Something to Write Home About
At university I studied law, but since I was spending more time working for the student newspaper, it seemed logical to become a journalist rather than a lawyer. I applied to join the Mirror Group training scheme and was initially rejected, but someone dropped out and I was offered a place at the last minute.
The scheme was based around a group of local newspapers in South Devon. In years to come prominent graduates would include Alastair Campbell (destined to become a key player in the rise of New Labour), Andrew Morton (whose works include Diana: Her True Story) and David Montgomery who went on to edit the News of the World and later became chief executive of the Mirror Group. The idea was that, after a course in the basics of journalism, we would be apprenticed to one or more of the half-dozen weekly newspapers owned by the group. I must have been particularly insufferable because I ended up being shunted around all six.
While still a trainee journalist I was selected as the Labour candidate for North Devon in the 1970 general election. At the grand old age of 22 I was far too young and immature to represent anyone, not that there was the slightest danger of being called upon to do so. Even in those days Labour voters in the constituency numbered little more than 5,000, and it has been downhill all the way since then. The sitting MP, clinging on by his fingertips against a strong Conservative challenge, was the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. Thorpe impressed me for several reasons. North Devon was a classic rural seat. Most of his constituents were opposed to what was then known as the Common Market; he was in favour. They were strongly anti-immigrant (although there were virtually no foreigners in Devon at that time), but he was liberal on immigration. Most of his constituents were keen on the death penalty (though murders in North Devon were rare); he was opposed. At the count, when I was found to be a few votes short of holding on to my deposit (which in those days required 12.5 per cent of the total votes cast rather than the present 5 per cent) he graciously insisted on a recount to see if the extra votes could be found.
In those far-off days, before misfortune overtook him, Thorpe had galvanised political life in North Devon, holding meetings in every village, sometimes as many as four or five a night, in addition to a gruelling schedule of national events. The electoral turnout was 85 per cent and a crowd of several thousand attended the final hustings and the declaration of the result. Much of that was down to his extraordinary magnetism. I might have been young and impressionable, but I prefer to remember Jeremy Thorpe as I knew him when he was at the height of his powers, rather than the tragic figure he later became.1
In March 1970, three months before the election, I obtained the first scoop of my career. I wangled an interview with the prime minister, Harold Wilson, on behalf of Student, a glossy magazine founded by the young Richard Branson, his first step on the way to billionairedom. I was with the prime minister for about forty minutes. A shadowy photograph of our encounter, me a long-haired youth, Harold puffing on his pipe, hangs on the wall of my study. We were standing by the window in the Number 10 drawing room. It would be another twenty-seven years before I stood in that spot again. A few days later the Daily Mirror printed an extract from the interview across two pages. This did not go down especially well with many of my fellow trainees or the Fleet Street old hands who taught us. They, after all, had been trying to teach us the proper use of full stops, commas, quotation marks and short paragraphs with the promise that, if we applied ourselves dutifully, we might one day be blessed with a by-line at the foot of an inside page in the great Daily Mirror. Now some insolent young upstart, who hadn’t been on the scheme for ten minutes, had gone and landed a double-page spread. It was not long after this that the managing director of West of England Newspapers (the Mirror Group’s local subsidiary) was overheard referring to me as ‘that fucker Mullin’.
Towards the end of our two-year apprenticeship we trainees were attached for a couple of months to one of the Mirror Group’s national publications. In my case this was the Sunday Mirror, where, at the end of my first week, my expenses were rejected by the person who was supposed to vouch for their accuracy on the grounds that they were so low they would embarrass everyone else in the office. At which point an old hand took pity on me and offered a short course on how to construct fraudulent expenses which, needless to say, I ignored. Many years later, at the height of the furore over MP’s expenses, I was telephoned by a journalist from the Sunday Mirror who was proposing to write a story along the lines of ‘they are all at it’. I took pleasure in pointing out to him that the only place I had ever worked where they were ‘all at it’ was the Sunday Mirror in the early 1970s.
In the summer of 1971 I secured a visa to visit China as one of a party of young people on a tour organised by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. At this time China under Mao Zedong was still a closed country. The Cultural Revolution may have burned itself out, but Nixon was yet to visit and visas for journalists were seldom granted.
Looking back, this was one of the seminal moments in my life. It awakened in me a lifelong interest in Asia and I made friendships that have lasted to this day. It was also potentially my first big break as a journalist. I was given eight weeks’ leave of absence from the training scheme and Tony Miles, the then editor of the Daily Mirror, agreed to pay my expenses. The Mirror also provided a Pentax camera and many rolls of Tri-X film. My, so-to-speak, fellow-travellers, were mainly students at Oxford or Cambridge, several of whom spoke rudimentary Mandarin. There were also two Americans: Gael Dohany, a film-maker; and Gil Loescher, an academic who many years later would lose both his legs in the explosion that killed the UN representative in Iraq.
We flew to Moscow and from there caught a train to Beijing. The journey lasted six days and seven nights, across Siberia, past Lake Baikal and then south across Outer Mongolia and northern China. We were the only Western passengers apart from two Queen’s messengers who joined us at Ulan Bator. Other travelling companions included a number of mysterious North Vietnamese, a Mongolian general and a Czech engineer bound for a cement factory in northern Mongolia who remarked that the ice on the Selenga river, on the border between Siberia and Mongolia, froze to a depth of several metres in winter. We were told at the border that the Americans in our party were the first ever to cross the Mongolian–Chinese frontier by train.
