Subterfuge, spies and survival

How I reported a story that could’ve led to the death of my source and her family. Part 1.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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Alma in a Jordanian hospital.

Alma Abdulrahman is lying gaunt and unable to move anything below her diaphragm in a hospital bed in Amman. Some bedsores have become so deep she’s having surgery tomorrow. Screws hold together her upper vertebrae, and cigarette burns pock her right shoulder. Her voice fades in and out, hoarse from either weakness or morphine.

Six months earlier, she was paralyzed when a regime soldier struck her in the neck with a rifle on a street on the outskirts of Damascus. Now, from a guarded hospital room, she wants to be heard, and what she has to say is deeply disturbing.

That’s how I began a story I wrote for The Atlantic in 2013. It was about a woman named Alma who said she had served at a high level in the Free Syrian Army, and was tortured and raped because of it.

I’d been reporting on rape in Syria since 2012 while I worked at the Women’s Media Center, by creating an experimental crowdmap in collaboration with Columbia University epidemiologists and Syrian-American volunteers. We’d hoped that people who knew relevant stories at least secondhand would report them to our website (we didn’t expect survivors within Syria to be able or want to log on to share). No one had ever tried this before. More than anything, we ended up doing our own reporting and adding the stories we collected to the map.

I traveled through Jordan to to interview Syrian refugees at the Zaatari refugee camp and in Amman. Then I went with a Columbia PhD student and a Syrian-American translator to the Turkish border with Syria to conduct more interviews, always seeking out stories about what women had experienced.

I was in what I’ve always liked to call “spitting distance” from Syria, at the Turkish border. That’s a Syrian guard tower.

But reporting on Alma was very different. 

A Syrian-American psychiatrist who had already been a source of mine told me about Alma at the beginning of June 2013, hoping I would write about her ordeal. The psychiatrist had visited Alma, then 27, in the hospital, and said that she was “very open about saying that the world needs to know that Assad is SAVAGE.”

Alma was the only woman I’d ever met or heard about who wanted to say such things publicly, using her full name and face. Doing so would have been a watershed moment — a way, hopefully, to finally get across with passion what was being done to thousands of women in the Syrian war.

On June 3, the psychiatrist and I discussed how I could interview her. We wondered if there was a hospital phone I could call her on, and who could be on hand to translate, either in New York or Amman. I hoped to video chat with her. 

We managed to find someone who could be in the room with Alma on June 7 for a video call. Then things fell apart.

Alma’s first anonymous, short interview had been given to Al-Arabiya, on June 6, 2013. After this, however, a person connected to the case told me that a man from the Jordanian government had visited the hospital to let the administration know that he was displeased that they were treating a “terrorist.” Although Jordan’s King Abdullah II was ostensibly opposed to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in the ever-convoluted Middle East, there is always room for duplicity.

We canceled our call, unsure when or if we could reschedule it.

In the meantime, I had to figure out where to publish the story. I pitched The Atlantic, which I had written for before, and they took it. 

We then decided to reschedule the interview for June 9, with subterfuge in place.

That day, a friend asked me how the interview had gone. I replied:

Ugh — we got thwarted by Wi-Fi/hospital, etc. but we’re supposed to talk again this morning. There’s a medical student there doing the translation for me and keeping lots of notes. She passed me a bunch just now and the dates of two detentions (there were two, not one as I was told at first) do not align with a supposed pregnancy and giving birth. [A soldier had struck Alma in the neck with his rifle, paralyzing her when she was six or seven months pregnant with her fifth child.] The dates, in general, are making me crazy.

There are a few other things driving me crazy. I’m chalking it up at this point to the fact that [Alma is] on morphine, exhausted and traumatized.

Surgeons used plates to fuse together Alma’s cervical and thoracic vertebrae after her neck was broken by a regime soldier. They also inserted screws to stabilize two upper cervical vertebrae.

I also told my friend that the medical student had “freaked out” the night before, saying that she believed she was being followed — entirely possible — and that I was also in danger — which was unlikely, but not impossible. Assad’s men were and are very technologically proficient. They’d tracked down many people in the opposition through their Facebook messages, for instance. Facebook is the most insecure form of communication, a digital security expert told me at the time. Still, all the activists I was speaking to in Syria insisted on using it. It was maddening.

“Someone out there may not want Alma’s (and other Syrian women’s) story to be heard,” the student wrote. “I think this is far bigger than we may think.”

