“Hey, Dad,” I said after the beep. “This is your son. I just wanted to give you a heads-up that about eight months ago I went to Syria to photograph the war, got kidnapped by al-Qaeda, did seven months in six of the worst prisons in the world until I managed to escape, and now I’m gonna be on the front page of the New York Times and on CNN. Hope all’s well with you! Byyyye!”
After I hung up I went to the gym, intentionally leaving my phone behind. He told me he almost had a heart attack when he heard the message.
My remorse about leaving Theo behind lasted about twelve hours after I’d crossed into Turkey, which was as long as it took me to find out about his Undercover Muslim exploits and realize just how much danger he’d knowingly placed me in by letting me convert, all without so much as a warning. The discovery came when I got to my hotel and went down to the business center to use the computers, hoping to track down Theo’s mother so I could at least let her know that he was alive. When I read about the premise of the book I could not believe it. Here was an individual whose treachery was so vast that it had followed me across the border to freedom. I’d always known the clock was ticking on al-Nusra figuring out that I was Jewish, but now I realized the danger had been ten times greater because it was also ticking on them figuring out Theo’s real name, the name on the cover of Undercover Muslim. This realization took me from feeling nothing but regret to thinking, basically, life goes on. I did everything I could to help him; I risked my life by staying and trying to pull him out for longer than most would have, despite his months of repeated betrayal. I did my best for him, and that was all I was really capable of doing, but he didn’t do his best for himself, or even try. I had nothing to feel guilty about. However, this didn’t mean that I wouldn’t continue doing everything I could to keep my promise and get help for Theo. In my mind, this was not an obligation I had to him but to my country: to act according to the values that my motherland had instilled in me, so that I could come home knowing I’d represented her with honor and could be proud of who I am.
I may have felt betrayed by the FBI’s handling of my case, but I was still doing all I could to help with the investigation. When I sat down with Brody and a sketch artist, they had me describe all the top jihadis I’d met—along with the Canadians. This last part threw me off, because I’d told her they were always wearing masks, but I did my dutiful best, and a month after this session Brody called with news: the FBI had two of the Canadians in custody. When I asked when they’d been arrested, she said they’d had them for “months.” In other words, they were already in custody when I described them to the sketch artist—the FBI knew who they were even before I came home, because while I was in captivity, they’d been monitoring my accounts as every cent was stolen from them, including tracking the two items that one of them mailed to himself in Quebec under his real name. That terrorist has since moved back to Canada where he lives a free man, having never been arrested or punished in any way for his role in the crimes committed against me.
Brody said that in order to move forward with charges against the Canadians I’d have to identify them, which I was extremely excited to do. Then she told me how I’d have to ID them: she would lay out some photographs of them wearing masks and play me a recording of their voices, as if it were the 1930s and she couldn’t just arrange a lineup or record a video of them on any cell phone. When I told her I wasn’t sure that I could ID people who’d been wearing masks from photographs and voice recordings and would need to see them to size them up, she tried to put my mind at ease by assuring me it was them, but at this point I trusted her about as much as I would a hungry lion. I didn’t want to risk identifying the wrong person—which would totally discredit me as a witness—or failing to identify the right one and giving his defense lawyers ammunition. I told her I wouldn’t do it—if she wanted me to make the Canadians it would have to be with me on one side of the glass and them on the other, to avoid any mistakes.
Brody was livid, and her response has ranged from having two agents show up on my doorstep on the anniversary of my abduction—threatening to arrest me for interfering in a federal investigation if I spoke to the press—to having my speaking engagements canceled. At the threat of arrest, I actually laughed in the agents’ faces.
“I can do your time standing on my fuckin’ head,” I said, holding out my wrists. “Where you gonna put me—in a federal prison? Go ahead, I’ve always wanted to learn how to play tennis.”
Over four years have passed, and not one of the Canadians in custody has been put before me for identification, much less indicted or extradited to Canada.
God bless the Patriot Act.
I spent the first month I was back in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Being that I hadn’t paid my bills in over seven months and the FBI refused to give me a new social security number
