by Mark Colvin
That afternoon at the burial, the sun was a distant memory as we trudged across Milltown Cemetery in fine soft rain, carrying our newly acquired stepladder. It was almost impossible not to laugh as we arrived at the graveside: the ladder had been rendered completely unnecessary. The IRA had erected scaffolding tiers on either side of the burial place on which we could set up our tripods. Two British Army helicopters hovered noisily overhead throughout, a provocation the Republicans objected to while also taking it almost as a matter of course. The coffin was brought, speeches were made, the rain continued to fall. Slowly, and with several minutes to go, the front of the scaffolding tiers started to sink into the mud. It was clear that if we stayed up there, there was a real danger the scaffolding would sink so far that we would be pitched, face- or lens-first, into the grave. There was a scramble to get off. Balaclavaed gunmen raised their rifles and fired their salute.
It was one of so many scenes I’ve witnessed as a reporter where the sombre has blended with ridiculous—the kind of scene that means Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, though written as satire, remains one of the most accurate things ever written about journalism.
* * *
In the autumn of 1981, our longstanding Brussels-based Europe correspondent Malcolm Downing being away, I was sent to Warsaw to cover the growing tension surrounding the Solidarity Trade Union. I’d grown up on tales of Budapest in 1956, and the promise of freedom before the tanks rolled in. As a sixteen-year-old, I’d watched in frustration in 1968 as the liberation movements in Paris, London and San Francisco were suddenly mirrored by a struggle for freedom against real tyranny in Czechoslovakia, then as all hopes were dashed as Moscow again moved to crush dissent. Now in Warsaw I found myself in the middle of something similar.
Solidarnosc, or Solidarity, had become as much of a social movement as a trade union, heavily buttressed by the strength of Poland’s Catholic Church, the force which the communists had never really suppressed and was now resurgent because the Pope, John Paul II, was himself Polish: the former Cardinal Karel Wojtyla. That’s not to say it was a religious revolution. Warsaw was in fact a hotbed of secular and moral—as well as Catholic—debate, with a sudden explosion of free discussion in pamphlets, magazines and meetings. But there was also a desperate sense that it was unlikely to last, so there was gallows humour everywhere. The red and white ‘Solidarnosc’ badges you saw on every second lapel were all rectangular. But people feared (rightly as it turned out) that the crackdown would come soon. Hence the joke I was told: ‘You’ve heard they’re making round Solidarnosc badges now? Easier to swallow.’
In much-invaded Poland, there was also historical bitterness about the neighbours—on both sides. ‘If the Russians and the East Germans invaded tonight, Sarge, which would you shoot first?’ ‘The Germans.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Duty before pleasure.’ Alleged truisms abounded: ‘Under capitalism one man exploits another, but under communism, it is the other way around’, and ‘Capitalism is teetering on a precipice. Soon communism will overtake it.’
I drove to Gdańsk to interview the Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa. I had a very good interpreter called Agnieska, who was bilingual and smart: she’d talked us through a couple of roadblocks along the way, and I trusted her work implicitly. Wałęsa, though, was mistrustful of the foreign media and somewhat prickly. He insisted on using his own interpreter, whose name I seem to remember was Ewa, pronounced ‘Eva’. She wasn’t quite as impressive, and bad translation can have consequences.
My experience with Wałęsa was almost an exact mirror of what had happened to the unfortunate US President Jimmy Carter when he visited Poland in 1977. He’d said he was happy to be in Poland. His interpreter turned that into ‘I am happy to grasp at Poland’s private parts’. In my case, it happened when I asked Wałęsa about General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the prime minister who some then still thought might be capable of reaching deals with Solidarity and the Church, but who others feared (correctly as it turned out) was planning to crush the movement towards freedom.
‘You and General Jaruzelski,’ I asked Wałęsa, ‘may be on opposing sides, but do you respect him?’
He looked startled at the translation, and asked Ewa to say it again. She did.
‘Certainly not,’ he replied angrily.
I was taken aback. It had seemed a reasonably innocuous query.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because I am not that sort of man,’ he replied.
The interview, which had been proceeding smoothly enough, did not last long after that. Fortunately I had just enough in the can for my TV news package, but I had hoped for much more. Agnieska, who had been chafing in the background, told me as we were leaving what had happened. ‘When you asked “Do you respect him”,’ she said, ‘Ewa translated it as “Do you have sexual desire for him?”’ Wałęsa, a staunch Catholic and a man’s man in a society where homosexuality was in any case heavily suppressed, had been understandably offended.
I left after a couple of weeks with a heavy heart, wondering only when—not if—the inevitable crackdown would come, and then listened with increasing chagrin to my old school roommate, now Warsaw correspondent, Tim Sebastian, reporting for the BBC when, on 13 December, Jaruzelski imposed martial law.
After that, another bleak joke filtered out from an exiled friend. Two Warsaw patrolmen are watching an old man walking down the street a few minutes before the hour of curfew. One of them picks up his gun and shoots the old man dead. The other, aghast, says, ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘Oh, that old guy,’ says the first. ‘I know where he lives. He’d never have made it home in time.’
Poland’s hopes for liberation were dashed, but they had represented another brief flowering of freedom in the Eastern Bloc, another resurgence of the human spirit under communism. Wałęsa was jailed, but he soon received the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia. This time, the world was watching closely, and in Leonid Brezhnev’s Moscow they must have been growing increasingly defensive.
The ABC had no Africa correspondent at the time, so I flew in to report stories from Uganda, still recovering from the rule of the madman Idi Amin Dada. I also visited South Africa for the first time. It was the flip side of Poland, a right-wing dictatorship hanging on by crushing the wishes of its own majority, a regime whose survival was only really guaranteed by the refusal of allies such as Reagan and Thatcher to support sanctions, let alone cut the white rulers off from their sources of arms and riot control. The shock of being called ‘Master’ by a man three times my own age, who insisted on carrying my suitcase at a hotel in Durban, was quickly followed by more stark reminders, such as walking down to the beach to see ‘Whites Only’ signs delineating the majority of its sand. Later, in Johannesburg, I visited the vast shantytowns of Soweto, and was told the big, well-tarmacked roads that criss-crossed them had been deliberately built to carry armoured vehicles—the rest of the town was alleyways and dirt roads. The tin shacks were sweltering, and the people mostly hungry, though few actually starved. Coming back to the hotel in the evening, though, you could drink dry white wine on the terrace with the rest of the all-white clientele, and eat grilled lobster and salad.
I had a South African friend in London who’d served several months of house arrest because he was the BBC’s Namibia stringer. It emerged much later that when he was smuggled out to freedom, it was through the agency of a member of the sinisterly named South African security service BOSS, building his deep cover as a mole within the opposition, while also quietly getting rid of a journalist who had become a PR problem for the government.
Just as I’d found in Poland, and later in the Soviet Union, it was always sensible to assume that you were being followed, bugged or monitored. One of the safety valves by which South Africa survived was to allow ‘homelands’, dots in the landscape which were technically autonomous. One of those was Sun City, a tiny enclave where people from largely Calvinist Johannesburg and Pretoria could go to drink and gamble. We went there to film, and shot among other thing
s a sequence in which I put a coin in a slot machine. The result was an instant jackpot—coins literally spilling out of the tray underneath, and on the soundtrack, the ching-ching-ching of the machine spitting out cash. I thought it might just have been a lucky strike, until I read years later an article about Sun City which said that every single fruit machine had been closely monitored, and there was a central desk which could dispense or withhold jackpots at the push of a button. It seemed a fitting symbol of the whole phoney set-up. Constant monitoring, constant control. The hallmark of dictatorships, left-wing and right. I never had much time for bands like Queen that took large sums of money to play Sun City, which was just a fig leaf on the appalling system that was called apartheid.
