Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  The Observer’s editorial was headlined ‘A scandal that shakes the very foundations of justice’ and its opening paragraph read as follows:

  The story of the Guildford Four is not just a personal tragedy: it is a scandal. How else to describe the wrongful imprisonment of four innocent people for 15 years, not because someone, somewhere made an understandable, if regrettable mistake, but because of a deliberate, organised attempt to pervert the course of justice?

  It ended by urging the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, to look urgently at the cases of the Birmingham Six.

  The Crown has finally admitted that, on occasion, police officers can lie and fabricate evidence in order to secure a conviction. This is precisely what the Birmingham Six allege. Their case is every bit as deserving as that of the Guildford Four. They must not be forgotten.58

  After twelve action-packed years on the paper, it felt good to go out with a bang rather than a whimper.

  I often think that too many people forget that even before the horrors of jihadi suicide bomb attacks, the world was no stranger to terrorism. Those who argue that Americans and Europeans would all sleep much safer in their beds if there were no Muslims among us are either too young to remember, or have very short memories, or are deliberately scapegoating ethnic and religious minorities. Perhaps I remember better than many others because I reported on so many of the attacks. Whether it was the Italian terrorism of the 1970s or the IRA atrocities of the ’70s and ’80s, I wrote far too often of the misery caused by political violence.

  I also sometimes wonder why so few people in Europe seem to remember that by far the worst atrocity committed on European soil since the end of the Second World War, far worse on the horror scale than any of the jihadi attacks in Madrid (2004), London (2005), Paris (2015) or Brussels (2016), was committed by people calling themselves Christians – and that their victims were Muslims. It happened in Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995, when an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by Bosnian Serbs. I was there a year later, and their ghosts were everywhere.

  But back to the ’80s. In 1984, I reported extensively from India on a campaign by militant Sikhs for an independent Sikh state of Khalistan. In April of that year, I reported from Amritsar, the site of the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, which armed militants had turned into their base of operations.

  Thousands of colourfully robed Sikhs, all carrying a traditional dagger or sword, flocked to the Golden Temple … where many attended an angry rooftop meeting addressed by the charismatic Sant Jarnail Bhindranwale, a 36-year-old Khomeini-like figure who openly called on his followers to take violent action against their enemies.

  With dozens of heavily armed guards surrounding him, the black-bearded leader, with a decorative sword and less decorative Smith and Wesson revolver hanging at his side, urged his congregation to arm themselves with ‘guns, machine guns, bombs and grenades…’

  The sight of Sikh activists patrolling inside the Golden Temple with rifles and sub-machine guns slung nonchalantly over their shoulders is one which no government would relish. Yet Mrs Gandhi knows that if she sends troops into the temple, she will unleash violence on a scale unprecedented since partition.59

  Amritsar was on a knife-edge and on one of several visits to the Golden Temple, I was taken firmly by the arm by a Sikh militant and ushered into the presence of one of their leaders. When I emerged an hour later, I learned that two men had been shot dead just a few hundred yards from where I had been sitting; the militants had been determined to ensure that no foreign reporter would witness the murders. As a lone British newspaperman, however, I was relatively inconspicuous, so I was mostly able to wander the streets undisturbed. On the few occasions when someone did notice me scribbling in my notebook, I was asked just two questions: ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘Are you Mark Tully?’, a reference to the legendary Delhi-based BBC correspondent, who had become a major public figure throughout the country.

  Despite my ‘Who knows what will happen next?’ forebodings – which were, and are, frankly, more or less standard fare for any visiting foreign correspondents when they lack a decent conclusion for their dispatches from the frontline – I did not expect to be back in India just two months later to report on the aftermath of what had indeed been a bloody attack by Indian troops on the Golden Temple. ‘Operation Blue Star’ was launched when the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, decided it was time to reassert government authority over the Golden Temple. The official death toll was nearly 500 Sikh militants killed and 130 military dead, although the true figures were probably much higher.

  I flew to India this time with my Punjabi-speaking Observer colleague, Shyam Bhatia, whose father, Prem Bhatia, was one of India’s most eminent journalists and diplomats. Shyam was immensely well-connected and, between us, we put together a lengthy account of what had happened and what it might mean.

  Major-General Shuhbeg Singh (Indian army, cashiered) died with his walkie-talkie still in his hands. The man who, for the past two years, had been the military mastermind behind Punjab’s bloody rebellion by Sikh fundamentalists, was calling the shots right to the end. He died of bullet wounds, in the smoke-filled basement of one of the holiest buildings in the Golden Temple of Amritsar.

  And, again, the conclusion was of grim foreboding.

