Eminentoes /Baghdad Gasbag

...Although Arnett's reporting there made him a controversial figure in some quarters, it sent his reputation among American journalists soaring...

...Arnett's apparent suspension of disbelief during his broadcasts—what New York Times television critic Walter Goodman described as his lack of "a touch of the skepticism that Washington reporters lay on when talking about American politicians"—could have been made necessary at the time by the constant presence of an Iraqi "minder...

...From the start of the war until the day Arnett left Iraq, he shared the Al-Rashid Hotel with Alfonso Rojo, who had previously covered the conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the Iran-Iraq war, among others...

...al-Hadithi permitted Rojo to remain when the others were expelled...

...the other press organizations and independent journalists were required by the Iraqis to share what remained...

...An editorial in El Mundo made little effort to hide the paper's disgust, arguing that "Arnett's behavior implied that CNN might have been in connivance with Baghdad...

...CNN, to its credit, broadcast a correction...

...CNN repeatedly aired a statement by one of its military analysts, retired air force general Perry Smith, who—as Arnett rightly puts it—"trashed my coverage...

...He told viewers on January 23 that "an official said it . . . was the only source of infant formula food for children one year and younger in Iraq," and added that the plant was "innocent enough, from what we could see...

...she told the camera in English...

...With Rojo's permission, it can now be disclosed that his principal source was the Soviet military attaché in Iraq, Col...

...In truth, CNN's competitors—roughly thirty people, working for NBC, BBC, ITN, and various other Western organizations—were ordered out by the Iraqis...

...Long before he went to CNN, Arnett's place in the pantheon was all but assured by the Pulitzer-winning stories he filed from Vietnam for the Associated Press...

...find the other side of the story...

...But his forced disappearance is another matter: "The only aspect that was very dirty," according to Rojo, "was his lie about being the only Western correspondent in Baghdad...

...Whether CNN knew it or not . . . if Saddam Hussein had launched a widespread campaign of terrorism as he had promised he would, the orders would have been passed along CNN's 'four-wire...

...We are human beings...

...The Iraqis gave CNN alone the use of a communications line from Baghdad to Jordan known as a "four-wire," which Arnett's book describes modestly as "like an international intercom" that "circumvented the hotel switchboard and other standard switching systems...

...Even then, Arnett's account differs from Rojo's...

...In fact, early reaction to his book has been thunderously favorable...

...C ontrary to general belief, however, Peter Arnett was not the only Western reporter in Baghdad after January 19...

...Worse, Arnett proceeded to make Rojo disappear...

...And he duped all of America, including his critics, into believing it...

...I, for one, am not happy about his journalistic tour de force in Baghdad...

...In short, the predominant image of Arnett among his fellow journalists is that of a reporter fiercely committed to the truth, an image that Arnett does not attempt to dispel in his new book, Live From the Battlefield.1 But Arnett's favored image lives on, ironically, only because the American press has failed to heed the imperative for which Arnett is thought to stand: to get out and 1 Peter Arnett, Live From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zones...

...62 The American Spectator February 1994 CNN alone had stood up to the White House...

...An equally curious episode in Arnett's reporting was his handling of the "Gulf Peace Team," a group of seventy-three anti-war activists from fifteen countries...

...Not published in the United States...

...I mean, why go to the trouble...

...Arnett writes that he let the Iraqis use his phone only to enable them to authorize visas for other American journalists...

...There is evidence, in fact, that the Iraqi government did go to the trouble...

...on camera...

...Gen...

...Hutchinson (London), 390 pages, £13.99...

...Were they fearful of angering a powerful news organization...

...the two were not competitors except in the remotest sense...

...Or was it, perhaps, a fraternal reluctance to corroborate the image of a reporter casting aside professionalism in pursuit of fame and the Great Anti-American War Story...

...Simon & Schuster, 463 pages, $23...

...Colin Powell maintained that the plant was actually a biological weapons facility with a civilian facade...

