by Theo Padnos
Inside the water, she drifted for a moment, then began to panic. Because the current was carrying her toward a shelf of overhanging ice, she reached both hands into the air. She snatched at the ice. But a cascade of black water was dragging objects much bigger than her—tractor tires, tree trunks, refrigerators—into the darkness beneath the ice shelf. The current pulled her under.
I woke from this vision with a start. I reflected on it, pushed it away, forgot about it, then examined it again.
It seemed to me that the broken-down dam was my life before Syria. It was my dying car at home, my abandoned writing projects, and my career in journalism. As an edifice, it was in an unsteady state, yes. But it existed. It had held me up.
The summery dress was my defense against the elements in Syria. A proper reporter comes into a war zone with a combat vest, fixers, editors in New York, something. I had wandered into Syria in flip-flops.
The outstretched hands in my Vermont scene described my helplessness before my captors. In their torture room, my hands had been cuffed behind my back. As they flogged my feet, I waved my hands at their cables. The first time this happened, their cables crushed my fingernails into bloody fragments. The third time it happened, my fingernails were gone. Still, I wriggled my fingers at their cables.
As for the flood, this was the current of electrocutions, songs, screams, and chanting soldiers that washed through the corridor in the evenings outside my cell. It was the old insurgency in Iraq joining forces with the new one in Syria. It was longing for revenge, plus garden-variety adolescent discontent in Europe, plus the terror that comes to a population under siege, at the mercy of the barrel bombs.
* * *
Sometime in January, the al Qaeda spokesman dropped by my cell for a visit. I understood then why this person’s underlings so rarely spoke in his presence. He lived in a private fortress of incandescent rage. When he spoke to me, he screamed. “Alive! Alive!” he called out that morning. “We’ve caught an American alive!”
I know now that at the time the spokesman was a rising star in the international jihad. According to his Wikipedia biography, this ISIS commander-to-be, Mohammed al-Adnani, began his career as an apprentice to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during the war against the Americans in Iraq. During al-Adnani’s time in an American prison there, he seems to have bonded with the future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Later on, after al-Adnani had broken with Jebhat al-Nusra, it was he who led the European fighters in their jihad against the West. “If you are not able to find a bomb or a bullet, then smash his [the unbeliever’s] head with a rock,” he urged the readers of the ISIS fanzine Dabiq in 2014, “or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.”
In Syria, I knew him by the nickname his underlings had for him, Abu Taha. That January, when Abu Taha was done exalting over having caught an American alive, he strode to the blanket on which I was sitting, tore the balaclava from his face, beamed a radiant smile at me, and then asked, in an innocent tone of voice, if I remembered him. In fact, I had caught glimpses of his face. I had seen it well enough when, three months earlier, he alighted from his SUV in the midst of the war zone to punish me for having pushed his blindfold away from my eyes.
Mostly, though, I remembered him by his voice. During his interrogations, he had burbled into my ear. His speeches had gone on for hours. I listened to him ordering people about, tiptoeing to the chair on which I sat during his interrogations, withdrawing his knife, then pressing its blade against my throat. As he pressed, he whispered into my ear. I wasn’t inclined to forget this voice.
On the morning he came to visit me in the eye hospital, he wanted the underlings there to know that he had done some Google research on me. “If you put his name in the internet,” he called out to the half-dozen attendants accompanying him that morning, “you’ll see he has been in Yemen. He has published a book about it called… called what?” He turned to me. “What was the name of your stupid book?”
My stupid book had been called Undercover Muslim. In it, I wrote, truthfully, I thought at the time, about what one learns as a student in the Salafi academies in Yemen. I hadn’t loved the title. I had, however, loved the idea of selling books.
I didn’t bother trying to explain myself to Abu Taha. I said that I had written a book called By the Light of the Crescent Moon. To Abu Taha, himself the author of several books, my title didn’t ring a bell. He turned to his underlings. Could any of them recall the title of my book? They could not. An underling in his thirties who was taller and more confident than the others picked up Abu Taha’s line of questioning: “So you have been spying on our brothers in Yemen?”
