Shooting History: A Personal Journey

Interviewing Nelson Mandela the day he became South Africa’s first democratically elected President in 1994.

On the line in northern Ghana, exploring the Greenwich meridian in a classic ‘Yendi smock’ in 2000.

With cameraman Ken McCallum in Baghdad, November 2003.

Advertising Channel Four News, with trusty steed on Euston station.

Prologue (#ulink_f7906fe9-c16f-5429-93a6-91347429e356)

THE BOAT stood proud against the horizon, its curved bow and stern silhouetted on the skyline. We had been looking for it for a day and a night. As we drew near, what we had thought were ornate outcrops from the deck of the boat materialised into the bobbing heads and shoulders of a mass of human beings. The vessel was no more than forty feet long, but there were hundreds of people packed aboard it.

We had set out that morning in November 1978 from Trengganu on Malaysia’s north-eastern coast aboard a fast local fishing launch. I was with my Swedish cameraman Claus Bratt and, somewhat unexpectedly, the books editor of the Daily Mail, Peter Lewis. Our quest was to encounter one of the myriad craft bearing refugees out of Vietnam across the South China Sea. These were the ‘boat people’ who in the previous few months, in their tens of thousands, had left the Vietnamese coast aboard almost anything that would float. The Vietnam War had ended three years earlier, but the flow of refugees was undiminished, orchestrated by traffickers and by the myth that America was waiting with open arms for any who fled.

The boat was well down in the water, with no obvious accommodation beyond a wheelhouse and two corrugated sheds at the back which were clearly lavatories. I urged the fisherman who’d brought us to take us closer so that I could engage the captain in conversation. Eventually we came alongside, and Claus and I boarded the boat. At that precise moment our fisherman panicked, fearing that some of the Vietnamese might try to jump onto his vessel. He suddenly thrust his engines to full, pulled away from us, and sped off whence we’d come. I could see the Daily Mail’s books editor remonstrating furiously in the stern. Soon the fishing boat was but a speck in the distance.

There was almost no room to move on deck. We peered down into the cargo holds, and dozens of faces, young and old, boys, men and women, looked up expectantly. Many seemed to be very sick. Claus and I were led with difficulty towards the captain, who was at the wheel in the stern. I calculated that there were at least 350 people aboard a vessel that might have comfortably carried thirty. They had been at sea for the worst part of three weeks. The smell was overpowering; the dead body of an elderly woman wound in a sheet lay against the gunwale. The boat people seemed to assume that we were the advance guard of a welcoming party headed by the US Ambassador that would be waiting ashore with passports ready to usher them all to their new lives in California.

We’d been sent by my editor at ITN in London to find out how this huge exodus of people from Vietnam operated, and who was facilitating it. Until now, such boats had been seized the moment they made landfall in Malaysia; the boat people aboard would be rounded up and carted off to a kind of concentration camp run by the UN further up the coast on the island of Palau Badong. Consequently it had proved impossible to get to the root of how their journeying had come about.

The captain, a rotund ethnic Chinese, spoke excellent English and was candid about how much each person had paid – the equivalent of $2000 a head, extracted mainly from gold dental fillings and melted-down family heirlooms. He was more vague about how or where they were going to land in Malaysia; indeed, he thought he might even be off the coast of Indonesia. I asked him if anyone could swim; he thought not. There appeared to be no food on board, and the lavatories had become a foetid disaster zone, from which we tried to keep as far ‘upship’ as possible.

Towards nightfall we had our first glimpse of land. The captain decided to make a run for the shore. Within moments we were greeted by a hail of rocks and sticks, hurled by irate ethnic Malays who seemed to come from nowhere and swarmed out along the beach. The defenceless Vietnamese trapped on deck were being cut about their heads, and worse. Our boat turned broadside across the rollers, and threatened to capsize before finally making it through the surf and back out into the open sea.

We advised the captain to try further up the coast at first light, in the hope that any reception party would not yet be about. A ghastly night passed before we renewed our run at the beach. I suggested to the captain that he rev the engine to its maximum, and try to burn it out as the vessel beached. This way I hoped we could avoid being pushed back out to sea again. Claus had by now secured remarkable film of everything that had happened, an unprecedented record of the tribulations in the lives of fleeing Vietnamese boat people.

The noise of the screaming engine summoned a new batch of Malays down the beach, and another fusillade of projectiles. The engine blew, sure enough, but before the captain had succeeded in beaching the boat, which was now skewing dangerously in the surf. I grabbed a rope from the bow and leapt into the water, trying to lug the waterlogged hulk ashore. Gradually the sea itself seemed to bring it in.

Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and thrown beneath the water. Someone took hold of a hank of my then long hair and dragged me to the beach. I was spreadeagled on the sand while one man stamped on my arms and another beat me about the chest with a pole. Claus, still cradling the wreck of his camera, blood pouring down his face, was thrown down beside me. Malaysian soldiers stood idly beneath the palms at the top of the beach, watching the Malays assaulting the boat people. Nearly all the victims were ethnic Chinese. I learned later that the Malay/Chinese balance in Malaysia was fragile in the extreme, and that Malays would go to any lengths to prevent the expansion of the Chinese population.

After what seemed an age, the police came and arrested Claus and me. Snapping handcuffs on our bruised wrists, they threw us into the back of a caged pickup truck. At Trengganu’s police station, the chief informed us that we were to be charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration, an offence that carried a twenty-year jail sentence. We found ourselves in a disgusting fifteen-foot-square concrete cell with a steel door and a small barred window. The floor was awash with urine and faeces. In the gloom I counted eight others already inside. One of them turned out to be our battered captain, Lee Tych Tuong. Mr Tuong, it turned out, was a former printer who had never touched a boat in his life before. It had taken him and some of the other escapers eight months to build the vessel. He told us how they had become completely disorientated upon leaving Vietnamese waters, and how dysentery had claimed half a dozen lives during the voyage.

It was a good six hours into our ordeal before I heard the heaven-sent voice of the Daily Mail man in the passageway beyond the cell door. Peter Lewis had somehow not only tracked down our vessel, but had also managed to arrange the intervention of the First Secretary from the British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur. Our freedom came at the expense of most of the film we had shot. We were free to leave, so long as we boarded the next plane to London. It was a salutary introduction to the vagaries of investigative journalism.

I came of reporting age in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, one of the defining periods of post-Second World War history, when the Cold War warmed to major bloodshed. A quarter of a century later I would be reporting on the war on Iraq, one of the watersheds in the evolving new world disorder that in turn followed the end of the Cold War. Both conflicts were essentially American unilateralist pre-emptive responses to what Washington perceived as threats to US interests.

Like many of my generation, as a student I had protested against the war in Vietnam, and I felt frustrated never to have had the opportunity to report on a war in which many of my older colleagues had cut their teeth. To be dispatched as a reporter, at least to try to explore the war’s legacy, even fully three years after its end, was some small recompense.

Our Malaysian adventure was set amid the prevailing certainty of global balances and security. Vietnam was now avowedly Communist, allied to the Eastern Bloc. Malaysia was emerging from the post-colonial era with its fledgling tiger economy, becoming an equally committed member of the Western capitalist bloc. It was possible to choose almost any place in the world and establish its position within the great Cold War tussle for control. In 1978 I was thirty years old, and my whole life had been set in the confident certainty that the ideological battle between left and right, between Communist and non-Communist, would prevail for all time. The world was relatively neatly divided. The idea that the Berlin Wall would ever come down, that Communism itself would ever fail, was simply inconceivable. We did not know that this order was about to suffer its first major violation, in the form of a radical Islamic revolution in Iran. Western imperialism had all but decolonised Africa and Asia; now the main point of friction was whether the emerging post-colonial states would tilt towards Moscow or Washington.

So I was privileged to start my reporting career in Africa, and to observe a state like Somalia move from British and Italian influence to independence under first Soviet and then American patronage. Somalia was only one of a number of developing countries I watched drift into the chaotic status of ‘failed state’, wide open as a recruitment and training ground for al Qaida. The disengagement of the West from countries like it was matched by a corresponding failure by the Western media to remain committed to reporting them at all. Somalia’s decline was mirrored by Angola, Sudan, Zaire, Uganda and others as we ceased to understand what was happening in them, and worse, ceased to care.

We in the West never expected to win the Cold War, or to lose it. When we did win, we were totally unprepared, and lost a huge opportunity to recast international institutions to fit the reality of a new world order dominated by one all-powerful superpower. Similarly, when Saudi militants attacked America on 11 September 2001, our response was militaristic and inadequate, and international solidarity with the United States degenerated very quickly into diplomatic warfare between much-needed allies. This book is the record of a personal journey that starts in the cosy years after the Second World War and treads the key stepping stones since, to arrive at that great pre-emptive action that was cast as an endeavour to strike down a very immediate threat to our own survival, the war on Iraq.

