On April 23, 1981, hundreds of Syria’s elite special forces gathered in designated meeting places near the northern city of Hama. They were led by Syrian President Hafez Assad’s brother, Rifaat Assad, and they had come for a simple purpose—to teach the citizens of Hama a lesson. For more than two years, the Assad government had been plagued with civil unrest and political dissent. Syrian military installations had been sabotaged, government buildings attacked, and even the president himself was no longer safe. The source of this turmoil was the mysterious Muslim Brotherhood, an organization of fanatical Sunni Muslims dedicated to the overthrow of the government. No one knew precisely where the Brotherhood was headquartered, but the city of Hama was widely considered one of its strongholds. The Assad brothers decided that the time had come to give its people a demonstration of good citizenship, Syrian-style.
Just before midnight, the troops were given the order to move. They streamed into the town and cut off several neighborhoods where Brotherhood sympathizers were believed to live. Then they systematically dragged hundreds of civilians, many of them teenagers, from their beds, lined them up against the walls of their own houses, and machine-gunned them to death. At first they left the bodies bleeding in the streets, for the edification of the townspeople; later, municipal garbage trucks scooped up the corpses and dumped them into open ditches. No official death toll was published, of course, but later estimates put the number as high as 350.
Readers who have never heard of this massacre (or who may have confused it with another, much greater massacre that took place in Hama in February 1982 and that claimed as many as 20,000 victims) are in good company. The foreign editors of most of America’s newspapers have never heard of it, either. In fact, just about the only Americans who are aware of the slaughter are those who happened to read about it in an article on an inside page of the Washington Post two months later. There, under the headline “Syrian Troops Massacre Scores of Assad’s Foes,” the Post’s Edward Cody, writing from Washington, told the story. Cody, one of America’s most experienced Middle East reporters, noted that the first report on the massacre had been published in the French daily Le Monde on May 13, 1981, and that the Post had delayed its own article until it had been able to gain independent confirmation.
The Washington Post’s report was a considerable achievement—an American exclusive on a major political event in an important Middle East country. But why, with so many foreign correspondents in Beirut, all of them assigned to the Syrian beat, did it take two months for the story to emerge? And why did other news organizations—the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and the three networks, to name only some—never report it at all? In the seventh paragraph of his story, Cody gave a diplomatic answer:
The massacre reports, in trustworthy and untrustworthy variations, have been discussed in Damascus and Beirut in the last two months. In an atmosphere created by the wounding of Reuters correspondent Berndt Debusmann, shot in the back by a gunman firing a silencer-equipped pistol, and threats against British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent Tim Llewellyn—both after stories considered by Damascus as unfriendly to Syria—the Hama reports have not been widely published from the area.
Cody’s meaning was unmistakable—the reporters stationed in Beirut must have heard the story circulating there and had chosen to ignore it. They had remained silent in response to recent Syrian violence against journalists. They had, in short, decided to censor themselves.
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II
It is hard to blame the correspondents in Beirut for being cautious. Muslim West Beirut, where most of them lived and worked, had been a battlefield since the onset of the Lebanese civil war in 1975-76. Following the intervention of Syria in the summer of 1976, the city and much of Lebanon came under military occupation and Beirut became an urban nightmare of random violence, terrorism, and repression.
It had not always been that way. In the 1960’s and early 70’s, before the PLO arrived in Lebanon, destroyed the country’s political and social equilibrium, and plunged it into chaos, Beirut had been one of the most sophisticated cities in the Middle East, a city where the old colonial French influence was still strong and which, in contrast to the closed societies of the Arab world, was an oasis of tolerance and of what one American correspondent, John Cooley of the Christian Science Monitor, described as a “free and easy” press.
Then, in 1970, the PLO, whose armed presence in the kingdom of Jordan had already become an acute threat to the government there, lost a bloody war against King Hussein’s troops. In the months following, almost the entire leadership structure of the PLO fled Jordan and relocated in Beirut, where it brought its armed militant presence to bear on the side of the Lebanese Muslims, much to the displeasure of the dominant middle-class Christians. It also brought a method for dealing with Western journalists that was both direct and brutal.
In those early days foreign reporters were considered enemies of the PLO unless proved otherwise; and certain subjects were off-limits to all journalists, friends and enemies alike. This approach actually began during the period that the PLO was still headquartered in Amman. In the late 60’s, Milan Kubic, who covered the Middle East for Newsweek, filed a report about the PLO’s contacts with European terrorist organizations. When it appeared, he was informed that an official of the PLO wanted to meet with him. He was taken to the office of the PLO’s chief spokesman in Amman, where his life was threatened. On leaving Jordan, Kubic hired two part-time correspondents to “report” on the PLO, one the son of the legendary British leader of the Jordanian army, Glubb Pasha, the other Mark (Abdullah) Schleifer, a Jewish convert to Islam and an anti-Israel propagandist. Both were, presumably, closer to what the PLO had in mind.
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After its exodus from Jordan, the PLO began expanding its power in Lebanon. Its base was the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab refugees in the country, and it joined forces with radical Muslim groups in a rough alliance against the Christians. By 1973, there was sporadic violence throughout the country, and in the spring of 1975, full-scale civil war erupted. The small community of foreign journalists in Lebanon was reinforced to cover the fighting. The PLO was particularly sensitive to the fact that its policies and methods were now under the scrutiny of a comparatively large group of Western reporters, and it undertook some of the same tactics that it had employed in Jordan in order to insure that its “enemies” in the Western press remained at arm’s length.
One such, ironically, was William Marmon of Time, whose Middle East tour had begun in 1973 when he became Time’s bureau chief in Israel. He soon established himself as one of the journalists most critical of Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinian Arab cause. His wife had a job teaching at Beir Zeit, the Palestinian-Arab college on the West Bank that was a hotbed of anti-Israel sentiment. All this, he assumed, would stand him in good stead when, in 1975, Time—which was itself in the process of adopting a position more sympathetic to the Arabs—transferred him from Jerusalem to Beirut.
He was wrong. During the summer of 1975 Lebanese security officers came to Marmon’s office and told his local assistant, Abu Said, that Palestinian intelligence had learned about Marmon’s Jerusalem years and was planning to kill him. Abu Said, himself a Palestinian Arab, learned that the threat had come from the PFLP faction of the PLO. Marmon contacted the American embassy in Beirut; he was told that although there was no information regarding this particular threat, the embassy’s policy was to take these matters very seriously.
Marmon decided to stay on in Beirut. He sent Abu Said to mediate, and his assistant was apparently able to convince the Palestinian terrorists to drop the threat. The correspondent remained in Beirut throughout the fall of 1975, a period in which Time’s office was shelled and the civilian slaughter in the city was, in Marmon’s words, “the worst I have ever seen.” On New Year’s Eve, Abu Said came to see him. He had word that PLO gunmen had been looking for Marmon the night before but had gone to the wrong apartment. This time the message got through. Marmon took the first flight out, and never again returned to an area under the control of the PLO. Even today he does not know how his name got on the enemies’ list.
Another member of the American press who ran afoul of the PLO in 1975 was Philip Caputo, a former Marine officer in Vietnam and future novelist, then the Beirut correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. He had already had a run-in with the PLO two years earlier, when he had been detained in Beirut on charges of “spying” and held for five days. Upon his release, he had written an emotional account of his ordeal for the Tribune. As often happens with the PLO, Caputo had received profuse apologies from the organization when, after scaring him out of his wits, it finally released him.
But Caputo’s problems with Beirut’s armed thugs were not over. On October 26, 1975, he filed a report to the Tribune, and left his office. He had not gone far when he was stopped at a checkpoint by “leftist militiamen.” As Caputo later described the incident:
They checked my credentials and told me to walk down to Hamra Street, a distance of about one hundred yards. I had gone about thirty yards when one of them fired a shot at me. I shouted at them to stop, but then another joined in and fired a burst of bullets, one of which literally went through my hair. I ran zigzagging and rolling low, and was grazed across the back and arms by flying bullets. Then one hit me in the right ankle and just as I reached the corner another one got me in the left ankle. I crawled down Hamra Street toward the Central Bank and a householder took me in.
Caputo was taken in an armored car to a nearby hospital; later, he was evacuated to the United States. When the Chicago Tribune reopened its Middle East office, it was in Tel Aviv.
By the summer of 1976 Beirut had become, in the words of James Markham of the New York Times, “the most savage and uncivilized place on earth.” Tens of thousands of civilians had already died in the fighting and the Muslim-PLO alliance seemed to be winning. It was then, at the ostensible invitation of the hapless and almost fictional Lebanese government, that Syrian forces entered the country and began to intervene on the side of the Christians. The press corps now had a new threat to contend with.
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III
Syria’s first move against the press in Beirut was directed at the local Lebanese media, and it was carried out with the cooperation of the Lebanese government. On January 4, 1977, the government imposed a state of national emergency, and with it, new and, for Lebanon, unprecedented curbs on freedom of expression, including a ban on the right of assembly and the institution of press censorship. Syrian forces also shut down seven local newspapers, including the relatively independent al-Nahar, through the simple expedient of seizing printing presses and locking employees out of the buildings.
By 1978, the Syrian occupation was a fact of life, and Beirut was totally divided between Christian East and Muslim West. Syria abandoned its alliance with the Christian forces; Damascus was now cooperating with the PLO, and together they controlled West Beirut. Armed “fighters,” some of them not more than fifteen or sixteen years old, roamed the streets, brandishing Russian-made assault rifles. Almost every journalist stationed in Beirut had had a close scrape or two.
During these years, Syrian pressure on the local press waxed and waned as circumstances dictated, but in 1980 it hit a high point with the murders of Salim Lawzi and Riad Taha. Lawzi, a Sunni Muslim who during the 1970’s had built a reputation as a moderate and thoughtful journalist, as well as a fierce antagonist of the Assad regime, had moved his journal al-Hawadess (Events) to London in 1977. In Lebanon for his mother’s funeral in February 1980, Lawzi was kidnapped. On March 6, 1980, the New York Times reported:
The tortured body of one of the Arab world’s most influential editors, who had been kidnapped by unidentified gunmen ten days ago, was discovered by a shepherd in a wooded area near here last night. . . .
Mr. Lawzi had been critical of the leadership of a number of Arab countries, notably Syria and Libya. . . .
The Times article cautiously refrained from speculating on the identity of the “gunmen” who had abducted and mutilated Lawzi, but at the bar of the Commodore Hotel, the foreign-correspondents’ gathering place in Beirut, various theories, most of them related to the dread hit teams of Rifaat Assad, were propounded. Needless to say, the murderers were never caught.
On July 23, 1980, Beirut was shocked once again to learn of the assassination of Riad Taha, the long-time president of the Lebanese publishers association. Despite the fact that the assassination had taken place in broad daylight, the police were, as usual, unable to find any clue regarding the identity of the murderers, who were rumored to be terrorists working for the Iraqis or the Syrians. That same day Charles Rizk, the Christian head of Lebanese television, resigned his post after having been kidnapped and held for four hours by “unidentified gunmen,” and the publisher and editor of al-Nahar fled Beirut. The terror had become an epidemic.
