222 AMERICAN SPY
in the large, comfortable home of his uncle “Omar,” an even more prom-
inent tribal sheik. Mine was not a sentiment to be shared by the many
American troops who would soon find themselves there, but I was thankful
to be in Ramadi.
After we were shown to our rooms and had a chance to catch our
breaths, my two American colleagues and I were treated to a phenom-
enal Arabic feast in the formal dining room of the large Iraqi house. Since
we were unexpected guests, I could not fathom how, on short notice, they
could pull together such huge platters of rice, lamb, and chicken that liter-
ally took two men to carry to the table. We never saw any women, but we
knew they were in the next room, preparing the feast. I was beginning to
understand why Dan and Imad had laughed when I asked if we should
bring in food supplies.
After dinner, I took a few things out of my backpack. My Toshiba laptop
had made the entire trip in a zippered sleeve, inside my backpack, which
remained inside the closed, air-conditioned Suburban. When I pulled it out,
the laptop was covered with dust as fine as baby powder that had somehow
penetrated the several layers of “security.” After confirming the laptop still
worked, I walked outside to call my daughters on my satellite phone before
passing out for the best night’s sleep I’d experienced in a week.
The next morning, before leaving Ramadi, we stopped to see the damage
done by the bombing of Imad’s nearby family compound. The large con-
crete structure had been flattened by the precision bombs. The sight of the
collapsed three-story home reminded me of the Serb government buildings
in Pristina that had been similarly targeted during the war in Kosovo. It was
not difficult to understand why no one inside the house had survived.
We then drove on in silence, heading east on Saddam’s highway,
through Fallujah and into chaotic Baghdad. There was no discernible
police presence in Iraq’s hot and noisy capital. Traffic was out of control,
and overwhelmed young American troops tried their best to provide secu-
rity in the city’s jammed traffic circles. I felt bad for our troops; they were
sitting ducks, surrounded by thousands of vehicles and unable to scan them
all for threats. Not that it was easy to distinguish between a threat and an
innocent Iraqi. Because of the traffic jam, we drove the wrong way down
a one-way street to our final destination, a villa owned by Imad in the al-
Mansour district of Baghdad.