“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 told 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.