[The Committee to Protect Journalists] annual report shows record # of journalists imprisoned worldwide in 2017, including 21 on “fake news” charges. @POTUS must understand his harmful rhetoric only empowers repressive regimes to jail reporters & silence the truth.
—Senator John McCain, Dec. 13, 2017
IT BEGAN IN the quiet way so many stories do, with information passed along to a reporter from a confidential source. Only this one was destined to be trouble from the start. It was a story about Egypt, and the information included a set of secret recordings. The recordings were proof that the Egyptian government was engaged in a two-faced foreign policy, publicly condemning the U.S. for the decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem while secretly supporting the Trump administration’s plan. An Egyptian intelligence officer could be heard calling some of the country’s most popular broadcast hosts and delivering a message: encourage the Egyptian people to accept the embassy move. David Kirkpatrick of The Times got the recordings in the final days of 2017. The Times went live with his story in the first week of the new year.
The blowback was immediate. David worked in London after many years in Egypt. He was out of harm’s way. Not so for The Times staff who continued to man our bureau in Cairo. They were a soft target, employees of a foreign news organization that had dared to take on Egypt’s supreme leadership. An Egyptian lawyer filed official papers demanding that the authorities begin a criminal investigation of The Times. The story had done the intolerable, he said, it had created an atmosphere of “instability and anxiety.” It was clear to him and his allies that The Times was nothing more, and nothing less, than a tool of the Muslim Brotherhood. By the next day, the vitriol aimed at The Times had seeped into Parliament. The Speaker claimed to have proof that The Times was funded by Qatar, a longtime Egyptian nemesis. (If you happen to be a conspiracy theorist, here’s something to pick over: our advertising department had managed to sell some ad space to the Qatari government shortly before our story.) Others joined in the campaign of intimidation. Pictures of our reporters were plastered in local newspapers, and a second member of Parliament weighed in, denouncing the story as evidence that the foreign media was waging a war against Egypt. From where I sat, the situation seemed to be exactly the opposite.
Soon the inevitable came: the accusation that we were trafficking in “fake news”—a term that since January 20, 2017, had become the slur-in-waiting for the world’s authoritarians every time they were unhappy about having the truth disclosed. By the start of 2018, the Egyptians were masters at deploying it, wielding it both as a weapon to silence and a way to link arms and curry favor with the new press-hating American administration. Ten months into the Trump administration, we knew better than to think that the U.S. embassy could have some constructive role to play in easing a tense and escalating situation that threatened an American news organization and put in jeopardy Americans’ ability to get real journalism about a country that mattered in the world’s most volatile region.
Within days of the story’s appearance, our Egyptian lawyer called: the state prosecutors were moving ahead with the criminal investigation of The Times.
It was never clear to me whether Times readers understood how isolated American news organizations and their journalists had become in many foreign outposts. The economic downturn in the newspaper industry had blown a hole in international coverage. Most large-city American newspapers had shuttered their foreign bureaus and retreated to their home bases, leaving the increasingly perilous business of covering the world from an American perspective to a handful of big players like the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Times, helped along by a few gritty and crazy-brave freelancers. For those news organizations that remained in the world’s hardest places, journalists had become easier targets for hostile regimes. It was just math: silencing one voice wasn’t much of a lift for governments used to locking down their own people whenever they dared to resist, especially if no one was there to witness it.
Back in New York, The Times’s international editor Michael Slackman and I tried to get a handle on what was happening in Cairo. In one sense, none of this was new. Michael and I had worked our way through threats to journalists in too many places over the years: Pakistan, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Turkey, Ethiopia, Cuba, Jordan, Mexico, Iran. That was just the short list. But no matter how often we had done this drill, the learning curve always seemed to start anew with the next call or next email about fresh troubles somewhere. There were too many variables, most of them out of our control or hidden from view: the shifting political climate, the on-the-ground sensitivities of a particular story, the strength of a reporter’s connections in a country, a regime’s appetite for bringing more attention to a damaging piece of reporting. Everything worth knowing was unknowable. And in many places we didn’t have many options anyway, which meant we were inevitably circling back to a first-order question: was it time to move our people out of the country?
I had sat through too many pitches from security firms that specialize in providing protection to American workers abroad, and they tried to impress me by how quickly they had moved their clients out of countries that had imploded with public unrest or terrorist attacks or the onset of war. I had little interest in any of that. I needed to know how good they were at keeping safe the people who planned to stay behind and run toward the fire. We were a news organization, not an oil company. We were in the world to be a witness to its troubles. And that was what made the calculation of deciding when to pull people so much more complicated. No one wanted to be the person who encouraged reporters to stay, only to watch from the warm safety of New York when they were detained by the authorities or worse. That was not abstract or hypothetical, at least not in Egypt, where American aid workers and Al Jazeera reporters had been arrested in recent years. On the other hand, to pull out could send the absolutely wrong message to a regime’s leaders: that they had the power to rid themselves of Western reporters by bullying them in the courts or in the streets. And there was always one more consideration: the reporters got a say. More often than not, they wanted to stay no matter what, to continue their reporting, to stand up to oppressive governments, to prove they weren’t going to be intimidated.
I had never set out to be The Times’s go-to person on security. It began in November 2008 when I received a call from Bill Schmidt, one of our editors, letting me know that our reporter David Rohde had been kidnapped in Afghanistan. David had set up a communications plan with our Kabul bureau and then driven with two Afghan colleagues to interview a Taliban leader who had previously met with Western reporters. After David missed a phone check-in, someone at our Kabul bureau had called his cell phone and learned that the three of them had been seized after driving into a trap set by the guy they were meeting. Three years earlier, I had been the drafter of the company’s kidnap response plan. I had worked with a committee and a consultant, we had convened several meetings, we issued our plan, and it was quickly tucked away in a drawer and essentially forgotten. That, it turned out, was enough to put me in charge of managing our response to David’s kidnapping three years later. I had only the vaguest idea of what we were supposed to do. A group of editors and I sat in a conference room that first afternoon trying to find out what we could from Carlotta Gall, our bureau chief in Kabul. I knew we had crisis consultants we could call, but we had never done that before; nobody at The Times had communicated with them in the years since the response plan was laid to rest in the drawer. Somebody mentioned that David was also working on a book about Afghanistan. Maybe we should find out what his publisher could do to help us, someone else suggested.
I stepped out of the room and tracked down the number for the publisher’s general counsel. When I got through, I explained how David Rohde was writing a book for his company and how David had just been kidnapped by the Taliban. He agreed with me that it was a terrible situation. “I’m glad you’re involved,” he said. “We wouldn’t know what to do.”
For the next seven months, my life would be consumed by David’s kidnapping. I would go to the FBI’s New York operations center with our editor Bill Keller to watch hostage videos released by David’s captors. I was on the phone or in meetings every day with David’s wife, Kristen, and his brother, Lee, as we tried to figure out how to get David and his two Afghan colleagues back home. Reporters at The Times with connections deep into the intelligence services gave us information that was always interesting but could never be verified. I worked with two outside security consulting firms. One was The Times’s regular consulting firm for crisis management. The other, introduced to us by a friend of David’s relatives, was run by a former Green Beret, whose top operations person was a former CIA agent. The CIA guy had already been convicted of a felony; his boss would be convicted a few years later of defrauding the government on defense contracts. They came filled with promises of cowboy missions and deep-state intelligence. They conjured up one crazy scheme after another. They gave code names to people who they said were in Pakistan, where David was being held, and who were providing them with firsthand information on David’s captors. They came up with mind-boggling plans to bribe Taliban guards, have them overpower the others, and spirit David and the two Afghans off into the night—going where and how … who knew? The details were not part of their game. At one point, Kristen, Lee, and I were summoned on a Sunday afternoon to a New York hotel lobby to meet with a guy who claimed to work undercover for the CIA and was willing to go into Pakistan and bring David out. We sat in an isolated corner as he whispered about his plans and swept his eyes around the nearly empty room. We had no idea what was real and what was phony, what would work and what wouldn’t. Somehow I had stumbled into this life, filled every day with Langley rejects, real and pretend spooks, and the occasional con artist, the bountiful reward for having once upon a time written a crisis management plan for my buttoned-up corporate employer.
