'Doors Opened Up' For Katie Couric To Report From Iraq

The "CBS Evening News" anchor is scheduled to fly tonight to Iraq. (By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

Katie Couric, who once expressed doubts about reporting from war zones, is heading to Iraq.

Couric leaves tonight and will anchor the "CBS Evening News" from Baghdad and Damascus, Syria, next week.

The broadcast networks have been skittish about such trips since Bob Woodruff, then co-anchoring ABC's "World News," was badly injured by a roadside bomb while traveling with Iraqi troops early last year. NBC's Brian Williams reported from the country in the spring.

"You can't help but get a very detached perspective when you're not there and you're not witnessing things firsthand. . . . I'm curious about very basic questions regarding living conditions, about how much fear there is in the street, about how the soldiers really are doing," Couric told the Associated Press.

"I don't like frivolous anchor trips of any kind," Rick Kaplan, the broadcast's executive producer, said in an interview. "I wouldn't do this if it wasn't a timely and important thing. We didn't spend two seconds pushing her or coercing her." He said the goal was to provide greater context before mid-September, when President Bush makes public the recommendations of the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

There is always a debate about how much anchors contribute with such high-profile trips that could not have been obtained by correspondents more familiar with the region. Kaplan said Couric would report as many as a dozen stories and that veteran Iraq reporter Lara Logan would do several more.

"We've gained access to some people and places we wouldn't have were it not at this kind of level," Kaplan said. "A number of doors opened up because it was Katie."

After signing with CBS last year, Couric told an interviewer that "as a single parent with two children," she did not plan to go to Iraq because of the danger. Kaplan acknowledged the risks and said anchors can easily become targets because of their fame.

The perils were underscored last week when Anwar Abbas Lafta, a translator working for CBS, was abducted from his Baghdad home by a group of armed men. After two ransom calls to his family, Lafta was found dead Monday.

Kaplan said the decision to send Couric grew out of conversations he initiated with her six weeks ago, and that they were encouraged by cooperation from the Pentagon and from officials and organizations in Iraq and Syria. He dismissed the notion that the third-place "Evening News" is making the trek to garner attention, but added: "We want people to understand this is a very aggressive broadcast."