Decade of Fear. Michelle Shephard
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The paper blizzard was haunting. At St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway at Fulton Street, where George Washington had worshipped following his inauguration, the snow-like drift was almost knee-deep. Somehow, the church’s 235-year-old bricks had absorbed the impact of the crumbling towers, but the gravestones in the adjacent cemetery were cracked and covered white with bills, business cards, charred unfinished reports and letters: the contents of thousands of filing cabinets and desktops now blanketing New York. All of it work people had laboured over, or had kept them awake at night, or had caused panic in the morning, and now it was just the debris of the dead.
For a couple of weeks after the attacks, I was one of hundreds of journalists who tried to make sense of the tragedy by telling stories of the dead, the living, the heroes and the villains. Relatives of the missing would press pictures into my hands, their eyes red and puffy, hoping that this young Canadian reporter could help them find their husband, child, lover, sister, mother, uncle, friend, still alive, perhaps with amnesia, somewhere recovering in hospital, or trapped in a pocket of air under the rubble. The struggle each day was not to find a story but to decide which to tell. I carried tissues or napkins with me because people cried openly.
At night, I would walk in a daze back to 6th Avenue and West 44th Street, to the Algonquin Hotel, where seven decades earlier a club of great writers and actors, including the acerbic Dorothy Parker (who famously said, “I don’t care what’s written about me so long as it isn’t true”), met for boozy lunches. I would say goodnight to Matilda, a snotty Persian cat who lolled on the front counter and would accept my pats with cool detachment. After filing my stories, I’d call my husband, Jim Rankin, a photojournalist at the Star, who had been dispatched to Boston, where two of the flights originated. We had left so suddenly it wasn’t until hours after we’d both got on the road that we remembered our poor new kitten—and I called my sister to see if she could look after him. Eventually, I’d crawl into bed sometime after midnight or one or two or three, and turn on ny1, sometimes crying as I watched the footage before falling asleep with the TV on.
There were a few voices preaching about the horrors of American foreign policy and a smattering of joyful rallies around the world celebrating that the great U. S. of A. was finally feeling their pain. But generally there was unprecedented international support. If not empathy, at least there was sympathy, or perhaps just fear about what would happen now that the United States had been brought to her knees.
The good thing about covering 9/11 was that you could do something when others felt helpless. It also provided the comfortable detachment so many journalists relish—writing about reality to avoid it. But in those first frenzied weeks I was just a scribe, recording what people told me, trying to put in words the heartache, or how a sickening metallic stench hung over Battery Park, or what it sounded like when Manhattan didn’t sound like Manhattan. The roar of patrolling F-16s echoed off the skyscrapers, which now looked like looming towers of death. I covered funerals and wrote obituaries before relatives acknowledged their loved ones were gone. All the while the dead watched us, hundreds of eyes looking out from walls and lampposts and restaurant windows and anywhere there was space to plaster the “Have You Seen” posters. It really was no different from the crime stories I had written for most of my career, only on a massive scale.
For the next decade, I went in search of the hows and whys, trying to define terrorism and understand its roots. In Yemen, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard explained why he admired one of the world’s most reviled men. In Syria, guards standing outside the notorious Far Falestine prison denied that it was a jail, let alone a place where people were tortured. Interviewing elusive Islamists on the un terrorist list in Mogadishu and Karachi helped me understand just how differently each region viewed the world. It took more than twenty visits to Guantanamo Bay to discover that the world’s most famous detention centre was almost indescribable.
Sometimes I didn’t need to go far. In Toronto, eighteen young men and teenagers were arrested for plotting to blow up financial and government buildings a ten-minute walk from my newsroom. I drank many cups of coffee with the police mole in the case, trying to understand why someone who hadn’t reached puberty before 9/11 would a few years later vow to blow himself up. Comedian Jon Stewart said what many were thinking the night of the dramatic June 2006 Toronto arrests: “You hate Canada? That’s like saying, ‘I hate toast.’”
During my ten years of putting pieces of the national security puzzle together I was never posted to a particular region and always returned to my home in Toronto. Nor was I a war reporter embedded in Iraq or Afghanistan. The benefit I got from the exotic and varied travel—and my return to the Western cities, politicians and public who would often determine the fate of those countries in turmoil—was a global view of terrorism and security. It helped me experience the great divide. It became easy during my travels to see all the disastrous missteps. It was harder to look ahead and see the way forward.
In the media we jump from story to story, from one crisis to the next—If it bleeds, it leads—with brief commercial breaks for philandering politicians, crack-addicted celebrities and a sporting event or two. Trying to understand the aftermath of 9/11 was different. It was a big, ugly, complicated, misunderstood, politically and financially motivated, sometimes humorous, sometimes sexy, sometimes dull, often devastating story.
On this night aboard the Spy Cruise, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, I left the Silk Den with that sinking feeling I often had after talking with people in positions of authority, where the underlying, unspoken message was, We know more than you, so just trust us. There is little doubt Porter Goss and General Michael Hayden knew much more about terrorism than I did, but I learned quickly in this beat that the greater the position of authority, the higher the level of skepticism I should have.
I retreated to my eighth-floor windowless “state cabin,” which was neither stately nor the size of a cabin. I couldn’t tell if it was the swelling ocean that caused the hangers in my closet to clang from side to side as I tried to sleep, or if my head was spinning from the evening’s conversation. Either way, I just felt woozy.
Six months after the cruise, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. So many hard lessons had been learned in the ten years since 9/11 and yet the immediate debate in the wake of his death felt like a step back in time. “Well, that didn’t take long,” journalist Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker on May 2, 2011. “It may have taken nearly a decade to find and kill Osama bin Laden, bit it took less than twenty-four hours for torture apologists to claim credit for his downfall.” Enhanced interrogation techniques were once again at the forefront of the news. Former Bush administration officials claimed waterboarding was the reason al Qaeda’s leader had finally been exterminated. I replayed the cruise conversations and still couldn’t help but wonder. KSM was waterboarded in 2003 and bin Laden was killed eight years later. I thought of what had happened in those eight years. Even if KSM had provided a nugget of intelligence (which was later largely discounted) is that what Goss and others called “effective”?
The problem with the national security beat is that the more you know, the more you wonder. All I have been certain about is that “the war on terror” was a ridiculous name for a war in the first place.
This is not a memoir or an exhaustive analysis, but a ten-year trip through the national security grey zone, which ends where it began—at Ground Zero. It is a glimpse at a decade of terror inflicted by both individuals and the state. It is an introduction to the people I met who instilled that terror, and to the victims they left in their wake.
“Some of the saddest aspects of the 9/11 story are the outstanding efforts of so many individual officials straining, often without success, against the boundaries of the possible.”
THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT
IT WAS MIDNIGHT on September 14, 2001, and Times Square was eerily quiet. The few people milling about had their chins dipped, eyes downcast, and if the knock-off Gucci handbag vendors had been out earlier, there was no sign of them now. Broadway was dark. No inebriated late-night diners. No tourists.