Fisk barks another quick, loud laugh, like a gunshot.
“I think now I regard the dead as friends who would want me to tell what happened to them, and if the soul exists, if they’re moving around, they’ll see me and say, ‘That’s Bob Fisk. He’ll tell the world what happened to us.’ But that’s not posttraumatic stress. That’s just my view on it. Now please turn off the recorder.”
I turn it off. But I can’t turn off the way his face closed like a shutter being snapped when I asked him if he saw ghosts. It’s the same look my father gets when anything comes close to the wounds at his core, the ones I watched him drown in food, wine, and money, ignoring them with every fiber of his being.
Because you can’t be around the dead that much without seeing ghosts. I watched them flit across Robert Fisk’s eyes myself. Whether he admits it or not, he’s haunted by them, just as my father is. I imagine their whispers can become quite loud in the dark and quiet. I think they must weigh on a person, heavy as the rocks and crags of the Lebanese coast.
THEN
June 1992
I knew right away things were not how they were supposed to be.
After the glorious, star-spangled homecoming, the AP asked my dad to choose between a chalet in Switzerland and a private island off the coast of Antigua in the Caribbean. We were to have a vacation; some time for our squeaky-new family to bond, away from the reporters. Luckily, my dad picked the island.
The trip should have been a dream realized. An active, playful seven-year-old unleashed upon a stretch of white sand and crystal waters, full of creatures to marvel at: I should have been over the moon. Instead, it felt like some sort of half nightmare, the kind where you float above your body and watch it move without your consent. I cringed at my father’s hugs, which felt unnatural and forced. Who was this man? He wasn’t kind and nurturing. He didn’t know me, and didn’t seem like he genuinely wanted to. His attentions were mercurial, fleeting—like the sun across the surface of the island waters. Only a mirage. Some part of me sensed that his attempts at connecting with me were stunted, and I shrank from them.
Now I understand how he must have strained, trying to reach past the wall he had built in his head—his only protection from the nightmare he had lived for seven years. How he must have wanted to hold the child he had only ever seen on TV; how frustrating it must have been to feel my rigid little body reject him.
What a strange little almost-family we were; my mother, my father, and I. Like puppets on a stage, we jerked and flailed through the awkward script the world had written for us.
The fights started almost immediately. The first one was the Nintendo fight. Someone—I can’t remember who now—gifted me with a Super Nintendo, one of many toys presented to me by well-wishers after my father was released. I had never played a video game before. Growing up in Cyprus, I barely ever even watched TV. My mother had been reading to me since I was still in her womb, and at age three, I started reading to her. By seven, I was reading at a teenage level, and much preferred books to cartoons. But the Nintendo was a novelty, and I would sit in our beautiful condo on the beach and play it for hours, moving the little figures around on the screen. Perhaps I liked having control over something in my environment. Or maybe I’m overanalyzing. In any case, it was certainly an escape from the weirdness of our situation.
One day, I had been in front of the TV for hours, and my father decided I should stop playing for some reason I can’t remember—maybe to eat dinner at the table or go outside or something. I would learn that his decisions regarding what a child should and should not do were often arbitrary and harsh—likely a product of his childhood, which I later understood was probably much more traumatizing than mine.
I don’t remember the fight verbatim. I was seven, after all. All I can recall now is how his face twisted with anger as he shouted, and my tears when he lost patience and yanked the Nintendo out of the TV. That was my first confirmation that the father I got was not the father I needed. I spent the remainder of the day tearful, sullen, and confused.
After Antigua, we moved around for the first few months, then landed in Westchester, New York, where we settled into an unhappy domesticity. My father would constantly berate me for minor infractions—sitting on my feet at the table, not finishing my food, being too hyper and loud. I had a moderate case of ADHD, so I was often possessed by surges of electric-quick energy that had to be released by running, dancing, making shrill, strange noises. We had mandatory family dinners, and I dreaded them, marked as they were by forced conversation and raised voices; they usually ended with me in tears.
I felt completely betrayed: I had waited for his return for as long as I could remember, fantasized about it, longed for it. And then all it brought us was a new kind of pain.
I was very much aware that my father was jealous of the bond my mother and I had formed in his absence. I understand now how difficult it must have been for him, trying to find a place in our somewhat unhealthy attachment to each other. At the time, though, I was heartbroken by his obvious irritation with my presence, and felt as though I had lost my mother as well. I thought of myself as unwanted, inconvenient. He would vacillate between offering me an awkward sort of love and bellowing at me, calling me a spoiled brat or a smartass. He told me on more than one occasion I was the reason he and my mother were always fighting. And it was true. My mother wanted my father and me to build our own rapport, so she hardly ever interfered in his treatment of me while I was in the room. But I heard them screaming at each other downstairs after I had gone to bed.
