So Close, Yet So Far

By Richard Stengel.

They saw the graceful parabolas of orange tracer bullets against the blackness of the sky. They heard the scream of jet fighters and the thunder of antiaircraft fire. They felt their hotel shiver in response to the bombs' pounding. But many of the U.S. reporters clustered in Al Kabir Hotel in downtown Tripoli were not quite sure what was actually going on. Like the people in Plato's parable of the cave who can discern reality only from the shadows that a fire throws on the wall, the correspondents could only make informed guesses as to what was happening.

TIME Correspondents Dean Fischer and Roland Flamini, awakened by the first percussive blasts around 2 a.m., leaned far out their hotel windows to watch the spectacle. "I had awakened into a nightmare," says Fischer, who witnessed the aerial fireworks to the north, over Tripoli harbor. "When I saw the first flash of an exploding bomb, I knew it was for real," says Flamini, whose room faced south, toward Gaddafi's headquarters. Within minutes, TV correspondents in Tripoli were reporting live via telephone to the three anchormen of the nightly newscasts. A nation eavesdropped on telephone conversations between New York City and Tripoli. "Tom, Tripoli is under attack," said Correspondent Steve Delaney, with admirable directness, to Anchorman Tom Brokaw of NBC, the first network to break the news, at 7:02. "What have you seen and heard?" asked ABC's Peter Jennings of Correspondent Elizabeth Colton. Colton was unsure who was doing what to whom; all she knew was what she heard, felt and saw. "Put your microphone out that window and let us hear it," urged CBS's Dan Rather of Producer Jeffrey Fager, who promptly did so, and the pop-pop-pop of artillery fire was heard in millions of American living rooms. Without pictures, television was reduced to radio.

Minutes later, at 7:20, Larry Speakes strode into the White House briefing room, and all three networks cut to his press conference. As Speakes informed the nation of the U.S. attack, Fischer joined other correspondents at Al Kabir in a huddle around ABC's open phone line to New York to hear for themselves what was actually going on.

In Libya last week, U.S. journalists found themselves in an unaccustomed position: instead of trailing behind a U.S. strike force, they were at the center of its target; instead of using the technical wizardry of minicams and satellite feeds to report a battle that seemed to have been orchestrated for the 7 o'clock news, they were forced to use an older tool, the telephone, reviving images of Edward R. Murrow during World War II's London blitz. They were right in the middle of a city that was being attacked by their own military and yet could not immediately confirm what was happening. Initially, they were handcuffed by the fact that they could neither see nor film what was occurring; later they were captives of the Libyans, who became tour guides to the apocalypse, stage-managing events and reality according to what they wanted U.S. journalists and American audiences to see and hear.

There had been some early warnings. The Washington Post's Christopher Dickey had been awakened by a 1:30 a.m. phone call from his U.S. office and told that an attack was to occur that night. Since the Post's editors did not know exactly when or where it would happen, they decided not to keep a telephone line open. Earlier that day, NBC had sent Producer Mike Silver up in a chartered plane to observe the Sixth Fleet. NBC decided that an attack was imminent and kept a phone line open beginning at 1 p.m. CBS and ABC did likewise.

Telexes were down. The lights in the hotel were out. Newspaper correspondents, like Edward Schumacher of the New York Times and G. Jefferson Price III of the Baltimore Sun, dictated a few paragraphs over ABC's open line during a lull in the barrage. Their reports, taped by ABC, were then passed on to their papers.

The Libyans, who make a point of observing the niceties of the relationship between host and guest, were understandably cool to the U.S. correspondents. "Their mood was sullen and angry," notes TIME's Fischer, "but their hostility did not seem directed at us." After Gaddafi's brief TV appearance Wednesday night, demonstrators began chanting "Down, Down, U.S.A.!" in front of the hotel, while others, in a more festive mood, organized a horn-tooting, flag-waving victory procession along the city's + corniche. Libyan radio reports that U.S. pilots had been lynched by furious mobs did not engender affection for Americans nor did it make the reporters less jittery.

After the attack, the Libyans turned Al Kabir into a kind of house of detention for foreign journalists, who were allowed out only for chaperoned tours. Accompanied by "minders" from the Libyan Ministry of Information, reporters visited a residential area, a hospital and a morgue. On Tuesday evening a group of handpicked correspondents, mostly women, were driven to the children's hospital at Al Fatah University and shown two young boys, who were identified as sons of Colonel Gaddafi's. Both were lying under oxygen tents, strapped to their hospital beds. On one outing, a Libyan militiaman held a plastic bag and plucked from it a child's charred foot that had been severed at the ankle. Holding it up in the air, he said, "That's what superpowers do."

Libyan television went all out to film the civilian damage inflicted by U.S. bombs; hour after hour they replayed lingering shots of lifeless children and wounded women. But Libyan plans to frame the view of American journalists were foiled by the confusion of the city. On Wednesday afternoon, a group of journalists were herded into a bus and told they were being taken to Gaddafi's house in the Bab al Azizia compound. Expectations were high that they might see the colonel. But as the bus approached the walled barracks, a dozen or so armed guards burst through an open gate, while the sound of gunfire ricocheted from inside the compound. The bus immediately sped off and headed back to the hotel. Was it a coup? For the press corps in Tripoli, a front-row seat for the action had turned out to be a frustrating peep show.

With reporting by Dean Fischer and Roland Flamini/Tripoli