I met my mother’s friend at our home in Sussex and he was very helpful with career suggestions, all of them naturally based on his own past experiences.
Sir Olaf Caroe had retired to write books about Asia after a highly successful professional life in the Indian Political and Civil Services between 1919 and 1947, during which time he graduated to serving as Chief Commissioner of Baluchistan and later as Governor of the North West Frontier Province.
I told Olaf that I had read all about the Soviets in Afghanistan and I wanted to do my bit against the invaders. My grandfather had fought for the Empire, my dad had fought the Nazis and I wanted to fight the Marxist threat. In Germany I had spent years with my regiment waiting for the armed might of the Soviet Union to attack, but this never materialized. So, for a chance of real action against the Soviets, not just their PFLOAG cadris I wished to join the Mujahideen guerrillas in their armed jihad against the Soviet invasion.
Olaf asked me if I liked extreme climates. I said that I did. He asked if I spoke Urdu, and I said, ‘No, but I’m good at languages. I could learn quickly.’ He worked hard to put me off by lending me written records, his own and those of his Anglo-Indian colleagues. Here are some excerpts from those notes which describe one of Olaf’s early work areas, the United Provinces between the Ganges and Jumuna rivers and only four degrees of latitude south of the Afghan border in the same climate belt.
We used to keep wet mats made of khas grasses hanging over our bungalow’s open doors. These helped to make the living room just about liveable for much of the year, but in the hot season every bit of furniture was burning to touch. The nights were terrible with my apartment a veritable furnace. We covered tables and chests of drawers with blankets, or the wood would split with noises like pistol shots. You took clean folded bedlinen or a shirt out of a drawer and they might as well have come out of an oven. We wore regulation Political Service clothing for many occasions . . . totally unsuitable! I often felt dizzy and wanted to sit when I had to stand.
When on field journeys of inspection in the forest areas, we slept in tents . . . hot as hell! By day flies were everywhere, crawling all over any food. Tree bark split and bamboo clumps crackled as though trying to scream. Mosquitoes always managed to find holes in my net and sucked my blood all night.
I asked him about the wildlife, but he clearly had no interest in the fauna.
We kept a dog and a tame mongoose to warn us of snakes. They were everywhere, especially in the rainy season. They liked our tents and the bungalow, above all to curl up in the dry toilet tubs and in our boots. They were especially frequent lodgers in the monsoon weeks when the rain filled their holes.
Apart from the snakes and other creepy crawlies, he described the monsoon as a welcome change, humidity instead of heat.
Like living in a Turkish bathhouse. Mosquitoes breed in millions. Armies of frogs hop to new pools. Every type of insect and spider heads for shelter in your bungalow. Rivers roar down dry valleys.
But the people [he assured me with a grin] are delightful for the most part. Especially the sugary bureaucrats so well portrayed by Peter Sellers. Let me give you some well known examples of their mastery of the English language . . . ‘An expected increment’ became ‘an excrement’, draft texts of petitions included the phrase, ‘two adults and two adulteresses’, and the habit of many Indian clerks to draw out long words could cause misunderstandings. For instance, an Indian restaurant waiter asking a newly seated English customer, ‘Are you com . . . for . . . table?’ might well get the answer, ‘No, I have come for tea.’
But [Olaf became serious] not all Indians are, of course, happy-go-lucky, nice chaps any more than we are. Think of the Black Hole. Back in the eighteenth-century in Calcutta, a city that we founded, the Nawab of Bengal sent 50,000 troops against the fort’s garrison of a couple of hundred British Army men. They soon surrendered and at least sixty of them, including two women, were shut up in the fort’s prison in a dark cellar only six by five metres in size with two small barred windows. It was mid-summer, there was standing room only and the prisoners fought to get near a window. The guards jeered at their screams. By nine o’clock at night many prisoners had slowly suffocated. There was no water. The weak were trampled by the strong. They defecated standing up. They raved, swore and fought. In the morning the guards dragged out the bodies of all but twenty-three of the prisoners and threw them into a ditch.
Olaf flicked an old newspaper cutting towards me. ‘They aren’t too gentle in your Afghanistan either. Look at these figures.’
Twenty-seven thousand Afghan civilians had, according to Amnesty International, been executed by the Kabul government even before the Soviet invasion, and after it hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians had been killed in bombing raids or massacres.
I decided, after further reading about the Afghan war, and specifically about the region north of Kabul, that I would join the forces of the Sunni leader there, Ahmad Shah Massoud, known as the Lion of Panjshir. I applied in October 1984 for an Urdu language course in London and approached the boss of ITN, for whom I had previously interviewed Sultan Qaboos in Oman, with the plan that Ginny and I would produce a documentary film titled Fighting for the Lion. We badly needed an income.
The week before we were due to go for our key ITN interview, we were woken at 4 a.m. one morning by a call from Los Angeles and I was offered the job of Public Relations Officer at Occidental Petroleum in the UK. The caller was Dr Armand Hammer, octogenarian founder and chairman of Occidental Oil, a man of enormous wealth and power. Previously, Prince Charles had persuaded the Doctor to help the Transglobe Expedition with fuel, and I had met him on several occasions.
‘I have never had a job outside the army,’ I warned Dr Hammer. ‘I know nothing about PR.’
This did not faze the Doctor. His attitude was that since I had persuaded sponsors to part with £29 million worth of goods for the recent Transglobe Expedition, then I must know something about public relations.
When I told Ginny the good news that our financial troubles were all over as I had my first ‘real job’, she turned over in bed expressing the sincere hope that my new boss was not going to make a habit of calling me at 4 a.m.
Later in the week I was flown to Los Angeles by private jet for an interview with the Doctor, who told me that I should consider myself his personal representative in Europe, not just one of Occidental’s employees in London.
I explained that I already had a career in expeditions and would need, therefore, at least four months a year away from my Occidental desk. Surprisingly, this proved acceptable and I was given the job.
I worked for Dr Hammer for the next nine years with the ambiguous title of Vice-President of Public Relations at Occidental in London. The North Sea oil platform of Piper Alpha was one of my PR responsibilities, and this turned out to be a very unhappy involvement when, in 1988, Piper Alpha caught fire and 167 of those on the platform died.
Apart from North Sea activities, I was periodically sent messages from the ‘good doctor’ with weird, non-oil related missions. These in the early 1990s included visits to Italy to pass on handwritten messages to the exiled King of Afghanistan with the end view of reinstalling his rule in that country. This plot, according to Dr Hammer, involved the US Secretary of State, George Shultz. It failed, but many years later when I was in Kabul with the BBC News senior correspondent John Simpson, I mentioned it to the then President Karzai who found it very amusing and commented, ‘There will never be another King here.’
I went with John, a group of ex-SAS security types and a BBC film crew for a fortnight’s filming in various areas of Afghanistan, including a night in an isolated police post overlooking the Tora Bora caves, made famous by their erstwhile inmate Osama bin Laden. I ended up feeling grateful to Fate that I had not spent time fighting for the Lion of the Panjshir Valley . . . Afghani politics and shifting allegiances were far too slippery to warrant life-threatening service there.
After the vi
sit to Afghanistan, which turned out to be pleasantly cool and not at all like Olaf Caroe’s hothouse, I was commissioned to write articles for a travel magazine on ‘great snow-covered mountains’, starting with Kilimanjaro.
The first Kili-Climb tour guide that I met at Arusha in Tanzania shook his head when I asked to interview him. ‘Snow-covered!’ he grunted, ‘I have put my guide business up for sale while the going is good and Kili still has at least a sprinkling of snow to help attract customers.’
Although there was certainly more than a sprinkling, there was definitely far less snow cover on the Kili glacier than when I had last seen the mountain only a dozen years before. Like the Arctic sea-ice cover, Kili had been considerably changed by global warming in a comparatively short passage of time, which was obvious even to the naked eye.
