'Any Word?'

How Newsday Got Its Journalists
Out Of Saddam's Prison

Newsday correspondent Matthew McAllester, left, stands next to Newsday photographer Moises Saman as he speaks to loved ones on the telephone inside a hotel room in Amman, Jordan after arriving from Iraq Wednesday morning, April 2, 2003. The two were released after being arrested by Iraqi authorities in Baghdad. © David Guttenfelder/AP WORLDWIDE

BY DELE OLOJEDE

Day One, Monday, March 24: Missing

The last contact I had with Matt McAllester was around 1:40 p.m. Eastern Time, by e-mail, informing me that he planned to file two stories later that day — one on an appearance on Iraqi TV by Saddam Hussein, and the other about the U.S. bombing of a residential complex in downtown Baghdad. The promised stories never came.

Matt, who completed a four-year assignment last year as our Middle East bureau chief, was covering the war in Baghdad, along with Moises Saman, a staff photographer. Both of them had by now spent a month in the Iraqi capital, evading meddlesome officials as best they could, hiding their satellite phones and other equipment in multiple places. While they had backup rooms in other hotels around town, they were on this day ensconced in Room 1122 at the Palestine International Hotel.

They never called, so by 10 p.m. we decided to substitute a Baghdad file by John Daniszewski of the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper owned, like Newsday, by the Tribune Company. I sent a note to John’s editor, Marjorie Miller, to ask if John, who also was staying at the Palestine, would go knock on Matt and Moises’s door.

During the course of the evening, Tony Marro, our editor, checked repeatedly with me, striding across the newsroom to ask, “Any word?” I reassured him that there was no cause for alarm, that in all likelihood they had been caught on the wrong side of town during another night of heavy American bombing, and probably had judged it unsafe to try to get back to their hotel and their satellite phones.

I also told Tony that Matt and I had an understanding that during the war, there might be times when he unavoidably would fail to get in touch for a couple of days, and that it should not necessarily create any undue aggravation. In fact, the same thing already had happened with some of our reporters embedded with Army and Marine units. Upon crossing the border from Kuwait into Iraq at the start of the war, some of them were prohibited from using their satellite phones and had maintained radio silence for up to two days.

Tony had reason to be concerned. He had made the decision to keep Matt and Moises in Baghdad even as other news organizations decided to pull their correspondents out. President Bush, after all, had specifically given journalists and others forty-eight hours to get out of Baghdad. The Tribune Company was concerned about the advisability of keeping reporters in Baghdad, as was Ray Jansen, our publisher.

Fearing a stampede as some of his colleagues were yanked out of the Iraqi capital, Matt had sent me an e-mail at home on Sunday, March 16, asking that he be allowed to stay:

I wanted to drop you a note about safety because you’ll likely wake up to the news that the Tribune and, it looks like, the WPost are pulling out of here. Others are leaving too — some TV, some Brits. I fear a domino effect . . . . We are hourly calculating safety matters but we continue to feel committed to being here. I could go into a long detailed explanation of all the myriad factors and calculations but I think the point is simpler. We are journalists who cover these sorts of situations and risk is part of it. There is risk in every conflict and sometimes journalists pay the price, as some might here. I wouldn’t be doing this job if I hadn’t thought long and hard about all this. I have a firm intention of passing away in my rocking chair with my grandkids around me, as does Moises. But we’re passionately committed to our jobs and this story. If we are pulled out, the story will be left to the embeds and the U.S. government.

Two days after that, as editors huddled around my speakerphone, Tony methodically grilled Matt and Moises about their situation, their motivation, and their preparedness. Finally, he asked how Matt might react if he were to be ordered out.

“Very, very disappointed,” Matt replied in a firm but respectful voice, leaving no doubt that this was an understatement. We signed off. Another quick meeting in Tony’s office, and the decision was made, unanimously. They could stay.

That was on Tuesday, March 18. The next day, bombs began dropping over Baghdad.

