The News Sorority Read online

  Another feminist feature Christiane and Andrew produced was a profile of Iranian human rights and women’s rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, just before she won her 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. Taking advantage of the brief thaw in Iranian-U.S. rancor during Khatami’s presidency (which would end in August 2005), Christiane and Andrew were able to shoot footage in a courtroom where Ebadi was representing a divorced woman who had lost custody to her husband, per the Islamic law. Ebadi’s client’s child had been tortured and killed by a stepbrother and stepmother. Revealing the Islamic Republic’s laws was risky for Christiane, who already had a complicated relationship with her country of origin, but she had to take that risk.

  Andrew always saw a bit of charming proprietariness, and vulnerability, in Christiane whenever they reported in her native country. She instinctively knew how to react during Muslim religious ceremonies, such as the passion plays held during Ashura, the celebration of Shiite martyrs. On one such occasion, “we went to a big barn far in the country—we had to drive a whole day to get there—and Christiane, all covered up, was sitting next to a woman who was hugging her emotionally. Christiane played right along.” And “she was proud of the cuisine. We would go to restaurants and she would order for everybody. She would ask me, ‘What do you think of this place?’” Andrew felt “she was asking: ‘Is my enthusiasm for Iran objective? Is there enough appetite for foreign news here that isn’t just about headlines but is also about the humanity?’” She loved her native country. She was of it.

  Pierre Bairin, who produced her CNN stories there, perceived that the “Iranian government had a love-hate relationship with Christiane. She’s a famous Iranian abroad, so they like that. But they know she’s going to ask the tough questions. They’re kind of proud of her, but at the same time they don’t like her because she’s not saying the party line.”

  • • •

  ON MARCH 11, 2004, Christiane rushed to Madrid, where 191 people had been killed in a terrorist attack on a train by way of backpack bombs. Whether or not the culprits were radical Basque separatists or members of al-Qaeda was long investigated and tormented over—and never definitively established. The attack made Europe unsettlingly mindful of its even greater vulnerability to terrorist attacks than America was because of its proximity to the seats of Islamic terrorism and its countries’ multicultural makeup.

  Two months later, in May 2004, Christiane flew to Africa again for one of her most touching, powerful investigatives. Just as the UN was deeming the conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, a genocide, she pushed her way into an extremely closed-off region to report on what was transpiring there. Ron Haviv, himself an expert at sneaking into hot spots, marvels: “Just getting into Darfur is not easy! The logistics of working in a place as remote as Darfur were daunting.” Christiane herself said: “Darfur is barely accessible to outsiders. With great effort, the UN and Human Rights Watch [had] gained access.” Ron continues: “It takes a long time to get visas—stacks of paperwork” are involved. “I’m sure she had to charm lots of government officials to get in. And then to broadcast her report live—there’s a whole bunch of technical stuff that had to happen. And it’s expensive. The fact that she could convince CNN to spend the money on a story that obviously very few people cared about, even though it’s kind of become a cause célèbre to some degree—that was pretty impressive. It was an indication of her reputation, to be able to say: ‘I care about this story, and this is worth people covering, and worth making sure that people understand.’”

  On May 12, 2004, Christiane stood outside the Farchana refugee camp in Chad—already crowded with seven thousand refugees, while more were flooding in—and brought this catastrophe to the world in her familiar impassioned tones: “The hellish scene in northern Chad where people are fleeing the vicious but little-publicized war in western Sudan’s Darfur region has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. . . . Children are dying of preventable causes, like diarrhea or lack of water and health care.” She spoke of the systematic rapes of women and girls, the burned-down villages, “the ethnic cleansing conducted by the Sudanese army.” Ethnic cleansing: She would always report on an atrocity that included that ultimate heinousness.

