Remembering Danny

"Here she is," a glowing Danny said in early 1999, whipping a photo out of his wallet. He couldn't stop gushing about his beautiful French fiancée, Mariane.

It was a wonderful emotion to see in Danny Pearl - a friend and colleague from The Wall Street Journal, so smitten with life that he couldn't keep a grin off his bespectacled face.

"Well," he asked theatrically, "What do you think?"

That was Danny: sharing his good fortune, infecting all he touched with his self-effacing laughter, charming his way into everything - and out of anything. Here was a man engaged in living; a compassionate man, who would have begun getting to know his unborn baby boy by speaking gently to Mariane's round tummy. But one month after Danny was abducted in Karachi, while contacting Islamic militants, he was brutally murdered in front of a video camera.

The brutality of his murder may have stemmed from the humiliation his captors felt. From special forces units in Afghanistan - who wear "I Love New York" patches on their uniforms - to the madrassas in Pakistan, where the fall of the Taliban and Al Qaeda is keenly felt, revenge is a key word.

For journalists, the post-Sept. 11 war on terror means a new level of danger. Danny's killing takes the toll of journalists to nine, more than the number of US soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan.

If his kidnappers' e-mails are to be believed, one could argue that Danny was a victim of America's relative success in the Afghan war - and the violent backlash it has spawned.

Danny probed Al Qaeda connections and found himself in the midst of this maelstrom. He was among those foreign correspondents for whom the search for truth is almost a religion. They know that policies and political rhetoric often paint inaccurate pictures of reality, using only black and white.

Like others, Danny saw his mission as exploring and defining the all-important gray areas - giving voice to the voiceless, and reminding decisionmakers that their acts have real-life consequences.

Ever cautious, Danny had told fellow journalists in Pakistan that he was leaving the Afghanistan conflict to them, because it was too dangerous for an expectant father.

It was always so. When I first met Danny in 1996 in Iran, driving together for days, he was very concerned about the risks of our extra-legal crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan to meet a local warlord. In Iran last week, I thought of that reluctance again in the lobby of the same hotel where we plotted our trip - and of how unlikely it was that Danny was a hostage.

During the years we both covered the Middle East, our paths crossed often. Danny was ebullient, and always looked like an ambitious young attorney with his wrinkle-free suit jacket - an item that we joked about.

In Iran, I admired his detailed list of contacts - a masterpiece that he had inherited from a predecessor. It became a template for all my own future contact lists. He was generous with those numbers: During the next few years, we exchanged contacts in odd places.

And we sometimes raced each other for quirky story angles. He could write like a dream. He once turned a toss-away story about a revival of pearl-diving songs in the tiny Gulf state of Qatar into a lengthy page 1 Wall Street Journal story.

Danny was good-naturedly aggrieved - accusing me of leaving him nothing to write when I beat him to stories in Iran on the rising popularity of plastic surgery for Western-style noses, and a piece about a government family-planning program in the Islamic republic.

One of the last times I saw Danny was during the funeral of Jordan's King Hussein. Afterwards, he came briefly to a party at our house.

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