Nasr would later say he went to Peshawar strictly as a humanitarian. In his telling, he found work teaching the Quran and Arabic in a school run by a Kuwaiti charity. The charity also disbursed food and clothes but, Nasr said, no arms. It was one of the happiest periods of his life, but it did not last long. The Islamists of his acquaintance in Peshawar often had energetic discussions about whether violence should be used as a political tool, and he, so he said, took the negative view. When there was a terrorist attack, he would speak out against it. Word of his opposition to terrorism spread, and the extremists on the other side of the argument eventually told him he must join the jihad. He, more lover than fighter, refused. They threatened him with death, and in 1991 he left, an innocent run out of another country.
He flew to Tirana, the capital of Albania, which was not the Western Europe of his dreams but which was, at last, Europe. He was given a grant of asylum on grounds of his persecution in Egypt. It was a convulsive time in the Balkans. The Berlin Wall had fallen only two years earlier, the Iron Curtain was being dismantled fold by fold, and ugly, austere Albania, one of the most closed of the Warsaw Pact nations, was moving from the stifling impoverishment of Communism to the unruly impoverishment of frontier capitalism. Meanwhile, next door, Yugoslavia was rending itself to tatters, and the rumbles of the nearby war shook Albania uncomfortably.
Nasr chose Albania because it was predominantly Muslim—the religion was a legacy of long Ottoman rule—although Albanians tended to exercise their faith more lightly than he. One of the country’s poets had written, “Churches and mosques you shall not heed. Albanism is Albania’s creed.” And indeed the Muslim majority and Christian minority had got on well enough over the years. Muslims and Christians overseas, however, thought that half a century of godless Communism had been detrimental to Albanian spirituality, and on Communism’s fall they sent missionaries to share their gods. Most ministered pacifically, teaching the Quran or Bible and digging wells or plowing furrows in hope of showing the goodness of their faith. But some Islamic charities, particularly those staffed by exiles from Gamaa and Jihad, had designs beyond winning converts.
A dozen or so of the Islamic charities were funded on Saudi wealth, and at one of these, the Human Relief and Reconstruction Agency, Nasr found work, the nature of which is not known. (Years later he would not be talkative about his job there.) He attended a mosque and in its chaste environs met an Albanian woman, Marsela Glina, whom he married after a brief courtship. He did not speak Albanian, and she did not speak Arabic. Their shared language was pidgin English. Theirs may have been one of those marriages, not uncommon among Islamists, in which a few phrases of male command and female assent made up much of the conversation. Glina apparently was not as fervent in her Islam as he, but when he insisted she wear a veil, she assented. He was thirty years old, she eighteen.
In 1994 the Human Relief and Reconstruction Agency ran out of money, and Nasr decided to establish himself as a man of commerce in the anarchic market. A photo from the time shows him cutting the figure of a businessman in a suit of double breast and effulgent sheen, his head cropped as close as a kiwi, his cheeks, which were starting to hint at chubby, smooth as gourds. An excellent mustache made the man. It was full and dark and wider than the lip on which it sat, in the style of men of the Levant and firehouses of West Virginia, and suggestive of virility. If he had worn a beard and galabia in Pakistan, as was likely, he had got rid of them somewhere along the way. He intended to open a grocery, but he ran into some sort of difficulty and abandoned the idea. He then settled on a sausage factory, which got as far as a $20,000 expenditure for equipment. Where the money came from is not clear, though perhaps from Arab entrepreneurs abroad. The factory, however, also ran into problems and never ground a gram of meat, and he seized next on a bakery. Not long before the ovens were to be fired, in August of 1995, he was visited by a police officer who told him he was needed at the station for a small matter—it would take only five or ten minutes. Nasr assumed one of his workers had gotten into trouble, and he was happy enough to help straighten it out. But on arriving at the station, he was transferred to the custody of the Shërbimi Informativ Kombëtar, the State Intelligence Service, or SHIK, and interrogated. As he told the story later, SHIK’s officers asked what he was doing in Albania, what he had done in Pakistan, why he had left Egypt, whether Islamists in Albania planned to attack Egypt’s foreign minister when he visited Tirana that week, and much else besides. It was obvious to Nasr that the officers knew a lot about him, which surprised him. He had thought the post-Communist government was barely functioning, and yet here it had conducted what seemed a very competent surveillance of him. He was questioned for days, often repetitively, he assumed to catch him in a mistake, and when his answers displeased, the officers struck him with fists or the handle of a gun.
