Buying the Night Flight (3 page)

And there would be one or two women on general assignment. But it was a specialized form of general assignment. A tragedy occurs? Send one of the women to do a three-handkerchief sob story. Political campaigns? Have a woman interview the candidates' wives. Ditto for the wives of ball players and other celebrities.

If necessity required that one of the females cover a major story, the headline usually began: "Our Gal at..."

This was the man's world into which Gee Gee somehow elbowed her way more than two decades ago, emerging from the women's pages a tough, determined, brilliant young reporter, cleverly concealed behind an irrepressible smile, apple cheeks, and honey-blond hair.

"She's nuts," we all laughed, in our basso voices, when Gee Gee made clear her intentions to become a foreign correspondent. The
Daily News
was fortunate to have a small but highly regarded foreign service in those days.

We were still chuckling when she managed to get herself assigned to South America.

But the laughter subsided when Gee Gee began trooping into the mountains for exclusive interviews with revolutionaries, when she demonstrated her uncanny ability to sense where the big story was going to break next, and when she began filing those sensitive, perceptive interviews that have become her trademark.

As Professor Henry Higgins might have exulted, for the wrong reasons, of course: "By God, she did it!"

And she did. After a while we began taking for granted the Geyer exclusive from this or that Latin American country. If someone was going to beard Fidel in his den, we knew it would be Gee Gee.

As the years passed Latin America wasn't big enough to hold her and she became one of those genuine, and rare, globe-hopping correspondents. The Middle East, Russia, Poland, Africa -- wherever the dateline originated, the quality was unsurpassed. She had not only become a foreign correspondent, she had become a great one.

She made it look easy. So easy, in fact, that even her friends didn't know how tough a job she had: The long process of studying the countries, the developing of news sources, the weeks, months, even years, of painfully inching toward that impossible interview. The stories she filed barely hinted at the dangers, the discomforts, the grueling hours, the personal sacrifices.

This book, which should be read by anyone interested in foreign affairs, journalism, and the professional growth of a woman -- as well as anyone who wants to read one hell of an exciting story -- finally tells us what it was like.

Gee Gee is now a syndicated columnist based in Washington. But that doesn't mean she is a Washington columnist. Not if that means working the cocktail parties, the dinner parties, the press clubs, the carefully rehearsed official briefings.

That's not Gee Gee's style, thank goodness. Her style is still to grab a suitcase and catch the next plane.

So we still don't know where Gee Gee's byline might pop up next. El Salvador? Warsaw? Oman?

But we do know that wherever it originates, her name on the story means we're getting the best.

Mike Royko
Chicago

To Die in Guatemala

"The guerrilla war in the mountains ... is the only way to revolution."
--
FIDEL CASTRO

The hut they led us away to that moonless midnight was a long wooden shack that stood alone in the forest. It sat on the far corner of one of the aristocrat's big haciendas, and the sardonic joke of the whole thing was not lost on us -- we were with the Guatemalan guerrillas and the
hacendados
or landowners were precisely the people the guerrillas were sworn to destroy.

As we groped in the darkness we found a hard dirt floor, which was used mostly for storing machinery. It must be little used and the area sparsely populated, or else why would they bring us here? Miguel, our guide, led us with a very dim lantern into a small separate room at the end of the hut. In it stood two canvas cots with blankets, and not much else. There we were. Henry Gill, the fine photographer who worked closely and collegially with me on the
Chicago Daily News,
was already getting testy over this whole unwholesome situation. Our guide, the mysterious Miguel, a handsome, curly-haired young student obviously of excellent lineage, carrying an attaché case full of obscure books, was playing the revolutionary game to the hilt. He would do at least one thing we wouldn't do: he would eventually die for its curious satisfactions.

Miguel left us for a moment, then returned with two rough-hewn pots which he delicately placed several feet apart in the other room.
"El servicio,"
he said with a comical gesture. One was for me, one was for Henry. It did not bother me in the slightest, but Henry was mortified. I was far more worried about other things, like getting out of this whole thing alive.

"You are to remain here for twenty-four hours," Miguel told us in a low whisper before he left. "We'll come for you tomorrow night. While you're here you must observe absolute silence. There will be workers on the hacienda passing right by the shack from the early-morning hours on. Some might come into the other room for tools. We'll bring you food when it's safe." Then he bade us sleep well and was gone into the opaque black night that was all we yet knew or felt of the Sierra de las Minas.

As he turned and twisted and tried to settle down on his canvas cot in the darkness, Henry kept muttering, "We must be out of our minds, we must be out of our minds." I couldn't, in truth, totally disagree with him.

For my part I curled up on my cot too, but only after taking a sleeping pill and accommodating myself psychologically to the new situation. In situations like this I reconnoiter the territory like an animal, sometimes only in my mind, and make my peace with it by absorbing it into myself and making it mine. I was doing that as I lay there, and soon I was perfectly and even peacefully part of this new place and time.

That left me free to acknowledge and experience several other waves of feelings. I felt a tremendous, euphoric excitement because I knew that we were on our way and that it was unlikely now that anything could turn us back. I also felt the journalist's special excitement of doing something that not only had not been done before but that would be of encompassing interest. Only two months before I had stood in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, listening to Fidel Castro rant before 300,000 persons, "The guerrilla war in the mountains ... is the only way to revolution. The people of Latin America will see that we were right." Now Henry and I were part of that revolution, which had the added piquancy that it was also a revolution our own country was trying desperately to destroy.

The morning broke bright and hot through the shutters, and the long, tedious day came and went slowly, very slowly. We waited there like Trappists, each lost in his and her own thoughts and feelings about this strange adventure. I ate whenever they brought food and found it good: campesino black beans squeezed out of a plastic bag onto tortillas, fried meat, boiled eggs, plain white bread, and strong coffee. But Henry refused adamantly to eat and I observed (for only one of many times) how much more finicky men are than women in situations such as this. In the muted whispers in which we occasionally communicated, he argued that he might get sick if he ate.
I
argued cogently that he would be too weak to take the trip if he didn't eat.

"Try a boiled egg," I insisted at one point. "How can a boiled egg hurt you?" I sat there peeling them and eating them.

"All right, all right," he finally growled, as one might placate a nagging wife. He hit an egg on his knee to break it and the gooey fluid ran all down his pants leg. He had got the only uncooked egg in the batch and smelled very much like rotten eggs during the whole trip. I kept my advice to myself from then on.

By nightfall we had both grown edgy. This was as far into the details of the plan as we had been entrusted and, trust notwithstanding, one had to wonder what would come next. "Put-yourself-in-their-hands" seemed the only possible approach to guerrilla journalism; but it did not rule out moments of doubt and even terror.

At 11:00 p.m. we heard stirrings outside. Was it the
hacendados
or the military? My throat closed. But it was Miguel. "We're going," he whispered, still cheerful, and we started walking up a side road. Then suddenly the word went along the line of twenty-nine men in Spanish. "Everyone down." We lay for an hour in the cornfield, as a new moon inched up over the trees, while every soldier and policeman, rightist terrorist, and American official in Guatemala was searching for us. That was how it all began.

***

Actually, of course, the situation had begun a long time ago. One would have to say it began that day four hundred years ago when the Spanish conquistadores marched down from Mexico to take the rich Mayan outpost cities of Guatemala. But while the other Latin American countries, led by Mexico in its 1910 revolution, eventually changed the traditional oppressive triumvirate of dictator-church-landowner and moved well on the way to becoming prosperous modern societies, only Guatemala, along with El Salvador and Nicaragua (and Paraguay on the continent), remained in this squalid feudal isolation.

By the time we got there in 1966, while the rest of Latin America was on the move -- changing, developing, spurred on by each country's own internal impulses and by the excitement of John F. Kennedy's "Alliance for Progress" -- Guatemala was not only stagnating, it was actually moving resolutely backward. In 1950, to cite just one indicator, 70 percent of the people had lived on a subsistence level. By 1963, 73 percent lived at that level. You could not even argue "trickle down" here.

At the bottom of everything lay the huge Indian mass -- 65 percent of the population, stubborn, long-suffering, fatalistic, and jealously protective of old customs that had remained unchanged since the Spaniards came. It was this inert mass that allowed the military, sometime cynically employing the fig leaf of a party and often without one, over and over again to overthrow democratic regimes without the danger of any public uprising. It was this mass -- its ignorance, its disease, its isolation, and its utter passivity -- that shamed the university students and intellectuals and sent them into the hills in the 1960s as guerrillas. It was this mass that brought us there.

But we were dealing with far more than just another guerrilla movement, or else it would certainly not have been worth the time, the expense, and the danger. We were seeing firsthand what could be
the
next post-Castro guerrilla movement of our era in Latin America, and the first one in Central America. Since Guatemala had had for a brief moment in 1954 a Communist government, the FAR guerrilla movement was looked upon by most analysts and diplomats as the next "Castroite" movement to attempt to take power. And if that happened, it would mean that Castro was not a single, isolated factor at all, but a movement that could crumble the stability of the Western Hemisphere with the force of his charisma, the simplicity of his message of revolution, and, of course, his guns. This was what we were testing, and, though doubtless it was more dramatic "to die in Spain" during the Spanish civil war, in the sixties in Latin America "to die in Guatemala" was a respected business.

***

How does one make contact with an underground guerrilla movement in a country where every security force is searching for them -- and more than eager to kill to find them? By looking around. I mean
really
looking around. One must psych out the society and judge where are the weak points, the soft spots, the places where one can probe and possibly make a breakthrough.

But when I went to Guatemala to make contact the first time, in March of 1966, after studying the situation carefully I really couldn't find any weak spots. So I asked an old Guatemalan friend, a person who was extremely well connected politically, "Look, is there any way at all to make contact with the FAR?"

"It's highly unlikely," José Maria told me frankly, as his mind roved over the possibilities, "but I can give you one idea. I know a lawyer who is a member of the Communist Party, and I will call him for you. You go to see him -- make a social call and mention
nothing
about his party connection -- and at the end simply mention the fact you would like to see the guerrillas."

That same afternoon I was climbing the stairs in a modern building set in the picturesque old streets of downtown Guatemala City, and soon I was chatting amiably with a well-spoken man in his forties. At the end of an innocuous conversation I said directly but softly, looking him in the eye with an innocent manner, "I am very eager to meet some of the young revolutionaries .... "

He offered not a single giveaway gesture. "But you know I have nothing whatsoever to do with them," he said, a trifle too fast but at the same time looking me straight in the eye.

"Oh, I know, I know that," I interjected.

"But it has been a pleasure meeting you," he said. "Do come by if there is anything I can really do for you."

As it happened -- and as these things virtually always happen -- I didn't have to "come by" again at all. The next day he appeared, suddenly and without warning, to have coffee with me at the hotel. And, strange, the day after that he called me in the morning and said he had a student leader friend I might like to meet. I was, of course, delighted and grateful.