Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  I also had the doubtful privilege of writing one of the first reviews of La Grande Bouffe, the official French entry to the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. It was the story of four middle-aged men who decided to commit suicide by eating themselves to death, and it was hugely controversial because, as I reported in the studiedly non-judgemental prose required of all Reuters correspondents:

  It shows the four men gorging themselves over several days in the company of three whores whom they recruit to liven up their last days, and a fat schoolmistress who turns out to be more rapacious than the prostitutes.

  I clearly took the view that readers deserved to be given as detailed an account as possible of what the film showed:

  The most controversial sequence shows the death of Michel Piccoli, who expires oozing excrement after the most audible and prolonged breaking of wind ever depicted on a cinema screen.†

  One of the greatest joys of the journalist’s life is that you never know who you are going to meet next. I did not expect, when I was sent to report on a demonstration at the cathedral of Notre Dame by anti-nuclear protesters who had chained themselves to the cathedral’s pillars, to bump into an old student friend, Albert Beale, who later went on to become one of Britain’s leading pacifist campaigners and a stalwart of Peace News. These days, he still describes himself as a ‘militant pacifist, born-again atheist, and freelance agitator’. He was, of course, pleased to see me, as it meant their protest might get at least a couple of lines of coverage in the next day’s papers.

  I also met one of the great legendary figures of post-war European journalism, the former Reuters Paris bureau chief Harold King, who had become the doyen of Europe’s foreign press corps due to his extraordinary access to two of the most influential figures of the time: Joseph Stalin and Charles de Gaulle. It was said that, as President, de Gaulle used to begin his news conferences with the words: ‘M. King, messieurs…’

  In 1943, while based in Moscow, King had filed a famous Reuters dispatch breaking every rule in the book. It began with the words:

  Premier Joseph Stalin, in a letter to me, said Friday that the winding-up of the Communist International ‘puts an end to the lie’ that ‘Moscow allegedly intends to intervene in the life of other nations and “Bolshevize” them’. The letter was in reply to a series of questions that I had submitted to Mr Stalin.

  So much for the Reuters rule that the words ‘I’ or ‘me’ must never appear in news copy; on the other hand, it was impossible to argue with the quality of the source. When King died in 1990 at the age of ninety-one, the New York Times described him as ‘a Reuters reporter whose letters from Stalin helped to shape the West’s perception of the Soviet Union’.

  By the time I met him, King was a much-diminished figure, a man in his seventies who had failed to find a role once his days as a correspondent were over. The thriller-writer and former Reuters correspondent Frederick Forsyth, author of The Day of the Jackal and many other bestsellers, said of him: ‘He was regarded by few with liking, by many with fear, and had a reputation for eating young journalists for breakfast and spitting out the pips.’25 My own bureau chief, Jonathan Fenby, recalled that when he was reporting on the 1965 French presidential election campaign, King ordered that he should not be left alone in the office since he had shown that he had Communist sympathies by reporting a speech by the Socialist François Mitterrand which had been critical of the General.26

  Together with a friend, Duncan Greenland, I invited King to dinner at a restaurant of his choosing on the right bank of the river Seine, just across from the Île de la Cité. I no longer remember what we ate, but I do remember that we consumed large quantities of vin rouge and ended the evening by carefully helping him into a taxi to take him home.

  I was always on the lookout for new opportunities, even though I had been with Reuters for less than three years. But when I was offered a new job, I turned it down: the American news magazine Newsweek asked if I would like to be their Paris stringer. When I asked what the job entailed, I was told that I would not be expected to write any articles, merely feed New York with the raw material with which they would write the stories. ‘Colour, quotes and anecdotes’ were what they required from their stringers, which did not sound quite my cup of tea, so I politely declined.

  I had been in Paris less than a year when Reuters, in its infinite wisdom, decided that it was time for me to pack my bags again. I was sent to Rome, stopping off in London just long enough to be immersed in an intensive, four-week Italian language course. Every morning, I would buy a copy of The Times and try to translate its main stories into Italian, while my tutor provided a copy of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera which I would be required to translate into English. It was an admirably efficient way of enabling me to master enough of the language to function adequately as a journalist as soon as my feet touched the ground at Fiumicino airport. It also meant that from then on, if I ever tried to speak Spanish, it sounded suspiciously like Italian.

  I fell in love with Italy the moment I landed, and I have remained besotted ever since. I am convinced that God intended me to be an Italian and that it was only by an unfortunate accident of geography that I ended up with a British passport. The food. The wine. The art. The music. The scenery. The language. The people. Che bellezza!

  Rome is a city that excites strong passions. It is overcrowded, often ill-kempt, and its ancient monuments are usually either hidden behind scaffolding or visibly decaying. The traffic is appalling, the drivers are certifiably insane and the corruption is endemic. Yet there is no other city in Italy where I would dream of living; the northern cities of Milan, Turin and Genoa are too Teutonic; the tourist honeypots of Florence and Venice are too pleased with themselves, and the southern cities of Naples, Bari and Palermo are too crumbling and anarchic even for my taste.

