It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

by Addario, Lynsey

  The Libyans sat us down in a reception room of our VIP prison and, over tea, offered to get us clothing, toiletries, and food. Qadaffi propaganda blared on the TV set in the background like white noise; I was riveted by the presence of a television—any connection to the outside world. None of us wanted to ask for much, because a long shopping list might imply we were staying for a while. As I finished up my list, the smiling interpreter whispered in my ear: “Do you need any women things? Any feminine things?” I shook my head. My body had a perfect knack for shutting down all monthly rituals in the face of trauma. I found it odd that the Libyans would tie us up, beat us up, psychologically torture us for three days, and then offer to buy me tampons.

  As the officials sat across from us, they filled the room with empty pleasantries. Anthony grabbed the TV remote and changed the channel from the pro-Qaddafi propaganda videos to CNN. Within seconds still images of our faces flashed on the TV screen, along with the words “the Libyan government still cannot ascertain the whereabouts of the New York Times journalists … but they have reassured New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller that they will cooperate …” I started crying again.

  The dignitaries sitting across from me begged me to stop.

  “Don’t you have children?” I asked. “How could you do this to our parents? Our families? Our families think we are dead. Why can’t you let us make one phone call?”

  The next time any of us entered the TV room, the only thing remaining of the cable box was a dangling wire.

  A few hours later our Foreign Ministry interpreter returned with a crew carrying maybe a dozen bags of groceries and new wardrobes for all of us. It was a terrifying sight—did the bags and bags of groceries mean we were staying for months? There were roughly six jars of Nescafé, cookies, chips, packaged croissants, dry little Italian-style toasts. We were each handed a tote bag full of everything we had requested. The men received shiny, cool Adidas tracksuits. In my bag there was a giant tan velour sweat suit with smiling teady bears embroidered on the front, emblazoned with cursive script that read THE MAGIC GIRL!! There were also three pairs of underwear, with the words SHAKE IT UP! written across the front, as well as a toothbrush, shampoo, conditioner, and a hairbrush.

  • • •

  SOMEWHERE AROUND two in the morning there was commotion in the hallway outside the room and a knock at my door.

  “Wake up! You get one phone call.”

  I paused. Without my BlackBerry I had no idea what Paul’s telephone number was. I didn’t want to waste my one call on my mother’s phone, because I was sure the phone would be lost somewhere in the depths of her purse and she wouldn’t answer. And my dad never answered his phone. The four of us met up in the guys’ room and conferred with one another on whom each of us would call. Without Paul’s number, I offered to be the one to call the foreign desk at the Times, to let them know we were OK. Tyler, Anthony, and Steve all knew the number of the foreign desk; I committed it to memory.

  One by one we were blindfolded and led into the TV room without a functioning TV. I was placed in a chair near a man who I presumed was there to monitor our calls. I recited the foreign desk’s phone number.

  Someone answered, and I said, “Hi, this is Lynsey Addario in Libya. Could I please speak with Susan Chira?”

  Susan immediately came on the line: “Lyyyyyyyynnnnnnnnsssseeeeeeyyyyyyy!”

  I was so relieved to hear a familiar voice. I told her we were all OK and that we were now in the hands of the Libyan government. She told me they were working hard to get us released. The man next to me told me to be quick. I asked Susan to please call my husband and tell him that I was OK and that I loved him very much. She said she would. And the conversation was over. Tyler called his father. Steve and Anthony called their wives. I wished I had been able to speak with Paul.

  The next day rolled into night, and no one came to visit us. We spent most of our time sitting around the kitchen table talking, telling war stories, recounting what had happened to us thus far so we wouldn’t forget by the time we had access to pens and paper. Tyler talked about being imprisoned in Chechnya and held at gunpoint in South Sudan. Steve described his ordeal only two years earlier of being kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had ended in the death of Times Afghan journalist Sultan Munadi and one British commando. This was Steve’s third time being detained, Tyler’s second time being held at gunpoint in less than three months, and Anthony’s second near-death experience after being shot in the West Bank. Steve reiterated his declaration from Sirte: “I can’t do this anymore. I am done with this.”

