The Girl From Kathmandu

by Cam Simpson

  These realities made a mockery of an identical mandatory statement appearing at the bottom of the instruction sheets for both U.S. government forms, the kind that seems designed by federal agencies to show Congress that they are not overburdening taxpayers with too much red tape. “We estimate that it will take an average of 15 minutes to complete this collection of information,” it read. For all twelve men, that was supposed to add up to just six hours of work.

  Handley made a list containing twenty-six items needed from each of the twelve families. Knowing Nepal as well as he did, he understood it could take weeks, even months, to physically track down everyone, assuming it could be done at all without his own presence on the ground and without the serious full-time help of a small staff. Handley’s only plan was to connect by phone with my contact in Nepal. If the two agreed on a plan together, that man could follow my trail back to the families and serve as a sort of bridge across the world for Handley.

  Even assuming Handley could get everything he needed by working remotely, other basic challenges inherent in the case might prove more significant, if not fatal. Because the men had been kidnapped en route to the base where they were supposed to work, the U.S. military might not have even a single piece of paper establishing their employment in the KBR Halliburton chain—not a sign-in sheet from the base, not a duty roster, not a contract, not a witness in the form of a supervisor or coworker. And at each link in the chain, from agents in Nepal up to and including KBR Halliburton, people had dissembled, obfuscated, or refused to cooperate. It took pieces of evidence from all of them, and beyond, to create a mosaic of what had happened. If Handley could not muster proof beyond stories published in the Tribune, the compensation claims might quickly crumble upon a challenge. He also faced a more bracing reality: if the logistical obstacles to launching compensation cases in which the law clearly demanded that the men’s families be paid were this great, what would it look like if the firm tried to take on KBR Halliburton and an army of well-paid defense lawyers in a complex human rights case?

  Assisting Handley was Molly McOwen, a young woman with degrees from Harvard and Columbia. McOwen easily could have made her way up the lucrative partnership ladder at almost any firm in the nation. Instead, she chose a relatively low-paying job in a human rights fellowship at Cohen Milstein, one the firm had established to give Fryszman full-time help from a lawyer without having to give McOwen the benefits of a fully paid associate. The salary barely covered the costs for a recent graduate to live in Washington and muster student loan payments, and there was no chance to get on even the bottom rung of Cohen Milstein’s ladder. Yet, for McOwen, the job represented the opportunity of a lifetime. How many lawyers in America get to focus full-time on international human rights, and do so right out of law school?

  Before the end of 2005, Handley and McOwen connected with Ganesh Gurung, the Nepalese academic and expert on foreign migration whose staff had helped me crisscross the country.

  Early one morning, as he waited by the phone in the ground-floor office of his Kathmandu home for a phone call from an American lawyer whom he had never met, Gurung braced for an oncoming wave of culture shock. The traditional Nepalese greeting is one word, Namaste. Its translation, “I bow to your spirit,” is familiar the world over, thanks to the modern ubiquity of yoga studios, but it carries a deeper meaning in Nepal. Despite the rigidity of the caste system, an educated or wealthy Nepali can literally bow to the spirit of the poorest farmer he meets, and vice versa. Mutual respect often is the default. In such a culture, dealing with Westerners, especially Americans, can be a jarring experience. The American straight-to-business, command-driven style can seem coarse to even the most Westernized Nepali. This can be made worse by the inherently transactional nature of business, and by the dynamics of someone from a very wealthy country speaking to someone from a very poor one. However, educated in the United States, Gurung understood the cultural divide thanks to years of dealing with Americans and Europeans.

  So, when Handley called to outline his purpose and the complexities and difficulties of the task before them, Gurung was guarded. Yet Handley deferred to Gurung on how best to proceed, asking questions and then listening thoughtfully to all Gurung’s replies. Once Gurung agreed to help, Handley also made it clear that he would accommodate Gurung’s schedule as they dealt with each other across the nearly eleven-hour time zone divide even if it meant rising in the middle of the night. It was the first time a Westerner, let alone an American, had ever shown Gurung such deference. It would have been natural, and even expected, for Handley to speak some Nepalese on the call, in an effort to forge a closer bond. He not only avoided doing this but also never even mentioned that he had lived in Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer, or his familiarity with the country. In short, Handley made Gurung feel every bit in charge of what needed to be done on his end. Gurung’s worst fears immediately melted.

  Gurung set about relocating and recontacting the families of the twelve dead men. Some who had moved to Kathmandu in the wake of the massacre had run out of the small amount of money they had been given from the onetime charitable payment made by their own government. Hunger had driven some of these families back to their farms in the rural expanses of Nepal. Few had phones, so to reach those beyond Kathmandu, Gurung drew a bull’s-eye on a map around villages where he thought they resided, and then made concentric circles reaching out to the nearest regional government offices. He recruited officials at these offices to help hunt the families down. When this method failed, he would send a member of his own staff to a family via cross-country expedition—by plane, then by bus, then on foot.

