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During his detention in an Iraqi prison, Berg was interviewed three times by the FBI, which sent agents to question his family in Pennsylvania. It wasn't his first encounter with the bureau, which had investigated a possible link between him and Zacarias Moussaoui, the al-Qaeda follower awaiting trial for suspected ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers. In 1999, during the semester Berg spent at the University of Oklahoma, he let an acquaintance access his e-mail account. Berg's user name and password subsequently got passed around and was used by an associate of Moussaoui's, who in 2001 enrolled in the nearby Norman flight school. But when the FBI interviewed Berg in 2002, agents determined that he had no connection to Moussaoui's associate. "It turned out to be a total coincidence," says a Justice Department official. When notified that Berg had been picked up in Mosul, the FBI might have wondered if its original assessment was wrong. After conducting a "thorough review of records," the agents decided once again that he was harmless--and possibly in danger.
Berg wasn't released until April 6, a day after his parents filed a federal lawsuit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claiming that their son had been transferred to U.S. military custody and was being detained without probable cause. Berg's father Michael, a staunch antiwar activist, now blames the Administration for his son's death while the U.S. military continues to deny it ever had custody of Berg. After he was released, the U.S. consulate offered to arrange for him to fly out of Baghdad, but he refused. Instead, he told friends and family that he planned to drive to Kuwait or Turkey. On April 10, he checked out of Baghdad's Al-Fanar Tower Hotel, suitcase in hand, and disappeared. U.S. soldiers found his decapitated body a month later.
Last week a video was posted on an Islamic militant website, and the world learned what had happened to him. After reading a statement about avenging the suffering of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of Berg's masked captors took a long knife from his shirt, grabbed a screaming Berg by the hair and cut off his head. CIA officials say there is a "high probability" that the knife was wielded by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden's believed to be the kingpin behind the recent attacks in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was nearly captured there last year, says a U.S. official. But the terrorist may have picked a particularly inappropriate victim, a young man who, according to his father, was a do-gooder trying to help the Iraqi people. Says the elder Berg: "They killed their best friend." --With reporting by Timothy J. Burger and Elaine Shannon/Washington, Adam Pitluk/West Chester and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad