Heartbreaker: Love, secrets and terror

by Nick Louth

  Over the headphones, Wyrecliffe heard it too, gallery producer Sandra Kulczek said: ‘We’ve lost the radio car, Jim. Chris we’ve got David Willey from Rome, but let’s hold him and move Simon up. His interviewee is primed.

  ‘We seem to have lost the radio car,’ Naughtie intoned. Never mind, we’ll come back to this story in a few minutes. We’ll also be interviewing health minister Andy Burnham at ten past eight.

  ‘Cue Chris. Time check.’

  ‘It’s 7.19,’ Wyrecliffe said. ‘British Airways has just reported its latest quarterly results, and once again losses have risen. Here’s Simon Jack with the details,’ Wyrecliffe said, nodding to the younger besuited man sitting at a console nearby. BA chief executive Willy Walsh was primed to go at the BBC’s tiny studio at the London Stock Exchange. The interview would probably be a minute, perhaps even less, which was pretty much all the time that such a confined space was bearable, at least to captains of industry.

  As the business segment kicked in, Wyrecliffe took a sip of coffee, and looked closely at page six of the Financial Times which was propped up on his keyboard next to a half-finished fruit salad. He checked it against his scripted piece on the banking crisis in Ireland, and spoke to the gallery.

  ‘Can someone look at this script quickly before we get the Irish finance minister on the line? The figures look wrong. Isn’t this billions not millions?’

  Wyrecliffe got an acknowledgment from the gallery. They were anxious not to screw this one up, seeing as the last time the minister had been asked for interview he’d been unable to get in before Thought for the Day and ended up being boshed, pushed off the schedule. There hadn’t been time to squeeze him in before the weather which had to be started by 7.58am, or they’d risk crashing the eight o’clock pips, the sacred signal that marks the formal news bulletin.

  Just as he was turning the page on the FT, Wyrecliffe did a double take. Like the uncanny ability to hear your own name whispered in a crowded room, he had pickedup, somewhere on the page, the name Taseena. It took a few moments to find it. Yes, being quoted under her married name Christodopoulos, in a report from Dubai about a new satellite channel for which she was the first female head of news. So, she was still breaking glass ceilings. Was she happy or not? Did she ever think of him? He always thought of her, always. Every day, as he was waking up, even though he hadn’t seen her for nearly twenty years. The discovery unsettled him for a moment, so that when the Irish finance minister finally did come on the line, Wyrecliffe had mislaid the questions he wanted to ask him. It was the effect Taseena had always seemed to have on him.

  Chapter Four

  Lebanon

  November 1989

  Wyrecliffe had lucid memories of that fateful day. He could still feel the searing heat of the blazing car, with Baxter still inside, struggling to get out. He tore open the door, leaving a layer of skin on the searing metal handle, and pulling the moaning cameraman out to lie shivering on the ground. He somehow retrieved the insulating space blanket from under the driver’s seat, knowing Baxter would need it. Then he ripped a sleeve from his own shirt to make a tourniquet for a jagged shrapnel wound high on Adwan’s inner thigh, and struggling with only partial success to stop the bright blood squirting out. He bellowed for help, turning in every direction and roaring in French, English and broken Arabic that there were two injured in need of help. The yells clattered around the dusty hills. Was there no one nearby? Or were they too scared to come?

  He scrutinised his injured crew, wondering how to get them both to safety, after the sickening realisation that no water or first aid supplies had survived the conflagration. Baxter, shaking and incoherent, had weeping mottled burns to face and hands, but attempted to stand. An agonised yell revealed the cameraman had a shattered ankle too. He tumbled to the dusty ground. Adwan, pressing the tourniquet to his leg, called for Wyrecliffe to listen to him. The young Palestinian, father of two young children, was conscious enough for a selfless gesture.

  ‘Take Rick for help. I’ll be alright.’

  ‘That’s a terrible leg wound,’ Wyrecliffe said gently, seeing the impromptu tourniquet already dyed scarlet. ‘I’m worried about it.’

