The Girl From Kathmandu

Cam Simpson

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062449733
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

The shocking story of the massacre of a group of Nepalese men working as Defense contractors for the United States Government during the Iraq War, and the widow who dedicated her life to finding justice for her husband and the other victims—a riveting tale of courageous heroes, corporate war profiteers, international business, exploitation, trafficking, and human rights in the age of global capitalism that reveals how modern power truly works.

In August of 2004, twelve men left their village in Nepal for jobs at a five-star luxury hotel in Amman, Jordan. They had no idea that they had actually been hired for sub-contract work on an American military base in Iraq. But fate took an even darker turn when the dozen men were kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists. Their gruesome deaths were captured in one of the first graphic execution videos disseminated on the web—the largest massacre of contractors during the war. Compounding the tragedy, their deaths received little notice.

Why were these men, from a remote country far removed from the war, in Iraq? How had they gotten there? Who were they working for? Consumed by these questions, award-winning investigative journalist Cam Simpson embarked on a journey to find answers, a decade-long odyssey that would uncover a web of evil spanning the globe—and trigger a chain of events involving one brave young widow, three indefatigable human rights lawyers, and a formidable multinational corporation with deep governmental ties.

A heart-rending, page-turning narrative that moves from the Himalayas to the Middle East to Houston and culminates in an epic court battle, The Girl from Kathmandu is a story of death and life—of the war in Iraq, the killings of the twelve Nepalese, a journalist determined to uncover the truth, and a trio of human rights lawyers dedicated to finding justice. At its heart is one unforgettable young woman, Kamala Magar, who found the courage to face the influential men who sent her husband to his death—a model of strength hope, bravery, and an unbreakable spirit who reminds us of the power we all have to make a difference.

Part I
“Give Us His Breath or His Body”

1

March 2013

Washington, DC

Kamala Magar, heart racing, stomach rising, gathered herself by focusing on the little things her lawyers had told her to do. Sit tall and straight in your chair. Interlace your fingers and place your hands on the table in front of you. Breathe.

The long table’s dark finish was so glossy she could see her hands and face reflected back in a kind of shimmer, as if she were looking into a still pool. A packet on the table marked “Exhibit 58” held her memories in photocopied snapshots: her husband posing alone in front of their farmhouse; her ten-year-old daughter beneath the endless blue of the Himalayan sky. Directly across the table from Kamala, a video camera fixed on a tripod stared her down. On either side of it sat defense lawyers, each representing one of the two companies she was blaming for her husband’s death of almost a decade earlier, when she was not yet nineteen. The lens closed in on her face. Her breathing quickened.

She wore a royal-blue long-sleeve kurti top with embroidered lilac trim swirling across her chest. The shawl around her neck was tightly wrapped, more like a piece of armor than a scarf, but the weight of a lapel microphone pulled it low, exposing her throat to the chill of the conference room. Terrilyn Crowley, the court reporter, sat off to the side with her stenography machine. Crowley had come to Washington, DC, all the way from Houston for the deposition, chosen by the attorney seated to the left of the camera. He represented KBR Inc., formerly known as Kellogg Brown and Root, the $4.5 billion military and construction contractor that had generated so much controversy during the Iraq War for its Texas-based parent company, Halliburton. The conference room was home turf for KBR, even though it was far from Texas. They were in the heart of Washington’s “K Street” neighborhood, on the top floor of a glass-sided building, where KBR’s law firm resided. K Street’s boulevards are canyons lined with office blocks, each building nearly equal in height and brimming with lawyers and lobbyists representing America’s biggest companies.

Crowley administered an oath to Kamala. She swore to tell the truth.

Joseph Sarles’s boyish face masked the sharpness of his cross-examination skills. His tone with Kamala as he began his interrogation lacked sting, but it also held no warmth. Filming a deposition tends to affect the conduct of lawyers and witnesses alike. If for some reason Kamala could not appear at trial, jurors might see this as her only testimony, hence her hands folded on the table, her back against the chair, her composed presentation. Sarles, too, needed to be careful, not just about what he said to the widow, but also about how he said it. Jurors might sympathize with Kamala even more if his questions came off as cruel or aggressive toward a young woman who had been through so much.

Sarles kept his voice at a steady, bloodless pitch, as if reading aloud from an accounting textbook. His tone barely changed when he began asking Kamala about four of the worst minutes of her life.

“Did you ever see any video, at any time, that related to your husband?” Sarles asked.

Kamala drew a deep breath and slumped forward. Tears welled behind her eyes, but she sat still, staring, lost, into the table’s reflection for what seemed an eternity—five seconds of silence passed, and then ten, and then twenty. No one in the room made a sound. Kamala swiveled gently from side to side in the gray chair, as she did when she comforted her daughter, eyes still lost in the table’s sheen. Slowly, she lifted her head. “Yes,” she said, looking back at Sarles. “I have.”

“Can you describe what video you’ve seen?” he asked.

Kamala dropped her gaze to the table again. This time it took only a few seconds for her to gather herself and look back toward her questioner. “I saw the one—the one in which they killed him,” she said, almost in a whisper.

