W. Scott Malone: DILEMMAS OF WAR - THE MEDIA

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By W. Scott Malone

                                   NavySEALs.com/BlackNET

The role of the media in war has no doubt sometimes been inimical to one side or the other, but it has almost always been integral, probably since the time of Thoth, the ancient Egyptian “scribe of the gods.”

The role of journalists in war and special forces operations in recent times has created dilemmas for all involved. Journalists do not wish to been seen as the ‘tools’ of one side, and possibly put at risk their and other journalists’ lives. Recent journalism deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought this issue once again to the fore.

Even Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qa’eda terrorists understand and exploit the media for their own ends. They struck the Pentagon on its West side for one very telegenic reason—as the news cameras rolled from the West side facing East, the likely target of incoming Flight 93 was clearly visible in the background—the U.S Capitol building--just as the news cameras were all pointed at the World Trade Center when the second hi-jacked plane fire-balled into the second Tower.

Two days before 9/11, Al-Qa’eda terrorists even posed as a Belgian TV news crew to assassinate Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance leader (and key CIA operative) Ahmed Shah Massoud--with a suicide bomb hidden in their TV news camera.

It is not the ‘embedded’ journalism of last year’s war coverage that creates the real dilemma, but rather the non-embedded kind where decisions are up to the various individual participants. They are the kind of decisions you rarely hear about, either in the media or from the military/intelligence community. In US history alone, there has been Revolutionary War pamphleteering, Andrew Jackson’s Indian campaign “reports,” Mathew Brady’s Civil War tin-types, William Randolph Hearst’s “Remember the Maine” yellow journalism, World War II’s certified “US War Correspondent” arm patches, and Vietnam’s “living room’ war coverage.

These modern day “dilemma” stories are mostly told only in smoky barrooms, and usually long after the fact. Modern journalists do not work for intelligence agencies or military commanders—they work, frequently at great risk, for their readers, listeners or viewers. But it can be a very thin line sometimes. The Washington Post’s Rich Leiby told his readers one hell of story about when he arrived in Baghdad in early May last year [2003] [Rich is currently--2012--the Washington Post's newly installed Pakistan Burean Chief]. Over one hundred angry Iraqi troops had gathered in an increasingly dark mood to protest their lack of jobs and even food, against the coalition occupation leaders.

"If the American government will not solve our problems, the Iraqi Army will fight and we don't care if half of them die," Salem Yassin was shouting, “in a deafening rage [to the] desperate crowd,” as Leiby later wrote.  Rather prophetically, Leiby quoted Yassin, a balding Iraqi army colonel who was rallying the protestors in front of the looted Air Force Officers Club near the center of Baghdad: "We cannot wait for a long time. We can all organize again -- as suicide attackers or whatever."

The officers were not against the American occupation per se, Leiby wrote, but they were weary of the “humiliating indifference” their demands for back salaries and pension payments had met. They were also demanding “a city with clean drinking water and reliable electricity.”

If the situation continued, Bara Kamel, an engineer who built guided missiles for Saddam Hussein warned Leiby, "you will create terrorists."

A retired Baghdad police lieutenant named Sabih Azzawe had advised the assembled soldiers to postpone any march. “It's too dangerous for military men, even if they're out of uniform and unarmed, to swarm without warning on U.S. troops.”

Then Azzawe turned to Leiby: “Come to my neighborhood in Dora…I found missiles there."

What happened next to the Washington Post reporter soon approached the dilemma threshold when Leiby was shown the location of several hidden missile caches. The potential dilemma was whether to report the locations to the coalition (i.e. US) forces, instead of to his readers, first.

That evening, Azzawe took Leiby and a photographer through a dust-blown residential section near Baghdad to a lot behind an old Christian seminary founded by Chaldeans.

There, Leiby wrote:

“Partially hidden behind a wall near the seminary's dormitory [were] five white missiles, about 30 feet long, still on their mobile launchers. The line of missiles stretches more than a hundred yards.

“Locals identify them as armed surface-to-air missiles. They say they've seen other SAMs and Al Samoud missiles, and even more war machinery, stockpiled inside the seminary's now vacant dormitory.

“Be careful, Azzawe and his neighbors sa[id]. The whole place is mined. Several people had died or been wounded in these fields after stepping on land mines, Azzawe warn[ed].

“So we do not attempt to enter the building, which sits adjacent to a large, barren field…A man named Abu Allowi, wending his way carefully past the missiles with his young son, says, ‘They were brought in at the beginning of the war. Many of them were fired from here.’

“What appears to be mobile radar equipment is also in plain view outside a 10-foot-high concrete wall that rings the religious compound.

“Neighborhood men present a military folder they say they found here. It identifies the Iraqi forces as belonging to a tank unit in the Republican Guard's 2nd Division.”

