Chapter 3

The Cold War

‘The onrush of the barbarians’ was Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s description of the arrival in 1945 of the Red Army in Berlin; these same ‘barbarians’ would within a few years acquire nuclear weapons. For a millennium war had either been about religion, secession, or the balance of power. The Cold War, initially about German secession, was inspired by a combination of causes: balance of power and an ideological rivalry that spanned the globe for forty-four years. The two great successors to the European state tradition, the United States and the USSR, fought perhaps the last and greatest of Europe’s wars. And, as with the two previous world wars, the cold version soon spread. Some of the conflict was focused on Europe – for example, the Berlin Blockade, the Hungarian uprising, and the erection of the Berlin Wall – but most of the actual fighting took place on the peripheries. The wars of independence and ‘national liberation’, especially in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, were essentially proxy wars for the new superpowers in a bipolar world.

Two European camps were formed on either side of the Iron Curtain, each led by an overarching military alliance that was aimed at the external rival, but they were also protection rackets to dominate the internal coalitions as well. Yet the American bomb and the dollar also saved Western Europe for democracy. The military doctrines of nuclear deterrence became a form of global insurance against Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The MAD insurance came closest to breakdown in the eyeball-to-eyeball Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Devout theorists developed a Dr Strangelove-like doctrine of thinking about the unthinkable – how to actually fight a nuclear war. Military writers immersed themselves in the arcane details of these doctrines, while conventional war correspondents were kept busy too. If the northern hemisphere was dominated by the threat of atomic Armageddon, then the south was frequently engulfed in the reality of insurgency.

Most of these wars of insurgency were perceived, and reported, through the prism of the Cold War. Meanwhile, in many Western European universities, two generations of arts and social science students were exposed to Marxist thinking. Later, few dons, if any, apologised or recanted when, after 1989, the USSR imploded and revealed what a Potemkin village the whole edifice had been. Battalions of journalists were also conscripted by the Marxist tradition, though it was never quite as divisive or subversive of media ethics as the Spanish Civil War. Both Moscow and Washington set up numerous covert fronts as media organisations to wage propaganda war, often staffed by talented journalists. Neither did many of these recant afterwards, though those who did were more likely to be found in Eastern rather than Western Europe, and barely at all in the United States.

The type of correspondents who liked to ‘get their boots dirty’ were busy in the period 1945 to 1953, when the rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union was especially intense. American journalists were primarily concerned with the triumphant communist victory in mainland China, though others were fascinated by the collapse of the British Empire. Associated Press’s Max Desfor, for example, photographed the massacres that resulted from the partition of India in 1947. Another British retreat was from Palestine. Stories from the Herald Tribune’s Homer Bigart and photographs by Frank E. Noel of Jewish girls being taken prisoner by British police, and of soldiers turning back desperate Holocaust survivors trying to disembark from the American-owned ship Exodus, influenced American popular opinion against the British. This pressure helped to precipitate the imperial scuttle from the Holy Land and elsewhere. Although Britain’s retreat from empire was in many respects less traumatic than others such as the French, its legacy – in Israel and in Pakistan especially – survives in many of today’s most dangerous crises. Meanwhile, Britain itself was about to launch into the first limited war of the nuclear age.

The Korean War

On 24 June 1950 the West assumed the Cold War was suddenly turning hot when communist North Korea invaded South Korea. For three years, under the banner of the United Nations, the West fought the most important campaign of the Cold War, which was essentially an American war. It was led by commanders who threatened atomic weapons but who in the end did not use them. Although Washington feared that the fall of the pro-Western, corrupt South Korea would constitute a domino that would tip other Asian states into the communist camp, it was not a war of survival to parallel the Second World War. Journalists assumed that, freed from the dictates of patriotism, they could report this war with little censorship. The US military soon decided otherwise. As American correspondent Hal Boyle remarked, this was the worst-reported war of modern times. Part of the reason was the actual request by some reporters for greater guidance from the military as to what they should or should not say. Some 270 correspondents were in theatre by the end of 1950, with only Wilfred Burchett and Alan Winnington covering the communist side. Most stayed at headquarters and out of the field; less than a fifth were on the front line, and many of these were Australians. The harsh terrain and weather, and the chaos of the disastrous first stage of the war, when the American-led forces were trapped in the small Pusan pocket, impelled journalists to rely on food, transport, and, above all, communications supplied by the US armed forces. All copy required routeing through army headquarters in Tokyo, which resulted in the opportunity for selection, delay, or deliberate ‘loss’ of unfavourable material. Initially, however, little deliberate censorship was imposed, especially since most Western correspondents adhered to the propaganda line of an anticommunist crusade.

Korean war memorial, Washington DC. (Author)

The Allied commander was General Douglas MacArthur who, besides spending two years as a press liaison officer in Washington in his early career, had enjoyed being in the spotlight in his glory days at the end of the Second World War. He also deployed the media for his own purposes. He even encouraged Life and Newsweek magazines to publish pictures of the bodies of soldiers who had been killed by North Korean troops. But the UN side committed atrocities too, particularly the South Koreans, and the military situation was worsening. In December 1950 MacArthur imposed strict military censorship. The voluntary ‘staff officer’ style of Eisenhower and Montgomery was discarded. Journalists who didn’t ‘join the team’ were ejected from theatre; seventeen suffered this fate. The new medium of television had already penetrated 65 per cent of American homes but there was no means to send the signal directly to the viewer. So censored film footage slowly reached the Stateside television audience days after events occurred.

In September 1950 MacArthur decided to try to turn the war around with an ambitious but risky amphibious landing at Inchon. With 262 ships, it was the largest naval task force since 1945. Journalist James Cameron was in one of the assault ships with a group of other correspondents. He observed wryly that the ship had been ‘full of agitated and contending correspondents, all trying to appear insistently determined to land in Wave One, while contriving desperately to be found in Wave Fifty’. After the successful landings, South Korean forces treated prisoners appallingly. Cameron, a bloody-minded and determined Scot, complained to the UN command to no avail. Cameron reported on the atrocities and, along with photographs by Bert Hardy, sent the material to Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post. After much cross-checking and the inclusion of a photograph of North Korean atrocities, the story was set to be published when the proprietor of the magazine, Sir Edward Hulton, pulled it. Hopkinson protested and was fired. It became a cause célèbre on Fleet Street. This famous case demonstrates that censorship can stem from all sorts of causes. Hulton spiked the story not because of any official pressure; his own personal political views stopped the publication. Also petty personal factors may have intruded: Hopkinson objected to Hulton’s wife trying to install herself as fashion editor of the magazine. The proprietor subverted the truth about an important story and his editor was sacrificed. Nonetheless, Hopkinson went on to edit Drum in South Africa and to be knighted for his services to journalism.1

I. F. Stone was as determined as Cameron or Hopkinson to dissect the truth behind the official lies about the war. When his classic work The Hidden History of the Korean War was published, many journalists and the US government were quick to condemn it as Soviet propaganda. He had made himself almost unemployable in the era of McCarthyism, so he started the famous I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which became a financial success and an icon of the anti-war movement in the 1960s.

Many reports about atrocities and racism in the war were hushed up, as well as many acts of military incompetence. One long-delayed story was of the amazing collapse of morale among US prisoners of war, especially compared with the successful stoicism of Turkish PoWs. Nearly every major newspaper in Britain and the United States supported the war. This was the period of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt in the United States. No one wanted to be accused of giving succour to the red peril that now consisted, it was claimed, of a monolithic communist bloc in the form of both the Soviet Union and China. After Inchon, UN forces pushed up to the Chinese border, whereupon – after many warnings – the Chinese People’s Liberation Army intervened and propelled Western forces back down the peninsula. Hence the famous comment by a US Marine general, ‘Retreat, hell! We’re just attacking in another direction.’ Another Marine told a correspondent, ‘Remember, whatever you write, that this was not a retreat. All that happened was we found more Chinese behind us than in front of us. So we about-faced and attacked.’2

John Thomas Ward, a Baltimore Sun correspondent in the Korean war, 1951.

The war ended in a negotiated stalemate in the summer of 1953. The border between North and South Korea was roughly where it had been in the summer of 1950 (and where it is today). No peace, merely an armistice was the result. Technically, more than six decades later, a highly belligerent, and now nucleararmed, North Korea is still at war with the South. Perhaps the intractability of the conflict explains why the shooting war came and went with much bloodshed but precious little glory and left no mark on American imaginations, though nearly as many Americans died there as in Vietnam. The Korean tragedy produced few films or novels in the heroic mould. The movie M*A*S*H, the most popular televised icon of the war, was actually made during the Vietnam era and bears little reference to the harsh realities of the Korean situation at the time. In his account of the Korean conflict British war correspondent and historian Max Hastings concluded: ‘The war seemed an unsatisfactory, inglorious, and thus unwelcome memory.’

Many Asians did not want to forget the war, however. ‘Where America paid a price,’ according to Henry Kissinger, ‘was among revolutionary leaders of Southeast Asia and elsewhere, who discovered a method of warfare that avoided large-scale ground combat yet had the ability to wear down the resolve of a superpower.’ Korea, of course, was largely a conventional war where the Western industrialised powers had a marked advantage, but it spawned alternative, Maoist-style insurgencies that played to the strengths of weaker and more patient opponents.