  Anthony, Tyler, and I remained silent. The fact is that trauma and risk taking hadn’t become scarier over the years; it had become more normal. It had become the job, especially as journalists became more of a target themselves, with an increase in abductions. The acceptance of that was a natural defense mechanism against questioning ourselves too much. Maybe the three of us didn’t want to admit how sick it was that we would even contemplate continuing to cover war while we were sitting in a glorified prison cell, kidnapped in Libya. We intermittently made small talk about our families, and wondered quietly how long it would be before we saw them again.

  Finally we broached the subject of what happened that March 15, three days earlier, the day we had been taken. We all had slightly different recollections of how it had gone down. Each of our brains had a selective memory to deal with trauma. We questioned whether our captivity could have been avoided, whether we stayed too long, and what the likelihood was that Mohammed, our young driver who had been pleading to leave for up to thirty minutes before we actually left, was still alive. Steve and I thought we saw his limp body on the pavement next to the driver’s side of the car. We were collectively responsible for what we assumed was Mohammed’s death. Like many Libyans at the time, Mohammed had seen driving Western journalists as a way to make money, and his way of supporting the revolution. During the uprising, most men his age were either fighters or helping journalists get the word out about what was happening. But was the pursuit of a story worth his life? This was a question without direct answers, in a way. Of course, none of us could say that a story was actually worth a life, or worth the pain we caused others. That was ridiculous. But I hoped we’d been clear with our families, our drivers, and our interpreters about how great a risk it was to love us or work with us.

  When the mood got grim, we would all retire to our beds. One morning I tried to cheer up the men by dancing around in my new Magic Girl sweat suit, singing Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” while doing jumping jacks and flailing around my arms. Steve asked why I was singing Britney Spears. We read the books they’d left for us—Richard III, Julius Ceasar, Othello—and Tyler suggested that if we got bored enough, we could always put on a play.

  More than twenty-four hours passed. I thought again about the amount of groceries they had bought us. Would we be here for weeks? Months? As captives, our only contact with the outside world was the man who delivered our hot meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our guard, and the mysterious men from an undisclosed branch of government who came and blindfolded us in the middle of the night to allow us our one phone call. We looked hard for any tinge of emotion in their faces that might indicate what our futures held. When our main guard was rude to us, we were sure there had been some decision made higher up that we were no longer worthy prisoners, and perhaps we would be transferred to a basement somewhere for torture.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY one of our captors came to get us. We were all blindfolded, placed in cars, and driven about fifteen minutes toward what we assumed was the center of Tripoli. People screamed epithets at us, and my captor told me to put my head down in my lap for my own protection.

  We arrived at an office in the Foreign Ministry building in downtown Tripoli, where our Times colleague David Kirkpatrick was waiting for us. It was so surreal—our being led out of cars as prisoners, broken and mentally scarred, at the same time that Da
vid waited for us in a shiny conference room, fresh out of his five-star hotel, with a mobile phone connected to the outside world. How could it be that we were captive and he was operating freely in Tripoli? The meeting began. Everyone talked about logistics, getting us out, getting passports made for those who had theirs confiscated. David explained that the Turkish Embassy was acting as proxy for the American Embassy, and then he got someone from the State Department in Washington on the phone so we could each work out our passport needs. When the phone came to me, I heard the voice of this cheery American girl who introduced herself as Yael and reassured me that they were going to get us home, and I cried at the mere sound of a fellow American. I was overcome with hope.