I denied it. Abu Taha shrugged. He launched into a new diatribe. I had been a spy in Yemen, he said, had come to Syria in search of al Qaeda, and now I meant to spread further lies about al Qaeda in America. I would see soon enough, he promised, just what the mujahideen had in store for the spies of America. For several minutes, he ranted for several minutes in this manner.
When he ran out of things to say to me, he turned to his attendants. They had collected in a corner, to the right of the door of my cell. “So we have an American alive,” he said again. “He’s alive, praise God!”
Was he pleased because he imagined he could swap a single living American for a thousand terrorists, as Hamas managed to do when they released Gilad Shalit? Or because my being alive meant Abu Taha could enjoy the pleasure of killing me? In the hours after he left my cell, I debated the matter with myself. I couldn’t decide. Because the hospital was a large structure in the midst of a war zone, while the library in which he first imprisoned me was in a farmhouse somewhere, far from the war, I assumed him to be a field commander. I assumed that the real bosses were upstairs somewhere, in a suite of doctors’ offices on the hospital’s upper floors, planning out their war. I told myself that my fate was in their hands, that Abu Taha was merely a blusterer who, thankfully, kept himself to the provinces. He will continue to forget the title of my Undercover Muslim book, I told myself, and none of his underlings will Google my name. If somehow this could be true, I hoped, and if Abu Taha’s discovery of my having written a book about Yemen never worked its way up the chain of command, the book would be forgotten. All would be well.
* * *
Later that January, the hospital commanders brought a photojournalist from Long Island named Matt Schrier to my cell. During the preceding weeks, Matt had embedded himself in a Free Syrian Army unit in Aleppo. He had been arrested on New Year’s Day during the course of a taxi ride that he hoped would take him from the battle zone, in Aleppo, to the Turkish border. The men who arrested him brought him to the eye hospital’s basement. Here, they confiscated his cameras, brought in native English speakers to interrogate him, accused him of nothing in particular, then remanded him to a solitary confinement cell. After twenty days alone, feeling himself going crazy, he resolved to draw the attention of the authorities. He spoke no Arabic. His English-speaking interrogators had disappeared. His strategy was to bang his head against the door of his cell, to scream, and to inquire what was wrong, to beg to be shot. The guards brought him to an office. They seated him in a chair, gave him a glass of tea, and spoke calmly to him. He was under investigation, he was told. If it should turn out that he had violated no laws, he would be free to go.
Shortly after this conversation, the hospital administration decided to move him into my cell. On the night they brought him to me, there was a power cut in the hospital. My cell was as dark as a cave at the center of the Earth. When the door opened, a little crowd of voices seemed to spill into the cell. Some of the voices spoke in broken English, some in Arabic, and one of them sounded like it had come from Long Island.
During those moments, I squinted into the Jebhat al-Nusra flashlights. Matt had wrapped one of the hospital blankets around his waist. He seemed to be wearing it as a skirt. Was this a futah—a sarong-like wrap—as men
in Yemen often wear? He shouted, almost if he were shouting at friends in a locker room, toward figures whose faces were shrouded in darkness. He seemed to know their first names. Would Mohammed fetch his other blankets, he wanted to know? What about his woolen cap. “Can you get my water bottle, too?” he asked. Because of the sarong, the darkness, and the manic kind of rapport Matt seemed to have established with this entourage of Jebhat al-Nusra guards, I assumed at first, that he was one of them.
As soon as the two of us were alone, however, he began a monologue. No, our captors did not belong to al Qaeda, he explained. “We’re in an Islamic court,” he said. The prisoners in the cells along the corridor were rapists and drug dealers. So one of the men who had escorted him to my cell, a civilian, apparently, with whom Matt had friendly relations, had told him. Most of the other prisoners, said Matt, were Syrian Arab Army POWs.
Since cameras and business cards on which the word “photographer” was printed had been found in his possession during his arrest, our captors, he said, knew him to be a journalist. They weren’t angry with him, hadn’t hit him or tortured him, and were currently busy confirming the facts he had given during his interrogation. He had persuaded himself that the interrogators would soon bring the results of their investigation before a judge. Since he had done nothing wrong, and since he was sure the interrogators would communicate this fact to a judge, he would, he felt, be on his way to Turkey soon. From Turkey, he would fly back to California, where he had lately rented an apartment. He meant to abandon photojournalism as a career idea. It had brought him considerable bad luck and no money. As soon as he got back to LA, he would focus on his screenplays. His true talent, he felt, lay in screenwriting.
At a pause in his monologue, I told Matt that I was pretty sure we were being held by Jebhat al-Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. I said that I had lately been tortured. I admitted that during the torture, I had confessed to spying for the CIA. A moment of silence opened up between us. I could feel him staring into the darkness. At length, he asked me if I thought I was going to be killed. I stammered. I considered the matter as if for the first time. I stared at the darkness for a few moments myself, and then I sighed. “I dunno,” I said.
“But you confessed?” he asked. “Why?”
I began a discussion about my state of mind during the torture but couldn’t find the right words, lost my way, and then lost interest in explaining myself. If this person cannot understand why a prisoner might confess under torture, I thought, I’m not going to go into it.
Matt began a new monologue. Our captors could not be al Qaeda, as I seemed to think they were, he announced, because the real al Qaeda would have killed us already. No, our captors were simply Muslims—obviously very devout ones—who wished to bring Islamic law to the rebel-held areas of Aleppo. He knew all about the real al Qaeda, he said. Bin Laden, 9/11, Zarqawi, the beheading of contractors in Iraq and Daniel Pearl in… where was it? He couldn’t remember. Anyway, we were dealing with a different kind of animal.
“Yes,” I said. “The Syrian branch of al Qaeda.”
“Would you stop saying that?” he said. He felt I had no idea what I was talking about. The proof of my idiocy was that I had confessed to being a CIA agent. I had all but dug my own grave. He, on the other hand, enjoyed the confidence of our captors. They positively liked him. As soon as the investigators briefed the judge, he would be set free.
During the first hour of this lecture, I kept silent. Perhaps, he’s right, I thought to myself. But the more he talked, the more obvious it was to me that, having no prior experience of Syria, Islam, or the Arabic language, Matt could not see the most basic facts about our world. In his blindness, he spun out fantasies for himself. Was he doing this because he was afraid? Too stubborn to see? I couldn’t decide if it would be wiser to clue him in or wiser to leave him to his fantasies. What would be best for him? For us? I wasn’t sure.
My circumspection did not last. Within hours my tactless side had won the day. “You’ve got the facts all wrong,” I told him. No, he countered, his facts were right. Mine were wrong. Okay, I decided, after we had been through several rounds of this argument, if he refuses to listen, what is the purpose of talking?
It took us about twenty hours of on-again, off-again arguing to properly despise one another. By the morning of our second day together, he had taken to acting out the screenplays he had written—and memorized—about juvenile delinquency on Long Island. To him, the screenplays, of which there were twenty, were his proudest achievement. But they were full of people being beaten and shot. I couldn’t bear to listen. As he recited, I stuffed my fingers in my ears. I looked away. He took my dislike of the screenplays as a rejection of all he had achieved in life, of his very identity. In the evenings, when the guards brought us our nightly ration of bread and olives, he would turn his eyes to them as if they could appreciate how excruciating it was for him to be locked into a cell with a priggish, unsmiling person like me. He would search the guards’ faces. “How ya doing?” he would say. They would not reply. “As you can probably tell,” he would say, gesturing at me and grimacing, “me and Shithead over there don’t really get along.”
The guards, most of whom were teenagers, would stare. Sometimes, they would whisper to one another in Arabic: “Which one is the spy?” one of them would say or “What is that one saying?” or “Are they really Americans?”
