At RFE/RL, Ismayilova reported to Kenan Aliyev (Aliyev was a common surname), the Azerbaijani service chief, who sat in Prague. Aliyev hired her because, he recalls, “I saw immediately that this woman has amazing energy and curiosity, and determination.  She’s fearless in many ways, and she also spoke English.” ^[15] Very quickly, he says, “she became an integral part of our operation.”

Ismayilova managed a staff of 19 fulltime and eight freelance reporters. With the 2009 broadcast ban, the service had to reorganize. She recalls that headquarters briefly considered halting the operation altogether. Instead, the service reduced its radio programing and built up its Web presence with multimedia content. It re-trained audio reporters as video reporters.

After Work . Meanwhile, in March 2009, Ismayilova agreed to take over as host of an RFE current affairs radio show. Its previous host had been so upset by the government’s broadcast ban that he resigned. “I didn’t want to lose the show,” remembers Ismayilova, “because I believed we could get our audience back. So I decided to do it myself.”

The broadcast ran daily from 5-7 pm (and repeated on weekends). ^[16] Listeners who previously had tuned in from their cars would now have to stay at work to catch the program on their computers. Ismayilova needed a strategy to attract them. So she modeled her show, which she dubbed “After Work,” on the hard-hitting BBC news interview program, HARDtalk. She says:

What could I do to make people sit in one place and listen to us? I decided to spill some blood in the studio… I invited officials, MPs from the ruling part, from the opposition, from wherever. The only rule is I’m equally mean to everyone... I have the reputation of a bitch.

Watch Khadija Ismayilova talk about her radio show.

The program enhanced Ismayilova’s standing in Azerbaijan; she became a household name. In addition to her radio work, in the fall of 2009, she started work on what seemed to have the potential to become a significant story. Her RFE colleague, Ulviyye Asadzade, had read in the press about sales of shares in a private bank, Silk Way, and noticed a familiar name among the bank’s shareholders—someone with the same name as President Aliyev’s daughter. Asadzade sought Ismayilova’s help in pursuing the lead.

Washington Post . Another project in late 2009, however, drew Ismayilova away for a while. Washington Post reporter Andrew Higgins was working on a story about members of President Aliyev’s family who apparently owned some $75 million worth of real estate in Dubai. The president’s 11-year-old son was listed as the ostensible owner of nine mansions worth $44 million (330 times the president’s annual salary). Ismayilova was Higgins’ local “fixer,” a journalist with good connections who could help him obtain the material he needed to substantiate his story. The Post published the story in March 2010, under a Dubai dateline. ^[17] Higgins used records from the Dubai Land Department to establish that three people with the same birthdates and same names as Aliyev’s three children had purchased the properties.

While the story may have caused a ripple in the US, it stunned Azerbaijan’s journalism community. Never had a reporter published so much concrete information about the Aliyev family and its doings. Ismayilova, in particular, felt she and her RFE/RL colleagues learned a valuable lesson. “Before that, we had a feeling that these documents are not available for us,” she notes.

We had kind of a complex about doing good stories. When [the Post ] did it, it was kind of a signal like—why can’t we do it?... The way Andrew [Higgins] was fact-checking was quite a good experience for me. He was checking the birth dates to prove that this is not a namesake—it’s the same person.

Newly emboldened, she and Asadzade returned to the bank story. They found a document on the Baku stock exchange website which listed as an owner of the Silk Way bank someone named Arzu Aliyeva—the same name as the president’s 21-year-old daughter—and provided an address. The address was 7 Samed Vurgun Street. The reporters then checked the voter list on the Central Election Commission’s website to find out who lived at that address. Aliyev’s wife and their two daughters were registered at that address for voting purposes. The birth years for those individuals in the registry corresponded to those of the first family. Another Silk Way owner, they discovered, had the same name and address as the wife of the president of the state airline company, AZAL. ^[18]

As they dug deeper, the two reporters were able to determine that during Azerbaijan’s 2003 privatization of the state airline, many of its properties—including airline catering, taxis, aircraft maintenance, duty-free stores—went to an umbrella company called SW Holding. Many SW Holding owners were members of the elite. SW Holding also took over the airline bank, Azal Bank, now renamed Silk Way. The bank privatization had not followed the legal process—there were no competing bids and no announcement. Instead, AZAL President Jahangir Askerov had quietly privatized the bank and sold it to his wife. The State Committee for Privatization had no idea the bank had gone private.

On August 13, 2010, RFE/RL published the story “Aliyev’s Azerbaijani Empire Grows, as Daughter Joins the Game” on its website in both English and Azerbaijani. ^[19] A photograph of Aliyev’s two glamorous daughters accompanied the story. RFE also hosted a radio discussion of the report. The story referenced other cases when government figures used close relatives to privatize a profitable part of the enterprise. For example, two sons of Minister for Emergency Situations Kemaladdin Heydarov owned a group of companies, United Enterprises International, which dealt in everything from caviar to soccer clubs. The investigative report attracted wide public attention. The government reaction, however, was silence.