Introduction
1. Paul Brighton, Original Spin: Downing Street and the Press in Victorian England (I. B. Tauris, London, 2016).
Chapter 1: The Early Days of War Reporting
1. For a fuller discussion of this debate see Paul Moorcraft, The Jihadist Threat: The Reconquest of the West? (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2015) pp.9-11.
2. R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995).
3. One of the best of the recent general histories of the subject is Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A new history of the Crusades (Penguin, London, 2006).
4. Caroline Chapman, Russell of The Times: Despatches and Diaries (Bell and Hyman, London, 1984) pp.41-2.
5. Nathaniel Lande, Despatches from the Front: A history of the American war correspondent (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996) xi.
6. Lande, Despatches from the Front, p.6.
7. I knew John quite well after our time as instructors at Sandhurst; thereafter he became the doyen of British military historians. I am not entirely convinced of his argument, however, in his introduction to Phillip Knightley, The Eye of War: Words and Photographs from the Front Line (Smithsonian, Washington D.C., not dated) pp.32-3.
8. For an elaboration of this theme, see James Morris, Heaven’s Command: an imperial progress (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986) pp.431-8.
9. For a colourful recent account of the Battle of Omdurman, see Simon Read, Winston Churchill Reporting (Capo Press, Philadelphia, 2015). For a more detailed account of British involvement in Sudan, Paul Moorcraft, Omar al-Bashir and Africa’s Longest War (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2015).
10. Peter Young and Peter Jesser, The Media and the Military: from the Crimea to Desert Strike (Macmillan, London, 1977) p.29.
11. Miles Hudson and John Stanier, War and the Media (Sutton, Stroud, 1977) p.33.
12. Raymond Sibbald, The War Correspondents: The Boer War (Sutton, Stroud, 1993) p.232.
Chapter 2: The World Wars
1. Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime (Allen and Unwin, London, 1928) p.57.
2. ‘Anastasie’ was the name given to the French system of censoring soldiers’ letters.
3. To quote the eminent Scottish historian Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War (Allen Lane, London, 1998) p.213.
4. M. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the First World War (Macmillan, London 1982) p.263.
5. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Faber and Faber, London, 1930) p.176. For a general background, see J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990).
6. See G. D. Sheffield, ‘Oh! What a Futile War: Representations of the Western Front in Modern British Media and Popular Culture’, in Ian Stewart and Susan Carruthers, Eds., War, Culture and the Media (Flick, Trowbridge, UK, 1996). Sheffield is critical of the exaggerated historical legacy of the war poets: ‘At bottom, the media obsession with a handful of unrepresentative soldiers reflects the fact that British perceptions of the First World War too often stem from literary rather than historical sources.’ (p.65). See Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon, London, 2005). See also Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (Pimlico, London, 1998).
7. Lloyd Clark, ‘Civilians entrenched: the British home front and attitudes to the First World War, 1914–18’, in Stewart and Carruthers, War, Culture and the Media, op. cit., p.48. Social advances during the war have been questioned. See, for example, John Bourne, ‘Total War 1: The Great War’, in Charles Townshend, ed. The Oxford History of Modern War (Oxford University Press Oxford, 2005) pp.136–7.
8. Hugh Cecil, ‘Why the press hid the truth’, the Sunday Times, (London) 12 April 1998.
9. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) p.316. Fussell has been extensively criticised for his factual errors but his main themes about the cultural impact remain valid.
10. For an excellent summary of the role of cameras and photographers, see Duncan Anderson, Glass Warriors: The Camera at War (Collins, London, 2005).
11. Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement (Frank Cass, London, 1992). His study analysed, inter alia, the Economist, the New Statesman, the Spectator, Sunday Times (London), and Observer.
12. Cited in Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Mythmaker (John Hopkins University, Baltimore, 2004) p.156.
13. According to Anderson, Glass Warriors, op. cit., p.122.
14. Cited in Trevor Royle, War Report: The War Correspondent’s View of Battle from the Crimea to the Falklands (Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1987) p.127.
15. George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War (Mercury, New York, 1961) p.211. For a useful summary, see ‘Fascism and the English’, in Fred Inglis, People’s Witness: The Journalist in Modern Politics (Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2002) pp.125-47.
