IDEMA

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 9 (UPI) -- Afghan authorities are prosecuting a U.S. soldier of fortune who is charged with abusing prisoners in a private Kabul jail. Jonathan K. Idema, 47, was arrested in Afghanistan for allegedly torturing prisoners after they were found dangling upside down in a private cell, the Independent reported Friday. 
Idema, two other U.S. citizens and four Afghans were held following a brief shootout at a house in the capital on Monday.

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Friday, July 9, 2004 at 0758 JST

KABUL — Afghan forces arrested three Americans, including a purported former Green Beret, after raiding a jail they were allegedly running in the Afghan capital and finding prisoners hanging from their feet, officials said Thursday.
The U.S. military, facing a widening inquiry into prisoner abuse, quickly distanced itself from the three, who had been posing as American agents before being detained Monday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday "the U.S. government does not employ or sponsor these men."
Afghan officials also dismissed claims by the apparent ringleader, Jonathan K Idema, that he was a "special adviser" to their security forces, saying the three had posed as military agents on a self-appointed hunt for terrorists.

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Central Asia

Idema: Trigger-happy and troublesome
By Richard S Ehrlich 

BANGKOK - American bounty hunter Jonathan "Jack" Idema, who has been put on trial in Kabul for allegedly torturing Afghans, arrived in Afghanistan alongside US invasion forces in 2001 and enjoyed threatening to kill journalists.
"That's what I love about Afghanistan - if you tell someone you are going to kill them, they f**king believe you," Idema said during several interviews with this correspondent in December 2001 and January 2002 in Kabul.
"If I'm in New York and I tell someone I'm going to kill them, they say, 'Yeah motherf**ker? Well, I'm going to kill you first.' But not Afghanistan. Here they believe you."
On Monday, Idema and two other Americans appeared on trial in Kabul denying allegations that they tortured Afghans they kept in a private jail. Idema told the court he hunted alleged terrorists with the knowledge of the US government. Washington and the Pentagon denied that Idema worked for them after he was arrested in July.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An American on trial for torturing Afghans in a private jail had deluded himself into thinking he was a one-man al-Qaida hunting machine, but there is no evidence to back up his claim that he had links to the U.S. military, a spokesman said Wednesday.

Jonathan ``Jack'' Idema and two other Americans are on trial on charges they poured boiling water and committed other acts of terrorism on about 12 Afghan men they held at a private home in the capital. They face up to 20 years in jail if convicted.

The military has acknowledged it accepted one detainee from Idema, but released the man after two months after it realized he was not the senior Taliban fighter Idema had claimed.

