When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Some of the British correspondents in Biafra – none of them necessarily critics of Forsyth – are in no doubt about his public relations role.

  Walter Schwarz of The Guardian wrote in his memoirs that Forsyth ‘had become one of Colonel Ojukwu’s propagandists’.516 Peter Sissons, then of ITN, wrote in his that Forysth ‘walked out on the BBC, put on a uniform and did his best to help the Biafrans, principally by presenting their case to the world’s media’.517 Michael Leapman, then of The Sun, told me, ‘He was always around and he was the man to go to if you wanted interviews and other facilities that the Biafran press people couldn’t fix.’ Sandy Gall of ITN wrote, ‘He was the only means Ojukwu had of getting his views to the rest of the world.’518

  But Gall is also one of those with a sneaking regard for Forsyth’s commitment: ‘I admired his devotion to what was obviously a lost cause.’

  And Martin Bell, then of the BBC, believes: ‘He was soldiering for a cause he believed is right. It’s not a thing that I would do. But as an individual, I thought it was rather commendable that he should risk his life in a cause that he believed in.’

  I read these quotes to Forsyth and put to him that the evidence suggested that he combined freelance reporting with being, in effect, a liaison officer for the media on behalf of the Biafran side. His first response was to emphasise his role as a ‘stringer’ but then he paused.

  Forsyth: Slow down just one second here, if we are talking now after May 1968 then we are looking at a situation now where we have a completely new story, the starving children, did I militate for them? Too bloody right. Oh yes, I was trying to get the world to sit up and take notice of a massive human emergency, a humanitarian disaster.

  Purvis: So were you a campaigner for the children of Biafra?

  Forsyth: As much as I could be, yes.

  Purvis: Was that done as a campaigning journalist or as a representative of the Biafran government?

  Forsyth: The former.519

  It seems that in Biafra Forsyth was at various times – and sometimes simultaneously – an independent freelance stringer, a campaigning reporter, as well as a ‘fixer’ for the Biafrans, an adviser to their President and a lobbyist for their cause. As conflicts of interest go, it was a full menu.

  The 21st-century view would be that a reporter couldn’t be all those things at the same time, certainly without being transparent about it, and not seriously compromise himself. But the rules were much greyer then.

  Volume Three: Frederick gets caught up in one coup too many

  In January 1970, as Nigerian troops captured one Biafran town after another, Ojukwu fled into exile leaving his deputy to surrender. One million people are estimated to have died in the fighting or the famine over the three years of the conflict.

  Forsyth ended up back in London where he met Guardian correspondent Walter Schwarz in a pub near Regent’s Park. Schwarz recalls in his memoirs:

  I felt sorry for him – a failed journalist – and as I left I asked in a patronising way what he was up to these days. He said he was writing a novel. Oh yes (still patronising) what about? ‘It’s about some people trying to kill De Gaulle.’ I wished him luck.520

  The next year The Day of the Jackal was published. It was fiction inspired by fact, in this case a real-life attempt in Paris in 1962 to shoot the French President by right-wing opponents of French withdrawal from Algeria. It sold a lot of books, formed the basis of a successful film of the same name and provided the media with a nickname for the international terrorist Illich Ramírez Sánchez, who became universally known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’.

  Forsyth had been a Reuters man in France at the time of the attempted shooting in Paris and one of his later books, The Dogs of War, similarly made into a successful film, was also based on his real-life experiences reporting the mercenaries in the Biafra war.

