Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  I had spent a long day up on the northern border with Lebanon on a press facility organized by the Israeli Defence Force’s Northern Command, who wanted to show how they were countering the threat of rocket attack from Hizbollah’s guerrillas just across the border. My cameraman and I had got back to Jerusalem shortly before midnight and we popped briefly into the office to return equipment. The phone rang as I was going out of the door. I hesitated, then answered it. It was a captain from the IDF press office. In heavily accented English she told me that Israel was ‘mobilizing’ to move into several Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. I asked her to repeat what she’d said, then put down the phone and looked at my watch. It was seven minutes to midnight. There was no time to warn the news desk, I would just have to write and file by satellite a thirty-second voice piece and get it on air in time for our radio bulletins at the top of the hour. The dramatic wording had every on-air news programme queueing up to interview me. Was this the big one? I kept being asked by presenters in London. Was Israel calling up its reserves to reoccupy the whole of the West Bank? I couldn’t answer that because I really didn’t know who to call in the Israeli hierarchy at one o’clock in the morning. But as soon as I drew breath from the first wave of broadcasting I sat down with the bureau producer, Keren Pekes, to decipher what the IDF announcement really meant. Keren had high-level contacts in Tel Aviv that a non-Israeli like me could not possibly have and she had rushed into the office as soon as she heard the news. Back came the answer from her sources. Yes, the army was going into several Palestinian-held areas, but by ‘mobilizing’ the spokeswoman who’d called me had meant ‘moving’ its forces, a very different meaning to the English concept of ‘calling up’ reserves or civilians. We decided that my broadcasts had been ambiguous enough for me to have got away with it. Just.

  The Intifada presented the Arab and Islamic world with one of its many crises. During the last Intifada of 1987–93 people read about what was happening in the newspapers and watched the occasional report on government-controlled TV. But this time round there was Arab satellite TV, most notably Al-Jazeera, and live reports were being beamed into living rooms from Gaza and the West Bank. Day in, day out, people watched clashes between mostly stone-throwing Palestinian protesters and heavily armed Israeli soldiers. One particular scene became the enduring, iconic image of the Intifada. An unarmed Palestinian man and his ten-year-old son got inadvertently caught up in a confrontation in the Gaza Strip. A cameraman filmed them as they crouched terrified against a low wall, the father trying desperately to shield his son from the bullets. But then the footage showed the boy’s body go limp: he had been shot dead and the Arab world was in no doubt the Israelis were to blame. The boy was called Mohammed Al-Durra and it became a household name all over the Arab world. Photographs of this tragic scene were reproduced on posters, car stickers and inflammatory leaflets, demonstrators in Arab capitals chanted his name and broadcasters referred to it almost every day.

  In one way it suited certain Arab governments to have the Intifada draw popular anger away from the many causes of domestic discontent at home. Military-political elites may have grabbed all the power, corruption have been endemic and human rights as rare as freedom of the press, but hey, this was nothing compared with what the Zionist entity was doing to Palestinians. In Cairo I went to interview the Israeli ambassador, Zvi Mazel, in his heavily guarded villa in a southern suburb. He complained that every day he and his staff counted dozens of anti-Israeli cartoons and other references in the state-controlled press. He said his complaints to the Egyptian government fell on deaf ears.

  But before long, Arab governments realized there was a risk that this popular anger could get out of hand. One Friday afternoon after prayers I went up to Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque to cover a small but noisy demonstration where rabble-rousers with megaphones were whipping up the crowd. One man held his baby son in my face and screamed that Israel was butchering Arab babies. ‘Egypt is the strongest country in the world!’ shouted another. ‘Israel can’t touch her!’ And then the slogans turned political, mocking and insulting President Mubarak and his government, which had long sought to mediate between Israel and the Arabs but which seemed incapable of delivering a homeland to the Palestinians. At a given signal, the riot police moved in, blocking off the street with their serried ranks of helmeted troops, and the demonstration dispersed. Similar protests were happening outside Cairo Zoo, where rioters advanced on the office block that contained the discreet Israeli embassy, but they were stopped and dispersed by the riot police.

