The demand for Anas’s services soon outstripped his capacity at the newspaper. Some of the requests he received for investigations didn’t quite qualify as journalism. So last year Anas created a private investigative agency called Tiger Eye. He rents an unmarked space across town on the top floor of a four-story building where a handful of his newspaper’s best reporters work alongside several Tiger Eye employees. It’s difficult to know where one operation ends and the other begins. But they’re all part of Anas’s investigative fiefdom. The work space is divided into two sections: a war room of sorts, with a bank of computers against one wall and a wide table in the middle where the team hammers out strategy; and Anas’s office, decorated with framed awards, oversize checks (including one for $11,700 for Journalist of the Year), and snapshots of himself in disguise. Anas appeared uneasy when I asked him about Tiger Eye, partly because he realizes that its commercial aspect puts him in ethically dangerous territory. Yet it also constitutes a major source of the budget he relies on for long-term newspaper assignments. During the two weeks I spent with him in January, Anas fielded calls from the BBC and 60 Minutes, as well as private security companies, asking if he could conduct investigations for them. All offered generous compensation.

Three days after checking in to the mental ward, Anas identified an orderly, named Carter, who supplemented his income by selling cocaine, heroin, and marijuana to patients. The two met secretly behind the dining hall. Carter brimmed with confidence and assured Anas that while other dealers could be caught or arrested anytime, “with me, you are safe.” According to Carter, customers paid extra “because of [his] personality.” Anas bought some coke, recording the transaction on his button camera. He did this several times. But he worried that Carter would grow suspicious if he was buying, but never using, the drugs. So for the sake of the investigation, Anas, who normally doesn’t even drink, began injecting drugs into his arm. That created a problem. Anas knew, going in, that he would be prescribed sedatives; he had consulted four friendly doctors on how to neutralize their effects. “If I go in and sleep the whole time, I will come out with no story,” he told them. One doctor suggested that a regular dosage of caffeine pills might do the trick, albeit for a limited amount of time. But he never considered how pot, smack, and coke would factor into the mix.

Five days after checking in, Anas sent a distressed text message to his doctors. His body had begun to shut down: his tongue went numb and he sat, fixed and immobile, for hours. “There have been stories I’ve done where there are guns,” he told me later. “But with this one, I felt the threat in my body. It’s an experience I have never had before, when everything you are looking at no longer appears normal. You come to believe that you are even a mad person yourself.” He got himself discharged, on the pretext of having to attend a funeral up-country. He stumbled out through the black metal gate into a waiting car driven by one of the doctors, who whisked Anas off to a safe house and hooked him up to an IV. He regained his strength and after three days returned to the hospital.