The Guardian, 3 December, 2001The Taliban commander put several names on scraps of paper and dropped them into a hat. "Pick one", he told Ken Hechtman, a Canadian journalist who had just been detained inside Afghanistan as a suspected spy.
"What's the prize?" the journalist asked. "The winner gets to shoot you. Let's get started", the commander replied. For the 33-year-old freelancer who had been intrigued by Afghanistan ever since reading tales of the mojahedin struggle against the Soviet invasion in the magazine "Soldiers of Fortune" as a teenager, it was a chilling moment.
"Until then I had been thinking I can get through this. I just have to stay cool. Then he throws me this curve," he said today, a few hours after he was released and taken back to Pakistan.
Hechtman's detention an hour or two after he crossed into Afghansistan on Sunday November 25 only became known two days later when a Pashtun resident of Chaman, the nearest Pakistani border town, accosted me on Tuesday evening as I came out of a backstreet phone shop. He gave me a card with Ken Hechtman's name, the words Montreal Mirror, and a phone number written on it.
The man, who called himself Mohammedzai, told me and a reporter from USA Today that he had seen a westerner earlier that afternoon under detention in a small windowless room, alone and chained hand and foot. Around eleven armed men were guarding him.
The prisoner gave him the card, and asked to have it passed on, Mohammedzai said. His jailers wanted ransom money, he added. He was vague about whether they were Taliban.
Hechtman is the third western journalist to have been held and released unharmed since the United States declared war on the Taliban movement. But his drama was the worst as the Taliban are anxious and on the defensive, he comes from North America and, with his decision to grow a beard and wear local clothes, he was suspected of being a spotter who calls in American air strikes.
"Wearing a shalwar kameez and having a beard was the worst advice friends gave me before I set off from Canada", he said today in an exclusive interview with the Guardian and USA Today.
"The Taliban have already executed about 20 or 25 people suspected of being spotters, mainly Pakistani-Americans. I don't speak the language so it would have been much better to wear western clothes. Dressing as a local sets off alarm bells, I realise now".
A computer programmer who has never been a journalist before, Hechtman had been in the region for six weeks. He offered to write for an alternative Montreal weekly, a free sheet which people pick up at tube stops. "Foreign reporting isn't the kind of thing they ever do, or have a budget for. But I wanted to go. I got a lot of help from Pakistani journalists", he said.
His editor, Alastair Sutherland, initially discouraged him from going and was devastated when we rang him on Tuesday night as soon as we got the hand-written card.
"When Ken started filing the stories were really good. He was reporting a side of the war that wasn't being covered, the view from the streets, the feelings about the Taliban", Sutherland said.
A New York Times reporter who recalls meeting him weeks ago at the regular press conferences given by the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan found Hechtman "cocky and contemptuous of mainstream journalism".
On his release from six days in a Taliban jail Hechtman seemed straightfoward, if inexperienced. But he was anxious not to fall into what he clearly saw as mainstream journalism's temptation to exaggerate and demonise.
"I reassured the Taliban their gaol was not the worst I had been in. It was the third worst". Asked to specify, he said he had been in prison in Atlanta and the Bronx as a member of radical squatters' movements when he lived in the USA thirteen years ago.
Besides wearing local clothes, Hechtman said his other big mistake came when he crossed the border (which has no controls on the Afghan side) and took a taxi to the main Taliban office in Spin Boldak the border town.
There was no one there, but instead of waiting to ask for a visa and explain he was a freelance journalist Hechtman got back into the taxi and drove to a hospital and refugee camps to interview people. Word was soon passed to the Taliban who arrested him, thinking he had tried to slip in unnoticed.
"I heard there had been an air strike some hours earlier. This made them think I was connected", he said. He was taken to the local gaol, where all prisoners had leg shackles. He could shuffle round in the yard, and slept in a cell with between four or six others. He got on well with other prisoners, and observed the Ramadan fast, even when they offered him bits of bread and water during daytime hours.
