Buying the Night Flight (48 page)

Baghdad. Legendary, shabby, magnificent, cruel. One day it was the Empty Quarter swirling with dust in a windstorm; the next its mosques' gold and blue domes glimmering in the sun. A world so ruthless that its symbol has been men hanging in the square: in Nebuchadnezzar's time the king banqueted while his enemies' bodies swung silently in the wind in the corners of the vast and pagan banquet halls.

I liked Iraq, but I knew it for what it was. Yet, I immensely preferred it to Iran; the Iraqis might stab you in the back, but they won't tell you you made them do it. Also there was little problem with writing about them. You could say they were ruthless, killers, assassins, and they didn't really mind because basically people know what they are. Here, as elsewhere, they didn't like the gratuitous insult, like, for some reason, being called "secretive."

But I was thankful I was not Iraqi. One night a Kurd told me how he had been in jail and tortured for three years. He had not been at all involved in politics. "All that, missy," he cried out to me, "all that ... just to stay honest." That was the bitter world of Iraq.

Our first call was to the Ministry of Information, an organization formed for the express purpose of keeping journalists from other countries from making any contact whatsoever with Iraqi officials or people. My interview with Tareq Aziz? Oh, yes, of course, they knew about it. And day after day after day, nothing got done.

Several of us made the rounds of the embassies to talk to the diplomats. In closed societies the foreign diplomats are always the major "other" source of information, as skimpy and spare as that sometimes is. Actually they could give us interpretation but precious little actual information because Iraqis are forbidden even to mix or to visit the homes of foreigners.

Meanwhile the hotel had taken on the contours of a world in itself. Most of the scores of journalists were stationed there for weeks in order to cover the war. Usually they could not leave the hotel until the ministry arranged some vague and rare trip to the front. One could easily get cabin fever ... or go a little crazy.

But the very first morning there I was amazed -- and initially delighted! -- to find all the others up early, bustling about as though covering the war itself. At first I thought, "How industrious they are!" Instead what they were doing was typical of the spirit and ingenuity of the correspondent corps. They were making a movie! About themselves! They wrote the script and organized the hotel staff to take part and they spent intensely busy days filming it with their video cameras.

The script was about a young reporter from the
Kalamazoo Gazette
who wanders, green as the young spring grass, into "legendary, ancient Baghdad." The screen pans first from the Lebanese "fixer," one of that world of Levantine procurers of anything and everything anyone might need in this world or the next, as he counts his money in the lobby, to the disco (which the hotel opened for the journalists' film), to the photographer Eddie Adams in an Arab headdress playing a slimy minister of information (a little scene they kept secret from the ministry).

In the end everyone has left. One of the best and unrehearsed moments was when one of the little Iraqi cuties at the front desk says spontaneously to the young reporter: "All the journalists is gone. So sorry." Our film ends with Mr.
Kalamazoo Gazette
having become "the fixer." The last shot has him, his eyes now having taken on that slitted, special Levantine glint, sitting in the lobby counting his money and watching for the next green gringo to arrive.

What struck me again, watching this, was the wonderful égalité of the foreign correspondent corps. There is no other profession with so many able to go across often forbidden borders in such a privileged and yet equal way. Among us there were only a few rules for acceptance, but they were certain. You had to be honest; you never undercut a friend; and you paid your part of the drinks. Particularly either of these last -- not helping a colleague and not paying your part -- would get you ostracized forever. They are not really a bad set of rules for life, when you think about it.

In the isolation our little group was making up its own games, like children caught indoors during an interminable summer squall. While we waited for the Big Guys, we were penetrating the society from our position of isolation, strength, and weakness. Yet without us, without this crazy little band of brothers and sisters, the world would be without its couriers, not carrying Saint-Exupéry's mail but conveying messages through the night that at best allowed people to know one another.

