Editor's Pick

ON 21 JANUARY 1991, a team from CBS News—from left to right, Juan Caldera, Peter Bluff, Bob Simon and Roberto Alvarez—were captured by Iraqi soldiers while covering the Gulf War. The team had broken away from the press pool embedded with the US military in Saudi Arabia and crossed the border into Kuwait, which Iraq had invaded in August 1990. It was the fifth day of the war, being waged by a US-led coalition under the terms of a UN Security Council resolution.

Simon, the correspondent leading the team, later told NPR that they had wandered off because of the system of embedding journalists “that restricted us from really doing anything, that put us all in packs that were to be led around by the nose by Pentagon information officers.” They drove to the border and walked into no man’s land, looking for signage indicating that they were indeed in Kuwait, since “it would be sort of nice” to record a bulletin from occupied territory. Before they could figure it out, a vehicle approached them. The previous day, an Iraqi soldier had surrendered to a CBS cameraperson, and the team initially thought the vehicle had regular soldiers who detained them as potential spies.

Once in Iraqi custody, the CBS team was moved to Baghdad, where they spent the next six weeks being interrogated by intelligence agents. They were kept in solitary confinement, frequently blindfolded and subject to beatings. Simon said in his NPR interview that his life had been spared by an administrative error—his Red Cross identification card did not mention that he was Jewish and based in Israel, information that, he believed, would have resulted in him being shot as a suspected Mossad agent. The team was released on 2 March, two days after the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, accepted a ceasefire.