The training of Iraqi military and police forces in intelligence and interrogation Techniques is far from a success.
Unlike the other officers in the intelligence directorate. Captain AIi preferred to wear his dark blue police uniform instead of plain clothes. He had a nervous smile and a strangely highpitched laugh for a man in his 40s. A veteran of Saddam Hussein's Internal security Agency, Captain AIi had spent a career recruiting Iraqis to betray their friends and family. He was of the close-knit Dulaimy tribe from Fallujah, and his father was a Buuthist general. Skills aside, he had the right pedigree.
One morning in January 2006, Captain AIi led me to a dank bathroom on the first story of the Fallujah Police Department. Urine pools and feces clumps stained the white tile floor. Captain AIi walked up to a shower stall and threw open the wood door. A gray-haired old man was scrunched in the corner. The man yelped, holding his hands above his head, as if to block an assault. Crusted blood lined the back of his shirt.
"We interrogated this man. He confessed to be a terrorist." Captain AIi grunted.
I suppressed my sudden urge to strangle the captain. I told him to leave the room and tried to calm the old man. He pleaded that he was innocent. I had no idea whether he was innocent or not. I did not even know what the alleged terrorist offense was. But 1 documented his situation, took photographs, and sent an abuse report to my command.
As the senior human intelligence (HUMINT) officer for a Marine regimental combat team in Fallujah from September 2005 to March 2006,1 faced many challenges. Chief among these was how to handle the Iraqi Army and police intelligence departments. My regiment was rapidly handing over battlespace to the Iraqi Army and giving more responsibilities to the police. Yet there were no certified Iraqi interrogators or HUMINT collectors. Most Iraqi commanders believed they did not need special interrogation qualifications. After all. they had learned about interrogation, which they equated with torture, under Saddam. Every Iraqi commander I met claimed to have conducted, witnessed, or been a victim of interrogations.
The Larger Problem on a Smaller Scale
Issues of the rule of law and human rights abuses aside, our HUMINT teams were being overwhelmed with Iraqi Army detainees, many of whom had been rounded up arbitrarily. Each detainee had to be interrogated, and the high numbers seriously strained our operations. The police reported to the Ministry of the Interior. While we rarely accepted detainees from their custody, we also had a mission to assist the police in becoming functional.
In February 2006, I traveled to the U.S.-run Military Intelligence Academy in Taji to observe the training Iraqi soldiers received in intelligence collection and interrogation, and to determine if such a course could also be opened to select police intelligence personnel. It could perhaps be a first step toward stopping abuse and building institutional capacity.
The academy was a microcosm of the larger problem of the U.S. occupation in Iraq and how it became another interorganizational quagmire. Although dedicated U.S. military personnel spent considerable effort building the academy, its operations were flawed from the beginning. Unskilled Iraqi soldiers cannot be effectively trained in the sensitive areas of military intelligence in seven weeks and then immediately be expected to perform adequately as military intelligence professionals on the frontlines of a raging insurgency. Indeed, as a case study, the academy suggests the process of building new, effective Iraqi institutions to run sensitive, ethnically diversified programs such as military intelligence could take years, if it is at all possible.
Size-14 Foot Into a Size-7 Boot
In July 2005, Multi-National Force-Iraq developed the concept of Iraqi Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) companies. These 120-man companies were designed to serve as full military intelligence units with counterintelligence (CI), HUMINT, reconnaissance and surveillance, and analytical detachments. Led by a Marine intelligence lieutenant colonel, the academy embarked on a difficult mission of developing from scratch a military intelligence curriculum for the ISR companies in three months, opening its doors to the first company in October 2005. To meet an initial timeline of training IO companies by November 2006, each class lasted seven weeks, which included a week of in-processing and a week-long final exercise. Comparatively, most introductory intelligence courses in the U.S. military last 12 to 14 weeks. The colonel's ultimate mission of institutionalizing the course and transitioning it to Iraqi Army control nevertheless was perhaps even more challenging. "Successful transition meant the Iraqis needed to assume ownership; they needed to have a stake in the solution," he noted to me in an e-mail, 'The tactic is a lot easier said than done, and understanding both cultures is critical to succeeding."
The academy staff consisted of 14 Army and Marine Corps officers and non-commissioned officers, most of whom came from intelligence occupational specialties, but only half had served in combat in Iraq. There were also eight contractors who had served in either intelligence or special forces. Few had any particular cultural expertise on Iraq. As with most U.S. military units in country, the academy relied on contract Arabic linguists. The staff also included approximately a dozen former Baathist intelligence officers who were selected and vetted by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and the U.S.-led Multi-National Force-Iraq. An Iraqi Shiite who had served as a military intelligence general in Saddam's army led the group of instructors, which included Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.
