This second of two interviews with Lieutenant Colonel Bentley Nettles deals with his July 2004 through January 2005 deployment as the information operations (IO) field support team chief for III Corps in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He begins by highlighting a significant challenge: that coalition partners either did not conduct IO in Iraq or they had markedly different conceptions of what it entailed as compared to the Americans. Nettles then talks about sending his deputy to An Najaf to help deal with Moqtada al-Sadr's uprising and his own presence at the same time in Al Kut with Task Force Thunder. "What we were trying to do in both of those operations," he explained, "was to get people back to repairing the damage done as soon as possible. We wanted to show the rest of the country that people were going back to work and that things had stabilized and normalized in those towns afterwards." In Najaf specifically, Nettles said, one fact that received very little press coverage were the anti-Sadr, anti-insurgent protests held by the local people of An Najaf. He also comments on the prevalence of outside media sources that the Iraqi people had access to in the wake of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Nettles then moves into a discussion of his role as the corps exploitation task force commander for Operation Phantom Fury (Al Fajr), the November 2004 combined/joint assault to retake the city of Fallujah from insurgent control. This job entailed gathering information about weapons caches, atrocities committed by insurgents in Fallujah - including photos of torture rooms and beheading videos - all of which were eventually given to Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and taken by him to a "regional convention of Arab nation leaders to show them why we had to go back into Fallujah to conduct these operations." Nettles also shares his overall sense of how the IO effort was prosecuted in Iraq, relates the success of a tips line where people could anonymously call in information about insurgent activities, offers some advice to commanders on how best to employ IO in future operations, and additionally tells how he himself was injured by enemy rocket fire while stationed at Baghdad International Airport.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited