Hack

by Graham Johnson

  I was getting all the plum jobs – but something was stirring in my soul. I wanted to do more serious stories. If I was going to go flying off round the world, with virtually unlimited budget and state-of-the-art surveillance gear, I may as well put it to good use. Instead, I was still getting sent to Florida. To interview Ernie Wise. Or to LA to do a story about Lynn Redgrave. Frustrated and sleepless in Hollywood, one night I went to a 24-hour bookshop. Cleaning the shelves out of all their Noam Chomsky books. Chomsky is an American linguist who analyses the media. Exposing the interests that are really being served. Thirsty to understand how my profession works, I locked myself in my hotel room.

  Chomsky explained that all the papers, whether Sun or Guardian, are run in the interests of the powerful and the rich. End of story. No back answers. Few exceptions. To bend the heads of the peasants. To stop any real dissent. To limit freedom and prosperity. Bang on! Having worked on the line in a propaganda factory, instinctively I knew this to be true.

  But in many ways, he said, liberal broadsheets are worse blaggers than even the red-tops. As they try to disguise their hypocrisy by pretending to be kinder and more honest. Which, he says, is a load of bollocks. The Guardian is not the real opposition to power. Merely an ‘acceptable face of dissent’. Brainwashing middle-class intellectuals into thinking that it sets the boundaries on what is ‘appropriate’ criticism. Anything beyond their norms is considered to be conspiracy theory. To be mocked. The limits of the arguments are set by a ‘manufacture of consent’. Between those on the left and those on the right. Kept in place by a constant process of ‘self-editing’. Preventing journalists from saying what they really think to their editors and colleagues in case they are laughed at. Or marked down as trouble-makers. All true by the way. I’d watched reporters self-edit for years. That’s why most stories are basically similar. The same themes are repeated over and over again. Have you ever wondered why the papers are full of bollocks? I’d lost count of the number of times readers would say: ‘I don’t buy the paper any more because there’s nothing in it?’ Here was the reason why.

  I was blown away by these ideas. But the next day it was back to Planet Nonsense. I had to go into the Hollywood Hills. To investigate why Lynn Redgrave was divorcing her husband. Over a secret love child that he’d fathered with her secretary. I’d come 6000-odd miles for this? I was confused. I couldn’t be arsed. I made up the quotes. Or, rather, I attributed quotes that Redgrave’s friend had told me she said. To Redgrave direct. I’d fallen off the wagon. I was gutted. I spent the whole day stressed out, worried and reflective. But on the other hand, so fucking what? What do the papers expect?

  32

  Slave

  In a bid to satisfy the yearnings in my soul, I decided to do more worthy stories. The first was a campaign about child slavery. To expose the secret sweatshop shame behind globalisation. The big economic movement sweeping the corporate world in the late 1990s. Today, retrospectives claim that cheap credit was the main driver behind the glory days of the big boom. But slave labour was the other vice propping up the P&L accounts.

  Paul Samrai gave me some good link-ups in South Asia. In Sialkot, Pakistan, I exposed the 10p-a-day children who made surgical equipment in filthy fume-filled factories – astonishingly for NHS hospitals. In the middle of the Rugby World Cup, I turned over the company that made the prestigious balls. The Gilbert company claimed that its world famous sports equipment was made in England. But behind the scenes, production was shadily subcontracted out to child slavery workshops in the Punjab. Then deep into the jungles of Assam. To find out the real price of your cuppa – little girls picking leaves in plush tea gardens for peanuts. No more than indentured slaves. Little had changed since the days of Empire. Except the new secret rulers of the world were multinationals instead of Rule Britannia. I loved doing these stories. But in tabloids they are generally derided for being ‘worthy’. Why go to all the hassle when we can do a spread on Anthea Turner and Grant Bovey?

  At the British Press Awards, I was a finalist for the ruthlessly competitive Reporter of the Year title. The nomination based on the Arthur C. Clarke exposé and a few other investigations. I was coming back in from the cold. Like the cloud from the Beast was finally dissipating.

  But the News of the World weren’t having any of it. Livid that I’d even been shortlisted. Like a personal insult for them. Even during the ceremony they couldn’t help themselves from having a go. Getting up to a few dirty tricks. Sending people over to the Sunday Mirror table. Where I was chatting with our paper’s dinner guest Max Clifford. To tape me up. News of the World Assistant Editor Harry Scott interrupted, trying to trap me. Saying, ‘There’s no way Ray asked you to stunt that Beast pic. Admit it now.’ Thinking that I’d fold, half-pissed. With my ego running rampant because I was up for a gong. Trademark News International. Always pushing it too far. Always fighting when it’s better just to fuck it off. Little did they know that the extremist win-at-all-costs attitude would one day bring it all on top for them.

  Next day, hangovered to death, I headed off to Albania to cover the breaking Kosovo crisis. In the Albanian capital Tirana, I hired the country’s only helicopter for $2000. To taxi me up to the mountain borderlands. Couldn’t wait to do another proper story. But deep down I knew the script – war reporting is basically a blag. Except for a handful of dissenting, anti-war journalists such as John Pilger and Robert Fisk, the rest are fucking blaggers and chancers. I knew this from my days as a freelancer in Bosnia seven years before. A lot of highly-paid staffers sitting around getting pissed in hotels. Holding court with other gobshites. Whilst paying a small army of local fixers and ex-services privateers to do the dirty work on the front line. You wouldn’t believe it how big a knob-head the average war correspondent is. It defies reason. Then, at the end of all this, regurgitating the propaganda of the ‘international community’. Ruthlessly self-editing in order not to offend any special interests. All that’s left is to cook up some harmless refugee stories. The war pack even hold rave parties next door to the tented camps. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve seen the most famous TV war correspondents do this.

  But that’s not the worst of it. Most of the war reporting done by these apparatchiks, even in the broadsheets and on the telly, is propaganda. Subtly controlled by NATO and the MoD. To make ‘our’ side look good and to demonise the bad guys. I took part in this fascinating charade. But only realised it later. Once you’re inside the matrix you don’t know what the fuck’s going on.

  Basically, the Kosovo war had nothing to do with a ‘humanitarian intervention’. Which was the line used by Tony Blair to justify bombing Belgrade. NATO attacked Serbia to increase US influence in the Balkans. As part of a military strategy to control Russian power in Eastern Europe. But you wouldn’t have read this in any papers at the time.

  Before I went to Albania the demonisation of the enemy had began. One day I was in the office working on a daft story about Vanessa Feltz’s new boyfriend. Mysteriously, I was asked to come off that very important piece. Told to write a backgrounder on Slobodan Milosevic’s wife instead, who no one had ever heard of. But slagging her off for being an evil ‘red witch’. Unusual, because we rarely did ‘foreign affairs’ stories like this.

  In the build-up to the war, I also wrote a story about how the SAS were being deployed in the region. To execute warlords. Another story out-of-the-blue bigged up the RAF’s latest smart bombs. Claiming that this campaign would be even cleaner than the Gulf War. With hardly any collateral damage at all.

  As the conflict warmed up, I went along with ramping up all the stories about mass graves and Serbian atrocities. Almost all of these stories were false. Propaganda deliberately planted by MoD shadow-men. With the editors and political reporters. Then passed down to me to write up. But the best phony mass grave story I read was a howler in my sister paper the Mirror. About the metal ore mines in a place called Trepca. Where ‘they’ said 1000 bodies of Kosovans had been smelted and dissolved wi
th acid by Serbs. The name Trepca, the Mirror said, would ‘live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka . . . etched in the memories of those whose loved ones met a bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution fashion’.

  But no bodies were ever found at Trepca. No human remains at all, according to the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia. After the war the FBI and war crimes commission found no evidence of mass graves in the whole of Kosovo. During the bombing, NATO officials reported as many as 225,000 Albanian men missing. After the bombing, officials said the Serbs had murdered 10,000 Albanians. So far investigators have found the bodies of only 2,108 presumed victims, including some Serbs.

