Photo: Greg Martin

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of numerous books, including Blood of the Liberals (FSG, 2000), winner of the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Award, The Assassins’ Gate (FSG, 2005), which was a New York Times Best Book of the Year, and the forthcoming Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (FSG, 2009). He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight Is for Democracy and was a 2001–2002 Guggenheim Fellow. His reporting has won four Overseas Press Club awards. He lives in Brooklyn. Betrayed is his first play.

George Packer on his play Betrayed

In January 2007 I went to Iraq for the sixth time since the beginning of the war. My idea was to write an article for The New Yorker about Iraqis who had worked with the Americans in their country—that tiny minority of mostly young men and women who had embraced the American project in Iraq so enthusiastically that they were willing to risk their lives for it. By then they were not easy to meet: one of them, from southern Iraq, would talk to me only in Kurdistan, a plane ride away; two others insisted on taking a room in the bleak, nearly empty Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad for our conversations; some would meet only in the Green Zone, and others refused to go there; some could speak only by telephone because there simply was no safe way to be together. Others had scattered outside Iraq for safety, and I had to track them down in far-flung cities: Amman, Damascus, even Malmô, Sweden. I spoke with thirty or forty of these Iraqis, having long since learned that, when they are not too intimidated by dictators or insurgents, Iraqis are wonderful talkers. Over the course of these interviews a single overwhelming story emerged.

They were all leading precarious, furtive lives, using assumed names, limiting their contacts to a handful of trusted people, creating elaborate lies about their history and employment, afraid every time the phone rang or someone knocked on the door. Every one of them had good reason to believe that he or she could be killed at any time: it would just take one mistake—being seen by the wrong person at the Green Zone gate, uttering a few words of English in public, an embassy badge discovered at a police checkpoint—for the end to come. In the world’s most violent country, they had no protectors. Every armed Iraqi faction, including the United States–supported government, saw them as traitors. Their American employers in general regarded their welfare as a bureaucratic nuisance. To survive, they had either to live entirely on American turf in Iraq, to establish double lives and move about as easy targets, or to leave the country. Normal existence in their homeland was impossible, and it would remain impossible for years—maybe for the rest of their lives. These Iraqis were as hunted and helpless as European Jews in the early 1940s. Conversations with them, which—once we could find a reasonably secure place to talk—lasted hours or even days, made my eyes burn with shame.

It wasn’t just the dangerous circumstances of their lives that riveted me. In the stories they told one saw the larger course of the war, and in every individual version it was a trajectory from suffering to hope—the kind of dazzling, outsize hope that comes when, as several Iraqis put it, your world is a prison and someone suddenly opens the door—through a slow, reluctant, increasingly brutal process of disillusionment to a sense of abandonment and betrayal. For me, this was the essential experience of the Iraq war, and nowhere was it more vivid than in these lives, these stories. They had the most to gain from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein—they were young and modern enough to benefit from joining the wider world—and they lost the most when they became pariahs and outcasts in their own society. They had pinned their hopes, irrationally it turned out, on the Americans, until those Americans proved to be not just incompetent occupiers but also unreliable allies and indifferent friends. But the tone of the stories was never simply bitter, as one might have expected; it was closer to the lingering surprise and hurt of a jilted lover. These Iraqis still spoke fondly of Americans and America. Every Iraqi knew an American who had tried, within the bureaucratic limits of the civilian and military structures in Iraq, to help someone in danger. The help was almost never enough: the American eventually left and the connection became tenuous, with no institutional means to oblige the U.S. government to honor its commitment to its best friends in Iraq, while the Iraqi continued to dodge death every day.

I wrote the article, which was published under the title “Betrayed“ in the March 26, 2007, issue of The New Yorker. Usually that’s the end of the story, but not in this case. The words that had filled my recorder continued to haunt me. They had the inadvertent bluntness and accidental poetry of a second language, and the intensity of life caught in a reflective pause during an extreme time. They spoke of great hope and equally great disappointment, and they tapped directly into feelings that the war evoked in me, as in many other Americans who became involved—guilt and anger, but deeper than these, a terrible sense of loss. They expressed what had always interested me most about the war: how the Americans and Iraqis saw one another, what kind of relationship was possible in such violent circumstances, the ability or inability of individuals to transcend their “official” roles and maintain a human pulse. In my experience this relationship defied the propaganda of all sides—it was neither that of liberator and liberated nor that of oppressor and oppressed. There was far too much mutual need and mutual suspicion, expectation and ignorance, simple affection and simple hatred, desperation and pain, to conform to the slogans and certainties of the war’s far-off judges.

In the spring of 2007 a young director wrote to me to suggest that “Betrayed,“ with its handful of characters and inherent drama, might be the basis for a play. Soon afterward, I met the staff of Culture Project, a theater company in lower Manhattan that takes on topical new work, and when I ran the idea by them they were encouraging. The thought of writing a play was deeply appealing: it would offer the chance to return to an early passion. When I was around twelve, my burning ambition was to become a Shakespearean actor, and I wrote a letter to my hero, Laurence Olivier, asking for advice. He wrote back, essentially, “Don’t,” which was how things turned out. What I loved about theater was the experience of collaboration, with months of preparation leading up to spontaneous, unpredictable life onstage. Journalism, however much it means immersion in the world, isn’t terribly less lonely in the writing than fiction. But with drama, the point at which other kinds of writing end is just when things start to get interesting. And rather than having to speak indirectly through a journalist, the Iraqis would get to speak for themselves (though the journalist wouldn’t entirely disappear).

I sketched out the structure of a plot, basing it on a couple of incidents described in the magazine article, while allowing myself wide latitude to invent. The story needed to be intimate—a tale told by two men in a hotel room—and yet encompass the arc of the whole war. The characters—three leading Iraqi roles and one American—became, almost naturally, composites of people I’d interviewed. As for the dialogue, it all but wrote itself. I had the best possible source of spoken words—my interviews—and knew them well enough that, while writing, I could open the relevant transcript and quickly find the right line or passage for a particular scene. At least half the dialogue comes from life; it would have been foolish to try to improve on how the Iraqis spoke and what they said. When the script was finished in midsummer, Culture Project agreed to produce Betrayed at its theater in Soho in January 2008.

The titles of recent New York and London productions suggest that audiences are hungry for drama drawn from the news of our turbulent age. The intensity of feeling about current events apparently demands something more personal and cathartic than a television clip; a part of the public wants its news with the immediacy and vitality of dramatic art. Unfortunately, a lot of topical theater is short on art and long on indignation, as if standards of drama can be waived when a play comes wrapped in political good intentions. What an audience then feels is likely to be a letdown: the soothing ratification of its convictions rather than the disturbance of new ideas and emotions. I have strong views about the fate of America’s Iraqi allies, who remain nearly as abandoned and endangered as when I first went to find them, and I wouldn’t have taken the time to write a play about them if their plight didn’t anger me. But what begins in partisanship can’t end there, or the result will be bad writing and bad politics. By giving my characters living words, with their sudden exposure of the speaker’s soul, I hoped to avoid the tendency toward flatness and cliché that is the occupational hazard of writing about contemporary issues. I wanted to do justice to the texture of life among Iraqi interpreters in wartime Baghdad in a way that can’t be conveyed in a news article or even a feature story. I wanted the characters to surprise American audiences, not by being exotic but by being, in their specificity, familiar. For all these reasons, owes more to the people named on its dedication page than simply the author’s gratitude.

Excerpted from BETRAYED, by George Packer, published in February 2008 by Faber and Faber Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright© 2008 by George Packer. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.