The News Sorority Read online

  During a portion of their time in London, Jamie took a position as television host on a British show. According to an American network executive, it wasn’t a good fit. Still, says Bella, “I never got the feeling that their agreement was that Jamie was a househusband. There is absolutely a sense that they have equally important careers—Jamie is passionate about politics, passionate about his time in office—but because of the vagaries of his job, because the Republicans came to office, it was the right time for her to return to England [in 2000]. If you’re a politician at the top of your game as Jamie was, then being out of office—during the Bush years, eight years of having to sit and twiddle your thumbs during the best years of your life—is really tough.” Christiane has been somewhat defensive about Jamie’s time in London while she had such an intense work schedule. When Oprah provocatively quipped, “I read he just gave up everything for you and put on an apron,” Christiane retorted, “He’s not a househusband—that’s a myth. He worked for a private company and wrote speeches. Post 9/11, he became Jamie Rubin, the voice of Americans overseas.” Whether or not that last remark of Christiane’s may be slightly hyperbolic, Bella says: “London was very receptive to Jamie. We Brits can be very snotty about the U.S.A. and its foreign policy or sometimes lack of it, but here was Jamie—brilliant on foreign policy.”

  When Darius was around six months old, Christiane traveled to a desolate part of southern Sudan with Andrew Tkach to do a 60 Minutes report on the fact that there existed a safe, effective medication to cure the area’s great child killer, sleeping sickness, but commercial forces were keeping it unavailable. It was like being in Bosnia again—Christiane risked her life to take the trip. “We were flying into a war zone in a charter plane,” says Andrew. “There were men with machine guns on trucks. The rebels were not going to shoot us, because they’d invited us, but there was no communication in advance. They had all their weaponry on the grass strip”—hence a misidentification of the plane could have been deadly. Once they safely landed, deplaned, and picked up their gear, “the African pilot, who was like a cowboy, took off again and ‘buzzed’ us—he flew just over our heads. He thought it would be fun to give us a haircut.”

  They were now in “the most remote part of Africa”—a shell of a city, Yambio, where “there was not a single moving vehicle, just bombed-out trucks that children used as playgrounds.” From there, they hopped into the Land Rover of a female Colorado doctor, Mickey Richer, the hero of the piece. “We had to go still deeper into the bush,” to a burned-out old clinic where Richer was doing her best to care for the victims of an outbreak of fatal sleeping sickness—with the only drug available, a horribly corrosive one. Christiane and Andrew witnessed children wailing in pain while being injected with malarsoprol, which had been developed forty years earlier. “It was like shooting antifreeze into the children’s veins,” Andrew says. “It was very painful for us to watch. We were viewing extreme human suffering. There was another medicine, DFMO, that was a hundred percent safe and effective.” But, as Christiane herself later said, one of the big companies producing the drug, Aventis, “was stopping making it because it simply wasn’t cost-effective to make it—for poor Africans.” Christiane, Andrew, and Dr. Richer felt sheer outrage, and their goal was to use the 60 Minutes piece to shame the drug company into donating a supply of the drug to the suffering children. And that’s what happened after the story aired, on February 11, 2001: Aventis (soon to be renamed Sanofi-Aventis) donated a five-year supply of DFMO and made a $25 million donation to the World Health Organization. (Eventually the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation took over the funding.)

  Christiane flew back to London in a safer plane than the one she had arrived in. This story out had been worth the risk.

  Working outside the network system as she did, both by virtue of her international location and her personality, Christiane was always a strong advocate for the stories she wanted covered. She was now considered the best-known foreign correspondent on TV, so the uphill fight she’d had with getting Bosnia covered was over. She had a unique relationship with 60 Minutes: She was the first two-network correspondent they’d ever hired, and she could call Don Hewitt any time she wanted—he deeply respected her editorial advocacy. She pushed for stories about crimes against humanity, about the oppression of women and children in developing countries, about unjust and unjustified wars, and about her native Iran.

  In September 2001, Christiane returned to Africa—to Sierra Leone—to shoot a 60 Minutes story. She and Andrew were doing their second story on child soldiers, this time on children who were tattooed by the rebel army, in big block letters on their foreheads and chests, to keep them from running away. Christiane had already interviewed the doctor who was in the process of removing the tattoos, and now, late on a Tuesday afternoon, she was just sitting down with the scarred children themselves—a very delicate task, and a wrenching one.

  The cameras were rolling on Christiane, gently talking to a child, trying to get him to open up about the painful physical disfigurement he’d endured, when an urgent call came in on Christiane’s dedicated CNN satellite phone: “There’s been a plane crash in New York. Please call.” Andrew’s thought was: “What does that have to do with us? There must be CNN crews that can handle a breaking news story in New York.” He called them back and politely but firmly said, “Thank you, but we will continue our work.” Minutes later came a second, more urgent message: “Need Christiane back. May be a major terrorist attack.”

  This, of course, was September 11. CNN chartered a helicopter out of the capital of Sierra Leone, picked her up, and got her to the airport to fly to London, where she reported live—first there, and then in Afghanistan—for her primary network. In Afghanistan for many months after 9/11, camplike conditions prevailed for the reporters. There were no hotels. The crews lived in the security compounds, and all cooked and ate communally. It was a little like Bosnia all over again.

  Soon afterward, Christiane covered Pakistan—Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan, our freshly bribed ally in our brand-new “War on Terror.” In that hotbed of pro-al-Qaeda sympathy, where many of bin Laden’s lieutenants were hiding or in the American line of fire, any reporter could have met the awful fate of Daniel Pearl, especially a “trophy” reporter. “But she went in there,” Parisa Khosravi says. “She went in there with a very tight schedule—a very tight schedule.” Christiane was then in the habit of wrapping up assignments quickly, in order to get home to be with her child. Parisa could empathize, as she, too, would soon have a baby, and their conflicting loyalties were as twinned as their backgrounds. “Regardless of the story, she did not change her absolute commitment and rules about how she raised Darius,” Parisa emphasizes.

  On the heels of her Pakistan coverage, Christiane flew back to Afghanistan, to do two 60 Minutes reports with feminist themes. Terrible conditions still existed for women there, even after the overthrow of the world’s most brutal antiwoman regime. Returning to the country that had been shorn of the Taliban in name only took guts for Christiane, considering that, on her last trip, a Taliban soldier had, for nearly three hours, circled her and repeatedly promised to kill her for being an Iranian and a Western woman. Christiane and a cameraman entered a special wing of the medieval-looking prison that was reserved for women escaping honor killings by their families for such “crimes” as resisting arranged marriages or being seen holding hands with a beau. The women were held there, for indeterminate periods of time, for their own good: to protect them from families culture-bound to kill them. Christiane conducted interviews with women, some of whose faces were protectively obscured. Then she traveled to a home where a twelve-year-old girl answered—“more with her eyes than with words,” Andrew recalls—the sensitive questions Christiane asked about her sexual abuse by the much older man to whom her family had married her off in order to pay off a debt.

  Christiane confronted the new chief justice of a high tribal court about these cases
. Forced marriage was now technically illegal in the post-Taliban Afghanistan, but Sharia was still the law. Right behind the chief justice—as he spoke vaguely of a “new” Afghanistan—was something disconcerting hanging on his office wall: “a whip, for the people publicly whipped for adultery,” Andrew recalls. “He wasn’t ashamed of it.”