Six months after that conflict began, I was at Amman airport in Jordan waiting for one of the rare flights into Baghdad. I found myself surrounded by pale British ex-servicemen trying to find ways into the country to take up jobs as bodyguards, and by heavy-set, unfit Americans who seemed never to have travelled outside Texas, carrying plastic bags filled with wads of hundred-dollar bills. The Americans were contractors on danger money coming in to fix the oil, water, gas and electricity infrastructure of a devastated country. It did not feel comfortable being among them, but they fitted well with my wider tale, one from which this reporter emerges at least as blemished as anyone he reports on.

ONE (#ulink_9072fa37-9e01-5221-9917-927f1236c747)

Home Thoughts (#ulink_9072fa37-9e01-5221-9917-927f1236c747)

‘THEY’RE COMING!’ my elder brother Tom screamed. ‘Run!’ The wailing siren sounded close as he and my younger brother Nick fled out of the beechwood hollow. I was slow, wading through the leaves, my legs like lead weights. We had been playing on the edge of the school grounds in a towering section of the beechwoods called Fellows Gardens. Amongst the three of us, the identity of foe tended to settle on me. As they ran that day, my brothers were the friends. But there was a darker sense of an enemy beyond. Somehow the wailing siren seemed to signal the presence of a larger threat at hand. I burst into tears, stumbling to a halt, and found myself standing alone knee-deep in mud and leaves. Still the siren sounded. I suppose in retrospect it signalled only a fire, but then it sounded more eerie, more menacing.

I was born in 1947. My childhood was spent in the headmaster’s house of Ardingly College, a minor public school set in the most green and rustic wastes of Sussex. Woven in and out of the sense of recent war and lurking threat were primroses, wood anemones, bluebells, and the sumptuous peace of countryside. From my bedroom window high up in the Victorian mass of red brick and scrubbed stone stairs I could see the lake, the woods, the rolling fields, and away in the distance, the long viaduct that bore the Brighton steam train to London and back. In the woods I, my brothers and the few other children that this isolated place could muster would play our own warfare.

My childhood swung between feelings of absolute safety and daunting vulnerability. The episode in the wood, when I was perhaps five, took place in 1952, when the war still cast a long shadow over our lives. The syrupy yellowy substance that passed for orange juice, in small blue screwtop bottles, still came courtesy of ration coupons. When I stood in the X-ray machine in Russell & Bromley’s shoeshop in nearby Haywards Heath, where toxic rays revealed my dark feet wriggling inside green irradiated shoes, the ensuing purchase still attracted talk of shortages.

In the early fifties, the Germans were still the oft-mentioned core of enemy. The adult talk was of military service, of doodlebugs, of blackouts and loss. Hence the rumble of planes, the crack of the sound barrier, and that siren spoke with such clarity of present danger, and of the newer Russian threat and atomic war.

My father had not fought in the Second World War. Had he done so he would never have met my mother. This absence of service signalled early that he was different from other fathers. Too young for the First World War, he was too old to be called up for the Second. Besides, the fact that he was a cleric somehow seemed to seal the idea that he would not have been allowed to fight. His age – he was fifty when I was five – and his lack of experience in warfare were among the rare issues that rendered him slightly inadequate in my childhood. While others boasted of fathers who had bombed Dresden, I could only plead that mine had led the auxiliary fire brigade at Charterhouse School, where he had been chaplain. Of this he would talk endlessly. The responsibility had brought with it precious petrol coupons, as his eccentric open-topped Hudson Essex Terraplane Eight became the fire tender. On so many family outings in the self-same car he would recount how ladders were lashed to a makeshift superstructure, and he would roar around the privileged boarding school in search of bombs. And then, one blessed day, he found one. A bomb had fallen on the school’s hallowed lawns. Even now I’m not clear what fire he may then have had to fight. But it became my father’s moment of ‘action’.

Freud might argue that my own subsequent exposure to all-too vivid conflict was some kind of attempt to make up for George Snow’s absence of war. My father showed no inclination to fight, although his great height and booming voice gave him an intimidating, almost threatening presence. If only he had refused to join the armed services; but in our house in those days conscientious objectors were regarded as being as bad as the enemy themselves. His lack of a war record also represented a strange contrast to the military paraphernalia amongst which we grew up.

In our own childish warfare there was more than a whiff of class. The few children of the teaching staff who lived near enough qualified for our war games. Oliver was one of these, a dependable friend who generally took my side against my two brothers, squaring up the numbers. But the children of the ‘domestic staff’ did not qualify for such sport. Susan lived across the road from Oliver, but she was the child of the school’s Sergeant Major. Although enticing and blonde, she was to be kept at a distance, and so almost became a kind of foe – unspoken to, mysterious. Her father had charge of the school guns, of which there were many. I have vivid memories of boys strutting around in military uniforms in large numbers, and of invasions staged in the school quadrangles. They were a further signal of that persistent sense of the overhang and threat of war.

A remote rural English boarding school is at best a strange and intense environment in which to grow up. My father, as headmaster, was God. He was an enormous man, six feet seven in his socks, and at least sixteen stone. He wore baggy flannel suits in term time, and leather-patched tweed jackets in the evenings. In the holidays he embarrassed us all with huge scouting shorts and long, tasselled socks knitted by my mother. His hands were large and handsome, the skin cracked and tanned. He was old for as long as I can remember. To me he was strict, dependable, and at times remote. I was a very inadequate son of God. In the ever-present school community, I felt exposed and commented upon.

Many of the domestic staff who lived on the school grounds seem to have been drawn from prisoner-of-war or internment camps. There were Poles, Italians, and others who appeared to have recently been released from mental hospitals. We knew them all by their first names. Among them was Jim, a kind man who was often to be found standing outside the kitchens having a smoke. One day, on one of my regular tricycle circuits of the school, Jim stopped me and asked if I’d like to come up to his room for some sweets. I was five or six. I left my tricycle and followed him up the dark staircase. Inside he sat me down and started to talk. Very soon he was undoing my brown corduroy shorts. I was worried that I’d never be able to do up the braces again – I couldn’t handle the buttons on my own. Suddenly I had no clothes on. Jim undid his trousers, and produced something which to me seemed absolutely enormous. At that very moment from beyond the door a voice shouted, ‘Jim! Jim! Come out here.’

‘Quick!’ said Jim. ‘Under the bed!’ He hoisted his trousers and left the room. I could hear raised voices. I recognised the voice of the other man – it was the school bursar, an ex-Wing Commander who often came to lunch at home. Home, three hundred yards away, suddenly seemed a very long way away indeed.

Jim returned, and peered at me under the bed. It seemed he’d been spotted abducting me. ‘You’ve got to go,’ he said.

‘What about the sweets?’ I asked.

‘Next time,’ he said.

‘Will you help me with my braces?’ I asked anxiously. He did. I was never to see him again. My brother Tom told me some time later, when I cautiously asked, that Jim had been sacked. No one ever spoke to me about what happened. Yet I can’t imagine that the bursar didn’t tell my parents. The next time he came to lunch he didn’t look me in the eye. I felt something bad had happened, but I didn’t really know what.

Beyond the prison-camp feel of the domestic quarters there was one other place where there was evidence of war: Ardingly village, a long walk from the college. Most walks, most day care was in Nanny Rose’s hands. She was a solid, dependable, working-class Kentish woman, with an irresistible laugh. We had two regular walks with her. The first would take us down past Collard’s farm and the ageing foot-and-mouth warning signs on the gates, to the Avins Bridge Hotel, which straddled the little railway line that ran from Ardingly to our nearest town, Haywards Heath. This walk was always a treat, because Nanny would time it to coincide with the arrival of a train. The steam engine would let loose just under the bridge, and for an age our world would be enveloped in dense white cloud. After the train had gone we would wipe the sooty residue from our faces.

The second walk took us in the opposite direction, to the village. And there we would see them: men in invalid carriages, one with a hole where his ear had been, another with an open hole in his forehead. There were younger men too – men with white sticks and eye patches, back from the Korean war. There was a large war veterans’ home in the village. Nanny said these crumpled humans were ‘shell shocked’. They frightened me, and I wanted to know what had caused those holes, but Nanny’s Daily Sketch seemed to have left her more comfortable talking about the royal family.

While hints of war lay around many corners, there was also the balmy, backlit sense of security that the harvest and the annual crop of Cox’s orange pippins from the orchard yielded. The reaper binder tossed the corn, and men made stooks in the field beyond the herbaceous border. The wind caught the scent of the magnolia on the terrace wall, and bumblebees hovered around the delphiniums. My distant parents seemed at times to display more affection for plant life than for us, while in her own way Nanny loved us as if we had been her own. The contrasts of my childhood world mirrored those in the life of my family.

