In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin

by Lindsey Hilsum

For three of us, this was beyond our danger threshold, but Marie shrugged. “Anyway it’s what we do,” she said. And that was that. She would go in.

It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario

More than anything, they shared a love of books. Katrina, who was studying English, introduced Marie to literature she had not previously read, ranging from the lesser-known works of Jane Austen to contemporary fiction. “She was a much faster reader than me, and would read more than one book at the same time,” Katrina recalls. It was the beginning of a lifelong delight the two took in recommending titles to each other and discussing them avidly, each feeling she hadn’t really experienced a book until the other had read it, too.

“We were careful to say to ourselves that if we don’t get married it’s fine, but the romantic ideal was that you would find this wonderful man and marry and have children,” says Katrina. In those days, Marie was resistant to much feminist thought. Pioneers of the new discipline of “women’s studies” were regarded as humorless and shrill, an image that repelled her. She didn’t question the accepted view of what made a woman attractive; she just wanted to ensure that, whatever it was, she had it. Without downplaying her intelligence or ambition, she found ways of pleasing men, sometimes by being “one of the boys” and at other times by flirting. July 3, 1977. I will always be wary of men who believe in the importance of men being able to cry. Men who talk about being sensitive belong with hyper-feminist Yale women who will always dominate them. They are always the one or two males in a Women’s Studies course because they can “relate.”

In her last week at Yale, she spent her nights holed up in the library with her coffee pot, desperately darting about like the Mad Hatter, from one stack of books to another, finishing papers so she could graduate. She had missed all deadlines for scholarships, grants, and fellowships. Through the four years, however, she had developed something of a philosophy, a combination of ambition and fatalism, as she explained in a piece entitled “Running Out of Time.” YALE DAILY NEWS, COMMENCEMENT, 1978 It doesn’t matter if you mess up, choose the wrong road, flop in Vegas. What’s important is to throw yourself in head first, to “go for the gusto.” And if you blow it, you blow it. What we have to worry about now is success. Once you’re successful, it becomes embarrassing to make mistakes, and more difficult to grab onto the nearest straw and hold on. You can always be a star, so what’s the rush?

Sometimes she wondered if she was deluded in her ambition. “I am nobody,” she mused. “Untrue. I don’t accept that. Why? I feel potential within. But I do accept this may come to nothing.” She was ready to go anywhere, but part of her felt she should stay near her mother, at least until both Boo and Cat had left home.

Marie might have sounded confident at work and in the pub, but that wasn’t necessarily how she felt inside. April 19, 1979. I am scared because everyone around me expects me to succeed and I know how weak, flimsy I am.… Joe is so sure I will “make it,” as if it’s a “fait accompli.”

Marie had agreed to work with Anthony Geffen, a young documentary producer, on The Faces of Arafat, a film about Arafat for the BBC and HBO. Anthony knew Marie was the key to access, so he put up with her unreliability: she never seemed to understand that the camera operator, sound and light technicians, and producer needed her to turn up when she had said she would. She and Anthony were in one of the Tunis safe houses, talking to Arafat off camera, when a small explosion shattered the windows. Everyone in the room dived for the floor as Arafat was whisked away—he was on a plane out of Tunis in less than half an hour. Some months later, a senior Israeli intelligence official mentioned the incident to Anthony. “We didn’t want to kill Arafat then,” he said. “We just wanted to frighten him.”

Through the windows of the Palestinian diplomatic vehicle, the cameraman filmed protestors throwing stones at the security forces. It was clear that the Chinese authorities were not going to tolerate the student demonstrators for much longer. Armed guards stopped their car at checkpoints, and they held their breath, waiting for the moment when someone would ask why they were traveling on Palestinian documents and not their own passports. The biggest news story in the world was unfolding around them, but Marie and Anthony were on a different mission. Delirious with exhaustion, they sped to the airport—only to find it surrounded by armed guards and closed to all but diplomats. There was only one answer: Marie, Anthony, the crew, and the bodyguards crawled under a fence and sneaked into the terminal, where they bought tickets with cash. At the gate, they caught sight of a BBC wildlife team that had been filming pandas and was now being deported. Anthony quickly handed over the film his crew had shot so BBC News could air it, and then he and Marie and their team took off again, soaring above Beijing just forty-eight hours before the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to quash the student protests.

