The New Republic

If the bombs begin falling on Baghdad, a broad swath of the TV-
viewing world will quickly become intimate with Jane Arraf, CNN's
Iraq correspondent for the past four years. Arraf files her reports
from the third- floor landing of a blocky white building a few
hundred meters from the Tigris River, with the ancient city's
minaret-filled panorama behind her. CNN shares the building with
the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, and the handful of other news
organizations that have a permanent presence in Baghdad. But there's
an uncomfortable fact about this building to which these tenants
don't often call attention: It's the Iraqi Ministry of
Information.About six floors above Arraf's set, not far from her office, sits
the ministry's monitoring section, where rows of apparatchiks in
headphones listen to recordings of Western broadcasts from Iraq.
One TV reporter who glimpsed the operation four years ago describes
the listeners transcribing the tapes by hand, with passages
critical of the regime written in red. The ministry stores the
transcripts in files, which are pulled out and analyzed when
journalists apply for visas. Elsewhere in the building, a group of
intelligence officials from the Directorate of Anti-Espionage
("M5") and the Directorate of Surveillance ("M10") congregate to
devise daily strategies for tracking and obstructing foreign
journalists. An ex-Iraqi intelligence official I contacted through
the opposition Iraqi National Congress wrote a memo to me
describing their tactics: sending women to seduce male reporters in
their hotel rooms, planting false information with reporters,
destroying reporters' equipment. The former Iraqi intelligence
agent wrote, "Every journalist from abroad is considered a spy with
a journalist cover. He should be followed and indicated and
controlled one way or another."

Like their Soviet-bloc predecessors, the Iraqis have become masters
of the Orwellian pantomime--the state-orchestrated anti-American
rally, the state-led tours of alleged chemical weapons sites that
turn out to be baby milk factories- -that promotes their distorted
reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these
displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media. It's not because
American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein;
broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue
to work in Iraq. "There's a quid pro quo for being there," says
Peter Arnett, who worked the Iraq beat for CNN for a decade. "You
go in and they control what you do. ... So you have no option other
than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq." In other
words, the Western media's presence in the Ministry of Information
describes more than just a physical reality.

In October 1995, ABC News' Sheila MacVicar filed a story from
Baghdad on Iraq's presidential referendum. Iraqis generally
consider it too risky to speak honestly to a reporter from American
television, but MacVicar had come across a rare moment of dissent.
As Iraqis lined up to cast their votes, they flashed MacVicar their
ration cards, which guarantee them a supply of government-issued
food. The point was clear: In exchange for their votes, officials
stamped the cards. When MacVicar filed her story, she reported this
small current of rebellion and called the forthcoming referendum
results--99.96 percent for Saddam--a fiction.

No correspondent had spent more time in Iraq than MacVicar. Since
her first trip to Baghdad in 1986, she had regularly shuttled
between Baghdad and ABC's London bureau. After her referendum
report, however, that shuttling abruptly ended. She stopped
receiving responses to her visa requests. More than 18 months
passed while she cooled her heels in the InterContinental Hotel in
Amman, Jordan, trying to report on Iraq from across the border. As
correspondents from other networks received visas, she realized the
Iraqis had targeted her for retribution. Desperate to get MacVicar
back to Baghdad, ABC sent a fixer, a Jordanian troubleshooter with
Iraqi government ties, to work the back channels. After several
trips to Baghdad, the fixer reported that MacVicar had been placed
on a blacklist, but an arrangement could be made: MacVicar could
return if she sent a letter apologizing for "her rude treatment of
His Excellency." MacVicar hedged. She wrote that she "apologized if
there was offense found." A few months later she was allowed to
return to Iraq.

MacVicar is not alone. Visas are the Ministry of Information's
primary tools for controlling foreign journalists. Even
correspondents for CNN and the BBC, which maintain permanent
offices in Baghdad, must continually apply for visas, which
typically last only two weeks. And without visas for their own
correspondents, the networks have to

rely on local Iraqis to keep their offices running--locals who are
even more subject to government reprisals than are visiting
Americans.

The process of obtaining an Iraqi visa is labyrinthine.

First you send the Iraqi consulate in Washington, D.C., a copy of
your curriculum vitae and passport. If the Iraqis decide that you
are eligible to apply, you fill out a form

provided by the consulate that asks about your religion and
relationship to the American government. During moments of crisis,
such as the current one, four separate committees in Baghdad review
the application. And you can't find out their decision for certain
by mail or by phone. The only way to get a definitive answer is to
travel to the Iraqi Embassy in Amman, or to have your
organization's Amman fixer make inquiries for you. NPR's Eric Weiner
recounts waiting for weeks at a time at the Amman InterContinental
Hotel. Every morning at 10 a.m., he'd walk to what journalists

call the "'window of shame'--a sliding metal shutter in front of the
[Iraqi] embassy. Invariably, the guy inside would mutter something
like, 'No visa today. Come back tomorrow,' and slam the shutter
closed." In other words, you can very easily travel halfway around
the world only to learn that you won't be going the last 200 miles
to Iraq.

