Testimony

by Scott Turow

  Badu was equally inscrutable for far different reasons. He was a large, amiable man, past seventy, hefty and bald, and a renowned authority on international law. He spoke beautiful, musical English and was composed and charming in his aloof way, clearly fit for the ceremonial aspect of his job, in which he received the diplomatic representatives of various nations. But beyond amiable chatter, virtually everything he said seemed to miss the point. He was the master of the grave nod or understanding chuckle, both of which he applied at deft intervals when his subordinates spoke. But he rarely responded directly to questions or suggestions. When I explained the possibility of seeing Merriwell, Badu kept repeating, “Very unusual, very unusual,” and then added his light laugh, without offering more.

  It was widely assumed around the Court that most critical decisions within the OTP were actually made by Akemi. As an example, I was told that it was she who had finally pushed through the encrusted layers of resistance to investigating Barupra. But she was reluctant about me interviewing Merriwell. She agreed that a conversation with the general in the Bosnian Embassy was technically lawful, but she said the Court, whose expenses were annually audited by the UN, could never pay for an investigatory trip to the US.

  Ordinarily, that would have been definitive. But for weeks, my ex–law partners had been nagging me to return to the Tri-Cities to discuss a criminal price-fixing investigation of Kindle County’s oil refiners, who for decades had charged the highest prices in the country. It took a few days, but my former clients confirmed that they would be only too happy to pay for the best seat on the plane. When I explained I could make the trip with no expense to the Court, Akemi had no way to refuse permission.

  So I prepared to head home. There was also family business waiting for me. Not long after I’d announced my plans to move to The Hague, my younger son, Pete, and his girlfriend, Brandi, had come to tell me they were engaged. Ellen and I had tried to schedule a celebratory dinner with Brandi’s parents, but the Rosenbergs were still wintering in Florida when I left. Now I called my ex to see if we could make arrangements for Saturday night, April 11, which worked out. Roger, in the meantime, said Merriwell could see me at 3 p.m. on April 10, a couple of hours after I landed at Dulles.

  The last step was to ask Esma to notify Ferko that we would need to see him in Barupra, where I would head from the US. She had called me a number of times in the interval, ostensibly to see what we had heard from the Bosnians. Because of the time difference with New York, we ended up connecting at the end of her court day, which was late at night in The Hague. Once we’d dealt with business, Esma inevitably prolonged the conversations with questions about my kids or stories about herself.

  I especially enjoyed her anecdotes about growing up with four sibs in a motor home. She described her father as a con who preyed on the elderly, and a brute who beat his wife and children. Her revenge was to go to school wherever they camped. Because it was forbidden for Roma girls to associate with gadjos after puberty, her father had her expelled from the Gypsy nation when she went to university. She claimed not to have cared.

  Interesting as Esma was, the perils with her remained obvious and I found myself trying to limit our phone calls to five minutes. This time I resorted to e-mail, but my cell rang moments later.

  “Ferko will show you the grave, but he requires me to be there to accompany him,” she said.

  It hadn’t dawned on me that she would make the trip, and my heart squirmed around for a second.

  “There’s really no need,” I said, even though I realized she had every right to be there, if that’s what Ferko preferred.

  “Bill,” she said, “I doubt you will see Ferko without my help. And he struggles with Serbo-Croatian. I can translate from Romany.”

  I accepted her decision and took a second to explain that I’d be arriving from the US. In response to her usual curiosity, I outlined my plans.

  “You and your ex-wife are comfortable at the same table?”

  “Completely. Now that we’re no longer responsible for one another’s happiness, we get along swimmingly. I’m actually going to stay Saturday night with Ellen and her husband.”

  “Dear me,” said Esma, which, truth told, reflected some of my own ambivalence about that detail. “You can tell me more in Tuzla. I shall see you Thursday week. The Blue Lamp?” Goos had already said the hotel was by a considerable margin the best choice in Tuzla.

  After ringing off, I sat in my new office, drilled by a hard truth that broke through often in the wake of my conversations with Esma: I was lonely. Worse, approaching fifty-five, I remained unsettled in fundamental ways. I still approved of my choices in the last few months, but I’d made a large wager with my future—and my sense of who I was. Sitting there, I felt the cold void I’d stumble into if things didn’t turn out well.

  6.

  Merriwell—April 10

  The Embassy of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina occupied a flat-faced futurist building near Twenty-First and E Street NW, not far from the US State Department. The neighborhood, Foggy Bottom, was a quieter part of town where the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings now housed embassies and museums and hotels, as well as upscale residences, along the leafy streets.

  I arrived near 3 p.m., wheeling my luggage with me because I had come straight from Dulles. Inside, grim-faced Bosnian security police treated me—like every other visitor, I’m sure—as a potential terrorist. After I passed through the metal detector, my luggage was impounded and my briefcase was searched. Without apology, my cell phone and tablet were removed for the duration of the visit, along with two pens. Roger had phoned last night to tell me that I couldn’t take notes during the meeting.

