Celebrities of War : ‘Instant Experts’ Fill Insatiable Need to Know With Incurable Impulse to Talk

Phebe Marr, author of a modern history of Iraq, is racing across town in a chauffeur-driven limousine, bouncing from an interview at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” The car phone rings. It’s for her. Yet another journalist wants Marr’s views on what Saddam is up to next.

In another part of town, on another night of war, Edward Luttwack, a military analyst known for his irreverent--some say outrageous--comments, is tangling with ABC’s Peter Jennings on air. The anchor asks a question implying that Israel will surely retaliate after an Iraqi attack. Luttwack volleys: “Not necessarily.”

And in yet another scene, on another day, at CBS studios in New York, Gen. Michael J. Dugan, canned as Air Force chief of staff last September for talking too candidly to the press about U.S. military operations, is being paid to decipher videotape from Baghdad. He examines the picture of a downed U.S. fighter plane and speculates it’s an F-16. “He knows by the color and the fuel tanks,” producer Ann Reingold says proudly of her new colleague.

The Experts. They are everywhere.

On the air, behind the scenes, in newspaper stories, the think-tank gurus and former generals have become instant celebrities as Week 1 of the war in the Persian Gulf draws to a close.

Actually, in Washington--a city known for its know-it-alls--the experts have been omnipresent since August, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and knowledge of the U.S. military and the Middle East suddenly became paramount to owning a blue-chip stock.

But lately the experts have been feeding the seemingly insatiable media appetite for minute-by-minute analysis, epitomizing both the good and bad of their trade as they help fill television time and news columns.

In fact, these pundits have become the official interpreters of incremental pieces of news--every boom of a missile, every utterance from Iraq. They have also had enormous influence on public opinion and, as some of them would like, on decision-makers in Washington and perhaps even Baghdad.

“I view my interviews as a public service but also as a way to influence policy,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter Administration, adding, “Now that I’m not in a position to make decisions, this talking about policy issues on television is second-best.”

And the requests for interviews come rolling in: Brzezinski says his office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, is like “a command center. I have three aides round-the-clock taking requests from all over the world.”

The pundits and the parade of retired military brass are out there analyzing, predicting and amplifying. They are also speculating, pontificating and sometimes even “boofing.” (Boofing is an onomatopoeic term coined by Washington defense analyst Joshua Epstein for what it sounds like when a particularly pompous expert holds forth. “There are people who do nothing but boof, and they are called boofers,” he says, noting that when food is served at a gathering of such people it is called “a beef and boof.”)

Most experts are not paid for their time but are eager “guests” invited by the TV studios.

But some have signed contracts to appear exclusively on a particular network and are called “consultants.”

Timothy Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, says his network put five experts on the payroll shortly after the invasion of Kuwait last Aug. 2, including a former Army general, a former Air Force colonel, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and a national newspaper reporter who has spent many years working in the region.

“That’s our stable of people,” Russert says, “and we’re really using them, at all hours of the night and day.”

The other networks also went after specialists, and the competition to have the best-known, highest-ranking former military man on staff began. One Washington observer called the derby for Pentagon pundits “the Retired Generals Full Employment Act.”

But CBS’ Reingold says the military men come in handy because they introduce a degree of realism into the reporting and often have an inside line on what might be happening behind the scenes.

Yet before anyone was put on retainer, the experts were run through a series of “pre-interviews” to ensure that they had a good command of English, didn’t use jargon, weren’t too verbose. Being pretty was not a prerequisite if they were “brilliant,” according to one network executive.

The pay scale for the consultants varies wildly, according to another Washington institution, the rumor mill. Nobody will talk about it publicly because everybody negotiates his or her own deal behind closed doors. But one former general is said to be making $10,000 a month for the duration of the war; other experts are said to be getting $1,000 a week, while one specialist is apparently signed for a year for $30,000.

One well-heeled pundit, who demanded anonymity, reports: “The generals get all the money and the scholars just get glory . . . but that gives us a chance with the foreign networks, and they’re a little gold mine--especially the Germans and the Japanese, who actually slip you envelopes of cash after the interview.”

But being at the networks’ beck and call can also cost the expert in sleep and sanity.

Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been wearing a beeper for a short stint at CBS. Kemp, a chuckle in his tone, tells this story about a call he received at 1:30 a.m. three days into the war:

“The phone rings, the beeper goes off. It’s CBS. There are Scud (missile) attacks on Israel. They want me and are sending a van to pick me up.