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With the Lebanese press largely frightened into silence, the Syrians turned their attention to the remaining independent journalists in West Beirut—the foreign press corps. Syria itself was in the throes of a brutal crackdown on dissent; thousands of Syrian civilians were being arrested and hundreds murdered. The regime in Damascus totally controlled the news within the country, and by carefully monitoring the entry of foreign correspondents, it tried to keep word of its bloody reprisals from reaching the outside world. But Beirut, as a listening post next to Syria, was a threat. Enemies of the Assad regime smuggled out information to foreign reporters, who in turn published it and even beamed it back to Syria via the BBC or Voice of America.
In the spring of 1980, the unrest in Syria was reaching a peak. Most correspondents, unable to get an eyewitness view of the fighting, were forced to rely on secondhand accounts and diplomatic leaks. Somehow Berndt Debusmann, Beirut bureau chief for Reuters, got hold of information about a near-insurrection against the Assad regime in the northern port city of Latakia, and got it published. On June 5, Debusmann and his wife were leaving a dinner party at the home of a fellow correspondent in West Beirut shortly after midnight. As they were getting into their car, another automobile with several men in it pulled up; they fired five shots with silenced pistols and then sped away. Debusmann, shot in the back, was rushed to the American University hospital. Later, he was transferred to a hospital in Cyprus and subsequently relocated by Reuters.
The attempted murder of Debusmann did not come as a complete surprise. After his reports on Assad’s difficulties had begun to appear, Debusmann was visited by an officer of the Lebanese security police, which under the Syrian occupation was a toothless but sometimes well-informed organization. According to the British Observer, Debusmann was warned that two armed Syrians were looking for him. This incident was followed by repeated telephone calls to the Reuters office in Beirut attempting to ascertain Debusmann’s whereabouts and on one occasion a visit to the office by a Syrian “journalist” who asked for a recent photo. Friends advised Debusmann to leave Beirut, but he refused.
Following the incident, Reuters sent out a story that stated, “There was no known reason for the shooting.” Reuters, which must have known about the repeated Syrian threats to Debusmann, chose to cover them up. But Debusmann’s colleagues in Beirut and throughout the Middle East were perfectly aware of the facts.
The party Debusmann had been attending on the night he was shot was held at the home of BBC correspondent Tim Llewelyn. It was the last one that Llewelyn ever gave there. For the BBC correspondent, who had watched the shooting of Berndt Debusmann from his upstairs balcony, would within weeks himself be forced to flee from Beirut ahead of the Syrian assassins.
The threats against Llewelyn and his backup correspondent, Jim Muir, came after they had persistently reported on internal unrest in Syria. In July 1980 a Syrian go-between informed several diplomats in Damascus that Llewelyn and Muir were going to be killed, and they passed the message along. The British embassy protested to the Syrian authorities but was told, with what the British Economist described as “laughable cynicism,” that security in Beirut was the responsibility of the Lebanese government. That was enough. Llewelyn and Muir sought refuge in Cyprus, where they waited for several weeks while the BBC reportedly tried to negotiate the terms of their return to Lebanon. It was a lost cause. Llewelyn, like Debusmann, was reassigned to East Africa. Muir remained in Nicosia. And the BBC’s new Middle East correspondent, Gordon Leach, took up residence in Cyprus. The BBC’s Beirut operation had been closed down.
The reign of terror did not end there. Later that month, Figaro correspondent Jorg M. Stocklin was, in the words of New York Times Beirut correspondent John Kifner, “suddenly pulled out [of Lebanon], and word about town was that he, too, had received a warning from the Syrians.”
Reporters in Beirut clearly recognized the organized, explicit threat posed by the Syrian government, but they found it difficult to respond directly. In the summer of 1980, a group of them held a secret meeting to discuss what might be done. They agreed, as one later wrote, that their “only protection lies in achieving maximum publicity” in order to show the Syrians that attacks on journalists would be counterproductive. They feared, however, that articles on the situation written from Beirut might lead to further harassment and violence. They decided instead to ask their home offices to print editorials and columns on the subject. Very few did so.
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IV
Ironically, Syrian violence against the press, intended to silence criticism, had another, perhaps unanticipated, effect—it made the PLO look good by comparison. From the time the Syrians arrived in the mid-70’s, most of the Commodore Hotel correspondents believed that, at least in terms of its dealings with the press, the PLO could be counted among the “good guys”—helpful, and somehow even protective. As Edward Cody of the Washington Post put it, “You do not have to fear the PLO when you write about Palestinian affairs.” Many of the Beirut veterans took as a proof of the organization’s benevolence the fact that it accepted occasional unfavorable press stories, and they contrasted this apparent sophistication with the rigid intolerance and bloody-mindedness of the Syrians.
What many of the correspondents failed to see was that the PLO’s liberality was hardly more than the willingness of a violent, powerful group to establish ground rules and then to allow the reporters to play by them. Journalists were free to write—as long as they avoided certain “sensitive” subjects. Western reporters were welcome in Beirut—provided that they were not considered “hostile” to the Palestinian revolution.
Most of the Beirut press corps never saw the PLO’s stick—they were too busy chewing on its carrot. That carrot was the permission the PLO gave them to work in the Lebanese capital and its assistance in covering its own secret, semi-underground activities. Still, in the backs of their minds, even the most obtuse journalists knew that the stick existed.
