When Flemings recalled me to London after three and a half years in Bahrain, it never occurred to me not to invite Amanda to come too. We had become inseparable and I revelled in her fresh, breezy approach to life; she was always thinking up new things to do, whether it was smuggling a bottle of champagne past the guard at Bahrain Fort and out on to the ramparts at sunset, or going indoor ice-skating while the temperature soared outside. We had a brilliant time in the Gulf, taking holidays in nearby Sri Lanka and Goa and taking the Flemings speedboat out to sea at weekends. Amanda even forgave me for nearly drowning us when I discovered, some miles offshore, that I had forgotten to put the bung in (a sort of nautical bathplug used to drain the water out when the boat is on dry land). Only frantic bailing by her and her friend Pippa saved us from slowly sinking as I steered us heavily back to the marina in shame. When a dozen of us went camping in the Wahiba Sands of Oman, Amanda overcame her phobia of snakes to sleep beside me on a rug beneath the stars. But the biggest tests were yet to come. Neither of us were to know that within two years her well-paid boyfriend would become a freelance journalist, nor that the broadcaster she then married would one day lie bullet-ridden and close to death in a city he once breezed in and out of as a besuited banker.
5
Journalism pre 9/11
BY THE AGE of thirty-three I had become seduced by the perks of the banking industry, if not by the job itself. I had grown used to flying everywhere in first or business class, staying in five-star hotels, eating good food and even having my suits run up by a Savile Row tailor. After three years in Bahrain I had paid off my London mortgage, learned to waterski and scuba dive, and, quite incidentally, met the girl of my dreams. The fact that the underlying industry of marketing investment management – essentially persuading other people to let us invest their money on their behalf for a fee – did not set me on fire did worry me, but I told myself it was too late to switch careers. Young journalists in their twenties were already making a name for themselves, and I must admit I didn’t fancy the idea of giving up a six-figure income for a dogsbody job on a provincial newspaper.
But I yearned to do something more exciting, like reporting for TV news. I could not remember the last time I had experienced adrenaline on the job, and so to compensate, on visits to war-ravaged Kuwait I would pack a video camera and practise pieces-to-camera in front of abandoned Iraqi sandbags. Amanda thought this was ridiculous. ‘You’re a banker,’ she reminded me. ‘Get over it.’ But I was not necessarily in charge of my own destiny.
After running the Flemings Bahrain office, I was rewarded for my efforts by promotion to Director. It had been a spectacularly successful period for our little Middle East office and all my client visits and socializing in Arabic had helped win the bank over US$2 billion of new Arab funds under management. I knew I had ‘made it’ when I was even invited to play tennis that summer with the Chief Executive. Now I was being brought back to London to ‘drive’ the Middle East business from head office. Frankly, I was rubbish at it. Out in the Gulf I had been able to convince myself I was doing something interesting, holding late-night meetings with charismatic sheikhs and merchants, then tacking on extra days to business trips to go exploring in the mountains of southwest Saudi Arabia. But commuting into the City of London every day and holding budget meetings with heads of departments just didn’t do it for me. I was suddenly surrounded by people who were genuinely interested in accounting and I was a fish out of water. My lack of enthusiasm showed in my work and I was given a gentle warning. General Sir Peter de la Billiere, who had joined the bank as a non-executive director in 1992, pulled me aside a few months after my return from Bahrain and told me to ‘buck my ideas up’. I was impressed that after spending most of his forty-year military career in the dangerous world of Special Operations he had adapted so well to corporate life, but then I was only half his age. By May 1995 I had lost all interest in banking and the feeling was mutual. I was summoned upstairs to a meeting room where my boss, John Drysdale, a kind-hearted and genial man, sat sternfaced next to a girl from Personnel (in the days before this term became Americanized to Human Resources). ‘I’m here to tell you there is no longer a job for you,’ he said. It was just over five years since he had said the exact opposite – ‘I’m here to tell you we’d like to offer you a job’ – and I think he probably found this more painful than I did. I mumbled a half-hearted protest, but actually it was a relief, the executioner’s noose after a sleepless night in the cell. Flemings were generous and we parted on good terms, like a couple who realize they are really better off just as good friends. That night Amanda and I celebrated with a bottle of champagne. ‘Now you can do anything you want,’ she said, her face as radiant as the day I first met her.
After nine years in investment banking I had been given precisely the kick up the backside I needed to throw myself into a career in journalism. I even resisted temptation in the form of a head-hunter who pounced on me the day I left Flemings, trying to convince me I would be perfect for a £200,000 a year (plus guaranteed bonus) Middle East financial marketing job he needed to fill. General Sir Peter de la Billiere showed a paternal concern for what was to become of me. The man who had commanded 45,000 British troops in the Desert Storm campaign of 1991 seemed genuinely worried that my departure from Flemings was going to lead to a tailspin of unemployment and self-doubt. He took me to lunch at his club, the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, where portraits hung of various SAS characters included one of Sir Wilfred Thesiger. Thesiger had joined David Stirling’s band of marauders in the Second World War to go raiding German airfields deep in the Western Desert, and his weathered features now stared down at me as if willing me to take a chance. I told Sir Peter that my mind was made up – although it had nothing to do with Thesiger’s portrait – I was determined to get into the news business. I was not a complete stranger to journalism, having written articles for the print media for the past ten years; I had even written a piece on Middle East security and terrorism for Executive Travel magazine at the height of the hijacking and hostage-taking scares in 1986, never imagining I would one day become the BBC’s Security Correspondent. But these had been freelance efforts, a bit of pocket money on top of my banking salary; now I needed to earn a living and get myself on to a very steep learning curve.
I went into overdrive, researching courses, reading manuals, phoning contacts. I went on an excellent radio-production course run by Morley College, where they sent us out into the streets around Victoria Station to make a radio feature report about rollerblading. The rather nasal radio presenter running the course decided I was too posh for his liking. ‘There’s only one place for your sort of voice,’ he sneered in front of the class. ‘Radio 4’s Today Programme. In fact your homework can be to record it tomorrow morning, bring it in and we’ll dissect it.’ He was not impressed when I overslept and only managed to switch on the tape recorder in time to hear John Humphreys thanking his producers and saying goodbye.
I attended another good, hands-on course on TV production run by ex-BBC people at Thames Valley University. We all took turns at being studio floor manager, director, cameraman and presenter. I quickly learned that I was happiest in front of the camera, but it gave me a useful grounding in how the all-important technical parts of a TV studio fit together. I also completed a diploma course in General Journalism at the London School of Journalism, just in case anyone asked me to produce a qualification. Which they never have. I bought a Hi-8 video camera and tripod, then practised filming tourists in Covent Garden and an anti-nuclear protest outside the French embassy. (It was the summer of 1995 and the French government was annoying the world by irradiating Moorea Atoll with underground nuclear explosions.) I took the camera to Latvia that summer and made an amateur tourism promotion film, which I sold – at a loss – to a Baltic travel company in London. I even managed to wangle permission to be the first to film inside a women’s prison there on the outskirts of Riga. After the cosy world of investment banking it
was something of an eye-opener to interview tattooed, shaven-haired women who calmly told me how they had murdered their husbands.
But what really counted was getting a foot in the door at the BBC, and here my Middle East experience came in useful in exploiting contacts. I cold-called executives, got them to tell me who was the right person to speak to, phoned them, implored them to see me, then turned up, overdressed in a suit. One manager who had already sent me a letter politely asking me not to bother him again was surprised to see me going into the office of his colleague across the corridor. This time I got a toe-hold.
‘Would you be interested in a two-week work experience on BBC World?’ asked Daniel Dodd, adding quickly, ‘It’s unpaid, of course.’
