by James Reston
“We sat there in silence for a while. Occasionally, as he kept feeding the boy in his arms, he glanced up at me and leveled me with a stare.
“Finally, he said, ‘Why have you come here tonight?’
“I told him I was brought at his command.
“‘Did you come of your own free will?’
“‘I did,’ I said.
“And then he asked, ‘For what purpose?’
“And I said, ‘To swear my oath to you.’ But I said I had a question. At that he was totally silent. I wasn’t sure he had heard me, so I repeated, ‘May I ask you a question about it?’
“He nodded. ‘I’ve heard you were inquisitive, Abu Tariq.’
“‘There is a phrase at the end, “not to disobey my commanders.” What is the significance of that?’
“‘That is not complicated,’ he answered softly. ‘If I ask you to do something, you will heed and obey me. If I ask someone else to do it, you will not object. You will not ask, “Why did you assign this task to this individual?” We must remember the holy text: “Obey God and all those who are put in authority over you.”’
“I started to interrupt, but he raised his hand for silence. ‘You do not like your companion Mohamed Atta, I understand.’
“‘No, yasayyidi.’
“I had to put that feeling aside, he said, and I had to put the Cause above personal likes and dislikes. But then he told me he had named Omar as the emir of our group. Omar! Our emir! That made me really happy, and I said, ‘Good. Wonderful,’ and then I caught myself. ‘Atta will be disappointed,’ I said. Because I wanted him to know I understood—we were a team.
“He kept looking at me, searching my face. And he said, ‘Mohamed Atta has spoken well for your group. He has said that you four came to us needing money to satisfy your duty to jihad. You expressed an interest in the Chechyna struggle. You wanted accomplices and training. He spoke to us of you personally, of your love of airplanes and flying. We welcomed his ideas, and we welcome your presence. We will give you money. We will provide you brothers to help. And for you, we will train you to fly airplanes. In return, we demand loyalty and obedience.’
“It was time for him to get the boy back to his father.
“‘Is there anything else?’ he said.
“‘Yes,’ I replied and stood straight, and looked at him.
“‘I pledge before God my obedience to you, Osama bin Laden, to listen and to obey, to carry out both pleasant and unpleasant orders, at good and bad times, and to work selflessly, to obey my commanders, and if necessary, to die in the Cause of God.’
“He seemed pleased, and he offered me blessings, and then said, ‘I will see you tomorrow at dawn at the volleyball pitch. Your first assignment will be in the front line as a net man. Remember what the Holy Book says, “Those in the front lines of the battle will achieve the upper ranks of Paradise.”’
“And then he laid the child aside and reached for the bowl of dates across the table.
“‘Would you like a sweet?’”
8
AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHED, Karima received her formal summons to be a witness in the trial of the prisoner from the Lades Chicken arrest. It turns out that he was the only surviving member of the Hamburg cell in police custody. Karima had been dreading this moment for a long time. The trial of the defendant named Mounir had been going on for a few weeks, but her appearance, the press wrote with wry understatement, was “much anticipated.”
The venue would be different this time. The imposing Criminal Justice Building was a venerable old pile near her beloved botanical garden, and Recht had told her of its notorious past. During the Nazi period, he said, many Jews had been tried there for their supposed “racial dishonor” under the Blood Protection Act. In modern times the building’s baroque façade had been painted orange to make it appear more welcoming. There was an irony about this trial, he said.
“This ugly, little Jew-hating Moroccan forged many ties with neo-Nazis.”
On the appointed morning she dressed carefully, intent to look more German than Turkish. As she was putting on the finishing touches, her mother called. She was holding a copy of Boulevard Zeitung. Karima’s picture, she said, took up the entire front page.
“And the headline reads, ‘SHANKSVILLE SIREN TO TESTIFY TODAY!’”
Karima groaned.
“Do be careful, my darling. They’ll all be gunning for you today.”
“Don’t worry, Mutti. Are you okay? Anything unusual?”
“Things always seem to be about the same for me, mein Schatz,” her mother replied.
When Kommissar Recht arrived to collect her, he was his usual laconic self. Karima wondered why she found his fumbling ways comforting. He presented the spitting image of a fussy old bachelor, gauche and rumpled. Perhaps he feels a tinge of the paternal, she thought, and is trying to protect his wayward daughter in distress. No. She discarded the thought. Her vanity was running away with her.
As they made their way toward the downtown, she broke the ice.
“Günther, you said once that the Americans felt their best chance to foil the 9/11 plot was with Sami.”