I had pretty much gotten over the old questioning, like why did I need all of this? The terrible intensity, the scattered loves, the fever, the dark and isolated nights, the gray sky, the great desert around you, the skeletal new Sheratons and Intercontinentals so incongruous with the war a few miles away, the palm trees blowing, the ominous sounds, the chicken-in-the-basket every night for dinner -- they now spoke for themselves, or didn't.

I have a Uruguayan print by an artist named Ojeda of which I am inordinately fond. It is called
Homage to the Poet
, and it has a stylized little man leaping squarely toward a radiant orange sun, carrying inside himself his houses, all his needs. In his hand is a single flower for the sun, on which his eyes are firmly fixed, and above him the word
Libre
, or
Free
. That was very much my life.

Baghdad -- and in particular one of that splendid race of men who were Lebanese drivers, Tony -- reminded me of this. Tony, a graying and sweet man, invited me up to his room one night for a drink. And there, in him, was the little man of my print. Tony carried his world with him. He had enough pills for anyone in the entire press corps that ever got sick. He had marijuana cigarettes, flashlights for everyone, Lebanese bread sufficient for his stay there, an oven to warm it in, liquor....

***

When the afternoons drew down late upon us, suddenly, however, the hotel became quieter. The winter sun began to go down at four thirty, and a long night awaited us. There were constant blackouts (because the Persians struck a power plant in Basra, because Kirkuk had been sabotaged, because always of vague and unsubstantiable rumors as untraceable as the wind). Often we sat with candles in the bar and in the restaurant, and often we walked up the darkened stairs with candles to our sixth-floor rooms. And we repeated Newsweek's Nick Proffitt's typical correspondent's crack: "The final indignity is that there is no final indignity."

But the fact was that the days were passing too quickly. And I was not getting my interview. In fact I was not getting any interviews, which is precisely what the Ministry of Information was working night and day to assure. I, meanwhile, was growing more and more anxious. How would it look if I had to leave without anything? Fifteen years later it was the Guatemalan syndrome all over again. To make it worse, I had left the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and gone with Universal Press Syndicate. It was a dream. I loved the new people and I was now in
The Washington Star
, something I had always dreamed of. Why, in God's name, had I made my first assignment with them such a virtually impossible one? It would all make one despondent, if one were a normal human being.

It had been twelve days. Now my time was really running out. Every day Selim, my contact at the ministry, assured me they were in contact with Tareq Aziz -- and every day there was "no answer" or "no answer yet, but surely tomorrow." It was a Thursday, and we were even thinking of leaving Friday for Amman. I hated to give up. So I decided to take things into my own hands.

All along I had thought that as a last resort I would simply get a cab and try to go to the Revolutionary Command Council, where Tareq Aziz's office was, and at least try to get a note to him. But that was a long, long shot. The
RCC
was guarded like the Kremlin. Virtually nobody there, I knew, spoke English. Any foreigner even approaching might well be arrested or even shot. Yet I had to try something before leaving. Then one of the diplomats suggested I try phoning -- and somehow he dug up the top-secret number of the
RCC
. If appearing on the doorstep of the
RCC
seemed like a one-hundred-to-one shot, this seemed like a thousand-to-one shot.

I dialed. A man answered in Arabic. I just kept repeating, "Tareq Aziz, Tareq Aziz, Tareq Aziz," over and over and over. Different men speaking in Arabic in different voices kept coming on the line. Then suddenly something utterly astonishing happened. A man speaking perfect British English was there on the line saying, "May I do something for you?"

"I am Georgie Anne Geyer, the columnist from Washington from
The Washington Star
," I was saying, my voice indignant. "And I want to speak to Tareq Aziz."

"This is Mr. Fawaz," the nice voice responded. "I am Tareq Aziz's assistant. We have been expecting you. Did you just arrive?"

"I've been here two weeks," I said indignantly. "Waiting. And I have to leave very, very soon." I wanted to say: "I can't wait forever," but with difficulty restrained myself.

"Oh, my," he was saying. "We did not know you were here. But let me talk to Tareq Aziz and call you back."