It didn’t help that the U.S. government was mostly an enigma to us. The FBI is the lead agency when an American gets kidnapped—even in a distant war zone like Afghanistan, where the CIA and the U.S. military and the State Department know far more about what is going on and seem not very interested in sharing with others, especially out-of-their-depth FBI types. FBI agents would lecture us on the illegality of paying ransoms, and then an agent would call me later and tell me that I shouldn’t be an idiot: these things got solved by money more often than not. Every so often, I would get invited down to the FBI operations center in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan so agents could complain that I wasn’t sharing information, and then I could complain that they weren’t telling me and David’s family anything, and then we would talk about sports. The FBI was unhappy that we had our own private security team working on the kidnapping, no matter how bungling that team might have been, no matter how little we actually knew about what the security consultants were doing, no matter how sketchy they were. At times, individual FBI agents and U.S. officials went out of their way to be helpful, reaching out directly to Kristen and David’s family and meeting with them in Washington. Others put on their game faces, revealing nothing and, I suspected after a while, knowing nothing. There would be very occasional contact from the kidnappers, always seeking money or the release of detainees. At one point David was able to make a call to his wife. The recording of it was heart-wrenching, and a testament to the strength of both of them, especially Kristen, who was composed and poised under circumstances I couldn’t imagine living through. Another time, the Red Cross showed up with a letter for Kristen from David. We spent seven months working blind, searching for some reason to hope, but never knowing what was really going on, not even with the people who were supposed to be helping us.
The Times also managed to keep the kidnapping out of the press. It was a controversial decision, one of those things that cut hard against our DNA as a news organization. Most kidnapping experts tell companies and families that they are better off not having the kidnapping in the papers. Little good can come from publicity. Worrying about what is going to be said and whether it could provoke the kidnappers to harm the victim or make more absurd demands is one more stressor in a situation that is, minute by minute, day in and day out, a slow burn of tension. When so little is under your control, it makes no sense to bring on one more out-of-control factor. At the request of David’s family, Keller and our corporate PR people asked other news outlets to stand down and not report what they knew about the kidnapping. It was awkward—we were in the business of disclosing information, not hiding it—but lives were at stake, and we extended the same consideration to others who were kidnapped when we were asked. In April 2009, David, while still in captivity, was part of a group of Times reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Afghanistan and Pakistan. We expected the story of the kidnapping to break then, and we prepared for the media blitz we anticipated. It seemed too good of a story for others to pass on—the Pulitzer Prize winner who was at that very moment being held by kidnappers, seized doing the coverage that was being recognized by the Pulitzer committee. The day came and went. No stories were written. At one point in the kidnapping, Al Jazeera obtained a staged Taliban video of David and his two Afghan colleagues marching through the mountains with their captors and put it on the air. Keller got on the phone to AJ editors and was able to get them to pull the piece. It was never broadcast again.
On a summer Friday evening in June 2009, seven months in, I was in a car with Susan Chira, our foreign editor, heading to a dinner party Susan was hosting when Kristen called my cell phone. “David just called my mother. He’s escaped and he needs help,” she said. I tried to make sense of what she was saying (beginning with the idea that a man held captive by terrorists for seven months would, first thing out of the box, call his mother-in-law). Kristen had gone out to dinner with a college friend, and her mother, who was at Kristen’s apartment, had picked up the phone when it had rung. David and Tahir, his Afghan colleague, had escaped by using a car tow rope to lower themselves from a roof to the ground below and made their way through the town of Miranshah to a nearby Pakistani military garrison. They had persuaded the Pakistani sentries and the military officer in charge to let them in (after they removed their shirts to show they were not rigged with suicide vests), but it didn’t mean they were safe. In the lawless tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan, where the Taliban held sway and the Pakistani government maintained only a nominal presence, there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t be handed back to their captors.
