I ended up snagging a story by accident while I was unembedded. I got back late one night and found a couple urgent emails from the Boston Globe in my inbox. I called them on Skype and found out that Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, had arrived that day to meet with honchos in the Green Zone and visit Massachusetts troops. Security was so tight that the Globe didn’t find out about this until Romney was already in Baghdad (apparently there was an email sent out by the Embassy, but I wasn’t yet on their mailing list).

I scrambled around, called the Embassy, and tried a couple other tricks but to no avail. It turned out he was going to be at the airport the next day, which isn’t a place I can get to without either advance notice or a death wish. So I asked the Embassy spokeswoman to pass along my number to Romney’s people and then gave up. I was eating chicken kebab in the Hamra coffee shop when my cell rang.  I picked it up and a big, friendly voice said, “Hi Charlie, it’s Mitt Romney!”

Fortunately I had both a pen and a notebook handy and managed to get a 10-minute interview.  He did a very good job of not saying anything controversial (pausing to contemplate responses to questions like, “What have you seen here that surprised you?”) and I give him points for calling me himself instead of having a staffer talk to me and then hand him the phone.  A guy named Dave who lived in my college dorm freshman year was from the Boston area and went to high school with one of Romney’s sons. Dave thought Mitt was a good guy. I was getting ready to bring up this fascinating bit of trivia when Romney told me he had to go.

Not long afterwards the Globe put my story up on their website, scooping the competition. Yet another piece of quality journalism turned out under harrowing conditions.