The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years

Michael Binyon had been The Times’s man in Moscow. Urbane, with the manner of the British diplomats with whom he spent so much of his time, the Cambridge-educated Binyon had arrived in the Soviet capital with his wife and three-year-old child in 1978. Extraordinarily, the paper had had no Moscow correspondent since 1972, a consequence of Soviet obstruction and a serious handicap to the paper’s pretensions as a world paper of record. Yet, as Binyon discovered, ‘the Russians had a great respect for The Times. They thought it was the official voice of Britain in the same way that Pravda is for the Soviet Union. They took it very seriously.’[403]

There was virtually no night life in Moscow, only endless ambassadorial receptions. Binyon had the distinction of being touched out of a photograph published in Izvestia at a reception for Michael Foot. He was more readily recognized for his work at the British Press Awards in 1981, when he picked up the David Holden prize. According to the judges, his reporting from the Soviet Union had been ‘one of the joys of the year. He combines hard reporting, descriptive writing and highly significant detail.’ Such observation filled his subsequent book, Life in Russia. But in mid-1982 he was moved on to become the paper’s Bonn correspondent. His replacement in Moscow was Richard Owen. Owen was thirty-four and had been at The Times for only two years, having previously gained a Ph.D. from the LSE and worked for the BBC. He spoke Russian, German, French and some Polish. He was still settling in Moscow when the Tass news agency confirmed Brezhnev’s death after eighteen years at the superpower’s helm. ‘When the end came, and it had been coming for a long time,’ reported Owen ‘the Soviet leadership seemed temporarily paralysed.’ The previous day The Times had led with the headline ‘Rumours of top leader’s death sweep Moscow’, based on Owen’s observations that ‘television schedules were changed without explanation and television news readers appeared dressed in black’. With the official confirmation, The Times went through its usual motions: page six cleared for a full-page obituary – ‘President Brezhnev: consolidator of Soviet power’ – while on the following page Owen assessed the runners and riders. ‘One of the main weaknesses of the Soviet system,’ he stressed, ‘is that it makes no provision for political succession.’ Konstantin Chernenko was the favourite followed by Yuri Andropov, while, of the less likely contenders, ‘Michael Sergeyevich Gorbachov is perhaps the most interesting Politburo member in the long term … He is confident, quiet, efficient, and biding his time.’[404]

In the event, Andropov pipped Chernenko, The Times trying to find the crumb of comfort that, having been head of the KGB for fifteen years, he would at least know what was going on in the country.[405] Fifteen months later, Owen was again prophesying a successor when Andropov died in February 1984 (he had not been seen in public since the previous August). The obituary had no option but to focus on his professional CV since – despite being at the forefront of Soviet politics for so many years – details such as whether he had a wife remained unknown (he did, but she made her first public appearance in the wake of his funeral). This time it was the seventy-two-year-old Chernenko who succeeded.

The West’s tense relations with the teetering old men of the Kremlin formed the backdrop to the most important non-party political movement of the early 1980s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In Britain, the particular rallying call was the arrival of ninety-six US cruise missiles at the Greenham Common air base in Cambridgeshire. A hard core of women ‘peace protestors’ had been camping out at the air base for fifteen months when, on 12 December 1982, they were joined by a mass demonstration of thirty thousand women who linked hands and circled the perimeter wire of the base. With flowers and poems being inserted in the wire, the tone of the protest harked back to the ‘make love not war’ hippy movement of the late 1960s, although the women-only nature of the demonstration reduced, to some extent, the opportunities for hedonism available. There were sixty arrests. A CND demonstration outside Parliament led to 141 arrests. Douglas-Home was not much impressed, but the huge scale of national unease over the deployment of US nuclear weapons could not be so easily dismissed as an offshoot of a particular strain of feminism. Uncertainty about the power struggle in Moscow and dislike for the gun-totting tough talk of the ex-Hollywood cowboy (as his detractors so frequently described him) Ronald Reagan produced a broad coalition which feared that the sober reality of MAD (mutually assured destruction) would prove insufficient deterrence against either side attempting a first strike. With Monsignor Bruce Kent as its general secretary, CND drew particular support from many Church groups and individuals. When The Church and the Bomb, a report by the Church of England’s working party, argued that the retention of Britain’s nuclear deterrent was immoral, the editor’s brand of muscular Christianity rose to the fore: ‘The immorality of possessing nuclear weapons with the improbable intention of using them is only a small fraction of the immorality of actually using them. Set that against the certain rather than probable moral benefits of sustained peace in Europe, and the working party’s case falls down.’[406]

