Ayaan fought back. Calling Wiegel “a reactionary conservative,” she threatened to form her own party if the Liberals expelled her. “He is just like one of those Turkish or Moroccan fathers who instinctively resist modernity, and when they can’t hold it back, retreat into their neighborhood where they are safe,” she told reporters. She later compared belonging to the Liberal Party to being part of a Somali clan. “And within the clan, you have to be extremely cautious, you have to take into account all kinds of unspoken mores. They told me I had to develop a feeling for this and a feeling for that. I hated those codes.” She also said she didn’t know how much longer she could go on living like this.
In public she never lost her composure. But she said she often dreamed of being chased. “In the dream I feel that they are getting close to me and I want to jump from the balcony. I run to the balcony and there are so many men there with beards and wearing galabiyas, like Mohammed Bouyeri. I feel that in another moment I will die, in another moment it will all be over. But then I wake up.”
Chapter Three
A few weeks after my article about Aafia Siddiqui appeared in the March 2005 issue of Vogue, I received an e-mail from the Pakistani journalist I had hired in Karachi. He had received a tip that “Aafia Siddiqui, the associate of Adnan Shukrijumah,” had been arrested the week before in Baluchistan and handed over to the CIA. According to his source, Aafia had first been arrested in Karachi two years earlier. But a former governor of Sindh and a retired lieutenant general had intervened to have her released. The same source claimed that Aafia’s children were safe with her mother, Ismat. My journalist friend asked me to see if I could confirm the tip with my U.S. sources.
I called the CIA and the FBI, but, as usual, they had no comment. Finally I forwarded the journalist’s e-mail to the Siddiquis’ lawyer in Marblehead, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, to see if she knew anything about it. Sharp e-mailed me back a couple of days later. She said the Siddiquis had heard nothing of the sort. I wrote my Pakistani colleague that unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to confirm that Aafia had been arrested. He replied that he hadn’t found any confirmation, either.
A few days later he e-mailed me again. This note was labeled “MOST URGENT.” “U have committed a big blunder by forwarding my mail regarding aafia’s alleged arrest to her lawyer in Boston,” the journalist wrote. “The lady lawyer forwarded my message to fauzia siddiqui who today called me and had a half-an-hour chat coupled with threats and grudge. i could not expect such unprofessional thing from a journalist who never reveals his/her source. u have no idea that u have risked my life.”
The journalist went on to say that Fowzia and Ismat had charged him with “hatching a conspiracy against them” and spreading false information in order to get money from Aafia’s former in-laws, the Khans. He complained that the two women had kept calling him for a whole day, until he finally had to switch off his phone. “Fauzia and Ismat insist that they have been given written assurance by state department that wherever aafia and children are they are safe and sound,” he wrote. He also said that when he had told Fowzia what Sharp had told me—namely, that the State Department had given no such written statement—Fowzia had accused him of lying. My Pakistani colleague concluded despairingly that he was “screwed up.”
I felt terrible. In retrospect, of course, I wished that I had just asked Sharp about the report of Aafia’s arrest, rather than forwarding the e-mail with the journalist’s name on it. But he hadn’t asked me to keep the e-mail a secret, and it never crossed my mind that I might be putting him in danger. I had thought Aafia’s family would want to know if she had been found.
I phoned the journalist and apologized for my mistake. He sounded quite shaken. But when I tried to inquire further about what the Siddiquis had said and how they had threatened him, he didn’t want to talk about it.
Years later, Aafia’s ex-husband, Amjad, heard from a Pakistani official that Aafia had been caught in Baluchistan around that time—early 2005—at the border crossing of Chaman, trying to enter Afghanistan without a passport. He was told that the ISI had quietly stepped in and had her released. If the incident really happened, it was never made public—like so much else in the war on terror.
Chapter Four
Ayaan had at least one consolation in the squall of bad feelings that descended upon the Netherlands. Foreign journalists were discovering what the Dutch media already knew: that this gorgeous young Somali and her story made irresistible copy. The earlier threats against her, in 2002, had lifted her from provincial obscurity to national fame. Now the international coverage of van Gogh’s murder swept her into worldwide celebrity.
