Jailhouse Jack took Delhi connection

According to the prosecution, Idema, who was sentenced on September 15 to a long spell in prison along with his sidekick Brent Bennett and TV cameraman Edward Caraballo, travelled to Kabul from New Delhi on April 14 this year on an Indian passport.

Indian authorities deny this. And so does Idema. Strutting about in the courtroom wearing wrap-around sunglasses, the American maintained that he had a US passport issued after 9/11 by ‘‘a special agency in Washington DC’’.

From the rest of his testimony, it was obvious that the reference was to the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) under the control of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Before coming to Kabul on his latest visit (he has been to Afghanistan earlier via Central Asia to team up with the Northern Alliance), he said he ‘‘went to the Indian Embassy in Washington, where I was told it would take six days to issue a visa’’.

He brags he pulled strings. ‘‘A senior official in the Department of Defence then requested the military attache, a general, in the Indian Embassy to issue me a visa,’’ Idema said. ‘‘After a conversation with the Consul about how Afghans and Indians both disliked the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency), I got my visa,’’ he added. ‘‘One of the reasons we were flying to Kabul from New Delhi was to prevent the ISI from tracking us,’’ claimed Idema.

The American was well looked after in Delhi. With a flourish, his defence lawyer from New York, John E. Tiffany, produced a Hotel Ashok bill to prove that Idema, Bennett and Caraballo stayed at the ITDC establishment as guests of Ariana Afghan Airlines on April 12 and 13.

He also produced three Delhi-Kabul Ariana ticket jackets. Curiously, the one which was said to be Idema’s was minus the counterfoil—so the passenger’s name was missing, though the serial numbers tallied with the other two tickets issued to Bennett and Caraballo.

Idema’s arrival at Kabul Airport was nothing short of flamboyant. A video played in court showed the three Americans being warmly welcomed on the tarmac by senior Afghan officials, including Kabul’s chief of police.

What the video did establish beyond doubt though is that Idema, whatever his other accomplishments (he was jailed in the 1980s in the US for fraud), is a master showman. The entrance to Kabul Airport is adorned with a giant portrait of Ahmed Shah Masood, the legendary Northern Alliace leader assassinated by Osama Bin Laden’s men shortly before 9/11.

The video’s dramatic finale shows the American mercenary striding up to Masood’s portrait and kissing it, much like a devotee at a place of pilgrimage.

So who is this mysterious Idema, and what propelled him to launch his own, private ‘‘war on terror’’? The huge, US $25 million reward on offer for Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden? A crusading zeal against evil? The need for constant adventure and personal glory?

His former girlfriend said Idema ‘‘likes his name in lights.’’ During the trial Jailhouse Jack came across as a combative, even perhaps foolhardy, individual with an extreme talent for theatre.

At one point, though a non-Muslim, he insisted on taking oath on the Quran, sending the Afghan audience, including his victims, into paroxysms of joy and shouts of ‘‘Allah-o-Akbar!’’

But Idema also insisted vehemently that he was conducting his highly unconventional campaign against Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan with the full knowledge of the Pentagon, the FBI and top Afghan leaders.

On the final day of the hearing, just before he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, his lawyers produced letters and videos to ‘‘prove’’ his Washington connections. The letters were all one-way, purportedly faxed by Idema to, among others, Rumsfeld and Lt-Gen William G Boykin, Undersecretary of Defence for Intelligence. There was no damning piece of paper signed by any Pentagon official.

There was, however, convincing circumstantial evidence that during his eventful, three-month-long operations in Kabul, Idema was known to the international security forces. He went on three raids hunting for explosives with Nato-led peacekeepers, and handed over a man said to be a top Al Qaeda operative to the US military (who later said he was innocent and released him).

‘‘If Jack was not authorised, why didn’t they stop him when he handed over the first guy?’’ asked the American defense lawyer Robert Fogelnest, who appeared for Caraballo. ‘‘He got into trouble because the FBI hates him—they have caught no one so far, and wanted Jack to reveal his Al Qaeda informants in Afghanistan.’’

As far as the American angle in Idema’s strange saga is concerned, is it possible that he was done in by Washington’s notorious inter-agency rivalry? After all, he claimed to be working for the rival Defense Intelligence Agency. But it is also likely that Washington, after supporting his mission to hunt down Bin Laden (Idema gets star references in Robin Moore’s book The Hunt for Bin Laden), decided to deny any links since allegations of torture in a private jail run by an American in Kabul were too reminiscent of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison scandal.