They work in places like Kosovo and Grozny, but they live—most of them, at least—in London’s Notting Hill, a neighborhood better known for its Victorian-camisole street fairs than its rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. The town house of CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, the world’s most famous war reporter, is smartly appointed, with African sculptures and socially conscious photography books stacked just so on the coffee table. Even the vase on the hallway floor works—but only after you hear the backstory: it’s the 155-mm. howitzer shell that landed two doors down from Amanpour at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn during the war in Bosnia. “If it had exploded, I and everyone else in that wing would have been killed,” says Amanpour, feet on coffee table, hands behind head.
The daughter of an Iranian father and British mother, Amanpour is part of a small brigade of women who have trooped, more or less as a group, from misery to misery, from Iraq to Bosnia to East Timor to Chechnya and, lately, to Afghanistan and Israel’s West Bank. They have shared rooms and deep friendships. They have elbowed each other out of the way to get the story, and gossiped behind one another’s backs. And they all think an article about female war correspondents is pretty lame. “Safari Susans!” exclaims Amanpour facetiously.
Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. “We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,” says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, *The Guardian’*s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing “Horse Killer Pass.” Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s my party patch,” says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. “I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.”
Despite toughness to burn, they concede that a woman reporter’s experience at war is different from a man’s. In traditional societies, where there is the residual belief that women are ultimately harmless, they may slip past checkpoints unhassled, or even unnoticed. Among Muslim extremists, such as in Afghanistan, they are the only conduit to half of the population, while the other half often views these Western women as different creatures altogether—“a third sex,” as Rowland puts it—to be both avoided and respected. (Perhaps that’s why many Northern Alliance soldiers could only handle calling her “Mr. Jack.”) There is, some suggest, an intrinsic, even biological difference between the ways they and their male counterparts look at war. “Boys get fascinated by toys about age two, and that never changes,” Colvin says. “That’s not what I think is important about covering a war. I think the story is the people.”
It’s an uneasy claim to make, and Colvin cringes at the notion that “women care about dying babies” and men don’t. And, to be sure, the point is often debated among female war reporters and their male colleagues. Nevertheless, it’s no coincidence that most members of the group revere Martha Gellhorn, the grande dame of women war reporters (once married to Ernest Hemingway), whose accounts of the Spanish Civil War and beyond reflected an interest not so much in bombs as in what lay beneath them—and a devotion to her own conscience. Patrick Graham, a longtime journalist who has met several of the women, admits that only someone like Marie Colvin would have hopped out of a car just because she saw a man sitting on the side of the road. As it happened, he was sitting by the grave of his young child and wife, who had warned him to leave town because Serbs were encroaching. “It was an incredible story,” says Graham. “And I think a lot of male reporters would have been too busy trying to find the next commander.”
Other characteristics they possess—which are inarguably feminine ones—have made it easier to get the incredible stories, too. A lover of tall, stiletto boots and good restaurants in her downtime, di Giovanni has the kind of large green eyes that inspire soldiers to unload their tales of woe. Petite and scrappy, Maggie O’Kane, 39, has routinely equipped herself with urgent stories and fake, “embarrassingly erotic” love letters to make it past police checkpoints. She has also turned endless jabbering into a professional calling: her epic grill sessions with her subjects—about wives, girlfriends, shoes, virtually anything—have had fellow journalists storming away, frustrated that they can’t get a word in edgewise, and even falling asleep.
It has also helped that all of them are easy on the eyes—a fact that none of them rushes to admit, especially Janine di Giovanni, she being perhaps the sexiest of the group. “I’m always getting called ‘the babe,’” says di Giovanni of her public image as she luxuriously goes to work on the shrimp in Notting Hill’s hip pan-Asian spot E&O. “It’s so tiresome.” Jacky Rowland, a five-foot-eleven blonde, had been sleeping in a freezing tent when she ran into her in Afghanistan late last year; di Giovanni suggested that Rowland do what she herself had done: just ask the French guy from the aid agency for permission to sleep in his office. “I can just imagine Janine ... ‘Oh, it’s so cold outside. Can I sleep in your office?’” says Rowland. “He just kind of melted in front of her. She was very kind in giving me that idea.”
