Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Jose Padilla, for instance, was a tattooed former gang member from Brooklyn who had converted to Islam in south Florida. He had been recruited for jihad in 1997 by Adham Hassoun, a representative of the Benevolence International Foundation. Hassoun knew Aafia’s friend Suleman Ahmer and had worked closely with Aafia’s friends the “Care brothers” in Boston. Another American resident, Adnan Shukrijumah, came out of the same south Florida Islamist milieu as Padilla. Shukrijumah was the Saudi-born son of a Trinidadian mosque leader who had been the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s translator in Brooklyn. Both men trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and both joined up with KSM in Karachi after 9/11.

  Whether Aafia met any of those conspirators around that time, she did shift her focus back to the United States. She told Amjad by the end of 2001 that she might, under certain conditions, return to her home with him in Boston. One condition was that he buy her a new computer, plus some religious books she needed. Another was that he join her in Islamic activities. He agreed, and Aafia flew back to the United States on January 5, 2002.

  Chapter Five

  Ayaan’s article about Voltaire led to an invitation to speak on the great Enlightenment philosopher Benedict Spinoza. Ayaan wrote in her autobiography that she had to go back to her books and read up on Spinoza, but she agreed to do it.

  Then she gave a speech answering yes to the question “Should We Fear Islam?”—after which she drafted an article attacking various Dutch politicians. They included the mayor of Amsterdam, who had called on nonbelieving citizens to respect the unifying power of religion. Ayaan showed her piece to the editor of Trouw. He wanted to publish it, but her boss at the Wiardi Beckman Institute, Paul Kalma, was aghast. He made her take out material calling the popular mayor, Job Cohen—a fellow member of the Labor Party—“Ayatollah Cohen.” Normally a disagreement between a junior researcher and her supervisor wouldn’t qualify as news, but Ayaan rarely minded talking to the press, and a few days later Trouw published an article describing the dispute at the institute.

  Cohen, whose mother had survived the Holocaust, was about as far from being an ayatollah as a man could get. If anything, the former law professor’s fault during the immigration debate was his determination to hear every side, a policy he called “keeping it together.” Personally very modest, he was devoted to his handicapped wife and shopped for their food (which he often cooked himself) at the little Albert Heijn supermarket around the corner from the mayor’s official house on the Herengracht. Cohen could also be tough. He had written the restrictive new immigration bill that had passed in 2000. If Ayaan couldn’t see the difference between him and an ayatollah, some of her colleagues later asked me, what could she see?

  Ayaan wrote that she couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. “I was learning that in these extremely civilized circles, conflict was dealt with in a very ornate and hypocritical manner.”

  Her institute held a meeting with Cohen to discuss the article. To Ayaan’s surprise, he stood up for her right to publish it. “He blew me away with his open-mindedness,” she later wrote. “I thought he was a hero.” Nonetheless, she still called him “Ayatollah Cohen” in the version of her article that later appeared in her book The Caged Virgin.

  Ayaan got more invitations to speak on radio and then television. Producers instantly recognized her as a media natural. As the British journalist Andrew Anthony later wrote, she “looks like a fashion model and talks like a public intellectual.” Yet Ayaan had more than that. After years of double-talk from Islamists, and excuses from Dutch politicians and academics, her willingness to speak openly about aspects of Islam that bothered Westerners came as a huge relief to many people. “She is very pretty, but she has something extra,” said Eveline van Dijk, a filmmaker with whom Ayaan had worked as a translator. “She has an aura that is really unusual.”

  With their Calvinist fondness for preaching, moreover, the Dutch were ready to hear her message that they needed to get over their fear of offending Muslims and confront them with the truth about their religion. The Dutch also approved of her view that Islam’s biggest problem was its sexual morality.

  Polls show that Muslims and Westerners disagree more about sex than about any other subject. Whereas Muslims see themselves as protecting women, Westerners see Muslims as oppressing women. Whereas Westerners feel they’re liberating women, Muslims feel that Westerners exploit women for commercial gain. Ayaan was a Muslim who told the Dutch in no uncertain terms that they were right and the Muslims were wrong.

  Ayaan’s Dutch was now excellent, but there was something un-Dutch and exotic about the way she framed her ideas. Like her father, she used simple stories—almost like fables—to illustrate her meaning, and she told her stories with calm precision and a cadence that was almost hypnotic. She was cool, even analytical, yet she radiated passion. Her righteousness acted like a magnet, attracting as many people as it repelled. She talked tough, yet people sensed in her a mixture of bravery and barely repressed fear that reflected their own churning emotions.

  More than one Dutch citizen would say later that a tingle ran up their spines when they first saw her on television or heard her on the radio. It was hard for them to explain why. No doubt the troubled times had something to do with it. As Naïma Azough, a young Muslim woman who had just been elected to Parliament, later said, “Without the attacks of September 11, the Hirsi Ali phenomenon would never have happened. She fit perfectly in the world of fear, war and doubt that unfolded.”

  Dutch intellectuals often sensed irritating barriers between themselves and Muslims. But they felt nothing of the kind with Ayaan. She wasn’t defensive. It didn’t seem to bother her when a Western admirer knew nothing about Islam. She didn’t preface her statements with tirades about the Palestinians or invocations to God. She was warm and funny. Above all, she was ready to talk critically about the three subjects most Muslims seemed to want to avoid: Islam, sex, and anti-Semitism. She also attracted the attention of influential leftists who were criticizing multiculturalism, such as her former professors Paul Cliteur and Bart Tromp and the columnist Margo Trappenburg.

  For some other people, however, who had made it their life’s work to learn about the Islamic world, the debate unfolding in the media could be painful.

  “It was stupid,” said Annelies Moors of the University of Amsterdam. “They were trading in fear and gross generalizations.” “Overnight,” said the journalist Joris Luyendijk, “the Dutch went from saying there was no problem with Muslims to saying there was no solution.”

  Chapter Six

  In Boston that January of 2002, Amjad tried to woo Aafia by putting the family up in a fancy hotel on the Charles River. They had never been able to afford a holiday like that before. Now that he was earning a good salary at Tufts, he wanted to treat her to it.

  But Aafia scolded him for wasting money on luxuries when Muslims were dying in Afghanistan. So they returned to Back Bay Manor, and Aafia found herself pregnant again.

  Her attention seemed to be elsewhere. She didn’t resume her missionary activities at the Roxbury mosque, and she didn’t put the children in kindergarten. Instead, she homeschooled them.

  Sometimes she put on makeup and a pretty shalwar kameez and greeted Amjad with a smile and a hug at the door, as The Muslim Marriage Guide recommended. But at other times she grew morose and withdrawn, and she curled up with the children and watched videos of dead Muslims in Chechnya or Afghanistan. When Amjad complained that the children were too young for such gruesome films, she flew at him and accused him again of wallowing in Western comforts. Her bad moods often seemed related to discussions on the Internet of Muslim wars abroad.

  The American mood meanwhile was triumphant, even vindictive. Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Kabul, and there were pictures everywhere of Afghan women flinging off their powder blue burkas. The first prisoners from Afghanistan were being locked up in the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In a frieze of humiliation, they appeared on televi
sion in orange jumpsuits, manacled and shuffling into open cages under twenty-four-hour halogen lights. Bush’s government announced that the prisoners were covered neither by the Geneva conventions nor by ordinary criminal statutes. Aafia said that proved that such treaties and agreements on human rights were just a smoke screen for U.S. imperialism.

  Most Americans didn’t know yet that the U.S. government was already making plans to invade Iraq, but Aafia did. She studied right-wing blogs and publications, Israeli as well as American. Few Americans had reacted the way she predicted they would after 9/11 (they hadn’t kidnapped Muslim children, for example), but the administration did seem to be acting according to the jihadi playbook. For one thing, she felt certain that Zionists in Israel and the United States planned to use the invasion of Iraq as a step toward a “Greater Israel” and Western control of Muslim oil.

