REAL HOUSEWIVES OF THE CIA 153About one week after our conversation, I was awakened in the middle
of the night in Erbil as US Special Forces in attack helicopters and armored
vehicles assaulted an Iranian “diplomatic” building a few blocks away
from our hotel. My daughter’s room was across the hall from mine, and
she did not hear a thing. From my hotel room window, I watched a Black
Hawk helicopter hover above the Iranians’ building. I learned later that
our troops snatched half a dozen suspected Iranian Quds Force operatives
from the building. According to the New Yorker magazine, the raid was based
on intelligence that notorious Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani,
the man responsible for Mughniyeh, the Buckley kidnapping, and recent
deadly “explosively formed penetrator” attacks against US troops in Iraq,
would be among those captured. Unfortunately, Suleimani had broken off
from the group before they arrived at the Iranian “consulate” and was in
a safe house provided by Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) leader
Masoud Barzani.^2
I heard from my KRG contacts that the US military had not coordi-
nated this daring operation in advance with our close (if not duplicitous)
Kurdish government allies. The Kurds were furious, and the incident led
to a tense armed standoff between US and Peshmerga forces later that day.
Our hotel was soon swarming with US and Kurdish military officers who
were frantically attempting to defuse the situation. For its part, the Iranian
government predictably expressed its outrage over this blatant breach of
international law, blah, blah, blah. (You can imagine my reaction to Iran’s
hypocritical outrage after their own blatant breach of international law
nearly cost me my life in Sarajevo. The “kidnapped” Iranian operatives
were not in Erbil to pass out candy, and they would not be tortured or killed
as I would have been.)
Regardless, this truly was a serious international incident, and the
entire story about what transpired during our daughter’s winter vacation
in Iraq was splashed the next morning across the front page of the New York
Times.^3