Audition

by Barbara Walters

  On our first trip to Saudi Arabia in 2002, we neither asked for nor needed security. The U.S. invasion of Iraq the following year changed all that. On this trip in 2005, there were armed guards in front of our hotel and security outside my room. We traveled in armored Mercedes-Benzes provided by the king’s security force. The government was taking no chances with our safety. Indeed, it was concerned with its own vulnerability to possible terrorist attacks.

  King Abdullah is a tall, imposing man in his eighties with dyed black hair and a matching dyed beard. Unlike most of the Saudi royal family, he doesn’t speak English. But even through an interpreter, he had a sense of humor and a twinkle behind his glasses. He only gave us half an hour of his time, and he held us to the second. He could see me getting my time cues and knew exactly when the time was up. That left me with a great many questions I wanted to ask but couldn’t. I did manage to question him on the delicate matter of women’s rights, or lack thereof, a subject of great interest back home. The king seemed to champion expanding rights for women. “My mother is a woman. My sister is a woman. My daughter is a woman. My wife is a woman,” he said. “I believe the day will come when women drive.”

  I’d gotten more or less the same answer three years before from several Saudi princes, yet nothing had happened. “Can you not just make a decree that women drive?” I asked him. “You are the king.” Here was his reply, which I still can’t figure out. “I value and take care of my people as I would my eye,” he told me. (That said, as of this writing women in Saudi Arabia still are not allowed to drive their own cars, though an organized petition drive directed at the king was launched in the fall of 2007.)

  His Majesty was less enigmatic on the subject of Al Qaeda’s terrorist acts inside Saudi Arabia, saying they were “Madness. Madness and evil. It is the work of the devil.”

  Has the threat been eliminated? I asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  No wonder we had so much security.

  He said he was against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and was very concerned about the unresolved Palestinian problem. “I believe this may have negatively influenced the opinion of the Saudi public toward the United States,” he said.

  Israel. The Palestinians. The incendiary issue kept coming up over and over again as the prime source of Muslim hatred toward America. I remembered the optimistic interview I’d had in 1999 with young King Abdullah of Jordan, who’d been thrust onto the throne by the deathbed wish of his father, King Hussein. Abdullah, then, was convinced that peace was at hand. “Maximum two, three years,” he had said. “We’ve gone too far in the peace process to go anywhere but forward.” But that was before 9/11. That was before the American invasion of Iraq and before the Palestinians in Gaza voted into power the militant Hamas party.

  Troubled times then. Just as troubled now.

  Which brings me to Venezuela’s maverick president, Hugo Chávez. I interviewed the highly controversial leader in the spring of 2007. Chávez, who considers Fidel Castro his mentor, is trying to create a socialist revolution in Latin America, starting with his own country. He has fertile territory. Almost 50 percent of the population of Venezuela lives in poverty. That there is poverty in much of Latin America is not big news, and we might not have paid too much attention to yet another left-leaning leader there were it not for Chávez’s bombastic name-calling of George W. Bush. In September 2006 Chávez visited the United States, and on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly, he condemned Bush’s invasion of Iraq and called the U.S. president “el diablo”—the devil.

  He certainly got everyone’s attention. The media was more interested in his tirade than his actual criticism of the president. I didn’t know Chávez, but suddenly we were told by the Venezuelan Embassy that if I was available, he wanted to do an interview with me. I’m not sure why. Maybe because he knew of my conversations with Castro. Anyway, as bad luck would have it, his few days in New York coincided exactly with the days I was in Australia interviewing Terri Irwin, the widow of the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin. Chávez said he wouldn’t do the interview with anyone else at ABC. He did do one with Tavis Smiley of PBS, but that was all, and home he went to Venezuela.

