In the Eye of the Storm

One Peter Arnett is in a pillory. He’s an enemy sympathizer, said the senator. A double agent and turncoat, said the movie stars. Definitely the propaganda voice of Baghdad, claimed others.

Arnett says it is all in the eyes of the political perceiver.

“I mean, one man’s information is another man’s propaganda,” explains the CNN newsman who reported the first crack of war over Baghdad--then remained when others left. “If you say that a visit to a shelter that has been hit clearly by a bomb or two and there are 300 dead, if you say that my reporting from that shelter is propaganda . . . then it is 100% propaganda.

“But if you say that it is important for the world to know that some of their warplanes bombed the wrong place, or this is what happens when they bomb what they think are the right places, then it is information . . . “

There is another Peter Arnett, instant global celebrity and immediate media hero. One publisher is reported ready with a $200,000 advance for his Baghdad book, sight unseen, sign here, let’s do an MRE lunch.

Arnett, 56, has been praised broadly and publicly by peers he admires enormously: Peter Jennings, Charles Kuralt, Dan Rather and John Chancellor.

Arnett says he has started to laugh at some of it.

“I was told tonight by a Turkish journalist that mothers are naming their children ‘Peter’ in Turkey,” Arnett says. Then he did laugh. “I also was told by two Pravda reporters that I am the most famous person in the Soviet Union. Not just journalist , the most famous person , even more famous than Gorbachev.

“My aged mother, my 89-year-old mother in New Zealand gets phone calls from the media. . . . “

There also is a more private Peter Arnett, a man of level concerns who thinks back on 30 years spent reporting 17 armed conflicts and now realizes the shortening odds.

“At the worst of times I go to bed at night thinking that . . . maybe in the morning I won’t wake up,” he says. “Then I’ll wake up some mornings wondering if I’ll survive the day. I made my peace with my maker a long time ago. But to some degree, I’m living on borrowed time.

“Look at all the guys we knew in Vietnam who died. Sometimes if I’m depressed . . . I figure: Hey, I’m going to join all my buddies one day. Maybe sooner than later . . . but I wouldn’t be too unhappy about joining them, somewhere, wherever they are.

“But that’s only when I get very maudlin. Because I don’t have a death wish. . . .”

Arnett is talking through what has become one of the world’s most celebrated telephones: a Mobile Telesystems unit able to ricochet trans-world calls to and from a communications satellite loafing in space.

CNN’s suitcase portable was functioning when Baghdad’s communications went dark during the first bombings of Jan. 17. For the last five weeks it has been Arnett’s only telephone link between the Al-Rashid Hotel and CNN headquarters in Atlanta.

He calls three times a day. The rate usually is $10 a minute. About $450 was spent on Friday’s interview as Arnett spoke of his opinions, his fears, bottled-water spit baths, the future of this war, reading the mood of Saddam Hussein and knowing the tempo of the streets of Baghdad:

* Where, he said, Iraqis do not view America as the Evil Force controlled by the Black House. “No way in hell,” Arnett says. “The average Iraqi adores America, they’ve got relatives in the United States. . . . the average Iraqi is amiable, easy-going and basically friendly.”

Now, says Arnett, the general population of Iraq wants out of the war: “For the past 10 days I’ve been saying, clearly, that people in Baghdad are unhappy about Kuwait, that they want to get out of Kuwait.

“For the past three days, we’ve been having people (Iraqis) on the air saying that.”

* He also had Hussein on the air for a 90-minute interview carried to CNN’s client nations and, via other international networks, to any country with television sets.

Arnett says he did not develop any sense of Hussein from their one meeting. But he felt a bond. “I looked him in the eye and I said to myself: ‘I’ve been bombed for eight days, no less than he has, and I can ask him anything I damned well like because we have shared common dangers.’

“And he felt the same way. He looked at me as a sort of veteran. So I asked him what I wanted.”

