On the day after the FBI meeting, Jack Martin dictated a twenty-seven-page account of everything that had been said during the six-hour interview. In the last moments, Davis said, “He wanted to give Richard the opportunity once and for all to say that he didn’t do it.” Jewell, Martin wrote, “unequivocally and fortunately said that he had nothing to do with the bomb and didn’t know anything about the bomb and if he did he would be the first to deliver the bastard to their door.” When Martin walked out, he thought to himself, This really was a formality. They had nothing.
* * *
In November a rumor swept through the newsroom of the AJC that Cox newspaper executives were rethinking their news policies. According to one reporter, “The sloppiness of the Jewell reporting and the lack of sources was the last straw.” A reporter named Carrie Teegardin was assigned to write a piece examining how the media spotlight was turned on Richard Jewell. In large part, her article wound up being an examination of the role of the AJC. After Wood and Grant threatened to sue, the article was killed. “We didn’t get through the editing of it,” John Walter said. “The Jewells’ attorney began saying, ‘We’re thinking lawsuit’ . . . and that made us more cautious.” Meanwhile, Lin Wood and Wayne Grant were busy holding meetings with lawyers from NBC and Piedmont College. At NBC, Tom Brokaw’s carelessness reportedly cost the network more than $500,000 to settle Jewell’s claims, although Jewell’s lawyers would not confirm a figure. “Brokaw Goofed and NBC Paid,” the New York Daily News would later headline. In talks with Ray Cleere, the figure of $450,000 by way of settlement was first suggested, then withdrawn when Piedmont College learned that it had insurance. “This will cost them millions now,” Lin Wood believes.
* * *
On one occasion I asked Richard Jewell if he had any theories about who might have placed the bomb. Jewell said he had popped “two or three theories off the top of my head” on the night he was interviewed by the FBI. “I have gone over that night hundreds of times in my head. You try to think, What type of person would do that? I know it is someone who wanted to hurt people. It is someone who is sick. I hope they find him so he can get the help he needs. Because I am totally torn up about what happened. Every day I think about it, and I will think about it for the rest of my life.”
Jewell often speaks with Bryant three times a day. As Jewell searches for a new job, he hangs around Bryant’s office, and he recently studied handwriting analysis at the police academy. He has been offered several security jobs with Georgia companies, but he is hoping he will be hired as a Cobb County deputy. In the meantime, Bryant, Wood, and Grant have become sought-after speakers on the First Amendment.
At FBI headquarters in late October, Bobi Jewell broke down and cried as she identified their possessions—the Disney tapes, the Tupperware, Richard’s AT&T uniforms, address books. It was a tableau of ordinary middle-class life, laid out on brown paper on a long conference-room table. “I just don’t fucking believe this,” Watson Bryant said angrily as he packed Bobi’s videos into packing crates. “The agents tried to shake my hand,” Bobi told me. “I wouldn’t touch them.” It took ten hours to remove their possessions, Bobi recalled, and four minutes to return them.
* * *
The FBI is working on a new and elaborate theory of who did place the bomb in Centennial Park. There is an informed opinion that the backpack discovered a week earlier had in fact been a test run to check FBI procedures, and that the bomber—perhaps a member of a militia group—was quite experienced and had struck before. After a torrent of criticism in the press, Louis Freeh announced that the FBI had arrested Harold Nicholson, an alleged spy for Russia, and he used the opportunity to appear on the Today Show and Good Morning America, hyping his role in what was a minor arrest, according to one former FBI agent.
In Australia in November, Bill Clinton was asked about his campaign contributions from Indonesia. “One of the things I would urge you to do, remembering what happened to Mr. Jewell in Atlanta, remembering what has happened to so many of the accusations . . . that have been made against me that turned out to be totally baseless, I just think that we ought to . . . get the facts out.” When Jewell learned of his comment, he pulled up the transcript from the Internet and became angry: “The president is just using me, like everyone else.”
