“How do you mean?” he barks. “What are you talking about?”
“I mean our policies in the Middle East going back decades.”
“Look, the United States has made mistakes, but we are the single greatest force for good on the planet,” he tells me with utter sincerity. “No country has given as much aid and protected and helped so many people . . . we are actually the greatest country on the planet. You have no idea how many countries’ democracies we saved over the course of my career . . . nobody gives us credit for that, the American people.”
His words aren’t surprising. Early in our conversation, it became clear that he’s a die-hard neocon. He talked about President Barack Obama as if he were the Antichrist.
“So you don’t hold with the whole idea that we install and help keep dictators in power?” I ask. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Egypt’s President Mubarak . . . those are just a few of the questionable leaders and groups we’ve sponsored and protected over the years. One might even say the United States’ oil-hungry meddling in Iranian politics—including a CIA-staged coup against one of Iran’s only secular, democratically elected leaders, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in the fifties—as well as our support of the autocratic shah, helped bring about the revolution. It’s probable that Iranians turned to radical Islamism in response to the continued brutality of the shah’s secular regime. I want to say, Hey, douchebag, there’s a reason these people hate us. But I continue to bite my tongue.
“Not every country is organized for democracy,” the ex-spook fires back at me. “Look at Afghanistan. You know what, I tell you the best thing they could have had? A benevolent dictator . . . we don’t run around trying to set up dictatorships. We are trying to set up stability and create the grounds for democracy.”
Fucking hell. If this is the best and brightest the Central Intelligence Agency has to offer, then our nation is totally and completely screwed. I didn’t get much from this interview, but it’s a solid reminder that I don’t need to religiously adhere to the government’s official version of events.
As a CIA field officer stationed in Beirut during the eighties, Bob Baer is a natural source for me to approach. He’s most famous for writing the books that inspired the George Clooney movie Syriana, and has made quite a career as a media source on American foreign policy since he left the agency, so I’m pretty sure he’ll talk to me. He agrees to an interview, which we do over Skype.
Baer is likable: blunt, humorous, and disarmingly honest—at least, that’s the impression he gives. I remind myself that no one ever really leaves the agency, as they say, but I’m encouraged by his frankness.
I begin by asking him about the Boogeyman. “I keep hearing that Mughniyeh’s motivation [for the kidnappings] was his brother-in-law being taken in Kuwait,” I say. “It seems kind of a simplistic reason. What do you think was his motivation?”
“I think there were multiple factors at play,” Baer responds. “He wanted to drive the French and the United States out. It was the middle of the Iranian revolution. They wanted to drive out Western culture and influence. They wanted to close down the CIA and French intelligence. They wanted the marines to leave. They wanted the Israelis, of course, to leave. It’s hard to sort things out with this type of movement, but he also wanted his brother-in-law out. And, at some point, I’m sure there was a lot of personal ambition on the part of Mughniyeh.”
“Right, that makes sense,” I respond. “He wanted to work his way into some power.”
“Exactly, but when does personal ambition bleed into nationalism?” Baer asks rhetorically. “I just don’t know. Somewhere there’s a line there, but I don’t know. I’ve never met the guy. I just know that he fought and was involved in the Islamic resistance.”
“I’ve heard that the Islamic Jihad was being directly sponsored by a [faction] that separated from the Revolutionary Guard, while Hezbollah was this larger, monolithic organization,” I say. “Not that Hezbollah can’t necessarily be held accountable, but I’ve been told they were two different animals.”
“They were two entities,” Baer agrees. “They operated separately. Their money was separate. Sometimes [the IJO] took orders from Iran, sometimes they didn’t . . . Hezbollah had a different agenda. They were building hospitals and fighting Israelis.”
This is pretty solid testimony to back up the theory I’ve been investigating. And my growing respect, if you can call it that, for Hezbollah’s strategic maneuvering is apparently shared by Baer.
“I mean, this is the most effective resistance in modern times,” he tells me. “Who predicted in 1982 that [Hezbollah] would be a Shia problem? I never saw it predicted. I think it’s phenomenal, I mean, their technical abilities, their ability to keep secrets, take on the Israeli army, and beat it effectively or fight it to withdraw.”
This seems like an eminently useful attitude for an intelligence agent to have toward an enemy. You don’t approve of what they do, you’re still going to fight them, but you respect your opponent, you grasp how their mind works and what path brought them to where they are now. How can you possibly effectively combat something you don’t understand?
It makes me think of something that Aurélie Daher, a French scholar, said to me. She recently published a book called Hezbollah: Mobilization and Power, which I came across during my research. Daher quoted numerous Hezbollah sources and seemed to be well connected with members of the organization, so I reached out to her and we had a lively and fascinating conversation at a café in D.C.
“When you ask Hezbollah about the hostages, bombings, et cetera, they say, ‘It’s not us who did it, we didn’t do it,’” Daher explained as we sipped our coffees. “So a lot of people would say, ‘Oh, they’re lying.’ Well, even if they are lying, I think there’s something interesting about the fact that they’re denying this. It’s like they don’t want to be looked at as people who abduct other people, which means that morally speaking, they know that it’s wrong.”
This jibes with the Hajj and Hamza’s almost conciliatory attitude toward me when they found out who my father was. Even if everyone in Hezbollah is lying and they personally gave the orders to kidnap Dad, it’s clear that on a psychological level, they understand that it was wrong. That’s not something most American analysts take into account when they publish books and papers about this “terrorist organization.” These people are human beings, whether they are right, wrong, innocent, or guilty. Acting like they’re not human doesn’t help anyone, least of all us Americans, if we hope for our government to resolve this conflict—whether through violence or diplomacy.
Before I end the Skype call with Baer, I ask if he knows anyone else I should speak with regarding my investigation. “You should talk to this guy in Amman, Mustafa Zein,” Baer tells me. “He was with Mughniyeh in the old days, at the time your father was kidnapped. Zein is no bullshit. Now, he may tell you some crazy things, so beware, but you should speak with him.”
I jot down Zein’s number. I probably won’t be in Jordan anytime soon—but it might be worth following up on.
THEN
December 2011
My Palestinian guide was looking at me like I was crazy. Which at that moment, I sort of was.
I had been in Lebanon for about eight months, working as a feature writer with the Daily Star, an English-language newspaper. I was in Ain el-Hilweh—arguably the most dangerous refugee camp in the country, with almost weekly car bombs and gunfights—for a story on foreign intelligence agents rumored to be operating in the camp.
Ain el-Hilweh is a heartbreaking place, full of big-eyed children in rags. The Lebanese government prohibits Palestinians from owning property or working in most occupations, mostly because xenophobia is something of a national trait and Lebanese fear that the Palestinians will assimilate into their society, flooding the job market with cheap labor and becoming a burden to the state. Today, Syrian refugees in Lebanon are faced with similar hostility from their host country.
There’s a long-st
anding ban on construction in the Palestinian camps, where refugees live in increasingly overcrowded, squalid conditions. The ban is frequently ignored, so poorly constructed upper floors are regularly built and collapse, resulting in dozens of fatalities a year. Tangled wires carrying stolen electricity stretch from one rickety building to the next, another potentially lethal consequence of camp life. On a later visit to the camp, I’d speak to a seventeen-year-old Palestinian girl whose mother had been electrocuted by one of these faulty wires. She lived in a tiny room with her two younger sisters and brother, all of whom she supported financially.
That day, I was there to talk to a prominent member of Fatah—a militant branch of the Palestinian Liberation Organization—known as Lino. We were in a room full of men brandishing machine guns, his entourage heavily armed because he had narrowly escaped two assassination attempts in the last month. I was interviewing him about a series of bombings and sabotage incidents in and around Ain el-Hilweh, which he blamed on foreign covert agents. The room was stuffy and thick with cigarette smoke, and I made an effort, as I often do in those situations, to pretend I spoke no Arabic, in case they would think I was mukhabarat, or secret police. Most nervous militants are suspicious of journalists, even petite female ones.
