Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

The mood in Baghdad was changing. Bakos and her fellow CIA officers could sense the shift during their still-unconstrained travels into the city’s neighborhoods to meet contacts or visit a favorite ice-cream place. The smiles and shy waves of the early weeks of the occupation had long since been replaced by sullen stares and drawn shades. Iraq was rapidly tiring of occupation, while the Bush administration’s attention seemed permanently fixed on settling the score with its political rivals in Washington. The moral underpinnings of the White House’s war effort were collapsing like rotten timbers, and aides to the president were working furiously to control the damage. The weapons of mass destruction that had loomed so threateningly in Bush’s speeches had not been found after four months of searching. Likewise, Americans had seen nothing of Saddam Hussein’s supposed links to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Congress was beginning to push for answers, and so, in the summer of 2003, the White House ratcheted up the pressure on the CIA’s analysts to find some.