Spying On ISIS, Foiling Terror

BAGHDAD — The driver was sweating as his white Kia pickup truck sped along a rain-slicked Baghdad highway toward a neighborhood bustling with open-air markets. With every jolt, his pulse quickened. Hidden in the truck’s chassis was 500 kilos of military-grade explosives that the Islamic State planned to use in an attack on New Year’s Eve shoppers.

A reckless driver on Iraq’s chaotic roads might clip him, accidentally setting off the bomb. A clash at one of Baghdad’s checkpoints could escalate into gunfire, potentially igniting a fireball. But there was another reason he was afraid. The driver, Captain Harith al-Sudani, was a spy. For the past 16 months, he had posed as a militant jihadist in the Islamic State while passing information to a secret branch of Iraq’s national intelligence agency.

He had foiled 30 planned vehicle- bomb attacks and 18 suicide bombers, according to Abu Ali al-Basri, the agency’s director. Captain Sudani also gave the agency a direct line to some of the Islamic State’s senior commanders. A 36-year- old former computer technician, he was, officials said, perhaps Iraq’s greatest spy. But now, on this last day of 2016, as he cruised toward his assigned target, the markets of Baghdad al Jdeidah, he had a nagging suspicion that his cover had been blown. Today he had been caught in a small lie, the second in months. If the explosives didn’t kill him, the Islamic State might. Before he left on this mission, he sent his father a text. “Pray for me,” he said.

Iraq’s counterterrorism intelligence unit, the Falcon Intelligence Cell, may be the most important organization on the front lines of the war on terrorism that almost no one has heard of. This article is based on interviews with the director of