The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  The crew sought relief in abandon. “I remember Christiane dancing on the table, to funky music, at an AP party,” says Emma. The Love Hotel had a great party space downstairs, and since the UN would always refer to the “warring parties” of Bosnia, any reporters’ bash held there was inevitably called the “Warring Party.” After one wild evening, a noted correspondent drank so much that he passed out in the street—“in the middle of the gutter. We actually put a pillow under his head,” Emma says.

  They imposed after-hours omertà on war talk. “At one point when we were sitting around drinking and chatting I said, ‘Can we institute a ban on Bosnia Bore at dinner? Can we please just talk about really random things that have nothing to do with this war? ’” Christiane escaped into corny romance novels. “Christiane said, ‘You have to read this really good book!’” She thrust it at Emma—The Bridges of Madison County. “I came back and I was outraged. ‘I can’t believe you made me read this book—it’s horrible!’ And she was, ‘No, no! It’s good! You have to keep reading!’ She really does have this sappy, romantic side.” Perhaps, Emma thinks, Christiane liked the book so much because the photographer protagonist was said to have been inspired by Jim Nachtwey, one of the most distinguished war photographers of his generation. “Jim was very tall and handsome and very, very nice,” Emma says. “We all had crushes on him.”

  A better escape was real-life romance. Christiane became seriously involved with the dashing Frenchman Luc Delahaye, the two repairing, during their off rotations, to an apartment in Paris. Romances among war zone reporters are their own kind of treachery. Vulnerability, attachment, and preoccupation—the staples of love—only leave the combat reporter disadvantaged in the quest for the focus so necessary to live another reporting day.

  “Christiane had a lot of boyfriends on the road, and she wasn’t thinking about getting married,” her sister Lizzy says. “I don’t think she was particularly discreet about her romances,” shrugs Pierre Bairin.

  • • •

  CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR. CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR. American viewers—and international viewers, the vast majority of CNN’s audience—got used to the battlefield-type credit line under the nightly reports, got used to the sight of the woman with the messy dark hair in the flak jacket or parka, standing against the darkened sky, holding the microphone and giving passionate nightly reports in a loud, crisp, plummy English accent, with the sound of distant bullets sometimes popping in the background. How different this all was—where was Bosnia? who were the Serbs? who were these besieged people, their victims? (Muslims in Eastern Europe?)—from the other news that Americans were really paying attention to in 1992 and 1993: the transfer of the presidency from a terse-talking aristocratic establishment Republican to the first baby boomer chief executive, a voluble hail-fellow Arkansas New Democrat with a blond named Gennifer in his not-so-distant past. The historic handshake on a podium in front of the White House between lifelong enemies Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat. And the tabloid grabbers: Amy Fisher shooting Mary Jo Buttafuoco!

  “Now to Christiane Amanpour, in Sarajevo”: The Atlanta anchor’s handoff was both anticlimactic, amid this gaudily competitive parade, and beseeching.

  “Christiane tried to pound it home to CNN that we had to stay there and cover this story,” says David Rust. “It wasn’t a popular war in America—we didn’t have a dog in the fight, it wasn’t a place we got our oil from—but she knew it was important for historic reasons. She was very, very persistent.” She relentlessly worked on Steve Cassidy, who was in charge of CNN’s international desk, and Eason Jordan, who oversaw all the network’s international operations. “I think her push and her drive made them keep agreeing with her that it was important.”

  Ron Haviv was Christiane’s partner in pushing the story, refusing to let it die, refusing to leave Sarajevo. As a conflict zone reporter, “you’d either just say, ‘I can’t handle this anymore—I’m just a voyeur and there’s no point,’” he says. “Or people like Christiane and myself and others would get so angry. Anger was the motivating factor to keep going, basically throwing these images in front of the Americans, in front of the politicians, and saying, ‘You can’t say you don’t know what’s happening—we’re showing it to you!’ She was going live, every night, from Sarajevo. Day one, day five. ‘This is what’s happening.’ Day thirty, day fifty. Day one hundred.” Christiane kept at it because she says she felt, “I cannot believe this is being allowed to happen.” The war was “being fought against civilians, in the cities, people’s homes, not on the battlefield. The United Nations [eventually] said that there has never been a war in modern times that has affected so many children. It is horrifying, and savage.”

  After a while Christiane was so upset and frustrated that other media—newspapers, networks—were not paying more attention to Bosnia that, after a particularly brutal day in Sarajevo, she did a piece entitled “Just Another Day.” She and David Rust massed together highly graphic video of carnage in the city, and between snippets she would look at the camera and say, “It was just another day in Sarajevo.” More shelling, more sniping. “It was just another day in Sarajevo.” She said it again and again. “The package was so effective,” David recalls, “that the day after it aired, an aircraft full of journalists arrived at the Sarajevo airport, and several mentioned that they had seen her report and felt compelled to cover the conflict.”

  As the siege wore on, and the “medieval conditions” the Serbs forced the Bosniaks to live under (as the war tribunal prosecutor would later describe them) intensified, “some of the most compelling stories occurred in the [Muslims’] so-called ‘safe havens’ established by the UN,” Rust says. One such “safe” town was Gorazde, where the Muslims, “surrounded by hostile troops”—the Serbs and the Croats—struggled to survive for months with little contact from the outside world. (The Croats had been initially aligned with the Bozniaks but that relationship had now fallen apart.) “Even the UN convoys could barely get in.”

  It was Christiane’s decision to try to get into Gorazde. As she, Nic, and David approached the city, they confronted the Bosnian Serb troops, who were stunned to see them. The Serbs were “very unhappy” with Christiane’s anti-Serb slant. A Serbian official had “a look of amazement” that she’d dared enter Gorazde. “We quickly proceeded down the road,” David says. “Our excitement turned to disappointment”—not fear, but disappointment that they might not get the story—when it was “explained that both the Croats and Muslims had extensively mined the area. They said the Muslims would meet us on the other side of no-man’s-land but that the Croats didn’t know where the land mines had been placed. We decided that walking across an unmarked minefield was too great a risk.” Ultimately, “we contacted a nearby UN facility and were told we were very lucky to be out.”

  • • •

  IN MAY 1994, via satellite from Sarajevo to the televised CNN Global Summit, Christiane asked President Bill Clinton—live, for the world to see—“Mr. President, my question is: As leader of the free world, as leader of the only superpower, why has it taken you . . . so long to articulate a policy on Bosnia? Why, in the absence of a policy, have you allowed the U.S. and the West to be held hostage to those who do have a policy—the Bosnian Serbs—and do you not think that the constant flip-flops of your administration . . . set a very dangerous precedent and would lead people such as [North Korea’s] Kim Il-sung . . . to take you less seriously than you would like to be taken?” Here was Christiane, giving what David Bernknopf calls her familiar “withering, unpleasant, nothing-held-back” response—scolding the president of the United States. More important, this was Christiane establishing her moral authority and insisting the leader of the free world do the same. Here was a war being waged on civilians, grave harm and injustice being done—why was the president dithering?

  Clinton at first seemed stunned by the steely criticism from a not very well-known female reporter. He came right back at
her, using his first defense: his trademark, mildly threatening finger wag. “No, but speeches like that”—Christiane’s nervy tirade—“may make them take me less seriously than I’d like to be taken,” he said, eyes narrowed. “There have been no constant flip-flops, madam.”

  Parisa Khosravi was sitting with Christiane while she was arguing with Clinton, via remote, and she recalls that, when Clinton seethingly called her “madam,” “Christiane had to hold her face to keep her composure” and keep from breaking up into the “nervous chuckles” the two women collapsed into later.

  Right after his sarcastic fillip, Clinton shifted into his default mode: empathetic, co-opting charm, with bitten-lip apology. “That poor woman has seen the horrors of this war, and . . . she’s been fabulous,” he said. “She’s done a great service to the whole world [and] I do not blame her for being mad at me.” As characteristically endearing as Clinton’s contrition may have been, he wasn’t just doing it for effect. He was correct in praising Christiane for doing “a great service to the whole world,” and his endorsement of her in that significant manner caused others—in the media, in diplomacy, in public service—to also look at her as a force for morality in public policy. Ron Haviv believes that U.S. and British intervention in the Kosovo War, which started in February 1998 and lasted a year and a half, “started much faster because Clinton and Tony Blair were like, ‘We can’t keep seeing these images again. We can’t keep seeing Christiane—Here’s Christiane Amanpour, again, on television, doing the same thing she did in Bosnia three years ago.’ So they were embarrassed into reacting much, much faster.”

  In addition to putting the government on notice, the exchange with Clinton “raised Christiane’s profile dramatically,” says David Rust. And it came at an accidentally propitious time. Less than one month later, on June 12, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman would be found stabbed to death in a Brentwood courtyard. O. J. Simpson would be arrested and arraigned. He would attempt to flee in a white Bronco, and he would be jailed. Suddenly every other story that Americans had been following, and to which networks were channeling resources, was shoved aside for this one. Christiane Amanpour—freshly anointed as a tough talker to the president—would be a voice crying in the wilderness, protesting that, along with the ethnic cleansing of the Bosniaks and the Siege of Sarajevo, there was also a horrific genocide under way in the African country of Rwanda. How could the media focus so single-mindedly on the O.J. case while these global humanitarian catastrophes were occurring?

  Later Christiane would say she was “ashamed” by the ineffectuality of her effort to promote coverage of these horrors. “It drives her crazy to see the kind of superficial stuff that passes for news,” says David Bernknopf.

  After all, journalists were putting their lives on the line for these important international stories. Five months after the start of the O.J. saga hijacked media attention, in November 1994, Ron Haviv and Christiane’s boyfriend Luc Delahaye were driving around, taking pictures, in Krajina, which was controlled by Serbian rebels. They drove past “some secret missile silo,” Ron recalls, where they were stopped, aggressively, by Serb militiamen and arrested.

  “We were handcuffed together and driven off and interrogated and beaten up,” Ron says. The captors performed “mock executions on them.” Then Ron and Luc were separated by their captors. “I don’t know what happened to Luc, but I was punched in the face, batted over the head, told I would be killed and that they would kill Luc, too. It was pretty scary.” At the time, Ron was on the Serbs’ “death list,” and Christiane—also considered their enemy—“was very worried that I would get her boyfriend killed.” For twenty-four, then forty-eight hours and counting, Delahaye’s and Haviv’s whereabouts were unknown to their colleagues (and to the U.S. State Department). Ron: “We just disappeared. We were just gone.” Fevered, behind-the-scenes negotiations began by “the French government, the U.S. government—I’m sure Christiane had a lot to do with them. Even the Russians got involved.” After three days, Ron and Luc were separately driven to a bridge on a densely foggy night. Each was pushed out of his respective captors’ vehicle and “we were just left there,” groping for the low, slim railings over a raging river. The French came and rescued Luc; the Americans came and rescued Ron.

  Christiane’s reunion with Luc was almost certainly emotional and passionate, but “Christiane and Luc broke up at some point quite soon after that,” Emma recalls, explaining that “having a successful or long-standing relationship in those conditions is extraordinarily difficult. The story is so consuming, it really sucks up every part of you. You don’t really have much left for anybody else.” Christiane subsequently had a Sarajevo-based love affair with French journalist Paul Marchand. (Marchand would dramatically evade abduction while on assignment in Algeria in 1997; years later he would commit suicide.) Little about war reporters’ circumstances—and, sometimes, their temperaments—was undramatic; tragedy dogged so many. A recent academic study has shown that the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder for ex–war reporters is almost as high as that of military veterans.

  “For Christiane,” having a relationship with a fellow correspondent “was now even more complicated because she was so visible,” Emma continues. “On the one hand, that new visibility made her powerful and gave her leverage with the State Department”—she had helped Haviv and Delahaye be freed. On the other hand, her increasingly intense and increasingly televised public invective against the Serbs made them hate her on the level that diplomacy doesn’t have time to reach: the hair-trigger, spontaneous, someone-could-kill-her-at-any-moment level.

  The capstone atrocity of the Bosnian conflict was the July 1995 targeted killing, by the Serbs, of eight thousand Bosniak men and boys. This attack, the Srebrenica Massacre, would later be officially cited as genocide. (The conflict would end with a negotiated peace four months later, in November 1995.) Having covered it and the events leading up to it, in the winter of 1994–1995, with Christiane, Pierre Bairin says it was hard for them to process “people transported in buses, separated in the middle of winter, with very little clothing. Ethnic cleansing—it was horrendous.” Outraged, Christiane pushed the story onto a public that was being stuffed, morning, noon, and night, with the O.J. Simpson trial. Now she was starting to be called—even in some quarters of the State Department—strident and nonobjective.

  Christiane didn’t give a damn. “Once Srebrenica happened, it was a massacre too far, and our Western governments, after showing a deplorable failure of collective will, finally got their acts together and did something about it. But they might not have done it if we were not reporting it,” she said. A year later she would shoot down the “nonobjective” charge, saying: “Objectivity means giving all sides a hearing. It doesn’t mean treating all sides equally. The overwhelming number of atrocities were committed by the Bosnian Serbs. The Serbs shelled civilians, sniped small children, and committed torture, rape, and murder against civilians. That’s not war; that’s war crime.” David Bernknopf says: The “this side says” and “the other side says” approach to stories like Bosnia “almost physically made her have a conniption fit. ‘Would you cover the Nazis that way?’ she would say.”

  • • •

  ESPECIALLY TOWARD THE end of her time in Bosnia, Christiane confronted resistance from another quarter—which wasn’t unexpected, but was now very strong: envy and resentment from male war reporters, both the seasoned ones and the young ones. “Men were jealous because she was a woman with bravado, doing things that these big macho guys wouldn’t exactly do,” explains Pierre Bairin.

  Someone else who observed the situation close at hand goes further. “Nobody had wanted to go into Bosnia; they thought it was a dangerous place. The London bureau of CNN had totally refused to go.” Then, as Christiane and her team began getting this story, “a lot of the guys” who hadn’t gone “criticized her a lot—they wouldn’t admit she was very good. They said nasty stuff. They
made stuff up.”

  Over drinks at pubs, the men who’d begged off war coverage would say, to one particular man who was joining her team, “‘Why are you doing this? You’ll get killed.’ It was kind of like, ‘Play on my team, not hers. There’s more weight behind one side if we all get together. Then none of us will go in [to Bosnia] and she can’t do it anymore.’” Essentially, they were trying to sabotage her work. The older guys could hide behind the boast, “‘I’ve done my war.’ One guy in his late forties even said, ‘I told my mother I’d never go anywhere dangerous.’” The man who heard this says, “I kind of had to look at the ground and chuckle. The younger jealous guys were particularly bitchy and bastardy. They would say, ‘Oh, she’s seeing this guy; try to spread a rumor.’”

  Female correspondents were sometimes derided by their male counterparts for using charm for access, Emma says. The unstated retort to the “please?” and the smile to the driver, the fixer, the guard at the checkpoint, was “Guys wouldn’t do that.” But Mark Phillips says, “Christiane would probably kill me if she knew that I said this, but she never flirted with anybody. That was never her thing, and some other correspondents did that.”

  As her prominence grew, 60 Minutes did a feature on Christiane—and this really set off some of the grumbling men. CNN wasn’t supposed to have stars—“The news is our ‘star,’” Ted Turner famously decreed—but here Christiane was: famous. What’s more, she was enjoying it. “She was excited when Mike Wallace came” to do the story on her, a CNN team member says. “She walked around with this Cheshire cat grin.” The other reporters also felt—and she seemed to realize—that the 60 Minutes segment on her “was a 60 Minutes job interview as well.