Shadowed, Arrested, and Shot At: Tod Robberson's Years in the War Zones

In this, the third installment in the interview series by Cadets Cody Bartmann '25 and Richie O'Connell, III '22 with The Cadet's Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist advisor, Tod Robberson, focuses on his arrest in Turkey while reporting on the Kurds, his tense interview with a radical cleric in Fallujah following the killing of four American contractors, and his encounters in Afghanistan with the mercinary Jonathan "Jack" Idema. Cody Bartmann: We also know that you were arrested in Turkey while you were interviewing a Kurdish family. What was the story that you were working on at that time, and what did that teach you about censorship and press freedom? Mr. Robberson: Well, this was 1998, I believe, and I was working for the Dallas Morning News then. And we decided we were going to do a series of stories where correspondents were going to fan out across the globe to write stories about forgotten wars, wars that the world was not paying attention to. My assignment was to write about the Kurds. The Kurds occupy an expansive land that covers parts of Armenia, a large part of Turkey, a large part of northern Syria, a large part of Iraq, and a large part of Iran. And I believe they are the largest ethnic group in the world without a country of their own. The Kurds had been involved in a guerrilla war in Turkey for a long time. They also had militias in Iraq and were giving Saddam Hussein hell. They weren't particularly welcome in Iran. Armenians were not happy with them. And so they were not well-liked people, but I wanted to interview Kurds and just hear their story. This was one of the stupid things that journalists do sometimes. I made a big mistake. When I was applying for our Visas to go over to Turkey and do this, I was trying to think of wording that would not take sides. I was trying ...to be honest with them [The Turkish Government] and say, "I want to cover the Kurdish, the war against the Kurds, and the Kurds' war against Turkey." And I used the word 'struggle,' which is a weighted word, obviously. And the Turks immediately said, "No, we're not giving you a visa." I said, "Well, what do I do? I'm going to write about this one way or the other." They said, "Well, you can go if you want to as a tourist. You're not going to get a journalist visa, but you can go, and good luck." So I went with a photographer. We were followed from the minute we got into the Turkish city, basically the capital of Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey. All of a sudden, we had five government agents. [I]t was almost like Monty Python, how silly it was. I couldn't walk five feet without these guys being right on top of me. The idea was to intimidate anybody whom I talked to from talking to me. Early on, before they were tracking me, the photographer and I were working in Istanbul, just going around in the suburbs of Istanbul where a lot of Kurds live and do menial work and work in factories and stuff. We found some people working in a factory and realized they were using child labor, and it was a little bit weird. We found a guy who we talked into letting us go to his house and interview his family in his living room. After he got off his shift, we went over to his house, and he welcomed us, and we sat on the floor and drank tea. I'm in the middle of doing a very cursory interview...it was not heavy stuff; it was asking him his background, where he had lived before he moved to Istanbul, what was his education and what was his job. Just background stuff. All of a sudden, the front door bursts open, and a bunch of police barge in, and they arrest us all. They arrested the father, me, our translator, and the photographer, and they hauled us off to jail, and they held us there for four hours. I can't remember what kind of phone I had back then, I think it was a cell phone. I got a call from the U.S. embassy, and the person on the line said 'the State Department is intervening on your behalf, and they have let it be known at the highest levels of the Turkish government [that] they need to let you go.' While I'm talking on the phone to this guy, the police chief, who had been Mr. Tough Guy and was kind of roughing us up and trying to get us to confess to something, gets a phone call. And it took a long time, but eventually they just let us go. They just dumped us out on the street in the middle of nowhere, and we had to find our way back to Istanbul. We found out later that they were trying to market us to different Turkish intelligence agencies and military agencies, trying to get somebody to take us off their hands, and they were trying to basically say this will be a great coup for you to have these journalists posing as spies for the Kurds. And they couldn't get anybody to take us. So the State Department said, "We know what you're up to, stop it, and just let them go." And so they let us go. That is what put these agents on my tail, and they started following me everywhere I went. I took a trip out to this monastery that was like 1700 years old; it was one of the oldest monasteries in the world, and still standing. When we got out of our car, the photographer, the translator, and I walked up to the door of the monastery, which was just this big, giant, thick wooden door. Right behind us are these five government agents. It was just silly; they were just right behind us. I get the knocker, this big iron