  The 1984 Battle of the Golden Temple, like the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, marks the beginning of a new and potentially turbulent chapter in Indian history. The chapter which opened with the 1919 massacre ended with the departure of the British. The new one is only 10 days old, and no one can say how it will end.60

  There is a good reason why we journalists are so easily tempted to fall back on easy clichés – more often than not, they turn out to be true. I have always tried to resist a tendency to end my reports with what one producer colleague used to call a ‘Lustig pompous pay-off’, although I hope I never stooped quite so low as to use the standard, all-purpose, one-size-fits-all TV reporter’s pay-off:

  As I stand here tonight, with the sun setting on the hills behind me, many questions still remain to be answered. But one thing is certain: things will never be the same again.

  The Battle of the Golden Temple led, inexorably, to the events of 31 October 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Again, Shyam and I were dispatched to Delhi – but on this occasion, there was not even time to collect a visa before we left, so when we touched down in the middle of the night, Delhi time, we had no idea whether or not we would be allowed to enter the country.

  Fortunately, the frantic long-distance phone calls that we had made during a stop-over in the Gulf had paid off; the visas were waiting for us and our passports were duly stamped. What we soon learned, as we headed into the city along deserted streets, was that anti-Sikh pogroms had already begun as furious Gandhi supporters took a terrible revenge against a community they blamed for her death. About 3,000 people were massacred, most of them in Delhi. (In 2005, a government-appointed commission found that senior members of Mrs Gandhi’s Congress party had been involved in instigating the pogroms, and the then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who was himself a Sikh, delivered a formal apology in Parliament for what he called ‘the negation of the concept of nationhood enshrined in our Constitution’.)

  Shyam and I saw at first hand the results of the killings. An anonymous late-night telephone caller to Shyam’s hotel room suggested that if we wanted to see ‘dead bodies’, we should head for the vegetable market in Old Delhi. It was not exactly a tempting proposition, but we knew we had to investigate. A night-time curfew had been imposed, and there were virtually no taxis to be found (most of Delhi’s taxi drivers were Sikhs and they, very sensibly, were staying well out of sight), but we managed to get to the market and we found the bodies.

  At first, peering through high metal railings, we saw only what looked like bundles of rags in a courtyard. But then we realised: they were bodies, many of them badly charred, dumped outside a makeshift mortuary be
cause there was nowhere else to put them. But how many were there? It was impossible to estimate, so Shyam, far more enterprising than I was, insisted on clambering over the railings into the courtyard and counting them. He got as far as 119 before I decided that we had been there long enough: the longer we stayed, the greater was the risk of us being arrested.

  Just before we left, we spotted what looked like an army truck parked by the side of the road. The back was open, and inside there were yet more charred bodies. No one would ever be able to deny that there had been mass killings – we had seen the evidence for ourselves. That is what reporters do and, no matter how much the technology develops, it is still the only way to be sure.

  It was on that reporting trip, however, that I began to realise how technology would eventually force us to rethink some of our cosy assumptions about the supremacy of the printed word. The ceremonial cremation of Mrs Gandhi’s body took place on a Saturday, three days after she was killed – The Observer would of course want a full report but the timing was going to be tricky. Shyam and I watched it live on Indian television and I phoned the office to let them know that the ceremony was proceeding on schedule.

  ‘We know,’ they said. ‘We’re watching it live as well.’

  If TV coverage of an event in India was also being broadcast live in the UK, what was the point in dispatching reporters? The answer was our report about those charred bodies in the makeshift morgue, because there was no TV, live or otherwise, that showed the world what we had seen in that courtyard. Television sees a great deal of what happens in the world around us, especially now that every smartphone can record, and share, video images. But it will never see as much as a sharp-eyed reporter.

  There was a deadly aftermath to the events of 1984. In June the following year, two bombs exploded thousands of miles apart – and thousands of miles from India – killing more than 330 people. The first was at Narita airport in Tokyo, where two baggage handlers were killed when a piece of luggage exploded while it was being transferred from a flight from Canada onto an Air India flight destined for Thailand. The second came less than an hour later, when a bomb concealed in an item of luggage in the hold of Air India flight 182 from Canada to India detonated while the plane was over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all three hundred and twenty-nine people on board. Both attacks were blamed on a Sikh militant group called Babbar Khalsa; a Canadian Sikh named Inderjit Singh Reyat was arrested in Britain in 1988, extradited to Canada to face trial and sentenced to ten years in jail after pleading guilty to making both bombs.

  One of the great joys of being an Observer reporter in the 1980s was that it often involved working with Jane Bown, a genius portrait photographer with a unique style and manner that could charm the most recalcitrant of interviewees. Jane was nearly sixty when we started working together and she had carefully cultivated the look of a little old lady with a shopping bag that just happened to contain a camera. She was not what potentially uncooperative interviewees expected when they were waiting for a Fleet Street photographer to turn up on their doorstep and, more often than not, they simply melted as she bustled around them, frequently rearranging the furniture in their homes to suit her requirements.

  Jane worked whenever possible only in black and white and only with natural light. Nearly all her images were taken with the same camera setting: 1/60 sec at f/2.8. Not for her the top-of-the-range light meter or giant reflectors – she would just sit her subject by a window and fire off a couple of dozen shots. ‘That’s it. Got it.’ And it was time to go.

