Italian Journalist: U.S. Lied

In February, Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena was taken hostage in Iraq. But after 28 days, she was rescued by an Italian intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari.

Sgrena and Calipari thought they'd escaped to safety, when an American patrol opened fire on their car. Sgrena was wounded; Calipari, an Italian national hero, was killed.

The incident has driven a wedge in the coalition. Last week in Rome, President Bush expressed his regret in person to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

How did it happen? The Army isn't talking. But in her first American television interview, Sgrena tells about the fatal rescue that has enraged Italy.

Giuliana Sgrena was Calipari's last assignment. In a video that Sgrena's captors forced her to make, the 56-year-old war reporter is seen begging, saying she would be killed if Italy didn't pull its troops out of Iraq.

She told 60 Minutes Wednesday that she feared beheading the most. She hoped they'd just shoot her instead. "I thought I am a woman, so they will kill me with a shot. Not cut me, the throat," says Sgrena.

60 Minutes Wednesday met with Sgrena and her husband on the balcony of their Rome apartment days after she left the hospital. She's recovering from a gunshot wound to her shoulder.

Sgrena, a veteran reporter for a communist newspaper, is against the war and has said so in her reporting. Her ordeal began when armed men yanked her out of her car in Baghdad. She ended up in a house, trying to show her captors she was tougher than they thought.

"Sometimes, they told me, 'Why you don't you cry?' Normally, I cry for everything when I am at home,'" says Sgrena. "And so my kidnappers told me, 'Cry. It will be better for you. Think of your family. So maybe you can cry.'"

But she says she didn't do it. The only time she says she cried was when the kidnappers ordered her to beg her husband, Pier, for help.

Her capture was a national obsession. Sgrena's face draped Rome's city hall, and the players on the city's leading soccer team wore "Liberate Giuliana" jerseys, which her kidnappers saw on TV, to their amazement.

The kidnappers were demanding that Italy pull its troops out of Iraq, but Sgrena told her captors what she thought of their chances. "I told them,'If you want me to ask to Berlusconi that we withdraw our troops, if not, you kill me. So, do it now,'" says Sgrena. "'Kill me now.'"

Instead of pulling his men out of Iraq, Berlusconi sent one more. In March, Calipari went to the Middle East to bargain with representatives of the men holding Sgrena. Her captors came to her to tell her the results.

"They told me, 'You are going to Rome,'" says Sgrena. "I am going to Rome? I couldn't believe."

We don't know what Calipari offered in exchange for Sgrena. There have been reports of a ransom that the Italians deny. But whatever it was, the kidnappers turned her over by leaving her in a parked car with cotton over her eyes, sunglasses and a headscarf.

The next thing she says she heard was Calipari's voice in her ear: "'Giuliana, Giuliana, I'm Nicola. I am a friend of Gabriele, of Pier. Now you are free. Come, don't be afraid. You are free. You are free.'"

"'You are free. You are free.' Yes, and this was really a very, very, it was just so happy, so really for me, it was a new life," says Sgrena.

Calipari took Sgrena to a car with another Italian agent at the wheel. They headed for the airport and the plane home.

Back in Rome, there were cameras in the newsroom as celebration erupted at Sgrena's paper. Her boss, Gabriele Polo, was summoned to Berlusconi's office, where the prime minister and Sgrena's husband were monitoring her rescue.

Sgrena says she was less than a half-mile from the airport, when the shooting began: "Seven hundred meters more, and we are in the airport, and we will be safe and we will be in the airport. And in the same moment, started the shooting."Sgrena says that as the car rounded a turn, driving no faster than 30 miles an hour, it was hit by gunfire and at the same time, a bright light. She and Calipari were in the back seat. "He [Calipari] pushed me down and with this, the body, covered me," says Sgrena. "He pushed me down in the car. And I was asking, 'Why?' Nicola doesn't say, he doesn't speak it, doesn't say nothing."

She says she heard Calipari's last breath: "I realized that Nicola was dead, without saying anything, nothing, no word, nothing at all."

What did happen? It appears the Italians had come across a checkpoint set up by the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard. The guardsmen had been in Iraq eight months, and one of their specialties was roadblock security. But it was a rainy night and two battalion soldiers had been killed by a bomb in the same area two days before.

The Italian government says the Americans should've been prepared for Sgrena's approach, because they say U.S. commanders were informed about the rescue mission in advance. Sgrena told 60 Minutes Wednesday that at one point, her driver was on the phone updating their progress to Italian and American officers at the airport.

The Army has finished an investigation, but the report isn't expected until the end of the week. The Pentagon declined to talk with 60 Minutes Wednesday, but the Army issued this statement on the night of the shooting: "Vehicle traveling at high speed refused to stop at a check point." [The soldiers] "attempted to warn the driver to stop by hand and arm signals, flashing white lights, and firing warning shots…when the driver didn't stop the soldiers shot into the engine block which stopped the vehicle."

"I think that is a lie," says Sgrena.

"Let's take this piece by piece," says Pelley. "Vehicle was speeding."

"No," says Sgrena.

"Attempted to warn the driver by hand signals," says Pelley.

"No," says Sgrena.

"Arm signals. Flashing white lights," says Pelley. "Firing warning shots."

"Nothing at all," says Sgrena.

"What you're saying in this interview is that none of those things happened?" asks Pelley.

"Nothing. No," says Sgrena. "I'm sure."

Checkpoints are a dangerous fact of life in Iraq. U.S. soldiers have been killed by bombers at checkpoints, and innocent Iraqis have been shot while approaching them.

60 Minutes Wednesday wanted to better understand what happens in these shootings, so it turned to a Marine, former Capt. Nathaniel Fick, who has a lot of experience with checkpoints in Iraq.

"They're snap judgments [whether to fire or not]," says Fick. "You make these decisions and you hope at the end that you've made more right than wrong."

"Did your Marines ever kill anyone at a checkpoint that in hindsight they didn't have to kill?" asks Pelley.

"There was one case when we did kill someone at a checkpoint," says Fick. "And the hindsight question is hard. We determined that there were no bombs in the car. No weapons in the car. And the other men in the car said that they didn't know why they'd charged at us. They [the survivors] were scared and disoriented and confused. So in hindsight, was it a mistake? I think it was. Given what I knew at the time, would I make the same decision? I think I would."

Fick has written a book, "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer," about what he learned in Iraq. The book will be published this fall. He told Pelley he learned the hard way that standard checkpoint tactics don't work.

"The hand and arm signals are hard to see, they're hard to interpret. The warning shots are difficult to see, almost impossible to see in daylight," says Fick. "Almost impossible to hear in a speeding car at a long distance. Usually, the last resort for us was attempting to fire into the engine block."

"Attempting?" asks Pelley.

"Almost impossible to do. A lot of that is Hollywood fantasy," says Fick. "I had a platoon that included many Marine snipers who are some of the best marksmen in the world. And they couldn't do it consistently."

Fick told 60 Minutes Wednesday that after struggling with the Pentagon's checkpoint procedures, he improvised; he stole an Iraqi stop sign.

"And at every checkpoint we set up after that, we put the stop sign down the road near the wire, and it was hugely successful," says Fick. "[It] worked very well."

This month, after several surgeries and three weeks in the hospital, Sgrena went back to her office for the first time. The reporter who refused to cry for her captors took cover behind her husband as she walked in to meet the friends that she feared she would never see again.

The Berlusconi government has kept troops in Iraq, despite polls that show about 70 percent of Italians oppose their presence.

Throughout Sgrena's kidnapping, Berlusconi refused to consider pulling out. But after the American shooting, the Italian government says it's looking at a schedule for doing just that.