To relieve the boredom I picked up his paper, started reading and suddenly standing right in front of me was a bloke with jet-black hair and a bright red moustache, wearing a blue parka and a green cap. I recognised him as one of the six men at the bar when we walked in.
He looked at me and said, ‘John?’
‘Nope,’ I said (maybe I did look Irish after all).
‘That’s me,’ said the mystery man.
The way the IRA cell system works, no one ever knows who’s who. Later we learned the newspaper was the signal for the guy with the mo and the cap to recognise us. It all seemed so Irish—no offence to my ancestors—but I thought there could have been any number of people in the pub reading the paper. Turned out to be not so. This was a very Republican town, so few around these parts would want to be seen reading the Irish Times, still thought of as a Unionist rag.
John and the man in the cap chatted for five minutes until Capman said, ‘Let’s go.’ We shook Micky to wake him up and left the pub with our new contact. John stayed in the pub. Capman told us, ‘We’ll drive for half an hour then change cars.’ Mike asked him where we were going. Fat chance of getting an answer to that, I thought, then heard, ‘Armagh.’ It didn’t mean a lot to me, but in the rear-vision mirror I could see Mike going pale.
‘Isn’t that in the North?’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ said Capman.
All I could think was, Shit, I haven’t got my passport.
‘Then we’ll need to go through a checkpoint, won’t we?’ said Mike.
‘Nope. We know how to avoid them.’
The North. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not only were we about to spend a day with a banned terrorist organisation but we’d be on English soil, entered illegally.
Our route took us along unmarked roads that got narrower and narrower until we got to a tiny lane covered in briar bush. The lane was wide enough for a horse but not our car so we scratched our way along until we reached a small partially hidden entrance to a tree-lined driveway. Capman pulled on the handbrake, stepped out of the car and wandered off. When he’d completely disappeared from view, we looked at each other, totally bewildered. We sat and waited, with no idea where we were, or what we were waiting for. But these blokes had been waiting since 1916, so what was another half hour?
Capman reappeared, this time in a very small car, and with him were two men wearing army fatigues and balaclavas. Then, running in from nowhere, two more similarly dressed guys appeared, and very apologetically said they must frisk us. They gave Mike, Micky and I a thorough going-over, but no one touched Andrea. Such gents these boys. They kill and maim women and kids with their bombs, but don’t frisk them. Their mums would be proud.
We transferred all the gear into the tiny car, leaving room for only one passenger, so in I got. I then drove off with the two balaclava-wearers, leaving behind my colleagues and my confidence. Half a mile later the car stopped and I watched the two balaclava-wearers looking nervously in every direction.
‘It’s down here somewhere,’ the driver said. ‘But I’ve no idea where. They switched locations on us this morning.’
I thought, ‘This is Keystone Cops stuff. How on earth did they manage to get anywhere near the prime minister’s residence?’
Then one of them pointed out a British checkpoint a mile down the hill and told me we would have to be very careful. There was a definite atmosphere of confusion and fear in the car. It was cramped and I was getting pissed off. Three British Sphinx helicopters passed noisily over our heads. Now I was frightened as well as pissed off. Then, to my utter amazement, the driver got out a two-way radio, made contact and asked where we were to rendezvous, and how to get there. I was new to all this, but I’d seen enough spy movies to know that the British soldiers at that checkpoint could easily have been listening in. I asked if that was possible.
‘Yeah sure,’ the driver said. ‘But we keep it short and talk fast.’
It felt so Irish. After five days loitering in Dublin, cryptic phone calls, mysterious car trips and three different contacts, we were now on a two-way radio asking for directions because we were lost.
But we drove on, finally pulling up outside a small white derelict cabin where three new balaclava-clad boys yelled at me to get the gear inside as fast as possible. Inside the cabin I looked around and my heart sank. There were cobwebs everywhere, holes in the floor, and one tiny window like a port hole. The room was dark, a cameraman’s nightmare. I asked if there was any power. They all glared at me with a ‘what a fucking stupid question’ look. It wasn’t a stupid question. Two months ago from Sydney we had asked about the availability of power. Two weeks ago in London, then two days ago in Dublin, we had confirmed it. No problems, we were told. Not only did we need power for lighting, the IRA had demanded we bring a voice scrambler to be used on location so there would never be a faithful reproduction of their voices. And they’d been told the scrambler only worked off mains power.
My colleagues finally turned up and I delivered the good news. Andrea hit the roof. She got stuck into the balaclava-wearers, telling them how slack they were, how unreliable they were, how arrogant they were, how they’d lied to us, how far we’d come to do this documentary, how she had only yesterday got a message through to the executive producer that everything was going according to plan ... ‘And I’m not letting you idiots fuck up my story!’
Silence. These blokes kneecap people for drinking in the wrong pub, but now they all looked desperately at each other through eye-holes in their balaclavas, terrified of this Australian banshee.
Within minutes of Andrea’s tirade, I had half a dozen helpers running metres of power cable, borrowed from a nearby farmhouse, and I started setting up lights.
Our first sequence was three men and two women being given instructions on how to dismantle high-powered weapons: AK47s, handguns and rifles, all bought from Eastern Bloc countries. Then from under a table the instructor brought out a 12-mm anti-aircraft gun wrapped in hessian. We were told it was the very gun that, a few days earlier, had brought down a British helicopter worth 10 million pounds. It was big news around the world, and front page of the Irish Times that I’d read in the pub lounge.
So we were not only talking to the IRA, which would give us five years in the clink, but if the Brits walked in now, they’d find us surrounded by heavy-duty weapons, including the one which the British army and local police were looking for. That’s twenty years right there.
Micky set up the voice scrambler for the interview with ‘Patrick’ the balaclava-wearer who appeared to be running the show. He was extremely articulate, obviously very intelligent and said he was one of the nine overall commanders of the IRA. With the scrambler up and running, Patrick insisted on hearing how he would sound. Satisfied he was unrecognisable, he was then keen to speak.
Mike began the interview, asking how the IRA could justify their dreadful terror tactics.
Patrick replied, ‘If the Irish people were black and not white, I believe the rest of the world would understand more easily how we have been treated like slaves by the English for centuries.’
‘But does that mean you have to murder innocent men, women and children?’
‘One of the great tragedies of war are civilian casualties,’ Patrick growled.
At the end of the interview we were told the helicopters had moved on and asked if we would like to film some target practice. Would we? At that point we only had enough shots for a tiny, seven-minute story and that was stretching it.
We raced outside while five of the men set up their targets. Knowing we needed much more footage, I started to film anything and everything that moved. Close-ups of eyes, feet, hands, men walking, Mike watching, a pan down from the sun, views through trees, etc. While I was taxing my artistic brain to the limit, Patrick told us they would fire five bullets and five bullets only, then they were out of there. I wasn’t sure if five bullets were all they had or if they were worried about the sound, but I wa
s still worried about lack of pictures. Before they fired any shots, I got close-ups of fingers on triggers, close-ups of eyes inside balaclavas, then shots of trigger-pulling but not really firing. We could put in the sound later.
Mike did a piece to camera with the five men in the background, aiming and ready to shoot. I rushed around filming each rifle and each set of eyes from five different angles, hoping some editor would save my arse. With quick cutting, it might just look like the most wanted terrorists in the world had a lot more than five bullets. I looked around for more filler, any filler, the more balaclavas the better, and just as I was frantically looking for those extra images, our terrorist talent disappeared into the woods and we were left with Patrick.
‘Well, how was that?’ he asked.
Before we could answer, he shook our hands and he, too, was gone. We were shell-shocked. We did appreciate the access, but didn’t they know we had fourteen minutes to fill? We’d come a bloody long way for this and might even have ended up sharing a cell with them. But these terrorists, freedom fighters, patriots, republicans, whatever they were, had done their bit. What do they care or know about television?
