White Hot Silence

by Henry Porter

  ‘Does this matter, Mr Weber?’ asked the judge.

  ‘It is important that the court acknowledges that Mr Hisami has done absolutely nothing wrong. He appears here as an innocent man.’

  She nodded. ‘Mr Balstad, proceed, if you will, and avoid the word “alien” in recognition of Mr Weber’s sensitivities.’

  Balstad stood and contemplated Hisami, as though he were looking at the embodiment of evil. ‘It is the department’s case that Mr Hisami is a man with a secret past that includes multiple acts of terrorism and at least one war crime. In order to facilitate his entry into the United States in January 1996, and his eventual application for citizenship, Mr Hisami constructed an elaborate backstory, changing his name and covering up his role as a violent terrorist who led attacks on the Turkish state. Mr Hisami was born a Kurdish national and from an early age was an active member of several different Kurdish nationalist groups, all of them dedicated to the creation of a Kurdish state. My colleague will distribute evidence that will leave the court in little doubt about the true nature of the man who passes himself off as a law-abiding American citizen.’

  A woman got up and handed a sheaf of photographs to the judge and to Hisami’s lawyers, then Balstad produced enlarged photographs printed on boards and marched over to an easel. ‘It may help, Your Honour, if I go through them here. These items are marked A through P – there are sixteen in all. The first four are copies of Turkish intelligence reports from 1993 to 1995 which feature a terrorist commander named Karim Qasim, who the Turkish government have connected to several attacks committed on Turkish soil. You can examine the intelligence reports at your leisure. This fifth establishes that Karim Qasim is in fact Denis Hisami.’ He lifted the photograph of an ID card showing the young Hisami with a short, unruly beard and a mop of black hair brushed forward. ‘This is a driver’s licence from the period issued to Karim Qasim by the Iraqi government.’ He let the court absorb the image of the tough young man. ‘And now we’ll go through some of the attacks which the Turkish government – a NATO ally and friend of America – believes that Mr Hisami was responsible for.

  ‘In the spring of 1994 the PKK attacked a convoy of unarmed military in eastern Turkey. Thirty-five young men were killed, together with four civilians.’ There were four photographs of a burnt-out bus and an SUV with bodies cremated in the wreckage of both. They were shocking images, and the last, which showed the charred body of the SUV’s driver slumped across the open door of the vehicle, drew a gasp from the courtroom.

  ‘I think you’ve made your point,’ said the judge.

  ‘But there are two other incidents I wish to draw to your attention,’ said the lawyer, who had not missed the journalists leaning forward or rising from their seats to get a better view of the easel. ‘This is what remained of the Golden Anatolia Hotel after it was firebombed by Mr Hisami’s terrorist group.’

  There were more charred bodies, this time lying in the lobby of the burnt-out building. In the foreground was a child’s doll part melted by the flames. Samson looked over to see Hisami raise his head slowly and regard the photograph with indifference. Weber was peering at the bundle of images before him with glasses held out away from his face, like a very old man studying a rare manuscript. The two lawyers beside him, who Samson guessed were from California, exchanged glances with Tulliver then nodded to another man, who had slipped into the court and now joined them at the table.

  ‘Finally,’ said Balstad, with a melodramatic tone, ‘we have conclusive proof of Mr Hisami’s involvement in one of the most disturbing war crimes of that period. I apologise for bringing this material into court, Your Honour, but the DHS believes it is relevant to our view that Mr Hisami should remain in detention while his case is being processed, and that this material graphically demonstrates the government’s concerns about the man before you.’

