Editor's note: GlobalPost correspondent James Foley was killed on Aug. 19, 2014 by Islamic State militants in Syria, where he had been held for close to two years. In 2011, Foley spent 44 days in captivity inside Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. This is his story.
The Capture
There is a single main highway along which lies every major city between the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in the east and the capital Tripoli in the west. It snakes along the coast and passes through Ajdabiya, Brega, Sirte and Misrata, cities made world famous by months of back and forth, and deadly, conflict.
The four of us were riding in the back of a red minibus at the beginning of April, approaching the strategic oil town of Brega, where some of the heaviest fighting of the conflict had been taking place. Our driver was a teenage boy, like his friend in the passenger's seat. The so-called front in this war was always changing. But we had already passed the last rebel checkpoint and we knew whatever front existed was beginning to reveal itself.
Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.
We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.
Two rebel trucks followed slowly from behind, filling up our back window before soaring past. This was how the rebel convoys seemed to form, like schools of fish that hunted together, but with no clear leader or command structure.
Over a small hill we saw some men, boys really, standing around a sedan. We leaped out to do some interviews. Clare asked how far away Gaddafi's forces were. The boy said 300 meters. 300 meters? I looked at Clare. It seemed impossible. But as a precaution, we hustled off to the side of the road. A static mortar or a rocket position could have easily dialed in on us from that distance. The small convoy rolled ahead, leaving us behind in what we thought was relative safety.
We watched the rebels push forward. They weren’t 200 meters away, at the rise of the next hill, when they sped back around. We watched for a second as they beared back down on us, followed by a barrage of machine gun fire. The loudest I had ever heard. Our small group of journalists — Anton, Clare, my fellow American, and Manu, a Spanish photographer — took off running.
"We need to get to the vehicles,” Anton shouted. But the rebel trucks were retreating too fast and the ones in pursuit were firing wildly. There were two Gaddafi military pickups — tan with large machine guns mounted on the back. The trucks were overflowing with armed men.
With all the bullets flying, we pressed ourselves as close to the ground as possible. The rebels faded into the distance and the Gaddafi trucks slowed to a stop. The shooting continued. The roar of bullets overhead sounded like machines eating up metal. AK-47 rounds ripped past us from less than 50 meters.
I crawled back toward Clare and Manu, who were under several small trees. The shooting intensified. We tried to speak, to yell for each other. But the bullets tearing overhead deafened everything. In a corner of my mind I hoped that we were in a cross fire, that behind us the rebels were shooting back. I crawled forward toward a larger sand dune with my camera rolling. Anton crouched about 10 to 15 meters ahead of me. The bullets streamed directly over my helmet and shoulders. This was no crossfire. They were shooting at us, and they were shooting to kill.
"Help, help," I heard Anton cry. His voice was weak. My mind tried to convince me of something I knew was not true. Maybe he had just fallen and twisted something. Another barrage of bullets passed over me. "Anton, are you ok?" I shouted between bursts of fire.
"No," he said, in a much weaker voice.
I’ve heard journalists say that Libya was the perfect war. A reporter could get to the front line, close enough to hear the shells coming in, and back to a comfortable hotel in Benghazi, with a solid internet connection, by evening.
But in reality, this war was anything but perfect — something I’d soon come to learn. It was a war led by the youth, the idealistic, but also by the inexperienced and with an oppressive sense of the unknown. This latest spasm of the Arab Spring had much the idealism of Tunis or Cairo, but quickly became showered in blood. For me, it truly revealed itself with a rifle butt to the head, which bruised into weeks of uncertainty, captivity and ended, however improbably, in an ex-general's safe house in the besieged Libyan capital.
Along the way, between blindfolds and quiet conversations with fellow captives deep inside the country’s brutal prison system, I witnessed the last gasps of the Gaddafi regime — a corrupt and corrupted system that for more than 40 years ruled this tribal, oil-rich land.
I had done several tours as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for me, the frontlines felt natural. And I believed it was my job. But the freedom with which you could maneuver was deceptive. There was no highly-trained U.S. platoon to escort you. And the rebels were said to be some of the worst trained soldiers in the world. Most had never held a gun before the end of February, when they stormed Benghazi's “katiba” and took them by force.
I tried to hold farther back after a few close calls — a near miss by a Girad rocket, for instance, or a tank shell ripping over the heads of Manu and I outside Ajadibya. Our ears popped. But the front kept calling.
As is common among freelancers, Clare Gillis, a 34-year-old from Connecticut, Manu Brabo, a 29-year-old from Gijon, Spain, and myself, had been sharing rides and interviews together for several weeks. Anton Hammerl, a South African photographer who covered much of Africa — from the townships during Apartheid to child soldiers in the Congo — came late to our little group.
With all the rebel offensives and retreats along the coastal highway, we felt we had to get to the front every few days or risk completely losing track of the story. So on April 5, we headed out.
Our plan was to try and get a sense of who was really controlling Brega, a strategic oil town that had been the scene of some of the most deadly fighting since the uprising began several months earlier. A rebel general told us that if the rebels took Brega, they would hold it without advancing right away, thus learning from earlier mistakes where they stretched themselves too thin and were forced into whole scale retreats.
But Brega was dangerous. Manu and I had been caught in heavy shelling outside the town days before. I had seen two shells bounce off the ground a hundred meters away. A rebel was killed by shrapnel to the head in the truck Manu had leaped into for escape. He went with them to the hospital, hugged the bawling comrades afterwards and shot some eerie photos of them washing blood off their grenades.
Still, Brega was where the front was, so we woke up early to beat the crush of reporters. The four of us went in a Mercedes van piloted by a teen. We stopped at the only manned checkpoint some 20 kilometers outside town, where a crowd of the usual disheveled men, many of them teens, milled about waiting for the real fighters to assemble. We got out into the early sunshine and told our driver he could leave us there. It was just after 10 a.m.
We waited. Usually, with shouts of “Allah Akbar,” a convoy would push ahead, and we’d jump into one of the rebel vehicles heading to the front.
The red mini-bus started moving and we hustled on. It drove ahead with us as its only passengers, the young driver and his friend in front looked nervously from side to side. We stopped after a kilometer to inspect two smoldering pickup trucks, blackened crisps in the road. It appeared to have been a rebel ambush.
"Hit by a Sam 7," Anton said pointing out the expended launcher and wire guidance system leading to the cindered vehicles. I took note of his wealth of knowledge. He’d been forced to join the South African infantry as a young man and hadn’t relished it.
As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head.
The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent.
