Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Certainly, they were kind enough to give me a slice of some of the best stories, the first of which more than adequately met the description ‘Only in Merseyside’. It was week two of the national lottery, and a local teenager had come up with the brilliant ruse of buying a new ticket featuring last week’s winning numbers and splicing it together with an old ticket featuring last week’s date. Joyous that the city had produced one of the first lottery millionaires, the local paper splashed a photo of the photocopied ticket, being brandished proudly by its newly minted owner, across its front page. Alas, lottery officials in London quickly detected the stench of a giant-sized rat and revealed the next morning that, of the handful of winning tickets, none had been purchased anywhere near the north-west. With the paper now demanding to see the original ticket, and with the teenager unable to provide it, he did a runner, and Liverpool was left to ruminate, as Liverpool so often does, on how it had produced the first lottery fraudster rather than one of its inaugural millionaires.

  By now, the youngster had been missing a few days, and I was dispatched to interview his anguished mother in a lace-curtain bungalow on the fringes of town. Still in the overly diligent phase of my career, my notepad was filled with an exhaustive list of questions, but the interview required only one. ‘What would you say to Jonny,’ I asked in a voice of faux concern that I would come to perfect over the years, ‘if he’s listening to this broadcast?’

  ‘Come home, Jonny, come home!’ came her howling reply. ‘COME HOME!’

  Fortunately, Jonny did come home shortly afterwards, just in time for tea – or, for the purposes of Radio Merseyside, just in time for its drive-time program, where he was given a stiff on-air reprimand from the presenter, who placed him in the wireless equivalent of the public stocks.

  By the end of our training, we were equipped with all manner of skills and expertise, which seem antique now and seemed antique back then. In the days of reel-to-reel recorders, the tools of our trade were white chinagraph pencils, razor blades and thin reels of sticky tape, with which we marked, slashed and then spliced together the soundbites making up our reports. A hesitant interviewee, with a bad ‘um’ and ‘ah’ habit, could take hours to edit, or ‘de-um’, in editing parlance.

  Still more frustrating was the time we consumed foraging under edit machines among discarded piles of magnetic tape, in the hope of finding a now-needed thought or abandoned consonant or vowel that had been rashly thrown onto the cutting-room floor. On occasions, it could be hazardous work as well, especially when deadlines pressed in and the required blade-work was undertaken at a furious pace. To this day, my body bears just two scars from my years as a correspondent: a wound on the crown of my head sustained on the subcontinent, which we will come to in due course, and a diagonal disfigurement at the top of one of my fingers, when my razor blade missed the editing block and de-ummed my flesh.

  To save my body from further impairment, I learnt the trick of alternating the shoulder on which I carried my German-made reel-to-reel tape recorder, a device called a Uher that felt like it had been minted out of lead. It rescued me from a handicap common among radio journalists of a certain vintage: the Uher droop.

  As our training progressed, we worked on our correspondent voices mainly by ventriloquising the correspondent voices of others. We learnt that good television was bereft of adjectival padding, that the trick always was to look for small, humanising details and that the great BBC fallback line of enquiry if, in a live interview, all your pre-prepared questions have been exhausted with two minutes left to run is ‘How will this news be received in the south of the country?’. It works virtually every time.

  But after our training was complete, I remember being left with a needling sense of the limitations of our new mediums. Most of us had come from newspapers, the purest form of journalism, where stories were usually long enough to accommodate the twin luxuries of explication and complication. By contrast, television news rewarded brevity and simplicity, and reduced multifaceted stories to their most elemental parts. It did to news what Hollywood movies routinely do to the works of great fiction: plotlines that could not easily be retold were simply discarded; peripheral characters were banished from view; and the temptation was not just to simplify but to exaggerate. Much like a reader would barely recognise a much-loved novel after it was put through the cinematic wringer, the characters in our news reports would often identify only with the shadowy outline of their story.

