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Over more than three decades as a foreign correspondent, Anne Garrels reported from some of the most dangerous places on earth. Known for reporting directly from the frontlines, Garrels’ tremendous skill in bringing the news of the world to our doorsteps from Central America, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and Baghdad made her one of the greatest journalists of her generation.

Anne Longworth Garrels was born July 2, 1951 in Springfield, Massachusetts to John C. and Valarie S. Garrels. Her mother died when Garrels was 25, and her father retired as Chairman and Managing Director of Monsanto Ltd. in London. She was much younger than her two siblings and developed an independent, precocious spirit. At the age of 8, she moved to London with her family and attended boarding school. In 1968, she returned to the United States to attend Middlebury College, eventually transferring to Radcliffe College. She graduated in 1972 having learned Russian along the way with a keen interest in events going on inside of what was then the Soviet Union. 

Shortly after graduation, Garrels accepted a research position at ABC News, and soon found herself on assignment in Moscow, largely due to her fluency in Russian. She had never been on the air and suddenly found herself thrust into all aspects of production, from reporting to running the camera. Many Russians were afraid to speak to the press because of the totalitarian state in which they lived. However, over the course of her time in Moscow, Garrels built relationships and came to deeply understand the many in the Soviet Union who wished to maintain human dignity and truth.  Her strong investigative reporting led to her expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1982.

Garrels was then assigned to Central America as ABC News Bureau Chief. Working in El Salvador and Nicaragua, she was able to talk to opposing factions to compile a more complete picture of the ongoing political conflicts. Returning to the U.S. in 1985, Garrels moved to Washington, D.C. to take a new position as State Department Correspondent at NBC News. While in Washington, she met her future husband and on June 14, 1986, she and James Vinton (Vint) Lawrence married.

In 1988, she joined National Public Radio (NPR) eventually returning to Russia as the Moscow correspondent.  In the 1990s, she also covered the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, where she began to realize that the rules of war were changing with the emergence of the internet. No longer needed as sole sources of information, journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and UN officials became prime targets for militants because they were worth both money and propaganda points. During her more than two decades at NPR, Garrels covered the fall of the Soviet Union, events at Tiananmen Square in China, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, both Gulf Wars, and the war in Afghanistan.

Perhaps best known for her coverage of the most recent Iraq War, Garrels was one of only two women among 16 American journalists who remained in Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel to report on the war before, during and for seven years after the American bombing campaign. The fear of being killed or taken hostage was never far from her mind.

In 2003, Garrels published “Naked in Baghdad,” a memoir about her time in Iraq. The title carries a double meaning. First, she had no protection as she reported the events going on around her. The second meaning is more poignant. While reporting from the Palestine Hotel, she frequently broadcast naked so that if Iraqi security agents knocked on her door, she would be able to ask for time to get dressed and hide her satellite phone, her only link to the outside world and her only means to broadcast her coverage of the war.

Anne Garrels lived her life bravely reporting on wars, though she never intended to become a journalist, and particularly not a war correspondent. In her words, “the wars found me.” She continued to cover conflicts around the world because she was interested in telling the stories of those most affected by the ravages of war. Preferring to report from the frontlines rather than from a pressroom, she took many risks and saw friends and colleagues killed or injured in the line of duty.  Garrels met and interviewed many different kinds of people who challenged the status quo, including human rights’ champion Andrei Sakharov, murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, American military officers who challenged accepted wisdom in war and Russians who questioned dictatorship and faced prison for doing so. She helped tell the stories of aid workers, doctors, teachers, diplomats and thoughtful lawyers and bankers in Iraq who refused to take sides. And she did all of this with poise and grace, fulfilling her self-defined role as a “good witness.”

Garrels won nearly every major broadcasting award, including the George Polk Award for her work in Iraq, the 2004 Edward R. Murrow Award, the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Los Angeles Press Club’s Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. She continued to share her extraordinary life with the public and was the 2011 Commencement speaker at the University of Hartford. Garrels was on the board of Oxfam America and was a long-standing member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2016 she published “Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia.” In 2019, she toured as part of “Between War and Here,” a collaboration with Ensemble Galilei and fellow NPR correspondent Neal Conan.

Garrells lived in Norfolk, CT and passed away on September 7, 2022. 

Related Links:

Naked in Baghdad

Interview on PBS NewsHour

Putin Country