Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Fidel quickly seized the initiative, taking Carter on a tour of the suspect biological sciences laboratories. American intelligence officials told me there was nothing to the State Department accusations, though Jimmy Carter was certainly in no position to reach a judgment either way. Castro claimed the labs were developing a meningitis vaccine in a joint venture with the American firm GlaxoSmithKline. The Cubans easily deflected the Bush administration’s concerns about weapons. And although Carter was able to meet with dissidents, there was no spontaneous outpouring by Cubans demanding free elections. Castro’s regime had too tight a hold on his people for that. As Castro had calculated, Carter had more of an impact in calling for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba than in sparking a groundswell for democracy. The Cubans I talked to were more interested in economic reform than political change.

  I interviewed Carter, but Castro refused all requests, not wanting to distract attention from his visitor. But as soon as Carter’s plane took off, Castro marched back down the red carpet and stood in front of my camera. Unfortunately, the roar of Carter’s jet on the runway drowned out what he was saying. As Castro left, and the camera crews started putting away their equipment, one of Fidel’s top aides came to get me and escort me inside the terminal. I was brought to a private room, where Fidel waited. We talked for forty-five minutes, and I extracted a promise that he would do another interview if I returned in six months to cover a conference commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With that, he took me to my plane.

  Little did I know how badly it would all turn out. A week later, Alan and I were in New York at a small dinner Barbara Walters was giving. She asked me to tell the group about my Cuban adventure. Unwittingly, I talked about my plans to cover Castro’s October conference, which was going to reassemble all the surviving players of the era: Robert McNamara and Ted Sorenson from the Kennedy administration, the Russian generals, and, of course, Fidel. Barbara and I are friends, and she has been unfailingly kind and encouraging to me over the years. We also share an unusual personal history, since she dated Alan in the 1970s, and remains close to him. But nothing gets between Barbara and a “get.” It is why she is, was, and always will be, the most indefatigable television journalist, male or female, in the business. In the following weeks and months, she proved it once again by talking Cuba’s young foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, into promising her an interview with Fidel during the Cuban Missile conference. Even worse, she insisted it be exclusive. He couldn’t keep his commitments to the other networks.

  The Cubans had planned to give interviews to Dan Rather, Barbara, and me. The Today show built two days of scheduled broadcasts around the event, flying in a plane loaded with equipment so that Matt Lauer could anchor from Havana. Everything was pegged to the Castro interview. I got to Havana, only to learn from a story in the New York tabloids that Barbara was getting the only interview. The foreign minister came to my hotel to apologize, explaining that he hadn’t realized how competitive the television news business was. Indeed! While we appealed the decision, the network was going crazy. The Today show urgently needed to know whether or not to send Matt. New York executives were calling by the hour to remind me of how much money I was wasting.

  Furious, Dan Rather’s people pulled out, but I stayed at least to cover the conference. It reminded me of the classic film Rashomon. Each side replayed its version of history, producing new evidence of how dangerously close they had come to a nuclear showdown. On the last day, the palace asked me to stop by and say good-bye to the president.

  He wanted to make amends. When Mary and I walked into his sitting room, he offered us “a very good California merlot” he’d gotten during a trade show in Havana. So much for the embargo! The situation could not have been more ridiculous. He asked me if I was still angry. I said I was, because he’d wasted our money and embarrassed me with my bosses. Trying to appease me, he said Barbara had only gotten what he called a “celebrity interview” and that if I came back, he’d give me better access than ABC had had. With that, he drove me to my plane. With Castro squeezed in the backseat of his armored limo between me and his trusted aide Juanita, I asked how the Russian generals had impressed him, after the passage of so many years. He said he was struck by the fact that they had no sense of humor. It was all I could do to retain mine.

  Fidel delivered on his promise to give me a special interview. I returned in December and we spent a week traveling all over the island. At my request, Castro took us to see the biomedical laboratories that had been the subject of so much State Department suspicion. We went to Lourdes, the Soviet-era spy station Castro was converting into a computer science school. We went to schools for the arts, for disabled children and for inner-city teenagers. We visited a port facility where Cuba was refining American grain. And finally, I got my interview.

  We talked for so many hours that at one point, I’m told, I nodded off. It wasn’t an easy conversation. With so much talk in the U.S. about the possibility of war with Iraq, Castro got cranky when I pressed him on his attitude toward Saddam Hussein. He was noticeably concerned about the possibility of war because of Cuba’s enormous dependence on foreign oil and the likelihood that war in the Gulf would cause shortages and higher prices. Once again, I pressed him about his own mortality and his plans for succession. We filed a series of stories for the broadcast and cable networks, and produced an hour-long, prime-time special for MSNBC.

  I left Cuba concerned about the country’s uncertain future, fears that were born out only a few months later when Castro ordered a major crackdown, arresting seventy-five dissidents, including many of the people I had interviewed. We applied for another visa, in order to cover their trials. This time Castro nailed the gates shut to American broadcasters. I argued that we could do a better job of reporting all sides of the story from down there, but the Cubans refused. So Mary stuck her neck out and gathered as much material as she could in Havana, while I did interviews in Washington. I talked to Cuba’s very effective representative in the United States, Dagoberto Rodriguez, along with Senator Chris Dodd, a longtime opponent of the embargo who was reevaluating his position because of the arrests, and Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya, who was visiting the States. Combining all of these elements, we did a series of tough reports on the crackdown. Castro was furious.

  I returned to Cuba to argue that we could tell their side of the story more completely if they granted us access. But all of Castro’s aides were angry about our coverage. During a meeting that turned into a virtual show trial of my work, the foreign minister even played a video they’d made of my reports on the human rights issue, cataloguing their complaints. I asked, “Who suddenly made you a professor of journalism?”

  In succeeding years, with Florida once again central to a presidential election campaign, and in reaction to Castro’s crackdown, the Bush administration tightened the embargo and all but eliminated cultural exchanges. Cuban-Americans can no longer return home each year. There were many unintended victims of the new policy. For instance, we profiled a Cuban-American soldier in Iraq who came home to Miami on leave, hoping to fly to Havana to visit his teenage children from a previous marriage. He missed out by one day. The new restrictions had just gone into effect. He is back in Baghdad, and has still not been able to see his kids.

  My adventures in Havana taught me a lot about “talking back” to dictators. There can be no compromise with freedom of expression. You can debate American policy, but you can’t justify “a little bit of repression.” It’s difficult to defend a regime that throws its critics in jail, no matter how demonized it is by its opponents. Fidel was willing to engage in a dialogue, but he had his limits. Over the years, I’ve bumped up against them every time I’ve pushed him hard on human rights. Still, if you can compare one totalitarian regime with another, I’ve been to other places that were far scarier. None was more frightening than Afghanistan, accompanying then–UN ambassador Bill Richardson as he tried to persuade the Taliban to a
gree to stop providing sanctuary to Osama bin Laden.

  The Taliban had first imposed strict Islamic law when they took power in 1996. Women were for the most part confined to their homes. Men had to wear beards of a certain length. By the time we arrived in April of 1998, they had imposed such severe prohibitions on women traveling without a male relative that even the United Nations was withdrawing its mission. At the airport, Taliban representatives lined up to greet our small UN plane. We weren’t sure whether we could even shoot video of the black-turbaned greeting party. It was against their interpretation of Islam for any living creature to be photographed.

  Bill Richardson had a deserved reputation as an international troubleshooter: before becoming UN ambassador, while still a member of Congress he had managed to win the release of Americans imprisoned in North Korea and Iraq. Now, he would be the first American official of cabinet rank to visit Afghanistan since Henry Kissinger in 1974. His stated mission was to broker a cease-fire between the Taliban and Afghanistan’s feudal warlords. The real purpose was to see if the Taliban would give up bin Laden.

  I had started writing about Osama bin Laden several years earlier, when American intelligence first began linking him to several bombings of U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia—charges later discredited. In one of those early reports for Nightly News, I had called bin Laden “the new face of terror, the renegade son of a Saudi billionaire. Elusive. Mysterious. And now, wanted worldwide.” My producer Robert Windrem and I reported that bin Laden recruited his followers by investing millions of dollars to improve conditions in countries like Sudan and then opening training camps to mold the young radicals into strike forces ready to disperse to other countries. Already, U.S. investigators were linking him to Ramzi Yousef, one of the masterminds behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And for the first time on American television, we had video, pictures of bin Laden climbing in the mountains of Afghanistan and meeting in his tent with his closest aide, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  How did we get the video? Bob and I had been at a background briefing with government officials in advance of writing our story. I asked if anyone had ever seen a picture of this guy. They showed us a paperback book, in Arabic, that had one photo, and said the original was in the New York Public Library’s Middle East division. We had a researcher fax us the entire book, in Arabic, along with a translation. To our amazement, once it was translated, we realized the back cover offered a companion video! Our Cairo bureau chief, Charlene Gubash, tracked down the producer and bought a copy for thirty-two hundred dollars. It may turn out to be one of the biggest bargains NBC News ever got. In the years since, we have used those pictures over and over again, followed by every other network. Those images are how the world was first introduced to Osama bin Laden.

  When we filed our first stories on him, the idea of a terrorist from a fabulously wealthy Saudi family who had fought alongside CIA-financed mujahideen to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan sounded far-fetched, and even a bit romantic. Some of my producers thought my focus on bin Laden was obsessive, that I had been spending too much time covering the CIA. But it wasn’t long before the agency had established a top secret bin Laden “station” headed by Michael Scheuer. Scheuer recently came in from the cold and identified himself as the author who, as “Anonymous,” wrote Imperial Hubris, a book sharply critical of the Bush administration’s war on terror. He subsequently resigned from the CIA.

  The Taliban told Richardson that bin Laden was their “guest” in Kandahar, and untouchable. As a small gesture to the visiting ambassador, they at least postponed that day’s public amputations and executions in Kabul’s sports stadium, their form of criminal justice. Having made no headway on terrorism, Richardson would have to settle for a promise on another front, that the Taliban would hold cease-fire talks in the civil war. On a final issue, the role of women, he won no concessions at all.

