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Prologue

THE BOAT stood proud against the horizon, its curved bow and stern silhouetted on the skyline. We had been looking for it for a day and a night. As we drew near, what we had thought were ornate outcrops from the deck of the boat materialised into the bobbing heads and shoulders of a mass of human beings. The vessel was no more than forty feet long, but there were hundreds of people packed aboard it.

We had set out that morning in November 1978 from Trengganu on Malaysia’s north-eastern coast aboard a fast local fishing launch. I was with my Swedish cameraman Claus Bratt and, somewhat unexpectedly, the books editor of the Daily Mail, Peter Lewis. Our quest was to encounter one of the myriad craft bearing refugees out of Vietnam across the South China Sea. These were the ‘boat people’ who in the previous few months, in their tens of thousands, had left the Vietnamese coast aboard almost anything that would float. The Vietnam War had ended three years earlier, but the flow of refugees was undiminished, orchestrated by traffickers and by the myth that America was waiting with open arms for any who fled.

The boat was well down in the water, with no obvious accommodation beyond a wheelhouse and two corrugated sheds at the back which were clearly lavatories. I urged the fisherman who’d brought us to take us closer so that I could engage the captain in conversation. Eventually we came alongside, and Claus and I boarded the boat. At that precise moment our fisherman panicked, fearing that some of the Vietnamese might try to jump onto his vessel. He suddenly thrust his engines to full, pulled away from us, and sped off whence we’d come. I could see the Daily Mail’s books editor remonstrating furiously in the stern. Soon the fishing boat was but a speck in the distance.

There was almost no room to move on deck. We peered down into the cargo holds, and dozens of faces, young and old, boys, men and women, looked up expectantly. Many seemed to be very sick. Claus and I were led with difficulty towards the captain, who was at the wheel in the stern. I calculated that there were at least 350 people aboard a vessel that might have comfortably carried thirty. They had been at sea for the worst part of three weeks. The smell was overpowering; the dead body of an elderly woman wound in a sheet lay against the gunwale. The boat people seemed to assume that we were the advance guard of a welcoming party headed by the US Ambassador that would be waiting ashore with passports ready to usher them all to their new lives in California.

We’d been sent by my editor at ITN in London to find out how this huge exodus of people from Vietnam operated, and who was facilitating it. Until now, such boats had been seized the moment they made landfall in Malaysia; the boat people aboard would be rounded up and carted off to a kind of concentration camp run by the UN further up the coast on the island of Palau Badong. Consequently it had proved impossible to get to the root of how their journeying had come about.

The captain, a rotund ethnic Chinese, spoke excellent English and was candid about how much each person had paid – the equivalent of $2000 a head, extracted mainly from gold dental fillings and melted-down family heirlooms. He was more vague about how or where they were going to land in Malaysia; indeed, he thought he might even be off the coast of Indonesia. I asked him if anyone could swim; he thought not. There appeared to be no food on board, and the lavatories had become a foetid disaster zone, from which we tried to keep as far ‘upship’ as possible.

Towards nightfall we had our first glimpse of land. The captain decided to make a run for the shore. Within moments we were greeted by a hail of rocks and sticks, hurled by irate ethnic Malays who seemed to come from nowhere and swarmed out along the beach. The defenceless Vietnamese trapped on deck were being cut about their heads, and worse. Our boat turned broadside across the rollers, and threatened to capsize before finally making it through the surf and back out into the open sea.

We advised the captain to try further up the coast at first light, in the hope that any reception party would not yet be about. A ghastly night passed before we renewed our run at the beach. I suggested to the captain that he rev the engine to its maximum, and try to burn it out as the vessel beached. This way I hoped we could avoid being pushed back out to sea again. Claus had by now secured remarkable film of everything that had happened, an unprecedented record of the tribulations in the lives of fleeing Vietnamese boat people.

The noise of the screaming engine summoned a new batch of Malays down the beach, and another fusillade of projectiles. The engine blew, sure enough, but before the captain had succeeded in beaching the boat, which was now skewing dangerously in the surf. I grabbed a rope from the bow and leapt into the water, trying to lug the waterlogged hulk ashore. Gradually the sea itself seemed to bring it in.

Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and thrown beneath the water. Someone took hold of a hank of my then long hair and dragged me to the beach. I was spreadeagled on the sand while one man stamped on my arms and another beat me about the chest with a pole. Claus, still cradling the wreck of his camera, blood pouring down his face, was thrown down beside me. Malaysian soldiers stood idly beneath the palms at the top of the beach, watching the Malays assaulting the boat people. Nearly all the victims were ethnic Chinese. I learned later that the Malay/Chinese balance in Malaysia was fragile in the extreme, and that Malays would go to any lengths to prevent the expansion of the Chinese population.

After what seemed an age, the police came and arrested Claus and me. Snapping handcuffs on our bruised wrists, they threw us into the back of a caged pickup truck. At Trengganu’s police station, the chief informed us that we were to be charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration, an offence that carried a twenty-year jail sentence. We found ourselves in a disgusting fifteen-foot-square concrete cell with a steel door and a small barred window. The floor was awash with urine and faeces. In the gloom I counted eight others already inside. One of them turned out to be our battered captain, Lee Tych Tuong. Mr Tuong, it turned out, was a former printer who had never touched a boat in his life before. It had taken him and some of the other escapers eight months to build the vessel. He told us how they had become completely disorientated upon leaving Vietnamese waters, and how dysentery had claimed half a dozen lives during the voyage.

It was a good six hours into our ordeal before I heard the heaven-sent voice of the Daily Mail man in the passageway beyond the cell door. Peter Lewis had somehow not only tracked down our vessel, but had also managed to arrange the intervention of the First Secretary from the British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur. Our freedom came at the expense of most of the film we had shot. We were free to leave, so long as we boarded the next plane to London. It was a salutary introduction to the vagaries of investigative journalism.

I came of reporting age in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, one of the defining periods of post-Second World War history, when the Cold War warmed to major bloodshed. A quarter of a century later I would be reporting on the war on Iraq, one of the watersheds in the evolving new world disorder that in turn followed the end of the Cold War. Both conflicts were essentially American unilateralist pre-emptive responses to what Washington perceived as threats to US interests.

Like many of my generation, as a student I had protested against the war in Vietnam, and I felt frustrated never to have had the opportunity to report on a war in which many of my older colleagues had cut their teeth. To be dispatched as a reporter, at least to try to explore the war’s legacy, even fully three years after its end, was some small recompense.

Our Malaysian adventure was set amid the prevailing certainty of global balances and security. Vietnam was now avowedly Communist, allied to the Eastern Bloc. Malaysia was emerging from the post-colonial era with its fledgling tiger economy, becoming an equally committed member of the Western capitalist bloc. It was possible to choose almost any place in the world and establish its position within the great Cold War tussle for control. In 1978 I was thirty years old, and my whole life had been set in the confident certainty that the ideological battle between left and right, between Communist and non-Communist, would prevail for all time. The world was relatively neatly divided. The idea that the Berlin Wall would ever come down, that Communism itself would ever fail, was simply inconceivable. We did not know that this order was about to suffer its first major violation, in the form of a radical Islamic revolution in Iran. Western imperialism had all but decolonised Africa and Asia; now the main point of friction was whether the emerging post-colonial states would tilt towards Moscow or Washington.

So I was privileged to start my reporting career in Africa, and to observe a state like Somalia move from British and Italian influence to independence under first Soviet and then American patronage. Somalia was only one of a number of developing countries I watched drift into the chaotic status of ‘failed state’, wide open as a recruitment and training ground for al Qaida. The disengagement of the West from countries like it was matched by a corresponding failure by the Western media to remain committed to reporting them at all. Somalia’s decline was mirrored by Angola, Sudan, Zaire, Uganda and others as we ceased to understand what was happening in them, and worse, ceased to care.

We in the West never expected to win the Cold War, or to lose it. When we did win, we were totally unprepared, and lost a huge opportunity to recast international institutions to fit the reality of a new world order dominated by one all-powerful superpower. Similarly, when Saudi militants attacked America on 11 September 2001, our response was militaristic and inadequate, and international solidarity with the United States degenerated very quickly into diplomatic warfare between much-needed allies. This book is the record of a personal journey that starts in the cosy years after the Second World War and treads the key stepping stones since, to arrive at that great pre-emptive action that was cast as an endeavour to strike down a very immediate threat to our own survival, the war on Iraq.

Six months after that conflict began, I was at Amman airport in Jordan waiting for one of the rare flights into Baghdad. I found myself surrounded by pale British ex-servicemen trying to find ways into the country to take up jobs as bodyguards, and by heavy-set, unfit Americans who seemed never to have travelled outside Texas, carrying plastic bags filled with wads of hundred-dollar bills. The Americans were contractors on danger money coming in to fix the oil, water, gas and electricity infrastructure of a devastated country. It did not feel comfortable being among them, but they fitted well with my wider tale, one from which this reporter emerges at least as blemished as anyone he reports on.