Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  The next year I accompanied Hillary to Greece, Turkey, and Bosnia, where she and Chelsea visited the troops during the war. Except for one evening in an Athens restaurant, and another at a party in Turkey organized on a yacht in the Bosporus, we rarely saw the unofficial side of the first lady. It was a caution bred of the roller-coaster ride of the early White House years and her growing belief that she and her husband were being victimized by what she came to call “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” She had been burned badly by the health-care debacle, Whitewater, and of course her husband’s scandalous behavior. In some ways she was still a bit tentative, almost ambivalent about her role. As good as she was, she still lacked the experience and self-confidence that would come later, after her election to the Senate.

  The visit to Bosnia was my first, having not covered the war, often to my frustration. Instead, I was tracking the tortuous diplomacy that eventually led to peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, and a treaty signing in Paris. Bosnia marked a watershed in U.S. relations with the United Nations. Instead of viewing the UN as a useful diplomatic tool, the Clinton administration felt hamstrung by the complex relationships within the Security Council. Finally, the president turned to NATO to lead the operation. As a result, when the conflict erupted in Kosovo, the same model was followed. The U.S.-led mission was coordinated with NATO, not the UN.

  That set the stage for my own adventure in Kosovo. On March 31, 1999, the Serbs took three American servicemen prisoner. Without even tacit approval from the White House, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, once again casting himself in the role of international troubleshooter, flew over to try to rescue them—with us in tow to make sure every dramatic moment was recorded. On our first night in Belgrade, I found myself on the floor—thrown out of bed. A small earthquake had hit Belgrade. I’d barely gotten back to sleep when NATO launched the biggest air attack of the war on the capital city. I felt reasonably confident that we were safe since I was sure the Pentagon knew where American reporters were staying. It’s a good thing I didn’t know about the mapping error that would later lead the U.S. to mistakenly bomb China’s embassy in Belgrade.

  Jackson had done this kind of cowboy diplomacy before, during the Reagan years, and successfully; now he was roiling the diplomatic waters for Bill Clinton. By putting the media focus on the three prisoners, he gave Slobodan Milosevic an opportunity to control the agenda, and distract from NATO’s hard-fought-for unified front. It became a propaganda bonanza for the Serbs. They brought Jackson, and our cameras, to inspect civilian damage from the air strikes. He held hands with the Serbian dictator and, paraphrasing Isaiah, said: “If a lion and a lamb can lie down together, we can all lie together and find the elusive peace that connects families again, between our nations and around the world.” Critics said it was a travesty. But the flamboyant civil rights leader also managed to see the prisoners, and pray with them, as well. Military officials did not permit questions about the war or politics, but the men were allowed to send messages home. For the first time, their families were able to see that they were healthy, and they were able to send their love to their wives and children.

  Ignoring objections from National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Jackson held running news conferences, repeating the Serb bargaining position: a halt to the bombing, no withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo until after NATO forces withdrew from Albania and Macedonia, and no NATO participation in an unarmed UN peacekeeping force. Jackson’s freelancing was turning U.S. diplomacy upside down, and we were giving him the platform. At the same time, he was succeeding in his primary mission. On May 1, while standing in the hotel lobby surrounded by reporters, an emotional and exhausted Jesse Jackson got word that the prisoners would be released. Using my cell phone as a microphone, we carried audio of his announcement live on MSNBC. And Jackson played into Milosevic’s hands by calling for a bombing halt.

  The POWs—Specialist Steven Gonzales, Staff Sergeant Andrew Ramirez, and Staff Sergeant Christopher Stone—were released to Jackson on a Sunday morning. It was late at night back home, long after our broadcasts, but once again we were able to carry audio of the event live on our cable network via my cell phone. Then I turned the phone over to the servicemen so they could call their families. Jackson took a call from the president, but also challenged Clinton to show what Jackson called “moral responsibility” and consider Milosevic’s demand for a cease-fire.

