Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Four and a half hours later, we landed in Israel. Someone handed me a press release from Khartoum. The Sudanese information ministry had denied that any incident had taken place or any apology requested by the United States. Instead, the official newspaper reported:

  The head of the presidential press office, Mr. Mahjoub Fadul, explained today the incident that took place at the presidential residence by saying that the U.S. reporter—who was posing a question at President al-Bashir, was crying and in an abnormal state, maybe even drunk. He further added that reporter was objecting to the fact that no questions were allowed to either al-Bashir or Rice, and that she was escorted outside of the room by U.S. security. Fadul further added that all reporters were allowed to take photos of Rice and al-Bashir before the meeting, even though they have arrived late.

  Late, after arguing to get in for an hour.

  At one-thirty a.m., standing on a Jerusalem hillside in front of the Western Wall, I appeared on Nightly News to report on what had happened when our day began so many hours earlier in Sudan. On the air, Brian Williams said he knew I was a reluctant participant in this story, but wondered how it left me physically and mentally?

  Of course, he had captured the problem perfectly. The story was the plight of the women of Darfur. I was an incidental player, but that’s what made the wire reports.

  On the show that night, I told Brian: “I was outraged. I was really angry. Angry at becoming part of a story that I wanted to cover, not be a principal player in, and angry because it did take away, at least temporarily, from the focus of the trip. But in fact, I can leave Sudan to come here to Israel. The people in Darfur have no choice. They are stuck there, and they are under the control of this government, which is making some progress politically, but as Secretary Rice said tonight, they’ve got a long way to go.”

  One week later, John Garang, the former rebel leader whose participation in the new unity government had given Rice so much confidence, died in a helicopter crash. His widow vouched for it having been an accident. In the months afterward, the peace agreement quickly unraveled. Rice recently told me Garang’s death was a “huge loss” because the former rebel leader had such “authority and presence” as well as “a real sense of purpose in building a more unified and a more humane and a more democratic Sudan.” Despite his background as a guerrilla warrior or perhaps because of it, she felt he could have infused the Khartoum government with a different set of values and attitudes. With his death died all hope for an easy resolution of the civil war.

  Once again, our focus on Darfur was short-lived. As often happened on these trips, competing crises erupted in each country we visited. That night was no exception. We didn’t get to the hotel in Jerusalem until nearly three in the morning, after finishing our broadcast for Nightly News. At that moment, sleep was less important than soaking in the tub. A few hours later, at six-thirty, a phone call rousted us to a secret briefing downstairs. After a scheduled morning visit to Ariel Sharon’s sheep farm in the Negev—where the prime minister pointedly showed Rice where a Palestinian Qassam rocket had landed near his gate—the secretary was going to make a secret trip to Lebanon.

  Only days earlier, that country had formed its first government since protestors forced Syrian forces to withdraw in April. Would this fledgling regime someday validate the president’s assertion that democracy was on the march? Once again, Rice wanted to help midwife a new government. But for security reasons, anyone who breathed a word to their news bureaus would be expelled from the press corps. We were in radio silence all the way to the airport.

  I took this order seriously. I remembered the Beirut of the 1980s, when Americans were being taken hostage and terrorists were blowing up the Marine barracks and the U.S. embassy. Now, there was a new wave of political assassinations, as rival factions competed to fill the political vacuum created by the withdrawal of Syrian troops four months earlier, following outrage over Syria’s presumed involvement in assassinating Lebanon’s popular former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. I hadn’t been to Lebanon in a while, but the Beirut of my memory was not for sissies.

  Less than an hour later, Rice’s Air Force jet rolled to a stop at the Beirut airport. Obediently, none of us had filed stories or alerted our networks. When we stepped off the plane, we were greeted by a mob of camera crews and reporters, told about the surprise trip by officials in all factions of Lebanon’s government. So much for maintaining security—and keeping secrets—in the Middle East!

  Rice’s motorcade crisscrossed Beirut at breakneck speed, trying to navigate the rough political terrain and the security risks. She paid tribute to the slain former prime minister, a symbol of resistance to Syria, by paying a condolence call at his family’s palatial residence. To drive the point home, she had her motorcade slow to a crawl as it passed the cratered site where Hariri died and paused to lay a wreath at his grave. Then, during a crowded news conference with the new prime minister, she warned Syria against choking off Lebanon’s borders. And she snubbed Syria’s remaining proxy, the holdover president, by seeing him only briefly. The choreography was hurried, but still masterful.

  By nightfall, Rice was back in Israel, hoping to breathe life into the new Palestinian government by visiting Ramallah the following day. With Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza scheduled in three weeks, Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was caught in a political cross fire between radical Palestinians and angry Israeli settlers.

  I hadn’t visited the territories since Yasser Arafat’s death eight months earlier. In Ramallah, people we spoke with were bitter, but resigned. They viewed the Gaza withdrawal as a defeat, a sign of their government’s weakness. They feared it would condemn Palestinians to economic imprisonment within the narrow confines of that strip of land. Israel was dictating the terms. The best Palestinians could hope for was that Rice would press Israel to at least guarantee border crossings with the West Bank and with Egypt for the flow of people and goods. But they had no answers from Israel or the United States about real gateways—the long-promised Gaza airport and seaport.

  Rice told us that Palestinian leaders had shown a new determination to crack down on violence in the territories in the past week. But Ariel Sharon, in one of his last visits with her before his stroke, insisted the crackdown was only sporadic. On her last day in the region before returning to Washington, she went to Ramallah to reassure the Palestinians, just as word came from Egypt that terrorists had bombed a resort area in the Sinai Peninsula. One of our top executives called from New York to ask me if I could stay behind to cover it. Was there any choice? As I rushed back to Jerusalem to finish writing a script on Rice’s Middle East diplomacy for that evening’s broadcast, the Tel Aviv bureau frantically arranged a midnight charter flight to the site of the bombings in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

  I delayed leaving Israel for an hour to see if I could first learn anything about the Sinai attack during a final meeting between Rice and Israel’s Shimon Peres at our hotel. It was after sundown on Saturday. With the end of the Sabbath, young children were racing through the corridors after festive family dinners. The contrast between normal Israeli life and the ever-present threat of violence could not have been more vivid. Peres told Rice that after the Gaza withdrawal, security had to come first before they would open any borders.

  Did the United States know if this attack—three simultaneous bombings—was the work of al-Qaeda or local imitators? Buffeted by competing demands from Israelis and Palestinians all day, not surprisingly, the secretary had no new information. I left for Tel Aviv and the airport with my producer, Lawahez Jabari, who is Palestinian. Neither of us anticipated what we were about to experience at the airport.

  Israel’s airport security is justifiably celebrated for its efficiency and painstaking attention to detail. Less well known is that they use the pretext of airport security as a cover for an extraordinarily intrusive intelligence operation. It seems I fit their profile of a terror suspect. Even though we were well credentialed, were traveling wi
th a veteran Israeli camera crew, and had a private plane waiting for us on the tarmac, we were interrogated for more than an hour. What triggered their suspicions? My passport carried stamps from places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and most recently, Sudan. Although I was still wearing press passes proving I’d just left Shimon Peres and Condoleezza Rice in Jerusalem, the intelligence agents wanted to know how well I knew Lawahez, and why I had spent part of the day at Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah. Before it was over, I had to show scripts of my Nightly News stories and transcripts of my interviews. They were doing everything but editing my reports—and who knows where the transcripts ended up.

  As we waited on the tarmac impatiently, the runway was suddenly ablaze with the headlights of an approaching motorcade. It was Condoleezza Rice. Barely a hundred yards away, Rice and her entourage, along with all my colleagues, were boarding that iconic blue-and-white military plane with the stars and stripes on its tail. They’d be home in twelve hours. I was embarking on another adventure.

