When Yasser Arafat strode into the debating chamber of the Oxford Union on that warm summer evening he got a standing ovation. Fresh-faced and idealistic students cheered him to the rafters, perhaps seeing him as a sort of Middle Eastern Mandela. But then it all went wrong. Arafat started well enough, although his English was sometimes hard to follow. But when it came to questions from the floor someone touched a raw nerve. Arafat was asked why he had imprisoned the Palestinian humanrights campaigner Iyad Sarraj for apparently saying Gazans had more freedom under Israeli occupation than they did under Palestinian rule. Quite simply, Arafat lost it. He banged his mottled fist down hard on the table, shouting over and over: ‘I will not allow it! I will not allow it! How dare anyone say this?’ There was a gasp from the audience, who suddenly realized that far from being a champion of freedom and justice they were actually looking at an authoritarian dictator who could not tolerate criticism, especially from a fellow Palestinian.
The following year, I got the chance to meet both Netanyahu and Arafat on their home turf. Ann McGuire, the BBC World programme editor who had taken an inexplicable liking to me, had a new project. She had been spearheading a half-hour interview programme called HardTalk, where the veteran reporter and presenter Tim Sebastian would put world leaders and news-makers under the spotlight. I had been there when the programme was just beginning, at a rather difficult interview with a cantankerous Ted Heath in his house by Salisbury Cathedral, still under police protection even though he had stopped being prime minister over twenty years ago. Now HardTalk was to head to the Middle East in the hope of interviewing as many leading Israelis and Palestinians as possible, and it was my job to help set up the interviews and accompany the team out there.
Pinning down the Israelis for interview was easy. They understood the value of the media and knew exactly how to turn it to their advantage. They spoke perfect English, albeit with American accents, and they made every effort to provide facilities to make our job easier. With very little work we secured an interview with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. We were advised to turn up two hours in advance to be cleared by security and not to ask him about his brother Jonaton, a Special Forces officer killed in the raid on Entebbe in 1977. Netanyahu insisted on having his own favourite make-up girl – at the BBC’s expense – which struck me as faintly ridiculous. Here was this strapping former Israeli commando who prided himself on his tough stance on terrorism, and now he was coming over all choosy about cosmetics. Whether or not the make-up was to blame, once the interview got under way a solitary fly kept circling the PM’s head, alighting again and again on his immaculately combed grey hair. But Netanyahu was a consummate performer in front of the camera. When Tim Sebastian thought he had him cornered with a killer question about how almost the whole world had condemned the Israeli shelling of a UN base in South Lebanon in 1996, Netanyahu turned on the theatrics.
‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’ he boomed, leaning forward towards the BBC man. ‘Back up here a minute.’ And by the time he had said his piece most viewers would probably have forgotten Sebastian’s original question.
By contrast, getting Yasser Arafat to commit to interview was a nightmare. It was not that his people said no, they were just incapable of reaching a decision. I spent night after night down in his Gaza headquarters, then another night at his base in Ramallah, trying to persuade the Rayyes, the ‘President’, to appear on HardTalk. For every two minutes of conversation snatched with the Palestinian leader as his entourage swept in and out of the building I spent hours waiting in his kitchen, chatting away in Arabic to his chainsmoking guards. We would sit round a Formica table late into the night, munching falafel sandwiches with a small armoury of assault rifles piled up to one side. It made no difference: Arafat never did the interview with us anyway.
We did, however, secure a lengthy and colourful interview with Iyad Sarraj, the Palestinian human-rights campaigner who had so infuriated Arafat by being quoted as saying there had been more freedom under the Israelis than under the new rule of the Palestinian Authority. We interviewed him up on a rooftop in Gaza’s teeming and squalid Al-Shati refugee camp. Filthy children ran barefoot in the street below while Israeli Air Force F-16s screamed through the sky just offshore. You did not even have to listen to the interview to know that life down here in this slum camp was grim and largely devoid of hope.
Someone who had been watching the misfortunes of Palestinians and other Muslims was as yet largely unknown to the West, but he would one day become a household name. The Saudi businessman-turned-holywarrior Osama Bin Laden had returned home to Saudi Arabia after years of helping the Afghans drive out the Soviet Army. Unhappy with the Saudi government’s alliance with Washington, he moved to Sudan, then fled to Afghanistan in 1996 when the Sudanese came under US pressure to expel him. Bin Laden took a keen interest in the media; his message to the world was that Muslims were oppressed and the United States and Israel were to blame. In London he had a front organization to distribute his communiqués, the Advice and Reform Committee, headed by a man called Khalid Al-Fawaz. On a muggy August afternoon in 1996 I went to meet Al-Fawaz in the tearoom of London’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, close to the BBC World Service in Bush House. A tall, imposing Saudi in a long white robe, Khaled Al-Fawaz was in constant contact with Bin Laden in Afghanistan. He strode purposefully towards me, past the Waldorf’s potted palms and the bare-armed girl playing the harp, to take his seat at our table. I exchanged glances with my BBC colleague, Nick Pelham, who had arranged the meeting. This devout Saudi looked a little out of place here in London’s theatreland. His long, untrimmed beard marked him out as a fundamentalist Muslim, while his forehead bore a smooth brown mark where he had touched it to the ground in frequent prayer. He cut straight to the chase.
‘Sheikh Osama is ready to give his first TV interview,’ said Al-Fawaz, scowling briefly at a woman at a nearby table who was throwing her head back, laughing too loudly. ‘And he has chosen to give that interview to the BBC.’ Although few people had heard of Bin Laden back then, to those of us who followed events in the Middle East he was already a familiar figure. The son of a wealthy Saudi construction magnate of Yemeni origin, Osama Bin Laden had used his wealth and engineering know-how to help the mujahideen (Islamic fighters) battle the Soviets in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. Tens of thousands of young, idealistic Saudis, Yemenis and other Arabs from all over the Middle East had flocked to join his cause, seeing it as a sacred duty to help drive out the ‘infidel’ Russians from Muslim land. They became known as the Arab Afghans, even though many of these volunteers never got further than Pakistan. To them Bin Laden was a hero, who commanded both their respect and their loyalty.
Although the US government was starting to view him as a dangerous enemy, Bin Laden was not considered too dangerous to interview in 1996, even by Western correspondents. The print journalists Robert Fisk from the Independent and Scott Macloud from Time magazine had both interviewed him in Sudan, but this scourge of the Saudi royal family had yet to appear in a TV interview. All right, we said, we were definitely interested, but we did have some concerns. What about this declaration of war Bin Laden had just issued, announcing that all Americans, whether military or civilian, were fair targets for attack? It sounded like an anti-Western fatwa to us, so how did we know that as Britons we would be safe in Bin Laden’s company? Al-Fawaz looked rather embarrassed at this point. ‘Ah yes, the declaration. Well, I disagreed with Sheikh Osama on this, I told him it was not the right time to issue it, but it is done now. But you can be assured it does not apply to journalists. The Sheikh values the media and wants the world to understand his message.’
My BBC colleague and I accepted the invitation to go to Afghanistan, trusting in the Arab code of honour of hospitality and protection for invited guests – which in twenty-four years, up until the Riyadh attack, never let me down. Despite the carnage and bloodshed that Bin Laden has inspired and sanctioned, to my knowledge he has never harmed an invited journalist. W
e now got down to working out the logistics; the invitation to interview Osama Bin Laden came with certain stipulations. ‘Sheikh Osama does not want you to come through Pakistan,’ said Al-Fawaz, who said he feared we would be trailed by agents from ISI, Pakistani military intelligence. Bin Laden clearly did not want people knowing who he was seeing, or even, perhaps, where he was based. ‘So you must fly via Delhi to Jalalabad in Afghanistan, where you will be met by a guide who will take you to Sheikh Osama’s camp.’ I have to say that at first my masters in the BBC were less than enthusiastic, and for quite the wrong reasons. ‘Sorry,’ said one manager, ‘no one’s heard of this guy, so we’re not interested.’ But with a little pressing and a strong endorsement from the Cairo bureau we were back in business. I went round to the sleepy Afghan embassy in London’s Prince’s Gate and procured visas for Afghanistan and then transit ones for India, worked out a budget, booked flights and arranged for a translator to meet us in Jalalabad with jeeps, water and spare fuel.
