Family & Fatherhood

My Mother's Baghdad

She spoke of a peaceful cosmopolitan city where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived side by side—a vision that has guided my life and work

An unmarked FBI van sped past my college residence at Yale and paused a block and a half away, engine purring. The driver had his usual instructions from the New Haven field office to avoid the appearance of waiting for me in front of my dorm.

“Just get in quick.”

We raced to a nearby town and established contact with a dozen or so armed field agents who had been passing time in unmarked sedans, covertly circling a small-time mosque. The driver turned up the volume of what sounded like AM radio, but instead of a Red Sox game, a tense conversation in Arabic, fuzzy with static, came through the speakers. The van’s receiver was tuned in to a wired microphone that a Muslim worshipper inside had agreed to wear up his pants, past his crotch, and underneath his shirt.

“The guy is Iraqi,” my handler piped up from the backseat. “He hasn’t slept in two weeks, ever since the cleric in there supposedly started threatening to break his arms and legs. If you hear the imam breathe so much as a word that sounds like a personal threat to the guy, just say so and we’re going to bust down the friggin’ door.”

It was spring 1996, my senior year in college. At 21, I had no idea exactly what I wanted to do with my life, but the FBI did. They assigned me to help them find out if this Egyptian cleric, long in the agency’s sights, had broken the law. According to the Iraqi, the cleric had threatened him for planning to join an “infidel” organization. Would he make the mistake of repeating his threat? The four of us sat there tense and sweating. The van’s stuffy air seemed to aggravate a palpable urge on the part of the agents to move out and storm the place.

“Come on, Joe, what’s he saying?”

I concentrated on the layers of a nuanced Arabic-language power play between the cleric and his disaffected minion. I detected an Egyptian dialect, paper-light but confident and laced with Quranic phrasing.