Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  What struck me again, watching this, was the wonderful égalité of the foreign correspondent corps. There is no other profession with so many able to go across often forbidden borders in such a privileged and yet equal way. Among us there were only a few rules for acceptance, but they were certain. You had to be honest; you never undercut a friend; and you paid your part of the drinks. Particularly either of these last -- not helping a colleague and not paying your part -- would get you ostracized forever. They are not really a bad set of rules for life, when you think about it.

  In the isolation our little group was making up its own games, like children caught indoors during an interminable summer squall. While we waited for the Big Guys, we were penetrating the society from our position of isolation, strength, and weakness. Yet without us, without this crazy little band of brothers and sisters, the world would be without its couriers, not carrying Saint-Exupéry's mail but conveying messages through the night that at best allowed people to know one another.

  I had pretty much gotten over the old questioning, like why did I need all of this? The terrible intensity, the scattered loves, the fever, the dark and isolated nights, the gray sky, the great desert around you, the skeletal new Sheratons and Intercontinentals so incongruous with the war a few miles away, the palm trees blowing, the ominous sounds, the chicken-in-the-basket every night for dinner -- they now spoke for themselves, or didn't.

  I have a Uruguayan print by an artist named Ojeda of which I am inordinately fond. It is called Homage to the Poet , and it has a stylized little man leaping squarely toward a radiant orange sun, carrying inside himself his houses, all his needs. In his hand is a single flower for the sun, on which his eyes are firmly fixed, and above him the word Libre , or Free . That was very much my life.

  Baghdad -- and in particular one of that splendid race of men who were Lebanese drivers, Tony -- reminded me of this. Tony, a graying and sweet man, invited me up to his room one night for a drink. And there, in him, was the little man of my print. Tony carried his world with him. He had enough pills for anyone in the entire press corps that ever got sick. He had marijuana cigarettes, flashlights for everyone, Lebanese bread sufficient for his stay there, an oven to warm it in, liquor....

  ***

  When the afternoons drew down late upon us, suddenly, however, the hotel became quieter. The winter sun began to go down at four thirty, and a long night awaited us. There were constant blackouts (because the Persians struck a power plant in Basra, because Kirkuk had been sabotaged, because always of vague and unsubstantiable rumors as untraceable as the wind). Often we sat with candles in the bar and in the restaurant, and often we walked up the darkened stairs with candles to our sixth-floor rooms. And we repeated Newsweek's Nick Proffitt's typical correspondent's crack: "The final indignity is that there is no final indignity."

  But the fact was that the days were passing too quickly. And I was not getting my interview. In fact I was not getting any interviews, which is precisely what the Ministry of Information was working night and day to assure. I, meanwhile, was growing more and more anxious. How would it look if I had to leave without anything? Fifteen years later it was the Guatemalan syndrome all over again. To make it worse, I had left the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and gone with Universal Press Syndicate. It was a dream. I loved the new people and I was now in The Washington Star , something I had always dreamed of. Why, in God's name, had I made my first assignment with them such a virtually impossible one? It would all make one despondent, if one were a normal human being.

  It had been twelve days. Now my time was really running out. Every day Selim, my contact at the ministry, assured me they were in contact with Tareq Aziz -- and every day there was "no answer" or "no answer yet, but surely tomorrow." It was a Thursday, and we were even thinking of leaving Friday for Amman. I hated to give up. So I decided to take things into my own hands.

  All along I had thought that as a last resort I would simply get a cab and try to go to the Revolutionary Command Council, where Tareq Aziz's office was, and at least try to get a note to him. But that was a long, long shot. The RCC was guarded like the Kremlin. Virtually nobody there, I knew, spoke English. Any foreigner even approaching might well be arrested or even shot. Yet I had to try something before leaving. Then one of the diplomats suggested I try phoning -- and somehow he dug up the top-secret number of the RCC . If appearing on the doorstep of the RCC seemed like a one-hundred-to-one shot, this seemed like a thousand-to-one shot.

  I dialed. A man answered in Arabic. I just kept repeating, "Tareq Aziz, Tareq Aziz, Tareq Aziz," over and over and over. Different men speaking in Arabic in different voices kept coming on the line. Then suddenly something utterly astonishing happened. A man speaking perfect British English was there on the line saying, "May I do something for you?"

  "I am Georgie Anne Geyer, the columnist from Washington from The Washington Star ," I was saying, my voice indignant. "And I want to speak to Tareq Aziz."

  "This is Mr. Fawaz," the nice voice responded. "I am Tareq Aziz's assistant. We have been expecting you. Did you just arrive?"

  "I've been here two weeks," I said indignantly. "Waiting. And I have to leave very, very soon." I wanted to say: "I can't wait forever," but with difficulty restrained myself.

  "Oh, my," he was saying. "We did not know you were here. But let me talk to Tareq Aziz and call you back."

  To my further amazement, in half an hour I was leaving the hotel when I heard the girl at the front desk speaking my name. It was a call from Mr. Fawaz, saying that Tareq Aziz would be happy to see me, but on the third day hence. I said I would stay.

  It was six thirty Sunday night. What had now become every day's blackout was fully upon us. The mysterious city along the sprawling Tigris, a bloated gray elephant of a river, in this strange darkness became frightening indeed. The military man, grim as are so many Iraqis, marched across the lobby. He was taking me to see Tareq Aziz, and everybody knew it. The Egyptian bellboys, "foreign workers" uprooted from their poor homeland to find work in a faraway and alien place like so many in this part of the world, were delighted. They all smiled knowingly at me. And I had the strangest feeling at that moment. I felt, in a very real sense, that I was doing it for them -- that I had in effect broken through, in this and other closed and harsh societies, for those good and decent and uprooted and sad people.

  I could not see the Revolutionary Command Council buildings -- certainly one of the world's most mysterious and closed places -- but in the darkness we passed through several guard posts and soon I was being rapidly ushered into simple modern buildings. Within moments, for now I had entered the inner sanctums of Ba'athist efficiency, I was sitting in a commodious armchair in an office sprinkled with silver trays and decorative pieces across from Tareq Aziz, one of the hardest men in the world to see.

  He was a small man, of lean build with cold dark eyes that bespoke systematic thinking and a world in which the strong survive and the weak die very young. His dark, curly hair was flecked with gray and his pinstriped suit was perfectly tailored. He turned out to have a good sense of humor, but even when he laughed at what he said -- or intimated -- it was a very cautious laugh. Even laughing at yourself in Baghdad could be dangerous.

  One Iraqi journalist, whose feelings can be easily ascertained, called him the Goebbels of the regime. Maybe. As a Christian in this land of Moslems and Armenians and Kurds and Zoroastrians and power-worshipers in general, Aziz had overcome everything with his systematic mind and finely tuned intelligence. And there was something else: no Christian could threaten Saddam Hussein in this Moslem sea. So Aziz was not only smart, he was safe.

  ''You must remember," Aziz started out, unsmiling, "that our grandfathers died on horseback." And then he proceeded to tell, for the first time, the entire Iraqi story of the world's newest and most dangerous war -- one not over horses and conquest but over the oil that fuels the industrialized world and over missiles and atom plants. A long way from Guatemala and the simplici
ty of that sierra.

  Why had they started the war? For one reason only, he said. Because Khomeini was trying to put the entire region in flames, to destroy the borders and reignite the struggles of the sixth and seventh centuries, when Islam swept from Arabia to Spain.

  "They must have sent a lot of agents," I volunteered at one point.

  "The Iranians sent hundreds of religious agents," Aziz said, in what must be one of the greatest quotes it has been my pleasure to hear, "most were hanged. Iraq is a very well-organized society."