Marlise Simons of the New York Times had hurried to Amsterdam as soon as she learned of van Gogh’s death. Simons had been the first to bring Ayaan to U.S. attention in 2002, and it was her front-page article about the 2004 murder that I had read while standing in line at the Atlanta airport. Soon her newspaper’s Sunday magazine assigned the freelance writer Christopher Caldwell to write a full-length profile of this extraordinary African feminist.
Caldwell was a balding commentator who wore thick glasses and wrote more frequently for the neoconservative Weekly Standard than for the Times. He had an abiding fear of Muslim immigration. (In 2009, he would come out with a book warning that Europe was in danger of being overrun with Muslims.) In an early article for the Standard about the van Gogh murder, titled “Holland Daze,” Caldwell sounded as though he had a reservation or two about Ayaan; he dismissed “Submission” as a “violent, semi-pornographic movie,” and he wrote that one reason the Dutch regarded an African refugee as “something like Joan of Arc” was that “her outsider status makes her a natural leader for a society that fears it will die if it does not change, but would rather die than be accused of racism, gay-bashing, or Islamophobia.” But by the time he was finished with his article for The New York Times Magazine, his skepticism had apparently melted.
“Hirsi Ali had been dealt a full house of the royal virtues: courage, intelligence, compassion,” he proclaimed in the cover story that appeared on April 3, 2005, under the title “Daughter of the Enlightenment.” He characterized Ayaan’s life under twenty-four-hour guard as “an inseparable mix of the terrifying and the tender.” “Hers is a big, heroic life that moves her fellow citizens but now gets lived mostly in locked rooms and bulletproof cars. She leads that life partly above other Dutch people, as a national symbol—and partly below them, as a prisoner.”
Caldwell even suspended his habitual cynicism about Third World migration to give the most dramatic and detailed account until then of Ayaan’s upbringing in Kenya and how she had fled Germany to escape marriage to “a Somali-Canadian cousin she didn’t know.” If Caldwell ever asked the question of how a runaway bride from Kenya had managed to qualify for political asylum in the Netherlands, the answer didn’t figure in his published piece.
“Daughter of the Enlightenment” was a rapturous endorsement, and more than any other single factor it smoothed Ayaan’s passage into the upper reaches of America’s media and political elite. Within days of the article’s appearance, Time magazine announced that the hitherto little-known Somali-Dutch politician had landed on its annual list of the hundred most influential people in the world. Soon Ayaan was flying across the Atlantic again, this time not to be bundled off to a suburban hotel but to be honored at a Time gala along with other “leaders and revolutionaries,” including President George W. Bush, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, and an up-and-coming U.S. senator named Barack Obama. (Presumably not every “leader and revolutionary” got an invitation. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was on the list but failed to show.)
Like Cinderella, Ayaan borrowed a gown for the ball. This one was a strapless silver frock designed by the Dutch duo Viktor and Rolf, and it showed off her slim figure and creamy brown skin to spectacular advantage. As she posed for the cameras outside Lincoln Center, the Dutch reporters filming every minute described her
performance as “brilliant.”
Ayaan’s literary agent, Susanna Lea, was in the process of selling the worldwide rights to Ayaan’s collection of essays, The Caged Virgin, as well as her proposed autobiography. Lea had finally convinced Ayaan that she should give up trying to actually write her book and do what other famous people did: hire a ghostwriter. Armed with this new plan and with the sensational acclaim Ayaan was getting, Lea managed to sell the U.S. rights to both books for a reported $125,000.
Mohammed Bouyeri’s trial was still going forward in the Netherlands, and that kept Ayaan in the news. When four Muslim suicide bombers killed fifty-two people on July 7, 2005, in a series of explosions on the London Underground, Ayaan’s warnings about the dangers of Europe’s Muslim minority seemed—to many people, anyway—vindicated.
Less than a week later, Bouyeri himself boosted her profile even higher. Through most of his trial the young Dutch Moroccan had sat silently in his prayer cap and caftan, rocking back in his chair, the picture of sullen defiance. But when the time came for him to be sentenced, he stood up to announce that he did not regret killing van Gogh and would do it again if given the chance. “I don’t feel your pain,” Bouyeri coldly told van Gogh’s mother. “I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a non-believer.”
That day, even Ayaan’s most vociferous Dutch critics had to ask themselves if she might have been right—that there were some aspects of Islam the Dutch Left just didn’t want to see.
As the year wore on, and another crisis blew up in Europe, she threw herself onto the frontlines again.
In Denmark the editors of the conservative newspaper Jyllands-Posten decided to test the limits of what they regarded as Danish self-censorship in regard to Islam by publishing a series of cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. Some of the cartoons appeared to mock the Prophet. And in a familiar pattern, the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami seized the chance to energize their base and polarize millions.
After adding a few fake and even more inflammatory cartoons, imams who were linked to the Brotherhood began waving them around the Middle East as proof of Europe’s lack of respect for Islam and of the weakness of corrupt Muslim leaders in the face of insults. The ambassadors of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim countries went to the Danish prime minister to complain. The Danish prime minister refused to see them, saying he had no responsibility for the Danish press. Islamist groups began rallying supporters around the Middle East and attacking Danish embassies, businesses, and citizens. The circle of violence widened, and much of it was televised.
Many European intellectuals were torn between seeing the cartoons as a provocation and condemning the attacks on them as stifling free speech. The Netherlands, Great Britain, and other European countries with troops already under attack in Iraq hastened to denounce them as tasteless. Ayaan, however, had no doubt where she stood.
In February 2006, she joined Salman Rushdie and ten other prominent writers in a manifesto condemning Europe for failing to stand up for the Danish cartoonists. Calling an international press conference in Berlin, she declared that freedom of speech must include “the right to offend.” She accused her own government, and everyone else who had criticized the cartoons and the Danish government, of being cowards who hid behind excuses involving fairness and responsibility. The truth, she said, was that they were afraid to stand up to Islam. “I wish my prime minister had the Danish prime minister’s guts.”
David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), was one of many in Washington who were impressed. The AJC was approaching its one hundredth anniversary, and President Bush and other dignitaries would be attending the centennial event. Harris proposed giving Ayaan the group’s Moral Courage Award and thus the chance to address this influential convocation.
For months, various think tanks and other groups—including the AJC, the conservative Hudson Institute (where Ayaan’s friend Leon de Winter was a fellow), and the American Enterprise Institute—had been promoting the idea that the United States needed to expand its war in Iraq to Iran in order to stop Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, from developing nuclear weapons. Ayaan had never been to Iran. She had no way of knowing whether it could build such bombs or not. She did know that the growing threats to bomb Iran were already exciting Islamist fantasies about Jewish and American plots to eradicate Islam and oppress the ummah. Nevertheless, she decided to use her keynote address to pick up the neoconservative theme and urge the United States to take preemptive military action against a third Muslim country.
Chapter Five
To the outside world, Aafia seemed forgotten. Many wondered by the end of 2005 if she was locked in a secret CIA prison. But the silver-haired former head of the weapons of mass destruction unit at the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, told me after he retired that, far from being under arrest, Aafia remained for him the stuff of nightmares.
Mowatt-Larssen had a special deck of fifty-two playing cards made up. Each carried the face of a suspected terrorist he feared might be planning the next big attack. Aafia was the queen of spades, the only woman in the deck. Mowatt-Larssen wouldn’t have put her at the top of his list of potential mass murderers, but he couldn’t rule her out. She was his wild card.
As an intelligence officer, Mowatt-Larssen tried to put himself in the place of al-Qaeda’s leaders and to think as they would. He believed that they had been close, several times, to obtaining weapons that could have caused huge casualties. In 2003, for example, the CIA heard that al-Qaeda had devised a small handheld weapon that could disperse hydrogen cyanide throughout an enclosed area, killing dozens or even hundreds of people. Al-Qaeda called it the mubtakkar, Arabic for “invention.” Around the time KSM was captured and Aafia went missing, the United States received information that an al-Qaeda cell in Bahrain had been ready to mount a mubtakkar attack on New York City’s subways but that Zawahiri had canceled the plan. Why did he cancel? Mowatt-Larssen feared that al-Qaeda’s number two had pulled back to work on a more spectacular strike. The group’s biological and chemical weapons expert, an Egyptian named Abu Khabab al-Masri, was still at large.