From the sidewalk outside Susan’s apartment, I called our security consultants. No one knew anything about the escape, and, after months of bravado and wild plans, they had no ideas about what we should do in the much-too-real situation that was unfolding before me. Susan and I had stopped outside her building, the two of us on the sidewalk making calls to Times people in Pakistan and Afghanistan and anyone else who might be able to help. I told her she needed to blow off her guests and come downtown with me to Kristen’s apartment. I didn’t make it sound like a choice. She and I dashed past her arriving guests and flagged down a cab. In the car, I called the U.S. embassy in Kabul, talked my way past the switchboard while sounding only marginally crazed, and finally got through to an official there. It was not yet daybreak on the other side of the world. I explained everything I knew so far, which wasn’t much. I could hear the embassy guy taking notes. He asked me for some basic information. And then he said, “Be assured, Mr. McCraw, we will do nothing to stand in the way of your operation.” I was in a cab on the West Side of New York. I was a media lawyer who had once written a corporate kidnap response plan. I was trying to get two kidnap victims out of the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan. This guy on the phone was, as far as I was concerned, the U.S. government. “I don’t have an operation,” I said. “I need you to have an operation.” He went off to find an operation, never to be heard from again.
We worked through the night calling everyone that Kristen, Lee, and I knew in the Obama administration, asking for their assistance. The calling was frantic, and it got to the point that someone at the Pentagon finally told Lee we needed to shut it down because everybody was spending valuable minutes answering phone calls from the officials we had called rather than doing something useful to get David out. The plan, as it evolved over the early morning hours, was to have a Pakistani military helicopter fly into Miranshah, pick up David and Tahir, and transport them to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. An FBI agent had shown up at Kristen’s apartment, and his colleagues were on the phone with me throughout the night and into the morning. After their spotty performance over the prior months, they were, at least for one night, true stars. Around 3:00 in the morning, we learned that the Pakistani intelligence service was insisting on having someone onboard the helicopter. That was not good news. The Inter-Services Intelligence, popularly known as the ISI, was the clandestine ally and sponsor of the Haqqanis, the Taliban family that had held David. The following year, the ISI would be accused of paying the Haqqanis $200,000 to carry out an attack that killed seven Americans at a CIA compound in Afghanistan. My FBI contact in New York told me that it was beyond his pay grade to do anything about the ISI’s involvement and suggested I call the U.S. ambassador in Pakistan, Anne Patterson. I reached her shortly before dawn, working on adrenaline after being up for 23 hours, and gave an almost cogent explanation of my problem with the ISI. What could the ISI contribute to any of this? What did the ISI agents intend to do? We needed to get David out. We didn’t need the ISI to do that. The ambassador listened patiently and then told me I was completely missing what was actually going on. David’s family and I had managed to rattle the entire U.S. government, which had in turn rattled the entire Pakistani government. Everybody was watching to make sure the mission went off without a hitch. If I needed something real to worry about, she said, maybe I should stop worrying about the ISI and start worrying about the weather—it was terrible in the north—or how nervous that Pakistani helicopter crew must be with so many people from two governments monitoring the crew’s every move.
A few hours later, I received word that David and Tahir had made it to Islamabad, then been flown to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan before David would return to America. Because David had largely worked overseas, I had never met him before, never talked to him on the phone, never sent an email to him during his years at The Times. We met one morning for the first time in the Dean & DeLuca restaurant on the ground floor of The Times building a couple of weeks after he got home. It was odd to feel such a bond to someone I had never met but who had been such an outsized part of my life day in and day out. There was so much to say, so many notes to compare about what we had been hearing back in the U.S. and what was really going on during his captivity, but a first meeting in a coffee shop was hardly the time or place. We settled for some polite conversation. Over the following weeks, I was welcomed into his family, embraced actually, and one day in the fall we all went to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game. Around the fourth inning, David and Kristen pulled out sonograms and handed them to me. They were expecting their first child. The passing out of sonograms (like crying) is not really allowed in baseball—I can’t help it; I’m a traditionalist—but it reframed for me a year of my life right then and there.
