Idema has insisted that U.S. officials at the highest levels in the Pentagon were aware of his activities in Afghanistan. The Pentagon and the State Department have both denied that, insisting that "Mr. Idema has never been employed by the combined Coalition Forces Command-Afghanistan." U.S. forces acknowledge, however, that they did accept one prisoner from Idema's team - they released him after holding him at a variety of locations and interrogating him for nearly two days of interrogation. Coalition officials also have acknowledged that on at least one occasion, International Security Assistance Forces aided Idema and his team, though an ISAF spokesman now maintains that the unit was "duped" into believing that Idema was operating either under contract to, or with the authority of, the U.S. military. American authorities say Idema, whom they term a mercenary and bounty hunter, may be just one of many shadowy Americans operating in Afghanistan without official sanction, lured in some cases by a kind of patriotic fervor, and in other cases, by the chance to collect that $50 million bounty.
But others claim that Idema was working with the full knowledge of authorities at the highest reaches of the Pentagon. His lawyer, John Edwards Tiffany, contends that Idema not only had regular contact with the FBI in the months before his return to Afghanistan, but also sent emails that detailed his plans and offered intelligence to officials in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office. Among the information that Idema's supporters claim he provided to the secretary was a possible location where Osama bin Laden might have been hiding during the latter part of 2003 and the early months of 2004. Whether the information Idema offered was accurate at the time he offered it is a matter of speculation. What is known is that no official action was taken on it. Idema claims that inaction was partly the reason he returned to Afghanistan in early 2004.
In the months following his arrest last summer, publications like the Dallas Morning News - in a series of stories penned largely by a journalist who had an unfortunate run-in with Idema at a Kabul hotel bar in the run-up to the American invasion of Afghanistan, along with the Columbia Journalism Review, and New York magazine, have all published highly critical articles questioning Idema's credibility and his credentials.
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