and disbelief. Once again, he was living in a society under siege by a shadowy enemy. He recalled his younger self—son of the privileged class, served by a black population with whom he had very little interaction. Only when he went off to high school in the requisite wool blazer and straw boater did Coen become aware that his people were at war. At war against the house “boy,” the garden “boy,” and the friendly men and women who humored his quiet, curious presence outside their shacks, smelling of wood smoke, ganja and bodies.
“Our headmaster gave speeches at assembly about the evil communists conspiring with black terrorists and about how Rhodesia was on the front line of the battle for Western civilization,” he recounted to Nadler during one of their many conversations on the creeping ascendancy of the Bush administration’s “Us against Them” mentality. “It was funny how overnight, the racist characterization shifted from treating blacks as backward baboons to branding them subversive and dangerous terrorists.”
By the time Coen neared his eighteenth birthday, he was convinced that he was living in a “twisted and schizoid country based on lies and fear.” Resolved not to serve in its conscripted army against black insurgents in an increasingly brutal bush war, Coen entered university a year early. His peers took up guns, and he took up political consciousness and the music of cynical disenchantment.
In 1978, after a couple of years of college during which he spent less time attending lectures than he did immersing himself in the lexicon of Frank Zappa and the growing student counter-culture that was questioning the status-quo of white power in southern Africa, Coen emigrated with his family to the United States. For someone arriving from the repressed right-wing society that was Rhodesia, New York at the height of the punk era of sex, drugs and rock and roll was like landing on another planet. Abandoning all academic pursuits, he got a job off-loading books from trucks and devoted the next several years to catching up on everything that had been out of bounds—and to attending as many Frank Zappa concerts as he could (even meeting his hero backstage after one show). Zappa’s music began responding to the politics of the times—the growing right-wing religious fanaticism of the Reagan administration. Those policies also became the focus of another major musical influence for Coen—The Clash, with their radical songs calling attention to the proxy wars in Central America, Nicaragua, El Salvador and . . . South Africa and Zimbabwe. He began to understand how these conflicts, separated by oceans, were all connected.
After taking a guerrilla video activist course, Coen returned to the independent Zimbabwe in 1985 determined to make a film about a civil war that was raging in neighboring Mozambique. It was baptism by fire—not only did he have no idea how to make a film but nothing could have prepared him for the brutality he would document over the next eighteen months. In a desperate attempt to hold on to power and halt black liberation, the apartheid regime in South Africa had unleashed a campaign of destabilization across the whole of southern Africa, including supporting the insurgency in Mozambique that specialized in terrorizing civilians by cutting off their lips and noses. The film Mozambique: The Struggle for Survival was broadcast by PBS exactly at the time right-wing Republicans were pushing for Washington to cut ties with the socialist government and recognize the rebels—but Coen’s camera had documented the war, exposed the South African hand and helped to influence policy.
After a film on the civil war in Angola, Coen turned to television news, becoming the roaming Africa reporter for CNN. For the next decade and a half, he honed his war reporting skills covering dozens of conflicts across the continent: from the Rwandan genocide to religious riots in Nigeria, from Islamic terrorism in Algeria to child soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone, interviewing “Blood Diamond” merchants, dictators, warlords and mercenaries along the way and also winning the Bayeux Prize for best television war correspondent in 1997. He became hooked on “the jazz” of pushing the limits as far as he could and together with a strange tribe of war junkies, some of whom eventually caught bullets with their names on them, would move from conflict to conflict.
In 2000, after he was nearly killed by angry war veterans in Zimbabwe, Coen’s reporter days came to a crashing halt. The years of violence, bloodshed and suffering had taken their toll and it was time to start afresh. In a new relationship and with a baby on the way he said good-bye to Africa and returned to New York, soon after the Twin Towers came down. Frank Zappa’s words were always with him.
This was a devotion of Coen’s that Nadler, after years of conspiracy chasing together, had become very aware of. More than once, over breakfast or coffee or a midday stroll along the industrial edge of the East River, they would be talking about facets of their investigation—some troubling revelation of the underbelly of science, progress and innovation, whether it be germ proliferation, pharma profits or targeted genetics, when Coen would stop and smile to himself. “You know Zappa had it right,” he would say, and Nadler would wait for the proof. “The government is just a cardboard cutout hiding the real workings of the machine.” Nadler would nod.
Nadler, like most Americans, spent the months after September 11 eyeing the skies warily and avoiding the dreadful evening news. For New Yorkers it was a particularly strange moment—a time when the sickest of questions popped into the head: Is that a jet overhead or a missile? Is it flying correctly? What are we breathing? Are we all caught in some death match between Jesus, Allah and the god of Abraham? Now in his early fifties, Nadler was not exempt from this acute weirdness that afflicted New Yorkers.
A city kid from a working class family, Nadler graduated from Brooklyn’s public schools and the State University of New York at Binghamton and passed straight into the ranks of Gotham reporters. He covered the police blotters, suburban town corruption, arson fires and the “Son of Sam” for the Gannett Newspapers in Westchester and then signed on as a political writer for the SoHo Weekly News, a pretty hip weekly in downtown NYC. In the early 1980s, Nadler worked out of a small apartment he shared with his wife and another couple with an infant son—a communal experiment on the Upper West Side. For a decade, Nadler’s work on the more awful maneuvers of the Reagan Revolution could also be found in a host of magazines—The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone. He was also on staff with Bob Guccione’s Penthouse, and co-authored “The United States of America vs. Sex,” a lively critique of the Meese Commission on Pornography, which Nadler found to be a scandalous political payoff to Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right. He and his co-author Philip Nobile lampooned the Commission as the “F-Troop of the Erogenous Zone.” He went on to earn heftier field stripes when he joined Danny Schechter and Rory O’Connor’s award-winning PBS weekly newsmagazine South Africa Now as investigative editor. In the 1990s, he produced several Frontline investigations for PBS dealing with the political influence of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the BCCI banking scandal and the “hidden history” of US and Saudi Arabian relations.
In the fall of 2000, Nadler, living in Jackson Heights, Queens with his wife Elisa Rivlin, the general counsel of Simon and Schuster, and their two kids, sold Court TV on his original documentary series Confessions, which aired videotaped confessions of murders supplied to Nadler by the Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. It was a very controversial effort at the time. For some reason Nadler has never understood, these real life interrogations—introduced as evidence in murder trials—were greeted hysterically by the media. Even before airing, Confessions prompted the New York Times to urge in an editorial that the network kill the reality show. Despite an avalanche of publicity and a doubling of Court TV’s anemic prime time ratings, the program was yanked after just two episodes. So when a museum in Denmark proposed that Nadler and his co-producer Richard Kroehling bring the Confessions tapes to a “censored television” festival in Copenhagen, all expenses paid, he readily agreed. He and Richard were booked on the 12:10 AM flight from Newark International Airport to Copenhagen—the first flight out of Newark slated on September 11, 2001—eight hours before United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked into infamy from that same terminal.
On the television set at the gate, the New York Giants were in the final moments of a 31–20 loss to the Denver Broncos. Nadler cursed, regretting a bet he had made earlier. When boarding began, he presented his ticket to the attendants and ambled into the jetway with a yawn. But halfway to the door of the plane, a uniformed US Customs official and a fellow in plain clothes were stopping passengers asking to see passports. Nadler produced his and the agent stopped