Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  With 37,000 US troops still stationed in South Korea, guaranteeing its security, US presidents could normally expect a grateful welcome in Seoul. Not Bush after his ‘axis of evil’ speech.

  The same was true of a visit a few months later to Berlin, another bastion of the Cold War where successive US presidents suffering slumps in support at home had gone to boost their flagging morale. Here, the surname Bush also carried some weight, since after the fall of the Berlin Wall George Snr, the then president, had been welcomed like a liberator. Bush Jnr, however, was unable to tap into this reservoir of goodwill and was greeted instead by the now-familiar scene: thousands of protesters carrying placards such as ‘We Don’t Want Your War’, ‘Stop Bush’s Global War’ and ‘Axis of Peace’, and those life-size papier-mâché puppets of Bush, bobbing manically from side to side. Europeans may have temporarily become Americans in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but not in the lead-up to Iraq.

  Rather than prompting any great introspection, I suspect these visits merely reinforced the ‘for us or against us’ bunker mentality that had now taken grip in the Bush administration. They also confirmed the existence, as Donald Rumsfeld described it, of an Old Europe, which was instinctively antagonistic towards Washington, and a New Europe to the east of Berlin, which was much more closely aligned.

  Lending grist to the Pentagon’s mill, just about the only place where George W. Bush was guaranteed an enthusiastic welcome was in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union. Whereas in cities such as Berlin and Paris the president’s image-makers rarely allowed him to step outside, in places such as Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and Bucharest they encouraged him to take part in massive outdoor rallies.

  His speech in the Romanian capital, opposite the communist headquarters where in 1989 Nicolae Ceauescu had to be lifted off the roof by helicopter, lingers in the mind because I had never seen Bush greeted with such delirium, even before a crowd of Texan Republicans. Under driving rain, in the most horrid of conditions, tens of thousands had gathered in Revolution Square, waving postcard-sized Romanian and American flags and bobbing their umbrellas up and down in time to the music. Loudspeakers belted out Elvis Presley’s ‘A Little Less Conversation’ – a rather neat musical summation, it could be argued, of the Bush doctrine.

  Yet it was the president rather than the king that the crowd wanted to hear. ‘Salut!’ shouted Bush, after bouncing onto stage wearing a hefty bullet-proof jacket under his overcoat that seemed for once an unnecessary precaution. Addressing freedom-loving new friends, Bush had rarely been more fluent at the podium. To wild cheers, he noted that ‘the people of Romania know that dictators must never be appeased or ignored. They must be opposed.’ For a brief moment, rays of sunlight breached the charcoal skies and a rainbow started to form. Noticing the change in the weather, Bush interpreted it as a sign from the heavens: ‘God is smiling on us today.’ Rarely in any doubt about the righteousness of his cause, he firmly believed it to be true. New Europe got it, I dare say he left thinking. Old Europe most definitely did not.

  The Old European exception, of course, was Tony Blair. From the moment at the Crawford ranch in April 2002 when he first signed up for the Iraq war, the British prime minister became the American president’s most useful ally. With an eloquence and coherence that eluded Bush, Blair built the case against Saddam Hussein with far greater intellectual and moral force. It helped shore up not only international support at the United Nations but also Democratic support in Congress. Blair helped provide Bush with diplomatic and political cover, even if it earned him the scorn of much of the British public, along with the sobriquet ‘Bush’s poodle’.

  Another eloquent English progressive, accused by his friends and former comrades of lurching precipitously to the right, lent his voice as well. As he laid out the case against Saddam Hussein, Christopher Hitchens became a frequent visitor to our bureau, as he had been during the impeachment saga – although this time he appeared significantly more sober. With a bronze bust of Sir Winston Churchill sitting, shrine-like, in the Oval Office and Tony Blair regularly flying in from London, Englishmen had never received a warmer welcome in Washington.

  This was more than could be said for the French – or the ‘cheese-eating surrender-monkeys’, as the New York tabloids took to calling them, or the founding member of the ‘axis of weasels’. I, like everyone else who used the government cafeteria on Capitol Hill, found myself eating newly renamed Freedom Fries. So, too, did the reporters aboard Air Force One, where French toast was banished as well. French wine was poured down drains, while a newspaper suggested that couples refrain from French kissing and opt for a ‘liberty lip lock’ instead. Even the wonderful little Parisian-style street cafe opposite where I lived in Georgetown came under fire for insisting still on flying the red, white and blue of the drapeau tricolore. The butcher up the road hit back with the war-on-terror trifecta of Old Glory, the Union Flag and the Australian colours, in appreciation of Prime Minister John Howard’s rock-steady support.

  If the sight of French red wine being poured down drains provided the pictures for our most frivolous ‘waiting for war’ stories, then a trip to Dover Air Base in Delaware was by far the most grave. It was the home of the US military’s largest mortuary and a base that had forced its way into the American consciousness during Vietnam because of the sight on the evening news night after night of so many flag-draped coffins being flown back from South East Asia. The ‘Dover test’ remained something of a yardstick, a gauge of how many American casualties the public would countenance, and thus of a given conflict’s political acceptability.

  In the early 1990s, the filming of the return of caskets had been banned precisely for that reason, the thinking presumably being that the American public had become a lot more squeamish. Even though that ban remained in place, the Pentagon agreed to show us the base’s upgraded facilities. A determinedly on-message officer from the base’s press team took us to the medical facilities available to casualties returning from the front and to the military-tailor shop. Its only task was to fashion ceremonial uniforms for the returning dead, and it boasted a complete collection of ribbonry, braiding, enamel badges and insignia from every US regiment and branch of the military.

  Morbid though it sounds, what we really wanted to see was the mortuary, the section of the base where cameras were prohibited and which thus had the most news value. While his boss briefly stepped away, a determinedly off-message Pentagon PR flack sneaked us into the mortuary, where the gurneys were already lined up in readiness for the first fatalities from Iraq. In those days, subversive military press officers were thin on the ground, but we were fortunate to be in the hands of one in the ten minutes or so that we had to film. In short time, he had handed us a rather macabre scoop.

  War eventually came with the much previewed ‘shock and awe’ of the first night-time assault on Baghdad. Like virtually everyone else in Washington, including the president himself, we watched it unfold on cable television. From the safety of the bureau, we admired the courage of our team that had chosen to remain at the Palestine Hotel in the Iraqi capital – most US networks had by this time evacuated – and envied the reporters embedded with the US and British troops, who we suspected would be joining them in a liberated Baghdad within the month.

  With the diplomatic manoeuvrings over, and the action unfolding on the ground, suits correspondents plummeted down the running order again, leaving boots correspondents with the lead. From 9.34 pm on 20 March 2003, when the war started, to when the statue of Saddam Hussein was hauled down in Firdos Square by a US Marines recovery vehicle – footage shown every 7.5 minutes on CNN and every 4.4 minutes on Fox, which suggested that American forces now controlled central Baghdad but were still a long way from winning the war – we felt like spectators.

  During this time, I can recall leaving Washington only once. I was dispatched to Palestine, West Virginia, a hamlet nestled in the Appalachians that was the home of Private Jessica Lynch, the w
ar’s most unlikely star. Awoken before dawn by London and told to get to West Virginia to file in time for the evening news – lunchtime US time – I thought the details of the story seemed just too good to be true.

  Private Lynch, the 19-year-old member of a US Army ordnance maintenance company, had been part of a convoy that had taken a wrong turn in Nasiriyah and had ended up being ambushed by the Iraqi fedayeen. In the firefight that followed, nine of her colleagues were killed. Over a week later, the Americans had learnt that she was still alive and being treated at the general hospital in Nasiriyah. Grasping the propaganda value of a dramatic rescue, the Pentagon mounted a full-blown raid on the hospital, spearheaded by Navy Seals and US Rangers, even though intelligence reports made it clear the Iraqi Army and fedayeen had fled the day before.

  The mission, punctuated as it was by shouts of ‘go, go, go’ from the rescue team and filmed in the jerky, handheld style of a Jason Bourne movie, made for enthralling television, which was precisely the intention. From its purpose-built, multi-million-dollar media centre in Doha, the Pentagon released an edited version of the luminous green night-time video along with a still photograph of Jessica on a stretcher clutching an American flag that had been handed to her by a soldier.

  Needing both a hero and a good-news story at a time in the war when the Pentagon was facing questions about the sluggish pace of its advance, young Jessica had become the perfect muse. To further embroider the story, the Pentagon turned the diminutive former supply clerk into some kind of Rambo. According to leaks handed to selected reporters, she had fought to near death and been stabbed and shot ‘multiple times’.

  ‘Saving Private Lynch’, as the rescue was inexorably dubbed, certainly had cinematic potential. Alas, it had a counterfeit plot. Though held captive initially by Iraqi soldiers, she was later cared for at the hospital by local doctors, who protected her from government agents and had offered up their own blood for transfusion because of a chronic shortage of supplies. The doctors had even arranged to deliver Jessica by ambulance to the Americans.

  By the time we got to Palestine – a community festooned in yellow ribbon – the usual armada of satellite trucks already filled the paddock outside the tin-roofed cottage where the Lynch family had kept vigil. The enamel-lapel-badge brigade was also doing its thing, turning a shy teenager into an icon. Arriving with less than an hour to go before the evening news in Britain, we just about managed to get a report to air that was dispatched, I would like to think, with the necessary dose of scepticism. However, I came away from Palestine the next day thinking myself the world’s worst journalist.

  That morning, The New York Times published a quite superb colour piece from Palestine, packed with local characters and atmospherics, most of which I had completely missed. In my defence, our deadlines had been even more testing than usual, and there had not been much time to adequately survey the scene. But I had always prided myself on being something of a ‘colour man’ and felt awful that The Times had done such a better job at capturing the mood.

  It was only the following month, when the newspaper published a front-page, 7000-word article chronicling the writer’s deceptions, that I realised why. The author of that report had been Jayson Blair, a serial fabricator and plagiariser, who wrote much of his copy from his apartment in New York in a cocaine-fuelled haze. On this story, like many others, he had not even left Manhattan Island. I mention it now to highlight the hazards of reporting during this disorientating phase. Not only did we have to sift through the Bush administration’s spin, obfuscation and misinformation, but also we could no longer rely on our usual bedrock, The New York Times.

  By the end of the war, our professional scepticism and cynicism started to reassert itself. On the day of Baghdad’s liberation, we suggested from our rooftop vantage point that running Saddam out of town had been the easy bit and that far greater challenges lay ahead.

  When museums and businesses in Baghdad started being ransacked under the idle gaze of US forces, we were quick to jump on Donald Rumsfeld’s famed ‘Stuff happens’ line. Then came Bush’s Top Gun moment, when, dressed in a shimmering olive jumpsuit, the president flew in for a tail-hook landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier ordered to anchor off the coast of California.

  ‘Militainment,’ someone said of a photo opportunity that screamed conquering commander-in-chief. And what of that banner: ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED’? To celebrate what Bush had described as the end of major combat operations in Iraq, the press was invited to a hoedown in the central courtyard of the Pentagon, a tree-dotted paved area long known as ‘Ground Zero’ because it was thought to top the Soviet Union’s ballistic target list. Amidst a mood of demob happiness, a country and western band serenaded the military top brass, which toasted its success with lemonade in the late-afternoon sunshine.

  In my piece to camera, delivered front of the stage and to disapproving glances, I asked how the Bush administration could claim bragging rights when Saddam Hussein remained at large and not a single weapon of mass destruction had yet been located. Perhaps for the first time since 9/11, I felt like a fully functioning journalist and that my faculties had been restored. After the fall of Baghdad, there was a sense that we had been liberated as well.