And then, forty-eight hours before our departure, the unexpected happened. The Taliban’s army of bearded, black-turbanned warriors, who had been spreading slowly out through the country from their Kandahar base in the south, suddenly made a dash for the capital, Kabul, putting the government to flight. Sitting in Nangarhar province, Osama Bin Laden was initially unsure of what this would mean for him and his Arab Afghans, so he sent us an urgent message through his man in London asking us to wait until things settled down in Afghanistan. But it was too late. In the renewed flurry of interest in that country other networks soon grabbed the first TV interviews with Bin Laden. Even the US networks got in on the act, and sure enough, their American reporters ventured right into the lion’s den and emerged unscathed. Khaled Al-Fawaz, who so nearly delivered us what would have been a scoop, was arrested in London soon afterwards and was held pending extradition to the US on charges of terrorism, which he denied. We had missed our chance.
But this narrowly missed scoop redoubled my determination to go and report from the Middle East. The BBC’s response was lukewarm. I was told that since I hadn’t come in on the news-trainee scheme, nor did I have a proven track record of reporting from abroad, my chances were slim. So I set out to rectify this. Soon after I started those night shifts at BBC World, I managed to secure a lucrative weekly live-interview slot with Canada’s state broadcaster, CBC, and this time it was me in front of the camera. Every Monday evening a limousine would take me to their studios in Bloomsbury, where a laid-back technician would hook me up to an earpiece and a microphone. When the live countdown played in my ear I had seven minutes to talk Canada’s viewers through three Middle Eastern topics of the week. It was unscripted, with no autocue, and at first it was terrifying, but I always got to agree the questions in advance with the presenter in Calgary, who was only too happy to let me run the show. It made him look knowledgeable about the Middle East and it gave me the perfect grounding in live television. If I ever made any career-threatening blunders on Canadian television my colleagues at the BBC were unlikely to hear of them.
At the same time, since no one was sending me abroad to report I started to send myself. When Amanda and I went on holiday to Queensland I took my Hi-8 video and made a film about the increasing threat to swimmers from lethal box jellyfish that were straying ever further south from their breeding grounds. All right, so the self-filmed reporter’s piece-to-camera in a mangrove swamp was so bad it was unusable, and there was the small problem that I didn’t actually have any footage of live box jellyfish. But we salvaged the project in London with natural-history archive and my first film made it to air in less than a year of my leaving banking.
In early 1996 I took the camera with me on a gruelling South American jungle trek with James Maughan, my future best man, up to the Lost City in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, dodging the snake known as la pudidora, ‘the putrefyer’, so called because a victim’s flesh becomes necrotic around the site of the bite. At night we slept in hammocks while the rain fell in sheets and howler monkeys emitted blood-curdling screams in the foliage above us. It was a magical trip. This time I framed the piece-to-camera properly with a line of ancient, moss-covered steps trailing away over my shoulder, and I tried to deliver my lines as casually as I could whilst clouds of malarial mosquitoes dived around my head. I also did my best to construct a ‘sequence’ of a river crossing. This is a cinematic device which entails filming the same scene several times from different angles. So if you have two Colombian porters wading across a boulder-strewn torrent with tottering backpacks, you film it wide from a distance, then up close and low so their boots nearly bump the camera lens, and then perhaps once more for luck at head height, concentrating this time on their faces. It did not exactly endear me to the porters, but back in London the videotape editor was delighted to have a variety of shots to play with, and he cut them together into a watchable sequence.
In terms of the Middle East and my grand plan to go out and report from there, this newly acquired skill meant I could now be bi-medial, meaning I could make my own news reports for both radio and TV. Looking at a map of the region I reckoned I had spotted a gap in the BBC’s coverage. They had a bureau in Cairo and another in Amman, but nobody in the Gulf. ‘Well, that’s because there’s no news there,’ said Kevin, a rather unimaginative World Service manager, when I put this to him. ‘There’s no news there because you’ve got no one reporting it!’ I countered. Having lived there for three years, I was confident there would be plenty to report on. Already, Islamist militants had blown the side off a US Air Force accommodation block in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen US airmen. There were other stirrings of discontent in that closed country, but almost no Western journalists were getting in to report on what was happening there.
To test the BBC’s appetite for stories from the Gulf I embarked on a series of self-funded reconnaissance trips around the region, armed with my new digital video camera. I filmed reports in Iran, Oman, Bahrain and the UAE, bringing back slightly off-the-wall business stories from countries where there was no BBC bureau at the time. The presenter of a BBC1 business programme said almost apologetically after one of my films, ‘Well, I expect it will be some time before we hear again from the dagger-makers of Oman.’ The trips barely broke even, but I was getting myself on air and I found it a huge thrill to be the only Westerner on the twenty-four-hour train journey across the length of Iran, for example, from Tehran to the Gulf coast, filming children outside in dusty villages as they cheerfully stoned the train. From each film I would make a radio version and then write a piece for The Times or The Economist; there was no question about it, there was a market for these stories, but I would have to move quickly before somebody better known than I was jumped in and set themselves up in Dubai. ‘All right,’ conceded Kevin, that unimaginative BBC manager, ‘we’ll give you accreditation, but you’re on your own. We’ll only pay you for the stories you get on air. Personally, I think you’ll starve.’
Poor Amanda. When I first left banking she had implored me to find a job in Dubai, but now, just as she was starting to enjoy London, here I was proposing we up sticks again and move back to the Middle East. We had just had a gorgeous, sunlit spring wedding in the country, she was pregnant with our first child and halfway through a degree course in computer studies. In short, we were happily settled. But after we had talked it through, Amanda agreed that moving to Dubai would be the right thing not just for my career, but also for us as a family. She supported me unequivocally.
Wilfred Thesiger was less encouraging. ‘Ghastly place, Dubai. Completely ruined,’ he huffed when I went round for lunch in his Chelsea flat. As we cooked up omelettes and the old explorer offered me some very stale white wine that he kept for visitors (he didn’t drink), he reminisced about the Dubai he had known in the 1950s. His black-and-white photos showed a sleepy trading port of barefoot smugglers and pearl-divers squinting suspiciously at the camera, a world of labyrinthine backstreets and intrigue, where cars were r
are and tower blocks unheard of. But I was able to assure him that beyond the plate-glass sheen of modern Dubai, much of the spirit of that old world still lived on, and he conceded that it would be an excellent base for exploring the region. In his day, half a century ago, he had the Desert Locust Control Organisation to fund his trips, while I now had the BBC.
Shortly before midnight on 23 September 1997, Amanda and I wheeled our luggage out of Dubai’s airport terminal into the dripping heat of late summer. We had packed up our flat, said goodbye to our friends and were embarking on a major gamble. Amanda was six months pregnant, I had no guarantee of income, and we had no one to help us set up in the Gulf. Outside the terminal we were greeted by a chaotic scene, with scores of Asian guest workers all shouting at each other in a dozen languages. At this time of year the Indian Ocean monsoon passed close to the southern Gulf, raising the humidity to almost unbearable levels. We were coated in sweat before we had even flagged down a taxi. Slumped in the back seat, on the way to our temporary home in Golden Sands rented apartments, I switched on my mobile phone. There was a message from Radio 4’s Today programme: they wanted to do a live radio interview with me the very next morning about two British nurses facing possible flogging and execution in Saudi Arabia. At that moment, as we pulled up at the nondescript block of flats that was to be our home for the next few weeks, I realized I had become what I had always wanted to be: a foreign reporter in the Middle East.
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