1989 (17 page)

Just before Christmas – which was of course unmarked in the Soviet Union, except by Orthodox Christians who celebrated it according to the old calendar on January 7th – several of the streets around Red Square, including Gorky Street where the Hall of Columns was situated, were unexpectedly closed off. Our youngest trainee correspondent was sent down to nose around and see if she could find anything out. An hour later she came back bursting with excitement and declared that she had been definitively told Ustinov was dead and they were preparing a lying-in-state. The duty man at the office, a slightly more senior reporter, checked her source, thought for a minute, then turned to his green computer screen and banged out a brief ‘urgent’ one-liner to London: ‘Soviet Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov dead, reliable sources say,’ it proclaimed in classic simple Reuterese.

Sure enough, however, before releasing this scoop to the world, the ever vigilant senior sub-editors on the World Desk in London came back on the internal telex with a service message: ‘Please detail nature of sources.’ In response back went a rewritten report: ‘Soviet Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov dead, a cleaning lady at the House of Columns said.’

Even as we watched the words chunter out on the teleprinter
– which was still how they were transmitted after leaving the
computer
screen – we could hear the roars of laughter from the old stagers in London. The trouble was that in Moscow terms, there could scarcely be a more reliable source for a scoop that didn’t come from official announcements. Our young reporter who spoke excellent Russian – and had the advantage in this rare case of being female – had gone up to one of the dumpy babushkas with mops and buckets schlepping in and out of the grandiose old building which was, as everyone knew, the traditional venue for the lying-in-state of senior party members and asked, ‘Who is it this time?’ As a result, we had a genuine scoop. After ten tedious minutes of exchanging teleprinter messages with London, it was agreed that the report should be issued with the original – less specific – wording.

With Ustinov down, the list of geriatric power-seekers was shrinking. One of the few remaining was Nikolai Tikhonov, who despite being nearly ninety could not be discounted as the next short-term incumbent of the top job. He was currently prime
minister
, a job to which in the past Western correspondents (and government leaders) had mistakenly attributed more power than was due. Because in the Soviet system the Communist Party had made itself the sole power in the state, real power derived from being head of the party – its general secretary – rather than any office of state. It was only towards the end of the Brezhnev era that the Soviets themselves had realised it was easier to make this clear by giving the general secretary the courtesy title of President of the Supreme Soviet, which was in theory just the speaker of the rubber stamp parliament but it meant that the Americans could refer to Mr
President
. The Russians felt (correctly) that this would make things easier for them to understand.

Tikhonov himself was, however, also rumoured to be ill. By March 1985 Chernenko had not been seen in public for months. But nor had Tikhonov. As fate would have it, the bureau chief was on a trip to Geneva to see his girlfriend and I was the most senior of our little team when a rare telephone call came through from London in the middle of the night. It was, inevitably, one of the Princes of Darkness. His message was that the BBC’s monitoring station at Caversham in Berkshire had picked up a change to classical music 
on most mainstream Soviet radio programmes. We talked over the situation and as one of his former protégés I was entrusted with both an honour and a burden: he would set up the codes so that if and when an announcement was made, instead of my report going first to the World Desk in London, it would go out live. To the world. This might, just might, give us an advantage over our rivals, the American Associated Press and the French Agence-France-Presse. That way it would be Reuters who ‘told the world the news’. On such tiny things did the reputation of news agencies depend.

There was, of course, one other thing: accuracy. I was on no account to get it wrong! Staggering downstairs in my dressing gown – in the claustrophobic atmosphere in which we all lived the office was just one floor below our flat – I turned on the radio (it was still too early in the morning for television) and was treated to a
neverending
sequence of Tchaikovsky piano recitals. The boys and girls at Caversham had hit the nail on the head. Something was up. But with the weight of my direct filing powers lying heavy on my hands, could I be absolutely certain what it was. It certainly had all the
hallmarks
of a death, but was it Chernenko’s or Tikhonov’s. Or what about the third possibility – much discussed amongst the
Kremlinologists
of late – that Chernenko would simply step down citing ill health and pass on the mantle to one of the relatively unknown younger men? That would hardly merit the solemn music, would it? Could I be sure? There was no precedent.