  Years later, when I was working in the Middle East, I began to understand why northern Italians sometimes call Romans gli Arabi, the Arabs. There is an undeniable cultural similarity: the love of bargaining, the delight in finding a semi-legal way through the thickets of official bureaucracy, and the understanding that a no can always become a yes if the price is right.

  For a foreign correspondent, Italy is both heaven and hell. The country and its people are full of the most amazing stories, yet only some of them are true and, for the diligent journalist, sorting out the fact from the fable can be well-nigh impossible.

  Admittedly, Italy was going through a particularly bad patch when I arrived there in 1973. It was virtually bankrupt and a chronic shortage of small-denomination coins, which the mint could no longer afford to produce, resulted in people using postage stamps, telephone tokens or boiled sweets instead of small change. Banks issued assegni circolari, or circular cheques, to take the place of scarce banknotes. The cheques were not legal tender, but they could, in theory, have been cashed at the bank. Of course, no one bothered.

  Poor Italy. A country with the richest cultural history in Europe – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Canaletto, Dante, Machiavelli, Verdi, Vivaldi, Puccini, Pavarotti, Christopher Columbus, Galileo – has also suffered the most inept, venal and corrupt political leaders. Harry Lime was definitely onto something when he said in The Third Man: ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’

  Italians look back on the 1970s as the anni di piombo, or years of lead, a time of terrorism from both the extreme left and the extreme right, when murders and bomb attacks were almost part of everyday life. Within a year of my arrival in Rome, eight people had been killed in a bomb attack on an anti-Fascist demonstration in Brescia; thirty-four people were killed in a Palestinian terrorist attack at Fiumicino airport; two members of the neo-Fascist MSI party had been murdered, allegedly by the extreme-left Red Brigades; there
were reports of a planned military coup, backed by the US, to prevent the Italian Communist Party coming to power; and twelve people were killed in a bomb attack on an overnight train between Rome and Munich. The former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, had disembarked from the train shortly before the bomb exploded. (Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978.)

  I got used to being woken during the night by a phone call from the Italian news agency ANSA, and a voice telling me: ‘C’è stato un attentato.’ (‘There has been an attack.’) Luckily, my flat, right next to the Quirinale presidential palace, with its gorgeous views over the rooftops of Rome’s historic centre, was only a minute’s walk from the Reuters office, so I could be filing the first dispatches within moments of a tip-off. The difficulty, as so often with terrorist attacks but doubly so in conspiracy-loving Italy, was trying to establish who was responsible for the latest outrage. The newspapers were constantly full of speculation about behind-the-scenes manipulation by foreign powers: right-wingers were convinced that Moscow was pulling the strings – this was, after all, at the height of the Cold War – while the left were equally convinced that Washington was in control.

  As it happened, the conspiracy theorists were often more than half justified in their suspicions of dark deeds at the highest levels. It usually took several years for the truth to emerge, which was no use to hard-pressed news agency reporters churning out instant copy. But the arrest of the head of Italy’s military intelligence agency, General Vito Miceli, on suspicion of involvement in a plot to launch a military coup was a good indication that something nasty really was going on beneath the surface. (Miceli later became a Member of Parliament for the neo-Fascist MSI party.) In 1976, the New York Times reported that, four years earlier, he had been paid $800,000 (equivalent to about $4.5 million now) by the US ambassador in Rome ‘to demonstrate to these people our solidarity about what they’re doing’. The CIA station chief in Rome had strongly objected to the payments, and complained in a telegram to Washington: ‘The ambassador has made clear his intention of not asking for too many details from the recipient of the money and not to impose any condition on the use of the money.’27

  Phone calls in the middle of the night are an occupational hazard for any reporter, but especially for news agency correspondents, who are expected to be ready to leap into action whatever the hour. In Rome, where the health of the Pope was a constant preoccupation, too many such calls seemed to be based on rumours circulating somewhere in South America.

  ‘Robin, old boy. Sorry to wake you. We’ve had a message from Buenos Aires asking us to check out the rumours there that the Pope has died. Would you mind checking?’

  ‘Tell them he’s fine. If he had died, I would have filed the story. Good night.’

  Risky, perhaps, but I trusted our friends at ANSA. They would have let me know if I needed to get up, and I did not fancy my chances of getting a sensible response from the Vatican press office if I had phoned them at 3.30 a.m. In fact, I would not have got any response at all. An institution that regarded a century as a historical blip was not temperamentally suited to a 24-hour news operation.

  If I had been starved of excitement in Madrid and Paris, I was soon overdosing in Rome. The Reuters bureau was run by one of the agency’s least likely managers you could imagine: Chris Matthews, whose languid manner and long blond hair gave him the look of a man who had stepped straight out of a film by the Italian director Federico Fellini. So perfectly Fellini-esque were his looks that when he was spotted one night in a Rome bar by a Fellini casting agent, he was immediately signed up as an extra in the maestro’s next film. I very much doubt that the Reuters bosses ever found out.