  Still, Arab and Muslim governments all agreed that the Intifada was a crisis that had to be addressed, and it became the top priority at an Islamic summit in Qatar that autumn. I suspected there would be lots of talking, a worthy closing statement and not a great deal else achieved, but it was a great opportunity to meet people and enlarge my contacts book. Events such as these presented the best chance of getting impromptu interviews with people like the Saudi foreign minister or the Yemeni prime minister. A lot of Western journalists, I have found, take a sort of perverse pride in dressing down, as if looking shabby somehow implies a dedication to exposing the inequities of the world – or perhaps it is simply a case of not being very well paid. Luckily, I still had two tailored suits from my banking days, and although in London double-breasted suits were becoming the preserve of gentlemen’s clubs and heirs to the throne, in the Middle East I could still get away with wearing one. It came in handy.

  Halfway through the Islamic summit there was a photocall for all fifty-six Islamic leaders. A roped-off area and tiered stage had been prepared for the kings, presidents, sheikhs and prime ministers. A Qatari official with a clipboard ushered the dignitaries through like a maitre d’ at an exclusive restaurant. Suddenly I found myself being guided into the roped-off area, and the next thing I knew I was standing between Yasser Arafat, King Abdullah of Jordan, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and President Khatami of Iran. I knew it would only be a matter of seconds before I was rumbled – or even arrested as a security risk – so if I was going to seize the opportunity and talk to any of these leaders I needed to choose one fast. Well, I’ve met Arafat already, I thought, Iran is off my patch, the Saudi leader will probably call for security, so that leaves King Abdullah.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ I turned to the Jordanian monarch and introduced myself, ‘hello, I’m Frank Gardner.’

  ‘Oh yes, hi, Frank. I’ve seen you on BBC World lots of times. How are you doing?’

  King Abdullah could not have been friendlier. A small, well-built ex-paratrooper who had graduated from Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he had a firm handshake and a winning smile. His accent was mid-Atlantic. We talked about the Dubai Desert Endurance Marathon, which his Special Forces had competed in two years ago. (Embarrassingly for them, they forgot to bring any puncture-repair kits for the mountain-bike phase so they ended up having to carry their bikes over fifty kilometres.) The king had been so intrigued by the BBC film I had made about the race that he had wanted the next one to be held in Jordan, running from Aqaba to Petra. But then his father King Hussein had died in 1999 and Abdullah had been thrust unexpectedly on to the throne. This conference was important for him, since most of Jordan’s inhabitants were Palestinians, and I left him before I was evicted by security, the king having readily agreed to an interview next time I was in Amman. But I did not have the same cachet as CNN’s Christiane Amanpour or the BBC’s John Simpson and I could never quite get through the layers of court protocol to secure the king’s time.

  Instead, I headed for Riyadh, where an international oil conference coincided with the start of a low-level terrorist campaign that was to be the harbinger of far worse things to come. The afternoon of 17 November 2000 was unseasonably wet for Saudi Arabia. The rain swept across the bleak desert landscape of the central Nejd plateau on the drive into Riyadh from the airport; winter had come early to the Saudi capital. I was in a taxi heading into town when someth
ing on the radio caught my attention. I asked the driver to turn it up. I could barely believe the news bulletin: a British expatriate, Christopher Rodway, had been killed by a car bomb in central Riyadh. Such things were unheard of in a country that made internal security one of its highest priorities.

  Rodway, a forty-seven-year-old hospital technician from Salisbury in Wiltshire, had been driving his car with his wife in the Olaya shopping district when the bomb exploded beneath his seat. The police duly threw a cordon round the wreckage, allowed the news agencies to publish a photo of the rain-soaked scene and began their own investigation. All sorts of spurious theories were doing the rounds but the interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdelaziz, who had been Mr Internal Security for over thirty years, was quick to offer an explanation: he was quoted in the official press two days later as placing the blame squarely on ‘a turf war amongst Western bootleggers in alcohol’.

