Licensed to Kill

by Robert Young Pelton

  Jack’s self-imposed tour of duty came to a screeching halt in June 2002 when his mother’s death forced him to return home to upstate New York. Not long after his mother’s funeral, Idema headed down to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for the Special Forces 50th Anniversary celebration.

  Idema has said that he wanted to join the Special Forces ever since he saw John Wayne’s movie, based on Robin Moore’s book The Green Berets. Idema’s father was a battle-tested World War II–era marine and Idema’s short stint in the army played a huge role in his sense of self-identity, though Keith’s record speaks to a spotty background and capability. On the surface, his army record shows that Idema was released after three years of service in February 24, 1978, with an honorable discharge. However, a March 18, 1977, evaluation report describes Idema’s performance as “marginally average,” citing lack of attention to detail, failure to follow instructions, and inability to accept constructive criticism as just some of his failings as a soldier. Another report by Captain John D. Carlson says Idema “is without a doubt the most unmotivated, unprofessional, immature enlisted man I have ever known.”

  Despite these scathing reviews, Idema used his military training and skills to start an antiterrorist training school in Red Hook, New York, called ConTerr. The business did not survive long, but he did manage to get a photograph of Ronald Reagan’s son visiting the school. Still capitalizing on his military background, Idema’s next career move was to start running Special Forces trade shows, which offered the latest in relevant military equipment and a place for military types to network. At one of these shows, he first met Robin Moore, the author who had first sparked his interest in the Green Berets.

  According to Moore, the two later reconnected at the Special Forces anniversary celebration during the summer of 2002, where Moore told Idema of his current writing project—a book about the Special Forces in Afghanistan. Idema quickly convinced Moore that the book could benefit greatly from his knowledge and recent experience in the country. Thus began an unfortunate collaboration that resulted in the book The Hunt for bin Laden.

  Because of The Green Berets, Robin Moore had plenty of credibility with the military, so when the war kicked off, Moore used his contacts to get access to do a new book on Special Forces in Afghanistan. The problem was that Moore was in his late seventies and afflicted with Parkinson’s. Unlike his first book, where he went through basic training and spent time in combat on the ground in Vietnam, the elderly Moore contented himself with doing interviews with Special Forces teams as they exfilled from Afghanistan to K2 air base in Uzbekistan. As one of the men of ODA 595 pictured on the back of the book remembers, “Moore would often fall asleep during interviews or forget to turn his tape recorder on.”

  Much of the work was done by Chris Thompson, who helped Moore gather and edit the interviews and put The Hunt for bin Laden together. It was understood that the book needed something to pull the disjointed chapters on each team together. Jack Idema suggested that he’d be the perfect central character—a mysterious ex–Special Forces operator turned contractor who enters Afghanistan to wage a one-man war on terror. Moore and Thompson thought the idea of Idema just going over as a private citizen added an exciting touch.

  Jack was smart enough to cut a back deal with Moore’s agent and actually got a percentage of the profits in exchange for writing large parts of the book. In the acknowledgments to the book, Moore gives great credit to Chris Thompson, a former soldier whose father was in Special Forces, but Idema’s contribution is elliptically referenced to an “anonymous Green Beret.” Intended to be about U.S. Army Special Forces, the book turned into a showcase for a man named “Jack,” even featuring a bandana-wearing Idema on the cover, strolling with an AK-47, a pistol on his hip, and flanked by two Afghan cohorts. “Jack” is listed in the index as a “Special Forces operative.”

  I am actually featured in The Hunt for bin Laden and can speak from my own experience in saying that much information is wrong, poorly researched, and written from afar so that minor details are confused or transposed. The Special Forces team I traveled with is pictured on the back cover. Though they never met or talked to Idema, and despite the fact that almost all team members had carefully detailed their actions to Moore at K2, the first chapter puts forth an account of the team’s infil into Afghanistan that the men tell me has been entirely fabricated. Contrary to the book’s reporting, there was no gunfire, no drama. They landed at night, were welcomed by an advance CIA team that included Mike Spann, and set to work unpacking their gear.

  Idema makes the fatal mistake of including the real names of the team and inventing actions that never occurred. An air force controller named Matt sustains much of the action in the first chapter, though the real Matt didn’t actually fly in until days after the rest of the group. The book has Matt screaming, “We’re about to be fucking overrun…. I need ordnance quick.” B-52 pilots are quoted as uttering the cheesy cliché “Bombs away.” Low-key SF operators are reputed to have said, “Holy shit, un-fucking-believable,” while watching “bodies of maybe a hundred Taliban and AQ troops drawn from the ground upward, arms and legs kicking for a fraction of a second, before disappearing into a pink haze without a trace of solid matter left of their bodies or clothing.” While the story of the team’s infil may be the tallest tale in the book, elements of B movie–inspired fiction permeate the work.

  One of the soldiers Idema creatively described as singing the “Ballad of Green Berets,” after a battle figures “the more crap they write about us, the more our OPSEC [Operational Security] is protected.” His wife, however, is furious about the decision to expose the real full names as well as photos and ranks of the soldiers. She feels any terrorist with a little computer acumen could find the home address of any of the cited soldiers to attack their families while their husbands are away on long deployments.

  At the end of the fictional nonfiction book, “Jack” waxes poetic, drunk on vodka and pomegranate juice, wearing two Makarov pistols, and spouting badly mangled lines from movies. “God, I hate it when a war ends,” the character mimics Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. With “his teary eyes glassed over from the booze,” Jack ponders the imponderable. “Throughout the war it seemed Jack was everywhere…. But was Jack one person, or several?” Perhaps therein lies the key to “Jack’s” mental illness and his destructive view of the truth and loyalty.

  To make the situation worse, an appendix to the book’s early runs listed six charities that purportedly assist Special Forces members, their children, or the people of Afghanistan. Only a sharp eye would catch that one of the cited charities, the U.S. Counter-Terrorist Group, also garnered photo credits for images used in the book, including one of Jack riding a horse. It is none other than ConTerr. The U.S. Postal Service has been tipped off that another address, purportedly for a charity to assist Special Forces soldiers, led to a post office box and a bank account controlled by Idema.

  Upon the book’s release, it began climbing the bestseller lists, initially delighting Moore. But he then began receiving dozens of e-mails from Special Forces members and families of members who had been there. Moore confessed to the betrayed soldiers that he’d had to “sex it up” and said he’d submitted changes that were never incorporated. The teams wrote off the duplicity to Moore’s failing mental condition, since they had no idea about the involvement of the unknown man pictured on the book’s cover. In the end, the man who had created the legend of the Green Berets had, because of Idema, destroyed four decades of trust between himself and the Special Forces community. Moore watched, heartbroken, as Amazon and his own personal Web page filled with angry postings denouncing The Hunt for bin Laden as fiction and a disgrace.

  Ed Artis was one of those who posted his views about Idema on Moore’s website, actually provoking Jack into filing a lawsuit against him. “I am being sued for ruining his reputation,” said Artis. “Fuck him. He can sue a dead man.” (Artis suffered a mild heart attack in 2004 while on a humanit
arian trip to the Philippines.) A judge dismissed the case in late 2005.

  Billy Waugh also managed to provoke Idema’s ire, though Waugh’s background in the Special Forces has inclined Idema to hold back on the lawyers thus far. “Idema said I bad-mouthed him,” said Waugh. “I said I didn’t bad-mouth him; I told the truth. He was not in the CIA, and he didn’t do any of that shit he said he did in Robin Moore’s book.” Idema started a verbal and written pissing match with Billy (with cc’s to Jim Morris, Bob Morris, and Bob Brown, the publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine). On March 17, 2003, Idema told Billy via a threatening e-mail, “Everyone who thinks they ought to jump on this bandwagon of hate and bullshit better buckle up because we’re going to court and let’s see who wins this fucking round, and billy boy, I got no problem suing your ass too if you want to keep passing on this bullshit.” Billy remembers the war of intimidation escalating beyond the simple possibility of a lawsuit. “Idema calls me up and threatens me. So I say, ‘Bring your shit, man, cuz I got about six guns and a few Claymores set up around my house.’ Then he calls me back fifteen minutes later and says, ‘I am not going to do anything because I know you have a great reputation.’ Which I do. If he thinks he’s going to buffalo me, he’s mistaken.”

  Idema didn’t sue Green Beret legends Billy Waugh or Robin Moore, but in March 2004, just before returning to Afghanistan, he did file suit against Chris Thompson, Thompson’s parents, and Robin Moore’s girlfriend, in addition to Fox News, Colonel Bob Morris, Ed Artis, and other perceived enemies. Jack, it appears, was desperately trying to protect his newly created image as a one-man army hunting bin Laden.

  Lawyers, Guns, and Money

  In April of 2004, allegedly bolstered by funds from Moore’s book, forty-eight-year-old Idema returned to Afghanistan, this time with a crew on his payroll that included filmmaker and CBS veteran Ed Caraballo, and Brent Bennett, an ex-soldier and former waiter at Ruby Tuesday in Fayetteville. Once on the ground, Idema rented a house and car and hired a few Afghans for local support. He called the mercenary group “Task Force Saber 7,” a play on Task Force Dagger, the official name for the original Special Forces campaign in Afghanistan. They wore U.S.-style uniforms, American flag patches, and often carried weapons, leading many locals to believe that they were a covert unit of contractors working for the CIA or U.S. military intelligence. From his large house in Kabul, Idema and his new crew began filming what could have been a bizarre reality show. Idema had a keen eye for mimicry and had created what could easily be confused for a CIA paramilitary operation complete with its local safehouse, hired Afghan “campaigns,” and tight-lipped aggressive posture toward inquiries, though when it suited his purpose he incongruously sought media exposure for his exploits. Networks were paying good money for any action story on terrorism in Afghanistan, and Idema seemed intent on taking advantage of the demand.

  Idema soon claimed he’d uncovered a plot to load taxicabs with explosives and attack U.S. and Afghan targets. Three times he convinced gullible foreign peacekeeping troops to provide backup on raids, which Jack led with maximum high-impact drama and bellicose bravado as Caraballo’s camera rolled. When he thought he had hit the jackpot, Idema offered the videos of his captured “terrorists” for sale for a quarter of a million dollars, but the networks had started to suspect Idema’s veracity and didn’t buy.

  Task Force Saber 7 also plied local sources for information and went about “arresting,” or effectively abducting, Afghans Idema deemed to be al-Qaeda or Taliban. The detainees were held, interrogated, and abused in Idema’s Kabul house of horrors. On May 3, Jack and his gang even turned an Afghan over to U.S. custody, photographing the exchange at Bagram for posterity. Jack described the battered Afghan as an HVT, a high-value target, but the U.S. military released the detainee without charges two months later. Idema’s most famous prisoner was not one well known for terrorist ties, but for his position as a prominent Pashtun and Afghan Supreme Court judge.

  Idema didn’t know it, but his rash of threats, lawsuits, and betrayals had created a rapidly growing cabal of former friends who were bound and determined to shut him down. He no longer had to be unjustifiably paranoid about a conspiracy out to get him, since he had forced the situation. A private investigator he’d screwed out of 15 percent from the proceeds of a successful lawsuit, a humanitarian he’d conned, an author he’d destroyed, an army officer who’d been used; the list goes on: all developed a covert network to share documents and information designed to expose Idema’s true nature. Several U.S. government agencies, the military, and the media were also investigating Jack’s activities, though he was unaware of the gathering storm.

  Jack also had no idea that he had a mole inside his organization. A man in Afghanistan working as an engineer had met Idema and been taken in by his charisma and “Action Jack” persona. After some time hanging out with him, however, the man started to recognize Idema’s pathology and started funneling out pictures of Jack brutalizing Afghans to a number of people. The mole didn’t really need to circulate the photos secretly, since Jack himself was sending out photos and video of his “operations” in an attempt to get the media to pay for his one-man show. Still no one wanted to arrest or even stop Jack. Media outlets were asked to bid on Jack’s new, and this time admittedly self-made, terror tapes, complete with action scenes of him kicking in doors and rousting Afghans. The media watched in horror but said nothing.

  Jack had become his own private army, with his own independent contractors assisting him in his brutal for-profit task. Caraballo acted as filmmaker for the action scenes, and then manned the camera to faithfully document the interrogations. Was this journalism, entertainment, or documentation of evidence? Idema’s high profile and sheer audacity led most to believe that Jack really must be doing something important and secretive with high-level approval. The CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) already seemed to be using ill-defined relationships with ex-military turned independent contractors in Afghanistan, so Idema’s operation fit into the pattern.

  Jack cultivated this impression and may have actually been attempting to jockey himself into an officially sanctioned position. While no available evidence suggests that Idema had achieved this, calls he made to the office of Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Warfighting Support, indicate he was trying.

  Boykin has a reputation for lending a sympathetic ear to ex–Green Berets with a patriotic cause. Idema began a series of interfaces with Boykin’s office, and their like-minded goal of rooting out terrorists made the exchanges positive. Junior and midlevel bureaucrats encouraged Jack to develop hard intel, and Jack promised them in effusive e-mails that he was on the verge of a major bust. Not surprisingly, Jack had Caraballo film his telephone calls to Boykin’s office. During one call, a man named Jorge Shim answers the phone and confirms that he has passed on information to Boykin and says they’ll get back to him. While intriguing, and offered up by Idema as evidence of his ties to the U.S. military, the exchange really only offers proof that Idema had spoken to Boykin’s office. As Ed Artis likes to explain, “There is a fiber of truth in everything Idema does, and then he goes and weaves an entire carpet.” Every branch of the U.S. military has officially denied any connection with Idema, and a call to the Pentagon’s press office will evoke an immediate and forceful: “There is no—repeat no—connection of any kind with Idema.” As standard practice, the Pentagon would, of course, deny any connection with a covert operator, particularly one who had sparked a scandal of such gargantuan proportions. In the case of Idema, however, they were actually telling the truth. Since Idema was so keen to film his every move, particularly those that made it appear he was more important or connected than he really was, he would have had more damning evidence of a connection if he’d actually been operating with official approval. If Boykin had ever returned his call, Caraballo would have most certainly had the camera rolling. Further, that Idema was recording and attempting to
sell film of his operations makes it even more impossible to imagine he was really running a sanctioned program.

  The irony is that if a real U.S. contractor had cultivated such a close relationship with the media and was attempting to profit from footage of supposed covert operations, the military would have likely managed to shut down his operation faster than they did Idema’s. While he clearly didn’t have U.S. government funding or formal approval, the fact that Idema ran his makeshift jail at a static address in Kabul for months suggests that those U.S. officials who’d become aware of Task Force Saber 7’s activities initially may have tacitly assented to allowing them to continue unhindered. With bin Laden on the loose, and former al-Qaeda and Taliban roaming the streets of Kabul, a completely deniable freelance operation run by a like-minded ex-military guy could have been an asset to the U.S. government’s goals in Afghanistan, if Idema had ever been able to produce any verifiable results. However, no marked achievements and a building controversy about the excessive tactics of Task Force Saber 7 meant Idema and friends wouldn’t enjoy their freedom of operation for long.

  As soon as a real covert operator, Billy Waugh, heard about what Idema had been doing in Afghanistan, he started to sound the alert. “I told General Brown at SOCOM that Idema is beating people up and running a POW camp…. They put bulletins all over the place saying do not talk to the son of a bitch. In Bagram, Tashkent, and all over. The CIA put it out, too. Before he was nailed, believe me, I made sure the word was out. But one thing you can do is simply tell people like Boykin that you’re doing sanctioned operations. That’s pretty clever.” Even Afghan minister Yunus Qanuni admitted Idema had duped him into thinking he represented the U.S. government.

  On May 15, 2004, two and a half years after Ed Artis had alerted Afghan and American officials to the presence of an armed and dangerous con man roving through Afghanistan, U.S. authorities in Kabul started circulating a poster for Idema with an “arrest on sight” order. Still, it took until July fifth for Jack and his crew to be picked up in a raid by Afghan police on his Kabul house.