Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  As we now know, history tells a different story.

  In the run-up to the Iraq War, I decided to keep a diary, so that I would be able to look back and recall what I thought of it at the time, rather than recreate my views later on with the benefit of hindsight. The first entry is dated 19 February 2003, a month before the start of the invasion:

  I have found a relatively comfortable fence, and I am sitting on it. If I were to fall off, it would probably be on the anti-war side, for the simple reason that if the arguments are as finely balanced as I think they are, I’d rather we didn’t kill people. Tony Blair thinks otherwise … the latest opinion poll shows that although a narrow majority of voters (51%) are now ‘anti-war’, more than 70% of Labour voters still class themselves as satisfied with the way Blair is doing his job.

  On the eve of the war, however, I recorded my deepening misgivings:

  I’ve finally realised why I’m so unhappy about this war. While I do want to see Saddam Hussein defeated, and Iraq ‘liberated’, I deeply distrust the motives of this US administration … I have concluded that the Bush people do have a hidden agenda, and that they do intend to extend their influence and power into areas where until now they have been powerless … What this means is that the war itself isn’t the story; what really matters is what happens next. In Iraq itself, we shall see either a US puppet regime installed, to the fury of the Iraqis themselves, or some kind of UN administration…

  The war lasted just twenty-six days. I had virtually taken up residence in Bush House, broadcasting hour after hour of war-related news, and then jumping on the Central Line to get to TV Centre in time for The World Tonight. I found it exhausting and depressing. Often, I would talk to correspondents who were travelling with the advancing US and British armies, and often, I realised that they knew less than we did in London. The interviews did not necessarily add a great deal to our understanding of what was happening.

  Correspondent 1: I asked a senior officer for the latest developments, and he started quoting reports that he had heard on the BBC World Service…

  Correspondent 2: You know, reporting the war from the front line is like looking through a letter box. I can tell you what is happening right in front of my eyes, but I have no idea what’s going on beyond my field of vision.

  And then it was over.

  Wednesday morning for me started at Bush House, with word from our colleagues in Baghdad that their government minders had all vanished and there were US tanks in the centre of town. By lunchtime, when I was on air, a crowd of young Iraqis were trying to topple a statue of Saddam, conveniently located just outside the journalists’ hotel … I feel no spirit of celebration at all – I think Iraq is going to be a violent, messy, angry place for a long time … I’ll probably be talking about Iraq until I retire.

  A few days later, I presented an hour-long programme live on both Radio 4 and the World Service. It involved a panel of six of the BBC’s finest correspondents discussing ‘The World after the War’ – Peter Day, Frank Gardner, Allan Little, James Robbins, Stephen Sackur, and Justin Webb. (You will have noticed that there was not a single woman among them.)

  When I asked our panel of expert BBC correspondents: ‘Is the world now safer or more dangerous than it was?’, most said ‘safer’. That surprised me, because I don’t agree. I see plenty of potential for serious unrest in Iraq over the coming months, and it could well spill over into both Iran and Turkey, possibly Syria and Saudi Arabia as well.

  My verdict on Blair, for what it is worth, is that he made a judgement, heavily influenced by his unshakeable conviction that he could make the world a better place by removing a dangerous, evil dictator, and he got it wrong. He ignored the warnings from those who knew better than he did what the risks were, and he pushed the available intelligence beyond what was legitimate. In my view, he should have resigned after the UN weapons inspectors reported that there had been no weapons of mass destruction and apologised to the nation and to the families of all the servicemen and women who were killed and injured in the conflict.

  I got my own chance to visit post-Saddam Iraq a year after the invasion, to mark the first anniversary of his overthrow. I drove in with a BBC team from Jordan, across the desert and through Ramadi and Fallujah. We had no armed escort, although we did have an ex-military ‘security adviser’ with us, whose job was to spot trouble before it spotted us. On the long drive to Baghdad, we were advised to place our flak jackets against the doors of our vehicle, where there was a chance that they might stop any bullets that came flying in our direction. It was not exactly state-of-the-art protection, but it was better than nothing.

  The BBC, like many other media organisations, had rented a house to act as its base of operations in Baghdad – the street was closed off by security barriers at each end and the house itself was protected by piles of sandbags on each side of the front door. We slept in a second house on the other side of the street, similarly sandbagged, but with the added amenity of a pool table on the ground floor. The street was lined with what had once been handsome villas, some of them still displaying a six-pointed star of David, indicating that they had at one time been the homes of some of the fifty thousand Jews, a quarter of the city’s population, who had been living in Baghdad until the great exodus of the early 1950s.

  Before leaving London, I had been sent to the BBC health department for a check-up and briefing. ‘Ah, a grown-up,’ said the doctor when he saw me. (Most BBC volunteers for trips to war zones tended to be at least a couple of decades younger than I was.) ‘You’ve done this sort of thing before, I suppose?’ I told him I was a veteran of the civil war in Lebanon.

  ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘So you’ll know what are the two biggest dangers you’re likely to face: a fully armed US soldier and an oncoming lorry.’ With my colleague Lucy Williamson, then a young World Service producer, now one of the BBC’s star foreign correspondents, I encountered plenty of US soldiers and plenty of oncoming lorries. But we emerged unscathed, and we summed up our conclusions at the end of a week in the Iraqi capital in three short sentences: the people whom we met were pleased that Saddam Hussein had gone; they hoped the Americans would now go as well; and they were terrified about the future. Unlike most conclusions arrived at on the basis of an assignment lasting just a few days, those seem to have stood the test of time.

  Steve, our security adviser, did his job well. Every time we got into a car, he checked underneath it to make sure no one had stuck a bomb to its underside, and every time we went to interview someone, he stayed outside with the car for the same reason. On one occasion, when I was interviewing a crowd of unemployed construction workers on a street corner, he suddenly grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me away.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go.’ As we drove off, he explained why: the crowd had grown so large that he was worried he would no longer be able to extricate me if trouble started. The rule of thumb was never to stay in one place for more than twenty minutes, because that was presumed to be how long it would take for news of our presence to reach people who might wish to do us harm. I never discovered who had made that calculation, or how.

  Broadcasting live simultaneously on Radio 4 and the World Service is a surprisingly complex undertaking. On Radio 4, programmes that are billed as starting at the top of the hour usually start after a two-minute news summary. On the World Service, on the other hand, they start precisely on the hour, with a sixty-second introduction, followed by a five-minute news bulletin, and then the programme picks up again at six minutes past the hour. So the script for a programme that in theory starts at 8 p.m. on both networks might look something like this.

  20:00.00: (World Service) Welcome to The Best Programme Ever Broadcast. Over the next hour…

  20:00.58: stop talking

  20:02.00: (Radio 4) This is The Best Programme Ever Broadcast. With me in the studio…

  20:06.02: (Radio 4 and World Service) Just a reminder, you’re listening to…

&nb
sp; The trick, of course, is to write the script so that no one listening, on either Radio 4 or the World Service, has any idea of the mental and linguistic gymnastics involved. And if all that is not complicated enough, something similar happens at half past the hour, when the World Service pauses for a two-minute news summary but Radio 4 happily carries on. A presenter’s life in the studio becomes dominated by the clock; every second matters, especially at the World Service, where re-broadcasters around the world install automated systems to pick up and drop out of World Service programmes at fixed times. If you miss a ‘hard post’, even by a single second, you will have some very disgruntled customers to deal with.

  But clocks, like presenters, are fallible. A typical BBC radio studio has at least three clocks: a digital and an analogue display on the wall opposite the presenter, and another one in the corner of the computer screen on the studio desk. When I started at the BBC, in the pre-computer age, Studio 4A in Broadcasting House also had a clock screwed to the desk. It showed a traditional analogue clock face, with an electronic words display underneath it. When the big hand on the clock pointed to the eleven and the little hand pointed to the ten, the words spelt out ‘It is five to ten.’ Ten seconds later, they changed to ‘It is just after five to ten.’ And then ‘It is four and a half minutes to ten.’

  And still some presenters (Jack de Manio on the Today programme was notorious) managed to get it wrong.

  More than once, I was confronted with clocks that were in disagreement with each other, and on one particularly terrifying occasion, the wall clocks started going backwards. Trying to remain calm as time appeared to be reversing itself required great mental fortitude.

  No wonder I always preferred being out of a studio, reporting from somewhere dusty and far away from the tyranny of the clock. In 2005 and 2006, I made two five-part documentary series for the World Service: the first, Looking for Democracy, took me to the US, Cambodia, Uganda, Bahrain and Ukraine to examine different types of democratic government and try to define the essential ingredients of democratic rule. A Ugandan MP put it neatly when I interviewed him sitting on the green leather benches of the Parliament chamber in Kampala: ‘An election alone does not make a successful democracy, in the same way as a wedding alone does not make a successful marriage.’

  The second series, Generation Next, was a look at the experience of growing up into adulthood in different societies around the world. I was instructed to write the programmes highlighting the fact that I was the father of two adult children and had observed the growing-up process at close quarters. In the final episode, my daughter Hannah, then aged twenty-one, was one of my studio guests, and towards the end, I asked her to describe what kind of a world she thought her generation would run. She tried to reassure me.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Dad. We’ll look after you.’

  For a period in the 1990s and early 2000s, I became the World Service’s Man for Big Occasions. From the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 to the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and several election night specials from, for example, Abuja, Harare, Jerusalem, Moscow and Tehran, I became adept at sounding as if I knew what was going on while perching precariously in a hotel room with a handheld microphone and a laptop computer balanced on my knees.

  I always enjoyed reporting on elections. Whether it was in Iran or Zimbabwe, Nigeria or Pakistan, people always seemed to vote in a spirit of hope: a belief that by placing a simple mark on a ballot paper they might help to make their country a better place. To watch people waiting patiently in line outside polling stations, often in blazing heat, was always a useful reminder of the importance that people the world over attach to the basic right to choose their own government.

  The funeral of King Hussein of Jordan in 1999 was particularly challenging. He was a hugely influential figure in the Middle East, one of the region’s great survivors and regarded as a staunch ally in both Washington and London, where he was known among diplomats as the PLK (‘plucky little king’). During his nearly fifty years on the throne, he had cultivated close relations with virtually every major world leader; among those who flew to Jordan for his state funeral were no fewer than four US Presidents (Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford), the Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Hafez al-Assad of Syria and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. My task was to act as commentator during several hours of ceremonial, somewhat hampered by the fact that there was no publicly available timetable or schedule and that I was confined to a hotel room watching the local TV coverage.

  Makeshift studios for live outside broadcasts require everyone involved to be prepared to adapt to circumstances. In Amman, our sound engineer installed all the necessary technical equipment in the bathroom and spent the entire broadcast sitting on the toilet (the lid was closed). The producer, who was the only person in the team who was able to communicate directly with London, could pass on their instructions to me only by means of hastily scribbled notes: ‘Two more minutes…’, or ‘Keep going as long as you can…’

  One note in particular, scribbled while the news was being read from London, struck me as unnecessarily curt: ‘Coming to you shorty.’ In his haste – or so he claimed afterwards – he had omitted the letter L from the word ‘shortly’.

  How often, I used to wonder, do listeners ask themselves exactly how a live outside broadcast is reaching them? What would they think if they knew, for example, that I was presenting a programme from a hotel car park, in the dark, with a laptop computer balanced on the front of the car and a satellite dish on its roof? Or that reporting live for The World Tonight from a Commonwealth conference in Australia, I was sitting on a beach at dawn, with the ocean lapping at my feet, just so that they could enjoy hearing the sound of the sea?

  In Istanbul, we went to great lengths to find a hotel from which we could broadcast while gazing out across the Bosphorus, just so that I could say – accurately – that I was at the exact point where Europe meets Asia. Did it really matter, given that it was for a radio broadcast and I could have been anywhere? I think it did.

  But, despite my preference for dusty places and muddy boots, there were some occasions when a studio in London was exactly where I wanted to be. UK election nights combined drama, uncertainty and complexity; they were occasions when even the World Service became an unapologetically British broadcasting service – after all, if you could not get a comprehensive results and analysis service from the BBC, where else would you be able to turn? From 1997, when Labour under Tony Blair swept the Conservatives from power after eighteen years in office, until 2010, when an inconclusive result led to the formation of Britain’s first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s, I anchored the World Service all-night election programmes and pretended that my name was Dimbleby. In the days before the internet and 24-hour TV news channels, I was told that every British ambassador in the world would be listening, anxious to discover who their new bosses would be.

  I had two pet hates as a BBC news presenter: summit meetings and Budgets. For much of the 1990s, I would travel, once every six months, to a different European city to twiddle my thumbs while EU leaders debated and decided the future of Europe. This was the time when they came up with the bright idea of introducing a single European currency, which I was convinced would never happen. I was wrong about that, although I was right to be deeply sceptical that it would ever work.

  Under John Major, the UK loudly championed the cause of the central and eastern European countries who were clamouring to join: the Foreign Office view was that a ‘wider’ EU could not also be a ‘deeper’ EU – and being in a union that had more members was infinitely preferable to being part of a project committed to ever closer political cooperation. I do not recall anyone asking what the ramifications might be for the commitment to freedom of movement throughout the EU, so the whole thing became another perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences in action.

  Reporting from an EU summit meant hanging around in media centres, waitin
g for someone – anyone – to emerge from the meetings with a hint or a whisper that might, with difficulty, be fashioned into a news story. As a radio reporter, I had to find people who were prepared to talk into a microphone, and I remember far too many occasions when an interview with, for example, the deputy defence minister of Slovenia could be counted as a major achievement. Far too often, we reporters ended up interviewing each other, mainly because we would think of nothing better to do and could find no one else to talk to.

  The media centres were sometimes many miles from where the summits themselves were taking place. And they were not always as fit for purpose as we might have liked. In Berlin – yes, Berlin! – we suffered a major power failure, which knocked out all our computers and all the lights. In the darkness, all that could be heard was the tap-tap-tapping of a manual typewriter, the property of an elderly, and very smug, German correspondent.

  In Bucharest, at a NATO summit held in Ceaușescu’s preposterous Palace of Parliament, which is said to be the third largest building in the world, I was reduced to scurrying along endless corridors searching desperately for someone to interview. Imagine my delight when I knocked on a door and found the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, inside. He took pity on The World Tonight and agreed to talk.

  But nothing compared to the nightmare that was the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009. With the representatives of 192 governments gathered in one place for a conference that had been inadequately prepared, in a conference centre that was woefully ill-suited to the task, the risk of failure was high. Delegates and journalists found themselves standing in line for a whole day to be issued with their accreditation – China complained that one of its ministers had been refused entry three times in as many days.