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 all 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.