  We weren’t released right away. But eventually we were transferred to another location, in the middle of Tripoli. In a room on the ground floor, TV cameras were set up on tripods and Libyan and Turkish diplomats had gathered. I actually believed we might be released. We were told to take our seats. I had dressed in a hand-laundered green Zara tunic and Levi’s jeans—the outfit I had been wearing the day of the kidnapping. While we waited for the formalities to begin, one of the Turkish diplomats there to help negotiate our release handed me his cell phone and told me to speak into it. He somehow had Paul on the line: It was the first time I had heard Paul’s voice since the ordeal began, and I fell apart.

  “Baby?” I whimpered between tears. “I am so sorry.”

  “I love you, baby.” Paul was firm, loving, and reassuring. “I will see you soon. Do you have your passport?” After a few more words of tenderness, we ended the conversation.

  I returned to the room just in time for our official handover to begin. A Libyan diplomat handed each of us an envelope with $3,000 in it to compensate us for the cash that had been stolen from us at the time of our detainment. I stupidly declined mine, saying my cash hadn’t actually been stolen (though $35,000 worth of camera equipment and gear was gone). Then the Turkish and Libyan officials signed documents, handing our custody over from the Libyans to the Turks. I was convinced the Libyans might change their minds.

  We were escorted into the crisp March air. It was the first time we had been outside without blindfolds. I hadn’t seen the sky for six days, and as we walked toward the diplomatic vehicle waiting to take us one step closer to freedom, I looked up at the cornflower-blue sky, dotted with fluffy clouds, and took a deep breath. The car ferried us to the Turkish Embassy. This was the second time the Turks had helped me, and I would forever be indebted to them.

  Libyan and Turkish diplomats arranged a convoy to the Tunisian border, where we would be handed over to a private security team hired by the Times. I called my mother and then my father and Bruce and told them I was safe and how sorry I was to have put them through so much stress. My father replied very simply, “We love you. This was not your fault. You were only doing your work.”

  From left: Stephen Farrell, Tyler Hicks, Levent Sahinkaya (the Turkish ambassador to Libya), Lynsey Addario, and Anthony Shadid in the Turkish Embassy in Tripoli before being released to Tunisia.

  It was difficult to get words out. We were all emotional, and I didn’t want to talk long. Conversation only brought my fragility to the surface, and I preferred to keep it tucked away until we were properly released and in private, rather than at the Turkish Embassy on a phone line that I assumed half of Libya’s intelligence services were listening in on. But I realized how selfless my parents were: Regardless of how much pain they suffered as a result of my professional decisions, they always supported me. They had given me a boundless inner strength.

  • • •

  TWO FORMER BRITISH SPECIAL Forces soldiers with wide chests and salt-and-pepper hair had been tasked with being our guardians. The plan was to escort us from the dusty Libyan border to the Radisson Blu hotel in the Tunisian seaside resort town of Djerba, then catch a flight to Tunis, and eventually out of the country. In the moments after our release, any logistical tasks—even purchasing a plane ticket and going to the airport—seemed too overwhelming to take on.

  Before we reached the hotel in Djerba, we stopped at a Western-style supermarket to purchase necessities to get us through the next few days. The massive grocery store—a North African Kmart—was like an emotional oasis. There was something reassuring about owning things. I reveled in selecting my own toothbrush, shampoo, face moisturizer, body lotion, and cheap, lacy Middle Eastern lingerie. I knew Paul would bring a suitcase full of my things to Tunis. But for some reason I wanted to use my freedom to buy something. Anything.

  At the relatively extravagant Radisson Blu, the New York Times security team arranged for a physician to look us over for signs of assault. I was weirdly ashamed that the seven days of physical torture—getting punched in the face and having my wrists and ankles bound—had left no visible marks on my body, save for little red marks where the zip ties had dug into my wrists. Without physical evidence, I felt that there was no proof of how much I had endured.

  Eventually we landed in Tunis. I walked through the baggage-claim area and out the doors, to where Paul and Nicki, Tyler’s girlfriend, were waiting for us. I collapsed into Paul’s arms. For seven days I hadn’t known if I would ever be able to hold him again. The relief, of course, was inexplicable—just like the morning in Pakistan when I looked up out of my morphine-induced haze to see Paul entering my hospital room with a clipboard after my car accident. I knew he would take care of me forever.