As a result I sat down at the computer screen and tapped out three alternative one-line reports, each of which properly ‘topped and tailed’ with the required codes so that if I chose it, it and it alone would go out to the world.

The first had a UU priority (urgent) and said simply: ‘Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov dead – official.’ There was no way I was pressing the button on this occasion unless it was official.

The second had an RR code (a rush) and was accompanied by three little bell symbols which mean bells would actually sound on the teleprinter alerting chief subs on newspapers, radio and
television
stations that something rather important had just happened. It read: ‘Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko resigns – official.’

The third – the biggie – had an SS priority, which stood for Snap,
and was accompanied by a signal six bells, said: ‘Soviet leader
Konstantin
Chernenko dead – official.’

That was it. All I had to do now was hunker down with the cup of strong coffee my wife had brewed to wake me up, and a snifter of Irish whiskey to steady my nerves, and settle in for a long morning of Tchaikovsky recitals.

It was nearly lunchtime before anything else happened. From about nine a.m. when television broadcasts had started for the day, both channels had shown only a red curtain and played similar programmes of Russian classical music. The TV men showed a slight preference for Rachmaninov. I thought I identified a snatch from his tone poem ‘Isle of the Dead’. But that might just have been wishful thinking.

Then, virtually on the stroke of midday, the television went silent, as did the radio. The teleprinter which relayed to our office reports from the official government news agency TASS had ominously already stopped chuntering out its fill-in diet of agricultural reports and sports results more than twenty minutes ago. Suddenly it sprang into life, the printer key humming at the beginning of a line as my knees bounced with nervous tension under the desk waiting for whatever it was about to spring on me.

And then it began to move. I watched as the little print head crawling along the paper spelled out the tidings, Cyrillic letter by Cyrillic letter, and most agonisingly of all with every bit of the
tortuous
bureaucratic pompous language in which all important Soviet official statements were couched. It was as if they were teasing me …

Clunk, and the teleprinter head shoots back as the paper whirrs and shunts up half a centimetre to start a new line:

Clunk, whirr …

Clunk, whirr …

My fingers flashed over the computer keyboard and deleted the Chernenko resignation option from the green screen. Sorrow was not an emotion reserved for resignations.

Yes, yes, yes, get on with it, I was almost shouting, taking in at the same time that whichever of them was dead had been dead for nearly eighteen hours before the authorities had got their act together to announce it.

Zap! K, not N, Konstanin Chernenko, and not Nikolai Tikhonov. My heart in my mouth – and my life in my hands – I hit the key that sent the ‘Chernenko dead – official’ flash around the world. And immediately covered my eyes. It wasn’t Chernenko, all of a sudden I knew it wasn’t. It was going to be somebody completely different, Karl Marx, Kemal Ataturk, Klaud Rains, Kary Grant.

But it wasn’t. I turned back to the teleprinter which had just finished spelling
K-O-N-S-T-AN-T-I-N_U-S-T-I-N-OV-I-C-H_C-H-E-R-N-E-N-K-O
, the full version of his name including patronymic and was now going on to list his titles. I breathed out a huge sigh of relief. I wasn’t out of a job. In fact, if I was lucky I might even be in for a herogram.

It came through an hour later, by which time the bureau chief was winging his way back from Geneva in a flap while the three of us in the office were busy sending over full-length round-ups, including
runners and riders for yet another succession race. It was
characteristically
terse and factual, but we knew that meant it was all the more genuine: ‘Congratulations Moscow Office, 45 seconds lead over AP’.

Forty-five seconds! We were ecstatic. In the world most people inhabit, forty-five seconds is next to no time at all, but in the intense competition between international news agencies it was almost as big a result as Michael Schumacher winning a Grand Prix by a similar margin. Most importantly for me, despite the fact that almost all the papers the next day would run stories from their own correspondents and analysts, almost all of them would carry the little rough-edged image that we called a ‘rag-out’ of ‘how the world heard the news’. And at the end of it would be a simple
sign-off
: REUTER PYM. Not exactly fame at last, but one of the biggest adrenalin highs of my career. I was bouncing off the walls for hours.

In fact I had only just about stopped bouncing, in time to get a cup of tea to sustain my energy levels – I had by now been in the office since three thirty a.m., having had barely three hours sleep before I had been awakened by the phone call from London – when the next shock hit us.