Mowatt-Larssen believed that if al-Qaeda used Aafia properly, she could be of huge value. His hope was that, whether because she was a woman or because her bossy manner got on the nerves of its male leaders, al-Qaeda wouldn’t be able to exploit her full potential.
It wasn’t Aafia’s prowess as a scientist that worried Mowatt-Larssen the most. The FBI had gone through her records from MIT and Brandeis. She had not taken any notably advanced biology and chemistry courses, and there was no obvious application to jihad in her neuroscience Ph.D. What set her apart in his eyes was her combination of high intelligence (including general scientific know-how), religious zeal, and years of experience in the United States. “So far they have had very few people who have been able to come to the U.S. and thrive,” he said. “Aafia is different. She knows about U.S. immigration procedures and visas. She knows how to enroll in American educational institutions. She can open bank accounts and transfer money. She knows how things work here. She could have been very useful to them simply for her understanding of the U.S.”
Mowatt-Larssen and his team had not forgotten the documents found in the Qadoos house at the time of KSM’s arrest. They had shown that Abu Khabab al-Masri, the Egyptian weapons expert, was ready to produce botulinum, salmonella, and cyanide, and was close to producing anthrax. They believed Aafia had a connection both to the Qadoos family and to Amir Aziz, the Lahore orthopedic surgeon who had been accused of helping al-Qaeda obtain anthrax. They also thought she was better equipped than any of them to be creative in using such poisons against the United States. “She had the imagination to come up with the next 9/11,” Mowatt-Larssen said. “The question was whether they would listen to her.”
He felt they might take some of her suggestions but might leave her out of the loop when it came to operation
al planning. He had heard what detainees such as Aafia’s second husband, Ali, had said about her. (Alas, the reports of these interrogations are still deeply secret.) Even with the hardest core of al-Qaeda operatives, she had a reputation for being headstrong. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘She must drive them crazy,’ ” Mowatt-Larsson told me. But he couldn’t be sure. The CIA had never pinned down her exact role. They just knew that “she was always in the picture. Connections between her and other people the FBI was looking at surfaced in just about every al-Qaeda investigation with a U.S. angle. She was always on our radar.”
At the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Aafia’s name was prominent on a different list, another former official in the Bush administration told me. This was a list of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists whom the U.S. government had authorized the CIA to “kill or capture” on sight. Once again, Aafia wasn’t at the top of the list. But she was on it and she stayed there.
Unfortunately from the U.S. point of view, the CIA could not easily operate by itself in Pakistan. Thus, when it came to finding Aafia or anyone else on the list, it usually had to rely on the ISI. And most of the time the ISI gave the Americans nothing. Despite the millions of dollars in rewards that Washington was offering, the ISI seldom, on its own initiative, arrested even foreign al-Qaeda suspects, much less Pakistanis.
So the CIA wasn’t surprised that its Pakistani counterparts showed little interest in finding a fellow Pakistani who was also a woman. “Everyone has patrons and protectors,” Mowatt-Larssen said. And Aafia, as a female and a member of a respected Deobandi family, was even more sheltered than most from the prying of U.S. investigators.
The Americans tried to escape their dependence on Pakistani intelligence by playing from an American strength: technology. The phones and e-mails of Pakistanis suspected of links to people on the target list were tapped by the National Security Agency. Ismat and Fowzia no doubt fell into that suspect category, as did some senior politicians and generals who the United States believed were shielding militants. The former official in the Bush administration said that if the Americans happened to overhear the whereabouts of one of their targets, they would go to President Musharraf with the information. They would ask him for permission to capture the person and take “lethal action” if they failed to capture him.
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