Dangerous Journalism   

The death of Daniel Pearl, killed for political reasons far from the battlefield, and the attack on a convoy of correspondents much closer to the fighting underscore the hazards of covering the war on terrorism.

Those chilling words echoed through the ranks of the foreign press corps on assignment in Central Asia, a region where torture and murder are part of the historical landscape. In recent months, journalists have become a preferred target for "holy warriors" waging a jihad.

The kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl on January 23 and the revelation of his horrific death sparked spasms of fear. His severed head was held before a camera in a macabre video, then displayed on a pile of newspapers as a message crawled past on the screen threatening: "If our demands aren't met, there will be more scenes like this."

Newsweek labeled the abduction and murder "the first international acts of terrorism against the United States since September 11." For Western correspondents working in strongholds of Islamic extremism, the message was stark: Pearl's execution signaled an era of greater danger and vulnerability outside of combat zones.

"It's a whole new ballgame now," says Scott Peterson, a friend of Pearl's who covers Central Asia for the Christian Science Monitor. "Everybody has been shocked by Danny's death."

Back in the newsroom, foreign desk editors agonize about how to coach their correspondents in the field. Should they lay low, pull back, leave altogether? What new precautions should be taken in a lawless region where cold-blooded warlords and criminals rule? Pearl's executioners would have cause to celebrate if their vicious deeds forced a media pullout.

Yet, there is a common belief that no story is worth dying for. During the weeks after his kidnapping, an e-mail message from his captors warned that all American journalists would become targets if they did not leave the country.

On March 4, that threat became a reality for some correspondents.

Toronto Star reporter Kathleen Kenna was seriously wounded when a grenade was thrown into a van packed with journalists covering front-line action in Afghanistan. Before the attack, an interpreter overheard gunmen debating about capturing the group. Washington Post reporter Peter Baker was in the convoy that came under fire.

"We were interviewing people and came quickly to the conclusion that they were not necessarily friendly to Americans," Baker said on NBC's "Today" show. "One of our translators overheard two of them talking about taking us hostage because one of their commanders had been arrested by the U.S. military. That's when we decided to get out."

As they tried to escape, a gunman lobbed a grenade through the window of the vehicle in which Kenna was riding. Shrapnel ripped through her buttocks and right thigh. The next day, international security forces warned of "credible" threats to kidnap journalists in retaliation for the ongoing U.S.-led attacks against al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Baker wrote that he was told by a Special Forces soldier, "These guys will kill anybody. If you're an American, they'll kill you."

By mid-March, the cadre of journalists in the volatile region was coping with the reality that they were being viewed as political pawns. Still, there was no evidence that major U.S. news operations were pulling out. "I don't believe there has been any wholesale change in policy, for example, pulling all staff out of potential danger zones in Afghanistan or Pakistan," says Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "It's a terribly important story, and it has to be covered."

When he first learned of Pearl's kidnapping, Tom Fenton, CNN's vice president for international newsgathering, remembers thinking, "Oh my God. It is Lebanon all over again." He was harking back to an incident in the 1980s when Terry Anderson of the Associated Press and others were held hostage in Beirut. He quickly offered his team in Karachi, Pakistan, the option of leaving. Only one, who happened to be ill at the time, took him up on it, he says.

Working in global hot spots always has been risky, but "the world has become a more dangerous place," says Fenton, a former reporter in such harrowing locales as Sierra Leone. Terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11 have upped the ante on Americans.

Journalists are being advised to keep a low profile, travel in convoys and avoid going out at night. After the Pearl murder, many hunkered down at the Karachi Sheraton Hotel. Some hired bodyguards and moved into the homes of trusted translators and drivers.

Fox News Channel called its team back to Islamabad, Pakistan, where, according to a spokesperson, it has a sizable operation. NBC announced that decisions on whether to pull out would be made by crews in the field.

Some news managers toughened their orders. Daniel Sneider, national/foreign editor for the San Jose Mercury News, told his correspondents to go on assignments with a fixer, a trusted driver or a colleague, but never alone.

Giving up was out of the question. "If we allow ourselves to be intimidated into not doing journalism anymore," he says, "these people have accomplished their goal."

Despite soaring risks, hundreds of reporters and photographers continue to straddle the line between doing their jobs and struggling to survive in a forbidding land of towering mountains, subzero temperatures and terrorists who issue deadly threats. Reasons for staying have a common ring.

Some talk about showing solidarity with the nine journalists killed in the region since the Afghan war began on October 7 (see "A Killing Field for Journalists," January/February). Pearl was the first American to die, and the first to be targeted for political impact. Common among the correspondents is a defiant attitude and a commitment to chronicling one of the most fascinating and challenging stories of modern times.

Journalists talk about how they cope, including built-in denial systems that click into place when they head into danger. "It is a notion that, like AIDS or cancer, it can't happen to us," says Juliette Terzieff, a freelance correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's how we protect ourselves from running to the nearest airport as fast as we can pack our bags. Every time one of us is downed in the field, you always get hit with the reality that 'it could have been me.' "

For a story for the Chronicle, Terzieff interviewed Mark Kukis, a freelance correspondent for United Press International, who canceled two planned trips after the Pearl murder--one of them to a rural region where American John Walker Lindh received religious instruction before joining the Taliban. "Perhaps it really isn't worth the risks," he told her.

Some journalists find ways to work through the fear.

"None of us want to end up like Pearl," says Terzieff, who recently returned from a perilous journey to a remote tribal area on the Afghan border. "So, at least for a few days, we all scale back our activities, put in panicky calls to embassies and lean on one another to keep going and not freak out. Then, slowly and carefully, we inch our way back out into the fray.

"Pre-Pearl, I would have jumped in the car and hit the road. Post-Pearl, I notified other colleagues of my plans, my approximate schedule and destination. I spent three days scoping out the situation before I felt it was safe enough to try."

Competitive correspondents have taken to sharing information about where they are going for stories due to the life-and-death situation. Terzieff knows from experience how quickly trouble can erupt. On an earlier assignment in Peshawar, a crowd of young boys flinging lit firecrackers stalked the reporter, screaming, "Foreigner go home!"

The Village Voice's Michael Kamber described covering an anti-war protest in Karachi, where stones and fists suddenly flew his way. "These were times you wanted to crawl out of your skin, pretend you were someone else," Kamber wrote, explaining that he once tried to purchase a fake passport that listed his citizenship as Canadian. Fixers, guides and interpreters have taken to introducing American clients as Swiss or French. "To admit being Jewish in such a climate would have been unthinkable," he wrote.

Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor views it as a "tribute to Danny" when journalists hold their ground and continue telling important stories despite the risks. "My calculation always is, 'I am coming back.' I don't go into dangerous places thinking otherwise," he says. "We're really in this business to try to clarify the gray areas, to explain and illuminate."

That, he points out, is what Pearl was doing when he was kidnapped.

In a testimonial in the Monitor to his friend, whom he had worked with in places like Iran and Kurdistan, Peterson related details of his own brush with disaster two years before in Kandahar. As he was attempting to hail a motorized rickshaw on a crowded street, two men behind him engaged in a frightening conversation.

"If I kill this infidel now, I will be in paradise," one of them said as he eyed Peterson. "I will become Ghazi," he proclaimed, referring to a supposedly heightened level of celestial bliss for those who kill nonbelievers.

A translator traveling with the reporter overheard the conversation and swept him to safety. Later, he explained, "For the Afghan people, it doesn't matter your tribe or race. Religion is everything." Peterson speculates that such thoughts might have been with Pearl's captors when they decided to kill "an Islam-hating Jew," as they labeled him.

"Danny made a decision on January 23 that all foreign correspondents have made many times before. Nothing cavalier, nothing cowboylike--just pursuing a story," Peterson wrote in praise of his friend.

Since September 11, the rules have changed, especially for Americans, who have become what one terrorist expert describes as "soft targets"--military jargon for vulnerable, unprotected prey. Media experts suggest reasons for the erosion of the media's safety net, including the widely held view in many Islamic communities that journalists double as CIA informants.

In e-mail messages, Pearl's kidnappers first claimed that he was a CIA agent, then later that he worked for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

"It's more dangerous today partly because the groups engaged are more hostile to the United States," says author David Halberstam, an acclaimed Vietnam War correspondent. "This was a very sophisticated setup, like somebody was playing chess with him at a high level," he says of Pearl's murder.

National Public Radio's Eric Weiner recalls putting his life in the hands of terrorist organizations in the past--Hamas in Gaza, Abu Sayyaf rebels in the Philippines, Hezbollah in Beirut--and not being "especially scared."

