“Kirk, we are going to have to study this more closely. But we can tell you that we are looking into this issue and appreciate your help in bringing these names to us. If we can, we’d like to be in touch with you after we’ve had a chance to review things more thoroughly?”
“Yeah, fine.” I was itching to get out of there, tense and unsettled in their company. Was I just some kid that they were humoring on a slow day, or would they actually do something? Hoping to add a little pressure, I mentioned the meetings I’d scheduled with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and with staffers on Capitol Hill, who would all be eager to know what the State Department would do with my list.
* * *
After the meeting, I hurried to a café to write down my notes. As I transcribed their comments, it became clear that every answer had been a classic yes/no, a staple of USGspeak, which sounds good enough in the moment but never settles well. In the end, they had only taken the list and committed to “looking into it.” I had zero concrete information to report back to Iraqis on the list.
One point of our discussion was particularly irksome: due to confidentiality requirements, they explained, they wouldn’t be able to speak with me directly about the particulars of any cases. Was I really not to be trusted? After all, I was the one giving them the list, which was filled with information that the Iraqis had entrusted to me. Hadn’t I crossed some threshold of common sense whereby the State Department could tell me what, specifically, Yaghdan would need to do before he could find a safe haven?
The more I considered it, the more I realized what a brilliant policy it was, from a bureaucratic perspective: it allowed them to suggest that they were so concerned with protecting the vulnerable that they were unwilling to communicate with the person who brought them names of the vulnerable, so pure was their commitment to the integrity of the process. It also carried a not-so-subtle message to buzz off. Don’t poke around in our process, and let us do this our own way, at our own pace.
* * *
A few weeks before my trip to DC, the Washington Post Magazine ran a piece I wrote about coming to terms with my accident and failures in Fallujah. I had written it long before Yaghdan and the refugee crisis took over my life, in an attempt to make sense of the accident and the PTSD I’d struggled with back in West Chicago. After the story ran, I received a number of emails from veterans—private first class to general officer—who shared stories of their own freak accidents suffered upon their departure from Iraq or Afghanistan. More than a few tied themselves to their beds each night.
Even though it was not the primary subject of the essay, USAID did not come off particularly well, and no government agency wanted any Iraq-related press by that point. On the heels of my op-ed about the agency’s abandonment of Yaghdan, I guessed that some folks in the public affairs office were probably upset. When I was scheduling meetings for my trip down to Washington, I’d sent an email to an old boss of mine, a Bush political appointee, and proposed a lunch when I came down with the list. He called me shortly after receiving the note.
“Kirk, I gotta tell ya, your articles are not being very well received here at the agency.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not coming after the agency. You guys can’t do anything about the list anyway. This is a State and Homeland Security issue.”
“You know what you’re pushing here, Kirk; you’re dragging the nation back to the rooftop of Saigon! Have you considered that?”
The photograph from the final moments of the fall of Saigon in April 1975, where South Vietnamese employees clambered outside our embassy with the hope of boarding one of the departing helicopters, became the iconic image of the end of the war, printed in every high schooler’s history textbook for a generation. I laughed. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I wasn’t dragging any nation anywhere. I barely had my own life together. My aunt had needed to rent out my room in Brighton to help pay the bills, so I was now sleeping on a mattress by the water heater in the unfinished basement, where I’d dumped my box of LSAT prep books and law school admissions paperwork.
* * *
A couple hours after my meeting at State, I headed over to my old employer. I stared at the smiling pictures of Bush, Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and USAID Administrator Randall Tobias hanging in the lobby of the Ronald Reagan Building, and wondered how they were affixed to the marble wall. Velcro would make them easier to peel off after an election, I figured.
The Bush appointee called out my name from the other side of the security screeners and metal detectors. I traded my driver’s license for a “Visitor—Escort Required” name tag and gave him a half smile as I shook his hand.
“Welcome back to the agency, Kirk.”
He poked at my silence as we rode up the elevator. “Good trip so far?”
“Going okay. Interesting feeling being back here at AID.”
The doors opened, and he escorted me into the Legislative and Public Affairs Bureau. As we walked past the government-blue cubicles that I had last seen in the compound in Baghdad, I noticed my magazine piece resting on nearly every desk. On one desk, I spotted a heavily highlighted printout of my op-ed about Yaghdan. I felt the aggressive unease of an encircled animal as I followed him into his office.
He sat down opposite me and asked if I wanted any coffee. When I declined, he started off in an irritated tone: “So, Kirk, I saw in your bio in your magazine piece that you were working on a collection of stories about your time in Iraq, is that right?”
“Well, yeah, that’s one of the things I’m working on.”
“And do you plan on publishing any more of these?”
“Yeah, I’m hoping to.”
He furrowed his brow as though deep in reflection.
“See, here’s the thing, Kirk: I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to be publishing anything about your time there with USAID. I’m saying this as a friend, because I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble for violating any terms of your contract.”
His words dissolved like a pill into my bloodstream, the impact immediate.
“I worked for USAID, not the CIA. I never signed any gag order.”
