He went on. "My definition of national security has changed a lot," he said, here so perfectly mirroring the sixties reporter's feelings and morality. "I'm not sure it doesn't have a lot more to do with better air and water and ethics for corporate executives than military problems." Then: "I did hate the Vietnam War; it was an evil." And: "We're such a big country, we can afford the diversity." And: "I publish something and -- surprise! -- the next day the Russians still haven't taken San Francisco."
And then the military, some quite rational and some not at all rational and some really quite crazy, put to him the classic question that for them determines loyalty to country: Would he print the metaphorical story about his country's troopship sailing in time of war?
Hersh had not the slightest hesitation. He hesitated not a whit.
"Would I write the story about the troopship sailing?" he repeated. "Yes, I would. Let it sail some other day. Does that make me less of an American? I'd worry more about my opposition -- about what
The Washington Post would have -- than national security."
I was horrified by Hersh's speech. Since I was on the ensuing panel, I commented on it. "What Mr. Hersh is doing," I said, "is exactly what he criticized the U.S. military for doing during Vietnam. He is 'punching his own ticket.'" I went on to say that the American press could not consider itself an amoral force, outside of society, with no responsibility or loyalty to the rest of society -- or that society would eventually exclude it. I said that we cannot be a surrogate for society and an adversary to it.
What was surprising was the reaction of the officers that night. We all met at a lively little party at the admiral's house, and I was now further stunned. The military were not at all angry with Hersh, but they were completely miffed at me . At first I could not understand what was going on. Then it hit me: Hersh they could understand.
Hersh fulfilled all their angry expectations of us in the press. My sense of complexity and ambiguity confused and angered them because I made them think something else about journalists!
***
The new challenges to the foreign correspondent did not end there. What to me, when I started in 1964, had seemed such an exciting and romantic life -- dangerous, yes, but dangerous in a way that was comprehensible and predictable -- now had become something of immense complexities. Not only were there the new-type dangers of an Angola and a Beirut but there were countries that virtually wanted to close down the world to us.
In the mid-seventies, for instance, some Third World countries, backed strenuously by the Soviet bloc, started the formation of a New Information Order under UNESCO . It began simply enough, with some Third World countries feeling genuinely and strongly that the Western press, in particular the news agencies like Associated Press and Reuter's, which saturated the news world, were not giving enough attention to Third World problems and development. To some degree this was true, and in the beginning Western publishers responded positively with offers to back up, even financially, the formation of Third World news networks.
Then as the Soviets got their hands deeper into it, it became a real down-the-line fight over the free press in the world. Now, in this new alliance of the Soviets and the Third World dictators, foreign correspondents could even be "licensed" by UNESCO -- and punished by them if they did not write the "right things." Soon all transmission of news and ideas was to be controlled, even computer information from companies to their home offices and military satellites. These developments were encouraged by the Soviet bloc, anxious to weaken the workings of the Western free press in the world, and by certain bloody dictatorships eager to keep out a press they did not want snooping around.
In the late seventies I began a new part of my career -- speaking on American journalism for the U. S. government's International Communication Agency (the former U . S . Information Service), which sends journalists on trips to various countries to speak to the journalists there. It is a fine program, very straight and very sound -- and since you are paid seventy-five dollars a day for marathon speeches, interviews, and meetings, no one can accuse you of being in it "for the money."
My first trip for ICA was in the fall of 1979, when I went to four countries in Africa, including two of the original New Information Order countries, and learned a great deal. In Nigeria, whose government had most pushed it, I sat every night for long talks with Nigerian journalists. I kept bringing up the New Information Order -- only to blank stares. Indeed, I could not even get them to talk to me about it.
Finally one prominent editor told me, as the others nodded, "We are not interested in that. But can't you help us get more freedom, can't you help us pressure our government to give us visas for the States so we can cover other countries?"
An even more interesting lesson in the new attempts to control the international press on the behalf of the socialist bloc and the worst dictatorships came a few weeks later in Tanzania, another of the fosterers of the New Information Order.
Tanzania, which faces the dramatically azure Indian Ocean on the southeast coast of Africa, where the Arab slave-traders used to ply their doomed human wares between Zanzibar and the Sahara, gained its independence in 1961. But by the time I was there almost two decades later, it had only marched resolutely backward. Not only were the poor Tanzanians far worse off than they had been in 1961, but the mammoth amounts of international aid that had been poured into Tanzania from well-meaning folks like the Finns and the Swedes had only helped the country not to progress -- because it made Tanzanians rely on outside help.
One day during my week there I was sitting with the editors of Shihata, the official government news agency, and they were as usual berating me for excesses, real and imagined, in the American press. I was actually only half-listening -- listlessness can serve many purposes -- as they squabbled on, when suddenly for no reason I decided to change the dull subject and asked:
"Tell me about your coverage of Uganda."
Since the Tanzanian government had just sent thirty thousand Tanzanian troops into Uganda to overthrow the murderous Idi Amin (an event I heartily applauded), it seemed an obvious question to ask. But to my surprise and then to my curiosity, the five men sat there without speaking.