  He propped up several images at the foot of the easel, some of which were intentionally the wrong way round so the court couldn’t see them. He revealed the first – the scene of a mass grave with the bodies of young soldiers piled high in a shallow ditch. They had been executed at the side of the ditch and fallen forward, but at the moment of death some had turned, and their faces, many of which had been blown apart from the bullets, could be seen. It made a truly horrifying tableau. At the other side of the ditch, where the soil had been piled, stood a group of soldiers, appearing altogether too relaxed in the face of such horror. Three, cigarettes in their mouths, were bent over a lighter held out by a companion. The others stood about, showing no visible signs of emotion, wiping their faces in the heat, checking their guns, chatting. ‘This shows the summary execution site of thirty-four Iraqi army recruits in Northern Iraq in 1995. International investigators have declared this atrocity to be a war crime. The men were all in their early twenties and were shot after they surrendered and had been disarmed by the men you see standing at the side of the grave.’

  There followed a shot of the same scene from another angle. Samson saw immediately what Balstad was building up to. At the centre of the group – though partly concealed – was the young Hisami, in a leather flying jacket with an AK 47 slung over one shoulder and a heavy field radio handset hanging from the other, a pistol in his hand. The beard and the cigar raised to his lips were reminiscent of Fidel Castro. His commanding presence was obvious.

  The close-up of Hisami came next. ‘You will recognise the commander of the execution squad as Karim Qasim, the man Denis Hisami, who sits before Your Honour and pretends to be an innocent American citizen, just like the Nazi war criminals who came to our country to escape prosecution for crimes against humanity after the Second World War. Denis Hisami is not only a terrorist but also a war criminal, and he should remain in detention until an order for deportation is made, which undoubtedly will be the outcome of this case.’ He paused and gave the courtroom a satisfied look. ‘That concludes our evidence, Your Honour.’

  The judge nodded and turned to Hisami’s lawyer. ‘Mr Weber, what do you have to say on behalf of your client? You’ve insisted that the government had nothing to back up its argument for continued detention, but now it seems they do. We are all ears, Mr Weber.’

  Weber rose and looked around, as though he were not quite sure where he was. ‘We are familiar with these photographs,’ he said slowly, ‘because, as you know, there have been attempts by the other side to circulate them. These attempts have been unsuccessful, because these photographs, as presented, are obviously libellous of Mr Hisami’s reputation. If the court allows, I will address the last allegation first, because it is the most serious levelled in this vexatious case against my client. We have our own photograph,’ and he reached down to a board handed up to him by an assistant from the front bench. Weber seemed to stagger slightly then set off unsteadily towards the easel, where he placed the board.

  ‘Here you see almost the same photograph, but the shot is wider and allows a full view of the men immediately surrounding Mr Hisami. Oh, by the way, we do not deny Mr Hisami’s presence at this dreadful scene.’ He paused, placed a finger on the photograph and looked around the court. ‘Here you will notice a man of fair complexion who is not in uniform and who carries only a sidearm. It is clear that he has taken off his aviator sunglasses to talk to my client.’ He nodded to himself and then turned to face the judge. ‘We are lucky, Your Honour, to have this gentleman in court with us today and he will give the context of this photograph as well as furnish details regarding the other allegations.’

  ‘Who is this man?’ demanded Judge Simon.

  ‘It is I,’ replied the tall man who had joined the table of lawyers a few minutes before. He rose and smiled obligingly.

  ‘And who are you, sir?’

  ‘Bob Baker, Your Honour.’

  ‘I said who are you, not what’s your name.’

  ‘I am the former director of field operations in Northern Iraq for the Central Intelligence Agency. I am the one in the photograph standing next to Mr Hisami. Subsequent to
this event, I became director of all operations in the Middle East for the Agency and have just retired from a desk job at Langley, overseeing another aspect of the Agency’s work overseas.’

  ‘Mr Baker is too modest to tell the court that he received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal on his retirement for, and I quote here, “achievements of an exceptional nature that contributed to the Agency’s mission”,’ said Weber.

  ‘What do you have to say?’ snapped the judge.

  ‘Well, I have a lot to say about this incident. At the time, Mr Hisami and I were working together, and I should, at the outset, stress that Mr Hisami was one of our most important friends in Kurdistan at that time.’

  ‘You are saying he worked for the Agency?’

  ‘Indeed he did, and he saved my life at least once – probably twice, if you count an ambush when I was unarmed.’

  ‘You mean Mr Hisami worked for the CIA?’

  ‘We don’t normally confirm these details, but, absolutely, yes he did. He was a very important part of our efforts in the Kurdistan theatre.’ Baker glanced down at Hisami. ‘He is one of the bravest and most resilient individuals I have ever had the privilege to know.’ Hisami showed no more interest in this testimony than in Balstad’s evidence, although he did acknowledge the compliment with a slight nod.

  ‘Can you explain these photographs?’ asked the judge.

  ‘Sure. These men were renegade Iraqi army soldiers, part of a force led by General Mahmood Al-Samarra, who was part of a plot to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1995. The unit was compromised before they reached the rendezvous with my team and PUK forces led by Denis. They were taken from their vehicles and murdered on the spot by Saddam’s security forces. We were just too late to save them.’ He stopped to compose himself. ‘This was an appalling tragedy, and the greatest regret of my time in the field, without doubt.’

  Balstad shot up. ‘How do we know you’re telling the truth?’

  ‘I’ll take an oath, if you like, but I am telling the truth,’ said Baker amenably, and in a way that no one could doubt what he was saying. ‘This episode is part of my book, which comes out next spring and has been passed by the Agency as suitable for publication. The Agency fully recognises the service Mr Hisami has given to our country.’

  The judge looked at the photographs. ‘It seems strange that such a scene of horror provokes so little reaction in the men around you in the photograph,’ she observed.

  ‘These men are battle-hardened troops, Your Honour. They’d seen many terrible things and the best way of dealing with an atrocity on this scale is to distance yourself from it, and the way you do that is by acting normally and not absorbing the horror. I know this from my own experience, I regret to say.’ He stopped and held the judge’s gaze. ‘I look at myself in that photograph today and wonder how I was able to behave like that. Was I any less of a human being then than I am now? I don’t think so – it’s just what you have to do.’

  ‘You’re saying Hisami had nothing to do with this?’

  ‘No more than I did.’

  ‘And these other terrorist atrocities – what was Mr Hisami’s involvement? The government would lead us to believe that Mr Hisami is the author of this barbarity. Do you have any information on the murder of the Turkish army recruits and the arson at the hotel in Anatolia?’

  ‘They are well-known incidents, all of them carried out by the Kurdish Workers’ Party – the PKK. That is quite distinct from the PUK – the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan – of which Mr Hisami was an important member. The PUK was an insurgency, but you could not describe it as a terrorist group. It was founded by intellectuals in the seventies and, to this day, that tradition is alive.’

  ‘So why is it that Mr Hisami is named as Karim Qasim on the intelligence reports?’

  ‘I believe Mr Weber is in a better position to answer that, Your Honour.’

  Baker sat down and the judge swivelled to Weber, who was standing at the easel with a rather vacant look on his face.

  ‘Mr Weber, what do you have to say?’

  ‘Um, this is not my field and, of course, I bow to almost anyone when it comes to the technology, but it seems that the disks whence these documents came have some issues.’

  ‘Issues, what issues? Are you suggesting they aren’t real?’

  ‘I must object,’ said Balstad.

  ‘This is not a trial, Mr Balstad. I don’t want objections,’ said the judge, ‘I want to hear what Mr Weber has to say. Mr Weber, please proceed.’

  ‘On Mr Baker’s advice, we took the disks for forensic examination, just to make certain my client was not being unfairly maligned. The documents are said to come from 1996 to 1997 – so, more or less, contemporary with Mr Hisami’s activities as a PUK commander.’ He paused and consulted some notes in his hand. ‘What the analysis found was that these documents were not all that they should be if they were generated in the mid-nineties. The metadata – that is, the data that summarises other data, I understand – was certainly dated to that period. But then, when they used a particular piece of equipment known as a Hex editor, which displays all the binary information in a file, they found that the metadata had been tampered with.’ He looked up. ‘I hope I am not losing you?’

  ‘Go on, Mr Weber,’ said the judge.