In May 1979 Robert Pfeffer of Stern magazine was murdered in Beirut. The thirty-eight-year-old German was working on a book about contacts between the PLO and the Baader-Meinhof gang and other European terrorist groups. As usual in Beirut, the murderers escaped, and there was no serious investigation. But most of Pfeffer’s colleagues guessed the identity of the murderers., As Doyle McManus, now of the Los Angeles Times, was later to observe, “Obviously Bob Pfeffer got killed, or at least most of us believe he got killed, for looking into the connection with Baader-Meinhof and the PFLP.”
Following Pfeffer’s murder, the Beirut press corps stayed away from the subject of the PLO’s contacts with European terrorist organizations. As for the PLO itself, having established the limits of its tolerance, it turned back to the job of cultivating and befriending individual journalists. In the lawless atmosphere of Beirut, the organization could portray itself as the guardian of the press—presumably from the same Syrians with whom, despite periodic tensions, it was allied.
In conformity with the PLO-dependent security system, Western reporters became, in effect, accomplices to their own isolation and supervision. They clustered around the Palestinian-run Commodore, where they knew that their movements, contacts, and outgoing communications would be monitored. Some of those with separate offices in the city found that they needed local Palestinian employees in order to establish contacts and guide them through the complexities of life in Beirut. These assistants were, in many cases, subject to the discipline of the PLO; if the organization was circumspect in its dealings with most foreign reporters, it could afford to be far less so in its demands on its fellow Palestinians or Lebanese Muslims.
Even in their own homes, some journalists were “protected” by the PLO. Peter Ranke, Middle East correspondent for Springer publications, was once told by a colleague he visited in West Beirut that he was regularly watched by a PLO guard who lived in the basement of his building, ostensibly to protect stores of beer and coffee but actually to spy on the foreign residents of the apartment house. Ranke was skeptical until, as if on cue, the Palestinian guard appeared at the German journalist’s door. As Ranke watched, astonished, the PLO man looked around the apartment, asked for a cold beer, and then left.
Sometimes PLO “protection” was totally shameless. After the murder of Robert Pfeffer, the PLO put out the word that it was conducting an investigation, and it did the same after the murder in 1981 of ABC’s Sean Toolan. These investigative efforts by the suspects themselves were, apparently, taken at face value by a number of journalists in Beirut, who by that time had adopted an unquestioning belief in the PLO’s role as their benefactor.
Many in the Beirut press corps also came to feel that they had a special obligation to help the PLO make its case in the West. Vincent Schodolski, former bureau chief of the UPI in Beirut, once told an interviewer, “I think people here try to keep balance, but you’re here and have daily access to the Palestinians. You see the people, you see the refugee camps, you’re bound to tell the story as you see it.” Others were deeply committed to the Third World view of national liberation and wished the Palestinian revolution well. (This group included both serious ideologues and thrill-seeking groupies.) The sympathetic view of the PLO also colored the press corps’ relations with Lebanon’s Christians. Despite the fact that half the Lebanese story was on the Christian side, few foreign reporters visited that sector with any frequency, and virtually none lived there.
Some even encouraged their visiting colleagues to keep away from the Christian part of town. Former ABC 20/20 producer Barbara Newman, who came to Lebanon in 1980 to film part of a documentary, surprised and dismayed the ABC bureau in Beirut by planning to stay at the Christian-run Alexandre Hotel and not at the Commodore. The reaction caused the documentary’s correspondent, Geraldo Rivera, to book rooms in both places and to ferry from one side to the other. Rivera was told by the late Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel in 1980 that he was the first American television reporter to stay overnight in East Beirut.
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Few professions are as vulnerable to the herd instinct as journalism, and once attitudes in the Beirut press corps were struck, they stuck: the PLO did not have much need to practice intimidation on the regulars in the Commodore Hotel. When it came to visiting journalists, however, the PLO had less reason to pull its punches. Correspondents who worked outside of Lebanon, and who had not been exposed to the influences that shaped the perceptions of their Beirut-based colleagues, could not be relied upon to respect, or even be aware of, PLO sensibilities. Many of these journalists were subjected to PLO threats or were simply not allowed to come to West Beirut at all.
Hans Benedict, one of the most widely respected European journalists, found himself a victim of “preventive intimidation” when he became diplomatic correspondent in the Middle East for Austrian national television in 1979. He applied to the Lebanese embassy in Vienna for a visa, and was astounded to learn that the answer was no. Even more amazing, a senior Lebanese diplomat told him that the decision had been made not by the Lebanese government but by the PLO.
Benedict had become unpopular with the PLO when he interviewed its Austrian representative, Gazi Hussein, in the fall of 1978 and asked about the Coastal Road massacre of Israeli civilians near Tel Aviv the previous spring. Hussein answered forthrightly that terrorism against Israelis, including women and children, was a legitimate tool of the Palestinian revolution and that the PLO would continue to use it as it saw fit. When the interview was aired, it caused a stir in Austria and was a major public-relations setback for the Palestinians.
The Lebanese diplomat who returned Benedict’s visa application was apologetic. He told Benedict that applications for Lebanese press visas had to be authorized by PLO headquarters and “if we ask them for a visa for you, they’ll be on the lookout for you at the airport.” Benedict, who first started covering the Arab world in 1946 and served as a correspondent for AP behind the Iron Curtain for more than fifteen years, knew a death threat when he heard one. He did not get to the Lebanese capital until the PLO departed in August 1982.
