Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

There certainly wouldn’t have been much to gain from reading my first report on the massacre. When a newspaper had been so loyal to a reporter as The Times had been to me over the past eighteen years – fighting off the British army in Northern Ireland, the Israelis and Palestinians, the American authorities and the Iranians and Iraqis whenever they complained about my reporting – there was a natural inclination to feel great trust in my editors. If my reports were cut, this was done for space reasons – I was usually given the chance to shorten my own dispatches – or because a breaking news story elsewhere in the world was forcing the paper’s night editors to change the pages after the first edition. But cuts were never made for political reasons.

Murdoch had already bought The Times when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, but I reported without any censorship on Israel’s killing of up to 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians – most of them civilians – and the subsequent butchery of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Christian allies. The Israeli embassy had condemned my dispatches, as they did the reporting of any journalist who dared to suggest that Israel’s indisciplined army killed civilians as well as soldiers. But under Charles Douglas-Home’s editorship, no foreign correspondent was going to have his work changed out of fear or bias or prejudice. His deputy, Charles Wilson, was a tough ex-Royal Marine who could be a bully, but who did not mince his words about Israel or any other country which tried to impugn the integrity of the paper’s journalists. ‘What a bunch of fascists,’ he roared when I had proved to him that an Israeli statement condemning my work was riddled with factual mistakes.

Israelis are not fascists, but it was good to have a deputy editor who was unafraid of a reporter’s antagonists. After Douglas-Home’s death from cancer, Wilson became editor. He remained a bully but could also be immensely kind. To members of staff who suffered serious illness, he was a rock of strength and compassion. He wanted to be liked. He was immensely generous to me when, for personal reasons, I wanted to work for a year in Paris. But there was one afternoon in Beirut when I had filed a long and detailed investigative report on torture at Israel’s Khiam prison in southern Lebanon. About an hour after I had sent my story, a foreign desk staffer came on the telex to ask if I could not add a paragraph to the effect that allegations about torture of the kind I had described – beatings and electrical currents applied to the genitals – were typical of the propaganda put out by Israel’s enemies. I protested. I had United Nations evidence to support my investigation – all of which was subsequently confirmed in a compelling report by Amnesty International. In the end, I inserted a paragraph which only strengthened my dispatch: that while such allegations were often used against Israel, on this occasion there was no doubt that they were true.

I had won this round, and thought no more about it. Then an article appeared on the centre page of The Times , which was usually reserved for comment or analysis. It purported to explain the difficulties of reporting the Middle East – the intimidation of journalists by ‘terrorists’ being the salient argument – but then ended by remarking that anyone reporting from Beirut was ‘a bloodsucker’. I was reporting from Beirut. I was based in Beirut as Middle East correspondent – for The Times , for goodness’ sake. What did this mean? The foreign desk laughed it off. I did not. Was Wilson trying to ‘balance’ my dispatches by allowing the enemies of honest reporting to abuse me in the paper? It seemed impossible. I don’t believe in conspiracies. Besides, I knew Wilson often did not read the centre page of The Times .

But it was a much more serious matter on 4 July 1988, when I discovered that my lead report for The Times – which I had been asked to write for the front page – was not appearing in the next day’s paper. All the investigative work on the panic and inefficiency of US warship crews in the Gulf, all the evidence that US personnel had been placing civilian airliners in peril for weeks – the long and detailed conversations with the Dubai air traffic controllers who had actually heard the radio traffic between US naval officers as the Vincennes was shooting down the Airbus – had been for nothing. If there had been any doubts about my report, they should have been raised with me on the evening I filed. But there had been silence. Two other routine dispatches – on Iran’s public reaction to the destruction of the plane and possible retaliation – were printed inside the paper.

Next morning, I spoke to Piers Ackerman on the foreign desk. He told me that my story had been dropped in the first edition for space reasons but that the later, reinserted and shortened version contained ‘the main points’. When I asked if cuts had been made for political reasons, he said: ‘My God, if I thought things had reached that stage, I would resign.’ I told him that if it transpired that the cuts were political, I would resign. The Times took days to reach the Gulf and I would be away in Iran, so I had no chance to read the paper for several days. When at last I did see the later editions, every element of my story that reflected negatively on the Americans had been taken out.

Journalists should not be prima donnas. We have to fight to prove the worth of our work. Neither editors nor readers are there for the greater good of journalists. But something very unethical had taken place here: my report on the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus had been, in every sense of the word, tampered with, changed and censored. Its meaning had been distorted by omission. The Americans, in my truncated report, had been exonerated as surely as they had been excused by Mrs Thatcher. This, I felt sure, was a result of Murdoch’s ownership of The Times . I did not believe that he personally became involved in individual newspaper stories – though this would happen – but rather that his ownership spread a culture of obedience and compliance throughout the paper, a feeling that Murdoch’s views – what Murdoch wanted – were ‘known’.

I had been very struck by the fact that the foreign desk staffer who had been so keen to add the ‘propaganda’ paragraph to my Khiam torture story was previously a very left-wing member of the National Union of Journalists – the very union which had done so much to undermine owner Lord Thomson’s faith in The Times and to truss up the paper for Murdoch to buy. A socialist lion had now turned into a News Corp mouse. I am neither a lion nor a mouse, but I can be a tough dog, and when I get a rope between my teeth I won’t let go until I shake it and tug it something rotten to see what lies at the other end. That, after all, is what journalists are supposed to do. Further enquiries to the foreign desk of the paper elicited ignorance. Wilson’s compliant foreign editor, George Brock, was unavailable to take my calls. Days had now passed since my original report was filed, the subs on that night were never on duty when I telephoned, Wilson had gone on holiday. But my concerns did not go away. It is one thing to have an article cut for space – or ‘trimmed’ or ‘shaved’ as the unpleasant foreign desk expression goes – but quite another to risk one’s life for a paper, only to find that the courage necessary to report wars is not in evidence among those whose task it is to print those reports. And so in the Gulf that steamy summer, I lost faith in The Times .

I decided I would try to join a brash, intelligent, brave, dangerously under-funded but independent new newspaper called – well, of course – The Independent . It would be months before I persuaded Andreas Whittam Smith, the editor and part-owner, to take me aboard, or to ‘draw rations’ as he was to put it, but within a year I would be reporting from the Middle East for a new editor, a new newspaper and new colleagues – although many of them would turn out to be fellow refugees from The Times .