Iraq: The Sad Tale Of Nick Berg

In a country where foreign businessmen are reluctant to travel even in armor-clad SUVs with security guards, Nick Berg crisscrossed Iraq by hailing cabs and hopping onto buses. Usually clad in a baseball cap and jeans, he made no effort to blend in with the locals as he lugged around sophisticated electronic equipment in search of work. His Arabic was awful, and he had a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In January, during his first prospecting trip to Iraq, Berg was picked up during a police sweep in the southern town of Diwaniya, where “there are supposedly a good deal of Iranian spies who wander over and sneak about,” he told friends in an email, adding, “Isn’t this starting to read like a mystery novel …?”

There are many haunting questions about Berg and his odyssey in Iraq, which came to a tragic close last week when his body was found and a video of his horrific execution was circulated on the Internet. Why was this communications-tower repairman imprisoned for 13 days this spring in the city of Mosul–and who had custody of him there? After his release, why did he refuse offers of help to get home? And perhaps the biggest mystery of all: How did a former Boy Scout, who had spent time doing humanitarian work in Africa, stumble into the path of one alleged al-Qaeda terrorist in Oklahoma only to end up kidnapped and beheaded by another in Iraq?

Berg, who was 26 when he died, was one of a small number of free-lancers in Baghdad hoping to make a buck and, his family recalled, do some good. A “tower guy,” he figured he could earn as much as $20,000 a month repairing antennas in Iraq, a job that sometimes involved climbing hundreds of feet of latticework in 120° heat, according to business consultant and fellow free-lancer Andy Duke, who says he drank some beers with Berg the night before he disappeared.

Berg embarked on his first trip to Baghdad in December. Friends say he assumed he could find work the same way he had launched his tower-repair shop in a Philadelphia suburb: by cold-calling potential clients and sweet-talking his way into assignments. He came home in February to West Chester, Pa., with some promising leads as well as rich tales of his adventures in the war-scarred land. “He had a comfort level in Iraq that is beyond our comprehension,” says colleague Dave Skalish, a technical supervisor at a Philadelphia radio station.

Berg’s innocence got him into trouble. He apparently didn’t know to avoid getting an Israeli stamp in his passport when he traveled to Israel en route to Baghdad. By the time he was picked up by Iraqi police at a Mosul checkpoint in March, rumors circulated among his associates that Berg, who was Jewish, was working for a telecom firm with ties to Israel, according to a security contractor in Iraq.

During his detention in an Iraqi prison, Berg was interviewed three times by the FBI, which sent agents to question his family in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t his first encounter with the bureau, which had investigated a possible link between him and Zacarias Moussaoui, the al-Qaeda follower awaiting trial for suspected ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers. In 1999, during the semester Berg spent at the University of Oklahoma, he let an acquaintance access his e-mail account. Berg’s user name and password subsequently got passed around and was used by an associate of Moussaoui’s, who in 2001 enrolled in the nearby Norman flight school. But when the FBI interviewed Berg in 2002, agents determined that he had no connection to Moussaoui’s associate. “It turned out to be a total coincidence,” says a Justice Department official. When notified that Berg had been picked up in Mosul, the FBI might have wondered if its original assessment was wrong. After conducting a “thorough review of records,” the agents decided once again that he was harmless–and possibly in danger.

Berg wasn’t released until April 6, a day after his parents filed a federal lawsuit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claiming that their son had been transferred to U.S. military custody and was being detained without probable cause. Berg’s father Michael, a staunch antiwar activist, now blames the Administration for his son’s death while the U.S. military continues to deny it ever had custody of Berg. After he was released, the U.S. consulate offered to arrange for him to fly out of Baghdad, but he refused. Instead, he told friends and family that he planned to drive to Kuwait or Turkey. On April 10, he checked out of Baghdad’s Al-Fanar Tower Hotel, suitcase in hand, and disappeared. U.S. soldiers found his decapitated body a month later.

Last week a video was posted on an Islamic militant website, and the world learned what had happened to him. After reading a statement about avenging the suffering of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of Berg’s masked captors took a long knife from his shirt, grabbed a screaming Berg by the hair and cut off his head. CIA officials say there is a “high probability” that the knife was wielded by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden’s believed to be the kingpin behind the recent attacks in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was nearly captured there last year, says a U.S. official. But the terrorist may have picked a particularly inappropriate victim, a young man who, according to his father, was a do-gooder trying to help the Iraqi people. Says the elder Berg: “They killed their best friend.” –With reporting by Timothy J. Burger and Elaine Shannon/Washington, Adam Pitluk/West Chester and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad