Back outside in the blazing heat of a Middle Eastern afternoon, we were allowed to interview some pilots in their hanger. ‘Yes, of course we take all measures to avoid hitting civilians,’ said one officer with his reflective visor pulled down over his face. ‘Sometimes we even abort a mission and turn back to base.’ By now there was a gathering roar coming from somewhere behind us: a pair of heavily armed Israeli F-16s were taxiing slowly towards us, preparing for a raid over Lebanon. It was an awesome and terrifying sight, all gunmetal fuselage and underslung weapons. The assembled media rushed as one to set up their cameras and tripods, while the airforce minders frantically waved their arms to stop them filming. To me it made no sense to invite journalists to film this base then not let them film it, and I said so. We made our case and the minders relented. Rolling up my sleeves and flexing my shoulders, I wheeled rapidly across the runway ahead of the advancing fighter jets. I was wearing a cordless radio microphone clipped to my shirt, just like the one Simon Cumbers had given me in Riyadh minutes before we were attacked two years ago. In what felt like one breath, I delivered my piece-to-camera with the sun full on my face, using a trick I had learned long ago: to avoid having to squint, you adjust your eyes by looking up at the sun with your eyelids shut for several seconds before opening them. I only had time for one take of my lines before the roar of the engines became deafening and it was time to wheel swiftly out of the way. Hot, dusty and caked with dried sweat, we returned to our vehicles for the long ride back to Jerusalem and an evening in the edit suite for the ten o’clock news. Despite the grimness of this story, I felt a tremendous sense of achievement. I was back in the heat and dust of the Middle East, doing my first television story, in the field since being shot. I had covered this story as well as anyone with two legs. I was back.
London
October 2006
Going Back
What is it like to go back to the city where you narrowly escaped being murdered? Nine years after being shot six times in a Riyadh backstreet and left for dead, Frank Gardner steeled himself to return to Saudi Arabia for the first time in early 2013, filming an in-depth documentary for the BBC. The following is his account of what he found and experienced there when he made this emotional return . . .
‘FRANK? FRANK GARDNER?’ I put down my departure-lounge cappuccino and turned round to face Sultan Al-Qassimi, one of the Gulf’s most prolific bloggers and tweeters. It seemed we were on the same flight from Dubai to Riyadh. Sultan was on his way to speak at a blogging forum in the Saudi capital and I was on a journey that, quite frankly, I never thought I would make again. ‘This is your first time back, right?’ he said perceptively, smartphone in hand, earpiece dangling below his neatly wrapped Emirati headdress. ‘So this is huge for you.’ It was.
Nine busy years had passed since I survived that attack by those fanatical, pointless gunmen in a Riyadh suburb, and my mother had always maintained that I made a hospital-bed promise never to return to Saudi Arabia, the country where she nearly lost her only child. But as the BBC’s Security Correspondent and someone still passionately interested in the Middle East, and the Gulf in particular, this was a country too big, too important, to stay away from any longer. In the intervening years the Saudis had made enormous strides against terrorism, largely driving the problem over the border into neighbouring Yemen. It was from there, in 2009, that Al-Qaeda very nearly succeeded in assassinating the Saudi prince in charge of counter-terrorism. Their Saudi master-bomber, Ibrahim Al-Aseeri, devised a bomb that he packed on to – or some say into – his own brother Abdullah, a fellow jihadist, who then pretended to the Saudis that he wanted to turn himself in and repent. The Saudi authorities granted him safe passage to the prince’s villa near Jeddah, and failed to search him properly, and once he was in a room with the prince, the device was detonated. It blew the bomber in half. Incredibly, Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, who went on to become Saudi Minister of Interior, survived. The blast blew downwards and the prince escaped with just a damaged hand, going on national television that night, admittedly a little shaken, to prove he was still alive. Clearly Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular had not gone away, it had just moved addresses.
