The Girl From Kathmandu

by Cam Simpson

  The street was quiet—it was residential, and these were working hours—but we showed pictures of the three best friends to almost everyone we saw. No one recognized them, but like the phone shop owner, all were aware of droves of foreign workers living somewhere on the street. Two independently directed us to the same house, at No. 58 Malfuf Street. It was on the low side of the hill, behind one of the dirty concrete walls, meaning the house could not be seen from the road. We left without trying to get past the gate and down the stairs, deciding we would knock on the door once we knew more, or if we ran out of other leads.

  One unchecked Amman phone number remained on the photocopy of the slip of paper from Nepal. Nader soon discovered it belonged to none other than Amin Mansour, the chain-smoking business partner of Ali al-Nadi who had been introduced as “Abdullah” during our meeting at the Grand Hyatt—the same man who Eyad Mansour had claimed took the Nepalese workers from the airport after they landed.

  The phone’s registered address, and Amin Mansour’s home, was at No. 58 Malfuf Street.

  After a few days we received a three-page report from the Jordanian government detailing official records on the twelve men inside the country. It showed the twelve had arrived in three different groups. The three best friends who had phoned home from the Horizons East booth landed together on June 30, 2004, and five more arrived on July 4, including Jeet; Bishnu Hari, the young man who had phoned the restaurant in Kathmandu to say, “I am done for”; and Prakash Adhikari, whose parents received a letter from him after they had burned an effigy of his lost body. The last four men came two days later, on July 6.

  There was no way to know how many other Nepali workers had arrived within each group, but Eyad Mansour’s estimation that these twelve had been among scores arriving from Nepal at the time made it likely there were many more traveling with them on the same planes.

  The next column in the report documented each man’s exit from the country, specifying which border crossing. It confirmed that a border guard scanned all twelve passports on August 19, 2004, at the Karameh Border checkpoint when the convoy crossed into Iraq on the Amman-to-Baghdad highway.

  The final column detailed each man’s police registration for his residence inside the country during the weeks between the border passport scans.

  The four who had arrived in the last group, on July 6, were registered at different locations. Perhaps that was because, as Eyad Mansour had claimed, so many workers had been coming into the country that the body shop operators were running out of space for them.

  The remainder—all eight of the men who had landed in the first two groups, including Jeet, Prakash Adhikari, and the three best friends who had phoned home—were kept together in the same residence. The police records registered all the men as residents of No. 58 Malfuf Street.

  The phone number registered for them, also required by the authorities, was identical to the one on the scrap of paper: the landline of Amin Mansour.

  Le Royal, the hotel where the men were supposed to have guaranteed jobs, towers above the neighborhood in central Amman that is home to the Zahran Police Station, where the men were taken for their registrations. In fact, it is on the same street.

  We phoned Ali al-Nadi to arrange one last meeting. Trying to get past his dissembling felt like a useless exercise. The only thing we needed now, from him and his partners with the fabricated names, was their picture. We felt strongly that photos of them should be published, and accordingly, we scheduled our afternoon meeting in an outdoor bar, so José Moré, a veteran Chicago Tribune photographer, could shoot them from a public place and at a discreet distance. We scoped out the bar in advance, to plan where everyone should sit.

  Al-Nadi and Amin Mansour arrived on time and arranged themselves around the table as planned. They ordered lager; they smoked. Al-Nadi volunteered almost immediately that he had, in fact, checked his records to see if the twelve men had ever worked for him, as he had promised to do the first time we met, because, as he had mused then, “If they were my workers, maybe I should be compensated for losing them.”

  This time, al-Nadi said yes, the men had at some unknown point been on his books, but he didn’t really have any idea what had become of them. More dissembling.

  For tactical reasons, we played dumb, because much more was at stake than just a vain quest for answers to fill holes in an article. U.S. law required contractors and subcontractors to pay lifetime compensation to survivors of anyone killed working for them, or on their way to work for them, in a war zone. Compensation came from a government-regulated fund, and not only were the families entitled to the compensation, but contractors and subcontractors could be prosecuted for a federal crime if they failed to follow this law. None of the victims’ families in Nepal knew the law existed, because no one had ever contacted them about filing claims.