“Yes.”
“What did you mean?”
“Everyone is pointing the finger at somebody else,” he said finally. “No one wants to be held responsible. There’s a frantic effort to shift blame away from wherever or upon whomever it belongs.”
“Yes, but why Sami? How could anyone have known about him? You said yourself he was the perfect sleeper.”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
Again, his eyes wandered to the passing buildings. His stock in trade was asking questions, not answering them, but he knew sometimes you had to give a little in order to get a lot. Occasionally, she said something that seemed to suggest greater knowledge than she had ever admitted before.
“There was a chance, just an off chance, of catching him as he came out of Afghanistan. He was detained in the Dubai airport.”
“Oh, yes, he brought me jewelry from there … and two lovely dresses from Pakistan. Why was he detained?”
“Because his passport appeared to have been tampered with.”
“How?”
“His picture was not affixed to the page correctly, and the entry stamp for Pakistan had been touched with a chemical of some sort. Such defects always raise suspicions. There is evidence that his name was on a watch list, but the Americans deny it. Probably someone is covering up.”
“Arabs sticking together?”
“Not necessarily. The Emiratis insist that they interrogated Sami for four hours.”
“For four hours! Didn’t they coordinate with the CIA or your people?”
Recht shot a sidelong glance at her. “Yes,” he said finally.
“Who gave the order to release him?”
“I can’t get into that,” he said curtly.
As they approached the downtown, she glanced over at him. “Whoever it was must be cowering in a corner somewhere,” she said distantly.
Recht said nothing.
“If they had broken Sami, that would lead them to Atta. Is that what you’re saying?”
“They didn’t have anything on Sami,” he responded.
“But you mentioned his doctored passport.”
Recht exploded. “Verdammte scheisse, Karima! I am not going to sit here and criticize my own colleagues! If you really want to know the truth, you’re the one who represented the best chance to stop him. You could have spoken up, but you didn’t!”
The fury of his outburst frightened her. She turned away.
“That’s just not fair,” she said softly.
As the courthouse came into view, she could see the TV antennas spooled to the sky, like the Zaqqum tree of Islamic hell, she thought. She saw the round apparatus at the top of the spools. “The shoots of its fruit-stalk
s,” she remembered from her childhood Koran, “are like the heads of Devils.”
“They’re going to shout some terrible things at you, Karima,” Recht was saying, protective again. “Just keep your shoulders back and your chin high.”
“Like the red carpet in Hollywood?”
“Yes, that’s a good way to think about it. Today, you’re the star of the show.”
When they pulled up, reporters swarmed around the car. She could hear the hum of cameras as loud questions were hurled her way. She heard only individual words, like Atta or terrorist or Shanksville or passenger revolt. She could sense their pent-up frustration over being unable to reach her until now. It was spilling out as anger. As Kommissar Recht whisked her down the cordon, the animated faces of the reporters whizzed by her as an amorphous mass, except one face she had seen before, a dusky man. He was shouting nothing, just smiling broadly at her. She had a sudden start of recognition. Wasn’t that the man she had seen in the Botanical Garden? She turned away for an instant. When she looked back, he was gone. She heard only one full question. A tiny, middle-aged, overweight woman, dressed in a loose-fitting shift, with big lips plastered in red like some garish, overly made-up Cabaret figure, and black hair streaked in gray, leaned over the rope and said in a stage whisper,
“Was he good in bed?”
Entering a courtroom, specially outfitted for this trial of a terrorist, she found the scene daunting. The dark wood paneling was carved in gothic designs, and a massive iron sculpture of the double-eagle symbol of the state hung behind the judge’s high dais. Karima glanced to her right to see the press and the eager spectators arrayed in their seats behind a thick bulletproof plexiglass barrier. The ugly little defendant slouched in his seat between his lawyers. The growth on his chin was spotty and his mustache skimpy as he squinted at her with his squirrel’s eyes. She noticed his overbite as he scowled. She could hear the audience rustle with excitement as she took her seat. The femme fatale had finally been forced from her secret lair.
When the bailiff asked everyone to rise, the door opened, and Judge Schneider entered in his black robe, velvet vest, white shirt, and tie. He climbed the stairs importantly to his high perch. After some formalities, Karima took the stand.
“As you know, Dr. Ilgun, the defendant in this trial is accused of providing material support to the hijackers on September 11 in the commission of their crime against humanity. Specifically, he is accused of lying about the whereabouts of one of the hijackers. And he is accused of sending money to a hijacker. This is the first public trial on the issue of material support for terrorists. But there may be more such trials in the future.”
