Wikileaks

I’m not Syrian.

I don’t live in Syria.

So how the hell did I end up igniting an uprising against Bashar al-Assad?

Remember my “Ten Years, Five Wives” chapter?

At one point, I gathered my six-month-old daughter, her mother, and her grandmother, and we all moved into my deep-water house in Lighthouse Point, Florida—an address that, remarkably, still appears on my driver’s license today.

From then on, I commuted to work from Florida.

Every Friday, I boarded a JetBlue flight south, anxious to see my baby. Early Monday morning, I’d be back on the first flight out, heading to Montvale, New Jersey, to start the week all over again.

***

One Friday afternoon, I arrived home and the house was empty.

I asked my caretaker, Don, where everyone was. He told me that earlier that day, Grandma had cooked a big homemade meal for the whole crew—the landscapers, the pool guys, everyone. That was the last time he’d seen my family.

In short, her mother decided she didn’t like America. She took our daughter and her own mother, and the three of them flew back to Aleppo, Syria.

Just like that, they were gone.

If you search online for “Fuat Kircaali, Florida man, Sofia,” you’ll find plenty of news coverage about what happened next.

***

One day, I was working at my Nixon Library office in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, when our receptionist, Edna, walked in.

“Fuat, two FBI agents want to see you,” she said.

I told her, “Send them in.”

Two agents introduced themselves. The one in charge was Byron Daniel. They said they needed to meet with me about an international case where they thought I could help, but since I didn’t have high-level clearance, they couldn’t discuss any details.

 All I gathered was that spies from two different countries were operating in the United States, and those countries were becoming a serious threat to Silicon Valley companies.

Some of those tech companies were exhibiting at our conference at the Javits Center the following week. The agents were especially interested in our registration list—20,000 attendees long.

We walked downstairs, and Krisandra exported a fresh registration file with full contact information and addresses. We handed it to Byron.

He also requested five attendee badges for the agents to attend the show. We issued full conference badges for all five.

***

My meetings with Byron lasted more than a year, until one day we were watching breaking news on 60 Minutes. The FBI had just cracked a huge international spy case.

By then, we had become friends. I explained to him that I was about to travel to Syria. My daughter had been taken there by her mother, and the Syrian government had no intention of sending her back home.

Only a handful of countries in the world didn’t recognize the Hague Convention on children abducted by a parent—places like Iran, North Korea, and Syria. That meant there was no legal treaty forcing them to return my daughter.

I explained to Byron that I had retained a former FBI agent—a specialist experienced in international kidnapping cases. We had used him earlier to uncover financial crimes as part of our news stories. A former high-level FBI executive, Mr. Black, I can’t recall his first name, from the Miami area, was also approaching the situation from his own angle to help me.

I told Byron the only option I had at the moment was to create a Twitter account, @SyrianPresident, travel to Syria, and use the #Feb11 hashtag to encourage an uprising against the government.

At the time, he was a special agent on the Joint Terrorism Task Force in the Southern District of Manhattan.

***

While I was boarding my flight to Damascus at JFK, he called me and told me to make sure I deleted all my communication with the FBI—emails, text messages, contact records, business cards, everything. I did. He also said that if I needed help for any reason, I should go to the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate and ask for the FBI agent in charge, and not talk to anyone else.

At that moment, I realized I was being protected.

***

I made half a dozen welfare visits to Syria. On each trip, Syrian intelligence followed me from the moment I landed until the moment I left the country. Once, while I was out of my hotel room, they opened my camera, put in fresh batteries to check what was inside, and lost one of the dead ones. When I returned, I found that battery tucked inside my shoe.

***

My very own Twitter-fueled Syrian revolution started to gain traction. Protests across the cities accelerated. At some point, my daughter’s mother had no choice but to leave the country. They took the last civilian flight from Aleppo to Cairo—the final flight out before everything shut down.

I flew to Cairo the next day and put them in a suite at the Sofitel Cairo Nile El Gezirah for six months. Then I brought them to Istanbul until I could arrange their visas back home.

***

Sometime later, the Wikileaks Syria Files emerged. My name was in them. The Syrian government had been making serious efforts to deal with me and my extracurricular activities in their country.

After the Wikileaks release, The Guardian ran a story about how Asma al-Assad, Bashar’s wife, had personally worked for six months to persuade Twitter to suspend my @SyrianPresident parody account. She succeeded. I was no longer leading an uprising against her husband—but my mission had already been accomplished. I got my daughter out.

***

One day, I was driving to Key West when Byron called. I heard the news about Bin Laden from him before President Obama went on TV.