Virtually everyone in Kamala’s life, nearly everyone she had ever met, nearly everyone in her homeland, had watched her husband die. Vendors had sold the execution video on DVD in the dusty streets of Kathmandu and even in the smaller towns. Some had hawked single viewings in curtained booths offered with a cup of tea for just a few pennies. Even the other widows in the ashram where she had lived after being rejected by her late husband’s family knew how he had died, or had even viewed his murder. When she met people for the first time, she felt their knowing pass as a momentary silence, or saw it in an arrested expression on their faces once they realized who she was. After Kamala learned she might testify, she had yielded to a voice that told her she had to see, had to know, despite all her instincts in the almost nine years in which she had avoided those four minutes and five seconds.

“When did you see it?” Sarles asked her.

“After a long time,” Kamala said.

“Who showed it to you?”

“I looked at it myself. I watched it on my own,” she said.

“Where were you when you watched it? . . . Were you at your house, or were you someplace else?”

“At my house,” Kamala said.

“How did you get a copy of the video?”

“Objection!” said Anthony DiCaprio, seated directly to Kamala’s right. There was no judge in the room to rule on DiCaprio’s objection, but objections in depositions are common, creating markers in the record that allow questions to be challenged and stricken later if warranted. They also give lawyers a tactical tool to emphasize a line of questioning that could be seen as unbecoming to jurors watching later on a big screen in the courtroom. Kamala’s lead attorney, a decorated human rights lawyer named Agnieszka Fryszman, had brought DiCaprio into the case specifically for this purpose. “You’ll be our pit bull,” she had told him.

Fryszman looked drawn. The lids of her brown eyes drooped and she’d lost so much weight that her “lucky” outfit, a black pantsuit she’d worn for years to every court appearance, gave her the look of a child dressed in her mother’s clothes. There didn’t seem to be a limit to the resources KBR was piling into its defense. Its cadre of lawyers fought even some of the most mundane facets of the litigation to the extreme, burying Fryszman in so many paper salvos that she didn’t have time to depose a single KBR employee, even as a trial date loomed on the court calendar. The defense had also made the fight personal, accusing Fryszman of misconduct in a raft of charges that might derail her career and hurt almost every lawyer who had helped her in the case. Her assistant counsel, an idealistic young woman with degrees from Harvard and Columbia, had resigned after skirting the edge of a nervous breakdown. Now, as Kamala suffered through her interrogation, Fryszman and her law firm had just one week left to respond to KBR’s charges. A star witness had stumbled badly in an earlier deposition, giving KBR more fodder. If Kamala broke down under questioning, the defense could pounce again, dealing a potentially significant blow to the case at the worst possible moment.

There was cause to worry. Most people who are grilled by a lawyer for the first time have at least seen a cross-examination in the movies or on television, but Kamala had grown up in a mountain village where the only power came from a battery in the back of a transistor radio and the only running water poured down gullies or through a tap jutting from a stone wall built into the mountainside at the village well. Although she had moved to Kathmandu after her husband’s murder, she had never flown on an airplane until the journey that brought her to Dulles International Airport three weeks before her testimony; nor had she ever seen snowfall except on the distant peaks of the world’s highest mountain range, which dominated the horizon of her village in the subtropics of the Himalayas. Powder had covered the U.S. capital when Kamala arrived in February. She regarded the snow with wonder and wished her daughter could see it.

Despite her exhaustion coming off a ten-thousand-mile journey, Kamala had worried herself awake that first night at the Washington Plaza Hotel. She had never been apart from her daughter and could not escape her fear of what might befall the child if something happened to her on this trip. Everything in the hotel room seemed so foreign, reminding her of how far she was from home: the keyless electronic door, the coffeemaker she struggled to use, the bright white linens impossibly smooth across the surface of the bed. For years, Kamala had focused solely on returning to life and raising Kritika alone, keeping everything else in the shadows. But during that sleepless night in the Washington hotel, memories of her husband were inescapable. Attesting to them was the reason she had found herself in such a strange place.

That night, she rose and moved to the small bathroom. There she stood in front of the vanity and the seamless mirror covering the wall behind it, reading the lines of her face, looking into her own eyes. I came here to fight for my husband, she told herself, but everything would be so different if he had come home as he’d promised. None of these things happening now would even have crossed my mind. She saw herself crumple. After a moment, she opened the taps, leaned over the bathroom sink, and with cupped hands raised the water to her face.

In the days that followed her arrival, Fryszman and DiCaprio tried to prepare Kamala for the cross-examination, with DiCaprio playing the bad guy in mock sessions, but he didn’t always get far. Many attempts began or ended in tears. Fryszman had worried that moving forward with the case at all would be too much for the families of the dead. She had hoped for a quicker resolution, given that so many respectable modern American corporations customarily own up to the actions that take place along their supply chains, all the way to the most basic raw materials and services—the conditions on the farms that grow the cotton used to weave the denim sewn into blue jeans, the mining of the tin that goes into the solder holding together the components of an iPhone.1 Yet, for the signal case that had he...