Under Fire: An Afghan Odyssey : California Medical Technician and New Jersey Film Maker Give Their Lives Telling Story of Rebels

It was like the film “Top Gun,” Jim Lindelof once told a reporter, “only we were the targets.”

He was talking about Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1985 and the daily bombing raids by MIG jets that rocked the village where he was working undercover as a medic tending to the sick, the wounded and the dying.

He never forgot the sound, or the smell, or the simple fear that gripped his stomach during those three months. And right up until he departed in March for his second unauthorized excursion into Afghanistan, he told his friends, “I must be crazy to go back.”

But he did anyway, this time as a sound man working on a film documentary funded by the anti-Communist Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

The quintessential California kid--Folsom native, 30-year-old Angeleno, a 6-foot-4 blue-eyed blond with a quiet manner and a smile like sunshine--once again darkened his hair, tanned his skin, put in brown contacts and grew his beard long so he could pass for just another Afghan peasant.

Ignored Own Advice

He once told a medical group that American doctors should not hesitate to go into Afghanistan to administer aid, providing they took the proper precautions. Travel only with established groups that can provide proper protection, he warned them; “You’re never going to be completely safe.”

And yet he seemed to ignore his own advice his second time out, desperate to publicize what he saw as Soviet genocide. He went with a film maker he hardly knew, doing a job he’d never trained for, under funding from a highly controversial church, and with a guide who turned back three days into the trip.

The result was simply tragic.

On Oct. 11, according to the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance, Jim Lindelof and New Jersey film maker Lee Shapiro were killed in Paghman, a snow-topped mountain area just west of the capital of Kabul. Word of their deaths took nearly two weeks to reach U.S. officials in Pakistan.

Some friends had tried to warn him. “I think you’re making a mistake,” Dr. Robert Simon, assistant UCLA professor of emergency medicine, had told him.

“His answer was he understood the danger,” Simon recalls. “But he still wanted to go in.”

It’s never easy to pinpoint when an ordinary life suddenly becomes extraordinary. But in Jim Lindelof’s case it was probably about the time he met Simon.

Lindelof had come out of a big family in Folsom to train in Los Angeles as an emergency medical technician. It seemed the perfect career choice, considering what friends describe as his “very kind, very caring” nature.

Just having him around made people feel good. “When he walked into a room he just lit it up. He was sunshine,” says Nancy Aossey, who knew him for years.

He got a job at UCLA’s prestigious Emergency Medical Center as a trauma tech assisting the nursing staff, halfway in status and responsibility between a paramedic and an orderly. There he met Robert Simon, who had been the first U.S. doctor to enter Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion. While studying atrocities in the Third World in 1983, Simon had discovered that there was a critical need for medical care inside Afghanistan, especially after the Soviets had ordered all international relief organizations out of the combat-wracked country.

Deciding he needed a firsthand look, Simon sneaked into Afghanistan in the spring of 1984 and emerged profoundly moved. He appealed to 52 international relief organizations to come to the Afghans’ aid, but all turned him down on grounds they couldn’t respond unless invited in by the host government.

Undaunted, Simon sold his Malibu house in September, 1984, to provide the seed money for the Westwood-based International Medical Corps, a nonprofit organization that would provide medical care “where no others dared to go.”

In July 1985, IMC set up a training center in neighboring Pakistan. There U.S. doctors and nurses trained Afghans to return to their homeland as surgically capable medics.

Word of Simon’s efforts got around UCLA’s medical departments. “Bob didn’t corner people or make a nuisance of himself or talk about it while on duty,” notes Dr. Marshall Morgan, director of the emergency center. “But people who were interested could find out about it.”

Lindelof, for one, was intrigued. “We would talk about it,” Simon recalls. “He was extremely interested in hearing about my experiences.”

The young medic volunteered to work for the IMC. “I knew that what I had to offer would be very helpful,” he told friends.

But Lindelof wanted to go inside Afghanistan, and federal funding prevented IMC from sending Americans into the war zone. He found another way. Joining with Houston surgeon Ron Halbert, 30, and a medical team from the Swedish Aid Committee, Lindelhof left in July, 1985, on a three-month trip into Afghanistan funded by the American Aid for Afghans, a nonprofit humanitarian aid group based in Grand Farr, Ore.

It was a grueling trip that took a severe physical toll. He traveled nearly 300 miles by foot over 18,000-foot mountain passes, braving blizzard conditions along treacherous cliffs. According to a journal he kept, he fell “sick as a dog” with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, collapsed from the strain of climbing the steepest slopes and woke up screaming from leg cramps because of all the walking.

To make matters worse, he was eight inches taller than the average Afghan man, so he had to “scrunch down” constantly to pass for one of them. To pass the time during those long treks, he and Halbert sang songs like “Rawhide” and “Satisfaction.”

In all, his team established three hospitals and 22 paramedic stations in cliffside caves--located so they could withstand day and night Soviet bombing raids--in the 60-mile-long Panjshir Valley, a rebel stronghold in isolated and rugged country.

The team also provided Afghan doctors with basic medical supplies and trained them.

Treating a total 333 patients, Lindelof served as an anesthesiologist during operations, prepared the medications and monitored the patients during the surgeries. He also found himself taking part in amputations in the dark, with the aid of only a flashlight, a lantern and crudely sterilized instruments.

“You didn’t need the advanced knowledge of a doctor or a nurse to be effective there,” he told one reporter afterwards.

Still, he was shocked at the atrocities he saw daily. One haunting picture from that first trip shows him holding the detonator to a “butterfly” bomb in one hand--and the leg of an Afghan who had stepped on one of the bombs, in the other. Lindelof and other Western medical workers inside Afghanistan claimed the bombs are designed specifically to maim. Their targets often are children because the bombs appear on the ground like harmless toys.

Later Lindelof would testify before Congress about what appeared to be a third-generation chemical bomb that had been dropped by parachutes, “raining fiery tar that would stick to humans and burn through metal.”

When Lindelof returned to UCLA, it was obvious to everyone that he had been profoundly changed. “It was not a religious type of transformation. But it was clear he had had an experience there that was of importance to him,” said Morgan.

Physically, he was reminded of the trip every time he looked in the mirror, because the dye still hadn’t grown out of his hair or his beard. And his situation at UCLA was not the same; he was expecting to return to a full-time position but only a part-time job was waiting.

In April, 1986, Lindelof resigned and switched to Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, where he worked at a first-aid station at Los Angeles International Airport until the end of the year.

All the while, he was trying to drum up support for the Afghan resistance. He spoke to a congressional forum sponsored by the Committee for a Free Afghanistan and Reps. Samuel Stratton (D-N.Y.) and Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) in November, 1985; on Voice of America and Radio Free Liberty; to the UCLA Medical School--to anyone who would listen.

“He felt there was such a lack of interest on the part of the American public. He was trying to get them stirred up about what was happening there,” ICM’s Aossey recalls.

Lindelof’s fervor was tied closely to his patriotism, friends and colleagues say. “He was a person that truly believed in the American way of life. He literally loved this country and what we had here,” Aossey says. “I think he fell in love with the Afghans and their spirit because he saw they were fighting to have the freedom that we have. Suddenly, that became his world.”

What frustrated Lindelof, like other supporters of the Afghan resistance, was the seeming inattention of the American new media. “They couldn’t understand how this could continue while the world was watching,” Aossey says. “But they were told ‘it’s not newsworthy,’ or ‘no one really cares,’ or that as long as it’s contained there and doesn’t affect us, people aren’t really interested in hearing about it.”

Lindelof wrote an account of his trip, drawn from his 200-page Afghan journal, for the Sacramento Bee, where his brother Bill works as a reporter. And he talked about the possibility of turning the journal into a book.

On July 1, 1986, he was named the first ever Paramedic of the Year in a national search sponsored by Emergency Medical Services, a trade journal based in Van Nuys, and Braun Industries, an Ohio ambulance manufacturer.