The American staff spent its first three months at the academy writing the course curriculum, which it modeled after Army and Marine Corps military intelligence instruction manuals. The course emphasized practical application. However, the curriculum, unlike U.S. courses, remained unclassified, in part because the Iraqi Army had no security management program or ability to store classified material, and in part to expedite the overall transition of the academy to the Iraqis. Thus, each Iraqi soldier first received a two-week introduction to military intelligence. The class then divided into sections for a three-week specialty course in either CI, interrogation, reconnaissance and surveillance, or advanced analysis. The staff assigned soldiers to one of the four specialties because their individual qualifications were unknown. For each course, the American staff worked with the Iraqi staff to design practical application exercises based on scenarios the Iraqi soldiers may confront in combat.
"What's That Capability?"
Given time and personnel constraints, the staff built a worthwhile basic curriculum. The success of the course, however, rested largely in the quality of students. In October 2005, the 1st Iraqi Army Division intelligence officer along with the local U.S. military training team screened approximately 250 Iraqi Army soldiers at its headquarters in Habbaniya, an old, battered British army base in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. From this pool of soldiers, the 1st Iraqi Army Division sent 161 soldiers to Taji for the first ISR course. The academy dropped 32 for illiteracy and CI concerns during in-processing. Once the course began, two soldiers went AWOL and one was dropped for medical reasons. No incentives were given for exemplary performance, and many soldiers performed poorly. There was, however, an understandable pressure to graduate as many as possible. Thus, only one was dropped because of a lack of skills, and the academy graduated approximately 125 from its first course.
The 1st Iraqi Army Division supported my regiment's operations in Fallujah. I did not learn about the training until after it had begun in October, when a senior intelligence officer mentioned it to me in passing. Multi-National Force-Iraq had assessed that U.S. forces in Anbar were in the greatest need of the enhanced capability they envisioned the ISR companies would provide, he said.
"What's that capability?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders, "Beats the hell out of me."
I heard virtually nothing else about the ISR company, its capabilities, or its concept of operations until January 2006, when 1st Iraqi Army Division Headquarters dispatched the first ISR detachments to my regiment in support of our 2d and 4th Iraqi Army Brigades. Unfortunately, within a week of arrival, approximately 30 percent of the ISR personnel went AWOL. The commanders had no idea how to employ these detachments. As a result, the ISR soldiers were assigned to regular infantry units and given basic infantryman tasks. From the HUMINT perspective, I was not able to identify a single ISR soldier in the 1st Iraqi Army Division who had received academy interrogation training.
The second academy course had been scheduled to train the 4th Iraqi Army Division ISR company in November 2005, immediately after the 1st Division soldiers graduated. Although the 4th Division was thoroughly briefed on the training requirements in early October, it failed to send any soldiers. The academy director later learned that most of the 4th Division's staff had since been replaced because of its incompetence.
In January 2006, 120 personnel from the Iraqi Army's 5th Division arrived for training. Ten of the soldiers were disqualified for illiteracy, but none went AWOL within the first two weeks. When I arrived in February, they were completing the final sessions of their two-week introduction. I observed one of the exercises.
Briefing Instruction-Iraqi Style
An older Iraqi man in a black leather jacket stood above a sand table in downtown Taji and spoke with authority, pointing a stick at various buildings on the table while describing the scenario. According to the scenario, an Iraqi Army commander wanted to send a patrol to locate and destroy insurgents. The instructor ran through a brief synopsis of past attacks at locations on the sand table recreation. "Now, you are each intelligence officers," the instructor concluded. "I am your commander. Give me an intelligence brief so I can prepare my patrol."
Ten Iraqi men stood around the sand table. They wore a mixed bag of civilian clothes and camouflage. One wore a Mickey Mouse t-shirt, jeans, and a camouflage hat. "Who are the soldiers?" I asked my linguist. "All of them," he replied.
None of the soldiers volunteered to begin, so the instructor called on the soldier in the Mickey Mouse shirt and handed him his pointing stick. The soldier popped to attention and repeated everything he could remember from the instructor's overview.
"Now, what did he do wrong?" the instructor asked. No one offered a reply. "He did no analysis," the instructor clipped, "He just repeated the information I gave him. This is not satisfactory."
