Deep Eddy

I opened the tear-away seal on the oversized FedEx mailer and shook it upside down. A single, personal check fell out. No envelope, no note, no nothing else. Just the check, which slid off the counter and fluttered down onto my sock feet.

I picked it up and examined it. “Seventy Five Thousand And 00/100.” The “A” in “And” was sloppy: He’d accidentally written “D” and had to make an “A” out of it after the fact by drawing a line through the middle.

He’d scribbled “Consulting” on the memo line. “Mmmm hmm,” I murmured, to no one. “Good work if you can get it.”

It was December 23, 2015. I’d been on the island for three weeks, during which time my peat bog scotch habit had regressed into a marshland morass of Deep Eddy sweet tea-flavored vodka. No longer burdened by the necessity of keeping up any sort of appearances, I was running through bottles and bottles of the stuff, often falling asleep reading The New Yorker by the water in an old school beach chair someone left in the garage, a rusty requiem for yesteryear’s family vacations, complete with yellow vinyl tubing.

I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was doing there. My family had a timeshare once upon a Piggly Wiggly, and I visited often as a teenager too, but other than the folding chair, I didn’t find so much as a trace of nostalgia. Instead, I found the (not always unpleasant) depths of alcoholism. And a bartender called Dana.

Caesar

On July 31, 2014, a man disguised in a bright blue parka, a hat and sunglasses, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Speaking through an interpreter, he described an ongoing genocide in Syria. And he had the pictures to prove it. More than 50,000 of them, in fact.

“Caesar,” as he’s known, was a military photographer who defected from the Bashar al-Assad regime in August of 2013. Prior to the country’s civil war, he photographed crime scenes, car accidents and the like. But in early 2011, when the uprising against Assad began, Caesar was called to photograph the remains of people the regime described as “terrorists,” only they weren’t. Rather, those first bodies were “just demonstrators,” as he put it, during a lengthy 2015 interview with The Guardian.

That was just the beginning. Over more than two years, Caesar worked for the Assad government photographing scores of tortured corpses as part of what Human Rights Watch called “a bureaucratic effort by the Syrian security apparatus to maintain a photographic record of the thousands who died in detention” since the onset of the war. On his way to Capitol Hill, Caesar brought the images to The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which made them into a video installation. Several months later, they were put on display at the UN’s New York headquarters.

It’s never been entirely clear why Assad insisted on keeping visual evidence of atrocities. Caesar himself “often wondered” about the regime’s rationale. In a 2015 interview with Foreign Affairs, Assad first suggested Caesar’s pictures might be fakes. (“They’re just pictures of a head, for example, with some skulls. Who said this is done by the government?”) Then he blamed Qatar (“[An investigation into the photos’ authenticity] was funded by Qatar. Nothing is proven.”) Finally, he resorted to Kremlin-style Whataboutism. (“The United States in particular and the West in general are in no position to talk about human rights.”)

One early examination of Caesar’s images was indeed commissioned by Qatar, which supported, funded and armed various rebel groups during the conflict. But that investigation (carried out by three attorneys with deep experience in the area, including the former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, who called Caesar’s photos “a smoking gun”) wasn’t the only authenticity inquiry.

In 2015, Human Rights Watch analyzed nearly 29,000 of the images. Using geolocation as well as evidence provided by other regime defectors from Assad’s military hospitals, researchers found “evidence of widespread torture, starvation, beatings and disease in Syrian government detention facilities.” The 86-page report also claimed to decipher the coding system for cards placed with the bodies of the dead. The investigators were able to identify dozens of victims whose relatives and friends were contacted and interviewed. One defector said, of the macabre backdrop for some of Caesar’s pictures, “I know this place stone by stone, brick by brick. I lived there 24 hours a day. I had to carry [the bodies] myself.”

In 2017, the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights filed a criminal complaint in Germany in connection with the images, noting that “metadata can be used to verify the photographs.” The following year, German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Jamil Hassan, who ran Syria’s Air Force Intelligence Service.

On December 9, 2024, just days after Assad abdicated and fled to Moscow, the US unsealed criminal charges against Hassan and another Assad official, who were accused by the Justice Department of war crimes. Detainees in their custody, including US citizens, were “beaten, electrocuted… burned with acid” and forced to “listen to the screams of tortured prisoners,” according to the indictment, which also alleges that Syrian military officials threatened to “kill and sexually assault” detainees’ family members.

“The Justice Department has a long memory, and we will never stop working to find and bring to justice those who tortured Americans,” Merrick Garland said, in a press release. Christopher Wray bemoaned “the systematic use of cruel and inhumane treatment” by the regime.

In addition to raising awareness about what, exactly, was going on inside Assad’s jails, military hospitals and torture chambers, Caesar hoped to prod the US government into some sort of action, but things got very complicated, very fast. ISIS had seized Mosul in Iraq and was in the process of declaring for itself a new caliphate with the Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital. The Obama government was busy with that, and there was a sense in which Assad, for all his brutality, was viewed as the lesser of two evils. “I completely understand,” Caesar said, late in October of 2014, “but I and millions of Syrians feel depressed when we see that the killer of thousands of prisoners is left unchecked.”

Four years later, Caesar made another trip to Capitol Hill, where he planned to testify again before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but there was a problem. Caesar’s translator, as well as congressional staffers and the witness himself, were concerned that one committee member might try to compromise his identity. And maybe even divulge it to the Assad regime. “I often disguise [witnesses],” Mouaz Moustafa, a well-known activist who served as Caesar’s translator, told The Guardian. “But that day I was especially wary of Tulsi.”

Dana

Life on the island feels a lot like a Gary Larson cartoon — “an enigmatic juxtaposition of incongruities,” as a 2024 article in Studies in American Humor put it.

The local economy’s brought to you almost entirely by big-name hotels, which is to say it’s a hopelessly generic, somewhat chintzy resort town, survived by the worst kind of over-commercialized, pre-packaged tourism and vacation golf. Alex Garland’s The Beach it isn’t.

And yet, local officials demonstrate an almost pathological commitment to preserving the natural habitat despite the place being overrun by publicly-traded leisure companies. There are strictly-enforced city ordinances covering everything from acceptable colors for commercial buildings and signs (taupe only) to the density of street lights (few and far between).

The result is a kind of safari atmosphere. The wildlife still roam freely, setting up Far Side-style human-nature juxtapositions, typified by alligators sunning themselves on the banks of golf course water traps. Dolphins still congregate at the usual places, at the usual times (no, you can’t ride them), and human manatees waddling pale around gift shop-lined marinas can still get a glimpse of the genuine article bobbing around the yachts (no, you shouldn’t feed them).

During the spring and summer months, the ratio of tourists to locals is skewed heavily towards the former, and the restaurant scene caters to that. There are a lot of national chains and even more regional ones. My first night back, too tired from the move to brave a dive bar hunting expedition, I settled for Bonefish Grill.

Dana wasn’t actually a bartender. She was just a server with “tenure.” Having put in her time on the floor, she won a more lucrative spot making drinks. You don’t need special expertise to tend bar at a chain restaurant. You just have to be able to follow the recipes for the corporate cocktail list. Odds are, you’ll spend the vast majority of your shift pouring Pinot Grigio and placing chilled glasses upside down on Mich Ultra bottles for the servers to take out to their tables.

She had a wry wit and a mordacious demeanor to match, which I appreciated. “You don’t really like any of these people, do you?” I remember asking her, on my second or third visit. She was short with jet black hair, which she wore in a pixie cut. On her left forearm, she had a small tattoo of a bird which was remarkable only for how unimaginative it was.

There wasn’t anything extraordinary about Dana, but I liked that she seemed to hate everyone, and she liked the enigma that was — and still is — the pensive loner whose very existence can sometimes seem inexplicable. (“Are you real?” she once asked me. “I honestly don’t know,” I told her.)

I took her shopping with me just after Christmas that year. I was determined to blow through a quarter of my consulting fees, but it didn’t occur to me how hard it is to spend money on clothes when there aren’t any boutiques around.

“It’s hot,” she half-complained. We’d been wandering around the local outlet mall for more than three hours. We weren’t even $7,000 in, and that was after spending nearly $2,000 at Sunglasses Hut, where you could at least spot the name of a real fashion house, if only on eyewear. “It’s winter,” I said. “Yeah. And it’s hot,” she assured me. She was tired. And that was fine. “F–k it, we can go. The car’s full anyway.”

By that time, the backseat of my trusty Acura TL was so full of bags from cheap stores — Banana Republic, Adidas, Brooks Brothers, Nike and on and on — that we couldn’t see out the back windows. And I had to keep the trunk free for a Best Buy run. Even with the gadgets, we didn’t make it anywhere near my $20,000 shopping target, a mark I could’ve hit in 15 minutes flat back in Manhattan.

“Tell me again what you do?” she wondered, without looking up from the iPad she was hurriedly unboxing on our way back over the two bridges connecting the island to the low country mainland. “Consulting,” I reminded her. She turned to me and smirked, winking so hard behind her new Prada glasses that her right eyebrow fell below the frame: “Mmmm hmm.”

Tulsi

On November 20, 2015, then-Democratic congresswoman and Iraq war veteran Tulsi Gabbard sat for a somewhat bizarre interview with CNN. The Obama administration, she assessed, was waging an “illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government of [Bashar al-Assad].”

She wasn’t wrong. The CIA was in fact engaged in a comedically maladroit effort to discern which among the Sunni rebel groups fighting to oust Assad’s government was the most “moderate” and thereby the most deserving of US support. The operation was a mulligan of sorts — a second go at the Assad problem after a Pentagon pilot program to recruit, train and arm opposition fighters famously failed to sign up enough volunteers. The CIA scheme was extraordinarily expensive, arguably counterproductive and ludicrously fortuitous for al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, al-Nusra, in whose hands many of the CIA-supplied weapons ended up. Mike Pompeo suggested Donald Trump shut down the program in 2017.

“I don’t think Assad should be removed,” Gabbard insisted, in the same CNN interview. “If Assad is overthrown, ISIS, al-Nusra — these Islamic extremist groups — will walk straight in and take over all of Syria.” She was right on that point too. Nine years later, nearly to the day, a successor group to al-Nusra in fact toppled Assad and now stands to exercise control over his power corridor, including the country’s capital, Damascus.

Maybe it was a stretch to suggest the US was at “war” with the Syrian government maybe it wasn’t, but to keen observers, it wasn’t so much the substance of Gabbard’s critique that came across as odd, but rather her delivery. She sounded, in no uncertain terms, like she was reading from a script penned by the Russian foreign ministry. “People said the very same thing about about Gadhafi,” she went on, complaining about the characterization of Assad as a murderer and a dictator, before chiding the US for its role in creating a failed state in Libya and also for George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq.

Again, Gabbard wasn’t wrong. In fact, she was right, and on almost all points, but something seemed off. Here was a strikingly beautiful, young Democratic congresswoman with an Iraq deployment under her belt, reading, wittingly or not, almost line for line from the Kremlin’s standard issue talking points on the many failures of US military adventurism. And all in defense of Moscow’s staunchest state ally just two months after Russia’s air force showed up in Syria to restore Assad’s grip on power.

That same year, Gabbard went to Syria as part of a congressional delegation. While there, she met with injured civilians, some of whom regaled her with tales of the Assad regime’s brutality. One of her escorts on that trip was Mouaz Moustafa, the activist who interpreted for Caesar during his testimony on Capitol Hill.

After Gabbard was nominated by Trump to be Director of National Intelligence, Moustafa, who runs a 501-C(3) dedicated to supporting the Syrian opposition, shared with US media outlets an anecdote about that 2015 trip. Gabbard, he said, spoke to two young Syrian girls badly burned in what they indicated was a government airstrike. “She asked them, ‘How do you know it was the Russians and Assad who did it and not ISIS?'” Moustafa claims.

If Gabbard did in fact ask that, it was a ridiculous question: ISIS had no planes, let alone an air force capable of conducting bombing runs. In remarks quoted by NBC, and first reported by The Washington Post, Moustafa said he gave up on Gabbard at that moment. “After that conversation with the little girls, I saw there was nothing to be done.” Facts, he went on, “don’t matter” to Gabbard, who he suggested would be a “dangerous” choice for a role in America’s security community.

In January of 2017, Gabbard introduced legislation in the House designed to forbid the Pentagon and the CIA from arming the Syrian opposition. Rand Paul introduced a version of the same bill in the Senate less than two months later.