The Sunday Times, like most British newspapers, ran a line under Marie’s copy saying it had been compiled under Iraqi censorship, but the controls in Baghdad were somewhat haphazard. In theory, a censor from the Ministry of Information would listen to reporters filing their copy over the satellite phone in the CNN or BBC office, but it was a boring job, and the censors rarely listened very carefully.

“Only in Libya does the bus stop and ask a policeman for directions to the spontaneous demonstration,” Marie noted.

In another of her favorite anecdotes she would describe how, after an interview, she was woken by a knock on her hotel room door in the middle of the night, to find a tall European woman wearing a full nurse’s uniform complete with hat, and a short Libyan man who came up to his companion’s hip. This, Marie was told, was Gaddafi’s personal nurse, sent because the Supreme Guide had thought Marie looked tired during an interview. “I Bulgarian. I take blood?” the nurse said, pulling out an enormous hypodermic syringe. Marie knew she couldn’t just say no to Gaddafi, so she prevaricated, persuading the nurse it would be better to return to take her blood the following afternoon, when she was less tired. The next morning, she went to reception to check out and leave the country, but the staff had been given strict instructions not to release her passport. “Luckily,” she wrote many years later, in a story about her relationship with the Brother Leader, “Arafat was in town again and was seeing Gaddafi. Members of Force 17, Arafat’s elite bodyguard, had decided to have a coffee in the hotel while they waited for him. When they walked into the lobby they saw me in distress.” Knowing that “Mary” was a favorite of their boss, they wrested her passport from the receptionist, drove her to the airport, and saw her safely onto a plane. “The next time I went to Libya I was nervous,” Marie wrote, “but Gaddafi started the interview by practically slapping his leg and laughing: ‘Remember the t...

Marie never practiced partisan journalism, the kind that adopts a cause and reports only the facts that advance it. Having no ideology, she never flinched from reporting stories that cast a bad light on people for whom she had sympathy. She was simply drawn to the underdog. In an interview with the Australian journalist Denise Leith three years later, she reflected on the question of objectivity in war reporting: “When you’re physically uncovering graves in Kosovo, I don’t think there are two sides to the story,” she said. “To me there is a right and a wrong, a morality, and if I don’t report that, I don’t see the reason for being there.” She felt that journalism, especially the early reporting of atrocities in 1998, had made a difference, pulling NATO in to defend the Kosovar Albanians, and that was good. The revenge killings appalled her but didn’t change her view of the Kosovar cause. Patrick, by contrast, described Kosovo as “a blighted land of blighted people”—like many journalists who have been through several wars, he didn’t see good guys and bad guys but history and politics. He believed that you had to pull back and see the geostrategic context, while Marie had Martha Gellhorn’s derision for “the big picture.” For her, context mattered, but the experience of individuals in war, whether fighters or victims, was the essence of the story.

The Sri Lankan government insisted that the Tamils who had accompanied Marie were armed Tigers who had shot at the soldiers, and that she had been caught in cross fire. After she recovered, they planned to arrest her. The U.S. ambassador, who had visited her in the hospital, dealt with that. “He spoke to them and said, you can do what you want, but do you want to arrest a badly wounded woman who can put her story on the front page?” Steve Holgate recalls. Marie was well enough to be amused by the contrast between the American and British response to her situation. The British High Commission, she told Farrell, had sent a diplomat in a Laura Ashley skirt, carrying a parasol, who told her there was nothing they could do—after all, Marie had gone to the north illegally. “Marie said she had never been more grateful to be an American,” he recalls.

As British and American forces gathered in Kuwait, Marie consulted an old soldier who knew something about fighting in Iraq: the Duke of Wellington, Jane’s father, now aged eighty-seven, who had commanded a mounted brigade fighting to capture Baghdad in the Second World War. His concern, he told her, was that the next battle for Baghdad would be fought with little clarity about its aim, or proper planning for the aftermath. “I have an awful suspicion that the role of the British will be to occupy and pacify the country,” he said. It was a prescient remark, and Marie understood from her own experience the sensitivity Iraqis would have about being occupied. But, like many journalists who had spent years interviewing people who had escaped Saddam’s prisons, or relatives of those who had been tortured and killed, she supported the war. She understood the perils of regime change, but was swayed by the Iraqis she knew who craved a future without dictatorship.