  Once we were sent to interview Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s defence minister, who was on a visit to London and staying in a five-star hotel on Park Lane. When we were ushered into his suite, we found him in the middle of the room, sitting on a sofa, with all the curtains drawn and security men in abundance.

  ‘Oh dear. This won’t do,’ said Jane. ‘Let’s get some light in here.’ She scuttled over to the windows, threw back the curtains, shoved a chair closer to the light, and told the bewildered Mr Rabin to sit where she could see him. She was deaf to the protests of his bodyguards and, with a resigned shrug, he did as he was told. If I had tried something similar, I would have been thrown out on my ear.

  On another occasion, we went to the home of the towering theatrical figure Sir Michael Redgrave, who was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease and whose memory was failing. He seemed disorientated and confused when we arrived, and Jane could see that we would have a tough time getting him to focus on the subject of our interview. Then she spotted a hat-stand, festooned with hats. ‘Oh, look. How wonderful. Which is your favourite?’ His eyes lit up as he chose one.

  ‘Lovely. Put it on and let’s go out into the garden.’ Her portrait, full of warmth, but with more than a hint of wistfulness, was a Bown classic.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson once said that the aim of a portrait photographer should be to ‘put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt’. Jane did that better than almost anyone else. ‘Just look at that face,’ she would marvel as she peered through the viewfinder of her trusty Olympus camera. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t this fun?’ I sometimes wondered if she knew that her subject could hear her, because when she got behind that camera, she seemed to be oblivious to everything except the light and the face. Nothing else mattered.

  I had to stop working with Jane when I became news editor, because from then on, I was strictly office-bound. I was never as happy sitting at a desk all day as I was out on the road – just as, twenty years later, I was never as happy sitting in a radio studio as I was when flying off to a far-flung place for some real reporting. But helping to shape a news agenda did have some compensations and I was especially proud of the part that The Observer played in the campaign to ban lead additives from petrol, spearheaded by the doyen of Fleet Street’s environment correspondents, Geoffrey Lean. I also would like to think that our disclosures about Mark Thatcher’s distasteful business activities, and his mother’s cooperation in them, may also have contributed in a small way to the public good.

  A news editor’s day is made up of endless telephone calls and endless discussions with reporters and other colleagues about what is or is not a story. Once, a media studies student came to spend a week sitting next to me to observe how the job was done, but after he had asked me for the hundredth time in a day ‘Why did you say that?’ as I put the phone down, I had to ask him to leave. Editorial decisions are almost always made according to gut instinct: ‘Yup, that sounds interesting, go for it,’ or ‘Nah, don’t like the sound of that, see if you can come up with something better.’ Ask me to explain why I made the decision that I did and the only answer I could come up with was: ‘Because.’

  In the days before emails, the telephone was our lifeline. Stories came in by phone, and stories were checked out by phone. Like the phone call from a man who said he was a double glazer and had been hired by MI6 to bug the Soviet trade mission (which in reality was Moscow’s spy centre) in north London while replacing their windows. It sounded deeply implausible, but I had a hunch and asked Leigh and Lashmar to check it out. To their surprise, it seemed to stand up, and when Donald Trelford told us that he had received a worried phone call from ‘someone in Whitehall’, we knew we were onto something.

  An MI6 mole infiltrated the Soviet trade delegation in Highgate, north London, and provided valuable information which helped unmask four suspected Soviet spies, expelled from Britain in the past 18 months.

  The coup was the first success for Britain’s hard-pressed counterintelligence service since KGB official Oleg Lyalin defected from the Soviet trade delegation more than 10 years ago and provided information which led to the expulsion of 105 alleged Soviet spies.61

  Five years later, there was a rather odd follow-up to the story, following publication of a book62 by the double-glazer, who may or may not have been called Bill Graham, and who claimed to have served in the Royal Military Police, the prison service and as a Ministry of Defence security of
ficer.

  The once-profitable career of Mr Bill Graham, an Irish double-glazer who became famous for spying on the Russians as an MI6 agent, seems to have collapsed in bizarre circumstances.

  Scotland Yard said last week that an urgent internal investigation was under way into how Mr William Hamilton, a Metropolitan Police Special Branch sergeant, along with Mr Graham and Mr David Murray, a man convicted of IRA offences, came to set themselves up as directors of a private company based in Northern Ireland which rapidly went out of business leaving a trail of unpaid bills.63

  I tell the story here because it still raises several intriguing questions. Did we ever really know who Bill Graham was? Was his story planted on us by MI6 itself, perhaps as a way of getting some favourable publicity? Assuming that his later book must have been officially sanctioned, what other explanation could there be for his original phone call to the Observer news desk? And what was he doing setting up a business with his former Scotland Yard Special Branch handler and a convicted IRA man, unless he was again involved in counterintelligence activities? In which case, why did their enterprise collapse?