He leaned over to a nearby chair, upon which sat a green binder. On its binding, I read “Kirk Johnson.” He flipped through what I recognized as my articles, past other pages that I couldn’t make out, and pulled out a few stapled pages of paper. He slid them across his desk to me.
“See, take a look at this contract language. It says right there, the section that talks about not speaking to the media or publishing anything without clearance from the agency.”
I looked at the contract and knew immediately that it was not mine. I pushed it back and forced a smile.
“This isn’t my contract. I never signed a gag order. Besides, I’m not even working for the agency anymore. I was never fired and never resigned; you guys just forgot about me after I walked out the window . . .”
He showed me his palms defensively and leaned back, away from the alpha stirring in me. I continued.
“I’m a little confused here. I told you I was coming in as a courtesy call to explain what I was doing with my list. And the first thing you do is bring up this contract?”
He recomposed and locked eyes with me.
“I’m telling you this as a friend. We’d hate to see your objectives torpedoed. What I thought would make sense is that you submit your future publications to us, just so we can have a look at it and maybe even help, before you actually publish them.”
I put my hands on my knees. “That’s not going to happen.”
He tried to change the tone of the conversation and asked, “Hey, can I see the list? Fill me in on what’s going on.”
I stared over his shoulder at a framed picture of the entire USAID Iraq staff in 2005, in the piazza of the compound. I had taken the picture during my first week in Baghdad. I pointed to it and said, perhaps melodramatically, “The list is right there, in that picture. I’m not s
howing it to anyone other than the principal actors in the resettlement bureaucracy.”
He looked over his shoulder at the picture. Half Iraqis, half Americans. There was Yaghdan, his modest smile concealed partly by a bushy mustache. Tona and Amina were off to his right. Of the Iraqis pictured, only a few remained with USAID.
“I’m not going to submit anything to you guys. If that’s a problem, then let’s see how it plays out. Subtract my medical bills, and I have about a thousand bucks left, and every other person in my family is a lawyer.”
He stared back at me, masking any reaction. I was getting too upset. I thought back to a trick I’d used during insufferable meetings at the palace in the Green Zone and imagined that I was arguing with a parrot perched atop a chair. I grinned and stood up. “I’m sorry we had this meeting. I’ve got somewhere else to be now.”
I shook his hand and motored out of the bureau, past my magazine pieces, past stacks of briefing books containing archives of my Iraq Daily Updates, past row after row of bureaucrats struggling to spit-shine USAID’s projects for an uninterested media and a yawning public.
The awareness of just how little I had to lose had fully dawned on me only when I had mentioned my bank account balance. It was strangely empowering. After all, what was the worst that could happen? That I fail again? That I move out of the basement and back home to West Chicago? It wouldn’t be great, but it still seemed trivial compared to what was filling my in-box each day.
I was waiting at the bank of elevators outside the Legislative and Public Affairs Bureau when the Bush appointee caught up with me.
“Let’s be in touch, okay?” he said in a hushed tone as he handed me his USAID business card. I didn’t understand why, since I already had his contact information.
“And look, if she gets in touch with you, make sure she gets on your list, okay?”
I glanced down at the card and saw the handwritten name of an Iraqi woman.
“Don’t worry, it’s not like I slept with her or anything. But try to get her help if she gets in touch with you.”
* * *
That evening, a friend in USAID forwarded me a press release in which Condoleezza Rice announced the creation of the Iraq Refugee and Internally Displaced Persons Task Force. Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky would lead the task force, “building on support already provided, to coordinate refugee and IDP assistance to the region and refugee resettlement. The task force will also draw on the Department of State’s multidisciplinary expertise to devise strategies for Iraqis at risk because of their work with the US government.”
I grasped for meaning in the sentences, but they evaded my best efforts as they fishtailed along: “The task force will focus the State Department’s coordination with other USG agencies, the UN, and other stakeholders. The work of the task force will also support the department’s participation in existing interagency processes run by the National Security Council.”
“Will focus . . . coordination . . . Will also support . . . participation.” Whoever drafted it had a mastery of the numbing potential of USGspeak.
Despite the vagueness, the task force was launched with one hard promise: in fiscal year 2007, already four months under way by that point, the United States government would admit seven thousand Iraqi refugees.
I ran the math in my head. In the first four months of the fiscal year, eight, nine, seventeen, and fifteen visas, respectively, had been granted to refugees from Iraq, for a total of forty-nine. I needed a calculator to get at the nut of the promise: for the next eight months, the State Department would have to issue an average of 870 visas each month—a 7,000 percent increase. This suggested an efficiency I had long since come to doubt.
* * *
Slouched in the back row of the Chinatown bus back to Boston, I tried to make sense of a stew of conflicting emotions. I was exhilarated by the brush with my old life—the life that I thought had ended when I fell out the window. I wasn’t navigating according to any master plan but by echolocation: after shouting about a problem, Iraqis shouted back, and now the government was talking.