At the time it was happening, David’s kidnapping seemed like a one-off. It was in fact more of a beginning. Security became part of my day-to-day life (complete with obsessive checking of my cell phone to see if someone had wandered into harm’s way and needed help). Three months after David returned, I received a call on a Saturday morning outside a suburban grocery store. Reporter Steve Farrell and an Afghan journalist who worked for the paper, Sultan Munadi, had been taken by the Taliban in Afghanistan. It started all over again: making the difficult calls to family members, connecting with the right people in government, collecting whatever information we could about the reporting trip they had been on, seeking out advice from the consultants (although we were done with cowboys). Four days later, British paratroopers staged a night raid on the house where they were being held. Steve was rescued. Sultan was killed in the battle, as was a British soldier. In David’s case, the American government had told David’s family that it would advise them if a military raid was being considered. Steve’s kidnapping was being handled by the U.K. government because he was a British citizen. The first time I knew of the military operation was when my contact at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office called me as the helicopters were bringing Steve back to Kabul.
And David’s kidnapping never quite went away. Rumors spread that The Times or the family had paid a ransom. We hadn’t. If someone else paid—the Saudis, the ISI, the U.S. government, persons unknown—we never knew about it, and the idea seemed particularly preposterous based on what was verifiable and known. David and Tahir showed up at a military garrison unannounced and had to plead to be let inside. There was no plan in place to get them out of the Pakistan tribal areas and to safety, not until David’s family and I prompted the U.S. government to do something after Kristen’s call to me in the car. None of that would make sense if someone had paid millions to arrange for the release. It would be irrational and illogical to leave such critical loose ends. Ransom-payers don’t want to have to pay twice. Plus I had heard David’s and Tahir’s story of the escape often enough to have no doubts about it. They said no one had told them to try to escape, and no one helped them. And I had every reason to believe that some of our cowboy consultants, eager to get a little credit for freeing David, and at the time embroiled in a billing dispute with us, knew something about how the rumors got started, although they always denied it.
By 2014, when the world was horrified by ISIS’s brutal executions of journalists James Foley and Stephen Sotloff (along with two aid workers), we had resolved to do better in protecting the safety of our journalists. The age of the swashbuckling foreign correspondent who drank hard, smoked to excess, and moved about the world with reckless abandon to track down The Story as the bombs fell and the bullets flew was over (if it ever existed at all). New security protocols were put in place, requiring journalists heading for dangerous places to provide us with copies of passports, basic information about their families, and a security memo to be signed off on by our incomparable in-house security advisor, Tug Wilson. Scheduled phone check-ins became commonplace. Reporters at times traveled with security advisors. We occasionally pulled people out of countries when the personal risk became unacceptable. Inside the news industry, I became one of the people who was called when other journalists were in trouble overseas: photographers who disappeared in Libya; Foley and the others taken by ISIS; Austin Tice, the freelance journalist and law student who disappeared inside Syria; reporters in trouble in Turkey.
One Sunday morning in January 2014, Karam Shoumali, a young Syrian working for us in Turkey, was given a picture of Theo Curtis, a freelancer who had been taken by al-Qaeda in Syria. Over the next 12 hours, Karam and I, along with our longtime foreign correspondent Chris Chivers, worked with Theo’s family to establish contact with a sheik from Kuwait who was behind the transmittal of the picture and was offering to help. In the end, we arranged for Theo’s mother, Nancy, to travel from Boston to Istanbul for a meeting, set up by Karam. It led nowhere (the all-too-usual story in every kidnapping), although the Curtis family told us it was empowering to, at last, be doing something directly to try to help Theo. Most days in a kidnapping are spent just waiting, feeling helpless, worrying without knowing a thing. We knew in helping Nancy we were going far beyond anything we were paid to do by The Times or supposed to do. We were putting The Times in the uncomfortable position of being part of a story, not reporting on it. But after what we had been through with our own journalists, I was unwilling to hand off the photo to Theo’s family and turn away if there was something we could do.
