CHAPTER 13

Coward at war

It was my fifth year at The Sun and for all the adventures, enjoyment, and occasional horrors, life was becoming routine. With no clear next step, I was beginning to worry. After so long in the same job, in the same office, at the same desk, in the same country, I was getting itchy.

I had never set foot in the United States, the country I had dreamed of visiting since Jean, my cousin in Mississippi, began sending me 10-cent comics when I lived in Libya. The closest I had come was in 1970, when Mary and I sailed back from Australia along the Panama Canal. The canal was built by Americans and located at the time within a strip of US territory known as the Canal Zone. I met Americans there, but it didn’t really count.

The Sun was the only Fleet Street newspaper without its own US correspondent. An aged veteran inherited from the old Sun had retired without being replaced. When I discovered editors were considering the appointment of a new correspondent, I thought I had built the credentials to be a candidate.

The obstacle to my ambition was a Northerner called Ken Donlan, who, as The Sun news editor, ruled my working life. Donlan was the most terrifying boss I ever had. Rupert made me tense, but Donlan made me afraid. He wasn’t given to outbursts so much as silent menace. He had a death stare when angry that I recognised years later upon seeing Anthony Hopkins play Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. He was a short, fraught, muttering man whose face changed its shade of red according to his mood, or the duration of his lunch that day with Larry Lamb, the brilliant but bibulous editor-in-chief.

When I was out of the office, I tried to call in only at lunchtime, when it was most likely Donlan would be away from his desk. Before making a call where I had to convey unwelcome news about the success of my assignment, I would lie on my hotel room floor and do Stanislavski’s relaxation exercises.

I was outrageous in my efforts to ingratiate myself with Donlan. I even tried appealing to his working-class roots by reviving my long-lost Scouse accent in the hope he might identify more with me. Nothing worked. He ignored me and continued to favour other reporters. His particular favourite was Iain Walker, whose own dour and unsmiling style must have connected with the boss. Walker could be fun away from the office, giving me grounds to suspect he adopted Donlan’s manner at work as a cynical strategy to get ahead.

My first opportunity to cover a foreign assignment other than Ireland came when Donlan was absent. It was mid-summer — August 1973 — when the newsdesk number two, Tom Petrie, sent me to a bank siege in Sweden. Two armed men at the Kreditbanken building in Norrmalmstorg square in Stockholm had shot and wounded two police officers, and taken three young women and a man as their hostages.

Sieges were still novel events — this was two years before the IRA siege in the boglands of Monasterevin — and journalists arrived in hordes. We checked into a hotel in the square, spending hours outside the bank and cultivating senior police officers for information about what was taking place inside. We heard gruesome stories from them of rape and a threat to hang the hostages. We were told that the vault where they were imprisoned had become ‘a virtual torture chamber’. But the story failed to live up to expectations.

After six days, when the police pumped gas into the vault to end the siege, we were ready to write many words on the unimaginable suffering the prisoners had endured. I had already alerted London of the graphic detail to come, when John Penrose of the Daily Mirror arrived in the hotel bar looking downcast. Penrose was an imposing figure, always smartly dressed, which was a tradition among Mirror men, probably because they earned so much more than the rest of us. But the usual brightness in his face was absent.

‘The word is nothing bad happened to any of them,’ he said forlornly.

To our surprise and disappointment, the hostages were telling a different story than the version conveyed to us by the police. Their captors, they said, were ‘fine boys’ who ‘never harmed us’. Kristin Enmark, a 23-year-old hostage, said from her hospital bed: ‘Don’t harm the boys. They have been very sweet. We really had fun in there. We played poker and noughts and crosses, told funny stories and all the time we were treated all right.’

The police were astonished: ‘Kristin’s reaction is a real surprise. We heard some spine-chilling conversations from the vault.’

The Stockholm police psychiatrist was mystified, offering the explanation that the hostages must have blanked out the ordeal. ‘If they were assaulted it is likely that they do not want to face the horror of the details,’ he told us.

Many journalists felt thwarted, especially those such as Penrose and I. We had voracious tabloid appetites to satisfy, and had expected to serve up a tale of cruelty and horror. My tale of happy hostages and merciful captors, along with the psychological explanation of what might have happened, proved underwhelming in London. It was reduced to a short single-column.

But, whether or not the police had exaggerated their accounts, it was accepted that the mental pressure of their ordeal had caused in the hostages what became known as Stockholm Syndrome.

This term became standard in psychiatry, and the American psychiatrist Frank Ochberg was the acknowledged authority. This was how he explained it:

The hostage is stunned, shocked and often certain that he or she will die. But then … little by little, small acts of kindness by one of the captors evoke feelings deeper than relief … a primitive gratitude for the gift of life, an emotion that eventually develops and differentiates into varieties of affection and love.

