The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  An Arab speaker, Beeston was more than equal to the challenge. The son of one of the Daily Telegraph’s most highly regarded foreign correspondents, he had avoided university, preferring to go straight into journalism. At the tender age of twenty-one he answering an advertisement to become a reporter in Beirut. There could have been few better training grounds. In this context, his dispatch to Baghdad did not seem to him to involve unnecessary risks. ‘It wasn’t frightening at all,’ he recalled, ‘it was exhilarating.’53 Two days before Operation Desert Storm commenced, Washington had contacted all the media networks and told them to get their journalists out of Baghdad immediately – US forces would be using bunker-busting bombs and their safety could not be guaranteed. Suddenly, Beeston found himself deserted by so many of the reporters who had congregated with him, holed up in Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel. Among the British broadsheets, only the representatives of the Independent and the Sunday Times opted, like Beeston, to stick it out.

  Excessive censorship from the Iraqi regime would have devalued the worth of Beeston’s commitment to The Times. However, Baghdad’s officials were in a state of confusion and disorder and proved incompetent censors. He found himself with considerable freedom of movement and the official minder appointed to shadow him and censor his reports let through references to how quickly the Iraqi defence effort appeared to be disintegrating. Only when he attempted to state that there was no water and the hotel was beginning to get a bit smelly did the minder cut in with the gentle admonishment, ‘Mr Richard, please take out the “smelly”. It is insulting to us.’54 Beeston felt in surprisingly little danger from the vengeance of the brutal Iraqi state although when he filed more detailed reports about the breaking morale and troop desertions, officialdom finally intervened. He was deported and banned from Iraq for three years. The only way a new Times reporter was going to get into the country was with the assistance of the British Army.

  The problem was that, aside from a repulsed Iraqi incursion around the Saudi border town of Khafji, there was still no sign of the promised ground war after almost a month of the conflict’s commencement and the ordinance dispatched from 67,000 sorties. Until the frontal assault began, analysts could not prove whether this war of missiles was working or was merely an expensive way to avoid confronting the ultimate necessity of a head-on ground invasion. Neil Kinnock sacked Clare Short, a Labour front-bench spokewomen, for suggested the bombing was about smashing Iraq rather than liberating Kuwait, but the specific event that had provoked her claim also strengthened the sceptics in their belief that all was not going well. On 13 February, two US missiles landed in Baghdad, penetrating ten feet of reinforced concrete and steel bars and exploding inside what had been identified as a military command and control centre directing Iraqi forces but was also a civilian shelter that included a school, a mosque and a supermarket. Graphic scenes were soon broadcast around the world of the charred remains of hundreds of women and children being brought out from the bunker. With Beeston deported, the Sunday Times’s Marie Colvin immediately filed her eyewitness report for The Times, painting the despair of the relatives as they visited the scene of carnage and discovered the rest of their families had been obliterated.55

  The opinions of Clare Short and those looking for reasons to condemn the war were one matter. Yet, to the alarm of a number of Times journalists cooped up in the rum warehouse, the editor’s resolve appeared to be severely shaken during the afternoon conference in which the attack on the shelter was discussed. Jenkins gave the impression he wanted a quick exit strategy to a war that was having calamitous consequences. His change of heart unnerved his colleagues. Martin Ivens and Rosemary Righter were especially determined to prevent The Times performing a U-turn halfway through a war it had endorsed. The leading article that emerged from the showdown gave little hint of the private confrontation. It expressed the hope that future targeting would better balance political with military imperatives and that the war had reached a stage when the bombing should concentrate on Iraq’s forward positions in the war zone of Kuwait itself.56 Nonetheless, for many of the senior editorial staff, it was Jenkins’s judgment that was seriously questioned. It was, to paraphrase what Margaret Thatcher had previously told George Bush, no time to go wobbly.

  With Jenkins’s doubts overcome, or at least, outgunned by Ivens and Righter, The Times stiffened its resolve for the battle ahead, unmoved by last-minute attempts by Gorbachev to mediate peace before the land war commenced in earnest.57 The Iraqis began setting the Kuwaiti oil wells alight on 22 February and the sky was soon black with the fumes of five hundred blazing oil installations. Two days later the ground assault into the emirate began. By 27 February, the Iraqis had fled from Kuwait City, a freelance correspondent with the US television network CBS being the first to broadcast the news from the capital that it was back in Kuwaiti hands even before the allied troops had arrived to liberate it officially. The Times’s Christopher Walker was not far behind. He discovered a city convulsed by devastation and jubilation. Hotels, public buildings, even the Emir’s palace, had been gutted. The cheering crowds were reminiscent of Paris’s liberation in 1944 and there was no shortage of Kuwaitis coming forward with their own tales of Iraqi barbarism. Tanks were continuing to sweep into the city ‘like a carnival parade’, Walker spotting one forgotten Iraqi running alongside the convey, ‘frantically signalling that he too wanted to be taken prisoner’. Beyond, ‘the roads were littered with Iraqi soldiers’ boots and helmets, discarded during their desperate flight north. Iraqi bodies lay scattered under blankets. One soldier lay sprawled face up on the road, legs buckled, anguish still written across his face.’58

  Much of the allied advance struck not through the emirate at all but up into southern Iraq to secure the western flank. The British 1st Armoured Division was among the mechanized forces hurtling at speed across the desert to reach the Euphrates and trap the half million Iraqi troops falling back in disorder. In particular, the allies wanted to prevent the elite Republican Guard from making it back to Baghdad. The military briefings in Riyadh were suggesting the extent to which it was a rout: there had been 79 American deaths in exchange for smashing 29 Iraqi divisions, 30,000 prisoners had been taken and more than 3000 tanks captured or destroyed. With the bridges blown and allied mastery of the skies secured, there seemed every possibility of not just liberating Kuwait but also of destroying Iraq’s ability to be a regional menace altogether. With the allied leader, General Norman Schwarzkopf, warning the Iraqis, ‘the gates are closed: there are no ways out’, a bitter tank battle ensued west of Basra between almost 500 US tanks and the 300 tanks of the Republican Guard. Again the Iraqis were pulverized. The biggest British armoured assault since El Alamein was also underway. Observing the advance of the 32nd Field Regiment for The Times, Philip Jacobson did his best to convey the terrifying nature of the barrage falling upon the Iraqis:

  From where I was watching just over a mile away, the flashes were blinding and the earth literally heaved beneath me. As shells passed overhead with a noise like someone tearing heavy canvas, the air pressure changed perceptibly. Then came the double boom of impact and percussion wave, like the slamming of a heavy door.… We could follow the course of the battle on radio links in our signals vehicle: the voice of Brigadier Patrick Cordingley, commander of the Desert Rats, was on the air continuously, pressing this unit to get a move on towards a new objective, cautioning another not to get carried away before securing an enemy gunpit. A flurry of traffic would indicate that a new attack was under way, yet virtually every voice was calm and composed, even when the first of the British casualties was brought in.59

  President Bush announced the ceasefire on 28 February, six weeks to the minute since the campaign began and a hundred hours after the ground war’s launch. The twin objectives of liberating Kuwait and defeating the Iraqi army had, he said, been met. US airborne troops had come within 150 miles of Baghdad. ‘There was no one between us and Baghdad,’ Schwarzkopf told reporters. ‘If it ha
d been our intention to take Iraq, if it had been our intention to destroy the country, if it had been our intention to overrun the country, we could have done it unopposed.’60

