ALTHOUGH THERE ARE several close contenders, the Sunday Times can justifiably claim to be Britain’s premier newspaper of smear. Since Rupert Murdoch was permitted by his friend, Margaret Thatcher, to buy Times Newspapers without regard to the rules restricting monopoly ownership, smear has been almost as regular a feature of the Sunday Times as the vacuities of ‘style’ journalism that bring in much of its profitable advertising.70 Unlike the unpretentious Sun, with which it shares offices in the Murdoch fortress at Wapping, East London, the Sunday Times suggests to its readers that it is a ‘quality’ newspaper; and from time to time it does publish work of a proper professional standard. But the smearing and pillorying of its ‘enemies’, together with the crude promotion of the interests of its owner and of sections of the British establishment – notably the Ministry of Defence and the security services – now characterise and distinguish the paper.
The Sunday Times’s attacks on British television are famous. These spring from Murdoch’s original alliance with Thatcher, which deepened following his ‘victory’ over the print unions at Wapping in 1986. ‘Wapping’ was crucial to Thatcher’s strategy to emasculate the trade unions and to further her ideological aims of ‘deregulating’ British society. Three years later Murdoch was rewarded when the Government’s deregulation of broadcasting allowed him to launch Britain’s first satellite television network, Sky Channel. Murdoch had long used the editorial pages of his papers to attack and undermine the BBC and ITV, which he saw as obstacles to his own expansion in television.
Thatcher shared his view of these institutions – it is fair to say she loathed them – and devoted herself as prime minister to trying to break them up. These efforts resulted in the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which sought to end the ‘cartel’ of ITV, but instead produced a farcical ‘auction’ that cost the industry heavily in resources while leaving most of the network in place. It did, however, achieve one goal dear to Thatcher’s heart: it got rid of Thames Television, whose franchise is not to be renewed in 1993.
Just as the Sunday Times faithfully expressed Thatcher’s spleen against television, so it played by few rules when attacking her opponents. In 1988 the paper conducted a smear campaign against Thames and the producers of its current affairs investigation, Death on the Rock. This report was significant in television journalism because it lifted a veil on the British secret state and revealed something of its ruthlessness – specifically, its willingness to use death squads abroad. The report described how an SAS team had gone to Gibraltar and carefully assassinated an IRA sabotage squad.
The Sunday Times attack on Death on the Rock served to marshal the Thatcher forces against Thames – from the usual vocal backbench Tories to the then foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, and Thatcher herself; and, of course, numerous ‘government sources’. One of the Sunday Times reporters assigned to the Thames story, Rosie Waterhouse, accused her own paper of being ‘wide open to accusations that we had set out to prove one point of view and misrepresented and misquoted interviews to fit – the very accusations we were levelling at Thames’.71 She later resigned. An enquiry conducted by a former Tory minister, Lord Windlesham, vindicated the programme’s accuracy and integrity. The Sunday Times branch of the National Union of Journalists called for an enquiry into the paper’s role in the affair. There was none.
On reading a book on the episode by Roger Bolton, the Thames executive producer, I recognised much of my own experience and feelings during the orchestrated attack on my documentary film, Cambodia: The Betrayal.72 In its issue of March 24, 1991 the Sunday Times brought to a climax its smear campaign against the film and myself. Occupying much of a broadsheet page was a huge photograph of me holding the Richard Dimbleby Award presented to me the previous Sunday by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for a lifetime’s work as a broadcast journalist. In place of the BAFTA gold mask was my head with the eyes taken out. Phillip Knightley, who twice won Journalist of the Year for the Sunday Times, described this as one of the most ‘shocking things’ he had seen in a newspaper.73
Under a black banner headline, the illustration and article covered the whole page: the sort of treatment a major Mafia figure might expect. I was represented as a disreputable person, who had no right to the numerous professional awards my colleagues had given me over a quarter of a century in journalism. I was certainly not worthy of the ‘Oscar’ which the full council of BAFTA had voted to award me.
The smear was malicious and almost all the ‘facts’ were wrong, right down to the trivia. Joe Haines, Robert Maxwell’s hagiographer, was quoted as the source of an assessment of my worth during my ‘early days’ on the Daily Mirror. In the 1960s, he recalled, I had ‘long got up the noses’ of those working near me. Haines was not on the Mirror during the 1960s; he was Harold Wilson’s press secretary until the mid 1970s. There was much else like that.
The attack was a model of McCarthyism. I was not a journalist, I was not even a polemicist; I simply falsified. No evidence was produced to justify this grave charge. Worse, I covered for communists. Three examples were given.
First, I had reported in 1979 that the only substantial relief reaching Cambodia in the first nine months following the defeat of Pol Pot came from communist Vietnam. This was wholly true, if unpalatable. Up until August of that year Vietnam had sent to Cambodia 30,000 tons of rice and rice seed and 5,000 tons of other goods, such as condensed milk. With others, I witnessed and filmed the Vietnamese convoys arriving from Saigon. In striking contrast, the International Red Cross and UNICEF had sent to Cambodia 100 tons of relief during all of ten months.74
Second, I had not reported ‘as other journalists reported, [that] Vietnam had placed huge obstacles in the way of an international relief programme’. I had not reported it because it was false. It was propaganda that had originated in a bogus CIA report which, as the Guardian reported, was central to ‘an international propaganda offensive’ conducted by the White House and the State Department to spread derogatory stories about Vietnamese behaviour in Cambodia.75 The campaign was propagated by US Government officials and journalists based in Washington, London and Bangkok. Western journalists who did go to Cambodia specifically refuted the stories about ‘obstacles’.76 Even the American ambassador to Thailand refuted them.77
Third, I was a dupe, because I had been ‘invited’ to Cambodia by the Vietnamese Government. I have never accepted an invitation from any government of any stripe: I got into Cambodia, as others did, by journalistic nous and with the help and encouragement of a number of indefatigable individuals who care about helping the Cambodian people.fn1
Indeed, so vile had been my reporting from Cambodia, according to the Sunday Times, that I had even failed to recognise America’s ‘humanitarian motives’ in Indo-China and the ‘tireless work’ of the American ambassador in Bangkok on behalf of the Cambodian people. This ‘tireless work’ was apparently undertaken in 1980, the year the Kampuchean Emergency Group (KEG) was set up in the US embassy in Bangkok, from where it tirelessly ensured that humanitarian supplies reached the Khmer Rouge.
Here the serious purpose of the smear was made clear. My crime was to have accused the West of aiding the Khmer Rouge and the British Government of secretly contributing to Cambodia’s suffering. For this the Sunday Times produced one of its principal informants, another Western ambassador who had ‘worked tirelessly’ for Cambodia. It was none other than Derek Tonkin, HM Ambassador to Thailand during the build-up of SAS trainers in that country, where they taught Cambodians to lay mines that blew off the limbs of countless people. The Sunday Times did not mention this fact at all. The article presented Tonkin as an aggrieved ‘retired diplomat’. This is an excerpt:
Watching the [BAFTA] ceremony on television last Sunday, Derek Tonkin, a retired British diplomat, murmured with dismay, as Pilger accepted his prize from Melvyn Bragg, the television arts guru, who described him as an outstanding journalist . . . ‘When I was British Ambassador to Thailand,’ he said, ‘I worked very hard to get a solution to the Cambodian problem. So had other members of the international community. So many people had worked so hard and Pilger just wrote the entire effort off.’
Tonkin denied everything. He denied the presence of the SAS. He denied that Margaret Thatcher had said that some Khmer Rouge were ‘reasonable people’ who ‘will have to play a part in a future government . . .’
The ex-ambassador was supported by William Shawcross, who told the Sunday Times that ‘Tonkin’s analysis seems to me to be cool and precisely correct’. Shawcross made no mention of Britain’s secret Cambodia operation, and did not explain why the ‘analysis’ of a top government official should be deemed ‘cool and precisely correct’.
Before the Sunday Times piece appeared, I was phoned by one of its reporters, Andrew Alderson, who asked me to trust him. ‘We are not doing a hatchet job,’ he said. ‘We are doing a profile following your BAFTA award.’ He referred to Tonkin’s attack on me in that week’s Spectator. I replied that the SAS operation had been run from the British embassy in Bangkok. ‘This has clearly got to go in,’ he said. Almost nothing of what I told Alderson was published.
The following week, when I enquired indirectly about a right of reply, I was told that this might be considered ‘if it is put through a lawyer’. On five Sundays in March and April I was the subject of smear and abuse in the Sunday Times, including a suggestion by Derek Tonkin that I was unhinged.78 A friend with contacts in senior management at the Sunday Times was told that the decision to smear me ‘came right from the top’.
Of course, journalists must accept that criticism is an occupational hazard, and that those who dispense it have to take it – as long as it is fair. When it is character assassination, baseless in fact and part of an orchestrated political assault, it requires exposure. For me, this is especially true when it has to do with an issue about which I care deeply.
Copies of the Sunday Times smear were distributed by the Foreign Office as part of a ‘Pilger package’ sent to people who wrote to enquire or protest about government policy in Cambodia. When one was forwarded to me, I sought an explanation from David Colvin. He replied that the government had distributed ten ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ articles ‘to demonstrate your mixed reputation’.79 I wrote to him that the great majority were ‘not only “anti” but riddled with recycled falsehood, distortion and inaccuracy’.80 These were mostly from the Sunday Times and the Spectator and drew on two principal sources: Derek Tonkin and William Shawcross.
Tonkin’s interest was self-evident. He had been a senior government official at the time of a secret British military intervention in Cambodia’s civil war. Shawcross’s interest was not quite so obvious – although others have described his previous attacks on my work as both a ‘vendetta’ and an ‘obsession’.81 Whatever his motives, I had no interest in that which distracted from Cambodia’s struggle. In a published reply to one of his attacks, I asked him not to work against, but with me for the benefit of Cambodia.82
Shawcross is best known as the author of Sideshow, a book about the ‘secret’ bombing of Cambodia ordered by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger. I praised Sideshow in my films Year Zero and Year One; and I have personally and publicly defended his work to Kissinger. I believe that in a world where serious journalists are under attack – the fate of Farzad Bazoft is an extreme example – we should support each other; for the wider political significance of such attacks ought never to be underestimated.
To many of its readers, Sideshow represented a trenchant criticism of the American political establishment and its military conduct in Indo-China. But this was not the case, nor was it the reputation sought by Shawcross, who was embarrassed by his ‘adoption’ by the anti-war movement. His prime target was not the system that had underwritten the war – and was now doing business with Pol Pot – but Nixon and Kissinger, whom the Eastern establishment held in contempt.
