The Education of an Idealist

When I turned up to collect the order a week later, I was taken aback by the sight of a half-dozen large brown boxes that would nearly fill my small office. My amateur creation had been artfully compressed into a small book with a gray cover bearing my name and the title I had landed on: Breakdown in the Balkans. When word got out that such a chronology was available, the Washington think tank, diplomatic, policy, and media communities quickly emptied the Carnegie stock. I soon heard from Fred, who called on a satellite phone from Sarajevo to congratulate me on publishing the “hugely useful” Breakdown, which he said he was passing out to government officials and aid workers.

I felt immense satisfaction—of a kind I had never experienced personally or professionally before. But now that people were actually reading it, I began obsessing about all that I had left out. “The gaps, the gaps,” I would say, deflecting compliments that came my way. Simultaneously, I chastised myself for craving the recognition I was starting to get. “Clearly, I am out, as always, for me, myself, and I,” I wrote in my journal. “I need so much to remember why the book came about in the first place.” I knew that conditions in Bosnia were deteriorating rapidly, and that if my chronology was to land in the hands of Fred’s besieged Sarajevan neighbors, they would likely burn it along with their other books to keep warm.

The war raged unabated. Four US diplomats—George Kenney, Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—had already resigned to protest what they saw as the weakness of the US response to the Bosnian war, the largest wave of resignations over US policy in State Department history. I read about these men in a lengthy Washington Post profile and was gripped by their testimonies. Jon Western, a thirty-year-old intelligence analyst, had sifted through hundreds of photos and videos of what he recalled as “human beings who look like they’ve been through meat grinders.” As he told the Post, the intelligence he needed to consume for his job described preteen girls raped in front of their parents, a sixty-five-year-old man and his thirty-five-year-old son forced at gunpoint to orally castrate each other, and Serb torturers who made Muslim prisoners carve crosses in each other’s skulls.

Western and the other US officials who resigned had initially tried to change policy from within, but having made no headway, had finally quit. They felt they could no longer be part of a US government that wasn’t doing more, reasoning that they could at least draw media attention to what they saw as America’s moral abdication.

After reading the Post profile, I grandiosely wrote in my journal: “My only regret is that I don’t work at the State Department so I can quit to protest policy. Instead, I sit impotent and incapable.”

Following my summer at CBS in Atlanta, when people had asked what I wanted to do with my life, I had begun answering that “I wanted to make a difference.” But at Carnegie I saw that this was an abstraction. Now I had a focus—a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized, and I wanted to do something to support them.

As a liberal arts major who had no particular knack for foreign languages, I still worried I had little to contribute. But I had managed to assemble the chronology, and I was seeing up close the vast number of ways researchers, columnists, journalists, government officials, and aid workers were involved in the enterprise of American foreign policy. All seemed to be struggling with how to define the US role in the world now that the Cold War was over, as well as how to manage a sudden flurry of nationalist and independence movements.

I remained acutely aware of all that I lacked—I wasn’t an engineer like Fred, a trained diplomat like Mort, or a doctor like Mum and Eddie. I was focused, but I did not know how to channel my interests. A frustrated journal entry from the time ended simply: “… Act, Power.”

7

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Ben Cohen, a British journalist and activist, was the person who gave me the idea of traveling to the Balkans. “You should see the war up close,” he told me. “And you should write something.”

After I met Ben at a Carnegie event, we struck up a fast friendship. A Sephardic Jew whose ancestors escaped to Bosnia during the Spanish Inquisition, he was more knowledgeable about the country’s politics, history, and literature than anybody I knew in Washington. Though he was devastated by all that had happened, he brought a dark humor to our discussions.

Ben arranged an invitation for me—the “author” of Breakdown in the Balkans—to attend a conference being held in peaceful Slovenia, the newly independent former Yugoslav republic. After the conference, he insisted, we should drive to Bosnia.

Given my chronic expectation that something terrible was bound to happen whenever life was going well, I feared heading into what appeared to be a blazing inferno of a war zone. I also didn’t see what I could add to the existing coverage of the war, as the experienced reporters in the region were doing phenomenal work. But Ben kept pushing. And with my internship nearing its end, I had begun considering what jobs would enable me to keep working on issues related to the conflict.

Thanks to Ben, I already had one published article. Not long after we first met, he had proposed collaborating on an op-ed critiquing the direction of international diplomacy on Bosnia. Joined by George Stamkoski, a Macedonian friend of Ben’s who became our third co-author, we produced what in retrospect seems a rather pedestrian essay and began “shopping” it to various newspapers.

We tried every mainstream publication in the United States, and when each one turned us down, we sent it to outlets in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada for which we could find fax numbers. Eventually, Ben called me with “good news and less good news.” Our piece had finally been accepted, he said. “But it might be hard to find.” The essay would be appearing in Pakistan’s Daily Jang, but he wasn’t yet sure if it would be in the Urdu or English edition.

