Hidden Damages

After his daughter died in a terrorist attack, Stephen Flatow won a historic judgment against her killers. But to collect the funds, he first had to battle his own government.

By M.R. O’Connor

On the morning of April 9, 1995, three friends, American students studying in Israel, boarded a bus at the central station in Jerusalem. It was a few days before Passover, and they were headed to Gush Katif, a popular beach resort in Gaza, to swim and tan. The bus traveled southwest to Ashkelon, a small city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, just eight miles north of the Gaza Strip. There they transferred to the number 36, a bright red bus, with 60 or so passengers. Many of them were young Israeli soldiers headed to beach resorts or to their jobs on military bases.

Alisa Flatow, one of the young Americans, had long, wavy brown hair and wore a denim skirt, a white shirt, and sneakers. She sat behind the bus driver, next to the window, beside her friend Kesari Ruza. The third girl, Chavi Levine, sat behind them. The red bus left Ashkelon and headed south on Highway 4 toward the Gaza Strip. Shortly after the bus crossed the unmarked border, two Israeli military armored vehicles pulled alongside to escort it through the Palestinian territory. The girls dozed as the bus passed plowed fields and greenhouses. They neared an Israeli settlement called Kfar Darom. Located between two military posts, it had a fence around it, like a compound.

Years later, Kesari would recall the moments that followed as a stream of blurry footage with a few sharp scenes. A loud and dull explosion. The window beside her broken. Was it rocks? Alisa falling toward her, eyes open, hands strangely curled. The bus kept rolling, and Chavi stood up in her seat and asked what was going on. Kesari told her to get down, and they both dropped to the floor.

When the bus came to a stop a few seconds later, they saw passengers bleeding, wounded, and groaning. Someone told them to get off. Alisa lay near the door. She wasn’t moving, but she didn’t look hurt: Her face was clean; there was no blood. Outside, the military escorts told them to move away, and then Kesari saw Alisa on the ground and EMTs arriving, cutting away her clothing, looking for injuries while someone held an IV bag over her body. Helicopters landed in a field nearby, and Alisa was put on a stretcher and carried to one of the choppers. Where is she going? they asked. No one could say for sure. Kesari’s hair was matted with blood, and when they found their luggage among the wreckage, the bags were dotted with pieces of flesh. Eventually, they located an ambulance headed to a hospital, and they rode next to an injured Israeli soldier.

At the hospital, Kesari and Chavi described Alisa to a social worker. Yes, there was a young woman who might match that description—she was coming out of surgery, they were told. The social worker took them to a ward. They saw a young woman on a bed. Chavi and Kesari couldn’t tell if it was Alisa. The young woman’s hair had been shaved off, and her face was badly swollen. They asked to see her clothes and recognized the skirt and sneakers. Yes, this is Alisa, they told the doctors.

On the morning of the bombing, Stephen Flatow was headed to temple near his home in West Orange, New Jersey. He was driving his eldest daughter’s car while she was studying abroad. Before he got to the end of his driveway, he heard a news report on the radio. A suicide bomber had blown up a bus in the Gaza Strip. Flatow knew instantly that his daughter was involved. He couldn’t explain how he was so sure that she had been on that bus. He felt it to be true.

Flatow, a 46-year-old lawyer who worked for a small insurance company, continued driving to Congregation Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob and David. He didn’t want to alarm his wife, Rosalyn, and their four other children.

In the middle of the service, a phone rang. Flatow knew it was for him. On the line was Rosalyn, who had heard from the father of one of Alisa’s friends in Israel that Alisa had been on a bus that had been attacked. Flatow shared the little he knew with his friends at synagogue and ran out. Back home he started making calls, first to the Israeli consulate and then to the State Department in Washington. His friends began reaching out to their own contacts in Israel and soon confirmed that Alisa was at a hospital called Soroka Medical Center in the town of B’er Sheva, some 50 miles east of Gaza. Alisa’s boyfriend, Alan Mitrani, a fellow student at Brandeis, spoke to a nurse at the hospital ward, who explained that Alisa hadn’t lost a lot of blood and her pulse was fine, but she was going into surgery.

Upstairs, Alisa’s brother and sisters were waking to the chaos. Gail, Alisa’s younger sister by two years, awoke to the sound of her mother and sister whispering. “What haven’t I heard yet?” she asked. Gail had returned from Israel a couple of weeks earlier. When she found out what happened, she felt like her emotions were being sucked down a drain, leaving her empty and exhausted.

The Flatows had raised their five children in the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community of West Orange. Stephen and Rosalyn met before he started law school in Brooklyn. He was a big guy and gregarious; she was a stately brunette, already working as a health care actuary. They married and, after he graduated, moved to New Jersey, where he began a career in real estate law. The couple had come to religious observance later in life, after Alisa was born in 1974. “We were normal American Jews—we celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,” said Flatow. But as a four-year-old, Alisa begged her parents to send her to a Jewish school, and soon they were observing the Sabbath and keeping kosher. Under her influence, the Flatows became a passionately observant family, with Alisa as the moral center. “We made a 180-degree change,” said Flatow.

Alisa had deep dimples and a warm smile. She visited Israel at age 11 and fell in love. When she started at Brandeis, she was already planning her sixth visit for her junior year. On the morning of her trip to Gush Katif, Alisa called home, where it was still Saturday night and her parents were going to bed. The sun was rising in Jerusalem, and she was about to leave for the bus station. Instead of panicking about her traveling to Gaza—the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—Flatow asked her about the resort they’d chosen. She told him that the hotel she was staying at had separate times for men and women to swim, in accordance with a strict Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law.

By this time, Alisa knew the ropes of traveling in Israel: how you had to bring your own toilet paper and plenty of cash because it wasn’t easy to use a credit card. And she had an agreement with her dad for venturing outside Jerusalem. Always go by public transportation, with a friend, to a well-known destination.

Now the Flatows waited for information on Alisa’s condition. A nurse called and translated a physician’s words into broken English. Post-surgery, Alisa was breathing and had a steady heartbeat, but she was unconscious. Another doctor called, one who spoke better English. Alisa’s condition was critical. A CAT scan showed hemorrhaging in her brain from a laceration made by a sliver of shrapnel that had pierced her skull. It had caused her brain to swell, and the doctors had removed part of her skull to allow the tissue to expand. Following the surgery, Alisa was unconscious, and the doctors didn’t know if they could stop the bleeding. “We suggest you come right away,” the doctor said.

The next day, Flatow flew to Tel Aviv. As his plane landed, he was ushered to the front to be the first passenger to disembark. American embassy workers and Israeli Foreign Ministry personnel waited on the tarmac. Two hours later, Flatow was standing next to his daughter’s hospital bed.

Only decades later would it become apparent that Flatow’s trip to Israel was the first part of a journey to hold accountable those who attacked Alisa’s bus. In her name, Flatow would walk the corridors of power in Washington, winning allies among senators and congressmen, and creating an unexpected adversary in President Bill Clinton. His determination to wring some meaning from his daughter’s ordeal would force American lawmakers to develop new tools for pursuing state sponsors of terror. His extraordinary quest, aided by two brilliant Washington lawyers, has provided families whose loved ones died at the hands of ISIS in Paris and in Syria a chance at recourse. And because of Flatow’s unyielding obsession with justice, the governments of Sudan, Iraq, Jordan, and Libya have been successfully sued in American courts, with judges awarding almost $20 billion in damages, each verdict a testament to a father’s devotion to his child. But before all that, he was just a father rushing to his daughter’s side.

Somewhere in Flatow’s consciousness lingered scenes from movies in which a father holds his child’s hand, whispering in her ear. At Alisa’s bedside, he took her hand and whispered, “Daddy’s here.” She didn’t say anything. “If you can hear me, squeeze my hand,” he said. When he let go, her arm fell limp.

In a side room, he huddled with Alisa’s doctors. Her brain had continued bleeding, and the damage was irreparable. She could no longer breathe on her own. There was no hope that she might eventually recover.

The room was quiet except for a fan pushing around hot air. Someone handed Flatow a cup of orange soda. He noticed that the doctors exchange looks. “I have a question for you,” Haim Reuvini, one of the physicians, said.

“You want her organs, don’t you?” said Flatow. A few weeks earlier, he had read in a newspaper that Israel was experiencing a severe shortage of organ donors because Jewish law requires bodies to be buried intact.

“We can save as many as six lives,” explained Reuvini. A line from the Talmud echoed in his mind:  “Whoever saves one soul from Israel, it is as if he or she saved a universe.” He also knew that Alisa’s attachment to the Israeli people was immense; he couldn’t say no.

He called Rosalyn to discuss the decision. Their consent caught the doctors by surprise; they had no documents prepared. One doctor grabbed Alisa’s chart and wrote out a consent form on a blank page. Then Flatow went back to Alisa’s room and sat for several hours, holding her hand, talking to her, and crying. That afternoon, Alisa was taken off life support. Soon after, the doctors removed her heart, pancreas, liver, lungs, and kidneys.

That evening, Flatow left B’er Sheva for Tel Aviv to meet with American officials about the logistics of bringing Alisa’s body home. Back at his hotel, he received a phone call from President Clinton. The president expressed his condolences and told him about a conversation he’d had with his wife, Hillary, at breakfast. They had wondered whether they would have the same strength if their own daughter had been injured in an attack. Before hanging up, the president said he would help find those responsible for the bombing.

The next morning, the Jerusalem Post reported that just hours after the attack, a group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had claimed that a 22-year-old member named Khaled al-Khatib had driven a truck into a bus on the highway in the Gaza Strip. Only half the bomber’s ordnance had detonated, but the shrapnel, metal, nails, and ball bearings embedded in the explosives killed eight passengers, including Alisa.

That evening, Flatow accompanied Alisa’s body to Ben Gurion Airport. He was ushered to the VIP lounge, crowded with reporters; the news of Alisa’s organ donation had been reported in the Israeli papers as well as The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press. “I don’t understand what all the fuss is about,” he said to an Israeli Army chaplain next to him. “You have no idea what you’ve done for us,” a reporter interjected. “You did something we don’t do for ourselves. You haven’t blamed us for what happened to your daughter. Instead, you gave us the gift of life.”

Flatow cried as he recited the Jewish prayer for the dead over her casket. “The Merciful One will protect her soul forever and will merge her soul with eternal life,” he said in Hebrew and boarded the plane.  

The next morning, Flatow landed at Kennedy Airport, where officers from the New York City, West Orange, and Port Authority police waited, along with personnel from the State Department. A motorcade escorted him to his house, now under siege by the media. His rabbi, Alvin Marcus, put his hand up in front of the gathered reporters and told them, “Alisa died al kiddush Hashem, sanctifying the name of God. That’s all you need to know.” Two hours later, the Flatows drove to their temple for the funeral. School buses and chartered coaches from as far as Boston were parked along the road. A bomb squad had searched the synagogue before anyone was allowed to enter. Two thousand people were present. Eight pallbearers carried the pine coffin draped in the Israeli flag. By now, Flatow had been awake for several days, and Rosalyn, who had kept everyone updated throughout her husband’s journey to Israel, could barely speak.

After the funeral, the Jewish tradition of shiva—seven days of mourning for the dead—began at the Flatows’ house. It was the week of Easter and Passover, and in his weekly radio address, President Clinton extended the condolences of all Americans to the Flatows. “The dark forces of terror test the faith of thousands of Jews and Arabs struggling to do the right thing,” said the president. “To these righteous people, I say: Carry on. America is with you.”

The day after the Flatows’ shiva ended, a 26-year-old American by the name of Timothy McVeigh detonated a bomb in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The bombing brought home the threat of terror, spurring lawmakers to introduce sweeping counterterrorism legislation to stem the violence. Six weeks later, the Senate passed a bill that increased the compensation and assistance available to American victims of terrorism, allowed the government to deport immigrants suspected of such acts, and banned fundraising for terrorist organization in the U.S. It included $1 billion to fight domestic terrorism.

A year later, the bill passed in the House of Representatives, and on April 24, 1996, the South Lawn of the White House was crowded with families whose loved ones had died at the hands of terrorists. Pan Am Flight 103, 259 dead. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, six dead and over 1,000 injured.

“Your endurance and your courage is a lesson to us all,” President Clinton said at the signing. “Your vigilance has sharpened our vigilance.”

Flatow had declined his invitation to attend the ceremony. He was still trying to cobble his life back together. It had been 380 days since Alisa was killed. As a family, the Flatows had taken a defiant position to their devastating loss: Life went on. Francine, who was 15, recalled asking her mother whether she would have to go to school after Passover ended. “Of course you do,” said Rosalyn. “Daddy’s going to work, you’re going to school.” Gail returned to Israel within a couple of weeks, and Francine followed that summer.

Still, the specter of grief affected Alisa’s parents in dramatic ways. Rosalyn internalized the pain of losing her eldest child. She could barely hear Alisa’s name, let alone speak it aloud. For a long time, Stephen lost the ability to dream at night. “You just black out,” he said, “that’s how emotionally exhausted you are.” On Friday nights, when he would say the evening prayer, he couldn’t make it through without crying. “My father is an open book,” said Francine. “If he felt like crying, he cried. If he felt like laughing, he laughed. And there were times when it happened at the same time. It let us know as kids that we’re all hurting, there’s no need to hide it or deny it.”

Flatow’s pain also seemed to animate him, transforming him into a sensitive, passionate, and driven person. Matrani, Alisa’s boyfriend, later described this change as though Alisa’s character had transferred to her father. He began speaking at synagogues and schools about his daughter’s life, several times a month. Later he understood that this impulse was a kind of therapy for the trauma of losing his child. “I had to speak and make people cry for Alisa,” he explained. “There’s a lesson to be learned: You don’t let the bastards get you down.”

After a speech at a synagogue in Queens, a rabbi approached Flatow and asked why he wasn’t using the new counterterrorism legislation to get justice for Alisa’s death.

The rabbi offered to put Flatow in touch with a lawyer in Washington, D.C., named Steven Perles who might be able to help.