When Lindelof accepted the award in Philadelphia last November, he wasn’t at all what the editors had expected. “He was impressive in his unimpressiveness,” recalls managing editor Barbara Feiner. “He was just a nice guy who was very committed to a cause, and a man who definitely had an idea of what he wanted to do in this world.”

As always, that meant going back to Afghanistan.

Lindelof complained to friends that most of the news footage from Afghanistan was “too superficial”--mostly because it had been shot near the Pakistani border. “He said no one had ever really filmed a stinger (missile) going off or had ever shown a helicopter bombing a village,” notes Simon. “He was not even a reporter but a medic, and still he wanted to shoot some proper footage.”

The medic began looking into the possibility of making a documentary film about Afghanistan. Eventually, he would meet Lee Shapiro, a 38-year-old film maker from North Bergen, N.J.

Shapiro had gotten into documentary work late in life. “What he really wanted to do was to make musical comedies,” says his assistant, Ellen Hori.

A graduate of the London Film School, he had already made a musical comedy about the Andrews Sisters. But in the 1960s Shapiro--described by his friends as a “gentle” and “good-hearted” cameraman with an easy laugh--was drawn to Korean Rev. Moon’s Unification Church.

A church member for 13 years, Shapiro graduated from Moon’s Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, N.Y., in 1978. Two years later, he formed his own company.

It was the church that turned Shapiro into a documentary film maker. During a Moon-sponsored trip through Central America in 1983, he learned of the plight of the Miskito Indians, a native population that was resisting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

“Once he saw the situation in those refugee camps in Honduras, those children with bloated bellies, those fighters who had sacrificed so much, he felt a connection with the people whom he felt were suffering,” says Hori, who also is a Unification Church member. “It really moved him so much, he thought, ‘This has got to be told.’ ”

He quickly received funding from CAUSA International (the Confederate Assn. for the Unity of the Societies of the Americas International), a nonprofit educational organization founded in 1980 by Moon to promote anti-communist activities.

Despite repeated warnings from the Nicaraguan government, says CAUSA spokesman Andrew Kessler, Shapiro repeatedly went to Central America to film the Moskitos. The documentary he produced, entitled “Nicaragua Was Our Home,” accused the Sandinista government of the calculated brutalization of the Miskito Indians.

Two years in the making, it was broadcast in 1986 on public television stations around the country. (KCET in Los Angeles ran it on June 17.)

During the filming in Nicaragua, says Hori, Shapiro “began to think about freedom fighters all over the world. . . . (And) he knew Afghanistan was a country where just horrible things were happening.”

CAUSA gladly approved a grant for Shapiro to film in Afghanistan but kept uncharacteristically “low-key” about the project, Kessler says, “because we knew that it would be extremely dangerous for him.”

CAUSA put up about half of the estimated $600,000 cost of the movie. Shapiro also received small grants from the John Olin Foundation, a public-affairs funding group headed by former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee community fund.

Toward the end of 1986, Shapiro needed someone to assist him and heard about Lindelof. “There were a lot of offers, but Lee was looking for somebody who had experience and who seemed fit and was eager to do something like this,” Hori says.

Flew to New Jersey

Lindelof flew to New Jersey in late January, 1987, and the two men instantly hit it off.

Hori couldn’t recall whether Shapiro ever told Lindelof about his affiliation with the Moon church. “It really wasn’t an issue,” she says. “Like if you were going to do something with somebody, you don’t say, ‘I’m Catholic. I’m Jewish. You still want to do it?’ I don’t know that it ever came up.”

She also said she cannot recall whether Lindelof was told that the church was funding the documentary.

From the beginning, it was clear that Shapiro, as both director and cameraman, was in charge. Jim would simply be the sound man. “It’s not very complicated work,” says Hori, who herself assisted Shapiro on sound for the Nicaraguan movie.

