If you’re looking for pieces on Jack Idema and his team, please click on this link.

To escape the horror of the bombed-out Inter-Continental Hotel, we rented a house in the Wazir Akbar Khan, a relatively upmarket suburb of tree-lined streets with two-story concrete houses behind walled compounds. It had long been a favoured address for warlords and other merchants of death, and was therefore one of the few places in Kabul relatively untouched by the civil war, since warlords tended not to shell themselves.

A venerable, half-blind commander lived opposite, surrounded by a small army of uniformed guards. He took a disapproving view of Westerners moving in and sent word by messenger to our door that Sebastian and I were not to use our balcony, as we might see women in the adjoining courtyard. Kim had just arrived in Kabul to shoot a documentary on Afghan women. To appease the commander, I introduced her to everyone as “my wife”. But we overstepped the mark by hiring a young Afghan woman named Fereshte to do our laundry. She was excited to have her first job since the Taliban ordered women indoors five years earlier. However, the commander deemed it unacceptable for an Afghan women to work in our house and ordered that we dismiss her.

The house came with six servants, working as guards, cooks and cleaners on salaries of $50 a month. Five of them were relatives of our new interpreter, Hamed, a slick young entrepreneur who had found the house for us and was turning it into a personal cash cow. While he paid his realtives a pittance, Hamed charges $200 a day for his own services and leased his car to us for $150 a day, paying the driver a salary of $35 a month. I wanted to sack him, but interpreters were in such demand that some news groups had persuaded English-speaking doctors to abandon their posts in hospitals to work for them. That left school students-who would accost us outside the gate. “Hello, English, very cheap, $100 please, sir, hello!”

Hamed treated the staff to his personal servants, clicking his fingers to have them bring him tea. They didn’t seem to do much else and it was apparently not part of their job description to do anything for Sebastian and me. The only one who worked hard was the cook, Fayez Mohammed, a sad-faced and extraordinarily hirsute man who laboured away in an unspeakably dirty kitchen. The others sat around on cushions looking glum, occasionally getting up to let in visitors or jumping up to serve Hamed.

The lack of bomb damage was the houses’ main attraction. It had concrete floors, almost no furniture, only occasional electricity and no hot water (in fact, no COLD water except form a well in the basement). The only heating was from small wood stoves. We were perpetually cold and dirty and the staff seemed miserable, but with a negligence born of exhaustion I left the running of the house to Hamed. I was too tired and busy to concentrate on anything but the work.

The day began at six with cold bucket showers by candlelight, after which Sebastian would fire up the generator to power the edit suite. As the room filled with the odor of petrol fumes, we would cut a television package by nine to allow for the time difference with Australia. After an hour’s round trip to the satellite feed point in the Inter-Continental Hotel, we would eat breeakfast and go out filming for the day. At night I would cut radio news pieces and features and often end up with a live radio cross at one-thirty in the morning. Then I’d sleep for four hours and start again.

The great frustration was that most of the news was happening outside Kabul in places we couldn’t get to–last ditch battles with the Taliban near Kandahar, starvation looming in Bamiyan, infighting in Mazar-e-Sharif, arrests of al-Qaeda suspects in Jalalabad. No matter how much we filmed in Kabul during the day, we would often have to ditch it the next morning in order to send voiceover for agency pictures of distant events we knew nothing about. Many of the stories could have been filed far more easily in Sydney. While I was desperate to get original material that could lead the news bulletins, Kabul remained steadfastly quiet.

But that was about to change, thanks to Jack.

We met up with him again at a Christmas party at the Inter-Continental Hotel. Christmas wasn’t a big event in Muslim Kabul, but for godless Western journalists it was an excuse for a piss-up. An American television producer had managed to smuggle in a case of vodka on an aid flight, and invited some of us to share it. We gathered by the satellite feed point, standing on the mouldy carpet under flickering fluorescent lights, trying to summon up Christmas cheer and ignore each other’s BO - many journalists had stopped washing entirely rather than persist with cold showers on freezing mornings.

Jack wandered in, still wearing the sunglasses indoors at night, and greeted us as long-lost buddies. “How the fuck ya doin’?” he asked and launched into an account of his latest exploits. We were about to leave to beat the ten o’clock curfew but Jack appeared to be settling in for a long drink. “Don’t worry, I’ve got the fucking password,” he said. “Hey, where you staying? I might have a story for you.”

Two days later he came around with a box of grubby Video-8 cassette tapes and an equally grubby portable player. It was more than six hours of al-Qaeda home movies. They were nothing like the usual al-Qaeda vision of masked men marching and staging exercises which were used as recruitment videos. In these tapes, the militants weren’t wearing masks and they were doing what appeared to be genuine training in assassination and bombing. Some had even filmed their families–one tape showed an infant boy and his younger sister carrying automatic rifles. The militants had obviously never expected the footage to be seen by outsiders.

It was possibly the most comprehensive view of al-Qaeda training that anyone had seen and potentially one of the biggest stories of the war. Jack told us one of his soldiers had found the tapes in a village that foreign militants had used as a training camp. We were almost touched he’d brought them to us first. For someone who continually threatened to kill people, Jack seemed to have a soft side for people he liked. But he also needed us. We were the only TV crew he knew well enough to trust. And without our help, he’d have no way to transfer or edit the footage into a form that could be sold to broadcasters who, unlike us, had money.

Sebastian stayed up all night to dub the footage, which he cut down to a 50-minute highlights reel. It was extraordinary stuff. The village school had become a university of terrorism.

There was a hostage-taking lesson on a rooftop, with the trainee terrorists barking at the mock hostages in English. Human-size cutout targets were placed in various situations and blown to pieces by gunmen. There was a carjacking and even a practice assassination of political leaders at a golf course. A trainer showed a map of a city on a whiteboard outlining how an ambush would be carried out. He went on to explain how the assassins would then assemble at a certain point where they would be given passports and visas to travel to Yemen.

It was uncomfortable having these tapes in the house, especially as I didn’t trust Hamed to keep them secret. Captured al-Qaeda and Taliban videotape had become a valuable commodity among the mujahideen, who were selling it both to media groups and to the US military. This footage was potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sebastian and I were nervous about it being seized at gunpoint if the Northern Alliance found we had it.

Jack offered to sleep at our place “for a few nights” to make sure there were no problems. His weapons came in with him, including a Kalashnikov and a pistol. As we watched him move his paraphernalia into the spare room upstairs, it occurred to me that he might be a difficult house guest to extract.

To confirm the footage was genuine, we made two trips out to the village of Mir Bacheh Kowt where Jack had said the al-Qaeda tapes were shot, to see if we could match the landscape and buildings to the tapes. Given Jack’s penchant for self-promotion, I also needed to make absolutely sure he hadn’t staged the footage. This would have been all but impossible, as many of the people on tape looked and spoke Arabic–a death sentence now the Northern Alliance was in control. But the definitive evidence would be the snowline. One part of the video showed heavy snow on the mountains behind the buildings. Winter had just begun but as yet no snow had fallen, leaving only a thin cover on the mountains surrounding Kabul from the previous winter. If we could find the same location and there was still less snow than in the footage, it would be proof the tapes had been shot long before Jack arrived or the Taliban had fled the region.

Mir Bacheh Kowt was a 40-minute drive north of Kabul along a half-destroyed road, the same road on which Tim and I had been stoned by the Taliban’s Vice and Virtue Police four years earlier. The Taliban had poisoned the wells and the villages had been destroyed as the frontline shifted back and forth between Kabul and the Panjshir Valley. We drove through now deserted remnants of mud villages that had been caught in the crossfire. Then we saw the mountains behind the village. Sure enough, they were almost bare of snow, meaning that the footage could not have been shot in the warmer weeks since the Taliban had fled.

The villagers in Mir Bacheh Kowt waved al-Qaeda detritus at us, hoping to sell it as souvenirs. A charred copy of the Koran, ammunition casings and even man-shaped shooting targets were among the offerings. They told us that the Taliban had ordered them to leave three years earlier to make way for the foreign fighters. They had just returned to the delapidated remains of their homes to find they had been used for target and bombing practice.

The village school was in a two storey-building I recognised from the tapes. It had been the main training centre. It was eerie to walk through the rooms where Arab and Pakistani militants had been learning to kill and maim. The walls were pockmarked with bullet and mortar holes from live-fire exercises. A blackboard still had a chalk diagram showing the correct shooting stance for close-quarter assassination.