So how did I feel about going back? Mixed, is the answer. For years I had dreamed, literally, of returning to my old Saudi haunts: the labyrinthine, spice-laden souks of Jeddah, the baboon-infested crags of the Asir mountains and the torpid, palm-fringed wadi valleys of the Tihama coast. I knew it would never be the same in a wheelchair, but being there was all that mattered and I most definitely wanted to go back. But what if I freaked out? How was I going to respond if a man in a traditional white thaub walked towards me and made a motion as if to pull out a pistol? Because this was, after all, my last able-bodied snapshot memory of Saudi Arabia. Having started writing this book in hospital in 2004 as soon as the bullet wound to my shoulder healed, I had found that getting everything that had happened to me out in the open was a very therapeutic experience. Incredibly, I had been spared the expected flashbacks, the nightmares and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that have afflicted so many young servicemen returning from the killing fields of Afghanistan. I have no doubt that meeting them over the years and seeing how they cope with their horrific amputations and other life-changing injuries has helped me to cope with my own. Soldiers don’t do self-pity, at least not in public.
But then came an offer I felt I could not refuse. BBC2 wanted to make a one-hour documentary about how, against all the odds, Saudi Arabia had largely resisted the violent upheavals of the Arab Spring. Unelected strongmen had been deposed in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, Syria was engulfed in a brutal civil war and neighbouring Bahrain was still wracked by a simmering Shi’a protest movement. And yet here was Saudi Arabia, arguably the least democratic nation in the entire Middle East, still ruled by an ageing dynasty of unelected princes at least half a century older than the median age of the population. A place where half the adult population were still forbidden to drive cars in the twenty-first century. True, there had been mass marches by the Shi’a minority against discrimination in the restive, oil-rich Eastern Province, and violent clashes there with security forces, but two years into the Arab Spring the Sunni majority had still not come out on to the streets in protest. King Abdullah still retained enormous loyalty from most of the population, despite the corruption, inefficiency and lack of transparency in his government. Why? Our programme aimed to find out, and because of my personal involvement with the country, it was to be called bluntly Frank Gardner’s Return to Saudi Arabia.
It nearly didn’t happen. We were upfront with the Saudis about exactly what and who we wanted to film, with no hidden agenda or pre-judgements, but after being promised ‘every possible assistance’ from Saudi officialdom, our visas failed to materialize. Months after applying, the advice I got in early 2013 from one Saudi advisor was simply to give up trying. No one, it seemed, was prepared to risk the wrath of senior princes if our film turned out to be unpopular in the palace. But having already invested a considerable amount of emotional currency in steeling myself to go back, I was not prepared to throw in the towel. As luck would have it, a senior prince I had interviewed years earlier came to London on a flying visit, we got word to him, he raised no objections, and within twenty-four hours we had our visas; doors flew open at every stage of our itinerary.
In the pale-yellow sunlight of a January afternoon our plane touched down at Riyadh’s futuristic King Khaled international airport. I glanced at the snaking lines of bewildered incoming guest workers from India and Pakistan queuing up to enter this strange new country. Their passports would be confiscated on arrival and they would be herded into dormitories, where they would put a thumb print on a contract they couldn’t read or understand, and then work flat out, six days a week for the next two years, with perhaps one visit home to see their families during that time. Many would eventually return home as relatively rich people in their own countries, to support entire extended families and build themselves th
e biggest house in the village, but others would struggle to pay back the money they had borrowed to make the journey in the first place, and would sink deeper and deeper into debt.
A Saudi official approached and steered me through Customs, then in the arrival hall I spotted Stew Griffiths, the hired muscle that the BBC High Risk Team had thoughtfully provided to get me in and out of awkward places and generally act as our eyes and ears in case of trouble. We were not expecting any, but after the catastrophe of my last visit the BBC was taking no chances. At thirty-two, Stew was an extremely fit and powerfully built ex-Royal Marine. We had worked together before, spending ten days on a merchant oil tanker in 2012 steaming through pirate-infested waters off Somalia and the Horn of Africa. His primary role had been to piggy-back me up the steep gangplank and ship’s internal stairs, and if we ever got overrun by armed pirates to throw me over his shoulder and sprint for the ‘citadel’, the ship’s strong room. Mercifully we did not have to put that last one into practice.