  From October on we tried to reinstate the interview. In December, Chávez was reelected by a huge majority to a second term as Venezuela’s president, and we renewed our efforts. Finally our opportunity came. President Bush decided in March 2007 to visit five Latin American countries: Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico. Chávez then decided to do his own tour of some of his neighbors, culminating with an interview with me upon his return home. So on Saturday, March 10, 2007, with my faithful producers Martin Clancy and Katie Thomson I left for Caracas.

  Our interview with Chávez wasn’t scheduled until Tuesday. What we had hoped to do in the interim was go around Caracas with Chávez and get footage of him in various parts of the city, but he was still out of the country doing his own Latin American tour, so we explored the city without him.

  Caracas is relatively uninteresting to visit. There is no true old section, few museums, little to do except to take the cable car up Avila Mountain for a scenic view of the city. This did not appeal to me (heights scare me, remember?). We stayed at a very well-serviced hotel and tried to get the feel of the country. I was introduced to some affluent citizens who lived in luxurious homes behind high walls topped with barbed wire. They traveled with bodyguards in armored cars for fear of being kidnapped. Venezuela has a reputation for kidnappings. Crime in Caracas is rampant, and Chávez either cannot or does not want to do anything about it.

  Many of the leaders of Venezuelan industry had already left the country. Others feared that Chávez might one day confiscate their property as Castro had done to much of the middle and upper class of Cuba. One of the sons of a man in the housing business introduced me to his friends, who told me they felt they would all have to leave the country in a year or two, for there would be no jobs for them and perhaps no home to go to.

  We also visited a barrio called Santa Cruz del Este, a typical area with houses of the poor stacked practically one atop another. You wonder how those houses don’t collapse into the street. Here the people, proud and friendly, told a different story. Chávez, they said, had helped them get running water and toilets. Venezuela is oil rich, the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, and Chávez has been handing out money to many of the poor to help them in community projects. They love him.

  The people in the barrio were welcoming, perhaps because we had set up our visit in advance. Nevertheless I traveled in an armored car with two bodyguards supplied by ABC. We were advised by people who knew the conditions to take no chances. We, too, could be targeted for kidnapping. We were told never to leave our hotel without our bodyguards. God knows why I wasn’t more afraid.

  We planned to leave the country on Wednesday after our Tuesday interview with Chávez so we could hurriedly prepare pieces to air on Good Morning America, 20/20, and Nightline. But at 1:00 a.m. Tuesday (again, nobody seemed to worry about late hours), we got a call that Chávez was hoarse from his travels and was “postponing” the interview. No word on when it would now take place. We were in a panic—all that time, all that money spent on transportation, hotels, camera crews, all that homework, writing of questions—all for nothing. Before I jumped off Avila Mountain, I got good news: Chávez would do the interview on Wednesday. That meant we could grab the first plane out on Thursday and crash our pieces for Friday.

  So what was he like? By now Chávez had added “donkey,” “liar,” “coward,” “murderer,” and “a drunk” to his list of adjectives describing Bush. I couldn’t wait to meet this loud, rude sworn enemy of the United States.

  Wednesday came. The interview was taking place in what had once been, a hundred years ago, an ornate private home. Now it was the closest thing Caracas had to a presidential palace. I expected to be greeted by the president in his trademark uniform of open-collar red shirt and ca
p. Instead, when I was ushered into his private office, I found a smiling, round-faced man dressed nattily in a navy blue suit, white shirt, and tie. He shook my hand warmly and was welcoming and gracious. He obviously wanted to please. Twice married and now divorced, he showed me photographs of his children and complained sadly, as he would also say later on camera, “I had to abandon them because my life is devoted to the poor of the earth.” He would also say, “It is also very hard for me to be married but I have got a heart here. I’ve also got blood running through my veins.” Good to know, I guess.

