Licensed to Kill (32 page)

Relishing the attention, he often possessed a keen talent for becoming whatever the media wanted him to be. But he could also be wildly erratic. He once fired his gun toward Tod Robberson of the
Dallas Morning News,
but warmly congratulated Linda Vester of Fox for scoring an interview with “a Special Forces guy.” His new nickname among the growingly skeptical media was “Jack Shit,” a sum-up of what he actually delivered for the money he charged. He told journalists and whoever would listen an ever-changing series of tales, billing himself alternately as a “Northern Alliance advisor” or the ever-elusive “expert,” even very briefly snagging a paid position with Fox as a news consultant. Even Idema's supposed Northern Alliance clients weren't immune from Jack's predatory need for cash. Jack told CIA-backed warlord Hazrat Ali that he needed to brief an important delegation of Pentagon officials at the Spin Ghar Hotel. The “officials” turned out to be reporters Idema had charged $100 to attend an “exclusive” briefing by Hazrat Ali.

Although he managed to make money here and there from the media, he didn't score big until January 2002, when he sold seven hours of purported al-Qaeda training tapes to top-bidder CBS News. Although in his auction to the media, Idema's William Morris agent suggested bids in excess of $150,000, CBS reportedly paid somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000 for the first rights to air the tapes. Secondary sales to other networks like BBC, ABC, NBC, and others increased Jack's income. CNN was a notable dissenter; they'd done their research on Idema and didn't even bother responding. In mid-January, CBS featured him on
60 Minutes II
and the
CBS Evening News
with Dan Rather. According to Ed Artis, “he made his first big media hit when he convinced CBS to buy his bogus al-Qaeda tapes.” Artis points out that the tapes were shot on archaic 8-mm Hi-8 videocassettes—the same format as the cheap camera Idema brought in with him when he met Artis. “First he claimed he captured them; then he claimed he bought them; then he said that they were given to him, and even that they were shot by a Japanese cameraman.”

Jack's self-imposed tour of duty came to a screeching halt in June 2002 when his mother's death forced him to return home to upstate New York. Not long after his mother's funeral, Idema headed down to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for the Special Forces 50th Anniversary celebration.

Idema has said that he wanted to join the Special Forces ever since he saw John Wayne's movie, based on Robin Moore's book
The Green Berets.
Idema's father was a battle-tested World War II–era marine and Idema's short stint in the army played a huge role in his sense of self-identity, though Keith's record speaks to a spotty background and capability. On the surface, his army record shows that Idema was released after three years of service in February 24, 1978, with an honorable discharge. However, a March 18, 1977, evaluation report describes Idema's performance as “marginally average,” citing lack of attention to detail, failure to follow instructions, and inability to accept constructive criticism as just some of his failings as a soldier. Another report by Captain John D. Carlson says Idema “is without a doubt the most unmotivated, unprofessional, immature enlisted man I have ever known.”

Despite these scathing reviews, Idema used his military training and skills to start an antiterrorist training school in Red Hook, New York, called ConTerr. The business did not survive long, but he did manage to get a photograph of Ronald Reagan's son visiting the school. Still capitalizing on his military background, Idema's next career move was to start running Special Forces trade shows, which offered the latest in relevant military equipment and a place for military types to network. At one of these shows, he first met Robin Moore, the author who had first sparked his interest in the Green Berets.

According to Moore, the two later reconnected at the Special Forces anniversary celebration during the summer of 2002, where Moore told Idema of his current writing project—a book about the Special Forces in Afghanistan. Idema quickly convinced Moore that the book could benefit greatly from his knowledge and recent experience in the country. Thus began an unfortunate collaboration that resulted in the book
The Hunt for bin Laden
.

Because of
The Green Berets,
Robin Moore had plenty of credibility with the military, so when the war kicked off, Moore used his contacts to get access to do a new book on Special Forces in Afghanistan. The problem was that Moore was in his late seventies and afflicted with Parkinson's. Unlike his first book, where he went through basic training and spent time in combat on the ground in Vietnam, the elderly Moore contented himself with doing interviews with Special Forces teams as they exfilled from Afghanistan to K2 air base in Uzbekistan. As one of the men of ODA 595 pictured on the back of the book remembers, “Moore would often fall asleep during interviews or forget to turn his tape recorder on.”

