The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  His chosen profession also involved him in dangers potentially greater than the ever-looming prospect of a hunting accident. In 1968, when he was The Times’s defence correspondent, he was arrested by Soviet forces after he discovered 25,000 troops waiting, concealed, along the Czechoslovak border. His report broke in The Times on 27 July. Just over three weeks later the tanks he had stumbled upon rolled in to crush the Prague Spring. The experience made a great impression upon him and deepened his intense hostility towards the Communist expropriation of half of Europe. He was also conscious that for many in Britain and the West, the desire to live in peaceful co-existence had deadened their condemnation of left-wing totalitarianism. His wife had been staying in a hotel in Folkestone when the news broke that Soviet forces had arrested her husband. She was promptly asked to leave the hotel. Its manager did not want the custom of the wife of a man who had been arrested.67

  The treatment of dissidents in Eastern Europe was an issue that deeply concerned both the editor and his wife. Douglas-Home had met and married Jessica Gwynne, an artist poised to embark upon her career as a theatrical set and costume designer, in 1966. Both subsequently became friends of Roger Scruton, the Tory philosopher who edited the Salisbury Review. Scruton was in touch with many of Eastern Europe’s leading underground samizdat thinkers. He was also involved with the Jan Hus Foundation, a support group that had been founded with money from Times readers who had been shocked following the paper’s reporting of the arrest in Prague of Anthony Kenny, the Master of Balliol, while discussing Aristotle in a dissident’s flat. When Douglas-Home became editor of The Times, Scruton encouraged him to publish an anonymous article by the Czech dissident Petr Pithart, who later became the Prime Minister of the Czech and Slovak Federation. Accompanied by Scruton, Jessica Douglas-Home made the first of her many trips behind the Iron Curtain in October 1983 to meet with and assist dissidents. Dodging the secret police became part of her routine. Meanwhile, every Tuesday The Times published brief biographies of political prisoners from around the world in a series called ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, written by Caroline Moorehead.

  Another writer who shared the Douglas-Homes’ loathing for Communism was Bernard Levin. In October 1982, he returned to The Times to write his ‘The Way We Live Now’ column. After a gap of eighteen months, his first article commenced with the words ‘And another thing …’68 Levin, a scourge of authority in almost any guise – from the North Thames Gas Board upwards – never shirked from what he saw as his duty to denounce the totalitarian mindset. The son of a Ukrainian Jewish mother and (an absentee) Lithuanian Jewish father, Levin had shaken off the left-wing views of his youth at the LSE and his early days as the That Was The Week That Was resident controversialist but not the argumentativeness or iconoclasm. While he continued to despise many aspects of the traditional British Establishment, in particular almost all the judiciary and most of the politicians, he was unsparing in his criticism of Soviet repression in Eastern Europe. There was no shortage of material for his scorn.

  Throughout 1981, Dessa Trevisan in Warsaw and Michael Binyon, the Times correspondent in Moscow, had been filing alarming reports about the deteriorating situation in Poland. The economy was in desperate shape and the Solidarity Movement, the Eastern Bloc’s first free trade union, was openly challenging the authority of the Communist Party. Moscow had been issuing the Warsaw government with ominous requests to put its house in order and crack down on ‘anti-Soviet activities’.69 There were fears of a repeat of the Prague Spring of 1968 with Soviet tanks this time invading Poland to restore Communist unity. On 13 December 1981, Poland’s leader, General Jaruzelski, took the hint and imposed martial law.

  For The Times, as with all news services, the problem was how to get reports out from a country that had imposed a news blackout. With the Polish borders sealed and all telephone and telex links shut down, it was extremely difficult to get any accurate news out of the country. Peter Hopkirk pieced together some details from ‘western diplomatic sources’ and a variety of eyewitness reports from businessmen leaving the country as the crackdown commenced. There were troops and armoured vehicles on the city streets but reports varied as to the extent of the strike action in the mines and factories. Roger Boyes, the Times correspondent in Warsaw, managed to get out a daily diary of the first four days of martial law and this appeared in the paper on 17 December. Solidarity’s leaders had been arrested and Lech Walesa was being held in isolation in a government villa outside Warsaw. ‘Chopin martial music and the general [Jaruzelski] on the screen and radio all day,’ Boyes noted. Announcers were wearing military uniform. Troops had occupied the Gdansk shipyards and surrounded the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, some of whose staff were led away. ‘Troops are to be seen everywhere with fixed bayonets.’70

  Prior to the imposition of martial law, The Times had taken the view that between offering fresh financial aid ‘tied to IMF-type conditions’ and witnessing the economic collapse of Poland, the first was preferable. Unlike the second option, it was more likely to detach the country from the Soviet Union. Jaruzelski’s actions in December 1981 killed off any hopes in Gray’s Inn Road of sending in the investment analysts.71 Harold Evans (still editor at that time) wrote to Rupert Murdoch, ‘You ought to know that The Times leader on the West’s reaction to Poland last week described the attitude of Lord Carrington as “flacid and feeble” (among other things) and he has let it be known that he is extremely annoyed.’72

  Following street scuffles and clashes with the police, 205 arrests were made in Gdansk over the weekend of 30–31 January 1982. More violent demonstrations led to 1372 arrests on 3–4 May and the reimposition of evening curfews in Warsaw for young people. With a Polish Pope in Rome who had become a rallying point against oppression, the Church in Poland was caught in a difficult position – a spiritual power trying to negotiate with a temporal one. As Roger Boyes suggested, ‘the perpetual paradox of Church strategy is that the closer it moves to talking to the government, the further it moves from the main body of Catholic believers’.73 In November, the release of Lech Walesa after 336 days in custody raised hopes that the end of martial law in Poland might be in sight. But still the West held back in refusing aid.

  The Polish situation sharpened the debate over whether the West should invest in the Communist east (a debate held in parallel to that over economic sanctions against South Africa). The cause célèbre was the construction of the Siberian gas pipeline. British jobs were involved in it. France and Germany wanted it to help with supplying their own energy needs. There were fears that a decision to cease cooperation would provoke Moscow into pressuring Poland to default on her massive debts to British and European banks. During 1982, however, President Reagan, having banned American companies from equipping the gas pipeline, sought to apply US law retrospectively against European companies involved in its construction. Considering the United States was continuing to sell Midwest grain cheaply to the Soviet Union, there was a measure of inconsistency in the President’s position. The Times, already irritated by Washington’s initial irresolution on the Falklands’ crisis, was deeply unimpressed, lambasting an idea that ‘set a precedent that could undermine the basis of international business trust’.74 Reagan backed down and the ban was lifted on 21 August 1983, exactly one month after the end of martial law in Poland. In July, Douglas-Home, accompanied by Murdoch, was granted a twenty-minute audience with President Reagan in the White House.

  Michael Binyon had been The Times’s man in Moscow. Urbane, with the manner of the British diplomats with whom he spent so much of his time, the Cambridge-educated Binyon had arrived in the Soviet capital with his wife and three-year-old child in 1978. Extraordinarily, the paper had had no Moscow correspondent since 1972, a consequence of Soviet obstruction and a serious handicap to the paper’s pretensions as a world paper of record. Yet, as Binyon discovered, ‘the Russians had a great respect for The Times. They thought it was the official voice of Britain in the same way that Pravda is for
the Soviet Union. They took it very seriously.’75

  There was virtually no night life in Moscow, only endless ambassadorial receptions. Binyon had the distinction of being touched out of a photograph published in Izvestia at a reception for Michael Foot. He was more readily recognized for his work at the British Press Awards in 1981, when he picked up the David Holden prize. According to the judges, his reporting from the Soviet Union had been ‘one of the joys of the year. He combines hard reporting, descriptive writing and highly significant detail.’ Such observation filled his subsequent book, Life in Russia. But in mid-1982 he was moved on to become the paper’s Bonn correspondent. His replacement in Moscow was Richard Owen. Owen was thirty-four and had been at The Times for only two years, having previously gained a Ph.D. from the LSE and worked for the BBC. He spoke Russian, German, French and some Polish. He was still settling in Moscow when the Tass news agency confirmed Brezhnev’s death after eighteen years at the superpower’s helm. ‘When the end came, and it had been coming for a long time,’ reported Owen ‘the Soviet leadership seemed temporarily paralysed.’ The previous day The Times had led with the headline ‘Rumours of top leader’s death sweep Moscow’, based on Owen’s observations that ‘television schedules were changed without explanation and television news readers appeared dressed in black’. With the official confirmation, The Times went through its usual motions: page six cleared for a full-page obituary – ‘President Brezhnev: consolidator of Soviet power’ – while on the following page Owen assessed the runners and riders. ‘One of the main weaknesses of the Soviet system,’ he stressed, ‘is that it makes no provision for political succession.’ Konstantin Chernenko was the favourite followed by Yuri Andropov, while, of the less likely contenders, ‘Michael Sergeyevich Gorbachov is perhaps the most interesting Politburo member in the long term … He is confident, quiet, efficient, and biding his time.’76

