In the gathering darkness, reporter Philip Smucker crawled through cactus and scrub near a Haitian border post. He had recruited a guide from the nearby town of Jimani in the Dominican Republic, the country that shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Lacking a Haitian entry visa, Smucker, an Alexandria native, had paid the man $200 to smuggle him across the border
In early September 1994, Haiti was suffering through a paroxysm of domestic and international political strife. President Bill Clinton was prepared to send U.S. military forces to restore the duly elected Haitian head of state, who had been ousted by a military coup.
The U.S. and international news media hastily sought on-the-scene reporting, so freelance war correspondent Philip Smucker, a 1979 graduate of T. C. Williams High School, flew to the Dominican Republic.
"As a younger man, I made it a habit of getting into places illegally," said Smucker, now 49. After evading Haitian patrols that night, Smucker walked up a mountainous ridge that formed part of the border. Becoming disoriented, he ended up back on the Dominican side in the morning. Undaunted, Smucker rented a burro and took another route into Haiti. After dismounting, he walked toward Port-au-Prince.
Haitian police soon accosted him and asked why his dirty clothes were full of cactus needles. "I told them I was on a hike and was staying at the, ah, um, oh yea, the Hotel Trianon in Port-au-Prince," he said. Smucker had just read Graham Greene’s The Comedians, a novel that featured a fictional hotel of that name patterned after Port-au-Prince’s Hotel Oloffson. "They somehow bought that, and I was in business." He quickly began reporting for Toronto’s Globe & Mail, McLean’s magazine, and others.

SINCE OBTAINING his master’s degree in journalism at the University of Michigan in 1986, Smucker has used Alexandria as his base as he traveled the world as an international reporter. He has spent years living abroad, with extended stays in Southeast Asia, Russia, Europe, Egypt, and the Balkans, and has covered the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By his count, Smucker has been ejected from four countries, threatened with a weapon or shot at on nine occasions, and feared for his life five times.
He has always been an independent freelancer, picking up ad hoc assignments from newspapers and periodicals ranging from the International Herald Tribune to U.S. News & World Report. Such reporters are called "stringers," and are paid by the piece and often get expense allowances. This approach, however, has not deterred him from superlative reporting. Smucker has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations, two from the Christian Science Monitor and one from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Smucker is an easy-going, friendly person, who puts people at ease with a quick grin and engaging conversation. He is a raconteur of the first order and has an interesting story for every situation. Graying now, but still an energetic man, Smucker carries himself with a confident air usually affected by the good guys in spy movies.
Smucker gained a national audience in late 2001 when in Afghanistan he traveled with U.S. special forces, CIA paramilitary officers, and local warlords in the search for Osama bin Laden. Writing for the Monitor and London’s Daily Telegraph, he was the first reporter to break the news that bin Laden, despite fierce U.S. bombing, had escaped from Tora Bora into Pakistan. In his 2004 book, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape, Smucker criticizes what he saw as a fumbling U.S. attempt to capture bin Laden.
Smucker returned from his ninth trip to Afghanistan this past July. Writing for the McClatchy newspaper chain, Smucker was embedded on three occasions with U.S. Army units in eastern Afghanistan.
Keen observers consider his reporting to be among the best from Afghanistan. "There is no better picture of the area than that offered by Philip," said Roy Gutman, McClatchy’s foreign editor. "His stories are so much more complete than reports from other news media, and certainly more informative than government statements."
Smucker addressed the grim state of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in a June 10, 2009 op-ed piece in USA Today, and led with this line: "Winnable? Yes. Bloody? Count on it." He disagreed with official statements at the time that the U.S. and NATO are holding their own in Afghanistan. "Calling this war a ‘stalemate’ is to smear lipstick on a pig," he wrote.

IT’S AN UNDERSTATEMENT to say that Smucker has deep roots in Alexandria and the Mount Vernon area. His mother, Louisa, is a member of two notable Virginia families, those of George Washington and George Mason. Although the Masons and Washingtons had intermarried several times over generations, Louisa points to one of those instances in 1921 when her mother, Louisa Fontaine Washington, married Philip Dawson. The elder Louisa was the granddaughter of the last Washington to own Mount Vernon, John Augustine Washington. Dawson’s grandfather was Samuel Cooper, the highest-ranking Confederate general in the Civil War. In 1827, Cooper married Sarah Mason, the granddaughter of George Mason of Gunston Hall.
Philip’s father, John, a retired Episcopal priest, is part of the Smucker jelly and jam family. He is many times removed, however, from the founder, J. M. Smucker, who started the company in 1921 in Orrville, Ohio.
"Philip was a little wild as a teenager, and I was surprised when he chose to become a foreign correspondent," John Smucker said of his son. "I never saw him read a book or write anything in high school. But his mother and I are very proud of him."
In a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal, Philip Smucker points to his honors degree in English lit from Cal-Berkeley.
John and Louisa Smucker live in a home in a compound off North Quaker Lane that has been in the Cooper and Dawson families since before the Civil War.
Following graduate school, Philip Smucker moved to Bangkok in 1986 to teach English while attempting to string for U.S. newspapers. "I had my first good splash in 1988 by reporting on anti-government demonstrations in Rangoon, Burma," he recalled. "I got some good exposure through the Washington Post and other news media, and even did three Q&As with Dan Rather on CBS News."
After reporting from Russia in the early 1990s and the Haiti adventure, Smucker gravitated to the hostilities in the Balkans that arose during and after Yugoslavia’s breakup. During the Bosnia War, he reported frequently on violent reprisals, war crimes, and just plain warfare for several news media outlets, including Daily Telegraph, Voice of America, and German radio.
While in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1998, he hired a young woman named Ivana Veselinovic to teach him the Serb language. After only a few sessions, his interests broadened beyond his lessons and they began to date. "He was a serious student at first and always did his homework," said Ivana, now Mrs. Smucker. "But he soon began to bring me flowers when we met to study."
Ivana and Philip were married in May 1998 in Belgrade. Among those traveling to the wedding from the states was actor Chris Meloni, the male lead in NBC-TV’s "Law & Order, Special Victims Unit." He and Smucker first met as children at Alexandria’s John Adams School. Fast friends in high school, both went off to University of Colorado in 1979. Smucker transferred to Berkeley after two years, but he and Meloni have since maintained their friendship.
Later in 1998, Serbia’s repression of Muslim Albanians in Kosovo erupted into horrific violence between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. NATO intervened with a massive bombing campaign to force Serbs out of Kosovo, permit the return of Kosovar refugees, and introduce peacekeeping forces. The hostilities drew Smucker like a moth to a porch light. The headlines for his pieces reflected his intimate involvement — "Hunger as an Instrument of War" (U.S. News) and "Faces Frozen in Terror" (Houston Chronicle).
As the Kosovo hostilities continued during 1999, Smucker encountered the most dangerous situations of his 23-year career. After what could have been a fatal confrontation, Serbian police forced him to retreat across the Macedonian border at gunpoint. "I walked up and down a mountain to get back into Kosovo, and after arriving, I witnessed terrible atrocities," he said. Smucker continued to dodge detention. "I hid in a village with two Albanians while Serb paramilitaries searched for us. It was the most terrifying night of my life."
True to his gregarious self, Smucker had the inclination during all of this to open a bar in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. He and several other war correspondents, who were co-owners, named it "Tricky Dick’s." Not a homage to Nixon, but rather in honor of Richard Holbrooke, who helped broker the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War in late 1995. In what must have resembled Rick's Café Américain in the movie Casablanca, Smucker described the place in 1999 as "an ex-pat drinking establishment frequented by Serbs, Albanians, diplomats, and journalistic riff-raff from around the world." The gin joint offered drinks called "B-52," "Tomahawk," and "Verifier."
The bar, which he no longer owns, is still open with the same name.
After two reporting stints in Egypt, Smucker headed for Kuwait as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq in March 2003. Like a camp follower during the Napoleonic Wars, Smucker trailed behind a U.S. Marine unit as it raced north after the "Shock and Awe" air campaign. Operating on his own for the Monitor and Daily Telegraph, rather than as an embedded reporter, Smucker quickly got himself into a jam.
"I did a short video segment for CNN and said that I was a hundred miles south of Baghdad between the Tigris and Euphrates," he said. U.S. military authorities objected, saying Smucker offered too much information about American military movements. After what Smucker described as a heavy-handed detention and interrogation, several Marines escorted Smucker back to Kuwait.
"I got back into Iraq three days later," Smucker said with a smile.

SMUCKER IS NOW home for a while and working to finish the manuscript of a new book, which Prometheus Books will publish next year. "My Brother, My Enemy: America and the Battle of Ideas in the Islamic World" will distill the experiences and observations that he has gathered in recent years. He is also preparing a documentary film to accompany he book.
He and his wife live in Alexandria’s West End, and she welcomes the down time. "I cannot let fear enter my mind when he is traveling," she said. "If I do, I’m afraid that will jinx him. Besides, he’s way over his limit of nine lives."
She works for Hands Along the Nile, a nonprofit that promotes economic development and intercultural dialog in Egypt.
When asked what’s next on their calendar, Ivana Smucker said, "Starting a family."
For more information on Philip Smucker, visit his Web site, www.philipsmucker.com. Also, Google "Tricky Dick’s" and "Pristina" for reports on the bar.