  The cadetship finished as it had started, with a written test, and then we were absorbed, like low-grade motor oil, into the BBC news machine. I ended up at our rolling news channel, Radio Five Live, which had so many hours of airtime to fill that even new arrivals were allowed to plug the gaps.

  Sure enough, by day two I had been handed my first assignment. That morning, the Daily Mirror had managed to expose the cracks in Downing Street security by squirrelling a reporter into the prime minister’s office. As the latest recruit, I was tasked with revealing the fissures in Daily Mirror security by squirrelling myself into the editor’s office high above Canary Wharf.

  From getting lost on the Docklands Light Railway to finding myself temporarily imprisoned in the stairwell of a 230-metre skyscraper, my first forays could hardly be described as auspicious. But the fear of returning to the newsroom empty-handed pushed me on, and I eventually managed to sneak past the security guards at reception, locate the executive floor and get within metres of the editor’s office. All the way, I had been faithfully capturing every moment of haplessness, and now my tape recorder was in record mode as I took my final steps towards glory.

  With the spires of the City in the near distance and the arc of the Thames below, the view from Piers Morgan’s office was magnificent, and I took great delight in describing the panorama to our listeners. Soon, my commentary was interrupted, as obviously I hoped it would be, by a fretful secretary mortified that I was reclining in her boss’s executive leather chair. Then came Piers Morgan himself, who was happy to play along in this pantomime by delivering a gentle scolding and describing me as a journalistic low-life.

  By now, the main challenge was to make it back to Broadcasting House in central London, and to brandish my razor blade with sufficient speed to deliver the report for the late-afternoon show. With the deadline bearing down on me, I pulled it off with the help of an industrious sound engineer, who underlaid the piece with that most hackneyed of musical clichés, the pounding theme tune from Mission Impossible. Over consecutive hours, we ran the story in two parts: the first ending with your correspondent banging helplessly on the door of some random office 43 floors up as I tried to escape from the fire escape; the second ending with the self-congratulatory words ‘Mission accomplished’, a phrase that would feature in very different circumstances much later in my career.

  For now, though, as the music died away and the presenter guffawed with delight, I basked in something that I have never managed to replicate: a ripple of applause that spread throughout the newsroom. I had delivered a piece of light entertainment rather than hard-hitting journalism, but it mattered not. After two days spent on the nursery slopes of my career, I had been earmarked as a black-run reporter. So much so that when the news came through from Jerusalem 48 hours later, the newsdesk rang to tell me that I had been booked on a plane at dawn the following morning. It was 4 November 1995, and the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had just been assassinated. My journeys as a foreign correspondent were about to begin.

  As for the loya jirga in Kabul, the children’s choir eventually made it through the security checks and barbed wire to perform on stage before the delegates. Their song was of a land tired of suffering and unfaithfulness, of a country lonely and unhealed, of stars and moons, of poetry and song, and of saddened and weary hearts. As no doubt intended, it provided the ideal coda for our report, but now we feared it might never even be aired. A giant red banner had just appeared on the bottom of the television screen in our hotel room, pulsating with th
e words ‘BREAKING NEWS’.

  Moments later, America’s top official in Iraq, ‘the American Viceroy’ L. Paul Bremer, stepped beaming before the cameras (prematurely, the Bush White House would later complain) to deliver a six-word announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!’ All that night, and well into the next week, the bulletins would be dominated by the extraordinary sight of a one-time dictator with a ragged grey beard having a swab of DNA taken by a US military doctor wearing white rubber gloves and wielding a wooden spatula. Saddam Hussein had been captured, and the headlines belonged to another corner of Correspondentland.

  Even for a novice, it was easy to see how the details of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination would lend themselves to immediate legend and nourish the belief that his death was somehow preordained. On that balmy November night in 1995, the Israeli prime minister had attended a peace rally in front of the City Hall in Tel Aviv, where 100,000 people had gathered in placid rebuttal to the Jewish nationalists and extreme right-wing Zionists who in the weeks before had held a string of protests at which they brandished placards depicting Rabin wearing an Arab headdress and, worse still, a Nazi uniform.