  I looked around for my colleagues and prison mates from the past week, Anthony, Tyler, and Steve. We would be bound for life by this experience. As I hugged Paul, I heard in my mind Steve’s voice, Everybody here?

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  CHAPTER 12

  He Was a Brother I Miss Dearly

  After I got out of Libya, Paul and I went to Goa for four days to decompress. The Zen destination that Indian friends had recommended to Paul was full, but the owner graciously offered us his private home on the resort grounds by a small creek. We were overcome with exhaustion. What might have been a celebratory, passionate several days was, in fact, a somber hibernation. Neither of us cried. We didn’t make love nonstop. We simply held each other, kissed tenderly, slept, walked, swam, ate, drank, and slept some more.

  That handful of days was enough for Paul and me to recenter ourselves before heading to New York; by that time, after so many years of travel and distance, five days together was the equivalent of five weeks of rest. My colleagues and I had to debrief the Times and do press interviews. We didn’t realize it while in captivity, but our kidnapping had made a lot of news, and we had been asked to appear on several news programs and talk shows. Our first stop was the New York Times.

  Walking into the shiny Times building, I was ashamed at what we had put our editors through with our kidnapping. I knew that countless hours of time and energy had gone into securing our release, and I steeled myself for reproachful glances. Journalists who got kidnapped several times were not necessarily heroes in our business. Bravery was one thing, recklessness another.

  I went to find Michele McNally, the paper’s director of photography, with whom I had worked for almost a decade and whose job it was to decide whether or not to send correspondents to this war or that revolution. It was one of the most stressful jobs at the paper, and she cared for us as though we were her children. When she saw me, she crumbled in my arms. Everyone in the photo department and others from the foreign desk surrounded us, took pictures, and clapped and cried. Everyone celebrated us. I felt like an idiot for having caused so much grief.

  And while I thought I was stable, seemingly meaningless statements or normal emotional reactions from friends or family turned me into a quivering mess. The four of us shuffled from a brief appearance on the Today show to an hour-long session—like therapy—with Anderson Cooper on CNN. We trudged dutifully from interview to interview because we felt, as journalists, it would have been hypocritical to turn down interviews with our peers.
We spoke collectively about the guilt and sorrow we felt for possibly ushering our young driver, Mohammed, to his death. I spoke openly about being sexually assaulted but not raped; it was important to me to set the record straight, publicly, about what happened to me in captivity. We had been completely at the Libyans’ mercy. But we had lived. I felt lucky. I had interviewed suffering people all over the world, and they never felt like victims. They felt like survivors. I had learned from them.

  Everyone asked us the inevitable question and my answer was yes. I knew I would cover another war. The hardest part about what happened to us in Libya was what we had put our loved ones through, but that had long been the excruciating price of the profession—my loved ones suffered, and I suffered when they suffered. Journalism is a selfish profession. But I still believed in the power of its purpose, and hoped my family did, too.

  • • •

  A MONTH LATER I met with three editors from Aperture Books in New York City. Prints of my work had been laid out on their conference table. We discussed the possibility of collaborating on a coffee-table book, something I had always dreamed of doing with my photographs but had never felt ready for. We were flipping through prints from Darfur, Iraq, and the Korengal Valley when I found myself distracted by the red light flashing on my BlackBerry. I did what I never did during a meeting: picked up my phone.

  The top e-mail on my phone was forwarded from Major Dan Kearney, who had led Battle Company and Tim Hetherington, Balazs Gardi, Elizabeth Rubin, and me through the Korengal in 2007. The subject line read:

  Tim Hetherington killed in Libya.

  My heart stopped. I was sure I was reading wrong. I looked at the body of the e-mail.

  Tim was killed in Libya. Please keep him in your prayers. I know the BATTLE Family will come together to support.