Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Back in London I found a prestigious invitation waiting for me. Stanmore Hospital was on a fundraising mission to build a new wing and would I mind terribly coming along to a lunch at Buckingham Palace hosted by Prince Andrew? The Prince’s daughter Eugenie had been treated at Stanmore for scoliosis and her father was taking a personal interest in its refurbishment.

  In a gilded room looking out on to the Mall, I waited alongside hospital directors, surgeons and fundraisers. When Prince Andrew appeared and went round shaking hands, I could not resist telling him that we had attended the same gym as five-year-olds in the 1960s, and that now was probably a good time to apologize for pulling his hair when he queue-barged. The Prince took a step backwards and stared at me open-mouthed. There was a small collective gasp all round. Had I breached some obscure royal protocol here, I wondered? ‘I don’t believe it!’ he exclaimed as heads began to turn. ‘Mr Sturgess’s gym! Yes, I remember it! Terrible place! I can’t believe he was making us do pull-ups on bars at five. He was a hard taskmaster, he’d never get away with it nowadays.’

  I had rather lost track of what Prince Andrew had been up to since piloting a Royal Navy helicopter in the Falklands, marrying Fergie, then splitting up. But in fact he had carved out a new role for himself as a roving royal ambassador for British industry abroad. He had established a good rapport with some of the up-and-coming young princes of the Gulf, who saw him as a symbol of regal continuity against a backdrop of shifting British politics. The Prince had a genuine interest in what was going on in the Middle East and he invited me down to his Windsor residence for a chat over lunch.

  I arrived in a suit; Prince Andrew was in jeans and a fleece. When a butler coughed discreetly and announced ‘Your Royal Highness, luncheon is served,’ I could not help thinking of those Blackadder sketches with Rowan Atkinson as the obsequious plotting butler and Hugh Lawrie as the fresh-faced Prince Regent. But Prince Andrew’s questions had little in common with the eighteenth century; they were all too reflective of twenty-first-century reality. How had Iraq gone so wrong? What did Al-Qaeda really want? Why did they hate us? Did I think Western-style democracy was possible in the Arab world? The previous day he had invited two Muslim imams to lunch and I was impressed that someone in so privileged a position, no doubt with access to any amount of Government and Foreign Office briefings, should be interested to hear the views of a journalist. When it was time to go, the Prince came out with me to my hired car, shook hands warmly with the driver, then personally dismantled my wheelchair for me. It was too natural a gesture to be effected for show, just the actions of a man in youthful middle-age trying to help someone the same age cope with the daily grind of being disabled. I liked the Prince.

  In March 2006 I went skiing. For me, this was a major landmark in my rehabilitation. All right, so we’re not talking wild, devil-may-care, bounce-down-the-moguls-thenhead-off-piste-before-lunch skiing, but a form of skiing none the less. When I first emerged from all those months in hospital, exhausted and mostly in pain, I couldn’t imagine doing anything so energetic again. But Amanda had gently but firmly made it clear that we should not let my terrible injuries stop our family from heading to the slopes. The gauntlet had been thrown down: I had better re-learn how to ski, but this time without the use of my legs. My friend Stu (made paraplegic after being shot in the back by robbers in Guatemala) had already mastered this and he was more paralysed than I was. Unable to feel or move a muscle below his chest, he was nevertheless able to steer himself downhill in a bobski with his arms and had now become a tour leader, taking other paraplegics skiing in Sweden. I found out there was a course run by the Army’s Adventure Training Centre in Bavaria that took disabled civilians for one week a year and signed myself up for it. There were fifteen skiers from Ireland, north and south, and they all had varying degrees of blindness. It certainly wasn’t hard to spot them at Stansted airport: some looked normal-sighted yet were clutching guides, some were clearly blind yet walking with amazing confidence, all seemed to have a brilliant sense of humour. These were the men and women who had recently been barred from boarding a Ryanair flight for travelling in too big a disabled group, so they were understandably relieved to get past check-in.

