Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  I think we both knew that Abu Sofiane was trying to get a rise out of us. He was angry. He was bored. He wanted a debate. Both of us knew that he understood the logic of the suicide bomber, that he was capable of committing such a crime, and that engaging him, as he fantasized, would only draw him out of himself. So we tried not to react.

  Instead, we argued with each other. Was Jebhat al-Nusra planning to kill us? Would a conversion to Islam save my life? We argued over these questions and then, with even greater bitterness, we argued over which of us could be proud of how we had comported ourselves in prison. Matt thought that by preferring Abu Sofiane’s company to his, I had disgraced myself. He felt I had capitulated to the terrorists in an inner way, while he had retained his dignity. I disagreed. We argued.

  When we ran out of things to argue over, Matt introduced topics: If the prison manager told me that I could go free provided I killed Matt, Matt wanted to know, would I agree to kill him? Some months earlier, in the eye hospital, we had agreed that if presented with such a choice, each of us would refuse to kill the other, but one afternoon in the warehouse basement, wishing to shock him into silence, I told Matt that, on second thought, I probably would kill him. He showered me with curses. He appealed to Abu Sofiane. Yes, Abu Sofiane agreed, if I were a Muslim, I would care about my fellow humans. But I was a pagan and a CIA agent. “It’s because he has cold blood,” Abu Sofiane explained to Matt, “which was why the CIA wanted him in the first place.”

  Our basement warehouse was a cavernous prison, about the size of a small airplane hangar. During the midday hours, a freight elevator shaft in one of the basement corners admitted a beam of strong summer sunlight. The opening through which this light shone was about five meters off the ground. Lying on my back and studying the opening from below, I judged that it might just be possible to scramble up the iron frame along which the elevator ran, when in service, to squeeze my head through the opening between the shaft and the floor of the elevator, and thus to wiggle away into freedom.

  The operation, I thought, would require a slender frame. Also, steady nerves. Abu Sofiane’s bullet-ridden right leg would have prohibited him from climbing up the elevator frame. If I were to tell Matt about the escape route I was eyeing, he would have blabbed about it to Abu Sofiane. Abu Sofiane would surely have scuttled our plans.

  My escape, I decided, would have to happen when my fellow prisoners were asleep. They would wake to find me gone. My escape was thus a bit of a dirty trick, but I had spied the escape route, not them. It belonged to me, I reasoned. The circumstances precluded me from inviting the others along. It was too bad, but it was what it was. Anyway, the basement was cavernous enough and the elevator shaft dark enough for them to be believed, during the outrage my escape would unleash, when they said, “We were asleep. We never saw a thing.”

  Thus, early one morning, as Matt and Abu Sofiane snored—when nothing seemed to be stirring in all of Aleppo—I scurried up the elevator shaft. For an instant or two, as I felt the heat of the day pouring into the shaft, I believed my escape would work. I saw myself fleeing over the rooftops like a cat burglar. I felt the brilliance of the sun in my eyes and the pain of running through the gravel on the soles of my feet. Pushing my body through the slot between the elevator and the shaft was going to require a creative kind of dexterity. But I had been a rock climber in a previous existence. I knew how not to fall in such moments, how to keep cool, carry on, and so get the job done.

  Underneath the freight compartment, I pressed the top of my head into the elevator’s floor panel, then pushed. Nothing moved. I tried to slither my head through the crack between the freight compartment and the elevator shaft. That crack was no wider than a mail slot. Bracing a shoulder against a bottom corner of the freight compartment, I tried to jostle the thing. Nothing doing. Discouraged and covered in elevator grease, I shimmied back to the basement floor.

  * * *

  During the previous months, Abu Sofiane had been eager to exhibit to anyone within earshot how wise he was to the machinations of the World Bank, the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, and American Jewry in general. When he was frightened or frustrated, as he often was, he eased his mind by steering the discussion in the cell toward the sinister designs of Jews in the Middle East. I was his example of the seemingly innocent American traveler who, under the cover of “journalism” or “diplomacy” or “business,” was plotting, in coordination with the World Bank and the CIA, to turn Syria into a sprawling plantation under the administration of Israeli settler families. When he had gotten the attention of a cluster of officers, he would put suggestive questions to me, in a loud voice, in Arabic. For instance, “How often do you go to Tel Abib?” and “Are you possibly a Jew yourself?” and “The newspaper you write for is a Jew newspaper, isn’t it?”

