Life in the cross hairs

It was nearly 3 p.m. on a wet, blustery afternoon when Bob Simon arrived at East Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel in a trench coat, his battered 40-year-old attache case belying how high his star is ascending at CBS News.

The week’s agenda: interviews for a “60 Minutes II” story on Palestinian young women-turned-suicide bombers.

Awaiting camera time with Simon, beneath 20-foot ceilings in the ornate, Persian-carpeted Pasha Room, was Lea Tsemel, Israeli Jewish attorney for Palestinian Arina Ahmed, an aspiring suicide bomber from the Dahaisha refugee camp outside Bethlehem. Last April, Ahmed backed out of her mission at the last moment -- just before a young Palestinian companion in Jerusalem detonated himself and killed two Israelis. Now charged as an accomplice, Ahmed was in Nevh Tirza women’s prison in Ramla, where Simon hoped to interview her.

For decades, Simon has been arguably the nation’s premier TV correspondent in this region, at home on many fronts but making his mark most indelibly in the Middle East as a war reporter and keen observer of human behavior.

He has operated confidently in political minefields where TV cameras often trespass gingerly. And also in the usual hot spots, where things haven’t always gone smoothly. He and a CBS News team spent 40 days in Iraqi prisons after their capture by Saddam Hussein’s forces near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border in the early days of the Gulf War in 1991.

Yo-yoing in and out of countries and hot spots would seem a young man’s game, not for someone only a few years from Medicare. And goodness knows, silver-haired Simon no longer relishes travel in a globalized age that challenges one to distinguish Kuala Lumpur’s skyline from Chicago’s.

Yet trying something else “terrifies” him, he said here last month. “What else would I do, become one of those guys in Washington engaging in a screaming match on a Sunday show?”

Instead, he’d soon be in Seoul for a piece on why South Koreans “hate us.” Then, faster than you could say jet lag, he’d arrive in New York, then be off to Flint, Mich., to chat up star documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, before moving on to ... you name it.

At the moment, he’s back here working in Israel, where he and Francoise, his French wife of 36 years, have their home near the beach in a community just north of Tel Aviv, even though he’s a U.S. citizen and no longer covers the Middle East regularly for CBS News.

Watching him at work for several days in pursuit of the suicide bombers story demonstrates vividly why he is so valuable to CBS News. Yet would the Ahmed interview take place? Simon knew from vast experience to take nothing for granted in this turbulent patch of planet.

‘This place has its own rules’

Although Tsemel wants it to happen, and Israel’s Shin Bet security service is thumbs up, there’s a snafu. The Foreign Ministry has just vetoed the Ahmed interview. That it could fall through at the last moment “did not shock me, no,” says Simon, who’s been in Israel off and on since 1963 when he summered on a kibbutz as a callow 22-year-old. “This place has its own rules.”

After a back-and-forth, the Defense Ministry relents, although Simon is still unsure tomorrow’s prison encounter will occur as he interviews Tsemel.

There are at least two Simons. One is friendly, a good companion who tells colorful stories with a ripe sense of humor over a glass of wine at dinner. He talks of books and movies with as much ease as he does world events, and loves opera. Yet an ever-ringing cell phone and these traveling TV sit-downs are the booming aria of his career.

So when cameras roll and the subject is suicide bombers, his jaw tightens and he’s all business. “Lea, who are these girls?” he opens with Tsemel, who later calls Ahmed “very much the girl next door.”

Simon’s questions here are mostly from Draggan Mihailovich, one of three field producers he collaborates with on “60 Minutes II” stories. “I’ll give him a list, and he’ll do them in his own order and add some,” says Mihailovich, who views the interview live on a portable monitor. Later he will edit the story in New York and write the script.

As Simon readily acknowledges, he and Mihailovich typify the tip and iceberg of newsmagazine shows, whose correspondents are the stars and field producers the unseen, unheralded workhorses. They usually make the initial contacts and lay foundations, even when on-camera reporters they work with are as able and experienced as Simon.

“Good,” says Simon after finishing with Tsemel. Then he lights a Kool and thinks ahead to tomorrow and “the girl next door.”

Mike Wallace’s successor?

Laura Haim, a French video journalist working for CBS News, observed here that the oft-traveled Simon appears weary at times. “But when you talk to him,” she added, tapping her brow, “you can see the light in his eyes.”

It better be there, for Simon has miles and miles to log for “60 Minutes,” where his presence is expanding greatly as he continues generating stories for its spinoff, “60 Minutes II.” And where, in something like British knighthood, he’s dubbed heir apparent to Mike Wallace.

“Nobody is Mike Wallace’s heir apparent,” Simon disagreed, titling the show’s most famous correspondent “the best interviewer there ever was.” Perhaps, but at age 84, the “best interviewer” is also one of the oldest interviewers, causing him to curtail his “60 Minutes” schedule. Simon is the beneficiary, his own stories there now jumping from five a year, he says, to between 10 and 12. When he’s on “60 Minutes,” moreover, he now earns its version of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: his own “I’m Bob Simon” intro at the head of the hour with those of the other correspondents’.