My colleague Tony Barber was still working on a lengthy piece about the possible succession candidates, and the likely date of an announcement. Nobody really knew exactly how the so-called ‘
election
’ procedure at the top of the Soviet hierarchy was conducted, except that everyone was pretty sure that democracy played little part in it. Officially the Central Committee which numbered some 300 members would convene in a special session to choose its general secretary but effectively one of the dozen or so members of its executive, the politburo, had already stitched it up. Nonetheless we expected procedures to be followed and an announcement of a new leader in about two days’ time.

So it was shock enough to have me spill my tea when Robert, our Armenian office assistant who had been studying every tic of the TASS teleprinter, suddenly ripped off a short three-line despatch which had just come up and waved it excitedly under my nose. I had already leapt to the computer to enter the same Snap codes as before – without asking London for fresh authorisation – with Robert still babbling excitedly in my ear: ‘
Eto Gorbachev
, Peter,
Eto Gorbachev
!!’
It’s Gorbachev! It was too. But even as I typed the six bells and the brief formulaic line: ‘Mikhail Gorbachev elected Soviet leader –
official
’, I had no idea how important those six words were going to prove. Nor had the rest of the world.

The Gorbachev effect was still no more than two hazily understood words –
glasnost
and
perestroika
– by the time my spell in Moscow came to a truncated end. It was truncated at my own instigation, though as things turned out it was unlikely to have lasted much longer anyhow.

I had finally done what I had been wanting to do for years: thrown myself off the Reuters treadmill of never-ending news cycles, feeding bare-bones stories into the maw of the global media machine. It was true we got to spread our wings occasionally – I had travelled into deepest Siberia to do a feature on the coldest inhabited place on Earth, and I had driven from Moscow to Tbilisi over the Georgian Military Highway through the Caucasus Mountains – but as far as writing was concerned we were always strapped into the straitjacket of the terse Reuters house style.

In the summer of 1985, I got an interview for the foreign desk of the
Daily Telegraph
through a word from my friend, their Moscow correspondent Nigel Wade. The man across the desk in the
Telegraph
’s
grand but poky offices on Fleet Street was Peter Eastwood, the paper’s infamously tyrannical managing editor. The actual editor was a former minor Tory minister called Bill Deedes, who was something of a Fleet Street legend, partly because he was
suspected
of being the model for Boot of the Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s splendid satire
Scoop
, partly because he was the supposed recipient of the fictional letters from Margaret Thatcher’s husband Denis
published
in
Private Eye
, and largely because he would go on churning out wry, if rather inconsequential, eye-witness journalism until well into his nineties. But there was one thing that by common accord he was absolutely no good at, and that was being an editor. As a result the hard-headed, domineering Eastwood had taken the throne from
beneath him and controlled every aspect of the
Telegraph
except for a couple of columnists and the editorials.

To my surprise he seemed less interested in my journalistic
credentials
or ambitions than my place of education – Oxford was fine – my recommendation from Wade, and strangely, perhaps most
significantly
of all: what my father had done in the war. In fact he had been a mechanic in the RA F, which I doubt was what Eastwood was looking for, but it was my immense good fortune that he had been shot down over Burma. Burma was all Eastwood cared about. That’s where he had been.

‘What happened to him?’

‘They bailed out over the jungle,’ I said hesitantly, trying to remember all those stories my dad had told that I’d never paid enough attention to, ‘and joined up with the Chindits.’

Eastwood’s eyes both sparkled and glazed over at the same time. ‘Ahhh, Orde Wingate’s bunch. Magnificent men.’

For the next ten minutes or so he waxed lyrical about
derringdo
in the jungle, attacks on railway lines, carriages behind them exploding, carriages in front of them exploding. I smiled. Under the circumstances it wasn’t hard.

‘Father still alive, is he?’

‘Yes, keeping well, thanks.’

I got the job. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite the job I was expecting it to be. The
Telegraph
was stuck in a time warp in more ways than one. For the past three years in Moscow I had been using
computers
– albeit primitive, green-screen models that were little more than electronic word processors linked to a telex line. At the
Telegraph
they were still using typewriters, and not even electric ones. News stories were typed on paper that looked and felt recycled but was probably just unprocessed – cheapness rather than concern for the
environment
being the overriding consideration – with three sheets and two layers of old-fashioned ink carbon in between so that a desk editor and sub-editor had their own copies. Every word was in any case eventually set in hot metal type by members of the print unions,
typesetters
and compositors who assembled the pages in mirror image out of shapes – words, pictures, adverts – all cast in lead alloy metal. It was a technology not light years removed from that which produced
the Gutenberg Bible in the fifteenth century. It was not unrelated that each of the print trade unions in a newspaper was known as a chapel, headed by a Father of the Chapel. The official who presided over the whole lot was known as the Imperial Father of the Chapel.

Some of the machinery still in use in 1985 had been made in the late nineteenth century, and there were two brand new
linotype
machines that had been delivered in the 1930s but were still in their packing cases because management and print unions had never reached agreement on terms for their introduction. Things were changing but Rupert Murdoch had yet to unleash the Wapping whirlwind that would change the industry for ever. On my first day foreign editor Ricky Marsh had to almost rugby tackle me to prevent me from stepping over a white line painted on the floor, which was the strict demarcation between journalists and ‘the print’. Had I crossed it, even accidentally, the brothers could have walked out and there would have been no paper the next day. On evening shifts, when the giant presses in the bowels of the building began to run, you could feel the floors tremble, while going along the
juddering
elevated walkway that led to the canteen felt like a stroll above the engine room of a supertanker.

But even that had at least a frisson of excitement attached to it: of being at the heart of an industrial machine that was actually
producing
the newspapers to be delivered to breakfast tables all across the country. The same could not be said of the foreign desk. The
Daily Telegraph
foreign desk in the summer of 1985 looked and felt as if it hadn’t changed since 1955. This was almost certainly because it hadn’t. Apart from Marsh, there was old Tom Hughes, a genial,
well-meaning
elderly buffer who sounded and acted a bit like Corporal Jones from
Dad’s Army
. Tom was the oldest member of the foreign desk but the others were to my youthful eyes not much better: a troika of tie-wearing gentlemen who looked more like clerks than journalists. Called Readman, Mossman and Dudman, their names alone were enough to fill me with silent dread. There had been a low-budget British TV movie I’d seen as a child called
Unman,
Wittering
and Zygo
about a teacher who dies for messing his publicschool pupils’ routine. Despite the reversal in the age spectrum, I feared something similar.

Marsh was a bright, rotund little man, perpetually fizzing with energy, forever bustling in and out of the Foreign Room, which for me rapidly began to rhyme with tomb. The only time of the day when I had to try hard to suppress a smile was mid-morning when the buzzer on the intercom linked to Eastwood’s office sounded, and Ricky would actually stand up to answer it with a brisk, ‘Yes, Peter.’ And then he would bustle off to morning editorial conference.

The low point was when Tom painstakingly instructed me that, ‘here in the Foreign Room we have a special way of using paperclips to make sure the copy stays together better’, and showed me how rather than just sliding the paper in he bent the inside loop back to create ‘tension’. I could have cried. The ‘copy’ in question, to boot, was usually Reuters, torn off into individual ‘takes’ – the classic
200-word
Reuter ‘page’ which I had been so eager to escape – by the final member of our happy little team, Paul, who actually was a clerk and therefore a member of one of the print unions, which – in those days just before the Murdoch revolution – meant he probably earned more than most of us and certainly a lot more than me.

What the foreign desk did, I was learning to my horror, was not so much write or even edit copy as to order it up, in much the same way as we ordered milky tea from the lady who brought the tea trolley round. The
Telegraph
liked to maintain the impression that it had its ‘own correspondents’ in every corner of the globe. In reality most of these were just stringers, local journalists who would knock something together on demand for the
Telegraph
in exchange for a token annual retainer. This meant the
Telegraph
could continue to give the impression it still had its ‘own man’ in, say, Srinagar, the Kashmiri old summer capital of the Indian Raj. On the odd
occasion
that something cropped up in Srinagar or Darwin, Australia, or Durban, South Africa – far-flung outposts of Empire were firm favourites – the
Telegraph
wanted their man’s byline on it. Or at the very least, ‘from our own correspondent’.

The trouble was that some of these blokes whiling away their days in the outposts of empire were semi-retired, and even others who might work in local newspapers, often had less access to what was going on in their area than we had with the resources of Reuters, the AP and AFP feeding us news. As a result, it was often the task of the
Telegraph
foreign desk man to ring up the local stringer and read him the Reuters copy. He would then take notes over the phone, go off, type out his own version, ring up the
Telegraph
copytakers and dictate it to them, and they would type it up on carbon triplicates, one of which would arrive back up in the foreign desk.
Occasionally
it was better, written in less-stilted style than that of the agency copy and with maybe a little more local background thrown in, but more often than not it was just a bastardised version of what I or someone else had read to him, with no infrequent occurrence of the ‘send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance’ syndrome. It was soul-destroying.

The only entertainment came, as it always did for journalists in those days, in the pub. The pub in question was the King and Keys, a dreadful shabby watering hole run by a southern Irishman called Andy, who might have got the job from Central Casting, as he spoke in a loud stage brogue, usually slurred, and routinely insulted all his customers. Luckily most of them never noticed and those who did couldn’t care less, sometimes because they were beyond doing so. There was an interesting patch on the raised flock wallpaper near the door which had been worn smooth, just about head-height, because of the number of heads which over the years had taken an extended rest there on their way out the door. The K’n’K had the one saving grace that it was right next door to the paper and so could be nipped down to quickly for a short ‘refresher’ – often while the refreshee’s jacket was left hanging over the back of his chair – and could also be got back from equally quickly in an emergency, such as when a senior editor noticed that despite the omnipresent jacket the seat in question had been cold for some considerable time.

The
Telegraph
did have more than its quota of amiable
eccentrics
, all of whom were regulars in the K’n’K. There was the erudite if somewhat pedantic home reporter who invariably closed his eyes when talking – occasionally enabling the subjects of his
erudition
to slope off unnoticed – whose modest byline was R. Barry O’Brien, and was therefore universally known as ‘Our Barry’. His diminutive, combed-over colleague A.J. McIlroy became (rather unfairly) A.J. Makeitup. There was the learned, acerbic and witty leader writer ‘Blind Peter’ Utley, whose obvious disability meant he
required a permanent assistant, invariably in the attractive shape of young female Oxbridge graduettes, whose job description included not only taking his dictation but also taking him to the pub.
Considering
he was quite capable of making his way, by touch, along the flocked wallpaper, to the Gents’, it was remarkable how often he would completely ‘miss’ his target when turning to tap them on the shoulder or pat them on the knee. And then there was Bill O’Hagan, the former South African police officer who had quit when his
colleagues
ridiculed his collection of Miles Davis and Count Basie jazz records as ‘kaffir music’. Bill was the
Telegraph
’s ‘late stop’ which meant his main job was to sit in the newsroom every night until four a.m. in case the Queen Mother died. He was a genial, round, hard-drinking man with a bald head and a little moustache who looked remarkably like a children’s comic butcher, which in order to give reality a lesson is what he ultimately became, when the sausages he made in his garage in Croydon became so popular with his
colleagues
he decided there might be a business in it. He subsequently bought a butcher shop and you can now savour O’Hagan’s sausages in pubs up and down Britain. Bill famously spent the night in the King and Keys when he dozed off momentarily in the upstairs
function
room and Andy locked him in.

None of this conviviality, however, made up for the fact that my own job, having finally made it to the mainstream of Fleet Street newspapers, was deathly dull. Luckily an escape route presented itself, in the jovial, ever optimistic, prematurely white-haired form of Graham Paterson. I had known Graham slightly at university, even if I had been rather put off by his overt self-confidence, loud voice, obvious ambition and the fact that his father had been deputy editor of the
New Statesman
. When he went straight from
university
to work on the
Telegraph
’s Peterborough gossip column on a salary at least fifty per cent higher than mine at Reuters, I muttered to myself about nepotism. Yet he was to prove my salvation. The
Daily Telegraph
’s dull Sunday sister paper desperately needed a shot in the arm and the man chosen to give it one was the foppish but charming and self-consciously intellectual Peregrine Worsthorne, who prided himself on his wit, dandyish clothes and a claim to have
was actually the second; theatre critic Kenneth Tynan had beaten him by eight years). He had picked Graham to be his news editor, and Graham in turn persuaded foreign editor Peter Taylor that I was the man to cover Europe for him.