I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

  The U.S. embassy was in Saddam’s old palace, an imposing feat of architecture that showed off the vicious dictator’s poor taste. It was now the brain center for the American occupation. Bureaucrats from every federal agency with an acronym (CIA, DIA, ATF, FBI, NSA, DOS, DOD, DOT, DOC, USAID, etc.) set up shop on the extravagant marble floors and relieved themselves in the palatial bathroom stalls that had been retrofitted by the Americans to include stand-up porcelain urinals. It was rare to see an Iraqi inside the embassy. The ambassador and the military commander of U.S forces in Iraq had their offices on the top floor. There was something telling and obscene about our being there. The gold fixtures and ostentatious chandeliers were the tacky choices of a brutal ruler flaunting his power, and it seemed even tackier for us to rule over the country from his former confines.

  Not that I didn’t like going to the place. It had a great, spacious lounge area, a former hall for imperial receptions where they had the best coffee shop in Iraq, the Green Bean, a Starbucks clone that served double lattes and vanilla smoothies twenty-four hours a day. The embassy also had a pool, where signs warned that no weapons were allowed while drinking. The American officials at the embassy worked in the palace, though they didn’t live there. At the end of the day, they all went home to the KBR trailer parks and slept under flimsy ceilings that would do nothing against a direct hit from the regular insurgent attacks. (A new U.S. embassy is currently under construction in the Green Zone. The cost is an estimated $2 billion, and when complete, it will be the largest U.S. embassy in the world, about the size of the Vatican.)

  To walk around the Green Zone, or even to get in, was impossible for most Iraqis—you needed that special IZ badge. Applying for a badge was a time-consuming, frustrating process that could take months. And once you received the badge, there was a chance the rules for badge applications would have changed, and you’d have to apply again. The badges became a fashion accessory displayed in pouches that everyone wore around their necks—they came in desert khaki, black, camouflage, and had embroidered inscriptions likeOPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM andU.S. EMBASSY BAGHDAD. According to the legend I heard, the first person to sell badge holders was Crazy Tony the German. Tony drove down to Baghdad from Europe in a minibus shortly after the invasion, and set up shop on the American bases, selling souvenirs and badge holders. (His most popular souvenir, which got banned by the Americans, was a coffee mug with Kenny fromSouth Park. TheSouth Park catchphrase—“You killed Kenny, you bastards!”—was altered to “You sent me to Iraq, you bastards!” Kenny was pictured with a bullet hole in his head.) Tony was known for driving a moped around town when most wouldn’t trust an armored car. He was also a source of cash for Westerners. The cash was generated from his souvenir and badge holder sales, which were huge. He could drop off tens of thousands of dollars in brown shopping bags in exchange for wire transfers to an account he kept in Croatia.

  Newsweekhad decided to move its bureau into the Green Zone in early 2005. The decision wasn’t made lightly. The previous year a car bomb had exploded down the street from theNewsweek house in the neighborhood of Mansour, killing eighteen, shattering the windows of the house, strewing body parts on the road and scrap metal across the lawn. The next temporary bureau was in the Rasheed Hotel, and then finally we rented the house on the street guarded by Edinburgh Risk, sharing the house with theL.A. Times and theWall Street Journal . (Despite the popular myth, most news organizations aren’t in the Green Zone. The three news organizations also had bureaus at the Hamra Hotel, a popular location for journalists just over the Tigris from the IZ. TheJournal ’s office there was damaged in a double car bombing in November 2005.)

  I was given a bedroom on the bottom floor. There was not much natural light in the house. There were notices up all over the place—fire plans, radio plans, advisories, labels on each piece of equipment, and rules governing the use of every room in the house. The rules were introduced by a veteran war correspondent who, after spending over twenty years in conflict zones, tried to control his environment as best he could. He had written a seven-page single-spaced introductory manual for Baghdad correspondents to read. It included directions to the house, its GPS coordinates, what you should carry when leaving the house (keys, radio, cell phone), what bedrooms belonged to each news agency, and a strong recommendation for visiting correspondents to clean up after themselves.

  It was a way to mitigate the chaos and the chance of violent death that was always present, everywhere, at all times. You are standing next to a car bomb, and boom; you are sitting drinking a cup of tea and a piece of shrapnel from a rocket landing three doors down hits you in the brain; you are waiting outside smoking a cigarette, not under hard cover, and a bullet, shot in the air in celebration, lands on top of your skull; your Humvee flips over and you’re crushed; a sniper in the distance, who could have picked anyone, picks you; your helicopter crashes; you’re on the commercial jet that gets shot down. Wrong place, wrong time, bad luck.

