Hunkered down at a freezing mountain outpost on a wind-blasted ridge in northeastern Iraq, Tom Sylvester had recruited a Sufi sheikh and his tribe of flesh-piercing mystics to help America spy on Saddam. For once, at long last, the CIA had religious fanatics on its side.
Sylvester led a ten-man Northern Iraq Liaison Element—six CIA officers, three Ground Branch paramilitaries from the special activities division, and a communicator, along with three commandos from the Tenth Special Forces Group out of Fort Carson, Colorado, whose motto was De oppresso liber, “to free the oppressed.” His team included Mick Mulroy from the CIA’s paramilitary Ground Branch, later the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East; Marc Polymeropoulos, later deputy chief of the CIA’s Europe and Eurasia operations, focused on Russia; and Andrew Warren, later station chief in Algiers. (Warren went to prison for date-raping women while station chief. Apart from him, officers who served under Sylvester tended to go on to greater things.)
Sylvester, who in twenty years’ time would be the chief of the clandestine service, had the lean look of a long-distance runner and the dry wit of a foreign correspondent trying to make sense of a world gone mad.
He had spent six years with SEAL Team Two, whose specialty was arctic warfare, before joining the CIA in 1991, starting out in the Cairo station and spending a decade as an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism officer before 9/11. He now had linked up with the Kurdish fighters of Iraq—the peshmerga, or “those who face death”—who had a long and bitter history of being seduced and abandoned by the United States. His mission was to work with them to penetrate Saddam’s military and spy networks, recruit agents from within the regime, and gather intelligence to support the coming American invasion, executing the essential elements of Luis Rueda’s ambitious covert-action plan for the Iraq Operations Group.
Sylvester delivered millions of dollars to Jalal Talabani, the longtime leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who ruled in the mountains of northern Iraq under the protection of the Northern Watch, a fleet of American planes patrolling a no-fly zone since the 1991 Gulf War. Talabani was fully on board, seeing an opportunity to gain political power in Iraq by being allied with the United States, which in time he did. Talabani had significant and long-standing support from Iran and an uneasy alliance with the rival Kurdish Democratic Party; a second Northern Iraq Liaison Element worked with the KDP. The CIA had bought the allegiance of the Kurds for many years. It had left them to face Saddam’s wrath twice before—once in 1975, selling them out on orders from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and again in 1996, following its fatally compromised operation to subvert the Iraqi dictator. Tenet twice met face-to-face with the Kurdish leaders in 2002 to urge them to unite, to pledge his support, and to promise them that the third time would be a Charm.
Talabani’s fighters had turned Sylvester on to a man who possessed a remarkable power. Among the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, Sheikh Muhammad Abdul Karim al-Kasnazani and his sons stood out for the intensity of their worship and the influence they secretly wielded in Saddam’s regime.
The Kasnazani flock was led by ecstatic Sufis; the most devoted of the sheikh’s followers were dervishes who pierced their faces with long skewers, stabbed their bodies with sharp knives, and ate broken glass to prove the sheikh’s baraka, his divine blessing and spiritual strength.
“With God’s and the sheikh’s permission, nothing happens to us, and the wounds heal right away,” in the words of one acolyte, Calipha Abdul al-Rahman. This metaphysical power had won the sheikh a multitude of devotees among Saddam’s military, intelligence, and security officers. Over the course of twenty years, hundreds of them had come to worship and witness the rites of ritual mortification at his mosque in Baghdad. They believed the sheikh was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and that God spoke to them through him. They thus heeded his orders.
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Tell them. Answer the questions. Speak!
Sylvester had been slightly incredulous about the Sufi mystics until he put their powers to the test. He paid the sheikh and his two sons $1 million a month, and in return, they produced a handful of Saddam’s generals along with scores of senior officers, military pilots, army base commanders, and members of the SSO, Saddam’s Special Security Organization, which was responsible for guarding his life against spies and traitors.
Saddam had made the mistake of persecuting the sheikh and his circle in Baghdad—despite the fact that they had a strong following among his intelligence and military establishment, men who were willing to work with the CIA if the sheikh so commanded. A parade of spies and soldiers came to Talabani’s safe house, a pistachio-colored building in the village of Qalah Chulan, or to outposts near the Green Line. They had been smug- gled out of Baghdad, not knowing where they were going, and when they saw Sylvester their eyes blazed with hatred. Then the sheikh would com- mand: You’re cooperating. Tell them. Answer the questions. Speak! And they spilled the secrets of Saddam’s plans to fight the Americans.
This excerpt from ‘The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century’ by Tim Weiner has been published with permission from HarperCollins.