Hidden in that analysis, I saw parallels with the wildly swinging emotions that come with the fear of being fired by a tyrannical news editor. It’s the only way to explain why I became fond of Ken Donlan.

Despite the disappointing outcome, my competence in Stockholm led to more important assignments. In the 1970s, reporting on aircraft disasters was a staple duty. It was the deadliest decade in history for commercial aviation, with 16,766 fatalities. In the worst year — 1972 — the Aviation Safety Network says 2,379 people died. By 2016, with many more aircraft carrying millions more passengers, the worldwide toll for commercial airliners was 325.

The aftermath I witnessed of one crash — the world’s worst when it happened — was impossible to describe in full for the pages of a family newspaper.

I was on duty and starting a lunch of beef and roast potatoes at The Old King Lud in Ludgate Circus when the bar’s phone rang. The call was for me. It was 3 March 1974. A Turkish airliner, bound for London via Paris, and with British passengers on board, had crashed outside Paris. The office had a helicopter — the flying bubble type — waiting at the heliport by the Thames in Battersea to take us there.

It was late afternoon when we arrived to a scene of overpowering horror. Turkish Airlines Flight 981 was an immense McDonnell Douglas DC-10, a missile weighing 200 tons, with 346 passengers and crew packed within its 170-foot fuselage.

The plane had come down at 500 miles per hour, and carved into the Forest of Ermenonville, 30 miles northeast of Paris. Like a harvester through a wheat-field, it had flattened everything in its path, reducing huge pine trees to stumps. It had been pulverised in the process, and only a couple of pieces of red-striped fuselage were intact among a lifeless carpet of human remains and wreckage.

No one survived and no body was found intact. Human parts were scattered everywhere and clothes were hanging in trees — a woman’s blouse, a pilot’s uniform jacket, a long black overcoat. What looked from a distance like red blossom on charred branches were human intestines. Searchers picked up body parts with spiked sticks, as if they were removing litter in a park. One held up to us a long brown scalp of hair. Six British models died in the crash.

Those sights revisited my dreams for years. Philippa Kennedy, a new young reporter who was with me, was white-faced and tearful. I tried to comfort her, but I think I felt just as bad.

The Sun published many pages on this story. Most of the dead were British passengers who had been forced to change flights because of a British Airways strike. The crash was caused by a faulty rear cargo door that blew off and wrecked the aircraft controls.

Back at the office, I was sprinting up the stairs for a night shift when I heard the low, silky voice of Arthur Brittenden: ‘Les, Les, slow down.’

Brittenden was The Sun’s number three editor, an odd man out, tall and slender with the polish and deportment of a cavalry colonel, and perpetually unperturbed among the frequent frenzies of the newsroom.

‘That was wonderful work,’ he said. ‘Any newspaper — tabloid or heavy — could have run your copy and been proud of every word. Wonderful work.’

I still felt miserable about what I had witnessed, but I was pleased by Brittenden’s words. I knew by then that good stories and other people’s misery were often not far apart.

I did not cover great conflicts, only minor disorders compared with Vietnam, the Middle East, and the brutal border of India and Pakistan. It wasn’t by choice; I was never asked, but I also wasn’t sorry. The occasional dangers and savagery I witnessed in other places easily exceeded my personal threshold for risk.

Thursday 8 August 1974 was my day off. I had gone that afternoon to a cinema in north London and was regretting my choice — a gruesome and silly film called The Exorcist. During an intense scene in which the blood-covered head of a devil-possessed girl was rotating on her body, much to her mother’s distress, the film stopped and a loudspeaker called my name and instructed me to call the office urgently.

This was the way of things for news people before cell towers, mobile phones, and the magic of electromagnetic interaction. We had rules to follow: never go anywhere without making sure the office can reach you, not to a pub or a restaurant or a cinema. And when you are on the road, check in every hour in case something significant is taking place nearby.

The big international story of the moment was the imminent resignation of Richard Nixon, but a major sideshow was a crisis in the eastern Mediterranean. The month before, the military junta in Athens had engineered a coup in Cyprus with the objective of annexing the island. For the Greek colonels, this was a grave miscalculation. Greeks and Turks in Cyprus had a history of murderous conflict, and the coup handed Turkey a perfect pretext for intervention. It at once invaded Cyprus, claiming only concern for its minority population.

The Cyprus crisis was at its height the day I missed the end of The Exorcist. Iain Walker, The Sun’s number one ‘fireman’ — the first reporter to be rushed to every big breaking story — was being pulled off the Cyprus job after a near miss. A convoy of four cars had driven into a minefield as it carried Walker and others through the Turkish zone. Two mines had exploded, killing a BBC soundman, 33-year-old Edward Stoddart, and injuring five others, including a journalist sitting next to Walker.

Walker was so shaken by the experience, he asked to be relieved, and I was asked to take his place. I flew in on a Royal Air Force VC10 — commercial flights were suspended — and checked into the Hilton in the island’s capital, Nicosia. The Nicosia Hilton was the media’s HQ in Cyprus. Like the Europa in Belfast, it was the place travelling journalists had identified as home. These gathering places are not sentimental. We like the company, but most of all we want to know what everyone else is up to.

The hotel bar was crowded with staff from the big US titles — Time, Newsweek, The New York Times — and heavyweight international correspondents from Europe and Fleet Street. For many of them, Cyprus was a diversion from their main job of covering the Middle East; Beirut was 40 minutes flying time when the airport was open.

The fabled Don Wise, whose by-line I had known since I was 10 years old, stood at the bar, impeccably tall and slim in a pressed khaki safari jacket, looking like a Spitfire pilot or a French musketeer with his anachronistic curling moustache. Wise was an adventurer as much as a journalist. He was brave, witty, and sometimes hilariously crude — the most famous remark attributed to him was about the Vietnamese language. ‘It’s like the sound of ducks fucking’, he is alleged to have said. He had attended almost every important conflict since the Second World War, when he was a serving officer and a prisoner-of-war on the Burma Railway. In a long career with the Express and then the Mirror, he had covered post-colonial upheavals from the Middle East, to Africa, to southeast Asia, and been wounded four times. Don Wise was an idol I didn’t wish to emulate.

It was my first night in Cyprus, and I was overcome by the excitement and boozy fellowship of journalists with the kind of experience I no longer sought, but whose company still left me wide-eyed. I stayed too long at the bar.

The noise that woke me wasn’t like a Belfast bomb. It was a sharp cracking sound, followed quickly by a heavy and repetitive thudding. As I went to the window of my hotel room, there was a mechanical roar so loud and so low that, pointlessly, I ducked. When I looked out, I saw flashing black shadows: Turkish jets were bombing the city, and retaliating Greek-Cypriot anti-aircraft guns were firing into the dawn light. There is nothing like the shriek of rocket-firing warplanes to amplify a hangover.

The hotel lobby was a rush of bodies. The carousing storytellers of a few hours before were now grimly preparing for a difficult day’s work, some heading out alone, others forming themselves into the safety of groups.

Don Wise arrived with a huge Union Flag flapping in his wake. It was to be draped across his car to establish his neutrality. We could hear warplanes and gunfire, and see the rising panic of the hotel workers.

‘Hey,’ he called to me. ‘Want to come along?’

‘No thanks,’ was my shameful reply.

That morning, Turkey had launched the second wave of its planned occupation. As bombers attacked military targets in the city and elsewhere, with a worrying lack of precision, infantry and columns of tanks were claiming new territory in the island’s north. Ultimately, the Turkish zone would occupy more than 35 per cent of the island. To the Greeks, the invasion was an atrocity; to the Turks, it was deliverance.

I declined Wise’s invitation because the Red Cross had declared the hotel a sanctuary area and it felt safer to stay where I was. The Red Cross designation proved academic, however, when several members of the Greek-Cypriot National Guard positioned themselves in the hotel doorway. I was 100 feet away when a Turkish rocket exploded by the main entrance, shattering the hotel’s glass facade. It was then I decided that, with no reliable hiding place, I might as well take my cowardice onto the streets.

We had no way of filing copy from the city, so Walker, who hadn’t yet left, agreed to head south to the British base at Akrotiri, where he could wire our story before the RAF took him home.

‘Get the office to call Mary to say I’m all right,’ I asked.

When the phone rang at home, Mary was seven months pregnant with Thomas, our second son. She was standing on a stepladder repainting a bedroom for him and listening to news of the action on the BBC radio programme World at One.

The UK had military bases on the island, but kept out of the fight, with orders only to protect British lives and defend the bases. British observation units placed themselves close to the invaders. We stood in trenches with them outside Famagusta watching dozens of tanks creeping eastwards through the dust, firing their guns towards no apparent targets. When a Turkish shell went awry, landing near the British observers, a major waving a white flag marched towards the advancing tank to berate a Turkish officer.

After the first explosive days, an uneasy ceasefire was declared, but the danger and tension were still intense. Crossing the no-man’s-land Green Line dividing Greek and Turkish territory was a tricky procedure. Leaving the protection of the Greek zone did not guarantee a welcome from the Turks. For me, there was a particular difficulty. The Sun had fallen into serious disfavour in Turkey after Walker had written a vivid account of allegations of Turkish atrocities. Greek-Cypriot villagers caught in the first Turkish advance had told him terrifying stories of their ordeal, and The Sun had devoted pages to his account, describing the Turks in a large one-word headline as ‘Barbarians’.