  I was doubly surprised: firstly that his investigators seemed to have solved the murder so promptly, and secondly that Britons or other Westerners were being blamed for such a dramatic act of terrorism. Drinking or dealing in alcohol is strictly forbidden in Saudi Arabia, yet despite the mandatory penalty of multiple public lashings most Western expatriates do drink alcohol from time to time and a handful even make some money on the side by dealing in it wholesale. But there is a wealth of difference between greasing a few palms to take delivery of half a dozen crates of Johnny Walker round the back door, and acquiring, then planting, explosives beneath someone’s car. Something did not feel right here. In fact it smelled strongly of sweeping trouble under the carpet. Back in London, the Saudi opposition figure, Dr Saad Al-Fagih, had his own theory. His numerous contacts inside Saudi Arabia – including some individuals even inside the security forces – were telling him that the bombing was the work of a small group of violent Islamists. Before long, the Foreign Office was drawing the same conclusion.

  Discussing the bombing and the investigation live on air from Riyadh that week, I pointed out to BBC audiences that any Western expatriate would have to be insane to dabble in terrorism in a country that beheads criminals for less. The rewards were simply not worth the risk. And what exactly were the rewards for dealing in bootleg alcohol? I subsequently did some research into this, interviewing, amongst others, a Yorkshireman who proudly called himself ‘a barman in Saudi Arabia’, which is about as ironic a title as ‘a diabolist in the Vatican’. Westerners did not on the whole, he said, get involved in the importing of alcohol. That was too risky and was left to middlemen, usually Arab expatriates, who in turn had to pay a cut to certain Saudis to get the stuff into the country. Where the Brits and the Irish made their money, he claimed, was in selling the alcohol in illegal ‘pubs’, usually converted games rooms on housing compounds full of expatriates. In a good year, the Yorkshireman said, he would make close to £50,000 on top of the salary he earned for his day job. A nice little earner, but was it worth committing murder for?

  Expatriates I interviewed scoffed at the notion of a turf war amongst them. This was not Chicago in the 1920s, they said, this was Saudi Arabia, where Western expats all got along with each other, united by the shared pressures of living in a country where alcohol and all forms of public entertainment were banned. For years the Saudi authorities had largely turned a blind eye to what went on behind the walls of expatriate compounds. It was an open secret that Westerners brewed and distilled their own home-made wine and beer. As long as their ‘decadent’ habits did not spill over into the wider community, even the mutawa – the religious police, responsible for upholding morality in public places – did not usually venture into the compounds for fear of starting a diplomatic incident. When it came to the alcohol business everyone got their cut and everyone was happy, which was why the killing of Christopher Rodway came as such a shock and why the sizeable expat community did not believe the official explanation.

  Within six months of Rodway’s death there had been several more bombings, several more Westerners had been injured, and the Saudi police had rounded up and incarcerated half a dozen Britons and a Canadian as the prime suspects. The men were initially put in holding cells, deprived of sleep and, according to them, brutally beaten by their interrogators. Again and again, they said, the Saudis kept asking them, ‘Who ordered you to place these bombs?’ Under pressure, one of the Britons gave the most unexpected answer. He told the detectives he was acting on orders from none other than the British Consul at the embassy in Riyadh. It seemed an absurd suggestion but the Saudi Interior Ministry took it seriously and demanded the British government order a full-scale investigation. So serious was this allegation that the demand went right up to Number Ten, Downing Street. Special Branch was duly asked to conduct a painstaking investigation, but they found nothing to substantiate the accusation. The British Consul was in the clear; almost. The Saudi Interior Ministry did not accept Special Branch’s findings and demanded the expulsion of the consul. Well before his tour of duty in Saudi Arabia was up, the hapless consul found himself being quietly shipped off to a posting in China. It was a dark chapter in Anglo-Saudi relations.

  Matters came to a head in 2001 when suddenly, without warning, the Saudi authorities put the imprisoned Britons on television to broadcast their ‘confessions’. Dressed in identical shirts, one by one the men told how they were ordered to place bombs in various places around Riyadh. They were even given little batons with which to point at a street map of Riyadh, while Arabic subtitles ran at the bottom of the screen, translating their confessions for the benefit of the Saudi audience.