  We landed in Sharm el-Sheikh at three in the morning. After failing to spot one thousand pounds of TNT buried under vegetables in Isuzu trucks being driven down the Peace Road, Egyptian police had finally figured out how to prevent another car bombing. They simply blocked all vehicles from approaching any of the hotels. Unfortunately, that meant we had to unload crates of television equipment and walk the last half mile to get to the front door and check in. Perhaps this explains why in the middle of the night, in a haze of sleep deprivation, I stumbled and broke a toe.

  After three simultaneous bombings that killed as many as 88 people in separate locations, including a twenty-seven-year-old American woman, and wounded 150 more, hospitals were exercising triage. My toe was of little importance. So for the next few days, I hobbled around, struggling to interview Egyptian police and the provincial governor. Most devastating was a visit to an open-air market where charred wreckage from one of the three car bombs was still strewn about in the street.

  Surveying the destruction, local officials told me the terrorist had likely been stopped at a checkpoint when he got to the square, so triggered his bomb before he’d planned. The clock tower had stopped at the moment of the blast: ten after one in the morning. Without intending to, the suicide bomber may have even survived, escaping on foot. Eventually, authorities determined that all the attackers were homegrown, perhaps inspired by Osama bin Laden but not taking orders directly from him.

  The Sinai bombings illustrated a trend as local terrorists evolved in the years since 9/11, adopting the tactics of bin Laden and “al-Qaeda Central” without necessarily taking direction from them. Other attacks—such as the London bombings in July 2005 and the attacks in Madrid a year earlier—were more likely perpetrated by lineal offshoots of bin Laden’s organization. Five years after 9/11, the terror organization was proliferating into dozens of local groups and imitators, harder to track, but perhaps not as well disciplined and therefore easier to penetrate.

  But as we were to learn in the summer of 2006, al-Qaeda and its affiliates often returned to the scenes of crimes, both real and imagined. During a month when the world was already agonizing over the war in Lebanon and northern Israel, a foiled plot to blow up airplanes in flight reminded us again of the potential for unexpected and unimaginable horror. A few days later, I saw the president at the State Department. He had just met with Rice, Vice President Cheney, and the rest of the national security team to evaluate both Middle East diplomacy and counterterror efforts.

  The White House had scheduled a series of events to highlight the war on terror and deemphasize Iraq—an obvious campaign strategy to reinforce an issue on which the president still enjoyed support. Only a week earlier, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman had lost his primary election contest to Ned Lamont, an antiwar Democrat riding a wave of liberal blogs and groups like MoveOn.org. From his vacation home in Wyoming, the vice president called wire service reporters the next day to drive home the administration’s new talking points about the national security implications of the win for an antiwar Democrat. He wasn’t subtle: “The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al-Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”

  Now, the president had come to the State Department to herald Rice’s hard-fought victory at the United Nations three days earlier. After failing to negotiate a halt in the violence while shuttling between Israel and Lebanon, she’d had to settle for a much weaker UN resolution than she’d been demanding. It did not establish who would disarm Hezbollah or give a multinational force real military power to intervene. Presidential visits to the Pentagon were routine. Stopping at Foggy Bottom was not. This was a calibrated effort to shift the focus from Rumsfeld to Rice, from the bloodshed in Iraq to a brand new cease-fire in Lebanon. Even though the war had ended badly for Israel, and therefore, for the United States, a newly emboldened Iran was defying demands that it give up its nuclear research. Israel no longer appeared invincible to its enemies. Hezbollah’s leader had achieved heroic status throughout the Middle East.

  The subtext of that day’s presidential appearance was the unprecedented code red alert on flights from London five days earlier. But whatever White House political strategist Karl Rove’s motive for capitalizing on the war on terror, there was no mistaking Bush’s passion about the subject when he answered questions from a small group of us at the end of the day. To the president, combating the threat of global terrorism was a lot more than a political game plan or a campaign slogan.

