High Anxiety
Within days Salopek was behind bars. Few people at the Tribune knew that until publisher David Hiller announced his arrest by e-mail on August 26. “As you know, Paul is not a spy, but only one of the world’s finest journalists,” Hiller wrote. “Ann Marie Lipinski and many others within the newsroom have been working around the clock for more than a week to get Paul back safely, and these efforts continue. Please hold good thoughts for our colleague.”
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Reporters measure each other by the stories they do and by what they are willing and able to do to get them. “Salopek’s work is so good and his reporting is so thorough and the things he does to get his stories are so extreme that he’s probably the most respected reporter in the building,” travel writer Alan Solomon told me. “The rest of us are hacks by comparison. I was doing a travel story in Northern Ireland in the mid-80s, and I remember asking the woman who ran the bed-and-breakfast, is there an area I should not go to? And she said, ‘Don’t go to Shankill Road.’ I immediately went to Shankill Road, and I got pelted by stones. But that doesn’t compare to guys like Tim McNulty who have been to serious war zones, or Liz Sly, or Salopek. These are people I wish I had the guts to follow their lead.”
I asked Mullen about his worst moments. “I was arrested by the IRA one night in Belfast because nobody knew who I was, arrested by–I’m not sure who it was–in southern Lebanon in 1978 when Israel invaded,” Mullen said. “They hauled me to a Syrian army post. That was one of the hairiest assignments I ever had. And Lebanon was much worse when Sean was murdered there.
I called McNulty, and wound up speaking to him and to Luft at the same time. “This has focused all of our attention and a lot of energy from all across the paper,” McNulty said, “not just in the editorial department, but from the top executives on down.” He and Luft were cordial and guarded. When I asked about conditions at the jail they said they had no firsthand knowledge and dropped the subject.