Tall and thin, with spectacles, a strong jawline, and a receding hairline, Perles had an unpretentious appearance that belied tremendous intellectual energy and ambition. The son of Boston academics, Perles had worked for years as the chief legislative assistant and staff attorney for Alaskan senator Ted Stevens. In the early 1980s, he founded his own firm in D.C., and some of his first cases included complex suits involving foreign governments such as Japan and Nigeria. One of his first highly publicized cases was Hugo Princz v. Federal Republic of Germany.

Hugo Princz was a 72-year-old American who had been held in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. Princz had sought reparations for decades, but the German government claimed that he was ineligible because he was an American citizen.

In taking on Princz’s case, Perles challenged centuries of international legal standards that gave sovereign states exemption from the jurisdiction of foreign courts. In the United States, Congress had upheld this legal immunity as recently as 1976, when it passed the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). It gave judges the power to review cases and determine whether foreign countries could be sued under certain exceptions, which were invoked regularly in commercial cases. But by 1995, no judge had ever decided in favor of an individual plaintiff.

Perles believed Princz’s case was an opportunity to create a new legal precedent. Here was an example of an atrocious injustice against an American citizen, yet the culprits were protected by the laws of Princz’s own country.

Perles ultimately lost the case, but he received a lot of media attention, particularly in New Jersey, where he lived in Highland Park, not far from West Orange. Flatow had followed the case in the newspapers.

When Perles received Flatow’s phone call, he’d already heard about Alisa. “I want something to come from my daughter’s death,” Flatow told him.

Flatow’s case came at the right time. The new counterterrorism legislation passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing included a little-publicized amendment that lifted immunity for governments guilty of injury or “death that was caused by an act of torture, extra judicial killing, aircraft sabotage, hostage taking, or the provision of material support or resources for such an act.” The amendment created an unprecedented opportunity for families of victims to go after state sponsors of terrorism.

Flatow found an ally in Perles, who possessed an unshakable moral compass and a formidable work ethic. “You detonate a bomb on a bus that has a U.S. passport holder on it, I don’t care whether they are Arab-American, Jewish-American, Irish-American, Baptist-American,” he said. “I am going to chase you to the end of the earth. I mean it. I chase these people to the end of the earth.”

Perles believed he could help Flatow get justice by targeting those who had given the PIJ the money to carry out the attack. They would sue the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict had created unlikely bedfellows in the Middle East. The alliance between Iran and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was surprising because, while the PIJ’s leaders were Sunni Muslims, the government of Iran was Shia. The organization had been founded in the 1970s by three Palestinian students inspired by the Islamic revolutions in Iran and had since split into factions. The PIJ didn’t build schools or mosques or provide social services to civilians; their purpose was to eliminate the State of Israel.

The PIJ had proven itself to be a deadly operation. In 1987, they assassinated an Israeli military-police captain. In January 1995, they blew up a military bus and killed 19 soldiers. Israeli authorities believed that the attack had provided the model for the one that killed Alisa. The PIJ’s leader, Fathi Shaqaqi, had publicly praised Iran, appearing in photographs with Iranian ministries and saying in 1988 that he prayed to “Allah to protect Imam Khomeini so that he will enter Palestine and we shall hand over the keys of Nazareth and Jerusalem to him.” In 1994, Shaqaqi told a journalist that the PIJ had received $3 million from Iran. Intelligence agencies believed Iran provided all of the PIJ’s funding.

For Flatow, the formidable challenges of bringing a lawsuit against an isolated government such as Iran were overshadowed by what might be accomplished in the process. Here was an opportunity to bring the world’s biggest sponsor of international terrorism into a courtroom. “We expected this to be a ten-year slog, which we were actually welcoming,” said Flatow. “Through litigation we could demonstrate to the world what kind of nation Iran was and how it sponsored terrorism.”

There were several immediate obstacles. One was the fact that Perles himself was Jewish. I can’t have this case be the Jews versus the Palestinians in our federal court system, he recalled thinking.

He needed another lawyer, a scholar of personal-injury law who was charismatic in trial. And in D.C., the personal-injury bar was split between two groups, Jews and the Irish. Who is the least Jewish trial lawyer I know? he wondered.

Then he remembered Thomas Fortune Fay, whose office was in the same building as Perles’s. They’d even had lunch a few times. Husky and broad shouldered like a pit bull, with slicked hair carefully parted, Fay struck Perles as a fighter. He arranged a meeting and told Fay point-blank, “I need to hire a brawling Irish litigator.”

“That’s me!” said Fay.  

Before they could proceed, they had to resolve some questions posed by the recently passed antiterrorism legislation: In which courts could such lawsuits be filed? What punitive damages could plaintiffs receive? The legislation didn’t specify. Fay set to work formulating a new amendment to the FSIA, while Flatow and Perles began walking the halls of Congress to lobby for support.

Perles had many relationships in Congress from his time as a staffer for Senator Stevens. But during meetings on the Hill, he often stepped aside so Flatow could lead. “It’s always been my observation that an articulate client is better than an articulate lawyer—and he is very articulate,” said Perles. Flatow would tell Alisa’s story and explain how Iran had sponsored the attack. “Iran was acting through proxies,” said Flatow. “Why should they get a pass on it?”

In the Senate, they searched for someone who would move the bill through the legislative process. They knocked on doors and cornered whomever would listen. “It was a lot of work: hot, muggy, stinky, sweaty,” said Flatow. “We would run from one side of the Capitol building to the other, from the Senate building to the House building, trying to button people.” They found their first ally in senator Frank Lautenberg, who represented New Jersey. Lautenberg was in Israel on the day Alisa was killed, and he had been personally moved by the event. They gained the support of senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman. On the House side, they convinced representative Jim Saxton of New Jersey to sponsor the legislation.

Their months of lobbying paid off on September 30, 1996, when Congress enacted the Civil Liability for Acts of State Sponsored Terrorism amendment. Known as the Flatow Amendment, it created a legal cause of action—a set of facts that justify the right to sue—and allowed private citizens to recover punitive damages from foreign countries.

The amendment was everything that Flatow and his legal team needed to move forward with their lawsuit. But it also set the stage for a conflict within Washington’s corridors of power. By giving the judiciary control of these terrorism cases, Congress shifted foreign-policy influence away from the presidency and into the hands of citizens and judges. In hindsight, it’s not surprising that such a move would arouse the ire of the White House and the State Department. “That’s a no-no, apparently,” chuckled Flatow. None of them could foresee the fight ahead.

On February 26, 1997, Perles and Fay filed Flatow’s complaint against the Islamic Republic of Iran. A few hours later, Flatow held a press conference on Capitol Hill. He stood next to a large photograph of Alisa, with congressman Jim Saxton and senator Frank Lautenberg looking on.

“Iranian officials need to be held accountable for the agents they pay to carry out terrorist activities,” said Lautenberg. “I wish the Flatow family well in their quest for justice that will benefit us all.”

The lawsuit had a litany of defendants, including the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security, Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei, and President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. “I’m not a sovereign nation,” said Flatow, explaining why he was suing Iran. “I cannot wage war.”

Perles and Fay had presented an unusual legal argument for compensatory damages called solatium, from the medieval Latin word for solace. Courts began awarding compensation for wrongful death in the middle of the 19th century, calculating the amount based on how much income an individual represented. But eventually, they recognized that the death of spouses, parents, and children was more than an economic loss; it extracted an emotional cost from families. During the Vietnam War, the American government had adopted the concept of solatium when it gave cash payments to Vietnamese families whose loved ones were accidentally killed, a practice carried forward to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now Perles and Fay argued that the tragedy of Alisa’s death had been amplified by the malice behind the attack, which transcended even premeditated murder. The emotional anguish merited that the court factor in solatium as well as economic losses. On this matter, the lawsuit included an eloquent passage on the nature of grief that echoed Flatow’s experience in the nearly two years since he had lost his daughter.

“Individuals can react very differently even under similar circumstances; while some sink into clinical depression and bitterness, others attempt to salvage something constructive from their personal tragedy. Such constructive behavior should not be considered as mitigating solatium, but rather as an equally compensable reaction, one in which courage to face their own mental anguish prevails in order to survive, and in some circumstances, to benefit another.” 

They asked for $150 million in damages.

When an American citizen is killed in a terrorist attack abroad, the customary practice is for an FBI team to investigate. But following the bombing that killed Alisa, Palestinian president Yasir Arafat refused to let the FBI into Gaza. In order to present their case for damages, Perles needed witnesses, first responders, and doctors who could testify about the bombing and Alisa’s suffering. In September 1997, Perles flew to Jerusalem, accompanied by his 11-year-old son, to ask the Israeli attorney general for help.

Perles found the city on edge, with heavily armed security guards and military personnel dressed in body armor patrolling the streets. A week before he arrived, three Hamas suicide bombers had blown themselves up on Ben Yehuda Street, a ten-minute walk from his hotel. As he made his way to the Justice Ministry, in the Arabic section of Jerusalem, Perles saw how the threat of terror had become a part of daily life.

When he arrived at the meeting, Perles asked for permission to send Fay to investigate. “I know Arafat turned these people away, but I don’t care,” he said. “I’m not subject to diplomatic niceties.” The official agreed and promised to provide a military escort.

Flatow had coordinated a vacation in Jerusalem to coincide with Perles’s trip, and one afternoon they met in the lobby of the Sheraton in the center of the city. An older man sat nearby with a bag of groceries. He finished his drink and walked out. That’s when Flatow saw that the man had left behind the bag. He threw Perles’s son to the floor and—though no small man—pancaked him to protect him from the bomb he was sure was about to explode. It was a false alarm.

With the support of the Israeli government, Fay began planning a trip to gather witness testimony. He enlisted Victor Holmes, a friend and videographer, to film the depositions. The two shared a blustery sense of humor. Just before their departure, Holmes turned up at Perles’s office and showed him a T-shirt he had bought for the trip: it was Day-Glo orange and said Don’t shoot, I’m a Lutheran in Arabic.

“Do you know what one Arab sniper said to another?” said Perles.

“What?” said Holmes.

“What’s a Lutheran?”

Holmes threw the shirt in the trash.

When they arrived in Jerusalem, Fay sought out government officials’ help in identifying witnesses, and a source gave him a list of the people on the scene of the Kfar Darom bombing. Among the first people Fay contacted was Orit Taft, a military radar technician who was riding the bus back to her post. She had refused to be treated for her injuries until every other person had been evacuated. The Israeli government later awarded her a medal.

After she finished her deposition, Taft offered to go with Fay and Holmes to Kfar Darom to view the scene of the bombing and help them locate other witnesses. They arrived in Gaza a day after Kfar Darom had been strafed by Palestinian snipers. First they sought out David Shaenbaum, an American man living in the village, listed as a witness at the scene of the bombing, “I know your voice,” Shaenbaum said to Taft after meeting her. “You’re the military officer that told me if I didn’t put down my camcorder, you’d shoot me yourself.”

Fay and Holmes went on alert: Camcorder? Shaenbaum, it turned out, had been tinkering with his new video camera when he heard the bomb blast. He didn’t know if it recorded anything, but he offered to find the tape. A few minutes later he returned with the cassette, and Fay and Holmes watched as the recording started and the image of smoke and flames appeared. Then they saw sky and dirt; Shaenbaum had dropped the camera on the ground.

But the vantage point changed as someone picked up the recorder and continued shooting. Now Shaenbaum was in the frame holding a plasma bottle next to Taft, and on the ground below them was Alisa. The camera panned to show Israeli Defense Force vehicles speeding across a field and helicopters touching down. Several people picked up a stretcher with Alisa on it and delivered it to one of the choppers. Altogether there was 20 minutes of footage that they could present in court to show the horror of the bombing.

“No one even knew that video existed,” said Fay. “It was invaluable to us.”

Next, Fay and Holmes deposed the doctors who had worked to save Alisa’s life and the individuals who had received her organs. Perhaps most crucially, they also found Reuven Paz, who had served with Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service at the time of the bombing. In the aftermath of the attack, Paz had intercepted a radio message from Iran congratulating the PIJ on the mission.

In 1984, the State Department labeled Iran a state supporter of terrorism. But if Perles and Fay were going to bring Iran to court and win, they needed to establish that there was a financial link between the Iranian government and the PIJ. To do this, they called on an economist named Patrick Clawson, who had worked at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Fluent in French, Hebrew, and Farsi, Clawson had extensive knowledge of Iranian and Middle Eastern politics and economics. For years he had studied Tehran’s stock exchange and understood the web of relationships between the Iranian government and various companies. On paper these corporations were private entities, but in truth most were controlled by government ministries and officials. To Clawson, the stock exchange became a tool for understanding the country’s cloaked financial activities and ambitions.

Clawson had also closely followed Iran’s support for Islamic extremist organizations, scouring records and parliamentary transcripts to track where money was being funneled. In 1995, Fathi Shaqaqi, the leader of the PIJ, had been assassinated in Malta, and the organization’s new head, Ramadan Abdullah al-Shallah, was not well known and needed money to build a reputation for himself. Clawson saw evidence that Iran had increased funding to the PIJ to help him do so, through attacks including a March 1996 bombing of a shopping mall in Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, a German trial gave Clawson another piece of the puzzle. Several Iranian and Lebanese nationals stood accused of assassinating three Iranian-Kurdish dissidents and their translator at the Mykonos Greek restaurant in Berlin in 1992. The Mykonos case had a central witness, a former top Iranian intelligence official who testified that all decisions about terrorist activities were made by a special committee that included the president of the country and Ayatollah Khamenei himself.

Clawson had studied Iran’s 1992–93 foreign-exchange budget, which included a line item for support of the Palestinian revolution. Based on this, Clawson’s conservative estimate was that Iran was spending around $75 million a year to fund the PIJ and other terrorist organizations. Further, he believed Iranian government leaders to be rational calculators who would change tactics if a particular approach proved too costly. After the capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, during the Islamic Revolution, for instance, the American government had seized billions of dollars of Iranian assets and imposed extreme sanctions on the country. The funds had provided powerful leverage for American officials to gain the release of the embassy hostages; when the 52 Americans were released, Iran got billions in return.

Perles wanted to know: What sum would get Iran’s attention now? Clawson believed a judgment of anywhere from $150 million to $300 million in damages would help Flatow attain his goal of getting the Iranians out of the business of attacking Americans.

That summer, five months after filing the complaint, Flatow attended a fundraiser at the Plaza Hotel in New York, knowing that President Clinton would be present. He handed Clinton a letter urging him to hold “Mr. Arafat’s feet to the fire of accountability” in connection with the release of a prisoner who was a member of PIJ. He reminded the president of their previous conversation: “Just because my daughter is not here with us on earth does not mean that I stop doing things for her.”

Clinton was in a difficult position. The Middle East and its multitude of conflicts had been a focus since the early days of his administration. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, recalled that she and the president were “intrigued by the possibility of better relations with Iran, whose strategic location, cultural influence, and size made it a pivotal state in one of the world’s most combustible regions.” In her memoir Madam Secretary, she wrote that before she was nominated, Clinton spoke to her of his desire to create breakthroughs in relations with Iran, the Middle East, and the Islamic world.

In August 1997, a new president had been elected in Iran. Mohammad Khatami was a reformist, brought to office by an unexpected 70 percent of Iranian voters. He told CNN at the beginning of his term that he wanted to create a crack in the “wall of mistrust” between Iran and the American people.

Now Albright and Clinton saw an opening. In October 1997, soon after Fay and Holmes returned from their trip to Israel, Clinton sent a message through the Swiss embassy in Tehran inviting Iran to meet with U.S. officials, without preconditions. It never happened, but he continued his overtures; in January 1998, at the end of Ramadan, he videotaped a message addressed to Iranians that said he regretted “the estrangement of our two nations.”

The team had a skeptical view of a possible rapprochement with Iran, given its conservative history. “Our view was there were two kinds of leaders,” said Perles, “extremists and even more extremists.”

Flatow, meanwhile, wrestled with his grief. That summer the first animal clone was born in Scotland. After Flatow read about the sheep they called Dolly, he began composing a short story in his head: He took a lock of his daughter’s hair and cloned another Alisa.

On March 2, 1998, the first hearing for Flatow’s lawsuit began at the imposing U.S. District Court building on Constitution Avenue, half a mile northwest of the Capitol. The suit would be presided over by federal district judge Royce Lamberth, a native Texan who had been appointed by President Ronald Reagan and was known for tough and sometimes unpredictable legal decisions.

Perles and Fay arrived looking like a study in contrasts, the skinny Perles and the hefty Fay, wondering whether the lawyers representing Iran would even appear. As required by law, Perles had mailed a copy of the complaint, translated into Farsi, to the foreign minister in Tehran. Four months later it was returned to Perles: The envelope had clearly been opened, and the words DO NOT USA were written across the back. When Flatow, accompanied by Rosalyn, daughters Gail, Ilana, and Francine, and son Etan, entered the courtroom, it became clear that they would not be meeting face-to-face with their opponents. Judge Lamberth described Iran’s glaring absence and return of documents as “contumacious conduct,” meaning stubbornly disobedient to authority.

At 10:05 a.m., Fay delivered his opening statement, outlining the historic nature of the lawsuit. “The Congress, in the amendments to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which allows us to proceed today, has seen fit to give each individual American citizen, each individual the right to proceed against that foreign government,” he said. “As Your Honor knows, this is truly an epochal case in that we have proceeded, not under the cover of government, but as an individual.”

Altogether, Perles and Fay had 18 witnesses, beginning with the recorded deposition of Orit Taft. Before the videotape started, Fay attempted to lighten the mood. “With Your Honor’s permission, I’ll simply stand, and hopefully, this will have a beneficial weight-loss result.”

“We could all use that, couldn’t we?” said Judge Lamberth. “Except Mr. Perles, of course.”

When it came time to show the videotape of the bombing site, Perles suggested that Flatow might want to leave. “I’d rather stay, Your Honor,” replied Flatow. For the first time, he watched the footage of Alisa being carried off the bus and laid onto the ground, her body limp. Fay then showed David Shaenbaum’s videotaped testimony. Kesari Ruza, who was now a law student at the University of Pennsylvania, appeared in person to describe her experience during the bombing. After the lunch recess, it was Flatow’s turn to take the stand.

“You were the father of Alisa Flatow?” began Fay.

“I’m still the father,” said Flatow.

Flatow described Alisa, starting with her voracious reading at an early age, her straight A’s, her interest in music and religion, her strong moral instincts. She had found time to volunteer at senior-citizen centers and taught Soviet immigrant children how to play baseball, her favorite sport. He described how the family had traveled to Israel in January 1995 for a ten-day visit with Alisa and Gail. It was the last time the family was together. He told of his experience returning to Israel after the bombing and the decision to donate her organs.

“Can you describe the effect on your wife, Rosalyn?” asked Fay.

 “I think it’s destroyed her.”

One of Alisa’s best friends at Brandeis, Lauren Sloane, painted a portrait of a funny and empathetic young woman. Her humor was witty, even intimidating. Alisa could come up with a funny line about almost anything before “you could blink,” said Sloane. She had a diverse group of friends, religious and nonreligious; she made nothing of sitting in the bathroom at night to comfort someone who’d drank too much.

In a letter to Sloane, Alisa had once written: “Do what you’re happy doing, and if something isn’t the way you want it, fix it.”

By 4:30 p.m., the first day of testimony was over. Everyone, it seemed, had shed tears, including Judge Lamberth. Perles had asked a rabbi to be present during the trial. At one point, Perles could hear Rosalyn breaking down and turned to ask the rabbi to comfort her, only to see him crying as well.

The next day, the plaintiffs called four expert witnesses: Patrick Clawson; Harry Brandon, a former counterterrorism FBI agent, who testified about the structure of the PIJ; Jerome Paige, an economic analyst who had conducted a life-earnings estimate for Alisa, based on her expressed desire to become an occupational therapist; and Reuven Paz, the former Shin Bet member who had intercepted the radio message between Iran and the PIJ.

Judge Lamberth adjourned the proceedings by 2:45. A week later, the Flatows returned to the courtroom, and Judge Lamberth began reading his decision. “The Court has examined the evidence and is satisfied that the plaintiff has established, by evidence satisfactory to the Court, that the death of the decedent was caused by the actions of the Islamic Republic of Iran in sponsoring this terrorist attack of this suicide bombing in Israel that resulted in the death of Alisa Michelle Flatow.”

As Lamberth continued, Perles could hear Flatow exhale, releasing years of stress. The judge awarded $1 million for the pain and suffering Alisa experienced before her death. He gave $20 million in solatium to Alisa’s family. And then he delivered his judgment for punitive damages. “The court is determined to award $225 million in punitive damages against the Republic of Iran and the other defendants in an effort and desire by the Court to deter other terrorist acts against Americans who happen to be in Israel or elsewhere.”

The judge turned to Flatow. “Mr. Flatow had done exactly what Congress has empowered him to do, and this Court has followed its duty. I hope that the rule of law can contribute ultimately to the solution of the problems presented in this case, where an innocent girl was needlessly killed,” he said. “It doesn’t contribute to the Mideast peace process or to the Mideast anything else to kill an innocent girl like this, and the Court cannot be stronger in condemning this kind of action.”

Outside the courthouse, Flatow, clean-shaven and in a beige raincoat, spoke to the assembled reporters with a stoic Rosalyn beside him. “These people are not heroes. They are not martyrs. They are traitors to the human race,” he told them. “I think Alisa is smiling on us today.”

The celebratory mood was short-lived, however: The morning after Lamberth delivered his verdict, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about its implications should the U.S. and Iran be moving toward rapprochement. “Our policy doesn’t get affected by court judgments,” Jamie Rubin, a State Department spokesman told the paper. “We believe the best way to resolve the differences we have with the Iranian government … is through direct dialogue.” To Flatow and Perles it was an unexpected declaration that the Clinton administration was no longer on their side.

Perles and Fay launched an inventory of Iranian assets in the United States that they could draw on to cover the damages owed to the Flatows. Following the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the taking of hostages from the U.S. embassy, President Jimmy Carter froze Iranian assets in America. Iran had lost billions, not only in property and cash, but also in funds deposited in American banks abroad.

When the two countries agreed to the Algiers Accords in 1981, it stipulated the release of the embassy hostages and the establishment of a claims tribunal at The Hague where future commercial disputes could be settled between the countries. Additionally, American hostages were prevented from suing the Iranian government, and some $4–5 billion of Iran’s money was returned. Estimates of the amount still held in the United States varied from millions to many billions, including the former Shah’s private holdings. In order to collect the judgment, Perles and Fay needed to know precisely how much money was left and where it was located.

On June 5, 1998, the lawyers served a subpoena to the Treasury Department, and a week later to the State Department, requesting a list of assets in which Iran had an interest. The denial came swiftly: The Department of Justice responded that the subpoenas would be overly burdensome in their scope and, in a letter to the court, argued that they would require the production of documents protected by “state secrets, law enforcement, and deliberative process privileges.”

The U.S. government also maintained that it didn’t have any Iranian assets. In a letter to Lautenberg on June 10, 1998, State Department assistant secretary of legislative affairs Barbara Larkin argued that the government regularly received requests from Congress and American citizens seeking to satisfy claims using frozen assets. But since the hostages were freed in 1981, she wrote, the government held no Iranian assets, save for a “small amount” that was under arbitration.

Perles and Fay had other ideas. They knew that within a few miles of their own offices were three pieces of real estate that no one could deny were Iranian: the Embassy Chancery of Iran, the residence of the minister of cultural affairs of the embassy of Iran, and the residency of the military attaché of the embassy of Iran. All three had been seized by the State Department on April 7, 1980. Embassy properties are under the protection of the Vienna Convention and are expressly immune from being used to settle claims. Yet, Perles had a hypothesis. The U.S. government had put them on the commercial real estate market, renting them out for money; maybe the government had inadvertently changed the status of the property from diplomatic to commercial. “It was the only thing we could chase,” said Perles.

Flatow’s legal team filed a writ of attachment—a court order to seize an asset—for the properties on July 8, 1998. The next day, at a hearing in Judge Lamberth’s courtroom, they were astounded to see over a dozen government lawyers. The government wanted Lamberth to deny the writ. “It wasn’t ours to give away,” explained Philip Bartz, then a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department who worked on the Flatow case. “We were obligated to make sure it was not attached and sold to satisfy a judgment. If we start allowing people to seize assets to pay judgments, then all our embassies are at risk.”

Perles watched as Flatow’s head sank. He had brought the Iranians to court with the belief that he had the powerful will of President Clinton behind him. Instead it seemed he had now gained a formidable foe, one who was prepared to fight him with all the resources available to his administration.

The government’s lawyers emphasized that the United States was not filing its argument on behalf of Iran, but to Flatow and his allies the U.S. government seemed to be defending the property of a state sponsor of terrorism.

In Congress, condemnation of the administration’s actions was swift. A week after the Department of Justice lawyers appeared in Lamberth’s courtroom, the House was debating an appropriations bill, and late on the evening of July 16, New Jersey congressman Saxton sought to attach an amendment to it that would allow diplomatic properties to be used by plaintiffs seeking their judgments. New York representative Eliot Engel spoke in support of the measure and criticized the president for protecting Iranian property. “They always say it somehow undermines the ability to have the president do this or that,” he said. “We are the United States Congress, and we make policy. We decide what is right.”

Saxton also spoke. “Terrorists operate around this world, and there is seldom a price to pay,” he said. “This is a tool for us to use as a civilized society.” The amendment stalled, and a few months later Lautenberg sponsored a similar one, attached to the 1999 Appropriations Act. When it passed, President Clinton used an executive waiver to strike it, in the “interest of national security.”

Flatow saw Clinton’s decision as an act of hypocrisy. He told the Associated Press, “Protecting Iranian assets of any type is equivalent to the FBI director saying he’s tough on gangsters but needs to be sensitive to the Mob.”

The battle lines between Flatow and his legal team, largely backed by Congress, and an army of administration lawyers had been drawn. At subsequent hearings, Perles and Fay argued that the government was using an abstract interpretation of its obligations under international law. The government’s lawyers responded that seizing diplomatic properties would adversely affect the foreign-policy interests of the United States. Should another hostage situation take place, for instance, the United States would need all the frozen assets it could access. If the Flatows had hypothetically been able to settle their judgment before 1979, deputy treasury secretary Stuart Eizenstat argued, the government might not have had the money and leverage to get the hostages out during the Tehran crisis. This was not an abstract argument for Eizenstat: He had been President Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser during the Iran hostage crisis.

Perles’s own wife was an employee of the State Department, and he understood the government’s interest in retaining as many bargaining chips as it could—including frozen assets—in its dealings with Iran. But he still didn’t agree with the strategy. “I never liked the idea of saying we’ll give you this money for our diplomats,” Perles said.

Flatow was becoming a thorn in the Clinton administration’s side. “They hated him,” said Patrick Clawson, the Iran expert who testified on Flatow’s behalf. “The U.S. government did its best to discourage and thwart the collection efforts—they didn’t care about judgments, but the collection efforts they hated.”

President Clinton was increasingly under attack in the press for his actions. On October 4, 60 Minutes aired a 13-minute segment detailing Flatow’s efforts that included searing video footage from the Kfar Darom bomb site and of an injured Alisa being carried off the bus. Lesley Stahl asked State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin whether the U.S. government was protecting Iranian assets because it wanted a thaw in relations with the country. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Rubin. “This has nothing to do with our Iran policy and everything to do with the fact that diplomatic property is sacrosanct.”

But this argument looked technical and heartless in light of a father’s emotional pleas. The segment elicited an outpouring of sympathy for Flatow, and the administration was publicly pummeled. Conservative columnist Tony Snow wrote, “Families and victims soldier on, determined to get their due—even if it means taking on a U.S. government that sits on the side of the courtroom, making cause with Fidel Castro, Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein.”

One day, Perles came home to his wife, who joked: “The Ayatollah and Madeleine Albright are getting together to draw straws to see who will get rid of you first.”

After eight months of exchanging motions and briefs, the Clinton administration extended Flatow an olive branch. On November 2, 1998, Perles, Flatow, and Fay attended a meeting at the Department of State building hosted by deputy secretary of the treasury Stuart Eizenstat. The room was crowded with Eizenstat’s staff, as well as emissaries of Frank Lautenberg, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the Office of Foreign Missions.

Eizenstat handed over more than 5,000 pages of documents and suggested that if they wanted to locate assets beyond the custodial control of the federal government, they should look no further than 650 Fifth Ave. in New York City. The 34-story building was owned by the Alavi Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting Persian culture and scholarship. In fact, Eizenstat told them, the organization was controlled by the Iranian government.

As startling as this claim appeared, the Alavi Foundation’s dubious facade as a nonprofit was an open secret. The Shah created the organization under the name the Pahlavi Foundation in 1973 and built the skyscraper at Fifth Avenue in 1978, the year before he was overthrown in the revolution. In 1995, The American Spectator published an exposé by reporter Kenneth Timmerman that detailed how Ayatollah Khomeini had forced the board of directors (including former secretary of state William Rogers) to resign, replacing them with sympathizers to the new Islamic Republic.

According to Timmerman’s investigation, the foundation began building Islamic centers in Maryland and New York with scholarship programs and adult-education courses that had a pro-Khomeini agenda. He unearthed tax records that showed that the Alavi Foundation had paid more than $1.4 million to a mosque in Brooklyn where the bombing of the 1993 World Trade Center had been planned and discovered that several of Alavi’s employees had been caught trying to buy or export to Iran IBM computers, lie-detector machines, and biological agents.

The Internal Revenue Service had also been looking at the Alavi Foundation ever since it tried to deduct from its taxes a loan it received from a bank affiliated with the Iranian government. In 1997, however, the IRS deemed the organization to be legitimate and gave it a refund, even though Bank Sepah, one of the Iranian banks blacklisted by the Treasury Department, still operated out of 650 Fifth Ave.

Perles and Fay decided to go after three of the Alavi’s properties in Maryland, all Islamic schools in Montgomery County. Just a few days after their meeting with Eizenstat, a sheriff delivered a levy to the properties, and on May 10, 1999, the two sides met in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

In their opening argument, the Alavi’s lawyers called the case a witch hunt and compared their client to the Rockefeller Foundation. If the IRS really believed Alavi was a fraudulent organization, as described in the suit, argued attorney John Winter, it wouldn’t have been granted a substantial IRS refund.

Fay argued that there were FBI videotapes showing the Imam of the Islamic Educational Center in Maryland meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini and the heads of Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as the PIJ’s Fathi Shaqaqi before he was murdered in Malta.

But at the end of oral arguments, Judge Alexander Williams Jr. turned to Perles.

“Why is our government recognizing it as a legitimate business or entity?” asked Williams. “Why don’t they forfeit it and seize the assets?”

Perles responded that the FBI was investigating a “circle of conspirators” that included the leadership of the Alavi Foundation.

“That’s speculative,” said Judge Williams. “Any of us can be investigated.”

Perles left the courtroom aggravated. “I followed that path because they gave me a box of documents about the Alavi Foundation,” he said

Shortly after, Perles and Fay sent a request to the Justice Department: Would the government support their arguments about Alavi in court? They never got a response.

Flatow saw the silence as a double-cross: They had been led to the Alavi Foundation by the government, who then refused to go the next step and give them proof that would win the case. The proceedings revealed how cautiously the administration was protecting its relations with Iran.

Indeed, there were serious concerns inside the National Security Council. The suit could force the State Department into the awkward position of stating whether or not it considered Alavi an instrumentality, or front, for Iranian financial and political activity in the U.S. “There are a number of difficult issues to address,” said an NSC internal memo. “Anticipating further inquiries and possibly a formal request, NSC will convene interagency counsel to explore the matter.”

It came as little surprise when, on September 7, 1999, the judge released the Alavi Foundation’s Maryland schools from the levy and granted a motion to keep Perles and Fay from trying to go after any of its other properties.

As frustrating as the defeat in Maryland was, Perles and Fay were beginning to realize that losing in court wasn’t such a bad thing. Every day, they spoke on the phone several times, urging each other on in the face of setbacks. “Sometimes the way to win, to move a case forward, is to lose,” Perles told me. “If you lose often enough, you can sometimes make things happen. I kept attacking Iranian assets and losing and complaining to Congress every time the Clinton administration intervened. The more we lost, the better we kept doing politically.”

Indeed, the political pressure and public scrutiny was needling the Clinton administration as Perles and Fay continued to file motion after motion in Judge Lamberth’s court. “It’s a very difficult policy issue,” said Stuart Eizenstat. “We understood—a family experiences a grievous loss, and they needed to take what steps they could. But we had to put it into a broader policy perspective. We couldn’t look only at the suffering of this one family.”

On July 30, 1999, Perles, Fay, Lautenberg’s staff, Eizenstat, and seven other administration officials met again. Eizenstat repeated his offer to help identify unblocked assets, saying he wanted to avoid confrontation and work together constructively.

Frustrated by their experience going after Alavi, Perles and Fay asked for an “interim measure of closure” for Flatow, suggesting that the rental proceeds, some $5–6 million from Iranian diplomatic properties, would be a good start. “We, too, want to avoid confrontation—but we need results,” Fay argued. “We want the discussion to go beyond unblocked property.”

The elephant in the room was another proposed congressional amendment: Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona, Connie Mack of Florida, and Lautenberg had put together the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, which would provide access to blocked assets. Administration officials were hoping the amendment would be dropped or at least postponed to prevent the president from exercising a veto.

Toward the end of the two-hour meeting, Perles finally lost his patience. “I have heard nothing from you today that is real. The only reason you are meeting with us today is because there’s a crisis for you,” he told them. “You’re here because you can count votes. I can count votes, too.… Think long and hard about the rental proceeds.”

With no indication that the administration was going to release the rental proceeds to Flatow, in the fall of 1999, Kyl, Mack, and Lautenberg went forward with the amendment. “Initially, the Clinton administration’s response to this was more from a legalistic, international-relations perspective,” Mack told me. “Eventually, as this thing heated up, the political instincts started to move, and they had to figure how to do it in a way that did the least damage to their position.”

According to internal memos, that September the Clinton administration began considering the possibility that they needed to make what they called an “advance payment” to Flatow to deter the new amendment—some 5 percent of the compensatory damages awarded by Judge Lamberth.

But by October, the two sides were still at a standstill, and Flatow appeared before the Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary to endorse the amendment. “If the administration will not help us, then at least let it get out of our way,” he pleaded. “Stop sending lawyers to court at taxpayer expense to defend the interests of terrorists.”

Eizenstat had also testified, arguing that the United States was at risk of losing its leverage against foreign states. And, he added, even if Flatow was legally allowed to claim blocked assets to satisfy his judgment, “the value of the judgment won by the Flatow family … exceeds the total known value of the blocked assets of the government of Iran in the United States. ”

An hour after Eizenstat testified, the phone rang at Thomas Fay’s office. The caller identified himself as a retired employee of the Department of Defense but didn’t give his name. His job at the department had involved something called the Foreign Military Sales Program. FMS was a program that allowed the U.S. to sell weapons to foreign governments; it was an oft-used tool of American foreign policy. At the time of the Shah’s fall in 1979, he told Fay, Iran’s FMS account with the U.S. government had hundreds of millions in its coffers, which had been seized.

Fay hung up the phone and started calling contacts on Capitol Hill to find out if what he heard was true. Within hours he had confirmed it.

Of all the countries with FMS accounts in the U.S., Iran had one of the largest; it had spent some $20 billion on American-made weapons systems over the decades. But the existence of any money left in the account since the revolution had never been disclosed to Flatow by the administration. In fact, it contained some $400 million.

Unbeknownst to Flatow and his lawyers, the administration had worried that Iran’s FMS account might come up in the litigation. In the summer of 1999, the president’s National Security Council adviser, Sandy Berger, sent the president a memo—now public in the Clinton Presidential Library archives—warning that yet another amendment was being proposed in Congress that would give plaintiffs access to blocked assets. If it passed, Clinton might be forced to use his veto power or risk giving Flatow the ability to tap “the $400 million of Iranian funds that we are holding in the FMS Trust Fund” and jeopardize “one of the primary policy tools at our disposal.”

At the bottom of Berger’s memo was a handwritten note: “We need to make a deal and get some $ to the Flatows—the trick is to give reasonable reimbursement w/out letting these claims eviscerate foreign policy. We’ve been so stuck on the ‘camel’s nose in the tent’ problem that we haven’t done enough to resolve the hot cases.” It was initialed “BC,” a sign that the president’s priorities were beginning to shift.

By the end of 1999, there were other compelling reasons that the Clinton administration wanted Flatow’s crusade to end: First Lady Hillary Clinton was beginning her campaign for senator of New York, and she needed allies on the Hill and the support of the Jewish vote.

The First Lady was already facing tough criticism from Jewish organizations stemming from her visit to Ramallah in the fall of 1999. In November, she had appeared at a public event with Suha Arafat, the wife of the Palestinian leader, where Mrs. Arafat accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian children with toxic gas. Clinton looked uncomfortable but didn’t dispute the accusation, and as she left the event, Clinton gave Mrs. Arafat a kiss. She later said that the translation she heard of Mrs. Arafat’s words were less severe and that a kiss in the Middle East is like a handshake. But her problems with Jewish voters—who generally make up 12 percent of the vote in New York State—were serious.

The First Lady began visiting Jewish centers around the state. On December 14, 1999, she spoke at the Orthodox Union in lower Manhattan. The event was closed to the press and attended by 100 Orthodox leaders and community members. Clinton was asked to explain a range of policy positions, including the status of Jerusalem and foreign aid to Palestine.

Flatow was in the audience, invited by the Union’s chairman to ask his own question.

“Do you support the administration’s handling of terrorist victims’ claims against the Islamic Republic of Iran?” said Flatow.

“No, I do not,” said Clinton.

The room went silent. It was a clear repudiation of her husband’s position. “Very simply, that became an entre to the White House to sit down and talk settlement. Not just with us but with other terror victims,” he said.

The White House’s ambitions for a breakthrough in Iran relations were largely dashed by the last year of Clinton’s presidency. It no longer seemed possible that he would be able to establish direct dialogue with Khatami, who was hemmed in by Iran’s internal politics and the Ayatollah’s refusal to engage with America.

Furthermore, he was no longer faced with just the Flatow case. In the year following the Flatow v. The Islamic Republic of Iran decision, courts had awarded a tsunami of judgments for terror victims. In March, Lebanon hostage Terry Anderson was awarded $324 million. In July, the families of two young Americans killed in a bus bombing in February 1996 were awarded $327 million. The family of a marine killed by Hezbollah was awarded $355 million. The families of the Brothers to the Rescue incident—unarmed planes shot down by the Cuban government in 1996—were still trying to collect the $187 million awarded to them.

After the meeting at Orthodox Union, one of the First Lady’s close advisers, Jack Lew, then director of the Office of Management and Budget, was put in charge of negotiations with Flatow and other families, as well as senators Lautenberg and Mack. Lew, also an Orthodox Jew and a Queens native, presented Flatow with a compromise. Would Flatow accept a payment of the compensatory damages from the United States judgment fund, typically used to settle lawsuits against the United States? Flatow declined. He didn’t want to accept taxpayer money—he wanted Iran’s money.

“I think that really got Hillary’s attention. Here’s this guy, he’s principled,” said Perles. After that, Lew called Flatow and told him he was going to get the problem solved.

Garry Shiffman, national security adviser to Senator Mack, helped oversee the negotiations between the administration, victims’ families, and senators over the ensuing months. The goal was to create legislation that authorized the secretary of the treasury to use some frozen assets to pay compensatory damages to the families.

The final agreement gave the plaintiffs two options. In the first, they could obtain 110 percent of compensatory damages plus interest but relinquish the right to try and collect any other damages, whether in U.S. or foreign courts. In the second, they could receive 100 percent of compensatory damages plus interest and only relinquish their rights to pursue damages in U.S. courts. They could also decline any payments from the government and continue trying to satisfy their judgments through the courts. Flatow chose the second option, retaining his right to go after Iranian assets abroad.

On May 9, 2000, the agreement passed in the House as part of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act. The Senate passed the act in July. Shiffman remembers convening a meeting with the Flatows and other families in the Senate offices during the vote. “There was this tremendous sense of inevitability that we were going to get this done,” he said.

On October 28, 2000, President Clinton signed it into law, thereby ensuring that some $213 million plus interest would be given over to eight families, including the Flatows. Clinton issued a statement saying that he was “pleased that the Congress and the executive branch have been able to reach agreement on legislation that reflects our shared goals, providing compensation for the victims of international terrorism and protecting the President’s ability to act on behalf of the Nation on important foreign policy and national security issues.”

It had been 962 days since Flatow had won his case against the Republic of Iran. As the political scientist Ofira Seliktar has written, the passage of the bill was viewed by Iran as confirmation that the U.S.’s attempts at detente had been a trick all along. “To the insular regime in Tehran, already convinced of Jewish dominance … the so-called Flatow bill was one more indication of Jewish power.”

In the years that followed, the Flatows’ lawsuit would ripple out in unexpected ways—including, over a decade later, unraveling a bank’s Iranian money-laundering scheme. In 2006, Eitan Arusy, an intelligence analyst at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan, who specialized in illegal Middle Eastern financing, began looking into the 1999 Alavi case that Perles and Fay had lost. Arusy’s interest was more than professional. He was a former Israeli soldier, and in his early twenties he had been one of the first responders to the bus bombing in Kfar Darom that killed Alisa.

As a result of Arusy’s digging, the prosecutor’s office investigated the Alavi Foundation further. An informant suggested that they focus on the financial records of the organization, which would show that the nonprofit had received millions of dollars from the Iranian-owned Bank Melli. When they began looking for Bank Melli, they discovered a surprise: money transfers with Credit Suisse and Lloyds, which, it turned out, had removed their names to avoid detection.

The Manhattan prosecutors began collaborating with the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Treasury Department, New York State’s financial regulator, and the Federal Reserve. Together, they argued, international financial companies including ING, Standard Chartered, HSBC, and BNP Paribas had laundered money on Iran’s behalf, as well as Sudan’s and Cuba’s. When Flatow found out that his case had helped lead to some $12 billion in settlements between the banks and the U.S. government, including $8.9 billion from BNP Paribas alone, it “knocked my socks off,” he said.

