In the last six months, I've been spending a lot of my time at the Frontline Club in Paddington.
I've always been a news junkie, so being at Frontline is the equivalent
of setting up home in the Golden Triangle, in the heart of the raw
supply.
It's run by Vaughan Smith, a legendary British TV cameraman, perhaps most famous for spending several months wandering around amidst the British and American forces in Saudi Arabia before the launch of Desert Storm, the operation to retake Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, in 1991. While pretending to be a British officer, with the aid of an ID card produced using the laminating machine of the British Embassy tennis club in Bahrain, he surreptitiously took footage outside the restrictions imposed by the military's pooling system for journalists.
Back in the eighties and nineties, the logistical difficulties of getting into dangerous and remote places created an opening for Smith and his freelance colleagues at what was then the Frontline agency to provide pictures to national broadcasters. Although the BBC's mantra was that no story was worth a life, many of Frontline's associates did indeed give their lives to get the stories - in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Africa and, in the case ofthe larger than life Anglo-Irishman Rory Peck, Moscow during the 1993 parliamentary coup against Yeltsin. Their story is told in the book Frontline by ITN's David Loyn, which I took with me on my trip to the Mid East over the new year. You won't find a better collection of tales of the most perilous adventures and colourful characters to be found anywhere in the last quarter century anywhere else.
One facile assumption the book overturns is that there'll always be
someone on hand to record the news. The story of Frontline shows just
how difficult is was to collect the stories that, even now, never
having seen them since they first aired nearly twenty years ago, I
still remember vividly - like John Simpson driving into Kabul just
after the Russians left, in the company of two mujahadeen double agents in the secret police.
Nowadays journalists routinely targeted by insurgents and terrorists. One day in suburban Riyadh in 2004, the bulk of the members of the Saudi branch of Al Qaeda were driving past when they noticed another Irish freelancer, the Irish freelance cameraman Simon Cumbers filming with the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardiner. They shot the pair, killing Cumbers and crippling Gardiner, who remains in a wheelchair. Gardiner is still doing the same job for the BBC. Cumbers is buried in Wicklow and is memorialised in an annual request funded by his friends and admirers among the Irish and international press.
The Frontline Club membership includes many such war correspondents,
both old and the new generation, along with admen, assorted
journalists, photographers and another old Iraq hand, a gentlemen
listed on the membership roll as "Mr Andrew McNab".
The costs of security for foreign staff is making news-gathering in dangerous places the most economic function to hand off to low-paid and disposable locals or third-world staff or else encouraged the battleship effect of overprotection and huge entourages of security people. Ironically, the growing dominance of a few global networks, especially the BBC, is increasingly making freelance TV work uneconomic. Frontline stands as a monument to these men and women and the sacrifices that they made.
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