The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  The team had a male producer, Jim Miller, whom they adored and who was especially useful since women in Saudi Arabia weren’t allowed to drive. As it was, “the Saudis were taken aback by the fact that CNN would send a team of women here.” Still, in worldly places like downtown Dhahran—the point from which the U.S. troops deployed to the desert bordering Kuwait—“the Saudis kind of loved us.” The three women befriended Prince Adel al-Jubeir, the soon-to-be-ubiquitous representative of the kingdom on American TV, whose vulnerable, beady-eyed face was often capped by an official royal headdress and who later became Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States. Adel wore jeans when he hung out with Christiane, Jane, Maria, and Jim. And in a play on the kingdom’s role as “Keeper of the Three Holy Mosques,” he anointed Jim “Keeper of the Three Holy News Babes.” So felicitous was this time that Christiane discovered, as she put it years later, “I have found it has been a great advantage [to be a woman reporter] in . . . Saudi Arabia. . . . Being a female correspondent, having a female crew with me, has been an amazing door opener.”

  Christiane appears to have been a bit of a femme fatale during this time, romantically vied for by New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar and CBS correspondent Bob Simon, who was married. In the 2006 novel of former New York Times Cairo bureau chief MacFarquhar, The Sand Café, recounting this time in Saudi Arabia, the character, Angus Dalziel, who seems to be MacFarquhar, becomes besotted by Thea Makdisi, a witty, provocative TV journalist for a cable network. Thea Makdisi is equally flirtatious and one-of-the-guys-like and is given to flashes of righteous disgust at the Saudi oppression of women. Thea is of Lebanese-Swedish heritage and she grew up in Beirut, and her subtle looks grew on men. “At first glance she did not strike Angus as beautiful. Her complexion was olive . . . but not distinctly exotic . . . and her nose, bending slightly over a little bump, was one that a less confident woman might have had reshaped. She was about five-foot-nine with unruly, light brown hair cropped off at the neck.” Other than the “light” brown hair, the description fits Christiane. But even closer than the physical description and the proximate stand-ins for Christiane’s Iranian-British heritage and her childhood in Tehran is the dead-giveaway fact that Thea works with two other women—Christiane, Maria, and Jane were the only all-female crew during Desert Shield—and that she tells Angus that she was told, at her network, “‘You’re foreign, you should go work for the Foreign Desk’” and that “some senior producers doubt I will ever overcome my slightly foreign looks and accent, but I am determined to prove them wrong”: almost literal real-life quotes of Christiane’s.

  Angus’s rival for Thea is an older network producer named Aaron Black—charming, experienced, and ultimately captured by Saddam Hussein’s troops after the start of the war. Aaron Black seems a clear stand-in for CBS’s veteran war reporter Bob Simon—even before The Sand Café was published, rumors had swirled that he and Christiane had had something of a romance. In the novel, Thea is charismatic and confident—she “arouses attention wherever she goes,” the jacket copy raves.

  Operation Desert Shield was all about waiting—the U.S. and coalition soldiers were getting ready to repel Saddam Hussein’s aggression. And although “there was worry that Saddam would invade” at any time, Maria says, a lot of it was fairly unanxious waiting. Romances notwithstanding, Christiane, Maria, and Jane did many nearly identical nonstories about live-fire exercises, with Christiane intoning, as Maria recalls it, “‘These are the men of the First Cavalry Division . . . ,’ and they were always men. The U.S. military did not deploy women.” (Women were, however, used in close-range support capacities in the Gulf for the first time in any U.S. war.) “One time when we stayed overnight in the desert, we might have been the only women in the contingent. We had to take showers in little makeshift wooden booths.” On the air, “we could never say where we were”—location was a military secret—“which was about a mile from the Kuwait border. It was all so controlled—kind of a dog and pony show.” The government wanted the media to do a “rah rah cataloging of military might—there was not a lot of journalism involved, unless there was a visit from Norman Schwarzkopf.

