by Scott Turow
Given the NATO aerial surveillance photos, the result was unsurprising, although I still had no idea why US troops wanted to bury five thousand weapons in the Cave. I was mulling that over, when my phone buzzed. It was Merriwell, calling from the limo on his way back home from Dulles.
We talked for a second about baseball. I had paid exorbitantly for seven field box seats for Sunday’s Trappers game, to which I would take two sons, one fiancée, one girlfriend, and, as an appreciation of their generosity, Ellen and Howard.
“So you’re in the US then?” Merry asked.
“I am. And I was hoping to make a stop in DC to get some more of your time.”
“Official business?”
“Not really. Related perhaps, but definitely personal.”
“Sounds intriguing.”
“I’ll explain when I see you.”
He weighed that for a second, but said he would have time tomorrow afternoon.
Once I hung up, I booked a seat on the noon Acela and returned to the second e-mail Goos had forwarded, which attached NFI’s findings from several of the cell phones that had been recovered from the Cave. The lab had identified four of the cells’ owners, although the names meant nothing to me. One of the phones was equipped with a camera. That was still an innovation in 2004, and given the dismal living standard in Barupra, the device might have been acquired by means other than purchase. But whoever was using it had taken pictures of everything—kids, dogs, clouds, cars, and many of the neighbors. The photos were often touching, showing people, even in the midst of agonizing poverty, enjoying what they could.
The most interesting pictures for our purposes had been snapped on the night of April 27, 2004. There were probably a dozen of them. They’d clearly been taken on the sneak, and many were unfocused and often quite dark, but they were still revealing. The first showed a line of Chetniks entering Barupra, weapons in hand. Next were a couple of stills of what I assumed was the Chetnik commander, standing with a flashlight shining on him and with the electric megaphone raised to his mouth. The most dramatic photograph in the bunch was of the same officer, a moment later. The megaphone still hung from his neck but he’d dropped to one knee, his assault rifle raised and flame, like a lizard tongue, jumping from the barrel. Following in the sequence was a photo of the soldiers tearing the old plasterboard sheeting off one of the dwellings, and then several images of the residents marching off toward the trucks at gunpoint, their arms crowded with things precious to them, while young children carried dolls or, even more pathetically, walked with their hands in the air. The last shot was fairly blurry, and it required a minute to make out the forms: the bodies of Boldo and his son. The boy had fallen faceup on his father’s chest, as they lay together on the ground brown with blood.
I had visualized and revisualized what had happened in Barupra so often, based on Ferko’s account, that I was instantly comparing what was here to what I’d imagined. Having dismissed Ferko as largely a con, I was startled that so much of what had been captured in these images bore out his testimony. Yet I also felt exhausted by the constant chase for the truth with Ferko and cautioned myself against trying to reach conclusions. Some of the hardest words for an investigator, especially after lots of work, are ‘We’ll never know.’
Once I set that aside, I found myself nagged at by something else, a sense I might have known the commander. His form—his posture and narrow physique—in the three photos in which he appeared seemed familiar. I couldn’t place him, although I had a visceral memory that he was someone I liked. My best guess was that he was one of the soldiers I’d met under General Moen’s command.
Merriwell was CEO of Distance Communications, a job he’d held quite successfully since leaving the service in scandal. The corporate campus was in northern Virginia, not far from the Pentagon, on a piece of land with hills and big deciduous trees, surrounded by a fence of steel spears at least fifteen feet high. At the guardhouse, I gave my name and waited for the back-and-forth until I was admitted.
For a company I’d literally never heard of before I met Merriwell, Distance had headquarters whose size astounded me. At least fifty acres served as a security perimeter for a network of low functional-looking buildings, designed with little regard to the lush hills behind them. The reception area was all marble but there was a hush to the place that seemed unnerving, especially in combination with the cameras that hung from most corners of the ceiling. After I signed in with the stoic receptionist, one of the cameras rotated to follow me back to my chair. I was sure I was being processed in facial recognition software against a database of terrorists. After a while, I received a clip-on badge, and one of Merriwell’s assistants emerged to escort me back.
The office to which she led me was vast. When I was US Attorney, I used to make jokes about the size of my office, saying that because the government didn’t pay much in salary, you were rewarded instead with square footage. But the space Merriwell inhabited had to be at least three times as large. You’d literally have trouble hearing someone on the other side of the room unless they shouted. Because the space was so huge, it had a somewhat barren quality. The furniture, for example, appeared to have been left over since 1960, teak Danish Modern, although I knew that stuff was coming back. Even so, Merry could have done more to warm the place up. Aside from the lone photo of his grandchild, there was not a picture in the place. The only decorations were awards the company had received over the years from DoD. I’d represented another defense contractor during my days in private practice and had been impressed by the deliberately nondescript character of the employees’ workspaces, especially the battleship-gray walls. I took it now that was an industry practice.