* Late Friday, Arnett said he believed the Middle East was less than 24 hours away from “a rapid descent into a major conflict on the ground. . . . I see a lot of action around Baghdad and I see a lot of casualties. I see chaos. I see real war ahead.”

Twenty-three hours later, the ground war was launched.

* He also sees increased danger for his CNN crew. “We are vulnerable here,” Arnett says. “We have our television uplink out on the lawn, our telephone is out on the lawn and things explode all around us.”

One missile blew up in the hotel yard. Another destroyed a conference hall adjoining the Al-Rashid. Several have flashed past CNN’s room on the ninth floor.

“We do a lot of work outside, and I’m just trying to wonder what form (harm) it will take,” he says. “But, as I say, I never accept the worst-case scenario that we’ll all die in a violent explosion or the mobs will come and get us.

“I daren’t think that.”

Holding that thought rigid, always denying the worst, has sustained Arnett through a career in which he has spent more years at more shooting wars than any soldier, military or mercenary.

He was in Laos, shortly after leaving his native New Zealand as an eager but damp 22-year-old reporter drifting through Southeast Asia. There were 10 years with Associated Press in Vietnam, where in 1966 he won journalism’s highest decoration: the Pulitzer Prize.

Then to Northern Ireland for the stocky reporter with a nose flattened in college by much better amateur boxers. Then Beirut, Panama, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Israel, El Salvador. . . .

Arnett was kicked out of Indonesia and imprisoned by the KGB in Moscow but has never been scratched in combat.

Now he is being wounded by the power he has encouraged so diligently: public opinion.

Attacks on his reporting and questions about his patriotism have come from Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), actors Charlton Heston and Kurt Russell and others.

“Peter Arnett is what we used to call in my day a sympathizer,” Simpson said in a recent Washington luncheon with reporters. “And he was active in the Vietnam War and he won a Pulitzer Prize largely because of his anti-government material. . . . I called that ‘sympathizers’ (sic) in my early days in the Second World War.”

Arnett says he is hurt by the criticism and takes Simpson’s words personally because of a July meeting and “a small press conference” in Jerusalem.

“He (Simpson) had just been to visit Baghdad with Sen. (Robert) Dole and Sen. (Howard) Metzenbaum,” Arnett said. “He (Simpson) and Metzenbaum upbraided the few American journalists there for misrepresenting Saddam Hussein.

“He said that because we had been reporting about Saddam Hussein’s threats to incinerate half of Israel . . . we had abused the man. The media had made him a terror figure . . . (when) he was really a reasonable person.”

Arnett points to his professional record of covering Jewish refuseniks in Moscow and 18 months spent reporting FBI activities when “they (the FBI) weren’t questioning my patriotism.”

“So I took that (criticism) personally because I felt that if he (Simpson) can’t understand why I am in Baghdad or why CNN is here, he just doesn’t understand what democracy is and what the American press is all about.”

Censorship, Arnett says, applies to everything he does in Baghdad “but actually, there is very little (censorship) done . . . to interfere with what we’re saying.”

In fact, he says, on Thursday he was escorted by Iraqi officials to a small town of historic significance to Islam. The escorts said there had been civilian casualties there. Arnett found few.

“There were 15 casualties in the past five weeks,” he says. “The hospital said there were plenty of supplies. So I was able to do a story on a place that had not been hit.”

Had it been a negative story, Arnett believes, the American public would have accepted this darker side of war news:

“I happen to believe the American public is sophisticated enough to learn (about) negative aspects of their (military) policy. I don’t think that they would object to knowing that a target that the Pentagon selected as a shelter or a military command post turned out to be full of civilians.

“And I don’t see why it is unpatriotic to report that fact.”

Then there were those disgruntled Iraqis who appeared on camera and spoke of their unhappiness with Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait.

“This (commentary) is not something that the government is allowing us to do,” Arnett explains. “But we are pushing that issue (Iraqi unhappiness) and we’ve been able to get a lot of information out.

