_____________________
By April 2002, Tora Bora was back in the news. Some of it was good, as several reports and quickie books confirmed our scoop that bin Laden had been there, and had been allowed to escape under the guise of the phony cease-fire.
Unfortunately, I was not getting the credit for the original reporting of his escape, and, worse, I was still getting reamed for faking the friendly fire incident. By avoiding the issue, I had made the situation worse. To the journalistic ruling class, my name was now synonymous with cheater. Sitting in Royal Jordanian Airlines’s modest first-class lounge at the Amman Airport, and having just been asked for the umpteenth time by a radio correspondent who was there from another network what “really happened” at Tora Bora, I decided I had to face it.
I went outside and, taking advantage of the fact that Jordan had something Afghanistan and most of the Mideast at the time did not, cell phone service, I called the Chicago home base of the Tribune Company, which owns the Baltimore Sun.
Although we had not spoken for a year, my former partner on the successful syndicated talk show and Tribune’s chairman Dennis FitzSimons was a trusted friend, and was sympathetic. “What took you so long?” Dennis asked when he got on the line, his voice kind and concerned. He explained that the public pummeling I had been receiving from one of his newspapers troubled him. I made my case to Dennis over the phone that I had made an innocent mistake. He promised to have his corporate ombudsman check out the Baltimore Sun’s account, and to do the right thing.
At the urging of that Tribune corporate official, the editors of the Sun agreed to hear my side of the Tora Bora story when I returned to the States. I eagerly looked forward to confronting my accusers at the paper. To help prepare my case, I hired Charlie Thompson, one of my best producers from our days together at 20/20, as my investigator. A gun-toting Vietnam War veteran, Charlie did some great reporting with me for ABC News. He produced our giant hour on Elvis and a series of reports on the lingering effects of Agent Orange on our Vietnam GIs.
We had some rollicking times together, near and far, including a blockbuster fistfight with a mean-spirited Missouri cowboy who was trying to prevent our reporting on the use of Agent Orange as a defoliant on his dioxin-contaminated ranch. When he smashed my camera, I punched him so often in the teeth that my fist got infected. I did the voice-over narration for our subsequent special report on the prevalence of toxic human carcinogen with an IV of antibiotics attached to my arm in Lenox Hill Hospital on New York’s Upper East Side.
Our team strode into the conference room at the Sun confident that the half dozen or so newspaper executives gathered would soon declare my mistake about the friendly fire incident an innocent one. We were greeted coolly but politely and were allowed to screen our videos, but we may as well have been speaking Pashto. They were not budging. Also, I confess to being disappointed that the video evidence we brought with us did not specifically show the “hallowed ground” where I alleged the friendly fire had happened in Tora Bora.
Although I was sure we had taped it, the scene was not among the tapes we showed the newspaper people. Having only arrived the night before from Israel, and having spent the morning before this confrontation at my daughter Simone’s piano recital in New York, I did not have a chance to screen the videos, which Craig and Greg had hurriedly put together upon their arrival home. Of all my self-inflicted wounds, this one takes the cake. My video vindication would wait another fourteen painful years.
We had been refused the chance to talk directly to the Sun’s TV critic David Folkenflik, but Charlie Thompson had earlier spoken with Steve Proctor, the paper’s assistant managing editor for features and the reporter’s immediate superior. Charlie told Proctor that, according to Major Brad Lowell, the spokesman for CentCom, Central Command down in Tampa, there had been between twenty and forty civilian and mujahideen fighters killed by friendly fire on or around December 5, 2001. “We won’t agree to the hundreds some are claiming happened that day, but are willing to live with twenty to forty,” Charlie quoted Major Lowell, but to no avail.
“DEAR BILL,” JUNE 3, 2002
In the case against me, Folkenflik had a single military source, a Pentagon spokesman, Marine Lieutenant Colonel David Lapan, who said there was no friendly fire incident in Tora Bora until December 9. In other words, I could not have confused the friendly fire incident I reported on December 5 with the friendly fire incident in Kandahar that day because there was no friendly fire in Tora Bora until several days after my report. Sun editor Bill Marimow wrote me that, “Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan said he did not recall any friendly fire incidents in Tora Bora around December 5, the day before your report.”
In a Dear Bill letter pleading my case to Marimow, I wrote on June 3,
Without belaboring the point, it is crystal clear in retrospect that the Sun television critic’s reliance on the Pentagon’s denial of a specific friendly fire incident in the midst of a raging conflict was at best naive . . . Pentagon denials [of friendly fire] were as routine as they were later proven inaccurate.
There have been many hundreds of friendly fire tragedies in Afghanistan, some documented, some not, that have inflicted widespread death and destruction, straining our relations with the government and putting at risk all the blood shed and treasure spent there. The AC-130 gunship’s destruction of the MSF hospital, killing scores in Kunduz in November 2015, was the worst recent example. In my letter to Marimow, I laid out some specific reports concerning Tora Bora during our intensive bombing campaign. This one, from Paul Salopek at the Chicago Tribune from December 28, 2001, is typical:
U.S. BOMBS LEAVE WASTELAND . . . FIERCE ATTACKS ANGER VILLAGERS, RAISE QUESTIONS
According to death tolls gathered from elders in four communities in the area in recent days, at least 87 farmers and anti-Taliban soldiers appear to have died in intense U.S. airstrikes on Tora Bora, the cave-riddled mountain stronghold of Bin Laden … For its part, the Pentagon at first categorically denied the bombing reports (emphasis added).
An unnamed Pentagon source told reporters earlier this month that the attacks “never happened.” More recently, however, the U.S. military has softened that view. “It is certainly possible that there were civilian casualties who were not Taliban and Al Qaeda that we’re not aware of in Tora Bora,” said Colonel Rick Thomas, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, the headquarters of the Afghan campaign.
After reviewing the available articles and screening the videotapes we provided, editor Marimow did write me privately praising my “courage and grit” getting “to the front line at Tora Bora, and under those extremely difficult circumstances, I can understand how any reporter could make a mistake.” Further, he assured me that he did not believe I intended to deceive our audience. Adding, “I personally do not believe that, despite the erroneous foundation of your story, you intended to deceive your viewers,” but he refused to say so in the pages of his newspaper.
There was also another piece of evidence that the editor and his folks chose to ignore as irrelevant. While Greg Hart was taping the killing zone, he spotted a longish piece of metal in the scorched earth. After he finished shooting, he retrieved the metal shard, which turned out to be shrapnel. It bore US identification, and was later identified as being part of a two-thousand-pound bomb, clearly dropped by a B-52.
THE SUN NEVER RISES, MAY 2002
After a month-long review process, the paper decided not to retract or clarify its report publicly. The paper also insisted that, while it might be unfortunate, it was not responsible for the fact that other critics and journalists were inferring from the Sun’s reporting that I willfully misrepresented the facts, rather than just got the story wrong.
As a result, critics kept piling on. Contrary to Roger Ailes’s confident prediction that the story would eventually go away, it showed no signs of doing so. An article in Variety in June 2002 tore into me. As I wrote to Kevin Magee, who was Roger’s number-two administrator at the time,
I understand what a pain in the butt my obsession with this Tora Bora controversy is, but it is like cancer to me. My silence on the issue will not help it disappear. In retrospect, I only wish that I had followed my initial instinct to challenge the slanderers earlier. My continuing frustration with the story is that everyone who repeats it, like today’s Variety, writes as fact that I had been “charged with and found guilty of unethical conduct.” Not only is that false, but my principal accuser now says for the record (but not in his newspaper) that I am innocent of it.
