The
Iraqi Who Sold His Life
To The Americans
By Peter Beaumont
20 June, 2004
The
Observer
A
muscular man in his mid-thirties, Waleed was the cousin of an Iraqi
who helped The Observer 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 family's request to protect their
safety. Waleed's 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 insurgents 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
insurgents 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 real insurgents 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 signalled 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.