Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991                   TAG: 9103240241
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BY PETER ARNETT
DATELINE: JERUSALEM                                LENGTH: Long

HOW I GOT SADDAM/ CNN'S MAN IN BAGHDAD TELLS WHY HE STAYED IN IRAQ

I was mobbed. Buses stopped, disgorging passengers to shake my hand. The Palestinians embraced me as a brother who had shared the hell of war with their idol, Saddam Hussein.

Then I walked into West Jerusalem, to the Orthodox Jewish community of Mea Shearim - a 30-minute stroll through the front lines of ethnic and religious hatreds.

I was mobbed again. The Jews who pulled me into their little storefronts, patting me affectionately on the back, wanted details of the execution of Iraq, and greeted me as a survivor from an evil place.

I take note of this personally, this spontaneous reaction as I walked by, my dark glasses and raised collar inadequate protection against recognition. My initial reaction has been to yield to it, to be swept up in the emotion of the circus - to obligingly give every interview requested of me, to kiss my fiancee yet again for the photographers. My colleagues, with whom I covered this and other wars, are as astonished as I am that I am now the subject of their fervid pursuits.

But as my moment of fame ticks by, a more pertinent issue persists: What hath CNN wrought in the worlds of communications, of diplomacy, of politics?

The debate that flared during the war about the social and political effects of an omnipresent video news service will only intensify with future crises, but in the meantime its personal effects still eddy around me. It's not just the passersby in the streets who want to share the postwar moment, it's Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan, or Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens, who are on the phone chatting about Baghdad and the future - while on hold are officials from Niger to New Zealand.

My weeks in Baghdad were spent oblivious to much of the reaction to CNN's war coverage; the information flow was necessarily one-way. It's only now that I am learning some of the depths of vindictiveness and slander that greeted my reportage - some from public figures with whom I've been acquainted for years.

The reason I stayed in Baghdad is quite simple: Reporting is what I do for a living. I made the full commitment to journalism years ago. If you ask, are some stories worth the risk of dying for, my answer is yes - and many of my journalist friends have died believing that. I revere their memories, and I would betray them if I did anything less than continue a full commitment to coverage.

There was no question about CNN staying in Baghdad - it became a question of who would do it. I had resigned myself to covering the Israeli side of the war - an important side of the story, though with less potential drama than the battlefield itself. I was summoned to Baghdad at the 11th hour unexpectedly when it became clear to CNN that the Iraqis might permit our coverage beyond the Jan. 15 deadline. Would I help out?

Upon my arrival in Baghdad on the eve of war I saw a repeat of what happened during the fall of Saigon. Reporters were bailing out for various reasons. I watched with wonder as this rich journalistic prize fell into fewer and fewer hands. Four days after the war began, only 17 journalists remained from the hundreds who had covered Baghdad.

Everybody out, the Iraqis said, except CNN. Even CNN isn't sure why they made that decision. Perhaps it is because CNN alone is seen globally. What the Iraqis told us is that they had found our coverage since August to have been "fair."

Me and my censor

Eventually, there was only me; the growing intensity of the war made the continued presence of a CNN producer and technician dangerously superfluous. Also at the Al Rashid Hotel was a Palestinian team that provided a flow of videotape sent overland to Amman, Jordan.

My means of communication was the INMARSAT phone, a suitcase-sized link with the world that I'd drag out each evening and aim at the heavens, while dialing into the International Desk at CNN Atlanta. At my end, we crouched in the chill of the evening, "we" being myself and at least one Iraqi censor, or "minder" as these censors came to be called. I prepared a simple, two-minute script that the minder approved, and that I then read into the phone.

But from the first day I established a procedure that I believe saved my credibility and made my presence in Baghdad a valuable one. That procedure was a question-and-answer routine between the CNN anchor of the hour and myself that followed each prepared script. The Iraqis were uncomfortable with it from the beginning because they could control neither the questions nor my answers.

The only rule I followed in these Q&A sessions was that I would not discuss matters of military security. Thus I didn't talk about the Scud missiles I'd seen barreling northwards on camouflaged trucks; I didn't mention the anti-aircraft weapons on buildings around the Al Rashid Hotel and I gave no details on military targets.

But that left a gray area of social change, of city life, of political and economic insights that I could glean from the daily trips we were permitted to make under supervision in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

Why did the Iraqis allow these Q&A sessions? I told them from the beginning that I was risking my life in Baghdad, but I was not prepared to risk my credibility. I accepted the limitations of military security, I said, but I needed the freedom to better explore the phenomenon of being in a capital at war.

Our arguments were long and sometimes heated. I sometimes had my bags half-packed to leave. But my views prevailed and the Q&As continued right up to my last broadcast, when I talked about finally being ordered out of Baghdad.

Chasing Saddam

Several of my stories were the subject of controversy in the West too. My coverage of the bombing of what the Iraqis identified as an infant-formula factory, and of the bunker in which hundreds of sleeping civilians were killed, were, I have learned, the subject of debate here.

But perhaps the most curious circumstances surrounding any story I did in Baghdad involved my interview with Saddam Hussein, conducted in the second week of the war. The promise of such an interview had kept Bernard Shaw in Baghdad during the war's opening days, and CNN president Tom Johnson had been urging me to pursue it.

I emphasized to officials from the ministries of foreign affairs and information the need for a coherent explanation of Iraqi policy at this stage of the war. We had been dependent on the patriotic tirades of Radio Baghdad, echoed in the daily press, for a sense of government direction.

Late one afternoon in one of the darkened recesses of the Al Rashid lobby, I was told I had an "important" interview. I presumed it was with the information minister, Latif Jassim, until five burly young men in suits and ties escorted me to a room on the second floor, asked me to undress completely, and began checking every pocket and seam of my clothing. My wallet, watch, pen and notebook, handkerchief and comb were put into a plastic bag and taken away. They were even reluctant to return my trouser belt until I objected.

