The relationship between American foreign correspondents and the representatives of the U.S. government abroad – from embassy-posted political officers to CIA “spooks” to soldiers – has undergone significant change. For decades, the U.S. embassy was the first port of call for most correspondents, and a cautious exchange of information was considered “innocent,” as an old Africa hand put it. That ease waned after the Cold War and largely shut down after 9/11. From the “on the team” days of World War II and the Korean War to the freewheeling individualism in Vietnam, through the press manipulation in Central America and the Gulf War, and the “embeds” in Iraq and Afghanistan, AP correspondents’ relation with the U.S. military has also evolved. Although correspondents whose reporting challenged the U.S. storyline experienced some political pressure, all clung to the ideal of objectivity, understood as lack of partisanship and efforts to present all perspectives, especially when covering scenes fraught with contentious politics and atrocious suffering.

The Embassy Line: U.S. Officials as Sources

As Chapter 4 describes, U.S. officials long were essential, if obviously partial, tipsters, sources, and analysts for foreign correspondents. Diplomats and journalists often navigated the same expatriate social circles, though in established media capitals, like Mexico City, AP and other agencies, bent on feeding the wire, struggled to break into the group with elite newspapers whose more forgiving deadlines allowed for “on background” sessions (Price, 8). Even in Vietnam in the early 1970s, when the “dissemblance on details of what actually was happening” led to public clashes between veteran reporters and U.S. officials, one correspondent remembered that diplomats threw her a birthday party (Lederer, 5) – and when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the U.S. Embassy was looted, an AP correspondent “retrieved” the bronze plaque honoring the U.S. troops who had died there during the Tet offensive (Esper 1998, 548). From a military coup in Turkey (Hurst, 3) to a devastating drought in Mauritania (Heinzerling, 2), embassy officials alerted journalists to news.