Keeping Journalism, and Journalists, Alive

It was a clear and starlit night in March of 1991 in the hillsides of northern Iraq, and the American journalist Frank Smyth ’82 and a colleague were crouched in a ditch, hiding from Iraqi Army tanks and machine guns. Smyth was one of a number of journalists who’d been embedded with Kurdish rebels to report on the uprisings against then–Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War. Most of the journalists had recently returned home, but Smyth, a freelancer who was covering the conflict for outlets such as CBS News and The Village Voice, had remained, along with the photojournalists Gad Gross and Alain Buu.

Eventually, Smyth and Buu became separated from Gross and the group’s guide, Bakhtiar Abdel-al-Rahman, and found themselves frozen in silence in the dirt trench amid a volley of rockets and bullets from encroaching Iraqi forces. They had been there since midafternoon, bracing themselves to be shot on sight. While tanks rumbled and army boots squelched in the mud overhead, Smyth and Buu remained hidden for eighteen hours.

Soon after sunrise, they heard screaming and gunshots from a small cinderblock house nearby. They realized that Gross and Abdel-al-Rahman had been killed. Buu believed that he and Smyth had also been spotted, so they emerged from the trench with their hands up to surrender, shouting, “Sahafi!” the Arabic word for journalist. 

Smyth and Buu were held in a prison cell for more than two weeks and repeatedly interrogated as suspected spies. All around them, they saw and heard the torture of Iraqis who had been rounded up for sedition. Smyth paced his cell, wondering if it would be his turn soon. “I thought to myself, ‘You’ve interviewed torture victims. Do you think you’re immune?’” he recalled.

Smyth said he and Buu were ultimately released from prison at the order of Saddam Hussein. “He wanted to show the Americans that he could be trusted in negotiating,” Smyth said. “He was brutal, but rational.” Thirty-five years later, Smyth turned emotional while reflecting on the ordeal. “It was terrifying,” he said. “It left scars and trauma. I feel very grateful that we made it.”

Today, Smyth’s reporting on geopolitical conflicts, organized crime, international human rights abuses, American gun violence, and other contentious issues continues to put him at odds with the powerful. Over the course of his career, in addition to covering cartels, genocides, and political extremists for publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor, he’s led investigative projects for outfits such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, with which he reported on the role France played in arming brutal regimes in Rwanda and how US military assistance fostered violent paramilitary units in Colombia. He’s made a career of sticking his neck out to tell truths, and along the way he’s met other reporters and activists who wound up paying the ultimate price for trying to do the same. 

The riskiness of his work, and the gratitude he feels for getting through it all alive, motivated him to embark on a second career. Smyth is also CEO of GJS, formerly known as Global Journalist Security, a firm he founded in 2011 to train journalists in how to survive in dangerous environments. As many as three thousand people have participated in GJS trainings, which use actors and props to replicate emergency scenarios they might actually encounter in the field.

The trainings, held in GJS’s headquarters outside of Washington, DC, or on-location with clients around the world, prepare participants to deal with everything from violent mob scenes and kidnappings to hostage-takings and threats of sexual assault. In addition to journalists, GJS now also works with NGOs, humanitarian groups, governmental agencies (but only if they meet his firm’s standards for transparency and commitment to press freedom), and other “human rights defenders.”  

Smyth said a sense of social justice has always been what fuels his work—though he puts it more bluntly. “I hate bullies,” he said. “I hate liars, and I hate liars who are bullies. My attitude is, I’m going to go after them.” Smyth said he was raised in a New Jersey suburb by right-wing populist parents who wanted their son to get a degree in business. But Smyth, who loved to read and to write his own stories, veered in another direction once he arrived at Boston College. He majored in English, sought out “every left-wing professor I could find,” he said, and was drawn to sociology courses that turned him on to critiques of capitalism and support for human rights causes. These were the early days of the Salvadoran Civil War, and Smyth was particularly incensed by headlines about the 1980 rape and murder of US Catholic missionaries by members of the National Guard of El Salvador. “That radicalized me,” Smyth said. “I couldn’t believe we were giving military aid to these murderous bastards.” 

El Salvador would turn out to be where Smyth broke his first major story. He traveled there in 1986 to study the country’s labor movement on a grant he obtained through graduate school at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where he earned his master’s degree in Latin American studies and international economics. While in El Salvador, Smyth obtained classified US State Department cables revealing that the Reagan administration, which staunchly supported El Salvador President José Napoleón Duarte, was trying to “divide and destroy” El Salvador’s opposition labor movement, Smyth wrote in The Nation magazine. He spent the next several years in El Salvador, reporting on abuses by guerillas and government officials alike. The Village Voice published a story by Smyth that implicated the country’s then–army chief in the 1989 massacre of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter. The Jesuits had been advocates of a peace deal to end the civil war. In 1990, he coauthored a report for an NGO called the Washington Office on Latin America that advocated for reducing the US military aid to El Salvador by 50 percent as a tactical path toward peace. Congress did exactly that about six months later, “and that began the process to end the war,” Smyth said. That report remains his greatest source of professional pride. “A lot of forces were involved, but what we wrote accelerated the peace process,” he said. “It was the most important thing I’ve ever done, to make that happen.”