I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  He raised a walkie-talkie to his lips: “Bring the American up.”

  “I could have believed you that you had nothing to do with them,” he told us. “But in these days, who will leave ten thousand dollars with strangers?”

  “We have a woman with a German passport of Arab origin and an American in a car with a camera, satellite equipment, and ten thousand dollars,” he said. “This is very suspicious. I think they need to be checked.”

  He had to turn us over to the army, he said, but he would let us keep our phones. “Call as many people as you can,” he said. The first person we called was a woman from the U.S. embassy, who urged Ehab to let us go. “You have to release these people,” she told him. “They’re journalists working for the New York Times.” But Ehab wasn’t the problem. He seemed as if he wanted to help us but said it was out of his hands.

  He handed us off to his driver, who took us to an army base. We were relieved; the military was the closest thing Egypt had to a stabilizing force, and we thought we’d likely be released. The men at the base were very friendly, but then something changed. One of the leaders suddenly grew apologetic. “My heart goes out to you,” he told me in Arabic. “I’m sorry.” They put us back in the car, and my anxiety surged as we set off again, this time headed to the intelligence compound. On the way there Nick got Bill Keller and the other editors on the phone.

  But now our phones were gone. We were sitting on plastic chairs inside this anonymous building, worrying about our families, worrying about what these intelligence people would do with us. “Maybe they will leave us here for weeks,” our driver Z said. “Maybe they will torture us.” I was glad that he was saying these things in Arabic so Nick couldn’t understand. I tried to soothe him, saying that we hadn’t done anything wrong and would be out of here soon, but I was seriously worried.

  We were taken to separate rooms, each with brown leather padded walls, to be interrogated individually. I ended up with the guy whom the others called “al-Pasha,” which means “the boss” in Arabic.

  Nick later told me that his interrogator spoke perfect English and said that he had lived in Florida and Texas. Between questions, he joked about the TV show Friends. Nick surmised that the interrogator, whom he found menacing, had learned his techniques in the United States. He would pretend to be nice for a minute, then say “We’re friends. Aren’t we friends?”

  “Okay, if we’re friends, can I leave?” Nick asked. “Can I have one of those cigarettes?”

  “Maybe if I like the answers to your questions,” the man replied.

  “Who knows—maybe he’s one of the guys who cooperated with the CIA in the War on Terror,” I told Nick later. The Mukhabarat has had a long working relationship with American intelligence services.

  My interrogation room was dim. The only light came from a lamp on the interrogator’s table. He stared at me fixedly and smiled.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “You are nowhere.”

  He asked when we had arrived in Egypt and why we had come. To him, the timing was suspect. “You came right before all these events started,” he said. “Why?”

  At first, I tried to avoid telling him the real reason for our trip. When we’d reported previously on the Nazi doctor’s links to Cairo for the Times, the Egyptians had not been pleased. We later learned that they’d interrogated everyone we’d talked to and even jailed some of our sources.

  “We’re working on a history-related book,” I told him vaguely.

  “On what topic?”

  I suspected he already knew. “It’s about a German man who lived in Cairo and died there,” I said.

  “What’s so special about this man?”

  “He was a Nazi who was living in Cairo.”

  He wrote something on the paper in front of him and looked up at me. “Yes, you are the woman who took his briefcase from Egypt to Germany,” he said with a sarcastic smile. “This was very bad for my country.”

  I looked down. I’d smuggled Aribert Heim’s briefcase out of Cairo in 2009, when we wrote our first story about him. It contained evidence of the life he’d built in Egypt: personal letters, medical reports, and other documents.

  “Why are you holding us?” I asked.

  “We have questions about your motives and who you are.”

  For some time, I’d been hearing what sounded like a man being beaten in a nearby room. Between his screams someone yelled, “You’re a traitor working with foreigners!” I strained to catch the words. I knew that for the sake of our Egyptian driver, I had to be diplomatic.

  My interrogator had been flipping through a file that lay open on his desk and making notes on a piece of paper. When he finished writing, he looked at me again. “We don’t very often get women here, and not often such a nice-looking one as you.” He didn’t say anything else. The message was clear.

  A few weeks earlier, I’d gone through a security training course for diplomats, aid workers, and journalists, taught by the German army. We’d been told to expect rape as a method to break and humiliate us. Until the moment my interrogator said that, I’d tried to hide my fear and nervousness. Now, for the first time, I felt that anything could happen.

  He stood up. “I must go now,” he said. “But some others will take very good care of you.” The sarcastic smile flashed across his face again.

  I was left alone in the room. A few minutes later, a man came in and said they would have to take me to another place. Playing for time, I asked if I could use the bathroom. He said it was across the hall and told me to go quickly. Other plainclothesmen stood in front of the interrogation room; one of them held a blindfold and handcuffs.

  The bathroom was very dirty, but I thought it best to use it, since I didn’t know when I’d get another chance. In the mirror above the filthy sink, I stared at my pale face and bloodshot eyes. I was worried they would separate me from Nick. Whatever happens now, you will not allow them to break you, I thought. You won’t break. It’s your body, not your soul, Souad. You will not break.