The militants had used the entire village as a training range, blasting each building with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Some buildings were still filled with live shells. Ragged children followed us around the village and toyed with the al-Qaeda debris, playing happily with Zeppelin-shaped grenades. A man with one leg pointed to a row of buildings and told us not to go near them. “Mines”, he said, gesturing at his stump.

If the US military knew of this base, it had certainly not investigated it. Wandering around, we found an extraordinary range of terrorist debris, including instruction manuals, notebooks filled with what looked like chemistry lessons and an Arabic translation of a US taskforce paper on counter-terrorism.

It seemed the Pentagon was less than delighted that Jack had found the tapes first. Jack had visions of Donald Rumsfeld or even George W. Bush hailing the discovery of the footage as an important breakthrough in the fight against terrorism. Every night he would stand on our balcony, muttering animatedly into his satphone as he tried to call important figures in the Pentagon. But it was obvious that the military regarded Jack with deep suspicion, if not a total whacko.

Media interest in the tapes made up for any hesitancy on the part of the Pentagon. Using the highlights reel Sebastian had edited, Jack was hawking the story around the US, Japanese, British and German network producers in Kabul. He created a bidding war, playing rival networks against each other, quoting figures of many tens of thousands of US dollars for exclusive rights. Everyone was incredulous that part of the deal was that the footage would be broadcast in Australia (on the ABC) first. The response of the Fox News producer was, “Australia! Who the fuck lives in Australia?”–suggesting a limited knowledge of his boss, Rupert Murdoch.

I still had nagging doubt about Jack. He’d refused to give me his real name, hinting that it was classified. Some journalists suspected he was a con artist. Producers back in the US, Japan and Britain wanted to know more of his credentials before paying him the money. They also wanted to know where it was going. Jack insisted it was all for charity. Speculation came to a head in a dramatic incident on New Year’s eve.

We were invited to a party at the house of a Newsweek reporter. All was fine until a reporter from the US military magazine Stars and Stripes who shared the house recognised Jack as someone he’d interviewed years earlier. The problem was, he used Jack’s real name and mentioned where he’d seen him last–in prison. Jack exploded in rage and punched him out before storming back to our place, where he then vowed to have a Northern Alliance commander kill the reporter.

“The motherfucker!” Jack shouted. “I’m going to tell General Bariolai tomorrow he’s a spy and get him shot.”

We managed to calm him down and made him promise not to take revenge. The next day Jack told us about his time in prison but insisted he’d been framed.

“I was in Lithuania in the early ’90s tracking down nuclear smugglers,” he said. “The FBI wanted me to hand over my sources but the Lithuanians wouldn’t let me. They knew the FBI had been infiltrated by spies. So they [the FBI] threw me in jail. I wouldn’t talk, though. Then two of the agents who testified against me were caught for spying for the Russians.”

Jack had a flair for exaggeration but this sounded like pure fantasy. I did an internet search on his real name and found he’d spent three years in prison for swindling $200,000 from companies involved in an exhibition of military goods. Bizarrely he was also suing the film director Steven Spielberg over the film “The Peacemaker”, starring George Clooney as a Special Forces colonel fighting nuclear smuggling. Jack claimed that George Clooney character was based on his personal exploits in Lithuania in the early 1990’s.

It was tempting to simply dismiss Jack as a fantasist and a con man. War zones were magnets for Walter Mitty types claiming military prowess and mysterious pasts that were 90 per cent imagination. But the intriguing thing about Jack was how much of what he said checked out. He definitely HAD wrangled himself a position as military adviser to the Afghans. We had seen enough of his dealings with Hazrat Ali and other Northern Alliance officials to be sure of that. He had extraordinary good contacts in the new government and was able to get us any interview or access to any location we wanted. US journalists bidding for the footage were able to confirm that he had served in Special Forces. Above all, the tapes of the al-Qaeda training camp were genuine. We had confirmed that from the detritus left at Mir Bacheh Kowt and the accounts of the villagers.

An excerpt from “Absurdistan” by Eric Campbell, available only through booksellers in Australia, or if you have a friend there who can send it to you.

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