  I tried to ignore him. This allowed the doubts about me in the room to fructify. I denied his insinuations angrily, in no uncertain terms. This caused Abu Sofiane to smile. “Not a Jew at all?” he would say. “Not one little bit?”

  “No,” I would say.

  “But you often go to New York, yes?” he would reply, grinning like a Cheshire cat. “There are many Jews in New York? About how many Jews would you say there are?” And so on. I worried that it wouldn’t take much for Abu Sofiane’s aspersions to crystalize into certainties, for the certainties to crystalize into a verdict, and, in this way, for Jebhat al-Nusra to justify an auto-da-fé. In the grocery store, I found that the only thing I could do to keep him from stirring up rumors was to massage his thigh. By June, three months after Jebhat al-Nusra had put a bullet through his femur, his upper leg was still a mess. The swelling had come down, but it still caused him excruciating pain. It wasn’t as if he were not in need of a massage.

  In the warehouse basement, I continued to massage his thigh, but down there, there was no audience for Abu Sofiane’s the-Jews-are-our-affliction conspiracy theories. He stopped flogging them. He often daydreamed about a future for himself away from the jihad, indeed away from Islam altogether. He saw himself at his seaside Moroccan restaurant. He spoke of the cash that would pour into his pockets in such a situation, the women he would meet, the alcohol he would drink, and the elegant clothing he would wear. Because I wanted good relations between us and because I couldn’t bear to hear him fantasize about blowing up public places, I was keen to summon his better angels. He liked to be sung to. I sang. He liked to fantasize about life as a dandy on the Moroccan coast. I listened. He wanted me to rub his leg. I rubbed.

  Matt found my solicitousness unbearable. He denounced me for sucking up to terrorists. Abu Sofiane denounced him for denouncing his masseur. This led to bitterer arguments. In the warehouse basement, there were times when the tension between Matt and Abu Sofiane caused the two of them to seize each other by the throat. They would waltz through the warehouse columns in this manner as if they were on an insane kind of date, each of them sputtering with rage, neither one willing to be the first to let go.

  After such confrontations, Abu Sofiane would settle himself on the foam-rubber mattress, next to me, on which I had been trying not to pay attention to my prison mates. “Mais, il est ma-lade, ce type!” (“But this guy is a nutter!”), Abu Sofiane would exclaim, as if he and our jailers were conventional, transparent jihadis whose psychology made sense, whereas Matt lived way out there in the blue, in a private world of madness. He seemed to feel that only the French (rather than the Arabic or English) means of expressing incredulity at someone else’s insanity (“Mais il est malade!”) could convey the depth of his astonishment. So he repeated this formula over and over, under his breath, as he gazed at Matt from the corners of his eyes.

  Looking back now, I suspect we were all drifting away from conventional sanity then. We so mistrusted one another, were so tired of jail life, and so much wanted to be free of the others that if freedom and vows of silence were on offer, any one of us, I suspect, could have been persuaded to do in the other two.

  * * * />
  In the beginning of July, the guards again came for us with their handcuffs and blindfolds. Again we were warned against sudden movements. Again we were piled into the back seat of a car, then driven at a crawl down quiet streets. We were unloaded from the car and led into a building, then down a flight of stairs. We were told to sit. We sat. A door closed. We removed our blindfolds. We found ourselves sitting on the floor of an airy, carpeted room. A pleasant breeze blew through the cell. Though I didn’t know this then, we were in the basement of the municipal motor vehicles department in an Aleppo neighborhood called as Shaer.

  Our new cell was about the size of a modest studio apartment. A bathroom in a corner, a bank of shoebox-sized windows high on the rear wall of the cell, some pillows on the floor, a stack of folded blankets—this was by far our most well-appointed prison to date. So far, so good, I thought to myself as I ran my eyes over the walls. Right away, Matt and I saw that the iron filigree, which had been welded over the windows in place of bars, had rusted away, in places, to a kind of friable chicken wire. Even from a distance of several feet, it was obvious, at least to me, that this filigree could be twisted into bits. Abu Sofiane was too big around the chest to fit through the foot-long channel on the other side of the filigree, through which an escapee would have had to slither. Matt and I, however, probably could have made it. He and I exchanged glances. The filigree in the rightmost window had begun to peel away from the window frame of its own accord. “That one could work,” Matt whispered as he nodded at the damaged window grate.

  I’m sure we would have turned to peeling back the rest of the filigree right away if not for Abu Sofiane. We didn’t know whose side he was on. Anyway, there was no way that Abu Sofiane could have fit his bulkier frame through the window and no way that he would have kept quiet as Matt and I worked on an escape plan that did not include him.

  Thus, during our first days in this cell, we ignored the rusting wire grille in the window. We devoted much of our mental energy then to thoughts of our former cellmates. Though Abu Sofiane had come to Syria to kill the members of the Syrian Arab Army, eight weeks in a pair of cells with seventeen of its officers had drawn him into their lives. “By god, their hearts are white,” he had declared before a delegation of Jebhat al-Nusra authorities in the Al-Haydariya prison. Speaking well of Alawites could only have encouraged the Jebhat al-Nusra authorities to suppose that something had gone wrong in his mind. If he were to be released, he might conceivably infiltrate a nearby mosque, introduce himself as a Moroccan jihadi, then betray every worshiper in the place to the regime. Abu Sofiane would have known that in saying a good word, in public, about Alawites he was risking his own skin. That he had done it anyway gave evidence of a courage none of us knew he had. In our new studio apartment prison, Abu Sofiane kept faith with our former prison mates by remembering each of them, by name, during the portion of the prayer in which prayer leader communicates the congregants’ most cherished wishes to God—the du’a. He asked God to return them to their families, safe and sound, at ease and in health, as Abu Ayoub had done for us when they led the prayers in our earlier prisons. I’m sure Matt, Abu Sofiane, and I hoped that if the officers couldn’t be sent home, they would be sent down the block to join us here, in this cool, carpeted sitting room.

  I, for one, felt that the Alawites might already have been released. I rated their chances of survival much higher than I rated the chances that Matt and I would be let go. It was true that the much-dreamed-of prisoner swap in which Jebhat al-Nusra members currently locked in the Aleppo Central Prison would be freed in exchange for the officers’ freedom seemed to have gone into eclipse. I could not, however, imagine that the terrorists would store the officers away for half a year, lecture them, chat with them now and then, and allow them to call their families only to murder them, in cold blood, when the Syrian government proved itself intransigent. Of course the government was intransigent. The government’s helplessness—its stubbornness and casual cruelty, I felt—was too well understood to serve as a motive for murder. For the time being, I assumed, the officers were like the crew of a ship that had gone down in stormy seas. They were clinging to a lifeboat. Because a spacious government rescue boat was only a few kilometers away, because no complicated international diplomacy would have been required to summon it, and because no government anywhere would abandon officers who had disappeared in the line of duty, in the fullness of time the rescue ship, I trusted, would come to the aid of the castaways.

  I suspect now that the America-style guns I saw on the roof of the school across the way from our grocery store prison really were the fruit of a US government–sponsored initiative to train and equip the Syrian rebels. At the time, my mother and the mothers of other Americans who had vanished in Syria had begun to knock on doors at the State Department in Washington. I know now that as the diplomats there were explaining to my mother that the situation in Syria was opaque, with developments occurring every day that confounded even the State Department experts, the US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, was posing for photographs in opposition-held territory with US-vetted rebel leaders. Those leaders were becoming famous within Jebhat al-Nusra not only for the esteem the Jebhat al-Nusra leadership had for their religious scruples but also for their ability to bring in high-tech weaponry. I assume that in his zeal to help the Syrian people, the ambassador did not want to know how, once they crossed the Syrian border, his weapons would be passed from cousin to neighbor to friend until they reached the fundamentalists. In their hands, the American guns would have been used to beat the American journalists in their custody and to kill more Syrians. I assume Ambassador Ford didn’t want to know about such matters. Anyway, after his Syria trip, when he met with my mother and Diane Foley, whose son James had also disappeared in recent months somewhere near Aleppo, he didn’t mention the US weapons pipeline to the Syrian rebels. He spoke of the opacity of the situation in Syria in general. He spoke of alliances that shifted like quicksand and of the general inadvisability of traveling to Aleppo.