It was the latest chapter in a story that Flatow and his legal team had tried to tell years before: that the Alavi Foundation was a front for the Iranian government. On April 17, 2014, Preet Bharara, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney, announced that the skyscraper at 650 Fifth Ave., in addition to properties in California, Virginia, Texas, and Maryland, would be sold with the intention of benefiting terrorism victims, among others. Some $2.8 billion of the BNP Paribas fine will aid 9/11 victims. The Alavi Foundation and the Iranian government continue to dispute that they are connected, calling the seizure “unwise and politically tainted.”

In December 2015, Congress finally passed a spending bill that included provisions for the hostages taken at the U.S. embassy in 1979 to receive millions in restitution, ending a 30-year legal battle. The money will come from the penalty paid by BNP Paribas.

Flatow’s agreement with the government prevents him from filing a claim to any of this money. But Perles continues to track down Iranian money in other countries. A few years ago, in Italy, his firm reached a settlement with Iran mediated by an Arab diplomat: Iran would pay a lump sum by wire transfer, and his clients, including Flatow, would drop all further suits. When the time came, Iran’s representatives never showed up, and the transfers weren’t made.

Most recently, Perles argued before Italy’s Supreme Court to adopt Judge Lamberth’s decision in the Flatow case, so he could begin going after Iranian assets there. (Italy is one of Iran’s biggest trading partners.) The court declined.

Perles’s practice is dominated by cases of victims seeking damages from foreign governments and corporations that materially support terrorists. He is representing the family of Steven Sotloff, the American journalist murdered by ISIS in 2014. In total, his clients have been awarded more than $17 billion in damages in connection with attacks against Americans.

Last January, negotiators reached a historic deal with Iran. The agreement, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, created a pathway to end decades of sanctions in exchange for Tehran dismantling its military nuclear program. Several months later, a bill in Congress sought to block the JCPOA until Iran satisfies judgments won by terrorism victims. The president threatened to veto the measure. “Obstructing implementation of the JCPOA would greatly undermine our national security interests,” said a White House statement, in language that echoed Clinton’s and Albright’s in the 1990s.

And just last week, on January 13, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, a case that bears a striking resemblance to Flatow’s. A group of some 1,300 families are seeking to recover damages on behalf of loved ones killed in terror attacks sponsored by Iran, including the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983. In 2013, Congress required a federal court to allow frozen assets of the Iranian bank to be used to compensate victims’ families. Now the court has to decide whether Congress acted unconstitutionally and challenged the separation of powers at the heart of American governance.

Remarkably, analysts believe that Flatow’s effort may have actually succeeded in its goal of making killing Americans so expensive that Iran would avoid doing so.

“What we’ve seen from this quixotic effort that Flatow had so many years ago is a very substantial penalty that the Iranian government has had to pay,” said Patrick Clawson. “There has been real change in behavior.” He points out the fact that Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups once commonly seized American citizens as hostages, a practice that dramatically declined after the Flatow case.

This isn’t to say that Iran hasn’t found other ways to pursue its interests, supporting everything from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime to Lebanon’s Hezbollah. It hardly needs to be said that terrorism itself has not gone away but merely emerged in more places with old and new actors and a seemingly always-fresh stream of money as the Middle East is engulfed in the fight against ISIS and sectarian conflict. In 2015, the State Department reported that global terror attacks grew by 35 percent between 2013 and 2014, and deaths increased 80 percent. Last week, the JCPOA was implemented, giving Iran access to $100 billion in previously frozen assets; Perles predicts that some of this money will be directed toward financing terrorist attacks by Iran’s proxies.

For Gary Shiffman, now a professor at Georgetown University in economics and security policy, the next stage for these cases is the international legal system. “If there’s a way for American citizens to go to international court and obtain a judgment for an act of terrorism, they should be able to do that,” he said. “If the price goes up, the demand goes down.”

The Flatows settled with the government for over $26 million, paid out of appropriated funds from the U.S. Treasury. According to the agreement, however, the funds will be deducted from Iran’s frozen FMS account in the future. (Perles’s and Fay’s fee was about a third of the amount.)

The Flatows created a scholarship fund in Alisa’s name to send college students to study in Israel each year. The fund is just one aspect of Alisa’s ongoing legacy, going back to the moment she was taken off life support and her organs were given to Israeli patients. Although three recipients died following surgery, three others survived, including a man who had waited for a new heart for more than a year.         

Today, the Flatow family includes 16 grandchildren, with four granddaughters bearing the name Alisa.

Flatow hasn’t stopped talking; he travels to high schools and synagogues, gives interviews to the media, and writes letters to editors. “It’s good therapy for me,” he said.

He and Rosalyn are considering a move this spring, and as a result Flatow recently sorted through old boxes, including some of Alisa’s belongings. As he sifted through college textbooks from Brandeis, toys, and birthday cards, he marveled at the passage of time. “Twenty years ago, I would have fallen apart,” said Flatow. “Now I just look and shake my head in wonderment.”

We welcome feedback at letters@atavist.com.

Holiday at the Dictator’s Guesthouse

What possessed a family man from Ohio to smuggle a Bible into North Korea?

By Joshua Hunt

One

On the morning of August 1, 2014, Jeffrey Fowle woke before seven in his room at a guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea. Soon a young woman arrived with his breakfast of rice, broth, and kimchi. She smiled as she set the tray down on the large desk at the foot of the bed, then walked out of the room and locked the door behind her. It was Fowle’s 87th day in custody.

He sat at the desk, watching a shadow play across his window. An opaque vinyl film had been applied to the glass, so Fowle could see only silhouettes walking past. That April, when Fowle had traveled to Pyongyang, he’d felt that God wanted him to help North Korea’s oppressed Christian underground. His attempt took the form of a Korean-English Bible, left behind in a bar bathroom; he was taken into custody as he tried to leave the country. Fowle poured the broth over his rice and began to eat.

An hour later, Mr. Jo, Fowle’s interpreter and minder, appeared at the door: His slacks were ironed, and he’d traded his usual polo shirt for a crisp dress shirt. “Today is the day,” Mr. Jo said. “Be ready.”

A few weeks earlier, Mr. Jo had told Fowle that he might be allowed to speak with international media. It would be his first chance to tell the world about his situation, and to remind the U.S. government that he needed help. At noon, Mr. Jo led Fowle to a conference room on the other side of the guesthouse, reminding him of his talking points along the way.

“Emphasize your desperation for wanting to get home and that your family needs you back,” Mr. Jo said. “Put some emotion into it.” He suggested that it might be good if Fowle cried. In the conference room, Fowle was seated at a long table with a couple of North Korean journalists from the Associated Press Television News. Instead of press badges, each reporter wore a pin with the smiling face of Kim Il-sung.

Some hours later, I was sitting in a coffee shop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when a report about three Americans detained in North Korea appeared on the television mounted to the wall. The first was Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American who had been held there since November 2012, when he was arrested for “hostile acts” against North Korea’s government and its young new leader, Kim Jong-un. Bae had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor and appeared on the screen dressed in a gray jumpsuit with his prisoner number, 103, drawn across the left breast. He spoke stoically in Korean about his failing health.

The next prisoner was Matthew Miller, who looked shaken. He’d traveled to North Korea hoping “to speak to an ordinary North Korean person about normal things” and decided that getting arrested might afford him the opportunity. He packed notebooks filled with scrawls meant to suggest he knew U.S. state secrets and that he was a hacker with ties to WikiLeaks. At the airport in Pyongyang, he requested asylum in North Korea and was taken into custody. Speaking to APTN reporters, Miller wore a black turtleneck and the look of a guilty child. “I’m now requesting help from the American government, the citizens of America, and the world, to release me from this situation,” he told the APTN reporters, with a quiver in his voice.

Jeffrey Fowle appeared last, his demeanor a strange contrast with the two men who preceded him. He appeared relaxed, spoke calmly, and even smiled. His oversize metal glasses frames seemed to magnify the twinkle in his eye; he seemed too youthful to be 56 years old. “I’ve been treated well,” he said. Foreign missionaries working inside North Korea have faced detainment, imprisonment, and execution, yet Fowle apologized for his actions with a smirk hiding in the corner of his mouth. He looked like a man interviewing for a job, not pleading for his freedom. I didn’t know what to make of his easy manner. Confidence, naivety, and insanity all seemed like possibilities.

North Korea’s persecution of Christians dates back to 1945, when the Communist north broke away from the south. Its founding leader, Kim Il-sung, whose own father was a prominent Christian activist, leveled churches, outlawed the Bible, and killed known Christians. So ferocious was this campaign that in the six years after World War II ended, hundreds of thousands of Christians fled south. The division of the two Koreas was formalized in 1948. In 1950, Kim Il-sung’s Stalin-backed regime invaded South Korea and started the Korean War, which touched off the north’s slide into isolation. Now ruled by Kim Il-sung’s grandson, Kim Jong-un, North Korea remains openly hostile to the U.S., its preferred enemy, and to free speech and religion, which imperil the regime’s autocratic rule and the cult of personality that has helped keep the Kim dynasty in power.

Fowle seemed to have acted alone, without the support of an international missionary organization. His crime implied no grand scheme, no strategy. If he harbored pretensions to courage, they were well hidden. And yet he’d gambled his freedom for an act of protest that offered limited rewards and great personal risk. I wanted to know who he was and why he did it.

On a Saturday morning in the winter of 2014, Jeffrey Fowle woke in the dark, before sunlight stirred the dog and the dog stirred the children. He was home in Miamisburg, Ohio, in a house that sits across the street from an invisible boundary with Moraine, the city where he had worked for the public service department since 1988. In the winter, he cleared snow. In the summer, he fixed curbs and sidewalks. On Saturdays, his wife, Tatyana, worked part-time as a hair stylist. On Sundays, they took their three kids—Stephanie, 9, and his sons Alex, 13, and Chris, 11—to church.

On that winter morning, his wife left for work and the kids retreated to the yard, leaving Fowle alone in the house. A child of the Cold War, Fowle had been fascinated by America’s Communist enemies for as long as he could remember. He read obsessively about the Soviet empire and took Russian classes in college. In the 1990s, he became fascinated by North Korea, the so-called hermit kingdom, after accounts of a terrible famine appeared in the news. Recent reports about the detention of missionary Kenneth Bae, and Dennis Rodman’s visit with Kim Jong-un, sparked Fowle’s interest once more.

In the glow of his iMac, he spent hours clicking between human-rights reports that criticized North Korea and tour packages offered by travel agencies promising a journey to its heart. He turned to Amazon to browse books, selecting Escape from Camp 14 and Long Road Home, which recounted the experiences of North Korean refugees, and Only Beautiful, Please, written by a former British ambassador to the country. Then Fowle added to his basket a book called Korean for Beginners. At the bottom of the page, he noticed a selection of recommended books based on his search history. One of the titles immediately caught his attention: a turquoise Korean-English study Bible. Its gaudy color reminded him of something he’d read earlier: that North Korean schoolteachers sometimes enlist children to find underground Christians. “Go home and look for a shiny black book with strange writing on the cover,” they tell their students. “Bring it to school tomorrow.”

In the 14 years they’d been married, Tatyana Fowle had learned that she was no match for her husband’s wanderlust. In 2013, Fowle was in Russia when he ignored her pleas not to go to Mongolia alone. “The guards caught him trying to cross the border on foot at two o’clock in the morning,” she said. “They told him he could die doing that, so he found a bus full of Italian tourists and rode across with them.”

So when her husband told her he’d booked a trip to North Korea, Tatyana thought little of it. The U.S. State Department warns against travel to North Korea, but it’s not illegal to visit. The government of North Korea allows foreigners, including Americans, to enter with authorized groups. According to estimates by tour operators, as many as 8,000 Westerners visited in 2014.

Fowle chose a ten-day trip organized by Koryo Tours, a Beijing-based company, which cost about $4,000. The group would meet in Beijing and travel together to Pyongyang, where the itinerary included the “famous, ornate Pyongyang Metro” and its stations “decorated with socialist-realist mosaics and reliefs.” Then the group would enjoy a train journey that would “reveal parts of the country never before seen by foreign eyes.”

A few days before Fowle’s departure, Tatyana watched her husband pack. Among the clothes and guides to North Korea, she spotted a turquoise book.

“Please don’t bring that Bible,” she said. “If you need to bring it with you for the flight, at least leave it in Beijing.”

Fowle didn’t look up. He needed to find a spot in his luggage for a deflated basketball covered in autographs. He’d bought the ball in December, at a Harlem Globetrotter’s exhibition game in Dayton. As players signed it, he told them it might be going to North Korea. At his most optimistic, he imagined presenting it to basketball-obsessed Kim Jong-un.

“It was like he didn’t even hear me,” Tatyana told me. “He seemed so distracted. So focused, like he was packing for some important mission.”

She didn’t know that her husband had been making plans for the Bible since it arrived. He tucked a photo of the family inside the cover and wrote out his name and Tatyana’s, along with their address and telephone number. She didn’t know that he was planning to take the book to North Korea and leave it somewhere in the northern territories. Far from Pyongyang and its powerful elites, he was sure someone in the Christian underground would find it. There the Bible might serve an entire community—a community of people who would know the name, face, and family of the man who had brought them this gift.

If the authorities found it, he’d say it was his study Bible and he’d forgotten it by accident. The language workbook would be his alibi: He would claim both were materials for studying Korean. For three decades, Fowle had lived with the feeling that God had a plan for him. It was too much to consider that it might all go wrong; he was in God’s hands now.

Fowle had stopped going to church when he was 12. His parents, Edward and Virginia, were Episcopalian when they married. Edward was a guidance-systems specialist in the Air Force. They lived in Florida when Fowle was born, in 1958, but a few years later, Edward was assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, outside Dayton. The family built a house in nearby Beavercreek. Virginia was a homemaker, raising Fowle and his three siblings. Each Sunday, they attended services at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.

As the family settled into their new home, Edward began to have a crisis of faith. At a time when new religious movements were multiplying, he became fascinated by the Worldwide Church of God, an organization led by Herbert W. Armstrong, who had helped pioneer the use of radio and television to reach far-flung worshippers. His teachings leaned heavily on the Old Testament and British Israelism, which held that white Europeans of the British Empire descended directly from King David.

