War reporting requires physical stamina above all else. So why is
the partially paralysed Frank Gardner allowed on the front line?

Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, stood in a military
compound in Afghanistan telling us about “the track record” of the
American General David Petraeus. It was Petraeus’s predecessor Stanley
McChrystal who is the four-miles-before-breakfast runner so why, I thought,
was the well-educated Gardner resorting to the hackneyed “track record” to
describe Petraeus’s military successes when “record” was enough. After all,
Gardner was reporting from a war zone, not at an athletics stadium.

Not for the first time, I pondered the wisdom of Samuel Goldwyn: “What
we need is some new clichés”. But then a question, far more serious than why
the average British TV and radio journalist slavishly adopts American
phraseology, popped into my head: what was Gardner doing there anyway?
Partly paralysed as a result of being shot in Saudi Arabia in 2004, dependent
on a wheelchair, he was managing to stand in front of a British armoured
vehicle by leaning on a Zimmer frame. Had the Taliban started lobbing
mortars into the compound, Gardner would have been in greater peril than
anyone else there. He would have been incapable of running for cover and
somebody else would have had to have helped him to safety, possible at risk of
his or her own life.

Gardner is clearly a very brave man. No one would have blamed him if
had he decided to quit journalism after the unprovoked and cowardly attack
by an al-Qaida gunman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, whose bullets damaged his
spinal nerves and killed his cameraman Simon Cumbers. By Gardner’s own
account, they had stayed too long in a dangerous part of the city. But Gardner
was determined to return to his job. It was the same determination that made
him resolve, at the age of 34, to leave his comfortable life as an investment
banker to become a journalist, in much the same way that journalists briefly
desire to be investment bankers when they read how much they are paid for
playing with other people’s money.

As a former Territorial Army officer, Gardner is obviously made of the
right stuff. And I raised a quiet cheer for him when, after a long time in
hospital and 14 operations, he rolled back into the BBC TV news studio to
resume his duties, commenting from his wheelchair on terrorism, war and
associated mayhem. That is all very good. But it is crazy, beyond
irresponsibility, for the BBC to put a man who is partially paralysed into the
line of fire. If it were safe for him to be in Afghanistan, then why was he
wearing a flak jacket? But if the whole of Afghanistan is a war zone, as we are
informed, then why was he being exposed to the possibility of violent death,
possibly even “live” on our screens via satellite? No amount of special
pleading about his need to see for himself could justify such a risk when the
information he required could be acquired on the telephone from an office in
London and transmitted from a studio in Shepherd’s Bush.

The British military wouldn’t do it. During the Falklands war, the boy
who grew up next door to us was in the Royal Marines. He won the rare
Distinguished Conduct Medal, but in doing so sustained terrible injuries to
both legs. He declined to have them amputated but was left unable to walk
without crutches. The Marines kept him in uniform and put him in charge of
the stores at Arbroath. They didn’t send him back to the front line, not out of
concern for his self-respect but because they couldn’t, and wouldn’t, take the
risk that a disabled Marine, anywhere near combat, would have presented to
his comrades.

I can understand Gardner’s wish to go back to the front line. One
Saturday afternoon in Belfast in 1976, I and the BBC cameraman Peter
Matthews were badly beaten up by a Loyalist gang in a street just off the
Shankill Road – in Downing Street as it happens. I could not wait to get out of
hospital and back on the screen. So, at the first opportunity, I was standing
outside the Maze Prison with my cracked ribs, a fat lip and an assortment of
facial bruises, doing a piece to camera on the story of the day. “That’ll show
those people”, I thought. I was wrong. I should have followed the example of
Matthews, who was taken off by his loyal sound recordist Bill Norman to a
quiet hotel in the Irish Republic in order to recover so his wife would not be
too alarmed by his appearance when he eventually returned home.

“Those people” who I had vainly hoped to show what was what wouldn’t
have been moved by anything, least of all my petty defiance of their boots
and fists. Of course, if violence had broken out outside the Maze when I was
filming that piece to camera, I could have run away as fast as my long legs
would have carried me, just as I would have got out of the way in Downing
Street, had we not been trapped when we were jumped. On most occasions, it
is better to flee than fight. That’s not, of course, a choice Frank Gardner
would be in a position to make in hazardous circumstances, whether in
Afghanistan or elsewhere.