Day Two, Tuesday, March 25: Concern

My cell phone rang shortly after 6 a.m. “Any word?” Tony Marro asked. I said not so far, and proceeded to tell him that I had sent e-mail messages to the Los Angeles Times’s Daniszewski and to Larry Kaplow, a correspondent for Cox newspapers and a close friend of Matt.

We were getting mildly concerned. It was well into the day in Baghdad, eight hours ahead, and still no word. But we also reasoned that if something horrible had occurred, we would have heard by now, and in that sense no news could be good news.

Around 9:30, Jim Dooley, our photo editor, played back a voicemail that had been left for him earlier that morning by Tyler Hicks, The New York Times’s photographer in Baghdad:

I imagine you are probably aware that Matt McAllester and Moises Saman have — I’m not sure exactly what happened, but they are no longer at the Palestine Hotel. I saw them as of last night, both of them . . . . Everything was okay. And today their room is empty. There have been a lot of expulsions overnight. People are being taken to Syria. We think they may have been among that group of people, although we haven’t had any contact with them.

Jim Dooley and I began a round of calls, trying to reach reporters in Baghdad. A couple of hours later I received a response from Kaplow, who confirmed what Hicks had said and speculated that Iraqi security had been conducting a sweep of people who came into Baghdad on tourist or limited-use visas. Daniszewski also sent me an e-mail saying he had spoken to a senior Iraqi information ministry official, who told him ten people were being expelled because their visas were not in order. The official said the ministry was arranging taxis to take them to the Jordanian border, and they would be accompanied by two officials from the information ministry.

On this day a ferocious sandstorm had blown in from the desert, and much of Iraq was blanketed. Visibility was poor and even U.S. forces heading north toward Baghdad were bogged down in central Iraq.

Though some of the details were contradictory, we were receiving much the same information from other sources, most notably the indefatigable Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists, who had been in constant touch with other reporters in Baghdad, including Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker. By now we had been told that Iraqi officials had grabbed Matt and Moises, along with an uncertain number of other journalists and peace activists, and were expelling them either to Jordan or to Syria.

We were frustrated that our people had been expelled while those from The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times had been left behind. But now, at least, we thought they were okay and would call us as soon as they were able to cross into Syria or Jordan.

Nonetheless, an undercurrent of anxiety ran through the newsroom. I was getting a steady stream of messages from Tim Phelps, our Washington bureau chief and my predecessor as foreign editor, who was close to Matt and had sent him on his first foreign assignments. Tony Marro strode into my office at least seventeen times during the course of the day, and finally he closed the door and said, “I hope you don’t mind that I’m very nervous about this.”

Day Three, Wednesday, March 26: Anxiety

Still no word. The sandstorm was worse than ever, and conditions were so bad that Larry Kaplow reported in an e-mail from Baghdad that it was “raining mud.” By now I was getting used to receiving a call from Marro at midnight and again at 6 a.m. We were beginning to get more information out of Baghdad. Marjorie Miller, the Los Angeles Times’s foreign editor, sent me a note saying she had been able to get through to an Iraqi information ministry official in Baghdad, who assured her that Matt and Moises and the others were safe and were being expelled for visa reasons.

Although Matt had been on assignment in Iraq several times — the last being in October, with Moises — they had been unable to obtain regular journalist visas on this trip. As war became imminent, and he and Moises grew increasingly anxious that they might not get in, they had asked my permission to do what many other journalists did: they got in on a visa issued to a group of peace activists, popularly called “human shields.” The visa clearly identified them as journalists, and the understanding was that they would cover the activities of the human shields. After an obligatory first story on the human shields, they had gone about the business of covering Baghdad, and the day before they were finally arrested, a month after they arrived in Baghdad, they had been issued regular press permits by the information ministry.

Now, the third day after we lost contact with them, I got the first full account of what their colleagues in Baghdad thought might have happened. The source was Matt’s friend, Kaplow, who would soon assume the role of our most important contact in Baghdad throughout the crisis.

