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There is no truth in Beirut, only versions.
—Bill Farrell
Middle East correspondent
THE NEW YORK TIMES
In the winter of 1983, my friends David Zucchino of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Bill Barrett of the Dallas Times Herald hopped into a taxicab in West Beirut and rushed up to the Druse village of Hammana in the Shouf Mountains to track down some senior Druse officers who had just defected from the Lebanese army. At the time, their defection was a big story—a big story which my two colleagues wanted to get firsthand. When they arrived in their taxi at the outskirts of Hammana, David told me later, their driver just sped headlong into town, not noticing a dilapidated Druse checkpoint that they whizzed right through.
“The Druse went berserk,” recalled David, “but our taxi driver just kept driving along, and we were saying to ourselves, ‘Hey, this place looks interesting.’ Then all of a sudden we see in the rearview mirror this car coming after us filled with all these guys with big beards flapping and guns poking out the windows. They cut us off. We pulled our car over and they all surrounded us, shouting and shaking their fists, yapping away in Arabic, and sticking their guns into the car. We thought, Oh shit, we are in deep trouble. We immediately began screaming ‘Sahafi, sahafi’ [Arabic for journalist] and flashed our Druse press credentials.”
The Druse militiamen examined the press cards, read them every which way, and then entered into a long discussion among themselves.
“I started to get real nervous—I mean, real nervous,” said David. “I thought maybe they were discussing who gets the honor of putting a bullet through our heads first. Then suddenly the one with the biggest beard sticks his head back into the car and says, “Which one of you is from Dallas?”
Barrett said, “I am.”
At that point the bearded militiaman, his eyes flashing fury, stuck his AK-47 rifle into the car, pointed it toward Barrett, and asked with a perfectly straight face: “Who shot J.R.?”
A second later the gunmen all erupted into howls of laughter and told the two reporters, “Welcome, welcome to our town.”
It was from incidents such as this that I derived my first rule of Beirut reporting: If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have come. A reporter must never lose his sense of humor in a place such as Beirut—not only because he will go crazy if he does, but, more important, because he will miss something essential about the Lebanese themselves. Even in their darkest moments, and maybe because of them, the Lebanese never forget how to laugh.
But being a reporter in Beirut, I quickly discovered, required something more than an appreciation of life’s absurdities. Since I was sent to Beirut by UPI only eleven months after being hired, it was on the job there that I really learned how to be a journalist. In some ways, Beirut was the ideal place to practice journalism, in other ways the most frustrating, but in all ways it was unforgettable.
What made reporting so difficult from Beirut was the fact that there was no center—not politically, not physically; since there was no functioning unified government, there was no authoritative body which reporters could use to check out news stories and no authoritative version of reality to either accept or refute; it was a city without “officials.” After the civil war broke out in 1975, the center in Lebanon was carved up into a checkerboard of fiefdoms and private armies, each with its own version of reality, which it broadcast through its own radio station and its own spokesmen. The pure white light of Truth about any given news story in Lebanon was always refracted through this prism of factions and fiefdoms and then splashed on one’s consciousness like a spectrum of light hitting a wall. As a reporter you had to learn to take a little ray of red from here and a little ray of blue from there and then paint in story form the picture that you thought most closely approximated reality. Rarely did you ever have the satisfaction of feeling that you really got to the bottom of something. It was like working in a dark cave with the aid of a single candle. Just when you thought you had spotted the white light of Truth, you would chase it, only to discover that it was someone else, also holding a candle, also looking for the light.
A few reporters found this news environment so bewildering that they began to try to impose an official-sounding order on it themselves. They created light where there was none. They didn’t make up the news, but they came up with some rather interesting attributions for what they found. For instance, one wire service used to attribute information about fighting in Beirut to “a Beirut police spokesman who could not be identified according to government regulations.” There was no Beirut police spokesman, and even if there was, there were no government regulations which would have inhibited him from giving his name. This same wire service occasionally used to write political stories attributed to “leftist sources.” What is a leftist source in Beirut? I used to wonder. A person who is left-handed? Half of West Beirut’s populace qualified as leftists. Quoting leftist sources in Beirut was about as meaningful as quoting “Jewish sources” in Israel, but reporters cited them to give their stories some authoritative quality in a city without officials.
Yet it was the very same chaos which made reporting from Beirut so stimulating. Being a reporter in Beirut was like being at a play in which the audience could, at any time, hop right up onto the stage and interview the actors as they were reciting their lines or acting out some dramatic scene. “Say, Hamlet, how do you feel about your stepfather?” There were no ushers to hold you back, no press pools or limits on access.
Because of this I got to witness encounters and to describe scenes that would have been hidden away behind an official shroud in any normal country. On the second day of the Israeli invasion, my assistant Mohammed and I drove down to the Bekaa Valley in an attempt to confirm whether Syria and Israel had begun fighting each other. No one really knew for sure at that early stage in the war. As we got near Lake Karun in south Lebanon, we saw a line of six 130 mm cannon firing toward the Israeli border. Several men in ill-fitting business suits, wholly out of context on a battlefield, were standing under a nearby tree watching the guns fire. They all had the look of Syrian intelligence officers. We drove our car over to them and quietly asked, “Excuse us, are those Syrian guns firing?”
“Yes,” they answered.
“And are those Israeli shells landing over there?” we asked, pointing to a hillside some 500 yards away.
“Yes,” they nodded. We then ducked into our car and sped back to Beirut with our story before they had a chance to ask, “Who were those two guys?”
Unfortunately, when reporters were left to probe to the limits of their own bravery, it meant inevitably that some went too far. During Israel’s 1978 incursion into south Lebanon, up to the Litani River, David Hirst of The Manchester Guardian, Ned Temko ofThe Christian Science Monitor, and Doug Roberts of the Voice of America rode down from Beirut to observe the fighting. They were told by Palestinian guerrillas in Sidon that the PLO had just driven the Israeli army out of the nearby village of Hadatha. The three reporters decided to check out the story and found that actually the Israeli army had driven the Palestinians out of Hadatha and then vacated it. When Israeli gunners saw the three journalists drive in, they thought they were returning guerrillas and fired rounds at them on and off for eight hours. The next day the three “surrendered” to a unit of Israeli soldiers sitting on a nearby hilltop and were taken back to Israel for their own safety. As soon as they crossed the border, an Israel Radio reporter walked up to David Hirst and asked him how it felt to be rescued by the Israeli army.
“After they stopped shooting at us,” answered David, “it was fine.”
Access, of course, was not totally unrestricted all the time. When going to visit any front, it was always wise, and often necessary, to obtain press credentials from the militia on whose side you would be viewing the action. The PLO, the Phalangists, the Druse, and the Shiite Amal militia all issued their own press credentials. Sometimes their spokesmen would travel around the front carrying the rubber stamp of their organization and an ink pad just in case you needed some credentials on the fly. Since reporters often traveled between different fronts on any given day, some of them kept their identity papers from the “leftist” militias in their left-hand pocket and from the “rightist” militias in their right-hand pocket, just to make sure they didn’t get mixed up and present Phalangist identity papers at a PLO checkpoint, for example, which would have been considered bad manners, to say the least.
What passed for a press card in Beirut, though, would not exactly get you into the White House. Robin Wright, an intrepid American reporter working in Beirut on a book about radical Shiite groups, used to have to spend a great deal of time moving in and out of Shiite neighborhoods controlled by the radical Hizbullah, “Party of God,” militia. For a woman, this could be a dangerous enterprise. So one day, Robin told me, she went up to a senior Hizbullah official and said, “Look, I’m an American. I am trying to write this book that will help us understand you people, but I am very nervous about driving around here without a press pass. Can’t you do something for me?”
Hizbullah knew more about kidnapping journalists than accrediting them. “The guy really didn’t know from press cards, yet he wanted to be accommodating,” said Robin, “so he walked over to this wall full of these fearsome Hizbullah posters, with pictures of clenched fists and people holding up AK-47s. He pulled one of the posters loose, ripped off the bottom corner with the organization’s emblem on it, and handed it to me. He said, Just show people this emblem and you won’t have any problems. I said, Look, can’t you date it or write your name on it or something? He just shrugged. But it worked! A few days later I was stopped at a Hizbullah checkpoint. I pulled out my poster fragment and they waved me right through, all smiles. Of all the press passes I brought back from Beirut, that is the one I have taken the best care of. You never know when it might come in handy.”
I had my own particular identity problem. It could crop up at any time, and there was no ID card I could flash to solve it. One day, for instance, I myself was riding with David Zucchino in a taxi up the Beirut–Damascus highway to cover some fighting between Druse and Phalangists in the Shouf. Halfway up the mountains, we came to a hastily erected checkpoint at which teenage boys with pistols stuck into the belts of their tight-fitting Calvin Klein jeans were stopping cars and asking some people to get out and step over to the side of the road. We didn’t know if they were Druse kidnapping Maronites or Maronites kidnapping Druse, but the poor Lebanese who were being taken from their cars seemed to know that they were dead, whoever the kidnappers were. Some of the hostages just sat along the roadside, their shoulders slumped and their heads hanging down on their chests in pathetic poses of resignation to their fate.
One of these teenaged thugs stuck his head into our taxi window and growled in Arabic, “What religion are you?”
I thought to myself, If I tell him the truth, that I am neither Christian nor Druse but Jewish, he’ll never believe me. But if I don’t tell him the truth, what do I tell him? I don’t know if he is a Christian or a Druse. I don’t know what he wants to hear.
We had a rather shrewd taxi driver, and when the militiaman demanded again, “What religion are you?” he answered gruffly, “They are journalists—that’s it.” Luckily for us, this was not their day for kidnapping journalists and they let us pass. I will never forget the look of envy which the hostages sitting along the road cast our way as we sped off.
Being the only full-time American Jewish reporter in West Beirut in the early 1980s was a tricky task at times, particularly during the height of the Israeli invasion. My policy was never to hide my religion from any friend or official who asked me about it straight out, but I did not go around introducing myself to strangers by saying, “Hi, I’m Tom Friedman and I’m Jewish.” It wasn’t that I was afraid someone was going to shoot me if they discovered I was Jewish, although in a place like Beirut one could never feel totally secure; I just didn’t want my religion to be an issue that would get in the way of my reporting. I wanted people to judge me on what I wrote and not on who I was.
But there was never a moment in Beirut when I wasn’t keenly aware of who I was. For the first few weeks after we arrived, I always felt as though there was a glowing neon sign over my head that was constantly flashing “Jew, Jew, this man Jew.” I quickly discovered, though, that people assumed that if you were in Beirut you couldn’t possibly be Jewish. After all, what Jew in his right mind would come to Beirut? Your name could have been Goldberg and most Lebanese still would have assumed you were a Gentile. I once went to apply for an Algerian visa, and when the embassy official filling in the form came to the blank marked Religion, he simply filled in the word Christian without even asking me. While Friedman is a recognizable Jewish name to Westerners, it is not so obvious to Arabic speakers unfamiliar with Western names.
Because I have dark Mediterranean features and a mustache, Lebanese were always asking me whether I was of Arab origin. “No,” I would say, “I’m American. One hundred percent.” But then they would ask, “What were you before that? What kind of name is Friedman?” I would always answer “Romanian,” because my paternal grandparents emigrated to America from there, and somehow that would satisfy people and there would be no further questions. They would say, “Romanian,” and nod their heads as if that explained everything.
Nevertheless, there was always a tension inside my gut, because I was constantly aware of the gap between who I was and who many people assumed I was. Whenever I was interviewing a militia leader or Arab statesman, my mind would start racing uncontrollably: What if this guy knew who I was? Would he care if he knew I was bar mitzvahed at the Adath Jeshurun Synagogue in Minneapolis in 1966? Would he be shocked to know that my oldest sister is a Lubavitcher Hasidic Jew with seven children living in Miami Beach?
In order to keep my mind vacant of such thoughts as much as possible, I became very adept at changing the subject of any conversation that seemed to be approaching the question of religion. I did not always succeed, however. Michel Khouri, the distinguished governor of Lebanon’s Central Bank when I was in Beirut, invited Ann and me to a dinner party he was hosting at a seaside Beirut hotel one evening. I was seated next to the wife of the Minister of Public Works. As soon as we were introduced, she started in with the questions: “Friedman, Friedman, what kind of name is that?” She quickly found her way through the maze of defenses I automatically threw up around the question and established that I was Jewish. At that point I tried asking her about the weather—really: “Nice weather we are having, eh?”