  We changed bureaus in January 2006. The new one was a much nicer house, and I would eventually consider it my home. It was where I got my mail, where most of my clothes were stored, where the bedroom had a shelf full of my books. It was a three-story seventies-era home with a clumsy layout; an excess of doors; and wiring that was totally fried (each room had at least half a dozen light switches). Half the time, the house ran off a large yellow power generator outside. There were six bedrooms, four bathrooms, a large kitchen, a nice lawn. It was once the home of an upper-class Iraqi family; that family was now long gone. We rented from a man who claimed to be the original owner. He now made his living leasing his four houses to foreigners. The owner didn’t live in Iraq anymore, either. There were sandbags on the front office window and a guard shack outside. Thick black Kevlar blast blankets hung on the windows along with old curtains made from an odd-feeling brownish fabric. I slept in the downstairs bedroom, next to the living room, which was connected to the office (which was converted from a dining room). Our downtime was spent on one of the two couches in the living room, watching bootleg copies of TV series and movies. That was basically the only recreational activity; it was common to blow through an entire twelve-hour season in three days or less, depending on the news.Rome, 24, Deadwood, The Sopranos, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Extras, The Office (both British and American versions),Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Desperate Housewives, andThe Wire.

  But living in the Green Zone raised a difficult reporting question: How well could you cover Iraq if you weren’t experiencing the real Iraq? Did working out of the Green Zone put too much distance between us and the Iraqi people? Were you by definition part of the occupation if you were in the IZ? There were advantages, for sure. We saved money on security costs. We had the best access to American and Iraqi officials. We rarely had to risk getting blown up at an IZ checkpoint in order to see an American diplomat or go to the generally worthless press events. We just had to roll out of bed. And from a more cynical perspective, American readers didn’t seem to care too much about the lives of average Iraqis. They cared about American decisions, and American decisions were made, for better or worse, but mostly worse, in the Green Zone. There were drawbacks, though. The Green Zone was a constant target for rocket attacks and shelling, and our Iraqi staff was at a high risk to get kidnapped every time they left the IZ gates, which insurgents kept under close surveillance.

  The question for journalists was always: How do you get closest to the story without getting killed? Not easy, when all Westerners are targets, and when your very presence endangers the lives of the people you are interviewing and working with. We constantly asked each other, How often are you getting out? Where are you going? What neighborhoods are still safe? No one I knew fell in love with Baghdad in the way journalists had with Saigon—there was no exotic intoxication or mystique. There was only a deep, unhealthy attachment.

  Scott explained the rules of reporting. In terms of going out in the Red Zone it was a simple calculation of risk ve
rsus reward. If it was a story that would get in the magazine, perhaps you go to the scene, or maybe you set up a meeting in Baghdad at a family’s home. But we weren’t chasing bombs anymore, he made clear. A year ago, when seventy people were killed in a bombing, that was a cover story; now it’s not even an item in Periscope—the two-hundred-word news briefs at the front of the magazine. We don’t go out wandering around the streets looking for stories; it’s too dangerous, and you can’t stay in one place for more than an hour; the risk increases exponentially. There are exceptions—if the story is exclusive, or if it’s an important interview—sometimes it’s worth taking a risky trip. But normally you have two options—you can set up interviews in secure locations, like the Hamra Hotel or the Rasheed or the Iraqi parliament, or you can go out on embeds with the military. The third way, the thing most integral to the success or failure of reporting in Baghdad, is to rely on your Iraqi staff to get the story.

  Our Iraqi staff was composed of four interpreters and an office manager, all fluent in English, all of whom also worked as reporters. There was Ahmer, Omar, Mohanid, Mohammed; later Ali and Hussam. There were ten drivers and guards, too. They were from Iraq’s two largest religious groups, the two dominant sects of Islam, Sunni and Shia. (The Sunnis made up the minority of Iraq’s population, roughly 30 percent; the Shiites the majority, close to 60 percent. Historically, there were tensions between the two groups—not unlike Catholics versus Protestants, and under Saddam’s regime, the Sunnis ran the country, while many Shiites were brutally persecuted. The U.S. invasion switched the power dynamic, so now the Shiites were in charge.)

  We had three Sunni staffers, who were brothers from a prominent Sunni tribe. In their past lives, before the war, they had been good citizens in the regime. Ahmer worked at the Ministry of Information as an interpreter; Omar studied to be a dentist; Mohanid was a nuclear engineer. Mohammed, our Shiite staff member, was also a former engineer.

  The staff worked out of a safe house that was set up to look like an electronics shop. We never visited the safe house, and the location was known only to them. We communicated with them by phone many times each day, or over Skype, the instant-messaging service; they would come into the bureau a few times a week. In contrast to other parts of the world where I have worked with fixers, the majority of Iraqi journalists I knew were more passive. If you asked them to do an interview, you had to send a detailed list of questions and follow-ups. If you said, please ask if his brother was killed, and the person said yes, they would not instinctually ask, why was he killed? Who do you think killed him? What day was he killed? In Iraq, cell phone signals were often disrupted, and the people they were supposed to be calling turned off their cell phones. The staff would make one call, and then not try again. They were too ready to take no for an answer. Also, they were inclined to view events with a conspiratorial eye, bringing with them their own cultural bias: They seemed to think Jews and Kurds were behind everything.

