A few times, I have felt myself in the presence of true evil. At those times, I learned what it means to have the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It's not just an expression. It happened to me when I met with a leader who recruited cannon fodder for his "jihad," and on a few other occasions in the last couple decades that I've spent interviewing terrorists to learn why they do what they do. But, more often, the evil I've witnessed has been banal. I have found myself able to understand the mistaken moral logic that can turn a boy into a terrorist.
More...
Here's a surprising thing. Almost everywhere -- in Pakistan, in Indonesia, in Texas -- terrorists offer you tea. Sometimes a full meal.
Otherwise, they are quite different from one another. Their motivations vary -- from irredentism, to pleasing the God they claim to worship, to cleansing the Earth of the mud-people that contaminate the world of purity in their minds. Some live in war zones with grievances that are easy for outsiders to grasp; for others, living in the cushy West, the war that is taking place is principally in their own minds, often over identity. Some are paid, some are blackmailed. Some are recruited, and some recruit themselves to their own holy war, whether at home or far away.
That latter seems to be what happened with Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who, according to the latest reporting, recruited themselves to their own "jihad" against America, based, in part, on their opposition to the U.S. role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it comes to understanding -- and stopping -- these kinds of leaderless resisters and small cells, we need to understand how terrorists think as individuals. Political science does not get us there. Leaderless resistance and lone-wolf terrorism is also about personalities and personal experience. Lone wolves and small groups may have commonalities, but we won't know that until we talk to enough of them. That is more art than science -- and the results, as investigators are now finding with Dzhokhar, can be as baffling as they are illuminating.
Last summer, I interviewed a neo-Nazi who had killed two police officers in a botched attempt to rob a bank to raise money for the movement. He was also a mercenary, convicted of war crimes in Bosnia. He fought on the Croatian side, he said, because he was attracted to the fascist ideology of the Ustashi, the Croatian Revolutionary Movement aligned with the Nazis during World War II. Although he is now serving a life sentence in a high-security prison, he is particular about whom he will meet with. Before agreeing to talk to me, he insisted on reading my last two books, one of which is about terrorism. The other is about my own rape, when I was 15. I was uncomfortable giving him my last book. I don't like the idea of being a character in a terrorist's mind. But that was the bargain we had struck, and I stuck with it.
The prison authorities gave me two hours to interview him the first day, four hours the second. I was not allowed to tape the interview. I was not even allowed to bring my own pen into the prison, in case I had a miniature weapon or recording devices hidden inside it. I had to switch pens with the guard.
I was not allowed to bring my own water or food into the prison, so, on the day of our first interview, he brought me tea from the prisoner's dining area. The second day, he also brought ham sandwiches. It's hard to talk to a person like this for four hours straight without sustenance. And besides, I wanted to accept what he was offering me -- this is how rapport is built. I must see the humanity in the murderer, something very uncomfortable to do. But one of the sandwiches on the tray he had prepared for us had a perfect half-moon bite taken out of the ham. I chose another, apparently unbitten one. I tried not to imagine him spitting in it. I had the sense he wanted to contaminate me with what he feels, a coldness in him.
He made sure to bring my rape into the room. He was born the year I was raped, he told me, right at the outset, in what I thought was a move to establish dominance. I was okay with granting him that dominance for the six hours we were together. There was a cord I could pull, the guards told me, in case of emergency. We'll all come running, they said. I would not have made it as far as that cord if the neo-Nazi wanted to hurt me. But somehow, I knew he wanted to talk to me a lot more than he wanted to kill me. I believe he wanted some kind of absolution.
SUBJECTS:
