THE ROAD TO WAR
Minding the Minders: You Report, They Decide
Vivienne!" shouts the minder from the Ministry of Information, a tall chain-smoker I've known for two years. He has cornered me on the cracked sidewalk outside the ministry's headquarters in downtown Baghdad. My heart sinks. "You've been in Iraq many times before," he says. "You know the rules. You went to church without a guide?"
There was no denying it. I'd stopped off to buy a bottle of whiskey, one of the few treats in this secular country. The Christian liquor-store owner suggested I come by his church later to see the latest sensation in Iraq, the ashes of Saint Therese of Lisieux, a young French woman from the nineteenth century whose remains had been hauled over to Baghdad in a box by a group of missionaries, to offer the beleaguered Iraqis some grace before the bombs begin to fall.
The invitation was too good to pass up. One is supposed to have a government "guide," or minder, for such an outing, so on my way I stopped by the ministry building — a concrete rectangle downtown near the Tigris River — to ask for one. I didn't expect much luck. The country was flooded with television crews and print reporters, who crammed the ministry press center each morning for a kind of frenzied auction, hunting for any minder with a decent grasp of English. The best were snapped up quickly by the highest bidders, who were prepared to offer $100 daily "tips" for being under continual surveillance. By late morning, the supply usually ran dry.
So it was this day. At sunset, I walked into the incense-filled
Chaldean Church in New Baghdad on my own and sat down to talk
to the soft-spoken priest.
It was an act that would haunt me during the weeks ahead. I'd broken one of the cardinal rules: do not wander Baghdad without a government guide. I'd won a feature story, but I might have jeopardized something far more important: my next visa.
While Washington plotted a new gulf war, those of us entrusted to describe life in Iraq to the outside world were mostly obsessed with three things: how to get in, stay in, and get in again.
As I write this, I am waiting for my fourth Iraqi visa in six months. For me and some of my most seasoned colleagues, this incessant waiting has produced a state of almost continual nervous anxiety. The quest has followed us even on time off. Fresh from Baghdad last November, I headed for the Turkish coast on vacation — only to spend every night crouched over a cell phone, pleading with Iraqi officials to let me back in. My mind was full of questions during the dark, sleepless hours: Had I paid the right money to the right person? Had that person any reason to push for a visa? What if U.N. inspectors turned up a major weapons find — say, tomorrow? Two months later I repeated the cycle almost exactly. Out of Baghdad again, I spent much of a week's break in South Africa crawling out of bed at dawn to call Iraqi officials in Baghdad.
Not even when the cherished stamp is issued at an Iraqi embassy does the obsession end. Gone for the moment is the pressure to get into Iraq. But bigger pressures begin almost from the moment one arrives in Baghdad: the battle to stay longer than ten days, the designated limit set by the Iraqi press center at the Ministry of Information. This requires nightly meetings — generally after nine — with senior officials in charge of visas. Crowds of reporters gather in a glass office inside the press center, waiting to plead their case for extensions or for new visa applications. "About half the time you're figuring out how to stay and watching the political winds at the ministry," says Ed Barnes, who visited Iraq in previous years as a Time correspondent and now works as a producer for FOX News. "You have to cut your work in half just to figure out what's going on with your visa. You can see people begin to fray the closer they get to the end of their visa."
There are other pressures, too. All foreigners are required to take an AIDS test if they are in Iraq more than ten days. Avoiding a weathered government-issue needle on one's exit from Saddam International Airport in Baghdad or at the land border to Jordan became another obsession. One U.S. correspondent finally paid $500 to be exempted for six months from AIDS tests. "One day I'll show you the certificate," says the reporter, who didn't want to be named in CJR.
And then there are the watchers, who listen and report on what you say and do. Even for those of us who've covered several wars, Iraq's challenges have been unique. "This is by far the hardest story from a psychological point of view I've ever covered, and I've been in Somalia, Colombia, Haiti, and Israel," E.A. (Ernie) Torriero of the Chicago Tribune tells me over a drink in Amman in early February, where scores of us meet again to wait for new visas. "You know you're always being watched, by audio, in the hotel, by video. Every driver's reporting back on you. It makes every day a very long psychological strain."
In reality, little stops us from walking around Baghdad alone. Thousands of Iraqis in the capital speak better English than our minders. And the city of five million people has plenty to offer for the idly curious: art galleries, cafes, mosques. But the threat of being banned from returning to Iraq has been enough to stop most reporters from venturing out on their own. "The visa's the carrot," Torriero says. "Dangle a visa in front of a journalist, and they'll jump and ask how high."
It's natural to assume that such pressures inhibit the reporting. Whispering late at night in the passage of Baghdad's Al-Rasheed Hotel, reporters on breaks from their bugged rooms swap anxieties about the self-censorship they might fall into. One regular in the late-night passage talk for months was The New York Times's John F. Burns, whose stories from Baghdad rarely hid his intense distaste for Saddam's Iraq. In an October story about Saddam's decision to release tens of thousands of political prisoners and common criminals, for example, Burns wrote that the release "seemed only to have confirmed the worst that many Iraqis had feared about the system they have lived under for much of their lives."
The press minders, it should be noted, not only watch and listen, they read, particularly in English. They are adept at using Google, and constantly remind journalists that they know their work.
Burns's Times duties have included covering China during the Cultural Revolution and South Africa at the height of apartheid in the 1970s. By early February, he was holed up again for weeks in the Grand Hyatt Amman — Jordan's journalist holding pen — waiting for a new visa. Over tea, we whiled away the hours listening to a jazz trio and discussing the likelihood of Saddam's taking journalists as human shields. A few days later, Burns calls to say the word has come from Baghdad: he is no longer welcome to return.
So, had he made the right choice in failing to watch his words in his stories from Baghdad? He tells me he thought he had. Or, rather, at fifty-eight, he finally decided he had no choice. Still, the anxiety of not getting another visa had plagued him for weeks. "I would sit in the Al-Rasheed night after night, and have this thought again and again: ‘Am I going to be excluded?'" he says. "Then I found myself writing into the night and I felt like the truth was sitting on my shoulder. Of course I'd love to be there. I'm demoralized about being excluded now. But I knew all along this was possible."
Perhaps what had made Burns a target was his ability to occasionally cut through the Iraqis' wall of silence about their government. Among all our challenges, that was probably the biggest. When I covered South Africa during its repressive state of emergency in the late 1980s, many people were willing to tell me things that could have them jailed for years. Somali gun runners and Palestinian fighters have shared information with me at great risk to themselves. But in Iraq, those kinds of quotes were almost nonexistent. Burns says he tried instead to describe by deduction, by reporting what was missing from the official picture. "It's like having a negative photograph," he says.
So who told the authorities about my solo visit to the church? I finally settled on my driver, whom I'd hired at $100 a day from the Al-Rasheed lobby. The small, gray-haired man had been nervous from the start, once insisting that he sit in with me on an interview with Swiss doctors from the Red Cross. The night of my scolding at the ministry, I anguished over what to do. The man's terror was clear, and all too human in Iraq, where the surveillance is relentless. Yet reporting Iraq demands at least a few moments of independent thought, if not action. I finally told the driver I would no longer need him. Faced with his disappointment, I slipped $200 extra in the envelope, and bade him good luck during the trying months ahead.
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