Moments later there was silence. We are operating in two completely different worlds, I thought, then realised I was going to miss out on the annual Labour Party conference. Well, not exactly the conference: it’s the networking you have to do at all the fringe functions where copious amounts of booze are thrown into your glass as you mix with other like-minded souls.
I suppose I could go to the UN Club, I pondered – but no: I had a lot on my mind and I had to think everything through in my head. The scales were tipping in favour of Afghanistan and so I sat down and made a few notes. I was going to call Esther Oxford, a fellow journalist who had moved to Islamabad to write a book. We had had dinner together a few evenings ago, after we had bumped into each other at one of the government buildings, and it was really pleasant seeing an old face.
However, I had so much on my mind that I decided not to give her a call because I would have been distracted and not good company. I walked over to the small fridge and took out a bottle of still water. I laughed to myself. I never thought I’d see the day when I’d go into one of those minibars and pull out chilled water – apart from in the morning to soothe a hangover.
My mind wandered back again to Afghanistan and how much of a risk I was really taking. I weighed it all up and it seemed like a good idea. Then I tried to think what other people would do in my position. I thought of a war correspondent friend, Marie Colvin, a true inspiration to journalists everywhere. I bet she would do it. She’s got more bottle and guts than anyone I know, and on top of that she writes so well and she carries so much respect.
I first met Marie when we worked on the Sunday Times and we would chat when she made her brief appearances at Fortress Wapping, home also to the News of the World, the Sun and The Times (all four are owned by the international newspaper magnate, Rupert Murdoch). Otherwise she would be filing copy that made compulsive reading from the world’s many war zones. ‘War correspondents will never be out of work,’ she recently said and, of course, she is right.
Marie made headlines in April 2001 when she was injured in Sri Lanka after being caught up in a clash between the government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels. The government says the rebels opened fire first when she attempted to cross over from rebel lines in Vavuniva, and the Tamils made counterclaims. The Tamils were telling the truth. She had four shrapnel wounds to her head, chest and arms, but we were all relieved to discover her injuries were not life-threatening. Sadly, Marie lost the sight of her left eye
Sri Lankan officials later said that Marie did have accreditation from the authorities, but had not obtained permission to enter rebel-held territory. However, as I was beginning to find out at the Taliban Embassy, correspondents rarely get permission to cross borders in times of trouble.
Marie later gave the reason for her visit: ‘I had travelled through villages in the Vanni and found an unreported humanitarian crisis – people starving, international aid agencies banned from distributing food, no mains electricity, no telephone service, few medicines, no fuel for cars, water pumps or lighting.’
Many say that, if it was not for her investigative reporting, the world would not have known about the plight of the Tamils. Of course, while she was largely praised for her bravery, there were a few snipers in the background saying she had been ‘foolhardy’. It is a sad reflection on journalism today, but there is this grudging, humourless section of the media capable only of throwing brickbats.
I have always been inspired by gutsy, professional women. They played an important role in my decision to have my baby. Daisy is probably the best achievement of my life and I am so proud of her; but I remember how shocked I was when I fell pregnant. Daisy is the result of a burst condom and at first I made the decision to have an abortion.
I saw my doctor and then a specialist and basically told them I would cut my throat rather than give birth. I remember the consultant telling me that, at 33, with my body clock ticking away, it might not be possible for me to conceive again.
‘Fine, excellent, that’s no problem for me. Well, I’ll see you next Monday,’ I said as I left his office. That weekend I was sent away on a Thomson Regional Newspapers (TRN) training course for women executives, which was set up to find out why women weren’t crashing through the glass ceiling.
I was assistant editor of the Sunday Sun and had been TRN’s first female news editor some years earlier. There were all sorts of women there and they were truly inspirational. I just love good, intelligent female company and these women were all that and more.
As I talked to each one individually I began to realise that having a baby might not be seen as a ball and chain to my career. One senior TRN woman I spoke to was single but her mother, who was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, was living with her. She said it was not unusual for her to be called from the newsroom because her mother would be found wandering in the park in her nightclothes.
Another woman, Maureen Simpson, from the Aberdeen TRN papers, had twin teenagers and had just gone through the process of a divorce. But the woman who had the greatest impact on me was an assistant editor at the Edinburgh Evening News called Helen Martin.
She was married to a Fleet Street journalist, but shortly after the birth of their baby, they split up. She had discovered that he had been having an affair for over a year. She sold her home and headed back to Glasgow, with about £700, to live with her mother. Starting from scratch, Helen had to rebuild her life, find a job, a home and a nanny for her son to enable her to go back to work and earn money to pay for the last two. I was impressed by her story and how she told it in such a matter-of-a-fact way.
As I travelled home to Newcastle on the Sunday night I reflected on the events of the previous two days and decided, ‘To hell with it. I may not be the greatest mother in the world but I am going to have this baby.’
I called the consultant at his home that evening and told him I wouldn’t be there in the morning. ‘Miss Ridley, I am delighted. I only wish I received more calls like this. I’m sure you will not regret your decision and I feel it is the right one for you.’ And, of course, he was absolutely right.
My flatmate Carole Watson gave me a great big hug. She’s been a real star, nonjudgmental and very supportive. ‘I’m so pleased,’ she enthused. ‘I just know you’re not going to have any regrets.’
I then called Daoud and put him out of his agony by telling him of my decision. He had been devastated when I put the relationship on hold while I tried to sort out this ‘pregnancy thing’ in my head. In his misery he had applied for a transfer from the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s consul in Cyprus to a position in the PLO’s Iraqi or Libyan embassy. I guess that must be the Palestinian equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion!
We had first met the previous summer in 1991, in Nicosia, when I went to visit a South Shields carpenter, Ian Davison, who was serving a life sentence with two other PLO terrorists following the infamous ‘siege of Larnaca’, in which three suspected Mossad agents were gunned down on board a yacht in the marina in the eighties.
I had been writing to him for nearly three years and he finally agreed that I could visit him, so I arranged to take two weeks’ holiday and fly out. I was working for the Sunday Sun, which had hardly any budget, so I agreed to pay half the costs.
Although I was in the process of getting a divorce from Jim, my passport still carried his surname, McIntosh. My credit cards were in the name of Ridley and I was staying in an apartment in Paphos, in southwest Cyprus, under another name.
When I arrived in Cyprus I got the last hire car, much to the disappointment of two Englishmen behind me so, I offered them a lift. By the time we arrived in Paphos we were the best of friends. They said they came from Grimsby in northeast Lincolnshire and were in the fish trade, and they had some dealing to do in the northern sector.
I invited them to stay the night in the apartment, which was huge and had three bedrooms. The following morning we drove to Nicosia and I dropped them off. They invited me over
to the Turkish sector, and I said I would meet them later in the afternoon in the village of Kyrenia. I then headed for the central prison and filled out the necessary visiting forms for the following day.
Afterwards I went to the PLO consular offices outside the capital and introduced myself. I told their head of media that I was a British journalist called Yvonne Ridley, working for the Sunday Sun, a British newspaper, and I wanted to know their opinions of Ian Davison. They asked me to return the next day.
I then went to the checkpoint and crossed over the Green Line and into the Turkish sector with the greatest of ease. I didn’t mention I was a journalist because that always gets people overexcited, so I put down my occupation as hairstylist.
In Kyrenia I met the guys from Grimsby and we had a lovely afternoon chatting, sipping wine and eating the most delicious kebabs. I wandered off to a nearby tourist office and began chatting to one of the girls. I mentioned that I was a journalist from the UK and her eyes lit up. She made a telephone call and then turned to me and asked, ‘Would you like to meet our Minister of Tourism? He will see you on Thursday. We will have a car to pick you up at the border.’ It sounded interesting so I said I would return.
