by Cam Simpson
During that initial meeting, Mansour told three different stories about the twelve men. First, he said he had absolutely nothing to do with them, and that Jeet and the others simply must have made their way to Amman on their own and then found jobs in Iraq. Later, he said the Kathmandu broker, Moon Light, had sent the twelve to Jordan, along with dozens of others, but that Moon Light dealt with a different firm in Jordan, not his. Finally, Mansour claimed that Moon Light had coordinated with him and sent the twelve workers to Jordan through his firm, but he said he had then sent the men to another Jordanian labor broker, who sent them into Iraq. This final account at least partially matched what Mansour had told the Associated Press in the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping and massacre.
After our meeting, I decided that politely and relentlessly pestering Mansour offered the best chance at getting more out of him. I hoped that, sooner or later, short of having me arrested for trespassing in his office, he would realize I wasn’t going away. My Jordanian interpreter and assistant, Nader Rabadi, and I even brainstormed about slightly mad plots as cover for repeatedly showing up at Mansour’s house. Not long after my first meeting with him, we walked into his office again—again unannounced—and Nader launched into a speech in Arabic, so I was mostly clueless about what he was saying, but his body language revealed some sort of entreaty. Mansour listened intently. At one point while Nader was speaking, Mansour pressed and rubbed the palm of his hand across his forehead and then drew it down over his eyes, the universal symbol for a man under stress. When Nader finished, Mansour asked him a question, also in Arabic. Nader answered and then turned to me and said we should begin.
We returned immediately to the specifics of the twelve men from Nepal, explaining, gently, that Mansour had previously offered different versions of what had happened to them. Which one was true? Suddenly, Mansour was more forthcoming. He said the twelve had not been alone, but were part of a much larger group of nearly eighty men. And beyond even those eighty men there were far, far more coming through Jordan, from Nepal and other impoverished Asian countries. Mansour said he had been doing a vigorous business since the start of the Iraq War, with the owner of the Moon Light agency in Kathmandu, a man he had met in Saudi Arabia. Nepalese workers were especially popular right now, Mansour said, “because they are good, they are honest, and they accept low salaries.”
According to Mansour, Moon Light charged each Nepalese man somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand dollars, a fee multiples beyond the average annual earnings in Nepal. The agents had only had one cost: a one-way ticket to Jordan, which could be had for about four hundred dollars apiece or even less. The rest belonged to the broker, and the profit off a single man equaled more than the national per capita income for an entire year. Multiply that by twelve, or several dozen, or hundreds, then thousands, tens of thousands, and the business of selling overseas jobs to farmers looks incredibly lucrative, on the supply side alone.
As the middleman, Mansour said he received e-mails or faxes from the agency in Nepal containing the names, passport details, and flight arrival information for men landing at Queen Alia International Airport. Sometimes there would be just a few Nepalis, and sometimes they would come in batches of twenty or more. Mansour would send some men to meet each group as it arrived at the airport. Farmers from the hills of Nepal were never too hard to spot amid the crowds arriving on flights from Doha, Manama, or Dubai.
Each Nepalese man carried with him a sealed envelope, which he was told never to open, and that he must hand over directly to the local broker upon arrival at the airport. Brokers in Nepal sternly warned each man of this sacred rule, and threatened that opening the envelope or losing it ended with one certainty: You will be sent home immediately. All will be lost.15
After his men collected the imported Nepalese “goods” from the airport, Mansour said that he would send them straight to another man in Amman, named Ali al-Nadi. More than anything else, this was what I really needed from Mansour: more names, more links in the human supply chain.
Al-Nadi ran what Iraq War contractors called “body shops.”16 If you needed the “bodies” of menial laborers, you went to Ali al-Nadi. His shop’s name, Bisharat, was the same name that Mansour had given to the Associated Press in the wake of the kidnappings, and the same name the kidnappers themselves had posted on the extremist website. Al-Nadi had been a dry cleaner prior to the war, Mansour said, but the U.S. invasion of Iraq had made him wealthy: “He is very rich from America. One American contract is all you need.” Al-Nadi provided Mansour with locations in and around Amman to drop off the men after the airport pickups. These small apartments sometimes housed up to thirty men, who would wait days, weeks, or perhaps even months for paperwork clearing their way into Iraq, including documents issued by the Pentagon.17
By the time Mansour finished his account, it was clear his involvement consisted of little more than typing “demand letters” on his stationery for nonexistent jobs in Jordan, sending them to Nepal, receiving e-mails containing the names of workers and their arrival information, and arranging airport pickups. His middleman role filled the smallest possible window, incurring virtually no costs, which made it a perfect enterprise—money for almost nothing. For this, Mansour received a total of three hundred to five hundred dollars for each Nepalese “import” he sent through the system. Some of that cash, we would eventually learn, came via the envelopes the men would hand-deliver when they got off their flights, meaning it came literally from their own pockets, and their families were indebted to pay it back. The rest came via a commission paid by al-Nadi, according to Mansour. Al-Nadi’s body shop exclusively supplied men to a single Jordanian company, Daoud (pronounced DOW-ude) and Partners, which had contracts to serve American forces in Iraq. Mansour claimed it was one of the biggest contractors in Iraq.