To my further amazement, in half an hour I was leaving the hotel when I heard the girl at the front desk speaking my name. It was a call from Mr. Fawaz, saying that Tareq Aziz would be happy to see me, but on the third day hence. I said I would stay.

It was six thirty Sunday night. What had now become every day's blackout was fully upon us. The mysterious city along the sprawling Tigris, a bloated gray elephant of a river, in this strange darkness became frightening indeed. The military man, grim as are so many Iraqis, marched across the lobby. He was taking me to see Tareq Aziz, and everybody knew it. The Egyptian bellboys, "foreign workers" uprooted from their poor homeland to find work in a faraway and alien place like so many in this part of the world, were delighted. They all smiled knowingly at me. And I had the strangest feeling at that moment. I felt, in a very real sense, that I was doing it for them -- that I had in effect broken through, in this and other closed and harsh societies, for those good and decent and uprooted and sad people.

I could not see the Revolutionary Command Council buildings -- certainly one of the world's most mysterious and closed places -- but in the darkness we passed through several guard posts and soon I was being rapidly ushered into simple modern buildings. Within moments, for now I had entered the inner sanctums of Ba'athist efficiency, I was sitting in a commodious armchair in an office sprinkled with silver trays and decorative pieces across from Tareq Aziz, one of the hardest men in the world to see.

He was a small man, of lean build with cold dark eyes that bespoke systematic thinking and a world in which the strong survive and the weak die very young. His dark, curly hair was flecked with gray and his pinstriped suit was perfectly tailored. He turned out to have a good sense of humor, but even when he laughed at what he said -- or intimated -- it was a very cautious laugh. Even laughing at yourself in Baghdad could be dangerous.

One Iraqi journalist, whose feelings can be easily ascertained, called him the Goebbels of the regime. Maybe. As a Christian in this land of Moslems and Armenians and Kurds and Zoroastrians and power-worshipers in general, Aziz had overcome everything with his systematic mind and finely tuned intelligence. And there was something else: no Christian could threaten Saddam Hussein in this Moslem sea. So Aziz was not only smart, he was safe.

''You must remember," Aziz started out, unsmiling, "that our grandfathers died on horseback." And then he proceeded to tell, for the first time, the entire Iraqi story of the world's newest and most dangerous war -- one not over horses and conquest but over the oil that fuels the industrialized world and over missiles and atom plants. A long way from Guatemala and the simplicity of that sierra.

Why had they started the war? For one reason only, he said. Because Khomeini was trying to put the entire region in flames, to destroy the borders and reignite the struggles of the sixth and seventh centuries, when Islam swept from Arabia to Spain.

"They must have sent a lot of agents," I volunteered at one point.

"The Iranians sent hundreds of religious agents," Aziz said, in what must be one of the greatest quotes it has been my pleasure to hear, "most were hanged. Iraq is a very well-organized society."

I wanted to know exactly how the decision to go to war came. And he told me: "We had this meeting, I remember, and we received news that they intended to close our airspace over Iranian territory and the passages to the Shatt-al-Arab. We analyzed that that was a step toward war. They were shelling our ships. That meant they wanted to close our waterways. Later we also found out that they had transferred their transportation planes to Pakistan. This meant they were preparing an air strike. By September, with all the news before our leadership, the analysis was that the Iranians were preparing for war."

And what about the Russian support -- or, more important, non-support -- of the Iraqi war? This was utterly crucial to the entire Middle East equation because Iraq had long been
the
Soviet
"friend" in the Middle East, and this had affected everything in the region from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the oil question. What he answered was staggering in its implications:

"I made two visits to Moscow in the last two months," he told me. "In these two visits the Soviets stressed their care for and relations with Iraq. They said that their friendship had not changed, but that while Iraq is a friendly country, Iran is a neighboring one. They did not want to spoil relations with Iran. They wanted the war to stop as soon as possible. They have stopped giving us arms. They are very strict on that point. We understand the situation."