Sub-headlines included: ‘My fiancé and six men were shot dead. The Turkish soldiers laughed at me and then I was raped’; ‘The Turkish soldiers cut off my father’s hands and legs. Then they shot him while I watched’; ‘They shot the men. My friend’s wife said “Why should I live without my husband?” A soldier shot her in the head’.

This story made The Sun the most loved and hated newspaper in Cyprus, depending on which side of the Green Line you were. The Turks were so furious that Greek-Cypriot authorities and the British military cautioned me about visiting the Turkish zone. I had no choice, but it was a tricky moment each time I presented myself to a zone officer who had the task of deciding who should be allowed to pass. The conversations invariably went the same way.

‘Hello, I’m from The Sun,’ I would say brightly.

‘The Sun? You think we are barbarians. What are you doing here? You told lies about us. You are not welcome.’

‘I didn’t write that,’ I would say. ‘I had nothing to do with it. I have no knowledge to make me believe that the Turkish people are barbarians. I am here to understand what is happening and to tell the truth to our readers.’

In time, making the crossings became easier, but they reminded me often of their view that The Sun was guilty of a terrible injustice in allowing itself to become the victim of Greek-Cypriot propaganda.

Walker’s story was the first contribution to what became a grisly contest by each side to establish the inhumanity of their enemy. Both sides produced persuasive evidence.

After The Sun’s ‘Barbarians’ front page, the Turks organised macabre day trips for the media to the sites of purported Greek atrocities. The worst of them ranks above Ermenonville as the most horrifying sight of my life. What we saw in Maratha, a village in the eastern Turkish zone, was more terrible than an air disaster because it was not an accident but slaughter.

Our mini-bus halted near the crest of a low dusty hill. Through the windows, we could see people wearing surgical masks, scarves, and handkerchiefs over their faces. Some were simply burying their faces in their raised, bent arms.

‘You will want to cover your noses when we get outside,’ a young Turkish lieutenant advised us as he tied a large white cloth around his head.

The air was hot and windless, and dense with the sweet stench of rotting flesh. One reporter began to retch, another returned instantly to the bus. An old woman dressed in black came towards us, staggering and wailing as a boy, no more than eight years old, his two small hands clutching one of hers, tried to take her away from where the lieutenant was leading us.

The bodies had been buried in the village rubbish dump for 20 days, we were told. When Turkey launched the second wave of its invasion, Greek-Cypriot nationalist gunmen had rounded up the Turkish villagers and shot them all. Turkish officers said 88 people were missing and they expected to find them in the dump.

Their remains formed a long, low mound, and had been exposed by a bulldozer that was now nearby with its engine running. They were stacked in seams, layer upon layer, and only partly covered with flesh. You could tell many were women, and could see the tiny decaying frames and skulls of children. Some bodies were charred, and we were told they were set on fire after being killed. A uniformed Turkish-Cypriot said he had arrived on leave from his post in Famagusta to discover his family had been murdered — six sisters, one brother, and his mother. Soldiers were picking with shovels through the pile like archaeologists, keeping the bodies as intact as they could.

Jon Akass, The Sun’s chief columnist, stood alone looking down on the scene. He had a pen in one hand and notebook in the other, but I didn’t see him write. Akass had seen the aftermath of Aberfan, had reported from Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Biafra, the Congo, and other African wars. He had been at the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. His piece next morning began: ‘Maratha is the most dreadful place I have ever seen.’

The smell from that day was impossible to wash away. It was still there shower after shower, but I think by then it was only in my head.

I left Cyprus within a few days of seeing the Maratha massacre. My departure was not straightforward; there were no organised flights or ships. The concierge at the Nicosia Hilton appeared to be the best connected man in the city, and he promised Barry Came of Newsweek and myself a comfortable passage by sea to Greece in return for a substantial amount of cash. The dockside was a crush of refugees, many of whom were left stranded as our overcrowded ship sailed away. Refugees were crowded on every deck, sitting and sleeping without access to food, drink, or hygiene. Came and I became popular when word spread that we had a cabin with a bathroom.

That same year, I attended the revolution in Portugal. It was one of the century’s most peaceful, and became known as the Carnation Revolution. Crowds came into the streets with flowers, children pushed carnations into the barrels of guns, and the US government soon put aside its fears of a communist takeover. There were tanks in the streets, riots, and some people died, but my lasting memory was of the evening in Oporto, when I was hurrying to file after a town-square protest. Walking towards me as I raced down the street was Graham Greene, who loved to visit the world’s troubled places. When I smiled at him, he smiled back.

These assignments gave me confidence. I was sure I was qualified to apply when I heard that Rupert Murdoch wanted someone from The Sun to join the all-Australian News bureau in New York.

Ken Donlan glared over his desk. ‘You can forget about that, old boy,’ he said. ‘There’s a long queue ahead of you for that job.’