Larry Johnson never wanted to work for a mainstream newspaper. He thought it would hold him back, he says, from telling the real story -- or at least the side of the story that U.S. editors generally write off with the words "rebel" or "guerilla."
Like the story of Pagal, a 15-year-old boy Johnson interviewed in the jungles of the Philippines. Three years before, the army, under dictator Ferdinand Marcos, had arrested all the men in Pagal's village and raped all the women. His 14-year-old sister was among them. The battered body of his uncle was later found by the side of the road.
Pagal was with a Muslim-led coalition fighting for autonomy in the southern Philippine islands. In the north, the New People's Army was battling to overthrow Marcos. Johnson was the first journalist to interview both guerilla groups and live to tell about it, publishing his account in Mother Jones magazine in 1979.
After the article came out, he managed to travel months at a time on grants or freelance advances, bringing home the stories of people fighting U.S.-backed regimes in the Philippines, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala. Along the way, secret police interrogated him in Chile and he was jailed and beaten before being expelled from Colombia.
In between, he worked construction or warehouse jobs in the Bay Area, living a decade in poverty. He finally took a fulltime reporter's job in 1988 and, since 1998, has been the foreign desk editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which sent him to Iraq both before and after the U.S. invasion to write articles that deftly captured the country's impending chaos.
Now 60, Johnson has put together a collection of his articles called Looking for Trouble: Dispatches from the Middle East, Asia and Central and South America, a book he decided to self-publish to help tend to the suffering he saw last year in Syria: All profit goes directly to Mercy Corps to help refugees of the Iraq War, which, like so many struggles he has covered, is typically told from an official point of view.
"My whole thing was to give a voice to these people who didn't have a voice," he says. "[At] the P-I, that's one of their principles -- it's on the wall in there -- but I think we seldom do that. For the most part, we give a voice to officials."
Which of the visits to the guerilla camps still sticks in your mind today?
It has to be the Muslim guerillas in the Philippines. It was the first time I'd done that, and I spent a long time there and it was such an interesting experience, talking and meeting with these young fighters. One of the contacts from the city, Cotabato City, said let's go for a little boat ride and I said OK, so we go on a little boat ride and we pull up and there's all these armed guerillas in this camp. I was kind of their prisoner for the next couple of weeks at the same time I was interviewing and meeting with their leaders out in the jungle. But all of this time, they still weren't sure that they weren't going to have to kill me. When I came back to the city, the guy I was with said, "I would have really hated that, because I was supposed to do it." [Laughs.]
Weren't you nearly killed, or threatened with death, in Colombia?
That was after the airport incident; I'd gone various places with [four different groups of] guerillas and did my interviews, took some video, took photos, tapes, had everything. I was on my way out of the country and this guy turned me in that I'd been working with while I'd been there the four months. One of the guerilla groups thought he was sympathetic -- he was a journalist -- and it turned out he was working for the government.
[So] I was about to step on the plane and this security agent stopped me and took me into a little office and stopped the plane and took all my luggage off. And that's when everything started, the interrogation.... They kept me in jail there for three weeks. They started with some mild interrogation because they weren't sure who I was, what I was. They thought I was FBI at first because I had some FBI information written in some notes about a story I was doing back in San Francisco about the FBI's efforts to find out my sources in the Philippines. Then they found I wasn't [FBI, that I was] a journalist freelancer, or so I claimed, and gradually turned up the pressure and eventually beat me up.
There were a lot of other strange things, psychological stuff, marching in soldiers [to my cell] and saying, "You haven't been cooperating. We're taking you up in the hills and shooting you." They did that a couple times to where it was getting old.
How did you get out?
I had this network of people I knew there by the time I left [and] I'd been warned that if you ever get in that situation, you should have one name to give up. It's horrible, but it's better than giving up the names of everybody you know, and if they start torturing you bad, you'll tell them anything -- I believe that.
They never did get to that point, [but] they brought in a friend I was going to stay with at one point [and] tortured him. He was just a youngster and had no contacts with the guerillas at all. They brought him into the cell, made him plead with me to tell them everything I knew, and then took him back and tortured him some more ... [Later, I saw] he had burn marks on his lip from electric shock. I think it was pretty brutal. [But] I kept telling them I didn't have any names.
And then finally -- I had this emergency program set up where if I didn't contact people within 24 hours, they were supposed to call or try to get in touch with journalism groups [and] Amnesty International. I always do this, but it had broken down. The person who was supposed to make the calls had stopped in Costa Rica on the way home and she thought I was fine, so there was a three-day delay. About the fifth day, she got back to San Francisco, found out I hadn't been in touch, and immediately started contacting all these people and they got all of these telegrams to the presidential palace saying this is a journalist working for Mother Jones, stop whatever you are doing, bring him forward, we know you have him, release this guy.
So they actually stopped the mistreatment at that point, before I had to give them the name. In fact, that day they came into my cell, which was like a converted horse stall, and they put pink sheets on the bed -- pink! -- and they brought in a little desk and they brought in some paper trying to make it really nice for me. From then on, they didn't mistreat me at all, and they let my friend go.
Eventually, they did hold a little kangaroo court for me. The way they do it is they march you out on a little stage and there's all these chairs up front filled with people and they have dark sacks over their heads so you can't recognize any of them. All different people. Some have suits, some have regular clothes, some look like military. It was a whole roomful of people. I was officially charged with practicing journalism without a license and they expelled me from the country. And I said [thumbs up]!
Your articles on Iraq in the lead-up to the war and after the invasion were prophetic. Talk about the trends you saw early on.
The Iraqis, they knew exactly what the situation was and what it was going to be if we stayed there as an occupying force. The women, for example, who were some of the most highly educated women in the Middle East at the time we went in, they said all of this is going to be lost. We're going to be pushed back toward the Middle Ages, we're going to have to start wearing veils, we're going to start staying in our houses. It's not safe now on the streets, it's going to get worse. And the men said there's no way we will ever accept an occupying force; they said the violence level was just going to increase phenomenally, and it did. They were right about all of those things. They were right about the increase in sectarian violence.
[Another] thing that everybody said, and this still hasn't been widely recognized, is that it wasn't just the fact that there was a dictator in charge that kept the Shiites and Sunnis from fighting each other. They'd intermarried for so many years there was a lot of goodwill on both sides. To get to the point where now everyone is fighting each other took some outside intervention. That's what a lot of Iraqis still say. A lot of these bombings [are] not Shia and Sunni, it's somebody else. They'll go bomb Shia and then they'll go bomb Sunni to try to get them to kill each other, and it's worked.
Would you attribute that to Al-Qaeda?
No, no. Al-Qaeda's probably done some, but the guerilla forces -- some of the representatives told me when I talked with them in Syria last year that a lot of these things are set up either by Israelis working independently or with United States cooperation [because] they don't want a unified, strong Iraq, which under any government would be a counterweight to the strength of the Israeli government. So [they say] if you have them fighting each other constantly, you'll always have a weak Iraq.
You've no doubt just said something of interest to the U.S. government. Have you ever worried over all these years, given that you've interviewed people considered U.S. enemies, that you've been under surveillance?
Oh, totally, yes. After I came back from the Philippines, I had quite a bit of publicity about those stories. It came to the attention of the FBI and they asked me to spy on not the Communists, not the Muslim group, but this guy [from] the middle-class opposition [to Marcos].
The person was in San Francisco. At first I said, I'm a journalist, I don't do that. They said, well, we'd really appreciate it. It would be helpful to your government. I said, no, no, no. And then I talked to some editors at Mother Jones and they said, why don't you do it? I went to this guy ... he's a Greek guy married into one of the wealthy families of the Philippines. They owned the electrical company there, still do. At the time, he was opposing the Marcos government and allegedly training some kind of guerilla force down in the Arizona desert -- not much of a guerilla force, if there ever was one. Anyway, I went to [him] and said, OK, the FBI has asked me to spy on you and we got this idea at Mother Jones: If you want to cooperate with us, we'll go along with them, we'll give them a little information, and then we'll do a story about it, because this is a violation of their ethics. They're not supposed to use journalists for any of this stuff, whether the CIA or the FBI, but they do. And so he said, yeah, that's great, let's do it.
So we all agreed on this and we did it, and eventually the story [got written] and Mother Jones backed out on it. After all that, they left me in the lurch. I've never forgiven them for it. They said it's just not that exciting... it's not like they're giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's not like they wanted you to kill anybody. And I said, come on, you wanted me to do this. They gave me a kill fee for the story. I said that doesn't help. I've been associated with the FBI as a spy, and now you're not going to [run] the story? I went madly looking for another outlet. I've got to get it out there, because people are going to find out some other way, and then someone's going to shoot me. I'd been with all these guerillas and now they [would] say, "He's working for the FBI." The Columbia Journalism Review was going to run it, then they said, well, we're going to have to back off because your tape clearly shows that you were saying, if you do this, you're going to be paid for it, so you were soliciting [the FBI] and you didn't make it clear that you were going to do a story about it. [Laughs.]
Luckily, one of the [journalism] professors, head of the magazine at San Francisco State University, where I'd gone, said, man, I'd be happy to publish it in the magazine. He made a cover story, "I Was a Spy for the FBI." [The reason] I don't think [government agencies] mess with me too much now is because of that.