The next day I visited Davison and I saw him virtually every day after that for the remainder of the two weeks. I had also dropped into the British Sovereign bases at Episkopi and Akrotiri to see some friends in the army whom I had met through the TA.
Several days before I left I popped back into the PLO offices and spoke with my contact again. He invited me for some lunch and we went high up the Troodos Mountains and had one of the island’s famous mezes.
Afterwards he stopped the car and we went for a walk in the woods. I must say I was feeling a wee bit nervous, especially when I noticed empty gun cartridges scattered on the ground. We were talking about the Palestinian situation and all the time I was looking around for a big stick that I could hit him with if he came near me. Was I going to be taken hostage? Maybe bundled off to Beirut to join Terry Waite?
In the event nothing happened and we returned to the car. However, I have since learned that he had little or nothing to do with the media and was in fact an intelligence officer. He had filed a report saying that he suspected I was a spy of some sort, possibly with Mossad connections. I must say that his report did sound pretty convincing. The PLO had had me followed since the day after I arrived, and in that time they discovered the following:
Yvonne Ridley has entered the country under the name of Yvonne Anne McIntosh. She has checked into an apartment block under another name with two men.
She seems to be able to go to and from the Turkish sector with the greatest of ease and four days after her arrival was picked up by a chauffeur-driven government limousine when she passed into the Turkish sector for the second time. She uses an official ID to get in and out of the British Sovereign bases. A check call to the newsroom of the Sun in London reveals that she does not work there. She has a foreign accent which she tries to disguise. She also has no fear characteristic of normal women and appeared calm when she was taken for a long walk through isolated woods.
Of course I could explain each point and there was nothing sinister about my visit. I found it funny that they thought everyone spoke the Queen’s English like Her Maj. They had obviously never encountered a Geordie accent before and thought I might be an Israeli.
The file was handed to Colonel Daoud Zaaroura, the head of PLO intelligence. He told Khalid to arrange a meeting and it turned out to be a fateful decision. The moment I first clapped eyes on Daoud I was smitten. The meeting was electric and I was captivated by his charm, totally unaware that I had half of the PLO intelligence section working overtime to find out who I was and what I was up to.
I spent my remaining few days visiting Ian Davison and the nights in the company of Daoud, who, I have to say, was a complete gentleman. He told me he was an investor and I had no reason to disbelieve him. I had no idea I was in the presence of the legendary Abu Hakim, former Commander of Fatah Land in South Lebanon and still revered by many Palestinians today. The Fatah Land was in the southeast of Lebanon and was controlled from 1970–8 by Arafat’s Fatah Party.
When I returned to Newcastle I had a cracking exclusive and Tony Frost, the new deputy editor, splashed on the story and promoted it on television. It was a huge success and all my colleagues congratulated me. We went down to the Printer’s Pie next to the office and had quite a few drinks.
Daoud and I kept in touch and he visited me some months later at my home in Leazes Terrace, Newcastle. I introduced him to one of my closest friends, Martin Shipton, the investigative reporter with the Northern Echo, and they went on to become firm friends.
It was around this time that Daoud dropped the bombshell of who he was and what he did. By then I was a captain in the TA and there was an obvious conflict of interests. I decided not to say anything to my superiors because I wanted to see how the relationship would develop.
I became pregnant in the New Year and went on an army exercise to Cyprus in the April. I was doing ‘local boy’ stories on a TA regiment that was going out to the Falklands for six months to offer support to the resident infantry company. It was quite an important story because it was one of the first times TA soldiers had been used in full-time positions.
Since I was largely in charge of myself, I was able to nip out of the barracks where I was staying to visit Daoud at his block of flats in the outskirts of Nicosia without having to report to anyone. One night I was resting in his lounge in full British Army kit when Khalid called to see his boss. You can imagine how shocked he was when he saw me sitting there dressed up like Rambo.