Unlike later in Vietnam, Britain had joined in this fight reluctantly. The British were wary of MacArthur and played a part in encouraging President Truman to fire him. They feared, rightly, that the maverick military genius was trying to incite an all-out war with China. Not for the first time, the British showed better judgement than their American allies. During the Second World War the Americans had insisted that Chiang Kai-shek was the leader who would save China and that French military leader Charles de Gaulle was insignificant. In each case London took the contrary view and was proved correct. Regarding Korea, Prime Minister Clement Attlee displayed good sense in helping to dissuade Truman from using nuclear weapons. The British were also more sceptical about the anti-communist ruler of South Korea, Syngman Rhee.

Korea was a disaster for the profession of war correspondence. The frontline cadre often showed great physical courage but did not display the same moral courage in questioning the overall purpose and conduct of the war. As James Cameron said, it was a ‘prep school for Vietnam’. But would journalists do any better in the next Asian war?

French Indochina

If General MacArthur had underestimated the capabilities of his Asian foes, General Henri Navarre was to do the same in French Indochina. Leaders in Washington had supported Ho Chi Minh’s resistance to Japanese occupation of the French colony. They were to regret doing this in the same way that they rued their support in the 1980s for Osama bin Laden’s contribution to the war against the Soviets. By 1950 Ho Chi Minh’s campaign against the French was splitting domestic opinion along political party lines. The Francophone Vietnamese intellectuals could appeal directly to the growing communist and socialist forces in the metropole. French journalists in Indochina were likewise split in their loyalties.

Map of South Vietnam.

Frustrated with a nine-year guerrilla war, the French commanders, especially Navarre, wanted to win an outright victory in a single, major, pitched battle. They chose Dien Bien Phu on the Laotian border, situated in the middle of the anti-French Viet Minh supply lines. After a fifty-five-day siege, the French surrendered on 7 May 1954. Morale in Paris collapsed. The French withdrew from their Far East empire, leaving the Americans to defend the corrupt pro-Western regime in the south. But Vietnam’s division would not endure like Korea’s.

Three weeks after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the most distinguished war photographer of the time, Robert Capa, visited Nam Dinh in the Red River Valley. He was killed in action, still clutching his camera in his left hand.

Suez: No End of a Lesson

For the British, according to one historian, ‘Suez was an imperial cataclysm’.3 In 1956, two-thirds of Europe’s oil went through the Suez Canal, giving Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, a ‘thumb on our windpipe’, to use Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s phrase. (Thirty-five years later, two-thirds of the West’s oil came from a region menaced, it was argued, by Saddam Hussein: ‘Same windpipe; different thumb,’ according to a well-known British columnist.)4 Acting in collusion with Israel, in the autumn of 1956 Britain and France (which was anxious to curb Egyptian meddling in Algeria) sent their largest and most publicised punitive expedition to topple Nasser and so protect, it was believed, the canal and access to Middle East oil. Such old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy did not work in the American century. The canal was becoming irrelevant anyway as a new generation of giant oil super-tankers were unable to pass through it. Anglo-French imperial hubris looked back rather than forward. The United States stopped supporting the pound, and France could not proceed on its own. Both nations were forced into a humiliating withdrawal. The Suez crisis split Britain and its press in a way that foreshadowed the divisions over the 2003 Iraq War. With fewer than five million British television viewers in the first half of the 1950s, heavily read British newspapers cheered on the invasion, led by a particularly aggressive London Times. The Manchester Guardian, the Observer, and the New Statesman opposed it. The Daily Mirror demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, which he submitted two months later. France never again trusted the United States, while for London the lesson was not to wage war without the Americans. The military strategy worked, but the political policy failed.

In 1956 the Soviets took the opportunity to crush the simultaneous Hungarian uprising. For nearly a decade the US-funded Radio Free Europe had urged the subjugated peoples of Eastern Europe to throw off their chains. This was in fact against the spirit, if not the law, of Article 2.7 of the UN Charter, which forbade interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, although Moscow allowed the Hungarians precious little sovereignty. When they did rise up, and they were ruthlessly suppressed by the Soviets, America did little but protest. (The same mistake was to be made in the 1991 Gulf War when USgenerated covert propaganda broadcasts encouraged the Shi’ites and the Kurds to overthrow Saddam Hussein, even though ‘regime change’ was not yet part of official American policy.) In 1956 the Soviets arrested American photographer Georgette ‘Dickey’ Chapelle and held her for three months, but not before she was able to smuggle out stirring photographs of the uprising. The BBC’s Charles Wheeler was in Hungary reporting for the flagship ‘Panorama’ programme. When the Hungarians heard about the Suez invasion they were horrified. ‘As they saw it,’ wrote Wheeler, ‘London and Paris were throwing away the moral authority that might have deterred Moscow from committing aggression in Hungary.’ If the Soviets used Suez as a convenient cover to suppress a revolution, the Anglo-French imperial ignominy helped to fire up the revolutionary war in Algeria.

Algeria: A Savage War

The French may have helped Algeria as a nation but not most Algerians. ‘In this admirable country in which a spring without equal covers it with flowers and its light, men are suffering hunger and demanding justice’, in the poetic words of writer Albert Camus in 1958.The war for independence in the French territory lasted from 1954 to 1962. Paris, humiliated by the German occupation,5 the fall of Indochina, and the Suez fiasco, was determined to hold on to Algeria, which was regarded as part of France, la Patrie, and not a colony. In Indochina there had been a steady erosion of local control: pourissement (rotting) was the term used. But in Algeria the French army held firm and fought the nationalists (whom they perceived as communists) with their own guerre revolutionnaire. This soon became a dirty, not a revolutionary, war.

The conflict ended the careers of six French prime ministers, prompted the rise and nearly the fall of President Charles de Gaulle, and twice led France to the edge of civil war at home. When it ended, after unspeakable mutilations and torture, a million Algerians had died and a similar number of French settlers had fled. The Algerian revolutionary struggle was the most pitiless of the European colonial wars.

As in Indochina, Francophone Algerian intellectuals could influence socialist and communist supporters in the metropole. In addition to newspaper campaigns, radio stations in Tunisia, Cairo, and Damascus stirred up the many illiterate followers of he Algerian Front for National Liberation (Front de la Liberation Nationale, or FLN). After Suez, Colonel Nasser’s support for the FLN intensified, while Soviet propaganda focused effectively on Algeria as a symbol of Western imperialism. Unwilling to be seen opposing non-communist national aspirations for independence, Washington allowed an Algerian Office of Information to be set up in the United States, a significant media victory for the Algerian provisional government. The French authorities controlled the radio stations and French-language newspapers in Algeria. The divisions in France, however, and the antipathy of the pan-Arab press could not be disguised.

In military terms, the French army fought an effective counter-insurgency war, especially in the countryside, despite its pervasive sense of racial superiority and wilful confusion of nationalism with communism. Then the FLN stepped up its bombing campaign in the capital, Algiers. Foreign Legion paratroopers went in hard and the bombing declined rapidly, but thousands of Algerians simply disappeared, while many others were tortured. The savage countermeasures fuelled the anti-war lobby, aided by revelations in Le Monde that confirmed torture was a central feature of French policy. The FLN’s strategic information operations on torture influenced French and Muslim audiences as well as public opinion in the United States and at the UN. (The campaign had echoes in the criticisms of the US treatment of suspects in its war on terror after 2003.) The media exposure of ‘the loss of the moral compass’ as shown by tireless Dickey Chapelle’s photographs, particularly of French air raids on villages, reverberated around the world. Using a ploy extensively copied in the twenty-first-century wars, she had dressed as a veiled Muslim woman to gain access to the killing zones.

The French Fourth Republic collapsed and de Gaulle returned to power and offered self-determination, which was eventually achieved after a failed French military coup in Algeria. It is arguable whether the limited Western war reporting in theatre, in a conflict that was difficult to access, was a primary factor in the French defeat.

France was severely divided politically by other factors, not least by the ideological chasm of the Cold War. The assaults on the morality of war by leading intellectuals (such as Jean-Paul Sartre), trade unions, and political parties greatly influenced public opinion. The domestic media exacerbated or simply reported these existing intense divisions.

Britain’s Colonial Wars

Until Suez the tone of British reporting, especially in the still popular cinema newsreels, was that of a great power, one of the ‘Big Three’, alongside the Soviet Union and America. Despite the dramatic reduction in imperial land holdings, journalism often remained couched in an old-fashioned jingoistic, nation-superior style. British war correspondents were active, for example, in Cyprus from 1954 to 1959, when Colonel George Grivas waged a guerrilla war for union with Greece.

A much longer campaign was fought in Malaya (later Malaysia). Particularly for Americans, this became a beacon to counter-insurgency experts, being the one major communist insurgency in Asia that was defeated, although it was a special case. The insurgency, which ran from 1948 to 1960, was rooted in the Chinese, not Malay, population. The Malayans were largely Muslim and intrinsically suspicious of godless communism. The British initiated an effective hearts-and-minds campaign (the term gained its popularity in this war) and were ready to grant independence quickly, the one thing the French so long resisted in Algeria. The British could still be heavy-handed, not least in the resettlement programme, though it was often welcomed by the locals as an improvement in the quality of their lives, and not merely a case of being herded into fortified villages. Nevertheless, in a replay of the scandal in the camps of the Boer War, thousands died of disease. British soldiers did commit atrocities, but the practice was not a sustained policy in the way that torture had been used in Algeria. The worst example was the murder of twenty-four Chinese villagers by soldiers of the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards at Batang Kali in Selangor in December 1948. A cover story was concocted alleging they were guerrillas trying to escape. The truth did not come to light until an investigation by the People newspaper led to an admission of guilt in the House of Commons twenty-two years later.

