I Was Told to Come Alone Page 20

I told him there were many lawyers who worked on such cases for no money because they objected to human rights violations. “I’m sure there are many lawyers in the United States who would help if they knew about how many civilians were killed in drone strikes,” I told him. “Most Americans respect the rule of law.”

  He said he had to leave for his next meeting. I feared that he still believed fighting was the only choice. I wondered how we would ever break this cycle.

  Weeks later, back in Germany, I came home from the gym one day and found my sister Hannan, with whom I share an apartment, watching the news. I’m not sure whether it was CNN or the BBC, but I remember what she said when I walked in: “You’re just in time. They’re about to interview someone who wants to sue the CIA for drone strikes in Waziristan.”

  I went to the kitchen to get a bottle of water, then hurried back to catch the interview. I swallowed a gulp of water, but when I saw the face of the man suing the CIA, I spit it all out.

  “What’s wrong?” Hannan asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I know that guy. I met him some weeks ago in Islamabad.”

  The TV reporter said that a Pakistani man named Kareem Khan had a list of all the innocents killed in U.S. drone strikes and that he planned to sue the U.S. government and the CIA.

  “Didn’t he tell you about his plans to sue?” my sister asked.

  “No. I don’t think he had any idea himself.”

  I called a colleague in the Times Washington bureau and told him about the conversation I’d had with Khan in Islamabad.

  He burst out laughing. “It’s very nice that you wanted to defend the people in the United States and our justice system,” he said. He added that it was Khan’s right to sue and that we should keep watching the story.

  A couple of weeks after this, Khan’s Pakistani lawyer filed a complaint that included the name of the CIA station chief in Pakistan. This was a jaw-dropping development, and it turned Khan’s accusations into a major international incident. In a place like Pakistan, where the drone campaign had fueled anti-American sentiment, revealing the name of the CIA station chief put his life at risk. He was immediately withdrawn from the country. We soon learned that U.S. officials were blaming Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), for Khan’s lawsuit.

  Some weeks later, when I was in Pakistan on another reporting trip, I requested a meeting with Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of the ISI. The agency’s spokesman, Zafar Iqbal, always attended such meetings and took notes on the conversation. Journalists called Zafar “Mr. Ponytail” because he had one, making him a rarity among clean-cut Pakistani security men.

  When I arrived at the ISI’s offices, I greeted both men and observed that General Pasha looked very tired.

  “General, how are things?” I asked.

  “Well, if we speak about our relationship with the United States, it is very bad. Actually, I can’t remember when it had been as bad as it is now.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “We got used to them blaming us for the Taliban. We got used to them accusing us of supporting bin Laden. But now they’re saying we told this farmer from Waziristan to sue them. And we really have nothing to do with it.”

  I started to feel very uncomfortable. “So is it that bad?”

  “It’s one of the worst situations between us, ever,” he said. He shook his head, sat back, and sighed deeply. I could see the dark circles under his eyes. “I have no idea who told this guy to sue them, but it wasn’t us.”

  “Yes, I believe you,” I blurted out.

  Zafar looked up from taking notes. “You believe us? You never believe us that easily. Why would you now?”

  I decided to keep my mouth shut and suggested we move on to other topics.

  After the meeting, Zafar walked me back to my car. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I get the feeling you know more about this drone lawsuit than you’re letting on.”

  I smiled and said good-bye.

  9

  Mukhabarat

  Egypt, 2011

  As the car entered the parking lot of the high-security intelligence facility on the outskirts of Cairo, I sent one last text message to my sister Hannan: “Don’t let our parents know, switch off the TV, and call the numbers I gave you. Love you all.”

  The numbers I’d given her were for my bosses in New York, a friend who worked at the German foreign ministry, and some journalist colleagues. I knew that my phone would soon be taken away, and I was anxious about the worry and pain this would cause my family and friends.

