Audition (79 page)

A lot had been made of George W. Bush’s remark on meeting Putin for the first time—“I looked this man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” (I understood, because when I do an interview I look straight in the person’s eyes and I can tell by the slightest expression, a squint or a flinch, where I have hit home. Good thing for journalism students to remember.) In any case, I agreed with Bush’s assessment of Putin. He had friendly eyes and, in person, hardly seemed formidable (though he held a black belt in judo). He was small and lithe and easy to talk with, even through the interpreter.

I questioned him, first of all, on Bush’s statement about his soul, a remark which by then had been ridiculed in the United States. Putin smiled. “It’s difficult for me to say what he saw in my soul, but I can respond to those who smiled in response. I believe it’s not accidental that he, not they, became president of the United States. He sees better and deeper and understands the problems more accurately.”

What concerned him the most then was Russia’s failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks on New York. “I had the feeling of guilt for this tragedy,” he said. “We had talked about the possible threats to the United States, to other countries, but [our special services] were not able to determine who, where, and how they would strike.”

Putin was, in fact, the first world leader to phone President Bush after the attack. “I expressed our solidarity with the American people,” Putin told me. “Because of acts of terrorism in Moscow, perhaps I understood better than many people what the Americans felt. The American people understand that in this dire moment in time, they are not alone.”

As the interview went on, I wanted to know more about Putin’s personal side. If I’d had the nerve to ask Qaddafi if he was insane and to ask Boris Yeltsin about his drinking problem, I had to ask Putin a question that had gone through my mind from the moment I knew I was going to do the interview. I hadn’t written it down on my list of questions, in case any unfriendly eyes saw them. The moment came toward the end of the interview when I felt our conversation was comfortable enough so that he wouldn’t be insulted. We all knew that Putin was a former KGB officer. Here was my question:

“Did you ever order anyone killed?”

“No,” he replied. “In fact my work was more intellectual, political information gathering, analysis, and so forth. So thank God, nothing like that happened to me.”

These days, as the list of the murders of some of Mr. Putin’s critics grows longer, the question is being asked again. Putin and his administration, of course, deny any involvement.

In the late winter of 2002 I had the most interesting foreign experience in years when I had the opportunity to travel through Saudi Arabia and interview pretty much anyone I wanted. Saudi Arabia’s image in America was very shaky after the violent events of 9/11, when it was revealed that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens and that the mastermind of the attack was another Saudi, Osama bin Laden.

Soon after the attacks, the Saudi royal family hired Qorvis Communications, a PR firm in Washington, to cast a better light, if possible, on the kingdom’s image. I had been asking the Saudi government for permission to go there for quite a while, and suddenly the permission came through. So I packed two long black skirts, a black scarf to cover my head, and off I went with Martin Clancy, a camera crew, and a Qorvis representative, Judy Smith.

I wanted to interview then Crown Prince Abdullah, who was the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia during the long illness of his half brother, King Fahd. I was told I could meet him but not interview him on camera. If he ever did an interview, however, he would do it with me. Well, good luck and fat chance. But I was glad to be introduced to him anyway in the royal palace in Jeddah on the Red Sea with its magnificent sculpted gardens.

What an eye-opener. Lest anyone think the Saudis are insular and out of touch, consider the entire wall of television monitors—I counted thirty-four—in the main reception room. Everything was on, from CNN and Al Jazeera to all three of the American morning shows—and even
The View
! In fact, I was a celebrity of sorts in the hotel beauty parlor because the manicurist watched
The View
.

Aside from the noninterview with Abdullah, we were given extraordinary access to travel across the kingdom. We not only went to Jeddah but to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and to the southern region of Asir. The Saudis hoped that we would show an enlightened country with a fairly well-educated population. Indeed, we found that to be true in some of our interviews, especially with members of the royal family who spoke perfect English, as they had been educated in the United States or Great Britain. The princes were charming and sophisticated as were their wives, who wore
abaya
s (long black robes) outside their homes and low-cut gowns by Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta inside. Their homes were exquisite, many with indoor fountains and air-conditioning—outdoors! Some of the living rooms were as large as hotel lobbies. Though alcohol is forbidden by Islam, they drank the best French wine, and, though satellite TV was forbidden by the government, they watched whatever they wanted.

