* * *
The journey had begun in a muddy field, where a concrete slab marked the entrance to the tunnel. They had been taken through orchards by former military officers fighting against al-Assad. “We move when it’s dark,” one of them said. “After that, just hand signals. No noise until we are in the tunnel.”
The night was cold, the sky lit with hundreds of rocket missiles. Inside Homs, twenty-eight thousand people were surrounded by al-Assad’s troops. Food supplies and power had been cut off, and foreign reporters had been banned. In Beirut earlier, Colvin had learned that the army was under orders to kill journalists. They had two options for penetrating the occupied area: race across a highway swept by floodlights or crawl for hours through a frigid tunnel. “Paul, I don’t like this,” she said.
Syria under al-Assad broke all rules of war. In Libya in 2011, Colvin and Conroy had spent months sleeping on floors in the besieged city of Misrata, living on “the war-zone diet”—Pringles, tuna, granola bars, and water—relying on each other for survival. Their arena was the closed world of war: one-room concrete safe houses with cheap Bokhara carpets and a diesel stove in the middle, mint tea offered by Free Syrian Army soldiers.
They were an unlikely pair. Conroy, a decade younger and a natural comedian, was called “the Scouser” by his colleagues for his working-class Liverpool accent. His sharp cheekbones and high brow reminded them of the actor Willem Dafoe. Colvin was the daughter of two Long Island public-school teachers, but she had the air of an aristocrat. Her nails were a perfect scarlet, and her double strand of pearls was a gift from Yasser Arafat. In a war zone, Colvin always wore a brown jacket with “TV” in large letters of silver gaffer tape on the back. Not this time: She was well aware that she could be a target for al-Assad’s soldiers, so she wore a Prada black nylon quilted coat as camouflage.
As they left for the second trip, they learned that there would be no space for them to carry flak jackets, helmets, or video equipment. Trained as an artillery officer in the British army, Conroy counted the rockets coming down and clocked forty-five explosions a minute. “Every bone in my body is telling me not to do this,” he said. Colvin listened to him carefully, her head cocked to one side. “Those are your concerns,” she said. “I’m going in, no matter what. I’m the reporter, you’re the photographer. If you want, you can stay here.” It was the first argument they had ever had. “You know I’ll never leave you,” Conroy said.
* * *
For Colvin, the facts were clear: A murderous dictator was bombarding a city that had no food, power, or medical supplies. NATO and the United Nations stood by doing nothing. In a nearby village, hours before they left, Conroy had watched her trying to get a signal and file her story for the next day’s paper on her vintage satellite phone. “Why is the world not here?” she asked her assistant in London. That question, posed by Colvin so many times before—in East Timor, Libya, Kosovo, Chechnya, Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka—was the continuing theme of her life. “The next war I cover,” she had written in 2001, “I’ll be more awed than ever by the quiet bravery of civilians who endure far more than I ever will.”
Surrounded by members of the Free Syrian Army, Colvin had gathered the essentials for the return trip: the Thuraya SAT phone, a battered laptop, La Perla briefs, and her lucky copy of Martha Gellhorn’s The Face of War, essays detailing wars, many of them waged before Colvin was born. At night, she would often reread Gellhorn’s leads: War started at 9:00 o’clock promptly.
“Hey, Marie, welcome back to hell,” said a Syrian activist huddled on the floor of the media center. All the other reporters had left. As always, when she was in a Muslim country, the first thing Colvin did was take her shoes off and leave them in the hall. In Syria, she found herself in a still-uncharted arena for war reporters—a YouTube war. She and Conroy watched as Syrian activists uploaded videos of the battle of Homs. “I am in a place where the locals are uploading videos etc so I think internet security is pretty much out the window,” she had emailed her editor.
At 11:08 p.m., she emailed Richard Flaye, the current man in her life:
My darling, I have come back in to Baba Amr, the besieged neighbourhood of Homs, and am now freezing in my hovel with no windows. I just thought, I cannot cover the modern day Srebrenica from the suburbs. You would have laughed. I had to climb over two stone walls tonight, and had trouble with the second (six feet) so a rebel made a cat’s cradle of his two hands and said, ‘Step here and I will give you a lift up.’ Except he thought I was much heavier than I am, so when he ‘lifted’ my foot, he launched me right over the wall and I landed on my head in the mud! . . . I will do one more week here, and then leave. Every day is a horror. I think of you all the time, and I miss you.
It was the last email she would ever send him.
THE SILVER GIRL
I arrived in London a few weeks after Colvin’s death forced the world to pay attention to the atrocities in Syria. It was a brutal winter for journalists: Anthony Shadid, forty-three, of the New York Times, had died while attempting to cross the Syria-Turkey border. The French photographer Rémi Ochlik had been killed along with Colvin. At Rupert Murdoch’s press empire, there were charges of hacking phones, bribing police, and trading favors with prime ministers. The company was in desperate need of a Joan of Arc, and in Colvin it found one. As foreign staffs around the world had been disbanded because of budget cuts and threats to reporters’ security, Colvin’s process still resembled Martha Gellhorn’s. Her notes were meticulously kept in spiral notebooks lined up on her office shelf at her house in Hammersmith, on the Thames. Nearby, a stack of business cards: Marie Colvin, foreign affairs correspondent. The role had defined her and had become, tragically, irrevocable.
Colvin’s boldness in war zones across the world could appear like a form of derring-do or addiction to the poison elixir of battle, as one reporter called it, but the truth was more complex. For years, the ferocious competition for scoops in the British foreign press thrilled Colvin and completely suited her nature. More, she had a deep commitment to reporting the truth.
By accident, I was an hour early for the celebration in Colvin’s honor at the Frontline Club, a gathering spot for journalists near Paddington Station. Organizers were trying to make the sound system work, and suddenly Colvin’s voice filled the room. She appeared on a TV monitor in a car outside an Iraqi prison in 2003. To her fixer in the backseat, Colvin says with fierce quiet, “Calm down. You getting excited makes the situation worse.” Then, to the driver, “Get out of here!” The steadiness of her gaze stops all debate. The footage came from Barbara Kopple’s 2005 documentary, Bearing Witness.
Among the scores of guests were Colvin’s editors John Witherow and Sean Ryan, the actress Diana Quick, and Vanity Fair’s London editor, Henry Porter. The historian Patrick Bishop, an ex-husband, and a number of former lovers were there, along with Flaye, as well as intimate friends, including the author Lady Jane Wellesley; two Bonham Carter sisters, Virginia and Jane; Rosie Boycott, the former editor of the Daily Express and the Independent; and British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman. The room also held dozens of young reporters whom Colvin had mentored with her astonishing generosity. “You always have to think about the risk and the reward. Is the danger worth it?” she had once advised Miles Amoore in Afghanistan.
From her earliest days as the American girl in the small, clubby world of British journalism, Colvin appeared to play beautifully into the paradigm of reporting as a bit of a lark, not to be taken too seriously, as if she had parachuted in from the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. In truth, Colvin identified with her subjects and found her own emotions in their plights. Her particular talent was giving voice to the voiceless—widows holding their mangled husbands in Kosovo, Tamil Tigers rebelling against the government in Sri Lanka. “The first sound of trouble was the screams of two little old ladies who slashed themselves on the razor coils topping the walls of the United Nations compound, desperate to enter,” Colvin had reported from the E
ast Timor city of Dili in 1999. It was, she always believed, her finest hour. For four days straight, she broadcast the plight of a thousand victims, mostly women and children, trapped in a siege that had killed thousands of Timorese. “Who’s there? . . . Where have all the men gone?” her editor in London asked when she announced that she and two female Dutch journalists had stayed behind to help the stranded refugees. “They just don’t make men like they used to,” she replied. The line would become part of her growing legend.
Colvin’s story recounting the river of blood that flowed out of her mouth when she was left to die in Sri Lanka in 2001 also became part of her myth, as would the quiet eloquence that set her apart from the cliché of the war correspondent as adrenaline junkie with a death wish. “Bravery is not being afraid to be afraid,” she said when she accepted an award for her work in Sri Lanka.
