A VISIT WITH
Ready to Rumble?
Ed Herman, the long-shot Republican candidate running against Democratic incumbent Dennis Kucinich in the 10th District congressional race, poses an intriguing question on the campaign trail.
"What do Osama bin Laden and Dennis Kucinich have in common?" Herman asks. He waits a beat while all kinds of wacky things run through your mind: Both men laid waste to an American city? They eat tofurkey?
"They both want me to lose the election in November," Herman continues. "I say that with as much humility as I can muster because I do believe if the voters send me to Congress, they will be sending someone who has a deeper, more intimate understanding of America's enemies than any other member of the House."
"To compare the congressman to an international terrorist who has killed over 3,000 people is offensive," says Kucinich spokesman Doug Gordon. "With that singular, offensive smear tactic Mr. Herman has proven himself unfit for office."
With less than a month to go until Election Day, it's war, baby.
Herman, a fresh-faced, 30-year-old Lakewood real estate agent, hopes to parlay his experience as a U.S. Army interrogator sent to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 into a stunning November victory.
Fluent in Arabic, Sergeant Herman grilled al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners, first at a detention center in Kandahar and later in Bagram, north of Kabul, for nine months from December 2001 to August 2002.
"In the beginning, at Kandahar, the phone would ring and it'd be [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld calling to find out what was going on," Herman remembers.
There was also a possible sighting of Vice President Dick Cheney.
"I saw a Marine colonel walking with a middle-aged, pretty much bald, white-haired guy, about 5-9, wearing a blue ski jacket, suit pants and dress shoes," Herman says. "In the military there is a universally observed etiquette that when you're walking with a superior, the junior officer is to the superior officer's left. The Marine colonel was to the left of this civilian. He looked just like Cheney from behind."
As a member of Task Force 202, the first Army intelligence unit deployed in the Bush war on terrorism, Herman is featured in a new book, The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda (Little, Brown and Co.; $25.95), written by Chris Mackey, the man who recruited Herman when they both were students at Fordham University in New York City.
Except Mackey is not his real name. And Herman appears in the book under the nom de guerre of Geoff Fitzgerald. His hometown of Cleveland also receives a new identity. It becomes Buffalo.
"Chris was able to take a lot of license because he didn't use real names. He makes us into characters who have certain roles. Like I'm sort of, like, Bones on Star Trek. I'm always kind of pissed off," Herman says.
The subterfuge is also part of what Herman calls a "screen" that Army censors required Mackey and his co-author, Los Angeles Times national security correspondent Greg Miller (one of the few real names in the book), to use to protect the players who are still active in the intelligence game.
"This book will be picked up by foreign intelligence services," Herman says. "They'll use it to figure out who's who. A lot of times what happens is you might get a posting to the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia where you'll be, like, a computer expert. If the other government has this book, then they can identify you as an intelligence operative."
All of which makes sense, except that Mackey and Miller include photographs of the very characters whose names they have changed.
"It was vetted through the Pentagon and they said, you know, this isn't something you really have to worry about," Herman says. "Not that you always want to take the Pentagon's advice. If we had to do it over, I'd probably prefer the pictures weren't in there."
Herman, the son of a retired Cleveland police captain, maintains he really is an agent for Realty One now, and not on some deep-cover mission for Army intelligence.
"Residential real estate is sort of a similar business to interrogation," he says. "It's all about dialogue and trust, getting folks to be your friend. Obviously, it's quite a bit more straightforward than interrogation. There's no betrayal or subterfuge involved."
Herman's decision to risk humiliating defeat at the hands of Kucinich is not some covert Republican rope-a-dope strategy.
"My run against Kucinich started in anger," Herman says. "I heard what he was saying about America and what we're doing overseas, and most importantly what it's going to take to keep us safe. His whole approach seems to be if we just stay at home and think about peace long enough, peace will happen. I've heard directly from al-Qaida members about what they plan to do. And what they plan to do is take advantage of our open society and our liberalness in order to hurt us. 9/11 was very real. I don't want it to ever happen again. I believe if we listen to Kucinich, it will happen again."
It would certainly raise Herman's profile if he could piggyback on the publicity that The Interrogators has generated. Time magazine praised it, noting it "provides rare insight into a process that, in the wake of Abu Ghraib [prison scandal], we urgently need to understand."
The book also has been touted on shows as diverse as Morning Edition on National Public Radio and The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News. Herman isn't using it on the campaign trail, though. He thinks the pseudonyms are too confusing.
He does, however, expect the book to trigger a response from Kucinich. "If the fire gets hot enough, he is going to wheel and shoot," Herman says. "The response we anticipate is, you know, This guy is an interrogator. Is that who you want representing you?'"
Herman thinks about that for a moment, then adds, "I'm sort of like the anti-Kucinich. Kucinich makes all these overtures of peace to, like, the dictator of North Korea, and I've got the al-Qaida suspect chained to a table."
The Internet is abuzz with speculation that the Bush campaign will stun voters with an October surprise, the odds-on favorite being the capture of bin Laden. Herman pooh-poohs that possibility.
"Bin Laden is, like, tied to a dialysis machine," he says. "He's a hurting unit, although it's not completely positive that he's still alive. If he is still alive it's because he's being protected by very powerful people. There's no way he doesn't have the protection of a state, or a state-sponsored organization. It's ludicrous to think that he could wander in the wilderness by himself and we couldn't find him. I would contend that whoever is protecting Osama bin Laden would not want to do George Bush any favors. I can't speculate about the identity of those people, but they're probably not Republicans."
Sunday Magazine staff writer Christopher Evans wishes political candidates at all levels would focus their attention on resolving the NHL lockout. He may be reached at 216-999-6139 or through magmail@plaind.com.