It was in Madrid that I learned how to operate a telex machine, a skill that is now about as useful as being able to illustrate a biblical text inscribed on vellum. Sending a telex involved typing a message on a keyboard that would punch holes into a paper tape that generated pulses to be transmitted over a special telegraph line. The telex machine in the Reuters Madrid office in 1971 did not have a paper read-out facility, so it became essential to be able to read the tape itself to check for errors.
During office hours, we had a full-time telex operator, Pedro Diez, a short, wiry man with a pencil moustache and only one hand as a result of an accident with a civil war-era grenade that he had picked up as a child. Our less kind colleagues liked to suggest that only a ramshackle operation like Reuters would see fit to employ a one-handed telex operator. Watching Pedro at work, holding one end of the telex tape between his teeth as he threaded the other end through the transmitter mechanism, usually put an end to the jokes.
Many years later, when I was reporting from Lebanon, I had good reason to be grateful for what Pedro had taught me – being able to hammer out my own telex tapes was a useful skill when hotel telex operators were under pressure from gaggles of sharp-elbowed correspondents.
Reporting from a country under Fascism was not an ideal introduction to the world of the foreign correspondent; in the dying days of Francoism, Spain was somnolent to the point of being comatose. It was hardly an encouraging environment for an impatient young reporter. But after a few months of little but sports results, I began to get my first nibbles at real stories.
Madrid, Sept 4, Reuter – The embalmed body of Eva Perón – second wife of former Argentine dictator Juan Perón – was returned to the ex-president here last night after a mysterious disappearance lasting 16 years…
Eva Perón – heroine for millions of Argentinians – crossed the French–Spanish frontier early yesterday morning in a blue Italian hearse flanked by Italian and French outriders. This appeared to confirm rumours that her body had been buried in Italy since its mysterious disappearance from a labour union headquarters in Buenos Aires in 1955.
The exiled ex-President Perón, who had been living in Madrid since being ousted in a coup d’état in 1955, was a permanent pain in the backside for the Reuters Madrid bureau, because the Argentine media were obsessed with his every move and constantly demanded extensive coverage of his activities. He was known to be playing a key behind-the-scenes role in Argentine politics from his Madrid base, and he eventually returned to power in 1973.
On one occasion when he had been scheduled to make an important speech, we had been instructed to provide full cover for the benefit of Reuters’ many clients in Argentina who would be hanging on his every word. My colleague on duty that night decided that, in the event, the speech was far too boring to warrant a dispatch and, towards the end of the evening, the following exchange of messages took place. (A word of explanation: although all Reuters messages were sent either via telex or over dedicated lines, they were still written in cablese, the language that had been developed during the telegram era, when messages were charged by the word.)
PROMADRID EXLDN. BAIRES QUERYING WHEN PROPOSE FILE PERON SPEECH. PLS ADVISE URGENTEST.
PROLDN EXMADRID. UNPROPOSE FILE PERON SPEECH. SERMON ON MOUNT SHORTER AND BETTER. WHAT PROPOSE DO IS DOWNCLOSE. GNITE.
(Translation: ‘To Madrid from London. Our office in Buenos Aires is wondering when you intend to file your dispatch on Perón’s speech. Please let us know as soon as you can.’
‘To London from Madrid. I do not intend to file anything about Perón’s speech. The Sermon on the Mount was both shorter and better. What I intend to do is close down the office and go home to bed. Good night.’)
Let us just say it was not a career-enhancing move.
The American newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop once defined the job of a foreign correspondent as a cross between an undertaker and a second footman: ‘… an undertaker because he is always present at scenes of death and destruction; a second footman because he meets the most interesting people under the most humiliating circumstances.’24 Others have likened reporters to vultures, forever hovering over those in distress in the hope of being able to feed off their demise. A news editor I once worked for used to mutter on distressingly quiet news days: ‘What we need now is a damn good hijack.’
It was not a hijack but a particularly gruesome traffic accident that introduced me to the ‘undertaker’ side of the trade that I had chosen to enter. A late-night phone call from London alerted me to the news that a coach carrying twenty-six Canadian tourists had been hit by a truck about eighty miles south of Madrid. Eighteen people had been killed and the Canadian newspapers were screaming for details. After a three-hour taxi ride, I arrived at the scene to find the badly mangled coach lying on its side in the road, and local police officers who were ghoulishly happy to shine their torches on the human remains still visible in the wreckage.
As dawn broke, having worked through the night, I was allowed to talk to some of the survivors in the local hospital. Most were French-speaking Canadians from Quebec; none had been told that many of their friends had been killed, and I found myself not only having to break the news to them but also acting as interpreter between them and the hard-pressed Spanish hospital staff. It was grim stuff, yet I felt in my element. Even more so when I saw the giant headlines on the Canadian front pages and the magic byline: ‘by Robin Lustig, Reuter staff writer’.
In a letter home, I wrote: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed covering the story (if you’ll pardon the word “enjoy” in this context) but it’s really what I went into this business for. At last, he cried, some real reporting!’
It sounds callous in the extreme. How could I have enjoyed – how could anyone enjoy? – being witness to such distress and human suffering? How can reporters want to cover wars, to see people being killed and injured, and to witness the worst that human beings can inflict on each other? It is not easy to explain, but in the same way as an undertaker who can take pride in a well-conducted funeral, or a surgeon who can ‘enjoy’ performing a particularly complex operation, reporters take satisfaction from a job well done, a story well told. It can often look like heartlessness, even callousness, but mostly, or so I hope, it is neither. The high number of war correspondents who suffer from post-traumatic stress, or who turn to drink, is an indication that they, too, are human and react as all humans do to scenes of death and destruction.
Reporters are driven by a belief that people deserve to know what is happening around them. It may be a war, or it may be a traffic accident, but they are entitled to an accurate account of what happened, however distasteful may be the process of acquiring the information. To get at the truth, a reporter has to get close.
But that sometimes posed problems for Reuters, which always insisted on explicit sourcing for its news stories. So when I filed dramatic accounts from Spain of clashes between protesting students and riot police – ‘Violence erupted at Madrid’s troubled university today when riot police, some of them on horseback, beat men and women students with riot clubs’ – I was immediately asked what my source was.
‘I was there. I saw it,’ I replied.
Back came from the rewritten copy from London: ‘A Reuter correspondent saw both men and women students shielding themselves from the blows…’ Honour satisfied.
Beneath the surface calm (now there’s a good journalistic cliché for you) of 1970s Spain, unrest was bubbling. On a clandestine trip to Barcelona, I was able to meet representatives of the illegal comisiones obreras, or underground trades unions; and, in the north, the Basque separatist movement ETA was already active. In December 1970, just a few months before I arrived in Madrid, ETA had kidnapped the German consul in San Sebastián, and in 1973, shortly after I had left, it assassinated the Prime Minister and Franco’s designated successor, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, having concealed a powerful bomb beneath the street along which his motorcade was driving.
Somehow
or other, I managed to find enough interesting material to produce a couple of pieces for the New Statesman, now being edited by my mentor, Tony Howard. I had to use a pseudonym (for many years, a mysterious freelance journalist named Francis Roberts seemed to follow me from assignment to assignment: wherever I was, there he was too), because Reuters strictly banned any moonlighting by its correspondents. Another fictional freelance, Bob Lowrey, made an occasional appearance in the Daily Express as well, just to ensure that political neutrality was maintained.
On one occasion, when the Fascist regime was growing particularly jittery about a wave of illegal strikes, both the International Herald Tribune and the New Statesman were banned from Spain because they had published my reports on the unrest. I regarded the government’s action – of course – as a medal to be worn with pride.
On the whole, though, my journalistic output from Spain consisted of little more than sports results, student riots and then more sports results. It was all a good experience, and I learned a lot of tricks of the trade, but I was not sorry to return to London at the end of my twelve-month stint to find out what the future had in store for me. And I was still hoping to find a way to break into broadcasting.
That is why, when I saw an advertisement for a reporter to join Yorkshire Television’s local news programmes, I immediately sent off an application. ‘Come to Leeds for an interview,’ they said, so I decided to combine the day trip from London with a call on an old flatmate from my student days who was a trainee on the Yorkshire Post.
‘Let’s meet at Yorkshire TV,’ he said. ‘I’ve applied for the same job.’
He got the job; I didn’t. Instead, I stayed with Reuters, and six months later they sent me to Paris.
Paris. Then, as now, a plum posting. The cafés, the women, the art, the architecture. All it lacked was news. The French President, Georges Pompidou, was not one of Europe’s most dynamic or charismatic leaders, and with the near collapse of the Fifth Republic during the student–worker uprisings of 1968 still fresh in the country’s collective memory, there was little appetite for political experiments.
I found myself a tiny studio apartment close to the Arc de Triomphe, at 8 Rue du Dôme, a narrow street at the top of some steps just off the Avenue Victor Hugo in the fashionable 16th arrondissement. The location was to die for, but the apartment itself was a hovel. I never again made the mistake of choosing a home by reference to its postcode.
The Reuters bureau was at 36 Rue du Sentier, in a ramshackle building that proudly bore the name of the Daily Mail over its front door, a reminder of the days when that paper was rightly famed for its network of foreign correspondents. (The last time I looked, the words were still there.) The Reuters office was reached by means of an ancient clanking lift with steel concertina doors. Working there felt as if I had gone back in time, to the great days of the pre-war foreign correspondents, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, with endless supplies of stories from far-flung places. The bureau chief, Jonathan Fenby, was ferociously bright and attacked typewriters with such energy that, when he was in full creative flow, it sounded as if the bureau was under machine gun attack. He later became Reuters’ editor-in-chief before moving to The Independent when it launched in 1986, becoming deputy editor of The Guardian and then editor of The Observer. He later edited the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and wrote several well-received books on both France and China.