He later told Daoud’s ex-wife, a Lebanese woman who was closely linked to the PLO. My understanding is that she reported this to Yasser Arafat and said Daoud was in the arms of a Mossad and British secret agent. There was a huge row brewing in the PLO and I thought it was about time I came clean with my commanding officer, a wonderfully charming man called Colonel David McDine.
When I arrived back from Cyprus I popped in to see Colonel McDine and told him I was pregnant and was going to have a baby. He said he was very relaxed about that, as the British Army had developed a more open approach to unmarried mothers. Detecting there was more to come, he winced slightly and said, ‘Who is the father. Do we have a problem there? Is it a married officer?’
I replied, ‘No, sir. He’s not a married officer but there could be a slight problem. He is a colonel but not in the British Army.’
He leaned forward across his desk and said, ‘Yvonne, whose army?’
Taking a deep breath, I said the father-to-be was a colonel in the PLO, and he was also head of their intelligence.
Colonel McDine looked at me and said, ‘We will have to end this conversation now, Yvonne, and I will make some enquiries to see if this is going to cause problems. Do not talk to anyone about this.’
I got the feeling that he felt matters could have been a lot worse and he was relieved that I had not been messing around ‘below ranks’!
It turned out not to be a great problem for me, but back in Cyprus Daoud was ordered to the PLO headquarters, which at that time were in Tunisia. He refused to go, saying our relationship was ‘not negotiable’. His wages were cut off, his office telephone was disconnected and a war of attrition developed between Arafat and him. The old man was used to getting his own way and his beloved David, as he referred to him personally, was not towing the line. He came over in the summer and told me about the flak he was getting.
‘I have told them we are married,’ he said, ‘and that we are having a child together and that is the end of the matter. Our story has gone all around the region. It is seen as a big love story and people are amazed.’
It tickled me that I was the talk of the launderette throughout the Middle East. Michael Scott, a trusted friend and photographer, took some ‘wedding photographs’ of us, which were then shown around Cyprus and Tunisia.
It amazed me t
hat my pursuit of an exclusive interview with a PLO terrorist had created such an impact on so many people’s lives, including my own. I really don’t go looking for trouble but it seems to find me. I remember Nicholas Hellen, the Sunday Times media editor, once telling me I was like journalism’s answer to Forrest Gump.
So, here I was in Islamabad, about to set off on another adventure. I knew I was taking a risk but I felt good about the whole operation. I wondered whether I should write some letters to my parents, my sisters and Daisy, my close friends … The list was endless, impractical and negative. It was not a Pollyanna thing to do.
There was also the possibility that Martin and Jim might block the project and I even contemplated switching off my phone, an action that could get me the sack. I was determined to see this thing through.
5
MY SILENT WORLD BENEATH THE BURKA
It was nearly midnight. In less than 24 hours I would be in Afghanistan. I spoke briefly to friends and family and my final call was to Daisy. I told her I loved her and she gave me a big kiss down the line.
‘Always remember: if you want or need me close your eyes and think of Mummy and I’ll be there for you,’ I told my daughter. ‘You will remember that, won’t you, Daisy? I want you to remember this conversation for ever and remember to be very strong.’
My wonderful daughter replied, ‘Whatever, Mummy. Now you haven’t forgotten my birthday, have you? It’s on Wednesday. I have to go now – we’re having fun.
And with that the line went dead.
I had a restless night’s sleep, but that is not unusual for me when I have something weighing on my mind. I knew I could pull the plug on the project if I wanted and if I felt unhappy then I decided I would.
I went downstairs for breakfast and was joined by a lively American photographer who covers Asia for an agency in New York. She was extremely feisty and tough and I would not want to cross her, that’s for sure. I didn’t tell her what I had planned in case she wanted to join me since, as I explained earlier, I prefer working on my own. She had lots of pluck and was still covering the mass demonstrations.
In the Hands of the Taliban Page 8