16. For a useful summary of the debate, see Knightley, The First Casualty, op. cit., pp.187-93. See also Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Pelican, London, 1986) pp.626-7. An excellent update of the debate can be found in Nicholas Rankin, Telegram from Guernica (Faber, London, 2003) pp.114-47.
17. Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American ‘Neutrality’ in World War II (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995) p.3.
18. See Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945, edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, (Pimlico, London, 2006).
19. Khaldei took perhaps the best-known picture from the Russian side of the war. For a while he was a Soviet favourite, taking portraits of the party elite. But in 1948 he lost his job – either because he was Jewish or because he had expressed favourable opinions about Tito; either was an offence that could lead to being fired, or a firing squad, in the time of severe Stalinist paranoia.
20. Brian Best, Reporting the Second World War (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2015) p.210.
Chapter 3: The Cold War
1. Tom Hopkinson, Of This Our Time (Hutchinson, London, 1984). When Hopkinson edited Drum he secured exclusive eyewitness accounts and photographs of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. Active in journalism training in Africa and the UK; in particular, he helped to set up the pioneering Centre for Journalism Studies at Cardiff University where I had the privilege to teach for three years.
2. Colonel Lewis B. ‘Chesty’ Puller to reporter Keyes Beech in ‘This Was No Retreat’, Chicago Daily News, 11 December 1950, cited in Nathaniel Lande, Dispatches from the Front: A History of the American War Correspondent (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1966) p.277.
3. Brian Lapping, The End of Empire (Paladin, London, 1989) p.235.
4. Robert Harris, Sunday Times, 12 August 1990, cited in W. Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1991) p.ix.
5. The French collectively tried to blank out the humiliation, and the historical truths, of the occupation. The impression created was not of a small minority, but almost the whole country resisting the Nazis. A 1969 film, a four-and-a-half hour epic called, in English, ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’, powerfully challenged the self-deceiving myth.
6. David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (Weidenfeld, London, 2004); Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Henry Holt, New York, 2004).
7. Cited in (Lt Col) John Hughes-Wilson, Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-ups (Robinson, London, 2004) p.206.
8. McNamara’s first apologia was his In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Vintage Books, New York, 1996); see also his Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (Public Affairs, New York, 1999).
9. Peter Arnett, Live from the Battlefield (Corgi, London, 1994) pp.91, 113.
10. See, for example, Kevin Williams, ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Mass Media, Public Opinion and the Vietnam War’ in John Eldridge, ed., Getting the Message (Routledge, London, 1993).
11. Gloria Emerson, ‘Remembering Women War Correspondents’ in Tad Bartimus et al., War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam (Random House, New York, 2002) p.xx.
12. Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000) p.151.
13. Peter Young and Peter Jesser, The Media and the Military: From the Crimea to Desert Strike (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997) p.80.
14. Brian Hanrahan and Robert Fox, ‘I Counted Them All Out and I Counted Them All Back’: The Battle for the Falklands (BBC, 1982) p.19.
15. Robert Harris, Gotcha: The Media, the Government and the Falklands Crisis (Faber and Faber, London, 1983) p.57.
16. Robert Fox, Eye Witness Falklands (Methuen, London, 1982) p.75.
17. Martin Howard, ‘Managing Media: The MoD View after September 11’, 2002 Rolls Royce lecture, Cardiff University. Howard was my boss for a while in the MoD and he was always calm and reasonable, unlike some other senior MoD mandarins who later adopted the shouty and foul-mouthed style of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s main spin doctor. Howard moved on to direct the Defence Intelligence Staff where he was well respected.
18. For a poignant naval view of the media, and the war in general, see David Tinker, A Message from the Falklands (Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK, 1983). Lieutenant Tinker RN died three days before the end of the war. The Observer called Tinker ‘the nearest we are likely to get to a Falklands Wilfred Owen’.
19. For a useful study of how opposing voices were stilled, see Glasgow University Media Group, War and Peace News (Open University, Maidenhead, 1985). Also, D. Mercer, G. Mungham, and K. Williams, The Fog of War: The Media on the Battlefield (Heinemann, London,1987). For a very different perspective, see the views of the Falklanders portrayed vividly in Graham Bound, Falkland Islanders at War (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2002).
