A Private War

by Brenner, Marie

  “Who could ever forget the first time they saw Marie? She was a whirl of black curls,” said John Witherow. “The impression she gave was quiet authority and immense charm.” Colvin, who had just turned thirty, was absorbed into Neil’s new team, which included a platoon of dynamic women reporters and one of the finest foreign staffs in the world, known for the vivid, personal style he exacted from them.

  Colvin quickly became the Middle East correspondent. Patrick Bishop, then the paper’s diplomatic correspondent, encountered her in Iraq, in 1987, monitoring the Iran-Iraq War. Bishop recalled, “There was a bit of shelling going on, and I was anxious to impress her by pointing out the distinction between outgoing and incoming fire. I explained that the bang we had just heard was outgoing and therefore nothing to worry about. Then there was another explosion. ‘And that one,’ I said, ‘is incoming!’ and threw myself headlong on the ground. As the shell exploded some distance away, I looked up to see the woman I had been trying to show off to, gazing down at me with pity and amusement.”

  As Bishop was leaving Iraq, he spotted Colvin trying to sneak off to the front. “Don’t think of going there,” he told her. “It’s much too dangerous.” She ignored him. “The next thing I know is I see the Sunday Times, and there was Marie, inside the lines in Basra,” said Bishop.

  Next, disguised as a Jewish settler, she got her nose broken when Palestinian demonstrators threw a rock through the window of her car. Then she interviewed Yasser Arafat, who invited her to travel with him on his plane. Those interviews would be part of a BBC documentary on his life that Colvin wrote and produced. He would give her twenty-three more interviews, and she accompanied him to the White House with Yitzhak Rabin. “Just put the pencil down and sign it already,” she reportedly told Arafat during the Oslo peace accords of 1993.

  She and Bishop were married in August 1989, and the marriage looked like a true love match. Both reared as Catholics, the couple shared a solid middle-class background, parents who were teachers, and families who stressed intellectual achievement. The pressure of war reporting, however, affected them in different ways. Not long after they were married, Colvin discovered that Bishop was having a dalliance with a European journalist. In Iraq, she struggled with reports of his betrayal, but they stayed together. “She would howl into the phone, shouting at him,” recalled the reporter Dominique Roch. Colvin never unpacked her wedding presents, which remained in a jumble under the staircase in her home.

  That marriage was followed in 1996 by another, to Juan Carlos Gumucio, a well-born Bolivian journalist working for the Spanish newspaper El País. “I’m going to have a baby!” Colvin announced to her friends. “That is my dream.” Instead, she had two miscarriages, and her volatile new husband proved to have a massive appetite for disputes and alcohol. They separated, and in 1999 Bishop flew to Albania, worried about Colvin’s safety in covering Kosovo. “I arrived convinced she was in desperate trouble only to be told that she was at the bar briefing young reporters on the local dangers.” They quickly reunited.

  Later, in East Timor, the writer Janine di Giovanni saw them happily sitting on a wall in Dili in the midst of the turmoil in the burning capital. “Marie was wearing a pair of white short-shorts and calmly reading a thriller. She looked like an Irving Penn portrait of Babe Paley.”

  In 2002, Bishop and Colvin were still together when they learned that Gumucio had committed suicide.

  * * *

  “I wake up now many mornings with a slab of cement on my chest,” said Sunday Times foreign editor Sean Ryan the day we met, not long after Colvin died. The hardworking Ryan was elevated to run the foreign desk in 1998. Though he had done some feature writing from Kosovo and Israel, he had never actually been posted in a war zone. He had occasionally worked on Colvin’s stories from Iraq in 1991, when they appeared on the features pages, but soon they were speaking every day, sometimes for an hour. Ryan would now supervise the foreign staff as the paper intensified its personal coverage in order to compete with cable news and the tabloidization of the Murdoch press.

  One morning in December 1999, he heard Colvin’s voice on the BBC, describing the siege going on in East Timor. “My stomach started churning,” he told me. For the next four days, he demanded copy, but Colvin never filed. She was, she said, too busy helping refugees contact their families. “That was life with Marie,” he said. “She was a crusader most of all.”

  A few months later, Ryan’s phone rang. “Hey, Sean, I’m lying down in a field, and there’s a plane circling overhead. I’ll call you back.” Colvin was in the middle of another bloodbath, on the Russian border with Chechnya. Before she left, Bishop had angrily warned her, “You will get stuck there if you go to that massacre. The Russians are targeting journalists.” Bishop was frightened about the danger Colvin would face. For years he had called his friend Witherow repeatedly to pull her out of battle areas. “You cannot allow Marie to do this,” he had said in 1991, when she was one of the first British journalists inside Iraq in the early stages of the Gulf War. “She doesn’t want to come back,” Witherow answered. “Order her,” Bishop said.

  When she landed in Georgia, she was drunk, her Russian photographer, Dmitry Beliakov, later told the Sunday Times. “The Chechens who came to take us were shocked. She was a woman, and it was Ramadan. The next morning she knocked on my door, pale from a hangover, and we talked. Or she talked and I listened. It was clear she knew what she was doing. She said, ‘If you aren’t sure of me, don’t go.’ ”

  After Colvin was smuggled into Chechnya, the leader would not shake her hand, because she was a woman. Colvin told him, “There is no woman in this room, only a journalist.” She found children who had been shot by drunken Russians for their amusement. When the car she was in was blasted by shrapnel at night, she fled into a field of beech trees. It “felt like a death trap,” she wrote in her report. “I spent 12 hours yesterday pinned down in a field by a road The planes, evil machines . . . circled again and again . . . dropping bombs that whined as loudly as high-speed trains as they fell.”

  Bishop flew to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to help with her rescue. Colvin’s only way out in subzero temperatures was across a twelve-thousand-foot mountain range. A Chechen guide took her and Beliakov zigzagging up sheets of ice. Colvin was carrying a computer and a satellite phone and wearing a flak jacket, a weight of thirty pounds. At one point, Beliakov threatened suicide. At another, Colvin plunged into icy water. She jettisoned the flak jacket and kept the phone. It took them four days to reach the border and cross over into Georgia. They found an abandoned shepherd’s hut, but their only food consisted of three jars of peach jam and some flour, which they mixed with fetid melted snow into a paste.

  Bishop and the senior correspondent Jon Swain beseeched the American Embassy for help as Colvin fled the hut. Her party stumbled for days through a series of deserted villages. Suddenly she saw “an Ernest Hemingway figure,” who said, “Jack Harriman, American Embassy. Are we glad to find you.” Reunited with Bishop, Colvin later made light of it all. When she joined her friend Jane Wellesley at her country house for New Year’s, she said, “If I hadn’t had this hideously expensive anorak you made me buy, I wouldn’t have made it.”

  “YOU ONLY CRY WHEN YOU BLEED”

  “So, this Oyster Bay—what kind of place is it?” the poet Alan Jenkins once asked Colvin of the town near where she grew up. “Oyster Bay? It’s just a little fishing village,” she said, and laughed when Jenkins later discovered it was an area filled with the very rich and social. In fact, Colvin came from East Norwich, the solidly middle-class next town over. At Yale, Colvin confided to close friends that she often felt insecure among her classmates. During high school, she had worked at the local yacht club for spending money. Her mother, Rosemarie, the first college graduate in her family, had grown up in Queens and fallen in love with a handsome Fordham student who was also studying to be an English teacher. Just out of the Marines in World War II, Bill Colvin was passionate about
literature and Democratic politics. “My parents had a storybook marriage,” Marie’s younger sister Cathleen, known as Cat, now a corporate lawyer, told me. “Our father doted on Marie.” The oldest of five children, Marie filled the house with her projects—fruit flies, architectural models. At night, Bill read his children all of Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper. Weekends, he packed the family into the car and drove to political rallies. A passionate Kennedy supporter, Bill later worked briefly for New York governor Hugh Carey.

  “You only cry when you bleed,” Rosemarie told her children, a mantra Marie took to heart. By the time she was a teenager, she had the confidence and moxie of a daddy’s girl, but her relationship with her father became stormy as she battled for independence. Determined to have her own sailboat, she saved up money from babysitting. A girl of her era—the late 1960s—she would sneak out the window and spend nights smoking pot with her friends. “Bill did not know what to do with her,” Rosemarie said. She made straight As, was a National Merit finalist, and took off for Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. “She and my father were so much alike in their visions that it was destined that they collide,” Cat said. Years later, in London, Colvin would tell Patrick Bishop that she had run away to Brazil—a classic Colvin dramatization of the facts. She actually went as an exchange student and lived with a wealthy Brazilian family. “She came back sleek and chic and determined she was going to live out of East Norwich,” Cat recalled.

  In Brazil, Colvin had neglected to apply to college. When she returned, in the middle of her senior year, the deadlines were long past. As the family story has it, she said, “I’m going to Yale,” and took the car to New Haven. “With her was her high-school transcript and her test scores—two 800s,” said Rosemarie. The next day she was back. “I’m in.” Soon after she entered Yale, she met Katrina Heron, and they quickly became a trio with Bobby Shriver, the son of Sargent Shriver, the founder of the Peace Corps. For a class taught by John Hersey, Colvin read his masterpiece, Hiroshima, and she began to write for the Yale Daily News. That fall, Bill Colvin discovered an advanced cancer. Marie was inconsolable when he died. “It broke something in her,” Heron said. To all of Colvin’s friends, her father remained a mystery figure. It was as if a part of her froze at the moment he died. Her guilt about their unresolved relationship haunted her, Bishop told me. But with Cat, her closest confidante, she frequently talked about her anger and her failure to restore the special affection they had had when she was a child.

  * * *

  Sent to Sri Lanka in April 2001, Colvin delivered an interview with a commander of the controversial and brutal antiregime Tamil Tigers, in which she highlighted that there were 340,000 refugees in what she described as “an unreported humanitarian crisis—people starving, international aid agencies banned from distributing food . . . no fuel for cars, water pumps, or lighting.”

  “She could have spent the night and probably have left safely the next morning,” Jon Swain said. Instead, she fled through a cashew plantation and had to dodge army patrols. Trapped as flares from a nearby base swept the ground, Colvin had to make a difficult decision: Should she identify herself as a journalist? Had she not, she later said, she would have been slaughtered as a Tamil rebel. “Journalist! American!” she yelled as she felt searing heat in her head. A bursting grenade had punctured one of her lungs and destroyed her left eye. “Doctor!” she shouted when soldiers arrived and tore off her shirt, searching for weapons. “Admit that you came to kill us,” an officer demanded and threw her into the back of a truck.

  “I was uninjured until I yelled ‘journalist’ and then they fired the grenade. The nightmare for me is always that decision about yelling. My brain leaves out the pain,” Colvin told the author Denise Leith. “They made me walk to them. I knew that if I fell they would shoot so I had them put a light on me before I would stand up, but I lost so much blood that I fell down, literally I replay that whole walk endlessly in the nightmare. I know that it is my brain trying to find a different resolution. ‘This body didn’t have to be shot.’ ”

  On the phone, Sean Ryan could hear Marie screaming in a hospital, “Fuck off  !” Ryan said he was relieved, at least, “that she sounded like Marie.” Later she told him that she had fended off a doctor who was trying to take out her eye. Flown to New York to be operated on, she filed three thousand words from her hospital bed. “My God, what will happen if I go blind?” she asked Cat. “I wish I could cry,” she told the TV news editor Lindsey Hilsum. “So many Tamils have called to offer me their eyes.” As she was slowly recuperating, a worried Ryan told Rosemarie to get her psychological support, but Colvin resisted.

  Back in London, Colvin was convinced that work would cure her. “I started to worry that she was self-medicating with alcohol,” Heron told me. Meanwhile, her editors gave her a heroine’s welcome and praised her stiff-upper-lip valor.

  * * *

  Ryan became alarmed when she called him, yelling, “Someone at the paper is trying to humiliate me!” A story of hers had run with a headline that used the term “evil eye,” and Colvin saw that as a plot against her. “It was bewildering, and the first sign that Marie was having a stress reaction,” Ryan remembered. Alarmed, Cat could not get her on the phone. “I’ve thrown my cell phone into the river,” Marie told her. “I’m not getting out of my bed ever.”

  Two close friends encouraged her to get counseling, and she sought treatment at a military hospital by someone who understood PTSD. “When I look at you,” one doctor told her, “no soldier has seen as much combat as you have.” Sean Ryan recalled a lunch with her at about that time: “Marie gripped the table and said, ‘Sean, I have PTSD. I am going to hospital to be treated.’ ” She seemed relieved by the specific diagnosis. According to Rosie Boycott, “While the PTSD was absolutely true, it was as well for Marie a way she did not have to confront her drinking.” Bishop begged Colvin to stop; she refused.

  For years in England, with its high tolerance of alcoholism and its reluctance to force confrontation, Colvin’s friends and editors often resorted to evasion—Marie is feeling fragile. Marie does not sound like herself. When they tried to intervene, she would tell them, “I have no intention of not drinking. I never drink when I am covering a war.” Her attempts to find help were always short-lived.

  She would wake up drenched in sweat. The desperate reel of horrors that played over and over in her mind kept returning to the refugee camp in Beirut, where she saw the twenty-two-year-old Palestinian woman lying in a heap with half her head blown off. As recently as last year, Colvin was staying with her nieces and nephews in East Norwich when the doorbell suddenly awakened her. The next morning Rosemarie discovered that Marie had gotten up and put a knife in her sleeping bag. When Rosemarie mentioned it, Marie said, “Oh, that,” and changed the subject.

  * * *

  Colvin worked at the paper two days a week and hated it. Robin Morgan, then the editor of the paper’s weekly magazine, begged her to write long stories, but Colvin pressed to return to the field. She called the office “the chamber of horrors,” and she hounded Ryan and Witherow to let her get back to work. She went to the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Jenin in 2002 to cover the intifada. Arriving in Jenin, Lindsey Hilsum was convinced that her TV team had the scoop:

  “And there was Marie, popping out of the rubble, smoking a cigarette. ‘Hey, you guys, can I get a ride out?’ ” Recalling the decision to allow her back into war zones, one correspondent recently could not contain his anger. “They would put us all in this kind of danger,” he said. Colvin was never out of the field again.

  In 2003, as George Bush prepared to go to war with Iraq, Colvin was sent to assess the scene. After witnessing Saddam’s brutalities, she would fiercely defend the war at parties, declaring that no reasonable person could allow the genocide to continue. In dispatches from Baghdad, she described the mass graves of dismembered Iraqis and the atrocities Saddam’s son Uday had committed on his own family. Not long after that,
while visiting her family on Long Island and seeing her nine-year-old niece with a collection of Barbie dolls, she said, “Justine, are you playing dead babies’ mass grave?” She then realized that she was slipping into another reality. She told Cat, “I know things I don’t want to know—like how small a body gets when it is burned to death.” She continued to struggle. “I couldn’t feel anymore,” she told an interviewer. “I’d gotten into too black a place. I needed to say ‘I’m vulnerable.’ ”

  In the weeks after Colvin’s death, angry emails circulated among the correspondents, blasting the attitude of the paper. The Sunday Times mounted an internal investigation into its responsibility. Several members of the foreign staff confided to me their rage at what they considered the danger they now faced in the paper’s frenzy for press awards. “Are you aware that there is a tremendous anger about what happened to Marie, and that you are taking a bit of the heat for it?” I asked Sean Ryan. Ryan hesitated and then answered carefully: “There have been a couple people who have expressed concern about it. . . . I initiated a debate about what lessons could be learned. There were some reporters who think there shouldn’t be war reporting. There were some reporters who think that any reporter who has ever had PTSD should be retired. . . . There are those who think that reporters on the ground should be allowed to make their own judgment. My view is in the middle, as is the majority of the staff’s.” Then Ryan surprised me, adding, “It is illegal not to allow reporters to return to work with PTSD after they have been cleared.” I asked him, “Is this a British law?” He hesitated again. “Yes,” he said.