Inevitably, there is also competition in this department. In Sarajevo, Maggie O’Kane wondered how di Giovanni managed to look so much better than everyone else. “There was a secret shower down in the garage [of the Holiday Inn], which Janine learned and didn’t tell us about,” says O’Kane. But there can be a downside to being pretty, too, as Rowland discovered when she met a leader of the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. While other Middle Eastern leaders had refused to shake her hand, he was more than happy to try to make out with her.
Ultimately, however, Rowland admits, being an attractive female helped her career along. The BBC correspondent in Belgrade during the 2000 elections in Yugoslavia and the fall of Milošević, Rowland says that “the only reason I survived as long as I did was because I was a woman,” and that Yugoslav information minister Goran Matic developed “a bit of a thing” for her, repeatedly summoning her to his office, where he’d binge nonstop with his cronies.
A rumor eventually emerged that the two were having an affair, and after doing some digging, Rowland theorized that Matic must have started the rumor himself. Given the fact that their affair would remain in the realm of Matic’s fantasy life, she says it’s no surprise that a few months later, in October 2000, he took particular enjoyment announcing her expulsion from the country for reporting—prematurely, he claimed—that Miloˇsevi´c was finished. “There is now a media war in Yugoslavia,” said Matic in a press conference, “and I see in this very room, over there, the correspondent of the BBC, Jacky Rowland, who says the elections are over and that the opposition has won.” Rowland didn’t leave the country, but went into hiding for five days. She came out to witness—and report—Miloˇsevi´c government’s literally going up in flames. Two months later she had a chance to speak to Goran Matic again at the fancy villa serving as party headquarters.
“Why did you expel me?” she asked.
“Jacky, you were just collateral damage,” Matic said.
“Did you know that I’d stayed?”
“Yes, I knew you stayed.”
“Did you care?”
“I didn’t care.”
Male correspondents can be just as love-struck and helpful as post-totalitarian bureaucrats. Consider the case of Bruno Girodon, a French television journalist, who fell in love with Janine di Giovanni at first sight, in Sarajevo in 1993; made serious headway in Algeria in 1998; and sealed the deal by Kosovo in May 1999. Girodon (in Kukës, Albania, at the time) got word that nato was bombing the Kosovo Liberation Army camp where di Giovanni was staying and that a number of soldiers had been killed. He decided it was time to act. After a dizzying maze of phone calls involving French secret-service agents, he finally got through to a Peruvian photographer: “Tell her to get out of there, it’s very important, she’s in great danger!” said Girodon before they lost the connection, hoping the photographer would relay the message to di Giovanni. Girodon’s crew moved on, but Girodon stayed behind at Kukës’s Bar Amerika hotel for two days, still unsure of di Giovanni’s whereabouts and going out of his head. After all, just one month earlier di Giovanni had been detained by drunken Serb soldiers who performed a mock execution on her and her colleagues. “And one day as miracle, she just appeared,” says Girodon, who didn’t recognize her at first. “And she said, ‘Here I am. I am still alive.’ And she was very muddy.”
Recalling his words, di Giovanni gets almost misty. “He just said, ‘I’ll never feel that kind of joy.’” As luck would have it, Girodon was staying in the hotel’s “nuptial suite”—which consisted of nothing more than a dirty mattress and one dinky pink pillow.
When it came to impressing his crush, Patrick Bishop didn’t have quite the luck that Girodon did. It was late 1986, six years into the Iran-Iraq war, and Bishop, a battle-hardened Sunday Telegraph reporter who’d made his name in the Falklands War, was imparting to Marie Colvin pearls from his bottomless reservoir of military knowledge. She was the new girl, after all, an American and a Yale grad, just 30 years old, and she happened to have this amazing, out-ofcontrol mane of brown curly hair.