My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47.
The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent. The terrifying reality grabbed hold of me. The soldiers firing probably didn't know that we were reporters. Rebels didn't dress in regular uniforms and many were often not even armed. I had to surrender or we’d all be gunned down.
I leaped up from where my head had been buried in the sand to face the group of wild men shooting uncontrollably — it seemed our only hope. I held up my hands and yelled, "Sahafa! Sahafa!" It was one of the few Arabic words I knew. It meant, “journalist.” I walked slowly toward them.
There were three or four skinny, Arab-looking soldiers carrying AK-47s and a larger, darker one to the right. My eyes drifted toward Anton as I stumbled past the dune ahead of me.
He was lying face down in the sand, his body askew, cameras still strapped around his shoulders, his legs splayed out. As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head.
My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47. All my instincts for self-preservation gathered within me. I went completely limp and complacent. The adrenaline was coursing so heavily.
I was thrown into the back of one of the pickup trucks. An Army boot pushed my face onto the floor. I glanced back and saw Manu and Clare being pulled off the ground.
A crazed looking soldier looked down and jeered at me in English, "You go on patrol! You go on patrol!" as if he knew exactly what we'd been trying to do. A cell phone was pushed close to my face. A picture was snapped. "Gaddafi Meia Meia," a younger one said, thumping his chest, “Gaddafi 100 percent.” These words terrified me.
After weeks of being with rebels who said things like, “Fuck Gaddafi,” with regular consistency, we had now found ourselves with the other side, the ones who had pledged their dying allegiance to the country's dictatorial leader of more than four decades.
Clare and Manu were also forced down into the bed of the truck. Manu was face down and Clare, pushed against his side, was facing me. I looked at her for the first time. She had a purpled eye. She saw blood running from my scalp.
"Jim, are you ok?" she said, pleadingly. I nodded, and took stock of the blood pooling in the back of the truck. With a boot again on my face, my hands were bound behind me with a plastic cord. We sped away from the scene.
To Qaddafi's Hometown
As we were driven fast over the sandy hills toward Brega, I stared at the back of Clare’s head. The soldiers wore semi-military uniforms — khaki fatigues, web belts and army boots. Like the rebels, they appeared to be mostly teenagers.
Their aggression gave way to a celebratory reenactment of the attack. Pretending their fingers were AK-47s, they shot into the air, laughing. I had seen this kind of behavior before. Soldiers often made light of an attack to mask the confusion and pain that inflicting violence must cause.
We pulled into a neighborhood in Brega, which seemed eerily quiet. The loyalist forces had commandeered a civilian house. All the other houses appeared recently abandoned. The soldiers yanked me out of the truck by the back of my arms, I started to fall out head first. Then one of the leaders stopped the soldier and sat me up before I hit the ground. The entirety of our detainment would be colored by this kind of confusion, acts of violence and intimidation muddled by small acts of decency.
We were marched inside and forced to kneel toward opposite walls. One of the young soldiers came toward me and I cringed, preparing myself for another beating. Instead, he began to wrap my bleeding head with toilet paper. He said some comforting words in Arabic and I felt a fleeting moment of calm.
Clare, Manu and I were taken into the living room and made to sit on a row of couches facing three soldiers. The older one, maybe in his mid-twenties, with slicked-back hair, questioned us in broken English, asking where we were from. Clare and I repeated Ameriki; Manu — Espani.
He held up a photo from my wallet they’d confiscated. It was of my youngest brother Mark in his American military uniform with an American flag behind him. He examined the photo and pointed at me. "Militar," he said.
"No," I replied emphatically. "Brother, brother." I gestured to the back of the photo, to an inscription my mother probably wrote. “Love Mark,” in her precise script, as if that was some kind of proof, for a Libyan who couldn’t read English, that the photo wasn't of me.
"No problem," the young man in charge said. It was the first time that I heard that phrase, but it wouldn't be the last. I'd hear those words many times over. The phrase would come to mean its opposite. For me, it indicated that, in fact, this was a big problem. “Two or three days you go back to your country,” he said — another line I would hear many times.
Two young soldiers stood guard, one with his AK-47 pointed in our direction. We asked them to loosen the bonds, which had become very uncomfortable, but they shook their heads.
Clare whispered to me if Anton was okay. Her glasses had been knocked off when she was punched, and she’d seen Anton in a pool of blood, but wasn't sure what had happened. Manu and I told her Anton was dead. Clare looked wounded. The soldiers yelled at us to stop talking.
We could hear soldiers trudging back and forth in other rooms. A few sauntered into the living room. Their youthful swagger made me nervous. A skinny one saw my neck pouch and rebel press ID under my collar. He pulled out the ID, flipped it over and examined it with curiosity. He made some jokes in Arabic and spit at me. Their leader ushered them out like children bothering the dinner guests.
"You think we're going to Tripoli?" Clare asked. I nodded. The thought was dreadful. Several New York Times reporters had been captured weeks earlier. It was a story we knew by heart. It had read like a movie script, and now it was our movie script.
Hours later, an older sergeant came in wearing a military hat. He told us that we would be taken to Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown. We were blindfolded and another set of zip ties were wrapped around our wrists.
We were shoved in the back of a small sedan. The car stopped at dozens of checkpoints along the coastal highway. Too tall, my knees were digging into the back of the driver's seat. A guard I could not see turned around to re-position me.
At some point in the ride, I felt a hand reach for my neck and slide down my chest. I tried to be still, but my arms hurt more than anything. He opened my neck pouch and took from it all the money I had.
A strange kind of tantric music mixed with words from the movie "300" played over Gaddafi's infamous "Dar, Dar, Zenga, Zenga" speech. Listening to that hoarse, enraged voice, over and over, the terror of where they were taking us began to sink in. At one checkpoint, a rough voice came through the window. “Fuck Sahafa, Fuck Obama, Fuck Everybody.” A voice at another checkpoint growled, “You are in Trabulous (Tripoli) now!”
“Wait, we’re in Tripoli?” Clare asked, incredulous. It was impossible. We’d only been traveling west for about three hours. The voice must have only been trying to intimidate us. We decide that we must have been in Sirte.
We felt the car roll through gates that we assumed were military. We parked and were marched up a flight of stairs. They forced us down and we knelt on the concrete. A pair of hands unwrapped the double layer of cords and zip ties and my arms and shoulders were finally free.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, shukran!” I said, feeling Manu’s relief as well next to me.