Much of the work was done by Chris Thompson, who helped Moore gather and edit the interviews and put
The Hunt for bin Laden
together. It was understood that the book needed something to pull the disjointed chapters on each team together. Jack Idema suggested that he'd be the perfect central character—a mysterious ex–Special Forces operator turned contractor who enters Afghanistan to wage a one-man war on terror. Moore and Thompson thought the idea of Idema just going over as a private citizen added an exciting touch.

Jack was smart enough to cut a back deal with Moore's agent and actually got a percentage of the profits in exchange for writing large parts of the book. In the acknowledgments to the book, Moore gives great credit to Chris Thompson, a former soldier whose father was in Special Forces, but Idema's contribution is elliptically referenced to an “anonymous Green Beret.” Intended to be about U.S. Army Special Forces, the book turned into a showcase for a man named “Jack,” even featuring a bandana-wearing Idema on the cover, strolling with an AK-47, a pistol on his hip, and flanked by two Afghan cohorts. “Jack” is listed in the index as a “Special Forces operative.”

I am actually featured in
The Hunt for bin Laden
and can speak from my own experience in saying that much information is wrong, poorly researched, and written from afar so that minor details are confused or transposed. The Special Forces team I traveled with is pictured on the back cover. Though they never met or talked to Idema, and despite the fact that almost all team members had carefully detailed their actions to Moore at K2, the first chapter puts forth an account of the team's infil into Afghanistan that the men tell me has been entirely fabricated. Contrary to the book's reporting, there was no gunfire, no drama. They landed at night, were welcomed by an advance CIA team that included Mike Spann, and set to work unpacking their gear.

Idema makes the fatal mistake of including the real names of the team and inventing actions that never occurred. An air force controller named Matt sustains much of the action in the first chapter, though the real Matt didn't actually fly in until days after the rest of the group. The book has Matt screaming, “We're about to be fucking overrun…. I need ordnance quick.” B-52 pilots are quoted as uttering the cheesy cliché “Bombs away.” Low-key SF operators are reputed to have said, “Holy shit, un-fucking-believable,” while watching “bodies of maybe a hundred Taliban and AQ troops drawn from the ground upward, arms and legs kicking for a fraction of a second, before disappearing into a pink haze without a trace of solid matter left of their bodies or clothing.” While the story of the team's infil may be the tallest tale in the book, elements of B movie–inspired fiction permeate the work.

One of the soldiers Idema creatively described as singing the “Ballad of Green Berets,” after a battle figures “the more crap they write about us, the more our OPSEC [Operational Security] is protected.” His wife, however, is furious about the decision to expose the real full names as well as photos and ranks of the soldiers. She feels any terrorist with a little computer acumen could find the home address of any of the cited soldiers to attack their families while their husbands are away on long deployments.

At the end of the fictional nonfiction book, “Jack” waxes poetic, drunk on vodka and pomegranate juice, wearing two Makarov pistols, and spouting badly mangled lines from movies. “God, I hate it when a war ends,” the character mimics Colonel Kilgore from
Apocalypse Now.
With “his teary eyes glassed over from the booze,” Jack ponders the imponderable. “Throughout the war it seemed Jack was everywhere…. But was Jack one person, or several?” Perhaps therein lies the key to “Jack's” mental illness and his destructive view of the truth and loyalty.

To make the situation worse, an appendix to the book's early runs listed six charities that purportedly assist Special Forces members, their children, or the people of Afghanistan. Only a sharp eye would catch that one of the cited charities, the U.S. Counter-Terrorist Group, also garnered photo credits for images used in the book, including one of Jack riding a horse. It is none other than ConTerr. The U.S. Postal Service has been tipped off that another address, purportedly for a charity to assist Special Forces soldiers, led to a post office box and a bank account controlled by Idema.