There were, in fact, satellite dishes on the roofs of houses all over Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the government looked the other way because more often than not, the images on Al Jazeera were of Israelis attacking Palestinians and bulldozing their houses.

I know this chapter is supposed to be about heads of state and here I am, going on about what would become our one-hour television
Special
on Saudi Arabia. But without the
Special
, I would not eventually have gotten the interview with King Abdullah (King Fahd died in 2005), even though much of what we found in Saudi Arabia was hardly complimentary.

We had begun our journey in the southern part of the country, where we met with two fathers of three young men who were among those accused of participating in the 9/11 attacks. Obviously none of their sons had returned home, yet each of the fathers, interviewed separately, said that his son, and in one case, two sons, were just away and would certainly shortly be back. No amount of conversation on my part about documented accusations made a difference. If there were documents the United States was lying and so was Saudi Arabia.

The high school textbooks we saw were particularly disturbing in the repeated depiction of Jews. One, for example, had a story about a talking tree behind which a Jew is hiding. “Muslim, come forward,” the tree calls out. “There’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” When we asked a government minister why the textbooks contained this kind of material, he said he, too, deplored the fact and the books were being corrected. To my knowledge they have not been.

Equally disturbing were the university students I interviewed. One told me he considered George Bush as great a terrorist as Osama bin Laden. Another claimed that Zionists must have attacked the World Trade Center because four thousand Jews stayed home from work that day. Furthermore, the student said, the Jews were responsible for every war throughout history. I countered with the facts, but I did not argue with the students. Their harsh prejudiced views revealed so much about aspects of the country’s culture.

Then there were the religious police, the
mutaween
, who prowled the streets and malls to make sure not one inch of a woman’s flesh was showing. It is well known that women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive, nor can they travel or be admitted to a hospital without permission from a male relative. They can’t even have a cup of coffee in public with the opposite sex. Neither could I. I deliberately sat in the men’s section at Starbucks in Jeddah to see what would happen and was politely but firmly escorted to the women’s section.

We ended our visit to Saudi Arabia with a brief interview with Abdullah bin Laden, thirty-five, one of Osama bin Laden’s fifty-four siblings or half siblings. Abdullah holds a Harvard law degree and was living in Boston until after 9/11, when he was spirited back to his own country. This interview had been arranged by Saudi Arabia’s influential ambassador to the United States, His Royal Highness Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud. Prince Bandar thought it would help the reputation of the bin Laden family, still one of the wealthiest and most important in that country. The ambassador practically had to drag Abdullah in front of my cameras and we got almost nothing out of him. He denied, of course, that he and the rest of the family had anything to do with his half brother, but the man was too nervous to say more than that. Still, we had talked with a bin Laden, which was more than anyone else had done at the time and it made for great on-the-air promotion.

The one-hour
Special
on Saudi Arabia aired in March 2002. It did extremely well. It was exotic, and people were curious to hear from brother bin Laden. Because it presented a good deal of material critical of Saudi Arabia, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t hear about the interview King Abdullah had promised me. Time passed. Katie Couric went to Saudi Arabia for the
Today
show and was able to do a brief what we call “walk and talk” three-question interview with King Abdullah. I gave up any thought that I would ever get an interview with him until, out of the blue, a Saudi official called in October 2005. If I was still interested in interviewing the king, the official said, I should put in my request right away. The king evidently remembered his promise to me, and although he had had many other requests, he was willing to honor mine. I was impressed and back I went to Saudi Arabia with my long black skirts and scarf.

