Summary

Part 3 opens with the interrogation of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as he sought to depart from Jordan in mid-1999 on the pretense of traveling to Pakistan to begin life as a honey merchant. Here Abu Haytham, head of the security service known as the Mukhabarat, greeted the terrorist extraordinaire in the making. Haytham had been monitoring Zarqawi and his plans for departure for weeks and here exercised the intelligence service’s prerogative to hold an emigrant for up to three days if they believed there were a security risk.

Abu Haytham and Zarqawi had a history, even in 1999: the officer had taken part in the raid in 1994 that had nabbed the militant just before he carried out a plan to attack Israeli troops at the Jordan-Israel border. He recalled the thug attempting to pull a gun on the officers who stormed his...