  So, the dissembling and denials from al-Nadi and his partners, not to mention those from people farther up the chain, created a potentially consequential roadblock for the families of the men they had sent into Iraq in gypsy taxicabs at the end of a trail of fraud and deceit and coercion. It could conceivably frustrate attempts to win even a small measure of justice.

  José Moré secured his cameras out of sight. He came to our table, signaling to me that he had what he needed. I introduced him as my colleague, and we said our good-byes.

  Past the gate at No. 58 Malfuf Street, we walked down the steps leading to the two-story house built on a concrete slab in the side of the hill above the ravine. Its primary resident, Amin Mansour, aka “Abdullah,” did not expect us. He didn’t know that we knew his real name, let alone where he lived.

  The bottom of the steps opened onto a small courtyard on the concrete slab. Amin’s front door was at the back. No one was about. Empty clotheslines strung across the courtyard overhead dipped gently beneath the weight of plastic pins of pink, purple, and blue, and someone had shoved a dull, faded sofa without feet into a corner, exposing it to the elements. We moved silently as we scanned the large porch, gesturing at things we saw of potential importance.

  To the left, an odd extension (a one-story, box-shaped addition) had been tacked on to the side of the home, with its own, separate exterior door, secured from the outside by a chain. A tower of ratty foam sleeping mats, piled higher than our heads, rose and teetered to the right of Amin’s front door. We counted twenty-one in the pile, and José snapped a picture.

  I rapped on Amin’s door, and he answered. He gasped. Then he smiled uncomfortably and invited us into a small reception room just beyond the threshold. It was eerie to be there, in the last place Jeet and the others had found themselves before being driven to their deaths. I sat next to Amin on the sofa. No one said a word; the room was tense. In the corner sat a giant sack of rice, like the kind used to feed an army. José Moré fired his camera, and the pop of the shutter, rapidly opening and closing to let in a burst of light, broke the silence. “No pictures!” Amin shouted. “You are forbidden from taking pictures in my house!” Quiet immediately fell over the room once again.

  I turned to Amin and handed him the three-page report we had received from the Jordanian government detailing official records on the twelve men. Their residence from the time they entered the country until they left, the very home where we were sitting, had been highlighted for Amin’s convenience, along with his phone number.

  He placed the three-page report across his lap. He flipped the pages, one by one, silent and transfixed, his eyes at first wide and then appearing to narrow and fill with fear. Nader discreetly phoned Amin’s landline from a cell phone and handed the cell phone to me.

  Suddenly the landline rang loudly in the silent room, startling Amin, whose head popped up from the records in his lap. I turned to him on the couch, holding the cell phone in front of his face with one hand and pointing to his number on the screen with the other. Then I pointed back down to the records before him. “You see, Amin, that’s your phone number,” I said. I let his phone ring another
time or two before pressing the hang-up button on the cell phone in an exaggerated way, making certain he saw me do it. The ringing inside the home died as suddenly as it had begun.

  Nader echoed my words in Arabic as I told Amin that we now knew that he and his partner had been lying to us all along. Either they had lied to us, I said, or they had lied to the Jordanian police.

  Amin rapidly fired back in Arabic with more dissembling. I cut him off and told him he had a big problem reconciling the truth and the lies. “Why don’t we go to the Zahran Police Station now and speak to them together,” I said, “and we can sort out with the police whether you lied to them or to me?”

  My hope was that once he was cornered, Amin could be convinced to come clean with at least some additional details. This clearly had been naive. Good cop, bad cop works only if someone else is in the room to play the good cop, and probably only if the person being questioned is a prisoner. Instead, Amin exploded, jumping to his feet and screaming a river of curses in Arabic. Nader tried to calm him, but it didn’t work. It seemed foolish to bark back, and I told Nader and José that we should leave.

