CHAPTER 9
An Army of One
“I want to kill every fucking Afghan I can.”
—“JACK” IN THE HUNT FOR BIN LADEN
“The only thing that that Jack should be allowed to attack and kill is his bar tab.”
—OWNER OF THE MUSTAFA HOTEL IN KABUL
On September 10, 2001, Jonathan Keith Idema was living the less-than-idyllic existence of an ex-soldier and convicted felon in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The next day, as he watched thousands of Americans murdered on the command of a turbaned and bearded Arab hiding in a South Asian cave, Idema discovered a new sense of purpose. He was going to kill bin Laden, along with any other suspected terrorists he could find. He informed friends and family immediately that he’d be packing his bags and heading to Afghanistan as soon as he could find a way. For Idema, President Bush’s demand in a nationally televised address a few days later for bin Laden to be brought in “dead or alive” was the directive he sought to buttress his already-simmering ambitions. The post-9/11 world opened a Pandora’s box of prospects for adventurers, conmen, and opportunists, and created the perfect environment for a man like Idema to satisfy the most dominant aspects of his character: his fervid patriotism and need for action and admiration. The multimillion-dollar bounty on bin Laden’s head also stimulated his ambition. He soon began planning his first trip into Afghanistan—the beginning of a dark odyssey that would ultimately see him arrested in Kabul for operating an illegal prison and torturing its prisoners.
Idema’s transformation from a down-on-his-luck ex-soldier and felon to the “superpatriot” he now calls himself began on September 12, 2001, when he managed to arrange an appearance on Fox affiliate KTTV, billing himself as a counterterrorism expert. In this capacity, he suggested to viewers that three Canadian aircraft may have also been hijacked the day before. While the idea seems preposterous, Idema offered it with the same characteristic bluster that would enable him to operate so successfully in the many roles he would assume over the next three years. From his first appearance as an expert on September 12 until his arrest in July of 2004, Idema would come to be known as many things—documentary producer, humanitarian, CIA contractor, DoD contractor, Special Forces member, Northern Alliance advisor, tour guide, Pentagon official, media consultant, freelance prison operator, torturer-interrogator, and bin Laden bounty hunter. Some roles were real, some imagined, but few were questioned or investigated until overwhelming pressure from Idema’s victims spurred authorities to arrest him and his tiny band of mercenaries. Idema’s exploits were no more than a sideshow to the real action in Afghanistan, and Jack himself was no more than a bit player with no real role in the legitimate private security industry. However, what Idema did manage to accomplish in Afghanistan speaks to a hidden danger created by the increasing profusion of armed civilians in a theater of war.
The many layers of deception in which his life is shrouded makes it difficult to fully dissect the enigma of Jonathan Keith Idema, and the wildly incorrect and compulsively dishonest tales he has fed to the press suggest that an interview with him would be more for entertainment than illumination. But through my conversations with many associates and others who’ve known Idema, a very disturbing portrait has emerged of how easily an ordinary, if deeply flawed, individual can take advantage of the shadowy modus operandi of covert operators and the recent explosion in the U.S. government’s use of private contractors. Idema has proven that an ambitious civilian upstart with certain key skills can soldier on independently of any government oversight, command, external financial support, or approval.
After 9/11, spurred by anger and his deep sense of patriotism, Idema felt certain he could hunt down bin Laden if given the opportunity, but he had to find a way into Afghanistan first. For his first trip into the war zone, he managed to create an opportunity for himself working on a National Geographic–financed documentary that was supposed to chronicle the work of two humanitarian organizations. While that sounds like an innocuous and even valiant endeavor, in reality Idema ended up scamming two well-meaning NGOs and attempting to make a documentary of his own dramatized heroism.
A small man with a tiny frame, bad eyesight, and black-dyed, thinning hair, Idema has a dominating persona and a talent for charm, when he chooses. Although he only stands five foot nine, he makes a lasting impression on the people who meet him. Edward Artis, director of one of the scammed NGOs, holds Idema in about as much regard as many others who have crossed the man’s path: “If his hod is full of shit and falls on him, that’s okay with me.”
Artis, a former army airborne soldier from the 82nd, has specialized in frontline humanitarian work since the early 1970s, including many trips to Afghanistan. His tiny NGO, Knightsbridge International, keeps things simple and moves fast. Though he already had a filmmaker following him to South Asia, ever mindful of the donation-generating benefit of publicity, Artis agreed to allow another film crew from National Geographic television to join his caravan when a friend referred Idema.
“The Nat Geo thing happened through Idema. I admit, I fucked up. In October of 2001, Jim Morris, who is a fellow Knight of Malta, a former Special Forces major, and writes for Soldier of Fortune, contacted me. Then Idema approached me via e-mail after being introduced by Morris. The way I figured it back then, Idema was a guy just out of prison, looking to do something honest…. He said he was producing a documentary for National Geographic with producer Gary Scurka and former CBS cameraman Ed Caraballo.”
Despite Artis’s first impression, Jonathan Keith Idema did not view himself as a felon trying to go straight. He had reinvented himself as “Jack,” a crime-fighting, bad-guy-punching, ex–Green Beret using his amazing skills and secret connections to save the world from evil. In reality, Idema was broke and involved in multiple frivolous and self-enriching lawsuits, including suing Dreamworks for allegedly stealing his life story and even suing a company for repossessing his Jeep when he missed payments. A cursory investigation into Idema’s background would have found arrest records for receiving stolen property, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, being a fugitive from justice, two counts of assault by pointing a firearm, discharging a firearm into a dwelling, communicating threats and assault on a female, and federal convictions on one count of conspiracy and fifty-five counts of wire fraud. Idema had never been to Afghanistan or been seriously involved in humanitarian work but saw an opportunity to use the lens of a documentarian’s camera to record for posterity all the heroic deeds he intended to commit, or at least to dramatize.