  There was a feeling of urgency and fear in the car. My colleague Nicholas Kulish and I were calling everyone we could think of: editors at the New York Times, the U.S. and German embassies in Cairo, various international organizations. Before we disappeared into what we feared would be a black hole, we wanted as many people as possible to know that we’d been arrested. A military officer had commandeered our car, and in the passenger seat our Egyptian driver dialed his brothers and friends, asking them to look out for his wife and kids. When he got his wife on the phone, she began to wail.

  “It’s your fault!” she told him. “Why did you work with these people?”

  I could feel my heart beating faster and I could hear my pulse in my ears. It reminded me of Baghdad, after the hotel bombing near my guesthouse, when I was thrown from my bed onto the ground: boom, boom, boom. What will they do to us? I wondered. How far will they go?

  Now I had Bill Keller on the line. He was sitting with others around a speakerphone at the paper’s headquarters in Manhattan. To help them figure out where we were being taken, we’d agreed that, under the cover of translating for Nick, I would try to describe what I was seeing for as long as I could.

  It was getting dark. I looked out the window and talked about the shopping mall we were passing. I asked the soldier who was driving for the name of the neighborhood. At the checkpoint where we’d been stopped, a friendly Egyptian officer had told us there was nothing he could do for us except let us keep our phones. “You should call whoever you can,” he told us. “You’re going to the headquarters of the intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.”

  The car entered a compound with high walls and cars parked inside. I held the phone facing downward, making sure my hand didn’t block the microphone. Our driver was trembling. “This is bad. This will end badly,” he said, turning toward me. There was fear in his dark eyes.

  “All will be good. Don’t worry. We haven’t done anything wrong,” I told him, unsure if I was trying to calm him or myself.

  “Please, do you know where we are?” I asked the soldier who was driving us. “Tell me, please.”

  He glanced into the rearview mirror. “Mukhabarat al-Jaish.” Then he added in English, “army intelligence, high-level security.”

  I turned to Nick and spoke in a louder-than-normal voice, hoping the editors would hear. “So you heard, Nick. He said we are here at the army intelligence high-security facility.”

  The car stopped in front of an entrance where three men in plainclothes waited. We all got out of the car. I tried to smile as I greeted the men in Arabic. In my head, I ran through some of the advice I had been given just three weeks earlier, when I took a course on surviving in war zones and hostage situations. One lesson stood out in my memory: try to establish a personal rapport with your captors.

  Why wouldn’t that work with intelligence officers? I wondered. But I was nervous and frightened. Instead of smiling back or saying hello, the men looked at us stonily. They turned to the officer who had driven us there: “Why are they not blindfolded? Why do they still have their phones?”

  “Switch off the phone,” one of them said in Arabic. I translated to Nick in a loud voice, again hoping the editors would hear. The man then looked angry and repeated in English, “I said you should switch off your phone.”

  “Me?” I answered. “Okay, I’ll switch it off.” I pushed the button. They took our phones and tol
d us to walk into a building. Nick, our driver, and I followed one of the men while the other two officers walked behind us. From now on, we would be on our own.

  * * *

  IT WAS JANUARY 2011. A month earlier in Tunisia, a fruit seller had set himself on fire, sparking countrywide protests against poverty and economic inequality that led to the overthrow of the president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. This marked the beginning of the wave of uprisings across the Middle East that would come to be known as the “Arab Spring.”

  Never would I have thought that Egypt would follow Tunisia. Nick and I had traveled there to do research for a book we were writing about one of the most-hunted Nazi war criminals, Dr. Aribert Heim, who had lived secretly in Cairo until his death in 1992.

  While we were there, demonstrations gripped the country. Tens of thousands of people filled the streets calling for Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, to step down. After calling our editors at the Times and volunteering to cover the protests, we changed our plans and drove to Alexandria.

