A Victim Who Never Feared for His Safety

To the people Nick Berg befriended here, he was an affable, strapping American who talked a good game about business but seemed oblivious to the dangers that raged around him and increasingly targeted Westerners.

The night before Berg checked out of the Al Fanar hotel, he had a beer with an acquaintance and spoke of going home. The next day, April 10, he left, suitcase in hand. A month later he was found dead.

Somewhere along the way, suspected Islamic militants snatched the 26-year-old Pennsylvanian, then beheaded him before a video camera, and on Tuesday posted the horrific images on the Internet. His family angrily blamed the U.S. military for jeopardizing his life by detaining him in late March when he had planned to leave, a charge the Army denies.

According to those who knew him, Berg was one of a small number of freelance businessmen who have come to this volatile, war-scarred country hoping to make a buck and maybe, in the words of his parents, do some good.

But he ran afoul of, first, Iraqi law officers and then suspicious American investigators. And then, perhaps, he fell victim to his own cavalier sense of adventure.

Iraqi police picked him up in the northern city of Mosul on March 24, 10 days after he arrived in Iraq for the second time in the last few months. Berg told friends he had been arrested after a night of drunken mischief. He was jailed for 13 days and interrogated three times by the FBI. The U.S. Army insists it never took custody of him from Iraqi police.

Berg later told friends he had been accused of spying -- though it wasn’t clear whether he meant his accusers were the Americans, the Iraqis or both. He told friends an Israeli stamp in his passport had made the Iraqis especially hostile. Berg was Jewish, and his family speculated that his religion might have been a factor in his kidnappers’ decision to kill him.

In Baghdad, Berg customarily stayed at the shabby Al Fanar, where rooms go for $30 a night. His overlooked the turgid Tigris River. Other residents recalled Wednesday the cheerful American entrepreneur who loved talking about communication towers. That was his business, to climb the metal latticework of the hulking antennas and repair damage done by nature or man.

“I would call him adventurous,” said Andy Duke, another American businessman staying at the hotel. “He was very comfortable that the political risks here weren’t any greater than the physical risks of being up on a tower.”

Friends at the hotel said Wednesday that they were stunned by the news of Berg’s highly publicized execution, but not entirely surprised. Berg, they said, appeared oblivious to the violence around him and unconcerned by the wave of kidnappings and assassinations aimed at Westerners.

“He was always concerned about his business,” said Hugo Infante, a Chilean journalist at the hotel who knew Berg. “He never talked about the war.... He was never worried about his safety here, never worried about the bombings.”

“Towers, he was always talking about the towers,” said Catalin Gombos, a Romanian journalist who often bumped into Berg at the hotel restaurant, where he would linger over beers and conversation. “That was his passion.”

Unlike many Westerners who strive to maintain a low profile in Iraq and are loath to leave the confines of their office or hotel, Berg often walked the streets alone in a baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans, or drove hundreds of miles through dangerous territory to find work, acquaintances said.

In one e-mail home to friends in suburban Philadelphia, he wrote, “The fact alone an Iraqi man and I are sitting in a free and open Internet shop is unbelievable to most Iraqis.”

Most businessmen come as contractors for big companies, such as Halliburton, and move around, if they move at all, in convoys of heavily fortified SUVs with armed guards. Not Berg.

“He took chances,” Infante said.

Repairing towers was a potentially lucrative business, Duke said. Berg hoped to get work for his fledgling company, Prometheus Methods Tower Service.

“He was here for the very simple reason that for a tower guy, this is the golden age,” Duke said. “That’s because Saddam didn’t allow the towers. Everything had to be hard-wired because that’s the easiest to bug.”

If Berg seemed oblivious to the conflict around him, it wasn’t for lack of signs.

The Al Fanar hotel stands at the edge of Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, the sprawling complex of buildings that serves as the headquarters of the U.S. occupation force. A Bradley fighting vehicle sits parked at the hotel’s front door, its cannon trained down a street heaped with garbage and razor wire.

Beside the hotel, a roaring generator -- necessary because power is still spotty a year into the occupation -- spews clouds of thick black smoke into hotel room balconies and stains the concrete.

Berg, a bespectacled gadabout who roamed the world and who supported the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, stayed at the Al Fanar for roughly a month in late December and January, then returned there for a night on March 22.

During his initial stay, he became a fixture in the restaurant, where he would drink beer with other guests seated on olive wood benches.

“He was very kind, very polite,” said the hotel desk clerk who checked him in. “He used to lift weights. He brought his weights with him.”

On March 24, Berg showed up in Mosul, north of Baghdad, where he was arrested by Iraqi police at a checkpoint, said his family, friends and U.S. officials.

