hoot72
11-02-2004, 06:37
After on and off research on JK Idema, I ran into some very interesting interviews and updates on this chap. I shall share them with you as alot of it has to do with Robin Moore's TDF novel and Tiger 02.
"Robin Moore, the bard of the Green Berets, arrived in Afghanistan in December, and Idema wasted little time in tracking him down and nominating himself as a source for Moore’s new book, to be titled The Hunt for Bin Laden. Moore—in his seventies, and debilitated by Parkinson’s disease, moving slowly across Afghan war zones with the aid of a cane—was shadowing a group of Special Forces called A-Team Tiger 02, which was preparing to seize the Taliban stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif in concert with the Northern Alliance.
Moore and Idema didn’t spend much time in the field together—it behooved Idema to keep a low profile among active Special Forces, for obvious reasons. Instead, Idema focused on ingratiating himself to other reporters instead which led to the Skurka "rescue."
Idema had to return to the United States in June 2002, after his mother died in Poughkeepsie. It was then that he made his most fateful contact with Robin Moore, who was also Stateside, trying to work the manuscript for The Hunt for Bin Laden into shape for Random House. Moore interviewed Idema extensively for additional background, and says the information “checked out very well.” Moore’s writing assistant, Chris Thompson, says that Moore brought on Idema as a “technical adviser,” to help ensure the book’s accuracy.
Idema was turning up regularly, via satellite telephone, on American television. He would occasionally call himself a Green Beret, clearly implying he was on active duty. And sometimes he would claim, falsely, to be working for Partners International, which, like Knightsbridge, had severed all ties with Idema. Mainly, though, he characterized himself in tellingly vague terms, even as he boasted about his high-octane military credentials: “You must be held in high regard,” he told Fox News host Linda Vester via sat phone in November 2001. “Because I think you’re the only person ever to get an interview with a Special Forces–qualified guy inside this country.”
Moore’s agent at the time, Marianne Strong, gives a very different account. She claims that Moore “conceptualized” the book but that he and Thompson turned in a rambling, dull manuscript. “Jack came along and rewrote the entire thing,” Strong says. “He came up with terribly exciting, excellent copy.” Moore wound up contributing only “a few pages” to the finished product, she claims, and Thompson only edited.
One thing is certain: Regardless of who claims ultimate authorship of the book, The Hunt for Bin Laden teems with characterizations of Idema as a titanic military presence in the Afghan war. It asserts outright that Idema was the only Green Beret gathering intelligence on the ground.
“In January, Jack uncovered an al-Qaida plot to kill President Clinton. In March, standing in the middle of a Kabul street armed with a Russian assault rifle and six hundred rounds of ammunition, Jack held off Islamic fundamentalists for four hours as they tried to take eighteen foreign citizens hostage, keeping them at bay until Engineer Ali and the Northern Alliance arrived to back him up. By the end of March, Jack was in a Northern Alliance helicopter on his way to the Nahrin earthquake, where the Associated Press photographed the lone American rescuing a little girl. She wasn’t the first child he would save, or the last.”
How Idema became a virtual army of one in the pages of The Hunt for Bin Laden remains a hotly disputed subject. Strong says that the book’s portrait of him fully accords with her own impressions: “He is a wonderful man, very brave and charismatic.” Moore and Thompson, meanwhile, maintain that Idema overtook the narrative because Random House wanted it that way. The publishers “wanted an action hero in the book,” Thompson says, “so they asked us to thread Idema all the way through.” Moore says that it was also Random House’s decision to put Idema on the book’s cover.
The next promotional twist concerning The Hunt for Bin Laden was either poetic or perverse, depending on one’s view of the publishing world. Having at the very least finagled a portrait of himself as the prime mover in the Special Forces’ Afghan war, Idema now was tapped to stand in for the Parkinson’s-weakened Moore in bookstore readings and media appearances for the title. In each radio interview he gave, he was described—as he is in the book’s pages—as a Green Beret working as an adviser to the Northern Alliance. At times he was so bold as to offer policy advice to Pentagon brass. “We in Special Forces have been lobbying for a lighter, faster Army,” he lamented to an interviewer for Bend, Oregon’s Classic Rock 98.3. “But General [Tommy] Franks isn’t listening.”
Moore’s book—the first allegedly insider account of the Afghan war—rocketed up the best-seller lists. But early reviews were harsh, and some called the book’s reliability into question. Moore was troubled by the claims and asked some Special Forces officers to review it for corrections in later editions. He forwarded the proposed fixes to his editor, Bob Loomis, but the publishing house did not alter the text. Random House will not comment on why the book is not being revised, but spokeswoman Carol Schneider denies that the publisher insisted that Idema take center stage in the narrative. “It was not our intention to make [Idema] the main character,” Schneider says. “We didn’t even know who he was until Robin Moore introduced him to us.”
When Idema got wind of Moore’s efforts to change the text, he retaliated in what was becoming a reflexive fashion: He issued a press release and filed suit. The release declared that a shadowy group of Special Forces soldiers, jealous of the attention lavished on Idema, “allegedly threatened and coerced 77-year-old Robin Moore, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, into submitting the changes to the already copyrighted bestseller.” Idema also sued the aid groups Knightsbridge and Partners International, claiming that they had also pressured Moore into changing The Hunt for Bin Laden. Idema initially alleged that the two aid groups had injured his reputation by causing Fox News to drop him as a regular commentator—but he was also suing Fox, on much the same grounds. Most of the suits were thrown out of court.
Moore and Thompson say they soon learned that they were victims of financial chicanery as well as what appeared to be an enormous media scam. The Hunt for Bin Laden contained an appendix encouraging readers to donate funds to assist Special Forces and their families and Afghan civilians. Moore says that Idema included an entry for the training camp he had founded in upstate New York, the US Counter-Terrorist Group. In the appendix, the group’s stated mission was “to help the Northern Alliance and to fight al-Qaida.”
Flush from the book’s success, Thompson and Idema (who had since relocated to Fayetteville) formed a promotional company, The Hunt for Bin Laden, LLC. As he worked in closer business quarters with Idema, Thompson says, he saw the man’s behavior grow increasingly erratic. In a deposition, Thompson said that Idema destroyed the interior of his own house with a samurai sword, that he choked his girlfriend in a fight, and that he forged a letter on Fox News stationery for use as evidence in his lawsuit against the network. A subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s office also arrived, followed by a letter from North Carolina’s postal inspector, charging Idema with mail fraud for using a post-office box registered to the company to solicit funds for the US Counter-Terrorist Group. Thompson says that after he noticed $18,000 from the company had gone missing, he drove down to Fayetteville to close the company bank account; he says that Idema followed him there and threatened to kill both him and his girlfriend.
Moore, meanwhile, learned that Idema had ordered hundreds of copies of The Hunt for Bin Laden from Moore’s account with Random House and never paid for them. “He got [the books] from my account and sold them at full price,” Moore says.
A month later, Idema was back in Afghanistan. He set up shop in a rented house in Kabul, telling the landlord he intended to start a rug-exporting business. Instead, he founded a paramilitary outfit called Task Force Saber 7, complete with its own fatigues and military insignia. Once more he had a former soldier, Brent Bennett, and a TV cameraman, Eddie Caraballo, in tow. They hired four Afghans, and began rounding up Afghan civilians to interrogate about ties to Al Qaeda. On at least three occasions, nato forces assisted Idema in his raids. On at least one occasion, troops took into custody a suspect Task Force Saber 7 had apprehended.
But Idema came to serious notice only when he committed the same oversight that the guards at Abu Ghraib did. On April 30, he e-mailed several Stateside friends with news of Task Force Saber 7’s efforts. The e-mail included jpeg photos of Idema and company in interrogation mode, some of which were extremely graphic. One recipient was very disturbed by the images and forwarded the e-mail to American authorities. The rest, is history.
To sum up the life and times of JK Idema, in an evaluation report by Captain John D. Carlson near the end of Idema’s three-year tour of duty in the Special Forces, read: “[He] is without a doubt the most unmotivated, unprofessional, immature enlisted man that I have ever known.”
avtar singh
(Based on research by Stacey Sullivan, Operation Desert Fraud
How Keith Idema marketed his imaginary Afghan war, Ivan Randall, Who is Jack?)
"Robin Moore, the bard of the Green Berets, arrived in Afghanistan in December, and Idema wasted little time in tracking him down and nominating himself as a source for Moore’s new book, to be titled The Hunt for Bin Laden. Moore—in his seventies, and debilitated by Parkinson’s disease, moving slowly across Afghan war zones with the aid of a cane—was shadowing a group of Special Forces called A-Team Tiger 02, which was preparing to seize the Taliban stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif in concert with the Northern Alliance.
Moore and Idema didn’t spend much time in the field together—it behooved Idema to keep a low profile among active Special Forces, for obvious reasons. Instead, Idema focused on ingratiating himself to other reporters instead which led to the Skurka "rescue."
Idema had to return to the United States in June 2002, after his mother died in Poughkeepsie. It was then that he made his most fateful contact with Robin Moore, who was also Stateside, trying to work the manuscript for The Hunt for Bin Laden into shape for Random House. Moore interviewed Idema extensively for additional background, and says the information “checked out very well.” Moore’s writing assistant, Chris Thompson, says that Moore brought on Idema as a “technical adviser,” to help ensure the book’s accuracy.
Idema was turning up regularly, via satellite telephone, on American television. He would occasionally call himself a Green Beret, clearly implying he was on active duty. And sometimes he would claim, falsely, to be working for Partners International, which, like Knightsbridge, had severed all ties with Idema. Mainly, though, he characterized himself in tellingly vague terms, even as he boasted about his high-octane military credentials: “You must be held in high regard,” he told Fox News host Linda Vester via sat phone in November 2001. “Because I think you’re the only person ever to get an interview with a Special Forces–qualified guy inside this country.”
Moore’s agent at the time, Marianne Strong, gives a very different account. She claims that Moore “conceptualized” the book but that he and Thompson turned in a rambling, dull manuscript. “Jack came along and rewrote the entire thing,” Strong says. “He came up with terribly exciting, excellent copy.” Moore wound up contributing only “a few pages” to the finished product, she claims, and Thompson only edited.
One thing is certain: Regardless of who claims ultimate authorship of the book, The Hunt for Bin Laden teems with characterizations of Idema as a titanic military presence in the Afghan war. It asserts outright that Idema was the only Green Beret gathering intelligence on the ground.
“In January, Jack uncovered an al-Qaida plot to kill President Clinton. In March, standing in the middle of a Kabul street armed with a Russian assault rifle and six hundred rounds of ammunition, Jack held off Islamic fundamentalists for four hours as they tried to take eighteen foreign citizens hostage, keeping them at bay until Engineer Ali and the Northern Alliance arrived to back him up. By the end of March, Jack was in a Northern Alliance helicopter on his way to the Nahrin earthquake, where the Associated Press photographed the lone American rescuing a little girl. She wasn’t the first child he would save, or the last.”
How Idema became a virtual army of one in the pages of The Hunt for Bin Laden remains a hotly disputed subject. Strong says that the book’s portrait of him fully accords with her own impressions: “He is a wonderful man, very brave and charismatic.” Moore and Thompson, meanwhile, maintain that Idema overtook the narrative because Random House wanted it that way. The publishers “wanted an action hero in the book,” Thompson says, “so they asked us to thread Idema all the way through.” Moore says that it was also Random House’s decision to put Idema on the book’s cover.
The next promotional twist concerning The Hunt for Bin Laden was either poetic or perverse, depending on one’s view of the publishing world. Having at the very least finagled a portrait of himself as the prime mover in the Special Forces’ Afghan war, Idema now was tapped to stand in for the Parkinson’s-weakened Moore in bookstore readings and media appearances for the title. In each radio interview he gave, he was described—as he is in the book’s pages—as a Green Beret working as an adviser to the Northern Alliance. At times he was so bold as to offer policy advice to Pentagon brass. “We in Special Forces have been lobbying for a lighter, faster Army,” he lamented to an interviewer for Bend, Oregon’s Classic Rock 98.3. “But General [Tommy] Franks isn’t listening.”