     LONDON -- Jonathan Keith Idema, the American being tried in Afghanistan on charges of running a private jail where prisoners were tortured, was a different man before Sept. 11, 2001, according to those who know him well.
     At the time of the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, he was a struggling ex-convict with a string of unsuccessful businesses and a mountain of debts. But when it became clear that the U.S. military was heading into Afghanistan, and that the news media lacked an authoritative voice to discuss Special Forces operations, Mr. Idema rushed to the scene.
     Soon after arriving in late 2001, Mr. Idema claimed he was in Afghanistan as an adviser to the Northern Alliance, a militia opposed to al-Qaeda and the then-ruling Taliban government. After the Taliban fell, he said he was on a mission, supported by both the U.S. and Afghan governments, to capture Osama bin Laden.
     Major news organizations and a celebrated author bought into his self-portrayal as an undercover spy, explosives expert, active-duty Special Forces operative, covert "black ops" specialist, and one of the few Americans truly dedicated to hunting down Mr. bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.
     But hundreds of documents, e-mail exchanges, photographs and other materials supplied by close associates of Mr. Idema offer an entirely different picture of who he really is a showman and convicted fraudster whose military career ended in 1984 before he'd even spent a day in live combat.
     Perhaps because of his military-style uniform, the authority in his voice, his swagger and authentic use of Special Forces jargon, many journalists and media personalities accepted him too quickly as the real thing, according to journalists and close acquaintances who witnessed Mr. Idema's personality makeover.
     "He's a very believable guy. He looks you in the eye. He looks like a Special Forces guy, acts like one. ... It's hard not to believe him once he gets talking," said Robin Moore, author of the 2003 book The Hunt for Bin Laden, Task Force Dagger, which features Mr. Idema as one of the central figures in the Afghanistan war.
     A photo of Mr. Idema, 48, appears on the book's cover, and he receives co-author credit in the book's British version.
     Mr. Moore, who also wrote The Green Berets and The French Connection, said he had been warned repeatedly about Mr. Idema during the 14 years they have been acquainted. He said they met in 1990 outside a Special Forces convention, where Mr. Idema was hawking military accessories. But it was only after the book was published that he began taking those warnings seriously.
      Web sites registered to Mr. Idema began appearing on the Internet advertising a purported new Robin Moore biography, An Army of One, which promised to detail Mr. Idema's one-man war on terrorism.
     Mr. Moore, who is 78 and suffers from Parkinson's disease, said the Web sites were bogus and unauthorized, and he had never intended to write such a book.
     Only then did he notice that, without Mr. Moore's consent, Mr. Idema had altered the manuscript of The Hunt for Bin Laden to include appeals for donations to two charities whose addresses belonged to Mr. Idema and his wife. The charities, which were promoted as helping the families of Special Forces soldiers killed or wounded in action, are now under grand jury investigation, according to witnesses subpoenaed to testify in the North Carolina probe.
     Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Kocher, whose name appears on the subpoenas, said she could not discuss details of any grand jury proceeding.
     Mr. Moore said he began questioning Mr. Idema's past, and the answers were troubling about the man he had come to know by his nickname, Jack. "I knew that Jack really didn't know what he was talking about. ... He was not really ever a Special Forces man," he said. "He claimed that he was in combat, but nobody could ever prove it to me."
     The Special Forces Association, a national organization of former Special Forces members based in Mr. Idema's hometown of Fayetteville, N.C., has banned Mr. Idema from its gatherings and disavowed any association with him, labeling his supposed battlefield exploits as "outrageous" in a letter from association officers.
     In Afghanistan, many reporters never verified who this swashbuckling character was and simply accepted his early claims as the truth.
     Others in positions to know better also were fooled. According to diplomatic letters and other official correspondence, U.S. and Afghan officials, presented with various false credentials, dual Social Security numbers and other misrepresentations, opened doors to Mr. Idema at the highest levels.
     Afghanistan's former education minister, Yunis Qanooni, admitted last week in Kabul that he was duped into thinking Mr. Idema was an American agent.
     Mr. Idema claimed in writing to have had 12 years' experience in the Special Forces, 22 years in combat training and 18 years in covert military Special Operations. During a promotional tour for Mr. Moore's book, Mr. Idema repeated those assertions in numerous television and radio appearances in the United States and Afghanistan.
     According to a copy of his military records, Mr. Idema trained and qualified for Special Forces in 1977. Mr. Idema then switched to reserve status, where he remained until he left the Army in 1984. There is no record of any combat service.
     Some acquaintances warned in 2001 that Mr. Idema was not what he claimed to be.
     Ed Artis, director of the nongovernmental organization Knightsbridge International, accompanied Mr. Idema on his first trip into northern Afghanistan in late 2001, when Mr. Idema claimed to be an aid worker and had signed an agreement to be involved only in nonmilitary, humanitarian activities.
     "This man is a very dangerous person by virtue of his carelessness and stupidity, and before he gets someone killed ... he needs to be removed from the area," Mr. Artis, a Vietnam veteran and former Army medic, wrote in a Dec. 18, 2001, letter to the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C.
     "I feel that given the amount of time that he has been allowed to run around telling people he has been working for the U.S. Embassy, Pentagon, Special Ops under cover or the CIA, that he has garnered or bought enough contacts to pose a real threat to not only me and those near me but the over all mission of the United States and the Coalition that is fighting there."
     The military took no action. Mr. Idema continued a steady climb to worldwide fame and occasional fortune before his recent plunge to notoriety.
     He is now on trial in Afghanistan, along with two American associates, for running a private prison in which he is alleged to have tortured captives as he pursued a $25 million bounty for Mr. bin Laden. In the United States, the U.S. attorney's office in North Carolina has initiated at least two court proceedings against him, including one to collect unpaid fines related to his 1994 conviction on 58 counts of wire fraud.
