What Remains (8 page)

Pam Hill’s
Closeup
is canceled in the spring of ’88, and the staff is folded into what we call the
long-form programming unit
—that is, anything that isn’t the evening news or a weekly magazine show. By now I am doing more research than travel or phones. I make research books for a series of one-hour specials ABC airs called
Burning Questions,
each on a different subject: education, drugs, the environment. I do time-consuming and expensive LexisNexis searches, pull every relevant article on each subject, and then make up binders with ABC News labels and mark them with a thick black Sharpie by producer name and story number.

I am essentially a production associate with a production secretary title, but I don’t mind. The production secretaries are paid hourly, so I get overtime, and I am working enough to get my own apartment—a small studio, a fourth-floor walk-up, over the Raccoon Lodge Bar on York Avenue, that I share with a family of insomniac mice.

After work the PAs go to Peter’s on Columbus, between Sixty-Eighth and Sixty-Ninth. The beer is cheap, and the hard-boiled eggs they keep lined along the counter are free. When we tire of the bar, we play pinball in the back room. We like Peter’s until someone spots a cockroach, and then we start going to Santa Fe around the corner. We are the young crowd. The old guard goes to the Ginger Man, on Sixty-Fourth Street. Like the Pentagon Bar for Edward R. Murrow and his boys swapping stories of McCarthy, the Ginger Man is for the producers who’ve been shot at and know which side of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem has the better rooms. It is for Charlie Glass, the Middle East bureau chief who was kidnapped in Lebanon. It is for David Lewis, Tom Lennon, Steve Singer, Chris Isham, Pat Cook, John Fielding, Richard Gerdau—the inner circle. The crowd who, if I peeked through the window at almost any time of the day, would epitomize what I think journalists should be. Smoking filterless Camels, drinking Scotch and soda, trading stories of evacuations and military checkpoints, comparing restaurants in Managua. I am enchanted with the world of the Ginger Man in the same way I was captivated peering down from the loft in Kingston at the grown-ups around the table in the Knotty Pine room.

One morning my phone rings. Tom Yellin, the executive producer of
PJR
, is on the other end. “We’re interested in Cambodia. Can you come to my office?” Peter Jennings has just created his own documentary unit,
Peter Jennings Reporting,
and a small group is assigned to work in it.

This is an opportunity, and I don’t grab for it so much as lunge.

I imagine
villages
and
jungles.
I imagine
refugees
and
guerrilla soldiers.
I imagine that someone has just handed me the phone, Cambodia on the line, and given me permission to step through. I have misty visions of bombs and sources and intrigue in my head, of suspicious men in trench coats slipping me microcassettes. I imagine deals brokered, negotiations, shady characters ringing at three in the morning.

“You’ll be working with Leslie Cockburn. I’ll have her call you, but expect to be there by the beginning of the year.” And then as an afterthought, “You’re familiar with the situation there, right?”

I say yes, of course I know Cambodia, though I’m not even sure, at this point, that I can place it on a map.

I have three months to become
familiar.
I spend nights after work in the news library reading back issues of the
Far Eastern Economic
Review.
I comb through
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia
by William Shawcross, all 544 pages. My twenty-five-year-old eyes grow wider. I make up research books full of every policy article I can find. I buy a safari vest at Banana Republic.

Leslie Cockburn is producing, and I’m assigned as her PA. Leslie is notorious—a one-word name in the news business, like Madonna. The daughter of a tycoon, she is on a first-name basis with Third World leaders, spies, and rock stars. She carries an Hermès address book full of the private numbers of arms merchants and drug cartel bosses. She has the source no one else can get, the impossible interview. She is famous for it.

She gives me a long list of things to do to prepare for the trip. I have to get visas for the crew to Cambodia and Vietnam and set up meetings with officials at the embassy in Thailand. I make an appointment with Dr. Kevin Cahill, the infectious-disease specialist, for my shots: tetanus, yellow fever, gamma globulin. I fill my prescription for malaria medication. “And call Sathern.” Leslie gives me his number. “He’s our stringer and will take care of everything.” Then she sends me ahead to line up interviews and smooth itineraries, with ten thousand dollars cash and a box of ABC News baseball caps.