The Variety story was the type that editor Marimow supposedly found regrettable, but brushed off. “I know that we disagree about whether [our] stories were ‘fair’ and I believe that we agree that some of the stories in other publications, which followed the Sun’s stories, were not fair.” But too bad.
Reporter Folkenflik’s career flourished, much of it at taxpayer-supported National Public Radio. He was the man who successfully cut Geraldo Rivera and Fox News down to size. In June 2002, he got $10,000 for his efforts, winning the Paul Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting on the Media, administered by the Center for Governmental Studies at the University of Virginia.
Adding insult to injury, I found out about the ten-grand prize from Roger, who told me as a “by the way” one afternoon in his office, saying, “Did you hear your boy won an award?” I didn’t even know Folkenflik was up for an award. The stay-at-home critic who risked nothing gets the cash prize, while the swashbuckling hero who gave up so much, risking life and limb, gets ridicule. I complained bitterly to Professor Larry Sabato, the well-known television pollster who runs the UVA program, that they could have at least reached out to me for my side of the story. He never responded.
After I simmered down, I had a Eureka! moment. The pending award to Folkenflik was why the Sun refused to say publicly what editor Marimow was saying to me privately. It was the fact that their reporter was up for the Mongerson award in the first place that kept editor Marimow from publishing in his newspaper the mitigating words he put in his letters to me. The editor denies the charge.
“A GOOD GIRL?” JUNE 2002
Professionally and personally, I stayed busy after the Sun’s devastating 2002 decision. Roger’s affection and loyalty to me seemed undiminished by the scandal. Linked at the hip, he named me to the cast of a new, though short-lived, Fox Broadcast Network show called The Pulse, hosted by Shepard Smith. It failed after a few episodes, but it got me back on the publicity circuit promoting the program. After I made several appearances, Craig referenced how cheerful I was on tour in comparison with my dour mood since Tora Bora. “I forgot how charming you could be,” he said.
On the personal side, Erica and I were swooning over each other hot and heavy, as our improbable relationship careened toward marriage. I used appearances on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, Billy Bush’s Access Hollywood, as well as visits with the funny and charming Regis and Kelly, irreverent Howard Stern, along with Carson Daly and Dennis Miller to introduce Erica—and the notion that we had fallen in love and were going to be spending the rest of our lives together—to the American people.
The only personality to scoff publicly was Joy Behar on The View. She was openly scornful and said as much on the air, essentially accusing me of being just another old man who dumps his age-appropriate mate to troll for naive postgrads. Cohost Star Jones was also cold. I do not blame either. Judging from appearances, I was the stereotype. Seventeen years later, no one is skeptical. Joy always remembers Erica’s name, and is totally respectful. We love her and Star, cohost Whoopi Goldberg, and, of course, the one and only Barbara Walters, who has withdrawn from the show she created after an incredible career spanning more than sixty years. Dear, diamond-tough Barbara was also passive aggressive when I first brought Erica around. Barbara simply refused to look at my shining star in the green room, even though just a few feet separated them. Nowadays, whenever we see any of them in public, our encounters are marked by kindness and caring.
Those few exceptions aside, even back in the day, most commentators were supportive of the relationship. Tonight Show host Jay Leno was especially loving and welcoming. He was so protective that he went so far as to edit out something I said on the show that offended Erica. When he asked on the air about my feelings for her, after telling him how I adored her and bragging on her professional competence, character, looks, and quality, I clumsily said, “She’s a good girl.”
After the show I found Erica in angry tears in the green room. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “A good girl?” was her sharp, pained response. “I’m not your child!” It was our first crisis. I had put my foot in my mouth. Worse, the statement made credible the old man/young lover stereotype. Leno saved me. Back in the Bel Air Hotel as Erica and I watched the taped show airing later that night, we realized that the excruciating scene did not appear. Unprompted by me, Jay had cut the offending phrase out of the interview. He got me off the hook, and I will always appreciate it.
Whenever possible, I used our downtime to bring Erica and the girls together, often on board Voyager. On one cruise, I wrote in my journal: “The sail was great. I just love being out there with the crew and the structured casualness and the magnificent vessel. It’s the best life. The family reunion went OK once I profusely apologized for breaking the news of our engagement on television, which really was déclassé.”
At this point inseparable for twenty-one months except for my travels, Erica and I were hurtling toward permanency. We spent a week with all four kids at our Malibu beach house. Cruz, then fifteen, and Gabriel, twenty-two, were more or less blasé about the unfolding soap opera. Isabella and Simone were OK with Erica, but cautious, skeptical, and embarrassed by the age-inappropriate match. Many of our old friends were regularly ridiculing the age difference, and the preposterous possibility that I was going to add a fifth notch to my tally of marriages. Then stuff really hit the fan when Page Six, the notorious gossip column in the New York Post, ran the following item:
You’d think that a cynical old journalist like Geraldo Rivera would be out of the marriage stakes after four attempts. But Geraldo, who covers war and mayhem for the Fox News Channel, is heading for the altar again. His former assistant Erica Levy, 29, is the lucky girl, according to the upcoming issue of Star magazine. The supermarket tab says Rivera popped into Harry Winston the other day and put down $280,000 for a five-carat ring. Erica is apparently unaware of what’s coming her way because Geraldo is waiting for the right moment in the next week or so to make his formal proposal.
The right moment came on board a flight to Edinburgh, Scotland, on August 21, 2002, where I was to make a major speech about advocacy journalism at the historic city’s Fringe Festival. As we snuggled, shortly after takeoff from JFK, I handed Erica the complimentary toilet kit. It contained the big ring, which cost almost ten times more than my modest first home on Avenue C in New York’s Lower East Side.
“I just love being out there with the crew and the structured casualness and the magnificent vessel.” Winter 2007.
FIFTH TIME’S THE CHARM, AUGUST 2002
When we got home from Edinburgh and our formal engagement was announced, I was distraught. The persistence of the Tora Bora issue convinced me that I would never be free of the emotional load until I proved my innocence of that charge of fakery. Contributing to my fragile emotional state was the fact my accountant was near panic.
From the journal:
Another emotional rollercoaster all centered around the very public engagement of Erica and me . . . Then there was my psycho breakdown in Scotland over money and age and Erica, then the buildup to the house and party, and the revelation of our finances all going to hell in a hand basket. The nightmare scenario is ending up old and broke. Won’t happen of course, but the thought of it is still very unsettling.
Statistically speaking, our coming marriage faced an actuarial bump down the road. At the rate I was spending money, how was I going to provide for my life after television, and for a wife who would survive me by half a century? Putting doubt aside and a smile on my face, I acted the Puerto Rican–Jewish Great Gatsby for the engagement party of the summer. Along with the tents and decorations, I temporarily added two hundred feet to our dock so that a deep-draft ferry could shuttle guests from the West Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin in Manhattan across the Hudson to our newly refinished home in Edgewater, New Jersey. It was unfortunately a dark and stormy night, the wickedest August weather in memory. Nevertheless, hundreds attended, including our families and numerous friends and friends-of-friends. Many of my former colleagues at NBC News came, as well as Roger Ailes and the entire Fox News crew, who improbably mixed with Reverend Al Sharpton and others from our earlier lives. I left shortly after the party, bound for Afghanistan.
AKBAR REUNION, SEPTEMBER 2002
Despite my chronic self-indulgence as a younger man, nothing is more important to me than family. My wife, siblings, and children command my unshakeable loyalty. Akbar Shinwari, about five feet seven inches with a mustache over a perennially smiling face, is de facto family, and seeing this cherished friend again was like seeing a too-long-absent brother or son.