Moore’s book—the first allegedly insider account of the Afghan war—rocketed up the best-seller lists. But early reviews were harsh, and some called the book’s reliability into question. Moore was troubled by the claims and asked some Special Forces officers to review it for corrections in later editions. He forwarded the proposed fixes to his editor, Bob Loomis, but the publishing house did not alter the text. Random House will not comment on why the book is not being revised, but spokeswoman Carol Schneider denies that the publisher insisted that Idema take center stage in the narrative. “It was not our intention to make [Idema] the main character,” Schneider says. “We didn’t even know who he was until Robin Moore introduced him to us.”
When Idema got wind of Moore’s efforts to change the text, he retaliated in what was becoming a reflexive fashion: He issued a press release and filed suit. The release declared that a shadowy group of Special Forces soldiers, jealous of the attention lavished on Idema, “allegedly threatened and coerced 77-year-old Robin Moore, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, into submitting the changes to the already copyrighted bestseller.” Idema also sued the aid groups Knightsbridge and Partners International, claiming that they had also pressured Moore into changing The Hunt for Bin Laden. Idema initially alleged that the two aid groups had injured his reputation by causing Fox News to drop him as a regular commentator—but he was also suing Fox, on much the same grounds. Most of the suits were thrown out of court.
Moore and Thompson say they soon learned that they were victims of financial chicanery as well as what appeared to be an enormous media scam. The Hunt for Bin Laden contained an appendix encouraging readers to donate funds to assist Special Forces and their families and Afghan civilians. Moore says that Idema included an entry for the training camp he had founded in upstate New York, the US Counter-Terrorist Group. In the appendix, the group’s stated mission was “to help the Northern Alliance and to fight al-Qaida.”
Flush from the book’s success, Thompson and Idema (who had since relocated to Fayetteville) formed a promotional company, The Hunt for Bin Laden, LLC. As he worked in closer business quarters with Idema, Thompson says, he saw the man’s behavior grow increasingly erratic. In a deposition, Thompson said that Idema destroyed the interior of his own house with a samurai sword, that he choked his girlfriend in a fight, and that he forged a letter on Fox News stationery for use as evidence in his lawsuit against the network. A subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s office also arrived, followed by a letter from North Carolina’s postal inspector, charging Idema with mail fraud for using a post-office box registered to the company to solicit funds for the US Counter-Terrorist Group. Thompson says that after he noticed $18,000 from the company had gone missing, he drove down to Fayetteville to close the company bank account; he says that Idema followed him there and threatened to kill both him and his girlfriend.
Moore, meanwhile, learned that Idema had ordered hundreds of copies of The Hunt for Bin Laden from Moore’s account with Random House and never paid for them. “He got [the books] from my account and sold them at full price,” Moore says.
A month later, Idema was back in Afghanistan. He set up shop in a rented house in Kabul, telling the landlord he intended to start a rug-exporting business. Instead, he founded a paramilitary outfit called Task Force Saber 7, complete with its own fatigues and military insignia. Once more he had a former soldier, Brent Bennett, and a TV cameraman, Eddie Caraballo, in tow. They hired four Afghans, and began rounding up Afghan civilians to interrogate about ties to Al Qaeda. On at least three occasions, nato forces assisted Idema in his raids. On at least one occasion, troops took into custody a suspect Task Force Saber 7 had apprehended.
But Idema came to serious notice only when he committed the same oversight that the guards at Abu Ghraib did. On April 30, he e-mailed several Stateside friends with news of Task Force Saber 7’s efforts. The e-mail included jpeg photos of Idema and company in interrogation mode, some of which were extremely graphic. One recipient was very disturbed by the images and forwarded the e-mail to American authorities. The rest, is history.
To sum up the life and times of JK Idema, in an evaluation report by Captain John D. Carlson near the end of Idema’s three-year tour of duty in the Special Forces, read: “[He] is without a doubt the most unmotivated, unprofessional, immature enlisted man that I have ever known.”
avtar singh
(Based on research by Stacey Sullivan, Operation Desert Fraud
How Keith Idema marketed his imaginary Afghan war, Ivan Randall, Who is Jack?)