Merriwell, in his white shirt and sedate tie, greeted me warmly, then showed me to a twelve-seat conference table that absorbed a corner of the room. He looked even better than a few weeks back and now had that vital windswept color that comes from lots of sailing. He said he’d been spending quite a bit of time at his place on the Eastern Shore. That was where Rog’s weekend home was, too, and I suspected they passed time together.
I asked if they’d spoken this week.
“We’ve been missing each other. He told me he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but I was in West Africa until yesterday. I assume I’m about to find out what he has on his mind?”
I shrugged.
“The one thing he told me on the phone,” Merriwell said, “was that your investigation is nearing its end.”
“It is. We exhumed the Cave.”
“With what result?”
“Well, I guess from your perspective, Merry, I’d probably say it was good news and bad.”
“Okay,” said Merriwell. He thought. “I’m feeling more optimistic lately, so I’ll take the good news first.”
“No bodies.”
He nodded many times with his mouth pursed.
“Forgive me, Boom, but I have told you more than once to expect that.”
“Based on what?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What made you so confident that the Roma of Barupra weren’t all massacred?”
“I was promised that emphatically. I told you I spoke to my senior officers before you and I first met.”
“Which of your senior officers assured you the Roma weren’t murdered?”
I received Merry’s scowl, his faint brows drawn into his eyes.
“You know I can’t answer that, Boom.”
“I say it was Attila. She had control of the trucks that ended up taking the Roma from Barupra.”
“Well, now you seem to know more than I do.”
“I doubt that, Merry.”
“If you have questions about Attila, she’s probably the best person to answer them.”
“If she will.”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“I was hoping you’d be able to explain that to me.”
He gave a slow, ponderous shake of the head to show he had no idea.
“And I
suppose,” he said, “I should ask for the bad news.”
“We found about five thousand light arms—assault rifles, grenades, ammunition, RPGs, mortars—a true armory. The bulk of them were of Yugoslav manufacture, but bore laser markings indicating they’d been in NATO’s custody. Am I telling you anything you don’t know?”
“That there were five thousand weapons in what you call the Cave? Frankly, I’m astounded.”
I considered whether I believed him.
“Well,” I said, “I think we’re verging on things you do know about. If my deductions are correct, those weapons were stolen by some of the Roma from a convoy that Attila was running to the airfield at Camp Comanche. About a hundred of those stolen arms were then sold by the Gypsies to Kajevic, who ended up using them to wound or kill twelve of your troops. That fact, I sense, was not only tragic for you, but problematic. Because all of those arms—the ones Kajevic used, the ones in the Cave, the ones in the convoy—were part of about 500,000 weapons you were collecting to ship to Iraq whose ultimate disposition seems to be quite mysterious.”
Merry had watched me with his lead-gray eyes absolutely still.
“Perhaps I’m helping you understand, Merry, why Rog wants a coffee date?”
“Boom, I thought you told me this wasn’t official business.”
“It isn’t. The ICC prosecutes crimes against humanity, not weapons trafficking. Besides, you and I both know that it’s against the law for me to be investigating on US soil, or for you to be helping me. This is just one of those conversations between two guys that isn’t even happening.”
Merry looked at me askance as he continued reflecting.
I said, “You had to have known within hours of the casualties in Doboj that those soldiers were shot with weapons that had been stolen from NATO. Originally, when I learned that, I thought you had kept that information to yourself because it was so embarrassing—our only combat fatalities in Bosnia coming with ammo and small arms that had been taken out of our hands. Then, over time, I reconsidered and wondered if you were suppressing that information because the Roma’s theft and sale of those arms gave American soldiers such a strong motive to play vigilante and to go kill the Gypsies.”
Merriwell shook his head and said simply, “No.”
“We’ll come back to that,” I said. “But more recently, I’ve become aware of something else, which is why I referred to the guns in the Cave as bad news for you. The problem with acknowledging that our soldiers had been killed with light arms stolen from one of our convoys was that somebody—the press, the parents of one of those slain soldiers, a representative in Congress—one of those somebodies would inevitably ask why in the hell a convoy of NATO-seized weapons was headed to Camp Comanche in the first place. Where were those weapons being flown? Because those arms—the guns that killed our soldiers, the guns buried in the Cave, the guns in the convoy, all 500,000 small arms headed to Iraq—were what you guys really don’t want to talk about.”
“I understand what you’re suggesting,” said Merriwell.
“But?”
“But the disposition of the Bosnian weapons sent to Iraq remains a highly classified matter.”
“It’s eleven years later, Merry.”
“Revising security classifications was never my job, Boom, and it certainly isn’t now. I’m sorry. It goes without saying that this business”—a finger circled the room—“depends on not overstepping those boundaries.”
I’d heard a lot of that bullshit by now. I folded my hands on the table. I was never under the illusion that Merriwell and I had become friends, despite sharing some personal moments. I think we respected each other, but we’d always recognized that our roles were in some way antagonistic.
“I really didn’t come here to threaten you, Merry.”