Perhaps the most blatant threat was directed against Geraldo Rivera. In early 1981, after meeting with Israeli experts on the PLO and interviewing PLO prisoners in an Israeli prison in the course of preparing a documentary on terrorism, Rivera flew to Beirut via Rome. The next day, he and Barbara Newman were taken by ABC’s Beirut correspondent, Jerry King, to a meeting with PLO spokesman Mahmud Labadi. Several armed men were in the room when the three arrived, and they remained there throughout the meeting. “I’ve been in very tight scrapes in my professional life,” Rivera later recalled, “and those red flags don’t get hoisted very often, but I definitely had a feeling that there were warnings implicit in almost everything Labadi said, in his entire attitude.”
During the time Rivera worked on the documentary in Beirut, the warnings remained implicit. But when it was broadcast, the PLO’s reaction crystallized. Rivera’s colleagues in Beirut passed along the message: “Don’t come back to West Beirut, or else. . . .” He also received telephoned death threats at his home in California. During the 1982 war, Rivera, like hundreds of other Western newsmen, found himself again in the Lebanese capital, in this case to do an exclusive interview with Lebanon’s president-elect Bashir Gemayel. He checked with contacts and colleagues on the west side of the city to make sure that he could cross the border and do some reporting there. “I was told point-blank, and by more than one source, never to come back to West Beirut, to Palestinian territory. I was told that I had a death warrant out for me.”
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The spring of 1981 was a time of considerable tension in Lebanon. Israel and Syria were facing off over the introduction of Syria’s Soviet-made SAM missile system in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa region, and Israel was pursuing a policy of preemptive strikes against PLO concentrations in the southwestern coastal area. The Beirut press corps was overworked and tense, expecting a major Israeli assault. One day late in May, three American correspondents, Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post and William Farrell and John Kifner of the New York Times, decided to take some time off and have what Farrell later described as “a civilized dinner party, a dinner-jackets-in-the-jungle kind of evening” at Kifner’s home in West Beirut. At about 11:30 their dinner party was interrupted by a telephone call. Someone informed Kifner that the long-anticipated Israeli raid on PLO bases in the Damur area was taking place.
Despite the late hour, the three decided to investigate. Their first stop was the Commodore Hotel. The consensus at the bar was that if there was a raid, it was probably a limited one; but Randal, Kifner, and Farrell decided that the tip was worth checking. Julian Nundy of Newsweek and William Foley, an Associated Press photographer, asked to come along and the five piled into Kifner’s car and headed toward Damur, about fifteen miles south of Beirut. They never got there. At the outskirts of the city they were cut off and pulled over by a Red Crescent ambulance belonging to the PLO’s first-aid and medical organization. Gunmen armed with assault rifles pulled them out of the car and demanded to see their identification papers, which they produced.
The armed men, members of the PFLP-GC faction of the PLO, examined the reporters’ credentials, and decided to haul them in. Farrell later recalled:
They booked us, police style, put our belongings in envelopes and took us to an area with narrow, high-ceilinged, almost coffinlike cells, about six-and-a-half feet long by three-and-a-half wide. They had steel doors with a little hatch you couldn’t see out of at all. There were no toilets, just a foam rubber pallet on the floor. It was hot as hell inside.
After about two hours, the reporters were stripped and searched. Later they were taken, one at a time, into an interrogation room, where they were questioned by two men. Not everyone got the same treatment. At least two feared that their lives were in danger. So, apparently, did their colleagues in town, who engaged in a frantic search throughout Beirut for the five journalists, contacting, in the process, senior officials of the PLO (a fact which lends weight to the supposition that the PFLP men were aware of the journalists’ identities early on).
At about five P.M., the five were reunited for the first time in fifteen hours. They were taken to another building, where they received profuse apologies, and were then released. When they were freed, Kifner raised the question of whether the story should be reported. Time later quoted one of the journalists as saying: “We made an informal agreement that we would not write about the incident. The stories would have just embarrassed everyone involved.” Especially the PLO.
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V
The Story of Palestinian-Syrian-controlled West Beirut between 1975 and 1982 is thus one of terror against journalists—Syrian terror wielded like a baseball bat, with crude, broad strokes; PLO terror, a scalpel used with discrimination and subtlety. Some resisted and paid with their lives, their careers, or their access to Beirut; others succumbed, wholly or partially, to the threats, the pressure, and the inducements to “get on the team.” And in the case of the PLO, many journalists did not need much encouragement.
Much of what went on in Lebanon and neighboring Syria was only partially reported or rarely mentioned—the excesses of the Assad regime, the PLO mini-state in South Lebanon, Palestinian links with international terrorists, and so forth. As in all cases of self-censorship, it is impossible to know what was being covered up; and in the case of Beirut, the problem was compounded by an even greater omission—the failure or outright refusal of Western news organizations to tell the truth about pressures and threats directed against their journalists in the Arab world.
This refusal was at variance with normal journalistic practice; more importantly, it meant the public could not properly evaluate the credibility of news reports from much of the Middle East. Readers and viewers who were unaware of the atmosphere of intimidation and violence that existed in Beirut, for example, could not know that much of the news from there between 1975 and 1982 was filtered through a veil of fear, caution, and self-censorship; nor did they have any idea that there was news they were not getting at all, because some reporters had been driven out of the Lebanese capital. Censorship in Lebanon was accomplished by terror, exclusion, and expulsion—yet, remarkably, most news organizations acted as if the public had no right to know that it was going on.
There were, of course, exceptions. The PLO’s abduction of Philip Caputo in 1975 was given considerable publicity by his paper, the Chicago Tribune. Newsweek, in the summer of 1976, printed a page-long story on the violence against foreign correspondents, including two of its own reporters, in Beirut. The imposition of Syrian-inspired censorship in early 1977 elicited a few critical articles in the Western press. But as the civil war dragged on and the Beirut-based correspondents got used to the situation and made their accommodations with it, less and less was mentioned about the pressure they faced. From mid-1976 until the summer of 1980, a four-year period in which a number of journalists were killed or harassed and the Lebanese press was effectively muted, almost nothing was reported by the American media about the situation in Lebanon. The murder of Robert Pfeffer, a politically motivated assassination, was barely noticed; the abduction and killing of Salim Lawzi, which shocked and frightened the Beirut press corps, was briefly noted in a few major newspapers and ignored by almost everyone else.
News organizations whose own personnel were under attack often tried to play down the incidents. Time, for example, sought to keep the plight of William Marmon a secret. When the two BBC correspondents Tim Llewelyn and Jim Muir were driven out of Beirut in 1980, the BBC at first said nothing, in the apparent hope that it could negotiate their return. When that failed, it made a belated and terse announcement about the situation and continued to “report” on Lebanon from Nicosia, Cyprus. The BBC’s public, which included not only Great Britain but millions around the world who depend on the World Service for independent and comprehensive news was effectively shut out of the Lebanese capital. Most had no idea that this was so.
Reuters, the world’s largest news agency, was no more forthright when Berndt Debusmann was shot. It reported the incident but made no mention of the previous Syrian threats to the correspondent, and compounded omission with distortion by saying that “there was no known reason for the shooting.”
Only a handful of newspapers addressed the issue editorially, among them the British Economist and the Guardian. The Guardian noted: “Although the BBC and Reuters were well aware that Syria was responsible for the intimidation of their reporters, neither organization felt able to publicize the fact.” The Economist was blunter:
The Syrians have thus forced the representatives of the BBC and Reuters out of Lebanon by terrorism and have got away with it without even being named. Foreign and local pressmen in Beirut were all in favor of a concerted exposure of the Syrian role, but when the two leading British news organizations declined to name any names, the protest collapsed.
Throughout the next two years, this pattern continued. The 1981 murder of ABC correspondent Sean Toolan was given a single 30-second mention on his own network, while the other two networks ignored it completely. The New York Times and the Washington Post reported it briefly, and only the Los Angeles Times gave the murder serious attention. Other outrages against newsmen in Beirut, including the death threats that resulted in the December 1980 flight from the city of CBS’s Larry Pintak, threats against Neal Temko of the Christian Science Monitor, and, preeminently, the seizure of the five American correspondents in the summer of 1981, went mostly unreported.
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Although the primary victim of this silence was the public, whose right to know was being subverted by a combination of Arab terror and journalistic acquiescence or indifference, there were serious consequences for Israel as well, which was engaged in a struggle with both the PLO and Syria. If the press in Beirut was not reporting fully out of a fear of Arab reprisal, then Israel was being forced to fight the war for Western public opinion with one hand tied behind its back. People who knew little about the PLO’s operations in southern Lebanon or its connections with international terrorist groups or about the internal situation in Syria often found Israel’s concern about these matters “paranoid” and its attempts to deal with them overreactive. Moreover, when Israel tried to point out what was happening in Lebanon or Syria, its arguments had little credibility—after all, there were plenty of American and European reporters in Beirut who would surely be aware of a Palestinian “mini-state” in south Lebanon if one existed, or of large-scale massacres in Syria.
The notion that the intimidation of Western journalists in Beirut was working—to Israel’s detriment—began to sink in after the murder of Salim Lawzi in early 1980. As the director of Israel’s government press office, I was then in close contact with many of the foreign correspondents in the Middle East. Some of them who visited Jerusalem told hair-raising stories about personal experiences they had had; many admitted that there were now subjects that they would not report. For almost two years I waited for an article on how the press was being abused in Lebanon. Finally, in February 1982, I decided to raise the issue myself.
The immediate stimulus was an ABC documentary about the West Bank entitled “Under the Israeli Thumb.” The program was exceptional in the harsh accusations it made about the occupation of the West Bank and in its refusal to present any Israeli point of view. I knew that ABC had recently had difficulties with the PLO in Beirut, and I thought there might be some connection. I called David K. Shipler of the New York Times, who was widely admired for his ability to understand and convey the feelings of all sides in the complex Arab-Israeli equation, and suggested an on-the-record discussion of the issue.
My interview with Shipler, which lasted about an hour, was printed two days later in the International Herald Tribune. The Paris-based Tribune, widely distributed in Israel, is published as a cooperative venture of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Shipler had done his usual accurate job. He began by setting forth my central contention—that terrorism was being used against correspondents in Beirut—along with my qualification that it was very often the news organizations, concerned for the safety of their personnel, who decided on self-censorship. The interview then went on to my suspicion that ABC had been trying to ingratiate itself with the PLO by doing puff pieces on the organization. I also mentioned the shooting of Berndt Debusmann of Reuters and the warning to BBC reporter Tim Llewelyn, and noted that the BBC had tried to cover up the latter incident and that it still had no regular correspondent in the Lebanese capital. I also raised, without mentioning any names, the hitherto unreported 1981 abduction of the five American reporters, including those from the New York Times and the Washington Post, who were seized and held by the PFLP-GC.
Although the interview appeared promptly in the International Herald Tribune, it was not published in the Times until February 14, and then only after the two paragraphs about the Times correspondents and the apparent decision to keep their detention a secret had been cut.
