To Be a Friend Is Fatal (26 page)

“I'm a little confused here. I told you I was coming in as a courtesy call to explain what I was doing with my list. And the first thing you do is bring up this contract?”

He recomposed and locked eyes with me.

“I'm telling you this as a friend. We'd hate to see your objectives torpedoed. What I thought would make sense is that you submit your future publications to us, just so we can have a look at it and maybe even help, before you actually publish them.”

I put my hands on my knees. “That's not going to happen.”

He tried to change the tone of the conversation and asked, “Hey, can I see the list? Fill me in on what's going on.”

I stared over his shoulder at a framed picture of the entire USAID Iraq staff in 2005, in the piazza of the compound. I had taken the picture during my first week in Baghdad. I pointed to it and said, perhaps melodramatically, “The list is right there, in that picture. I'm not showing it to anyone other than the principal actors in the resettlement bureaucracy.”

He looked over his shoulder at the picture. Half Iraqis, half Americans. There was Yaghdan, his modest smile concealed partly by a bushy mustache. Tona and Amina were off to his right. Of the Iraqis pictured, only a few remained with USAID.

“I'm not going to submit anything to you guys. If that's a problem, then let's see how it plays out. Subtract my medical bills, and I have about a thousand bucks left, and every other person in my family is a lawyer.”

He stared back at me, masking any reaction. I was getting too upset. I thought back to a trick I'd used during insufferable meetings at the palace in the Green Zone and imagined that I was arguing with a parrot perched atop a chair. I grinned and stood up. “I'm sorry we had this meeting. I've got somewhere else to be now.”

I shook his hand and motored out of the bureau, past my magazine
pieces, past stacks of briefing books containing archives of my
Iraq Daily Update
s, past row after row of bureaucrats struggling to spit-shine USAID's projects for an uninterested media and a yawning public.

The awareness of just how little I had to lose had fully dawned on me only when I had mentioned my bank account balance. It was strangely empowering. After all, what was the worst that could happen? That I fail again? That I move out of the basement and back home to West Chicago? It wouldn't be great, but it still seemed trivial compared to what was filling my in-box each day.

I was waiting at the bank of elevators outside the Legislative and Public Affairs Bureau when the Bush appointee caught up with me.

“Let's be in touch, okay?” he said in a hushed tone as he handed me his USAID business card. I didn't understand why, since I already had his contact information.

“And look, if she gets in touch with you, make sure she gets on your list, okay?”

I glanced down at the card and saw the handwritten name of an Iraqi woman.

“Don't worry, it's not like I slept with her or anything. But try to get her help if she gets in touch with you.”

That evening, a friend in USAID forwarded me a press release in which Condoleezza Rice announced the creation of the Iraq Refugee and Internally Displaced Persons Task Force. Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky would lead the task force, “building on support already provided, to coordinate refugee and IDP assistance to the region and refugee resettlement. The task force will also draw on the Department of State's multidisciplinary expertise to devise strategies for Iraqis at risk because of their work with the US government.”

I grasped for meaning in the sentences, but they evaded my best efforts as they fishtailed along: “The task force will focus the State Department's coordination with other USG agencies, the UN, and other stakeholders. The work of the task force will also support the department's participation in existing interagency processes run by the National Security Council.”

“Will focus . . . coordination . . . Will also support . . . participation.” Whoever drafted it had a mastery of the numbing potential of USGspeak.

Despite the vagueness, the task force was launched with one hard promise: in fiscal year 2007, already four months under way by that point, the United States government would admit seven thousand Iraqi refugees.

I ran the math in my head. In the first four months of the fiscal year, eight, nine, seventeen, and fifteen visas, respectively, had been granted to refugees from Iraq, for a total of forty-nine. I needed a calculator to get at the nut of the promise: for the next eight months, the State Department would have to issue an average of 870 visas each month—a 7,000 percent increase. This suggested an efficiency I had long since come to doubt.

Slouched in the back row of the Chinatown bus back to Boston, I tried to make sense of a stew of conflicting emotions. I was exhilarated by the brush with my old life—the life that I thought had ended when I fell out the window. I wasn't navigating according to any master plan but by echolocation: after shouting about a problem, Iraqis shouted back, and now the government was talking.

But the promises were meaningless USGspeak. I had hoped to dump off the list at the State Department and move on, but I now worried that if I didn't keep the pressure on them, it'd be forgotten, misplaced, used for scrap paper.

I thought about who might be able to help me. The Americans with whom I'd worked in Iraq cheered me on privately, but nobody else stepped forward in any public way because they were still working for the government. One State Department foreign service officer had created a separate Gmail account for the sole purpose of referring the name of an Iraqi colleague to my list. “I am weeping into my keyboard as I write this, with the hope that you can help him,” she wrote. When I wrote her back and asked why she felt the need to create a secret account, her response came in one line: “I can't be seen writing you.”

But there was one person with whom I was emailing almost hourly,
who seemed to be my only ally in turning the screws on the US government. I had devoured George Packer's reporting for the
New Yorker
while in Iraq, reading his book
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
over two sleepless nights on a sagging cot at the CMOC in Fallujah. I'd first emailed him years earlier, in 2004, seeking his advice on how to find a job in the reconstruction efforts, but we started talking regularly after he wrote an op-ed in the
New Republic
about the need to protect US-affiliated Iraqis. We traded each rumor or theory we uncovered about the Bush administration's policy, and when he went to Iraq and Syria to investigate the crisis for the magazine, I introduced him to Yaghdan, Ziad, and several others. If Packer wrote about the list, there was no way the State Department could ignore it.

A
fter a nightmarish journey as human cargo, shuttling through Dubai to India, Syria, and then to Egypt, Ziad's smugglers told him they would attempt the dangerous final trek to Sweden. Stockholm, which had no part in the war, had already admitted tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees at a time when no coalition members were opening their doors. Worried about the safety and legality of the final leg into Europe, I begged him not to continue, which might have played a role in his decision to run from his smugglers once he got to Cairo. Soon thereafter, an officer in the
mukhabarat
, the dreaded Egyptian secret police, who was involved in the smuggling network picked him up and took him to a prison beneath the Cairo airport. There he was tortured, mainly by electrical shock. For weeks, he resisted the cockroaches in his cell by wadding up bits of paper and jamming them into his ears and nostrils so that they wouldn't lay any eggs there.

Yaghdan and Haifa were now in Syria, having run out of time on their visitor's visas in Dubai. They had planned to rent a cheap apartment in the Sayyida Zainab neighborhood of Damascus, where many other Iraqis fleeing the civil war had holed up, but Yaghdan was convinced that he'd been spotted by a member of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which openly maintained an office in the city. They boarded a northern-bound bus to Homs and waited. Either their money would run out or they would get a visa.

It had been a month since I had delivered my list to the State Department, and, apart from a bland email in which it said it would “prioritize” the Iraqis on my list “as appropriate,” there was no tangible progress. New names continued to come in each day, and although I'd developed a system of emailing encrypted files to the Refugee Bureau, it was beginning to feel like loading up a car that was missing an engine.

Any illusions I had maintained about the list being a short-term project shattered upon the publication of “Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted America the Most.” In March 2007, on the fourth anniversary of the war, George Packer's sixteen-thousand-word exposé erupted with a suffusing outrage in the
New Yorker
. Yaghdan's plight was spotlighted in the pages of one of the most influential magazines in the world. Packer wrote about my accident, the family history with Dennis Hastert, and about my trip to DC with the list.

A new torrent of emails ensued, from foreign service officers, contractors, soldiers, and marines who had read the piece and wanted to refer the names of their Iraqi employees. Some wrote from a place of guilt: “I wish I had thought of doing more to protect him . . . has he written to you? Is he already on your list, and if not, can you find him?” Another wrote perfunctorily: “Please add the following name to your list: Ahmed al-Rikabi.”

The flimsy dam that I had constructed to manage the river of emails from refugees was buckling under the new pressure. With each click to refresh my in-box, I found new names and new requests.

A second round of emails came from other journalists suddenly turning their attention to the issue. I assumed that they wouldn't want to talk with me, since Packer had already written about the list, but I soon realized that they had been assigned by their editors to produce their own reports, no matter how derivative. His reporting had bulldozed a path through which the rest of the media now strolled.

It was a strange business. The more that journalists wrote about the list, the more requests I got from other journalists. I found myself fielding one or two calls a day, walking each journalist through the crisis, teaching what I'd learned about the refugee admissions process,
and steering him or her to annoyed public affairs officers at the State Department's Refugee Bureau. Although a few had bothered to do some background research before calling, most would kick off the call with, “Okay, I'm recording. Why don't you just start from the top?” as though I were peddling a movie script.

Someone from a reputable paper would call and say, “I'm looking for a woman, preferably in Syria, who worked for the Americans and was attacked.” Or, “Is there anyone on the list who is in Egypt, Christian, and had family members killed?” Or, “Yeah, hi, I need someone in Iraq or Jordan who's been tortured and is in hiding.” Or, “Do you have any Iraqis who worked for the Brits who fled to Lebanon?” Like ordering a pizza.

If the journalists needed me for a quote, the Iraqis on the list needed them for much more. Beyond the obvious benefits of greater coverage of the crisis, whenever a journalist wrote about someone on the list whose case had been frozen for months or years, the government magically unfroze that case. I'd tried to capture the State Department's attention by delivering my list quietly in February, but it wasn't until articles started appearing in major papers that Iraqis began to receive interviews at our embassies in the region. I kept a revolving short list of Iraqis willing to talk with the media, and notified the Refugee Bureau whenever someone would be the subject of an upcoming profile.

“Americans aren't going to give one stinking damn about Iraqi refugees on their own!” An audio technician from
ABC World News
with thick fingers was clipping a microphone to my shirt and snaking the wire under my shirt and down my chest. With a furrowed brow, I warded off someone approaching me with a powder kit in hand. Another crew member adjusted an off-camera lamp. The TV producer continued: “That's why we need you for the piece. The fact that you're a young white guy from the Midwest makes it much easier for them to plug in to this whole thing!” I shifted in my seat as the lamps turned on and the camera started filming.

And so I sat in front of cameras in air-conditioned studios, talking about people that had been raped or tortured by power drill because
they worked for the United States. I was glad that the American public might finally learn about the largest refugee crisis in the world, a direct result of our botched occupation. But I was growing uneasy with the tidiness of the stories: several articles referred to me as the Schindler of the Iraqis.

Americans don't like to be presented with intractable problems or morally confounding situations. We like to think of our bombs falling on only the right homes, our bullets bending around good guys in search of bad flesh, our torturers as rare bad apples. And so overzealous members of the media were already anointing me as a hero when I hadn't helped a single person to safety. All I had done was double-click on Microsoft Excel and make a list. I didn't want Americans to hear about millions of refugees and think that everything was fine because of my meager effort.

Despite my misgivings, I was mindful that media interest was fleeting. I figured the State Department was hoping to weather a little negative publicity over the refugee crisis with the hope for a speedy return of the clear skies of American apathy. It could wheel out a new interagency group and promise to “ramp up,” and enough people would be satisfied. I treated each interview as though it would be my last, using the media to advance as many cases on the list as possible before it all evaporated.