Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  The city of Nogales straddles the border. Or, to be strictly accurate, there are two cities called Nogales, one on each side of the border, separated by a high fence and a frontier post. We stayed on the US side of the border, where we were shown around by a border patrol agent. We also met a leading member of the Minutemen militia, who were mounting their own unofficial patrols of the border to fill in the gaps left by the official agents. Both men were helpful, courteous and articulate, and they were more than happy to spend time with foreign reporters sticking our noses into their business. They were proud of what they did, and they wanted the world to know.

  The US is full of people like them, which is why it is such a rewarding place for reporters. We are simple folk at heart: all it takes to make us happy is a good story and someone who is prepared to tell it. Someone like Sarah Blazak, who drove me across the two-tier Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River between Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky. The fifty-year-old bridge had been officially declared ‘functionally obsolete’ and was carrying twice as much traffic as it was designed for, but no one could agree on who should provide the $2.5 billion that it would cost to replace it. Sarah’s story of how she had to crawl in snail’s pace traffic across the bridge every day on her way to and from work (‘Every day when I get across, I breathe a sigh of relief’) was a perfect illustration for a report on the nation’s crumbling infrastructure crisis.

  Or the man at the Chinese-owned solar panels factory in Illinois, who told me in a perfect sound bite why it made excellent sense for the Chinese to buy up US manufacturing companies. ‘You know how we market these panels? “Made in America – by Americans.”’

  I have learned a lot more about what makes America tick by talking to people in Rolla, Missouri, or Chattanooga, Tennessee – or even Dunkirk, Ohio (population: 875) – than over any number of fancy cocktails in Washington. If I had never ventured beyond the Beltway, I would never have understood what Washington and the federal government look like to Mr and Mrs Middle America. Too often, I discovered, Washington looks a very long way away, both geographically and culturally – much further, for example, than Brussels seems from London.

  And I would never have understood the power of that famous Ronald Reagan quip about the nine most terrifying words in the English language: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’

  Terrifying they may be – unless, of course, you want someone to pay for a new bridge across the Ohio River.

  CHAPTER 15

  ON BEING WILLIAM BOOT

  Why don’t you go as a war correspondent? …

  After all, you’ve been to Patagonia.

  SCOOP, EVELYN WAUGH

  IN AUGUST 1935, a young reporter by the name of William Deedes was summoned by his editor, H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post, and asked if he would like to be sent to Abyssinia to report on an expected war with Italy. Deedes, who later become editor of the Daily Telegraph and one of Britain’s best-known journalists, also became immortalised in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop as William Boot of the Daily Beast.

  Before Deedes set off, having bought what he imagined would be suitable clothes (‘three tropical suits, riding breeches for winter and summer, bush shirts, a sola topi, a double-brimmed sun hat … and long boots to deter mosquitoes at sundown’), Gwynne sent him a note about how to send his reports back to London:

  We shall be glad to have anything you can send by mail, but we want to be on a level with our competitors in regard to telegrams … While we do not want to be extravagant, yet we want to be in a position to give as good a picture as any other paper with one correspondent can give.122

  The technology may have changed a bit since the 1930s, but getting the story out remains a major challenge even in the days of Wi-Fi and communications satellites. William Boot was advised to equip himself with cleft sticks in which to insert his dispatches before entrusting them to his runners – I was never reduced to emulating him, but there were times when it came close.

  What has always attracted me to the character of Boot is the way he somehow managed to survive as a journalist, totally ill-suited to the task he had been given but making a go of it and coming out the other end in one piece. I can identify with that, even if I probably pretended far more than Boot ever did that I knew what I was doing.

  Army veterans tend not, as a rule, to dine out on tales of the battles they lost. Nor do reporters usually regale their long-suffering friends with stories of the scoops they missed. But it would be wrong of me to give the impression that my career as a newsman has been an unbroken succession of jolly japes and stories that changed the world. So here are some of the ones that are probably best forgotten.

  Like the time in Abuja, Nigeria, when we were about to broadcast live from a hotel room while simultaneously caring for a colleague who had succumbed to heatstroke. Just a few seconds after we went on air, the power failed and our computers and satellite dish went dead. Desperate inquiries at the front desk were met with calm assurance: ‘Do not worry. The power will be back tomorrow.’

  The only words that World Tonight listeners heard from Nigeria that night were: ‘Here in Abuja…’

  Whenever possible when reporting from overseas, we would try to send our recorded material to London ahead of transmission, so that even if disaster struck, they would still have something to broadcast. But if you have booked a live guest to be your main interviewee in an hour-long programme from Brazil, there is not much you can do if he gets to your hotel an hour later than requested. That is why, over the years, I developed a deep suspicion for any plans that involved the word ‘live’ when broadcasting from abroad.

  Sometimes, technical mishaps can derail even the best-laid plans. An interview with Britain’s top diplomat in Baghdad, recorded by a senior BBC sound engineer while we were both in the Iraqi capital, fell victim to a corrupted digital memory card in a sound recorder; by the time we realised, the diplomat had left town. The same thing happened a few years later when I was granted a rare joint interview, recorded for both TV and radio, with the Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the former Irish President Mary Robinson. Oh, how I yearned for the days when you could see the reels of magnetic tape gently revolving in a Uher tape recorder.