Now fully dressed, I was taken into the bathroom and my hands were immersed in a disinfectant carried by one of the group. This was either an extreme form of security, or else, I mused, Saddam has a Howard Hughes-like phobia of germs. Then I was escorted back to the lobby, and instructed neither to talk to nor touch anyone.

As I waited in the gloom, my CNN colleagues arrived after a three-day overland trip from Amman with a portable satellite video transmitter and tons of other gear. As they joyfully descended on me, I had to shout, "Don't touch me!" When they later phoned CNN's international editor Eason Jordan and told him what had happened, he told them that maybe I was angry that they were late.

I was taken to a late model, black BMW and sat alone in the back seat as the driver crossed the July 14 Bridge and drove into the darkened city. It soon became clear he was checking to see if he was being followed, taking elaborate maneuvers to throw off any possible pursuer, rounding traffic circles three and four times, weaving in and out of poor neighborhoods.

After an hour of driving, we pulled up at a comfortable bungalow on a prosperous-looking street where all the houses looked the same. A single attendant came to the car and took me inside. The living room had been transformed into a makeshift presidential suite, with brocaded chairs, official seals and three Iraqi Television cameras - all brightly lit by power from a humming generator. Saddam's closest aides were there: his chief of staff, a nervous, obsequious young man; his personal secretary, who sported a hairpiece; his young interpreter, who was familiar from the 16 previous TV interviews Saddam had given the Western press.

While we waited for the president, the group discussed in English recent programming they'd seen on CNN monitors in government ministries in Baghdad, laughing at pictures they'd seen of me operating the satellite telephone in the garden of the hotel. Only the information minister knew my name. Saddam's secretary asked me to spell it twice before introducing me to the president when he arrived. Saddam shook my disinfected hand. I think that all he knew about me was that I was the man from CNN.

En route to the interview I resolved to be as tough in my questioning as the situation would allow. I was not intimidated by the prospect of encountering the man many had called "The Butcher of Baghdad." I figured he could do no worse to me than the constant bombing of Baghdad was threatening to do.

Saddam speaks

Saddam unsettled me initially when he appeared. I had expected him to be in uniform, but he wore a mohair topcoat over a well-tailored dark blue suit, set off with a fashionable flower-print tie. He made small talk by asking, through his interpreter, why I had stayed in Baghdad. I replied it had become a force of habit because this was my 17th war. He expressed the hope it would be the last I would have to cover, and asked if I had "a long list of questions" to present to him. I answered melodramatically that I intended to ask him the questions to which the world wanted answers. He smiled, nodded his head and invited me over to the cameras. "Let's go," he said.

I sat down opposite Saddam knowing this would be the most important interview of my life. I had not based my journalistic career on interviews, but over the years I'd undertaken a variety of them, from Fidel Castro to Yasser Arafat to Pham Van Dong. The day before I traveled to Baghdad, I had interviewed Israel's Yitzhak Shamir. He shook his head in disbelief when I told him some CNN staffers intended to remain in Baghdad through the Jan. 15 deadline for Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait. "They want to write books or something?" he wondered. At the time I was not aware of my own travel plans.

I knew the Saddam interview might shed important light on the course of the developing war. It might also have an impact on the course of my journalistic career if I didn't set the right tone. As I began my first question, I locked eyes with him, and stayed unblinking throughout. I was as undeferential as possible. From the corner of my eye I could see his aides stiffening and muttering, but the president seemed relaxed and at the end thanked me for the conversation, posing with me for pictures that aides sent over to the hotel a few days later.

After Saddam left the interview room, I had an argument over the videotape. There were three angles photographed by Iraqi TV cameras, and Saddam's secretary wanted to let me have them the following day. I wanted to take them with me immediately, because I was concerned that they might try to censor the material. We compromised; I would take delivery of the tapes within two hours at the hotel, dub them and return them to Iraqi TV.

We planned to transmit the interview as our first video feed from Baghdad, and our two technicians struggled through the night to assemble the equipment. But by late morning, I discovered that the Iraqi officials had changed their minds about using the uplink for the interview. One told me, "the moment you start sending pictures of Saddam from here the Americans will bomb the satellite and the hotel."

This was the continuation of the argument over whether we should stay in the hotel at all. I had resisted initial attempts to move me to a "safe house" somewhere in the suburbs because there was no way I would give up the panoramic view of the air war from the hotel terraces. The government had also attempted to resist my use of the satellite phone to transmit daily reports in the earlier stages of the war. I argued successfully that the allies were more interested in hearing Saddam than in silencing him, and by late evening the first pictures were beaming to CNN headquarters in Atlanta - and I was praying that my confidence in the coalition's curiosity was not misplaced.

Just don't label me

I have not seen enough of the commentary on CNN's coverage of the gulf war to react to it. I know I have been criticized, and that many colleagues defended CNN's decision to allow me to stay in Baghdad. For that I am sincerely grateful. Later, in consultation with CNN, I intend to make a thorough examination of the criticism, and if necessary, a defense.

Criticism I accept - and expect. It's the labeling that angers me. For covering the Vietnam War the way we did, many of us were labeled "enemy sympathizers," if not communists. For being in Baghdad when I was, I was again labeled a sympathizer, if not a fascist.

I'd go anywhere for a story if there was enough viewer interest and CNN wanted coverage. I'd go to Hell itself for a story if someone important down there wanted to be interviewed. But then, the labelers would probably declare I was down there because I was an atheist.

Last week, Arnett defended his reporting from Baghdad as vital to the American public. "I have no apologies," he told a crowd of hundreds of journalists at the National Press Club in Washington.