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

by Lindsey Hilsum

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...