Angry Planet - The Extraordinary Life and Death of War Correspondent Marie Colvin

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

War correspondents risk life and limb to report on conflict. Increasingly, it’s a leath profession. Marie Colvin was one of the best in the business. She was so good that Bashar al Assad’s regime ordered her execution.This week on War College, Lindsey Hilsum walks us through Colvin’s life and death. Hilsum is a journalist and friend of Colvins. She’s just published a new book, In Extremis, that follows Colvin’s fascinating and heartbreaking career.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. You know, I was furious with her. You know, I said, why on earth have you gone back in? You already did a great story. And she said, Lindsay, it's the worst thing we've ever seen. And I said, I know, but what's your exit strategy?

She said, well, that's just it. I don't have one. We're working on it now. and she was killed a few hours later. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Kaylee Rogers.

War correspondents are a rare breed. They are extraordinary people who risk life and limb to keep the world informed and shed light on the darkest places in the world. Increasingly, it's a lethal profession. One of the best in business was Marie Colvin. Colvin covered Chechnya, East Timor, Kosovo, and the Middle East. She interviewed Libyan dictator Moimar Gaddafi and received pearls as a gift from Yasser Arafat. Here to tell us about her extraordinary life is her friend and colleague Lindsay Hilsom. Hilsom is the international editor for Channel 4 News in Britain, and Colvin's life is the subject of her new book, in Extremis.

Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure. To start off, can you tell us about the title? What does it mean to be in extremists? Well, the title comes from something Marie wrote. She wrote, it has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremists, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars. But Marie also lived her own life in extremists,

both in terms of the way she covered wars, the fact that she would always go in further and stay longer, and also her personal and emotional life. There was always drama with Marie. She always pushed everything to the limit. When did you first meet her? So Marie and I met in 1998. I'd known about her before, because she was very well known, you know,

amongst her foreign correspondents covering the Middle East and so on. And, you know, and she was always somebody I rather admired. And then it was 1998, and war had broken out between Ethiopia and Eritrea. And there were a group of us who were in Djibouti, which is the hottest place on earth. And it was what, you know, everybody sensible was trying to leave Eritrea, all the business people and so on.

And there were what H.L. Mencken called the Little Bunch of Mad Men, and that's the journalist trying to get in. And so Marie and I happened to sort of fall into lockstep as we walked across this very lumpy runway to a, a small plane which was going to take us in with Ukrainian pilots. And we sat next to each other. And as we went along the runway, we heard, and we saw two things whipping past the window. And we realized they were our pilot's t-shirts, which they had taken off because it was so hot

and hung to dry on the wings. And then we looked into the cockpit. The door was open. And sure enough, our Ukrainian pilots were flying bare-chested. And then the plane took off. And as it took off, all the TV gear, which they had. put unsecured at the top, at the front, started to slide down the aisle. And Marie and I got the giggles.

We were so sure we were going to die and we were going to fall into the Red Sea. We just got the giggles like two little girls in school. Can you tell us a bit about who Martha Gellhorn was and her influence on Marie? Well, Marie didn't study journalism. She actually studied anthropology at Yale. But then she decided while she was there that she wanted to be a journalist. and she had a couple of role models. Now, the first one was really John Hersey, who taught at Yale,

and who wrote that incredible book, Hiroshima, which Marie always said was the best book on war she ever read. And what Hersey did was he took the lives of five people who had been there during the atomic bomb. And it wasn't a book about strategy, and it wasn't a book about the technology. It was a book about the people's lives. and Marie's friend Katrina remembers that, you know, after she came out of that first class,

Marie said, now I know what I want to do. I want to tell these big stories in this way through the human story of what happens in war. And then her next role model was really Martha Galhorn. Now Martha Galhorn reported the Spanish Civil War and World War II. And she was really, I mean, she was somebody who believed in being out there on the ground and getting the intimate story of people's lives in war. And that was what, she called it the view from the ground. And Marie used to travel with a rather battered copy of the collected or the selected

works of Martha Gellhorn, which had that same title as a book. And she really believed in reporting the way that Martha did, which was not, you know, generals and strategy and what Martha Gellon rather than write if you called the big picture. It was the small picture, the picture of what happens to people. Did you find that Marie's view of doing this type of work influenced you? Did it change the way that you approached your reporting? I sometimes reported alongside each other, but we're doing very different things because I worked for a daily TV news program while she was on a Sunday paper.

