When the whole business had died down, Pamella sent me a card from abroad, in which she apologised for dragging my name into the headlines. She added: ‘If both Andrew and you were my boyfriends, I can assure you that if I had to choose in the end – it would be you. Because you are a lovely, lovely man, so kind, intelligent and witty … I also think that you are terribly handsome.’ No, I didn’t believe a word of it either.
The most famous headline in the whole affair resulted from Neil’s evidence: ‘DIRTY DON TRIED TO PULL MY PAM SAYS RANDY ANDY’. Even though it was a parody of the truth, I can now – after so much time and having happily remarried – see the funny side of it. So much so that a framed copy of The Sun’s front page now hangs in my study.
My only lasting complaint against Ms Bordes is that in an interview she described me as a ‘pixie’, a nickname seized on by Private Eye and applied to me with relish for many years to come. Still, I suppose there could be worse things to be called. When I made my debut in Private Eye in the early 1970s, I was described as ‘the appalling Donald Trelford’. That same evening, I went to a dinner party in Blackheath and the host mentioned to another guest that I worked for The Observer. He came up to me and said: ‘You must know the appalling Donald Trelford.’ I took immense pleasure in replying: ‘I am the appalling Donald Trelford.’
At this year’s Oldie awards lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand, nearly three decades after the Bordes episode, I was rather startled to find myself seated next to Andrew Neil. I was even more startled when he whispered: ‘Have you seen Pamella Bordes? I heard she was in London.’ My answer was a very firm ‘No’.
CHAPTER 15
FARZAD
Five box-files containing press cuttings, letters and other papers about Farzad Bazoft have followed me around the world for the past twenty-seven years, a perpetual reminder of my most harrowing time on The Observer. Going through them again and reliving that terrible period has been a painful but enlightening experience, especially in the light of some crucial facts which have only become available since the death of Saddam Hussein.
Farzad was thirty-one when he was executed in Baghdad. He had been born in Iran and came to England in 1975, at the age of sixteen, to complete his education. After the Khomeini revolution in 1979, he was allowed to stay on because Iran had issued a warrant for his arrest as an ‘anti-revolutionary’. He became a freelance journalist and throughout the 1980s he fed The Observer and other media, including the BBC World Service, with items about the Iran–Iraq War.
He was a handsome and rather exotic figure with an Omar Sharif moustache. Although never on The Observer’s staff, or even on a retainer, he was welcomed in the office and allowed to use a desk and a telephone. Part of his attraction was his undisguised ambition to be a famous journalist like the Washington Post’s Watergate sleuths, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He carried around with him a copy of John Pilger’s book, Heroes. His favourite film was Killing Fields, about foreign correspondents in Cambodia. He fought hard for a byline on his contributions. This naïve and romantic side of his nature was to have tragic consequences.
His opposition to the Khomeini regime made him accepted in Iraq and he was invited there five times and saw the front line of the war from their side. It is important to stress this, because after his execution I was virtually accused of his murder. This was in a Sunday Telegraph article of which John Pilger wrote: ‘No finer example exists, not even in The Sun, of journalism’s sewer.’
The paper equated investigative journalism with espionage and said I was ‘culpably naïve’ in sending an Iranian ‘into the slaughter-house’. The fact is that I never even knew that Farzad had gone to Iraq. I didn’t need to know. My deputy, Adrian Hamilton (son of Sir Denis of Times and Sunday Times fame), could authorise any expenses of the trip; fares and accommodation were paid for by the Iraqi Foreign Office.
This sixth, ultimately fatal invitation came in September 1989, to cover elections in Kurdistan. The invitation was not addressed to Farzad, but to Ian Mather, an Observer reporter who had been captured and detained during the Falklands War. Mather couldn’t go, so he passed on the invitation to Farzad, who accepted it eagerly. On the day his press party arrived in Baghdad, The Independent led with a story about a massive explosion at a military complex in Iraq which had allegedly killed 700 people. There were suspicions that it might have involved chemical or even nuclear weapons. An ITN crew went to look but were sent away and their film confiscated.
Farzad met the deputy Foreign Minister, Nizam Hamdoun, and asked to visit the site. He also sounded out contacts at the Information Ministry about taking him there. Then, sensing that this might be the scoop of a lifetime, he enlisted the help of Daphne Parish, a British nurse he had met on a previous visit, to drive him to Al Hillah, 40 miles south of Baghdad. She agreed on condition that there would be ‘no fence-jumping or James Bond stuff’. They went on successive days to take photographs and collect soil samples, though they always stayed on public roads.
When Farzad returned to Baghdad, he told the other journalists what he had been doing and showed them what he had found. Some of them were nervous on his behalf and urged him to leave the country. He was waiting for an Iraq Airways flight to London, just before midnight on 15 September 1990, when he was picked up at Baghdad airport and taken for interrogation by Saddam Hussein’s notorious Mukhabarat secret police. He had either been followed, which was a common experience for foreign journalists in Iraq, or his telephone conversations with The Observer in London had been tapped.
He was held in solitary confinement for six weeks while this newspaper, the Foreign Office, the European Commission and many journalist organisations around the world campaigned for his release. Observer staff and other Fleet Street journalists joined a mass protest outside the Iraqi embassy.
Eventually, on 1 November, the Iraqis issued a tape showing him ‘confessing’ to being a spy for Israel. Earlier the Iraqis had claimed he was spying for Britain. When Farzad’s Observer colleagues watched the tape together, we were shocked by his appearance. He had lost much weight and seemed to be exhausted, drugged or suffering from the effects of torture, or possibly all of these. His eyes were those of a sick and frightened man.
Worldwide appeals continued for his release, or at least a fair trial. I saw Iraq’s ambassador in London twice. On my second visit, the ambassador was accompanied by a younger man in glasses, who sat with his long legs sprawled across his chair and looked contemptuous of our appeals for mercy. I assumed he was from the Iraq intelligence service and that they were calling the shots.
I went with Adrian Hamilton to see the head of the Middle East desk at the Foreign Office. He was dismissive of our requests for trade sanctions to be imposed on Saddam until Farzad was released. In Cabinet papers released in January 2017, Norman (now Lord) Lamont wrote in a memo to Douglas (now Lord) Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, that trade or credit restrictions would be ‘ineffective in influencing the attitude of the Iraqi government’, and would ‘inflict disproportionate damage on UK industry’.
Hurd replied: ‘Iraq would see any further action as a further political response to Bazoft. That would be bad for our wider commercial interests.’
Hamilton has made the shrewd point that, while the United States foreign service sees its role as protecting American people, British diplomats serve the interests of the British government and those interests were chiefly commercial. Only the toughest action by the British government might have saved Bazoft and that was not forthcoming.
In 1988, Saddam had sent war planes to attack the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons, gassing between 3,000 and 5,000 men, women and children. Just a year later, the British government relaxed controls on arms exports to Iraq. Why? Because Saddam’s Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, had promised Sir Geoffrey Howe, then Foreign Secretary, that Iraq would not use chemical weapons again.
The Cabinet papers make clear that the Thatcher government’s main interest in the whole Bazof
t affair was protecting and promoting British arms sales. Lamont has since admitted that ‘the decisive thing’ in determining Britain’s response was that, although he was a British resident, ‘he wasn’t a British citizen’. We now know that Farzad’s fate was almost certainly sealed the moment he fell into the hands of Saddam’s security police. But that is no excuse for the Thatcher government’s failure to back up its strong words against Saddam with any kind of decisive action.
It has become clear now that they were never going to confront Baghdad over Bazoft. Many of Thatcher’s ministers had made the trip to Baghdad to befriend Saddam and promote British trade with the Baathist regime. Hurd himself, William Waldegrave, John Biffen, John Wakeham, Alan Clark and David Mellor had all shaken the tyrant’s hand. As Pilger put it, Bazoft’s arrest and execution were ‘the gravest inconvenience’.
We were shocked to learn that, even while Farzad was under arrest, the Institute for International Affairs was hosting a conference to promote trade with Iraq. I told the organisers that the whole Observer staff would descend on Chatham House in St James’s Square to disrupt the meeting unless they called it off. In the end we reached a compromise. I agreed to call off our protest march if I was allowed to see the Iraqi deputy Foreign Minister, Hamdoun, who was attending the conference. He had met Farzad on his fatal visit, when he had sought permission to visit the site of the explosion. Hamdoun, who seemed a decent man, was sympathetic but he confirmed the view we had already reached that Farzad’s fate was outside the control of anyone but Saddam Hussein.
I was refused permission to attend the trial, as was the British QC we appointed to defend him. His defence lawyer in Baghdad was given one day’s notice of the trial. It was conducted in Arabic, a language Farzad didn’t know. Sworn statements by The Observer and his press colleagues on the trip were not admitted. On 26 November, the Revolutionary Court sentenced him to be hanged, with no right of appeal, and Mrs Parish was given fifteen years’ hard labour (she was eventually released and returned to Britain after ten months).
In 2003, The Observer tracked down Kadem Askar, the colonel in Iraq’s military intelligence who had interrogated Farzad. He admitted that he knew Farzad was innocent, but that he was powerless to obstruct Saddam’s personal orders to have him convicted and executed.
The British Consul-General in Baghdad, Robin Kealy, had been summoned to Abu Ghraib prison on 15 March 1990 and informed that Farzad would be hanged in one hour, only to discover that the prisoner had not been told. He had to break the news, which Farzad bore with dignity. He left letters for his family and friends and apologised to Daphne Parish ‘for having involved her’. His final words were: ‘I was just a journalist going after a scoop.’
I was informed of his execution by the BBC’s Today programme when they telephoned me at home just before 7 a.m. I went straight on air and was unable to keep the tears and anger out of my voice. When I got to the Observer offices on Battersea bridge, the staff in all departments were in a state of shock. They couldn’t think or talk of anything else.
When Canon John Oates, the Rector of St Bride’s, rang with a message of sympathy, I asked him if he could come round and say some prayers. He held a deeply affecting ceremony around the paper’s news desk, with staff from other departments looking on from a balcony. This seemed to calm the distraught atmosphere and allowed normal work to be carried on.
The Observer’s management, working through the Foreign Office, tried hard to arrange for Farzad’s body to be returned to his parents in England. Eventually, with no warning, the coffin arrived late at night at Heathrow airport, accompanied by a chilling message from an Iraqi official: ‘Mrs Thatcher wanted him. We’ve sent him in a box.’ The Daily Express ran a disgraceful front page, claiming that the absence of Observer representatives at the airport was proof that the newspaper, for all its public rhetoric, didn’t care about its dead colleague.
His eventual burial in Highgate Cemetery, close to the grave of Karl Marx, was attended by his family and dozens of Observer staff. His office desk became a shrine, his picture surrounded by flowers and messages. Readers sent hundreds of sympathetic letters, some including poems or money. A permanent plaque and photograph remembering Farzad are now on display in the Observer newsroom.
Even now, nearly three decades on, it is hard to contain one’s anger – not just at the insane barbarity of Saddam Hussein, but at parts of the British press that tried to shift the blame for his murder onto poor Farzad himself, onto The Observer and especially onto me. Some journalists came out well from the affair, notably Paul Foot, Hugo Young, John Pilger and Keith Waterhouse. Others, notably the Sunday Telegraph and Today, were guilty, to use Paul Foot’s phrase, of ‘vicious humbug and hypocrisy.’
News broke after his death that Farzad had spent twelve months in jail as a young man for attempted robbery (a surprise to us). It was splashed on the tabloid front pages and presented as if this was more important than his execution, even providing some justification for it. It appeared that, eleven years before his death in Baghdad, Farzad had found himself in financial difficulties and threatened to blow up a building society unless it gave him £475, the exact amount he was in debt. There was no bomb. He was arrested later that day.