  ‘I have always believed that the majority of people want peace and are ready to take the chance for peace,’ said the former general, who two years earlier had shaken the hand of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, on the South Lawn of the White House.

  As they stood together on stage, looking out over the largest rally that Tel Aviv had witnessed for more than a decade, the Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres raised the possibility of an assassin lurking in the crowd. Ever the soldier, Rabin did not seem perturbed. Nor did his wife, Leah, who was asked by a radio reporter if her husband had taken the precaution of wearing a bullet-proof vest. ‘Have you gone crazy?’ she scoffed. ‘What are we – in Africa?’

  The rally reached its climax with Rabin mumbling his way through an unfamiliar peace song, the words and music of which had been handed to him beforehand by a diligent aide. Then, as he got down from the stage and walked towards his prime-ministerial limousine, he spoke briefly to a radio reporter, not knowing that this would become his valedictory interview: ‘I always believed that the majority of the people are against violence.’

  Moments later, a young assassin stepped forward and fired four times from a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. By the time the 73-year-old reached the hospital, the doctors could not detect any blood pressure or heart beat. Still inside his jacket pocket was the music of the peace song, now spattered with his blood.

  When work called late that Saturday night, I did not even bother asking who was the assassin. Here, I repeated the same mistake as Rabin’s Shin Bet bodyguards, who had not been prepared psychologically for anyone other than an Arab gunman carrying out the killing. Yet the murderer was a 25-year-old student named Yigal Amir, a former Israeli soldier who lived with his strictly Orthodox parents and claimed to be acting ‘on God’s orders’.

  Later, the Israeli police discovered that he had been ejected from a Rabin rally in September for screaming about the abandonment of over a hundred thousand West Bank settlers. They found on his bookshelf at home a copy of The Day of the Jackal. Proudly, Amir told police that he had tried on two previous occasions to get close enough to the prime minister to kill him, and now, unlike Frederick Forsyth’s failed assassin, he had finally achieved his goal. Israel’s favourite son, the great hero of the Six Day War, had been slain by a fellow Jew – an act of fratricide immediately comprehensible in the frenzied aftermath, given the fury aroused by the peace process, but unthinkable just a few seconds earlier.

  By now, our Jerusalem bureau had been fully mobilised, and, as ever in these circumstances, the BBC newsdesk at base bolstered its numbers with fly-ins from London. By happy chance, I was fully sober and, in the days before mobile phones were standard issue, close to an old-fashioned landline. It helped, too, that more senior colleagues of Nokia ranking were too drunk to notice their phones were ringing and vibrating, then ringing and vibrating again. Hard though it is to recall in this age of hyper-connectivity, it was possible back then as a journalist to be spectacularly out of the loop, and to remain so for many hours. As a result, I suddenly found myself leapfrogging others on the call list who simply could not be raised, such was the rush to get anyone on a plane to the Middle East who could wield a microphone.

  Violent deaths of beloved leaders always resonate in the national imagination, inviting not only mass mourning but also mass hysteria. Yet as soon as we touched down at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, it became immediately clear that there was something very solid about the emotional response. It was almost as if the mourners themselves were aware that Rabin, the cranky chain-smoker, would have frowned upon any sentimental excess.

  By far the biggest vigils were held outside Rabin’s home, and at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, where his final peace rally had been held. But all across Jewish Jerusalem, Israelis sat in small huddles, young people especially, clutching peace candles, praying and intoning psalms so quietly that our intruding microphones struggled to register any sound. The lines outside the Knesset, where Rabin’s body lay in rest in a simple coffin draped with the Israeli flag, stretched for miles down a road lined with Cyprus trees and pines, and within 36 hours a million Israelis had filed solemnly past. When his remains were borne on a military command vehicle through the streets to the burial site, again tens of thousands stood weeping.

