E-Mail This Article to a Friend Back from Baghdad In her new book, NPR correspondent Anne Garrels describes life in a war zone — and those who risked their lives to help her report it BY TAMARA WIEDER

AT NIGHT, HOLED up in a flea-infested hotel room in Baghdad, Anne Garrels would take off her clothes.

She wasn’t particularly hot, nor was she preparing her wardrobe for the laundry. Garrels was merely ensuring the continuation of her professional duties: she simply figured if she was naked while broadcasting her National Public Radio reports on the war, and security forces from the Iraqi Information Ministry knocked on her door, she’d buy time getting dressed and simultaneously hiding her contraband satellite phone. "If someone knocks," Garrels writes in her new book, Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War As Seen by NPR’s Correspondent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), "I can pretend they have woken me up, beg for a few minutes to get dressed, and then perhaps have enough time to dismantle the phone and hide it. Not a great plan, but the only one I could come up with."

Garrels’s book, a detailed, journal-style account of her time in Iraq in the days leading up to and during the war — she was ultimately one of only 16 non-embedded American journalists who stayed through the invasion — also includes e-mails sent by her husband, Vint Lawrence, to friends and family, messages he called Brenda Bulletins, after tenderly nicknaming his wife Brenda in a nod to comic-strip heroine Brenda Starr. The book, Garrels says, is a tribute both to Lawrence and to the man she calls "Amer," her Iraqi driver/minder who was integral to the work she did — and continues to do — in the midst of extreme conflict.

Q: I read the book this weekend and was completely captivated by it. I found it so informative.

A: I had just a very small window on the war; all of us covering it saw just one part of it. I guess I also wasn’t prepared for when I came home, for the attention. This was by no means the worst war I’ve ever covered, but it’s certainly the most high-profile. So I guess now I’m sort of wondering, why did I write book?

Q: Which is an interesting question to be asking as you embark on a book tour.

A: Yes. What is so clear to me, though, is that the Iraqis that I spoke to from October on laid out exactly the problems that we’re seeing now. They knew exactly what was going to happen, whether it was the looting in the immediate aftermath of the war, to the violence and attacks that we’re now seeing. They know themselves pretty well.

Q: You sort of answered my first question, which was, "Why the book?" It sounds like you don’t really know.

A: Well, I was just bombarded with questions when I came back. Listeners were extraordinary. I was in a cocoon for the entire time I was there. My only communication was a satellite phone, and I had to use that sparingly, lest the security forces find it. And so I really was in a cocoon; I had no idea what the response had been from listeners. Sometimes I thought, oh my God, given how jingoistic wars can become, am I considered to be Tokyo Rose? The outpouring from NPR listeners, of real care — people sent me presents, they sent me sort of get-well cards, enormously personal messages. I’m not used to that kind of public profile. So my way of dealing with it was just to go hide and put it all together in this diary.

Q: It must’ve come together awfully quickly, because the last entry in the book is dated in May.

A: My husband said that he spoke to me more when I was in Baghdad than he did when I came home. It was not easy on him; I was still sort of missing in action, if you will, when I came home.

Q: Was that a publisher’s deadline, or was that just because you wanted to get it on the page?

A: It was really both. I didn’t want to live with it that long. And I knew that I was going to be going back to Baghdad [in July]. Also, a lot of people who I didn’t know approached me from all over, you know, agents and publishers, who had no idea what they wanted, and that was easy to say no to. But when Jonathan Galassi from [publisher] Farrar, Straus approached me, I mean, I’ve known him for a long time, and he had received the Brenda Bulletin, so he knew what he was talking about when he approached me. And when we spoke, he immediately saw the importance of the man I call Amer, so that it made sense. And I guess I wanted to pay tribute to Amer, and to my husband. I guess it was a catharsis. And I hope interesting to other people.

Q: You chose to stay in Iraq when so many other journalists were choosing to leave. What do you think it is about you that allowed you to make that choice?

A: There were a lot of factors. I think the networks certainly felt that they were just too high-profile. I didn’t suffer from that. It was just me, there was no big team, I didn’t have a fancy office. I mean, I thought I was below the radar, although as I have since come to find out, I was not as much under the radar as I thought: I went back to see one of my minders when I was there [in July], a man called Qadm who had been in charge, basically, of the daily operations at the Information Ministry. He was not a bad man, and I found out that he had in fact protected me in ways that he could not tell me about then. He had hidden my file, because when I came in March, I had bought my visa from an ambassador in Amman, and he knew, as I mention in the book — he took one look at me and realized, because he knew that I hadn’t gotten approval from upstairs, so he knew that I could get into trouble. Not that my visa was illegal — it had been issued by the Iraqi ambassador — but it wasn’t entirely correct. He told me this time when I saw him that at that point, he took my file and put it in his drawer and never sent it upstairs.

Q: Did you learn a lot of things like that when you went back to Iraq this last time?

A: I don’t know what I learned, because people are trying, obviously, to rewrite history and their roles. Everyone is saying, "Oh, I just did it because I had to." It’s very hard to know what people really believe, and who they really are. That will take time. That was very much like the Soviet Union; a lot of Soviet officials I would deal with suddenly said, "Oh, I was really a closet democrat all along; I had to do this." One’s suspicions don’t go away. I spent hours asking Qadm, "Why did you work for Intelligence? Why did you end up at the Information Ministry?" He explained it to me that he had merely been a translator. I don’t know if that’s really true. He said that basically he was a Shiite, he had been at university, and he was recruited and had no choice as a young man; you couldn’t say no. And that he had remained an honorable man in a difficult situation. I certainly know that as far as I know, he never hurt me. And what he tells me now does explain certain things that I was unable to explain at the time, like why I was able to stay, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s very difficult. And this is true for Iraqis: they’re looking at each other, and they don’t know who each other is. They don’t know what people really believe.

Q: In the book, you ask the question, "Is maintaining a presence at the cost of not reporting the whole truth worth it?" How easy was it for you to answer that question?

A: I had already faced that question many times in the past, especially in the former Soviet Union. And in fact it was interesting in those days; I don’t think people did pull their punches. But you have a very different dynamic now of live broadcasts. The Iraqis were watching live broadcasts in real time. [The TV broadcasters] were under much more pressure than I was. But even so, for NPR’s purposes, there was no point in me being there just for press conferences. And if I was going to get expelled for what I reported, fine. We would’ve gotten in eventually, somehow, some way. I mean, one of my colleagues was expelled, from NPR, for her reporting. And in fact, NPR was not going to be let back in. I only got back in by [paying] $1000 to the Iraqi ambassador in Amman. Thank God for his greed. And thank God for Qadm ultimately, as he says, hiding my file. But it wasn’t a difficult decision on my part, because all you were left doing was going to press conferences. You could get that off the wires.

Q: What did it feel like each time another American journalist left Baghdad?

A: The last 10 days before the war, I just wanted to avoid everybody, because it was rumor central. You were living in a world you just couldn’t predict. Somebody had spoken to someone who said, "You’re going to get taken hostage," [while] other officials were saying, "No, you’re not; stay." Nobody knew what to believe, and everybody was sort of walking up to each other saying, "Are you staying? Are you going? What are your bosses saying? Are you being pulled? Are you not?" And then suddenly one network left in the middle of the night. It was like Ten Little Indians: and then suddenly there were 16.

Q: What do you think were the biggest differences between being embedded and unembedded?

A: Actually, I think the embedded reporters did a phenomenal job. All of us just had a small window, and what everybody did in the end created a mosaic, and that’s the only way you can cover a war. All of those reports sort of create an overall picture. I have huge regard for embedded reporters. For starters, some embedded reporters ended up not being with units who did anything. Some, if you will, were "lucky," and were in the middle of it. The problem for embedded reporters was that those who saw the most were unable to report at length because they were moving so fast under such dangerous circumstances.

I know that Eric Westervelt, one of our correspondents, when he came out, was really shocked at how, initially, embedded reporters were kind of being dissed. I think in some ways the networks — well, the broadcasters — did them a disservice, because the people who had the least to say were on the air the most. And television was having to fill a huge amount of air time. I didn’t see the reports, because of course I didn’t have access to television, but I know that people would say to me, "Oh my God, hours and hours of ‘Here I am on a tank.’" And that really was a disservice to those who truly had something to say, and I think it became sort of popular to dismiss the experience. I had been very suspicious of the embedded experience to start with, having seen how the military had basically treated us in Afghanistan, and it was a far more successful exercise than anybody could’ve imagined.

Q: What was it like reading the Brenda Bulletins?

A: I was stunned. I mean, my husband is a far better writer than I am. I don’t think I realized until I came home how much he essentially was in suspended animation, and basically gave up his own life. I mean, the Brenda Bulletins to start with I thought were charming, and then I began to realize that this was his way of coping. And they were love letters. That he was so proud of me and had supported me through all of this — I just wept. He’s extraordinary. And then when I said to him, when I went back in July, "Okay, what do you think?" He just looked at me and said, "You need some new stories. I think you better go." He is incredible.

Q: As the build-up to war was going on, did you have an opinion about whether the war should happen or whether it was justified? That doesn’t really come across in the book, and of course I understand why, but I’m wondering internally how you were feeling.

A: Frankly, like Iraqis, I never fully understood what the rush was. I mean, the Iraqis were much more forthcoming with the inspectors than I think the US had anticipated. And there was progress being made. The Iraqis certainly were not as forthcoming as they were obligated to be, but nonetheless, their obstinacy was being chipped away. Iraqis would ask me, "Why now? Why the focus on Iraq now? What’s the rush? Let the inspectors do their job." And I agreed with that. Of course, I also saw a brutal police state that in essence was destroying the country. So I saw both sides. I certainly didn’t understand the need to go in so fast, nor did I believe, talking to US officials, that they were fully prepared for what we’ve now seen. There was so little planning for the aftermath. It is shocking.

Q: What was it like being there in July?

A: It’s a very unhappy place. And the security situation just gets worse. The US, those who are there to try and rebuild Iraq, are living in fear for their lives in armed camps. The Americans over five months have made some bad mistakes: large, indiscriminate raids by the military, which is a very blunt force, have taken a toll on Iraqi bystanders, which has only fueled America’s opponents. Many Iraqis now are determined to avenge the deaths of relatives, or at least are highly suspicious of American intention. One Iraqi, who really in his heart is sort of pro-American and detested Saddam ... he looked at me and he said, "Prove to me why you’re here. I will help you, if I understand why you are here." And unfortunately, I don’t think the administration has done a good job. The military, because of the security situation — which was predictable, and now the administration is completely once again revamping its views — it realizes it needs to have Iraqi security, that the US on its own is not good at collecting intelligence there. It is not good at understanding what is going on. I think more and more officials are realizing it was a mistake to disband the military. US officials are now going back to Iraqi security, because they need them. They need their intelligence. It’s been a real mess. And consequently, it’s been very disorganized.

The idea that when the US says that they’re surprised at how fragile the infrastructure is, I mean, aid organizations — not to mention reporters — had long since reported in what desperate condition the country was. I mean, this should not have been a surprise. Iraqis aren’t easy to help, either. There’s no question that many of them are sort of sitting there saying, "Well, fix it for us." But because of the looting, the damage to all the ministries, there’s nowhere for these ministries to work out of, there’s nowhere for people to set up a desk, or there has not been. By allowing the looting and the destruction, which did not come from the bombing, the US in essence sat by. So Iraqis’ own abilities to help rebuild went up in smoke in those early days. And it made it just that much easier for them then to say, "Hey, you’re the occupiers: you do it."

Q: When you were there during the war and the build-up to the war, the sentiment toward you as an individual was very open and friendly. Did you find that when you went back recently?

A: Personally, people were still very friendly. Although for the first time, I did have problems in Sadr City, where a man called Muqtader Sadr, a young fundamentalist cleric, is essentially challenging the Shi’a establishment as well as the Americans. I did find hostility there. But I found as many people there welcoming. He’s appealing to the poor and the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, and he’s very well-organized. While the middle class are sort of sitting on their hands, you see this group who suffered under Saddam, many of them were in prison, tortured, but they had an underground that was ready to move immediately when Saddam was removed. Immediately in April, as the troops were coming in, these people were out actually protecting the places the US was not protecting. But they’re since playing a very inflammatory role. They’re stopping short of telling people to attack the Americans. And Muqtader Sadr knows perfectly well that the US is loath to arrest him because he would be a martyr. It’s a very difficult situation, and the US is trying to work with the Shi’a establishment, who are sort of elderly men who don’t have those same kinds of roots in the community. Even in the best of all possible worlds, this is an incredibly difficult task. It is just stunning to me, though, how naive and cavalier the US was in the initial months. They’ve lost a lot of trust, and unnecessarily.

Q: Did you see Amer when you returned to Iraq?

A: I did. He’s in despair. He’s frightened of Iraqis, because he doesn’t know who’s who. He’s frightened of the Americans, as many are, frightened of the American troops, because they have been known to shoot wildly, and arrest people and you don’t know what happens to them. His family is essentially locked inside; he’s afraid for his children and his wife, because of the chaos on the streets. He’s exhausted, because it’s been hot, and he has no electricity. There are no phones that function. I mean, this is five months in. It’s exhausting.

Q: But he doesn’t have any plans to leave?

A: He has no plans to leave. He is from a very traditional tribe. He has no relatives out of the country. He cannot imagine living outside of Iraq. We had fights; he would start talking and he would become nostalgic for Saddam, a man who ruined his career, and who he felt had destroyed the country. But he was nostalgic for a world he knew and understood. He is terrified of the future.

Q: Does he have a copy of the book?

A: I brought him a copy of the unedited proof. He took it and read every word. We had discussed whether we would use his real name or not, and he was very frightened, and he said, "No, this world is still uncertain." After he read it, he said, "Is it too late to put my real name in?" And I said, "Yes. It is too late."

Q: Where do you go next?

A: I will go back to Iraq. I mean, having spent so much time there, I will continue to follow it. I don’t know after that.

Q: It must be hard to imagine, at this point, going somewhere else; you’ve invested so much there.

A: That’s right. And really, since 9/11, I’ve spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, and now Iraq, but even so, I’ve been hurtling even within that region from place to place to place. And I want to now just stay and watch what happens in Iraq. It’s very complicated, and it’s shifting constantly. And it’s not clear to me that this will be a success. It’s not at all clear to me where this is going. How the international community is going to get involved, how the US — I mean, there is a learning curve, but they’ve been very slow to deal with facts on the ground. So it’s a mystery to me as to how this will play out.

Anne Garrels reads from Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War As Seen by NPR’s Correspondent at Harvard University’s Longfellow Hall, in Cambridge, on September 30, at 6 p.m. Call (617) 661-1515. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com