  Chris’s mother, Tanya Matthews, was a redoubtable correspondent in her own right, and for many years she was the BBC’s correspondent in Tunisia. She was of Russian origin, and Chris had inherited her striking Russian looks. When the Reuters board of directors turned up in Rome on what could easily have passed for a state visit – they were a crusty medley of elderly newspaper owners and executives, each one more hidebound than the next – their shock at the appearance of their local bureau chief was a joy to behold.

  The chairman of the Reuters board at the time was Sir William Barnetson (later Baron Barnetson of Crowborough), chairman of the United Newspapers group, a man of military bearing who gave the impression that he expected Reuters outposts to be run along military lines. He was visibly unimpressed by the soft leather shoulder bag that Chris carried everywhere (man bags were hardly commonplace in the 1970s) and remarked in a voice dripping with sarcasm: ‘I like your handbag, laddie.’ The following day, Chris bought an identical bag and presented it to Sir William as a gift from the Rome bureau: ‘because you said you liked it so much’.

  Shortly before the Reuters directors descended on Rome, the bureau had been joined by the company’s first ever female graduate trainee. Anne Rubinstein (now the bestselling author Anne Sebba) suffered a treble handicap: not only was she a graduate and a 21-year-old female, but she also had blonde hair. The Reuters general manager, Gerald Long, made it perfectly clear that he regarded her as a guinea pig: ‘The standard of your work and behaviour will determine whether or not Reuters hires other women in the future.’ Anne suffered even more than the rest of us during the directors’ visit to Rome: in an article written many years later, she reported that during a supposedly social gathering one evening: ‘I became aware that an elderly gentleman peer … clearly suffered from a nervous tic as his hand kept wandering onto my knee.’28 Anne has never publicly named the peer in question, but as he is now long dead, I am able to identify him as the 11th Earl of Drogheda, who was then the managing director of the Financial Times.

  Not long after my arrival in Rome, one of the telephones in the office was removed. Supposedly, only one person – the Pope’s personal doctor – knew the number; the idea was that if the phone rang, we would instantly know that we were about to learn something important. The death of a Pope (Pope Paul VI was seventy-six years old at the time and died the year after I left Rome) was the sort of story that no news agency wants to be beaten on. But because of the vagaries of the Italian telephone network, the phone rang constantly – and it was never the Pope’s doctor. It was no good for our nerves and it had to go.

  Italian politics were widely seen as a joke during the 1970s; governments lasted on average no more than eight months before the headlines would again scream: ‘Crisi di governo!’ I soon learned that the word crisi should not be routinely translated as ‘crisis’ – it meant, in a political context, simply that a coalition administration would need to reshuffle a few ministerial portfolios before reappointing the same men belonging to the same political parties to slightly different jobs. These coalition administrations were known with good reason as ‘revolving-door governments’, and the whole system, riddled as it was with corruption, came crashing down in the early 1990s, when a series of corruption inquiries uncovered the full scale of the iniquity. At one point, half the country’s MPs had been indicted in connection with the ‘mani pulite’ (clean hands) investigation; the two main governing parties, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, both collapsed, and a new force – and new face – emerged as Italy’s saviour. His name was Silvio Berlusconi and, whatever else he may have been, he was no saviour.

  I was one of a very small and select group of correspondents who took Italian politics seriously, and it was a source of constant frustration to me that Reuters in London, and the international media in general, did not share my belief that something important was going on beneath the surface. Only once, in 1975, when regional elections resulted in huge gains for the Italian Communist Party, did any of the political stuff that I churned out from the Rome bureau make an impact. Was Italy really going Communist? A founder member of the EEC, a fully paid-up member of NATO, a nation sometimes called ‘America’s Mediterranean aircraft carrier’ – in the hands of the Reds? No wonder the Americans were twitchy.

  When the gover
nment collapsed the following year, I reported:

  The fall of Italy’s most fragile government since World War II heralds the start of this crisis-racked nation’s most critical period for 30 years.

  It could end with the arrival in power of the powerful Communist Party, an event which would have enormous international repercussions and, in the opinion of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, could spell the end of the NATO military alliance.

  It did not happen. It never did. Hence my frustration, and the rest of the world’s lack of interest. But a freely elected Communist government in western Europe at the height of the Cold War would definitely have been of interest. I still believe that it was worth taking seriously: after all, this was a time when, in the UK, rumours were swirling of plots to overthrow the government led by Harold Wilson (some MI5 people were apparently convinced that he was a Soviet agent, or at least a Soviet sympathiser, even though there was never a shred of evidence), and in Washington President Nixon was being forced to resign over the Watergate scandal. For conspiracy theorists the world over, there were rich pickings to be had; but for correspondents trying to stick to what could be proved, it was tough going.

  There is good reason to believe that Italy had become NATO’s ‘red line’, and that a decision had been made that, at whatever cost, the Italian Communist Party must not be included in any government coalition. The party had carved out a position that was notably more pluralistic than the official Moscow line (although it later emerged that it was still receiving several million dollars a year from its Soviet sister party) and, for many years, its leader, Enrico Berlinguer, together with the leader of the Spanish Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo, was a leading exponent of ‘Euro-communism’. Nevertheless, to Washington, Communists in a NATO government, and with access to NATO’s military secrets, would be a step too far.