Intrepid reporter from conflict zones who found ‘the wars kept happening’
Anne Garrels, who has died aged 71, was a broadcast correspondent who was expelled from the Soviet Union, covered Central America’s civil wars and brought National Public Radio listeners into the heart of Baghdad during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. ‘‘I didn’t set out to be a war correspondent,’’ she said in a 2003 interview. ‘‘The wars kept happening.’’
Garrels became one of NPR’s most experienced voices from the field during conflicts and from flashpoints that included China’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy crowds in Tiananmen Square, Russia’s war in Chechnya in the 1990s and the fall of Kabul to Western-allied forces following the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks.
With deft use of natural sound and a vivid descriptive palette, she became a master at what is often the most compelling kind of war reporting: moving beyond what foreign correspondents call the daily ‘‘bangbang’’ to bring stories about the people caught in the conflict and informed analysis on what was likely ahead.
Covering one of the indelible moments of the Iraq War – the toppling of a huge statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad – Garrels accurately noted that the euphoria of Hussein’s downfall would soon fade and the Pentagon would likely be in for a long struggle against opponents of Western forces.
In an oral history published by the Columbia Journalism Review, Garrels said her editors in Washington wondered if she should emphasise the celebration. She stood firm. ‘‘Many people were just sort of standing, hoping for the best,’’ she said, ‘‘but they weren’t joyous.’’
She was among the few correspondents for US media in Baghdad during the initial airstrikes in 2003. Her dispatches described scenes in the Iraqi capital amid the relentless air attacks as US-led ground forces closed in.
During the height of the war, Garrels managed like other correspondents: keeping the bathtub full to anticipate water cuts, working by candlelight or generator, and getting by on snacks and, for some, smokes.
Her personal account of the war, Naked in Baghdad (2003), refers to her habit of working in her hotel room without clothes as a security trick. If Iraqi security came to the door, she explained, she could ask for time to get dressed – and allow her a chance to stash her satellite phone to avoid confiscation.
Anne Longworth Garrels was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1951. She moved to Britain with her family at age 8 after her father, an executive at agrochemical giant Monsanto, relocated to London.
A longtime family friend, Peter Kazaras, said Garrels showed an early hint of the journalist at age 4 at Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International). As she waited with her older siblings for a flight to join their parents in Bermuda, she interviewed all the other passengers. ‘‘She asked everyone, from an 80-year-old woman to a young child who, as it turns out, was going to her father’s funeral,’’ Kazaras wrote in an email. ‘‘ ‘Why did he die? How did he die?’.’’
Garrels graduated in 1972 from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts with a bachelor’s degree in Russian. In 1975, she started as a researcher at ABC News and later was posted to Moscow. Her reports on Soviet life, including housing shortages and suicides, put her at odds with Kremlin minders.
She was expelled in 1982 following a tense period after her car struck and killed a pedestrian she described as ‘‘drunk’’. She was cleared of any charges, but claimed the investigation was used by authorities to keep her under pressure. I ‘‘found myself caught up in a political wilderness where there were no rules’’, she wrote in 1986.
After Moscow, she covered the conflicts in El Salvador, where the United States backed the right-wing governments, and in Nicaragua, where US-aided contras were trying to overthrow leftist Sandinista leaders. She returned to Washington in 1985 as NBC’s State Department correspondent, covering the Reagan administration.
Garrels joined NPR in 1988 in Moscow just as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel. Amid the chaotic aftermath, she began following the lives of a group of people in Chelyabinsk, a city near Russia’s Ural Mountains. For two decades, she kept tabs on their lives. The result was the 2016 book, Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia.
In the 1990s, she managed to reach the front lines in Chechnya despite Moscow’s controls on media access to the Muslim republic seeking autonomy. In Afghanistan, she travelled by bus to reach the Northern Alliance, a US-backed force that was the first to push into Kabul in 2001 to topple the Taliban.
Her husband, James Vinton Lawrence, a former CIA operative who became an illustrator, died in 2016. Survivors include two stepdaughters, a brother and a sister.
During the Iraq War, Garrels played down her own courage and pointed to the people caught in conflict as often showing true resolve. She once recounted a time when she and her Iraqi assistant, Amer, pulled an injured man from a firefight. ‘‘As Amer and I washed away the blood, [the man] looks at me with a smile and says with a certain amount of surprise, ‘You are very brave.’ I look at his suit, now covered with blood, and tell him the same.’’
I ‘‘found myself caught up in a political wilderness where there were no rules’’.
Anne Garrels of her time reporting in Russia