On New Year’s Eve 1989 I take an overnight flight to Thailand. Sathern picks me up at the airport and takes me to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. It’s not the Commodore. There are plush white robes and warm slippers, and the laundry is returned wrapped in tissue paper—no artillery fire, but still. It’s where the journalists stay.

The documentary is to be called
Peter Jennings Reporting: From the Killing Fields
and will focus on American foreign policy. It will have good guys, bad guys, innocent victims, a culpable government. There will be refugees and insurgents, a front line and coalition forces; guns and money and one of the most murderous groups in history, the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia and Thailand and Vietnam, places where it seems there is no end to war.

The United States has a long history in Cambodia, most of it duplicitous. In the early seventies, as part of its Vietnam strategy, the Nixon administration secretly dropped close to a quarter million tons of bombs in northern Cambodia, along the Mekong River. And by 1974, Cambodia was simply another casualty of the Vietnam War. When the United States pulled out, it was left shattered. The next year Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge marched to the capital city of Phnom Penh and emptied it. They tortured and killed close to two million people. The worst act of genocide since World War II.

I have a list of things to do, and it starts in the border town of Aranyaprathet, where Sathern and I head first on a dusty road out of town, at night to avoid the Bangkok traffic and heat. Cambodia is just over the mountain, a few hours’ hike. Border towns are where everything happens, in the lawless haze between one country and another. They are hideouts for illegal gunrunners, jewel traders, and military intelligence officers. Sathern has a list of names and numbers for everything I’ll need. He knows everyone, or if he doesn’t, he knows what they cost. As stringers go, he’s the best.

He has set up a meeting with the Thai generals so I can get permission to film in the refugee camps. The camps are run by the United Nations, but nothing happens without a nod from the Thai military. The meeting with the generals is a formality. I sit in a tent across a metal folding table from three men. They regard me suspiciously.
Americans,
they must think,
sending a woman to do a man’s job.
They examine the business card I hand them and seem reassured by the logo. The cards are not even real. PAs don’t get business cards, but someone told me to bring a box of them. So I cut out an ABC logo from letterhead before I left and took it to a print shop by my apartment. I ordered three hundred cards, and except for the cheap paper they look as good as the official ones. I am winging this, all of it.

I ask their permission to film, I ask for access to the people inside the camps. I get our names on the list, and then money trades hands, paperwork is filled out, ABC News caps are passed around.

We stop at Site 8 because it is famous—the refugee camp under control of Khmer Rouge soldiers. This is understood more than stated, and affirmed by their telltale green caps. There are nearly thirty-five thousand refugees in Site 8, many of them used as mules to carry food and ammunition to the secret military camps over the border.

I go back to Aranyaprathet a few weeks later, alone, to get footage of these camps. I have the name of a local cameraman who freelances for WTN, World Television Network, and, according to rumor, runs guns in and out of the camps on the side. I have no trouble finding him. Aranyaprathet is straight out of the Wild West—you walk into the saloon and ask for the WTN guy, and they all point across the street. “He’s over there.” He speaks just enough English to understand where I want to go, and he has legitimate equipment, a Sony Beta camera. I hire him for two days, and we drive, then hike, to the KR military camps across the Thai border. The soldiers are young boys with smooth cheeks, thin arms, and expressionless faces. We ask them to march through the trees. We film them riding in trucks. We film them in the camps, bored and smoking cigarettes. Such a fierce reputation, and they look so harmless. My requests do not surprise or startle them; they seem accustomed to this.

To get Peter Jennings to Phnom Penh I have to fly to Hanoi, Vietnam, to negotiate a charter with the president of the state-run Vietnamese airline. I am met at the Hanoi airport by Nuygen, a government minder, who has been assigned to translate and keep his eye on me. To take me to the shops where he gets kickbacks on what I spend. He takes my passport and tells me in perfect English, with a French accent, that I can have it back in four days.

I am booked in the VIP hotel, the one for diplomats, though when I arrive it is filled mostly with French and Australian businessmen. I check into my room and make phone calls, report back to the foreign desk, and two hours later Nuygen is still waiting in the lobby. “Would you like to see where your Senator McCain was shot down, Miss Carole?”

I meet with the president of the airline the next day, and through Nuygen we agree on a price for a charter flight and make a plan for me to deliver the cash. We don’t discuss currency, we make assumptions, and I make the wrong one. The next morning I have six thousand dollars in my shoulder bag, and I stop at a bank to convert it to Vietnamese dong. The president, when he sees this, is enraged. “No, I understand,” I tell Nuygen, who looks worried, trying to keep up with the translation. “Tell him, please, I’ll convert it back.” There is another fee for the transaction at the bank, but I return within the hour. Everyone is happy.

Carolyn will make me tell these stories again and again.

I’m learning the ropes: how to talk to guerrilla fighters and negotiate with presidents of airlines, and where to find the best exchange rate on the black market. I know now to always to carry cigarettes, and lighters with the ABC News logo. Bartering tools are almost as good as cash in third world countries.

I have the coalition military generals standing by to take the camera crew and Leslie to the front lines. It is a dangerous trip through a stretch of guerrilla-controlled territory inside Cambodia touted as the “liberated zone.” But Leslie isn’t here and the generals are getting anxious. Calls to New York are pointless. “Don’t worry,” my boss tells me, “it’s Leslie.”

“It’s okay,” Sathern says, “we’ll stall them.”

When she arrives a week later I find her sitting in the hotel café, sipping iced tea in a knee-length skirt and a yellow-silk jacket, and I feel silly, suddenly, in my safari vest. She is cool and composed and offers no explanation. I don’t ask.

I hand her a file folder of details: an organizational chart of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front and the Khmer Rouge, schedules and backup schedules, alternate shooting dates with times and attendees. She glances at it and nods indifferently. Leslie knows, and I will find out, that dates and times are meaningless in countries with corrupt military and guerrilla fighters.

When Peter arrives, it goes quickly. We drive directly to Aranyaprathet, interview aid workers, and spend a day filming on the front line. Then Peter takes the charter flight with Leslie to Phnom Penh to interview Prime Minister Hun Sen and General Zak. When they return, we fly from Bangkok to Beijing to interview the exiled Cambodian prince, Norodom Sihanouk. The United States is giving him money to fight the Vietnamese-installed government in Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk has a deep-rooted history with Cambodia and a tenuous one with the United States. We helped to oust him in a 1971 coup, and now we’re helping him reclaim power, but he’s teamed up in a military coalition with the Khmer Rouge. It’s sticky.

Sihanouk is a cheerful man, quick to laugh, eager to please, careful not to talk. “I don’t wish to tell you,” he says to Peter when he is asked about the money for arms. But Peter presses him for an explanation.

“Well, sometimes perhaps your government and the CIA are not cooperating with each other.”

At the end of Peter’s four days, we both fly back to New York. There are still interviews to get with politicians and policy wonks. We need a response from the State Department, and I spend weeks and weeks, it seems, on hold.
I’m sorry, someone will have to get back to you.
When I call finally to tell them, “Peter Jennings will be in Washington tomorrow at 10 a.m., standing in front of the State Department. We’ll have a camera crew, and we need someone to answer our questions,” they sacrifice Richard Solomon, assistant secretary for Southeast Asian Affairs.

He is unlucky, because our reporting is flawless, and Peter invokes Nazis in the first two minutes of the show. Solomon mistakenly uses the word “arms” instead of “aid.” We have footage of Nixon, of United States aircraft dropping bombs on Cambodia in the seventies, of policemen killing students at Kent State who protested those bombs. I find a haunting piece of stock footage, of Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge emptied it out—a small child toddling alone through the streets of a deserted town. Phnom Penh, the vibrant metropolis, now a hollow shell. It is a very powerful image.