The Nat Geo documentary wasn’t the first time Idema had tried to cast himself in the role of hero. In May 1995, Jim Morris had sent a film pitch to Steven Spielberg entitled Loose Cannon: The Keith Idema Story, described as a “treatment based on Idema’s exploits but replete with fictionalized accounts,” a pattern Idema followed faithfully even in real life. This film treatment became the basis for a 2000 lawsuit brought by Idema and Morris against Steven Spielberg, Dreamworks, George Clooney, and others involved in the 1997 nuclear smuggling film The Peacemaker. They sued for $150 million, but the case was dismissed and Idema was later ordered to reimburse Dreamworks’s legal fees of $273,000.
As sketched out in Loose Cannon, Idema claims that while he was in Lithuania training police in the early 1990s, he learned about an extensive network of black-market smuggling in nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union. Upon his return to the United States, Idema reported this information to the Pentagon and the FBI, but when pressed to turn over his contacts for this information, he refused. When Idema was later arrested on more than fifty counts of wire fraud, he contended that the FBI was unfairly punishing him for not turning over his sources. He says this conspiracy was behind his prosecution, conviction, and stint in federal prison, not his actions in falsifying credit lines to purchase, but not pay for, supplies for his failing mail-order business. Abuse by conspiracy, hatred of the FBI, alleged theft of property, and total denial of any wrongdoing had been common themes in Idema’s life for years before he capped off his life’s performance in Afghanistan.
During his trial, Idema ignored his court-appointed attorney and acted as his own lawyer. He constantly made claims of conspiracy and belittled the evidence, as well as the judge and prosecutor. The judge presiding over the case took umbrage at Keith’s claims, excuses, and behavior. Magistrate Wallace Dixon told Idema, “In my assessment, you are a bully who apparently likes to talk, to hear his own tongue wagging.” Later, Dixon continued, “I think you are sick. I don’t know of any other way to say it. I think you have a mental illness.” Judge Terrence Boyle’s opinion of Idema was equally harsh: “All of the things you purport about what a wonderful patriot you are and what a singled-out person you are is pure fantasy.” Idema’s response was typical: “I’m going to sue the FBI,” he said. “They know I’m going to go on TV. They know I’m going to go to Congress. They know I’m not going to give up until I prove my innocence.” On April 11, 1995, thirty-eight-year-old Keith Idema was sentenced to four years in prison and fined $250,000.
Defeated and chastised in the courts and penal system, Idema did turn to the media to fight his battle. Jim Morris, a longtime friend and co-complainant in the Dreamworks lawsuit, supported Idema’s tale of persecution and reported on the case of the Lithuanian nukes for Soldier of Fortune in April and May of 1995. It didn’t take long for CBS to send one of their top investigative journalists, Gary Scurka, to interview Idema in prison. The October 1995 60 Minutes segment on Lithuanian nuclear smuggling ended up winning awards for investigative journalism, but those assembling the broadcast felt uncomfortable about the quality of one of their sources and completely excluded the interview with the bug-eyed federal prisoner from the segment.
Idema reconnected with Scurka after being released from jail in 1997, and the two started a production company together called Point Blank News. Idema pushed for their first project to be Any Lesser Man: The Keith Idema Story, but despite Scurka’s belief in Idema’s story, networks and financial backers did not share their enthusiasm. Of the $1 million they needed to start production, they managed to raise only about a quarter, and ended up shelving the project.
Mr. Potato Head
After September 11, when Idema heard about Ed Artis’s planned trip into Afghanistan, it must have sounded like an opportunity for the reformulation of Any Lesser Man. Though the documentary pitch ostensibly focused on the work of Ed Artis, Idema envisioned a starring role for himself as another ex-soldier turned humanitarian braving danger to lessen the suffering of poor Afghans. As war against the Taliban loomed, and the American public thirsted for any information on their newly discovered enemy, media organizations scrambled to fill programming hours with anything related to Afghanistan. In this environment, it seemed of little consequence that Idema had no humanitarian, military, business, or any other connection to Afghanistan. The pitch to National Geographic, called “Operation Pathfinder,” portrayed “Keith” as a leader of a team of ex–Green Berets who would come to the rescue of “Sir Edward Artis,” a Vietnam vet and “one of the world’s most renowned humanitarians.” The pitch describes Keith as a man who did time for a crime he did not commit and now wants to “get back into the action.”
Idema first contacted Ed Artis as Artis was waiting in Tajikistan for passage into Afghanistan with filmmaker Adrian Belic, who was shooting a documentary, Beyond the Call. Even in that first conversation, Artis remembers Idema as being less than forthcoming about the focus of the documentary. Artis recalls: “We’re in the convoy getting ready to go over and I get this call on my sat phone from Idema. We filmed that call. I got pictures of him telling me about Nat Geo. ‘Gary Scurka of Nat Geo wants to come in and do a doco on you.’ ‘What’s the pitch?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been in the biz. Let me see the outline.’ Idema says, ‘We will get the outline to you before we come over.’ Idema told me, ‘Gary Scurka doesn’t want to give it to you by e-mail. We will bring it with us,’ he says. I say fine. The idea was they’d do a documentary on Knightsbridge International’s efforts to help the people of Afghanistan. You know, ex-military guys doing humanitarian work while bombs fall around them kinda stuff. Coverage is good, but with me it’s mission first. It’s not about me.”