knocker, and I'm "bang, bang, bang" on the door of this monastery, and I had already set up an interview with the priest who ran the monastery. He comes to the door expecting just me and the photographer and the translator, and then he looks behind me and sees all these agents, and I said, "We're here!" and he just looked at me, and so we walked a few steps in and we just started kind of looking at all the artwork and everything and admiring the beauty of the monastery, and he pulls me aside he says, "Say nothing, act like you're enjoying the tour, and if we can distract them I will get you off into a separate room and we can do our interview. But say nothing in front of them." I said, "Okay. So we literally walked, all eight of us or nine of us, through this monastery looking up at the beautiful artwork and everything, and I'm saying, "Oh, how old is that painting over there? So are you in some kind of danger here?" and he's pointing up at the painting and goes, "Yes, they will not leave me alone, they are searching the monastery every five days, there they think that we are hiding something." We conducted an entire interview by looking at artwork and pointing at it while the photographer and the translator tried to distract the agents, and that's how we got away with doing an interview with this priest. It was silly, but I got through it, and that's what happened. Richie O'Connell III: After the killing of four American contractors in Fallujah, you interviewed a radical cleric there. How did you prepare for that moment, and what was going through your mind during the interview? Mr. Robberson: So, that was in 2000, I think it was toward the end of 2003. Early in the war, the Iraqis were just kind of caving in. There was very little resistance left. But then, at a certain point in the summer of 2003, it became apparent that there was an organized resistance, and it had yet to define itself in any way. We just knew that one of the major pockets of resistance was in Fallujah. So I had been to Fallujah a few times, and it was a bizarre kind of Wild West situation where I was standing on the street, and two M1 Abrams tanks just go rolling by, kicking up dust, and you just stand there and watch them, and they just roll by, obviously heading somewhere. You would get military convoys coming through, and I figured I was safe because there was just such a heavy US military presence there, but at the same time knew it was dangerous because these contractors had been killed and their bodies were hung from a bridge. I wanted to know who was behind that. I went with a translator, even though I could speak Arabic, I had a translator handy for various reasons. We went from place to place asking people, you know, "Who's behind this? Who would be able to talk to us about who's behind this?"Everybody said,"You need to go to this mosque and talk to this Imam, and he knows about it." It took us a while, but finally we went to the mosque, and then they said, "You have to go to his house." So we went to his house, and he at first said, "No, I don't want to talk to you." Finally, I kept talking and talking and finally worked our way in. We sat down, and he was there with two guys who clearly had sidearms, and it was not a friendly interview. He was very suspicious from the start, not friendly in any way. I don't think he offered us tea or anything, and clearly wanted us to leave. I was letting my translator translate the questions. I figured it's a device, while he's asking the questions, and I'm listening to the answer and waiting for the translator to translate, I could already take notes and get ahead, and figure out what my next question is gonna be while I'm writing down what he's saying. The Imam was noticing that I wasn't waiting for the translation to write out his answers. He just kind of put up with it for a while, but he kept looking down at my notepad and looking at me. So I told my translator, "Ask him this question," and the translator was getting so nervous his hands were shaking, his voice was shaking, and he was very slow to get questions out in formal Arabic. The Imam answered, and the translator was getting more and more nervous and slower and slower in his translation, and I'm writing out the answer anyway, and I looked over at the Imam, and he looked at his watch, and I said, "Oh boy, he's gonna cut this off. So I cut off the translator, and I said, "Okay, I know what he said, ask him this. And the Imam stopped, and he said, "Journalists don't speak Arabic, CIA agents speak Arabic." I look over at my translator, his hand is going like this. [wildly trembling]. He turns to me and whispers, "Mr. Tod, we must leave immediately." I said, "Just stay calm, stay calm. We'll be okay, we'll be okay." And I said to him [the Imam], "Look, I learned Arabic because I respect you, I respect the Arab people. And it is a gesture of respect that I learn your language and be able to communicate with you in your language. And it makes me a better journalist." The Imam said, "Okay, but we're done here." So I said, "Fine," and we left very quickly after that. We did not stop to interview people on the streets anymore or anything; we just got the hell out of there very quickly, and that was it. The translator was under a lot of threats after I left Baghdad, and he wound up getting out of Iraq with his family and moving to Germany, and he's still living in Germany today. Cody Bartmann: We also have some information regarding your