|
Perilous Arrival
After a brief stop in Jordan, the team's plane touched down in Iraq on Feb. 7, 2004, at Baghdad International Airport. The three men were ushered onto an old shuttle bus and dropped off at a nearby checkpoint. Due to a logistical screwup, they waited five hours for transport to their final destination: the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad. Sitting on their luggage at the checkpoint, they saw the reality of Iraq. Tanks and Humvees rolled past in columns, plumes of black smoke rose on the horizon, dust swirled and there was an omnipresent whump-whump-whump of Apache helicopters. "The whole thing was just surreal," Danforth says.
To get to the Babylon Hotel, the men had to travel a portion of what's widely considered the most dangerous road in Baghdad, a 10-mile stretch from the airport to the "Green Zone." Bordered by the Tigris River, the Green Zone is a heavily fortified makeshift camp housing the provisional government; it was where Danforth's team would work closely with U.S. authorities. Some five miles beyond was the hotel, and there was no mistaking that it was a perilous place.
An aura of danger seemed to choke the hotel, he says. For starters, a private security detail made up of Italian guards greeted the team, their rifles raised as they swept rooftops and windows for snipers. Danforth and others were issued 28-pound bulletproof vests and helmets. Daily trips to the Green Zone became feats of security prowess. Guards, for instance, would escort Danforth from the hotel to two cars at a nearby lot. Each had a driver and a shooter, with the second "chase" car providing extra security and a potential escape vehicle. The route changed daily. Upon returning to the hotel, Danforth would hear his driver call out on the radio, "pick 28, arriving at A5." A tall, trim Italian-baker-turned-security guard named Fabrizio Quattrocchi was assigned to protect No. 28.
Inside the Green Zone, Danforth met CPA senior advisors responsible for the development of Iraq's 26 ministries. It didn't take long to realize that progress was happening in silos. The problem, Danforth says, stemmed from an executive order. "Bremer had issued a warning to senior advisors, telling them that the June 28th deadline for handing over sovereignty to the interim government of Iraq will be met, come hell or high water, so they better be ready," he recalls. This kind of pressure set off an epidemic of tunnel vision up and down the command chain. Senior advisors began making decisions that benefited only their assigned ministries, he says. Independent satellite communication networks and other sundry IT investments sprang up.
Iraqi ministers also had a silo mentality. They pressed Danforth's team to advocate for separate ministerial data centers -- a telltale sign of mistrust within Iraq's political hierarchy, Danforth notes. "We were constantly walking through quagmire." As a result, the team agreed that a major thrust of the IT Strategic Plan had to be a call for unity, in the form of common applications, standard procedures and shared services.
Out Into the Field
In order to assess Iraq's real IT capabilities and potential, Danforth had to make excursions into the heart of Baghdad. This was always a dubious affair, and Danforth would wake up jittery whenever he had to venture into unprotected areas. During one visit to a ministry, Danforth recalls his car being blocked by makeshift barriers. Surrounded by hundreds of Iraqis carrying AK-47s, he and his team walked the length of a football field to get to the building.
Meeting with Iraqi ministers, deputy generals and senior aides proved to be extremely valuable. Through thick accents, they peppered Danforth with questions and took reams of notes. Danforth sensed that they thirsted for technology and he, in turn, felt he had gained their respect by meeting them on their turf. But he was taken aback by the country's great technology void. Nary a personal computer was in sight, let alone a server. Lofty dreams of creating an e-government in Iraq were quickly dashed.
The bigger issue was an absence of IT talent in the country. Danforth didn't meet a single Iraqi with real-world technology chops. His suspicions were confirmed after a meeting with Iraq's incoming national CIO. He had a doctorate degree in technology from the University of Baghdad, yet didn't know how to turn on a computer. Moreover, the national CIO's annual salary was $32,000. Such low pay rates, coupled with a common mistrust of outsiders, would make it impossible to attract and retain highly skilled foreigners to run critical operations on an ongoing basis, Danforth says. There was no question that a national grassroots technical training program would have to be part of the IT plan.
Back at the hotel, Danforth spent evenings chatting with Tracy Hushin, a manager in charge of operations for BearingPoint. She was the "team mom" who handled everything from acquiring pencils to scheduling cars. He also passed the time smoking cigarettes with his security guard Quattrocchi, who would give him safety tips. "George, you have to watch the eyes, always the eyes," Quattrocchi would tell him. "You can tell if someone's up to no good because the eyes will twitch." Other times they talked about what brought them to Iraq. For Danforth, it was a career move tinged with patriotic duty. For Quattrocchi, it was to earn money to buy a house so he and his fiancée could raise a family back in Italy.
On Day 30 of the assignment, Danforth's team submitted an outline with their top 10 IT recommendations to U.S. representatives. The recommendations balanced technology, process and people, and formed the foundation from which technology could spring and evolve. "They're not rocket science," Danforth says. "The magic was selecting them over a thousand choices." The outline was greeted with rousing acceptance, he says, and the team was given 60 days to flesh out the steps and deliver a tactical guide.
Two weeks later, Danforth flew to Dubai and, later, to Jordan, to relieve the stress of being in a combat zone for an extended period. Indeed, he had come within 50 yards of a mortar blast while getting cough medicine in the Green Zone. That incident left nine people dead and a three-foot hole in the ground. On another occasion, his car was ambushed minutes after he left it, with insurgents firing 51 bullets into the door. At home, his wife Diana wasn't faring much better. She compulsively cleaned the house, the car, the cat -- anything to keep her mind busy. Her appetite waned and she lost 11 pounds. "I wasn't sleeping or eating much," Diana says, adding, "If it didn't move for 30 seconds, I washed it."
Quattrocchi and three companions also decided to leave Iraq for a little rest and recuperation, according to Danforth. They planned to drive to Amman, Jordan. Since Jordan did not allow weapons to cross its borders, the men left their guns at the Babylon Hotel. That proved to be a fatal mistake. On the road to Jordan, they were captured, and Quattrocchi was killed. (The other captives were later released.) Quattrocchi's image was aired on networks around the world, his gruesome death recorded on videotape. Moments before being shot in the back of the neck, Quattrocchi, 36, allegedly shouted at his captors: "Now I'll show you how an Italian dies!"
The news of Quattrocchi's death deeply shook Danforth, who was still outside Iraq on leave. He called Doug Tatum and told him that he wanted to go home. The feeling was mutual. "I told George, 'Don't go back there; I want you back in the States,'" says Tatum, adding, "We were in tears on this telephone call." But when the sun rose the next day, Danforth jumped on a plane back to Baghdad. "I remember thinking, Fabrizio would never let these bastards beat you," Danforth says. The killing carried the trappings of an inside job -- the scuttlebutt was that hotel workers were the only ones who knew Quattrocchi and his companions were traveling to Jordan defenseless. With security compromised at the hotel, BearingPoint moved everyone to private housing.
|
 |
|
|
