Dan Snow's History Hit - John Simpson: Six Decades of Warzones

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Over six decades John Simpson has been on the frontline of reporting bringing news from some of the most dangerous places on the planet to the television screens of millions of people. His work has opened the public's eyes to the terrible cost of conflict across the globe. Along the way, John has been arrested, harassed, beaten up, threatened and nearly killed on a number of occasions. He joins Dan on this podcast to talk about his life, his career, the therapy of writing, why he keeps working and how his new novel Our Friends in Beijing has been inspired by his experiences reporting in China.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We've got a legend on the podcast today. We've got a bit of a national treasure. In 1970, a very young, a cub reporter for the BBC went up to the UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And in the melee, this cub reporter shouted at Harold Wilson, when was he going to call an election? Maybe it's a touchy subject because Harold Wilson did actually call an election in June or something, 1970, and he lost it to the Conservative Party anyway. This cub reporter, in return for his question, not super impudent question to the Prime Minister, got punched in the stomach, punched in the stomach by the Prime Minister.

It was not hugely remarkable at the time, this assault of a journalist. There you go. Times change. And it maybe should make us a little bit more relaxed about the buffoonish antics some of our elected leaders at the moment. Maybe. I'm not sure. Anyway, that cub reporter was a guy called John Simpson. He would go on to have a pretty big career. He would have a career stretching from that day to this. He is still going to some of the world's most dangerous places. He is still interviewing some of the world's most important people and interviewing the men and women who find themselves at the mercy of decisions made by those important folks, or at the mercy of those giant impersonal forces that we are seemingly

helpless to prevent, like climate change. It's John Simpson. He's the world affairs editor of BBC News. He's reported from 120 countries. He's been to dozens of war zones, as you'll hear in this podcast. I grew up watching him, listening to him. He always seemed to have that knack of being in the right place at the right time, or perhaps the wrong place at the wrong time, if you were a close family member of his. He's been arrested. He's been harassed. He's been beaten up. He's seen it all as John Simpson. And it was a great honour to have him on the podcast talking about his long career and his new book. He's got a new book out, a fiction, quote unquote, fictional book set in China. Interesting stuff. So it's a great privilege to have him talking about some more recent history on this podcast, the things that he has seen and done. If you want

to listen to other podcasts in the History Hit Network without the ads, you've got to go to History Hit TV. It's where you want to go. HistoryHit.tv. It's like Netflix, but just for history. In fact, it's better than Netflix. It's got all this audio on there as well. So it's HistoryHit.tv. 30 days free when you sign up today. For a very small subscription, you get access to the world's best history channel. So go and check it out. But in the meantime, here's John Simpson. John Simpson, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Well, it's a real pleasure and a privilege to be asked, Dan, actually. It really is. You've witnessed a dizzying amount of history being made. Have you been able to predict the

things that have really endured or have some things fizzled out? Some things have just faded from the popular view. Do you know when you're living through a historical moment that this will endure, this will change the world? Yes, I mean, quite a lot of things that you think, I am watching history, my grandchildren are going to be asking me what it was like, have just been forgotten, just sort of excised from the public mind. One example, I'm sure there are plenty actually, but one example is Belgrade, 1999. For reasons which were perhaps not altogether honourable and noble, President Bill Clinton tried to bomb Serbia into obedience, tried to get it to stop attacking Kosovo and so forth. And the way to do that, they thought, was to bomb Belgrade. And I managed to get into Belgrade,

and I was there all during the bombing. I'm almost the only correspondent at times. I thought people are going to be asking me about this for decades to come. Within a decade, I think it had been entirely wiped out of people's minds. And occasionally, you know, one refers to these things just in the family or something. And I could see just a sort of look of what's the old boy going on about? Perhaps he got the details wrong. Perhaps it was somewhere else. So that was a real example of something that was seismic at the time. I mean, it was just all over every front page of every newspaper for weeks, and which has just vanished into obscurity. And I guess, well, interestingly, this new book you've written is about China.

Perhaps looking back, it's those trips to China were the ones on which you saw history being made, perhaps rather than the more explosive, eye-catching, memorable moments of your career elsewhere. I think so. I really do think that's right. When I compare, and again, these are things you don't often get around to doing, but when I compare my first visit, which was in fact in the run-up to the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the difference between the China of 1989 and the China of today, it's so far from what it was just a relatively short space of time ago that it's hard to compute it all how Chinese people managed to do that coming from real rank third world poverty to being in some ways

one of the richest if not the richest country on earth is really hard to work out and I would say although I'm not necessarily the greatest fan of the way that the Chinese government operates, and that rather shows, I suppose, in my novel, but the way that the Chinese people have accepted and moved into these changes has been magnificent, I think. You mentioned you were there to support Tiananmen Square. I mean, you have had a strange knack of working out where to be at the right time or perhaps the wrong time if I was your mum or dad. Is that just because you have a knack, you can sniff it out, or because you throw a lot of muck at a lot of walls and we only hear about the ones that work out? There is an element of that. I mean, what I somehow never get around to explaining is all the times

that I went to places that I thought something was going to happen, and it didn't, and I left disconsolately 10 days later. But there is a deal here, Dan, that, of course, well, yes. But the fact is that in previous decades, you could just kind of more or less say, I think something's happening somewhere or another. I think I should get on a plane and be there. And people would allow you to do that. Nowadays, there's far more regimentation and organization and there's somebody whose job it is to work out whether you should get on a plane and go somewhere and he behind him or she behind her has an enormous committee of other people that all take those decisions and in those instances it's so much easier to say, well, let's just wait a few days and see how the story develops. Whereas if you're more or less on your own, as I was,

and you had the authority, as I used to, don't have it any longer, to say, I think I should go somewhere, then the chances are maybe three times out of five, you'll be in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment. And I was lucky enough to spend most of my career under that sort of system. Well, you say near misses, there's been many. I particularly remember your report from the road south from Turkey to Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom 2003 when you were hit in an airstrike. That was one of those reports that I will certainly never forget. The big question, John Simpson, is how have you managed to stay alive? A lot of luck, a lot of help from really good friends. I mean, when that bomb landed in northern Iraq in 2003, we paced it out afterwards. I was only 13 yards or 13 paces,

rather, from where this thousand pound bomb landed and exploded. But I had good friends and good helpers and a Serbian, actually, whom we'd hired to come with us, dragged me out of the sort of danger zone, even though he himself had been injured by the bomb. You know, it's things like that. And sometimes just luck. And sometimes a certain experience in how to deal with aggressive, noisy, angry people and try and sort of just calm them down. I've had so much experience of that working for the BBC over the years. It also works on mobs and angry mobs in Iran and in China, indeed. Well, let's talk about China. That's what the latest book's about. And it's what everybody

is talking about at the moment. I mean, we think of you, or I think of you as someone who's in the middle of hot wars, and therefore China's not a place where I would assume that you've faced threats to life and limb. Tell me about some of your near-misses, your scrapes in China. Well, I've been arrested rather a lot. I mean, always with television news, actually, I suspect rather more than the kind of television that you do, which is more sort of organized and thought out in advance. Although I dare say all sorts of hairy moments have happened to you. But when you're working for television news in some kind of rather noisy situation, everybody in a uniform and some

of those who aren't in uniform think it's their bounden duty to come and grab you and put their hand in the television lens. And it happens just about every day, everywhere in the world. And so you get arrested really quite a lot. I've always noticed in Britain, when I talk in public about these things, the audience always tends to go a bit quiet when you talk about being arrested. There's a natural assumption, I think, in Britain that if the police or somebody else arrests you, they must have good reason for it. You must be something you're doing wrong. Whereas, in fact, it is just part of the life of a television correspondent. And I've been badly treated. I've been thumped up quite a bit. I mean, not desperately badly treated, but

beaten up and knocked around, screamed at, threatened naturally, all that kind of stuff. Right across China, just about everywhere I've been, my chief character in the book undergoes quite a nasty torture experience, which also did happen to me, but not in China. It's something that happened to me in Beirut in 1982, when the Israelis invaded and there was wild civil war and really appalling stuff happened. And one of the milder elements was that I was arrested and tied up and tortured and beaten up and then subjected to a mock execution. And that has always worked on me. And somehow or another, I just wanted to get rid of it, exorcise it by writing about it. But I presented it as though it was in China. But in fact, it was in Beirut years before. Did it work by writing about it by talking about it publicly? Did that work? Absolutely. You know, I was once in Kabul, when the Taliban were carrying out lots of executions, and I had to go to an execution of three men, three awful men. Amnesty International would find it hard to take up their case.

They're killers and murderers. But the whole thing was done so appallingly badly that I remember thinking as I was watching it, this is going to haunt my dreams for the rest of my life. I'm going to be waking up in the night and thinking about this. And indeed, that night, I'm going to be waking up in the night and thinking about this. And indeed, that night, I and my colleagues did dream about it. And all of us, I think, had nightmares about it. In those days, I used to write a column for the Sunday Telegraph, and I wrote a full page about this thing. And at that time, we used to dictate our copy by phone, very antique stuff, even though this was only 25 years ago or something. At the end of it, the very sort of nice, comfortable,

motherly lady had taken it down, just said to me, oh, I'm so sorry for you, dear, that you've had to go through that awful experience. My heart goes out to you. But as a result of writing about it and talking about it and thinking about it, it was a kind of therapy. And I never have had any bad dreams about it. I do sometimes think about it. It's not something you would just forget, but it doesn't have a hold on me. It doesn't hurt me or harm me anymore inside. It doesn't seem to anyway. And I think writing more than broadcasting is a real, real therapy for me. And so I'm hoping that the 1982 experience, which I always rather kept quiet about, didn't tell anybody about it because I didn't feel I behaved very well and so on.

I'm hoping to kind of maybe wipe that out by now. A lot of people are probably wondering why you've gone on. Is it for positive reasons? You love it and you think it's important? Or is it because you're addicted? You just can't quit? Well, it's all sorts of things. I'm 77 in a day or so. Now, I suspect it's a kind of bloody mindedness. I just want to show that a bloke of 77 can still get on a plane and go somewhere nasty. I'm just, in fact, about to go off to Afghanistan to cover whatever happens with the Taliban and so on. And that's whatever happens with the Taliban and so on. And that's something which I've kind of got a pride, really, in being older than just about my two colleagues put together and probably plus all the other correspondents that will be there doing the same job. So that's one aspect of it. Another

is that I've got a young son, a 15-year-old son, and I don't want to be the old bugger in the corner saying, turn that music down, you know. I want him to feel that I've still got a life and an activity of my own and that I've got kind of stories. And they're not always just stories about the 1980s. They're stories about the 2020s. And it's a desire, I suppose, to stay relevant. I mean, I'm sitting here in the south of France, absolutely lovely, doing absolutely nothing except reading and taking the odd swim. But that's because I'm getting ready to go back to Afghanistan. I suspect that if I was just thinking about getting ready to go back to London,

life wouldn't be quite so enthralling and interesting. I'd get bored with my own company very quickly, I think. You're listening to Downstone's History. I've got John Simpson on the pod. Very exciting. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.

There are new episodes every week. John we're actually talking by coincidence on the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee publicizing his first website back in the 1990s your career therefore is much longer than the lifespan of the World Wide Web. When you look back at how that's changed your career, how it's changed what the media does, perhaps how it's changed the world, looking back on those decades, how has the existence of, well, the internet changed what you do? I mean, of course, it's a nuisance sometimes,

like any technological advance is always going to have some nuisance-y element to it. But in terms of how I do my job, it's absolutely fantastic. The way in which you can ask ordinary people who have no interest and no awareness and experience of journalism to just get their iPhone out and start recording what they see in front of them, and you've got pictures of it, is absolutely magnificent. And I've used the phone myself to film all sorts of difficult things, like in Iran in 2009, when there was an uprising against the government of the Ayatollahs, which looked for a moment as though it might actually succeed. And having a proper television camera was far too dangerous.

We filmed the whole thing on my little iPhone. And all sorts of other things have happened over the years. I mean, I remember some years ago, there was a gigantic storm, one of those sort of monster occasions in Southeast Asia. And by pure chance, I happened to be holidaying in the very place where it came ashore in Thailand. And I told the BBC and my wife came out with me with her iPhone. My 15-year-old son shone a torch on me. It was pitch dark. The waves were bashing away behind me. And I yelled something to camera. We went back to the hotel restaurant and my wife emailed the report back to London. It was on that night, six o'clock news within minutes.

And I was in my hotel, fantastic meal and everything. And I was starting to get messages saying, don't take these dangerous risks, John. You know, your life is more important than covering the news. I felt deeply guilty and deeply grateful for all the new technology that exists. That's classic John Simpson. Even when you're on holiday, you're in exactly the right place or the wrong place, depending on the objectives. The internet, I mean, the World Wide Web, of course, has had one extraordinary effect, and that is the fracturing of where we all get our information from. You look back and you think about, I mean, William Howard Russell writing his reports for The Times from the

Crimean War, and the ultimate, of course, Walter Cronkite just doing a piece of camera in Saigon and just calling time on the Vietnam War, watched by tens of millions of people, including Lyndon Johnson in the White House. That moment when you're speaking to an entire nation doesn't really happen anymore, does it? I think the idea of the nation watching a single broadcaster is probably faded now from our national and international experience but there are moments when things happen big big things happen people tend to turn to the BBC for one reason or another and then you know you can find yourself broadcasting to vast audiences and doing a sort of version of the Walter Cronkite thing. But I'm not actually

terribly confident anyway about the notion of the broadcaster as the nation's teacher. I'm a reporter. I just want to report on things. I don't think you even ought to worry who's watching. And I certainly don't think you should worry about what effect your reporting is having because somebody once said to me that's the job of a politician not a reporter your job as a reporter is simply to say look this is what's happening here you make your own mind about it I'll give you as many of the background details as I possibly can but the decision is yours and not mine. And I think that's the best type of broadcasting, is that to leave it to people to make their own mind up, rather than doing the Walter Cronkite thing, I am telling you this war is a mistake.