Though her dispatches brought her numerous awards and fame in England and in every major conflict zone in the world, she was less known in her own country. Unlike Gellhorn, she did not leave a literary legacy; her genius was for low-to-the-ground newspaper reporting. Her writing had a strong moral undertow. She functioned best when she was on the scene. In spite of the massive changes of the last twenty-five years brought on by the high-tech presence of Twitter and YouTube, Colvin continued to believe that war reporting remained the same: You had to be there. “How do I keep my craft alive in a world that doesn’t value it? I feel like I am the last reporter in the YouTube world,” she told her close friend Katrina Heron. “I am inept with technology.” Heron, the former editor of Wired, sent her frequent tech advice.
She pushed into combat zones that made her drivers sometimes vomit from fear. Yet she dreaded becoming “this smelly, exhausted pseudo-man,” as she wrote in British Vogue in 2004 when explaining her “defiant preference” for satin and lace underwear in the trenches. In the hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds in the head and chest in Sri Lanka, she received a missive from her editor, who had seen pictures of her wounded and seminaked in the field. He asked her to “tell us about your lucky red bra.” He did not realize that the bra was “cream (lace cups, double satin straps) but had turned red because it was drenched in my blood,” Colvin wrote. She added that militia had broken into her hotel room in East Timor and that “all my La Perla knickers and bras had been stolen. How weird is that?” They had “left behind a radio, tape recorder . . . even a flak jacket.” Not long before she left for Homs, she told Heron, “I would like to have a saner life. I just don’t know how.”
* * *
In London, she rarely talked about her fieldwork. “Hornet, make me a huge martini right this second!” she would demand as she breezed into the kitchen of Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson, whom she had nicknamed after the vintage car. If she talked about her travels, she would lighten them with a flawless imitation of a despot guaranteed to get a laugh. “I don’t want to be the kind of person about whom they say as you move up to the bar, ‘Oh, god, here comes the experiences in Beirut again,’ ” she once wrote. Former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil recalled the day in 1994 he got swept up in his star reporter’s carousel: “Suddenly I found myself in a taxi being uprooted from my hotel to a secret and god-awful place in downtown New York where I was to meet the most astonishing Saudi defector. How would she do it? I have no idea. There I was, powerless under Marie’s spell.”
There were no boundaries in her friendships; guerrilla fighters, refugees, movie stars, and writers would appear at her parties. “She stayed in many ways a wayward teenager,” one friend said. She was careless when it came to bills, taxes, and expense-account receipts, and she failed to deliver books she promised publishers. In Iraq in 2003, Colvin accidentally left her SAT phone on, and the paper had to cover a $37,000 bill. She laughed loudest at herself—chain-smoking, starting to serve supper at midnight, drunk, and realizing she had forgotten to turn on the stove.
“THE SILVER GIRL SAILS OFF INTO THE NIGHT,” the Sunday Times headlined the inside spread of its special section, where Colvin was pictured in a tiny bikini on Richard Flaye’s sailboat. A fierce dieter, she would have been delighted to see her sveltest self taking up almost half a page. Several memorials referred lightly to Colvin’s long nights of drinking. The reality was darker. Often she would disappear for days. “I’m in the hole,” she once confided to producer Maryam d’Abo, and she would say the same to friends when they drove to her house, worried that she had slipped back into the terrors of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). An extreme reaction to psychological trauma, PTSD has become a regular news feature, afflicting returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. The complications—paranoia, alcohol and drug abuse, night terrors—are often slow to appear.
At the Frontline Club, I detected a strong undercurrent in the room. “The Sunday Times has blood on its hands,” I overheard one writer say. In the days following Colvin’s death, there were many unanswered questions: Why didn’t she wait to file her copy until she had safely crossed the Lebanese border? What drove her back, knowing that her SAT phone had been compromised and journalists had been targeted? What was a fifty-six-year-old woman with a drinking problem and PTSD doing in the center of a massacre?
