Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : WAR & CRISIS REPORTING
Not war reporting - just reporting by Tim Franks 
Tim Franks Not war reporting - just reporting British Journalism Review Vol. 14, No. 2, 2003, pages 15-19 It was only when I was standing naked in the Iraqi desert that I realised how far I'd sunk. We were queuing for the showers at our neighbouring regiment's encampment. The cold lawn-sprinkler could take four at a time. Journalists and soldiers stood - very distinctively - side by side. Ahead of me in the line, two equally clothesless officers greeted each other warmly and began catching up on lost times. In cut-glass accents, they sighed and tutted as one of them, a major, recalled a mutual friend who hadn't been the same since he'd caught some metal in the head in the Falklands. I stared vacantly forward. After a while, I became aware of Ben Brown, the BBC TV correspondent (naked, by the way, in case you haven't yet grasped the leitmotif here), snorting with laughter next to me. Only then did I realise that the situation was at all unusual, and that my acceptance of it perhaps indicated that I'd been sucked a little further than expected into military life. I was part of the hub, also known as the FPIC - Field Press and Information Centre, also known as the FTU - Forward Transmission Unit, or, as our commanding officer explained to us, - Fuck the Unilaterals!. Of that, more, later. We were the main group embedded close to the divisional headquarters of the British army: correspondents, camera people and engineers from the BBC, ITV News, Channel 4 News and Sky. Later, we were joined by The Sun, The Times, CNN, and a small café-load of European broadcasters. We were initially based in northern Kuwait, in the unforgiving desert. A week into the war we moved to an old UN compound in what had been the demilitarised zone, about six miles north of the Iraq/Kuwait border. The camp had been built for 12. Soon it housed more than 100. That number included the troops who were looking after us. They were a mix of regular and part-time soldiers. The regulars professed embarrassment at the physique and professionalism of the Territorials, and sonorously and bloodily blamed union leader Andy Gilchrist for the fact that battalions had been held back in the UK in case they were needed to fight fires. The proximity of the soldiers, the foulness of the latrines and the singularity of the 24-hour ration packs ('Ah, menu G today, so that'll be greasy meat in sauce then.') were all badges of the embed. Never before had so many 'ournalists entered the maw of the military. Most correspondents were with individual British or American battalions or regiments. The FTU was supposed to provide a view of the broad sweep of British military operations across southern Iraq. The hub was supposed to work for us in four ways. We would receive material - for which, in TV terms, read rushes - from the 'spokes', the front-line embeds. We would receive briefings from the British military on the overall picture in the British area of operations. The military would take us on 'facilities' - organised trips either to what they wanted us to see or to what they understood we wanted to see once hours of bleating had finally sunk in. The military would feed us, water us, construct uniformly revolting loos for us, and provide security. Merely a tool The payback for the military was outlined to me by the admirably open and even-tempered commander of our camp, Lieutenant-Colonel Sean Tully. First, they wanted us to be part of their information operations. They wanted a 'particular message delivered to particular audiences', both in the UK and in Iraq. That was why CNN and Christiane Amanpour were invited: the British military viewed them as 'weighty, well-listened to, and in terms of Baghdad, directed at the very highest source'. We were, in Sean Tully's words, 'a tool, a weapon, a battle-winning asset'. The flipside of that was that the French and German broadcasters who asked to be embedded were told to go hang. As one senior officer put it to me - carefully asking me first not to report his name: 'We are in the business of news management. We are not interested in the anti-war view.' The other bonus, as far as the military were concerned, was that they could control who was in the 'battle-space', and where. In the eyes of the military, this was not simply for editorial leverage. As Lieutenant-Colonel Tully put it, if a reporter goes off on his own and has a limb blown off, he is an 'administrative and emotional burden' to British troops. He can obstruct military operations. The case is unanswerable. It is also a highly dangerous precedent. In journalistic terms, Terry Lloyd's instincts were admirable when he tried to find out what was happening outside the purview of the embeds and was killed. So how did our embed work? Day to day, everyone hissed. The spokes in the wheel thought the hub consisted of a bunch of 'remfs' - rear-echelon motherfuckers - who often got the glory (i.e. airtime), unlike the military 'remfs', who literally shovelled shit. (Being a spoke was a lottery. Some were with units that staged one exciting raid after another, changing the map of the war. Others spent weeks digging holes with units that were guarding oil installations.) To London, the hub appeared, on occasion, 'bloated and well fed', as one programme editor put it to me. The military thought we had appalling standards of hygiene, couldn't take an order, and moaned endlessly. And boy, did we whinge. Get three journalists in a room and that's what happens - a steady vibration of railing against constraints, which we told ourselves we were heroically trying to shuck. The reality - well that lay, unheroically, in the self-evident. We were journalists; the military were protagonists. We had to piece together what was happening and write engagingly about it. They called us war correspondents, but the important part of that label was not 'war'. Previously I had spent longer as a political correspondent than anything else and everywhere in Iraq the corollaries abounded. As with the FTU, so with the lobby. We had privileged access to information. In the early days of the war, this was particularly useful. But it was information that always needed to be treated sceptically. We had to keep the elastic as taut as possible, without rupturing the relationship to the point of uselessness. That is no dramatically clever insight: I could have broken an embargo on a future operation, but in doing so I might have endangered lives and quite likely been 'disembedded', which would not have been much use for BBC radio. At the same time, it was absolutely right for us to be doubtladen, awkward and occasionally aggressive. But the fact that we had to employ no more than the basic principles of journalism did not mean that the system was worthless. We at the FTU provided part of the picture. We had the first opportunity to talk, at length, early in the conflict, to Iraqi civilians. Remember how novel that was. These were people just beginning to clamber out of the jaws of the regime. Their views were subtle and fascinating. Few in the south suggested that they supported Saddam Hussein. But many had concerns about the invasion - about the forces - will to stay, about the long-term ambitions of the American and British governments. Their lives had been shaken and sometimes steamrollered by the war: they complained of a lack of water and a lack of sleep; of Fedayeen forcing them to fight; and of injury and bereavement from the guns and bombs of the invaders. We spoke to these people as quickly and as openly as we could, but only by crawling through the rules. The military, partly perhaps for our security, and partly - more probably - out of a will to control, preferred us to leave camp only on their terms, going in convoy to places of their choosing. The drawbacks were clangingly clear. It was sanitised and it was - to use the American journalistic vernacular - a clusterfuck. For the BBC, we circumvented this as often as we could, with our armoured car, an experienced and quietly thoughtful safety guy called Jed, and, eventually, an invaluable interpreter, fixer and tactician called Yusef. Both Jed and Yusef were as wonderful as getting us into the right sort of situations as they were at removing us at the first whiff of the wrong sort. More often than not, the military would sigh and grunt about our truancy when we returned to base. I would nod and cock my head. And the next day, we'd dance the same steps. Slipping the shackles I can write with confidence only about radio. The system, as abused by us, worked well. Typically, early in the morning, we would be given a magisterial lecture from the expansive UK army spokesman, Colonel Chris Vernon, on both the detail and grand intent of British and, often, American operations. Then we would try to slip the shackles and see for ourselves. TV was, inevitably, more cumbersome. There was the slow churning of the pool: a helicopter trip which was limited to one cameraman; the correspondents queuing to film their urgent pieces-to-camera; the slowness of dubbing every tape that came in. There were the logistic hassles: the forms and briefings and rules and expense. And there were days when it almost entirely fell to pieces. Remember the 'mass morgue', the breathlessly speculated evidence of Saddam's war crimes? We spent five hours in military convoy, pinballing between one camp and another, trying and failing to receive permission to visit a site from which unilaterals had already broadcast. Tim Ewart, the ITV News correspondent, recalled his six-year-old daughter, Georgia, summing up a disappointing day at the safari park: 'Daddy, we didn't see any elephants, but we smelt their plop.' And on the day resistance in Basra crumbled, we spent three-and-a-half hours in a TA convoy, driving, in the end, in a nearperfect circle. I careened between the suicidal and homicidal. In the end, Jed and his armoured car rescued my afternoon with a trip into the city centre. For all that, the pool, on the whole, worked for us, despite and because of our grumblings about its limitations. In between the crap, there was journalism. I have one cavil, but it is directed at me and would, in retrospect, have been avoidable had I followed more vigorously the homiletic rules I have already described. I didn't, in the first flush of the short battle for Basra, pursue hard enough the story of civilian casualties. When we were first told that the governor of Basra province, Ali Hassan al- Majid - also known as Chemical Ali - was dead, killed in an airstrike on a house in Basra, I/we spent our time examining the credibility of the claim and its implications if true. (At the time, we couldn't get into the centre of Basra.) Even when people of varying reliability were informing us that he had been seen going into a house that had been laser-painted by special forces (not for reporting) and then flattened by one of three bombs (the other two were duds - not to be reported, because it gives the enemy information on effectiveness of targeting), I/we were too caught up in how to report this information to ask, immediately, what damage had been done to the surrounding houses. After all, Basra isn't Beverly Hills. They don't do detached much, let alone estates. And yes, next door to the building in which Ali was reportedly killed was the house in which a doctor and his family were crushed. Three babies died. We didn't even ask the question. Had the army said that they wouldn't tell us the size of the bomb and that they had no assessment of 'collateral damage', we could have had a simple formulaic line saying just that. We could have implied that the raid might have caused casualties beyond the suspected bad guys. I can, perhaps, indirectly blame the culture of the embedee, but that feels a bit too easy. It was a miss. This was not All the President's Men. This was not even war reporting. It was just reporting. |