A Private War

by Brenner, Marie

  “If the Sunday Times had not allowed Marie to continue the work she loved, it would have destroyed her,” said Colvin’s executor, Jane Wellesley.

  THE BOATMAN

  “My God, they are drugging the fucking journalists,” Colvin cracked when she landed in the town of Qamishli, on the northeastern border of Syria, as the 2003 war in Iraq began to build. It was March, and Colvin, like scores of other reporters, was trying to get a visa into the country. Paul Conroy told me, “For days the journalists camped out, sleeping on plastic chairs in the office of the consul closest to the border. That was the first time I clapped eyes on her. She walked into that room and then just turned and walked out the door.”

  Shortly after that, he recalled, “She whirled into the lobby of the Petroleum Hotel and called out, ‘Where is the boatman?’ ” Conroy, then a freelance cameraman, had been so determined to get into Iraq that he built a raft in his room and launched it with a stringer from the New York Times. “We were arrested almost immediately by the Syrians,” he told me. “They held us a few hours and then let us go, telling us they believed in free speech.”

  “You built a fucking boat?” Colvin asked Conroy when she tracked him down. “I fucking love that! Everyone else here looks dead. Let’s sail!” That night they stayed out drinking until dawn. Conroy did not see her again for seven years.

  Back in London, for therapy she rediscovered the thrill of ocean racing. “It focuses my mind completely,” she told Rosie Boycott. “Three hours on deck, three hours asleep—that was how she destressed!” Boycott told me. Through a friend, she met Richard Flaye, a director of several companies. Soon she was introducing him as “the love of my life.” Flaye, who grew up in the privileged world of white Uganda, has a colonial elegance and a macho demeanor. Like Colvin, he is a fierce ocean sailor. “We worked out an exit strategy for her,” Flaye told me. Colvin happily agreed to work half of the year and sail with her new love the rest of the time. “I hope you don’t mind if I buy a house a few blocks from you,” he said several months after they met. Colvin spent time designing a new kitchen for her own house, planting her garden, and finally unpacking her wedding presents. At night she cooked elaborate dinners for Flaye and his teenage children. “I warned her when we got together, I am a leopard with spots,” Flaye said. “Marie herself was strongly independent by nature and recognized that she had to give me my independence as well.”

  * * *

  Then came the Arab Spring. In January 2011, Sean Ryan was at the gym looking at the news from Tahrir Square, in Cairo, when his cell phone rang. “Are you watching this?” Colvin said. “It looks to be a small crowd,” he told her. “No, Sean, this is really important,” she said. “I think I should go.” Once there, she learned of the attack on CBS’s Lara Logan and had a call from Ryan. “What can you do to add to this story?” he asked.

  The next time Colvin called, she sounded terrified. She was locked in a shop, where people from the neighborhood had turned violently on her as a foreign woman. In the background, the editor on duty could hear a crowd trying to break in. She was barely able to get out with her translator. The Sunday Times headline read: “Trapped in an Alley by a Mob After My Blood.” “Shaken but okay,” she wrote Judith Miller. “This is not our Egypt.”

  Concerned about Colvin’s state of mind in Cairo, her colleague Uzi Mahnaimi sent a warning email to London. Despite the alarm of some at the Sunday Times, Sean Ryan says, if he had thought Colvin’s condition was serious he would have gotten her “on the first plane home.”

  Colvin’s romantic life had once again collapsed. She and Flaye had separated when she discovered in his emails a trail of other women. One afternoon she read all of the emails to two of her closest friends, sobbing. She went to a new therapist, who tried to get her to a center in Cottonwood, Arizona, that treats alcohol addiction and trauma. “There was no longer hiding in euphemisms what she had,” one friend said. But it was even more complicated than that. Work was where she felt competent and safe. She would say, “I have no problem with drinking when I am in the field.” Inside the paper, however, others disagreed.

  “Are you happy to work with Marie Colvin?” Paul Conroy was asked by his editor in the winter of 2011 as war raged in the city of Misrata, Libya. “Are you kidding?” he said. “She’s a bloody legend.” Conroy, by then on the staff of the Sunday Times, was caught up in the frenzy of antigovernment demonstrations in the Arab world. When Colvin spotted him in the lobby of his hotel in Cairo, she cried, “Boatman! I don’t believe it!” It was as if no time had passed. They flew to Tripoli and found their way by ferry to Misrata, which was being shelled by Qaddafi loyalists.

  As rockets ripped nearby buildings apart, Colvin and Conroy made it to their destination, the clinic where Colvin knew victims were being taken. Just as they arrived, they saw stretchers being carried in. Inside they learned that Vanity Fair contributing photographer Tim Hetherington had just been admitted. “Marie suddenly turned white,” Conroy said. She rushed off to find Hetherington, and later that night she told Flaye that she had cradled the dying man in her arms.

  Colvin and Conroy had planned to stay in Misrata five days, but they remained for nine weeks. Colvin often slept on the floor of the clinic, where she felt protected.

  “Hornet!” she wrote Hugh Hudson:

  I am now like a character in a modern remake of Stalingrad I pause in my race to the shelling at the front and veer over to the roadside when I spot someone selling onions from a wooden table on the verge But when I hear a chorus of “allahu akbars” . . . shouted from the doctors, medics and rebels in the parking lot, I know a body or severely injured person has arrived and I head down There is always a story at the end of a rocket. On the positive side, this is like a health reservation without the counselling. No booze, no bread. Off to the front in my Toyota pickup. Handful of dried dates, can of tuna.

  “I MUST SEE WHAT IS GOING ON”

  “Every week, she would convince me they had a good story for the following week,” Ryan said. Colvin outdid herself. She delivered a rapist’s confession and a profile of deserters from Qaddafi’s army, and from time to time she accompanied Conroy to the front. In London, Ryan was now concerned. “Do not go to the front,” he emailed her. One day, she mentioned that she had been there. “Didn’t you get my emails?” he demanded angrily. “I thought you were joking,” she said.

  “What did you live on?” I asked Paul Conroy. “Pringles, water, and cigarettes. One day, Marie shouted, ‘Paul, I have eggs!’ She had found them at a farmer’s stand and was balancing them on her head.” He added, “Marie quit smoking completely. She was losing all of her teeth. Whenever I would light up, she would say, ‘Blow the smoke at me, Paul. I miss it so fucking much.’ ” He was in a London hospital, still recovering from injuries suffered in the attack in Homs that killed Colvin.

  On October 20, 2011, as the first reports of Qaddafi’s death made the news, Conroy and Colvin got frantic calls from their editors to take a plane to Tripoli and get a story for page one in seventy-two hours. “Hey, boatman, we are on the move!” Colvin said as she scrambled to find her passport, which she had misplaced. Landing in Tunis, they realized that all they had was a possible lead on Qaddafi’s body in the morgue. “That is nothing. Everyone will have that,” the picture editor told Conroy. With only twelve hours to go, Colvin was tipped that Qaddafi had last been seen in his childhood home of Sirte, a besieged city, once a faux Beverly Hills in the desert. In a frenzy, she ordered up another driver to take them through the desolate landscape. “You’ll never get in,” the driver said. “Trust me. If Marie says we will, we will,” Conroy said.

  “Libya is my story,” Colvin said as she fell asleep on Conroy’s shoulder. She was on a high, with the possible thrill of a scoop ahead of her and no sign of any competition. They had four hours left to file. Conroy crawled out of the car’s back window, hoping for a satellite signal, and found a way to put gaffer tape on a makeshift antenna to transmit their copy
and photos. “We were screaming at each other to share the laptop,” he recalled. “Marie was typing madly, and I was trying to send my pictures. The driver looked at us and said, ‘I have never seen anyone act like this before.’ And Marie shouted, ‘Well, you have never worked with the Sunday Times.’ ”

  * * *

  “My God, what should I do?” Colvin asked Flaye, with whom she was back together, on Skype not long after she reached Homs. “It is a risk. If I go on the BBC and CNN, it is very possible that we will be targeted.” It was late in the afternoon on February 21. “I watched a little baby die today,” she told Ryan, a line she would repeat on television. “This is what you do,” Flaye assured her. “You get the story out.” Her editors agreed and cleared her to broadcast.

  “It is absolutely sickening,” Colvin said on the BBC about her hours in the clinic. “A two-year-old had been hit. His little tummy just kept heaving until he died. It is shelling with impunity and merciless disregard.” Her voice was calm and steady as Conroy’s footage beamed all over the world. “I could feel the intensity of the shelling increasing not long after,” Conroy said. “At that point, Marie and I just looked at each other, and it was, like, How do we survive?”

  Colvin emailed Ryan: “All well here. It is the worst day of shelling in the days I have been here I did interviews for BBC Hub and for Channel 4. ITN is asking, not really sure of the etiquette, as it were. Is doing an interview for everyone just guaranteed to piss everyone off  ? . . . Two cars of the activists who tool around Baba Amr getting video both hit today, one destroyed.” Ryan tried to Skype with Colvin, then emailed her. “Can you Skype me please? I am alarmed.”

  Soon after that, two French journalists appeared. “We can’t leave now that the Eurotrash is here,” Colvin told Conroy, and she emailed Ryan: “I want to move at 5:30 in the morning I refuse to be beaten by the French.” Ryan emailed back, “I don’t think their arrival makes you and Paul any safer. Leave tomorrow night.”

  * * *

  At 6:00 a.m., they were jolted from their sleeping bags as an outer wall shook. “It sounded like the Battle of Stalingrad. We were directly targeted,” Conroy said. “Then another shell landed on the building. Everyone started screaming, ‘We have to get the hell out!’ If you had gone out carrying a flag, none of it would have made a difference. After the third shell, I reached for my camera. I was trying to move for the door. Marie had run to get her shoes. The next blast blew through the door. It hit our translator and snapped his arm. I felt the hot steel in my leg. I shouted, ‘I’m hit!’ It went in one side and out another. I could see the hole through my leg. I knew I had to get out. And as I did, I fell over. I was next to Marie. I could see her black jacket and her jeans in the rubble. I listened to her chest. She was gone.”

  For five days, with little medication and racked with pain, Conroy was taken care of by Free Syrian Army commanders. Meanwhile, the Sunday Times went into overdrive: Mission to save journalists fails. Syria’s cycle of hate traps wounded Sunday Times photographer. “We did not know how we were going to get out,” Conroy told me. Finally, he was strapped onto the back of a motorcycle and taken through the dark tunnel.

  * * *

  “I really don’t have a good feeling about this trip,” Colvin had said the night before she left for Syria. There was a last dinner in Beirut—Colvin wanted Lebanese food—and she came in wearing the boots she always wore. “Where am I going to get long johns?” she asked. With her was her friend Farnaz Fassihi, of the Wall Street Journal. “Marie was the trailblazer,” she said. “That night I said, ‘Marie, don’t go.’ We all knew how dangerous it was. All of the activists had told us.” Colvin hesitated, then said, “No, I have to go. I must see what is going on.”

  One year earlier, Colvin had been caught in a tear-gas explosion in Cairo while running in a crowd with Fassihi’s partner, a Newsweek reporter. It was a perfect moment for Colvin, watching the force of a new world order sweep through Tahrir Square as acid clouds mixed with the crowd’s screams. “Are you all right?” the reporter called back. “You bet. I have one good eye, and it’s on you!” Colvin yelled, laughing as she ran.

  THE BALLAD OF RICHARD JEWELL

  FEBRUARY 1997

  ”The weird thing was that when they were searching my apartment I was, like, ‘Take everything. Take the carpet. I am law enforcement. I am just like you. Guys, take whatever you are going to take, because it is going to prove that I didn’t do anything.’ And a couple of them were looking at me like I was crazy.”

  The search warrant was short and succinct, dated August 3, 9:41 a.m. FBI special agent Diader Rosario was instructed to produce “hair samples (twenty-five pulled and twenty-five combed hairs from the head)” of Richard Allensworth Jewell. That Saturday, Atlanta was humid; the temperature would rise to eighty-five degrees. There were thirty-four Olympic events scheduled, including women’s team handball, but Richard Jewell was in his mother’s apartment playing Defender on a computer set up in the spare bedroom. Jewell hadn’t slept at all the night before, or the night before that. He could hear the noise from the throng of reporters massed on the hill outside the small apartment in the suburbs. All morning long, he had been focused on the screen, trying to score off “the little guy who goes back and forth shooting the aliens,” but at 12:30 the sound of the telephone disturbed his concentration. Very few people had his new number, by necessity unlisted. Since the FBI had singled him out as the Olympic Park bombing suspect three days earlier, Jewell had received approximately one thousand calls a day—someone had posted his mother’s home number on the Internet.

  “I’ll be right over,” his lawyer Watson Bryant told him. “They want your hair, they want your palm prints, and they want something called a voice exemplar—the goddamn bastards.” The curtains were drawn in the pastel apartment filled with his mother’s crafts and samplers; a home without a dog is just a house, one read. By this time Bryant had a system. He would call Jewell from his car phone so that the door could be unlatched and Bryant could avoid the questions from the phalanx of reporters on the hill.

  Turning into the parking lot in a white Explorer, Bryant could see sound trucks parked up and down Buford Highway. The middle-class neighborhood of apartment complexes and shopping centers was near the DeKalb Peachtree Airport, where local millionaires kept their private planes. The moment Bryant got out of his car, the reporters began to shout: “Hey, Watson, do they have the murderer?” “Are they arresting Jewell?” Bryant moved quickly toward the staircase to the Jewells’ apartment. He wore a baseball cap, khaki shorts, and a frayed Brooks Brothers polo shirt. He was forty-five years old, with strong features and thinning hair, a southern preppy from a country-club family. Bryant had a stern demeanor lightened by a contrarian’s sense of the absurd. He was often distracted—from time to time he would miss his exits on the highway—and he had the regional tendency of defining himself by explaining what he was not. “I am not a Democrat, because they want your money. I am not a Republican, because they take your rights away,” he told me soon after I met him. Bryant can talk your ear off about the Bill of Rights, ending with a flourish: “I think everyone ought to have the right to be stupid. I am a Libertarian.”

  At the time Richard Jewell was named as a suspect by the FBI, Watson Bryant made a modest living by doing real estate closings in the suburbs, but Jewell and his lawyer had formed an unusual friendship a decade earlier, when Jewell worked as a mailroom clerk at a federal disaster-relief agency where Bryant practiced law. Jewell was then a stocky kid without a father, who had trained as an auto mechanic but dreamed of being a policeman; Bryant had always had a soft spot for oddballs and strays, a personality quirk that annoyed his then wife no end.

  * * *

  The serendipity of this friendship, an alliance particularly southern in its eccentricity, would bring Watson Bryant to the immense task of attempting to save Richard Jewell from the murky quagmire of a national terrorism case. The simple fact was that Bryant had no qualifi
cations for the job. He had no legal staff except for his assistant, Nadya Light, no contacts in the press, and no history in Washington. He was the opposite of media-savvy; he rarely read the papers and never watched the nightly news, preferring the Discovery Channel’s shows on dog psychology. Now that Richard Jewell was his client, he had entered a zone of worldwide media hysteria fraught with potential peril. Jewell suspected that his pickup truck had been flown in a C-130 transport plane to the FBI unit at Quantico in Virginia, and Bryant worried that his friend would be arrested any minute. Worse, Bryant knew that he had nothing going for him, no levers anywhere. His only asset was his personality; he had the bravado and profane hyperbole of a southern rich boy, but he was in way over his head.

  For hours that Saturday, Bryant and Jewell sat and waited for the FBI. From time to time Jewell would put binoculars under the drawn curtain in his mother’s bedroom to peer at the reporters on the hill. Bryant was nervous that Jewell’s mother, Bobi, would return from babysitting and see her son having hairs pulled out of his head. Bryant stalked around the apartment complaining about the FBI. “The sons of bitches did not show up until 3:00 p.m.,” he later recalled, and when they did, there were five of them. The FBI medic was tall and muscular and wore rubber gloves. He asked Jewell to sit at a small round table in the living room, where his mother puts her holiday-theme displays. Bryant stood by the sofa next to a portrait of Jewell in his Habersham County deputy’s uniform. He watched the FBI procedure carefully. The medic, who had huge hands, used tiny drugstore tweezers. “He eyeballed his scalp and took his hair in sections. First he ran a comb through it, and then he took these hairs and plucked them out one by one.”