The Girl From Kathmandu

by Cam Simpson

  Fryszman drove Kamala to a store not far from her hotel, where they bought a stuffed panda bear and a gray teddy bear with a black nose for her to take back to Nepal for Kritika. Kamala had turned the tide.

  15

  April 2013

  Kathmandu to Houston

  Inside a dusty file room on the western edge of Kathmandu, Ganesh Gurung furiously combed through stack after stack and drawer after drawer stuffed with paper records. Agnieszka Fryszman had relentlessly driven the Nepalese academic to locate any other men who had been recruited to Jordan in the same group as Jeet and his eleven murdered compatriots. Evidence Fryszman had developed showed that the twelve were part of a bigger group of Nepalese men fed into Iraq through the same pipeline. The pressure Fryszman was under got passed on to Gurung over long-distance phone calls as she hammered him to come up with witnesses who had shared the twelve men’s path to Iraq under KBR’s contract with the U.S. military. Although he was among his nation’s most respected public intellectuals, Gurung was not a trained or experienced investigator, and he’d exhausted nearly every possibility he could think of until, almost in desperation, he decided to physically comb through all the chaotically organized files at Nepal’s Department of Foreign Employment. As he stared at the cabinets and stacks, he faced the almost paralyzing realization that more than one hundred thousand foreign labor permits had been issued each year since 2001. This was orders of magnitude beyond searching a haystack for a needle, but it was all he could do, and it would be worth doing even if he came up with nothing. At least then he could tell Fryszman that he had left no piece of paper unturned, and perhaps she would relent.

  On his sixth day in the dust-filled room, and on the brink of giving up, Gurung looked down through his thick black-framed reading glasses and saw the words “Moon Light” on a file folder. Because the documents were organized roughly by the date when they had been submitted, he jumped to one of the last files in the group, which contained paperwork for dozens of men from across Nepal recruited and sent to Jordan in the same group as Jeet and the others. Gurung stared wide-eyed as he thumbed through the papers, which were not only for the twelve but for dozens of others: contracts promising jobs at Le Royal Hotel in Jordan, demand letters from Eyad Mansour, and the rest of the transnational deceptions used to get the men off their farms and into Iraq. Gurung copied the documents, scurried to another government office, one that issued passports, and within days came up with passport application records containing information he could use to start locating as many of these men as possible, so he could speak to them.

  Alerted to Gurung’s find, Anthony DiCaprio boarded a plane and rushed to Kathmandu.

  In early April, just days ahead of the deadline for filing their final brief on KBR’s motion for summary judgment, DiCaprio began meeting at Gurung’s office with men who had been fed through the same pipeline as the twelve. In all, lawyers for the plaintiffs took sworn statements from seven men who had been delivered to the joint operations of Daoud and KBR at Al Asad and other U.S. military bases—including Fallujah, where they landed just before the bloody and infamous Second Battle of Fallujah; the nearby Al Taqaddum Air Base, which served Fallujah; and the Kirkuk Air Base. Even beyond the airtight general evidence that thousands of foreign workers like the twelve had been brought to Iraq under conditions that U.S. investigators deemed human trafficking, Fryszman now had specific evidence showing a systematic and organized pipeline feeding Nepalese men to U.S. operations, a pipeline that began with Moon Light and ended with KBR. It was exactly the kind of evidence KBR’s lawyers had hammered Fryszman for lacking since the first hearing.

  DiCaprio met Biplav Bhatta, who had been just twenty-four years old in 2004 when he replied to Moon Light’s ad for cooks to work at a hotel in Jordan. After buying his job the way everyone else did, Bhatta was put on a plane in July 2004, landed in Amman, and was met at the airport by men with a “Moon Light” sign. They took his passport and drove him to a compound, where he was ushered through a gate, down concrete stairs, and into a room with at least two dozen other Nepalese men inside. The door was locked behind him, from the outside. “We were all housed in two foul, overcrowded rooms without windows,” Bhatta told DiCaprio. “The room where we had to cook our food, which was one of the two rooms, was also the bathroom. The toilet would clog and overflow with feces from overuse because there were so many people sharing one toilet.” The Nepalis there included Jeet and at least three others from among the twelve that he could remember: Ramesh Khadka, Prakash Adhikari, and Mangal Limbu. Bhatta told DiCaprio that Arab men “would come to the compound once a day or so and throw food [in] from the outside,” or, at other times, would order the Nepalis to keep quiet. He added that the Arab men would put their fingers to their lips in a shushing motion and then feign tearing up the Nepalis’ passports or would even make throat-slitting gestures.

