Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  To do otherwise would be to deny your colleagues information that is rightfully theirs. But being the pool reporter in a country run by a dictator like Assad presents special challenges.

  No American president had been to Damascus in two decades. It was too risky, diplomatically and politically, because of Syria’s support for terrorism and its domination of Lebanon. Assad has been compared to Machiavelli or a Mafia boss. I think his talent for political survival was more particular to the Middle East. In a region of bullies, he had figured out how to be the toughest guy on the corner. For fifteen years, he had incited rival Lebanese groups to kill each other. When they didn’t rise to the bait, he sent his agents to assassinate their leaders. He’d driven Yasser Arafat out of Tripoli into exile in Tunis. After years of reporting on terror attacks linked to Assad, I had no idea what to expect. But as it turned out, the Syrian strongman had no idea what to expect from me, either.

  A realist, Assad knew he would eventually have to make peace with Israel. Now the White House believed he was ready to deal, if Israel would withdraw completely from the Syrian territory it had occupied since 1967 on the Golan Heights. Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, agreed that the signals were promising and encouraged Clinton to go. So one day after participating in signing ceremonies for an historic peace agreement between Jordan and Israel, Clinton headed to Damascus to meet the Syrian leader on his own turf.

  Assad had not survived for so many decades without protecting himself from internal and external enemies. Clearly, the American press corps represented a real and present danger—at least, that’s what you’d have to conclude from the way his security treated us when we arrived. Syrian police went through everything in our bags, and I mean everything. Our personal hygiene products were taken apart. Medication was analyzed. In my case, contact lens fluid was viewed as highly suspicious. Since this was long before such searches became routine at American airports in the wake of 9/11, it seemed extraordinarily invasive, especially when applied to a handful of reporters who’d just disembarked from the security bubble of Air Force One.

  The drive to the ceremonial palace where Clinton and Assad would meet was not any more welcoming. The White House advance man told us how the landscape along the highway had been transformed in the previous week. Decrepit housing had been torn down, trees planted, the ground painted green to appear lush. At sixty miles an hour, it looked pretty real. It was another Potemkin Village, as we’d seen years earlier during Ronald Reagan’s trip to the DMZ in Korea. Dictators, it seemed, were very good at creating stage sets.

  After the high-speed motorcade ride, Assad’s enormous white marble palace loomed at the top of a hill, dominating the landscape. It was monolithic, forbidding, and sterile, since it was used only for ceremonial events. Once inside, past another security barrier with a full pat-down body check, we were given our marching orders by the Syrian equivalent of a presidential press secretary—that is, if they’d had a press corps covering their president. We were told there would be a press opportunity, but only for cameras. No writers would be permitted. As the only representative for the networks, I told the White House that we would not allow our cameras to cover the meeting without an editorial presence to report the facts and surroundings—standard rules. After huddling with their Syrian counterparts, Clinton aides told us Assad’s men had backed down, but only if I pledged not to ask a question. I made no such promise, as they knew I wouldn’t. Just before I entered the room, the Syrians reminded me once more not to say a word. I simply smiled.

  Clinton and Assad’s meeting earlier in the year in Geneva was during a stopover on the president’s return from his Moscow summit. At the time, Clinton was facing a storm over Whitewater at home, but squeezed in six hours of talks with Assad to set up what he hoped could develop into a new peace track between Syria and Israel. During their joint news conference, Assad had given the White House new hope of a breakthrough by declaring that Syria could have “normal peaceful relations” with Israel if a treaty were negotiated. But he avoided spelling out what “normal” meant. Now Clinton was in Damascus to see what Assad might be willing to deliver.

  I lined up with the camera crew, mentally rehearsing possible questions to ask. Even if I got lucky, there would be only one opportunity at best. Should I try to get Assad on the record about Israel or terrorism? If I dared to ask a question, what would happen to the camera crew? Assad and Clinton were sitting in armchairs, on either side of a coffee table, not unlike the arrangement in the Oval Office. I waited just long enough to make sure I was not interrupting their small talk, and asked the Syrian dictator why he still supported terrorism—hoping to provoke any kind of response.