  ‘It seems the file contains a very modern version of a font called Calibri, which was introduced by Microsoft in 2006 and is the default font of Office 2007.’ He looked around the court to see if the penny had dropped. Among the young press corps, it most certainly had. ‘All these documents had apparently been saved at a much earlier date, but of course they couldn’t have been, because the font did not exist in the nineties. It came into use much later. That means that all or part of the documents is a fabrication.’

  He clicked his fingers at the assistant, who rushed forward with another board. ‘And here is the proof,’ he said, revealing a large-scale copy of the code which, among other fonts, spelled out c.a.l.i.b.r.i. ‘These documents are recent forgeries,’ he said, and began to make his way back to the table.

  ‘You’re certain of this?’ asked the judge.

  ‘We will submit all the evidence now to the court,’ said Weber, hovering uncertainly by his chair. ‘And it will form part of our case in the defence of Mr Hisami.’

  Samson saw that Hisami had barely moved throughout this. He didn’t look up or acknowledge Weber when he at last sat down.

  The judge took off her spectacles. ‘If Mr Hisami is the hero that your side makes him out to be, Mr Weber, why did he need to change his name from Karim Qasim?’

  Balstad rose angrily. ‘Are you hearing the case now?’

  She turned towards him. ‘No, as I explained, we are deciding whether the ICE – that is, the DHS – is right to continue to detain Mr Hisami on the basis that he is a threat to American citizens.’

  Weber leaned across Hisami to consult Baker then drew back and looked at Hisami, who gave a barely perceptible shake of the head. ‘That concludes our argument,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we no doubt will hear why Mr Hisami changed his name in due course. It is not a crime to change your name, unless it has been done as part of an attempt to conceal information from the immigration authorities.’

  Weber bobbed up again. ‘I can say that Mr Hisami changed his name for reasons of personal security, which he would rather not speak about for the moment.’

  The judge nodded and turned to Balstad. ‘If you are to continue to hold Mr Hisami, you must bring more convincing evidence to this court. I am going to order Mr Hisami’s release, but with an ankle monitor, which will be fitted by the New York Police Department before he leaves this building.’

  Weber rose more quickly than he had done during the hearing. ‘But this is nonsensical, Your Honour. Mr Hisami is not a flight risk and the government has never argued that he was. They said he was a danger to society.’

  ‘This is the way it’s going to be. The DHS will know where your client is without the necessi
ty of locking him up.’ She turned to Balstad. ‘I want a complete report on the disks and photographs you have brought into this court as evidence. And the next time I see you, I will expect an explanation. The evidence that you bring then will be incontrovertible, or the case will be dismissed immediately. Do you understand?’ She paused and glowered at him. ‘Next case!’

  The man was right. It was just a few hours before the truck reached its destination, but it felt like days to her because of the intense cold. When the truck came to a halt and the doors were flung open on a misty and frosted forest clearing, they had to pick her up bodily and carry her out of the truck. From watching people who had been rescued in the Aegean, she dimly recognised what was wrong with her – she was shivering and her teeth were chattering, her speech was slurred and she couldn’t order her thoughts to tell the men about the pain in her shoulder. A few more hours of that and she knew she’d be dead of hypothermia.

  But now she was out in the morning light and the sun was shining above the autumn mist and she saw Kirill standing in the glade, now sporting a tweed hunting jacket with leather shoulder pads, pockets with large flaps and a dark green Tyrolean hat which had an orange feather stuck in the hat band. She thought she was hallucinating until he bent over to examine her and she smelled the tweed jacket and the acrid aroma of a Turkish cigarette.

  He spoke rapidly in Russian to the three men who held her and they carried her across the clearing to a compound surrounded by a high mesh fence and inside which was a large log cabin and several smaller outhouses. The porch of the main building was decorated with boars’ tusks and antlers. One of the men caught his jacket on a set of tusks as they negotiated the door and had to be unhooked before they finally got her inside, laid her on a hard bench and covered her in a rug made from crochet squares.