Christiane Amanpour

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the broadcaster Christiane Amanpour. She has made her name reporting from some of the most dangerous places in the world, from Bosnia to Rwanda and most places in between. She has borne witness to the very worst that humanity suffers, as well as analysing the often labyrinthine complexities of the world's geopolitical landscape. From the early nineties onwards, she was so ubiquitous on screen that her peers in the press pack coined the darkly comic phrase, where there's a war, there's Amanpour. Born to an Iranian father and a British mother, she cites the turmoil of the revolution in Iran as the event that galvanized her political consciousness. It has served her well. So far, she's won 11 Emmys, and at the last count, 69 world leaders follow her on Twitter. These days, she's pretty much traded the grit and shrapnel of the front line for the relative calm of a live T V studio, hosting an eponymous nightly show on CNN. She says, Do you know what the greatest high in the world is? There's no greater high than having survived. It's the biggest shot of adrenaline there is. So welcome, Christiane.

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As you came in today, there was a palpable change in the balance of the room. There is a kind of.

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Whirlwind property about you. Are you somebody who's sort of always just slightly adrenalized? Yes, I think that is actually correct. I do, though, take great exception and affront to the notion that war correspondents are somehow war junkies or adrenaline junkies. I do though believe that you have to have that kind of adrenaline, that kind of curiosity about life in order just to put one foot in front of the other, survive and tell these stories and do this job which is so passionate. One of your one-time colleagues, a guy called Walter Rogers, once said of you, she gives the best war in the business. What's at the core of what you're transmitting to the public? I know that I have a desire to go right below the bang bang, right below and underneath the headlines and the stereotypes. You have to get to the heart of people's humanity. And I learned that in Bosnia. It was a life-changing and profession-changing experience for me, a career-solidifying moment for me. All those years of the war in Bosnia, I understood that I just needed to tell the stories about these ordinary people who were caught up in it. You get to get on a plane, you get to come home and eat a good meal and have a shower, but you take with you some of what you've seen, the skin you've touched, the eyes you've looked into. How do you deal with that? By having a very solid family support network, a very solid network of friends. I never feared to talk about how I felt, although it was always very, very difficult to describe because people who haven't had that kind of experience glaze over, they're bored, they think you're telling war stories. So I never really talked about actually what I'd seen with people who hadn't done it before. I did that with all my colleagues. You know, you sit around, you talk about what you've experienced, and that's not just showing off or one-upping, it's a way of coping. I go to museums, I see beautiful things, I go to plays, I see fantastic performances, human experience in other dimensions and on other stages. And I take vacations now in my later years and rest and rest my mind and surround myself with love. We will talk about the many places that you have been and the many things you have seen, but for now, on the topic that you were just discussing, there, tell me about this one, your first piece of music. Why have you chosen it and what is it? Well, my first piece of music is by REM Losing My Religion, and it puts me right back into my armoured and sometimes unarmoured car, wearing my flak jacket, crossing front lines between the Bosnian and the Serb side of Sarajevo.

Christiane Amanpour4:22

That's me in the corner.

Christiane Amanpour4:26

That's me in the spot.

Christiane Amanpour4:29

Like the loose in my religion

Christiane Amanpour4:34

Try and keep up with you.

Christiane Amanpour4:39

And I don't know if I can do it

Christiane Amanpour4:44

Oh no, I've said too much.

Christiane Amanpour4:49

I haven't said enough.

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That was R.E.M. and losing my religion. Christian Amanpoor, your life now is slightly different. You are in a studio most nights of the week for your programme. Do you feel like a bit of a caged tiger? Do you sort of sometimes route when I went back to the United States with my husband a few years ago and I couldn't be a balls to the wall, get your suitcase and run kind of foreign correspondent from that far away, from New York. It just wasn't possible. Plus, and this is the main reason, my son was about seven years old and at that stage, I believe, needed me much more at home and as a daily constant presence. Having said that, I went and covered, obviously, you know, 9-11, and it was a long time in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and that part of the world. Covered the Arab Spring in 2011. Along with all of these rules overseas, there have been, you know, the big landmark interviews, people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and Robert Mugabe and Colonel Gaddafi and on and on and on. Do you yourself have a sort of a ritual, a procedure that you go through before you're about to encounter one of the biggies and sit down with them to do a one-to-one?

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The ritual really is immersing myself as much as humanly possible into who they are and to trying to know more about them than they know about themselves. You know, you always have butterflies. I'm an ordinary human being who got somehow to sit in front of these extraordinary people and on behalf of viewers have to hold them accountable. When has the biggest knot been in your stomach prior to one of these big one-to-ones? Who have you thought, oh, okay, I'm really, really having to gird myself for this one?

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Well, Slobodan Milosevich.

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The, as we know, butcher of the Balkans. I asked him, you know, how he could sleep at night. And it's very difficult when you have the facts and you have been on the ground and you've seen the carnage and you've seen the destruction. When you go to then the leader and you bring them these facts and they just deny it. They just sit there and deny it. So your challenge is to constantly bring them back to the facts. Let's have some more music. Christiane Amanpour, what's next? Francis Cabrel, je témé je tême et je têmeré. I loved, I love and I will love you forever. And I said that despite all this disaster, I feel very much full of love. And I love this because it was given to me amongst a whole group of CDs years and years ago in the middle of Bosnia when I was actually seeing a great French photographer.

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Temais, je taimi, je têmerai.

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La mour à partour dir garden.

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Dan l'emoire dru require de l'espas.

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In the moietray putard.

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That was Francis Cabrel and Je teme, je tem et je téméri. I loved, I love and I will love you. So Christiane Amanpour, you were born in London, but your early years pretty much were spent in Tehran. What do you remember about that first chunk of your life? I remember everything because even though I was born in London, my mom took me back to Iran after I was several weeks old. That was my fundamental foundation, was my life in Iran. So what kind of house? The heat, the food? Give me some flavour. Everything. The flavour was fantastic. A lovely Persian-style house, quite modest, a tin roof. I used to lie on my parents' bed when it was pouring with rain and listen to the rain on the roof. I thought that was really cool. I learned to ride horses. That was my sport when I was five years old. And that, I believe, gave me the backbone, the courage, and the bravery, and the discipline that has carried me through my life. Because when you get on a big horse at five years old, and we're not talking ponies here, occasionally you fall off when you're learning to ride. And there was no surrender. You know, there was no ability to cry and walk into a corner. I had to go right back on. It taught me a life lesson. Tell me about your mother.

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A young English woman who, at the age of, I believe, about 21, took a huge adventure driving her father's friends, business friends who happened to be Iranian, back all the way from England to Tehran in 1956 or so. There, falling in with a wonderful group of fantastic friends who introduced her to my dad, who was a confirmed bachelor about 19, 20 years older than her, who saw my mother, fell in love, and that was that. My parents remained married until my dad died this past year at the age of 101. And my mother and my father taught me that you can be from East and West, you can have a tolerance of different ethnicities, different religions. My father was a Muslim, my mom a Catholic. You can live in these disparate environments and learn about tolerance and can-do. And my mum never, even though we lived in Persia, never ever intimated, nor did my father, that as a girl, any route was closed to me. Is it true that she sort of negotiated or laid it on the line with your father that when we have children, they will be brought up Catholic? Yeah, my mom is very devout, and that has been her strength through her life. Some more music, Christiane. Tell me about your third. David Bowie, but he's singing My Death, which was composed by Jacques Brell. And I saw it on the Russell Hardy interview show in the early 1970s. And you have to imagine this conservative convent girl and this apparition, David Bowie, with the orange hair, the feathered dew, the chandelier earrings, the glittery suit, the platform boots. And I think just showed me the power of Western rock and roll and Western music and creativity.

Christiane Amanpour10:57

Death waits like

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Death.

Christiane Amanpour11:01

Men old Drew wine.

Christiane Amanpour11:04

So confident.

Christiane Amanpour11:07

I'll go his way.

Christiane Amanpour11:11

Whistle to him

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And the passing time

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My death waits like

Christiane Amanpour11:24

A fine vo Uh

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Yeah.

Christiane Amanpour11:26

Uh

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Bro.

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That was David Bowie with My Death, composed by Jacques Brell. And you said, Christiane, that you're a convent girl. By that time, you were at Holy Cross Convent in Buckinghamshire. When you came to Britain, then, I'm guessing it wasn't such a culture shock, but there must have been elements in that first year as an 11-year-old. You were the oldest of four girls. Your three sisters were at home with mum and dad in Tehran. What were the differences that still stay with you? Well, do you know what? You're right. There wasn't such a huge difference for people of my class and friend group. Yes, there was a huge section of Iran that was doing differently than we were doing. That's presumably why there was a revolution. But it wasn't that different. We did grow up with a sense of possibility, of freedom. But I think that coming to England at that young age, you know, I was 11. I was really homesick. I cried a lot. It was strict. I mean, every time. And I was really naughty and really rebellious, you know, comparatively. What sort of things? Just stupid things, like, you know, refusing to eat a pilchard and then having to sit there for like 12 hours with it in front of me. There was corporal punishment. But you know what? It's all good backbone building stuff. This stellar career that you've gone on to have in broadcast journalism, it began rather haphazardly. You ended up on a journalism course entirely by accident, really. Tell me about that. It was sort of haphazard because I wanted to be a doctor. But probably because of the school environment that I'm describing, I changed schools. And I went to another school, which frankly didn't teach the sciences well. So I didn't do well, and I certainly didn't do well to get into medical school. So I was in a period of sort of wilderness after my A-levels, and it happened to coincide with the time of the revolution. And I spent all of 1978 in Iran watching this revolution build up.

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And I suddenly realized, oh my goodness, I am going to have to forget about relying on my parents and make my own way in this world. What am I going to do? So I thought, well, this is just the kind of thing that fascinates me. I was so curious as a kid. I love to ask questions. I love seeing the drama. And I thought, that's what I want to do. I want to be in a position to take pictures, to tell stories, and to explain these things to people. That was my initial sort of unformulated desire to be a journalist. And then I came to England. My sister had joined a, I don't know why, a journalism course, because she didn't want to be a journalism. She decided she didn't like it. I went to try to get the fees back because we didn't have any money. They said, nope. I said, then can I take her place? And they said, yes. And the rest is, well, history that we will talk about. Tell me about your next, then we're going to hear your fourth of the morning. Well, this is all about the Iranian revolution, although it may seem weird when you hear this. Gloria Gaynor, I will survive. I heard it December 1978. That I will survive was, I will survive this revolution. You know, I will survive.

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At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side.

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But then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong And I grew strong And I learned how to get along

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Run out of faith.

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I just walked in upon you here with that sad look upon your face. I should've changed that stupid lock. I should've made you leave your key. If I'd have known for just one second, you'd be back to bother me.

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I will survive, Gloria Gaynor. So, Christiane Amanpour, you studied at an American university, and I understand one of your very close friends was John Kennedy, Junior, son of JFK.

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At the time I mean he was dubbed the most desirable bachelor.

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In the world? Can we say in the world? I think we safely can. How did you two get along? Very well, actually. And because there was nothing between us except for a really deep friendship that began at university, we were at different universities, but in Rhode Island. And then I spent two years off campus in a house with him and three other friends. I had everybody, you know, sharing the shopping duties, the cooking duties, the cleaning, the bathroom duties, including John F. Kennedy Jr.

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And it was just fun. We had a great time. And because of his, you know, unique being, he also attracted a lot of interesting people. We kind of had a salon at home where people would come and talk and we'd debate things like nuclear Armageddon and nuclear arms control and apartheid in South Africa. I mean, this is the early 80s, right? And all these issues. Ronald Reagan was president. And it was just amazing to get that kind of education.

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Before I went off into the journalism world. He went on to be a public prosecutor in New York, and then he he was married, of course, married to Carolyn Bessett Kennedy.

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Tragically, as the world knows, they died in a plane crash along with Carolyn's sister, Lauren, in 1999. And you had maintained this long-term close friendship. And indeed, I have read that you had spent a weekend with them not long before they died. The last weekend of their lives. We were all together in Martha's Vineyard. It was a small group of us, and we just had a great time. Yes, it was one of the

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Worst moments of my life. I was very lucky because my friends at CNN called me to give me a heads-up before it hit all the major news that his plane was missing. And

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I just went into sort of zombie mode. I just sat down and I couldn't believe it. But after many days it was discovered that in fact they had crashed and a young man, his wife and her sister lost their lives, and so many families and so many friends have been devastated by it.

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Of course, it's not just the tragedy and it happening and losing the people that are dear to you, but it is also somehow.

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How something like that can throw your own life into relief. Did it give you pause for thought? Not really. It didn't, because at that time my own sense of mortality was not particularly developed. Ah, okay. And you know, it's now much more developed. So when did that change for you then, if you didn't have it at that point? I would say certainly after my son was born. And the first assignment, my first foreign assignment after Darius was born was right into the middle of, at the time, hullabaloo in the Middle East. I mean, I went to cover yet again the Israeli-Palestinian fighting and all the rest of it. Just getting on the plane in London, I thought, what are the plane crashes?

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What's going to happen to my son? The fear I felt before was a different kind of fear. It was fear of not getting the story. It was a fear of getting, I don't know, scooped. It was fear of, you know, how do you actually get across the front line when you're being shot at? It was that kind of stuff. But it wasn't as profound. You just barreled through it.

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Now this was fear for another person.

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Let's take a break for some music, Christian. We're going to hear your fifth. Tell me about this. This is Handel's Water Music. When I was a kid in Iran, I remember being sat down in probably in a school assembly or something, and the teacher played two pieces of music, Handel's Water Music and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. And I decided to choose for this Handel's Water Music.

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The English concert directed by Trevor Pinnock there with the Allah Hornpipe from Handel's Water Music. So, Christiane Amanpour, let's talk a little bit about CNN. We should remind people it was the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage. It was the first all-news station that ever existed. TV News is a fiercely competitive environment. How did you actually manage to get on air in the beginning?

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Well, I was having a hard time going to a small market in the United States because of my accent. I was British because of my hair color. Everybody else was blonde if they're a woman. And I couldn't get a reporting job. So they said to me at my local station, We've heard about this new station and we've even heard some British accents on it. So I called them up. This was the summer of 1983. And they asked me 10 questions. And one of them was, What's the capital of Iran? So I knew that. And I passed with flying colors. And I remember the HR guy saying to me, Hey, Christiane, you know, we got a space on the foreign desk. You're foreign. You're going there. So I did. And that's how I sort of plugged along and, you know, came in on my own time, learned how to write, got better at that, learned how to produce, got better at that. And then finally, the president of the network brought me in and he said to me, Christiane.

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We've got a little slot for a few weeks. Somebody's going on sabbatical or whatever, and you can go and fill in and see how you do. Then, eventually, three years later, I was given a foreign correspondent position, and that's when the first Gulf War happened. It was the first time war had been broadcast in real time, and I was there. And this was the era of, it would go on to become the era of the sort of Scud stud, as the first reporter was called, and all that sort of stuff. So, there was the invasion of Kuwait. You were sent to Saudi Arabia. This was just to place it in time around about 1990.

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First report

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When you were on your first foreign assignment, and I'm sure it felt like a blinking big gig.

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How did you know how to do it? You figure it out on the job, so to speak. Many, many professionals will tell you that, of course, perhaps not if they're doctors, but in any event, we were three women. Three women in Saudi Arabia. So you had a female camera? Female camera, female sound editor, and me. But we used it to our advantage, and they were very, very good to us, the Saudis, and they opened the door for us, and we got a lot of access and a lot of support. What do you mean you used it to your advantage? What did you. Precisely that. I think because people were so.

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Female camera

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Remember to

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What did you?

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Flummocks to see these three women, you know, these Charlie's angels charging at them, you know, wanting access and wanting the door open and wanting to get the scoop and wanting to go to the front line, that they were like, whoa, okay. And I remember being driven by one of the princes to the front line, and CNN got the first pictures of Iraqi tanks somewhere in that no man's land between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We got these long telephoto

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On in a

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Pictures of it and came back thrilled to bits. Even more thrilled when our much more experienced and venerable male colleagues were just like, what? They beat us to this scoop. Some more music, Christiane Amanpour. Tell me about your next one. This is your sixth. This is Annie Lennox, the Eurythmics, along with Aretha Franklin. Sisters are doing it for themselves. And it was a great, empowering anthem.

Christiane Amanpour22:40

There to be a Ready for mine

Christiane Amanpour22:44

Run and easy time to change and go in

Christiane Amanpour22:49

No longer true.

Christiane Amanpour22:51

So we're coming out of the kitchen. Cause there's something we forgot to say to you with this love.

Christiane Amanpour23:01

All you said

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Eurasmics featuring Aretha Franklin and sisters are doing it for themselves. Is it true, Christiane, that you thought you'd never get married or have children? Yes, frankly. I strongly believe that I couldn't, anyway, do the extreme experience of this particular profession if I was also concerned and worried about a husband, kids, at home. I knew that I couldn't do it. So it was only just before I sort of hit 40 that I thought, well, maybe, in fact, I tell you, it's pretty funny. I hope this doesn't sound self-aggrandizing, but I'd won a few awards. And one of my producers says, So, Christiane, what are you going to do? Hug your awards every night? And I thought, you know what? This is a clarifying moment. And when you met James Rubin, he was somebody with a considerable profile, international profile at that point, who people will know as the former advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. Did you have to keep your romance quiet? No, I think it was perfectly clear that although he was an official of the Clinton administration back then, I had been the bane of the Clinton administration by all the reports I was doing from Bosnia and elsewhere around the world, again, holding them accountable. Indeed, you had had a particularly terse exchange with Bill Clinton at one point over Bosnia, where you had absolutely called him to account and he had thrown his toys out the pram live on air. Yes, you know, I didn't intend that to happen, but there was a global town hall hosted by CNN, and they asked some of us around the world to come and ask a question from where we were at that time. I was in Sarajevo. So there was a live satellite link up to the town hall? Correct. And I heard President Clinton justifying what the US administration was doing. And I was getting more and more heated, let's say, because I could see the fact that they were keeping out, so were the Brits and so were the French, so were the whole alliance, not stopping this war, that it was having a terrible, terrible prolongation effect of the war, and not to mention bodies piling up every day. I said, don't you believe your constant flip-flops on this issue? You were. To an extent, enabling this and potentially causing a precedent around the world. Anyway, of course, he was very angry, very upset. But then he did come back afterwards and he said, Poor woman, you know, she's seen so much and this and that. But anyway, you know. It's a complex subject, isn't it? The sort of thorny issue of, well, people call it objectivity, but you said our job is to be truthful, not neutral. I do believe that. And I learned in Bosnia because of the criticism that I faced in Bosnia. I did face criticism by some people who like to comment about it, and some journalists, some of my colleagues, they started to say, well, isn't she taking sides with the people in Bosnia? And I thought, well, yes and no. I'm not taking political or religious sides. I'm taking the side of fact and truth. And at one point I said, hang on.

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Yeah.

Christiane Amanpour25:24

But you know.

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What if I'd been around during World War II? Would I have had to say that Hitler had a point, on the one hand or on the other hand? No, no, no, no. And I stick to that. And I know it causes me trouble. And I know it gets me called out sometimes. But I stick to it because I believe that if you are neutral in those kinds of situations, you are an accomplice. And I will not be an accomplice to genocide or injustice.

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Let's have your seventh. What's next, Christian? So my seventh is Ave Maria. I pick it because it was sung by a friend at our wedding. And also I love the Vienna Boys Choir and this contrast with the fantastic choir voices and Placido Domingo's voice.

Christiane Amanpour27:17

When we're auft diesel since the world, the world is the same.

Presenter27:47

Ave Maria, composed by Franz Schubert and performed by Placido Domingo and the Vienna Boys Choir, with the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra conducted by Helmut Froschauer.

Presenter27:57

So, Christiana Anampoor, let's talk for a moment about Iran. We're seeing constantly very exuberant youngsters in Iran bump up against government forces. When you go back yourself, there must surely be a degree of poignancy. When you think about that little, you know, eight, nine-year-old girl running about with the freedoms that you had, what do you feel as a

Presenter28:21

As a female, as a human, going back to Iran now? Well, as a human being and as a female, I feel very, very deeply moved by their plight, their experience, but also their courage. And my heart is with them. I love my country, but I love the people who are struggling to get their freedom, their rights. And I don't think there should be any mutual exclusivity between an Islamic regime and true freedom for the people. We've talked so much today about the awfulness of what the world has to offer, about the terrible things you've seen and the things you've reported on. What makes you laugh in your lighter moments? Lest listeners think that I'm only steeped in doom and gloom. And you know, people used to ask me, what do you do when you come home? They were expecting me probably to say, I sit in my backyard and fire off a Kalashnikov. I don't know. I genuinely could not survive unless I was the most optimistic person I know, which I am. And I see light everywhere, not just darkness. In war, I see the light of human dignity and the spirit to survive and to keep going. In children who are badly wounded, I see, wow, the youngest amongst us with the least can be so resilient. All of that is light and hopeful and full of laughter. I've had so many good laughs with some of the people who I cover, even in the worst of circumstances.

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Uh

Presenter29:41

You have been to many far-flung places in the world, but as you know, today we cast you away to the desert island. There will be no satellite phone. You will be all alone.

Presenter29:51

How on earth are you going to deal with it, Christiana? It's really going to be hard, Kirsty. It's really going to be hard. I love talking. I love communicating. I love being talked to. I love all the experiences and the discourse. The discourse and just the beauty and the variety of life and always being engaged. Not to mention, you know, missing my family. It's going to be really hard.

Christiane Amanpour29:52

It is

Presenter30:16

The music will come for you, though. Tell me about your final one. What are we going to hear? Well, my final one is Kat Stevens' Wild World. It's for my son. The title speaks for itself. But also, it's my struggle with my son's independence. He's now 16 and a half. He's going to be, you know, moving on to his own independence, as is exactly how it should be. But of course, a mother, you know, never wants to let go. So these are all the words that I would maybe say to him. And Kat Stevens says it so much better.

Christiane Amanpour30:43

That if you wanna leave, take good care Hope you have a lot of nice things to wear

Christiane Amanpour30:50

Then a lot of nice things turn bad.

Christiane Amanpour30:53

Yeah

Christiane Amanpour30:58

Oh baby, baby, it's a wild word.

Christiane Amanpour31:04

It's hard to get back just to Paul's smile

Presenter31:08

Cat Stevens and Wild World. We give every castaway a copy of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and they get to take a book of their own along to the island. What is your book going to be? Well, I decided that I would take the complete works of Eugene O'Neill. Really sort of emotive plays. I thought that would get me really emotional and ground me and all the rest. Then I thought maybe I'd learn all the words by heart and then perform all the characters and somehow occupy myself for an eternity. You can have that. A luxury too. I would take a guitar that I bid on and won at an auction for wounded heroes in the United States. And this was Bruce Springsteen's guitar. Wow. And he signed it to me, and I thought that I would take it with a lot of sheet music and learn how to play the guitar. You may have that then. And which of the eight discs would you save? Annie Lennox, Aretha Franklin, sisters doing it for themselves, because I would need a little bit of a pick-me-up and a joyful song, and I could dance and I could get sort of, you know, all this internal strength from it. Christiane Amanpour, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you for having me.

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