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There had been some early warnings. The Washington Post's Christopher Dickey had been awakened by a 1:30 a.m. phone call from his U.S. office and told that an attack was to occur that night. Since the Post's editors did not know exactly when or where it would happen, they decided not to keep a telephone line open. Earlier that day, NBC had sent Producer Mike Silver up in a chartered plane to observe the Sixth Fleet. NBC decided that an attack was imminent and kept a phone line open beginning at 1 p.m. CBS and ABC did likewise.
Telexes were down. The lights in the hotel were out. Newspaper correspondents, like Edward Schumacher of the New York Times and G. Jefferson Price III of the Baltimore Sun, dictated a few paragraphs over ABC's open line during a lull in the barrage. Their reports, taped by ABC, were then passed on to their papers.
The Libyans, who make a point of observing the niceties of the relationship between host and guest, were understandably cool to the U.S. correspondents. "Their mood was sullen and angry," notes TIME's Fischer, "but their hostility did not seem directed at us." After Gaddafi's brief TV appearance Wednesday night, demonstrators began chanting "Down, Down, U.S.A.!" in front of the hotel, while others, in a more festive mood, organized a horn-tooting, flag-waving victory procession along the city's + corniche. Libyan radio reports that U.S. pilots had been lynched by furious mobs did not engender affection for Americans nor did it make the reporters less jittery.
After the attack, the Libyans turned Al Kabir into a kind of house of detention for foreign journalists, who were allowed out only for chaperoned tours. Accompanied by "minders" from the Libyan Ministry of Information, reporters visited a residential area, a hospital and a morgue. On Tuesday evening a group of handpicked correspondents, mostly women, were driven to the children's hospital at Al Fatah University and shown two young boys, who were identified as sons of Colonel Gaddafi's. Both were lying under oxygen tents, strapped to their hospital beds. On one outing, a Libyan militiaman held a plastic bag and plucked from it a child's charred foot that had been severed at the ankle. Holding it up in the air, he said, "That's what superpowers do."
Libyan television went all out to film the civilian damage inflicted by U.S. bombs; hour after hour they replayed lingering shots of lifeless children and wounded women. But Libyan plans to frame the view of American journalists were foiled by the confusion of the city. On Wednesday afternoon, a group of journalists were herded into a bus and told they were being taken to Gaddafi's house in the Bab al Azizia compound. Expectations were high that they might see the colonel. But as the bus approached the walled barracks, a dozen or so armed guards burst through an open gate, while the sound of gunfire ricocheted from inside the compound. The bus immediately sped off and headed back to the hotel. Was it a coup? For the press corps in Tripoli, a front-row seat for the action had turned out to be a frustrating peep show.