Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  There was also that security briefing at his ranch in Crawford on 6 August talking up the possibility of an attack orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, the existence of which was suppressed until April 2004. Among various other alerts, there was the famed Phoenix memo from an FBI agent in Arizona warning that bin Laden had sent students to attend civil aviation schools. Despite these lapses, no high-ranking administration figure lost his or her job in the aftermath. Nor did the American press demand any scalps.

  Rather, leading lights in the administration became overnight sensations. Such was the star power of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the one-time college wrestler who helped pull bodies from the rubble of the Pentagon, that fans wanted to know the brand of his rimless glasses and what grooming oil he used to slick back his silver hair. The president took to calling him ‘Rumstud’. Spouting his ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’, his press conferences became command performances, and were by far the best theatre that post-9/11 Washington could muster. Unfortunately, the Pentagon press pack often served as his stooges and seemed almost hypnotised by his epistemological wordplay. In the view of a BBC colleague, Justin Webb, the press conferences looked like ‘spanking sessions for a generation of defence nerds’.

  Typical of the fawning coverage was Bob Woodward’s fly-on-the-wall book Bush at War. Consider his description of the president’s reaction at being told that a second plane had ploughed into the World Trade Center. ‘Bush remembers exactly what he was thinking,’ Woodward recounts, before delivering a self-serving quote from the president. ‘“They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war.”’ Then Woodward takes up the story, in a manner that reinforces the impression that the president was fully in command. ‘Bush decided that he needed to say something to the public.’

  And that is it. Inexplicably, Woodward failed to describe The Pet Goat episode in that Sarasota classroom, used to merciless effect by the film-maker Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, and which still makes for excruciating viewing. Even after Card had whispered in his ear, Bush continued to listen to the children reading the book. A minute later, he actually picked up the book himself from the shelf, started to look at it in complete puzzlement, and then cracked a lame gag, like the jester of old. When the children had finished, he thanked them for showing him their reading skills and congratulated them on spending more time reading than watching television. Then he expressed gratitude for making him feel so welcome.

  At this point, he could easily have left the classroom to get an update from his aides, but instead he allowed the school principal to step in and thank him for coming. Though Woodward did not touch on any of this, Bush’s performance in Sarasota suggested that he was not even in charge of the classroom, still less the country. The contrast with Woodward’s work, alongside Carl Bernstein, on Watergate almost 30 years earlier could not have been starker. Then, he had helped demolish a Republican president. Now, like so many other Washington-based reporters, he provided buttressing when Bush wobbled badly.

  In those months after 9/11, Washington became a far more dismal city in which to live and work. Inelegant concrete barriers soon encircled every single major government building and landmark, giving some of L’Enfant’s boulevards the look of freeway entrances. Even at the Lincoln Memorial, a monument as solid as a fortress, ugly security barriers fell within the Great Emancipator’s brooding stare. Batteries of surface-to-air missiles were even positioned within sight of the Capitol’s dome.

  For weeks afterwards, it was impossible to watch a plane land at National Airport on the banks of the Potomac, a few seconds’ flying time from the White House, without wondering if it might suddenly change direction at the very last moment and spear into a building. Years on, I still caught myself peering into the sky to check if incoming aircraft had lowered their landing gear.

  Flying into Washington, passengers made sure they had visited the toilet well before coming in to land. To do so during the final approach was to risk having your arm or jaw broken by an air marshal. Washington now had even less of the feel of The West Wing. Instead, it mirrored 24, the new Fox show that premiered in November 2001, where an anti-terrorism agent played by Kiefer Sutherland tried each week to save America from prime-time Armageddon.

  Still more depressing was New York. Usually, I travelled there by train from Washington, partly to enjoy the invigorating sight of the spires of Manhattan’s skyline as you rumbled through the industrial swampland of northern New Jersey. The first time I made the journey after 9/11, however, Lower Manhattan was unrecognisable. Peering through the smokestacks, freeway overpasses and rusting pylons, I mistook it for an outlying suburb of Newark.

  With no shortage of heart-rending stories to tell, or images to shoot – jagged and cindery, the remains at Ground Zero smouldered for months afterwards – the main challenge for journalists was literary. Words seemed not only inadequate in describing the attacks but also superfluous up against the instant iconography of the planes darting into the Twin Towers. Anyone with access to a television or the internet had such a visual association with 9/11 that it was hard to come up with any commentary, other than the repetition of simple facts, that added much to their experience.

  What could one say, for instance, about the crackly tape recordings of victims making 9/11 emergency calls or telephoning their relatives while the towers were aflame, in the certain knowledge that they were saying their last goodbyes? All that was needed were short biographies of the office workers making the calls. That is perhaps why ‘The Portraits of Grief’, The New York Times’s brief pen portraits of the victims, were so compelling. We knew what had happened. What we wanted to find out was to whom it had happened.

  ‘The Portraits of Grief’, which fleshed out a victim’s personality from small illustrative details, provided this human mosaic. We heard of Leon Smith Jnr, the big-hearted fire-truck driver; Dianne Bullis Snyder, a wife, a mother, a doer; John F. Ginley, a quiet family man; Mohammad Salman Hamdani, the all-American Jedi; and Todd Isaac, a jolly snowboarder.

  Even when The New Yorker drew upon its vast literary resources to provide short prose poems, they felt meagre. John Updike, who had been ‘summoned’ to the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building to ‘witness something great and horrendous’, spoke of how ‘the south tower dropped from the screen of our viewing; it fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air.’ More convincing was his description of ‘the mundane duties of survivors – to pick up the pieces, to bury the dead, to take more precautions, to go on living’.

  In the same pages, the novelist Jonathan Franzen tried to capture the convolutions of the New York mind. ‘Besides the horror and sadness of what you were watching,’ he wrote, ‘you might also have felt a childish disappointment over the disruption of your day; or a selfish worry about the impact on your finances, or admiration for an attack so brilliantly conceived and so flawlessly executed, or, worst of all, an awed appreciation of the visual spectacle it produced.’

  Updike had spoken of the ‘false intimacy of television’, but, whether false or not, it made much of what was written in the aftermath of 9/11 redundant. The familiarity with these terrible events was visual, visceral and unspoken. However erudite, literary renderings tended only to provide fresh perspectives rather than adding more emotional depth. Strangely, perhaps the most apposite words came from a dead poet, W. H. Auden, and his poem ‘September 1, 1939’:

  The unmentionable odour of death

  Offends the September night.

  Likewise, there were surprisingly few champions in the literary sport of encapsulating 9/11 in novels. In Underworld, a stupendous tour de force that seemed almost to foreshadow the 9/11 attacks by featuring the Twin Towers shrouded in cloud on its fly-jacket, Don DeLillo captured America’s Cold War paranoia better than any other novelist. Yet Falling Man, which filtered the aftermath of 9/11 through a la
wyer working that day in the World Trade Center who sought solace by screwing a fellow survivor and disappearing into the windowless poker rooms of Las Vegas, was a disappointment.

  Similarly, John Updike’s Terrorist, which offered a twist to the canon by approaching 9/11 from the perspective of a radicalised young American Muslim rather than a victim of the attacks, was far from his best work.

  In Philip Roth’s Everyman, the main protagonist had moved away from Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11, a metaphor perhaps for the author’s apparent squeamishness at tackling the subject himself.

  Just as the authors of the great American novels have not yet produced the great 9/11 novel, nor has anyone else. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which told the story of a nine-year-old boy who lost his father in the Twin Towers, was heart-rending and fantastical, and it captured not only the depthless anguish of September’s bereavement but its randomness as well. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland encased the melancholy and desolation that hung in the still-putrid air of Manhattan. But I have not yet completed a post-9/11 novel with complete contentment. It was not so much a failure of imagination. Instead, the problem for novelists is that no new stories were needed when there were more than enough from the day itself.

  Again, this explains the success of that other surprise bestseller, The Report of the 9/11 Commission. Try as they might, novelists and film-makers have not yet managed to turn 9/11 into a major cultural event. Rather like the Second World War, which has never been commemorated with appropriately epic works of fiction, simple, real-life narratives have had more than enough drama, pathos and sentimentality.

  The fact that The Report of the 9/11 Commission made it so effortlessly to the top of the national bestseller lists was all part of what came to be described as the new normalcy. An anxious America of colour-coded security warnings, the rote removal of shoes at airports, National Guardsmen in musty combat fatigues at railway stations, worries about owning property in Washington or Manhattan because of the possible detonation of dirty bombs and runs on hardware shops to buy up plastic sheeting and duct tape.

  I remember telling London that the duct-tape panic was a complete media beat-up, a confected alert from our friends at cable news. Americans simply were not that paranoid. Then I went to an old-fashioned hardware store near the bureau, in an area populated by urban professionals – lawyers, college lecturers, accountants, journalists – and discovered that Americans were that paranoid now. The shelves were completely empty.

  More so than the run on duct tape, the low point for me came when I watched a wheelchair-bound woman in her 80s being told to remove her white slippers, presumably to ensure they were not packed with explosives. Paranoiac madness or what the writer George Packer called a ‘mental state of emergency’.

  However much one wanted to return to 10 September, there was reason to be afraid. Ominous warnings about chemical and biological weapons were borne out in early October 2001 when anthrax-laced letters turned up in the post of news organisations and the offices of two senators, including the Democratic senate majority leader Tom Daschle.

  Cordoned off with yellow tape, and patrolled now by police officers wearing chemical-warfare HAZMAT suits, Capitol Hill resembled the set of a big-budget science-fiction movie with extremely high production values. With ABC News, CBS News, NBC News and the New York Post all coming under anthrax attack, it was not long before all of the mail sent to our bureau in M Street was also being screened for deadly spores. Danger normally comes in combat zones and war-torn countries, but now it came through the mail. I distinctly remember the moment I heard that NBC News had been targeted, for I felt physically sick.

  Strangest of all was the sight of policemen dressed in HAZMAT suits at the headquarters of the National Enquirer in Boca Raton, Florida, the first media organisation to be targeted. ‘The Enquirer Hit By Anthrax Attack’. Not even the tabloid’s inventive sub-editors could have produced a headline as outlandish as that.

  Usually so optimistic, America had become a place of fear, anxiety and paranoia. Crucially, however, there was curiosity too. Part of the public response to 9/11 was a quest for understanding, with many Americans now considering it part of their civic duty to find out ‘why they hate us’. Search engines spewed out information on al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the Northern Alliance and General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

  Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, a once-obscure history of a once-obscure band of Islamic zealots, became an unexpected bestseller. So, too, did Islam: A Short History by the religious scholar Karen Armstrong, and Holy War, Inc. by a British journalist, Peter Bergen, who had once interviewed bin Laden.

  With more weighty matters to discuss, the green rooms of the cable news channels now played host to more serious-minded pundits. Retired colonels edged out political hacks. Former intelligence officers, especially those with expertise in Afghanistan and Pakistan, took precedence over Hollywood divorce attorneys. The BBC also benefited from this thirst for knowledge, not least because so many of the US networks and newspapers had defenestrated their networks of foreign bureaux. Our ratings in America soared.

  Naturally, the fun went out of American reporting, for gone in an instant was the frivolity of the Clinton era and the relatively relaxed pace of the start of the Bush years. With the aftermath of 9/11 now the single preoccupation, trips beyond the Beltway to cover a lighter menu of stories also came to an immediate halt. Keen to explore as much of America as I could – my running tally of ‘states visited’ was closing in fast on that magic number 50 – my editors had been surprisingly indulgent when it came to recreational reportage. They had let me file from ‘The Big Easy’ on how the jazz clubs of Bourbon Street were being elbowed out by strip joints; from Las Vegas on the Y2K fear, hilarious in retrospect, that on the stroke of midnight at the start of the new millennium electronic gambling machines would turn into silver waterfalls; and even from Tinseltown, where I had donned a black tuxedo for red-carpet duties at the Oscars. Instead, the American 9/11 beat was limited pretty much to Washington, New York and the occasional nearby military base.

  An exception was to fly, via Puerto Rico, to America’s Caribbean redoubt: the most controversial new landmark in the Bush administration’s war on terror.

  Much of Guantanamo Bay felt more like a resort than an encampment, a heavily militarised holiday camp on the craggy shores of the Caribbean. On every night of the week, the Downtown Lyceum, an open-air cinema with terraced bleachers, offered the latest in Hollywood escapism. Tuesday and Sunday were bingo nights at the Windjammer Cafe. The Cuban Club promised ‘the genuine taste of the Caribbean’. If that did not suit, there was Rick’s Lounge for the officer ranks, the Tiki Bar, a late-night hotspot with views across the moonlit-dappled water, a Reef Raiders dive club, an 18-hole golf course, 11 beaches and, inexorably, an O’Reilly’s Irish pub.

  Were it not for its battleship-grey paint job, the roll-on-roll-off ferry connecting the two halves of the base, on the windward and leeward sides of the bay, would not have looked out of place steaming into Martha’s Vineyard. The bayside clapboard homes of the naval commanders again recalled New England and could have provided the backdrop for a Ralph Lauren fashion shoot.

  The weather was perfect. Unblemished blue skies, with a soothing breeze blowing off the sea. Needless to say, there was a Pizza Hut, a Subway and a McDonald’s, the only branch on the island of Cuba. It came complete with golden arches and the normal architectural blandishments of dull-brown brick walls, plate-glass facades and mansard roofs. The only thing missing was a Toyota dealership next door.

  Other parts of Gitmo looked like a museum of the Cold War – albeit a working museum, since this was one of the few corners of the world where it had not yet ended. A 17-mile fence-line hyphenated with tall watchtowers separated Cuban Cuba from America’s century-old outpost, the first beyond its shores. US Marines looked out over a no-man’s-land known still as the Cactus Curtain. Cuba’s Frontier Brigade stood guard on t
he other side.

  Even though many of the 55,000 landmines had been cleared on the orders of Bill Clinton, it was still thought to be the biggest minefield anywhere in the western hemisphere and the second most dangerous in the world. US forces patrolling the fence-line even kept up the Soviet-era precaution of covering their mouths whenever they spoke, lest Cuban lip-readers picked up what they were saying by peering at them through binoculars.

  Just two years on from 9/11, Gitmo already housed a relic of the Bush administration’s war on terror: Camp X-Ray, the temporary detention centre where ‘enemy combatants’ had been brought from Afghanistan wearing orange boiler suits, goggles, restraints, earmuffs and face masks. Its makeshift wooden watchtowers had not yet been dismantled, nor its open-sided wire cells with mesh walls and corrugated tin roofs that made them look more like dog kennels.

  We had been invited to Guantanamo by the Pentagon to look at its replacement, a purpose-built prison constructed in a remote corner of scrubland once populated by iguanas and banana rats. On arrival at Gitmo’s airstrip, we were loaded onto a white-painted school bus, ferried across the bay and introduced to our Pentagon guide. She was an attractive African-American lieutenant colonel with a winsome smile, a velvet voice and more than a passing resemblance to Halle Berry. In their battle for journalistic hearts and minds, the US military had unleashed a devastating new weapon: a smart bombshell.

  She had put together a busy itinerary. There were interviews with camp cooks, who showed us, with the aplomb of television chefs, their new Muslim-friendly dishes – though ‘culturally appropriate’ was the phrase de jour. The menu included halal meat, baklava pastries and even special dough that they proudly called Taliban bread. During the fasting month of Ramadan, especially large breakfasts were prepared to help the inmates last until sundown.