In Iraq, Journalist Richard Engel Sticks to the Story

He says he was "scared to death," especially when given a gun to hunt small game. Nina Engel remembers getting a letter from her son: "I just returned from my survival hike. I clubbed a bird to death and ate it." When the teenager returned, he told his mother: "I learned a lot about myself."

Engel says the experience began a transformation that largely enabled him to overcome his dyslexia and school problems. Despite his learning difficulties, he showed early promise in other ways.

"He was a great writer," says Ross Peet, who was a classmate at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx. "But he struggled with anything that had a number on it."

At 16, Engel spent a year as an exchange student in Sicily. After graduating from Stanford in 1996 with a degree in international relations, Engel says, he decided that "the Middle East would be the story of my generation." He announced to his parents that he was moving to Cairo, where the family had once taken a trip.

"Are you insane?" Nina Engel recalls asking him. "Do you remember what a hellhole it was?" When her son said he was also considering Damascus, she allowed as how Cairo was not really that bad.

The aspiring reporter took his $2,000 in savings, moved to Cairo, enrolled in Arabic classes and found an apartment in a neighborhood where donkeys and dogs roamed the dirt roads.

Engel did some local freelancing and caught an early break when he was asked to take over the English-language Middle East Times after the staff walked out in the wake of the editor's firing. He wrote all the articles -- making plenty of mistakes in the process -- and took the proofs each week to a printing press in Athens, as a way to avoid Egyptian censorship laws.

Engel ran into trouble anyway as he began reporting on the group that would become al-Qaeda. He says Egyptian authorities started following him and bugging his phone. Once, after a weekend trip, an official called to ask how he had liked staying in Room 17 of a hotel in Alexandria. Engel reported the surveillance to the U.S. embassy, to no avail.

"The embassy was useless," he says. "It was my first lesson that you cannot rely on anyone else. No one is coming to help you."

In 1999, Agence France-Presse hired Engel to go to Jerusalem and cover the Palestinians. As the intifada protests against Israel turned violent, he says, "I spent the next three years on my stomach, getting tear-gassed and shot at with rubber bullets."

Most people might consider that a miserable existence. But Engel brightens at the thought: "I was lucky enough to be on the fault line as history shifts and moves."

Friends were not surprised at his constant need for an adrenaline fix. "He has no interest in a 9-to-5 job," Peet says. "He's very much into living on the edge. I don't think he has much interest in having a normal life."

By late 2002, as war with Iraq loomed, ABC News and the BBC had hired Engel as a freelancer. But even though he spoke Arabic, Engel wasn't on anyone's list to get an Iraqi visa. The networks were concentrating their efforts on their bigger stars.

Undeterred, Engel took $20,000, went to Jordan and bought a human shield visa, meaning that he was pledging to chain himself to an Iraqi facility as a deterrent against U.S. bombing. Engel got the visa from an Iraqi official who knew full well he was a journalist but was swayed by a few hundred dollars and some baby clothing that Engel had bought for extra persuasion.

Once in Iraq, Engel bought a generator and some crowbars, souped up two Volkswagens so he could move fast without being conspicuous, and hired an off-duty police officer. On the eve of the Western invasion, most of the networks pulled out their correspondents for safety reasons, a decision that Engel could not fathom.

"You knew it was going to be horrible -- that's why you're there," he says.

As other journalists either withdrew, were expelled or clamored to get in, Engel was for a brief time the only American television reporter in Iraq. He found himself much in demand by ABC, which still identified him as a freelancer. He did the videotaping himself with a small camcorder. Once Saddam Hussein was toppled, ABC and NBC both offered to hire Engel. He retained a top New York agent and decided he would prefer a fresh start with NBC, "coming in the front door as opposed to climbing up the fire escape and breaking in the back door."

In the invasion's aftermath, Engel would drive each week to such cities as Najaf and Fallujah, poking around to find stories. But that gradually changed as the security situation deteriorated. Now, unless he is embedded with a military unit, Engel usually finds himself confined to the safer precincts of Baghdad, an experience he describes as "a noose tightening around us." He increasingly relies on Iraqi staffers who are from certain neighborhoods or members of the same ethnic group as a given area's residents. But even that can be problematic. "I've gotten rid of the ones who I think cannot be trusted," Engel says.

Not everything he covers involves bombs and bullets. Engel did a piece earlier this year on the plight of children at a Baghdad orphanage, which drew so much public reaction that "NBC Nightly News" aired it a second time.

"I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories. I don't have an abacus," he says.

But bad news has a way of finding journalists in Iraq. On Memorial Day, Engel heard a nearby explosion. He soon learned that CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier had been badly wounded and her two crew members, Paul Douglas and James Brolan, killed by the blast.

His mother sent him an e-mail: "YOU ARE UNDER HOUSE ARREST UNTIL YOU CAN BOOK A FLIGHT OUT OF THERE . . . Mom's orders."

She writes him every day, but he has not followed her evacuation instructions. Still, there are psychological effects. Riding in an Army Humvee, Engel looked down at his legs and thought how fragile they looked. What if he lost them?

"You worry about how many lives you have and how many I've already used up," Engel says. "I don't think I'm invincible."