01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 23, 2006

BY ANDY SMITH
Journal Television Writer

In Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, a memoir of her mother's mental illness, National Public Radio correspondent Jacki Lyden wrote that deciphering her mother's madness left her with a powerful urge to uncover secrets.

"Many years later, as an adult, I longed to be sent to find things out in places of great secrets, loving most the places that were the furthest and strangest and hard," she wrote.

These days, Lyden said in a phone interview, uncovering secrets doesn't get much harder than in Iraq.

"There's a constant sense of physical danger," she said.

Lyden covered Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1989; since the 9/11 attacks she has spent a great deal of time in the Mideast, reporting not only from Iraq but from Afghantistan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

She will be in Providence Thursday at the First Unitarian Church to speak on "The Dark Art of Reporting the Iraq War."

In Iraq, Lyden said, she didn't stay in Baghdad's relatively secure "Green Zone," but disguised herself as an Iraqi woman and traveled where she could, accompanied by a driver and an interpreter. (Almost all Western journalists in Iraq, she said, are completely dependent on Iraqi translators).

"We're able to go to a handful of areas," she said. "We used to be able to go almost anywhere, but things have gotten so dramatically worse. I think anyone making even an educated guess would have trouble reaching a conclusion now as to how this is going to end."

Why does she call her war reporting "a dark art?"

"There's a certain bargain you make with people, that you will risk your life to tell their stories," she said. "And other people's lives as well."

Then there's the effort to break through what Lyden calls the "wall of obfuscation" reporters encounter from almost everyone concerned in Iraq.

Lyden tells about a Minister of the Interior in the interim Iraqi government who was afraid to go into his office for fear of being assassinated. But American spokesmen, she said, nevertheless spoke as though the country had a functioning ministry.

She said she's angered when she sees "a pure piece of propaganda," such as a March 5 column in the New York Post by Ralph Peters that denied Iraq is on the brink of civil war.

"He was there for two days in a [military] Humvee!" Lyden scoffed.

Carefully tell a difficult story

Lyden said her goal is to very carefully, very intelligently, tell an extraordinarily difficult story.

"I don't believe in some sort of false balance -- if the news is dire, let's go out and look for a happy story to balance that," she said. "The news is the news . . . I don't think it does anyone any good to paint a rosy picture of Iraq."

But Lyden said she was impressed with the American military forces she spent time with there.

"They're knocking themselves out sideways to do the job," she said. "Three years into this, and they're learning how to fight the war now . . . it's turning into an urban combat zone fight, which is the very thing we said we didn't want to do."

Lyden said many Iraqis told her privately they didn't want American military forces to leave, fearing the sectarian violence would only get worse.

"Iraq is not yet Rwanda," she said. "Most middle-class Iraqis do not want a civil war."

Lyden covered Iraq both before and after the American invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Asked if the Iraqi people are better off now that he's gone, she had trouble answering.

"That's a hard question. I don't feel comfortable answering that," she said. "There is certainly more freedom, more political freedom, than there used to be. But for the average Iraqi, it is a much more dangerous place. There is less freedom to stay alive."

She is more certain about the lack of American planning that accompanied the decision to invade Iraq.

"They say fortune favors the prepared mind. We were not prepared, and that's obvious now . . .

"There was no Plan B. We came in and knocked out the support struts of society and didn't replace them with anything."

A potent force of nature

When in the United States, Lyden divides her time between Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn. (She was in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, 2001, and was the first NPR reporter on the air from New York that day.)

She said she's working on an investigative report on Iraq that will probably air on NPR in June. She is also writing a book based on an Iraqi translator she met when she was there in 1990, along with other Iraqis she has met since.

Her first book, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, is an acclaimed memoir published in 1997. It focuses on Lyden's mother, Dolores, who suffered from manic depression, usually trapped in its manic phase.

It takes its title from the day in 1966 when Lyden came home from school to her house in Menomenee Falls, Wis. Her mother appeared before her, wrapped in bedsheets, wearing a tiara, with hieroglyphics drawn on her arms in eyeliner pencil.

"I am the queen of Sheba," she announced.

Throughout the book, Lyden's uses the term "Sheba" to refer to her mother's manic persona, which for all the heartbreak and chaos it left behind also exerted a strange, intoxicating power:

"My mother's a wraith, a poet, a magician," Lyden wrote. "She is as destructive as Shiva's consort Durga, riding her tiger, slashing with eight or ten arms, a potent force of nature sheaving houses into sticks."

(Lyden's book also details some colorful episodes from her own life, such as the period in 1975 when she ran off to join a sleazy rodeo.)

After smacking a judge in the head with his own brass nameplate during a court hearing, Dolores Lyden was committed to a mental institution. Slowly, with the help of lithium, she left Sheba behind.

True means accurate

Memoirists these day risk being tainted by the likes of James Frey, whose best-selling A Million Little Pieces has been revealed to be a mixture of truth, exaggeration and lies.

"In a way that's a good thing, because he roiled waters that should have been roiled a long time ago," Lyden said. "I think his publisher's position on this was absolutely untenable. To be true to the 'spirit' of events, but not the facts, is absurd.

"If you're calling something true, then it darn well better be absolutely accurate. I can swear by every every single sentence in Daughter of the Queen of Sheba."

Lyden said there are plans to turn her book into a movie, produced by HBO Films and directed by Lasse Hallstrom (The Shipping News, Chocolat, The Cider House Rules). Lena Olin is on board to play Dolores; who will play Jacki is yet to be determined.

Lyden said Dolores, now in her mid-70s, is excited about the movie, although she had mixed feelings about the book when it was published.

"She wanted a testimony of a difficult life, and she wanted to emerge as a heroine . . . I think enough time has passed so that she's more accepting of the book."

Lyden will speak at the First Unitarian Church, 1 Benevolent St., Providence, Thursday at 7 p.m. Admission is free; no tickets are necessary. For information go to www.rihumanities.org or call (401) 273-2250.

asmith@projo.com / (401) 277-7262