I didn’t care: I faxed an illegible copy of the op-ed (in English!) to Mum’s office, and stuffed it into Mort’s mailbox.

When I called Fred Cuny in Sarajevo to get his advice about traveling to Bosnia, he agreed with Ben: I should experience what was happening myself. He also invited me to watch his team in Croatia preparing for the water restoration mission he was planning to undertake in Sarajevo.

“I will explain more when I see you,” he said cryptically, not wanting to reveal on the phone how he intended to sneak the necessary machinery past trigger-happy Bosnian Serb soldiers.

Fred’s encouragement was all the motivation I needed. I worked at a think tank. I was published in a widely read newspaper. Well, okay: I interned at a think tank, and the paper was read widely in Karachi. But I was already going to be in the region, so I decided to add two stops after the conference in Slovenia: Bosnia, where Ben promised we would visit someplace safe, and neighboring Croatia, to see Fred in action.

As it happened, Carnegie’s offices were located in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, a weekly magazine with a circulation of more than two million readers. I asked a journalist friend to introduce me to Carey English, the magazine’s chief of correspondents. Three days later, I found myself entering his small cockpit of an office with a copy of my Balkans chronology in hand. As he thumbed through it, revealing little, I asked whether U.S. News would consider running an article from me once I got to the region.

Carey was tough but patient—far more patient than I would have been in his shoes. He asked me about my past journalistic experience, and I pulled out the Daily Jang op-ed and several sports clips from the Yale Daily News. He shook his head. “You are going to a war zone, you know.” I assured him I understood and would not take dumb risks.

“Define a smart risk,” he said.

I blanched, but he continued. “Look, I’m skeptical,” he said as he handed me his business card. “But see what you come up with when you’re over there, and call me collect on this number if you have a story.”

I thanked him and soberly shook his hand. When I left the U.S. News office and the doors to the elevator closed behind me, however, I let out a joyful scream.

“Whoo-hooo, I’m going to be a foreign correspondent!”

Ben was elated at the news and immediately began filling me in on the practicalities, including that I would need a UN press badge in order to pass through checkpoints and enter Bosnia. This meant that a news organization had to sponsor me. He suggested I head back downstairs to U.S. News to procure a letter vouching that I would be reporting for them.

But this was an impossible ask. Carey had said he would take my call if I had a story to propose; that was a far cry from U.S. News sponsoring me as its correspondent. The magazine had a regular freelance contributor in the region already, and Carey was not about to undermine him by adding an untested second.

Crestfallen by the realization that our fledgling plan might already be falling apart, I sat at my desk staring at the ceiling, unsure what to do next. But when two of my fellow interns who worked at Foreign Policy walked by, an idea popped into my head. Back then, the Foreign Policy journal mostly published work for academics and policy scholars.[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo) Its content was nothing like that of newsmagazines like Time, U.S. News, or Newsweek—and it certainly did not employ foreign correspondents. But I doubted the UN knew that.

I waited until the Foreign Policy editorial staff had headed home and the cleaners had completed their nighttime rounds on the floor. Once the suite was completely deserted, I walked into the office of Charles William Maynes, the journal’s editor, picked up several sheets of his stationery, and then hurried back to my desk.

Hands shaking, I began typing a letter impersonating the unwitting Maynes. I was committing a fireable offense, but to me it felt like a felony. All these years later, I still feel terrible for having violated the trust of a program that was giving me so much. But determined to get to Bosnia, I went ahead and wrote to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide Samantha Power, Foreign Policy’s “Balkan Correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”

I had a guilty conscience, but I also had what I needed to obtain my press pass.

IN AUGUST OF 1993, Ben, his friend George, and I met up in peaceful Slovenia. After participating in the conference, we made our way to the Avis car rental agency. Knowing that Avis would prohibit us from taking one of its vehicles into a combat zone, Ben told the salesclerk that he and I were planning a romantic getaway to nearby Venice, Italy. He threw himself into the part, describing our courtship and love of the coast.

Our route to Bosnia took us through Croatia, and when we arrived in Zagreb, the capital, we headed to the Bosnian embassy to collect our visas. We found a grim scene. Dozens of Bosnian refugee families huddled in a long line around the block. Several of the men and women waiting had shaved heads and crosses etched into their faces. One of them told us that they were Muslims whom the Serbs had tortured and marked.

None of my graphic late-night reading at Carnegie had prepared me to see scars cut into human flesh. I asked a man whose right leg had been amputated above the knee what he thought of the current UN peace plan, and he put his thumb down to signal his disapproval. For good measure, he directed the only English words he seemed to know at the Western negotiators: “FUCK OFF.”

A proper journalist would have asked him and the other Bosnians to recount what they had gone through, but I could not bring myself to probe for details. Forcing them to rehash what had happened seemed cruelly voyeuristic. Instead, after George (who spoke Serbo-Croatian) translated some small talk, we shuffled inside to get the visas we would need in order to cross into Bosnia.

