Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Over the next few weeks, as we struggled with the local bureaucracy, found a place to live and implored the phone company to hurry up and put in a line, my mobile phone became our lifeline. We were so tight for money that at first we could not afford a second mobile phone, so Amanda was left with no means of communication while I was off reporting. Given that she was expecting a baby within eight weeks, this was a testing time for her, but living within five minutes of the beach had its compensations: floating with friends in the sea allowed her to feel mercifully weightless for a while.

  One call I always welcomed was from the BBC’s foreign assignments editor, Malcolm Downing. If he had been around in the Second World War he would have doubtless been one of those people shuffling wooden ships across maps and marking up friendly troop deployments on a blackboard. His job was to ring up stringers and correspondents in far-flung postings and send them to places where a story was brewing. He always asked nicely and said ‘Good man’ if you accepted, but you knew it would not be a good career move to say no. Malcolm could make or break a foreign correspondent’s career.

  In October 1997 he asked me to go up the coast to Bahrain to see if I could interview the team of UN inspectors as they flew in from Iraq. Tensions were mounting between the UN and Iraq over Saddam’s refusal to give the inspectors unfettered access to suspected WMD sites, and if I could grab a soundbite from them in Bahrain it would put us well ahead of the competition. It was a classic piece of forward thinking by Malcolm, but it began to go wrong from the start. As I was a journalist, the Bahrainis at first refused to let me through Immigration without a visa acquired in advance. They only relented when they were satisfied I had not come to report on Bahrain’s rumbling anti-government insurgency by the country’s Shi’ite majority. I hired a car and drove round to the field office of UNSCOM, the original UN weapon inspectors’ organization. Yes, they said, they were expecting a flight in that afternoon from Iraq’s Habbaniya airfield, but no one could give any interviews without authorization from a Scotsman called Euan Buchanan at UN HQ in New York. I called up Euan Buchanan and he laughed in my ear.

  ‘You’re wasting yer time, laddie. Bahrain’s just a support office, it’s where we come to buy our light bulbs and loo roll. And noo, I’m not going to authorize any interviews, so yer best off going back to Dubai.’

  Great. My first foreign news-gathering assignment in the Gulf and I had blown it. But just then I saw a white-painted C-130 with UN markings banking in the sky in preparation for landing. I got back into my hire car and raced round the perimeter fence to confirm it was landing with a manifest of UN weapons inspectors. As I called up the news desk in London to give them the news, I suddenly found myself surrounded by police cars. I was placed under arrest on suspicion of spying and taken off to Muharraq police station. The arresting officers were crude and aggressive, probably congratulating themselves on breaking up some imagined foreign conspiracy, but the police chief was plainly embarrassed. He could see at once that I was who I said I was and he even allowed me to do a live interview with News 24 on my mobile as I sat in his office, still technically under arrest. ‘I understand you’re doing this interview under rather difficult conditions,’ said the presenter, safe in her studio in London. Like a naughty schoolboy being fetched by his parents, I had to wait until someone from the Ministry of Information came to vouch for me and then took me straight to the airport.

  The rest of 1997 passed in a blur of assignments. The stand-off between Iraq on the one hand and the UN and US on the other grew worse, and as the BBC’s stringer in the Gulf I was the easiest – and cheapest – person to deploy on to a US Navy aircraft carrier to report on the US military build-up in the Gulf, something I did a number of times. This meant tiptoeing back into Bahrain again, waiting in a hotel for the call from Navcent, the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, then racing out to the airport to board a Navy flight out to sea. For reasons I resented at the time, the American media always seemed to be offered the soft option, flying out in big, comfortable CH-53 helicopters, while the rest of us were corralled on to a diabolical invention called the COD. This stood for Carrier On-board Delivery, meaning a stubby-winged propeller plane almost certainly invented by a direct descendant of the Marquis de Sade. The metal seats faced backwards, there were almost no windows to see out of, and it felt like a giant, airborne coffin. The turboprop engines were so incredibly noisy that after the initial safety briefing on the runway we all had to clamp ear-defenders on our heads, wondering why smoke was filling the cabin (it turned out to be dust). A shout bordering on panic would then go up from the Navy Flight Supervisor and we would be off, pitching and rolling high above the Gulf. When it came to landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier it felt like we were literally dropping out of the sky, hitting the floating runway with a heavy thump then screeching to a halt within seconds. The ramp would go down at the rear of the plane and we would be marshalled into a world straight out of Hollywood’s Top Gun.