They ushered us into a lone cell, I flopped onto a mattress on the floor. I was too tired to think. I drifted to sleep. Later that night, I was again blindfolded and taken before some kind of official. I could hear them flipping through the pages of my passport. I told them I was a journalist and who I worked for. At the end of about an hour of questioning, the interrogator said he thought I was a spy. “I’m not a spy, I’m a journalist,” I said. I was guided back down the stairs and into my cell.
The next morning I woke up in a white washed cell, grimed with streaks of either blood or feces, or both. Sun peeked through from a barred window high on the back wall. The initial capture and beating replayed through my mind on a loop.
I spent the whole day thinking and trying to sleep, my mind wandering between anguish and confusion. I was given rice dishes with no silverware. I ate greedily with my hands.
A man dressed as a civilian appeared at my door. I asked for a cigarette, he gave me one and, of all things, a banana. It was the first of many acts of kindness that would get us through the coming weeks. “We are prisoners too,” he whispered with a smile.
I spent the whole day thinking and trying to sleep, my mind wandering between anguish and confusion. I was given rice dishes with no silverware. I ate greedily with my hands.
That night we were pulled out of our cells. I was told to wash the blood from my face and hair. Clare and Manu appeared in the hall and we held a long embrace. We were guided upstairs and asked to do an interview for the state-controlled television station. We discussed among each other whether or not we should agree to do it.
A television crew was already setting up. We thought that some channel outside of Libya might pick it up, and it might be a good way to begin ingratiating ourselves with the Libyan government.
A female reporter with beige make up and a beige hijab began arranging our chairs in front of the camera. She asked Clare and I who had done the damage to our faces. We said it had been Gaddafi's soldiers. “No!” she replied. “Impossible.”
The interviewer held out a microphone bearing the insignia of State TV. We replied as truthfully as we could. The interviewer, a man, asked how we felt about the NATO air strikes that had recently begun across the country. Manu said he was opposed to international intervention in any internal conflict. I mumbled something about how air strikes were good if they protect civilians, bad if they kill civilians. He reminded me to look at the camera.
The next afternoon we were pulled out of our cells and led upstairs without blindfolds. A large man said we were going to Tripoli, confirming our earlier suspicions. We walked out, unbound in the sun, not quite believing how freely they were treating us.
There were three other captured journalists in the van with us — Hassan Zeitouni, an Algerian British television correspondent; Megdi, his Egyptian cameraman; and another younger Libyan Egyptian who appeared to be their fixer.
Zeitouni was wearing clean, even elegant clothes. They were captured rather cordially, it seemed. He said that the captain of the group who had captured them was Gaddafi’s cousin. He was confident we’d be released soon. With no blindfolds and more cigarettes, we watched the desert countryside passing by as the van flew toward Tripoli. All of us were lifted by the journey.
But we had darker things on our minds. “We cannot say anything,” Manu said, his eyes full, referring to Anton. It was what we had all been thinking. Clare and I nodded.
The Trial
We had been in captivity now for two days. Five hours after leaving Sirte, we arrived in Tripoli. A city of modern high-rise apartments, its outskirts were plastered with billboards praising the 42-year old revolution. Like a tour guide, our drivers pointed out Gaddafi’s palace, Baab Al Azziza. There was a line of cars waiting to get in.
“See Tripoli is normal,” the driver said. We blinked in amazement. Indeed, the only thing out of sorts was the extraordinarily long line of cars at the gas station.
When we were taken out of the van, at a military base, the energy changed immediately. Authoritative voices yelled at us, telling us to keep our heads down. A blindfold was tied too tightly over my eyes and my hands rebound. Then all six of us were shoved into a paddy wagon and driven to some kind of prison.
The next thing I saw was my cell, a large concrete block with a row of bunk beds pushed against the far wall. There was one window over the cell door. Clare soon followed, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn't be alone. Manu and the others were placed in other cells.
When they first came, they came after midnight. Clare was first. A young, slick-looking guy carrying an AK-47, said “Madam,” and motioned for her to follow. Clare quietly refused. He insisted. She left, and didn't return for more than eight hours. Somehow I managed to get some sleep. When she came back, at about 7 a.m. in the morning, she burst into tears.
“It was horrible,” she said. “They think I’m a spy.”
“Clare, that’s just the game they’re playing,” I said, trying to comfort her. I knew I’d be next. They would do this to all of us one by one. We could be accused of being spies it seemed, regardless of the truth, or the evidence.
The next evening I was taken upstairs in a blindfold. Knowing how Clare had been broken down over many hours, I tried to calm myself, to prepare for a similar kind of interrogation. They sat me down in a dirty office, or maybe a storage room. There were bunk beds without mattresses and a heavy desk littered with cigarette butts and trash. I was blindfolded again when my interrogator entered the room.
“Are you a sporting man?” he asked, leaning over me, clutching my thighs in an aggressive but not altogether unfriendly manner.
“The Americans are bombing us with Tomahawks,” he said in English. “Tomahawks. I can show you where they’ve hit houses and killed our children.” I nodded, thinking it was probably best to agree with everything he said. “My grandfather fought the Italians from a horse. From a horse!” He yelled. “Allah, Gaddafi, Libya,” he pronounced. This went on for several hours.
When he finally began asking how I got into Libya, who I reported for, where I had stayed, and who I had talked to — I was careful to tell the truth, and to be consistent, down to the number of stories I had filed. I knew I wasn’t smart enough to construct a lie, that it would be dangerous and with no obvious benefit. I said I hadn’t met any prominent rebels besides the Transitional Council spokesmen, only omitting the name of the rebel general we’d interviewed.
The interrogation began to turn. The voice asked me about the rebels themselves — were they well armed? How did they eat, how did they get money? I told him about how poorly the rebels were organized, how they often went to the front unarmed. I said I thought they were crazy, which was true. He asked me if I would go on State TV and say these things. “The TV station is waiting outside,” he said. But he was lying.
I started to become paranoid. I thought that maybe I was being too quick to please and that the voice was seeing an angle. I envisioned myself separated from Clare and Manu and carted around Tripoli as a propaganda tool. I asked for a cigarette. “We are done smoking,” he said.
“I don’t want to do a TV interview,” I said. The voice exploded. “You eat with us, you smoke with us! We treat you nice. You say the rebels are crazy. And you won’t tell us in a TV interview. Now you are lying!” he yelled. “Your country is bombing us and you are lying!”