  Because Bhatta could speak some English, he said that he tried to act as a sort of ambassador for the Nepalis, communicating with the Arab men who occasionally came to deliver food or menace them, asking the men specifically about the jobs the Nepalis had purchased. The men, he said, replied, “in broken English, that our papers and jobs were being processed.” After five days in the foul and overcrowded rooms, the Nepalis were visited by two Arab men who entered and started calling out some of their names. They ordered Bhatta and a handful of others to gather their things, telling them they were headed “to our work site.” Jeet and his compatriots “remained behind, since their names were not called,” Bhatta remembered.

  After a ten-hour car drive, Bhatta arrived at what he would later learn was “an American military base in Iraq called Camp Fallujah.” He repeatedly told supervisors for Daoud and KBR that he and the others were supposed to be working in Jordan, not Iraq, but the men were told they had no choice. “I was frightened by the DP [Daoud and Partners] men and knew that we were trapped,” he said, adding that he and the other Nepalis with him didn’t have their passports, “and we were in the middle of a war zone.” He also told DiCaprio, “From the moment I arrived at Fallujah, I told KBR people almost every day that my friends and I wanted to return to our families in Nepal, that we had been promised jobs in Jordan, had been brought to Iraq against our will, and that we wanted our passports back.” KBR supervisors allegedly told the Nepalis that these issues were between them and Daoud, or they “would simply say I was there to work,” Bhatta said. Angry over their plight, the men went on strike, refusing to work and demanding to be sent home immediately. Bhatta told DiCaprio that the strike ended “because KBR and DP refused to give us food until we went back to work,” adding, “After about five days we were too hungry to continue our protest.” DiCaprio interviewed others Ganesh Gurung had found, all of whom either traveled with the twelve or were held with them in Amman. Everyone was fed into the same human supply chain.

  I met Bhatta myself in Kathmandu three years after DiCaprio. I showed him a photo array made up of random candid pictures of Arab men, some that I had copied from the Internet and others of friends of mine from the Middle East—along with a candid picture of Amin Mansour, the man first introduced to me as “Abdullah” so long ago in Amman. I turned my laptop toward Bhatta and asked him to identify anyone he recognized. Without hesitation, he laughed and pointed to my computer screen. “There’s Amin,” he said, scoffing at a photo of Amin Mansour smoking a cigarette. He also identified pictures of Mansour’s property at No. 58 Malfuf Street in Amman as the place where he had been held for five days in two foul, overcrowded rooms, and where Jeet and the others remained for a total of nearly fifty days.

  Sworn statements from Bhatta and the other men Ganesh Gurung had located landed in Washington moments before Fryszman ran up against her final deadline for answering KBR’s motion to kill the case. Including the misconduct charges, the replies to KBR’s attacks totaled 1,835 pages and were made without full discovery of KBR’s records she had sought and without deposing a single witness. The federal antitraffick
ing law, which had been toughened specifically because of these twelve men, imposed culpability on “whoever knowingly recruits, harbors, transports, provides, or obtains, by any means, any person for labor or services” deemed to involve forced and coerced labor, language that a federal appeals court had found to criminalize a broad spectrum of conduct befitting the supply chain nature of the crime itself. Fryszman’s biggest hurdle in keeping the families’ case alive was to show Judge Ellison that there was a genuine issue of material fact to present to a jury about whether KBR’s conduct was “knowing” in regard to human trafficking within its operations for the U.S. military in Iraq. KBR’s lawyers had never disputed that its executives knew about trafficking allegations in their human supply chain; they said only that it was impossible to pinpoint when they knew, and whether they knew before Jeet and the others were massacred. This is precisely why Fryszman had worked so hard to get into the company’s files, and perhaps why KBR had fought and stalled for so long to keep her out.

