Imagine a menacing security guard pounding
on your door demanding to be let in immediately. Rather than
protecting yourself, you intentionally answer the door unarmed,
unguarded and completely naked.
Meet Anne Garrels,
National Public Radio’s senior foreign correspondent and
author of the new book Naked in
Baghdad, which chronicles her
reporting assignment in Iraq. “Obviously for NPR, it was
a seminal moment because we were the broadcast voice from Baghdad.” Yet
she really didn’t appreciate that until after she left
Iraq. “I was just too busy lurching from moment to
moment, just trying to get information, get it right, under
fairly difficult circumstances.”
In the run-up to the
war, Garrels was staying at the Palestine Hotel and noticed
that each day more and more of her fellow journalists were
leaving. By the time President Bush declared war, Anne was the
only broadcast journalist among the remaining 16 reporters in
Baghdad.
Using a smuggled
satellite telephone, she filed her daily NPR reports from her
Baghdad hotel room. She used the contraband phone so she would
not have to file her reports from the Information Ministry
— a noisy, crowded building and a U.S. military target.
People caught using
illegal phones were either expelled or detained in solitary
confinement. So Garrels filed her reports naked in a desperate
effort to allow herself time to hide the phone during the
hotel’s daily sweep by intelligence officers looking for
illegal equipment used to broadcast out of Iraq. “I
figured that if I answered the door naked, I’d get a few
minutes to shut the door, hide the phone, throw on a dress that
I had laid out ready for such an event, and then let them
[security guards] in,” she explained.
For Anne, it was a
long road to Baghdad. She graduated in 1972 with a major in
Russian from Harvard. “I did not start out wanting
to be a journalist. I worked for a publishing company when I
got out of college. But the world began to change,
opportunities began to open up, and I guess I was pushy enough
to take advantage of them and one thing led to another and I
became a journalist,” she recalled.
Before joining NPR in
1988, she was the state department correspondent for NBC News
and for a decade was Moscow bureau chief and Central American
correspondent at ABC News. She won the duPont-Columbia Award in
1996 for her reporting in the former Soviet Union, and the
Whitman Bassow Award for her report on global water issues.
As a journalist she
was able to report the predicaments facing places such as
Tiananmen Square, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Israel.
“I did not start out as a war correspondent, but, with
the breakout of ethnic wars, I inadvertently became a war
reporter,” she said. “Every war is different, and
every war has its own complications”
Anne sees journalists
as unarmed observers when they enter the war-torn regions. In
Iraq, Anne encountered someone who was shot and she was unable
to find help for the individual. She said that “being
unarmed makes it difficult to be of assistance in an extremely
violent area and a reporter cannot walk the streets looking to
help people. But what journalists can do is raise questions and
inform.”
Anne said there is a
big difference between reporting for television networks and
NPR. “I certainly enjoy being a reporter far more at NPR,
because I’m given the time to explore issues far more
in-depth than I was at the networks,” she said.
To assure Naked in Baghdad was
timely, Anne spent a frantic month writing it and it was
released in September. “I had always thought
I’d write a book about the former Soviet Union, something
I know a great deal about,” Garrels said, “[But]
this was really a kind of ‘emotional burp’ coming
out of the war and I realized that I had something to
say.”
