The Australian: An Aussie
reporter's years of living dangerously
Sunday, September 12, 2010
An Aussie
reporter's years of living dangerously
Rory
Callinan
From: The
Australian September
13, 2010 12:00AM
IT
was somewhere on the outskirts of Gardez, in eastern
Afghanistan, that I realised just how much the
Michael Ware I knew had changed.
As I sat in a battered minivan speaking on a
satellite phone to an editor back in Australia, a
particularly filthy and angry-looking Afghan kept
pounding on the windows.
To the terror of my translators and driver, the
Afghan began screaming foul insults in Pashtu, and
making threatening gestures.
"Tell him to get lost," I told my translator, who
tried, but shrank back into his seat after receiving
a few more glares from the
intruder.
As I looked with mounting concern at the thug's
broken-nosed features, I detected a smirk and
suddenly realised this grubby, bearded apparition,
clad in traditional salwar kameez, pakul hat and
broken sandals, was the reporter I had sat next to
years earlier at Brisbane's Courier-Mail. "As-salamu
alaykum (peace be upon you)," he said with a
laugh.
This was early in a
stellar career that would turn a lowly print reporter
in Australia to one of the big names of cable news in
the US, trading barbs with then presidential
candidate John McCain, earning the plaudits of US
combat soldiers and having a high-profile
relationship with one of the US's most glamorous
television reporters, not to mention claiming some of
the industry's top awards.
Ware has come a long way from his home town, where he
was once an associate to Queensland judge Tony
Fitzgerald and a Queensland rugby representative,
whose playing career was ended by a car
crash.
Ware is the subject of tonight's Australian Story on
ABC. It promises to be a gripping tale, which begins
soon after the horrific events of September 11, 2001,
inspired a US-led coalition of forces to hunt down
members of al-Qa'ida who were being sheltered by
Afghanistan's Taliban.
Ware's career in the US began with the faith held in
him by Steve Waterson, then editor of Time
Australia.
Waterson, now editor of The Weekend Australian
Magazine, had hired Ware a couple of years earlier
from the Courier-Mail, and backed his fierce
enthusiasm against more experienced and better-known
journalists from Time's US
headquarters.
"Michael was mad-keen to go to Afghanistan from the
moment the coalition forces landed," Waterson says.
"I wasn't sure he was ready, but I knew if I didn't
send him he would resign and head there on his own,
and probably die. I thought he'd have a better chance
of surviving with the resources of Time magazine
behind him."
Ware made embarrassingly prolific use of those
resources, recalls Waterson, who funnelled huge
amounts of cash to him through contacts in Kabul and
Kandahar.
"It rather strained my relations with Time's money
men in New York, because Michael never quite grasped
the concept of receipts," Waterson
says.
"I used to tell them I didn't care if he was blowing
it on opium and carpets, but he wasn't going to be
killed because I hadn't given him enough cash to hire
a gunman."
I was to meet some of those hired gun guards in the
days I spent with Ware in 2002 near Gardez, about
100km south of Kabul, and it was a tiny glimpse of
his unique attitude that would take him
far.
Needing to secure an interview with a local warlord,
I ended up in Ware's vehicle unaware at that point we
were travelling towards what was about to become one
of the last major pitched battles against al-Qa'ida
in Afghanistan.
Dubbed Operation Anaconda, the battle had started
after US special forces were ambushed when they tried
to land on a mountaintop in east
Afghanistan.
More Americans died when they tried to rescue their
stranded mates as Taliban and al-Qa'ida forces were
streaming into the district, sensing an easy
victory.
The conflict raged around a snow-capped mountain
range, and Ware had covered the action as it
escalated, ignoring the threat posed by fanatical
local al-Qa'ida supporters who had previously
ambushed a convoy of journalists with a hand grenade,
almost killing a Canadian
reporter.
Ware's protection was a motley crew of mostly useless
local tribesmen, high on hash and sulking after their
weapons had been confiscated by US special forces at
the last checkpoint.
He had a local driver, an unsuspecting Western
photographer, and two constantly quarrelling
fixer/translators named Muhib and
Ruhulla.
To ensure the loyalty of this disparate crew, Ward
had $10,000 in $US100 bills from Waterson for
pay-offs, bribes and wages, packed into a black
computer bag hidden under the back seat of his
battered four-wheel drive
vehicle..
As we drove deeper into no-man's land, ever closer to
al-Qa'ida boltholes, the farms and compounds were
strangely deserted, and B52 bombers cruised high over
the nearby mountains that would erupt seconds later
with the huge explosions from the aircraft's massive
bunker-buster bombs, designed to collapse al-Qa'ida
tunnels.
Following tyre tracks to avoid the threat of old land
mines, we drove on until we saw a US unmanned aerial
vehicle taking an unnatural interest in our
vehicle.
