This set the pattern for the next eight days. They would start with an early briefing with my mother to discuss the theme of the day and by mid-morning they would have transmitted the new story and begun the endless rounds of phone calls to overseas media outlets. My mother tells me that throughout the day James would be constantly in touch, honing and refining the ‘Yvonne Ridley Show’ with the greatest effect. My mother was instructed to have three writing pads beside the telephone. Every incoming call was to be tape-recorded and entries were to be made into the television pad, radio pad or newspaper pad.
Unlike most running stories, where the subject is the main agenda, this one had James and Ted marching to a different drumbeat. From the start of their campaign their media output had only one aim: to persuade the Taliban to let me go.
The international press pack who had camped outside my parents’ home also expected regular bulletins from my mother. She was coached by James and Ted so that nothing she said could be misinterpreted. Initially, there had been hope of a quick release. But the situation worsened when the Taliban started using the word ‘spy’.
Ted later told me that my family’s frustration with the poor efforts of the Foreign Office helped their presentation to the Taliban. He was able to voice my family’s disillusion and loss of faith in my own government by promoting my family’s reliance on the goodwill of my captors. But, without the star performance of one Joyce Ridley, much of their work would have come to nought.
Jim Murray asked me, ‘Who is that James Hunt?’
I laughed and said, ‘He’s a man that casts no shadow. Don’t ask.’
As we neared the Lake District I asked Jim to allow me to have a private meeting with my daughter because I did not want her ‘utilised’ again. I called the school to ask if it was OK if I popped in for an hour.
It was a magical moment. Her boarding house has magnificent views over Lake Windermere and as I approached the door I could hear lots of excited chattering and children’s laughter. A teacher motioned me to go round the corner and as I did Daisy had just walked out of the bathroom. Her curly hair was damp and she had a fresh, pink glow on her cheeks. She saw me and came running at me, hurling her arms and legs around me. I carried her to her bedroom and we sat on the bed and just hugged. She then gave a couple of little sobs and I asked her if she was angry with me. ‘No. I know it’s your job. But how could you be so silly as to forget your passport?’
We talked for a while and I told her I was sorry I had missed her birthday. ‘I did sing it to you, though, Daisy. I sang from the room I was sitting in.’ She looked at me with those brown saucer eyes and said, ‘I know. I heard you.’ She then showed me her poetry book and read some poems she had written.
Her bedroom wall was covered in birthday cards and I asked her how it had gone. ‘Fantastic. I got loads of really nice presents and everyone wanted to sit next to me. I think it was because you were away.’
An hour later, after more hugs and kisses and a promise that I would always tell her if I was going abroad, I left and said I would see her at the weekend. She smiled and went running off to play with her friends.
The Space Cruiser returned and we continued our journey to a remote farmhouse in Little Langdale near Coniston. Jim explained all the Ridley family would be there and I looked horrified: ‘We can’t remain under the same roof for more than ten minutes without rowing.’ I was half joking.
It was great seeing Mum and Dad again, but I thought they both looked a little weary. My colleague Gareth Crickmer (son of Clive) had spirited Mum and Dad away from the hordes of waiting press the day after I was released. Scores of reporters sat outside an empty house for a good twelve hours before they realised the garden-gate briefings had gone for good.
My niece Bianca was there and so was my sister Jill with her partner Paul Bailey. Then Viv and I made seven. We had a nice meal in a pub near Coniston and then returned to the remote cottage.
I was eventually left with my two sisters and I have to confess we got plastered! We had a great laugh and then Jill brought me back to earth with a thump when she said, ‘When you thought you were going to die, how did you think they were going to do it?’ Talk about being blunt! Not even the hardest-nosed hack has asked me that one.
The next morning, both bleary-eyed, Viv and I struggled out of bed, and went to the kitchen. Dad was making bacon sandwiches – they are so tasty. I don’t know anyone who can make something so simple taste so good.
