Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

“Look, if we can produce solid intelligence that proves Saddam is in bed with al-Qaeda, that’s fabulous,” he recalled telling his men during a group huddle in the summer of 2002. “But we’re not saying anything remotely like that until we get solid evidence that’s happening. We’re not going to pass off rumors and bullshit as the truth.” Faddis’s group consisted of eight men, all of them with extensive military experience and two of them members of the CIA’s secret paramilitary unit known as the Special Activities Division. Their base was a small house provided to them by friendly Kurds a few miles from the Ansar camp. It served as an operations center as well as living quarters for the men, who spent much of their days conducting surveillance and joining in the questioning of captured militants seized by friendly Kurds. Their access to Ansar and al-Qaeda prisoners was extraordinary; the Americans were able to interrogate dozens of prisoners, and they considered each new account against a growing database of intelligence gleaned from earlier detainees as well as their own surveillance of Ansar’s camps. The findings were beamed to CIA headquarters in the form of hundreds of classified electronic messages, relayed to Langley via Faddis’s satellite phone.