Benjamin Hall recalls the moment deadly Russian shells struck his car in Ukraine
Fox News foreign correspondent Benjamin Hall describes the moment Russian shells hit the car he, Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and consultant Oleksandra 'Sasha' Kuvshynova were in while covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine one year ago.
Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall's new book "Saved: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home" (Harper, March 14, 2023).
The Pentagon
Arlington, Virginia March 14, 2022
Fox News' Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin looked down Corridor 9 on the second floor of the Pentagon’s D ring and saw a woman running straight at her. Jen knew the woman—Sylvie Lanteaume, longtime national correspondent for the global news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP)—but didn’t know why she seemed in such a rush. Not that it was all that unusual; Jen had hurried down more than her share of Pentagon corridors, driven by tight deadlines and breaking news.
"Is your team OK?" Lanteaume asked when she finally reached her.
Jen Griffin was in the middle of preparing a report about the war in Ukraine, based on pointed questions she had just finished putting to John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesperson.
It had been a stressful morning, as all the mornings and afternoons and nights had been since Russia invaded Ukraine 18 days earlier. Fox News had several employees on the ground in Ukraine, and there was a constant swirl of concern and activity around them, but Jen had heard nothing about anything happening to anyone. The look on Lanteaume’s face, however, told her that something was wrong.
"Ben and Pierre may have been hit," Lanteaume said.
Pierre Zakrzewski was one of the cameramen working for Fox News in Ukraine. Ben, of course, was me.
Immediately, Jen slipped into an operational mindset. "My brain goes a mile a minute and I’m spinning up all these moves, who do I know, who do I call, what can I do," she explains. "I’d handled traumatic situations before."
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Since joining Fox News in 1999, Jen had been fired on in Gaza while covering the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, reported on the killing of Usama bin Laden and the attack on the Benghazi consulate in Libya, and questioned senior military leaders in hazardous war zones around the world.
She was known to be as effective a leader and crisis manager as there is in journalism. "Jennifer is the kind of person who walks into a room," says someone who has worked with her, "and within five minutes everyone is asking her, ‘What should we do?’"
Outside the Fox News media booth at the Pentagon, Jen was on her cell phone within two or three seconds of Lanteaume’s question about her team. She had to find out what had happened, how bad it was, and what she could do to fix it.
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The first person she called was Jay Wallace. Shortly before noon that day, Nicole Knee, executive assistant to Fox News Media’s President Jay Wallace, picked up the phone in her office in the News Corp Building, Fox News’ skyscraper headquarters in midtown Manhattan. It was Greg Headen calling. Greg, head of the Fox News International desk and vice president of News Coverage, asked to speak to Jay.
Nicole told him Jay was in a meeting and would be out in about ten minutes.
Two minutes later, Greg called again.
"I need you to get Jay, it’s urgent," he said. "I believe our team has been hit in Ukraine."
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Nicole wrote a message on a Post-it and hustled to the second floor conference room, where Jay and Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, were in a talent meeting. In the conference room she handed Jay the note.
Headen called—it’s urgent, it read.
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