The Iraqi Spy Who Infiltrated ISIS
nytimes.com
The Iraqi Spy Who Infiltrated ISIS
17-22 minutes
Capt. Harith al-Sudani’s wife, Raghad Chaloob, center, and their three children, Riyam, Rawan and Muamal, atop their home in Baghdad.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times
BAGHDAD — The driver was sweating as his white Kia pickup truck sped along a rain-slicked Baghdad highway toward a neighborhood bustling with open-air markets.
With every jolt and turn, his pulse quickened. Hidden in the truck’s chassis was 1,100 pounds of military-grade explosives that the Islamic State planned to use in an audacious attack on New Year’s Eve shoppers in the Iraqi capital.
A reckless driver on Iraq’s notoriously chaotic roads might clip him, accidentally setting off the bomb. A clash at one of Baghdad’s frequent checkpoints could escalate into gunfire, potentially igniting one hellish fireball.
But there was another reason he was afraid. The driver, Capt. Harith al-Sudani, was a spy.
For the past 16 months, he had worked as a mole, posing as a militant jihadist in the Islamic State while passing critical information to a secret branch of Iraq’s national intelligence agency.
His record was stunning: He had foiled 30 planned vehicle-bomb attacks and 18 suicide bombers, according to Abu Ali al-Basri, the agency’s director. Captain Sudani also gave the agency a direct line to some of the Islamic State’s senior commanders in Mosul.
A 36-year-old former computer tech, he was, agency officials said, perhaps Iraq’s greatest spy, one of a few in the world to have infiltrated the upper reaches of the Islamic State.
But now, on this last day of 2016, as he cruised along the four-lane crosstown highway toward his assigned target, the markets of Baghdad al Jdeidah, he had a nagging suspicion that his cover had been blown.
Every day he remained embedded with the Islamic State was another day he risked his life. Today he had been caught in a small lie, the second in a matter of months.
If the half-ton of C-4 plastic explosive riding alongside him didn’t kill him, the Islamic State might.
Before he left on this, his penultimate mission, he sent his father a text.
“Pray for me,” he said.
Listening to the Enemy
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The trophy room at the Baghdad headquarters of Iraq’s counterterrorism intelligence unit, known as the Falcons. The rows of photos show Islamic State members who were caught and executed because of the agency’s work.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times
Iraq’s counterterrorism intelligence unit, the Falcon Intelligence Cell, may be the most important organization on the front lines of the war on terrorism that almost no one has heard of.
This article is based on interviews with the director of the agency, members of Captain Sudani’s unit and its commander, his friends and family members, and a review of transcripts and video of operations, and text messages to and from Captain Sudani.
Little known outside of the highest levels of Iraqi and allied intelligence agencies, the Falcons have placed a handful of spies inside the ranks of the Islamic State. Its intelligence helped oust the extremists from their last urban strongholds last year and it now aids the hunt for the group’s leaders, like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Recently, an Iraqi-American sting based on Iraqi intelligence led to the arrest of five senior Islamic State members who had been hiding in Turkey and Syria. Iraqi officials say the Falcons have foiled hundreds of attacks on Baghdad, making the capital the safest it has been in 15 years.
American military officials consider the agency as good as they get among non-Western spy services.
“It has proved to be an extremely valuable unit,” said Col. Sean J. Ryan, a spokesman for the American-led military coalition in Baghdad. The Falcons, he said, have diminished the threat of the Islamic State by infiltrating its cells, killing its leaders and terrorists, and destroying its weapons.
Mr. Basri, the Iraqi intelligence chief, credits the group’s undercover work.
“A drone can tell you who has entered a building but it can’t tell you what is being said in the room where the men have gathered,” he said. “We can, because our people are inside those rooms.”
University Dropout
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Admission to Baghdad University, above, is a coveted opportunity. Mr. Sudani blew it.CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Not many people in Mr. Sudani’s life credited him with the audacity or ambition to be a spy.
Not his father, Abid al-Sudani, a strict disciplinarian who demanded unstinting obedience from his eldest son and put him to work after school in his small print shop.
Not his professors at Baghdad University, who flunked him out. Intoxicated by the freedoms of student life, he blew a coveted opportunity, neglecting his studies and chasing women.
His father gave him an ultimatum — buckle down or be kicked out of the family home.
“It was a decisive moment for him,” said his youngest brother, Munther. “He was really disappointed that he couldn’t live how he wanted to.”
Mr. Sudani settled into an arranged marriage and returned to school, studying English and later, Russian. He took a mundane job monitoring surveillance systems for Iraq’s oil infrastructure.
At the same time, near daily terrorist attacks were tearing Iraq apart. They ended up giving Mr. Sudani an opportunity, and a purpose.
As the government and the American occupation forces struggled to stem the insurgency in post-Saddam Iraq, Mr. Basri, then the intelligence director in the prime minister’s office, created a special unit with a narrow mission: targeting terrorist leadership ranks.
In 2006, he recruited 16 men from Iraq’s elite military units and police academies. He called his new unit Al Suquor, or the Falcons.
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Captain Sudani, when he was training in Lebanon, in a photo provided by his family.
“I searched for them like a man searches for a wife,” he said. “We were ready to take on any challenge.”
Another of Mr. Sudani’s brothers, Munaf, was an early recruit. While Harith was bored with his job and spent most evenings playing video games or hanging out in tea shops, Munaf came home from work brimming with enthusiasm.
Munaf urged his brother to apply, saying his computer and language skills made him an attractive recruit. Harith did, and in 2013 was offered a job monitoring web traffic and telephone calls of terrorist suspects.
The change transformed him.
“He was enthusiastic about his life for the first time in a long time,” said Munther. “He was happy. We all could see it.”
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Stern, strict and traditional: Captain Sudani’s father, Abid al-Sudani, center, with his wife, Laisa Hashim Shuaith, and one of Captain Sudani’s daughters.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times
In the summer of 2014, a new insurgency burst on the scene. A jihadist group calling itself the Islamic State seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria, declaring it a Muslim caliphate. The Falcons took on a new mission: penetrating the group with undercover agents.
Mr. Sudani volunteered. His commanding officer, Gen. Saad al-Falih, said he was motivated by photos of children killed in Islamic State attacks.
“He couldn’t let them do that,” General Falih said. “He was a father himself.”
Mr. Sudani was promoted to captain and began training to pass as a jihadist.
When he was young, the Sudani family had lived in Ramadi, in Iraq’s Sunni Muslim heartland. The Sunni minority had ruled Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. After the Americans ousted him in 2003, extremists exploited the anger of disempowered Sunnis to build the insurgency that would later become the Islamic State.
Captain Sudani’s ability to adopt the Ramadi accent would help his credibility with the group.
But as a Shiite, he was unfamiliar with Sunni rituals and prayer. So he pored over the Quran, memorizing verses favored by jihadists and learning the chants they used for praying and killing.
He would become known as Abu Suhaib, an unemployed man from a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. His mission: infiltrate a notorious Islamic State lair in Tarmiya, a town near the intersection of two highways that was a hub for suicide bombers heading to the capital.
On a September night before his mission was to start, he stayed up with his brother Munaf, drinking tea and listening to crickets chirp in the warm air as Munaf gave him a pep talk.
“He was the first of us to volunteer for such a mission,” Munaf said. “It was a real risky thing he was doing.”
The next morning, Captain Sudani walked into a mosque in Tarmiya that the local Islamic State cell used for meetings. He stayed inside all day, longer than he and his superiors had planned.
Munaf, who was part of the surveillance team monitoring his brother, was certain that something had gone terribly wrong.
Around dusk, he recognized his brother’s loping silhouette coming to the prearranged exfiltration spot.
Captain Sudani reported a success — the cell had welcomed Abu Suhaib. He was going back to live with them in Tarmiya.