Iraq Pulls CNN Off the Air, Silencing the Last Link

After 17 hours of dramatic and specific narration from the battle zone, Cable News Network’s reporting crew in Baghdad was pulled off the air by Iraqi authorities Thursday, and the world’s lone phone line into Iraq was silenced.

The decision to silence the line through which CNN’s three reporters had described the effects of the first night of the multinational attack was apparently the object of a bitter split within the Iraqi government.

CNN officials said that, even as CNN anchor Bernard Shaw and two colleagues described a new bombing raid beginning in Baghdad as night fell Thursday, Iraqi officials engaged in a bitter internal debate in the hotel lobby over whether to stop the broadcasting, weighing the public relations virtues of keeping communication open to the West versus the military danger of giving away information about the damage of the multinational bombing raids on the city.

Thirteen hours after the three were taken off the air, one of them, correspondent John Holliman, suddenly came back on but only to read a written statement prepared by the Iraqi government, which claimed that Saddam Hussein’s forces has shot down 55 allied planes and 23 cruise missiles.

The statement, which Holliman read with Iraqi censors standing over him, also noted that the 25 foreign journalists still in the country were all safe. Holliman said that after lengthy negotiations, he was allowed also to say that there was much calm in the city.

It is not clear if the group will be allowed to broadcast again, but apparently CNN’s now-famous telephone line will be used to deliver official government messages.

“I think it is the age-old struggle between security (services) worried about the enemy learning about us, and others in the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Information getting their message, their image across,” CNN’s veteran journalist Peter Arnett said moments before the line was silenced. “And that image is a city being evacuated in an orderly fashion. Even though part of the city is in flames, there is no evidence that this country is falling to pieces.”

At one point, Holliman even privately apologized to colleagues that he might have been too accurate in his spotting of the American bombs on the air.

At another point, Holliman noted that Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had commented on television that U.S. military authorities had learned about the accuracy of the bombing in Iraq from CNN’s reporting.

CNN had some contact with the crew after the line was silenced.

“They are safe, and we are negotiating in Baghdad and in Atlanta to re-establish a connection,” CNN President Tom Johnson said.

One possibility for further communication--it was thought, at least before the war escalated with the missile attack on Israel early this morning--was that, under the guidance of an Iraqi censor, CNN could use a portable phone link to broadcast still pictures.

The CNN line that was open Wednesday night and Thursday morning became what correspondent Arnett called “a tiny little prism of the battle” through which the world could see.

“What we are seeing through these hotel windows is only a tiny piece. Beyond our view, beyond the city, there is an enormous bombardment,” he reported.

In addition to restoring that prism for the world, CNN was trying to re-establish the link that had made the Atlanta news organization something of a separate battleground between enemies.

“We have been tipped to many things by the Iraqi side that no one else was privy to,” said Eason Jordan, CNN’s vice president for international news, precisely because CNN was a common transmission belt. The same thing is true on the American side.

Even after war began, “We were getting tremendous cooperation and encouragement by Iraqi officials, who were in and out of our rooms (in the Baghdad hotel) for hours Wednesday night,” Jordan said. “There were some in the Iraqi government who badly wanted CNN to continue to broadcast.”

The focus of this attention was CNN’s “4-wire,” a 24-hour open phone line that in essence is the type that Edward R. Murrow used for his live broadcasts from London during World War II. However, in its modern variant, CNN’s 4-wire is connected by a microwave dish to a satellite uplink to Amman, Jordan, then bounced off two more satellites before it reaches Atlanta.

The arrangement, which CNN officials set up last fall, won the eager approval of Iraqi officials, who turned down similar requests from the other American networks not long after.

Nonetheless, CNN itself was surprised that its phone line had remained open through the American bombing.

“When it began, I told people we’re working on borrowed time,” CNN’s Richard Tauber, director of CNN’s satellite system, said, “because we thought the line was routed through the Iraqi telecommunications center, which was destroyed. Apparently it goes out some other way.”

Through the line, CNN officials were also able to monitor the safety of the crew that had remained behind in Baghdad after most other reporters had left.

Similar special arrangements allowed CNN to receive the first word of the effects of the war in Kuwait. Several times through the day, Kuwaiti citizens phoned the network, offering the news that bombing was occurring there.

The line from Kuwait was established last fall, when the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington called CNN unexpectedly, offering the connection. CNN set up arrangements whereby callers had to prove their identity before putting the calls on the air.

When the war began, there were 45 reporters still in Baghdad. On Thursday morning, 20 of those had left in an automobile caravan for Jordan, including a CBS crew carrying footage both from CNN cameras and its own showing the attack’s beginning.

The CNN crew in Baghdad includes the three on-air correspondents and a crew of five, producers Robert Weiner and Ingrid Formanek, cameramen Mark Biello and Nick Robertson and technician Kriz Manich.

Arnett, who has been with CNN for five years, was an Associated Press reporter for 20 years and won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam in 1966. He has worked for CNN in Moscow, Washington, Jerusalem and Latin America.

Shaw, the network’s principal Washington anchor, has been with CNN since it began broadcasting in 1980. He was formerly a Capitol Hill correspondent for ABC and from 1971 to 1977 was a CBS News correspondent.

Holliman, who has also been with CNN since its inception, is a general assignment reporter in Washington.

When war broke out, Shaw was in Baghdad hoping to get a last interview with Hussein, and planned to leave Thursday; but the interview was postponed one too many times. Holliman and Arnett had been reporting there for some time on what CNN founder Ted Turner described as a voluntary policy under which any of the correspondents or crew could stay or leave as they chose.

“I was involved in the decision” to set up that policy, along with other CNN executives, Turner said. “We are more than a U.S. network. We are international, and in that sense we had a responsibility to take reasonable risks.”