Another part of the world where glaciers were in alarming retreat was the Andes. I went there to climb eight volcanoes near Quito. Temperatures in the Andes have of late risen faster than the global average and the glaciers that provide much of the water for towns like Bolivian El Alto are disappearing, to the alarm of the inhabitants and thanks to the greenhouse gas emission of the industrialized world.
I witnessed great lightning storms in the Andean volcanic mountains, including a stunning lightning and thunder display on Chimborazo at over 20,000 feet above sea level. My mountain guide there commented that these potentially lethal storms were on the increase. Not long before he had joined the search for a fellow guide and his Scandinavian client. He had found them both near the Chimborazo summit with a hole drilled neatly in the helmet of the guide who had been struck directly by a bolt. His ice axe was partly molten and his client, some fifty metres away, had also been killed, apparently by the electrical current having passed down the icy rope that connected the two men.
From the Andean volcanoes I flew to Texas where I visited the NASA headquarters at Houston for an interview with the lady in charge of all astronaut in-flight food. She was, at that time, experimenting with new ways of providing maximum calories for minimal weight. This was exactly what I needed at the time for an attempt to cross the Antarctic continent, manhauling all supplies for 1,500 miles and three months without replenishment.
The three NASA food experts that I met in Houston were an interesting group and, over sandwiches and coffee in their Space Center, the conversation covered all things related to how ‘heat makes the world go round’. We discussed many topics which were thrown about like a game of dysfunctional ping-pong, and some of the disjointed heat-related nuggets included a discussion about the fact that my cousin Oliver Fiennes, the Dean of Lincoln, had recently left Texas taking with him the Lincoln copy of the Magna Carta with which he was touring the USA. One of my NASA hosts remembered cousin Oliver’s talk about Magna Carta and how it helped form the US Bill of Rights. But he was much more impressed by Oliver’s reaction when accused by the cathedral treasurer of spending too much on heating the building. He had simply erected a small glass greenhouse in the cathedral’s vestry in which he lit a small kerosene heater and switched off the cathedral’s central heating. The saving of costs over the next winter overrode the complaints by the freezing congregation, and the cathedral vergers could warm up their hands over the heater.
‘I’m sure,’ one NASA man commented, ‘there are lessons there for our over-cosseted astronauts.’ He added that American researchers were following up their own version of my cousin Oliver’s heat-saving action. The US ‘Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy’ was backing the development of a project known as Local Warming. The principle of this was that buildings are highly inefficient consumers of heat, especially in winter when a huge amount of energy is wasted heating empty homes by day and warming empty office buildings by night. Even when buildings are functional, unoccupied spaces are kept at the same temperature as those that are in use.
Little wonder then that the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning of buildings accounts for 13 per cent of total energy consumption in America. ‘Note,’ he added, ‘that all solar power in the country only provided 1 per cent of available energy.’
This Local Warming project was based on the premise that, apart from the modest ambient heat needed to prevent pipes from freezing, it is people rather than buildings who care about keeping warm. So why not aim heat at individuals as they move about their place of work? Local Warming’s apparatus consists of a combination of powerful infra-red lamps, clever optics and servo motors to direct beams at people as they are tracked by a Wi-Fi based system. An alternate system being worked on uses arrays of infra-red LEDs and targeting optics that switch on and off as people move about. Local Warming estimates that, once one of its systems becomes practical and cost-effective, building heating costs could be cut by as much as 90 per cent.
This led to the comment from our NASA lady host that global warming was causing ‘islands of urban heat’, which in turn was killing off many tree species in South Carolina including the attractive red maple, and this was causing a massive increase in the populations of urban pests such as the wonderfully named gloomy sap-sucking scale insects, whose fertility rates increase greatly in the warmth.
Another problem is that the viral disease dengue fever which causes excruciating bone and joint pain and is transmitted by the Aedes mosquito is now present in the southern states, including Texas and Florida. And chikungunya fever, which is similar to dengue, but from a different host mosquito which is also now breeding in the USA.
