Summary

Part 6 opens in the northern section of Iraq that served as the hideouts of the Ansar al-Islam militants. The area was the site of Saddam’s notorious nerve gas attack on Kurdish villages, resulting in several thousand deaths and an enduring sense of disorder, as local militias and warlords continued to fight each other and Saddam’s forces. CIA operatives gathered in the region in the summer of 2002 to monitor the Ansar al-Islam group, which had already established a base where it enforced its strict version of Islamic law by time Zarqawi arrived. The CIA team discovered that militants had an enormous stockpile of poisons; it was unclear whether they knew how to weaponized them, but their lethal intent was clear, as demonstrated by their experiments on local stray dogs.

The CIA was surprised to discover another group of intelligence operatives...