What Leiby did not include in the article he wrote on his weapons discovery was that he had reported the deadly find directly to US military officials. Leiby had used his GPS-equipped satellite phone to precisely locate the area where the missiles were stored. He gave those GPS readings to the coalition with a warning that the seminary was either booby-trapped or mined or both.

Although Leiby did mention in a magazine article he wrote three months later, in passing and without details, that coalition officials had been notified and the missiles removed, I only learned about this Washington Post weapons enforcement action in a smoky barroom almost one year after the fact.

“When I saw Iraqi kids playing right next to those massive SAMS, I said to my photographer, ‘Holy shit. We've got to get that picture and put it in the paper tomorrow’,” Leiby recalled to me over a glasses of Merlot back in Washington.

“My new Iraqi friend, Lt. Azzawe, wanted to know whether his message would get through to US officials. ‘I'm going to send your message to a million people,’ I remember telling him. Perhaps a bit dramatic, but I really thought my story with a good photo might help wake up Washington to the fact that disbanding the Iraqi army, and not paying them, and leaving their weapons in place, probably wasn't such a great idea.”

Yet, in hindsight, Rich Leiby says he does not feel it was a real dilemma—he felt he did the right thing.

He also is not planning on going back to Iraq anytime soon.

****

I myself  have faced similar ‘dilemmas’ over an almost thirty-year career chasing bad guys for the BBC, PBS Frontline, The Washington Post, Life Magazine and others. I was almost always working as an investigative journalist, as opposed to being a regular news guy. In investigative journalism, I found, you were either way ahead or way behind whatever the current “news” was at any given time.

One dilemma arose in late November, 1986, while I was in the Philippines investigating the rampant, 20-year reign of corruption by the just deposed dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. I was NOT there to cover any of the numerous coup attempts that were then being launched almost daily. Lurking not-quite-so-quietly behind most of the coup plots was the then sitting Defense Minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, whose own defection from the Marcos regime nine months earlier had helped lead to Marcos’ overthrow.

One foggy morning out of the blue my hotel phone rang and the next thing I knew I was in a car headed to the private estate of Gen. J. Villareal, chief of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA). The general had called myself (who was doing the ‘historical’ Marcos corruption investigation) and old Philippine hand Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Examiner (who later married Sharon Stone and got bitten by an alligator) to his home in the apparent, if rather faint, hope that we might offer some form of US journalistic “protection” during the morning of the most serious coup attempt to date.

This coup was being instigated as usual by Juan ‘Johnny Ponce‘ Enrile and his special forces chief of security, Gringo Honasen. Gen. Villareal, in a quite serious tone, asked for my counsel on what he should do next. I was torn. I felt uncomfortable to be asked, and troubled to possibly be interfering in on-going events. After a very long pause, I finally gave the chief of Philippine intelligence my advice—separate Honasen and ship him to the countryside away from Enrile’s security detail. I told the general that Gringo would then only be able to plot coup attempts 12-hours a day instead of 24.

Two days later, Honasen was indeed detached from the Defense Minister’s security detail and shipped to a remote base far from Manila. He only pulled one more coup attempt, about six weeks later, this time using purloined jet fighters. It too was put down and Gringo Honasen was finally put out of the coup business.

Thus, the Scott Malone-PBS Frontline coup control counseling program proved successful, if not rather unorthodox.

****

Although not quite a modern armed conflict, I faced a similar dilemma during a 1980 island insurrection in the then ‘condominium’ of New Hebrides in the South Pacific. That time I handled it a little differently.

The exotic, paradise-green island nation was being granted independence from both Britain and France, hence, it was the last jointly-ruled ‘condominium’ territory in the world. In the weeks prior to this grand celebration in the capital of Vela, the ‘big-man’ chief of the largest island of Espiritu Santo had declared his own independence. He was backed in this endeavor by a millionaire American businessman out of Reno, Nevada. And, secretly, by the French, who did not like the British leanings of the about to be installed government of the about to be renamed country of Vanuatu.

While dignitaries from around the world arrived for gala celebrations on the capital island, Jimmy Molly Stevens, with his piercing green eyes evidencing his partial decent from a long ago Scottish sea captain, took over the Espiritu Santo airport and booted out the local authorities and declared it the new nation of Nagramel.

French paratroopers then landed and cleared the runway so a British Royal Air Force C-130 could land. The French took over the airport bar, and the Brits went into the only town and re-raised the Union Jack. Jimmy Stevens continued to rule the rest of his new, rebel island nation.