In the end they told him they knew he was clean. He was not sure whether they had known so all along or had concluded so from the interrogation. They then said that as a businessman he commanded the respect of many people and would make a valuable informer. They asked him to be their spy and said that in return they would help him with the application for citizenship he had recently submitted. The pitch was not much different from the one he had been given in Alexandria six years earlier. He refused this one too (so he later claimed) and somewhat to his surprise they let him go.
When he got home, he told his wife he had been detained because of a mix-up at the station: the police had thought he was using his business as a front to smuggle drugs, and it had taken time to convince them of their error. Evidently husband and wife did not discuss the topic in detail because years later Marsela Glina would be able to say little more than that the arrest had soured him on Albania and he decided they should leave. A few weeks after his release he traveled to Romania and, liking what he saw, applied for residency for himself, Glina, and their daughter Sara, who had been born a year or two earlier. Another child was on the way. The Romanians were apparently inclined to grant Nasr asylum on grounds of his persecution in Egypt, but they had no need for another housewife and two more children, and the application was denied.
Nasr devised another exit strategy. At the end of 1995 or the start of 1996 he bought tickets for the family to fly to Cairo via Munich. He was told that to change planes in Germany, they would need German visas, so, as he later told the story (with possible embellishment), he bribed an officer to let them through the emigration checkpoint. He had also been told that Glina was too far pregnant to be allowed on a commercial flight, so he had her dress in thick, baggy clothes to disguise her state. Nobody stopped her as they boarded. Later, when the flight began its descent to Munich, Glina pretended to go into labor, on Nasr’s instructions. She must have been convincing, because when they landed an emergency crew was waiting at the jetway. A German officer came aboard and said Glina would be taken to a hospital but since Nasr and his daughter had no entry papers, they would have to stay on the plane. When Nasr refused to be separated from his wife, the airline crew begged him not to make a scene. They were in enough trouble, they said, for transporting a woman in so advanced a pregnancy. He ignored them and demanded asylum. Under German law, he was permitted to remain in the country while the government evaluated his claim, so the whole family was taken to the hospital, where doctors discovered that Glina was only seven months pregnant and not in labor. They were sent to a refugee center outside Munich to await the outcome of their plea.
While they waited, Glina gave birth to a boy, whom they named Omar. In history, Omar was a seventh-century caliph who evicted Christians and Jews from Arabia and reserved Mecca and Medina for Muslims ever after. The production of a male heir earned Nasr the honorific Abu Omar, Father of Omar. Technically speaking, he was also Abu Sara, but that title would not have been considered a decoration; Glina, on Sara’s birth, had become Umm Sara, Mother of Sara. Some months later Germany denied their request and they appealed. By the time the denial was finally affirmed, they had spen
t nearly a year and a half in the refugee center. What Abu Omar, forbidden to work, did with himself while Glina attended to home and children remains a matter of speculation. Confinement, however, was not good for their marriage. They quarreled often, and after one tremendous fight, they divorced in the fashion permitted by some schools of Islam—the husband solemnly declaring himself through with his wife, whereupon God recognizes their partition. For reasons unknown, they did not also dissolve their civil marriage in Albania. When their final plea was denied, Glina returned to Tirana with the children, but Abu Omar’s future lay elsewhere. He would, he determined, slip into Italy.
