by Simon Reeve
The kind of investigations I had previously been involved with were expensive and time-consuming. I was told pockets were no longer as deep as they had been. Gradually there wasn’t enough money to fund investigations properly, and I was being moved from deep research on to stories that were more regular news. I found it hard to summon the same levels of enthusiasm.
A prime example was one of my last jobs. I was supposed to drive to a house in Northolt, I think, where a third-rate politician involved in yet another scandal was going to hold a press conference and confess his sins. It was all very last minute. I was late and I wasn’t especially bothered about the story. I was sitting patiently in a traffic jam idly wondering whether I would get there on time, when a souped-up BMW came streaking along next to me, driving on the wrong side of the road at high speed. At first I thought it was the police. Then as it whizzed past my line of traffic I caught a glimpse of the driver, who had his window open and was barking into a mobile phone the size of a brick while steering with one hand. I recognised him immediately as a reporter from a rival paper. I knew him vaguely from Friday-night drinks in the pubs around Wapping. And I knew instantly that not only was he going to the same dead-end scandal press conference, but he was infinitely keener to get there, and in that second I realised I never wanted to care so much about filing copy on a grubby politician that I’d weave through traffic risking my neck and the lives of any schoolkids who might step out into the road.
By the time I got to Northolt the press conference was already over. The BMW driver was there, still on his mobile phone talking loudly to the office. I remember smiling to myself. I knew the job was no longer for me. I didn’t have the drive or desire. I wasn’t actually very good at the job of reporting and finding completely different stories every week. It was research and investigations that I loved, and the writing. I was a fan of what the veteran managing editor at the Sunday Times called ‘a scoop of analysis’.
I was a staff writer by then, apparently the youngest in the venerable history of Times Newspapers, and I was working on the news desk most weeks writing and rewriting copy and as the deputy night news editor on a Saturday. It was an enormous responsibility for someone as young as me, but I revelled in it. The newspaper was my life, not only professionally, but personally as well. I had grown up there. I socialised with colleagues, moved in with friends I met at work and had a couple of relationships at the paper. I wanted to spend more time investigating subjects I was passionate about, but I hadn’t seriously planned to leave. Until, that was, the wrong rugby score was printed on the front page of the paper while I was on the news desk. It was a huge mistake, only spotted in the final edition, which meant hundreds of thousands of copies were printed and scattered around the country. I have a horrible feeling the mistake reversed the result, but I have largely blocked out the memory due to the trauma of the aftermath. It was like the Spanish Inquisition the following week. Several people were culpable, but I was one of those supposed to be in charge, so part of the blame stuck to me. The whole atmosphere there had soured.
I felt it was time to leave, and I came up with a crazy plan to write a book about the World Trade Center bombing and the aftermath. I wrote more than a dozen letters to London literary agents in the hope someone would represent me, then went to see a couple before settling on a lovely chap called Robert Kirby, who I am still with to this day. He had the warm and friendly air of a social worker, and a relaxed confidence that put me at ease. Crucially he was also intrigued by my proposal and by my claim the WTC attack represented a new type of terrorist strike, by a new type of terrorist. I wanted to write a book that would tell the story of the attack and follow the huge investigation and aftermath. Robert thought we had a decent chance of getting it published. That was good enough for me. I negotiated a small redundancy payoff, and I left the Sunday Times.
It was 1994/5 and I was barely into my twenties. In a few short years I had gone from being the boy on the bridge to somebody who had the confidence to quit my job with a plan to write a book. I ploughed on with the research and Robert started to look for a publisher prepared to back the project.
At the same time life outside work was taking off as well. I had studied for an A-level at night school, so at least I have one to my name, and with my book still in research mode, I started to wonder about further education. Despite all my chippy comments and views about elite universities I went for an interview at an Oxford college, arranged on the basis that as the youngest staff writer on a newspaper I might qualify as an exceptional candidate. I thought not going to university might be something I always regretted. Sitting in the waiting room with twenty boys, all of them dressed in public-school ties and tweed jackets, and at most two girls, I knew immediately it was too late. I had made a mistake. Arrogantly perhaps, I felt that after all I’d seen and done there was no way I could go back to full-time study. These kids still had spots, for goodness’ sake. I was so certain that I stood up, apologised to the gracious staff and left. I was becoming an expert at walking out. They had given me the powerful gift of a second chance, but at least I had confirmed it wasn’t for me. I never had another serious regret about my lack of education.
My girlfriend Anna was waiting outside the college. She had been hugely supportive of my idea of going to university, and she was a pillar when I changed my mind. Anna was my first serious girlfriend. Certainly the first woman I tried to move in with. Glamorous, charismatic and fascinating, Anna had fallen in love with Russia and Russian literature, and so of course she went to live in Moscow, sang in jazz clubs and learned to speak the language fluently, with a heavy Georgian accent that to other Russian speakers marked her out as a gangster. She lived in a sunny flat in Hampstead and drove a convertible. We met at work and she started writing a column for The Times, partly about my attempts to inveigle myself into her life.
Anna’s father was a well-known British journalist and war correspondent. He died, tragically young, after being shot by a sniper while he was covering a civil war in Central America, and she was at university. She had suffered a huge trauma, and she taught me much about grief and life. I’m not sure what I gave back. I think I was a charity case. I remember I kept flooding her bathroom. Then I blew it all by being too jealous and she dumped me.
After her my love life was a series of short and often disastrous relationships. There was one girl from Sicily, gorgeous, vivacious; although a bit vague as to why she was in London. It took a while to get at the truth.
‘O-K,’ she finally said in her thick Sicilian accent. ‘I know you want to know so I’ll tell you. My family had a leetle bit of a problem and they decided London was safer for me. The truth is, three of my uncles, they are in prison for twenty-five years for being Mafiosi.’
Twenty-five years apiece wasn’t minor theft. When I tried to end our relationship – fairly soon after she revealed who my in-laws would be, actually – I’d come home and find messages on my machine left in her distinctive accent.
‘Si-mon, Si-mon, where are you?’ she’d sing-song. ‘Why don’t you answer my calls? Dar-ling, we have to go on holiday to Sicily. My family really wants to meet you.’
I went on a series of holidays, but with my friends, travelling and training across Europe. In a rammed hostel in Paris a mate of mine fell off his bed, landed on top of me and cracked my rib, but I laughed hysterically through the pain. In another hostel dorm we stayed with a Dutch netball team. They made a big impression. Then a group of us were due to go on a lads’ weekend to Barcelona. We were all looking forward to some sunshine after dreary weather in London, but at the last moment the tickets were changed to Copenhagen. Still thinking we were going to a beach, half of us showed up at the airport without coats, and three were in shorts and flip-flops.
Copenhagen was freezing. We had no guide book, no idea where we were going and our first port of call became an army surplus store for winter coats. We were all pretty grumpy about the cold and the change of plan, but we dealt with it in
the only way possible, by getting hideously drunk. Then we went to Christiania, the self-proclaimed anarchist district of Copen-hagen, accidentally ate some spiked cakes, and everything went a little blurry. I vaguely remember walking into a pub in Christiania and feeling like I had walked into an off-world bar from Star Wars. I thought there was a polar bear in the corner. Everything was very trippy and psychedelic.
For some reason one of our group then called an ex-girlfriend who lived in the city. She was a construction engineer, and she took it upon herself to take us to the Oresund tunnel and bridge that was being built to link Denmark with Sweden. This was an extremely foolish decision. There were ten of us, and we were drunk and tripping. I can only assume it was her professional enthusiasm. She fitted us out with hard hats and took us down into the huge tunnel. We were stumbling and staggering around, and then several of us were completely spooked by space ships flying down the tunnel towards us, which I now suspect were dumper trucks. A few of us fled through a door in the tunnel wall in a panic and that led to one or two alarms going off, the entire site being put on lockdown and security being called to extract us. Apparently I was hiding under a tarpaulin with a friend and we were hugging each other and babbling when we were rescued.
Fortunately the Danes were very forgiving. Someone explained we were English, and the site manager decided not to press charges. We left and found refuge in yet another bar. We were too well-mannered to be obnoxious, but few countries like wandering drunks. Yet as we staggered around Copenhagen all we encountered was kindness, tolerance and mild amusement. People helped us, advised us, took us to bars, and bought us more drinks.
By the time we went home I couldn’t walk, and the others had to push me in a shopping trolley to the train that would take us to the airport. I was half-carried to the plane, and I’m frankly amazed the cabin crew let me on board. For a full week after, I had alcohol poisoning and my poor flatmates graciously cared for me.
At the time I was living with Julie and Elspeth, a couple of friends I knew from working at the Sunday Times. We had moved into a cheap flat, with an interior that resembled a shoddy alpine chalet, just around the corner from my ex Anna in Hampstead. Our flat was an awful 1970s block, but we looked out at some of the most beautiful and expensive properties in London. Poor Anna. I bumped into her on the High Street one day and the look on her face didn’t need translation – You’ve moved around the corner from me? Really?
Life with Elspeth and Julie was fun and social, like a series of Friends set in North London. We had wonderful parties where the flat was full of scores of burning candles and a total mix of characters and pungent smoke. Elspeth was a witty delight who had me in stitches with pithy one-liners and Julie was a bundle of energy and joy who spread love wherever she went. When we entertained, which was often, the floor in the living room would bow with the weight of people dancing. One night after a long party we decided to walk onto Hampstead Heath to watch the sun rise. Twenty of us set off and it was only when we were making our way up Parliament Hill that someone pointed out it was already completely light and people were out jogging and walking to work. We were so far gone none of us had noticed.
Morning recoveries were painful, but then I would start work researching and writing, wearing a dressing gown, of course, like any recently liberated writer. There I was, just into my twenties, trying to live like a Woodstock boho while at the same time researching a book about what was then one of the worst terrorist attacks in US history. I remember one afternoon sitting in my dressing gown on the phone to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, so hungover I was struggling to focus.
I would spend the afternoon researching, the night being social, and then the early hours trying to write to a soundtrack of Ibizan dance and urban jungle broadcast on pirate radio stations run from tower blocks by friends from school in Acton. None of this was a good idea. Inevitably after spending most of the morning sleeping I would have to unpick and rewrite the incoherent stream from the night before. This was not conducive to productivity.
I was following and researching the investigation into the World Trade Center bombing by phone from London. But then my agent Robert managed to secure a UK publishing deal for my book on the attack, followed by a small contract for the US, and I worked myself into a rhythm and a focus, and started to take the whole project much more seriously. The book I ultimately spent five years researching and writing became the single most involving and exhausting project of my life.
My research had two tracks. There was the ‘Tradebom’ investigation into the World Trade Center attack, which was being run by a Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF) out of New York, directly comprising perhaps seventy agents drawn from the FBI, NYPD, the US Secret Service, the US Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and others. There was also a more secret global intelligence operation studying the wider terror group and emerging connections behind the attack. By phone I was already working my way along a chain of contacts ever closer to the JTTF unit, and soon meetings in London with contacts in MI6 helped my entry into the intelligence world.
On the investigative side my initial approach was to call the media departments of both the NYPD and the FBI and ask to speak to their investigators. It took persuasion, discussion and time, but essentially it was as simple as that. They connected me to agents and detectives who were peripherally connected to the investigation, and I spent hours on the phone milking them for everything they would tell me, going through it all in minute detail. I had a book to fill, after all. Then, after winning their trust and exhausting their patience, I would simply ask if they could pass me on to colleagues working more closely on the investigation for another angle, saying I wanted to accurately capture their professionalism and skill. One phone call led to another and I was passed from person to person until I had a network of contacts.
With the help of the tiny funds from the US edition of my book, which almost covered my international phone bills, my sources ultimately expanded to include the FBI Supervisory Special Agent running the Joint Terrorism Task Force, who was exceptionally generous with his time, and officials from the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict at the Pentagon. In London I met contacts from MI6 individually in pubs in Vauxhall and Soho. They passed me on to more contacts in their own world, including in Pakistani intelligence and the CIA. Sometimes it was farcically informal. I still have a pub coaster somewhere with the scribbled telephone number for a former head of Pakistani intelligence.
Why were they meeting me, talking to me and sharing information? It’s something I’ve thought about since. I think there were many reasons. Trust was important. I did not pose a threat. I wasn’t going to burn their cover or reveal a source. I was also unassuming, perhaps a bit disarming, and – crucially – I was interested. Many of those involved in this world felt they were operating in something of a vacuum and that nobody was listening to their concerns and warnings. The prevailing feeling internationally in the 1990s was that the Cold War had been won, the West was unassailable and nothing really posed a threat. Many in the intelligence world disagreed with that idea. They felt the WTC attack was different from anything that had gone on before. So when I popped up on the phone asking questions, people were happy to help. They felt it was their duty. Plus I think everybody wants to feel appreciated. Everyone wants to feel that their work is important, it’s human nature. The main reason people answered questions from a wide-eyed, twenty-something Brit, was simply because I asked.
My sources made it clear the scope of the WTC investigation was unprecedented. Every one of the fifty-nine FBI field divisions in the US and every one of the sixty-three global FBI Legal Attachés, known as Legats, and each effectively an investigative field office, was involved. The volume of information generated about the attack and the group behind it was enormous. Even just the number of telephone numbers thrown up during the investigation was huge. Three or four agents worked full-time uploading numbers ont
o computers and identifying suspects. The FBI developed databases based on the names and numbers that were used by investigators for years.
The mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Ramzi Yousef, fled the US shortly after the explosion. He could have slipped quietly away and lived out the rest of his life in a friendly dictatorship. But he was determined to launch more attacks. Just months later the detonator of a bomb he was placing to target Benazir Bhutto, the secular candidate for Prime Minister in the October 1993 Pakistani elections, exploded in his face. His right eye was injured but after treatment in two Karachi hospitals, where he told staff a butane gas canister had exploded, his facial injuries healed and he disappeared.
Yousef next appeared on a Philippines Airlines flight bound for Tokyo from Manila in December 1994. He placed a bomb under his seat and left the flight at Cebu, 350 miles from Manila. Two hours later an explosion killed a Japanese man and injured a dozen people sitting nearby. The other passengers on the flight were lucky their plane was not blown out of the sky. The bombing, and an earlier explosion in a Manila cinema, were practice runs for a horrific scheme called the ‘Bojinka Plot’, a plan for simultaneous attacks on twelve airliners. Terrorists would have boarded American-bound flights in the Far East and slipped miniature bombs designed around Casio wristwatches under seats. Undetectable liquid nitroglycerine hidden in contact-lens solution bottles would have been connected to a Casio timer by detonator parts hidden in shoes. Yousef had assembled the parts for his own bomb in the toilet during the flight to Cebu. And then he vanished.
Less than a month later in Manila, police saw smoke rising from an apartment block, raided a flat, and arrested one of Yousef’s co-conspirators. It was a crucial breakthrough. A map was discovered tracing the route Pope John Paul II was to take during a visit the next week, as well as a priest’s robe, a fragmentation grenade and a timer constructed from the shell of a normal digital watch: all ready for a suicide attack on the Pontiff. Yousef’s Toshiba laptop computer was also discovered. But again Yousef himself evaded the authorities, escaped from the country and returned to Pakistan. He became the target of a huge global manhunt.