  Still, Fryszman and Hoffman believed they had gotten enough to defeat KBR’s summary judgment motion and get a trial in front of a jury, including some internal KBR e-mails and documents the company had handed over, and others between Daoud and KBR that they had received from Daoud.

  Their case to Judge Ellison began in the main staging area for the initial invasion of Iraq, at the logistical hub for KBR and the entire invasion force, which was a base in Kuwait called Camp Arifjan. On June 3, 2004, a captain in the U.S. Army’s Central Command gave a damning memo to KBR about the treatment of foreign nationals being sent into the war zone from Arifjan, just as the insurgency was seriously intensifying its attacks on contractors. Given how vital these men were to the operation, he cited “both a moral imperative and [a] self-interest to require a minimum standard of care for the employees working for our contractors,” not just in Kuwait but also across Iraq. His top concern in the three-page memo: “Drivers hired by brokers to work in Kuwait [are] being financially blackmailed to cross the border against their will.” Military officials also told KBR that when the drivers purchased their jobs, they had been promised they would be in Kuwait, not Iraq, and that those who didn’t want to risk their lives were fired with the debts they had still hanging over their heads. The memo also said that contractor deaths and injuries were not being reported for compensation. Army officials then called a meeting and wrote on the agenda, “Recruiting Practices and Free Will.”

  On July 1, 2004, Robert Gerlach, the KBR purchasing and procurement manager over Al Asad and the entire Anbar Province, the very same man Fryszman and Hoffman had been trying to depose, e-mailed a top Daoud executive. It was just three days before Jeet and some of his countrymen landed in Amman. Gerlach’s subject line was “Now what?”

  Without comment or question, Gerlach cut-and-pasted a BBC News report that he said KBR supervisors on the ground in Fallujah had raised with him. It alleged that Indian men who worked for Daoud had been recruited to work in Jordan but had now been held against their will in Fallujah for two months, and the company refused to send them home. Gerlach did not seek to investigate these allegations himself but merely wrote the Daoud executive to “give me feedback,” and nothing more. She replied the next morning—“Dear Bob”—claiming the Indian men had “signed papers agreeing to work in Iraq,” but promised that they would be immediately transported to Baghdad and then sent home. Gerlach does not appear to have looked into any of the claims, or initiated any kind of inquiry by anyone else, or tried to speak to any of the Indian workers himself, although he did forward the exchange to other KBR executives. Within days of those e-mails, Biplav Bhatta and his compatriots, too, would have been working under Daoud and KBR in Fallujah, where, they would later allege, they immediately started complaining to anyone they could find, including KBR supervisors, about their passports being taken, about being deceived, about being brought to Iraq against their will—all despite paperwork from Moon Light promising them hotel jobs in Jordan—allegations virtually identical to those contained in news reports regarding the Indian men. In fact, each of the men Gurung located for DiCaprio said in his own sworn statement that he had raised such issues with either Daoud or KBR, or both, before Daoud’s broker in Amman organized the ill-fated convoy for Jeet and the others. Some of the twelve dead Nepalis had said the same when the terrorists filmed them giving their final statements before the black banner.

  Fryszman also had found KBR workers who were posted at Al Asad in April, May, and June 2004 and gave sworn statements saying it was common knowledge among KBR employees that third-country nationals had been trafficked to the base. An employee named Terri Hobbs said in a sworn statement that the treatment she observed was “offensive to me as an American” and was of an ilk “no American company should permit to occur.” Mistreatment and human trafficking “were spoken of so often and in so many contexts by so many people, including the American KBR workers, that no person working with or near foreign workers, including KBR managers, could have remained ignorant of these claims and concerns,” she said. Another KBR employee, Rebecca Durham, said there “was a culture of fear among KBR employees, and it was generally understood that employees should not discuss the mistreatment of TCNs.” Hobbs named the KBR supervisor who she said had told her “she should shut up” about the issue because anyone reporting it to the military “would be fired.”

  Three weeks after the twelve were killed, the KBR LOGCAP project manager for Iraq, a man named Robert Hill, fired off an e-mail to KBR executives saying he had found out that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, was going to investigate KBR’s human supply chain, based on the concerns of a Marine lieutenant colonel on the base named Jay Huston. The First Marine Expeditionary Force held operational control of the base, and Hill wanted to shut down their investigation fast. “It has come to my attention that NCIS has been asked to conduct an investigation of our subcontractors’ hiring practices. LTC Huston has decided that D&P has slave labor working for them. I need your input ASAP, please get [another Marine commander] involved. We need to squash this immediately. He has no business in our operations.” Another e-mail a few weeks later, this one from the KBR regional security chief, warned of the same thing, repeating that a senior U.S. Marine commander believed that Daoud was “running slave labor camps” for KBR at Al Asad.

  Duane Banks, a contractor hired to audit KBR’s bookkeeping practices, arrived at the base in August 2004. In his own sworn statement, he told Fryszman that “shortly after arriving at Al Asad, many people approached me to tell me about the abuse and mistreatment of TCNs at Al Asad that they had witnessed,” including that workers had been held against their will and passports had been confiscated. He said that many of his sources were KBR or Daoud employees, and they often “appeared at my quarters, uninvited, at night, explaining that they feared KBR or DP would retaliate against them for making such disclosures to me.” Although he had no background in human trafficking or forced and coerced labor, Banks was so outraged that he wrote a long, damning e-mail summarizing these issues about six weeks into his work on the base. His e-mail quickly ricocheted up the food chain at KBR, eventually landing in the in-box of a senior executive named Thomas Quigley, the man in charge of the overall LOGCAP operation in Iraq. Quigley and other KBR executives turned to their top procurement man in Anbar Province to respond to Banks’s concerns: Robert Gerlach.

  Gerlach wrote a scathing attack on Banks for his bosses, and called for Banks to be removed from the base. “You may read into this what you choose, but this is nothing but social editorial rhetoric unworthy of response. Tom [Quigley], as you have seen from my earlier email I want this guy removed . . . he is out of his lane so far,” Gerlach wrote. Banks said in his sworn statement that Gerlach then “came to my quarters, uninvited, agitated, and angry. Mr. Gerlach asked me, ‘What the hell is going on?’” Banks said he informed Gerlach that KBR employees had visited him after hours to make these allegations, and had levied allegations about Ger
lach himself. “Mr. Gerlach responded by saying that he wanted me out of Iraq.” Banks almost immediately was flown to Dubai, where he was fired.

  “Duane is being pulled,” a KBR executive said in an e-mail to Gerlach, copying Quigley. “I gave instructions this morning.” The e-mail also proposed sending someone to Al Asad to speak with Gerlach, so he could personally “walk them through all your research so this [controversy about TCNs] can be closed once and for all. Can we do that?” It also said, “As you know, Bob, this isn’t the first time the issue of TCN treatment has come up. You get it from various sources. It also seems to come up every so often in the media”—he added that several e-mail chains about the issues raised by journalists were being circulated within KBR. Gerlach replied that he was happy with the proposal to guide someone through why he believed TCNs were well treated, adding that it was important for them to be treated with respect. In the very same sentence, however, he also said that “these kinds of allegations really need to be put to bed in such a manner that we do not revisit them each time a ‘social crusader’ comes on the scene.”

  Fryszman packed all this and more into the case she made to Judge Ellison that KBR had had enough evidence of what was happening for him to find that its conduct was “knowing” or perhaps willfully blind. Still, there were significant allegations she did not know about inside KBR’s records regarding the man whom senior executives had turned to repeatedly to deal with allegations about Daoud and trafficked workers, the man who proposed putting any and all questions to bed, once and for all. It was the same man KBR had first identified as a key potential witness in the case when it was trying to get the lawsuit moved from California to Texas, and the same man it would not let Fryszman and Hoffman speak with: Robert Gerlach.