It was well past dark in the camp. I was in the Palestinian NGO worker’s car, shaking like a leaf while I watched the seemingly endless line of cars in front of us as we waited to leave. When we’d arrived at the camp, I had flounced up to the Lebanese soldiers guarding the entrance and handed them my U.S. passport as well as my entrance pass, provided by the NGO. They had gaped at the stupid American girl insane enough to march into this place without any sort of protection, then allowed me to enter. It only occurred to me later that the Lebanese army, being the airtight institution it is, every terrorist and potential kidnapper in Ain el-Hilweh probably knew I was there.
My guide was watching me tremble with mounting concern. “Are you okay, Miss Anderson?”
“I need to get out of here,” I said in a whisper. In conjunction with the dangerous, desperate environment of the camp, my Ritalin-induced paranoia was overwhelming me.
“What’s the matter? It’s just a little traffic. The roads here are very narrow and this often happens.”
“No,” I replied, almost shouting. “I need to get out of this place. Now.”
I got out of the car and started walking, though I had no idea how far it was to the gate. My driver called after me, then pulled the car over and ran to my side.
“It’s okay, Miss Anderson! I’ll take you to the gate. Just calm down.”
“My father was kidnapped,” I blurted out. “I have money. I’m afraid they’ll take me too.”
He put a hand on my heaving shoulder and whispered to me, as one would calm a frightened animal. “It’s fine. You’re with us; no one will touch you here.”
But he was beginning to look increasingly suspicious to me, and I flinched from him.
“Just get me out of here. Please.”
As soon as we exited the camp, I leaped into the car my newspaper had provided and told the driver to take me home to my apartment in the Hamra neighborhood of Beirut, about an hour away.
That drive was the most terrifying of my life. I was convinced that every car behind us was a villain intent on snatching me and condemning me to a hell of captivity and rape. After a while, the puzzled looks my driver was shooting me in the rearview mirror became sinister, and I was convinced he was in on the plot. When we arrived at my apartment, I scrambled out of the car without saying good-bye and fit my key into the lock with shaking hands.
I spent the night squirreling around my apartment, peering out windows, taking more Ritalin to ward off the yawning chasm of misery I knew awaited me when I crashed, and Googling conspiracy theories to feed my fevered brain. At about 4 A.M., I think I tried to go to sleep so I could make it to the office the next day. Needless to say, that was a futile effort. Instead, I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling and muttering to myself in a voice that was increasingly unrecognizable. The empty place below my rib cage yawned endlessly. Insanity unfurled, stretched lazily, and grinned at me. This is your life, it whispered. This is forever.
After a while, the call to prayer drifted through my open window: “Allah w Akhbar . . .” The muezzin’s voice was thick and rich; and although I didn’t speak enough classical Arabic to understand everything he was saying, I had grown up hearing the adhan, and I knew some phrases by heart.
“There is no god but Allah,” he chanted. “Hasten to success.”
An admonition, or maybe a promise of redemption, just out of reach. I saw it then, the choice I had to make, and began to cry silently. There was oblivion, and there was survival. I knew the road I was traveling by heart, and what it would bring me—pain, pain, and more pain. That was the path I’d been on for years, and it represented a life I often considered ending, a chaotic, substance-fueled existence pocked with endless chasms of self-loathing. But for the first time in my life, I noticed there might be another way. I barely recognized it, and I knew immediately it wasn’t going to be natural for me, or easy—but in that moment, I decided I was going to get better. I also realized there would be no cure, no pill to make the crazy disappear. If I chose that way, it was going to be a long, hard slog, and my soul sagged with exhaustion. It was the closest I’ve ever come to suicide. It was also the moment I decided I was going to live.
The next day, I called my mother and asked for a plane ticket back to the States. A week later, I was hospitalized for the second time.
7. THE CONSPIRACY THEORY
He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy’s life.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
NOW
I’m beginning to think this trip was a mistake.
Mustafa Zein and I are sitting in a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman, Jordan. I treated myself to the room because this whole investigation is starting to get to me. Hours spent peering blearily at Google search results, trying to follow up on the hundreds of frustrating, tantalizing leads I keep stumbling upon, are taking their toll. I knew I should follow Baer’s suggestion to speak with Zein, since he was supposed to have participated in the hostage negotiations. So I reached out to him, booked my ticket from Beirut to Amman, and was thoroughly enjoying the lavish hotel.
Until our meeting. Now I’m looking at Zein with mounting concern for his sanity and wondering how to get through this craziness as fast as possible so I can go check out the hotel swimming pool.
“Let me tell you what I have.” Zein is chattering rapidly at me. “I brought you this as a gift.” He hands me a thin, bound booklet with the words Summary of Science and Faith on them. I place it in my lap.
“I’m the only game in town,” Zein continues. “The politicization of Islam is anti-Koranic, anti-Islamic, through and through, and the so-called Islamic religious state is anti-Koranic. This is a summary of mine. You have never seen anything like it, because I put the Koran under the scientific test.”
“Hmm,” I respond, thinking, What the fuck has Baer gotten me into?
“What did I prove?” Zein asks rhetorically. “That there is a hereafter cosmologically. That there is God scientifically. And that there is an accounting to the soul, and where the soul is positioned in your body. This spark of divinity from paradise, which is antimatter. How do you keep antimatter in a laboratory?”
“Um . . . suspend it?” I offer. Glad I recently watched that episode on Discovery Science.
“Within a magnetic field!” he crows. “What is that magnetic field within your body? The solar plexus! That’s the scientific proof. I know it’s there. The instantaneous human combustion.”
“When people just go up in flames?”
“The antimatter soul should go out before the heart stops and the field vanishes,” Zein explains. “But if it touches the cells, it turns—and this is a scientific discovery I copyrighted in the United States—it turns the water into its basic elements: hydrogen, oxygen, electricity, fire. Hydrogen: fuel. Oxygen . . . so you will have burning from the cellular level.”
“Amazing,” I murmur, looking at the door. “Fascinating.”
“Yes!” Zein says, laughing. “You are getting my full story, political and spiritual.”
I see an opportunity. “Right, your political story,” I interject. “Can you tell me how you became involved in the hostage negotiations?”
I know Zein was used as a crucial source by the CIA because I just finished reading Kai Bird’s moving, well-sourced book The Good Spy, about the life and death of Robert Ames, the CIA agent who was killed in the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing. The attack was carried out by the Islamic Jihad.
Zein plays a pivotal role in the book. His long-term friendship with Ames and recruitment as an unpaid CIA source—the unpaid part is something Zein heavily emphasizes to me—led to the establishment of an intelligence-gathering and personal relationship among Ames, Zein, and Ali Hassan Salameh, a high-ranking member of the PLO.
The book describes how Ames, by all accounts an intelligent, empathetic, and sincere man, essentially went somewhat “off the reservation” as a result of his relationship with Zein and Sal
ameh. According to Bird’s reporting, Ames always displayed Arabist tendencies and seemed sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but with Zein and Salameh’s influence, he began working quite hard to bring the U.S. government around to the idea of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue through negotiations with the PLO. Because Salameh came to trust Ames so deeply, their unusual friendship—unusual in the sense that it was not a typical agent–source dynamic; there was real mutual respect and admiration between the two men—led to some extremely valuable information being shared. In fact, it looked like the Zein-Salameh-Ames team was making real headway in getting Yasser Arafat, then–chairman of the PLO, to compromise on some major points regarding a potential peace agreement with Israel.
Then, in 1979, the Mossad assassinated Salameh. Don’t get me wrong, they had their reasons—for one, the suspicion (now widely held as fact, although Bird’s book raises questions on this point) that Salameh masterminded the 1972 Munich massacre in which eleven Israeli athletes and a German police officer were killed by Black September, an armed wing of the PLO. Certainly Salameh was known to have been chief of operations for Black September, and that group is believed to have committed some significant acts of violence, including hijackings and bombings. So it makes sense that the Mossad would want him out of the picture.