  It was an appalling piece of theatre, intended to ringfence the bombings as something expatriates did to each other, rather than admitting them to be a symptom of a wider, growing malaise within the Saudi population. Certainly the men’s Saudi lawyers did not believe their confessions and nor did the British Foreign Office. Again and again, Tony Blair sent Baroness Amos to Riyadh to press for the Britons’ release. The Saudi Foreign Ministry was sympathetic, the Interior Ministry was not. A small coterie of advisers round Prince Nayef, the interior minister, had convinced him that these men were convicted criminals, terrorists even. The fact that the bombings continued after their imprisonment did not seem to sway him. Rumours began circulating that two of the men had been tried in secret and sentenced to death by execution. When Tony Blair held an impromptu press conference in a Riyadh palace after meeting the king and crown prince in October 2001, we asked him what progress he had made on the release of the Britons. The question clearly irked him. Yes, he had raised the subject with his Saudi hosts, but this was not the right forum to discuss it. Next question, please.

  A few months later, in the spring of 2002, I flew to Geneva for Newsnight to interview the Britons’ Saudi lawyers, Sheikh Salah Al-Hejailan and Tariq Al-Tuwaijiri, who were on a brief visit to Switzerland. Sheikh Salah had already made a name for himself as the lawyer who had successfully defended the two British nurses accused of murdering an Australian nurse in Saudi Arabia in 1997. When I had spoken to the two Saudi lawyers in Riyadh they had been tight-lipped about the case of the imprisoned Britons. This was hardly surprising, since their phones were almost certainly being tapped. But in the relatively liberal atmosphere of Switzerland they felt able to speak freely, and confirmed what I had long suspected. Yes, the Britons had been coerced into making those confessions. In fact, when they had been filmed with the map of Riyadh the prisoners had had no idea they were going to be on TV. But coercion can take many forms, they said. It does not have to mean torture in the classic sense of thumbscrews and electric cattle prods. It can be psychological, and this was the primary means used by the Saudi interrogators to get the Britons to confess to bombings they had nothing to do with. After a lengthy period in a cell with little or no sleep it must have been hard to resist the temptations of a man waving the prospect of a flight to London, saying, ‘Look, this is your ticket out of here. All we need is for you to own up to what you did and you can leave.’

  I
n August 2003 all six were pardoned and released by King Fahd. By then Saudi Arabia was waging a full-scale counter-terrorism campaign that had nothing to do with boozed-up British expatriates. In the three years since Christopher Rodway had been killed by that first bomb beneath his car seat, Britain had quietly sent over sixty delegations at ministerial level or above to Saudi Arabia to plead for the men’s release. One of the most strained periods in Anglo-Saudi relations since the screening in Britain of the film Death of a Princess could now draw to a close.

  Saudi Arabia was not the only Arab country with an image problem over terrorism. The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya – or just ‘Libya’ to you and me – was in the dock, literally, over Lockerbie. When a bomb on a PanAm jumbo jet exploded in December 1988 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, killing 270 people in the air and on the ground, the finger of blame pointed towards Tripoli. It was surely revenge, it was argued, for America’s bombing raids on Libya in 1986. The West demanded that Libya hand over two men suspected of putting the bomb on board in Frankfurt, and when the country’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, refused to comply the UN slapped on sanctions and Libya was isolated by an air embargo. The sanctions were only lifted in 1999 when Libya agreed to hand over the suspects to a Scottish court specially convened at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

  I made my first visit to Libya in the spring of 2000 under the pretext of reporting an Arab–African NGO conference in Tripoli. My first impression was a pleasant surprise. Despite the years of sanctions the airport was clean and efficient, the road into town went past sunlit groves of olives and fields of wheat, and the Libyans seemed polite if a little reserved. Wearing a mixture of Western suits, loose white robes, waistcoats and small black felt berets, they looked like no other Arab race I had ever encountered. Their faces were sharp-featured and clean shaven but their hair was often frizzy – rather like a cross between Tom Jones and Lionel Richie.