We always wondered how the news of Farzad’s criminal record had come out. The Cabinet papers released in January 2017 contain a note sent by Sara Dent, private secretary to David Waddington, then Home Secretary, to Charles Powell, Thatcher’s foreign affairs adviser, while Farzad was under sentence of death. It sets out the facts of the failed robbery and adds: ‘Although this has no bearing on his sentence in Iraq, it may be raised by the Iraqis or the press.’ She said the Home Office ‘proposed not to volunteer this information but not deny it if it is raised with us’.
There can be no serious doubt that the information was leaked from the Home Office to smear Farzad and distract press attention from the government’s failure to help the Observer reporter. The smears succeeded to such an extent that several papers and columnists, including John Junor in the Sunday Express and Woodrow Wyatt in the News of the World, said the Bazoft affair should not be allowed to disrupt British trade with Iraq. One has to wonder who provided the Mail on Sunday with a story linking Farzad with Iraq’s so-called ‘doom gun’ project. The documents the paper used were later shown to be forged.
The conduct of two Tory MPs was unforgivable. Terry Dicks said he ‘deserves to die’. Rupert Allason said he was a spy. He had no evidence, other than that the name of an Israeli arms dealer was found in his diary. I had actually passed on that name and telephone number to Farzad myself as a possible contact for an investigation we had launched into the international arms trade.
Farzad’s conduct in Baghdad, announcing his trip in advance to the Iraqi authorities and sharing the results with his fellow journalists, was hardly the stuff of espionage. As he said himself, he was ‘just a journalist going after a scoop’. The deadly fact was that the story concerned Iraq’s closest secret, its arms programme.
Ironically, Farzad Bazoft achieved his ambition of reaching the world’s front pages. Sadly, however, his name was in the headline, not the byline. But his highly publicised death did highlight the evil of Saddam’s regime in a way denied to the thousands of victims who died in silence. Only a year after his death, Iraq invaded Kuwait, sparking the First Gulf War and demonstrating the global threat that he posed.
Nothing will ever soften our rage at the injustice meted out to a dear friend and colleague, or our shame at the Thatcher government’s collusion with Baghdad. But it does give added dignity and meaning to Farzad’s death to know that it served, if nothing else, as a terrible warning to the world.
CHAPTER 16
MUAMMAR
I first went to Libya for The Observer nearly fifty years ago, when the country was still reeling from the discovery of the massive oil deposits which had raised it suddenly from one of the world’s poorest countries to one of the richest. At independence in 1951, its
total budget was £7 million; by the time I went there in 1968, a single housing project in Tripoli cost £400 million.
It was ruled by King Idris, whom I described in my report as ‘a tall ascetic figure with a white beard in steel-rimmed spectacles, incubating a dignity that somehow refuses to hatch’. As I packed my bags in my hotel room on the Sunday morning on which this article appeared, I received a call from the Information Ministry, saying I must report there as a matter of urgency. Suspecting that this might for a rebuke for showing disrespect to His Majesty, I said I would go, but instead took a fast taxi to the airport and managed to get lift-off before I could be stopped.
King Idris – or El Sayyid Prince Muhammad Idris bin Muhammad al-Mahdi as Senussi, to give him his full name – probably didn’t deserve to be ridiculed, having fought a tough guerrilla war against the occupying Italians in the 1930s and helped the British in the desert war against Rommel. The problem for me was that Idris was then a popular drink in England, often advertised on the London Underground (‘Idris when I’s dry’), which limited my ability to take him too seriously.
Besides, I sensed an impermanence about the country’s current set-up and doubted if the old feudal monarch, who had chickens’ throats cut in his honour whenever his cavalcade passed through a village, was the right man to share out the country’s new booty. In my final paragraph, I mentioned the Ghibli, a hot searing wind that roars in from the Sahara, and said the people were expecting one to arrive any minute.
Blown in on the Ghibli was Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who swept King Idris away in a military coup the following year. A handsome, dashing figure, often pictured on a horse in the sort of gown worn by Peter O’Toole in the film Lawrence of Arabia, he looked every inch the ideal Arab nationalist and a hero to old Arabists like Robert Stephens, The Observer’s diplomatic correspondent, who was dewy-eyed when he talked about him.
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