20. This at least was Phillip Knightley’s view: see The First Casualty, pp.478, 481.
21. William Boot, ‘Wading Around in the Panama Pool’, Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1990. William Boot was the pseudonym of Christophe Hanson of the Seattle Post-Intelligence.
22. Young and Jesser, op. cit., The Media and the Military, p.157.
23. Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1988).
24. Jonathan Mermin, Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post-Vietnam Era (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999) pp.36-65.
25. Martin Walker, The Cold War (Vintage, London, 1994) p.347. Walker was the American bureau chief of the Guardian when he wrote the book.
26. Robert Skidelsky, The World After Communism (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1995) p.195.
27. Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda (HarperPress, London, 2006). See also Paul Moorcraft, The Jihadist Threat: The Re-conquest of the West? (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2015).
Chapter 4: African ‘Sideshows’?
1. Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, (Chatto and Windus, London: 1988) p.25. See also Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (Routledge, New York, 1999) p.312.
2. Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business, (Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1992).
3. Frank Barton, The Press of Africa: Persecution and Perseverance (Africana, New York, 1979) p.ix.
4. For a detailed account see Paul Moorcraft and Peter McLaughlin, The Rhodesian War – 50 years on from UDI (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2015).
5. Anthony Clayton, Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa Since 1950 (University College of London, London, 1990) p.96.
6. Author interviews, 1979–81, with Ken Flower, head of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation. Flower said that a British Marine brass band and a company of paratroopers would have done the trick – the few South African hotheads in the Rhodesian Light Infantry would have been sorted out by loyalists. White Rhodesians were generally intensely loyal to the Crown but they despised the Labour government.
7. For a comment on Cecil’s death, see Ed Harriman, Hack: Home Truths About Foreign News (Zed, London, 1987) pp.124–5. Richard Cecil was a colleague and squash partner of mine. I interviewed witnesses of the incident. Cecil sometimes carried a gun, as did many of the correspondents, even when working for liberal British newspapers. Despite much discussion of the issue and the refusal of some journalists to bear arms (I worked inter alia for Time magazine, which did not allow the carrying of weapons), many felt it necessary to be armed outside the towns. The guerrillas rarely asked for press cards before opening fire on whites.
8. Unlike South Africa, blacks could vote on a restricted franchise and had limited seats in parliament. In 1979 universal franchise was introduced. The separate roll for whites was removed after two general elections, as per the Lancaster House agreement.
9. For a perceptive if rather languid account of the mood of whites at the end of the war, see Denis Hills, The Last Days of White Rhodesia (Chatto and Windus, London, 1981). For a brilliantly written but also highly personalised bestseller of this period, see Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House, New York, 2001).
10. For a lively account of foreign correspondents in Rhodesia, see Chris Munnion, ‘Secrets of the Sergeants’ Mess’ in his Banana Sunday: Datelines from Africa (William Waterman, Rivonia, South Africa, 1993). Munnion, who worked for the London Daily Telegraph, was rightly considered the doyen of foreign hacks in this period. I ran the Salisbury press club, as its deputy chairman, in the crucial transition period, 1979-1980.
11. For example, Jeremy Brickhill, ‘Zimbabwe’s Poisoned Legacy: Secret War in Southern Africa’, Covert Action Quarterly 43 (Winter 1992–93) pp.58-60. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe (Faber and Faber, London, 1981). Martin Meredith, The Past is Another Country, (André Deutsch, London, 1979). David Caute produced a more literary account in his Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia (Allen Lane, London: 1983). A comprehensive summary of white attitudes can be found in Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock, Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia c. 1970–1980 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993). Godwin was a Rhodesian-born journalist who wrote for the London Sunday Times and later worked for the BBC. He also wrote a minor classic on his childhood in the country: Mukiwa (Picador, London: 1996).
12. Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2004) p.471.
13. The phrase is South African journalist Rian Malan’s in his ‘Not All the News Is Fit to Print’, Frontline, Johannesburg, December 1989 p.9. Rian and I were regular contributors to this radical (in South African terms) magazine. Its famously eccentric editor, Denis Beckett, gathered around him a small stable of controversial writers, whom he nearly always forgot to pay.
14. According to Elaine Potter’s thesis, the Afrikaans-language newspapers acted as a sort of a mild internal opposition as well as a mobiliser for Afrikaner nationalism (Elaine Potter, The Press as Opposition [Chatto and Windus, London, 1975]). Hachten and Gifford argued later that Pretoria had launched a ‘total onslaught’ on the media (W. A. Hachten and C. A. Giffard, The Press and Apartheid (University of Wisconsin, Madison,1984). Radical writers such as Ruth and Keyan Tomaselli maintained that all white-owned media, as tools essentially of capitalist mining houses, offered only cosmetic opposition to apartheid: R. Tomaselli, K. Tomaselli and J. Muller, The Press in South Africa (Currey, London, 1987).
15. For a comprehensive summary of all these wars, see Paul Moorcraft, African Nemesis:War and Rvolution in Southern Africa 1945-2010 (Brassey’s, London, 1994). I made a number of TV documentaries while travelling in territory controlled by Renamo, the main anti-Marxist rebel movement in Mozambique. The best surveys of the destabilisation wars were Joseph Hanlon, Apartheid’s Second Front (Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK,1986) and Beggar Your Neighbour (Catholic Institute for International Relations, London, 1986). See also Phyllis Johnson and David Martin, eds., Destructive Engagement (Zimbabwe Publishing, Harare: 1986) and their Apartheid Terrorism: The Destabilisation Report (Commonwealth/Currey, London, 1989). For a more recent South African perspective on military influence, see Hilton Hamann’s Days of the Generals, (Zebra, Cape Town, 2001). Hamann was the military correspondent of the Johannesburg Sunday Times.
16. Fred Bridgland, The War for Africa: 12 Months That Transformed a Continent (Ashanti, Gibraltar, 1990); Helmoed Römer-Heitman, War in Angola: The Final South African Phase (Ashanti, Gibraltar, 1990). For an overall assessment of the main battle at Cuito Cuanavale (1987-88), see Greg Mills and David Williams, Seven Battles That Shaped South Africa, (Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2006) pp.167–88.
17. According to his obituary in the London Telegraph, 2 November 2006.
18. Greg Marinovich and Joa˜o Silva, The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (Arrow, London, 2001) p.261.
19. One of the best accounts of this period is Patti Waldmeir’s Anatomy of a Miracle (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1997); see also John Simpson’s Dispatches from the Barricades (Hutchinson, London, 1994) pp.256-87. For a black journalist’s perspective, see Rich Mkhondo, Reporting South Africa (Currey, London, 1993). For an academic survey, see Gordon S. Jackson, Breaking Story: The South African Press (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1993).
20. Greg McLaughlin, The War Correspondent (Pluto, London, 2002) pp.147-8; C. Jensen, Censored: The News That Didn’t Make the News and Why (Four Walls, New York, 1994) pp.234-8.
21. Sam Kiley, ‘My Agony and Some Ecstasy in Reporting Africa’, The Times (London), 26 September 1998.
Chapter 5: Europe’s Wars
1. Duncan Anderson, Glass Warriors: The Camera at War (Collins, London, 2005) p.187.
2. In his testimony before the US House Armed Services Committee, 25 May 1993, p.41.
3. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992) p.31. The Serbs were guilty of intentionally killing a large number of journalists. Anthony Loyd of the London Times, worried about being captured and killed by Serb forces, said: ‘The Serbs hated what the foreign press did almost as much as the foreign press hated what the Serbs did.’ Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So (Penguin, New York, 2001) p.308.
4. Mark Thompson, A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (Vintage, London, 1992) p.198. The simplistic critique of Serb’s culpability was analysed, consciously from the left, by Diana Johnstone in Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto, London, 2002).
