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Meanwhile, Mashadani was informed by his superiors that they had a special duty for him. At the meeting place, a mukhabarat facility, he says, "I found my duty was facing a lot of hands with guns." For six hours, Mashadani was grilled about his dealings with al-Jaburi. "All the senior bosses were coming to my interrogation," he says. "Everyone went crazy that a mukhabarat officer had been meeting a spy." At daylight, his jailers took him to see the beaten al-Jaburi. Both say they admitted nothing.
For four days, al-Jaburi says, his jailers tortured him: beating him, shocking him, smashing his hand. Mashadani gives a similar account. At one point, interrogators dragged al-Jaburi's mother and wife into the prison for questioning. Al-Jaburi could hear them wailing through the cell door. The sessions went on for six to eight hours at a time. Al-Jaburi says he was grilled about other spies, information he had relayed before his capture, GPS coordinates he had sent. He says his CIA training prepared him to give away nothing of importance. But he feared that time was running out. With the regime collapsing, Saddam's execution squads were working double time, plucking five to 10 men from their cells every hour. "It was like a slaughterhouse," says al-Jaburi.
As the war's front changed, al-Jaburi and Mashadani were moved from Abu Ghraib to prisons in Fallujah and then Ramadi. On April 11 the last guard at the Ramadi jail fled the advancing Americans, and locals came to set the two men free. Half-crippled and waving a white flag, they staggered up to an American unit. "I told them that we had just got out of prison and that we worked for the CIA," says al-Jaburi. A military-police humvee whisked them to Baghdad airport, which was under U.S. control. A CIA officer appeared with open arms. "Don't touch my back," al-Jaburi yelped, the wounds from his interrogation still fresh. He remembers the officer saying, "You are the heroes of the airport, the keys to Baghdad. Your future is assured."
ENTICING THE GAMBLERS
As an underground operative of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), Wael Abu al-Timman spent years hiding from Saddam's henchmen. Now, with the war fast approaching, al-Timman was recruiting them. His instructions from the I.N.C., which worked closely with the U.S. before and during the war, were to find men not only willing to provide information about Iraqi defenses but also willing to see to it that the Iraqi forces failed to fight. Having served as a captain in the Republican Guard, al-Timman, who was based in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq but traveled often to Baghdad, turned to his old comrades. He was astonished by how many were willing to switch allegiances. "They knew it was their last chance [to join the likely winners]," he recalls. "We called them the gamblers."