By Douglas Martin, The New York Times, January 29, 2012
 |
| Jonathan K. Idema in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2004 (credit, Ahmad Massood, Reuters) |
Jonathan K. Idema,
a convicted con man who gained notoriety in post-invasion Afghanistan as a swaggering hunter of
terrorists, then ignominy when he was imprisoned for taking Afghans hostage and
torturing them, died Jan. 21 at his home in Bacalar, Mexico. He was 55.
Penny Alesi, a former girlfriend, said the cause was AIDS. A State
Department spokesman confirmed the death.
Mr. Idema was a fast-talking, sunglasses-wearing, AK-47-toting fortune
hunter and a flamboyant figure in Kabul, the capital, in the early 2000s. He
flaunted his experience as a member of the Army’s Special Forces, or Green
Berets. and let on that he was in cahoots with American and Afghan intelligence
officials as he pursued the big rewards offered for leaders of Al Qaeda. He
cultivated the news media, often with tall tales.
He provided broadcasters with videotape of supposed terrorist training
camps; was interviewed as a covert operative by National Public Radio and Fox
News; and insinuated himself into a book by the author Robin Moore, “The Hunt
for Bin Laden.” Few knew he had served three years in federal prison in the
1990s on 58 counts of fraud. That information came out in 2004 when he was
tried in Afghanistan for imprisoning and torturing eight men in a private jail
that he and his civilian colleagues ran in the hope of getting information
about terrorists and bounty money. (They wore uniforms with the American flag
on the sleeves and called themselves Task Force Saber 7.) The case was widely
compared to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
His defense was that he had been working for the American and Afghan
governments. Both denied it, although at the trial American military officials
acknowledged taking his calls and once interrogating a suspect he had captured
before releasing him.
“Perhaps if he did something successful, the government would pay
attention to him,” a Western diplomat said to The New York Times.
Sentenced to 10 years in prison, Mr. Idema was pardoned by President
Hamid Karzai after 3. He said he did not know Mr. Karzai’s reasons, nor why he
had been given an apartment-style cell in prison with satellite television,
Persian carpets and specially prepared meals.
Jonathan Keith Idema’s eventful life began May 30, 1956, in
Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and ended in Mexico in a town on the Yucatan Peninsula,
where he called himself Black Jack, ran a charter boat, was said to hold orgies
and flew a pirate flag over his house.
He sued people constantly. One was Steven Spielberg. Mr. Idema
contended that he was the basis of the George Clooney character, a Special
Forces operative, in the 1997 movie “The
Peacemaker,” produced by Mr. Spielberg’s company, DreamWorks. The
claim was dismissed, and Mr. Idema was ordered to pay $267,079 in legal fees.
His father said Mr. Idema had been an Eagle Scout. He himself said the
direction of his life was set when he saw the 1968 John Wayne movie “The
Green Berets,” loosely based on a book by Mr. Moore. Mr. Idema
joined the Green Berets after enlisting in the Army at 18. The Vietnam War was
ending, and he saw no combat, though he later claimed he did.
He was honorably discharged but not allowed to re-enlist, according to
testimony in a 1994 trial. An Army evaluation made public at the trial had
described him as “unmotivated, unprofessional, immature.”
During the 1980s he did security work in Haiti and Thailand. He said
he sometimes took his dog, Sarge, who parachuted out of airplanes with him and
sniffed for bombs.
Back at home, he was arrested as many as 36 times in the 1980s and
1990s on various charges, including possession of stolen property and assault
with a firearm. He was never convicted.
In 1991 he went to Lithuania to train local police officers. There, he
contended, he discovered a black market in backpack-size nuclear weapons,
though many weapons experts consider the existence of such weapons unlikely. He
nevertheless contributed to a “60 Minutes” segment on the issue. When the
F.B.I. asked him to reveal his Lithuanian sources, he refused. His refusal, he
later claimed, prompted a federal prosecution against him for business fraud.
That
business was making products for paintball combat games. He was convicted of
purchasing materials using faked credit references.
Mr. Idema went to
Afghanistan in November 2001 to make a documentary for National Geographic on
humanitarian efforts there, but he soon abandoned the project and turned to
bounty hunting and fighting. He began calling himself Jack and telling
journalists he was an adviser to the Northern Alliance, the Afghan group then
trying to oust the ruling Taliban. He became a regular on conservative talk
radio in the United States.
In 2002, he provided what he said were Qaeda training videos to “60
Minutes II,” which broadcast them. Rolling Stone magazine quoted Dan Rather as
saying that Mr. Idema was “an adventurer with a conscience.”
He had a temper. He once fired a shot within six inches of the head of
a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. He threatened to punch the broadcast
journalist Geraldo Rivera.
Mr. Idema made big, unprovable boasts. One was that he had discovered
handwritten Qaeda plans to assassinate President Bill Clinton at a Malaysian
summit meeting in 1998. Mr. Clinton did not attend, but Vice President Al Gore
did. No attack was attempted.
Interested in his exploits, Mr. Moore, who had Parkinson’s disease,
enlisted Mr. Idema to help write the 2003 book “Task Force Dagger: The Hunt for
Bin Laden.” Mr. Idema ended up writing and rewriting chapters, mostly to
glorify the “Jack” character — himself. Mr. Moore later disavowed the changes.
After his release from the Afghan prison, Mr. Idema did not return to
the United States. Ms. Alesi, his former girlfriend, said he feared being
prosecuted there for any number of things. Instead he went to Dubai and then
England before moving to Mexico.
No comments:
Post a Comment