The Story Read Free Page B

almost every Arab leader—but not Saddam. I kept a stack of fifty rejected faxed requests for meetings with him in a file in Cairo. Saddam rarely gave interviews to journalists, especially foreigners.
    On another trip to Baghdad in 1985, I had yet another encounter with a bomb. I was having lunch at the home of a British defense official with David Blundy, a British reporter for the London Sunday Times —a brilliant, dashing friend with whom I often collaborated. (A sniper killed David four years later, while he was covering the war in El Salvador.) As the diplomat, David, and I talked about the war, an Iranian missile struck. By the sound of the explosion and proximity of the white smoke, our host guessed that the missile had landed nearby. Since this could be a rare opportunity to see precisely which missile the Iranians were firing, we hopped in the diplomat’s jeep and raced to the bomb site.
    Arriving before the Iraqi police, we ran toward the smoking crater. Scud-B missiles were more than thirty-three feet long and capable of carrying 2,200 pounds of explosives, the defense expert told us. This missile was less than half that size, and the damage around it suggested that it had contained less than 500 pounds of explosives.
    I snapped pictures of the crater and the surrounding damage, removed the film from my camera, put it in my purse, and inserted instead a half-usedroll of film containing photos of a boring government-sponsored trip to the Iraqi front that I had taken the previous day.
    The defense attaché was measuring the crater when we saw an unmarked black car with tinted windows—standard issue for the Mukhabarat, secret police—in the far distance. If we all began running, David warned, the Iraqis would surely catch us. It could be fatal for foreigners to be anywhere near such sites. David and I agreed that while we should stay, it would be riskier for a diplomat to be found there. The Iraqis might accuse him of being a spy and us his accomplices. I shoved the film roll I had just taken into his hand, hoping that he would get it out of Iraq in a diplomatic pouch. “We’ll be all right,” Blundy assured the Brit as he made a dash for his jeep.
    The black car rolled to a halt, and three stocky men in black suits scrambled out, pistols drawn. David and I raised our hands and yelled in unison, “ Sahafi! Sahafiya! ,” Arabic for “journalists,” among the first Arabic words foreign correspondents in this treacherous region learned.
    The men took us to a police station in a part of Baghdad I did not know. There we were thrown into an insufferably hot, pee-stinking cell. There was no toilet, no water, no bed, and no shortage of flies. While I paced back and forth, blinking at the graffiti in Arabic on the cell’s peeling walls, David spread his safari jacket out on the least filthy part of the floor and dozed off instantly. His ability to catnap through any crisis was impressive, if infuriating. “Cheer up,” he yawned an hour later, restored by his nap. “It’s cheaper than the Sheraton.”
    The hours passed slowly. I was desperate for a cigarette, and so was David, but my pack was in my confiscated purse. As an Iraqi guard walked by, cigarette in hand, David called out to him. “ Habibi ,” he pleaded, using the Arabic for “dear friend,” “have you got a cigarette?”
    The guard, who appeared to speak no English, moved closer to the cell. He had clearly understood, as he blew a smoke ring in David’s face through the bars. “What you give?” He smiled menacingly, extracting an Iraqi cigarette from his uniform’s shirt pocket and waving it in front of David.
    â€œ Ma fi lira ! ” David replied. “I h-a-v-e no m-o-n-e-y. You have my wallet,” he added, dramatically emptying his jeans pockets.
    â€œWhat you give?” the guard repeated. David looked at me, grinning