Many Americans seemed shocked by reports that beset Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government is believed to have hired thugs or used plainclothes police to provoke violence that would later be used as a pretext to point to as evidence of a need to protect an Egyptian Silent Majority.
That news was coupled by reports of Mubarak supporters going after the press to try and stop an unfavorable message or image. A reporter was threatened with beheading. Several were roughly handled. CNN’s Anderson Cooper was punched by some Mubarak fans and Cooper announced he was reluctantly leaving Cairo.
The fact: these are there realities of how politics works some places in the world. I had my own baptism of fire starting a few years after graduating Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism’s masters program. The settings: Indira Gandhi’s India, Francisco Franco’s Spain and post-Franco-transitioning-to-democracy Spain.
In 1974, my trusting world view was altered when a Russian journalist tried to recruit me for the KGB. I was the Chicago Daily News’s prolific New Delhi stringer when I met a Russian journalist. I excitedly told him that my grandfather Abraham Ravinsky was from Russia (I didn’t mention that my grandfather HATED the Communists, which is why he fled to the United States).
The young journalist then invited me over to his house where he gave me a big dinner and dark vodka. He did it one more time. Then he said he had a business proposition: he’d like me to string for his news agency and send him written reports but not tell anyone I was doing it and I would get paid for it. This set off alarm bells. Even if I could tell people who I was writing for, I didn’t exactly see how stringing for a Russian news agency in the days of the Nixon presidency would look awesome on my resume.
So I asked an American diplomat whom I often saw at a restaurant I’d frequent to find out if this was a recruitment attempt by just telling me “yes or no” one day, no details needed. A week later he said “Yes” and offered me a few details about who had ordered it.
Another eye-opener came one year later in Madrid.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.