Step by Step

by Simon Reeve

  But it was a fascinating place to work. Every day was interesting. Every week had at least a little bit of an adventure alongside the post sorting, whether it was researching, investigating, surveillance, or being sent out to football matches or riots. In the early 1990s the IRA was still very active on the UK mainland. In 1991 three mortars were fired at Downing Street. A couple of weeks after that a bomb exploded at Paddington Station. Later in the year there were explosions on Oxford Street, the National Gallery and at Clapham Junction. Even as a post-boy researcher I would be among a group sent to the scene scouring for information.

  I was helping out on the news desk one busy Friday night, just a day after the general election which re-elected John Major as Prime Minister, when the IRA detonated a massive truck bomb at the Baltic Exchange building in the City of London. The Sunday Times offices were a few miles away but we heard the blast clearly. For a second everyone froze. Then a few people went outside to see if they could see smoke. Andrew Neil, the editor, emerged from his office and came striding towards us.

  ‘OK, everyone, let’s focus,’ he said, clapping his hands to get attention. ‘You, you and you,’ he said, pointing to some of the reporters. ‘Get on the phones and find out what’s happened.’ He turned to a handful of others that included me. ‘You four – go there now and see how close you can get.’

  A couple of us raced to our cars. Someone else jumped on their motorbike, another into a taxi and we headed to the scene in an attempt to glean as much information as we could. Whether we were going to a bombing, a riot or a football match, often it was about seeing with our own eyes what had happened so we could give a visual account for the newspaper, or in this case talking to others who had been close to the blast or were even walking wounded. The Baltic Exchange bombing killed three people, including a fifteen-year-old girl, and injured ninety-one. It was believed to be the biggest bomb detonated on the mainland since the Second World War. Then just a few hours later another large bomb went off at Staples Corner in North-West London, also causing mayhem.

  Being at the scene of a riot, or the aftermath of a bombing, can be frightening and upsetting. But I confess it can also be exciting. You feel challenged, on edge, and alive. I managed to slip through the police cordon around the Baltic Exchange and see the damage for myself. There was devastation. I wrote up my notes and sent them on to feature writers who included my copy in their final article.

  I can’t say I ever actually learned how to write. Eventually I learned how to put words in roughly the right order. I watched how others wrote, sitting quietly next to them for hours and weeks until I could predict what words they would use. I arrived at the paper without preconceptions or skill and I was able to train with some of the best writers in the industry. But I never studied or understood the basic rules. I still cannot define a noun, let alone a definite or indefinite article, or an objective personal pronoun. I rely on spell-check to guide my use of ‘to’ or ‘too’. Does it matter? Colleagues said to me: ‘If you want to write, just get on and write. Don’t wait for a qualification.’

  Peter asked me to work on an investigation into a dam project under construction in Malaysia. He had finished and published the main investigation and he was about to pen a follow-up article a couple of weeks later when he looked across the desk at me.

  ‘Why don’t you write this up instead?’ he said. Then he gave me a final piece of superb advice: ‘Just make every sentence count.’

  I stayed late into the night with rain rattling hard on the corrugated plastic roof. I worked in every nuance and detail of the investigation, then remembered Peter’s advice and stripped it back to the key essentials. I topped it with a drop-intro and tailed it with a pay-off conclusion. It was all I had learned about the style of the newspaper.

  The piece went into the system with a few changes, but never made it to print. Yet I was delighted. It was a massive boost to my self-esteem. I wrote a few more short pieces that were tucked on the inside pages and within a short space of time I was writing articles that went into the paper pretty much unchanged. Then the news desk editors began asking me to glance over other copy and ‘give it a quick tweak’. I would take an article in the news desk holding queue and doctor it a little. The way the system worked meant that writers could see where their articles were in the sausage machine that led to the editor’s system, sub-editors and then ‘the stone’, where type was set into a final layout for inclusion and printing, in the old days using a stone slab. By checking the computer, you could tell exactly where your article was in the line and whether someone had it open on their computer. It didn’t take long before experienced journos realised an article they had been slaving over for days was being edited by the twenty-something post-boy. Initially a couple stormed over and asked to know what I was doing. I had to explain that the news editor wanted me to take a look at it, and I was trying to help get it into the paper. Egos were involved, but publication was the ultimate aim for everyone, and most people accepted that if the news editor wanted the post-boy to tweak it then he was the boss.

  After a year or so of tweaking articles I became one of the news department’s main re-writers. Several of the expert correspondents were specialists from their particular fields rather than trained journalists, and I would sometimes be given their articles to rework into the Sunday Times style. I had been promoted out of the post room into the newsroom but people from other sections would still ask me to fetch their cuttings or take a package to the post room. More than once I had to explain I wasn’t really working in the post room any more, and I had a front-page article to copy-edit.

  The original Sunday Times articles about the Malaysian dam scandal caused something of a stir. Relations between the UK and the Malays soured, legal letters flew back and forth. It became a major diplomatic incident.

  The article had helped to reveal that a sale of British weapons to Malaysia had been linked to the provision of hundreds of millions of pounds in UK aid for the Pergau hydro-electric dam scheme in northern Malaysia, a project deemed hopelessly uneconomic by officials in Britain and Malaysia. It remains one of Britain’s biggest aid scandals. In response to the newspaper revelations, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, imposed a sweeping trade ban with the UK, freezing negotiations for Malaysian government contracts worth billions.

  Around the same time a group of British soldiers went missing in Malaysian Borneo and a veteran reporter from the Sunday Times was sent out to cover the search. The following Saturday we were working to get the paper out when a phone rang in the newsroom. I picked it up. ‘Newsroom,’ I said.

  I could hear shouting, the sound of banging, then a voice came down the line, strained, desperate; panic in the tone. ‘Who is that?’ it said.

  ‘It’s Simon,’ I said blankly.

  ‘Reeve?!’ I recognised the voice of my colleague.

  ‘Yes. What’s going on? Are you all right?’

  ‘No, no, they’re taking me. I’m being taken.’

  I shouted over to alert the news desk and put the call on speakerphone.

  ‘They’re taking me away. Get someone from the Embassy.’

  We heard more shouting, then another voice came closer to the phone screaming abuse in what we presumed was Malay.

  The line went dead. It had to be some sort of retribution for our articles about the Pergau dam. The news editor ran into the editor’s office. He emerged in seconds and told me to get on the phone to the Foreign Office while someone else called the British ambassador in Kuala Lumpur. The deputy news editor began preparing an article for Reuters, the global news wire. I was on the phone to the Foreign Office as my colleague was tapping away at his keyboard: A senior Sunday Times correspondent has been arrested in Malaysian Borneo . . .

  An article for Reuters meant the news would spread worldwide in a matter of minutes. I spoke to a senior official at the Foreign Office and asked them to inform the Foreign Secretary and flash an alert to the Ambassador in Malaysia. There
was a degree of panic at the other end of the line:

  ‘What are we supposed to do? It’s Borneo, for heaven’s sake. It’s the middle of the night over there. We’ve only got an honorary consul anywhere near there and he’s four hours away.’

  ‘Phone him,’ I said. ‘Wake him up and get him over there. The editor is demanding you take this seriously.’

  Twenty minutes or so later they called back to say the consul had jumped in a car and was already driving through the jungle. By now the article was ready to go to Reuters, but before it was sent the news editor suggested that maybe we should try to call a stringer in Borneo, a freelance journalist who had worked on a couple of articles for us in the past. He, in turn, managed to speak to a highly indignant local chief of police. Far from being carted off as retribution over the dam articles, our ST man had been embroiled in a heated argument in a restaurant over the price of a lobster. He had strong words with the owner, and then became involved in an unfortunate altercation with a man he thought was a waiter. In reality he was the brother of the owner, and he was also the local chief of police.

  We had called the emergency line to the duty officer at the Foreign Office and sent the honorary consul halfway across Borneo. Very embarrassing. When our correspondent was released in the morning and slunk home a few days later, he found a blow-up plastic lobster on his desk. He also found one under his desk and another in his filing cabinet. It should have taught me the importance of checking and double-checking facts before you put them into print.

  After I had been on the newspaper for a few years a senior colleague called Maurice Chittenden, a charismatic and witty reporter, wrote a slightly sneering article about a group called ‘The Lesbian Avengers’. The following Saturday afternoon there was a kerfuffle at the door and a bunch of young women burst into the newsroom carrying massive water pistols and shouting slogans. The first person they confronted was Maurice, who stood there in semi-shock as they demanded to know where Maurice Chittenden was. He recovered quickly.

  ‘Maurice Chittenden?’ he said innocently. ‘Oh yes, Maurice Chittenden, I think he’s in the library, I’ll just go and fetch him.’

  He took off leaving the rest of us to deal with the group, who were chanting slogans as they handcuffed themselves to our computers and filing cabinets, and started soaking everyone with their water pistols. Pretty soon the entire ageing computer system was in danger of exploding.

  ‘If we’re still here at 5 p.m. can we watch Brookside?’ one of the protestors said to me, just as an entire regiment of white South African security guards stormed into the building. They had a tendency to direct all of the black members of staff to the car park furthest from the office yet had failed to stop the invasion. Their punishment was to stand in front of the computers while the women sprayed them up and down, before van-loads of police arrived, cut the women loose using bolt-cutters and took them away.

  THE EDITOR

  60 COPPERS

  8 LESBIANS

  (and 4 pairs of handcuffs!)

  read the banner headline in the News of the World, which ran a full-page article the next day on the ‘mayhem’ and quoted an aggrieved policeman who said: ‘I was playing football. I can’t believe they called so many of us out. There are seven police vans here.’

  Most of us had a chuckle. But some of the senior executives were outraged by the attack. In a misguided attempt at retaliation one hatched a plan for the newspaper to infiltrate the Avengers. They asked several female journalists on the paper to go undercover in the group, but they pointedly refused. One of the secretaries also turned them down. Then they asked one of the new youngsters in the post room. The most obvious issue was that he was male. When they summoned him to the office to discuss the job they closed the door. That guaranteed they were serious. When he emerged he was pale. The poor lad couldn’t believe it. ‘They want me to wax my legs and put on make-up,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy. But if I don’t do it I’ll be out.’

  It was a ludicrous idea, followed by other idiotic schemes. A star-chart reward and punishment system was introduced as if we were at pre-school. Then I was asked to work on an ill-fated drugs investigation which was proving especially tricky because some of the targets were threatening and powerful. One of our team had his legs broken during a mugging attack that appeared to have been organised by the drug gang.

  It was my job to look after a whistle-blower, and it genuinely appeared his life could be in danger. He was a sexually aggressive and odious man who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. We were driving from one hotel to another in leafy Surrey and he leapt right across me to lean out of my window and shout at a young woman riding a bicycle in the opposite direction. When I wouldn’t turn the car around to pursue her, he turned on me, screaming abuse. We had to keep moving him from hotel to hotel because within an hour of checking in he’d be drinking in the bar and trying to impress the staff with tales of what we were doing. He was a total liability. I began to feel the support and back-up from the London office was inadequate. One senior exec just laughed when I said we had been forced to jump out of a first-floor hotel window and flee in the night when someone tried to get into our rooms. They tried to get a work-experience kid at the paper to take over babysitting him, followed by a young female journalist, even though I said I thought she would be in physical danger if placed alone with him. She had to barricade herself into a room as protection.

  One of the final straws for me came when a friend of mine at the paper, a secretary who several colleagues thought looked like supermodel Cindy Crawford, was asked to travel to Kent to interview Alan Clark, the notoriously lecherous Tory Member of Parliament. Clark, who was once described as ‘the most politically incorrect, outspoken, iconoclastic and reckless politician of our times’, had been cited in a divorce case in South Africa, in which it was claimed he had affairs with the wife of a judge, and both her daughters. It was a media sensation, a tale of politics, sex and a dysfunctional family. The interview was scheduled to be at Clark’s home. Everyone knew his reputation. I thought she would be a lamb for a wolf. Many of us felt it was outrageous.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Towers

  On 26 February 1993, a huge bomb exploded underneath the World Trade Center in New York. Six people were killed, hundreds were injured, and America was rudely awoken to the realities of international terrorism. The explosion rocked the towers like an earthquake – tourists one mile away on Liberty and Ellis Islands in New York harbour felt the ground shudder, all power in the towers was severed and the entire building was plunged into darkness. Commuters on the subway below were buried in concrete and twisted metal as the roof above them collapsed. America was stunned.

  I was at the Sunday Times working on an investigation involving the IRA when news reports first came in from New York. Within an hour I had switched focus and began collating information on the WTC attack.

  It took hundreds of firefighters two hours to extinguish the blazes and more than five hours for them to evacuate both towers. Gasping for breath, their faces blackened by soot and muck, thousands of workers and visitors staggered out onto the street and collapsed into the snow, many of them hacking up blood from their lungs. It was a devastating attack. The bombing created more hospital casualties than any other event in domestic American history outside of the Civil War. The New York City Fire Department sent a total of 750 vehicles to the explosion and did not leave the scene for the next month.

  For two weeks I researched the attack for the newspaper. Events moved quickly in New York and I kept coming across details and snippets of information about the attack I found extraordinary. Within days investigators had found the vehicle identification number of the truck that had carried the device. A few calls and checks established that it had been rented from a Ryder hire firm in nearby Jersey City by a man whose name appeared on an FBI militant watch list. Staff at the leasing agency told FBI agents the man had actually returned to the office since the bombing to claim a refund on his
$400 deposit for the van, which he said had been stolen the night before the explosion. Staff had told him to get an incident number from the police, and he was due back in a few days. The FBI staked out the hire firm and quickly caught three of the men behind the bombing. Within a few more days a man called Ramzi Yousef was identified as the mastermind of the attack. He had fled the US just after the bombing. A global manhunt began. The FBI even extended their famous list of ten most wanted fugitives to eleven to include their new quarry.

  We published a comprehensive account of what had happened on the first Sunday and a follow-up piece the next week. But then other terrible things were happening in the world and the newspaper lost interest. I didn’t. I became fascinated and then obsessed by the attack. A British intelligence contact told me explosives experts on our side of the Atlantic had been asked to provide assistance, because the device used to bomb the World Trade Center was so rare that the FBI’s explosives laboratory believed it had only been used once before in more than 73,000 separate recorded explosions. It was almost unique. In the mainstream media the bombers were portrayed as a small, isolated group of lunatics. But I was being given snippets of information by contacts that suggested there was a much bigger story behind the attack.

  Week after week I kept returning to the bombing and the aftermath, discovering more leads and angles. But nobody on the newspaper was interested in taking another story on the attack or approving more research. Peter Hounam had left the paper, along with several other friends and colleagues, and the whole atmosphere there was changing.