What I knew was, we still needed more pictures, so on the way back to the cars, with Mike and Andrea still shaking their heads at the abrupt finish, I filmed everything I could think of, in and out of focus. Close-ups of feet, the farmhouse we were told we couldn’t shoot, car tyres, tyre tracks and shadows. Maybe now we had enough.
It was far too risky to have the story lying around, so as soon as we got back to Dublin, Mike hopped on a plane to Amsterdam and hid the footage in the ceiling of a friend’s house. If we were arrested under the British Terrorist Act, we could be held for up to two weeks with no charges laid, but they’d never find any evidence of what we had done.
Safely ensconced in the Shelbourne Hotel, Andrea, Micky and I drank, and laughed, and drank some more, still amazed at the lengths we went to for a story.
When Mike got back from Holland, we did reenactments of the whole lead-up to the rendezvous in Northern Ireland. Andrea on buses, in the coffee shop, meeting ‘John’, the Irish Times and the pub scene, Capman and car trips. It turned out to be a classic 60 Minutes story.
9
Frequent Flying
At 60 Minutes we spent half our lives in planes, from 747s to single-engine jobs to lear jets. On an eight-week trip we could easily do 30 flights, and even home in Australia we’d fly constantly from state to state. 60 Minutes is based in Sydney but I was amazed at how few stories were actually shot there. If the story was out in the bush, we’d charter a small plane, usually an eight- or ten-seater with three or four seats removed to accommodate all the gear. In the early days we did a lot of single-engine flying, then we started carrying more and more gear, and got a little more plane savvy. We announced there’d be no more single-engine flying. Plane engines do pack up, we read about it often, so why take the risk? Seemed pretty dumb to go flying with one engine if there were planes with two.
Storms in any aircraft were not fun, but in a small twin engine, in complete darkness with lightning all around, it was brown pants territory, and if you’d also been drinking it was paper bag territory. But if you were an unflappable producer with no access to a paper bag, you did as one of my colleagues did. He’d only been with us for a month and was carrying with him the most beautiful Italian leather briefcase I’d ever seen, a present from his workmates at his previous job. A fierce storm had us bouncing all over the place and the producer’s sweaty face suddenly turned green. He leant forward, unbuckled the shiny brass clasp of his expensive farewell gift, placed his head inside the briefcase, and deposited lunch and a great number of beers. He then casually closed the briefcase, locked the brass clasp, and said, ‘Wow, that was close.’ He later carried it regally off the plane as if it contained family heirlooms.
A four- or five-hour flight on a small plane was not uncommon, but a toilet on one of those planes is really uncommon. So uncommon I’ve never seen one. But we were young and so were our prostates and bladders, so who needs a toilet? Well, Ron Sinclair, our larger than life producer, did.
Ron had been on light aircraft before so you’d think he would’ve learned, but when he arrived with a slab of beer for our five-hour flight over Western Australia, expecting to be thanked, he was nonplussed when we told him it wasn’t such a great idea. We reminded him of the lack of facilities on our very small and very cramped eight-seater aircraft. Not deterred in the least, he reckoned we would be begging him for a beer after a few hours and he just might not be willing to share with blokes who are so boring. Two hours into the flight he’d forgotten his threat and offered beers all round. We all said no thanks.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said, as he snapped open his first can.
Snap went can number two, and Ronnie was away, the jokes coming thick and fast. He loved his own jokes, and his laugh was really infectious. After cans three and four, hoping not to sound too patronising, I reminded him of the distance we still had to travel and maybe he should take it a bit easy. He reminded me that he was a big man and I presumed he was insinuating that with that comes a big bladder. Sitting at the back of the plane with his slab, Ronnie was having the time of his life, when suddenly he announced he had to have a piss. We replied that he had been warned, there was still two hours to go, we were flying at 20,000 feet, and there wasn’t an airport within a million miles.
‘I know, but I’m busting, I really have to go.’ It was suggested he piss back into the cans.
‘Good idea,’ he said, and proceeded to deftly empty his bladder.
Minutes later we heard that classic Ronnie chuckle.