time in Afghanistan, and that you encountered Jonathan "Jack" Idema, the controversial figure operating outside normal military channels. Can you describe that experience, and what insight did that experience give you into the fog of war and the people who exploit it? Mr. Robberson: That's a nice way of putting it, "a controversial person working outside the normal framework of war." Jack Idema had made very clear that he was, first of all, he had a military background. The first time I ever met him was on the rooftop of a hotel in the center of Kabul. And it was nighttime, pitch black, because nobody had lights in Afghanistan at the time. This is early 2002. He was still wearing sunglasses at night, and I just thought it was silly. I was talking with another journalist friend whom I had known from El Salvador. We were talking about my capture in El Salvador. I mentioned the guy who headed up the US military group at the US Embassy in El Salvador, Colonel Jim Steele, and I was talking to this other journalist about Jim Steele. And this guy just butts in, and he goes, he used an expletive that I'm sure you can't reproduce in your newspaper, but, "What the 'F' do you know about Jim Steele?" I said, "I'm a journalist. I used to work there. My friend here used to work there, and we knew him." He goes, "No, you didn't know Jim Steele." I said, "Yeah, we knew him, we interviewed him." He goes, "No, you must know something more." He was implying that I was CIA because Jim Steele ran the Contras. He was a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair, and he testified before Congress. Anyway, this guy [Idema] was going around Kabul portraying himself as an operator. In other words, he was trying to suggest he was undercover. He had convinced a lot of people, including military personnel from other countries' militaries. He had the passwords to get through checkpoints at night. He knew all the lingo. You ask him about any weapon system, and he knows it. You ask him about operations, military operations, and he could talk the talk. He was very believable, I wanted to know more about him, and so I started trying to hang out with him as much as I could. One night we were having a little get together on the top floor in this suite of the same hotel where we had been on the roof before. It was actually a party for me because I was going to be leaving the next day. The owner of the hotel was there, a journalist, two other journalists were there, and one ex-Special Forces guy was there, and Jack Idema. This one journalist started playing music, and Jack didn't like the music and pulled out his gun and fired it into a wall and said, you know, 'Put some F-ing other music on!" So the guy put on some other music, and we just kind of thought, "Oh man, this is, this is weird." I'm kind of taking my cues from the special forces guy, 'cause he really seemed to know what was going on, and he was relaxed, so I stay relaxed. We're sitting around this coffee table, I was maybe five and a half feet away from Jack. And we started talking about El Salvador, and I was telling him about what happened in Arkitao. Then he said, "If I ever find out that you're out interviewing Taliban in Afghanistan, I'm going to come, and I'm going to kill you." I interrupted him in the middle of that to try to say, "We journalists get information that you can't get because we can go places you can't go because the other side will trust us to talk to us." I was trying to get that sentence out, but I interrupted him. I didn't realize he pulled out his gun, and shot, and missed my left bicep by about four inches, which means he missed my heart by about eight or nine inches. The bullet went through a couch and into the wall between another journalist and me. And I froze. At first, I leaned back because I wanted to measure how far away the bullet hole was from where I was, and then I leaned forward, and I said, "I'm sorry I interrupted you. What were you saying?" The Special Forces guy said later, "That was the coolest thing I've ever seen." That was the highest compliment I've ever received from anybody in the military. So yeah, Jack shot at me. I just made it my life's mission to figure out who this guy was. I filed Freedom of Information requests with the U.S. Government. I went out, and I interviewed the head of the Army Special Forces, who was out in Pul-e-Charkhi, a base just outside of Kabul, and he was a Colonel, and we had a long talk, and I asked him about him. He just gave me this statement: "We in the U.S. Military do support the activities of other agencies working here." He was very specific in his wording. It was very practiced, and it was almost like he knew I was gonna ask the question, and he had this answer ready. He was implying that this guy was either a rogue element or he was working for another agency, and he wanted to make clear we have nothing to do with this guy. I asked a lot of questions, and then I left town. I asked more questions when I came back to Kabul. One time, I came back, I found out that he had been arrested for kidnapping Afghans off the street and taking them to his house, where he was conducting his own interrogation sessions with them. He was arrested and put in the Pul-e-Charkhi prison, just literally almost across the street from where this U.S. Military base was. A few days before that, Peter Bergen, who is a terrorism specialist who's written books about Bin Laden, and he's on CNN all the