...An Iraqi whom Arnett described as "a distraught woman" was shown at the site yelling anti-Western epithets...

...But none of CNN's privileges compared with the departure of CNN's rivals by January 19, just days after the bombing began...

...But senior BBC correspondent John Simpson, in his book From the House of War,2 reports that the four-wire also happened to be part of a hardened communications network normally reserved for the Iraqi military—an impressive concession for CNN...

...In his broadcasts, he created the myth that he was the only Western reporter there...

...Well before CNN was granted its most important privilege—the ability to remain in Iraq while other Western journalists were sent packing—CNN was already receiving and accepting preferential treatment from the Iraqi government...

...Although the details of Arnett's ambitious deceptions were widely reported in Britain, they have never been reported here...

...But with Baghdad's telephone links knocked out by the bombing, Rojo desperately needed the use of CNN's satellite connection to transmit his stories...

...Anchor Bobbie Battista went so far as to ask on the air whether he was "developing a relationship" with the Iraqi minders...

...Both before and after the bombing commenced, CNN zealously upheld its prerogative, always fending off requests for help from other correspondents who needed to have stories sent out...

...Since January of 1991, when television audiences in the United States and 104 other countries followed his CNN broadcasts from Baghdad, his position in the pantheon of legendary reporters has seemed certain...

...Arnett unapologetically narrates the diplomatic efforts of producer Robert Wiener and himself that brought CNN's privileges about...

...And although the network officially stood by Arnett throughout the conflict, it appeared to recognize something was askew...

...I worried that political pressure from the U.S...

...His postwar honors include an Emmy, as well as awards from the Washington Journalism Review, the graduate school of journalism at Columbia, the Overseas Press Club, and the National Press Club...

...Is it that the ones who knew were simply afraid to sound like sore losers...

...Arnett has Rojo asking to use the phone once, while Rojo contends he tried "many times...

...Arnett's treatment of Rojo had scant logic...

...government could undermine what I was doing...

...Upon leaving Baghdad, Arnett repeated the claim at a postwar press conference...

...While the equipment in front was French, the nuclear equipment in the rear—overlooked by Arnett's eagle eyes—was Austrian...

...0 The American Spectator February 1994 63...

...According to Rojo's sources, the plant "was set up under the guise of a powdered milk factory to prevent a repetition of the Israeli raid on Iraq's main nuclear facility in 1981...

...The tactic worked...

...Arnett merely to read the policy statement of the camp's sponsoring organization which would have set the record straight—that the Gulf Peace Team's position was nonviolent and nonpartisan—he was not interested...

...Because Arnett refused, Rojo was reduced to sending handwritten reports by land to the Spanish embassy in Jordan, which faxed them to the newspaper...

...David Andrew Price is a writer living in Washington, D.C...

...Was their nuclear weapons plant described—was it disguised as a bagel factory...

...Who made this area like this...

...Not that his professional standing needed any help...

...A correspondent for the Sunday Times of London recalled bitterly that Arnett "wouldn't let anybody other than Iraqi officials use his phone...

...The New York Times Book Review, for example, ran a front-page review three years to the day after the launching of Desert Storm, commending Arnett for his "fearless insistence on seeing things for himself' and nominating him as "the quintessential war correspondent of our half-century...

...Yet Arnett did make an exception for one supplicant—the Iraqi government...

...In a number of instances, CNN's anchors treated his reporting with ill-concealed skepticism, as his book points out with evident irritation...

...Simpson, who was awarded a CBE by the British government for his reporting from Baghdad, argues that CNN's use of the four-wire, combined with the global reach of CNN's broadcasting, gave Iraq the capability to transmit its own signals instantaneously to its embassies and agents, if need be...

...Two days later, on February 1, Arnett reported from the scene of what the Iraqis claimed to be civilian bombing damage...

...Alfonso Rojo, a foreign correspondent for the Madrid daily El Mundo, reported in the Manchester Guardian shortly after the war that the The American Spectator February 1994 61 "baby milk factory" was a secret location for nuclear weapons research and development...

