The Fixer: Amjad M. Tadros' extraordinary 30-year journalism journey through the Middle East

For more than three decades, Amjad M. Tadros was one of the people behind some of American television’s most important coverage of the Middle East.

A Jordanian journalist and the son of Palestinian refugees, Tadros joined CBS News in 1990 almost by accident after a job in Saudi Arabia fell through in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

He went on to spend more than 30 years as CBS News’ Middle East producer, working across Iraq, Yemen, Syria and the wider region and helping correspondents from CBS News and 60 Minutes report from some of the world’s most difficult and dangerous environments.

His career placed him at the centre of stories that shaped American understanding of the region. He was in Baghdad when a US cruise missile struck his hotel in 1993, leaving him injured and unexpectedly face-to-face with Saddam Hussein in an Iraqi hospital.

In Yemen, he pursued stories about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s network. He worked on reporting about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Arab Spring and Syria’s war, among many other major stories.

Yet Tadros never saw himself simply as a producer. For much of his career, he was known as a "fixer" — the person who could open doors, find sources, arrange access, navigate bureaucracy and help foreign correspondents understand the places they were reporting from.

That experience is at the heart of his new memoir, The Fixer: A Journalist’s Accidental Journey Through the Middle East. He spoke to The New Arab about his memoir, the extraordinary experiences that shaped his career and what has happened to American coverage of the Middle East.

The New Arab: Your memoir is called The Fixer: A Journalist’s Accidental Journey through the Middle East. Why did you choose that title, and what does being a “fixer” mean to you?

Amjad M. Tadros: I decided to call the book The Fixer because although I had many titles during my career, I had no problem with being called a fixer. We don’t really have this term in Arabic; the Americans called us “fixers,” and we do everything from getting the coffee to arranging interviews.

Some of my colleagues did not like the term, and eventually I got called a producer. But I was proud to be called a fixer. I was the best at it, and I fixed for all the major US networks. Plus, it was a nice title.

The book was actually going to be called The Accidental Journalist for a long time because I really did become a journalist by accident. But The Fixer felt more honest.

Being a fixer was not just a job title for me. It was about adapting, surviving and connecting — about being the bridge between two worlds.

One of your assignments was to go to Iraq, and it ended with you being caught up in a US missile attack on Baghdad while you were in a hotel. You ended up in hospital, where you met the then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Most people would have quit after that, but you kept going back to Iraq. What happened, and why did you keep going back?

It was in January 1993, and back then the Iraqis didn’t trust us Jordanians because we could speak the language. So when American reporters would go out on assignment, I stayed behind in the Baghdad hotel.

We didn’t think this would happen, as the hotel was meant to be a safe place. But we were hit by an American cruise missile, and I was injured.

I was taken to the hospital screaming. I was worried that people would go to my hotel room to see blood, see I was not there and assume I was dead. My parents would then see the news and think I was dead too.

Nobody knew where I was. After being stitched up, the hospital refused to let me go because they got word that Saddam Hussein was going to visit the injured. He wanted to show people he was still alive, which is why he was coming. I had only a few minutes to decide what to say to him, and I chose to avoid politics and just thank him for the humanitarian gesture.

When he came into the hospital, I pulled myself up and leaned forward to greet him with a kiss on the cheek. Iraqi television took a photograph of us, and that image was widely circulated. It became a defining moment in my career because Iraqi officials began to assume that I had a connection to Saddam. After that, I was able to work in Iraq largely uninterrupted for years and gained access that allowed me to pursue stories other journalists could not.

Up until a few years after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, American media was always interested in Iraqi stories, but you also tried to get more interest going in Yemen too. What was it like trying to get the US media to cover Yemen?

Yemen was a hard sell. I have three chapters in the book about Yemen and the stories I covered there. 

The first story that brought me to Yemen was about a Yemeni guy in Guantanamo Bay; while there, I discovered a guy who was Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard.

I got CBS to greenlight the story, and after that one, I kept going back to cover more stuff. It was always hard to get American editors to approve these stories, though, but I managed it; I got CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes, and the website to do stories on Yemen.

I love the country; the Yemeni people are the nicest, and it's so scenic and fascinating. Dangerous at the same time, but very beautiful. There are over 40 million people who live there; they are part of an important global access point, and you can’t just ignore them.

Do you think your journalism made a difference in how the US saw the Arab World, and how would you assess where we are today with American coverage of the region?

I hope I made a difference. Journalists often like to take the moral high ground and believe they are making an impact, so I hope I made a difference.

I believe we covered stories that no one else did, and especially with something like 60 Minutes, where we could cover a story with great depth, I like to think this made a difference.

Unfortunately, in recent coverage, I think certain technological changes have challenged how things are covered. Things like social media and AI have created a demand for more news to be produced in less time.

But this approach doesn’t work for understanding developments in the Middle East; these are old societies with long histories, and you cannot convey this with these incentives.

I also believe news coverage has become shallower and more opinionated; this is not how I was taught journalism.

One of the reasons I wrote the book was to push back on claims that we are legacy media, fake news and so on. We did important stories like the US abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, which had an impact in America; we were certainly not joking around.

While some outlets still do good work, unfortunately they are being pushed in the wrong direction.

Usman Butt is a multimedia television researcher, filmmaker and writer based in London who read International Relations and Arabic Language at the University of Westminster and completed a Master of Arts in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter