246 AMERICAN SPYmental to Turkey, the paranoid Turks were suspicious of this American
with stated plans to assist the Iraqi Kurds. By the time I was allowed to
cross the border into Iraq, it was late afternoon with only an hour or so of
daylight left. I was relieved to be out of Turkey and in Iraq. Prime Min-
ister Salih’s nervous Kurdish bodyguards put me in the back seat of one
of their convoy’s Toyota Land Cruisers and took off at high speed. After
winding through Dohuk, we headed straight for the deadly city of Mosul.
Our average speed on the narrow, chaotic Iraqi highway was 100 mph. We
somehow made it through Mosul and Kirkuk without incident. The body-
guards did not breathe a sigh of relief until they safely delivered me to the
old Palace Hotel in downtown Suly later that night.
A few days later, my meetings with Salih concluded, the same body-
guards returned me to the Turkish border via the same bare-knuckle route.
We were briefly delayed in Mosul while explosives were cleared off the
road and detonated, but otherwise the return trip was uneventful. After
we arrived at the border crossing, I took a group photo with my seven
guardian angels and bid them a grateful farewell.
The Suly project was a resounding success, and Salih labeled it “an
example for the Middle East.”
Two years later, I traveled on a 3:00 a.m. flight from Amman to the
Kurdish capital city of Erbil to meet with President Masoud Barzani of
the KRG. The Barzani clan controls Iraqi Kurdistan’s other major political
party, the Erbil-based Kurdistan Democratic Party. Royal Jordanian Air-
lines initially bumped me off the very popular and typically overbooked
flight, but KRG interior minister Karim Sinjari, who was on the same
flight, made a call and arranged for someone else to be bumped so that
I could make the flight. The KRG treated me and my colleagues royally
during our Erbil visit. They put us up in a huge, modern presidential guest
mansion in Sari Rash, the KRG leadership community a short drive up the
mountain from Erbil. President Barzani paid us a visit one day to discuss
a possible contract with Babylon Inc. During his visit, the genial and leg-
endary Barzani displayed typical Kurdish hospitality, breaking off a piece
of cooked chicken for me with his bare hands. We also met with his son
Masrour Barzani, then head of the Kurdish intelligence service, and with
his nephew, then KRG prime minister Nechirvan Barzani, at the opulent
Kurdish “White House.” The trip was both comfortable and memorable,