Lindh's fellow students mockingly nicknamed him Yusuf Islam, after the folk singer Cat Stevens, a celebrated convert to Islam who took that name. For his part, Suleyman Lindh shunned his fellow expatriates and, after five weeks at the YLC—even though his parents had already paid half the $6,000 annual tuition—dropped out of the secular center. He frequented mosques and other holy places. Says a teacher: "He was always wandering around the mosques of old Sana'a, from the Grand Mosque to the Talha Mosque to the Motawakil and Ali Ibn Abi Taleb." Yet even the religion bewildered him. He had been indoctrinated as a Sunni of the Salafi sect, but most of the mosques in the area were Shi'ite mosques of the Zaidi sect—which can be compared to an evangelical Protestant finding himself at worship in a Catholic church. Eventually, Lindh learned to travel to the outskirts of the crowded Shamayla zone, to find a Salafi mosque, the Ahl El Kheir.
The puritanical Salafis, who forbid the chewing of khat, built the Ahl El Kheir Mosque from plain beige bricks, with black basalt adorning windows paneled in white iron. The interior of the mosque is unadorned: whitewashed walls, green and blue carpets. Mosque decoration is considered heresy. This was the Islam Lindh sought. It was reinforced by what he learned at Al-Iman University, where he studied after leaving the YLC. There he would have heard the teachings of Al-Iman's founder, Sheikh al-Zindani, a fiery political leader whose ideas parallel bin Laden's. Lindh's parents never inquired about his new school's politics.
Yemenites say the blame for Lindh's radicalism lies elsewhere, however. A language teacher says Lindh came from the U.S. already hating America. And Lindh's correspondence from Yemen evinces an ambivalence toward the U.S. In a letter to his mother dated Sept. 23, 1998, he refers to the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa the previous month, saying the attacks "seem far more likely to have been carried out by the American government than by any Muslims." By October he writes home, saying, "Although I'm not particularly fond of the idea of returning to America, I do have a four-month vacation in about six months. This means you'll probably be seeing me again before you expected."
Leaving Yemen in February 1999 turned out to be tumultuous. YLC director Saleem says Lindh was detained when he tried to leave the country without an exit visa and was taken to the school he had abandoned, to clear matters up. "His face was awful," says Saleem. "I think he was tired of Yemen, tired of everything, and he wanted to go home." But even when Lindh was finally permitted to return to the U.S., the drama was not behind him. Life at home, he soon discovered, had undergone a dramatic change. In late 1998 Frank said he was gay and moved out. On June 30, 1999, not long after Lindh's return, Frank filed for divorce from Marilyn. Three days later the Lindhs sold their home in San Anselmo at a profit of approximately $270,000.
When Lindh got together with his young Muslim friends, he would discuss many things, including his desire to continue studying Islam and return to Yemen. But he did not discuss his family—except Naomi. Says his friend Abdullah Nana from the Mill Valley Mosque: "He did mention about his sister. He was worried about his sister."
As time passed, Lindh started to wear Arab, not Pakistani, dress. He also spent less time at the Mill Valley Mosque and began frequenting mosques in San Francisco where Salafi Yemenis worshipped. To reach the mosques on Sutter and Jones streets for Friday prayers, he would take a bus ride into the city, leaving the sunny hills of Marin County for the streets of San Francisco. It was while waiting to return to Yemen that his path into Pakistan and then Afghanistan opened up.
In autumn 1999 the Mill Valley Mosque played host to a band of seven visiting missionaries who belonged to the Tablighi Jama'at. They had journeyed north from San Diego on what is called an aik saal—a one-year religious trek from mosque to mosque—preaching as they went. One member of the group was Khizar Hayat, a businessman from the town of Bannu in Pakistan. Hayat apparently made such an impression on Lindh that the American asked him for his address and telephone number in Pakistan. Hayat says he barely remembers the meeting. But Lindh's spiritual adviser in Pakistan, Mufti Mohammad Iltimas Khan, says that the young American vividly recalled the occasion. Says Iltimas: "It was the beginning of the dangerous journey, the first jaunt, the pleasure journey."
Soon after, Lindh got a visa for Yemen. His mother was distraught but again kept it to herself. "I was promising myself that I wasn't going to lose it this time like the last time he left," she said. But his sister Naomi was devastated. As Frank noted in his diary on Feb. 1, 2000, "Poor Naomi was crying endlessly" as the family saw Lindh off. "God bless my darling, tall, sweet, handsome John as he leaves on this wonderful journey to the ancient city of Sana'a!"
Lindh would remain in Yemen for nine months. He behaved as he did during his first trip. He was distinguishable from most Yemenite men only by his height. He insisted on speaking in Arabic, even though his mastery was still weak. He took language instruction at a different school but still pursued religious studies at Al-Iman University, which, despite its designation and funding from gulf states and Saudi Arabia, is an undistinguished building on a hill surrounded by dirt paths. The school boasts 4,000 male students and 1,000 female students from 55 countries. "Even Americans?" a TIME reporter asked Aisha Abdel Maguid al-Zindani, the daughter of the school's founder. "Yes, of course," she replied. Did she remember the American mujahid? "I don't know anything about him. But anyway, we are not the terrorists; the Americans are."
Though Lindh's lawyers deny that he traveled there, reports persist in Yemen that he frequented the town of Damaj, near the Saudi border, where religious controversies brew. "He got even more confused there," says the Yemen Times' Mohamed bin Salam, a well-connected local journalist. "He came for something, but he did not know what." One theory circulating in Yemen is that Lindh was enlisted by anticommunist Islamic recruiters who had been associated with Sheik al-Zindani and were looking to deploy fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. With a promise of jihad and a $500 monthly salary, the offer was attractive to many poorer Arabs. "He seems to have been a victim of these people," says bin Salam, who assumes Lindh "was told that what he was looking for could only be found in Afghanistan." In any case, just weeks into his second stay in Yemen, he wrote to Hayat, the businessman-missionary, in Bannu asking him about lessons in Pakistani madrasahs. In October Hayat says he received a call from Lindh saying he was arriving in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, in a week. Would Hayat mind making the five-hour drive to pick him up?
Hayat met Lindh and took him on a tour of various madrasahs, searching for the perfect one from Karachi in the south to Peshawar in the northwest. The young American rejected them all and preferred remaining at Hayat's side. He helped Hayat at his store, a prosperous business dealing in powdered milk. Hayat, who has a wife and four children, says he had sex with Lindh. "He was liking me very much. All the time he wants to be with me," says Hayat, who has a good though not colloquial command of English. "I was loving him. Because love begets love, you know." Lindh's lawyers deny that their client engaged in homosexual relationships.
"He was ready to stay with me," says Hayat, "but I pushed him into the madrasah." Nevertheless, the businessman appears to be jealous of Lindh's relationship with the teacher he recommended, Mufti Iltimas Khan. (Lindh, says Hayat, "loved me more.") The mufti does not discuss the nature of his relationship with Lindh, though he seems happy to talk about the young man. "Everyone who saw him wanted to talk to him and to look at him and to look at his face. A very lovely face he had, John Walker."
Lindh chose to study at Iltimas' Madrasah al Arabia, in the village of Hasanni Kalan Surani, outside Bannu. He would remain there from December 2000 until the following May. The mufti insists that the studies had nothing to do with jihad, just the Koran and its memorization. Lindh could recite almost a third of the holy book by heart before he headed for Afghanistan. How, then, did the reputedly scholarly Lindh become a holy warrior? Did Hayat have anything to do with this? In response, Iltimas just smiles and says, "Maybe Mr. Hayat was trying to turn a warrior into a scholar." Iltimas recalls lying next to Lindh on their separate cots at night, talking about opening a madrasah in the U.S. He felt that Lindh's faith and natural magnetism would make him an influential American imam.
Nevertheless, Lindh's notebooks from the period contain translation exercises with passages from the Koran that include descriptions of battles with the Jews. One of the notebooks includes a passage that reads, "We shall make jihad as long as we live."
It was in Pakistan too that Lindh fired his first Kalashnikov. Nearly every compound around Bannu has one of the Soviet-designed submachine guns for protection from thieves and attacks from rival clans. Hayat says he took Lindh out behind their walled home for some dove hunting. He showed Lindh how to load the clip and cock the gun. He says Lindh was a miserable shot. "He was hitting nothing but air."
While with Iltimas, Lindh would e-mail his mother every Thursday night from an Internet cafe. Sending a message could sometimes take hours, but Lindh soon became something of a local computer whiz. At the end of the U.S. presidential election in 2000, he e-mailed his mother, referring to George W. Bush as "your new President" and adding, "I'm glad he's not mine." Despite the weekly contact with home, Lindh would not discuss his family with Hayat or Iltimas (except for the occasional mention of concern for his sister Naomi). Both men said he was always careful to ask for parental permission before embarking on any large trip. And yet, when he decided to leave Bannu, he did not elaborate on his plans. Frank Lindh says he would have refused to give it if he had known that the ultimate destination was Afghanistan. But in May, all Lindh said was that the weather was cooler in the mountains and it was terribly hot in Bannu. Could he go up to the mountains? And Frank gave permission.
