by Mark Colvin
There was much patriotism on the Union Square wall, many God Bless Americas, some paeans of hate for Osama bin Laden, and these three short lines: ‘I will not forget. I will not forgive. I shall not understand.’
There were at least as many calls for peace, and protests against American foreign policy.
But the dominant tone was of love for the city of New York itself, almost as if it were an independent state and not part of America. And not just from people who have lived there all their lives.
This for instance: ‘I am Australian and always will be, but New York is my home. I always loved this city and its people. September 11th changed us all and I fell more in love with this city and its people all over again. Thank you.’
But for some, finally, words were just redundant: ‘I’ve talked about it. I’ve listened to others. I have nothing left to say. I have too much to say. There is too much loss.’
I turned away from the Union Square wall to a commotion by one of the tables. A young man was writing the word ‘Love’ on a piece of paper. An older man was shouting at him. ‘I’m sick of this left-wing political agenda. It’s all political.’
A middle-aged man with a voice disconcertingly like Woody Allen’s yelled back, ‘Bush wants to start a war. What’s that if not political?’
Suddenly everyone was shouting, in a rapid escalation of political assertion and personal abuse.
I looked at one of the organisers of the wall project who was standing beside me.
‘What did you expect?’ she said. ‘New York is New York.’
I thought it was as good a piece of radio reporting as I’d ever done. It encapsulated what I believe about the value of being a reporter. Christopher Isherwood’s line ‘I am a camera’ springs to mind—the single pair of eyes recording the precise moment, the words recorded painstakingly in my notebook, the single perspective on what’s known as ‘the first draft of history’. Something about that wall made me think of history, too, with its steady accretion of new messages slowly covering, without destroying, the ones that had gone before: like the many layers of ancient Troy, one displacing another for hundreds of years until archaeologists come and cut through them in cross-section to try and guess what the past really looked like.
It can be frustrating to know that you’re still able to tell first-hand stories as a journalist in the field, yet return to being desk-bound. I could still walk long distances in 2002, and therefore function as a reporter, but very soon those days were gone. As a side effect of the long treatment of my illness, I lost the cartilage in my right ankle, which made walking extremely painful, and the cortisone-induced brittleness of my bones meant that parts of my spine were starting to collapse. I began living more and more in the virtual world, playing video games for a while, but also leaping in imagination from continent to continent in search of news sites and blogs, reading more and more online to supplement my long-term book addiction.
Then, in February 2009, I had a minor fall and broke my upper thigh, the fracture uncomfortably close to the hip replacements I’d had in 1996, and, during a fortnight’s stay in hospital, discovered Twitter. Once I’d realised that the 140-character rule was not as limiting as I’d thought, because of the ability to include links, the appeal was immediate. I’d long been sharing articles and pictures among friends but had never wanted to start a full-time blog. Nonetheless, I’d learned a lot from some of the blogs I’d read: enough to realise that you could use Twitter as a micro-blog, a place where you could share and exchange without having to write an essay every time you did so. I followed a wide variety of interesting people, and gradually got more and more of the information I’d been used to scouring the web for, directly from Twitter.
And so in June 2009, without leaving my desk, I found myself—in a virtual sense—back on the campus of Tehran University, nearly thirty years on from the events with which this book began. In the weeks of turmoil after Iran’s most recent elections, it had become increasingly clear not only that there was a revolt going on over the rigged result, but that the state was doing everything it could to prevent news of that revolt getting to the outside world. It wasn’t for lack of trying by Western reporters. The ABC’s own Ben Knight was pumping out as much information as he could, for as long as he was allowed to stay. My old BBC friend John Simpson, bringing the perspective of thirty years in and out of Iran, plunged into crowds to interview and report, despite knowing that foreign journalists—and eventually anyone with a camera—was a target for Basij militia thugs or Revolutionary Guards. But it was a losing battle. The BBC’s resident correspondent, John Leyne, had already been expelled. John Lyons of The Australian remained as long as possible, filing copy until he too was thrown out. Soon, almost all of them were gone.
What was worse was that the US networks, once so powerful, chose at first almost to ignore the situation. CNN in particular, still then highly influential in the news business, gave it so little coverage that a hashtag sprang up and went viral: #CNNFAIL.
For me, among others, this was the first moment when, in the absence of traditional media source material, Twitter started to become a genuinely useful primary source for journalism. It was by no means easy or reliable: there was a vast amount of miscellaneous material coming out of Iran, with no way of verifying it absolutely. But if you had a sharp eye for detail, you could pick up indications of whether someone was truthful or not.
If they referred to protest action in a particular square, were other people saying the same thing? Quite often I would find three Twitter sources, all apparently in different parts of the crowd, reporting on the same event, though from a different perspective. Time came into the judgement as well. Was this someone whose tweets yesterday and the day before had been proved to be true by other reports later? One Twitter user, ‘Change_for_Iran’, reported, in a series of messages, being under siege in a university dormitory. Another, from another part of the campus, reported seeing the same thing from another angle. A day later, pictures started coming through confirming the damage done in the attack. It starts to add up to something like credibility.
I found I was developing a method of triangulation, applying the old journalistic methods of verification to a new medium. When one reliable tweeter, a student I’d been following since the unrest began, sent out a stream of 140-character messages, I’d developed enough faith in his reliability to link his tweets up and have them voiced over and put to air:
It was a nightmare, I can barely breathe & my face is burning, Masood got shot in the arm & Shayan’s brother is missing. I don’t know where to start with, first they attack our peaceful memorial gathering in front of the university with water gun. The university’s doors were closed, we couldn’t run everywhere! & then they start shooting tear gas at us. They were so many! riot police, normal police, intel, IRG [Revolutionary Guard], Basij! … We didn’t realize for a moment they started shooting at people, the gun’s sound was like a toy gun, not loud & the soldiers were smiling. I was going to tell Masood they are using fake guns for scaring people! until people started screaming in agony … We ran as fast as we could in the opposite direction, at the same time Basiji bastards started to hit fleeing people. I think I saw 2 or 3 people lying on the ground in blood & IRG started to move them, probably hide them.
He disappeared off Twitter soon after, never to be heard of again. At around the same time the Iranian Government started to muddy the waters with fake accounts and black propaganda. Still, we’d had a glimpse into a scene the government didn’t want us to see, and I’d learned lessons that we could apply in subsequent stories.
When a talented young woman called Jess Hill started researching for us at the beginning of the Arab Spring, she built on those lessons, using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Skype to make contacts all over the Middle East. She was tireless, and highly effective in breaking down dissidents’ natural suspicions: state secret police were posing as journalists in sting operations, so that in itself required persistence and t
alent. The result was that I was able to talk to people in places and situations which would have been completely inaccessible in previous contacts: a photographer speaking to me live as Bahraini troops attacked a peaceful demonstration; a young woman in Misrata on the Libyan coast describing, live, the experience of being under siege by Colonel Gaddafi’s artillery; a young man in the remote mountainous south of Libya, describing the advance of Gaddafi’s tanks across the plains below; a dissident in Der’aa, Syria explaining the revolt against the Assad government in the days before the opposition was taken over by crazed fundamentalists like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.
So the new media technologies have given me a virtual telescope through which to bring the world closer, now that I am so much more limited in going to view it in person. But they’ve also brought me closer to the audience. Because of my Twitter feed, no-one any longer thinks of me as ‘just a newsreader’. They get a daily feel, whether they listen to the program or not, for the breadth of my reading and the depth of my experience. And they can judge for themselves whether I am, as I am occasionally accused of being, a ‘right-wing stooge’ or a ‘lefty nutjob’.
I don’t link to a lot of articles about Australian politics, but when I do, it’s because they’re well written, amusing, or contain unusual insights, not because I endorse everything in them. Of course, I have to accept that people who follow me over time will make assumptions about what I do and don’t agree with. Sometimes they’ll be right, sometimes wrong. I have striven throughout my career not only to appear, but to be, fair to all sides in politics, something I don’t find hard because I’ve never belonged to a political party, or been tempted to.
I’m not a political eunuch, though, and in international affairs, even within the bounds of my ABC role, it’s possible to express some opinions. I don’t like dictatorships. I don’t like regimes that imprison writers and dissidents. I don’t like torture. I read Nineteen Eighty-Four and Darkness at Noon at an impressionable age, and I got the message.
As I’ve recorded, I reported from the Soviet Union and its satellites, and from apartheid South Africa; I travelled through China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution; and I experienced life under the Iranian theocracy. I know what dictators look like, and I’ve seen at first hand what happens to their victims.
My heroes include Andrei Sakharov, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Václav Havel. I have always done my best to spread news about the oppressed, the tortured and the gagged in countries like Iran, Burma (Myanmar) and North Korea.
A few months before I was stricken with chronic illness in 1994, I’d done a short internet course at the BBC in London, enough to convince me of its revolutionary potential both in my life and my work. In the six months or so I spent in hospital in late 1994 and early 1995, one of my chief frustrations was the inability to use a modem to hook my laptop up to the web in my hospital room: the ability to span the globe from a keyboard had already become that important to me.
A fear of boredom runs in my family. For me, the questing for action in the field, the travel (when I could still travel frequently), the voracious consumption of books and newspapers, the round-the-clock trawling of the internet, are all probably symptoms of that fear of the empty moment. As illness and disability have encroached over the last two decades, the virtual world has only become more important to me.
And my good fortune has been that the deterioration of my health and mobility has coincided with an enormous improvement in the availability of virtual experience. Encyclopedic knowledge at the touch of a key, music and vision flowing as from a tap, books downloaded to an e-reader the moment they’re released in London or New York, groceries or clothes ordered online and delivered to your door, and free calls to friends and relatives anywhere in the world via Skype or FaceTime—it’s all come at the right time for me.
So I’m thankful to be able to end this narrative with two words: Never Bored.
Acknowledgements
THE FIRST PERSON to thank is my mother, Anne Synnot, for giving me the peace and quiet at her farm that I needed to write most of this book. She celebrated her ninetieth birthday part way through the process, but proved (if proof were needed) that age had not even slightly affected her memory or mental acuity. Many of the details in the account of my early years emerged from conversations with her: she read the manuscript and provided corrections, clarifications and constructive criticism.
My sister Zoë also contributed hugely, both by adding her own perspective on shared experiences and because, as a former Hansard reporter, her grammar and punctuation are far better than mine.
If I owe my mother thanks for bringing me into the world, there are a number of people I must also thank for keeping me alive for the last two decades and more. They include Dr Andrew Keat, then of Charing Cross Hospital, London; Professors John Charlesworth, Bruce Pussell and Zoltan Endre, and Dr Grant Luxton, all of the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, Sydney; Dr Andrew Lennox, whose surgical skills allowed me to have a new kidney; and above all, Mary-Ellen Field, whose absolute conviction that her kidney would be a match for mine and that I should accept it was beyond generous, liberated me from the difficulties of dialysis, and has so far given me an extra three years and more of productive life.
It was a good time to write this book, because the wall of secrecy around the SIS in the relevant years is slightly more porous than it used to be.
By a stroke of fortune, Paddy Hayes’ book Queen of Spies, about my father’s colleague and contemporary Daphne Park, came out just when I was beginning my research. Not only is the book a cracking read, but it also supplied new clues and revelations about two of my father’s most significant postings—Hanoi and Ulan Bator. Paddy was also personally very helpful in pointing me in the right direction for further research.
The intelligence historian Professor Richard J Aldrich, Director of Research Degrees in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, knew my father and hosted him and other former SIS colleagues at seminars. Professor Aldrich gave me new information and pointed me in the direction of more.
The BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera contacted me some time ago to tell me of a CIA officer he’d interviewed who had sung my father’s praises. Gordon’s book The Art of Betrayal: Life and Death in the British Secret Service is an important contribution to espionage history. It was invaluable in writing this book, shedding particular light on the chapters which cover the 1950s.
Professor Scott Lucas, of the University of Birmingham, helped me to understand the UK/US manoeuvrings behind the Suez affair.
Thanks to the espionage writer Nigel West for confirming to me that his ‘outing’ of my father in The Faber Book of Spies was done with official sanction.
I’m grateful to Matthew Parris, whose published collections of diplomatic despatches have both amused and enlightened many readers in recent years about the work of the foreign service. Matthew referred me to Joe Lloyd, who spent a week researching for me at the Public Records Office in Kew, and unearthed large numbers of declassified cables from my father’s Vietnam and Mongolia postings.
In another accident of fortunate timing, Adam Sisman’s biography of John le Carré was published just before I wrote this book. Le Carré (real name: David Cornwell) was employed at different times by both major branches of British intelligence. Sisman’s account describes le Carré’s time in Austria, working for MI5, shortly before our time there, and gives details of his SIS training in 1950s London not long after my father joined the service. Sisman’s work helped me understand considerably more about the world in which my father worked.
On events in Malaysia and Indonesia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Leon Comber’s Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–60: The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency shone a light on one aspect of my father’s activities, and David Easter’s paper British Intelligence and Propaganda During the ‘Confrontation’, 1963–1966, in Intelligence and National Security, 2001, was helpful
in providing clues to his role during the Indonesian Konfrontasi.
Simon Kear’s paper The British Consulate-General in Hanoi, 1954–73, in Diplomacy & Statecraft, 1999, was also useful.
Sarah Ferguson, Andrew Sholl, James Jeffrey, Jim Middleton, Peter Logue and Peter Newport were among those kind enough to give me feedback on chapters of this book while it was in the making. Thanks also to Tim Curnow.
Finally, to the team at MUP. This book would not have been written without the frequent encouragement of Louise Adler, who first asked me to write it some years ago and was patient enough to wait until I was ready. Sally Heath has been an enormously encouraging and constructive midwife to the work, and I thank her for her patience when a medical crisis interrupted work for some time, about two-thirds of the way through. And many thanks to Paul Smitz, whose copyediting has been meticulous and who has corrected and guided my copy with friendly courtesy and admirable attention to detail.
Mark Colvin
Sydney, July 2016
Index
A Spy among Friends (Macintyre), 61
ABC: Bland, 213–14; Boyer Lectures, 214; Breakfast show, 188; Fraser cuts budget, 213; Nationwide, 2–3, 4, 230–1; use of Mark’s material, 45
ABC News: avoiding controversy, 185; bread-and-butter news, 185; Canberra, 186–9, 229; Cobar bushfire report, 190–1; double-dissolution story, 186–7; first story, 185–6; learning the skills, 182–3, 184, 185, 186, 189; NSW parliament, 188; newsroom, 183; Orange station, 189–90; reporters’ ‘voice pieces’, 190–1; reporting standards, 183; ‘research’, 184; return to, 229; Russ Handley, 183; shorthand course, 185, 186; switchboard, 184; telex, 18, 184; unions oppose cameras, 229
