She’s back from Iraq, well clothed

Anne Garrels is a loner, and excels at conveying stories of ordinary people in extraordinarily bad situations -- qualities that served her when the National Public Radio correspondent was the only American broadcaster to remain in Baghdad during the Iraq war.

These attributes aren’t as helpful, though, when she’s on a book tour of the U.S. and she’s the subject of the story.

“I’m getting so sick of myself. Thank God I have a day job,” Garrels quipped during her stop this week in Los Angeles. Compared with the book tour, she said, “Baghdad is looking better by the minute.”

“Naked in Baghdad” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) serves as a diary of her time in the Iraqi capital before, during and after the U.S. bombing and invasion. Interspersed among her entries are copies of e-mails that her husband of 17 years, artist Vint Lawrence, sent from their Connecticut home to friends updating them on Garrels’ situation. The breezy “Brenda Bulletins,” a reference to comic-strip journalist Brenda Starr, belie Lawrence’s fear for her safety, while giving insights into Garrels’ life in the war zone.

And while the book’s title might be a figurative description of her isolation and vulnerability in a foreign capital under attack, it’s also quite literal. She broadcast in the nude while giving radio reports over her satellite phone in her hotel room. She figured that if Iraqi authorities came knocking, she could claim they woke her and she needed to dress, giving her time to hide the contraband phone.

“Not a great plan, but the only one I could come up with,” she wrote. And at the other end of the line, “All Things Considered” host Robert Siegel “remained in blissful ignorance.”

But she, too, was ignorant. Mostly cut off from news outside Baghdad, Garrels said she hoped her dispatches served as pieces of a mosaic, building to create a clear picture for others.

“I think she was totally oblivious to the impact she was having over here,” said Bruce Drake, NPR’s vice president for news. “There was just something, not only about what she said, but the tone and demeanor. Here is this calm, articulate reporter voice that had this air, that sometimes betrayed fatigue, that sometimes betrayed compassion for the people she was covering.”

With no other American TV or radio reporters in the city, she conveyed vivid reports from within Baghdad, such as the scene of a bombed market, which an Iraqi doctor later told her was probably the result of a wayward Iraqi antiaircraft shell.

Survivors accosted her, one youth holding a tin can he said held the brains of a victim, another holding a severed hand. She compared them to a Greek chorus as they asked her, “Is this what you call human rights? Is this what you call liberation?”

A listener in New York wrote NPR commending Garrels’ “extraordinary coverage.” “Her measured and detailed reporting in the face of official censorship from the center of the war zone deserves the highest praise for courage, balance and principle.”

A woman in Boston said, “Her stories are articulate, balanced, well-researched and concise, her demeanor empathic. She must be supremely brave. I feel humbled but grateful to have been able to hear her reports.”

“Listeners were treating me like one of the family,” said Garrels, 52, who added that her editor warned her she couldn’t skip a report, even if she didn’t think she had any substantial information to offer. Loren Jenkins told her, “Annie, if you don’t go on, they’re going to think you’re dead. And I don’t want to answer the e-mails.”

Garrels became a foreign correspondent almost by accident. While a pre-med student at Harvard, she took Russian at the suggestion of her organic chemistry professor, whose class she was nearly failing. That spawned a fascination with Russia and the Soviet Union, which in turn led to a job with ABC’s Moscow bureau. She eventually became bureau chief, until the government expelled her in 1982. She later worked as the State Department correspondent for NBC News, before joining NPR in 1988.

She was part of the NPR team that won a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in 1992 for covering the Gulf War. She won the award again four years later for her own coverage of the former Soviet Union.

Garrels cited two reasons she likes being a foreign correspondent: You can smoke and you get a driver. She has been to Chechnya, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the West Bank and Iraq while working for NPR.

And even after a cruise missile whizzed by her window on its way to a target in Baghdad, and U.S. troops shelled the Palestine Hotel, the international journalists’ headquarters, Garrels says Iraq was not her worst, or most dangerous, assignment.

While covering the civil war in Chechnya, she survived the dangers of drunken Russian soldiers, Moscow’s carpet-bombing campaign and the increasing radicalization of fighters on both sides of the conflict. “That was awful,” she said simply.

Garrels said she plans to return to Iraq to continue covering the war’s aftermath, saying she’s not well-suited to “coming back to Washington and being in a herd and covering a building.”

“I’m better at working in these strange places. I like the absurd logistics, and I’m infinitely curious about what people do,” she said. She’s also convinced of the importance of the work. “I’m a witness. It’s a great job; I don’t want to be made out to be a martyr. I don’t have a death wish.”

For her work in Baghdad, Garrels was one of three recipients of the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. But she deflected the honor to her co-recipients: Guatemalan columnist Marielos Monzon, who’s had her life threatened for reporting on human-rights violations, and Ukrainian newspaper editor Tatyana Goryachova, who was attacked with acid and has been harassed by the government over stories about official corruption and malfeasance.

She also credited the nonjournalists she’s encountered and relied on in her travels, such as Amer, her driver and translator for most of her time in Iraq, and a co-star of the book. He became a friend and confidant, ushering her through the city streets and even compiling information and conducting interviews in places where she was barred from going.

“Let’s face facts: I can come home. These people are caught in the maelstrom. They are truly courageous,” Garrels said. “Those people have gone, at great risk to themselves, to document the reality of the world in which we live, literally risking their lives. If I’ve ever been courageous in what I did, it’s because of them.”