He was repeatedly interrogated, on one occasion by six Arabs from Qatar. "They wanted to see my sophisticated communications equipment and were disappointed that I only had a mobile phone", he said. After the shock of the incident with the names in a hat to pick the man to shoot him, there was no follow-up. "I realised they were joking. They never mentioned a ransom. That's not the Taliban way".
Back in Chaman, when news of his detention broke, the USA Today reporter and I rang colleagues to warn them not to follow Hechtman's example. Several had been discussing similar escapades. The drive to be "the first reporter in Kandahar" was, and still is, strong.
In the search for clues we sent our Pashtun interpreter on Wednesday morning with Mohammedzai to confirm the story, find out where Hechtman was, and how he felt.
To our alarm, the interpreter did not contact us for the rest of the day. The next day we heard from two Canadian diplomats sent from Islamabad that he had been in touch with them. He was all right but lying low, they said, without further explanation.
By now we were taking calls from Hechtman's father and brother in Canada, anxious to verify the Canadian government's assurances that action was underway. We admitted we did not know.
On Friday afternoon our interpreter appeared in Quetta, the town 80 miles from the border where most journalists stay. He came to the USA Today reporter's room, upset and afraid. One reason, it turned out, was that he was worried that if military action was taken to free Hechtman and people died he would be blamed.
He had discovered - what neither we nor the Canadians yet knew - that Hechtman's captors were not a group of ransom-seeking bandits, as Mohammedzai hinted, but the Taliban. He was not in solitary confinement in a windowless room, but in the main jail in Spin Boldak. Mohammedzai's talk of ransom was apparently an opportunistic effort to extract cash without the Taliban knowing.
For our interpreter (who does not want his name known) the truth was more serious. He now wished he had never gone to look for Hechtman. In Chaman, the Pakistani border town, there is as much sympathy for the Taliban as in Spin Boldak. Every family has relatives on both sides. If the interpreter fingered the Taliban and provoked air strikes, he could be in trouble, he believed.
He told us he had explained this to the Canadians in a guarded way without revealing Hechtman was in Taliban custody. They had been unsupportive and ungenerous, he felt. "They just treated me with suspicion. They didn't understand the danger I was in.
"After my first public contact with them when everyone saw us go into the hotel where Ken had stayed, they told me to come back next morning without offering to let me stay out of town at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees place where they were staying. They did not even offer me a meal.
"They had given me a government number in Ottawa and I had rung it for quite some time more than once. They never asked me how much I had spent on calls".
The interpreter's cri de coeur came out as he sat in the hotel room in Quetta after leaving Chaman without telling the Canadian diplomats. After 90 minutes of tense discussion, we persuaded him to ring them and reveal that Hechtman was actually being held by the Taliban.
First he rang Ottawa and informed them. Then he spoke to the Canadians in Chaman. They did not know where he was. Their opening response was a stern "You were supposed to call three hours ago". Aware finally where their compatriot was, the Canadians urged the Pakistanis to contact the Taliban, explain he was a journalist, and ask for his unconditional release.
Pakistani officials have good working relations with the authorities across the border. The Taliban took some time to decide their next move. One group wanted to send Hechtman to trial in Kandahar, and Hechtman's family was told by a Canadian government official this was what was going to happen.
Half an hour later the Taliban took a different decision. They woke Hechtman, and told him he was being released.
The final scene was yet to come. The jailer had lost the key to the shackle on Hechtman's left ankle. "They took a sledgehammer and smashed it off. Then I was driven to Chaman and let go", Hechtman told us.
Disappointed he never got to Kandahar, Hechtman is furious with Le Journal de Montreal which mentioned in a piece last week that he was Jewish. "That blows me. My cover was that I was Catholic. You can't be Jewish here. There are enough people around who can call up websites and read the piece. Now I have to leave. Otherwise I would have asked the Taliban, once they were convinced I was a reporter and not a spy, to let me go on to Kandahar", he told us.