My tasks in Paris were not significantly different from what I had become used to in Madrid; the main difference was that there was a lot more sport. Every afternoon, someone in the bureau – usually me – was required to translate the editorial from Le Monde, a useful way to brush up one’s comprehension of literary French. In continental Europe, unlike in the UK, journalists prided themselves on the use of a language as complex and flowery as possible, a reflection of continental journalism’s origins in the literary salons rather than in the seventeenth-century scandal sheets of the UK. Le Monde’s editorials were not written for the benefit of milkmen in Kansas City.
I had expected that at least one benefit of having left Madrid would be that I need no longer concern myself with every cough and sneeze of the Argentine ex-President Juan Perón. But I was wrong because, when he returned to Argentina in late 1972, his route from Madrid to Buenos Aires included a refuelling stop in Senegal, west Africa. Reuters clients in Argentina would, of course, expect to be informed when he arrived there and when he left again and, as the Reuters stringer in Senegal was able to transmit his stories only via Paris, I was instructed to make myself available to receive his all-important phone call, expected at around 5 a.m.
When the call failed to materialise, I managed to make my own call to Dakar airport, got through to the control tower and was able to confirm not only that the great man had arrived but also that he had left again. The stringer finally made contact some hours later, presumably having had the benefit, as I had not, of a decent night’s sleep. So much nervous energy expended for so little of genuine news value. On the other hand, if I had discovered that the plane had not landed as scheduled, that would have been a big story, at least in Argentina, so the exercise was not an entirely pointless one.
Phoning airport control towers became something of a speciality during my Reuters days. Hijacks were not uncommon and the only reliable way to find out who had hijacked what and why was usually to talk to the man in the airport control tower, who was in direct contact with the hijackers. My technique was simple but effective: on getting through to the airport switchboard, I simply barked, in as authoritative voice as I could manage: ‘Ici Paris. Le tour de controlle. Vite.’ It is possible that the switchboard operators assumed that I was an important government official as there was not always time to spell out the fact that I was a reporter. All that mattered was that it worked without me having to tell any lies.
On 1 January 1973, the UK joined what was then still called the European Economic Community, or Common Market. Reuters decided that they needed an extra hand on deck in their Brussels office, and I was the one who drew the short straw. I have never had much affection for grand institutions and, although I consider myself a European to my fingertips (with my background, what else could I be?), I was not thrilled to be sent to a city where every story seemed to be about an acronym: EEC, NATO or WEU (the Western European Union, a singularly useless body that was finally put out of its misery in 2011).
I did, however, learn the art of covering European summit meetings, which involved many long hours of waiting, followed by thirty minutes of crazy activity, usually in the early hours of the morning, to produce a news story that was of very little interest to anyone. During the 1990s, by which time I had joined the BBC, I covered far too many such summits, in many different European capitals, and I developed a passionate loathing for them. But even I recognised that someone had to report on them, and that the task was bound, sometimes, to fall to me.
The goal of the agency reporter at a summit meeting is to get the story of the summit conclusions before anyone else does. A leaked draft communiqué from a friendly diplomat, even a whisper in a deserted corridor, is all that is needed, but it can make all the difference between plaudits and angry messages from the bosses in London.
The Reuters bureau chief in Brussels in the early 1970s was the hyperactive and supremely well-connected Robert (Bob) Taylor. If anyone in Brussels wanted to know what was going on, Bob was the man they asked. More than once, while waiting for news at a European summit, I would fight my way to the front of a gaggle of reporters being briefed on the latest developments only to find that it was my own boss doing the briefing.
Once, he was already hammering away at a telex machine when I emerged from an official end-of-summit briefing with the official spin on the outcome. Bob had already picked up the main points from his own sources, but the official version that I relayed to him differed in some minor respects from what he had already sent to London. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Watch this story bend.’ And, as he continued to t
ype, the later intelligence was seamlessly and elegantly woven into what had gone before. It was so much less confusing for Reuters’ clients than having to issue a correction.
Even in 1973, British newspapers were reluctant to take news from Brussels unless they could be persuaded that it might have a direct, preferably harmful, relevance to their readers’ everyday lives. ‘Want to get your stuff printed in London?’ the Daily Express correspondent advised me. ‘Start every story with the words “British housewives today face…”’ Plus ça change.
I did not much like Brussels; neither the story, nor the weather (it was February), nor the city itself. So I was perfectly happy to return to Paris after a couple of months and pick up where I had left off. The biggest story in town before I left had been the Vietnamese peace talks between the US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam. An agreement was finally signed in January 1973, and Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The American singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer was one of many who regarded the award as grotesquely inappropriate, famously remarking that ‘political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize’.
So what else did Paris have to offer an impatient young foreign correspondent in the early 1970s? An occasional student riot, a bizarre murder case in which a British teacher was accused of having killed his father while on a camping holiday in southern France, and the end of the historic food market at Les Halles, which had fed Parisians for more than a century.
Is Anything Happening? Page 15