A little under three months ago, an American civilian named Andrea Parhamovich was killed in Baghdad when her car was ambushed by gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades. She was 28 years old and had only been in Iraq since last August. She'd taken a job with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), a Washington-based NGO headed by Madeleine Albright that assists governments around the world in building democratic institutions. The plan was to get some experience in Baghdad, then come back and work on a presidential campaign.
"Andi had extraordinary potential and an insatiable appetite for knowledge," said Matthew Hiltzik, for whom she once worked as an assistant when he headed up corporate communications at Miramax. "It was so tragic that she never had a chance to live out her potential, but it is some consolation that her life ended at one of its happiest points."
Parhamovich went to Iraq because of a blossoming relationship with Michael Hastings, 27, a junior Newsweek reporter who was posted to the magazine's bureau there shortly after the two met at a cocktail party in New York in the spring of 2005. When she died on Jan. 17, the two had reservations at the Four Seasons George V in Paris for Valentine's Day, where they'd planned to elope.
The story of Parhamovich's death rocketed across America.
Pretty, blonde-haired, blue-eyed civilians murdered in brutal circumstances have the ability to bring the war home here with a force that is unmatched by the deaths of more than 3,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis. The cable and broadcast networks covered it; so did all the major newspapers.
Hastings covered it too, after a fashion. In the days after her murder and before he accompanied Parhamovich's remains back to her tiny hometown of Perry, Ohio, he began digging into the particulars of the ambush: the apparent recklessness of NDI to approve her trip to Yarmouk, a notoriously dangerous neighbourhood; the firepower faced by her convoy of three armoured vehicles as she left her meeting at the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) headquarters; the possibility that IIP, despite having been welcomed recently at the White House, has ties to al-Qaeda.
A few days after the funeral, possibly to help himself work through what had happened, Hastings did what reporters do: He began to write. He wrote furiously for a month straight, churning out 75,000 words about Parhamovich's death, about their relationship (the good and the bad), about his past battles with substance abuse and Parhamovich's own dark past, about the abysmal security situation in Iraq. His ground-level view of Baghdad is eye-opening and depressing, and he is nakedly dismissive of those at the top. ("Bush proclaims a war and lists excuses for it," he writes.) Hastings produced a very rough manuscript, bitter and raw and forthright, and it was full of spelling and grammatical errors and some embarrassingly intimate and cheesy prose, but still he gave it to someone at the Wylie Agency, the powerful literary shop with an office across West 57th Street from Newsweek, and they sent it to publishers around town with the title I Lost My Love in Baghdad and sold it on March 29 for a reported $500,000 (U.S.).
(Some of the cash will go to a foundation set up in Parhamovich's memory to support college-age women pursuing careers in media, politics or humanitarian work: it's at TheAndiFoundation.org.) The next afternoon, Friday, March 30, someone (perhaps someone at a publishing company that lost out on the book, it's unclear) e-mailed the manuscript to the New York Observer's media blog. Someone there -- evidently a junior someone there, possessing limited experience with copyright law and a similar lack of good taste -- followed the bloggers' dictum about information wanting to be free and figured it would be a great idea to post the whole manuscript, all 131 pages of it. The post went up without the participation of the blog's editor. (The Observer didn't return requests for comment.) The next day, someone working the weekend shift at Gawker.com -- evidently a junior someone there -- decided the news about the book and its contents would make for fine comic fodder. He riffed on the text messages between the two lovers that were included in the manuscript, and joked about, "the literal January death," of Parhamovich." Never mind that Hastings had actually been on a freelance assignment for Gawker on the night he met Parhamovich; in the blogosphere, it's all fun and games until someone gets -- oh. Sorry.
By Monday, the grown-ups were back in charge. The Observer eradicated the post from its website after receiving a lawyer's letter which suggested that the manuscript, aside from being copyrighted, contained information about the Baghdad operations of Newsweek that, if disseminated, could endanger people over there.
Last Friday, the magazine's assistant managing editor responsible for foreign correspondents, Mark Miller, told me Newsweek staff had gone over the manuscript and were confident there was no such risk.
But there are other consequences to the Observer's post. The lawyer's letter suggests that the manuscript contained private information about Parhamovich that Hastings had not yet related to her family. That's putting it mildly: In fact, as I discovered over the weekend, Parhamovich's family didn't even know Hastings had been working on a book about their daughter.
He'd planned to tell them at some point, perhaps after sitting down with them and telling them about how Parhamovich had died. They don't yet know all the details. But then, neither does Hastings. He's back in Baghdad, searching for the truth about her death. That's the only work he can do over there now. When the book contract was being hammered out, he was in transit to the Middle East, intending to do more reporting for Newsweek. But last Friday, Mark Miller told me the manuscript's release by the Observer had suddenly scuttled those plans because it exposed Hastings's cynical view of the war. "We don't normally want our correspondents to be expressing these kinds of views," said Miller. "Given that it is out there, I think it's best that he not be reporting for us from Baghdad. There is a perception issue."
True, but maybe they should leave him in, anyway. Hastings has earned the right to be cynical about this war and those who prosecuted it. He's paid with his heart. He'll be paying for the rest of his life.
Simon Houpt