I was concerned about the level of detail she was using in her emails to me. I told her: “No more using the ‘r’ word or ‘SV’” — rape or sexualized violence. I also told her: “Don't worry. Just become overly cautious.”

She wrote to me later that day and I received the email three times. “Change your Gmail password immediately to be safe,” I wrote.

I was far away and seemingly secure in New York, but we really didn’t know how far the regime’s tentacles reached. We’d been planning the interview for several days. We mainly used secure communication, but I have to admit we stupidly sometimes used Gmail. I broke my own security protocols; I don’t remember why.

My friend, who was an international criminal and human rights investigator, wrote back to say:

I’ve been thinking about your interview. Get as much detail as she will give you. This could be the best or only interview of her. She should be able to give you surrounding detail of the cell, daily life in the prison, etc. Take your time and build to the more painful areas. I know you know this. Sorry.

No reason to be sorry — I needed all the advice I could get. I wrote back one minute later:

I’m on skype now with [Alma] and the translator. I spoke extensively to the translator about what we need and sent detailed questions. She’s right now speaking in Arabic and recording while I listen and will translate occasionally. She said it seems to work best if the flow continues, etc. so, fingers crossed.

The translator and I had agreed that the best approach would be for me to send her a list of questions. This is what I sent, stressing in bold the points that were most important for me to understand:

1.     Dates of each incarceration. Were both at Harasta detention center?

2.     Dates of pregnancy. When did she give birth? 

3.     How many other women was she detained with each time? Were they all in a room together?

4. What did the detention center look like? How were the cells arranged? 

5.     How many of them were tortured? Raped? Was she taken out of her cell to be tortured or did it happen in her cell?

6.     Can she describe any specific acts of torture she witnessed (or endured)? Was she handcuffed or restrained somehow? Did they give her any kind of shots or drugs?

7.     Did she have any specific injuries from rape? Internal or otherwise?

8.     Alma mentioned that another girl was badly injured from rape and that she helped her get reconstructive surgery. Did this happen during her first detention? Does she know where any of the other women she was held with are, and would it be possible to find them to speak with them?

9.     Was she able to see at any point any of the men who raped her? Did she hear any names? Did she ever hear the name Yusuf? Basel? Mazen?

10.  Was she ever shot? When if so?

11. You have this in the notes: “When A was taken into the hospital, she was unconscious and her name was unknown to the hospital. She says if she had been conscious, she would not have allowed them to take her to this specific hospital.” Why?

12.  See if she can tell you specifics about a single rape — maybe the first or the last time. Let her go slowly and tell you anything she remembers. Smells, words, movements, whatever.

Later that day, my friend had just arrived in Geneva while I was heading to JFK for a flight to Istanbul.

“Did she mention any names without prompting?” she asked. “Do you think it went well? Are the rapes and torture still 10 months ago or anything recent?”

“I think it went well, yes,” I replied. “But not as well as if I was there in person. And my flight’s been delayed to leave at 9 tonight. I’m beyond tired from working on this all weekend and don't want to go. Oh, also — when I asked again for express permission to use her first name she asked that I use her FULL name.”

This is one of the fundamental issues you face when writing about someone in a precarious position. I wanted to reveal what she’d been through, and, as I said, using her name was critical toward providing credibility to her story, as well as those of so many other Syrian women.

The reason I was heading to Istanbul was to present our team’s work on the crowdmap at a conference. While there, I posed the question of whether to use her name or photo to two people: a Pulitzer Prize-winning McClatchy reporter named Roy Gutman, who had been the first journalist to expose the Bosnian death camps and systematic rape of women in the former Yugoslavia; and an advocate from Human Rights Watch.

Roy told me unequivocally that I had to use Alma’s full name (he was less sure about her photo). He said that he had done as much in his reporting, and that it had helped open the eyes of the world to the atrocities in the Bosnian war.

Then I spoke to the woman at HRW.

“Absolutely not!” she said, in shock that I would even consider such a thing. She asked me whether Alma still had family in Syria — she did — and told me that if I published her name or her face, they would all be killed.

I understood where both of them were coming from. But I was unsure how to make such a monumental decision. I didn’t want to take away Alma’s agency, but I also didn’t want to be responsible for the deaths of her children.

I was as frightened as I’ve ever been while doing a story, and I had no idea what to do.

More to come in Part 2…

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