Artis didn’t want to delay his mission into Afghanistan and quickly became impatient with how long it was taking his new documentarian tagalongs to get moving. “I told Idema to come via Tajikistan and to get a visa. I told him, ‘Look I am not waiting for you. We’re going to a fucking war zone, buckwheat.’” Although NGOs were being blocked from entry at that time, Artis and Belic went in on October 14 under the guise of journalists and actually did some radio reports to justify their visas.
At the end of October 2001, Idema and Scurka finally made the trip, joined by retired Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Greg Long, a humanitarian from Partners International Foundation, the other NGO whose work was supposed to be featured in the Nat Geo documentary. As Artis recalls, the group encountered problems before their trip really began. “They fly into Russia and then Uzbekistan without a visa. I TOLD them to get a visa. I figure they are with NGOs, they know how to get a visa. The Uzbeks arrested all three of them for three days in the VIP lounge.” On November 2, 2001, Idema managed to convince a young desk officer at the embassy that he was a DoD contractor. It may have been an understandable error, since Idema had the embassy verify his citizenship through the head of Partners International Foundation, who also happens to be an active-duty colonel at SOCOM, or Special Operations Command, from where many covert operations are managed.
Artis continues, “Colonel Bob Morris says he received a phone call from somebody at the embassy, and as an active-duty colonel and someone that wants to retire a pay grade higher than private, he was asked to verify that they are U.S. citizens. That’s it. He probably didn’t know what kinda tales Idema was spinning at the other end. He was asked to confirm that they were U.S. citizens and they got the letter. How they got a letter saying Scurka, Idema, and Greg Long were DoD contractors, I will never know.”
Colonel Bob Morris does his humanitarian work on the side of his regular full-time as active military. It is not difficult to imagine Idema giving embassy officials a little wink and nod as he asks them to get him out of this detention problem by verifying his citizenship through Colonel Bob Morris at SOCOM. Ordinary verifications usually go through the State Department. An e-mail from the U.S. embassy confirmed that a low-level military attaché thought he was doing Bob Morris a favor.
“My guess is that Idema has a fake ID from the U.S. military saying that he is a major. That got him in-country. Then one lie became another once he had that embassy letter.”
Even later, after Artis had recognized Idema’s aversion to truth and tried to alert others, he felt many of his warnings went unheeded. Artis blames that initial letter with giving Idema all the “top cover” he needed to pass himself off as an undercover contractor. “I tried to warn people about him. I warned the Afghans about him, but now I know why they didn’t do anything…. That letter gave him the ability to trump my warnings. Every time I said he did this or that to the Afghans, they ignored me.”
Artis remembers certain early warning bells. “Idema had sent e-mails from Tashkent telling me he was bringing an interpreter—a female who spoke Russian. I sent back: ‘Stop! DO NOT bring a Russian-speaking woman into an Afghan camp.’ Turns out Idema had picked her up that night and she was his whore. And he invited her to Afghanistan.
“He also didn’t have a cameraman, which is another odd thing for a film crew to show up with plenty of gear but no cameraman. It was obvious to me that Scurka couldn’t work a camera, and Idema couldn’t, either. They had those new cameras that aren’t Beta cameras, but give a professional quality image. At that point, I hadn’t met them and I had my doubts, but I figured I have dealt with nuts on location. That’s why they make gaffer tape.” He laughs.
“Idema and Scurka hire a guy named Neil Barrett as a cameraman—a long-haired good guy, but Idema made him cut his hair off to get the job. Idema wanted him to look more military.”
Artis had begun to feel slightly uneasy because of some of his interactions with Idema, but it wasn’t until after they had met in person, on Idema’s first night in Afghanistan, that Artis’s antenna really went up. They had all been invited to share dinner with some of the high-ranking local commanders at Khowjaboddin, the Northern Alliance forward operating base. As Artis recalls, “They pass out the meal. Scurka reaches in with a piece of naan bread like you’re supposed to, and Idema yells, ‘Don’t touch that fucking food! It’s unclean. Don’t touch the food!’ He throws an MRE at Barrett and at Scurka. ‘You will eat MREs, and do not drink their tea.’
“That was just the first night. That was when I kinda felt I’d fucked up. I realized that Idema, not Scurka, was the leader of this group.” Agitated and suspicious, Artis decided to put down some ground rules for the filming of their documentary. “I tell him, ‘Look, you follow me and shoot it. You don’t get a retake. He called me a motherfucker. ‘You like to give orders,’ I said, ‘you get the fuck out of here right now.’
“The next morning I went to see Jim Maceda of NBC to get my morning coffee and daily update…. Jim asks me, ‘Who is your new friend?’ I said, ‘My new friend is Keith Idema.’ Idema says, ‘My name is Jack. And don’t tell anyone who I am with.’ By then, [Idema] was wearing his dark vest and the shades.”
Artis had been under the initial impression that he would be working with Scurka and that Idema would just be there for security. He had not even been informed that the documentary would also feature another NGO. “[Idema] brings out this EKG worth about six to ten thousand. That’s when this guy Greg Long, who said he was with another NGO named Partners International said, ‘Let’s go up and deliver the EKG.’ Then Idema pushed Greg Long aside for the photo op. I was confused and pissed.”
As the tension continued to build, Idema’s lust for the media spotlight soon proved reason enough for Artis to blow up at him. “Idema started doing interviews about the desiccant packages poisoning the Afghans. They’d put these small desiccant packages in with the yellow plastic humanitarian meals, and the Afghans were supposedly eating them and getting sick. Somehow now Idema is a medical and military expert on something other people had brought to the military and media’s attention.