  But in 1978 the Sunday Times Insight Team alleged that Forsyth’s connection with mercenaries from his days in Biafra went much deeper than this. According to the newspaper, he had provided a quarter of a million dollars towards a plot to overthrow the then President of Equatorial Guinea in 1972. The Sunday Times named the organiser of the plot as a Scottish mercenary, Alexander Gay, who, it said, had met Forsyth in Biafra. Gay had allegedly ordered an arsenal of weapons – automatic rifles, light machine guns, mortars, bazookas and 40,000 rounds of ammunition – and recruited mercenaries and former Biafran soldiers. Forsyth’s own objective, it was said, was to provide ‘a new homeland for the defeated Biafrans’. However, the mercenaries were arrested in a boat off the Canary Islands and the coup never happened.521

  There were similarities between this narrative and the plot of The Dogs of War, published two years later, although in the novel the coup actually happened and the motive was mineral wealth, not helping Biafrans.

  Forsyth denied the Sunday Times story and his former literary agent, Bryan Hunt, said that Forsyth was too mean to have loaned anybody a quarter of a million dollars: ‘To imagine Freddie giving anyone ten pence would be amazing.’

  However a few years later, Forsyth was quoted as admitting that he had indeed played a small part in the aborted coup attempt, posing as a South African arms-dealer. It was said he had done this to help gather research for a novel.

  The twists in this tale continued into the next century.

  In 2004 the former mercenary and British Army officer Simon Mann organised an attempted coup in the very same country, Equatorial Guinea. It bore a striking resemblance to what was said to be Forsyth and Gay’s plan. It ended the same way when the mercenaries were arrested on their way to west Africa, though this time it was in Zimbabwe.

  Then in 2009 Forsyth happened to be in the west African state of Guinea-Bissau, again to research a novel, when the President was assassinated. Always a foreign correspondent, he telephoned one thousand words of copy to a British newspaper about what he had seen. ‘Unfortunately the American intelligence services listened to it and wasted my wife’s computer screen.’ He has no proof of this unusual cyber-attack.522

  The following year, in August 2010, when Forsyth sat down to record a half-hour interview with Stephen Sackur for the BBC programme HARDtalk, there was a lot to talk about.523

  Sackur was well briefed. The programme’s opening included the line: ‘Fact or fiction, has Frederick Forsyth sometimes blurred the lines?’ Sackur started this revealing encounter by raising the allegations that Forsyth had once funded an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea:

  Sackur: The truth is, when you were researching The Dogs of War, about a bunch of mercenaries involved in a plot to topple a west African regime, you were actively in touch with a bunch of real-life mercenaries and you have said to respected journalists in the not so distant past that you gave that man money. The man we are talking about of course is Alexander Gay. Did you give him money?

  Forsyth: Yes.

  Sackur: You in a sense were financing him.

  Forsyth: Well, not that much.

  Sackur: How much did you give him?

  Forsyth: Never mind, it was information. I rarely, rarely buy information but this was necessary. I wanted to find out exactly what was going on in order to make a contribution, so I did. Sackur: There’s an ethical problem here, isn’t there?

  Forsyth: No.

  Sackur: You knew this man was plotting to bring down a government and you handed him money.

  Forsyth: I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  Sackur: How did you know that?

  Forsyth: Because it was impossible, it just wasn’t going to happen.

  Sackur: In your books it’s not impossible.

  Forsyth: In the book you can make it happen, but you look at something and say it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to go forward, so I watched and it didn’t, it was discontinued.

  Sackur: It was discontinued because British intelligence got wind of it, and it was intercepted.

  They then debated the rights and wrongs of Forsyth standing bail for Alexander
Gay when Gay was charged after depositing a case at a left luggage office. ‘I was prepared to believe that the man was minding a suitcase for someone else but he shouldn’t have been, it was a stupid thing to do, he put it in a left luggage office, it was discovered, there was a live firearm inside it.’

  Did he cross a line in that relationship? Forsyth explained it was a matter of loyalty: Gay had once ‘pulled me out of a hole in a combat situation and I might not be here but for that’.

  Forsyth pointed out thirty years after he had helped to fund Gay’s planned coup in Equatorial Guinea there had been another failed coup, also penetrated by intelligence agencies which he called ‘Mr Simon Mann’s attempt to knock over the same island, funnily enough’.

