After a nightmarish journey as human cargo, shuttling through Dubai to India, Syria, and then to Egypt, Ziad’s smugglers told him they would attempt the dangerous final trek to Sweden. Stockholm, which had no part in the war, had already admitted tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees at a time when no coalition members were opening their doors. Worried about the safety and legality of the final leg into Europe, I begged him not to continue, which might have played a role in his decision to run from his smugglers once he got to Cairo. Soon thereafter, an officer in the mukhabarat, the dreaded Egyptian secret police, who was involved in the smuggling network picked him up and took him to a prison beneath the Cairo airport. There he was tortured, mainly by electrical shock. For weeks, he resisted the cockroaches in his cell by wadding up bits of paper and jamming them into his ears and nostrils so that they wouldn’t lay any eggs there.
Yaghdan and Haifa were now in Syria, having run out of time on their visitor’s visas in Dubai. They had planned to rent a cheap apartment in the Sayyida Zainab neighborhood of Damascus, where many other Iraqis fleeing the civil war had holed up, but Yaghdan was convinced that he’d been spotted by a member of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which openly maintained an office in the city. They boarded a northern-bound bus to Homs and waited. Either their money would run out or they would get a visa.
It had been a month since I had delivered my list to the State Department, and, apart from a bland email in which it said it would “prioritize” the Iraqis on my list “as appropriate,” there was no tangible progress. New names continued to come in each day, and although I’d developed a system of emailing encrypted files to the Refugee Bureau, it was beginning to feel like loading up a car that was missing an engine.
Any illusions I had maintained about the list being a short-term project shattered upon the publication of “Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted America the Most.” In March 2007, on the fourth anniversary of the war, George Packer’s sixteen-thousand-word exposé erupted with a suffusing outrage in the New Yorker. Yaghdan’s plight was spotlighted in the pages of one of the most influential magazines in the world. Packer wrote about my accident, the family history with Dennis Hastert, and about my trip to DC with the list.
A new torrent of emails ensued, from foreign service officers, contractors, soldiers, and marines who had read the piece and wanted to refer the names of their Iraqi employees. Some wrote from a place of guilt: “I wish I had thought of doing more to protect him . . . has he written to you? Is he already on your list, and if not, can you find him?” Another wrote perfunctorily: “Please add the following name to your list: Ahmed al-Rikabi.”
The flimsy dam that I had constructed to manage the river of emails from refugees was buckling under the new pressure. With each click to refresh my in-box, I found new names and new requests.
A second round of emails came from other journalists suddenly turning their attention to the issue. I assumed that they wouldn’t want to talk with me, since Packer had already written about the list, but I soon realized that they had been assigned by their editors to produce their own reports, no matter how derivative. His reporting had bulldozed a path through which the rest of the media now strolled.
It was a strange business. The more that journalists wrote about the list, the more requests I got from other journalists. I found myself fielding one or two calls a day, walking each journalist through the crisis, teaching what I’d learned about the refugee admissions process, and steering him or her to annoyed public affairs officers at the State Department’s Refugee Bureau. Although a few had bothered to do some background research before calling, most would kick off the call with, “Okay, I’m recording. Why don’t you just start from the top?” as though I were peddling a movie script.
Someone from a reputable paper would call and say, “I’m looking for a woman, preferably in Syria, who worked for the Americans and was attacked.” Or, “Is there anyone on the list who is in Egypt, Christian, and had family members killed?” Or, “Yeah, hi, I need someone in Iraq or Jordan who’s been tortured and is in hiding.” Or, “Do you have any Iraqis who worked for the Brits who fled to Lebanon?” Like ordering a pizza.
If the journalists needed me for a quote, the Iraqis on the list needed them for much more. Beyond the obvious benefits of greater coverage of the crisis, whenever a journalist wrote about someone on the list whose case had been frozen for months or years, the government magically unfroze that case. I’d tried to capture the State Department’s attention by delivering my list quietly in February, but it wasn’t until articles started appearing in major papers that Iraqis began to receive interviews at our embassies in the region. I kept a revolving short list of Iraqis willing to talk with the media, and notified the Refugee Bureau whenever someone would be the subject of an upcoming profile.
“Americans aren’t going to give one stinking damn about Iraqi refugees on their own!” An audio technician from ABC World News with thick fingers was clipping a microphone to my shirt and snaking the wire under my shirt and down my chest. With a furrowed brow, I warded off someone approaching me with a powder kit in hand. Another crew member adjusted an off-camera lamp. The TV producer continued: “That’s why we need you for the piece. The fact that you’re a young white guy from the Midwest makes it much easier for them to plug in to this whole thing!” I shifted in my seat as the lamps turned on and the camera started filming.
And so I sat in front of cameras in air-conditioned studios, talking about people that had been raped or tortured by power drill because they worked for the United States. I was glad that the American public might finally learn about the largest refugee crisis in the world, a direct result of our botched occupation. But I was growing uneasy with the tidiness of the stories: several articles referred to me as the Schindler of the Iraqis.
Americans don’t like to be presented with intractable problems or morally confounding situations. We like to think of our bombs falling on only the right homes, our bullets bending around good guys in search of bad flesh, our torturers as rare bad apples. And so overzealous members of the media were already anointing me as a hero when I hadn’t helped a single person to safety. All I had done was double-click on Microsoft Excel and make a list. I didn’t want Americans to hear about millions of refugees and think that everything was fine because of my meager effort.
