Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  About the Book

  It was on 6 June 2004 that BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner and cameraman Simon Cumbers were ambushed by Al-Qaeda gunmen in a quiet Riyadh back street. Simon was killed outright. Frank was hit in the shoulder and leg. As he lay in the dust, a figure stood over him and pumped four more bullets into his body at point blank range . . .

  Against all the odds, Frank Gardner survived. Ten years on from that horrendous attack, although partly paralysed, he continues to travel the world reporting for the BBC.

  His acclaimed, moving and inspiring memoir is now brought up to date with a new chapter recalling his return to Saudi Arabia for the first time since he was shot. This anniversary edition is a reaffirmation of his deep understanding of – and affection for – the Middle East in these uncertain times.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword by John Simpson

  Map

  1 Hit for Six: Getting Shot

  2 Early Encounters

  3 Living in Cairo

  4 From Bedouin to Bahrain

  5 Journalism pre 9/11

  6 Arabia post 9/11

  7 London: Spooks and Sources

  8 Iraq and Afghanistan: the New Jihad

  9 From Riyadh to Rehab

  10 Making Sense of It All

  Afterword

  Going Back

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Frank Gardner

  Copyright

  For my parents, Grace and Neil

  FOREWORD

  This is an important book about one of the dominating issues of our time: the rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism, and its collision with Western society. It is also a desperately sad and personal book. Frank Gardner was partially paralysed as a result of a murderous and entirely unprovoked attack by a group of Al-Qaeda gunmen while he was filming in Saudi Arabia in 2004; his cameraman, Simon Cumbers, an Irishman who was a great favourite with everyone in British television who knew him, was murdered in cold blood. Frank himself survived only through the most remarkable good fortune. Now he has woven together the two strands of his story, the personal and the geopolitical, into a compelling and sometimes disturbing narrative.

  But this is not all about bombs and bullets. Frank’s twenty-five years in the Middle East encompass many happy experiences: living with the Bedu in the deserts of Jordan, learning Arabic with a family in the backstreets of Cairo, or riding for two days down to Khartoum on the roof of a train. In this book he reveals a little-known side of the Arab world that he feels privileged to have seen.

  There are plenty of good books about militant Islamism, but Frank is able to provide us with a unique understanding of the phenomenon: as an Arabic-speaker, as a correspondent who has lived in the Arab world, and as a professional observer of international terrorism. And finally, we could add, as someone who has come close enough to be marked by it for life.

  The world has been plagued by political or religious terrorism – the two have often been deeply intertwined – since the 1960s. Yet in the past the most violent organizations had specific aims, and specific enemies; even if many, perhaps most, of those who were killed as a result of their actions had nothing to do with the basic cause. And somewhere in the minds of the activists and their apologists there was usually a faint sense that murdering innocent passers-by was something to be ashamed of, or at the very least explained away.

  For more than a decade now, the religious terrorism which Osama Bin Laden has espoused from his refuges in Afghanistan and Pakistan has troubled itself very little about who, precisely, it has killed. There have been disputes within the Al-Qaeda movement about the value of indiscriminate killing, but it still goes on. Hundreds of those who died in the Twin Towers attack on 11 September 2001 were not Americans; some of those who died or were injured in the London bombings of 7 July 2005 were Muslims. None of it mattered. The aim was to kill as many people as spectacularly as possible. Politicians and newspapers have used the word ‘terrorist’ to describe just about every act of political violence since the early 1970s, and it has therefore come to be an undifferentiated term of abuse. Yet attacks like those on the World Trade Center and the public-transport systems of Madrid and London were, in the precise sense of the word, planned with the intention of causing terror.

  Frank Gardner and Simon Cumbers were attacked because they happened to be Europeans and their attackers happened to spot them. The gang that shot them was later involved in the savage murders of two Americans. All of them, Frank, Simon and the Americans, were targets, not because of what they did, but because of their ethnicity. That has always been a defining characteristic of Al-Qaeda. Any Westerner who worked alongside or reported on the mujahideen uprising against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan quickly learned how dangerous some jihadists could be: even though the common enemy was supposedly the Russians. The extremists hated all non-Muslims, regardless of their origin or motivation.

  For his part, Frank Gardner has had a lifelong respect for and love of the Islamic world, like so many of us who have worked in Muslim countries. Nothing that he has experienced has changed that. His perspective on Al-Qaeda and the threat it poses is a unique one: not only does he have an authoritative insight into the Al-Qaeda phenomenon, he has looked an Al-Qaeda team in the face and survived. In understanding what happened to Frank and to Simon Cumbers, and honouring them both accordingly, we can begin to appreciate more about the causes and nature of the threat which people like their attackers present to us.

  John Simpson,

  BBC World Affairs Editor.

  January 2006

  1

  Hit for Six: Getting Shot

  ‘DO YOU HAVE time for some supper?’ called Amanda from the kitchen.

  I looked at my watch. It was Tuesday 1 June 2004 and the car taking me to Heathrow airport would be here in twenty minutes, but I was packed and ready to go. ‘I’ll be right down,’ I replied, and walked out of our bedroom, unaware that that was the last time I would ever see it.

  Three days earlier there had been a bloodthirsty raid by Al-Qaeda fanatics in the eastern Saudi town of Al-Khobar. A small but well-armed team of terrorists had gone on the rampage, looking for Westerners and non-Muslims to kidnap and kill. First they found a prominent British expatriate, Michael Hamilton, as he arrived at his office. They shot him dead in his car, then tied his body to their car bumper and dragged it around town for over a mile in some kind of grisly parade of their power. Then, masquerading as government security forces, they marched into the Oasis compound, a large residential complex housing many Westerners, Indians and Filipinos who worked in jobs administrating the country’s vast oil industry, meeting no resistance at the poorly defended gatehouse. They worked their way methodically through the buildings, rounding up all those they suspected of being non-Muslims. Having questioned them on their religion, according to the testimony of survivors, the militants coolly slit the throats of the ‘non-believers’, Al-Qaeda’s usual term for non-Muslims. The siege appeared to end in front of local TV cameras with the arrival of Saudi commandos who landed by helicopter on the roof of one of the buildings. But in fact the Saudi authorities had done a deal with the terrorists, believing it was the only way to spare massive bloodshed. Fearing that Al-Qaeda had several hundred hostages at their mercy, the Saudi authorities allowed three of the four terrorists to escape from the premises. But by the time order was restored in Al-Khobar, twenty-two people had been killed.

  The raid came as a shock to most Saudis. Yes, there had been suicide bombings and attacks on Western
ers before, but almost none here, in the normally tranquil Eastern Province of the country. Al-Khobar was a quiet, dull place that existed to serve the oil industry. Its grid-patterned streets were laid out like a small US city, its neon signs advertised Kentucky Fried Chicken and other fast-food outlets. There was no public entertainment and very little for expatriate Westerners to do other than drive across the nearby causeway to freewheeling Bahrain or fantasize about the next annual leave in Bangkok.

  Saudi Arabia’s charismatic ambassador to London at the time, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, had wasted no time in touring the TV news studios to defend his government’s record in tackling terrorism. I interviewed him on Monday night for the ten o’clock news. A former Saudi spymaster, Prince Turki was unusually open and frank. He took the view that his country had nothing to hide and encouraged British journalists to visit, helping with urgent visa requests. I was to go there to report for BBC News together with Simon Cumbers, a freelance Irish cameraman and trusted veteran of countless BBC assignments.

  That night Amanda and I sat up talking late into the night. My wife was understandably anxious about my forthcoming trip; clearly there were people on the loose in Saudi Arabia who hated Westerners with a passion. ‘Do you have to go to Saudi?’ she asked. I did not. Unlike some other TV networks, the BBC is quite reasonable about asking people to go to difficult places and I have never personally been told the equivalent of ‘Go to Baghdad or pick up your P45.’ It had been nearly a year now since I had last been to Riyadh, a great deal had happened there since then and people in News felt this was the right moment to update viewers on what was going on in this under-reported country. Besides, Saudi Arabia was not considered a high-risk-category country like Iraq or Afghanistan; I knew of no visiting journalists who had ever been threatened there.

  ‘Then are you taking a flak jacket?’ asked Amanda. This was a touchy subject between us: she has always maintained I agreed at our wedding never to be a flak-jacket journalist, a pledge I have no recollection of making. In truth, though, I have never seen myself as a ‘war correspondent’, believing that no story is worth getting shot for, although there are occasions when it is wise to wear a flak jacket as a precaution. But I did not feel this was one of them: no civilians wore flak jackets in Saudi Arabia and if anything it would only attract unwelcome attention. But Amanda’s concerns troubled me, not just because I did not want her to worry while I was away but because she has an uncanny knack of being right about places she has never even been to. ‘So what are you going to say when terrorists have got a gun to your head?’ she asked me. I tried to reassure her – and myself, for that matter – that I would not get into such a situation, that we were going to tread extremely carefully on this trip, going nowhere without a government escort. We would have absolutely no contact with anyone hostile to the government and we would put ourselves entirely in the care of our Saudi minders, and knowing how overcautious they tend to be, our only problem should be not getting enough access to interesting subjects. One of the last things I packed was a miniature copy of the Koran, one of several I keep to give as presents to hospitable Muslim hosts, a gesture that always brings great appreciation.

  I kissed my wife and children goodbye and watched them recede through the car’s back window on that warm summer night. I tried to dismiss the feeling of unease I had in the pit of my stomach, reminding myself that Saudi Arabia was a country I knew well and had been to countless times since 1989, and that I’d always felt safe there. Soon I was at Terminal Three, helping Simon heft heavy cases of camera equipment on to the scales at check-in. He and his wife Louise had their own freelance TV production company, Locum Productions, and with his innate sense of fair play Simon had recently felt bad about asking one of his cameramen to go to Baghdad. He had resolved that when the next filming trip to the Middle East came up he would take it on himself.

  We flew overnight to Manama, where a man from the Saudi Interior Ministry met us to escort us over the causeway that connects the island of Bahrain to the Saudi mainland and the oil town of Al-Khobar. When we drew up at the local five-star hotel, the Al-Khobar Meridien, I could hardly believe it: Saudi security had set up a sandbag gun emplacement outside, backed by an armoured car. This was a businessmen’s hotel which I had often stayed in in my former incarnation as a Gulf banker, but even during the dark days of the Gulf War in 1991 there had never been anything like this atmosphere of brooding tension. I had only been away eleven months and already this was not the Saudi Arabia I knew.

  The next few days were a blur of hastily filmed and edited reports for our television news bulletins. Having got a team into Saudi Arabia, the BBC was keen to use us to the max. Not surprisingly, the attack in Al-Khobar had sent the global oil markets into jitters, sparking fears that any more brazen attacks like this would damage the output of the world’s biggest oil producer and exporter. But the Saudi authorities believed they had nothing to hide from our news camera. They allowed us, under close escort, to get right into the heart of their oil-producing and exporting industry and it gave them the opportunity to show off their tight security. We had even been allowed to film one of their most highly guarded sites, the loading terminal on the Gulf coast at Ras Tanura, one of the Kingdom’s economic lifelines.

  So in my TV reports I had made the point that while Al-Qaeda-linked groups had successfully attacked a relatively small number of Westerners and other non-Muslims living here, they had so far failed to make any impact on Saudi Arabia’s oil production itself. I wanted to dispel the myth that the Saudi oil industry would collapse the day after Western expertise departed. In fact Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, employs a majority of Saudis. Westerners, mainly Americans, tend to be involved more in long-term planning and finance than in day-to-day production. In the Eastern Province our days passed in a whirlwind of filming, driving and frantic editing in our hotel room, followed by a dash up the motorway to the nearest satellite uplink station in time to make the one, six or ten o’clock TV news in Britain; in other words, pretty much typical of a foreign newsgathering trip following a major event.

  Simon seemed to have endless patience and good humour. With the clock ticking against us he would juggle two conversations at once, talking down the phone to the satellite intake desk in London while simultaneously cajoling the local Saudi technicians into trying a failed connection one more time. Once, when we had been out filming all day and had just sat down to a plate of sandwiches, Simon looked at me and said mildly, ‘Do you realize we’ve only got forty minutes left to cut this film for the six o’clock news? That’s not very long, is it?’

  In the middle of this schedule I was invited to attend the memorial service for Michael Hamilton, the first Westerner found by Al-Qaeda on their murderous spree a few days earlier. The service was held in a schoolhouse in Al-Khobar and I sat at the back, as discreetly as I could, taking notes for the report I needed to file for the Radio 4 six o’clock news. I had never known Michael Hamilton, but was overwhelmed by the sadness and futility of his death. One had only to look round the room at his mourners to judge his popularity: Saudis, Britons, Bahrainis and Indians had all come to pay their respects. The British ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, read a deeply moving tribute and that night we interviewed him in his hotel room, sharing my packet of Walkers shortbread fingers for which the ambassador admitted a weakness. Cowper-Coles’s previous posting had been as ambassador in Tel Aviv and he had a refreshing tendency to tell it how it is. ‘Saudi Arabia does have a serious problem with terrorism,’ he said, ‘and I predict there will be more attacks on Westerners.’ Prescient as he was, he could not have foreseen that Simon and I were to be Al-Qaeda’s next victims.

  On the Friday we took the short flight to Riyadh and spent the afternoon at a barbecue with British expatriates in their walled compound. Friday is the day off in Saudi so this was half work, half pleasure. Our intention was to film a slice of Western expatriate life and interview Britons about their new fears of Islamist terrorism. Life
here had recently taken a turn for the worse, they said. They had accepted for some time the risk of being caught up in a suicide bombing but now there was a new horror: being taken hostage and then executed in cold blood, on the basis of one’s religion or the colour of one’s skin. The expats had been hearing reports of Al-Qaeda scouts marking Westerners’ number plates with chalk to indicate them as potential targets. (Within ten days there were to be two separate kidnappings and murders of Americans in Saudi, but I would not be conscious to report on them.)

  When we checked into our Riyadh hotel we saw similar security precautions to those in Al-Khobar. A chicane of concrete roadblocks zigzagged across the road up to reception, presumably to deter truck-bombers, but I noticed there was no visible armed guard on duty and this worried me. If Al-Qaeda decided to raid this hotel and go through it room by room, I did not believe there would be much to stop them. As soon as I was allocated my room I went over to the window and decided that if there was to be an armed raid I could probably jump down on to the tree below, which would break my fall. I felt that a raid was unlikely, though; not because Al-Qaeda might be put off by the security – they had been growing increasingly brazen in their attacks – but the summer heat meant there were so few Western guests in the hotel it would hardly have been worth their time.

  Simon and I had come to Riyadh with the aim of reporting on the deeper story of how the Saudi authorities were combating the country’s Al-Qaeda-inspired terror cells. The previous summer I had been granted unprecedented access to Saudi’s counter-terrorist teams in training, filming them on my own in 45-degree heat at a secret base on the outskirts of Riyadh. We were hoping to build on this by interviewing senior security officials who could brief us on their strategy now that Al-Qaeda had raised the stakes by attacking the hinterland of the oil industry. We spent a morning traipsing round various offices in the Ministry of Information, applying for permission to film. Saudi Arabia does not allow unescorted film crews, partly for their own safety. Many Saudis still have a xenophobic view of outsiders, making them deeply suspicious of foreigners with cameras, convinced they are trying to film their women or pass the footage to some Western government.