Indeed, in his second book on Cambodia, The Quality of Mercy, Shawcross paid fulsome tribute to those US Government and other Western officials who were among his principal sources. At the same time he cleared up any misunderstanding of his purpose by exonerating the American crusade in Indo-China.83 He is a staunch defender of America’s ‘humanitarian motives’. He believes the government of Vietnam is responsible for most of Cambodia’s recent suffering. As Grant Evans has pointed out, a theme of Shawcross’s ‘Cambodia campaign’ is that it is always the communists who allow ‘politics’ to thwart the ‘humanitarianism’ of the West and the converse is apparently unthinkable.84
Ironically, in seeking to redeem the West, he denies not only recent history – such as the killing of more than half a million Cambodian peasants by American bombs85 – but also the undisputed message of his own book, Sideshow: that the bombing provided a catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In The Quality of Mercy he appeared to go out of his way to invest one of those indirectly involved with the US bombing campaign, Colonel Michael Eiland, with humane motives. Acknowledging that Eiland had previously ‘taken part in secret, illegal intelligence-gathering missions into Cambodia’, Shawcross wrote, ‘Inevitably, his work made some journalists and relief officials suspicious of his new task on Cambodia’s west flank’ (that is, running KEG). ‘Others’, wrote Shawcross, ‘found him a diligent and effective official concerned above all with the efficacy of the relief operation. Eiland himself later said that his work and his views during the 1979–80 Cambodia crisis were dominated . . . by his first posting in the US Army – to a base near Dachau. In 1983 he returned to the Pentagon to work in the Defense Intelligence Agency.’86 Such apologetics help to explain Shawcross’s attacks on those who identify the other side of America’s ‘humanitarian motives’, its complicity with and restoration of the genocidists.
In his paper, The Cambodian Genocide, 1975–1979: A Critical Review, Ben Kiernan, the world-renowned Khmer-speaking scholar at Yale, who has worked with Shawcross, wrote,
Not a single Western country has ever voted against the right of the Khmer Rouge government-in-exile to represent its former victims in international forums. International commentators often followed suit. An interesting example is the British journalist William Shawcross [who] chose to hang the label of ‘genocide’ on the Khmer Rouge’s opponents. He alleged that Hanoi’s invasion to topple Pol Pot meant ‘subtle genocide’ by enforced starvation . . . Fortunately, he was very wrong . . . but he remains preoccupied with opponents of the Khmer Rouge.87
In an article published in the Observer on the day I was to receive the Richard Dimbleby Award (Headline: ‘The Trouble with John Pilger’), Shawcross wrote, ‘Cambodia’s travails arouse passions’.88 Indeed. But the reason he gave for writing the piece was erroneous; he claimed to object to my receiving the award for Cambodia: The Betrayal when, in fact, it was awarded to me for a lifetime in broadcast journalism, spanning some thirty-six documentary films. The rest of his article echoed familiar official denials, including the foreign secretary’s. He complained that I had ‘constantly compared’ the Khmer Rouge with Hitler’s Nazis while ignoring the historical examples of communism. This too was false. I had likened Pol Pot’s reign both to Maoism and to ‘Stalin’s terror’89 and had described the Khmer Rouge as ‘the most fanatical, extreme left-wing regime’.90 I pointed these out to Shawcross, but the inaccuracies remain uncorrected and are constantly recycled. Clearly, to deny the historical truth is to cut one of Cambodia’s lifelines.
The year Shawcross completed Sideshow, 1979, was the year of the defeat of Pol Pot by the Vietnamese. Those of us who went there and reported at first hand the suffering of the Khmer people and the part played by our own governments in prolonging their suffering, found to our surprise significant parts of our eye-witness accounts contradicted by Shawcross – who had not been to see for himself. Writing from London and Washington, Shawcross endorsed and promoted a series of hearsay stories that the Vietnamese were committing ‘subtle genocide’ in Cambodia. In the Washington Post he wrote that ‘one-half of all the international aid reaching the port of Kompong Som [in Cambodia] . . . was being trucked into Vietnam’. His sources for this damaging and, as it turned out, entirely false charge was a ‘defector’ who had been immediately shipped off to Paris and ‘put under wraps’.91 In a sensational and widely quoted article entitled ‘The End of Cambodia’, Shawcross gave credence to an unsubstantiated story that the Vietnamese were behaving in a barbarous way in Cambodia: mining ricefields and shooting farmers.
The effect of Shawcross’s ‘exposé’ was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: a difference of night and day. Shawcross wrote that ‘it seemed possible that they [the Vietnamese] were a lesser enemy of the Cambodian people than the Khmer Rouge. Now the awful possibility arises that they may not be. Indeed, there have been reports that they are treating the Cambodians with almost as much contempt as the previous regime did . . . if there is a famine in Cambodia today it is principally the Vietnamese that must bear the immediate responsibility.’92
More puzzling than this allegation was its similarity to the message coming from official Washington sources. On January 8, 1980 John Gittings reported in the Guardian that State Department sources had revealed ‘their intention of mounting an international propaganda offensive to spread atrocity stories about Vietnamese behaviour in Kampuchea. Within days, presumably on White House instructions, US journalists in Bangkok and Singapore were shown the appropriate ‘refugee stories . . .’
They were also shown ‘the latest US intelligence report’, which claimed that humanitarian aid was being diverted ‘into the hands of pro-Soviet Vietnamese and the Heng Samrin military’.93 At that time the UN under-secretary general in charge of the humanitarian operations in Cambodia and Thailand was Sir Robert Jackson, a distinguished civil servant and veteran of many disaster emergencies. When asked about the stories of diversion of aid, he replied, ‘In terms of the Vietnamese Army living in, say, Kampuchea, we have never had one complaint from anywhere nor have any of our people. There’s been all these allegations . . . and we’ve said, “Look, for heaven’s sake, will you give us the time, date and place and we’ll follow through.” We’ve never had one response when we’ve asked that question.’94
Journalists in Cambodia in 1979 and 1980, at the height of the emergency, found nothing to confirm the ‘subtle genocide’ story. Jim Laurie, the prize-winning producer of American ABC News, who travelled extensively in Cambodia, wrote in the Far Eastern Economic Review:
At no time during 26 days in Kampuchea did this correspondent find any indication of wilful obstruction in the delivery of international relief supplies. Nor did there appear to be any basis for allegations that food was being diverted to either Vietnam or Vietnamese troops . . . Interviews revealed no complaints of Vietnamese troops preventing the harvest of rice as alleged in some Bangkok reports.95
In reply to a letter I wrote to Shawcross in 1983 he retracted the ‘genocide’ story. He wrote that the retraction had already been published and he gave me a reference, which proved inaccurate.96 If this was a professional difficulty for one journalist, it was a human disaster for the people of Cambodia. That most emotive and evocative of words, ‘genocide’, united conservatives and liberals in America. Communists could be damned and lumped together again – Pol Pot with Ho Chi Minh. And now that there was ‘evidence’ that the Vietnamese communists were practising ‘genocide’ (the ‘subtle’ soon fell away), surely America’s war against them had been justified.
