Author’s Notes
“INDEED, ISLAM BEGAN AS SOMETHING STRANGE, AND IT WILL RETURN TO BEING STRANGE JUST AS IT BEGAN. SO GLAD TIDINGS OF PARADISE BE FOR THE STRANGERS, THE ONES WHO ARE RIGHTEOUS AND ARE GUIDED BY ALLAH.” ~ Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam
Palestinian human rights activist, political scientist, and philosopher Iyad el-Baghdadi (not that Baghdadi, as he is fond of saying!) remarked on Twitter, “The focus on Jihadism studies without a wider interest in Muslim and Arab culture, history, art, and native agency makes me very uncomfortable. Someone is really interested in us, but only in our warts and boils.”
When I started writing this novel, I set in my heart that I wanted to write an honest, heartfelt depiction of Dawood’s Islamic experience. His journey into and out of the faith, explored against September 11, 2001, the greater War on Terror, and the existential shock that has pulsated through the Middle East since. I wanted to delve deep into what it means to be a Muslim, to love Allah with one’s whole being, to live to the rhythms of Islam. To embrace an Islamic and Arab identity.
I hope my attempt has succeeded, at least in part.
One of the most frequent questions I am asked by editors and proofers, following Whisper, is, “Are you Muslim?”
At the time of this writing, no, I am not. However, to dive deep into the soul of Islam and attempt to portray the faith with any shred of justice, I felt it was only appropriate to go to the very center of Islamic studies. To that end, I enrolled in an Islamic seminary as a visiting student. The imams and scholars have welcomed me as a seeker, opening their arms, their hearts, and their minds to my journey of understanding. I like to think, in some ways, we have helped open each other’s minds in certain areas.
Am I a Muslim today? No. Am I an Islamic seminarian? Yes. Could I, one day, see myself as a Muslim? Yes, to the extent that I now nurture a burning desire to take up Dawood’s personal quest as my own, and to be a voice for peace, love, and acceptance within the Islamic world.
To me, to be a Muslim is to be at peace with the universe. To have internally surrendered to Allah, to be in a constant state of surrender to Allah, to His love and compassion, and to the universe. To be in harmony with what Is. To be in a state of Islam is to hold the faith of Allah in the center of your soul.
Islam today is experiencing a revolution, one as existential as the Reformation was to Christianity. Muslims and non-Muslims are struggling to answer questions about Islamic identity, the intersection of Muslim faith, politics, and society, and how to reconcile Islam’s past, present, and future. One of the best books I have read on this topic is Shadi Hamid’s Islamic Exceptionalism – How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World. For the reader who wants to understand more of the political history of Islam and how the faith is examining itself as it moves into the future, I strongly recommend this book. It was my favorite of my research materials, and one I’ve read multiple times, each re-read finding something new to explore.
The second most asked question I have received is, “How much of this story true?”
A lot of it. Possibly, more than could be believed. I have retained as much historical fact as possible, up through Chapter 22, and have consciously placed my fictional characters within a true historical world and setting.
Kris’s interrogation of Abu Tadmir in Chapter 2 is based on FBI Agent Ali Soufan’s interrogation of Abu Jandal in Yemen on September 13, 2001. FBI Agent Soufan was the first individual who provided evidence corroborating al-Qaeda’s link to September 11. Agent Soufan successfully used Islamic arguments to convince Abu Jandal to cooperate and to identify the hijackers as being al-Qaeda operatives. The lines from Chapter 2, where Kris tells Abu Tadmir that it was Tadmir who told him al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks, are accurate representations of what occurred in the real-life interrogation. That is exactly how Abu Jandal relayed to Agent Soufan who was responsible for the September 11 attacks.
Following the interrogation, Abu Jandal, Bin Laden’s former bodyguard, renounced al-Qaeda and became a witness for the United States in federal court, turning against his former terrorist brothers. “This is not right,” he said. “This is not the Islamic way. The Sheikh… he has gone crazy. This is not right.”
The CIA’s war in Afghanistan, the invasion after September 11, is true. Details for this section were collected from CIA records, archives, the CIA museum, and declassified memos of the invasion. The officers who went to Afghanistan on Operation Jawbreaker are some of the finest in the agency, and were more prepared and more culturally sensitive than I have shown my very fictional George and Ryan to be. Many of the struggles that the team encountered in this novel were encountered on the ground. They also faced additional struggles and political machinations. The invasion was a grueling endeavor, with successes and failures across the board.
The fight in Tora Bora is likewise accurate, though scaled to fit within one chapter. Entire novels have been written about the Battle in Tora Bora, as well as multiple military and intelligence analyses. Ultimately, the failure to plug the passes over the Spin Ghar Mountains by US Army Rangers and by the Pakistani military allowed Bin Laden to slip into Pakistan and into the remote tribal regions, where he hid for several years. At one point, the US military fighting unit in the mountains was within fifty feet of Bin Laden’s position, but was unable to move forward and capture or kill al-Qaeda’s leader.
The CIA’s detainee program, and the arrest, capture, and torture of Abu Zahawi are based on the arrest, detainment, and torture of Abu Zubaydah. Working from classified materials, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, military tribunal records, Red Crescent Society investigations, and Abu Zubaydah’s diaries themselves, I reconstructed a fictional representation of the CIA’s imprisonment of, and decision to torture, their first high-value al-Qaeda detainee.
Declassified memos reveal the CIA made the decision to keep Zubaydah “…incommunicado for the rest of his natural life,” after deciding to torture him. Zubaydah voluntarily gave up information to his interrogators for two months prior to any application of torture. In DC and at Langley, it was the fear that Zubaydah was holding back critical information that pushed officials to turn to torture in a blind attempt to double-check that Zubaydah had given up all that he knew. After torturing him for almost one month straight, and subjecting him to waterboarding over eighty times, the CIA determined that Zubaydah had “no new information to provide.” He had shared all intelligence he would ever share prior to the beginning of his torture.
Abu Zubaydah, to this day, remains locked in Guantanamo Bay, and all his requests for a trial to be set or for a decision to be made about his fate have been postponed indefinitely.
Trainers from Guantanamo Bay, who helped build the detainee program and the CIA’s torture apparatus, were sent to Abu Ghraib Prison to train and instruct military and private contract prison guards. Most of the training centered around how to “break detainees” and how to “soften them up for Military and CIA interrogators”.
For more information on the CIA’s detainee program, please check out The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program; The Convenient Terrorist: Two Whistleblowers’ Stories of Torture, Terror, Secret Wars, and CIA Lies, by John Kiriakou and Joseph Hickman; Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, by Mark Danner; and Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, by Trevor Paglen.
Another book, written by the architect of the CIA’s torture program, Dr. James E. Mitchell, is Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America. Dr. Mitchell is a strong advocate for the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that he helped craft. Dr. Mitchell’s experience, up to that point, was as a consulting psychologist for the US military’s Survival Evasion Resistance & Escape (SERE) program, the military’s training environment for personnel who needed counter-interrogation training. This training included tactics and techniques taught to withstand torture, and as part of the training, US military personnel were subjected to several “enhanced interrogation techniques”, under medical supervision, to simulate the experience of torture at an enemy’s hand. Dr. Mitchell was instrumental in pushing the CIA to move from rapport-building interrogation to his methods, which have been called “torture” by multiple human rights organizations, US government institutions, and international NGOs.
All branches of the US military, in the early 2000s, decided to eliminate waterboarding from the SERE curriculum entirely.
In 2009, President Obama ended the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and in 2014, President Obama made the unprecedented admission that the US, and specifically the CIA, had tortured detainees they’d captured. President Obama went on to say, “It is important, when we look back, to recall how afraid people were after the twin towers fell, and the Pentagon had been hit, and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent… We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.”
The confrontation between the vice president—Dick Cheney, at the time—and a leadership team at the CIA in the run-up to the Iraq war over conflicting intelligence conclusions actually took place. Connecting Iraq to al-Qaeda was a foundational goal of the Bush Administration, with the express desire to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The book, The One Percent Doctrine, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, brilliantly dives into the Bush Administration’s response to September 11, 2001, the lead-up to the Iraq War, and the intelligence community’s crisis during that era.
Saqqaf is a fictional representation for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the grandfather of the present-day Islamic State. Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joby Warrick is a phenomenal deep-dive into Zarqawi’s history, psychology, and his disastrous shredding of the soul of the Middle East.