  In a final piece in Afghanistan, Christiane interviewed a Tajik family returning from exile to their newly liberated village. The Tajiks were the main ethnic group within the Northern Alliance, loathed by their foes, the Taliban. “We rode on their truck with them”—those memorably televised dilapidated vehicles brimming with fifty feet of roped-together clots of a family’s total belongings. “The towns they were returning to looked like Berlin after the war—not a wall standing, just rubble,” Andrew says. But the ex-exiles were jubilant. One beaming returning resident was thrilled to find his “house”—even though now it was merely a roofless hole. He creakily pulleyed up an inaugural cup of water from a hundred-foot-deep well that was part of a two-thousand-year-old irrigation system on his reclaimed land. How clean could this water be? Nevertheless, the happy returnee “passed the metal cup to Christiane” for her to take a ceremonial sip for the camera, Andrew recalls. “She looks at me for a second: Should I do this? There were obvious sanitary questions—animal waste, for one. And some of those wells had been poisoned” by the departing Taliban. But the Tajik man had “smiled so broadly, Christiane knew if she made a face like, ‘I don’t think so,’ it would have destroyed the relationship and also destroyed the moment on film.”

  So she took the risk. “She drank it. She was a trouper.”

  Still, Christiane was also becoming more demanding—with her CNN stories, anyway, if not necessarily with her 60 Minutes ones produced with Tkach. “She got a reputation as time went on as being somewhat difficult to work with,” David Bernknopf says. “As she got more known and more experienced, she had power—and she insisted that everybody work to her standards. She would not take any crap from anybody back in Atlanta about the direction of a story.” This would prove a double-edged sword, but for now Christiane’s powerful reputation intimidated people. Kathy O’Hearn was now producing CNN’s brand-new American Morning. This tall, commanding woman learned to hold her own with the toughest of male colleagues when, years earlier, she was the second female camera operator ever hired by a network. Now she found Christiane “tough as nails” in dictating what time slot she wanted to be in. “She was not gonna buy anybody else’s characterization of where she should be,” says Kathy, “and if I whispered in her ear, ‘I only have two minutes for you, okay?,’ she’d ignore me and go on for four minutes if that’s what she needed. She cut a daunting figure.” She was tough, cocky, life-risking, in-the-field famous Christiane—and she was being indulged by daily-grind studio-centered Atlanta.

  But the balance of power wouldn’t always stay this way. Coming home to the States would mean playing her game differently. Did Christiane know that?

  One CNN writer at the time notes that “after September 11, Walter Isaacson, [then] president of CNN, was trying to get all the reporters in the Middle East to skew their stories more favorably to Israel. The reporters were complaining, and I remember Christiane just going to the producer—she is pretty fearless; some of the news brass were afraid of her—with a story about a village where the Israelis came in and decimated it. She did one giant story about how bad Israel was, and I think she put a call in to [the Israeli] side but she didn’t include their quote. And there was all this flak” before the story aired. “‘Where was the other side? Why didn’t she have an Israeli point of view?’” The writer laughs, and explains, “The producers just aired it!” Christiane had the power to push a piece through.

  Yet the hubris that Christiane was used to wielding, allowing her to get away with such behavior, would come back to bite her a few years later. “She rarely criticized herself,” says someone who was high up at CNN. “She’ll rarely take the blame. Nothing’s ever her fault.”

  • • •

  CNN DISPATCHED CHRISTIANE to Iraq when Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003. “Of course you’re here. Of course I’m here. How could we not be here?” she and Ron Haviv said when they bumped into each other in Baghdad. The minute the statue of Saddam came down, they and all their colleagues “knew immediately that things were going downhill,” Ron says. “I remember Christiane saying: ‘No intervention on the looting. No martial law . . .’” She and Ron agreed that the U.S military’s failure to implement these measures was a mistake “They won the war easily, but they immediately screwed up the rest of it.”

  Christiane was utterly unafraid of tendering criticism of the Iraq War, even in venerable company. At some point after it became clear that there had been no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—those weapons being, of course, the very pretext for our invasion—and that Judith Miller’s prewar reporting about the weapons for the New York Times had been off the mark, Christiane and Jamie spent a few weeks in the Hamptons. Darius attended a day camp there, as did a child of Emma and Bill Keller, who was then the editor of the Times. While sitting around watching their children play, Emma Keller mentioned complications at the paper that had arisen from the reporting of Judith Miller and others.

