Buying the Night Flight (35 page)

He was also unusually fair-minded about women. When I saw him in 1979, I had just observed the strikingly lovely National Day celebrations. Among many things I was impressed with the manner in which the littler girls had taken part, faces uncovered, in the dances and in some restrained exercises in the dignified public extravaganzas in the stadium.

"There was only one thing, your Majesty," I said, referring to the races. "The little boys ran. The little girls didn't run."

He thought for a moment. Then he smiled and said to one of his British advisers, "She is right. Take a note. Next year ... the girls will run."

***

But the most difficult interview of all to arrange was one that occurred in the summer of 1973 -- this time, with Libya's mercurial, eccentric dictator, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Again, as it happened, a friend in Cairo played the intermediary. "You should interview Qaddafi," he said. I threw up my hands.

Interview Qaddafi? First of all there was the little fact that the Libyans had passed a law by which Americans had to have all the data in their passports written into the passport in Arabic. What this law successfully accomplished was to keep Americans out of Libya since that legally constituted defacing your passport, and would cause you to lose it. Second, Qaddafi didn't want to see any journalists at all, and particularly not American ones.

"Why don't you send me?" the Egyptian said finally, as we sat in his pleasant garden in Cairo. "It won't cost you any more than if you go on an exploratory trip, and I have the contacts there -- I can find out for you .... "

I thought it over for about two minutes and told him to go ahead. If it worked, I would put it on my expense account openly. If it did not work, it would be there but piecemeal. I never cheated the paper, but in cases like this I did what had to be done.

I understood fully that he had his own reasons for wanting to go to Libya, perhaps a Libyan lover he wanted to see or some bit of mysterious political business he wanted to attend to. But you soon learn in this business that unless there is something illegal or unethical or something that impinges upon your work, you are better off not asking. Amazingly, the plan worked! He came back and told me (1) that Qaddafi would give me the interview, (2) that they had invited me as a "state guest," which meant not that they were paying for me but that this way they could forget the writing in the passport. My friend then left Cairo, and it took me a full week to convince the Libyan ambassador that I was indeed their "state guest."

But my real problems began only once I was in Tripoli, that hot, blindingly white city on the sea. I reported immediately to the Ministry of Information, only to discover that they were in the midst of Qaddafi's "cultural revolution" and that nobody -- nobody -- was in the offices. Everybody was "out with the people," which could mean at home or on the beach or any number of other curious things.

A charming and beautiful Swedish correspondent, Birgitta Edlund, and I began working together, dismaying our male colleagues because they just hated to see that not only could women be good friends but that professional women could even work together in such fun and harmony. One day we decided to go direct to the top and assault the Revolutionary Command Council, where Qaddafi was surely hiding from his blasted "cultural revolution." So we walked boldly up to the gate, explained who we were, and began to try to talk most convincingly of having to get in....

To our surprise they were just delighted to see us. They could not have been more gracious or courteous; they ushered us in! They were showing us around when, as we reached the fourth floor, we said we thought we should see Colonel Qaddafi. The men looked at one another in bewilderment. "But Colonel Qaddafi is not here," one finally said. "This is the tobacco company."

When we finally did find the Command Council, we managed to get Qaddafi's office on the phone at the gate. I was watching Birgitta talking to them in French when suddenly a look of utter incredulity crept over her.

"That was the French television crew," she said as she hung up, dazed. "They are sitting in Colonel Qaddafi's office waiting for him!"

Finally our driver got on the phone in Arabic and told us after ward that, no, they wouldn't see us. As we drove away, I thought to ask him what he had told Qaddafi's office.

"That two foreign ladies wanted to see him," he answered calmly.

