Buying the Night Flight (44 page)

Not surprisingly, people within the institutions of our society -- in particular, the military, but also the politicians and the more conservative citizens -- came to feel these particular journalists were against them.

I had never really been a moralist about Vietnam. Keyes truly believed that Vietnam was a kind of moral crusade, and he wholly ignored the intrinsic quality of the country, the government, the politics, the fighting. I, on the other hand, had great concern about all those intrinsic qualities, seeing that without them there could be no workable denouement. At the same time, I saw Vietnam as a strategic absurdity -- and when you do things that are un-pragmatic, un-winnable, un-strategic, then really evil consequences follow. Strangely enough, self-interest is always and everywhere the most accurate and even moral measure to use.

But now the next generation of journalists came to feel that they had the duty and the right to make every most astonishing judgment, to change society through their writings, not merely to report it or reflect it but to redeem it. They became very dangerous -- and I am barely exaggerating when I say that they nearly destroyed the truth in journalism in the United States.

After I returned from my short stays in Vietnam, I was often invited to the war colleges -- Army, Navy, and Air Force -- to day-long seminars and conferences on the media-military confrontations brought on by the Vietnam War. And they were confrontations indeed. One I recall particularly. It was in the spring of 1977, up at the Navy War College at Newport, Rhode Island, a lovely spot swept by the cool Atlantic waters.

Seymour Hersh, the hotshot investigative reporter in the States at the time, got up and said some interesting things. "National security secrets?" he said. "That's where it is. In all my stories I violate national security -- I'm not worried about it. I don't care. I'm a 'bad news' guy. The only qualification to this is common sense. We're entitled to publicize any secret we can get -- and keep. The right to call it -- without any qualifications whatsoever -- that's ours."

He went on. "My definition of national security has changed a lot," he said, here so perfectly mirroring the sixties reporter's feelings and morality. "I'm not sure it doesn't have a lot more to do with better air and water and ethics for corporate executives than military problems." Then: "I did hate the Vietnam War; it was an evil." And: "We're such a big country, we can afford the diversity." And: "I publish something and -- surprise! -- the next day the Russians still haven't taken San Francisco."

And then the military, some quite rational and some not at all rational and some really quite crazy, put to him the classic question that for them determines loyalty to country: Would he print the metaphorical story about his country's troopship sailing in time of war?

Hersh had not the slightest hesitation. He hesitated not a whit.

"Would I write the story about the troopship sailing?" he repeated. "Yes, I would. Let it sail some other day. Does that make me less of an American? I'd worry more about my opposition -- about what
The Washington Post
would have -- than national security."

I was horrified by Hersh's speech. Since I was on the ensuing panel, I commented on it. "What Mr. Hersh is doing," I said, "is exactly what he criticized the U.S. military for doing during Vietnam. He is 'punching his own ticket.'" I went on to say that the American press could not consider itself an amoral force, outside of society, with no responsibility or loyalty to the rest of society -- or that society would eventually exclude it. I said that we cannot be a surrogate for society and an adversary to it.

What was surprising was the reaction of the officers that night. We all met at a lively little party at the admiral's house, and I was now further stunned. The military were not at all angry with Hersh, but they were completely miffed at
me
. At first I could not understand what was going on. Then it hit me: Hersh they could understand.

Hersh fulfilled all their angry expectations of us in the press. My sense of complexity and ambiguity confused and angered them because I made them think something else about journalists!

***

The new challenges to the foreign correspondent did not end there. What to me, when I started in 1964, had seemed such an exciting and romantic life -- dangerous, yes, but dangerous in a way that was comprehensible and predictable -- now had become something of immense complexities. Not only were there the new-type dangers of an Angola and a Beirut but there were countries that virtually wanted to close down the world to us.

In the mid-seventies, for instance, some Third World countries, backed strenuously by the Soviet bloc, started the formation of a New Information Order under
UNESCO
. It began simply enough, with some Third World countries feeling genuinely and strongly that the Western press, in particular the news agencies like Associated Press and Reuter's, which saturated the news world, were not giving enough attention to Third World problems and development. To some degree this was true, and in the beginning Western publishers responded positively with offers to back up, even financially, the formation of Third World news networks.

Then as the Soviets got their hands deeper into it, it became a real down-the-line fight over the free press in the world. Now, in this new alliance of the Soviets and the Third World dictators, foreign correspondents could even be "licensed" by
UNESCO
-- and punished by them if they did not write the "right things." Soon all transmission of news and ideas was to be controlled, even computer information from companies to their home offices and military satellites. These developments were encouraged by the Soviet bloc, anxious to weaken the workings of the Western free press in the world, and by certain bloody dictatorships eager to keep out a press they did not want snooping around.

In the late seventies I began a new part of my career -- speaking on American journalism for the
U
.
S
. government's International Communication Agency (the former
U
.
S
. Information Service), which sends journalists on trips to various countries to speak to the journalists there. It is a fine program, very straight and very sound -- and since you are paid seventy-five dollars a day for marathon speeches, interviews, and meetings, no one can accuse you of being in it "for the money."

My first trip for
ICA
was in the fall of 1979, when I went to four countries in Africa, including two of the original New Information Order countries, and learned a great deal. In Nigeria, whose government had most pushed it, I sat every night for long talks with Nigerian journalists. I kept bringing up the New Information Order -- only to blank stares. Indeed, I could not even get them to talk to me about it.

Finally one prominent editor told me, as the others nodded, "We are not interested in that. But can't you help us get more freedom, can't you help us pressure our government to give us visas for the States so we can cover other countries?"

An even more interesting lesson in the new attempts to control the international press on the behalf of the socialist bloc and the worst dictatorships came a few weeks later in Tanzania, another of the fosterers of the New Information Order.

Tanzania, which faces the dramatically azure Indian Ocean on the southeast coast of Africa, where the Arab slave-traders used to ply their doomed human wares between Zanzibar and the Sahara, gained its independence in 1961. But by the time I was there almost two decades later, it had only marched resolutely backward. Not only were the poor Tanzanians far worse off than they had been in 1961, but the mammoth amounts of international aid that had been poured into Tanzania from well-meaning folks like the Finns and the Swedes had only helped the country not to progress -- because it made Tanzanians rely on outside help.

One day during my week there I was sitting with the editors of Shihata, the official government news agency, and they were as usual berating me for excesses, real and imagined, in the American press. I was actually only half-listening -- listlessness can serve many purposes -- as they squabbled on, when suddenly for no reason I decided to change the dull subject and asked:

"Tell me about your coverage of Uganda."

Since the Tanzanian government had just sent thirty thousand Tanzanian troops into Uganda to overthrow the murderous Idi Amin (an event I heartily applauded), it seemed an obvious question to ask. But to my surprise and then to my curiosity, the five men sat there without speaking.

"But you did cover the Ugandan war, didn't you?" I asked, in total innocence.

"You know, the military nowhere in the world likes journalists," the director of Shihata finally answered, with all the indirection of a cobra in heat.

"That's very true," I replied agreeably. "It was the same in Vietnam."

"Well, we did send reporters in," the editor went on, brightening suddenly, perhaps because I had mentioned Vietnam. "But the generals didn't like them and they made scouts of the reporters."

"Scouts! Of the reporters!" I was aghast. "Did they survive?"

"Oh, yes, yes, they did," he went on. "And finally we did cover it."

"When?"

"About five weeks after it started," he answered.

"Five weeks? For five weeks there was nothing?" They all nodded, a bit chagrined. "But why?"

Now the editor drew himself up. "Why, we might have lost," he said. I nodded.

"That was what our generals told us in Vietnam," I said with a dryness that escaped their notice.

Then I added, "But didn't your readers notice that you weren't, ummm, covering the war?"

He smiled. "Oh, yes, they would come to us and say, 'There are thirty thousand Tanzanians in Uganda. You journalists must be the only people in the country who do not know they are there.'"

Right there you had the problem -- the problem that all of us everywhere were trying to come to grips with -- and the operative truth. You had to have press freedom, not for some esoteric reason but because it was the only way to keep the compact between the people and the government, the only way to keep the basic agreements of society, relatively truthful. It was the new challenges to this compact and to this faith that we were beginning to see across the developing world.

Covering the Khomeinis and Their Dark Worlds

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."
-- George Orwell

When a friend suggested in December 1978 that I try to interview the Ayatollah Khomeini as I was going through Paris, my prescient answer was, "I don't think he'll really turn out to be anybody."

Still, I did telephone, first Reuter's News Agency in Paris to get Khomeini's phone number in Neauphle le Château. Then I called there and talked for about five minutes to Ibrahim Yazdi, later to become foreign minister. Yes, Khomeini would see me that Thursday at 11:00
A. M.
-- but I must telephone in my questions the next day. When I did, I got my first taste of the strange mixture of modern and ancient elements, and sheer cunning that was Khomeini. I read the questions, all very general, to Yazdi and he said, "Fine, we have them recorded and we'll have them translated by the time you get here." Nobody had said anything beforehand about "recording" -- funny, I thought.

When I arrived that cold and snowy day, tired and fretful from the overnight plane ride, I was conservatively dressed. I had a long loose dress on, high black boots, and a long fur coat. Nevertheless a young Persian, smiling, came toward me with an ugly scarf, which he dutifully wrapped around my head so that only my eyes were showing. Like all women, I was far too enticing to be allowed to run about uncovered.

On the walls was one message repeated over and over:
THE AYATOLLAH HAS NO SPOKESMAN
. They did not want the members of the press, who were pouring out here to see the ayatollah, to accept the word of anybody else. In actuality what he was saying day by day and hour by hour was so confusing and so contradictory that it was questionable whether they needed this additional protection.

Soon Yazdi led me across the road, lined with Persians of every possible religious gown and hat and filled with French police watching the dark gowns
and
hats, which always seemed to be marching in proclamatory processions, to a small, wooden French worker's summer cottage. There lived the ayatollah: in a tiny room emptied of furniture whose walls were covered still with the frowsy, flowered wallpaper of the limpid French bourgeoisie. Yazdi and I sat quietly, crouched in what must be the outer limits of discomfort on the floor.

After a few minutes "in" swept the Ayatollah Khomeini -- actually he floated in. He was a massive presence then, a huge black moth of a man, and when he sat down, he floated to the ground like a specter. His round white ayatollah's hat hovered precariously atop his head like an obstinate halo, but the thing that I will always remember were the eyes. For the hour and a half that we spent with him, his eyes never rested on either of us -- not on Yazdi and certainly not on me, the dangerous female. Utterly black and sinister, those eyes stared between and beyond us. If we existed at all to him, it was surely as lower creatures who could never understand the vision he alone could see.