Kidnapping pressured Boston, Baghdad

Monday, August 21, 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?'"