In neighbouring Zimbabwe I attended the anniversary of independence, another long Cold War struggle, in which a liberation fight for majority rule against the rump of minority white settlers had been supplanted by a far-Left dictatorship led by Robert Mugabe. The world was still dewy-eyed about Mugabe then, but the scales fell from my eyes at Harare’s national stadium. After leaving the crowd waiting in hot sun for three hours, Mugabe turned up to watch a demonstration of martial arts by his pride and joy, the Fifth Brigade. As they postured, rolled, kicked and punched, the announcer told us with pride that they’d been trained by the army of Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea. The Fifth Brigade went on over the next few years to lead the widespread massacres and other brutalities by which Mugabe crushed the heartland of his political opposition, Matabeleland.
* * *
Back in London, Margaret Thatcher was not doing well domestically. Cities like Newcastle-on-Tyne, where I travelled to film the slow death of the shipbuilding industry, were beginning to fall apart, with few plans for regeneration. Yorkshire mines were closing and mining villages were dying, although it would still be a couple of years before the all-out war between Thatcher and the miners’ union. The effects of economic belt-tightening were biting hard on the working class in the form of unemployment, and people had not yet begun to see the benefits of major transformational programs like the right to buy, instead of rent, your own council house. Thatcher was trailing in the polls by more than 10 per cent at the beginning of 1981, and even the Labour split which created the Social Democratic Party, or SDP, did not really help her. It was Labour and the SDP which were vying for first place in the polls most of that year and into 1982, and there was even talk, in first-past-the-post Britain, of an SDP-led government, perhaps with Roy Jenkins as PM and Shirley Williams as his deputy.
And the Bristol unrest I’d covered the year before had just been a foretaste. The summer of 1981 was marked by huge riots which racked London’s Brixton and destroyed swathes of Liverpool’s Toxteth. The press tended to write the Brixton troubles off as race-related, but (to borrow a phrase from the music industry at the time) it was more 2-Tone: disaffected, unemployed black and white youth with resentments against the police force in the era of the stop-and-search regime known as the ‘sus’ laws. Toxteth was an even more serious matter: in parts of depressed Liverpool, youth unemployment was at an astonishing 90 per cent, and Liverpudlians had the very strong sense that the Thatcher government had abandoned them. It was only Thatcher minister Michael Heseltine, given the job of listening to and rebuilding the north-west, who poured oil on the troubled water, but even so, disaffection had burrowed deep and the Conservatives entered 1982 trailing badly.
What saved Mrs Thatcher was the Falklands War, an Argentine invasion which her cost-cutting government had unwittingly triggered in 1981. It had done so by withdrawing one of the Royal Navy’s patrol vessels, HMS Endurance, from the area. We know now from Cabinet documents released under the thirty-year rule that both Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and the Navy chief, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Henry Leach, strongly warned Margaret Thatcher and Defence Secretary John Nott in 1981 that this could ‘prejudice our national security’, and that ‘Unless and until the dispute is settled, it will be important to maintain our normal presence in the area at the current level.’ At the time she refused even to see Admiral Leach (a fine man and an old friend of my stepfather’s), despite his repeated written pleas, and ignored Carrington. So after the warnings to which she’d turned a deaf ear came true, Margaret Thatcher was extremely fortunate in the magnanimity of these two old-fashioned gentlemen. Lord Carrington ‘did the honourable thing’ by taking the blame for the invasion and resigning as foreign secretary, while Sir Henry Leach not only did not recriminate, but stood by Thatcher and stiffened her resolve. In response to her doubts, we now know the admiral told her not only that she should, but could, send a naval task force to retake the Falklands. He assembled it, and executed the naval operation which helped her win the war.
So Thatcher and Nott, whose insistence on naval cuts and lack of foresight arguably caused the crisis, survived and thrived. Amid a truly astonishing tide of jingoism and outright racism in the tabloid press, the task force sailed.
These were frustrating days of guesswork and speculation for a reporter. Both my colleague Peter George and I, as dual British passport holders, applied to sail south in the fleet with the other ‘embedded’ journalists. (Both sons of naval families, we’d earlier discovered that Peter’s father had been on board HMS King George V when it accidentally ploughed through my stepfather’s ship, HMS Punjabi, in the Arctic Convoys during World War II.) But the British decision on the task force media contingent was final: only representatives of selected British media were to be allowed to go. In practice, of those who did sail, those who were allowed most access were from the most fervently red-white-and-blue of the tabloids. I recall Sun reporter Tony Snow reporting on how he was allowed below decks to write a message to Argentina’s then president from the paper’s readers on the warhead of a deadly ship-toair missile: ‘Up Yours, Galtieri!’ Days later, under his by-line, came the sentence, ‘I saw my missile hit the back of the enemy aircraft. It exploded as advertised. His plane was in flames.’ (My italics.)
After that, it hardly came as a surprise when The Sun reacted to the sinking of the Argentine warship General Belgrano with the infamous headline ‘GOTCHA’. There’d been 1095 human beings on that ship, and 323 of them were now dead. But what else was Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie going to go with? After all, he’d already used ‘STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA’.
In the London bureau, we pieced together a daily news jigsaw, not helped by the daily obfuscations given at dictation speed, as if to a very slow secretary, by government spokesman Ian MacDonald. The task force reporters were heavily censored, often counterproductively to the point of not being able to give details such as how many aircraft had returned to a carrier unharmed—Argentina was falsely claiming to have shot down dozens, if not scores, of British planes. The BBC’s Brian Hanrahan got round the restriction on his ship with the famous phrase ‘I counted them all out, and I counted them all back’.
As well as radio and TV reports, you could build a partial picture through a careful reading of all the broadsheet reporters’ stories, and listening to the ‘white noise’ coming out of Whitehall. My only notable victory in terms of analysis (and it was a tiny one) was an AM piece in which I said the barrage of denials of an early landing by ground forces was now so intense that it was extremely likely that such an attack would take place within the next twenty-four hours. This extrapolation proved correct: I filed it that evening, London time, and woke up the next morning, 22 May, to hear that British forces had indeed landed at San Carlos.
Like all wars, the Falklands conflict was nasty: both at sea, where the British as well as the Argentines lost a lot of men, and on land, where the battles took a mental and physical toll in death and injury on many. Years later, freed from censorship, The Guardian’s Gareth Parry wrote:
In the task force, if not in the saloon bars of England, there was little taste for glory achieved at such a cost. Even seasoned officers said they never wanted to return to Goose Green, the insignificant hamlet where 300 men died in a few hours. The scene af
ter the battle was ghastly. There were rows upon rows of corpses badly charred by the phosphorus of artillery shells. In several places there were rifles stuck in the mud with helmets on them, marking where men died.
To anyone familiar with the reality of armed conflict, whether or not they had been among the war’s backers, the triumphalist words of Margaret Thatcher, ‘Just rejoice at the news and congratulate our Forces and the Marines’, were hard to swallow. But the opinion polls, the street parties and the bunting-strewn homecomings showed that most people not only agreed with her, but had also come round to the iron-willed determination of the Iron Lady more generally. By the time I finished my London posting at the end of 1982, I was fairly convinced that she would be elected to another term and that Thatcherism was there to stay.
Chapter 24
Obviously KGB
IN THE NORTHERN autumn of 1984, having become the ABC’s Europe correspondent, based in Brussels, I found myself reluctantly heading for Moscow. The reluctance arose from repeated warnings by my father that, because of him, I would be a KGB target, and unpleasant things might happen. Because of the continuing barriers to revealing anything about Dad’s real job, however, this was not something I could tell anyone else.
I’d spent just over a year back in Sydney, at the beginning of which my career had hit a small speed bump. Although it was generally agreed I’d done a good job in London, no department had a vacancy for me. So I spent some time in ABC limbo, increasingly worried, on something called the ‘unattached list’. Eventually, Managing Director Keith Jennings heard of my plight, called me in, and told me he’d try to get something organised. Simultaneously, my friend Paul Murphy, now the presenter of PM, lobbied the head of Radio Current Affairs, Russell Warner, to hire me. Warner asked me to come in for an interview.