  In the event, Andropov pipped Chernenko, The Times trying to find the crumb of comfort that, having been head of the KGB for fifteen years, he would at least know what was going on in the country.77 Fifteen months later, Owen was again prophesying a successor when Andropov died in February 1984 (he had not been seen in public since the previous August). The obituary had no option but to focus on his professional CV since – despite being at the forefront of Soviet politics for so many years – details such as whether he had a wife remained unknown (he did, but she made her first public appearance in the wake of his funeral). This time it was the seventy-two-year-old Chernenko who succeeded.

  The West’s tense relations with the teetering old men of the Kremlin formed the backdrop to the most important non-party political movement of the early 1980s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In Britain, the particular rallying call was the arrival of ninety-six US cruise missiles at the Greenham Common air base in Cambridgeshire. A hard core of women ‘peace protestors’ had been camping out at the air base for fifteen months when, on 12 December 1982, they were joined by a mass demonstration of thirty thousand women who linked hands and circled the perimeter wire of the base. With flowers and poems being inserted in the wire, the tone of the protest harked back to the ‘make love not war’ hippy movement of the late 1960s, although the women-only nature of the demonstration reduced, to some extent, the opportunities for hedonism available. There were sixty arrests. A CND demonstration outside Parliament led to 141 arrests. Douglas-Home was not much impressed, but the huge scale of national unease over the deployment of US nuclear weapons could not be so easily dismissed as an offshoot of a particular strain of feminism. Uncertainty about the power struggle in Moscow and dislike for the gun-totting tough talk of the ex-Hollywood cowboy (as his detractors so frequently described him) Ronald Reagan produced a broad coalition which feared that the sober reality of MAD (mutually assured destruction) would prove insufficient deterrence against either side attempting a first strike. With Monsignor Bruce Kent as its general secretary, CND drew particular support from many Church groups and individuals. When The Church and the Bomb, a report by the Church of England’s working party, argued that the retention of Britain’s nuclear deterrent was immoral, the editor’s brand of muscular Christianity rose to the fore: ‘The immorality of possessing nuclear weapons with the improbable intention of using them is only a small fraction of the immorality of actually using them. Set that against the certain rather than probable moral benefits of sustained peace in Europe, and the working party’s case falls down.’78

  The 1982 Labour Party conference voted for the third year in succession in favour of Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament. The motion, put forward by the SOGAT ’82 print union, gained the necessary two-thirds majority to ensure it was binding on party policy (it had, in any case, the support of the party leader). It called for ‘developing with the trade union movement a detailed programme for the conversion of the relevant parts of the arms industry to the manufacture of socially-useful products so that no compulsory redundancy should arise from this policy.’ Truly, the party was committed to turning swords into ploughshares. Few on the editorial floor at Gray’s Inn Road doubted the ability of SOGAT to master the art of turning sophisticated technology into labour-intensive machinery.

  III

  Like Rupert Murdoch, Harold Evans had been broadly sympathetic towards Israel, putting on record his doubts about some of his leader writers’ wish to endorse a Palestinian state at a time when the PLO was not prepared to acknowledge the state of Israel. He had been up against the pro-Palestinian view of, in particular, Edward Mortimer, a leader writer and foreign specialist at The Times since 1973. An Old Etonian, Balliol man and fellow of All Souls, Mortimer’s history of Islam, Faith and Power, was published in 1982. Rather pointedly, he stuck up a pro-Palestinian poster in his office.79 He would later become chief speech writer to the Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. In June 1982, The Times affirmed its commitment to an independent Palestinian state: ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese, must be the slogan; Israel for the Israelis; and a Palestine of some sort, west of Jordan, for the Palestinians.’80

