I saw that letter and cried because my father loved me before he knew my name.
I actually end up reading the self-authored pamphlet Mustafa Zein gave me, A Summary of Science and Faith. I can’t decide whether it’s a revolutionary interpretation of Islam or just plain crazy. Something about its message moves me, though. I remember what Zein told me during our interview that summarized my beliefs more articulately than I could.
“Religiosity is the greatest crime man has committed against God,” he said.
In that respect, I think he seems saner than most.
Philosophy aside, I’m curious about his claims that Ali-Reza Asgari was a Mossad asset, so I start researching again.
After reading The Good Spy, I know that Asgari is indeed believed to be the architect of all the Islamic Jihad’s terrorism. From the limited information I can find online about his time in Lebanon, he appears to have been working for Mehdi Hashemi, who my reporting leads me to believe may have been operating separately from the IRGC members training Hezbollah.
What makes Asgari interesting is that in 2007, he disappeared while in Turkey. Because he was a brigadier general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and former deputy defense minister, his disappearance did not go unnoticed. At first, the Iranians were saying he had been kidnapped by a Western intelligence agency—high irony, if that were the case—but as news reports unfolded, most observers seemed to believe he had defected to either Israel or the United States. Zein told me Asgari had originally defected to the United States but ended up in Israel.
“The Mossad sold Asgari to the Bush White House as another person than the one who had commanded the Iranian guards in Lebanon,” he writes in an e-mail. “It is I who went to Damascus to bring evidence that Asgari was and is the degenerate who commanded the Iranian Guards in Lebanon from 1982–1992 and now no one in Washington wants to hear his toxic name . . . he lives in Israel now.”
Zein’s testimony aside, it was clear from the moment Asgari disappeared that he was probably a mole. A 2007 article in the Sunday Times quoted multiple sources as saying Asgari was a high-level mole and his defection had been orchestrated by the Mossad. The Washington Post reported that he was in the United States providing the CIA with a treasure trove of valuable intelligence on Iran and Hezbollah, and reports surfaced for months about Israeli and U.S. actions supposedly triggered by information he provided. The Iranians insisted that Asgari had been kidnapped by the CIA and Mossad. An alternate narrative appeared that included Asgari’s death in an Israeli prison, but Western media coverage seemed to take it for granted that he had been a mole.
I find a 2012 report from the Library of Congress called Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security: A Profile and read this passage: “Asgari’s defection was significant because he was deeply engaged in establishing Iranian links to Hezbollah. Asgari seems to have provided intelligence to the Israelis and may have been the source of the intelligence they used in Operation Orchard to strike Syria’s nuclear reactor.”
With this in mind, Mustafa Zein’s claim that Asgari was supplying information to the Mossad during the eighties is sounding a little more plausible. If he later became an Israeli mole, would it be such a stretch to consider that he may have been cooperating with the Israelis earlier on? The scenario wouldn’t be completely out of place in the vicious, backbiting atmosphere of covert ops in Lebanon during the war. I feel the idea twisting its roots into my mind, trying to take hold of my perspective. But I must battle the urge to swallow this entirely. Even if there is some truth to Zein’s claims, there are infinite ways this scenario could have played out and no way to prove any of them now. So while I resolve to follow up about this during interviews, I know I need to double my focus on finding out more about the men who kidnapped my father.
THEN
March 2012
After I got back to New York and spent a couple of days cringing in my bed, detoxing from Ritalin, my mother and I researched possible treatment centers where I might be able to get my head together. We landed upon a dual-diagnosis inpatient facility in Connecticut that treated both substance abuse and mental illness. It cost a small fortune and boasted a number of celebrity alumni.
I was there for two months. No need to go into detail about that time, except to say that the facility was more a drug rehab than a psychiatric hospital—they were well equipped to deal with addicts; less so crazy people. Their curriculum was based heavily on the twelve-step model, so by the time I got out, I had two months clean, one shiny Narcotics Anonymous chip, and a list of meetings in the city. I also started at a dialectical behavioral therapy outpatient center, which again, cost an absurd amount of money. That wasn’t counting my $300-an-hour psychiatrist. The expense made me painfully aware of how lucky I was to be able to afford that kind of care. I knew so many others didn’t have the same privilege, and I found that incredibly unfair.
So I hit the ground running. I went to a meeting a day, stood up, announced countless times to everyone that I was an addict, and watched my clean time mount with some satisfaction. But after a month or so, that shiny sober feeling began to melt away, only to be replaced by something darker, a familiar swirling sadness I had thought I’d put behind me. I watched my friends in the program get their shit together, start jobs, and feel better. But I would sit in a room full of people who were supposed to be like me and feel completely alone.
When I shared in meetings, I’d cry to my fellow addicts about how I heard a voice in my head most of the time telling me I was worthless and disgusting; but the voice wasn’t anyone else’s. It was mine, so I simultaneously believed it utterly and knew it was whispering lies to me. Desperately seeking understanding, I’d tell the room that I was in constant, bone-breaking battle with myself, and without drugs to numb the pain, I’d often end up on my couch or in my bed, hugging my knees to my chest and sobbing from the depths of my soul. I’d say I thought about killing myself all the time, just to make the pain go away. But apart from one or two people who nodded, I was generally met with blank stares. I began hearing the word crazy muttered behind my back.
