I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  “That would be great,” I said. “Do you make them with cumin?”

  This time he was the one who burst out laughing, along with the other police.

  I turned to our driver and the other Algerians and asked if they wanted chickpeas, too, but one of them whispered: “‘Chickpeas’ is the code word here for beatings.”

  The police chief then asked who we worked for.

  “We are journalists and we work for the New York Times,” Michael said. When I began to translate, the chief interrupted me.

  “Have I understood well? You are reporters for the New York Times?”

  “Yes,” Michael said.

  The chief stood up. “I don’t believe it. This would have been the perfect gift for these terrorists, kidnapping two journalists from an American media outlet.”

  He asked one of his officers to contact the Ministry of the Interior in Algiers and tell them where we were. Then he told us to go back to the capital. The police drove us to the edge of Naciria. From there, a dark blue Toyota tailed us all the way back to Algiers.

  Several days earlier we’d submitted a request to extend our visas. I couldn’t imagine our arrest would help. “I think the Algerians will throw us out of here,” I told Michael.

  To our great surprise, when we reached Algiers, we learned that the extensions had been granted. It didn’t make sense.

  We were still hoping to find a way to interview Droukdal in person. That evening, Michael called me in my room and said that I should come outside quickly and bring all my equipment. “Bring your phone and computer. We will need some time here.”

  We met on the hotel terrace. Michael told me that he had just received a phone call from our editors in New York. An FBI agent had come to the New York Times office and reported that there was a threat against Michael’s life. The agent didn’t get into specifics but said it was related to the work we were doing and came from somebody with ties to the militants.

  “And what about me?” I asked. “We always work on these stories together, so if there is a threat against you, there must be one against my life as well.”

  Michael called the FBI agent in front of me, but the agent said there had been no threat against my life. He strongly advised Michael to get out of Algeria but said that I wouldn’t have to leave.

  “So we need to decide,” Michael said. “I could leave, and you could stay and finish the job; or we both stay; or we both leave.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” I told him. “Why would they threaten you but not me? Both our names are at the top of these stories.”

  “Maybe it’s one of these guys who wants to marry you and who is jealous,” Michael said half-jokingly. But I didn’t buy it.

  We decided that I should reach out to some of the people we’d interviewed in the past to see if they knew anything. Had we upset the jihadists? But if we had, they would be after me as well.

  I called Abu Jihad in Zarqa, using my satellite phone, and asked what was going on. I talked to Zarqawi’s supporters in Jordan and the guys from the camps in Lebanon. “Do you have anything against my colleague?” I asked. They all said no.

  Then I contacted my AQIM source through our email account. “We learned that there is a threat against my colleague’s life,” I wrote. “Do you have anything against him?”

  “We have nothing against you or your colleague,” he wrote back. “But you should leave the country for your own sake. Something is wrong here, and it’s not coming from us.”

  I told Michael that I couldn’t guarantee his safety if we stayed, and that I didn’t want to stay either. “This stinks,” I told him. “Let’s get the hell out of this place.”

  We called our editors in New York, who told us there was an Alitalia flight leaving for Rome in three hours.

  We ran back to our rooms, packed, and left Algeria. I spent the flight running through the list of people we had interviewed in my head. Who would have had a reason to threaten Michael? For days I wondered why this threat had surfaced on the same day Michael and I had been detained. Something was off, but we concentrated on finishing the story.

  I was still determined to interview Droukdal and his group and also to give them the chance to answer some of the allegations against them.

  “Are you and your colleague safe? Are you out of Algeria?” our contact person inside the group asked me in a draft message the next day.

  “Yes we are,” I wrote back. “Now how about we get you the questions for the head of your group and you guys send us back the answers, on your letterhead and with a recording of his voice?”

  “I can’t promise anything, but I can try.”

  Michael and I worked on a list of questions, and I sent them to my contact. “It is very important that we get the answers on tape so we can hear his voice,” we told him in our message. We also wanted a statement from Droukdal on camera, with the date, which we would use for verification but wouldn’t publish, and if possible the whole interview in writing.

  Ten days later, I received a link to a Dropbox account. The link was valid for only an hour or two. When I clicked on it, I found the text of the interview, the voice recording, and the video clip we’d asked for. The group also sent us a message on stationery stamped with the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb letterhead, acknowledging that the group had received questions from the “honorable journalist Souad Mekhennet, who works for the New York Times.”

  Droukdal had answered all our questions. A university graduate who had studied mathematics, his voice was surprisingly soft. We worked some of what he said into an article and decided to publish the interview transcript as well.

  After our story ran, AQIM continued to grow. The group was active in Mali, where a militant Islamist takeover of key cities would spur a French military intervention in 2013. Today, officials in Europe and the United States view it as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist outfits. Droukdal is still alive and still at the helm.

  The reporting had been a success, but our experience in Algeria and the alleged threat against Michael’s life hung over us like a shadow. We understood that if the threat was genuine, it could signal the end of our reporting on jihadists.

  I checked with some of my intelligence sources to see if they knew anything. About two weeks after our story ran, I received a call from a European intelligence source. He said it was urgent, and he needed to see me. “It’s related to the question you asked some weeks ago about your colleague,” he said.

  I talked to my editor Matt Purdy, and we decided that I should meet with the intelligence official. Two days later, at a small restaurant in the city where my source worked, he leaned across the table and whispered, “I just want you to know, in case you go back to North Africa, that you were followed from the beginning by a hit team.”

  “What do you mean? Whose hit team?”

  “The CIA, NSA, you name it. They were all following you.”

  I thought it must be a joke, but his face was serious. “But why hit teams?” I responded. “And what’s with that threat against my colleague’s life?” I thought back on all the meetings we’d had at the U.S. embassy in Algiers, with the group of American businessmen who had traveled there. Which of them had been working for the intelligence services? I remembered the handsome American men from the little telecom company who had always tried to sit with us at dinner. But I still didn’t understand. Why this ominous threat against Michael’s life?

  “They wanted your colleague to be out of the danger zone because he’s American. They were thinking you would finish the job, so they would follow you.”

  I was stunned. Had these U.S. agencies been hoping I would lead them to Droukdal? If their goal was to kill him, would they have killed me, too? How far would they have gone to get to the leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?

  “Was my life in danger?” I asked.

  The source nodded, then hedged. “Well, I don’t know if they would have gone that far,” he said. “But they were a
ll over you in Algeria.”

  I knew that most European and U.S. intelligence agencies worked closely together. “That means you were, too,” I said.

  He was silent.

  My own country had to be involved as well. Would the German government so willingly sacrifice one of its citizens in exchange for a counterterrorism victory? I didn’t know the answer, but I was worried. Back home, I Googled the name of the company the two handsome Americans had said they owned and found a single, vague entry. I shut down the messaging system I’d established with my AQIM source in Algeria. I now think those online communications were what put me on the intelligence services’ radar.

  I went over everything again in my head. Did they really want Michael out because he was American, and was my life expendable because I wasn’t? Did Germany consider me a second-class citizen because I was a Muslim and my parents were immigrants?

  My jihadi sources often argued that in the calculus of the West, Muslim lives mattered less than Western ones. For a moment I asked myself if they were right and whether what had happened to me was proof. “Sympathy” would be too strong a word for what I was feeling, but I appreciated their anger and understood their point of view in a newly visceral way. I felt helpless and angry myself. It stank of hypocrisy, the same charge the jihadis leveled against Western societies all the time. They thought I would lead them to Droukdal. They wanted to use me as bait to capture or kill him. I would have been caught in the middle. Anything could have happened.

  Algeria was the last reporting trip Michael and I took together. Because of the threat, he was pulled off the jihadist beat. He started working on food security, and in 2010 he won a Pulitzer Prize. “Look how often you and I risked our lives to bring those stories home, and to explain to people what was happening in the world, and we didn’t win even one award,” Michael said when I called to congratulate him. “I won the Pulitzer for stories about peanuts and meat.”

  I told my editors at the Times that I felt some intelligence services posed a greater threat to my safety than the jihadists did. A few months later, I met an American intelligence operative at a conference in an Arab country. I got the feeling that he knew more about me than I did about him. After we’d talked a few times, I asked if he knew anything about what had happened in Algeria.

  “Look, there was a time when people had questions about you,” he told me. “You had access to people who were on most-wanted lists and people wondered if you were a sympathizer. We later understood that you were doing it because you believed in journalism, but people wondered before, what’s behind her drive to reach all these guys?” He confirmed that my family background and religion had led some to question my motives.

  I began to be deeply worried that the way I was trying to do my job—not taking any side but speaking to all sides and challenging them all whenever I could—was becoming untenable for someone with my background. Could this kind of impartial journalism about jihadists and the War on Terror be safely practiced in the West only by someone whose parents had been born and raised there, rather than someone whose Muslim descent made her an object of special interest and suspicion? How much longer would I be able to do this kind of reporting?

  These were dark thoughts that made me question the foundations and ultimate success of the West’s supposed openness to outsiders and its commitment to freedom of speech and thought.

  8

  Guns and Roses

  Pakistan, 2009

  Working with American colleagues who were married with children had made me realize that I, too, wanted to find a partner and build a family—and definitely not with some jihadist sheikh looking for a second or third wife. After long, exhausting days in strange faraway places, I sometimes overheard my coworkers sharing their experiences with their spouses. Meanwhile, I was always trying to keep the truth about what I’d seen or heard or felt as vague as possible when I talked to my parents, my brother, and my sisters.