My stomach curled and fear enveloped my whole body. “This was going to be a soft interrogation, now it’s going to be a hard interrogation! Take off your shoes,” he commanded. I obeyed. The bottoms of the feet are extremely sensitive and thus useful in torture. They would beat the bottoms of my feet until I submitted, I thought. He kicked my shoes aside. I began to tremble. “Will you at least write what you said?”
I nodded, still trembling. “Okay, okay, he is very nervous,” another translator said. His reasonableness was either genuine or it was part of the charade. “Put your shoes back on.” I did. “Give him a cigarette.” I took one. I inhaled, feeling a huge sense of relief. It was a classic good cop/bad cop routine. I felt like a scared child rewarded with threats for following directions.
The voice grabbed both my thighs again and squeezed playfully. “We are not CIA. We blindfold you and ask you questions, but remember we are not CIA. The CIA are killers. Killers!”
“You will go back to your country in two or three days,” he said, and left the room. I was allowed to lift my blindfold to write a series of paragraphs about how disorganized the rebels were. Then I signed my “confession,” which they had transcribed in long hand Arabic, and pressed a green ink thumbprint to each page. Clare had done the same thing the night before. Blindfolded yet again, I was guided back down stairs and to my cell.
On my way, Manu's voice called out to me. “Jim,” he called from his cell.
“Manu, brother, how are you?”
“Ok,” he said, “just got back from interrogation.”
“Me too,” I said.
Clare and I sat for 11 more days in that cell, praying, telling each other the endings of books we hadn’t read and movies we hadn’t seen, and worrying about our families. We worried about Manu in his cell two doors down. We couldn’t imagine how it was to be alone. He later told us he spent a good amount of time constructing juggling balls from tape and ripped blankets. We searched for things to talk about besides when or how we’d be released. One afternoon, Clare, who has a PhD in history, lectured me for four hours on the fall of the Roman Empire.
Each day brought more worry that our moms were at home panicking. We felt guilty for the pain our disappearance was surely causing them. Clare was supposed to have called on her mom’s birthday, the day after we were captured. I prayed my mom would know I was okay. I prayed I could communicate this through some cosmic reach of the universe.
I began to say the rosary. It was what my mother and grandmother would have done. It took a long time, almost an hour to count a hundred Hail Mary’s off on my knuckles. And it helped to keep my mind focused. That night a man tapped on the wall by Clare’s bed and she answered by speaking through the electrical socket, talking in French to a man named Mohammed.
The next day I banged on the opposite wall. I heard a tapping back. To our shock, the voice on the other side of the electrical outlet was American. He said he’d arrived in Tripoli in January with the approval to start a construction management company. When all the “trouble” started happening, he decided it was best to drive out through Egypt. He was stopped on the second checkpoint outside Tripoli, where he refused to bribe to a policeman, and was thrown in prison.
“I think I was the first American captured,” he said. He had a kind voice and quoted Bible scripture to us through the electrical socket. Both Clare and I prayed together out loud a few days after we met him. It energized us to express our weaknesses and hopes out loud and together, as if in a conversation with God, rather than silently and alone, lost in ourselves.
The mysterious American also talked and prayed with Manu, who happened to be on the other side of his cell. He called Manu Brabo, Johnny Bravo. “Hey, Johnny Bravo had a bad dream last night. He just wanted to make sure you guys are okay,” he would tell us.
Every few days, a kindly looking black man who seemed to be some kind of official, would stop by our cell and tell us that, in two or three days, we would be freed. We peppered him with questions — How? Together? A ferry to Malta? He didn’t have any details. Mostly, he would shrug and supply us with Marlboro reds.
Clare marked the days using her zipper on the wall. We started a new category of hash marks for the few cigarettes we managed to scrounge from the guards. I had smoked heavily since arriving in Libya, and the lack of nicotine combined with boredom was grating. I wished for a book, for anything to occupy myself other than our depressed faces looking back at each other. We tried exercise routines. Clare did yoga. I did push-ups and sit-ups. During the day, we would plan out what to talk about after dinner. One night it was failed relationships, another life stories. Out of burning desire to see something that would clue us in to what was happening, we would boost ourselves up on the cell door to look out the barred window into the courtyard, until one day Clare got caught and one of the interrogator’s told her that being curious was not a good thing.
On April 18, almost two weeks after our initial capture, they told Clare she was free to go and took her away. She returned three hours later utterly confused. The amount of times we were told that we were free, or soon to be free, and then not freed, was a vicious kind of mind game until we realized after weeks that the officials were just saying it to placate us. The next morning, the manager came back. “Free,” he said, “you and you,” pointing to us both. We bumped fists in jubilation.
I was blindfolded and led out to the paddy wagon, walking outside for the first time in 12 days. We were joined by Manu and Megdi, the Egyptian from MBC. After a quick ride through Tripoli's streets, we came to an abrupt stop, were hustled out of the paddy wagon and up a series of stairs into in a large, empty courtroom where we were placed in a cage, still handcuffed.
Clare was called before the prosecutor. She stalked back into the courtroom cage three hours later, dejected. “They’re holding me for seven to 10 days so his boss can check my information,” she said. Our hope deflated like a punctured tire.
A guard asked if I was American and made an “X” mark with his arms when I told him that I was. They took Megdi and I out to the paddy wagon without seeing the prosecutor. I feared they were sending us to a worse prison. Then Megdi said “Bukra,” meaning tomorrow. We would go to court tomorrow. So we were driven back to the detention center. That night I knelt and prayed.
The next morning, Megdi and I were taken back to the court, where we finally appeared before a prosecutor. A wizened interpreter asked me basic questions from my case file. He told me that I was being charged with entering the country without a visa and reporting without permission. I would appear before a judge in five days, he said. The interpreter asked if I had any requests. “Just that I join my friends,” I said, worried that I would be separated from them.
“Manu and Clare,” the interpreter nodded, “I helped them yesterday.”
The Prison
Megdi and I were shoved into a dingy office with steel cabinets, where a prison guard rifled through our clothes looking for contraband. The guard was especially rough with Megdi. In tears, he tried to explain that he was a journalist with MBC.
“Sahafa?” the guard said, “Sahafa this!” he shouted, sticking up two middle fingers.
We were led down a concrete hall past a puddle of filthy water, and down a long hallway lined with cells. An outer door was unlocked. There were two cells on either side of a small courtyard littered with breadcrumbs and cigarette butts. We had arrived at Al Jadida, a general prison.
The guards opened the door on the right and I caught my first glimpse of my future cellmates. They were all on the floor, huddled around wooden bowls of macaroni. I had no idea what to expect. But they were welcoming. Megdi introduced us and explained that we were “Sahafa.”
“Welcome Jim!” a big Libyan named Abdullah said. Within minutes these guys, all of them Libyan, were treating me like a guest. After all the confusion and show of the courthouse, and bouncing around Tripoli on the rough planks of a paddy wagon, a feeling of calm swept over me. These, I thought, were my people.
They gave me a choice piece of chicken and I was offered a cigarette. They were all political prisoners, arrested under the wide umbrella of treason. Treason meant many things — from being from the rebellious cities of Zawiya or Zawara, to sending text messages, to possessing rifles. Every last one of them — there were eight Libyans in the cell with Megdi and myself — wanted nothing more than to see Gaddafi go down. It might be the only way they’d ever see their families again.
Rdwan, a 24-year old from Zawara, had the build of a soccer player and scars on his nose from continuous beatings. He showed me where the electro-shocks had been attached to his index finger. The rebellion in his fishing village near the Tunisian border had been stomped out in less than two days by a line of Gaddafi tanks. “I just want freedom,” Rdwan said. “We experienced 20 days of it before the tanks came. It was beautiful.”
From the cell across the courtyard, I talked to Mamoud, 31, who had been busted for texting, “Fuck Gaddafi,” to a friend. “They pulled me over and found three text messages,” Mamoud said in surprisingly good English. He said he had been an engineer for an American oil company. Others had been swept up by roving vans that were monitoring phone conversations around Tripoli.
On that first night, Walid from Zawiya offered me his bunk and took the floor. The others stayed up half the night talking and smoking. Sleeping with a blanket over my head would become routine. Women were being kept in a separate wing, but I wanted to see if Manu was in the same wing as me. I asked Mamoud’s friend, Tarik, if he’d heard of a Spanish guy being held in Al Jadida.
“Manu, Manu!” Tarik yelled, pushing his voice out the bars through the courtyard door. Amazingly, Manu shouted back from what sounded like the depths. “How are you bro?” I yelled. “Ok, and you?” he replied. I could tell just by his voice he was coping with the situation the same way I was — keeping friendly, and staying hopeful.
In that 12-by-15 foot cell, together with nine others, all you could do was go to the bars and look at birds clinging to the steel grating above the courtyard, or gaze up at the stars over Tripoli, or lie on a sofa made of woven rugs, waiting to smoke part of a shared cigarette. It dawned on me that this prison might be more removed, more insulated, than the first.
The cell wasn’t awful, just overcrowded. We had a functioning sink, a separate stall for a toilet and a shower. Al Jadida had been a criminal prison and outfitted like one. The regime let most of the criminal prisoners go in order to fill the cells with political ones, according to my cellmates.
There were six bunks for 10 people and light-colored roaches crawled around and over most of them. The guys who didn’t have bunks slept on mattresses woven from blankets and laid them crosswise on the floor to sleep. I was still wearing my jeans and blood stained shirt. Rdwan urged me to wash my clothes again, and I did. The next day I was happy that my jeans were stiff from laundry soap and a good drip dry. I used a yellow cloth ripped from a blanket for a belt.
“Five, maybe, seven days, Gaddafi finished,” Gheri, another cellmate from Zubrata, would say, looking at his beard in a triangle of shattered glass. It sounded good, but I wondered how these guys were so sure. Soon I realized they did it to stay sane.
After a week sitting in the same cell, nothing had changed. I waited for meal times, and waited to fall asleep after the late macaroni lunch. I woke up to my cellmates chanting prayers and to a reality that seemed increasingly bleak. I was still in prison, in the same cramped cell. Getting out somehow seemed more and more remote. This was a purgatory that no one outside Tripoli knew about. There was no telling how long I'd be there.
Mamoud told me about another freelance reporter named “Angel.”
“You mean Nigel?”
Mamoud nodded. My heart sank. I had heard this name while at the military detention center. I called out to him. His voice was weak but unmistakably English. He said he’d been there for more than 40 days, and he didn’t have much hope. “They don’t like me very much,” he said. I tried to imagine how dark his weeks had been in this prison, and wondered if we were being too optimistic about our chances of getting out.
It was difficult to focus my own prayers when the Libyan prisoners prayed five times a day. One of them was constantly reciting from the single pocket Koran they passed around.
When one evening the Haj mournfully called the evening prayer through the bars across the courtyard, I happened to be by the sink. Rdwan taught me how to purify my hands and arms with water. I decided I might as well go along with it. By the time I finished washing my feet and lining up on the prayer rugs, kneeling at “Allah Akbar,” I had unknowingly proclaimed my conversion to Islam. It must have been a sight for them — an American Christian trying to pray to Allah inside a Tripoli prison.
That very night, around 10 p.m., several guards called for me, and brought me out of the cell. In the hall I saw Manu and a man named Lutvig, a Tunisian Canadian, for the first time in a week. We were haggard but overjoyed to see each other. Manu told me he’d also been praying with his “mates.” Upstairs in the warden’s office, a distinguished man in a suit stood and said, “We felt you might want to call your families.” Strokes of disbelief shot through me. He gestured to a cell phone on the warden’s desk.
I said a final prayer and dialed the number. My mom answered the phone. “Mom, mom, it’s me Jim.”
“Jimmy, where are you?”
“I’m still in Libya mom. I’m sorry about this. So sorry.” I wanted to infer many things but the official was listening.
“Don’t be sorry Jim,” she pleaded. “Oh, Dad just left. Oh… He so wants to talk to you. How are you Jim?” I told her I was being fed, that I was getting the best bed and being treated like a guest.
“Are they making you say these things Jim?”
“No, the Libyans are beautiful people,” I said.
“I’ve been praying for you to know that I’m okay,” I said. “Haven’t you felt my prayers?”
“Oh Jimmy, so many people are praying for you! All your friends have been calling. Your brother Michael loves you so much!” She started to cry. “The Turkish embassy is trying to see you and also Human Rights Watch. Did you see them?” I said I hadn’t.
“They’re having a prayer vigil for you at Marquette. Don’t you feel our prayers?” she asked.
“I do mom, I feel them.” I thought about this for a second. Maybe it was their prayers strengthening me. I hadn’t thought about it because I had had no idea what was happening outside. But maybe their prayers were keeping me afloat.
The official made a motion. I started to say goodbye. Mom started to cry. “Mom, I’m strong, I’m okay. I should be home by Katie’s graduation,” I said, referring to my sister’s graduation in Boston, which was a month away.
