Nada Bakos, Former CIA Agent discusses movies and real life.
By Helen Mondloch
As leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi waged jihad so ruthlessly that even Osama bin Laden was reportedly appalled. In 2004 bin Laden dispatched one of his top henchmen to Iraq with a crucial message for Zarqawi: Stop killing fellow Muslims in bombing attacks, or you may be out of a job.
That same year, Nada Bakos accepted the lead role in tracking Zarqawi from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) in Langley. Her team’s mission was to unearth Zarqawi’s whereabouts and disrupt his plots, ultimately disabling an emerging and increasingly menacing arm of the terror organization that had attacked America on 9/11.
To that end, the analyst-turned-targeting officer immersed herself in all manner of intelligence minutia, including a steady stream of “junk” posted on social media sites. She would later tell an HBO interviewer, “I never met Zarqawi, but I was thinking about him 24/7.” She would add, “It wasn’t pleasant after a while.”
But for Bakos, 44, who left the CIA in 2009, the job of second-guessing the motions and mindset of the world’s most vicious terrorist was just the latest stress factor in a nearly decade-long career stint. In the dark days following September 11, she witnessed the run-up to the invasion of Iraq under what she depicts as exasperating circumstances. Then there was the war itself, which in many respects seemed as mismanaged as it was ill-conceived. The former agent’s frustration still rings clear in her recollections.
With her softly layered hair and pensive manner, Bakos evokes the character of Maya, manhunter extraordinaire in the blockbuster movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” played by actress Jessica Chastain. (In reality, Maya is a composite character, based on a number of women working the counterterrorism beat in the decade leading up to the raid on bin Laden’s compound in May 2011.) But the job was no Hollywood production, Bakos adamantly asserts. She likes to clear up misconceptions spawned by the film, especially about the “sexy payoff” of hunting down radical jihadists. The unglamorous nature of the job is more accurately conveyed in HBO’s documentary “Manhunt,” based on the book by Peter Bergen, in which Bakos and other former officials speak candidly about the endless hours and tedious work they performed as targeters—collaboratively, not as the “lone gunslinger” Chastain portrays in the film—throughout the 10-year search for bin Laden and other al-Qaeda operatives.
At Bakos’ current post in Washington State, where the Montana native relocated a few years ago in order to reunite with the mountains and fresh air of the American west, she applies her strategic talents to various kinds of consulting work. She also spends a lot of time reflecting on the insights she gained at the CIA by writing articles and blog posts. Occasionally she does televised interviews for outlets such as Huffington Post Live and “Late Night with David Letterman”. Her latest endeavor is a documentary, due to air this spring, about “a sensitive topic” that she is not yet at liberty to discuss. Bakos does reveal that she is working with a major outlet and will serve as one of the documentary’s producers.
In these various forays, Bakos’ newfound mission is to provide the American public with a sobering reality check on recent history. Her work illuminates the confounding realm of terrorists, the tireless work of those who strive to outmaneuver them, and not least, the means by which the battle might best be fought. Probing worlds that are sometimes stranger than fiction, Bakos provides a vivid picture of the good, the bad, and the ugly—and the ways in which those distinctions are sometimes blurred.
Joining the agency
Bakos began working at the CIA in 2000 as a traditional analyst. She holds back in revealing what her job entailed at any given time. She’s no Edward Snowden (for whom she harbors zero admiration), so she hesitates, searching her judgment for what she should or shouldn’t say. Her disarming laugh regularly breaks any tension produced by her apprehension, and so affirms a comment made by an Examiner reporter who ran a story on her: “She’s careful with her words and uses very few, but … comes across as likable and engaging.” Chalk up Bakos’ diffidence to the customary secrecy of her former profession, a world where everything is so secret that it’s hard to recall if and why something is secret.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Utah, then spending a few years in the corporate sector, the thirty-something Bakos embarked on an intelligence career because she wanted to “work outside the box.” In the beginning, she analyzed the data on transnational “illicit networks,” including organized crime.
After 9/11, in a world transformed by images of burning towers and the black scars of the Pentagon, Bakos shifted her focus to the warriors waging jihad. While she had not yet joined the CTC, it came as no surprise to her or anyone at the agency that Osama bin Laden had masterminded the attacks. Everyone had been cognizant of the al-Qaeda leader’s declaration of war against the west, first delivered in a 1997 interview with CNN’s Peter Bergen and Peter Arnett in a mud hunt in Tora Bora (an event that drew little attention from the American public). Moreover, in the decade leading up to the attacks, a couple of women who would later become Bakos’ colleagues at the CTC (and members of what was dubbed the CIA’s “sisterhood”) would compose urgent warnings about the storm clouds gathering around bin Laden’s enterprise—none of which prompted any notable action from the Clinton or Bush administrations, even while analysts were growing increasingly alarmed.
Mission Iraq
Shortly after the attacks, Bakos’ team was tasked with investigating possible links between al-Qaeda (which, at the time, had not yet set up shop in Iraq) and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Were Saddam and bin Laden partners in terror? Another team of analysts was tasked with investigating whether Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
Both teams came up virtually empty-handed. Bakos’ team found that Saddam had at times given material support to anti-Israeli groups, but nothing indicated a relationship with bin Laden, a conclusion firmly spelled out in their extensive report.
But the White House, says Bakos, was unrelenting in its pursuit of a connection. In an article she recently wrote for Wired, the former analyst recounts in shocking detail the back-and-forth between “determined Bush administration officials,” including Vice President Dick Cheney, and her branch members, starting in late 2002. Her team was constantly fielding questions that she says were designed to steer them “down a rabbit hole,” an allusion to the bizarre alternative universe discovered by “Alice in Wonderland”. The ongoing questions and briefings in which White House officials tried to pressure the team into reshaping its position “became a labyrinth,” she says. Under fire to hold its ground, the team engaged in “murderboard” sessions, with the branch chief playing the role of “Fake-Cheney” to help analysts man-up for an intense contest of wills.
Bakos still laments the potential compromise of principles affected by such executive maneuvers: “The nature of intelligence analysis is to gather as much information as possible to assist a policymaker in making difficult choices. If a policymaker has a preference to what the intelligence product should say, that pollutes the objectivity of the intelligence—and diminishes its value,” she says in her article.
Perhaps most maddening of all for Bakos and her cohorts was the imperviousness of Bush administration officials when it came to delivering intelligence reports to the American public. Bakos recalls that shortly before the invasion in March 2003, she watched Cheney speaking on “Meet the Press.” The Vice President calmly asserted as fact that Saddam “has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization”—precisely the opposite of what her team had concluded in its report. “I found myself yelling at the TV like I was contesting a ref’s blown call in a football game,” she recalls.
The team’s report was later corroborated by the 9/11 Commission Report, an extensive analysis of the complex factors that led to the attacks. Nonetheless, as late as 2011, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made what Bakos calls “the unfortunate blunder” of echoing outdated conventional wisdom on Iraq while addressing troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad. Panetta told them, “The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States was attacked, and 3,000 Americans … got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.” After lamenting the “short shelf life of facts,” Bakos concludes by saying, “What concerns me most, is that to this day, we don’t seem to get the story straight about why we invaded Iraq, and it matters; it really does matter.”
Photo courtesy of Nada Bakos
Exhaustion and other frailties
While Bakos’ articles and blog posts are often just what you’d expect from a former CIA analyst—factual and analytical—she does occasionally display her frailties, especially when reflecting on those early days of the invasion. In one post she notes, “I remember landing in Baghdad thinking this was not the mission that I signed up for. This was not where I was feeling the fight should be. I … remember calling my now-husband and saying, ‘I can’t stay here that long. I can’t just watch this play out at this point.’” She also admits to having “some guilt about being involved in this conflict. It’s remorse … (for) the toll this has taken.”
In her Wired article, Bakos reveals that she quit the CIA for three days in 2004. “I was exhausted. … I couldn’t take it,” she recalls. But the ink on her resignation was barely dry when she got a call from a higher-up in the CTC, inviting her to return with a new position as a tactical leader within the National Clandestine Service, the home of spies. Instead of writing about Zarqawi, Bakos would now enlist to find him.
While the transition was gratifying, feelings of frustration heightened in coming years, especially after occasions when her team embedded in military ground raids designed to root out insurgents in Iraq. Bakos still refers to the raids as a “game of wack-a-mole” that proved strategically self-defeating. The raids—conducted at one point by the hundreds per day—fomented the Iraqi people’s distrust and bitterness towards Coalition forces, she says. The raids also compromised the work of targeters, whose goal was to tear down the terror enterprise in a manner that would have the greatest operational impact—from the top-down.