Kaplow reported that the bus supposedly taking the detainees to the border apparently never left town Tuesday, possibly because of terrible weather conditions, but was believed to have departed this morning. No one, however, could say for sure. Kaplow also had talked to an Italian free-lance photographer named Marco DiLauro, the last person to see Matt and Moises in their room on Monday night Baghdad time, as they prepared to send their stories and pictures for the day. DiLauro said they were relaxed and their room was filled with several hundred pounds of equipment, and that there was no way the room could suddenly have been stripped clean by the following morning unless they’d been arrested by the security police.

This was how we began to get the first inkling that they might have been arrested by the security police, and not ministry of information officials. We also had been told by then that the security police had taken Molly Bingham, a free-lance photographer, that same night from the room she shared with Nathan Thayer, a free-lance journalist on assignment for Esquire. Thayer had witnessed the arrest, and reported that Molly’s notebooks had been packed away in plastic bags. We heard that another free-lance photographer, Johan Spanner, a Dane, had also been seized, as had Philip Latasa, a human shield from Virginia.

At this point, all the information we had still pointed to their expulsion, although we weren’t sure. We began to reach out to other institutions, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the papal nuncio in Baghdad. Tim Phelps had contacted the Pentagon to tell them that Matt and Moises were missing. Craig Gordon, our correspondent in Doha, Qatar, contacted the U.S. Central Command.

We were starving for real information, and we needed to head off rumors in the newsroom. In midafternoon Tony Marro sent a note to the staff, saying we had had no contact with Matt and Moises since Monday, and we were working hard to find out what had happened to them and why. That same afternoon, I received a call from an old friend, Bill Spindle of The Wall Street Journal. Bill was Daniel Pearl’s editor when the Journal reporter was abducted and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, almost exactly a year before. “I know what you’re going through,” he said, and wished me luck.

It was the first time I felt a slight trepidation, and I fought to conceal my emotions by taking a quick walk down the hall. I promised myself that I would betray no sense of panic to my bosses and to the newsroom, and at all cost maintain a serious but cheerful disposition.

Day Four, Thursday, March 27: Code Orange

If we didn’t hear from Matt and Moises this morning, deputy managing editor Les Payne had told Marro in an early phone conversation, we were facing a serious situation. We could no longer assume that our people were on a bus out of the country.

We began to press forward on a number of fronts — getting as much information as we could out of Baghdad, getting messages to the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and other nongovernmental organizations. We contacted diplomatic missions still open in Baghdad, particularly those likely to be looked upon favorably by the Iraqi regime, such as the Vatican’s and Russia’s, and we contacted individuals who we thought could have lines into the Iraqi regime.

By now Kaplow’s editors had told him that he could spend as much time as he needed on helping us locate his friend, and he began to file detailed reports on whatever he could pick up out of Baghdad. Our reporter, Mohamad Bazzi, then in northern Iraq, was suggesting useful contacts in the Arab world as well as back here. Other staff members started spending most of their time helping. Lauren Terrazzano, a reporter, and Adrian Peracchio, a member of the editorial board, who speak Italian, were assigned to talk to the papal nuncio.

Tony Marro and managing editor Charlotte Hall started giving dozens of interviews, essentially saying that two of our people were missing in Baghdad. The constant trooping of TV camera crews created a sense of heightened anxiety in the newsroom. A couple of reporters showed up at my office door, seeking information that I didn’t have. Some people were beginning to cry.

That night, Les Payne offered to buy me a drink. We sat at a bar not far from Newsday’s offices on Long Island. We have a serious crisis here, he said, and in so many words said he was relieving me of my duties as the editor in charge of our war coverage. He said he felt I needed to continue to spend all my time coordinating efforts to locate Matt and Moises. He wanted to bring up Tim Phelps from Washington to take over the editing. Other correspondents on the war front needed attentive editors experienced in foreign reporting, he said; just that day, one of them, Letta Tayler, had been shot at by Iraqi irregulars fighting U.S. Marines in central Iraq. Early the next morning Les proposed the change to Marro, and Phelps was on the 11 a.m. shuttle.