And maybe more was behind it, at least for me. Theo had been held for a time with a freelance American photographer named Matt Schrier. They were imprisoned in a basement in Syria and after weeks of being there were able to get a high small window open. Theo boosted Matt up and he wiggled through. Matt made an effort to get Theo out, but then dashed to freedom when Theo could not get up and through. When Matt got back to the states, both CNN and The Times interviewed him about the escape and mentioned that Matt had been aided by a second American prisoner. I somehow missed the reference as I reviewed our story before publication. I have never regretted anything more in my work for the paper. When Theo was later freed, he acknowledged what I had feared: he had been brutalized after his captors learned of his role in Schrier’s escape, apparently from the media accounts. Much later, I was invited by Theo’s family to a screening of a documentary about his time in captivity. It was hard to sit there in that darkened theater and watch the part about CNN and The Times and be reminded of what had happened to Theo afterward.
After the incident with Steve and Sultan, we had no more kidnappings, but other crises kept coming. Anthony Shadid died while on a reporting trip inside Syria; Alissa Rubin was seriously injured in a helicopter crash on Mount Sinjar in Iraq; a freelancer was detained in Ethiopia; two other freelancers were jailed while reporting from the Sinai Peninsula; one of our stringers in the Democratic Republic of Congo had to be relocated to Kenya; and we were in a more or less constant showdown with the authorities in Turkey as the Erdogan government took a hard turn toward authoritarianism. The dark turn of the Turkish government was particularly saddening for me. When four of our journalists disappeared in Libya during the war there in 2011, it was the Turkish embassy we turned to for help. The U.S. diplomatic corps had left the country, but the Turks had stayed and were instrumental in getting our people back home. They stood up for the journalists and for human rights in a way that now with Turkey seems unfathomable.
The four—Tyler Hicks, Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, and Steve Farrell—had vanished one afternoon, along with their driver Mohamed Shaglouf, as they covered the war from the rebels’ side. About the only useful bit of information we had in the first hours was that they had been carrying a satellite phone. And we knew that for as long as the phone was on, it would be transmitting their geographical location—the longitude and latitude of where they were. It would be a critical clue to finding them. There was just one problem: the sat phone company wouldn’t give us the data from the phone. Our tech people kept calling; the phone company kept refusing. The most important lesson I had learned from dealing with foreign crises was to be persistent, to keep trying, anything and everything, no matter how hopeless. The company was headquartered in the Middle East, and I finally got a senior executive to come to the phone. It was early in the morning in New York, and I sat in my office, alone on my floor, making the plea. I explained that we needed the geographic coordinates, that it was a matter of life and death. The executive was warm and courteous, courtly almost, but nothing I said could move him. He said it was illegal to give me the information. But it was our data, I protested. No, he said, that was wrong. The data did not belong to The Times, and it did not belong to his company. It belonged to the land that was Libya, to the planet earth. It was nonsensical, utterly stupid, and so around and around we went. I was exasperated.
Then the executive’s tone shifted unexpectedly. “Oh, Mr. David,” he said, “I hear what you are saying. You know sometimes a person’s head speaks and sometimes his heart speaks. And my head, it is saying I cannot legally give you this. I am so sorry. But, Mr. David, you know, my heart is saying something else, it is saying that you should type into Google right now…”
It was true. The guy was giving me the coordinates. I wrote the numbers down feverishly, hung up the phone, turned to my computer, and typed in the coordinates.
Some obscure location in the middle of Poland popped up.
I was pretty certain that Tyler and the others were not in Poland. I was pretty certain the Qaddafi regime had not surreptitiously transported them to Europe when we weren’t looking. I was pretty certain I’d written the numbers down wrong. So I took a deep breath and dialed back. “Can you go back to that part, the one where your heart is doing the talking?”
We learned over the next day that the journalists had been rounded up during a fight between the rebels and Qaddafi’s military at a checkpoint. In New York, I was working 16 hours a day trying to get them freed, knowing that the U.S. and its allies were about to start bombing Qaddafi’s strongholds and everything would be more complicated when that happened. Chris Chivers left his home in Rhode Island and showed up to assist. We were joined by one of our outside security consultants. The three of us sat hour after hour in my office brainstorming on how we could reach the Qaddafi government. Every morning and afternoon, I gave regularly scheduled updates to the four families. We sorted through Twitter trying to figure out which way the war was going. Four days into the crisis I learned of two people in New York who knew Qaddafi personally. I got them on the phone and convinced them to call the Libyan leader even as the bombing of Tripoli started. (I was told that Qaddafi said The New York Times could go fuck itself.) I cajoled and pressed my contact in the State Department to do more to help us get to the right people in the Libyan government. We’d learned that our journalists had been mistreated, and we needed the government to do more, faster.