  We marched across the border into Croatia, with the three former POWs shouting in unison, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” It was an emotional homage to Dr. King that was surely done at Jackson’s prompting. Meet the Press was just going on the air. I put Jackson on the phone to answer Tim Russert’s questions. As we drove toward a NATO base where the men would be returned to their commanders, they drank Coke, ate doughnuts, and complained about how bad they looked in news magazine pictures of their capture. It was a happy ending for the three servicemen, but it was left to Defense Secretary Bill Cohen to remind the world that Milosevic’s gesture in releasing the men should not diffuse the intensity of NATO’s resolve to win the war. From Carter to Jesse Jackson, over the years Bill Clinton had his hands full with freelance diplomacy.

  Often, explosive foreign policy issues erupt on a president’s watch with no warning. Such an instance was the arrival of a five-year-old child, clinging to an inner tube, who washed ashore in Miami on Thanksgiving Day in 1999. Elian Gonzalez had survived the physical travail of being at sea for two days as well as the horror of watching his mother and at least ten others on their seventeen-foot boat die. He was about to become the central figure in an international custody dispute that forced both Cuba and the United States to retreat even further from any accommodation with each other.

  Miami’s Cuban-American community claimed Elian as the poster child for their opposition to the Cuban dictator. All of America seemed to fall in love with this doe-eyed little boy. As the custody dispute gained emotional force, Fidel Castro’s government organized enormous anti-American demonstrations in Havana to counteract the outpouring of anti-Castro sentiment in Miami. The story was being covered almost completely from Miami’s point of view. Danny Noa, NBC’s director of foreign news and a Cuban-American, agreed with our bureau chief in Havana that we had to find a way to report the Cuban perspective as well. Elian hadn’t been hatched at sea, as many Americans seemed to feel. He had a father, grandparents, a pet parrot, a dog, and schoolmates. What was his childhood like in communist Cuba? Why had his mother been so desperate to flee that she would risk her life, and her son’s, in a seventeen-foot boat? We wanted to tell that story.

  I had never been to Cuba, and now NBC ordered me to Miami to catch a charter flight. We were in a hurry, trying to get to Havana in time to broadcast live for Brian Williams’s nine p.m. cable newscast on MSNBC. But when I arrived at the airport to meet the camera crew, we discovered that our foreign desk had lined up a one-engine prop plane, with only one pilot. Both were violations of standard network practice. I was willing to take the chance, but felt I couldn’t order the camera crew to risk it. And the weather in Havana, we were told, was turning ugly.

  A call to network headquarters confirmed that we should ask for a second pilot. After a lot of phone calls and scurrying around, one turned up, out of uniform. Only when we were taxiing down the runway did my cameraman point out to me that the copilot wasn’t even wearing a headset. I imagine he was the pilot’s brother-in-law, or a buddy who ran the local gas station. In any case, he had no idea how to fly a plane.

  In a blinding rainstorm, we arrived in Havana, opening a new and important chapter in my life. In the years since, I have returned many times. Cuba, with all of its contradictions and tragedy and potential, has become part of my bloodstream. It is open and mysterious, embracing and sinister, exuberant and rigid. I love the people, the food, the architecture, and all the rhythms of Cuban life captured so vibrantly in their music.

  Entering Havan
a from Miami separates you immediately from the Canadian and European tourists Cuba courts so assiduously. Flights from the United States arrive in Havana’s oldest terminal, and passengers are subjected to special scrutiny, targeted as suspicious by Cuban immigration officials. But we were on deadline, and as I’ve discovered over the years, Fidel’s secret police are no match for the hurricane force of NBC’s Havana bureau chief, Mary Murray. She practically dragged us through the gates, overriding all objections.

  Mary is from a working-class background in New Jersey, half Irish, half Sicilian, and has lived in Cuba for more than a decade. She has a warm embrace, but her maternal appearance is deceiving. When she’s chasing a story, Mary is one of the purest journalists I’ve ever known. If she worked in Washington, she would stand out for being so unyielding to pressure or compromise. Living in a totalitarian society as she does, her gutsiness is nothing short of a badge of courage. If anything, going up against Cuba’s maddening bureaucracy has toughened her, rather than softened her edges. She is the kind of instinctive reporter who spots a phony a mile off. Nothing intimidates her, not even the bearded icon Cubans call Commandante.