"Two foreign ladies!" Birgitta and I exploded in unison. "God damn it, we are not ladies! ... "

Such was life in Libya in the good old days when Qaddafi was just a crazy young colonel and before he became the scourge of the Western world. Every day was rather mad, but wonderful. There was a Swiss journalist who ventured out of the city one day to visit an agricultural center, only to be "captured" by Libyans in the Bengasi airport as a "spy." (Having passed on from the "cultural revolution," Libya was then in the throes of one of its many "spy crazes.")

When the Swiss called me from the Tripoli airport after his release to tell me in mild hysteria what had happened, he said with a little cry of hurt, "And -- me, the head of the Swiss-Libyan friend ship society!"

Birgitta and I were the only ones who finally did see Qaddafi, for the men correspondents fell off day after day. We did it through an odd ploy. Knowing Arabs as both of us did--and understanding their deep and real sense of honor--we somehow spontaneously hit upon a successful tactic. We kept telling the men close to Qaddafi that they had "given their word" to us that we would see him, as indeed they had, and that we had believed them because "an Arab never breaks his word."

That Saturday night, at midnight, at the last possible moment, Birgitta and I were ushered into the presence of the "crazy" young colonel. Birgitta for the last two weeks had worn tight jeans and a blouse open almost to her waist, as we tooled around Tripoli on our madcap jaunts. Now she wore a flowing over-blouse and loose pants. Trying to be respectful, I had for two weeks worn what I called my "Saudi dress." It was a dark cotton dress, with a long full skirt, a high neck and three-quarter sleeves; it was the kind of thing to wear not to offend the Saudi's sensibilities, and it was so ugly that not even the European men in the hotel dining room looked at me.

But Qaddafi of course did not know this. He did not know what a gorgeous spectacle Birgitta had made of herself for two weeks -- or how modest I had been to all pure Islamic eyes around me. He only saw us now. He looked at me disapprovingly, then looked at her and said, "Now
that's
the way I like to see a woman dressed!"

I would like to say that I found Qaddafi interesting, but in truth I did not. I would like to say I found him handsome, but in truth I did not. His pictures flatter him. Actually his forehead is unusually broad and his eyes unusually deep set -- which gives him an oddly asymmetrical look. His eyes were the eyes of the Baptist preachers of my youth who did not believe in going to the movies or to dances or (presumably) to motels, even with Baptist boys. They were tight, fanatic eyes.

He had just nationalized some oil firms and we got the exclusive story that he was going to nationalize more. But the only interesting thing came, again, when I could think of no more questions and asked him another "nothing" question. "How do you see Libya's place in the world?"

His tight eyes tightened still more, until they were virtually cold slits. "We are in a jungle surrounded by howling wolves," he whispered heavily.

"Howling wolves?" I repeated, startled. "Do you mean the European countries?"

"No," he said, "I mean the Arab countries."

This was long before he broke with Sadat and other Arab leaders, so it was a telling emotional revelation.

The next time I saw him, at an Arab-American dialogue conference in the fall of 1978 in Tripoli, he came before the group dressed in a tailored Italianate jacket and ascot, and introduced himself by saying, "Now you are hearing it from Qaddafi, the madman, Qaddafi, the crazy man.... "

Everybody wanted me to write that Qaddafi was "crazy," that he was "mad." I refused to do it. That would have made it easy: pat, clear, and woefully incomplete. Yes, Qaddafi sent terrorists out (I had no question about that and abhorred it), but he was also one of these Third World anti-imperialist leaders who could discourse at length about how the real "imperialists" were the Americans, who were frightening him with their Seventh Fleet in the Mediterranean. Once a man stopped me on the street in Chicago and asked me why, on television, I had described Qaddafi as a "young colonel who goes to the desert to meditate." He would have preferred to keep the image of a mad terrorist leader. I told him that Qaddafi was that, too, and that if we did not see these leaders in their entireties, then we missed the reality and could fatally misjudge them.

