by Theo Padnos
“So money was the reason for you coming to Syria? You admit this?” I didn’t want to admit anything. He pressed me. In fact, I had come to Syria to make money.
“I never do anything for money,” I said. “If I had wanted money, I would have stayed home.”
He gave me a dubious look. “But you did not stay home. You must have come for money. Why not admit this?”
“Yes, okay,” I said. “I needed money.”
“Good,” he said. “Very good.” He asked if, in my opinion, anyone at all could come out for the jihad.
“Of course not,” I said. “A mujahid”—one who fights in the jihad—“must have learning from the Koran. He must understand why he does what he does.”
The judge nodded. He looked into the viewfinder in his video camera. “True,” he said. He rubbed his chin. “You’re not a journalist, are you? Not really, right?”
I insisted that I was a journalist. We argued. I had no press card. I had no fixed employer. I knew no other journalists who were currently working in Syria. “Yet you are a journalist, you say. Very well,” he said. “Is there anything else?”
“Will you allow me to show you my articles on the internet?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Is there anything else?”
There was not. He called out to a sentry posted outside his office. “Prepare a room for him downstairs,” he said. The soldier escorted me out of the office, down two flights of stairs, then into a basement cell block. He opened a black steel door. He pushed me through, into a dank closet, about the size of a phone booth, then locked the door. This cell’s previous occupant had left crusts of bread on the floor. A tin dish sat in a corner. The cell reeked of sewage. I stood on a squishy, discolored patch of carpet, the center of which sagged over a hole in the floor.
The soldier told me to lift the carpet when I needed the toilet. He would be in the next room. If I tried to escape, he would shoot me. “Need anything else?” he asked, then walked away.
I stood to the side of the hole. I examined the steel door and the cell’s window, which was about ten feet off the floor. A hatch in the base of the door, like a flap for a cat, seemed big enough to accommodate my head. I knelt on the carpet, then tucked my head under the flap. From the hallway outside my cell, the soldier spoke: “We’ll shoot you,” he said. “You want a bullet?” I withdrew my head. Several minutes later, a tapping from the cell next door to mine drew my attention: “Put out your head, brother,” said a voice.
I poked my head through the flap. The occupant of the cell next door, a middle-aged man whose hair had been neatly trimmed into a white crew cut, poked his head through his flap. He made a gentlemanly smile. “Welcome,” he said. “Where are you from?” His head withdrew and then a boy, about twelve, poked his head through the same flap. As our eyes met, the boy’s face lit up with happiness. “How are you doing?” he whispered. “What is your name? What is the news from your side?”
I asked him what he had been accused of. He made a sheepish grin, then nodded toward the room from which the soldier had threatened me. “We’re Shia,” he whispered. He made a mocking face at the room next door, as if we were naughty students. The guards were rule-bound schoolmasters. The boy was ready for recess. “What did you do?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped?” he said. He gave a surprised laugh. “Us too!”
To my left, the occupants of a larger cell, about the size of a small elevator, which contained about six prisoners, were listening to this dialog. I was just beginning to introduce myself to these people when a guard came to unlock my cell door. He seized my wrist, then escorted me into a hallway in which the mustachioed chief from the upstairs office stood staring, as if stunned. The dark shadow that had fallen over his face told me he had bad, maybe devastating news to convey. In fact, he said nothing. He stepped aside. From the shadows behind him, Abu Osama, Behajat, Mohammed, and a cluster of new comrades—perhaps six people in all—grinned at me. Abu Osama reached out for my hand, as if greeting a long-lost friend. Behajat seized me by the elbow. Abu Osama took the other elbow. We marched up a flight of stairs, through a series of rooms in which soldiers lounged, then outside, into a parking lot. On the courthouse steps, more young men, some in jeans and T-shirts, some dressed for the jihad, with scraps of white cloth bearing the testament of faith around their foreheads, turned to stare at us.
At the rear door of the taxi wreck, Abu Osama put me in the handcuffs I had wriggled out of earlier that morning. People I did not know climbed into the seat next to me. Abu Osama, beside himself with happiness, sat in the front seat. His eyes gleamed.