What rights does a private citizen have against the government? The legal precedent for suing the FBI, Bivens v. Six Unknown Agents, focuses on the behavior of individual agents. Wood believes that Jewell has a strong case against Johnson and Rosario. When Wood learned of Colonel Ressler, he hired him as a possible trial expert. In December, the FBI announced that it would pay up to $500,000 to anyone who could lead it to the Olympic Park bomber.
As Jewell and I drove back from Habersham County in November, he went over the early-morning hours of July 27: “I remember all of the people who were my responsibility. I remember the guys’ faces who were flying through the air. I remember people screaming. The sirens going off. I don’t think I will ever forget any of that. You just kind of wish sometimes. You think, Could I have done something else? . . . What if we only had five more minutes? Then maybe nobody would have been hurt. But you are what-if-ing. I have been over it a thousand times. I think we could not have done it any better. I think that is something I will always be wondering.”
He said he was not sure if he would ever get a job in law enforcement again, particularly since he had been held up as a cartoon figure. On the day of Jewell’s exoneration, Jay Leno apologized for having called him a Unadoofus, and said, “If Jewell wins his lawsuit with NBC, he will be my new boss.” He later said that this was “the greatest week in trailer-park history.” The Atlanta radio station 96 Rock had put billboards of Jewell all over town; “Freebird,” they said, a reference to the Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Jewell would later file suit against the station, but the billboard’s message was clear. Jewell knows that for many people in America there will perhaps always be a subtle doubt: What if, after all, Richard Jewell really did do it? What if the government let him go simply because it could not make its case? Then he becomes not the innocent Richard Jewell, but the Richard Jewell who may be innocent. “You don’t get back what you were originally,” he told me. “I don’t think I will ever get that back. The first three days, I was supposedly their hero—the person who saves lives. They don’t refer to me that way anymore. Now I am the Olympic Park bombing suspect. That’s the guy they thought did it.”
THE TARGET
APRIL 2013
“They cannot stop me. I will get my education, if it is home, school, or any place.”
One day in November 2007, on an editing console in the Dawn television news bureau in Peshawar, Pakistan, the bright brown eyes of a young girl popped from the computer screen. Just three hours to the northeast, in the Swat Valley, the mountain town of Mingora was under siege. Walking by the desk of the bureau chief, a reporter named Syed Irfan Ashraf stopped to take a look at the edit, which was being translated into English for that night’s news, and heard the girl’s voice. “I’m very frightened,” she said crisply. “Earlier, the situation was quite peaceful in Swat, but now it has worsened. Nowadays explosions are increasing. We can’t sleep. Our siblings are terrified, and we cannot come to school.” She spoke an Urdu of startling refinement for a rural child. “Who is that girl?” Ashraf asked the bureau chief. The answer came in Pashto, the local language: “Takra jenai,” which means “a shining young lady.” He added, “I think her name is Malala.”
The bureau chief had driven to Mingora to interview a local activist, the owner of the Khushal Girls High School & College. On the roads, Taliban soldiers in black turbans pulled drivers out of cars at checkpoints, searching for DVDs, alcohol, and anything else in violation of Shari’a, or strict Islamic law. In a lane near the market, a low wall protected the two-story private school. Inside, the bureau chief visited a fourth-grade class, where several girls shot up their hands when asked if they wanted to be interviewed. Seeing girls speak
out in public was very unusual, even in the Swat Valley, a cultivated, 3,500-square-mile Shangri-la with 1.5 million inhabitants. That night, the brown-eyed girl’s sound bite led the news.
Later that evening the bureau chief ran into the school’s owner, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who said, “The girl who spoke on your broadcast. That Malala is my daughter.” The highly educated Yousafzai clearly understood that in the rigid class system of Pakistan he was an invisible member of the rural underclass, unseen by the elite of Lahore and Karachi. For his family, a moment on national news was huge. Like his daughter, Ziauddin spoke excellent English. Ashraf, who had been a professor at the University of Peshawar, could not get the image of Malala’s piercing gaze out of his mind. “She was an ordinary girl, but on-camera extraordinary,” he said. His beat at Dawn television included covering the bombings that were devastating remote villages all through Swat, and he determined to meet Malala and her father the next time he was on assignment in Mingora.