“I took Idema aside—and Neil Barrett filmed this—I put my bony finger in his face and said, ‘I don’t know what your agenda is, but I don’t want you at any of our sites. You’re out of my fucking life.’ To make it perfectly clear, I told Idema, ‘Cease and fucking desist,’ and then Gary Scurka tries to defend him. I tell him, ‘If Idema is needed to make a documentary, then you can take all the tape you shot so far and shove it up your ass.’ Scurka was allowed to stay when we did our distribution because he was still following us and doing a piece about us.” Artis thought he had solved his problem, since from that point forward Idema was not allowed anywhere near him while they were shooting, but that was before the artillery attack incident.
On November 11, Veterans Day, after a long day of distributing humanitarian supplies, Artis was heading back to base camp after dark amid a backdrop of not-so-distant artillery fire when he heard an urgent voice crackling over his cheap walkie-talkie: “Ed Artis. Are you there? An American has been wounded. They want you down at the helipad.”
Artis hustled down to the site, where he first saw freelance journalist Kevin Sites, shooting film, and Idema, “walking around like a caged animal and talking to someone on the sat phone saying he needs a Blackhawk.”
Idema ignored Artis the first time the humanitarian asked who was wounded. “And I ask him again, ‘Who is wounded?’ Idema says, ‘Scurka.’ They’re sitting up in the back of the king cab pickup truck and Scurka is talking to his wife on another sat phone.”
Artis went up to examine a wound that had torn through the flesh of Scurka’s knee, abdomen, groin, and leg. Scurka and the other journalists had been standing out in the open when a brief barrage of Taliban artillery had erupted. They had tried to take cover behind a Northern Alliance tank, unaware that the tank was the actual target of the attack. The shrapnel of an exploding artillery shell had hit Scurka.
“The situation is that there is a lieutenant colonel Special Forces medic there. I am a combat medic. Greg Long takes a look at the wound. I ask him is it serious enough to order a evac? The answer is no.”
Trying to put the brakes on Idema’s overreaction, Artis went back to where he was still pacing around yelling into the sat phone about needing a Blackhawk.
“I ask him who he is talking to. Idema tells the guy on the phone that he’s talking to some aid worker here. I grab the phone out of his hands and ask, ‘Who am I talking to?’ It’s a major at the embassy in Tashkent. I tell him ‘Major, I was a combat medic in Vietnam. I have not seen anyone wounded bad enough here to send in a helicopter. If you want to check out who I am…’ I give him a number of a congressional aide at Dana Rohrabacher’s office. I tell him that there is no need to risk lives or to cause an international incident. Then I take the antenna off Idema’s phone, hand it back to him, and let him have it.”
Artis says he yelled at Idema, “‘If you fuck with me again, I will have you arrested or shot. We are going to take Gary up to the hospital.’ And Idema just deflates. Idema is panic-stricken. I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here. We’ll do the rest of the filming that you can see in the documentary.’”
Journalist Kevin Sites also remembers the event as being one in which Artis’s action was appropriate, and Idema was grandstanding for effect. Three men on the scene, including Artis, had advanced medical training; Idema did not. However, Scurka later credited Idema with finding an exit wound on the ride to the hospital that had escaped the first treatment.
Artis and others are of the opinion that Idema knew perfectly well the value of the filmed scene. The “daring rescue” would be a part of his documentary, portraying him as the hero who saved the day. Artis had his suspicions confirmed when he finally read the script outline for Idema and Scurka’s documentary proposal.
“Right up to the day before we got on the helicopter to leave, I still believed the film piece was on us. They never did give me the script. The last day before I left, I went through Scurka’s backpack. I am up early. Idema and Scurka are out on the tennis court interviewing each other. There was a folder in there that they were always looking at while I was busy doing good-guy shit. It’s a letter with a big gold seal from National Geographic signed by Tim Kelley saying, ‘To whom it may concern, Gary Scurka is filming a documentary on a UN-sponsored mission to Afghanistan and is working with Keith Idema. Mr. Idema has enough money to support his mission…’ or words to that effect. Then there is a five-page script. A shot list of them coming in, matching up with us, and the NGO fucks up, and then Keith Idema steps in and saves the day. We were set up.
“Later on, Gary calls me and he says he wants me to sign a release. I tell him, ‘You’re not allowed to use my image, my voice, until I see the script. If there is one image or one mention even in the credits of Idema, you cannot use my name.’ That’s why you don’t see him in that doco.” National Geographic had been duped, having unwittingly paid for and supported “Jack’s” entry into the War on Terror.
“Jack” had been once again cut out of his reality show, and far from starring in his epic of humanitarian relief and derring-do on the battlefield, he found himself unemployed in South Asia. Widely renowned for his resourceful, if morally compromised, opportunism, Idema kept himself busy after parting ways with Artis, selling himself as an “expert” to members of the media and granting numerous interviews. Journalists also recall Idema selling premium-priced transit into Afghanistan on one of Northern Alliance commander Massoud Khalili’s battered Mi-17 helicopters.
Most of the media privately ridiculed Idema as a wannabe hero and strange war tourist. According to Artis, the journalists in Khowjaboddin referred to the tiny, bug-eyed, gun-toting aid worker-slash-mercenary-slash-terrorism-expert-slash-huckster as “Mr. Potato Head” for the number of slightly different disguises he could adopt. Although Idema seemed to be friendly with the leadership of the Northern Alliance, nobody could quite figure out who Jack was. Artis had at least figured out who Idema wasn’t, and started contacting Northern Alliance and American officials to warn them of Idema’s duplicity.
