When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  The production team wondered what to do about the film they had shot, which in many ways was now out of date, because the Russians had taken over. But they soon realised that showing those few days of ‘freedom’ would be an even more powerful record of what it had been like when Hungarians appeared to be in charge of their own destiny again.

  Washington

  If Germany and central Europe was Wheeler’s first great love and his first big career break, the United States was to be his second. His profile was raised when he started to appear regularly on British television screens as one of the BBC’s two Washington correspondents. He and fellow reporter Gerald Priestland covered all the big stories of the ’60s from the Vietnam War to the civil rights movement. It was, in the words of a later BBC Washington correspondent, Martin Bell, ‘always an uneasy partnership’ because the two men saw America through very different eyes.488

  As an example, Bell highlighted Wheeler’s reporting of the civil rights movement:

  He broke away from the ‘on the one hand this and on the other hand that’ tradition of BBC reporting. If he felt that something was wrong, he found a way of saying so. I was told that some of his work drew sharp intakes of breath from the senior managers of the time, for they had no taste for controversial journalism, but to their credit they let him get on with it.

  The most striking example of this was Wheeler’s reporting for BBC radio and television of the riots in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1965. In one BBC TV news report he spoke directly to camera about what the black rioters had told him.

  They talk about police brutality in these terms – they push us around, they arrest us for nothing, they call us niggers, they say we stink, they insult our women, we’ve had this for years, as long as we can remember and the point finally came when somebody decided he wouldn’t take it any more … It boils down to this, they say, we are treated as second-class citizens, we’re even treated as animals, we have been behaving like second-class citizens, we have been behaving like animals, we know it, we can’t help it, it is going to go on until something is done.489

  Wheeler never actually said then that he thought the violence was justified, but he did confirm years later, in a BBC interview, that this was indeed what he thought at the time: ‘I came to believe in those two years when these riots were going on … that violence was justified in a riot because it made white America listen.’ He said of the rioters:

  They were really the victims because they were burning down their own ghetto and I used to go around saying this at Washington dinner parties and people would be absolutely horrified at the idea that a journalist would think that burning down buildings was a justified form of protest. I believe it was.490

  As a predominantly foreign correspondent, Charles Wheeler rarely covered the disturbances on the UK’s streets from Londonderry to Toxteth and Brixton and so we will never know what would have happened if he had used the same reporting techniques and displayed the same sympathies with rioters. I suspect the response from his editors and from politicians would have been very different.

  Newsnight

  In 1980 Wheeler joined BBC Newsnight as a presenter then a reporter. And so began the third great career episode as he enjoyed the freedom to travel around the world. In the Middle East after the first Gulf War in 1991 he stood on a storm-swept hillside in the Kurdish area of Iraq and reported on the desperate state of the Kurdish refugees trying to escape from Saddam Hussein’s retribution. Mostly he let the pictures speak for themselves and one English-speaking refugee speak for herself. Then, standing cold and slightly dishevelled amidst a line of vehicles, he offered a calm and considered view on what he was witnessing:

  You spend five or ten minutes in this area and no matter what clothes you are wearing you are soaked and you are wet and you are miserable. These people have been here two weeks, two weeks since they left these Kurdish towns. The road is closed and what these people cannot understand is why they are still sitting here and why so little aid is coming from outside.491

  The British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, was later to talk of ‘something must be done’ journalism (see Chapter 9). Wheeler was too elegant a writer to reach for such clichés as ‘something must be done’; he got his message across in more subtle ways.

  Despite the power of Wheeler’s reporting from Kurdish Iraq and similar images in the rival ITN bulletins, the then Prime Minister, John Major, effectively responded that nothing could be done: ‘What is happening in Iraq at the present time is very distressing, and it is malignant, I agree entirely with that thought. But it is also wholly within the borders of Iraq, and we have no international authority to interfere with that.’492

  Within a week the impact of the coverage by Wheeler and others was such that this policy was reversed and something was done. Major and Hurd announced their proposal to create ‘safe havens’ inside Iraq to protect the Kurds from Saddam.

  Wheeler later said of his reporting of the plight of the Kurdish refugees in Iraq: ‘All right, I wasn’t dispassionate … but I was terribly angry and objectivity flies out of the window on these occasions. What do you want me to do, do an interview with somebody who thinks this [situation] is good to balance the story?’493

  Wheeler believed that as a foreign correspondent, ‘you’ve got to remember that you have access to more than just the bare facts. You’ve got access to people, you’ve seen things that the viewer and listener don’t have so you have to do more interpretation.’ He also wondered, perhaps remembering that the first BBC impartiality rules were limited to trying to get a balance in the reporting of Westminster politics, that a BBC foreign correspondent may have ‘more licence than you get as a domestic political reporter for example where you have lots and lots of people sensitive to what you are saying and watching your back’.

  Another example of classic Wheeler reporting from this period showed his focus on the underdog, in this case an underdog that most viewers would probably never have known existed. After American, British and Saudi troops had driven Iraqi troops from Kuwait most correspondents were occupied with covering joyful liberated Kuwaitis and the oilfields set on fire by Saddam’s departing, defeated troops. But ‘dogged, determined and bloody minded’ as Jeremy Paxman called him, Wheeler sought out a different angle and investigated claims that Palestinians, who the Kuwaitis regarded as collaborators with Saddam, were being tortured in a Kuwaiti hospital.494 In a head-to-head confrontation with a Kuwaiti doctor who denied the allegations, Wheeler stood his ground until the doctor finally and unwisely said of the Palestinians, ‘If they were treated badly, they deserve it.’ Wheeler responded with icy calm, ‘Are you speaking as a doctor?’ ‘As a Kuwaiti citizen, not a doctor,’ came the reply. Wheeler knew he had won the argument. He politely thanked the doctor and ended the interview.495

  Wheeler spent his sixty-eighth birthday in a war-damaged hotel in Kuwait City and apparently said, ‘I can’t believe how lucky I am to be here. Something awful might have happened to me – like retirement.’ In 2001, unusually for a journalist, the government appointed him a CMG – Compantion of the Order of St Michael and St George – which, according to the official website of the British monarchy, is awarded to those ‘who render extraordinary or important non-military service in a foreign country’. In 2006 he was knighted.

  Charles Wheeler never really stopped reporting and because he left the BBC staff in 1976 to work freelance, no one could retire him against his will. He was making television programmes well into his eighties on subjects as varied as the British soldiers shot for desertion in the First World War and the forcible migration of thousands of children from Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. In 2008 he was working on a radio programme about the Dalai Lama, whose flight from Tibet in 1959 he had covered as the BBC’s Delhi correspondent, when he died aged eighty-five. The cause of death was lung cancer. He had been a lifelong smoker.

  Two years before he died I had the chance to talk to him about his career. I
interviewed him for the Royal Television Society (RTS) to mark his knighthood and the next morning we were interviewed together on Radio 4’s Today programme. Before the RTS event he was very touchy about the fact that I had mentioned his knighthood in a preview article in The Guardian. I put that down to humility but I also wondered if he regretted accepting the honour.

  In The Guardian I had said that ‘the journalism of one man poses intriguing and sometimes awkward questions’ about the rules on impartiality. I asked when ‘engagement’ (then a BBC buzzword) with people caught up in news events became commitment to their cause. On Today I wondered when a ‘professional judgement’ (allowed by BBC guidelines) became a ‘personal view’ (not allowed).

  As befitted a knight of the realm looking back on half a century of journalism, Sir Charles Wheeler was wonderfully relaxed about debating these issues. He had once said that ‘the trouble with the quest for a statutory definition of impartiality is that it will create incoherent journalism, a Tower of Babel, truth smothered by sheer words’.496 Now he declared with pride rather than any embarrassment, ‘You mention something called the BBC guidelines. I have been working for the BBC for more than fifty years and I’ve never seen them in my life.’

  Instead he offered an alternative to official BBC rules:

  One guideline that has always stuck in my mind – this came up after I said something rather unusual about the then Prime Minister of Ceylon – I’d called him an inexperienced eccentric running a cabinet of mediocrities – there was a big row about that and about three months later Hugh Carleton Greene, BBC’s then Director-General who was himself a journalist, raised this with me … and he said, look, as a foreign correspondent this is what you should do – sail as close to the wind as you can, but get it right. And that’s been my guideline. And if you get it right there is no problem.

  8

  FREDERICK FORSYTH

  THE FORSYTH SAGA – AN AFRICAN TRILOGY

  Prologue

  It is such an intriguing story that it could come from the pages of a thriller.

  A young foreign correspondent is sent to an African civil war but gets into a row with his employers in a battle between truth and censorship. Called home and banned from the front line he decides to return to the war at his own cost. Telling the story the way he wants involves risking his life. He is ready to shoot himself rather than be captured and tortured by enemy troops. He also makes enemies among the troops he is with. Our hero emerges unscathed but ghosts from his past reoccur with strange regularity for the rest of his life.

  In fact this is the real life story of the bestselling novelist Frederick Forsyth. As with many of his thrillers there are unpredictable twists in this tale.

  Forsyth was sent to Nigeria by the BBC in 1967 to cover the conflict caused by the eastern region, Biafra, breaking away from the federal state. At the time it seemed a relatively normal assignment for a reporter with the job title ‘Foreign Correspondent, London-based’. Forsyth’s desk was at the BBC but he regularly was sent on foreign trips.

  Why was it that this visit, and his subsequent ones to Nigeria, ended with his journalistic contemporaries so divided on whether or not Freddie (as they knew him) had taken the Biafran side?

  Why do so many of them think that when the BBC pulled him out he went back to work for the Biafrans as a propagandist?

  And how did he later get caught up not just in one attempted coup in west Africa but two?

  No BBC correspondent, not even Charles Wheeler, has ever been involved in such controversy about alleged partisanship. And no correspondent accused of breaking the impartiality rules that Forsyth and Wheeler and all other BBC journalists worked under has ever turned the tables so publicly, declaring that it was not them that were taking sides but the BBC.

  When I joined the BBC as a news trainee in 1969 it was after Forsyth had left in controversial circumstances, but the story of what he had done in Nigeria as a foreign correspondent, and what he’d been doing since, was a regular talking point in the BBC Club bar across the road from Broadcasting House.

  The conventional in-house view was best summarised by John Simpson, now the BBC’s world affairs editor but then a junior journalist, who wrote, ‘As an extremely lowly sub-editor in the BBC radio newsroom I had to put Mr Forsyth’s Biafran dispatches on the air. Even at the age of twenty-three I could see that he had accepted the Biafran line entirely. He was reporting propaganda as fact.’

  Former ITN correspondent Michael Nicholson, who also covered the Biafran war, recalled seeing Forsyth in what he said was the uniform of the rebel army and armed with a revolver. From these and other sources, including the BBC, the National Archives and interview comments from Forsyth himself, Jeff Hulbert and I have put together a record of those events. A popular TV series of the time was called The Forsyte Saga, based on three novels of the Edwardian writer John Galsworthy, and a diplomat caught up in the Biafran controversy was to label it ‘The Forsyth Saga’. As with Galsworthy’s work, ours is a trilogy. Volume One: Nigeria divides and Frederick is sent to the front Even after Nigeria became independent from Britain in 1960 the influence of the former colonial power was still strong on its politics (British experts had helped write its federal constitution) and its trade (British Petroleum was the dominant oil-producer). Harold Wilson’s government was very much on the side of the federal forces trying to crush the Biafran secession. Undoubtedly, as in so many wars, concern about control of oil supplies was never far away.497

  Martin Bell, whose reporting from Nigeria for the BBC helped make his reputation as a leading foreign correspondent, remembers:

  My recollection of that war was that it was hugely controversial at home – actually more so even than the Vietnam War, with which it was of course concurrent – because the British were actively involved. We weren’t in Vietnam, but my goodness, we were funding, we were arming the federal Nigerians and the people were suffering on the ground.

  The BBC agreed with the British government that the first mention of the conflict in any news story would never refer to ‘Biafra’, which might imply some recognition of it as a sovereign state, but a form of words such as ‘the breakaway south-eastern region which calls itself Biafra’. This didn’t exactly trip off the tongue.

  All the BBC’s written archives are kept in a small building on the outskirts of Reading. In the files on Nigeria there are many examples of the tension between broadcaster and government throughout the Biafran conflict from 1967 to 1970. The most regular complainant was the British High Commissioner in Nigeria, Sir David Hunt, better known a few years later as a winner of the BBC’s Mastermind competition. But at this point his preoccupation with the BBC was the output of its overseas radio services. He concluded one complaint letter to the BBC with this comment on those services: ‘They announced last week that the Duke of Edinburgh was going to visit West Africa. The news roused great excitement here as you can well imagine. When people discover that it is quite false it will be another nail in the coffin of the BBC’s credibility.’498

  Into this kind of stressful atmosphere in July 1967 stepped 29-year-old Frederick Forsyth. He had joined the BBC in 1965 after four years as a Reuters foreign correspondent, including a period as the Reuters man in France and East Germany. The BBC files report his promotion in January 1967 to ‘Foreign Correspondent, London-based’.499 In the summer of that year the BBC decided that in addition to having its correspondent in the federal capital, Lagos, it needed to send a reporter to cover the area controlled by the Biafrans. Forsyth was chosen and before he was sent it was decided that he needed a proper briefing about Biafra, its people (who were mostly from the Ibo tribe) and its controversial leader, Colonel, later General, Ojukwu.

  Forsyth later recalled, ‘The briefing basically was that the secession of Biafra – the eastern region – from Nigeria was being forced upon the people by the ruthlessly ambitious Ojukwu.’ He says he was told ‘that they were perfectly happy under the Nigerian dictatorship and the predict
ion was that the magnificent and British-trained, largely Hausa, Nigerian army would invade and sweep through’.

  Forsyth’s initial experiences in Biafra were rather different:

  What I got there to find was that the people were massively in favour of secession, that the restraining influence had been Ojukwu and far from sweeping through, there was absolutely no military movement whatever.

  I discovered absolutely everything I had been told was rubbish. Being naive (not about reporting, I had been four years with a far better outfit called Reuters, but about the BBC mindset) I reported this. Outrage, horror, he must be biased. Asked to recant, I repeated what I was seeing – no federal victories.500

  Starting with our High Commissioner in Lagos and moving up through the Commonwealth Office, the Wilson government adopted a passionately pro-Lagos view and imparted this to the BBC. The High Commissioner and the senior BBC West Africa man were 400 miles away in Lagos but they knew far better than the man in the thick of it.

  The BBC’s man in Lagos was veteran foreign correspondent Angus McDermid, who became a legendary figure when he sidestepped Nigerian censors, sending back an exclusive story on the assassination of an army general by dictating it in Welsh.

  But soon Forsyth was offering a rather different perspective on the Biafran conflict from the BBC’s man in the federal capital:

  He [McDermid] began filing these reports from the Nigerian propaganda ministry, putting the attribution perhaps at paragraph three or four, so it sounded as if the BBC was making flat statements. Then Broadcasting House began bombarding me – it wasn’t the other way round – will you please tell us about all these things seen from the Biafran side – the rebel side as they called it. And I had no choice but to file back and say, they’re not happening.

  But Forsyth didn’t just report what he saw with his own eyes, he also reported the claims which the Biafrans made. In his mind this was no different from McDermid reporting the claims which the federal side made from Lagos. But Lagos didn’t see it that way and trouble began brewing.