The Hostage's Daughter by Sulome Anderson

Author:Sulome Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

In October 2014, another ex-spook I approach, whom I’ll keep anonymous, agrees to be interviewed by me in New York. Since he didn’t join the CIA until the late nineties, he wasn’t active in the agency at the time of my father’s captivity, so I almost don’t bother reaching out to him. But I decide it can’t hurt to learn more about the way the agency operates in the Middle East, and we meet for lunch in Hell’s Kitchen.

Soon after we sit down, he launches into a long bout of mansplaining when the topic of female CIA agents casually comes up in conversation.

“Let me say this,” he booms, articulating his words as though I were a mentally challenged four-year-old. “Over the course of my career I had a number of women who worked for me as case officers. The good ones all came in older. None of them in their twenties were worth anything. They were useless in their twenties. They were young; they were pretty. Every guy they went out with wanted to sleep with them and they couldn’t get anywhere. The better looking they were, the more difficult it was . . . the girls were a big problem. I didn’t want to see them, didn’t want them within twenty miles of me. Useless, totally.”

Being a woman in my twenties, I take serious issue with this assessment. But I nod, smile demurely, and listen as he presents his “analysis” of my father’s captivity. I happen to love mansplainers. They underestimate women so much it’s embarrassingly easy to play into their fantasy of a quiet, innocent young girl captivated by their genius and get them to say really stupid things, which I can then write about.

“Let me just walk you into this slowly,” he begins. “Have you heard of Imad Mughniyeh?”

I’ve been reporting on this for almost two years, and the man kidnapped my father, I think. But no, tell me about Imad Mughniyeh, because my tiny little female brain can’t have possibly grasped that kind of complex information.

I nod, wide-eyed.

“Well, there were times that Mughniyeh wouldn’t listen to the Iranians at all. He did whatever he wanted and they would complain about him too . . . remember something, the Iranians had different political objectives than Hezbollah. Hezbollah was all about taking out the Israelis and trying to create an Islamic state in Lebanon.”

“But then how did you know from the beginning that the IJO was part of Hezbollah?” I ask. “It’s all so confusing to me.”

“We knew it was Hezbollah holding the hostages,” he says flatly. “Very early on. Amal was talking to us. Amal said, ‘It’s not us, it’s them.’”

That’s like saying an IRA member would be credible if they blamed a Protestant militant for a crime at the peak of the Irish troubles. “But there was a lot of fighting between Amal and Hezbollah then,” I point out.

“Well, yes,” he responds without missing a beat. “They were at war.”

Okay. Logic doesn’t seem to derail this

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