Our next stop was the local UN headquarters, where the press official told us that he did not have the passes for which we had applied. My imagination began running wild. I visualized a vast team of forensic specialists conducting an exhaustive verification process—including a call to Foreign Policy asking Maynes to confirm the contents of “his” letter. In reality, the UN official responsible for laminating the badges had simply taken an extra-long lunch break.

With our visas and paperwork finally in hand, we drove our rental car several hours in the direction of Bihać, a small Muslim enclave in the northwest corner of Bosnia that was surrounded on all sides by Serb militants. Ben had sold me on this destination by reminding me that Bihać was the only one of six UN-declared “safe areas” actually living up to its name. But while Bihać was not experiencing the brutal fighting going on elsewhere, the risks of visiting were real. The UN press officer had explicitly warned us not to travel there and had cautioned that many of the roads along the way were mined.

We placed a handwritten “PRESS” placard in our car window as a precaution, but it offered uncertain protection. Many Serb rebels believed they were being unfairly villainized by Western journalists—all it would take for our trip to turn deadly was one renegade soldier deciding to seek revenge. I was scared for my physical safety and knew that the trip was placing great stress on Mum and Eddie.

After passing through Croatian army and Croatian Serb rebel checkpoints, we saw the royal blue, white, and gold flag of Bosnia. A minute later, a group of very thin Bosnian soldiers welcomed us with smiles and high fives. Most of them looked no older than twenty. We drove further, into a landscape of bucolic green hills. So far, Bosnia looked nothing like the bombed-out ruins for which I had prepared myself. Around every bend I half expected the summer cheer to be shattered by gunfire, but the only sounds of war we heard were a comfortable distance away.

Over the course of our three-day stay in the Bihać area, we learned that the relative calm had a great deal to do with a wealthy Bosnian Muslim businessman named Fikret Abdić. Abdić ran a food-processing company that was the region’s chief employer, which gave him bargaining power with the Serbs encircling Bihać. If they let supplies in and didn’t attack, Abdić agreed to provide continued access to the food his company produced.

Because Abdić’s main focus was his own profits, and because Bosnian Serb forces were killing Muslims and Croats elsewhere in the country, the Bosnian government denounced him as a traitor. He was also wanted in Austria for allegedly pilfering money intended for refugees. But the civilians we met, who had been able to keep working and sending their children to school, described Abdić as a hero. I interviewed a young pharmacology student named Nedzara Midzic who had lost twenty-two pounds when she had lived in besieged Sarajevo earlier in the war. In Bihać, she was no longer scrounging for food. “He may profit,” she said of Abdić, “but at least we profit too.”

Listening to Bosnians express their gratitude to Abdić was a reminder of how little I actually knew about the country’s complex dynamics. I wasn’t sure how I would get to the bottom of what was really happening. But at a minimum, I knew I would need to spend much more time in the region and take greater risks.

When we left Bosnia and crossed back into Croatian territory, I was immensely relieved. We had not been attacked and I had managed to interview civilians, soldiers, and government officials as if I were an actual reporter. Back at our hotel in Zagreb, I telephoned Mum at her Brooklyn hospital to let her know that everything had turned out all right.

Ben and George then took me to the Zagreb home of Richard Carruthers, a BBC correspondent with whom they were acquainted. Richard’s smoke-filled flat was everything I had ever associated with the romantic life of a foreign correspondent. Several rugged-looking reporters in cargo pants were drinking whiskey and playing poker at a coffee table. Carruthers himself was thumbing through a vast collection of LPs in search of just the right jazz record for the steamy afternoon. And Richard’s girlfriend, Laura Pitter—an American from Laguna Beach, California, whose byline I knew from Time magazine and the Christian Science Monitor—was on the porch in a red bikini, cooling off in a paddle pool and drinking a margarita.

Sitting among these journalists, I was mesmerized by their lively back-and-forth on Balkan politics. After inquiring about the Serbs’ territorial ambitions, I asked them which news outlets they worked for. They told me that they all filed stories for multiple publications and networks. Because most American and British outlets did not have full-time correspondents permanently based in the region, they often relied on “stringers,” regular contributors who were not on salary but were paid for each article or broadcast piece that was accepted.

When I asked whether a newcomer like me would be able to find work, though, they quickly shot me down. “The strings are all taken,” one said definitively.

Laura, the only woman in the group, did not contradict her colleagues in the moment, but she pulled me aside before I left. “I don’t know what these guys are talking about,” she said. “There is plenty of work to go around. You should move here and give it a try.” Looking around, she grabbed a cardboard coaster out from under a beer and wrote down her email and phone number.

“You can totally do this,” she said as she handed me the coaster. “Write me if you’re coming back. I’ll show you around.”