I put my life in his hands during the first battles of the never-ending Afghan War and would many times over the years. He came to stay with us in New Jersey, and I knew he could be trusted to keep us safe anywhere on earth that his Sunni Muslim Pashtun cousins held sway.
Akbar gave me a deep and abiding respect for the sincere power of his faith. He had proudly made the Hajj, the ritual pilgrimage to Mecca, several times, and regardless of the state of combat raging, sometimes with bullets zinging around us, he dutifully prayed the requisite five times facing toward his holy city.
On this journey back to Afghanistan to mark the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the worst sneak attacks on America since Pearl Harbor, he knew I had two goals. One was to prove Osama bin Laden could easily have escaped the ridiculously imperfect trap our forces tried to set for him at Tora Bora in December 2001. The other, more personal, was to prove that there were friendly fire casualties where and when we said there were.
We drove the depressingly familiar thirty miles of bad road from Jalalabad, arriving back in Tora Bora, scene of bin Laden’s great escape and where my fate as a war correspondent was sealed. It was exactly as we had left it nine months and a lifetime ago. The Arab fighters, their wives, and consorts were gone, but everything else was the same.
The next morning we broke camp and set out first to visit bin Laden’s home in Tora Bora. A gigantic bomb had leveled the one-story cement structure, but you can still see how nicely the property is situated, with a swimming pool looking out at the majestic snow-peaked White Mountains and Pakistan beyond.
With widespread doubt still attached even to the issue of whether bin Laden was here when and where I said he was, and how and why he was allowed to escape, my goal on this return as I said was to confirm my reporting once and for all. Using footage from December 2001, I reported:
Not many observers had a better front-row seat to the fight at Tora Bora than we did. We were close enough to get shot at [video showing ducking and grunting] . . . We were close enough to watch the sound and fury of U.S. airstrikes [video showing boom booms]. We were close enough to witness the advance of our Afghan allies [video] and we were close enough to watch their occasional retreat [video]. And if he was there—and we have still heard no reliable evidence to the contrary—then we think we know when, how, and to where Osama bin Laden escaped.
With Greg, Craig, cameraman Carl Glogg, and Akbar, who gave me a deep and abiding respect for the sincere power of his faith. March 2003.
It is the second week in December 2001 and al Qaeda is on the ropes. We hear them on the radio speaking in Arabic about laying down their arms and surrendering. The U.S. strongly suspects the obvious, that the requested cease-fire is a hoax, a hoax to allow the beaten terrorists some breathing room in which to escape . . . Yet over the objections of Hazrat Ali, the brave Afghan military commander on the scene, local Afghan politicians grant a twenty-four-hour cease-fire, later extending it to thirty-six hours.
So even as our mighty B-52s circle overhead cutting back on their bombardments, and honoring a cease-fire that the U.S. had warned against and does not believe in, many Afghans believe the al Qaeda chief escapes.
Militia commander Hazrat Ali met us on this return to Tora Bora and granted a new interview at the scene, with Akbar translating: “When I found out about the cease-fire, I said to my commanders they just want to betray us.”
Here is what the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations reported in November 2009, eight years later: “On or around 16 December 2001, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today (2009).”
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S ESCAPE ROUTE REDUX, SEPTEMBER 10, 2002
If partisan-cheerleader war correspondents like me had had the courage or insight to report it, we would have said that the war in Afghanistan started unraveling almost immediately with bin Laden’s escape. As our high-altitude bombers pounded the bunkers and caves thought to be hiding the architect of the 9/11 attacks, he snuck out the back door. As we boasted of “America Triumphant” on live TV, showing the world what real resolve looks like, the mastermind, the world’s most-wanted man, just walked away unscathed.
It should have been vexing news, but its impact on American self-esteem was muted by the prevailing “we can do no wrong” patriotism that followed the brutal attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center; and by the newness of this war, wars always being popular in the beginning. Buoyed by our counterattack, no one wanted to view bin Laden’s escape as anything more than a temporary setback. We will get him. It is just a matter of time.
In my return to Tora Bora in 2002, it was with great pleasure that I pissed on what remained of bin Laden’s residence in the rugged but lovely valley. Then, as the crew filmed from the valley floor, I frantically scaled several cliffs, sometimes with Akbar by my side, to peer inside to see whether there was any evidence left behind. I was manic the entire time, restlessly tracking down every lead as to the whereabouts of bin Laden. Here is how we solved the mystery of bin Laden’s disappearance in 2002, almost eight years before Congress came to the same conclusion: “We follow a small river coming down out of the White Mountains of Tora Bora on the lookout for yet-undiscovered al Qaeda hideouts. In a Fox News exclusive we find something else instead. After a three-hour march we discover an ideal escape route out to Pakistan.”
If you were around to follow the news from Tora Bora, you heard the refrain on countless talk shows: How could a caravan led by bin Laden, a six-foot-five-inch Arab on kidney dialysis, traveling with his extended family, walk out from under the noses of the world’s most formidable military? It was easy. The most formidable military in the world had virtually no soldiers on the ground.
We had that handful of special operators but, as I mentioned earlier, no plan for creating a blocking force, and were utterly incompetent in our plan of action. The United States endured the consequences of bin Laden’s escape for years to come. It emboldened his fellow Sunni Muslim extremists and proved that even the vilest crime could be committed against the United States and (for too long) go unpunished.
After our march, I ended the report by reading our location from our handheld GPS device. Our coordinates proved that in just three hours we had walked from the Tora Bora battlefield in Afghanistan across the unmarked, undefended international border into the tribal territory of Pakistan. We could have easily kept marching deeper into Pakistan until we reached a town or city or railroad station and disappeared into the teeming populace, as bin Laden manifestly did. I showed the reading on the GPS to the camera. We were live on Fox and Friends.
That would make our position right about here, 070 degrees 11 minutes east longitude, 34 degrees 05 minutes north latitude; that would put us right about here. This white [on the map], this is Pakistan. If we could make it into Pakistan, certainly Osama bin Laden could.
Although the crucial question of Osama’s current whereabouts is impossible for us to answer, he clearly had the means and opportunity to make good an escape to Pakistan.
Tora Bora was and remains a rough neighborhood for outsider infidels. As far as I know, no other reporter replicated our relatively simple exercise, exploring the immediate environs. No one picked up on either our original December 2001 reporting of bin Laden’s probable escape date or on this September 2002 report of his likely route out. Though every historical account now confirms that our reporting was accurate, even groundbreaking, critics were less interested in bin Laden than they were in taking shots at me, and, through me, at Fox News.
Returning home to the United States, I wrote,
Coming back from Afghanistan, I head home with an almost perfect performance under pressure and duress. It is unusually low pressure, really. Danger is not pressure. Getting close enough to danger is pressure. Weird how Tora Bora still rankles. If only. Yet the only way to remove the stain is by consistent brilliance under fire. And surviving.
In presenting my case to friends and colleagues at Fox News once I got back from this second trip to Afghanistan, I chose a letter addressed basically to all the reporters and producers at our bureaus across the country and abroad.
Despite risking everything in many violent encounters from Afghanistan to Somalia to the Palestinian territories, for the first time in my thirty-two-year career I stood publicly accused of combat chiseling. For war correspondents, there is no graver charge. It has been a humiliating and frustrating experience.
But because we saw what we saw in Afghanistan and taped it, I knew the truth would eventually clear us. And here comes the truth.
Then I described our return to Tora Bora.