"But you did cover the Ugandan war, didn't you?" I asked, in total innocence.
"You know, the military nowhere in the world likes journalists," the director of Shihata finally answered, with all the indirection of a cobra in heat.
"That's very true," I replied agreeably. "It was the same in Vietnam."
"Well, we did send reporters in," the editor went on, brightening suddenly, perhaps because I had mentioned Vietnam. "But the generals didn't like them and they made scouts of the reporters."
"Scouts! Of the reporters!" I was aghast. "Did they survive?"
"Oh, yes, yes, they did," he went on. "And finally we did cover it."
"When?"
"About five weeks after it started," he answered.
"Five weeks? For five weeks there was nothing?" They all nodded, a bit chagrined. "But why?"
Now the editor drew himself up. "Why, we might have lost," he said. I nodded.
"That was what our generals told us in Vietnam," I said with a dryness that escaped their notice.
Then I added, "But didn't your readers notice that you weren't, ummm, covering the war?"
He smiled. "Oh, yes, they would come to us and say, 'There are thirty thousand Tanzanians in Uganda. You journalists must be the only people in the country who do not know they are there.'"
Right there you had the problem -- the problem that all of us everywhere were trying to come to grips with -- and the operative truth. You had to have press freedom, not for some esoteric reason but because it was the only way to keep the compact between the people and the government, the only way to keep the basic agreements of society, relatively truthful. It was the new challenges to this compact and to this faith that we were beginning to see across the developing world.
XV.
&nb
sp; Covering the Khomeinis and Their Dark Worlds
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."
-- George Orwell
When a friend suggested in December 1978 that I try to interview the Ayatollah Khomeini as I was going through Paris, my prescient answer was, "I don't think he'll really turn out to be anybody."
Still, I did telephone, first Reuter's News Agency in Paris to get Khomeini's phone number in Neauphle le Château. Then I called there and talked for about five minutes to Ibrahim Yazdi, later to become foreign minister. Yes, Khomeini would see me that Thursday at 11:00 A. M. -- but I must telephone in my questions the next day. When I did, I got my first taste of the strange mixture of modern and ancient elements, and sheer cunning that was Khomeini. I read the questions, all very general, to Yazdi and he said, "Fine, we have them recorded and we'll have them translated by the time you get here." Nobody had said anything beforehand about "recording" -- funny, I thought.
When I arrived that cold and snowy day, tired and fretful from the overnight plane ride, I was conservatively dressed. I had a long loose dress on, high black boots, and a long fur coat. Nevertheless a young Persian, smiling, came toward me with an ugly scarf, which he dutifully wrapped around my head so that only my eyes were showing. Like all women, I was far too enticing to be allowed to run about uncovered.
On the walls was one message repeated over and over: THE AYATOLLAH HAS NO SPOKESMAN . They did not want the members of the press, who were pouring out here to see the ayatollah, to accept the word of anybody else. In actuality what he was saying day by day and hour by hour was so confusing and so contradictory that it was questionable whether they needed this additional protection.
Soon Yazdi led me across the road, lined with Persians of every possible religious gown and hat and filled with French police watching the dark gowns and hats, which always seemed to be marching in proclamatory processions, to a small, wooden French worker's summer cottage. There lived the ayatollah: in a tiny room emptied of furniture whose walls were covered still with the frowsy, flowered wallpaper of the limpid French bourgeoisie. Yazdi and I sat quietly, crouched in what must be the outer limits of discomfort on the floor.
After a few minutes "in" swept the Ayatollah Khomeini -- actually he floated in. He was a massive presence then, a huge black moth of a man, and when he sat down, he floated to the ground like a specter. His round white ayatollah's hat hovered precariously atop his head like an obstinate halo, but the thing that I will always remember were the eyes. For the hour and a half that we spent with him, his eyes never rested on either of us -- not on Yazdi and certainly not on me, the dangerous female. Utterly black and sinister, those eyes stared between and beyond us. If we existed at all to him, it was surely as lower creatures who could never understand the vision he alone could see.
I had deliberately, as usual, made the questions quite general. Did he consider this a "holy war"?
"Yes," the answer came back through the Persian interpreter, "we consider this a holy war -- and by that we mean for the sake of Islam and for the sake of God and for the liberation of our own people."
How strange, I thought to myself, an ancient cry for a "holy war" going out from this snowy little French town, with its mewing cows outside and its faded wallpaper!
And the Marxists in the revolution? "Our aims and goals are different from those of Communists and Marxists," he said. "Our movement is based on Islam and monotheism, and they are against both of them. Thus there is no cooperation and compatibility between our movement and theirs." And all the while the strange, dark, expressionless eyes stared between us -- and far, far beyond us.
He talked of an Islamic state that is a republic, which "relies on the general vote of the public, neither capitalist nor socialist." He believed there were enough Iranian "experts" in exile to run a modern, industrialized state "in an Islamic way." When I mentioned Saudi Arabia or Libya, even in his impassive manner he was able to show an utter disdain.
And so it went on, for more than an hour, while I sat there covered over like some armchair during spring house painting. And when the time came, Khomeini just rose, his eyes still showing no emotion whatsoever, and ... floated out.
