Baath house: cleaning out the Iraqi embassy

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2003 by Eric Pfeiffer

A few days before Halloween, I went by the best haunted house in Washington: the Iraqi embassy.

From any serious distance, it looks like any other monumental stone building along Embassy Row, with its brick structuring and gated entrance. But come closer, and you see visible signs of rot: Cords of ivy slither inside open windows, stacks of unopened newspapers have deteriorated into wet pools of grey mush, and weeds, creepily, have overwhelmed the foliage in the front yard and begun to suffocate the sidewalk. Them are literally cracks in the foundation.

The embassy was abandoned shortly after U.S. forces entered Iraq in late March. All but one of its employees were ordered out of the country, and it fell under the control of the American government, like Iraq itself. And just like Iraq, the situation at the embassy has been deteriorating ever since.

No lights were on inside the embassy, even though I visited at one in the afternoon. The embassy's entrance was shielded in a breeze way of dark, reflective Plexiglas that obscured any view of the front doors. I stepped inside the darkened walkway and faced a large, wooden door with a thick metal handle. After three knocks had gone without response, I gave the door a light shove. It opened. My memory flashed to a skit from "The Daily Show" last year. Correspondents for the faux news program went on a trick-or-treat escapade through Embassy Row. Approaching the Iraqi embassy the sky darkened as the soundtrack of a Bela Lugosi-era monster flick filled the background. But what was a parody last year has now become reality.

Faint sounds emanated from inside the 30-room, 9,000-square-foot building, so I called out my most pleasant sounding "Hello?" Several more calls and still no response. I worked my way down a stairway to the building's basement, which was covered with a glass canopy that had a single shattered panel near its center. It was very dark. At the bottom of the stairs, I found a dead bird lying on the floor, head twisted away from its body, the beak pointed toward a thick metal door. A large padlock had been undone, but the room inside was pitch black. At that moment, a stranger's hand gripped my shoulder from behind.

I swung around and stood face to face not with some threatening Lovecraftian menace, but a State Department official. She could have won a Karen Hughes-look-alike contest, in her sleek gray business suit, and cropped, gray-sweaked hair.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

My voice was half friendly, half quavering: "I'm here to speak with Achmed."

Her eyes narrowed. I realized this was the sort of vague thing an alQaeda wannabe seeking a contact might say. "Achmed," the first name of the Iraqi embassy staffer I had scheduled to meet, even sounded like a code name. "What's his last name?" she asked, forebodingly.

"Alkaissy." After I showed her my press pass and explained why I was there, she seemed, reluctantly, convinced I wasn't there on business for the Fedayeen.

"And what might you be doing here?" I asked. She smirked and replied: "I'm with the State Department. You'll Nave to go around to the front and wait for him outside."

Back around front, I found Alkaissy exiting the embassy with another Department employee. He greeted me warmly and exchanged a few parting words with the visiting State employees, who had left behind a crew of maintenance workers unloading equipment to clean up the embassy grounds. Alkaissy led me back inside the building, which was still without power. We walked through the darkness up a short flight of stairs into a large ballroom. Rays of light seeped in through its dust-covered windows, leaving the room partially illuminated, and we sat down. The building was purchased by the Iraqi government in 1961 and has had a turbulent history since. The motto "The name of this chamber is Peace" was once inscribed upon the second-floor fireplace. The inscription disappeared in the early '90s. Literally and, I suppose, also figuratively.

Alkaissy has seen his career and his country's diplomatic connection with the United States threatened twice, after the 1991 Gulf War and this year's overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and managed to outlast both. Dressed in a solid blue t-shirt, jeans, and an Oakland Raiders football cap, he set his pack of Dunhill cigarettes on the coffee table and started smoking immediately. Were I to have casually passed him on the street, I would never have guessed this was the man responsible for trying to revitalize the principal American headquarters of a country with which the United States has spent the last seven months at war.

For the last six months, Alkaissy has been the only contact for Iraqi citizens in the United States, attempting to run the dealings of an embassy that is charged with assisting the more than 300,000 Iraqis currently living in the United States, from the confines of his house in Alexandria. "I couldn't do anything. The Iraqi community started calling me. I don't have authorization from the State Department to do anything. The main thing the Iraqi community wants is passports. I have 630 passports waiting. They can't return to their families and they can't establish themselves here. They are stuck."