Free And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East by Richard Engel Page B

high-quality toddler clothes and some cheap tea, and then flew to Amman. It did the trick. He gave me the required stamp without even looking at the rest of my passport, which would have identified me as a reporter.
    Human shields didn’t need the gear I required, so I had to smuggle it in. That meant hiring a driver with the right disposition and a car with enough room for a handheld video camera and satellite phone, a bulletproof jacket, a chemical/biological/radiological suit and gas mask, and atropine autoinjectors (an antidote for nerve agents). I strapped $20,000 around my ankle in a pouch that looked like an Ace bandage and stuffed my pockets with $20 bills, which work best for quick payoffs. The only highway to Baghdad cuts through Iraq’s Western Desert, where bandits sometimes robbed cars.
    I was in a fairly weak position, all things considered. I was in a car filled with illicit equipment, I carried a misleading visa, and I had no firm commitment from the news network I was working most closely with at the time, ABC News. But I was surprisingly calm as I hopped into the GMC Suburban in the middle of the night on March 5, 2003. Maybe it was the car’s red racing stripes. Maybe it was the digitized verse from the Koran that played when the driver turned the ignition key. Or maybe it was because I was a kid and didn’t know what a real war was all about. I was now about to go to what I saw as the third stop on the train of history in the Middle East. First was Cairo of the big men. Next was Jerusalemto see the end of the peace process. Now I was off to Baghdad to cover a war that would set in motion events that would tear down the status quo across the Middle East and unleash pent-up religious and ethnic hatred, creating a new generation of terrorists even more vicious than al-Qaeda.



THREE
    WHEN WE ARRIVED IN BAGHDAD at 4:30 a.m. on March 6, 2003, my driver, Sami, parked the GMC in a lot in the Al Mansour neighborhood. I loaded my gear into a local taxi and started searching for a hotel. I knew only one thing for certain: I was not going to be a human shield. That made getting a reporter’s visa my overriding concern.
    Most journalists were staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel, the most luxurious and expensive ($150 a night) in Baghdad, but the place was crawling with Iraqi intelligence agents. Speaking in purposely broken Arabic, I asked the taxi driver to find me a small, clean hotel somewhere away from the center of the city. I landed at the incongruously named Flowers Land Hotel on a small side street. Irented a mini-apartment, with a kitchen, a living room, two small bedrooms, and two balconies facing the right direction, southeast, for me to pick up a signal on my satellite phone.
    Baghdad seemed calm but the foreign journalists were edgy. No one knew how much firepower the United States and Britain would bring to bear, or even when the invasion would begin. The description of the American military strategy as “shock and awe” was designed to unnerve the Iraqis but it had the same effect on us journalists. Rumors swirled that the Pentagon was preparing to use electromagnetic bombs—e-bombs—that would knock out all computers and communications equipment, making it impossible for the Iraqis to command and control their forces. An e-bomb would also knock out journalists, frying their laptops, satellite phones, and video uplinks. At the time, I supported the invasion on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was monstrously cruel to his people. I had been to Iraq several times and found Saddam’s regime both terrifying and evil. Faced with the choice of supporting a policy that promised to eliminate that evil or one that left it in place, I thought the choice was obvious. I had no idea at the time how bad Washington would bungle it, how inept the Iraqis would be at managing their own affairs, and the horrible forces—the rot deep within the Middle East—that the war would ultimately unleash.
    As the countdown to