NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garrels dies of lung cancer at 71

Her career saw her report from the Soviet Union, Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya, among other locations

NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garrels has died of lung cancer at 71 (Screenshot / YouTube / Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame)

NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garrels has died of lung cancer at the age of 71.

Ms Garrels passed away on Wednesday, according to NPR, which she joined in 1988 after a decade at ABC working in TV news, serving as bureau chief in Moscow and Central America.

Her career saw her report from the Soviet Union, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya, among other locations. After the Iraq War began in 2003, Ms Garrels became one of 16 American correspondents who stayed in the country while not embedded with US troops, The New York Times noted, and she was one of few reporters who remained in Bagdhad.

“She was relentless, just relentless,” NPR correspondent Deborah Amos told The New York Times of Ms Garrels. “She took every risk you could take.”

Born in Springfield, Massachusetss on 2 July 1951, Ms Garrels was partly raised in the UK. She returned to the US as a student and enrolled first in Middlebury College in Vermont, then transferred to Harvard University, from which she graduated in 1972 with a degree in Russian.

Ms Garrels wrote two books over the course of her career. The most recent one, Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia, came out in 2016, was billed as “an intimate portrait of Middle Russia.” She told Publishers Weekly at the time: “Imagine if America had gone through what Russia went through: all of a sudden, a great unchallenged superpower is a beggar,. In fact, look at what Americans are doing now! They feel threatened, uncertain, the world is changing around them, and you have demagogues like Donald Trump.”

In the Publishers Weekly interview, Ms Garrels discussed her lung cancer diagnosis, for which she was set to undergo surgery. When asked whether she felt comfortable having information about her illness included in the story, she told writer Wendy Smith: “It’s the reality.”

Ms Garrels’s first book, Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War as Seen by National Public Radio's Correspondent, was released in 2003. The title is a reference to a strategy used by Ms Garrel to avoid detection while working on her reports using a satellite phone.

“And then I decided it would be very smart if I broadcast naked, so if that, god forbid, the secret police were coming through the rooms, that would give me maybe five minutes to answer the phone, pretend I’d been asleep and sort of go ‘I don’t have any clothes on!’ And maybe it would maybe give me five seconds to hide the phone," she once told NPR’s Susan Stamberg.

Ms Garrel was married to J Vinton Lawrence, a former CIA officer and artist. He died of leukemia in 2016 at the aged of 76.