  Baxter was unable to walk, but with burns that were perhaps too painful to risk him being carried. But would he die of shock left alone? The weight of decisions was crushing. Adwan ran the risk of bleeding to death if left alone. Or worse if Phalangists found him. A Palestinian refugee, with a Lebanese ID card listing him as Muslim, was as good as dead down here. The BBC accreditation he also carried would make little difference. If he hid his ID they might assume he was Hezbollah, a recipe for torture first, then death. That Fouad Adwan was willing to drive a BBC crew deep into enemy territory had marked out an extraordinary but nonchalant courage. So Wyrecliffe made the decision that of the two, Baxter, a British national and clearly so, was safer to be left behind. The SLA would not harm him, at least not deliberately, not as an act of policy.

  Wyrecliffe knelt by the side of the barely conscious Baxter. ‘Rick, listen to me. I’m going to take Fouad for help. I’ll get back as soon as I can. Stay in the shade, okay?’

  Baxter nodded, and looked up. Wyrecliffe wondered if it was the last time he would see his cameraman alive. He turned to Fouad Adwan, and squatted down, easing his arms under his back and thighs to help him stand. As he did so, Wyrecliffe bent down, reached between the Palestinian’s thighs, and hauled him across his shoulders in a fireman’s lift. That wasn’t just the easiest way to take the weight, but allowed him to compress the soundman’s wound with his forearm. Getting him up there wasn’t difficult. Wyrecliffe was a big man, and Adwan wasn’t. But he was still a good ten stone, 140 pounds. During rugby training at Balliol, Wyrecliffe had once run four hundred metres in just over two minutes carrying a hundredweight sack of potatoes on his shoulders. But carrying someone for an hour or more, uphill back to Soultaniye was going to be more of a challenge, especially without water, and in thirty degree heat.

  ‘Tell me about your kids, Fouad,’ Wyrecliffe said, trying to stop his charge slipping into unconsciousness. ‘How many have you got?’

  ‘Two. There is Hakim, who is…’ he whispered

  ‘How old is he, Fouad? How old is Hakim?’

  ‘He is ten years, a lovely boy.’

  Wyrecliffe coaxed out the details of Fouad Adwan’s life. The two kids he doted on, his young wife Noura, his own four brothers and three sisters, his father Abu Saleem.

  How far was it to Soultaniye? Four miles, maybe five? Uphill it felt like twenty. After the first half hour, having changed positions half a dozen times, Wyrecliffe realised he was drenched with Adwan’s blood. The soundman had long since failed to respond to his conversation, and looking back all he could see was a long gory trail of crimson drips pocking the dust down into the valley. The journey never seemed to end. Wyrecliffe realised that this would have been part of the same journey north that Fouad’s grandfather had taken, back in 1948 when the family was forced out of their home in Jaffa, now Haifa. More than fifty years later Fouad himself was taking a part of that journey, and in even more danger.

  A child was tending goats on the edge of the town. Wyrecliffe bellowed in French for directions to a doctor. The child pointed, and ran alongside as Wyrecliffe lumbered on to the indicated house. The woman he saw there identified herself as the town’s midwife and, from the moaning coming from a nearby room, she was busy. He laid Adwan gently down onto a rug to ask her to look. He was unconscious and the blood flow appeared to have stopped. The midwife listened to his chest, checked his pulse, and shrugged an apology.

  ‘Desolee. Fini,’ she said with the brevity of one just as familiar with the end of life as the start of it. The same medical scramble, ending in one case with the cries of a child, and in the other, silence. Wyrecliffe spent the next ten minutes trying to resuscitate Adwan. She went back into the bedroom after first telling him to move the bloody corpse off the mother-to-be’s best rug.

  From then on
things got hazy. Wyrecliffe had no recollection of the phone call to Taseena he made from Soultaniye, nor of the call to the duty editor in London, nor of hiring an informal but outrageously expensive taxi there to get Baxter and himself back to Beirut. He had no recollection of that long and grim journey, of stumbling into the cramped BBC office at 11pm that night, having taken Baxter to hospital. But he did recall the shock on Taseena’s face at seeing him, her blood-spattered boss, lurching into the newsroom and demanding to see the day’s copy. Only after she had given him the sheaf of papers, and he had watched the VCR tape of the piece used by the Six O’Clock News, did he agree to go to the bathroom and let her carefully remove the shirt, thick with dried blood that had matted into his chest and back hairs.

  ‘I think you need a new shirt,’ she had said, as she gently soaked it with wet paper towels, then millimetre by millimetre peeled it off, a process that had taken half an hour. Once he was stripped to the waist, she washed off the dried blood on his hair, neck and back. Her warm and slender hands, slick with soap on his chest and back, were a sensual frisson and a comfort, the first for many hours, and he tremblingly surrendered to it. She held his hands and said kind words. In the mirror he was shocked to see his own eyes: haunted, aged, alien. And the top half-inch of his right ear, gone, with barely a speck of blood. It hadn’t hurt at all until he saw it. And then it hurt like hell.

  How he had got through the next two days of back-to-back TV and radio bulletins he had no idea. The car bomb that killed the Lebanese president and twenty-five bystanders had weighed a quarter of a tonne, big even by Lebanese standards, and had blown the armoured Mercedes carrying the president dozens of feet into the air. Radio 4 presenter Brian Redhead had asked Wyrecliffe who could be behind it, and the answer was simple: almost anyone. The truth was that Moawad was a genuine moderate, probably the only man capable of uniting a fractured nation. Dozens of different factions, seeking profit from Lebanese agony, had a motive for killing him.

  Three days after hurriedly depositing Baxter in hospital, Wyrecliffe finally found time to visit him. He’d made sure the cameraman was in a private hospital in the east of the city, where those with money had the best treatment. His burns, to face hands and neck, were no more than second degree. The ankle, smashed by a large piece of shrapnel which tore right through the car, was now pinned.

  For Wyrecliffe another blow arrived a week after the assassination, after the editorial and staff department phone debrief, where all the platitudes and sympathy and false admiration had been trotted out for his attempts to save Fouad Adwan. It was then that BBC regional manager Alastair Marsh, who had flown in specially from Jerusalem, took Wyrecliffe aside into a stairwell and gave him an almighty echoing bollocking for being stupid enough to take a Palestinian soundman into SLA-held territory. Marsh, a sharp and clever Scot who had been a legendary foreign correspondent in his day, wasn’t interested in Wyrecliffe’s explanation that only Fouad Adwan was available that day. That Adwan had volunteered counted for nothing either. Marsh didn’t care that he was the best soundman in Beirut. Nor, as he put it, did he ‘care a toss’ that Adwan could pass himself off as a Christian, with enough of an accent and slang to fool the keenest Phalangist. Most unjustly of all, Marsh didn’t even consider the fact that Fouad Adwan’s death was as random as most deaths in Lebanon. Wyrecliffe knew that Adwan wasn’t killed that day because he was a Muslim. He wasn’t killed because he was a Palestinian. He died because a jagged lump of metal from a grenade thrown by a grieving gunman happened to tear an artery in his leg. His leg, not the leg of anyone else who was in the vicinity. Marsh may, deep down, have agreed. But his conclusion was that Wyrecliffe was culpable because in his frenzy to get a scoop he’d put an enthusiastic young freelancer in danger.

  ‘Your ambition got the better of you,’ Marsh said, his pale eyebrows arched beneath his balding pate. ‘And it’s not for the first time.’

  That was not a judgement that Wyrecliffe could contest. He didn’t even want to. Because the truth was that Marsh’s conclusion exactly matched his own.

  Marsh did give Wyrecliffe one break. He volunteered to put together the formal BBC letter of protest at the killing, to be signed by the Director-General. He might ask Wyrecliffe for detailed advice for exactly whom to give it to, given that the SLA didn’t have liaison officers, or a Beirut head office. In any cases copies would be sent to the Lebanese government, the press office of the Israeli Army, which was the SLA’s paymaster, and to the British Embassy in Lebanon.

  One thing that Wyrecliffe had forgotten completely only emerged a month after Fouad Adwan’s death. It was the photograph of Adwan’s wife Noura and her two children, a boy and a girl, which Fouad had kept in his shirt pocket. Wyrecliffe had bundled them together with his identity card, and other personal effects which had survived in the same container as the space blanket: a cotton bag with an electric razor, a comb and a toothbrush; a neatly ironed white short-sleeved shirt in a plastic bag; to which was clipped a letter in the neatest Arabic from his wife. Enclosed within the letter was the little girl’s drawing. It was a smiling stick man with a box, which seemed to contain another face. Wyrecliffe stared at it for a long time before understanding. A television. The child had portrayed her father’s work for TV. And now he was dead.

  Chapter Five

  Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp – Lebanon

  December 1989

  A casual visitor to Ain al-Hilweh would probably not recognise it as a refugee camp. This sprawling, untidy and intensely crowded community of seventy thousand hangs like a teardrop from the eye of the coastal city of Sidon. It is a place apart, yet there are no polythene shelters, no starving children, no begging. Like elsewhere in Lebanon, and like many places across the Middle East, there are untidy cement block houses, many with half constructed upper stories, back yards choked with rubbish and the occasional olive tree. There are bundles of looping electricity and phone cables, and streets filled with impatient traffic. Of sweet spring water, the meaning of the camp’s name, there is no sign.

  But Ain al-Hilweh is the oldest and largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and the nearest to the southern border with Israel. Most of the families who live here were expelled or fled during the 1948 war from Jaffa, in what became Israel. Just fifty-six miles south, but a different world. Since then four decades of social stasis and economic stagnation, four decades of being a lost people within another state, has done nothing to calm the Palestinian sense of injustice. It was this anger, a fury against an uncaring world, which became the engine of vengeance for those who took refuge here and in the dozens of other camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and elsewhere. It was this anger which set the political and sectarian fault lines which ever since have been rumbling right across the Middle East.

  Wyrecliffe had first had Ain al-Hilweh pointed out to him by a fellow passenger on a jet coming in to land at Beirut International Airport back in 1984. Flights from Cairo, having stayed well out from Israeli airspace, turned sharply east to cross the coast south of Sidon, and curved around the town to line up with the main Beirut runway. This took them right above the camp, often quite low, even though the airport is another few dozen kilometres to the north.

  Aircraft can stray across the camp with impunity. Israeli warplanes photograph it by day, and by night occasionally create sonic booms which wake the inhabitants. It is a different story on the ground. Once the Israeli ground forces withdrew south of the Litani river, Ain al-Hilweh became a no-go area. Lebanese officials rarely go there, police never, Christian Phalangist militiamen at their peril. Even the Lebanese army, riven by religious and factional differences, knows that the weapons in the camp and the experienced fighters who wield them are more than a match for them.

  Bomb plots, murders and kidnappings were planned in Ain, wanted terrorists or guerrillas hidden, ammunition stored and bunkers built, ready for the day when Palestinians rose up to reclaim their homeland south of the border. To Wyrecliffe, Ain al-Hilweh was like Norther
n Ireland: complex, dynamic, important and fascinating. Above all it was tragic. Wyrecliffe had once gone to Ain in an attempt to meet and interview the notorious terrorist Abu Nidal, who in 1982 had organised the shooting of the Israeli ambassador in London and singlehandedly provoked one of Israel’s many invasions of Lebanon. Nidal, who described himself as ‘the evil spirit who moves around only at night causing nightmares,’ was said to have visited the camp in disguise from time to time to talk to associates. But Wyrecliffe’s Palestinian go-between from the Fatah Revolutionary Council couldn’t find him. It was a wild goose chase, just like the quest for an interview with the SLA’s Lahad.

  Today’s journey, though, wouldn’t rate a headline anywhere outside the BBC staff magazine. Wyrecliffe and cameraman Rick Baxter were going to visit Fouad Adwan’s family and pay their personal condolences for his death. They met Bashir, an interpreter and fixer provided by Fatah, by the concrete filled oil drums that marked one of the entrances to the camp. Bashir took Wyrecliffe’s letter of invitation and passport to a man in a tatty dark green uniform sitting on a beer crate. He waved the car through a chicane of obstacles while a boy of perhaps fourteen, armed with a Kalashnikov, watched them while smoking a cigarette.

  Five minutes later Wyrecliffe arrived at the two-roomed cement block house where Adwan had lived with his father Abu Saleem, wife Noura, her sister Fatima, and their six children. This extended family, ate, slept and dreamed of a better future in just two rooms, neither more than twelve feet square. Faded curtains on wire further divided the rearmost of these tiny spaces, a three foot section for the women to dress, and a couple of narrow ‘bedrooms’. At the back in the alley was a plastic curtain which cordoned off an alcove over which a plastic bag was slung from a single nail. This bag, filled with water and peppered with tiny holes, was the family’s shower. The only toilet was a crater by a broken sewer fifty metres away, shattered by an Israeli mortar in 1983, and never repaired. There was a pervasive smell of bad drains.