Both are moving tributes, but I am happy to say that I have survived a terrible ordeal – and have been able to tell you all about it. This would have been the end of my story and my book would have had a happy ending – but for a sequence of events that has left me very sad and confused.
12
THE MAKING OF A SPY
Trying to get back to a normal life (although I’m not sure what is normal in my life) has been difficult because I feel there is still unfinished business. My arrest brought a halt to my work in the region, and my departure from Afghanistan, when it finally happened, was rapid. My exit from Pakistan was just as quick. I didn’t even get to say a proper goodbye to Pasha.
It has been difficult to adjust because, while everyone knew what was happening in the media, there are ten days of my life that are missing and I’m still trying to piece together that jigsaw.
Some of the missing blanks were hilarious. There was the high farce when I read all the stories about my being a member of Special Forces. I found it amusing that the Taliban had told a press conference that I was in the Special Forces – it’s pretty obvious that I’m not SAS material, especially when you think how many cigarettes I smoke! However, the spying accusations being bandied about by the Taliban were very serious and potentially fatal for me.
Humour in newspaper offices can be quite black and vicious at times and one of the main culprits for gallows humour at the Daily Express was a journalist called Anthony Mitchell. Ant had been furious when his secret wedding plans leaked out into the newsroom and became even more enraged to discover Greg Swift had been responsible for imparting this delicious piece of gossip to me. I had immediately telephoned the priest to get more information and for this, Ant never forgave us. While I was being held in Afghanistan by the Taliban, Greg Swift was covering the war from the Northern Alliance lines.
Apparently, there were ripples of laughter around the office as Ant said: ‘All I need now is for Swift to be shot and my joy will be complete.’ Nice one Ant!
In complete contrast to these entertaining anecdotes, after 10 days of being treated with respect and courtesy by my captors I was shocked when I got a black cab in London. The East End driver recognised me.
‘You’re that bird that got locked up by them Taliban people aren’t you?’ I nodded and he continued. ‘Did they rape you?’ I shook my head and then he added: ‘It’s hard to believe. If I’d been out there I’d have given you a go.’
I couldn’t believe it. I think he thought he was paying me a compliment. ‘Welcome back to civilisation, Yvonne,’ I thought.
Some parts of the puzzle will doubtless be missing for ever and there are some pieces I wish I had never picked up and connected. For instance, at least one party entered my room in the Crown Plaza and removed some items, including the Agent Provocateur perfume.
Dennis Rice, who works on the Daily Express, told me when I returned that an Italian television crew had been in my hotel bedroom ahead of David Smith. But, from the description I was given, it seems someone else had been in ahead of the Italians.
It may have been undercover Taliban operatives in Pakistan or just another bunch of journalists. I had given them my room number because I had nothing to hide. No money or credit cards had been taken and my passport was where I had left it. My contacts book had been moved and some papers had been disturbed. Furthermore, my bed, which was made when I left, had also been pulled back and searched. As I say, I may never find out who went in and what the purpose of their visit was.
When I returned to my flat in London’s Soho, Viv said she had had to break into it because no one knew how long I was going to be detained. She called a locksmith, who quoted around £70 to change the locks, but when he got there he did not expect to find two downstairs security locks and three more upstairs on the door to my flat, so Express Newspapers had to cough up almost five times the original quote.
Viv said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. The locksmith worked like a surgeon, operating with wires and mirrors to gain entry. It was unbelievable. When he got upstairs to your flat door he again used some wires and clicked through various chambers to undo each lock. He told me you’d obviously lost your keys before, because someone else had been there and done what he was doing.’
I stopped her in her tracks and asked her to recount the story again. ‘But Viv, I’ve been here just over a year and I have had the locks changed, but I’ve never locked myself out.’
That began to niggle me and I spoke to the locksmith but he could not point me in any specific direction.
Dennis also said the television channel had shown a picture of me, Daisy and Hermosh on a barge in Iran. I had to laugh at first, and then I thought of the consequences and wondered if the Taliban had seen the bulletins. Al Jazeera has a huge following and its apparent ease at showing interviews with Osama bin Laden has made it compulsive viewing during this conflict for many Muslims and millions of others. While TV is banned in Afghanistan, the ruling Taliban still managed to watch it.
I was furious because these people at Al Jazeera could have cost me my life. The Taliban do not mess around if they suspect someone of spying, and I could so easily have been hung from the gun of a tank and paraded around as a warning to others.
I called the chief editor at the TV station’s Qatar headquarters and said, ‘I want to know why you tried to get me executed. What made you run two bulletins trailing a much larger exposé and what made you suddenly stop running the bulletins?’
He said Al Jazeera had received some authentic-looking documents that heavily implied I was a spy and they decided to run with the story while the London end of the operation made several more checks. He asked me if I would do an interview and I agreed as long as I was able to clear my name and, more importantly, get sight of these documents.
Several days later I met the journalist Nacer Bedri at the offices of Al Jazeera, which are just off London’s famous Carnaby Street. We talked and I could tell he was suspicious of me. After we climbed the stairs I was out of breath and said to Nacer, ‘Look at my gasping for air. Do you really think I’m Special Forces or a spy?’ He smiled, but I knew I was going to have to go a lot harder to convince him.
We sat down and talked and he showed me photocopies of documents that contained authentic information up to a point. Inland Revenue tax returns looked genuine, but my annual income had been exaggerated threefold.
They had the title deeds to my previous home in London’s Docklands and a certificate showing that the house had sold for £500,000 and not £220,000. Nacer gave me a photocopy of an Israeli passport belonging to Husband Number Three, and it all looked genuine. Then he had a Mossad code number and ID card, which he claimed also belonged to him. These documents were said to have been found on me when the Taliban made their arrest.
‘What nonsense!’ I remarked. ‘If I didn’t take my own passport into Afghanistan why on earth would I take that Israeli’s documents?’
Nacer smiled, then triumphantly pulled out a picture of me, Hermosh (still can’t bear to use his first name) and Daisy on a barge. ‘There,’ he said. ‘This was taken on a river in Iran when you entered the country illegally.’ I gasped with disbelief and then remembered that, several days into my captivity, the Taliban interrogators had said they had evidence to show that I’d been in Iran.
Who the hell was trying to get me shot? I asked myself. Then I looked at the picture again and initially laughed, saying it had been taken in October 1998 in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then an awful feeling came to my stomach and I wanted to vomit. I remembered where I had last seen that picture – in my top drawer at my new flat in Soho.
I had kicked out Husband Number Three a couple of weeks after those pictures were taken and they weren’t developed until later, after he had gone. So who had been in my flat? I then remembered what the locksmith had told my sister and I had this terrible feeling of unease.
Nacer was like a dog with a bone and he could almost smell my fears. He then
said, ‘We know the documents must have originated from an intelligence source. I was inundated with them but we didn’t know if some were fake or not. The file was originally sent to Qatar, our headquarters, and then they were emailed and faxed to me.
‘It was a really thorough job. We also know that the Taliban intelligence had the same file. It was a very complicated situation and the aim was either to use you or frame you. Either way, the consequences could have been dire,’ added Nacer.
Dire? I thought. That’s a bloody understatement. Instant execution, more like. I called a few friends and contacts who belong to or are connected to this dirty world of espionage and ran this information past them.
‘This has the hands of American intelligence all over it,’ said my man in Whitehall. ‘My God, if you had come home in a crate that would have really swung public opinion in favour of bombing those barbaric bastards. Still, I wouldn’t take it personally, Yvonne,’ he chuckled. He would say that, wouldn’t he? It could just as well have been the dirty work of British intelligence, Mossad, or even another foreign agency, for all I knew.
Then I remembered a conversation I’d had with the retired Labour MP for Chesterfield, Tony Benn, after the BBC’s Breakfast with Frost show. He had read my account of my time in Afghanistan in the Sunday Express and said it was a good piece of journalism.
‘You’ve put a human face to the Afghans while the West has spent weeks trying to demonise these people,’ he told me. ‘It’s so much easier to drop bombs on an evil regime. You have done very well.’
I was so flattered. Benn is one of the greatest peace campaigners of our time, a brilliant orator and a very wise politician.
Obviously if the barbaric Taliban had tortured and killed me and sent my broken body back in a box, or even performed my execution live on Al Jazeera, it would have provided a wonderful piece of propaganda for the West.
An Islamic cleric I consulted on my return added, ‘If the Taliban had believed in the contents of the file I think they would have kept you as a bargaining tool. You would have disappeared into the mountains of Afghanistan because they would think you might have valuable information which they would need to extract.’
Thankfully, the Taliban’s intelligence people were not that stupid, and so I think I can now tell you why I was released. I think the Taliban intelligence officers realised that their Western counterparts were trying to manipulate them and they didn’t like it. So, to everyone’s amazement, the day after America and Britain had blitzed Kabul with fifty cruise missiles, I was kicked out of Afghanistan after Mullah Omar signed my release on ‘humanitarian grounds’. It was a two-fingered salute to the West from the one-eyed spiritual leader.
I didn’t escape entirely unscathed, either. The Taliban said in a statement to the media that I had been difficult, rude and had a ‘bad mouth’ and I think they were just as relieved as I was when I crossed the border.
However, weighted against the evidence supplied by my newspaper, they realised I was a journalist and certainly not a secret agent. And they had made an Islamic promise to Paul Ashford that I would be free to go once that was established.
I had also made a promise that I am honour-bound to keep. I gave my word to the Taliban cleric who asked if I wanted to convert that when I returned to London I would study the Islam faith. The Taliban kept theirs and now I will keep mine.
I have already seen Dr Zaki Badawi, who is head of the Muslim College in London, a prestigious postgraduate institution for Muslims. He has offered to help me understand more about Islam and for that I am very grateful. It is indeed a fascinating religion and, like every religion, has its finer points.
If there is anything I have learned from this whole episode it is to be tolerant towards the ignorance of others. When I returned to England, certain sections of the media were prevaricating, abusive and even downright vicious towards me. Female columnists sat in the safety of their ivory towers, polishing their nails, pontificating about me as a mother, a journalist and a woman. Their bile was undiluted and their rabid rants would not have been out of place in the marketplace in Kabul on a Friday.
