What was discussed at that lunch and at subsequent lunches and meetings was to have a major effect on the way Afghanistan was to be reported in Britain for a decade and beyond. And it raised questions about who was using whom and whether in the relationship between news-gathering and intelligence-gathering any ethical lines are crossed.
The ITN man at the lunch was Henderson Alexander ‘Sandy’ Gall, once a veteran foreign correspondent for Reuters, who, since joining what was then Britain’s most watched TV news service, had combined reporting with presenting the news.
The man from MI6 was paying for lunch because he had a question for Sandy Gall and it came from no less a person than the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington. How could the war in Afghanistan between the Russians and the Afghan mujahideen be kept ‘in front of the British public’? Gall explained there was a shortage of TV pictures of the conflict and it appeared the only way that could change was if freelance cameramen thought there would be a financial return in going there. He offered his advice and left it at that.587
But two years later he and his contact were back at Stone’s and this time Gall was paying because he was the one looking for advice. He was planning to visit Afghanistan and wanted suggestions about who to meet there. The man from MI6 volunteered a name that meant nothing to Gall – Ahmed Shah Massoud (sometimes spelt as Masud), a mujahideen leader still in his twenties and based in the Panjsher Valley, north-east of Kabul. ‘We think he has all the makings of a second Tito,’ said the man from MI6. For a man from British intelligence to make comparisons with the Yugoslav partisan leader who Britain had backed against the Nazis and who had united various factions into one nation was praise indeed.
Gall later recalled, ‘As I walked back to the office I felt more excited than I had been for a very long time.’ Gall had already collected a fair few exciting moments in his career. In 1965 he made a film for ITN about the IRA which showed gunmen being trained in handling weapons, practising throwing hand-grenades and in which he interviewed the IRA’s chief of staff and other leaders. A decade later such a film would have caused major controversy and ended up with Gall being questioned by the police under anti-terrorism legislation.588 At the time, no one seemed to notice. Later he spent time in one of Idi Amin’s ‘execution cells’ in Uganda, and in Vietnam was an eyewitness as the Vietcong took over Saigon. A departing British embassy official left him the keys for safekeeping. Later, in 1991, Gall was the first correspondent to get back a report as coalition troops crossed into Kuwait to drive out Saddam Hussein’s army.
But whenever Sandy Gall looked back on his years on the road one moment seemed to strike an especially emotional chord. In 1956 Reuters sent him to the Hungarian capital, Budapest, where the Russians were crushing an uprising led by the Prime Minister, Imre Nagy. This Communist had turned against Soviet Communism and wanted to take Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact, something the Russians were not prepared to tolerate. Nagy and his colleague General Pál Maléter sought asylum in the Yugoslav embassy. Nagy was tricked into leaving, believing that he was being offered safe conduct. Instead he was arrested and never seen again.
Sandy Gall later recalled:
I was the only Western correspondent in Budapest when the news came over Moscow radio that Nagy and Pál Maléter and the rest had been tried in secret, found guilty, sentenced to death and executed, all done before anything was announced … As a Reuter man you’re supposed to be impartial and one was impartial in one’s reporting but one’s own private feelings were that this was a dreadful system that could behave in this sort of way.589
And he later wrote: ‘In their crushing of the Hungarian Revolution the Russians displayed a callousness and a ruthlessness that even they would find hard to improve on.’590
Afghanistan
Gall has linked his time in eastern Europe to his decision, in 1982, to set off to Afghanistan with a documentary crew:
I was interested initially because of the Russians being there, the Soviet Union, after all I’d spent a lot of time in Germany, in Hungary where the Soviet Union was very much involved, and I had seen Soviet power at its worst, you might say, I wondered what was going to happen there.
In this first trip he set a style that was to become familiar over the next decade: a veteran foreign correspondent accompanied by mujahideen and pack-horses traverses steep mountainsides to meet and talk with a guerrilla leader. A documentary, a book and several promotional radio interviews later Gall was making clear the impact which ‘the second Tito’ – Ahmed Shah Massoud – had on him.
He impressed from the very start, a quality of leadership and authority, he was only twenty-eight, he had achieved it himself because of his brains and his organisational skills, and his courage, he was a man apart … I came away feeling that he was a very impressive character, very clever, very dedicated … I think he’s just a natural, and an organisational genius, almost a genius.591
Given this enthusiasm one radio interviewer wondered how unbiased Gall’s view was: ‘I think I have been long enough in the profession to know how to be impartial … I went in with a completely open mind and anything I’ve said or written is what I saw and what I heard there.’592
Sandy Gall’s reporting of Afghanistan was about to develop in a very significant way and again it would be with a little help from a friend.
He had first met Zia ul-Haq in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman. It was September 1970, known as ‘Black September’, when King Hussein of Jordan and his troops launched an all-out attack on the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the PLO. What became a civil war was sparked by the PLO using Jordan as a base for attacks against British and American airliners and other Western and Israeli targets.
Gall was reporting the crisis for ITN, Zia was a Pakistani brigadier advising the King of Jordan on how to defeat the PLO. He helped Gall get access to film Hussein’s victory celebrations with his Bedouin troops.