You must have broken stories that you think have made an actual difference in the world. think have made an actual difference in the world? Yeah, you never know somehow. I have done that various times. I've reported on things which I thought were going to be devastating and I've sat back and nobody's really taken very much notice. There are other times, for instance, in Tiananmen Square, when you knew that what you were saying was going to have an impact on just about everybody in the world, and it was going to last. And it's interesting to me to see how, although people have forgotten so many, many things, Tiananmen Square is something that nobody in the world has forgotten, except, of course, in China, where the authorities want it to be forgotten. But again, it's very hard to judge

what effect your words are having. And I take that as a bit of a comfort, actually, because, again, if I wanted to manipulate events, I would be a politician. I wouldn't be a journalist. I just want to tell people what the hell's going on. Lately, John, I've noticed in some of your pronouncements, and particularly your Twitter feed, there's a creeping pessimism about the state of the world. Is it climate change? Creeping authoritarianism? Am I right? Do you have those concerns? Is that a fair

characterisation? Yes, it is. Until about three or four years ago, I suppose I still would have stuck with the Steven Pinker view of human history, that it is actually getting better. And there are many, many ways in which it is. I mean, how incredible that we can have a population of seven and a half billion people on the planet and still be able to feed just about everybody. Because 20, 30 years ago, longer, we would have thought that the world would collapse under the weight of seven and a half billion. would collapse under the weight of 7.5 billion. Extraordinary things like 1 billion people taken out of poverty in the last 10 years, lifted out of gross poverty and into a modest and successful way of existing.

Again, remarkable, absolutely remarkable. But now it's really a matter of the last six or seven years. I suppose it's been creeping up. I'm really, really scared about the effects of what we've done to our planet. Of course, all the ideas we have about trying to repair the damage are far too little and far too late. And I am worried about the future that my son will inherit. I mean, I'm sure the world will stagger on enough for me, but for him, he'll probably last into the 22nd century if he's lucky in the way that lifespans are increasing. that lifespans are increasing. What sort of a world, devastated, burned out world will he be seeing? And in politics too, there was a time when Vladimir Putin in Russia was thinking about

joining NATO, linking up with the Western powers, and then he saw greater political advantage to himself from opposing NATO, opposing the West, and doing the kind of dirty deeds that he and his regime have been doing. In China, I remember in 2009, creeping past some guards to interview a man on the outskirts of Beijing who was under house arrest, managing to get in without them noticing, interviewing this man who'd been a leading figure in the Chinese political leadership, but then made the terrible mistake of deciding that democracy was the way forward for China as well as for everybody else, had been jailed and then put under house arrest. He knew we were coming and he'd prepared himself, he'd prepared a speech. And part of the speech really, really impressed me. He said, within

five years, China will be a functioning democracy and I will be a member of the duly elected Chinese parliament. Well, it didn't happen. And the reason it didn't happen was that Xi Jinping came to power and he realized or he decided that the great danger to Chinese communism came from too much freedom, hence the clamping down on all sorts of groups of people across China, and hence the clamp down on Hong Kong. So suddenly, in the last sort of seven or eight years, things have changed. And I'm afraid my pessimism is justified I'd rather be wrong about all these things than about anything else on earth well thank you very much I mean I say thank you I mean if that's the right word thank you for showing that person and infecting us with that pessimism speaking of China what's the name of this brilliant new book you got out oh thank you yes it's our

friends in Beijing and it's based on reality. In fact, I worked it out. Something like 80% of it actually happened either to me or to somebody whose story I know well and can justify. It's really the story of an attempted coup against Xi Jinping by a man. against Xi Jinping by a man, there's no problem sadly in telling his name now, a man called Bo Xilai, a very charming, I think very crooked, top politician in China, whose career I followed right almost from its start, and whom I actually played a part, I think, in getting promoted by interviewing him. He said the leadership thought that he could handle the Western press very well and were deeply impressed by his interview that he did with me. He rose up and then, just like Icarus, he just went too close to the sun.

And now he's serving a life sentence in moderately comfortable conditions. I think he still gets his shoes from Lobs in London and his suits made, I think, in Savile Row and sent to him. But he's there for life. And I based it on his story and the excitements that he generated. That sounds fascinating. Thank you, John Simpson, for coming on the podcast. Thank you. A real privilege, Dan. Thank you very much indeed. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. We've reached the end of another country, all work out and finish. Thanks, folks.

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