Donald Kirk has been covering Korean Peninsula issues for decades.
The perils of 'embedding'
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By Donald Kirk
The concept of “embedding” journalists when they want to visit U.S. military units in combat has always been repugnant to me.
That’s because, when I was covering U.S. forces in Vietnam a few decades ago, we never heard about “embedding.” Armed with press cards from MACV, the acronym for Military Assistance Command Vietnam, and JUSPAO, the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office, we could go anywhere on military transportation and hang out with troops.
The Pentagon got the notion of “embedding” in response to Vietnam. Military people believed correspondents covering that war didn’t appreciate what a privileged lot we were, and they were convinced that negative or critical stories by free-wheeling journalists contributed mightily to the U.S. debacle.
Then along came a woman named Paula Broadwell who was “embedded” in Afghanistan while writing up General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander there. Working on her happy-talking bio of the man, she had to have gone through the routine that afflicts all journalists when they join U.S. forces in the field. That is, she got approval to “embed” in order to live in military quarters. Military public affairs people may now be wondering what the term meant when applied to Broadwell and Petraeus.
The Petraeus scandal does suggest the advantages of embedding with the topic of your project if you want to get the best stuff. Late night comedians have no doubt made the most of it. Petraeus actually was such an impressive figure, personally, intellectually and professionally, that you might not have suspected Broadwell’s close relationship just because her book is incredibly sycophantic.
A lot of other people have had nothing but praise for the man. I missed glimpsing him when I was in Baghdad for several months in 2004, but I got to see and hear him five years later when he addressed the graduating class at Princeton the day after I’d attended a reunion there. Petraeus, who has a doctorate from Princeton, didn’t talk about waging wars but conveyed an inspiring message of the need to follow and fulfill dreams. The only actual quote I remember was his good-natured final phrase, delivered almost as a laugh line, “Go Tiger.” He made his point.
Now it would seem that Petraeus, having retired as a four-star general and “resigned” from his post-retirement job as CIA director, will be the inspiration for spy dramas tinged with double agents, cyber-espionage and, of course, beautiful women. It might not be far-fetched to imagine North Korean cyber-spies digging up those emails that he exchanged with Broadwell and threatening to spread them around unless he provided inside information on U.S. military plans. Worse, in some far-fetched scenario perhaps the Chinese could use him as their super-spy inside the CIA. Might the Chinese and North Koreans, according to this plot, be conspiring with each other?
Not that there’s any suggestion that Petraeus was compromised professionally by his relationship with Broadwell or the relationship that she imagined he was having with another woman in Florida. It’s just that the story of the downfall of this brilliant man, so totally unexpected, lends itself to endless speculation about the inherent possibilities for infiltrating the highest councils of the U.S. ruling establishment. The general who knew how to deal with some of the world’s most fearsome foes was blind-sided by a woman, like him a U.S. Military Academy graduate, preparing for a doctorate, with whom he’d embedded at the height of his military career.
There’s something a little unfair about Petraeus’ fall from grace when you consider some of the relationships formed during the Korean War. One of the most outstanding U.S. officers in Korea, “Iron Mike Michaelis,” “Iron Mike” of the Pusan perimeter, whose Wolfhounds regiment had a lot to do with keeping the North Koreans from breaking through to Pusan in the terrible summer of 1950, had numerous affairs.
One of the best known was his relationship with a Korean singer. He also was known to be providing more than quotes for a noted American correspondent, a woman breaking into a man’s world. Michaelis died in 1985 13 years after I interviewed him for the Chicago Tribune on my first visit to Korea shortly after his retirement as commander of U.S. Forces Korea. Petraeus reminds me a little of Michaelis – though Petraeus is more of a cerebral type who combined intellectual with military achievement.
The good news about Petraeus’ fall, though, is that it ended much of the yakking about the U.S. presidential election. Just as people were tiring of those pundits with all their stock-in-trade “opinions,” along came Petraeus’ announcement that he’d been a bad boy and had to quit his spymaster job. Now the pundits had something else to talk about.
Reporters descended like flies looking for the principals in the drama, the girlfriend from whom the general was said to have broken off and the “other woman” who blew his cover by notifying the FBI about her threatening emails. Oh, and they had to look for his wife of 37 years. She’s the daughter of another four-star general, William Knowlton, who held top-level posts in Vietnam while I was there as a correspondent. No, I never met him in Vietnam, but I did meet him years before he died in 2008. We talked briefly about the freedom correspondents had in those days. For the Pentagon, the lesson might be, embedding carries risks.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, has covered wars from Vietnam to the Middle East but has never been embedded. He’s at kirkdon@yahoo.com