He would have been through my mobile phone by this point. He would have found the Facebook messages I had written to an acquaintance in Russian. As the car pulled away from the station, he turned to me and patted my knee. “Kak dyela?” he chortled. “Ochen khorosho?” In Arabic, he asked me, “So you work for Russia, too? Iran? Israel? All of them?”
Behajat undid the scarf he wore around his head. He thrust the scarf into the hands of a comrade in the back seat. “Blindfold his eyes,” he said. The comrade seized my head. He wrapped the scarf around my head in a fury, like someone fighting to tie down a spitting cat, then thrust my head toward the floor. Hands punched at my shoulders and at the side of my head. A boot sole pressed itself into the back of my neck.
The car drove slowly. “Nobody talk,” Behajat ordered. The car purred, then picked up speed, and then we were soaring down a highway.
We drove at high speeds for about ten minutes, then came to a stop over crunching gravel. Hands reached into my hair, then dragged me from the car. I remember staggering down a lane, the shouting of my captors—to hurry, to shut up, to run—and then the door to a house was opening. Fists were ripping at my clothing and my hair. I was in bare feet being hurried across a carpet, possibly in a living room. My blindfold slipped enough to allow me a glimpse of a man on a mattress on the floor. He was waking from sleep. He propped himself on his elbow. Above his mattress an enormous black flag, big enough to cover the breadth of a living room wall, bore the testament of faith in an ornate cursive. I held the man’s eyes for an instant, and then I was being pushed through further rooms. A door opened. I was outside and running again, this time with many hands pulling my head by fistfuls of hair.
My feet sank into the dirt. I fell, was dragged to my feet, then ran on. About a hundred meters from the house, in the midst of what I imagined to be a recently plowed field, my captors paused. I felt my legs climbing down into the earth. At the bottom of a tiny flight of steps I was made to kneel. The butt of a gun hit me across my back. I tumbled, headfirst, into soft earth. Above me, there was light. I knew that my captors were up there, on the surface of the earth, crouching at the rim of this pit, but how many of them there were I did not know. Ten? Twenty? I heard the sound of cocking Kalashnikovs. They kicked clumps of earth into the pit. I clenched my eyes shut. So I was to die in a pit in a field? How suddenly one’s fate presents itself, I thought. I hope it’s over quickly, I told myself. But how will my parents ever find out what has become of me? I raised my elbows over my head. Probably, I thought, the bullets will not hurt. Because no bullets came, I listened to the men above me jeering. “Bring the camera,” a voice called out from somewhere above me. A second, faraway voice, possibly answering from the house through which I had just been trundled, replied, “Where is the camera? Which one?”
As the camera issue was being sorted, the men lobbed insults at me. I was an enemy of God, a devil, filth. Their boots kicked splashes of earth over my body. “Hey, you. Animal!” a voice shouted, in a tone used to frighten dogs in the street. “You comfortable?” Another person climbed into the pit with me. He slammed the butt of his rifle into my chest. He kicked at my legs and thighs, then climbed out. From the lip of the pit, he launched himself through the air. He landed with both feet on my chest, balanced for a moment, then stomped his feet down on my
elbows and shoulders, as if he meant to pound my body deeper into the earth. This soldier wanted me to call him “sir.” He wanted me to tell him that I had come to Syria to spy, that my name was Spy (and Jew-American and Animal and Filth), and that I would soon be in hell.
“Yes, my name is Spy,” I told him.
He slammed a rifle butt into my chest. “Your name is Spy, what?” he asked.
More blows from the rifle butt came. Eventually, I caught on. “Spy, sir!” I called out.
“Good!” he said.
“And a Jew-American?”
“Yes, Jew-American, sir!” I called out.
This person, whose voice, I was sure, had been with me over breakfast, as we listened to a pop song about love, asked me if I liked the taste of dirt. He—or someone—must have had a shovel. Heavy showers of dirt poured over my stomach. They splashed over my legs and covered my feet. “Eat,” voices told me. “Very good Syrian earth. You like?”
As the ordeal dragged on, a fake argument broke out among my tormentors over whether or not my life was worth the cost of a bullet. “But the bullet is twenty-five Syrian liras,” said one voice. “Please. Give him the knife.” A voice screamed: “Animal! Hey, devil! The knife in the neck you want?”
Another voice countered: “But he is a polite little boy, isn’t he? Yes. So give him a bullet.”
Moments later one of the tormentors again climbed into the pit. He bent down, then whispered into my ear, “Shh. Don’t say a word. I am from the Air Force Intelligence.” He said that he knew of a way to deliver me into the care of his friends in the Syrian government. It would cost me. Did I want his help?
“Yes,” I murmured.
“It’ll cost a thousand Syrian liras,” he whispered—about $16. “Gimme quick, okay?” I did not reply. “Wait,” he said. “What? You’re all out?” He climbed out of the pit. He addressed his friends: “Says he’s got nothing. Not a penny. Busted flat. What a time to go broke!” The group burst into laughter.
There came a period during my ordeal in this pit when Abu Osama and Behajat put religious questions to me. Behajat announced to the six or seven people crouching at the lip of this hole that I had memorized bits of the Koran. “Recite!” he ordered. I recited a pair of lines. “You see?” he said to the others, as if my having memorized the Koran were the crime for which I was being punished. He wanted to know if I believed in the angels of God. “I don’t know,” I screamed. Did I believe in the reality of paradise? I didn’t know.
“Do you believe in the Prophet of God?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I screamed.
So I had lived in Yemen and Syria for years, he observed, had memorized bits of the Koran, and never, not once, had I wished to enter the religion of Islam?
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Devil,” a voice replied. More dirt dribbled into the pit.
“Who is the Prophet of God?” a voice asked.
“Mohammed?” I answered.
“Not Jesus?” said the voice.
“I don’t know,” I said. A heavy shovelful of earth spilled over my forehead. Much later, I discovered that a few weeks after he inflicted this torture on me, Abu Osama posted a video to his Facebook page, which recapitulated this scene down to the smallest scraps of dialog. The video, an animation with cartoonlike characters and an orchestral soundtrack, was produced by a website called IslamExplained.com. What shall become of the unbeliever in the moments after his death? According to a legend known as the Trial of the Grave, a pair of angels bearing mighty hammers will come to the unbeliever just as he is settling himself into his crypt. An interrogation will begin. After the unbeliever has admitted the faithlessness with which he has gone about his life, the angels will smite him, over and over, until his body sinks away into the abyss beneath the grave. I suspect now that Abu Osama and his friends’ real purpose on that afternoon wasn’t so much to punish me for spying or for my lifelong refusal to become a Muslim but to make the old myths come true. I doubt Abu Osama knew much about the old myths. Yet echoes of them would have come down to him through the animated videos in his social network. Now and then, the religious authorities in his life would have reminded him of the imminence of a reckoning with these angels. Rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked, this pair of angels assures that a principle of justice, however invisible, undergirds the universe. The hour of reckoning, this legend promises, cannot be escaped.
In the Syria in which Abu Osama grew up, it would have been difficult to discern the operation of a principle of justice. I suspect now that Abu Osama and his friends were out to change all of that. They meant to make the cheats and the swindlers pay. They wanted punishment for the lawless, and they didn’t want to wait until the afterlife to see justice upheld. Thus their little pit, and the drama they staged within. I suspect I wasn’t the first sinner to whom these wannabe angels appeared, nor was I the last.
Later, a voice I didn’t recognize made a halfhearted effort to inquire into the course of my career as a CIA officer. Where had I been trained, the person screamed at me, how many people had I killed, and how much had the CIA paid me? “I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!” I replied to every question. This voice tried to persuade me that he had found concrete proof of my connection to the CIA in my wallet. “Your card,” the person said. “We tried it out on the internet. It opens up straight to the Pentagon.”
“The green card?” I murmured. It was my debit card. I tried to explain to the voice what a debit card is.
