To Be a Friend Is Fatal (27 page)

In June
ABC World News
, the first television program to profile the list, asked to tag along on my next trip to Washington, my first time back since Packer's
New Yorker
piece. I had just settled into a burgundy armchair in the high-ceilinged waiting room of office 317 in the Russell Senate Office Building when the double doors burst open, and Edward Kennedy barreled through with a bellow: “Where's Kirk Johnson?!”

In my surprise, I half expected someone else in the room to stand up and announce himself as me. I leaped up and felt my hand disappear into his firm grip.

“C'mon inside. Let's have a talk.”

I followed him, tugged by an orbital force as he ambled swiftly through a second room of staffers into his main office. He pulled forward
a chair for me and sat down so our knees were touching. I completely forgot about the cameras filming the meeting.

As he answered some quick questions from nearby aides, I managed to pry my eyes loose from his face and glance at the mantle over his left shoulder. Two busts stared down at the sitting area: one of JFK, the other of RFK. He patted my knee and brought me back into his orbit.

“So, tell me, when were you in Iraq? You were with AID, no?”

I couldn't tell at first if he was just making small talk for the camera, but when I responded, he leaned forward slightly and listened to me, furrowing his brow at points, nodding at others. Over the next thirty minutes, he asked precise questions about my experience with the Iraqi staff and shot instructive glances at his staffers, who took notes as we spoke.

He had quickly emerged as the leader in Congress on the issue, having called the first Senate hearings a few months earlier in January 2007; but by the scope and depth of his questions, it was clear to me that he had more in mind. I tried to keep up with his questions about the process, about which stages were proving the most problematic for the Iraqis on my list, and how many Iraqis I thought might be affected by the stigma of collaborating with us.

I was halfway through responding to a question when the doors opened, and his Portuguese water poodles raced in and jostled around our legs.

“She wants to play,” Kennedy said, handing me a tennis ball damp with canine saliva.

I rolled the ball along the floor and tried to remember the question I was answering, but the dog returned, nudging the ball against my thigh until I plucked it out and tossed it again.

Eventually I yielded my seat to the ABC correspondent, who interviewed the senator about the list. I sat on a couch and looked around the room in bewilderment as they spoke. Every square inch of wall space was filled with photographs with leaders, Kennedys, letters from schoolchildren, clippings of articles.

I snapped to attention when Kennedy bellowed, “We
know
who these people are! They aren't terrorists! They helped us over there, and now there's a target on their backs.”

His outrage was invigorating, a clamorous and fearsome arrival of reinforcements, an entire regiment in one man. I allowed for a little optimism: the Iraqis on the list were not alone anymore.

When the ABC profile ran in July 2007, about five months after I first brought the list to the State Department, it included a damning interview with Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey, who strongly disputed my claim that the White House was loathe to resettle Iraqi refugees because doing so would be an admission of failure in Iraq. “I really reject that. There has been no constraint placed on us by the administration. The administration has been fully supportive.” Emboldened, she said, “People like to compare this period to the fall of Vietnam. . . . At that time, we did not have the security process that has been put in place after 9/11. It's a different world that we live in today.”

The correspondent asked a simple question: “Why haven't any of the Iraqis on Kirk's list been given visas yet?”

Sauerbrey: If Kirk Johnson has a list, I wish he'd give it to us.

Correspondent: He says he has.

Sauerbrey [startled]: If we have a list, if we have any such list, I've not seen it.

Correspondent: You're saying that Kirk's list, that's gotten all this publicity—that you don't have it?

Sauerbrey: I don't have Kirk's list.

ABC closed its piece by reporting that the State Department called shortly after the interview to say that it did, in fact, have my list, but that Secretary Sauerbrey had not been properly briefed. Not long after, another TV producer hoping to do a profile on the list was told, “If Kirk Johnson is part of your piece, Assistant Secretary Sauerbrey won't sit with you.”