I leaped at the chance. BBC World is the BBC’s satellite news channel, almost unknown in the UK but watched by hundreds of millions around the world. In Bahrain this had been our staple source of news, long before I got interested in how it was made. This was my first break, my first time inside a newsroom, and I was willing to make the tea if that’s what it took. The head of the team I was assigned to took a long cool look at me. Ann McGuire was a slim, elegantly poised woman with a sharp mind and – I don’t know why I remember this – curious pointed green-suede shoes.
‘Normally we get eighteen-year-old school leavers in here on work experience, but you’re obviously a bit older,’ she said. She was right there, I was thirty-four, a rather ripe age to be embarking on a full-time career in news journalism. ‘So, do you want to just look around or do you want to actually do something useful?’ She guessed my answer before I gave it and immediately sent me downstairs to a planning meeting. The following day was the fifth anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and they were discussing how to mark this. ‘Has anyone here been to Kuwait?’ asked the person in charge of the next day’s programme. I waited a few seconds, then put up my hand as if I were at school. A roomful of seasoned hacks turned to look at me; until then no one had noticed me come in. ‘All right,’ he said, wanting sorely to add ‘smartass’, I’m sure, ‘any ideas, then?’ I suggested interviewing the Kuwaiti ambassador, Khaled Al-Duwaisan, so off we went to see him in his South Kensington embassy. I was allowed to accompany the duty reporter, Peter Biles, as long as I did not get in his way. I asked him how he had got to where he was and he sketched out an already impressive career as a foreign correspondent in East Africa. It was clear I had a lot of catching up to do if I was going to get taken seriously in the newsroom.
Fortunately for me, Ann McGuire did take me seriously. Both she and Daniel Dodd stood up to the naysayers who huffed and puffed that there was surely no place in a cash-strapped newsroom for an ex-banker with zero television experience. When my unpaid work experience came to an end I was asked to come back as a freelance assistant producer to do shift work. Often this meant thirteen-hour night shifts, which were exhausting and thoroughly destructive to one’s social life, but once inside TV Centre I loved the feeling of being at the centre of this big rolling news machine, taking in satellite feeds of events as they unfolded on the other side of the world, going off to the graphics department to help organize an animated map of the Middle East, sorting through the next morning’s papers to find stories for the presenters to talk about, or just going down to Reception to meet and greet the early-morning studio guests.
Since in these early months there was almost no chance of being on TV myself I saw no reason to dress up. On one overnight shift I was wearing a particularly baggy jumper that had seen better days when I bumped into Eddie O’Sullivan, the tough-talking editor of a business magazine called Middle East Economic Digest (MEED). The last time he had seen me was at an Arab finance forum in a five-star hotel in Knightsbridge, when I was a besuited banker. He recoiled in horror. ‘Bloody hell, Frank,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to you? Are you all right?’ He found it hard to believe I was happier now as a lowly paid journo than I had been as a high-flying banker, but by then I had worked out that, for me at least, job satisfaction was measured in something less tangible than money.
Amanda too was happier. In the first months after our return from Bahrain neither of us had enjoyed London much. While I had been slogging away in the City, coming home at night tired and disgruntled, Amanda had found it hard to get interesting work. In Bahrain she had been used to giving high-powered advertising presentations to clients; now, a New Zealander on a two-year ‘working-holiday’ visa, she was being asked by employment agencies for qualifications she didn’t have, then being told to apply for jobs she didn’t want. Having been used to living in sunny places like New Zealand, Hong Kong and Bahrain, Amanda also found England hard to adjust to at first. But now we were both doing jobs we enjoyed – she’d started working for a slick American PR company – and in the evenings we made the most of living amidst the buzz and bustle of Covent Garden. One evening I took Amanda out to dinner at her favourite restaurant, Le Palais du Jardin, with something very much on my mind. I had woken up that morning and suddenly known, with the utmost certainty, that she was the girl I wanted to marry. In my lunch-break I had gone straight to Hatton Garden and bought an engagement ring. Now, with coffee and desserts on the table, I was struggling to extract it from my jacket pocket. Apparently I looked so flushed she thought I was having a heart attack. But when she heard me propose her face shone as she accepted, and she added mischievously, ‘Now you’d better call my father!’
