Sunday, August 20, 2006
Sunday, August 20, 2006 Two of the kidnapped reporter's colleagues worked relentlessly for her release. By PETER GRIER CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR In the early days, Mary Beth Carroll did Sudoku puzzles or read cards sent by well-wishers before she went to bed. A week and a half after the abduction, Jill's mother decided to attend a Sunday Mass at which Alan Enwiya was going to be memorialized. She had been invited to a Chicago-area Assyrian Christian church by some of his relatives. It turned out to be a cathartic trip. Mary Beth and her companions arrived at the church on time — but it was almost empty. As the Mass began, it filled up, pew by pew. By the end of the emotional three-hour service, it was jammed with parishioners who prayed for Alan and prayed for Jill, as Mary Beth sobbed into her handkerchief. She knew Jill would want her to be there. It made her feel closer to her absent daughter. And it was the first time she'd cried since the whole ordeal began. The strain was also evident at the Christian Science Monitor. Under pressure While the public support was heartening, Jill's emergence as an iconic figure — a smart, pretty and idealistic American caught in the maelstrom of Iraq — heightened the pressure in Boston and Baghdad. After all, terrorists behead Western icons. While the stress was nothing like what the Carrolls faced, Team Jill and the Baghdad Boys (staff writers Scott Peterson and Dan Murphy) felt compelled to exhaustively pursue every lead, no matter how thin. And it was taking a toll. At one point, a worried British security adviser told editors in Boston that Murphy and Peterson "go to bed at 3 a.m. every night, after plotting the next day's strategy, and wake up expecting this will be the day Jill is found. That's unrealistic, and they can't keep this up." Through most of the time Carroll was in captivity, a single 8-by-11-inch color photo of her in a hijab hung near the door of the building that houses the Monitor's Washington bureau. It had been placed there as a backdrop to a press conference by David Cook, D.C. bureau chief and the paper's public face through the crisis. The avuncular Cook has three sons not much younger than Carroll. He passed that photo, as it grew more dog-eared and tattered, every day. "You'd come in the door and see her picture and think, 'Have I done everything I could today to help get her out?'" Made it their job Murphy and Peterson weren't investigators in the law-enforcement sense. They never visited the scene of the kidnapping, as that Baghdad neighborhood was too dangerous. (Neither did the FBI investigators, who were not allowed to leave the safety of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone without an armed military escort.) But for almost three months, the two reporters made finding Jill their primary job. In a way, they became scholars of kidnapping. Murphy created a database and drew diagrams of which groups had claimed responsibility for holding which hostages and when, to look for connections. They strategized with the British security firm, the Iraqi police, and the U.S. Embassy's Hostage Working Group in the Green Zone. They were told aspects of the FBI and U.S. military efforts, but never given the full picture. So, they sifted through cases that might be analogous to Carroll's, to see who had been released and who hadn't. They looked for things that people on the outside had done that might have helped. In one instance, the friends of a kidnapped Australian put up posters in the neighborhood where the crime had occurred, pleading for his safety. Murphy and Peterson decided to take that idea and supersize it. They mapped out a three-stage media plan, starting with advertisements in newspapers, then moving to radio news and television public service announcements (PSAs). Their campaign Their theme was "Jill Carroll loves Iraq and loves Iraqis. She needs your help. Please help free Jill Carroll." Each step built on the previous one. The TV spots — produced with the invaluable help of CNN Baghdad staffers — used the voices of Iraqis themselves ("Oh, she was like a sister to me") with pictures of Carroll in her hijab, quotes from Mary Beth Carroll, and, in one, 30 seconds of the Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi calling for her release. Iraqi television news directors were generous with donated time. The point was to get people who might know something to come forward with information. But the Monitor Baghdad Boys knew they were walking a thin line. They wanted to keep Carroll in Iraqi minds, as a sympathetic character — making it harder for her captors to kill her. But they didn't want to be too loud or make her too hot a property. That might raise any ransom demand through the roof. Or, worse, it might cause her kidnappers to believe that they needed to get rid of her, fast — and that death was their best option.