  This was Christiane at her best—and her most effective. “I’m sure people donated after that report,” says Ron Haviv. Parisa Khosravi says that the fact that “people do respond to these stories, on so many different levels”—the United States, the EU, the UN, NGOs, grassroots organizations—is what kept Christiane flying off from London to do them. “She really takes exception to people saying, ‘Americans don’t care about international news,’” Parisa says. “She is all about fighting that perception,” which can lead to American networks saying, “‘Okay, then we won’t cover international news.’” She refused to let that perception become a self-fulfilling prophecy—and that’s largely what the immensely challenging first five years of her working motherhood were all about.

  Toward the end of 2004, Christiane and Andrew journeyed to Fallujah, a city in Iraq that had become, in Andrew’s words, “a hotbed of radicalism,” therefore leading to a number of casualties perpetrated, often unintentionally, on Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military. “What the army would call ‘collateral damage,’” says Andrew. The U.S. military occupied Fallujah a month after the March 2003 invasion; bloodshed ensued; a year later Iraqi forces reseized it, leading to two reinvasions by U.S. forces. It was not an easy place for a member of the U.S. military to be safe—or to not veer into hair-trigger reactions or the temptation to go rogue.

  Digging out a story in which the U.S. military was, accidentally, to blame for the deaths of children might have been emotionally awkward for Christiane, given that “she had almost a fan club in the American military” by now, says Andrew. Servicemen and -women “were constantly stopping her to take pictures with her, to get her autograph. She was a star to them, and I think it’s because she empathizes with the grunts. She knows what war is like. She knows it’s not what any soldier finds pleasure in but, rather, is forced to do. But even in the situation where there is a natural empathy between Christiane and soldiers, it wouldn’t stop her” from being objective and aggressive to find the truth, however badly it reflected on U.S. soldiers.

  Christiane and Andrew had heard a rumor: A family of Iraqi chicken wholesalers who supplied food to U.S. soldiers had been driving to market, had been mistaken by U.S. soldiers for insurgents, and had been fired upon by the soldiers. The U.S. military spokesman denied the rumor. “We decided to investigate,” Andrew says. He and Christiane were driven around the armed-to-the-teeth town by a soldier with an AK-47. Once Christiane and Andrew got confirmation of the incident from a pro-U.S. Iraqi police chief, the U.S. military spokesman conceded that the chicken truck siege might have happened, but that it was an accident. This did nothing to lessen the fact that Fallujah was dangerous to U.S. soldiers and contractors. Andrew: “This was the same place where, a couple of weeks later, Iraqis strung up four U.S. contractors on the bridge and burned them.”

  Aside from those found dead in the impetuous gunfire the Americans had rained upon the chicken truck, two boys—one, the chicken purveyor’s son—were missing. Christiane and Andrew visited the family of one of the missing boys and filmed the conversation. “They were extremely gracious,” Andrew says. After further prevaricating, the U.S. military spokesman admitted that children might have been killed in the assault on the truck. Christiane eventually found the military hospital where one of the family’s two missing boys—listed as an “enemy combatant”—was lying in a bed, his legs shattered. The boy was compassionately interviewed. Between the family, the badly injured boy, the equivocating U.S. military spokesman, the local Iraqi chief of police, the streets full of tense armed soldiers, both Iraqi and American—between all these diverse players in the web of conflict—“our report showed how war touches all sides.”

  Tragedy would eventually touch the cameraman—P
aul Douglas—who filmed that scene as well. A year and a half later, he and four others would be killed by an IED in the Sunni Triangle. Douglas would be the first black journalist to be killed covering the war in Iraq; his colleague, CBS reporter Kimberly Dozier—seriously injured in that same attack—was one of a number of female journalists to be badly wounded in the same conflict in which Christiane risked but escaped that same fate.

