Adventures in Correspondentland (47 page)

As soon as the first aerial pictures came through of the tsunami wave, which were broadcast almost in real-time, it was obvious that Japan was confronting its worst crisis since the war. Again, had the pictures of the worst-affected coastal communities been rendered in black and white, we could have been looking at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

As ever in these situations, the first death toll was virtually meaningless, for it registered that just five people had been killed. Given the ‘end of days' feel to this disaster, footage that resembled the latest in three-dimensional computer animation and the added horror of nuclear reactors overheating to the point of partial meltdown, it was clear early on that the dead would be counted in the tens of thousands.

That Friday night, I had finished up work and was getting ready to join Fleur on a business trip to New York, where I planned to play Mr Mom for a week. Then the call from London came through, asking me to head to Japan. This time, I said no, and I explained my reasons to an old hand in the newsroom who had sent me on countless assignments in the past. ‘Don't worry,
it's only your first wife,' he deadpanned – a joke I had heard him deliver so many times down various crackly mobile-phone lines that it had become his catchphrase.

Just as I could not have let down Fleur, I would honestly have struggled to cope with such a massive disaster – not that I told him that. In response to a major tragedy, I had said no only once before, when an earthquake struck off the coast of Chile in 2010 just as Fleur and I were in the midst of an IVF round. Under the drop-everything-and-go laws of Correspondentland, it is not a word that comes to be uttered that often. Another threshold had been crossed.

Walking the streets of New York with a four-month-old strapped to my chest was enormous fun, and I found that the city took on an entirely different character when confronted by a newborn. Passers-by smiled. People stopped to stay hello in the street. Weirder still, they allowed me to grab the next available cab.

While I was waiting to meet a former colleague in the lobby of a downtown radio station, a man who seemed vaguely familiar came up to us cooing and aaahing with great Big Apple aplomb. No wonder, it was Kiefer Sutherland, taking a break from planetary-protection duties, who happily chatted away while we waited to be taken upstairs. Impressed by the dimensions of our baby boy, he assumed that my wife must have ingested a tranche of drugs to deliver him. So when I explained that she had let nature run its course, he was ashen-faced. ‘Christ, I need a cigarette,' he said, and with that he was off.

For all our fun, as the city prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, there were regular reminders of that more fretful period in the aftermath of the attacks when New York was
nowhere near as welcoming: the National Guardsmen at Penn Station; the bronze memorials on the walls of every firehouse downtown; the ongoing construction work at Ground Zero; a skyline unrepaired.

Still it was impossible to hear the wailing doppler of a passing police car, or the burps and belches of a fire truck responding to an emergency call – a 911 call in America, remember – without wondering, however fleetingly, if New York had come under renewed assault.

Then there was the unfinished business from the founding mission of the Bush administration's war on terror: the hunt for the man who had masterminded the attacks. The anniversary loomed as an emotional deadline for his capture, when no doubt he would taunt America with another videotaped message.

My preoccupation on returning from New York was completing the final edit of this book. In fact, I had just started on the last read-through when a stream of Twitter chat, more high-pitched by the second, started coming out from Washington. The talk was of an unusual late Sunday-night speech from the president. In the ceremonial East Room, no less. White House correspondents, who only the night before had seen Barack Obama mercilessly lampoon Donald Trump at their annual black-tie dinner, were told this was not an event they would want to miss. Former colleagues received cryptic messages from their contacts within the Obama administration, simply noting, ‘Go to work.'

Needless to say, presidents rarely address the nation at such short notice, and never at such a late hour on a Sunday night. When word leaked from the West Wing that the statement concerned national security but had nothing to do with Libya or Muammar
Gaddafi– America's latest target – it could mean but one thing.

As on election night in 2000, Fox News raced out of the traps. By strange coincidence, Geraldo Rivera, who had purchased that gun in the hope of killing Osama bin Laden himself, was on anchoring duties. ‘Can it be, ladies and gentlemen?' he asked, after receiving word from a Fox News producer working his contacts on Capitol Hill. ‘Could it be?' Then he looked down at his computer terminal. ‘Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it,' he said, as he stared, transfixed, at the one-line message on the screen. ‘Bin Laden is dead. Bin Laden is dead. Confirmed. Urgent. Confirmed. Bin Laden is dead.' With that, he gripped the hand of the white-haired general seated alongside him on set in celebration. ‘Happy days. Happy days, everybody. This is the greatest night of my career. The bum is dead.'

Even before President Obama addressed the nation, a huge crowd had amassed outside the White House, similar in magnitude and mood to the one that gathered on the night of his election in 2008 – one that mixed celebration with vengeance. In New York, too, chants of ‘USA, USA' were soon ringing out at Ground Zero and Times Square, which tapped the same groundswell of ulta-patriotism we had witnessed in the emotional wake of the attacks. The scenes of unabashed celebration also produced one of the ringing images of the night: firemen from Ladder 4 sitting atop their rig watching a news ticker announce the death of bin Laden and punching the air with muscly delight – a blue-collar rendering almost of Alfred Eisenstaedt's iconic portrait from V-J Day in 1945 of an American sailor kissing a swooning nurse.

In Washington, the White House started to weave a narrative that did not always marry with the facts – something correspondents had become familiar with during the post-9/11
years. The incriminating claim that bin Laden's wife had been used a human shield, with all the insinuations of unmanliness that flowed from it, turned out to be false. So, too, the suggestion that the al-Qaeda leader had been armed. Still, Barack Obama was at pains to eschew the triumphalism of a ‘Mission Accomplished' moment, even if the crowds pressing up against the railings of the North Lawn were not in the mood for circumspection.

In any case, it was hardly as if the president needed a victory banner, because the bumper sticker was already in the works: ‘Osama got Obama' – although anchors and reporters would repeatedly fluff their lines that week as they tried to differentiate between the two.

That the al-Qaeda leader had been hunted down in the cantonment city of Abbottabad came as a genuine surprise, but not the notion that his compound fell within the gaze of the Pakistani military and, by extension, the ISI. This time, however, the Pakistan leadership, which had been kept in the dark about the mission, was not given the chance to play its double game. In the days after, Pakistan's political and military leadership claimed repeatedly that they had no knowledge of bin Laden's presence on their soil – another staple. They also expressed outrage at the violation of their sovereignty. But was it confected rage? Part of the Pakistani Government's double game with its own people?

That whole week, it felt like the 9/11 years were flashing before our eyes. Barack Obama made a pilgrimage to Ground Zero, with a much more timeworn Rudy Giuliani at his shoulder. Baseball games took on the feel of patriotic rallies, as they had done that September. The more strident scenes of rejoicing, criticised in many quarters as jingoistic excess, even brought back that moment in Firdos Square, when a marine briefly draped the still-erect statue of
Saddam Hussein with the Stars and Stripes. On a more sober note, there were the heightened fears of reprisal attacks on American soil, and elsewhere. There was also the suggestion that some of the intelligence used in tracking down bin Laden's courier might have been gleaned from using waterboarding torture techniques at Guantanamo Bay, giving a share of the credit, it was argued, to George W. Bush.

The comedian Bill Maher, who had been taken off air after 9/11, pilloried the Bush administration for losing its seven-year game of hide-and-seek with bin Laden and joked that it had required a black gangsta president to do the job. All week, the usual procession of uninformed talking heads made the short journey into the cable studios of Washington, talking up the political dividend for Obama, their Beltway preoccupation, but having little of interest to say about Pakistan. Alas, the pundit who could have peered much further into the distance was absent from the screen. Captive now in Tumourtown, Christopher Hitchens was losing what he called his freedom of speech. The voice of the British tabloids, however, was just as strong as ever. ‘Bin Bagged,' crowed
The Sun
.

Bob Woodward proved he was still the most well-connected Washington reporter by producing the first fly-on-the-wall account of the raid. It included a delicious detail from a White House meeting when the head of the National Counterterrorism Center predicted there was only a 40 per cent chance that bin Laden would be found in the Abbottabad compound. That sounded like a low probability of success, someone chimed in. ‘Yes, but what we've got is 38 per cent better than we have ever had before,' he replied, instantly lending weight to what US military chiefs in Afghanistan had told us down the years.

Once the satellite trucks had set up shop, there came a stream of pictures from outside bin Laden's compound, where he had been hiding in plain view. They featured the usual ball-scratchers from the Pakistani Army and young boys, dressed in their
shalwar kameezes
, picking up fragments of the SEAL team's downed helicopter that would doubtless come to be used as cricket stumps.