Edward quickly became serious about his new beliefs. He forbade the family from celebrating Christmas, pushing them instead toward Old Testament celebrations. In the fall of 1967, he took the children out of school and drove the family to the Pocono Mountains, to celebrate the Feast of the Tabernacles. During the festivities, Fowle’s brother, Jaime, ran through a window, slicing his eyelids open; his younger sister, Lynn, developed pneumonia. Virginia’s patience ran out, and she returned to St. Mark’s.

Despite the rift, Edward’s commitment deepened. When Armstrong said that his adherents could serve only one master, God or government, Edward left the Air Force after 13 years of service. He resigned without hesitation and without Virginia’s blessing. He continued working at Wright-Patterson as a private contractor but forfeited his pension.

The Fowle household was divided. On Saturdays, Edward dragged Jeffrey and his sister Laurie to Worldwide Church of God services. On Sundays, Virginia took Jamie and Lynn to St. Mark’s. By 1970, Jeffrey Fowle had stopped going to church altogether.

In 1980, Fowle was 22 years old and studying at the Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster, Ohio. He lived in a rented room on a farm in Ohio’s Amish country. His social life was slow, his love life nonexistent. In the evenings, he’d lay in bed and wonder what the future held for him. One night the answer came to him in a dream.

The images stayed with Fowle for decades: He was looking down on a large field, where an old-fashioned revival was taking place. A woman and her son stood nearby. To Fowle, the scene was ridiculous. “You see those holy rollers down there?” he asked them; he’d meant it as a slur.

Fowle heard a voice coming from behind him, and he was so sure it was God that he didn’t bother to turn and look.

“Don’t make fun of them,” the voice said. “They are sincere in what they do.”

Suddenly, Fowle rose from the ground and into a gray mist, which became a brilliant cloud that enveloped him. Passing through the mist, he felt that his sins had been cleansed. When he awoke, his pillow was wet with tears.

Fowle emerged from the experience certain that God had a plan for him. In 1983, he finished school and gave away most of his possessions. He packed what remained into his ’68 AMC Rambler Ambassador and drove to Death Valley, California, Christ’s 40 days of fasting on his mind. When he reached the desert, he drove his car deep into a desert canyon and pinned a note behind one windshield wiper, along with the car’s paperwork. Whoever found the vehicle, he wrote, could have it. He wasn’t planning on coming back.

For four days and four nights he fasted and hiked, carrying a bedroll and little else. He found stoned hippies, raging bikers, and other wanderers looking for answers. When he made it back to his car, there was no message from God—only a note from the park rangers, who had returned the car’s title to the glove compartment.

Fowle worked odd jobs in California but eventually returned to Ohio. He moved in with his parents and took the Air Force officer’s examination. Weak vision disqualified him from being a pilot, but he was invited to enroll in the navigator’s course. In Texas, he began officer training but flunked out. For a few years he foundered, and then, in 1988, he found work as a semi-skilled laborer with the streets division in Moraine, a suburb of Dayton.

As Fowle’s life began to settle, he no longer felt content just reading books. He wanted to see for himself what he called the “dark corners of the world.” In 1989, he saw a TV commercial for tours to the Soviet Union. As a boy, he’d been fascinated by Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko’s 1946 book I Chose Freedom. He signed up for the trip and traveled to Leningrad, Moscow, and Turkmenistan as part of a local organization called the Dayton Friendship Force. The group often stayed with locals, which gave Fowle the sense that he was seeing what life was really like in the declining Soviet empire, right down to the minders who warned against taking unauthorized photographs. In Turkmenistan, Fowle saw the Door to Hell, a giant smoldering crater born when a natural-gas field collapsed into an underground cavern in 1971. While his coworkers vacationed in Florida, Fowle learned to water-ski on the Caspian Sea.

The USSR’s collapse didn’t dampen Fowle’s interest in the region. In 1996, he traveled to the Balkans in the aftermath of the Bosnian War, which had ended the year before. In Serbia, Fowle stayed in a house scarred by shrapnel; their guides kept a close watch to ensure that no one walked into an active minefield.

While his travels grew more ambitious, Fowle’s life in Ohio was lonely. “I had been a wallflower in high school, and in college I really hadn’t dated,” he would later say. In 1998, he decided to join an introduction service that paired American men with women from abroad.

“You don’t hear the term mail-order bride anymore,” he said. “I guess guys are ashamed to call it that nowadays, but I never understood the stigma myself.”

A catalog from the introduction company arrived, and Fowle chose an Iranian woman and several Russians to correspond with. One photograph of a kind-faced brunette named Tatyana Shoom, 15 years his junior, intrigued him more than the others. He wrote to her alternating bits of college Russian with English. She overestimated his fluency and responded with more Russian. He enlisted his former Russian-language professor for help with translation.

In the fall of 1999, Fowle visited Tatyana in her hometown of Yekaterinburg. He returned again in December. She found the American idea of organized religion strange at first. “My country was without God for 70 years,” she said.

Tatyana arrived in the U.S. on July 1, 2000. Her visa required her either to marry Fowle or return to Russia within 90 days. On her 91st day in America, the two were married.

In April 2014, Tatyana drove her husband to the bus station in Cincinnati. After a quick goodbye, Fowle climbed onto a bus that took him to Chicago, where he boarded a flight for Beijing. The day after he arrived, Fowle and three dozen other tourists from around the world gathered for orientation. Simon Cockerell, a longtime guide with Koryo, explained the rules of travel in North Korea: no unauthorized photography; no off-color remarks about founder Kim Il-sung, his son Kim Jong-il, or the current Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un; and no pushing outside ideas on North Koreans. The next morning, Fowle and his fellow travelers caught their flight to Pyongyang. From the plane, North Korea’s rugged landscape vaguely reminded Fowle of Ohio’s cornfields. He wore black jeans and a blue dress shirt with a red tie, fidgeting uncomfortably like a child in church clothes. His leather bomber jacket hung low on the left side, sagging from the Bible’s weight.

At Pyongyang’s Sunan International Airport, the group spilled out onto the tarmac, iPhones and cameras in hand. An enormous portrait of Kim Il-sung awaited them on the facade of the main terminal. The Great Leader ruled the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as North Korea is formally called, from 1948 until his death in 1994, and during that time he systematically replaced objects of worship with his own image.

Inside the terminal, Fowle approached a security officer and felt for the first time the gravity of his mission. As he handed over his luggage, he told himself to trust in God. The thought alone was not enough to comfort him. The agent worked through his bags quickly, but each time Fowle walked through the metal detector, an alarm buzzed. He emptied his pockets, but the alarm kept on. He fumbled to remove his belt. The buzzing continued.

It was too much for Fowle to take. Sweating, he reached for his left pocket and unsnapped the two buttons that held the pocket closed. If he handed the Bible over now, maybe they would believe it was just for him. Then the agent waved him ahead. Fowle grabbed his bag and stepped through, snapping the two buttons shut again. He was in.

Tourism didn’t come naturally to North Korea—it had to be invented. In 1992, an Englishman named Nicholas Bonner traveled to Pyongyang to visit a friend. The country had opened its borders to foreign visitors six years earlier, but Bonner noticed that no one was coming. The next year, he founded Koryo Tours, in partnership with the Korea International Travel Company, which is operated by the North Korean government.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had collapsed, taking with it the cheap oil that had powered North Korea’s economy. Steel mills in the northern territories slowed production, and glass factories were shuttered. Hospitals came to resemble morgues as equipment broke down, one Soviet-made part at a time. The power grid flickered into permanent decline, and the countryside was picked clean of any wood that could be burned and any plant that the stomach could hold down.

As conditions deteriorated, Koryo Tours’ business grew. In Pyongyang, well-fed elites and an air of relative stability helped the city preserve its appeal. In 1995, Koryo brought a hundred foreign tourists to Pyongyang for an International Sports and Cultural Festival for Peace. Muhammad Ali was among the guests, who saw professional wrestlers from North America and Japan compete before an audience of more than 150,000 people. KITC ensured that Ali and the other visitors were kept in a bubble, their sanitized view devoid of signs that the catastrophic, years-long famine was hitting its grim peak. What we now know of the Arduous March, as it was euphemistically called, is largely thanks to human-rights groups, United Nations inspectors, defectors, and Christian organizations. Because sanctions have left North Korea largely isolated from the global financial system, foreign tour operators pay KITC through banks in China, which remains a North Korean ally. In the past, even Chinese banks have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for laundering Pyongyang’s money, some of it counterfeit, some of it related to nuclear proliferation or illicit trade.  

In 2013, North Korea began allowing foreign visitors to carry their mobile phones into the country and access the Web, via Koryolink, North Korea’s mobile service provider. The change in policy coincided with the rise of social media. Suddenly, photographs, albeit government approved, could be uploaded to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. What mattered was that people saw something they’d never seen before: a broken-down Stalinist amusement park, preserved as though in amber.

Critics of North Korea assert that such expeditions carry a hidden cost. Despite the limits on financial institutions dealing with the regime, international funds still flow into the country through tourism, and that money often filters down to nations that are hostile to the U.S. and its allies. Some have called for a travel ban to North Korea, pointing out that the regime has contributed to Syria’s weapons program and was likely helping Iran as well. But in Fowle’s mind, his mission absolved him of complicity.

Though he felt guided by God, his movements were controlled by the government. He stepped out of the airport and onto a bus owned by the KITC, which employs the North Korean guides, minders, drivers, and videographers. On the bus, Fowle took a seat by himself. He wore a broad, toothy grin that was often directed at no one in particular. Around him others compared camera lenses and swapped stories. Fowle was assigned a roommate for the trip, a Canadian named Ken, but Fowle kept mostly to himself.

Pyongyang was a mass of contradictions. Children in sooty clothes chased each other down sidewalks while soldiers and students walked by in crisp uniforms. Peasants pushed broken-down oxcarts along dusty roads while nearby streets were filled with taxis. The schedule was tight, packed with visits to the restaurants, markets, parks, and monuments. The Bible never left Fowle’s jacket pocket, which bulged with its mass. At the Mansudae Grand Monument, the group placed flower arrangements at the feet of enormous bronze-colored statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il and performed a deep ceremonial bow. To Fowle’s eyes, these were the churches of North Korea.

He knew from the beginning that he’d leave Pyongyang with the Bible. He had no desire to leave it in a city run by the ruling elite. From the outset, the Bible was headed for Hamhung or Chongjin, in the northeast. The farther from Pyongyang, the more open he felt the people would be to outside ideas. In the human-rights reports, he’d read stories documenting persecution of Christians in Chongjin, a city in the north of the country. He recalled a defector from outside Chongjin who told a heartbreaking story to the United Nations. The defector’s son was 20 years old when he met a Korean-American pastor. He converted to Christianity and attended secret Bible-study meetings. In 2008, agents from North Korea’s State Security Department dragged the boy from his home. Two years later, the boy’s mother heard from a friend that their son had been interrogated for six months and then sent, without trial, to a prison camp. The man told UN investigators that he knew his son was “as good as dead.” Another defector told the U.S. Senate that she’d witnessed the execution of six elderly Christians who had refused to renounce their faith. They were lined up and killed one by one, she said, by a soldier who poured molten iron over them.

Accounts like these convinced Fowle that the people of Chongjin had suffered, and that among them were a stronghold of Christians who worshipped in secrecy. At the orientation in Beijing, Cockerell had mentioned that North Koreans outside Pyongyang, particularly in the northern territories, tended to be more conservative and more distrustful of foreigners. But the warning did nothing to weaken Fowle’s resolve. God’s will, he felt, would prevail.

After three days in Pyongyang, the group headed east on a private, three-car locomotive. Outside the capital, signs of poverty were more apparent. Wood-cooker trucks, their engines jerry-rigged to run on burning wood chips, crept along like rolling barbecue pits. The 1970s Korean diesel train was immaculately preserved, with a luxurious dining car, but it sounded like a junkyard as it carried the group along the coast.

In recent years, security around foreign visitors has tightened dramatically, after an incident in 2008 in which a South Korean tourist strolled onto a military site while out for a walk and was shot to death by a soldier. At times, Fowle felt the eyes of a minder about to notice the Bible, or a penetrating glance that would divine his secret mission. The sooner he got rid of it, the sooner he could stop worrying about the North Korean guides. In Wonsan, they visited a giant railroad station, notable because in 1945, Kim Il-sung had traveled to Pyongyang from that very spot, after he was liberated from the Japanese. And they saw the small hotel where the Dear Leader had slept the night before the journey. But there was no chance to slip away. Next came Hamhung, which also provided no opportunities. There was nowhere to leave it at the Hamhung Fertilizer Factory or the city’s brutalist Grand Theatre, either.

On the evening of May 5, the train rolled into Chongjin, and a small group headed for a local pub before turning in for the night. Around nine, Fowle and several others arrived at the Chongjin Seaman’s Club. In the days when North Korea shipped much of its steel to Japanese companies, the club had been a popular drinking spot among sailors. Now it catered to foreign tourists, with a gift shop that sold delicately arranged bouquets of dried fish. It was the last stop before the group returned to Pyongyang, a fact that weighed heavily on Fowle as he sipped orange sodas and watched his fellow travelers drink and socialize. After an hour, Fowle excused himself to the restroom. It seemed as good a place as any to leave the Bible. The city sees few tourists, Fowle told himself. Once his group left, it could be days before anyone used the bathroom again.

He slipped into the men’s restroom and took in the layout—a sink and a mirror, a row of urinals, and a few stalls. He walked out and back to his seat. A few minutes later, Fowle returned to the bathroom. He was about to remove the Bible from his pocket when he saw Daniel Levitsky, a guide with Koryo Tours, washing his hands. Fowle froze. “Don’t miss the bus,” Levitsky told him on the way out.

Fowle walked into a stall and shut the door behind him. He wrenched the Bible free from his pocket. From his other pocket he pulled a sheet of newspaper and wrapped the Bible like a gift. His mind raced: What if he couldn’t make the scene look accidental? Beneath the twitchy blue light of a bare bulb, the bathroom looked so small and clean. He took a pen from his pocket and dropped it on the floor, as if training his hands to manufacture an accident. Staring at it, he wondered if it looked right. Then, in one motion, he tucked his gift beneath a wastebasket.

Hiding it, he hoped, would buy him enough time to get out of the country. Some janitor would find it days later and god would take care of the rest. If it was found, he’d deny everything. He collected himself and climbed aboard the bus. The group spent the night at the Chongjin Tourist Hotel, which, Koryo’s itinerary boasted, overlooks train tracks, “providing a great chance to observe night-time rail traffic and soak up the city’s industrial atmosphere.”

Fowle awoke in an anxious mood the next morning. The group headed out for a tour of a Chongjin factory, which sold candy and dinner rolls. The products sat in small piles at the end of silent conveyor belts, but they didn’t appear to have actually been produced there. The facility was as clean as an operating room. Not a single conveyer belt moved.

It was late morning when Simon Cockerell gathered the group in the parking lot outside the factory. “Did anyone leave something at the Seaman’s Club last night?” Cockerell asked.

“Oh yeah,” said Emanuel Luttersdorfer. “I left behind 3,000 renminbi in a toilet stall.”

Luttersdorfer had traveled with Koryo before and expected Cockerell to laugh. But Cockerell was silent. Another tourist doubled down on the joke, saying that he’d left his Bible behind.

“Are you serious?” Cockerell asked.

“No,” the man said. “Of course not.”

Cockerell asked again, turning to look at everyone in the group. Finally, Fowle stepped forward.

“I think I forgot my book,” he said.

“What kind of book?” Cockerell asked. His face reddened as he stared Fowle down.

“A turquoise book,” he said. “My Bible.”

Cockerell and Levitsky pulled Fowle behind one of the KITC tour buses along with a guide from the KITC named Mr. Oh. Fowle’s ideas about Chongjin, it turned out, had been wrong. Someone had found the Bible almost immediately. And rather than pass it along to some underground pastor, they turned it in, very likely in terror. A KITC representative told Cockerell about the discovery.

“How did this happen?” Cockerell asked.

Mr. Oh interjected; he was vehement that North Koreans would have no interest in a Bible. “No one believes this stuff here,” he said.

After Fowle explained what he’d done, Cockerell and Levitsky spoke with the KITC guides. The minders are responsible for the actions of the tourists they shepherd around the country. They also serve as the link between their Western guests and the state. A short time later, Cockerell found Fowle again.

“That was a really stupid thing to do,” he said. “But I think we have things worked out.”

Fowle was relieved. Later that day, at a karaoke restaurant, he clapped along with the waitresses belting out North Korean pop songs and danced with one of them, smiling broadly as he spun her around. During dinner he approached Cockerell to ask about the itinerary for the remainder of the trip. For a moment, Cockerell stared at him in disbelief.

“You really don’t get it, do you?” he said.

The next morning, as the train pulled out of Chongjin, Fowle felt like a man who had crawled out of his own grave. In less than 24 hours, he’d be out of the country and on his way home. But his fellow travelers were not impressed with what he’d done: Some gave him dirty looks, while others criticized him openly.

One of the members of the tour group told me that he asked Fowle what he’d been thinking, but Fowle “just shrugged and stared back at me with that Alfred E. Neuman grin of his.”

It was an overnight trip to Pyongyang. Fowle slept. The next morning, on the way to the airport, Mr. Oh approached Fowle and gave him a quiet dressing down. He wanted Fowle to know that actions have consequences.

At the airport, Fowle’s group cleared customs and walked onto the tarmac. Simon Cockerell had told him to expect a longer customs check because of his stunt, so Fowle wasn’t surprised to be walked through the metal detector over and over again. A few minutes later, two large North Korean men approached him. They wore black slacks, polo shirts, and serious expressions. Silently, they motioned for Fowle to follow. They led him out of the airport and placed him in the back seat of a black Volkswagen Passat. Fowle sat in the middle, with one of the men to his left and the other to his right. They looked to Fowle like mirror images of one another, right down to the way they folded their arms onto their laps. From the passenger seat, a North Korean man in Western-style clothes introduced himself as Mr. Jo and said he was going to be Fowle’s interpreter.

The car arrived at the Yanggakdo Hotel, and Fowle was ushered into an empty back room. Mr. Jo walked over with the Bible in his hand.

“Is this yours?” he asked.

A photograph of Fowle’s family, which he’d forgotten about, peeked out from behind the turquoise cover. Given how carefully he’d placed the Bible under the trash can, his grand plan to pretend that he’d dropped the book accidentally no longer seemed plausible.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s mine.”

It’s not common for Americans to go missing in North Korea, but it happens often enough to have its own protocol. Within hours the U.S. Embassy in Beijing was alerted to Fowle’s situation. Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, problems like these fall to diplomats based in China. A few of them have developed a specialty in dealing with North Korea, which has leaned heavily on the Chinese for support since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Beijing sent a diplomatic cable to Washington, D.C, where Linda McFadyen, a desk officer with the State Department, was assigned Fowle’s case. In 2009, McFadyen helped bring home Laura Ling and Euna Lee, two American journalists who’d been detained in North Korea after walking into the country from China. McFadyen contacted the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang, which serves as the “protecting power” for American citizens in North Korea. She spoke with ambassador Karl Olof-Andersson and urged him to locate Fowle and arrange for a consular visit.

Back in Ohio, Tatyana learned of her husband’s detention from her sister-in-law, Laurie, who burst into the salon where she worked and told her the news. Simon Cockerell had been calling the Fowle residence all day but couldn’t get through because of errant digging that had damaged neighborhood telephone lines. Tatyana was shocked and angry; she also realized she had suddenly become the sole breadwinner. “I didn’t have time to worry about my emotions,” she later told me. “I had to take care of the family.”

A few hours later, a liaison from the State Department spoke with Tatyana and told her that the government was doing everything possible to bring her husband home. The liaison asked Tatyana not to tell anyone outside the family; the government needed to manage the news carefully. Desperate for engagement, aid, and visits from foreign dignitaries, the North Korean government sees Americans as bargaining chips that can be used to achieve its goals and manufacture propaganda.

As soon as Fowle identified the Bible, Mr. Oh escorted him to a room on the 36th floor of the Yanggakdo Hotel. Less than an hour earlier, he’d been on his way home. Now he contemplated his grim future while looking out on the Pyongyang skyline. It was like a postcard that had been left in the sun, its colors washed out. Behind him two North Koreans cataloged his luggage, removing items like razors and nail clippers. Then a man in a military uniform stepped into the room. “You are here under investigation for this incident of leaving the Bible in the DPRK,” the man said.

A short while later, a compact man named Mr. Kim arrived in a gray two-piece uniform. Its stiff fabric glistened in the soft light. The jacket was cut in the style popularized by Mao Tse-tung. He wore a small red pin affixed to the left breast, on it an image of Kim Il-sung’s smiling face.

He was the shortest of several Mr. Kims that Fowle met, and so Fowle started calling him Short Mr. Kim. He began by asking about Fowle’s interest in North Korea and the minutiae of his life in Ohio—his work, his family, his education, and his upbringing. His tone was distant but probing, with a forced sense of informality. After 30 minutes, the mood shifted. The conversation became an interrogation.

“Who is paying you to do this?” Mr. Kim asked. He spoke calmly, but his posture grew more assertive and his eyes hardened. He seemed to sink into his suit, like a snake coiling before it strikes. “Things will be much less pleasant for you if you don’t cooperate,” Mr. Kim said. “Tell us who gave you the Bible.”

“No one sent me,” Fowle said. “I bought the Bible myself, on Amazon.”

He immediately regretted the detail. If they forced him to sign into his Amazon account, they’d see his order history, full of books by North Korean defectors and critics. Fowle tried to explain why he’d brought the Bible to North Korea. He told Mr. Jo and Mr. Kim about his dream, and about his trip to the desert. Both men seemed baffled. Mr. Kim looked vaguely disgusted.

“You’re not being forthcoming enough,” Mr. Kim said. “We’re going to transfer you someplace where the facilities won’t be as accommodating and the interrogation techniques will be harsher.”

After an hour, Mr. Kim left Fowle with a minder. There were no shackles and no bars on his window, but each minute that ticked by brought him further from the tourist he’d once been. He turned on the television and saw a report about Matthew Miller, the American who had been arrested in North Korea just a few weeks earlier. The next day, a worker arrived to look at the television. When he finished, it no longer picked up foreign channels like the BBC and Japan’s NHK. He was getting a taste of what it meant to be North Korean. His few possessions fit in a suitcase, his movements were restricted, and he had access to just three state-owned channels.

A few weeks later, a doctor was brought to examine him. Her name was Dr. Park; she gave Fowle a checkup, which consisted primarily of her placing one hand flat against his chest and thumping it with the other.

A routine began to emerge. In the mornings, a minder, Tall Mr. Kim, would arrive. He had a relaxed manner, and like Fowle, he knew a bit of Russian. The two men exchanged pleasantries and sat down to watch TV together. In the mornings, they watched exercise programs. Tall Mr. Kim would follow along with the routines and encourage Fowle to join him. In the afternoons, Short Mr. Kim would arrive. Mr. Jo explained that Mr. Kim was helping him prepare for a trial. First he would have to confess his crimes against the government of North Korea. This confession would take the form of a written document, which the two men would draft together. Each day, Fowle’s interrogator announced himself the same grating way: Instead of knocking, he rolled the backs of his fingernails against the door.

Mr. Kim expected Fowle to wear dress shirts during his interviews and to bow deeply to all North Korean officials he encountered. Some days the conversations were congenial. Others, tedious. Occasionally, they were menacing.

“No one sent me,” Fowle repeated again and again. “I came on my own.”

“That’s schoolboy logic,” Mr. Kim said. “If you don’t start cooperating, things are going to become less pleasant. It will be very bad for you if you behave like this at your trial.”

Since the truth didn’t seem to satisfy his captors, Fowle eventually invented a man named Mr. Carter who, he said, ran a secretive underground missionary operation based in China. “He’s the one who pushed me to do it,” he said, but Mr. Kim didn’t believe him.

In the evenings, Fowle watched old propaganda films from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, often with Tall Mr. Kim at his side. In one movie, Truman and Eisenhower faced off against Stalin. Fowle loved hearing the snippets of American English. When the films ended and Tall Mr. Kim left, Fowle’s thoughts turned to his wife and family.

A few days after Fowle was detained, Simon Cockerell returned to Pyongyang for a business trip. He felt certain that Fowle was being held at the Yanggakdo Hotel. He had no illusions about rescuing Fowle but wanted the American to know that someone was looking out for him. Every night of his ten-day stay, Cockerell opened his windows and blasted Western music. When he went out or returned, he walked along different floors of the hotel, looking for guards. He left Pyongyang with no news for Fowle’s family.

Back in Ohio, Tatyana received a weekly check-in from the State Department. These situations play out according to a pattern, they said. In six months, her husband would be home. There was nothing to do but wait. In the meantime, she could send letters to her husband through the State Department. If the ambassador in Pyongyang managed to arrange a meeting with Fowle, he could pass them along. So far his requests had gone unanswered.  

Tatyana couldn’t sit idly. She wrote to several former presidents: Clinton, both Bushes, and Jimmy Carter. The only reply she received was a form letter from the younger Bush’s office. She’d come of age in the last days of the Soviet Union and understood the social underpinnings of Communist regimes. “It’s about who you know,” she said. “If I talk to enough people, maybe one of them knew my grandfather or my uncle.” She called the Russian Embassies in Washington, D.C., and Pyongyang.

“If something happened to you, maybe,” they told her. “But he’s an American.”

On June 6, the U.S. government acknowledged Fowle’s detention, and the media descended on Miamisburg. A few hours later, Tony Hall, a former Democratic congressman who had represented Dayton, told reporters that he had called North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, hoping to get more information about Fowle’s situation. Hall had traveled to North Korea eight times, working on fighting hunger, and had developed some ties in the North Korean government. He promised Tatyana that he would look into her husband’s case. “Leaving a Bible in a room is not a big deal and shouldn’t be a big deal,” he said.

The media remained outside the Fowles’ house. For two weeks, Tatyana didn’t go to work, because she couldn’t face the reporters. The kids, meanwhile, wrote letters to their father. Tatyana sensed that they needed something to distract them. She bought some hens and a rooster, and soon there were dozens of chicks, small and fragile and soft, and in need of attention.

“Eight Days a Week”

“Back in the USSR”

“I Wanna Hold Your Hand”

On the blank pages of his Korean language workbook, Fowle wrote lists to distract himself from all the questions he couldn’t answer. He had no idea if his wife and kids were OK, no idea if they knew what had become of him. He didn’t know if he still had a job. His list of Beatles songs began optimistically enough, with “I Feel Fine.” The 11th entry, “Help,” was scrawled in anxious block letters. In a list of American presidents, he missed only Chester A. Arthur and Martin Van Buren. He preferred to list songs by category—Motown Sound, Christmas, Sixties Classic Rock—humming the melodies to push dark thoughts away. Paper was in short supply, but he kept a diary, writing just two sentences per day: notes on the progress of a construction project visible from his window, or about an immaculately refurbished old army jeep parked in front of the hotel. After three weeks at the Yanggakdo, Fowle’s statement of guilt was complete.

On May 31, Fowle was told to collect his things. His minders led him downstairs to a familiar Volkswagen Passat, the same car that had brought him there from the airport. Driving through Pyongyang, they passed several construction sites, which reminded Fowle of something he’d read. A group of workers were tearing down houses on the outskirts of Pyongyang, to make way for a highway extension. In one house, they discovered some pages from a Bible. Investigators compiled a list of everyone who had ever lived there and tortured them until they revealed the names of a handful of North Korean pastors operating in secret. The pastors were made to lay down on the pavement. They were still alive when the steamroller pressed them into a freshly laid section of highway.

A few minutes later, the car pulled up in front of a stately guesthouse with a green roof. The driver and Mr. Jo, Fowle’s interpreter, walked ahead of him, like Secret Service agents clearing a path for the president. They entered a large room with walls the color of split-pea soup. Mr. Jo handed Fowle a piece of paper with his statement of guilt and instructed him to read it aloud to an official with an oval face. At the conclusion, Fowle bowed deeply, as he’d been taught. Then Mr. Jo led him to his room.  “Start thinking about what letters you might want to write home,” Mr. Jo told him.

