“But did you get bang-bang?” was the distant producer’s first response.
The question was so ridiculous that my answer was probably disproportionate. I do not quite remember; I had been up for nearly forty-eight hours under a bit of stress.
“Of course I’ve got fucking bang-bang,” I probably screamed.
“Ok, ok,” came the reply. “Just send in the tapes and we will take a look and see what there is to work with.”
“What about the script?”
“Uh, we’ll work on that once we’ve seen the tapes and give Nightline a little taste to see if they are interested.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Well, we have been having some really interesting conversations with Tom Battag and others over there, but haven’t sewn up the package deal we want quite yet.”
I was stunned. There was, in fact, no Nightline contract—only a sort of general expression of interest and intent.
“Well, what about that money you were supposed to have sent me. I had to beg my taxi fare from the night watchman here.”
“We are going to have to wait until Nightline says yes. So just send the tapes.”
“Send me the money you owe me.”
“Don’t get pushy with me. Just send the tapes.”
“Send the money.”
It was all down hill from there.
Steve Coppen, the ABC bureau chief, caught me in the hallway coming down from the employee restaurant and my crash pad on the library floor.
“Welcome!” he said. “It must have been tough!”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to avoid his eyes and move past him down the stairs. The conversation I had had with Philadelphia the night before had thrown a real monkey wrench into the works of my relationship with ABC, from what I could see. The staff didn’t want an outsider like me around in the best of times. And these were not the best of times.
“Look,” said Coppen, grabbing me by the elbow and preventing my egress. “I got a message from your people in Philadelphia this morning, these vee-en-eye folks.”It was pretty strange. I don’t see language like that often. Do you have a problem?”
I did not know Steve Coppen from Adam, aside from the fact that he was the bureau chief of the Moscow office of the TV network for which I was, apparently, not working.
“Yeah,” I said. “I have a problem. A big problem.”
And I leveled with him. I said that unless I had grossly misunderstood the conversation I had had with Philadelphia the night before, the people who had paid me nothing to go and maybe lose my life in Chechnya were so disappointed in the fact that I was not dead that they had just cut me loose; that not only was there no longer any ABC relationship, but that what had been described to me as a Nightline contract was in fact only a Nightline “connection.” I explained how I was screwed, shafted, and generally left up the proverbial creek without the proverbial paddle, but that none of that was any of his business or responsibility.
“I am sorry for any confusion or misunderstanding I have created,” I said. “I’ll clear my stuff out within the hour.”
“And go where?”
“I have no idea.”
“Look,” said Coppen, still holding on to my arm. “I have no idea who you really are and what you really do or what you have just done, and I certainly have no idea who these people called vee-en-eye are. But I have been around the block a few times myself, and one of the things I know is that you do not throw people out on the street. The library is yours to sleep in; the canteen food is for free; the telephones are yours to use within reason, and if you need cash, I can front you some of that, too.”
“Why?” I asked, stunned.
“I did not like the tone of that twit in Philadelphia calling me at home at five in the morning with instructions to kick you out. This is my office.”
With some sort of base to work from secured, it was how to get the Samashki material on the air. I had rather a rude awakening. A subdued and short explanation of the “problem” to Ted Koppel’s executive producer Tom Battag at ABC Nightline D.C. elicited an interesting response. Battag said that while he had the greatest respect for my courage and person, and could and would certainly vote for me when I ran for the papacy, he would not and could not sacrifice a potential long-term relationship with VNI by viewing my Samashki material independent of that agency. ABC’s competitors proved even more reluctant to know me. Either through the VNI grapevine, or maybe just the simple protocols of the television news business, it quickly became apparent that, while producers and shooters at CBS, NBC, and elsewhere might have had the highest respect for my courage and endeavor (frequent phrases), no one wanted to look at or consider the work. My entire stock of Samashki tapes was regarded as tainted goods.
Most exasperating was the lack of interest as framed in the rhetorical context of “What is the story?”
“The Chechen story” had been the siege and fall of Grozny and the retreat of the Chechen leadership to the mountains. Then “the Chechen story” had become an interview with Djohar Dudayev, preferably as he hunted bear in the mountains, or possibly a profile of the elusive Shamil Basayev, the diminutive commando leader who had so ripped up Russian armor in the capital and who was now leading the defense of the eastern front from his hometown of Vedeno. “The Chechen story” next became the battle for Fortress Bamut, a former Soviet missile base in the crotch of the mountains near the Ingushetian frontier, where rumor had it that Djohar Dudayev stashed his alleged nuclear arsenal. This story in turn attracted the American humanitarian worker Fred Cuny, whose disappearance and presumed execution then became virtually the only story from or about Chechnya that American print and electronic editors were interested in, thanks to the unspoken rule that, unless there was an American at the center of the story, there was no story.
And Samashki? What was that and where was that and why should anyone be interested in a group of guerrillas in a surrounded town in the northern plains of Chechnya that had been under Russian control for the past month or more?
It was maddening, insulting—and finally, enlightening.
“Look at this,” said Uncle Larry, thrusting a batch of Reuters news copy at me. “The official news we are picking up and reprinting from official sources suggests your little town is packed with bandits.”
“That is bullshit.”
“I know it. You know it. But does anyone else, and what do you intend to do about it?”
Uncle Larry, better known as Lawrence Sheets, was an old friend and fellow crisis correspondent during some of the nastier times of the post-Soviet Caucasus. As the Reuters bureau chief in Tbilisi, and with me based in Baku, we had ridden quite a few highways and byways together. Arguably, the low point was the siege and fall of Sukhumi in September 1993.
Sukhumi had been pretty scary, all right—but it was nothing like covering or reporting from Chechnya, which Sheets had been doing for Reuters since the very start of the war. He had been inside Dudayev’s presidential apparatus when the first Russian planes attacked, had then become a cellar dweller when the Russian army fought the Chechen resistance for control of the destroyed capital. He was ubiquitous with his satellite telephone, earning himself a reputation for extreme bravery bordering on a death wish. Taken to task about driving straight through a Russian checkpoint at night despite a blanket ban on crossing armed barriers, he casually replied: “Checkpoint? What checkpoint? That was just some guys with guns standing along the side of the road.”[14]
14
A few years later, while a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, a more sober Sheets penned an article comparing Russian media policy in Chechnya in wars One and Two. Referring to his own antics, he wrote: “I covered the first Chechen conflict from 1994-96 extensively. It was a ridiculously dangerous business. Nineteen of my fellow correspondents, both Russian and foreign, paid for that final story with their lives.” Cf. “Russia’s Media Policy in Chechnya” in