The 1982 Labour Party conference voted for the third year in succession in favour of Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament. The motion, put forward by the SOGAT ’82 print union, gained the necessary two-thirds majority to ensure it was binding on party policy (it had, in any case, the support of the party leader). It called for ‘developing with the trade union movement a detailed programme for the conversion of the relevant parts of the arms industry to the manufacture of socially-useful products so that no compulsory redundancy should arise from this policy.’ Truly, the party was committed to turning swords into ploughshares. Few on the editorial floor at Gray’s Inn Road doubted the ability of SOGAT to master the art of turning sophisticated technology into labour-intensive machinery.

III

Like Rupert Murdoch, Harold Evans had been broadly sympathetic towards Israel, putting on record his doubts about some of his leader writers’ wish to endorse a Palestinian state at a time when the PLO was not prepared to acknowledge the state of Israel. He had been up against the pro-Palestinian view of, in particular, Edward Mortimer, a leader writer and foreign specialist at The Times since 1973. An Old Etonian, Balliol man and fellow of All Souls, Mortimer’s history of Islam, Faith and Power, was published in 1982. Rather pointedly, he stuck up a pro-Palestinian poster in his office.[407] He would later become chief speech writer to the Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. In June 1982, The Times affirmed its commitment to an independent Palestinian state: ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese, must be the slogan; Israel for the Israelis; and a Palestine of some sort, west of Jordan, for the Palestinians.’[408]

In June 1981, Israeli jets struck the Osirak nuclear plant near Baghdad. The Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, justified it as a pre-emptive strike at a project that was covertly developing Iraq’s attempts to gain nuclear weapons, and he had no doubt that such a capability would be used to annihilate Israel. The Israeli attack raised several issues, not all of them subject to definitive answers. Was Iraq really developing such a capability and, if so, would she use it against Israel? Did such a possibility justify a pre-emptive attack of this kind? There was also the diplomatic angle, given the outrage felt by Arab countries and the French government. France had built the reactor and French personnel (one of whom was killed in the attack) were helping to operate it. The Times took the view that the Iraqis probably were acquiring weapons-grade enriched uranium but that the Israeli action would only drive Saddam Hussein into the arms of Syria. The action ‘may cause rejoicing in Israel in the short term, but it has not guaranteed Israeli security in the longer term’ concluded the leader column.[409] The unpalatable central issue – whether it was in anyone’s interest for Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear weapons – was sidestepped.

Robert Fisk was the paper’s Middle Eastern correspondent. Having completed a Ph.D. at Trinity College Dublin on Irish neutrality during the Second World War, he had joined The Times in 1971 in his mid-twenties, reporting on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and winning Granada TV’s What The Papers Say award for Reporter of the Year in 1975. It was while in Ireland that he uncovered a succession of British Army cover-ups, further cementing his dislike of what he saw as the repressive tendencies of authority and officialdom. ‘I learned that authority lies, governments lie, ministries of defence lie,’ he said of his time in Ulster, adding that his response was to ‘keep challenging, to reject and refuse what you’re handed’.[410] The police took him in for questioning following their discovery that he had been receiving classified documents from a rogue Army press officer who was later convicted for manslaughter. His subsequent switch away from reporting on Ireland was wrongly attributed to this incident. In fact, he merely wanted a change of scene. But Gray’s Inn Road was no place for a man of Fisk’s peripatetic courage. He had an ally in Douglas-Home, at that time home news editor, who, despite his own regard for the British Army, always encouraged Fisk to investigate further. In 1976 he was dispatched to the Middle East, finding plenty of trouble to write about in the Lebanon and Iran before covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where he gained considerable access to the Soviet forces. At the IPC awards he had won International Reporter of the Year for two years running in 1980 and 1981. Frequently shot at, ‘you reach a point’ he laconically observed, ‘when one shell looks very much like another’.[411]

