Did Berg hide a secret?

Nicholas Berg – the affable 26-year-old communications specialist whose videotaped execution shocked the world – may have had a secret agenda.

Before proceeding, please note: I am not proposing that Berg’s activities were in any way underhanded or dishonorable. Neither does this essay address the controversy surrounding the videotape. I am merely suggesting that researchers take a closer look at the odd circumstances surrounding Berg’s final journey to Iraq.

One insufficiently scrutinized aspect of the Berg mystery concerns what we may call the “in between” period. This term refers to the four days between April 6, 2004 (the date of his release from “Iraqi police” detention) and April 10, the date of his reported re-capture by terrorists linked to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Berg “usually called home once a day and e-mailed several times; [father] Michael Berg is his business manager, and they needed to stay in touch.” During his first detention, Berg’s parents naturally became quite worried for their son’s safety, and one can imagine how they felt upon hearing his voice on April 6. (No news account known to me specifies whether this call came from Mosul or Baghdad -- an important point, as we shall see.)

That conversation, we are told, was the last time Nick Berg’s parents heard from their son. He also sent an email on that date -- reportedly his last.

An AP account published May 13 establishes that Berg spent the next few nights in the Fanar Hotel in Baghdad. While staying at the hotel, he went out for drinks with friends Hugo Infante (a Chilean journalist) and Andrew Duke (a Colorado businessman). He even visited a local gym, where he spoke with a journalist named Jamie Francis.

Berg was a man in a war zone with free time -- yet he apparently did not let his anxious family know either his location or his specific travel plans. No public statement by Michael Berg indicates that he knew where his son was staying. Before his first detention, the younger Berg had asked his parents to meet him at the airport on the expected arrival date. Yet he had no similar discussion with his parents after his release.

How did he get to Baghdad and how did he intend to leave Iraq? The stories differ widely.

First, we must account for the trip from Mosul to Baghdad on April 6 -- presuming he was, in fact, in Mosul at the time of his release. Road conditions were extraordinarily hazardous. Yet news accounts would have us believe that Berg made this journey without military assistance -- an unlikely scenario (rendered even moreso by the suggestion that he continued to wear an orange prison jumpsuit, as depicted in the videotape).

The oddities do not end there. United States officials confirm that they offered to fly Berg out of Iraq via Jordan. Berg turned down this offer, which must have come on or before April 6, because he discussed this business with his father on that date. Michael Berg reports that his son turned down the proposal because travel to the airport was “too dangerous.”

This statement makes little sense. The United States rotates soldiers, private contractors and CIA personnel in and out of Iraq on a routine basis. Is it likely that safety concerns would have prompted Berg to refuse official help? Is it likely that Berg felt safer journeying from Mosul to Baghdad, and from Baghdad to another country, entirely on his own? What factors would make “private” travel plans safer?

A key AP story of May 13 insists that Berg “preferred to travel on his own to Kuwait.” The report goes on to describe Berg’s April 9 conversation with Duke:

Duke, who drank beer with Berg the night before he left, said Berg told him he had made a lot of money and was thinking about going sailing in Turkey. He said he thought Berg was planning to leave the country by land.

"He was looking forward to going home," Duke said.

A journey by land would seem an odd choice for a man who told his father that travel to the airport was too dangerous.

But did he truly fear travel to the airport? According to a CNN report of the same day, “Infante said he thought Berg was intending to go to Baghdad Airport the following morning and take a flight back to the United States.”

During this time, Berg also made odd references to the reasons for his detention as a suspected spy. He did not mention the matter at all to Jamie Francis (in fact, Francis felt that Berg’s very presence in the country was a tad mysterious). He gave his friends at the hotel the impression that the arrest was something of a grand adventure.

He told them that he was arrested because he had a Jewish-sounding last name and an Israeli stamp in his passport. Many countries will not accept visitors whose passports show evidence of a previous trip to Israel, which is why travelers to that nation frequently receive a second passport. Berg had traveled widely throughout the third world in his young life; it is difficult to believe that he could have done so with only a stamped-in-Israel passport.