“You don’t have to worry about that. That’s all outgoing,” said Bishop above the explosions surrounding them on the Iraqi front line. “You’ll learn when you’ve been around like I have to distinguish between outgoing and incoming.... That’s outgoing,” he continued, “and that one is ... incoming!” Bishop dived for cover, Colvin remained standing, and the Iraqi soldiers walked away laughing.
“For the rest of my trip,” recalls Bishop, “I was thinking, How can I redeem myself having made such an ass of myself? I had these fantasies that the Jeep would be hit and shelled, and I’d be able to drag her from the wreckage and save her life.”
Bishop never had the opportunity to save Colvin, but she eventually fell for him anyway, unaware at this point that falling in love in a war zone often means acquiring an ex-husband. The marriage lasted two years. By the end, Colvin had decided that he was “the last person I ever want to see, speak to, hear of again.” As Colvin looks back on her marriage to Bishop, a picture emerges of two restless kids too caught up in destruction and death to concern themselves with anyone else—even each other. “If you have the war, the conflict, it becomes so important that those details are something you just forget,” Colvin says. “You get on a plane and you’re off somewhere, and if the phone gets cut off, the phone gets cut off. Your life is lived in this very ... almost schizophrenic way, and that is not what relationships are. [Relationships] are about squabbling over who forgot to buy the milk.” Surely Marguerite Higgins, the Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent from the New York Herald Tribune, would have understood: she once said she would not marry “until I find a man who’s as exciting as war.” Unfortunately, Colvin had to learn her lesson twice. A few years later, while covering an outbreak of violence in the West Bank, Colvin met Juan Carlos Gumucio, a reporter for El Pais. They, too, got married; they, too, split up not long thereafter.
Which brings us to the other problem with meeting husbands in the war-correspondent trade: once the marriage is over, you may very well run into them in the next war zone. In Kukës, Albania, around the same time di Giovanni and Girodon were having their emotional reunion, Marie Colvin returned to her room, only to find that someone else had moved in—judging from the stuff, a man. “I thought, Oh my God, what if that is one of my ex-husbands?” recalls Colvin, who knew they were both covering the story. She did what any grown woman would do: rummage through his bag. She was relieved to find a Rolling Stones tour T-shirt. “I knew neither of them would wear that.”
Relationships aren’t the only casualty. As a group, these reporters have lost close friends, such as Kurt Schork and Miguel Gil Moreno, two veteran risktakers who were slaughtered in Sierra Leone. At least one has lost pregnancies. Maggie O’Kane speculates that her four miscarriages may have been due to the fact that “I’ve kind of knocked myself around a lot.”
Also at risk is a healthy head space. Once the gunfire has stopped, normal life can seem eerily quiet, and disconcertingly shallow. Jacky Rowland, after running through the burning streets and tear gas in Belgrade on the day Miloˇsevi´c fell—the day she describes as “one of the best days of my life”—found smart London insufferably boring. “I was incapable of having an ordinary conversation with people about ordinary things,” says Rowland. “The experiences of being in a war and being bombed, and being on the run and being chased by authorities, it just makes it quite difficult to come down and talk mortgages and the latest fashions at Top Shop.” Belgrade was like an epic motion picture in which “time seems to move more slowly; the quality of light, everything, looks different.”
Like addicts, they need their fix. It’s worth noting, though, that it’s the former war journalists, such as ex–CNN correspondent Siobhan Darrow, author of Flirting with Danger, who will compare war to drugs. “I had the feeling of being a junkie,” says Darrow, who covered Chechnya, the Balkans, and Albania and now refers to herself as a “recovering war reporter.” “I was so used to being in a constant state of crisis that that was a comfortable place for me. If I stopped it for any amount of time, I was sort of left with myself and the void.”