And the "reality" out there was always different, and often utterly bizarre. In the fall of 1978, after the ill-fated conference in Tripoli, Judith Miller of
The New York Times
and I flew with Najeeb Halaby, the prominent Syrian-American businessman whose daughter became Queen Noor of Jordan, from Tripoli to Amman in his small private plane. We had left Tripoli, where we had been drearily observing the "dry" laws, at about noon, determined to make Rhodes by evening and have a wonderful, fun-filled Greek evening. I fell asleep in the back of the plane and awoke a full four hours later. Since we were approaching a city, I asked brightly, "Is that Rhodes?"

Two dark-visaged faces turned to me, growling, "It is Bengasi," Najeeb spat out. Bengasi -- the city right down the coast from Tripoli? The Libyans had routed us so far south when we left Tripoli that we were almost over Chad, probably to avoid our seeing Soviet-supported military installations. (Qaddafi's Libya had indeed be come "the" friend of the Soviets in the Middle East by the late seventies.) Since it was sunset, we had no choice but to land in Bengasi, even though we were officially checked out of the country.

To our amazement and curiosity we landed at an empty airport. There was no one around, even to refuel us. More, twenty-eight Soviet MIG-23 jets sat on the airport runways, unguarded and unwatched. We could easily have blown them up, had we been of such an unworthy mind. Instead, even more amazingly, we just locked up the airplane, caught a taxi into town, checked into the main hotel, had dinner, and checked out again in the morning.

Nobody bothered us for anything -- except the landing fee, which we dutifully paid. Nobody asked to see our passports. Anyone could have landed there and done whatever he wanted and left. That, too, is this part of the world.

***

One always has to watch carefully and empathically to see a leader in three dimensions, and perhaps women do this better than men.

For instance, in October of 1978, soon after the Camp David accords and the drama of the peacemaking, I was in Jordan talking with the man who is probably my favorite Middle Eastern leader, King Hussein: always charming, gracious, intelligent, rational.

But during this interview, in sharp contrast to my others with him, I kept getting vibes of a new kind. He was deeply troubled by the peace treaty, deeply angered because he had been kept out of it, and even insulted by the various parties who nevertheless wanted and expected him to "come in." It became clear to me in our hour's talk that he wasn't going to come in at all: a dramatic revelation. But how could one tell? Again it is not through words.

The king, sitting in his handsome dark wood office, with the pictures of his legendary family, kept returning, almost melancholically, to the words "threat to the Arab identity."

"It concerns me deeply," he said at one point. "We must not lose our identity, our ties to the past--all that may be in jeopardy." At first I couldn't exactly figure out what he was talking about. Then at the end I asked another silly question. "Your Majesty," I asked, "why did you decide to grow a beard?" It was meant to be a light question, but the heaviness of his response showed me that he was deeply serious about the symbolism of it. "My grandfather told me when
I
was no longer young always to observe my inheritance," he said quietly.

I was getting a kind of shorthand that can be deciphered only if you understand the area, its history, and its culture, and then add intuition and empathy as well. I sensed that he was so disturbed by what he considered the terrible insults to the Arab history involved in all of this that he wasn't going to come into the Camp David accords.

When I saw our ambassador there, I asked him, "Am I crazy, or is there a 'new Hussein'?"

"No," he answered, "you're right. We've just become aware of it."

The "old Hussein," the favorite of the West, was now turning away, hurt and snubbed, and this was utterly crucial to the future of peace.

Gradually I learned to predict the unpredictable.

The late Chicago psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, one of the great men of our time and a respected friend, called the work of psychoanalysis "empathic immersion." By this he meant immersing yourself in the world of patients, listening to them as they are speaking of themselves and not only as you might be superficially hearing them, and then extracting truths from what you hear. As a journalist, and particularly as a woman journalist who used what are thought of as "feminine" abilities and principles, I "listened" to what people were telling me; I cared about them, and I immersed myself in their perceptions. With many male correspondents interviews become a "pissing match," as one irreverent but correct observer put it. Most men could never have "heard" what King Hussein was telling me that day, for there would have been too much competition between them.