He found comfort in the unwritten contract between foreign correspondents and foreign militants: "You give me protection, and I will give you a fair hearing." Those who killed Pearl ripped up that contract, Weiner wrote in an opinion piece for the International Herald Tribune.

The belief that journalists once were useful to all sides in a conflict has changed dramatically, says the Mercury News' Sneider. Years ago, when he covered fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan, he was courted by all warring factions. Now, foreign correspondents are perceived as surrogates for their governments. "We are viewed as part of the enemy," Sneider says. The shroud of neutrality that once might have provided protection has evaporated into blanket hatred for the West.

In many places, a free press system is considered an invention of the decadent "infidels." It is common in the Islamic world for the government to control the flow of information. In Iraq, for instance, the penalty for criticizing Saddam Hussein is amputation of the tongue.

After Pearl's death, a flurry of tributes and op-ed pieces examined the new dimensions of danger. Newsweek's Evan Thomas wrote a sobering assessment of the changing climate: "Reporters sometimes believe they are protected by a kind of invisible bubble, that they can stand and watch a mob chanting, 'Death to America' and come to no harm.... But, in Karachi, the normal rules do not apply. And the terror war is not like any other war. There are no noncombatants."

New York Times foreign correspondent John Kifner focused on a familiar theme, "it could have been any of us," as he explored how journalists gauge risks in hostile places. Then, he issued a grim reminder: "In a new war in which everything American is the enemy, so are we."

The hideous symbolism of the Pearl execution was meant to deliver an indelible blow to the American psyche, says Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist who has worked in counterterrorism for a quarter of a century. It is a common perception among Islamic militants that "we in the West, who rule the world, are the ones who are out of touch with humanity. They see us as corrupt, perverse, ungodly. They, ironically, want to make us look responsible for their bestiality," he says.

That could account for the photos of Pearl chained with a 9mm pistol aimed at his head; the mocking and degradation; the forced denouncement of country and religion; the slashing of the throat and beheading; all recorded on film. Historically, decapitation has been used to humiliate the vanquished and show dominance in a region where the armies of Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great once roamed.

Pearl's killers cast themselves as lead actors on a global stage, focusing a powerful spotlight on their demands. In the end, says Ochberg, they made a critical mistake. "They failed to calculate the positive effects in rallying the world's journalists who are sending the message, 'This clearly isn't going to stop us.' "

To some this might be reminiscent of 1976, when Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was killed by a car bomb while investigating organized crime. Reporters from around the country poured into the state to pursue the story.

Being kidnapped and held at gunpoint for 20 days by bandits in Somalia didn't stop Tina Susman, a news editor for the Associated Press back in June 1994 (see "When a Journalist Is Kidnapped," September 1994). Like Pearl, she believed she had taken the proper precautions.

At the time of the attack in Mogadishu, Susman was in the back seat of a car in broad daylight at a crowded intersection, flanked by two armed bodyguards. She remembers hitting the floor when bullets started to fly and being dragged away by Somali gunmen. Later she would recall, "It was like watching yourself in a movie. I was thinking, 'This can't be happening to me.' " Nevertheless, Susman says she never gave up hope that she would make it out alive.

In an extraordinary show of solidarity, at the request of AP editors, news organizations around the world agreed not to report the kidnapping during her 20-day captivity. The hope was to reduce the market value of such abductions and discourage copycats. Susman's captors lowered the initial ransom demand of $300,000.

In the end, Susman, now a reporter with Newsday, was freed unconditionally. News reports speculated that Somali clan elders and political factions played a key role in bringing about her release. She later learned that she had been an easy target because her driver was part of the plot.

Instead of accepting a stateside assignment, Susman stayed for seven more years in the hot zones of Africa. "I didn't want to be known as 'the journalist who got kidnapped.' If I stopped doing my work, that would have been my only claim to fame," she says.

In September, Newsday sent her to Central Asia. The following month, disaster struck again. A vehicle in which she was riding flipped over twice and crashed into a wall of rock when the brakes failed along a steep mountain road in Pakistan. She was rushed home for surgery on a badly broken leg. "I'm not going to be in shape to run for my life for a while yet," she jokes.

In a recent telephone conversation with her mother about Daniel Pearl's murder, a jolting reality hit home about her own kidnapping: "That could have been you, Tina," her mother said. "Do you realize how lucky you are?"