THE IMMIGRANT to Milan travels with the arc of history. Over the millennia, bands of strangers from the North battled their way through Gaul, stopped in Milan with little more intention than to repair mail and plate, and ended up staying centuries. From the South warriors also came, meaning to fill their carts with grain before crossing the Alps, but they stayed too, and their blood still runs in Milanese veins. Strangers have often ruled, but not, historically speaking, for long. Thus the Celts supplanted the foundational Ligurians and were defeated in turn by the Romans, who succumbed to Hannibal and the Carthaginians, who were beaten in a return match by the Romans, who were followed, in loose succession, by Attila, the Goths, the Lombards, Barbarossa, the Spaniards, the Austrians, Napoleon, and Silvio Berlusconi. This crossroads history is reflected in the city’s name, which probably comes from the Celtic “Mid-lan,” or “place in between”—what we would call a hub—and has made a hash of Milan’s culture, so that one may enter a Milanese trattoria and find both pomodoro a strica-sale, which is salt-rubbed tomato, a legacy of the South, and cotoletta alla milanese, a breaded veal cutlet that any Northern European would recognize as wiener schnitzel.
The greatest immigration in Milanese history began just after World War II, when the U.S. Marshall Plan and newly liberated Italian capital remade northern Italy. Milan had been a seat of industry before the war—there was a saying that while Rome had a church on every corner, every corner in Milan had a bank—but after the war Milan was the seat of Italian enterprise. Breda made trains in the city, Falck forged iron and steel, Alfa Romeo built its sinuous coupes (the company’s logo, the serpent and red cross, was the coat of arms of Milan’s Visconti), and Pirelli, the colossus, made tires. Italians called the nation’s economic rebirth il miracolo, and “the miracle” became a byword for Milan. To man the enormous factories, Milan imported a proletariat of hundreds of thousands. Most came from Lombardy and other regions of the North, but a large minority came from the Mezzogiorno, the land of the Midday, which was to say south of Rome. In Italy, the cultural split between North and South approximates that of the United States. Northerners of that era called Southerners terroni, which was derived from terra, “soil,” and could be translated as “clodhopper.” In the Northern stereotype, terroni were indolent, dirty, clannish, and slow. Northerners liked to say that Africa began at Rome, and even that great urb irritated many Northerners with its inefficiency and bureaucracy. The Milanesi believed themselves mislaid in Italy. Their city, they said, was an international capital in search of a country.
The migrants who powered the miracle were greeted in Milan with wretched apartments in sunless streets, the worst of schools, and the blackjacks of police. Long after the miracle went bust, a haphazard jumble of tenements might still be called a Corea, because so many of them had been built during the Korean War, which coincided with the miracle. The bars where Southerners drank, having been kicked out, sometimes literally, of “Northern” bars, were called le casbah or i suq. The neighborhood of Dergano, where Abu Omar would settle, had its share of le Coree, le casbah, and i suq.
The immigrants helped make Milan the richest city in Italy and one of the richest in Europe. Milan faltered a bit in the early 1970s, when the factories were boarded up and the jobs sent to places where workers did not ask for union wages and Sundays off, but the recovery was quick. Other industries had flourished during the miracle: banking, technology, publishing, television, and above all the one with which Milan became synonymous—la moda, fashion. Since at least the sixteenth century, Europeans had appreciated Milan’s skill with gloves and hats, ribbons and point lace, leather and jewelry. Sellers of these wares in England were called Milaners, and the English, with their genetic oblivion to the foreign accent, pronounced and eventually spelled the word “milliners.” (Later the meaning of “milliner” was restricted from a general haberdasher to a maker of ladies’ hats.) Toward the end of the miracle, Milan’s small fashion workshops transformed themselves into great manufacturers, and Armani, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and Prada became global clichés for taste. To visit Milan was to know this. The shoes of the Milanesi were a little pointier than those of other metropolitans, their heels were a little higher, their pants a little blacker, their stockings runless, their hemlines revelatory of neither too little nor too much leg. Their glasses were isosceles.