In the strange way these things unfold, I ended up on the phone one afternoon with a Libyan government official who was in the same room with not just the four Times journalists being held but also David Kirkpatrick. David was covering the war for us from Tripoli, while at the same time working tirelessly to help his imprisoned colleagues, and he had been permitted to come see them. The official told me everything could be resolved if I got in touch with an American named “Jose.” Jose had always known how to get things done whenever there was a problem involving the U.S. government. He was the man to speak to. The Libyan official gave me Jose’s cell phone number. Jose, it turned out, was the CIA’s clandestine contact person in Libya. The State Department was not pleased that I had his number.
Five days into the standoff, the Libyans finally committed to handing the four over to Turkish diplomats. A time was set, arrangements were made, and the Turks began traveling through the streets of Tripoli to the pickup point. And then the bombing resumed. The Libyans said the transfer could not go forward. It was late at night in New York. Chris and I closed down my office and came dragging back in at 4:00 in the morning, when the Turks were to try again. Shortly after dawn, we got the news that the ordeal was over. Our journalists had been handed over. The Turks had come through. They escorted the four to the Tunisia border and freedom.
There remained one task undone. Mohamed Shaglouf, the driver, had disappeared after the car was stopped at the checkpoint. He had worked for The Times for exactly one day, hired that morning to take The Times journalists to report on a hospital in a village near the front. Prodded by Chivers, a former marine, I knew we had to help his family as they tried to find out what had happened to him. By then, Libya was attempting to pick up the pieces after the fall of Qaddafi and the rebels’ victory. Mohamed’s family had tried to sort through rumors and hazy reports of his whereabouts. Someone recalled hearing his name called out at a Qaddafi detention facility. That proved to be untrue. In fact, he had been shot and died at the checkpoint. (Chris and Tyler Hicks later traveled back to Libya to meet with the family and pay their respects.) Not far from where he had died, a Libyan man had created a carefully tended cemetery of unmarked graves for those whose bodies had been left behind in battle. He had taken pictures of the interred in the hopes that, later, families might be able to identify their loved ones. Shane Bell, one of our security advisors in country, volunteered to travel into the heart of Libya to get DNA samples from Mohamed’s family and from a body that appeared to be his. I set about trying to find a lab anywhere in the Middle East that could do the DNA testing quickly. I got nowhere. Shane was due to take home leave, so he packed the samples in his suitcase and carried them halfway around the world to Australia, where he found a lab that did DNA work. The samples were not in good shape, and the lab told me it would be hard to do a proper analysis, but the technicians there finally managed to pull it off. They sent me the results. There was no chance that the body in the unmarked grave was Mohamed.
I carefully typed up an email to the Shaglouf family, hoping to cushion what I knew would be the harsh blow of learning that they had not found their son and brother. They had studied pictures of the corpse and they were convinced that the DNA would confirm the identity. I expressed my regrets as best I could and hit the send button. I had been in regular contact with the family for months, I knew their grief, and I knew there was nothing more I could do. No response came. I feared that I had offended them in some way with my email. I felt cowardly about having not called. At the same time, I worried they would come back and ask for me to do something more in what I knew was now a hopeless situation.
Months passed, and the whole ordeal of Libya finally faded for me, until one morning when I woke up and checked my email. At the top of the inbox was the name of Mohamed’s brother. I could only imagine what the family wanted now, and I dreaded being asked. I clicked on the email and read: “Mr. David, we have heard about the storm Sandy in New York City. We hope you and your family are safe.”