  According to Amjad, the only way to keep Aafia quiet while he got through his exams was to make her think the two of them were still training for jihad. She often recalled the U.S. Army manuals she had mailed to Pakistan after the FBI had come looking for her in 1995. She said they had never arrived, and she went to look for more at the used-book store near Harvard Square where she had bought the originals, but the store no longer sold such books. Amjad suggested they try the Internet. That spring, he ordered The Anarchist Arsenal: Improvised Incendiary and Explosive Techniques and Homemade C-4: A Recipe for Survival, together with other books on weapons and explosives from Paladin Press, a publisher specializing in survivalism and warfare.

  Only a few days after Aafia returned to Boston, Daniel Pearl, an American reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped from Karachi’s Village Restaurant, across the street from the Sheraton Hotel, where Aafia’s mother used to hold her conferences. Pearl’s pregnant French wife, Mariane, went on television and begged her husband’s kidnappers to return him. But a month later, the U.S. Consulate in Karachi received a video that showed Pearl being decapitated.

  The film had a title: “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”

  A few days before he was kidnapped, Pearl had written an article about the jihadi group that Aafia had wanted to join, Jaish-e-Muhammad. It soon emerged that Jaish-e-Muhammad was deeply involved in the murder. A former bodyguard for the Jaish leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, had set up the meeting between Pearl and those who turned out to be his kidnappers. Later, Pearl’s body was found on some property owned by the al-Rashid Trust.

  Soon the ghastly video of Pearl’s murder appeared on a new Web site called www.ogrish.com. The aptly named site featured macabre images of dead bodies, mostly taken from footage of auto accidents and crime scenes, juxtaposed with slick ads for pornography. The FBI discovered that a Dutchman named Dan Klinker ran the Web site out of Amsterdam, although a U.S. company, Pro Hosters LLC, of Sterling, Virginia, hosted the Web site. The FBI asked Pro Hosters and Ogrish to remove the video, and initially the companies complied. But when they realized how much money they could make with 750,000 people a day watching Pearl’s execution, they decided to fight back. Pro Hosters contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, won its support, and ten days later the beheading of Daniel Pearl was back online. The Web site ran a notice claiming that “all people out there have the RIGHT to see the Daniel Pearl video if they CHOOSE to. Banning this video would violate the 1st amendment: freedom of speech; do we want that? NO!” Thousands of people signed a petition imploring Klinker to take the video down, but he refused. The FBI backed down, too, after the ACLU said the government had no grounds for prosecution under U.S. obscenity laws because obscenity involved only sex.

  Aafia usually followed all the news about Jaish-e-Muhammad, but Amjad says he doesn’t recall them ever talking about the Pearl murder. Other news stories seemed to hit closer to home. While Aafia had been in Pakistan the previous autumn, the FBI in Massachusetts had interviewed her friend Suheil Laher and other volunteers at Care International. The “Care brothers” and Laher’s employer, Ptech Inc., would become the focus of a wider investigation of several Boston companies that were later accused of having ties to terrorism. (Ptech’s chief executive officer and chief financial officer were charged in 2009 with concealing the fact that one of their investors was on the U.S. terrorism watch list.)

  Amjad and Aafia didn’t know it, but they too had been the objects of official curiosity. Auditors at Fleet Bank filed a suspicious-activity report after Amjad, on December 21, 2001, transferred $8,000 to their joint account at the Habib Bank in Pakistan, a sum he says he used to settle the family’s bills and pay for their tickets back to the United States.

  The Americans finally captured an important al-Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, in March 2002. Under questioning by an FBI interrogator, Abu Zubaydah revealed what the Bush administration had not known until then: that Ramzi Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had planned the 9/11 attacks.

