To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

  A woman sent photographs that she had taken as she fled her neighborhood in southern Baghdad: dust-covered corpses and exploded vehicles.

  Another sent me an email with a video clip attached. I stupidly double-clicked it and found myself staring into the resigned eyes of an Iraqi man about forty years old, hands bound behind him. He was forced to confess to his work with the Americans, after which a militant held his badge up to the lens, which began to blur. The camera lens shuttled back a bit and a US government-issued Green Zone access badge came into clear focus. The man offered no resistance when a balaclava-clad militiaman pushed him to his knees. I should have closed the video, but continued to stare as the muzzle of an AK-47 came to rest a few inches from the man’s left temple. He was looking down at a crumbling sidewalk when it fired. He slumped forward.

  * * *

  These people were making a huge mistake. I was only twenty-six. I didn’t have a job and couldn’t afford my own apartment. I was stealing a Wi-Fi signal from the neighbors on a laptop that had six months of life left in it at most. I didn’t have even the most basic answers for any of their questions about how to make it to safety. I had little knowledge of the refugee resettlement process and didn’t have any useful contacts with the decision makers within the State Department. All I had done was write an op-ed so that someone else, ideally in the government, would figure things out for them.

  I closed my computer, threw on a coat, and stepped out into the frigid Brighton evening. I lit a cigarette and started walking. It felt as though I had just witnessed some kind of crime and had to decide whether to call the cops. I looked over my shoulder and could see the light of my room, where the laptop beckoned like a black hole.

  I took a long drag, my heart already racing. What the hell was I supposed to do? I could write a blanket reply to all of them, telling them I couldn’t do anything. I’d only been trying to help Yaghdan, after all. But how could I ignore Ziad? I had worked alongside nearly one hundred Iraqis at USAID. What about the rest?

  On and on I walked, past Kiki’s Kwik-Mart, where down-on-their-luck Brightoners frittered away paychecks on scratch-offs. Losing tickets littered the parking lot, clinging to the tires of departing cars for a few turns before slipping off into the snow. My smoke burned out, but my exhalations were still visible in the cold. After an hour of wandering, I became numb.

  I made up my mind. Helping one hundred people was a ludicrous proposition. I was penniless and needed to focus on finishing law school applications. I would draw the line around my closest friends, like Yaghdan and Ziad. The rest were on their own. I could not help someone I didn’t know; I didn’t even know how I was going to help the ones I did.

  * * *

  Seven more emails from Iraqis had come in during my walk. Most of the subject lines were a variation on the theme of “Please help, Mr. Kirk!”

  A guy my age wrote to say that he was holed up in his apartment with his wife and baby daughter. He had been an interpreter for the US Army, but his cover was blown. Someone kept calling his cell phone to say “We will find you, soon.” He estimated that he had one month’s worth of canned food and rice inside his apartment, where he stood guard by the door with an AK-47. “I have only two clips for the Kalashnikov. We are waiting to die here, please help us Mr. Kirk.”

  A Christian woman named May sent a long message from Amman. She had worked in the Coalition Provisional Authority under Bernie Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who had overseen a disastrous early attempt at training Iraqi police, an effort that lasted just ninety days before he packed it up and went home.

  May helped manage the TAPS program, an Iraqi version of 911, allowing ordinary citizens to call in anonymous tips about impending insurgent attacks. Shortly after Kerik left, May’s fifteen-year-old son had been walking to school when a group of armed men leaped from a sedan, snatched him, and sped off. May’s cell phone rang with the demand: $600,000 for the release of her son. Her husband divorced her in anger over the calamity caused by her work with the United States, and paid a large amount of money to the men who had taken their son.

  May tried to continue her work with the US government but soon received her own death threat, whereupon she fled to Jordan and applied for resettlement as a refugee at the UNHCR. Her application had been stalled for over a year. Her email to me included scans of her ID badges and several commendation letters, including a note that Kerik had written, which concluded with: “Your courage to support the coalition forces has sent an irrefutable message: that terror will not rule, that liberty will triumph, and that the seeds of freedom will be planted into the great citizens of Iraq.”

  I found another email from Ziad, recounting a memory about his former colleagues from his days at USAID:

  I remember one day I was so upset when a group of Iraqis asked me about a TV report on Al Jazeera network showing the Vietnamese who worked for the US in Vietnam kicked out of aircrafts evacuating the employees from an American base in Vietnam and I assured them at that time that it was mere propaganda to make us stop working with the US to help our country, how stupid I was and now here I am facing what I lied about.

  He signed his email with a quote: “Henry Kissinger once said, ‘To be an enemy to the US is a problem, but to be a friend is sometimes fatal.’ ”

  I stopped reading. It was three in the morning, but I was wide awake, with a throbbing headache. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened to the ringing of my ears. I thought about ignoring all of the emails. If I just kept silent, they might stop writing. But I had to reply, if only to tell them that I’d try to find someone else to help them. I was embarrassed to be receiving pleas from sixty-year-old heads of families who told me that I was their only hope. I worried that they would find out how poorly suited I was to help them.

