The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  “We were quickly setting up and all of a sudden, that roar happened, and that was our first indication that Kim Jong Un was there,” said Mojica. “And it was incredibly shocking, I could not believe it.”

  The moment was captured in the film Vice made for HBO of the trip. The crowd of about ten thousand uniformly dressed spectators rises as one and begins thunderous cheering and clapping. Then the camera turns to view Mr. and Mrs Kim.

  “I was just walking around the sideline of the court shooting pictures and then suddenly I see people just stand up and start screaming,” said Barthelemy. “It was insane. It was like when … you can’t imagine an American stadium … this was like the wave was going by everywhere in the stadium at the same time. Everyone was on their feet going crazy and showing whatever they need to show. The whole time that I was ever in the same area as him he seemed to be on Leg Three of the Kim Jong Un Shows Himself to the Country PR Tour. I get the sense that he was equal parts projecting cool, I get it, I have people from the NBA coming to hang out with me and we can sit around and have a good time and also … I can drop bombs if I want to and I can get to space so … fuck you, I’m Kim Jong Un. He seemed playful. It seemed like a bit of playfulness mixed in with the sort of visual body language that you would want to do to project authority … this weird combination of maybe compulsive glee … compulsive playfulness and fun or whatever and … Oh my God! I can’t believe this is happening to me! That was maybe somewhat mitigated by … OK, hang on a second. I’m leader here. I may have people around me that might murder me at any given moment so I’d better gesticulate wildly with my hands to show that I’m a tough guy in charge … and that type of thing. He walked in and sat down and then Rodman went over to sit next to him and the atmosphere in the place was electric for a moment and then just very aware…. You could feel everyone watching and I got the sense of being aware of eyes on them as well.”

  Rodman sat and chatted with the Great Leader through translators throughout the event, forming his overall impression of Kim as a great and highly misunderstood guy.

  “I realized at one point that Kim Jong Un was pointing to me and waving at me,” said Barthelemy. “He was craning his neck forward a bit, waving at me like somebody would be waving at a little kid that they see getting off a plane at the airport like … Hey buddy! That kind of a thing…. I turned around to see if there was somebody behind me that he was waving at and there was nobody back there. Then I look again and he nudges his wife, gets her attention, points and me and then they both wave at me, smiling. I got a picture of that. That was really bizarre. That was definitely something I didn’t expect in North Korea.”

  There was more to come. After the game, the Americans were invited to a reception.

  “We were told we could not bring any cameras, we could bring no phones, no pens, no notebooks, nothing, like bring nothing,” recalled Mojica. “Oh, and also, by the way, it is formal and we leave in thirty minutes. And so we had our crew running around, shop in the lobby. Jake, our cameraman bought like a child’s sport jacket and squeezed into it. I happened to have a jacket with me so we did the best we could. So we jump into our vans and we are driving around. And by this point, we are starting to understand the layout of Pyongyang. You know, we were heading out by to the Kumsusan Palace, then we made this drop to another brick road, and then we were driving down another which we had never been on before. And it was very dark, and I asked my minder, ‘So where are we going?’ He is like, ‘I do not know; I have never been here before.’ And then we pull off to this kind of gray building, gray stone building. [There are] intense multilayers of security as they are checking us in. We walk into kind of like a white marble foyer type thing, and there is a bar.”

  Mojica said he asked for a glass of Scotch at the bar, and then he and the rest of the Vice entourage were escorted into a banquet hall.

  “And we walk in, and there is kind of a receiving line, kind of like a wedding reception,” he recalled. “And I look over to see, like, who the person at the end of the line is. And I saw kind of an old man and could not figure out who he was, and I was like, OK, interesting. So then, I turned, and immediately the very first person in the line is Kim Jong Un. Like right to my right, and I am like, Oh shit! So I put this glass of Scotch down, and I go over, and suddenly the cameras are flashing, and I have my kind of my Saddam-Rumsfeld moment. [Donald Rumsfeld was photographed shaking the dictator Saddam Hussein’s hand in 1983, as an American envoy to Iraq. The shot became famous years later when Rumsfeld, as secretary of defense, directed the violent overthrow of Saddam.] So it was kind of like, here is my handshake photo with the evil dictator that will come back to haunt me years later.”

  When he took his seat at the assigned table a waiter brought his discarded drink back, and then set down a large tumbler and a full bottle of the Scotch brand he had ordered. Koreans were alternated with Americans around each table, and whenever an effort was made to converse, a translator would scurry up and lean in. The menu was elaborate, starting with caviar and ending with a terrific dessert. An attentive waiter kept Mojica’s tumbler of Scotch full. Throughout the meal, there were well-lubricated toasts, and at one point Mojica was pushed forward to make his contribution. He was slightly ready for this. He had jotted down a few notes in anticipation when it became clear he would have to do it. So he stood with a microphone in one hand and his full tumbler of Scotch in the other, the notes back at his table. He was already feeling no pain.

  He tried to remember his notes. He said the most difficult part of the trip was trying to get Rodman, the NBA’s former bad boy, to get along with the Globetrotters, who were like Boy Scouts.

  “And I think that we have done that, and therefore it proves that anything is possible, even world peace!”

  There was laughter and cheering, first from the Americans, and then, moments later, from the Koreans as his words were translated. Jason lifted his glass to Kim at the head table, took a sip of the Scotch, and put the microphone down and started back to his seat. Then he heard a voice yelling at him from across the room. He turned to look, and realized that it was Kim, sitting on the edge of his chair, shouting and gesticulating with a raised left hand. Mojica was confused. Then Kim’s translator shouted the Great Leader’s words in English, “Bottoms up! You have to finish your drink!”

  Mojica looked down at the giant glass of brown fluid. This was clearly a command performance.

  “I am a guest so I am going to do it,” he said. “So I finished—kind of guzzled this drink and [when] I finish, my head is kind of spinning.”

  He reached back for the microphone and spoke again, amazing himself as the words came out of his mouth, “If we keep it up at this rate, I will be naked by the end of the evening.”

  Some of the women in the audience looked aghast. There was silence as his challenge was relayed to Kim in translation.

  “He is sitting there kind of like on the edge of his seat with his mouth open and eyes wide,” said Mojica. “And he is like listening, listening, and nodding and nodding, and then he is like, Oooh! slapping the table, and everyone laughs with great relief.”

  Mojica said his memory grows foggy at that point. He recalled the all-girl band revving up the theme music from Dallas, and then Rocky. Things got a little out of hand. One of the group’s translators got up onstage and played the saxophone. There was crazy dancing. One of Rodman’s friends got into a drunken fight with someone in the Globetrotters’ entourage and they were escorted from the hall. At one point one of their North Korean hosts came over to Mojica with a message from Rodman.

  “He suggested that we may want to chill out a little bit,” he said. It was alarming. Things had apparently drifted further out of hand than Jason had thought. Also … memorable. How many people can say that they were advised at a party by Dennis Rodman to tone things down?

  At one point in the evening, before things got too hazy, Mojica remembered staring at Kim for a long time because … “he was, like, righ
t there.” Sitting just twelve feet away, he tried to drink in every detail, knowing how rare it was for an American to get such a close look at the young dictator. Kim seemed perfectly relaxed. Not at all drunk. Friendly. Smiley. Fat. Interacting with his guests in a very formal way.

  It was hard for Mokica to believe that this young man was, in this place, completely, utterly, in a way most Americans cannot fully grasp, in charge.