“You lie,” the voice replied. “Shut up, Animal!” Clumps of earth fell across the blindfold.
It was the cocking and recocking of the Kalashnikovs that made me feel the end was seconds away. It was also the rage in the men’s voices. Of course it was the little avalanches of dirt, and the fact of being bound up, inside a pit. Somehow, the rage in their voices frightened me more than the rest of it. They screamed as if they themselves were being killed. I tried to imagine that I was about to embark on a voyage. I hoped it would take time to reach my destination, that as I traveled I would watch the fields and the rivers floating by, and that when I materialized wherever I was going I would be surrounded by friends.
During my first moments in their hole, I had kept my elbows raised over my face. Now I told myself that elbows do not block bullets. I rested my hands and their cuffs on my chest. I had tried to respond to questions, as if a right answer might help me. Now I stopped talking. I wanted them to get on with it.
In the late afternoon, they brought me out of their pit. A menu of tortures floated in their imaginations, apparently. The next item on their list involved locking my neck and knees inside a used tire, then beating the soles of my feet. After the tire came a CIA-agent-appropriate water torture. There were handcuffs, a scaffolding that had been erected over an irrigation pool, and ridiculous questions (“Why did you join the CIA?” “Where did your training take place?” “For how many years did it last?”) that were to be answered as they poured water over my face.
Later, when the sun had gone down and I was shivering in a heap beside their irrigation pool, they handcuffed my hands around a post. They cinched my blindfold down so tightly that I had no vision whatsoever. I sat cross-legged at their pole and listened as voices and footsteps clustered around me. Someone brought me a bowl of labneh. A hand pushed a glass of tea into my hands. But I was trembling too much, was too cold, and was too tightly locked to the pole to do anything but pour the tea down the front of my shirt. I tried to eat their labneh. I had no appetite and couldn’t see the spoon or the dish. When I gave up, the captors understood my unwillingness to eat to be a CIA resistance technique. They forced the spoon into my mouth. I spit it out. There was much screaming into my ear. Someone reached into my hair, seized it by the roots, then throttled my head back and forth as if the person felt he were holding a coconut, filled with milk, that wanted to be shaken about before it could
be cracked open. The shaking made me dizzy. The dizziness made me nauseous. But they were screaming at me. I had to eat.
Toward midnight, it became apparent to me that a crowd was gathering. The many singsongy ring tones of the cell phones, the overlapping conversations, and the footsteps near the pole to which I was attached filled my head with images of tormentors streaming through the house, then collecting on the patio by the pool. The crowd seemed to have materialized out of the night. Somebody would have sent out an internet bulletin. Perhaps the news of my arrest had gone out over the radio waves. Ostensibly, a CIA officer had been caught. The men came to poke the barrels of their rifles into my chest and to ask me the sorts of questions revolutionary interrogators might ask captured agents: “Who do you know in Damascus?” “What are their names?” “Who sent you?” Nobody, it seemed to me, took more than a moment’s worth of interest in my ostensible crime—spying for the CIA. I was guilty of something deeper, I felt. It seemed to me that the men had gathered for a ritual of some kind, that it was to involve my humiliation, possibly my killing and that as I was being killed, the onlookers meant to celebrate. I felt as though I had stumbled into the clutches of a tribe of hunters. I was a buffalo that had fallen into their trap. So God had sent them a gift. Now they meant to tear the gift to pieces, and to sing and dance and smile as my blood drained into the earth.
So it seemed to me at the time. Probably the crowd was considerably smaller in fact than it was in my imagination, but I was drifting away from reality at this point. I imagined that the puddle of liquid in which I was sitting was my own blood. I felt that whatever had been done to my feet had left them too shredded and too pulpy to touch. Later, however, the handcuff chain happened to catch in my toes. They were in fine shape, I discovered, as I rubbed them with my fingers—normal toes. My underwear was soaked. I was certain it was soaked with blood. But I poked my fingers down beneath my waist enough for them to get wet. I smelled them, then put my fingers to my mouth: water.