During these rites of absolution, the truth about Cambodia expired in the United States. The documentary films David Munro and I had made, Year Zero and Year One, were shown throughout the world, but not in America where they were virtually banned. An assistant to the director of news and current affairs programming at the Public Broadcast Service (PBS), Wayne Godwin, explained, ‘John, we’re into difficult political days in Washington. Your films would have given us problems with the Reagan Administration. Sorry.’97
With the Vietnamese now demonised as marauding invaders, the United States reinforced its total blockade against Cambodia, a country with which it had no quarrel. Like Vietnam, Cambodia now bore a ‘Category Z’ in the US Commerce Department, which meant that not even parts of water pumps supplied by the foreign subsidiaries of US corporations could be exported. In the United Nations the Khmer Rouge were soon concealed behind the façade of a ‘coalition’, invented by the US and China, while Pol Pot’s red and yellow flag continued to fly in United Nations Plaza.
On June 25, 1991 the British Government admitted that the SAS had been secretly training the allies of Pol Pot since 1983.98 For almost two years ministers had denied the allegations that Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, David Munro and I had made in films and articles. Twice in the Spectator Derek Tonkin had categorically denied that Britain was training Khmer terrorists. ‘I deny it,’ he replied, when challenged by Chris Mullin, MP.99 The Government had never before made such an admission. On questions about the SAS and the security services, ministers either issued a blanket denial or refused to comment. The Cambodia operation involved both the SAS and MI6. What made it different was the risk of the whole truth coming out in court.
Shortly after Cambodia: The Betrayal was transmitted in October 1990, two former British Army officers, Christopher Mackenzie Geidt and Anthony de Normann sued Central Television and myself for libel. The two men were named in the film as witnesses to the final withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in September 1989. Also in Phnom Penh, as a British parliamentary observer, was the shadow overseas development minister, Ann Clwyd, who was surprised to find the men officially listed as representatives of the Ministry of Defence.
To my astonishment, the two men claimed the film had accused them of training the Khmer Rouge to lay mines. My initial response was straightforward: nowhere in the film was there any such accusation, nor was any intended; and I was prepared to say so. But libel actions are not that simple.
At a preliminary hearing, counsel for both sides put the legal argument about whether or not the film could be construed as defamatory. In other words, could it be interpreted to mean something it was not intended to mean? The judge decided that only a jury could decide, and it was put down for trial. In more than thirty years as an investigative journalist this was the first time I had been sued: a record, I believe, with few equals.
As we accepted that the two men had not trained Khmer Rouge guerrillas, or indeed any Cambodian guerrillas, we obviously could not justify an allegation we did not intend to make and did not believe we had made. The basis of our case was that the words I had used did not carry the meaning the plaintiffs put on them and that, in any event, the film was honestly commenting on a matter of public interest, namely British Government intervention in Cambodia. Our defence had crucial questions to put to three ministers – Mark Lennox-Boyd of the Foreign Office, William Waldegrave, formerly of the Foreign Office, and Archie Hamilton of the Ministry of Defence – all of whom had made misleading statements to Parliament about the SAS operation in Cambodia. We subpoenaed these ministers. We also subpoenaed the commanding officer of the SAS, Lieutenant-Colonel John Holmes, and his predecessor, Brigadier Cedric Delves. Both of them had a great deal to tell the court about Britain’s ‘non-existent’ support for those in alliance with Pol Pot.
Most important for our case, our questions to them would be based on information we had been receiving from a ‘Deep Throat’ source within the British intelligence world. David and I had numerous meetings with this person, who cannot be described in any way. What he told us proved highly reliable. He supplied precise details, which we were able to confirm with official and other sources. He informed us that the SAS operation had not ceased in 1989, as the Government had claimed; on the contrary, it had become ‘the principal direct Western military involvement in Indo-China’.
On June 25, the Government delivered a bundle of government documents to our solicitors. These were covered by a letter from the Treasury solicitor, J. A. D. Jackson, who wrote, ‘Let me say at once that it is not the desire nor the intention of HM Government to interfere with a fair and proper hearing of the issues in the present litigation. Nevertheless the Crown, and indeed the court itself, has an obligation to consider the public interest in relation to the disclosure of information falling within certain categories.’ He went on to say that this ‘public interest’ demanded that ‘only certain information be disclosed in court’.
The threat was close behind. The Government, he warned, ‘is prepared to intervene in the proceedings at any stage . . . in respect of documents and/or oral evidence from any witness’. Attached to this was a statement by Archie Hamilton, in the form of a written parliamentary reply to a stooge question in which the Government admitted for the first time that which he and his ministerial colleagues had worked so hard to suppress: the existence of an SAS Cambodia operation.
As a damage-control measure, it was neat. Training had ended in 1989, according to Hamilton, and its purpose had been ‘to strengthen the position of those forces [the Sihanoukists and the KPNLF] in relation to the more powerful forces of the Khmer Rouge and in their struggle against the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh’. No mention was made that the Khmer Rouge effectively led this noble ‘struggle’. Neither were we told anything about the excluded information, which fell into these ‘certain categories’.100 Could this be that the training was still going on? Could it be that the Khmer Rouge were the direct beneficiaries?
Our five subpoenas were stopped, meaning that our main witnesses could not be called. When the trial began, the authority for this gagging order – a ‘Public Interest Immunity Certificate’ signed by Tom King – was presented to the judge.101 The promised ‘intervention in the proceedings’ was now underway, and in a most spectacular fashion. Acting for the Government, John Laws, QC, spelt out the catch-all provisions of the ‘certificate’. For example, evidence regarding the SAS and the security services, such as M16, which might have been produced as evidence by our defence counsel, would be challenged and the judge would be asked to rule it out of court.
We looked on almost incredulously as much of our evidence was pored over by Laws and his junior, Philip Havers, and up to six officials from the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and M16. An affidavit by a former Foreign Office official submitted in our defence was censored as this scrum of Government officials leaned over Laws’s shoulder and directed his pencil in moments of high farce. (They were especially concerned about a passage which said it was ‘common knowledge’ that both the SAS and the American Special Forces were involved in Cambodia.) ‘Is it OK to leave in the Americans?’ said one of them, to which another replied, ‘No, take them out.’102
Laws told the judge that ‘national security’ might be at stake with the disclosure of evidence that ‘travels into the area that the secretary of state would protect’. He did not explain what events in Cambodia had to do with Britain’s national security. The judge asked what he had in mind. Alas, it was not possible to be precise as he did not know what else the defence might produce. The judge accepted this restriction. This meant that if we called a Ministry of Defence witness he would not even be allowed to confirm or deny anything about the SAS; and we would not be allowed to challenge this.
The Government had effectively tied a gag on the whole trial. Our defence counsel, Desmond Browne, QC, described this ‘considerable injustice’ as ‘grossly unfair’. He said it was reminiscent of the Spycatcher case four years before when the Government had intervened in a trial in an uncannily similar way – then, as here, in the name of ‘national security’.
With all our principal witnesses silenced, we withdrew and Central Television paid damages to the men who insisted they had been libelled. Central had been prepared to see the trial through to its conclusion, and had left the final decision to me.103 The backing of the company – especially that of Andy Allan, Colin Campbell and Roger James – was exemplary at a time of real political pressure on ITV, not least given the auction of franchises that saw off one ITV company, Thames, which had challenged the Government on another matter involving the ‘national security’ and the SAS.
In many respects ITV and Channel 4 have taken over the traditional, often mythologised, newspaper role as whistle-blower. It is a tenuous responsibility for broadcasters, who are bound both by commercial and a plethora of legal constraints. Overshadowing them all, of course, are the libel laws; and until Parliament empowers the courts to accept the public interest as a defence and to reject political intervention in the conduct of justice, the British judicial system will continue on its steady, downward path.
On the day the case was settled, David and I began making our sixth documentary on Cambodia by placing on film the statements of witnesses whose evidence would have been ruled inadmissible under the Government’s gagging order. With Noel Smart and Mel Marr, the cameraman and sound recordist who had worked with us on Cambodia: The Betrayal, we drove from the High Court to Heathrow and caught a plane to a European city, where we had arranged a clandestine meeting with a former Cambodian guerrilla. This is the man referred to here, who had been trained by the British in Malaysia and had worked under cover with the Khmer Rouge.
Back in London, we filmed an interview with General Tea Banh, minister of defence in the Phnom Penh Government, who had flown from Cambodia to give evidence in the libel case. He had brought with him intelligence documents and other evidence, which described the training of Khmer Rouge by six British officers at Nong Nhai camp on the Thai border.104 ‘The main source is a senior Khmer Rouge,’ he said. ‘Nong Nhai is a well-known Khmer Rouge training camp.’
Of course, a representative of the Phnom Penh regime would have a vested interest. Yet in this instance, Tea Banh and Hun Sen’s closest adviser, Uch Kiman, who had accompanied him, were deeply concerned about offending the British Government. They believed they needed British goodwill if they were to gain anything from the UN peace plan, with which they said they had no choice but to comply. They also believed that Cambodia: The Betrayal had told an important truth about how the Khmer Rouge had been kept going by the West, and they were prepared to take a calculated risk and back us.
The same could be said of our ‘Deep Throat’ source who, at the end of the libel case, agreed to be interviewed on film as long as his face was hidden and his voice altered. In the interview he described his career ‘in British intelligence working on the operational side overseas’. (David and I, and executives of Central Television, know who he is.) He said that not only was the British training of Cambodians continuing, but that there was now an even ‘greater commitment’ by the Government. I asked why. He replied,
The situation in that part of the world is becoming increasingly more sensitive. We have the problems of an imminent destabilisation within the People’s Republic of China. We have Vietnam, which is quietly making overtures to the West . . . We have a power vacuum in Cambodia itself. At the same time, the lessons of Americans in Vietnam have been well learned and what is being done now is to provide a greater degree of on-the-ground support and training [than] the American old-style of going in heavy and high.
Shortly before Christmas Simon O’Dwyer-Russell died. David and I were stunned. He was twenty-nine. He had suffered a heart complaint and undergone a by-pass operation in October. He was recovering well when he suddenly relapsed. The Sunday Telegraph published an obituary that warmly celebrated his memory, describing his ‘series of notable exclusives’ and his ‘unrivalled access to both the Armed Forces and the security forces at all levels.’105 Incredibly, there was no mention of his biggest scoop: the secret British operation in Cambodia.
Simon would have been arguably our most important witness in the libel case. Before the case was due to be heard, I had a meeting with the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Trevor Grove. I asked him if he would repeat in court some of the praise that his newspaper had showered upon Simon at the time of his death. It was, I pointed out, Simon who had broken the SAS in Cambodia story and appeared as a witness in Cambodia: The Betrayal. It seemed reasonable that his editor should now speak out for his memory, as a character witness.
Grove was clearly discomfited by this. ‘I’m afraid’, he said, ‘there were problems with Simon . . .’ Without elaborating on this, he went on to cast doubt on Simon’s professionalism, capping it with: ‘You know, the MoD even had a file on him.’ I suggested that a Ministry of Defence ‘file’ might be regarded as recognition of Simon’s independence and worth as a journalist. I recounted his paper’s proud recall of Simon’s ‘series of notable exclusives’ and his ‘unrivalled access’ to the military and the security services ‘at all levels’. And there was the Simon O’Dwyer-Russell Prize that King’s College was soon to inaugurate for War Studies essays, which had been funded by his colleagues as a lasting tribute. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I’m not in a position to speak for him. I’m so sorry.’
In the week after the case was settled the Sunday Telegraph published a prominent article in which I was accused, by clear implication, of once supporting the Khmer Rouge. ‘It must not be forgotten’, said the paper, that the Khmer Rouge ‘publicly thanked people like him [that is, me] for their help.’106
I phoned Trevor Grove and told him he had published lies. I said I had never supported the Khmer Rouge and that, far from thanking me, they had set out to kill me. His response was to blame his staff. ‘You see, I don’t really have charge of that page,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Like the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph had relied on the same two ubiquitous sources, Derek Tonkin and William Shawcross. After I had written a reply to the paper, I was phoned by the letters editor and told I could not mention Shawcross’s name, or correct his allegations.107 When David Munro wrote to the Evening Standard to explain Tonkin’s involvement, his letter was not published.108 When Chris Mullin wrote to the Spectator, following a poisonous tirade by Paul Johnson, his letter was not published.109
I recount these episodes not merely as further examples of how a section of the British press routinely plays the part of medieval witchhunter, but of the important function of the Western media in sidetracking the issues of life and death in Cambodia. The most urgent issue today remains the prospect of the return of the Khmer Rouge in some form. But as the Khmer Rouge role was central to American policy, critics of this policy, who oppose the return of the genocidists, were to be targeted, rather than those who supported their return. This was the point Ben Kiernan made. At times it had a ‘looking glass’ quality; but the logic was there.
The struggle to eradicate public memory was most crucial. ‘Public opinion’ had proven a potent force in the defence of Cambodia’s human rights, as thousands of letters to Downing Street had demonstrated. Moreover, the three stages of Cambodia’s holocaust were all within public memory: the American bombing, the Pol Pot period and the American-led blockade against the survivors of stages one and two, which had maintained Cambodia in a state of physical ruin, disease and trauma. Public awareness of how the Khmer Rouge had been rehabilitated – diplomatically, politically and militarily – could not be tolerated.110
Diminishing Western culpability is, of course, standard media practice in most global matters. However, support for those who put to death a fifth of the Cambodian population presented a challenge. In this, Pol Pot provided a lead. ‘We must’, he said in 1988, ‘focus attention on the Vietnamese aggression and divert attention from our past mistakes.’111
The discrediting of Cambodia’s liberators was an essential first step. As already noted, this began with an act of self-defence described as an ‘invasion’,112 false accusations of Vietnamese ‘atrocities’ and ‘subtle genocide’. Once Pol Pot’s communists could be equated with Vietnam’s communists, regardless of the fact that one group was guilty of genocide and the other was not, in propaganda terms almost anything was possible.
Numerous initiatives by the Vietnamese to extricate themselves from Cambodia were dismissed or went unreported, and the attempts by others to broker peace derided. When the Australian foreign affairs minister, Bill Hayden, tried to develop contacts in the region in 1983, he was vilified in the press as a ‘communist dupe’ and his efforts dismissed as ‘stupid’ by the US secretary of state, George Schultz.113
By 1985 Vietnam’s only condition for the withdrawal of its troops was that the Khmer Rouge be prevented from returning to power.114 This was welcomed by several South-east Asian governments, and rejected by the United States.115 On July 13, 1985 the Bangkok Post reported, ‘A senior US official said that [Secretary of State] Schultz cautioned ASEAN to be extremely careful in formulating peace proposals for Kampuchea because Vietnam might one day accept them.’ When the Vietnamese withdrew unconditionally from Cambodia in 1989, Western support for the Khmer Rouge – justified as necessary realpolitik as long as Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia – did not cease; it increased.