The train was Chinese. Each carriage had a Chinese steward and the walls were decorated with pictures of the Great Helmsman; unseen loudspeakers played ‘The East is Red’ as we pulled out of Moscow’s Yaroslavl station. The engine and the dining car, however, changed according to which country we were passing through. For the first five days the dining car was firmly in the hands of the Russians, which meant we had to make do with a diet consisting mainly of cabbage soup and meatballs, supplemented by whatever tinned fruit and fish we had brought with us. When the train reached Mongolia it was replaced by a local dining car that travelled across the country virtually unused since the stewards stoutly refused to accept anything but Mongolian currency. Only when we reached China, and a Chinese dining car was attached, was there a marked improvement in the quality of the cuisine.
From the outset our party, eighteen persons in all, divided broadly into two ideological camps. On the one side was a group I christened the Rave Babes, who thought that everything about Maoist China was wonderful and adapted effortlessly to the slogans of the hour. The other faction I tagged Capitalist Roaders. They were only about 95 per cent signed up to the glories of the Chinese revolution and from time to time expressed mild scepticism about some of what we were told. I was in the second camp. Although by no means a Rave Babe, I firmly believed at that time that the Chinese revolution was the greatest advance in human history, an opinion acquired from a hasty perusal of the works of sympathetic Westerners such as Edgar Snow, Jack Belden and Felix Green. We knew a little of the devastating famine that followed Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, but tended to dismiss the most lurid reports as capitalist propaganda. Now I know different, although, to be fair, it wasn’t until many years later – when the Chinese themselves began to write their memoirs and official archives were opened – that the full horror became known. Anyone who is under the slightest illusion about Mao or the Communist Party of China should read the works of Jung Chang, Frank Dikötter and Mao’s doctor, Li Zhisui.2
Young, impressionable and ignorant, we marvelled that great order prevailed under heaven, and in a country of more than a billion people which had known decades of civil war, famine and chaos this seemed no small achievement. There were no beggars on the streets and no shortage of food in the markets (in contrast to the half-empty shelves we had seen in Russia, supposedly a wealthier country). One statistic above all spoke volumes: in 1949, the year of the revolution, average life expectancy in China was just twenty-eight years; by the 1970s it had almost doubled. Whatever their sins, the Communists must have done something right.
Even so, there were small incidents from which I should have drawn larger conclusions. On our first night at the Beijing Hotel, just off Tiananmen Square, we were treated to a banquet. In those days it was common for even the lowliest officials to be invited to sit at the top table in a spurious show of equality. Under the surface, however, all was not as it seemed. I attempted to strike up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, but when we had scarcely got beyond pleasantries perspiration began to roll down his forehead and he began to shake. He turned out to be not an official, but one of the stewards who had accompanied us on the train from Moscow, now in his best bib and tucker, and I had failed to recognise him. Of what was he afraid? Later, visiting a coal mine in southern China, I rounded a corner slightly ahead of our party just in time to see a brutal looking cadre roughly push an old man out of the way. Back in Beijing two or three of us tracked down Rewi Alley, an old New Zealander who in the 1930s had come to China as a fire inspection officer and stayed. On his wall he had a black-and-white photograph of Chairman Mao, taken some years earlier at the airport. The face of the man standing next to Mao had been crudely obliterated. ‘Who was that?’ I asked. ‘Ah,’ he replied cheerfully, ‘that was Liu Shaoqi, the former president. We had to rub him out during the Cultural Revolution.’
Our chief guide was a genteel, middle-class woman who, one felt, had known better times. No doubt she had suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Though she talked vaguely of having spent time in the countryside she treated us warily – as well she might, for there was a spy in our midst, a commissar we nicknamed the Mandarin, who spoke not a word of English but who spent most of the trip making notes. On the first night I spent a lot of time chatting to a young male guide who was much more sociable than the others. The Mandarin must have noticed, because after a couple of days the guide disappeared without explanation. Another guide, Mr Li, a thin, tense man from Guangdong in southern China, told us that he had lost most of his family to famine. We were given to understand that the famine in question was prior to the revolution, but knowing what I do now, I can’t help wondering whether they were really victims of the devastating hunger that followed Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward.
We travelled the length of China by train and bus – south to the cradle of the revolution in the lush Jinggang mountains, east to the great cities of Shanghai and Nanking, north to the barren province in Shansi, where we stayed two nights in the homes of peasant farmers in Sha Shih Yu, a model village where the peasants had the unfortunate habit of applauding whenever we went near them, thereby rendering impossible any hope of sensible dialogue. Foreigners at the time were a rarity in China and we attracted huge, curious crowds wherever we went. In Shanghai the crowds were so great that we had to board a bus to keep ahead of them. ‘Waigoran, waigoran’ (Foreigner, foreigner), we could hear the children whispering. Gil Loescher, six feet eight inches tall, was of particular interest. He and I wandered the back streets of Nanking, attracting crowds of children who would disappear down alleyways as soon as we tried to take a photograph. In the end it became a game. One of us would walk a little way ahead and then suddenly spin round and take a photograph. If you look carefully at their faces, you can see the children, caught on the hop, are just getting ready to run.
We knew nothing of the terrible tensions below the surface at the highest level of the Communist Party of China. No one did. Three weeks after we departed a plane containing Mao’s designated heir, Lin Biao, mysteriously crashed in Mongolia. Allegedly, Lin had attempted a coup, presumably in protest again Mao’s decision to make friends with America, but as always the truth was opaque. In August I photographed a class of young Chinese schoolgirls, dressed identically and all with regulation pigtails, rehearsing in Tiananmen Square for the great national day parade due to take place on 1 October, the anniversary of the revolution. That year, however, the parade was cancelled as a result of Lin Biao’s disappearance.
After five exhilarating weeks we returned the way we had come – on the train across Mongolia and Siberia. Unfortunately, I blew my chances with the Daily Mirror. The copy I turned in was hopelessly naive and the editor wisely declined to use it. I avenged myself by negotiating a toe-curlingly embarrassing centre-page spread in the Mirror’s great rival, the Sun, then recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch. The opening line reads ‘The first thing you notice about China is the girls …’ (Aaaagh …) All was not lost, however. The New York Times magazine bought my account of the train journey from Moscow to Beijing and the Telegraph magazine ran a feature on our stay in the village of Sha Shih Yu. I thought I was made, but I was wrong. Nothing I ever wrote subsequently proved of interest to the New York Times. The Telegraph magazine, however, proved more promising.
In January 1972, on graduating from the Mirror Group training scheme, I was offered a job at the Sunday Mirror’s Manchester office which I declined. Instead I paid £81 for a one-way ticket to the Far East, having made little or no preparation and having only the vaguest idea of where I was going. I hoped to fund my travels by writing about them, which, in the end, I more or less succeeded in doing, though I had no commissions and few contacts. In those days there were no Lonely Planet guides, no internet and no mobile telephones. I simply disembarked at Bangkok airport, caught a bus into the city and ended up in a doss house-cum-brothel near the railway station. Later, I made my way up to Laos, a beautiful but tragic land which had been sucked into the Vietnam war and as a result had the unenviable distinction of being the world’s most bombed country. There I did something extraordinarily foolish. I caught a bus north up Highway 13 in the general direction of the war. I was the only foreigner on the bus and inevitably the other passengers assumed I was an American. When they started calling me a bomber I decided it was time to get off. I spent the night in a temple at Vang Vieng, a town surrounded by jagged limestone hills, before returning to the capital, Vientiane.
Undaunted, I then set off down Highway 13 in the opposite direction. A few hours out of Vientiane, just before Paksan we came to a bridge which had been recently dynamited. A small boat ferried us to the far bank, where a fleet of pick-up trucks waited to take us south. The only other foreigners were two French nuns who worked locally. After a while, as the light was beginning to fade, we came to a tree which had been felled to block the road. What was this? An ambush? We held our breath. The driver hesitated and then, spotting a gap between the upper branches and the verge, managed to steer us through. On the far side there was a burned-out car, still smouldering, the fate of the occupants unknown. That evening in Paksan I was sitting outside a restaurant on the main street when from the outskirts of the town there was a burst of gunfire. Instantly, the lights went out, the street cleared and I found myself alone. My abiding memory is of a one-legged man, using his crutch like a pole-vaulter as he disappeared round a corner.
The next two days were less eventful. I continued south on a series of buses and trucks. It was the hot season, the road was unpaved and we bounced along throwing up a great cloud of orange dust as we passed. Much of the Royal Lao Army consisted of boy soldiers who would occasionally hitch a ride. They would clamber aboard, clutching their M16 rifles, which they would sometimes pass round for other passengers to admire. Each had a belt full of hand grenades which would swing back and forth unnervingly as we bounced through potholes. It was a relief to reach the safety of Pakse.
In Pakse there was a South Vietnamese consulate. My plan was to apply for a visa and then catch the weekly flight to Saigon. Once again, I had not done my homework. I duly called at the consulate only to be firmly told by a courteous official that he was unable to issue me with a visa, only the embassy in Vientiane – from where I’d just come – could do that. Despairing, I set off down the street, hotly pursued by the man from the consulate brandishing my wallet. I had left it, stuffed full of dollars, on his desk. Without it I would have been stranded. The man could easily have kept it and disclaimed all knowledge had I returned. That was the moment I realised that, despite all the tales of corruption in South Vietnam’s military regime, there were good people on both sides of the conflict. Later I came to realise that there were bad people on both sides, too.
Once again I was foolish. Instead of taking the sensible course and spending a few extra dollars on a direct flight back to Vientiane, which would have taken less than two hours, I once again set off on the three-day journey by road. On the second day, after Savannakhet, the buses and pick-up trucks ran out. I sat all day in the great heat by the dusty highway and not a single vehicle passed. Eventually, a soldier appeared, an officer in the Lao army. He spoke little English, but his message was unmistakeable. This was not a safe place for a foreigner. He indicated the scar from a bullet wound on the back of his neck. I went with him to a nearby village, where I was put up for the night, and the following day a place was found for me on a truck heading north. Eventually, I made it back to Vientiane in one piece.