  Over the years, my job as a lawyer had led me into confrontations with lots of supposedly important people—the Catholic archbishop in Kindle County, countless CEOs, the Senate Judiciary Committee that grilled me about my appointment as US Attorney. Yet minutes away from my interview, I found myself unusually nervous.

  General Layton Merriwell had achieved that distinctive public profile lately referred to as ‘iconic.’ He was arguably the most decorated soldier of his day, and had been briefly—but seriously—promoted as a candidate for president of the United States. All that said, his notoriety had increased substantially when he joined the long march of American males of great power and achievement who wandered dick-first into disgrace.

  When I was growing up, the popular image of a successful Army officer was Patton, someone who supposedly had balls the size of eggplants, who addressed God by first name, and who could inspire his troops to latitudes of courage they had never foreseen in themselves. Personally, I had virtually no firsthand experience with the US military, since I was of that social class which, in my time, didn’t get involved in defending their country, much like the five-hundred-plus members of Congress who had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq and then as a group sent a single child to fight there when the war started. But over time, I’d developed the clear impression that the men and women who rose to the top in our armed services were far more nuanced figures than Patton.

  Certainly that appeared to be the case with Layton Merriwell. He represented the fourth generation of his family to attend West Point, and he had graduated number two in his class before training further as an infantry officer and parachutist. Over the years, Merriwell had moved back and forth between the Pentagon, the field, and academic assignments, teaching Tactics at the Army War College and also spending semesters at MIT, where he was completing a doctorate in Game Theory.

  His strategic views were not complex and had been often quoted: “Fight only when absolutely necessary, and then with overwhelming force.” His battlefield record was glorious: Grenada, Panama, Haiti. During Desert Storm, he was chief of staff to General Schwarzkopf, planning the hundred-hour ground operation that followed our unrelenting air assault.

  All of that had led him to the Balkans, where he was the first commander of the US forces in th
e NATO Stabilization Force in Bosnia. He was reassigned after the peacekeeping mission was well established, but returned as supreme commander of NATO forces during the bombing of the Serbs in Kosovo and the ensuing pacification of that country and Bosnia. Finally, in 2004, on the recommendation of his friend Colin Powell, he was dispatched to lead the Central Command in Iraq. He had some success in neutralizing Al Qaeda, only to confront the Sadrite insurgency. After eighteen months he asked to be relieved, reportedly convinced that there was no near-term prospect of a democratic Iraq. Instead, he supposedly recommended to the president that we double our force to fully subdue and disarm the many malcontents, much as in Bosnia, and then withdraw.

  Once he was back in the US, Merriwell took leave to finish his doctorate, while reports of his misgivings about the war circulated widely. Early in 2007, several prominent Democrats floated his name as a presidential candidate for the 2008 election, until Merriwell announced he would not leave the service. Three years later, in 2010, President Obama nominated Layton Merriwell to become the next chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Within forty-eight hours of that announcement, both the Washington Post and the New York Times published front-page accounts, probably based on leaks from Bushites eager to get even, of Merriwell’s long affair with his aide-de-camp at NATO. When the relationship started, Captain Jamie St. John, who was half the general’s age, was unmarried, a gifted West Point graduate, and the daughter of one of Merriwell’s academy classmates. Whatever this young woman had offered Merriwell proved to be something he was unwilling to forsake. He brought her with him to Iraq, but there the relationship foundered. She requested a transfer, which he’d tried unsuccessfully to block, while he continued to e-mail her, his messages growing more and more abject and profane. Finally, after her engagement to a fellow officer much closer to her age, he had sent a series of ridiculous threats—most composed late at night and admittedly under the influence of far too much alcohol—claiming he would end her Army career unless she returned to him.

  Both the affair and the turbulent aftermath had been over for roughly four years by the time it became news; in the interval, Merriwell had apologized to now Major St. John in writing several times. Nevertheless, he resigned from the service the week the story broke, while his wife of forty years tossed him out of their house in McLean and his two daughters publicly spurned him. He was now the CEO of Distance Communications, a hi-tech manufacturer of the electronic components for various weapons systems, part of that immense gray world of military contracting where billions were made and little was publicly known.

  Merriwell’s downfall had come as I was in the waning days of my marriage, and it fascinated me more than those of Bill Clinton or Sol Wachtler or Eliot Spitzer or the hundreds of other men of standing who’d been shamed this way in recent decades. The common understanding of all of them was that they were idiots who proved yet again that a male is just a human being chained to a maniac. But to me there was a deeper enigma: Why had each of these men found desire more powerful than their attachment to everything else in life they had struggled so long to attain? As a group, their behavior said, in substance, something that reverberated with me: With everything gained, huge success was still not enough. Something essential remained missing. Perhaps all humans feel like this and men of power simply have the means to follow the siren’s call. Or perhaps this phenomenon reflected the fact that the drive of big power guys was the result of a permanent lack of contentment.