Throughout the course of the kidnappings and the detentions and the random mayhem our reporters encountered, I didn’t always love the way we were treated by our government, but that was usually in the details—disagreements about what could be done reasonably and what could not. My experience had been that when an American reporter was in trouble, somebody in the U.S. government would come to the phone. Whatever unhappiness an administration may have had with our coverage, it got set aside. I also knew that as part of the core American diplomatic mission, under Bush and under Obama, the foreign service made a point to advocate for a freer press in countries struggling to find democracy. The Bush State Department, no fan of The Times, had sent me to speak in Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, and various countries of the old Soviet bloc about how press freedom worked in the U.S. It was part of spreading the secular American gospel of freedom.
The first time we had a problem in the Middle East during the Trump administration, someone in the State Department called one of our editors. He wasn’t authorized to speak, but he needed to tell us about a threat that was looming for one of our reporters who had offended the local government. The official had made the call on his own because he wasn’t convinced that in the new State Department we would be able to count on anyone at the local embassies to help us out. I was told by people at other news organizations with reporters in trouble that the Trump State Department had continued to be helpful, but I was not looking forward to finding out for myself the first time we really needed the backing of the U.S. government in the midst of a crisis.
Then there was the president’s obsessive denouncing of the U.S. mainstream media as “fake news.” It was corrosive inside our borders. Beyond them, it was dangerous. The calculus for the world’s worst autocrats was simple: if the American president could denounce independent news organizations in his country as enemies of the people and work to undermine a free press, there was no reason they should not deal with their own local journalists in exactly the same way. By the second year of the Trump administration, autocratic nations like Malaysia were enacting laws banning fake news, barely hiding what was really going on: there would now be another tool available for authoritarians to control the media and keep unpleasant truths from their people. The situation was also bleak for those American news organizations that happened to be working in repressive nations. When autocrats harassed or brought charges against American news organizations over stories that displeased a regime, they undoubtedly assumed they were ingratiating themselves with the government in Washington.
Steven Erlanger of The Times reported on how infectious the president’s “fake news” diatribe had been among the world’s worst leaders. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, responding to reports of human rights abuses, said, “We are living in a fake-news era.” President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela echoed his sentiments. In Myanmar, where the government turned a blind eye to the military’s savage killing of Rohingya Muslims, an official said it was all fake news. Others joined the chorus in Poland, Hungary, Libya, Russia, and Somalia. Steve offered a chilling example from the People’s Daily, the government propaganda organ of China, which wrote:
If the president of the United States claims that his nation’s leading media outlets are a stain on America, then negative news about China and other countries should be taken with a grain of salt, since it is likely that bias and political agendas are distorting the real picture.
America had often held itself as a model when it was out promoting democracy to the world. The authoritarians of the world didn’t seem much interested in following our lead in those days. But now? They were suddenly eager to sign on to be like this new America.
In the summer of 2018, A. G. Sulzberger, our new publisher, traveled to the White House and raised directly with President Trump how dangerous his attacks on the press were, how easily they could prompt violence against journalists. In tweeting about the meeting, the president never mentioned anything about that, and within days he was back out doing campaign-style rallies, denouncing journalists as always.
The situation in Egypt after David Kirkpatrick’s story continued to perplex us. We were told by our local lawyers that the investigation of The Times was going forward, but what the investigators were doing and how seriously they were doing it remained secret. The lawyers advised us that our reporters in Cairo should continue carrying on, doing what they always did—writing stories about what was going on in that critical country and how the complicated relationships that laced the Middle East remained in uneasy flux. The criminal investigation would have to exist for us as a shadow in the background, not quite visible but not going away.
A few weeks after we broke Kirkpatrick’s story about the broadcast hosts, Michael Slackman got in touch with me. Our reporters were working on a new story out of Egypt, this one about how the Egyptian authorities were secretly letting Israel conduct air strikes inside Egypt’s borders aimed at destroying terrorist encampments. The timing was all wrong for us. We were under criminal investigation for our critical reporting on the government, and here was another story that would cast doubts on the honesty and trustworthiness of Egypt’s leaders. It would show again the government’s clandestine alliance with the demonized state of Israel. It was easy to predict what the reaction from the Egyptian government would be.
Michael and I talked through our options, but we both knew what the truth was: there was no way for The New York Times not to publish a story that important.