In Lebanon in 1976, a BBC camera crew and I came under fire from a
regiment of Syrian T62 tanks. Without pausing for consultation, all three of
us managed to crawl through a tiny hole to find refuge under a partially
demolished house. Before the Syrians opened fire, I hadn’t noticed the house
let alone the life-saving hole. But I found it instinctively when I thought I was
going to die. What cameraman Bill Hanford and sound man Albert Charlton
would have done had I been accompanying them in a wheelchair I cannot
imagine. As it was, when we eventually crawled out and looked at the tiny
hole, none of us could work out how we all managed to get through it in less
than five seconds. Adrenalin, I suppose.

An unnecessary risk

Frank Gardner could not have got through that hole. Can he go anywhere
to a war zone without back-up? If not, how many people does he need to get
him to the place where he can do a 30-second piece to camera? Is the standard
military helicopter “wheelchair accessible”? If not, how many men does it
take to haul him on board and what goes through the minds of the squaddies
as they load and unload him? Isn’t it all an unnecessary risk?

Too many times, in wars big and small, I hit the ground hoping it would
swallow me up while men with automatic weapons emptied magazines over
my head. I believed I had a duty to get the story, whatever the danger, even
though I was married with a small daughter and loved everything about life. I
once expressed my thoughts about duty and the dangers of violent death to a
BBC colleague who was a brilliant reporter but an even better cynic: “We are
not officers and gentlemen,” he declared. “We are just hacks.”

He was right. We weren’t being paid to put our lives at risk. Our bosses
would have bent over backwards to have avoided giving that impression to us,
not because they cared much for us as men, but because it might have exposed
the BBC to financial claims should anything have gone wrong. They wanted
the story but were not at all keen on having to pay compensation. We all knew
that the BBC was relying on our willingness to put ourselves in harm’s way to
get the story. But it was never acknowledged. Risk comes with the job. In
television, it is not possible to phone a war in from a bar stool at a five-star
hotel one or two time zones from the front line. We had to be close. And we
wanted to be. We were all competitive. We asked to be sent. We wanted the
big stories, and most of those involved people killing each other in exotic
locations.

On the selection board for some job or other, I was once asked by a senior
BBC person, whose entire career had been spent at Television Centre, what
“man management skills” I possessed. None really, I replied, apart from the
fact that sometimes I had to convince two other men, who had five children
between them and large mortgages, that it was a good idea for them to drive
with me in an un-armoured car down a dirt road in Africa that we all knew to
be mined. And they did it. I didn’t get the job.

The BBC has always been very leery about taking responsibility for
people who are killed or injured on duty. There is a closing of ranks on the
management floors whenever such things happen. After the expressions of
official grief and a good turn-out of the top brass at the funeral, or a
succession of hospital visits to the injured employee, it all comes down to
pounds and pence: liability and how to avoid it. Sympathy and human regard
for victims and their families is not followed by munificent generosity. In
terms of large sums of financial compensation, the BBC is deficient. The
initial concern is swiftly stifled by the obligation to safeguard the licence-payers’
cash.

In August 1974 in Cyprus, the BBC reporter Chris Morris was blown up
and badly injured in a Turkish minefield. His sound recordist, Ted Stoddart,
a 34-year-old family man, was killed. Morris had to battle with the BBC long
and hard to secure even the modest sums that were eventually forthcoming
to compensate for the injuries he bears to this day. When John Harrison was
killed in a car crash in South Africa, the BBC initially maintained he was off
duty at the time. But Harrison was being driven to a satellite point in order to
refresh an earlier report with new footage. His widow wasn’t intimidated by
pressure not to take legal action and held out for the sort of settlement that
should have been offered immediately, on a golden tray, with the BBC’s
undying gratitude for her husband’s life and work.

