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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown
Trilateral Talks to Begin in China; Spread of SARS; Who was Deep Throat?
Aired April 22, 2003 - 23:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: For some of the big stories of the night, we begin our second hour of NEWSNIGHT with our second "Whip" of the evening. It doesn't get better than that, does it?
The whip starts off with the latest on the United States and North Korea, ahead of talks set to begin in China. Andrea Koppel has that story for us.
So, Andrea -- a headline.
ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN STATE DEPARTMENT CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Aaron.
It has been six months since U.S. and North Korean officials last sat down together to talk about North Korea's nuclear weapons program. This time around, they'll be joined by China, the country believed to have the most leverage over the Stalinist north.
BROWN: Andrea, thank you. Back to you tonight.
To Karbala next and the latest on the pilgrimage of Iraqi Shiites. Karl Penhaul is still covering that for us.
Karl -- a headline.
KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Aaron.
Day is dawning on the final day of a massive pilgrimage by Shiite Muslims to this city of Karbala. It's been a celebration for new- found religious freedom, but these pilgrims are also now sending a message to coalition forces: Thanks for helping us get rid of Saddam Hussein; now please go home, they say.
BROWN: Karl, thank you.
The journey home for one rescued American POW, Ronald Young. Susan Candiotti had the assignment of the day.
Susan -- a headline.
SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Aaron.
Flowers, autographs and a police escort, Army pilot Ronald Young comes home to Georgia, and he shares just a little bit about what he was thinking during his captivity in Iraq.
BROWN: Susan, thank you.
And Beijing, our final stop, the latest on the spread of SARS. Jaime FlorCruz is there for us.
Jaime -- a headline.
JAIME FLORCRUZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, SARS-related statistics are rising sharply now that the Chinese leadership has decreed to stop the cover-ups on SARS cases. And the political, economic and human costs of such cover-ups are also rising.
BROWN: Jaime, thank you. Back to you and the rest shortly.
Also coming up in this second hour of NEWSNIGHT, more on SARS, including a report from the place that's been hit harder than any other outside of Asia: Toronto.
And the journalism students who think they know what others have spent a generation trying to figure out: Who was Deep Throat of Watergate fame? We'll tell you who they think it is, and they'll explain why.
That and more in the hour ahead.
But we begin the hour with a headline that sounds about six months old: the White House in a squabble over U.N. weapons inspectors returning to Iraq. But it is most definitely a headline from today.
The chief U.N. weapons inspector made the suggestion that his inspectors are the right people to go back into the country, and the United States was quick to say, no thanks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HANS BLIX, CHIEF U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: I am also convinced that the world and the Security Council, which have dealt with this issue forever, 10 years, that they would like to have the inspection and verification, which bear the imprint of that independent and of some institution that is authorized by the whole international community.
ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN: We have a coalition that is working on the ground to dismantle Iraq's WMD programs, and we think that's going to be effective. We think it will get the job done, and that the bottom line is the president wants to focus things on the most effective to get the job done.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: So on to Iraq we go, and another visit today by the retired American general, who has been given the charge of rebuilding the country. He got a mixed reception in Baghdad yesterday. Today in northern Iraq, he was greeted like a returning hometown hero, because in that part of Iraq, that's exactly what he is.
The story from CNN's Jane Arraf.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JANE ARRAF, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A lot of expectations from this long-awaited landing. The U.S. general in charge of rebuilding Iraq arrived in northern Iraq to rebuild bridges with Kurdish leaders, who have run this part of the country since the 1991 Gulf War.
From the streets and among Kurdish officials, he couldn't have asked for a warmer welcome.
LT. GEN. JAY GARNER (RET.), OFFICE OF RECONSTRUCTION AND HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE: This is like coming home.
ARRAF: Garner was last in northern Iraq when he ran Operation Provide Comfort, the effort by the U.S. and its allies to care for hundreds of thousands of destitute Kurds, after their failed uprising following the 1991 Gulf War.
Things have changed a lot since then. With U.S. and U.N. help, Iraqi Kurds have gone from a devastated minority to running their own government. The U.S. is brokering an important role for the Kurds in the new Iraqi government.
GARNER: Our desire is that the new government of Iraq represents all Iraqi people -- the Kurdish people, Shiites, Shia, Turkmen, Assyrians, Chaldeans -- all people. It will be a mosaic of the cultures, the religions, the ethnicity of Iraq.
ARRAF: An admirable goal not easily implemented. In Mosul, a northern Iraqi city with one of the biggest ethnic mixes, U.S. troops are overseeing an uneasy peace. American helicopters and American soldiers haven't diffused the simmering tension on the ground between Kurds, Arabs and other groups, a tension made worse by food and fuel shortages.
In the long lines for essentials such as gasoline, Iraqis seem increasingly impatient and angry that although they had been freed from the Iraqi regime, they're still suffering.
(on camera): That initial euphoria of having been freed in a sense from the Iraqi regime is still there but wearing a little thin. And local leaders, both Arab and Kurds, warn that if changes don't come soon, safer streets, electricity returning to the cities, the situation could become even more volatile, for the local people and the American soldiers among them.
Jane Arraf, CNN, in northern Iraq.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: For a quarter of a century, no Shiite Muslim in Iraq could commemorate one of the most sacred days, the death seven centuries ago of a revered figure, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, at least they couldn't celebrate in the way that they wished. With Saddam Hussein gone, no restrictions for the pilgrimage now, and an astonishing sight it is.
CNN's Karl Penhaul is in the Iraqi city of Karbala.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PENHAUL (voice-over): The power and the passion of a new-found religious freedom. Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims are streaming into Karbala to pay homage at the shrine of a revered Muslim martyr.
Under Saddam Hussein, the annual gathering was severely curtailed, small numbers traveling only in buses and trucks. Now, for the first time in decades, these pilgrims are free to fulfill ancient tradition and come on foot.
Flocking from all corners of the country, walking for days, covering hundreds of miles, they're bringing a message for the coalition forces. It's quite simple: Thanks for ridding Iraq of Saddam; now go home.
The downtrodden Shiite Muslim majority wants to determine its own political future. Carrying placards and chanting for Islamic law in Iraq, they called, too, for unity with all Muslims across sectarian divides.
U.S. soldiers, based nearby, have stayed off the streets, occasionally observing proceedings from helicopters. Coalition sources say plans are still on track to play a key role in establishing an interim government to run the country.
The top Shiite clerics say they will not accept a hand-picked leader imposed by the United States and Britain. Those same clerics shy away from claiming political office for themselves, but they vow to take a lead hand in shaping the new Iraq.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
The day is dawning, Aaron, on the final day of the pilgrimage this morning. The morning call to prayer has come, and hundreds of thousands of pilgrims are beginning to flock back out into the streets again. Many of them were milling around the main square during the nights. Others were curled up asleep on the sidewalks. And this indeed, as I say, has been a tremendous celebration for these people.
There is no indication now how they will proceed with these calls for the creation of some kind of Islamic law. No idea of what action these people might take if the coalition doesnt heed their calls to withdraw from the country. All that still remains to be seen, but just for the moment, these people are happy to be here -- Aaron.
BROWN: Karl, thank you -- Karl Penhaul in Karbala.
Imagine the one-month odyssey of a 26-year-old Army pilot named Ronald Young. His helicopter goes down in Iraq, he tries to swim to safety, but eventually he's taken prisoner, then rescued, along with six other American POWs. They all go to Germany, then Texas, where he meets with the president of the United States.
Ronald Young made the last leg of an exhausting journey home today, back to Georgia, but he wasn't too tired to smile.
Susan Candiotti was with him and his family, and she's with us now -- Susan.
CANDIOTTI: What a journey home, Aaron.
Let's see, he received applause at the airport, applause during his plane ride home from Fort Hood, and was even asked to sign autographs. Finally, a police escort led him to his childhood home here in suburban Atlanta.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RONALD YOUNG, JR., FORMER POW: It's overwhelming. I mean, I was -- they kind of -- I guess I was sheltered a little bit, so I didn't know to expect all of this. This is wow!
CANDIOTTI (voice-over): Former POW Ronald Young flew home to Atlanta to a hero's welcome, and the love of a family he sometimes thought he might never see again.
YOUNG, JR.: You don't know what runs through somebody's head when they think that they'll never see the people they love the most in life again. Ever.
CANDIOTTI: But even under fire in Iraq, the Apache pilot said he never lost faith.
YOUNG, JR.: And the shelling got pretty intense. I mean, when that really scares you, I mean, you can't help but think that, you know, this may be it.
CANDIOTTI: His father said the homecoming was second only to the day when he saw his son had been rescued from Iraqi captivity.
RONALD YOUNG, SR., FATHER: The high point of my life was knowing that you was alive and well.
YOUNG, JR.: Well, OK.
YOUNG, SR.: That was the high point.
YOUNG, JR.: That was the high point of my life, too.
CANDIOTTI: Ron Young, Jr. was not ready to talk yet about his three weeks as an Iraqi prisoner of war. His immediate plans?
YOUNG, JR.: Just relax, do some fishing, of course. Just clear my head and do the things that are going to relax me and allow me to kind of put this a little bit behind me.
CANDIOTTI: He asked again for prayers for all of the military still in Iraq and those not coming home. YOUNG, JR.: God bless America. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We love y'all.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CANDIOTTI: Young's father said if he could have exchanged places with his son as a POW, he would have done it in a heartbeat. Young smiled, looked at his father sideways and said, "Oh, no, dad; no, you wouldn't."
Aaron -- back to you.
BROWN: Well, I remember -- and we can smile now -- on the day he was captured his parents saying, he joined the Army because he wanted to fly. He really wanted to fly helicopters.
Does he have a long-term plan for his life at this point?
CANDIOTTI: He does. He wants to go back to flying with the Army. Eventually, he probably wants to do that in the private sector, but for now, he said he just wants to -- believe it or not -- he said, "Go to the beach." He said, you might think I'd be a little sick of the sand, but no, I'd like to go to the beach and have some fun in the water.
BROWN: Doesn't sound bad. Thank you, Susan -- Susan Candiotti in Georgia tonight.
Beijing is a busy place these days; deep concern about SARS, for instance. More on that a little bit later.
But Beijing is also host to a meeting that until a few days ago wasn't on anybody's dance card, the first high-level diplomatic session between the United States, North Korea and China in months.
And as CNN's Andrea Koppel reports, there is no shortage of important things to talk about.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KOPPEL (voice-over): Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly arrived in Beijing, hoping to ease tensions, but not expecting much. U.S. officials say Kelly will tell North Korea it must give up its nuclear program and allow weapons inspectors back into the country.
RICHARD BOUCHER, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN: The purpose of these talks is to get started, for us to be able to lay out the need for a verifiable and an irreversible end to North Korea's nuclear programs.
KOPPEL: Although billed as a multilateral meeting, besides Kelly and his North Korean counterpart, only a senior Chinese official will participate, leaving neighbors, South Korea and Japan, on the sidelines. Last week, Kelly tried to reassure these anxious allies they will be included in future meetings. JON WOLFSTHAL, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR PEACE: The Bush administration now has to try and walk a fine line of engaging North Korea in these three-party talks but pushing very quickly to have the other countries included.
KOPPEL: But the Bush administration is not of one mind on its Korea policy. While Secretary of State Powell favors engagement, Pentagon officials say Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a recent memo suggested, the U.S. should team up with China to topple the current North Korean regime.
Another U.S. official says Rumsfeld also recommended replacing Kelly with Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, who, like Rumsfeld, favors getting tougher with Pyongyang.
(on camera): Until now, the administration's policy has focused on convincing North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for security assurances and economic assistance, but considering how close the Beijing talks came to being cancelled over a poorly- translated North Korean statement, a deal anytime soon is unlikely.
Andrea Koppel, CNN, at the State Department.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, we'll take a look at SARS. Are we worrying too much about it? We'll also hear about its impact from Toronto to Beijing.
And "Segment 7" in this hour: Who's giving what to whom? Candy Crowley checks out the records of the presidential candidates.
A ways to go. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: We have word tonight of an unexpected two-week break from school for the children in Beijing. We can imagine the kids are the only ones happy about it, everyone else is surely alarmed, because this two-week break is because of SARS.
The numbers continue to rise in China, and even though the government is taking steps to be more open about SARS, they're concerned that no one really knows the extent of how far it has spread.
Our report tonight from CNN's Jaime FlorCruz.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
FLORCRUZ (voice-over): There are about half-a-dozen SARS patients under intensive care behind tightly-sealed windows in this Beijing hospital ward. Just how many other SARS victims there are in China remains a question.
The health minister two weeks ago claimed the epidemic was under effective control, even while SARS was spreading across the country.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We often have seen I think in cases like this, knee-jerk reactions from old-style communist cadres, whose initial reactions to a crisis are, cover it up, muzzle the media and hide the facts.
FLORCRUZ: Chinese officials often do that, just like in the imperial times, for fear of losing face or losing their jobs. Like in the 1990s when the AIDS epidemic first struck China, these poor Henan farmers contracted HIV selling blood, but they suffered in the dark, while officials covered up the epidemic for five years. This time, Chinese leaders acted more boldly by dismissing the health minister and the Beijing mayor from mishandling the crisis.
To contain SARS, a public information campaign is under way. Pharmacies sell traditional preventive medicine, but trying to bottle up the disease calls for big sacrifices. China has shortened the week-long Mayday holiday to curtail mass travel.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just like after 9/11, the American people, immediately they gathered around the American president, and so the whole nation are fighting against terrorism. And now, the Chinese needed to unite against this terrible disease.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
FLORCRUZ: Aaron, Beijing says the government is willing to spend as much as it takes to contain SARS, and they probably can contain SARS. But the bigger task for them is how to regain the peoples' confidence. And experts here say they need to institutionalize a modern crisis management mechanism and a transparent reporting system -- Aaron.
BROWN: Jaime, thank you very much. Jaime FlorCruz is in Beijing tonight.
There are several more stories on SARS tonight. Most of the cases and most of the fear about SARS have been confined to Asia. There have been no deaths in the United States and relatively few cases, but Canada, and especially Toronto, Canada, has been hit quite hard.
Today, the Centers for Disease Control, the American Centers for Disease Control sent a team to Toronto to help out.
Here is Melissa Fung of the CBC.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MELISSA FUNG, TORONTO, CBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A warning from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control for travelers to Toronto:
DR. JULIE GERBERDING, CDC DIRECTOR: And we have issued a health alert to travelers to Toronto, Canada, and that health alert basically says, no reason to stay home, but if you're going there, be aware that SARS is present in some settings in the community and you may wish to avoid the hospital environment or the health care environment.
FUNG: The CDC will be issuing these information cards at border crossings and airports to everyone coming into Ontario. Similar warnings are already in place for people traveling to parts of Asia, like China and Hong Kong, that have been stricken by SARS.
In the meantime, a team from the CDC is visiting Toronto to assess the city's efforts to control the spread of SARS in the community.
GERBERDING: Health Canada made a request to have additional technical assistance, and we are certainly willing to do what we can in any way that we can to assist.
FUNG: And assistance, officials here say, is needed. Ontario's health care system is beginning to buckle under the strain.
DR. PAUL GULLY, HEALTH CANADA: Recognizing that the health care workers are under an extreme stress and having to work in a situation for long periods of time, which may be difficult.
FUNG: Provincial officials met today to discuss the worst-case scenario: What to do if the disease continues to spread, and whether health care workers can be brought in from other regions to ease the pressure?
ERNIE EVES, ONTARIO PREMIER: We will certainly do whatever has to be done in terms of benefits to them, and making sure that they are compensated for. Whether or not we have to go beyond the boundaries of the province to solve any particular health care issue, certainly the 30 people meeting today will be providing that advice to the government.
FUNG (on camera): And more advice will come next week. Officials from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Health Canada are scheduled to meet in this country, a summit to develop strategies for treatment and control of a disease that has now affected 25 countries around the world.
Melissa Fung, CBC News, Toronto.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: There have been moments in this SARS story that have brought home just how potentially dangerous this disease is. One was the moment people realized that doctors and nurses were getting it, too.
A look at how health professionals are coping, this time in Singapore, from CNN's Andrew Brown.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANDREW BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): About seven weeks ago, Dr. Lawrence Lee (ph) treated one of the first SARS patients admitted to Singapore's Tan Tock Seng Hospital. At that time, Lee (ph) didn't know much about SARS and its lethal potential. He does now. One of the doctors who worked with him on that early case is already dead.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He got the disease, and he passed away, unfortunately. He was one of my family friends. He was only 27 years old, and his fiance and him were about to get married in a few months' time. And that was very, very sad for everyone.
BROWN (on camera): Health care workers dealing with the worst SARS cases need a lot of courage. Dozens have been infected, not because they weren't taking the right precautions, many of them were just unlucky.
(voice-over): These days, Lawrence Lee (ph) does everything he can to protect himself. He wears a gown, a mask and two pairs of gloves and keeps them on even when he's outside in Singapore's tropical heat.
This reception center, where Lee (ph) screens patients for SARS, was set up as an open-air facility to reduce the risk of cross- infection. But even the tiniest flaw can lead to a new infection. Lee (ph) says one of his colleagues caught SARS because her face mask was the wrong size.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She was from another hospital, and they ran out of stock for that size of mask.
BROWN: The most infectious area in Tan Tock Seng is the intensive care unit. Almost all visitors are barred from the ICU. Flowers and food have to be delivered by hospital staff.
CNN was allowed to film here for only 10 minutes. Inside, health care workers were using surgical respirators because of the extreme risk.
CATHERINE CHUA, NURSING OFFICER: Like you're taking mucous from the patient, then there is a chance of the mucous go into contact onto your face.
BROWN: Catherine Chua says in her career she has never seen so many of her co-workers come down with a disease they're treating. That adds more stress to an already stressful job.
CHUA: It's very emotional this time, and very (UNINTELLIGIBLE) affected.
BROWN: That doesn't mean Chua or the many other health care workers in Singapore are giving up. Each day, they report back to work at Tan Tock Seng, one of the front lines in the battle against SARS.
Andrew Brown, CNN, Singapore.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: It's important that we keep asking the question: Is the fear of SARS spreading faster than the disease itself?
Our next guest says a pervasive fear is not only unwarranted, it can be dangerous.
David Ropeik is with the Center for Risk Analysis at the Harvard School for Public Health. He joins us from Boston -- or the Boston area tonight.
David, good to have you with us.
DAVID ROPEIK, CENTER FOR RISK ANALYSIS, HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Thanks, Aaron.
BROWN: Well, you heard these health care professionals in Singapore talking about their concerns, their fears, and what I think you want to argue is, let's keep this all in proportion.
ROPEIK: It's dangerous to be chronically more stressed than normal. Our body in a kind of a mini-fighter flight response when we're afraid for our survival secretes adrenalin and cortisol, two terrific things for running away from the lion, but which suppresses our immune system, makes us more vulnerable to infectious disease -- getting them, being more affected by them, having them longer.
SARS is a serious disease. We still don't have a lot of the answers about SARS. We should be concerned about it, but we should also worry about fear itself, because it, too, can be dangerous.
BROWN: There is -- it is interesting to me that we worry hardly at all about the flu, OK? The flu kills literally thousands of people in the country every year. No one has died in the country of SARS yet. Why worry about one and not the other?
ROPEIK: It turns out that humans are kind of pre-programmed with this ancient instinctive or emotional sort of way of interpreting what is a threat to our survival. Long before we could think, we had to be able to recognize and respond to danger and get out of harm's way.
So we don't use just the facts when perceiving a risk. In fact, we more often use emotional characteristics. They're called "risk perception factors." And with SARS, three are at work.
We're always more afraid of a risk that's new than one we've lived with for a while. Witness Londoners and Israelis with terrorism, or in the States a lot of cities that had West Nile Virus and freaked out at first. And it's still killing people now, but we've calmed down about it. It's no longer new. We have some perspective on it.
Second, SARS is fraught with uncertainty, and the more we don't have the answers, the more we protect ourselves with fear or precaution -- whatever word you want to use. Think of the sniper in D.C. last fall. It was a very low risk, and a lot of smart people in D.C. knew that. But because we didnt' know who he was and who he was going to shoot next, we were terrifically afraid. The third one is, here we are on your show talking about SARS and not the flu and not heart disease and not some of the bigger killers in the world. Awareness fuels fear. The more aware of a risk we are, the more afraid of it we are.
And there's a fourth factor: control. If we think we can do something to make ourselves safer -- avoid a neighborhood, wearing a mask, buying plastic and duct tape. We don't have that really with SARS, because we don't have a lot of the answers, and that all raises our fear regardless of the relatively low risk.
BROWN: You almost got to this, and I think somewhere in this equation this exists. There is something in us that says, we should not find new diseases. We should be curing diseases, not finding new ones. And the mere fact that there are new ones out there, or a new one out there, is in and of itself really unsettling.
ROPEIK: Absolutely. Laurie Garrett's wonderful book, "The Coming Plague," talked about a lot of new diseases. These germs, these bacteria, these viruses, they mutate a whole lot faster than we do. And in the race between our drugs and the bugs, the bugs are catching up on the drugs pretty fast. That whole problem is called "antibiotic resistance."
There will always be new organisms: AIDS, Ebola, new strains of flu, antibiotic-resistant staphylorious (ph) and pneumonia. They will always keep happening. They'll always scare us when they're new. Our challenge is to keep it in perspective so our fear doesn't add to the danger.
BROWN: How do you think the media has done on this?
ROPEIK: I think like most new and juicy stories, they have reported it well, but played up the dramatic aspects of it, and I plead guilty. I was a reporter for 25 years for the ABC station in Boston and did this myself. These risk characteristics that make you and I afraid as citizens, make you and I as journalists pretty excited that we've got a good story. And the dramatic aspects of this get played up.
Nobody has said that this is simply a serious respiratory disease, like the flu and like some other things. That kind of context has been left out and would help people with their fears, I think.
BROWN: And in 20 seconds, how do you think the government has done in communicating on this?
ROPEIK: They've learned their lessons of anthrax, where they stated things unequivocally, but they really didn't know. They're being "humbled," Julie Gerberding's word at the CDC. They're saying, because we don't know, we're being overly precautionary. They're being pretty good. They're building trust. But they could add a little context that this is only a respiratory disease, not the "new plague."
BROWN: David, good to have you with us tonight. Nice job.
ROPEIK: Thanks for having me.
BROWN: Thank you very much.
Coming up on NEWSNIGHT, we'll go back to the Watergate scandal and the claim about the identity of Deep Throat, the source that blew the whistle on the Nixon administration scandal. Does he have a name? You'll hear it tonight.
This is NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(NEWS BREAK)
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BROWN: So that's what's on your mind tonight.
One of the most persistent parlor games over the last three or so decades has been trying to uncover the true identity of Deep Throat, the key source for "Washington Post" reporters, Bob Wood -- I almost did it, didn't I -- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, during Watergate.
The journalists have recently given -- well, they were paid $5 million -- their paperwork on all of this to the University of Texas. No secrets to be told for years yet.
But for the last four years, journalism students at the University of Illinois have been investigating, and they say they do have an answer as to who Deep Throat is.
Joining us tonight from our Washington bureau, Bill Gaines, who is the professor -- or a professor of journalism there, and two of those students, Tom Rybarczyk and Kelly Soderlund.
Good to have you all with us.
Professor, let me start with you, and just take a little bit of time and talk about the methodology, how you went about trying to solve what has become one of the great mysteries of the last 30 years or so.
BILL GAINES, PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN: What we did was rely on documents. We didn't rely on interpretation or our own preconceptions from the beginning.
We started out and we had -- we started with everybody in the world was a suspect as being Deep Throat. And then we started eliminating individuals because they didn't fit the mold. We took the word of Woodward and Bernstein from their book, "All the President's Men," as true and accurate. We also worked with nonfiction. It's autobiographical in nature.
And we took that information, and we eliminated person by person until we got it down actually to seven people last June. And at that point, we couldn't eliminate everybody specifically, so we started working on the individuals and what access they had to information.
We used every document we could find, and we were able to determine that Deep Throat was one person. That one person is Fred Fielding.
BROWN: Now, Mr. Fielding, even people really familiar with Watergate, it's not one of those names that is up there on the list. So really, he was who in all of this?
GAINES: Fred Fielding should be known, but he is not known by the public. He's had long years of service in government. He's an excellent lawyer. Right now, he's on the 9/11 Commission, the 10- member panel appointed by the president, and he's on a panel with ex- governors and senators. And he should be, because he's a very prestigious individual. He served for five years as the chief counsel to President Reagan after the Nixon administration.
So he's kept a low profile, and...
BROWN: And he was -- I'm sorry. He was John Dean's assistant, and that placed him in a spot where he could know many, many things.
Tom, let's run down a couple of things that Mr. Fielding would have known that others could not have known, because there's a lot of people who could have known some of this. Are there certain things that only he would have known?
TOM RYBARCZYK, JOURNALISM STUDENT, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA- CHAMPAIGN: Certainly. One of those was a memo that he sent actually to Earl Silbert, who was the prosecutor of -- the special prosecutor for the Watergate hearing. It was in June of '73. He sent a memo saying that he read an FBI memo of July 21, it was 1972, and in that memo it contained some sensitive information that perhaps only he and John W. Dean would have read, except for, of course, the FBI.
And what we found in that memo is the scene -- I don't know if anybody recalls this in the movie with (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and Mr. McGruder (ph) -- the scene with the missing cash fund in the Committee to Re-Elect the president. And he appeared to be one of the only people to have this information, which is actually incorrect. And Deep Throat is -- Deep Throat tells Woodward this for the story, the same exact information from this memo. And this is the only memo that Fielding has claimed to read.
BROWN: Kelly, is there any evidence in the work you did that Woodward and Bernstein or the "Post" protected their source, protected Mr. Fielding, at any point along the way?
KELLY SODERLUND, JOURNALISM STUDENT, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA- CHAMPAIGN: Well, one of the things we were able to obtain was the original manuscript from "All The President's Men" from one of our secret sources, which we're not naming. And we went through every page of the manuscript, and there were things that were in the manuscript that didn't make it into the book that coincided with the Deep Throat reference. And we questioned whether they took it out because it was correct and they wanted to hide something, or because it was incorrect.
BROWN: Did you ever talk to Woodward and Bernstein and asked them?
SODERLUND: Tom actually talked to Bernstein. He has an interesting story.
BROWN: Yes -- Tom?
RYBARCZYK: Yes, I did talk to Bernstein. It was last fall. I was speaking with him -- actually it was a former student had got his number by camping outside his hotel room sometime back. And when I got the number -- Professor Gaines actually gave it to me. We wanted to discover who exactly Woodward and Bernstein said was not Deep Throat.
And I called just to make a friendly conversation. He started out pretty friendly, but by the end of it, he was using some profanity expletives. But at the end of it, at the time -- at the end of the conversation, by the time he had hung up, he never said the one thing that really got kept us going, was that he never said we were wrong about our seven candidates. He just seemed infuriated that we used those seven candidates. So...
BROWN: Professor, we've got about a minute here, and I want to try and get two things done. One of the pieces of evidence that you and your students worked with was the attempted assassination on George Wallace. How did that play into this story line?
GAINES: Well, that we were able to trace the FBI reports from the Wallace shooting to John Dean's office. That's as far as it went. But a lot of people who have done research on this can't tie that in. They can't understand how George Wallace could have been shot in Maryland investigated by the FBI out of Baltimore, and Deep Throat found out about it.
But those FBI reports we found with a Freedom of Information request that tied in to information that Woodward had exclusively was sent over to the White House and ended up in John Dean's office, where Fred Fielding was the chief deputy.
BROWN: All of you, thank you. We should -- well, just yes or no, did you ask Mr. Fielding?
GAINES: We contacted Mr. Fielding, but he did not get back to us.
BROWN: OK.
GAINES: We'd like to talk to him.
BROWN: I'll bet.
GAINES: We just want to find him to give him an award for being Deep Throat.
BROWN: Well, we'd all like to know the answer. You guys did terrific research. I read it tonight. Nice to have you on the program. Thank you very much.
GAINES: Thank you.
RYBARCZYK: Thank you.
SODERLUND: Thanks.
BROWN: We'll take a look at morning papers up next -- tomorrow morning's papers that is. A break first.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: All right, time for a quick check of tomorrow morning's papers from around the country and perhaps around the world, depending on how long it takes me to get through the country.
Starting with "The New York Times," all of the news that's fit to print. Three stories in the "Times" front page dealing essentially with unrest in Iraq: "As Baghdad waits for aid, passions rise in the south." Up in the top: "Iran said to be sending agents into Iraq." A story on the front page also: "In a hotbed of Shiite passion, clerics jockey for leadership."
So the "Times" really going at the Shiite and theocracy in all that story.
The "Boston Herald," I didn't even know I picked this one: "Cuts run deep, House plan slashes aid." It's a budget story. It's an Iraq Shiite picture on the front page also. That's the "Boston Herald."
The "Chicago Sun-Times," "Reinsdorf" -- that's Jerry Reinsdorf -- "on wild fans: Throw the book at 'em." This is after a fan jumped out at used to be Kaminski Park, but it's called something else now, and tackled an umpire. This has happened a lot in Chicago. And actually the way other people played this story was Reinsdorf said, it's not really my problem; it happens everywhere.
Oh, by the way, the weather tomorrow in Chicago is "Tease," which I assume is good but not fabulous.
Here's an unsettling headline for you in "The San Francisco Chronicle": "Quake scientists predict big one by 2032." I'll do the math and figure out old I'll be in 2032. "Likely to be stronger than 6.7." So that would be a big quake. And the Iraq -- Iraq, Aaron -- Iraq Shiite story also on the front page.
How're we doing on time, please?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
BROWN: Thank you. "Detroit Free Press": "Cops ask: Terrorists or tourists." It's a neat little story actually. If you find yourself looking at a nuclear plant or a building too long, police are liable to come up to you and ask you what you are doing and why you're doing it in the post-9/11 period.
And "USA Today," why not? And, Matt (ph), if you're traveling today, this will end up in your hotel room. I have no idea actually of what this story is, but it's a very cool graphic: "Walk/Can't Walk: The way cities and suburbs are developed could be bad for your health." That's "USA Today" in full color.
We'll take a break, and then we'll do something else. Oh, we'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Finally from us tonight: money. Following the money, of course, has been part of the mantra for cops and journalists for decades. Witness Watergate.
CNN's Candy Crowley has always been following the money where politics is concerned.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): All told, the nine Democratic presidential hopefuls raised almost $24 million in the first quarter of this year. It came in checks of 2,000 or less from about 22,000 Americans, and therein lie the footnotes of fund-raising.
For instance, what do you suppose the real-life dinner conversations are like at the home of Malcolm's mom, who is really married to President Bartlett's deputy chief of staff? He gave $2,000 to real candidate Dick Gephardt; she did the same for also real Howard Dean.
Dean emerges as a Hollywood fave. What meathead, you ask, would donate to Dean? This one.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): The wheels on the bus go round and round...
CROWLEY: No calls, please. Ron Reiner did play a character called "Meathead," a liberal in the conservative home of Archie Bunker. He doesn't really live with Archie, but he really is a liberal.
Also on the Dean bandwagon, Nash and band buddy Crosby. Stills was mum in the first quarter. But here's a hint: When John Kerry ran unopposed for his Senate seat last year, Stills was a contributor.
Dean also picked up two grand from Michael Douglas, who can afford it now he has another little tax deduction. John Edwards, who raised more money in the first quarter than any other candidate, got 1,000 of it from half of Hollywood's version of "Regular People," actress Rita Wilson, who is married to Tom Hanks.
And Joe Lieberman, who once told Hollywood to clean up its act, picked up 2,000 from "Will & Grace" star, Deborah Messing. And Monty Hall gave Lieberman $250, but maybe Lieberman will also get whatever is behind "curtain 2."
A final oddity: Of donors who gave over $200 to any campaign, who many do you suppose were from Iowa, home of the presidential season's first contest? Of nearly 22,000 people who gave money, 45 were from Iowa; 131 wrote checks out of New Hampshire.
But candidates don't look for money in Iowa and New Hampshire. They look for buzz and momentum, which they use to go raise money where it is, California. Nearly every major candidate had more donors and raised more money in California than anywhere else. New York was a close second.
Candy Crowley, CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: That's all for tonight. We'll see you tomorrow at 10:00 Eastern Time. Good night for all us.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com.
was Deep Throat?>
Aired April 22, 2003 - 23:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: For some of the big stories of the night, we begin our second hour of NEWSNIGHT with our second "Whip" of the evening. It doesn't get better than that, does it?
The whip starts off with the latest on the United States and North Korea, ahead of talks set to begin in China. Andrea Koppel has that story for us.
So, Andrea -- a headline.
ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN STATE DEPARTMENT CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Aaron.
It has been six months since U.S. and North Korean officials last sat down together to talk about North Korea's nuclear weapons program. This time around, they'll be joined by China, the country believed to have the most leverage over the Stalinist north.
BROWN: Andrea, thank you. Back to you tonight.
To Karbala next and the latest on the pilgrimage of Iraqi Shiites. Karl Penhaul is still covering that for us.
Karl -- a headline.
KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Aaron.
Day is dawning on the final day of a massive pilgrimage by Shiite Muslims to this city of Karbala. It's been a celebration for new- found religious freedom, but these pilgrims are also now sending a message to coalition forces: Thanks for helping us get rid of Saddam Hussein; now please go home, they say.
BROWN: Karl, thank you.
The journey home for one rescued American POW, Ronald Young. Susan Candiotti had the assignment of the day.
Susan -- a headline.
SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Aaron.
Flowers, autographs and a police escort, Army pilot Ronald Young comes home to Georgia, and he shares just a little bit about what he was thinking during his captivity in Iraq.
BROWN: Susan, thank you.
And Beijing, our final stop, the latest on the spread of SARS. Jaime FlorCruz is there for us.
Jaime -- a headline.
JAIME FLORCRUZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, SARS-related statistics are rising sharply now that the Chinese leadership has decreed to stop the cover-ups on SARS cases. And the political, economic and human costs of such cover-ups are also rising.
BROWN: Jaime, thank you. Back to you and the rest shortly.
Also coming up in this second hour of NEWSNIGHT, more on SARS, including a report from the place that's been hit harder than any other outside of Asia: Toronto.
And the journalism students who think they know what others have spent a generation trying to figure out: Who was Deep Throat of Watergate fame? We'll tell you who they think it is, and they'll explain why.
That and more in the hour ahead.
But we begin the hour with a headline that sounds about six months old: the White House in a squabble over U.N. weapons inspectors returning to Iraq. But it is most definitely a headline from today.
The chief U.N. weapons inspector made the suggestion that his inspectors are the right people to go back into the country, and the United States was quick to say, no thanks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HANS BLIX, CHIEF U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: I am also convinced that the world and the Security Council, which have dealt with this issue forever, 10 years, that they would like to have the inspection and verification, which bear the imprint of that independent and of some institution that is authorized by the whole international community.
ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN: We have a coalition that is working on the ground to dismantle Iraq's WMD programs, and we think that's going to be effective. We think it will get the job done, and that the bottom line is the president wants to focus things on the most effective to get the job done.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: So on to Iraq we go, and another visit today by the retired American general, who has been given the charge of rebuilding the country. He got a mixed reception in Baghdad yesterday. Today in northern Iraq, he was greeted like a returning hometown hero, because in that part of Iraq, that's exactly what he is.
The story from CNN's Jane Arraf.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JANE ARRAF, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A lot of expectations from this long-awaited landing. The U.S. general in charge of rebuilding Iraq arrived in northern Iraq to rebuild bridges with Kurdish leaders, who have run this part of the country since the 1991 Gulf War.
From the streets and among Kurdish officials, he couldn't have asked for a warmer welcome.
LT. GEN. JAY GARNER (RET.), OFFICE OF RECONSTRUCTION AND HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE: This is like coming home.
ARRAF: Garner was last in northern Iraq when he ran Operation Provide Comfort, the effort by the U.S. and its allies to care for hundreds of thousands of destitute Kurds, after their failed uprising following the 1991 Gulf War.
Things have changed a lot since then. With U.S. and U.N. help, Iraqi Kurds have gone from a devastated minority to running their own government. The U.S. is brokering an important role for the Kurds in the new Iraqi government.
GARNER: Our desire is that the new government of Iraq represents all Iraqi people -- the Kurdish people, Shiites, Shia, Turkmen, Assyrians, Chaldeans -- all people. It will be a mosaic of the cultures, the religions, the ethnicity of Iraq.
ARRAF: An admirable goal not easily implemented. In Mosul, a northern Iraqi city with one of the biggest ethnic mixes, U.S. troops are overseeing an uneasy peace. American helicopters and American soldiers haven't diffused the simmering tension on the ground between Kurds, Arabs and other groups, a tension made worse by food and fuel shortages.
In the long lines for essentials such as gasoline, Iraqis seem increasingly impatient and angry that although they had been freed from the Iraqi regime, they're still suffering.
(on camera): That initial euphoria of having been freed in a sense from the Iraqi regime is still there but wearing a little thin. And local leaders, both Arab and Kurds, warn that if changes don't come soon, safer streets, electricity returning to the cities, the situation could become even more volatile, for the local people and the American soldiers among them.
Jane Arraf, CNN, in northern Iraq.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: For a quarter of a century, no Shiite Muslim in Iraq could commemorate one of the most sacred days, the death seven centuries ago of a revered figure, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, at least they couldn't celebrate in the way that they wished. With Saddam Hussein gone, no restrictions for the pilgrimage now, and an astonishing sight it is.
CNN's Karl Penhaul is in the Iraqi city of Karbala.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PENHAUL (voice-over): The power and the passion of a new-found religious freedom. Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims are streaming into Karbala to pay homage at the shrine of a revered Muslim martyr.
Under Saddam Hussein, the annual gathering was severely curtailed, small numbers traveling only in buses and trucks. Now, for the first time in decades, these pilgrims are free to fulfill ancient tradition and come on foot.
Flocking from all corners of the country, walking for days, covering hundreds of miles, they're bringing a message for the coalition forces. It's quite simple: Thanks for ridding Iraq of Saddam; now go home.
The downtrodden Shiite Muslim majority wants to determine its own political future. Carrying placards and chanting for Islamic law in Iraq, they called, too, for unity with all Muslims across sectarian divides.
U.S. soldiers, based nearby, have stayed off the streets, occasionally observing proceedings from helicopters. Coalition sources say plans are still on track to play a key role in establishing an interim government to run the country.
The top Shiite clerics say they will not accept a hand-picked leader imposed by the United States and Britain. Those same clerics shy away from claiming political office for themselves, but they vow to take a lead hand in shaping the new Iraq.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
The day is dawning, Aaron, on the final day of the pilgrimage this morning. The morning call to prayer has come, and hundreds of thousands of pilgrims are beginning to flock back out into the streets again. Many of them were milling around the main square during the nights. Others were curled up asleep on the sidewalks. And this indeed, as I say, has been a tremendous celebration for these people.
There is no indication now how they will proceed with these calls for the creation of some kind of Islamic law. No idea of what action these people might take if the coalition doesnt heed their calls to withdraw from the country. All that still remains to be seen, but just for the moment, these people are happy to be here -- Aaron.
BROWN: Karl, thank you -- Karl Penhaul in Karbala.
Imagine the one-month odyssey of a 26-year-old Army pilot named Ronald Young. His helicopter goes down in Iraq, he tries to swim to safety, but eventually he's taken prisoner, then rescued, along with six other American POWs. They all go to Germany, then Texas, where he meets with the president of the United States.
Ronald Young made the last leg of an exhausting journey home today, back to Georgia, but he wasn't too tired to smile.
Susan Candiotti was with him and his family, and she's with us now -- Susan.
CANDIOTTI: What a journey home, Aaron.
Let's see, he received applause at the airport, applause during his plane ride home from Fort Hood, and was even asked to sign autographs. Finally, a police escort led him to his childhood home here in suburban Atlanta.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RONALD YOUNG, JR., FORMER POW: It's overwhelming. I mean, I was -- they kind of -- I guess I was sheltered a little bit, so I didn't know to expect all of this. This is wow!
CANDIOTTI (voice-over): Former POW Ronald Young flew home to Atlanta to a hero's welcome, and the love of a family he sometimes thought he might never see again.
YOUNG, JR.: You don't know what runs through somebody's head when they think that they'll never see the people they love the most in life again. Ever.
CANDIOTTI: But even under fire in Iraq, the Apache pilot said he never lost faith.
YOUNG, JR.: And the shelling got pretty intense. I mean, when that really scares you, I mean, you can't help but think that, you know, this may be it.
CANDIOTTI: His father said the homecoming was second only to the day when he saw his son had been rescued from Iraqi captivity.
RONALD YOUNG, SR., FATHER: The high point of my life was knowing that you was alive and well.
YOUNG, JR.: Well, OK.
YOUNG, SR.: That was the high point.
YOUNG, JR.: That was the high point of my life, too.
CANDIOTTI: Ron Young, Jr. was not ready to talk yet about his three weeks as an Iraqi prisoner of war. His immediate plans?
YOUNG, JR.: Just relax, do some fishing, of course. Just clear my head and do the things that are going to relax me and allow me to kind of put this a little bit behind me.
CANDIOTTI: He asked again for prayers for all of the military still in Iraq and those not coming home. YOUNG, JR.: God bless America. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We love y'all.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CANDIOTTI: Young's father said if he could have exchanged places with his son as a POW, he would have done it in a heartbeat. Young smiled, looked at his father sideways and said, "Oh, no, dad; no, you wouldn't."
Aaron -- back to you.
BROWN: Well, I remember -- and we can smile now -- on the day he was captured his parents saying, he joined the Army because he wanted to fly. He really wanted to fly helicopters.
Does he have a long-term plan for his life at this point?
CANDIOTTI: He does. He wants to go back to flying with the Army. Eventually, he probably wants to do that in the private sector, but for now, he said he just wants to -- believe it or not -- he said, "Go to the beach." He said, you might think I'd be a little sick of the sand, but no, I'd like to go to the beach and have some fun in the water.
BROWN: Doesn't sound bad. Thank you, Susan -- Susan Candiotti in Georgia tonight.
Beijing is a busy place these days; deep concern about SARS, for instance. More on that a little bit later.
But Beijing is also host to a meeting that until a few days ago wasn't on anybody's dance card, the first high-level diplomatic session between the United States, North Korea and China in months.
And as CNN's Andrea Koppel reports, there is no shortage of important things to talk about.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KOPPEL (voice-over): Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly arrived in Beijing, hoping to ease tensions, but not expecting much. U.S. officials say Kelly will tell North Korea it must give up its nuclear program and allow weapons inspectors back into the country.
RICHARD BOUCHER, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN: The purpose of these talks is to get started, for us to be able to lay out the need for a verifiable and an irreversible end to North Korea's nuclear programs.
KOPPEL: Although billed as a multilateral meeting, besides Kelly and his North Korean counterpart, only a senior Chinese official will participate, leaving neighbors, South Korea and Japan, on the sidelines. Last week, Kelly tried to reassure these anxious allies they will be included in future meetings. JON WOLFSTHAL, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR PEACE: The Bush administration now has to try and walk a fine line of engaging North Korea in these three-party talks but pushing very quickly to have the other countries included.
KOPPEL: But the Bush administration is not of one mind on its Korea policy. While Secretary of State Powell favors engagement, Pentagon officials say Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a recent memo suggested, the U.S. should team up with China to topple the current North Korean regime.
Another U.S. official says Rumsfeld also recommended replacing Kelly with Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, who, like Rumsfeld, favors getting tougher with Pyongyang.
(on camera): Until now, the administration's policy has focused on convincing North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for security assurances and economic assistance, but considering how close the Beijing talks came to being cancelled over a poorly- translated North Korean statement, a deal anytime soon is unlikely.
Andrea Koppel, CNN, at the State Department.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, we'll take a look at SARS. Are we worrying too much about it? We'll also hear about its impact from Toronto to Beijing.
And "Segment 7" in this hour: Who's giving what to whom? Candy Crowley checks out the records of the presidential candidates.
A ways to go. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: We have word tonight of an unexpected two-week break from school for the children in Beijing. We can imagine the kids are the only ones happy about it, everyone else is surely alarmed, because this two-week break is because of SARS.
The numbers continue to rise in China, and even though the government is taking steps to be more open about SARS, they're concerned that no one really knows the extent of how far it has spread.
Our report tonight from CNN's Jaime FlorCruz.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
FLORCRUZ (voice-over): There are about half-a-dozen SARS patients under intensive care behind tightly-sealed windows in this Beijing hospital ward. Just how many other SARS victims there are in China remains a question.
The health minister two weeks ago claimed the epidemic was under effective control, even while SARS was spreading across the country.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We often have seen I think in cases like this, knee-jerk reactions from old-style communist cadres, whose initial reactions to a crisis are, cover it up, muzzle the media and hide the facts.
FLORCRUZ: Chinese officials often do that, just like in the imperial times, for fear of losing face or losing their jobs. Like in the 1990s when the AIDS epidemic first struck China, these poor Henan farmers contracted HIV selling blood, but they suffered in the dark, while officials covered up the epidemic for five years. This time, Chinese leaders acted more boldly by dismissing the health minister and the Beijing mayor from mishandling the crisis.
To contain SARS, a public information campaign is under way. Pharmacies sell traditional preventive medicine, but trying to bottle up the disease calls for big sacrifices. China has shortened the week-long Mayday holiday to curtail mass travel.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just like after 9/11, the American people, immediately they gathered around the American president, and so the whole nation are fighting against terrorism. And now, the Chinese needed to unite against this terrible disease.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
FLORCRUZ: Aaron, Beijing says the government is willing to spend as much as it takes to contain SARS, and they probably can contain SARS. But the bigger task for them is how to regain the peoples' confidence. And experts here say they need to institutionalize a modern crisis management mechanism and a transparent reporting system -- Aaron.
BROWN: Jaime, thank you very much. Jaime FlorCruz is in Beijing tonight.
There are several more stories on SARS tonight. Most of the cases and most of the fear about SARS have been confined to Asia. There have been no deaths in the United States and relatively few cases, but Canada, and especially Toronto, Canada, has been hit quite hard.
Today, the Centers for Disease Control, the American Centers for Disease Control sent a team to Toronto to help out.
Here is Melissa Fung of the CBC.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MELISSA FUNG, TORONTO, CBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A warning from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control for travelers to Toronto:
DR. JULIE GERBERDING, CDC DIRECTOR: And we have issued a health alert to travelers to Toronto, Canada, and that health alert basically says, no reason to stay home, but if you're going there, be aware that SARS is present in some settings in the community and you may wish to avoid the hospital environment or the health care environment.
FUNG: The CDC will be issuing these information cards at border crossings and airports to everyone coming into Ontario. Similar warnings are already in place for people traveling to parts of Asia, like China and Hong Kong, that have been stricken by SARS.
In the meantime, a team from the CDC is visiting Toronto to assess the city's efforts to control the spread of SARS in the community.
GERBERDING: Health Canada made a request to have additional technical assistance, and we are certainly willing to do what we can in any way that we can to assist.
FUNG: And assistance, officials here say, is needed. Ontario's health care system is beginning to buckle under the strain.
DR. PAUL GULLY, HEALTH CANADA: Recognizing that the health care workers are under an extreme stress and having to work in a situation for long periods of time, which may be difficult.
FUNG: Provincial officials met today to discuss the worst-case scenario: What to do if the disease continues to spread, and whether health care workers can be brought in from other regions to ease the pressure?
ERNIE EVES, ONTARIO PREMIER: We will certainly do whatever has to be done in terms of benefits to them, and making sure that they are compensated for. Whether or not we have to go beyond the boundaries of the province to solve any particular health care issue, certainly the 30 people meeting today will be providing that advice to the government.
FUNG (on camera): And more advice will come next week. Officials from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Health Canada are scheduled to meet in this country, a summit to develop strategies for treatment and control of a disease that has now affected 25 countries around the world.
Melissa Fung, CBC News, Toronto.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: There have been moments in this SARS story that have brought home just how potentially dangerous this disease is. One was the moment people realized that doctors and nurses were getting it, too.
A look at how health professionals are coping, this time in Singapore, from CNN's Andrew Brown.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANDREW BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): About seven weeks ago, Dr. Lawrence Lee (ph) treated one of the first SARS patients admitted to Singapore's Tan Tock Seng Hospital. At that time, Lee (ph) didn't know much about SARS and its lethal potential. He does now. One of the doctors who worked with him on that early case is already dead.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He got the disease, and he passed away, unfortunately. He was one of my family friends. He was only 27 years old, and his fiance and him were about to get married in a few months' time. And that was very, very sad for everyone.
BROWN (on camera): Health care workers dealing with the worst SARS cases need a lot of courage. Dozens have been infected, not because they weren't taking the right precautions, many of them were just unlucky.
(voice-over): These days, Lawrence Lee (ph) does everything he can to protect himself. He wears a gown, a mask and two pairs of gloves and keeps them on even when he's outside in Singapore's tropical heat.
This reception center, where Lee (ph) screens patients for SARS, was set up as an open-air facility to reduce the risk of cross- infection. But even the tiniest flaw can lead to a new infection. Lee (ph) says one of his colleagues caught SARS because her face mask was the wrong size.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She was from another hospital, and they ran out of stock for that size of mask.
BROWN: The most infectious area in Tan Tock Seng is the intensive care unit. Almost all visitors are barred from the ICU. Flowers and food have to be delivered by hospital staff.
CNN was allowed to film here for only 10 minutes. Inside, health care workers were using surgical respirators because of the extreme risk.
CATHERINE CHUA, NURSING OFFICER: Like you're taking mucous from the patient, then there is a chance of the mucous go into contact onto your face.
BROWN: Catherine Chua says in her career she has never seen so many of her co-workers come down with a disease they're treating. That adds more stress to an already stressful job.
CHUA: It's very emotional this time, and very (UNINTELLIGIBLE) affected.
BROWN: That doesn't mean Chua or the many other health care workers in Singapore are giving up. Each day, they report back to work at Tan Tock Seng, one of the front lines in the battle against SARS.
Andrew Brown, CNN, Singapore.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: It's important that we keep asking the question: Is the fear of SARS spreading faster than the disease itself?
Our next guest says a pervasive fear is not only unwarranted, it can be dangerous.
David Ropeik is with the Center for Risk Analysis at the Harvard School for Public Health. He joins us from Boston -- or the Boston area tonight.
David, good to have you with us.
DAVID ROPEIK, CENTER FOR RISK ANALYSIS, HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Thanks, Aaron.
BROWN: Well, you heard these health care professionals in Singapore talking about their concerns, their fears, and what I think you want to argue is, let's keep this all in proportion.
ROPEIK: It's dangerous to be chronically more stressed than normal. Our body in a kind of a mini-fighter flight response when we're afraid for our survival secretes adrenalin and cortisol, two terrific things for running away from the lion, but which suppresses our immune system, makes us more vulnerable to infectious disease -- getting them, being more affected by them, having them longer.
SARS is a serious disease. We still don't have a lot of the answers about SARS. We should be concerned about it, but we should also worry about fear itself, because it, too, can be dangerous.
BROWN: There is -- it is interesting to me that we worry hardly at all about the flu, OK? The flu kills literally thousands of people in the country every year. No one has died in the country of SARS yet. Why worry about one and not the other?
ROPEIK: It turns out that humans are kind of pre-programmed with this ancient instinctive or emotional sort of way of interpreting what is a threat to our survival. Long before we could think, we had to be able to recognize and respond to danger and get out of harm's way.
So we don't use just the facts when perceiving a risk. In fact, we more often use emotional characteristics. They're called "risk perception factors." And with SARS, three are at work.
We're always more afraid of a risk that's new than one we've lived with for a while. Witness Londoners and Israelis with terrorism, or in the States a lot of cities that had West Nile Virus and freaked out at first. And it's still killing people now, but we've calmed down about it. It's no longer new. We have some perspective on it.
Second, SARS is fraught with uncertainty, and the more we don't have the answers, the more we protect ourselves with fear or precaution -- whatever word you want to use. Think of the sniper in D.C. last fall. It was a very low risk, and a lot of smart people in D.C. knew that. But because we didnt' know who he was and who he was going to shoot next, we were terrifically afraid. The third one is, here we are on your show talking about SARS and not the flu and not heart disease and not some of the bigger killers in the world. Awareness fuels fear. The more aware of a risk we are, the more afraid of it we are.
And there's a fourth factor: control. If we think we can do something to make ourselves safer -- avoid a neighborhood, wearing a mask, buying plastic and duct tape. We don't have that really with SARS, because we don't have a lot of the answers, and that all raises our fear regardless of the relatively low risk.
BROWN: You almost got to this, and I think somewhere in this equation this exists. There is something in us that says, we should not find new diseases. We should be curing diseases, not finding new ones. And the mere fact that there are new ones out there, or a new one out there, is in and of itself really unsettling.
ROPEIK: Absolutely. Laurie Garrett's wonderful book, "The Coming Plague," talked about a lot of new diseases. These germs, these bacteria, these viruses, they mutate a whole lot faster than we do. And in the race between our drugs and the bugs, the bugs are catching up on the drugs pretty fast. That whole problem is called "antibiotic resistance."
There will always be new organisms: AIDS, Ebola, new strains of flu, antibiotic-resistant staphylorious (ph) and pneumonia. They will always keep happening. They'll always scare us when they're new. Our challenge is to keep it in perspective so our fear doesn't add to the danger.
BROWN: How do you think the media has done on this?
ROPEIK: I think like most new and juicy stories, they have reported it well, but played up the dramatic aspects of it, and I plead guilty. I was a reporter for 25 years for the ABC station in Boston and did this myself. These risk characteristics that make you and I afraid as citizens, make you and I as journalists pretty excited that we've got a good story. And the dramatic aspects of this get played up.
Nobody has said that this is simply a serious respiratory disease, like the flu and like some other things. That kind of context has been left out and would help people with their fears, I think.
BROWN: And in 20 seconds, how do you think the government has done in communicating on this?
ROPEIK: They've learned their lessons of anthrax, where they stated things unequivocally, but they really didn't know. They're being "humbled," Julie Gerberding's word at the CDC. They're saying, because we don't know, we're being overly precautionary. They're being pretty good. They're building trust. But they could add a little context that this is only a respiratory disease, not the "new plague."
BROWN: David, good to have you with us tonight. Nice job.
ROPEIK: Thanks for having me.
BROWN: Thank you very much.
Coming up on NEWSNIGHT, we'll go back to the Watergate scandal and the claim about the identity of Deep Throat, the source that blew the whistle on the Nixon administration scandal. Does he have a name? You'll hear it tonight.
This is NEWSNIGHT.
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BROWN: So that's what's on your mind tonight.
One of the most persistent parlor games over the last three or so decades has been trying to uncover the true identity of Deep Throat, the key source for "Washington Post" reporters, Bob Wood -- I almost did it, didn't I -- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, during Watergate.
The journalists have recently given -- well, they were paid $5 million -- their paperwork on all of this to the University of Texas. No secrets to be told for years yet.
But for the last four years, journalism students at the University of Illinois have been investigating, and they say they do have an answer as to who Deep Throat is.
Joining us tonight from our Washington bureau, Bill Gaines, who is the professor -- or a professor of journalism there, and two of those students, Tom Rybarczyk and Kelly Soderlund.
Good to have you all with us.
Professor, let me start with you, and just take a little bit of time and talk about the methodology, how you went about trying to solve what has become one of the great mysteries of the last 30 years or so.
BILL GAINES, PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN: What we did was rely on documents. We didn't rely on interpretation or our own preconceptions from the beginning.
We started out and we had -- we started with everybody in the world was a suspect as being Deep Throat. And then we started eliminating individuals because they didn't fit the mold. We took the word of Woodward and Bernstein from their book, "All the President's Men," as true and accurate. We also worked with nonfiction. It's autobiographical in nature.
And we took that information, and we eliminated person by person until we got it down actually to seven people last June. And at that point, we couldn't eliminate everybody specifically, so we started working on the individuals and what access they had to information.
We used every document we could find, and we were able to determine that Deep Throat was one person. That one person is Fred Fielding.
BROWN: Now, Mr. Fielding, even people really familiar with Watergate, it's not one of those names that is up there on the list. So really, he was who in all of this?
GAINES: Fred Fielding should be known, but he is not known by the public. He's had long years of service in government. He's an excellent lawyer. Right now, he's on the 9/11 Commission, the 10- member panel appointed by the president, and he's on a panel with ex- governors and senators. And he should be, because he's a very prestigious individual. He served for five years as the chief counsel to President Reagan after the Nixon administration.
So he's kept a low profile, and...
BROWN: And he was -- I'm sorry. He was John Dean's assistant, and that placed him in a spot where he could know many, many things.
Tom, let's run down a couple of things that Mr. Fielding would have known that others could not have known, because there's a lot of people who could have known some of this. Are there certain things that only he would have known?
TOM RYBARCZYK, JOURNALISM STUDENT, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA- CHAMPAIGN: Certainly. One of those was a memo that he sent actually to Earl Silbert, who was the prosecutor of -- the special prosecutor for the Watergate hearing. It was in June of '73. He sent a memo saying that he read an FBI memo of July 21, it was 1972, and in that memo it contained some sensitive information that perhaps only he and John W. Dean would have read, except for, of course, the FBI.
And what we found in that memo is the scene -- I don't know if anybody recalls this in the movie with (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and Mr. McGruder (ph) -- the scene with the missing cash fund in the Committee to Re-Elect the president. And he appeared to be one of the only people to have this information, which is actually incorrect. And Deep Throat is -- Deep Throat tells Woodward this for the story, the same exact information from this memo. And this is the only memo that Fielding has claimed to read.
BROWN: Kelly, is there any evidence in the work you did that Woodward and Bernstein or the "Post" protected their source, protected Mr. Fielding, at any point along the way?
KELLY SODERLUND, JOURNALISM STUDENT, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA- CHAMPAIGN: Well, one of the things we were able to obtain was the original manuscript from "All The President's Men" from one of our secret sources, which we're not naming. And we went through every page of the manuscript, and there were things that were in the manuscript that didn't make it into the book that coincided with the Deep Throat reference. And we questioned whether they took it out because it was correct and they wanted to hide something, or because it was incorrect.
BROWN: Did you ever talk to Woodward and Bernstein and asked them?
SODERLUND: Tom actually talked to Bernstein. He has an interesting story.
BROWN: Yes -- Tom?
RYBARCZYK: Yes, I did talk to Bernstein. It was last fall. I was speaking with him -- actually it was a former student had got his number by camping outside his hotel room sometime back. And when I got the number -- Professor Gaines actually gave it to me. We wanted to discover who exactly Woodward and Bernstein said was not Deep Throat.
And I called just to make a friendly conversation. He started out pretty friendly, but by the end of it, he was using some profanity expletives. But at the end of it, at the time -- at the end of the conversation, by the time he had hung up, he never said the one thing that really got kept us going, was that he never said we were wrong about our seven candidates. He just seemed infuriated that we used those seven candidates. So...
BROWN: Professor, we've got about a minute here, and I want to try and get two things done. One of the pieces of evidence that you and your students worked with was the attempted assassination on George Wallace. How did that play into this story line?
GAINES: Well, that we were able to trace the FBI reports from the Wallace shooting to John Dean's office. That's as far as it went. But a lot of people who have done research on this can't tie that in. They can't understand how George Wallace could have been shot in Maryland investigated by the FBI out of Baltimore, and Deep Throat found out about it.
But those FBI reports we found with a Freedom of Information request that tied in to information that Woodward had exclusively was sent over to the White House and ended up in John Dean's office, where Fred Fielding was the chief deputy.
BROWN: All of you, thank you. We should -- well, just yes or no, did you ask Mr. Fielding?
GAINES: We contacted Mr. Fielding, but he did not get back to us.
BROWN: OK.
GAINES: We'd like to talk to him.
BROWN: I'll bet.
GAINES: We just want to find him to give him an award for being Deep Throat.
BROWN: Well, we'd all like to know the answer. You guys did terrific research. I read it tonight. Nice to have you on the program. Thank you very much.
GAINES: Thank you.
RYBARCZYK: Thank you.
SODERLUND: Thanks.
BROWN: We'll take a look at morning papers up next -- tomorrow morning's papers that is. A break first.
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BROWN: All right, time for a quick check of tomorrow morning's papers from around the country and perhaps around the world, depending on how long it takes me to get through the country.
Starting with "The New York Times," all of the news that's fit to print. Three stories in the "Times" front page dealing essentially with unrest in Iraq: "As Baghdad waits for aid, passions rise in the south." Up in the top: "Iran said to be sending agents into Iraq." A story on the front page also: "In a hotbed of Shiite passion, clerics jockey for leadership."
So the "Times" really going at the Shiite and theocracy in all that story.
The "Boston Herald," I didn't even know I picked this one: "Cuts run deep, House plan slashes aid." It's a budget story. It's an Iraq Shiite picture on the front page also. That's the "Boston Herald."
The "Chicago Sun-Times," "Reinsdorf" -- that's Jerry Reinsdorf -- "on wild fans: Throw the book at 'em." This is after a fan jumped out at used to be Kaminski Park, but it's called something else now, and tackled an umpire. This has happened a lot in Chicago. And actually the way other people played this story was Reinsdorf said, it's not really my problem; it happens everywhere.
Oh, by the way, the weather tomorrow in Chicago is "Tease," which I assume is good but not fabulous.
Here's an unsettling headline for you in "The San Francisco Chronicle": "Quake scientists predict big one by 2032." I'll do the math and figure out old I'll be in 2032. "Likely to be stronger than 6.7." So that would be a big quake. And the Iraq -- Iraq, Aaron -- Iraq Shiite story also on the front page.
How're we doing on time, please?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
BROWN: Thank you. "Detroit Free Press": "Cops ask: Terrorists or tourists." It's a neat little story actually. If you find yourself looking at a nuclear plant or a building too long, police are liable to come up to you and ask you what you are doing and why you're doing it in the post-9/11 period.
And "USA Today," why not? And, Matt (ph), if you're traveling today, this will end up in your hotel room. I have no idea actually of what this story is, but it's a very cool graphic: "Walk/Can't Walk: The way cities and suburbs are developed could be bad for your health." That's "USA Today" in full color.
We'll take a break, and then we'll do something else. Oh, we'll be right back.
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BROWN: Finally from us tonight: money. Following the money, of course, has been part of the mantra for cops and journalists for decades. Witness Watergate.
CNN's Candy Crowley has always been following the money where politics is concerned.
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CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): All told, the nine Democratic presidential hopefuls raised almost $24 million in the first quarter of this year. It came in checks of 2,000 or less from about 22,000 Americans, and therein lie the footnotes of fund-raising.
For instance, what do you suppose the real-life dinner conversations are like at the home of Malcolm's mom, who is really married to President Bartlett's deputy chief of staff? He gave $2,000 to real candidate Dick Gephardt; she did the same for also real Howard Dean.
Dean emerges as a Hollywood fave. What meathead, you ask, would donate to Dean? This one.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): The wheels on the bus go round and round...
CROWLEY: No calls, please. Ron Reiner did play a character called "Meathead," a liberal in the conservative home of Archie Bunker. He doesn't really live with Archie, but he really is a liberal.
Also on the Dean bandwagon, Nash and band buddy Crosby. Stills was mum in the first quarter. But here's a hint: When John Kerry ran unopposed for his Senate seat last year, Stills was a contributor.
Dean also picked up two grand from Michael Douglas, who can afford it now he has another little tax deduction. John Edwards, who raised more money in the first quarter than any other candidate, got 1,000 of it from half of Hollywood's version of "Regular People," actress Rita Wilson, who is married to Tom Hanks.
And Joe Lieberman, who once told Hollywood to clean up its act, picked up 2,000 from "Will & Grace" star, Deborah Messing. And Monty Hall gave Lieberman $250, but maybe Lieberman will also get whatever is behind "curtain 2."
A final oddity: Of donors who gave over $200 to any campaign, who many do you suppose were from Iowa, home of the presidential season's first contest? Of nearly 22,000 people who gave money, 45 were from Iowa; 131 wrote checks out of New Hampshire.
But candidates don't look for money in Iowa and New Hampshire. They look for buzz and momentum, which they use to go raise money where it is, California. Nearly every major candidate had more donors and raised more money in California than anywhere else. New York was a close second.
Candy Crowley, CNN, Washington.
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BROWN: That's all for tonight. We'll see you tomorrow at 10:00 Eastern Time. Good night for all us.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com.
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