“We love you Jim!” she said. I hung up and handed the phone to the official. I would replay that call hundreds of times in my head — my mother’s voice, the names of my friends, her knowledge of our situation, her absolute belief in the power of prayers. She sounded okay, even with the crying. She sounded strong. I returned to the cell feeling somehow lighter. “Called mama?” Abdullah asked. “Takalem Mama!” I shouted.
I pointed up at the ceiling. Their faces beamed — I called my mother hours after my first prayers to Allah. Mamoud nodded when I told him from the door. He smiled. “I am happy for you this day, as I’ve felt it every day I was raised Muslim.” I sat back on a bunk. They were up late talking as usual, but I felt a warm energy emanating from around the room. Maybe it was hope. The one thing Clare and I had been for weeks praying for had finally been gifted to us.
A few days later Manu and I were called up to the manager’s office again. Inside, a well-dressed man with polished English introduced himself as Mr. Shabbani, an assistant to Saadi Gaddafi. Saadi is Muammar Gaddafi's third son, a former professional soccer player with a reputation for drugs and luxury. “Engineer Saadi just heard about your case three days ago. He wants to help you,” he said. Shabbani said he had also just visited Clare.
He asked if we needed anything. We asked for a Koran in English, figuring it would help to know we were serious about our conversion to Islam. Word had gotten out all around the prison that we had converted. Manu asked for money for cigarettes. We felt like beggars, but Shabbani gave us each 50 dinars and promised to help find us a nicer place to stay. We didn’t believe his story, but thought it was a sign that outside forces, maybe the Turks, were advocating on our behalf.
I gave the 50 dinars to Mamoud. The group in his cell was almost out of cigarettes. I managed to move there that afternoon when the guards let us out briefly to clean the cells. There were two inmates who spoke English well, including Haj Abdel Ghani, a toothless imam, who’d denounced Gaddafi in front of 1,500 worshippers.
Here, the hierarchy of the cell was clear. The Haj was the symbolic leader. He kept the money and doled out cigarettes. He also led us all in prayer. Mamoud and Tarik were the “generals.” That is, they made all the deals for food and cigarettes with the guards and were always looking for angles, even to smuggle in a cell phone. From there the pecking order was based on age, with the youngest guys, like the Egyptian Hamedino, ordered to serve us chai, and regularly clean the cell.
As a foreigner and an American, I was the guest and treated well. I was also the freak show. I embraced the role. I would sing raps to them in English, or mimic them when I was in the mood, to howls of laughter.
Haj Abdel Ghani asked if my conversion was true. I wanted to please him, but also to learn more about Islam. I worked on memorizing the first prayer of the Koran, the Fatiha, which he wrote out phonetically on the back of a cigarette carton for me. Between my attempts to memorize the prayers, I would stare up at the calendar, written in ballpoint pen, on the bottom of the top bunk. I began to keep a journal.
Journal Entry No. 1, written on back of cigarette carton:
“Prison is a world of small miracles. To call your mother after disappearing for 17 days. To see your passport in a guard’s hand. A judge who gives you two more weeks without telling you. To get 50 dinars from a representative from Saadi Gaddafi’s office. To receive fresh packs of cigarettes, boxes of juice. To wash your jeans after 20 days, your shirt still spotted with blood after three sink washings. To learn the Fatiha and hope inner peace will carry you outside the bars. To be released for one hour to the sunshine and see the faces closed to the sun.”
Journal Entry No. 2, written on the back of a 10 x 15 photo of three children found in our cell:
“Tripoli is a series of bars and cells, separated by locks and keys, guards with the same haircuts, a court room with a green scale of justice surrounded by a Medusa like wreath. We travel to court in blindfolds, in boxes of steel, or in a bus with manacles on our wrists and ankles. The judge sits behind a desk in a dark suit jacket reading the same notes from the previous two questionings, while a young man transcribes new notes of the same answers.”
On the way to my third court appearance, we drove through the streets in a big prison bus. The head guard yelled insults at people in the traffic-clogged streets. When we disembarked at the courthouse, two guys in tracksuits yelled, “Fuck you,” at me as they passed. I looked over at big Mohammed and he winked.
Megdi and I shared leg irons, one two-ing it up the courthouse stairs. Mohammed shuffled behind in his own shackles. A girl walked by in nice heels, trailing a scent of perfume. The judge said he was reviewing my case. That was all.
“How much time you got brother?” I yelled down the hall to Manu when we returned to Al Jadida. “Two weeks,” he said. “Me too,” I think. “No problem man, just pray,” he said. I would have told him the same thing. I had spoken to my mother and was praying five times a day.
On the afternoon of April 29, almost a month after I was first captured, a guard came into our cell and said, “James, free.” Mamoud saw my eyes light up. I hugged all of them and made sure my notes and their phone numbers were stuffed under the insole of my shoe. I shouted to Nigel that I was getting out. I was waiting by the door when I saw Manu being escorted down the hall, a bandana over his loose hair. The guards passed by my cell, stopping at Nigel’s instead. I could hear the clanging of the doors. Then silence. I looked at Mamoud. “Just wait,” he said. I smoked two cigarettes as I paced up and down our little carpet in front of the cell door.
The guard was confused, Mamoud said. I felt sick. They had freed all the western journalists but me. I had just yelled to Nigel that I was getting out and to give me any messages for his family. Now he was getting out instead. Separation from the others was my worst fear all along.
But that night, something much more terrifying would rain down from the sky. The fear of death, like I had felt all those weeks ago on the side of a road outside Brega, again took over. The war was coming near. We could hear NATO's jets soaring overhead, and the rumbling of bombs at night. We’d hear the explosions and rush to the cell door, listening intently, quietly, telling everyone to hush. “Allah Akbar!” the other inmates would yell every time a new bomb would strike.
A bomb whirled down from the sky. I could hear it come closer and closer,
listening to the whistle as it cut through the sky above Tripoli. It seemed to take minutes to reach us. It struck so close to our prison home that it shook the foundation and all of us with it. Then another — whistle, explosion — as Mamoud ducked for cover in the bathroom and Motsen, a new cellmate from Zawara, tried to dive underneath one of the bunks.
The young Egyptian, Hamdeino, Abdu Baset, a volunteer ambulance driver who’d been shot in Zawiya, and two others, fearing for their lives, lifted the heavy steel door off the bathroom hinges and began to ram it into the outer cell door, joining the 14 other cells that were simultaneously trying to do the same thing. I feared we’d all be shot if they broke free. After a few minutes of slamming, the guards ran down the hall threatening violence. Mamoud shot back that he didn’t want to die there.
