by some colleagues and bosses, but my cameraman had no doubts. There are some things, he said, that nobody should see and he would not film them even if I ordered him to. He was right.
We were, by now, desperate to get home for Christmas and we went out to the airport to try to get a flight. We knew there wasn’t much chance. The problem was that the crater we had sheltered in a few days earlier, plus several more, meant no commercial airlines had a hope of operating. We were told it might help if we lent a hand to some of the workers trying to fill in the holes so that at least some light aircraft might be able to operate. Parked at the edge of the runway was a small, ancient single-engine plane which might, just about, have been the very last remnants of the old East Pakistan air force. The passenger door had been removed and a large machine gun bolted to the floor. There was a young man standing next to it. We asked him if he was the pilot and when he said he was we asked him if he would fly us out – ideally across the border to Calcutta a couple of hundred miles away. He looked a bit dubious but he thought there was probably enough space between potholes to take off. We settled on a price, squeezed in around the machine gun and set off. We did a little praying, held our breath, wobbled a bit … and we were airborne.
The pilot seemed mightily relieved but still tense. He had no maps and nor, as far as I could see, much in the way of working instruments but after what seemed like a very long time he pointed out of the window: ‘Look! Calcutta!’
Now it was just a matter of landing. Obviously there was no question of trying the international airport (they’d have probably thought we were the Pakistani enemy launching an attack) but our pilot said he knew there was a grass air strip somewhere – and so there was. The landing was, second only to being rocketed by the Indian air force, the most frightening moment of my life. It wasn’t so much a landing as a series of crash landings, each slightly less shattering than the last. When we skidded to a halt on the grass strip I swear the pilot offered thanks to whichever god he worshipped. I said something like: ‘Err … well done! Looked a bit difficult …?’
‘Yes indeed,’ he said, ‘it was my first time!’ It turned out that he had been a co-pilot and his instructor had yet to prepare him for a solo landing.
In September 1973 I was despatched to Chile to report on the bloody military coup that had just been staged. It was a big story. Democracy was a fragile flower in Latin America and the democratic government of Chile had been threatened for some time by those who opposed the policies of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Leading them was the man who was to become one of the world’s most ruthless dictators: General Augusto Pinochet.
I happened to be in New York at the time and London ordered me to get to Chile post-haste. It was difficult. All the Chilean airports had been closed and no international flights were being allowed in. So I decided to get as close as possible and, with my film crew, caught the next plane to Buenos Aires – more than 5,000 miles south. Maybe we could drive across the Andes and into Chile by road. I was disabused of that idea very swiftly: far too dangerous and, anyway, it would take for ever. So maybe we could charter a light aircraft from Argentina. No chance. Again, too dangerous. The Andes are very big and very high.
There was only one way to get in – assuming the Chilean army would let us. I decided we should charter a jet and tell them we were on our way. That wasn’t easy either. The only one on offer was from the Argentine state airline and it was a jumbo jet. I suspected my masters in London, desperate though they were to get footage out of Chile, would quibble at the cost. And the airline wanted the money up front. But there were many other foreign correspondents from news organisations around the world in BA also trying to get into Chile so we all met in my hotel room, agreed to split the cost, handed over our credit cards and I scuttled off with them to the airline’s office. They made it clear that once the deal had been done we’d have to pay whether our plane was allowed to land or not. We were over a barrel so I paid up and a few hours later we all pitched up at the airport and prayed.
Late in the evening the word came through from Santiago: permission granted. At any other time the prospect of flying over one of the world’s great mountain ranges in your very own jumbo jet would have been the stuff of dreams. But not in the middle of the night and not when you’re worried sick about trying to catch up on a story that had broken days before. The champagne in the first-class cabin went undrunk. When we finally arrived in Chile we were greeted by the military – ‘greeted’ meaning that we were herded into the back of an open-topped troop carrier and driven into a subdued and fearful city. The fighting was over. The government had been crushed and the dictatorship led by Pinochet was in total control of the country.
We were allowed into the city’s football stadium, now converted into a vast prison for Allende supporters. I wondered as we filmed them how many would still be alive the next day. We also filmed at the presidential palace, which had been stormed by Pinochet’s soldiers. Allende’s body had been removed long since. We all assumed he had been killed by the military. Years later his body was exhumed and it was established that he had killed himself with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro of Cuba. It bore a gold plate with the subscription: ‘To my good friend Salvador from your friend Fidel who, by different means, tried to achieve the same goals.’ His daughter eventually told the BBC that Allende chose suicide rather than face being humiliated and used by Pinochet to further his own goals.
So I had my story. Now I had to get it back to London. The good news was that the airports had been opened. The bad news was that when I arrived with my ‘onion bag’ (the name we gave to the sacks in which we carried the cans of film) they would not let me on the plane. I tried everything – including begging and bribery – but the airport officials, closely watched by military minders, were adamant: they would not let me board the plane unless I handed the film over to be put in the hold. I had no choice. I reckoned that the chances of it getting through security, making it into the hold and reappearing at Heathrow airport were no better than fifty-fifty. At best. So I spent the next fourteen hours en route to London calculating how much money I had laid out in the past five days for a story that might never appear on the air. It was several times my annual salary. I waited at the conveyor belt in Heathrow. And waited. My own suitcase arrived and so did everyone else’s. No onion bag. And then an angel appeared. She did not have a halo and she was wearing a British Airways uniform but I knew she was an angel because she did have the onion bag. She seemed a little surprised to be hugged by a tearful young man who hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for a week.
Those, as I said, were the dark ages for television news. If, God forbid, there were to be another military coup in Chile tomorrow the pictures would start appearing on our television screens within minutes.
In fact, things had already begun to change when I was based in Washington in the mid-1970s. The first electronic news-gathering (ENG) cameras were appearing. They were great clunky things but they had one massive advantage over the cameras we’d been using since the first motion pictures were invented in the 1880s. No film. They transformed the way we covered stories. A roll of film on our news cameras lasted for just over ten minutes, so you had to be very careful when you switched on and when you switched off. And Sod’s Law dictated that the moment you switched off was when the bomb blew up or the Queen slipped on the banana skin.
But you spent your life terrified that you would miss the one moment that mattered. You would also get a bollocking from the boss if you used too much film – partly because it all had to be developed, which took time back at base, but mostly because it was very expensive. And there was the other fear. The hair in the gate. No matter how careful the cameraman was when he loaded a new roll (always a ‘he’ incidentally: I never once worked with a camerawoman) he could never be a hundred per cent certain that a little hair had not managed to find its way into the gap between the film and the lens. You could tell when it happened if you were passing the edit suite just after the film had come back from the lab. The cry from an anguished reporter of ‘Oh fuck! There’s a fucking hair in the gate!’ It made the film unusable.
No