  Defending the Indefensible

  Published as “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Has the Most Ferocious Lawyer in America Defending Him,” Vanity Fair, March 2015

  We do not often think of a defense lawyer as someone who wars with her own client, but if it comes to that, Judy Clarke will go to war. Her latest client, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, so far claims that he is not to blame for detonating a bomb among spectators at last year’s Boston Marathon, killing three people and severely maiming dozens. It is doubtful that he will prevail on that point, but with Clarke in his corner, it is even more doubtful that he will ever be put to death for the crime, even if he gets it in his head that he wants to be, or that his cause demands martyrdom. Clarke is on a mission bigger than Tsarnaev alone. She is at war with the state—in particular, with the state’s power to impose death. She calls the death penalty “legalized homicide.”

  Clarke has taken one notorious death-penalty case after another. Among others, there was Ted Kaczynski, the deadly Unabomber, now living out his days in a supermax prison in Colorado, and still furious with his onetime defense attorney (“Judy Clarke is a bitch on wheels and a sicko,” he wrote to me); Susan Smith, who strapped her two small boys into car seats and then drove them into a lake and watched them drown; Eric Rudolph, the racist and Christian zealot who set off a bomb in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics as part of a spree that killed two people and injured 150 more; Zacarias Moussaoui, the Al Qaeda operative accused of helping to plan the September 11 attacks; and Jared Loughner, who opened fire in a parking lot near Tucson in 2011, shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords through the head and killing six others. Clarke’s client list is a catalog of the worst.

  You might suspect a lawyer with a record like that to be a publicity seeker, but Clarke is the opposite. She shuns attention. She almost never gives interviews, and she does not stand before cameras and microphones on courthouse steps. She cultivates invisibility, right down to the muted way she dresses for court appearances. There is a deeper logic at work in her predilection to defend those who have achieved monstrous notoriety. In every instance cited above, there is little mystery about the crime itself—and in all the cases, her clients have been convicted. But while prosecutors have tried to invoke the death penalty, none of her clients have been executed, even when, as with Kaczynski and Rudolph, they are actually proud of what they have done. It’s not unusual for clients like these to resist Judy Clarke’s help. One, the white supremacist Buford O. Furrow Jr.—who in 1999 walked into a Jewish community center in Los Angeles and sprayed seventy shots, wounding five victims, before shooting and killing a mailman outside—has threatened to kill her. Clarke defends even people who do not wish to be defended, and who don’t have a prayer—clients who are not just dream candidates for the death penalty but in some cases seem determined to embrace it. One case at a time, with whatever legal methods will work, she halts the march toward execution.

  Clarke makes her point not with stirring courtroom rhetoric or brilliant legal reasoning but by a process of relentless accretion, case by case, win by win. This is her cause. Because if the state cannot put these defendants to death, then how can it put anyone to death? Thirty-nine executions took place in the United States in 2013 for crimes that form an inventory of human cruelty—and yet few of these crimes were as willful and egregious as those committed by Judy Clarke’s clients. Meanwhile, Kaczynski is hard at work on his next book. Smith, from her cell, advertises for pen pals. And Rudolph writes essays defending the bombing of abortion clinics—essays that his followers post on the Internet.

  We are more willing to impose death when the killer is painted in monochrome—if we can define him or her by the horror of the crime. Many think this is just: that is what blame and punishment are about. But in 1990, in rare public comments to the alumni magazine for Washington and Lee University, where she teaches law, Clarke has argued that no person should be defined “by the worst moment or worst day” of his life. She laboriously constructs a complex and sympathetic portrait of the accused, working with a far more varied palette; sketching out the good and the bad; unearthing the forces that drove a killer to the terrible moment; and insisting that judges, juries, and prosecutors see the larger picture, weighing not just the crime but the whole person. She seeks, not forgiveness, but understanding. It takes only a small spark of understanding to decide against sentencing someone to death.

  Her record defending the indefensible speaks for itself. Among those who want capital punishment abolished in this country, Judy Clarke is the most effective champion in history.

  David Kaczynski’s estimation of Clarke can be encapsulated in a single wordless gesture as she stood beside his brother, Ted, in a Colorado courtroom on January 7, 1998. Ted was trying to fire Clarke.

