A bizarre turn on the investigative trail

Recently I got a hot tip about U.S. war crimes in Iraq. It led me to some very cold, very weird places.

By Mark Benjamin

Read more: Veterans, Iraq, Deep Throat, Opinion, Mark Benjamin

Jan. 23, 2008 | When I tell people I'm an investigative reporter, I secretly hope that it sounds sexy and mysterious. I imagine that they might think of me like Bob Woodward, eclipsed by a dark column deep inside a Washington parking garage, waiting for Deep Throat to impart a haiku of wisdom -- "follow the money" -- that will lead me to the noblest of reporting revelations.

The real work, of course, is miraculously less glamorous. I pore endlessly through documents, wait long hours for phone calls to be returned, and type up tedious Freedom of Information Act requests. Occasionally I even follow a mysterious man up a snow-covered mountain in a rental car made to fit a Pygmy.

Recently I got a hot tip about a Marine who was fresh back from Iraq and was now out of the military. His unit, I was told, had committed war crimes, and this Marine wanted to unburden himself by sharing information about the atrocities. "War crime" -- two words that are news, and even more so when taken together. And there was more: This source was said to have video evidence.

Before a reporter goes off chasing some great white whale and burning up thousands of dollars of his editor's budget in airfare and hotel bills, it is good to have some idea of whether the story is authentic. This can be a tricky balance, however; when a particular lead starts to smell funny or takes a weird turn, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going nowhere. A shocking truth might yet be waiting around the next bend in the road. An investigative reporter's charge is persistence.

I've done a lot of reporting on veterans' issues, and I got information about this Marine from other veterans who wanted to expose war crimes if indeed they had been committed. This Marine was for real, I was told. So I started talking to this Marine on the phone. We will call him Joe.

In recent years I have talked with many dozens, if not hundreds of veterans. Joe immediately seemed atypical -- on the phone he sounded more like Jeff Spicoli than Chesty Puller. He said "dude" a lot. He told me that he lived in Burlington, Vt., which, if true, would have meant that there was at least one Marine in the Green Mountain State.

Joe talked a pretty good game, though he was a bit vague about, well, everything. The more I made it clear that I was prepared to jump on a plane to Burlington to meet with him, the worse Joe got at returning my phone calls. His cellphone was apparently on the fritz, the battery dead. He suddenly got busy. Still, it's much harder to assess a source on the phone than in person. Sometimes a face-to-face meeting can make all the difference.

In my efforts to track down Joe, I ended up talking to Joe's roommate. We'll call him Hank. Hank confided that, among other things, busy Joe was actually unemployed. Hank also called me "dude."

Finally, after days of phone calls, I succeeded in getting Hank to physically hand his cellphone over to Joe. Joe then agreed to meet me the next night in Burlington, even though he said that would be tough, because the day after our scheduled meeting he would have to wake up at the crack of dawn and drive four hours to Connecticut to see a V.A. doctor.

Meanwhile, Vermont had just been struck by a blizzard. There was at least a foot of snow on the ground, and air traffic was almost at a standstill. But reporters are supposed to be as intrepid as postal workers in such situations. The next day I left Washington, sweated out a long delay at JFK airport, and after many, many hours landed in snowy, frigid Burlington. When I tuned in to a local radio station inside my rental car, the announcer said it was zero degrees outside.

I proceeded to the Courtyard Marriott. Joe's phone apparently was on the fritz again. No answer for hours. I paced the checkered carpet of my room. It was too early to hit the minibar. On the tube, MacGyver was powering his alarm clock using some old wires, a russet potato and a glass of water. I wasn't quite desperate enough to crack open the Gideons Bible.

Eventually, I tried the cellphone of Joe's roommate Hank. Hank answered. Apparently, despite my appointment with Joe -- and Joe's early morning visit to the V.A. doctor in Connecticut the next day -- Hank, Joe and a bunch of their friends had developed other plans. "Yeah dude, Joe's right here," Hank said. "We're skiing, dude." What better thing to do in a snowstorm, after all? They were at Sugarbush, some 40 miles south of Burlington. Some young lady in their retinue apparently had a wealthy father who had an empty house "right on the slopes, dude."

So I pressed Hank to give me directions to the mountainside chalet. The trail leading to Joe was getting more treacherous: "OK, dude," Hank said, "you take a hairpin turn and then another hairpin turn, and then ..."

Back at the Burlington airport the perky young man at the Enterprise rental counter had offered me a four-wheel-drive SUV. "There's a foot of snow out there," he'd chirped -- but at the time I thought I would simply be driving to the hotel, and Joe was going to be right there in Burlington. So I rented the "mini" or "micro" or whatever they call the cheapest car on the lot. It was a Nissan Crapola or something. Red. Almost toylike. It looked like something you'd rent in the Balkans. It had tires the size of doughnuts. As I walked up to it, keys in hand, I was half expecting circus midgets to pile out.

It was long past dark by the time I was on the roads snaking up to Sugarbush. They were twisting, dark and impossibly steep. Wind gusts from the black woods blew snow from roadside drifts across my windshield. The Crapola careened like an amusement park ride. I imagined swerving into an embankment and waking up in Stephen King's "Misery." I white-knuckled the wheel. I thought of my kids.

I could not find the chalet, which was nestled somewhere among the dark trees. My cellphone had long ago lost all connection to the civilized world. After one particularly hairy hairpin, the Crapola's wheels spun to a halt on a hill and I began sliding slowly backward on the ice.

At that moment, exposing crimes in U.S.-occupied Iraq somehow didn't seem so important, public service be damned. I turned the toy car around, preparing to limp back down the mountain in low gear.

Next page: Maybe I was working for the CIA, without even knowing it