Fisk had arrived in the Lebanon just as the Syrians were invading the country. The Lebanon had collapsed into anarchy and the Syrian occupation had the backing of the Arab League and East Beirut’s Christian population. It was not long before Damascus’s intervention became, in turn, deeply resented and the Christians began to look for a new saviour – Israel. Syria, meanwhile, decided to crush ruthlessly its own fanatical Muslims. In February 1982 there was an insurrection by Sunni fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama. With the Syrian government warning foreign journalists they risked being shot by their forces if they tried to travel there, it was impossible to gauge exactly the extent of the uprising and the undoubted ferocity with which it was being suppressed. Fisk, however, decided to get a closer look and took a detour from the road to Damascus. As he approached, he could see the smoke from the ruins of Hama’s old city rising but roadblocks prevented him from getting any closer – as they had prevented any other journalist from enquiry. Fisk, however, had a stroke of luck when two displaced Syrian soldiers approached his car and asked if they could hitch a lift with him back to their units. This was his opportunity. With shells whizzing overhead, Fisk’s car sped across the battlefront, making it to the Syrians’ lines from where Soviet-made T62 tanks were firing across the Orontes river. A mosque was being shelled to pieces; a giant eighteenth-century wooden waterwheel was on fire, water cascading from its shattered structure; huge mortar cannons rocked back and forth, pounding the ancient walled city to obliteration. Bullets pinged and whirled back from the insurgents. The siege, Fisk learned, had been going on for sixteen days. There had been ferocious fighting in the cellars and passageways underneath the city as well as within it at street level. Syrian troops had even been blown up by a new and shocking phenomenon – women suicide bombers who embraced them clutching uncorked grenades. Some troops had defected to the insurgent Muslim Brotherhood.[412]

At Gray’s Inn Road there was considerable concern for Fisk’s safety, not least when he telegrammed, ‘My decision is to stick it out.’[413] The Syrian government was keen to silence him and complained to the British Ambassador in Damascus that Fisk was filing false reports from Hama and other places ‘which he had not visited’.[414] Syrian radio denounced him as a liar. The Times, however, stood by its reporter’s claim to have been the only journalist to have witnessed the scenes of carnage. The following year he returned to Hama to find out what had happened in the aftermath. To his amazement the old city had simply disappeared. Where ancient walls and crowded streets had once stood, now there was only a giant car park. The death toll remained unknown but was estimated at around ten thousand. The Baathist regime had successfully destroyed its militant Islamic opposition. [415] The Times was no advocate of instability for its own sake in the area. It believed the Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, was ‘a man of straightforward dealing and statesmanlike behaviour’ and warned Israel not to take advantage of Syria’s internal problems by invading southern Lebanon.[416]

Instead, with the world’s attention on the Falklands War, Israel attacked southern Lebanon following the shooting on 3 June 1982 of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain outside the Dorchester Hotel in London. Israel claimed that since the ceasefire agreed with the PLO in July 1981 she had been subjected to more than 150 terrorist attacks. The Times disputed the legitimacy of this casus belli, questioning not only the statistics but also pointing out that none of the attacks during this period had come from the northern front.[417] The implosion of Lebanon, once a land of democracy and prosperity, was, of course, a long affair. Civil war in 1975 was followed by occupation by Syria. Hating their Palestinian and Syrian guests, many Lebanese Christians regarded the Israeli invaders as liberators. But in Gray’s Inn Road, sympathy with Begin’s Israel was wearing thin. Peace with Egypt in 1978 and massive military and financial aid from the United States, far from giving Israel the sense of security necessary for it to make concessions to the dispossessed Palestinians, appeared to have encouraged aggression: the attack on Iraq’s nuclear plant in June 1981, the bombing of Beirut the following month and the annexation of Golan in December. In leading articles written by the paper’s Middle East expert, Edward Mortimer, both the invasion of the Lebanon and the equivocal attitude to it from Washington were condemned.[418]

The Israeli offensive into the Lebanon temporarily displaced the Falklands’ conflict on the front page. Christopher Walker was able to file censored reports on the Israeli advance including a gripping account of the storming of Beaufort castle, the twelfth-century crusader fortress that had been the PLO’s main forward position in southern Lebanon for over a decade. Robert Fisk filed daily from Beirut, chronicling the air assault on the city. Transmitting his reports was an arduous business. At five o’ clock each morning he would travel south to observe the Israeli advance, often with reporters from the Associated Press bureau, coming under ferocious air attack, before returning to Beirut to file his report from a telex machine in time for it to make the copy deadline at Gray’s Inn Road. The situation deteriorated as Beirut became surrounded. The electricity supply was curtailed and food and petrol were not allowed into the city. Fisk kept his generator running by bribing an Israeli tank crew to supply him with fuel at extortionate rates. Filing to London could take hours because, whenever the generator cut out, the telex went down too. At eight o’clock in the evening, the task would be completed and Fisk, exhausted, had anxious moments waiting for Gray’s Inn Road to confirm it had indeed received all of his copy. Periodically, a message would be returned thanking him for his report and apologizing for the fact the unions had called another strike and so it would not be appearing after all. When they were printed, his reports were graphic, gripping and made no attempt to be impartial. ‘To say that Israel’s war against the Palestinians is turning into a dangerous and brutal conflict,’ he wrote, ‘would be to understate the political realities of its military adventure into Lebanon’[419]

By 14 June, Israeli tanks had linked up with the Christian Phalange in East Beirut. The Palestinians were hemmed in and surrounded. Yet Fisk, still in the city, predicted disaster for the invader: ‘a war which was initially supposed to take their troops only 25 miles north of their own border’ now appeared poised to degenerate into costly street fighting, ‘terrorizing the entire civilian population of West Beirut and killing hundreds of people. Is it a war that will ultimately be worth winning?’[420] From the greater comfort of Gray’s Inn Road, Edward Mortimer agreed, adding that ‘the inability of the wealthy and supposedly powerful rulers of the Gulf to save Lebanon and the Palestinians from being destroyed with weapons supplied by the United States will add fuel to the brushfire of Islamic revolution blowing in from Iran’.[421]

The disaster came in September. A disengagement force led by US Marines had overseen the evacuation of the PLO guerrillas from West Beirut, a notable triumph for Israel. But it was no harbinger of peace. Scarcely had the US Marines left than chaos returned. On 14 September, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s Christian President-elect, was killed in a terrorist bomb blast on a Beirut Phalangist Party office. Two hours later, Israeli troops moved into West Beirut. The next day they surrounded the Sabra and Chatila camps which were teeming with Palestinian refugees. As early as the 18 September edition of The Times, Leslie Plommer was able to report from Beirut that Phalangists had entered the camps, started fires and removed individuals while Israeli troops looked on. Two days later, Fisk filed a report that painted an altogether more serious picture. His dispatch dominated the front page. The shooting, he wrote, had lasted fourteen hours. He estimated the deaths at around a thousand (the actual figure is still disputed, though thought to be between 600 and 1400). Fisk had gained entry to the Chatila camp shortly after the last Phalangists had left: ‘in some cases, the blood was still wet on the ground … Down every alley way, there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents – lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine gunned to death,’ he wrote. The smell of death was everywhere. Having feasted on the dead, flies moved pitilessly to the living. Fisk had to keep his mouth covered to stop them swarming into it. ‘What we found inside the camp … did not quite beggar description although it would be easier to re-tell in a work of fiction or in the cold prose of a medical report.’ It was certainly graphic, men shot at point-blank range, one castrated. ‘The women,’ Fisk continued:

were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair and her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.

Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded flower, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too.

