BAGHDAD, 22 June 2004 — A muscular man in his mid-thirties, Waleed was the cousin of an Iraqi who helped an English newspaper earlier this year by giving directions to the scene of a terrorist attack. Now Waleed is dead; gunned down in the street as he took his car to be repaired because he was unmasked as a spy for the Americans.
His cousin told me about Waleed’s death: How he had been in the feared Saddam Hussein Fedayeen before the war; how he had turned his back on the paramilitary fighters who now provide the backbone of the Iraqi resistance; and how he had finally turned informer.
It is a morally equivocal tale; a dark insight into one of Iraq’s most hidden worlds — a place circumscribed by disgrace and fear. The names of all those involved have been changed at the familys request to protect their safety. Waleeds mother has been forced to flee her home and his cousin is nervous for his own relatives.
“He told me what he was doing,” the cousin admits. “He was stupid and it was shameful. One minute he did not have the money to buy cigarettes, and then he had money to buy a $4,000 car, a new TV and a satellite dish.”
The story began four months ago, not with greed — although the cousin considered Waleed greedy — but with a sarcastic insult in the street to Waleed’s mother about his former membership of the Fedayeen. On hearing of the remark, Waleed went to the Americans to tell them that no matter what they heard, he had left the fighters behind. That was the beginning of Waleed’s undoing.
“He went and told them he had been in the Fedayeen but that he was not interested in them any more.”
The cousin can only speculate about exactly what happened but, within a few weeks, Waleed was working for the Americans. Waleed would report what he knew of the activities of the fighters to a US officer assigned to handle him and was given assignments to carry out.
At first, the cousin believed Waleed was being used as an intermediary by the Americans to buy back illegal weapons from the street. But one day Waleed confessed to him that he was actually “selling heads” to the Americans.
Waleed’s downfall was simply that he was not a subtle spy. He told his cousin and other family members what he was doing. He did little to hide it from his own son, who mimicked his father by writing his own “reports”, one of which was found by the horrified child’s grandfather.
Waleed started receiving threatening phone messages. After that, says the cousin, the Americans came to the house, taking away the mobile phone and pistol they had licensed to him. Three weeks later he was murdered.
The life and death of Waleed is not unique in the new Iraq, a place that has become a battleground for competing intelligence-gathering operations in the war between the coalition and their Iraqi allies and those bent on violence and chaos.
The Americans and their supporters are desperate for hard information on both the home-grown fighters and on the network of foreign fighters led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
Both of those groups run their own networks of spies — in the fledgling Iraqi security services, on street corners and among the flocks of child cigarette sellers who crowd at busy junctions and in some areas, such as the violent town of Mahmudiya, earn money for pointing out westerners’ cars for ambush.
Political parties also run their own intelligence-gathering operations, with some of their methods alarming coalition officials. Yet still the violence goes on.
The intelligence operations of the CIA and MI6 are only possible because of men such as Waleed — who know from the graffiti on walls that the penalty for “spies and agents” is certain death. Yet it has been a deeply troubled operation, more remarkable for its failure to prevent a string of high-profile bomb attacks and assassinations and inability to break up the resistance than for any success.
It has failed even though the CIA station in Iraq, according to best published estimates, is 500-strong in a mission originally planned to be 85-strong. The biggest CIA operation since Vietnam has been reinvigorated by the replacement of the station chief, following concerns that vital intelligence in the war against the terrorists was not being scooped up. According to the Washington Post last March, the mission has been hampered by a CIA directive that officers must travel only with armed bodyguards, making it almost impossible to conduct discreet meetings with Iraqis on their own turf. “How do you do your job that way? You can’t,” said one former CIA official back from Iraq. “They don’t know what’s going on.”
According to UK sources, the MI6 operation has been no less draining, calling on most of its available Arab speakers.
Perhaps most challenging of all, however, is the culture of Iraq, a place where — as Waleed sneered before his death — people would queue at the US base at Baghdad airport to sell bogus information about their enemies for $20.
Hard information on the fighters is often much more difficult to come by. Officers have a huge budget to recruit agents, pay informants and buy influence with tribal sheikhs, with tip fees of between $1,200 and $1,500, depending on the quality of the information.
None of which has impressed Iraqi political figures, who have long argued they should be given a free hand in the methods and scope of intelligence-gathering.
This issue may be addressed in 10 days time, when sovereignty is transferred to an Iraqi government which signaled its determination last week to tackle the 14-month-old security crisis with an Iraqi solution — including the threat of martial law and other “drastic measures” by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi after car bombs killed 41 Iraqis last Thursday.
One thing is sure. All sides will still be looking for men such as Waleed, prepared to spy and betray people.