  But finding a partner wasn’t easy for me, as jihad followed me into my private life. After the Algeria debacle, I arranged to spend some time in New York, working out of the Times headquarters. I wanted to get to know my fellow reporters and editors better and improve my English, which was my fourth language after Arabic, German, and French.

  My American friends seized the opportunity for matchmaking. Some arranged dinners to introduce me to “accomplished Arab Americans”; another signed me up for a website where I could supposedly meet Arab singles from around the world. All went well—until the men found out who I was and Googled my articles.

  Some hated what I was doing and accused me of making Islam or Arabs “look bad”; others sent messages full of compliments but noted that “what you are doing is so brave but also dangerous.”

  The man who wrote those words was an American-born engineer of Arab descent whom I’d met online. A friend had set up a profile for me, entering answers to questions about my preferences and whether I wanted to get married and have kids. (The answer to both was yes.)

  There was no picture of me on my profile page, and I never sent my picture to anyone I met on the site. I wrote that I was of Arab-European descent and worked in media, without specifying where. I said I was independent and hardworking, that I liked to listen to music, that I liked long walks and art museums and went to the movies and read a lot, and that I was a very social person. When one man I met on the site learned who I was, he asked if by “social” I meant that I liked to meet jihadists.

  Even before I got responses like that, I had mixed feelings about online dating. I didn’t feel at home in that world, and separating the normal people from the nuts was time-consuming. But the friend who set up my profile told me that half her friends in America had met their partners online. “This is the new thing,” she said. I thought it might be worth a try.

  As with any dating site, some men were looking for a fling. I immediately deleted those messages. But some guys seemed more serious. An engineer I was talking to seemed well-mannered, friendly, and open-minded. He said he wanted an equal partnership. When I first told him I was a journalist, he seemed excited. He said he liked women with strong views, who were engaged in world events. He didn’t mind a woman working or traveling, but when I finally told him my name (after chatting with him anonymously for nearly three months), he felt differently. Instead of the light conversation we’d shared before, his tone grew more stilted.

  If I’d traveled the world to cover environmental issues or fashion, none of it would have been an issue. But this guy worked for the U.S. government. I interpreted his message as a way of saying good-bye. We dropped out of touch.

  I never met the engineer in person, but I did have coffee with a wealthy Arab-American businessman whom I’d also first met online. He flew to New York to meet me. On our way back to my office, a man accidentally bumped into me on the street. He said he was sorry, but the businessman was furious. “You should really apologize to her,” he told the man. I assured him that everything was fine and that the man had already apologized. But I also thought, I can speak for myself just fine.

  My colleague Michael Moss worried about me in his brotherly way. He and a Times researcher and friend convinced me to let them run background checks on the men who wanted to meet me, including the businessman. It turned out that he’d been arrested a couple of times for beating his ex-wife.

  When he contacted me again online, I told him I didn’t think we were a good fit. He seemed perplexed. “Why?” he wrote. “We had a nice coffee. I thought we had something.” I told him I knew about the domestic violence arrests and asked him not to contact me again.

  I felt I was wasting my time. Like most people, I wanted a steady and loving partner who understood me and appreciated my quirks. I knew that if I had children, my work might change, but I wanted to be with someone who would be proud of how I have built my career, not afraid or ashamed.

  “What happened to all these people who say, ‘Behind a strong man is a strong woman’?” I ask
ed myself and all my girlfriends. “Where are they?”

  My friend Mahvish pointed something out to me. “You’re a badass in your job,” she said, “but with guys, you’re just too nice.” I certainly felt pressure not to intimidate men with details about my day job. The fact is that many men have set ideas about women who work in the field I do. It was hard for the men I met to see me as anything but a thrill seeker or some kind of bizarre female action hero. Many were drawn to what they saw as the glamorous side of my work, but they were often surprised to learn that I also cooked, cleaned, and liked wearing nice clothes and going out with friends, or that I wanted to have children. It seemed impossible for them to hold all these ideas in their heads at once. The jihadis who said they wanted to marry me didn’t get it, either. For them, I was little more than a curiosity.

  As usual, work came to my rescue. In 2009, the Times sent me to Pakistan to look into the networks that had trained and helped the perpetrators of the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, in which more than 160 people were killed at two luxury hotels, a train station, a Jewish center, and a hospital. The sole surviving shooter had given information to the Indian police about the planning and coordination of the attacks that the Times wanted to investigate.

  I’d heard so much about Pakistan from prisoners and jihadists that I was eager to explore it. But I had a lot to learn about the country and culture, which were very different from the Arab states I’d visited. This time, I didn’t speak the local languages, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Pakistan is formally a democracy (albeit one that has had several extended periods of military rule), but in recent decades Islamist groups have grown more influential, establishing seminaries in which they promote an ideological worldview. The seminaries, many of them cheap or free, are often the best options for poor and working-class families to educate their children. Meanwhile, the country’s oligarchic power structure and weak democratic institutions have helped strengthen Islamist movements.