It was an uncomfortable and somewhat dangerous situation that wasn’t helped by the fact that earlier in the day, I’d taken about five times the dose of Ritalin I was prescribed.
The prior week was a blur. A month before, I had stopped taking one of my medications because it made me gain twenty pounds and was so sedating I felt like I was trudging through glue most of the time. It’s a mood stabilizer, but also an antipsychotic; my previous bouts of abusing ADD meds had never resulted in psychosis, so I wasn’t prepared for the result of this particular binge, which was what I can only describe as a psychotic break.
I was barely making it to the office, and my mind was swirling with conspiracy theories—my paranoia went through the roof. I sent a number of extremely embarrassing e-mails detailing my suspicions to some very important people, who thankfully did not answer. I somehow convinced Fadi, my editor at the Daily Star, to let me come to Ain el-Hilweh in search of a story on foreign intelligence assets in the camps. No matter how bizarre my behavior or disheveled my appearance, I consistently turned out stories that generated page hits, so I had earned his trust. Every time I tried to stop taking so much Ritalin, I’d crash and fall into a yawning pit of depression, so I decided I just wouldn’t stop until I ran out, hoping to avoid the jagged despair that consumed me when I wasn’t high. But I had built up a tolerance to the drug by then, and kept having to increase my dose in order to achieve the same rush of energy and sensation of controlled competence. Taking large amounts of an amphetamine-based medication without an antipsychotic to balance it out can easily lead to a psychotic break, so when the mood stabilizer left my system, I lost my mind a little.
I had chosen to work in Lebanon for a number of reasons—I spoke some Arabic and had traveled to Beirut almost every year since I was born. As a result, I was very close to my mother’s family. Lebanon meant summers in my aunt’s tiny, crowded apartment in one of the poorer Christian neighborhoods of Beirut. It was the smell of the Marlboro Reds my grandmother compulsively smoked; lazy days on the beach and dinners at a tiny restaurant by the sea—fresh fish piled high with fried pita bread, endless plates of hummus, and the burst of watermelon for dessert. My aunts would gossip constantly with my mother about the neighbors; my cousins and I would fight viciously and laugh uncontrollably. They were the best friends I had growing up, the next best thing to the brothers and sisters I wanted so desperately. Lebanon was one of the only places I felt at home, surrounded by people who loved and accepted me.
But I was also familiar with the country’s sociopolitical landscape. Just as I remembered the comfort of my family, I never forgot the bullet holes pockmarking almost every wall in Beirut. Or the time Israel shelled the city when I was twelve—how my mother screamed at me to get away from the windows as the night boomed and cracked. The country is still haunted by the everyday violence and lawlessness of its fifteen-year civil war, though that war ended nearly a quarter century ago. I was always aware of Lebanon’s volatile politics, and of how strained and fragile the postwar peace really was.
In fact, it was partly my frustration with that environment that drove me to leave the United States and live in a place that was in many ways still quite foreign to me. I didn’t go back to Lebanon to confront my past or anything profound like that (although I should probably have foreseen that that would inevitably happen, with or without my efforts). I did it at the time because I loved that beautiful, fucked-up place, and was tired of seeing it quietly tear itself apart. I thought people should know about this gorgeous, war-weary country full of ruthless warlords posing as politicians, pitting segments of the population against each other in their battle to control the government. And about the opportunistic governments of other countries who were also shitting all over it. In his book Beware of Small States, David Hirst illuminated how Lebanon has been used as a forum for the proxy wars of other nations since its creation in 1920.
It’s a place with abundant history, culture, and potential, and yet the Lebanese, despite being so proud of their starkly beautiful mountains and lush valleys, their beaches and Roman ruins, can’t seem to love their country enough to reach across the vast divide of sectarianism and stop hating one another. I found it infuriating, fascinating, and heartbreaking all at once, and I needed to be in the middle of it.