The therapy was going significantly better. DBT was developed by a psychologist who knew what it was like to feel empty and alone. She compiled a thick volume of life skills that seem pretty commonsensical on the surface, but like many borderline patients, I was accustomed to unhealthy coping mechanisms and it gave me some tools to work with when I was feeling terrible. My therapist was a kind, encouraging man who was usually available outside of sessions to listen to me when I felt like I was falling apart. The meds were helping a little, but I was still struggling with impulsivity, and trying to find solace in men who weren’t particularly nice to me.
I was also bored stiff. I had a degree from Columbia and some experience working at the Daily Star, but when I would apply for journalism jobs in New York, they couldn’t give less of a shit about a little paper in Lebanon, so I was told I didn’t have enough experience. Besides, since the advent of the Internet, journalism was and is still becoming a ruthless, thankless profession. I knew competition was fierce, and I needed a leg up at a well-known U.S. publication.
So I gritted my teeth and applied for internships, knowing I was overqualified for them. In the summer of 2012, I managed to land an unpaid position at a major magazine in D.C. Ignoring the advice of everyone in NA who said moving in my first year of sobriety was a recipe for disaster, I picked up and left for Washington.
Let’s just say the six months I spent in D.C. were not the best of my life. The magazine internship was brutal. Aside from the icily professional female editor in chief, it was an almost exclusively male newsroom, and from what I understood, the crop of interns before me had been mostly quiet girls, fresh from college. I was loud, pushy, still somewhat unbalanced, and I knew the long hours of free bitchwork the magazine was getting from me were more than they deserved. The newsroom was quiet as a graveyard—not a sound but the clitter-clatter of keyboards. Every now and then, someone
would make a snarky comment, people would snicker, and then it would go back to silence.
I made a few friends, and my fellow interns helped keep me sane, but I’d cry in the ladies’ room at least once a week after being snubbed by another staff member. My condition often made me behave inappropriately or laugh too loudly at odd things. I went back to New York almost every weekend, desperate for the refreshing, in-your-face rudeness of my city. At least there, people have the decency to tell you to fuck off to your face.
And there was the fact that I had fallen off the wagon. Shortly after I celebrated six months clean, I started drinking and smoking pot again. It seemed fine at first, but as I grew more and more miserable, I started to drink too much, and ended more than one night with my face in the toilet. But something really wonderful happened toward the end of my time in D.C. About a month before I left, the doctor I had been seeing put me on a new mood stabilizer, and with the new med in conjunction with the one I was already on, I started feeling the anxious self-loathing lift. I stopped drinking as much, thought before I spoke or acted, and learned how to turn down men I wasn’t actually interested in. I felt calmer, more balanced, better than I ever had before, actually. I started looking forward to the next chapter in my life with a little more hope.
It was with great relief that I finished my internship and started trying to figure out my next step. I applied for jobs again, with no success. But a year of following car bombs in Beirut and rocket attacks into Israel on Twitter had frustrated me beyond belief. I had been convinced there was going to be a war at least three times while I was interning, and my mother had to talk me out of buying a one-way plane ticket to Beirut.
So I finally succumbed to the conflict bug I’d been infected with since birth. In many ways, it felt quietly inevitable. I desperately missed the life-or-death stakes in Lebanon, the rush of adrenaline, and most of all, the feeling that I was doing something that mattered. So I talked my panicked mother down, bought the plane ticket, and landed in Beirut just as the Mediterranean winter was starting to wrap its damp tendrils around the city.
Not long after I arrived, I realized I hadn’t ever bothered to make friends with other journalists in Beirut. I mostly socialized with my cousins and their friends when I was living there, too mired in misery to really care much about schmoozing with anyone. I felt certain my erratic behavior had, as always, made me the target of much mean-spirited gossip among my coworkers and the few other reporters I had met.
But now I felt the need to be around people with similar concerns and interests. I felt mentally stable enough to handle the Beirut journo scene. So I e-mailed Josh Wood, a stringer with the International Herald Tribune whose work I had admired for some time. I felt self-conscious approaching someone I had never met to hang out, nervous I would come off like some opportunist or sycophantic amateur. But he seemed nice enough, and we made an appointment to meet at a local bar.
It was a bit awkward at first, but after a couple of drinks, we were both laughing our asses off. His cynical humor appealed to me, and I think my brassy bravado amused him. There was nothing romantic about the interaction; he had a serious girlfriend back in the States and I was dating someone in New York. But when the bar looked like it was going to close, Josh invited me back to his place to hang out with his friend.
And that was the night I met Peter Kassig, a former army ranger who couldn’t have been more different from the asshole who abused me for two years. Pete grew up in Indianapolis and served in Iraq during the “liberation” of the country from Saddam Hussein and his “weapons of mass destruction.” It soon became clear to him that the invasion was nothing more than rich men exploiting the tragedy of 9/11 to become wealthier; at the expense of many innocent lives. He was ashamed of what he watched his country do to the Middle East.
So Pete came to Beirut, armed only with his hopeful idealism and the need to heal instead of hurt. He had been a medic in the army and soon cofounded an NGO that provided medical aid to civilians in war-ravaged Syria, risking his life to help people the world had all but abandoned. It was the kind of sacrifice I could barely wrap my head around, and he talked about it without any air of martyrdom. But as I would come to learn, that was Pete.
He was a good-looking guy, with an infectious laugh and a sweet innocence that belied his ranger tattoos and tough talk. But he was five years younger than me and I was absorbed with the guy I was seeing back home. Pete was definitely flirting with me that night, but I just laughed it off and the three of us stayed up until dawn talking about everything under the sun.
We discussed my father at length. They were very curious about my family’s experience, so I told them about the tinfoil game pieces and how Dad’s kidnappers broke his glasses. I shared with Josh and Pete things about my fucked-up life I had never said to anyone else. I could tell they understood the consequences we all risk in this kind of work, and most of all, they were familiar with trauma.
We would end up talking about Dad many times throughout our friendship, but I’ll never forget something Pete said that night.
“Jesus,” he muttered in awe after I finished one of the stories about my father. “I don’t know what I would do if that happened to me. I think I’d probably go out of my mind.”
8. THE WARLORDS
Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.
—ADOLF HITLER
NOW
Sobhi al-Tufayli has seen better days.
Josh and I roll up to his bunker in Brital, a town in the Beqaa Valley. Our fixer is driving, and as usual, I’m about to fall out of the car and kiss the ground in relief that I survived the trip. He is highly skilled behind the wheel, but in typical Lebanese style, he drives at heart-stopping speed, and I’ve left nail marks on Josh’s arm from clutching him in panic.
The first thing we notice as we arrive is an octogenarian militiaman brandishing an ancient machine gun, accompanied by a couple of unarmed teenagers. Not exactly an intimidating entourage of bodyguards, but luckily for Tufayli, we aren’t there to harm him. We both want to interview the former secretary-general of Hezbollah, Josh for a story and I for my investigation. One of the teenagers ushers us into the receiving room while the elderly militiaman glares at us threateningly.
“Not sure if that gun will even fire,” Josh murmurs to me when we sit down. “It looks like it should be in a museum.” I stifle a giggle as we’re served bitter black coffee in small china cups.
Finally, Tufayli makes his entrance and we greet him politely. I’m wearing a hijab out of respect for his position as sheikh, to Josh’s endless amusement. We’re all seriousness now, though, as Tufayli holds court.
Tufayli’s relationship with Hezbollah is complicated. He was replaced as secretary-general by Abbas al-Musawi in 1991, but the reasons for his ouster remain unclear. Some say he opposed the establishment of Hezbollah as a political entity in the Lebanese government because it “moderated” the organization and opened it up to the corruption of the state. Since he left, he’s become an outspoken critic of Hezbollah and Iran, and generally seizes most opportunities to make his opinions clear, which is how we managed to secure an interview with him.
I don’t know whether Tufayli’s grievances are legitimate or he’s just bitter about his ouster, but I’m curious to see how the sheikh responds to the allegations that he was involved in terrorism. As always, I don’t bring up my father right away. Instead I listen as Josh asks Tufayli about the situation in Syria and Hezbollah’s role in the conflict next door.
Tufayli is quite dismissive and rude to Josh, so I’m nervous when it seems like it’s my turn to ask questions.
“Sheikh, this might take longer because Miss Anderson is writing a book,” our fixer tells him in Arabic.
“What book?” Tufayli asks.
“What should I say the book is about?” the fixer asks me in English.
“Just tell him it’s about Lebanon during the war.�
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“She should send us a copy as a gift,” the sheikh pronounces, which I promise to do without meaning a word of it.
“I know Hezbollah started as a resistance movement,” I begin. I want to warm up to my important questions. “The Israelis invaded Lebanon five times, but are you saying the resistance aspect isn’t legitimate anymore? What should Hezbollah do now? Should they disarm and become purely political? What’s the best course of action for them?”
“What’s best for Hezbollah, for the Lebanese people and the region always, is the right path,” Tufayli tells me through our fixer. “What I mean by the right path is the path of justice, the path of the will of the people . . . The regime in Lebanon is corrupt, and Lebanese officials are corrupt to the highest degree. The body of the regime is in decay. Hezbollah did not contribute to this in the past. If Hezbollah came and said, ‘We would like to build a state free of corruption, with clean officials, and would like for the rule of law to be respected in earnest, and not to interpret the law in a different way on a daily basis through personal whims’ . . . if the instruments of the government are purged of their many impurities, I believe that the Lebanese people would have stood behind [Hezbollah], and no saboteur would be able to impose himself, no matter how much wealth or influence he has—especially those with known profiles. Moreover, no one whom Hezbollah has deemed corrupt will ever be able to get into power. This means that all officials need the consent, approval, and judicial records from Hezbollah for the people to accept them as public servants in the Lebanese government.”
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