“American,” Mohammad said to me, gesturing at the man.
“Yeah right,” I replied. “Can I get my blankets now and go back in the other room?”
“No, no—American! You can stay in here now, and talk.”
And that’s when I looked more closely and saw that Mohammad wasn’t joking. This guy really was an American.
“Oh my God,” I whispered to myself.
He looked like he’d been there for a hundred years. After retrieving my blankets from solitary and sending someone to retrieve my pants from the other cell, they locked the two of us in the darkness together.
“You’re American?” I said, “Jesus Christ, they’re collecting us! Who are you? How long have you been here?”
“Three months.”
“Why are you here?”
“They think I’m a fucking CIA agent. I can’t believe you’re really here.”
“Yeah, well, believe it. What’s your name?”
“Theo.”
And that was it—the worst moment of my entire life, because now I knew they weren’t letting me go. They’d had me for three weeks and never let me see or hear him, this suspected CIA agent, which meant they’d been thinking about releasing me—but now that they knew I wasn’t going anywhere, it no longer mattered if I saw him, because there would be nobody I could tell.
Theo kept saying how happy he was that I had joined him, which kind of pissed me off because I was a little bummed out to be there. On the other hand, I can’t say I blamed him, especially after learning he’d been locked up for almost the whole three months by himself. Then he said he hoped they threw some more Westerners in with us so that he would have even more people to talk to.
“Why not just hope that they let you out, man?” I said, frustrated. “Wouldn’t that be better than wishing this upon people?”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” he said in his soft voice.
It felt like we were getting off to a bad start, so I changed the subject.
“All right, man, look: let’s get some important shit outta the way,” I said, mock serious. “Are you a fag?”
“No,” he replied.
“If you are it’s cool with me, man,” I said sincerely. “I have nothing against you. It’s just that if I wanna jerk off, you can’t watch. If you watch we’re gonna have a problem.”
I’d been trying to break the ice, get him to laugh, but Theo didn’t catch the humor and instead assured me seriously that he wouldn’t watch me beat off if the mood struck, so I changed the subject again—to how he’d landed in that room.
His story was definitely a unique one and I remember thinking all through it, What the fuck did I do to get locked in a room with a guy like this? If ever someone deserved the Darwin Award, it was him—he was to journalists basically what Gomer Pyle was to the marines in Full Metal Jacket. Theo’s journey began in Antakya, Turkey, a city on the Syrian border. He’d rented a room in some ten-dollar-a-night hotel where Syrian refugees were known to congregate, in the hopes of making some contacts for his next story—which, ironically, he was hoping to write about Austin Tice, the first American journalist to go missing inside Syria. He even told me that he’d emailed Tice’s editor before he left, asking the guy if he’d be interested in helping him finance an article about his missing colleague (something I later confirmed).
So anyway, he’s at this cheap little hotel when he meets a seemingly nice Syrian boy of about twenty named Osama, with blonde highlights running through his black hair. Osama said he could hook Theo up with tour guides for his trip into Northern Syria. There were three of them, and they convinced Theo to cross the border illegally at night rather than use his valid passport. The next day, after they were across and spending the night at a remote location somewhere outside the city of Idlib, these tour guides beat the shit out of him, and then broke out the handcuffs.
“So you basically hired your kidnappers?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“So wait, you got kidnapped before you even entered Syria, and you didn’t even know it?”
“No, they kidnapped me the next day.”
“No, they let you in on it the next day.”
My memory gets a little fuzzy here, but I remember him saying that after they had him, the kidnappers didn’t know what to do. They discussed asking for four hundred thousand in ransom, but they didn’t know how to collect it, so instead Theo was passed around from group to group like a puppy nobody wanted to keep. He was tortured several times during this period and didn’t think he was going to last long.
“First they tried to waterboard me, but they didn’t know how to do it,” he told me.
“What do you mean?”
“They cuffed me to a ladder in an empty pool and kept pouring buckets of water on me. Then they laid me down in a ditch that they dug and started covering me with dirt.”
At one point, he actually managed to escape. It was the middle of the night—he slipped out of the handcuffs with one of his kidnappers on the other end. Barefoot, he ran from the apartment where he was being kept out onto the street and flagged down a friendly vehicle. This Good Samaritan drove Theo directly to an FSA headquarters, where he was given a hot shower, a hot meal, brand-new clothes, and an apartment they kept especially for journalists. The next day they asked him whether he wanted to go home or go looking for the guys who’d taken him, and Theo chose option number two.
Theo should’ve remembered those old Taco Bell commercials and run straight for the border, but instead he was crammed into a car full of armed jihadis, looking for his kidnappers. After a while he actually spotted the car and pointed out one of the criminals. The
