A Special Q&A about Naked in Baghdad

Listen to some of Garrels' recent reports

Photo © Christopher Little

With bombs falling and the constant threat of sniper fire, NPR's senior foreign correspondent Anne Garrels reported each day from Baghdad throughout the recent war in Iraq. One of only 16 American journalists who stayed in the besieged capital, she was at the very center of the storm. Soon after the U.S. military reached the city, Garrels left Baghdad and returned to the United States, where she wrote a book about her experiences. Naked in Baghdad provides readers with a vivid account of the sights, sounds, and smells of the recent war. The book is scheduled for release in September 2003 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

On the eve of leaving for a new reporting assignment that returns her to Baghdad, Garrels took time to answer a few questions about her book, her years of reporting from foreign lands, and what she's anticipating as she returns to Iraq. This interview was conducted by Kathie Miller for NPR Communications.

Q: You recently completed writing Naked in Baghdad, a book about your reporting experiences during the recent war in Iraq. At what point did you realize that you had the inspiration to write a book?

A: Really not until I came home. I had been in a cocoon in Baghdad and had no idea what impact my reporting from Baghdad had had. I knew I was one of just a few who had stayed, but I hadn't seen the e-mail from listeners…and I was incredibly overwhelmed, quite frankly, when I came out and felt like, if you will, the "taste of the week." It was both wonderful and alarming, and in a way I realized that I just needed to hide for a while and digest everything that had happened.

I was approached by any number of agents. One publisher in particular had heard my NPR reports and had seen letters that my husband had sent out - which are also part of the book - and he "got it" immediately. He realized what I could and could not do in what turned out to be a month of ferocious writing. The book had to be turned out quickly in order to be timely and I was just fortunate that a friend who was a publisher got it... and that was the reason I did it.

I had always thought I'd write a book about the former Soviet Union, something I know such a great deal about, but that I would have spent a lifetime on. And this was really... a kind of "emotional burp" coming out of the war, and I realized that I had something to say as things moved away from the air war onto the ground. I realized from all the experience that I'd had since October hearing what Iraqis had to say, that they had so well predicted what we are seeing now.

Q: You were the only U.S. network staff member to remain in Baghdad until military forces reached the capital city. What was it like to be the only U.S. broadcast journalist to report on the story?

A: A shock! In the week before the war - in some ways that was really the hardest time - you almost didn't want to see your colleagues because the question always was "Are you staying or are you going? What do your bosses think? Are they pulling you? Are they letting you stay?" Everybody was waiting to see what the American networks were going to do, and at the very last minute they pulled out. Then CNN was thrown out. Suddenly, as the deadline for the bombing ticked down, we realized there were only 16 of us left, and that included print reporters, photographers…that was it! It was a tiny group, and it was a very intimate experience. And obviously for NPR, it was a seminal moment because we were the broadcast voice from Baghdad. And I didn't fully appreciate that until I got out - I was just too busy lurching from moment to moment, just trying to get information, get it right, under fairly difficult circumstances.

Q: What was it like to be a woman reporting on the war from Baghdad? Were there any advantages/disadvantages?

A: I was not the only woman by any means. There was another American woman there for Newsweek. There were lots of other women for European publications and television stations. And frankly, this question is one I sort of dismiss because bullets don't discriminate because you're a man or a woman, and we were all just as frightened whether we were men or women.

Probably I had more access as a woman because I could meet both men and women…and being an older woman at that, I have a benefit. There's a certain respect, if not surprise, that a woman is reporting and even in Middle Eastern, relatively segregated societies, I'm given all the access that a professional can expect. And as a woman, I can go in and talk to the families in ways that men are often not allowed to.

Q: You've reported from other foreign locations during wartime. How did reporting from Baghdad compare?

A: Every war is different, and every war has its own complications. In some ways, Chechnya was far scarier than the actual war period in Baghdad. That was a far more chaotic war. There was indiscriminate carpet-bombing by the Russians. The soldiers on the ground were drunk and out of control. The Chechens increasingly loathed us, so we became targets for the Chechens over the years. So that was in fact far more difficult. The difference of course was that the Americans weren't involved in Chechnya.

Q: Your book is titled Naked in Baghdad. In an interview with NPR's Susan Stamberg after your return from Baghdad, you explained that you chose to broadcast naked so that you could use a smuggled satellite phone to file reports for NPR. What would have happened if the smuggled phone had been discovered?

A: Well, that's a good question. Happily, I was not found. The reason I broadcast naked was in a sort of desperate effort to give myself a few extra minutes as the security goons went on their regular sweeps of the hotel looking for the illegal equipment that we had. I figured that if I answered the door naked, I'd get a few minutes to shut the door, hide the phone, throw on a dress that I had laid out ready for such an event, and then let them in. Those people who were found with illegal phones were either expelled or, during the war, four were detained for eight days in solitary confinement, and we did not know their whereabouts until they suddenly appeared safe and sound in Jordan. The best scenario was that you would be expelled. The worst scenario would be that, as happened, people were detained and suspected of espionage.

Q: Why did you use a smuggled phone to file your reports?

A: There were several reasons. When we came into the country, we had to declare our equipment. And I indeed did, as I always had, but it turned out by pure fluke that when I came over by land at the border they did not record my satellite phone. Initially, I was going to turn up at the authorities in Baghdad and register it, and then I thought to myself "Hey listen, a war is about to break out. We don't know whether we'll be allowed to stay for it and if we are allowed to stay what restraints will be put on us in terms of our reporting." So, I decided not to declare the phone, to keep it hidden.

The other issue was that when you did declare your equipment, you had to keep it at the Information Ministry and only work there. The conditions there were appalling. There wasn't enough office space; basically, I was out on a sidewalk working under impossible conditions next to a highway... it was very noisy. So there was just a practical reason why I did not want to work at the Information Ministry. The broadcasts were barely audible because of the surrounding noise. And the other was that the Information Ministry was a target. It was quite clear the US planned to hit the Information Ministry, and I did not want to work out of there.

So, with this combination of factors, I decided to keep the phone at the hotel. And, in fact, many reporters, even those who had declared their phones, did the same thing. They smuggled them out and worked from the hotel because it was just too dangerous to stay late at night during bombing hours in the Information Ministry.

Q: What are you anticipating as you return to Baghdad for another reporting assignment?

A: I think the postwar situation is really more dangerous in some ways than it was during the war. As the Iraqis predicted, it is a chaotic situation. Even those Iraqis who might have supported the ouster of Saddam Hussein predicted all along that there'd continue to be opposition to the Americans, that there would be Saddam loyalists, that the society would fracture along religious and tribal lines, which it has done. Even Iraqis who hated Saddam said sort of grudgingly that the country needs a strong man to keep it together. As the American troops came in, one Iraqi who did not support Saddam looked at me and said, "the Americans are going to have to exert control, and we will resent them every step of the way." And that apparent contradiction is exactly what we're seeing.



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