  From Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Libya – the model is always the same. The ingredients of modern propaganda never vary. Starts with demonisation of leader. Then mass grave-spoofing. SAS saving the day. Finally smart bomb stories that disguise the true numbers of civilian dead. If the pudding needs over-egging then the issue of WMDs is thrown in, just like it is today. In the buildup to the war with Iran. I had to laugh when I was watching the Gaddafi caper unfold. I sat there in front of the telly watching Sky, ticking them off my list.

  Saying that, I did get some good stories in Kosovo. Got an interview with the first Serbian prisoner of war. His pockets full of gold rings. Robbed at gunpoint from old refugee women. I paid the Kosovo Liberation Army fixer £3000 in cash for the pictures and interview. Promising him an extra £2000 in London. But of course we bumped him for the balance. Later he threatened to kill me, spending years trying to get to me. It’s true – those Albanians never forget. Also I bagged a good story about how loads of the humanitarian aid was corrupt – with UN emergency supplies being sold off the back of a lorry.

  But when I got back to London it was straight back on to skateboarding parrots. Flew to Tenerife. After veteran TV comic Lenny Henry was accused of harassing strippers on a BBC bender. Behind the showbiz frippery, a menacing air of violence and shadiness hung around the story. The sunshine isle was controlled by one of Britain’s richest gangsters, John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer. Goldfinger was knee-deep in a gang war with his former enforcer. The main drag Playas de las Americas was a seething cauldron of smouldering underworld tension. Everyone, from the lowliest bar touts to the millionaire nightclub owners, encased in their bulletproof cavalcades, was on trigger-finger red alert. Into the valley of death – I fear no evil.

  I arranged to meet a small-time Brit villain in a wild west-themed bar. After he rang the News Desk, claiming to have pictures of Lenny Henry with the strippers. We got on well. Before he nipped off to the bogs, he agreed to sell me the pics for a few grand. But after ten minutes, mysteriously he’d still not come back. I nursed my pint for a further 20 minutes. Worried that he’d got cold feet and run off. Suddenly, I heard a commotion near the entrance of the pub. I decided to take a look. There he was, my contact. Lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Under the slatted wooden swing-doors. Surrounded by a horrified stag party. Paramedics trying to save his life. Throat cut. Eye gouged out with a knife. Slash marks all over his face and arms.

  Later in intensive care, one of his mates tried to blag me off. Claiming that the attack had nothing to do with meeting me. That it was down to a long-running underworld feud over pub crawls. Tourists pay through the nose to go on 18–30-style organised drinking sessions. A trade so lucrative that gangsters had started killing each other for the concessions. Especially now that war had broken out between the island’s godfathers and rival gangs were looking for protection.

  But I suspected he wasn’t telling me the whole truth. Later my suspicions were proved correct – the contact had been stabbed for talking to me. I was warned that he’d been deliberately targeted because another rival gang had also got hold of the Lenny Henry pics. But had agreed to sell them to the People for bigger money. My guy was stabbed to keep the pictures exclusive. Of course, the People didn’t know any of this. Just business between local hoods playing at being paparazzi. Chequebook journalism was becoming a dangerous business. This was the first time that I’d noticed organised crime blatantly cashing in on a story. But it was a sinister influence that would go on to grow and grow. Especially as villains realised the amount of money to be made from the papers. Along with the potential to blackmail the growing number of young celebrities.

  Later that night, I realised I was being followed. I was warned by some very heavy doorman to drop the story. My spider senses were exploding. Then I got a moody phone call. Telling me to get off the island. In the early hours I woke Carmen up – she’d come over to see me from mainland Spain on a flying visit – and we slipped out the back door of the hotel. Stealthily checking into another four star on the other side of the island. Under a false name.

  I’d been involved in a similar situation a few years before at the News of the World. In which I’d been held hostage in a hotel. By some extremely serious villains. So I knew the drill and didn’t want a repeat.

  That story had started out benignly enough. Turning over a TV soap star for selling cocaine. Straightforward up-and-down. No big deal. Got the target on tape up to no good. Was just about to check out of the hotel when I got a phone call from a mate.

  ‘You know that feller off the telly you’re looking into,’ my mate said. ‘He’s not just a silly actor, you know.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ I asked. ‘How do you know what I’m doing?’ I’d been undercover for two days and no one was supposed to know what I was up to.

