When I thank my brother Lee and his wife, Christie, for his seven months of effort, he says he knew I would do the same thing for him. My sister, Laura, and brother-in-law, Chris, had their children pray for me while I was in captivity. They say they are simply overjoyed that I am safe. My brother Erik says he missed our daily calls and friendship. He remains calm and supportive of me, as always.
I apologize in each conversation and promise that my days as a war correspondent are over. I describe how much I’ve missed them and tell them I want to spend more time with them. I try to explain how eager I am to come home. After the phone calls, I am astonished by everything Kristen, Lee, my family, my editors, and friends have done to help us. I am also deeply touched by what my parents, Laura, and Erik have endured. All of them stepped back and allowed Kristen and Lee to make major decisions. While I was in captivity, they had the strength to let go. In some ways, that is more arduous and courageous than insisting on being involved.
Exhausted after being awake for twenty-four hours, I try to go to sleep. The black duffel bag I left in the Kabul bureau on the day we left for the interview has been brought to Bagram for me. For the first time in seven months, I put on a T-shirt.
I climb into bed and I fear closing my eyes. I’m afraid I will wake up in Miran Shah and this all will have been a fantasy. As I try to go to sleep, an alarm sounds outside and a voice on a loudspeaker announces that all personnel should go to bomb shelters. A Taliban rocket attack is under way. I make my way outside but Tahir remains inside.
I crouch inside a concrete bomb shelter with a handful of American soldiers and embassy personnel. The soldiers wear reflective vests that are designed to prevent them from being hit by vehicles when they walk around the base at night. The shelter and vests seem odd to me. They embody a focus on safety—and preventing death—that did not exist in Waziristan.
The all-clear sounds over the loudspeaker. I return to my bed and lie down. Again I fear closing my eyes and waking up beside Timor Shah and our other guards. I awake early the next morning and feel euphoric. We have, in fact, escaped.
I plug in my BlackBerry and charge the battery. I turn on the phone and Kristen’s face stares at me from the small screen. It is the first time I have seen her image in seven months. She is beautiful.
Three hours later, I say good-bye to Tahir. He insists on going to Kabul to see his family. They continue to not believe that he is actually free. Embassy officials have promised me he will not be detained. We hug good-bye, and for the first time in months, we are not in the same house together. I am delighted he will finally see his family, but miss him.
My plane takes off for Dubai and I stare out the window. For months, I looked up at the planes flying overhead as I paced back and forth in Waziristan and dreamed of being on one of them. As I fly over southern Afghanistan, I look down and wonder if “Little America” is somewhere in the desert below. I know I will probably never be able to return there.
I look to the east, think of Asad, and break into tears. He is dead or remains in captivity.
REUNION
Kristen, June 21, 2009
A
round noon, I speak to my husband again briefly. The Pakistani military has flown David and Tahir to Islamabad, where they were picked up by an American military plane and taken to the sprawling base in Bagram, just north of Kabul. He refuses to leave Bagram until Tahir is safely reunited with his family. He does not want to leave Tahir in the lurch. He feels that the Haqqanis will target Tahir if he returns to his unguarded home in Kabul.
I am slightly hurt by his overwhelming desire to stay put until the situation is resolved, but I understand his concern. I know David will do everything possible to ensure that Tahir, who injured his foot during their escape, receives good care and is treated well. I also realize this is a confusing time and that perhaps David needs a moment to adjust.
The last few months have taught me to be patient. And I know no one suffered more from David’s decision to go to the interview than David himself. If there is a reason to his surviving misfortune—lessons learned, wisdom gained—he has been given the chance to express it.
A few hours later, David calls back and says something unexpected. “Your God helped me through this experience,” David says. I think it is somewhat funny that he would frame God in this way, as belonging to someone else—or anyone for that matter. But I assume he means that prayer and belief in a beneficent higher force has helped him survive this ordeal. I am relieved. My one wish was that David would find some sort of inner peace during captivity, a personal expression of faith. Clearly he has.
I tell him to take the time he needs—but not too long! I will be on the next flight to Dubai, which gives him about twenty-four hours to leave Bagram. Arrangements have been made to transport him to Dubai and he promises to be at the airport to greet me.
In the early evening, David McCraw stops by with a bottle of champagne. The label has an image of a windmill. “So you can stop chasing windmills,” McCraw says, referring to Don Quixote. I save the bottle, vowing to share it with McCraw, Lee, and David when the four of us are together.
On the way to the airport, Lee and I listen to our voice mail, now overflowing with messages of relief and happiness from family, friends, and co-workers. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher, left a message expressing the paper’s joy at David’s freedom. Throughout our ordeal, he’s been kind and supportive—often inviting me into his office for coffee and pep talks during my frequent visits to the
Times
building. Christine Kay, David’s editor, calls and says, “You made all the right decisions. He is alive. You kept him alive.” Tearful, elated words pour in.
I also speak to David’s sister, Laura, who is ecstatic about this unexpected turn of events. “I am so happy to think of him back home in your arms where he belongs,” she says. She, too, has spoken with David and gotten more details of his escape, which she relays to me. From David and Tahir’s bold, impromptu decision to flee and their physical discrepancies—David is thin, Tahir is stocky—we both agree that the whole thing is amazing and, at this safe distance, amusing—Butch Cassidy and the Sun-dance Kid meet Abbott and Costello.
The flight to Dubai is long—thirteen hours. Lee and I spend a good deal of it watching movies. I am too anxious to sleep. We are both rendered speechless by our long ordeal finally having reached a happy and unexpected ending.
Toward the end of the flight, I duck into the ladies room to change. This is my second trip to Dubai. The first was with David more than a year ago. I was careful to keep my neck and legs covered at all times, so as not to stand out as a foreigner. Despite its modern trappings, Dubai is still conservative. But this time around, I think it would be tragic to greet my husband after seven months of captivity wearing sweatpants and a baggy sweater. I change into a modest but flattering dress and heels.
As we descend into Dubai, I glance out the window. Dubai is eight hours ahead of New York. We have lost a day in transit, as if propelled forward in time chronologically and emotionally. The desert below begins to glow in the last vestiges of sunlight. I think about what I want to do when David and I are reunited. We traveled a lot throughout our courtship, and spent our honeymoon in France and India. Friends have assumed that we will now want to run off somewhere together. The truth is, the last thing I want to do now is jet to an exotic location. I simply want us to be at home together, enjoying the daily things—drinking coffee in the morning, grocery shopping, going to the dry cleaner, riding the subway—that give life continuity, consistency. I realize I have made many mistakes over the last few months. We probably both have. But, ultimately, we have each survived. David is alive. That is all that matters. We must have done something right.
The Dubai airport is massive and modern with touches of Middle Eastern detailing. Female customs agents greet us at passport control in full headscarves, their eyeliner exquisitely applied in a striking contrast to the modesty of their dress. Large, modern white columns flank the sides of the baggage terminal. I am slightly tipsy from exhaustion and apprehension as we proceed to the exit.
I spot David waiting with several men and carrying flowers. My first thought is that he looks unchanged. He is the David I remember, only slightly thinner and paler. His hair is well groomed, trimmed. His face is clean-shaven. He is wearing the same gray V-neck sweater and brown khakis he wore on our honeymoon and on the day he departed New York for Kabul in late October.
He runs toward me.
EPILOGUE
David
F
ive weeks after our escape, Asad crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan, called his family, and said he was free. Ten days later, spoke with him by phone.
Asad said the guards had slept until predawn prayers on the night Tahir and I escaped. At first, they thought we were in the bathroom. Then they realized we were gone.
Asad said Timor Shah ordered the other guards to hunt for us. “If you find Tahir,” he said, “shoot him.” When Badruddin Haqqani learned we had escaped, Asad said, he “lost consciousness.”
All three of our guards were jailed and questioned about our escape, according to Asad. The guards called Abu Tayyeb for help but he said he would face problems in Miran Shah and declined to return. Two of the guards were released but Timor Shah was taken to a Taliban jail in South Waziristan for punishment.
Asad said Taliban commanders accused him of knowing about our escape plan. They chained and held him underground for seventeen days. For three of those days, he was beaten, he said. Removed from the underground jail, Asad was then used as a forced laborer on construction projects.
In mid-July, Asad’s family, with the support of
The New York Times,
sent a tribal delegation to press his captors to release him. On July 27, Asad was building a wall and the guard watching him said he was going to make some tea. Left alone, Asad fled, found a taxi, and took it to the Afghan border.
In our phone call, Asad denied cooperating with the guards during our captivity and said he had carried a gun because the Taliban had ordered him to do so. In the end, I believe that Asad played along with the Taliban to survive.
After returning home, I learned of the wide array of people who had worked for our release. Among them were Afghans and Pakistanis who offered to try to obtain information about our whereabouts or to gain our release. Some of them volunteered; others asked for money. Two of the Afghan men died in ambushes. A man carrying a message to our captors was killed in Pakistan in January, and an Afghan died in an ambush in Afghanistan in April.
Whether those attacks were definitely related to work on our case remains unclear. Determining the truth of events in the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan is notoriously difficult. Killings are rarely investigated. I believe the only responsible thing to do, though, is to assume that the two deaths were related to our case. I will always deeply regret going to the interview. I will always be deeply grateful to everyone who tried to help us.
After our escape, rumors surfaced that a ransom had been paid. Neither my family nor
The New York Times
, nor any contractors who worked on our case paid a ransom. American government officials maintained their long-standing policy of not negotiating with kidnappers, freeing no prisoners and paying no ransom. Pakistani and Afghan officials said they also released no captives and provided no money.
Reports also circulated that our guards had been bribed. Security consultants who worked on our case said paid Afghan informants reported giving cash to Taliban members who said they knew our whereabouts. The paid Afghan informants provided the detailed reports on our location that Kristen received from March through June, including the names of guards they said were bribed.
None of the available information supports claims from the Afghan informants that they successfully bribed our guards. The locations where they reported us being held were wrong during three of the four months when they purportedly tracked us. In June, they correctly reported we were in Miran Shah but said we were being frequently moved around the town in a black Suzuki jeep, which was false.
The names the Afghan informants gave for our guards were wrong and no guards helped us before or during our escape. On the night of our escape, the contractors expressed absolute surprise that we had gotten away and did not suggest to my family or newspaper that their informants had any involvement. After I returned home, American government officials said their sources were never able to pinpoint the exact house where we were being held or identify our guards. They backed the statement a senior American military official made to Kristen in April that “anyone who tells you they know exactly where your husband is is lying.”
Tahir and I do not believe our guards were successfully bribed. We believe the local informants hired by the private contractors did what people who inhabit the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area have done for centuries: When being paid for information, they told the foreigners what they wanted to hear.
Nine months after our escape, two of my colleagues at
The New York Times
reported that two of the contractors who worked on our case participated in a secret Defense Department project. Under the program, Pentagon officials reportedly hired private contractors to help track and kill militants. It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. As a result, Defense Department officials launched an investigation.
Michael Taylor of AISC and Duane Clarridge were subcontractors in the program, which was run by a civilian air force official named Michael D. Furlong. In the story, Taylor denied any wrongdoing and said they gathered information about possible threats to American forces but were not specifically hired to provide information to kill insurgents.