Having taken down bin Laden, the Obama administration now sought to snuff out his image. As the week drew to a close, the administration released footage that was as demystifying as the photographic stills of Saddam Hussein having his mouth probed with a wooden spatula. It showed a frail-looking bin Laden flicking through home videos of his days as a warrior in Afghanistan, like some arthritic bantamweight wistfully watching reruns of his title bouts.

For those of us who had covered his hunt, there were feelings that week both of professional exhilaration and of anticlimax. And although the capture of bin Laden opened up all sorts of new lines of inquiry and raised a welter of questions, I suspect most of us felt a sense of journalistic closure, a banality that seems, in this instance, almost unavoidable. At the outset of the 9/11 years, we had made such an effort to find apposite words. Now, we ended them with the laziest of thoughts: that an era had drawn to a close.

But mentally it had.

Certainly, it has been an exhausting decade. At times, a dangerous one, too. And even if my time in Australia often has had the feel of a lifestyle sabbatical – an escape from the sapping relentlessness of the 9/11 beat – perhaps it is time for a proper break. In some guise or other, I intend always to be a citizen of Correspondentland, but I know already that Babyworld harbours
much richer pleasures. So I hope that you will forgive me when I say: the time has come to spend more time with my family.

The news industry can be a little like the grand-prix world of Formula One, in that a travelling circus flies from country to country and from continent to continent investing an extraordinary amount of work, energy and ingenuity in order to keep one person ahead of the competition. Apart from the occasional use of flameproof underwear, there – alas – the comparison almost ends. But correspondents often end up scooping the awards and receiving the herograms – just as drivers end up popping the champagne corks – when it is truly our cameramen, producers, picture editors, assignment editors, drivers, local fixers and translators who are more deserving of the plaudits. My great fortune since joining the BBC has been to work with the best of them.

(That said, and at the risk of breaking with authorial convention, if there are any errors in the book, I, like any foreign correspondent worth his salt, will immediately blame my producer.)

In Washington, what would I have done if the pit lane had not included Dorry Gundy, Joni Mazer Field, Jeanette Thomas, Beth Miller, Karina Rozentals, Linda Seeley Kirkpatrick, Sara Halfpenny, Ron Skeans, Chuck Tayman, Lou Kerslake, Jon Jones, Mark Orchard, Sanjay Singhal, Philippa Tarrant, Rob
Magee, Mark Rabbage, Allen McGreevy, John McPherson, Fiona Anderson, Marc Allard, Andrew Roy, Martin Turner and Bill McKenna, the pinball wizard. And what about the staff at the Port of Piraeus cafe underneath the bureau, the purveyors of the famed Delaware Destroyer breakfast sub that kept me going throughout impeachment. Neither should we forget Kerry Meyer and his delightful wife, Misa Rosetti-Meyer, who ran the rooftop television position overlooking the White House and who gave the appearance, at least, of never tiring of my customary voice-level check: ‘I'll be talking like this, I'll be talking like this, I'll be talking like this …'

Over the years, I shared that backless tent with some of the BBC's smartest correspondents: my dear friends, the husband and wife duo Philippa Thomas and Richard Lister, the great Paul Reynolds, Rob Watson, Matt Frei, Justin Webb, Jonny Dymond and the human megaphone himself, Stephen Sackur.

After Washington, I was lucky to head to Delhi, another fabulously close-knit bureau, where I enjoyed the camaraderie and friendship of Nik Millard, Vivek Raj, Paul Danahar, Ravi Lekhi, India's finest home-grown news cameraman, Phil Goodwin, Shilpa Kannan, Sanjeev Srivastava, Adam Mynott, Soutik Biswas and Niraj Nirash. Nik and Phil also provided many of the still photographs from Afghanistan and beyond, offering even more proof of their talent.

Elsewhere in South Asia, I could not have functioned without Ali Faisal Zaidi, our Islamabad cameraman and a two-letter-word fiend at Scrabble, or Bilal Sarwary, our Kabul Mr Fix-It. Shelley Thakral deserves double thanks, for working with me in both Washington and South Asia. Then there are Matt Leiper and Andrew Kilrain in Sydney.