  • • •

  A NEWS FLASH erupted on July 7, 2005, that was jarringly close to home for Christiane. During Monday’s morning rush hour, the London subway was attacked by four bombs—ignited, in quick succession, by members of a local al-Qaeda cell. Right after that, a London bus was blown up by a fifth bomb. Fifty-two people, and four of the bombers, were killed, and seven hundred were injured. Christiane did stand-up and reporting on this terrorist attack for CNN, and the cross fire of anger that pulsed within her and her family’s home city—both the radical Islamic cells and mosques operating openly there and the outright discrimination against foreign-born Muslims by many native Britons—moved her, so much so that this woman born to a British mother and a Muslim father decided to produce a documentary on the phenomenon. She began work with CNN producers on the film, which would be titled The War Within. As Andrew Tkach, who had now moved over to CNN and produced the project with her, describes it, it was about “the war within the Islamic community in the UK—the fight between forces of moderation and extremism, and the Islamophobia that was becoming a force. We followed a former radical who was now working to bring people to their senses. Christiane feels strongly that those are the forces that need to be supported.” While working on this project, she began talks with CNN to produce yet another series of documentaries exploring the bellicose absolutism in each of the major religions: how what salves and redeems—religious faith—is also a creator of divisiveness, hate, and warfare.

  While she was working on the first documentary and conceiving the second, she flew to Kenya to undertake, for CNN, another of her powerful advocatory investigatives, “Where Did All the Parents Go?,” about the devastating orphaning of young African children due to the continent’s AIDS epidemic. “There is a big prejudice” in American news “about Africa and about telling news from Africa,” Christiane has said. It was one of her prime missions to bust through that prejudice, that aversion to news about the continent’s desperate need and pathos.

  “According to the United Nations, there are 12 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and in four short years that number will skyrocket to 18.4 million,” she now announced, looking somberly into the camera. She continued, explaining that, whereas pregnant American and European women have medication that can prevent the passage of the AIDS virus to their babies, only 10 percent of pregnant women in Africa had access to such treatment. This, a doctor she interviewed rightly said, was simply “unacceptable death.”

  The stories she was trotting the globe to report had a clear theme. Consider: The twelve million and counting AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, themselves at risk of infection and death. The frightened boy with the shattered legs and the dead brother in the Fallujah hospital. The child soldiers in Sierra Leone with tattoos on their foreheads. The children wailing from excruciating treatment for sleeping sickness in Sudan. The trafficked Moldovan girl telling her story in her Italian safe house. The Iranian divorcee whose child had been tortured to death in her ex-husband’s mandated custody. The raped twelve-year-old Afghani child bride hiding from almost assured honor murder. The massive number of female fetuses aborted, and the dowry-blackmailed women and their families, in India. The hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi children made ill and killed by arsenic in their water. It was no coincidence that Christiane became a champion of children and women after she became a mother, Parisa Khosravi believes. “You can’t help it,” Parisa says. “I’m a mother. I certainly saw stories differently after I became a mother, because you can ‘put’ your own child there. Christiane has always been committed to stories about women and children, but having Darius probably reinforced her even more.”

  Parisa saw Christiane juggle the stories and mothering during these years, with increasing intensity and stress. “She is an incredibly hands-on mother,” Parisa says. “She knows every hour where Darius is and what he is doing and his programs. She’s talking to every caregiver and the teacher—and the fact that she’s managed to have this kind of international field career, with its demands, and get a good few years of it with a child—she has talked about it to me. And I saw the change. She would not take every assignment.” For those she took, “she would go and stay at the length” it required to fastidiously complete the reporting, but “it was not endless, and she and Jamie coordinated it so one of them was always there with Darius.” Parisa is adamant: “Regardless of the story, Christiane did not change her absolute commitment to and rules about how she raised Darius.”

  Christiane herself has described the abiding push-pull during dangerous assignments this way: “I’ve said, ‘Please, God, let me get through this and I’ll never do this again.’ And then I do it again.”