What makes less sense from a purely psychological perspective is why Ames would have become so close to Salameh. The man was known as a terrorist. How could a high-ranking CIA agent allow himself to intimately, personally invest in someone like that?
All I can offer by way of explanation is this: some people might look at the casualty statistics from the most recent 2014 Gaza war and ask an important question. Were the 2,251 Palestinians who met their deaths via Israeli military action (according to the UN, almost 70 percent were civilians) any less victims of terrorism than the 71 Israelis (5 were civilians, the rest soldiers) who died under Hamas rocket fire? What exactly is terrorism?
Strictly defined, terrorism is “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” I, for one, can imagine few things more intimidating than the enormous stockpile of U.S.-donated arms, defense technology, wealth, and political influence wielded by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government today. Certainly any real examination of casualty estimates from the Arab-Israeli conflict will demonstrate that while both sides are willing to act violently to achieve their political aims, the Israelis do so much more effectively. Palestinian dead make up 87 percent of the total number of people killed as a result of this conflict since 2000.
One could argue that things were different when Bob Ames was alive. While it would defy credibility to ever have called this conflict equally matched, there seemed to be slightly less of a David-and-Goliath feel to the whole dynamic. The Palestinians had been invaded and displaced, they were fighting back (with the limited help of other Arab nations), and so a war was taking place in which one party hurt the other and vice versa. Also, targeting enemy combatants is quite different from terrorizing and killing civilians. As the leader of Black September, Salameh would have ostensibly been responsible for the deaths of civilians.
And yet, Ames might have looked at this man and thought, Well, we don’t shirk at dealing with governments that have massacred millions of innocents. Why should I refrain from associating with someone who may be responsible for a fraction of that? Especially if that relationship could have helped bring about the end of a conflict that was already proving significant in both its destabilization of the Middle East and its devastating impact on American foreign policy. I wasn’t in Bob Ames’s head, so this is pure speculation—but I think it’s as good an explanation as any.
In any case, Zein and Ames’s efforts in this direction were largely stalled when Salameh was assassinated—until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and worldwide outrage generated by the Sabra and Shatila massacres. In that political environment, it seemed more likely that Ames, with Zein’s help, might be able to convince his superiors in the agency and their bosses in the Reagan administration to consider establishing a friendlier dialogue with the Palestinians. So they continued to collaborate on a possible resolution to the conflict that would involve active negotiations with the PLO.
Then the embassy was bombed by the IJO, Ames was killed, and it looked like that dream was well and truly put to rest. I believe I understand Zein’s role as middleman between the CIA and the Palestinians. But how did he come to play a part in the hostage negotiations?
“My plan was to exchange the American hostages with the seventeen in Kuwait,” Zein tells me. “I was dealing with Imad Mughniyeh.”
“Directly?” I ask.
“Directly!” He laughs. “I knew him when he was sixteen years old and working with the Palestinians. I knew him intimately because, you see, I’m Shia from the northeast, I was Shia in a Palestinian organization, and my name was at the top. I was the one who sent him at seventeen years old for special training in Algeria.”
“Okay.”
“Who recruited Imad?” Zein asks. “General Ali-Reza Asgari, who was the second in command of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran . . . Ali-Reza Asgari gave Imad the job to record the names and the addresses of foreign patriots, Western patriots in Beirut.”
“Okay,” I encourage him. This bolsters my theory regarding Asgari’s role as point man with the IJO.
“See, all this information would hurt Israel because now you have the culprit, a general from the Revolutionary Guard, being guided by his master, the Mossad, so the liability was placed on Iran and the Mossad got a free pass.”
I take this in for a moment, blinking.
