The Geraldo Show by Geraldo Rivera

Author:Geraldo Rivera [Rivera, Geraldo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781946885203
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.

Chapter 6

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TOUR OF TERROR

The year 2002 became my year of living ever more dangerously. Stuck with me by contract and apparently still thinking the Tora Bora scandal would blow over before it destroyed my career or killed me, Roger made me senior war correspondent and host of a weekend show then called War Zone. The designation of senior correspondent was a letdown. The understanding I had with right-hand man John Moody was that if I returned home bathed in glory, I would be named the network’s chief war correspondent.

Always with brother Craig and/or Greg Hart in tow, I vowed never to let any reporter out-risk me. Chasing institutional terrorism became my mantra and raison d’etre. After saying goodbye to Erica and the children, the crew and I headed for Kenya. I had not been there since 1998, just weeks after al Qaeda destroyed two of our embassies in East Africa, in its first major attack on US interests.

After doing a series of interviews with military and political experts in Kenya, the crew and I flew on to bordering Somalia. On Saturday, January 12, we landed in a pair of small, chartered twin-engine aircraft on a rolling grass field outside Mogadishu.

The trip was unusual even for that relatively free-spending era in foreign news coverage. We were lavishly equipped. We had a nimble airplane, a King Air, with us the entire time, and a second, less-elegant twin-engine cargo airplane available whenever we had to move the two tons of satellite gear needed to make television when we found something newsworthy. Nowadays, crews in the digital era need far less equipment to do the same job. I am convinced that eventually some tech genius will figure out a way to make our eyes able to transmit stories directly to home base with a coded blink.

Our King Air was owned and operated by a supremely knowledgeable and impressively connected black African pilot named John Mohammed. With him, we could fly confidently to every dusky, dangerous enclave around the Horn of Africa, secure that we had both local knowledge and a trusted go-between to negotiate access with whomever the power players happened to be at the moment. This man could have run a major airline or a big import/export firm.

The main Mogadishu airport, like the harbor and most of its infrastructure, had been destroyed by constant, careening, often-mindless violence. We drove into the lawless, ruined capital where no real government had existed for nine years. Back then, in 1993, our first military intervention into Africa, which was designed to prevent Somalia from dissolving into ethnic/tribal/religious factions, was ill-advised, short-lived, and tragic in its ending. The military disaster is now known by the radio call that signaled catastrophe to our commanders, Black Hawk Down.

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