A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Steve Hendricks Read Free Book Online Page A

arrest.”
    Years later he would say he did not realize he could be arrested for vigorous sermonizing, a perhaps plausible claim since at that moment, several years after Sadat’s assassination and several before Gamaa’s campaign of terror, Mubarak’s government was arresting extremists with some discrimination. The policemen put him in a car and drove him to an office of the State Security Service, where he was made to sit on a chair and blindfolded. An officer started screaming questions at him: When did he begin attending Islamist lectures? Who did he know in the mosques? Why did he speak against the government? Who told him to do it? The officer punctuated his questions with blows—first with fists, then with a stick. After some hours, the questions stopped, and Nasr was driven to a different office and the questions were repeated, only this time the punctuations were shocks with an electrified rod. At the end of the interrogation, he was driven from Alexandria to Tora Prison, outside Cairo, where he was held without trial for six months. During that time he met many Islamists, including members of Gamaa and Jihad, whose piety and commitment to achieving sharia impressed him. Probably he was further radicalized under their influence.
    At the end of his term, he was returned to the State Security office in Alexandria, and an officer said he hoped Nasr’s adventure had taught him a thing or two about public speaking. He also said that, having met a lot of members of Gamaa, Nasr would make a useful spy, and he offered him a job as a paid informer. Nasr would later say that he refused, that even had he been tempted by money or fear, Islam forbade him to betray his brothers. He would not be untrue to Islam. But the officer insisted, and when Nasr hesitated, the officer said he would jail his whole family if he did not take the job. Nasr asked for two weeks to think about it—a play for time, he later said—and the officer granted his request and sent him home.
    He resolved to flee. He got a student passport, which was not hard to do, but getting across the border was another matter because he was probably now on a registry of political criminals forbidden to leave the country. He heard, however, that a new port of entry had been opened at Nuweiba, on the Gulf of Aqaba, and that either it had no computers or its computers were not yet linked to central computers in Cairo. He decided to try it. He shed his Islamist clothing for Western wear, trimmed his beard, and left Alexandria without telling anyone, not even his family. At Nuweiba he passed through the border station without incident. Either the stories he had heard about the computers were true, or he was lucky.
    He traveled by ferry to Jordan, which was not the destination he ultimately desired but would have to do for the moment. His ultimate desire was Europe or, better still, America. He would later say that at the time he practically worshipped the United States and that he had earlier applied for visas to study there and in Europe but had been turned down. Evidently he was untroubled by the contradiction between his admiration of the West and Islamism’s critique of it—a contradiction not entirely unusual in Islamism, several of whose luminaries were educated in or took refuge in the West.
    Nasr had chosen Jordan as expedient because it was nearby, because an Egyptian did not need a visa to enter, and because it was poor enough that one could live there on little money. His plan was to work, save, and make his way to Europe to resume his legal studies. But Jordan turned out to be much poorer than he had thought—startlingly so to a bourgeois Alexandrian—and jobs were scarce for a young man who not only knew no trade but had never held a job in his life. The job he finally found was carrying rocks at a construction site, but he was too delicate for the task and soon quit. When he failed to find other work that appealed to him, he asked his Jordanian