In mid-November, Haroon Amin, the spokesman for the Northern Alliance, wrote a letter to Artis stating that Idema wasn’t working for them. A couple of weeks later, Idema told a reporter from the Fayetteville Observer via a sat phone that he was “working with the Northern Alliance.” If Idema had managed to convince the Northern Alliance he was a covert operator, they would have denied that he was working for them, or Idema could have just directly approached the local commander, Massoud Khalili, to set up the lucrative journalist transport endeavor without the knowledge of the higher-ups. The one thing that can be deduced with certainty is that a real security contractor in South Asia at that time would have had a more pressing assignment that didn’t involve profiteering off journalists, and a covert operator would not have been so actively seeking the media spotlight.
While Jack hustled to make a living in the war, Artis contacted Billy Waugh to do a little more research into Idema’s claims. As Billy recalled, “Ed Artis wrote me and said Jack Idema has put the word out that he is working for the CIA. Ed asked me, ‘Is that true?’ I didn’t know who Jack Idema was…. I told him he wasn’t working with us because I knew everybody on the ground. We only had about eighty guys involved in our operations. Idema wasn’t one of them.”
As the war progressed, Jack moved south to Jalalabad, where he continued his war profiteering by charging journalists money to attend press conferences and offering $800 battlefield tours to people like Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker. Well-funded reporters, desperate and under pressure from editor desks back home for exclusive stories about the war, became Jack’s greatest benefactors in Afghanistan. A media circus of epic proportions descended on the tattered Spin Ghar Hotel in Jalalabad during the battle of Tora Bora. Since Idema could often be seen storming in and out of hotels followed by his small group of armed Tajiks, journalists assumed that Jack and his band of mercenaries were busy hunting bin Laden. At that time, Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and the CIA were actually doing just that, working a badly disguised covert operation, flitting in and out of hotels, military bases, and commanders’ camps in dusty SUVs. All had orders to stay away from the media and, if needed, to use their Afghan proxies to threaten, rough up, or arrest journalists who got too close. By contrast, Idema would put on his prescription sunglasses, throw a checked Afghan desmal scarf around his neck, wear U.S.-looking but Afghan-made tan combat attire, and with a pistol strapped to his thigh and an AK in his hands, hold court with hundreds of newly arrived and gullible journalists. He perfected the knowing but enigmatic nod of the head when responding to difficult questions and would baffle them with bullshit use of SF terminology and angry outbursts against unpatriotic sentiments. Idema became a seasoned purveyor of exciting tales. He had become the media’s favorite oracle, with few insiders willing to call him out. Journalists who did their homework quickly figured out that Jack’s tales didn’t always square with reality, but others were taken in by his charm and swagger, assiduously recording his every word.
Relishing the attention, he often possessed a keen talent for becoming whatever the media wanted him to be. But he could also be wildly erratic. He once fired his gun toward Tod Robberson of the Dallas Morning News, but warmly congratulated Linda Vester of Fox for scoring an interview with “a Special Forces guy.” His new nickname among the growingly skeptical media was “Jack Shit,” a sum-up of what he actually delivered for the money he charged. He told journalists and whoever would listen an ever-changing series of tales, billing himself alternately as a “Northern Alliance advisor” or the ever-elusive “expert,” even very briefly snagging a paid position with Fox as a news consultant. Even Idema’s supposed Northern Alliance clients weren’t immune from Jack’s predatory need for cash. Jack told CIA-backed warlord Hazrat Ali that he needed to brief an important delegation of Pentagon officials at the Spin Ghar Hotel. The “officials” turned out to be reporters Idema had charged $100 to attend an “exclusive” briefing by Hazrat Ali.
Although he managed to make money here and there from the media, he didn’t score big until January 2002, when he sold seven hours of purported al-Qaeda training tapes to top-bidder CBS News. Although in his auction to the media, Idema’s William Morris agent suggested bids in excess of $150,000, CBS reportedly paid somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000 for the first rights to air the tapes. Secondary sales to other networks like BBC, ABC, NBC, and others increased Jack’s income. CNN was a notable dissenter; they’d done their research on Idema and didn’t even bother responding. In mid-January, CBS featured him on 60 Minutes II and the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. According to Ed Artis, “he made his first big media hit when he convinced CBS to buy his bogus al-Qaeda tapes.” Artis points out that the tapes were shot on archaic 8-mm Hi-8 videocassettes—the same format as the cheap camera Idema brought in with him when he met Artis. “First he claimed he captured them; then he claimed he bought them; then he said that they were given to him, and even that they were shot by a Japanese cameraman.”
Jack’s self-imposed tour of duty came to a screeching halt in June 2002 when his mother’s death forced him to return home to upstate New York. Not long after his mother’s funeral, Idema headed down to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for the Special Forces 50th Anniversary celebration.
Idema has said that he wanted to join the Special Forces ever since he saw John Wayne’s movie, based on Robin Moore’s book The Green Berets. Idema’s father was a battle-tested World War II–era marine and Idema’s short stint in the army played a huge role in his sense of self-identity, though Keith’s record speaks to a spotty background and capability. On the surface, his army record shows that Idema was released after three years of service in February 24, 1978, with an honorable discharge. However, a March 18, 1977, evaluation report describes Idema’s performance as “marginally average,” citing lack of attention to detail, failure to follow instructions, and inability to accept constructive criticism as just some of his failings as a soldier. Another report by Captain John D. Carlson says Idema “is without a doubt the most unmotivated, unprofessional, immature enlisted man I have ever known.”
Despite these scathing reviews, Idema used his military training and skills to start an antiterrorist training school in Red Hook, New York, called ConTerr. The business did not survive long, but he did manage to get a photograph of Ronald Reagan’s son visiting the school. Still capitalizing on his military background, Idema’s next career move was to start running Special Forces trade shows, which offered the latest in relevant military equipment and a place for military types to network. At one of these shows, he first met Robin Moore, the author who had first sparked his interest in the Green Berets.