As early as 1985, Shapiro contacted Aziz Sadat, an Afghan native and chairman of Freedom International, a Bellevue, Wash., nonprofit organization that lobbies for anti-communist resistance movements around the world and provides humanitarian assistance directly to the Afghan moujahedeen .

Sadat had come to the United States as a student in 1979 and had maintained close relations with the Afghan resistance. Specifically, Shapiro wanted Sadat’s help linking up with the “right group” of moujahedeen so that he could film “the Russian atrocities, the destroyed villages, the refugee camps and basically cover all the Afghan crisis,” Sadat recalls.

In September, 1986, Sadat and Shapiro arrived in Peshawar to make contact with Hezb-i-Islami, one of the largest and most militantly fundamentalist Islamic guerrilla groups fighting in the Afghan moujahedeen . “I felt it was the best organized one in the country,” Sadat says.

The rebel leaders agreed to help--with a proviso. “They told him he was going at his own risk and that if anything happened, they could not provide him any protection because there’s a war on there.”

On this preliminary trip, Sadat took Shapiro across the border on a 21-day walk to the town of Paghman, the moujahedeen -controlled region in the snow-covered mountains north of Kabul. The area had been the scene of extensive fighting, with Soviet jets “literally bombing the villages every single day,” Sadat says. Shapiro stayed two months filming.

He left in late January, returning to Peshawar in late March with Lindelof. To Sadat, the Californian seemed “very enthusiastic” to get started on the trip, seeing it as a good chance to see more of the country. “He wanted to write a book when he came back, and the moment he entered Afghanistan, he started writing in his journal.”

Lindelof seemed especially eager to get out of Peshawar--a teeming center of Afghan resistance filled with mercenaries, spies, drug peddlers and CIA and KGB agents--and to slip across the border.

Inside Afghanistan, the weather was mild in the mountains but unseasonably warm deeper in the country. Both men knew to expect the seemingly endless walking, although Shapiro occasionally rode a horse when he became exhausted, Sadat says.

Band of Guerrillas

They headed to the central part of the country and then to the north because Shapiro wanted to be “right on the border with the Soviets,” Sadat says.

Traveling with a band of 120 Hezb-i-Islami guerrillas, they planned to visit the huge Soviet-Afghan air force base in Parwan province; neighboring moujahedeen -controlled Anvarab province where a super-generator sends power to several parts of Afghanistan; dangerous Kunduz province in the north; and Badakhshan province, where a natural gas pipeline extends into the Soviet Union. The Americans planned to return to Pakistan in October, and to the United States in November.

Bid Them Farewell

Sadat bid the film makers farewell at their first stop of their trip--in Khost, a border town that is the location of a large moujahedeen base and training ground. Newly married, he felt he had to return home after months of separation.

Shapiro, though upset, responded with a joke. “Yeah, you’d be crazy if you go again with me,” Sadat quotes the film maker as saying.

When it came time for Sadat to leave, “We hugged and said goodby. Lee was in tears to see me leave. And that was the last time I saw him.”

Sadat also hugged Lindelof. But the Californian was smiling. “Yeah, we’re going to make a good film--and hopefully we’ll return safely,” Sadat quotes him as saying.

The Afghan kept track of the two Americans’ progress. Two weeks after they had left, he heard that the group had been attacked by Soviet troops and lost six people and some horses and equipment. But Shapiro and Lindelof emerged unscathed.

A week later, Sadat heard that they had made it to Parwan safely. In May, Shapiro flew back to the United States for a week to repair a camera that had been damaged in the ambush, while Lindelof waited in Pakistan.

And then a month ago, Sadat received word from Hezb-i-Islami headquarters in Pakistan that the Americans were doing “very well” and “soon would return.” The next word he received was the phone call from the rebel leaders telling him that the film makers were dead.

When Aossey heard about Lindelof’s death on the news, she was “really shocked. And yet, by the same token, he was the kind of person who would risk his life in no uncertain terms if he believed in something. And that’s very, very rare, I think. And very unusual--especially nowadays.

“A lot of people may believe in some cause or idea. But he was the kind of person who believed with a passion.”