She answered me in a mischievous tone, and with a slight twinkle in her eye. “You’re trying to change the subject?”
She didn’t say it in a vicious way, but she wanted to talk about me some more, to dwell on my identity a bit, maybe try it out on the other people at the table—and I didn’t. I had not been subtle enough in diverting her questions and this had only piqued her curiosity. We both started to laugh. I raised my arms in mock surrender and told her with a broad smile that she had caught me at my own game.
Then I changed the subject.
The truth is, I was usually much more concerned than I needed to be. Lebanon was probably the best Arab country in which to be an American Jewish reporter, because people there were quite used to living with lots of different religious communities; it was not like being a Jew in Qatar. Although virtually all Beirut’s Jews had emigrated by the time I arrived, they had been, in better days, very much part of the fabric of life in the city. All my close Lebanese friends knew I was Jewish, and it never made a dime’s bit of difference to any of them. In fact, they bent over backward to make sure I felt at home. I was more relaxed as a Jew in their presence than I was at times in my predominantly Gentile high school back in Minneapolis, where anti-Semites in my class used to throw pennies at us to see if we “cheap Jews” would pick them up. (One of my earliest childhood memories from Minneapolis is that of a Gentile boy in my grade-school class who had a lisp calling another Gentile boy a “dirty Dew” when they got into a fight.)
Even in the presence of people who did not know I was Jewish I heard very little in the way of nasty anti-Semitic remarks in Beirut. There was the usual canard about Jews being clever at business or controlling America, which I occasionally heard from former Lebanese Prime Minister Saeb Salam, but it never had a hard edge to it. It was the kind of statement made more out of awe than antipathy. Salam, a Sunni Muslim, knew very well I was Jewish, because we often discussed it. I think he was always proud of the fact that we were friends, and he and his family always looked out for me. He did, though, enjoy shocking some of his acquaintances with my identity. One day I was waiting to see Salam, while he was bawling out some wild-eyed Muslim sheik because his Friday mosque sermons were too hostile to the Lebanese army. As the little sheik with his red-and-white turban and thin beard was leaving Salam’s office, Salam insisted on introducing him to me. He told the sheik that I was a reporter from The New York Times, that I had won a Pulitzer Prize, that I spoke Arabic, and, on top of it all, said Salam, “he is Jewish.”
The words hung in the air for a second, before this poor little sheik’s eyes bulged out. I thought his beard might fall off. He’d probably given a few Koran-thumping sermons about the Jews in his day, and I am sure I was the first one he had ever met in the flesh. After a limp handshake he scurried out the door.
Most of the PLO officials and guerrillas with whom I dealt regularly knew I was Jewish and simply did not care; they related to me as the New York Times correspondent, period, and always lived up to their claims to be “anti-Zionist” and not “anti-Jewish.” On one occasion, however, my religion did become an issue with the PLO.
In early July 1982, in the middle of the Israeli siege of Beirut, Mohammed and I asked Mahmoud Labadi, who was then the personal spokesman of Yasir Arafat, for an interview with the PLO chairman. Labadi, I had heard, did not like Jews, and we had always had a very awkward relationship. I guess I was his nightmare during the summer of ’82. Here was the PLO’s biggest moment on the world stage and who has to be the reporter for the most important American newspaper but a Jew—not a self-hating Jew, not an anti-Zionist Jew, just a regular Jew. While I aimed to be rigorously objective, and he knew it, he also knew I was not one of the PLO groupies—those members of the press corps, mostly Europeans, who unquestioningly swallowed everything the PLO fed them.
A few days after I made the request for an interview with Arafat, Labadi took aside my assistant Mohammed (himself a Palestinian) and informed him that we would get an interview—but it would not be I who would get it. It would be “the tall one,” as Labadi put, referring to my lanky colleague, Bill Farrell. Mohammed, on my instructions, explained to Labadi that I was the bureau chief and that the interview had to be done by me or not at all. After thinking about it overnight, Labadi relented. The day of the interview arrived, and just as I was about to enter the room with Arafat, Labadi pulled me aside by the elbow and said, “I just want you to know that I have asked our office in New York for a complete assessment of all your reporting on us.”
“That’s fine, Mahmoud,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
The interview went well. It was published on the front page and a week passed without my hearing anything from Labadi. Then one day Bill Farrell was at Labadi’s office getting his PLO press credentials renewed, an always dangerous adventure, since you never knew when the Israeli air force might arrive and ravage the neighborhood. While Bill was having his papers stamped, Labadi came in and threw a telex down in front of him. It was from the PLO mission at the United Nations. The telex was an assessment of my coverage, describing it as generally fair and balanced, but noting obliquely that the “cousinly ways” of my newspaper, an apparent reference to the Times’s original Jewish ownership, sometimes made it less supportive of the PLO than they would have liked. Labadi told Bill he wanted to talk to me immediately. When Bill informed me of the encounter, the paranoia I had kept in check all summer ran riot and I lay awake in my bed the whole night worrying that someone was going to burst in and blow my brains all over the wall. Mohammed, my everfaithful and wise assistant, tried to calm me down by explaining what was going on. “They are trying to squeeze you,” he said, twisting his hands together as though wringing out a piece of wet cloth.
The next morning, Mohammed and I went to see Labadi. He handed me the telex. I read it over and then read it aloud.
“Sounds okay to me, Mahmoud,” I said, laying it down on my lap.
“It’s not good enough,” Labadi said coolly.
Mohammed jumped in, saying that he had read every word I had written that summer and it was all “very fair, very fair.” Labadi cut him off in mid-sentence, saying that Mohammed’s English was not good enough to understand the nuances of what I wrote.
For a few seconds there was only silence in the room. I had the telex resting on my knees and was staring at Labadi. Labadi was staring at me, and Mohammed was staring off into space and shifting nervously in his chair. I decided it was time to put all the cards on the table.
“Mahmoud,” I said, “let’s get everything out in the open. I’m Jewish and you know I’m Jewish. When my editors asked me how they could send a Jew to Beirut, I told them it was no problem. I told them that I had never encountered any difficulties with the PLO because of my religion. If the rules of the game have changed, then let me know and I’ll go back to the Commodore and pack my bags.”
“No, no,” said Labadi, waving his hand. “That is not necessary. We have nothing against Jews. We just want you to do a little better in the future.”
“Fine,” I said. “I will try to be fair. I have been trying up to now.”
After the meeting, Labadi took Mohammed aside and told him, “We know he’s not bad. We just need more from him.”
That was in early July of 1982, before the Sabra and Shatila massacre. I don’t think Labadi and I said more than five words to each other the rest of the summer.
Despite the cordial way that I personally was treated, I never had any illusions that religion was not a basic element in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. It couldn’t help but be. This conflict involved not just two nations clashing over the same land, it also involved the clash of two religious communities, Muslims and Jews, with a long history of theological antagonisms behind them. Palestinians speaking among themselves almost never refer to the Israelis as Israelis, but always as “the Jews.” It is not meant derogatorily. It is simply an honest expression of how they view Israelis—as Jews, as a religious community that has always lived under the control of Islam, not as a national community entitled to rule over Jerusalem and Muslim land. Yet as much as I tried to play the objective reporter and stay above the fray, something would always come along and kick me in the gut, to remind me how visceral and tribal this conflict really was—and that I was a member of one of the tribes.
In the fall of 1983, after a rebellion broke out against Arafat’s leadership within the PLO, I decided to go up to Tripoli, in north Lebanon, where the combined forces of Abu Musa and Syrians-ponsored Palestinian leader Ahmed Jebril had just routed Arafat from his last stronghold, the Badawi refugee camp. I shared a taxi to Tripoli with a visiting correspondent from Time magazine, Barry Hillenbrand, and we went straight to Badawi, where we found Jebril and his men occupying two four-story prefab apartment buildings, one of which had been used as Arafat’s headquarters. We asked a few guerrillas standing guard outside whether we could interview Jebril. They told us to wait a minute while they went in and checked.
As we waited, two young Palestinian women, probably in their early twenties, gingerly approached the guards. I eavesdropped as the women explained that they lived on the ground floor of one of the buildings and had fled from the fighting two weeks earlier. They were now coming back to reclaim their apartments and check on their belongings. Could they go in? At first, the guerrillas growled “No,” but when one of the women burst into tears, they relented and let them pass.
“Go in,” one of the guerrillas instructed, “but don’t take anything out.”
The two women were inside for about two or three minutes before they flew out of the apartment house in a screaming rage, tearing at their clothes and wailing in grief. One of them went up to a guerrilla and started beating on his chest.
“Shame on you. Shame on you,” she bellowed in Arabic. “You tell me not to remove anything—there is nothing left to remove. For ten years we worked—ten years. For what? For this? Everything is gone … You took it all!”
It was a heartbreaking scene, and I was on the verge of tears myself, before the other woman, her fists clenched in anger, started to scream at the guerrillas at the top of her lungs, “We are not Jews! We are not Jews! We are not Jews! Why did you do this to us?”
Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention, and one of the most important journalistic inventions that necessarily developed in the chaos of Beirut was the local Lebanese “fixer.” These were Lebanese or Palestinians who knew how to wend their way through the arabesque maze of Beirut and to pay the appropriate bribes to the appropriate people at the appropriate times—for the appropriate commissions.
I didn’t employ a fixer, but would occasionally call upon Mohammed in times of need. Mohammed did everything from climbing up telephone poles to repair our phone lines when they were damaged in street fighting, to negotiating with the landlord of a neighboring building who threatened to cut our telex wire, which traversed his roof, if we did not pay him $7,000—in cash. One day during the summer of ’82, when the Israeli siege of West Beirut was at its tightest, Mohammed spent an entire day walking around the city seeking to buy gasoline for our car—at $150 a tankful. Eventually he located a source of supply. That night, as we drove home in darkness from the Reuters bureau, we were stopped on Hamra Street by two Palestinian guerrillas standing by a jeep. One was holding a gun and the other was holding an empty water bottle and a long rubber hose. They asked, very politely, whether they could suck a few gallons of gas from our tank to get their jeep going; it was out of gas. Mohammed, having spent an entire day scrounging around for our gasoline, was not going to give it up so easily. Without blinking an eye, he began screaming that our tank was on empty, that we would be lucky to make it home, and if they did not believe him they could come over to his side of the car and look at the gas gauge themselves.
The gauge was resting comfortably on FULL. I couldn’t believe what Mohammed was doing. I sat there stiff in my seat, with a stupid grin covering my face, praying to myself that one of the guerrillas would not call Mohammed’s bluff; fortunately, they believed him. When we drove away, I told Mohammed in a quivering voice that if we ever got stopped again by guerrillas looking for gas he should give them however much they wanted—otherwise I would suck it out of the tank myself.
If there were a Beirut fixers’ hall of fame, though, Abdul Wadud Hajjaj would occupy the central pedestal. In my day, Abdul was the fixer for both Newsweek and UPI Television News, and he was the most delightful and lovable operator I have ever known. His long career as a fixer finally came to an abrupt close in 1985, when Newsweek and UPITN sent to Beirut some bureaucratic-minded reporters who did not understand that in Wild West Beirut one does not hold to the accounting standards of Arthur Andersen.
Abdul used to keep a desk drawer full of blank receipts from every taxi company in Beirut, which many a reporter drew on to account for all kinds of misspent funds. I shudder to think how many champagne dinners and wild nights at the Casino du Liban were recorded on reporters’ expense accounts under the bland cover of “Taxi ride from Beirut to Sidon.” But when you needed something, Abdul could get it for you—whether it was a telephone, a driver’s license, or an autographed picture of Yasir Arafat.
Among his many scams, Abdul was forever having the place of birth on his Lebanese passport changed according to which group, Palestinians or Lebanese, were the dominant force in West Beirut. To this day I still don’t know if he was born in Lebanon or Palestine. Actually, it didn’t matter. Abdul could talk his way into anywhere. On the wall of his office he had a display of pictures showing him posing with various famous and infamous people. One photograph featured Abdul shaking hands with Ted Kennedy, which was taken in the 1960s, when Kennedy paid a visit to the American University of Beirut campus and Abdul hosted him, I was told, as head of some Christian student society.
Abdul was a Muslim.
In return for his services, all Abdul asked of his friends was loyalty and an occasional story. Abdul hated to write, so when the Newsweek correspondent was out of town and he was asked to supply a story, we at UPI would pitch in and write a story forNewsweekunder Abdul’s name.
In Arab society it is considered impolite to show people the soles of your shoes. I used to love to come into Abdul’s office, pull up a chair right in front of his desk, and then put my feet up onto the middle of his blotter so that he could see nothing but my soles. He would unleash a litany of vile Arabic curses on me and then we would both have a good belly laugh.
Not everyone, though, found Abdul as entertaining as I did. Among his detractors was Claude Salhani, then the chief photographer for UPI in Beirut and someone for whom Abdul often made life miserable with various tricks. Abdul loved to have just a little something on everyone; as a fixer, he never knew when it might come in handy. Claude was a Christian with family in East Beirut, and during the early years of the civil war Abdul would often tell him that PLO guerrillas had come looking for him but that he, Abdul, had told them that Claude was okay and not to harm him. Claude always longed for an appropriate revenge on Abdul, and one day he found a way to fix the fixer.
At the end of the summer of ’82, after the PLO had departed and Israeli troops and the Lebanese army were fully in control of West Beirut, Abdul flew off on vacation. While Abdul was away, Claude went into his office, which was right across the hall from UPI, and removed the pictures Abdul kept on his wall. One picture showed Abdul arm in arm with Yasir Arafat, another showed him with George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and a third was a Polaroid head shot of himself.
“I spread the word that two plainclothesmen had come in and taken the pictures, after asking a few questions about Abdul,” Claude later told me. “When Abdul called in one day from vacation, his secretary told him this story and he started shitting in his pants. As soon as he got back to Beirut, he came over to UPI and asked me who these plainclothesmen were. I told him that these men told me it was none of my business who they were and that they had guns, lots of guns—many, many guns. For weeks Abdul kept pumping me for more details.”
All the time, Claude kept the pictures hidden away in his drawer. A few months later, Israel and Lebanon began negotiations over the Israeli withdrawal; the talks took place at a hotel in Khalde, just south of Beirut. One day while Claude was photographing the Khalde talks, he asked an Israeli official there to put some official-looking Hebrew stamps on the back of each of Abdul’s pictures and to give him a cover letter on Government of Israel stationery, with only the words Return to Owner written on it. The Israeli official, when briefed on the ruse, happily complied. Claude then kept the whole package in his drawer for almost two years, until just before he was about to leave Beirut. The day he left, Claude gave the package to his replacement and asked him to arrange, once Claude was well out of town, to have one of the delivery boys in the building bring the package over to Abdul’s office and hand it to him.
“The play went off perfectly,” said Claude. “The delivery boy came in and told Abdul this package had been dropped off for him. They told me that he opened it up, saw the Israeli stamps all over his pictures, and went white as a sheet. He immediately panicked and called the Amal militia [which was then in charge of West Beirut]. He wanted to show them that he was really feared by the Israelis. To this day, Abdul never knew it was me, and he never knew what the Israelis might have had on him. It was such sweet revenge.”
The home of all good Beirut fixers—not to mention all good Beirut reporters and crooked taxi drivers—was the Commodore Hotel. Every war has its hotel, and the Lebanese wars had the Commodore. The Commodore was an island of insanity in a sea of madness. It wasn’t just the parrot in the bar, which did a perfect imitation of the whistle of an incoming shell, that made the place so weird; it wasn’t just the front desk clerk, who would ask registering guests whether they wanted a room on the “shelling side” of the hotel, which faced East Beirut, or the peaceful side of the hotel, which faced the sea; it wasn’t the way they “laundered” your hotel bills by putting all your bar charges down as “dry cleaning”; it wasn’t even the sign in the lobby during the summer of ‘82 which read: “In case of shooting around the hotel, the management insists that neither television cameramen nor photographers attempt to take pictures. This endangers not only their lives but those of the guests and the staff. Those who are not prepared to cooperate may check out of this hotel.” It was the whole insane atmosphere, an atmosphere that was neatly captured by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau in a series of Doonesbury strips he did about the Commodore during the summer of ’82. My favorite shows his character, television newsman Roland Burton Hedley, Jr., calling down to the front desk from his Commodore room.
“Any messages for me?” Hedley asks the desk clerk.
“Let’s see …” says the clerk. “Yes, a couple more death threats. Shall I put them in your box?”
“Yeah, look,” says Hedley, “if they call again, tell them I only work for cable.”
You did not stay in the Commodore for the quality of its rooms. The only thing that came with your room at the Commodore was a 16 percent service charge, and whatever you found in the blue-and-gold shag rugs. The lobby consisted of overstuffed couches, a bar, a would-be disco with a tin-sounding organ, and enough bimbos to stock a whorehouse. There was also a Chinese restaurant and an old dining room, where the service was always bad and the food even worse. When the Shiites took over West Beirut in 1984 and imposed a more fundamentalist regime, the Commodore management was forced to close the bar in the lobby and to open up what became known as the Ramadan Room on the seventh floor. (Ramadan is the Muslim holy month of fasting.) Hotel guests would knock on the Ramadan Room door with all the caution of entering a speakeasy during Prohibition. Yunis, the bartender, would peek out to make sure it wasn’t some mullah come to break his bottles, and then let you in. Inside, guests would be sitting in the dark, sipping drinks on the couch, while Fuad, the hotel manager, would be shuffling back and forth uttering his favorite expression: “No problem, no problem.”
If you got tired of visiting the battlefront, all you had to do was sit in the Commodore lobby and wait for the front to visit you. One quiet Saturday night in 1984, a large number of journalists were gathered around the bar, getting loose after a day in the field. Yunis was keeping the booze flowing, when suddenly shots rang out from the lobby. The journalists all ducked behind the bar while a band of Druse gunmen poured into the hotel from the front door and kitchen, chasing after a certain gentleman who was apparently cutting in on their drug business. They found him in the lobby and tried to drag him out, but he, knowing what was in store for him, wrapped his arms around the leg of a couch. In order to encourage him to let go, the Druse pistol-whipped him and then pumped some lead into his thigh. Just as this scene was unfolding, my friend David Zucchino happened to come out of the elevator.
“All you saw in the lobby was this poor guy holding on to the couch for dear life, while the gunmen were trying to drag him away; and over at the bar all these little eyes of journalists were peering out from behind the stools,” Zucchino recalled. “At the front desk, two gunmen were beating the clerk, who was trying to call Amal for help. But what I remember most was that CBS correspondent Larry Pintak’s Dalmatian, which he used to keep tied up to the AP machine in the lobby, got so excited by all the shooting that he broke his leash and started lapping up this guy’s blood on the lobby floor. It was disgusting! The gunmen finally left and this guy let go of the couch, got up, and sat on a bar stool in shock. Fuad immediately showed up and pronounced, ‘No problem, no problem.’”
Why did any sane journalist stay at the Commodore? To begin with, most deluxe hotels in West Beirut had been destroyed during the early years of the Lebanese civil war. But more important, the Commodore’s owner, a Palestinian Christian by the name of Yousef Nazzal, who bought this fleabag in 1970 from a pair of Lebanese brothers who needed some fast cash to pay off their gambling debts before their arms were broken, was a genius at catering to journalists. He understood that there is only one thing journalists appreciate more than luxury and that is functioning communications equipment with which to file their stories or television spots. By paying enormous bribes, Yousef managed to maintain live international telex and telephone lines into his hotel, no matter how bad the combat became. In the summer of ’82, he once paid someone to slip into the central post office, unplug Prime Minister Shafik al-Wazzan’s telex, and plug the Commodore’s in its place. Yousef never took politics or life too seriously. He loved to sit on the stiff blue couch in the lobby right around deadline time and listen to the hum of all the telexes going at once—at a rate of about $25 a minute. He would sneak up behind me and say, “Tom, my boy, some people make a living, other people make a killing.”
The other important attribute of the Commodore was that it filled the void left by the defunct Lebanese Ministry of Information. For a “small consideration,” also known as baksheesh, also known as a bribe, the Commodore would get you a visa at the airport, a work permit, a residence permit, a press card, a quickie divorce, or a marriage certificate. Hell, they would get you a bar mitzvah, if you wanted it. As long as you had money, you could buy anything at the Commodore. No money, see you later.
Pro-Israeli press critics used to complain that the Commodore was a “PLO hotel.” There is no denying that many a Palestinian spokesman hung out there, but when the Israeli army invaded West Beirut, more than a few Israeli officers dined in the Commodore’s restaurant and used it to contact reporters—the exact way the PLO had. The Commodore lived by the motto: The king is dead, long live the king. I would not be surprised if today a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini is hanging over the reception desk.
Every serious Beirut militia, whether Christian or Muslim, Palestinian or Lebanese, had a spokesman and a few assistants. The militia spokesmen were the real gatekeepers for Beirut reporters and we all knew it. If you wanted an interview with the big boss, you needed to stay on his spokesman’s good side. Some of the spokesmen developed a reputation for honesty and integrity, and as a reporter you would be willing to give great weight to the information they passed on. Others were liars of the first order; you had to double- and triple-check anything they told you. They also were not above accepting a little baksheesh themselves, as in the case of one guerrilla spokesman who asked a group of reporters to buy him a refrigerator as a wedding present.
The most sought-after spokesman was the PLO’s Mahmoud Labadi, whom I’ve described above. During the summer of ’82, Labadi could often be found outside his office, sitting like a vacationing tourist in a lawn chair on the sidewalk of his deserted street filled with a sea of debris, broken windows, shrapnel, brass bullet cases, and dirt berms. Visiting journalists would pull up stools and get a briefing, after which they might check the latest additions to Labadi’s sidewalk museum, which was made up of all the different kinds of bombs and shells the Israeli army had dropped on the PLO and West Beirut. It was a bizarre display of ordnance, which included several unexploded cluster bomblets (roughly the size of baseballs) that were kept inside a captured Israeli helmet. One afternoon the UPI bureau chief in Beirut, Vinnie Schodolski, a fine reporter with pretensions to being a juggler, showed up at Labadi’s office to get his press credentials renewed. On his way in he picked up a couple of these cluster bomblets from the helmet, not knowing that they were still live, and began juggling them, walking at the same time into Labadi’s office. Labadi happened to be sitting at his telex when Vinnie strolled in performing his act. Labadi looked up from the telex, saw Vinnie with the cluster bomblets in his hand and in the air, and became, in a rare instance, tongue-tied. Vinnie recalled later that Labadi’s only word was “Yipes.”
The PLO spokesman’s office in Beirut has often been depicted by the Israelis as a slick Madison Avenue public-relations machine. It was anything but that. One tended to cover the PLO more in spite of Labadi’s office than because of it. The PLO never had any conception of deadlines or the time differences between Beirut and New York. Arafat’s idea of a press conference was to call in reporters late Saturday night, just in time to miss the Sunday paper’s early deadline, so that whatever he said would not get printed until Monday morning. It was not for nothing that reporters in Beirut often felt the PLO’s information office worked on the famous Arabic IBM principle: Will Arafat be here today? Inshallah,—God willing, they would say. And if not today, then when? Bukra,—tomorrow, they would answer. And if not tomorrow, well, Maalesh,—never mind. Inshallah, Bukra, Maalesh— IBM.
I rarely relied on the PLO spokesman’s office for real news, but turned instead to the spokesmen for the smaller PLO factions such as Nayef Hawatmeh’s Marxist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and George Habash’s Popular Front. The DFLP and PFLP had many of the most interesting, best-educated, and intelligent people in the PLO working for them, some of them European-trained Marxists. Because they were part of the PLO, they were always well-informed about what was happening, but because their organizations were smaller and less bureaucratic, they were much more willing to share inside information. Indeed, one of my lasting memories of the summer of ’82 was going to the Democratic Front office in West Beirut shortly after dusk on many nights to speak with their information chief, Jameel Hillal, who had a Ph.D. in political theory from the University of London. I usually found him sitting at his desk reading by a gas lamp and listening over and over again to a tape of Pachelbel’s “Canon,” with the sound of real cannon fire in the background. I became so addicted to this recording that at the end of the Israeli siege one of the first things I did was go into a music shop in London and buy a cassette for myself.
Naturally, no self-respecting reporter took just what the spokesmen said as God’s truth. We were hardly under any illusions about the objectivity of their information. They were one source among many. Sometimes, of course, they tried to convey the image of knowing more than they did. Several times when I worked with UPI in Beirut, we had to contact the PLO office and get a reaction, or claim of responsibility, for some guerrilla raid against an Israeli target. We would call up the PLO office and ask, “Do you claim responsibility for the attack on the bus in Jerusalem?” Frequently, the voice would come back: “What attack? There was an attack? Let me check; call back in an hour.” In an hour we would call back and be told that the “brave strugglers of the Muhammad Ali battalion” were responsible for such and such a raid. Occasionally, more than one group would claim responsibility for the same attack. Wire-service reporters in Beirut got so used to calling up the PLO for a reaction to this or that incident that when the actor John Wayne died, Ned Temko, then a reporter with UPI, could not resist calling up Labadi and seeking his response.
Just for the record, Labadi said that he did not like John Wayne and he did not like cowboy movies, and if he wanted to see cowboys in Beirut all he had to do was look out his window.
Gathering the news in Beirut was one thing—getting it all out was another. No discussion about the reality of Beirut reporting would be complete without mentioning a major reporting constraint journalists there faced: physical intimidation. Reporters, whether they are in Beirut or Washington, don’t operate in a political vacuum. In order to do objective reporting a journalist has to negotiate with his environment. On the one hand, he has to develop access and intimacy with his subjects in order to gain real understanding of them, and on the other hand, he has to remain disinterested and distant enough from his subjects to make critical assessments of them. It is a delicate balancing act, but one that is essential to objective reporting. A reporter cannot possibly be fair and objective about a person or group if he doesn’t truly understand them, but he also cannot be fair if he understands them alone. Intimacy without disinterest lapses into commitment to one side or another; disinterest without intimacy lapses into banality and misunderstanding. Maintaining this balance between intimacy and disinterest is a challenge for a reporter at any time, but trying to do it in a place such as Beirut was unusually difficult because you were living amid one side in a multisided conflict, and that side, as well as all the others, was not above doing physical harm to anyone who was too critical of them or too understanding of their enemies.
There wasn’t a single reporter in West Beirut who did not feel intimidated, constrained, or worried at one time or another about something he had learned, considered writing, or had written involving the Syrians, the PLO, the Phalangists, or any of the other forty-odd militias in Lebanon. Every reporter in Beirut was fully aware that for $1.98 and ten Green Stamps anyone could have you killed. Your newspaper would name a scholarship after you, and that would be the end of it. Any reporter who tells you he wasn’t intimidated or affected by this environment is either crazy or a liar. As my colleague John Kifner once wrote, reporters in Beirut carried fear with them just like their notebooks and pens.
The biggest threat in my mind was from the Syrians and the extreme pro-Syrian Palestinian groups. The Syrians did not take a joke well at all, and during a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s their agents in Beirut shot several Arab and Western journalists, including Salim al-Lawzi, the editor of the popular Arabic weekly called Events, who, in March 1980, was abducted in Beirut and found a short time later with a bullet in his head and his writing hand mutilated from having been dipped in acid. The situation got so bad that many Lebanese were afraid to even mention the word “Syria” in public.
There was a joke that made the rounds during this period about a Lebanese man who ran up to a policeman and said, “Officer, Officer, a Swiss stole my Syrian watch.”
The policeman gave him a quizzical look and said, “What do you mean, a Swiss stole your Syrian watch? You mean a Syrian stole your Swiss watch.”
The Lebanese man looked at the policeman and smiled. “You said it, Officer, not me.”
The main PLO factions, the Phalangists, and the various Muslim militias were less direct, and much less touchy, than the Syrians, but no one had any illusions that they would tolerate much seriously critical reporting. The biggest Sunni Muslim militia in West Beirut was known as the Murabitoon. It was really more of a street gang with a patina of Nasserite ideology than a political party, but it took itself very seriously and had one of the most sophisticated public-relations offices in the heyday of the militia rule of West Beirut. The Murabitoon’s efforts to cast their mafialike leader, Ibrahim Koleilat, as a serious statesman were often richly comical, given the fact that he was little more than a thug. Nonetheless, Koleilat had a beautiful young woman working for him who handled his public relations. She came around to the UPI office one day in 1980, when I was still working for the wire service, and said to me, “Of course your Rome bureau will be covering Mr. Koleilat’s upcoming visit to Italy,” where he was scheduled to meet some low-ranking official on the Lebanon desk in the Italian Foreign Ministry.
“Why, ahhhh, of course our bureau in Rome will definitely be covering the visit,” I stammered.
As soon as she left, I sent a message to our Rome bureau asking them to please write a dummy story about Koleilat’s meanderings in Rome, unless they wanted me to end up in the Mediterranean sleeping with the fish. Sure enough, Koleilat’s visit came, and the Rome bureau wrote up a story, only instead of putting it out on the general news wire read by all the newspapers, they sent it to us on a secondary message wire, read only by our bureau, since there was no way we could put such nonsense on the actual news wire. Koleilat’s people did not know this, of course, and when they came around to the bureau to collect the story, as we knew they would, we presented them with an authentic-looking UPI news story just ripped off the wire. They immediately made photocopies of it and distributed them to every newspaper in West Beirut, while making each an offer they couldn’t refuse to publish it. This dummy story about Koleilat appeared the next morning in almost every Beirut paper. The Murabitoon were happy, and we were off the hook. But the matter did not end there.
At Christmastime that year the young woman came back to our office carrying a very large round package wrapped in gold paper. She walked in the door, asked for me, and said, “Mr. Koleilat wants you to have this.” The first thing I did was check to see if it was ticking. My Lebanese colleague David Zenian and I then went through a comic routine of “You open it … No, you open it … No, you open it.” Finally, I pulled rank on him and he gingerly unwrapped the package, only to find a cut-glass bowl filled with chocolates, courtesy of the Murabitoon. We were so relieved that the thing did not blow up that we barely noticed the chocolates were at least a year old.