  This lackluster attitude wasn’t true in all cases, of course, and in their defense, when I met our staff they were already three years into the war—three years of no electricity and the threat of death; three years of worrying their children were going to get killed on the way to school; three years with no end in sight. Of the more than 110 journalists killed since the war began, over 90 were Iraqis. And on a very basic level, I sensed they were not comfortable with us. We were friends, close friends, even, but the entire enterprise was too colonial to feel right. They had to go home to terrorized families at the end of the day; we could kick back and watch a DVD. No matter how well we treated them, or that we were paying them better money than they’d ever made before, we were Americans. We were responsible for their new and difficult lives.

  One morning in October, I helped myself to a bowl of Frosted Flakes and sat down at a table in the living room. I was in a good mood. I had gotten my first byline from Iraq in the American edition ofNewsweek, having obtained an exclusive document from the United Nations. An Iraqi staffer from theWall Street Journal, Hakki, sat down across from me.

  I could tell Hakki was agitated. His pale, doughy face and goatee were damp with sweat.

  “Do you know what happened to me on the way here today?” he asked.

  “No, what happened?”

  “One of the PSDs waved his gun at me. Outside of my own home this American man waves a gun at me, threatens to shoot me. And for what? What had I done? I had crossed the street, that’s what I did. And he points a gun at me?”

  I nodded.

  “You know,” Hakki went on, “I cheer when Americans are killed. Not you, you are the journalists, you are okay, we are friends. But when these soldiers get killed I am happy.”

  He told me that a friend of his, the owner of a cell phone shop next to his own electronics shop, had been murdered recently. He explained that in “Saddam’s time,” if the secret police asked you for information, you gave it to them. It was how the system worked and how you survived. “Yes he was a dictator, but if you stayed out of politics, there was no problem. Now I cannot go outside. I have moved back home with my mother. This is freedom?”

  I listened, thinking it was best not to tell him that my younger brother was in the 10th Mountain Division, scheduled to deploy to Iraq soon.

  “Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you understand why I am angry?”

  I finished up my Frosted Flakes and excused myself. I walked up to the roof to smoke a cigarette. I could see all of the Green Zone from up there, a suburb within a city of squat tan houses and sagging palm trees and government buildings. I could see part of Baghdad’s skyline past the boundaries: a few high-rise buildings, an oil refinery, minarets, plumes of smoke of unknown origin. Bombs? Fires? Burning trash? The only sounds from the city to reach me were sirens.

  What Hakki said had disturbed me. But I’d gotten my first Iraq byline in the magazine, and I was proud and happy and excited to be where I was.

  I thought about calling Andi to tell her to go pick up a copy of the magazine from the newsstands on Broadway, but I didn’t want to wake her up.

  CHAPTER3

  June–August 2005

  NEW YORK CITY

  I met Andi two days before I found out I was going to Iraq. For more than a year, I’d been asking my editors to send me. At first, they laughed—literally. The former chief of correspondents, Marcus Mabry, whose laugh is legendary at the magazine, guffawed all the way down the hall. The foreign editor joked about me being “cannon fodder.” But I persisted, and finally Marcus said if I was serious, he would send me to get the required security training. Three months later, in May 2005, I completed a training course in rural Virginia, run by a private security company called AKE.

  There were about fifteen other journalists in the weeklong course. Most news organizations now required these classes before a staffer was allowed to cover a conflict. The highlights I remember: The thing to do if you accidentally entered a minefield was to yell “Stop, mines!” then freeze, then get on your knees, and using your pen, or a stick if it was handy, crawl forward or retrace your steps back, lightly digging into the ground in front of you. Another thing to note: Don’t get kidnapped, but if you do, keep a positive attitude. We watched a video of a man in Chechnya whose fingers were cut off one by one and sent to his family in the mail. He wasn’t able to maintain his positive attitude, and was later killed, fingerless. Also, as a general tip, the best way to stop massive blood loss was to tie a tourniquet—and your belt could work as one—very tight.

  Despite the training course, I still didn’t know if the magazine was serious about sending me to Iraq. So I was doing some freelance work to get other kinds of reporting experience, writing under a pseudonym for a website that traffics in New York gossip. My freelance assignment on June 1 was to interview Jerry Springer. The editor had called me in the afternoon to see if I’d like to go to a party hosted by Air America Radio for the launch of Springer’s new radio show. I didn’t really want to go, but I said I wou
ld. I took the F train up to 57th Street and walked to Rosa Mexicano, the restaurant where the event was being held. Andi was one of Air America’s two publicists, and she was in charge of hosting and organizing the event. She and her colleagues had flirted with the idea of disinviting me—they didn’t know if it was a good idea for the gossip website to cover the launch after all—but decided that protesting had the potential to make the situation worse.

  The minute I walked in, an intern who had been assigned to keep a lookout for me went up to Andi and told her, “Michael Hastings is here.”

  Andi approached while I stood at a table that was serving nachos and guacamole. I told her who I was, that I was there to interview Springer. I remember thinking right then how cute she was.