NPR war correspondent spotlighted human toll

Anne Garrels, an international correspondent for NPR who reported from the front lines of major conflicts around the world, including during the U.S. “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad in 2003, died Wednesday at her home in Norfolk, Conn. She was 71.

Her brother, John Garrels, said the cause was lung cancer.

Garrels started her journalism career in television at ABC News. But it was at NPR, where she worked for more than two decades, that she made her name covering strife and bloodshed across the world. She became known for conveying how momentous events, like wars, affected the people who lived through them. Her backdrops included the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Her elegant personal style and intellectual air masked a zeal for taking risks. She covered both Chechen wars despite a Russian ban on outside journalists. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she traveled to Afghanistan to report from the front lines of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

She was also irrepressible. When the war in Ukraine began in February, Garrels, long retired from NPR and in treatment for cancer, proposed covering the conflict.

The network declined to send her, so instead she helped found a nonprofit relief organization, assist-ukraine.org, which raised money to send supplies to Ukrainians.

Her most acclaimed reporting came during the 2003 Iraq War. More than 500 journalists, including more than 100 Americans, covered the run-up to the war. But once the United States began the all-out bombing campaign known as “shock and awe,” she was one of 16 U.S. correspondents not embedded with U.S. troops who stayed — and for a time was the only U.S. network reporter to continue broadcasting from the heart of Baghdad.

In 2003 she received the George Polk Award “for enduring bombings, blackouts, thirst and intimidation to report from the besieged Iraqi capital of Baghdad.” The next year she was part of the NPR team that won the duPont-Columbia Award and a Peabody Award for its Iraq coverage.

Anne Longworth Garrels was born July 2, 1951, in Springfield, Mass. Her father, John C. Garrels Jr., was an executive and later chair and managing director of Monsanto, the chemical company. Her mother, Valerie (Smith) Garrels, was a homemaker.

When Anne was about 8, the family moved to London for her father’s work. Anne attended St. Catherine’s School in Bramley, southwest of London, and then enrolled at Middlebury College in Vermont in 1968.

“She was originally going to be a doctor,” Laura Palmer, who met Garrels when they both worked at ABC News in the mid-1970s, said by email. “A chemistry professor at Middlebury told her she should learn Russian. She was never sure why. But she transferred to Harvard and fell in love with Russian and everything about the country.”

Garrels graduated in 1972 with a degree in Russian. In 1975 she landed a job as a researcher at ABC News; because she knew Russian, she was sent to Moscow. ABC soon promoted her to Moscow bureau chief. Her tough reporting on topics like housing shortages, loneliness and suicide led authorities to expel her in 1982.

After Russia, ABC sent Garrels to cover the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua. NBC then hired her in 1985 as its State Department correspondent in Washington.

In Washington, she met James Vinton Lawrence, whom she married in 1986. Lawrence, who had worked for the CIA in the 1960s, became a renowned caricaturist, chiefly for the New Republic.

Garrels joined NPR in 1988 and worked in its Moscow bureau. When she left Moscow in 1998, she and Lawrence sold their home in Washington and moved to his family’s compound in Norfolk, in northwest Connecticut.

Garrels’ first book, “Naked in Baghdad,” was published in 2003. The title referred to her habit of working in her room at the Palestine Hotel with no clothes on. Strange as it seems, her explanation was that if Iraqi security forces banged on her door, they would give her time to get dressed, and she would be able to hide her illegal satellite phone.

Garrels retired from NPR in 2010, although she remained a contributor. Her continuing reports from Chelyabinsk, a military-industrial city in Russia, provided the basis for her second book, “Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia.” It was published in 2016 — the same year that she underwent her first treatments for lung cancer and the year her husband died of leukemia.

In addition to her brother, Garrels is survived by her sister, Molly Brendel, and her stepdaughters, Rebecca Lawrence and Gabrielle Strand.

Dianna Douglas / NPR 2006 Anne Garrels in Iraq during one of the wars she covered.