Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  In the days that we covered the rebel perspective, all the renegade president’s supporters were inside the Parliament under siege. Christiane felt that we needed to get inside and speak to President Gamsakhurdia himself. It didn’t seem like such a hot idea to me. Georgians may be gentler than your average combatants, but people were still getting shot. Just that morning Jane had come down to breakfast shaken up. A stray bullet had pierced her bedroom balcony in the night, missing her by inches, but breaking her window. She was undaunted, arguing that the rebels we were with would not fire on us if we crossed the square to reach the Parliament, while those holed up on the other side would know we were journalists. Perhaps the president’s supporters would figure that nobody else in their right mind would attempt to run across the square dividing the two sides, even though plenty of people had come out to watch the fighting. As I would see in later wars, an incredible voyeurism draws people out to see the action, risking their lives. Crowds gathered on street corners to watch, at first tentatively, then inching closer for a better view. When the shooting moved too close and the bullets started ricocheting past their heads, they scattered. One day we came into rebel headquarters and found Coco’s wife, Nina, there. She too wanted to see the action.

  I was terrified at the thought of crossing the square, but as the producer and only Russian speaker, I couldn’t let Jane and Christiane go alone. Coco tried to talk us out of it, but then, since we were his guests, insisted on coming too. It occurred to me how terrible it would be to have to explain to his widow and orphaned children that he had been killed because he was trying to be a good host to his crazy guests. But we were off.

  Christiane went first, then Jane, then me. Coco came last. One by one we ran across the fifty yards of no-man’s-land into the besieged Parliament. I was so terrified I couldn’t even tell if anyone fired or not. I was breathless, immensely relieved to get to the other side alive. But my euphoria was short-lived, as it dawned on me that we’d have to run across the square again to get out of there. First, however, we had to try to get this madman to talk to us.

  Gamsakhurdia’s followers were surprised to see three women and Coco show up uninvited into their lair. Being Georgians, they could do nothing else but welcome us and offer whatever food they could scrape up. They rustled up some tea and grizzled salami sandwiches, eager to share what they had even though they were surrounded and had few provisions. It was Christmas day; the first of many I’d spend embroiled in a news story. I looked around this Parliament-cum-bunker at these mustached men armed to the teeth lounging about on sandbags. I loved Russia and always wanted to tell its story, but I had never expected this job to entail such personal risk. I wondered if I would ever get used to it.

  We waited for hours, and finally Gamsakhurdia agreed to see us. He seemed deranged, with the crazed “I’ll stop at nothing” look in his eyes often seen in guerrilla leaders or revolutionary zealots. As we shot our videotape, he rambled on and on. It almost didn’t matter what he said: we had scored a major coup just getting an interview with him and being able to report his side of the story under such trying circumstances. In a blur, we ran back across the square to the rebel side of the street. We had been shipping our stories by air out to Moscow with fleeing Georgians, who were generally happy to carry a tape out for us for fifty dollars. When we got back to the hotel to edit our exclusive story, we learned the airport had just been shut down.

  Our ever-resourceful Coco found someone willing to make the treacherous five-hour drive through the mountains to the airport in Sochi, the nearest city, to get our story out. Our producers in Atlanta were thrilled. However, we knew that although we had scooped the competition, it would take half a day for our tape to get out and on the air.

  It was obvious that we should keep our scoop secret from competing television crews, especially after what we had been through that day. But humans, and especially journalists, often have a hard time keeping a secret. Sitting around the restaurant that night, the all-male NBC and CBS teams were discussing a possible plan to get inside the Parliament by stowing away in an ambulance the next day. They were desperate to get inside but were afraid, and probably rightly so, just to bolt across the square as we had. Jane, Christiane, and I sat in silence, dying to boast that the girls had already done that while the boys were sitting around debating the risks. Women covering war often feel they have to be braver and tougher than their male competitors, just to prove themselves. If we could wait a few hours, we could gloat to our hearts’ content. But it was just too tempting to burst the balloon of macho bravado, and it slipped out of Jane’s mouth. Jane was a female pioneer in the male-dominated world of cameramen and had taken endless amounts of grief over the years, so maybe she deserved her moment. The boys were shocked and hurried to match our story. That day other networks got to President Gamsakhurdia, but we still beat everyone else, getting the story on the air several hours before them, the kind of thing that reporters pride themselves on.

  Many war zones later, I found out that covering a war is often all about that kind of bravado and, in some cases, an addiction to danger. Some correspondents give up their families and stable lives to push themselves to the limits of risk and endurance. Although CNN took care to provide flak jackets, lots of hardened journalists would never be caught dead in one, the wartime equivalent of seat belts. Staring death in the face and surviving can be empowering, and some people feel more alive by coming close to death. During that first trip to Georgia, I was such a novice I didn’t even know that flak jackets were an option. I saw the soldiers in them, but didn’t know we could have them too. Later, I was often embarrassed to bring up the issue of wearing one, because I didn’t want to show how scared I was. We could always tell the new crew to the scene: they were the ones suited up in flak jackets and helmets. Camera-people often resisted wearing them because they said flak jackets impeded their flexibility. That often made the rest of us feel like wimps for wearing them. As a result, we were inconsistent. Half the time we put them on after we found ourselves in the middle of a gun battle, crawling back to the car on our bellies to fish them out of the trunk. I saw people sensibly tape their blood type to the front of their flak jackets, but I never did the same. It made the reality of why we wore them too visceral. I became nonchalant about basic safety precautions—playing Russian roulette with my life. Like many other correspondents, I was deluded, thinking that danger somehow diminished each day I was there covering a war.

  After I got back to Moscow from a few weeks in Georgia, I started working in my free time on my voice and camera presence. When I was out with a camera crew shooting a story, I practiced speaking in front of the camera until I became comfortable. On days off I wrote my own stories. It had become frustrating to do interviews and be out discovering all the quirky aspects of a story firsthand and then turn all I had found over to a reporter to write. Often that reporter didn’t understand the language or hadn’t been filming with me, so some of the nuance would be lost. I wanted to tell the stories myself. In a matter of months I moved up from producer to correspondent. That was one of the great things about CNN in those early days: anyone with the desire to advance could do so with a bit of perseverance and hard work and willingness to work through weekends and holidays. My other lucky break was that Eason Jordan was in charge. Eason never discriminated on the basis of gender. If a story breaks, he wants someone in there covering it, and never seems to care if the person is male or female. He is responsible for CNN having so many female camera operators and other women covering wars, unheard of at other networks.

  My first big chance to report as an on-air correspondent came in autumn of 1992. The Moscow bureau chief was on vacation and I had been left in charge. Russian reforms were in a shambles and frustration was growing over the delays in reaching the prosperity that everyone expected after the collapse of communism. Russian politicians were looking for someone to blame. Boris Yeltsin, eager to protect his image as a popular hero, chose Gorbachev, his longt
ime rival. Yeltsin commandeered Gorbachev’s newly founded think tank without telling the former president, who turned up to work one morning and found the doors of his office padlocked. The next day Yeltsin stripped him of his special government limousine and his dacha, or country home. That week I interviewed Gorbachev, who appeared genuinely hurt that after all he had done to avert violence in Russia, he was so unappreciated by his countrymen. Gorbachev had been pushed out by Yeltsin for his slow pace at reforming the Soviet Union and argued that a more gradual dismantling of the system would have resulted in less chaos. He warned that Yeltsin’s decision to unshackle the Soviet republics would result in widespread bloodshed. With Gorbachev still popular in the West, I was on the air several times a day covering the spat between the two statesmen.

  It was a great break for me. But I was also getting a lesson about how petty and childish politicians can be, letting personal animosities and political expedience override all other concerns. I was astounded by the intensity of the bitter personal rivalry between these two men. Initially they had been allies in the fight against old Soviet hardliners, but in 1987 Gorbachev had insulted Yeltsin by sacking him as Moscow Communist Party boss. After Yeltsin took over the presidency in late 1991, he took every opportunity to pick on his former superior. He especially loved to take swipes at Gorbachev’s relationship with his late wife, Raisa, expressing an old-fashioned Russian distaste for a wife’s involvement in state affairs. Yeltsin often spoke with pride about how he kept his own wife out of politics. But he didn’t always apply the same principle to his daughter, Tanya, who later played a significant role in his government.

  I threw myself into work. And there was no shortage of news in Moscow to report, with one crisis emerging after another. One such story came when tanks in Moscow’s streets began firing at the Russian White House, or Parliament, in October 1993. Yeltsin was locked in a power struggle with his old Soviet-style parliament, one of the last vestiges of Soviet power and full of disgruntled communists. They were trying to thwart his reforms, so at one point he dismissed them and called for new elections. It was democracy, à la Russe. When Yeltsin’s vice president, Rutskoi, complained publicly that reforms weren’t delivering all that they were supposed to, Yeltsin confiscated his government car and dacha, the favorite form of official torture. When Rutskoi joined forces with the parliament in an all-out mutiny, refusing to budge until their demands were met, Yeltsin shut off the White House’s heat, then the electricity, and finally the water.

  We had to cover the story in shifts, sleeping in the White House, waiting for the inevitable conclusion, knowing that an attack could come. We would prepare for our daylong turn inside as if on a camping trip. Given the amount of TV equipment we had to haul around, personal luxuries like sleeping bags and food supplies had to be minimized. As my camerawoman and I curled up on our coats, shivering one night on a bed made of two wooden chairs, we laughed at the notion that a few utilities being turned off would have any effect whatsoever on a Russian.

  Yeltsin disappeared during the standoff, and I assumed he was out at his dacha, drinking. Outside the White House, crowds of demonstrators grew larger and larger as outcasts from all over the former Soviet Union made their way to the Parliament building. Nationalists and neo-Nazis, carrying heavy weapons, teamed up with genuinely democratic-leaning deputies who felt Yeltsin had no right to dissolve Parliament at whim. It was a bizarre scene, especially at night. We wandered around with flashlights, often turning a corner and bumping into a half-crazed zealot pointing a gun at our heads. In fact, they were quite harmless, usually just looking for someone to listen to all their frustrations. For many, the breakup of the Soviet Union not only robbed them of a subsistence living but of identity, so they banded together hoping to turn back the clock. In the news media, the story looked black-and-white—Yeltsin’s democratic forces were beating back the evil communist resurgence—but as with most stories, the reality was gray. The lives of many decent people had been turned upside down, and they had legitimate gripes. Respected physicists, no longer able to survive on their salaries, were working as drivers for foreign news bureaus. We interviewed a doctor who moonlighted as a prostitute to make ends meet. For many people, the new freedom didn’t compensate for the humiliation with which they lived in the new Russia.

  Yeltsin eventually sorted out the standoff the way Russians know best—by bringing in the tanks. In broad daylight, they rolled down a grand thoroughfare called Kutuzovksy Prospect and, conveniently for us, right past the CNN bureau and our rooftop camera. As they started firing missiles at the White House, people out walking their dogs or with kids in strollers stopped to watch. In old Soviet fashion, regular programming was cut and the news was blocked from Russian TV stations. But in the age of satellite TV, those old Soviet tactics didn’t work as they used to. Many viewers had access to CNN, where they watched as Yeltsin bombed his Parliament into submission. The news was presented as Yeltsin slaying the last gasping breath of communism. But it was hardly a democratic approach.

  All the excitement provided a needed diversion from my personal life. Alessio and I were still working in the same office, and it was hard to ignore the beautiful Russian nymphets who were always dropping by to see him. My suitors were limited. All I had had was a fan letter from a desperate farmer telling me there were no women like me in Idaho and that after seeing me reporting from inside the Russian White House, he had fallen in love. And, in Uncle Leon’s increasingly frequent letters to me, was a warning of my impending spinsterhood.

  Dear Siobhan,

  I caught some of your recent reports on the television. I was thrilled to see someone I know personally, let alone my own flesh-and-blood niece, reporting on such weighty events. But, sweetheart, the real icing on the cake would be news this year of your engagement. Traveling to foreign locales is all well and good but it doesn’t take the place of husband and home.

  Sincerely, Uncle Leon

  The Vomitron

  Living in Moscow as a CNN correspondent in the 1990s was a completely different experience from living there as the impoverished young wife of a Soviet citizen in the 1980s. I had a BMW. I never rode the metro. I always shopped in the hard-currency stores, spending my dollars on meat imported from Finland instead of lining up for the shoe leather that they called meat in the domestic stores. My clothes were bought during vacations to Italy. Instead of trudging through the snow to a Laundromat that seemed to eat as many clothes as it cleaned, I had a maid. Just like the natives, I learned to be a capitalist in the new Russia.

  By 1992, Boris Yeltsin was dismantling the unwieldy old arms of the Soviet state with a sledgehammer. But it was an enormous task, and Russia was not converted to a market system overnight. Instead there was an unpredictable mix of new and old. Kiosks and chaotic street markets sprang up in the open air, while old state-run businesses still occupied space within buildings. Vigorous entrepreneurs struck up bizarre alliances with old-style tenants to sell their wares. In one of my favorite examples, the main state-run bookstore on Gorky Street, now called Tverskaya Street, was doubling as a dealership for Chevrolets. The shelves of books seemed to lend credibility to the car salesmen’s pitch. A customer might have come in looking for a Chevy coupe, and leave instead with Turgenev’s collected works or vice versa. Such was the new Russia. The Lenin Museum rented out a floor to a modeling agency. In another wing, home appliances were on offer next to a museum display case featuring a lock of Lenin’s hair.

  A lot of Russians, denigrating the old methods that had held their nation together for decades, flung open the door to the outside world. It was often the tawdriest and most base that came first. Hustlers and modern-day carpetbaggers had a field day. Just as a vulnerable and needy woman welcomes the attentions of any man, including a scoundrel, an insecure Russia gobbled up the worst of the West.

  Trevor was a refugee from New York’s financial district. He had come to Russia looking for adventure, and he quickly saw the business potential that lay
in a system newly opened to entrepreneurs and without much effective government regulation. Originally he had wanted to negotiate with the Russian Space Agency to take him up on a ride into space, but the Russians kept raising the price on him, even after he agreed to pay more than $1 million, so the plan never materialized. But he got to know MiG test pilots and quickly improvised a scheme to borrow MiG fighter jets from the Russian air force and take paying tourists from the West on expensive joyrides. MiG flights were a good diversion for bored drones from Wall Street with too much discretionary income. The Russian test pilots, just like everybody else in Moscow, were desperate for cash. Everything could be bought or rented for a price. One day I was sent to do a story on Trevor. I went reluctantly: he sounded like one more foreign jerk taking advantage of the giant fire sale under way in Russia.

  I arrived with my camera crew at the crack of dawn at Zhukovsky Air Base outside of Moscow with our special-clearance passes from the KGB, which we needed to get into this once-top-secret facility. My cameraman was Hugh, a six-foot-seven-inch Australian. I loved working with him because he had an eye for the absurd, and examples of absurdity abounded in Russia. His height was sometimes helpful: occasionally it intimidated people who got in our way, or it enabled him to reach above the crowd for a good angle. At other times it brought too much attention to us. Sergei, a Russian sound technician, was also with us. Between Hugh’s wry sense of humor and Sergei’s ability to mimic, I was laughing on most days.