“The van gets lost. The minutes are ticking away. This is my one moment to be brilliant with Dan Rather, and my van is lost. Finally, I get there; the makeup is slapped on, and I try to figure out what’s happened. Are there eight Scuds or four?

“Finally, I’m on with Dan and I’m qualifying every word out of my mouth. ‘Well, Dan, based on what I’ve heard so far. . . .’ Then I’m off the air with Dan, but the studio people tell me to stay put.

“Suddenly, there’s a bomb alert in the studio. A big Volkswagen is heading down M Street (site of CBS’ Washington bureau) with no driver. We evacuate to the back of the studio, where some Vietnam vet guesses a blast would be less effective. In other words, my 15 minutes of fame is blown by some drunk driver in a Volkswagen. Geeeeeeezz.”

For those who aren’t paid consultants, the pace is more manageable--although not much.

Robert Neumann, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Morocco and, most important for this crisis, Saudi Arabia, started a day recently at 7:30 a.m. with an interview for a Pittsburgh television station and went on to a dozen other interviews with French, German and Swiss stations. He wrapped up the day on Larry King’s show live from 11 p.m. to midnight.

“What I can say?” asks Neumann, who is 75. “I’m one of the usual suspects.”

Neumann says he has been talking “morning, noon and night” about the fragile alliance against Iraq that has drawn together several Arab countries with the Americans. “I do it out of a combination of vanity and vanity. . . . God knows, I didn’t have anything on my schedule this month, and now look at me.”

Many experts, particularly in Washington, are waiting eagerly these days to be called. Some don’t bother to wait and call the studios, offering themselves up.

Gail Evans, CNN’s vice president for bookings, hears from these people constantly. “You wouldn’t believe how many ‘inquiries’ we get. They say, ‘Have you seen what I’ve written on this subject?’ And if we haven’t, they send it to us.”

The networks and newspapers seem to rely on a regular roster of people, many of whom come out of Washington think tanks. To some, it’s as though someone who doesn’t live in Washington, New York or within walking distance of Harvard University couldn’t understand the war.

“This is one of the many dangers of the expert business,” says Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “After all, the press people have WATS lines, the networks have uplinks. What’s wrong with an expert in the Midwest?”

Hess’ expertise includes the media and he says many dangers lurk in the way they use pundits. “The anchors have a tendency to ask people a lot of questions they’re not in a position to answer,” Hess says. “It’s one thing to ask a former general to describe a Scud missile. It’s another to ask him what he thinks Saddam Hussein is up to next.”

Phebe Marr, the respected Iraq scholar, regularly runs into that question. “I give it my best shot,” she says. “I look at the best history, look at past thought, and I can come up with a tentative answer. During quieter times, it’s easier: I can read, think, talk to people. . . . But there’s no time in a crisis.”

Unlike someone such as Marr, Janne Nolan, who has written extensively on defense technology in the Third World, considers herself low on the chain of experts, noting: “I talk in compound sentences and find it difficult to look at anchors.” But just as she is completing this sentence, her other phone line rings--and when she returns to the interview, she confesses that the other call was from CNN. They want her.

Nolan, in fact, is a self-described “missile nerd,” which means she is being called regularly to explain how Scud and Patriot missiles work. But she worries about the misinformation being doled out to the U.S. public. She has begun keeping track of the number of mobile missile launchers that the media reports Hussein has.

“The range is from a couple of dozen to 1,000,” she says. “The fact is, it is unclear. We can extrapolate a lot from specialized literature, but I repeat, it is unclear.”

If there is competition in the media to get the highest-profile interviews, there is more competition among the experts to ferret out their colleagues who are frauds or have only a tangential relationship with their subjects.

Air Force Col. Ralph Cossa, an analyst at the National Defense University in Washington, says he cannot abide “other great think-tank strategists who wax poetic but have never been actually involved in military strategy.”

Fouad Ajami, who was born into a Shiite Muslim family in Lebanon and now teaches about the Mideast at Johns Hopkins University, is one of the few experts who has visited the region since the Persian Gulf controversy erupted.

“I wanted to see with my own eyes,” Ajami says. “I wanted to see how the Saudis were handling the foreign (military) presence. I wanted to measure their fear of defilement; that way, I was more comfortable talking about it with Dan (Rather) on the air.”

Ajami, who has been on retainer with CBS since 1985, wouldn’t venture to sum up the performance of experts on other networks.

“The one thing you don’t do in this business is watch television when you’re living round-the-clock in the studio,” he says. “You don’t even watch yourself. It’s amazing.”