* * *
Last autumn, I contacted Ashraf at a computer lab in Carbondale, Illinois, where he is studying for a doctorate in media studies at Southern Illinois University. On October 9, he had seen in a news flash the horrifying image of Malala Yousafzai lying bandaged on a stretcher, after having been shot by an unknown extremist on her school bus. For the next three days, Ashraf did not leave his cubicle as the world grieved for this teenager who had stood up to the Taliban. Then he wrote an anguished column in Dawn, Pakistan’s most widely read English-language newspaper, which seemed like a profound mea culpa. Ashraf was savage regarding his role in Malala’s tragedy. “Hype is created with the help of the media while the people wait for the dénouement,” he wrote. He decried “the media’s role in dragging bright young people into dirty wars with horrible consequences for the innocent.” On the telephone he told me, “I was in shock. I could not call anyone.” He described his mute agony watching the TV coverage. “It is criminal what I did,” he said in an apoplectic tone. “I lured in a child of eleven.”
Ashraf had watched the news as Malala was later rushed to a hospital in Birmingham, England, where army trauma victims are treated. She was mysteriously separated from her family for ten days. Many wondered why no relative had been allowed to travel with her. In Pakistan, thousands held candlelight vigils and carried posters that read: WE ARE ALL MALALA. Before she was flown to Birmingham, General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistan army chief and former head of the all-powerful Inter-services Intelligence agency (ISI), had gone to the hospital in Peshawar where she struggled for life on a ventilator. The question arose: Why would the most powerful man in Pakistan’s military rush to the provincial capital? Other girls had been assaulted, and the government had hardly reacted.
A country of conspiracy theorists, Pakistan has a long history of Kabuki theater masking the ISI’s and the army’s possible involvement in silencing anyone who attempts to expose the military’s links with extremists. At least fifty-one journalists have been killed there since 1992.
The attack on Malala exposed not only the dark side of an army unable to provide security but also the abysmal quality of education in Pakistan. Only 2.3 percent of its gross domestic product is allocated to education. Pakistan spends seven times more on its military. According to a recent UN study, 5.1 million children are out of school—the second-highest number in the world—and two-thirds of them are female.
“We have a national lie. Why do we have to tell the truth to the world?” says Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States. “The national lie is that the Swat Valley has been liberated from the bad Taliban. Young Malala and her father mess up that narrative.”
Suddenly a fifteen-year-old who traded copies of The Twilight Saga with her friends was being talked about as a possible future prime minister, if she could just recover from the bullet wound she had sustained while sitting on her school bus after taking an exam on the Holy Koran.
I told Ashraf I wanted to understand how a girl from a remote village had become a cosmic force for change as well as a focus for a number of complex agendas. He said, “We had to get the story out. No one was paying attention to what was happening in Mingora. We took a very brave eleven-year-old and created her to get the attention of the world. We made her a commodity. Then she and her father had to step into the roles we gave them.” At first I thought he must be exaggerating.
THE GIFTED CHILD
The capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, Peshawar in 2007 was a boomtown for local journalists. At the Pearl Continental Hotel, reporters jockeyed for the services of a freelance professor or writer who might want to earn $200 a day to guide them safely into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a poor, mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and long a refuge for the Taliban and other jihadists from around the world. Editors who had interviewed Osama bin Laden a decade earlier could command $500 for a three-hour session with a reporter from the West. In 2006, Dawn had begun hiring for the launch of its national TV channel in an effort to grab a market share of Pakistan’s recently deregulated airwaves. The explosion of cable networks set off a hiring frenzy for instant experts who could do a decent two-minute stand-up on the terrorist chiefs, the al-Qaeda-related Haqqani network, and the dozens of Taliban groups that passed between Afghanistan and Pakistan. To interview the Taliban commanders and tribal chiefs, foreign reporters darkened their hair, grew beards, and went with a Pashtun fixer who could use his contacts to ensure their safety.