Perhaps the most disturbing irony of the Iraq War was the fact that the US “accidentally gave [Zarqawi] a platform that helped him grow into a major terrorist,” says Bakos. A one-time street thug was now recruiting fighters from his native Jordan and across the Middle East and northern Africa. In Iraq, where al-Qaeda once was nonexistent, the band of jihadists was now flourishing.
The organization lost vigor, of course, as U.S. air strikes began taking out more of its leaders, including Zarqawi, who was killed in 2006. That was a few months before Bakos moved on to a different assignment. She doesn’t specify the reason for her departure, but her decision appears linked to a growing sense of unbalance, later paraphrased in a CNN report about the challenges faced by women at the CIA: “After a couple of years, Bakos realized that she knew more about Zarqawi than she did about many of the other men in her life.”
Averting foolish consistency
Given the surreal nature of a post-9/11 world, and her decade of hands-on experience from behind the murky scenes, the former analyst has a few “out-of-the-box” ideas about bringing America’s national security apparatus into the next phase of the 21st century.
Inherent in her proposals are a few passionate convictions. First, she believes that in order to devise a “full counterterrorism strategy,” our leaders need to understand the root causes of terrorism. A common theme in her writings is that those working the front lines in the military and intelligence complex must avoid sowing fertile ground where extremism can take root and expand, as happened in Iraq. Deadly pitfalls include “imposed solutions” and crusades for regime change. (“We suck at regime change,” she asserts.) Second, Bakos continually emphasizes that effective strategy requires keeping a finger on the pulse of change and avoiding foolish consistencies. Terror networks are ever-changing, and so must be the paradigm we apply to combat them.
Take, for instance, the evolution of al-Qaeda, which has splintered from a strong, centralized organization in the late ‘90s to its present incarnation—a set of scattered groups in places like in Mali, Somalia and Yemen. Of particular concern is Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, notes Bakos. To convey the dynamics of change, she evokes the old analogy of a toothpaste tube that is crushed at the center: “If it shoots out on either end, you have regional groups that can later metastasize.”
Moving forward, she insists, will require change in terms of how government agencies do their work. “It’s very hard for governments to shift from paradigms of what they know, into the unknown—in particular, from a mentality of Cold War and state actors to a paradigm of dealing with non-state actors,” she asserts.
Bakos’ intricate understanding of regional terror groups and the sway they hold is compelling. In an article published last January by CNN, she probes the power vacuum filled by groups like al-Nusra in nations with weak or collapsed central governments. She notes that these groups often provide needy populations with basic necessities, including food, water and health care, thereby garnering local support. She also observes that oddly enough, the funding such groups receive often increases after they earn notoriety for their jihadist credentials. Al-Nusra has grown richer since the US declared it a terrorist organization. With regard to impeding the groups’ support systems, Bakos points out, “As a [former] targeter, I can tell you that facilitation networks are key: they are the means by which groups … are funded, supplied and sustained.” But working to disrupt these channels is only part of the solution, according to the analyst, who advocates for a balance of necessary “hard power” with “soft power” strategies, like the use of microcredit and other approaches that empower people living in vulnerable zones. She has also studied the tragic effects of sexual crimes against women, and has proposed concrete measures for preventing the use of rape as a weapon of war.
Asked about the use of enhanced interrogations—more commonly called torture—Bakos concurs with critics who opined that its use in tracking bin Laden was significantly overblown in “Zero Dark Thirty”. She adds, “My whole mantra is making sure we decide now, not later, if [the use of enhanced interrogations] is acceptable if we are attacked again. As of now, our government has decided it’s not acceptable, and I think that’s the right decision.”
Regarding the threat of homegrown radicalization—apparently the case in the Boston bombings—Bakos argues once again that an ominous new frontier demands a change in methods. When it comes to individuals suspected of terrorism, she’d like to see investigative work entrusted to local police departments in addition to the FBI. She argues that the feds are overburdened, and that local agents who “live and breathe and work in a community” are much more in tune with its undercurrents: “From my experience in Iraq and working on a joint terrorism task force, I know there’s nothing like having that type of local knowledge.”
Such are the insights born of a journey that bears retelling. While Bakos has moved away from the pressures and thorny affairs of the D.C. Beltway (about as far away as one could go without leaving the lower 48), she revisits them in a new incarnation every time she sits at her keyboard. In the future, maybe she’ll write a book or even start a TV series. “I like being able to reinvent myself,” she says. With any luck, she’ll help reinvent the world she left behind as well.
(October 2013)