  Quietly we walked out the door, up the stairs, and away from No. 58 Malfuf Street, with Amin probably still cursing behind us. Nader never told me all of what Amin had said, but when we reached the street, he cautioned, “I should have warned you. In Jordan, a man has a right to kill you if you are on his property without his permission.”

  It would take almost a decade until something emerged resembling the full truth about what Jeet and his compatriots experienced over their nearly fifty days in an overcrowded, locked, windowless room. But we walked away that day from No. 58 Malfuf Street with everything from Jordan that could be had, and much of what we needed to proceed.

  7

  1996–2005

  Texas to Baghdad

  Richard B. Cheney wanted to run for president in 1996, but garnered so little Republican support that he formally bowed out of the race more than a year before the first GOP primary. He needed twenty million dollars just to get into the conversation and had managed to raise only a million. Texas businessman Thomas H. Cruikshank was among the disappointed. “I was ready to support him to lead our country, but since he has chosen not to do that, we want him to come do the next best thing,” Cruikshank said. Apparently the next best thing to being president of the United States was the job of Cruikshank, who served as chairman and chief executive of the Halliburton Company in Dallas, Texas. It was August 10, 1995, and Cruikshank was at a podium with the fifty-four-year-old Cheney by his side, about to retire after twenty-six years and hand over the reins of his company to the Republican politician.1

  Cheney had no experience running a business, having spent his entire career in politics and government. It was a leap for Halliburton, too. Playing politics, especially in the revolving-door fashion of Washington, was not part of its modus operandi. The outcome of this gamble would prove fateful for all sides.

  By 2004, Halliburton had become a global household name, one synonymous with outrage over the Iraq War. Dick Cheney was now vice president, and the war’s strongest advocate inside the Bush White House, and his former company was the war’s largest private partner, owing to the fact that Halliburton earned more than any other contractor.2

  Damage to Halliburton endured beyond the war. Thirteen years after the invasion, and five years after the full withdrawal of U.S. forces, the company ranked second to last in a Harris Poll of American attitudes about the nation’s one hundred most visible companies. Only Volkswagen ranked lower in 2016, after admitting it had rigged tailpipe emissions tests.3

  The outrage, however, has been somewhat misdirected. Behind Halliburton’s Iraq controversies was not the company with the household name but, instead, a subsidiary called Kellogg Brown and Root, or KBR. Allegations of undue political influence, wartime profiteering, massive cost overruns, fraud, abuse, and waste rarely had been linked to Halliburton, but that wasn’t true for KBR. Such allegations clung to the firm almost from its founding in the early twentieth century.4

  Herman Brown, the son of a grocer, got his start in the public works business in 1914, at the age of twenty-one. He ran a crew of roughnecks and broken-down cowboys who lived in tents erected in the Texas dirt.5 When his men weren’t in county jails for their weekend high jinks, they were building public roads for Brown after he had arranged bail with local sheriffs.6 These weren’t painted highways but, instead, primitive trails carved from tangles of brush, sometimes following paths already worn into the earth by cattle herds.7 Brown started with four mules and a single Fresno scraper, a plow pulled behind beasts. His old boss had given him the lot in lieu of back pay after going belly up.8 Road building was a tough business, and not just physically. It was notoriously corrupt, and Texas was largely broke. That meant funding for Brown’s work relied on a shallow public trough. To stay afloat, he needed to invest his meager funds wisely, in the right Texas politicians.9

  Herman Brown wasn’t terribly affable, but his younger brother, George, seemed well suited for political work. Someone inscribed George’s high school yearbook with the words “gains his power through his ability to make friends.”10 Dan Root, who was married to the Brown brothers’ sister, loaned Herman twenty thousand dollars, and Herman named the business Brown and Root as a thank-you.* He made George a full partner.11