  I wanted to know exactly how the decision to go to war came. And he told me: "We had this meeting, I remember, and we received news that they intended to close our airspace over Iranian territory and the passages to the Shatt-al-Arab. We analyzed that that was a step toward war. They were shelling our ships. That meant they wanted to close our waterways. Later we also found out that they had transferred their transportation planes to Pakistan. This meant they were preparing an air strike. By September, with all the news before our leadership, the analysis was that the Iranians were preparing for war."

  And what about the Russian support -- or, more important, non-support -- of the Iraqi war? This was utterly crucial to the entire Middle East equation because Iraq had long been the Soviet"friend" in the Middle East, and this had affected everything in the region from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the oil question. What he answered was staggering in its implications:

  "I made two visits to Moscow in the last two months," he told me. "In these two visits the Soviets stressed their care for and relations with Iraq. They said that their friendship had not changed, but that while Iraq is a friendly country, Iran is a neighboring one. They did not want to spoil relations with Iran. They wanted the war to stop as soon as possible. They have stopped giving us arms. They are very strict on that point. We understand the situation."

  "But," I persisted, "they must have given you what was in the pipeline?"

  Aziz shook his head soberly and deliberately. "They stopped completely. They have given us nothing ... nothing ... nothing." Was it possible that Iraq, the "best friend" of the Soviets, was breaking with them? The next words confirmed that they were, for they constituted an obvious opener to Washington.

  "The major reason for our non-relations remains the Arab-Israeli conflict," he said. "We do not ask the U.S. not to take sides. We are a realistic people. We only ask for a balanced attitude. Consider the French. They have strong relations with the Israelis. They have even built up their military apparatus. They care about the security of Israel, but they do not support the invasion by Israel. The U.S. is still patronizing Israel -- and all of its policies. Americans are not only supporting Israel, they are guarding the Israeli invasion politically, economically, and militarily -- and that is an anti-Arab attitude.

  "What we'd like to see is for the American attitude to get closer to a balanced attitude toward the conflict. Then Iraq would not have objections toward resuming diplomatic relations. We are not permanent enemies of the United States."

  The surprises did not end there. He then went on to say that while they still took a hard position on Israel, they would "accept what our Arab brothers wanted." In effect they would accept a separate Palestinian state, which is what King Hussein and even Yasser Arafat had told me and some others.

  He went on. For years the Iraqis had been the most brutal of the brutal, the assassins of the assassins. They had sent assassination squads out all over Europe, killing anyone who tried to escape, murdering the moderate Palestinian leaders. But in the last year that had stopped. They had also stopped supporting radical Palestinians, like George Habbash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

  "After 1973," he told me, "Iraq was active in the rejection front [i.e., the radical Palestinian groups]. They were radical but nationalist. Because of ideological weakness of the leadership, many of these groups lost their ideology and political independence step by step. Now they are totally communist. We support only groups that are patriotic, independent, and progressive."

  We went from the serious things -- which could quite literally affect the future of the world -- to the humorous. A slight smile played across his face when he talked, contemptuously, of the disorganization of his Iranian neighbors.

  "In every spot along the border, there is a struggle on the Iranian side," he said. "It is up to the officer. If a religious man is in charge, it is total confusion. If a military man and a religious man are in charge together, the men will fit well if the religious man is in Teheran."

  When I asked him whether they had indeed intended to overthrow Khomeini himself, Aziz smiled enigmatically, but with just a touch of devilishness. "You know, we had some experience in our party with trying to change regimes," he said. And then he went, year by year, down the Ba'aths' coup-ridden history until it got very funny indeed, and we both were laughing heartily. He ended up with, "We now have a conviction that a regime cannot be toppled from behind frontiers. We cannot topple Khomeini ... but maybe the war could be an assisting element."

  He smiled.

  Within a year and a half, of course, that formulation had rather dramatically changed. By then, the Iranians, driven by their ongoing internal frenzy, threw wave after human wave against the Iraqis, defeating them. But that was not my problem and not my business: my business was to report and capture moments of history -- and that was what I had done in Iraq that strange December.