  The White House and Syrian presidential aides were flabbergasted. No reporter, and certainly not a woman, had ever dared ask Hafez al Assad a question at a photo opportunity. To my amazement, instead of ignoring me, he began to answer, vigorously challenging the premise of my question. As he did later in a joint news conference with Clinton, Assad denied that anyone could name one incident in which Syria had committed a terrorist act. But before he could finish, I suddenly felt myself being lifted off the ground. With the cameras safely focused on the presidents, two burly Syrian security men had come up from behind, grabbed me under the elbows, and were carrying me out of the room. To my amazement, Assad continued to answer my question, but effectively, I was silenced. If I’d protested against what the thugs were doing, I would have interrupted Assad, and ruined the photo opportunity for all of our later broadcasts.

  Watching me be ejected so ignominiously greatly amused Clinton, who doubled over with laughter. He later told me that he’d finally found a way to shut me up. Perhaps, but it didn’t last long. As I’d learned with Frank Rizzo, Don Regan, and assorted scoundrels, “talking back” to presidents and dictators was second nature to me. No matter how much they meant not to, sometimes they responded, in spite of themselves.

  Clinton’s visit to Damascus did not create the breakthrough he’d sought. In private, Assad agreed to condemn terrorism, a commitment Clinton wanted before he would agree to peace talks. But in public, afterward, Assad denied that terrorism had even come up. The president had put his prestige on the line, as he did repeatedly during his two terms in pursuit of a Middle East peace, only to be disappointed. After the hope and optimism of witnessing the treaty signing between Israel and Jordan a day earlier, Syria brought Clinton back to the grinding reality of Middle East diplomacy. It was never going to be easy.

  My trip to Damascus that fall was my last foreign assignment as a White House correspondent. Soon I discovered the new challenges of traveling on my own, without the communication gear and assorted spear-carriers that accompany the White House. Perhaps I could have started with an easier venue, like Paris. For whatever reason, for my debut as a solo actor the news gods chose the poorest and least-developed country in the Western hemisphere, Haiti.

  Haiti is the kind of place that grabs your heart, and never lets go. It is not only poor; it has been ravaged by corrupt politicians, ruthless generals, and a small group of ruling families that have left it polluted, violent, and desolate. The disparities between the elites and the rest of the population are overwhelming. The rich live elegantly in villas draped in bougainvillea and other luxuriant plants. The rest of the people are among the least educated, most superstitious, and most victimized in the region.

  I flew into Port-au-Prince in February 1995, five months after twenty thousand American troops had deposed Haiti’s military dictators and restored the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. An experienced NBC producer, Joe Alicastro, had organized a team on the ground, but for the first time in many years, I was traveling outside the cocoon of the White House press corps. When you land in a Third World country with the president of the United States, advance teams from the White House and the networks have already installed computer lines, direct-dial telephones to the States, computerized video screening and editing equipment, TV monitors—the
works.

  To maintain security, the White House travel office—the same office the Clintons had purged when they first arrived—makes all the other arrangements. Fax machines? Copiers? Printers? Ready to go. The networks and print media jointly pay for all this. It is in the interest of both sides to work together: the White House wants the president’s activities to be reported; the news organizations want to transmit their stories instantaneously from remote locations. But all this proximity can breed too much coziness for our own good.

  My first night in Haiti was in sharp contrast to the ten years I’d spent on the White House beat. U.S. troops had established martial law, but gangs still roamed the streets. Our NBC team had found rooms in a run-down guesthouse called the Hotel Idéale. The conditions inside were anything but. For starters, it had neither running water nor its own generator. Undressing in the dark, longing for a shower, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. I had flashbacks to my first foreign trip for NBC almost two decades earlier in Guyana, when I was still trying to figure out the basics, like how to get my stories filed. Surely, I had learned enough in the intervening years to handle this.

  By morning, we’d started to figure out how to rise to the challenge. NBC flew in a gas generator to power our equipment so that we could edit our stories. Joe Alicastro and I huddled over TV monitors with flashlights to screen the video our camera crews had shot. As the deadline for Nightly News approached each evening, two Haitian drivers, Andre and Sergo, rocketed down the rutted streets of Port-au-Prince to get us to the satellite uplink. Along the way, we had to dodge chickens, dogs, protestors, and streams of raw sewage, sometimes all at the same time.

  When you arrive in Port-au-Prince, the first thing that strikes you is how vibrant the colors are. Buses, buildings, fences, clothing, everything is brightly painted in primary hues. On closer inspection, you see the reality behind this brightly colored landscape: a dark, grinding poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere. Everywhere you look, there are barefoot children, unpaved streets, filthy alleys, and ramshackle houses. Quickly, you’re hit by the smells—fumes from open sewers make you gag. This was true a decade ago, before the economy was further starved by additional years of local and international neglect. It is difficult to imagine what could be left after killer hurricanes slammed into Haiti in 2004. What additional plague can be brought upon the heads of these people?

  We relocated to a real hotel that had everything you’d want except a computer connection. There was one pay telephone with long-distance service. In those days, before wireless connections, if you timed it correctly you could manually pulse-dial the laptop to send scripts to New York. Occasionally, it worked. The capital city itself was a cauldron of political intrigue. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the populist poet-priest who had spent his exile courting politicians in Washington, was safely reinstalled at the Presidential Palace. Rival political factions plotted against each other, reflecting the sharp class differences that divided Haiti’s masses—Aristide followers—from the mercantile class and the military.

  As often happens in Haiti, first impressions can be misleading. While we waited for President Clinton’s envoys, former president Jimmy Carter, Senator Sam Nunn, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, we passed a parade in the main streets near the Presidential Palace. Was it to celebrate the return of the trio that had helped negotiate the departure of Haiti’s dictators and restore Aristide to power five months earlier? To the contrary, it was to protest Carter’s call for what would be the country’s first democratic elections. Aristide’s followers didn’t want elections or any part of representative democracy. They took to the streets, chanting that they wanted to make Aristide “president for life.”

  Carter, Nunn, and Powell offered intriguing contrasts in diplomacy. When the three had first gone to Haiti the previous fall to negotiate the departure of the generals, White House officials told me >they’d sent Powell to make sure Carter didn’t cut too easy a deal. They thought of it as “babysitting” Carter, reflecting the president’s suspicion that Carter would compromise too quickly. Despite similar backgrounds, the two presidents were not close. Clinton did not even want Carter to attend the Democratic convention in 1996. The tension between them had deep roots. Clinton had long resented Carter for relocating Cuban boat people to Arkansas when Clinton was in his first term as governor. He lost his reelection, he thought, because of voter anger over a prison riot by these unwelcome immigrants. (At the dedication of Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock in the fall of 2004, Carter said he wanted to apologize, acknowledging, “I made some mistakes in 1980 during the Mariel boat lift, and the presence of Cuban refugees in Arkansas may have cost him his reelection.”)

  The friction between these two Southern Democrats worsened after Clinton became president when Carter took it upon himself to go to North Korea to resolve a crisis over nuclear inspections. For more than twenty-four hours, despite attempts by the National Security Council to reach him, he kept the president and vice president in the dark. Not hearing from the former president, they couldn’t answer our questions about how the negotiations had gone. When they finally found out, it was only by watching Carter live on CNN, the network owned by his close friend and benefactor Ted Turner. Clinton did not quickly forgive Carter’s breach of protocol and common courtesy.