‘Hotel or join up with the team where they’re filming?’ asked Stew as we settled into the back seat of the taxi and pulled away from the airport in the gathering twilight. I had landed already fairly exhausted from several edgy days of reporting from Afghanistan. On the first morning in our heavily guarded hotel in Kabul we had woken to the sounds of a triple suicide bombing going off down the street at a police headquarters. As much of an adrenalin rush as it was to fly low over the icy, snowbound Hindu Kush mountains later that week in a US Army Chinook helicopter with the tailgate open and the door gunner scanning the hilltops, I was glad to get out of there. After Afghanistan, I reckoned, Saudi Arabia should be a breeze. ‘Let’s join up with the team now,’ I replied. ‘Good man,’ grunted Stew.
It was dark by the time we pulled up beneath a large modern shopping centre bearing a sign saying ‘Harvey Nichols’. It stood in the shadow of the soaring Faisaliya Tower, a skyscraper shaped like a fountain pen that had become one of the defining landmarks of modern Riyadh. I remembered filming here in 2000 as they were putting the finishing touches to both buildings. I had looked on then as the fun detectors from the ‘Mutawwa’, the religious police, officially titled ‘The Committee for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice’, went round the newly opened shopping mall telling shopkeepers to turn off their music, since they frowned on all forms of public entertainment. The Filipinos in the Swatch boutique would dutifully comply, then turn the music back up again as soon as the straggly-bearded men had left, posting someone to keep a lookout in case they returned. Back then I had to film covertly, and sure enough before long a religious policeman came up, backed up by a normal cop, to say ‘We’ve had reports that you were filming here, it’s forbidden,’ urging his colleague unsuccessfully to have me arrested. Now, in 2013, the atmosphere seemed completely different. Our BBC team was filming quite openly – admittedly with a timid ministry minder in tow – and no one was objecting, not even the quietly spoken religious policeman who came up at evening prayer time to politely tell all the Saudis in the cafeteria to finish their meals and go off to pray. It was only my first evening back and this was, of course, a modern, Westernized shopping mall, but Riyadh already felt like a different, more relaxed place than the tense, terror-conscious capital I had left on a stretcher nine years ago. Yet nothing prepared me for the man I was to meet the next morning.
Fahad Al-Butairy is a hugely popular Saudi comical satirist. Those last three words take some getting used to, given that this is such an austere city in the most austere of all Arab countries. Yet Saudi Arabia has recently discovered it has a sense of humour, and Fahad is one of its leading lights, thanks to the power of the internet, social media (he has nearly a million Twitter followers) and his team’s short, snappy eight-minute YouTube videos. A US-educated twenty-something, dressed in T-shirt, baggy shirt and trainers, Fahad greeted me outside a studio adorned with African spears and ibex horn knives, perhaps a throwback to the prehistoric African wildlife that once roamed the ground we now stood on. His eyes seemed to glint with mischievous intent behind his heavy, librarian’s glasses, and his hair, a wild, unkempt Afro in some of his videos, was now close-cropped. Neither of us pretended we knew much about the other’s work, but Fahad was quick to fill me in.
‘Right now, in YouTube rankings, Saudi Arabia globally is number three, behind the US and Brazil,’ he told me. ‘Considering the population here [21 million Saudis] – wow, it’s huge. We’re actually number one globally in mobile YouTube views.’
Could this, I suggested, have something to do with the official Saudi disdain for public entertainment?
‘There isn’t much entertainment here in general,’ he agreed, ‘and the YouTube shows are really popular, because people see these shows as talking about the things that represent them more than TV right now.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘OK, this episode I’m going to show you was one of the most viewed video clips on YouTube in the Middle East in 2012.’ Fahad reached for the laptop and clicked the ‘Play’ button. It’s New York’s Times Square and the voiceover announces, ‘We bring you one of the finest and most intelligent Saudi students studying abroad.’ A nervous Borat type appears holding a microphone and approaches a young American man in the street (actually an actor, but the viewer doesn’t know that).