  In Bavaria it snowed non-stop. Visibility was rarely more than a few feet but I was too busy re-learning how to ski to notice. The centre had hired a German coach for a day to teach me. Andrea was a tanned and fit mountain girl who had broken her back while extreme skiing and was now a paralympic skier; she made it look easy. Essentially, you sit in a sort of moulded bucket mounted on a spring mounted on a monoski. You strap yourself in tightly, then steer with a couple of outriggers – mini ski poles with folding mini skis on the end. Since I still had the use of my abdominal muscles, I soon found I was able to turn by leaning out to one side, planting a pole in the snow then flicking my hips which turned the ski. Getting on and off the ski-lifts was not so easy. There was a strap attached to the front of my bobski and when I reached the front of the lift queue I handed this to the attendant, usually a student in a Bavarian felt hat with a feather stuck in at a jaunty angle. ‘Fertig?’ he would ask. Was I ready? I would nod nervously, he would restart the lift and off I would go, jerking unsteadily forward up the hill, stopping myself from falling over to one side by balancing with the two outriggers. At the top it was always a mad dash to lean forward, flick a catch to release the strap and propel myself out of the way before other skiers crashed into me. Twice I missed the catch and had to be rescued by the coach before I got dragged back down the slope, but eventually I got the hang of it. Skiing sitting down really wasn’t so hard. By the end of the week I was on to the red slopes and the following month I took my whole family skiing in Switzerland. On the final day we all made it down the slope together, me in my curious-looking bobski, Melissa and Sasha skiing on either side, and Amanda on a snowboard. I had a grin from ear to ear. Going through my head was the thought, ‘Mission accomplished: the Gardners are back on the slopes!’

  By now, in the spring of 2006, I was physically stronger than when I had first emerged from hospital after all those months of being dissected, injected and X-rayed, but my medical problems were not over. Aside from the sheer tedium of paraplegia, I was still getting periodic but excruciating nerve pains in my legs. ‘Surely that’s good?’ said friends, who hoped it meant my paralysis was retreating. But it’s a cruel facet of paraplegia that you can be incapable of moving your legs, or even sensing a touch to their surface, yet you can experience acute nerve pain from inside them. I had the added joy of an occasional pain deep inside my core body, caused by the gunshot wounds, which seemed to get worse at altitude in the Alps. I had stopped taking all painkillers some time ago, partly because they were not that effective and partly because I really wanted to be off all pills and get back to as normal a life as possible.

  As early summer came to England, the hardback edition of this book was published and I embarked on a frantic publicity tour round the country, when a new horror emerged. Turning over on my side in bed one night, I suddenly felt as if I had been kicked in the kidney. The pain grew steadily worse the next day as I struggled to get through the interviews I had promised to do, until eventually I submitted to a CT scan. (My consultant Frank Cross had warned me that CTs are not to be undertaken lightly as they deliver many times the amount of radiation you get from an X-ray, and I had already had rather too many of them for comfort.) The scan revealed an unforeseen legacy of my bullet wounds in Riyadh: a kink in my ureter, the tube that connects the kidney to the bladder. Now that kink was blocked by grit, causing an inflamed kidney, and they would have to operate to straighten it out.

  I dreaded going back into hospital: the newspapers had been full of scare stories about patients catching MRSA or C. Diff, a virulent and potentially deadly bacterium that lives in the gut, and which apparently had made itself quite at home in certain British hospitals. More than anything, I just wanted to be done with all this medical stuff and get on with my job. But to m
y intense frustration, just as the biggest news story of the summer – Israel’s war with Lebanon – began to unfurl across our television screens, I found myself once again filling in surgery consent forms and changing into one of those clinical backless hospital gowns.

  To my relief, the operation was brief and successful, and within days I was back at work. The Lebanon war was now well underway and BBC correspondents, crews and presenters were being dispatched to the Middle East, reporting live on the evacuations from Lebanon, the bombardment of south Beirut, and Hizbullah’s retaliation against the residents of northern Israel. There was obviously no place for me in a war zone – frankly, I had never fancied dodging precision-guided munitions even before my injuries – but there was a major diplomatic story emerging in Jerusalem, which was safe enough for the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to fly into for some shuttle diplomacy. My friend and colleague Jo Cayford (she who had brought me back caviar from Moscow when I was recovering in hospital) was running our Jerusalem bureau. Somehow, in between juggling the demands of umpteen programmes, she nipped down to the American Colony Hotel and checked it out for wheelchair access, then procured a ramp for the bureau so I would be able to get myself up to the live broadcasting position. As the Lebanon war entered its second week, I boarded a plane for Tel Aviv and my first Middle East assignment since getting shot in Riyadh. The adrenalin which had been so noticably lacking during my nine years in investment banking began to flow once more.

  I had last flown out of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the evening of 11 September 2001, frantic to get back to my patch in Cairo to report on the Arab reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Now, five years on, the terminal was cleaner and more efficient than ever, but the Israeli immigration and security people were not happy about the Arab entry stamps in my passport. Like many journalists I had two passports, but they both bore the signs of travel around the Arab world and the Israeli questions came thick and fast. ‘How long did you spend in an Arab country?’ ‘Who do you know here in Israel?’ ‘Who asked you to come here?’ To shortcut all of this I had brought with me a copy of this book, and as I now handed it to them their eyes widened. ‘Wait here a minute, please.’ The Israeli officials disappeared inside an office before eventually returning my passport, which, contrary to all my requests, they had stamped without explanation. Great. That passport was now useless for travel to almost anywhere else in the Middle East.

  In the golden light of late afternoon, my producer Alex Milner and I drew up at Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel, on the edge of what used to be the old border between Israel and Jordan. It’s something of a misnomer as it has nothing to do with America, but rather is an old Ottoman building that has long been a refuge from the troubles of the region, a meeting place for Palestinians, Israelis and foreigners who sip mint tea in its flowered courtyard or come on Saturdays for its lavish lunches. I had spent many happy times here while up on assignment from Cairo, sometimes bringing my family, who loved the little swimming pool beside the mosque and watching the koi carp in the fountain. The telephones in reception had a lovely soft warbling ring, rather like an exotic bird. I had heard that same ring tone on the ward of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London after my attack, and it had saddened me to think that I would probably never stay at the American Colony again. Yet here I was, wheeling over the flagstones and kilims, tipping Palestinian porters and ordering the Jerusalem Post for the morning.

  The sun was starting to sink behind the date palms as I rolled out into the garden for a mint tea; this was always one of my favourite times of day in the Middle East, that moment when a city seems to breathe a sigh of relief that the heat of the day is over and the evening will be a time to relax with friends. Basking like a lizard in the sun’s dying rays, I phoned Amanda to tell her all was well. At which point a shot rang out. Then another. There were six in all. ‘What’s going on?’ she shouted down the phone. ‘Are you all right?’ This was like a bad dream. I hesitated for a second before I realized what was happening. ‘It’s OK,’ I reassured her – and myself. ‘It’s a wedding party!’ The ‘shots’ had been firecrackers and now there was drumming and ululating from somewhere behind a wall. My heart beat again.

  Reporting from Jerusalem on the Lebanon war was frantic, exhausting and fascinating. There were so many things our audiences needed to know. Would the US put pressure on Israel to halt its aerial bombardment of Lebanon? Would the Israeli army go in on the ground? How far would they go – all the way to Beirut? What were the chances that Syria would get drawn in? How good was Israeli intelligence on the ground? Could Hizbullah’s missiles hit Tel Aviv? The demand from London was unrelenting and I relished it. On the hour, every hour, I would be miked up in the live studio, a backdrop of Jerusalem visible behind me, while the presenter interviewed our various correspondents around the region, coming to me for the diplomatic and strategic perspectives. I was not supposed to comment on the Arab view, since that was being done by our correspondents in Lebanon and Syria, but I could not help noticing how this conflict was further strengthening the hand of the extremists in the region, who wanted their governments to have nothing to do with the West. You could almost hear the collective sighs in Riyadh, Amman and Cairo, where moderate governments were wincing at Hizbullah’s new-found popularity on the Arab street. Now it would be even harder for them to be seen to be adopting anything approaching a policy aligned with America, Israel’s global backer.

  If your job is to report on Israel’s position in a story like this, then Jerusalem is a very easy place to report from: the story practically comes to you. Cabinet ministers, academics, senior army officers and pundits would breeze in and out of the bureau continually. Almost every day the Israeli Foreign Affairs spokesman, Mark Regev, would drop in, always available for a quote or ready to explain the latest government position. I enjoyed arguing with him without rancour. Whenever he began to tell me what he thought the Arab position was, I would find myself correcting him, reminding him that I had lived for many years in the Arab world and he had not. He must have found me very irritating.

  Jerusalem in August 2006 may have been a comfortable place from which to report, but all of us who were covering this story were appalled at the casualties this war was claiming. Lebanon was getting hammered by the Israeli airforce, its infrastructure pummelled into the ground, while Hizbullah was blatantly targeting civilians by firing its rockets – some of them packed with ball bearings – at Israeli villages. Almost the entire civilian population of south Lebanon was on the move, desperate to get away from the fighting, yet anything that moved on the roads risked being targeted from the air. The war seemed to have taken both sides by surprise. When Hizbullah’s fighters had made their sudden raid across the Lebanese border and snatched two Israeli soldiers they had obviously expected retaliation. But had they known it was to cost their country a thousand dead, mostly civilians, and over a billion dollars in material damage, they might have thought twice. For Israel’s part, its military chiefs grossly overestimated the extent to which their air power could pressurize Hizbullah into submission. The Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, was an airforce general and the Israeli press was full of accounts as to how he had made the case for an overwhelming air campaign. Israel’s new government was new and untested in war – the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was a far cry from the veteran general Ariel Sharon, who lay comatose in a hospital bed – and it was wary of risking the sort of unpopular casualties Israel’s ground troops had suffered in the killing zones of south Lebanon until it withdrew its forces back across the border in 2000.

  But far from being terrified by Israel’s air raids, Hizbullah’s fighters proved surprisingly resilient. From orchards and olive groves, from balconies and trucks, they launched their salvoes of rockets indiscriminately at northern Israel. As the Israeli population’s resentment grew at its government’s failure to protect it, the Israeli airforce intensified its bombardment, seeking to break Hizbullah’s will, decapitate its leadership and int
errupt its resupply of weapons from Syria. ‘We knew which building Sheikh Nasrallah [the Hizbullah leader] used in south Beirut,’ an Israeli military analyst boasted to me. ‘We even knew which elevator he used. We just didn’t know what time he would get in it.’ Israel certainly had a network of spies and informers in Lebanon, coupled with extensive aerial surveillance, but its intelligence-gathering had deteriorated sharply in the six years since it had withdrawn from its northern neighbour. On 28 July the Israeli airforce bombed a residential building in Qana, south Lebanon. Far from harbouring gun-toting fighters, it was sheltering women and children. A total of twenty-eight bodies were carried out amidst scenes of heart-wrenching grief. It was time to ask the airforce how it chose its targets.

  When the Israeli airforce cautiously opened up one of its operational airbases to the media, we jumped at the chance. It was a long way from Jerusalem, being right down in the south near the border with Gaza, and it was a hot, sweltering drive with only the haziest of directions provided. So secret was this base that not a single street sign betrayed its presence. Only the distant roar in the sky of a homecoming F-16 jet told us we were close to what had once been a British wartime RAF airfield. Through security, through the gates, and hoisted by my fellow journos up a set of steps, I wheeled myself frantically down a corridor to catch the press conference being given by the base commander. ‘Three hours ago,’ said a man who gave his name only as Colonel A, ‘I was in the sky over Lebanon and believe me, I felt a lot more comfortable up there than I do now facing you journalists.’ He was only half joking, since military commanders rarely enjoy meeting the media in the midst of operations, but he had little to fear from the Israeli press, who nodded in patriotic agreement as the colonel laid out Hizbullah’s terrorist credentials. An aerial film clip followed, showing a truck firing rockets from between two residential buildings. ‘So if you were a pilot and you saw that, what would you do?’ drawled the colonel. ‘Would you back off because it’s a residential area and hope they stopped firing at our population? No. Of course not.’ ‘So let me get this clear,’ I asked as heads swivelled round, ‘who decides what target to attack?’ The answer I got was news to me. Apparently the film footage taken from the plane is relayed back in real time to airforce headquarters on the ground in Israel, where analysts hunched over monitors make the decisions, then give the orders to the pilot. The Israeli military were clearly on the defensive about the high rate of civilian casualties from their raids over Lebanon, but they were quick to blame Hizbullah. ‘Sometimes,’ said the colonel, ‘we think they actually want us to hit civilians so it makes us look bad.’