Anne Longworth Garrels (July 2, 1951 – September 7, 2022) was an American broadcast journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, as well as for ABC and NBC, and other media.

In the mid-1970s, when she worked for ABC (including as producer), Garrels was one of the few women national broadcast journalists in the United States—eventually serving as ABC's Moscow Bureau Chief in the Soviet Union, until expelled for her detailed, unflattering reporting on the country and its issues. She became a war correspondent for ABC, covering Central American conflicts. She later became NBC's reporter at the U.S. State Department.

In 1988, Garrels began her 22-year career as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), closely covering conflicts and other major events throughout the world, earning numerous media awards, most famously for covering the 2003 Iraq War and its aftermath—at one point the only American broadcast journalist in Iraq's war-torn capital.

Garrels was active in journalism-related organizations, and global affairs causes, and wrote two noted books—one about the Soviet Union, and one about the Iraq war and its aftermath, both recounting her own experiences, as well as providing detailed historical coverage of those places in that time.

Background and education

Anne Longworth Garrels was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on July 2, 1951, the daughter of Valerie (Smith) and John C. Garrels Jr.

Career

Early career

In 1975, Garrels worked for the ABC television network in several positions for ten years, including as producerone of the few women broadcast journalists at the time.

She served ABC in the Soviet Union as Moscow bureau chief and correspondent until she was expelled in 1982. Able to speak Russian, and "in love" with the country, she was noted for more in-depth reporting from that country than most other U.S. journalists. She interviewed prominent Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev, and Sergei Kovalyov. Her reporting exposed numerous hardships of Soviet citizens, displeasing the Soviet government, resulting in her 1982 expulsion. She did not return until 1988, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Garrels' workload at National Public Radio (particularly as State Department correspondent), and a family illness, forced her to withdraw from the program that November.

NPR career

Garrels joined NPR in 1988 and reported on conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, and Iraq.

Garrels was the Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1996, and was a member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists from 1999 until her death in 2022.—and for a while was the only American broadcast reporter still broadcasting from the middle of Baghdad. Garrels survived the April 8, 2003, U.S. tank attack on the Palestine Hotel, where she and hundreds of other journalists were living.

Following the April 8, 2003, U.S. bombing of the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad, which killed journalist Tareq Ayyoub ("Tariq/Tareq Ayoub"), Garrels reportedly said that Ayyoub should have known better than to be in his office during the invasion—a comment that raised angry responses from some in the international journalism community, who accused her of "blaming the victim."

Shortly after her return from Iraq, she published Naked in Baghdad (2003, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a memoir of her time covering the events surrounding the invasion. Garrels also covered the January 2005 Iraqi national elections for an interim government, as well as constitutional referendum and the December 2005 elections for the first full term Iraqi government. As sectarian violence swept much of central Iraq Garrels continued to report from Baghdad, Najaf and Basra.

In 2007 Garrels was criticized by FAIR for using confessions by prisoners who had been tortured, during a story about an Iraqi Shiite militia (broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition). Garrels later defended her story on NPR's Letters program, saying: "Of course, I had doubts. But the details that were given seemed to me to gel with other things that I had heard from people who had not been tortured. But I was as uncomfortable as the listeners were with the conditions."

Garrels retired from NPR in 2010.

Late career

Garrels continued her work with the Committee to Protect Journalists until the end of her life, serving on its board of directors.

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Garrels, then 70 years old and undergoing treatment for cancer, approached NPR about coming out of retirement to cover the conflict. While her offer was declined, she started a non-profit organization, Assist-Ukraine, to raise money to support Ukraine and victims of the war, particularly medical supplies, reportedly raising US$1 million for the cause.

Personal life

In 1986, Garrels married J. Vinton Lawrence, They were married until Lawrence's death from leukemia in 2016.

  • 1994 Citation for Excellence, Madeline Dane Ross Award ("for best correspondent[s] in any medium showing a concern for the human condition"), Overseas Press Club, for her NPR work: Russia: The Human Cost of Reform.
  • 1996–97, Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
  • 1998 Whitman Bassow Award, Overseas Press Club, with Loren Jenkins, for an NPR series on water issues around the globe. "enduring bombings, blackouts, thirst and intimidation to report from the besieged Iraqi capital of Baghdad."
  • 2003 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF).
  • 2004 Peabody Award, to NPR – specifically citing Garrels (first) and 9 other NPR journalists, for coverage of the war in Iraq.
  • 2004 Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
  • 2004 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, Missouri School of Journalism, University of Missouri, (awarded in 2004, presented in 2009)
  • 2010 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism, Los Angeles Press Club
  • 2012 Inductee: "Writers & Journalists" category, Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame
  • Inter-Action's Award for Excellence in International Reporting

Films

  • Journalist: Killed in the Line of Duty, – Co-narrator, with Christiane Amanpour, Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather (director: Steven Rosenbaum; host: Anderson Cooper)

Television programs

  • Science Journal, 25-part weekly news series on science, medicine and technology, 1988, WETA-TV / PBS