So I was rather jealous because she always had time, you know, because she could spend, you know, six days on a story where I would have one. So, you know, in that sense, we were not in competition, and, you know, I could only just sort of look and wish that I could do that. But I think that she was influential in general because back in the mid-80s, it was quite unusual to reporting the way that she did. She sometimes used the first person, and she would, she really believed in getting up close. It was sort of the written equivalent of the photography. photographer Robert Kappa's maximum. You know, if your pictures aren't good enough, it's because you're not close enough.

And that was what Marie believed. And, you know, sometimes she would take that again to a real extreme, you know, which is, you know, she could put it, you know, sort of going in bare, eating the same thing as people eat and sleeping where they sleep and so on. This was very much the way that she reported. But I think that, I mean, the way I report is somewhat different, partly because I'm television, but I think that also I'm not so very, right of the big picture as Marie was. I do think that when you're on the front line,

you also need to pull back as well. They give you two different kinds of stories, though, right? They give you two different kinds of stories. And Marie definitely always put in context. She had everything in context. But I think that it was this, the intensity of her experience really came through in her stories. And I think that that was what appealed to readers and what made her writing and her reporting so fresh and so compelling. Do you know if there was a particular story or interview or period of work that she was particularly proud of? Well, I think she was very proud of East Timor.

So she went to East Timor in 1999, as did many other journalists when there was a referendum on independence from Indonesia. and the referendum, as everybody knew, went 98%, 99% for independence, but the Indonesians weren't willing to accept that. And they sponsored militias that went around threatening people and killing people and waving machetees. It was very terrifying. A lot of Isti-Marie fled into the UN compound,

and the journalists also went to the UN compound, and it was besieged, and it was very terrifying. And most editors ordered their journalists to leave, and the UN was also going to evacuate to pull its staff out because it was so dangerous. But Marie felt that that would be abandoning people and that would be morally wrong. She also thought that the story was right there where they were. And so she and two Dutch journalists, Minca and Irina, stayed when the other journalist left. And it's just a classic Marie story that she called her foreign editor after all the other journalists had left.

He would have rather liked to have been consulted, but that wasn't going to happen. And so she said to him, look, Sean, I'm here. And he said, well, who else have stayed? And she said, well, Minka and Irene are these two Dutch women. And he said, well, where are all the men? And she said, well, they've gone. I guess they don't make men like they used to. Now, that was a classic Marie comment.

I have to say, in all fairness, that I know of two corresponders, who happens to be men who had gone into the mountains with the guerrillas. Also, obviously, there were UN staff who volunteered to stay as well. But she was, you know, she was constantly broadcasting from that compound. And the broadcast that she did, not just her Sunday newspaper reporting, but the broadcasts had a huge impact. And she felt that by staying with people and by, you know, refusing to abandon them, you know, that that had made a difference. And indeed it had. And there was a lot more pressure on the Indonesians after that.

because of the news and the stories that she was getting out. And after a few days, they caved and they agreed that a peacekeeping force led by the Australians could go in. And that was a story where Marie really felt that she had made a difference, and she was very proud of it. That story really speaks to the danger of doing this kind of work. And can you tell us how Marie dealt with it both physically and emotionally? Well, well and badly. You know, she, sometimes people would describe Maria as fearless, and that's not true. She wasn't fearless.

She got afraid. Everybody gets afraid, but she would conquer her fear. And she would conquer her fear partly because, like all journalists, she was competitive and she wanted to be the one who got the story. And also because she was really committed to what she did. But she drank too much. Now, that's not unusual amongst foreign correspondents or journalists in general. but after she

she was in Sri Lanka in 2001 and she crossed the front line from the Tamil tiger held area to the government-controlled area and the people she was with they were ambushed by government forces and she was shot in the eye and she lost the sight in that eye

and after that she became very vulnerable to nightmares she had terrible nightmares about the moment before she was shot and a few years they were as she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. And a lot of the images, you know, which she had seen in her life as a war reporter, came back to her, you know, people who've been blown apart, a child, a woman who's, you know, foot sticking out of a haystack in Kosovo, this kind of thing.