For her part, my mother became quiet, sullen, and even more preoccupied with me, though in a darker, more complicated way. She would criticize me constantly, and her expectations became almost impossible to fulfill. Mama was always vigilant when it came to my misdeeds and I started to feel as though I was under constant surveillance by a government agency, like I was out on parole and my PO was sure to catch me doing something awful. When I misbehaved, she would punish me, then refuse to speak to me for days, even weeks. I remember prostrating myself outside her bedroom door once, begging hysterically for her to forgive me. She would always say the same thing: “Sorry isn’t good enough.”
So I retreated into the only place that felt safe: my imagination. I would play in our backyard for hours every day, creating a fantasy world that seemed much more real than the painful isolation waiting inside our house. I began acting out, fighting at school. I cut off my hair, wore boys’ clothes; I was always climbing trees. My behavior, as well as my thick glasses, buckteeth, and strange name, made me an easy target for bullying. I had few friends, so there was no solace for me at school, apart from my talent for academics. I was always an honors student, and I still read constantly—books about faraway places, elves, talking animals, demons, and witches. I must have gone through almost everything Tolkien wrote before I was eleven. Things made sense in those books. Characters were either good or bad, heroes or villains. People who were supposed to be heroes weren’t inexplicably, bafflingly cruel. And the endings were genuinely happy.
We were constantly in the news—the world expected us to be content, assumed my parents’ marriage was solid. It used to make me furious to have to lie to reporters and tell them how thrilled I was to have my daddy home, when in reality, I would cry at night and pray for those men to take him back.
Of course, I had no idea what that really meant. About three years after my dad came home, his book, Den of Lions, was published. My mother cowrote it, and it was a huge success. I don’t remember how many weeks it was on the New York Times bestseller list, but it was a while. I read the book for the first time soon after it came out. I must have been about ten years old. That’s when I began to understand exactly how terrible those seven years were for my father. He’s a wonderful writer, and he recounted every facet of his fear and misery in excruciating, captivating detail. I’ve avoided rereading the book for years—there’s a copy on my shelf, and I suppose I’ll go back to it event
ually, but the prospect doesn’t thrill me. I’m old enough to truly grasp the horror of his experience now, and I’m afraid to awaken those terrible images in my head.
At the time, certain details and scenes stood out, and have never left me. They broke his glasses when he was taken, for one thing. My father and I have the exact same eye prescription; we’re so nearsighted that without glasses or contacts, we might as well be blind. I thought about what it would be like, chained in a basement without being able to see, and I was just as terrified as if it had happened to me.
They eventually taped his glasses back together and gave them back, but the brutality continued. There were regular beatings and psychological torture, of course. They would put a gun to his head, tell him he was about to die, and pull the trigger, but it wouldn’t be loaded; he would just hear a click. One year, they wouldn’t let him send us a Christmas message and he became so hopeless, so consumed by anger and desperation, that he beat his head against the wall until he was covered in blood and they had to restrain him before he seriously injured himself.
Because, of course, my father was valuable to them. He was a commodity they needed to keep alive, the human equivalent to a fistful of cash. I was also struck by his descriptions of the times his kidnappers had to move him: they would wrap him in duct tape from head to toe, with only his nose sticking out, and throw him in a compartment under a truck. I remember that he and his fellow hostages used to make chess pieces out of tinfoil left over from their meals. They would hide them from their captors and play to escape the endless, silent passage of time, but every now and then, the men who held them would find the pieces and throw them away. There are other things I recall now, similar horrifying vignettes of his captivity, but I try not to think about them too much. It’s why I won’t watch Homeland, why I can’t bear being confined or restrained in any way. His experience is burned into my brain, and for years, it was the stuff of my nightmares.
The book answered some of my need to understand what had made him so closed off, so numb and dismissive, but it didn’t bring us closer together. My father remained remote and casually, unintentionally hurtful, and I never stopped desperately longing for the daddy I had invented as a small child—the gentle, nurturing man who would hold me close to him and make me feel safe and loved.
My father almost never discusses his captivity with me. Before I started investigating it myself, everything I knew about what happened to him I learned from the book or from watching him speak. But the book ended with his happy return, and it didn’t address the very real misery I was experiencing at home.
Some years ago, when I was in my early twenties, my father came to visit me in New York. We went to dinner, and one of us made the mistake of bringing up those years. I still try to avoid broaching that topic with him as much as humanly possible, but it does come up from time to time. My father and I remember my childhood very differently. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset,” he’s said to me more than once as I fight back tears, not wanting to break down in front of a restaurant full of strangers. “Things weren’t that bad.”
But my father didn’t live in my head, and as far as I’m concerned, things were that bad. At this particular awkward meal, my father mentioned a little vignette from my childhood. He seemed to think it was funny.
When I was nine, we were having one of our innumerable fights. I was a stubborn little girl, and as year bled into unhappy year, I became more and more angry at my situation. Maybe it was the books I was always reading—stories that pitted good and right against bad and wrong. Perhaps it was just a child’s innate sense of fairness. Either way, on some level, I knew someone my age should not feel so desperately alone, and it pissed me off.