“When you get down to it, we are (still) independent reporters who handle information the way we want to.”

Arnett says there may even be disproportionate public and official attention paid to his reports, which form “just a tiny bit of the (overall) story.”

“The Pentagon comes up with endless briefings that can knock the information down, the British have a briefing, there’s a briefing from the Saudis . . . and I’m contributing very little to this.”

His CNN reports are accompanied by frequent disclaimers noting Iraqi censorship. Then, Arnett says, he is constantly justifying his reporting to his Atlanta editors and anchors.

“The anchors on CNN question my credibility every day,” he says. “And justifiably. They say: ‘Are you sure, Peter. . . . Are you sure that the damage wasn’t caused by the shell of an anti-aircraft weapon?’

“In fact, Peter Jennings sent a note to the network a few weeks ago. He congratulated me on what I was doing but sent a little note to the anchor saying: ‘Leave the guy alone. He’s an experienced journalist. Why pick on him all the time?’ ”

Arnett volunteered for Baghdad from Israel. He arrived with every intention of remaining in Iraq, because air wars have become his sub-specialty.

“I was in Hanoi in ’72 and drove around North Vietnam for a while as an AP reporter, and U.S. planes followed us and bombed us there,” he remembers. “I was in Beirut for most of ’82 when Israeli planes bombed us. I was in Afghanistan in the years that followed when Soviet planes bombed us.

“So, I mean, an air war doesn’t really disturb me much.”

Nor did this one. Arnett knew the story was worth doing and, in his experience, also quite survivable.

“Let me tell you, I’ve been in far more dangerous places with far less acclaim,” he says. “I’m not being brave being here. I felt it was a story that could be done, that is should be done . . . and so I stayed on.

“I’m not a hero. I’m not a cowboy. I’m simply a journalist, and I think that if you had been here, you would have stayed.”

Yet he clearly is a journalistic gallant. Even hard-nosed fellow reporters--especially combat correspondents--approve of Arnett. They follow a rule that is the supreme accolade: Never leave a hot spot if Arnett is staying.

Arnett, however, is uncomfortable with acclaim. He certainly is unsure about the applause he has earned in Baghdad.

“When I got the Pulitzer Prize in Vietnam, it was detrimental to my effectiveness as a reporter,” he recalls. “It got to the point in Vietnam that officers who had newly arrived in the country were asking for my autograph in the field.

“They didn’t treat me as just another reporter. I was something special.”

Becoming a media celebrity, he says, offended his professional ideal set years earlier when he vowed never to be “a Joe Alsop who would travel with the bloody general, get special treatment and be so far removed from the war that every analysis he wrote was absolute bull.

“And I’d hate to think that this attention I’m getting now would affect my ability to spend the rest of my life doing this (reporting) thing.”

Arnett is no longer the lone Western face and voice in Baghdad. Now there are 50 other reporters in the torn city. They face identical dangers and endure the same hard work and, he says, deserve just as much praise as he, but “I’ve got the attention mainly because CNN is going to 105 countries.

“Really, I’m just part of a huge team, doing what I’ve always done with a helluva lot of good journalists. We’ve worked together before, and I’ve always felt that we journalists, we correspondents, never really did get our due.

“No one really understood what we were doing. Or cared about it.”

But the new, instantaneous nature of television war coverage and the multiplicity of exposure, he says, may be changing all that.

Arnett remembers another war, another country and one small village in El Salvador. It was a garrison town bombed in error by government planes. Innocents died, and Arnett filed a story from the village.

“On the basis of my reporting there was an investigation and that town, two years later, had become sort of a neutral zone,” he says. “Because innocent people were killed, both sides agreed to leave it as some kind of sanitized area.

“You can actually go there today --and freely. There are no troops there. So, in a sense, I realized that, God, maybe what I’m doing has the power to ease, to help, to heal emotions.”

In Desert Storm, he continues, similar live, in-depth reporting is alerting and informing America, the world and its policy-makers. Arnett’s purview has been the air war and “it (the air war) has been superbly done, but . . . every day or two there are some terrible accidents.

“If in some way, if the facts that I have been given help to give understanding of the whole picture, then I’ve done a good job.”

History, Arnett knows, cannot be rewritten. But had CNN been in Vietnam, he believes, had there been live television coverage of Tet offensives and B-52s over Hanoi, had there been objective reporting from all camps, “(Vietnam) would have been a much shorter war, I’m convinced.”

Despite 20 years as a print journalist, Arnett says he is happier as a broadcaster.

Before television there was Associated Press and a thousand stories on front pages of the world, but “nobody seemed to be reading them. . . . It just wasn’t getting through to people.”

But with CNN, looking at life through a television lens, Arnett found pictures “a helluva medium. . . . When I’d go down to Panama, people would stop me in the street and talk about the coverage I’d done of Central America.

“And I was having an impact on what was happening.”

He found his callouses softening and sensitivity returning.

“With my notebook . . . I would go to a village that had been bombed and write a story,” he says. “But now when I come back from a village or a town or a community, I see the faces on the tape and I write to that.

“I hear the crying . . . and that’s what goes out to the viewers. So in the end, the final sum of my life. . . . I think I can actually see that what I’m doing may be beneficial.”

At any war, Arnett is the consummate lifer. Every risk and in-country move is carefully calculated. He respects local sensitivities because within social acceptance there is understanding, then access.

Arnett’s emotions are steady “because I’ve been here before . . . and I came in knowing that what I was doing was very important to the network and very important to the world.

“I figured that I have a real mission here . . . and I was going to stay on top of it and my personal considerations would be secondary. . . .

“And I’m not being courageous or bold in saying it. After 30 years of this, I can . . . stay in the heart of the story.”

He is wary of Baghdad, but it does not scare him. Fear, he knows, lessens personal performance. Yet he has seen civilian casualties from American bombing and with them Iraqi anger leading to the spitting on and shoving of American reporters attempting to cover the funerals of air raid victims.

“Anything can happen, of course, but I never look at a situation as a worst case,” he says. “We are in a large hotel in the government district of town. . . . This is not a place where mobs frequent.

“So even if the worst comes to the worst, we are not going to have mobs marching on this hotel . . . and I don’t buy mobs tearing us to pieces.”

With or without mobs, Baghdad is far from being a comfortable assignment. Bed and board at the Al-Rashid Hotel (“the most most modern hotel in the Middle East,” Arnett says) averages $400 a day. There is no heat. The only available water is winter cold, pumped from the Tigris to the hotel for one hour each day.

“The biggest challenge each morning is to get up and get clean, basically throw half a dozen bottles of water over me,” Arnett says. “That really takes courage. But I feel that . . . if I smell right, I’ll look right on the air.”

Breakfast, he continues, is the second major challenge of the day: “We have waiters from other countries who are very nervous about coming up from the bomb shelters. So they hurriedly serve you, then disappear.

“Anyway, the breakfast is miserable. It is usually a partially fried egg.”

The final challenge is “to gather information for the day.”

But Arnett is finding the best of times: “I guess the satisfaction is to have survived six weeks in Baghdad. Not surviving the war, but surviving with my reputation hopefully still intact despite the toughest criticism I’ve ever had in my life.”

He also knows the worst of times: “I’ve had the flu, I miss my girlfriend. . . . I miss loving, I miss a decent meal, I want a hot shower and I get very lonely at night.”

Fortunately, there always is that Telesystems telephone.

Arnett uses it to call his girlfriend, Kimberly Moore, a former CNN intern.

Unfortunately, an Iraqi censor chaperones even these intensely personal calls.

“When I proposed to my girlfriend during a bombing raid, he was sitting nose to nose with me,” Arnett says. “He said yes before she did.”

Arnett declined to discuss details of the courtship.

Press censorship, he says, works both ways.