time. Peter Bergen came to Kabul, and he asked to interview me about Jack Idema, and I told him the story about getting shot at. And so I was quoted in Rolling Stone, a story that Peter Bergen wrote about Jack Idema. I talked to the director of prisons for all of Afghanistan. I did a lengthy interview with him, and at the end of the interview, I asked him if he could give me permission to go to the Pul-e-Charkhi prison and see where Jack Idema was living. I wanted to talk to Jack. He permitted me, and he gave me his cell phone number. I went out to the prison, and the prison director said, "I won't permit it. You cannot go in." I said, "But the director of national prisons says I can go in." He goes, "No, you cannot." I picked up my cell phone, and I dialed up the number, and I handed it to him, and he said, "Okay." And he let me in. I went up to his jail cell. Jack was gone, and his two friends who were jailed with him were gone. So I got to tour Jack's suite, which had a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, it had a computer, it had a TV, and videos. He was not suffering in prison, put it that way. I went into his bedroom, and there on his bed was this Rolling Stone article. I opened it up, and I circled my name where the paragraph where I was quoted, and I left my business card, and I said, "Jack, I was here, you were gone, hope to see you soon," or something like that. He was absolutely furious, and he made some phone calls to try to have me intercepted at the airport and arrested. I got out before. I had made arrangements ahead of time for people to monitor the airport in case I got detained at the airport, because I suspected Jack was up to something, and I had gotten word of it. I got out of Afghanistan, and Jack stayed in prison for a long time, and finally he got released and wound up in Mexico, where he died a few years later. He criticized me, as well as the people who helped me get information about him, until his dying day. When I got shot at, I told everybody in the room, "Not a word of this gets out. Not a word. Because if my wife finds out what happened in this room, I'm done. I can't go to war zones anymore. So not a word gets out.", and everybody agreed that we weren't going to write about this. When he was arrested, I was living in London at the time with my wife and daughter, and I was reading the Guardian newspaper in the morning, and on the front page was a photo of Jack Idema, and it was talking about this American who was arrested in Kabul. I thought, "Okay, he's in jail." So I turned to my wife, and I said, "Do you see this guy right here?" And she said, "Yeah," and I said, "He shot at me from across a coffee table in Kabul." I told her the whole story, but I had sat on that story for two, I think two years, not saying a word about it by that, during that entire time, because I just couldn't. I'm sure my wife is not thrilled that I wasn't being forthcoming with her, but she knew that I didn't tell her everything that I went through in those war zones, and that's why, because I wanted to keep going there. Cody Bartmann: We understand that it was soon after you made a mutual friend of ours aware of the incident across the coffee table that Mr. Idema was arrested and disappeared into the Afghanistan prison. Mr. Robberson: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. A mutual friend of mine and The Cadet was helping me every step of the way and providing very crucial information that was helping me write stories. I have been very careful to hold on to everything that I got with the intention of maybe doing something about that down the line, maybe write a book or something like that. I did have an incident a few years later. We moved in 2006 and were living in Dallas, working for the Dallas Morning News. I got invited to speak at a Jewish community center in northern Dallas. I knew that there was a process server looking for me because this process server had been banging on our front door while my daughter was home sick, and she had called me very frightened, saying somebody was pounding on the door, demanding that she open the door, and I said, "Do not open that door." There had been things like somebody left a shotgun shell in our driveway, sitting up, and I knew somebody was up to something. I am literally getting up to give a speech at this Jewish Community Center, and a process server walks up to me, and he said, "Are you Tod Robberson? You getting ready to speak here?" I said, "Yeah." He goes, "I'm sorry I have to do this. You've been served." He handed me court papers that I was being sued by Jack Idema for tortious interference. And I can't remember the amount, it was a lot of money though, he was seeking from me. We got it dismissed very quickly, but there's nothing that'll rattle you --- well, getting shot at will rattle you --- but it'll really rattle you if you're getting ready to speak up before a big audience and you're served papers at the time. It's not my way to get served. In the upcoming fourth and final installment in the interview series with Tod Robberson The Cadet will focus on the ethical boundaries of reporting in life-or-death situations, the responsibility journalists carry toward sources and translators, the long-term consequences of publication, and the principles that guide decisions made under extreme risk. Please consider supporting our work at www.cadetnewspaper.com. The Cadet is 100% dependant on donations and advertising.