  Apart from Tom Cruise, all the other details were the same: the screaming jets, the drifting steam from the catapults, the towering superstructure, the helmeted bomb-loaders pushing their lethal trolleys. Within seconds of landing on the USS Nimitz, a massive 95,000-ton leviathan with 5,500 people on board and a small, floating air force of attack jets, I witnessed my first air launch. One after another, F/A-18 Hornet jets would taxi up on deck a few feet away from me, the names, nicknames and ranks of their pilots stencilled on to the fuselages below the cockpit canopies. The red-jacketed flight-deck crew would crouch down by the front wheel to check the plane’s attachment to the steam catapult, then step back to signal to the pilot, who would give them a thumbs-up. A moment later and several tons of hi-tech weaponry would be catapulted off the deck and there would be a massive roar as the jet’s afterburners kicked in, two blazing rings of orange fire that rose like a comet into the clear Arabian sky before the jet turned north and headed for Iraq. ‘Phooar! That’s the lot, boys!’ went a voice on the ship’s tannoy that turned out to come from a man called the Air Boss.

  The US was not actually at war with Iraq in late 1997, but on that testosterone-packed warship it certainly felt that way. The aircraft carrier was a hive of constant activity, with jets being raised up to the deck on hydraulic lifts then armed with enormous, laser-guided ‘smart bombs’. ‘What you are seeing here, gentlemen,’ said the admiral up on his surprisingly cramped bridge, ‘is Operation Southern Watch in action.’ Southern Watch was an Anglo–US–French coalition operation set up after the Gulf War in 1991 to prevent Iraq’s air force from taking to the skies in the southern third of the country, which, along with the northern Kurdish part, had been designated a ‘no-fly zone’. The aircraft were flying CAPs – Combat Air Patrols – but were carrying enough armament to destroy Iraq’s anti-aircraft installations the moment some hapless Iraqi operator on the ground was ordered to switch on the radar to illuminate the aircraft and thereby effectively sign his own death warrant. By the time the US and Britain formally went to war with Iraq in 2003 their air forces had had twelve years of flying missions over the country.

  I was on and off US Navy aircraft carriers as tensions built further with Iraq, delivering one inaudible piece-to-camera in goggles and helmet on the crowded flightdeck as F-14 Tomcat jets screamed past me down the runway and up into the air.

  Back on dry land, I went up to the tiny UAE emirate of Umm Al-Qaiwain to report on an oil spill that turned out to have come from a sunken fuel barge that had been smuggled out of Iraq and which now wrecked the emirate’s entire coastline. I got the full story about a corrupt local importer from an oil official, who misheard me saying I was from the BBC and thought I had said ‘BPC’ – British Petroleum Company. There were limits, though, and I was not willing to overstep them at the risk of being deported. In the Gulf, it seemed, you could criticize government but not individuals, especially members of the ruling families. Any journalist breaking that rule did not stay long in the country.

/>   On 14 December 1997 Amanda announced, ‘Get the car, the contractions have started.’ Our first child was preparing to greet the world. We had Amanda’s mother Jennie staying with us, and when the BBC rang to ask if I could cover a plane crash that had just happened in Sharjah she nearly snatched the phone and spoke to them herself. Mobile switched off, we raced to Dubai’s American Hospital, where some hours later Melissa was born. I will never forget that wonderful smell of a newborn baby, our own kin, cradled in my arms when she was not yet five minutes old.