Afterwards, Stuart Mason, the Manchester Express photographer, had me, Mum and Dad walking across fields for reunion shots. I think the plan was for everyone to go, leaving me and Jim behind to crank out the secret diaries for that Sunday.
‘I told the Taliban I don’t do squalor,’ I protested. ‘Well I don’t do the countryside, either. Please get me out of here.’ He could see I was not part of the green-welly brigade and if he wanted to get the best out of me we had to head for a city.
I hugged Mum and Dad goodbye and our party set off for Manchester. Excellent! I was given the presidential suite in the hotel and a computer was set up, and on the Thursday I began to write the full version of my diaries.
As I said before, I had written dates and notes on the inside of a cardboard box that had held a tube of toothpaste. I was not allowed any writing materials in Jalalabad but when I had got to Kabul the Shelter Now girls had given me some paper. I kept it hidden and wrote mini-notes, buzzwords, times and dates on it.
When I was moved I hid the paper and when I was released I stuffed my notes down my knickers, along with a letter Kathe had given me to send to her brother Andreas in Hanover. The toothpaste box was hidden in my bra along with other notes and pieces of paper.
By Friday afternoon I had knocked out twelve thousand words and the diary went across many pages in the Sunday Express, as well as into foreign newspapers and magazines in more than forty countries around the world.
Daisy arrived with her uncle, Bill Brown, and we all had dinner that night in the hotel. When we got back to my room, Daisy was very excited. She loves staying in hotels and we usually watch a film from our bed, but we were so exhausted that we fell asleep. The bed was bigger than king-size but she still crept over and cuddled into me. It felt so good and I realised just how much she meant to me.
The following day we had a slow start. I hate mornings. Daisy was bouncing up and down on the bed. She was truly excited because Bill was taking her to Blackpool to the funfair. I wished I could have gone because I’ve not been to Blackpool before and I know how much Daisy loves fairground rides.
Instead, Viv and I headed for London. As the car drove over Blackfriars Bridge I began to feel rather emotional and I thought I was going to lose it. ‘Don’t you dare start now,’ warned Viv, and I checked myself. The sight of the old bridge, the ‘grey Lubyanka’, looming large was wonderful and there had been times when I had thought I would never see it again.
As I walked into the newsroom it was great to see all the familiar faces again. Judging from the expressions on them, it was obvious some my colleagues had thought they would never see me again.
Martin Townsend came over and I could not help but remark on his weight loss. ‘We’ve been to hell and back,’ he said. I then checked my email and there were more than four hundred messages in the system, most of them pleasant. However, there were three very unpleasant ones. I responded in a likewise manner and all three ended up in a newspaper diary page – funny, that!
My voicemail machine was full, too, and so I went through the messages and most were from friends and well-wishers. There was a nasty message from the fascist group International Third Position and it made me smile. ‘Time to turn those Nazi bastards over again,’ I promised myself.
That night in the pub there was lots of jollity and laughter. Even the manager of the Mad Hatter pub insisted I have a drink on the house, which brought feigned outrage from a couple of my colleagues. ‘Bleedin’ hell!’ said cockney Stu Kershaw. ‘She goes off for some two-we
ek jolly to Afghanistan and gets a glass of wine. What do you have to round here to get a free drink?’
That weekend I started going through the cuttings that had been saved for me. It’s not often anyone gets a chance to read their own ‘obituaries’, but I did. Former colleagues who were obviously not expecting to see me again wrote some moving tributes. The best came from Martin Shipton, who is the chief reporter of Wales on Sunday. There was another by John Sweeney, a freelance journalist, which was never published, but we can read it today. First, though, the Shipton piece:
When I was told on Friday afternoon that Yvonne Ridley had been arrested in Afghanistan, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. In the 24 years since I first met her when we were both trainee reporters in Northeast England, she has always been a risk-taker, often surviving by the skin of her teeth.
