CHALLENGE: Iraqs homegrown police are vital to achieving security, but they are undertrained and unequipped
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On paper, at least, the new government knows what it has to do. The counteroffensive starts with al-Shahwani (who, for security reasons, declines to be photographed). For months, he has been quietly recruiting and schooling Iraqi agents and expanding his network of informants. Since he took the job three months ago, at least five classes have graduated from his covert college. At the same time, he has been weighing in with his own ideas as the Prime Minister's security team shapes a battle plan. Al-Shahwani calls for a mix of aggressive tactics, reinstating Saddam-era mukhabarat intelligence professionals and carefully picking fights that can be won. With as yet no army to speak of, the government is throwing al-Shahwani's agents straight into the trenches. Their prime targets are the global terrorists and foreign jihadis who take their cues from Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian acolyte of Osama bin Laden. The new government is blunt in its approach. "Be ruthless. Either they kill you or you kill them," National Security Adviser Muwaffak al-Rubaie tells TIME. "With them, there can be no mercy." Al-Rubaie thinks al-Zarqawi made a "fatal mistake" with the wave of bombings two weeks ago that killed more than 100 Iraqis in a single day: "That alienated everyone." It could help al-Shahwani quickly recruit informants and obtain the kind of intelligence that can flush out the jihad groups infesting western Iraq. "We might be starting from zero," he tells TIME, "but we will definitely do better than the coalition because we know this country. This is our life."
Al-Shahwani brings one other advantage to the job: intimate ties to the CIA. A onetime international athlete who won a gold medal in the decathlon at a 1963 athletic meet in Jakarta, he was sent to the U.S. for Ranger training four years later. By the time of Iraq's conflict with Iran in the 1980s, he had become commander of the Iraqi Special Forces School. During the war, the combat vet led a daring helicopter-borne recapture of Iraq's strategic Kardamand mountain, held by thousands of dug-in Iranian defenders. But Saddam distrusted such displays of talent and in 1984 put the general under mukhabarat surveillance.
By 1990 al-Shahwani had fled to London. As the first Gulf War approached, he moved to Jordan and joined the opposition as an intelligence collector. Four years later, he played a leading role in a CIA plot to mount an army coup against Saddam. But the dictator's secret police penetrated the network and aborted the attempt. Al-Shahwani escaped, but among the conspirators inside the military were his three sons. They were imprisoned and eventually executed. As the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq in 2003, he joined American covert teams in the western desert, though he declines to discuss the missions. "I came back to fight for my sons," he says. "We did what was required."
Al-Shahwani's current strategy is also fraught with risk. He helped broker the truce that ended the April uprising in Fallujah by setting up the Fallujah Brigade, drawn from the insurgents themselves, to police the restive city. It has left the place a sanctuary for terrorists. But he argues that the current cease-fire, flimsy as it is, serves to keep the lid on. "If we went to war there, we could lose thousands of people," he says. "Or we can have peace and capture the insurgents as they come and go from their safe haven." That, he says, is all the government can do for now.