A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (5 page)

He traveled by ferry to Jordan, which was not the destination he ultimately desired but would have to do for the moment. His ultimate desire was Europe or, better still, America. He would later say that at the time he practically worshipped the United States and that he had earlier applied for visas to study there and in Europe but had been turned down. Evidently he was untroubled by the contradiction between his admiration of the West and Islamism’s critique of it—a contradiction not entirely unusual in Islamism, several of whose luminaries were educated in or took refuge in the West.

Nasr had chosen Jordan as expedient because it was nearby, because an Egyptian did not need a visa to enter, and because it was poor enough that one could live there on little money. His plan was to work, save, and make his way to Europe to resume his legal studies. But Jordan turned out to be much poorer than he had thought—startlingly so to a bourgeois Alexandrian—and jobs were scarce for a young man who not only knew no trade but had never held a job in his life. The job he finally found was carrying rocks at a construction site, but he was too delicate for the task and soon quit. When he failed to find other work that appealed to him, he asked his Jordanian acquaintances where else he should look, and they told him Yemen. The Yemenis, they said, had a large, uneducated population and were hiring Arabs from abroad to teach their children the Quran. Egyptians did not need a visa to get into Yemen, so after two or three months he quit Jordan for Sanaa. Yemen, however, proved to be already awash in Egyptians teaching the Quran. He managed to find work at a school library, which was more agreeable than hauling rocks, but the pay was slight and he could save nothing. Again he asked the natives where he might find a better life, and this time he was told to go to Pakistan. Pakistan, the Yemenis said, is the place for a man like you. After four or five months in Yemen, he went.

PESHAWAR IS
the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. From its tin-makers’ shops and wool-spinning factories, it is a short and not particularly steep climb to the Khyber Pass, beyond which lies the chaos of Afghanistan, battlefield of greater powers since history began. Afghanistan’s modern convulsions started in 1978, when the country fell into civil war, which prompted the Soviet Union to invade and the United States to arm the opposing rebels, some of whom, notoriously, saw in their struggle not merely a resistance to empire but a jihad. The war was—is, depending on how one defines it—nasty, brutish, and long, and millions of shelled and pauperized Afghans sought refuge over the Khyber Pass. With them came holy warriors who set up headquarters in Peshawar, from which they raised money, bought arms, launched raids into the motherland, and in some cases trained terrorists for attacks beyond Afghanistan. The noncombatants who overfilled Peshawar lived in sweeping tent cities whose pitiful sight moved governments and individuals across the Middle East to send money for their relief. For a time Peshawar was, if not quite soaked, at least damp in riyals from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, dinars from Algeria and Jordan, and pounds from Egypt and Syria. Much of the money went to schools, clinics, and charities of the food-and-shelter variety, but much also went to jihad. For terrorists, it was convenient to smudge the line between humanitarian and military aid, and so charities arose that gave long-grain rice with one hand and long-range sniper rifles with the other.

Arabs sometimes traveled to Peshawar with similarly smudged intentions. A man might start from Jeddah for a madrassa and end in a Tora Bora tunnel. Sometimes the madrassa had been a ruse all along, but sometimes the man had been moved to fight only after arriving. Or maybe he had known he would fight but not that he would become a terrorist. Some Arab governments, eager to be rid of their zealots, paid their way to Peshawar. Egypt even released a few extremists from prison on condition they enplane for Pakistan. Evidently the governments assumed that the zealots would be killed in the war, or their zeal would shrivel in the Afghan wastes, or the rich among them—Osama bin Laden being the epitome—would run through their fortunes arming God’s battalions. The Arab governments thought little, and the American government less, about the men who would survive the Afghan wars. They did not foresee that the zealots’ passion for sharia might be intensified or that they would become practiced in guerrilla warfare and connected to an international network of terroristic financiers, recruiters, and plotters. The blowback, infamously, would concuss the Hudson and Potomac.

Peshawar had many exiles from Egypt, in large part because the repression by Mubarak after Sadat’s assassination sent many Islamists fleeing at just the time when Peshawar was most in need of humanitarians and soldiers. One Egyptian who came to Peshawar, for a few months in 1980 and a few years from 1986, was Ayman al-Zawahiri. A surgeon, he dressed the wounds of refugees in a Red Crescent hospital but eventually developed an enthusiasm for mass murder. From Peshawar (and elsewhere beyond Egypt) he rebuilt Egyptian Jihad, allied the group with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, and plotted a righteous apocalypse, which was partially realized with the massacres at Luxor in 1997 and in the United States in 2001.

Nasr would later say he went to Peshawar strictly as a humanitarian. In his telling, he found work teaching the Quran and Arabic in a school run by a Kuwaiti charity. The charity also disbursed food and clothes but, Nasr said, no arms. It was one of the happiest periods of his life, but it did not last long. The Islamists of his acquaintance in Peshawar often had energetic discussions about whether violence should be used as a political tool, and he, so he said, took the negative view. When there was a terrorist attack, he would speak out against it. Word of his opposition to terrorism spread, and the extremists on the other side of the argument eventually told him he must join the jihad. He, more lover than fighter, refused. They threatened him with death, and in 1991 he left, an innocent run out of another country.

He flew to Tirana, the capital of Albania, which was not the Western Europe of his dreams but which was, at last, Europe. He was given a grant of asylum on grounds of his persecution in Egypt. It was a convulsive time in the Balkans. The Berlin Wall had fallen only two years earlier, the Iron Curtain was being dismantled fold by fold, and ugly, austere Albania, one of the most closed of the Warsaw Pact nations, was moving from the stifling impoverishment of Communism to the unruly impoverishment of frontier capitalism. Meanwhile, next door, Yugoslavia was rending itself to tatters, and the rumbles of the nearby war shook Albania uncomfortably.

Nasr chose Albania because it was predominantly Muslim—the religion was a legacy of long Ottoman rule—although Albanians tended to exercise their faith more lightly than he. One of the country’s poets had written, “Churches and mosques you shall not heed. Albanism is Albania’s creed.” And indeed the Muslim majority and Christian minority had got on well enough over the years. Muslims and Christians overseas, however, thought that half a century of godless Communism had been detrimental to Albanian spirituality, and on Communism’s fall they sent missionaries to share their gods. Most ministered pacifically, teaching the Quran or Bible and digging wells or plowing furrows in hope of showing the goodness of their faith. But some Islamic charities, particularly those staffed by exiles from Gamaa and Jihad, had designs beyond winning converts.

A dozen or so of the Islamic charities were funded on Saudi wealth, and at one of these, the Human Relief and Reconstruction Agency, Nasr found work, the nature of which is not known. (Years later he would not be talkative about his job there.) He attended a mosque and in its chaste environs met an Albanian woman, Marsela Glina, whom he married after a brief courtship. He did not speak Albanian, and she did not speak Arabic. Their shared language was pidgin English. Theirs may have been one of those marriages, not uncommon among Islamists, in which a few phrases of male command and female assent made up much of the conversation. Glina apparently was not as fervent in her Islam as he, but when he insisted she wear a veil, she assented. He was thirty years old, she eighteen.

In 1994 the Human Relief and Reconstruction Agency ran out of money, and Nasr decided to establish himself as a man of commerce in the anarchic market. A photo from the time shows him cutting the figure of a businessman in a suit of double breast and effulgent sheen, his head cropped as close as a kiwi, his cheeks, which were starting to hint at chubby, smooth as gourds. An excellent mustache made the man. It was full and dark and wider than the lip on which it sat, in the style of men of the Levant and firehouses of West Virginia, and suggestive of virility. If he had worn a beard and galabia in Pakistan, as was likely, he had got rid of them somewhere along the way. He intended to open a grocery, but he ran into some sort of difficulty and abandoned the idea. He then settled on a sausage factory, which got as far as a $20,000 expenditure for equipment. Where the money came from is not clear, though perhaps from Arab entrepreneurs abroad. The factory, however, also ran into problems and never ground a gram of meat, and he seized next on a bakery. Not long before the ovens were to be fired, in August of 1995, he was visited by a police officer who told him he was needed at the station for a small matter—it would take only five or ten minutes. Nasr assumed one of his workers had gotten into trouble, and he was happy enough to help straighten it out. But on arriving at the station, he was transferred to the custody of the Shërbimi Informativ Kombëtar, the State Intelligence Service, or SHIK, and interrogated. As he told the story later, SHIK’s officers asked what he was doing in Albania, what he had done in Pakistan, why he had left Egypt, whether Islamists in Albania planned to attack Egypt’s foreign minister when he visited Tirana that week, and much else besides. It was obvious to Nasr that the officers knew a lot about him, which surprised him. He had thought the post-Communist government was barely functioning, and yet here it had conducted what seemed a very competent surveillance of him. He was questioned for days, often repetitively, he assumed to catch him in a mistake, and when his answers displeased, the officers struck him with fists or the handle of a gun.

In the end they told him they knew he was clean. He was not sure whether they had known so all along or had concluded so from the interrogation. They then said that as a businessman he commanded the respect of many people and would make a valuable informer. They asked him to be their spy and said that in return they would help him with the application for citizenship he had recently submitted. The pitch was not much different from the one he had been given in Alexandria six years earlier. He refused this one too (so he later claimed) and somewhat to his surprise they let him go.

When he got home, he told his wife he had been detained because of a mix-up at the station: the police had thought he was using his business as a front to smuggle drugs, and it had taken time to convince them of their error. Evidently husband and wife did not discuss the topic in detail because years later Marsela Glina would be able to say little more than that the arrest had soured him on Albania and he decided they should leave. A few weeks after his release he traveled to Romania and, liking what he saw, applied for residency for himself, Glina, and their daughter Sara, who had been born a year or two earlier. Another child was on the way. The Romanians were apparently inclined to grant Nasr asylum on grounds of his persecution in Egypt, but they had no need for another housewife and two more children, and the application was denied.

Nasr devised another exit strategy. At the end of 1995 or the start of 1996 he bought tickets for the family to fly to Cairo via Munich. He was told that to change planes in Germany, they would need German visas, so, as he later told the story (with possible embellishment), he bribed an officer to let them through the emigration checkpoint. He had also been told that Glina was too far pregnant to be allowed on a commercial flight, so he had her dress in thick, baggy clothes to disguise her state. Nobody stopped her as they boarded. Later, when the flight began its descent to Munich, Glina pretended to go into labor, on Nasr’s instructions. She must have been convincing, because when they landed an emergency crew was waiting at the jetway. A German officer came aboard and said Glina would be taken to a hospital but since Nasr and his daughter had no entry papers, they would have to stay on the plane. When Nasr refused to be separated from his wife, the airline crew begged him not to make a scene. They were in enough trouble, they said, for transporting a woman in so advanced a pregnancy. He ignored them and demanded asylum. Under German law, he was permitted to remain in the country while the government evaluated his claim, so the whole family was taken to the hospital, where doctors discovered that Glina was only seven months pregnant and not in labor. They were sent to a refugee center outside Munich to await the outcome of their plea.

While they waited, Glina gave birth to a boy, whom they named Omar. In history, Omar was a seventh-century caliph who evicted Christians and Jews from Arabia and reserved Mecca and Medina for Muslims ever after. The production of a male heir earned Nasr the honorific Abu Omar, Father of Omar. Technically speaking, he was also Abu Sara, but that title would not have been considered a decoration; Glina, on Sara’s birth, had become Umm Sara, Mother of Sara. Some months later Germany denied their request and they appealed. By the time the denial was finally affirmed, they had spent nearly a year and a half in the refugee center. What Abu Omar, forbidden to work, did with himself while Glina attended to home and children remains a matter of speculation. Confinement, however, was not good for their marriage. They quarreled often, and after one tremendous fight, they divorced in the fashion permitted by some schools of Islam—the husband solemnly declaring himself through with his wife, whereupon God recognizes their partition. For reasons unknown, they did not also dissolve their civil marriage in Albania. When their final plea was denied, Glina returned to Tirana with the children, but Abu Omar’s future lay elsewhere. He would, he determined, slip into Italy.