Mansour claimed that Daoud operated as a sort of cutout. In the same way that Mansour was a middleman, Daoud’s work was being done solely for, and at the behest of, another company, KBR Halliburton. Halliburton had been much in the news; it had not only the largest contract in Iraq, but also the largest wartime contract in history. Before 2000, when he left to campaign as the running mate of George W. Bush, U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, a prime backer of the war, had served as Halliburton’s CEO.
It wasn’t clear yet if Mansour had told the whole truth in this latest round, but he had been dramatically more forthcoming that day. As we walked out of Mansour’s office and into the Amman heat, I asked my interpreter, Nader, “What happened in there? What did you tell him when we first arrived?”
Nader replied that he had warned Mansour that I was something akin to a manic police detective who would keep showing up at his office, and maybe at his home, too, until a full and honest version of events emerged. Nader confided to Mansour that the best way to make me go away was to be as cooperative as possible.
“And then what did he ask you?” I said.
“He asked me if you were really a journalist,” Nader said, “or if you were secretly some kind of government agent.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him you were a journalist,” Nader said, “but I couldn’t be sure about anything else.”
I burst into laughter. Nader just smiled uncomfortably. He had worked with dozens of reporters who had flooded into the Middle East during the war, including some real characters, but this was certainly a far stranger adventure than any he had ever undertaken before. I suspect he was slightly worried about what I was up to, and what I might be getting him into.
* * *
Daoud and Partners’ presence, at least on paper, left room for doubt about Mansour’s veracity. A report from a financial research company said that Daoud’s total staff numbered just twenty-five people. The company “principally engaged in hotel cleaning and catering,” but also “freight forwarding and clearance services,” and had only an average credit rating. The research firm assessed Daoud’s “operating trend” as “steady,” not bo
oming beyond belief. Most important, at least in terms of gauging the veracity of Mansour’s story, the research firm said Daoud’s reported annual revenues were less than a million dollars in 2003, the first year of the Iraq War, and a smidge higher in 2004.18 That seemed beneath a pittance, given that the United States spent an average of almost fourteen billion dollars per year on contractors in Iraq.19
The company’s physical presence in Amman also did not seem to befit a major wartime contractor. None of that booming construction across the Jordanian capital appeared to include a single building for Daoud, let alone a tower, or even a significant set of suites. In short, Daoud did not appear to be the glistening Arab incarnation of Halliburton.
Mansour had feigned losing the contact details for everyone he had done business with, but had let loose some vague details about one Daoud office. Knocking on a few doors led to its location, in a converted apartment on the top floor of a four-story residential building. It was located in the Abdali neighborhood of downtown Amman, where government bureaucrats are stashed inside gray concrete office blocks. Daoud’s converted apartment resided in a building behind the Jordanian Ministry of Industry and Trade.
At the top of the stairs and beyond the threshold, a balding, slightly sunburned, middle-aged Daoud employee named Haitham Shwarham sat behind a reception desk in what had been the apartment’s living room. The room was spare and colorless, beyond Shwarham’s slightly reddened dome.
We asked for Ali al-Nadi, and were informed that al-Nadi did not work directly for Daoud. But, Shwarham said, “he brings the workers here.”
If the flat functioned as a transit point for Mansour’s “goods” from Nepal and beyond, then it made sense that Mansour knew this to be the company’s office. Maybe Mansour had been telling the truth, or some version en route to it, after all.
Could Shwarham please provide contact information for al-Nadi? we asked. He refused.
Would he consider dialing al-Nadi’s mobile number himself from the office phone and then handing over the receiver? Reluctantly, he agreed.
Al-Nadi answered immediately, and when the phone was handed over, he sounded flustered, saying he was attending a funeral on the outskirts of Amman, so he couldn’t meet with us. He also said that while sometimes he uses foreign workers in his cleaning business, he didn’t know anything about the twelve Nepalese workers who were murdered in Iraq, and that he had had nothing to do with them. He said he would be happy to meet once he returned to Amman, but he declined to offer his phone number or even the location of his firm. He promised he would be in touch if we left contact details at the desk where we were standing.
We did that, but Shwarham had warmed to us just enough to offer the location of al-Nadi’s office, a couple of miles away, and we headed straight there. The receptionist said he wasn’t in, but offered us his business card. It carried an amateurish-looking logo crafted from the word Bisharat, which means “good news” or “good tidings,” the same firm named by the terrorists following the kidnapping.
Ali Kamel al-Nadi spread his legs wide, leaned back into the sofa, and drew hard on a filtered American cigarette, the tip crackling and glowing in front of his face. From behind the bursts of smoke, he repeated claims he had made over the telephone in the previous two days: it was completely possible that the twelve Nepalese men in question had somehow found their way to Amman from villages across the Himalayan kingdom and perhaps even to his laundry business before slipping away into a convoy bound for Iraq that he had no involvement with. These things happen. Workers come and go every day, he said.