NASA, according to a notice on the Houston canteen wall, was leading mankind’s efforts to reach into space about 14 billion years after space ‘began’ and the Big Bang occurred. Life appeared on Earth 3 billion years ago. Humans evolved from other primates 7 million years ago. The wheel was invented 4,500 years ago. The first time great heat was used to smelt rock into iron was in 3000 BC, and good quality steel was produced by the mid eighteenth century. This helped man to land on the moon in 1969, thanks, of course, to Houston and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
What, I asked our hosts (their names are sadly long since forgotten), is the hottest temperature on our planet? Their answer was that, if a hole was drilled right through Earth, the temperature an explorer would experience in the epicentre would be around 7000°C.
And the hottest man-made fires? The NASA men laughed. They knew of a product produced by arsonists, known to the FBI as High Temperature Accelerant (HTA), which could speedily destroy an allsteel and concrete construction and which would reach temperatures of over 5000°F. Steel girders melt and concrete is turned to powder by this HTA. The Seattle Fire Department, analysing HTA post-arson debris, speculated that a concoction resembling rocket fuel was involved. Firefighters had to stay well clear of the infernos caused by HTA arsonists and found that water jets intended to put the fires out actually encouraged the blaze. In order to add my pennyworth of heat information, I volunteered that the biggest man-made non-nuclear detonation ever recorded was in the summer of 1917 during the trench war in northern France when a ridge line, known as Messines, was held by the Germans and seemed impregnable. British miners secretly dug nineteen tunnels under this ridge and set off a single huge explosion of over a million tons of ammonite which blew great craters along the ridge, instantly killing 10,000 Germans. The Prime Minister in London actually felt the tremor at his desk, and the sound of the detonation was heard in Dublin. My uncle was killed a week later during the follow-up attack.
Despite good advice from our NASA friends, we were never able to obtain a daily ration of 5,000 calories weighing hardly any less than those used by Captain Scott in 1910. However, NASA did subsequently agree to try to help locate Ubar by using special cameras on the Space Shuttle.
Back in the UK, I mounted a series of journeys with Dr Mike Stroud. We broke a number of polar records in the Arctic and Antarctic, but I was on a solo attempt to reach the North Pole unsupported when my 300lb sledge fell through sea-ice in the dark at minus 48°C with a wind blowing. To rescue my sledge I ha
d to fish around in the iceladen water to retrieve the harness ropes (which I had released to avoid being dragged into the sea myself). Using my left arm I located the rope and managed to drag the heavy sledge back onto a solid ice floe. Rapidly losing all feeling in my ‘dry’ hand and knowing that I already had bad frostbite damage to my wet left hand, I was extremely lucky to be able to erect at least one half of my small tent and creep into it out of the freezing cold, already shivering violently, before both my hands became useless. I then tried to light the cooker, for I knew that without heat I would die within a few hours. But with only one hand to pump the fuel I could not prime it, so I put one side of the stove in my mouth as a substitute for my useless hand and managed the pump action with the other (still just usable) hand. To my huge relief when I struck a match, a minor petrol explosion resulted, together with a high flame. I then found that the cooker was stuck to my lips due to the cold metal. Tearing it away there was blood all over the place. The cooker flame then set fire to the inflammable tent liner, but this I put out with my sleeping bag.
The feeling of warmth that soon spread through the little space in the drooping tent was the best feeling I can remember. Heat was at that moment the most wonderful word in the English language.
In the same vein I can remember the days of the most unbearable heat during the three expeditions with Ginny in the sand dunes of the Empty Quarter when, less acclimatized than in my army days, I felt the oppressive effects of the heat more easily.
Some time after I had left the Sultan’s Armed Forces, my old friend Tim Landon (who had been crucial to the coup which ousted my boss Sultan Said bin Taimur) wrote to offer me a job in Dhofar. The work involved raising and leading an anti-PFLOAG raiding group to be based in the region of Shisr (my old Ubar-hunting camp) consisting of Mahra anti-communist tribesmen.
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