Dozier: No Safety Guaranteed In Iraq

CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who was critically injured by a car bomb in Baghdad, wrote this article for the 2005 Summer issue of Wellesley, the magazine of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association.

Firas made it to work, sent his car to the shop, and poured himself a stiff early-morning Scotch (he doesn't drink), then retreated to a darkened room for the rest of the day. He did not tell his family — especially his mother — fearing she'd henceforth ban him from leaving their house. That's what many Iraqis do to avoid the violence on Baghdad's streets: They stay home for weeks, sometimes even months.

For most Americans, the bombing was just another ugly headline that would doubtless cause many to change the channel. It would likely prompt yet another U.S. military commander to ask me, "Why do you always report the bad news?" Because I can't ignore 35 people being killed, no matter how many hospitals or schools have been rebuilt, I would invariably reply.

There has been good news in Iraq — the election, for instance, with the massive popular turnout, which rocked the pessimistic press back on its heels, me included. But there are still more bad days than good, which is not a welcome message back home. It's also hard to find a new way to describe the same horrors over and over in order to keep Americans listening, when they've heard a phrase like "hail of shrapnel and glass" 100 times before.

Then again, I can't go so far as to show on air what I really see, like the bits of people I've inadvertently ended up standing upon amid the wreckage of a car bomb. After I'd finished stand-ups at one scene, the producer pointed out, "Did you notice you were standing on someone's toe?" We can't put that on TV.

The truth is, no matter how I'd like to spend my days doing "good news" stories, Iraq is still a horror show, one most Iraqis and many young American soldiers cannot escape, and one U.S. commanders have admitted will take years to change, given the strength of the insurgency.

So we stay on, broadcasting a message that isn't always popular with the military or our audience, in an environment that has gotten more dangerous for journalists, and for every other type of foreigner, by the day — and more dangerous still for Iraqis.

A City of Armed Camps

Baghdad's skyline has to be etched into every American's brain by now: a chockablock dun-colored hodgepodge of ugly post-Soviet modern buildings with a couple of blue mosques thrown in, which help break up the skyline when someone has bothered to dust them off. The Tigris runs through it, but the river is treated more like an obstacle to traffic than anything else. Saddam Hussein didn't let anyone on it, parceling out the best riverside plots to his chums. The attitude stuck; people turned their backs on the river then, and it has stayed that way. The few restaurants that did make a living along the shores are now mostly shut, because few people dare to venture out after dark for an evening meal.

Our bureau takes up an entire floor of one of the city's largest hotels. When security gets really bad, say when the militants put out one of their occasional "We're gonna get all the foreigners" flyers, we're mostly housebound. Then the hotel compound becomes what I like to call "the Habitrail Hotel for Hamsters and Journalists," and my days dissolve into a mind-numbing series of trips from my room, to the office, to the roof, to the office, to the roof, to the room, and to bed.

When we do go back outside, we have to take care, because we stand out. While a newspaper journalist can still get around a bit — just one person, with an Iraqi driver, a notebook, a recorder, and a microphone — TV news requires a small army: a correspondent, a producer, a cameraman, a soundman, a translator, and two drivers, all tucked into two armored vehicles.

That means we need a veritable army to guard us. On every trip outside the hotel, we take along at least two former British Special Forces guys, with AK-47s tucked discreetly inside their first-aid packs. Their job: to watch for anyone in the traffic who seems to be paying too much attention to us.

They tell us, however, that two to three of them are still not enough to fight back if, say, a dozen armed attackers hit us — a method that has been used to kidnap foreigners from vehicles or compounds in the past. But they say they may be able to buy some of us enough time to get away. Not very reassuring, to say the least.

So when we drive to interview an imam or a politician, our "security advisors," as they are called, are ready to respond, with one hand on their radios and the other resting on the butt of the gun at their feet — or tucked in the trigger at particularly tense moments. When we get invited to barbecues or dinners at other networks across town, we usually decline. Like Iraqis, we've learned the merits of traveling only when absolutely necessary.

Journalist's Credo:
I Can Do It Myself

None of us used to work this way, me in particular. No armed bodyguards, no armored vehicles. As a radio journalist just after Sept. 11, 2001, I ran all over Kabul and Tora Bora on my own, traveling with one unarmed guide in the middle of prime Taliban country. Now those weeks spent clambering over the mountains, looking for Osama bin Laden's hideout, seem perversely carefree.

It was like that for a while in Iraq, too. Just after Saddam fled Baghdad and his statue was yanked down on international TV, my cameraman Chris Albert and I were driving around Baghdad on our own, hunting up stories, stopping for a coffee or a kebab at local restaurants. We drove to Tikrit on our own, and we drove back to Amman, Jordan, almost a month later on our own, too, on a road that is now so dangerous that no foreigner goes near it.

The network did have a couple of security advisors back then — ex-military guys meant to protect us. We thought of them, initially, as guys who took a valuable seat in the vehicle and got in the way, so quite often we politely ignored them and left them behind.