Unbelievably pompous invective flowed from pens in all corners of England and Scotland, with the exception of a few articles written by people who really know me. Even the waspish and sometimes downright cruel Private Eye sprang to my defence.
More than a handful of humourless women at the annual Women in Journalism meeting that I addressed on my return felt it was fine to ‘stone’ me verbally. It was then that I realised that some people, mainly women, really did wish I had been raped or tortured, or come home in a box.
‘The Taliban treated me well and I’m grateful,’ I told that meeting. ‘Maybe if they’d pulled out my fingernails, electrocuted me, held me down in freezing baths, abused me with a red-hot poker, these particular women might have been happier.
‘I know Afghan women are treated horrendously by the Taliban and I hardly think the Northern Alliance, whose human rights record is just as appalling, will treat women any better. But I cannot be held responsible for the way the entire female population of Afghanistan is being treated.’
One night I was particularly troubled by the spiteful criticism inflicted on me, and I called the media commentator and former Mirror editor Roy Greenslade, whom I have known for many years. I asked him what he thought of it, and how long it would last.
He said, ‘Yvonne, much of it is down to commercial rivalry and the fact that you work for Express Newspapers. Ignore it.’
A few days later, when I was walking towards the BBC’s Bush House, an Afghan woman came up to me and said, ‘Thank you so much for what you have written. I am no longer ashamed to say I am from Afghanistan. Your stories have helped make us human again.’
Those few kind words were a real inspiration to me and I realised that it is pointless to allow the bitter feelings of a few angry people dictate how I behave.
I have also since realised that my detractors are very much in the minority. When I visited Belfast to address the Society of Editors conference less than two weeks after my release I was mentioned in a very moving speech by the RUC’s Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, and overwhelmed when he called me brave and courageous.
When I came to address the conference I praised the many regional reporters who expose drug dealers and crime syndicates and regularly risk their lives to bring the news to the breakfast table. I also paid a personal tribute to the Irish journalists who take risks daily as they go about their normal duty, and in particular singled out Martin O’Hagan, who was gunned down in front of his wife after he had written a series of hard-hitting exclusives about Loyalist terrorists wrapped up in organised crime.
Martin was killed on the same day I was arrested and, while I commanded headlines throughout the world, his bravery and courage went almost unnoticed, written off by some as yet another sectarian murder.
After my speech, his northern editor, Jim McDowell of Sunday World, thanked me for my words and tribute to his journalist. I salute journalists like Martin O’Hagan, and may they long be praised for their determination to expose evil and write the truth.
Later, I was stopped in the streets of Belfast by ordinary people who wanted to shake my hand, and at the Europa Hotel a young porter came up to me and said, ‘Britain is proud of you.’ Two middle-aged ladies followed suit.
Ed Curran, editor of the Belfast Telegraph, who was hosting the conference, said, ‘You know, Yvonne, life is never ever going to be the same for you again. I doubt if you will ever be able to work undercover, and you’re going to have to reinvent yourself.’
I reflected on his words and I was sad, because this is a great job and I enjoy being the chief reporter of the Sunday Express. I’m not sure how I will handle the future but I have a message for my critics.
I have a sense of humour and I will continue to laugh. I enjoy a drink and I will continue to quaff champagne. I love life and I will continue to embrace it head on. It does not mean I don’
t care.
And, especially after my experiences at the hands of the Taliban, my faith in God has been reinvigorated and I will continue to pray and hope he listens.
Some say that it was the strength of their Christian faith that landed the Shelter Now International aid workers in Kabul Prison, where they were held for more than three months accused of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. Personally, I think it was a cynical attempt by the Taliban’s religious police to close them down, but what I also know is that it was their faith in God that got them through the experience.
After five weeks of bombing, the Northern Alliance moved forward and the Taliban forces appeared to crumble, having been devastated by the might of America’s relentless air campaign. When they fled from Kabul, the retreating Taliban took the eight Christians with them, heading towards Kandahar, their stronghold.
‘We were scared. We knew that if we ended up in Kandahar we would probably not survive,’ said their leader, Georg Taubmann, an experienced aid worker who has operated in Afghanistan for sixteen years.
Their vehicle stopped at night in the neighbouring province of Wardak and all eight were locked overnight in a freezing shipping container. The next morning they were driven to the prison in Ghazni, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Kabul. As they were being locked up a bombardment by American jets was under way. When the bombing stopped, their cell door was thrown open and an Afghan with a rifle entered.
‘We thought that was it, and they were going to kill us,’ Taubmann said. Instead, the gunman beamed and said a single word: ‘azadi’ (freedom).
After spending another night in Ghazni my former cellmates were dramatically snatched out of the area by three US helicopters operated by Special Forces. I know I had predicted a dramatic rescue by Special Forces, but certainly not on this scale. I was particularly elated to see that Heather Mercer had pulled through and my eyes glassed over when I saw pictures of her hugging her father, who had maintained his own vigil in Islamabad.
In the Hands of the Taliban Page 21