But the promises were meaningless USGspeak. I had hoped to dump off the list at the State Department and move on, but I now worried that if I didn’t keep the pressure on them, it’d be forgotten, misplaced, used for scrap paper.
I thought about who might be able to help me. The Americans with whom I’d worked in Iraq cheered me on privately, but nobody else stepped forward in any public way because they were still working for the government. One State Department foreign service officer had created a separate Gmail account for the sole purpose of referring the name of an Iraqi colleague to my list. “I am weeping into my keyboard as I write this, with the hope that you can help him,” she wrote. When I wrote her back and asked why she felt the need to create a secret account, her response came in one line: “I can’t be seen writing you.”
But there was one person with whom I was emailing almost hourly, who seemed to be my only ally in turning the screws on the US government. I had devoured George Packer’s reporting for the New Yorker while in Iraq, reading his book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq over two sleepless nights on a sagging cot at the CMOC in Fallujah. I’d first emailed him years earlier, in 2004, seeking his advice on how to find a job in the reconstruction efforts, but we started talking regularly after he wrote an op-ed in the New Republic about the need to protect US-affiliated Iraqis. We traded each rumor or theory we uncovered about the Bush administration’s policy, and when he went to Iraq and Syria to investigate the crisis for the magazine, I introduced him to Yaghdan, Ziad, and several others. If Packer wrote about the list, there was no way the State Department could ignore it.
14.
Journalists
After a nightmarish journey as human cargo, shuttling through Dubai to India, Syria, and then to Egypt, Ziad’s smugglers told him they would attempt the dangerous final trek to Sweden. Stockholm, which had no part in the war, had already admitted tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees at a time when no coalition members were opening their doors. Worried about the safety and legality of the final leg into Europe, I begged him not to continue, which might have played a role in his decision to run from his smugglers once he got to Cairo. Soon thereafter, an officer in the mukhabarat, the dreaded Egyptian secret police, who was involved in the smuggling network picked him up and took him to a prison beneath the Cairo airport. There he was tortured, mainly by electrical shock. For weeks, he resisted the cockroaches in his cell by wadding up bits of paper and jamming them into his ears and nostrils so that they wouldn’t lay any eggs there.
Yaghdan and Haifa were now in Syria, having run out of time on their visitor’s visas in Dubai. They had planned to rent a cheap apartment in the Sayyida Zainab neighborhood of Damascus, where many other Iraqis fleeing the civil war had holed up, but Yaghdan was convinced that he’d been spotted by a member of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which openly maintained an office in the city. They boarded a northern-bound bus to Homs and waited. Either their money would run out or they would get a visa.
It had been a month since I had delivered my list to the State Department, and, apart from a bland email in which it said it would “prioritize” the Iraqis on my list “as appropriate,” there was no tangible progress. New names continued to come in each day, and although I’d developed a system of emailing encrypted files to the Refugee Bureau, it was beginning to feel like loading up a car that was missing an engine.
* * *
Any illusions I had maintained about the list being a short-term project shattered upon the publication of “Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted America the Most.” In March 2007, on the fourth anniversary of the war, George Packer’s sixteen-thousand-word exposé erupted with a suffusing outrage in the New Yorker. Yaghdan’s plight was spotlighted in the pages of one of the most influential magazines in the world. Packer wrote about my accident, the family history with Dennis Hastert, and about my trip to DC with the list.
&nb
sp; A new torrent of emails ensued, from foreign service officers, contractors, soldiers, and marines who had read the piece and wanted to refer the names of their Iraqi employees. Some wrote from a place of guilt: “I wish I had thought of doing more to protect him . . . has he written to you? Is he already on your list, and if not, can you find him?” Another wrote perfunctorily: “Please add the following name to your list: Ahmed al-Rikabi.”
The flimsy dam that I had constructed to manage the river of emails from refugees was buckling under the new pressure. With each click to refresh my in-box, I found new names and new requests.
A second round of emails came from other journalists suddenly turning their attention to the issue. I assumed that they wouldn’t want to talk with me, since Packer had already written about the list, but I soon realized that they had been assigned by their editors to produce their own reports, no matter how derivative. His reporting had bulldozed a path through which the rest of the media now strolled.
It was a strange business. The more that journalists wrote about the list, the more requests I got from other journalists. I found myself fielding one or two calls a day, walking each journalist through the crisis, teaching what I’d learned about the refugee admissions process, and steering him or her to annoyed public affairs officers at the State Department’s Refugee Bureau. Although a few had bothered to do some background research before calling, most would kick off the call with, “Okay, I’m recording. Why don’t you just start from the top?” as though I were peddling a movie script.
Someone from a reputable paper would call and say, “I’m looking for a woman, preferably in Syria, who worked for the Americans and was attacked.” Or, “Is there anyone on the list who is in Egypt, Christian, and had family members killed?” Or, “Yeah, hi, I need someone in Iraq or Jordan who’s been tortured and is in hiding.” Or, “Do you have any Iraqis who worked for the Brits who fled to Lebanon?” Like ordering a pizza.
To Be a Friend Is Fatal Page 19