Toward the middle of February, the hospital authorities brought a Moroccan jihadi, Abu Sofiane, to our cell. For a few days, the arrival of a third person relieved the tension Matt and I could only make worse. Abu Sofiane had been arrested on a quiet afternoon, about a month earlier, in the Aleppo suburb of Anadan. He had gone to a Jebhat al-Nusra office there to volunteer himself as a medic and a fighter. After a meeting with a commander, he emerged into the street. A pair of Jebhat al-Nusra fighters followed him to the car in which he and a friend had driven to the office. As he was getting into this car, the Jebhat al-Nusra fighters accosted him, told him that he was under arrest, and when he resisted, one of them shot him through the thigh. He was packed into the trunk of a second car. An hour or so later, his limbs were being lashed to a metal bed frame in the basement of the eye hospital. During the following four weeks, the Jebhat al-Nusra authorities did not allow him to move from this bed frame. A “doctor”—or, anyway, a Jebhat al-Nusra partisan of some kind—had wrapped Abu Sofiane’s thigh in an Ace bandage. His wound received no other treatment. He peed through a catheter. When the guards brought him to our cell, he staggered forward, hopped about a bit, then collapsed in a heap. A few minutes later, I was unwrapping the bandage that covered his wound. His thigh had swollen up to the size of a watermelon. The skin around that wound was a thin membrane of flesh beneath which a soup of black-and-yellow liquid rippled. As I unwound the bandage, a gush of pus poured onto the blanket.
Somehow, Abu Sofiane had convinced himself, as Matt had convinced himself, that the Jebhat al-Nusra high command liked him. In his view, a misunderstanding had cropped up lately between him and some of the middle managers at the hospital. He believed—or pretended to believe—that the matter would be cleared up when the more senior authorities came to the hospital to redeem him. In the meantime, as he waited for his deliverance, he was anxious to forget about the pain in his thigh. Having lived for much of the previous decade in suburban Virginia, he spoke English well. “Do you like movies?” Matt asked him during our first evening together. In fact, Abu Sofiane did like movies.
“Great,” said Matt. He had written twenty screenplays. He had memorized them all. Did Abu Sofiane want to hear one?
Indeed he did. In this way, in the evenings, our cell became a little theater. Matt acted out all the parts. Abu Sofiane listened like a child at bedtime He laughed at the right moments. He wondered what had become of Matt’s characters and why they acted as they did. For my part, I tried to tune the two of them out. For a few weeks that spring, this movie-inspired entente brought a kind of peace to our cell.
* * *
One afternoon in mid-March, a guard brought an electric razor to our cell. He shaved Matt’s head and mine. Abu Sofiane, who had short hair as it was, didn’t require a shave. A day or so later, the same guard brought an orange jumpsuit to the cell. “You will make a video,” the guard explained.
When it was my turn to stand in front of the camera, a Canadian-accented jihadi asked me questions, in English, about my career as CIA agent. The prison manager who, by this point, I had come to know as Sheikh Kawa, stood in the background. Prompting the Canadian now and then, Kawa held his chin in hand. He nodded. He listened carefully. At the time, Kawa’s control over me was such that he didn’t need to threaten me to get me to reply as he wished me to reply. He had tortured me. I knew well enough what he wanted me to say.
As the camera rolled, I confessed to being a veteran CIA agent, to having suborned more Muslims into spying for the CIA than I could recall, and to having done it all out of hatred for Islam.
When I was done, I took off the orange jumpsuit Kawa had brought for the occasion. The cameraman escorted me back to the cell in silence.
CHAPTER 5 THEIR NEWS
That spring, I found I couldn’t get the suicidal girl who had come to me once or twice in January darkness out of my head. In the evenings, as the light drifted into the cell, and whenever I was trying to make myself sleep, I saw her poised on her plank, high above a river in Vermont. She gazed into a curtain of falling snow. She swept the flakes from her hair, contemplated the roar at her feet, and did not jump. At first, it was the might of the flood and the impossibility of surviving it, even for a minute or two, that held her attention, but the more she stared the more she marveled at the entirety of the scene. The bobbling of the debris in the river held her attention, and then she wondered at the tendrils of woodsmoke rising from the village houses and how busily the inhabitants of this bedraggled ex–mill town went about their lives. They scurried back and forth along the highway that functioned as a village main street. They piled into their cars, drove up the lane a bit, then piled back out. Upstream somewhere, other villagers appeared to have tossed their backyard furniture—and possibly some of the contents of their living rooms—into the flood.
