CBS’ Simon Returns to Scene of Ordeal : Television: Correspondent who was captured and held prisoner by the Iraqis goes back to Baghdad for special that will be aired July 4.

CBS News correspondent Bob Simon is reminiscing over his breakfast plate, but he is keeping the stomach-churning details to a minimum.

A print reporter, one of several attending a morning interview session promoting the July 4 CBS News special “Bob Simon: Back to Baghdad” is nevertheless determined to get some of the gore for her big-city tabloid.

“How did they treat you?” she asks Simon, 50, who sat out most of Desert Storm after he strayed into the no man’s land between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, was captured by Iraqi soldiers and imprisoned for 40 days.

“Badly,” he replies between mouthfuls.

How badly, she wants to know.

“They beat us up all the time and starved us and threatened to kill us but nothing what you’d call methodical torture,” he says. “Not as badly as they treated the Kuwaiti resistance people,” he adds, advising the woman she would not really want to hear about it.

Looking back at the experience, which began Jan. 21 when Simon, his producer and crew went just 200 meters into an area they believed would be perfectly safe--safe enough for him to think the three Iraqi soldiers who drove up in a single jeep, armed with AK-47s, were probably defectors--he can almost laugh about it now.

One of the network’s most esteemed and battle-ready correspondents, Simon, who is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and had covered the Vietnam War, war in Beirut and revolution in Romania, says, “This is the most embarrassing thing to admit because after everything that happened, I would like to say, ‘But what we were after, had we gotten it, let me tell ya . . . ‘ “

He pauses, smiles and says, “Not at all. It was a really routine thing. . . .

“Frankly you could call it many things, but I think it was really bad luck.”

Released March 2, Simon spent three weeks writing everything down back in Israel (he is trying to write a book about his experiences). “And then all of a sudden this came up and so there we were on the road back to Baghdad.”

Some wondered why Simon wanted to go back at all, something he said was not as difficult as it might seem.

To start, “They were inviting me in with a proper journalistic visa, which I certainly didn’t have the first time.” Not that there weren’t any difficult moments.

Though he was not allowed to photograph or see the actual cell where he was imprisoned, he did a stand-up outside.

“When we got there, there were four of these goons, four guards who were obviously intelligence guys . . . and I recognized one of them, he was one of the guards who I knew from not all that long before. . . . We had a still photographer with us who spoke Arabic and he asked him, this guard, if he recognized me, and the photographer told me that he said in a very cocky tone, ‘Sure I know him, he was with us a long time.’ ”

With the guards nearby, Simon made a last-minute change in his copy.

“I chickened out,” he says. “I had something written about, ‘This is Saddam’s intelligence headquarters, the interrogation center where political prisoners are starved, beaten, tortured and tried’--all of which is true--but I just wasn’t going to say that with those guys listening in, and I didn’t. So we have it in voice-over later on.” he says, laughing.

Since his return, Simon says, he has received more than 1,000 letters--more mail than he has ever received. Most of it was positive, prayerful, full of praise and warmth.

About one in 30 people, however, told Simon he got what he deserved for breaking Pentagon pool-coverage rules.

What the experience means to Simon’s future as a war correspondent is unclear--he had never been captured before, though he had been in danger many times.

“If there was a war tomorrow I wouldn’t go,” he says. “How I’ll feel in a year from now, I don’t know.”

CBS’ “Bob Simon: Back to Baghdad” will be broadcast Thursday.