Since July, when the first convoy of Kuwaiti oil tankers flying newly issued American flags steamed under U. S. naval escort through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf, dozens of U. S. journalists have come on board ships of the U. S. Middle East Joint Task Force.
For reporters accustomed to covering the Gulf escort operation from afar, the exposure to the fleet has been invaluable. But the method of exposing the press to the U. S. Navy’s operations in the Gulf leaves room for improvement.
The pool, originally intended as a last resort for providing prompt media coverage of major military operations without compromising operational security, has been distorted in the Gulf to become the first resort for covering routine operations.
A better system would be to adopt what people familiar with press coverage of military operations call “unilateral plus.” The idea is that reporters should frequently visit ships on a unilateral basis, operating singly and writing only for their own organizations. In an emergency, the Pentagon could quickly draft these correspondents into a team working on behalf of the entire press corps.
At present, there is no unilateral coverage of the Gulf fleet. The only way a reporter can visit one of the Navy’s ships in the Gulf is to join a six-person “media pool” that operates from Bahrain. Journalists are assigned to the pool for three weeks at a time, and their reports during this period are shared with the entire American press.
Each pool consists of a television crew (reporter, camera operator, and sound technician), a radio journalist, a print journalist, and a still photographer. The pool spends a few hours or a few days at a time on board the Navy’s ships, sharing both the long hours of boredom and the rare moments of terror that fill the lives of the 25,000 or so servicemen on the 25 ships currently operating in the Gulf and nearby waters.
Reporters agree not to disclose classified information, and all their reports are screened by the military.
The pool worked best on the very first Gulf convoy, when the supertanker Bridgeton hit a mine. Newspapers and magazines received dozens of print reports carrying datelines on board the Fox (CG-33) and the Kidd (DDG-993), and all the television networks aired footage from the voyage.
But when American destroyers last fall shelled the Rostam oil platforms in the Gulf, used by Iran as a base for armed speedboats, the pool was not sent along. That episode, following a Silkworm missile strike on the tanker Sea Isle City in Kuwait’s harbor, was the most important instance to date of U. S. retaliation for Iranian actions against a reflagged Kuwaiti tanker and was the kind of operation ideally suited for pool coverage.
Since then, American reporters have mainly witnessed routine operations in safe waters, although they have seen a few close calls when Iraqi jets buzzed American ships, including the recent episode when an Iraqi Badger bomber fired a Silkworm air-to-surface missile near an American escort vessel.
As the print representative on the pool last December, I spent eight days on board six ships of the Persian Gulf task force. They ranged from the smallest to the largest ships deployed there: the minesweeper Fearless (MSO-442), the amphibious vessel Okinawa (LPH-3), the command ship La Salle (AGF-3), the cruiser Ticonderoga (CG-47), the carrier Midway (CV-41), and the battleship Iowa (BB-61).
In the year before visiting those ships, I probably wrote J00 news articles in The New York Times about the Iran-Iraq War and the American policy of protecting Kuwait’s oil tankers in the war-torn Persian Gulf.
But until the Pentagon selected me to participate in the press pool, my direct observation of naval operations in the Gulf area had been limited to a day spent last August on board an Iranian Navy vessel conducting a show-and-tell minesweeping demonstration just outside the Strait of Hormuz!
That display was a far cry from the real-world, tactical scene I was to witness from the Okinawa in December. The pool flew alongside U. S. Navy RH-53D mine countermeasure helicopters, escorted by Cobra helicopter gunships, as they trolled the windswept waters near Farsi Island in the northern Gulf.
In 12 hours on the “Oki," the reporters in the pool got a crash course in Navy life. We watched the painstaking maintenance of the helicopters, both in the hangar deck and on the flight deck; we chatted with the chiefs late into the night; we talked with young men standing watches on the ship’s bow with shoulder-fired Stinger surface-to-air missiles.
That kind of personal contact paints an indelible image on the journalistic mind, and military commanders ought to shelve their preconceptions about the “hostile” press and encourage more such visits.
But the current system of pool coverage is not efficient. Most of a typical three-week rotation in the Gulf is spent ashore, with little to do. Our group became so frustrated with the leisurely life at the Diplomat Hotel in Bahrain that we had tee-shirts printed with the slogan: “When there’s news in the Gulf, we’re in the pool.”
Allowing reporters to work unilaterally in the Persian Gulf would maximize their exposure to the fleet and reduce the logistical burden and operational interference.
There is no doubt that reporters who have spent a few days on the Navy’s ships will do a better job of accurately reporting breaking news stories, whether they be relatively minor events like the discovery of a new mine field, or tragedies like the attack on the frigate Stark (FFG-31) last May. It’s not so much that an experienced reporter knows all the answers; but he or she has a better chance of asking the right questions.
—Jack Cushman