RETURN TO HALLOWED GROUND, SEPTEMBER 2002
It was relatively simple to track down eyewitnesses to the widely remembered friendly fire tragedies, including the one that happened during the first week of the critical offensive in December 2001. On the same “hallowed ground” where tragedy struck, I interviewed a twenty-five-year-old fighter named Sheer Ahbad, who described three of the victims on camera with Akbar translating. “They were mujahideen [anti-Taliban fighters],” Sheer Ahbad says on tape.
After taping the interview and doing several live shots during our dramatic hike from Afghanistan to Pakistan, we pulled out. Resentment over the bombings and the disruption from the war, along with a general lawlessness and opposition to authority, made it too dangerous to hang out. But as a trusted insider and member of the dominant Shinwari clan, Akbar had free rein, so I left the task of further evidence-gathering to him, our Afghan brother.
Akbar taped several more interviews with eyewitnesses. One was with another mujahideen fighter with the regal name Sultan Mahmood, a member of the provincial military commander Hazrat Ali’s staff. Sultan was one of our guides at Tora Bora during the original December 2001 trip.
The interview was conducted at the Jalalabad Airport where Mahmood was the head of security for the US Special Forces base there. As the tape shows, his US-issued identity card reads, SULTAN/ALPHA COMPANY/1st CORPS/RANK: COMPANY XO/No. 86.
Mahmood told Akbar on tape that he remembered the incident of the mujahideen fighters accidentally killed and injured on the first day of our coverage of the assault on Tora Bora. “They were mujahideen from our side,” he recalled. “These people were killed by the B-52 bombing on Tora Bora.” Mahmood recommended that Akbar then visit the nearby village of Agam, near the Pakistani border, to speak with other eyewitnesses.
In Agam, Akbar found and later interviewed several, including Sayed Alam and Abdul Sapar, both twenty, and both mujahideen fighters near the front line at the time of the bombing. Sayed recalls during the videotaped interview done at the scene, “This was the front line where we were fighting against Taliban and al Qaeda and we were here when a B-52 dropped a bomb here and three of our mujahideen were killed here and more of them were injured.”
Forgive my obsession with this incident, but understand that it is the only time I have been formally accused of faking a wartime report, the one persistent stain on my reputation. It changed my life.
SHOCK, AWE, AND DRINKING HUSSEIN’S BOOZE, BAGHDAD, MARCH 2003
The world’s attention was about to leave Afghanistan, despite my feeble efforts to keep it in the headlines. We missed the beginning of the March 2003 Iraq invasion because my team and I were 1,645 miles away in Kandahar, Afghanistan. We were with the First Brigade Combat Team of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division when the Iraq War started with the massive “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad. I had committed to then-Colonel John F. Campbell, my war buddy and the commander of the Fort Bragg, North Carolina–based First Brigade, that we would cover a major offensive his fighters were waging in Afghanistan against the Taliban. When he was forced to retire in 2016, Campbell had leaped five ranks and was a four-star general, having received the fastest promotions of any other flag officer in decades.
General John F. Campbell retires after a brilliant career that saw him rise from colonel to four-star general in record time. April 2016.
We knew the Iraq invasion was coming, having covered the run-up to the war from nearby Turkey and Cyprus, including the frantic efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigators to prevent it. We gambled that we could wrap the Afghan assignment before the Iraq battle began, but were a week off. The administration of President George W. Bush was beyond eager to launch the Iraq invasion despite only sketchy evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The WMD were only just an excuse to oust the Iraqi dictator, anyway.
Colonel Campbell arranged to have us flown from Kandahar in one of his C-130 cargo planes heading to Kuwait, the staging area for the Iraq invasion. At the sprawling base outside Kuwait City, we loaded our gear onto a flight of Black Hawk helicopters, embedding with the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, Air Assault, the famed Screaming Eagles, at their front-line base in the blowing sands of Iraq’s western desert. From there, the Apache attack choppers of the Air Wing of the division were launching furious attacks against Saddam’s rapidly deteriorating forces, but not without casualties. Three of the warbirds were lost trying to land in the intense, blowing sand of Iraq’s desert.
Preparing to embed with the 101st Airborne Division during an Iraqi missile attack. Kuwait, March 2003.
As the division and the rest of our massive invasion force swept unstoppably into an upscale suburb of Baghdad, our unit made its camp in the abandoned estate of a cousin of Saddam Hussein. The lush compound had a swimming pool and a private helicopter hidden under a camouflage awning. It also had a full bar, which made the two-day stay particularly luxurious. The Hussein family thus bought this correspondent a few drinks. Funny how many supposedly devout Sunni Muslims, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf, are some of the biggest party-hearty players on the planet.
As we rested after the grueling sprint across the desert and into the outskirts of the city, then two-star Major General David H. Petraeus, code-named “Eagle 6” and commanding the 101st, visited our company. What I remember most about his demeanor was that he was all business. He led the division into battle from the front, issuing the stirring battle cry of the Screaming Eagles when the war began:
“Guidons, Guidons [Battle Flags, Battle Flags]. This is Eagle 6. The 101st Airborne Division’s next Rendezvous with Destiny is north to Baghdad. Op-Ord Desert Eagle 2 is now in effect. Godspeed. Air Assault. Out.”
You do not want to mess with this war-fighting man. Despite the suffocating heat and choking dust, General Petraeus’s uniform was immaculate, and we watched as he chastised several troopers for not being shaved and for having their uniforms out of order. When one NCO stated mildly defensively that they had just finished a long, hot march, the general shot back, “So have I.”
It was clear that Petraeus was going places, and as with eventual- General Campbell, it was an honor to track his meteoric rise from two- to three- to four-stars. In my cluttered Fox News office, which is festooned with memorabilia from far-flung assignments, right next to the dead al Qaeda guy’s helmet from Tora Bora, which I never got around to donating to the firehouse because of embarrassment over the controversy, I have an array of signed pictures taken with battlefield commanders I have had the honor of covering, including General Petraeus after he engineered the Surge, which, for a time, vanquished our radical Islamist enemies in Iraq.
The photo was inscribed, “20 October 2010, For Geraldo—With respect and with thanks for sharing hardship and risk with our troopers over many campaigns and many years. Air Assault! Dave Petraeus.”
With honored war buddy General John F. Campbell, “America’s Spartan.” Baghdad, Iraq, 2007.
Another photo is with the indefatigable warrior I by then had dubbed “America’s Spartan,” General John F. Campbell. We are standing outside Saddam Hussein’s parade grounds in the Green Zone in the battered Iraqi capital, where the general had command during hard, ugly fighting that claimed many GI lives.
Petraeus retired first, leaving the military in 2011 to assume the directorship of the CIA. A year later, our generation’s greatest general got into the much-hyped scandal that ended his career. It involved an ill-advised affair (aren’t they all?) during which he told tales out of school to his biographer-mistress, Lieutenant Colonel Paula Broadwell. It was stupid and shortsighted on his part, but having often thrown caution to the wind under similar circumstances, I can relate. Boners make boneheads out of the best of us. Petraeus is a great patriot, and his forced resignation was a tremendous loss for the country.
Speaking of hype, let me tell you a bit about my second wartime scandal, the infamous “Line in the Sand.” This one generated far more negative press than Tora Bora, but did not bother me nearly as much because it was an attack on my judgment, not my character. In broad strokes, as I explained the state of the battle during a live shot from our desert base, I used a stick to draw a map of Iraq in the sand. The purpose was to demonstrate generally where our unit was relative to Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.
It was clear that Petraeus was going places. Brilliant war fighter. Baghdad 2007.