  It seems to me now that, as the billion dollars in covert aid the Obama administration approved for the Syrian resistance in the spring of 2013 began to flood into Syria, some of the rebel commanders, feeling themselves buoyed by newfound alliances, lost interest in making deals with the Syrian government. Perhaps the guns that began to tumble into the rebels’ hands then had the effect of bringing out their will to kill. Perhaps they hadn’t been much interested in making a deal in the first place. Now new, richer deals beckoned on the horizon.

  Because I keep in touch with two of the officers with whom I was imprisoned that spring, I know this for sure: After negotiations with their families, Jebhat al-Nusra released two officers. Two others escaped. Now, six years after the families’ last contact, which came in the form of hurried cell phone calls from a villa basement, the parents of the remaining thirteen continue to search for news of their vanished sons.

  I suspect now that toward the middle of July, Jebhat al-Nusra’s patience with Abu Sofiane finally ran out. He had been promising to give the commanders information on a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor they hoped to kidnap. But Abu Sofiane had no such information. He had been hinting to them that the US might pay a ransom for him. But he was no US citizen. He made the mistake of telling them this openly, over and over, as if he felt that his captors would reward him for not being an American. Probably he misread the clues.

  Anyway, about two weeks after Abu Sofiane, Matt Schrier, and I arrived in the as Shaer prison, a group of five men in balaclavas came for Abu Sofiane.

  When the visitors called his name, a shock of wonder and happiness came over him. He had been waiting for his deliverance for six months. He shot up from the mattress on which he had been sitting. “Me?” he exclaimed as one of the soldiers called out his name.

  “Yes, you. Pack your bags,” said a voice.

  The eyes of the man who spoke, however, were dead. The soldiers stared at us, then stared at the line of T-shirts
and underpants we had hung up to dry on pegs beneath a window. They murmured but did not speak. All of their eyes were dead.

  As they were leading Abu Sofiane out of the cell, he reminded them that he was barefoot. Out of deference to his feelings, it seemed to me, but not because he would be needing shoes in the place they had in mind for him, one of the men in the balaclavas kicked a pair of sandals across the carpet. They washed up against Abu Sofiane’s feet. “We want you to travel in comfort, Doctor,” said the soldier.

  Though Abu Sofiane had not gone into details with me and though Jebhat al-Nusra never told him why they had arrested him, remarks he let slip about a bride in the Jebhat al-Nusra–controlled Aleppo suburb of Anadan—a bride he had yet to marry in an official sense but to whom he was committed in the eyes of God—made me think his real crime had somehow involved sex. Or an attempt at sex.

  The men in the balaclavas, I think now, were the last to see him alive. Neither his brother on Long Island nor his ex-wife in Virginia—people with whom I know he longed to be in touch—have received messages from him. The FBI, which became aware of his presence in Syria at about this time and which knew him to be a potential suicide bomber, say that he disappeared from their radar screens in July of 2013.

  He never wrote to me, though I think I knew him well enough to know that if he could have, he would have. A prison fantasy he cherished possibly more than all the others had caused him to believe that once I was freed I would vouch for the soundness of his character before the US immigration authorities. When the authorities had relented, he was going to return to Virginia. He would reunite with his wife and children, then carry on with life in the suburbs as if there had been neither a deportation nor any jihad at all.

  Now I think that one day in July, the Jebhat al-Nusra sheikhs decided that the time had come to bring Abu Sofiane to an open field, and, out there, to make him kneel in the dirt. They would have known that he had come into Syria on his own, with no one to vouch for him and no connections to any authorities in the jihad. He had spent his first weeks in the country lying about medical training in America, avoiding the war, and insinuating himself into an Anadan family. Perhaps the authorities suspected him of being more interested in sexual adventures in Syria than in killing. I certainly did. Since he bragged so often about his training in America, at least some of his acquaintances would have supposed that, during his time in Virginia, he had discovered the personal advantages that came from moonlighting for the CIA. In Syria, freelancers for the Assad security services proliferate like fruit flies. It would have been natural for his Syrian friends to suppose that he was playing a double game.