  Like most first-time parents we were beside ourselves with excitement, and bringing Melissa home to our little villa near Jumeirah Beach made life complete. We had had to put down a whole year’s rent on the place in advance, such was the power Dubai landlords could exercise over expatriate tenants, but we were blissfully happy. We had planted our tiny walled garden with jasmine and bougainvillea, and we hired a talented Pakistani gardener who would occasionally produce in triumph a plastic bag into which he had stuffed the nest of a venomous redback spider. From out of our window we could see the outline taking shape of the Burj Al-Arab, what was to become the world’s most expensive hotel, with a top suite costing close to ten thousand pounds a night at the time of opening. But there was still enough open desert outside our front door for me to go running at night with a diplomat friend from Exeter University days. There was almost no crime – we often left our doors unlocked – and we had the warm waters of the Arabian Gulf to swim in just a few hundred metres away. In short, life was very sweet.

  If I had stayed put in Dubai all year we would have very quickly run out of money; there simply weren’t enough big stories here to fight for a place on the BBC news programmes. Instead, the country that put me squarely on the map in news terms was Yemen. The poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, it has arguably the best scenery, the richest culture, the worst food and the most guns. Yemen was awash with weapons. In fact it has long been said (but never proven) that the country has over fifty million guns in private hands, nearly three per capita. Outside the big cities few men would be seen dead without their trusty AK-47; I have known taxi-drivers to keep loaded pistols sliding around their dashboards, and almost every Yemeni male past puberty wears the jambiya, a huge curved dagger tucked into a broad waistband.

  And if Yemen did not have enough on its hands with its surfeit of weapons, it also had a drugs problem. Not the pill-popping or hypodermic-needle sort, but a narcotic leaf called qat. Yemenis chew it by the bundle, sending them into a sort of hallucinogenic torpor by five in the afternoon. Personally, I could not see the attraction: it looked and tasted like a privet hedge. But a lot of Yemenis swore by it, blowing their household budget on the leaf and doing very little from noon until dusk. The president had publicly condemned the practice and tried to stop government employees from chewing the leaf, but with limited success. But one Western diplomat told me he believed qat got an unfairly bad press. ‘If people were not getting together to chew qat every afternoon,’ he said, ‘there would probably be a lot more arguments and a lot more bloodshed.’

  To complete the picture, Yemen in the late 1990s was starting to get a reputation for kidnapping. At first, it was all pretty benign. A tribe would seize a Western hostage, often an oil worker but occasionally a tourist or two, and use them as bargaining chips to demand economic concessions from the government. The hostages would be treated as honoured guests, lavished with plates of mutton and rice and generally made as comfortable as possible while negotiations went on nearby. What usually happened was that the Interior Ministry would quickly encircle the tribe with the hostage, sending in tanks and troops, but not too close. Someone from Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, would then be dispatched to open negotiations with the tribal chief or his representative. These would drag on for days, extended by lengthy qat sessions in the afternoons. The tribe would demand a new road, a school or a greater share of the oil that was being piped across its land. Eventually a deal would be struck, the hostages would say their goodbyes and be taken to a waiting helicopter for the flight back to the capital, a public thank-you to the Yemeni government and a final car journey to their country’s embassy. Often the newly released hostages would be given parting gifts by their captors and one British couple was even presented – with no hint of irony – with a pair of hand-crafted shotguns.

  But of course nobody ever knew for certain how the kidnappings would be resolved, and in April 1998 the Mitchell family from Britain became the latest victims. It takes about six hours to drive from mountainous Sana’a to the steamy Indian Ocean port of Aden. The road they were on begins in the dusty suburbs of the capital, where the city’s ancient white mud and stucco walls give way to a barren black landscape of laval hills. One hour out of Sana’a the road is bisected by a scruffy military checkpoint manned by wary soldiers in a variety of uniforms, their lone sentry hut standing beside concrete-filled oil drums and home-made ‘stingers’, a row of spikes that can be dragged across the tarmac in a hurry to stop a speeding car. Beyond the checkpoint the road starts to descend sharply through a mountain pass, down to a hazy, sun-baked valley. Just before the town of Ma’abar the road curves sharply between two rocky promontories and levels out. There is little traffic; this part of the road is often deserted. It was here that the Mitchells were attacked by the Bani Dabyan tribe as they drove north from Aden, about to go on leave.

