The red dot of a laser pen drew a circle around the journalist’s dead stare. “Completely out of it: ’E’s in shock,” said the voice. “Remember what we talked about yesterday: Shock is a state of acute circulatory insufficiency of the blood. In other words, yer ’art can’t pump enough blood, at the right pressure, through yer vital organs. Symptoms: apathy; weakness; rapid ’artbeat. In some cases you stay conscious but lose alertness. But I’ll be surprised if this fella doesn’t pass out. Watch.” The video resumed, and the reporter fell heavily onto the warm, stained carpet. I noticed his thin bare legs, covered in a spray of human sewage.
As I tried to control my breathing, I felt something push hard against the back of my plastic chair. “Skewsme,” said a muffled female voice near my left ear. I turned to see a woman, a fellow delegate in the Surviving Dangerous Countries course, dive for the door of the conference room. Her right hand was clamped over her mouth. The door slammed behind her. We heard stilettos on ceramic. There was another slam, this time softer and with a short echo, as the soon-to-be-embedded journalist bolted into the bathroom. I considered following her.
Switches flicked. The overhead lights in the conference room buzzed and flashed, before capturing twenty worried, sweaty faces in unflattering glare. The voice at the front of the room belonged to David Silver, a former Royal Marine and onetime member of the Special Air Service (SAS). The elite regiment was based a few miles north, at a former RAF base in Hereford. Silver was in his late forties and looked as though he had been made from squares: square jawbone, square shoulders, square skull, and neat, square beard. He was dressed in corporate hikewear: desert boots, ironed Rohan sweater, and a checked, vented shirt, carefully tucked in. He looked like a life-size Legoman. Silver’s minibiography, part of the course’s reading material, said he had spent two years attached to the U.S. Army Rangers and once trained the private army of a billionaire sultan. I wondered if he had been one of the SAS commandos in black hooded jumpsuits who had stormed the Iranian embassy in London on May 5, 1980. The raid came after Khuzistan terrorists, funded by Saddam Hussein, took twenty-six hostages. All but one of the living hostages were rescued—while five of the six captors were shot dead. The commandos, like real-life 007s, had gone straight to a champagne reception with Margaret Thatcher when it was over. The siege at the embassy, meanwhile, later inspired a Hollywood film called Who Dares Wins, after the regiment’s motto.
Silver attempted a square, mechanical grin.
“Any questions?” he asked.
The room fidgeted.
On one side of me was David Sharrock, The Times’s Madrid correspondent, and on the other Richard Mills, a Times photographer from Northern Ireland. Opposite was a Dutch television news crew. The rest of the Surviving Dangerous Countries delegates were junior producers from the BBC and Tonight with Trevor McDonald, plus a Swiss radio journalist. It was an overweight, hungover, and nicotine-addicted room. There was a salty, sweaty taste in the air. I felt nauseous.
Finally someone pointed at the image of the weeping, fingerless reporter and said: “Is that gonna happen to us?”
Silver laughed. It was a barracks laugh, as cold as a wet day in Wales.
“Let’s ’ope not,” he said.
There was more fidgeting. Everyone wanted a cigarette, or a drink, or both. There was a bar only yards away, in the lounge.
“Look,” said Silver. “Let’s not pretend. After September 11, everything changed. Westerners are now seen as targets. Members of the media, especially journalists from America or Britain, are seen as ambassadors of their countries. If you think you’ve got immunity—forget about it. Back in the day, people didn’t deliberately target the media. Even in Vietnam. Or Gulf War One. They do now. Look what happened to that fella from the Wall Street Journal, Danny Pearl.”
I imagined how much worse the video of Pearl’s death must have looked compared with the amateur amputation we had just witnessed. The tape of Pearl’s murder, entitled “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl,” was released on February 21, 2002. It was three minutes and thirty-six seconds long. In it, pictures of dead Muslims and footage of President Bush shaking hands with the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon were displayed alongside a jumpy reel of Pearl’s murder. The worst moment came precisely one minute and fifty-five seconds into the video, when the reporter was shown with his throat sliced open (a technical error by the captors prevented the actual deed being recorded). Afterward, Pearl’s head was detached and held up by the scalp while a list of the captors’ demands, including the release of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, was superimposed on top. The terrorists, who called themselves the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, had previously sent their demands to the Wall Street Journal from the e-mail address kidnapperguy@hotmail.com. The captors’ final e-mail threatened, “If America will not meet our demands, we will kill Daniel. This cycle will continue [until] no American journalist could enter Pakistan.” Pearl’s body was found three months later outside Karachi. At the time of Pearl’s murder, his wife, Marianne, was pregnant with their first child.
I suddenly felt very cold. Silver was still talking.
“Take out yer booklets,” he said, “and look at the stats: 347 journalists killed worldwide in the past ten years: That’s five times more reporters than were killed in World War II. In 1994 alone, twenty journalists were kidnapped—by militants, criminals, guerrillas, government forces, or whatever—and executed. That’s why we’re ’ere: to help you reduce the risks while still getting yer stories.”
Silver pointed to the reporter still in agony on the screen. It was like a holiday snap from hell. “This poor fella up here, I think, survived,” he said. “Someone must have paid the ransom when they got ’is pinky in the post. But you can imagine the psychological damage. And if yer gonna do this ‘embedded’ thing with the Americans, it’s something worth thinking about. If the Iraqis get hold of you, they won’t be that interested in a ransom. Or yer little finger.”
“Portland Place, please. Langham Hilton.”
This was me, in a London cab, a few days earlier. The date was Saturday, February 15, 2003, and I had just staggered off a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to London Heathrow on my way to meet Fletcher’s “chaps from the SAS.” The chaps, it turned out, ran a school for war reporters from a luxury hotel near Ross-on-Wye, in Herefordshire, and were best known for a five-day course entitled Surviving Dangerous Countries. Fletcher had booked me on it. The syllabus said that on Monday we would learn about “target awareness,” and on Tuesday about “controlling bleeding.” The former would “demonstrate why people become targets” while the latter would “explain the causes and types of bleeding.” The message seemed clear: Journalists stupid enough to embed themselves with the Marines would become walking targets, who bled. I feared the Surviving Dangerous Countries course would convince me to avoid dangerous countries, never mind survive them. At least leaving Los Angeles had been easy: Alana was away on a business trip.
According to office gossip, the SAS course had cost The Times four thousand dollars. There was also a rumor that The Times saved 40 percent on Lloyd’s of London insurance for journalists who took it, with the policy covering claims of up to $1 million. This, however, was not true. I later learned that News International had its own blanket policy that covered all reporters on the battlefield.