  Kamala and the other families scattered across Nepal had no way of knowing what had happened in the United States in the many months since I had ever so briefly appeared to interview them about their dead sons, brothers, and husbands. So, when Gurung tracked them down, many were uncertain about him and his claims. The farmers had never heard of Gurung. Most still had no idea what had really happened to their loved ones, or what role the system that had delivered them to their deaths played for the United States and its prosecution of the Iraq War. The idea that they were entitled to money from the U.S. government had never occurred to them.

  In a country still divided by its own civil war, their other relatives, friends, or local elders sowed doubts about Gurung’s intentions. Who was this bigwig from Kathmandu asking them to cross the country and come to his office, bearing copies of birth and marriage certificates, passports, citizenship cards, and every other piece of paper they had? Could they really believe his claim that he worked with American lawyers who wanted to help them? Some cautioned that Gurung was out to manipulate the dead for his own ends. Complicating matters further were the basic questions Handley needed answered on the forms, some of which violated cultural taboos in Nepal. Requests for seemingly intimate information fueled distrust.

  Gurung found himself in the confounding position of having to convince and reassure the people he was trying so hard to help that he meant them no harm. “There is nothing lost in simply filing these papers, but if you don’t file, then it’s finished,” he would tell them over and over again. “If you don’t file, what hope is there? If you withdraw, there is no chance.” Because of the nature of what had happened to the men in Jordan and Iraq, because of the tragedy of their shared endings, Handley wanted to file all the cases together, believing there was strength in numbers. That meant that no case could proceed until Gurung had pulled all the families together and elicited all the necessary information. Foot-dragging by one family delayed them all.

  In imploring some of the more reluctant families to move forward, Gurung found himself in the role of not just interpreter and assistant to Handley, but also social worker, therapist, priest, chief persuader, and family counselor. In desperation, he would remind them that they all needed to be together in order for any one of them to stand a chance.

  Kamala never seemed to doubt Gurung’s intentions. Her ashram was not
far away from his offices, and she visited several times, carefully listening to his take on what Handley was trying to do, and how she might benefit. She questioned him about the process, but always with the aim of figuring out what else she could do to help. Gurung seemed to be wise and kind, almost avuncular, so she trusted him. On September 10, 2006, less than two weeks after the second anniversary of Jeet’s murder, she sat down in Gurung’s office and signed Handley’s forms.

  Weeks turned to months as the forms for the families made their way back and forth across the world by courier service, and between Gurung’s office and Handley’s. They were accompanied by supporting documents and their legally certified translations. As 2006 came to a close, the forms were all signed and delivered to Washington. Handley inspected them immediately, checking that everything was in order. Reaching the form for Ramesh Khadka, Handley noted that the date of birth listed for him meant Khadka was nineteen on the day of his murder. At the bottom of the claim form, where signatures were commanded from his parents, two lines instead contained their thumbprints. They were pressed onto the U.S. government form so close to one another that they had overlapped at the edges. Flipping through the rest of the forms, Handley would see that paperwork for three other families also carried the dark swirls, loops, and arches left by ink-stained fingers. He had never before represented clients unable to sign their own names.

  John R. Miller, the U.S. ambassador-at-large in charge of the State Department’s recently created Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, had also noticed the Tribune series and wanted to investigate. Miller and his staff had already been placing key Iraq War allies on the top tier of the U.S. watch list for human trafficking, without knowing that the Pentagon relied so heavily on those same nations to channel tens of thousands of workers into Iraq. He had never imagined that his post would require him to investigate his own government, and he felt genuine outrage, even as he was unsure whether he had the statutory authority to do anything about it. His remit was to hold foreign governments accountable, not the U.S. government. And the only real power flowing from his office was the ability to publicly name and shame those governments through the annual watch list. Even this power could be greatly diluted. Just weeks before the Tribune stories appeared, President Bush had waived the rules for the White House’s Iraq War allies on Miller’s list, sparing them from potential sanctions and citing “national security” concerns in the cases of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.6

  Still, as Handley and Gurung worked across the world in 2006 to file compensation claims for the families, Miller had pulled whatever levers he could in Washington. Although the issue of human trafficking had first come onto the radar of the U.S. government largely through the work of conservative Christian groups fighting sex trafficking, what was happening in Iraq had opened Miller’s eyes, and those of many other American leaders, to the far wider world of forced and coerced labor. The United Nations’ International Labour Organization would estimate that 68 percent of the twenty-one million people trafficked worldwide were trapped in situations of forced or coerced labor.

  As an economist, Miller knew that market forces drove human trafficking as much as depravity and indifference, and he could see the extraordinary demand created by the privatization of war. He wanted to force the Washington bureaucracy into action, not just on what had happened to the twelve men, but also on the system behind the invisible army running the war effort. Miller also had been a four-term Republican member of the House, so he understood the pressure Congress could bring to bear on the bureaucracy. He quietly worked with allies in the GOP-controlled House to push the Pentagon for an investigation. One of those whom Miller leaned on was Representative Christopher H. Smith. The New Jersey Republican had sponsored legislation that became the cornerstone of the U.S. human trafficking law that President Bill Clinton signed in October 2000, less than four years before the twelve Nepali men were executed. Smith’s law had also created Miller’s job.

  Smith was the vice chairman of the House International Relations Committee, and he chaired a subcommittee with oversight for human rights. It did not, however, have oversight of the Pentagon. Smith therefore needed to team up with the House Armed Services Committee, where the appetite for taking on contractors wasn’t always so strong. Together, Miller and Smith nudged the bureaucracy. Ultimately, however, it would move only so far. The two men had pressed the Bush administration’s undersecretary of defense for an investigation. He, in turn, got the Defense Department’s inspector general to launch an inquiry in conjunction with the inspectors general of the armed services in Iraq.

  The resulting memorandum verified the Tribune investigation but also reached some other startling conclusions, including that KBR Halliburton was under no obligation to make sure the companies supplying its massive force of foreign workers in Iraq complied with U.S. antitrafficking laws inside the war zone or en route. “To date, there are no clauses in contracts between [the U.S. government and] KBR Halliburton that make them responsible for labor fraudulently procured by independent contractors or subcontractors,” it read. Because there were no such accountability clauses in the contracts, and because regulations requiring such clauses still had not been finalized by the federal government, the memorandum concluded that “there are no potential criminal violations to be investigated or DoD contracts that can be legally terminated.” The official who wrote the memorandum presumed that the contract language had greater force of law than the laws against human trafficking themselves.

  He appeared to go even further in offering cover to KBR Halliburton. “While it would appear that some foreign based companies are using false pretenses to provide laborers to KBR Halliburton subcontractors in Iraq, we must note that none of the allegations in the Chicago Tribune articles are against U.S. persons or U.S. contractors.”7

  General George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, had determined that widespread passport seizures by contractors and subcontractors clearly violated U.S. laws against human trafficking. He issued orders to everyone under his command demanding that all workers’ passports promptly be returned. His orders contained a host of other reforms, including banning illegal or excessive fees for workers. It was unclear how any of these orders, beyond passport returns, might be enforced. Still, the actions amounted to enough for Smith to get a hearing on the issue before Congress, but since his human rights subcommittee lacked jurisdiction over Pentagon contractors, he could do so only by persuading the Armed Services Committee to hold a joint hearing. Lawmakers and witnesses in attendance read statements condemning the practices, to varying degrees. An air force colonel overseeing efforts to implement Casey’s orders said that getting contractors to return passports was harder than the proverbial pulling of teeth. No one from KBR Halliburton was forced to testify.

  Still, the inspector general’s memorandum leaked out, along with Casey’s orders and other records. The memorandum specifically corroborated accounts that the twelve men had been working for the KBR Halliburton contractor Daoud and Partners. In so doing, it offered Handley evidence beyond the Tribune, from no less than the Pentagon’s investigative arm, if anyone were to challenge the compensation claims.

  One family simply wouldn’t cooperate with Gurung. As for the rest, only siblings survived two of the murdered men, and were not entitled to compensation under U.S. law, even though they had lived together as a family unit, had paid for their brothers’ jobs, and were dependent upon them for survival. When, in 2007, Handley sent the claims and supporting documents to the New York offices of an obscure division of the U.S. Department of Labor with responsibility for running the compensation program, the twelve cases had, by law, been whittled down to just nine.

  Almost immediately, the insurance company for Daoud and Partners declared the claims invalid and said it would not pay them. It told the government that the contractor had no record of ever employing any of the Nepalese men and brought in Roger Levy, a California-based lawyer, to fight the claims. Nearing
retirement, Levy had literally written the book on the obscure wartime compensation law, a legal textbook, and his decades of specialty practice made him one of the foremost experts in the nation on such cases.

  The Department of Labor office overseeing the program also had responsibility for federal workers’ compensation programs and cases. Its chief was a curmudgeonly New Yorker named Richard Robilotti. In his fourth decade on the job, he had dealt with countless battles between employers and insurance companies on one side and workers or their families on the other. He’d also dealt with legions of lawyers. To Handley, it didn’t seem that Robilotti liked any of them. He would call Handley and leave terse, gruff voice mail messages, sometimes half barking, almost always commanding some action, such as “Call me!”

  Ambassador Miller’s office at the State Department worked behind the scenes to encourage compensation for the families. Handley got his hands on the Pentagon memos, but he had no clue from his dealings with Robilotti what position the U.S. Department of Labor would take. A key part of Robilotti’s job was to try to press the two sides into resolving cases without having to go to court. He had little power, but his long experience gave him the gravitas to wield considerable influence, such as when he advised an insurance company lawyer to pay a claim because otherwise he would get his ass handed to him by a judge, or when he told a worker’s lawyer to drop a claim for the same reason. His New Yorker’s forcefulness didn’t hurt, either.