I hope very much that her luck holds on this inauspicious occasion. Yvonne stood out among the trainees at weekend schools in the late seventies. Most of us were earnest young graduates who had come from various universities round Britain with high-minded ideas about journalism’s ‘mission to explain’.
Yvonne hadn’t been to university and wasn’t interested in fancy media theories. She was training to be a journalist so she could find out unusual information, write about it, and have a lot of fun doing so.
She was the wildest party animal, combining great personal charm with the ability to go completely over the top. She would stay up all night, drinking many hardened male drinkers under the table, ultimately leading them to a greasy spoon café for breakfast.
Her early career was spent at a variety of papers in the Northeast: the Stanley News, the Northern Echo, the Journal and the Sunday Sun. Newcastle became her domain in the eighties and she made it her business to delve beneath the surface, infiltrating that city’s underworld as she researched stories about rival protection rackets and drug wars.
There were times when I went with her into that world, accompanying her as she mingled with people rumoured to be leaders of the local gangland. They seemed to regard her with fascination verging on affection, probably because she used her charm and made it clear she wasn’t frightened of them.
In the late eighties she became interested in a story that had fateful consequences for her. Some years before a rebel without a cause from the Northeast called Ian Davison had joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation and been sent on a mission to Cyprus. Together with some other PLO members, Davison hijacked a yacht and killed three Jews, allegedly members of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.
Davison was jailed in Cyprus and Yvonne was determined to get an exclusive interview with him. To gain access to him she had to liaise with the so-called PLO Embassy in Nicosia. Again her charm had its intended result and she got her interview with Davison. More importantly for her, she fell in love with a PLO colonel called Daoud Zaaroura, who left Cyprus and went to live with her in Newcastle. They had a daughter, Daisy, who will be nine on Wednesday.
Until meeting Daoud, who for a while anglicised his name to David, Yvonne had a turbulent private life. She had two broken marriages behind her, with several other unsatisfactory liaisons. Her work was her consolation.
For a time Daoud helped her to a new stability. He settled well in Newcastle, where he now works as chief executive of the North of England Refugee Service.
A highly intelligent and cultured man who once effectively commanded part of Lebanon during its occupation by the PLO, Daoud had a fund of stories to match Yvonne’s.
Through Daoud’s contacts, she secured an exclusive interview with Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When she was seven months pregnant she travelled to Damascus to ask him whether his organisation had been involved in the Lockerbie air crash.
Yvonne’s relationship with Daoud was placed under severe strain when she moved to Cardiff in 1993 to become deputy editor of Wales on Sunday. Very shortly after she arrived the then editor was diagnosed with cancer and went on long-term sick leave.
Yvonne took charge of the paper. After the paper went to bed on Saturday night she would embark on the mammoth trip to Newcastle, where Daoud and Daisy stayed, returning on Monday afternoon.
In August 1995, Yvonne left Wales to embark on a new career in Fleet Street, where she worked on a variety of papers. Initially she had some bad luck, encountering male chauvinism and a disdain for ‘provincial’ journalists expressed by some of the more unreconstructed hacks.
She also experienced frustration when one news editor pooh-poohed the story she brought in about illegal arms sales to Sierra Leone. Weeks later she was asked to empty her notebook for the benefit of a member of staff, who had finally caught up with the story himself.
Over the past year, however, she has found herself a comfortable home at the Sunday Express, bringing in a series of exclusives that earned her promotion to chief reporter. Her relationship with Daoud sadly ended and after another broken marriage she is currently without a partner.
As on other occasions in her life, she has been prepared to disregard her own personal safety in pursuit of her work. She has been in tight situations before, but never one as tough as this.
Yvonne has demonstrated her resilience many times in the past. I very much hope she will soon be in a position to write up the biggest story of her life.
I spoke to Martin afterwards and he said he really never thought he would see or hear from me again.
