Snipe and spin

Spectator, The, May 11, 2002 by Manyon, Julian

Julian Manyon watches Britain's finest in action as, back at base, the media circus continues

Bagram

IT was lights out in our tent. Specialist 'Woody', the callow young soldier assigned to mind us, had finally fallen asleep, his copy of Shotgun News slipping from his hand. Woody reads Shotgun for its small ads: `Beretta automatic pistol, blue metal, very good $449.99'; or `Russian AK, one of the world's most reliable designs, $179.99'. As he puts it, `You never know when you might have a problem and need a gun.' But now Woody was in dreamland and a real problem was suddenly erupting outside. In the dark we heard shouting, running feet and curses as someone tripped over our tent ropes. Then the door-flaps were pulled aside and an unidentifiable head bellowed, `Better get up. Those bastards have briefed the newspapers.'

The word 'bastards' was an unkind reference to the Ministry of Defence media team who throughout the day had stalwartly denied a mounting swell of rumour that a major Royal Marine operation was underway in eastern Afghanistan. `You'll have egg on your face if you go with that one,' Lieutenant Colonel Harradine told the BBC correspondent and myself, his blue eyes glinting with a hint of menace. However, as soon as most of us had retired to our dust-caked sleeping bags, a select few from the British daily press received a completely different version. Almost 1,000 Marines were combing the mountains in an operation codenamed 'Snipe'. A ministry embargo prevented publication before the morning editions.

As usual at Bagram, the Defence media team had opted for a policy of divide and rule with the natives in the press tents, and, as so often, the result was a fiasco. A spokesman claimed that the intention had been a level playing-field with all media reporting the news simultaneously. However, those who were briefed produced surprisingly few column inches, and bad feeling spread among the rest. As to the following morning's press conference, an infuriated American reporter, a diminutive terrier-like figure in dark glasses called Caesar, demanded to know why Lt Col. Harradine had told lies to the press. The answer, insofar as I understood it, appeared to be that the British do things differently.

Indeed we do, and it must be admitted that the composition of the British press contingent - ranging from studious defence experts through hardened and independentminded war correspondents to tabloid hacks determined, inter alia, to establish whether a female member of one of the RAF helicopter crews is a transsexual - makes collective handling difficult. However, any hopes that British warriors and British scribes would develop a mature relationship have evaporated. Instead, childish conduct has marked the behaviour of both sides.

At the time of writing, Operation Snipe has failed to unearth a single Taleban or alQa'eda diehard, but very few journalists have been permitted to approach the operation, let alone observe it. The first press visit was to the Forward Operational Base, which, despite its title, is more than 50 miles from where the troops are working and was accurately, if sarcastically, described by an American officer as 'a petrol station in the desert'. We arrived after a lengthy helicopter flight, the route of which seemed designed to confuse, and were welcomed by a likable British officer who immediately informed us that, for reasons of operational secrecy, he could not tell us where we were. A small settlement was visible in the distance, so I asked for its name. `Can't pronounce it,' the officer said with a grin.

However, the British forces had reckoned without the new item in every self-respecting war correspondent's kit - the portable GPS - and within 15 minutes our grid co-ordinates had been established and our position plotted on a map. It turned out that we were a little way south of Kabul, no more than 30 minutes flying time from Bagram, had we not been taken on an elaborate, and doubtless expensive, aerial version of blind man's buff. Quizzed on this, our media handlers retorted that we could not be trusted with information that could cost soldiers' lives, and regarded themselves as vindicated when one exasperated American reporter published the grid co-ordinates in his newspaper. My more seasoned colleagues believe that the MoD must now review its information policies. `We should have been briefed about Operation Snipe in advance, because we are not so crass that we'd give away secrets,' says Jon Swain of the Sunday Times, who, like myself, remembers with nostalgia the freedom we enjoyed in Vietnam: `There should be more trust, less stupidity.'

Some of our minders are amused at the suggestion that they could ever trust the press. `It's never going to happen, Julian,' one engagingly direct Welsh officer told me over a satisfyingly stodgy meal in the Marines' canteen. `One of you would always do something silly.' MoD ultras firmly believe that the Vietnam war would have been won had the media not been allowed to interfere and generally regard journalists as either useful channels for propaganda and disinformation or as downright dangerous.