Licensed to Kill (31 page)

Artis continues, “Colonel Bob Morris says he received a phone call from somebody at the embassy, and as an active-duty colonel and someone that wants to retire a pay grade higher than private, he was asked to verify that they are U.S. citizens. That's it. He probably didn't know what kinda tales Idema was spinning at the other end. He was asked to confirm that they were U.S. citizens and they got the letter. How they got a letter saying Scurka, Idema, and Greg Long were DoD contractors, I will never know.”

Colonel Bob Morris does his humanitarian work on the side of his regular full-time as active military. It is not difficult to imagine Idema giving embassy officials a little wink and nod as he asks them to get him out of this detention problem by verifying his citizenship through Colonel Bob Morris at SOCOM. Ordinary verifications usually go through the State Department. An e-mail from the U.S. embassy confirmed that a low-level military attaché thought he was doing Bob Morris a favor.

“My guess is that Idema has a fake ID from the U.S. military saying that he is a major. That got him in-country. Then one lie became another once he had that embassy letter.”

Even later, after Artis had recognized Idema's aversion to truth and tried to alert others, he felt many of his warnings went unheeded. Artis blames that initial letter with giving Idema all the “top cover” he needed to pass himself off as an undercover contractor. “I tried to warn people about him. I warned the Afghans about him, but now I know why they didn't do anything…. That letter gave him the ability to trump my warnings. Every time I said he did this or that to the Afghans, they ignored me.”

Artis remembers certain early warning bells. “Idema had sent e-mails from Tashkent telling me he was bringing an interpreter—a female who spoke Russian. I sent back: ‘Stop! DO NOT bring a Russian-speaking woman into an Afghan camp.' Turns out Idema had picked her up that night and she was his whore. And he invited her to Afghanistan.

“He also didn't have a cameraman, which is another odd thing for a film crew to show up with plenty of gear but no cameraman. It was obvious to me that Scurka couldn't work a camera, and Idema couldn't, either. They had those new cameras that aren't Beta cameras, but give a professional quality image. At that point, I hadn't met them and I had my doubts, but I figured I have dealt with nuts on location. That's why they make gaffer tape.” He laughs.

“Idema and Scurka hire a guy named Neil Barrett as a cameraman—a long-haired good guy, but Idema made him cut his hair off to get the job. Idema wanted him to look more military.”

Artis had begun to feel slightly uneasy because of some of his interactions with Idema, but it wasn't until after they had met in person, on Idema's first night in Afghanistan, that Artis's antenna really went up. They had all been invited to share dinner with some of the high-ranking local commanders at Khowjaboddin, the Northern Alliance forward operating base. As Artis recalls, “They pass out the meal. Scurka reaches in with a piece of naan bread like you're supposed to, and Idema yells, ‘Don't touch that fucking food! It's unclean. Don't touch the food!' He throws an MRE at Barrett and at Scurka. ‘You will eat MREs, and do not drink their tea.'

“That was just the first night. That was when I kinda felt I'd fucked up. I realized that Idema, not Scurka, was the leader of this group.” Agitated and suspicious, Artis decided to put down some ground rules for the filming of their documentary. “I tell him, ‘Look, you follow me and shoot it. You don't get a retake. He called me a motherfucker. ‘You like to give orders,' I said, ‘you get the fuck out of here right now.'

“The next morning I went to see Jim Maceda of NBC to get my morning coffee and daily update…. Jim asks me, ‘Who is your new friend?' I said, ‘My new friend is Keith Idema.' Idema says, ‘My name is Jack. And don't tell anyone who I am with.' By then, [Idema] was wearing his dark vest and the shades.”

Artis had been under the initial impression that he would be working with Scurka and that Idema would just be there for security. He had not even been informed that the documentary would also feature another NGO. “[Idema] brings out this EKG worth about six to ten thousand. That's when this guy Greg Long, who said he was with another NGO named Partners International said, ‘Let's go up and deliver the EKG.' Then Idema pushed Greg Long aside for the photo op. I was confused and pissed.”

As the tension continued to build, Idema's lust for the media spotlight soon proved reason enough for Artis to blow up at him. “Idema started doing interviews about the desiccant packages poisoning the Afghans. They'd put these small desiccant packages in with the yellow plastic humanitarian meals, and the Afghans were supposedly eating them and getting sick. Somehow now Idema is a medical and military expert on something other people had brought to the military and media's attention.

“I took Idema aside—and Neil Barrett filmed this—I put my bony finger in his face and said, ‘I don't know what your agenda is, but I don't want you at any of our sites. You're out of my fucking life.' To make it perfectly clear, I told Idema, ‘Cease and fucking desist,' and then Gary Scurka tries to defend him. I tell him, ‘If Idema is needed to make a documentary, then you can take all the tape you shot so far and shove it up your ass.' Scurka was allowed to stay when we did our distribution because he was still following us and doing a piece about us.” Artis thought he had solved his problem, since from that point forward Idema was not allowed anywhere near him while they were shooting, but that was before the artillery attack incident.

On November 11, Veterans Day, after a long day of distributing humanitarian supplies, Artis was heading back to base camp after dark amid a backdrop of not-so-distant artillery fire when he heard an urgent voice crackling over his cheap walkie-talkie: “Ed Artis. Are you there? An American has been wounded. They want you down at the helipad.”

Artis hustled down to the site, where he first saw freelance journalist Kevin Sites, shooting film, and Idema, “walking around like a caged animal and talking to someone on the sat phone saying he needs a Blackhawk.”

Idema ignored Artis the first time the humanitarian asked who was wounded. “And I ask him again, ‘Who is wounded?' Idema says, ‘Scurka.' They're sitting up in the back of the king cab pickup truck and Scurka is talking to his wife on another sat phone.”

Artis went up to examine a wound that had torn through the flesh of Scurka's knee, abdomen, groin, and leg. Scurka and the other journalists had been standing out in the open when a brief barrage of Taliban artillery had erupted. They had tried to take cover behind a Northern Alliance tank, unaware that the tank was the actual target of the attack. The shrapnel of an exploding artillery shell had hit Scurka.

“The situation is that there is a lieutenant colonel Special Forces medic there. I am a combat medic. Greg Long takes a look at the wound. I ask him is it serious enough to order a evac? The answer is no.”

Trying to put the brakes on Idema's overreaction, Artis went back to where he was still pacing around yelling into the sat phone about needing a Blackhawk.

“I ask him who he is talking to. Idema tells the guy on the phone that he's talking to some aid worker here. I grab the phone out of his hands and ask, ‘Who am I talking to?' It's a major at the embassy in Tashkent. I tell him ‘Major, I was a combat medic in Vietnam. I have not seen anyone wounded bad enough here to send in a helicopter. If you want to check out who I am…' I give him a number of a congressional aide at Dana Rohrabacher's office. I tell him that there is no need to risk lives or to cause an international incident. Then I take the antenna off Idema's phone, hand it back to him, and let him have it.”

Artis says he yelled at Idema, “‘If you fuck with me again, I will have you arrested or shot. We are going to take Gary up to the hospital.' And Idema just deflates. Idema is panic-stricken. I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here. We'll do the rest of the filming that you can see in the documentary.'”

Journalist Kevin Sites also remembers the event as being one in which Artis's action was appropriate, and Idema was grandstanding for effect. Three men on the scene, including Artis, had advanced medical training; Idema did not. However, Scurka later credited Idema with finding an exit wound on the ride to the hospital that had escaped the first treatment.

Artis and others are of the opinion that Idema knew perfectly well the value of the filmed scene. The “daring rescue” would be a part of his documentary, portraying him as the hero who saved the day. Artis had his suspicions confirmed when he finally read the script outline for Idema and Scurka's documentary proposal.

“Right up to the day before we got on the helicopter to leave, I still believed the film piece was on us. They never did give me the script. The last day before I left, I went through Scurka's backpack. I am up early. Idema and Scurka are out on the tennis court interviewing each other. There was a folder in there that they were always looking at while I was busy doing good-guy shit. It's a letter with a big gold seal from National Geographic signed by Tim Kelley saying, ‘To whom it may concern, Gary Scurka is filming a documentary on a UN-sponsored mission to Afghanistan and is working with Keith Idema. Mr. Idema has enough money to support his mission…' or words to that effect. Then there is a five-page script. A shot list of them coming in, matching up with us, and the NGO fucks up, and then Keith Idema steps in and saves the day. We were set up.

“Later on, Gary calls me and he says he wants me to sign a release. I tell him, ‘You're not allowed to use my image, my voice, until I see the script. If there is one image or one mention even in the credits of Idema, you cannot use my name.' That's why you don't see him in that doco.” National Geographic had been duped, having unwittingly paid for and supported “Jack's” entry into the War on Terror.

“Jack” had been once again cut out of his reality show, and far from starring in his epic of humanitarian relief and derring-do on the battlefield, he found himself unemployed in South Asia. Widely renowned for his resourceful, if morally compromised, opportunism, Idema kept himself busy after parting ways with Artis, selling himself as an “expert” to members of the media and granting numerous interviews. Journalists also recall Idema selling premium-priced transit into Afghanistan on one of Northern Alliance commander Massoud Khalili's battered Mi-17 helicopters.

Most of the media privately ridiculed Idema as a wannabe hero and strange war tourist. According to Artis, the journalists in Khowjaboddin referred to the tiny, bug-eyed, gun-toting aid worker-slash-mercenary-slash-terrorism-expert-slash-huckster as “Mr. Potato Head” for the number of slightly different disguises he could adopt. Although Idema seemed to be friendly with the leadership of the Northern Alliance, nobody could quite figure out who Jack was. Artis had at least figured out who Idema wasn't, and started contacting Northern Alliance and American officials to warn them of Idema's duplicity.

In mid-November, Haroon Amin, the spokesman for the Northern Alliance, wrote a letter to Artis stating that Idema wasn't working for them. A couple of weeks later, Idema told a reporter from the
Fayetteville Observer
via a sat phone that he was “working with the Northern Alliance.” If Idema had managed to convince the Northern Alliance he was a covert operator, they would have denied that he was working for them, or Idema could have just directly approached the local commander, Massoud Khalili, to set up the lucrative journalist transport endeavor without the knowledge of the higher-ups. The one thing that can be deduced with certainty is that a real security contractor in South Asia at that time would have had a more pressing assignment that didn't involve profiteering off journalists, and a covert operator would not have been so actively seeking the media spotlight.

While Jack hustled to make a living in the war, Artis contacted Billy Waugh to do a little more research into Idema's claims. As Billy recalled, “Ed Artis wrote me and said Jack Idema has put the word out that he is working for the CIA. Ed asked me, ‘Is that true?' I didn't know who Jack Idema was…. I told him he wasn't working with us because I knew everybody on the ground. We only had about eighty guys involved in our operations. Idema wasn't one of them.”

As the war progressed, Jack moved south to Jalalabad, where he continued his war profiteering by charging journalists money to attend press conferences and offering $800 battlefield tours to people like Jon Lee Anderson of
The New Yorker.
Well-funded reporters, desperate and under pressure from editor desks back home for exclusive stories about the war, became Jack's greatest benefactors in Afghanistan. A media circus of epic proportions descended on the tattered Spin Ghar Hotel in Jalalabad during the battle of Tora Bora. Since Idema could often be seen storming in and out of hotels followed by his small group of armed Tajiks, journalists assumed that Jack and his band of mercenaries were busy hunting bin Laden. At that time, Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and the CIA were actually doing just that, working a badly disguised covert operation, flitting in and out of hotels, military bases, and commanders' camps in dusty SUVs. All had orders to stay away from the media and, if needed, to use their Afghan proxies to threaten, rough up, or arrest journalists who got too close. By contrast, Idema would put on his prescription sunglasses, throw a checked Afghan
desmal
scarf around his neck, wear U.S.-looking but Afghan-made tan combat attire, and with a pistol strapped to his thigh and an AK in his hands, hold court with hundreds of newly arrived and gullible journalists. He perfected the knowing but enigmatic nod of the head when responding to difficult questions and would baffle them with bullshit use of SF terminology and angry outbursts against unpatriotic sentiments. Idema became a seasoned purveyor of exciting tales. He had become the media's favorite oracle, with few insiders willing to call him out. Journalists who did their homework quickly figured out that Jack's tales didn't always square with reality, but others were taken in by his charm and swagger, assiduously recording his every word.