The commander of the RAF C-130, a group wing captain, whose name is now lost to me, kindly allowed us to fly with him and his crew and film all over the islands. But he was under strict orders NOT to fly the intrepid Yankees into the disputed Northern island. Finally, I managed to arrange for a rebel “speedboat,” as my local contacts kept referring to it, to pick us up from a sparsely populated island between the capital island and Espiritu Santo. It took even longer, it seemed, to persuade my recalcitrant cameraman that the rebel “speedboat” would not tip over and destroy his expensive equipment. I then organized a puddle-jumper flight to the middle island, where we camped in the jungle overnight, and were met the next morning by a 100-foot French yacht with its name painted out.

Upon our arrival, we took a bone-jarring, 2-hour jeep jungle ride up to the beautiful Bay of Espiritu Santo, from which the World War II Battle of the Coral Sea had been launched by US forces some forty years earlier. We were formally greeted by a grass-skirted rebel formation whose members were armed with bows and arrows. With our camera running, President Stevens welcomed us with a sudden and unannounced display of his previously unknown stash of refurbished Springfield infantry rifles.

In the flash of the camera’s eye, it was no longer just a “bow and arrow revolution,” as it had been labeled by some rather impertinent Aussie and Kiwi journos still sitting in a bar back in the capital.

A day or so later, the RAF group wing captain flew in to re-supply the French airport bar garrison, and he was now more than glad to fly us OUT of the rebel island. Over the roar of the four turboprop engines, as we stood on the open tail ramp of the RAF C-130 cruising at 5,000 feet, the group wing captain asked me if I would speak to the “intelligence boys.” I asked if they would tell me anything in return, and he shook his head. So I said, screw them, but that I would be honored to brief the group wing captain in their stead.

I was, after all, particularly indebted to the group wing captain for all the help he had extended to us, including getting us out there. (Again, I was not a “news” reporter per se, and my film would not go on the air for another five weeks.)

Back on the ground in the still festive capital of Vela, the RAF group wing captain and another member of his flight crew joined me for drinks at the hotel. They brought with them one of those gigantic, duty-free, gallon bottles of the Queen’s scotch. I helped them put a major dent in it, told them my version of world history since it began, along with the salient details of the previously unknown arms cache, and, as they stumbled down the hall, I heard the loud crash of what was left of the Queens’ scotch hitting the stone floor.

At a later embassy suare in Vela, an “MI6 type,” like the very ones I had earlier told the group wing captain to tell to go screw themselves, did slide up to me in a crowd and drop me one intelligence nugget—the visiting Cuban Ambassador to Japan was actually a major player in the DGI (Cuban intelligence)—a tip which I later verified and used in the program.

Jimmy Molly Stevens’ rebellion was eventually put down after I left, and Stevens’ oldest son was killed in the process.

I still have my Nagramel passport, just in case, signed by the President, Jimmy Molly Stevens.

****

Finally, there are the unintended, indirect consequences kind of media-war dilemmas. In the Fall of 1987, Life Magazine dispatched this reporter on assignment to exclusively cover the dismantling of Titan II ICBM missiles and silos outside of Little Rock, Arkansas.

These liquid-fueled, nine-megaton city killers were actually targeted during the Cuban Missile Crisis on Moscow. Although employing vacuum-tube technology, these versatile and dangerous monsters could be set for either “ground burst” or “air burst.” One silo, labeled in red graffiti as the “ghost silo,” had actually killed 54 silo construction workers back in the early sixties.

As we began photographing the various dismantling procedures, it became abundantly clear that these procedures were actually the previously classified codicils of the SALT II arms control treaty. A definite scoop. After the missiles were de-fueled and removed, the heavy steel launch rings were cut in half and photographed by the Air Force.  The internal workings of the warheads were removed and then crushed. This too was photographed. The plutonium from the thermonuclear “triggers” was actually saved to be recycled if necessary.

The 10-foot tall, aluminum and epoxy-resin nosecones were then blown up with 17-pounds of C-4 explosive. I know, because, in order to coordinate with our science photographer’s multiple remote cameras, they gave me the detonation plunger. I got to actually blow up the nuclear warhead (nosecone). (I still have the blackened tip of it.)

Finally, the silos themselves were blown up with 8,000 pounds of crystalline explosive, and the holes were left open for six months to allow then Soviet satellites to verify their destruction. The various collected Air Force photos were then quietly turned over to the Soviets.

All of the above was previously unknown publicly. It made for an excellent Life Magazine spread. The editors, in their eminent wisdom, actually employed my working title: “Swords into Plowshares.”

Only years later would I learn from official Russian sources that that independent magazine spread had significantly helped sooth still-simmering Cold War mistrust.

It was also the only time I ever won a peace prize. New York University’s Center for War, Peace and the Media presented Life Magazine with its 1987 “Olive Branch Award.”

Unintended consequences indeed.

[Scott Malone is a multiple Emmy, Dupont and Peabody award-winnirg investigative journalist who was the then editor of NavySEALs.com and its counter terrorism newsletter, BlackNET Intellligence Channel, wherein this article was first publded on 09 April 2004]