The workforce of the more sophisticated second boom required a supporting proletariat as the first boom had, and many of the janitors and maids and nannies again had to be imported. The immigrants were poor, unskilled, and from families that had until recently worked the land, only this time the land was not metaphorical Africa but the thing itself: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Mali; also Albania, Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, and China. The newcomers found Milan no more hospitable than their predecessors had a few decades earlier. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, made their first Milanese homes in abandoned factories or idled trains. When these quarters became an embarrassment to the city, the local government steered its guests into metal, container-like shelters that broiled in summer, froze in winter, and were ringed with barbed wire and uplifting rules, like bans on card-playing and women.
In time, some immigrants established themselves in cheap apartments and lent their floors to newer arrivals, some of whom in turn established themselves and lent their floors. A few opened businesses. Because their neighborhoods tended to be rundown and their clothes not alla moda, many Italians associated the new residents with shabbiness and crime. The same Italians tended also to be disturbed when they emerged from certain Metro stops into a welter of Indo-Aryan and Semitic languages spoken by men socializing on the hoof outside kebab shops where not long ago pizzerias had been. Politicians saw opportunity in such changes, and mean, small-minded parties of the Right rose to power in Lombardy on “the immigrant threat.” Their hysterics about the contamination of the culture, the language, and the race were exactly those of such parties everywhere. By the end of the 1990s, residents of foreign extraction made up just ten percent of Milan—chicken scratch by the standards of major American or British cities—but to hear the xenophobes, one would have thought it was forty-nine percent and counting. For immigrants, the result was hostility, discrimination in housing and jobs, and stops by police on the street to check their identification—dark skin being cause enough for suspicion.
These affronts came to be symbolized in a homeless Moroccan named Driss Moussafir, who in 1993 was killed, along with four policemen and firemen, by a Mafia car bomb that exploded near a park in which he was sleeping. From the reaction of many Milanesi, one would hardly have known Moussafir was among the dead. The mayor’s eulogy of the victims omitted him, high officials paid their respects at the coffins of the Italians but ignored his, and police and news reports listed him last, when mentioning him at all, and usually referred to the others by name but to him only as “an immigrant.” There were protests of this neglect, and the city grudgingly agreed to name a school for him where immigrants were taught Italian. The sign on the school misspelled his name “Woussafir.” Moussafir meant “traveler.”
To the devout Muslim, Milan presented additional trials, not least of which was a constant assault by the human, particularly the female, form. In Milan one inhaled sex as in Alexandria one inhaled sea air. The prevailing advertising strategy—for clothes and p
erfumes, cars and stereos, dishwashers and paper clips—could be summarized in the word “cleavage,” if cleavage were no longer associated with the naturally occurring breast. The breast of advertisual Milan was watermelonious, demanding, and seemed to spring from every other billboard and shop window. There were buttocks to match, their display meant to give a dromedary assurance that in this desert of life a man could mount such as those and ride a long time before reaching the next oasis (where, apparently, he bought paper clips). Ten minutes’ residence in mammarian, gluteal Milan could prove a trial for the devout Muslim. The city made manifest what came of a people who deadened themselves to God, and the newly arrived Islamist was not surprised to learn that the country’s great cathedrals were filled only when a Nobel laureate or a foreign philharmonic visited. Many a pious Muslim dove for cover in Milan’s mosques.
ABU OMAR CHOSE Italy partly because he knew a few Islamists who had settled there and partly because Italy, notwithstanding the growing hostility to immigrants, was still relatively liberal with grants of political asylum. Italy was also easy to get to. The refugee center outside Munich was not much policed, nor were voyages by train, so he simply bought a ticket on the express to Rome and one day in May of 1997 was off. On arrival, he requested asylum from his persecutors in Egypt. Apparently he did not mention his fraternization with the mujahidin of Peshawar or his arrest by the SHIK of Albania. He was given temporary quarters and help with his petition by the Jesuit Center of Rome, which abutted Vignola’s Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, not far from the Vatican—an irony for an Islamist with, as would later be discovered, a growing distaste for infidels.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 5
