I was once stuffed into a car at gunpoint in Baghdad by an Iraqi Republican guard officer and two machine-gun wielding soldiers and driven around town while they asked if I was a CIA agent and threatened to kill me. I survived.
1/2 It was during my Dec 1998 Iraq trip, which I wrote about earlier here on Twitter. We were bombing them, so it was natural they’d be suspicious about a young American guy out in the streets. They had me for two hours(?).
2/2 In the car I had images of movies where the guy rolls out of a moving car, but I was sandwiched between two guys with AR-15s and the officer in the front seat screaming at me in perfect English (trained in US, naturally). Little did they know I had $3000 sewn into my pack.
I had just done an interview at the intl press center and was walking back to the hotel I was staying at. All I had to identify myself was an English/Arabic flyer explaining the goals of the protest campaign I was a part of. I think the Iraqis saw it as too preposterous for CIA.
