Leslie Cockburn - Looking for Trouble: One Woman, Six Wars and a Revolution

Leslie Cockburn has had a fabulously interesting career impressive and often amusing.

The Village Voice

Danger-loving journalist Leslie Cockburn has broken bread with the Cali cartel, marched with the Khmer Rouge, thwarted a Kurdish war, taken on the tobacco lobby, and lived to tell the horrifying tales in her ripping collection of war stories Hello, Mattel? Cant you make a Barbie like that?

Vanity Fair

With tenacity and talent, [Cockburn] pries her way into the fraternity of journalistic firemen who can parachute into any crisis and extract a story Cockburns work has given her an extraordinary perspective on 20 years of failures in American foreign policy.

The New York Times Book Review

Cockburns resume makes Peter Arnett look like a book reviewer extremely well written.

New City (Chicago)

Cockburns lively first-person account prove[s] shes not just another parachute journalist who drops in for a live shot on the evening news before being airlifted to safety I give her credit for her guts, persistence, and tenacity.

Greensboro News and Record

Cockburn clearly has prodigious amounts of both talent and stamina.

Memphis Commercial Appeal

Vividly captures the mixture of knowledge, contacts, and bravado required to bring U.S. audiences stories from countries where secrecy and cover-up are a way of life.

Booklist

ALSO BY LESLIE COCKBURN

Out of Control

COAUTHOR ( WITH ANDREW COCKBURN )

Dangerous Liaison
One Point Safe

A N A NCHOR B OOK
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

A NCHOR B OOKS , D OUBLEDAY , and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint copyrighted material: Excerpt from Canto XXIX from The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:

Cockburn, Leslie.
Looking for trouble / by Leslie Cockburn.
p. cm.
1. Cockburn, Leslie. 2. Women journalistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Investigative journalismUnited States. I. Title.
PN4874.C599A3 1998
070.92dc21 97-21479
[B]

eISBN: 978-0-307-83412-6
Copyright 1998 by Leslie Cockburn
All Rights Reserved
First Anchor Books Trade Paperback Edition: March 1999

v3.1

For Chloe, Olivia, and Charlie

This book would not have been possible without Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency, whose encouragement was crucial to the enterprise. Arabella Meyer at Anchor ushered it through to completion with patience and a ruthless eye for detail.

I owe a debt to family and friends who urged me to write about my perilous travels to the back-of-beyond. Ana Carrigan, Gloria Emerson, Flip Caldwell, Jeanne Redlich, Melissa North, Jennifer Phillips, Connie Bruce, Lindy von Eichel, Emma Gilbey, Gail Percy, Wade Davis, Joel McCleary, Alexander Chancellor, and Bill Broyles gave me indispensable support. John Hatt gave me champagne at the Oriental.

Speak civilly to blondes and they will speak civilly to you.

P. G. W ODEHOUSE

W E BOARD the sleek white United Nations jet in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. U.N. is painted in huge letters on the wings. There is an illustrated land mine warning card in every seat pocket. Our destination, Afghanistan, is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. Mine sweepers complain of vertical minefields in the ruins of Kabul, fifteen layers of mines planted in the sediment of homes rocketed into troughs of dust. Families are living in the ruins. Most Afghan women give birth to eight or nine children. Then the mines and rockets pick them off, one by one.

It is October 1996. This trip is a whirlwind assignment for ABC News. It begins with a call on a Wednesday morning from Phyllis McGrady, executive producer of Primetime Live.

Diane wants to go to Afghanistan. Diane Sawyer is the Primetime Live anchor at ABC in New York. I told her you were the only person who could produce this piece. Do you want to do it?

I cant think of anything Id rather do. This is, in fact, true. The occupation of Kabul in September by the Taliban, an army of shadowy fundamentalist Muslims from Kandahar, has been catastrophic for Afghan women. Surgeons, engineers, and civil servants who have kept the capital functioning throughout eighteen years of war, during the Soviet occupation and its bloody aftermath, have been fired from their jobs. They can no longer appear in public without wearing a shroud. If there is a hint of an ankle, the Taliban enforcers beat them with sticks. The heavy silk burka has a three-inch embroidered screen to allow partial vision without the eyes being displayed. Their daughters have been expelled from school. Thirty-five thousand war widows, whose paltry income from menial work feeds some 300,000 children, have been forced by the bearded mullahs to quit work. The children are starving.

ABCs McGrady gives me carte blanche to assemble a team. I call Fabrice Moussus, a seasoned cameraman in Paris, and Carlos Mavroleon, a London-based fixer and troubleshooter who speaks Dari and Pashto, the languages of Afghanistan. He has ties to guerrilla factions dating back to his days fighting with the mujahedin against the Russians. A soundman and an assistant to coordinate logistics fill out the crew. We agree to meet on Saturday in Islamabad, the jumping-off point for U.N. aid flights. The Red Cross has suspended flights to Afghanistan due to bombing. No one flies commercially. The only other aircraft in Afghan airspace are MIGs, Russian-made fighter-bombers, in the hands of the Taliban and their opponents in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Carlos brings the steel-plated flak jackets.

I have now covered six wars and a revolution, as a producer for CBS and ABC News, correspondent for PBS Frontline, and writer for Vanity Fair. I have covered this war twice. For Diane Sawyer, this is unfamiliar turf. Foreign travel usually means a chauffeur-driven Volga to the Kremlin for an interview with Boris Yeltsin. Still, she weathered a Russian coup and seems game for anything.

Our last meeting before this expedition was at a transvestite magic show in Dublin. Dianes husband, Mike Nichols, was conducting research at a popular Irish club called Mr. Pussys for his upcoming film The Birdcage. I was in town with my husband, Andrew, to write a Vanity Fair story on the American involvement in the impending cease-fire in Northern Ireland. The four of us sat primly in a booth while a drag queen placed his sequined accomplice in a box and proceeded to saw slowly through her. Diane and I discussed the state of television news.

We lamented the lack of foreign stories in the increasingly frothy tabloid mix of the network newsmagazines. Now, ABC News has been swallowed up by the Walt Disney Company. One of Disneys first acts was to install a Mickey Mouse souvenir shop in the lobby of the news headquarters on West 66th Street in New York. I call ABC News Disneys Reality Division. The lead story on Dianes newsmagazine the week of our departure is a hard look at garage door openers.