I got an unwilling smile. “But you’re going to threaten me anyway. I’ll tell you right now that if you truly think I was engaged in arms trafficking, then you have no leverage at all.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing I do know, Merry, one of those pieces of criminal law trivia you learn as a federal prosecutor, which I suspect you know, too: There’s a wartime exception to the federal criminal statute of limitations. Anything that might be regarded as a fraud against the US government will be prosecutable for at least five years after the last troops left Iraq, which means Roger and you remain in the crosshairs until the end of 2016 at least. I don’t know exactly what you guys did, but I’m pretty sure that your mutual anxiety attack isn’t just about face-saving. The efforts you’ve made to hide this have been too sustained and energetic. And nobody grits his teeth through an accusation of war crimes on the front page of the New York Times—especially an accusation that’s untrue—unless silence is required to hide something real.”
I got a very tough look from Merriwell. He was a soldier.
“So, Merry, consider me like many other successful fifty-five-year-old lawyers. I have lots of friends on Capitol Hill, people who’d be happy to see me on short notice, including the senator who named me US Attorney. People in office always enjoy getting their names in the paper as champions of the truth—and American taxpayers. My goal isn’t to embarrass Roger or you. But I’m not going to be stonewalled either. I’ve just wasted six months of my life investigating a crime that didn’t happen, so you guys could avoid an investigation of what did. I’d like some answers. Call them hypothetical if you like. But if I was imagining that 500,000 small arms were going to be shipped to Iraq, should I be thinking they got there?”
Erect in his chair, in a posture he’d probably first assumed by the time he was five, Merriwell drummed his fingers on the tabletop.
“All OTR?” he asked. Off the record.
“Deep dark OTR,” I said.
Nonetheless, he took another instant.
“They were sent in two shipments,” he said then. “My belief is that they all arrived at the airport in Baghdad. What happened after that is somewhat opaque.”
I smiled. That was the same word Roger had used in January when he visited me in my law office.
“And why opaque?”
“There were documents that showed that officials of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense signed for the weapons. But the Iraqis claimed subsequently those signatures were forgeries.”
“So the weapons never got to Iraq?”
“No, they were definitely in Iraq.”
“If the guns were in Iraq, why did the Defense Ministry deny they’d received them?”
Merriwell, cautious by nature, watched me, clearly weighing what to say next.
“Many of the weapons were recovered on the battlefield,” he said at last.
I didn’t get it for a second.
“From the enemy?”
“Yes.”
“He sold them to Al Qaeda in Iraq? The defense minister?”
“Or they were stolen from him. Or they were diverted before reaching Baghdad, which is what the Iraqis claimed.”
“So you shipped hundreds of thousands of weapons to Iraq that were then used to kill US soldiers and Marines?”
Merriwell declined to react. His face was granite.
“It would have been very embarrassing, Boom. No question about that. But there were no witnesses, at least none who would talk to us about seeing the weapons shipments in Baghdad. Ultimately, the White House and DoD decided this had to remain a top-secret matter, because of the lasting damage it would have done to our relationship with the new government of Iraq.
“You must remember the context, Boom. After the invasion in 2003, we disarmed the civilian police and the armed forces because they were Saddam’s proxies—almost all were Sunnis, like Hussein. But they were also the only forces trained to maintain order. By the time we realized we had made a catastrophic mistake and wanted to give those folks their weapons back, a Shia-dominated government was in power, whose members recoiled at that prospect. So if the Iraqi Shia government misdirected a weapon or two for every assault rifle given
back to the Sunnis, we had no choice but to accept it. Weapons in this world are like currency. They are in demand everywhere.” Merry hitched a shoulder. “Al Qaeda would have bought arms from someone else.”
It was bribery, of course, of a sophisticated form: Help the defense minister and God knows who else loosen their objections to rearming the Sunnis by allowing him and his cronies to pad their Swiss bank accounts.
“Merry, I doubt the American taxpayers would have been philosophical about the Iraqi defense minister selling the weapons killing our troops. No wonder DoD and the White House didn’t want that story to get out. It would have devastated support for the war.”
Merriwell pulled his lips into his mouth.
“You know that I never favored that war, Boom. But the task that confronted me once I arrived was to salvage the remnants of an entire society. We’d destroyed their government and every public institution. We were stuck, unless we wanted to leave and hand the Iranians title to the whole country.”
As Nara insisted, there were often no good choices once a war begins.
“And why are Roger and you so squeamish if the White House and Defense were onboard originally?”
He displayed a sardonic little smile.
“You probably know how the blame game goes in this town, Boom. Memories fade. Fingers point. You can’t find ten people who were in Congress who’d say they would invade Iraq again today. A lot of this would come down to what was documented, in a situation in which no one ever wanted to put anything in writing. Roger was the top intelligence officer. I was the senior commander. As they say, Shit rolls downhill. And over the years, Boom, there were several congressional briefings and inquiries where someone might say Roger and I chose our words a little too carefully.”