On our first trip to Saudi Arabia in 2002, we neither asked for nor needed security. The U.S. invasion of Iraq the following year changed all that. On this trip in 2005, there were armed guards in front of our hotel and security outside my room. We traveled in armored Mercedes-Benzes provided by the king’s security force. The government was taking no chances with our safety. Indeed, it was concerned with its own vulnerability to possible terrorist attacks.

King Abdullah is a tall, imposing man in his eighties with dyed black hair and a matching dyed beard. Unlike most of the Saudi royal family, he doesn’t speak English. But even through an interpreter, he had a sense of humor and a twinkle behind his glasses. He only gave us half an hour of his time, and he held us to the second. He could see me getting my time cues and knew exactly when the time was up. That left me with a great many questions I wanted to ask but couldn’t. I did manage to question him on the delicate matter of women’s rights, or lack thereof, a subject of great interest back home. The king seemed to champion expanding rights for women. “My mother is a woman. My sister is a woman. My daughter is a woman. My wife is a woman,” he said. “I believe the day will come when women drive.”

I’d gotten more or less the same answer three years before from several Saudi princes, yet nothing had happened. “Can you not just make a decree that women drive?” I asked him. “You are the king.” Here was his reply, which I still can’t figure out. “I value and take care of my people as I would my eye,” he told me. (That said, as of this writing women in Saudi Arabia still are not allowed to drive their own cars, though an organized petition drive directed at the king was launched in the fall of 2007.)

His Majesty was less enigmatic on the subject of Al Qaeda’s terrorist acts inside Saudi Arabia, saying they were “Madness. Madness and evil. It is the work of the devil.”

Has the threat been eliminated? I asked him.

“No,” he said.

No wonder we had so much security.

He said he was against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and was very concerned about the unresolved Palestinian problem. “I believe this may have negatively influenced the opinion of the Saudi public toward the United States,” he said.

Israel. The Palestinians. The incendiary issue kept coming up over and over again as the prime source of Muslim hatred toward America. I remembered the optimistic interview I’d had in 1999 with young King Abdullah of Jordan, who’d been thrust onto the throne by the deathbed wish of his father, King Hussein. Abdullah, then, was convinced that peace was at hand. “Maximum two, three years,” he had said. “We’ve gone too far in the peace process to go anywhere but forward.” But that was before 9/11. That was before the American invasion of Iraq and before the Palestinians in Gaza voted into power the militant Hamas party.

Troubled times then. Just as troubled now.

Which brings me to Venezuela’s maverick president, Hugo Chávez. I interviewed the highly controversial leader in the spring of 2007. Chávez, who considers Fidel Castro his mentor, is trying to create a socialist revolution in Latin America, starting with his own country. He has fertile territory. Almost 50 percent of the population of Venezuela lives in poverty. That there is poverty in much of Latin America is not big news, and we might not have paid too much attention to yet another left-leaning leader there were it not for Chávez’s bombastic name-calling of George W. Bush. In September 2006 Chávez visited the United States, and on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly, he condemned Bush’s invasion of Iraq and called the U.S. president
“el diablo”
—the devil.

He certainly got everyone’s attention. The media was more interested in his tirade than his actual criticism of the president. I didn’t know Chávez, but suddenly we were told by the Venezuelan Embassy that if I was available, he wanted to do an interview with me. I’m not sure why. Maybe because he knew of my conversations with Castro. Anyway, as bad luck would have it, his few days in New York coincided exactly with the days I was in Australia interviewing Terri Irwin, the widow of the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin. Chávez said he wouldn’t do the interview with anyone else at ABC. He did do one with Tavis Smiley of PBS, but that was all, and home he went to Venezuela.

From October on we tried to reinstate the interview. In December, Chávez was reelected by a huge majority to a second term as Venezuela’s president, and we renewed our efforts. Finally our opportunity came. President Bush decided in March 2007 to visit five Latin American countries: Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico. Chávez then decided to do his own tour of some of his neighbors, culminating with an interview with me upon his return home. So on Saturday, March 10, 2007, with my faithful producers Martin Clancy and Katie Thomson I left for Caracas.