Check out the tape of the incident. There was never any actionable intelligence in that crude, stupid map. I would never give away military secrets or put our beloved troops in the field at risk, two of the most frequent and annoying charges at the time. Military experts in studios in New York and Washington, DC, were using far more detailed electronic maps of the unfolding action in real time.
As I said at the time, aside from my dopey drawing of the dumb map in the sand, grossly aggravating my dilemma was the fact that Fox News was engaged at the time (2003) in a publicity war with our desperate cable-news rivals at CNN and especially at then-fading MSNBC, whose parent network, Big NBC, came after me with all PR guns blazing. Remember, I had jilted them by leaving my top-rated show to jump to Fox two years earlier.
It was, as several key participants later admitted, an organized, network-sanctioned “Get Geraldo” campaign, for which, as I said at the time, they used their “neo-Nazi ex-congressman [Joe Scarborough] and psycho ex-sportscaster [Keith Olbermann] as their hatchet men.” I promised to beat the hell out of both men when I caught up with them, but never got around to it, although I came close with Scarborough in a Washington, DC, bar while in a tequila haze after one of the White House Correspondents’ dinners.
In fairness, their attacks on me were a tit-for-tat for our attacks on them. At the time, our guys were mercilessly mocking NBC’s Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent Peter Arnett for “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” His sin was granting an unauthorized interview to Iraqi state television in the first few days of our invasion, in which he questioned US policy.
“It is clear that within the United States there is a growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war,” Arnett told the interviewer. “So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy.”
Despite the fact that he was technically correct, the timing and the venue of his interview were indefensible. One of the few Western correspondents reporting live from Baghdad, Arnett was soon cable-news history. Fox News and most congressional Republicans came after him. Former New York senator Al D’Amato accused Arnett of treason in wartime, for which the penalty can be death. Unlike my crude line in the sand, Arnett’s sin was not forgiven, and he was summarily fired by NBC.
In June 2005, in describing the overreaction to my incident to Sridhar Pappu, the fine writer for the Atlantic magazine, I said,
Attacks like this are more illustrative of the people who hate me than they are in any way of me—because action talks and bullshit walks. That’s why I said [then-CNN anchor] Aaron Brown would shit in his pants if he had been in some of the places I was. That’s true. That’s absolutely true. It’s the same way about all of them—every one of those Geraldo detractors. How many times have you been shot at?
Reporter Pappu wrote in that issue of Atlantic what I consider the most intellectually honest biographical summary of me, saying,
He is a cultural phenomenon and often, it seems, the punchline to some pop-culture joke. He broke major stories as far back as thirty years ago, and there is no more fearless war correspondent around. This is hard to remember, however, when seeing footage of him having fat from his buttocks injected into his forehead, or contending with brawling neo-Nazis on his talk show, or vainly searching “Al Capone’s vault” for two hours on live TV, or promising to personally kill Osama bin Laden, or simply strutting and preening and boasting the way he does.
Some smart, prominent people (Harvard professors, high-powered lawyers, distinguished journalists) who know Rivera well call him brilliant—and yet he can’t seem to escape the larger-than-life circus act that is “Geraldo.”
Guilty as charged. But there is much to be proud of in the last five decades, like the Willowbrook crusade, which changed the fate of so many of the disabled; my work on behalf of migrant farmworkers, the urban poor, the drug-addicted, the wheelchair-bound, cheated consumers, storm victims; the many televised confrontations with the KKK and racist skinheads; and the fact that few high-profile correspondents have spent more time marching into harm’s way alongside members of our military.
I doubt any correspondent has taken more pictures with deployed service members, attended more memorials, fundraisers, and promotion ceremonies, or has pictures alongside GIs later killed in combat sent to me by their families after the tragedy.
WARRIOR JOURNALISTS, NOVEMBER 2003
It has taken several years, but the cynical attitude and skeptical vibe toward me has definitely diminished as I evolved toward senior citizenship. Still, it remains a wound on the body of my career, not the whole run as a larger-than-life persona, but the war reporting specifically. In my case, every accusation of dishonesty is baseless. Whatever you think of my style or grandstanding, no one can deny that over the last four-and-a-half decades I have been around more hostile gunfire from closer up than any other “celebrity” reporter.
In Israel, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan, Sinai, Syria, Egypt, Mexico, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Kosovo, the Philippines, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Libya, and elsewhere, I have always behaved admirably under fire or extreme duress, as gutsy as any war correspondent in the half century beginning in 1973.
I am not alone. In the late War on Terror era (2013–2017), which I played no role in, there were brave beat reporters who matched my earlier exploits, while getting a lot less attention. More recently, women like CNN’s Arwa Damon and Clarissa Ward have taken the lead in covering the fight against ISIS in occupied Iraq and especially in the bloody Syrian Civil War, which began in 2014. Because not many American forces were initially involved on the ground, the reporters’ superb efforts under fire attracted far less intense public interest than the giddy early days in what we called the War on Terror.
Despite the relative lack of attention, those conflicts are still grinding out death, misery, and refugees as I write three years later, although the end, or rather the latest version of the end, may be in sight. All of Iraq, including Mosul, has been retaken from Islamic State, as was the “capital” of their self-proclaimed Caliphate, Raqqa, Syria, which fell to a U.S.-backed alliance in October 2017. There were still scattered pockets of resistance along the Euphrates River, but ISIS no longer exists as a geographic entity.
My fierce face. Iraq, 2007.
Let me further amend my statement about having been Top Gun among celebrity reporters, which I define as public personalities whose fame exists beyond the boundaries of the news business, men like Hemingway and Ernie Pyle in WWII, and Dan Rather and Morley Safer in Vietnam. In that exclusive crowd, there is a gutsy chick who is the heir to glamorous World War II icons Oriana Fallaci and Martha Gellhorn. Even after she got brutally assaulted in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in 2011, CBS 60 Minutes’ Lara Logan, a sharp, smart, beautiful woman, also had the biggest balls in the modern war-reporting business, gender ceiling notwithstanding.
I saw her courage up close in Afghanistan. Craig, Greg, and I were riding a few vehicles back in the same military convoy as Lara and her CBS team on November 23, 2003. She was in the lead truck because the military loved her, a lioness’s heart with a face from Vogue magazine. Our convoy was driving along a desolate dirt road close to the Pakistani border, just below a trouble spot called Lozano Ridge, outside the Shkin base in Paktika Province.
Embedded with the 504 Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division. Paktia Province, Afghanistan, March 2003.
The ridge had been the scene of several fatal ambushes in recent months. Everybody was on edge, GIs scanning the ridge, fingers on their triggers, when all hell broke loose. I watched as the lead truck Lara was riding in hit an IED. She and her cameraman, who were both riding in the bed of the truck, got tossed as the vehicle was rocked and overturned in the violent blast. The soldier riding in the front passenger seat of the truck lost his leg as the wrecked vehicle rolled and twisted.
Cameras rolling, Craig, Greg, and I ran toward the truck; the GIs that formed a protective circle around the wreckage were unleashing furious suppression machine-gun fire aimed at the ridge above. Lara, her cameraman, and David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who had been traveling in a second vehicle, were sheltering in a huge hole blown in the road by a previous explosion. (A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Rohde was later captured by the Taliban, and dramatically escaped after nine months of captivity.) As we taped the wounded GI being evacuated by helicopter, I interviewed Lara, who gave a breathless, but otherwise incredibly calm, professional account of what happened when the bomb blew up under her. When it became apparent that her camera had been smashed in the blast and that she had no tape of her own near-death experience, I offered to provide her all the footage we shot of her harrowing ordeal. She accepted gratefully, later using our video in her report for CBS News.