It was as if he were talking not to her, but playing to the crowd. More trials? What was he talking about? Who else had they captured?
“Did you ever have contact with Mr. Mounir, the defendant here present?” he began.
“Yes. He called me once.”
“Go on.”
“In the fall of 1999 when my boyfriend—”
“Your boyfriend?” the judge said maliciously.
Karima was determined not to be intimidated. “Yes, when my boyfriend, Sami Haddad, left Hamburg and did not turn up at his parents’ house in Lebanon, I was very concerned. This man called to allay my concerns. He said he was calling at Sami’s request and assured me that he was fine and would be returning soon.”
“Are you sure it was Mr. Mounir?”
She hesitated. “It’s possible it was someone else.”
“Try to be precise, Dr. Ilgun,” the judge scolded her. “Were you on the verge of calling the police about your missing lover?”
“Yes.”
“But you did not do that.”
“No.”
“Of course, had you done so, the course of history might have changed.”
The judge let his comment hang in the air. His menace was palpable. It was not Mounir who was on trial, she realized, but she. With the press obsessed with her, the judge was making the most of it.
“In fact, Sami Haddad went to Afghanistan to train as an al-Qaeda operative,” he continued.
“Yes. I know that now.”
“When he went to Afghanistan, did he tell you where he was going?”
“He said he was going to Lebanon to visit his parents.”
“When did you know differently?”
“I received a card from him in Yemen. And when he got back, he said he’d been in Pakistan.”
“Not Afghanistan?”
“He never mentioned Afghanistan.”
“Didn’t you ask him why he went to Pakistan?”
“Yes, he didn’t want to talk about what he had done there. He said it would be better for me if I didn’t know.”
“Did that not raise your suspicions?”
“It certainly did, but I couldn’t pry anything further out of him.”
“Did you know Mohamed Atta?”
“No.”
“How about an operative called Omar?”
“No.”
“Or someone called Muktar?”
“These names have been in the news. But I never heard of Muktar before the attacks.”
“Did he ever mention meeting a Sheikh Osama bin Laden?”
“No.”
“Did he discuss jihad?”
“Yes, he did. But I didn’t know what it meant.”
“Are you not a person of the Islamist faith?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t know what jihad means?”
“In a general sense, yes. I meant I wasn’t sure how he understood the concept.”
“Did he ever talk to you about his training in Afghanistan?”
“No.”
“In a deposition you said you had noticed a change in him in 1999 to 2000. Do you have any notion about how he became radicalized?”
“Only what I have read or heard in the media. I am not sure what ‘radicalization’ means. He began to pray more frequently, but that was not alien to me. I grew up in such circles. I suppose I did find it a little disturbing. But I preferred him praying rather than hanging around discos and getting drunk.”
Titters filled the court room, and the judge sternly gaveled for silence. Karima gained confidence from the gallery reaction.
“Did he ever tell you what his target was in this 9/11 plot?” he asked.
She paused to reflect on this absurd question, as people in the audience leaned forward to hear what she would say. The judge was grandstanding. Let him, she thought. It was time to push back.
“I think he put that plane down deliberately in Pennsylvania.”
A few gasps came from the gallery. “He what?”
“Yes, so he would not reach his target, whatever it was.”
More utterances came from the audience. The judge demanded silence.
“Why do you think a thing like that?”
Again she paused. “It is merely a woman’s intuition,” she said.
“I thought you knew nothing about his mission.”
She realized she was entering dangerous waters. “Well, I just know it in my heart,” she said.
“You have no other basis for thinking that?”
“No.”
“Dr. Ilgun, we are engaged here in a criminal investigation. We are concerned about the state of your knowledge in your brain, not the hopes and fantasies of your heart.”
“I’m sorry. That’s just what I feel.”
From his perch high above the proceedings, Judge Schneider shuffled his papers. Was it for dramatic effect, Karima wondered? “Dr. Ilgun, did you know in advance that Mr. Mournir would be arrested that day at the Lades Chicken restaurant?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Weren’t you going there that day to meet him?”
“No, I wasn’t, Your Honor.”
The judge’s frustration showed
on his face, as he glanced between his papers and her. She waited for his next salvo, sitting up even straighter and primly adjusting her suit coat. Finally, as if he had come to a revelation about the next phase of his questioning, he spoke.