Hours later an obviously drunk officer came by to calm us down. He carried a .45 under his belt. Mamoud and Tarik charmed him, laughing at our earlier panic. The next day my feeling of isolation grew. A feeling I’d been left because I was American. That to hold me was probably a good insurance policy as NATO planes lit up the sky around Tripoli. After the fifth prayer of the day, I prayed in my bunk to Jesus, and tried to sleep with the blanket over my face to keep out the cigarette smoke.
A few more days passed. They seemed to just pass and pass, day in and day out, again and again. Mamoud asked around the prison when he made his rounds to serve lunch. He confirmed that Manu and the others were probably at a refugee camp in Tripoli or, maybe, they had already crossed into Tunisia.
“What if they keep me in here as a bargaining chip, Mamoud?”
“Impossible,” he said. “Don’t think.” His friendship helped me preserve my dignity, to help me contain my worry, and to not break down. I surrendered even more to prayer. By the following Sunday I had accepted the fact that it was not a mistake — that I was the last westerner on the political wing, maybe one of the last in Tripoli.
My cellmates thought Nigel had gone insane during his 40 days in prison and I worried the same would happen to me. “Nigel crazy,” Hamdeino said. Mamoud said he saw Nigel hitting his head against the cell bars. I later learned that the sores on his head were more likely from malnutrition, or lack of sunlight.
Journal Entry No. 3, written on the back of a cigarette carton:
“In four days I will have been in captivity over a month. It’s passed with slow conversations, cigarettes, praying, eating, sleeping and hoping the next day it will happen.”
The bombing increased in frequency. As I waited one night to go to sleep, the power went out. One of the Libyans made a lamp out of a sardine tin filled with cooking oil. It made our all-night conversations feel oddly romantic. The next day's rumors were that the rebellious Tajoura neighborhood had cut the lights because they were going to come in and free us. I almost believed it.
By May 4, conditions began to improve for all of us. It was as if the guards knew which way the wind was blowing politically — we were allowed to go outside in the courtyard to see the sun. Tarik got deliveries of cookies, Pepsi, Marlboro reds, tomatoes and coffee. A few days later his brother brought in bags of new clothes for dozens of prisoners. I was given an Adidas shirt and warm up pants. Prisoners began wearing tri-colored bracelets they’d woven from re-braided blankets.
On May 7, the guards called my name and Mamoud said that I should bring my stuff. I made the round of hugs again, this time half-heartedly, knowing it was likely yet another false alarm. I was taken up to the prison manager’s office and said goodbye to Mamoud on the stairs. He looked at me from behind his bushy beard and meaningful eyes. I wanted to say something more to him, but didn’t want to jinx my chances.
In the warden’s office I signed some papers and they photographed me. I was guided back into the familiar old paddy wagon. It felt like a ride that would lead to my freedom, but I had learned over and over again that you could never be sure. I wondered to myself what would happen to the prisoners who didn’t have the assistance that I apparently did. One day I was pledging to leave with them in a mass release; the next day I was being whisked away by unseen forces.
The Villa
I was taken out of the paddy wagon and led into some kind of compound. They sat me down in a soft chair. I could feel that it was a luxurious place. I thought I might see an ambassador or some other sort of official. It was the only thing that made sense.
A man in a suit came in and said, “upstairs,” with a flourish of his hands. A servant took me up, past a living room with gold-cushioned furniture. I saw people sitting at a table out of the corner of my eye, and figured them to be prominent members of the regime, or guardians of it. I was led to a posh hotel-style room with twin beds.
I looked down the hallway and there, a sight I had cast aside as impossible, was Manu and Clare. “Hey bro!” I blinked at them. It was actually Manu and Clare. They had been sitting at the table and saw me come in. After a week apart, I’d decided it was foolish to even pray for a reunion.
I marveled at their stories of cigarettes, TV and fruit baskets, all plentiful at this three-floor villa, which was owned by a former Gaddafi general. His son, Saadi, had set up the accommodations, Clare said. And it was true, the guards had mistakenly taken Nigel instead of me.
“There were days when I had to decide whether I asked for you or more cigarettes,” Clare said, with her Cheshire smile.
That evening I took a long shower and slept in a soft bed. I woke up in the night, expecting the Arabic and cigarette smoke of the cell. Instead it was just the clipped voices of the BBC Nigel watched from the living room.
In the villa, TV satellite proved all the hopeful news we clung to in jail was wrong — there was no sign of a NATO invasion of Tripoli and there was no open rebellion there either. No one knew that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan a week earlier.
Manu and I continued to pray, laying rugs in the room with the plants. We didn’t pray as much as in prison, but it helped to keep to some of the spiritual routines, as it was apparent we were only experiencing the illusion of freedom, and it was unclear how long they’d keep us there.
Two days later, the retired general appeared and politely told us we had visitors. The Hungarian ambassador, Ambassador Marton, was a joyful, balding man who liked to rub his hands together. We spoke for a few minutes before he asked, “And do you have any information where this man Anton is?” It was the first time anyone had asked about him. Our minds darkened. We said we didn’t.
“I think he’s already been released, right?” the general interrupted. It was an awkward interjection and I began to sense that we were getting the first glimpse of the kind of lies the regime had been spreading.
Despite the lie, we were all buoyed by an actual fact — an embassy was now involved. It was the first sign that diplomatic machinery had engaged. The Hungarians said they were appealing to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ambassador Marton said the regime was afraid of making a mistake by freeing us, that we might still have some value to them, especially if their backs were ever against the wall.
We might be there all summer, the general inferred. At least, he said, it was a nice place to stay. It was a strange phase of our imprisonment. It felt more like house arrest. The villa came with three course meals, hundreds of channels on cable and huge beds.
As the days dragged on and the Hungarians didn’t return, our frustrations grew. We felt we were close to being released, but had no definite way out. We weren’t allowed into the courtyard. We began to behave like a somewhat dysfunctional family on a holiday that’s lasted too long. Nigel spun out rather long conspiracies based on how the guards treated him on latest his trip to the court.
On May 12, Nigel was told he’d return in 10 days for a court date with a lawyer. He believed this meant getting an actual sentence. Clare and I argued there were three tracts for our release — our connections to Saadi, our new relationship with the Hungarians and lastly the courts. But Nigel had been stuck in the system a month longer than us, and couldn’t get the worst out of his head.
We were in some of the best accommodations in Tripoli, and I felt guilty while the Libyans who had taken care of me were still crowded in a single cell. Tarik would be commandeering the TV remote right now. Mamoud would have already talked his way out the door of the villa. Watching hours of bad movies, I found myself paying attention when Hollywood showed a prison or torture scene. A part of that world was real now.