Malaya was not well covered by war correspondents, not least because it was a virtually inaccessible jungle war, which required walking long distances, especially in tropical heat with an over-abundant supply of leeches and snakes. Every contact with the enemy required an average of 1,800 man-hours of gruelling foot patrols; only tough and lucky reporters witnessed or photographed a contact. Most correspondents who covered the war went to Malaya on press facility trips and filed ‘colour’ pieces about being on ‘patrol with the Jocks in the jungle’. Even so, some correspondents who participated in such managed forays gleaned a story. The Daily Mirror reported on the Army’s ‘league table’ of kills, which prompted questions in the House of Commons (though the Army carried on with the practice anyway). This was an interesting precedent for the American military’s later obsession with body counts in Vietnam.

Malaya was an example of both successful counter-insurgency and decolonisation. The military had deployed effective media operations in both its propaganda campaigns inside the country as well as largely deflecting a lessthan-inquisitive British press. The overall commander, General Gerald Templer, claimed that the British had simply reversed Mao’s doctrine and won the heartsand-minds campaign. But he had demography on his side and – like all successful commanders – he had more than his share of good fortune, not least with the media. In particular, Templer was lucky because there were no photographers like Dickey Chapelle in Malaya to take incriminating pictures. Dramatic photographs of the occasional atrocities or the frequently dismal conditions in the coastal resettlement camps could have derailed the effective police, army, and intelligence elements of the mainly political war.

Malaya became independent in 1957. In 1963 British territories in Borneo, Sarawak, and Sabah joined the renamed ‘Federation of Malaysia’, while Singapore was later encouraged to leave. The new government soon asked the British Army to return to assist in a confrontation with Indonesia over a disputed border with Borneo. Conscription had ended in Britain in 1960 and the Borneo confrontation was the first major operation in Malaysia by regular troops, often supported by the Special Air Service. Excellent leadership and first-rate UK, Gurkha, and Commonwealth troops deterred a major escalation, which could easily have become a debacle like Vietnam.

Malaya was an exception in the imperial recessional: it was a genuine communist revolt. That didn’t stop the ‘Reds-under-the-bed’ paranoia about a welter of anti-colonial conflicts in many UK newspapers, most notably the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph. Any instance of an African nationalist visiting Moscow or Beijing or showing the mildest interest in Marxism convinced some editorial writers that the whole empire (now Commonwealth) was under siege from the worldwide communist conspiracy.

Leica M2, a stalwart of correspondents after 1957.

The ‘emergency’ in Kenya, which started in 1952 and continued until 1960, was definitely not a communist revolution. It was about a desire of some Kikuyus to regain their land by force from the white colonial settlers, a war of decolonisation. But it was also a civil war between the Mau Mau rebels and the Kikuyu loyalists who supported the colonial administration. The alleged leader of Mau Mau, Jomo Kenyatta, was demonised by the British; many senior colonial officials thought they were in the presence of the devil when they dealt with him. But the blood oaths and murders by machete roused the media in Britain and prompted equally primitive reprisals by the colonial administration. Despite exaggerated reports of machetes wielded in the night, the total figure for white settlers killed was thirty-two. In response, more than 1,000 Kikuyu were hanged, and perhaps 12,000 rebels were killed in police and army actions. Thousands more died in detention camps. Additionally, many atrocities associated with the police and army counter-insurgency units were hushed up. Missionaries protested, questions were asked in parliament (especially by Barbara Castle, a future Labour minister), and the left-wing press waged a campaign, but none of these actions ignited public interest. James Cameron, reporting for the Daily Mirror, saw among the settler community ‘the death of colonial liberalism, and the loss of the moral order that gave empire its only possible justification’.

Historically, the British boasted that their empire was uniquely benign in its mission to spread civilisation and freedom, and that, unlike the French, their decolonisation was dignified. This may have been largely true, but not in Kenya. Yet nearly fifty years passed before the real story emerged. Two recent authoritative studies (by David Anderson and Caroline Elkins) showed that Kenya was turned into a police state and that the number hanged, 1,090, was more than the number executed by the French in Algeria (though far fewer ‘disappearances’ occurred in Kenya).6 Far more were killed because of a routine culture of beatings, starvation, and torture. Alsatian dogs were used to terrify prisoners, and men were forced to sodomise one another. Racist savagery created a primitive psychopathology sometimes matching the Mau Mau abominations that were so regularly featured in conservative newspapers such as the Daily Mail. If Kenya was Britain’s Algeria, London was nevertheless successful in easing the erstwhile devil into a pro-Western presidency of independent Kenya. President Kenyatta was equally eager to erase the past in the interests of national and pan-tribal unity. It was perhaps similar to South Africa’s ‘truth and reconciliation’ after 1994, but without the truth. With some honourable exceptions, such as James Cameron, journalists failed to expose this absent truth.

Britain continued to fight far more secret campaigns. In 1957 the Sultan of Oman asked Britain to help contain a rebellion in the great mountain massif known as Djebel Akhdar. This was the post-Suez era but, nevertheless, Britain had long-established treaty obligations with Oman as well as a string of colonies and protectorates in the area, from Aden on Oman’s border to Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial states north of Oman. All would perceive failure to support Oman as a further indication of British weakness. So a typically deniable British compromise was arranged: British Army officers and NCOs were seconded to the Sultan’s army. The RAF was quietly sent in as well.

The Djebel Akhdar campaign was clandestine but the problems in nearby Aden were widely covered in the media. In the late 1950s Aden was one of the busiest harbours in the world and a vital element of British security. By 1967 the most densely occupied quarter of Aden, Crater, had become a restricted area for British troops, even though London had promised to leave by the following year. Colonel Dick Blenkinsop worked closely with the press in the final period of British rule. He said that the British press and the BBC were ‘extremely helpful. I found it was always enough to say, “Gentlemen, I don’t want you to repeat what I’m saying but let me bring you into the picture, off the record,” and I was never let down once’. As the tally of military deaths mounted, the British press transformed Lieutenant Colonel Colin ‘Mad Mitch’ Mitchell into something of a national hero because of the way he complained about ‘prowling journalists’ and ‘squeamish politicians’ who prevented him from ‘sorting out the Arabs’. Mad Mitch was told to wind in his neck by his superiors, and the British soon left. Far from sorting out the Arabs, the campaign was disaster for the departing empire. The Aden protectorate was renamed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen and became a wholehearted Soviet satellite. The journalists who had been reporting British military failures in 1967 were now firmly kept out.

The British army also excluded the press – and parliament – from the topsecret five-year war fought in Dhofar in the 1970s. Three hundred officers and NCOs plus an eighty-strong SAS squadron fought in a territory the size of Wales in the western part of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman. No pressmen were allowed in by the Sultan. And so the military thereafter liked to point out that this might have been a factor in winning the war, one of the few examples where a communist insurgency was decisively defeated.

America’s War on the Doorstep

In December 1956 a small group of revolutionaries led by Fidel and Raúl Castro and a young Argentinean doctor called ‘Che’ Guevara landed in the south of Cuba. The armed band was soon dispersed by government forces. For two years the revolutionaries, through force of circumstances hiding in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, forged the concept of foco insurgency. Later developed in Guevara’s book Guerrilla Warfare, it suggested that a dedicated armed revolutionary group could cause a shift in mass opinion which would precipitate a social revolution. This foco theory was a handy shortcut for those who did not have the patience to engage in Mao’s concepts of protracted war. Moreover, it could perhaps work in cities in the West, not just in Third World jungles or bush. The vital qualities were moral rather than ideological.

Che, captured by Alberto Korda in Havana in March 1950. Despite becoming the most famous picture of the twentieth century, Korda refused to accept royalties (except in one case when the portrait advertised alcohol which Korda felt undermined the revolutionary message).

Fidel Castro was a romantic socialist. Only after he had taken power in the face of extremely hostile US opposition did he become a hero of communism. In his time in the mountains, Fidel Castro offered the New York Times exclusive rights to cover his revolution. Soon television crews were clamouring to film the long-haired wild bunch. One CBS investigative reporter, Robert Taber, stuck with Castro throughout the fighting and later produced a minor classic on guerrilla warfare, War of the Flea. The pro-American dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, sent more and more troops into the Sierra Maestra and many defected to the rebels. On 1 January 1959 Castro’s army entered Havana.

A poster of Che soon became compulsory in nearly every European student’s bedroom as the Cuban revolution promised to spread, especially in Latin America. An American economic blockade and a failed US-sponsored invasion pushed Castro further into the arms of the USSR. Another photograph, this time from a U-2 spy plane, showing the construction of Soviet missile sites in Cuba, pushed the two superpowers to the brink of a nuclear war in October 1962. In the US perspective, Moscow blinked and pulled back. Dramatic TV aerial shots of the Soviet ships approaching and then stopping at the US-imposed ‘quarantine’ line around Cuba captured an attentive and anxious worldwide audience.