You entered another world when you drove from Peshawar into the mountains. NO FOREIGNERS ALLOWED PAST THIS POINT, warned signs along the entrances to FATA. Pakistan’s history of intrigue, coups, and assassinations had long paralyzed its dealings with the frontier.
In the lower Swat Valley was the town of Mingora, a remote getaway for much of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Many of Pakistan’s most popular Pashtun singers, dancers, and musicians came from the area, and in summer, tourists from around the world would arrive in Mingora for its Sufi music and dance festivals. The area was close to a UNESCO site of ancient Gandhara Buddhist art and ruins. In recent years, however, the Taliban had changed all that; the Pearl Continental Hotel was now empty except for a few reporters and their fixers.
On a cement wall at a corner on Haji Baba Road, the red sign of the Khushal school carried the school crest—a blue-and-white shield with Muhammad’s words in Arabic: O my lord, equip me with more knowledge—as well as the Pashto phrase “learning is light.” Inside, beneath a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, some of the girls would remove their headscarves and throw their backpacks on benches. Zahra Jilani, a young American working at a local NGO, recalled walking into the school for the first time: “I heard all this laughter, and girls running in the halls.” She told Malala and her class on one visit, “Girls, you must speak up for what you believe.” Malala asked her, “What is it like in America? Tell us!” The question was hardly casual. Malala had spent years observing her teachers shrouding themselves in burkas to shop at the bazaar, as if they were living under the Taliban in the 1990s. In Islamabad many young women went to work without even scarves.
Down the alley from the school, Malala lived in a concrete house with a garden. Small rooms opened off a central hall, and Malala kept her royal-blue school uniform on a hook near her bed. At night, her father often read the poetry of Rumi to her and her two younger brothers. Yousafzai was himself a poet, and recitation had played a large part in his education. “I have the right of education. I have the right to play. I have the right to sing. I have the right to speak up,” Malala would later tell CNN. As a young teenager, she was reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and watching her favorite show, My Dream Boy Will Come to Marry Me, on Star Plus TV—until the Taliban cut all cable to the valley.
The Khushal school was an oasis of enlightenment, a tiny dot in a surrounding theater of war, where classes were taught in English. The city of 180,000 had two hundred schools for girls. The curriculum at the Khushal included E
nglish, Pashto, Urdu, physics, biology, math, and Islamic studies, imposed by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, the religious fanatic who seized power in a 1977 coup and later declared Islamic law.
Mingora has long been dominated by tribal culture dictated by the vast number of Pashtun inhabitants, whose religion and tradition braided together. For outsiders, one of the most difficult aspects of the culture to understand was Pashtunwali, a personal code that stamps every aspect of Pashtun life, including morality, hospitality, independence, and revenge. Pakistan’s Pashtuns were closely connected to Afghanistan’s, making the frontier a staging area for the military and the ISI well before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, in 1979. In recent times, the Pashtuns have been divided between extremists and prodemocracy nationalists who push for greater autonomy. It was commonly known that the army’s and ISI’s links to jihadist groups such as the Taliban ran far deeper than was ever acknowledged. There were frequent explosions in the area, and power could be cut for days. The Taliban became a well-established presence in Swat. A decade earlier it had taken over the Mingora airport.
* * *
Arriving in Mingora in 2007, Ashraf quickly grasped the danger in the surrounding hills. “The most important district official refused to come on-camera,” he said. “ ‘Appearing on TV is not Islamic,’ he told me. This was the government representative.” The musicians who had made the city a tourist draw were now putting ads in the newspapers pledging to lead pious lives. Swat was a microcosm of the shifting loyalties in a dusty war for control of Pakistan among the military, the Islamists, and the progressives.
A Private War Page 11