For Reporters, Coverage of Beirut Is a Risky Business

When Muslim terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847 last Friday morning, taking 153 people hostage and killing at least one, a scattering of American journalists began returning to West Beirut, where a U.S. passport can put a person in grave danger.

In the week since, most American news organizations have warned their reporters not to walk the streets of the Lebanese capital without escort and not to travel anywhere after dark. At least some American television network crews hire armed Lebanese bodyguards.

And many American newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have refused to send Americans to cover the story at all, relying instead on wire services or Lebanese stringers.

“This is a situation where American journalists have been specific targets of the terrorists, which makes it quite different from any situation I’ve ever had to deal with as an editor,” said Jim Hoagland, assistant managing editor for foreign news of the Washington Post.

Even with the precautions, there have been incidents. A hijacker Wednesday fired shots over the heads of reporters gathered on the tarmac of Beirut airport to interview the three members of the TWA crew being held hostage there.

In the last 15 months, two American journalists have been kidnaped from mostly Muslim West Beirut, the last on March 16, when three men in a green Mercedes-Benz seized the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, Terry A. Anderson.

After Anderson was kidnaped, the last American reporters began to leave West Beirut. Los Angeles Times correspondent Charles P. Wallace, for instance, moved to Christian-dominated East Beirut, which is somewhat safer, and shortly thereafter began setting up a permanent bureau in Amman, Jordan.

Representatives of at least two major U.S. television networks travel under the escort of paid, armed bodyguards, network officials acknowledged.

“I don’t believe anybody travels anywhere in Beirut without guns,” said Sam Roberts, foreign editor of CBS News. “It is not a policy. It is not anything the company sanctions. It is just done.”

“When you travel, you have bodyguards who carry AK-47s (automatic rifles) in their laps,” said Ed Turner, executive vice president of Cable News Network. “They are Shia (Muslims), and they have worked for us over the years.”

The only network to deny employing armed guards was ABC, which did admit, however, that Muslim militiamen at times do escort its personnel. However, “it is something imposed on us, certainly not something we pay for,” said Robert Murphy, vice president for news coverage.

Unlike many newspapers and the two major wire services, three of the four major networks, including CNN, have sent Americans to cover the hostage crisis this week.

To date, CNN has not sent correspondents back into Beirut, although it has maintained Lebanese staff in the country since its Americans pulled out last winter. CNN’s Beirut bureau chief, Jeremy Levin, was kidnaped in Beirut on March 7, 1984, and held captive for nearly a year until he surfaced safely in Syria last February.

Among other papers sending reporters to the scene are the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun and the Houston Chronicle.

Several papers, however, have refused to send reporters because they consider the danger too great.

Both the New York Times and Washington Post have used Lebanese stringers. However, the foreign editors of both newspapers said Thursday night that they are considering returning their American correspondents to the city.

The Los Angeles Times has decided to rely on wire service reports rather than risk sending in an American correspondent. The Times does not use stringers or foreign nationals as reporters. “We feel the risk factor is too high” to send an American reporter there, Foreign Editor Alvin Shuster said. “Americans have been targets of kidnapers, and we didn’t want to provide another target.”

Two Times foreign correspondents, Shuster said, have been killed in recent years, Dial Torgerson in Honduras in 1983 and Joe Alex Morris Jr. in Tehran in 1979.

Even the wire services have stopped using Americans in Beirut. The Associated Press’ three reporters there are British and Bolivian, while United Press International’s are British and Lebanese.