  I opened the door. One of the men said they would have to blindfold me and take me somewhere else. “I’m not going without my colleague,” I said in a loud voice, hoping that Nick would hear me.

  “We need to go now,” another man told me. I began to scream: “My name is Souad Mekhennet. I am a journalist. I will only go with my colleague Nicholas Kulish.” My aim was to tell the other prisoners that I was here, or had been here. If I were to die or if anything else happened to me, I wanted to make sure someone would know my name.

  One of the men began to tap his left foot impatiently. “Stop shouting, or we will need to use other methods,” he said.

  The door to an interrogation room opened, and an officer came out. “What is going on here?” he said. (I would learn later that this was Nick’s room, and the officer was the chatty but creepy English speaker.)

  “I don’t want to leave without my colleague,” I said.

  “You need to go now,” the officer responded. “We need this room for the next interrogation. Your colleague will come soon.”

  They blindfolded me and we started to walk. I heard the footsteps of several men. Two of them were holding me by my arms and shoulders, while another walked very close behind me. I heard a woman screaming. They led me toward the sound. I tried to stay calm and breathe. Are they raping her? Will they rape me now too? A door opened and we passed the screaming woman. I told myself again, Whatever is happening now, it is only your body. One of the men was breathing heavily into my ear. I could feel his breath on my neck, too, as if he were saying, You’re next. I did my best to ignore it. Don’t break down. You will not break down.

  We walked further until a door was opened and I was taken inside. There they removed the blindfold. I stood in a small bare room with white walls and six orange plastic chairs. The tile floor was gray and dirty. A large clouded glass window let in a bit of light, but not much, since it was night. The room was very cold. A couple of moments l
ater, Nick and Z were brought in.

  “Did they beat you?” Nick and I asked Z after the men had left.

  “No, I’m okay,” he replied. So it wasn’t his screams I had heard during my interrogation. They’d questioned him, he said, but he’d told them he was only the driver and didn’t know much about what we were doing.

  We compared notes on our interrogations and learned that the questions had been fairly mundane. They’d asked Z how long he’d been working with us, who had hired him, where we’d been, and whom we had met. Nick was asked about the reasons for our Egypt trip, who he worked for, and why we’d chosen to come when we did. As we talked, a picture came into focus. It seemed that our jailers thought that Nick and I were part of a possible conspiracy against Egypt, or could have been made to look that way. At the time, the Egyptian security services were accusing U.S. and European nongovernmental organizations and political groups of having orchestrated the protests, so the fact that Nick and I had arrived before the demonstrations, as well as the equipment and money found in the car, might indicate to some that we’d helped organize them. I already had a black mark against me for having smuggled out the Nazi briefcase. At the time, a few Egyptian media outlets had raised questions about my being a spy who was telling Dr. Heim’s story as a way to damage Egypt’s reputation. It sounded crazy, but from what we knew about how the Egyptian government thought and operated, it kind of made sense, in a warped kind of way.

  At first, communication with our guards was relatively consistent; one of the nicer intelligence officers brought each of us a Pepsi and a small package of Oreos, saying, “Let me see what I can do for you.” Later, he came back into the room, sat next to me, and told me that he loved Morocco. We started talking and it turned out that he had served at the Egyptian embassy in Rabat.

  “Why did you get yourself into this situation?” he asked me.

  “You guys brought us into this situation. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  He leaned close to my ear and whispered, “You should thank God that you ended up here. We know you. We know who you are. There are other places where they would just see you as a woman, do you understand?”

  I begged them to release us, telling them I wasn’t feeling well. They sent a doctor with a blood-pressure gauge. I remembered former detainees telling me that before the guards used electroshock, their jailers would bring a medic to examine them, to see how much torture they could survive.

  “You need to be checked?” the doctor asked me, smiling.

  “No, no. I think I’m okay,” I replied.

  We asked repeatedly to speak to our embassies or to the Times, but we were told to wait. After a while, some of the men we’d seen earlier came back to talk to us.

  “We know you’re just journalists,” one of them said, “but we can’t release you because it’s very dark outside and it’s very dangerous.”

  “Just give us our phones. We can call the U.S. embassy,” I said. Our jailers refused.

  The room was freezing cold, and it was difficult to sleep with only the hard plastic chairs to lie on. I thought about my past, about all that had gone wrong and all the things I wanted to do in my life. Maybe we would never get out of here. Maybe we would die here.

  There is a saying that walls have ears. In rooms like this one, walls also have voices—voices that belong to the others who have been detained there. During our long night, I read Arabic graffiti written on those walls. “Allah, please release me from my pain,” someone had scribbled. “Ahmad, 4.5.2010,” another wall read.

  I thought about whether I should leave my name behind. Maybe then at least people would know that we—that I—had been there. “Who knows what they’ll do with us,” Z told me, his whole body shaking. I asked if he was afraid, but he said he was freezing.