According to Moore, the two later reconnected at the Special Forces anniversary celebration during the summer of 2002, where Moore told Idema of his current writing project—a book about the Special Forces in Afghanistan. Idema quickly convinced Moore that the book could benefit greatly from his knowledge and recent experience in the country. Thus began an unfortunate collaboration that resulted in the book The Hunt for bin Laden.
Because of The Green Berets, Robin Moore had plenty of credibility with the military, so when the war kicked off, Moore used his contacts to get access to do a new book on Special Forces in Afghanistan. The problem was that Moore was in his late seventies and afflicted with Parkinson’s. Unlike his first book, where he went through basic training and spent time in combat on the ground in Vietnam, the elderly Moore contented himself with doing interviews with Special Forces teams as they exfilled from Afghanistan to K2 air base in Uzbekistan. As one of the men of ODA 595 pictured on the back of the book remembers, “Moore would often fall asleep during interviews or forget to turn his tape recorder on.”
Much of the work was done by Chris Thompson, who helped Moore gather and edit the interviews and put The Hunt for bin Laden together. It was understood that the book needed something to pull the disjointed chapters on each team together. Jack Idema suggested that he’d be the perfect central character—a mysterious ex–Special Forces operator turned contractor who enters Afghanistan to wage a one-man war on terror. Moore and Thompson thought the idea of Idema just going over as a private citizen added an exciting touch.
Jack was smart enough to cut a back deal with Moore’s agent and actually got a percentage of the profits in exchange for writing large parts of the book. In the acknowledgments to the book, Moore gives great credit to Chris Thompson, a former soldier whose father was in Special Forces, but Idema’s contribution is elliptically referenced to an “anonymous Green Beret.” Intended to be about U.S. Army Special Forces, the book turned into a showcase for a man named “Jack,” even featuring a bandana-wearing Idema on the cover, strolling with an AK-47, a pistol on his hip, and flanked by two Afghan cohorts. “Jack” is listed in the index as a “Special Forces operative.”
I am actually featured in The Hunt for bin Laden and can speak from my own experience in saying that much information is wrong, poorly researched, and written from afar so that minor details are confused or transposed. The Special Forces team I traveled with is pictured on the back cover. Though they never met or talked to Idema, and despite the fact that almost all team members had carefully detailed their actions to Moore at K2, the first chapter puts forth an account of the team’s infil into Afghanistan that the men tell me has been entirely fabricated. Contrary to the book’s reporting, there was no gunfire, no drama. They landed at night, were welcomed by an advance CIA team that included Mike Spann, and set to work unpacking their gear.
Idema makes the fatal mistake of including the real names of the team and inventing actions that never occurred. An air force controller named Matt sustains much of the action in the first chapter, though the real Matt didn’t actually fly in until days after the rest of the group. The book has Matt screaming, “We’re about to be fucking overrun…. I need ordnance quick.” B-52 pilots are quoted as uttering the cheesy cliché “Bombs away.” Low-key SF operators are reputed to have said, “Holy shit, un-fucking-believable,” while watching “bodies of maybe a hundred Taliban and AQ troops drawn from the ground upward, arms and legs kicking for a fraction of a second, before disappearing into a pink haze without a trace of solid matter left of their bodies or clothing.” While the story of the team’s infil may be the tallest tale in the book, elements of B movie–inspired fiction permeate the work.
One of the soldiers Idema creatively described as singing the “Ballad of Green Berets,” after a battle figures “the more crap they write about us, the more our OPSEC [Operational Security] is protected.” His wife, however, is furious about the decision to expose the real full names as well as photos and ranks of the soldiers. She feels any terrorist with a little computer acumen could find the home address of any of the cited soldiers to attack their families while their husbands are away on long deployments.
At the end of the fictional nonfiction book, “Jack” waxes poetic, drunk on vodka and pomegranate juice, wearing two Makarov pistols, and spouting badly mangled lines from movies. “God, I hate it when a war ends,” the character mimics Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. With “his teary eyes glassed over from the booze,” Jack ponders the imponderable. “Throughout the war it seemed Jack was everywhere…. But was Jack one person, or several?” Perhaps therein lies the key to “Jack’s” mental illness and his destructive view of the truth and loyalty.
To make the situation worse, an appendix to the book’s early runs listed six charities that purportedly assist Special Forces members, their children, or the people of Afghanistan. Only a sharp eye would catch that one of the cited charities, the U.S. Counter-Terrorist Group, also garnered photo credits for images used in the book, including one of Jack riding a horse. It is none other than ConTerr. The U.S. Postal Service has been tipped off that another address, purportedly for a charity to assist Special Forces soldiers, led to a post office box and a bank account controlled by Idema.
Upon the book’s release, it began climbing the bestseller lists, initially delighting Moore. But he then began receiving dozens of e-mails from Special Forces members and families of members who had been there. Moore confessed to the betrayed soldiers that he’d had to “sex it up” and said he’d submitted changes that were never incorporated. The teams wrote off the duplicity to Moore’s failing mental condition, since they had no idea about the involvement of the unknown man pictured on the book’s cover. In the end, the man who had created the legend of the Green Berets had, because of Idema, destroyed four decades of trust between himself and the Special Forces community. Moore watched, heartbroken, as Amazon and his own personal Web page filled with angry postings denouncing The Hunt for bin Laden as fiction and a disgrace.
Ed Artis was one of those who posted his views about Idema on Moore’s website, actually provoking Jack into filing a lawsuit against him. “I am being sued for ruining his reputation,” said Artis. “Fuck him. He can sue a dead man.” (Artis suffered a mild heart attack in 2004 while on a humanitarian trip to the Philippines.) A judge dismissed the case in late 2005.