  ***

  By the next night I was growing strangely disquieted. I had decided to wait until very early the next morning but, now that I had what I had come for, I simply wanted to fly away: across the poor man's desert, over the cruel border posts, and back up the friendly golden hills to Amman. At the last moment I got a young NBC Jordanian driver and we decided to leave at 10:00 P . M ., even through it meant doing the whole long drive at night.

  The boy, they had told me, was a good driver -- and completely safe and responsible for a woman traveling alone. This, as it happened, did not turn out to be the problem. As we approached the large traffic circles outside of Baghdad, where each spoke emanating from the circles flung you into a totally different -- and fixed -- direction, he suddenly went kind of crazy. He swerved here and there, seemingly unable to decide where to go, or why.

  Finally he was actually in the lane turning off toward Kerbala, clearly marked in both Arabic and English, when I started to scream: "No, no, no ...!" After all this all we needed was to be in Kerbala, the closed and holy city of the Shi'ites at midnight! A Christian Western woman during a Moslem holy war! When I finally got him out of that lane and onto the right road, marked RUTBA , I suddenly realized what was the matter: the poor boy could not read. For the rest of the trip he was wonderful. And for most of it, through the bitter cold of this winter night, through the unrelieved bleakness, I slept well under a blanket, swigging an occasional drink of Scotch from the little miniatures I had purchased in preparation for the trip at the foreign money shop and watching the darkness rush by outside while thoughts of my life rushed over me in waves.

  At 1:00 A . M . we swept by Rutba, a town asleep and in darkness. The streets were empty and still; the cement villas had their shades drawn down like eyes closed to a harsh world. I noticed an oddly picturesque little hotel where I thought would have been fun to have lunch.

  At 2:00 A . M . we stopped at a shabby little place for coffee. I sat up and watched the young man. He was fine. Now he was in his element, and he knew exactly what he was doing. I was pleased that he was so serious.

  By 3:00 A . M . we were sweeping across the great red-brown plain, with its rocks and volcanic markings, and the sky was totally black. Every minute that brought me closer to Amman made me happy. From time to time we were stopped by guards along the road, and always they had those tough, leathery, harsh faces of the Iraqi tribesmen in this endlessly harsh land. They looked long and hard at my passport and at me, but each time they let us go through.

  I thought about a lot of things in those strang
e and prescient hours. I thought about what I had given up for this life, about the joys and comforts of the other life of home and family and predictable love. I thought about how those things weren't so predictable anymore, either. I thought, without rancor but with sadness, about how the women of my generation who had taken this other -- this night -- flight had had to do it all alone: without really any close support from the men we loved and without even in our souls knowing whether what we were doing was fully right for women. I thought about how, despite that, we had done what we had to do with honor and dignity. And then I thought about the other joys and rewards.

  The night flight: the hundred thousand stars, the serenity, the moment of sovereignty. After my interview with Tareq Aziz and his story of the war, it was as though I were holding within me a totem, a magic amulet. Only those who care about information -- unique or first information -- can understand this. It was a kind of protection for me. I hoarded it. I protected it. The next day I would begin giving up the thing I had discovered. But it would really be no loss, because then began the next stage, the stage of being the courier, and the pleasure of seeing the information one has gathered dispersed throughout the world.

  The "night plane" was only an all-night taxi ride through a bleak part of the world? The hundred thousand stars only blackness? No. The sense of serenity and of sovereignty and of completeness was there, and Saint-Exupéry is right that there is no buying it, no matter how you try. It is something you can only earn, something you find only for yourself, create only for yourself, and ultimately interpret only for yourself. It goes only to those willing to risk their comfort and their lives and their sacred honor for it. In this, as in so many aspects, it is like a very great love -- and everyone has some of the night flight inside herself.