Asked by NPR’s Scott Simon in December of 2016 whether the Syrian opposition, extremists or not, could possibly be worse than a government which “has used chemical weapons and has committed what a lot of people consider to be war crimes against its own people,” Gabbard was unmoved. “My statement stands,” she told Simon, adding that “if those who are calling for the removal of this regime are, in essence, accepting the fact that al-Qaeda would take over that country, and for people to think that that would somehow improve the lives of the people there in Syria or that it would somehow better secure the American people — I think that’s a crazy notion.”

Let me pause here to note (and this is important) that it’s far from unusual for counter-narrative to sound eminently rational and even for it to be “right” when considered in a vacuum. The master of that dark art is Maria Zakharova, Putin’s de facto propaganda minister. If you didn’t know who she was — imagine, for example, that someone played for you Zakharova’s remarks and told you she was a Russian expat teaching courses at a prestigious American university — you’d come away agreeing wholeheartedly if not with everything she says, then certainly with the overarching narrative which, infallibly, revolves around masterfully-wielded “Whataboutism.”

Just two days after introducing the so-called “Stop Arming Terrorists Act,” Gabbard disclosed to CNN that she took a secret four-day trip to Syria where she met with Assad, in person. “Whatever you think about Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” she told Jake Tapper. “In order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur there has to be a conversation with him.”

It was surprising, to say the least, that a sitting member of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committee would travel, in secret, to a war zone, to meet with a foreign head of state widely reviled and considered by many in the US government to be a war criminal. “My visit to Syria has made it abundantly clear: Our counterproductive regime change war does not serve America’s interest,” she said at the time, defending the trip.

Later, it emerged that the visit was partly paid for by a non-profit which some suggested had links to the Assad regime. (The group denied any such link.) Gabbard quickly reimbursed the organization, saying scrutiny of the expenses had become “a distraction.” The jaunt was approved by the House Ethics Committee.

Since 2017, Gabbard’s foreign policy views have, if anything, calcified. In 2020, she ran for president on the Democratic ticket with no shot whatsoever of winning, raising questions as to why she bothered. Shortly thereafter, she defected from the Democratic party and became a regular on Fox News. Gabbard’s metamorphosis came as no surprise to me. I’ve “known” Tulsi for nearly a decade, although she doesn’t know me.

Moustafa, describing to The Guardian Caesar’s concerns ahead of his second congressional testimony, said that there was a “member sitting on [The House Foreign Affairs Committee] that we believe[d] would give any intelligence she has to Assad, Russia and Iran, all of which would have wanted to kill Caesar.” In 2019, Congress passed The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. The bill, which was signed into law on December 20 of that year, imposed sanctions on dozens of Syrian officials deemed complicit in atrocities.

When the Assad regime fell early in December, Gabbard was derided mercilessly on social media. “Wonder if Tulsi Gabbard will offer Assad safe harbor at her house?” Adam Kinzinger mused.

Importantly, no one has produced any evidence whatsoever to suggest Gabbard has links to foreign security services, and there’s likewise nothing in the way of proof that she has connections to any foreign governments. Nor am I accusing Gabbard of any such links or connections.

It’s entirely possible that Gabbard’s just like a lot of other Americans: She was duped by counter-narrative, and lost irretrievably down the rabbit hole. Indeed, according to three ex-advisers who spoke to ABC this month, Gabbard regularly consumed (and shared) articles published by RT which, along with Sputnik, serves as the Kremlin’s foremost international propaganda channel.

As The State Department put it in 2022, “When factual reporting on major foreign policy priorities is not favorable, Russia uses [RT and Sputnik] to inject pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda into the information environment.”

Eastern Promises

“Hey, do me a favor? Go in the bedroom and grab my phone charger. It’s in the nightstand drawer.” I took a shot and waited. Then, from the other room: “Oh. My. God. You are too f–king much.”

It was Valentine’s Day 2016, and we were drinking at my place. We’d decided not to buy each other gifts given our shared disdain for what we agreed was a fake holiday. But I couldn’t help myself.

