Imperial Life in the Emerald City (15 page)

7

Bring a Duffel Bag

EVERY TIME I WALKED
into the palace's main rotunda, my eye went immediately to a blue tarpaulin tacked to the wall. Only those who had arrived during the earliest days of the occupation knew what was behind it: a portrait of Saddam handing bricks to construction workers rebuilding the bombed-out palace after the first Gulf War. Two dusty, table-size scale models of the building sat nearby. One depicted the damage from the bombing; the other showed the larger, grander, rebuilt structure. A few months into the occupation, the models disappeared.

On one side of the rotunda, a metal detector stood next to three burly guards. That was the entrance to Jerry Bremer's office. On the other side was the Green Room, home to the Strategic Communications team.

Stratcomm, as it was called in the palace, was the CPA's public relations office. It was run by Daniel Senor, a lanky thirty-two-year-old with a receding hairline and a you're-either-with-us-or-against-us attitude toward journalists. He arrived in Iraq with Garner but stayed on after Bremer arrived. His press relations experience was limited to a stint as a spokesman for a senator, but Senor was an ardent Republican and soon became a trusted member of the viceroy's inner circle. He helped Bremer, a fellow Harvard Business School graduate, decide when to hold press conferences, which journalists to grant interviews to, and what photo opportunities were worth a dangerous trip outside the Green Zone.

As the occupation wore on, Senor became the most visible CPA official after Bremer. Clad in a suit, he held televised press briefings several times a week in the Convention Center. The briefing room had been decorated by a White House image consultant, who was flown to Baghdad to specify the dimensions and location of the backdrop—a gold seal emblazoned with the words
COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY.
The consultant also had had two big-screen plasma televisions affixed to the wall so Senor could play video clips. While other CPA officials waited months for equipment and staff to arrive from the United States, the press room's needs were quickly met.

Behind the podium, Senor never conceded a mistake, and his efforts to spin failures into successes sometimes reached the point of absurdity. “The majority of Iraqis… do they want the coalition forces to leave? They say no,” he once said. The CPA's own polls suggested just the opposite. Asked why Iraq had such interminable lines at gas stations, Senor insisted it was “good news”—more Iraqis were driving because the CPA had allowed the import of a quarter million new cars. He made no mention of the CPA's delays in getting Halliburton and other contractors to solve the problem by repairing refineries. When Senor was frank, it wasn't for publication. In April 2004, a few reporters asked him about a paroxysm of violence that had Americans hunkering down in the Green Zone. “Off the record: Paris is burning,” he told them. “On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

Senor couldn't speak Arabic. When an Iraqi journalist asked a question, the cameras captured Senor lifting a pair of earphones so he could listen to a translation. His language handicap made some briefings almost comical. Basic queries posed by Iraqi reporters—When will you pay pensions? When will electricity production increase?—were often unsatisfactorily answered because the question or the response was mangled by an interpreter. Other requests for information about government services were punted to the Governing Council, to perpetuate the myth that it had real authority. The council's press office was inept, so the Iraqi reporters rarely received an adequate answer.

At his briefings, Senor talked about visits by congressional delegations and cabinet secretaries. There was another session for Arabic speakers, but it was conducted by a Brit who regurgitated day-old items from Senor's talking points, a slight that rankled many Iraqi journalists. “The Iraqis want to know what is happening in Iraq,” a correspondent for one of Baghdad's largest newspapers groused after a Senor briefing. “But all he talks about is American politics.”

Senor's priority was feeding the American media, particularly outlets favored by supporters of President Bush. Fox News, whose coverage of the occupation was generally sympathetic and supportive, was a favorite. (After the occupation ended, Senor joined Fox as a paid on-air commentator about Iraq.) On one occasion when I entered his office, only one of his three televisions was switched on. Like most televisions in the palace, including the one in Bremer's office, it was set to Fox. None of the other TVs in Senor's office was tuned to al-Iraqiya, the national channel, which Stratcomm was supposed to oversee.