‘Hello, how are you?’ he asks.
‘I’m good,’ drawls the New Yorker. ‘What’s going on?’
The Saudi student notices the man’s chequered Arab scarf and asks hopefully, ‘You are Arab?’
‘Oh no,’ replies the New Yorker. ‘It’s just fashion, man. D’you like it?’
‘Nice for Arab,’ says the Saudi student. ‘But you are Muslim?’
‘Oh no, I’m Jewish, man.’
Instantly the Saudi student drops his microphone in horror and runs away, looking back in case he is being chased, a parody of some of the anti-Jewish invective whipped up by certain Saudi clerics.
The video cuts to a second clip. The same Saudi student is approaching an American woman as she is about to get into her car.
‘Er, no woman get driving,’ he says in broken English.
‘Er, I’m sorry?’ she says defensively, adding, ‘That’s fine, I’ve been driving for ever.’
‘It’s OK,’ he insists. ‘You are queen. I am for you driving.’
At one point Mickey Mouse appears, accompanied by Minnie Mouse, dressed typically in a short, flouncy skirt.
‘This is your wife?’ enquires the Saudi student interviewer, who then scolds him, ‘It’s shameful to let your wife go out looking like that. I’m very upset with you, Mickey.’
I had to remind myself that these were Saudi comics poking fun at their own society’s mores. If this had all been dreamed up by some American scriptwriter in New York, it would have been taken as insult bordering on racism. Yet just as the noughties TV series Little Britain laughed at some of our foibles in the UK, here were Saudis laughing at theirs.
‘This humour is newly found,’ said Fahad. ‘It’s probably been surfacing in the past five years, I’d say. I have a theory that the most miserable nations are the funniest. Usually.’
But as we scrolled through more of his video clips, I realized there was a serious, contemporary side to his humour. One episode poked fun at the government’s faltering attempts to clamp down on corruption, with Fahad pretending to lecture sternly to the camera: ‘It’s lights out for you evil-doers! Here comes the one who will put an end to this nonsense. Here comes . . . the Saudi Anti-Corruption Committee.’ Flames licked the screen and there was the sound of a dramatic explosion offstage.
‘Is the Anti-Corruption Committee effective?’ I asked him.
‘Not very. That’s why they are material for the show.’
Yet Fahad came across as curiously patriotic, telling me that most of the issues they parodied came from caring about the country. ‘We are not really pointing fingers,’ he said. ‘We are trying to be constructive in our criticism.�
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So, knowing the Saudi authorities’ fondness for media censorship, I asked the obvious. ‘Could the government block you if they wanted to? Could they come and arrest you?’
Fahad shrugged. Clearly he was not losing any sleep over this prospect. ‘Yeah, they could, but we haven’t felt threatened in that sense at all. Very high officials in the government, even princes, follow our shows and love them, even though we’ve addressed really sensitive issues. So we are starting to realize there is an increasing level of freedom of speech in Saudi that has never been there before.’
Could this be the Saudi version of the Arab Spring? We had arrived as the kingdom was experiencing an explosion of free discussion, criticism and satire, all on the internet. The state seemed content to let this run as long as nobody insulted Islam or the king, and as long as ‘cyber-protest’ did not cross over into real-time protests on the streets. We decided to put this to the test and head for the country’s Eastern Province, the oil-producing corner of Saudi Arabia where the Shi’a minority are concentrated and where protests have periodically erupted and been put down in violent clashes. It would be untrue to say that our government escort, a colonel from the Ministry of Interior, together with another uniformed policeman and an armed security guard in plain clothes who kept his distance, were overjoyed to take us to the most troubled part of the country, but their orders from above were to give us full access and they complied with good grace. ‘I promise you, Frank, we are not here to stop you meeting anyone,’ said the colonel. ‘We are only here to look after your safety.’
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