[ Posted Monday, February 4, 2002 ]

a cnn producer's first day at war

TRAILING CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR PAST BULLETS, MUNCHING ON THE LOCAL DICTATOR'S SALAMI SANDWICHES, AND SCOOPING THE MACHO NBC GUYS — ALL IN A DAY'S WORK.

BY SIOBHAN DARROW | In 1992 my personal life was in shambles, but my career was taking off. CNN prized breaking news — in a war zone above all. I got my first taste of war coverage with Christiane Amanpour, whom I had known in Atlanta, and who was already on her way to becoming a star correspondent for CNN.

At the time I was a rookie producer in the Moscow bureau, and Christiane had been sent in to help cover the collapse of the Soviet Union. We went to Almaty, a city in Central Asia where Boris Yeltsin and leaders of the newly unshackled republics were meeting to form a loose political union. About to fly back to Moscow, we learned that civil war had broken out in Georgia, the former Soviet republic, where the president had become so dictatorial that his rivals tried to overthrow him, reducing the capital, Tbilisi, to a war zone. Tom Johnson, CNN's president, was in Moscow to supervise coverage of the breakup of the Soviet Union. When we discovered that there were no direct flights to Tbilisi, Tom told us to charter a plane to get there.

I had never been sent to cover a war before, and was apprehensive, but as a new producer I wanted to hide my fear. It was my job to make all the arrangements to get us there and find a way to cover the story, and I didn't want to let on that I hadn't a clue what that would entail in a war zone. Christiane seemed confident and unfazed, as did Jane Evans, our camerawoman. Jane had lived through the worst of the fighting in Beirut, and Christiane had made her name in the Gulf War. I didn't want to let these two experienced war hands see how much of a chicken I really was.

We arrived late at night, and Tbilisi had completely shut down. There had been days of fighting in the center of the city. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a poet-turned-president-turned-dictator, was holed up in the Parliament building. Opposing forces were dug in at a movie theater across the street. The once-fashionable Rustavelli Street looked like a shooting gallery. None of the taxi drivers at the airport wanted to go anywhere near downtown Tbilisi, so we were stranded until I tracked down an old friend, a Georgian doctor named Coco.

Georgians are among the most hospitable people in the world. They believe that a true Georgian must spare nothing to accommodate a guest, even if they are caught in the middle of a civil war. So without a second thought, Coco rounded up a van in the middle of the night and came and got us. He wanted to take us home and give us tea and food first, but we insisted that we had to get to the story, so he drove us into the thick of the fighting. We filmed the sounds of gunfire and burning buildings, and, with a couple of interviews, we filed a story within hours of arriving on the scene. Coco insisted on staying by our side at all times and introducing us to all the rebel commanders. He was horrified that we wouldn't stop to eat and was always trying to drag us home so his wife, Nina, could wine and dine us and he could show us off to his friends. We occasionally relented, knowing his wife had slaved all day preparing a feast for us.

Tbilisi is such a tiny place that everybody seems to know everybody else. They were all so friendly that I even wondered if they were actually shooting at one another, or simply aiming over one another's heads. As far as conflicts go, to a first-timer, this one seemed relatively benign. Nevertheless, rebel forces were shooting at Parliament, trying to oust the president, who had suddenly developed a totalitarian streak reminiscent of that other famous leader from Georgia, Joseph Stalin.

For days, Coco took us to see a ragtag group of rebels, sometimes led by a doctor from his hospital or some childhood friend. The Georgians had lived under the yoke of communism for so long that they weren't about to tolerate a new dictator now that the Soviet Union had dissolved. They are born entrepreneurs and have a deep independent streak. Nestled in the Caucasus Mountains, Georgia has a warm climate, and the verdant landscape contrasts sharply with the austerity of Russia. Many hills are covered by vineyards that produce famous wines, and Georgians boast that Winston Churchill's favorite wines were Georgian. Georgians are Mediterranean in nature and enjoy abundant and rich food, like shish kebab and spicy vegetable ragouts, unlike in Moscow. The Georgians we met were such devoted hosts that when we showed up, rebels would stop fighting in order to feed us. Whether it was a simple hacha puri, doughy bread with melted cheese and a fried egg in the middle served with wine, or a full-fledged eight-course feast, they could never let a guest go away with an empty stomach.

In the days that we covered the rebel perspective, all the renegade president's supporters were inside the Parliament under siege. Christiane felt that we needed to get inside and speak to President Gamsakhurdia himself. It didn't seem like such a hot idea to me. Georgians may be gentler than your average combatants, but people were still getting shot. Just that morning Jane had come down to breakfast shaken up. A stray bullet had pierced her bedroom balcony in the night, missing her by inches, but breaking her window. She was undaunted, arguing that the rebels we were with would not fire on us if we crossed the square to reach the Parliament, while those holed up on the other side would know we were journalists. Perhaps the president's supporters would figure that nobody else in their right mind would attempt to run across the square dividing the two sides, even though plenty of people had come out to watch the fighting. As I would see in later wars, an incredible voyeurism draws people out to see the action, risking their lives. Crowds gathered on street corners to watch, at first tentatively, then inching closer for a better view. When the shooting moved too close and the bullets started ricocheting past their heads, they scattered. One day we came into rebel headquarters and found Coco's wife, Nina, there. She too wanted to see the action.

I was terrified at the thought of crossing the square, but as the producer and only Russian speaker, I couldn't let Jane and Christiane go alone. Coco tried to talk us out of it, but then, since we were his guests, insisted on coming too. It occurred to me how terrible it would be to have to explain to his widow and orphaned children that he had been killed because he was trying to be a good host to his crazy guests. But we were off.

Christiane went first, then Jane, then me. Coco came last. One by one we ran across the fifty yards of no-man's-land into the besieged Parliament. I was so terrified I couldn't even tell if anyone fired or not. I was breathless, immensely relieved to get to the other side alive. But my euphoria was short-lived, as it dawned on me that we'd have to run across the square again to get out of there. First, however, we had to try to get this madman to talk to us.

Gamsakhurdia's followers were surprised to see three women and Coco show up uninvited into their lair. Being Georgians, they could do nothing else but welcome us and offer whatever food they could scrape up. They rustled up some tea and grizzled salami sandwiches, eager to share what they had even though they were surrounded and had few provisions. It was Christmas Day, the first of many I'd spend embroiled in a news story. I looked around this Parliament-cum-bunker at these mustached men armed to the teeth lounging about on sandbags. I loved Russia and always wanted to tell its story, but I had never expected this job to entail such personal risk. I wondered if I would ever get used to it.

We waited for hours, and finally Gamsakhurdia agreed to see us. He seemed deranged, with the crazed "I'll stop at nothing" look in his eyes often seen in guerrilla leaders or revolutionary zealots. As we shot our videotape, he rambled on and on. It almost didn't matter what he said: We had scored a major coup just getting an interview with him and being able to report his side of the story under such trying circumstances. In a blur, we ran back across the square to the rebel side of the street. We had been shipping our stories by air out to Moscow with fleeing Georgians, who were generally happy to carry a tape out for us for fifty dollars. When we got back to the hotel to edit our exclusive story, we learned the airport had just been shut down.

Our ever-resourceful Coco found someone willing to make the treacherous five-hour drive through the mountains to the airport in Sochi, the nearest city, to get our story out. Our producers in Atlanta were thrilled. However, we knew that although we had scooped the competition, it would take half a day for our tape to get out and on the air.

It was obvious that we should keep our scoop secret from competing television crews, especially after what we had been through that day. But humans, and especially journalists, often have a hard time keeping a secret. Sitting around the restaurant that night, the all-male NBC and CBS teams were discussing a possible plan to get inside the Parliament by stowing away in an ambulance the next day. They were desperate to get inside but were afraid, and probably rightly so, just to bolt across the square as we had. Jane, Christiane, and I sat in silence, dying to boast that the girls had already done that while the boys were sitting around debating the risks. Women covering war often feel they have to be braver and tougher than their male competitors, just to prove themselves. If we could wait a few hours, we could gloat to our hearts' content. But it was just too tempting to burst the balloon of macho bravado, and it slipped out of Jane's mouth. Jane was a female pioneer in the male-dominated world of cameramen and had taken endless amounts of grief over the years, so maybe she deserved her moment. The boys were shocked and hurried to match our story. That day, other networks got to President Gamsakhurdia, but we still beat everyone else, getting the story on the air several hours before them, the kind of thing that reporters pride themselves on.

Siobhan Darrow worked for CNN for nearly 15 years as a correspondent in Russia, Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Israel, Chechnya, and Albania.

Excerpted from Flirting with Danger by Siobhan Darrow. Copyright 2002 by Siobhan Darrow. Excerpted by permission of Anchor, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.