Billy Waugh also managed to provoke Idema’s ire, though Waugh’s background in the Special Forces has inclined Idema to hold back on the lawyers thus far. “Idema said I bad-mouthed him,” said Waugh. “I said I didn’t bad-mouth him; I told the truth. He was not in the CIA, and he didn’t do any of that shit he said he did in Robin Moore’s book.” Idema started a verbal and written pissing match with Billy (with cc’s to Jim Morris, Bob Morris, and Bob Brown, the publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine). On March 17, 2003, Idema told Billy via a threatening e-mail, “Everyone who thinks they ought to jump on this bandwagon of hate and bullshit better buckle up because we’re going to court and let’s see who wins this fucking round, and billy boy, I got no problem suing your ass too if you want to keep passing on this bullshit.” Billy remembers the war of intimidation escalating beyond the simple possibility of a lawsuit. “Idema calls me up and threatens me. So I say, ‘Bring your shit, man, cuz I got about six guns and a few Claymores set up around my house.’ Then he calls me back fifteen minutes later and says, ‘I am not going to do anything because I know you have a great reputation.’ Which I do. If he thinks he’s going to buffalo me, he’s mistaken.”
Idema didn’t sue Green Beret legends Billy Waugh or Robin Moore, but in March 2004, just before returning to Afghanistan, he did file suit against Chris Thompson, Thompson’s parents, and Robin Moore’s girlfriend, in addition to Fox News, Colonel Bob Morris, Ed Artis, and other perceived enemies. Jack, it appears, was desperately trying to protect his newly created image as a one-man army hunting bin Laden.
Lawyers, Guns, and Money
In April of 2004, allegedly bolstered by funds from Moore’s book, forty-eight-year-old Idema returned to Afghanistan, this time with a crew on his payroll that included filmmaker and CBS veteran Ed Caraballo, and Brent Bennett, an ex-soldier and former waiter at Ruby Tuesday in Fayetteville. Once on the ground, Idema rented a house and car and hired a few Afghans for local support. He called the mercenary group “Task Force Saber 7,” a play on Task Force Dagger, the official name for the original Special Forces campaign in Afghanistan. They wore U.S.-style uniforms, American flag patches, and often carried weapons, leading many locals to believe that they were a covert unit of contractors working for the CIA or U.S. military intelligence. From his large house in Kabul, Idema and his new crew began filming what could have been a bizarre reality show. Idema had a keen eye for mimicry and had created what could easily be confused for a CIA paramilitary operation complete with its local safehouse, hired Afghan “campaigns,” and tight-lipped aggressive posture toward inquiries, though when it suited his purpose he incongruously sought media exposure for his exploits. Networks were paying good money for any action story on terrorism in Afghanistan, and Idema seemed intent on taking advantage of the demand.
Idema soon claimed he’d uncovered a plot to load taxicabs with explosives and attack U.S. and Afghan targets. Three times he convinced gullible foreign peacekeeping troops to provide backup on raids, which Jack led with maximum high-impact drama and bellicose bravado as Caraballo’s camera rolled. When he thought he had hit the jackpot, Idema offered the videos of his captured “terrorists” for sale for a quarter of a million dollars, but the networks had started to suspect Idema’s veracity and didn’t buy.
Task Force Saber 7 also plied local sources for information and went about “arresting,” or effectively abducting, Afghans Idema deemed to be al-Qaeda or Taliban. The detainees were held, interrogated, and abused in Idema’s Kabul house of horrors. On May 3, Jack and his gang even turned an Afghan over to U.S. custody, photographing the exchange at Bagram for posterity. Jack described the battered Afghan as an HVT, a high-value target, but the U.S. military released the detainee without charges two months later. Idema’s most famous prisoner was not one well known for terrorist ties, but for his position as a prominent Pashtun and Afghan Supreme Court judge.
Idema didn’t know it, but his rash of threats, lawsuits, and betrayals had created a rapidly growing cabal of former friends who were bound and determined to shut him down. He no longer had to be unjustifiably paranoid about a conspiracy out to get him, since he had forced the situation. A private investigator he’d screwed out of 15 percent from the proceeds of a successful lawsuit, a humanitarian he’d conned, an author he’d destroyed, an army officer who’d been used; the list goes on: all developed a covert network to share documents and information designed to expose Idema’s true nature. Several U.S. government agencies, the military, and the media were also investigating Jack’s activities, though he was unaware of the gathering storm.
Jack also had no idea that he had a mole inside his organization. A man in Afghanistan working as an engineer had met Idema and been taken in by his charisma and “Action Jack” persona. After some time hanging out with him, however, the man started to recognize Idema’s pathology and started funneling out pictures of Jack brutalizing Afghans to a number of people. The mole didn’t really need to circulate the photos secretly, since Jack himself was sending out photos and video of his “operations” in an attempt to get the media to pay for his one-man show. Still no one wanted to arrest or even stop Jack. Media outlets were asked to bid on Jack’s new, and this time admittedly self-made, terror tapes, complete with action scenes of him kicking in doors and rousting Afghans. The media watched in horror but said nothing.
Jack had become his own private army, with his own independent contractors assisting him in his brutal for-profit task. Caraballo acted as filmmaker for the action scenes, and then manned the camera to faithfully document the interrogations. Was this journalism, entertainment, or documentation of evidence? Idema’s high profile and sheer audacity led most to believe that Jack really must be doing something important and secretive with high-level approval. The CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) already seemed to be using ill-defined relationships with ex-military turned independent contractors in Afghanistan, so Idema’s operation fit into the pattern.
