The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  One of New Zealand’s first professional female camera operators, she was born Margaret Wilson but changed her name to Margaret Gipsy Moth. By the time Moth got to Sarajevo she was already a legend: After seven years as the aggressive, exotic bird at a Houston, Texas, TV station, she had gone on to cover news for CNN—in the Middle East, in India, in the crumbling Soviet Union. She’d jumped out of planes barefoot; she’d shot footage of rebel warriors while they were aiming guns at her head. She was a striking beauty, with fine features within a long, heart-shaped face, framed by tousled, curly black hair that tumbled well past her shoulders. She possessed a fashion model’s figure—and vanity, often virtually starving herself for her looks. She rimmed her eyes with quarter-inch-thick black eyeliner, producing the effect, against her milk white face, of a Goth-tinged Elizabeth Taylor in her prime—or Grace Slick in Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 posters.

  Moth was forty-two when she joined the Sarajevo group. She chomped cigars, drank everyone under the table, played a game called “Who Would You Rather Sleep With?,” proffering amusingly ridiculous choices for colleagues she queried. She was a role model to and supporter of women, especially Christiane—the one female colleague who, like she, had been an aggressive, black-haired, English-accented, “foreign” duck out of water at a TV station in the American South.

  In those early days of the Siege of Sarajevo, the team did not have armored cars.

  CNN dealt with the potential danger to its staffers the cheap way: by dividing the risk among the reporters, placing teams of journalists on three-week rotations.

  Christiane was on rotation in the United States when, one day in July, Margaret Moth went out for a routine drive down Sniper Alley, with her head and lens stuck out the window of the car, taping the scene. As she was taping, a bullet whizzed at her—right at her. It shot through her cheekbone and exited the other side of her jaw. The bottom of her face was partially blown off.

  The press crew was shocked—even panicked. Moth was immediately medevaced out of Bosnia and flown to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. According to David Rust, who was on vacation at the time, “They decided to evacuate the whole Sarajevo team out when Margaret was hit—they wanted a new team, because the trauma” resonated so intensely with all the other crew members. Moth’s grievous, maiming injury shook the team members to their core. Parisa Khosravi recalls that, along with deep worry for Margaret, there was the strong, silent—shared—feeling: “‘Oh, my God, if this could happen to her, then it could happen to any of us.’”

  Parisa rushed to the Mayo Clinic to see Margaret, “who was very conscious. Her head was the size of two basketballs. I gave her a pen and paper, and the first thing she wrote was, ‘I want to go back to Sarajevo and look for my teeth.’” Moth later told Emma Daly—when she eventually returned to Sarajevo*—that she’d put her finger to her lower face right after the blast “and all I could feel was my tongue.” No skin or lips or bone.

  Christiane, about to go off on a scheduled vacation to a Spanish island, also immediately flew to the Mayo Clinic to see her wounded mentor.

  After considering suspending its Bosnia coverage, CNN decided to stay the course. An international desk assignment editor phoned Christiane and asked: Would she fly back and rejoin the team there? People were “surprised,” David Rust says, when Christiane said yes. Parisa Khosravi probed her friend about the choice, for her own safety. “Are you sure?” she asked Christiane. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a break and rethink?” After all, CNN—however dependent on her it may have been—didn’t order reporters to war zones; reporters had to volunteer for the postings. “And here was a story where they were outright targeting journalists—that realization is what changed it for all of us,” Parisa says.

  “It was very dramatic; it was a decisive moment. Christiane gritted her teeth, and then she said, ‘I’m going back.’ Seeing Margaret with her jaw shot out steeled her to go back to Bosnia.”

  Here’s how Christiane has explained her decision, fighting back tears: “I said yes because I couldn’t say no. I said I’d go back” to Sarajevo because “we did the work for her. We did it because [Margaret] was our champion, and we wanted to be her champion.” But she also said this: “I know to this day that if I hadn’t said yes, then I probably never would have gone back, and I never would have done this career.”

  • • •

  THOUGH THE WHOLE CREW covered the war together, Christiane’s passion and pushiness, and her emerging prominence with CNN, kept the coverage going and made the Bosnian atrocity known to America. “She reported the hell out of that war,” says Emma Daly. And Bob Simon says, “Christiane was probably the best correspondent covering Bosnia, and she was certainly more dedicated than anyone else. She became completely devoted and committed to that story.”

  But the depth and breadth of all of that would come later. For now, in July 1992, with Margaret Moth in the hospital, David Rust says he “called the CNN international desk to get details, and then I volunteered to join Christiane” and return to Sarajevo. A week after Margaret’s shooting, he met Christiane in Zagreb, where she “was already following a breaking story involving detention camps, or what the Serbs euphemistically called ‘transit’ camps.” What was to become known as the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosniaks by the Serbs had begun. In one camp, “a British television crew got images of prisoners that looked a lot like photos taken in Nazi concentration camps toward the end of World War II.”

  On August 14, Christiane and David flew from Zagreb to Sarajevo. At the airport they ran into two fresh arrivals in Bosnia, both from ABC: Diane Sawyer’s Primetime partner Sam Donaldson and producer Dave Kaplan. Christiane greeted Sam and Dave collegially, and the four of them planned to meet up at the Holiday Inn. The ABC folks were accompanying then Yugoslavian prime minister Milan Panic into town. Donaldson entered Panic’s armored UN vehicle, while Kaplan hitched a ride with another TV crew. That car was unarmored.

  Minutes after the car in which Kaplan was riding turned onto the highway, out of the airport, a sniper bullet pierced the car. The bullet penetrated Kaplan’s back and exited through his chest. He died almost instantly.

  At the Holiday Inn, and at the bar at the Love Hotel, this news of a fresh sniper assassination of a journalist (on top of the recent injuries of fourteen other newspeople) was received with ashen faces, fists clutched around shot glasses, steely resolve, submerged fear, and sorrow. Christiane had rescheduled her missed vacation for three weeks hence. But after Kaplan’s killing, redoubling her conviction, she canceled it for good. She was in for the long haul. She must have anticipated then—in her bones, in her heart—what she would later put in words: that Bosnia was “where I became myself as a reporter, where I learned how to use my voice, where I learned what it means to have someone’s back and for them to have yours; where we risked our lives and sometimes our sanity . . . [and] forged the closest of bonds.”

  Because of the sniper killings, CNN instituted a new policy: Reporters and crew would travel only in armored vehicles. In most cases they wore bullet-resistant vests and helmets. As an additional safety measure—and an act of community—the media outlets organized the Sarajevo Agency Pool, whereby the news bureaus rotated being on duty and shared the fruits of their news gathering with the others, thus mitigating the risk. “So many lives were saved through this,” Emma Daly says.

  The danger was escalating. As David Rust recalls,* “Although there was activity every night in the Bosnian capital, this night”—August 24, ten days after Kaplan’s death—“was different. The intensity of the shelling and small arms fire was far greater than any previous night. Explosions were constant. Because it was too dangerous to go outside the hotel at night, we were forced to cover the battle from inside the hotel. While Christiane and Nic [Robertson] gathered facts and tried to file reports over satellite phone, I went to the upper floors and tried to use nightscope to get pictures of the firefight.
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br />   “Mortar shells exploded close enough to the hotel to spray shrapnel into the windows. Through the broken windows in many of our rooms you could hear rounds from AK-47’s whiz by, some lodging in the metal frames of the windowsills. The battle lasted throughout the night and into the early morning hours. It got so intense at one point that we decided to protectively load up our armored car with supplies and equipment that we”—Christiane, David, and Nic—“felt were essential in case we needed to abandon the hotel and seek shelter somewhere else.”

  Nevertheless, by day’s end, they filed their story—Christiane filing audio reports over the phone until the early hours of the morning. Sleep was impossible; their rooms were on a low floor, where the tank rounds could easily pierce the windows and walls. So, sitting in the hall outside Nic’s room, the three talked all night as the sounds of warfare pounded all around them. When the sun came up, the sleepless trio, fueled on bad coffee and much adrenaline, left the hotel. The national library was ablaze. In the previous twenty-four hours, twenty people had been killed and over a hundred wounded on the Bosniak side alone.

  David and Christiane drove off to do a story at a playground about the children of the war. This was a heart-stopper. Some of the children’s little friends had already been killed. As Christiane gently probed the children, David filmed, noting in his diary that “they had very nice faces, including one that was disfigured by a mortar blast—she still smiled a lot. I also got pictures of two little boys with plastic rifles that featured homemade sniper scopes.” The plight of the children was one of the reasons Christiane felt—as she’d say much later, even after she’d seen so much crisis—that “Bosnia [remained] the most emotionally wrenching and physically arduous story I’ve ever covered or been through in my life. You just see terrible stuff all the time. If it’s not bodies, it’s children bloodied and battered, old men and women injured. . . . [W]e saw houses burned and people inside, charred like barbecue, and mosques and churches dynamited.”

  Just as Christiane was wrapping up her piece, “War Through the Eyes of Children,” she and David got news that a colleague, BBC’s Martin Bell, had been hit by shrapnel. She and David drove—past a stretch of highway the British were now calling “Murder Mile”—to the BBC studio’s “feed point,” where Christiane filed the story in time to make the morning newscasts—getting this story out to an America that had barely heard of Slobodan Milosevic or even Bosnia now seemed urgent. Then they rushed to the hospital to see Martin Bell and to wish him well (he eventually fully recovered) before he was medevaced to England. Returning to the hotel, Christiane, David, and Nic had to drive on back roads to avoid heavy shelling. “We did see a fire burning about a half mile behind the hotel but felt it wasn’t worth chasing,” David wrote.

  The three of them later met in the lobby for dinner. No sooner had they begun to eat than a bomb was detonated, very close by. “Soon, there was increased fighting all over the city. It was dark outside except for flashes from explosions, tracer rounds, and fires.” Christiane wrote the copy while Rust and BBC cameraman Rory Peck taped the fighting through the upper-floor windows. (Less than a year later, Peck would be killed while on assignment.) For three hours “artillery shells, mortars, and machine-gun fire lit up the darkened neighborhood,” David recalls. “There were tracers and loud bangs with echoes almost continuously. It reminded me of a scene out of Apocalypse Now. Those glass windows in the room that were still there would shake after each explosion. You could often hear the individual rounds whiz by when they were close enough.”

  Christiane took the tape and went live with it on CNN International. “Despite the fact that the [Atlanta-based] anchor could hear loud explosions in the background, he asked Christiane, ‘Are you in any personal danger?’” In an impatient, emotional voice, Christiane retorted: “Everyone in Sarajevo is in personal danger!”

  The risks continued, unabated. “Our armored car was hit by small arms fire over nine times,” says David. “Once it was taken out of commission by a fifty-caliber machine gun that tore up the engine compartment. We also encountered snipers a number of times while on foot. Once, we were doing an interview with a French officer in charge of airport detail, and a sniper shot hit, right off the wall, about four feet above our heads. Cement flew! So we moved to another location.” Christiane kept interviewing and David kept taping. “That was pretty typical,” he says.

  Another time, Christiane has recalled, when Serb “gunners on the hills figured out” she and her team were reporting on, of all things, the starving animals in a zoo (they’d been abandoned when the zookeepers ran for their lives), she kicked in a building and took refuge in a doorway, and as they too ran for cover, “all I could keep saying to [them] was, ‘If you die, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’” She later realized that, by being “too busy apologizing,” she had cleverly tricked herself from fearing her own possible death. “The minute the shooting stopped, we ran out of there.” Yet another time, CNN producer Judy Milestone conducted an Atlanta-to-Sarajevo phone interview with her. “I could hear gunshots,” Judy says. “I asked Christiane, ‘Are you okay?’ Christiane said, ‘I just ducked behind a door.’” What Ron Haviv and the other photographers and videographers appreciated was that “she wasn’t just doing stand-ups from hotels; she was in the front lines with the rest of us. There were not a lot of TV people who would do that.”

  Then there was Mostar, where for nine months Bosnian Croats had been shooting, shelling, and hemming in the Muslims “under extraordinarily bad conditions,” says David Rust. “Christiane wanted to see for herself what was going on in Mostar, and she decided we should follow a UN food convoy”—these were allowed in only at the pleasure of the Croats—“into the city. The convoy entered, and workers started to unload flour and cooking oil. Before they could start to distribute supplies, the trucks were surrounded by townspeople. They came out of buildings heavily damaged by war. We found many residents living in basements of buildings that were without running water, heat, or electricity”—this was in the middle of winter. Then Christiane wanted to see and report on old Mostar, “a no-man’s-land and the scene of the most extensive destruction in the city. We were told it was dangerous to go there.” They went, cautiously, anyway.

  They had a Muslim guide—their lifeline in hostile territory—and he was skittish. The only way to get to the no-man’s-land was over a questionably viable bridge. “We worked our way through the town, past shell-damaged buildings and somewhat close to the entrance to the bridge. As soon as we got there, our guide ran from the cover of the buildings and crossed the bridge. Unfortunately for us, we had to follow him. He had guided us to the bridge and we needed him to get us back to the food convoy. Our only choice was to follow him across”—amid gunfire.

  “Christiane made the first dash for the other side. I stayed back to videotape the crossing. It took nearly forty seconds for her to run from the safety of the last building, across the bridge, and finally to a building on the other side. Normally, that’s not a long time, but when you’re being shot at, it’s an eternity.”

  Rust could see that the bridge was a wreck. “It had been shelled often and many parts were missing”—yet those gaps were hard to see because the planks were snow covered. You had to just “forget about the snipers” because “one false step and [you’d] be making a seventy-foot plunge into a deep, ice-cold river with swift-flowing water.”

  But he and Nic made it safely across, after Christiane had. On the other side, the Muslim and Croat armies were virtually on top of each other. “As we ran through the trenches, several shots and a couple of rockets were fired, and inside one of the buildings I heard soldiers on both sides shouting at each other. I couldn’t believe the opposing sides were that close.”

  After taping and reporting, they gingerly picked their way back over the rickety bridge, “one at a time, and then we raced back to the convoy.” After that, Sniper Alley and the Holiday Inn f
elt like relatively safe havens.

  “It’s shocking how normal things become,” says Emma Daly. She and Christiane—who both wore jeans and parkas and bare faces while the Bosnian women around them (many of them fixers and translators) were slathered in makeup and tottered around in high heels—talked about how this war disabused them of dependence on what now seemed like trivial luxuries. “It became normal to walk into a room at night and not reach for the light switch, because there was no electricity. It became normal to live without bathing for several days. Our great friend and colleague Allan Little of the BBC said to me one winter, ‘We’ve all heard of dying from hypothermia, but nobody ever died of smelling bad—so, no, I am not taking my clothes off to wash in my windowpane-less hotel room [in twenty-degree weather].’ It became normal to drive on the sidewalk because there were no traffic lights, traffic rules, or”—during heavy shelling—“traffic.”

  Harder was getting used to friends’ near misses. A sister newswoman, Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe, was attacked by the Bosnian army but, fortunately, was rescued at zero hour by a UN crew. (Neuffer was killed in a car crash in Iraq in 2003.) Harder yet was seeing the raped women and the constant civilian casualties. “People would be killed running out to try to get food or standing in line for water,” Emma recalls. And the children had gotten so used to war, “they would play games based on the real circumstances of their life, like, ‘I’m the sniper, you’re the victim, and that’s the ambulance.’ Or, later, they’d play the humanitarian aide worker game: ‘Here, pretend this rock is your bowl of rice.’” Emma and Christiane had a hard time shaking off the images of the children in hospitals, like the blind little girl “with both hands cut off.” Christiane has said, “Seeing children victims of the genocide was more than I could tolerate. Children who’d deliberately been scoped through a sniper’s sights and killed: It’s a kind of horror that you don’t believe is possible.” Amid the horror, they felt so helpless, so frustrated by the paltriness of their own contribution as journalists, a disappointment that the people they were covering vociferously and contemptuously seconded. “After someone was shot and one of us would show up,” Ron Haviv says, “people would spit on us and say, ‘Leave! You’re not doing anything to help us. We don’t want you here!’”