She came back in, carrying the new MacBook I’d put in the drawer. There was a Post-it note stuck to the plastic wrapping: “Happy contrived holiday.” “You needed it,” I told her. “To match the iPad.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she sighed, plopping down next to me on the couch and crossing her legs Indian style. “Hey,” she said, tapping my knee and switching to a more serious tone. “What do you really do?”

She must’ve asked two-dozen times in two months. “This,” I said, pointing at the half-empty Deep Eddy bottle on the coffee table. “No, seriously,” she pressed. “You really want to know?” “Yessss.” “Ok,” I said, getting up. “Wait here.” I went upstairs, rummaged around in the closet and came back with a manila folder, which I dropped in her lap. “There.”

She opened it and thumbed through the paperwork. “That one,” I stopped her. “Read that one.” After a minute or two she started laughing. “That’s funny to you?” “No, it’s just — ‘terrifying’? Someone said you’re ‘terrifying’? I don’t see it.” “I know, you’d think I was Jimmy Bulger.” “Is all of this true?” she wondered. “Ehh, not all of it. And not any of it when you have enough money and the right lawyer.”

“So…” “So, what?” she asked, putting the envelope on the table and picking up the MacBook box. “I’m relieved,” she told me. “Why’s that?” “I thought you were like — this perfect, straight-arrow guy, and it was kinda making me self-conscious.” Now I was laughing. “That’s me: Mr. Straight And Narrow.” “So this is ‘consulting’?” she asked, nodding back at the envelope. “Was. Was consulting. I’m retired.”

Another month went by, maybe six weeks. One Saturday morning, before dawn, she woke up to find me typing furiously at my desk, which I’d put in the breakfast nook because I liked the view. “It’s so early,” she whined, wandering into the kitchen to pour herself a cup of the coffee I’d made. She was wearing one of my favorite Versace sweaters. It came down nearly to her knees, and the long cuffs covered her hands, which she wrapped around the steaming mug.

“What are you doing on there?” she asked. “Consulting,” I said. “I thought –” I interrupted her: “This is a different kind of consulting. Wanna see?” She walked over and I pointed to the screen. “It’s your website?” “It’s a website,” I told her. She didn’t care. And even if she did, she wouldn’t understand. “Well tell me the name of it later,” she mumbled, not even bothering to feign interest as she walked out the door onto the deck to watch the sun rise.

It wasn’t long after that when the paranoia started. No stranger to danger, my entire adult life to that point was one long case study in taking enormous risks in pursuit, primarily, of financial gain. But this (that) was a different sort of risk. Or at least I thought it might be. I wasn’t sure, though, and that was the worst part.

I saw Dana less and less. I was getting sick. From alcohol, yes, but also from worry. The penultimate time I saw her she invited herself. “What’s going on with you?” she demanded, sinking casually into the couch while I paced around the room, vexed that she’d shown up unannounced. “Come over here, I’ll show you.” I motioned her towards the breakfast nook, woke up my iMac and opened a page I’d bookmarked.

“See that?” “What?” “That. That’s Sputnik.” “What’s Sputnik?” “It’s a goddamn Russian propaganda website.” She shrugged and shook her head. “So?” “Read this.” I pointed to the first paragraph of a short article. “That’s me!” I chafed, slapping the table. “I mean, it’s not me, but it is me.” She’d never seen me anxious, let alone overtly perturbed. Her body language shifted. “What’s the problem, exactly?” “That’s my analysis, Dana. I wrote that. Literally. And now it’s on f–king Sputnik.”

I saw her one more time after that. She showed up unannounced again a few days later. I opened the door and she didn’t want to come in. “I don’t think this is right for me,” she said, staring at the ground. I shut the door in her face, took a few dizzy steps backwards and sat down on the stairs. After a few minutes, irritation — and the adrenaline boost that goes along with anger — won out over anxiety. I walked upstairs, took a shot, and called him.

“Your crazy bullsh-t is costing me girlfriends now.” He laughed. Then, in that cursed Eastern European accent I’d come to despise: “It is VOHD-ka that cost you girlfriend. You will find another.” “Yeah, and you will find another accessory, because I’m done,” I seethed. But it was like shouting at a wall. He was unreachably insouciant. Cold as Kharp in January. “Don’t worry so much,” came the sardonic reply. “You are just consultant.”

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