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Anchor Jeb Sharp speaks with Amitava Kumar, author of “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb.” The book describes the real-life stories of convicted terrorists who — according to Kumar — were goaded into committing crimes by US government informants.

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JEB SHARP: A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. That’s the curious title of a new book by Amitava Kumar. He’s a professor of English at Vassar College. Kumar describes the real-life stories of convicted terrorists who, he believes, were goaded into committing their crimes by government informants. One of those convicts is Hemant Lakhani, a 70-year-old merchant arrested in New Jersey for trying to sell a fake missile to an FBI informant. Kumar is struck by Lakhani’s incompetence, and how he’s a sort of mirror image of the man who helped put him in jail.

AMITAVA KUMAR:  Hemant Lakhani was a failed used clothing salesman. But he had ambitions to get into the arms trade. And the person who helped and trapped him was a Pakistani immigrant. A man who had been helping the drug enforcement authority out in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And he came to this country. He tried to set himself up in business, but failed several times. He also committed fraud several times. And then he helped entrap Hemant Lakhani, who incidentally I should add, I didn’t think was someone, as we say in India, washed in milk. He was certainly not innocent of his own varieties of fraudulence. But was he, not only willing, but able to acquire a missile? He wasn’t. But both were mirror images of each other in the sense that both of them were failures. Both of them had failed at several enterprises. Both of them were desperate to impress the other in highly inflated terms about their own value.

SHARP:  What did that similarity mean to you? What does it tell us about this moment and about the war on terror?

KUMAR: [INDISCERNIBLE] tells me something new about the ecology of terrorism. It tells us that there is a little culture that is being produced. A new culture. A culture in which one weak vulnerable man will help catch another weak vulnerable man. And that this is a self-serving enterprise which serves the state because then it can say, in spectacular terms, that is has made an arrest.

SHARP: And how representative is that? I mean the backdrop obviously is 9/11, and just unspeakable acts since and the specter of terrorism. How representative is Lakhani and the stories of others who might be called bunglers, in a way, or perhaps a different kind of criminal?

KUMAR: I think it’s hugely representative. We must remember that of all the arrests that were made since 9/11, only a handful went to trial. In fact, of the people who were convicted, most of the convictions were simply on [INDISCERNIBLE], credit card fraud, and things like violating federal laws on insurance or old-age pensions.

SHARP: Amitava, I imagine that your interpretation of these events leads some people to accuse you of being an apologist for terrorists and I wonder you respond?

KUMAR: Yes, I must say I am in many ways alert to the fact that some of these people are not entirely innocent. My claim is that they have been goaded to perform crimes. Of if they’ve not been goaded, they have been presented as people who are not only willing, but able, to perform these crimes. My real interest in this is as a writer. To think about those aspects of the new society we are living in that we have not talked about before. So, for example, after the killings in Mumbai, after the handful of men arrived from Pakistan and held siege at this hotel, for me as a writer I was struck by the fact that here were ordinary men, young men, who had been paid, who are serving the machinations of powers that were so much bigger than them. And that this man, for example, setting fire to this grand hotel in Bombay would say to his handler, look the windows are so huge here. That he was struck by the tiles and by the plants and by the beauty. And that he did not know what those plasma televisions were and he said, there are huge computers on the walls. And the handler would urge him to quickly set fire. So I’m just – as a writer I’m halted by this human drama for a moment. To see what leads people to these circumstances. And even in those circumstances that we understand, or seem to think is transparent, what is really happening there.

SHARP: In the section in your book about literature you note a passage from the 9/11 commission report which says, “To us Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of al-Qaeda America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were” And I wonder why you quote that, what that divide means to you and how it plays out in the lives of the people, the small people as you say, you’re writing about?

KUMAR: I was struck by that quotation. I thought there’s a great deal of honesty and recognition there. There’s also some self criticism. That we had been insular. That the West in some ways had been insular. And that there were some recognition there of the imagination of those who cross borders. Of those who sometimes we look at with a little bit of indifference if not exactly contempt. But who actually carried these different worlds within them. And therefore are better prepared for the crises that this world constantly flings at us.

SHARP:  Amitava Kumar is the author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. He’s also a professor of English at Vassar College. Thank you very much.

KUMAR: A pleasure. Thank you so much.

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