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.
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.