What I didn’t know at the time was that someone from the magazine had called the German security services and asked if I had “a clean sheet.” Did my family have links to any terrorist groups? How religious were my parents? Was I attending mosque, hanging out with the wrong people? Was I part of a sleeper cell, another Mohamed Atta in the making? As a Muslim and the daughter of migrants, I was automatically suspect in Germany, the country of my birth.
I threw myself into my work for Der Spiegel’s investigative team. I soon grew interested in a nineteen-year-old German convert to Islam named Dennis Justen, an ordinary teenager from a Frankfurt suburb. Justen had become an observant Muslim seemingly overnight, fasting for Ramadan and breaking up with his girlfriend. His parents didn’t think much of the changes until one day he disappeared. In September 2001, he was arrested trying to illegally cross the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan and interrogated by the FBI. I called an editor and told him I wanted to interview Justen’s parents. The magazine had tried several times to talk to them, but they had refused. I wasn’t sure I could convince them either, but I was deeply curious and felt obligated to try.
This editor wanted the interview with Justen’s parents, but he wasn’t keen on my involvement. “It’s better you stay away from this,” he answered. “If this involved a mosque or Islamic bookstore, you could do it. But these are German parents.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me here,” I answered.
“Well, if I imagine myself in their shoes and see someone like you knocking on my door, I would think you might be a spy for the Taliban,” he said.
Once more, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I wanted to throw up. It seemed that my own colleagues and editors didn’t trust me. I knew this editor wouldn’t support the extension of my contract and that it was just a matter of time before I would have to leave the magazine. So I decided to prove him wrong. That evening, on my own, I drove to Dennis Justen’s parents’ home. I found his grandfather there, who spoke with the parents on my behalf. I met with them that same night. The next day, they agreed to the interview. I wrote the story with a colleague in the Frankfurt office.
I called the editor. “See, they didn’t think that I was a spy for the Taliban,” I told him.
My hope was that he would understand how much his comment had hurt me and that the next reporter of Muslim descent to work for the magazine wouldn’t face the same prejudices.
*
MY EARLY EXPERIENCES with journalism devastated me and gave me a sense of the alienation and rejection that so many Muslims in Europe were feeling. But I didn’t let my feelings deter me from my search for what was really happening on the streets. I remained interested in understanding how young Arab men could be brainwashed in the country of my birth—and often their birth as well. Sometime that fall, I called al Hajj again.
“I would like to see the mosque,” I said.
“Don’t let anyone know you are a journalist,” he advised. “Do you have a hijab? You know, Sister Souad, you will have to wear one.”
I told him not to worry. As I entered the mosque, it felt strange to be walking in the literal footsteps of Mohamed Atta. My heart started to beat faster. I couldn’t look into the faces of the people who were there to pray. I thought they would be able to see that I was a reporter.
To me, a mosque was an imposing building with a minaret. Here was a mosque on the same street as sex shops, with prostitutes standing outside. The nondescript building occupied a seedy area near the Hamburg train station, right across from a police station. The men’s prayer room was a study in color, with brightly colored carpets and turquoise walls in a sprawling room built for hundreds. By comparison, the women’s prayer room was plain and cramped.
After praying, I ducked into the mosque’s library. In it were videotapes of Imam Mohamad Fizazi, a fiery preacher from Tangier and one of the biggest influences on Atta. “The Jews and Crusaders must have their throats slit,” the imam said in a sermon videotaped at al-Quds. At the mosque I spoke to an Egyptian and a Moroccan who had known Atta and the others. I asked why their friends became radicalized and why they ended up killing all those people. The Egyptian told me that I’d been “brainwashed by the Western media, which isn’t surprising because you ended up working with them. Look at all these tens of thousands of Muslims who have died for years now, and they are not even mentioned in the media.” Atta and the other hijackers, he said, had “paid America back for what they and the Jews have done to us all these years.”
I was a bit shocked, but also very young. If that’s how they think, I thought, I’ll just need to spend more time with them to understand.
Soon I moved back to Frankfurt, balancing my freelance journalistic work with my studies. I also started attending a major terrorism trial there. The case involved five Algerians who had been accused of plotting to blow up the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France, in December 2000, nine months before September 11. Most of these men had spent time in training camps in Afghanistan, and I wanted to understand who they were and why they’d made the choices they did. Sometimes I wrote articles for one of the Frankfurt papers or reported for the radio station, but it was really my own curiosity that made me keep showing up.
During a break in the proceedings, at a nearby coffee shop, I ran into some American journalists. One of them was Shannon Smiley, an American who worked in the Washington Post’s Berlin bureau as an assistant to the correspondent and stringer. She spoke German, and I’d talked to her before at the courthouse. There was also a guy from the Associated Press, someone from the Chicago Tribune, and a woman from Reuters. And there was another reporter I hadn’t met before: Peter Finn, the Post’s Berlin bureau chief and an important contributor to its global terrorism coverage.
“The Watergate Washington Post?” I asked when I was introduced to Peter. He smiled. I couldn’t believe that I was sitting with a senior correspondent from that paper. I asked if Woodward and Bernstein were as good-looking in real life as the actors in the movie. Peter and Shannon laughed.
Back then I barely spoke English. But with Shannon’s help, we chatted about Hamburg, and I told them about some of the people I had gotten to know there.
“Interesting,” Peter said.
A week later, Shannon called me and said that Peter had a proposal and wanted to meet me. My heart was beating very fast when I walked into the breakfast room of the Steigenberger airport hotel that day in May 2002. Peter stood up to greet me. He said that he was working on a piece for the Washington Post about the Hamburg cell. It was supposed to be the main story in the paper one year after the September 11 attacks.