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Supporting resistance fighters in the north of Iraq had more promise. A successful insurrection might spread south toward Baghdad. Still, Anderson had doubts about the leader of the opposition. The Iraqi National Congress, a shaky coalition of anti-Saddam groups, had been put together by the CIA in 1992 with an MIT-trained banker named Ahmed Chalabi as its head. Chalabi had close ties to the West, and he was a good politician, but he had lived in exile for much of the past four decades, mostly in Jordan, and he had no experience running guerrilla attacks. He had also been convicted in a Jordanian court of embezzling tens of millions of dollars, although he later was reconciled with King Hussein.

The top brass at the CIA were also wary of dealing with Kurds, the fierce tribesmen of the north who had for many years been trying to carve a homeland out of the mountains claimed by Iraq, Turkey and Iran. In the chaos that followed the gulf war, the Kurds had seen their chance, and, protected by a "no-fly zone" policed by allied air power, had seized a measure of autonomy from Baghdad. But over the decades the Kurds have been used and betrayed by many great powers, including the United States. Riven by tribal rivalries, they were not likely to put complete trust in any CIA agent's promises. To the senior spooks at Langley, the Kurds seemed like a cutthroat and untrustworthy lot.

To Bob, however, they looked like good fighters--tough mountain men in the mold of the mujahedin, some of whom had worked successfully with the CIA as guerrillas against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. After an undercover inspection tour of northern Iraq in 1994, Bob and several of his colleagues became convinced that the CIA should set up a permanent station to work with the Kurds as they fomented rebellion against Saddam. An American presence would inspire confidence, they argued, by showing the Kurds that the CIA was committed.

Bob, then 41 years old, was motivated partly by his love of clandestine adventure. A champion skier in his youth, he had operated undercover in the former Soviet Union in the early '90s, and, disguised as an Egyptian, reported on street riots in Sudan in 1985. For his work training Sudanese guerrillas for operations against Muammar Kaddafi, he had been hunted by Libyan intelligence. He was considered a rising star at the CIA, although, as one of his superiors put it, "Bob needed constant adult supervision."

Operating out of a house in Salah ad Din, a city in northern Iraq, in the winter of 1995, Bob had little more to work with than a computer with a satellite uplink. He had no arms or explosives to offer the Kurds, and he reported back to headquarters that the Kurds were stealing much of the money that the CIA was spending to support the anti-Saddam opposition. But he got on well with the resistance leaders, including Chalabi, who was impressed by Bob's knowledge of Arabic and Islamic culture, as well as his gung-ho spirit.

For more than a year, Chalabi had been trying to sell the CIA on what he called the "Three City Plan." Chalabi wanted to mount guerrilla raids against three Iraqi cities--Mosul and Kirkuk in the north and Basra in the south. The hope was that the raids would stir local insurrections and persuade Saddam's soldiers to defect to the opposition. The plan had little support in Langley. But Bob was more encouraging. "He was very supportive," Chalabi told Newsweek. Today, in the wake of the failed covert action, different stories have emerged out of the CIA and the Iraqi opposition. The Iraqis say that Bob suggested, in response to a question from an opposition leader, that the United States would provide air cover. If Saddam sent his tanks into the north to crush the rebellion, U.S. warplanes would hit them, Bob allegedly said at a meeting of INC leaders on Feb. 13, 1995. Bob insisted to his superiors that he had made no such promises.