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Jonathan Idema: Our Man in Kabul

With Friends Like These

The Hunt for Bin Laden

No one who has ever met Jonathan Keith Idema would deny that he is both a card-carrying lunatic and world-class pain in the tail. The 48-year-old ex-con and former Green Beret, whose exploits in the early days of the allied invasion of

Afghanistan

are detailed in Robin Moore's bestseller "The Hunt for Bin Laden," is prone to fits of wild self-aggrandizement. He is an intractable, intransigent, and irritating as hell. He's a "junkyard dog" and a "pit bull." And that's all according to his friends.

Jack Idema has done time on charges ranging from assault to mail fraud, run more than one business into the ground, is notorious for filing lawsuits against anyone who crosses him, and has been known to treat associates like POWs, and has even managed to alienate most of his former comrades from Special Forces. But for all his failings -- and there are many -- he's also a guy who is said to have had formidable successes that only seem to heighten the controversy that surrounds him. .

Though many suggest that Idema has gilded his resume, others insist that Idema is the real deal.

He was, his supporters insist, the first to alert the public in the early 1990s to the danger of loose nuclear material floating around the black market in the former Soviet Union.Gary Scurka, a longtime friend and veteran newsman, says information compiled by Idema first led him to the sources that confirmed the existence of nuclear material floating and led to an award-winning report Scurka filed for "60 Minutes."

In what may have been a measure of the kind of love-hate relationship Idema has with the mainstream media, his contributions to the report were largely ignored. But Scurka, who later formed an award-winning Internet news service-cum-production company with Idema, insists that "he made it possible for me to obtain the nuclear smuggling documents from Russia, passed on to the Lithuanians. That's because he was there a few years before and had bonded with the Lithuanian police, especially the Lithuanian organized crime police...If there was no Keith (aka Jonathan) Idema, there would not have been a "60 Minutes" story. I can't make that any more clear."

Video cover: The Peacemaker

In an odd footnote to that story, Idema later sued director Stephen Spielberg, claiming that the character played by George Clooney in the movie "The Peacemaker" was based on his exploits. That case is still pending.