Idema’s defenders insist he is a true patriot who was hot on the trail of Osama bin Laden. “The United States has put a $25 million bounty on this guy, so why all of a sudden this ’tsk, tsk’ when someone goes after him?” says Ken Kelch, a filmmaker and former Special Forces soldier who knows Idema. Other Green Berets, though, are among his worst critics. “Idema is not a member of the SFA and he never will be,” says a spokesman for the Special Forces Association, a veterans’ organization.
Idema boasts of serving in various roles in nearly every U.S. battle zone in the past 20 years: Central America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, even Haiti. Idema’s active-duty military service was quite short; his military records, obtained by NEWSWEEK, show that he spent three years in the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group as a rear-base radio operator until 1978, and then an additional six years in the Reserves. There is no record that he was in combat or overseas with the U.S. military. His criminal record shows a long string of charges including assault and resisting arrest going back to 1988, with convictions on driving offenses and misdemeanors. He started a business making military and paintball gear. To keep that failing enterprise alive, prosecutors alleged, he defrauded suppliers, and ended up sentenced to four years in prison on 55 federal wire-fraud counts. At his sentencing, Idema argued that prosecutors were persecuting him because of the “national- security secrets” he knew.
September 11 gave Idema a new sense of mission. Within weeks he had found his way to northern Afghanistan, where he spent his days in dealings with many foreign reporters (including NEWSWEEK), NGOs and Northern Alliance fighters. He sometimes identified himself to aid workers as a journalist, to journalists as an aid worker. After the Taliban fell he became a well-known figure in Kabul, frequenting the Mustapha Hotel, a favored residence and hangout for the gun-toting Americans who poured into Kabul as civilian security contractors. “He was passionate about getting the bad guys,” recalls a former Navy SEAL who works for a private security firm there. “He was always talking about getting bin Laden.” That obsession inspired Idema to create Task Force Sabre 7, which he said in e-mails back to the States was getting closer “to the last terrorists.”
U.S. officials deny any ties to Idema. As long ago as February 2002, U.S. consular officials in Kabul had been warning newly arrived Americans to steer clear of him, but even so it took until late June before the Coalition authorities began posting wanted posters around Kabul describing Idema as “armed and dangerous,” accusing him of “interfering with military ops.” (In an e-mail to his lawyer about the poster, Idema wrote, “the charges are a lie.”) Kabul’s streets are full of Americans brandishing weapons in unmarked SUVs, and Afghan security forces are forbidden to ask them for identification. Some of his supporters are still convinced that he was on some officially authorized operation. “What was his mission?” wonders Jim Maceda, an NBC correspondent who knew Idema in Kabul. “I believe that he believed he had a mission.”
Perhaps. But now Jack Idema’s mission will be to avoid a conviction in an Afghan court, which could bring him up to 20 years in jail. And if he beats that rap, the Feds are still looking for him back in the States to face charges of “impersonating a peace officer,” after police had stopped his car in North Carolina. (His wife, Viktoria Runningwolf, says he’s innocent.) Either way, it doesn’t look like he’ll be collecting that $25 million bounty any time soon.
