238 AMERICAN SPYoffice in the city of Mosul. He agreed and went on to run one of our
more profitable offices in Iraq. Babylon Inc. remained in business before,
during, and after ISIS’s brutal occupation of the city. ISIS briefly shut us
down but then gave us written permission to continue to operate. Our
local employees in Mosul had no idea they were working for an American
company. It was better for them, and for us, to keep that fact secret.Once Omar was back in Baghdad, I casually asked Ali Baba for the receipt
from al-Qaeda for the ransom payment. My request was made almost
reflexively, based on my years of CIA experience. Ali Baba thought I was
serious and explained to me why that was probably a bad idea. Reacting
like a CIA bean counter, I instructed him to send Hatem back to the muja-
hedin neighborhood to get a receipt, or he’d have to eat the expense per-
sonally. He finally figured out I was joking.
The ransom payment was not the most unusual item I ever encoun-
tered in expense reports from Baghdad. One employee actually submitted
a seventy-five-dollar claim for a sheep. He corroborated his claim by sub-
mitting a photo of the hog-tied sheep in the trunk of his car, which was
parked in front of our office in the al-Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad.
My only question was whether the sheep was to be categorized as meals,
or entertainment, or both. (It turned out our office gave the sheep to the
family of an employee whose mother had just died.)
As for the handgun Hassan took from his would-be al-Qaeda murderer,
years after the incident, we asked our Kurdish driver Rebaz to return it
to us. Rebaz went inside his house and came out with a pellet gun that
more or less resembled the al-Qaeda gun. He no longer had our gun and
was apparently hoping we had forgotten what it looked like. He eventually
admitted he sold our prized possession without telling us. We fired him. It
was long overdue.