Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Long into the night, reporters would trade marching-season war stories. The Northern Ireland veterans had the best yarns and were also gifted anecdotalists. But at least I could tell of once being confronted by an irate Orangeman who threatened to spear me with a ceremonial pike, and also of coming close to having my posterior peppered with bullets. We had been filming a paramilitary show of force on a Loyalist estate off the Shankill Road, another ritual of the marching season, where a teenage honour guard fired a volley into the air to the delight of a baying crowd. On this occasion, however, the sub-machine gun proved way too heavy for the young Loyalist doing the firing, and, rather like a weightlifter struggling under the load of a giant barbell, his knees started to buckle. With each stumble and stagger, the trajectory of the bullets got lower and lower, and we got closer and closer to the ground, rueing our decision to film from directly in front of the firing squad.

  Then part of the global conflict circuit, Drumcree attracted the world’s big-name, international war correspondents, such as Christiane Amanpour of CNN, which added a certain frisson. But by far my favourite international blow-in was an Australian reporter who worked for Downtown Radio, one of the commercial stations in Belfast. His hourly updates, delivered in a thick Waltzing Matilda twang, made the Garvaghy Road sound like a side street in Broken Hill. What else could we call him but ‘Crocodile Drumcree’?

  However violent, what was always remarkable about the marching season was how quickly Northern Ireland rebounded. Although many journalists saw in the rubble of burnt-out buildings and the charred carcasses of hijacked buses images that illustrated perfectly the sorry state of the peace process, it was another overused cliché, ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn’, that often had the ring of truth. Just 15 days after my first Drumcree in 1997, the IRA announced its second ceasefire. Soon after, Sinn Féin entered a fresh round of peace talks.

  In October, politicians of all shades, from the representatives of the IRA to the spokesmen of the Loyalist paramilitaries, from Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party to John Hume’s nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), met at Stormont for the first all-party talks in 25 years. Then, in November, Gerry Adams led a Sinn Féin delegation to Downing Street, the first time that a Republican leader had gone through the door of Number 10 since the days of Michael Collins and David Lloyd George. Just six years earlier, the IRA had fired mortar bombs that exploded in the back garden. Now, Gerry Adams, who was still a member of the IRA’s Army Council, entered in a tie, a suit and a dark woollen overcoat, the bland attire that a visiting Belgian finance minister might wear.

  By the following Easter, 1998, a peace deal had been hammered out, and in a corner of Britain where dark adjectives such as ‘black’ or ‘bloody’ had attached themselves to the gloomiest days of the Troubles, there was finally a Friday that could truly be described as ‘good’. On the night of the Good Friday Agreement, few things were more touching than the sight of a long line of swooning journalists, men as well as women, waiting for Senator George Mitchell, Bill Clinton’s peace envoy and the chairman of the talks, to autograph copies of the peace deal. The most self-effacing of men, Mitchell was embarrassed by the fuss and wanted nothing more, after months of fraught negotiations, than to head back to America to see his young son. But his fingerprints were all over Northern Ireland’s historic compromise, and before he could make a dash for the airport everybody wanted his signature on it, too.

  Normally at Easter, the darkness of Christ’s crucifixion on the Friday gives way to the celebration of his resurrection on the Sunday, but in parts of Northern Ireland that weekend this holy liturgy was turned on its head. The optimism of Friday was followed by uncertainty and resentment. On Easter morning in Crossmaglen, in the heart of IRA bandit country, the talk was of betrayal, with Gerry Adams cast as Judas.

  Hundreds of dissident Republicans, many of them active IRA volunteers from the feared County Armagh Brigade, gathered in St Patrick’s churchyard for their annual commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising. There, amidst tombstones etched with the names of dead IRA men, they vowed to continue their armed struggle. Marching briskly to the centre of the graveyard, a man dressed in a combat jacket, balaclava and black beret appeared out of nowhere to address the crowd. ‘There will be no settlement,’ he shouted into a microphone as a British Army Lynx helicopter circled overhead. ‘There’ll be no peace for this country until those people up there leave this country.’

  Another dissident Republican put it even more bluntly: ‘To say this deal is transitional towards a united Ireland is bollocks.’

  The British Army watchtowers of County Armagh; the IRA warning signs at the side of the country roads reading ‘Sniper at Work’; newly painted murals on the gables in the Loyalist areas of Belfast that now included slogans such as ‘Compromise and conflict’ alongside the usual imagery of gun-toting paramilitaries; former prisoners who spoke eloquently of ‘new paradigms’ and genuinely seemed to mean it: all this formed the backdrop to the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, which would essentially decide the question asked intermittently since Partition in 1921 – could the people of Northern Ireland ever peacefully co-exist, and was that truly their desire?

  The temptation was to cover the referendum campaign as if it were a straightforward choice between the future and the past, of reformers against rejectionists. However, in a country where history was ever present, it was far more convoluted. As one would expect, the high priest of the ‘No’ campaign was the Reverend Ian Paisley, whose most famous political catchphrase, delivered in a thunderous voice at maximum volume, was ‘ULSTER SAYS NO’. (At a press conference in the lead-up to the vote, I asked the Big Man, as Reverend Paisley was known, some smart-arse question. ‘Where are you from?’ he bellowed. ‘The BBC,’ I timidly replied. ‘I THOUGHT SO,’ he roared back.) Yet it also included more quietly spoken victims of the Troubles – mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters – who detested the idea of watching the murderers of their relatives released from prison under the terms of the peace deal.

  The ‘Yes’ campaign, meanwhile, was run with the help of Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executives dressed in Paul Smith suits, although its strongest advocates included some of Northern Ireland’s most psychotic murderers and thugs. The poster boy for former Loyalist paramilitaries, for instance, was Michael Stone, a Charles Manson lookalike and notorious assassin. The last time most people in Northern Ireland had seen him was in some of the most infamous television footage from the Troubles, which showed him mounting a lone gun and grenade attack at the funeral in Milltown cemetery of three IRA members shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar.

  In the final week of campaigning, however, Stone was allowed out on day release from Maze Prison to appear at a ‘Yes’ rally organised by former paramilitaries at the Ulster Hall. To cries of ‘We want Michael! We want Michael!’ and with a banner draped from the balcony declaring that ‘Michael Says Yes’, Stone was greeted with such rapture that it made a mockery of the claim that a ‘Yes’ vote equated automatically with progress.

  Days before the Good Friday Agreement, Tony Blair had declared it was no time for soundbites, then revealed that he could feel the ‘hand of history’ virtually massaging his shoulders. But although a prime architect of the agreement, his ‘Hi, guys’ trendy vicar routine always grated on the unionist leaders, who were men of Victorian manners and sensibilities. A member of the band Ugly Rumours at college, who strummed on his electric guitar in his upstairs flat in Downing Street, Blair may have thought of himself as a politician with rock-star charisma. But in the final days of campaigning, he was completely blown away by a rock star with rock-star charisma.

  Bono arrived in Belfast, with The Edge by his side, to perform at a concert intended to arrest a last-minute slump in support for the ‘Yes’ campaign. Somehow, he also managed to persuade David Trimble, the buttoned-down leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, and John Hume of the SDLP to appear with him on stage. In choosing what to
sing, Bono had considered the merits of John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’ (too obvious), Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’ (too obscure), The Beatles’ ‘We Can Work it Out’ (too corny) and even Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ (too silly). Eventually, he settled on the 1969 love song that Lennon had written for Yoko Ono, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, with the lines of the chorus changed so they now read ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’.

  Before an ecumenical crowd of some 2000 sixth-formers drawn from Protestant and Catholic schools, Bono belted out the song with marvellous passion. (My most treasured souvenir from my time in Northern Ireland is a bootleg recording of his performance.) Then he introduced the bespectacled middle-aged politicians who had done more than any others to bring Northern Ireland to this point – of ‘taking a leap of faith out of the past and into the future’, as Bono put it.

  Two more unfashionable politicians it was hard to imagine than the highly strung David Trimble or the podgy John Hume, but they made their awkward entrances from either side of the stage and then clasped hands in the middle. To appear more up-to-the-minute, both men had discarded their suit jackets, though not their ties, while David Trimble even cracked a smile. Bono had also made his own sartorial adjustment. Normally, he appeared in rose-tinted spectacles, but this time he came on stage without any sunglasses. Predicting a bright and brilliant future, he presumably wanted everyone to see his eyes.

  The ‘No’ campaign was quick to condemn the concert, complaining that U2 was trying to buy the votes of young people with a free concert. Ian Paisley also claimed that, during one concert in America, Bono had set fire to the Union Flag – an accusation that the singer rejected vehemently. Yet, at a time when the late momentum was with opponents of the Good Friday Agreement, this south-of-the-border superstar gave the ‘Yes’ campaign the fillip it desperately needed: a late reminder that peace was hip and trendy, and that it meant Bono more than Michael Stone.

  Just three days later, in the highest attended poll since partition, 71 per cent of people in Northern Ireland voted ‘Yes’ to the Good Friday Agreement. In the Irish Republic, where the country’s constitution penned by Éamon De Valera would soon be rewritten to drop its claim on the north, over 94 per cent voted in favour. When Ian Paisley arrived at King’s Hall in Belfast – the agricultural showground where the result was announced – he was met by Loyalist chants of ‘Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio’. Paisley represented the sectarian politics of ‘No’. For once, Ulster had said ‘Yes’.

  Later that night, the ‘Yes’ campaign hosted a strangely lifeless victory party in a rooftop bar with mauve lighting, panoramic views of the city and lukewarm Pinot Gris. But there was much better craic to be had at the BBC Club, just over the way from the newsroom, which was the scene of an almighty booze-up. Whatever they thought of the agreement, journalists celebrated the simple joy of having, for the first time in 30 years, a much more hopeful storyline to impart.

  With Guinness, Harp lager and whisky – Bushmills for the Protestants and Jameson for the Catholics, not that it seemed to matter so much any more – we partied all night, and then, when dawn came, partied some more. Less than three months later, these same journalists would cover the massacre at Omagh, when dissident Republicans killed 29 people, many of them Catholic, after detonating a car bomb in a street packed with shoppers. It was Northern Ireland’s worst single atrocity. Yet so strong was the sense of public revulsion that the hope also was that Omagh would become the last. For once, the Real IRA was even humiliated into an apology.

  In the BBC Club, perhaps the home-town journalists had another cause for celebration: their newsroom would no longer have to accommodate over-ambitious blow-ins from London who had been heading to Belfast since the late-1960s in the hope of making a name for themselves. One of the biggest changes during my time in the BBC is also one of the most welcome: young tyro reporters are no longer blooded in Northern Ireland. Admittedly, it had taken longer than that gentle landlady had predicted, but comfort had come, by and large, to the streets of Belfast.

  The end of the Troubles; the sudden death of England’s most glorious rose; the assassination of Israel’s favourite son: at a time when the requirements of continuous news turned big stories into mega-stories, I had the good fortune to cover three of them very early on. And, as if in a game of consequences, my luck held. On the return flight to Washington, after attending Rabin’s state funeral, the then house speaker Newt Gingrich was so enraged that President Clinton declined to speak to him aboard Air Force One on the flight back from Israel that it contributed to his decision to starve the federal bureaucracy of congressional funding. This led directly to the government shutdown in late-1995 and early-1996, which in turn meant that Clinton came to rely more heavily on the team of White House interns, since regular staffers were not allowed to show up for work. One in particular caught his eye. She was a 21-year-old from Beverly Hills. Her name was Monica Samille Lewinsky.

  What luck in those early years of my nascent career to have a guardian angel with lax morals, a chaotic personality, an appetite for everything and, better still, presidential ambitions. As a student journalist, the first story I ever managed to get published by a newspaper in London was about Governor Bill Clinton. It was a trifling diary item about a bar in Little Rock called Slick Willie, his then nickname, which had come up with a range of cocktails to mark his run for the White House – although even then the press was showing more interest in his penchant for Arkansas cocktail waitresses.

  Six years later, as a young BBC reporter, President William Jefferson Clinton landed me my first permanent foreign posting, when scandal once more engulfed him, and we discovered that his taste in women now extended to voluptuous White House interns.

  During the impeachment saga, it was often said that cameramen who had amassed vast sums of overtime pay splurged it on motor cruisers and small yachts on the Potomac or at Chesapeake Bay, which they inevitably christened Monica. Had the BBC paid its correspondents piece rates, I would have hurled the champagne towards the hull of a vessel named Bill or, perhaps, Just William. That diary story not only gave me the pleasure of seeing my work appear for the first time in print but also got me my start as a high-society gossip columnist. The Lewinsky scandal – though it should truly have been called the Bill Clinton scandal – made me a Washington correspondent. It was a job I had coveted from the time I realised I was not about to become the next Le Corbusier, turned my back on architecture and switched instead to studying American political history.

  To meet him, of course, is to be exposed immediately to the Clinton Treatment: the mauling handshake; the empathetic nod; the piercing stare, fixed and admiring; the instant intimacy; a gravitational pull with the power to suck people into his orbit. Often, it is said that Clinton comes not only with his own force field but also his own personal weather system, and that he’s so expert at the art of seduction that he can make even the most fleeting acquaintance feel as if he or she is the single most important person in the room. Still, when I first encountered him during the 1992 New Hampshire primary campaign I came away thinking there was something much more transactional about his celebrated interpersonal skills. The feeling was of being the most important voter in the room, or, in my case, the most important journalist.

  I was over from Oxford at the time conducting research for my thesis on Jack Kennedy, a leader with whom Clinton was intermittently compared. I was trying to persuade him to agree to a short interview for his old university rag. Always obliging, the one-time Rhodes Scholar did not need much cajoling and suggested I contact his chief of staff in Little Rock, Betsey Wright, the sorter of his details, the keeper of his secrets and the freewheeling aide immortalised by the actress Kathy Bates in the movie Primary Colors. For a top-ranking aide in the midst of a presidential campaign, Wright could hardly have been more helpful. However, a candidate’s time is not only donor money but also votes, and it was impossible for her to find a gap in his schedule, since there weren’
t any gaps in the first place.

  So when next I ran into Clinton, I tried once again. This time, he was outside the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in south Boston, where I spent my days poring over yellowing presidential papers in an archive that assassination-conspiracy theorists were convinced was bugged, and where the governor had gone for a posthumous character reference. Already, his campaign had published a black-and-white photograph taken when he was 17, looking preternaturally self-possessed as he shook the hand of JFK on the South Lawn of the White House – the Clinton handshake was a marvel even then – and took command of the small talk, as if Kennedy was merely house-sitting.

  Before Clinton levered himself into his people mover, which in those early days could comfortably accommodate both his campaign staff and travelling press corps, he once again agreed in principle to the interview and suggested I badger Wright. As before, the governor seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the idea, although I had seen enough of him by now to recognise that this was his stock response to any idea put to him while trying to harvest votes.

  Nothing if not persistent, I made my third approach at a campaign rally in a downtown Boston hotel, when I tried to corner Clinton in one of those narrow, back-of-house corridors favoured by presidential candidates needing to make a fast escape from the balloon-strewn ballroom, via the kitchen, to their waiting limousine. This time, I had even brought a snapper, a college friend studying photography who was happy to play the role of paparazzo. Perhaps Clinton felt he was being ambushed, since gone now was the easy charm of our first two encounters, and absent was his outstretched hand. Instead, the mere mention of the word ‘Oxford’, which had always been my best calling card, seemed to instil a sense of near panic in both him and his handlers.

  As the governor was bundled out of a back entrance, it seemed my chances of landing an interview had vanished as well, and I left thinking the presence of the photographer had blown my chances. Yet, a few days later, the headlines offered a very different explanation. As a student at University College, Oxford, Clinton had managed to avoid being conscripted for Vietnam, through a combination of political contacts and the luck of drawing a high lottery number in the draft. Now that reporters had caught a whiff of the story, he no longer wanted his varsity days revisited.