Over the next year, our attitudes toward our security advisers started to change. Our respect for them rose in tandem with our growing aversion to appearing on television wearing orange, as the unwilling star of an insurgent hostage video.

The militants were just figuring out that kidnapping foreigners grabs headlines. And they soon lumped journalists in with the rest, stripping us of the pseudo-immunity the media usually enjoys, that used to allow us to move unhindered on all sides of the conflict.

There was also a shift in attitude on the street. After the bombings and other terror attacks picked up pace, Iraqis who used to wave at us now shouted things like "CIA," and glared, as if we were a carload of Typhoid Marys who had personally brought this plague of violence to their country.

It didn't help that our flashy four-wheel-drive armored vehicles were identical to the ones being used by the U.S.-led coalition. We changed that after a roadside bomb exploded near one of our 4WDs. The producer and security advisers inside were fine; the blast hit a car just ahead, and the armor absorbed the rest. But it was enough of a wake-up call that we switched to low-key armored sedans, kept as unwashed and dusty as possible to blend in with the choking Baghdad traffic.

All of us also wear bulletproof jackets, in case we have to abandon the car under fire, and the women among us have taken to wearing veils, at least for long trips. I confess I sometimes leave my veil behind for short trips, or when the thermometer hits more than 100 degrees. Then I kick myself when a carload of Iraqis next to us spots me and glares.

Typhoid Marys

It's funny how things have come full circle when it comes to being a foreigner in Iraq.

In Baghdad in 1998, when then-President Clinton treated then-President Saddam to a four-day sound-and-light show of precision bombing, I would make occasional dashes downtown to grab some fresh bread and fresh air, leaving my official government "minder" behind. The minder needn't have worried that I was going to talk to anyone. Iraqis avoided me like the plague, literally parting like a wave around me on the sidewalk, as if I were contagious. I later found out why: Anyone caught talking to a foreigner without an Iraqi-government minder present to monitor the exchange could end up dragged away by Saddam's henchmen to jail, torture, or worse.

For a year or so after Saddam's statue fell, Iraqis enjoyed saying whatever they wanted to whomever they met. Now — again — Iraqis risk death just for talking to me or associating with any foreigners in any way. This time, the dreaded enforcers are the militants. We learned that the hard way, when we rolled up to the house of a dentist. One of our Iraqi cameramen had done all the pre-shooting — one of the ways we limit our exposure to the outside world. But our interview subject hadn't realized an American woman would be doing the interview, and we hadn't thought to tell him.

The dentist welcomed us into his home — Iraqi politeness winning out over his fear —but he was pale and sweating. When we finished the interview, he told my Iraqi cameraman why: His next-door neighbor was a militant sympathizer from Fallujah, and he didn't know what retaliation awaited him once we left. Since then, he has refused to take our calls.

Republic of Fear, And Beyond

In the old Iraq, Saddam ruled very much by the phrase, "Kill one, frighten a thousand." Brother spied upon brother, and no one knew whom to trust.

We foreigners got a small taste of that. Journalists were watched everywhere we went. We all stayed at the Rashid Hotel, because that's where the Iraqi government put us. Some 30 pairs of eyes watched us from the moment we walked through the Rashid's front gate until we got to our hotel rooms, many making small notations in notebooks as we passed.

We were told they were recording us in our rooms, as well. Our only proof: If you unplugged your television, a member of the hotel staff would magically appear at your hotel door, telling you to plug it back in. Apparently, that's where the recording device was located.

Now, we have other watchers.

This past spring, as we filmed a stand-up from our hotel rooftop — a kilometer from the Green Zone — a pair of Apache helicopters buzzed us twice, flying so close I could see one of the pilots was having a bad day.

Then not five minutes later, a U.S. Marine patrol burst onto the roof, running in our direction. They told us they had a report that we were filming the Green Zone, which was forbidden for security reasons. A bit bemused, we took them downstairs to the bureau, gave them cold sodas, and sent them on their way.

Unfortunately, they're not the only ones keeping an eye on us. Intelligence sources have told us that the militants are watching, too — tracking our movements, even monitoring our cell-phone calls. We didn't really believe it.

When a rocket slammed into our building recently, we dismissed it, assuming it was aimed at the Green Zone nearby. Then a video of the rocket attack appeared on a militant web site. You can hear the attacker's voice, saying, "The CIA is meeting at this hotel right now, so we are hitting the tenth floor." And then, they fire.

No one was hurt by the blast, nor were there any American secret agents hiding out on the tenth floor, as far as we know. (I would have had a few pointed questions for them.) But the militants accomplished their goal — frightening every Iraqi working in the hotel, and giving them another reason to fear foreigners like us.

It was one more reminder for us that there's no such thing as immunity from violence in Iraq — and no shortage of it, either. At least not yet.

And of course, it was one more incident our colleague Firas chose not to share with his mother.

By Kimberly Dozier. Originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of Wellesley, the magazine of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association