Rachel confirmed everything I already knew, and highlighted the aftercare issue, reminding me that many of these surgeons had trained up to fifteen years ago and in a place like this had little chance to update their skills. She talked me calmly through the night – she had no connection with Kate. She told me like a nurse and without emotion. I knew that, like me, she had been here before.
I conducted four interviews but I felt I was just ticking the boxes. I wasn’t solving it or understanding it; I was simply going through the motions. This wasn’t my kind of work or my forte. Not going into Mogadishu made the process harder.
Karel handed me some pictures and that was as good as it got. But I needed to be there in Somalia so we’d be better prepared the next time this happened. One of the most important aspects of my job was to show the journos what we had learned from previous trips anywhere in the world – I couldn’t do my job if I was unable to sketch out the position of the vehicle to the compound, making the point that they had to get inside at all costs and, failing that, highlighting the angle of the passenger seats to the street. Not going meant potential exposure for any of our teams around the globe in the future. The basic errors were totting up – sandals, no flak jackets, and entering a vehicle from the open road outside the building you were visiting.
I learned the most from Kirsten from NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) Security Service. She had the greatest insight into the local political terrain and was the only person who could offer knowledge on who had pulled the trigger. There were three simple but different theories.
Had there been a threat to the Head of the BBC Somali Service, a known opponent to the Transitional Government? Kate may have taken the bullet on their behalf. Kirsten also thought it could be part of a simple vehicle contract dispute. That wasn’t uncommon in local gang warfare, nor was it as random as it sounded. The BBC had been offered the gunman’s vehicle before Kate’s shooting but had said they didn’t need it. That could be enough to set anybody off. If we took Ajaf at his word, this car already had a track record in the underworld. Ultimately, the vehicle behind Kate’s death could have been the one our guys were driving and might already have had a blood-stained past. The actual owner of the car brought the paperwork to the hotel and confirmed that three men had hired it, assuring him nothing would happen to it.
Disappointingly, theory number three was simply that the gunmen were bored. The vehicle had been hanging around since midday looking at targets and Kate was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were always going to take someone out – Kate was their opportunity. Doors close very quickly in these parts; witnesses, weapons and vehicles disappear. Crime goes unsolved. How depressing to think the killers could just have got pissed off waiting.
Both the government and the security team had investigations underway. We would learn very little at that point. My gut said that Kate wasn’t the target – the Transitional Government was in their sights. She was the first to exit, and I share the boredom theory. If the guys had parked in the compound, Kate would be alive today.
I called Aulad, the fixer. He told me nothing new. In fact, he said that he felt everything was fine; the threat level had been the usual – it was just a normal day in Mogadishu. He described the Shafi Hotel as a safe place, well equipped with good internet, larger than the other hotels. Many dignitaries stayed there. Interesting, but little help if I couldn’t get to see it. He did fill me in on the vehicles. This, I needed to know. The cars had been parked four to five feet from the gates. There had been the solitary shot. Panic ensued and, amid the shouting and screaming, one of the technicals shouted, ‘That car – it shot her.’ He told me a doctor and a woman gave blood for Kate in the hospital, which I knew already, and that Ajoos had driven Peter and himself back to the hospital after Karel rang. They then gathered up Kate’s clothes and headed for Dayniile Airport, at that time controlled by one of the drug warlords. Aulad had been told that Kate wasn’t a target – her shooting was an attempt to destabilise the Transitional Government.
I then rang Ajoos, who had been employed by AP as one of their technical staff. He had been asked by the BBC fixer Daood to pick up Kate and Peter from the airport. It was dangerous territory, just a strip some 110 kilometres away used mainly by aid workers. It was Ajoos who had taken them to meet Karel at the hotel for lunch. He was pretty vague, said very little, but did confirm there were two conflicting stories: either weapons and the Koran had been found in the car, or indeed nothing had!
My nose was twitching. I needed to put my boots on the ground. I was in the wrong city and the wrong country and this confirmed it. I didn’t know who was telling the truth, who was covering up, or indeed if I was wasting my time. I liaised with Hamish, the head of UN security in Mogadishu, who was working on the history of the car and digging through his local contacts to see if the police had pulled in anyone. There was nothing.
It was a total waste of time – I was chasing shadows. In the narrowest of modern worlds, with GPS, the internet, CCTV, this was one of the last places where anyone could disappear at a moment’s notice; there was no government and whoever had the most guns and cash would be in control.
Paul Greeves and I got together to piece together the day. We were both banging our heads against a brick wall. Everything about this trip was wrong and I hated it. I didn’t operate like this. It was one dead end after another, bar piecing together how Kate had died. We knew a bit more than when we left the UK but essentially, after twenty-four hours, we were driving down a road with no headlights on, our first report little more than a checklist.
These were the principal questions:
Had we sorted everything before she left? Was it all signed off? Was the operation to BBC standard? If she had been wearing body armour, would she have survived?
The last point is key. Wearing a flak jacket would have made her a target, and the threat at the time didn’t warrant that. We do provide covert body armour and could have done so but hadn’t advised it in the planning. This was a grey area.