  “But at a certain point, one of the soldiers we were interviewing made an aside about a [weaponry] supply side problem they were having, so Christiane’s ears perked up and she made a story out of it,” Maria continues. “A photographer from Time magazine—this older, seasoned guy—got very angry at her and tried to get her not to report it because she was reporting against the military. Of course she didn’t get intimidated by him. She did the story.”

  Along with the military cheerleading, Christiane, Maria, and Jane produced human interest stories. “Because we were women, people let their guard down—they think you’re less threatening, so you can get more information and more access,” says Maria. They reported on Saudi women who organized protests to be able to drive. (That effort, which has been ongoing ever since the war, is periodically refueled, with brave Saudi women circulating clandestine petitions and flyers in beauty parlors, and is just as regularly rebuffed by the Wahhabi-beholden government.) They reported on women who owned businesses. They shopped for gold jewelry in Bedouin bazaars, and they socialized with the Westerners who worked for the oil conglomerate Saudi Aramco and lived in the large, gated compounds where women could not only drive but could wear bathing suits in mixed company—“and where all the houses had the exact same floor plan, with a room in the back where everyone made alcoholic drinks,” forbidden in the kingdom, Maria explains.

  “But mostly we spent time in the desert. We always wore those sleeveless vests with all the pockets”—a look Christiane would trademark in her broadcasts. “For some reason,” Maria says, “she had very limited clothes: three shirts, which she kept rotating and laundering and rotating. She was developing her style” based on an eschewal of style. “From the beginning, she was self-assured. She was a force.”

  CNN itself became a force the night—January 17, 1991—that the coalition bombs started falling in Baghdad. “Everybody took our signal to get the coverage,” Fleet says gleefully. “It was golden for CNN! The people who had called us Chicken Noodle News for years were now begging to use our signal!” Iraq launched Scud missiles—initially feared to have chemical warheads—into Israel and Kuwait. Now that the war had started in earnest, Christiane did live stand-ups for the suddenly not only respectable but also on-the-money CNN, just as the missiles flashed in the sky. “She showed her stuff,” says Parisa Khosravi. “Her reporting was outstanding and memorable. She had nerves of steel.”

  Soon Christiane left Saudi Arabia for Baghdad. She was ready for a real challenge.

  David Rust had been part of the CNN team in Baghdad around the time the air war started. Much of the team, including Rust, returned to Amman, Jordan, the next day, leaving correspondent Peter Arnett and a small crew. When Rust and the others returned to “the embattled city,” as Rust recalls, all hands were needed for intense, round-the-clock reporting. But two members of the team had gone briefly on holiday. One was Nic Robertson, a British satellite engineer who’d joined CNN in 1989, and the other was his fiancée.

  Robertson would quickly return, soon to become Christiane’s Bosnia producer (and eventually an iconic and prolific conflict broadcaster). Their abrupt departure left the team “with only one photographer and one reporter, and we were unable to do all the work that needed to be done,” Rust says. “CNN decided to ask Christiane if she was willing to risk travel to Iraq to help with the coverage.

  “She jumped on it,” Rust says. Rust had seen Christiane in a CNN “gag reel” shot in New York. The more she had tried to be mock-serious in the film, the more she’d cracked up. He’d been fascinated by this posh-British-accented woman, “endearing” in her inability to keep a straight face. But the Christiane who flew to Baghdad was different: all business. “She wanted to be there. She came in to help Peter out and did whatever was asked of her. My sense is she liked
to be in the center of stories—and this was the center. She was amazed when the bombs burst,” but not in a bad way. “To Christiane, danger was just an obstacle that had to be overcome to provide a top-notch story.” He adds, “She worked extremely long hours, under very difficult circumstances, and she never complained.”

  The Iran-Iraq crisis was close to her heart; her family’s exile to England had been due not merely to the Revolution but also to the breakout of that war. While in Iraq, she covered the dilemma of the Kurdish refugees on the border of the two countries, left over after the end of that long and still resonating conflict.

  By now, “things in the Balkans were heating up,” Rust says. “Yugoslavia had begun to break apart when Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. There was a ten-day war in Slovenia, but the war in Croatia was more prolonged and severe.” Christiane went to Croatia and “was totally immersed in the story by the time I got there,” he says. “The famous pictures of the prisoners of war? Guys at the camp, all skin and bones? She was right on top of that”—she’d already gotten into Bosnia briefly—“when I went in to join her. It proved to be a particularly brutal war for journalists. Between Croatia and the beginning of the Bosnian War, we lost so many—a ton of people were killed.” There were more journalists killed during the Vietnam War but over a much longer period of time. In 1991 alone, twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia (thirty in a five-year period). By contrast, in Vietnam, sixty-three journalists lost their lives over a twenty-year period.

  • • •

  CHRISTIANE AND DAVID RUST were both in Croatia intermittently during its ten-month fight for independence, from early March 1991 to early January 1992. A male reporter with whom David was working had begged off. “He promised his wife he wouldn’t go to the hot spots.” So that reporter left, but Christiane—a single female and neophyte hungrily acquiring experience (she had also, briefly, flown to Russia to cover the breakup of the Soviet Union and the war in Tbilisi)—did not demur.

  “As tensions spread, it was obvious that Bosnia would be the next area of conflict,” David says. “The Croatian war was a sort of warm-up. Everybody knew that something big was breaking out in Bosnia.”

  Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in late February 1992. In the new multiethnic state, officially called the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a slender plurality—44 percent of the population—were Muslims (called Bosniaks), one-third were Orthodox Serbs, and 17 percent were Catholic Croats, who had essentially already declared their independence. The idea of this unified new nation was violently rejected by the Orthodox Serbs, under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic. War broke out, with Milosevic’s forces—the Army of Republika Srpska—pitted against the Bosniaks’ Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  A month after rejecting a brokered peace, in early April, thirteen thousand Srpska soldiers, armed with every kind of weapon—from sniper rifles to rocket-launched bombs—laid siege to the capital city of Sarajevo. In early May, the Serbs went further, blockading the city, and the Croats launched their own attacks against the Bosniaks. The Bosniaks were outmanned and overwhelmed.

  The Siege of Sarajevo, as it would come to be known, lasting nearly four years, would be considered the longest assaultive military blockade of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Eleven thousand civilians were killed and fifty-six thousand were injured, 10 percent of both figures being children.

  This is the conflict that Christiane—by now a rising star—threw herself into.

  A community of reporters, photo agency still photographers, cinematographers, and producers assembled, starting in the late spring of 1992, at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn. It was located on what was immediately nicknamed “Sniper Alley” because of the proliferation of Serbian marksmen along the route to the center of town, where the one television station was located. Nic Robertson was there. David Rust was there. So was Ron Haviv, a twenty-seven-year-old NYU graduate who, despite his low-key, unswaggering demeanor, had already been captured and beaten and almost killed in two other conflicts where he’d bravely aimed his camera. Among the photographers in this core group were Gilles Perez, Chris Morris, and Haviv’s close associate Luc Delahaye—actor-handsome, French, especially gifted with color image. Joining them later was chic, witty Emma Daly, reporting for the Independent. She and Christiane—both British, female, single—would meet up at the reporter-filled bar on the ground floor of the building housing the Associated Press office (nicknamed “Love Hotel” because it was a former brothel), bonding over the special challenges of women covering war.

  The group was soon joined by Mark Phillips, a cameraman from CNN Australia who would begin to work closely with Christiane (eventually being captured with her by the Taliban in her 1997 ordeal). Like the other cameramen who’d weathered Bosnia and other hard-core conflicts, Mark would soon be called a “shithole specialist”—a “term of endearment,” he stresses, which masked the considerably less sentimental calculation, made by the Atlanta bosses, that only such seasoned war dogs were fit for dangerous assignments “because it cost CNN $30,000 to $100,000 to get us into these places and CNN didn’t want to invest money in people” who would be unnerved by whizzing bullets.

  But they were all unnerved. Pierre Bairin—the soft-spoken, gay Belgian videotape editor who had known Christiane in Zagreb and was drafted to join her in Bosnia, eventually becoming her producer and confidant—says that he resisted fear during his time traveling Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley, but then, “when, after a month there, I got back to my hotel room in Croatia, and it was so peaceful in comparison, I started to cry.”

  The oldest war dog there, at forty-five, was the charismatic Reuters contract photojournalist Kurt Schork. War reporter was a fourth career incarnation for Schork, a onetime Rhodes scholar who’d previously been an executive with the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, an aide to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, and a successful real estate developer. Impatient with the constraints of actually reporting for a news bureau, “at some point he’d decided to send himself to Sarajevo,” working for Reuters on his own terms, says Emma Daly. Kurt grew very close to Christiane, and all the others, who learned from him and loved hanging out with him at the Love Hotel bar. “Kurt was amazing,” says Ron Haviv. “He would show up somewhere and after a couple of days everybody else was showing up because of the respect he had from his peers and his ability to find stories that needed to be documented.” “Kurt was very smart, very dry, with a very dark sense of humor,” adds Emma Daly. He would blast Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms” on his portable CD player in honor of the solidarity they all felt—and had to feel.

  Schork was slyly competitive. “He would write his stories even before the UN briefing”—the source for others’ stories—“and he would kick the AP reporters’ asses,” says Emma. But he was also a profoundly romantic character. “He was a natural ascetic who adored women and usually rose before dawn to read literary novels—he was a great fan of Michael Ondaatje.” The story he reported of a Bosnian Romeo and Juliet—a Serb man and a Muslim woman, both twenty-five, gunned down for their love—was among the most moving narratives to come out of the anguish of that conflict. It began:

  Two lovers lie dead on the banks of Sarajevo’s Miljacka River, locked in a final embrace. For four days they have sprawled near Vrbanja bridge in a wasteland of shell-blasted rubble, downed tree branches and dangling power lines. Bosko is face-down on the pavement, right arm bent awkwardly behind him. Admira lies next to her lover, left arm across his back.

  The crew became inextricably close. Pierre would soon introduce Mark Phillips to the woman Mark would marry, and Pierre would become the godfather of their child. Ron Haviv and Christiane would each briefly leave Sarajevo, in December, for Mogadishu, Somalia. “We ended up covering three genocides together: Somalia, Bosnia, Darfur,” Ron says. “It would become, when we’d run into each other, ‘Of course you’re here,
too.’”

  Still, no one in this grab bag of likely and unlikely war dogs possessed the idiosyncrasy, glamour, and chutzpah of camera operator Margaret Moth, who was a senior member of the CNN team. The previous half century of wars yielded a dazzling dozen or so female journalist legends—camera operators, still photographers, and reporters—among whose ranks Moth incontestably belonged. There was Margaret Bourke-White; there was Lee Miller, the Poughkeepsie-raised British Vogue model and Man Ray paramour turned World War II photojournalist who’d snapped a photo of herself in Hitler’s bathtub. Add them to Martha Gellhorn, Oriana Fallaci, and Gloria Emerson: in aggregate, a jewel-boxful of women of war whose quality of work and personal panache made up for their small number by a quantum of a thousand. At the end of the twentieth century, there would be two other excellent candidates for this elite sorority. One was the London Sunday Times’s Marie Colvin. Half blinded in the line of duty, the hard-drinking, aggressive, and exquisitely vain Colvin wore an eye patch—along with designer lingerie under her flak jacket. She would eventually be killed in February 2012 after smuggling herself into Syria to do dangerous reporting on Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on the rebels. The other draft pick for this dazzling group? Hands down: the Sarajevo gang’s Margaret Moth.