Iltimas packed Lindh's suitcase for him, but the young man said, "I want to leave my things here with you." He took only a small backpack and wore sunglasses and a white shalwar kameez—a long tunic over loose-fitting pants—as he waited for Hayat to arrive on his 2001 Honda 150-cc motorcycle to pick him up. "When will you be back?" Iltimas asked his student. Lindh, he says, was silent. He wonders whether Lindh didn't want him to know where he was going or when he would be back. "A Muslim is never a liar," Iltimas says. The next time he heard of Lindh was from Hayat. The young American, said the powdered-milk entrepreneur, was in Batracy, a small village in the rugged mountains of Mansehra, north of Islamabad—a gateway into the militant training camps that stage attacks in Kashmir. From there, it was on to Afghanistan.
The video is riveting. "do you know ..." CIA agent Johnny (Mike) Spann begins, addressing the bedraggled prisoner in front of him. "Do you know the people you're here to ... Hey, look at me. Do you know that the people you're here working with are terrorists? They killed other Muslims. There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City. Is that what the Koran teaches? I don't think so. Are you going to talk to us?" Lindh remains silent. Almost immediately afterward, the CIA officer was slain by other prisoners in an uprising that riveted the world, as allied control of northern Afghanistan seemed to hang in the balance. While his fellow Taliban prisoners set upon the Americans and their Northern Alliance allies, Lindh took off running. He sought safety in the basement of a fort from which several Taliban soldiers would sporadically fire upon the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance would use burning oil and then freezing water to roust the holdouts. After seven days Lindh and his fellow fighters surrendered.
On Dec. 1, after the rebellion had ended, Marilyn Walker turned on her computer and chanced on a website bulletin touting the discovery of an American Taliban. And then she saw a photograph of her son. She was terrified but at the same time relieved. She had spent months writing letters to Pakistan, including one in Urdu, trying to determine if he was alive. And now she knew he was. But he was no longer just her son: the young man she believed to be gentle and sensitive had become, in the eyes of the world, the American Taliban, a traitor to his country.
Frank continues to believe in his son's idealism, saying the al-Farooq camp where he is said to have trained with al-Qaeda was for "Saudi teenagers (who) would come down for summer, do their jihad military service ... Many of them never had any intention actually of going to the front lines." Says Frank: "John went (into Afghanistan) to help the mujahedin, as he understood the people Ronald Reagan called the 'freedom fighters.'" But in America's eyes, those freedom fighters have become terrorists.
Marilyn and Frank are allowed to visit their son twice a week, approximately one hour at a time. There is always an fbi agent present. Frank says the agents are pleasant but every word uttered during their visits is recorded. Even so, Marilyn tries to fly across the continent to Washington every two weeks to see her son. They talk through Plexiglas. Neither parent has been able to embrace him. The closest they have come to physical contact was through a mesh screen when they saw him after he was first brought back to the U.S., 55 days after the world saw him on television. Lindh held his palms to the mesh, and each parent took turns holding their hands against his, palm to palm, mother to son, father to son. Frank says he could feel the "warmth" of Lindh's hands through the mesh. That was the last touch that his mother and father had from Lindh.
Since he agreed to plead guilty to "supplying services to the Taliban," Lindh has been debriefed regularly as part of the ongoing effort to gather intelligence about terror networks. "They ask him very detailed questions," says a visitor. "If he went into a room, they ask him what color is the door, the room." Though now clean-shaven and scrubbed, Lindh remains a faithful Muslim, praying toward Mecca five times a day, kneeling on a jailhouse towel that serves as his prayer mat. Lindh has access to newspapers and rues the way he feels the media has demonized Islam. Says Abdelwahab Hassan, spiritual leader for Muslim inmates at the Alexandria Detention Center: "He said the America he is reading about is not like the America that he knew when he left here." Does he worry about the long prison sentence he may face? Says Hassan: "He thinks life is of value wherever it is. In his cell he can enjoy praying and reading the Koran." He will now have time to memorize the two-thirds he had left unfinished when he headed for the mountains. |