Seven years later Gall was at his desk at ITN one night when the news broke that the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been overthrown by a military coup led by a general, a certain Zia ul-Haq. Gall put in a call to the new leader of Pakistan and a week later a familiar voice came on the line. ‘Sandy? Zia here. How are you, how are the family?’593 An invitation to visit Pakistan followed and for the next few months Gall regularly talked with Zia on and off camera, most noticeably in April 1979 when former Prime Minister Bhutto was hanged for the murder of a political rival following a trial which many believed to be unfair. The next day Zia told Gall on the phone that he had overruled pleas for clemency because ‘I have tried to show that nobody, whether high or low, is above the law’.594
In another interview in that period Zia told Gall, ‘We don’t intend to stay for years,’ instead it would be just ‘months, certainly months’ before free and fair elections.595 But five years later, in 1984, Zia was still very much in charge and he had an idea about Afghanistan, an idea which he had discussed with the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.
Sandy Gall got to hear about it at another of his lunches with MI6, this time at a Soho restaurant. MI6 had been sent the minutes of a meeting between Zia and Thatcher. They showed that Zia had appealed to Thatcher for more media coverage of the war and mentioned Gall’s documentary made two years before. He apparently had offered to support Gall if he made another trip.596
Zia was able to make that offer because he wasn’t just an interested neighbour watching events across the border in Afghanistan. In many ways the Afghanistan war was Zia’s war. He ran it as a proxy for America once they had decided that in this Cold War climate if the mujahideen were the Russians’ enemy they must therefore be America’s friend. Most of the military and financial aid which Washington sent was directed through one of the Pakistani intelligence agencies, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the ISI.
When Gall and an ITN team arrived in Pakistan they discovered that not only had Zia organised for them to go into Afghanistan
with a group of Afghan mujahideen but that he would be sending four of his own Special Forces troops along to make sure they were safe. At a meeting Gall came up with an impromptu request to the Pakistani military leader: ‘Could we take some SAM7s with us? It would make a brilliant picture if we filmed a Russian helicopter being shot down by a Russian missile.’ Zia agreed and organised it through the ISI.597 With hindsight, as a senior executive of ITN, I should probably have pointed out to Sandy that we were in the news business rather than the arms business.
As it turned out the mujahideen never did get to shoot down a Russian helicopter with a Russian missile, much to the relief of local villagers who pleaded that if they did the Russians would come and bomb their homes.
On his return to London Gall was invited to lunch with the head of MI6. ‘It was very informal, the cook was off, so we had cold meat and salad, with plenty of wine,’ Gall noted.598 They talked missiles and Gall passed on the mujahideen’s concern that they needed better ones than the Russian SAMs. MI6 made sure the CIA got a copy of Gall’s latest TV documentary, which showed the problems the mujahideen were having with SAMs.
In the mid-1980s news reports and documentaries shot on location and then brought back to London to be edited still had an important place in British television but the appetite was growing for more live coverage using a new generation of lightweight satellite dishes. These could be transported to remote locations where they would be pointed up at the relevant passing satellite to feed pictures back to base.
During this period I had progressed up the ITN hierarchy partly through my interest in such technology. By 1988 I was a senior editor when Sandy Gall came to me with an intriguing idea. Again it had come about through his network of friends and contacts. On this occasion it was Lord Cranborne, whom Gall described as ‘an ardent supporter of the mujahideen’.599 Cranborne had persuaded General Zia to allow a satellite dish into Pakistan, where it would be taken to pieces and transported on the backs of horses into an area of Afghanistan controlled by the mujahideen. It could then provide live pictures from their camps. By luck and timing it looked as if this venture could come to fruition in time for the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989. How would ITN like to join and help organise the expedition to the outskirts of Jalalabad, which was about to fall to the mujahideen?
Mujahideen
It took less time for me to decide to go ahead than it probably should and on 15 February 1989, as the Russian ground forces finally departed, British, and then a few minutes later American, viewers watched the first ever live transmissions from inside Afghanistan. Sandy Gall sat, dressed in Afghan clothes, with the mujahideen in a camp where, since it was three o’clock in the morning there, nothing much was happening. Local villagers asked the ITN team and their Afghan and Pakistani minders to move on for fear of reprisals by the Russians. A few days later the village was bombed. ITN had been assured the Russians would not be able to detect the source of what, to them, was an illegal transmission inside Afghanistan but villagers suspected a spy in the village had passed back details of what had occurred that night. Sandy Gall returned to London, his reputation as the silver-haired gentleman bravely reporting from the Afghan front line further enhanced. Other reporters came and went but none made the impact of Gall.
A few months after the Russians gave up and went home Sandy Gall was back in the saddle crossing the mountains to visit Massoud again to see how he was progressing in his battle against the Communist government which the Russians had left behind.
