A Rope and a Prayer (19 page)

“My friend!” I shout, as my colleague describes confronting the commanding American general in Afghanistan. “My friend!”

A still photo of two men arrested with Dilawar in his taxi that day flashes across the screen.

“I found those two men in Khost,” I say, explaining that I helped write a follow-up story. “I interviewed them and took that picture.”

The next segment describes how another colleague obtained a 2,000-page American military report that confirmed Dilawar was innocent and had been beaten to death. A final segment recounts how the same American military police unit was transferred to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison where similar abuses occurred. Photographs then flash across the screen of a female American soldier, Lynndie England, smiling as a naked Iraqi prisoner masturbates in front of her. Other images show naked Iraqis stacked in pyramids and England’s boyfriend, Specialist Charles Graner, giving a “thumbs up” over the body of a dead Iraqi prisoner.

Badruddin and the guards grow visibly angry. The images reinforce their view of Americans as malevolent hypocrites who preach human rights but torture privately. I try in vain to explain that American journalists, in fact, exposed the Abu Ghraib abuses. My explanations do not matter. My captors pick the information that fits their worldview and ignore the rest. I realize that Badruddin does not fit the Western caricature of a Taliban fighter—a cave dweller who rejects modern technology. Instead, he and other young Taliban embrace technology and use it to strengthen and spread their worldview. Globalization impacts their lives and exposes them to vast amounts of new information, but does not moderate them.

At the end of the film, autopsy photos of dead prisoners appear. Each prisoner is naked. I am sure the film’s director included the images to force American viewers to face the reality of the abuses. To an Afghan audience the images further insult the dead. For Afghans, public nudity is deeply humiliating.

After the film ends, the guards complain that none of the American prison guards were seriously punished for the abuses. I have no answer for them.

 

 

We reach mid-December and I find myself hanging on to each word uttered by Badruddin. We have not heard from Atiqullah for weeks. Badruddin is increasingly unpredictable. During one visit, he declares the Taliban will not kill me.

“You are the golden hen,” he says, expecting me to lay a golden egg.

I ask him to promise not to kill Tahir and Asad. Speaking directly to me in broken English, he says the Taliban have decided to kill Asad if their demands are not met in a week. Then he leaves the house. I panic. Our worst case scenario is unfolding.

When we tell Asad about the deadline, he is fatalistic. Escape from our current house—with its twenty-foot walls—is impossible.

“The Afghan always gets fucked,” Asad says.

Over the next two days, I frantically try to think of ways to save our young driver. Since we were abducted, I have spent hours talking politics, religion, and survival with Tahir, but I can barely communicate with Asad. I speak little Pashto, he speaks little English. I try to help him with chores, searching the rice for stones each day before it is cooked. When an English-language newspaper arrives, I show him photos and try to explain what they are about. He laughs, but I feel like a monster. Asad is an impoverished, hardworking father of two—and I am going to get him killed.

On the third day after Badruddin’s visit, I tell Mansoor that I am willing to make a video—or do anything they want—to save Asad. Mansoor says he will check with Badruddin. The following day, Mansoor announces that it has all been a misunderstanding. There is no deadline to kill Asad. I feel enormous relief but do not know what to believe. The lies from our captors are constant and, it seems, intentional. While researching my book, I had heard a Pashto saying that described lying as a tactic of war.

“Speak good words to an enemy very softly,” the proverb says, “then gradually destroy him root and branch.”

Several days later, Badruddin arrives to make the video. He tells Asad that he had recently watched the video of the beheading of Sayed Agha, the Afghan driver kidnapped with the Italian journalist in 2007.

“I’ve decided that I don’t want to do that to you,” Badruddin says with a smile.

He promises us that the video will go only to our families, but what he instructs us to say makes me think it will be released publicly. As we sit in the room where we normally sleep, Mansoor and Qari put scarves over their faces and point assault rifles at our heads. Badruddin aims a handheld camera at me. Following Badruddin’s orders, I call for President Bush and President-Elect Obama to meet the Taliban’s demands.

“If you don’t meet their demands,” I say, “they will kill all of us.”

Tahir and Asad then make similar statements in Pashto. Badruddin departs, and I tell myself that our families will at least know we are alive.

 

 

Several days before Christmas, Atiqullah and Akhundzada appear. Atiqullah has spectacular news.

“We are here to free you,” he declares, wearing no scarf over his face for the first time. “We have come here to release you.”

Atiqullah is bald and his face is pudgy. He is not the dashing Afghan warrior that Americans idealized during the anti-Soviet jihad. Delivering the news of our release, though, his round face looks sincere to me. I am euphoric. My confidence in Atiqullah is not misplaced. He is a moderate and reasonable Taliban leader who will release us.

Two of Atiqullah’s younger brothers accompany him as well. They also make him seem more moderate. One is a respectful young man in his late twenties named Timor Shah. The other is in his early twenties and says he is a fan of American wrestling. He lifts weights and says his favorite wrestler is John Cena.

After dinner, my conversation with Atiqullah turns menacing. Before we are released, he says, we must answer his questions.

“We’ve investigated you,” he declares. “We know every interview you did. We’ve analyzed every stamp in your passport.”

I tell him I have nothing to hide and to ask any questions he wants. Atiqullah announces that on the morning we were kidnapped the American military had mounted an operation to arrest Abu Tayyeb, the Taliban commander who had invited us to the interview. Stunned, I tell Atiqullah I know nothing about a military operation.

He accuses me of sending text messages from my cell phone to Saudi Arabia before the interview, to tip off the American military about Abu Tayyeb’s location. I tell him I have no idea what he is talking about.

Finally, he declares that I am a spy, along with other employees of
The New York Times
in Afghanistan. His men have prepared a suicide attack on the paper’s Kabul bureau, he says, which he could set off with a single phone call. His men nearly kidnapped another one of our reporters, but they left an interview just before the Taliban arrived, he says. I know he is probably lying on both counts, but I fear he is telling the truth.

Finally, Atiqullah begins asking me a series of questions about the time I lived in New Delhi and served as the newspaper’s South Asia bureau co-chief. He demands to know exactly how many times I met the American ambassador there. I answer truthfully, saying that I spent the vast majority of my time in Afghanistan and Pakistan and met the American ambassador in New Delhi once at a group interview and once at a holiday dinner. Atiqullah scoffs at my reply.

Our imprisonment, I think, has reached a low point. Our captor believes I am a spy and my colleagues in Kabul are now in danger as well. Atiqullah’s talk earlier in the day of our imminent release seems farcical. The following morning, Atiqullah insists that there is, in fact, a deal. At one point, he says we will be exchanged within “days.” He toys with me, asking which flights I will take back to the United States and how many television cameras will be at the airport. He asks me what I will say to Kristen when I see her.

By this point, I have begun to doubt everything he says. Then I learn that he has lied to us from the beginning.

In separate conversations when our guards leave the room, Tahir and Asad each whisper to me that Atiqullah is, in fact, Abu Tayyeb. They have known since the day we were kidnapped, they say, but dared not tell me. They ask me to stay silent as well. Abu Tayyeb has vowed to behead them if they reveal his identity.

Abu Tayyeb invited us to an interview, betrayed us, and then pretended he was a commander named Atiqullah.

I am despondent and left with only one certainty: We have no savior among the Taliban.

A
round noon I receive a call at my office at
Cosmopolitan
from Jim, the Joint Terrorism Task Force FBI agent assigned to our case. The kidnappers have made a video of David. Jim cannot say how the FBI obtained the video, but offers to bring it to me for a private screening. The FBI is honoring our family’s request to see the footage first, before the newspaper and security team, in a discreet setting. Everyone involved in the case has been jockeying for my trust of late. This is clearly a gesture on their part. Jim and his fellow agents tell me to look for the blue car parked outside Starbucks on West 57th Street, not far from my office in Midtown Manhattan. I find this slightly amusing as I recall a similar scene from a
Sopranos
episode.

I am so thankful my office has a door. This is not typical at women’s magazines. A glass wall separates me from the rest of the photo department—very convenient when planning a clandestine meeting with federal agents. From the exterior cubicles, I can be seen but not heard. This is a great advantage in terms of keeping my situation secret, although the isolation the secrecy fosters leaves me feeling like a lone fish in an aquarium at times.

I’m only a month into my new job, but I regularly fail to arrive at the office before 10 A.M., delayed by phone calls and updates, and then I usually need to leave well before 7 P.M. My associates must be thinking the new girl is a real prima donna. While I have informed the top editors at the magazine of my predicament, the rest of the staff is unaware of my unusual situation. As a newlywed, I am often asked about my husband: Do I have a photo from the wedding I can show? When will I be bringing him to the office for a visit? Has he returned from his reporting trip? I find new and inventive ways to respond to or, in effect, not answer these questions.

I meet Jim, Cathy, and another agent for a private screening in their four-door sedan. This gives new meaning to the phrase “drive-in movie,” I think. Jim produces a silver laptop. I assume the video has been intercepted somehow, but do not know from where. The video is poor quality black-and-white footage. David sits between two men Jim tells me are Tahir and Asad. Immediately I notice David is wearing his glasses. This is a huge relief. I was worried they had been confiscated. He is nearly blind without them, and I have spent nights tossing and turning over this fact.

Two Taliban gunmen frame the image, each with a Kalashnikov. One of them has a scarf over his face. The other is cropped out from the neck upward.

David speaks first.

“I am David Rohde, a journalist for
The New York Times
,” he says. “I was detained on November 10 and have been held captive for thirty-four days. It’s very cold, very difficult. They are moving us around the mountains of Afghanistan and we are not allowed to make calls.”

“I ask my office, President Bush, and President-Elect Barack Obama to meet their demands,” he says. “If you do not meet their demands, they will kill all three of us. Please meet their demands. Please meet their demands. Please meet their demands.”

Tahir and Asad repeat similar speeches in Pashto and plead to Afghan president Hamid Karzai in addition to the American government. All three look remarkably calm, which surprises us. The guns remain pointed at David throughout.

It’s the first time I have seen my husband in a month and a half. He seems like a foreign object to me. His expression is a little vacant and glassy-eyed. He is well groomed, cleaner than I expected. He wears a salwar kameez, the baggy pants and shirt that are the local dress. A woolen blanket covers his shoulders. I try to discern information, signals from his eye movements. His hands, concealed by the blanket, are behind his back. I have no idea if they are bound or free. I am struck by the fact that his beard is neat. I was expecting unkempt hair akin to John Walker Lindh, the American who was captured fighting for the Taliban in 2001.

The world within the video feels so removed from my own—distant, foreign, staged. It is not every day one sees one’s husband videotaped by terrorists. I find it difficult to absorb this fact. I am at once enraged and relieved. It incenses me to see David used as a mouthpiece. Yet it is comforting to see that he has not been physically mishandled. And, odd as it seems, I am simply relieved to have contact with him. No one has heard a word from him or his captors in over a month. I interpret any form of communication, after this long a silence, as a sign of hope.

And yet there are no specific demands being made in the video. I worry that the Taliban are directing their vague message to the United States government. In addition to being a disturbing situation, it is also bad timing. We are between administrations—in political limbo. The old guard is on its way out; the new is not yet able to step up to the plate.

I watch the video over and over. I can’t stop looking at it. One of the drawbacks to clandestine meetings in cars on 57th Street in the middle of Manhattan is traffic. Someone bumps the fender. A traffic cop arrives and threatens to issue a ticket. Jim has to produce his credentials—apparently even the FBI is not exempt from traffic laws. The irony and humor of the situation is not lost on Jim. Months later, when we review the list of communications received from David’s captors, he will refer to this one as “the car bump video.”