At this point a sandstorm blew up, filling Marie’s computer and satellite phone with tiny particles, so she couldn’t file. (She was hopeless with technology, frequently erasing stories by accident and needing help to file from her computer, but on this occasion it wasn’t her fault.)

Marie’s reporting at this point was not her best. She continued to believe that Chalabi would be Iraq’s next leader long after it should have been obvious he would not. Later, her old friend Jonathan Landay did a major investigation, concluding that Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress had fooled not only Marie but many other journalists, including Judy Miller, who ended up entangled in a controversy about her reporting in the run-up to the war. Essentially, Chalabi had lied to U.S. intelligence and to journalists in order to drum up support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. His team fabricated evidence that Saddam had retained weapons of mass destruction when in fact he had destroyed them. The previous year, Marie had written a long piece based on a videotaped interview with a supposed defector that turned out to be false, but when Jonathan called to ask her about it, she was defensive. “I believe they acted in good faith,” she said. “Over seven years, I would not say there was a story I was fooled on.” Why did Marie not see through Chalabi? Maybe because he was a source of what seemed to be good stories, and as with all plausible fabricators, not everything he said was untrue. But maybe her sympathy for the underdog had blinded her. “Marie was one of the best war correspondents, and she had a gigantic heart for people who were suffering,” says Jonathan. “That’s a problem when you start identifying with the people that you’re covering to the extent that she did.… It...

She was also there when a man turned up to confess to a crime that had remained unsolved since she was in Baghdad during the war twelve years earlier. Six hundred Kuwaitis had gone missing in that conflict. After their disappearance, the Kuwaiti government had offered a one-million-dollar reward for information that might reveal their fate. The man, whom she called Feras in her story to protect his identity, said that he had been a member of the Iraqi secret police and that the Kuwaiti citizens had been brought to the compound where he worked. Wearing the traditional Arab dishdashas, eyes blindfolded and hands tied behind their backs, they were prodded onto a firing range in two horseshoe-shaped groups. Senior military officials, including a half brother of Saddam Hussein, gave the order to fire. Feras said he had been the driver of one of the trucks that took the bodies to a secret police base near Fallujah. Three trenches were dug and the bodies thrown in. It was an extraordinary story. “But how were we to believe a man like Feras, who was expressing interest in a reward, in the new Iraq where people are so desperate for money?” pondered Marie. Then she had an idea—in the journalistic golden moment of anarchy after the invasion, you could do anything. So she rented a mechanical digger with operator. As they headed for the base where Feras had said the bodies were buried, she told him she would believe his story only if he could point out the graves. THE SUNDAY TIMES, NEA...

They went to a club where waiters descended from the ceiling on elastic bands, squirting vodka shots into people’s mouths.

In May 2004, Jane took her to the Princess Grace Hospital, where she checked into a small, plain room and, much to the consternation of the staff, immediately forced open the window so she could smoke out of it.

The Israel Defense Forces had said Gaza would be a “closed military area” during the operation to remove the settlers, so she wanted to explore the option of renting a sailboat to get to Gaza. Purely for research purposes, she and Aviram went sailing while Dominique waited onshore, knowing perfectly well that the idea would come to naught because the Israelis would shoot at any unidentified boat coming ashore. (Marie often thought renting a sailboat was the best way to get to a story. It never was, apart from an occasion when she rented a dhow to get to Yemen.)

They had lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in London a couple of weeks after Patrick moved out, followed, sometime later, by a typical chaotic Marie day when they were supposed to go to the races but she had lost her phone. They looked for it in the fridge, where instead they found beer, which they drank while they continued to search, until they gave up, arriving after the races were over.

Sometimes drinking brought clarity. In October 2006, the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow. She had exposed atrocities committed by Russian troops in Chechnya, and many suspected that the FSB, the Russian secret service, had a hand in her killing. A week later, the Frontline Club was packed with journalists and human rights activists, come to hear a panel discuss Anna’s career and the implications of her death. The panel had diverted into a more general discussion of democracy in Russia when Marie arrived, late and somewhat the worse for wear. She leaned against the back wall, her thin frame encased in a black leather jacket over a white vest, eye patch dominating her face, her hair escaping from the pins that held it back, so it stuck out like tufts of feathers on a bedraggled bird. “I want to ask a question, right now tonight,” she bellowed, her words slurred but determined. “Who killed Anna? That’s the best thing we can do. I’ve covered Chechnya, I care about it, I had a car shot out from under me by the Russians. I don’t want to hear this about democracy. Who killed Anna? That’s what we can do as journalists.… I don’t want to hear all this stuff about principles. Who killed Anna?” It was an electric moment. A slim man rose from the middle of the audience. “I’m a former KGB agent. I know who killed Anna,” he said. He turned around and addressed Marie directly. “Come and see me afterward.” She got his card and they talked that night, but she ne...

Later, when repression was renewed, journalists who sympathized with the protestors were criticized for getting carried away and not predicting doom. Marie was well aware of the perils in Egypt. “There appear to be three possible outcomes,” she wrote. “A transition to democracy; a new dictatorship, perhaps led by a general around whom the old guard would coalesce; or an Islamic state.” But only a cynic could have failed to be moved by the idealistic young people who thronged Tahrir Square in those early days.

Marie had always scoffed at boy reporters who liked to identify weapons, but if she was to understand the battle for Misrata, she needed to know what was killing people, and the distance that projectiles could travel.

She and Paul ended up staying nearly two months. In Misrata, all her contradictions came together: She could survive seven weeks in a war zone without alcohol even though, by many measures, she was an alcoholic. She had suffered PTSD because of her conflict experiences, yet she was in her element in a place where death was a constant danger. Personal pain could blind her to the needs of others, yet she thought of her friends in London while under extreme stress and when communication was difficult. She identified too closely with those she saw as victims of war, and yet her reporting was calibrated and contextualized.

They arrived at a muddy hole, the entrance to the storm drain through which the FSA brought out the wounded and took in food and other supplies, including weapons. A deep breath, and they were lowered into a dark, dank, claustrophobic tunnel. Filthy water sloshed over their shoes, and if they stood upright, they cracked their heads on the concrete. J-P said he couldn’t do it, but there was no way back now. Marie’s voice trembled as she tried to make light of their situation. “Don’t worry. I’ve got the fear, too,” Paul replied. They started to walk, bent over, muscles tightening, the way ahead lit by faint flashlights. Their breath came in short bursts as the oxygen thinned out and the atmosphere grew hotter. After a while they heard a giant rumble coming toward them, and the fetid air filled with fumes: a motorcycle was approaching. J-P had collapsed, gasping for breath. As the motorbike maneuvered round in a small space built into the tunnel, he tried to say that Marie should get on the back, but it was clear he needed the bike more, so he sped off. The others tramped on. It seemed to take forever. Eventually the air began to smell better, and they could hear the sound of raised voices. “That old saying about light at the end of the tunnel is nonsense,” Paul joked. “At the end of the tunnel there is a bunch of arguing Arabs.”

In the morning, General Shahadah hosted a celebration in his office. The military officer who had launched the attack was congratulated, along with the intelligence operatives who had helped pinpoint the location of the Media Center. At around 11:00 a.m., the head of the General Intelligence Branch 318, Colonel Firas al-Hamed, arrived at the party to say that electronic surveillance had confirmed that two foreign journalists were dead. Having intercepted outgoing calls from Baba Amr asking for help to evacuate both the bodies and the survivors, they knew the names of who had been killed. According to “Ulysses,” they ate and drank and crowed about their success. “That blind bitch was Israeli,” said one of the officers. “Marie Colvin was a dog and now she’s dead,” said General Shahadah. “Let the Americans help her now.” “Ulysses” says that a few days later, Khaled al-Fares received a reward for his part in the killing of Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik: a brand-new shiny black luxury sedan, a Hyundai Genesis. “The car was a gift from Maher al-Assad,” he claims. “A reward for the successful operation.”