Day Five, Friday, March 28: Code Red

At 7:16 a.m., Tim Phelps forwarded an e-mail he had received from a European peace activist in Amman, Jordan, who was one of the coordinators of the human shields program. The activist, Johan Groeneveld, said his colleagues in Damascus had confirmed the arrival in Syria of Molly Bingham, Johan Spanner, and Philip Latasa. No word of Matt and Moises.

We were excited by the news, because this meant we had people to debrief who could give us firsthand information about Matt and Moises. I asked my deputy, Jim Rupert, then on assignment in Amman, to track the three down in Syria. But this eventually turned out to be a wild goose chase. No one had arrived in Syria. It was one of several false alarms. Perhaps the most serious sounded later in the day, when I received a call from Arthur Green of the State Department’s Iraq Task Force, who said he had happy news: Our guys had been released and confirmed to have crossed the border into Syria.

I felt a sudden rush of blood to the head and barely held back from yelling in jubilation. I asked instead how the State Department received this confirmation. Green said that the press attaché at the U.S. embassy in Amman had passed on the information. By now it was around 2 a.m. Saturday in the Jordanian capital, and I called the duty officer at the embassy, who told me that the wonderful news came from none other than a reporter, Lisa Barron, of CBS Radio in Amman. My heart sank when I talked to Barron, who apologetically said “someone” had told her that Newsday had confirmed reestablishing contact with their guys, and she had dutifully passed it on to the press attaché at the embassy, Justin Siberell, who in turn had reported it to the State Department, which then passed it on to me. It was all I could do to keep from screaming in frustration.

We had begun to operate in full crisis mode. The crisis management team consisted of Tony, Charlotte, Les, Lonnie Isabel, an assistant managing editor, Tim, and myself. The day before, Tony had contacted the Catholic bishop of Long Island, William Murphy, who, it turned out, was an old friend of the papal nuncio in Baghdad, and he spoke to the bishop again. I contacted the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed al-Durri, and he promised to send urgent messages to Baghdad — though he said communicating with his government had become difficult, since U.S. planes just that morning had destroyed the telecommunications tower in the Iraqi capital. I also met with Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general, in his law offices in New York, to ask his help in opening lines to senior Iraqi leaders, particularly Tariq Aziz, with whom he had maintained a cordial relationship. He said he would make preliminary inquiries, and if no progress had been made by the weekend, he would write formally to Aziz and other officials.

Also on this day, Marco DiLauro, the Italian photographer, and Nate Thayer, Molly Bingham’s roommate in Baghdad, were both expelled from Iraq. They also had been in the country on visitor’s or human-shield-related visas. As they crossed the border into Jordan, DiLauro — the last person to see our guys — called me by satellite phone and we spoke briefly of what he knew. I then alerted Jim Rupert in Amman to get ready to debrief both men as soon as they arrived in the Jordanian capital.

Rupert’s detailed conversation, the results of which he relayed to me later in the day, caused us a measure of alarm. Thayer described to him the demeanor of the Iraqi security men, who as it turned out were from the feared Mukhabarat, Hussein’s secret police. DiLauro described in detail the atmosphere in Matt and Moises’s room on the night of their disappearance. More important, he gave us the first full account of the central role that the illegal use of satellite phones might have played in their arrest. He described the heightened state of paranoia in the besieged capital, and he made clear that our men were without question in the hands of the secret police, who likely believed them to be spies. Matt is a British citizen, Moises a Spaniard, both working for an American newspaper, and as Matt would later describe it, “We formed our own little axis of evil.”

“We have to prepare for the worst,” Jim Rupert said, adding that at all cost we had to get them out before the regime collapsed.

It was a grim evening. Phelps, who had been our correspondent in the Middle East through the first gulf war and is one of the most knowledgeable people on our staff about the region, said this was now much bigger than Newsday and we had to seek help more widely. We concluded that Syrian officials could be crucial, and decided to pull Mohamad Bazzi, who has wide contacts in Damascus, out of northern Iraq.