Many of the world's authoritarian regimes--North Korea, Myanmar,
Iran--use similar methods to control foreign journalists. But in
those less newsworthy countries, American media organizations don't
play along nearly as much.

In Iraq, by contrast, high-ranking network functionaries endlessly
court the Ministry of Information so they will be well-positioned
when they need to get their reporters in. (Media executives not on
news-gathering missions get visas much more easily.) This month--in
preparation for the impending war--Fox News Senior Vice President
John Moody made the pilgrimage. And nobody has schmoozed the
ministry harder than the head of CNN's News Group, Eason Jordan, who
has traveled to Baghdad twelve times since the Gulf war. In part
these trips consist of network execs setting up meetings with Iraqi
officials to try to persuade them that the networks are not sending
CIA stooges. And in part they consist of network execs promising
the Iraqi regime that

they will cover its propaganda. "[The Iraqis] make it clear that you
must attend if you hope to get future visas," one cameraman told
me. That may explain why earlier this spring Tom Brokaw drove
eleven hours through the desert to broadcast live from Baghdad on
the eve of Saddam's sixty-fifth birthday--and why dozens of top
correspondents covered this week's presidential referendum, even
though every journalist considers the event a sham.

The networks make these concessions because the alternative is no
access. Jordan says the Iraqis have shut down

CNN's Baghdad bureau on at least five occasions since the Gulf war,
at times when they deemed CNN reports to be too critical.
Currently, three of the network's correspondents-Wolf Blitzer,
Richard Roth, and Christiane Amanpour-

are banned from obtaining visas. Recently retired New York Times
reporter Barbara Crossette, who traveled to Baghdad twice in the
late '90s, wasn't allowed back after she wrote articles in 1998
belying Iraqi stories about the horrors of U.N. sanctions. And as
ABC's "Primetime Thursday" prepared an interview with Saddam's
former mistress, Parisoula Lampsos, which ran last month, an Iraqi
official told the network's fixer in Amman that ABC would never
again receive visas. (ABC has since been granted permission to
enter.) In fact, according to an ABC source, the official intimated
that they could pay an even greater price. "Was ABC not concerned
with the safety of their people?" he asked.

If you are lucky enough to gain a visa to report in Iraq, you also
receive a minder, an English-speaking government shadow who is
required by the regime and will cost you at least $100 per day. In
theory, the minder is the journalist's ally--a logistician,
translator, and source of basic information about Iraqi life. In
practice, as Newsweek's Joshua

Hammer puts it, "They range from real

bastards to boring parrots of the regime." The minder is a
well-practiced obstructionist, limiting journalists' travels to a

government-approved itinerary. "From the moment you arrive," says
Crossette, "freedom of movement is an irrelevant concept."

It's the minder who enforces the Ministry of Information's will.
When a TV crew wants to shoot footage, even of one of the many
Saddam murals and statues, the reporters must get a letter of
permission from the information ministry. "You better have a piece
of paper or they won't let you shoot. They'll think that you're a
fucking spy. They're paranoid," says Arnett. The letters, which the
minders demand, often impose strict restrictions on the crew,
occasionally dictating camera angles. Sometimes the minders even
impede journalists' work just for the heck of it. One producer
described to me the agony of filming a B- roll shot of an arch
composed of two oversized swords at a parade ground. Her minder
furiously objected. After extensive haggling, the minder forbade
her crew from taking this meaningless footage.

According to the ex-Iraqi intelligence officer, even when the minder
is out of sight, officials are watching all the time. His six-page
memo refers constantly to the journalist as hadef ("target"). He
writes, "Put the target under secretive surveillance. This will be
used to gather information against him or find him doing something
he's not supposed to. Prepare plans to make him fail, or seduce him
to do things. ... One effective way is though sexual relations. ...
When they feel the target is closing in on sensitive material,
create technical problems that will obstruct his path. ... For
example, create a car accident. This usually will happen with a
taxi driven by intelligence personnel. ... Produce false
information, and see what level of ability he has to distinguish
between good and bad information."; "'They're obviously watching me
in bed,' he said. 'And I'm pretty sure that they're watching me

in the bathroom. I've never wanted to leave a place so badly.'"

The American correspondents I spoke with corroborated that they were
under constant surveillance. One producer describes making a
satellite telephone call from a corner of the Al Rasheed Hotel's
garden, far from her minder and any other apparent eavesdroppers.
As she left the garden a man approached and told her, "Never do
that again." Hammer spoke in French with a friend by satellite
phone in his hotel room; the next morning his minder greeted him,
"Vous parlez franais, aussi?" When one correspondent unplugged a
television, a repairman knocked on his door a few minutes later
asking to fix the set. "They're obviously watching me in bed," he
said. "And I'm pretty sure that they're watching me

in the bathroom. I've never wanted to leave a place so badly."

Even when reporters faithfully follow the regime's instructions, the
Ministry of Information still torments them. Arnett describes
constant harangues from ministry officials, even about colleagues
over whom he had no control. They'd complain, "What the hell is
Larry King saying? Can't you shut him up?" Other reporters describe
fierce tongue-lashings for having crossed prosaic red lines. The
Iraqis won't abide references to the "regime" (they prefer
"government") or to "Saddam" (they prefer "President Saddam
Hussein").

Sometimes the officials go beyond angry lectures. According to a
network source, on about four separate occasions in 1996 the Iraqis
roused MacVicar from her hotel room at 2 a.m. and drove her to the
Ministry of Information, where officials screamed that she was
working for the CIA. The French documentary filmmaker Joel Soler
told me how his minder took him to a hospital, ostensibly to
examine the effects of sanctions, but then called in a nurse with a
long needle. "He said, 'Now we'll do a series of blood tests.'"
Soler jumped on the table screaming: "I said, 'I'm calling my
ambassador.' If I'd been American, forget about it." There's the
horror story of The London Observer's Farzad Bazoft, an
Iranian-born British journalist. A few months before the Gulf war,
the Iraqis tried Bazoft behind closed doors on charges of espionage.
They then hung him. As he turned over Bazoft's remains to the
British Embassy in Baghdad, Information Minister Latif Nassif
Jassim told journalists, "Mrs. Thatcher wanted him alive. We gave
her the body."

To stay on the right side of the regime, many reporters on the
Baghdad beat take the path

of least resistance: They mimic the Baath

Party line. Lacking other stories, they go along with
government-arranged tours--most popularly to the leukemia ward at
Saddam Central Children's Hospital, where doctors recount the
horrors of

sanctions, and to the Martyr's Monument, a Baghdad memorial to 400
women and children accidentally killed

by an American missile during the Gulf war. ("They revel in pointing
out the pieces of charred flesh on the wall," says Howard Witt of
the Chicago Tribune.) The Iraqis also load up buses of foreign
journalists for tours of alleged weapons sites or street protests.
But the demonstrations aren't terribly convincing. One journalist
described to me an anti-American demonstration held last April in
Baghdad to celebrate Saddam's sixty-fifth birthday. She saw the
same high school students pass by several times, simulating an
endless stream of angry protesters. When her colleagues turned
their cameras on, officials with bullhorns instructed the crowd to
increase the volume of their chants. "Everyone knows they're a
sham," says the journalist. "But CNN in Atlanta is telling Nic
Robertson that he has to file a story. He doesn't have anything
else to work with. So he shows the demonstration."

Nobody better exemplifies this go-along-to-get-along reporting
strategy than the dean of Western reporters in Baghdad, Arraf. In a
segment last month, answering viewer phone calls, Arraf rebutted
the charge that Saddam's vanity construction projects have diverted
money that could have been used to feed his starving people.
Sanctions, she said, have "tied his hands in some respects." Later
in the same segment, repeating Saddam's constant refrain, she told
viewers, "If there's been anything that's been essentially agreed
over the last decade, it's been that the sanctions that are in
place, held in place by the U. N. and U.S., haven't been working."
(That's a pretty substantial overstatement given that both the
United States and the United Nations officially believe sanctions
serve a necessary purpose: to keep Saddam from more rapidly
rearming. ) Arraf even endorsed Saddam's justification for denying
U.N. weapons inspectors entry to presidential palaces: "[T]he
palaces are ... a symbol here, a symbol [of] sovereignty and a
symbol [of] President Saddam Hussein, and they're not too fond of
the idea of inspectors just barging in." In that same report Arraf
never notes that the United States suspects those same
presidential-palace complexes of doubling as weapons factories.

There's nothing unusual about reporters ingratiating themselves to a
source. But Arraf's beat sweeteners are a little hard to swallow.
Last year she ran a story on the tenth anniversary of the Gulf war
that included this nearly congratulatory section on Saddam: "He,
too, endures. More than a symbol, a powerful force who has survived
three major U.S.-led attacks since the Gulf war, bombing, and plots
to depose him. At 63, the president mocks rumors he is ill. Not
just standing tall but building up. As soon as the dust settled from
the Gulf war, and the bodies were buried, Iraq began rebuilding."
In her report reviewing Saddam's past ten years, Arraf included no
mention of his butchery that has been documented in Human Rights
Watch reports and in dozens of books. From her telling, you'd think
he's the Robert Moses

of Mesopotamia.

In fact, even Arraf herself seems to know that what she is saying is
probably bunk. Last March she published a piece in London's Daily
Telegraph (which the Iraqi Ministry of Information apparently
missed), in which she outlined the near impossibility of reporting
honestly on Saddam's regime. She wrote, "People in the streets are
not allowed to talk to television journalists; or rather, the
journalists are not allowed to talk to them. 'Why do you want to
ask them political questions? They are not qualified to answer,' an
official said. ... More than most countries, there is a wide gap in
Iraq between what people profess in public for their own safety and
what they say in private." Nonetheless, Arraf still frequently
includes in her CNN reports, without qualification or caveat,
footage of Iraqi people condemning the United States and lauding
their leader.

Many of Arraf's colleagues commit the same egregious errors,
treating regime- organized demonstrations as if

they were genuine expressions of public opinion. NBC's man in Iraq,
Ron Allen, filed a report from Saddam's

birthday bash last April that noted, "[T]he huge crowds in the
streets suggest Saddam still has firm control of his country. Iraqi
officials defiantly insist the celebration sends a clear message,
especially to the U.S., that the people will stand behind their
leader." Introducing a tour of an Iraqi nuclear facility north of
Baghdad last month, he said, "The propaganda war really heated up
here in Iraq," but then never hinted at the many indications--the
fact, for instance, that Iraq isn't allowing inspectors to visit the
site--that

the tour was a sham. The point, he told viewers, was "to show that,
in fact, this site is virtually harmless. ... 'It's a peaceful
place,' [the Iraqis] said, 'a place for peaceful research.'" He
even refers at length to former weapons-
inspector-turned-Saddam-apologist Scott Ritter, without an allusion
to Ritter's well-documented change of heart about the Iraqi threat.
Unlike Allen and Arraf, even the three Democratic congressmen--Jim
McDermott, Mike Thompson, and David Bonior--who recently returned
from a peace mission to Baghdad, grasped that a cursory inspection
by nonexperts could serve no purpose except to further Saddam's
propaganda.

In part, reporters spin these bogus tours into stories because the
risks of airing meaningful material are just

too high. A TV journalist told me about the time he interviewed a
respected Baghdad politico on camera. The journalist was shocked by
his subject's candid criticisms of

the government. But as the reporter left the interview, his minder
told him, "I can't tell you what to do. But if he says that on
camera, he'll be in severe trouble--and so will I." Worried about
putting lives at risk, the journalists never aired his footage.
Even innocuous conversations can result in reprisals. Witt, who
traveled to Iraq last spring, says, "Most journalists don't want to
put anyone at risk. The potential price is too horrible. Either you
get your tongue cut out and then you're executed, or you're just
executed. You have your choice."

There are alternatives to mindlessly reciting Baghdad's spin.
Instead of desperately trying to keep their Baghdad offices open,
the networks could scour Kurdistan and Jordan, where there are many
recently arrived Iraqis who can talk freely. "Amman is the place to
find out what's really going on in Iraq," says ex-CIA officer
Robert Baer, who spent the mid-'90s working in and around Iraq. (To
CNN's credit, it has sent reporter Brent Sadler to Kurdistan
despite Baghdad's furious objections.) Or they could use their
access to depict the harsh realities of life under Saddam--even if
it means never returning to Iraq. It's a method used by Soler in
his documentary Uncle Saddam, to be aired on Cinemax next month.
After spending a month ingratiating himself with Saddam's
entourage, Soler convinced the Iraqis to grant him camera time with
His Excellency's inner circle. His film shows Saddam to be a
lunatic, devoid of morality or humanity. It captures images of
Saddam's unique style of fishing- hurling grenades into a pond and
then sending aides to retrieve the kill. It documents Saddam's
megalomania: Iraq's biggest paper features Saddam in a new pose on
the cover each day. "I don't need a relationship with Iraq," he
explains of his decision to bare all. "It was my one shot. Every day
it was how can I push the limits."

To be sure, after screening his documentary for film festivals and
Iraqi opposition groups in the U.S., Soler found red paint
splattered on his Los Angeles home, his trash can set on fire, and
a death threat in his mailbox. But with the film he smuggled out of
Iraq via courier, Soler gives more psychological insight into
Saddam than ten years of American TV reportage.

When I asked CNN's Jordan to explain why his network is so devoted
to maintaining a perpetual Baghdad presence, he listed two reasons:
"First, because it's newsworthy; second, because there's an
expectation that if anybody is in Iraq, it will be CNN." His answer
reveals the fundamental attitude of most Western media: Access to
Baghdad is an end in itself, regardless of the intellectual or
moral caliber of the journalism such access produces. An old
journalistic aphorism holds "access is a curse." The Iraqi
experience proves it can be much worse than that.

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