Distant Voices (57 page)

Writing in New York's
Newsday,
the former Indo-China war correspondent Sidney Schanberg (whose epic story was dramatised in the film
The Killing Fields
) scornfully referred to the ‘disingenuous semantic game' that ‘Solarz and his
White House pals have played with life and death in Cambodia'. This ‘magnificently weasel-worded' announcement, he wrote, was confirmation that the White House had been lying on Cambodia.
⁶⁹

August 1979 to June 1992

^fn1
Association of South-East Asian Nations

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