Ware appeared unperturbed.
Stopping the car, he ripped out strips of gaffer tape
and decorated the roof and sides with the words
"PRESS, TIME and TV".
But the drone came in low and began to circle
ominously.
Ware was still in Afghan garb, and the translators
muttered something about needing to attend to a call
of nature and bolted in an outrageously suspicious
manner for the nearest hills, leaving me and the
photographer to wave desperately, take off our hats
and show our white faces.
The drone finally departed and despite entreaties
that we should turn back, Ware insisted on
continuing, arriving at a corner of the battlefield
where he got an exclusive interview with a group of
al-Qa'ida-sympathising villagers who had witnessed
the battle first-hand and were being monitored by
Australian Special Air Service
soldiers.
We returned as night fell on Gardez only to be told
al-Qa'ida was now threatening to blow up the only
hotel in town, a filthy two-story brick building with
no plumbing. The threat had sent most other
journalists racing back to Kabul for the
night.
Ware decided that to keep a low profile, he and his
team would sleep in a local guesthouse, smaller,
dirtier and even less secure than the
hotel.
Reckoning there was safety in numbers, I tagged along
and set up camp in the cramped
room.
Later that night, as the tribesman stank out the foul
air of the room with their hash cigarettes, a series
of eerie whistles could be heard getting
closer.
Then came the sound of someone trying to smash in the
compound gate, stopped by a deafening blast of
automatic gunfire.
Thirty minutes passed and then the whole drama
started again, repeating itself through the
night.
While the photographer and I tossed and turned
nervously all night, Ware snored in the corner. Such
things had become normal for him.
Even Ware's loyal fixer, Muhib, considered one of the
most fearless around, had on occasions become nervous
when working with him.
He recalled a move by Ware to go undercover as a
Muslim and pray in Kandahar's biggest mosque, built
by Taliban supremo Mullah Omar.
Ware spent days learning the basic prayer so he would
blend in and when he arrived at the mosque, Muhib
watched admiringly as his new convert in Afghan garb
laid out his blanket and began enthusiastically
praying to Allah.
"What he didn't know was that everybody knew he was a
Westerner," Muhib told me,
laughing.
His fellow worshippers, many of them Taliban
supporters, were so stunned by Ware's audacity they
didn't do anything.
It was just one of many stories retold around the
traps.
Eventually Ware's willingness to go where other
journalists wouldn't led to him being selected for
Time's Iraq coverage.
He was assigned to the northern front, where he was
when Australian cameraman Paul Moran was killed by a
suicide bomber.
Ware assisted shocked ABC reporter Eric Campbell in
recovering Moran's body and repatriating it to
Australia.
When Iraq stabilised, Ware stayed on as Time's bureau
chief, a job normally confined to a compound and
guarded by his own private Iraqi army, which he
consistently horrified by going out and mingling with
the locals, building up impressive contacts among
tribal sheiks who would later become central
al-Qa'ida figures.
His exclusive reports from al-Qa'ida operatives
earned him accusations of treason by some in the US:
he was once present when an al-Qa'ida cell fired off
mortars.
But no doubt anti-war types said the same thing when
he reported from one of his many embeds with US
forces.
He gained the trust of the soldiers with his
frontline reports, even following a US soldier into a
house full of insurgents and filming the epic battle.
Ware narrowly avoided being shot by the soldier, who
was later nominated for the Congressional Medal of
Honour.
Such jobs led to his appointment as CNN's Baghdad
correspondent, with more money and more
resources.
They also led to a high-profile relationship with
glamorous US Sixty Minutes reporter Lara Logan and an
equally high-profile split after a much-talked-about
row with her new beau in Baghdad.
But years of covering the bloodbath have taken their
toll, leading to Ware's return to Australia early
this year on a break.
He was in Brisbane last week, but how long he will
stay in his home town is hard to say.
The Australian's editor, Paul Whittaker, who worked
alongside Ware at The Courier-Mail, says Brisbane was
never going to hold Ware's interest for very long.
"It was only a war zone that could ever really keep
him occupied," Whittaker says.
"There are many brave journalists who take calculated
risks, but Michael's risks, by comparison, have been
insane, where he has pushed the boundaries almost to
the point of self-destruction.
"I have never quite understood what drives him to put
himself on the line again and again. If you could
unlock that question, you'd have a good
story."
Rory Callinan covered the war in Iraq and
Afghanistan for News Limited and worked
for Time
as its South
Pacific correspondent.
* * * * * *
Michael’s report
for Time:
On al-Qaeda’s Western Flank
To learn more about the American servicemen killed
during Operation Anaconda, visit CNN’s
Home and Away project; choose
Afghanistan, 2002, March, Gardez.