One
Citizen’s Misadventure in Securityland
by
Ann
Jones
Where
did I go wrong? Was it playing percussion with an Occupy Wall
Street band in Times Square when I was in New York recently? Or was
it when I returned to my peaceful new home in Oslo and deleted an
email invitation to hear Newt Gingrich lecture Norwegians on the
American election? (Yes, even here.) I
don’t know how it happened. Or even, really, what happened. Or
what it means. So I’ve got no point -- only a lot of
anxiety. I usually write
about the problems of the world, but now I’ve got one of my
own. They
evidently think I’m a terrorist.
That
is, someone in the U.S. government who specializes in finding
terrorists seems to have found me and laid a heavy hand on my bank
account. I think this is wrong, of course, but try to tell that to a
faceless, acronymic government agency.
It
all started with a series of messages from my bank: Citibank. Yeah, I
know, I should have moved my money long ago, but in the distant past
before Citibank became Citigroup, it was my friendly little
neighborhood bank, and I guess I’m in a rut. Besides, I learned
when I made plans to move to Norway that if your money is in a small
bank, it has to be sent to a big bank like Citibank or Chase to wire
it to you when you need it, which meant I was trapped anyway.
So
the first thing I noticed was that one of those wires with money I
needed never arrived. When I politely inquired, Citibank told me that
the transaction hadn’t gone through. Why not? All my fault,
they insisted, for not having provided complete information. Long
story short: we went round and round for a couple of weeks, as I
coughed up ever more morsels of previously unsolicited personal
information. Only then did a bit of truth emerge.
The
bank wasn’t actually holding up the delivery of the money. The
funds had, in fact, left my account weeks before, along with a wire
transfer fee. The responsible party was OFAC.
Oh
what? I wondered. OFAC. It rhymes with Oh-Tack, but you’ve got
to watch how you pronounce it. Speak carelessly and the name sounds
like just what you might say upon learning that you’ve been
sucked into the ultimate top-secret bureaucratic sinkhole. It turns
out, the bank informs me, that OFAC is a division of the U.S.
Treasury Department that “reviews” transactions.
“Why
me?” I ask. As a long-time reporter I find it a strange
question, as strange as finding myself working on a story about me.
By
way of an answer, the bank refers me to an Internet link that calls
up a 521-page
report so densely typed it looks like wallpaper. Entitled
“Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons,” it
turns out to be a list of what seems to be every Muslim business and
social organization on the planet. That’s when I Google
OFAC, go to its site, and find out that the acronym stands for the
Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Its
mission description reads
chillingly. It “administers and enforces economic and trade
sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals
against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists,
international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities
related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and
other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of
the United States.” And it turns out to be a subsidiary
of something much bigger that goes by the unnerving name of
“Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.”
Off
With Her Head
Whoa!
Perhaps it doesn’t help, at this moment, that I’ve just
been reading Top
Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,
the scary new book by Washington
Post
reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin about our multiple,
overfed, overzealous, highly-classified intelligence agencies,
staffed in significant part not by civil servants but by
profit-making private contractors. Suddenly, I feel myself in
the grip of the national post-9/11 paranoia that hatched all that new
“security.” (And you, too, could find yourself in
my shoes fast.)
I
check OFAC’s list more carefully. It’s in a kind of
alphabetical order, but with significant incomprehensible diversions
-- and if my name is there, I sure can’t find it. Since
I’ve spent most of the last decade working with international
aid organizations as well as reporting
from some of the more strife-ridden lands on the planet,
including Afghanistan,
the only thing I can imagine is that maybe all those odd visas in my
fat passport raised a red flag somewhere in Washington.
Next,
I search for the name of my Norwegian landlady. Did I say that
the wired funds that never arrived were meant to pay her my rent?
She’s in India, a volunteer health-care worker with Tibetan
refugees, currently helping refurbish an orphanage for 144 kids.
(What could be more suspicious than that?) I can’t find
her name either. No Anns or Heidis at all, in fact, among the
raft of Mohammads and Abduls.
Heidi
is a Buddhist. I’m an atheist. Almost everybody on
the list seems to be Muslim, including really dangerous-sounding guys
like “Ahmed the Egyptian.” But I guess that to a
truly committed and well-paid terrorist hunter, we must all look
alike.
I’m
desperate to get the rent to Heidi so she can cover her own expenses
as a volunteer; an international organization pays for the children’s
needs, but Heidi does the work. So I call the American Embassy
in Oslo and speak to a nice young woman in the section devoted to
“American Citizen Services.” I tell her about me
and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian. She says, “I’ve
never heard of such a thing. But there are so many of these
intelligence offices now, I guess I’ll be hearing these stories
more often.” (Maybe she’s been reading Top
Secret America,
too.)
