It seemed that nothing I said would convince them to abandon their suspicions about me, which meant that they would continue to deal with me on the basis of these suspicions.
This put me in a peculiar position. I was not what they thought I was, but I was in the position of someone who was what they thought I was, precisely because they refused to believe otherwise.
This suspicion became self-reinforcing. The more I came across as a normal man, the more it convinced them that I wasn’t. The more straightforward I was, the more they believed I was concealing something, and was just reciting a prefixed story given to me, no doubt, by my terrorist superiors.
At least part of this, I think, stemmed from whatever cooperation they had gotten from the Americans. If the FBI had suspicions about me, well, that’s conclusive.
If it was inevitable that they would deal with me as if these suspicions were facts, how, then, should I deal with them? This became, as it were, the elephant in the room; it didn’t matter if it was an entirely imaginary elephant.
The next day, they took me out again in the morning. The interrogators were more affable; not exactly friendly, but less formal. They gave me coffee.
They asked about what mosque I used to attend in Colorado, who I knew there, who I learned from…I got the impression that they felt my arrest was an opportunity for them to impress the FBI; as if they expected me to be a valuable asset of sorts. This was not a normal homicide investigation.
When I talked about IANA and the accusations of the Anti-Defamation League, I could see the quiet gratification on their faces, and the disappointment when I explained how the accusations were ultimately dismissed as unsubstantiated. I admired their self-control; it must have been hard to not just say “get to the part where you became a terrorist!”
We reached the point of talking about my aborted trip to Pakistan, the FBI intervention, and my travel to the UK.
Who was going arrange my entry into Afghanistan? Who did I know there? How long was I there? Etc, etc. When I went to the UK, did I really go on from there to Pakistan? They were sure that this was the key moment; that they had finally cracked the egg…Even though I explained that I scrapped the trip to Pakistan, like the FBI, they refused to believe it. Believing it was too important to them.
This willful need to interpret, or misinterpret, invent, or deny facts to suit their own preconceived conclusions is something I think all intelligence services have in common. If enough of the boxes are ticked on their checklist of a terrorist profile, any unticked boxes will be explained away as being due to the suspect’s evasive and deceptive cleverness.
Intelligence agencies and police have created more terrorists than Al-Qaeda. And I don’t mean ‘created terrorist groups as part of some sort of rogue covert operation’. One does not advance one’s career by arresting non-terrorists; so being arrested for anything, if you are a Muslim, puts you at risk of suddenly becoming a terrorist over the course of your interrogation. It’s like being given an honorary degree. You can enter the interrogation room as a petty criminal, but you may well leave it as a top Al-Qaeda operative. This is what was happening with me. I saw it on the faces of the police who brought me in when the head of the CID was waiting out in the sun to get a look at me. I could see it on the face of the detective who was interrogating me when got the call from his superiors telling him that my case was being transferred to State Security. And I could see it on the faces of these two special agents interrogating me.
When they looked at me, they saw a promotion, another stripe or star on their uniforms, a step up the career ladder, the promise of a higher pay grade. “Shahid,” the man who had been asking the questions eventually said, perhaps his patience waning, “can one hand it clap?”
“No.”
“No, never it don’t can. One hand it don’t can clap.” This little truism had been repeated to me several times over the past week from an array of questioners, always with identically broken grammar.
“If you help us, we help you.”
The “help” being requested here, I understood, was my verification of their suspicion that I was a terrorist; what was unclear was what the reciprocal “help” being offered constituted.
I told them that I was helping them as much as I knew how, telling them the truth, leading them to the body, being as open and straightforward as I could be.
He assured me that they had tremendous authority; I asked who they were exactly. “You know the Ruler? We are number two from the Ruler…even you can say we are one and a half.”
One and a half; close indeed, any closer and they’d have to marry.
“Everything is in our hands,” he said.
The interrogation was beginning to reveal itself as a negotiation.
I said, “Look, I know what you are saying. I understand why I am here, I understand why you think my case is very unusual; I get it. But there is simply nothing more to it than what I have told you.” Both of them stared at me for a long moment, looked at each other, then got up and left the room. I was, apparently, intransigent.
When they came back they tried another route, showing me pictures of people and asking if I knew them, “maybe you have seen them in the mosque.” I didn’t recognize anyone, and told them, as I had before, that I spent all my time with my family and didn’t socialize very much.
I assumed that these were all people suspected of ties to terrorist groups, or perhaps people already detained on such charges. I honestly didn’t know any of them.
After some time of this, some more questions, and more apparent uncooperativeness on my part, the man behind the desk took the pictures, replaced them in the folder, tapped the folder on the desk like a news anchor, and left the room.
The man opposite me who had been asking the questions, and who believed had developed a rapport with me, looked at me for a moment, then leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him, and said in almost a whisper, looking me in the eyes, “Shahid, tell me, man to man…are you an agent?”
A laugh escaped me involuntarily. An agent? This had never occurred to me. Without thinking I said, “If I were an agent, do you think I would be sitting here? An agent for whom?” He looked slightly crestfallen. “Brother,” I said, “there is nothing more to this than what I have told you. I am just a normal person, honestly.”
He kept looking at me, trying to read my face, then got up and left. Shortly thereafter the guard came to take me back to the detention center.