Further gruesome descriptions followed, the dispatch ending with Fisk moving on from the camp and finding himself with Israeli troops under fire from a ruined building. Taking cover beside a reticent army major, he tried to solicit information on what had happened at Chatila: ‘Then his young radio operator, who had been lying behind us in the mud, crawled up next to me. He was a young man. He pointed to his chest. “We Israelis don’t do that sort of thing,” he said. “It was the Christians”.’[422]

Subsequently Journalist of the Year again, Fisk’s dispatch from Chatila became famous with the closing statement adopted as its title. It was reproduced in The Faber Book of Reportage, an international anthology edited by John Carey in 1987, one of only four historic examples of Times journalism to be included.[423] Fisk also secured an interview with Major Saad Haddad who denied his Israeli-sponsored private army had participated with the Phalangist militia in the massacre. The tone of Fisk’s interview was decidedly sceptical. The Times leader column was quick to point the finger at Israel’s shared culpability: ‘Even if they did not actively will the massacre, they are guilty of knowingly creating the conditions in which it was likely to happen.’[424] The following February, the paper devoted extensive coverage, led by Christopher Walker in Jerusalem, to the findings of the Kahan Commission, the Israeli judicial enquiry, into the tragedy. It was highly critical of the Begin administration’s general disregard and in particular found fault with Ariel Sharon, the Defence Minister and architect of the Lebanon invasion, who had permitted the Phalangists to enter the camp despite the obvious likelihood that they would slaughter its inhabitants.

The instant response of The Times to the massacre was to argue that, since neither Syrian nor Israeli forces had brought the stability necessary for a civilian government to succeed in the Lebanon, a multinational UNsanctioned force should be sent. The Times wanted full British participation, something Mrs Thatcher was keen to avoid.[425] Reagan, however, responded immediately, ordering eight hundred US Marines back into West Beirut. France and Italy followed as, reluctantly, did Britain. They marched into a trap. On 23 October 1983, two Shia Muslim suicide bombers killed 242 US Marines and 58 French troops stationed in Beirut. In one day, more servicemen had been killed than Britain lost throughout the Falklands War the previous year. In December, French and US jets retaliated, hitting Syrian positions. It was all in vain. In the new year the Lebanese government fell, having lost control of West Beirut. In March, the multinational force packed its bags and left. The Israelis were drawing and redrawing their defence line closer and closer to their own border. The Lebanon was being left to the militias, the Syrians and the undertakers.

IV

While Robert Fisk and other courageous reporters around the world dodged shot and shell to file their copy for The Times, the paper continued to be under an industrial life sentence itself. At the NUJ’s annual conference at Coventry in March 1982, the union’s president, Harry Conroy, warned that the freedom of the press was being undermined by the Thatcher Government, the proprietors and ‘the misuse of new technology’. The Times had sent its Midlands correspondent, Arthur Osman, to cover the speech but he was barred from entering the conference on the grounds that the NUJ did not allow non-NUJ journalists to cover its affairs. Mr Osman’s crime was to be a member of the Institute of Journalists union. First up to condemn The Times for having the temerity to employ a member of a different trade union was Jake Ecclestone, long-term scourge of Times Newspapers’ management, who had finally left The Times’s employment the previous year and taken up the position of deputy general secretary of the NUJ. Those who spoke most volubly about safeguarding the freedom of the press were, it seemed, less keen on the freedom of association.

The Fleet Street paradox was that, although the various print unions hated one another and the various journalist unions hated one another, they remained great believers in trade union solidarity across unrelated industrial sectors. British Rail still had the contract to deliver The Times. In June 1982 a rail strike paralysed distribution of the paper. Yet rather than assist the companies that employed their members, the SOGAT print union refused to distribute any newspapers that were switched to road distribution, thereby closing off the only means of circumventing the National Union of Railwaymen’s ability to shutdown the press.[426] This was far from being an isolated incident. In August, Fleet Street was silenced by a sympathy strike by the London press branch of the EETPU (electricians’ union) in support of a 12 per cent pay claim by NHS nurses. Fleet Street’s proprietors, working though the Newspaper Publishers Association, could not see what the going rate for hospital nurses had to do with those employed to produce newspapers and secured a High Court injunction against what was classed as ‘secondary action’. Frank Chapple, the EETPU’s moderate general secretary, also appealed to his members not to pull the plug on the press. Undaunted, Sean Geraghty, the branch secretary, led his 1300 members out. No national newspaper managed to publish. Geraghty had excluded only the Communist Morning Star from the EETPU strike. Despite this thoughtful dispensation, it too failed to appear when SOGAT members halted its production.