Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran Page A

palaces in Baghdad that had not been bombed by the military. When they told him that it would take a few days to respond to his request, Veale went on the Internet. On a Web site called DigitalGlobe, he pulled up images of a massive edifice with a blue dome—the Republican Palace. It seemed ideal. But when he received a list of standing palaces from the intelligence staff, that one wasn’t among the possibilities. He walked back to their villa with the DigitalGlobe printout. “Hey, you didn’t show me this one,” he said. A day later, they called Veale. “We have good news, Major Veale,” one of them said. “Yes, this is a palace and it does exist. But it got hit on the first night of shock-and-awe [bombing] and it’s been pretty much destroyed.” Veale was skeptical. His image of the palace had been taken within the past week. But the intelligence personnel were certain. “Take our word for it,” one analyst said. “These buildings have been pretty well destroyed.”
    So Veale had planned for ORHA to move into the Sijood Palace, a small structure down the river from the Republican Palace. He spent days diagramming the building, identifying where people would work, where cars would be parked, where helicopters would land. A few days after Baghdad fell, he headed up from Kuwait to begin preparations. But when he got to Sijood, he found it rubbled by an American cruise missile. He thought to himself,
What am I going to do?
    As he sat outside the palace, a few Special Forces soldiers stopped to talk. Veale recounted his plight. One soldier encouraged him to keep looking. “Hey, man, you have to go down the road,” he said. “There’s a palace that’s fully intact.” When Veale got there, he discovered that it was the same palace he had seen on the DigitalGlobe Web site.
    With Garner due to arrive in less than a week, Veale set about trying to get the lights on and the water running. The American military had bombed the outbuilding that housed the air-conditioning and power-generating units. Getting the water to flow was difficult because he could not find any schematic drawings indicating where the pipes were buried. Trolling through the labyrinthine basement to look for pipes and wiring was harrowing. “We didn’t know if it was booby-trapped,” Veale recalled.
    As Veale conducted his inspections, he was accompanied by a CIA operative searching for weapons of mass destruction. All they found were a few hard-core looters and two bewildered Republican Guard soldiers who had failed to join their buddies in fleeing home a week earlier. Then Veale heard a rumor that one of Uday’s tigers had escaped from its cage and was prowling the palace grounds. Veale soon grew more afraid of running into a feline than a former regime fighter. For the better part of a week, he walked around at night with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    Tim Carney had hunted elephants, cape buffalo, giraffes, warthogs, and two species of zebra. He owned an elephant gun—a double-barreled, double-triggered weapon whose bullets are almost a half inch in diameter, nearly the size of the largest rifle used by the U.S. Army—and he ate what he shot. The list of exotic animals Carney had bagged was rivaled only by the list of exotic places he had been stationed as a diplomat: Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge converged, Mogadishu in the throes of civil war, Port-au-Prince when American marines waded ashore.
    Carney was tall, soft-spoken, and exceedingly polite. But he also could be blunt and clear-eyed about the failings of American foreign policy. (The chatty American diplomat played by Spalding Gray in the film
The Killing Fields
was based largely on Carney.) By the time he retired in 2000, he had more experience in hostile places than almost anyone else in the State