  Each case probably had its own answers, including that for many of these men the only thing new was that they had gotten caught. But the profiles of Merriwell included countless testimonials from friends who insisted that these events almost certainly had no precedent. And yet in his last desperate messages to Major St. John, Merriwell had promised to abandon his wife and to leave his Army career behind. Merriwell’s story was ultimately most striking to me, not because he felt such intense longing for something missing in his life but rather because he seemed to think he had found it.

  When I approached the conference room, through the glass panel in the door I saw Layton Merriwell waiting. He was impeccable but abstracted, a man very much alone at that moment, as he looked off with his legs crossed, one glossy Oxford jiggling idly beneath the knife-edge crease in his trousers. As I entered, he came to his feet and offered his hand. He was a bit smaller and slighter than he looked on TV, with sharp features and trim gray hair, still long enough to comb over. For a person of his age—sixty-eight, according to the net—his cheeks were unusually rosy, probably a remnant of drinking. His hands, pale and perhaps even manicured, seemed unexpectedly refined for a soldier.

  Still standing, we talked a little bit about Roger. General Merriwell told me they had served in the same places several times, and we exchanged a couple of light remarks about Roger’s intense nature. Merriwell made me laugh out loud by briefly imitating the way Roger screwed up his whole face when he was bearing down on things. Then the general gestured to a chair. We sat on the same side of the long conference table.

  “So what can I tell you, Mr. Ten Boom?” He smiled a bit, understanding the ambiguity of his remark.

  “Many things, I’m sure, General, but first we need to get through some preliminaries.”

  “You’re going to tell me that I have the right to have a lawyer present?”

  “I was and you do.”

  “As you would expect, Mr. Ten Boom, my attorneys have already told me not to talk to you.” Merriwell by now had plenty of experience with lawyers, since the revelation of his affair had led to both a congressional investigation and a brief grand jury probe that went nowhere because the alleged victim insisted she had never taken any of his threats seriously. I already recognized that his preconditions—that he would meet only alone, off the record and without notes—reflected a lawyer’s advice, since those in effect inoculated him from any subsequent use of his words against him.

  “We both know that I don’t face much practical peril here, Mr. Ten Boom. If the ICC ever tried to charge me, our government would do whatever was required to save me.”

  “Ah yes.” I smiled. “The Hague Invasion Act.”

  General Merriwell smiled, too, but without parting his lips. We were facing each other in two adjoining high-back executive chairs upholstered with uncommonly rich blue leather. There were eighteen of them surrounding the beech table, its pinkish undertone revealed in the late April light entering through the large windows. The paneling was also beech, and the room was double height, three baubled chandeliers suspended over the table. At the far end, the blue flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with its yellow wedge and white stars, as well as the Stars and Stripes, stood on staffs on either side of the obsidian face of a large-screen TV that presumably served for occasional diplomatic teleconferences, as well as viewing satellite broadcasts of the soccer leagues back home.

  “You know, Mr. Ten Boom, I don’t want to start out on the wrong foot, but what you are doing here is exactly what the armed forces feared about the International Criminal Court. The other countries negotiating the ICC treaty refused to exempt peacekeeping troops, like the ones we had in the Balkans, from prosecution.”

  Given his NATO role at the time, Merriwell obviously was speaking with firsthand knowledge.

  “General, how can you give anyone immunity for committing crimes against humanity? The British and the French and the Germans all had peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, and they joined the ICC.”

  “The British and the French and the Germans are not the same targets our country is, Mr. Ten Boom. And those governments agreed in Dayton that our troops could only be prosecuted by us under American law. Apparently the ICC doesn’t regard itself as bound by that stipulation.”

  “The Court never signed that agreement, General. But you’re raising a very good point.” The compliment caught him off guard and he raised a faint eyebrow. “Do you know,” I asked, “if the Army has done any investigation of this alleged massacre?”


  Merriwell lingered before answering.

  “Not while I was in the service. Since then, I wouldn’t know. But no one would share the results with you anyway, Mr. Ten Boom.”

  “That’s not really why I’m asking. The way the ICC works, the Court is authorized to investigate crimes only when the nations involved can’t or won’t do that. As you just pointed out, the US Army always retains the power to prosecute its soldiers. So a thorough inquiry by the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and a public report of the findings would have prevented the ICC from going anywhere near this case. I don’t understand why that hasn’t happened.”

  “Mr. Ten Boom, the US military is not about to let any international body tell them to investigate our troops when there’s no basis to do so. Or to reveal its findings when there is. It’s hard enough to persuade the American people to allow our military to intervene overseas, without having to tell parents that their sons and daughters will be subject to the moralizing whims of a court thousands of miles from home with procedures nothing like our own.”

  “It’s the same justice everywhere, General. Sealing four hundred men, women, and children in a coal mine without any provocation is a crime in any land, and I doubt you truly view the prosecution of an atrocity like that as ‘moralizing.’”

  Despite the jousting, our tone was pleasant, even amused, with occasional quick smiles that were only a little bit short of winking. We both knew the arguments. It was probably not a surprise that a military man and a trial lawyer each relished this kind of back-and-forth as a way to get acquainted. But my last challenge to Merriwell brought a more somber look.