I don’t remember what started the fight that day, but we were screaming at each other, my father red-faced and furious.
“You think you’re smarter than me?” he shouted.
“I’m just as smart as you!” I countered shrilly.
“We’ll see about that, you little smartass,” he said. And the next day, I was whisked away to a child psychologist to have my IQ tested in order to prove I was not actually as smart as he was.
Turns out, we have the exact same IQ.
Decades later, as we sat across from each other at the restaurant in New York City, I gaped at my father, who was laughing about the incident.
“Dad, can’t you see how fucked up that was?” I asked him plaintively. The tears started to well up.
“Come on, Sulome,” he huffed. “It was a long time ago.”
Some months after that dinner, I was recounting the story to a friend. “Jesus,” he said when I was through. “It’s actually a fucking miracle you turned out this normal. I mean, you’re crazier than a bag of cats, but still. You should probably be dead of a heroin overdose.”
“Uh-huh.” I smiled as I railed up a line of cocaine. “Welcome to my life.”
3. THE BOOGEYMEN
Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.
—NEIL GAIMAN
NOW
The first whispers of the Islamic Jihad Organization were lost in the noise of the civil war.
Twelve people were killed and twenty-seven wounded in the 1982 car bombing of the French embassy in Beirut. The culprits were elusive. There were a few mysterious anonymous calls to newspapers by people taking credit for the bombing on behalf of various entities, most of which had never been heard of. One of these previously unknown names was the Islamic Jihad.
The French had been pissing people off in Lebanon for decades. Their long-term sponsorship of the Lebanese Christian minority was an open sore to many Muslims, especially given the outrageous wartime behavior of Christian factions such as the Phalange. The country’s long-marginalized Shia population, which had already begun looking to Iran for support, often clashed with the Christians. As if that weren’t enough, France’s then-president François Mitterrand was becoming very cozy with Israel, which would invade Lebanon a month later. So the fact that French installations had become a target in Lebanon made sense at the time.
Despite that first phone call, the IJO would go largely unnoticed until April 1983, when a suicide bomber blew up the American embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people including eight CIA agents. Robert Ames, the agency’s top Middle East analyst and Near East director, died in the blast. It was a devastating blow to the U.S. government, which had joined a multinational intervention force with other Western nations in an attempt to restore some semblance of order and governmental authority in a war that was rapidly spiraling out of control. Although this force was originally intended to be a neutral player in the conflict, it was quickly perceived by many as supportive of Israel, which wasn’t making any friends in Lebanon following its invasion. Resentment against America had been mounting in the months preceding the attack, but no one expected such a brutal retaliation.
Ironically, my father covered the embassy attack. In an article for the AP, he quoted an anonymous call by his future captors to a Beirut daily newspaper. The bombing, the caller claimed on behalf of the IJO, was “part of the Iranian revolution’s campaign against imperialist targets throughout the world.”
Then, an eerie foreshadowing: “We shall keep striking at any imperialist presence in Lebanon, including the multinational force.”
Until the embassy bombings, these types of attacks against Western targets were rare, and the emergence of such a tactic was extremely worrying to Western intelligence agencies. Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat with the U.S. State Department, was one of the lucky survivors of the attack. At the time, he was serving as the embassy’s political chief, and he would eventually be appointed as U.S. ambassador to Lebanon in 1990, making him the chief State Department official dealing with the hostage crisis. In a phone interview, he explain
s the initial U.S. perception of the Islamic Jihad.
“The first concrete indication that there was something new and bad out there came pretty early,” Crocker tells me. “I think looking at it just from my perspective, we knew we had a militant Shia Islamic phenomenon supported by Iran and Syria. It was going to be something that we would have to reckon with that would be a real danger to us. It never had the clarity, if you can call it that, of the Palestinian guerrilla movement . . . They were deliberately careful to avoid labels or recognized offices.”
It wasn’t long before another spectacularly violent display convinced Washington it had a major problem on its hands. On October 23, 1983, two suicide truck bombs simultaneously struck buildings that respectively housed American and French armed units. Fifty-eight French paratroopers and 241 U.S. servicemen lost their lives, making the Beirut barracks bombing the single deadliest day the United States Marine Corps has experienced since its battle at Iwo Jima during World War II.
Again, a mysterious phone call. Again, that name: the Islamic Jihad. My father also covered that event for the AP. Dad had left his home in upstate New York to join the marines when he was seventeen years old and served two tours in Vietnam before becoming a professional journalist. He once told me that in the aftermath of the bombing, he saw someone he had fought with in that ill-fated war. Well, he saw parts of him, enough to recognize, anyway.
This was a catastrophe of epic proportions for the United States. The marines had come to Lebanon to keep the peace, until politics made enemies of the people they were supposed to be protecting. Scores of Americans were dying in a new kind of warfare—one almost impossible to anticipate or prevent, given its nature. It was the dawning of a fearful era.
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