While the Vietnamese were fulfilling their ‘aggressor’ function in Western eyes, the Khmer Rouge were being regarded very differently. From 1979 the American far right began to rehabilitate Pol Pot. Douglas Pike, a prominent Indo-China specialist, described Pol Pot as a ‘charismatic’ and ‘popular’ leader under whom ‘most’ Cambodian peasants ‘did not experience much in the way of brutality’.116 Pike argued that the Khmer Rouge should share political power in Cambodia: the essence of the UN ‘peace plan’.117
In 1980 the CIA produced a ‘demographic report’ on Cambodia, which softened Pol Pot’s reputation by denying that he had carried out any executions during the last two years of his regime. In fact, in 1977–8 more than half a million people were executed.118 During Congressional hearings in November 1989 Assistant Secretary of State Richard Solomon repeatedly refused to describe Pol Pot’s crimes as genocidal – thus denying his own department’s earlier unequivocal position.119
Journalists whose reporting reflected the US Administration line received the highest commendation. Nate Thayer, an Associated Press reporter, was described as ‘brilliant’ by Congressman Stephen Solarz, one of the architects of US policy.120 Richard Solomon called the following Thayer commentary ‘the most sober-minded and well-informed assessment of that issue I’ve seen’.121
In Thayer’s view the ‘good news’ in Cambodia struggled to be heard above the din of the ‘tales of terror’. Writing in the influential Washington Quarterly, he described the one-and-a-half million people who died during the Khmer Rouge years as ‘displaced’. Using the official euphemism, Thayer distinguished ‘the policies and practices of the Khmer Rouge’ from what he called the ‘violence and misery that preceded and succeeded them’. He wrote that, while Pol Pot did implement some ‘objectionable policies’ these were ‘largely perpetrated only on a certain section of the population . . . to which journalists, scholars and other foreign observers have had access’. Thayer claimed that ‘perhaps 20 per cent of Cambodians support the Khmer Rouge’. The source for this? Why, Pol Pot himself! The author made no further mention of the 20 per cent Pol Pot had already ‘displaced’ somewhere.122
It is difficult to imagine a New York Times headline: ‘Hitler Brutal, Yes, But No Mass Murderer’. Inserting ‘Pol Pot’ for ‘Hitler’, this announced a major article which dismissed Pol Pot as ‘a bit paranoid’, and claimed there was ‘no genocide’.123 (The author, Richard Dudman, had earlier credited the Khmer Rouge with ‘one of the world’s great housing programmes’.124) Just prior to publication of this, two Cambodia specialists, Roger Normand and Ben Kiernan, separately offered the New York Times articles that spelt out Pol Pot’s genocidal past and plans for the future. These were rejected.125 The Nation was the only American journal to accept Normand’s landmark exposé of Pol Pot’s secret speeches, which made mockery of Washington’s insistence that the Khmer Rouge could be included in the ‘peace process’.126
In Britain, the rehabilitation was similar. In June 1990, the Independent published a major report by its South-east Asia correspondent, Terry McCarthy, headlined: ‘Whatever the crimes committed by Pol Pot’s men, they are on the road to power. The West must stop moralising and learn to deal with them.’127 McCarthy called on the West to ‘reach out’ to the Khmer Rouge. The ‘genocide issue’, as he put it, had been ‘exploited to the full’. The point was, the Khmer Rouge had changed. They were now ‘respected’ for their ‘discipline’ and ‘honesty’ and ‘admired’ for having ‘qualities that most spheres of Cambodian society lack’. Moreover, they had ‘considerable support’ in the countryside because ‘many’ peasants ‘do not have particularly bad memories’ of Pol Pot. He offered no real evidence of this ‘support’ among a rural population of which 15 per cent had perished during the Pol Pot years. He advocated increased aid to the Khmer Rouge to ‘entice them back into the real world of human politics’. It is time, he wrote, ‘to face up to the fact that the Khmer Rouge embodies some deeply entrenched traits of the Cambodian people . . .’128
These mysterious ‘traits’ became a popular theme in the revised explanation for Cambodia’s suffering. Forget the actions of Pol Pot, Washington and Beijing; the ordinary people of Cambodia had allowed these horrors to happen because that was the way they are. According to Michael Fathers in the Independent, ‘Cambodians are a neurotic people with an intense persecution complex . . .’129
Meanwhile, reported The Times, Pol Pot had ordered the Khmer Rouge ‘to protect the country’s wildlife’. Cambodians were ‘not to poach birds and animals, and to refrain from killing them for any reason’ because they were ‘an important part of Cambodia’s heritage’. And the source for this nonsense? ‘Western intelligence sources’ no less, inviting us to believe that Pol Pot had ordered his most trusted general to ‘sentence’ anyone found poaching rare birds. This general, according to the same disinformation, was himself ‘hot on ecology issues and protection of endangered species’. And who might this ‘green’ Khmer Rouge general be? He was the notorious Mok, who between 1975 and 1979 was credited with the deaths of thousands of members of the human species. In Cambodia today he is still known as ‘The Butcher’, though Western journalists prefer to call him ‘Ta Mok’. Ta gives him the affectionate sobriquet of ‘Grandfather’.130
In the same spirit, The Times announced: ‘Khmer Rouge asks for another chance.’ (The temptation, again, is to conjure the headline: ‘Nazis ask for another chance.’) The redemption seeker in this case was Mok’s boss, Son Sen, who is Pol Pot’s defence minister. He explained to The Times that he ‘did not deny the past [but] we have to think about the present and the future’.131 Son Sen stands accused of the murder of 30,000 Vietnamese villagers in 1977. Under his authority, Tuol Sleng extermination centre in Phnom Penh tortured and murdered at least 20,000 people and, like the Gestapo, recorded all details.132
On November 28, 1991, the leader writer of the Independent proffered the following memorable advice to the people of Cambodia: ‘The promise of a return to respectability of the Khmer Rouge is the wormwood baked into the cake. It makes it hard to swallow for those who will always be haunted by the horrors of that regime. If Cambodia is to find peace, then swallowed it must be, and in its entirety.’ (My italics.)
Few dissenting voices were heard above this. In Britain, one of the most informed and courageous voices belonged to Oxfam, which in 1979 defied Government pressure and went to help stricken Cambodia. That was the year Margaret Thatcher came to power and one of her first acts as prime minister was to join the American boycott of Vietnam and suspend all food aid there, specifically powdered milk for Vietnamese children. She gave Vietnam’s ‘invasion’ of Cambodia as the reason.
In June 1979 representatives of the main British voluntary agencies were called to the Foreign Office, where they were told that the British boycott of Vietnam now applied to Cambodia. They were warned that the Vietnamese were ‘obstructing’ aid and that if they attempted to fly into Phnom Penh, they might be fired upon. This was official deception on a grand scale, setting the tone for British policy to the present day.
At the meeting was Jim Howard, an engineer and Oxfam’s senior ‘fireman’, a veteran of disaster relief in Biafra, India, the Sahel, Latin America and Asia. Howard embodies Oxfam, which was set up in 1942 by Quakers with the aim of arousing public interest in the suffering of civilians in Europe, especially children, who were denied food because of the Allied blockade. What struck me about Jim Howard when we first met in Phnom Penh, was that he saw every problem he was sent to solve unfailingly from the point of view of the people in need.
Oxfam ignored the Foreign Office ‘warning’. Howard flew to Paris with £20,000 in cash and got in touch with an air charter company, based in Luxembourg, whose Icelandic and Danish pilots had a reputation for flying ‘anything anywhere’. They were prepared to fly a DC8 to Phnom Penh; Howard set about loading it with drugs, vitamins and powdered milk. On August 19 he sent his passport to the Vietnamese embassy in Paris, where it was stamped and returned to him that afternoon. A few hours later he was airborne.
When the aircraft landed at Bangkok to refuel, a source of obstruction which the Foreign Office had neglected to mention, the Thai regime refused to allow it to fly on to Phnom Penh. ‘We told them “OK”,’ said Howard, ‘“We’ll fly somewhere else; we’ll fly to Saigon instead.” So they finally let us take off and we circled out over the South China Sea and indeed flew overhead Saigon, before heading for Phnom Penh. The pilot couldn’t believe his eyes. There was nothing at Phnom Penh airport. We did one low run and went in. There wasn’t even a fork lift. We lifted the supplies down by hand. All the skilled people were dead, or in hiding. But there was willingness and gratitude. We landed at eleven in the morning; by four o’clock that afternoon, the milk and antibiotics were being given to the children.’
Jim Howard’s aircraft was only the second Western relief aircraft to arrive in Cambodia in the eight months since the end of Asia’s holocaust.
I was already in Phnom Penh, working by candle-light in my room at the old Hotel Royale. The afternoon monsoon had been so insistent that rain had poured through the louvres of the french windows and two rats scampered to and fro, across the puddles. When Jim Howard walked in, I was endeavouring to compile a list of urgently needed items – the very things he had brought – which I intended to give to the Australian ambassador in Bangkok. To illustrate the enormity of what had happened, I told him that, down the road, one man was struggling to care for fifty starving orphans. ‘Where do I start?’ he said: words that would make for him, and others at Oxfam, a fitting epitaph.
The following day his first cable to Oxford read: ‘50 to 80 per cent human material destruction is the terrible reality. One hundred tons of milk per week needed by air and sea for the next two months starting now, repeat now.’ So began one of the boldest rescue operations in history. Shortly afterwards, a barge left Singapore, sailing into the north-eastern monsoon, with 1,500 tons of Oxfam seed on board. Guy Stringer had put the whole remarkable venture together in a few weeks and with just £50,000.
Like Jim Howard, he had already navigated his way through a political storm. Singapore was, and still is, supporting those allied with Pol Pot. Back in London, Oxfam’s director, Brian Walker, stood his ground calmly against press charges of ‘aiding communists’. Indeed, Oxfam’s strength has been not to be deterred. But its very presence in Cambodia and the success of its schemes have made it enemies from London to Washington to Bangkok. An American ambassador in Bangkok would berate visitors with his views on ‘those communists at Oxfam’.
Cambodia had a profound influence on the way Oxfam saw its responsibilities. Many Oxfam workers believed it was no longer enough to dispense ‘Band Aid charity’ and that the organisation should take more literally its stated obligation ‘to educate the public concerning the nature, causes and effects of poverty, distress and suffering’.
In 1988 Oxfam published Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea, by Eva Mysliwiec, Oxfam’s American chief representative in Phnom Penh and the doyenne of voluntary aid workers in Cambodia.133 Marshalling her facts, most of them gained at first hand, she presented a picture of a people who had suffered more than most and were now being punished by so-called civilised governments for being on the ‘wrong side’; she identified the roots of their suffering in the American invasion of Indo-China. Her book was distributed throughout the world.
The reaction became an assault in 1990. An American-funded extreme right-wing lobby group, the International Freedom Foundation, presented an ‘Oxfam file’ to the Charity Commission in London. Its author was a young Tory activist, Marc Gordon, who had made his name a few years earlier by ‘joining’ the Nicaraguan Contras. His complaint of ‘political bias’ was supported by several back-bench Conservative MPs. Gordon told me, ‘All the incidents we cited in our submission to the inquiry were upheld.’ I asked an official at the Commission if this was true and he would neither confirm nor deny it. ‘A fact is a fact,’ he said boldly. Oxfam was never told officially who its accusers were, or the precise nature of the evidence against them.
In 1991 the Charity Commission censured Oxfam for having ‘prosecuted with too much vigour’ its public education campaign about Pol Pot’s return. Threatened with a loss of its charity status, Oxfam no longer speaks out as it used to and has withdrawn from sale a number of its most popular publications, including Punishing the Poor.
It seemed to me that those who were meant to keep the record straight had two choices. They could blow the whistle and alert the world to the betrayal of Cambodia, as Oxfam did, and risk incurring a penalty, be it smear or sanction. Or they could follow the advice of Son Sen’s wife, Yun Yat, who was minister of information during the years of genocide. In boasting that Buddhism had been virtually eradicated from Cambodia and that the monks had ‘stopped believing’ (most of them had been murdered), she said, ‘The problem becomes extinguished. Hence there is no problem.’134
August 1979 to June 1992
fn1 In his 1980 report to Oxfam, Jim Howard, who began Oxfam’s Cambodia operation, wrote, ‘It was made clear by Pilger that they wished to film where they liked on the aid programmes and the general situation, and they would not work to a pre-planned schedule as this was too limiting and they would decide daily what to film and where. The arrangement was partly . . . to avoid “set pieces” arranged by the authorities.’77