If Packer's article had opened the spigots for other reporters, the ABC profile unleashed the hydrant of the American viewing public. Within minutes, my in-box began to vibrate with messages of support and condemnation. I was amused by the hate mail but at a loss to respond to
the hundreds of strangers who wanted to help. A World War II veteran asked where he could send a check. A yoga instructor wrote to say she wanted to donate. Several computer programmers volunteered to make a website for me. A family in Ohio wrote to say they would host any Iraqi on my list if they made it to America. A woman volunteered to marry an Iraqi on the list if it would help him get to safety.

Others wrote, usually from anonymous accounts, to register their venom. Subject line: “Why don't you take your dumb ass back to Iraq! Why don't you spend your time telling Iraqi people to fight for their own country instead of whining?” Subject line: “You pervert what it means to be American, shame on you! You must admire Benedict Arnold!” Others told me that I was naïve: Muslims could not be trusted with a visa to our country.

Although Iraqis emailed me with excited updates about upcoming visa interviews, I was unsettled by the knowledge that there simply weren't enough journalists to write about every Iraqi on the list. Flying by the seat of my pants, I had managed to use the media to advance a number of cases, but if Yaghdan and Ziad and others were to navigate the straits of the US refugee bureaucracies, I needed to find an organization powerful enough to help those on my list in a more official, systematic way. I developed a new plan to steer all of the donors and people offering to volunteer to a proper nonprofit, one that would know far better than I ever could how to solve the crisis.

I
had a crippling pain in my head that I suspected was a migraine. I fell asleep each night with my laptop open next to me, the screen a jumble of half-written emails. I had no health insurance, and the headache was getting worse; any time I glanced to the left or right, a jolt of pain burrowed into my brain.

My mom mentioned my self-diagnosed migraine to her gynecologist, who wrote a prescription. She dropped the pills in the mail to me, and I sat with anticipation on the front porch, waiting for the mailman. The snow was melting in Brighton, disinterring a winter's worth of cigarette butts, frozen leaves, and dog shit. After three days, the pills arrived, but they did nothing to ease the pain.

I was worried that whatever caused my accident was surfacing again, that something had given way in my brain. I walked over to St. Elizabeth's Hospital and sat down in the emergency room. I filled out an application form for MassHealth, Massachusetts's health care for low-income residents, sheepishly entering “0” for annual income. I stared at the check boxes on the paper, an impromptu evaluation of my life. Twenty-six. Broke. Uninsured. No job prospects. Sleeping fitfully in an unfinished basement. Relying on my mom's gynecologist for prescriptions. My dating life was still in a yearlong slumber, as I spent most nights entering names of Iraqi refugees into Excel.

After a CT scan, an IV dripped heavenly morphine into my forearm, relieving me of the headache for the first time in weeks. I stared anxiously
at the drops lolling down the tube, fearful that the cost of the visit would exceed what remained of my credit card limit. I was stubbornly refusing all offers of financial help from my worried parents. The last thing I wanted after a miserable year of setbacks was to become financially dependent on Mom and Dad once again.

The attending ER doctor came in with my CT scan results and asked in an excited tone, “So what
hap
pened to you, Mr. Johnson?”

I smiled, and explained my accident.

“Are you a little stressed right now?” he asked.

“Yeah. I guess I am.”

“What do you do?”

What did I do?

“It's kinda hard to explain. I've got a list of refugees . . .”

The morphine was making me drowsy, but I was aware of how incoherent I was sounding.

“Okay, well we're going to keep you in here for another couple hours to rest and then send you home with some medicine to help you out. Try to control your stress levels, though, okay? We don't want to see you back in here again with the same problem.”

That afternoon, I checked out with an acute tension headache and walked from the hospital into downtown Brighton. I sat at a café, charged a two-dollar cup of tea to my credit card, and stared distractedly into the glass. More than three hundred Iraqis, widows and fathers, infants and elderly, were depending on me. My thoughts, once again, seesawed toward quitting. For my own sanity, I told myself, I should just write to everyone to announce that I'd run out of money and energy and could no longer help.

While I was in the hospital, another fifteen emails had arrived. It seemed as though many had only heard my name over the phone from other Iraqis, addressing me as “Mr. Kirk” and referencing the friend who had referred them.

I found an email from someone at the State Department requesting a call. The painkiller administered by the hospital was still working its way through me, but I dialed and stared out the window as the bureaucrat
complained about a quote of mine from a recent article. Someone across the street was stapling a sheet of paper to a telephone pole. Intrigued, I wandered over, half listening to the USGspeak tumbling into my right ear—“. . . will require interagency resources that may or not be available . . .”—and found a picture of a black-and-white cat under the heading “Lost.” A $50 reward was posted. My eyes bulged. I set out in search of the cat and then tuned back into the call. “. . . If they don't answer their phone, you know, we can't really help them.”

“I don't understand; have you tried calling them?” I snapped. “They all tell me they're desperate to hear from you.”

“I can't speak about the particulars of any case, as you know, but I know that sometimes refugees don't answer the phone.”

“Okay. Well, I'll make sure they pick up the call.”

I wandered up a steep side street in Brighton as we talked, peering into front yards and around trash cans.

“You know, there are some of us here who think you're not being entirely fair about what State can and can't do in this situation.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, my voice slightly winded from the uphill climb.

She was growing bolder: “I don't think you realize that we have had to rent office space in the region! We've had to fill those offices with staffers and get all kinds of equipment!”

At this, I paused in my search for the cat.

“Okay, so what am I supposed to say to that? Do you want me to tell these Iraqis to stop being so impatient because the State Department needs to rent office space and buy printer toner?”

I felt a twinge of guilt. This was not a political appointee capable of steering policy but a career foreign service officer doing some time in the PRM Bureau. But she had been the one to start this debate, and she parried: “We are not the only actor in the resettlement process! The Department of Homeland Security is also responsible! So is UNHCR! So is the International Organization for Migration!”

“But I don't understand. Is this a budgetary and logistics problem for State? Or is the problem at DHS? Explain it to me so that I'm not being unfair.”

She reined herself back in, and the portcullis of USGspeak dropped on the conversation:

“We have committed to doing what we can, as one actor in a multi-actor refugee resettlement program, to help the Iraqis on your list.”

As the conversation ended, I realized I was a thirty-minute walk from home and decided that the cat couldn't have strayed so far. I made my way back and transcribed as much of the conversation as I could before deciding to heed the ER doctor's advice and take the rest of the day off.

I needed help. I called several of the established refugee advocacy organizations and asked if they would take over my list, but was politely rebuffed. Even though I depended heavily on their expertise and reports from the field, I was soon disabused of the notion that I could simply dump my list on another refugee nonprofit. Some organizations receive funds to help refugees in the field; others work to help refugees who have been resettled in the United States. But I didn't need an organization to pass out short-term relief to those on my list in Syria or Jordan. I didn't need a stateside-focused organization, because nobody on my list had made it to America yet. I needed to find a group that acted as the bridge, to shepherd a refugee through that vast and dark space of the US Refugee Admissions Program.

So when Sharon Waxman and Janice Kaguyutan, senior advisors to Senator Kennedy, suggested that I get in touch with an attorney friend of theirs who had worked on Iraqi asylum cases, I leaped at the idea.

Chris Nugent, at the law firm of Holland and Knight, was clearly in a trench of his own. Over the course of a ten-minute call, paralegals and attorneys kept walking into his office to ask questions, his keyboard never seemed to stop clacking, and an unanswered cell phone rang persistently. He had read George Packer's piece and knew about my list, he said, before walking me through a number of Iraqi asylum cases he had successfully represented. Chris had a stellar foundation in asylum and immigration law and knew far more than most people in DC about what was happening in Iraq, as a result of interacting with his clients.