In one of his reports he said:
This is one of the arms trails from Pakistan to Afghanistan. A few RPG rocket boosters and their white plastic cases went in with the convoy we joined, but this year the arms trail to the north – the stronghold of the most famous guerrilla commander of them all, Ahmad Shah Massoud – has been virtually empty. While other lesser commanders get regular shipments Massoud is reported to have received no fresh supplies at all through the American-financed and Pakistani-controlled arms pipeline.600
In November 2012 I interviewed Sandy Gall at the BBC, a new and slightly strange experience questioning on air a reporter who’d once been one of my team at ITN and asking him about decisions I had been involved in. I focused on his report about arms shipments and what lay behind it, especially his relationship with the most famous guerrilla commander of them all, Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Although the British and the Americans both supported the mujahideen they took very different sides. The British helped Massoud – their ‘second Tito’. The Americans championed a leader called Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, believing that his fighters killed more Russians than anybody else. And the Pakistani ISI made sure most of the CIA’s dollars went to Hekmatyar, who they expected would succeed and eventually run Afghanistan in co-operation with them.
In the BBC interview I asked Sandy Gall about this rivalry between mujahideen leaders.
Purvis: In the commentary you refer to him as the most famous guerrilla commander of them all. Now what’s not covered in your report, I suppose, is the background, which is that while the British were supporting one guerrilla leader, Massoud, the Americans were supporting a rival one, Hekmatyar. Would he be one of the lesser commanders you are referring to?
Gall: Yes in terms of efficiency and effectiveness … I mean he was a political animal, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was also the darling of course of the ISI, the ISI being the Pakistani intelligence.601
Purvis: It sounds like you’ve slightly taken sides with the guerrilla leader that the British backed against the one that the Americans and Pakistanis backed.
Gall: [laughs] Well, that may sound so, Stewart, but really it was my knowledge of the situation. I thought that Massoud was honourable, a straight shooter as you might say, whereas I knew from experience that Hekmatyar was really, I would say, a murderous thug.602
Sandy Gall’s feelings towards Hekmatyar were personal. He blamed him for the murder of two of his friends. One was Andy Skrzypkowiak, a former SAS soldier who became a freelance cameraman in Afghanistan ‘supplying ITN and the BBC with first-class combat footage’. Gall dedicated one of his books to him as a ‘travelling companion, warrior and friend, killed in Afghanistan 1987’.603
Skrzypkowiak was on his way to meet Massoud when he was kidnapped and murdered. Gall wrote that Skrzypkowiak’s ‘only crime was his friendship with Massoud’.604
I then moved on to the issue of Western arms supplies to Massoud and whether he was supporting on air the argument that Massoud should get more.
Purvis: Now after that report the Foreign Office sent a telegram about the situation to Washington and deliveries of American arms were resumed to Massoud the following year, that’s the account in your book. Was that what you had been hoping for as a result of your trip?
Gall: Do you know, I’d forgotten that … you know, Stewart, I hope I’m an impartial journalist, I never manoeuvred for anything like that to happen. The deal was that Reagan and Mrs Thatcher worked through General Zia, who deputed the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence, to run the war. So the ISI ran the war on behalf of Zia and Zia was running the war on behalf of Reagan and Thatcher and this meant that the arms were going to the people that Zia and the ISI decided to send them to and Hekmatyar was the chief client, he got most of the money, he got a huge amount of money from the Americans. It was only very late in the day that the Americans decided that he was not what they thought he was and they kind of dropped him and said to the British, you were right, we were wrong, that was amazing.
Finally I turned to whether, with his unrivalled access to people and places on the mujahideen side, he had told British viewers of the depth of British involvement. He said that he knew the British were sending in people to train the mujahideen but hadn’t reported it. However, it had been obvious. It was also clear from the British walkie-talkies that the mujahideen were using.
Purvis: What do you think the audience – and we’re talking about millions of people back in Britain seeing
your reports – do you think they understood just how deeply Britain was involved in helping the mujahideen at this point?
Gall: Maybe not.
Purvis: Did you think it was any part of your role to tell them?
Gall: I think in all those reports there was hardly any mention of British involvement. I don’t feel at all guilty about it, I didn’t think I’d overstepped my area of journalistic impartiality.
So what are we to make of the ethics of Sandy Gall’s close relationship with British intelligence?
News is news…
Hacks talking to spooks has always been a sensitive subject in British journalism. The fact is that when British journalists return from places where diplomats find it hard to get to the Foreign Office will invite them in for a chat. If they go along it is, in effect, a de-briefing. Some will go along out of a patriotic duty, others because they think that in return they will get information which means they will hopefully get to know more about what’s going on. Sandy Gall was never anything other than totally honest with me when he was invited to the Foreign Office and I never questioned his decision to go.
However, when Sandy Gall revealed his full connections with British intelligence in his book News from the Front: The Life of a Television Reporter in 1994, there was unease among Gall’s former colleagues at ITN about what he had written about his trips – even among editors such as me who had happily relished the exclusivity of the material he brought back to us. The context of the time was that ITN was perceived by some as having been too close to the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. So anything that looked like a ‘joint venture’ between ITN and the Tories aroused suspicion.
When Reporters Cross the Line Page 26