  There were simply too many to track. I needed to impose some order on the mounting chaos of my in-box. I opened Microsoft Excel, and in the first field I typed in Yaghdan’s full name. Below it, Haifa’s. The third name was Ziad. I carefully inputted their emails and cell phone numbers, and created a column to briefly describe their situation.

  Below their names, I typed in May’s full name. Below hers, the man hiding in his apartment with an AK-47. Below that, the FedEx employee. Below him, Maryam, whose husband had been disappeared by men in Iraqi police uniforms. It became instantly clear that I would need the names of children, spouses, dates of birth, and more specific information about their threats and work history before I could figure out what to do with this list.

  I sent scores of emails, telling them that I needed more details. I made no promises other than to say that I’d try to find someone else to help them.

  * * *

  When I woke, I had dozens of responses, laden with photographs of bullet-pierced arms and legs and torsos, death threat letters with Muqtada al-Sadr’s rotund and scowling mug in the corner, and scans of US government ID badges. I studied the death threats and found three that were nearly identical, save for the name of the threatened. It was an odd thing to consider that seven thousand miles away some militia member was working away at his own computer, formatting death threats using a list of names supplied by the chewers that waited outside the checkpoints of the Green Zone.

  With each round of emails I sent, my messages were forwarded to other Iraqis, who then wrote to me with their own stories. I kept asking for more—more information, more documents, more facts—and the list grew. If I was trying to draw a line around the extent of my involvement, I was doing a terrible job of it.

  I stared at the names of a handful of former USAID colleagues on the list and knew that I needed to find out what had happened to the rest. I dug up a warden’s list—the HR roster of all USAID Iraq employees, American and Iraqi—took a red pen, and placed checkmarks next to Yaghdan and Ziad. There were over ninety more. Within a few days, I reconnected with nearly all of them: in the eleven months since I’d left, more than half of USAID’s Iraqi employees had fled or gone into hidi
ng inside the country.

  Within a couple weeks of the publication of the op-ed, I had all but forgotten about law school. I submitted some rushed applications and stuffed the LSAT prep books and personal statement drafts into a box in the basement. Every morning, I woke up and worked with a manic intensity on the list, which grew by a dozen names each day. I’d forget to eat at times, wading through the tragedy of my in-box before collapsing into bed with the following morning’s work on my mind.

  With each revision to the list, I took the old copy out to the front porch and burned it in an empty flowerpot. There was little risk of anyone in Brighton discovering the names, of course, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Several Iraqis told me that a list of embassy employees had not been shredded but instead thrown into the trash, where it was discovered in a Baghdad landfill by a militia scouring American garbage for intelligence. Names of US-affiliated Iraqis soon appeared on the walls of neighborhood mosques under the title “Traitors.”

  December 29 arrived, marking the first anniversary of the fugue state. I felt something resembling relief to be sleeping without pills or nightmares, to see the scars across my face slowly melting into flesh, to feel less brittle in bone and tooth.

  But in the inventory of what might qualify as a return to normalcy, much was missing. An oral surgeon’s assistant stunned me by asking me out after staring into the pulp chambers of my incisors and vacuuming up saliva during root canals. I went on my first postaccident date, but all we talked about were my teeth. I picked at the soft heart of a loaf of bread, still unable to chew or pick up a fork, and tried to muster a smile for her. Before my dwindling bank account evicted me from my tiny apartment in the South End of Boston, I’d lived in an apartment building full of gorgeous dental students who were fascinated by the war zone of my teeth, but I felt too scarred and fractured to ask anyone out.

  A full recovery from the fugue meant finding a job again and moving back into my own place. If I lucked into a spot in law school, I’d have about nine months to fill before classes started.

  But as I peered into the coming year, all I saw were the names of Iraqis, rows upon rows of fathers and mothers and children and grandparents to whom I had made a vague promise. At some point, I’d have to bring the list to the State Department. Once I handed off the information I’d compiled—all of the names, cell phone numbers, email addresses, recommendation letters—I was hopeful that something would happen. Maybe Yaghdan and Haifa and the others would start getting phone calls and invitations to come to the embassy for visa interviews. They could stop running and start new lives, maybe even in America.

  13.

  Bureaucrats

  Ellen Sauerbrey was not a very gifted politician. After a stint in Maryland’s state legislature, she ran twice for the governor’s seat and lost twice. After that, she stopped running and started raising funds for George W. Bush. The sixty-eight-year-old’s reward from the president was not a sinecure ambassadorship in some obscure Caribbean nation but the reins of the Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration as assistant secretary of state.

  She was nominated to replace Arthur Dewey, a decorated Vietnam War veteran with decades of experience in refugee and humanitarian affairs. As the head of the Refugees Bureau, she would oversee a $700-million-a-year operation to work with various organizations and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to establish and sustain refugee camps. She would also be entrusted with overseeing the US Refugee Admissions Program, which was still recovering from a total shutdown following the attacks of 9/11.

  Not everyone was convinced of her qualifications.

  On October 25, 2005, she went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a grilling by Democratic senators who considered her too inexperienced in humanitarian affairs to run the bureau. Senator Barbara Boxer led off: “I don’t think we see the requisite experience that we’ve seen in other nominees.”

  Sauerbrey responded feebly, “I do have experience managing resources. I do have experience in managing people. I think these are highly transferable skills.”

  Boxer: “I’m talking about a résumé for this job, not about the census or other things.”

  Senator Barack Obama weighed in: “I think the concern here is just that the issues of refugee relief are a very specific and extraordinarily difficult task, and it doesn’t appear that this is an area where you have specific experience.”

  The New York Times ran an editorial blasting the nomination: “Ms. Sauerbrey has no experience responding to major crises calling for international relief. . . . This is a post for an established expert in the field.”

  The editorial board of the conservative Washington Times was among the few outposts urging her appointment, implying that the principal factor driving Democratic opposition was the mishandled Hurricane Katrina relief efforts under another inexperienced Bush appointee. “[I]n the wake of the Michael Brown debacle at FEMA, her critics want the Senate to think she’s an unqualified crony. In this case, the facts simply don’t bear it out.” The paper suggested that Sauerbrey was opposed for two reasons: that she was pro-life, and that she was an outsider who might disrupt the status quo: “The other possibility is that the career types might see in Mrs. Sauerbrey another John Bolton. Mrs. Sauerbrey is not a career diplomat or humanitarian-aid specialist; she lacks an establishment pedigree. Worst of all for them, she appears to have strong convictions—which, by the way, are shared by the president. If confirmed, she might upset business as usual in the way Mr. Bolton has at the United Nations.”

  The White House, anticipating the Democrats’ objection, bypassed the confirmation process and installed her as a recess appointee in January 2006, a month before the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra and the start of a several-year miasma of ethnic cleansing and human displacement.

  * * *

  On the morning of February 11, 2007, I woke up with a sore neck and a restless mind, having slept poorly on a buddy’s couch in DC. Seven weeks after writing the op-ed about Yaghdan, I was now hours away from my first meeting with the Refugee Bureau at the State Department. I flicked on the TV and saw a crowd gathered by the old state capitol building in Springfield. “Illinois Senator Barack Obama to announce candidacy momentarily” pulsed at the bottom of the screen.

  I printed out the list, watching page after page spool out with the names, phone numbers, photographs, and scans of badges that I had spent the past two months gathering. I was nervous. I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. Until now, I had kept myself busy with a strategy of gathering details. It was a simple-enough system, allowing me to put some emotional distance between stories of tortured and raped bodies and myself: find a phone number, enter it into column D.

  But now I had to do something with these names, and I had no idea what to expect from the State Department. I stuffed the list into a manila envelope on which I wrote “DOS.” I walked through a biting chill toward Foggy Bottom and listened to my HELO playlist of clichéd Vietnam War songs, created partly in jest to listen to while I flew in Blackhawks and Chinooks. “The End,” “Paint It Black,” “Fortunate Son,” “All Along the Watchtower” all helped to drown out the thoughts racing through my mind.

  At the entrance to the State Department, I was met by a woman who’d spent too many years in the dull light of federal buildings, her skin grayed and her voice hoarsened by what I assumed to be a lifetime of cigarette smoke. She forced a smile and escorted me through security and into a conference room in which four other officials from the Population, Refugees, and Migration Bureau were waiting.

  I sized up the room. The black suits and gray dresses sitting across from me created a dynamic that seemed slightly adversarial. I felt uncomfortably young, not unlike during meetings with the command staff of the marines in Fallujah, which only made me more intent on being taken seriously.

  The gray-skinned woman started out with a pro forma welcome to the State Department. I thanked them and started out earnestl
y:

  “I have these names of our former colleagues, and have been gathering them so that we can help get them out of harm’s way. I know it’s difficult to track Iraqi employees of the US government, so I’ve spent the last two months contacting all of my former AID colleagues, and—”

  “And how have you been doing that, Kirk?” the woman interjected. The others stared at me.

  “How have I been communicating with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I have the email addresses for a few of my former colleagues. But to figure out the complete list of colleagues, I used a former warden’s list to start identifying those I hadn’t accounted for—”

  “But it’s my understanding that you’re no longer working for the US government?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So how do you have access to a warden’s list? Those are classified, aren’t they?”

  A little missile of anger spiraled from one side of my brain to the other. I sat silently for a moment, gathered my thoughts, and then locked my eyes onto hers.

  “Look, if this is going to be the tenor of our conversation here today, we’re not going to get very far. Warden’s lists are not classified, anyhow. I didn’t come to explain the mechanics of how I’m connecting with the Iraqis, but to see what you’re going to do to help them.”

  “And we understand and appreciate your help with that, Kirk.” Patronizing drips splashed and puddled on their side of the table.

  I pulled the envelope from my backpack and thunked it onto the table. The woman unsealed it and began to flip through the pages, pausing here and there, passing sections to other staffers. I watched in silence. I was wearing the only suit I owned, and noticed that I had tracked slush up the back of my pant legs. Time seemed to stretch into hours as I waited for someone to look up from my list and say something.