“I knew from Imad when Imad was alive,” Zein continues. “He told me the car that hit the embassy in Beirut was supposed to go to the marine barracks first. The last minute, it changed course and came to the embassy. The one who changed the course of that car was a Mossad agent . . . Asgari was a former SAVAK officer working for the shah and was trained twice by the Mossad in the early 1970s. He became a Mossad agent in 1980.”
SAVAK was the shah’s notoriously brutal secret service, sort of the Iranian KGB. The Mossad and the CIA helped the Pahlavi regime establish the organization in 1957. It became Iran’s most hated and feared institution because of the gruesome torture methods it would use on opponents of the shah.
“I don’t understand,” I interrupt. “You think Imad Mughniyeh was working for Israel?” This seems odd, considering the Mossad and CIA were widely blamed for Mughniyeh’s assassination in 2008. I can’t say I shed tears when he died—whatever faction in Iran pulled his strings, there’s no doubt the Boogeyman engineered my father’s kidnapping with enthusiasm.
“Without [his] knowing,” Zein corrects me. “He was working for the Revolutionary Guard. There was this separatist group—”
“So the orders were coming from this unit, he thought it was Iran, but in actuality it was the Mossad? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Through Ali-Reza Asgari. And where were they meeting? In the Iranian embassy in Damascus to separate themselves from Hezbollah in Beirut . . . Imad was not a member of Hezbollah at the time, and the group that was doing jihad work was not a part of Hezbollah. They had a special unit that they were within . . . it was a purely Iranian Revolutionary Guard operation through Ali-Reza Asgari, who was working with the Mossad, and I’ve got the proof, because who marketed Iran-Contra to the United States? The Mossad.”
Well, documented history proves he’s right about that last part. In many ways, Zein’s allegations would explain so much—but no, every journalist I know would roll their eyes at this. Yet I find myself continuing to nod along with Zein as he speaks. Have I completely lost it? At this point, I’m exhausted and I need to do some thinking, so I end the interview. Just after I turn off my recorder, Zein looks at me.
“How did you get your name?” he asks suddenly.
I get this question a lot. Normally I just laugh and say my mother made it up, because the real story is
so strange. But for some reason, I decide to tell Zein the truth.
“My mother says she saw it in a dream,” I say.
“Does she remember the dream?” Zein asks. “Did she tell you what it was?”
“Yes, she did,” I answer. “It was a couple of months before they took my father. My mother had just found out she was pregnant with me and they were going to call me Daniel if I was a boy or Danielle if I was a girl. One night my mother dreamed she was walking in a desert. She came to a large, black stone building. She says it looked like a church but it wasn’t a church. She went to the back of the building and there was a graveyard, and the first tombstone she saw had the word ‘Sulome’ carved on it in big letters and the word ‘Anderson’ in small letters. She put her hand on the stone and says she felt this woman was significant to American culture and politics. Then she looked to see when this woman was born and when she died, but the dream went all blurry before she could read it. My father was waking her up to go to his tennis game. The first thing she said to him when she opened her eyes was ‘We’re having a daughter and her name is going to be Sulome.’”
Zein nods thoughtfully. “Some people are like the hub of a wheel,” he tells me. “Things happen around them. They have a very strong purpose in this material life. You must be one of these people.”
Well, I don’t know about all that. What I do know is that in June of 1985, my birth was reported by most major news agencies in the hope that Dad would hear he had a new daughter, and that’s how my father leaned of my existence. Recently, I found a letter he wrote Mama from captivity.
“Madeleine, my love, my heart, I saw our daughter on TV the other night and I cried for joy,” my father wrote thirty years ago from his prison. “I only saw her for two or three seconds, enough to notice your black hair and beautiful, bright eyes. But I can’t describe how it felt to end months of not knowing. Our guards had seen the piece in the early news and brought in the TV for the late-night cast—all in Arabic, but at least I saw my family and the pictures. Is it Danielle? Or Sulome? No matter, I only wish you had been in the film.”
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