I spent eight months bumming around Asia, through Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and across northern India, through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, a beautiful, primitive land of arid deserts, rugged mountains and feuding tribes. This was in the days before the earth changed places with the sky. Before the coming of the Russians, the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden, the warlords and NATO. The market stalls were laden with luscious fruit, King Zahir was in his palace and the great Buddhas still occupied their alcoves at Bamiyan. In those days a Westerner could go anywhere unmolested. After exploring Kabul and Bamiyan, I took a ramshackle bus south to Kandahar and from there across the desert to Quetta in Pakistan. The bus had been bought second-hand from Germany and still displayed its original destination – Munich railway station. It was manned by a couple of fearsome-looking brigands, one of whom chewed all day on a single piece of gum which, from time to time, he took out of his mouth and placed on the choke button to rejuvenate. From Quetta I went by train to Karachi, from where I took a boat to Bombay. It was the dry season and the heat was unrelenting.
In those days more than 80 per cent of Indians lived in the countryside (today it is more like 50 per cent), but an invisible barrier separated urban India from the surrounding countryside. For hour after hour the rural people could be glimpsed ploughing their fields, tending their crops. When the train stopped they would lay siege, attempting to sell bananas, cashew nuts or mangoes through the barred windows, but none of the city-dwelling passengers knew how to make contact with them. They might as well have lived in a foreign country for all the contact they had with their urban brethren. I wanted to spend time in a village and asked my Indian acquaintances if they could put me in touch with anyone who lived in the countryside. They scratched their heads, consulted their friends, but no one had the slightest idea. Eventually, I was given the name of a Catholic priest in Poona (now called Pune) and he put me in touch with a local official who agreed to accompany me to a village and interpret while I chatted to the villagers.
‘Sir, what is your memo for breakfast?’ he asked as I turned in on the first night.
Later I was passed on to an Irish priest in Andhra Pradesh, and from there I went south to Tamil Nadu to visit Joe Homan, once a teacher at my school. Ten years earlier, with just £200 in his pocket, Joe had disappeared to southern India to set up a village for destitute children. Fifty years later, he was still there. I visited him again in January 2012. By then he had established half a dozen children’s villages and other projects designed to lift rural children out of poverty and provide a better life for them and their families. Joe Homan led one of the most useful lives of anyone I have known.
I returned home in the autumn of 1972. There followed four or five months of unemployment. Like many a freelance journalist, I never quite admitted, either to myself or to my friends, that I was unemployed, but for all practical purposes I was. No one who hasn’t been out of work can truly understand what a debilitating experience it is. Gradually your self-confidence evaporates. One day blends into another. There is no distinction between weekends and weekdays. You can’t bear to see friends because there is so little to talk about.
Eventually, I got a job as a reporter on the Hampstead & Highgate Express, a remarkable local newspaper edited for decades by the redoubtable Gerry Isaaman, a man who knew his patch inside out. I wasn’t much good as a local reporter since my mind was often elsewhere and never quite adjusted to reporting the finer points of Camden Council committee meetings or controversial planning applications on the fringes of Hampstead Heath. There was, however, one great bonus. I struck up what became a lifelong friendship with the paper’s news editor, Liz Forgan, a wonderful woman who went on to achieve great things in public life.3 During the course of my life I have come across a handful of people who I look upon as life enhancers, merely to spend time in whose company is to come away refreshed. Liz is one of them.
After a few months at the Ham & High my fortunes began to look up. I was asked by John Anstey, editor of the Telegraph magazine, to write a lengthy piece on ‘the future of South East Asia, dear boy’. Under Anstey, the Telegraph magazine was widely considered to be the best of the weekend supplements. One of his strengths was a willingness to encourage young writers and, briefly, he took a shine to me, but there was a downside. Anstey was a tyrant and, as with all tyrants, those who worked for him were at the mercy of his whims. He rarely emerged into daylight, preferring to operate from behind a wall of secretaries, bombarding the underlings with often contradictory memoranda. Features editors came and went, some lasting only a matter of weeks. This posed the added difficulty that whoever held the post when copy was commissioned was rarely the person who received the finished work, and their replacement might have entirely different ideas. Anstey was especially hard on women. Marina Warner, now a successful author and academic, worked for him around that time. She says, ‘Anstey was a bully. He enjoyed giving his female colleagues a hard time. I was amazed by the number of us I found in the ladies loo, crying.’ He liked to disparage work roughly and without explanation. ‘He was difficult to gain access to – secretive, arbitrary, opinionated, heavy … a sort of Middle Eastern dictator.’
Marina had her revenge. Unable to stand working for Anstey any longer, she departed for a job on Vogue. Soon afterwards she entered, under an assumed name, the magazine’s Young Writer of the Year competition. It wasn’t until the shortlist was announced that birth certificates were sent for, at which point her cover was blown. Of the several thousand entries, hers was easily the best and, inevitably, she won. Among the glittering prizes: a job on the Telegraph magazine. How did Anstey react when he discovered her identity? ‘He took it quite well, as it happens. Rough justice of a sort, and he understood that.’
Byron Rogers, who worked for Anstey in the early 1970s, compared the Telegraph magazine under his editorship to Montenegro, ‘the independent little mountain kingdom that somehow survived inside the Ottoman empire, a place where the central authorities never came … There, in a brown felt-lined room, dark even at midday, a thin ray of intense light illuminating a few inches of his desk, John Anstey ruled absolute and withdrawn, a grand Turk among the women.’ Rogers went on, ‘the editor of the main paper which appeared six days a week, had one secretary. Anstey who edited the give-away magazine, had four. But then he needed them for he communicated only by letter, even with his own staff, and then usually to sack them.’4
I, too, had my share of difficulties. Early in 1973 I purchased a second-hand Citroën 2CV from a posh young car dealer in Fulham who was the proud owner of a top-of-the-range BMW and a Messerschmitt light aeroplane. ‘Breakfast in Calais, dinner in Nice’ was how BMW were advertising the car. In passing, the dealer remarked that the car would probably get him to Nice faster than the plane. I foolishly mentioned this to Anstey and he immediately seized upon it.
So, there came a day when a party of us – the Telegraph’s motoring correspondent, two photographers, the owner of the plane and myself – assembled at a small hotel in Calais to put the proposition to the test. The car’s advantage was that the pilot had to get to and from the airport, submit a flight plan and land at least once to refuel. To be sure, the BMW was a beautiful car, but the 775-mile journey was hair-raising. The French were yet to impose speed restrictions on their motorways. We would slow down to 100 mph to pour out coffee on the back shelf, causing scarcely a ripple. And yes, the car did reach Nice before the plane. That evening we all assembled for dinner at a château outside Nice. Anstey himself flew down for the occasion. He departed next morning, leaving instructions that he wanted a photograph of the car and the plane racing each other. It is, of course, illegal for planes to fly so close to a main road so, very early next morning, in the hope of avoiding both French air-traffic control and the gendarmerie, we decamped to a stretch of motorway outside Nice, placed photographers on two bridges and at a prearranged signal the plane swooped.
Back in London I hastily knocked out my copy and submitted it. Almost by return came a note from Anstey with a list of impossible demands, one of which was that I was to make clear that this exercise had not been a race which, most assuredly, it was. (I guess he had received advice from lawyers.) The last line added maliciously: ‘I do not want this copy taken out of the country’ (he knew very well that I was due to depart for the Far East the following day). I ignored this last stricture, did my best to amend the copy on the flight and posted it back to him from Singapore. Later I heard that he had given it to the Telegraph’s motoring correspondent to rewrite and the man, bless him, had refused. The photographs weren’t satisfactory either and the team was sent back to a disused aerodrome near Calais to repeat the exercise. In the end nothing appeared. The entire, ludicrous exercise must have cost thousands.
So, it was with distinctly mixed feelings that I accepted Anstey’s commission to write about the future of South East Asia. On the one hand, it was too good an opportunity to miss. On the other, I knew this was the end. There was no way that my assessment of the war in Vietnam and its likely outcome would coincide with that of the Daily Telegraph. My strategy was to string the trip out as long as possible, staying in cheap hotels and taking on as much other work as I could garner in the certain knowledge that, once I had handed in my copy, I was unlikely ever again to be invited to write for the Telegraph.
In Singapore I had half an hour with the prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who ruled the city-state with a rod of iron for more than thirty years. The Singaporean authorities in those days took a very dim view of long-haired males. At the airport there were posters indicating the maximum permitted hair length. Those whose hair was longer risked being refused entry. Aware of this, I’d had a trim before setting out. I passed unscathed through immigration and went to see the British high commissioner, Sir Sam Falle.
‘Get your hair cut,’ he advised.
‘But I just have.’
‘Not enough,’ he said.
By the time I went to see Lee Kuan Yew I might have passed for a Buddhist monk. I remember little of the interview, except that we argued about Vietnam. ‘You should join a monastery,’ he said in response to my suggestion that if, as he claimed, we were defending freedom, perhaps we could do better than General Thieu.5 One other thing: Mr Lee’s desk was entirely clear. There was not a single piece of paper, a pen or even a blotter. Since that time I have noticed that the desks of the powerful are almost always free of clutter.
From Singapore I went to Indonesia to interview the country’s foreign minister, Adam Malik, then up to Laos to do what really interested me. The destruction of Laos was one of the great unreported crimes of the twentieth century. A remote, picturesque, rural backwater with its own royal family, Laos had the misfortune to find itself caught between the warring parties in Vietnam. Officially it was neutral, but the veneer of neutrality could be maintained only by turning a blind eye to the activities of both sides. The North Vietnamese, under heavy American bombardment, had established a network of trails through the sparsely inhabited forests of eastern Laos, along which they supplied their soldiers in the south. They also armed and trained an indigenous Lao insurgency, the Pathet Lao. For their part the Americans armed the hill tribes and began bombing what became known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. As the war intensified, it spread inland, engulfing and annihilating everything in its path. By 1970 the Americans had dropped an incredible one ton of bombs per citizen on Laos and a quarter of the country’s population were refugees. Officially they were ‘refugees from Communism’, but if you talked to them, most said that aeroplanes had destroyed their homes – and only one side had aeroplanes.
As the bombing spread, so did Pathet Lao control of the countryside. By the time I came on the scene in the early 1970s, the communists controlled two-thirds of Laos, leaving the government with only the towns along the Mekong valley and the lowlands around Vientiane. The American strategy (similar to that employed in South Vietnam and later in Cambodia) was to render uninhabitable territory captured by the communist insurgents. The clue lay in the type of bombs they dropped: so-called ‘Area Denial Ordnance’ – millions of bomblets about the size of hand grenades, designed not to explode on impact but to scatter over as wide an area as possible, turning once-fertile land into a huge minefield. Even today, forty years after the end of the war, Lao rice farmers and their children are being killed and maimed by cluster bombs buried in scrub and mud which, on contact, explode into hundreds of steel splinters. In 1980, eight years after the bombing ceased, I visited the Plain of Jars, one of the most beautiful and fertile areas of Laos, which, with Russian help, the Lao government was trying to rehabilitate. Up to that time 65,000 pieces of live ordnance had been recovered.
Even by the early 1970s very little had been written about what was going on in Laos, a sideshow compared with Vietnam. Little by little, however, the lid had been lifted. In February 1970 a group of journalists had stumbled upon Long Tieng, a vast CIA-run airbase in the mountains of northern Laos, the existence of which was until that time a closely guarded secret. At the time of its discovery Long Tieng was one of the largest US overseas military bases. It had a three-quarter mile long runway and was one of the busiest airports in the world, with a population of around 40,000, making it the second largest city in Laos, and yet it appeared on no map and very little was known about what went on there. In addition to several hundred CIA operatives and other American advisers, it housed several thousand Thai mercenaries and a secret army which the CIA had set up under the Hmong warlord Vang Pao, into which tens of thousands of hill-tribe youths had been pressganged. The war was run from the US embassy in Vientiane under the control of successive US ambassadors who were, in effect, proconsuls. Of these the most notorious was George McMurtrie Godley. A fellow ambassador who knew him well said of Godley, ‘He was a super-hawk, going far beyond his brief and revelling in the kill-ration. He was coarse, insensitive and behaved more like a governor general than an ambassador.’ On one occasion, at a British embassy party in honour of the Queen’s birthday, Godley (known to fellow diplomats as ‘Almighty’ Godley) had a disagreement with the Indian ambassador and grabbed him by the lapels. Until the late 1960s, the war in Laos had been a secret, even from the US Congress, which, by the time I came on the scene, was beginning to take an increasing interest in what was being done in their name in Laos.
Vientiane, the capital of Laos, was an unusual city. A backwater in which, uniquely, all sides in the conflict were represented, on account of the Lao government’s theoretical neutrality. Americans, Russians, Chinese and the North Vietnamese all had embassies. They occasionally met at diplomatic cocktail parties where they eyed each other warily from a safe distance. Even the communist Pathet Lao were represented, in a large house near the main market, a stone’s throw from the ministries of the government with which they were at war. And just to confuse matters, the nominal leader of the Pathet Lao was Prince Souphanouvong, half brother of the prime minister, Prince Souvanna Phouma.
In the summer of 1973 I returned to Laos and teamed up with a young Australian photographer and adventurer, John Everingham, who lived in Vientiane and spoke the language. He stayed on there after the communist takeover and rapidly became disillusioned, eventually helping his Lao girlfriend to escape by swimming the Mekong, an event which brought him brief international fame and was made into an excruciatingly bad film starring Priscilla Presley. But all that lay in the future. In the early 1970s Everingham was one of the very few people who had managed to cross over into the parts of Laos controlled by the communists, where he had taken some remarkable photographs. On his first visit to the Pathet Lao zone, in December 1971, he had visited Long Pot, a valley of hill-tribe villages. The head man was extremely worried. The war was getting ever closer and he was under pressure to send younger and younger boys for the army to feed into the Pathet Lao meat grinder. Lately he had refused and had been warned that, if he persisted, his villages would be considered communist controlled and bombed. When Everingham returned six months later he found the villages gone. His photographs showed the scene before and after. Each taken from more or less the same spot. One depicted a picturesque cluster of traditional thatched houses on stilts, set against a ridge of sharp green limestone hills. In the other, the same green hills, but no houses; just bare earth, charred remains and the tell-tale scum of napalm. They were incontrovertible evidence of what was happening and completely undermined the repeated assurances of successive US ambassadors that civilians were not being targeted.
In the countryside north of Vientiane we visited camps where a succession of so-called ‘refugees from communism’ described how their homes had been destroyed by aerial bombing. They were simple people, mainly illiterate rice farmers who, until the bombers came, had never left their hills and valleys. Few had ever met an American and none knew where America was or why America had bombed them. They described their plight in simple terms. It was impossible not to be moved. This was the head man of Ban Muang, a village on the Plain of Jars:
Life was good in Ban Muang. We grew paddy rice, corn and vegetables. There were wild cattle and deer in the forest and also tigers and bears. When the Pathet Lao came in 1964, life went on as usual. They brought their own rice and did not take ours. But before the Pathet Lao had been in the village for a month, the planes came. They shot at us and dropped bombs. Much of the village was burned. The planes came back many times, they came day after day. Even after the village was destroyed they came back … After the first day we never lived in the village. We went to the forest where we built huts and dug tunnels beside them. We slept in the huts and, when the planes came, we hid in the tunnels. For five years we lived in the forest. We could only work in our fields between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m., then the planes came.
A second man said, ‘It wasn’t just the village. If the planes found anyone in the open they bombed him. If they saw a buffalo in a field, they bombed it.’
From Laos I went on to Vietnam, a country that would come to play a large part in my life. Somewhere in the chaos of Saigon there was a young student, Nguyen Thi Ngoc, who would later become my wife. But that was many years in the future. For now I was just another journalist observing a war that, by the time I came on the scene, was in its final throes. The Paris Peace Agreement had been signed and America had withdrawn its troops, leaving behind a network of ‘civilian’ advisers (many of them military men who had merely swapped their uniforms for suits). The aim was to create a decent interval between US withdrawal and the collapse of the artificial regime in the south, a collapse which, although regarded by most observers as inevitable, when it came eighteen months later was far quicker and more dramatic than anyone had anticipated. For the time being, an uneasy truce prevailed. Taking advantage of this, I caught a series of public buses north up Highway One a journey of several days via the coastal cities of Nha Trang, Quy Nhon, Quang Ngai and Da Nang, ending up in Hue, the former imperial capital which five years earlier had been captured by the Vietcong and held for twenty-eight days against relentless bombardment. At Hue, the road ran out. The zone north of the city had been the scene of recent heavy fighting and was closed to civilians. By a stroke of luck, however, I ran into one of the ubiquitous American advisers who typed out on a piece of official notepaper a request that I be allowed to make ‘a reportorial visitation’ to the town of Quang Tri just south of the 17th parallel which divided North and South Vietnam. This got me past the military checkpoints and on to the road known to veterans of a previous conflict as The Street Without Joy. Destroyed tanks and other military vehicles littered the roadside and not a single house was intact. A year previously Quang Tri had been captured by the North Vietnamese in the offensive that preceded the signing of the Paris Agreement. Once in enemy hands it was declared a free-fire zone and subjected to a terrifying onslaught by B-52 bombers. The town itself had been annihilated. Not one structure had survived. Camped in the ruins were soldiers of the southern army and across the river, clearly visible from their corrugated-iron dugouts, were the tents of the North Vietnamese. Next time, in the absence of American air power, they would not be stopped.
Back in Saigon, I made a remarkable discovery. The Daily Telegraph correspondent whose reports appeared in the paper under the by-line John Draw was not John Draw at all, but Nguyen Ngoc Phach, an officer in the army of the southern regime attached to the staff of General Cao Van Vien, the chief of staff. It wasn’t that his reports bore a resemblance to the official version of events. They were the official version. So blatant was the arrangement that Lieutenant Phach used to appear in uniform at the Reuters office to tap out his dispatches. This unusual arrangement was known to most other Saigon correspondents, but such was the reluctance of dog to eat dog that no word of it had leaked out. When I got home, I offered the information about John Draw’s real identity to the editor of the Guardian diary column, but he declined to use it on the grounds that it was ‘a bit sowhattish’. I doubt the Guardian would take the same view today. I took the matter up with the Telegraph editor, Bill Deedes. He confirmed that John Draw was indeed Nguyen Ngoc Phach, but obfuscated as to whether Phach was an officer in the army of the southern regime.
From Saigon I flew to Cambodia, where the situation was a great deal more precarious. Phnom Penh, the capital, was surrounded. In places the enemy were within ten miles of the city centre. Only the bombing was reckoned to be holding them at bay and the US Congress had finally forced President Nixon to order a cessation from 15 August. I flew in on 8 August. No one knew what would happen when the bombing stopped. Even as we took off from Saigon there were doubts as to whether it would be possible to land at Phnom Penh’s Pochentong airport, which was already under sporadic rocket attack. On arrival I went to see the British ambassador, who advised that the fall of the city was imminent and that I should leave immediately. When I declined, he suggested I buy a supply of tinned food and retreat to my hotel room.
Phnom Penh in those days was a sad place, but little did its hapless residents know that there was much worse to come. Once an elegant colonial city on the bank of the mighty Mekong, it was now crowded with refugees from the countryside. The government of Marshal Lon Nol had come to power in a military coup two years previously which had ousted the hugely popular Prince Sihanouk. Sihanouk had done his best to keep his country out of the war engulfing his neighbours, even turning a blind eye to American bombing of the Vietcong enclaves on the border with Vietnam. But neutrality was not enough and the Americans had connived at his overthrow. The result was disastrous. Sihanouk immediately flew to Beijing and joined up with the insurgents with whom, until that moment he had been at war. Almost overnight they went from being a minor insurgency to a credible alternative government.
The Paris Peace Agreement had put an end to the bombing of Vietnam and Laos which left the US free to massively increase the amount of ordnance they were pouring onto Cambodia. As the deadline approached so the bombing intensified. At night the city shook as the B-52s plastered the countryside around Phnom Penh. As in Laos, the war seemed to be controlled from a windowless annex attached to the American embassy. US diplomats were actually burning down the country to which they were accredited. This only became apparent when a journalist, twiddling with the dial on his transistor radio, found himself listening to a dialogue between the pilots and their command centre and noticed frequent references to ‘the embassy’. Thereafter the radio was left hanging in the office of the Reuters news agency, permanently tuned to the channel linking the embassy and the bombers. Many bombs went astray. On 6 August a B-52 accidentally dropped twenty tons of bombs on the centre of Neak Luong, a small regime-controlled town on the Mekong, about forty miles south-west of Phnom Penh. This was the biggest accident of the war. More than 400 people were killed or injured and much of the town was destroyed. One man lost his wife and ten of his eleven children. The cover-up began immediately. The town was sealed off and, when challenged, official spokesmen in Phnom Penh obfuscated. They might have got away with it but for Sydney Schanberg, a courageous New York Times reporter who managed to hitch a ride on a barge and floated down the Mekong into Neak Luong, where he became the first outsider to witness what had happened. With several other journalists, I had dinner with Schanberg soon after he returned from Neak Luong. He would later become famous as the American journalist characterised in Roland Joffe’s film The Killing Fields. The bombing of Neak Luong is the opening scene. An official report later blamed the incident on ‘a computer error in Honolulu’, the navigator had his pay docked by 700 dollars and, by way of compensation, the families of the dead were offered a hundred dollars a head, which at that time represented a new high for the value of a Cambodian life.
Incredibly, even at this late stage in the war, the Americans had no idea who they were fighting in Cambodia. Little or nothing was known of the dreaded Khmer Rouge who eighteen months later would emerge from the countryside and wreak a terrible revenge on the urban population. The official line, carefully explained to me by an American diplomat, was that they were facing a Vietnamese invasion: ‘Yes, there may be a handful of Cambodians involved, but they were primarily a front for the Vietnamese.’ As for the Khmer Rouge leaders – Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim; ‘the three ghosts’, as they were known – at least two and perhaps all three had been murdered years ago by Sihanouk and their places taken by imposters, said the American. This nonsense continued to be spouted with an entirely straight face even after Sihanouk had travelled to the so-called liberated zone and had fun filming himself with the men he was supposed to have murdered. Even the name of Brother Number One – Saloth Sar, aka Pol Pot – was unknown until Sihanouk blurted it out at a press conference in Pyongyang. How was it possible for a government with the vast intelligence and military resources of the United States at its disposal to be so mind-bogglingly ignorant?
On my second day in Phnom Penh, with the congressional deadline for the end of the bombing fast approaching, I witnessed a bizarre little ceremony at Pochentong airport at which the US ambassador made a show of handing over an ancient DC3 to the chief of staff of the Cambodian army, General Sosthène Fernandez. It was intended to symbolise a transfer of responsibility to the woefully inadequate Cambodian military, much of which existed only on paper. ‘From now on you are on your own, good luck,’ was the subliminal message. All concerned put on a brave face, even though by then contingency plans must have been in place for a sudden evacuation. The ambassador, Emory C. Swank, resplendent in a white suit, was helicoptered the five miles from the embassy to the airport (the roads being deemed unsafe). A podium had been erected, a military band played and all around columns of smoke arose as the bombers plastered the surrounding countryside.
By mid-August foreign correspondents from all over the world had assembled in Phnom Penh to see what would happen when the bombing stopped. Not everyone who claimed to be present was actually there. Jon Swain, the Sunday Times correspondent, opened a telegram addressed to a journalist from a prominent British newspaper. It was what is known in the trade as a ‘herogram’ from the man’s foreign editor: CONGRATULATIONS YOUR EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF FIGHTING ON HIGHWAY TWO … or words to that effect. The problem was, as we all knew, the journalist concerned was not there. He was safely in Bangkok or Singapore rewriting agency copy.
As is the way in such conflicts, most of the correspondents were billeted in the city’s most luxurious hotel – in this case the Royale – from which they commuted daily to the war. The roads out of the city were like the spokes on a bicycle wheel. Depending on which one you chose, you could reach the front line in a matter of an hour or two. Highway Two was the shortest. There the war had reached Takhmao, a hamlet a few miles from the city centre. You could travel there after breakfast and be back in time for lunch by the swimming pool. On Highway Four you could get much further. I travelled about twenty-five miles in a convoy behind the prime minister, In Tam, who was anxious to demonstrate that reports of the regime’s imminent collapse were exaggerated. We stopped at burned-out villages. ‘Who did this?’ we asked the locals. ‘The communists,’ they replied. At the time I was sceptical, but given what we now know about the Khmer Rouge, it was almost certainly the case.
As it turned out, reports of impending collapse were exaggerated. The bombing stopped at noon on 15 August 1973 and nothing changed. The foreign correspondents waited a week and then dispersed. It was to be another eighteen months before the regime fell. The end came on 17 April 1975, two weeks before the fall of Saigon. It was dramatic. US ambassador John Gunther Dean was pictured running for a helicopter with the embassy flag over his arm. The insurgents entered the city and began driving the population out into the countryside. No one was spared. Rich, poor, old, sick, they were all forced out of the city in temperatures of forty degrees centigrade. Thus began Cambodia’s long dark night in which perhaps a third of the population perished at the hands of one of the world’s most brutal regimes.
Back in London, I tapped out a 4,000-word account of the bombing of Laos, illustrated by John Everingham’s graphic photographs, and delivered it to John Anstey at the Telegraph magazine. This was not what he had commissioned and it was not what most Telegraph readers wanted to read, but to Anstey’s great credit he published without hesitation. My piece on the future of South East Asia met a less happy fate. As I feared, it was way out of line with the Telegraph’s world view. Anstey ran it past one of the paper’s senior foreign correspondents, who duly shredded it. It was to be eight years before I wrote for the Telegraph magazine again.
Footnotes
1 In 1978 Thorpe, who had resigned as Liberal leader in 1976, was charged with conspiracy to murder a gay lover who was allegedly blackmailing him; although acquitted, his reputation never recovered and he lost his seat at the 1979 general election. In later years he suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
2 Wild Swans (Simon and Schuster, 1991); Mao’s Great Famine (Bloomsbury, 2010); The Private Life of Chairman Mao (Random House, 1994), respectively.
3 Senior Channel 4 and BBC executive during the 1980s and 90s; chair, Heritage Lottery Fund 2001–8; chair, Arts Council 2009–13; chair, Scott Trust (which owns the Guardian), 2003–16.
4 Byron Rogers, Me, The Authorised Biography (Aurum, 2011).
5 President of South Vietnam, 1965–75, who came to power following a series of military coups.