  Breaking with the Jewish tradition of burial before sundown the day after death, the funeral had been pushed back until Monday so that international leaders could make the journey to Jerusalem, and not since the funeral of the Japanese emperor Hirohito had so many gathered in one place. Heading a delegation that included two former presidents, Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush, and 40 members of Congress, Bill Clinton traced a line back to the assassinations of Lincoln, the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, who in Memphis also appeared to have a rendezvous with death. He characterised Rabin as a ‘martyr for peace’.

  For once, the American president was completely upstaged by Arab leaders, who were making their first visit to Jerusalem since it had been conquered by Israeli forces in 1967. King Hussein of Jordan, wearing his red-and-white-checked headdress and regularly wiping away tears, called Rabin a ‘friend’ and ‘brother’, and sighed, ‘You lived as a soldier. You died as a soldier for peace.’ The Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who had shunned Israel since taking office, was less generous, but prepared still to don a blue baseball cap handed to him by Israeli officials when Rabin was laid to rest, in deference to the Jewish tradition of covering the scalp at religious ceremonies.

  The emotional punch, meanwhile, came from Rabin’s 17-year-old granddaughter, Noa Ben-Artzi, whose freckled beauty and fierce determination that this solemn national occasion should also have the character of a more intimate family farewell made her its unlikely star. ‘Forgive me, for I do not want to talk about peace,’ she said. ‘I want to talk about my grandfather.’

  Alas, everyone else did want to talk about peace, and the possibility that Yigal Amir had succeeded in his aim of sabotaging the Oslo Accords. Rabin was not just a central character but also its indispensable character. The standard cliché that week was also a truism: only the man who won the West Bank could hand it back.

  But the fact that Rabin had been the chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces who orchestrated victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six Day War only partly explained his towering authority. Nor did it stem from the accident of birth that made him Israel’s first native-born prime minister. Just as important was the simple fact that Rabin was so gruff, irritable and of his generation. So it was not just as an Israeli soldier that he could stand before his nation, in defiance of the Jewish nationalists, to make the case for a historic compromise trading land for security. It was, as his friend the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pointed out at the time, as an Israeli Sabra.

  As the years
progressed, I covered various peace initiatives involving the Palestinians and a succession of Israeli prime ministers, from Shimon Peres to Ehud Barak, from Ariel Sharon to Ehud Olmert, but Rabin was matchless. It is tempting to think he could have delivered lasting peace to the region, but that is to tread territory usually best avoided: the land of might-have-been.

  As a cub reporter on my first foreign assignment, that week in the Middle East felt like correspondent boot camp. It was the first time I ever had a loaded weapon cocked towards me, when a Palestinian policeman took umbrage at me for wandering onto a prohibited section of the beach next to Yasser Arafat’s shoreline headquarters in Gaza. Holding me at gunpoint in a briefly threatening manner, he suggested I should leave with a couple of twitches and flicks of his AK-47.

  That same day, I also had my first encounter with an Islamic militant, when a bearded 20-something slipped, almost unnoticed, into the back seat of our car, in true cloak-and-dagger fashion, to outline in more detail how Hamas had reacted to Rabin’s assassination. Needless to say, Hamas was delighted, because the killing had the twin benefits of eliminating such a long-time opponent of Palestinian nationalism and of undercutting Arafat, whom it cast as a traitor for dealing with the Israelis.

  Nor had I visited the Gaza Strip, the slum-like slither of land that hugged a 25-mile stretch of Mediterranean coastline, where Arafat had made his triumphant return from exile the previous year in the hope that a scruffy fiefdom, over which he enjoyed only partial control, could blossom into a fully functional Palestinian state. And never before had I cast eyes on the Palestinian leader himself. Fearing it would inflame passions on both sides, he had avoided Rabin’s funeral, but in the days afterwards he welcomed a string of Western diplomats to the one-time beach club that was now the headquarters of the newly established Palestinian National Authority.