  The Clinton administration wanted to get out as fast as it could, even if it was before Haiti was stable. American troops would depart on schedule and be replaced by a smaller, less-experienced force of United Nations peacekeepers. Badly burned by his experience with the American deployment in Somalia two years earlier, Clinton had only reluctantly agreed even to send troops to Haiti. He remembered all too well how, during his first year in office, armed Haitians had blocked a U.S. troop ship, the USS Harlan County, from docking in Port-au-Prince. The ship’s humiliating retreat became a metaphor for the president’s continuing struggle to be accepted by the military, and to be seen as a strong commander in chief.

  Now, despite his promise to stay long enough to restore electricity and other services, Clinton was planning to pull out U.S. troops. The country still had rolling blackouts, and without reliable power and telephones, businesses would not return. Seventy-five percent of the people were unemployed. Hunger was rampant, traffic impossible, garbage everywhere. To provide additional security, Clinton national security advisor Tony Lake, Aristide’s chief supporter within the administration, had advised the Haitian leader to retain some of the country’s military officers. But fearing another coup, Aristide defied the White House and fired the entire army.

  That left the country with no military, no functioning police force, and virtually no criminal justice system. I went with Nunn and Powell to Haiti’s national prison, where only eighteen inmates of 580 had even seen a judge. Criminals were simply warehoused. People waited months, even years, before being charged. On a micro scale, and without the challenge of a well-armed insurrection, it was not unlike trying to create order out of chaos in Baghdad today. To accomplish this, the administration imported an experienced police administrator, former—and future—New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly.

  Kelly, a tough, take-charge Irishman with the crew cut of a former marine, was undaunted by the chaos of Haiti’s streets. One day, he took me with him as he made his rounds in Port-au-Prince during Carnival week, Haiti’s version of Mardi Gras. The celebration seemed to get more frantic as we moved into the more desperately poor areas of the city. At one point Kelly pushed through a mob to prevent a crowd from lynching a bicycle thief. Haitians had developed their own kind of instant justice. “You can’t do this in Haiti anymore,” shouted the marine translator in Haiti’s vernacular Creole patois.

  My expert cameraman, Maurice Roper, captured the entire incident: Kelly grabbing the accused thief with one arm while shouting at the screaming lynch mob to get back. The scene encapsulated the chaos of the streets. You could see the terror in the face of the Haitian victim, surr
ounded by a threatening crowd of thugs. Yet, somehow the mob backed down under the sheer moral force of a single law enforcement official. The confrontation was captured on tape, a vivid example that violence could erupt at any moment. At the same time, the populace was prepared to respond to authority, but the American soldiers would not be there long enough to assert it.

  Kelly’s multinational force had eight hundred police from twenty-seven countries, including Jordan and Pakistan. For their governments, “blue-helmet” duty in a multinational force was a good source of income. The UN paid a healthy stipend for the use of foreign troops. But flying north with Kelly on a helicopter tour of outlying towns, we learned that food for the police had not been delivered, and they wouldn’t be paid for another two weeks. Kelly needed to resolve the problem quickly. An earlier police pay dispute had become violent, turning into a riot. In that incident, Kelly had also waded in to rescue the victims, helping to evacuate the wounded and retrieve the bodies of the dead.

  In a northern town, we saw the depth of the squalor and degradation of Haiti’s scandalous prison system. Behind the gates of a stone and iron enclosure, inmates crouched on mud floors in buildings nearly two centuries old. If they had committed murders, the inmates told us, it wasn’t of their own volition. They were under a spell cast by voodoo spirits.

  A month later, the United Nations took over, and Ray Kelly’s work was done. He had given up electricity and plumbing and seeing his family for six months in order to give the Haitians a head start toward creating some civil order. Did he succeed? No outsider could have in such a brief period. When I returned a year later to cover Haiti’s first elections since the military coup, I saw that the political and economic divisions between Aristide and the elites had deepened. Unable to run again by law, Aristide couldn’t succeed himself, but he could undermine the chances of his successor, Rene Preval.