  After sweeping us through customs and immigration, Mary raced through Havana’s insane traffic to get me to my live shot downtown. By the time we arrived, we were barely minutes from our broadcast. The protestors were still marching in the rain. Over their shouts, I did my first report from Havana, the first correspondent from the States to cover the story from Cuba. Mary and I had barely had time to say hello. But in a way, we didn’t need introductions. We share a love for the excitement of chasing a story, especially in a hostile environment. We both thrive on adrenaline, chocolate, and very little sleep. That first broadcast, under deadline pressure, was the beginning of our adventures together, and the start of a friendship that continues to this day.

  Fidel Castro was staying out of sight, trying to give Bill Clinton enough leeway to extricate himself from the Elian mess. But on the eve of the 2000 election campaign, there was no chance of that. Cuban-American relations in the Clinton years had taken many fateful turns. Early in the administration the president’s top national security officials had thought they could take on the Cuba issue and lift the embargo that had separated the two countries for four decades. But in February of 1996, Cuban MIG fighter jets had shot down two planes piloted by anti-Castro activists belonging to a group called Brothers to the Rescue.

  In the middle of a reelection campaign, Clinton had to retreat from his secret back-channel overtures to Havana and accept even tighter restrictions demanded by Congressional hard-liners Senator Jesse Helms and Congressman Dan Burton. Later, White House officials acknowledged to me that they had not read the fine print of the new law. They had been badly outmaneuvered. From that point on, the sanctions could be lifted only by a majority vote of Congress, instead of a simple presidential executive order.

  In those early weeks of the Elian crisis, American immigration officials were insisting on interviewing the boy’s father, who lived in a small fishing village two hours from Havana. But Juan Miguel Gonzalez was unwilling to submit to U.S. authority. It was now up to Fidel. Mary and I started pressing for an audience with the Cuban leader. His aides told us to wait, that a summons might come. Each night we stood by, dressed and ready at any moment for a call from the palace. When it finally came, we were told to come for dinner at eight that evening.

  We arrived at Fidel’s palace and were greeted by his top aides and told to wait. Looking around nervously, I noticed that the furnishings seemed to have a strong Bauhaus influence—leather chairs, glass tables, wood paneling, more like a 1960s New York office building lobby than what I’d expected in Havana. When Castro arrived, I was even more surprised to see him wearing a dark brown, double-breasted business suit instead of military fatigues. Except for the beard and his long fingernails, characteristic of Latin men of a certain generation, he looked like an elderly diplomat. He greeted me halfway across a narrow footpath crossing an elaborately landscaped indoor garden with a small waterfall and gurgling brook.

  For almost an hour we exchanged small talk, while they offered us orange juice or potent mojitos. Though I was dying to take notes, I knew it would be rude. When he finally escorted us in to dinner, the long banquet table was set with the first course, the largest grapefruits I’d ever seen. There was a lot of talk about healthy diets, and his decision years earlier to give up cigars. He told us he still enjoyed red wine, which was good for his heart. He didn’t like treadmills but exercised by walking for miles each day around his convention center, a palatial complex. This was a man very conscious of his physical health.

  That first conversation lasted seven hours. Castro was sizing us up, deciding whether we would be a suitable vehicle for any statement he wanted to make about Elian and U.S.-Cuban relations. Of course, I was also forming my own impressions about him. While fierce about his politics, in demeanor he was courtly, paternal, old-fashioned. In some ways he was surprisingly modern: the aging leader stayed up nights surfing the Web. He read constantly on the Internet, although he interpreted what he read through the filter of his communist ideology. Still, he was up-to-date, knowing at least a little about many contemporary events, especially economic developments.