‘What’s going on, Ronnie?’ I asked.
‘Hey, how come when you drink six cans, you can piss eight?’ he said.
We laughed as we pondered his question but not before warning Ronnie that if he spilt one drop of the contents of his cans, he was a dead man.
He spent the rest of the flight delicately holding and balancing those cans as if he was tending to six tiny newborns, and so delicate was he that his babies weren’t even aroused by the not-so-smooth landing. That’s dedication.
When that plane finally stopped, Ronnie was out of there in a flash, he couldn’t wait to rid himself of those six cans, plus the other two.
•
‘If you pull the orange cord first, you will certainly lose your testicles. So remember, it’s the green cord first, because you certainly don’t want to make that mistake, though the chances of you actually surviving the 20,000 feet free fall before you can pull any cord are practically zero, so good luck tomorrow.’
After a few blokey pats on the back, our instructor was gone, and if colour blindness set in, so were my testicles.
Back at the hotel pool, Ray Martin and I practised our freefall as we rolled into the water. Was it the green or orange cord to yank first? And if we jumped out of the plane at 50,000 feet, how would we know when we’d dropped to 20,000? What if we pulled the cord at 19,000 or 21,000? And which tag was the one that actually released the chute?
We had been overloaded with information. Orange, green, main chute, emergency chute, oxygen, body position. Way too much to absorb in just one day. Bugger it, we thought, we’d rather die than be castrated. Besides, it could be fun to plummet 50,000 feet. How many people have a chance at that?
So we went back to our beers and tried not to worry about our B-52 flight at dawn the next day. Which wasn’t easy. Because it wasn’t just a flight, it was nine hours from Guam in the Western Pacific to Queensland. And back.
Nine hours is plenty of time for something to go wrong in a plane that took its first flight in 1952. We might not be in that exact plane, but the last of those monsters was produced in 1962, so I wanted to be in one of the twenty-year-old newer ones.
Before arriving in Guam, Ray and I had to complete a string of physical tests—lung capacity, elevated heart rate, stress, etc.—the same tests that airforce pilots must complete ev
ery year to make sure they still have the ‘right stuff ’. Naturally, Ray and I passed with flying colours. Obviously, we had the right stuff, so next all we had to do was sit inside an airforce recompression chamber then answer a few basic questions to gauge what effects oxygen deprivation would have on us. How hard could that be?
Six pilots going for their annual test joined Ray and me inside a strange cylindrical-shaped room that looked like a submarine. I sat with three pilots on a bench on one side and on a bench directly opposite us were Ray and the other three pilots. Hovering above us were all sorts of wires and cables, and dangling from them were oxygen masks. We were each given a pen and a set of questions—name, age, address, etc., plus some simple mathematical problems. We would be taken to the equivalent of 60,000 feet and told to remove our oxygen masks, then we had to write down the answers to the questions.
Our instructor explained that we were about to experience hypoxia, or lack of oxygen, and that the tell-tale signs will be bluish or purple-coloured fingernails, maybe a sense of panic, but often a sense of euphoria.
‘If, at any time you feel giddy, short of breath or notice your nails have changed colour, apply your oxygen mask immediately,’ he said. ‘Because if the euphoria kicks in when you’re flying in a plane, you will die. So be well aware of the signs. Good luck.’
Ray’s team, the A team, went first, which suited me fine. They hit 60,000 feet and were told to remove their masks. They all looked full of the right stuff as they confidently stared at us, still with our masks on, then checked their nails and started writing the answers to the questions. But almost immediately one of the pilots—clearly the wrong stuff—grabbed his mask and sucked in the oxygen. Ray was holding up well, regularly checking his nails, then going back to his maths. Then whack. Another pilot clamped a mask on his face. Ray, still obviously awash with the right stuff, continued with his maths, turned the page and checked his nails. Suddenly, with an odd look on his face, he slapped on his mask, and I heard rapid breathing. A few seconds later the whole of the A team were re-oxygenated. A pretty good effort, I thought.
All This in 60 Minutes Page 10