My father’s lack of experience in the trenches was more than compensated for at the dining table by the exchange of verbal grenades with my older brother Tom from behind The Times. For as long as I can remember, Tom was on the warpath. He was a revolutionary almost as soon as he knew the meaning of the word, and his targets were my parents. Tom was to become a lifelong committed trade union official, representing some of the lowest-paid people in the country. From an early age he asserted that he intended to break with family tradition. For three centuries each eldest son had fathered a son, and each George had named that son Tom; each Tom had followed suit with George. But this Tom was most assertively never going to call any son of his George.

The Toms and Georges from three hundred years dominated the walls not only of the dining room of our home, but the drawing room to boot. Most prominent of all the portraits was that of my grandfather, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow KCB, KCMG, who hung scowling above the dining-room mantel. I never ate a boiled egg that he didn’t seem to have inspected. He was a massive presence in the home, despite having died seven years before I was born. My father spoke of him with reverence and not a little fear. My brother Tom regarded him as a monster, ‘one of so many in the ruling classes who had led their unsuspecting serfs to wholesale slaughter’.

From time to time our table warfare would be joined by my first cousin Peter – destined one day to lead many a sandpit war for both ITN and the BBC. Peter was ten years older than I, and in a better position to take Tom on. His father was a serving Brigadier, and Peter himself possessed more than a streak of the old General, our mutual grandfather, in his make-up. His main contribution to the table tensions was at critical moments to reach for, and upset, the overfull and highly unstable sugarbowl, scattering the stuff across the entire battlefield. Whereupon, of course, hostilities had to be suspended while Nanny was summoned to clear it all up.

Throughout the First World War General Tom, like so many of his time, had resisted mechanisation, believing in the value of the horse long after the tank had come to stay. I was perhaps six years old when my father recounted how his father had gone to Khartoum in 1885, after the failed attempt to break the siege in which General Gordon had been surrounded for ten months by the Mahdi. Tom had arrived too late to prevent Gordon’s shooting on the steps of his residence, but soon enough to acquire a chunk of the step upon which he’d died and to cart it home. It was to languish in his home at 3 Kensington Gate in London until the Blitz struck the house in 1940 and the ‘Gordon step’ was rendered indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble.

As far as I could divine as a child, General Tom had been knighted twice, at least once for leading a retreat. Commanding the Fourth Division during the First World War, it seems his actions in sorting out the retreat from Mons in 1915 saved many lives. My brother Tom of course preferred to dwell on the lives the great man had caused to be lost, and of these there must indeed have been very many. General Tom was a large and austere man who ended his days in a hand-operated invalid carriage. His horse had been shot from beneath him in 1917, smashing his pelvis. He was probably one of the last British generals ever to ride a horse into battle.

Further round the dining-room walls from my grandfather the General hung the family black sheep. He was a yet earlier Tom, who had made a killing of a somewhat different kind from the South Sea Bubble in 1720. He had presided over Snow’s Bank, which stood on the street named after him to this day, Snow Hill on the edge of the City of London. Of this Tom little was said – so little indeed that at one point I thought he was such a black sheep that he was in fact black. Either it was a very dirty painting, or he appeared to be of an unusually dark complexion, with black curly hair.

There was no representation of my mother’s family anywhere in the house. Like everything else about her, her forebears stayed obscurely in the background. The most interesting thing about her father, my maternal grandfather, Henry Way, was that he had been born in 1837 and sired her at the age of seventy-three. He was an estate agent in Newport, on the Isle of Wight. My mother was the last of nine children born to Henry’s three wives, two of whom died in childbirth. Her eldest half-brother was fifty years older than she was.

Beneath the daunting images in the dining room, our family gathered for prayers at the start of every day. Adamson the butler, his wife the cook – always known as ‘Addy’ and ‘Mrs Ad’ – and Nanny Rose would join us three boys, my mother and the eternal conductor of this solemn moment, my father. We would stand in line in order of importance. Mrs Ad always saw to it that her husband came at the end of the line. She was a formidable woman who regarded herself and Nanny Rose as at least as good as those they served. Poor Mrs Box, who did the cleaning, and Mr Webster – ‘Webby’ – the gardener, didn’t get a look-in. They were so far below stairs they never even got to glimpse the dining-room floor until it came to cleaning it or bringing in the logs.