  From time to time, we heard Egyptians being beaten and screaming after every blow. Someone, presumably an official, shouted in Arabic through the thuds and the cries that followed: “You are talking to journalists? You are talking badly about your country?” A voice answered, also in Arabic, begging for mercy: “You are committing a sin. You are committing a sin.”

  As the hours dragged on, the powerlessness and uncertainty became excruciating. I have no idea how anyone has the fortitude to survive weeks, months, or years in such limbo. We could hear protesters going past in the street, and we remembered the burned-out police stations we’d seen, as well as a Muslim Brotherhood member who told us he’d been in a prison that was set on fire and had nearly died. What would happen if a mob torched the intelligence facility where we were being held? We could easily burn or choke to death inside.

  I looked at Nick and Z. We had all grown very silent, as if lost in ourselves; there was fear in this room, in all three of us. I thought about all the things I had saved on my devices. I knew they wouldn’t be able to access the contacts list on my phone, as I had set up a special passcode to protect my information. Then I remembered something else. “Shit,” I heard myself saying.

  Nick looked up. “What?”

  I explained that they had taken my Kindle, and that I had some books on it.

  “So what? You’ve probably got stuff on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but that’s okay. You’re a journalist.”

  I was thinking of something else. A friend had sent me a book that was supposed to help single women better understand men. I had just started reading it. I told Nick the title: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship.

  He burst out laughing. I translated the title for our driver, who also started laughing. I was glad that we had been able to break through the fear, at least for a few seconds. But before long, we heard the dim sounds of people screaming again.

  The next morning a new officer appeared. He said his name was Marwan. He seemed angry with us, saying that he had enough problems to deal with, because there were “thousands of people under arrest just like you.” Then he told us to come to the door and look out. We saw more than twenty people sitting in the hall outside our room, most blindfolded and handcuffed, several of them Caucasian. “We could be treating you a lot worse,” Marwan told us.

  Nearly twenty-four hours after we were first detained, Marwan said that we really would be released before long. Nick and I had agreed that we wouldn’t leave without Z. They said we couldn’t bring him. We said we had to bring him. They said Egyptians had to go through a different system. I knew we couldn’t leave him behind.

  “I will throw myself out of the window,” Z told me in Arabic. “They will torture me to death and later bury my body in some mass grave.” He was crying.

  “He is Egyptian, he has to stay,” Marwan told me.

  “Marwan, to me the life of an Egyptian is worth as much as the life of an American or a German,” I told him. “And I think you as an Egyptian should be happy to hear that.”

  He said that I was crazy. “You have to think about yourself, do you understand?” His voice was aggressive now.

  In the moment, Nick and I came up with another idea. We took all our luggage—everything that had been in our trunk—and gave it to Z to hold. Bags hung from his shoulders and he held our suitcases in his hands. He looked as if he might collapse under the weight.

  “He can’t come!” Marwan repeated.

  “Then you have to carry the bags,” Nick told him.

  Marwan looked at us in disbelief.

  “Well, if you aren’t carrying our bags, then you have to let him come,” I said. “Are you going to drive us back to our hotel? Who is going to drive us?”

  His expression turned to disgust, as if all these tasks were beneath his dignity. “Fine,” Marwan grumbled. He confided his exhaustion to us. They had arrested so many people, he said—too many. He and his men were overwhelmed.

  Soon afterward, some men came to get the three of us. They said they were taking us to the hotel where our colleagues were staying in downtown Cairo. We were brought out of our room but had to w
ait in the hallway as several people with jackets over their heads were led into the facility. Marwan and the man who told me how much he liked Morocco stood by the entrance as if waiting to say good-bye.

  The evil-looking man who had interrogated Nick gave us back our phones and our other possessions, including my Kindle.

  “There’s one thing I want you to know,” Nick’s interrogator told him. “We still have complete control.”

  Nick smiled. “It sure doesn’t seem like it out on the streets,” he said.

  “No, this is just for show. In reality, we are still in charge.”

  I turned to Marwan and the friendly man who liked Morocco. “We’re going back to the hotel, right?” They stared at the ground and said nothing. The evil-looking man told Nick that we had to sign a paper saying we’d all been in good health when we left the facility.

  “We can’t do it till we get to the hotel,” I protested. The man insisted. Finally, they brought us outside and turned us over to yet another set of guards. We were jubilant until I asked them to confirm that we were going to our hotel.

  One of the men, who wore plainclothes over body armor and carried an assault rifle, told me we weren’t.

  “Where are we being taken?”

  “You don’t get to know that.”

  They put us into our car. Another guard, also armed with an assault rifle, said, “Put your heads down. Look down, and don’t talk. If you look up, you will see something you don’t ever want to see.”

  They left us for what felt like ten minutes. We heard ammunition clips being locked into place and duct tape being ripped. We all thought it was for our eyes and mouths.

  “They will kill us, by Allah, they will kill us,” Z started whispering. It sounded as if he was crying. “I can’t stay in this car. I need to run away.”

  I was worried he would open the door and give them a reason to beat him up. “Don’t,” I whispered in Arabic. “Stay calm. Stay calm.”