  Looking back, what I should have done immediately after the Iraq war was to head straight for Baghdad. Instead, the weekend after the toppling of Saddam’s statue I boarded a plane to Augusta, Georgia, for the US Masters. A feminist group calling itself the Pink Ladies planned to picket the tournament in protest at the refusal of a golf club where all the holes were named after flowers to admit women as members. It was an inconsequential story, a real ‘And finally’ number tagged onto the end of the sports bulletin. But that was the point. After the war and its elongated build-up, this was my own kind of exit strategy.

  Shamefully, I never did make it to Iraq, and to this day it remains the biggest lacuna on my résumé. Perhaps it was sheer spinelessness that kept me from going, although I would like to think it had more to do with the difficulties and frustrations of reporting post-war Iraq. So violent was the insurgency, and so strong was the risk of kidnapping and beheading, that our news teams found it hard to venture out beyond the front door of our heavily protected Baghdad bureau. Most of all, I suspect, it was simple mental fatigue. As with that trip to Augusta, Georgia, I needed a holiday from post-9/11 news.

  From that first moment of semi-consciousness and semi-understanding in Seattle to the time more than two years later that I boarded a plane at Dulles International Airport at the end of my posting in Washington, virtually everything came to be viewed through the lens of the war on terror.

  My lasting recollection from a drop-everything-and-go dash to Chicago was that we ended up kipping down for the night in what had once been Hugh Hefner’s hotel suite, which partly compensated for the Saturday night on the eve of the Democratic national convention when I turned down the Playboy Mansion invite. But the reason we had rushed there was to cover the arrest of an al-Qaeda suspect accused of plotting a dirty-bomb attack.

  Even after the second shuttle disaster, when the Columbia disintegrated high above Texas on 1 February 2003 on its approach to Cape Canaveral, the Department of Homeland Security had to play down fears of sabotage by terrorists. The shuttle had exploded over Palestine, Texas, and carried its first-ever Israeli astronaut. People jumped to conclusions. Ground Zero itself remained the source of an endless torrent of stories. There was the ongoing controversy over what should fill the gaping hole left in Lower Manhattan, and the bitter disputes over how victim-compensation payments should be dispensed. The last two involved large sums of money and large numbers of lawyers – an unmistakable sign that America was on the mend.

  To start with at least, we suspected that the Washington sniper attacks could be the work of jihadists. Certainly, they brought terror back to the capital. During the 23 days in October 2002 that the killings continued, almost everyone in Washington imagined themselves framed in the crosshairs o
f a marksman’s rifle. As I walked to and from work at a much hastier pace than normal, and relied much more heavily on cabs, I knew I did.

  A man mowing his lawn. A woman vacuuming her Dodge caravan. A 55-year-old government bureaucrat picking up groceries at Shoppers Food Warehouse. An FBI intelligence analyst outside Home Depot. A boy, just 13 years of age, arriving at middle school. A bus driver at the end of his morning run. The simple fact that the sniper struck in such banal suburban locations made the attacks all the more terrifying. The Tarot death cards left at the murder scenes, with macabre messages such as ‘Call me God’ and ‘Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time’, also made them surreal. Stranger still was the coded dialogue used by the police to communicate with the sniper, one side of which played out on television as the officer leading the investigation addressed the murderer through the media.

  A barrel-chested African-American with a trance-like stare, Chief Charles Moose, could hardly have been better cast, and even his name seemed fictionalised. ‘You have indicated that you want us to say and do certain things,’ said Moose at a particularly mystifying news conference. ‘You have asked us to say “We have caught the sniper like a duck in the noose.”’ The story defied analogy, and London could not get enough of it.

  For three weeks, we chased the sniper from one suburban murder scene to the next. One night, we even caught up with him, after checking into a cheap motel over the road from the scene of his latest killing, a Ponderosa Steakhouse just north of Richmond, Virginia. Kicking back with a beer on the walkway outside our rooms after filing our report over to London, we toasted our luck at staying in what must have been the safest place in the entire metropolitan area.