During Ingwerson’s tenure of nearly a decade as managing editor, his experiences with journalist abductions and murders thankfully were limited. But there had been incidents. Only months into his new position, one of the paper’s stringers was shot in the back and killed by Indonesian troops in East Timor. In 2004, a British journalist on assignment for the Sunday Times , who occasionally wrote for the Monitor , was kidnapped in southern Iraq . Ingwerson remembered making a few fruitless inquiries, trying to learn the journalist’s location and his captors’ identity. The reporter was released after less than 24 hours in captivity.

The most recent abduction of a Monitor contributor (technically, a freelance writer) had occurred a few months prior to Carroll’s kidnapping. In July 2005 Steven Vincent, an American journalist based in Basra, had written three articles for the newspaper, including one about the rise of political assassinations in Iraq. The following month, gunmen posing as police seized Vincent and his Iraqi translator.

At the time, Ingwerson contacted full-time Monitor correspondent Dan Murphy in Baghdad, asking him to check with his sources—US officials, the embassy, Iraqi civilians, reporters, Iraqi police—for any information on Vincent, his whereabouts or his kidnappers. Meanwhile, Ingwerson obtained payment records to find Vincent’s US address and phone number to inform his wife of 13 years of the abduction. “We were kind of working the lines, especially Dan,” Ingwerson says. But within three hours, Vincent’s body was found on a Basra street. Vincent and his translator, with their eyes blindfolded and their hands tied behind them, had been shot multiple times and left for dead. The translator survived. Vincent was the first US journalist kidnapped and murdered in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003.

But the case that weighed heavily on any editor whose correspondent was kidnapped was that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Before Pearl’s 2002 abduction, journalists—especially foreign journalists covering dangerous places—had enjoyed a kind of quasi-protection from violence thanks to their profession. The attacks of September 11, 2001, seemed to have changed the rules; Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers did not care whether a captive was a journalist or not. Joel Simon , director of the non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), comments:

In some of these places, your press pass has traditionally been your "get out of jail free" card. In other words, no matter who had you, you could say, "Look, I’m a journalist. I’m here to tell your story, and I can’t tell your story if you’re kidnapping me..." They traditionally cared about the way the public perceived them, particularly the public in the West. They’re fighting a propaganda war as well as a military war, and the press is important. ^[4]

Listen to Simon talk about journalists losing their status as neutral observers. Length: 1 min 20 sec

Pearl’s kidnapping on January 25, 2002, while on assignment in Karachi, Pakistan, changed all that. A previously unknown group calling itself the “National Movement for Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty” took responsibility for his kidnapping. It claimed that Pearl, 38, was a CIA and Israeli intelligence officer “posing as a journalist of the Wall Street Journal .” ^[5] Pearl was captured when he went, alone, to a rendezvous with a source for a story.

Daniel Pearl, Courtesy Wikipedia

The Journal exerted every effort to find out what had happened to its South Asia bureau chief. The editors knew they could count on Pearl to do whatever he could to secure his own release; with years of reporting experience in dangerous places, Pearl had even drawn up safety guidelines for overseas staff. Meanwhile, they orchestrated a campaign on his behalf. The CIA was persuaded, against every precedent, to state forcefully that Pearl had no connection to the intelligence agency. Terry Anderson, a reporter held hostage in Lebanon for seven years, published a piece in the New York Times in which he noted that his captors had admitted that kidnapping was not a “useful tactic.” ^[6] Anderson, clearly hoping his words would be read by Pearl’s kidnappers, wrote that “the kidnappings stopped because they just weren’t worthwhile... Unfortunately, the kidnappers in Pakistan seem to have forgotten that lesson.” Other appeals came from around the globe to release Pearl.

They were to no avail. On February 22, 2002, the world learned that Pearl had been executed. A videotape left at the US Embassy showed one of his captors slitting his throat. The equation for journalists had changed. Observes CPJ Middle East Program Director Joel Campagna : “The status of journalists as neutral observers has eroded over the years. I think a worrying trend is that the journalists... are being exploited for their potential political value.“ ^[7]

Security. As the security situation for journalists in Iraq deteriorated, news organizations took a variety of steps to protect them—from kidnapping, explosions, suicide bombers, and so forth. News organizations as a matter of course staffed their bureaus, as well as reporters’ homes or hotel rooms, with armed guards. Some shared these costs; others chose to have an exclusive contract with a security agency which could advise on individual reporting assignments and offer security personnel to accompany journalists.

Disagreements arose, however, over how best to protect reporters outside the bureau. Sometimes the stiffest resistance to increased protection came from reporters themselves, who argued that they were safest if they traveled “under the radar”—meaning without elaborate precautions. Some preferred to move around in small sedans, dressed in Iraqi clothing. Other news outlets, by contrast, provided armored cars, armored guards, even “chase” cars which made it hard for gunmen to be certain in which vehicle a kidnapping target was traveling. Some provided training in how to handle an attempted kidnapping. “The news organizations that send journalists to cover conflicts have to recognize their responsibility to their employees,” said then CPJ-Director Ann Cooper.

They need to talk about security in detail and make sure their journalists are properly trained. But on specific questions like whether to travel with bodyguards or not, there are different opinions—and no right or wrong approach. ^[8]

At the start of the Iraq war, many journalists had shunned security. "Traveling with gunmen, they argued, tainted the image of journalists as neutral observers,” elaborated Cooper. At a journalists’ conference in Budapest in late 2003, some European reporters maintained that “the presence of outside security people in battle zones is unhealthy for the newsgathering process, and in fact endangers all journalists because it blurs the line between reporters and combatants. In the heat of battle, the argument goes, nobody consults a copy of the Geneva Conventions.” ^[9] By 2006, however, US television correspondents tended to travel with armed guards. Others accepted protection according to the situation. National Public Radio, for example, split the difference—its reporters traveled in armored cars, but without armed guards.

Carroll herself had been well aware of the hazards facing journalists in Iraq. In early 2005, she wrote in the American Journalism Review that “the anger and violence have only gotten worse since [the US siege of Fallujah and simultaneous Shiite uprising in April 2004], and a new terror has been added: kidnapping.” ^[10] In her story , she noted that 200 foreigners, including several journalists, had been kidnapped, cowing other Western reporters into remaining “virtual prisoners in their hotel rooms.”

By the beginning of 2006, the Committee to Protect Journalists had tallied 36 reporters—Americans and non-US—covering the Iraq War who had been abducted by rogue groups. As Managing Editor Ingwerson learned on the morning of January 7, the Monitor’s Jill Carroll was the 37th.