  As their car emerged from the mountain pass, the family noticed a four-wheel-drive jeep suddenly swerve across the road in front of them, blocking their path. A Yemeni man got out carrying an AK-47 assault rifle and fired it in the air. It was obvious he wanted them to stop. When the Mitchells got out, another gunman struck David Mitchell, the forty-eight-year-old father, with the butt of his gun as they bundled him, his wife Carolyn and their fourteen-year-old son Ben into their vehicle. The Yemenis then drove off the road, bouncing over the rough ground, taking them eastwards into the lawless land of the Bani Dabyan tribe.

  In fact it was a case of mistaken identity: the kidnappers had been after the British Consul in Aden, David Pearce, and had been confused by Mr Mitchell working for the British Council (the two English words would have sounded identical to a Yemeni). A few days earlier the gunmen had tried to seize David Pearce on the outskirts of the capital by forcing him off the road and into their car, but he had simply driven his jeep straight at their car, hitting one of their passenger doors. One of his would-be kidnappers had leapt on to the back of Pearce’s jeep and hung on until Pearce managed to throw him off by swerving; in the meantime this conveniently prevented his fellow tribesmen from opening fire on the British diplomat as he drove off to safety.

  In the summer of 1998 Britons could still get a visa on arrival in Yemen, so after suggesting to the BBC that this was a story worth covering I flew down to Sana’a, bought my visa for thirty pounds and, since no one asked, neglected to tell anyone I was a journalist. I had my own digital-camera kit, purchased from London’s Tottenham Court Road the year before, since I was not yet grand enough to merit my own cameraman. While the negotiations for the Mitchells’ release dragged on, I decided to film as much as I could to explain the phenomenon of kidnapping in Yemen. In fact what I really needed was an interview with a kidnapper – but without being kidnapped myself. With the help of a friend at the embassy I hired the most ideal fixer any journalist could wish for. She was a former TV presenter with a face that opened doors wherever she went, she was the second wife of someone important in the government and hence well connected, and she had time on her hands and was bored out of her mind in Sana’a, so was keen for some adventure. She was also rich enough to refuse payment. I trusted her immediately. I will call her Lubna.

  With Lubna in the back seat of the taxi and me in the front (it was emphatically not the done thing to sit together unless you were married or related), we charmed our way through the government checkpoint on the outskirts of the capital with my camera kit stowed beneath the seat. We then filmed the exact point on the road where
the Mitchells had been kidnapped, taking advice from local Yemenis. In the town of Ma’abar we did not have to look far to find a shop selling machine guns by the van load. To illustrate the poor state of the local infrastructure I only had to point the camera at the street, which was a river of shallow mud after a recent cloudburst. The drains had overflowed and there was a foul stench in the air.

  We then had to choose our rafiq, our companion from a local tribe who would vouch on his honour to protect us. Lubna was suspicious of the first two we talked to. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because I can see it in the way they are looking at you, ya Frank. They would sell you to the kidnappers the first chance they get.’ Lubna went through Ma’abar marketplace like a housewife selecting ripe fruit, eyeing up, evaluating and dismissing possible guides for our trip. Eventually we chose two honest-looking men and we set off eastwards in their Toyota Land Cruiser, their Kalashnikov rifles resting between their knees.

  Within minutes we had left the relative civilization of Ma’abar behind; the going grew progressively rougher, the stony scenery ever bleaker and the skies darker. Eventually we pulled up at a mud-walled fortress-like building surrounded by a grove of fruit trees. Our guides went in to investigate, then came out with the owner. He was a young man dressed immaculately in the Yemeni style, with clean shirt, jacket, black-and-white chequered scarf draped around his shoulders and a wraparound embroidered futa (lunghi) above an expensive-looking pair of leather sandals.

  ‘Welcome, welcome, I am Faris. I am so sorry that my father cannot be here to welcome you as our guest,’ said the young man in Arabic, ‘but please, I hope you will accept some fresh oranges from our family orchard.’ The pleasantries over, I set up the camera and tripod and got down to asking him about kidnapping. Our two guides had hinted at his possible involvement in this murky business.