The Times had thus confirmed my original charge—that news organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere were committing acts of self-censorship to protect their own interests. I asked William Claiborne, the Jerusalem-based correspondent of the Washington Post, if the Post might be interested in this story, but after checking with his home office he said no. Norman Kempster of the Los Angeles Times thought it was a good story, but his foreign editor evidently did not. I had better luck with Tim McNulty of the Chicago Tribune. Three days later, that newspaper became one of the first to report on the Times’s censorship of my charges that it had committed self-censorship.
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The Israeli media also seized on the story. The Jerusalem Post carried a front-page article, several Hebrew papers gave it headline treatment, and the national radio led its morning news bulletins with the incident. Now, I was certain, the wire services, AP and UPI, would pick it up and send it out to their thousands of clients. But neither would touch it. They first mentioned the affair ten days later, after both Time and Newsweek had devoted full pages to it in their “Media” sections—one of the rare occasions when the wire services have been scooped by weekly magazines.
On February 18, four days after the sanitized interview appeared, the Times published a follow-up entitled “Official in Israel Assails the Times.” It now reported my criticism of the paper for deleting the story of the detention of the two Times correspondents, and then went on:
Craig H. Whitney, deputy foreign editor of the New York Times, said . . . “It is the policy of the Times to report difficulties encountered by its correspondents in the course of reporting only if the difficulties themselves become news and we did not consider this such a case, then or now.”
This was apparently a new policy. A recent, prominently displayed, article by Youssef M. Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American who then worked for the Times, had described his crossing from Jordan into Israel by way of the Allenby Bridge. He had arrived at the bridge unannounced, carrying tapes of conversations with leaders in the PLO and correspondence among various PLO officials. These aroused the interest of Israeli security officials. Ibrahim was questioned for about five hours and then allowed to drive to Jerusalem. Some of his notebooks were examined and returned a day later. In the shuffle, a pair of pants got lost. Ibrahim was understandably agitated, especially about the five-hour delay, and proved it by writing a tough piece which the Times published. But he had never been locked up in a cell or threatened by gunmen, nor was he held overnight. Was his experience more newsworthy than that of his colleagues in Beirut?
Then there was the article by Martin Tolchin, the Times White House correspondent, about his experience trying to get permission to cross from Jordan into Israel via the Allenby Bridge. In this article, Tolchin described his feeling that he and his family had been treated rudely by the Jordanian bureaucracy because they were Jewish. Certainly Tolchin’s experience was unpleasant and aggravating, but it was a far cry from twenty hours in a PLO slammer. If the Times had a policy of not printing stories about difficulties encountered by its journalists “unless the difficulties themselves became news,” it was a rather selective one.
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On February 22, twelve days after the interview had first run in the Herald Tribune, the Times made an effort to rectify matters with a piece entitled “Reporter’s Notebook: Fear Is Part of the Job in Beirut.” In it, John Kifner described the conditions under which he and his colleagues were forced to work and the possible implications for the reader who expected full and comprehensive information. In Beirut, Kifner admitted, “a journalist must often weigh when, how, and even whether to record a story.” The piece was somewhat bland and defensive in tone, but at least it confirmed the existence of serious harassment of journalists in Beirut.
Although Kifner did not say so in his article, he was very nervous about having had to write it. He made an unusual request—that the Times run the article in New York but keep it out of the International Herald Tribune, the reverse of what had happened with my interview with Shipler. The Times, once again bowing to the fear of Arab violence, agreed. But by mistake the Tribune did publish the article. At this point, Kifner decided it would be a good time to go elsewhere for a few days. His hurried departure from Beirut might have gone unnoticed but for an article by the London Observer’s news service which stated that Kifner had left because of threats he received after his February 22 story was published in the Tribune. The Observer article was written by its Beirut correspondent, Colin Smith, who did not ask to be anonymous. In an effort to protect him, however, the Observer left his name off the story and bylined it only “A Special Correspondent,” a designation that greatly concerned Smith’s stringer in Beirut who feared that he, and not Smith, might be held accountable by local gunmen.
If the New York Times finally dealt with the story, other American news organizations were less forthcoming. Newsweek, for example, carried an article, “Who’s Afraid of the PLO?,” that was written in part by Julian Nundy, who had been one of the five detainees. The article, which did not explain why Nundy had failed at the time to report on his detention, sought to minimize the whole event by noting that the correspondents had been held and then released “with profuse apologies.” Missing from the Newsweek account (but included in Time’s article on the incident that same week) was the fact that the reporters had been abducted at gunpoint, and that at least two of them had felt their lives were in danger.
Throughout the controversy, only one of the American news organizations whose reporters had been involved in the PLO abduction—the Washington Post—managed to keep the whole matter blacked out of its news pages. Finally, several weeks after the incident, Martin Peretz of the New Republic exposed the Post’s stonewalling. In “A Journalistic Cover-Up,” Peretz noted that “the Washington Post hasn’t given the story an inch” and revealed, for the first time, the names of the abducted reporters.
The Post’s vehicle for finally addressing the controversy was an op-ed article by the foreign editor, Jim Hoagland. Writing on March 4, Hoagland conceded that there was “something” in my charges—at least with regard to the Syrians. As for the PLO, however, he described it as a benevolent force which “tacitly provides protection for the American embassy and [has] as often pulled correspondents out of scrapes as imperiled them.” Regarding the failure of Jonathan Randal to report on his detention by the PLO, Hoagland admitted that “in retrospect Randal was probably a bit too phlegmatic in dismissing [it] so lightly,” but he also cited Post correspondent Edward Cody on the exquisite symmetry of the threat to journalists. “You know that you can get picked up by Palestinian kids with guns anytime you do your job. Or you know you may be bombed by Israeli jets. That does not mean you write any differently.” No doubt even Cody had not intended to say that Israel was carrying out air raids on journalists in order to intimidate them. Yet Hoagland made it seem that Israeli jets posed the same threat to press freedoms as the “Palestinian kids” who had murdered Robert Pfeffer, threatened Geraldo Rivera and Hans Benedict, and driven Milan Kubic and William Marmon out at gunpoint.
Worst by far, however, was Hoagland’s version of how the entire incident of the five reporters’ abduction had first come to light. He wrote:
Chafets said that one of the reporters, William Farrell, formerly Jerusalem correspondent for the Times and now based in Cairo, had subsequently told him the five were “held for a number of hours and threatened and frightened.”
I had, in fact, never mentioned Farrell’s name at all, never mentioned any names, and certainly had not said what my source for the story was. Hoagland, by publicly naming Farrell, who was still stationed in the Middle East, as a source of information for an Israeli official, was making a charge that could get the Times reporter into serious trouble in the Arab world. Hoagland had never contacted me to check this point. I later learned he had never bothered to contact Farrell, either, who was badly frightened and upset by Hoagland’s article.
I immediately wrote a letter to the Post setting the record straight and challenging Hoagland to produce evidence that Farrell had told me of the incident. It took six weeks and three transoceanic telephone calls for the letter to be published, along with the following note:
Mr. Hoagland replies: “In July 1981, Mr. Chafets told William Claiborne, the Washington Post’s Jerusalem correspondent, that Mr. Farrell had recounted the Damur incident to him that month, and Mr. Chafets confirmed that fact in an on-the-record interview with Mr. Claiborne on February 15, 1982.”
This was a plain lie. There had been no interview, just a private conversation in which I had tried to interest the Post in the self-censorship issue and in which Farrell’s name had not figured at all. When I asked Claiborne about this, he readily agreed the facts were as I had stated them, and confessed he did not know what the Post was up to.
On April 28, the Post ran a “correction,” signed by William Claiborne:
On April 17, the Post published a letter from Ze’ev Chafets denying that he had publicly said that William Farrell of the New York Times had told him of the detention of five Western reporters in Beirut in 1981 by Palestinian guerrillas. Through an error it was stated in a response that my conversation with Mr. Chafets on this point on February 15 was on the record. Mr. Chafets did not address that point on the record during the February 15 conversation, and continues to refuse to say for the record if he had discussed the incident with Mr. Farrell.
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The Post’s behavior in this matter sheds some light, I think, on its recurrent problems with accuracy. The formula is one part carelessness, one part arrogance, with a big touch of bias thrown in. The bias in this case may have to do with the fact that the good name of the PLO, whose cause the Post, under Hoagland’s guidance, had adopted, was being called into question.
For as a cursory look through the Post’s back issues reveals, the paper often publicizes the difficulties its reporters encounter in the line of duty, even when these difficulties are considerably less serious than abduction at gunpoint. There was, for example, “Rumanian Agents Blunder After Visiting Newsman,” by correspondent Michael Dobbs, a seventeen-paragraph article about being followed on a visit to Rumania; or “Interrogation—Post Reporter Runs Afoul of Bolivian Army,” twenty-two paragraphs devoted to Charles A. Krause’s arrest and interrogation by “five army intelligence agents, one of them armed with a submachine gun.” The whole episode lasted, according to Krause, nearly three hours, and he was never threatened physically. Other stories in recent years included a report that Indonesian authorities had refused to renew the visa of a Post stringer; a long article on reporters’ working conditions in Poland; and a piece stating that the Post correspondent in Moscow had been called in by Soviet authorities for a fifteen-minute meeting in which he was “rebuked” for some allegedly “slanderous assertions” about the USSR. Only when the “authorities” in question were ones the Post had been touting as moderate and responsible did the incident cease to be newsworthy.
Nor has the Post correspondent Jonathan Randal always been so “phlegmatic” when he has come under attack—even in Beirut. In 1975 he published a stirring first-person article entitled “Morning in Rebel Hands,” recounting how, just after dawn, armed men had burst into his room, arrested him, and taken him and some of his belongings into headquarters. His detention that time lasted not twenty hours but only a couple. Randal was not locked up, merely questioned and then taken to the home of his old friend, the Algerian ambassador. Yet the grippingly written article—in which the reader learned, among other things, that Randal had worked in Vietnam, that Randal had worked in Algeria, that Randal spoke French, that Randal was cool in tight situations, and that Randal slept in boxer shorts and a black T-shirt—was presumably intended to convey a sense of the perilous situation in Beirut. If so, it is hard to see why what happened to Randal in May 1981 should have been any less revealing of the climate or less interesting to Post readers. But that, perhaps, is the point. In October 1975 Randal’s abductors were “members of two Lebanese Communist outfits,” not members of the PLO.
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VI
Taken together, the incidents recounted here add up to a depressing chapter in Western journalism. The essence of journalistic credibility is candor, both in what is reported and about what restrictions and constraints limit or influence that reporting. But at one time or another over a period of some seven years, Reuters, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, the Associated Press—to name only some—played an active part in hiding from the public many of the facts about what was happening in Lebanon in general and, in particular, the way in which their newsmen were being subjected to intimidation and violence there. By acquiescing in this state of affairs through silence, cover-up, and other accommodations, some of which are known, others of which we can only speculate about, the Western news organizations betrayed their readers, their traditions, and their own standards.
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