Berg’s time in Mosul remains murky and mysterious. Dan Senor, chief spokesman for the U.S.-led occupation authority here, denied Wednesday the Berg family’s claim that he had been in U.S. custody in Mosul. Senor said Iraqi police retained custody of Berg for 13 days and “at no time” was he “under detention or jurisdiction” of U.S. authorities.

Yet the Mosul police chief, Mohammed Kairi Barhawi, denied in a telephone interview that his department had held Berg for the time cited.

Senor said that Berg was interrogated three times by the FBI while in Iraqi custody and that the agency “determined that he was not involved in criminal, terrorist activities.”

In Washington, a senior FBI official said members of the 50-agent force in Iraq interviewed Berg at the request of the occupation authority.

“We did not find that there was any interest for us. He was there purely on his own commercial, personal venture,” the official said. “He was picked up in a sweep. Right now, it is unusual to find an American wandering by himself in that region.”

The Berg family last month filed a habeas corpus petition against Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, saying Berg was being illegally detained by the U.S. military without probable cause. Berg was released a day later, April 6.

According to the petition, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, the family said it understood, based on information provided by the FBI and the State Department, that while Berg had originally been detained by Iraqi police in Mosul, he was later transferred to U.S. military custody.

The petition said the FBI had been involved in “investigating and confirming Nicholas Berg’s identity and to ensure that the individual detained was Nicholas Berg based on a concern of possible identity theft.”

The Bergs added that the FBI had recommended that their son be released from custody, and that the State Department had told them it no longer had power to intervene or to bring him home because the son “had been turned over by the Iraqi police to the United States military.”

Soon after Berg’s release, a U.S. consular officer advised him to leave the country. The officer offered to help Berg book a flight from Baghdad to Jordan. But Berg told the officer he planned to travel overland to Kuwait, said State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon.

Once free, Berg returned from Mosul to his Baghdad hotel. He told friends of his misadventure and suggested that anti-Semitism on the part of the Iraqi police was partially responsible for his treatment.

“He said, ‘Hey, man, I was arrested,’ ” Infante, one of the hotel guests, recalled. “He said: ‘I was messing around, and the Iraqi police picked me up. They saw I had a Jewish name and an Israeli seal in my passport.’ ”

Infante said Berg had not appeared to be very bothered by his detainment. “He told me: ‘Hey, it was an adventure for me. They treated me fine.’ ”

Berg told Duke that he had been accused of espionage. But Berg saw it as “fun,” Duke recalled.

Berg appeared to be more concerned about his inability to find work in Iraq on this latest visit, his friends said. Without work, Berg entertained himself in the hotel’s restaurant and by listening to the music of Aerosmith and other rock groups on his computer. He also began planning his departure.

On April 9 he called his parents in Pennsylvania and told them he was seeking a safe route out of the country either through Jordan or possibly Turkey. Most of the routes were closed because of military action around Fallouja.

April 9 was also the day that seven U.S. contractors and two soldiers disappeared when their supply convoy was attacked near Baghdad.

Berg checked out of the Al Fanar on April 10 and was not seen or heard from again until U.S. troops discovered his decapitated body near a Baghdad overpass Saturday. U.S. military officials would not say Wednesday whether the head was recovered.

On Tuesday, video images of his execution were posted on an Al Qaeda-linked website by Islamic militants, who said they were killing him to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. military.

In the images, a militant with his face concealed by a headscarf, takes a long knife from his shirt, grabs Berg by the hair and slits his throat. A time stamp on the pictures seems to show an 11-hour delay between the footage in which the militants read their statement and finish killing Berg.

The video was titled “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American.” Zarqawi is a Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden whom U.S. officials hold responsible for many of the bombings and other attacks in Iraq in the last year.

It was not clear whether Zarqawi was one of the five masked assailants on the video, simply ordered the killing or was not involved. The accents of the man reading a statement calling President Bush a dog, and of the men who shout “Allahu akbar” (God is great) as Berg is attacked appear to be Iraqi.

“We don’t have any other intelligence corroborating that he was or was not involved in this murder,” Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Wednesday.

In fact, the entire procedure -- the publicized decapitation of a person by black-clad Iraqis -- is familiar here. Under Hussein, his fiercely loyal Fedayeen Saddam militia publicly decapitated prostitutes and pimps.

Duke, the businessman who had a drink with Berg at the hotel the night before he disappeared, said he started to watch the video of his friend’s execution but had to turn away. He said he couldn’t forget the look of sadness on Berg’s face.

“If you look at the video and listen to the sounds,” Duke said, “you can tell Nick was deeply disappointed that human beings can do this to one another.”

Times staff writers Mary Curtius and Richard B. Schmitt in Washington and John J. Goldman in West Chester, Pa., contributed to this report.