Jonathan Keith Jack Idema

May 2024 · 5 minute read

NOBODY who met Jonathan Keith “Jack” Idema could doubt his self- belief. It hit you as forcefully as his rocky good looks, his patriotism and his prickliness. But who was the self he believed in?

Was it Jonathan, the rather spoilt single child from Poughkeepsie, fond of fast cars and prone to collecting speeding tickets, who was inspired by John Wayne in “The Green Berets” to join the American special forces? Was it Keith, the ex-soldier who went into business selling paintball equipment and then military clothing, before being convicted of defrauding 59 companies and sentenced to six years in prison? Was it Jack, the tough guy who rocked out to Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11th attacks to do humanitarian stuff, capture Osama bin Laden and work undercover, he said, for the Pentagon? Or was it Black Jack, the swashbuckling captain of a tour boat in Mexico who, before he succumbed to AIDS, saw himself as Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean”, flew a pirate flag from a minaret, held constant orgies and liked to play the score of “Apocalypse Now” and Louis Armstrong's “What a Wonderful World”?

No doubt it was all these selves, and others too, for Mr Idema was a man of many parts, and his lack of self-doubt helped him both to ignore setbacks and to gain the confidence of those who should have seen through him. The real and the imaginary were as one to him, just as right and wrong were. And he moved in a world peopled by others with as many fantasies, as few scruples and plenty of motives for inventing tall stories.

Some of the stories made Mr Idema seem almost lovably heroic. He preserved genetic material from his dog, for example, so that he could later be cloned. Sarge was, after all, no ordinary dog but a Tibetan shepherd that would jump out of aircraft with his soldier master and help sniff out bombs (when not scuba diving). Other tales cast Mr Idema in a more Bond-like guise. Thus in 1991 he told the FBI that among the detritus of the Soviet Union he had discovered a Russian mafia gang bent on smuggling suitcase-sized nuclear weapons out of Lithuania; no details could be revealed, though, because the FBI was riddled with KGB agents.

He could be a victim, too. Was he not the object of a vendetta by the FBI? And had his story not been stolen by Steven Spielberg for George Clooney in “The Peacemaker”? He sued Mr Spielberg, and others who had crossed him: journalists, an aid worker, a colonel, even his father.

Then there was his discovery of an al-Qaeda plot to kill Bill Clinton at a summit in Malaysia (the president wisely stayed away) and two other planned assassinations in Afghanistan. He claimed, too, to have fought with the Northern Alliance, America's anti-Taliban allies in Operation Enduring Freedom. He had also secured a video of al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists undergoing training, which he sold to CBS and several other broadcasters.

Oh, what a lovely war

Journalists were not alone in being conned by Mr Idema, especially after he formed Task Force Sabre 7, a freelance group of American and Afghan vigilantes-cum-fortune-hunters who operated with impunity for a while after the Americans had ousted the Taliban in 2001. Afghanistan at this time was an adventure playground for thuggish American ex-servicemen employed or masquerading as security guards. They hung around the Mustafa hotel, wearing wraparound sunglasses and camouflage fatigues, drove about in big Toyotas and carried a small arsenal of weapons. They were not so much the dogs of war as the coyotes, dingoes and hyenas. Mr Idema was one of them.

Some of these people operated with the complicity of the American authorities, who had contracted out so many of the tasks once performed by soldiers. No wonder that on three occasions in 2004 Mr Idema found it easy to con the NATO force into providing him with support for raids on compounds. He even conned the Americans into taking into custody a captured Afghan alleged to be a Taliban loyalist. He was nothing of the kind.

Far more serious was the private prison run by Mr Idema and his friends. When it was discovered, complete with torture chamber and eight captives, bound and hooded, some hanging by their feet, the Afghans said Mr Idema was trying to extract information that would lead to bounties. He said it had all been okayed by the Pentagon, even by Donald Rumsfeld. But he was tried nonetheless and given ten years. After three, spent in extraordinarily comfortable conditions in the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi jail, he was inexplicably pardoned by President Hamid Karzai.

By this time, though, Mr Idema was beginning to look less plausible, his luck less inexhaustible. His loyal wife, Viktoria Runningwolf, had been abandoned, along with the Ultimate Pet Resort that he had helped her set up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And his past, including 36 arrests (though no convictions) in the 1980s and 1990s, had come to light. He was still wanted in North Carolina for impersonating a policeman and, despite claims to “superblood”, he was to contract AIDS. His life ended in a haze of vodka and cocaine, the self-belief perhaps slightly dented, the self-delusion as strong as ever.

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