To her friends and teachers, sixteen-year-old Tina Isa was a bright, bubbly American girl, working at a fast-food restaurant to earn money for college and dating a shy, poetic senior. But at home there were secrets that scared the honor student. Her parents and older sisters were constantly on the attack - she had humiliated them by assimilating into American culture instead of conforming to the traditional Muslim values dutifully followed in their native West Bank village.
Furious, Tina's father beat her so savagely that she told friends - and left notes in her schoolbooks - that if anything happened to her, her father was to blame. Tina had long known that Palestinian terrorism was behind his mysterious phone calls and many trips to the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. Her father and the other Abu Nidal Organization operatives worried that Tina might expose their activities.
. One midnight, as Tina returned home from her job and walked into the living room, her father made a chilling pronouncement. "Listen, my dear daughter," Zein Isa said. "Tonight, you're going to die.".
Meanwhile, the FBI had Isa under electronic surveillance as a suspected terrorist. He and his relatives and friends had been sending money and letters to the Abu Nidal Organization and had been involved in arson, food stamp fraud, and even murder.
The FBI had bugged and wiretapped Isa's home and business for years, never expecting they would be taping Tina's murder: eight minutes of screams as her father stabbed her through the heart while her mother held her down, a tape that, when played at the murder trial, had jurors sobbing.
Veteran reporter Ellen Harris explores not only Tina's death, but the culture that advocates such brutality. Zein Isa was eager to kill American Jews and Israeli civilians for thwarting Palestinian independence. But even more horrific was his willingness to kill his youngest child, his most beloved daughter, for violation of traditional Palestinian mores.
Tina's sisters and cousins condoned, and even encouraged, the slaying, saying it was "an honor killing": to restore tribal honor, a man must slay a wayward woman.
Guarding the Secrets is not only a terrifying true-crime story, but also an exploration of a tragic culture clash and a warning of just how serious a threat terrorism is in the United States. If the FBI had not been monitoring Isa and his colleagues - resulting in the arrest of two major Abu Nidal leaders - these men might have been guilty of even more murders. Indeed, right now, there are Abu Nidal Organization collaborators and sympathizers in at least sixteen cities across the United States.