  The UN resolutions sanctioning Kuwait’s liberation did not provide for occupying Iraq. The war had been a remarkable achievement. Britain had suffered twenty-four casualties in action (nine of them from ‘friendly fire’) while the Iraqi dead and wounded was assumed to exceed 100,000. Before the war began, the Pentagon had warned Bush that there could be ten thousand American casualties. In the event, there was about one coalition soldier death for every one thousand Iraqis killed. The sheer one-sidedness of the ‘turkey shoot’ on the trapped Iraqi forces militated against prolonging the slaughter. The Times supported Bush’s ‘statesmanlike’ decision to call a ceasefire rather than to press on to Baghdad. Writing for Op-Ed, David Owen, the former Foreign Secretary and late leader of the SDP, maintained that if this was not to prove ‘to be the single largest mistake of what has otherwise been a brilliantly conducted operation’ it was ‘our duty to make it impossible for Saddam to continue in power’. Rather than treating with his emissaries for peace terms, his removal and charge with war crimes should be the precondition and sanctions should remain in force.61

  Instead, it looked, briefly, as if the Iraqis might answer Bush’s plea and overthrow Saddam without the need for further intervention. In defeat, Iraq’s regional and religious divisions opened up. The Kurds in the north and the Shia Muslims in the south rose against Saddam’s Sunni dominated regime, pinning it back to its heartland around Baghdad. Iraqi order appeared to be imploding. Indeed, given the separatist aims of the Kurds, the country risked splitting up altogether. The Shia revolt centred upon Basra but uprisings were being reported across the country. However, after five days of fighting, the Republican Guard gained the upper hand. Despite their presence in the south of the country, the coalition forces stood aside. Initially, The Times found it impossible to get any reporters close enough to witness the bloody suppression at first hand but when reports and television pictures of the Kurdish plight eventually did reach London, fears spread that a form of genocide was underway. In freezing conditions, Kurdish families were fleeing to the hills to escape the Iraqi reprisals. If Saddam did not finish them off, the weather might do so. Turkey and Iran sealed their borders.

  By the first days of April, reports were appearing that left Times readers in no doubt about the extent of the Kurdish plight. The demands for a humanitarian response crescendoed. Some asserted that having been called upon to rise up in the first place only to be denied any military support when they did so, the Kurds’ and Marsh Arabs’ suffering was largely Britain and America’s fault. In an article entitled ‘Blood on our hands’, Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote in this vein. He was especially incandescent at the UN’s refusal – having sanctioned the liberation of Kuwait and the removal of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction – to insist upon creating democracy in Iraq and safeguarding its victims. The coalition, it seemed to him, preferred to keep the despicable Saddam in power than remove him and risk a power vacuum that might result in a disintegrating Iraq. Yet, seeing the dangers of being drawn into a long term commitment to occupy Iraq, Bush was reluctant to protect the Kurds, confiding that he ‘did not want one single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war in Iraq that has been going on for ages’.62 Although The Times saw no option but to provide humanitarian assistance, its leading article saw clearly the dangers of interfering in matters of internal sovereignty. With remarkable prescience, it argued:

  The 1990s are certain to be the decade of ethnic distress. The unravelling of communism will lead to thousands of ‘economic’ refugees crossing frontiers, making calls on the charity and possibly the armies of the world. The liberal dream of global ethnic concord is no more. Nationalism, the ‘-ism’ that defies communism, liberalism and capitalism alike, remains rampant … The nations of the West will be inclined to use their strength, like medieval crusaders, to reorganize the world according to their own high principles, and sometimes their lower ones. The world must be sure it knows what it is about.63

  John Major, however, was not concerned with the theoretical arguments of the future but the need to address the humanitarian plight of the moment. He secured European support for a plan for creating Kurdish ‘safe havens’. This pressured – perhaps shamed – a reluctant Washington into joining in. The deployment in mid-April of 5000 American, 2000 British and 1000 French troops saved an unquantifiable number of lives. In Baghdad, however, Saddam remained. Containing, rather than removing, him became the policy through sanctions and no-fly zones. The UN resolved that his weapons of mass destruction should be destroyed and the process of overseeing the process began. It would not prove to be the end of the affair.

  While politicians and commentators talked of a ‘new world order’ of international cooperation of which the UN resolutions and the liberation of Kuwait were but the bright beginning, the Gulf War had also brought alive the notion of a ‘global village’ for the news media. From Baghdad’s Al Rashid Hotel, Beeston had filed his dispatches to Wapping from a telex machine. Transmitting to satellites from the hotel’s roof, CNN had beamed images and reports instantly into homes in ninety-three countries around the world. On 28 January, CNN’s Peter Arnett even managed to have a ninety-minute interview with Saddam in which the Iraqi president threatened to use nuclear, chemical and biological warheads against the allies. Satellite television – in which Murdoch was now investing – and the twenty-four-hour rolling news coverage it facilitated had arrived. No other event did more to demonstrate the extent to which power had passed from print to broadcast media. Indeed, while coverage of the war attracted massive viewing figures in Britain, the daily sale of tabloid newspapers actually fell during the period. For its part, The Times had performed well. Its late editions were going to press at 3 and sometimes 4 a.m. in order to compete with the television coverage. But it was under no illusions that if it wanted to hold onto its market share in the future it would have to perform two conflicting functions: to be fast in reporting breaking news and to provide more detailed analysis than its broadcasting rivals could muster.

  V

  The evidence that the future lay with satellite television could not have come at a better time for Rupert Murdoch. While the Gulf War unfolded, his media empire imploded. The roots of News Corp.’s difficulties lay with his purchase in the United States of Metromedia and Fox. He could have funded the purchase by issuing new shares in News Corp., but that would have diluted his control of the company. Having seen the way his father had been treated, Murdoch never lost his belief that family control was the only guarantee of keeping direction of the company. An alternative was simply to borrow the money. In order not to exceed the gearing limit permitted of debt compared to shareholder equity, he had approached Michael Milken, the ‘junk bond king’, at the bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. Junk bonds offered a high yield because they involved high risk. In March 1986, Milken secured $1.15 billion in junk preferences. This was described as a preference stock – a form of virtual equity – in order not to breach the banks’ gearing limit. However, Milken inserted a clause stipulating that if the $1.15 billion could not be repaid within three years (i.e. by March 1989) remuneration for lenders would reflect News Corp.’s latest share price. Thus, as the News Corp. share price went up, so the debt repayment soared. For Murdoch, this proved disastrous. Thanks to the move to Wapping, News International’s operating income had gone from £38.4 million in 1985 to £150.2 million in 1987. This had sent News Corp.’s ordinary share price rocketing from around $8.50 in March 1986 to $35 a year later. Thus, the more profitable News Corp. became, the greater in debt it plunged. Unless he wanted to issue more shares and lose control of the company, Murdoch had no obvious way out of this vicious circle. What was more, the classification of the junk preferences as equity prevented him from borrowing from banks to pay them off since he had to stay within his banks’ gearing limits. As one comme
ntator put it, ‘Wapping had turned Milken’s conversion clause into a $3.6 billion nightmare’.64

  During 1990, the downturn in the Western economies intensified. Banks sought to call in their loans. For News Corp. this was an alarming prospect. The recession hit advertising, seriously depleting revenue. The company’s profits were falling, as was its share price. Sky, Murdoch’s satellite television venture, was losing in excess of £2 million a week. The situation was not even secure in the tabloid newspaper market. Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror had gained ground on the Sun, partly because Maxwell had invested in colour printing. This had forced a reluctant Murdoch to buy colour presses for Wapping as part of a re-equipping and extension to the plant that consumed £500 million. The Times was the beneficiary of this investment but in so far as it contributed towards destabilizing the company’s finances it was a risky venture. On top of all this, five years of making acquisitions around the world had brought with them debts whose scheduled repayment dates had arrived. The company had in excess of $7 billion in unsecured bank debt and owed $3 billion to its trade creditors. It had to repay $2.6 billion by October 1990. Not only was it in no position to pay this sum back, it needed an extra injection of $600 million merely to keep trading.