When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  First the Nigerian federal government complained to the BBC that he was ‘working illegally in Eastern Nigeria’. As they didn’t accept the secession of Biafra they resented a BBC man entering what they still regarded as their territory without their permission. Forsyth was using neighbouring Cameroons as his crossing point and a British diplomat there, Nicol Morton, tracked him down. Like many British diplomats around the world his role was partly to debrief correspondents on what they had seen on the front line and report back to Whitehall. His cable to colleagues had a patronising tone:

  I formed the impression that Forsyth did not see more nor learn more than what the Biafrans wanted him to know. And whereas I would not wish to misjudge him, I imagine his reporting objectivity was coloured by his lack of experience in unsophisticated places.501

  Mr Morton got an enthusiastic reply from fellow diplomat G. D. Anderson in Lagos. He seems to have been the first to draw the literary allusion with Galsworthy’s novels, and headed his memo ‘The Forsyth Saga’.

  The Forsyth Saga

  Your letter … of 4 August about Forsyth, the BBC’s ex-man in Enugu/Douala was read here with the closest interest as … [a] contribution to lengthy exchanges we have had with London about the BBC’s (in our view!) inept and unintelligent reporting generally on the civil war in Nigeria – and about Forsyth’s part in it in particular. … You may however get a little quiet amusement from reading the enclosed sheaf of telegrams about BBC/Forsyth … You may see a little more of Forsyth, perhaps on his way out of Eastern Nigeria again for the second – and we hope the last time.

  I should perhaps explain that our grouse against Forsyth/BBC is not so much that the tenor of their broadcasts is pro-Biafran … but that they have tended to retail as BBC news the undigested and unattributed Biafran news hand-outs, thereby, in many eyes, lending fictitious authenticity to Biafran reports and thus coming close to the point of being Biafran propagandists.502

  The diplomatic cables from August 1967 in the National Archives reveal how the Forsyth Saga escalated from grumbles between diplomats in west Africa to direct contact in London between the Commonwealth Office and the BBC. One cable reports a success in getting the BBC to back down and stop transmitting one of Forsyth’s reports.

  CONFIDENTIAL

  IMMEDIATE COMMONWEALTH OFFICE TO HIGH COMMISSION LAGOS

  BBC told us this morning they had received cable from Forsyth reporting claims made to him by Eastern authorities in Enugu that RAF had taken over Kano Airport.

  We confirmed to BBC that there was absolutely no truth in this story. BBC said they would not use it on African services even with denial and after discussion agreed to recommend internally that it should not be used on any services even though coupled with denial.503

  Inside the BBC the best guide to corporate thinking about news and current affairs traditionally came from the so-called ‘ENCA minutes’.

  Each week for many decades the editor, News and Current Affairs (ENCA) would bring together his (and it always was a ‘his’ in those days) senior executives for a mixture of departmental housekeeping, service messages and editorial guideline-setting. The minutes were distributed to middle management and avidly read for any clues about what was really going on. During the late ’60s the main sport on the night shift in the BBC radio newsroom was going through managers’ filing cabinets trying to find copies.

  The ENCA minutes about Forsyth for the next few months of 1967 were typically gnomic but in hindsight very significant.

  On 18 August 1967, just two days after the telegram from Lagos had been received in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the ENCA minutes recorded that

  FNE [foreign news editor] said it had been decided to suppress a report from Frederick Forsyth reporting Biafran rumours of the closing of Kano airport because it had been alleged that the closing was intended to hide the stationing there of RAF fighter squadrons. But once this report had been denied by the Commonwealth Office, some parts of Forsyth’s despatch had been used.504

  However, this was not to be Forsyth’s last appearance in the ENCA minutes. In early September 1967, ENCA was told that the Nigerian federal government had been threatening to expel a BBC TV reporter in Lagos, David Tindall. The minutes say:

  It was not clear whether this was because they were dissatisfied with Tindall’s reporting or simply annoyed because Frederick Forsyth had been reporting from Biafra … Senior Foreign Duty Editor asked whether Forsyth should be withdrawn. Editor News and Current Affairs favoured keeping Forsyth on the spot for the time being. ACOS [Assistant Controller Overseas Services] drew attention to a recent dispatch from Forsyth which he described as ‘extraordinary’; the External Services had not used it.505

  There’s no explanation of which despatch this was. But it could have been the kind of Forsyth report which John Simpson later recalled: ‘He announced, without any qualification, that Biafra had shot down (as far as I remember) sixteen federal Nigerian aircraft. The newsroom copy of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft said that the federal air force possessed only twelve.’506

  Whatever the specific details of the despatch, five days later the ENCA minutes record that ‘Frederick Forsyth was returning to London now that the Nigerian story was no longer in the forefront of the news’.507

  Two months later another single sentence, but this time in the minutes of a different meeting, records: ‘ENCA confirmed that Freddie Forsyth would be reverting to his previous role as a reporter.’508

  His days as a BBC foreign correspondent were over, at least for the foreseeable future. He was grounded to a more domestic agenda.

  The reason for this is never explained in any available BBC archive document. And what of the reason he was withdrawn from Biafra in the first place? Was it because of what he’d filed, or because of Nigeria’s threat to expel a BBC man in Lagos or because ‘the Nigerian story was no longer in the forefront of the news’ – probably the least likely explanation as Biafra continued to be a major news story for some time.

  A year later the head of BBC External Services, Charles Curran, came up with yet another version in a letter to Sir David Hunt. The British High Commissioner in Lagos believed that Forsyth had been ‘an ardent Ibo partisan and spread the most alarming and exaggerated report of their progress’.509 Curran, presumably trying to avoid giving Hunt the satisfaction of knowing that his complaints might have worked, explained that Forsyth was withdrawn ‘when it became impossible for him to transmit his reports, either for television or radio. There would clearly have been no point in retaining a correspondent in a place without communications.’510 Another unlikely story: communications from the front were a problem throughout the Biafran conflict and reporters didn’t give up in frustration.

  Martin Bell’s view four decades later is very direct and very different from that of BBC colleague John Simpson:

  I had the sense that the BBC was – in a sense that would be unthinkable now – in the government’s pocket. The British High Commissioner didn’t like Freddie Forsyth’s reporting and Freddie was withdrawn for no good reason.

  I think he was an incredibly brave guy. But if that happened today, there should be more resistance now – I hope – to Foreign Office pressure. He was scapegoated. I found nothing wrong with his work at all. It was brave. He might have made a map-reading error here or there, but it was vivid, first-hand reportage. What did the British High Commissioner think? That we were supposed to report this war from one side only? No, he was scapegoated.

  Forsyth’s own, shorter-form, explanation is: ‘They said I was biased because I contradicted the High Commissioner.’

  Having read all the available files I don’t believe the BBC sent Forsyth to Biafra to get the Biafran point of view but to witness what they expected to be the fall of Ojukwu’s regime. One of ITN’s correspondents in Biafra, Sandy Gall, later wrote in his memoirs that Forsyth’s reports for the BBC ‘had quite truthfully depicted a string of successes for Ojukwu’. This was not what the B
BC in London or Sir David Hunt in Lagos had expected, nor was it what Harold Wilson’s government wanted to hear broadcast.

  Two of Forsyth’s television reports that I have been able to view are energetic, vivid reportage. I could see no obvious bias in them, no breach of the principle of ‘due impartiality’. On the issue of his reporting of Biafran claims, the BBC may have overlooked his experience as the Reuters man in Communist East Germany when, in Forsyth’s words, ‘everything that came out of the Information Ministry was propaganda, you reported it as it was, I always started my reports with the source of the claim, I never crossed the line’.

  Nowadays experienced broadcasters are expected to go further than just repeating claims, especially ones that they suspect may be dubious, and even to point out when people in the news make factual mistakes. But back in 1967 rather than highlight where, say, the Biafrans might have got their facts wrong on the number of federal Nigerian jets shot down, the BBC dropped the story altogether under pressure from Lagos and London. Possibly the threat from the Nigerians to the BBC’s important Lagos bureau, and with it all the BBC’s coverage of the story, may well have tipped them over the edge into withdrawing Forsyth. Sitting in his high commission office in Lagos, Sir David Hunt probably took some credit for the outcome.

  But, for Forsyth, the result was demotion to the ranks and a personal and professional crisis.

  Volume Two: Biafra: what Frederick did next

  This volume begins in a café in London in the autumn of 1967 where Forsyth sits alone over dinner. He’d discovered that British media organisations were going on a trip to Biafra organised by a Geneva-based PR company called Markpress which had won a contract with the Biafrans to promote their cause.511 Forsyth had proposed to his BBC news editor that he should join the trip but the idea had been rejected by senior executives. Over dinner in the café, Forsyth pondered his future:

  That was the point at which I said quite bluntly, is the BBC an independent newsgathering organisation or is it an instrument of British government?

  Shall I now blow quite a good career to pieces on a point of principle or shall I knuckle under and go back to the Beeb and serve out my time until I’m old and grey, with a pension and deputy head of some department inside Broadcasting House. And I sat for three hours mulling it and finally said, no. This you have bloody well got to cover or you will never be in your own eyes, in the shaving mirror, a journalist again. So I paid the bill and got a cab to Heathrow.

  It’s what Forsyth did when he got back to Biafra that has created the most debate among his contemporaries. Having resigned from the BBC he was no longer bound by the statutory duty to remain impartial. Like any British newspaper reporter he was free to be partial if his editors back in London agreed with his line of argument. But just how far can any journalist go in his or her commitment to a cause without losing their credibility?

  Forsyth says he was primarily a ‘stringer’ for various British newspapers. Stringers are freelances sometimes on retainers, sometimes paid by the day. They send back copy and provide logistical support when staff reporters, often known as firemen, turn up on their patch. Forsyth and the Biafrans saw an opportunity for each other. He could cover a story which he was strongly involved in and from which he could make a living, they could use him to get their case across.

  A BBC Timewatch programme about Biafra made in the 1990s included an interview with Patrick ‘Paddy’ Davies, a Nigerian Ibo who worked in the Biafran Propaganda Directorate.512

  He told Timewatch that

  Biafra welcomed the foreign press because it knew these were the people who were supposed to help disseminate Biafran propaganda. And so, even though Biafra had only one telex line to the outside world, and it was very much in demand by everybody, Frederick Forsyth was given access to this telex line. He was given a Volkswagen car, which was a rare thing in Biafra, and he was given petrol vouchers by Ojukwu. This enhanced his work, and Frederick Forsyth became very, very useful as a friend of Biafra.

  Michael Nicholson, who covered Biafra for ITN and, along with Sunday Times photographer Don McCullin, brought back the starkest images of starving children, says Forsyth was seduced by the suffering endured by the Biafrans. He tells of encountering a man who looked like a ‘model mercenary’:

  There was this guy in a tiger suit, camouflage suit, with a beret and dark glasses. I think he had a kerchief around his neck – very debonair – and he had a pistol, he had a revolver. And he introduced himself as Freddie Forsyth, which was a bit of a shock because that’s the last thing I expected an ex-BBC man to look like. But he introduced himself as General Ojukwu’s PR man, liaison man, the man between the visiting international press and General Ojukwu himself.513

  On the issue of his dress code, Forsyth’s response to this allegation is that Biafran officers at the front would not let anybody go there in civilian clothes because in a jungle environment, anyone who was ‘not in a camouflage uniform’ would ‘stand out like a sore thumb and attract bullets’.

  On the matter of the revolver, Michael Nicholson says Forsyth was worried about a plot to get rid of him because ‘he had made some dangerous enemies and without Ojukwu’s protection they could kill him and nobody would know how or when or where’.

  I had this quote in my mind as I sat across the table from Frederick Forsyth in a BBC radio studio in November 2011 to record an interview for a Radio 4 programme, When Reporters Cross the Line. I asked him why he carried a gun in Biafra back in 1967. I was not expecting his answer:

  ‘I was going to blow my own brains out rather than be taken alive by the Hausa.’

  Shocked at this reply I paused for a moment to gather my thoughts before continuing.

  Purvis: But that shows the extraordinary danger that you were in. And you were doing this as a freelance correspondent without any commitment to a cause?

  Forsyth: If you want to cover a war, you can’t just sit in a hotel. If you look at the list of dead war correspondents, it’s big.

  Purvis: Well, I sent some of those people to the front – including some who died, I’m sad to say – but if one of them had said to me, I’m carrying a gun because I might need to kill myself rather than be captured, I’d suspect that was time to bring them home.

  Forsyth: Well, possibly you’re right, but I don’t think you’ve ever seen a body the Hausa have finished with – I have.

  Then I put to him perhaps another extraordinary claim about his time in Biafra. Jeff Hulbert had found in the National Archives a previously unpublished letter in 1967 from a Mr Arbuthnott of the British high commission in Lagos to diplomats back in London. I handed it to Forsyth, who had never seen it before, and he read it out:

  From Mr Arbuthnott – British High Commission in Lagos

  To Mr Lewis at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London

  Forsyth’s personal support for the Biafran cause and personal affection for Odgers – his pet name for Ojukwu – are well known. He was indeed reported as having written the Biafran story in a caravan in the well-guarded grounds of Ojukwu’s Umuahia home, and world press and television have both said that he holds the rank of major in the ‘Biafran’ army under the name Atkinson.514

  So I put directly to the now world famous novelist: had he once been Major Atkinson of the Biafran army?

  Forsyth: No, I was not. I was never Major Atkinson. It’s Tommy Atkins [laughs].

  Purvis: Meaning?

  Forsyth: Well, Tommy Atkins was a name given to a British soldier by Kipling. Private Tommy Atkins. So he, Ojukwu, mockingly called me Private Tommy Atkins. It was never Atkinson, it was never Major – it was Private Tommy Atkins.

  Purvis: Odgers, as it says he was known to you. Is that right?

  Forsyth: I may have called him that, yes. But not to his face.

  So Forsyth is clear that he was never a member of the Biafran army. The term he prefers is that he was ‘embedded’ with them. The concept of reporters living alongside soldiers goes back to the coverage
of the Crimean War in the 1850s and possibly earlier than that. In return reporters agree not to give away the soldiers’ position, tactics or other military intelligence.

  The word ‘embedded’ entered the journalistic lexicon after the Iraq War of 2003 when both the British and American armies invited reporters from countries inside the ‘Coalition’, though noticeably not from countries outside, to join them on the battlefield against Saddam Hussein’s troops. Undoubtedly the military commanders and their political masters believed that the reporters would become bonded with the soldiers and report events from their perspective.

  But this version of embedding is different from Forsyth’s. During the Iraq War the reporters were certainly dependent on the military, just as Forsyth was, for food and for transport. They had no freedom of movement, they either went where the army went or they were ‘unembedded’.

  But at all times they were accountable to their own news desks for maintaining their editorial independence. If at any time they felt that the conditions imposed by the military were unreasonable they would have had the support of their employers for breaching the military censorship or for opting out of the pact with the military. In fact one ITN reporter in Iraq in 2003, Romilly Weeks, disobeyed an instruction from a commanding officer and filed a report which she felt he was objecting to not because it endangered his troops but because it embarrassed him. She knew she would have the support and logistical resources of ITN if she needed it.

  But Forsyth had no single employer happy to bring him back to London with a new job waiting. He had to file to a number of organisations as a freelance, and to continue to do that he needed the constant logistical support of the Biafrans. That inevitably limited his options. Colonel Ojukwu paid for his accommodation, his food, his car and his petrol vouchers. There are also Commonwealth Office documents claiming that Forsyth acted as an envoy for Ojukwu, taking a message from him to a senior British diplomat in London.515