Interviews with Khomeini were certainly interesting, but hardly conclusive. The very next week after this call for a Moslem "holy war," he told Marvin Zonis, the fine Iranian specialist at the University of Chicago, that "No Moslem would kill another Moslem. The people doing the shooting in Iran are one thousand Israelis imported by the shah." So it went; every interview totally contradicted the other, something the Persians cleverly call "dissimulation."
Afterward we wandered back across the road, and while Yazdi translated the answers from Persian for me, I strolled (my enticing limbs and raging beauty still covered up) about the house. I was flabbergasted. Every room looked as though it had been set up for a moon shot. Electronic gear of every conceivable sort lined the walls. When I returned to Yazdi, I asked him what it was all about. "This is the way we operate," he told me. "When the ayatollah wants to send a message to Iran, we make twelve recordings of it. Then we put those on the telephones to different parts of Iran. There they are rerecorded onto cassettes and boys on Hondas carry them all over the country."
It was staggering. I had seen, I thought, every kind of revolution -- but never had I seen this very new, very modern phenomenon of using the modern technology at the service of such an ancient faith. It was a long time and a long way from the original countryside guerrillas in the mountains of Guatemala: one of many strange voyages I was to see and make in my lifetime of observing revolutions and revolutionaries without, while all the time going through my own woman's revolution within.
I had to ask myself, as honestly as I could, whether being a woman -- and being all bundled up by them, for my own protection, bothered me. I didn't like it, but it really didn't upset me unduly; after all I had the power to interpret them to the world, didn't I? What was an old rag compared to that? Had I been one of their women, a woman forced to live out her life under a black veil, I would have either rebelled totally or gone stark raving mad. But then, I asked myself, how to explain the Iranian women who, first as a mark of support for the revolution, and later for other reasons, themselves adopted the chador?
(Actually, as odd as that was, it was at that time also understandable. The women were taking up the sanctuary of the black robe as a defense of their personality, in the same -- yet apparently contrary -- manner as Western women were disrobing in defense of their personality. It is strange, but true.)
My position as an outsider -- as a Western woman -- was intensely clear to me. And yet I knew that men would talk to me, even (or perhaps more so) in places like the Middle East; I would remain "woman," the listener, the absorber, the understander, the unifier of elements. How lucky to be able, through journalism and writing, precisely to use those elements that are disadvantages for other women as an advantage in my work.
Indeed the first time I visited Saudi Arabia, in 1973,1 ran head-on into Moslem attitudes toward women in a classically dramatic way. I had a fine guide, a good man who was both smart and trying very, very hard to be honorable and fair. I knew I was somewhat of a problem for him, because they simply were not used to foreign women journalists. However, he was very tolerant and took me anyplace I asked, and the only time he allowed himself to show a distinct displeasure was when I insisted upon buying some Bedouin silver -- he waited outside the little shop, his back turned to me, because he could not sustain the idea that a Western "lady" would buy cheap country silver -- instead of "ladies'" gold.
Then, since the Friday holiday was coming, he invited me to go with him, his wife, and their little daughter out to "the creek," which is a great, meandering arm of the Red Sea that forms a nice "swimming hole" for Jedda. I was delighted -- it was a most unusual invitation.
Their house was a small one, protected by large fences, where no one could see us. So we -- he and I, for his wife
was pregnant -- changed into swimsuits and walked out to the pier. The moment we emerged from changing clothes, I felt the most terrible shame sweeping over me. Ahmed himself had turned several shades of red. He did not -- could not -- look at me. I stared straight ahead, feeling that I was indeed (as I, too, had been raised to believe, though more subtly) the very incarnation of evil. Eve's supposed grave is in a wild field in downtown Jedda, so one might argue obscurely that it was the propinquity of the past evil that also was affecting me.
We both got quickly into the water, where I swam eagerly up and down, but I shall never forget those feelings. The shame that society cast on my body and thus soul had overtaken both of us, a man of goodwill and a woman of goodwill--but it had not destroyed our innocent attempt to ignore it. All my professional life I have deeply appreciated and revered people -- men and women -- who are trying honorably and sensitively to live out in their own brief existences, and despite the deep conflicts imposed by their pasts, the great epic changes of our times.
What we are talking about -- in all of this -- is a basic way of looking at societies, and then of analyzing them, and finally of writing about them. It is a process that proceeds on several levels, until it goes from your usual surface "reporting" of a society to a deep and mysterious and totally penetrating psychological portraying of it. It is a new kind of "reporting" and, to my mind and soul, an absolutely crucial one. But let me put it into practical form, with practical questions. Let me start again with Iran, because it became such a crucial example of the madnesses of nations in our time.
Was Iran difficult to cover and understand? No. When I started to cover Iran in 1968, basically I asked the same questions you would ask in Chicago: Who are his enemies? Would they kill him? The mullahs, you say? What do they want? What would they pay for it? Where do they get the money? Only ... I wasn't talking about Richard J. Daley, I was talking about the shahanshah of Iran -- and Ruhollah Khomeini.
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