Stupidly, just as I got off the tube at White City to meet him, I got soaked in a downpour, and now looked even worse. My suit was in ruins, looking as if it had been screwed up in a bag and then put on. What a dickhead I was – I was in such a hurry to get there, I had made a schoolboy error. Seconds later the skies cleared.
Chris reassured me, telling me not to worry about the suit. ‘Don’t worry, the job is yours,’ he told me. ‘They’ll ask you a couple of scenario questions – take your time and be confident.’ Then he left me in the foyer and I was on my own. In the toilets, I looked in the mirror, sorted my suit out and had a good word with myself. I knew I could I do this if my nerves didn’t muck it up.
Tony Loughran led me up to the board. He was giving me that ‘You’ll be fine. I want you on board’ look. I felt the valve on the pressure cooker being released ever so gently. Also present were Bob Forster – ex-RAF but now head of Safety. Tony was the senior security advisor and alongside him were Harry Muir, a health and safety advisor, and Jenny Baxter, the stand-in Foreign News editor.
Harry hit me with some questions about journalists carrying respirators and nuclear biological germ warfare. I could handle that no problem. Tony asked me about my medical training and how I would react in a war zone scenario if there was an accident. Again, that was right up my street. He quizzed me on my priorities – safety first or getting the pictures?
‘We’re in the business of getting pictures.’ I told them what they wanted to hear. It was also the way I had begun to think during my previous engagements on Panorama duty. That work had stood me in good stead, despite the irregularity of it. Crucially, too, I was showing them that the ex-soldier was learning to think like a programme maker.
It felt like I was in there no time at all. They grilled me for just under an hour. The fact that it flew by told me I had done well. I had put the suit behind me and my knowledge on the table and was mixing it with my own. In fact, I felt they had a bit of a simplistic attitude to security but being interviewed by ex-military definitely put me on a level footing. I left thinking one thought. I had got that job. (I found out afterwards that Jenny wanted a female to do the job. I don’t think she wanted an ex-squaddie coming in. The previous applicant had been a woman.) I rang Sue to say that it had gone well – the inside info from Chris had calmed me. Unless I had totally misread it, I knew the job was mine.
Two days later, they rang. I would start on 5 March 2001. All my frustrations and uncertainties were laid to rest; the four individual jobs I had been given since last May had shown me the way, and my badgering of Chris and Tom had finally paid off. Little did I know that the weekend that I was due to start, the IRA would decide to bomb Television Centre.
OFF WITH A BLAST
Seven people were injured when the Real IRA detonated in front of TC at half past midnight on the weekend of the 3 and 4 March. The building would have been less populated than at any other point in the week. They hadn’t wanted to kill anyone; it was simply a warning in response to a Panorama special naming certain individuals. What a welcome to the BBC.
I was up early on the Monday as a big adrenalin rush kicked in. I hadn’t been interested in working for any other networks – for me, it was all about the BBC. Not only did I have the job I chased for months but suddenly on day one, when I was meant to be sitting down to a Health and Safety induction, I had a chance to show my worth instantly. Yes, in the new era, courses and form-filling were rife, but I knew this was tasty. Ireland had been my patch four years previously, and now they were on our very own doorstep the day I started work. I was flashing back to Armagh. There had been no phone call to Panorama or the BBC, even though the IRA usually like to take credit, but we knew and I knew.
Tony and Chris met me at the door – except it wasn’t the one I had walked through for my interview. That had been blown off. I entered through the side and within an hour we were marching over to Panorama to brief and be debriefed. I was desperate to get started and to bump into Tom Giles again.
Straightaway, I was assigned to talk to the wife of reporter John Ware, teaching her about number recognition systems, and how to spot changes to her car – a mark here or there, and the boot might have been tampered with. Always check under the vehicle, too, without being obvious about it. I told her to look regularly and to go to the police with anything unusual. There was no point checking it only the next day. Ireland had taught me to look for something like a small Tupperware box with a tilt switch attached. When you drive off – well, you don’t. You get blown into the sky.
This wasn’t the first day that the department had had in mind for me but I loved it and stayed for twelve hours. They’d wanted someone slightly below my skill set who was more into Health and Safety, rather than an individual who could develop the security side, but on day one I saw opportunity and have never looked back. I began to carve out the job for myself. The IRA’s attempt to blow up the BBC actually triggered my most significant career move yet, saving me from a life of paperwork and thrusting me into the heart of the action.
When I finally got home, Sue could see I’d had the time of my life. I told her about everyone I’d met and everything I’d done and when I finished I was already watching my mobile, hoping for it to ring to call me back in. I was loving it. My journalistic taste buds had been tickled and I knew the BBC needed me in security. They had done an average job patching up the building after the bomb with some guard rails set up outside and some half decent measures to screen the thousands of people coming and going. They had just about got their shit together but it was clear that security at the BBC could never be the same again. I was already in pole position to help shape that.
I gave everyone I could my number to put myself about, and told them I was there 24/7. By Friday, the week had become a joyous blur – I felt like I had always been there and had a key role to play. By the time we treated ourselves to a takeaway and put our feet up for the weekend, Monday couldn’t come quick enough. Honestly, I have never been happier. I knew if I didn’t balls this up, KCM was history, but who cared? It was already dead and buried before it had got off the ground. I now worked for the BBC.
Then came the classic BBC nonsense. By Tuesday of the next week Bob Forster had me down for that Health and Safety course, which rendered me a zombie for two hours and left me cursing under my breath. I needed a NEBOSH qualification, whatever that was, to tick the boxes. That bit of paper would make me a Health and Safety god. Jesus.
Next followed the crushing blow – he dropped into the conversation that I was not to assist Current Affairs in any covert camera work. That was not in my job remit. He was trying to pigeonhole me after my flying start last week. I hadn’t been there a fortnight and was desperate not to lose the job, but I was not happy. I took it in silence, but the second thoughts I was having dominated my mind. I wanted to walk, but the experiences of the past year told me that was foolish. I had craved this so badly. I would sit it out and network, make friends with everyone in news, and annoy the shit out of Tom Giles. I needed to get back out in the field but for now politics had left me desk-bound The first two weeks couldn’t have been more contrasting. I was rock bottom.
FRIENDLY FIRE
Within a fortnight, all that turned out to be bullshit. I was a plane to Macedonia and then Israel.
First, Malcolm Downing, the senior desk editor, asked me to fly 50,000 Deutsche Marks to the producer in Skopje. I rang Sue immediately and left the same afternoon. Talk about a U-turn. Malcolm said he would talk to Bob, and Tony Loughran told me to leave as soon as possible. The left hand didn’t know what the right was doing but suddenly I was back in the game.
Sue asked me if it was safe and so begun what would become a familiar routine of me palming her off nonchalantly – over the years she would only ever watch the news if she knew I was heading there. This was the first time I had ever been a courier, and out here the BBC credit card would get you nowhere. If you needed fuel, hotels, fixers or bribes, cash was
the only currency that counted.
Crucially, I was trusted. One man standing in my way had been overridden by the immediacy of the demands of news, and that was just the beginning: over the years, I flew to Jenin in Israel, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, Kenya, Brussels, Borneo and even Peru to lay the groundwork for a series on planet Earth!
I was quickly learning who to hang out with to fulfil my dreams. But of course, the stakes were suddenly raised on 11 September 2001. Everything changed overnight. The world was at war with Osama bin Laden and I now had a front-row seat.
When the planes flew into the Twin Towers, I was in Paris being courted by a ballistics company. I had seen a French reporter in Israel wearing a special type of flak jacket that I knew we would need going forward. This was my new life, being wined and dined on the Champs-Élysées, living it up on the BBC, but ultimately 9/11 was the moment which would define the next decade of newsgathering for all journalists and also for myself. Just like the IRA bomb, for those in the field, bad news was good news.
As I raced to get home, my journalist colleagues were trying to get to the States, eventually hiring a 747 together with ITV and flying to Canada, before tearing down through North America in a hire car. Certain teams had already been deployed to Pakistan without my knowledge and I got straight on the phone to Tony to tell him I had to get there. I was told that a freelancer had to go – I was needed in London as the link between News and the teams on the ground – but that was bollocks. They were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I didn’t get further than delivering kit to Stansted.
In place of myself I had to send an old mate, Tony Rippon, but I made sure he only stayed a week and a half! Then I called him home, having blagged it to the news team that they needed more kit, more sleeping bags, and more meals. Sooner rather than later, I was on that plane to Islamabad.
This was to be the first time I met John Simpson. Over the next decade we would be close to inseparable on such trips. I then got summoned home – they didn’t want me out there more than two weeks. We were all simply waiting to get into Afghanistan. We had only just met, but as I flew back to do bloody paperwork, John told me it was ridiculous: someone with my experience, which he had not been used to having in tow previously, had to stay with him on the ground.
A decade of Health and Safety was getting underway at the same time that the world changed forever. Apparently, it was more important for me to complete the paperwork on sitting upright on a BBC chair than it was to penetrate a border by nightfall as guns and missiles rained supreme all around.
When I returned, Tony told me that Bob wanted me back. It wasn’t my role to chaperone John as he famously ‘liberated Kabul’. I had to fill in the forms and tick the boxes back at base. As the new era dawned in the West, I had to fight the internal war too. The world was watching America and her allies. The War on Terror had begun.
Over a year later, in February 2003, I went into work in London as usual, but with an extra spring in my step. I knew from my days in the army when it was all kicking off and it was obvious from the headlines that the US and the Brits were going to invade Iraq. This was what I was here for.
The phones had been ringing off the hook but all I had been able to do was prepare equipment – the Beeb were nervous about sending ex-military personnel in before hostilities had broken out. Then Tom Giles called and Malcolm Downing came to see me. Jim Muir, the Tehran correspondent, was crossing the border as we were talking; Stuart Hughes was out there on his first trip to do radio; and John had newspaper columns to write, a book deal in the bag, and needed to file for Panorama. Fred Scott, an American was on board as cameraman … would I go as the security advisor?
I didn’t need asking twice. Within a day, I was on the plane. I told Sue that my return depended on Mr Bush! In fact it was a done deal: by the end of that meeting Dave Bristow at the travel desk had already booked the tickets and Oggy Boytchev had come over to introduce himself as the producer. There was no doubt at all that we were leaving and it couldn’t come soon enough. I had grabbed together what I could from the BBC Safety Store – Sat Phones, GPS, sleeping bags, duvet jackets, body armour, helmet and rations. If I thought I needed it, it was in. However, I had gone to work that morning knowing that tension was in the air but unaware that within twenty-four hours, I would be gone for two months. Our planning was shit. But I loved it.
We flew to Turkey, then on to Adana in the south, before taking a 21-hour coach journey to the Northern Iraq border. You couldn’t fly into Iraq, and the key meeting place for all foreign journalists was on the Salopi border. Although time consuming, this was the fastest, safest route in. When we got there, we still didn’t have a BBC coach, and we were kicked off the CNN one – tempers were running high. It took thirty-six hours in all to get from the border to Arbil in the north, Iraq’s fourth largest city. During that time, one of our fixers, Dragan Petrovic, heard from Belgrade that he had become a dad. John had promised to get him on this trip after working with him in the Balkans, and Dragan needed the money. He should have been at home, especially as for the next five weeks we did fuck all.
John was getting frustrated waiting for the war to start, and he was convinced we were in the wrong location. We had nowhere to go, having been given only a four-day visa. We ignored its expiry date and decided to sit it out for the duration.
In the weeks up to 19 March, our days would be spent planning, doing the odd bit of local reconnaissance, and generally batting away all the local fixers and car dealers who had got wind that the BBC were camped in the Tower Hotel. Word was out that the great John Simpson was in town. This meant money to the locals. Eventually we forked out an extortionate $3,500 a month for a Hyundai and a Toyota. We also seemed to have acquired a fixer caller Russa and a freelance stills photographer, Abdullah, who had great contacts with the local Peshmerga and – much to my irritation – had wormed his way onto the team. I knew he thought John was his meal ticket (and I mean that literally). Not only would the BBC’s World Affairs editor probably be on the scent of the story, there would be three fine meals a day – and Abdullah was always first to clean his plate. Risgar, the manager of the hotel, couldn’t do enough for us either, even offering me a pistol to take on the road, which I declined. I learned that he was cutting deals with FOX TV, too. Clearly, this was a big payday all round.
By night, we would chew the fat, sing some songs and Fred would start up the card school – John the Ace Simpson and Craig the Shark Summers fighting to the death over the jackpot prize … of toothpicks! We were that bored. To make it worse, Fred had just had a little baby and had spent only twelve hours at home in months. He hadn’t even heard her cry. That was the price we all paid just to get the story.
But there was no story. All John could think about was getting to Baghdad but we had no way in yet. He had knocked on my door one night to express his concerns that we simply did not have enough or the correct equipment for the locals we had taken on. This appalled him, and rightly so, but that’s often the deal when you leave at a moment’s notice. I did my best to scrounge around for extra supplies.
On the night of the 19th the Americans fired Tomahawk missiles into Baghdad. Finally, we were in business – and a good job too, because Bob Forster had already tried to get me home once. I briefed our locals to tell their families our plans and ordered everyone to pack a bag with spare kit so we could move as and when. I also checked the vehicles for road-worthiness. Word was reaching us that morale was low in the Iraqi army; the streets were quiet and shops were beginning to get boarded up. The war had well and truly started. But it wasn’t until the first ten days of April when we tasted the horrors of conflict ourselves and, in our hunt to get the story, became the very story itself.
By 2 April, Stuart Hughes had been in Iraq for two months. As the front line between the Kurdish-controlled North and the Central and Southern Territories held by Saddam Hussein began to crumble, Stuart, Kaveh Golestan his cameraman, and a local Kurdish soldier were on
the road gathering material near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
As American bombs poured out of the sky, Stuart and Jim Muir stopped at a checkpoint to get some knowledge of the best vantage point for footage of the Yanks attacking the frontline in the distance. The local Kurdish Peshmerga guide told them it was safe to proceed to another track, 100 metres on the right, turning left to a second route near an abandoned Iraqi military position. They should pull over there to avoid being ‘crested’ (visible on the other side of the ridge). Jim was nervous about stopping off-road and parked his left-hand drive at an angle.
Kaveh had sat next to Jim in the front; in the back Stuart was on the right, Rabeen, a fixer, was in the middle, and the local Peshmerga sat on the left. He was the first to exit.
Stuart was next to get out. With one step, his right foot set off the first mine. Jim threw himself down next to the driver’s door, believing they were taking incoming fire. On hearing the first detonation from the rear, Kaveh ran around to the front of the vehicle for cover. He threw himself onto two mines, and was gone. Killed instantly.
Rabeen was the only one left inside the vehicle. He had also thought it was a mortar attack, but quickly realised there was no distinctive whistling sound so it must be a mine strike. Then he heard Stuart crying out from the rear right – but he could also see Stuart’s legs. Ahead, he saw another body covered in dirt. In the moment of impact, he thought it was a dead Iraqi, only understanding it was Kaveh a few moments later when Jim called out he was going to rescue him.
Rabeen urged him not to risk further injury but Jim insisted. It was too late. There was no pulse.
The local Peshmerga fired his rifle to attract attention. Rabeen pulled Stuart into the vehicle over the bags in the cargo area behind the back seat. Jim dragged Kaveh to the vehicle and rested his body across Rabeen, revealing extensive abdominal and lower-leg injuries. By now there were twenty or thirty locals out on the track. Jim put his foot down, heading for the nearby hospital about five minutes away.
Bodyguard Page 4