  Behind their burkas, the women of Kabul floated through the dusty streets like ghosts, robbed of all identity. Before the Taliban, they were able to work as doctors and teachers, filling essential jobs in a society whose male population had been decimated by more than a decade of civil war. Now, barred from holding jobs, many were committing suicide. On the streets, religious police patrolled in black pickup trucks, on the lookout for anyone who bared too much ankle, or dared to talk in public to a man.

  I was approached by two young men, brothers, who huddled on the filthy floorboard of my car to avoid detection so they could tell me about their mother and sister. Eighteen-year-old Shoaib said his mother had been a school principal, his younger sister a star student. Now both were housebound, virtual prisoners. He and his brother pleaded with me to tell their story so that the world would know of their plight. What would their future be like? They told me they both wanted to be journalists so that they could report on Afghanistan’s struggle. I was afraid of putting them in danger and didn’t dare record their appeals on camera.

  We traveled north to Shibergan, one of the few cities then still free of the Taliban’s hold. We were greeted by cheering throngs, including a group of women doctors. The contrast to the profound silence of Kabul could not have been more striking. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the local warlord and leader of the Uzbeks, welcomed our small traveling party with elaborate pageantry and the performance of bazkashi, a polo-like game played by Uzbek horsemen tossing the head of a goat. Somehow, I got separated from the rest of the motorcade and had to run across the playing field, dodging horses—and the goat’s head—until I reached the safety of the stadium seats.

  In the chaos of our arrival, the National Security Council’s top Middle East expert, Bruce Riedel, tripped and fell into an open pit carrying sewage, slashing his leg. Blood was pouring out of the gash on his calf. I ran to get my producer, who was carrying a first aid kit. To my amazement, he knew how to sterilize a needle and confidently stitched up Bruce’s leg. For years afterward, Bruce jokingly told me NBC had probably saved his leg, if not his life.

  Richardson negotiated what he thought was a successful cease-fire, halting the civil war and laying out a timetable for peace talks to come. Details still needed to be worked out, but he ran out of time: in order to fly out that night we had to leave before sundown—there were no lights on the airstrip. As we prepared to leave, Dostum ordered his men to pile Afghan carpets into a truck, one for each member of the official party. All I could think of was what the load of heavy carpets would do to the lift, on a dirt runway no less, of that small prop plane.

  I never saw what happened to the rugs, but as we took off, we saw spectacular bursts of antiaircraft fire. The cease-fire was already broken and the two sides were once again shelling each other as our pilot took evasive action. I buckled my seat belt and practically held my breath until we had crossed the mountains into Pakistan.

  My departure from Islamabad was delayed as thousands of pilgrims tried to get on flights to Saudi Arabia for the annual hajj. When I finally did get back to New York and put together my stories, I had no idea that the region would become such a tinderbox, and so important a part of our universe. Only one month later, Pakistan’s government set off a nuclear test, triggering a tense arms race with India in one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints. Shortly after that, a secret indictment handed up by a grand jury in New York charged Osama bin Laden with terrorism in connection with the killing of eighteen U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993 as well as the attacks on U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia and the 1996 al Qaeda fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Jews and Christians anywhere they could be found.

  Later that summer Osama bin Laden attacked two American embassies in Africa. Bill Clinton retaliated against suspected training camps in Afghanistan and a possible bin Laden–related chemical plant in Sudan, but critics said the intelligence was faulty, and the response too little, too late. The president could have been distracted: he had just testified to the grand jury investigating the Lewinsky affair and acknowledged, finally, what he had long denied. He had had what he called
an “inappropriate relationship”—what other people would call “sex”—with “that woman Miss Lewinsky.”

  Under the strain of the terror attack and their personal turmoil, the president and his wife led the nation in mourning the victims from the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania at a memorial service at Andrews Air Force Base. It was our first chance to observe the Clintons since their painful retreat to Martha’s Vineyard after he confessed his marital infidelity. They had aged dramatically since those first days in the snows of New Hampshire.

  Standing at Andrews, I watched the flag-draped coffins being carried from the planes and thought of all the other victims of terrorism who had been eulogized during the years since the Beirut bombings during the Reagan administration. None of us had any idea that this tragedy, as awful as it was, was only the first of many worse still to come. Bin Laden and al Qaeda were already plotting an assault on America more devastating than anything we had yet contemplated.

  CHAPTER 8

  Peace on Earth

  The millennium dawned peacefully. Despite billions of dollars spent in anticipation of a technology crash, computers worked. Trains ran on time. Planes landed with no interruption in air traffic control. None of this had been forecast. At the Federal Reserve, top officials had been up all night manning command posts to pick up any hint of a breakdown in the electronic global check transfer system. The FBI and Canadian authorities were working around the clock to preempt a millennium bomb plot. At NBC, correspondents and producers were positioned around the world on terror alert. Nothing happened.