The Cuban war established a romantic guerrilla legend that many tried, and failed, to imitate. Guevara himself was shot in the Bolivian jungle in 1967. Rural guerrilla insurgencies did spread to Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, and Nicaragua, with varying degrees of success. The concept of the urban guerrilla became fashionable, especially in Western Europe, inspired by the theories of Carlos Marighela: that gangster-like action in the cities – bank robberies and kidnappings – could provoke the government into repressive countermeasures that in turn would antagonise and mobilise the people. Governments, however, often proved effective in labelling would-be urban guerrillas as mere ‘terrorists’. This happened in Uruguay where the Tupamaros, after initial popular success with their Robin Hood tactics, were crushed, not least by a massive swing of public opinion to the right. In the words of a French writer and sometime revolutionary, Régis Debray, the insurgents had become ‘the gravediggers of liberal Uruguay’. Nevertheless, the lives and works of revolutionaries such as Guevara and Debray, as well as Franz Fanon, a doctor from Martinique who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, had a profound influence on literature and journalism, especially on the left. The arch apostle of the New Left revolutionaries was Herbert Marcuse, a philosophy professor based in California, who encouraged disaffected students to apply Guevara’s teaching to the streets of the West rather than the jungles of the Third World.

Other insurgencies in Latin America inspired numerous headlines later, especially the revolution in Nicaragua and the US-backed counter-revolution of the 1980s. The funding of the Contras created at least two major scandals. The Iran-Contra affair of 1986 and 1987 rocked the Reagan administration. Secondly, in 1996 Gary Webb wrote in the San Jose Mercury News a three-part series, ‘Dark Alliance’ (later made into a book), that linked CIA support of the Contras to the distribution of crack cocaine in Los Angeles. Amid the national furore and attacks from major national newspapers, the Mercury News backed away from the story, and Webb’s career as a mainstream journalist was ended.

The financial and drug scandals in the 1980s and 1990s media, however, were light-years away from the ideological passions of the New Left in the 1960s. The media stars of the ‘alternative society’ are now almost forgotten: Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, and Jerry Rubin, to name but six. The radicals in the 1960s student movements and the left-wing media in Europe and the United States were soon to coalesce on one issue that has not been forgotten: Vietnam.

Vietnam

Vietnam utterly polluted contemporary military–media relations by creating a myth that the media lost the war. Especially in the United States, the military credo for officers became ‘duty, honour, country, and hate the media’. Much of the argument hinges on the coverage of the 1968 Tet offensive, a major military defeat, but an accidental propaganda triumph, for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. The reporting was to leave an ineradicable grievance in the US military mind against the lies, incompetence and self-seeking ambition of journalists in particular and the media in general. It remains to this day. In the words of one Vietnam veteran:

We lost the war at Tet. When those lying sons of bitches showed American boys fighting and dying in Saigon and Hue ... . Hell, what did they expect real combat looked like? A cat fight in the ladies’ room? But they never showed what was happening to the VC [Viet Cong] in the [Hue] Citadel and what they were doing to those Vietnam civilians. They never explained just how we was whuppin’ those NVA [North Vietnamese Army] bastards’ ass ... . I’ll never, ever, trust the press again. ... They lied.7

Much of the current debate about media power is founded on the assertion that television lost the Vietnam War. The Tet Offensive, however, was mounted by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, not CBS. Journalists do not lose wars, even though the PR-media-marketing strategy may often be a vital ingredient in starting and even sometimes in winning them, perhaps. No matter how streetwise public affairs specialists might be, if democratic governments are losing a war, or have just lost one, war correspondents – blinkered as they may be sometimes – will eventually notice. More importantly, so will the voters at home.

The Vietnam War, like the Iraq War of 2003, was fought without understanding anything about the country beyond a few clichés. Americans simply did not comprehend the Vietnamese peasantry in their ‘black pajamas’, and they certainly underestimated them. The harder Americans attempted to win this war, the more injury, disruption, and chaos they brought to a society that had a long tradition of repelling foreign invaders. Washington did not grasp the complexities. When it started to, frustration set in, and eventually the public demanded to get out, under a fiction of ‘peace with honour’. The cultural gap was immense, not least because of foreigners’ bewilderment with the Vietnamese language. The sung vowels and glottal stops were, according to one Australian correspondent, ‘like listening to ducks fucking’. As Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers’ fame, once put it, ‘No American in Washington or Saigon could have passed a term paper on Vietnamese history’ at the start of the war. Despite this cultural ignorance

the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army to Vietnam, dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, and pursued a military strategy deliberately designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes, and used chemicals in a manner which profoundly changed the environmental and genetic order, leaving a once bountiful land petrified.

That was veteran Australian journalist John Pilger’s take on the war. Another old hand, Richard Beeston of the London Daily Telegraph, tried to explain in his memoirs the reasons for the war:

John Pilger was famous for his left-wing views, especially concerning Vietnam.

Shortly before leaving Vietnam I met a rather drunk CIA agent, who was a specialist in Indochina. ‘What the f*** are we doing here?’ he said over a bottle of scotch. ‘This is a civil war between the North and the South that’s been going on for centuries; it’s nothing to do with us.’ How about the ‘Domino Theory’ – the then fashionable theory that an American pullout would deliver South-east Asia to the communist bloc – I asked. ‘It’s all a load of balls,’ he replied. ‘The moment we leave here, China and the Soviets will be at each other’s throats.’ He was absolutely right – but no one was listening.

How important was the war to US security and could it have been won at an acceptable cost? Those questions have inspired thousands of learned tomes since the war ended in 1975. Was the war a deliberate crime or merely a catastrophic mistake? The defence secretary at the time, Robert S. McNamara, has contributed a number of belated mea culpas.8 Others have suggested that the war could have been ended earlier or that it could it have been fought more forcefully, or that the final years were not the military disaster often described. And yet the best insight into the war is still to be found in the gonzo classic of the war, Michael Herr’s Dispatches. Here he is describing some of the hard men sitting around the bar of the Rex in Saigon:

This is where they asked you, ‘Are you a Dove or a Hawk?’ and ‘Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?’ Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena, I’d think, but I wouldn’t say it, especially not here where they knew that I knew that really they weren’t fighting anybody anywhere anyway, it made them pretty touchy. That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of highprotein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guys just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, ‘Colonel, you’re insane’? It was like turning up in the middle of some black loony tune where the Duck had all the lines.

Vietnam hosted at the war’s height up to 1,000 senior war correspondents and many would-be reporters. The prevailing view has been that Vietnam was a media free-for–all and that enterprising journalists used this freedom to crusade against an arrogant civil-military elite’s unwinnable war. In reality the South Vietnamese applied censorship and American self-censorship abounded, practised not least by editors in Washington and New York. Above all, journalists, especially in the United States, generally supported the mindlessly optimistic authorised version of the US government. Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Caputo, in his memoirs Means of Escape, used the phrase ‘Great American Delusion Machine’. As Peter Arnett, later a correspondent for the Cable News Network (CNN) and also Pulitzer Prize winner, summed it up: ‘Supporting the official American policy of concealment was the politically repressive Vietnamese regime that was distrustful of all comers, and all too willing to bully and intimidate the foreign press.’Arnett also quoted a colleague who suggested that the censorship was worse than the Kremlin’s.9 It is true that free transport, usually by helicopters, was often readily available. Indeed, the chopper crews were often lionised by the media. It was this access that prompted Max Hastings to comment: ‘The Americans may not tell you the truth, but they provide the means for you to go and find out the truth for yourself, if you can be bothered.’

Until the Tet Offensive, the vast majority of Western correspondents backed the Cold War strategy of the conflict, though they questioned, sometimes, the tactical means to achieve victory. Even after Tet, when many foreign correspondents became much more sceptical, they did not conspire to dethrone the US military. By instinct, journalists do cock-ups, not conspiracies. The profession is too anarchic and sometimes too inebriated to spawn effective mass organisers. Few outside journalism can comprehend just how competitive top correspondents are. Even the best and the brightest in Vietnam spent much of their time squabbling with one another. Associated Press, for example, was locked in bitter ground combat with United Press International. And Saigon’s increasingly cynical resident press corps waged a silent and sullen war against their usually more hawkish colleagues and editors safe in newsrooms back home.

After 1968 television criticism of the war intensified, especially after the great Walter Cronkite famously lamented during Tet, ‘But I thought we were supposed to be winning.’ This led President Lyndon Johnson to confess, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I have lost the war.’ Cronkite’s own statement was classically moderate: ‘We did our best; we must get out.’ Yet such criticisms tended to follow and echo the breakdown of political consensus in Washington. Moreover, quality newspapers probably had more direct impact on policymaking elites than television did.10 Television did not lose Vietnam, but many US decisionmakers, especially in the military, believed it did.

In the longer perspective, it is the iconic still photographs that have been scorched into the collective memory. A Buddhist priest, Tich Quang Duc, burned himself to death in June 1963 to act as a catalyst for change. History did not disappoint him. On 1 February 1968, Eddie Adams, a thirty-five-year-old AP correspondent, caught the instant Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan put a gun to the head of a young prisoner and pulled the trigger. It won Adams a Pulitzer. On 8 June 1972 came the pictures by Nick Ut of AP that broke the hearts of the most hardened war correspondents: young children running with their flesh alight after South Vietnamese aircraft had mistakenly napalmed the village of Trang Bang. Some of the best photographs of the war were captured by a cantankerous and garrulous Welshman, Philip Jones Griffiths, who wrote and designed the famous book Vietnam Inc., published in 1971. Photographers won prizes and many, such as Tim Page who worked for Time and Life, became addicted to war, but they also paid a high price. Early in the war, on 18 October 1965, Dickey Chapelle was killed by a landmine, the first American female photographer to be killed in action. She was given the last rites by a kneeling chaplain. She wore, as usual, small pearl earrings, and there was a flower in the band of her bush hat. After experiencing many wars, her last words were reported as ‘I guess it was bound to happen’.11

Eddie Adams, of Associated Press, won a Pulitzer for this photograph, which shows General Nguyen Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon, in 1968. (Courtesy of AP)

Vietnam may have been called the first ‘television war’, but television played a relatively small part in deciding its outcome. Possibly the still photographs explained more. Perhaps the war was not entirely explicable. As Michael Herr suggested, conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it. He called it ‘a communications pudding’. And this was a deliberate policy of the US government’s public relations campaign. Herr said:

At each stage of the escalation, the United States tried either flatly to deny what it was doing or to minimise the effects or to conceal the results behind a torrent of questionable statistics, a bewildering range of euphemisms, and a vocabulary of specially created words that debased the English language.

The American military found it hard to understand why journalists, although by and large sympathetic, would not treat Vietnam as they had the Second World War and the Korean conflict. The war corroded the reputation of both professions. Journalists often fell prey to racist stereotypes and failed to uncover the massive corruption endemic in US support for Saigon. Indeed, some journalists were accused of being black marketeers themselves, especially regarding foreign currency transactions. And they backpedalled too: Arnett admits that it would have been ‘professional suicide’ for journalists in AP to have suggested that the North Vietnamese opposition was generally superbly trained and well-motivated to believe in their revolutionary cause. Good and honest journalists such as Arnett were effectively dissuaded by home-based editors that it was best to ignore the fact that the conflict was in many respects a civil war, not just one of US technology versus communist ideology. Incountry journalists made some major mistakes, including missing stories such as the My Lai massacre, which was picked up by a diligent home reporter.

Australian cameraman Neil Davis evacuated from Vietnam after being hit by a mortar blast.

Yet a few journalists established durable reputations in Vietnam by proving that government and military personnel alike lied to the correspondents, perhaps deliberately or because they were deceiving themselves. David Halberstam won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his reporting. Like Neil Sheehan, he followed the charismatic Lieutenant Colonel (later a ‘civilian general’) John Paul Vann into action. Halberstam came home and wrote a classic book, The Best and Brightest.

Sheehan worked for UPI and then the New York Times. His diligent journalism won him many admirers, not least in the US Army. Such was his reputation that military analyst Daniel Ellsberg decided to entrust his famous Pentagon Papers to him. Ellsberg, an ex-Marine, was highly placed in the Pentagon. In 1969 he came across a 7,000-page top-secret history of the war going back to the initial US involvement.

He was appalled at the mendacity of the public position on the war and became convinced that his country was wrong to continue waging it. Over the years he photocopied the papers. In March 1971 he decided to entrust the papers to Vann. Their secret meeting went awry and Ellsberg turned to Sheehan. Their decision to publish led them and the New York Times (and Washington Post) to the Supreme Court, where they were vindicated. Later Sheehan wrote a bestseller, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.

Other correspondents such as James Cameron went to Hanoi. So too did the most famous American anti-war intellectual, Noam Chomsky. They both wrote intense accounts of the suffering and courage they saw there. But the overall accusation embedded in military folklore – the so-called guilty media thesis – has been shown to be wrongheaded. To summarise one recent and persuasive analysis of the debate, ‘the notion of a feckless, irresponsible and oppositional media is therefore misplaced’.12 Another authoritative study succinctly suggested that the media ‘reflected public opinion rather than formed it’.13 As the war worsened the US military became more obstructive and administered ‘news with an eye-dropper’. But the extent of US casualties could not be hidden. Whereas in the Korean War television was in its infancy, by the Vietnam War casualties were shown on the nightly news. With both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts public support dropped when casualties mounted.

The collapse of the will to fight in Vietnam resulted from a political process in which the media were only one part. The editors and op-ed writers in the United States shifted along with their constituency and source of authoritative information, the government. As befits a mature democracy, the evidence suggests that, from the beginning of the war, whatever the efforts of the press or the government, the American public made up its own mind.

The US military returned home but not as heroes. Those most emotionally bound to the failed US policy fixed their anger on the most visible elements of the society that had rejected them: the media. As late as 2006 Britain’s leading military historian, Sir John Keegan, still subscribed to the guilty media thesis in Vietnam and warned that it might happen again over Iraq. The Vietnam/Iraq debate exacerbated many of the old wounds, despite the obvious differences in the war zones. Nevertheless, by 2007, four years after the impressive initial military victory in Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein, America was again preoccupied with an unwinnable war, started on false pretences and with little cultural understanding of the country it was occupying. Despite mounting casualties, atrocities, and no clear exit strategy, this time the media did not bear the brunt of blame. Perhaps this was because President Nixon’s infamous claim was not replicated: that the Vietnam War was ‘the first in our history during which our media were more friendly to our enemies than to our allies’. Nixon of course would say that, given that his own downfall was precipitated by the famous investigative journalism of the Washington Post that exposed the Watergate scandal.

Larry Burrows was an English photojournalist who made his name in Vietnam. He was killed in February 1971 when his helicopter was shot down over Laos.

The Empire Strikes Back

On 19 March 1982 a detachment of Argentinean soldiers posing as scrap metal dealers raised their country’s flag on the almost uninhabited rocky island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic Ocean. They sparked a conflict that proved to be a watershed in the military–media relationship. Although Argentineans previously had no claims over the sovereignty of South Georgia, they took Britain’s non-reaction as a signal to launch, two weeks later, a full-scale invasion of the adjacent islands, which they claimed as their own Malvinas. With 1,800 islanders involved in a change of regime they did not want, the British government, led by Margaret Thatcher, proved determined to retake the Falkland Islands by force if necessary. The UN condemned the Argentinean action and had the justification for doing so from the international community – despite centuries of disputes over the islands’ true sovereign owners.

It was the last war in which the military could guarantee control over the flow of information going into and out of a theatre of operations. The media problems of the war also caught the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) by surprise, and anything that could remotely be described as its media ‘policy’ was more backward- than forward-looking, deriving from an age of secrecy and operational security rather than ‘pro-active’ media relations. This was personified by the MoD’s spokesman, Ian MacDonald, whose briefings in London earned him the nickname of ‘The Speak-Your-Weight Machine’.

Argentinian armoured cars parked in Port Stanley, a photo taken secretly by a Falkland Islander journalist, Graham Bound.

As for the war itself, fought 8,000 miles from Britain, the rapidly assembled task force somewhat reluctantly took with it twenty-nine correspondents and their support crews. They were all British; the foreign media were to be supplied with news by the Reuters correspondent. One of the reporters, Robert Fox, described the information and press policy as ‘chaotic’, while the MoD subsequently admitted, with classic British understatement, that there was a ‘degree of improvisation about all the arrangements’. Although this was largely because of the speed with which the task force was assembled, the Navy retained its wariness of dealing with the press. The Army, however, had learned through its Northern Ireland experience that it could forge a working relationship with reporters. The Navy relented only under pressure from 10 Downing Street.

As the task force sailed south it was clear that many people doubted the outbreak of an actual war. Time magazine published an incredulous cover under the headline, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. Indeed, the travelling correspondents took little with them. They had been chosen by their editors because they had either simply been available or because they were only expecting a ‘boating holiday’. Although many did become quite famous subsequently – Brian Hanrahan and Robert Fox, for example – the general reaction to those selected by the military was ‘what the hell do they know about war?’ They were given the Green Book, the MoD handbook for media operations based on First World War guidelines and hence woefully out of date. This in itself revealed how seriously the British military regarded media relations at the time, perhaps because it had become so accustomed to patriotic media coverage of its activities. The hacks were then allocated to ships where the attitude toward them varied greatly according to the prejudices of the senior staff. Officially, no censorship existed, merely ‘guidelines’ as to what they could and could not report to which they had to adhere as part of their accreditation. The no-go areas related largely to OPSEC (Operational Security) matters, such as troop sizes and locations, equipment capabilities, and so on. For the most part, the journalists co-operated: this was epitomised by Hanrahan’s famous report of Harrier aircraft returning from a mission with the words: ‘I counted them all out and I counted them all back.’14 However, two of the most infamous breaches of security– often recounted in military colleges as an example of how the media cannot be trusted – were the result of leaks from troops and officials rather than the media. The loss of two Wessex helicopters on South Georgia became public only when a young sailor on HMS Antrim wrote about it in a letter home, and the BBC’s broadcast in advance of the Goose Green operation was possible only because an MoD official in London had talked about it. Other information came from ‘armchair strategists’ in the UK. This was usually lucky or clever speculation and had nothing to do with any leaks from the corralled journalists in theatre.