Clare began to tell me a lot of things I didn’t know. Saadi Gaddafi had come in an armored SUV to get her out of prison and deliver her to a four-star hotel. When she was at the Corinthian Hotel in Tripoli, she was able to place a conference call with a former and current Congressman, who had previously met with the Gaddafis. They discussed a trip he planned to make on May 3 for International Press Freedom Day. Several days later, however, Gaddafi's youngest son and several of his grandchildren were killed in an air strike. The trip fell through.
Clare thought we might be there until the end, whenever that was. Nightly we heard the NATO planes overhead and felt the longer they bombed, the more likely they were to keep us as bargaining chips. Sometimes the bombs dropped at the same time as the call to prayer and we wondered if that was a coincidence.
We could hear the bombs falling and exploding into targets as we watched the movie Iron Man on May 13. We went to the windows and saw men outside trying to talk on phones. After the second hit, the men disappeared, as did all the cars on the street. I felt a kind of sick joy. Some of them had to be our guards. And they were probably more scared than us.
The next morning we were sitting around the breakfast table smoking when we the voice of an American woman enter the villa. She was a well-dressed blonde, with Mr. Shabbani, Saadi's assistant, in tow. She seemed about as out of place as one could get. She had a casual, almost valley girl-type air about her. She said she worked with Engineer Saadi for a year as a public relations and business consultant. At the time the conflict started, she casually mentioned that she started helping other imprisoned journalists. She said she had arrived in Tripoli the night before to help us. In the paranoid world of Tripoli, her story sounded fishy to me; but with the way she called Mr. Shabbani, “Dear,” and her total butchering of “Mush-kla,” she seemed like our best hope yet. Even Nigel seemed to brighten, before he went upstairs and began to puzzle if her main business was really us.
Two mornings later Nigel woke me up. He said that he and Clare were being taken back to court. At 2 p.m., the servant said the paddy wagon had come for Manu and I. Something was definitely up. We jumped in. Lutvig, the Tunisian Canadian we had met earlier, sat there blindfolded, almost feral. We were shuffled up the stairs of the court and stood in the hallway. I spotted some of my Libyan cellmates from Al Jadida at the end of the hall and waved. We were called before the judge one-by-one, told our charges and asked how we pled. We went out and I surreptitiously threw one of my old friends some cigarettes.
We were called in again one-by-one to receive our one year suspended sentences. And like that — Clare, Manu, Nigel, Lutvig and I — were freed with a 250 dinar penalty. Lutvig began praying and fell trembling to the floor.
After three more hours, the guard put us in the paddy wagon. A protest outside had turned into a sad little rally on the steps of the court. They laid out NATO member flags, apparently to be burned. Nervously I looked out the hole in the truck. I felt we were close. Finally, the other guard came with the official paperwork for our release.
The next day we said goodbye to the villa. We were again blindfolded and driven in two sedans, to what we thought was going to be the Tunisian border. We were anxious about being blindfolded and separated again. Yet again, something didn’t seem right.
We pulled up to the front of the Rixos Hotel, where all the foreign journalists with invitations from the regime stayed. I couldn’t believe it even as it unfolded, us walking toward the glass doors to an ambush of dozens of cameras. We were shocked and angry. Manu and Clare gave their names to the scrum. A cameraman trying to get a clean shot on Clare pushed me back, so I slipped away toward the manager’s office. Musa Ibrahim, the Gaddafi spokesman, publicly — and laughably — offered to allow us to stay in Tripoli as reporters.
In the office, we were met by the South African ambassador who very cordially wanted information about Anton. I wanted to give it. Manu argued it wasn’t safe, and with his eyes alone he wore me down. We decided to wait until we were out of Libya. I asked the ambassador to give us 24 hours.
Shortly after, representatives from Hungary and Spain arrived, told us to say nothing to the press, and to go with them. We spent the night in the Hungarian embassy. At four in the morning the Libyan foreign embassy called and told us not to move without their permission. We grew tense.
The next afternoon were taken to the border in a Mercedes van with diplomatic plates. We passed huge gas lines, where young men had been employed to move an owner’s car in a line that could last three to four days. We saw the battered, pockmarked cities of Zawiya and Zawara, almost empty, at least of the young men and flying green flags. At the border we waited for four hours as a final entanglement was smoothed over, and then we crossed into Tunisia.
Several contractors who specialized in capture situations were there to meet us. And I saw a GlobalPost colleague I’d met in Egypt. He said he’d been waiting six weeks for me there. I looked at the horizon.
That evening we arrived at a luxury resort in Jerba, Tunisia. My brother, Michael, was there waiting for me. It took me several minutes to believe it was really him as we smoked cigarettes on the balcony and he told me how friends had worked tirelessly to try to free us. The sea outside rolled in under darkness.
Later that night, it was finally time for the truth. Clare and I called Penny, Anton’s wife. I feared this moment perhaps more than anything else. We dialed her number. I listened to Clare and then I got on the phone with her. Her voice was weak from crying. I told her exactly what happened, how Anton had called for help and then said nothing, I told her the best I could, as fresh tears poured over the line from London. But the facts didn’t seem enough. I couldn’t give her enough information. I kept repeating how sorry I was. We didn’t know what happened to his body. We didn’t know who in the regime knew what had happened, and we didn’t know who was lying.
Anton was dead. The young Libyan soldiers had shot and killed him without a shot fired from the rebel side. At the distance he was shot, they must have seen he wasn’t Libyan, that he was carrying cameras and not weapons. We told her we thought it was a war crime. That maybe his body was hidden in the desert. The coldest truth was that none of us ever asked the soldiers to help Anton. I said no words when there might have been a chance, the slimmest of chances, to save him. We didn’t get the quick catch and release we had earlier hoped for, and maybe that was our price.
My friends’ and family’s stories always end in attaining their goal — my freedom. Anton’s does not. His body has never been found. I realized that our lives would remain like smashed windows for some time. Clare, Manu and I were in the middle of that smashed bit of glass and the cracked spider web led to all our friends and family on the other end.
Weeks later, a Libyan man called my house in New Hampshire. I wasn’t home but my mother answered. He spoke in broken English and said, “Jim is in prison. He is alive.” The line went dead and when he called back, my mother said, “Jim is home. He is free.” My mother said he sounded joyous at this. I think it was Tarik. He’d written my phone number inside his jeans.