Al-Nadi had agreed to meet us for drinks in the lobby of Amman’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, a space so filled with gold and garish fixtures and highly polished marble that it resembled the palace of a nouveau riche king. Al-Nadi’s sunglasses were atop his head, nestled in his tight, thick dark hair, and his gangling, long limbs loosely filled an olive-colored business suit. He carried a protruding belly above the waistline of his trousers, evidencing a fondness for lager.
He was accompanied by two men whom he introduced as his partners. One dressed younger than his years, in designer jeans and a fashionable long-sleeved T-shirt. Al-Nadi called him “Ghaleb.” He was the only one in the trio without a wedding ring. The other had longer hair and a thick mustache that veered toward handlebars at the ends. He wore an ill-fitting suit cut from inexpensive cloth. A bright gold watch hung languidly around his left wrist in the fashion that requires the occasional jiggle of the hand to make it drop below the cuff. Al-Nadi introduced this man as “Abdullah” and sometimes looked his way before answering questions.
Service at the Grand Hyatt tended toward the obsessively attentive in that colonial-era style often displayed in five-star establishments of the Middle East. Waiters streamed over, bearing fresh glasses of beer, clearing the empties the second they were dry, and constantly swapping dirty ashtrays for unsoiled ones. It wasn’t just for show, as al-Nadi could empty a glass of beer in just a few tilts, and each man seemed to light another cigarette the moment he’d tamped out his last.
The men answered questions about their livelihood with hedged statements or hypotheticals, frequently retracting comments and contradicting one another only moments after each had spoken. “Abdullah” seemed most often to lead these retreats.
Were they in the business of delivering workers from poor Asian countries into Iraq to work for the U.S. occupation? Maybe that was a profitable line of business in Jordan right now, they said, and maybe they were involved. Maybe they were, and maybe they weren’t.
As the beer and smoke flowed more freely, al-Nadi increasingly seemed to enjoy being the center of attention for an American journalist, which perhaps explained part of his motivation for agreeing to the meeting. How many other businessmen in Jordan were holding court at the Grand Hyatt for the pages of an American newspaper? The more he drank, the bigger he seemed to feel, and that was a feeling worthy of cultivation.
Did al-Nadi’s cleaning business ever broker foreign workers to firms doing business in Iraq? Yes, al-Nadi said, but usually these were just human loans and did not last very long, maybe only a month or two.
Did they specifically send workers to the company called Daoud and Partners, the firm Mansour had identified as the major Iraq contractor?
Ghaleb jumped in. He said they indeed delivered workers to Daoud.
Immediately, Abdullah became unnerved. “There are some things about our business that we keep even from our wives,” he said.
Yes, the ringless Ghaleb chimed in. “We don’t even tell our mothers.”
Assuming hypothetically that such contracts even existed, they would surely contain clauses demanding confidentiality, Abdullah said, a statement that seemed crafted to remind his partners that they should be more cautious.
I returned frequently to the twelve dead Nepalis by asking slightly different questions about them, but the answers never went far beyond the initial hedged denial from al-Nadi. After one such question, al-Nadi reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket and removed a slender calendar book, the kind banks used to give away for opening a new account. He said that if I wrote down the names of the twelve dead men, he might be persuaded to try to check whatever employment records he could find to see if they had possibly worked for him before wandering off on their own and getting themselves killed in Iraq.
Al-Nadi never expressed or feigned remorse over the executions of the twelve men in the video, but he did say that checking whether they had been in his employ could be useful. After all, he said, “If they were my workers, maybe I should be compensated for losing them.”
A cigarette hung loosely from al-Nadi’s mouth as he strutted out of the lobby bar and to the front of the hotel, where we waited for the valet to bring his car around. Abdullah remained by his side. As the parking attendant pulled up, al-Nadi said he needed to show me something in his car, something I absolutely had to see. He popped the trunk and placed a DVD into a player mounted inside it, an
d we spun around into the rear passenger seats where there were two small screens on the backs of the headrests in front of us. He said he had installed them to quiet his children with cartoons.
A newscast popped up on the screens, and suddenly al-Nadi and “Ghaleb” were in the frame, appearing at some sort of formal meeting. In the car, “Abdullah” leaned in from the open door and, acting as a sort of sycophantic member of his boss’s posse, pointed insistently to the screen at a well-suited man. “You see,” he said, “the ambassador!” Al-Nadi smiled.
The man in the frame was the Philippine ambassador to Jordan. I pretended to be duly impressed to be in the presence of a man who had been in the presence of an ambassador on the television news. The broadcast was in Tagalog, the dominant tongue in the Philippines, and I had no idea what anyone was saying.
I urged al-Nadi to give me a copy of the DVD, which he seemed to think was an excellent idea. “Abdullah” immediately objected. Al-Nadi ignored him, and we spun out of the car and back around to the trunk. Al-Nadi fumbled as he tried to keep a cigarette dangling from his mouth and simultaneously eject the DVD. “Abdullah” grabbed at his arm to physically try to stop him from handing over the disc, but al-Nadi grew angry and firmly shoved his partner’s hand away. “Abdullah” then fell silent.