Aboard the ships the reporters found that they had military ‘minders’ allocated to them. These public relations officers had traditionally been regarded as having dead-end careers, effectively going nowhere in the military. Not only was the media suspicious of them but often their military comrades had little time for them as well. While the minders saw their own role as ‘security review’, the press saw them as censors, and other soldiers and sailors saw them as colluding with the media.

The war took place just before the age of portable satellite communications equipment; task force reporters were completely dependent on the military for communicating their copy and images back to Britain. Additionally, the task force was dependent on US satellite technology for its intelligence gathering and communications with London. The reporters, however, were clearly quite low down the priority order for use of the military communications systems, especially television images requiring high bandwidth. The Navy insisted that live television coverage was impossible owing to technical reasons, so the reporters were forced to send their despatches and tapes to Ascension Island before being flown on to London, which could take as long as three weeks. Indeed, one ITN report took longer to reach London in 1982 than Russell’s despatches from the Crimea 130 years earlier. Most reports of the war’s events went public days or even weeks after the event and not, in fact, ‘as they happened’. And it is sobering to reflect that the eventual surrender of the Argentineans at Port Stanley went completely unrecorded by the media. (A British soldier took some unofficial still photographs.) As journalist Robert Harris noted, ‘For the bulk of the Falklands war, the camera might as well not have been invented.’15

When words or images did reach London, they were subjected to a second scrutiny at the MoD. Further delays caused further tension. Indeed, because the Argentineans had allowed their reporters to accompany their troops, both the BBC and ITN, starved of current images from their own reporters, broadcast ‘enemy’ footage – causing the Thatcher government to fume. This in turn reflected how much warfare was on the cusp of a new information age. The unique nature of this particular war may have enabled Admiral Sandy Woodward to conduct his campaign to retake the Falklands within a virtual information vacuum from the media’s point of view, yet beyond the theatre of operations news was getting out via Argentina and feeding the global village. But old-fashioned values still prevailed in London. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher even objected to BBC reports referring to the ‘Argentineans’ rather than the ‘enemy’, and she considered using reports from ‘enemy’ television stations as unprofessional conduct.

Back with the task force, any attempts by reporters to remain impartial were proving difficult after weeks of spending time aboard ships with the men who faced the possibility of death in combat. One reporter noted: ‘I began by saying “the British” and within a few weeks I was [saying] “us” or “we”.’ This kind of bonding is perhaps inevitable in such circumstances, but the lesson was not lost on the MoD when planning media access for future campaigns. Reporters accompanying troops for prolonged periods soon begin to identify with them. As Robert Fox testified: ‘If the Argentineans had shown any sign of counterattacking and overrunning our positions ... I would have grabbed the nearest weapon to hand and used my limited knowledge to make it fire back.’16 This kind of statement causes angst in journalism ranks, but it is difficult for those who have not served as war reporters to understand the pressures that frontline reporters face when they accompany military personnel into war – especially if the war is popular as this one was, with around 80 per cent support in Britain. Back home, the tabloids in particular reflected this public support with excessive headlines such as ‘Up Yours Galtieri!’ and ‘Argie Bargy’. Perhaps the most infamous of all was the Sun’s headline over the report of the sinking of the Belgrano: ‘Gotcha!’ This seemed heartless in light of the fact that almost a thousand Argentinean sailors drowned in the sinking. When questions were asked about this in the House of Commons, the government stated that the ship was sunk because it was steaming toward the task force, which subsequently turned out to be untrue. Twenty years later, Martin Howard, director general of communications at the MoD at the time, commented on the episode:

Sun headline.

On some occasions, the thing to do is just simply say, ‘We don’t know’. It’s very hard for government departments to say ‘we don’t know’ because it sounds as if we don’t know what we are talking about, but that is very frequently the reality of the situation. The second thing is to correct things which have been said and which turn out to be wrong ... the information given to us [about the Belgrano], by the naval staff, at the time was, quite honestly, wrong. It was used as an answer to a PQ [parliamentary question] and as a result became part of the accepted wisdom. The Government made a huge mistake there, because when it was discovered in fact that the Belgrano hadn’t been steaming towards the task force, what should have happened is that a minister should have gone to the House of Commons and said, ‘Sorry, the information was duff, but it actuallynmade no difference – it was a threat to the task force and we were justified in sinking it.’17

This kind of confusion was partly because the news operation was centred in London rather than in the field. As a result, news reports were bound to become caught up in Whitehall bureaucracy and Westminster politics. The politics of the Thatcher government had set the tone for the nationalistic media coverage that followed. The Falkland Islanders, hitherto forgotten and recently made British citizens (albeit second-class ones) under the 1981 Nationality Act, were suddenly portrayed in terms of national self-determination against a brutal invasion by a fascist dictatorship. The prime minister spoke in parliament of ‘British sovereign territory ... invaded by a foreign power ... unprovoked aggression by Argentina against British sovereign territory ... not a shred of justification, and not a scrap of legality’. Four days later, the Sun was referring to ‘a black moment in our history ... a wound we cannot forget. But now our troops are on the way to wipe out that memory and free our loyal friends’. The Falkland Island sheep farmers became ‘British bulldogs’, defiantly resisting their ‘criminal’ invaders with such songs as ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

Having established the ‘just war’ tone for the coverage, the lack of timely news from the theatre of operation, along with the censorship arrangements, meant that hard news about the war’s progress was lacking. Setbacks, such as the sinking of HMS Sheffield, could be minimised in such a news-starved, speculation-rich environment. Sir Frank Cooper, the undersecretary of state for defence at the MoD, told a post-war enquiry into the media coverage: ‘You will never have it easier than the Falklands. There is no doubt about that.’

The war was a disaster for the British media; it was also an intelligence fiasco. The Ministry of Defence, especially the Defence Intelligence Staff, blamed the Foreign Office – ‘that hotbed of cold feet’ was the memorable expression used. Added to the infighting in Whitehall and between government and the civil service, disputes within the armed forces proliferated. The media also fought among themselves – the Navy started calling the onboard reporters the ‘fourth form’.18 The problems of communications over 8,000 miles, abused by the MoD’s censors, plus the restraints of the correspondents’ self-censorship and often gung-ho patriotism, created a very one-sided coverage of the conflict. The task force journalists felt that they had been misled by the MoD, but a general coalition of the willing emerged: military, media, and government immersed themselves in a patriotic desire to win. Opposition in the UK was generally drowned out or ignored.19

Despite, or perhaps because of, the British casualties caused at the battle of Goose Green by unnecessary political intervention, the ten weeks of war proved a massive vote winner for Prime Minister Thatcher. The correspondents’ anger at the MoD was, therefore, somewhat misplaced. ‘The MoD achieved exactly what its political masters wanted it to do, and its role in the Falklands campaign will go down in the history of journalism as the classic example of how to manage the media in wartime.’And many in the media, especially at home in London, connived with the MoD to wave the flag. ‘If it was rape,’ concluded Phillip Knightley, ‘then it was rape with contributory negligence.’20

Perhaps the sole example of reporting that had unintended political consequences was the Argentinean coverage of the Royal Marines surrendering at the outset of the invasion. The prisoners were forced to lie on their stomachs on the road outside Government House in the capital, Stanley. When the photographs were published in the UK, they provoked outrage – ending the possibility of a negotiated settlement.

British journalist Max Hastings was celebrated for being the first hack to enter Port Stanley, alongside British troops.

The war established the reputation of one correspondent above all – Max Hastings – the first reporter to reach Port Stanley. In his memoirs he wrote, ‘No big feature film has ever been made about the Falklands war, because the imperialists won and no Americans took part.’ The Americans, however, played a key intelligence role in the war. Initially, Washington appeared to side with the Argentinean junta, which it was wooing in its campaigns against left-wing insurgencies in South America, especially in Nicaragua. Eventually the special relationship, particularly between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, kicked in, and vital satellite and munitions data were passed to London. But most crucially the American military became intrigued by the media lessons of the war. The Falklands was an atypical colonial-style war fought at the ends of the earth. It was short and, for Britain, successful. Above all, the UK MoD had a communications monopoly over the British correspondents. The Pentagon decided that Britannia had waived the rules as far as the lessons of Vietnam were concerned. Next time, Washington would fight according to the new Falklands rulebook.

Grenada, Panama and Haiti

American forces invaded Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 on the grounds that elements in those countries had threatened US lives, endangered Washington because of the expansion of communism (Grenada) or drug trafficking (Panama), and were generally not practising democracy. The reasons were largely spurious, but the issue here is the political decision to exclude, censor, and manipulate the media during these examples of closed expeditionary warfare.

Like the Falklands, Grenada was relatively remote and lacked a sophisticated media infrastructure. Grenada was also a former British colony, which had gained independence within the British Commonwealth in 1974. Neither London nor White House spokespersons were informed of the invasion. Prime Minister Thatcher refrained from public criticism, mindful of her recent debt to President Reagan during her own military adventure.