  At first, the protests in Alexandria were relatively peaceful, but as the demonstrators’ anger grew, some started throwing stones at the police, who responded with tear gas and, in some cases, live ammunition. Nick and I went to several hospitals to count the dead and injured, as frantic family members searched for relatives, wailing with grief when they found them. We also talked to the lawyers and activists who had been among the first to protest. At night, we drove to neighborhoods controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, where clusters of young men manned checkpoints every few blocks.

  Many Egyptians wanted free elections, but not everyone wanted Mubarak to go. Egyptian Christians, members of the Coptic Church, said things I’d heard before in Arab countries ruled by kings or autocrats: that even though these leaders were dictators, they sometimes protected members of vulnerable minority communities. These minorities did not want to take their chances with pure majority rule.

  Nick and I were planning to write a story about the Copts and their apprehension about the protests. But the day we began our interviews, we heard there was another demonstration planned. When we arrived, we saw a two-man team from a German TV channel standing on a pickup truck filming the demonstrators. At this point in the protests, Egyptians would often gather in front of cameras and make a lot of noise, hoping to send a message to viewers across the globe. But the German TV reporter wasn’t satisfied with the crowd’s response; he wanted more. He raised his arms like a concert conductor, urging the men in the street to yell louder, while his colleague filmed them.

  “Are you crazy?” I yelled at the TV crew in German. “Come down!” These crowds could be volatile, and riling them up seemed dangerous, not to mention unethical. As we moved through the crowd, I began to worry about Nick, who stood out as a foreigner because he is tall and blond. But Nick wasn’t the problem—it was the Germans. I turned and saw people pointing at the TV team, and I heard men yelling, “Kill him! He filmed us! He’s a Jew and a spy!”

  Luckily, we’d brought along a large team. Nick and I had eight people with us: our driver, whom I’ll call Z because naming him could endanger his family; seven Egyptian men who had formed neighborhood protection groups during the unrest in Alexandria; some of their friends joined us as well. It turned out to have been a prescient decision. I asked two of the Egyptians to stay close to Nick, while the other five and I walked back toward the TV crew. By the time we got there, the crowd at their feet had turned into an angry mob.

  The Germans were trying to get away, but there was nowhere to go. Just then, a man pulled up in a car. One of our Egyptian companions asked him to give us a ride. He agreed.

  “Get the hell into the car!” I yelled at the TV guys in German. “These people will lynch you!”

  They ran over and scrambled in, and I climbed in after them. Meanwhile, Nick had come over and was standing nearby. We both realized there was no room for him in the car. He gave a little wave, and I waved back, as if to say, “What can we do?” There was no chance; if he’d tried to get in, the doors would not have closed. Nick waved again, telling me to go on. I felt awful. I saw Nick turn back into the crowd and walk casually away. I hoped that the Egyptians I’d asked to stay with him would make sure he was safe, but I didn’t know.

  In the intervening seconds, one of the men in the crowd had reached through the driver’s open window and grabbed the car keys out of the ignition. Now we were stranded, surrounded by angry men with knives, sticks, and machetes. The camera team was paralyzed. “What do you want?” I screamed at the mob.

  “We want the camera, we want the pictures they took of us!” one man shouted. I looked out my window and saw that two men with knives were trying to slash our tires.

  “There is no way out,” our Egyptian driver said. He didn’t know any of us but had stopped to help. Now this poor man was stuck with us, I thought. I told the cameraman to give me the memory card with the pictures he had taken. But the TV reporter refused.

  I turned to him angrily. “Are you nuts or what? You want us to get killed for some pictures of protesters and your stand-up in front of the camera?”

  The crowd outside our car was growing angrier. “Give me the memory card, NOW!” I shouted at the reporter and cameraman in German. Finally, the cameraman handed it over.

  I opened my door and started screaming at the crowd in Arabic: “What’s wrong with you people? What is it you want? You want the pictures?”

  The Egyptians seemed to be in shock. They hadn’t expected me to speak Arabic or to get out of the car. They started to back away. I hurled the memory card into the crowd, and the men in the street dashed to find it.

