January, 2005
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE

The American Dream (continued)

What had at first been a nagging suspicion that Hanna was capable of exaggeration had become, after a month spent with her and reporting her story, a crippling doubt. Iraq, the context for her amazing story, was an astonishment of human cruelty. That is why her story was so terribly believable. She was telling a larger truth. And the American government, out of sincere altruism or rank political opportunism, responded to this truth. Even if it wasn't her truth. Even if it was, in fact, a mirage. Even if she was, after all, a liar.

THE MOMENT I WAS DREADING had arrived. It was time to call Oxford, though by now, of course, I knew what the answer would be: Hanna had never graduated or attended the school, which didn't even offer a degree in accounting. The significance of this falsehood was immediately obvious: It opened her entire story to doubt. If she lied about Oxford, a claim that could be so easily refuted, what else was she lying about?

Jeanne d'Arc would certainly know the truth of Jumana's story. She was home alone when my translator arrived. Had her daughter ever lived in England and attended Oxford? he asked. Jeanne d'Arc, sheepishly, said she hadn't. She was terrified of Hanna. That's why she had never said anything.

Now Hanna walked in the door. She looked at her mother and, sensing the mood in the room, asked what was wrong. Jeanne d'Arc said something, and Hanna shrieked, "I did go to Oxford! I did! I did go to Oxford!" Her pupils shot straight up into her head. "I will write to them," she announced, and sat down at the computer. She tried typing a few words, but her agitation was too great. Enraged, she gave the computer mouse a few good thwacks against the table, then flung it at the ceiling.

"I will call!" she cried, running into the kitchen. The recorded message informing her that she had misdialed played—one, two, three times—until, in frustration, she threw the phone hard against the kitchen wall.

"You ruined my life!" she screamed at her mother, who sat shaking in her favorite chair. "I will never forgive you. You betrayed me once, and now this is the second time!"

Jeanne d'Arc's face had turned blue. "No, no," she protested. "I didn't say you never went to Oxford. All I said was that I forgot where you went exactly."

But Hanna had already begun throwing things: a crystal ashtray, a brass candleholder, a greeting card welcoming her to America, several framed photographs, an almost full cup of coffee. She made a clean sweep of everything on the coffee table, hurling the objects straight at her mother.

The book was finished, she said. She wanted nothing more to do with me.

Her recklessness shocked me. I'd been a reporter for twenty-five years and considered myself a professional skeptic, yet I'd been duped. I consoled myself with the thought that I was in good company. If I'd been duped, so had the Pentagon, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and one of the nation's most esteemed newspapers. On the other hand, I understand that the relationship between a journalist and a source is based on trust. I'd never met anyone who played with that relationship as cynically as Hanna. She could coolly size up her audience, calculate what they wanted to hear, and work it to her advantage.

"She was very poised, very credible," recalled Gerald Burke, a retired Massachusetts State Police major who met Hanna soon after he arrived in Iraq as advisor to the Baghdad police chief. "For just coming in country, it was a perfect case: someone coming forward with our worst expectations of what the regime was like." He, too, believed Hanna, though a part of him wondered whether her story seemed a little too perfect. "Occasionally, we would even say to ourselves, If this is a con job, then she deserves to go to the United States, or even Hollywood."

Far from being a story about the indomitability of the human spirit, Hanna's tale now seemed to open a window on the coalition's naivete—the willingness of its leaders to believe almost anything that fit their agenda.

I began cataloging the details that once sounded so rich but now seemed improbable, then started a new round of phone calls.

Was it true that two of her four bodyguards had been killed while protecting her?

No, Dryden said, never heard that one. And by the way, she didn't have four bodyguards. Only one.

Was it true that her old prison had been turned into a museum, which was then named in her honor? No on both counts. The prison was bulldozed and excavated to make way for a new addition to the Baghdad Police Academy.

Was it true that she was physically unable to stand (and therefore work) for long periods of time because her uterus leaked as a consequence of horrific torture? Hardly. An ultrasound had shown that she was merely going through early menopause. And according to one Iraqi friend, she could stand for hours if it entailed a shopping trip.

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