She couldn't get rid of those images. And then she was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and she recovered. But I think, you know, she had this image of this brave, glamour, bold war reporter wearing the eye patch. And it was an image which she bought into. She liked that image. But she couldn't always marry it up with what she felt inside. And I think that whereas after she lost the sight in her eyes, she was forced to come to terms with the fragility of her body. I think it took her a long time. And maybe she never really did come to terms with the fragility of her mind. What made you decide to write this book? Why did you want to write her biography?

I wasn't Marie's best friend. If I'd been Marie's best friend, I couldn't have written the book. I'd have been too close. I was on her out of circle. You know, I was a friend on the road. I used to like to think of us as the Selma and Louise of the press corps. But it so happened that we were in Beirut together in February 2012, and Marie said that she was going to get smuggled into Babarama, which was the besieged enclave of Homs. It was just when the Syrian Revolution was turning into the civil war. that that was beyond my danger threshold, I couldn't do it, but she went ahead and went in. And so I was obviously following her closely, and then she did an incredible report on the widow's basins. It was a very important report because the government of President Bashar al-Assad was saying that there were only terrorist fighters in this enclave. And Marie's story showed that the enclave was full of women and children who were being pounded by Assad's rockets. And so I read it, and I thought, great, she'll be back in London soon. and then I got a message from her saying that she'd gone back in.

And I couldn't believe that she'd gone back in. I knew that she had had to walk bent double through a storm drain to get in. And then she called from Skype on the satellite phone inside because she wanted to broadcast and be on Channel 4 News and say what was happening, which was terrible. I mean, there was sort of endless rockets coming in. people were being slaughtered. And, you know, I was furious with her. You know, I said, why on earth have you gone back in?

You already did a great story. And she said, Lindsay, it's the worst thing we've ever seen. And I said, I know, but what's your exit strategy? She said, well, that's just it. I don't have one. We're working on it now. And she was killed a few hours later. And so I suppose that that just stayed with me.

I couldn't, you know, she was always there. and I realized, you know, that I hadn't really known her that well. And so that was what made me want to write about her. How did you, what did you have access to and what did you learn about her life that surprised you while you were writing this? Well, I was very lucky. You know, it's a strange, it's a strange thing to get to know your friend better in death than in life. But Marie kept notebooks and diaries all her life from the age of 13 up until, just before she was killed.

And I had access to those notebooks and diaries. Now, a lot of the notebooks are like, you know, any of us as journalists would keep, you know, with just descriptions of places and interviews with people. But some of them are very intimate, and she would write down her feelings and her thoughts. And then also when she was doing something exceptional, like, for example, when she was in Chechnya under bombardment and she got cut off and had to walk through the Caucasus Mountains to escape. She kept an incredibly detailed diary of, you know, exactly, you know,

what she'd, where she was and what was going on and, you know, all her thoughts about how she was, you know, how she might die and how she, you know, it was, it was, it was terrifying, terrifying stuff. And I find, you know, and then, you know, it was just before Christmas. I mean, let's a video a little bit about she's in this, In the middle of the snow, she's just crossed the border into Georgia, but she's no idea whether she's going to be saved or not.

They've walked for four days under bombardment for some of the time. And then she writes 24th of December 1999. Should be in Paris cooking Christmas dinner. Snowstorm closes in midday, obscuring the mountains in a haze, starting on the small, gentle white flakes, then cloud of white. I'm not worried we won't survive, just how long we have to be here. and the worry I will cause those who care. It does make me think who cares.

Mom, if she knows, will have a terrible Christmas. Patrick, that was her ex-husband, who she was now back together with, will be worried and furious. I can't tell what he will feel. I think he does love me. But it's a love where he wants his own life and me to fit into it. Hard to describe even to myself. And you sort of reason I back, and you have this sort of vision of this woman

who's gone through this extraordinary, physical feat of climbing these mountains to escape and great terror. And she's sitting in his hut writing about her boyfriend and does he love her or not. So I think that it was that kind of very human and intimate side that I found really fascinating. I'm curious if you've seen the film that they've done on Marie's life and what you thought of it, especially having done so much research and sort of learning so much about your friend afterwards in writing this book. Yeah, I mean, there's two films. There's a documentary under the wire, which is, which features Paul Conroy, who was the photographer who she was with on that last trip into Homs in Syria, which is a, it's just terrifying and extraordinary.

And then there's the feature film, Private War, starring Rosamond Pikes Marie. And I think that, I mean, Rosamond Pikes is an extraordinary actress, and she really studied, she never met Marie, but, you know, there's some Marie on, on YouTube and so on that you can find. and she really studied her movements and she's absolutely kind of spooky when you watch her because she's really got that there's a very angular way in which Marie walked and Marie's voice I mean Marie was a 20 a day smoker

and she never lost her New York accent very distinctive voice and you know Rosam and Pike really really has that so yeah it's very it's very strange to watch it Is it odd to watch a myth be built up around someone you knew well? Well, you know, and you can argue that maybe I'm guilty of building the myth as well, and I worry about that sometimes.

But I hope that in the book, you know, I'm honest, because Marie was a very flawed person. And, you know, she was a brilliant journalist, but she also made journalistic mistakes. and I'm clear about that. I mean, I think she made a lot of misjudgments in the run up to the 2003 war in Iraq. She believed to the leader of the opposition, Ahmed Chalabi, when it was, you should have been clear to her that he was a charlatan

long before she was willing to recognize that. So, you know, like all journalists, she made mistakes, and not all of her stories were brilliant. And in her personal life, you know, look, being married to Marie, oh, my goodness, you know, I can't imagine anything. more traumatic. But, you know, I think what I worry about in the myth is that she will come over as sort of saintly and righteous and somebody who was committed, you know, committed to the cause of the

victims of war, which she was. But she was also very funny, you know. She was the best company on the road. And she was very witty. And I hope that in this sort of missmaking, that we don't lose sight of that, this very flawed, flawed but glorious, very human woman. Do you think those journalistic mistakes are kind of a feature of the kind of work she was doing? If you get that close to a story, you get a certain, you know, like you were saying earlier, you get a certain perspective on the story. but if you don't have that zoomed out view,

you do tend to, you know, get maybe too involved in these people's lives. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I think you can definitely, look, Marie was not ideological. She wasn't left wing or right wing. She wasn't one of those journalists who will, you know, like a paint-by-numbered journalists who will go in and find a story, you know, find the facts to fit her opinions. But she definitely, you know, her bias was in favor of the underdog.

and so that was what you know that was the passion that drove her but yes I think that you can argue that that made her you know vulnerable as it were to somebody you know telling a lie about the underdog or exaggerating the situation of the underdog or whatever so yeah I think that there are ways in which her journalism was flawed it's like the strength of her journalism was also its weakness but I think that it's important to recognize and understand that because, you know, there is no such thing as a perfect journalist.

Journalism is a very imperfect craft. I want to switch tracks just a little bit and talk a little bit more about her death, if we can. Sure. Because I think it's important that people understand that this was the nature of it. It wasn't just that she died in an artillery bombing. She was killed, correct? Absolutely correct. I mean, she was, I mean, her family, her family,

sister, Kat Colvin, and Henephew and Yvesh and Nies have taken out a civil case against the Syrian government with the help of the Center for Justice and Accountability, where they're suing the Syrian government in a civil court in Washington for Marie's extrajudicial killing. And there is quite a lot of evidence which has come up, which I cite in the last chapter, from defectors who basically say that the fourth division, which is commanded by President Basharassi, that's brother Maher, was targeting the media center and the journalist in the media center because it's also important to remember that there was a young French photographer, Remy Oshlich,

who was also killed in the same attack where Marie was killed. And what the defectors say, there are two defectors, but one of them says that the broadcasts that Marie did with CNN, the BBC, and with Channel 4 News, my own program, that those signals were intercepted and then triangulated with human intelligence, in other words, a spy on the ground. And that was how they knew exactly where this media center was, and they attacked it.