Muammar Qaddafi was the dictator of Libya for over thirty years. He brutally repressed his people, his authoritarian regime violated human rights and was a strong state sponsor of global terrorism. He was at odds with Islamists for the majority of his tenure, as he sought to bend Islam to support his political system, rather than bring Islamic practices into Libyan daily life. He violently clashed with Islamic clerics and was at odds with many Islamic scholars. Recordings of executions carried out in basketball stadiums have been recovered in post-Qaddafi Libya.
Hamid, the Jordanian mole within al-Qaeda, is based upon Humam al-Balawi, a real-life Jordanian double agent who infiltrated al-Qaeda in 2008 and then turned against his Jordanian handlers. In 2009, at Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, Humam al-Balawi blew himself up at a meeting with his CIA and Jordanian handlers, killing seven CIA officers, his Jordanian handler, and an Afghan security officer. Those killed were: Jennifer Matthews, base Commander; Scott Michael Roberson, base security chief; Darren LaBonte, Amman station case officer; Elizabeth Hanson, Kabul station targeteer; Harold Brown Jr., case officer; Dane Clark Paresi, security officer; Jeremy Wise, security officer; Sharif Ali bin Zeid, Jordanian intelligence officer and Balawi’s handler; and Arghawan, an Afghanistan security officer entrusted at the meeting.
Balawi worked with al-Qaeda to manufacture video evidence of his penetration into the highest ranks of al-Qaeda. The plot was sanctioned by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who knew the CIA would seize upon any chance to gain access to al-Qaeda’s inner circles. “Balawi Fever”, the rush to grasp the opportunity Balawi presented to strike at the heart of al-Qaeda, was blamed as one of the significant failures of the pre-operation workup. In Whisper, Kris has taken on the role of Jennifer Matthews at Camp Chapman. He, unlike Jennifer Matthews, lived.
Chapter 22 is also where I begin to weave a wholly independent and fictional story. Al-Qaeda never attacked Camp Chapman with a second wave attack and never kidnapped a CIA officer to put on trial and execute. Executing a CIA officer was their original plan, when they thought Balawi would only be meeting with a handler or two in Miranshah. But when Balawi was invited onto Camp Chapman, their plans grew larger.
David’s capture, beating, and exile in the mountains of Pakistan are entirely fictional. The sweeps of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) for fighters after Bin Laden’s death, and for the next several years, are not.
A mole within the CIA, working in conjunction with al-Qaeda and planning an attack on American soil, is also fictional. The CIA mole’s motivations are based, in part, upon the motivations of former FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen, who betrayed the FBI to the Soviet Union and to the Russians for twenty-two years. He is currently serving fifteen consecutive life sentences at a federal supermax prison, in complete isolation form the world. Hanssen’s betrayal was one of the worst in the United States’ history. At his arrest, Hanssen stated that he was trying to help the United States through his betrayal, to make the US stronger.
Muslims for Progressive Values is a real organization, small but growing, and is an important voice in progressive Islam. With chapters around the world, MPV is a “human rights organization that embodies and advocates for the traditional Quranic values of social justice [bringing together] an understanding that informs our positions on women’s rights, LGBTQI inclusion, freedom of expression and freedom of and from belief.” () MPV’s vision states: “[We] envision a future where Islam is understood as a source of dignity, justice, compassion and love for all humanity and the world.”
Dawood’s use of the phrase ‘you are the moon that rises in my darkness’ is inspired by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Baraka Allahu fika! May Allah bestow his blessings upon you.
Thank you for reading.
Additional thanks to my editors and proofers, Rita, Justene, Charlotte, Trisha, Lindsey, and James.
For readers who want to know more, selected books I read during the writing of Whisper were:
- Inside the Jihad: My Life with Al Qaeda, by Omar Nasiri;
- The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Flight, by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy;
- Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al Qa’ida Since 9/11, by Seth G. Jones;
- Dijihad et la Mort, by Olivier Roy (Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State);
- Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy, by Jonathan A.C. Brown;
- Our Last Best Chance: A Story of War and Peace, by King Abdullah II of Jordan;
- In the Footsteps of the Prophet, by Tareq Ramadan;
- Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims, by Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle;
- The Road to Mecca, by Muhammad Asad;
- The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy, by Yassin Al-Haj Saleh;
- The Holy Quran