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In Baghdad, Mohammed, of Qusay Hussein's office, was ordered a few days before the capital fell to tour the antiaircraft batteries in the area that had, by and large, stopped firing. When Mohammed asked soldiers sitting in their bunkers why their guns were silent, they answered, "Our general told us not to shoot." Mohammed told them Saddam had ordered that any crew failing to fire that night would be executed. In the morning he returned, bellowing at the units to explain why they had not fired at the U.S. jets. "Because straight after you left yesterday, the general came around," one man replied. "He told us not to listen to you guys."
DAY-AFTER GRUMBLES
Not all the secret agents got away with subversion. "Sultan," a captain in the SSO, says he became suspicious of a man claiming to be a mukhabarat official who was telling colleagues that the Iraqi army was losing and that the Americans were everywhere. Sultan suggested the man come and speak to his unit. "We took him to real mukhabarat officers. They sniffed him out immediately and took him," says Sultan proudly, sipping tea in a back-street cafe in Tikrit.
The suspected spy probably met the same fate as an undercover I.N.C. man called Lieutenant Ali, a close friend of al-Timman's. He was caught when the man who smuggled him to Baghdad from Kurdistan sold him out to the regime. After the war, al-Timman learned that Ali was imprisoned for weeks before being taken to Ramadi, where he was propped against a wall and shot on April 9, the day Saddam's statue came down in Baghdad's Firdos Square.
Some undercover agents who helped the U.S. are dissatisfied with the price they have paid. Disillusioned by their prospects in the new Iraq and threatened by an increasingly bold resistance movement, they feel abandoned by the Americans, for whom they risked their lives and betrayed their country. A mukhabarat colonel who spied for the I.N.C. now sits in a bare office. He has a nominal position with a minimal income and no real authority. He is bitter, claiming he was promised more. "If they don't give the Iraqi groups power, we can liberate ourselves from the Americans and engulf Iraq in fire," he threatens.
Al-Jaburi and Mashadani, the CIA's heroes of the battle for the airport, feel left out in the cold as well. Al-Jaburi says he was paid $75,000 for his efforts, Mashadani $60,000--good money in a country where the average yearly income is $2,500, as well as in the U.S., where the per-capita income is $23,000. Still, the two men feel that they are highly exposed and that the U.S. is not doing enough to protect them. Al-Jaburi's name has appeared on a death list--obtained by TIME--kept by the remnants of the Fedayeen Saddam militia. Two of his relatives were shot dead while driving his car. He complains that the U.S. has not given him a license to carry a gun to protect himself. Without such a permit, Iraqis with arms are subject to arrest at U.S. checkpoints.