Sometimes the void is filled with a nagging sense of guilt that they are war profiteers of a sort. “We are vultures, really,” says di Giovanni, whose reports about amputees and child soldiers in Sierra Leone made great copy and earned her high-profile awards. “We are peeling horrible stories from them. And then we are leaving their lives.” Colvin, too, sometimes feels “like a fake because ... I get to go home.” But the images rarely dim, a point brought home in February when Colvin’s second husband, Gumucio, took his own life—“a brutal reminder,” she says, “of seeing too much.”
What makes it all worth it—their fundamental passion—isn’t the romance or the adrenaline rush. It’s the quest for justice. And once, in Bosnia, as a group, they achieved it. “It was,” Amanpour has said, “my Vietnam.” For di Giovanni, “Bosnia broke my heart more than any man could.”
A campaign of ethnic cleansing waged by the Serbs against an essentially helpless civilian population of Muslims, Bosnia, says di Giovanni, “was a lot like the Spanish Civil War. You had a group of very idealistic young reporters who believed that we had to do something.” For her, that meant writing The Quick and the Dead, a wrenching account of the siege of Sarajevo told entirely from the perspective of the victims—the children who’d lost parents, the terrified mothers trying to keep it together, the disillusioned soldiers—as Europe and the U.S. stood by and watched. “It broke my heart,” says di Giovanni, “that tens of thousands of people died that did not have to die.”
While di Giovanni’s approach was that of a sympathetic witness, O’Kane was a “one-woman war-crime tribunal,” as journalist Patrick Graham puts it, and she made it her duty to doggedly hunt down murderers, such as a disgruntled bus driver said to have massacred an entire family in Suva Reka. It made a difference. In 1992, after reporting on the horrors of the Serb detention camp of Trnopolje, O’Kane concluded that it was a “concentration camp.” Three hundred and fifty journalists promptly raced into the area, among them an Independent Television Network reporter, Penny Marshall, who was filmed shaking hands with an emaciated man behind barbed wire. The image—eerily reminiscent of another 20th-century atrocity—was beamed around the world, and within 20 minutes of its airing on American television, President George H. W. Bush suddenly decided that “the international community cannot allow innocent children, women, and men to be starved to death,” and Prime Minister John Major recalled his Cabinet from vacation for an emergency meeting.
That camp was soon closed, the war went on, and the reporters did not let up. Two years later, CNN sponsored a town-hall forum starring President Clinton, who had promised during the 1992 campaign to take action in Bosnia but had done very little since taking office in 1993. Amanpour appeared on satellite television from Sarajevo and asked, “Do you not think that the constant flip-flops of your administration on the issue of Bosnia set a very dangerous precedent?” His feel-your-pain act dissolved. “There have been no ‘constant flip-flops,’ madam,” Clinton replied.
Amanpour soldiered on, relentlessly exposing Bosnia’s suffering to remind the Western powers of the tragedy they were letting occur in their backyards. Eventually, the flip-flops ended and the leaders acted decisively. “What we reported in Bosnia made it untenable for democracies to allow that kind of thing to happen again,” Amanpour says. As for the flak they sometimes received for not being “objective,” for rushing to hysterical judgment, all of them roundly dismiss it. “I certainly wasn’t objective,” says di Giovanni, “because I really believed there were very clear sides to be taken.” Or, as O’Kane explains, “The truth isn’t objective.”
Bosnia helped make their careers, brought them acclaim—and, in the case of Christiane Amanpour, made her an international icon, her own wing of the United Nations. By 1996, Clinton was introducing Amanpour as “the voice of humanity” at White House dinners. He wasn’t the only famous politico who developed a soft spot for Amanpour toward the end of the Bosnian conflict. So did then State Department spokesman James Rubin, who, before meeting Amanpour, divided the world between those who “thought that Bosnia was a fundamental moral imperative and people who saw it as another problem in a faraway land. Those who were in the first group were special.” When their courtship began in 1997, one of the jokes Rubin played on her “was to sort of pretend that I didn’t really know of her that much, and I didn’t watch much TV.” It wasn’t long before Rubin had to start taking it all a bit more seriously, as when he recently worried that Amanpour might meet the fate of the eight journalists killed in Afghanistan. “I bought into this package knowing that this was always part of it,” says Rubin, who married Amanpour in 1998 and has now spent many days and nights alone with their two-year-old son, Darius. “You never like it, but you get used to it, and you develop devices. We talk an enormous amount on the phone, we see each other on TV.”