Here, then, is the John Sweeney piece:
The Coach and Horses, Rae Street, Farringdon, is a far cry from a Taliban prison cell in Jalalabad but I’d bet a little bit of money that the chat right now will be just as good.
For one of the great story-telling stars of the Coach – a sunless oubliette favoured by journalists from the Observer – is currently a guest of the Taliban’s pleasure in the aforesaid prison cell.
Yvonne Ridley was arrested by the Taliban while doing her job, for doing her job. She is a journalist through and through. If she is – as has been alleged – working for the British Special Forces, then I am a duck.
Yvonne, who hasn’t been heard of for almost two weeks, was arrested while working for the Sunday Express. Her nine-year-old daughter, Daisy, hasn’t heard from her for that time. Some people might think it crazy to risk everything to spend time with the Taliban.
But all reporters worth their tea and ginger biscuits have done daft things. My esteemed colleague, John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, turned transvestite and donned a burka – the full-length dress complete with yashmak – to get in and out of Afghanistan. You might think that Simpson would make a poor version of an Afghan Mrs Doubtfire, and I suspect that you might be right, but he did it because the story merited the risk.
In my career – such as it is – I have pretended to be Lord Sweeney, a Chechen, an engineer, a zoo keeper, a theatrical agent and the President of Bophuthatswana. No, it’s too long a story.
To get out of the siege of Dubrovnik I once hid in the ladies’ toilet of a ferry. I had to cram my knuckles in my mouth to suppress violent giggles because I never knew before that even ladies break wind. Had I been arrested by the Serbs, well who knows what would have happened?
My friend Maggie O’Kane of the Guardian criss-crossed Bosnia on buses, pretending to be a simple housewife, and hid at the back, hoping that no-one would check out her passport.
Once, in 1990, seventeen people turned up at the border of Stalinist Albania for a tour of Illyrian archaeology. The seventeen included a theatrical agent, an architect and a fancy goods salesman: respectively me, Maggie and the cameraman from Sky News.
All good reporters take risks. Yvonne just got caught.
I got to know her well when we both worked on the Observer. That fine newspaper, the world’s oldest, has been in the story-telling business since 1791 and Yvonne is a hilarious raconteur.
She would sit in the Coach, surrounded by her listeners, and give you a breath-taking, gobsmacking, blow-by-blow accou
nt of the story that mattered or her latest clash with the boss class or her amazing love life.
She is from the North East and educated at, as they say, the university of life. No toffee-nosed smartypants, Yvonne. Sometimes, she was caught off-guard by some cultural reference. At the Observer there is a computer file called quotquot, which is a list of embarrassing overheards. You only ever get into quotquot if you have said something which is a bit daft. My favourite one on Yvonne goes like this: ‘Yvonne Ridley demonstrates the advantages of not reading the Sunday Times culture section: “What’s a butt of malmsey and why is it dangerous?”
But quotquot only tells you the embarrassing stuff. Yvonne is as sharp as a butt of mustard, an acute observer and – cliché alert – one with a heart of gold.
I can hear her now, weaving a story, leaving the listeners weeping with laughter, as she described the cruel knocks of adversity and how she side-stepped them.
Observer parties are always a bit swanky. She once turned up at the book launch of a colleague with a man on her arm who is, perhaps, the most famous (and infamous) lover in all England.
Yvonne stole the show, a world-class character. When I first heard the news Yvonne had been arrested I winced, then smiled, then emailed one of her legions of friends, the Observer’s best night lawyer: ‘I feel sorry for the Taliban.’
Let us hope that the Taliban come to their senses and release our colleague. In the meantime, it is important to remember why journalists do daft things. We want to tell the best stories. And the best stories are those that powerful people who do terrible things don’t want told.
And so, Yvonne, if by some magic you might be listening to this from your prison cell in Afghanistan, you should know that all your friends know why you did what you did.
And can’t wait to hear all about it. From you, in person. In the Coach and Horses.
In the Hands of the Taliban Page 20