Heartbreaker: Love, secrets and terror

by Nick Louth

  This was the last and most dangerous stage of a journey to interview the most powerful man in Southern Lebanon. Antoine Lahad, a retired lieutenant-general from the Lebanese Army, had run the SLA since 1984. He was either an icon of national salvation or a despicable turncoat, depending on which parts of Lebanon’s tangled ethnic thicket you came from. The Palestinians hated him, and they detested the SLA. It was a feeling that was reciprocated in full.

  While the SLA was implicated in many bloody acts, it was most notorious for one single horror, undertaken in three days in 1982. More than 3,000 Palestinian civilians, mainly women and children, had been slaughtered like cattle in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila while Israeli soldiers looked on.

  Today, seven years later, the SLA was ready to let the BBC interview its leader. Interviewing Lahad was a quest that for Wyrecliffe had begun months, even years ago. He had always known it might not work out. Things often didn’t in Lebanon, but in recent months the chances had improved. The bloodiest phase of the civil war seemed to be over, and the toll of death across the country was now down to the mid teens. Not per month, not per week. Per day. This was calm for Lebanon, unthinkable carnage for any other country. Still, that relative calm, and the upsurge in news elsewhere around the globe this year had given Wyrecliffe the break in his daily work schedule to try. London, by which he meant the BBC editing desk, was less likely to pester him when they had their hands full with the IRA bomb blast in Deal which had killed eleven soldiers, the Thames pleasure boat cut in two by a dredger with the loss of eighty-nine lives, the Tiananmen Square massacre whose death toll had run into hundreds, and above all the gradual collapse of the Iron Curtain. Lebanon would need an extraordinary news day to compete with that.

  Lahad had agreed to be interviewed, on camera, by the BBC for half an hour. It was a coup. No-one else from the international press had ever interviewed him, and the ‘non-interviews’ in sympathetic newspapers and on Maronite radio were just polemic rants. A true interview, with critical questioning, was what Wyrecliffe wanted. Getting it was another matter. Wyrecliffe’s initial list of questions, demanded by Lahad’s officials in advance, were systematically whittled down. Most emphatically, Lahad wouldn’t talk about the 1982 massacre, or his relationship with Elie Hobeika, the Christian Phalangist leader who had ordered it. Well, there are always ways.

  Then there was the location. Wyrecliffe had been ready to go as far south as Marjayoune, just south of the Litani River, a Maronite redoubt where Lahad lived. The SLA had other ideas. A secret location, finally dictated over a crackly phone line at 5am that morning. Wyrecliffe would wait at Soultaniye, a town two hours deeper into South Lebanon. He would then be escorted to Lahad’s operational headquarters nearby.

  A longer journey compounded the potential snags. Roadblocks. Israeli or militia action. A car breakdown. Or simply a warlord who had changed his mind.

  Soultaniye, a jumbled collection of cement homes, wooden sheds and olive groves looked deserted except for the stray goats which wandered around a burned out wreck of a car, and foraged amidst piles of rubbish. Adwan parked the car in the narrow main square as agreed, underneath a broken metal lamppost from which cables still looped towards a nearby house. He then tried one again to get a signal from the car radio, but he went right through the dial with nothing but the odd crackle.

  ‘Is broke,’ he said, finally.

  ‘Like everything on this blasted car,’ Wyrecliffe said, taking the opportunity to get out, stretch his bulky frame, and massage his sore buttock.

  Had he remembered to bring his short-wave radio, he should not only be able to get BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio Lebanon, but also Israeli Army Radio and the ad-hoc station run by the SLA. As it was, they had not heard a news bulletin since 6am. It made him all the more nervous about the huge risk they were running.

  Wyrecliffe’s senior colleague, Jim Moore, was away in Edinburgh for a long-booked family wedding. This meant leaving the office in Beirut in the youthful and inexperienced hands of Taseena al-Khalifa. Of mixed Lebanese/French and royal Saudi parentage, Taseena had buckets of confidence, connections and charm, but she was still only twenty-two and utterly new to the BBC’s rigid style. She had spent most of her brief time since graduation from the Sorbonne covering Lebanese politics for a Gulf-based Arab language news magazine. She used her beauty to charm elderly but powerful politicians, who routinely underestimated her nose for news. Wyrecliffe had recruited her as a stringer, a journalistic freelancer three months ago at a pifflingly small rate. Her job was to add some back-up to the reporting: good contacts, excellent Arabic, a few stints monitoring the local language news broadcasts for anything missed by Caversham, the BBC’s Reading-based monitoring facility. Neither Moore nor Wyrecliffe envisaged her doing much up-front reporting. She was there to help them prepare for the unexpected. She was there in what journalists universally call CYA mode: Cover Your Arse.

  Wyrecliffe had been warned that Taseena was ‘a looker’ by Associated Press bureau chief Mike Toller, who’d recommended her. But he hadn’t been quite prepared for the extraordinary glamour and poise she possessed. When he sat down to interview her, he was so distracted he dropped her application form, mislaid her Lebanese security credentials and forgot the questions he had intended to ask her. That was when he first experienced her laugh, something so warm and infectious that Toller had described it as being ‘bathed in sunshine’.

  Whatever her talents, she’d need to fit BBC needs, and Wyrecliffe had done his best to prepare her. He bluntly told her to forget trying to convey Lebanese politics to a UK audience. The Great British Public struggles to follow anything from the Middle East except death and disaster, preferably along the known fault lines of Arab versus Jew and Sunni versus Shia. ‘Lead from the facts,’ he said. ‘You’ll lose their attention, and that of the editors, with much more.’

  The facts need careful wrapping. Wyrecliffe had passed her a copy of the style guide, and recounted the essentials of reporting Lebanon for the BBC. First, good reporters avoid emotionally loaded descriptions. Say guerrillas or preferably militants not terrorists. Say explosion, or blast, if you hear one. Don’t use the term bomb until you know for sure it is one. In a typical minute of air time there is barely enough for the ‘what, when and how’ essentials of a bombing or attack. The ‘who’ needs careful handling, and you’ll rarely have time for much on ‘why’ even though that may interest you most. All news stories have to compete for air time with whatever is happening elsewhere. It’s not a story for London unless we have at least ten dead bodies here, if they are locals. Road accidents, gas blasts and other civil carnage isn’t news until we’re in the realms of twenty to thirty dead. Dead or kidnapped foreigners are more interesting, of course. The minimum for London interest is three Europeans, two Aussies or Kiwis, or a single Brit or American. Brutal, yes, but absolutely standard.

  Wyrecliffe had left her his ‘boilerplate’ file, in which three typical Lebanese news events were effectively pre-written in BBC style. They were called Bombing, Clashes and Other, respectively. All she had to fill in was the body count (always headline and first paragraph) the source for this number (preferably a hospital), and to remember to pick initially the lowest figure if death tolls varied. ‘If you get conflicting numbers,’ Wyrecliffe had said, ‘be conservative. Say you have twenty-six, fifteen and twelve from different sources. Then say ‘At least twelve people have died in…’ that’s the best way to handle it. Nothing is worse than grabbing a headline with reports of eighty-five deaths and having to row back to seventeen later on.’

  All that he had passed on in the interview, while trying not to stare too deeply into those big kohl-lined eyes. He had done all he could, but now everything was in Taseena’s hands. She was the CYA resource.

  But now there was no radio for him to check up on her. Without being able to pick up news bulletins he was running blind and that always made him nervous and irritable. There had been talk months ago of London
making available to Middle East region one of their three precious new satellite uplinks. These suitcase-sized monsters took fifteen minutes to set up and came with a satellite dish the size of a wok, but enabled correspondents to stay in touch and file copy wherever they were. Wyrecliffe had put in a plea to be allocated one, as had pretty much every correspondent outside Europe. Lebanon’s phone system was dire in the best of times, even before the Israeli invasion, but that could equally be said of Lagos, Nairobi and even Mexico City. The first uplinker dispatched last month to cover East Berlin street protests had been stupidly labelled for what it was, and seized by East German airport officials before it had ever been used. BBC’s bean counters had then issued an edict stipulating they were only to be used ‘where there is a reasonable chance they will not be lost or damaged.’ Nowhere near a news story, then.

  So as things stood, Taseena wouldn’t be able to contact him, and he could only ring her by prevailing on a local villager en-route. On top of that, the SLA hadn’t so far deigned to send anyone to meet them.

  ‘Why isn’t there anyone here to meet us?’ Wyrecliffe asked, draining one of their four remaining litre bottles of mineral water. It was warm after six hours in the car, but still refreshing.

  ‘We’re late,’ said Baxter. ‘It’s half two. They said 2pm. Maybe they’ve given up.’

  ‘Come on, Rick, this is Lebanon for Christ’s sake,’ Wyrecliffe said. ‘Lebanese punctuality means arriving on the same day as agreed, screw the time.’

  Adwan honked the horn a few times. An old woman clad in black skirt, shapeless woollens and a headscarf emerged from a doorway. She and Adwan engaged in a shouted conversation in a mixture of Arabic and French.

  He turned to Wyrecliffe. ‘She say Lahad people at next village.’

  The woman gesticulated to Wyrecliffe, pointing south and then dismissed them with a flicked wrist go-away gesture and a final volley of speech.

  ‘Who are the sons of dogs?’ Wyrecliffe asked, his limited Arabic not able to pick up more than the insult.

  The driver chuckled. ‘Hezbollah. She say Hezbollah fired a rocket which hit village early today. Kill her chickens. Only two left.’

  Wyrecliffe leant against the car, lit a cigarette and flexed his aching back.

  Somewhere in the distance there was the crack of small arms fire. Five or six shots. Then nothing.

  ‘That’s why there was no reception committee,’ Wyrecliffe said. ‘Let’s take a closer look.’ They climbed back in the car, and Fouad Adwan gunned the engine, taking the vehicle right at the square between stone cottages and up a twisting dirt lane towards the Maronite church which occupied the highest point in the town. From its hibiscus-overgrown graveyard they could clearly see the valley between them and the next hilltop village of Tebnine. The glint of a stream winding through orchards and vegetable plots gave way on the higher slopes to ancient olive groves, edged with dry stone walls and goat folds. Wyrecliffe scanned the scene with binoculars, looking for signs of tents, pick-up trucks or anything which might indicate the presence of an SLA base. The scoop now hung in the balance. If Hezbollah had got this far south, which wasn’t usual, they would fire rockets into Israel another eight miles further on. Those rockets probably wouldn’t do any damage, but the retaliation – and there always was retaliation – would come in the form of artillery fire. The guerrillas would be gone, but all too often Christian homes nearby would be damaged. Lahad would have other matters on his hands than a BBC interview.

  Wyrecliffe had a dilemma. He could wait for the SLA reception committee to come to him. Which might never happen. Or he could take the risk of going out to find them. Further in the distance there was a more sustained bout of gunfire which lasted about thirty seconds. Looking back on this moment, years later, he thought this was the time he should have turned back. But he was a BBC correspondent in a war zone. You don’t turn back when you hear shooting. You go to it. That’s where the news is.

  ‘What do you think, Fouad?’ Wyrecliffe asked. ‘Would the road be mined?’

  The Palestinian shrugged. ‘God willing, not. Too far south. But who knows, the SLA are crazy bastards.’

  ‘I vote we wait here. It’s where we are supposed to be met,’ Baxter said. ‘Give ’em an hour.’

  Wyrecliffe looked at his watch. ‘No, I think they’ve forgotten us. An hour waiting is another hour out of touch. Let’s go.’

  Baxter groaned as Adwan started the engine. They drove back through the town, taking a sharp right down the rutted hill into the valley, passing a wheel-less and rusted Soviet truck, Syrian army markings still visible, and a reminder of how fought over this terrain was. The vehicle might have met its end in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967 or 1973, or more likely in the Syrian interventions in Lebanon of 1976. Or perhaps later still. Take your pick. The labyrinth of Lebanese suffering defeated all but the locals, who knew every twist and turn of the country’s agony.

  From Tebnine a dust cloud betrayed the passage of another vehicle, travelling towards them at speed, horn blaring. It gradually distilled into a battered pick-up with at least two armed figures in the back. Wyrecliffe’s stomach tightened. He reached over to the back seat and fished out a large piece of dirty white card with the word PRESS written on it in marker pen letters a foot high. He pressed it against the windscreen, and prayed, as he always did in such circumstances, for literacy amongst the militias.

  Four hundred metres away, the other vehicle started flashing its headlamps. Adwan pulled off the road and slewed to a halt, flashing lights in response.

  ‘Our reception committee, finally,’ Wyrecliffe said, tossing the PRESS card into the back seat.

  The pick-up screeched to a halt beside them. There were at least six armed men in it. An angry-looking driver leaned out and yelled something at them.

  ‘BBC,’ boomed Wyrecliffe, pointing to the cardboard sign as he and Baxter got out of the car. ‘Interview. Lahad.’ He pointed further up the road.

  ‘Moawad, Moawad!’ moaned one moustachioed man standing in the body of the pick-up. He was beating his chest with a fist, his face full of tears. Taped in the vehicle’s front window was a picture, hastily edged in black, of Rene Moawad, the Christian President of Lebanon, and underneath the single Arabic word qatala.

  Murdered.

  ‘Jesus, Moawad’s been assassinated?’ whispered Baxter.

  Wyrecliffe groaned as his worst nightmare appeared before him. Fouad shouted for a confirmation from the SLA driver and got one. Yes, Moawad was killed today, by a car bomb. The most important man in the country, blown to pieces.

  ‘He’s only been president a couple of weeks,’ Baxter said, as if Lebanon’s crazy fratricidal politics paid any respect to such things.

  ‘Fuck the bloody radio. Fuck FUCK! We’ll have to get back now,’ Wyrecliffe muttered, pounding the car roof.

  Everything, including Wyrecliffe’s BBC career, now depended on how Taseena handled the story in their absence. For all the preparations in the boilerplate file, and all the advice to her, Wyrecliffe had known he had left himself vulnerable. He had known it. Murphy’s law of broadcasting: the big story breaks always when only a junior is on duty. Now this had happened. There was nothing in the boilerplate about presidential assassinations. She would have access to the Reuters terminal, and probably copy from the Associated Press in the adjacent office too, if she used her initiative. Maybe someone from the AP would offer a helping hand, maybe not, as they would be run off their feet too. She might be able to hold the fort for a few hours on spot copy, but London would very soon be wanting to speak to him for interpretation, background and analysis. He had broken the cardinal rule. He was off-base, six hours’ drive away at least from Beirut, and out of contact.

  Wyrecliffe began to ask the SLA men about the president, and where the nearest telephone might be, but the pick-up was already pulling away. Over the tailgate the weeping man shouted into the skies and then tossed them something. It was done with such gentleness, such underha
nd bowling precision that Wyrecliffe for a split second took it to be a gift. Perhaps fruit, bread or some fond SLA memento from the wasted life of Rene Moawad.

  Well, perhaps it was the latter.

  ‘Grenade!’ yelled Adwan, throwing himself down. Wyrecliffe saw, as in slow motion, the grenade fall ten feet behind the Peugeot. It bounced a foot off the ground, turning gently, a little puff of dust following it into the air as it described a balletic arc, showing the full three hundred and sixty degrees of its elegant killing simplicity. The ringed safety pin was missing, the detonator lever released and standing out, the typical three second fuse almost gone. All this Wyrecliffe absorbed in a silent millisecond as he hurled himself as far forward along the side of the car as he could. Baxter had dived into the car’s back seat. There seemed no sound of explosion. Just an enfolding hiss of static, like a TV without a signal. In his head he was shouting, screaming even, but he could hear nothing but this fizzing, roaring ocean.

  Chapter Three

  BBC Radio 4 studio, TV Centre, Wood, Lane London

  April 2009

  James Naughtie, in thick cardigan and headphones, looked at the clock.

  ‘The time now is 7.15. Now, it’s often said that Britain is a greying nation. Yet the care homes industry according to a recent report is failing to provide the level of care that we should expect. There was, as you remember, that shocking report on the Beeches, the care home in Nottingham, now closed down. However, according to a report just released by the new Care Quality Commission, more than a third of care homes are not up to the job. To discuss this we have on the line Sandra Ellgood of the Commission, and in our radio car, Paul Neesdale, who represents the care industry association.