And then there is the awful case of Kate Peyton, the 39-year-old freelance
working at the BBC’s Johannesburg bureau in 2004. Following an interview
with her BBC boss who accused her of “lacking focus”, she believed her
contract would not be renewed if she refused to go to Somalia to work on
some feature stories. She was shot in the back the day after she arrived in
Mogadishu and died six hours later. I went to see her mother Angela and
heard how she, and Kate’s brother and sister, had become rapidly
disillusioned by the way the BBC treated them, as the family tried, without
much help, to get to the truth about Kate Peyton’s death and the pressures
she had felt under to enter a place of extreme danger. The Ipswich Coroner
who conducted the inquest into Payton’s death said he wasn’t criticising the
BBC, but he sent them a copy of his verdict which pointed out the dangers of
putting pressure on employees to work in dangerous places. The BBC
responded by sending round a memo pointing out that anyone could refuse a
dangerous assignment.

Lacking human concern

My injuries in Belfast were minor but I will never forget the telephone
call from a news executive when I got out of hospital. It became clear he was
trying to find out whether or not I would be seeking any compensation. His
questioning about the circumstances of the unprovoked attack, when we
were not filming and didn’t even have the camera with us, was entirely
lacking in human concern. He made me feel as if I had somehow caused the
attack and was responsible for Peter Matthews and me ending up in the
Mater Hospital with three nuns to look after us. And when I contracted
hepatitis in the Guatemalan jungle during that country’s confrontation with
Belize, and was off duty for three months, the single “home visit” I received
was to find out when I would be back at work. I instructed our family solicitor
that, should anything happen to me, he was not allow anyone from the BBC
near my wife, and to sue the Corporation until a dumper truck arrived to
deposit a large sum on money on our front lawn.

The BBC now sends people who might be assigned to war zones on
courses that are usually run by ex-military types, who are paid to train
reporters, camera crews and producers how to stay out of danger. In truth,
that is not possible. If you are covering a war or any armed conflict, the
precautions you can take are minimal. Blind luck is probably as good as any
formal protection.

I never rose to even the lowest rung of the BBC news hierarchy. I didn’t
write memos and avoided attending meetings in the belief I had been hired to
be a reporter rather than a news apparatchik. But I did make one
contribution to BBC bureaucracy. At the end of one arduous overseas
assignment, I was asked to take a look at a draft for a job advertisement for a
new reporter. There was the usual stuff about “relevant experience” and
“sound news judgment”, with “a knowledge of foreign languages” being
“desirable”. I observed that the first and essential requirement for a reporter
or correspondent was physical stamina, because without it the job could not
be done. A successful candidate had to be able to work flat out for 72 hours
upon arrival in a foreign country, be able to drive 300 miles over a mountain
range to get to the scene of an earthquake, live rough for several days and, at
the end, still be able to function as a skilled reporter.

I believe that in advertisements for BBC reporters, “physical stamina” is
still listed in the qualities required. These days, with satellite phones and the
facility for live transmission from all but the most inaccessible places, the
human factor is still vitally important. There is no substitute for health and
strength, and that is why TV reporting in conflict zones is a job best done by
youngish people. But it is instructive to see how few new reporters last long
at the sharp end, most turning up before long in studios or in foreign bureaux
where danger of war is remote. No one today will ever match the war
reporting record of Martin Bell.

Frank Gardner is 49. Courage he has aplenty, but his BBC bosses are
doing him no favours by pretending to the world at large that a partly
paralysed man can be a war correspondent. He should not be expected to be
one. He should not be encouraged to be one. He should be prevented from
being one. He should be told that there is much valuable work that can do
away from the front line. Just think of the row in the press and even in
Parliament if he were to be injured on one of his “in theatre” visits. And, say
someone else “bought it” while saving him. It doesn’t bear thinking about,
does it? And that is before financial damages are factored in. I cannot believe
someone in the BBC hasn’t thought of that.

— Michael Cole

Michael Cole was a reporter for BBC TV News from 1968 until 1988, during
which time his work won two Royal Television Society awards. He now runs his
own public relations company and broadcasts on the BBC and elsewhere.