In this second of two interviews regarding his Global War on Terrorism experiences, Major John Athey discusses his May 2005 through May 2006 deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom as part of the Iraqi Assistance Group's ministry intelligence transition team, known as the MoD/MoI Support Team. He begins his interview by talking about the lack of any advisor-specific predeployment training "on the teach-coach-mentor level" that he and his fellow team members received at Fort Carson. Once in theater, Baghdad specifically, his joint team fell under Multinational Force-Iraq's combined staff intelligence officer (C2), Major General John DeFreitas, and Athey received his personal assignment to be the advisor, or "analytical counterpart," to the Iraqi ministerial intelligence chief (M2). Then, halfway through his yearlong tour, he transitioned to become the senior advisor for the Iraqi director general for intelligence and security (DGIS). In his first position, the most significant areas he worked on with the Iraqi M2 were "predictive analysis and evaluation of sources." With the DGIS, Athey focused on introducing the concept of budgeting and also more basic skills such as "how to read and mark a map, how to take a report, how to do analysis; but then we also had to step up our efforts on the other fronts," he added. "That organization was throughout the country, so there were DGIS offices in faraway places. We'd send a two-man team out and they were sometimes quite far away from us support-wise." In addition, Athey talks about the "uniformly good" linguists he had access to, the constantly frustrating patronage system the Iraqis lived and worked under, as well as a bureaucracy that was "very, very developed and much worse than ours." Despite the fact that they dealt with many different services and coalition partners, Athey said that a common NATO doctrine served as a significant unifying factor. He also speaks to the unique opportunity these assignments afforded him to work at such high levels of responsibility.

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