A RISING STAR
“Are we really going to do this?” Colvin asked the photographer Tom Stoddart as they stood outside the refugee camp of Bourj el Baranjneh, in West Beirut, in 1987. Beirut was divided by a “Green Line” battle zone—Christians on the east, Muslims on the west. Colvin and Stoddart were recent hires at the Sunday Times, covering the conflict between Lebanon and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization. In the camps, the Palestinians were being starved and were under siege by Amal, the Syrian-backed Shiite militia. Almost seventy women had been gunned down, and sixteen had died.
“Every reporter in Beirut was trying to get into the camp,” Stoddart said. “But Marie, with her American charm, had convinced a commander not to shoot us. We had a plan.” They would run two hundred yards across a road manned by Amal commanders with rockets. “The idea was that we would hold hands. In case one of us was shot, we could rescue each other.” Colvin hesitated, then took Stoddart’s hand. “This is what we do,” she said calmly, then ran.
The next morning, snipers turned their guns on Haji Achmed Ali, a twenty-two-year-old Palestinian woman, who lay near a pile of rocks by a burned-out car. Blood poured from the wounds in her head and stomach. Colvin took in and described the young woman’s tiny gold earrings and “the handful of blood-soaked dirt she had clenched in her pain.”
Stoddart captured Colvin by the makeshift operating table, her face glazed with incomprehension. Colvin and Stoddart then had to smuggle the film out of Bourj el Baranjneh. Colvin put the canisters in her underwear, along with a letter Dr. Pauline Cutting, a British surgeon trapped in the camp, had written to Queen Elizabeth, urgently appealing for her help. They fled Beirut on an all-night ferry to Cyprus. Colvin filed her story on a telex. The headline would read “Snipers Stalk Women on the Path of Death.” Inside were two full pages of photographs of the young Palestinian woman leaking blood. It was the Ur-moment of Colvin’s early London career. But the image of Haji Achmed Ali and her earrings would haunt Colvin’s nightmares.
By the time she arrived in London, Colvin had already worked as the Paris bureau chief of UPI. Not long out of Yale, she had so impressed her UPI bosses in Washington that when she threatened to quit if they didn’t send her to Paris they did. “I was the bureau chief and everything else, including the desk assistant,” Colvin later said of that assignment. But her vision of the future had been shaped by Vietnam and Watergate and fueled by reading the New York Times war correspondent Gloria Emerson and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Soon, bored by the jeunesse dorée of Paris, she realized she was missing a bigger story—a possible war in Libya. In Tripoli, Muammar Qaddafi, an epic thug in a desert filled with oil, was poised in his underground lair, planning terror strikes. “Just go,” the then New York Times reporter Judit
h Miller told Colvin, giving her a list of contacts. “Qaddafi is crazy, and he will like you.”
When the sleek young reporter appeared at Qaddafi’s estate—avoiding any press-corps briefing—the startled guard believed she was French. At forty-five, Qaddafi lived in a palace at the Bab al Azizzia compound, and he had an endless appetite for beautiful women. That night, she was summoned to his chambers.
“It was midnight when Col. Moammar Gadhafi, the man the world loves to hate, walked into the small underground room in a red silk shirt, baggy white silk pants and a gold cape tied at his neck,” Colvin began her story, a scoop that went around the world. She had an exquisite eye for detail—Qaddafi’s “stack-heeled gray lizard skin slip-ons,” TVs replaying his speeches continuously. “I am Qaddafi,” he said. She remembered saying to herself, “No kidding,” and then spent the next hours fending off his advances.
The UPI bannered the story, and Qaddafi’s ardor for her grew stronger. In a later interview, he pressed her to wear “petite green shoes”—his favorite color—and on one occasion he sent a Bulgarian nurse to draw her blood. Colvin refused and soon fled the country.
* * *
Colvin’s mother was visiting her in Paris in 1986 when the invitation came from the Sunday Times. “I’m not going to work there!” Marie said. “All my life I wanted to live in Paris, and I’m finally here.” Besides, the Sunday Times of London had been in turmoil since the Rupert Murdoch takeover. Former editor Harold Evans, whose investigative reporters had revolutionized British journalism, was gone, as was the former owner, Roy Thomson, who had backed the vigorous disclosure of corruption. The new, young editor, Andrew Neil, persuaded Colvin to take the job.
A Private War Page 3