This is I spy, the show from foreign policy where spies tell their stories.

We're following the vehicle and he pulls into this farm essentially with like a grove of trees that are set up to block the wind for all the buildings around there.

The canopy of the trees we can't see through it, so we don't know where he's gone at this point.

He got out and ran, and we couldn't see him. We don't have any way to tell the special operations forces on the ground like which way he went.

They get to the pickup and you know and capture all the belongings and everything and confirm it was him in the car

because he left everything behind. But yeah that was that was incredibly infuriating to get that close

to him without actually capturing him.

From foreign policy, welcome to I spy.

Real-life spy stories told by the people who were there. Each week we feature

one former intelligence operative from somewhere around the world describing one operation. I'm Margo Martindale. On today's show,

Nade Bocos, a CIA targeter, led a two-year hunt for a man in Iraq.

Abu Musab Zarkawi, the Al-Qaeda jihadist,

had carried out some of the deadliest attacks of the Iraq war against Americans and Iraqis.

Bacchus worked on the operations side of the agency while targeting Zarkowi, but she started her career

with the CIA as an analyst. Her story begins in 2003 after the first round of America's major combat operations in Iraq.

After the start of the war, they were looking for volunteers that would go to Iraq in order to help continue to work on whether or not we can find information that ties Al Qaeda and 9-11 to Iraq.

So our team had to volunteer and we were sending one person at a time and I just

volunteered to be the second person on our team to fly there.

The agency had started sending analysts into conflict zones and war zones prior to 9-11, but after 9-11, they needed that subject matter expertise on the ground.

So they sent them into Afghanistan, and then they sent them into Iraq.

Analysts were working alongside the operations colleagues because it was just much more efficient

to do that on the ground versus waiting for that information to come back to headquarters.

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