The instructor called on another soldier, who went through the same routine but tried to add some additional analysis, suggesting points where the enemy may be located. Afterward, the instructor critiqued his points, and then called on the next soldier. By the time we reached the tenth soldier's briefing, it was a professional and impressive overview. Throughout the process only two soldiers looked more engaged than the others, many of whom appeared apathetic and passive.
"Would You Fight?"
I went up to the two after the exercise and asked what they thought of the course. "We had no idea what we were coming to," one said, "but we are glad to be here." Both men were jundis-junior enlisted soldiers-but they were high school graduates and held government jobs before the war. They were older and Sunni. "A lot of the other soldiers here are not Sunni, and they don't like getting instructed by an old Sunni general," one of them coneluded. I looked at my linguist. He nodded, affirming the instructor was in fact a general under Saddam.
I asked the two soldiers why they fought in the Iraqi Army. "To earn a paycheck for our families," they each replied.
"Would you fight in Anbar?" I returned.
They paused, and then said, "No, we fight for our families. If we go to Anbar, our families will be killed."
I elicited some more information and then said, "Thanks for your service." For all I knew, these two men may have taken the course information straight back to the insurgency.
I spent the next two days speaking with the American staff, contractors, and other Iraqi soldiers, including a number of Iraqi instructors who taught the interrogation course. Each instructor had served as an intelligence officer under Saddam. They knew what to say to maintain job security.
"We teach human rights first," one instructor told me.
I asked him what "human rights" meant to him.
"No torture," he replied.
I tried to get the instructor to tell me about his interrogation techniques under Saddam.
"Detainees were always so fearful they just told us everything," he replied, with a smirk.
The interrogation training had not yet begun, so I read through the practical application scenarios. Put in an Iraqi context, they were modeled after many of the scenarios I had learned during my own interrogation training. This was understandable, because the McCain Detainee Amendment requires that the new U.S. Army interrogation manual be largely unclassified, and that the unclassified sections be translated into Arabic for distribution.
Any Reason for Optimism?
As I prepared to return to Camp Fallujah, I drafted a report for our Marine commanders and senior intelligence officers. I outlined the course and emphasized that its success hinged on the quality of Iraqi soldiers sent to Taji. I suggested there be a specialized selection process for the next batch of soldiers sent to the academy. In particular, the ISR companies needed good officers to ensure that they were adequately employed when they returned to their parent units. I also noted that 1st Division could send additional soldiers to Taji for ISR training to replace the 40 percent who were cut or went AWOL. Although the academy did not have the capacity to handle police training, I suggested that it be studied as a potential model for creating a similar course that could train and credential police interrogators. I don't know if these recommendations had any effect. But by as late as March 2007, Marine interrogators, not Iraqi ISR trained interrogators, were still handling Iraqi Army detainees in al Anbar Province. Because training the Iraqi Army was the priority, the option of training police interrogators had not been addressed. The Iraqi police nevertheless continued to interrogate their own detainees despite receiving no U.S. led interrogation training.
In addition to the initial failure to integrate ISR companies, there were serious concerns about the number of Iraqi soldiers going AWOL after receiving specialized ISR training. Although unclassified and basic in nature, we did not want this training to fall into the hands of the insurgents, who often targeted former Iraqi Army soldiers for recruitment. High desertion rates were detrimental to our counterinsurgency efforts. An argument could be made that it was essential to employ former intelligence officials as the chief instructors for military intelligence courses. After all, these men possessed a mastery of many of the aspects of the intelligence craft that took years to develop. However, it remained unclear whether or not the instructors would continue to teach a U.S.styled course that placed some emphasis on human rights when we left. I had my own doubts after dealing with former intelligence officers like Captain AIi, the police intelligence officer from Fallujah who felt no hesitation using old torture tactics on suspected "terrorists."
After returning to Camp Fallujah, I sent an e-mail to one of the academy instructors, an affable American captain who had been especially generous with his time with me. I sent him a copy of my report on the academy and thanked him again. Then I asked if he was optimistic about the future of Iraqi military intelligence. "I think it is still possible to build Iraqi military intelligence," he replied, "but only if we are committed for the long haul. My biggest fear is that we leave, civil war engulfs this place, and then we have Iraqis using our training against each other."
Captain Barcott served five years on active duty as a Marine Corps intelligence officer, deploying to Bosnia and Hercegovlna, the Horn ol Africa, and Iraq. He is a dual masters degree candidate at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Business School.