Because Saddam's government had installed a network of terrestrial transmitters, al-Iraqiya was the one channel available everywhere in Iraq. Before the war, satellite dishes were verboten. The national channel was the only choice, despite its bland newscasts and prime-time paeans to Saddam. After his government fell, Iraqis predictably rushed out to buy dishes and tune into al-Jazeera and other pan-Arab stations. But the initial excitement soon wore off, and Iraqis were eager for news about their country. When they tuned in to al-Iraqiya, they rarely got it.

On an August afternoon, a thousand-pound truck bomb detonated in front of the United Nations headquarters. The blast shook homes five miles away. It was the biggest explosion in Baghdad since the war, and Iraqis scrambled to their roofs to find out what had happened. Seeing only a dark plume of smoke in the sky, they ran down to turn on the television. When my friend Saad clicked over to al-Iraqiya, it was airing an Egyptian cooking show. Saad, like seemingly everyone else in Baghdad, had a satellite dish. He switched to al-Jazeera, which had a live report about the incident. He watched al-Jazeera for the next few hours as it aired video footage from the scene. The on-the-ground reports were objective, but in follow-up commentary, self-proclaimed analysts branded the American occupation as illegal and all but praised the insurgents responsible for the attack.

“Do the Americans want us all to become jihadists?” Saad asked me later. “Why don't they try to compete with this filth?”

         

I got the answer from a veteran television producer named Don North.

North had been a cameraman in Vietnam, a bureau chief in Cairo, a media adviser to the Saudi Arabian military commander, and a journalism teacher in the Balkans. A few months before U.S. troops invaded Iraq, he got a call from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a large defense contractor, offering him a job to help build an independent television station in Iraq. North, a silver-haired man whose foreign-correspondent gruffness was tempered by Canadian politeness, was pursuing a freelance career near Washington. He'd had his fill of wars and the Middle East. But the job in Iraq was too appealing. It was a combination of everything he had done since Vietnam.

SAIC had been contracted by the Pentagon to run the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), which would comprise the national television station, a national radio station, and a newspaper printed six times a week. SAIC had no experience running media operations in a post-conflict environment; it specialized in designing computer systems for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, the Pentagon offered the Iraqi media contract to SAIC without inviting other firms to bid. The contract was written by Doug Feith's office. Feith's deputy, Christopher Ryan Henry, had been a vice president at SAIC before joining the Pentagon. SAIC hired Robert Reilly, a former Voice of America director, to head the IMN project. During the Reagan administration, Reilly had headed a White House information operations campaign in Nicaragua to drum up support for the Contra rebels.

Don North's first task for SAIC was completed on American soil. He helped produce a documentary about Saddam's crimes against humanity that the U.S. government wanted to broadcast in Muslim nations to build support for the war. When it was finished, North asked his new bosses what he could do to prepare to run Iraq's television station. “But they said, ‘Okay, Don, you can go do whatever you want right now. We'll see you again in Baghdad, after the fall of Baghdad,'” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, isn't there something we can be doing? Planning? I mean, in my experience it takes years to plan programming and structure for a new TV and radio station.'

“‘No. No. We got a few people that will be buying equipment. We're not quite sure what we'll find when we get to Baghdad, but don't worry about it.'”

When North arrived in Kuwait, he took stock of the equipment that SAIC had purchased. There were thirteen tripods, but all lacked a base plate upon which a camera could sit. The receiver for satellite transmissions didn't have a power cord. Nothing had instruction booklets. “It was like they bought everything from a flea market in London,” North said.

A few days later, his backup plan, to use the broadcast equipment at the Iraqi Ministry of Information, went up in smoke when the military flattened the building with cruise missiles. As he was departing for Baghdad, North noticed that SAIC had purchased a few new video cameras, but when he tried to take one of them, he was told that the equipment had been promised to SAIC's security team.

Upon reaching Baghdad, he and two Iraqi exiles linked up with an army unit that had a radio transmitter. Within a day, they were broadcasting news reports and public-service announcements in Arabic. The setup was primitive: one of the Iraqi exiles listened to the BBC on a shortwave and wrote news blurbs that North edited and the other Iraqi exile read on the air. A week later, when Jay Garner was scheduled to hold his first news conference, North's team figured they should cover it. But when North asked his SAIC colleagues for a tape recorder, he was told there was none.

Once again, the Pentagon had failed to provide the resources necessary to accomplish the mission. SAIC received only $15 million. In a memo pleading for more funding, Reilly noted that al-Arabiya, a new pan-Arab news station, had an annual budget of $60 million. SAIC, he noted, was doing not just television but radio and a newspaper as well.

But it was never clear to North how SAIC was using even the $15 million it had initially received from the Pentagon. Reilly claimed to have spent $1.2 million on television and radio studio equipment before the war, but North didn't see much in the way of usable gear. Months later, the Defense Department's inspector general provided a partial explanation: SAIC charged the government for the purchase of an H2 Hummer and a Ford C350 pickup truck, and the cost of leasing a DC-10 cargo jet to fly the vehicles to Baghdad. Pentagon auditors weren't able to determine exactly how much the vehicles and the plane trip cost, but they estimated it to be more than $380,000. The auditors discovered that the purchase had initially been rejected by a Defense contracting officer, but SAIC circumvented him and obtained approval from Feith's office. The white Hummer, with air-conditioning and tinted windows, was used by SAIC personnel to drive around Baghdad. It quickly became a spectacle in the Green Zone. All of a sudden, the CPA's Suburbans seemed modest.

A month after North arrived in Baghdad, IMN was ready for its first television broadcast. More than two hundred Iraqis, many of whom had worked for the national television station before the war, had joined IMN as technicians, editors, and reporters. Some even brought in cameras and editing equipment they had taken home for safekeeping during the looting.

The IMN staff decided that the first broadcast would be a news report. But the night before they were to go on air, Dan Senor told North that his anchor, a well-known former exile who ran an opposition radio station, was unacceptable. Senor didn't want an exile. He also instructed North to take the newscast, which was to be prerecorded, to the home of Kurdish political leader Jalal Talabani so Talabani's wife could vet the program.

North compromised on the anchor by promising to add a woman who was not an exile. But he refused to prescreen the show for Talabani's wife.

“Dan, you're off base on these things,” he told Senor. “These things are not going to fly. The Iraqis aren't going to allow it.”

IMN recorded the newscast the next day. It opened with a brief prayer from the Koran. But just before the tape was to be broadcast, Senor came to the studio and told North to cut the prayer.

“On whose orders?” North said.

“This is from Washington,” Senor said. “We are going to start off by separating religion from television programming.”

“Wait a minute,” North responded. “I've lived for a long time in Arab countries. It really is traditional that this be done.”

“No,” Senor said. “Those are orders.”

North nodded and walked away.
It's not going to happen,
he thought.
Screw them.

When he related the conversation to the Iraqis at IMN, they were adamant that the prayers be included. The newscast aired that night in its original form.

It was amateurish. The tape edits were rough, and the video had the quality of a homemade production. But it was an Iraqi newscast, and it immediately generated a buzz on the streets of Baghdad.

To North and his Iraqi colleagues, IMN was supposed to be like the BBC, a government-funded television-and-radio network that retained editorial independence. Iraqi journalists, with initial assistance from American advisers, would decide how to cover the news. But to some in the CPA, IMN was a propaganda tool: we're paying for it, so we can decide what airs. SAIC managers, North said, didn't want to rock the boat. If the CPA wanted to control what went on the air, that was just fine by them.

After the first few broadcasts, North asked Senor to set up a time for Bremer to be interviewed by IMN's anchor. Senor said he would try but that Bremer was very busy. Several days later, Senor noticed an IMN crew in the palace. Bremer had a free half hour, he said. You want to tape him? The reporter was an Iraqi who spoke little English, so Senor gestured to them to follow him and set up their equipment in Bremer's office. When the camera started rolling, Senor moderated the conversation, asking Bremer one softball question after another.