  Once, at a Conservative Party conference, I was left making polite conversation with the then Home Secretary Michael Howard in his hotel room, while a producer dashed off to find a functioning minidisc recorder. He was gone for a very long time, and I was rapidly running out of small talk when Mrs Howard very politely asked me to leave, as she wished to change for dinner, and I was finally ushered out of the door.

  Honesty compels me to admit that many of my most serious foul-ups were entirely of my own making. Like the time I was interviewing the ambassadors of Armenia and Azerbaijan (their two countries were at war at the time) and somehow got them muddled up. Or when I was interviewing a guest from a studio in Oxford and, at the end of the interview, when it was time to thank him, my mind went blank and I could not remember his name. Embarrassing? Very.

  Even worse was the time when, having finished another interview with a guest who was in a different studio, I remarked to the producer that it seemed to have gone all right ‘even though he [the guest] is a bit of a media tart’. When I got back to my desk, I found an email from the guest: ‘Next time you call someone a media tart, I suggest that you make sure that your mic is switched off.’

  And then there was the occasion when I found myself having to interview one of the world’s most respected economists, Professor Paul Samuelson, who after his death in 2009 was hailed by the New York Times as ‘the foremost academic economist of the twentieth century’. What my colleagues did not know, and what I certainly did not want Samuelson to guess, was that I had only ever studied one term of economics as an undergraduate and had never even got to the end of his bestselling textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis. Somehow, I stumbled through the interview without being found out – b
ut I still break out in a sweat when I think about it.

  Jobsworth bureaucrats are a constant threat: in every country in the world, there are officials whose only pleasure in life comes from saying no. And if they choose to say no at the wrong time, it can sometimes spell near disaster.

  One of my last assignments before I left The Observer was to work on a TV documentary, produced jointly by the paper’s fledgling film division and producer-director Anne Webber of Yorkshire Television. (Anne later founded the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which tracks down works of art looted by the Nazis and restores them to their rightful owners.)

  The film told the story of Soviet Jews who had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union to emigrate to Israel, but whose true ambition was to get to the United States. Tens of thousands of them ended up in Italy, waiting in limbo to be granted refugee status by the US immigration authorities. We called our film Uncle Sam’s Refuseniks123 and one of our sequences was to be shot at Fiumicino airport as a family, having finally been granted asylum, boarded a plane to New York.

  The day before they were due to leave, we discovered that we needed a special permit to film at the airport and, as I was both an Italian speaker and surplus to requirements, I was sent off to do whatever needed to be done.

  Some of the relevant offices were closed. Some of the relevant officials were unhelpful. In the heat of a Rome August, I dashed from one side of the airport to the other, knowing that unless I got hold of that all-important signature on that all-important permit, our film would have a very large hole in it. There was nothing at all glamorous that day about being a documentary film-maker.

  But the story has a happy ending. After several frantic hours of begging and pleading, I got the permit and we made our film.

  Most embarrassing of all was the time when I, in common with many other journalists who should have known better, was taken in by a hoax website. It was in the early days of the uprising in Syria, when a blog called ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ appeared, apparently written by a gay woman, half-Syrian, half-American, who was living in the Syrian capital. It offered a vibrant account of life in Damascus and was widely quoted.

  It eventually emerged, however, that the author was neither gay nor a girl, nor in Damascus – the blog was, in fact, the work of an American postgraduate student at Edinburgh University called Tom MacMaster. (After his hoax was revealed, he wrote: ‘I do not believe that I have harmed anyone – I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about … I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.’)

  There was then a totally surreal twist to the tale: a woman called Paula Brooks, who ran the lesbian news website which first published the ‘Gay Girl’ blogs, turned out in reality to be a 58-year-old retired male construction worker in Ohio by the name of Bill Graber. He apparently had no idea that the gay woman he thought he was corresponding with in Damascus was in fact a married straight man in Edinburgh, nor did the man in Edinburgh have any inkling that Paula was Bill. It was a valuable lesson: just because something is online does not make it true. I once saw a quotation attributed to Abraham Lincoln: ‘Not everything you read on the internet is accurate.’

  Leaving aside hoax websites (and bad jokes), however, it is the perils of the outside broadcast that give rise to the highest stress levels. Even if the equipment works perfectly, there is never any shortage of malign elements conspiring to make the broadcaster’s life a misery. So, over the years, I developed a set of rules designed to minimise the risks.

  Do not set up a live outside broadcast position close to a road junction with traffic lights, unless you have established that they do not emit a loud beeping signal every time the lights indicate that it is safe for pedestrians to cross. Similarly, do not plan to go on air from a hotel car park, even if it is the only place where you can get a decent satellite signal, if there are also refuse bins into which hotel staff will tip dozens of empty bottles from the bar.