It also seemed clear that Lebanon was, in many ways, crucial in maintaining the precarious balance of power in the Middle East, and I believed it was an important time to be a reporter there.
At that point, after I’d been lost in a drugged haze for so many years, reporting was the only thing keeping me going. Getting on meds had changed my life—I went from cokehead to nonfunctional opiate junkie to at least some semblance of competence. My head wasn’t always the hellish swamp of pain and self-hatred it used to be, and going to journalism school had taught me I had something to hold on to, something I loved. But I carried my amphetamine addiction with me when I moved to Lebanon in 2011. I felt like my life was an endless game of Whac-A-Mole: every time I beat one demon down, another popped up, cackling.
I was also still mentally ill, although at the time, not self-aware enough to realize it. Every time I went on a new medication, I felt better. I’d think I had kicked this borderline thing for good. I’d take them for a while, then party too much and forget. My mood swings and unhealthy interactions with the people around me would get worse, along with the only thing of value I thought I had—my overt sexuality. Promiscuity, however, is generally not a good look, and even less so in conflict situations, with the threat of rape constantly hanging over you.
So I started living for the job. I quickly realized being borderline had its benefits, in the right circumstances. My talent for empathizing was incredibly useful during interviews. Everyone has a story, and whether they’re aware of it or not, most people want to be understood—they crave talking to someone who can slip into their skin for a moment and share in their experience. I’ve found that this applies even to the most hardened of killers.
My first few stories bought me some measure of respect from my coworkers, who had at first probably assumed I was a spoiled wannabe riding her dad’s coattails. I started by covering subjects like transgender Lebanese and child beggars, but I was soon assigned meatier and more dangerous pieces. I went to Roumieh, the most notorious prison in Lebanon, to speak with mentally ill inmates, and to a Palestinian refugee camp to interview drug addicts about substance abuse there. I loved my work.
But I would soon discover the job has even more pitfalls than I’d been aware of growing up. For instance, there is a kind of workaday machismo, paired with the numbness of PTSD, that characterizes the approach of a lot of conflict journalists, and it’s insidious. When I was just starting to freelance in Leb
anon, a well-known TV reporter asked me why I got into journalism.
“You know, you can’t become a war reporter just because you have a nice rack,” he said to me in a tone obviously meant to be playful.
Humiliated, I started trying to explain my reasons to him, and he stopped me with a smile. “Sulome,” he said, “when you see little dead children all piled up on top of each other, it stops being about giving voice to the voiceless. I do this because I’m good at it, and because I like to fuck the competition.” People like him, who need to hide behind a brittle veneer of inhumanity in order to escape the weight of what they’ve seen, are a cautionary tale to me.
A close friend I would meet in Lebanon has been covering war for more than five years. He drinks himself to sleep most nights to avoid night terrors. He visited me in New York not long ago, and on the subway ride from the airport to my house, he saw a homeless man begging for money, saying he had once been shot in the face. My friend and I were at a restaurant when he told me this story, and he looked at me across the table with haunted eyes. “I saw his scar, and I knew the caliber of the bullet that shot him. No one should know a thing like that.”
I’m not fearful of my own death; when you’ve sat up with a knife to your wrist, praying for the strength to press a little harder, death doesn’t seem all that scary. But I am afraid of the horrors I would suffer if I were taken like my father. I’m also terrified of the possibility of seeing other people dying in front of me.
Nonetheless, despite my understanding the emotional trauma that comes with conflict reporting, the adrenaline called me, even back then. I would never do the hard-core bang-bang, bullet-dodging kind of journalism, not even later, but it always beckoned me; it still does. That hit of knowing you can die at any moment is better than any drug I’ve ever taken. But I also knew the price this job can exact. Growing up, I lived it every day. The sacrifice my father made for his career was etched into my psyche, impossible to forget. I know now that I need to be very careful, and remain vigilantly aware of the impact this work has on me. The lesson came hard that night in Ain-el-Hilweh.
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