  Abu Zubaydah also told them that KSM had other plans. One was to send Jose Padilla, the American convert and former gang member, to the United States, either to set off a radioactive bomb or to spark natural gas explosions in high-rise apartment buildings. Abu Zubaydah named Adnan Shukrijumah as the person al-Qaeda was most likely to use as an operative in a future attack on the United States.

  Within a few weeks of his arrest, FBI agents began quietly questioning Aafia’s former professors and other associates at Brandeis and MIT.

  Amjad passed his final board exams in April. He had the highest score in his cohort. He had also turned out to be so good at teaching that Tufts named him teacher of the year and promoted him to assistant professor.

  He began taking Aafia and the children on weekend camping trips to Cape Cod and the New Hampshire mountains. Amjad says he saw the trips as a way to introduce the children to his family’s passion for hunting. Aafia got the chance to practice the techniques of survival outlined in her books. They went to a Boston camping store to buy hunting gear and supplies. Amjad purchased survival guides, a global positioning system, a night-vision device for hunting, and a bulletproof vest. But he says he had no intention of going back to Pakistan anytime soon. He wanted to resume his original plan to earn a Harvard master’s degree in public health and other qualifications in pain management and health care administration. He says he went along with Aafia’s fantasies of jihad simply to keep her from bolting back to Pakistan.

  Three or four weeks after the couple visited the camping store, the FBI appeared at their door. Aafia and Amjad assumed that their purchases had triggered the bureau’s interest.

  But possibly not. A few days before the FBI’s visit, agents had arrested Jose Padilla when he landed in Chicago on May 8. Padilla was carrying the e-mail address of another nephew of KSM, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. The FBI soon learned about Padilla’s ties to the other Florida jihadi, Adnan Shukrijumah, and they accused Padilla of plotting to combine ordinary explosives with radiological matter in order to launch a dirty bomb attack on the United States. The FBI evidently learned, too, that Aafia was e-mailing one or more of the conspirators, and perhaps it suspected her of being involved in the same plot.

  Aafia was at home in Back Bay Manor when the agents arrived. She heard them at the door but refused to open it. Then she telephoned Amjad at the hospital to tell him what she had done.

  Amjad had barely hung up when two other FBI agents appeared at the hospital. When he sat down with them, they asked a disturbing question. Some of the 9/11 hijackers, they said, had been seen entering and leaving their apartment building the summer before. Did he or his wife know any of them?

  Amjad said he didn’t, and he didn’t think his wife did, either. (Since the FBI never raised this point again, the agents may have been fishing.) They told him they would call later and make an appointment to talk with him and Aafia together.

  When Amjad got home, he called Aafia’s brother in Texas, as well as some Boston friends from Care International whom the FBI had already questioned. They told him being questioned was no big deal. E
ven if the FBI knew about the anti-American speeches that Aafia had made before 9/11—and even if the bureau could prove that the hijackers had been in their building—she and Amjad hadn’t committed any crimes.

  Aafia balked. She didn’t want to talk to the FBI. She wanted to go home again.

  “Why?” Amjad asked. Her refusal made no sense. He didn’t want to return to Pakistan.

  All they had to do was to sit down and explain everything. The FBI would leave them alone after that. The FBI, Amjad argued, had questioned their friends the “Care brothers,” who had done far more for jihad than Aafia or Amjad had, and the “Care brothers” hadn’t been arrested.

  But Aafia wouldn’t budge. Amjad called a Boston lawyer, James Merberg, anyway and made an appointment to meet with the FBI at Merberg’s office. Aafia’s brother, after numerous phone calls, convinced her to join them.

  The interview started slowly. The agents asked about the Saudi man who had been living in their apartment the summer before. Amjad explained that the man had briefly sublet their apartment after meeting Amjad at the hospital. The agents wanted to know about the camping equipment and the night-vision device Amjad had bought. He told them that his uncles had been champion hunters in Pakistan and he hoped to take up hunting in the United States. They asked about the books he had bought online. Amjad offered to return them, but the agents told him that wouldn’t be necessary. “This is a free country,” one said solemnly.