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

by Lindsey Hilsum

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...