The United States launched Operation URGENT FURY on 25 October 1983. The military were allowed almost complete exclusion of the media, both American and foreign, especially in the first few days after the invasion. Under the guise of a multinational operation (including 300 troops from Caribbean states who saw no action), the United States deployed overwhelming strength against the lightly-armed Grenadian forces, which numbered about 1,000. At the UN, US Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick fulminated about Grenada’s secret military deals with North Korea, Cuba, and the USSR. In fact, some largely unfit and relatively old Cuban construction workers on the island did put up a good fight during a US operation that was largely a fiasco, though few correspondents could attest to that because of the news blackout. Years passed before the full story seeped out, but at the time military stills and video gave the impression of a new efficient American military, which had fully recovered from the traumas of Vietnam.

On the second day, despite an official ‘quarantine’ of the island, enterprising journalists hired boats and landed to attempt independent coverage, but they were intercepted and transported to the US flagship, the USS Guam, for their ‘own protection’. On the third day, the military accepted the first press pool, which was soon expanded but still heavily controlled. The number of journalists eventually reached more than 300, but by that time the fighting was over and there was nothing to report except the fact that they had not been able to report. The media also resorted to amateur radio operators in the region, but the military jammed the frequencies.

Maggie Thatcher was incensed that Ronald Reagan had ordered the invasion of Grenada, a former British colony and still a member of the Commonwealth, without informing her. But the British prime minister kept her remarks private as she was aware of how much the special relationship with Washington had helped her re-conquer the Falklands.

The Washington Post quoted journalists who said the military were operating a ‘mad dog and pony show’. Some television stations, when showing US military footage, used the superimposed caption ‘cleared by the Defense Department’ to imply censorship. That was more than the UK MoD allowed in the Falklands: the term ‘censorship’ had been censored on UK broadcasts. Nevertheless, Grenada was a public relations triumph, and initial US opinion polls indicated that the public supported the post-Vietnam restrictions on the media. The only legal challenge to the media restrictions came shortly after the invasion and from an unlikely source: Larry Flynt, publisher of the pornographic Hustler magazine. There followed eventually a movie (The People vs. Larry Flynt, 1996) that touched on the case though, in 1984, a court case had already ruled that restrictions on the press in theatre were the responsibility of the military commanders in the field. The military’s perspective emerged in more traditional terms in the 1986 Clint Eastwood film Heartbreak Ridge.

The patriotic surge and controlled media manipulation of the invasion of Grenada, cynics alleged, may well have been timed to drown out the bad news from Lebanon. When the Israelis withdrew from most of the country after their invasion, an international peacekeeping force from the USA, Italy, France and Britain entered Beirut. Hezbollah, a radical Shi’ite group, suicide-bombed the US embassy, killing sixty-three people in April 1983. It was the worst ever attack on a US diplomatic mission. Then, two days before the Grenada invasion, Hezbollah insurgents drove a truck loaded with explosives directly at the US Marine Corps barracks at Beirut airport, killing 241 Marines and sailors. The French were also hit – seventy-one French troops died. British sentries stopped the truck aimed at their base, and no British casualties ensued. Photographs of the American disaster were circulated around the world, exciting Islamic extremists’ desire to emulate the mass-casualty tactic. The invasion of Grenada, however, boosted Ronald Reagan’s domestic approval ratings.

Just as the Falklands media fiasco prompted the Franks Report in the UK, the American media criticism also generated a report by Major General Winant Sidle (retd) that recommended a continuously updated accredited pool system, proper communications for media use, and transport to, and within, theatre for the correspondents. The military realised that exclusion and media monopoly worked effectively only for a short time and in conditions of rapid US success. Although the Sidle report was generally welcomed by the media it would lead to much greater control, under the cover of apparent access via pooling. Control of the pool led eventually to the ‘embedding’ principle and to manipulation in longer and far less successful wars.

On 20 December 1989, 24,000 US troops invaded Panama to remove a former CIA ‘asset’, General Manuel Noriega. He had been demonised by the US government as a drug dealer on a massive scale, providing official protection for the growing, processing, and transportation of drugs into the United States. Noriega was also accused of nullifying elections and democracy, as well as threatening the lives of American citizens. The US claimed the right under the existing Torrijos–Carter treaties to intervene militarily to protect the canal. Sidle’s work was completely sidelined in the invasion, dubbed Operation JUST CAUSE, Washington’s biggest military operation since Vietnam, as news was controlled by exclusion and manipulation. The Pentagon’s aim was to portray the war as clean, swift, and efficient – to create an illusion of bloodless battlefields. Again, the selected pool hacks, as well as senior public affairs specialists in the military, were kept out of the loop. Accredited journalists who accompanied the military were cooped up and soon sent home. ‘William Boot’ defined the Defense Department pool as ‘a select group of combat journalists that is never permitted to see combat’.21

The military achieved its aim: the media were silenced and the administration had apparently met its real goal – the security of the crucial Panama Canal Zone, with its bases, installations, and, of course, its canal. A few hours after the invasion began, Guillermo Endara, who would probably have won the elections nullified earlier in the year, was sworn in as president. Much of Latin America criticised the United States, accusing it of wanting to re-establish military bases and even renege entirely on the Torrijos–Carter treaties whereby the administration of the canal had to be returned to the Panamanian government on 31December 1999. From the US perspective, the security of the canal had been restored (and Washington fulfilled its treaty obligations in full and on time).

The combat was over quickly and Congress, except for Democratic stalwarts such as Edward Kennedy, was silenced. The publicity triumph stalled, however, once the media managed to get into Panama. First, Noriega had not been captured. Instead he retreated to the Papal Nunciature in Panama City. US forces laid siege and, under the orders of General ‘Mad Max’ Thurman, they bombarded the embassy with loud and violent rock music including songs with messages such as ‘Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide’ and ‘I fought the law and the law won’. Noriega was believed to be an opera buff who hated pop music. Other embassies were besieged and diplomatic rights violated. Then the invasion was revealed to have been rather less bloodless than depicted by the Pentagon. Spanish-language newspapers reported that up to 400 civilians had been killed and 2,000 wounded. Photographs of the destruction emerged. The ‘cocaine’ reportedly found in Noriega’s quarters proved to be talcum powder. The disclosures got worse; General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted in his memoirs, ‘The Press ate us alive, with some justification.’ But General Powell was wrong – what mattered was the initial impression of the invasion – successful and bloodless. That had been the headline news on TV. The truth, dribbling out over months on the inside pages of newspapers, mattered far less, especially once US troops returned to their bases. Another inquiry followed (the Hoffman Report) the following year, but that too was sidelined.

The invasions of Grenada and Panama were to prove practice runs for the Gulf War of 1991. The strategy for media management was clear: secrecy in planning; demonisation of the enemy; destabilisation of the target; search for legitimacy; build up and deployment; and declaration of victory, rapid pull out, and the truth to filter out slowly thereafter. In this process, the media were to be used where appropriate. Even the trusted and vetted pool correspondents were to be excluded from planning but would be useful in demonisation. Noriega was lambasted in the US press: he was called everything from a child molester, sexual deviant and Satanist to, inevitably, a latter-day Hitler. The target country would be softened up by economic sanctions and other pressures. And the media could then be used again in the search for legitimacy. While diplomats worked on the UN, the American media could help woo friendly states. Once the war was won, journalists’ infamous short attention span would soon move elsewhere and leave deeper investigation to reporters such as John Pilger, who remained critical of the manipulation of mainstream journalism. The strategy would vary slightly according to the geographical and political factors, but what remained constant was a ‘secret agenda by the military and government to ensure maximum exclusion and containment of the media, while paying lip service to the public’s right to know and the duty of the media to keep them informed’, according to one definitive analysis of military-media relations.22

As experience in Vietnam indicated, and Grenada confirmed, Americanbased journalists had a remarkable tendency to accept government information as basic truth rather than consider its strategic value as propaganda, as happened in Grenada (and to a lesser extent Panama). In 1983 the faction within the Reagan administration that advocated a strict control of the media prevailed.23 In 1983 there had been muted Democratic Party attacks on the invasion, but by 1989 President George H. W. Bush won bipartisan support in Washington for his actions in Panama. It is true that the wind-down of the Cold War allowed the United States, as the only effective superpower, to act more aggressively and more unilaterally. But a more important factor was probably the Democrats’ increasing desire to seem less soft on defence and foreign policy issues in a period of Republican dominance. It has been argued that just one segment of the electorate was crucial: Southern swing voters, who favoured a hawkish posture. Without these votes the Democrats could not recapture the White House.24

Both major US political parties soon found Cold War hawkishness defunct. But the government once more used old-fashioned methods on its own doorstep, in Haiti in 1994. The country had witnessed, 200 years earlier, the only successful slave revolt in history and then became the world’s first black republic. In 1991 the Haitian military overthrew democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. US propaganda had previously painted the former priest as a Marxist psychopath, but soon he was transformed into a latterday champion of civil rights because Washington liked the military junta even less. President Bill Clinton decided to restore democracy, though his action may have been motivated by wanting to cut the flood of Haitian refugees into the United States. The usual tactics were employed: demonisation, the search for legitimacy elsewhere, and destabilisation via sanctions. After the softening up would come the application of force. The Marines had invaded before, in 1915, and stayed for nineteen years. Washington later backed the voodoo-expert tyrant, François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, and subsequently his son, Jean-Claude, presumably because – for all their faults – they were at least not communists like Castro. Prior to the 1994 UN-sanctioned invasion, US military psychological operations (PSYOPS) teams had been stationed on the island and were known to have sent information to the American media as well. This enabled American television news crews to anticipate the invasion and so reach the island before the troops. The threat that news sources could transmit the invasion live spurred the Pentagon to establish some guidelines, but the TV networks had the upper hand. They were already in Haiti and could not be excluded. The disorganised, ill-equipped Haitian troops were not prepared to offer resistance, and the Americans landed almost completely unopposed. This was an easy victory for the Pentagon in a no-risk war, and the media got their pictures. Haiti’s politics remained much the same as before, and Aristide was ousted, with US help, ten years later.

End of History?

In 1989 popular efforts brought revolution to Eastern Europe and to Western television screens. ‘Parliament on the streets’ prompted the non-violent ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the bloody events that ended Romania’s dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Similar and simultaneous ‘people power’ events in Brazil and Chile (in defiance of American interests) received minimal television coverage. The retreat of the Soviet army from Afghanistan and dramatic pictures of the revolt at Tiananmen Square in Beijing were couched in implicit Cold War terms. How else could they be interpreted, after so many years of a media framework of ideological conflict between capitalism and communism? Ever since the Russian revolution, most of the media most of the time took for granted the master template of good versus evil. Sometimes it was modified by détente or later glasnost, but it was still a case of ‘friendly enemies’. Many correspondents had spent years studying the arcane nuances of nuclear weapons’ technology and strategy, as well as the complexities of arms control; the peace movements and the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament received far less attention. Gradually, especially with the arrival of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the harsh media images of the Russian Bear softened. This was a man ‘we could do business with’, in Margaret Thatcher’s famous words. With the end of the Soviet Union and the media shorthand of the Cold War, journalists groped for new guidelines.

The End of History. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did end the first stage of the Cold War, though hostility with Russia resurfaced in the next century.

What would replace the national security directive, NDS-68, which became the fundamental document of the psychological war in Europe? The original command post of the Cold War Kulturkampf was the CIA’s International Organizations Division, set up in 1950 by Tom Braden, a disciple of the legendary spymaster Allen Dulles. NDS-68 was meant to win over not just journalists, but novelists, painters, and musicians – the cream of the intelligentsia. Many were ex-communists – who better to fight the not dissimilar cultural war waged by Moscow? Many of the greatest thinkers, some unwittingly, were involved. Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, and W. H. Auden were invited, sometimes paid, to join fronts such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom or to write for journals such as Encounter. John Updike’s Bech novels caught the atmosphere of this period – the radical American writer wanders Europe on cultural tours, meeting a CIA operative here, a communist functionary there. When Ramparts magazine blew the story amid the anti-Vietnam protests in Europe, the American cultural bubble was burst, leaving a legacy of strong suspicion and resentment among the intellectuals of Western Europe. Especially in France, this hostility grew intense as the chattering classes in Paris perceived the cultural domination of Europe as being transformed into commercial globalisation of the continent, and indeed the planet.

This had been the deployment of what came to be known as ‘soft power’. There would be little cultural freedom in Western Europe if the Soviet tanks rolled in. Naturally, most war correspondents – they included intellectuals in their ranks too – concentrated on the hard power. After 1945 the West intervened militarily in the Third World, but success was rare. The French army lost in Indo-China and Algeria. The British were bogged down in guerrilla wars in Greece, Cyprus, Malaya, and Kenya during the 1940s and 1950s, in Aden and Malaysia in the 1960s, and the longest counter-insurgency in Europe, containing the Irish Republican Army for thirty years. The United States was traumatised by its defeat in Vietnam.

The Cold War had conditioned the mindset, morality, and careers of nearly two generations of foreign correspondents. The West also contended with international terrorism, but that was an intellectual construct that did not play well with ambitious journalists who wanted to get their boots dirty in ‘real’ wars. When conventional wars were fought, however, the side with the best-trained forces generally won. The professional British Army defeated the largely conscript Argentinean forces in the Falklands, although distance and terrain made it a close-run affair. The Israelis established themselves as masters of the art of rapid mobile war and air combat. It was easier, and much safer, for hacks to work with well-disciplined modern armies. When both sides were incompetent, as in the eight-year Iran–Iraq War, the campaigns could be long and indecisive. But very few Western correspondents were permitted to cover the battles between Iran and Iraq. Nonetheless, the well-trained and highly armed modern states were deterred by the threat of nuclear war, the continuous paradigm, and by the increasingly effective new forms of insurgency: a Maoist war that humbled the Americans in Vietnam, the Jihadist success against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the quagmire of Israeli forces in Lebanon. South Vietnam was well-populated with journalists, and Lebanon, though more dangerous and unpredictable, was often accessible to the hacks. Saigon and Beirut had hotels and bars. Afghanistan, especially the wild interior, long marches away from the Pakistan border, was largely terra incognita to all but a small band of determined journalists who had to be tough, fit, and able to do without alcohol for long periods.

After 1919 the United States withdrew from Europe. In contrast, in 1945 American vision helped to create the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and global financial institutions. Central to this was the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, both of which became stalwart allies of Washington. Some military correspondents devoted the majority of their time analysing the arcane intricacies of the defence systems which did not fire a single shot in anger. When it came to shooting wars, nearly every time the West fought after 1945, it lost or at least failed to win (British counter-insurgency in Malaya was an honourable exception). While it suffered reverses on the battlefields of Korea, Dien Bien Phu, Suez, and Vietnam, the West constructed regional economic success stories in Europe and Asia, which were to prove more decisive in the long run. ‘By the last decade of the Cold War,’ according to a senior journalistturned-historian, ‘the supreme irony had emerged of the Soviet Union steadily diluting its ideological commitment, while the Reagan and Thatcher governments promoted their own counter-ideology of free markets and private property with proselytising fervour.’25 Reagan, however, was only partly responsible for the arms build-up that helped to precipitate the fall of Soviet communism. The USSR was indeed, in economic terms, Upper Volta with nukes. When the Berlin Wall came down, many correspondents indulged in bouts of triumphalism about an event nearly all of them failed to predict.

Although the centrepiece of the Cold War was Berlin, much of the actual fighting took place on the peripheries, such as Angola. The South Africans and Americans backed the Angolan rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi (left).

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington for the third time in the century had the chance to step in and make a ‘new world order’, though it was not the ‘end of history’ as some had hoped. Still, the hacks jumped on the bandwagon; their articles were frequently infected by the new world lexicon that was cranked out by Washington. The United States had to strike a balance between its twin instincts – that the US must slay every ‘distant monster’, to use John Quincy Adams’s phrase – or succumb to its latent tradition of isolationism. For a while, however, the media generally reflected the optimistic engagement and hopes for a ‘peace dividend’. The Soviet collapse brought knock-on effects around the world, for example, in Cuba, Angola, Cambodia, and the Horn of Africa. If Soviet withdrawal encouraged the old nationalisms in Eastern Europe, in the developing world it helped to display the fragility of the nation state itself. Somalia was a classic example. And this now provided the adventurous hacks with lots of opportunity to dirty their boots and please their editors. Even in the Soviet Union, hopes of rapid liberal democratic advance soon faded; nevertheless, the correspondents could now poke around in a post-glasnost society previously closed to outsiders. In spite of its Marxist pretensions, communism was not intrinsically different from traditional Russian despotism; rather it was a particularly vicious and destructive manifestation of it. In its ‘heroic’ phase – the Soviet Union in the 1930s and China in the 1950s and 1960s – communism inflicted catastrophic damage on its own people, though little was reported to the outside world. ‘The United States and its allies killed tens of thousands of people defending freedom; the communist countries killed tens of millions in promoting socialism’, according to one assessment of the Cold War.26 The difference is not fortuitous; it was a matter of open versus closed systems of thought, politics, and free speech. And a key element of the last quality is the ability of Western foreign and war correspondents to report on the closed societies despite the intrinsic difficulties, not least lack of access. Overall, journalism largely failed to report on the monstrous conditions in the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War, as well as their reflections in the numerous proxy wars elsewhere. The failure to report on major tank battles in Angola is one egregious example.

The battles between the South Africans and Russians and Cubans backing the procommunist Angolans led to tank battles that matched the North African campaign in the Second World War. This was Operation SMOKESHELL in Angola, 1980. (SADF)

At the beginning of the 1990s the United States found itself in a unique position. It was the sole superpower, yes, but – to paraphrase Henry Kissinger – America could neither dominate the world nor withdraw from it, when it found itself both all-powerful and totally vulnerable. Soon the country was to enter another long war – accompanied by big battles with the media, especially as the occupation in Iraq became a quagmire – where it would have to relearn the lessons of the Cold War: that military strength, when misused, could be highly counterproductive. When the collapse of the USSR and its satellites came, it was partly with delicious irony because of the weight of communism’s own internal contradictions. Yet, as Michael Burleigh has persuasively argued, it was also because of the resilience and arguable resurgence of a competing ideology, Christianity.27 The first government of the newly liberated German Democratic Republic boasted four Protestant pastors, for example. Evangelicalism flourished in the United States, while Orthodox Christianity dramatically resurfaced in Russia itself. But did this renaissance of faith help to inspire the hatred of the Occident in an even more implacable and violent form of totalitarian philosophy, Islamic extremism? Just as most media pundits failed to anticipate the imminent collapse of the Soviet system, likewise few predicted the rise of religion as a key factor in modern warfare.