The thought of writing something other than a list thrilled him almost as much as knowing he’d be allowed to communicate with his family. Before going to bed, he sat at the large desk and laid out his writing utensils. He pulled open the desk drawer, and a line of block letters stared back at him, written in black ink on blond wood: NO SCHOOLBOY. Had another detainee stayed in the room? Was it Kenneth Bae?

A new routine took shape. In the late afternoons, Mr. Jo would come and fetch Fowle for his daily walk. The interpreter would walk ahead, signaling when it was OK for Fowle to follow. Outside the men spoke more freely. One night, Fowle asked Mr. Jo about the disastrous famine of the 1990s. Mr. Jo recalled that the worst years had coincided with his time at college, when he studied English at university in Pyongyang. Fowle pressed him to say more, but he wouldn’t.

On June 20, Fowle was driven to a hotel to finally meet with the Swedish ambassador. The American was warned in advance not to try passing any notes to the ambassador. As he walked into the room, Fowle saw a stack of letters and a couple of chocolate bars sitting on the table and broke down. It was the first contact he’d had with the outside world since his ordeal began. For months he’d imagined his life unwinding—a lost job, perhaps a lost home, and a family that would be lost without him. When the ambassador told Fowle that his family was fine, he felt a tremendous sense of relief. He was surprised to learn that he’d made international news. He had feared that he would be swept under the rug—that the North Koreans would somehow be able to cover up his disappearance.

The ambassador passed Fowle an anthology of works by Ernest Hemingway and a stack of letters from back home: his sister-in-law, Brenda, had sent a week’s worth of Sudoku and crossword puzzles clipped from the Dayton Daily News. Each of his children had sent letters. Tatyana had not. A product of the Soviet Union, she hated the idea that someone, American or Korean, would read them. Besides, there was really only one thing she wanted to say: Why didn’t you listen when I told you not to bring that Bible?

During his visit with the ambassador, Fowle was allowed to make a collect call to his family. The call cost about $140, a large expense for a family facing an uncertain future.

A week after America learned of Fowle’s detention, Sony Pictures released the first trailer for a film called The Interview. “THIS DECEMBER… JAMES FRANCO… AND SETH ROGEN… WILL ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE… KIM JONG-UN,” the teaser proclaimed. Two weeks later, North Korea condemned the film, promising a “merciless response” if the U.S. government did not take steps to prevent its release. The regime considered the comedy an act of war. Fowle couldn’t have chosen a worse time to place himself at the mercy of Kim Jong-un.

In October 2013, Nigel Clark, the head of international marketing for Sony Pictures, asked Li Chow, the studio’s general manager in Beijing, for her thoughts on the script. He was worried that the leadership in China, a major market for Hollywood blockbusters, might object to the portrayal of its ally. On November 1, 2013, Chow responded:

“It is difficult to say whether the government will object. In times when there is no political tension in the region, it would not be a problem.… In recent years, China seems to have distanced itself from N. Korea and it is unlikely that Sony will be hurt by making the film.”

By this time, Kenneth Bae had been in custody for a year. Then, in April and May of 2014, Miller and Fowle were detained. On the day that Fowle met with the Swedish ambassador, Kim Myong-chol, a spokesman for the North Korean government, released the first of a number of statements criticizing the film. “There is a special irony in this storyline as it shows the desperation of the U.S. government and American society,” he said. “A film about the assassination of a foreign leader mirrors what the U.S. has done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine. And let us not forget who killed Kennedy—Americans.” Suddenly, Sony Pictures had a problem on its hands; its CEO, Michael Lynton, asked the Rand Corporation for a threat analysis. After watching an early cut of the film, an analyst warned Lynton that the regime “will likely explore Sony’s computer systems to see if Sony is ready to deal with North Korean criticism,” adding that The Interview would not be “the first time that American films have satirized the North Korean leader.” The analyst also recounted a conversation with Robert King, the State Department’s special envoy for human rights in North Korea: “Their office has apparently decided that this is typical North Korean bullying, likely without follow-up, but you never know with North Korea.” On July 2, Shiro Kambe, a Sony executive in Japan, wrote to the film studio’s top lawyer and its head of public relations. “We understand that several US media recently reported about … North Korea’s decision to put two detained American tourists on trial,” he wrote. “Are these changing the tension of the US media or government on the movie?”

As the summer dragged on, Fowle’s lists of pop and gospel songs gave way to a growing litany of health concerns. He began to suffer from dizzy spells. Sometimes the edges of his vision were suddenly flooded with black spots. He started wondering if his captors were poisoning him. In a napkin, he began stockpiling his nail clippings and collecting hairs from the bathtub drain so that they may one day be tested. One afternoon in July, Mr. Jo took him to a local hospital, a three-story cement building that looked like a commercial warehouse.

Mr. Jo led Fowle past a modest pharmacy and down a long corridor, stopping at various stations along the way. At one station, Fowle had his blood drawn. At the next, his hearing was tested. He gave a urine sample. At another station, a nurse laid him on a gurney and placed eight electrodes on his chest and arms for an EKG test. At the ear, nose, and throat station, Fowle complained of congestion. A man tipped his head back and squirted a brownish red liquid up his nose.

Next they arrived at Dr. Park’s office. The physician, who had examined Fowle at the Yanggakdo Hotel, wore a crisp white lab coat with her name printed on a breast pocket. Her assistant, Jun, wore a nurse’s uniform with an old-fashioned cap. The doctor flashed a familiar smile and greeted Fowle in English. An X-ray technician wearing a heavy lead vest blasted Fowle’s chest with radiation while he and Dr. Park made small talk. The machine looked decades old. Fowle noticed the thickness of the technician’s vest and the fact that no one else in the room was wearing one. Dr. Park didn’t seem concerned. Before he left, she repeated the test she’d administered at the hotel, tapping his body with her hands. No one asked about his dizzy spells or his vision problems.

If Fowle had dreamt of seeing the real North Korea from his family room in Ohio, now he had a front-row seat. He managed to get through only one Hemingway story before the book was taken away “to be checked”; it was never returned. At the guesthouse, the plumbing rarely worked, power outages were constant, and television programs were limited almost exclusively to propaganda. Sometimes the electricity remained off for 12 hours at a stretch.

For the first time in his life, Fowle finished a Sudoku puzzle. Mr. Jo was intrigued by the game. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s Sudoku,” Fowle said. “Don’t you have these here?”

By the time the first Sudoku appeared in a Japanese newspaper, in 1984, relations were already strained between the two countries.

Mr. Jo was guarded but seemed to regard Fowle with less suspicion as time passed. Sometimes it seemed to Fowle that he was speaking candidly about his own life and his own thoughts.

“Power is a very precious thing in North Korea,” he said. “Even here in Pyongyang, the power is off a lot. But I don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Fowle asked.

“I have a solar panel for my house,” he said. “Made in China. When the power goes out, my lights stay on.” In Pyongyang, more and more people were getting them, he said.

The two men became friendly. Mr. Jo arranged for him to see Dr. Park and summoned a barber when Fowle started looking shaggy. Because his toiletries had been confiscated, Fowle couldn’t even trim his nails without borrowing Mr. Jo’s Swiss Army knife.

Once, during their daily walk, Mr. Jo told Fowle something surprising about Jeju Island, a volcanic province of South Korea.

“I’ve heard they grow oranges there,” he said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Sure, I like oranges,” Fowle said.

“Food security is one of the major things we’ve got to worry about here. We’re always on edge,” Mr. Jo said, lowering his voice. “You never see oranges in North Korea.”

Fowle was touched by this small revelation: a grown man captivated by an island full of orange trees. As they made their way back to the guesthouse, Mr. Jo spoke again. “Food is a precious thing here,” he said. “It isn’t always easy.”

For hours each day, Fowle was left alone in his room. He’d been warned not to cross the threshold that divided his bedroom from an outer anteroom, where a window looked out onto the east side of the compound. But boredom emboldened him. He started by peeling back bits of the vinyl covering from the windows in his bedroom, creating slits through which he could see Mr. Jo riding up to the guesthouse on his bicycle. Before long he started creeping into the anteroom. One day he saw a worker plant a flower in the hair of the young woman who brought Fowle his meals. When she arrived with his dinner that night, it was still there. He paid her a compliment he’d learned from his Beginner’s Guide to Korean and pointed to the flower. She blushed.

Fowle no longer received letters from home and had no idea if the letters he wrote were reaching his family. Still, he kept writing. In August, he wrote to his daughter:

I love you and miss you very, very much. I know you are already a big help to mommy, so keep up the good work while I’m gone. Keep studying hard in school and study your bible lessons in school and church. I’m sorry I missed your birthday. I pray that I’ll be home for your next one.

In early August, Mr. Jo accompanied Fowle to the press conference I had seen on TV. Fowle was determined to project a positive attitude. Though he was beginning to lose hope, he wanted his children to see that their father was alright. In front of the cameras, Fowle forgot his talking points; off-camera Mr. Jo reminded him what he needed to say.

For Tatyana, seeing her husband in good spirits on TV was a relief. She also knew that Tony Hall was using his connections to help bring Fowle home. Thanks to the work he’d done to help combat hunger in North Korea, he was able to set up a meeting with a diplomat from the DPRK; on August 13, the two men discussed Fowle’s case at a New York City hotel.

A few weeks later, Mr. Jo began coaching Fowle for his next interview. On September 1, Fowle was driven to a nearby sports complex. He was seated at a large table; this time the reporters waiting to speak to him were Americans.

As I watched in Manhattan, it was clear to me that the month since Fowle’s last television appearance had not been easy on him. He wore the same blue dress shirt and the same oversize glasses. But his demeanor had changed entirely. He spoke too quickly, tripping over his own words. There was a panic in his eyes. He told CNN’s Will Ripley, “I’m getting desperate,” and he looked to me like he meant it.

His boss, the city manager of Moraine, told reporters that if Fowle didn’t return soon, he would lose his job. “We can’t let this go on forever,” he said. At the end of September, Fowle was laid off.

In the weeks after the press conference, the weather grew cold. Mr. Jo brought Fowle a heavy brown jacket, to keep him warm during their late-afternoon walks. He told him he’d brought it from home.

On October 21, Mr. Jo brought Fowle’s suitcases to the room and began packing. Each item was checked against the inventory that had been noted when he was first arrested. In five minutes they were on the road, and in ten they were pulling up to the same hotel where Fowle had met with the Swedish ambassador. Fowle was led down a hallway and into a large conference room filled with North Korean journalists and photographers. Twenty minutes later, a uniformed official entered the room and approached him.

“The Supreme Leader and First Secretary of the Worker’s Party, Kim Jong-un, has recommended that you be released,” the man said.

It took a few seconds to sink in. He’d expected to be hauled off to a gulag; instead he was free. He bowed deeply and began talking about his appreciation for Kim Jong-un. A young, well-dressed Korean-American man stopped him, explaining that he was from the Department of Defense.

“Watch what you say until we’re on the plane,” he said.

They were joined by a middle-aged man who wore a heavy beard. Together they walked quickly to a waiting car, which rushed them to the airport. They boarded a large plane, and Fowle looked around for Miller and Bae, hoping that they, too, were heading home. He sat next to the bearded man, who explained that he was a doctor. Fowle told the man about his health problems in North Korea and removed a napkin from his pocket, which contained the nail trimmings and hair follicles he’d saved. He offered them to the doctor; the doctor shook his head no.

Fowle asked the doctor how the Americans had convinced the North Koreans to let him go. Just then a man approached Fowle with a tablet device to show him a letter from a North Korean official to Tony Hall, which praised his efforts on Fowle’s behalf.

A few hours later, Tatyana learned the news. For months the weekly updates from the State Department offered nothing new. Now a television news broadcast was reporting that her husband was on his way home. She told the children they were all going to the airport early in the morning for a surprise.

The next day, before the sun rose, Fowle landed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where he’d visited his father countless times as a young boy. A few hours after he landed, I called his house. Tatyana answered the phone and yelled for her husband.

Several months later, after many phone conversations, I flew to Ohio to meet Fowle in person. He greeted me on his porch, looking healthy and relaxed. He spent the day telling me about his time in North Korea, both as a tourist and as a captive. He spoke fondly of the guides, KITC employees, who became his jailers. His headaches had stopped, and his vision was back to normal. His wife eventually forgave him, and the Moraine streets division gave him his old job back.

Sony Pictures hadn’t fared as well. In the months after Fowle’s release, a group called the Guardians of Peace hacked into Sony’s network and published a trove of data, including salary information and internal emails. While the North Korean government did not acknowledge its involvement, the hackers’ threats included references to “the movie of terrorism,” which everyone believed referred to The Interview. The intelligence community is all but certain that North Korea was behind the cyber attack. Sony Pictures eventually released the film in a limited theatrical run but ended up losing millions of dollars on it.

When Tatyana returned home from work that evening, we sat down to a baked-fish dinner. Fowle wondered aloud about Kenneth Bae and Matthew Miller, who were freed two weeks after him thanks to a visit from former National Security Agency director James Clapper. He wanted to talk with them about their time in North Korea.

Fowle was warm but beguiling. I pressed him about whether he felt he’d accomplished anything; he shook his head and told me that God must not have wanted him to succeed in North Korea. But after hours of conversation, I realized that Fowle was wrong. Somehow he didn’t see that, during those endless talks with Mr. Jo and Tall and Short Mr. Kim, he had managed to share his most intimate thoughts about his faith. He told them about his fast in the desert, the dream in which God had cleansed away his sins, and how a divine plan had brought him to North Korea to help encourage unlikely believers. It hadn’t happened how he’d imagined: He thought that God wanted the Bible to be his tool, but then Fowle found a captive audience.    

I asked Fowle if his hunger for adventure had been satiated. Soon after he returned home, he made a joke to local reporters that he was thinking about going to Pakistan. His boss didn’t find it very funny. It turns out that Fowle’s new employment contract explicitly states that if he travels somewhere dangerous ever again, it could be grounds for dismissal. For the moment, Fowle seemed chastened. “No Mount Everest, no Saudi Arabia,” he shrugged.

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