  • • •

  IN JANUARY 2005, two months from Darius’s fifth birthday, Christiane had a chance to do an exclusive interview for 60 Minutes that would bring her closer to what was beginning to feel like a necessary goal: an easier working life, without the need for such regular bargainings with God. Viktor Yushchenko, a handsome reformist, had run for president of Ukraine. His wife, Katherine, was a reverse immigrant, an American who had moved back to that once proud country whose capital was Kiev: Her parents had been USSR-era Ukrainian immigrants who had fled to Chicago, where Katherine grew up. Months before the election, in early September, Yushchenko fell mysteriously and critically ill. He recovered enough of his health to continue the campaign, but one symptom was durable: His smooth facial skin was horribly pocked and disfigured; it was as if he’d instantly become another man, thirty years older.

  Then came the December election. Yushchenko’s rival, the government-favored Viktor Yanukovych, “won,” but there was widespread belief that the election had been rigged, and it was proved that Yushchenko’s near death and disfigurement had been the result of dioxin poisoning. An idealistic Orange Revolution—strikes, protests, civil disobedience—sprang up to support reform, honesty, and the defaced Yushchenko. In a second runoff election in January, Yushchenko was deemed the winner by a healthy margin.

  Christiane’s exclusive with Viktor and Katherine—set in a historic Kiev cathedral that had been destroyed by Stalin but had been rebuilt as a symbol of the new, free Ukraine—was a kind of chance to audition to become a Barbara, a Diane, a Katie: the handsomely paid, serious but accessible, heartstring-tugging star female interviewer gently probing a simultaneously specifically personal and also resonantly inspiring story out of the political hero of the hour and his wife. It was an audition for a next step she wanted—one without the nonstop travel, the constant separation from Darius, the danger. How would she do on it?

  She put her characteristically slightly confrontational touch on the questions. “You challenged people about your face,” she said. “You said that your face is everything that is wrong with Ukraine. What did you mean by that?” He answered, “People cry when they see my face, but my country has also been disfigured. Now we’ll bring both back to health.” Then he said, of the face in the mirror, with a wistfulness evident even in the sentence structure, “This Yushchenko I’m still not used to.” The interview was strong. Yushchenko’s last line—“To die is not very original, but to live and carry on, that’s special”—was proof of greater Russia’s stubborn genius for literary expression. But in it Christiane revealed what would prove to be a limitation to her advancement from field correspondent to anchor/analyst: her lack of warmth, when it was needed, with government leaders. She was deeply sympathetic with suffering children; her clipped mien instantly evaporated in their presence. But with powerful officials she was
crisp—and crispness was not always the optimal mode with interviewees, even with heads of state. Barbara, Diane, and Katie knew this in their slightly more emotive, domestic-broadcast-seasoned bones; they could match their interviewees’ level of sentiment expertly. The annoying double standard—that women doing hard and soft interviews had to tread water in that delicate netherworld of the interrogative-but-also-sympathetic: Barbara, Diane, and Katie knew it; they had lived it. Diane had threaded the needle with Whitney Houston, Barbara with Monica Lewinsky, Katie with the Columbine families. Christiane—who’d been an outsider—didn’t get it quite as instinctively. Yushchenko’s responses were more reflective and musing than was Christiane’s tone of questioning. For an interviewer of an injured political hero, this is not a good thing.

  Christiane’s AIDS orphans piece aired in July 2006. Around this time, she and Parisa began having deeper talks than they’d had before. “I don’t want to say ‘philosophical,’ but ‘What does it all mean?’” was a question they mulled. For one thing, leaving Darius behind was so very hard, but the need to tell the stories was also deeply compelling, on a public service level. For another, there was the clash of realities. Christiane and Parisa talked about how “shocking to the system” it was to be “in one part of the world that is incredibly devastated and then catch a flight—and five hours later be in London at a café. You think: ‘Look what I just left! Why do I have this opportunity and those people don’t?’ And you look at the conditions in the third world countries. And you stop yourself if you’re ungrateful or angry, next to what these people are going through. And that is a lot where” their conversations started to go: “What is that bigger purpose? And, with that perspective, how do we do things differently? It’s doing a gut check on yourself continually: ‘Yes, we’ve given voice to the voiceless in so many places around the world, and that’s wonderful, but: Am I doing what I’m meant to be doing?”