Ann Garrels, an international correspondent for NPR who reported from the frontlines of major conflicts around the world, including during the 2003 US “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad, died Wednesday at her home in Norfolk, Connecticut. I was. she was 71 years old. .
Her brother, John Garrels, said the cause was lung cancer.
Garrels began her journalism career on television for ABC News. But with her NPR, where she worked for over 20 years, she earned her fame reporting on strife and bloodshed around the world. She became known for telling how significant events such as war affected the people who lived through them. It included Chechnya, the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Garrels’ report is full of history, context, analysis, humor, and skillfully uses natural sounds.” so read the quote When she won the Alfred I. Dupont Columbia University Award for Reporting on the Soviet Union in 1997, it may have been applied to her body of work over the years.
Her elegant personal style and intellectual flair masked her willingness to take risks. She covered both Chechen wars, even though Russia banned outside journalists. . After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, she traveled to Afghanistan. report from the front line of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. During that trip, when a journalist in the convoy was ambushed and killed, Mr. Garrels decided it would be safer to travel alone and embarked alone on his two-day bus to Kabul.
In the process, she gathered stories from those around her for reports on the human toll of war, writing letters by candlelight and transmitting them by satellite phone.
“She was relentless, just relentless,” NPR correspondent Deborah Amos, who worked with Garrels overseas, said in a phone interview last year following the obituary. “She took every risk you could take,” she said.
She couldn’t help it either. When the war in Ukraine began in his February, Mr. Garrels, long retired from NPR and undergoing cancer treatment, offered to cover the conflict.
The network refused to send her, so instead she helped found a non-profit relief organization. assist-ukraine.orgraised funds to send supplies to the Ukrainians.
Unlike some correspondents who parachute into hotspots to travel, Mr. Garrels often returned to the scene of previous coverage to dig. – 20 years in Central Russia.
Her most acclaimed report came during the 2003 Iraq War. Her more than 500 journalists, including more than 100 Americans, covered the war preparations. But when the United States launched a full-scale bombing campaign, “Shock and AweShe was one of 16 American correspondents not incorporated into the US military, and for some time the only American network reporter to continue broadcasting from central Baghdad.
Her lively reports were often picked up by other stations, and Ms. Garrels and her safety became a topic of its own.
When she got home, other reporters interviewed her about her ordeal. She lives on KitKat chocolate bars and Marlboro lights, collects water in a giant trash can to bathe in, and powers her equipment with jumper cables connected to the car batteries she brings into her hotel room each night. she said there was.
Garrels told Terry Gross: A host of the NPR program Fresh Air, she never thought twice about staying in Baghdad. “My instincts told me I was fine,” she said.
She admitted to Gross that she was sometimes worried that she might be taken hostage, but said she was often exhausted at night and “slept like a baby during the bombings.”
What really scared her, she said, was the idea that she wouldn’t be able to tell the story as well as she had hoped. “I don’t write lightly,” she said. “It’s a painful process.”
Years later, Mr. Garrels said in an interview with NPR While in Baghdad, she experienced an important journalistic reckoning. She predicted that the arrival would be humiliating and that Americans would soon be outraged.
Ms. Garrels’ editor in Washington was watching television and asked her if she wanted to revise her story, given the discrepancies between her words and the images shown on television. No, she told them, arguing that the interview more accurately reflected the moment.
her version is Other photojournalists on the ground and After-the-fact report by the Army, It said the Marines more or less staged the destruction of the statue with a handful of Iraqis in an empty square.
“It was probably one of the most important moments for me as a reporter,” she said, strengthening her own instincts to trust her reporting.
Her ability to discover deeper realities became a hallmark of her reporting.
In 2003, she won the George Polk Award for “having endured bombing, blackouts, thirst and threats from the besieged Iraqi capital of Baghdad”. The following year she was part of her winning NPR team. DuPont-Columbia Award and Peabody Award For that Iraq coverage.
Ann Longworth Garrels was born on July 2, 1951 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Her father, John C. Garrels Jr., was an executive and later chairman and managing her director of the chemical company Monsanto. Her mother, Valerie (Smith) Garrels, was a stay-at-home mom.
When Anne was eight, the family moved to London for her father’s job. She attended St. Katherine’s School in Bramley, southwest London, and she entered Middlebury College in Vermont in 1968.
“She was originally going to be a doctor,” Laura Palmer, who met Ms. Garrels while working for ABC News in the mid-1970s, said in an email. I said I should learn Russian, she didn’t know why, but she transferred to Harvard and fell in love with Russia and everything about it.”
Garrels graduated in 1972 with a degree in Russian. In 1975, she got a job as a researcher at her ABC Her News. She knew Russian, so she was sent to Moscow. ABC soon promoted her to Moscow Bureau Chief. Her harsh press on topics such as housing shortages, loneliness and suicide led authorities to deport her in 1982.
Following Russia, ABC sent Mr. Garrels to cover the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua. NBC then recruited her in 1985 as a State Department correspondent in Washington.
In Washington, she met and married James Vinton Lawrence in 1986. In the 1960s, while she worked for the CIA, Mr. Lawrence became a well-known caricaturist, primarily for the New Republic.
She joined NPR in 1988, working in the Moscow bureau. When she left Moscow in her 1998, she and Lawrence sold their home in Washington and moved to his family’s estate in Norfolk, Connecticut.
Garels’ first book, Naked Baghdad, was published in 2003. The title refers to her habit of working naked in her hotel room in Palestine. Strange as it may seem, her explanation is that if Iraqi security forces knock on her door, it will give her time to get dressed and she will be able to hide an illegal satellite phone. That’s what it means.
Garrels retired from NPR in 2010 but remained a contributor. Her ongoing reports from Chelyabinsk, Russia’s military-industrial city, provided the basis for her second book, Putin’s Land: A Journey to True Russia. It was published in 2016 — the same year she received her first treatment for lung cancer and the year her husband died of leukemia.
In addition to his brother, Garrels has a younger sister, Molly Brendel, and stepdaughters, Rebecca Lawrence and Gabrielle Strand.
Her husband, Lawrence, used to say that Garrels has two speeds. When she returned from abroad, she would switch on the inside and go into rest from combat mode. During her downtime, she was often very confused and unable to navigate the roads to town or operate her computer.
But when she was ready to leave again, according to Lawrence, she went back into combat mode.