  In the chaos, one of our friends from the local neighborhood watch group somehow managed to get our car keys back. The driver started the engine, but men packed the road ahead of us. “You have to drive now,” I told him in Arabic. “Drive!” When he protested, I put my hands firmly on his shoulders and spoke in as even a voice as I could manage. “They’ll move, just drive.” He stepped on the gas and the men in front of us melted away.

  We were all in shock. Back at our hotel, I greeted Nick with relief. One of our Egyptian neighborhood watchmen took me aside. “Are you aware there was a guy on your side of the car who had a knife?” he asked. “When you got back in the car, he was coming after you. If we hadn’t held his hand, you would have had a knife in your back.”

  I was holding a glass of water and I saw that my hand was shaking. “Thank God they got what they wanted,” I said.

  “They didn’t get what they wanted,” the German TV reporter said with a smile. “We didn’t give them the footage. We gave them an empty memory card.”

  I was furious. There were only two hotels in Alexandria where foreign journalists were staying: the Four Seasons and our place, the Cecil. We already had a security issue at the Cecil because an Al Jazeera crew was staying there and had been sighted filming stand-ups on their balcony. When the angry men we’d seen that day realized they’d been given the wrong memory card, I feared they would find out where we were staying and come after us.

  We decided to get out of there. The next day, Nick and I headed back to Cairo, traveling in a convoy with the German TV team after they asked us not to leave them alone in Alexandria. When they ran out of space for their equipment in the trunk of their car, we even offered to let them stow some of their luggage in our trunk.

  When we reached the edge of the capital, we were stopped at a checkpoint, one of many on the roads at that time. The men who ran them wore plainclothes and carried knives and sticks. It was impossible to know whether they worked for the government or some other group.

  One of the men asked our driver for his identification papers and told him to open the trunk. Z had been growing more nervous the closer we got to Cairo; I played Arabic songs on my phone to calm him down. While we were sitting there, I saw the men at the checkpoint wave the Germans on. They sped past us toward Cairo, not even bothering to pull over and wait to see if
we made it out all right.

  When the men opened our trunk and saw a large bag with an orange microphone sticking out, they started screaming in Arabic, “These people are spies!”

  “It’s okay. We’re not spies,” I said, trying to calm them. “All is good.”

  One of the men had a gun in his hand. “We should kill them,” he said. “They are spies.”

  “We’re just journalists,” I said. “It’s all okay.”

  I had no idea what was going on, but then I remembered what was in our trunk: the gear belonging to the TV crew, including a satellite dish and a camera. Here was a woman of Arab descent with a German passport and a tall blond American in a car with a satellite dish and a camera. It didn’t look good.

  Two Egyptians got into the car. I thought they would take us to our hotel. In an attempt at friendliness, I offered them chocolate and muesli bars I had in my bag. “You’re trying to help us, right?” They gave me strange looks, but they took the snacks.

  The two guys sat in back and told our driver where to go. We stopped at a compound whose sign identified it as a lumber company. Later, the police told us that the station where they ordinarily worked had been set on fire by demonstrators. It drove home how tenuous the situation was in Egypt then. Back in Alexandria, we’d seen police stations with charred walls, broken windows, smashed computers, and piles of loose paper lying around.

  The men took the TV crew’s camera bag. I was told to get out of the car and follow them while Nick and our driver stayed behind. Inside, I saw some men in camouflage trousers and others in plainclothes with guns. We went upstairs to the roof, where a man in a suit was smoking a cigarette. He introduced himself as Captain Ehab. He asked about my background, and I told him who I was. I explained that the camera bag belonged to the German TV reporters who had been traveling with us, that they’d run out of space in their car and asked us to carry some of their gear.

  Ehab seemed to believe me. He looked inside the bag and felt along the edges. Then he unzipped a pocket, reached in, and pulled out an envelope. I saw the faces of the two men who had been in the car with us turn serious. The envelope had a number written on it: 10,000. Inside, Ehab found ten thousand dollars in cash.