- Steven Senne/AP PHOTOS
- James Foley
Michael Lev didn’t know James Foley, but he knows the business Foley was in. A former foreign correspondent now an editorial writer for the Tribune, Lev published a story Friday called “The dangers of being a war correspondent.” Lev was in Pakistan and Afghanistan after 9/11. You want to stay safe, he explains, but “you are there to get the story.”
He gave me a link to a story Thursday by Martin Chulov in the Guardian. Chulov, who reported from Libya during and after that uprising, described Foley as a type—as someone who showed up “with a sense of purpose and opportunity and, at times, immunity to the dangers,” and who enjoyed “plenty of potential buyers for his frontline images.”
He didn’t know Foley and he didn’t know anything about his working relationship with GlobalPost or anyone else. He wouldn’t speculate on what kind of support Foley did or didn’t get. But he remembered that in 2002 when he crossed into Afghanistan he could afford to spend “hundreds of dollars a day” on cars and drivers and fixers. If he teamed up with a freelancer or two all he’d ask was that they “contribute what they could.”