  And what of the strange events in the night in Guinea-Bissau in 2010 when Forsyth happened to be in the capital as the army killed the President because they thought he’d been behind the death of one of their generals?

  Sackur wondered if some people thought there might be a connection between Forsyth’s arrival and the fighting.

  Forsyth denied any involvement but volunteered that he thought the Americans did believe there was a connection. He explained that he’d filed a report on the fighting to the London Daily Express, where he was a columnist. ‘Everything up there in the ether is intercepted, probably by the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.’ When he got back to his farm in Berkshire he discovered his wife’s computer had ceased to function, which he blamed on the Americans though he accepted he had no proof. He thought they were suspicious because of his ‘bit of previous in west Africa’.

  As one of the HARDtalk team, Bridget Osborne concluded in an article for the BBC website: ‘To paraphrase Oscar Wilde badly, to be involved in one West African coup attempt and for that to be found out might be considered a misfortune, but to be caught up in what appears to be a second West African coup attempt looks like carelessness.’

  By then Forsyth was no longer a practising journalist, but a very successful novelist, who was also politically active and vocal.524 Some of his novels were inspired by real events but he was now unashamedly a man of fiction. Was the novelist researching plots for his latest book still governed by any of those values that influenced his earlier career? He didn’t seem to think so. In fact the marketing of his books was probably helped by the speculation about what exactly he had been up to in Africa. But one thing is certain: this particular Forsyth Saga may be factually accurate, but it seems too far-fetched for any Edwardian novelist or any modern thriller-writer to have dreamed it up.

  9

  MARTIN BELL

  He was one of the BBC’s most famous and respected foreign correspondents and was at the high point of his career. Viewers noticed his distinctive ‘lucky’ white suit and admired his calmness under fire, especially when his luck ran out and he was wounded by shrapnel. One newspaper columnist wrote that he was ‘one of the very few journalists employed to stand in front of television cameras who can properly and with pride be described as a reporter’.525

  But when Martin Bell got a phone call in 1992 from the editor of Panorama, it was very much what he called ‘the PBI’ (poor bloody infantry) of television news being addressed by the ‘officer class’ of television current affairs.526

  During his career Bell had already been on the battlefields of Biafra, Vietnam and Kuwait. Now he was in Bosnia where the biggest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War was taking place. But he’d only ever made one film for Panorama, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme. By his own admission it was a failure.527 Back in 1974 he’d been made a ‘temporary member of the officer class’ for a programme to mark the first five years of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. He seemed a natural choice as the BBC news reporter who’d spent most time there reporting how the civil rights campaign of the late ’60s, the arrival of British troops and the IRA bombing and shooting campaigns of the early ’70s had evolved into what Bell called ‘the closest thing to a civil war inside the UK’.528

  That programme, in his own words, ‘set out where we had come from and where we stood’ but ‘when the final titles had rolled, what had been the point of it? There wasn’t one.’ He concluded that the fault had been his because his programme ‘really had nothing to say’.

  Now, eighteen years later, the latest editor of Panorama was offering Bell another chance at current affairs. Glenwyn Benson asked if he would ‘do her a Bosnia’. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia was a subject on which Bell would definitely have something to say. He was excited: ‘No conditions, no instructions, no preconceived notions or prescriptive shadows falling across my path. It was a journalistic blank cheque.’529 What Martin Bell wrote on that blank cheque was to start an ethical debate that has lasted right up until the present day. It has stirred up strong feelings among his closest colleagues and divided opinion among other journalists. Most significantly it has revealed a confusion about what one of the BBC’s priorities, its commitment to ‘due impartiality’, actually means. As recently as July 2012 one of Bell’s editors, who had subsequently become an academic, was to write, with some understatement, ‘There is much confusion over terms.’530

  The Bells were newspaper people. Martin’s grandfather was a news editor on The Observer and his father, Adrian, invented the Times crossword, but Martin was a BBC journalist. He has said that he got his first job, in the BBC newsroom in Norwich in 1962, because the editor there was the father of an ex-girlfriend. It was like that in those days. Six years earlier the then director-general of the BBC, Hugh Carleton Greene, who had a home in East Anglia, watched the output and was so shocked that he sent along a senior editor from London to instruct the Norwich newsroom in the basics of television journalism.

  The instructor would have had available the in-house guide to journalism, ‘The Radio Newsroom, News Guide’. The versions of this pamphlet which were produced in the 1960s never provided a clear definition of impartiality. Rather the reverse. The authors believed that broadcast journalism was about what you selected to transmit and that ‘to couple the word selection with the word impartial would seem to be a paradox. Any selection must, of its nature, be to some degree partial.’ 531

  But it did offer one helpful clarification to young journalists like Bell: ‘Impartiality must not be confused with neutrality. We are not pallid neutrals in regard to matters which offend the national conscience. We are not neutral in regard to crime, and to the sins of cruelty and racial hatred.’

  As Martin Bell’s career moved on from Norwich to London, to Washington and the world’s trouble spots, he learned that the BBC’s independence wasn’t always clear cut.

  When in 1966 he was sent to his first armed conflict, the Nigerian Civil War between the breakaway Biafran state and the federal authorities in Lagos, he ‘had the sense that the BBC was – in a sense that would be unthinkable now – in the government’s pocket’.532 Harold Wilson’s government was on the federal side.

  Going up to a line

  By contrast, nearly three decades later the British government of John Major wasn’t on any side in Bosnia. Instead this was a conflict which ministers preferred to stay as far away from as possible. In their minds, much greater events were going on. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, Germany was reuniting, Britain and America had just defeated Saddam Hussein’s troops in Kuwait. Privately some recalled parallels with Neville Chamberlain’s comment during the Munich crisis of 1938 that the dispute over the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia) was ‘a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’.533 Publicly the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, said the British government rejected three policy options for Bosnia: sending in troops to impose a peace, sending material support to one side or another, and doing nothing. ‘We made a fourth choice. We decided to save civilian lives by supporting the humanitarian aid effort. At the same time we mobilised ideas and pressures for a negotiated settlement.’534

  The United Nations sent
in a ‘protection force’ (UNPROFOR) with priorities such as supplying humanitarian help for civilians and orders which avoided military confrontation with the rival factions. British troops joined UNPROFOR as part of Mr Hurd’s ‘fourth choice’.

  If it had ever come to deciding which of the Serbs, the Croats, the Muslims and, for a brief bloody spell, the Slovenes were the villains of this almost tribal conflict then British public opinion would probably have picked out the Serbs.

  In Martin Bell’s view the Serbs ‘started this war, they killed and they burned and they ethnically cleansed’ but ‘they didn’t hold monopoly rights on evil’. He concluded that ‘the Serbs were demonised by themselves as well as by others. But such is the nature of television that some of the coverage of the war was quite literally weighted against them.’535

  To his credit Bell tried, at some personal risk, to resist this weighting. He said that he always made a habit of talking to the ‘supposed bad guys’ in conflicts he reported so he spent a lot of time with the Serbs.

  During internal BBC debates about the shape of the Panorama programme he argued against ‘constructing a charge sheet against the Serbs in the form of a forty-minute video-prosecution’.536 Instead he would prepare a report which showed what was happening and heard from all sides. The climax would be what he called a final ‘peroration’. He would put the case for a form of military intervention by the outside world that would go much beyond ‘peacekeeping’.

  Bell began by asking in a piece to camera, ‘Is it time to cut and run or to intervene?’ He seemed to answer his own question when in his final piece to camera, delivered in a ruined building, he concluded, ‘The case for intervention is not to help one side against the other, but the weak against the strong, the unarmed against the armed, to champion the everyday victims of this war who until today have had no protection. It is fundamentally a question of whether we care.’537