5. Mark Urban, UK Eyes Alpha: The Inside Story of British Intelligence (Faber and Faber, London, 1996) p.213.
6. General Sir Michael Rose, Fighting for Peace (Harvill, London, 1998) p.75. For another soldier’s perspective, see Milos Stankovic, Trusted Mole (HarperCollins, London, 2000). Stankovic was one of the three fluent Serbo-Croat speakers in the British Army. He acted as Rose’s translator. Besides saving many Bosnian lives, he was awarded medals for gallantry, and then accused, unjustly, under the Official Secrets Act, of being a Serb spy. He was arrested while starting his course at the Joint Services Command and Staff College on 16 October 1997. The JSCSC had just opened for the first time and his arrest by the Ministry of Defence Police caused quite a stir in the College and the Army. I was teaching in the next seminar room at the time of the arrest. Stankovic was acquitted. See also Colonel Bob Stewart, Broken Lives: A Personal View of the Bosnian Conflict (HarperCollins, London, 1994). Stewart was the British commander in central Bosnia between October 1992 and May 1993.
7. I worked briefly in the UK Ministry of Defence media ops team in Pristina at the beginning of NATO involvement. My perception was of a very hardworking and open attempt by the military to ‘feed the reptiles’, as the Army jargon went.
8. Editorial, ‘Too Many Truths’, British Journalism Review, vol.10, no.2, 1999, p.5.
9. Diana Johnstone, ‘Seeing Yugoslavia through a Dark Glass: The Ideological Uniformity of the Media’, in Lenora Forstel, ed., War, Lies and Videotape: How Media Monopoly Stifles Truth (International Action Center, New York, 2000) pp.156-7.
10. Desmond Hamil, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969-1984 (Methuen, London, 1985) p.171.
11. Peter Taylor, ‘The Military, the Media and the IRA’, in Stephen Badsey, ed., The Media and International Security (Cass, London, 2000) p.36.
12. I was on patrol in 1999 in Pristina with soldiers from Northern Ireland. One tough sergeant was boasting of his long experience in house-to-house searches ‘back home’: ‘Learned all I know from there,’ he said. In the next breath, he shouted at a group of Kosovo Albanians who had illegally taken over a Serb house, ‘Open up or I’ll kick down the door.’ ‘They must have different doors in Belfast,’ I said quietly to him. ‘That one is reinforced steel.’ Without a comment, or hesitation, the sergeant sent his squad around the back to enter via the windows.
13. David Miller, Don’t Mention the War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and the Media (Pluto, London, 1994).
14. Susan Carruthers, The Media at War (Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK, 2000) p.190.
15. The comparison is made by P. J. O’Rourke in his Holidays in Hell.
16. This is why David Miller chose the title of his book. See endnote 13.
17. David Loyn, Frontline: The True Story of the British Mavericks Who Changed the Face of War Reporting (Penguin, London, 2005) p.267. Anthony Loyd of the London Times made a similar comparison: ‘It was an act of mass murder. In Bosnia I had seen men guilty of attempting to take innocent life; in Chechnya I found the Russians as coldbloodedly culpable in their complete disregard for innocent life. Basically, they just blew the place to pieces.’ Loyd, My War Gone By, op. cit., p.243.
18. See, for example, Paul Moorcraft, ‘Revolution in Nepal: Can the Nepalese Army Prevent a Maoist Victory?’ RUSI Journal, October 2006, vol.151, no.5, pp.44-50.
Chapter 6: The Middle East and Afghanistan
1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order (London: Touchstone, 1998).
2. Cited in Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and US Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (University of California, Berkeley, 2005) p.172.
3. The CIA funded the Afghan resistance, and this later included bin Laden but too much has been made of the direct financial linkage. Bin Laden largely used his own, not the CIA’s, money. For one side of the argument, see Richard Miniter, Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror (Regnery, Washington DC, 2005) pp.11-22. The funding issue was popularised in Charlie Wilson’s War, a 2007 film about Democratic Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, who conspired with zealous CIA agents to fund the Afghan fighters. Tom Hanks, who starred, captured Wilson’s charm, but not his macho recklessness.
4. Hamid Mowlana, ‘The Role of the Media in the US-Iranian Conflict’ in A. Arno and W. Dissanyake, eds., The News Media in National and International Conflict (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1984) p.87. See also W. A. Dorman and E. Omeed, ‘Reporting Iran the Shah’s Way’, Columbia Journalism Review, vol.17, no.5, January-February 1979, pp.27-33.
5. The longest conventional war between two states. Vietnam was a civil war; China and Japan’s conflict over Manchuria never reached the point where one state declared war on the other. For a clearly written and balanced account of the war, see Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Conflict (Paladin, London, 1990).
6. Sandy Gall, Behind Russian Lines: An Afghan Journal (Sidgwick and Jackson, London: 1983). His companion, Nigel Ryan, takes a slightly different view in his often amusing, A Hitch or Two in Afghanistan (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1983).
7. Another memoir by a daredevil cameraman is Jon Steele, War Junkie: One Man’s Addiction to the Worst Places on Earth (Corgi, London, 2003).
8. For an insight into the enigmatic Jouvenal, see David Loyn, Frontline: The True Story of the British Mavericks Who Changed the Face of War Reporting (Penguin, London, 2005). I worked with Jouvenal briefly in the early days of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. He seemed to be cast from the same heroic mould as adventurers such as Wilfred Thesiger.
9. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: Afghanistan, Al Qaida and the Holy War (Pluto, London, 2003) pp.48, 57.
10. Philip M. Taylor, War and the Media: Propaganda and persuasion in the Gulf War (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997) pp.45-6.
11. Such was Hugh Miles’s view in Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Changed the World (Abacus, London, 2006) p.72. Palestinian support for Hamas has declined in the decade since this book was published, not least with the rise of the Islamic State.
12. Cited in Stephanie Gutmann, The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy (Encounter, San Francisco, CA, 2006) p.3.
13. Ibid., p.271.
14. Gadi Wolfsfeld, Media and Political Conflict: News from the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997) p.204.
15. Ibid., p.197.
Chapter 7: The Long War
1. John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience (Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2004) p.5.
2. Paul McGeough, Manhattan to Baghdad (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2003) p.86.
3. Hugh Miles, Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World (Abacus, London, 2005) p.124.
4. Gary Bernsten and Ralph Pezzullo, Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and Al-Qaeda (Three Rivers, New York, 2005) p.306. See also Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail (Brassey’s, Inc., Washington DC, 2004).
5. Miles, Al-Jazeera, op. cit., p.78.
6. The quotes, in order, were cited in: Mark Thomas, foreword, in David Miller, ed., Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq (Pluto, London, 2004) p.x; Michael Massing, Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq (New York Review of Books, 2004) p.25; Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Harper Perennial, London, 2006) p.139.
7. Rand Beers, who served on the staff of the National Security Council during the run up to the war. Cited in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin, London, 2006) p.56.
8. Public Affairs Guidance on Embedding Media during possible future operations in the US Central Command’s Area of Responsibility, February 2003. This was put on line for journalists.
9. Brian Appleyard, ‘Lost in the Media Blitz’, Sunday Times (London), 30 March 2003.
10. Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq (Lyons Guilford, CT, 2003) p.xi. For details of journalists killed in the war, see The International News Safety Institute, Dying to Tell the Story: The Iraq War and the Media, a Tribute. (International News Safety Institute, Brussels, 2003).
11. Paul Moorcraft, ‘The Missiles That Miss’, New Statesman, 7 April 2003, pp.20-2.
12. Michael Clarke, ‘Request Backup’, Sunday Times (London), 30 March 2003.
13. Peter Preston, ‘Here Is the News: Too Much Heat’, Observer, 30 March 2003.
14. See Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Knopf, New York, 2006).
15. The phrase is that of the Daily Mirror’s defence correspondent, Chris Hughes, Road Trip to Hell: Tabloid Tales of Saddam, Iraq and a Bloody War (Monday, London, 2006) p.250.
16. See Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown, New York, 2006) pp.390-6. Isikoff worked for Newsweek and Corn for The Nation.
17. Some of the most controversial were Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, ibid. Ron Susskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11 ( Simon and Schuster, New York, 2006); and Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold? The Decline and Fall of Truth (Penguin, New York, 2006).
18. Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2006) p.xiv.
19. James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA under the Bush Administration (Free Press, New York, 2006) p.162. Risen won a Pulitzer in 2006.
20. E-mail communication to me in April 2007. See also Sam Dealey, ‘At War in the Fields of the Drug Lords’, GQ, October 2006.
21. For details of Terry Lloyd’s death see International News Safety Institute, Dying to the Tell the Story: The Iraq War and the Media, a Tribute (International News Safety Institute, Brussels, 2003) pp.21-31. The specific targeting of hacks in Iraq was something new, according to some writers (though they had also been deliberately killed in Bosnia as well): see Phillip Knightley, ‘History or Bunkum?’ in David Miller, ed., Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq (Pluto, London, 2004) pp.100-107. See also Herbert N. Foerstel, Killing the Messenger: Journalists at Risk in Modern Warfare (Praeger, Westport, CT, 2006).
22. For a full account of the wars in Sudan, see Paul Moorcraft, Omar al-Bashir and Africa’s Longest War (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2015).
23. For a summary of the dangers of UN intervention, see Paul Moorcraft, ‘A Replay of Iraq Beckons in Darfur, if We Send in Troops’, Guardian, 6 April 2006.
24. Faisal Bodi, ‘Target practice’, Journalist, (UK) January–February 2006, p.10. The publication is the organ of the UK National Union of Journalists.
25. See Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq (Tarcher/Penguin, New York, 2006).
26. For a very succinct, and damning, list of stories which had been planted in the Western media in general as part of the strategic information campaign, see Nick Davies, Flat Earth News (Vintage, London, 2009) pp.218-19.
27. John Mackinlay, ‘Losing Arab Hearts and Minds’, review essay, RUSI Journal, vol.151, no.4, August 2006, p.86. John, a former colonel, is a wise fellow, as I discovered in many conversations when we both served as directing staff at the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College.
Chapter 8: The Rise of the Islamic State
1. Cited in Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars: The Inside Story (Simon and Schuster, London, 2010) p.69.
2. Bob Drogin, Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused a War (Random House, New York, 2007).
3. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website (Cape, London, 2010). See also David Leigh and Luke Harding, Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (Guardian, London books, 2010).
4. For a lively discussion on the future of the internet, see Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, (Knopf, New York, 2010).
5. A feature film was based on da Silva’s and Greg Marinovich’s book, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War. Both explore the complex motivations of the four members: opposition to apartheid, personal ambition, macho sense of adventure and the more prosaic business of earning a crust.
Chapter 9: The Mechanics of Reporting Peace and War
1. Cited in Nik Gowing, ‘Real Time Television Coverage of Armed Conflicts and Diplomatic Crises: Does It Pressure or Distort Foreign Policy Decisions?’ JFK School of Government discussion paper, pp.94-1, Harvard University, June 1994, p.64.
2. Susan D. Moeller, ‘Locating Accountability: The Media and Peacekeeping’, Journal of International Affairs, Spring 2002, vol.55, no.2, pp.369-90.
3. Virgil Hawkins, ‘The Price of Inaction: The Media and Humanitarian Intervention’, The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, 2001. www.jha.ac/articles/a066.htm. See also John C. Hammock and Joel R. Charny, ‘Emergency Response as Morality Play: The Media, the Relief Agencies, and the Need for Capacity Building’, in R. Rotberg and T. Weiss, eds., From Massacres to Genocide: The Media, Public Policy, and Humanitarian Crises, (World Peace Foundation, Cambridge, MA, 1996) pp.115-16.
4. David Shaw, ‘Foreign News Shrinks in Era of Globalization’, Los Angeles Times, 27 September 2001. C. Moisey, ‘The Foreign News Flow in the Information Age’, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Harvard University discussion paper D-23, November 1996. J. Hoge, ‘Foreign News: Who Gives a Damn?’ Columbia Journalism Review, vol.36, November-December 1997, pp.48-52; G. Utley, ‘The Shrinking of Foreign News: From Broadcast to Narrowcast’, Foreign Affairs, vol.76, no.2, 1997, pp.2-10.
5. Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News Media, Foreign Policy and Intervention (Routledge, London, 2002).
6. Jim Naureckas, ‘Media on the Somalia Intervention: Tragedy Made Simple’, March 1993, http://www.fair.org/extra/9303/somalia.html.