She
takes it up with her superiors and calls me back. The Embassy
can’t help me, citizen or not, she says, because they don’t
handle money matters and have nothing to do with the Treasury
Department.
“What?
The State Department doesn’t deal with the Treasury?”
“No,”
she says, “I guess not.”
Perhaps
since I last paid attention the Treasury stopped being considered
part of the government. Maybe it now belongs to Lockheed
Martin.
At
least the State Department has some compassion left in it. If
I’m really destitute, she assures me, the Embassy might
be
able to give me a loan to pay for a plane ticket that would get my
two cats and me back to the States. I guess it doesn’t
occur to her that under the circumstances I might feel more secure in
Norway.
Down
the Rabbit Hole
Still,
all I want to do is clear up this mess, so I put my head in the
lion’s mouth and send an email directly to OFAC. I tell
them that I’m in Norway for the year on a Fulbright grant as a
researcher -- that is, as part of an international exchange program
founded by a U.S. Senator and sponsored by the U.S. Government, or at
least one part of the State Department part of it. Among my
informal responsibilities, I add, is to be a goodwill ambassador for
the United States, but I’m finding it really hard to explain to
Norwegians that I can’t pay my rent because a bunch of
terrorist-trackers in the pay of my government have made off with the
money and left nothing behind but a list of Muslim names.
Remarkably
quickly OFAC itself writes back, giving me the creepy feeling that it
was lurking behind the door the whole time. It is sorry that I
am “frustrated.” It will help me, but only if I
supply a whole long list of information, mostly the same stuff I have
already provided three times to the bank, the same information the
bank later said wasn’t the issue after all. (Still later,
the bank would say that I had given not too little information, but
too much.) I send the requested tidbits back to “Dear
OFAC Functionary or Machine as the case may be.”
Two
days later comes another message from OFAC, this time signed by
“Michael Z.” Like Afghans, or spies, he evidently
has only one name, but my hopes that he might be an actual person
inexplicably rise anyway -- only to sink again when he claims OFAC
needs yet more information. All this so that Michael Z.,
presumed person, may help me “more effectively.”
(More than what, I wonder?) He is, he insists, trying to locate
my money with the help of my bank, which by the way is now blocking
me from seeing information about my own account online.
It
seems odd to me that this top-secret office of Financial Intelligence
somehow can’t manage to lay hands on the money it snatched from
me, but what do I know? I’m just a citizen.
Then
-- are you ready for this? -- comes what should be a happy ending.
A message from the bank tells me that the money has slipped through
after all, and sure enough there it is at last in a Norwegian bank,
only a month late. I won’t be evicted after all, and
Heidi will make sure those Tibetan kids get some fresh fruit and
brand new bright green curtains.
Still,
this is not a cheery story. So I have to send my apologies to the
long-dead Senator J. William Fulbright: I’m sorry indeed
that certain changes in the spirit and operations of the United
States have occurred since that day in 1948 when you launched your
farsighted program of grants to encourage open international
educational and cultural exchange. And I apologize that some of those
changes may have temporarily cramped my style as a goodwill
ambassador; I’ll try to get back on the job if I can just
figure out what hit me.
Was
this all simply a mistake? A technical glitch? An error
at the bank? I’d like to think so, but what about that
list of “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons”?
Why was I directed to that?
And what about Michael Z., who presumably is some kind of
intelligence analyst at OFAC and who, when last heard from, was still
seeking information and trying to find the money?
Frankly,
this month-long struggle has left me mighty tired and uneasy.
Right now, Senator Fulbright, I’m lying low, down here at the
bottom of the rabbit hole, trying to make sense of things. (I took a
last look at the “Blocked Persons” list, and just this
week it’s grown by another page.) So I want to tell you
the truth, Senator, and I think that with your great interest in
peaceable international relations, you just may understand.
Strange as it may seem, since I’ve been hunkered down here in
the rabbit hole, I’ve worked up some sympathy for Ahmed the
Egyptian who, I have a sneaking feeling, could be down here, too.
It’s hard to tell when you’re kept in the dark, but maybe
he’s just another poor sap like me, snarled in the super-secret
security machine.
Ann
Jones is in Norway under the auspices of the Fulbright Scholar
Program, researching the Norwegian economic, social, and cultural
arrangements that cause it to be named consistently by the United
Nations as the best place to live on earth. A TomDispatch
regular, she is the author of Kabul
in Winter
(2006) and War
Is Not Over When It’s Over
(2010).
Copyright
2011 Ann Jones
This
article originally appeared in TomDispatch.com without the image.
Home