Despite my misgivings, I was mindful that media interest was fleeting. I figured the State Department was hoping to weather a little negative publicity over the refugee crisis with the hope for a speedy return of the clear skies of American apathy. It could wheel out a new interagency group and promise to “ramp up,” and enough people would be satisfied. I treated each interview as though it would be my last, using the media to advance as many cases on the list as possible before it all evaporated.
In June ABC World News, the first television program to profile the list, asked to tag along on my next trip to Washington, my first time back since Packer’s New Yorker piece. I had just settled into a burgundy armchair in the high-ceilinged waiting room of office 317 in the Russell Senate Office Building when the double doors burst open, and Edward Kennedy barreled through with a bellow: “Where’s Kirk Johnson?!”
In my surprise, I half expected someone else in the room to stand up and announce himself as me. I leaped up and felt my hand disappear into his firm grip.
“C’mon inside. Let’s have a talk.”
I followed him, tugged by an orbital force as he ambled swiftly through a second room of staffers into his main office. He pulled forward a chair for me and sat down so our knees were touching. I completely forgot about the cameras filming the meeting.
As he answered some quick questions from nearby aides, I managed to pry my eyes loose from his face and glance at the mantle over his left shoulder. Two busts stared down at the sitting area: one of JFK, the other of RFK. He patted my knee and brought me back into his orbit.
“So, tell me, when were you in Iraq? You were with AID, no?”
I couldn’t tell at first if he was just making small talk for the camera, but when I responded, he leaned forward slightly and listened to me, furrowing his brow at points, nodding at others. Over the next thirty minutes, he asked precise questions about my experience with the Iraqi staff and shot instructive glances at his staffers, who took notes as we spoke.
He had quickly emerged as the leader in Congress on the issue, having called the first Senate hearings a few months earlier in January 2007; but by the scope and depth of his questions, it was clear to me that he had more in mind. I tried to keep up with his questions about the process, about which stages were proving the most problematic for the Iraqis on my list, and how many Iraqis I thought might be affected by the stigma of collaborating with us.
I was halfway through responding to a question when the doors opened, and his Portuguese water poodles raced in and jostled around our legs.
“She wants to play,” Kennedy said, handing me a tennis ball damp with canine saliva.
I rolled the ball along the floor and tried to remember the question I was answering, but the dog returned, nudging the ball against my thigh until I plucked it out and tossed it again.
Eventually I yielded my seat to the ABC correspondent, who interviewed the senator about the list. I sat on a couch and looked around the room in bewilderment as they spoke. Every square inch of wall space was filled with photographs with leaders, Kennedys, letters from schoolchildren, clippings of articles.
I snapped to attention when Kennedy bellowed, “We know who these people are! They aren’t terrorists! They helped us over there, and now there’s a target on their backs.”
His outrage was invigorating, a clamorous and fearsome arrival of reinforcements, an entire regiment in one man. I allowed for a little optimism: the Iraqis on the list were not alone anymore.
When the ABC profile ran in July 2007, about five months after I first brought the list to the State Department, it included a damning interview with Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey, who strongly disputed my claim that the White House was loathe to resettle Iraqi refugees because doing so would be an admission of failure in Iraq. “I really reject that. There has been no constraint placed on us by the administration. The administration has been fully supportive.” Emboldened, she said, “People like to compare this period to the fall of Vietnam. . . . At that time, we did not have the security process that has been put in place after 9/11. It’s a different world that we live in today.”
The correspondent asked a simple question: “Why haven’t any of the Iraqis on Kirk’s list been given visas yet?”
Sauerbrey: If Kirk Johnson has a list, I wish he’d give it to us.
Correspondent: He says he has.
Sauerbrey [startled]: If we have a list, if we have any such list, I’ve not seen it.
Correspondent: You’re saying that Kirk’s list, that’s gotten all this publicity—that you don’t have it?
Sauerbrey: I don’t have Kirk’s list.
ABC closed its piece by reporting that the State Department called shortly after the interview to say that it did, in fact, have my list, but that Secretary Sauerbrey had not been properly briefed. Not long after, another TV producer hoping to do a profile on the list was told, “If Kirk Johnson is part of your piece, Assistant Secretary Sauerbrey won’t sit with you.”
If Packer’s article had opened the spigots for other reporters, the ABC profile unleashed the hydrant of the American viewing public. Within minutes, my in-box began to vibrate with messages of support and condemnation. I was amused by the hate mail but at a loss to respond to the hundreds of strangers who wanted to help. A World War II veteran asked where he could send a check. A yoga instructor wrote to say she wanted to donate. Several computer programmers volunteered to make a website for me. A family in Ohio wrote to say they would host any Iraqi on my list if they made it to America. A woman volunteered to marry an Iraqi on the list if it would help him get to safety.
Others wrote, usually from anonymous accounts, to register their venom. Subject line: “Why don’t you take your dumb ass back to Iraq! Why don’t you spend your time telling Iraqi people to fight for their own country instead of whining?” Subject line: “You pervert what it means to be American, shame on you! You must admire Benedict Arnold!” Others told me that I was naïve: Muslims could not be trusted with a visa to our country.
Although Iraqis emailed me with excited updates about upcoming visa interviews, I was unsettled by the knowledge that there simply weren’t enough journalists to write about every Iraqi on the list. Flying by the seat of my pants, I had managed to use the media to advance a number of cases, but if Yaghdan and Ziad and others were to navigate the straits of the US refugee bureaucracies, I needed to find an organization powerful enough to help those on my list in a more official, systematic way. I developed a new plan to steer all of the donors and people offering to volunteer to a proper nonprofit, one that would know far better than I ever could how to solve the crisis.