Haim said it was her French film on Palestinian suicide bombers that drew “60 Minutes II” toward its own story focusing on females.

Her entree to CBS News was Simon. She called him out of the blue four months ago to ask him to view her footage. “He’s very famous, he’s a star, but he’s very accessible and he’s a journalist,’ she said.

Another of Haim’s contacts was rejected by Simon when he and his colleagues gathered in a lounge just off the hotel bar to discuss it in hushed tones like characters in an espionage novel. A young Palestinian was willing to be interviewed about her plans to become a suicide bomber. But what if she were lying? Even worse, what if she weren’t, in effect making “60 Minutes II” her confidante about a slaughter that could occur even before the interview airs?

Like many journalists dipping even a toe into this region’s boiling caldron, Simon has been scalded by critical comments from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet when asked about Simon in his Ramallah office in the West Bank, Radwan Abu-Ayyash, chairman of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corp., didn’t parse: “Bob Simon is balanced. He knows exactly what’s happening. He is an enlightened person.”

Praise also comes from Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office. “Don’t write this down -- this will kill him -- but Simon is good for Israel,” said Seaman, a former New Yorker known for regularly lambasting the foreign press for what he sees as pro-Palestinian bias. “He’s also been critical of Israel other times,” Seaman added. “But he’s professional, he’s good. It’s not Simon I’m against. I just believe that we shouldn’t be giving publicity to terrorists.”

Why even explore these bombings carried out by terrorists some call “walking dead”?

“They’ve transformed the map of the world, to say nothing of the United States, and they’ve changed the political equation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Simon. “And the fact that women are now involved is part of the story.”

Which doesn’t mean Ahmed should be interviewed, protested Seaman. “Terrorists should be put in jail and that’s it. No one should try and understand what it’s about. We shouldn’t let them sit there and put a human face to it.”

He predicted how Ahmed would appear on TV. “You see her and you say, ‘Look how terrible the occupation [of the West Bank and Gaza Strip] is. Look at this sweet little girl. The damn Jews drove her so mad that she considered committing suicide. She changed her mind at the last minute because she believes in peace.’ ” It fits, Seaman said, with the view that “Jews brought on the Holocaust themselves, because that’s what Jews do.”

An interview in the balance

The bright lilac lipstick and clunky jewelry adorning Nevh Tirza’s colorful female warden contrasts with the austere, narrow enclosure where Simon’s interview with Arina Ahmed will happen.

If she wishes it to happen. It’s her call, the warden and her chief spokeswoman stress to the CBS News entourage of 11.

Mihailovich has come with 53 questions for Ahmed, and the crew laboriously sets up cameras and other equipment in the tiny space -- only to break it all down later when she says no, then no again after meeting privately with Simon.

He says he told her: “You’re being charged as an accomplice, when in fact you were back in Bethlehem when those two people were killed. They’re going for life imprisonment. There’s no way that talking to us will help your case, but I can’t imagine how it would hurt you.”

Ahmed says she wants to ask her family before deciding. The CBS crew and prison authorities suspect, instead, that a Palestinian prison leader doing life for her part in the murder of an Israeli is pressuring Ahmed to reject the interview.

Indeed, her final answer is again no, affirming that stories don’t always pan out perfectly. More productive days are ahead, though, with Simon interviewing the mother of an Israeli girl who died by terrorism and Palestinian parents of the suicide bomber who killed her.

Lives in transition

Simon was born in the Bronx to a German father who worked in a bank and a Russian mother who introduced him to libraries even “before I could read.” That accounts for an interest in words and books that found him graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a history degree from Brandeis University and earning a Fulbright to France. After a U.S. foreign service stint, he joined WCBS-TV in New York for $12,500 a year, more than double his government pay. He began his CBS News career in 1967, earning awards galore through the years for foreign stories ranging from Vietnam to China’s Tiananmen Square.

In 1996, Simon began inching his way into “60 Minutes,” where his daughter, Tanya, also works as an associate producer. His story mix is ever widening, and he now spends as much time in the U.S. as abroad. Yet foreign reporting remains his big, bold signature.

If Simon is in transition, so is “60 Minutes,” given the announced phasing out of warhorse executive producer Don Hewitt, 80, in favor of middle-aged Jeff Fager, now running “60 Minutes II.” Although the show’s Nielsen ratings and storytelling remain blue chip, critics of “60 Minutes” find it creaky, mostly because it attracts grayer viewers while being an oasis for age in a medium obsessed largely with youth. Commentator Andy Rooney is as old as Wallace, Morley Safer is 70, Ed Bradley and Leslie Stahl are 61, and Steve Kroft is 57.

And Simon? The show’s self-proclaimed “new kid on the block” is clearly no kid as he nears 62. Nor is he new. He’s returned to Baghdad for CBS News several times, and he opposes war with Iraq.

“OK, Saddam’s a monster,” he said. “He was a monster when he was our boy too. But people have short memories.

“There is absolutely no evidence that there was any collaboration whatsoever between Saddam and Al Qaeda,” Simon said. “But the White House understands it can set the media’s agenda to such an extent that all they have to do is repeat it over and over and a majority of Americans will believe that Saddam was behind Sept. 11.”

Simon also fears invading Iraq “will take the level of rage up in the Muslim world another 10 notches,” that “those not political will become political” and those angry “will be angrier.”

Of course, intense anger, along with sadness, already blackens the Middle East.

Irony and suffering

In Jerusalem’s Kiryat Yovel neighborhood, a modest apartment is heavy with gloom. It’s where Simon interviews Avigail Levy, whose daughter, Rachel, died along with a security guard when Hayat Akhras -- instead of withdrawing at the last moment as Ahmed did -- blew herself up at a suburban supermarket on March 29.

Rachel was 17, Hayat 18. Both were pretty and looked enough alike to be sisters, Rachel’s mother tells a grim Simon. “All we see and hear about is the poor Palestinians, but why do I have to pay for it?” she adds, as if an answer were possible. The Levys left Israel in 1984 for nine years of sunshine in Los Angeles, where they had family and Avigail attended Pierce College, before returning home.

The terrible irony, she says, is that Rachel sympathized with Palestinians in impoverished ghettos like Dahaisha where Hayat grew up and became embittered. Did that environment, together with Israeli occupation, drive her toward the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which sent her on her lethal mission?

Avigail Levy thinks not, telling Simon “terrorism is in the blood.”

Only a temporary injunction filed by attorney Tsemel now stops the Israelis from bulldozing the Dahaisha home of Hayat’s family as part of their policy of collective retribution that Palestinians claim punishes the innocent. Simon asks Avigail Levy if she wants it demolished. She pauses, then answers yes.

Simon says he doesn’t harden to pain he witnesses. Yet what sort of person thrives on this work? “I don’t think it’s an accident that so many of the best journalists and writers of the last century were depressive or manic-depressive,” he says.

That darkness, he adds, also applies to him. “I have always found it helpful to be in situations where people have been suffering, because I could relate to it.”

As he says that, his face is drawn, his mood somber. He doesn’t elaborate further.

Clarity is the casualty

“They are going to Hayat’s house!”

That, says a Palestinian interpreter, is what young boys are shouting as they scamper alongside two vans carrying the “60 Minutes II” group through Dahaisha’s crowded warrens on a gray day when drizzle falls from the January skies like tears. They could be boys in any neighborhood, though walls in this hilly one are covered by graffiti and posters of “martyrs” the likes of Hayat.

Her parents, Mohammed and Khadra Akhras, greet Simon and his crowd warmly and serve hot tea inside the structure Israelis want to raze. This is where Laura Haim shot footage of Hayat’s family for her own film months earlier, just as TV crews rushed to the Levys in Jerusalem when their daughter died.

Much of the Akhras’ house is now a memorial to Hayat. Living here with the parents are two sons (two older ones are in Israeli jails), six surviving daughters and seven grandchildren. Among them are two huggable cherubs in pigtails, ages 3 and 4, little girls so full of life and personality that Simon can’t resist playing and laughing with one as the crew sets up. An observer can’t help but be struck by the surreal notion that she could be his granddaughter, or in a dozen years the death of him.

Simon faces Hayat’s parents in a cramped second-floor space. In an adjoining area, a TV is going and two young women in head scarves are on the floor making bread amid small children. Atop another flight of stairs is a nicely furnished room with a fancy chandelier, recalling a more affluent time when now-jobless Mohammed worked regularly as a construction supervisor.

The irony, Simon notes privately, is that Mohammed probably earned his living building Israeli settlements on land Jews believe God ordained to them, like one the CBS caravan passed on the way here. Attached like a blister to a steep hillside, it prompted Simon to observe: “Even aesthetically, it’s an abomination.”

A related abomination is today’s topic, as Simon asks through the interpreter if Hayat’s parents “respect” what she did in that Jerusalem supermarket. When the response is vague, Simon tries again. “Did she do the right thing on March 29?” They won’t be pinned down. “I’m afraid that I have to ask you again,” says Simon, “because the answer is not very clear.”

Clarity is a casualty this day, even though Mohammed tells Simon he would rather “die a hundred times” than another of his daughters become a suicide bomber.

“Would you like to meet Mrs. Levy?” Simon asks Mrs. Akhras, who has changed to a handsome black frock and head scarf for the camera. “Maybe someday,” she replies.

Indeed, why not go for a mother-to-mother face-off, which, however exploitative, is something all-news cable networks probably would do? When asked that later, Simon is repulsed, calling it “cross-fire of the dead.”

What is it with Simon and Israel? Why does this avowed non-Zionist, secular Jew stay when the logical thing, job-wise, is resettling in the U.S.?

The gravity and intensity of Israeli life are an “addiction,” he says. “Until Sept. 11, I’d leave Israel and go to the States and find that what people talked about I didn’t care about. I had no interest. But I don’t know if I’ll go on living in Israel. In terms of ’60 Minutes,’ it makes more sense for me to move to New York.”

Next morning, he amends his answer, saying he couldn’t see himself ever trading Israel for the Big Apple. A few days later, he was in Seoul. The light shines.

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Howard Rosenberg is The Times’ television critic. He can be reached at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.