  In June 1981, Israeli jets struck the Osirak nuclear plant near Baghdad. The Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, justified it as a pre-emptive strike at a project that was covertly developing Iraq’s attempts to gain nuclear weapons, and he had no doubt that such a capability would be used to annihilate Israel. The Israeli attack raised several issues, not all of them subject to definitive answers. Was Iraq really developing such a capability and, if so, would she use it against Israel? Did such a possibility justify a pre-emptive attack of this kind? There was also the diplomatic angle, given the outrage felt by Arab countries and the French government. France had built the reactor and French personnel (one of whom was killed in the attack) were helping to operate it. The Times took the view that the Iraqis probably were acquiring weapons-grade enriched uranium but that the Israeli action would only drive Saddam Hussein into the arms of Syria. The action ‘may cause rejoicing in Israel in the short term, but it has not guaranteed Israeli security in the longer term’ concluded the leader column.81 The unpalatable central issue – whether it was in anyone’s interest for Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear weapons – was sidestepped.

  Robert Fisk was the paper’s Middle Eastern correspondent. Having completed a Ph.D. at Trinity College Dublin on Irish neutrality during the Second World War, he had joined The Times in 1971 in his mid-twenties, reporting on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and winning Granada TV’s What The Papers Say award for Reporter of the Year in 1975. It was while in Ireland that he uncovered a succession of British Army cover-ups, further cementing his dislike of what he saw as the repressive tendencies of authority and officialdom. ‘I learned that authority lies, governments lie, ministries of defence lie,’ he said of his time in Ulster, adding that his response was to ‘keep challenging, to reject and refuse what you’re handed’.82 The police took him in for questioning following their discovery that he had been receiving classified documents from a rogue Army press office
r who was later convicted for manslaughter. His subsequent switch away from reporting on Ireland was wrongly attributed to this incident. In fact, he merely wanted a change of scene. But Gray’s Inn Road was no place for a man of Fisk’s peripatetic courage. He had an ally in Douglas-Home, at that time home news editor, who, despite his own regard for the British Army, always encouraged Fisk to investigate further. In 1976 he was dispatched to the Middle East, finding plenty of trouble to write about in the Lebanon and Iran before covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where he gained considerable access to the Soviet forces. At the IPC awards he had won International Reporter of the Year for two years running in 1980 and 1981. Frequently shot at, ‘you reach a point’ he laconically observed, ‘when one shell looks very much like another’.83

  Fisk had arrived in the Lebanon just as the Syrians were invading the country. The Lebanon had collapsed into anarchy and the Syrian occupation had the backing of the Arab League and East Beirut’s Christian population. It was not long before Damascus’s intervention became, in turn, deeply resented and the Christians began to look for a new saviour – Israel. Syria, meanwhile, decided to crush ruthlessly its own fanatical Muslims. In February 1982 there was an insurrection by Sunni fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama. With the Syrian government warning foreign journalists they risked being shot by their forces if they tried to travel there, it was impossible to gauge exactly the extent of the uprising and the undoubted ferocity with which it was being suppressed. Fisk, however, decided to get a closer look and took a detour from the road to Damascus. As he approached, he could see the smoke from the ruins of Hama’s old city rising but roadblocks prevented him from getting any closer – as they had prevented any other journalist from enquiry. Fisk, however, had a stroke of luck when two displaced Syrian soldiers approached his car and asked if they could hitch a lift with him back to their units. This was his opportunity. With shells whizzing overhead, Fisk’s car sped across the battlefront, making it to the Syrians’ lines from where Soviet-made T62 tanks were firing across the Orontes river. A mosque was being shelled to pieces; a giant eighteenth-century wooden waterwheel was on fire, water cascading from its shattered structure; huge mortar cannons rocked back and forth, pounding the ancient walled city to obliteration. Bullets pinged and whirled back from the insurgents. The siege, Fisk learned, had been going on for sixteen days. There had been ferocious fighting in the cellars and passageways underneath the city as well as within it at street level. Syrian troops had even been blown up by a new and shocking phenomenon – women suicide bombers who embraced them clutching uncorked grenades. Some troops had defected to the insurgent Muslim Brotherhood.84