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The
strange story of Tora Bora Jack A man is arrested in Afghanistan with eight prisoners in his house, some hanging from the ceiling. He says he is a US agent: America brands him an impostor. Christina Lamb unravels the bizarre background of the ‘torturer’ of Kabul The reinforced door with a large combination dial and armed guard looks like the entrance to a bank vault in a movie. Instead, it opens into a bar with mirrored ceilings and pink marble walls. From one wall, a bronze sculpture of the four horsemen of the apocalypse protrudes alarmingly. Men with cropped hair and beards, black bulletproof vests, thickly muscled forearms and Glock pistols strapped to their thighs sit around, alternating vodka shots with “green grenades”, the local term for cans of Heineken. Female company is scarce but is sometimes provided by slinky-skirted waitresses from the nearby Thai restaurant. The bar at Kabul’s Mustafa hotel has become the gathering place for the flotsam of war. Bounty hunters, gem dealers and renegade militiamen mingle with aid workers, private security guards, war correspondents and special forces operators. Drink flows heavily and tempers rise. It is not uncommon to see someone slam a pistol onto the table. Often holding court in the bar until recently was a thick-shouldered 48-year old from Poughkeepsie, New York, with a tanned face, black beard and dark shades. Jonathan Keith Idema was known to everyone in Kabul as simply Jack. A former Green Beret, Idema was a larger-than-life figure -at least in his own opinion. He claimed to have trained with the SAS in Herefordshire. He was both a co-writer and the hero of Task Force Dagger, an American bestseller about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Pictured
on the cover striding through the Afghan desert with his Kalashnikov
slung across his bare chest, he claims in the book to have been
involved in a number of special forces operations. Afterwards Idema began calling himself Tora Bora Jack. Dressed in a uniform with the stars and stripes on the sleeves, he owned a selection of weapons that he let excitable journalists pose with. He became such a well-known local figure that Kabul’s first cocktail bar named a cocktail after him: $10 buys a Jack’s Tora Bora Sunset, made of vodka and pomegranate juice. Tora Bora Jack has now achieved fame beyond his dreams; but it comes at the cost of notoriety and a possibly crushing jail sentence. On Thursday he will make his second appearance in a Kabul court since Afghan police raided his house last month and found eight Afghan captives, whom he had allegedly been torturing. Some were said to be hanging upside down from the ceiling. Idema insists he was working with American and Afghan authorities in a secret counterterrorism operation, but both governments strongly deny this. Arrested along with him were two Americans, one of whom was apparently filming a biopic: Tora Bora Jack’s Story -the Movie. He could never have imagined such a twist in the plot, but the fact is that Idema’s story is in many ways a saga of modern-day Kabul. The Afghan capital has become a town where nobody knows if anyone is really what he (or she) claims to be. Many of the regulars at the Mustafa have nebulous jobs involving some combination of the words “communications”, “adviser” and “security”. Conversely, what seem the most bizarre of cover stories often turn out to be true. The short New Yorker who claimed to be a correspondent for a magazine called Cat Fancy, writing about the plight of cats in post-Taliban Kabul, could not be genuine -until he faxed me his surprisingly moving articles. I discovered he really did have a rescued kitten in one of the rooms upstairs in the Mustafa. He had named her Queen Soraya. Then there was the Finn setting up a sheep bank in Taliban-plagued Kandahar. And the eccentric Englishman who wanted to import hair dyes into Afghanistan and who now runs the country’s first package tours. The spider at the centre of Kabul’s strange web of mysterious characters and wide-eyed innocents is the Mustafa hotel’s owner, Wais, a fast-talking neurotic Afghan-American from New Jersey who knows everybody. Americans call him the Fonz of Kabul. Convinced that the Northern Alliance are trying to poison his food, Wais keeps his desk always covered with bottles of vitamin pills and spends much of his time mooning over his doomed love affair with a German girl. In
warmer months he holds famous Thursday-night barbecues on the hotel
roof where guests can sit on the looted seat of a Russian MiG fighter
jet and down Polish vodka shots overlooking central Kabul. Afghanistan has long had a romantic allure. Back in the 1960s it was the main destination on the hippie trail. Today it attracts a different kind of adventurer, attracted less by high-grade drugs and more by rewards ranging from $50m for Bin Laden down to $5m for lesser-known bad guys. The US State Department is offering a total of $340m for the 30 most-wanted terrorists. It says $57m has already been paid out. Idema was one of the bounty hunters chasing this money. My first encounter with “Jack” was in the Mustafa in December 2001, not long after the Taliban had been ousted from power by the Americans. The hotel had been in the process of being converted into a gem dealers’ market, but when the Taliban fell it was hurriedly changed back into a hostelry to cash in on all the arriving journalists. Instead of walls, the rooms still had glass partitions and iron security grills. The Mustafa had no bar then and only very occasional electricity, but Pounds 100 could secure a bottle of Scotch from the nearby Chelsea supermarket where Bin Laden and his Arab cohorts used to shop. With a 9pm curfew, a shortage of women and an excess of testosterone, there was nothing to do but drink by the light of hurricane lamps -and fight. Idema, whom even his friends described as “highly volatile”, was frequently a participant in these brawls. There was a sentimental side to him too. He had featured in an article in The New York Times about pet owners who think their pets can be cloned. He said he had saved some genetic material from Sarge, a dog he used while serving as a soldier. He added that the dog had parachuted out of planes with him and sniffed out bombs. Among the many escapades Idema recounted on long Kabul nights were his key roles in just about every conflict of the past 20 years from Bosnia to Haiti. He also casually let slip that he was suing Steven Spielberg’s company DreamWorks for allegedly basing the hero of one of his movies on him. The 1997 film, The Peacemaker, stars George Clooney as a maverick American colonel who tracks down a Russian smuggling team. Idema told us that he had come into Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s enemies, and claimed to have saved hundreds of Afghan lives with his special forces’ medical training. The alliance was unsure who he was. “We saw him; he seemed to have lots of money but we didn’t know who he was working for,” said Muslim Hayat, a senior Northern Alliance commander who is now defence attache at the Afghan embassy in London. “He was certainly not hired by us.” For a while, during the run-up to the war in Iraq, Idema disappeared from the Mustafa, perhaps to write his book. This year he re-emerged at the hotel’s newly fitted bar (which had briefly been co-run as an Irish pub until Wais fell out with his business partner in a fracas over a boy). Although Idema had rented a house and was no longer staying at the hotel, he would appear most evenings with his dark sunglasses and an Arafat-style black-and white chequered scarf around his neck -as favoured by most American special forces. Usually he was with a friend called Dan from Arizona who said he worked in security for telecommunications and carried an AK-47 sprayed with camouflage paint. Paul Vickers, a BBC radio producer, was with them at the bar a few months ago when Dan decided to give an impromptu knife display. “He pulled a flick-knife from his belt and did a Jackie Chan kind of flailing demonstration,” remembers Vickers. “It was quite a scary moment.” From then on regulars knew the Arizonan as Dan, Dan the Scary Man. Another of Idema’s drinking buddies was David, who worked in satellite communications for the Americans and who had set up one of the prettiest Thai waitresses in a beauty salon at the Mustafa. Often with them was a square-bearded Belgian cameraman who excitedly told people he had hired a Soviet Mi-8 helicopter in Islamabad to film the capture of Bin Laden, which he believed Idema was poised to carry out. After a couple of green grenades, Idema would tell people that he was leading a group called Task Force Sabre 7, which he said was involved in a secret mission reporting directly to the office of the US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld. “We’re closing in on the last terrorists,” he would whisper dramatically. Was he a bounty hunter? A conman fantasist? The leader of a team of freelance anti-terrorism vigilantes? Or was he really on a top- secret Pentagon mission? “I was suspicious from the word go,” said Vickers. “They seemed odd and kind of showbizzy, what with their uniforms and the fact they called themselves Task Force Sabre 7, which is like an SAS moniker. I’ve been with real SAS and my experience is they don’t tell you things like that.” But given that there really were secret operations involving US special forces and FBI officials reporting to Rumsfeld’s office -and there were also plenty of undercover agency people wandering around Kabul with briefcases of dollars -nobody could be sure what Idema and co were actually up to. Afghan security forces are forbidden from asking for identification from the many bearded Americans speeding around Kabul in unmarked vehicles. And not all US operatives seem to know about each other. Earlier this year I was at the residence of Hazrat Ali, the army chief in Jalalabad, when an inter-agency row broke out that almost led to a fist fight. I heard a local CIA agent demand from an arriving defence department group: “What are you doing here? This is our patch.” Whatever Idema was up to, it was always entertaining to listen to his stories of “black ops” and derring-do around the world, and he generally found an attentive audience. With more than a third of the country declared a no-go area by the United Nations, few journalists or aid workers ventured out of Kabul and they loved to hear his stories. He in turn adored conspiracy theories; he was a keen reader of The Da Vinci Code. His favourite tale was of being involved in operations uncovering “backpack nukes” in Lithuania in 1992. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, weapons-grade nuclear material had been pouring into the hands of international terrorists who were developing a nuclear backpack that could destroy 40 city blocks when detonated. Idema claimed to have gained the confidence of the Lithuanian KGB by outshooting them at the firing range then out-drinking them in the officers’ bar afterwards. Every so often he would disappear from the Mustafa on a “top- secret mission”. Vickers saw Idema and Dan head off on one such adventure and then come back with lots of photographs. “They were complete with kneepads, elbow pads, M16s, RPGs, grenades, AKSUs, radios, the works. What they did I don’t know, but it involved hiring camels and lots of photo opportunities firing weapons.” Then a month ago a strange e-mail was sent out to journalists by the press office of the American-led coalition forces in Kabul. It declared: “US citizen Jonathan, Keith or Jack Idema has allegedly represented himself as an American government and/or military official and the public should be aware that Idema does not represent the American government and we do not employ him.” Wanted posters began appearing all over Kabul, describing him as “armed and dangerous” and accusing him of “interfering with military ops”. On July 5, after a drunken punch-up outside the Mustafa, his home was raided. Someone had betrayed him. Inside the green-painted house in a run-down suburb of Kabul, Afghan police were astonished to find a private prison. There was an office with two clocks, one showing the time in Kabul and the other the time in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the US special forces have their headquarters. A piece of paper pinned to the wall was headed “Missions to Complete”. Number two was “Karzai”. Number four was “Pick up Laundry”. Idema was arrested with two other Americans, Brent Bennett and Edward Caraballo, and four Afghans working as cook, guard and translators. Caraballo is a film-maker. All of them are currently being held in the jail of the Afghan national directorate of security. They are in cells 15ft by 10ft, sleeping on pallets on the floor. The prosecutor in the case, Mohd Naeem Dawari, said after visiting Idema that he found him crying. “I don’t think he is crazy,” he said. “He is a proud person.” Tora Bora Jack now faces his most serious mission to date: to avoid conviction in an Afghan court for running his own personal Abu Ghraib. He faces five charges: taking hostages, having a private jail, torture, robbery of vehicles, and entering the country without a visa. If convicted, he could receive a sentence of up to 20 years. At his first court appearance two weeks ago he turned up in his usual outfit of desert boots, khaki combat pants, dark glasses and a shirt with American flags on the shoulders. “We were working for the US anti-terrorism group. We were working with the Pentagon and some other federal agencies,” he told reporters crowded round the dock. “We were in direct contact with Rumsfeld’s office five times a day, every day.” The Pentagon denied it. A Defence Department spokesman said Idema had been discharged from the US military in 1984 and had had no connection since. “This group of American citizens does not represent the American government and we do not employ or sponsor them,” the spokesman said. But Idema’s lawyer, John Tiffany, said he had video evidence, audiotape and e-mails that “go to the highest levels” to prove his claims of being part of a covert anti-terrorist outfit. Robert Fogelnest, lawyer for one of the other two Americans arrested, claimed all three were being made scapegoats to divert attention from the recent uncovering of the abuse of prisoners by American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Idema admitted detaining prisoners in his house but said they were Taliban and Al-Qaeda suspects whom he intended to hand over to US and Afghan authorities. His captives told the court they had been held for days in shackles. They claimed they had been kicked and beaten, had had scalding water poured on them before being dunked in ice water, and at times had lost consciousness. Abdul Baset Bakhtiari, the lead judge on the three-member panel, told me he had personally inspected the prisoners and witnessed the evidence of torture. “They do not belong to Osama Bin Laden and he beat them,” he said. “I have seen their bodies. There were red marks on their wrists and they were burned.” American and Afghan officials are still investigating how many other Afghan citizens Idema may have detained, and whether any have been harmed. The story does not end here. Last week embarrassed officials from the Nato-led peacekeeping force admitted that they had assisted in three of Idema’s raids this spring. They said his uniform, with its American flags, had duped them into thinking he was military. Equally embarrassingly, the US military has itself admitted that it had dealings with Idema as recently as May. Idema claims he handed over a Taliban intelligence chief after single-handedly breaking up a plot to assassinate members of the Afghan cabinet. The military confirm that they did receive a prisoner from Idema, but he was not a top Taliban official. Idema’s military records are perhaps the best indication of the truth. They show that he spent three years in the US 10th Special Forces Group as a radio operator until 1978 and then six more years in the reserves. Although some special forces members have been called back from retirement since 9/11, it seems unlikely someone who had not seen active service for so long would be recalled. In fact the only kind of combat Idema had definitely been involved in over the past 20 years is paintball. He once ran a magazine called Paintball Planet and produced equipment such as combat helmets. Court records show that he also notched up a string of convictions and charges, including assault and resisting arrest. In 1994 he was convicted in Fayetteville, North Carolina, of wire fraud and faking credit reports to keep alive his sinking company. He spent four years in prison, claiming all the time that the FBI had stitched him up because he had refused to reveal his sources in the Lithuanian KGB. Some believe that given the failure of the 20,000 US forces on the ground in Afghanistan to find the distinctively tall Bin Laden or even the Taliban’s one-eyed former leader, Mullah Omar. in the past three years, characters such as Idema should be encouraged rather than tried. But among his strongest critics are serving members of the special forces. They claim plans are already in place for him to be extradited to Fort Bragg and prosecuted. “We are fed up with all these adventurers,” said one. “No Afghan is going to trust us that we are who we say after this. And if he really is working for the Pentagon, then it looks like he is going to fall on his sword.” The Afghan judge supervising Idema’s case in Kabul is in a quandary: he finds himself admiring the mystery man. “I’d like to be like Jack, because he is a very brave man,” said Bakhtiari. “I understand he had fought terrorism and I’m sorry he has been arrested. I feel the government of Afghanistan could have done more with him.” Bakhtiari added: “The reason I can say nice things about him is because when I met him he was very courteous and understood our customs.” He said Idema had told him privately that he did not work for the government or any organisation but received money from wealthy people to fight terrorists. “I see the future of Jack as very dark,” said Bakhtiari. “I know he is a good man but at that time he was bad and that is what is so disappointing. Until the government or the CIA says he worked for them I don’t know what to think.” (C) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2004 |