  If you are in Jerusalem, do not base yourself in an Israeli-owned hotel in the occupied eastern part of the city and then expect a Palestinian official to come to your makeshift studio. Check the weather forecast and make sure you have a Plan B if there is the slightest chance of a tropical storm knocking you off air. And always, always, have twice as many batteries as you think you could possibly need.

  Broadcasting after dark presents its own challenges, never more so for me than in June 1994, when I was in Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landings. The day had not started well: the four guests who had been lined up to take part in our programme all found themselves on the wrong side of a security cordon and were unable to get to us.

  Then, as 10 p.m. London time approached, I took up my position, seated on a World War II concrete gun emplacement as close to the edge of the cliffs as I dared. The idea was that listeners would enjoy being able to hear the gentle lapping of the waves far beneath me as I described all the solemn ceremonies that had taken place during the day. In one hand, I held my scripts, in the other I held a fat, furry microphone, designed to minimise the noise of the wind as it howled across the clifftops. Beside me on my concrete perch was a flimsy desk lamp, casting a gentle yellow glow onto my scripts.

  At exactly two minutes to ten, the lightbulb blew and I was plunged into total darkness. More alarmingly, so were my scripts. With what I hope was admirable sangfroid, I spoke into the microphone: ‘I don’t know if anyone can hear me, but I now have no light and I can’t read my scripts.’

  There then followed a scene that could have come straight from one of the Roadrunner cartoons. A sound engineer emerged from a Portakabin a hundred yards or so inland from my position and sprinted towards me. As he got perilously near to the edge of the cliff, he engaged reverse gear and did one of those emergency stops that the makers of cartoons love so dearly.

  But he had a torch, which was all that mattered, and for the next forty-five minutes, he stood over me like a sentinel, shining a light where before there had been none. And from then on, I always carried my own torch.

  Unlike William Boot, I was never asked to go to a place that did not exist, although on a reporting trip to China in 2005, I did find myself in a place that seemed to teeter on the edge of reality. The model village of Huaxi, sometimes known as ‘Number One Village under the Sky’ is about ninety miles northwest of Shanghai and boasts that it is the richest village in China. To me, it looked disturbingly like the original Potemkin village, everything perfect, spotless and fake.

  When we asked to see inside a typical home, the local Communist Party official who was showing us around took us to what he claimed was his own home, a show house so sparkling that there was not even a tube of toothpaste in the bathroom, nor any other sign of human habitation. And as we drove away at the end of our visit, I did not dare look behind me, in case I might see party officials hard at work, dismantling the entire village and putting it into storage for the next visit by impressionable foreigners.

  The aim of any foreign correspondent is to be in the right place at the right time. On occasion, however, things go slightly awry, as they did in October 2000, when the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević was finally forced from office. Together with several other BBC news people, I was dispatched to Belgrade to report on the drama. But first we had to stop off in Budapest, where we hoped to be able to pick up our visas.

  The embassy was unable to help, due to the political upheavals in Belgrade, which left us in a quandary. Some of the team headed for the border by road, hoping that somehow they would be able to get across without visas. But it was a four-hour drive at the best of times and, with no guarantee that the border would be open, the rest of us decided to try an alternative way in.

  We had heard that visas were still being issued in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, 500 miles to the south, and that it might be possible, in cooperation with journalists from other news organisations, to charter a special flight to get us there. Arrangements were made, and
by midnight we were in Podgorica, handing over our passports to a man in the hotel lobby who promised that they would be returned to us, appropriately stamped, by breakfast.

  He was as good as his word, and by the following lunchtime we were in Belgrade. (Our colleagues who had tried to get in by road never made it. The border was closed.) The city was utterly peaceful and displayed no evidence of the political earthquake that had just taken place. Once again, I thought of William Boot: ‘All quiet here. Weather fine. Send more money.’

  It was not quiet, however, in Israel, where a new outbreak of violence had erupted following a visit to the site of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by the then opposition leader Ariel Sharon. A quick look at the flight schedules established that if we could get ourselves back to Budapest by the following day, there was one last flight to Tel Aviv before the start of Yom Kippur, when everything would shut down.

  Our hotel managed to find us a driver who was prepared to take us back to Budapest but, when he turned up, he had clearly been drinking. So I did what I usually do when I get into the back of a car: I fell asleep. When we got to Budapest airport at 3 a.m., it was deserted, save for Lindsey Hilsum and a crew from Channel 4 News. Like us, they were heading for Tel Aviv.

  Belgrade, on that occasion, was the wrong place to be, and I was there at the wrong time. It is also possible to be in the right place but at the wrong time, especially if you are on a death watch assignment that entails being on site for an expected death which will, when it happens, be deemed exceptionally newsworthy.

  My days as a correspondent in Rome, where the health of elderly Popes was a daily concern, had taught me always to be ready for bad news. But at least I was based there and knew that when the time came, I would be in the right place. It was different as Nelson Mandela became increasingly frail, and the world’s news organisations started planning for what they knew would one day be a huge global news event.