On a frigid night in March 1997, we found ourselves in a mud hut in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, surrounded by armed al-Qaeda fighters.
Peter Arnett asked their leaders a simple question: “What are your plans for the future?”
Osama bin Laden responded, “If God wills, you will see them and hear about them in the media.”
This was Bin Laden’s first television interview, and Bin Laden and his team chose Arnett and CNN to conduct it, and I produced the interview.
The following year, bin Laden made good on al-Qaeda’s terrifying threat of near-simultaneous attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing more than 200 people. In 2000, his men bombed the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors. And, of course, there was the 9/11 attack, which killed about 3,000 people and sparked the “Global War on Terror.”
I first learned about Arnett in 1993, and he passed away on Wednesday. At the time he was one of the most famous people in the world, and certainly the most famous foreign correspondent. Just two years after the first Gulf War, Arnett’s brave decision to remain in Baghdad after other Western journalists left as American bombs rained down on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq changed CNN’s standing among viewers around the world. And that turned Arnett into a worldwide celebrity.
I could clearly hear Arnett’s voice before I saw him coming. He was a stocky guy with a peppy New Zealand accent that could completely shatter a glass. And you saw the man himself. Nothing bigger than life does him justice. Arnett was a newspaperman’s newspaperman and was full of war stories from Vietnam and many other wars around the world.
When I first met Arnett, I was 30 years old and had never been to a conflict zone. Soon we were flying into Afghanistan, which was in the middle of a civil war. After World War II, the capital Kabul was in ruins, similar to Dresden. Different warlords were fighting each other in blocks. Child soldiers were also often seen. Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had the distinction of being perhaps the only prime minister in history to shell his country’s capital daily.
Arnett interviewed all the major figures in the civil war for CNN. These include Hekmatyar, Hekmatyar’s main opponent Ahmad Shah Massoud (assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before 9/11), and Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was killed by the Taliban in 2011.
During Afghanistan’s civil war, Kabul was constantly bombarded with shells and militias of various ethnicities and sects fought each other in continuous firefights, but Arnett seemed perfectly content. He wants to be where the action is, and in 1993 there was a lot of action in Afghanistan.
One piece of advice Arnett gave me then still sticks with me. I thought this was wise advice: “Never act half-heartedly in a combat zone.”
We were in Afghanistan because we were tracking the World Trade Center bombers in 1993. The group, some of which had fought against or supported the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, had parked vans loaded with explosives underground, aiming to destroy the Twin Towers. They failed, but six people died.
In 1997, I spent several weeks negotiating with a group of Bin Laden’s associates in London to secure a meeting with the al-Qaeda leader. We believed that bin Laden may have been involved in the 1993 trade center bombing. (I didn’t know it at the time, but Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 bombings, was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operational commander of the 9/11 attacks.)
Other networks were also pursuing interviews, including the BBC and CBS’ “60 Minutes.” I believe that Arnett’s reputation for impartiality in his coverage of the Gulf War was crucial in securing the interview for CNN.
Arnett returned to the mountaintop in Afghanistan and asked bin Laden why he was declaring jihad, or holy war, against the United States.
Bin Laden gave a lengthy response criticizing U.S. support for America’s allies in the Middle East, including Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The response reversed President George W. Bush’s frequent claims since 9/11 that the United States was attacked for “freedom.”
Four years before 9/11, bin Laden said in a CNN interview that the basis for his jihad against the United States was America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
I had the honor of spending many weeks in Afghanistan with Arnett in 1993, and again four years later producing the first television interview with Bin Laden.
Arnett was a man who could not feel fear. Since then, I have never done anything for fun in a combat zone.