7. See, for example, Charles J. Hanley, ‘U.S. Starts Iraqi ‘Good News’ Offensive’, Washington Post, 17 October 2003.
8. J. Metzl, ‘Information Intervention: When Switching Channels Isn’t Enough’, Foreign Affairs, vol.76, no.6, November-December 1997, pp.15-20.
9. Justin Lewis et al., Shoot First and Ask Questions Later: Media Coverage of the 2003 Iraq War (Peter Lang, New York, 2006) p.63. The academic team comprised staff from the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. I had the privilege of teaching fulltime in the early 1990s in what is probably Europe’s leading journalism department. I returned later to teach parttime as a visiting professor.
10. See David Miller, ‘Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control?’ in Yahya R. Kamalipour and Nancy Snow, eds., War, Media and Propaganda: A Global Perspective (Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford, 2004).
11. Lewis et al, Shoot First, op. cit., p.35.
12. Specialities/military roles are defined in the British Army by numbers G 1–7. The US military uses ‘J’ not ‘G’.
13. Robert Partridge, ‘Absurdity of War’ in Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, eds., Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq (Lyons, Guilford, CT, 2003) p.253. Partridge, a very companionable officer, had a good way with hacks. I worked with him in Pristina and was wearing standard UK Army camouflage uniform (I was serving in the MoD at the time) but rigged out with a journalist-style camera jacket with lots of pockets. Partridge joked, ‘Are you ready for fishing or fighting?’ The military sometimes used to call hacks ‘fishermen’ because of their multi-pocketed jackets. In civilian life, Partridge owned a company making special effects for movies, especially the use of guns and explosives. Being a ballistics expert as well as working in the film industry were useful complements to his military role.
14. Nik Gowing, ‘Conflict, the Military and the Media – A New Optimism?’, the Officer, May–June 1997 p.1.
15. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception (Center for Media and Democracy, New York, 2003).
16. Andrew Marr, My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (Pan, London, 2004) p.327.
17. Anthony Loyd was also the author of a minor masterpiece, My War Gone By, I Miss It So (Penguin, London, 1999).
18. Emma Daly, ‘Reporting from the Front Line’, in Stephen Glover, ed., Secrets of the Press: Journalists on Journalism (Allen Lane, London, 1999) p.275.
19. Martin Bell, Through Gates of Fire: A Journey into World Disorder (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 2003) p.182. The ‘war zone thug’ description is in the subtitle of his book, In Harm’s Way (Penguin, London, 1996).
20. Interviewed by David Loyn, Frontline: The True Story of the British Mavericks who Changed the Face of War Reporting (Michael Joseph, London, 2005) p.257.
21. Anthony Feinstein, Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2006).
22. John Carey, The Faber Book of Reportage (Faber, London 1987) pp.xxxiv-xxxv.
Chapter 10: The End of Heroes?
1. Nik Gowing, ‘Real-time TV Coverage from War: Does It Make or Break Government Policy?’ in James Gow, et al., eds., Bosnia by Television (British Film Institute, London, 1996) pp.81-91. See also Paul Moorcraft, ‘CNN: The New Emperor of International Politics?’ New Zealand International Review, November–December 1997, pp.22-5.
2. Quoted in Johanna Neuman, Lights, Camera, War: Is Media Technology Driving International Politics? (St Martin’s Press, New York, 1996) pp.10-11.
3. Jamie Shea, ‘Modern Conflicts and the Media: Dealing with the Dilemmas’, in World Defence Systems (RUSI, London, 2000) pp.36-8. See also Warren P. Strobel, Late Breaking Foreign Policy (US Institute for Peace, Washington, DC, 1997).
4. Jeremy Paxman, ‘All Is Not What It Seems’, Guardian (Media), 8 May 2000.
5. See Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (HarperCollins, London, 2006) pp.xix, xxiii. Fisk said that the hero of Foreign Correspondent, Huntley Haverstock, whose words I have quoted, encouraged the young Fisk to become a journalist. Fisk also cites Amira Hass, the Israeli journalist, who said that the prime role of journalism is to monitor the centres of power.