Brilliance and tenacity were not enough: Todd Smith gambled with death to get a story, and lost.
Brilliance and tenacity were not enoughTodd Smith was not on assignment when he went to Peru's Huallaga Valley last fall to write a feature on the region's coca-growing peasants. He was on vacation.
Smith, the county government reporter for The Tampa Tribune, had asked his paper to send him to Peru. His editors demurred, partly because of the danger. Smith went at his own expense.
Smith's self-assigned risk-taking was in character; he was determined to take the fast track to becoming a foreign correspondent. In 1987, for instance, when he was a local reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, he quit his job and spent two and a half months with the Nicaraguan contras as a freelance journalist.
He managed to sell only two articles produced during those weeks in Central America, to the St. Pete Times and to the San Francisco Chronicle. The fees didn't even pay his air fare. But that didn't discourage him, he told friends. The important thing was that he had been there, and he had gained experience that would make him more salable as a foreign correspondent.
Smith was following this dream of becoming a foreign correspondent when he went to Peru. The dream cost him his life.
Six months after this death, little more is known about what happened to Smith than that which was said in the wire service dispatches last November: Despite warnings from colleagues, Smith had gone alone into the bloody region in which drug traffickers and Sendero Luminoso guerrillas operate freely. His badly beaten body was found near the village of Uchiza. The FBI briefly investigated the murder, but, lacking jurisdiction, backed off.
Peruvian authorities, for whom Smith's death was merely another entry in a brutal 10-year war with leftist insurgents that has claimed at least 10,000 lives, abandoned the investigation.
Smith was 28 when he died.
Todd Smith's brief career had been uncluttered by failure. He was reared in northern Florida, first in Jacksonville and then in Tallahassee. His father, Robert Smith, an appellate judge, says his son was hooked on journalism at an early age. Todd worked on his middle school's paper and was a co-editor of his high school paper.
After his death, close friends spoke of Smith's passion for journalism, but they also recalled that he drew inspiration from three historical figures: Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy - three smart, aggressive, tenacious, and supremely self-confident men.
Smith was graduated from high school in 1979 as a National Merit Scholar, and he entered his father's alma mater, Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Clark Mollenhoff, who for years had been one of the nation's best investigative reporters, was on the faculty, and he quickly became a mentor to Smith.
"I had the feeling when I first got acquainted with him that he was going to do something really great," Mollenhoff says. "He did work all along that was of the highest quality."
Smith made the Dean's List throughout his freshman and sophomore years, and he became editor of the student paper, Ringtum Phi, in his junior year. He also employed his considerable artistic talent to draw a satirical comic strip called "The Mink" for the paper. The strip was so popular that friends urged him to continue it beyond graduation and syndicate it.
But Smith didn't want to be an office-bound satirist; he wanted foreign soil under his feet. He studied Latin America, parts of which were in considerable ferment and constantly in the news.
In the summer after his sophomore year, Smith spent six weeks studying Spanish at the Instituto Fenix in Cuernavaca, Mexico. When the course ended, he finished his summer break by living on a Mexican goat farm, partly to learn more about ordinary people, and partly to perfect his language skills.
In 1982 Smith landed a summer internship with the Tallahassee Democrat, and in the summer of 1983, he won a scholarship for Latin American research at the Library of Congress.
Smith had relished his work on the school paper, but his journalistic passion cost him academically. He failed several courses during the first semester of his senior year.
"He went through a depression and started skipping classes," says his father, "but he eventually snapped out of it. His attitude toward life was generally buoyant and optimistic, but we worried about all kinds of little signs."
Todd Smith was probably depressed because "he had bitten off more than he could chew," says Mollenhoff, who confirms that Smith bounced back onto the Dean's List before he graduated, a semester late.
Smith also chafed under what he believed were unreasonable demands placed on him by one of his journalism professors. It became a test of wills, and in a fit of pique Smith switched his major from journalism to English.
"He was a person who knew his own mind," Mollenhoff says. "He would listen to what you had to say, and if it made sense, he'd do it. He just figured in his own mind that what was being demanded of him was unreasonable and that he had ways around what we expected him to do."
Following graduation, Smith joined the staff of the St. Petersburg Times in January 1984. Over the next three years, he covered local governments in suburbia. Although he was thought to be a skillful and talented reporter with a solid future, Smith was frustrated that his goal of becoming a foreign correspondent continued to elude him.
"He would come in and visit from time to time," his former mentor, Mollenhoff, recalls. "He said he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. I told him it usually took seniority."
In May 1987, Smith quit the Times and paid his way to Honduras, where he made his way to the camps of the Nicaraguan contras. He spent one 10-week stretch accompanying one contingent on combat patrols inside Nicaragua, compiling the material that he would later sell as a two-part series to the St. Petersburg Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. His take: $400.
But he had acquired the foreign-soil credentials he hungered for.
On one of Smith's post-Nicaragua visits to Washington and Lee, Robert Maria, who had been one of his teachers, expressed concern over the chances Smith had taken.
Maria recalls Smith's response: "I'm a cat. I always land on my feet."
In April 1988, Smith became a reporter at the Tribune, the Times' bay-area competitor, and again he excelled as a political writer covering Hillsborough County. After only a year, the paper entrusted him with a demanding five-day-a-week column on politics and governmental affairs.
Smith often ticked off the officials he wrote about, but, after his death, many conceded at a memorial service that Smith always had been fair and thorough.
"I think he turned a corner with that column," his father says. "That was when he really began showing excellence journalistically. But he was eager for bigger things and ready to do something else."
Last August, as drug-related violence in Colombia increased and as President Bush was stepping up the war on drugs, Smith's editors asked him if he would go to Medellin, Colombia, to write a series about the cocaine trade. He accepted with enthusiasm; the assignment took him a step closer to his goal of becoming a foreign correspondent.
If anything, going to Medellin was more hazardous than Smith's self-assignment to Nicaragua. "The U.S. consulate in Bogota told us that Medellin was the second most dangerous city in the world after Beirut," recalls Tribune photographer Bruce Johnson, who accompanied Smith.
"The Hotel Intercontinental where the press always stays was bombed with two grenades while we were there," says Johnson. "Then for good measure they sprayed the front of the building with machine guns. The drug lords had declared war on journalists, and this was seen as a warning."
Johnson recalls a chilling incident at the end of their reporting trip. While returning to the States, he and Smith changed their flight reservations from Eastern to Avianca. Later, the line of people at the Eastern counter where they would have been standing was machine-gunned and several passengers were wounded.
Moments later, while Smith and Johnson were waiting for their Avianca flight, a rumor circulated that drug traffickers had planted 600 pounds of dynamite in the airport.
Johnson voiced his concern, and he recalls Smith's rejoinder: "You can't cheat death."
Then, says Johnson, Smith "just sat down and read a book."
Returning to Tampa, Smith churned out a powerful two-part series with sidebars on the drug traffic and how the common people were affected by it. At year's end, the Tribune nominated Smith posthumously for a Pulitzer Prize for the series.
While in Colombia, says H. Doyle Harvil, the Tribune's executive editor, Smith learned that most of the coca leaves processed in Colombia originate in the valley of the Huallaga River, high in the Peruvian Andes. Smith wanted to visit the valley, and he asked Harvill if he could go to Peru to cover the municipal elections in November, which were widely seen as a bellwether for April's presidential race, and do some more work on the drug traffickers.
Harvill rejected the idea, partly because of the danger involved. Smith then applied for a two-week vacation, dug into his own bank account, and went on his own.
Smith left for Peru on November 7 and quickly linked up in Lima with Sharon Stevenson, a stringer for The Miami Herald and Time magazine.
After his death, Stevenson told investigators that Smith wanted to write a piece on the small farmers in the Huallaga Valley who depend on growing coca for their livelihoods, and who were targets of a United Nations effort to persuade them to raise alternative crops.
She and a colleague had just returned from the area, Stevenson told Smith. The trip was safe, she said - as long as he traveled with a group or with an army unit.
"He was discouraged from going alone, not only by other correspondents but by American officials, because that area wasn't under the control of Peruvian authorities," Harvill explains. "But he didn't want to be stigmatized by going with the army."
If there is a spot on this planet where angels might fear to tread, it would be the Peruvian hinterlands. They are the domain of drug lords who ruthlessly defend their fiefs, and they are also the stronghold of the notorious Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, a band of about 8,000 Maoist fanatics that is an Andrean version of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.
The senderistas kill government officials, peasants, and foreigners with equal abandon, and they regard local journalists as choice victims. An estimated 47 Peruvian newsmen have perished at the hands of the senderistas since 1980. In one incident in January 1983, they stopped a press bus near Ayacucho, killed eight reporters and cameramen, and left their bodies sprawled on a mountainside.
Given these circumstances, one might suppose that Smith was foolhardy. Or naive. Or cocky. Smith's family and friends, however, dispute such characterizations.
"He saved my life in Medellin," says Johnson, recalling last August when the Tribune sent the pair to Colombia. Smith and Johnson had gone into the Medellin suburb of Itagui to report on the funeral of a young man who had been slain in a drug vendetta.
"He told me," says Johnson, "|Look, these people have been drinking aguardiente all day, they're out for revenge, and they'll kill you [for taking pictures].'
"When the funeral procession came by, I started to take a wide-angle shot at belly level. He grabbed the camera and chucked it in the car. In retrospect I know he was right. Todd was a very careful, cautious person. He wasn't gung-ho, gonzo journalist but more of a thoughtful, intellectual person."
Harvill has a similar assessment: "I don't think he was afraid. He wasn't the type to be afraid. He was cautious."
Smith's father, however, has a slightly different view: "I don't think he even felt he was risking his life," he says. "I don't think he ever had a sense of imminent doom.
"Yet, he was a very fateful person who thought he was destined to do something of importance from this unknown land. It was really an element of daring that kept repeating itself."
Wayne Garcia, a close friend and colleague who wrote a moving account of Smith's life and death for the Tribune, also noted Smith's penchant for risk-taking:
"He knew what he was doing - but did he take more chances than a more seasoned reporter? Yeah. He took more chances than a correspondent for The New York Times or The Washington Post, because their editors hold them back.
"You won't see Joe Treaster of The New York Times parachuting into the Huallaga Valley. Todd went in there like he was covering a neighborhood here in Tampa. He wasn't content just to read newspapers for background."
Given Smith's aggressive get-the-story personality and self-confidence, it's conceivable that he believed he could work his way into the confidence of the guerrillas if they confronted him, as he had with the contras, by offering to tell their story.
If so, he was mistaken. The senderistas have little concern for telling their story, because they care little for world opinion.
All that is publicly known about Smith's final reporting trip is that he left Lima about November 15, hopping aboard a propeller-driven flight to Tarapoto in the upper reaches of the Huallaga Valley.
After interviewing local officials and farmers at an agricultural cooperative and snapping some photos, he doubled-back to Uchiza. Even his fluent Spanish must have been of limited value in that isolated region, where the dominant language is Quechua, the ancient tongue of the Incas.
On Friday, November 17, witnesses saw Smith at the primitive airstrip in Uchiza, waiting for a scheduled hop back to Tarapoto. A group of men approached him someone stuck a gun in his ribs, and he was escorted away.
When Smith failed to return to Lima, Stevenson called the Tribune's newsroom on Monday, the day Smith was to have reported back to work in Tampa. Harvill notified Robert Smith of his son's disappearance, and the two men booked flights to Lima.
"We were at the Miami airport when we got the word that they had found the body of an American," Smith recalls. "That was it for me. I just went home."
Harvill proceeded to Lima with reporter Tim Collie. They learned that a body had been dumped near a soccer field in Uchiza on Monday. A sign near the body said: "In this way die North American spies linked to the Pentagon ... ." Harvill was not asked to identify the body. Smith had been so badly beaten and the body so assaulted by the elements that he was unrecognizable. Instead, Smith's dentist in Florida rushed Smith's dental X-rays to the Tribune, where positives were printed and sent electronically to the Reuters bureau in Lima.
The autopsy revealed that Smith had been tortured for perhaps three days. His facial bones had been broken, and he had been garroted with a rope or wire.
The murder was similar to other killings by the senderistas, although some Lima newspapers carried a report, never confirmed, that Smith had been "sold" to drug traffickers for $30,000, in the belief that he was an agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
What really transpired after Smith was marched off from the dirt airstrip at Uchiza probably will never be known.
Similarly, the line of reasoning that led Smith to that remote valley in Peru is a mystery.
"He was defintely restless," says Garcia, whose desk was near Smith's at the Tribune. "He really would have liked to move on to Tallahassee or Washington. he was getting tired of the column, even though he was doing it well. He was under daily pressure to produce a column whether he had one or not."
In compiling the material for his memorial article on Smith, Garcia had learned from a few intimates something that Smith had never confided to him: that Smith harbored political ambitions that encompassed the presidency.
Photographer Johnson, however, saw a significantly different side of Smith:
"He expressed to me on a number of occasions that he expected to be at the Tribune the rest of his life. He knew he wasn't in a bad position. He said, |Look, I'm in my 20s and I've got my own column. What more could I want?'"
Meanwhile, in Tallahassee, Robert Smith grapples with the question of why his son was driven repeatedly to gamble with death to get a story.
"I don't think it was destiny," he says softly. "I think he was pushing himself to the limits of achievement that he thought were beyond his reach."
Brash, self-confident, restless, cautious, caring, demanding, ambitious, fun-loving, laconic, stubborn, socially liberal, an admirer of the contras - all were terms used by friends and colleagues to describe Todd Smith, a man who had so greatly admired the aggressive, ambitious, and self-confident Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.
Smith was "real curious, bright, easy to work with," reflects Diane Egner, Smith's assignment editor. "A lot of people loved and respected him before he died. A lot
PHOTO : Todd Smith at the Honduran-Nicaraguan border in August 1987.
Robert Buckman, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, has worked as a freelance journalist in Latin America.
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| Author: | Buckman, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Quill |
| Article Type: | Biography |
| Date: | May 1, 1990 |
| Words: | 2910 |
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