And Paul Conroy, the photographer, who had previously been a soldier, he says that he could tell that they were bracketing. In other words, they were firing to the left and firing to the right until the spotter, you know, got them able to make a diary, hit. So yes, there is strong evidence that she was directly targeted. And the defector also

says that the particular part of the Syrian military, which was responsible, also celebrated her death. Why was it important for them? Why was that a target? Because the narrative of the Syrian government was that everybody in Baba Ama was a terrorist, a terrorist and a rebel. And that there were, was amiss that there were women, children, victims there. And Marie's story in particular had given

the light of that. Marie's story was about these poor frightened people huddling in this basement and in these terrible conditions with the snow coming through the broken windows and the absolute terror of rockets coming in every few minutes.

She had painted this incredibly vivid story, this situation of what was really going on. And it absolutely went against what they were trying to say and what they were trying to prove. And the translator, Marie, worked with YL. I mean, his view is that as long as this was just written, then it was less significant for the Syrian government. But the moment Marie started broadcasting from Baba Amr, that was where they were really determined that she should be silent. What was the immediate reaction and impact for the community of foreign correspondents who had worked with Marie when they found out about her death?

I think it was massive because, you know, Marie had been killed, Remy had been killed, Paul Conroy was badly injured. Edie Bouvier, a French journalist who was also there, was also very badly injured. And it took two weeks for them and William Daniels and Javier Espinoza, who were other European journalists, side to be able to escape, to get out. And so everybody's eyes were fixed on Babarama. Were the rest of our colleagues going to survive, or were they also going to be killed, like Marie and Remy? And then, you know, sometime later,

the Islamic State kidnapped James Foley and Stephen Sotloff, and then they were murdered. And so Syria became unacceptably dangerous and almost impossible to go in to report, if you managed to get a visa from the government side, which wasn't easy to get. And I think that this was a point where editors began to think that, you know, it was unacceptably dangerous to send people. But then what also happened was that Syrians started to report their own story.

And it's also, you know, we should remember that the majority of journalists who've been killed in Syria are Syrians. You know, we're talking more, you know, in the hundreds there as opposed to, you know, fewer than ten of foreign coroner. respondents. And so, you know, but that became a rather different way of covering the story and this sort of, you know, eyewitness outside a journalist like Marie. I think that her just showed us, you know, some people I think that felt, you know, she was very famous in the community. And it was like, you know, if Marie can die, if Marie can be killed, or what hope is there for the rest of us? It had a profound impact, I thought, on it was all, I think. we would love to hear you reflect on what Marie's legacy is.

Well, I think Marie's, you know, when we were all really shocked as well as grief-stricken when Marie died. But I think that her legacy is, you know, she believed in bearing witness and in being there, in being an eyewitness. And since she died, a couple of her friends at least who said at the BBC and Jane Wellesley, who's the executive of her Willough, and I, we've sort of banded together and we started a small project trying to provide support to young female journalists in the Arab world, Arab journalists, and, you know, trying to provide mentorship and, you know, safety training and counselling and so on. Because I think that increasingly these young people, men and women, but we're concentrating women for the moment, who are the ones who are carrying the legacy forward, reporting stories in their own countries. Because the model of

journalism and news story writing and so on has changed and because there's a little money and foreign corresponding now and newspapers and TV stations aren't having bureau in the same way they used to and and so I think that Marie would want to see the these people carrying on her legacy and reporting in her tradition so that's what we're trying to do but I think that you know I think that basically she believed that reporting could have a impact to make a difference. I think that that is increasingly difficult now with the fragmentation of the media, but she totally believed in information for its own sake and trying to find out what was going on and telling the truth. So I think that now, you know, even if you can't

say it makes a difference, they can never say afterwards that they didn't know what was happening because we told them, journalists told them, Marie told them. And, and we told them, and And journalists reporting in Marie's tradition will continue to tell them. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on the show. That's all this week, War College listeners. Thank you for tuning in.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation as well as our extra special guest host. Next week, we'll be looking at what's going on between Ukraine and Russia. The story we uncovered may surprise you a little. As always, if you like the show, please remember to like and subscribe to us on iTunes. It helps others find the show. We're on Twitter at war underscore college and on Facebook. Just search for the War College podcast. Stay safe until next week.