Our foreign duty editors who man the newsdesk in London morning, noon and night are rarely anything other than a delight. The same is true of the traffic managers, who record our dispatches, and the assignments team, who tell us where to go, led with such aplomb by the likes of Jonathan Chapman, Malcolm Downing and Jonathan Paterson. My World News editors, Jonathan Baker and Jon Williams, have shown great forbearance towards a correspondent who kept on going east after Delhi when he was probably meant to go west. Two senior BBC News executives, Stephen Mitchell and Mark Byford, have also been kind over the years.

I could not end my BBC vote of thanks without mentioning Geoff Morley, my first tutor, who at least tried to straighten out my grammar, and Mark Sandell, who first came up with the idea of breaking into Piers Morgan's office and who then packed me off to Jerusalem. Rik Morris was not only the first person to send me to Australia but he also vouched for my professional competency when Washington was looking to bolster its numbers. Then there is our happy band of BBC news trainees: Gavin Allen, Terry Stiastny, Amelia Newsom-Davies, Jasmin Buttar, Sarah Fradgley and my dear friend James Helm, who was also good enough to perform best-man duties in Galle.

To the colleagues and friends kind enough to read chapters of the book – Soutik Biswas, Shilpa Kannan, Vivek Raj, Angus Paull, Richard Lister, Daniel Zammit and Nick Glozier – I owe a particular debt of gratitude, not least for saving my blushes on a number of occasions. Malcolm Balen, the BBC's editorial tsar, was a real pleasure to work with and nowhere near as stern or censorious as his unofficial job title suggests.

My thanks to Random House Australia. Mark Lewis, my
publisher, not only saw in my sketchy proposal the seeds of a book but also took the trouble to read all 600-plus pages of my first tome,
The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality
. Hopefully, Mark's
Boy's Own
enthusiasm, to deploy a cliché that he himself would try to purge from the script, comes through in its pages. Kevin O'Brien had the unenviable task of editing them and learnt early on that, although the BBC had spent almost a year trying to straighten out my grammar and syntax, it needed considerably more time to fully complete the job. I felt in very safe hands. In Peri Wilson, I could not have hoped for a savvier publicist. Thanks, as well, to the designer who came up with the idea of combining a semi-naked Bill Clinton with Diana
in excelsis
. This
is
a work that I hope readers will judge by its cover.

Had it not been for my agent, the indefatigable Pippa Masson, I would never even have been introduced to Random House. Something of a family mascot, Pippa has managed to get not only my wife into print but my sister-in-law as well. Pippa also suggested that I should overcome both my British and BBC inhibitions to write about my adventures as a correspondent, which was something initially I was reluctant to do.

Where would I be without Paul Kalra, my best friend from college, who introduced me to the lovely Madhu Chawla, who in turn introduced me to the Aussie knicker lady? Not in the Antipodes, for sure.

Perhaps I should even thank my lucky stars that the story related in the final paragraphs of the postscript unfolded before my book was sent off to the printers rather than in the weeks following.

At the end of my first book, I thanked Sarah and Rod Selkirk,
my sister and brother-in-law, for their legendary hospitality. Since then, it has become even more lavish and generous, for which thanks again. Ellie, Katie, Millie and Rory are even more of a joy than they were the first time around.

Were I to thank my parents, Colin and Janet Bryant, for everything, this book would require a whole new chapter. So all I will do here is express my gratitude for imbuing me with a sense of curiosity and for never seeking to limit where it might take me. It is not an exaggeration to say that my journalistic training began in the home, with a running seminar from my parents on fairness, integrity and decency.

My darling wife, Fleur Wood, met me at a time when I was in danger of venturing so far into Correspondentland that I ran the risk of being trapped permanently within its borders. And although I realised fairly early on in my career that there was much more to life than two and a half minutes on the evening news, Fleur helped show me precisely what it was. Together, we stand in happy defiance of that Indian proverb: nothing grows under a banyan tree.

As well as her love and a completely new wardrobe, Fleur has given us Billy. The most beautiful of babies – here, confessedly, I deviate from the BBC's normal rules of impartiality – it is a measure of his congeniality and all-round calmness that in the early months of his life I lost far more sleep to news than to him. Dear Billy will soon come to realise, I hope, that his father is not attached umbilically to a MacBook Pro, despite appearances to the contrary during his first six months.

So I complete this book a contented man; and in what has been a life of great abundance, as well as great adventure, Fleur and Billy have been the greatest gifts of all: my family.