  I had begun the actual interview by asking him, on a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, how he would rate President Bush’s visit to Latin America. Not surprisingly he gave it a one, saying he had done that only because he wanted to be generous; he really thought it should be a minus five. He had called Bush a devil and then a donkey, he said, because “he is very ignorant about the things that are happening in Latin America and the world.” If he, Chávez, had been “excessive in his language” (his words), he said he might apologize. Moreover, he proclaimed that he himself would win a U.S. election if he ran because of his “respect for human rights.” “George Bush does not struggle for this,” Chávez went on to say. “He struggles for other things. He bombs people, villages, and he invades nations.”

  Chávez accused Bush of trying to assassinate him. He seemed actually to believe it. However, reassuring the United States, he also said there were no circumstances in which he would cut off oil except “in case of any other aggression by the U.S. administration.” Then and only then would he cut off the supply.

  He complained that the U.S. media demonized him by showing only photographs of him with Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Mu‘ammar Qaddafi. They never showed pictures of him, he said, with Pope John Paul II or with Bill Clinton.

  At the end of our interview Chávez spoke a little broken English, assuring “the people of the United States, all the women, all the men, we Venezuelan people love you. We want to be your brother. I love very much a great leader of you. Martin Luther King is my leader. His dream, Martin Luther King’s dream, is your dream, is our dream, is my dream.”

  When we left his office, he pumped the hand of every member of our group, cameramen, bodyguards, and producers.

  In December 2007, he lost a referendum that would have given him an indefinite term in office and even more power. Still, as things stand now, Chávez may have many years ahead to accomplish whatever his dream may be. Like his mentor Castro, he wants a socialist Latin America, thinks our democracy is a mistake, and will try to prevent it from happening in the other countries of his hemisphere. He has already begun to nationalize some of Venezuela’s industries like telecommunications, electricity, and oil. He says he will leave private property alone. Perhaps. And he says he looks forward to good relations with the next president of the United States. One more thing: he drinks twenty cups of coffee a day.

  Adventures with the Most Mysterious Men

  THE INTERVIEW that got me in the most trouble began innocently enough in the summer of 1986 on a yacht in the South of France. Merv and I were on our honeymoon, and through a friend of Merv’s, we were invited for lunch aboard the Nabila, the opulent yacht owned by Adnan Khashoggi. Who knew that within months Khashoggi would become a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal that tarred the Reagan administration—and almost cost me my job?

  At the time we knew Khashoggi only by reputation. He was a rich, very rich, Saudi wheeler-dealer who had made millions brokering the multibillion-dollar sale of American weapons to Saudi Arabia in the sixties and seventies. That, plus other deals, had earned him the reputation of being one of the world’s richest men—and the biggest spender. Judging from his yacht, it was true.

  The seventy-million-dollar, 280-foot floating palace he’d named after his only daughter had its own helicopter and landing pad, marble bathrooms with gold fixtures, eleven VIP suites, each named for a semiprecious gem like garnet or topaz, a barbershop, and mirrored massage rooms. The ship was wired with cutting-edge technology that might not seem like much today but back then was unheard of. Everything in the master suites was operated by remote control: a button to lock and unlock the door, a button to unveil the TV, a button in Khashoggi’s own stateroom that swung open the back wall of the shower to reveal a secret staircase leading, presumably, to a safe room. The Nabila even had a state-of-the-art operating room with a closed-circuit TV system that enabled the doctors aboard to be in visual contact with doctors anywhere in the world.

  At lunch, we learned one way he’d managed to accumulate such wealth. Would I or any of his other guests, Khashoggi asked, like to visit his onboard Hindu mystic, Shri Chandra Swamiji Maharaj, or, for short, Swamiji? Swamiji could see into the future, Khashoggi told us, and read people’s minds. I bit, having never met a true swami before, and was escorted after lunch to a much smaller cabin where the swami was sitting on the floor in the lotus position, playing with his toes. There was another man in the room in an ill-fitting suit who was described as the swami’s translator, but I paid no attention to him. The swami had such an aura of calm about him that I poured out all the trouble I was having with my daughter at the time, hoping for some swami wisdom.

  Well, I didn’t get much wisdom. Nor, I discovered months later, did anyone else Khashoggi dispatched to the swami. Turned out that he offered an audience with his guru to anyone with whom he was doing business in the hope that he would eventually reveal his personal and business concerns. The so-called translator would then relay them to Khashoggi.

  Merv and I liked Khashoggi. He was pleasant, quite small and plump, and looked somewhat like one of those blow-up toys you push over that bounce right back. We accepted his invitation to return for dinner that night, where among the guests was the flamboyant former prime minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau. We had another luxurious meal on the Nabila, but that was that. We didn’t see Khashoggi again.

  Four months later the Iran-Contra scandal burst into the headlines and threatened to severely damage the Reagan administration. Reported first in a Lebanese newspaper, then on the front pages of every U.S. newspaper, was a labyrinthine tale about the Reagan administration violating its own policy by secretly selling weapons to Iran in return for the release of American hostages being held in Lebanon. Soon afterward it was disclosed that proceeds from the covert arms sales were secretly and illegally going to support the anti-Communist insurgents in Nicaragua. And who was the mysterious middleman who was thought to have brokered the arms deal? Khashoggi.

  What a story! Since I knew him I started tracking down Khashoggi all over the world to see if I could interview him for 20/20. Finding him was a challenge. He had a huge ranch in Kenya as well as homes in Mar-bella, Paris, Cannes, the Canary Islands, Madrid, Rome, Beirut, Riyadh, Jeddah, Monte Carlo, and a thirty-million-dollar apartment in New York. When I finally managed to reach him, he was pleasant enough, but noncommittal. He didn’t say yes, but he also didn’t say no. So I’d wait a bit, then phone him again.

  He called me back, unexpectedly, while Merv and I were at La Costa, Merv’s spa and golf resort in California. Khashoggi told me he was sending me some material by air that he wanted me to read. His personal messenger hand-delivered the package the next day. Enclosed was a copy of a letter he’d sent to Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security advisor, in 1985, suggesting that there were “moderate” elements in Iran that wanted to open communication with the United States. Most interesting was that McFarlane personally answered him, thanking him for his interest. Lots of people sent ideas about a lot of subjects to the White House, but few received responses from such a senior member of the administration. Khashoggi was confirming to me his personal relationship with the highest level in the Reagan administration. I got the message.

  What I didn’t understand was a copy of a lecture he also sent me, presented by former CBS News president Fred Friendly at Columbia University. This lecture dealt with the dilemma faced by r
eporters who uncovered information that might prove dangerous to the country if made public. Was Khashoggi warning me? Or was he asking me if I could keep a secret? I didn’t have a clue.

  The next time I called him, I asked him about the lecture. Instead of answering me he agreed to an interview. “I’ll come see you,” he said. Three days later he arrived at La Costa.

  “Do you have a secure phone?” he asked, after we had exchanged pleasantries. The answer was no. We weren’t in the business of state secrets. But we were about to be.

  “We have our own phone line in the cottage,” I told Khashoggi.

  “Is there an extension?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “In the bathroom.”

  “I’m going to call someone. You don’t need to know who,” he told me. “Listen on the extension, but don’t make a sound.”

  So there was Khashoggi on the phone in the living room and there was I, on the extension in the bathroom, sitting on the lid of the toilet. And he was talking arms sales with another mystery man.

  “How much did we get for this? Seven million? Good. And how much did we get for the TOWS? Two million….”

  I didn’t have paper or a pen with me, so I grabbed an eyebrow pencil, ripped the top off the tissue box, and started scribbling notes as fast as I could. (I didn’t know from TOWS then but I now know it stands for “tube-launched, optically tracked wire-guided” missile. I wrote “toes” in my notes and wondered what feet had to do with all this.) The conversation lasted far longer than the tissue box, but I got the point. Khashoggi was proving to me that he was indeed the middleman in the U.S.-Iranian arms deal. The interview, he now said, would have to wait.