  As I had first learned as a cub reporter—even earlier, as a “copyboy”—there is no substitute for personally witnessing an event, or meeting a politician face-to-face. It is why I always wanted to travel with Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to major events when I covered their presidencies. Now, because of budget cuts and the constant deadlines of cable news, we often don’t have the luxury of seeing things first hand. Given this opportunity to form my own impression, I was immediately struck by how Bush’s eyes flashed with conviction, even zeal, when talking about terrorism, in a way that is difficult to fully understand from reading his comments, or watching him on television.

  Chopping the air with his hands for greater emphasis, the president said: “The world got to see—got to see what it means to confront terrorism. I mean, it’s the challenge of the twenty-first century. The fight against terror, a group of ideologues, by the way, who use terror to achieve an objective—this is the challenge. And that’s why…I spoke about the need for those of us who understand the blessings of liberty to help liberty prevail in the Middle East. And the fundamental question is, can it? And my answer is, absolutely, it can…. And by that I mean people want to be free. One way to put it is I believe mothers around the world want to raise their children in a peaceful world. That’s what I believe.”

  It was as clear a statement as I’d ever heard of the Bush doctrine—unambiguous and arguably simplistic, but the central thesis informing decisions that have dramatically changed our world since 9/11. Approaching the fifth anniversary of that attack, only days after the British had foiled another possible plot to blow up passenger planes, the president also blamed his predecessors—implicitly, including his father.

  “For decades, American policy sought to achieve peace in the Middle East by promoting stability in the Middle East. Yet the lack of freedom in the region meant anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits. We saw the consequences on September the eleventh, 2001.”

  Friends of Bush’s father have told me how they cringe when the son criticizes “the old man.” The contrast between the elder Bush’s decision to stop at Iraq’s border—to avoid what he feared would become civil war—and his son’s invasion is one of the most bizarre, and painful, chapters in American history. That Condoleezza Rice�
�a protégé of the father’s and his top advisor, Brent Scowcroft—is now reversing their policies (and some of her own) only adds to the human drama. George W. Bush’s secretary of state has set out to shift the course of years of decision making. She sees this as an era of change in foreign policy—no less important than the one we entered at the end of the Second World War. For this, she and the president have been accused of everything from genocide to fuzzy thinking. Surely, even their harshest critics will acknowledge that it is more complicated than that.

  In this book I try to portray the human beings behind the caricatures, sharing what I’ve learned about the ideologies and motivations of powerful men and women like George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. And I want to make journalism less mysterious, and I hope, less sinister. How do we reporters filter out our own opinions? Most people think we don’t. In fact, deciding what is important—what constitutes news—is subjective. But most of us are agnostic about the issues we cover. Yes, we tend to be antiestablishmentarian, and that mindset can breed its own bias, especially when covering powerful industries, like energy. (It’s been my experience that corporate leaders are often their worst enemies.) But outside of talk shows—a different genre—we reporters don’t advocate. Many of us are driven by the desire to expose malfeasance and correct societal wrongs—as in the exposure of the government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina. My passion is not partisan advantage. It’s storytelling about the colorful, inspiring, crooked, cantankerous, arrogant, self-serving, and self-sacrificing people I meet every day in politics and government.

  The job can be maddening. I have to explain complex decisions under the pressure of deadlines and competition, in the increasingly combative atmosphere of a super-heated news media. The velocity of new information is at times overwhelming: new technologies have expanded our reach beyond anything I ever imagined when I first wrote stories for my hometown paper. Now, we blog, appear hourly on cable, record newscasts for cell phones, file columns for the Web. In this digital universe, the era of collecting string all day to weave into a textured report exclusively for the evening news is over. The personal stakes are getting higher, too; more journalists have died in Iraq than in any previous conflict. Sometimes, we fail, as we did before the start of the Iraq war—for reasons I detail in this book. I would like to believe we have learned to be less credulous, but inevitably, our collective failure on Iraq has contributed to the intense suspicion with which the mainstream media is often viewed to this day.