Shooting History: A Personal Journey

‘Why ever not?’

‘Yours was the only source. We knew UPI, AP and Reuters were all on the flight with you, so we waited for them, and when they failed to file we decided you’d got it wrong.’

‘You idiot!’ I screamed. ‘I had the tape of Hills saying he was free, I had bloody Callaghan saying he was thankful, Amin booming away, what else did you want?’

‘A second source, Jon. Now if you don’t mind, I can see the first Reuters snap coming through, so I can let your stuff run.’ With that he rang off.

‘What’s the trouble?’ asked Peter as I came out of the phonebox.

‘They didn’t run it,’ I said mournfully. ‘They couldn’t get a second source to confirm it.’

‘Are they running it now?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes’.

‘Well, don’t worry, you’ve still got a beat.’

And sure enough, LBC and my report were used as the source for that afternoon’s Evening Standard front page. It was an early tutorial in the ways of journalism.

It was a much bigger tutorial on the true condition of Great Britain. Amin, the jumped-up non-commissioned officer, had succeeded in humiliating the Foreign Secretary of his erstwhile imperial rulers. Britain was still finding her post-colonial feet, still unsure whether a Foreign Secretary should do this sort of thing. She had played an unwitting role in bringing Amin to power and keeping him there. The coup against Milton Obote had been seen as a benign and potentially beneficial development. The wholesale deportation of tens of thousands of people because of their Asian ethnicity was simply accepted. It might be argued that the office of the British Foreign Secretary seemed to have put more effort into saving one eccentric white man from execution than into preventing the abuse meted out to sixty thousand Ugandan Asians. Despite the furious immigration debate in Britain, those Asians were to prove Uganda’s crippling loss and Britain’s huge economic gain.

That autumn of 1975, imperial Britain’s home-grown crisis was taking serious hold on both sides of the Irish Sea. On 3 October a Dutch businessman, Dr Tiede Herrema, was kidnapped by the IRA as he drove his Mercedes to work at Ferenka Ltd, the huge tyre factory in Limerick of which he was managing director. The kidnappers threatened to kill him unless Republican prisoners were released from jails in the Republic of Ireland. Ireland was in the throes of trying to leave her nineteenth-century backwardness and become a fully paid-up member of Europe, and the kidnap was a body blow, particularly as Ferenka’s parent company was the hugely influential Dutch multinational Akzo.

For nearly three weeks no trace was found of the missing Dutchman. The kidnap made the Republic of Ireland appear a place of refuge for the hard men of Republicanism. Then on 21 October Herrema was located in a council house on the edge of Monasterevin in County Kildare, forty miles south-west of Dublin. He was being held by two IRA members, Eddie Gallagher and Marian Coyle. The discovery triggered an immediate siege. LBC dispatched me from London with almost no money and virtually no other resources.

The house stood at the back of a working-class, 1950s-built redbrick estate that gave onto farmland. From the far side of one of the fields it was possible to get a view of the back and side of the house. The Irish police, the Gardai, were everywhere, and the press were kept well back. Gallagher loosed off a couple of gunshots soon after I arrived, as if to support the police in their endeavour to control the media.

LBC’s appetite was voracious. At peak times they wanted a piece on the hour, every hour. Initially I was able to persuade the ITN correspondent and future bestselling novelist Gerald Seymour to let me use the back of his car as a base. The one motel in Monasterevin was already full, and was anyway too far from the siege house. Seymour was a star reporter, and I felt honoured to be allowed to use his car. That first night he slept in the front, I in the back. I remember his socks to this day. With the Irish mist hanging in the dawn light, I could just pick out the shapes of policemen wandering around the garden fence of the siege house. We were in for a long haul.

By midday, trucks had begun lugging caravans into position at the top of the field. A temporary press encampment was taking shape. Gerry Seymour upgraded himself to a four-berth mobile home, and I took over the whole of his car. At the vantage point we constructed a large brazier and filled it with peat briquettes. I must be one of the few reporters who has ever put in a charge for peat briquettes on his expenses claim form.

Although I spent more hours than most at the vantage point, there were times when I would retreat to the car to sleep. The problem was that the car was at least two hundred yards from the point from which you could see the house. So I went into town and bought a great length of bell wire, a buzzer, a bell-push and a battery. The buzzer was draped through the car window, while the bell-push lay near the brazier two hundred yards away. From time to time, once they’d checked I was asleep, one of the photographers down at the brazier would sound the buzzer just for the hell of seeing this half-naked hack falling out of a car pulling on his trousers in his haste to witness the end of it all.

There were very few real developments during the Herrema siege, but somehow it built up into a compelling twenty-four-hour news radio event. Eddie Gallagher, the IRA man whose hare-brained scheme the kidnapping had been, turned out to be in conflict with the IRA leadership. Indeed, this may well have been one of the early signals of division in the IRA between the political and the mayhem wings of the Army Council. Gallagher’s girlfriend was not Marian Coyle, with whom he was now holed up in the siege house, but Rose Dugdale, who was later to marry Gallagher and bear him a child. Dr Dugdale was an English aristocrat and a graduate of the London School of Economics who was serving time for conspiracy to smuggle arms and explosives to Northern Ireland, and was one of the IRA convicts in return for whose freedom Herrema was being held hostage. She was also suspected of having seized a helicopter in 1974 and dropped two explosives-filled milk churns on a police barracks, where they failed to explode. Gallagher had been imprisoned after that episode, but had escaped four days after being sentenced. Technically, despite his stationary position in our sights, he was on the run.

It was not just the divisions within the IRA that the siege exposed. We also saw, writ large, a preparedness on the part of both Irish and British governments to countenance an eventual deal with the Republicans. No one was prepared to go in with all guns blazing. But then, early one morning about a week into the siege, the Gardai grew impatient with Gallagher and decided to mount a surprise attack. I was at the vantage point. I buzzed the buzzer and a motley crew of my colleagues came running down the path from their encampment, led by the man from the Sun. Les Hinton was not only an excellent journalist, but good company. If I had been asked then to identify which of our band would one day become Rupert Murdoch’s British supremo at News International, I’m not sure I’d have spotted him. It’s an extraordinary journey from Monasterevin to the Murdoch summit in Wapping.

We were all flabbergasted by the crudity of the Garda assault. An old ladder was leant against the bathroom window at the back of the house, and a detective scaled it and tried to open the window. BANG! A terrific shot rang out, followed by a yelp, and the detective tumbled down the ladder. Gallagher had blown the man’s index finger off.

The next day I received a hand-delivered note from the editor of ITN, Nigel Ryan. He had approached me earlier in the year about moving to television news, and I’d refused. This time his note said that if I accepted, the job as a reporter for ITN was mine. I decided to talk to my own editor when I returned home.

The siege dragged on for seventeen days. Eventually Herrema walked out unharmed, and Gallagher and Coyle gave themselves up. The brazier camaraderie came to a rapid end and we all went our separate ways. What we didn’t know was that five of the twenty-five or so of us who had been the core of the siege-watchers had contracted a pretty grim lurgy that would strike a short time after we returned home.

Nigel Ryan was a highly regarded, patrician, Reuters-trained editor. He’d seen action in the Congo, but was also at ease in the British Establishment. I sat in his office on the second floor facing him. My editor at LBC had strongly advised me to cross to ITN while the going was good.

‘So, which college did you go to?’ Ryan asked.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t at Oxbridge. I read law at Liverpool.’

He was rather startled, and I got the impression that if I did secure a place on the reporters’ bench I’d be breaking with the Oxbridge norm. Fortunately he never asked me what degree I got, so I didn’t have to cover up the rather serious matter of having been rusticated. To this day I often wonder whether he’d have employed me if he’d known. But the job was mine, and with three months’ notice to LBC I would start in March 1976.

Two days later I woke up feeling utterly dreadful, listless and sick. I phoned a doctor friend to ask what he’d recommend for a ‘pick-me-up’. ‘Have a glass of sherry,’ he advised. I did, and immediately vomited. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I was a noxious shade of bright yellow. I phoned my GP, and by the evening I had been admitted to Coppetts Wood isolation hospital in north London.

‘Are you a homosexual?’ The man in the white coat at my bedside wafted in and out of my consciousness. ‘Have you had oral sex with another man?’

‘Crumbs!’ I thought. ‘Is that the only way to get whatever I’ve got?’

‘You’ve got Hepatitis A,’ the doctor said through his facemask. ‘It’s highly contagious.’

‘No, I’m not a homosexual,’ I said eventually.

‘Well, how did you get this?’ he asked. ‘Where have you been?’

‘The Irish Republic – covering the Herrema siege,’ I said. ‘There was a cow trough with a tap in the field where we camped. I drank some of the water.’

‘That’s almost certainly it,’ he said.

Soon it was confirmed that five of us had exactly the same complaint from the same source, and I’d had sexual relations with none of them. ‘No alcohol for six months, and complete bed rest,’ the doctor said, and left.

I was sharing a flat in Primrose Hill with Nick Browne, whom I had met at university. To this day, a truer friend I could not wish for. He had taken the route I’d been expected to and actually become a barrister. The day after I was admitted to hospital he came to my bedside with the mail. ‘I couldn’t help spotting this one,’ he said.

‘On Her Majesty’s Service’, it said in black print. ‘Confidential, Personal’ was typed in red. I pulled out the contents. No wonder Nick was looking curious. He knew exactly what it was, and so did I.

It read:

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE, Room 055, Old War Office Buildings,

Whitehall.

5 January 1976

Dear Mr Snow

1. I think it just possible that you might be able to assist me with some confidential work I have in hand. I therefore should be most grateful for an opportunity to have a talk.

2. If you are agreeable perhaps you would be kind enough to telephone me and we can discuss when it would be convenient for you to call. You should, incidentally, come to the side entrance of Old War Office Buildings in Whitehall Place and say you have an appointment in Room 055.

3. I will naturally reimburse you for any reasonable expenses. Please do not hesitate to take a taxi if you are pressed for time.

4. I should be grateful if you would treat this letter as confidential and not discuss it with anyone else; furthermore please bring the letter with you as a means of identification.

5. I very much regret that I cannot go into further explanations in a letter or on the telephone, but would naturally do so if we meet.

Yours sincerely,

D. Stilbury

Ten days later I was at the side entrance of Old War Office Buildings, a grey, uninviting building opposite Horse Guards Parade. I had called Stilbury and made an appointment. I figured that I should at least check the thing out. I mean, how often do you get an invitation to the epicentre of Britain’s spy network?