According to Infante, Berg mentioned that Iraqi police found the electronics equipment in his car suspicious. At no point did he tell his friends that he carried a Koran and an allegedly anti-Semitic book titled “The Jewish Problem” (or something similar), as later reported in the press.

Berg did discuss with Infante and Duke the nature of his captivity, in terms that call into question the official story that he was held solely by the Iraqi police. Coalition Provisional Authority Dan Senor told CBS: "I think there's a little bit of confusion that emanates in part from the fact that many of the Iraqi detention facilities are supported in some way by American MPs." According to Infante, however, Berg said that he was held in “a coalition facility” which also housed Syrians, Egyptians, and other outsiders suspected of entering the country illegally. (We can fairly presume that foreign fighters would not be questioned by the police.) Berg made a similar statement to his father -- a statement consistent with State Department communications with Michael Berg and with the claims of the Mosul police.

Berg’s brag to Duke -- that he had “made a lot of money” -- also deserves some scrutiny.

Although Berg’s ostensible purpose in the war-torn nation was to repair communications towers, none of the many news stories about Berg’s second trip to Iraq specifies who paid him and for what purpose. Accounts differ as to whether his company, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, was approved by the Coalition Provisional Authority to do work in Iraq. Spokesman Senor told a briefing that Berg “was not a U.S. government employee, he has no affiliation with the coalition and to our knowledge he has no affiliation with any Coalition Provisional Authority contractor.”

In January, Berg wrote an email reporting that he would do “tower work” for the Harris Corporation of Melbourne, which had won a Coalition contract. However, there is good reason to suspect that Berg did no work pursuant to this deal.

Some background: Berg had made an earlier visit to Iraq in December, ostensibly in search of work -- even though he had a number of tower jobs lined up at home (Baltimore Sun, May 13). During this time, he seems to have worked on the damaged communication tower at Abu Ghraib -- despite the fact that, according to Senor, his company did not appear on the Coalition’s list of approved contractors.

He also seems to have made contact with Harris representatives. According to AP:

He stayed until Feb. 1, making contact with a company that indicated there would likely be work for him later. But he returned on March 14 and there was no work, so he began traveling.

Those three words -- “he began traveling” – are the sole clue we possess as to his reasons for going to Mosul. Why did he go there? What work, if any, did he do in Iraq on this second journey? Just how did he make “a lot of money” in the short span of time before his detention?

The Iraqi police arrested Nick Berg as a spy. The FBI was sufficiently intrigued by this allegation to interview him three times and to interview his family. Is it possible that the charge held some measure of truth?

We should re-examine, in this light, a bizarre coincidence – if coincidence it be: Iraq was not the first place Nick Berg encountered Al Qaeda-linked terrorists.

In 1999, Berg attended the University of Oklahoma (we are not told why he chose a not-overwhelmingly distinguished college far from home), where he encountered one or more members of an Al Qaeda cell. Most news accounts refer to a single meeting on a bus with an associate of Zacarias Moussaoui; Michael Berg, however, has told reporters that his son had accidentally run into more than one terrorist while in Oklahoma.

One would think that there would be immediate tension between an increasingly conservative young Jew and a Muslim with secret links to terrorism. Yet Nicholas Berg, we are told, allowed access to his computer – and even revealed his password! (Even pre-teens usually know better than to discuss passwords.) The password traveled throughout the terror network, and seems to have provided the FBI with one mechanism for tracking Al Qaeda members in the United States.

One may fairly ask if “accident” truly suffices to explain these events. Berg’s “foolishness” had the interesting effect of making Al Qaeda more transparent to the authorities.

Nicholas Berg was young but mature, intelligent, in good shape, politically conservative, eager to take risks, willing to learn difficult languages, and fond of travel to exotic lands. What intelligence agency would not want to recruit someone of that description?

Further investigation may resolve many of the questions asked in this essay. New facts may reveal that Nick Berg really was just a telecommunications specialist in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At this moment, however, we have good reason to wonder.