  In other ways, Castro was frozen in time, a captive of his Cold War mentality, and paranoid about the overwhelming power of the Goliath to the north. (That said, sometimes paranoids have reason; after all, Fidel had survived several assassination attacks, including the ludicrous CIA plot during the Eisenhower administration to kill him with an exploding cigar.) The dinner had its moments of comedy. Poor Mary, sitting to my left, had a sudden allergic attack. She was trying to cover up her sneezes, I was slipping her handkerchiefs under the table, and Fidel, who misses nothing, ordered his foreign minister to get her some nasal spray.

  He also showed me his personal notebook, in which he had transcribed a Meet the Press interview with Madeleine Albright. He told me that he had been advised to watch these interviews for hidden messages to him from Washington. Typically, he did not leave it to an aide to transcribe the shows for him. Castro was his own note taker. When it came to the case of “the child,” as he referred to Elian, he knew every detail, including the relevant U.S. case law. I remembered that before becoming a revolutionary, he had graduated from law school.

  Our longest conversation that first night involved one of his pet projects, the Medical University of Latin America. Cuba was inviting students to come from all over the region to study medicine in Havana, tuition-free, as long as they agreed to return to their countries after graduation to practice medicine in urban or rural poor communities for several years. It was his version of the Peace Corps, guaranteed to do good while polishing Cuba’s relations with its neighbors. Although he did not want to do an interview on camera about Elian, to preserve his diplomatic options, I thought this might be a way to get him to go on camera. I suggested he give us a tour of the medical school.

  Two other comments got my attention. In the middle of a lengthy discussion about Cuba’s faltering economy, Castro mentioned my husband. He said, “I’ve read a lot about him on the Internet. He seems to be a serious person who does a good job. The only issue on which I would disagree is, why did he bail out Long Term Capital?”

  I couldn’t believe that I was sitting at dinner with one of the world’s last committed Communists, and he was asking me why the Federal Reserve Board of New York had intervened to help negotiate a settlement for a troubled multibillion dollar hedge fund.

  Castro’s other unusual comment involved Elian. He predicted that the custody fight would become a huge political controversy that would tie up the American courts for months. He guessed that the child would not be returned to his family until May or June. How could this custody fight drag on for that long? We thought that he was crazy.

  The next night, we were invited back for a five-course dinner that didn’t start until two in the morning. Castro was known among forei
gn visitors for his late-night dinners and lengthy conversations. To stay awake, I found myself digging my fingernails into the palms of my hands. This time, Fidel was wearing his more familiar combat fatigues. Clearly, he had something important to communicate. Squeezing Mary’s arm for emphasis, he said he needed someone young to go to Cardenas, Elian Gonzalez’s family’s village, at dawn the next morning. If she was there, she might see something very interesting. We realized that the stalemate that had continued for weeks, with the boy’s father refusing to be interviewed by American officials, was about to break.

  Not only was Castro giving us a huge tip, he jokingly told us he would act as our producer. He told us Mary should arrive at exactly the right hour and since she would have to travel at night, he would have his driver take her over the difficult roads. We assured him that that would not be either necessary or appropriate. He also agreed to give us a tour, on camera, of his medical school the next day, and do a sit-down interview. We were going to be the first American reporters to question him on camera since the Elian story had erupted. Castro had also been very wary of American television interviews over the years. He had done a lengthy interview with Barbara Walters decades earlier, and more recent interviews with Dan Rather for CBS and Maria Shriver for NBC. But the access we were being given was extraordinary.

  I stayed behind at dinner while Mary left to get the camera crew and prepare for the trip. For hours into the night, Fidel talked about the case, about his conflicts with Washington, and the American presidents he had observed from his island citadel. Whom had he respected the most? John F. Kennedy, he said, despite the fact that JFK had tried to kill him. But he thought Clinton was smart, and seemed eager to see if there was still a chance to reach out to him. If he wanted better relations, then why had Cuba shot down the two planes from Miami four years earlier? He told me that he had repeatedly warned the White House that the Miami “spies,” his term for anti-Castro Cuban-American activists, were going to try to invade Cuban airspace and that Washington had ignored his concerns. Incredibly, he also refused to take responsibility for the shoot-down, saying his military commanders had not consulted him—an assertion I found difficult to believe.