But before that, I got a real shock when Craig Oliver, editor of the Ten, rang me.
KATASTROFIK
‘We want to give Košice another go,’ Craig said.
It was now the end of August 2008 – nearly a year after our last visit, and seven months on from the cock-up in Kent. This was the last chance saloon – again. My gut feeling was that this was unfinished business. My mind was also elsewhere: I was supposed to be preparing for John’s little brainwave, and if I wasn’t careful the re-emergence of sex trafficking could run headlong into that. Given the amount of time and effort already spent on this story, as much as I was pleased, I didn’t want to scupper the chance to a lifelong ambition. John, Robin Knox-Johnston and Ranulph Fiennes would have to wait.
David had spoken to a contact in Košice who could definitely provide girls. Annie Allison had gone back to Craig Oliver. He had agreed – one last shot. I needed no second invitation. I was so ecstatic that I would take any snippet of intelligence to make it work. Everybody knew we had a great story – and there was a lot of sympathy that we just hadn’t got the girls. The story was 100 per cent true but the fact remained – no money shot, no show. It was time to meet Luboš.
On 31 August, we arrived back in Košice. Luboš was part of the same gang we had met the previous Christmas. He would take us to Peter, higher up in the chain. One thing was clear: none of these people were called Peter. At 21.10 we rang him.
We were to meet at the front of the station. It didn’t get more rock ’n’ roll than that. All sex and drugs seemed to be sold out of here. Paul and David went ahead. Twenty minutes later Peter met us in Herna – a small gypsy casino opposite.
‘I hear you are looking to buy some bitches,’ Peter began.
‘Yes, but they must be in the UK and already in the sex business.’ Paul clarified our position and complimented Peter on his English.
‘I have been living in England and Ireland for the last fifteen years. I have businesses in Dublin and Dover. I do two weeks in Dublin, and two weeks in Dover. In fact, I’m travelling back on the 2nd. It takes me three days to get back.’ He pointed at his new white refrigerated Transit van. By businesses, he meant girls. You wouldn’t find him in the Yellow Pages.
Paul then specified that the girls must be aged eighteen to twenty-five.
‘I can get them from here. It’s easier. I can deliver them and it’s cheaper,’ he promised.
‘We have tried that before and Boss has been fucked around. They must be in the UK and working. Can you help?’ Paul asked.
Because of time constraints, and the fact that this was our last throw of the dice, we had changed tack. Our story stood up. It just lacked girls. We didn’t need to go through the whole process from the start again. Peter then left to head in to the bar area, returning with his boss. His name, to my surprise, was Peter.
In Slovak, Peter 2 explained that his girls were for sale in Sheffield, Peterborough, Birmingham and Chatham. Ah, the elusive Chatham. This was a broader network than we ever knew. Dublin and Dover was all I had suspected. He told us that he would only sell – leasing came with too many problems. We could flog them on after for between four and five thousand euros. They were all clean and with no disease, though he didn’t say how he knew. We could see them on his website, which, in itself, was a new development. He explained that he had his woman in England who we should deal with. She controlled the girls. As we exchanged numbers, he made it clear he did not want to get fucked by the police. No, I’m sure, he didn’t!
Original Peter then offered to sell us some Dublin girls. We would speak tomorrow.
I wasn’t exactly jumping through hoops. It all felt a bit déjà vu but they had cut to the deal much quicker and they looked less like scrotes than some of the other gangs. Plus, their talk of leasing showed me they had been in the game for some time, and the brand spanking new refrigerated van told me they were trafficking drugs too – sniffer dogs would not get a whiff of anything out of a vehicle like that. He was a player, and a regular one. I had to be optimistic. But it all seemed too easy and, this time, there was no way I was going to involve Kent Constabulary. I wasn’t going down that route again. The next day, it was business as usual – nothing happened.
‘I cannot get hold of the woman who runs my girls in England. She is not answering the phone.’ Peter 2 said.
Lunch was cancelled. They did meet us though – at 18.00, back at the station. When I say ‘us’, I mean Paul and David. I told Paul to tell them that the boss didn’t hang around railway stations doing business. That white refrigerated van was clearly dealing at the same time – get all your business done in one go at Peter’s registered office, Košice Central!
‘I will be leaving for England tomorrow,’ Peter 2 announced. ‘I will call you when I get there. I have three girls for sale in England at the moment. One is blonde with big tits and the other two are dark haired – all in their twenties. We will meet in London.’
By 6 September we had returned to the UK. They, had after all, said they were heading there. It proved to be untrue.
Paul took the call from an overseas number. ‘Hello Paul. I am Peter speaking from Slovakia. We no come London. Problem in Slovakia. We must to stay in Slovakia. I am sorry. We come next week. Next week, sure. What day you in London?’ It was Peter 2. I didn’t know what to make of it. What they’d said in Košice suggested that they were for real. My previous dealings with Slovaks also told me that this was the normal way. It might just be that he didn’t have any girls at this point, when he’d thought he had. Everyone was just a cog in a chain, grinding very slowly. What gave me belief was that he had called at all. We never rang him. That was a very good sign.
Two days later, the other Peter rang. He was now in Dublin. Predictably, he apologised for the delay – he had a couple of things to finish off back in Košice. Now, he needed to sort out his business in Dublin. Today was Monday; he would call by the end of the week. Every delay took me a day closer to the next trip with John, and I had to see this one through. We were so near the sting, and I had worked so hard on this – so many trips to Košice and so many stop starts. Annie Allison tackled me on this.
‘You’re going to be away for a couple of weeks,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to get it done.’
‘No way,’ I stood my ground. ‘Just tell them I’m away. It’s got to be me or not at all.’
I wanted the glory. And I had done the work. But I was due to leave on 14 September. The next day, Peter in Dublin rang Paul. No surprises here, more delays – the other Peter had problems in London.
‘Some personal things, you know,’ he said. ‘He gonna call me at ten tonight, then I will find out what the problem is.’
‘So there’s no meeting in London tomorrow?’ Paul asked.
‘No, my friend, I’m sorry.’ Peter answered.
Paul reminded Peter that the boss was going to ‘Spain’ for two weeks and we were concerned they would be back in Slovakia by the time he returned. He assured Paul that wouldn’t be the case. ‘Tell your boss when he come back from Spania we do the girls business in London. One hundred per cent.’ They agreed to speak at the end of the week.
I was now running dual lives. Ran and Robin were in for their briefing at the Hostile Environment Training Course near Reading and that was something you couldn’t take lightly, as many times as I had overseen it. The clock was ticking. At any moment, I was due to leave with them on John’s crazy idea. But I might have to go to Košice. Or Dublin. Or Kent? Spain was the only place I wasn’t going. By 14 September, it was too late.
Frustration got the better of me, and I knew patience was running out at TC. There were only so many times I could try to re-persuade Craig Oliver and Annie: everyone knew we were so nearly there, and it concerned me that my absence over the next fortnight would kill the story. Without me there, it would be easy for it to slip down the agenda.
I wanted to be in two places at once but there was no way I was going to delay or a
bandon John’s trip. I was about to fulfil a boyhood dream. The chance to work with Robin Knox-Johnston, Ranulph Fiennes and John Simpson meant that I would be taking three of the world’s greatest explorers to a place nobody went any more. I wouldn’t be the star of this show but I didn’t want to miss out.
And the BBC was paying for it again. It was time to unleash the Three Dogs.
THREE DOGS
I picked up the report in Dubai Airport. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. As I read the transcript, I felt it slipping away. I realised that if nothing happened while I was abroad, then they would call time. I was the lifeblood of that story – in my absence, there wasn’t anyone to represent it. Nobody had lost interest, but it was yesterday’s news. Here comes Craig again, asking for money to chase birds across Eastern Europe.
In one way, I wished nothing would happen so I could pick it up on my return. On the other hand, if nothing did happen the story was gone. There had been just a small development.
Peter: Hello Paul, how are you?
Paul: Hello Peter. Good to hear from you. I thought you had forgotten us.
Peter: Listen I speak to Peter in London and we have three girls ready. Give me email address and I send you pictures.
Paul: Hang on, Peter. You know Boss is in Spania and I must speak with him …
Peter: Yes, I know. You can send him pictures. If he like the girls we do business when he come back …
Paul: OK, this is good. Let me call the boss now.
Peter: You call me back?
Paul: Yes, I call you back for sure. Give me some minutes and I call you straight back, OK?
Peter: OK. Bye, Paul.
Paul: OK. Bye bye, Peter. I call you back.
I texted Paul immediately.
He had rung Peter back straight afterwards to say that I thought that emailing the pictures was excellent. There were three girls, aged seventeen, twenty-three and twenty-six. They were all in the UK. I loved it. It was brilliant, and I have never been more pissed off in my life to be sat in the Executive Lounge in Dubai. Compounding the problem, of course, was that I would soon have to turn my phone off and that meant an update an agonising three hours from now. I would have to wait until I touched down in Kabul.
I sat back and thought about the show we were doing now. Dee, John’s wife, had pitched it to the BBC. It started as a joke back in Zim – that’s what you do when you are sitting around incognito, waiting to file. You dream up shit, and later you get someone else to pay for it.
Sir Robin Knox-Johnston was born in 1939 – a world away. He was the first man to perform a single-handed non-stop circumnavigation of the globe. In 2006, he became the oldest yachtsman to complete a round the world solo voyage. Quite simply, the man was a legend. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes was five years younger than Robin. He had actually served in the British army for eight years. Guinness World Records listed him as the World’s Greatest Explorer. He had done the lot. North and South Poles, Antarctica on foot, and some doddle of a mountain called Everest. And then there was John.
The show was to go out on BBC2. I didn’t give a shit if nobody watched it. This gig was too good to turn down – not that I ever rejected any free trip or work with John. The name of the game was that each Dog would take the others into their ‘comfort zone’ and we would see what transpired. And so was born Top Dogs: Adventures in War, Sea and Ice. It was almost completely different to everything I had done before, except that the terrain was still very tricky. And it just proved that if you had the right cast list, you could get any old nonsense commissioned! It was a jolly, but with risks. Nobody from the West had reported back from the Tora Bora mountain range since the Americans thought they had bin Laden there in December 2001. That’s where the Dogs were heading.
When I touched down in Kabul, there was nothing on the sex trafficking. Paul confirmed that the email with the pictures hadn’t come. Nor did it come the day after or the day after that. Peter in London seemed to be in some bother. But I had to park it to one side. In my mind, even if word came in that that op was live, I wouldn’t abandon the Three Dogs. Sex trafficking was officially on hold again and there was little I could do. I had to let the Dogs off their leads. It was time to chase down the Taliban.
John didn’t really know the other guys and it was a nightmare co-ordinating everyone’s schedule. The proposed dates had got moved several times – it was one of those jobs. I was only going on the first leg. We were really making it up as we went: it was a classic case of coming up with the show before knowing what it was. At one point, we were in meetings with the Ministry of Defence and talking about flying into Kandahar to see the troops. That was all a bit too Geri Halliwell for me – I didn’t want to be part of their propaganda, despite the military in me. In fact, they were borderline useless, unable even to offer us definite seats in the Hercs to get us out there. It was also changeover time for the troops in Kabul, which meant this was the worst possible time to ask the Foreign Office to help us. We were on our own.
Kandahar and Helmand were out of the question. I certainly wasn’t sitting around in Kabul for three weeks, and there was no real interest for this type of show if Robin and Ranulph just shadowed John fishing out the usual stories in the capital. As part of the story, John still had to do his job. I only had one route in my head – let’s do the Khyber Pass and get to Tora Bora. From Kabul to Jalalabad was about three hours, and that could mean anything in these parts. From Jalalabad to the Khyber Pass, it was in theory anything up to a further three.
The Khyber Pass was steeped in history and Tora Bora had shaped contemporary current affairs. Mention the Khyber Pass and most people see Sid James running around in his red uniform in the Carry On films. The truth was that it was one of the most influential border crossings in the world, an integral part of the Ancient Silk Road, dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan and the huge mountain range across both. To this day, it still bustles with both legitimate and illegitimate trade, but its roots go as far back as the Bible. It was an absolute must – take the three of them to a heartbeat of the Old British Empire, now confined to the history books even though their generation lived alongside it, and get one of the world’s most respected journalists to al Qaeda’s den. Nobody had confirmed it, but British and American Special Forces came within a whisker of taking out Osama bin Laden in the vast network of caves in this mountain range before Christmas of 2001. Who wouldn’t want to go there and breathe in history?
Let your imagination run wild for a moment and wonder what went on in there. Remember, too, that the Americans helped build the network when it supported Afghanistan fighting the Soviets in the early 1980s. And yet today it remained an unvisited mystery, hiding a million secrets. To get the Three Dogs there would be incredible. It was like getting John in and out of Zim – but this time with celebrity in tow. That was the beauty of this show. Could the World Affairs editor deliver once again from the back of beyond, and could we do so while making a reality-type show, which wasn’t what any of us had trained to do, and still feed the Ten at the same time?
I arrived two days before the Dogs. More than ever, it was imperative I sorted out the best vehicles for the trip. This was not the terrain to be leased a duff vehicle by the usual local fixers around the Hotel Serena, who saw big pound signs as always whenever the BBC turned up.
There were no specific threats at this time but, hey, this was Afghanistan. You always had to be on your guard, and despite having excellent BBC contacts on the ground, nobody could really say with any certainty who we would run into on our trip, especially once out of Kabul. Were there any extra risks in taking three old boys this way? Yes, a few. At the Hostile Environments Course back in the UK, both Ran and Robin had asked really sensible questions. Ran in particular loved refreshing his military skills – the soldier never dies in you. They had both read up like pros and had done their homework, never once asking a naive question. They were like kids in a sweetshop. Ran also got to use a defibrillator
. This was a minor issue that I had to include in the risk assessment. Unscathed through all his adventures, he had actually suffered a heart attack in 2003. That was really my only concern but it was minimal. He would never complain, and I think you could say that he had more than proven himself over time!
Hanif, our fixer, took Oggy and me to see the cars. I really didn’t want to be driving around in tinted armoured American 4x4s. None of us wanted to stand out and announce our presence. That’s where there would be an incident. My suspicions were confirmed: one of the cars wasn’t up to it. There was no way I was driving to Tora Bora with bald tyres.
Hanif was very well connected – I had worked with him many times before and the BBC trusted him. He also worked as a presenter on Afghan TV and accompanied Afghan dignitaries on trips abroad. He was the man to know. I told him to get it sorted by the time the Dogs arrived. New tyres, a service, and I needed to see it again – they were my instructions. Hanif didn’t let me down.
When John, Ran and Robin touched down, I just knew I was on the brink of something special – a real landmark trip, and very different to what I had left behind. Yes, it was a jolly and there was no need to make the show, but John had stretched himself with the ambition for it. Journalistically, he gave it merit. To watch the chemistry between the three of them, even in these early stages, was inspirational. For Simpo, this was old hat, his thirtieth, fortieth trip – we had all lost count. He was a seasoned veteran here. But for Ran and Robin, you could see the mutual respect in their faces and it was a pleasure to chaperone two men who still had an appetite for culture, even after all that they had seen. Yes – they would have been to places like this before, but the planet never ceased to amaze them. I looked at them looking at Kabul. You could see that they simply had explorer eyes.
Bodyguard Page 24
