him over to the gold CIA Suburban, the one carrying the CIA’s source. They pulled back his hood and shined a light in his face. Jamadi was “alert, wide-eyed, and scared,” one of the SEALs reported later. He had a swollen right eye and blood on his face. But it was rare that a detainee didn’t have blood on them. People got bloody when you blasted into someone’s home and carried people out in minutes if not seconds. A SEAL got on the radio and spoke briefly with the CIA personnel in the gold Suburban. The CIA’s source confirmed they had the right guy from inside the vehicle.
They repeated the process with the man they had captured in the apartment next to Jamadi’s. The source didn’t know the neighbor, but he mistakenly believed the neighbor had been caught in Jamadi’s apartment. Based on this mistaken belief, the source thought the second detainee was probably one of Jamadi’s accomplices and was worth interrogating. So the neighbor went back into the Humvee with Jamadi. They both rode back to base. On the way, the convoy stopped at the St. Michael forward operating base, where they had stopped on the way to Mahmudiyah.
Now, the second mission could begin. The Humvees carrying the GROM and a few SEALs sped off to a nearby building—the gold CIA Suburban ferrying the CIA’s prized source followed behind.
This second mission was a decoy operation to protect the CIA source. It was just for show: a mock capture. It was designed to obscure the identity of the man who had ratted out Jamadi.
During the decoy mission, the GROM would “capture” the source and drive him back to Camp Jenny Pozzi. The US military would publicize his capture. A military document released under a Freedom of Information Lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union identifies the man captured by the GROM as Abu Ali, a “senior member of the Abu Abdullah Terrorist Group.”
The source of information for the Jamadi mission and many others was an Iraqi man whom I will call Ahmed. Ahmed provided the information that led to numerous missions aimed at capturing or killing insurgent leaders throughout the fall of 2003. “Ahmed gave us everything,” Cerrillo says. “Pretty much every target that we hit in Baghdad and Sadr City was from Ahmed.” Thanks to Ahmed, Foxtrot Platoon dismantled an entire terrorist cell south of Baghdad. The four key figures of the cell they captured included the senior bomb maker, the chief financier, the operation’s boss, and ultimately, Jamadi, the cell leader.
Ahmed was a paid informant for the US government, one of many Iraqis feeding information to the Americans for cash. Ahmed, a clean-cut man in his mid-30s and a devoted father, Jamadi had burrowed deep inside one of the prominent Iraqi insurgent groups. Jaysh Muhammad (Army of Muhammad) claimed to have 5,000 fighters and a decentralized structure extending west to Ramadi and north to Tikrit. It was one of several groups that claimed credit for the bombing of the United Nations in August 2003 that killed 22 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the head of the UN mission in Iraq. All these groups would eventually merge into the umbrella resistance led by the bloodthirsty terrorist al Zarqawi.
It was Ahmed who misidentified Jamadi’s apartment and sent the SEALs into the home of his next-door neighbor. “Motherfucker couldn’t give directions for shit,” Cerrillo says. Cerrillo met Ahmed several times to extract as much information as possible about the locations they were planning to assault, but he otherwise avoided him. “I stayed away from sources,” he says. “They were all turncoat scumbags who ratted on their bros to make money.”
On mission after mission, the information from Ahmed kept sending SEALs to blow up the wrong doors. Yes, there were always gaps in intelligence in wartime. A good commander had to be ready to adapt on the fly. But this wasn’t a one-time mishap. It happened frequently, and you didn’t need to be a military strategist to see the problem. Foxtrot platoon was hunting terrorists who saw killing Americans as a chance for glory. They knew the US military might come looking for them. They just didn’t know when. Blowing open the wrong door gave whoever was inside the chance to grab whatever weapons they had on hand and get ready. If it kept happening, it was going to get someone killed.
Part of the problem with the informants may have been cultural, something woven into the fabric of Iraqi society. They brought the SEALs close to the target but not to the right door. The informants needed the money the Americans offered but didn’t fully trust them. They were afraid. To the SEALs who worked with these informants, the closer they got to the correct target, the more nervous they got. They risked their lives for representatives of a foreign government they didn’t completely trust. So, the informants split the baby in half: They sent the team to the house next door or down the street. After an informant sent Foxtrot Platoon to the wrong location, the SEALs walked the surrounding area. The informant grew increasingly nervous as he walked closer and closer to what turned out to be the correct location.
The informants knew that a horrible death might await them if they were exposed as turncoats. “When you play for money, eventually it catches up to you,” one member of Foxtrot platoon said. Eventually, it caught up to Ahmed.
The men Ahmed helped the SEALs capture eventually figured out who had ratted them out. And in 2004, they soon found Ahmed and his daughter. Ahmed died a horrible death. He was killed with an electric drill. The Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, was known for torturing prisoners by drilling holes in their hands or ankles. Cerrillo told me what he said Bruce Schliemann had told him: Ahmed was forced to watch as his daughter died before his eyes as somebody used an electric drill to pierce holes in her skull. Then, they did the same thing to Ahmed.
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