My having said that Beirut was intimidating, though, does not mean that reporters there were intimidated into total silence. Certain press critics have taken the line that the West Beirut press corps was intimidated by the Syrians and the PLO, hence the reporters did not write the truth, hence the truth did not get out, and hence Israel’s image in the world was skewed.
The truth is that while most Beirut-based journalists were keenly aware of the intimidating atmosphere at all times, their reaction was not to simply fold up their typewriters on sensitive subjects but, rather, to try to find another way, maybe indirect, to get the news out. The reason the Syrians, or others, had to go to the length of shooting reporters was precisely because all their other levels of threats and intimidation failed to dissuade newsmen and women from writing negatively about them. I cannot recall a single case in which reporters in Beirut knew about a major news event and consciously covered it up because of intimidation—including for that matter the fact that journalists were being harassed.
Reporters in Beirut found novel ways to negotiate the space needed to learn and write the truth, while at the same time protecting ourselves. Sometimes we ran pieces without a byline, as in the stories about how the Syrians were shooting journalists. Sometimes to hide where we were we ran stories under a New York or Cyprus dateline. Sometimes we quoted the local militia radio stations on sensitive stories which we knew to be true ourselves but did not want to be the first to report. And many times we simply wrote things that were critical of the PLO, Syrians, or Phalangists and just hoped that they were not played back in the Arabic press or seen by those who might take offense. Was it all the news all the time? No. Was it an ideal situation? No. Was it a cover-up? Also, no.
While I insist that the intimidating atmosphere of Beirut never prevented a major breaking news story from being covered in some way, there were, however, some slightly less immediate—yet important—stories which were deliberately ignored out of fear. Here I will be the first to say “mea culpa.” How many serious stories were written from Beirut about the well-known corruption in the PLO leadership, the misuse of funds, and the way in which the organization had become as much a corporation full of bureaucratic hacks as a guerrilla outfit? These traits were precisely the causes of the rebellion against Arafat after the summer of ’82, but it would be hard to find any hint of them in Beirut reporting before the Israeli invasion. The truth is, the Western press coddled the PLO and never judged it with anywhere near the scrutiny that it judged Israeli, Phalangist, or American behavior. For any Beirut-based correspondent, the name of the game was keeping on good terms with the PLO, because without it you would not get the interview with Arafat you wanted when your foreign editor came to town. The overfocusing by reporters on the PLO and its perception of events also led them to ignore the Lebanese Shiites and their simmering wrath at the Palestinians for turning their villages in south Lebanon into battlefields.
As for the Arab critics, who never tire of complaining about how the Western media were just “Zionist agents,” I have only two things to say. When my own editors took out the word “indiscriminate” from a story of mine about Israeli shelling of Beirut on August 4, 1982, I protested in writing with enough force to almost get me fired. At the time, my editors felt the word “indiscriminate” was “editorializing”; I felt that it was an exact description of the day’s events, and that its omission was editorializing. I still feel that way. In the end, though, I wasn’t fired, and in retrospect that was the only word ever changed for editorial reasons from any story I wrote out of Beirut. Moreover, during the summer of ’82 when the Israelis were pummeling West Beirut, and the Palestinian cause was on the line, it should be noted that the first journalists to run out of town were the Arabs: the Kuwaiti, Saudi, Qatari, and other Arab journalists were nowhere to be found at the height of the Israeli siege. It was only the “Zionist Western media” that stuck around in West Beirut to tell the story, and it was the “Zionist” New York Times that ran a four-page reconstruction of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila—more extensive than any other newspaper in the world.
Some might ask why in the world anyone would put up with reporting from a place like Beirut, especially for almost five years. The truth is, I asked myself that question many times, especially when my colleagues began to be kidnapped. The first to be snatched, while walking to work, on March 7, 1984, was Jeremy Levin of Cable News Network, who lived in our apartment building just two floors above us. Levin had had a somewhat stormy relationship with the CNN bureau in Beirut, largely because he came in and tried to clean house and post work rules in what was a typical Beirut news bureau, where the local staff were all relatives and bookkeeping was “creative,” to say the least. It was a bit like posting work rules in Sodom and Gomorrah, so when Levin was abducted in the spring of 1984 my first thought was that one of the Lebanese in his own bureau might have arranged a pair of cement boots for him. The day Levin disappeared, CNN sent a two-man film crew over to our apartment house to take one of those clichéd close-up shots of the mailbox with his name on it. I asked the film crew if their bureau had abducted him. They just laughed and laughed.
It later turned out that Levin had been kidnapped by Shiite extremists, and fortunately, he escaped after eleven months in captivity.
Levin’s kidnapping, and the dozens that would follow, taught me a valuable lesson about journalism that one could learn only in a place like Beirut—to pay attention to the silence. In a city where there are so many spokesmen, so many militia radio stations, and so many people who want to come up and tell you their story, you can think after you have been there for a while that you know everyone, and everyone knows you. When ABC Television newsman Charles Glass was kidnapped on June 17, 1987, the first thing many of his friends said in defending the fact that he dared to continue working in Beirut was that “Charlie knew everybody.” The truth was, Glass knew everybody who talked to journalists. But the people who kidnapped the Americans in Beirut, who blew up the American embassy and the Marine compound, who abducted the British hostage negotiator Terry Waite, didn’t go around introducing themselves or drinking at the Backstreet Bar. They were the type who kidnapped or killed, and then, instead of running out to brag about it to journalists, savored it quietly at home over a Turkish coffee. They were the young men I passed on the street who did not speak my language or travel in my circles.
After the kidnappings began in Beirut, I acquired a healthy respect for how little I had really penetrated the place. I gained an equally healthy respect for the notion that the real story is often found not in the noise but in the silence—and that is why it is so often missed. I now live by an adaptation of Groucho Marx’s famous line that any club that would have me as a member I wouldn’t want to join. My version is that any protagonist in the Middle East who is ready to talk to me cannot be worth talking to; he cannot be at the center of what is happening. It’s the people who won’t talk to me whom I really want to meet.