NONFICTION - Dec. 29, 1991

LIVE FROM BAGHDAD: Gathering News at Ground Zero by Robert Wiener (Doubleday: $22; 384 pp.). When producer Robert Wiener’s team at CNN Baghdad heard that CBS called its people out of Iraq just before the Gulf War with the secret message, “Everyone’s fine at home except the kids have the sniffles,” they recoiled. “The kids have the sniffles? Sniffles? That’s a candy-ass code if I ever heard one,” exclaimed Wiener. “Who the hell comes up with these things?”

Wiener was irritated partly by CBS’ gullibility--the White House had called for an evacuation less for the reporters’ personal safety, he believed, than for its own political safety. (Wiener’s skepticism toward all sides should be partly credited for the Iraqis’ decision to let CNN alone stay in their country; even they came to respect the network’s consistently “objective” reportage.)

Truth be told, though, the “sniffles” code mostly annoyed Wiener because it sounded so wimpy. Wiener, about as macho as combat reporters come, flaunts his fearlessness in these pages, recounting how he had been “trapped in a hell hole under Vietnamese fire so close and intense you could almost hear the enemy loading their mortars . . . yanked out of my car more than 32 times while partisans cocked a gun to my head . . . running down nine flights of stairs at the Sheraton hotel in Mexico City while the earthquake split the hotel in two and blew out the windows.” Just about his only fear, it seems, is the possibility that NBC’s plumage might appear more impressive than his own.

Wiener’s machismo never comes off as sexist or unpleasantly egotistical, though, because it is so good-humored: In addition to making the irresistible jokes about Iraqi spying (e.g., the automatic TV in Wiener’s room which turns itself on and off at odd moments), Wiener often pokes fun at his own operation, dubbing it, at one point, “Captain Wacky’s Flying Circus.”