At Shkin Base, “The evilest place in Afghanistan.” Paktika Province, November 2003.
As long as I’m acknowledging ballsy colleagues, there’s also ABC’s Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz, who broke the news in 2006 that bin Laden’s main man in Iraq, Abu al-Zarqawi, had been killed; and CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who was brutally wounded in an IED attack that same year in Baghdad. She fought her way back to health and work. She reports now for the Daily Beast and I ran into her when we shared a military C-130 relief flight down to hurricane-stricken Puerto Rico in 2017. Others include NBC’s excellent Richard Engle, who came to fame by getting to Mesopotamia as a freelancer and sticking it out as war started all around him in Iraq in 2003. Now he’s the network’s chief foreign correspondent. CNN’s Ben Wedeman, like my excellent Fox News friends and colleagues Steve Harrigan, Christian Galdabini, and Rick Leventhal, is cool, unflappable, and deeply impressive. Ben also speaks Arabic. I give kudos as well to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who despite his status, high style, wealth, and fame, often went the extra step toward peril to get the story, as in the Cairo uprising of 2011.
In front of a Humvee severely damaged in an IED attack. Paktika Province, Afghanistan, November 2003.
A THOUSAND MILES OF BAD ROAD, MARCH 2004
Having covered war during five different decades, I subscribe heartily to what British prime minister and serial war hero Winston Churchill said about surviving close combat: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
That is why soldiers go to war. Everyone thinks the other guy is the one who is going to get shot, not you. To quote perhaps our greatest World War II fighting general, George S. Patton, who said before leaving North Africa to begin the invasion of Nazi-occupied Sicily in 1943, “I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country. We want you alive!”
Thankfully, while my brother, Craig, and other brothers-in-war like Greg Hart have endured hardship, loneliness, and danger at my side in combat, in my forty-eight years as a television correspondent, my crewmates suffered only a single combat injury. In 2004, one of my drivers was wounded when our convoy was ambushed outside Mosul, Iraq.
Ambushed in Mosul. Our driver Hussein took a bullet in the arm. Probably a ricochet. Iraq, 2004.
We were taping an action-packed, hour-long Fox News special report called A Thousand Miles of Bad Road, which chronicled a perilous tour of war-ravaged Iraq from south to north, bottom to top. We began on the Kuwait border in the southern city of Basra and made our way north through the tense Shiite strongholds of Najaf, Karbala, and Sadr City, to the Sunni Triangle towns of Ramadi and Fallujah.
In Fallujah, we videotaped a pickup truck filled with dead bodies in the same community where eleven years later bloody battles were still being fought. As I reported on February 15, 2004, “Tension was razor sharp near the embattled Fallujah police station. Evidence of day-old violence was everywhere, following a guerrilla raid that took the lives of twenty-two cops, left others wounded and dazed, and resulted in a jail-break that freed dozens of anti-government prisoners . . . Still, they put up a hell of a fight, as indicated by the four dead attackers piled in the back of a police pickup truck, bound soon for coalition headquarters in Baghdad. This is the grim carnage, the reality of what happens, this is what Iraq looks like far too often.”
Few journalists saw more death than our team in those years 2001– 2012. Because I saw my role as part goodwill ambassador, I gave these battered Iraqi cops in Fallujah a pep talk. As I noted at the time, “Because under those circumstances it took guts and grit to stand and fight and not to cut and run, I let these men know how they earned my enduring respect.” I exhorted the dispirited government cops through our translator: “Tell them we appreciate their courage. They are brave fighters, fighting for a free, independent Iraq. Don’t be discouraged by this, don’t let them frighten you away.”
After a few days of high-tension work in and around then deadly, dangerous Baghdad, we continued north, making a stop in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit on the historic Tigris River. There we met General Ray Odierno for the first time. Big, bold, bald, and confident, he was then the newly anointed two-star commander of the Army’s Fourth Infantry (Iron Horse) Division, the crew Hemingway attached himself to in the fighting around the Ardennes in 1944, submachine gun in hand.
Odierno was an aggressive war fighter in the heartland of the Sunni resistance in the early days of the Iraq War, and he was a far more realistic administrator than our charismatic ambassador-dud, Paul Bremer, a Yale-educated Yankee who made the disastrous decision to dismantle the Iraqi Army after the invasion, thereby destroying the one integrated Iraqi entity that might have prevented the nation’s vicious spiral into chaos and anarchy. As Bremer scrambled desperately to keep Iraq from unraveling, I was in his office when he handed a shady-looking Sunni sheik a suitcase jammed with Benjamins, as in fresh, stacked $100 bills. I did not see him get a receipt.
General Odierno, on the other hand, had supervised the efforts of his First Brigade Combat Team to capture Saddam hiding in a rabbit hole near his hometown of Tikrit. We watched, over the years and through many interviews, as Odierno ultimately became the four-star Army chief of staff before his retirement in 2015.
Leaving him, we headed up to the Kurdish communities of Kirkuk and Erbil, until we finally met our near-death experience in Mosul, the northern Iraqi city that is a perfect example of how frustrating the wars against militant Islam have been for the United States. Even back then in 2004, I said of the city, “Mosul is a former Saddam stronghold, overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. Former regime elements are still strong here.” They were strong enough to capture the city and surrounding countryside. Between 2014 and July 2017, thirteen years after the incidents described here, ISIS controlled Mosul. Iraq’s second-largest city was recaptured from the militants only after months of ferocious fighting that left much of it in ruins.
General Raymond T. Odierno, retired chief of staff of the Army. June 2015.
Our destination in 2004 was the big base in the city that had recently headquartered the legendary 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) when it was under the command of one of our best-ever warriors, the aforementioned General David Petraeus. After he received a big promotion to three stars and the division was redeployed back to Fort Campbell, on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, the Mosul base was taken over by a smaller and much less effective fighting force out of Washington State called Task Force Olympia, centered on the relatively new and untested Stryker Brigade.
We were en route to an interview with the task force commander, Brigadier General Carter F. Ham. Later in his career, General Ham was commander of all our forces in Africa during the time of the tragic 2012 attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya. He is a good guy, charming and charismatic. Back then he was working hard to get the kinks out of his just-deployed unit.
Among their Herculean tasks was to make sense of the new multi-wheeled, but lightly armored, Stryker combat vehicle, from which the brigade took its name. Ultimately, it proved not up to the task of dealing with the wickedly powerful improvised explosive devices, the IEDs that wreaked havoc on our forces, and which required the much heavier Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to defeat. Ham had the additional task of getting the Sunni tribal leaders to respect him. Unlike Petraeus, who exerted a tremendous authority over the wily sheiks, Ham had no such status among the tribesmen, many of whom would later turn on the United States and support the ISIS occupation.
As we approached the base, Craig and I were riding in the backseat of a hardened SUV that was just behind our security guys leading our four-vehicle convoy. Hardened means it was armored strongly enough to deflect most bullets, but not anything bigger. A rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), for example, would tear it to shreds.
Picked by a bushwhacker as the highest-priority target, our vehicle was suddenly hit by fourteen shots on Saturday morning, February 28, 2004. Each shot from what was probably an AK-47 felt like a hammer blow on the armored doors and bulletproof windows. We got most of the incident on tape. In those days Craig and Greg both drove around holding a digital camera in their laps, fingers on the trigger.
“Roll tape!” I yelled to Craig, unnecessarily. He was already rolling as the rounds smacked into the SUV. Then I said breathlessly to Craig’s camera:
Craig caught the attack on camera. “Roll tape!” I yelled to Craig, unnecessarily. He was already rolling as the rounds smacked into the SUV. Mosul, Iraq. 2004.
“We’ve been hit. Ladies and gentlemen, we have just been attacked. We’ve just been sniped. We’ve been hit! Go, go, go! We’ve been attacked. We’ve been hit.”
After scrambling a few blocks to reassemble our convoy, I got through on the security guard’s radio to the US base, “We’ve been hit as we were about to enter your base. We have a wounded man. Our driver has been wounded. We’re going into the university area; can you give us instructions?” Not getting a reply, we pulled into what seemed a safer area. As I reported, “Seeing the four-man security detail guarding the university hospital, we pulled behind their strong gate to await help from the Army base nearby.”
Then on camera: “Now, we’re inside the grounds of the university hospital. There are cops here, situation relatively stable. Actually, we’ve got a good place because we’ve got that injured driver also. He’s been hit in his left shoulder and hand. Right wrist possibly fractured.”
Aside from tending to our wounded man, the first thing we did when we were safe was to screen Craig’s tapes. “He got the shots,” Greg confided with quiet jubilation after seeing that Craig had captured seven of the fourteen bullet impacts on tape. As I said quoting Churchill earlier, there is no greater sense of satisfaction for a war correspondent than surviving close calls. I reacted by smoking a cigar offered by cameraman Carl Glogg and strutting around like I was General Patton.
Protected by fate, our armor plating, and good luck, we suffered just that lone casualty, our longtime driver and friend, forty-year-old Hussein Ali Farhan. He was driving the unarmored equipment bus behind us when he was hit by a single shot, maybe a ricochet off the side of our vehicle. The round pierced his right shoulder, running down his arm and fracturing his wrist before exiting his body.
“Who loves you, baby?” I kidded Hussein, as our security guys stopped the bleeding and stabilized his wound. Then after puffing on that celebratory cigar, I did a show-and-tell describing how the rounds had struck our vehicle.
They [the bullets] came sweeping down, obviously on this side. The shot—this is the first shot. I heard the first shot. It hit here—then the bullets—got in front of us, turned back, sprayed us again—then he—then he went to the next vehicle. Which has—the glass is not bulletproof, it punctured his [Hussein’s] window and put the rounds into the glass. We’re OK. Thank God. Thank God.
Pointing where bullets struck our armored vehicle, which likely saved our lives. Mosul, Iraq, 2004.
We later pried out the crushed bullets and kept them as souvenirs. Hussein was fine after being treated at the then-still-functioning university hospital, never losing his good nature as we completed our taping at Task Force Olympia and eventually made our way out of Iraq via Turkey, eighty long miles away.
I personally drove our SUV for the rest of the journey, resolved that if we came under fire again I would use our hardy, now-tested bulletproof vehicle to squash any attacker. Typically, no other media picked up the story of the breathtaking, caught-on-tape ambush. I said bitterly at the time, “Imagine if this had happened to any other network correspondent?”
After a few days home, I wrote in my journal, “Coming back from Iraq after that violent trip, filled with death and still stunned by the attack in Mosul, I went through an unprecedented decompression. I was in shock, my bravado stripped, nerves shaken. It was deeply unsettling.” Again, in retrospect, I am fortunate that my wild post-9/11 reporting did not get Craig or Greg or somebody else killed along the way.
NEW YORK HARBOR, SEPTEMBER 2004
A steadfast friend from our initial meeting in Afghanistan in November 2001, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a man of impeccable character I described earlier, is one I continued to rely on to get a firm, fair idea about the war and his nation’s progress. Sadly for him and Afghanistan, neither has gone well. In fact as I write this, more than sixteen years after our war in Afghanistan began, the nation totters on the brink. The Taliban is resurgent and the future bodes ill. President Trump has authorized a mini-surge to reverse the downward slide, but I don’t expect his efforts to do more than prolong the endless fight.
Several years after we met in Panjshir Province, I had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Abdullah in New York. By then representing his nation as foreign minister, which is comparable to our secretary of state, he was in town to attend the United Nations General Assembly of 2004.
I picked him up by boat at the West Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin in Manhattan, and, with brother Craig and Greg Hart, took the foreign minister on my well-practiced tour of New York Harbor. It is a boat ride I have done so many times, I consider the harbor my backyard and know every buoy and navigational marker. Tugboat crews and police and Coast Guard personnel wave friendly greetings when they see my familiar boat Belle, an old thirty-six-foot Hinckley, a stylish but modest vessel, which is a cross between a traditional Maine lobster boat and a classic, varnished-wood runabout.
In Belle I gave Dr. Abdullah my “Why We Fight” harbor tour, which since 9/11 includes stops at the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. I later gave an on-camera version of the same tour during Celebrity Apprentice, narrating the highlights and capping the task by yelling, “Screw the terrorists! We have rebuilt the Trade Center bigger and bolder than ever!”
The NYPD freaked when we told them the Afghan foreign minister had accepted my invitation to tour the harbor. They assigned a police boat to shadow our cruise after reminding me that Dr. Abdullah was a “Class One Target” for terrorists. Our boat ride ended with dinner with Erica at our home on the Hudson River near the George Washington Bridge. We catered it from the local Afghan restaurant on nearby River Road.
After being twice cheated out of the presidency of his country, Dr. Abdullah has served as chief executive of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan since 2014. The position is a kind of co-presidency. He, at the highest level, and more modestly, other solid friends like Akbar in the middle, represent the best of Afghanistan. Unlike the more outwardly sophisticated Iraqis or Iranians, the down-to-earth Afghans I have met are fiercely loyal and reliable friends, but they are captives of their history.
Despite Abdullah’s unfailing honesty, courage, and patriotism, political cronyism and endemic corruption, plus the spreading cancer of Sunni Muslim extremism and the undefeated Taliban’s eternal war on women and modern life, all conspire to keep the country stuck in the fifteenth century. The population rejects outside ideas instinctively. That cultural and now harsh religious intransigence drained the energy of Alexander, and of the Persian, Sikh, British, and Soviet empires, and will do the same to ours if we over-commit to trying to change it. Afghanistan will break President Trump’s heart as it has all the others’.
PETER JENNINGS’S LAST PATROL, IRAQ 2005
Because of my own experiences with the Tora Bora controversy and the “line in the sand” in Iraq, among other professional crises, I had some sympathy for NBC anchor Brian Williams when he got into that jam for puffing war tales. As I mentioned earlier, he spoke repeatedly about how his helicopter had been hit by enemy rocket fire, when the RPG had actually hit another helicopter from the unit. Despite that obvious unforced error, you should know that Brian is a brave reporter. Notwithstanding his unfortunate exaggeration, he had the guts to be in Iraq during the most dangerous period, pre-Surge, when we were losing three or four or more GIs a day.
We shared a flight on a C-130 military transport plane from Baghdad to Mosul during 2005, a really violent year when the insurgency made flying truly perilous. Our aircraft was forced to execute extreme evasive action, banking sharply to the left after takeoff following an incoming missile alert. We were fine, but I am just saying those were bad times, and he was there, unlike most of his critics.
Also on board that flight, coincidentally, was ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who at this point in his distinguished career rarely made his way to the front lines. As senior men, Peter and I sat in the cockpit jump seats. Brian sat with the crews and GIs in the main cargo compartment. Before boarding, Brian and I had a whispered conversation about how nice Peter was behaving to everyone, signing autographs for the crew and being extremely gracious to all the soldiers and to us. Since he was often overly formal and stuffy during the fifteen years I worked with him at ABC News, his egalitarian behavior now was as refreshing as it was unexpected.