We were talking to anyone who could reach senior Iraqi leaders. I suggested we should contact the former Russian prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who was extremely close to Iraqi leaders. We asked our Moscow correspondent, Liam Pleven, to return to base from Paris, where he had been covering the antiwar movement. Later, as we tried to figure out who could reach out to Primakov on our behalf, someone floated Henry Kissinger’s name, at which Les Payne said, “I’ll have to abstain on that one.”

Day Six, Saturday, March 29: Scrambling

Tony Marro met Ray Jansen, the Newsday publisher, outside All Weather Tire in Huntington Station, Long Island, not far from where they both lived. Tony gave Ray the grim accounting, particularly that we now believed Matt and Moises were being held by the Mukhabarat on suspicion of spying. “Oooohhh shit!” Jansen said. The publisher agreed that it might be a good idea for him to hit the road to Damascus, to personally seek help from Syrian leaders. I would accompany him. Tony did not immediately tell him that he might have to travel with a suitcase filled with cash.

Josh Friedman, a former Newsday reporter who serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, had suggested contacting Arab media, including al-Jazeera, to get the word out. We drafted talking points to create a consistent message. The most important of these were that Matt and Moises were Newsday staff journalists, that they were assigned by Newsday to cover the war and its impact on the Iraqi people, and that they were in Baghdad for no other reason. Charlotte Hall became the public face of Newsday, giving the bulk of interviews, drafting press releases, and managing the creation of a Web site for the missing journalists, including their biographies and highlights of their past work, particularly in Arab and Muslim lands.

We had been in touch with Matt’s and Moises’s families, in Britain and Spain, all week. But by Saturday, Janey McAllester, Matt’s sister, who lives in London, was demanding to know just what the hell was going on. Tony and I began talking to family members constantly, and we assigned one of our reporters, Bart Jones, who is fluent in Spanish, to serve as the contact for Moises’s parents, who live in Barcelona.

While covering events leading to the first gulf war, Tim Phelps had covered Jesse Jackson’s successful effort to gain the release of U.S. and Kuwaiti captives from Iraqi officials then occupying Kuwait. He now suggested that perhaps Jackson could help. The next day Janey McAllester called Jackson, who immediately agreed.

Day Seven, Sunday March 30: ‘Moises Is Palestinian!’

I awoke to a breathless e-mail from Rupert in Amman, headed: “Moises is Palestinian!” Rupert had received information from Sufian Taha, our news assistant on the West Bank, who said that while Moises was on assignment on the West Bank with Matt before the Afghan war of 2001, he had tried to track down his relatives in the Palestinian village of Beit Jala. Rupert recognized the importance of Moises’s background right away, and he copied this message to Larry Kaplow in Baghdad, asking him to get it within earshot of the appropriate Iraqi officials.

Phelps ran into Payne in the Newsday parking lot this Sunday morning and he could barely contain himself. “Saddam Hussein cannot hold a Palestinian in prison! He just cannot hold a Palestinian in prison!”

He could, however. As we would later find out, Hussein was holding and torturing many of them in the vast Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where unbeknownst to us at the time, Matt and Moises also were being held. But at the time we were happy to get any positive piece of information, and this was a big one, not least because we could now gain the attention of Palestinian leaders, who had good contacts in Baghdad.

As it happens, Moises’s grandfather, Hanan Saman Hanna Nozrala, had emigrated from Beit Jala to Lima, Peru, in 1912, at the age of twenty-five, and had married a local woman. Moises’s father, also Moises Saman, was born there, as was Moises, before his parents moved to Barcelona. And so, with Rupert coordinating from Amman, we sent Sufian Taha and our reporter, Andrew Metz, then temporarily assigned to Jerusalem, to comb the streets of nearby Beit Jala for the Samans. We contacted Al Quds, the major Palestinian newspaper, which promptly did a page-two story on the son of Beit Jala and his colleague, believed to be held by the Iraqis. We also started knocking on the doors of Palestinian leaders. We published fresh profiles of the missing two in Newsday. We put family members on television, along with Charlotte. We began fielding an avalanche of calls from news organizations all over the world, from Peru to Britain, the Middle East to Spain.