  Although contemporaries considered George more genial than Herman, the two were alike in their extremism. Robert Caro, who interviewed George Brown extensively for his multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, described the brothers as ultrareactionaries.12 They were racists, virulent anti-unionists, and stridently antitax and antigovernment, even though their firm would rely on taxpayer-funded contracts.13 (Herman Brown also made a tidy sum squeezing impoverished African American residents of tenements he owned in the slums of Austin, Texas.)14

  The Brown brothers used their money and influence to build Lyndon Johnson’s political career, despite the New Deal supporter’s seeming to be their ideological antithesis. They had always seen Johnson as a practical investment, and considered him more of an opportunist than a true believer. As George Brown told Caro, “Basically, Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understand. You get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical. He was for the niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God . . . he was as practical as anyone.”*

  Brown and Root’s lawyer and chief fixer orchestrated Johnson’s first nomination to Congress, in 1937, and he did it so Johnson could orchestrate something vital for the company in return. The company needed someone to get authorization and funding through Washington for its first federal contract, construction of the Mansfield Dam,* on the lower Colorado River in Texas. The Browns had put their own money into equipment, but the project had stalled in a legal and bureaucratic morass. Strictly speaking, it also was a boondoggle.15 Johnson went to work as soon as he landed in Washington in March 1937, and his frenetic efforts on behalf of the dam culminated weeks later with a now legendary go-ahead for the ten-million-dollar project from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Give the kid the dam,” Roosevelt reportedly told one of his aides.16 Given the fortune Brown and Root made from its construction, he more accurately could have said, “Give the Brown brothers the dam.” Johnson immediately obliged the Brown brothers a second time, untangling a political and legal snarl to secure the extra seventeen million dollars they sought for an expansion of the same project. Their thanks were so great, and so widely known in Washington, that Roosevelt’s aide and master fund-raiser Tommy Corcoran later told Caro, “Lyndon Johnson’s whole world was built on that dam.”17

  Johnson and the Brown brothers entwined their fortunes together for the next three decades. Their relationship grew into one of the purest examples of the symbiosis between corporate money and political power that Washington had ever seen, and certainly one of its most intimate. Brown and Root reaped billions from government contracts with Johnson’s help while
financing his rise to national power, which culminated in the presidency.18

  Brown and Root gave and generated millions of dollars for Johnson throughout his career—Johnson even flew in the company airplane to campaign stops—raising campaign cash from the oil elite of Texas and squeezing contributions from its own army of employees and subcontractors. And the cash wasn’t just for Johnson’s own races. He channeled the Browns’ largesse through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to build power and influence across Congress and the nation. Caro would conclude that the Brown brothers, through their support for Johnson, had pushed the corporate corruption of American politics to an unprecedented level.19

  If Johnson’s mammoth ambition drove his desire to attain the most powerful office in the world, Herman Brown’s ambition did the same for him in the world of business. “We were always reaching,” said George Brown. “We never had any walking-around money, because we were always reaching above our heads. We never felt we had it made. We were always reaching for the next plateau.”20

  Roads and dams funded by taxpayers could build a fine and profitable Texas company, but only one thing could take Brown and Root to the next plateau: a war.

  As the 1930s drew to a close, Congress gave Roosevelt permission to spend $1 billion to expand the U.S. Navy and extend its reach into the waters of an increasingly troubled world.21 In April 1939, the president authorized a first round of about $67 million for building new naval bases. Johnson served on the House Committee on Naval Affairs, so Brown and Root bid on a contract to build a naval base in Puerto Rico, which navy brass unceremoniously rejected. Johnson, still a novice, used the little clout he possessed to press for an explanation, and received a terse reply from a low-ranking navy staffer, amounting simply to this: Brown and Root wasn’t qualified.22 The Browns quickly found another way to break through. In 1940, Roosevelt faced a contentious challenge from within his own party, and via Texas. The Brown brothers quietly orchestrated key support for the president through their chief fixer, who assumed fund-raising duties for Roosevelt’s campaign in Texas. The administration gave the fixer a senior post over public works contracts, a ripe and rich source of campaign cash.23