Once in the office by about 5 a.m., Ingwerson and Scott reviewed the situation. The Monitor’s two full-time Middle East correspondents were Scott Peterson and Dan Murphy, known in the newsroom as the “Baghdad Boys.” Typically, the two rotated in and out of Baghdad for four to six weeks at a time. But neither was in Iraq at the moment. They had returned to their home bases in Istanbul and Cairo respectively just before Christmas, leaving Carroll in charge.


Dan Murphy
© Christian Science Monitor


Scott Peterson
© Christian Science Monitor

Stringer. In the beginning of 2005, Carroll was hired as a “stringer”—someone who took on regular assignments for the Monitor and was paid a fee for each published story. (A contributor was another category of freelancer who had submitted less than five stories.) The Monitor retained some two dozen stringers around the world; in Iraq, there were two or three in addition to Carroll. Stringers tended to be young reporters hoping to win an eventual fulltime job with a news organization after proving their worth on an important story.

Carroll did not work exclusively for the Monitor . She was not a member of the news staff. As a stringer, she had no benefits such as health or retirement. Her stories carried the tag “correspondent” in the byline, whereas fulltime reporters were cited as “staff writers.” Carroll answered formally to Foreign Editor Scott, but worked closely with reporters Peterson and Murphy and reported daily to Middle East Editor Mike Farrell.

The Monitor editors in Boston worried about the security of all its writers, staff, and stringers alike. In general, they took their cues from the reporters on the ground. “Scott [Peterson] and Dan [Murphy] were very much of the low-profile school,” says Foreign Editor Scott.

[They felt] "the less we look like something that’s valuable, the better. The more we blend in, the better." And since it was their lives, we in Boston trusted that all for the most part.

Scott himself visited Iraq in 2003, where the head of security for the German embassy told him that “we feel much safer living in a house, low profile, in the neighborhood.”

Nonetheless, Scott says the Monitor made security provisions for its staff—stringers and fulltime reporters alike. The Monitor’s Baghdad bureau was in a hotel, where its reporters also lived. The hotel was in a compound shared with other news organizations including NBC News, the Washington Post , McClatchy News, and USA Today. A security unit stood at the entrance to the compound, as well as at the entrance to the building housing the various news organizations. The Monitor did not have an independent contract with a security firm. But it says it offered staff a week of “hostile environment” training from a British security firm, Centurion. Finally, the Monitor made a chase car option available to all its writers, if they chose. No preventive measures, however, could completely obviate risk. Notes Bergenheim:

You have to decide, do you continue to send reporters to dangerous areas... Unfortunately, these are the kind of places news occurs... Why do you send someone into Zimbabwe? Why do you send someone into the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan? It’s that if you don’t shine a light of some sort, their ignorance of these terrible things going on leaves people to continue to be subject to these conditions and situations.

In February 2005, the Monitor published Carroll’s first story for them, co-written with Murphy, a profile of a candidate for Iraq’s prime minister. During that year, Murphy had mentored Carroll, who was covering the Middle East for several newspapers besides the Monitor. By Christmas, Murphy felt she could manage the bureau on her own for a short while, and he and Peterson could take a much-needed break. Carroll had not had a chance to get the “hostile environment” training, but before she took over the bureau for a couple of weeks, Foreign Editor Scott discussed with her what security measures were available. Murphy and Peterson also reviewed security procedures with her.

Now, barely two weeks after they had said goodbye to her, a British security firm (AKE) that advised numerous news organizations in Iraq had contacted Peterson to inform him of Carroll’s kidnapping. At the time of her abduction, Carroll had been in a Monitor car with two Iraqi staff members, but with no guards or special protection.

Notify family. Ingwerson decided his first responsibility was to let Carroll’s family know what had happened. He found a phone number for her mother, Mary Beth Carroll. He dialed and braced himself to deliver the bad news. But she had already heard from the US State Department. To his surprise, she wasn’t upset. Instead, Mary Beth reassured him, telling him that Jill had an IQ of 140, that chances were Jill was mostly worried about their being worried, and that Jill would outsmart her captors. Nevertheless, he promised her that the Monitor would do all it could to gain her release.

Watch Ingwerson discuss talking to Carroll’s mother

Next, Ingwerson considered how to deploy his forces. Peterson and Murphy were already on their way back to Baghdad. For his part, Editor Bergenheim had picked up the message left at his hotel in Mexico and phoned Ingwerson. After they talked, Bergenheim immediately booked himself on a flight back to Boston, and was home by Saturday night. While Bergenheim was enroute, Ingwerson had urgently to decide what to do about Carroll’s capture qua news story.