  ‘Never mind how I know. I’m just calling you for your own sake. The guy you’re on is the front man for one the biggest drug cartels in Europe.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said, the confusion setting in even more. ‘He’s just a two-bit actor off the telly selling a bit of gear on the side to look hard.’

  ‘No, he’s not. He’s got himself wrapped up with some serious cocaine importers. Not only that, he’s on their firm. He’s agreed to be the licensee on a nightclub they’ve just opened. If you turn this soap star over in the papers, then he’ll lose the licence. The club will be shut down.

  ‘And the gangsters will lose all the squillions of quid they’ve invested in the front business.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said, understanding the significance of the info immediately. Phone down. Down the stairs. Heading for the doors. But it was already too late. The lobby was full of roid head gangsters in baseball caps waiting for me. No escape.

  I ran back up the fire escape. To my room with the freelancer I was with. We locked ourselves in. I pulled the mattresses off the beds. Jamming them up against the door. Shored up by a heavy-based table, a chair and a lampstand. Waiting for it to go in.

  But instead the phone rang. The man on the other end was matter-of-fact. I could hear the sounds of a toddler in his arms.

  ‘I’m downstairs. We want a meeting,’ he said. The man turned out to be Colin King Cocaine’ Smith. One of biggest drug barons in the UK. Worth an estimated £200 million. His senior partner was Curtis Warren, the richest criminal ever caught in British history with an estimated £300 million fortune. What followed was yet another bizarre merry dance. The News of the World opened up negotiations with the drug barons. The cartel boss employed a professional PR firm to talk terms on their behalf. The News of the World flew in a freelancer called John Merry, who’d been in prison with Curtis Warren. Merry negotiated my freedom in exchange for the coke story on the soap star being dropped.

  Fast forward back to Tenerife. I’d managed to sidestep a similar situation by moving hotels in the dead of night. But it freaked Carmen out and I didn’t see much of her after that. But before I got on the plane home I got a call from one of my contacts: ‘It’s a good job you got out of your hotel.’

  ‘How did you know that I did?’

  ‘Because they were watching you. If you hadn’t have left, you would have woken up with them in your room with balaclavas on.’

  33

  Millennium Bug

  Back in London. Back on t
o the treadmill of humdrum nonsense – spies at the Palace, rugby star drug shame, monkey meat for sale. Then I did one of the saddest and meanest stories of my career. The News Desk asked me to turn over a former Grange Hill star for drugs. Erkan Mustafa used to play Roland Browning in the BBC’s much loved kids’ serial. The chubby loner who’d helped front the show’s ‘Just Say No’ anti-drugs campaign. Now the child actor had grown up and was on his arse. Trying to reinvent himself as a club DJ. Someone came up with the idea of exposing him as a heroin dealer – even though he wasn’t one. Don’t let the facts get in the way of good story. I set him up in an elaborate sting operation. Luring him to a plush hotel suite. Complete with a Jacuzzi and a couple of tasty girls hanging around. As is standard in this entrapment model, the inducement was a big record deal. I blagged Erkan that I was big promoter. I wanted him to play at raves in Spain and Dubai at £20,000-a-set. Roland wasn’t too clever. After a string of leading questions he offered to sell me heroin. I knew he was just trying to please me as a thank-you for the blag DJ contract. Bigging himself up as a gangster in front of the girls. The upshot was total annihilation on the front page. I always felt guilty about doing those Mazher Mahmood-style stings.

  I finished off the year with another big drugs sting – turning over the builders at the under-construction Millennium Dome. For serving up coke, weed and pills on the job. No big deal. Most big building sites these days are awash with gear. But everyone was kicking the Dome to death. So it would have been rude not to. Happy New Year.

  The turn of the new millennium should have marked a paradigm shift. Inspired by my child slavery series in South Asia, I wanted to do more serious stories. About big, bad corporations fucking everyone up the arse. Fucking up the planet etc. No more silly drugs turnovers. No more stitching up straw men for cheap thrills. Raising my game was the name of the game. Fixing my sights on some proper targets.