     Mr. Idema's attorney, John Tiffany, denied his client tortured anyone or sought a bounty but does not deny Mr. Idema detained Afghan men in a Kabul home. In May, Mr. Idema e-mailed photos of himself and others interrogating a blindfolded Afghan man, whose hands are bound, head heavily bandaged and clothes that appear to be stained with blood.
     Mr. Idema acknowledged in an e-mail message sent to multiple recipients that the bounty offered by the U.S. government was on his mind. In a Feb. 15, 2002, message, he referred to one of his failed attempts to capture the al-Qaeda leader as "a day late and a dollar short ($25 million of them to be exact)."
     Mr. Idema has asserted at his trial in Kabul that his actions were coordinated with and sanctioned by the U.S. and Afghan governments. U.S. and Afghan officials have denied any relationship with him and say they have found no evidence to back his claims.
     Although Mr. Idema has issued conflicting statements, he acknowledged in Mr. Moore's book that his Afghanistan mission, which he named Task Force Sabre/Task Force 7, was "unofficial and unsanctioned." Mr. Tiffany conceded there is no evidence Mr. Idema received any contract or funding from the U.S. government.
     Mr. Idema has asserted since 2001 that he was on a military Special Operations mission to advise the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance militia, which helped defeat al-Qaeda and its ruling Taliban sponsors.
     But the chief Afghan representative in Washington, H.E. Haron Amin, denied those assertions from the start. He wrote in a December 2001 letter to Mr. Artis, "Mr. Keith Idema is not now nor has he ever been an official civilian adviser to the Northern Alliance."
     Mr. Tiffany insists that the letter is not the final word and that Mr. Idema met with numerous high-level Afghan officials who gave verbal approval for his and Task Force Sabre's alleged mission.
     Mr. Idema's transformation from penniless ex-con to counterterrorism super-spy was a collaborative work in  which the mass media played a crucial, if unwitting, role, according to journalists and military personnel who watched it happen.
     "Keith looked like he'd spent a lot of time on uscavalry.com," said Tim Friend, a reporter for USA Today who met Mr. Idema in northern Afghanistan.
     Mr. Moore's book includes a vivid description of how Mr. Idema took command of a group in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 after National Geographic Television producer Gary Scurka was injured by shrapnel from an incoming Taliban tank round.
     Mr. Friend, who said he has six years' experience as an operating room technician, cleaned and dressed Mr. Scurka's wounds, which he described as "not life-threatening."
     In the book, however, Mr. Idema is described heroically as taking control of the situation, cleaning up Mr. Friend's messy bandage work, and saving Mr. Scurka's life by hauling him to safety and arranging an evacuation helicopter. National Geographic Television cameras recorded his every move.
     Mr. Friend, who witnessed the incident, described the book's account as a "complete fabrication."
     Chris Thompson, who co-wrote the book with Mr. Moore, said he relied on an account by Mr. Idema for the passage in the book. Mr. Scurka provided corroboration, he said.
     A search of Mr. Idema's now-defunct Web sites showed that he and Mr. Scurka had a longstanding business partnership through PBN News, a documentary production company the two ran.
     Mr. Scurka acknowledged that he had traveled to Afghanistan with a detailed "pitch" in which he would depict Mr. Idema's Special Forces exploits saving a humanitarian mission from disaster. He said the account in the book is accurate.
     "Keith was blustering and just basically going nuts," Mr. Friend said of Mr. Idema's behavior when Mr. Scurka was injured and the television cameras were videotaping him. "I have a feeling that Keith was making sure they were rolling. It took me a little while to figure out why Keith was behaving that way, but when I realized that he and Gary had this script, I realized that Keith was playing for the script, for the cameras."
     Mr. Artis, of Knightsbridge International, confirmed Mr. Friend's version.
     Even before they arrived in 2001, U.S. officials were asking questions about who Mr. Idema really was. He and Mr. Scurka were detained in Uzbekistan after they tried to enter without visas in order to enter northern Afghanistan. Mr. Idema carried a letter saying he was a humanitarian aid worker, while Mr. Scurka had National Geographic credentials.
     They traveled to the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent on Nov. 2, 2001, and emerged with an embassy letter requesting Uzbek visas on their behalf. The signed and stamped letter identified them as "Contracting Officers from Defense Department, who arrived to the Republic of Uzbekistan for official trip."
     The visa provided by the Republic of Tajikistan has a different passport number for Mr. Idema than the one issued for Uzbekistan.     
     A letter from the Tajikistan mission to the United Nations in October 2001 also granted a visa to Eduardo Caraballo, a cameraman employed by PBN News who is also on trial with Mr. Idema in Kabul.
      Mr. Caraballo's brother, Richard, said he persuaded his younger brother to abort that trip. But he failed to dissuade him from traveling last April on the trip that landed Mr. Caraballo and Mr. Idema in jail.
     Mr. Idema has transmitted photographs by e-mail of Mr. Caraballo dressed in military garb standing alongside Mr. Idema and his associates, all of whom are identified in an email message as Task Force Sabre/Task Force 7 members. Richard Caraballo said he does not believe his brother knew what he was getting into with Mr. Idema.
     In the last two years, Mr. Idema has been indentified as a covert Special Forces operative by such prestigious news organizations as CBS, CNN, National Public Radio and Fox News -- all of which gave him extensive air time in which to expound on his unconfirmed exploits.
     In numerous broadcast interviews, Mr. Idema was asked to explain why the government allowed him to speak when other agents and operatives couldn't. Invariably, Mr. Idema switched the subject without responding to the question. In interviews reviewed for this story, the point was never pressed.
     He achieved particular fame in 2002 after claiming to have uncovered seven hours of secret al-Qaeda training tapes. Instead of handing them over to any of the U.S. agencies he said he work ed for, Mr. Idema tried to sell them to the news media for as much as $70,000 each.
     Close associates of Mr. Idema said the income from those tapes helped fund his future missions in Afghanistan, possibly including the private prison and interrogation operation that is the focus of his current trial.
     However, U.S. intelligence agencies reviewed the tapes and dismissed them as fake, according to one knowledgeable source. A voice analysis concluded that Mr. Idema himself can be heard at one point shouting, "Come in," as a supposed terrorist trainee knocks at the door, the source said .
     News organizations were quietly warned that the tapes were of dubious authenticity, the source said. But in the wake their wide distribution, it's clear that not all heeded the warning.

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