...With communications facilities scarce and highly sought after, only CNN was allowed exclusive use of its facilities...

...Live From the Battlefield makes no bones about the special relationship that existed between the CNN team in Baghdad and the Iraqi government...

...Is it that no American reporter knew the truth...

...To persuade the Iraqi government to let him stay, Rojo had approached Naji al-Hadithi, the director general of the information ministry, and spoke grandly of the historical and cultural ties between Spain and the Arab world...

...Though I tried to balance his diatribe with pertinent questions, I got the worst of the exchange...

...Pazaluk has since retired and is living in Moscow...

...Rojo now believes, aftermuch reflection, that "Arnett had the right to deny me the phone...

...Bill Monroe, former editor of the Washington Journalism Review, hailed him as journalism's "antihero hero" and as "our man in Baghdad...

...Not only did he find powdered milk packages at the site, he writes, he found "a full schematic plan of a structure called `Baby Milk Factory' drawn up by the builders, Sodetag Industries of France...

...Duane Stanfield, a Scottish member of the team, remembered the episode a little differently in a letter to the International Herald Tribune: To represent our views to the world, CNN's Peter Arnett chose an extremist American member of the camp, who proceeded to vilify the U.S...

...Yet Arnett has not backpedaled fromthe reports he filed from Baghdad, and Live From the Battlefield continues to present the conclusions of some of his more disputed reports as simple matters of fact...

...For the European reporters who were in Baghdad with him, a different picture of Peter Arnett emerged...

...After being grilled about the story by a stateside CNN anchor, he recalls, "I felt that even my own news organization was doubtful of my ability to assess the facts...

...From January onward, Arnett's fabrication was reported as fact by every major newspaper and wire service in the United States...

...The team set up a camp near the Iraq–Saudi Arabia border in hopes of deterring military action by either side...

...In Live From the Battlefield, Arnett finally mentions Rojo, but only briefly...

...Arnett has been hazy about the events: In his commencement address the following spring at Harvard Law School, he claimed, weirdly, that the rest of the American press had left in response to pressure from the American government, and that he was able to stay because 2John Simpson, From the House of War...

...The flames in this area, it's the West...

...For Arnett, it could only have been a reporter's dream come true...

...Arnett never voiced doubts on the air about the Iraqi story, and nowhere in his book does he concede that he might have been misled about the factory...

...Later, when I tried to get Mr...

...Haven't you ever heard of competition?' I heard him telling other reporters...

...In Live From the Battlefield, Arnett recounts his surprise and chagrin at Lawrence's performance: The soft-spoken Washington bureaucrat was transformed on the air to an emotional advocate that all Americans join the peace movement, before the conflict "turns into a holocaust...

...If that were the explanation, then one would expect him to fill in the gaps left by Iraqi censorship, now that he is safely beyond its reach...

...There, on January 30, Arnett interviewed an American member of the team, Anthony Lawrence, who denounced the American war effort at length as an "imperialistic attempt to wrest the oil resources of this region...

...The CNN team's preferential treatment was painfully evident to the rest of the Western press corps in Baghdad...

...1 t was a good question...

...Likewise, in a postwar interview with Sam Donaldson, Arnett had asked, "Why would the Iraqi government go to the trouble of doing all this...

...L ike the Alec Guinness character in Our Man In Havana, who sent spurious information about Cuba back home to Britain, Arnett sent home reporting that was rendered unreliable by his seemingly uncritical acceptance of the Iraqi government's position...

...After the bombing devastated Iraqi communications lines, Iraqi officials asked for and got the use of Arnett's satellite phone to call their embassy in Jordan...

...His coverage of the "baby milk factory" bombing is a case in point...

...After the bombing started, Iraq moved the campers to Baghdad...

...The woman soon turned out to be a plant—in fact, an aide to Saddam's undersecretary for foreign affairs...

...There were other privileges...

...Viktor Pazaluk...