Not long after that trip, back home in summer 2005, Peter died of cancer, and I wondered if he knew he was sick while in Baghdad, and whether that influenced his mellow mood and gracious conduct.
Hopefully, by the time you read this, Brian Williams’s career will have been restored. Although he necessarily lost his big anchor job at NBC Nightly News to Lester Holt, who by the way is terrific, Brian made a good start at rehabilitation at MSNBC with his skilled, professional election coverage in 2016. Subsequently, in 2017 Brian got his own show on MSNBC called The 11th Hour (and his scandal became small potatoes compared to what happened to Matt Lauer and the other men drummed out for sexual harassment), but everyone makes mistakes. It is easy to puff, brag, and misremember a war story, especially in a barroom retelling. But the shaming that accompanies innocent puffing in this one area can be disproportionately egregious.
One extreme example from 1996 involves the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jeremy Borda. The first CNO to rise from the enlisted ranks, he killed himself after a Newsweek reporter questioned why he was wearing two Combat Distinguishing Devices from Vietnam that were not earned. I mention Borda’s suicide because, at times during the Tora Bora scandal, as I said, I contemplated my own. If you hear some snot savaging someone you trust, remember what Teddy Roosevelt said: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena . . .”
VINDICATION, THE LOST TAPES, MAY 11, 2016
As I was about done writing an early draft of this book in May 2016, before the harassment furor at Fox over Ailes and O’Reilly, I asked Greg Hart to have one more go at our video libraries to see if there was anything from Tora Bora that we might have missed. Although nowadays most news cameras are digital, with archives stored in the cloud, we still keep a vast archive of all the pre-digital field tapes. The storehouse also contains random memorabilia, such as the studio chair the racist skinhead used to break my nose in 1988.
Now fifty-two, Greg has worked with me since the day thirty years ago he graduated Fordham University in the Bronx. Erica, Craig, and I attended his wedding to Andrea at their new home on John’s Island, South Carolina, in June 2017. As his brother said during his wedding toast, “Here’s to the last never-married straight guy in South Carolina.” With the tightly built body of a jockey, Greg is a perpetual-motion machine who has an understated way of delivering good news, like when he told me that Craig had captured on tape the bullets hitting our car during the Mosul ambush of 2004.
This time, Greg told me that he had found previously untouched out-takes from Tora Bora from the days in question, December 5 and 6, 2001. It was like the past decade and a half of cloudy skies parted and the glorious sun shone through. My life was redeemed. On May 12, 2016, I sent the following email to former Baltimore Sun editor William Marimow and former Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan, to then Fox attorney Dianne Brandi, Fox executive Bill Shine, and to my immediate Fox supervisor back in 2001, John Moody. Later that day I sent it to television critic David Folkenflik himself.
From: Rivera, Geraldo
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2016 9:14 AM
To: Marimow, William; David.Lapan.com; Moody, John; Brandi, Dianne
Cc: Shine, Bill; Rivera, Geraldo
Subject: Urgent: Lost Tapes Found
Gentlemen and Lady,
In vetting the final draft of the manuscript for my war memoir, we found the raw tapes in storage from Tora Bora from 5–6 December 2001. Those tapes belie the then Baltimore Sun reporter David Folkenflik’s destructive characterization of my work as fraudulent. They also disprove then Pentagon spokesman Lt. Colonel David Lapan’s statement that there were no incidents of friendly fire until 9 December 2001 in Tora Bora. Obviously in the heat of combat Pentagon statements on friendly fire have been wrong before, at least until corrected by the facts. I herein offer you the facts of what I saw and reported.
In your defense, it does not appear that we presented these tapes to you when we visited the offices of the Baltimore Sun on 15 May 2002 in the vain attempt to prove to you that I made an honest error rather than intentionally reported that I was somewhere I wasn’t. What we presented to you that day 14 years ago was what we aired on Fox News. The following on camera statements were never aired. Obviously, since I present them to prove my statement that I witnessed the immediate aftermath of an incident of friendly fire in Tora Bora on 5–6 December, the fact they never aired is irrelevant.
Since we had two cameras rolling, the incident is captured on both the camera operated by Greg Hart, and a second camera operated by Craig Rivera.
Late on 5 December local time, as the tapes which we have now recovered and which are available for viewing show, I reported on both cameras as we walked across a battlefield in No Man’s Land:
(12:18 in on CRAIG #22 tape)
That smoke over the rise is from our air strikes, you can tell that these guys are a little edgy about getting on the other side of this thing (indicating the nearby ridge. A bomb hits nearby as I speak, the explosion is caught on tape). They don’t want another repetition of friendly fire, the forces are so fluid, they are moving so quickly it is almost impossible I would imagine for U.S. Central Command to know exactly where the good guys are. They are moving. They are sweeping.
Early on 6 December local time (and before the appearances that doomed me to a decade and a half of ridicule), I report the following graphic scene on both cameras:
(22:14 in on HART #17 tape)
(47:58 in on CRAIG #22 tape)
This devastated moonscape here is where at least one incident involving friendly fire happened. There are the bits and pieces of Mujahedeen uniforms, even body parts. It’s obvious that some American bombs were dropped here, inadvertently. I told you how fast the Mujahedeen were advancing. The intelligence back at the Central Command simply could not keep up with it. This is the result, a tragic accident of war; a warrior’s worst nightmare, death by friendly fire.
The shards of body parts and the shreds of clothing are clearly visible in the huge bomb craters. Then, on tape, I said the prayer, the reporting of which I was widely mocked as being fraudulent.
(48:49 in on CRAIG #22 tape)
Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us thy trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the power and glory forever, Amen.
It is on tape. Then I do another on camera, which says,
(57:55 in on CRAIG #22 tape)
So the butcher’s bill is in for today’s fighting, three Mujahedeen fighters killed, two wounded, but they ended up killing nine, they killed nine of their enemies, al Qaeda. Now they have come down off of the mountain. They have called in air strikes to get rid of some of the Rats Nest up there, so they have come down off of the mountain to avoid any of those terrible friendly fire incidents. So from Tora Bora, the Rats Nest itself, and the battle raging around it, I’m Geraldo Rivera, Fox News.
It is on tape. We are ready, willing and able to show these tapes to anyone you suggest. I will follow any timely instructions you have to allow you to view these tapes. I want you to admit what these tapes prove, that you made an honest mistake in portraying me as dishonest.
Please pass this message to David Folkenflik. I await a response from all of you. If you would like to designate anyone, including a forensic expert, to come to Fox News to screen these tapes please so indicate as soon as possible.
Thank you,
Geraldo Rivera
Neither of them answered, not former Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan nor editor Bill Marimow. Speaking for Fox News, attorney Dianne Brandi was generally supportive, but cautioned against my counting on my antagonists suddenly reversing themselves. Folkenflik, to whom, as I said, I sent his own copy of the message, and much of whose career since December 2001 has been based on this lie, did say he was interested in seeing the lost video from Tora Bora, but has not been heard from since.
Marimow and Folkenflik gave lame statements to Page Six of the New York Post, standing by their stories, but have otherwise remained silent and have not responded to my request to have our grievance arbitrated by a panel of journalism-school students.
The awful irony is that I am bringing this long-dead incident back from the grave of obscurity. My obsession with it is probably more interesting to most than whatever happened at the time. But I could not let this black mark go unchallenged for the obituary writer at the New York Times or Wikipedia to gloat over when I’m gone.