  He wasn’t supposed to stand up or speak at that point in the hearing, but he jumped to his feet before Judge Garland Burrell Jr., and announced in his high-pitched voice, “Your honor, I have something very important to say!”

  A bailiff shouted, “Sit down!”

  Ted had been legally cornered. Defending him was never going to be easy. The evidence was overwhelming. From the strict isolation of his small cabin in Lincoln, Montana, he had painstakingly built and mailed bombs that had killed three people and injured twenty-three others. A once brilliant math student with advanced degrees, Kaczynski had become one of the most deliberate killers in history. He had drawn up a detailed manifesto with numbered paragraphs that he blackmailed the Washington Post and the New York Times into publishing by threatening to continue killing if they did not. The tract was a far cry from incoherent, though it was certainly turgid and extreme, arguing that the steady march of modern technology, of industry, and of socialization was profoundly dehumanizing and was destroying the possibility of happiness. Here was a man who had carefully thought through his reasons for murder, and then carried out his attacks with great deliberation over a period of years. His crimes fell well within at least two of the modern criteria for capital punishment—premeditation and multiple victims. His trial was almost certain to end in a sentence of death. He could avoid it by pleading guilty and accepting life in prison without hope of appeal, pardon, or parole, which he did not wish to do. Or he could proceed to trial and let Clarke and the other lawyers present the defense they had painstakingly prepared in the two years since his capture—an approach that he had just realized would portray him as mentally ill. Kaczynski would later accuse Clarke of having deceived him about this until shortly before the trial. For this murderously proud man, something more than personal humiliation was at stake. An insanity defense would forever color his theories as madness. And, for him, his ideas were the important thing. They were why he had killed. He was prepared to die for them.

  None of this was made explicit in the courtroom, but from his seat in the front row Ted’s brother had pieced it together. David had mixed feelings about the trial. He himself had led the FBI to Ted, and he was pleased that he had stopped his brother’s violence, but he dreaded the prospect that his principled act of betrayal would lead to Ted’s execution.

  “It must have been the most awkward and difficult moment for Judy, as well as Ted, because at this point the real issue for him was that he didn’t want the world to think he was crazy,” David recalled. “He thought there was meaning in what he did, and to be described as a crazy person would have taken the meaning out of it. Of course, Judy as an attorney is trying to use her best influence with Ted to save his life, and here it was kind of falling apart at this critical moment. She could have been just really frustrated. She cou
ld have [felt], My client is taking himself down despite all of my planning and best efforts to save his life.”

  There was a sidebar conference and then a further discussion inside the judge’s chambers, at which point Clarke effectively torpedoed Ted’s request to rid himself of his attorney. The judge did not want to further delay the trial, so he proposed a compromise: he would allow Ted to represent himself if his defense team would remain in the courtroom as his “advisers.” Clarke rejected this proposal. Such a trial would be a charade, she said. She and her team would not take part. Her refusal forced the question, and she must have known that doing so would scuttle her client’s wishes. Back in the courtroom, as Ted listened to Burrell deny his request, Clarke raised one hand and rested it gently on his shoulder. She knew, as David did, what a blow this was to him. Within hours he would attempt to hang himself in his cell. A few weeks later he grudgingly pleaded guilty—not to avoid the death penalty, but to avoid Clarke’s insanity defense. He is still complaining about it—that was the point of his letter to me.

  But it was Clarke’s kind gesture that impressed David.

  “Her instinct in that moment is not to turn a cold shoulder to him or express frustration or anger, all of which would have been understandable, but to put her hand on him. To touch him.”

  Compassion, the quality David Kaczynski saw in her, cannot by itself explain Judy Clarke. There is a steel in her that we don’t ordinarily associate with kindness. In her interview with the alumni magazine, Clarke spoke of teaching students to act in the best interests of their client—and of “their cause.” She said, “The idea is that we stand between the power of the state and the individual.” If Clarke is compassionate and kind, she is also defiant and committed. This is no marshmallow.