Through Stephen Hindy, president of Brooklyn Brewery and a former deputy foreign editor at Newsday, we contacted Edward Abington, the former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, who represents the interests of the Palestinian National Authority in Washington. Abington called Yasir Arafat for help, and over the next twenty-four hours, one of Arafat’s top aides, an Iraqi-Palestinian who had served as Arafat’s ambassador to Baghdad, would talk repeatedly to key Iraqi leaders. We had now achieved “motion and commotion,” as advised by Judith Kipper of the Council on Foreign Relations, who had assisted CBS News in securing the release of its reporter Bob Simon from Iraq in 1991.

Before I turned in for the night I sent an e-mail to John Daniszewski of the Los Angeles Times in Baghdad. It bothered me that we still had no official confirmation from the Iraqis that they were holding our men. I urged John to throw even more effort into the task, if that were at all possible. In the morning I received a reply from John: “I am so sorry I do not have any good news to send you. My personal sense is that Matt and Moises and the other three are being held by some organ that the normal government bodies don’t want to mess with . . . . I am really sorry to share these grim thoughts with you. If I had to bet, I still would put my money that they are here in Baghdad but caught in some sort of Kafkaesque knot.”

Day Eight, Monday, March 31: Contact

Several crucial things happened, almost simultaneously.

A Jordanian source with good contacts in Baghdad confirmed that Matt and Moises were being held by the Mukhabarat.

The papal nuncio in Baghdad told us he got messages through to Iraqi cabinet ministers.

After that morning’s press conference, Larry Kaplow delivered an appeal signed by several other correspondents to the foreign minister, Naji Sabri.

Ramsey Clark called to say he had delivered letters to Baghdad, and he counseled a change in tactic: we had been saying we believed Matt and Moises were being held by Iraqi authorities. He said it was better to say that they were missing, and we were asking the help of Iraqi authorities in locating them. This was an important distinction, he said, because we did not want to back them into a corner. He said many senior Iraqi leaders believed they would never leave the city alive, as American forces pressed in from all sides, and that as much as we loved our correspondents, in the circumstances their safety might not mean very much to people who now believed they themselves were going to die. We quickly revised our talking points accordingly.

Throughout the day I made preparations for the proposed trip the publisher and I were to make to Damascus. We continued to contact other people for help. Jansen signed letters to Primakov and to Syrian leaders. Near midnight, Les, Lonnie, Tim, and I gathered at a nearby bar, handicapping our progress. Tim suggested we had reached first base, I said second, but we all agreed that this had been an important day.

Day Nine, Tuesday, April 1: Joy

Reluctantly, we decided to seek help from Bush administration officials. We figured that while they commanded no great affection in Baghdad, they probably could prove useful by acting through third parties. Phelps secured an appointment at the State Department for himself and Tony Marro, to see Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state.

They already were en route to Washington when I got a call from Stephen Hindy. Ed Abington, he said, had informed him that Arafat and his aides had spoken directly to Iraqi leaders, in particular the director of intelligence, who confirmed that his agency was holding Matt and Moises, as well as Molly, Johan, and Philip. He confirmed further that they were being held in prison, but added that they were in good health.

I called Abington, who confirmed the report and added that Yasir Arafat had personally conveyed to Iraqi leaders that he would be very grateful if the Baghdad Five could be released immediately.

And so, for the first time, we had official confirmation from the Iraqi government that they were being held and, more important, that they were alive. Les Payne and I called Marro just before he boarded the 1 p.m. flight for Washington, to relay the good news.

Six minutes later, my colleague Mary Burke, the staff assistant on the foreign desk, received a call and called out to me. “It’s Matt,” she said, almost casually. I sat down and picked up the receiver.

“Dele, it’s Matt,” Matthew McAllester said by telephone from the Jordanian side of the Iraqi border.

A great cry arose around the newsroom.

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Dele Olojede is the foreign editor of Newsday.