Jack cultivated this impression and may have actually been attempting to jockey himself into an officially sanctioned position. While no available evidence suggests that Idema had achieved this, calls he made to the office of Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Warfighting Support, indicate he was trying.
Boykin has a reputation for lending a sympathetic ear to ex–Green Berets with a patriotic cause. Idema began a series of interfaces with Boykin’s office, and their like-minded goal of rooting out terrorists made the exchanges positive. Junior and midlevel bureaucrats encouraged Jack to develop hard intel, and Jack promised them in effusive e-mails that he was on the verge of a major bust. Not surprisingly, Jack had Caraballo film his telephone calls to Boykin’s office. During one call, a man named Jorge Shim answers the phone and confirms that he has passed on information to Boykin and says they’ll get back to him. While intriguing, and offered up by Idema as evidence of his ties to the U.S. military, the exchange really only offers proof that Idema had spoken to Boykin’s office. As Ed Artis likes to explain, “There is a fiber of truth in everything Idema does, and then he goes and weaves an entire carpet.” Every branch of the U.S. military has officially denied any connection with Idema, and a call to the Pentagon’s press office will evoke an immediate and forceful: “There is no—repeat no—connection of any kind with Idema.” As standard practice, the Pentagon would, of course, deny any connection with a covert operator, particularly one who had sparked a scandal of such gargantuan proportions. In the case of Idema, however, they were actually telling the truth. Since Idema was so keen to film his every move, particularly those that made it appear he was more important or connected than he really was, he would have had more damning evidence of a connection if he’d actually been operating with official approval. If Boykin had ever returned his call, Caraballo would have most certainly had the camera rolling. Further, that Idema was recording and attempting to sell film of his operations makes it even more impossible to imagine he was really running a sanctioned program.
The irony is that if a real U.S. contractor had cultivated such a close relationship with the media and was attempting to profit from footage of supposed covert operations, the military would have likely managed to shut down his operation faster than they did Idema’s. While he clearly didn’t have U.S. government funding or formal approval, the fact that Idema ran his makeshift jail at a static address in Kabul for months suggests that those U.S. officials who’d become aware of Task Force Saber 7’s activities initially may have tacitly assented to allowing them to continue unhindered. With bin Laden on the loose, and former al-Qaeda and Taliban roaming the streets of Kabul, a completely deniable freelance operation run by a like-minded ex-military guy could have been an asset to the U.S. government’s goals in Afghanistan, if Idema had ever been able to produce any verifiable results. However, no marked achievements and a building controversy about the excessive tactics of Task Force Saber 7 meant Idema and friends wouldn’t enjoy their freedom of operation for long.
As soon as a real covert operator, Billy Waugh, heard about what Idema had been doing in Afghanistan, he started to sound the alert. “I told General Brown at SOCOM that Idema is beating people up and running a POW camp…. They put bulletins all over the place saying do not talk to the son of a bitch. In Bagram, Tashkent, and all over. The CIA put it out, too. Before he was nailed, believe me, I made sure the word was out. But one thing you can do is simply tell people like Boykin that you’re doing sanctioned operations. That’s pretty clever.” Even Afghan minister Yunus Qanuni admitted Idema had duped him into thinking he represented the U.S. government.
On May 15, 2004, two and a half years after Ed Artis had alerted Afghan and American officials to the presence of an armed and dangerous con man roving through Afghanistan, U.S. authorities in Kabul started circulating a poster for Idema with an “arrest on sight” order. Still, it took until July fifth for Jack and his crew to be picked up in a raid by Afghan police on his Kabul house.
As expected, Idema insisted he was doing supersecret work with direct approval from the top. Jack produced his evidence of calls to General Boykin’s office, but Boykin was not about to say he endorsed Jack’s activities. Idema also insisted he had records of phone calls to Rumsfeld’s office and other groups. These turned out to be correct, but again they proved to be one-sided inquiries from Idema.
After a very brief—and by all accounts, farcical—trial, the Afghan government convicted Idema, Bennett, and Caraballo of running an illegal prison and of torturing Afghan citizens. Idema and Bennett were sentenced to ten years each, and Caraballo got eight, though their sentences were later reduced to five years for Idema, three for Bennett, and two for Caraballo.
Despite incarceration in Afghanistan’s most notorious prison, Task Force Saber 7 enjoys the poshest setup available. Idema allegedly bribed the commander of Policharki Prison, a Tajik under General Fahim, to allow him to have couches, carpets, Internet access, and a sat phone. Caraballo was released in the spring of 2006, pardoned by Karzai for the Afghan New Year. While serving out his five-year sentence, Idema continues to publish a website and do interviews with those he considers friendly, all the while protesting his innocence and damning the conspiracy that keeps him from fighting his own war on terror.
Those who had met Idema in Afghanistan assumed there was something more important, someone more powerful behind the tough-guy façade. Those who know Idema well write him off as low-grade con artist who ends up revealing himself in his desperate hunger for publicity and money. The Afghan/American owner of the Mustafa Hotel in Kabul where Jack held court takes a more humorous approach: “The only thing that that Jack should be allowed to attack and kill is his bar tab.” Others have been financially, emotionally, and professionally damaged by Idema’s serial litigation, slander, and hyperaggressive campaigns to threaten or discredit former friends.
That such a transparent criminal could so easily label himself a contractor to act out his own covert paramilitary fantasy is a warning about the growing ubiquity of independent contractors. Bill Hagler, a private investigator and former associate of Idema’s, blames Idema’s long run in Afghanistan on the vague world of covert operations. “A world where the military can neither confirm or deny covert operators. That’s fertile ground for con artists like Idema.”