I don't have my notes on me at the moment so dates mentioned in this post are going to be vague at best...
As I blogged about just after Thanksgiving, the holiday season while deployed is usually business as usual. I tend not to get too excited and the only thing to look forward to is a chance to sleep in, relax a bit, and get a really good meal.
As the intelligence officer, all I wanted for Christmas...and the rest of the year...was a really good capture.
I thought we had it about a week prior to Christmas when one of our high value targets (HVIs) was detained at a checkpoint outside of Muqdadiyah which is a town of mixed Sunni and Shia but also out of the Squadron's area. The individual was believed to be a key leader in AQI around the As Sadiyah area and I was thrilled about his detainment because interrogations may have led to information about the organization in the area. I was not the only one to believe this and as soon as the task force created to target and capture Sunni threats heard of this man's capture they had him transfered from Iraqi control to their control. The Iraqi Army brigade intel officer was also pleased but his joy was tempered (the man never really had any joy that I saw anyway) when he learned the task force had custody. He wanted our target in Iraqi custody as soon as possible. Normally I would find this a sign that our target had friends in high places and would bribe his way out of prison, but this individual was a little different.
He had been detained previously, a couple of months before 1-14 Cav's arrival, and had been accidentally released by the task force. Having proved that we were incapable of keeping this guy once, MAJ Mustafa wanted to ensure his detainment by keeping him in Iraqi custody.
Well, mistakes happen...and sometimes they happen twice. Our target was shuffled between a couple of organizations and somewhere along the lines it was mistakenly believed that he was not a wanted individual. So he gets dropped off by helicopter at FOB Warhorse (the brigade headquarters) and told by the base defense cell that he is not a wanted individual. Base Defense takes their word for it and without asking Brigade...or the unit on the ground where this guy is from (1-14)...they decide to release him. Base Defense took him right outside the gate and let him go. D'oh.
I was pretty pissed, the squadron commander was pissed, and the Iraqi Army intel officer was really pissed. Every few weeks MAJ Mustafa would bring up this target and give me updates on the rumors going around. He was an American spy; he worked for the CIA; he worked for Special Forces; he was on my pay roll (this one I found amusing); or he had a letter from the Americans saying he shouldn't be arrested. Every time MAJ Mustafa brought him up I told him that he was still wanted and that he should be arrested, I don't care what kind of letter he had. Or, he could just shoot him and that would solve the problem.
The situation put me in a foul mood; my Christmas gift had been taken from me, but an email would soon change everything a couple of days after Christmas.
The email would come from the task force and was sent to our incoming operations officer (his time as troop commander was over and he was taking over as S3, the current S3 was acting as the XO and the S3 since the XO had injured himself and had been sent back to the States). The email was sent to him because he had worked closely with this task force on a few other missions previously in the As Sadiyah area. The message originated from the task force's sister task force in Baghdad (I'm being cyptic about these task forces because they are classified and I would get in real trouble for naming them...just think special forces).
The message was a picture and an interrogation summary of an individual detained in Baghdad just prior to Christmas. The individual wasn't who they were targeting but happened to be at the location where the raid occured. They kept him because he was rather suspicious and as it turned out just so happend to be...
...this guy, who I believe was our number 1 target at the time. As I mentioned in the post that I linked to, my brigade had been targeting him in the previous deployment and we had spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to capture him; he essentially fell into our laps. I was so happy that I teared up. As you can read from my post about him though, my joy tempered when I learned through his interrogation reports why he became an insurgent, but that would come in a few days. For the time I was ecstatic.
It was honestly one of the best Christmas gifts I ever got.
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