That evening Paul and I learned that Kate’s post mortem would be done the following day and her body would be released to fly back that evening. I wasn’t allowed to go to see her. Someone from the BBC should have gone out of respect – she had died in the line of duty. In this part of the world, there was also a pretty good chance that not everything would add up. Rachel had been present through the entire operation and she told us that there was a small bullet hole. If Kate had been gunned down with an AK-47 or a 7.62, the shot would have gone straight through and there would have been a massive exit wound. There wasn’t. It was a nine millimetre bullet that killed her.
I saw no point in staying. I could have sat around on the BBC’s cash eating the finest steaks five star but I wanted out. I immediately offered to take Kate home. Paul had never known Kate. It should be me to take here back to the UK. I was done.
This wasn’t the first time I had taken the dead home to be buried. In 1985, I had been on exercise in Belize when one of my best mates, Mick Small, had been killed in a bad road accident. In total, I flew five bodies back to the UK.
Flying back was the easy bit. I boarded with a hard-nosed soldier’s mentality. The bodies were in a metal case in the hold and I couldn’t reverse their fate. Nor can you sit next to them, obviously. I had been on a six-month tour and selfishly, all I could think about was that I would get two weeks’ leave at home. Every soldier looked death in the eye. It sat on all of our shoulders. I was conditioned to deal with it way before any of my BBC life. Every soldier would have seen it as the same – a fortnight’s leave and thank God it wasn’t me. But the truth was that Mick’s wife was pregnant at the time, and that was bloody awful.
In Belize City, everything had shut for the weekend – I had flown the five bodies in body bags in a helicopter into BC and they had been left in a refrigerated food truck until the Monday because there were no morgue facilities at the weekend.
In reality, then, there was litt
le for me to do for Kate. In London, we had a ‘Repatriating a Body’ document – people inside the Beeb knew how to get the dead home. They had been here before and had prepared for it on many occasions. I was surprised that it was all taken care of for me. In the eyes of the world, I was flying with her out of respect, but I would never see Kate’s body again.
Before the flight, I rang Ajoos, who filled me in on the two investigations. Something didn’t ring true, though. I felt he was a major player in the whole story, and the only way I could find out if he knew anything more, anything sinister, was to be in the same room as him. Attempting to do so from Nairobi didn’t help.
Then I called Sue to say I was on the way. ‘I’m bringing Kate’s body back,’ I told her matter-of-factly.
‘That’s really sad.’ She had become used to bad news: wherever I called from, it was probably because there were dead people there. She was relieved when I told her I wasn’t going into Mogadishu, even though that’s where my heart was. As usual, I kept my conversation to the minimum.
I still made no contact with Kate’s family. I wasn’t one for small talk and I didn’t know them well enough. Someone else would make that call. Sarah Ward-Lilley at Newsgathering had rung to thank me. In reality, I had done bugger all.
The operation to get Kate’s coffin home was military-like, discreet and under the radar. If you were a passenger watching bags being loaded, you wouldn’t have seen Kate being transferred on the plane. Plus, it was a night flight – nobody would ever know. Probably only the captain and I knew the horror of what lay beneath. There was nothing I could do and nobody to meet; nor could I bring her back to life. The British Consul and the BA staff took care of everything. I checked in and boarded. That was all. Symbolically, I was on the plane as a gesture, but it didn’t matter if I was on the flight at all. All I really could think without being disrespectful to Kate was: have a drink, next stop London. I don’t say that inhumanely. Years in the job had taught me that to do the job well, you remove yourself from it.
As I landed at Heathrow, BBC legend Fergal Keane texted me to say he had said a prayer for both of us. I loved Fergal to bits but to me that was bollocks. I didn’t need any prayers. I had been an actor. Not even that – more an extra, fulfilling the goodwill gesture of someone being on the same flight home as Kate. I could see through my role even if no one else could. The truth of the matter is that the real drama was yet to come.
I didn’t go to the funeral two weeks later; I went to Spain on holiday instead. If I had been home, I would have made the effort but the world and his dog were there. When you get to my age, all you do is bury the dead, and I hate running into all the hypocrites at funerals who sing your praises when all your life they’ve slagged you off. It just isn’t my scene.
For Kate’s family, it would never end. They had to wait until November 2008 for the inquest. Charles, Kate’s brother, claims that her boss didn’t even give a statement to the Corporation until three years after, and he accuses them of being evasive and vindictive.
I had to send every email to do with the trip to the lawyer, even if the mail just said ‘thanks’. John Glendinning’s risk assessment was the Corporation’s saving grace. Personally, I hadn’t been waiting on the verdict. Life went on and a lot had gone on in three years. As much of a grievance as I knew Kate’s family felt, I think I only glanced at it in the paper. The coroner, Peter Dean, recorded a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’. He also sent the BBC a letter urging them to learn lessons from the inquest – while Helen Boaden, the Director of News gave an interview to the BBC website claiming that the coroner had made it clear that ‘the BBC did not put Kate under any pressure’.
Unbelievably, as recently as 2010 Rebecca Peyton took a stage show telling Kate’s story to the Edinburgh Festival. For the BBC, life went on. Hindsight is a great thing: the question of body armour came up time and time again. For Western journalists, Somalia was up there with Afghanistan and Iraq in 2005. I felt that not wearing covert body armour was probably the right thing, though it should definitely have been available.
After Kate’s death, any mission deploying to Mogadishu had to be cleared by the High Risk Team in London in consultation with senior BBC management. If you were working with UN troops, you now had to wear overt body armour; if you were working independently, covert body armour would suffice. Of course, we were in a dangerous business and journalists always had the sixth sense to take more and more risks. There was no way that what happened to Kate would not happen again. We would inevitably be back in similar territory soon.
I didn’t have long to wait.
HOOLIGANS
‘Come on, Tom. After Japan 2002 there’s going to be an appetite for it, and it is Germany, mate.’ I was touting for business, itching to get out there.
‘If it is it going to be the same as 2000, we’re not sure,’ came the reply.
But I knew. Only the proper fans had made the trip out to Asia; for this World Cup, 170,000 supporters were expected – 3,500 of them on the banned list. If I was still with the old West Ham boys, I would have been planning this from the moment the final whistle was blown last time around. A country with a Nazi past as backdrop, which itself had a clash with Poland on the horizon, meant this was going to be the hooligan faction in its element.
The Germans were desperate to make a statement to the world about their new unified country. The spotlight was on them across the globe, but internally they were digging deep, too – their coach, the legendary Jürgen Klinsmann, regularly jetted in from California. Nobody fancied them. On their own doorstep, and on so many levels, they had everything to prove.
I had heard that internally it was Jeff Wilkinson who would make the call – I didn’t hesitate to email for a meeting. Typical BBC – no reply! Finally, he called, and I was in there the next day. ‘I’m not sure how this is going to work,’ he began. He explained that Simon Boazman was on board.
I had to think on my feet. ‘We need two undercover teams – one restricts you.’ I couldn’t not be on the greatest jolly yet, could I?
Budget was an issue. I even offered my own kit to save on costs or, to put it another way, to get me on the plane. News were giving me grief, though – I was meant to be working for them, sorting the security on the ground. I bullshitted them, telling them that Current Affairs had summoned me specifically to go undercover. I did them the courtesy of sorting their back-watchers with the brief that they were to avoid contact with me because I was there as a fan as my cover story but they all knew I was feathering my cap. Nearly six years into the job, that cap was pretty well feathered by now!
But this was my territory. I didn’t need a brief – I had to just get stuck in and if that meant joining in with the popular hit ‘I’d rather be a Paki than a Kraut’, then I would play that role. Euro 2000 seemed like yesterday, and the old ICF West Ham days never leave you. For some hooligans, this was the first trip; I would be the guy to look up to, a veteran of the thug element. In fact, at Heathrow on the way out, I was given a ‘red card’ by the authorities – they briefly took my passport for looking like a thug. They actually were stupid enough to issue physical reds. I was warned that I was going overseas, and that these were the rules, blah blah blah, and that I had to behave myself. Gimmickry had come into policing.
Yes – I would be on my guard for slippery old customers. If there was a square they would be there; if there was an Irish bar that would be the meet. They were all creatures of habit who couldn’t resist a good punch-up, and the famine of Asia 2002 meant this would undoubtedly be a feast.
And guess what? Before a ball had even been kicked at the tournament opener, it had all started. Germany, you may recall, hosted Costa Rica in Frankfurt for the opening match. Once again, all roads led to O’Reilly’s – this time opposite the main railway station. We were pitched up in a hotel five minutes away with the commentator John Motson. He told me England couldn’t win the tournament. That meant it definitely would kick off. More importan
tly, it saved me from a stat attack from a man who couldn’t use an iron but could tell you who played left back for Nigeria in a B international in 1976. Bring it on.
It was scorching hot – trouble was in the air. It was going to be a long day.
The overt crew had the long lens on the bar. I was out with Simon, filming through the buttons on a specially made-up shirt. My Ralph Lauren shorts were specifically doctored so I could slip my hand in to record. If necessary, we could pop back to the hotel and change roles. It would be a welcome break from these dickheads.
We had checked each other down – Simon was carrying the spares, and he stuck the lead to my lens onto my shirt with gaffer tape. We did the crucial dummy run, to see if I was shooting too high. To get the perfect angle at head height, I had to lean back or bend down – and that looked ridiculous. It was a good job we’d gone through the basics first.
Our phones were off – only coppers or journos made prolonged calls in this environment. By 11.00, we were in the bar. On our approach, we toured all the side streets, planning our exit strategy for later. I had learned from last time around with the tear gas. This time, it would be through cafés and sex shops. For the role, I was in familiar territory.
The early signs were there: a few England ‘fans’ were already tying flags to the railings; face paint was everywhere; footie tops were off; and buying and selling was well underway. I already knew that if we were offered tickets, I would decline, joking that I was here for the trouble. This time we were tracking the Huddersfield posse – but at this point we only knew that they were on their way.
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