I had only been at BBC World for a few weeks when I heard someone say, ‘Hey, does anybody here know anything about this Egyptian guy convicted in New York?’ The Egyptian guy was Sheikh Omar Abdurrahman, a blind Muslim cleric on the run from the Egyptian authorities. He had been part of an extremist group based around a mosque in Brooklyn, and in 1995 he was convicted of playing a part in the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in New York. It was quite late in the evening in the BBC studio and the chances of booking a studio guest to comment on this conviction at short notice were slim. I stuck my hand up again. ‘OK, we’ll tell you if we need you, but you’d better get some make-up on just in case. Sorry, what did you say your name was?’ My heart leaped. What had I gone and done? What if I froze up and couldn’t remember what I wanted to say? A number of people looked at me in disbelief. I was a complete newcomer to broadcasting, and to be honest, I did not even know a great deal about this blind Egyptian cleric. But I was the only person in the newsroom who could pronounce his name, and after an agonizing two-hour wait, wondering if they would need me on air or not, I was summoned to the studio. To someone who had never before done live television, ‘You’re on in five’ were some of the most frightening words in the English language.
I was ushered into the revered set during a commercial break (unlike domestic BBC, the international channel runs advertisements) and a studio manager clipped a pin microphone on to my lapel. ‘Remember,’ she said, noticing I was white with nerves, ‘three minutes all up and you must stop talking after the presenter waves his hand for you to stop.’ The presenter was Alastair Yates, whose kind and calming personality put me instantly at ease, despite his strange penchant for green and lilac jackets. The lights came up, Alastair did a short intro into the camera then swivelled round to face me. ‘And with me here to discuss this is our Middle East analyst Frank Gardner. Frank, what do you make of this?’ Middle East analyst! That had a nice ring to it, I thought. It felt as if I had barely opened my mouth before the interview was over, but I was on a high for the rest of the night. I went to join Amanda and Brad, an Australian friend, in a Covent Garden bar. Brad looked at me incredulously and said, ‘Strewth, I don’t believe it, you’re wearing make-up!’ He then examined my glass, ‘To check yer not wearing lipstick as well, ya ponce.’
The next day the Head of BBC News, Chris Cramer, brought me back down to earth. ‘Get a haircut’ was his only comment, a fair one since I did have a rather unnewslike boy-band fop hanging over my forehead at the time.
Before long Ann McGuire gave me my second break, putting
me in charge of producing BBC World’s weekly news feature films – we’re talking three minutes here, not a Hollywood epic. The topics were varied, to say the least. One week we would be filming an ostrich farm in Oxfordshire, the next a university debate with O. J. Simpson. It was a case of the blind leading the blind, since the reporter was always a radio hack out of Bush House who was almost as new to TV as I was. The only person who knew what he was doing was the cameraman, who was more often than not the huge, imposing Kiwi, Adam Kelliher. Adam had been a stringer for The Times in Beirut in the worst days of the civil war in the eighties; he had also seen up close the recent horrors of war in the Balkans. He needed regular feeding and refreshment or he would turn grizzly, but he bore our ignorance with patience and good humour and we were to become lifelong friends. It was also useful to keep in his slipstream whenever there was a press scrum.
One of these occasions was when Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, or the ‘President’, as he liked to be called, came to give an address at the Oxford Union. Before he spoke to the assembled undergraduates he was introduced to the press upstairs in a wood-panelled chamber. When it was my turn Arafat gripped my hand and looked imploringly into my eyes, almost certainly mistaking me for someone else. It was summer 1996 and Arafat was still in shock. His great friend and peace partner Shimon Peres, who had become prime minister following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli, had just lost the Israeli election to the arch-hawk Binyamin Netanyahu. Arafat’s dream of the early achievement of Palestinian statehood had been shattered and he simply did not appear to have a Plan B. George Galloway was there too, puffing on a cigar, oozing bonhomie and calling me by my first name, although I suspect that he could not have known me from Adam.
Blood and Sand Page 15