Upon the book's release, it began climbing the bestseller lists, initially delighting Moore. But he then began receiving dozens of e-mails from Special Forces members and families of members who had been there. Moore confessed to the betrayed soldiers that he'd had to “sex it up” and said he'd submitted changes that were never incorporated. The teams wrote off the duplicity to Moore's failing mental condition, since they had no idea about the involvement of the unknown man pictured on the book's cover. In the end, the man who had created the legend of the Green Berets had, because of Idema, destroyed four decades of trust between himself and the Special Forces community. Moore watched, heartbroken, as Amazon and his own personal Web page filled with angry postings denouncing
The Hunt for bin Laden
as fiction and a disgrace.

Ed Artis was one of those who posted his views about Idema on Moore's website, actually provoking Jack into filing a lawsuit against him. “I am being sued for ruining his reputation,” said Artis. “Fuck him. He can sue a dead man.” (Artis suffered a mild heart attack in 2004 while on a humanitarian trip to the Philippines.) A judge dismissed the case in late 2005.

Billy Waugh also managed to provoke Idema's ire, though Waugh's background in the Special Forces has inclined Idema to hold back on the lawyers thus far. “Idema said I bad-mouthed him,” said Waugh. “I said I didn't bad-mouth him; I told the truth. He was not in the CIA, and he didn't do any of that shit he said he did in Robin Moore's book.” Idema started a verbal and written pissing match with Billy (with cc's to Jim Morris, Bob Morris, and Bob Brown, the publisher of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine). On March 17, 2003, Idema told Billy via a threatening e-mail, “Everyone who thinks they ought to jump on this bandwagon of hate and bullshit better buckle up because we're going to court and let's see who wins this fucking round, and billy boy, I got no problem suing your ass too if you want to keep passing on this bullshit.” Billy remembers the war of intimidation escalating beyond the simple possibility of a lawsuit. “Idema calls me up and threatens me. So I say, ‘Bring your shit, man, cuz I got about six guns and a few Claymores set up around my house.' Then he calls me back fifteen minutes later and says, ‘I am not going to do anything because I know you have a great reputation.' Which I do. If he thinks he's going to buffalo me, he's mistaken.”

Idema didn't sue Green Beret legends Billy Waugh or Robin Moore, but in March 2004, just before returning to Afghanistan, he did file suit against Chris Thompson, Thompson's parents, and Robin Moore's girlfriend, in addition to Fox News, Colonel Bob Morris, Ed Artis, and other perceived enemies. Jack, it appears, was desperately trying to protect his newly created image as a one-man army hunting bin Laden.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money

In April of 2004, allegedly bolstered by funds from Moore's book, forty-eight-year-old Idema returned to Afghanistan, this time with a crew on his payroll that included filmmaker and CBS veteran Ed Caraballo, and Brent Bennett, an ex-soldier and former waiter at Ruby Tuesday in Fayetteville. Once on the ground, Idema rented a house and car and hired a few Afghans for local support. He called the mercenary group “Task Force Saber 7,” a play on Task Force Dagger, the official name for the original Special Forces campaign in Afghanistan. They wore U.S.-style uniforms, American flag patches, and often carried weapons, leading many locals to believe that they were a covert unit of contractors working for the CIA or U.S. military intelligence. From his large house in Kabul, Idema and his new crew began filming what could have been a bizarre reality show. Idema had a keen eye for mimicry and had created what could easily be confused for a CIA paramilitary operation complete with its local safehouse, hired Afghan “campaigns,” and tight-lipped aggressive posture toward inquiries, though when it suited his purpose he incongruously sought media exposure for his exploits. Networks were paying good money for any action story on terrorism in Afghanistan, and Idema seemed intent on taking advantage of the demand.

Idema soon claimed he'd uncovered a plot to load taxicabs with explosives and attack U.S. and Afghan targets. Three times he convinced gullible foreign peacekeeping troops to provide backup on raids, which Jack led with maximum high-impact drama and bellicose bravado as Caraballo's camera rolled. When he thought he had hit the jackpot, Idema offered the videos of his captured “terrorists” for sale for a quarter of a million dollars, but the networks had started to suspect Idema's veracity and didn't buy.