  Christiane shot back, “Well, they [those Times reporters] got us into this war, didn’t they?”

  Roughly around this time, Christiane, Andrew, and their 60 Minutes crew journeyed to places that did possess weapons of mass destruction: Russia and Kazakhstan. “The Soviet Union had the biggest biological weapons program, which they continued all the way into the Gorbachev era,” Andrew explains, on the basis of Christiane’s and his investigative work. “The U.S. had a program as well, but we dismantled ours, but the Soviet Union did not. We had access to these Soviet bioweapons, because Americans were paying for their cleanup, and the main testing and production site was in Kazakhstan.

  “We ended up in this room—‘the most dangerous room in Kazakhstan,’ our guide told us—where the biological remnants of altered smallpox pathogens were stored.” Protection against harm or accident was shockingly primitive and minimal. “They’d built a wall around the building, but that was it. The only security was the old Russian system where they melt a candle over a door sealed by two strings to prove that nobody’s opened it.” The twenty-first-century world’s bioweapons were protected by nineteenth-century folk safety.

  Dressed in extremely inadequate protective wear provided by their Kazakh hosts—little more than hospital surgical greens—Christiane, Andrew, and their camera operator entered the chamber. The guide “brought out test tubes with pieces of cotton inside them,” each marked according to the lethal pathogen the tube contained. “He was arguing that, basically, they needed help to secure them.” But while the guide was thundering around making his case, “any of those vials could have been dropped and broken. We looked at each other: What are we doing here?”

  But they knew just what they were doing: “Telling a story.”

  • • •

  AFTER THAT QUIETLY harrowing brush with toxic substances, Christiane embarked, again with Andrew, on a deeply feminist double-subject investigative report in India about the country’s “missing girls”—India’s dearth of female babies—and one bold young woman’s solo fight against the illegal exploitive dowry system, which drives all money from women’s to men’s families’ pockets.

  In their reporting, Christiane and Andrew found a link between two alarming practices. One was the practice of “silent abortions”: the destruction of female fetuses—a custom that, although illegal, was so strong one village in Punjab had virtually “no girls” and had to bring them in from Nepal. Related to this, they found, was the culturally resilient practice—again, against the law, since 1961—of a family’s having to spend its entire life savings to marry off a daughter. With such a dilemma—losing all their money to marry off a daughter—why wouldn’t d
esperate families choose to have only boy babies? Together the stubborn customs helped to create a virtual holocaust of female infants. Christiane stood outside a penitentiary housing convicted mothers-in-law telling 60 Minutes viewers, in her uncompromising voice, that seven thousand to twenty-five thousand young women were murdered every year by “greedy husbands” trying to extort more dowry money. “To avoid crushing debts that go with marriage, many Indian families are now aborting all their girl babies,” she bluntly said.

  The capstone of the piece was footage of a family brawl at the nuptials of a brave young woman named Nisha Sharma, who called off her wedding at the last minute because her groom-to-be’s family was trying to extort more dowry. The powerful piece, “For the Love of Money,” won an Emmy.

  The trafficking of young women from money-starved ex-Soviet states was another under-the-radar crisis that Christiane brought attention to. Moldova had the highest incidence of girls being lured to Mediterranean countries with promises of glamorous jobs, only to be enslaved. Christiane and Andrew found a Moldovan girl who’d been absconded to Italy, where she’d escaped her pimp. “We interviewed her in a shelter, her face hidden,” Andrew says. “Then we went to Moldova and found her family on a farm within a town of wooden houses and horse-drawn carriages. Christiane made an easy rapport with the parents.” When she put them on the phone with their daughter—who could not yet leave her safe house in Italy—“the outpouring of emotions was so raw.”