Now Amanpour has men worldwide deciding that she’s a new kind of sexy, and Gwyneth Paltrow wishing aloud in Harper’s Bazaar that she could be her. Even when she receives nasty barbs in the press, as when the *New York Post’*s Andrea Peyser called her a “war slut,” she’s left with the upper hand. Post owner Rupert Murdoch wrote Amanpour a personal letter of apology.
Naturally Amanpour claims, “I’m not caught up in the celebrity culture,” but the words roll off her tongue so readily that one wonders if the lady doth protest too much. The photo gallery in her living room—basically limited to her family and various Kennedys—suggests celebrities aren’t so horrible. As does her reaction when a friend’s phone call brings the news that the actor Aidan Quinn thinks she rocks. “Aidan Quinn? I’m in love with Aidan Quinn!” she squeals from the other room. She returns to her interview blushing a little and, shrugging, says, “Another fan.”
For Maggie O’Kane, her five-year-old son, Billy, has given her joy and a keener perspective on her work. The story of the Bosnian woman who saw her four children machine-gunned down in Suva Reka is, she says, “a horror I wouldn’t have understood without being a mother now.” But he’s also brought her new conflicts. Sitting by the fire in her Georgian house in Edinburgh on this cold day in November, her little boy and his cat, Sylvia, cuddled in her arms, O’Kane says, “I’m not prepared to miss the next year of his life.” But when the radio brings the news that Mazar-e-Sharif has fallen, she fires up another Silk Cut and becomes restless—and one wonders whether she wouldn’t mind missing, well, maybe the next month of it. This spring, she was back in Bosnia, on the trail of Radovan Karadzic, wanted for six years for genocide.
At 37, single and on the up-and-up, Jacky Rowland isn’t yet plagued by such matters. She’s too busy providing testimony to the U.N. war-crimes tribunal about the grisly Serb prison she visited in Kosovo—which just happened to be bombed by nato forces on the afternoon she was there. Like Amanpour, she’s coping with both the thrill and the awkwardness of her newly minted celebrity. Her name and picture have recently been popping up in the U.K. press, and the media have dubbed her “the new Kate Adie.” Unfortunately, it’s a title that doesn’t sit well with the old Kate Adie, the 56-year-old doyenne of the BBC, who covered Libya, Tiananmen Square, and the Gulf War, and was once Rowland’s role model. Last fall, at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, Adie launched her own Scud missile at Rowland and her ilk, saying BBC bosses were now looking for reporters with “cute faces and cute bottoms and nothing else in between.” Rowland took it as a direct affront. “To see that the person who inspired me as a teenager is making bitchy comments about the young women who are following in her footsteps, I just don’t think that does justice to a proud tradition,” says Rowland. “She did establish women as war correspondents— and time ticks on.”
Fueled by Bosnia, Janine di Giovanni has continued the good fight. One of a handful of reporters willing to risk getting kidnapped, di Giovanni, in 2000, sneaked into Chechnya, where she witnessed—and was first to call—the fall of Grozny. Just as she had done in Bosnia, di Giovanni waited it out with the victims as they were bombarded, this time by Russian planes and tanks. The sights—from the dogs eating dead bodies, to the house filled with hungry, blind Chechens waiting in vain for help to come—were every bit as grim as those she saw in Bosnia. But this time the Western world did not intervene to stop the violence. After she tried without success to send help back from London to the blind Chechens, a bitter reality of being a war reporter hit her. “I felt so defeated,” says di Giovanni. That sentiment deepened in April when she returned to the site of her first story in 1989, the West Bank. “I see people who 12 years ago were throwing stones,” she says from the battle of Jenin. “Now they’re gunmen.” Finding comfort with Bruno Girodon isn’t easy. Based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he says, “I’m not thinking about the future. She wish I could think about the future, but I’m not living like that.” To which di Giovanni can only sigh, saying, “You choose to fall in love with a gypsy, what do you get?”
Colvin, too, has continued the quest—at times triumphantly. In East Timor in 1999, after machete-wielding militiamen went on a rampage, the U.N. staff and the journalists decided to evacuate, but Colvin stayed behind to act as a kind of human shield for 1,500 Timorese women and children, among them mothers who were so desperate they were throwing their babies over the barbed-wire fence surrounding the U.N. compound. Embarrassed by Colvin’s reports, the U.N. reversed its decision to leave the innocent behind, and the civilians were taken to safety in Australia.
And last April, Colvin took a 30-mile journey on foot through the jungle into the northern, Tamil-controlled area of Sri Lanka, a corner of the world truly forsaken by the West. Journalists were banned, and a humanitarian crisis, in which government forces had besieged 500,000 civilians, denying them food and medical aid, remained hidden from the world. Colvin filed her story, exposing the horror, and during her nighttime exodus she was caught in a fiery ambush; shrapnel from a grenade landed deep in her left eye. Despite her protests—“Don’t shoot! American! Journalist!”—she was pummeled by the government soldiers, who believed she was with the enemy Tamil Tigers. She was grilled by soldiers before being flown to Colombo, then to London, and then to New York. A doctor was able to save her eye—but not the ability to see out of it.
Colvin isn’t pitying herself, nor does she think she’s a hero for having nearly died for her cause. “I feel that I am very lucky,” she says. “These people you are leaving behind are much braver. If they want to live, they have to be brave every single day of their lives.” One such person was a Catholic priest she had met in Sri Lanka, who told her, icily, “No journalists have come, no one cares about us, so why should I talk to you?” After hearing of her injury, he had a letter smuggled out of Tamil Sri Lanka, where there’s no postal system, and had it sent from Colombo. The letter read, “I am very sorry to hear of your injuries. You are remembered here as a brave and honest person.” “It was just two lines,” Colvin says, “and it was so ... it made me feel good.”
After her injury, there was someone else who made her feel good, too, who treated her swollen eye with endless drops of steroids and antibiotics and ate meat loaf with her. In Kukës, Albania, three years ago, the night Colvin feared one of her two ex-husbands had become her roommate, ex-husband No. 1, Patrick Bishop, was actually just down the street and after 13 years apparently still held onto the hope that he might get to rescue her. He believed her to be in Bajram Curri, an area on the Albania-Kosovo border so dangerous he needed to get her out immediately. Desperately trying to find an armed escort for the mission, he asked a fellow reporter if he knew any reliable men: “Well, why don’t you go and ask Marie Colvin, she’s a great expert. She’s in the bar down the road.” “I went in there,” says Bishop, “and she was surrounded by young male acolytes who were listening to her every word. They were all dismissed as I sat down, and we started talking and that was that. We’ve been together ever since.”
Though they have figured each other out a little better this time around, Colvin and Bishop continue to butt heads. Two days before Colvin was injured, Bishop had a nightmare that she was killed. But knowing Marie, there was no point in telling her. And as of March, she was back, eye patch and all, in another war zone banned to journalists—Ramallah—braving the crossfire and stun grenades lobbed her way. There are no plans for marriage. In fact, Colvin wears her two wedding rings “to remind myself never to get married again,” and the Patrick Bishop problem seems to have found a workable solution. “He lives in Paris,” says Colvin from her garden flat in Notting Hill, “which is perfect.”