John Ray
ITV News Correspondent John Ray was sent to Libya in 2011 to capture the dramatic fall of Gaddafi in the Arab Spring.
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Here are some lessons from
recent history.
How it can all go horribly wrong. How luck and fine margins mark the boundary between triumph and disaster. How so often you don’t see that boundary until you’ve stepped over it.
The setting is Libya. It’s 2011. Western warplanes are trying to bomb out of business an autocratic regime that’s just turned its guns on thousands of its own citizens. Sound familiar?
Specifically, it’s the early hours of August 22. I’m in a cramped little car that stinks of the fumes from several jerry cans of petrol, part of the unwieldy kit of cameras, body armour, and generators needed to carry the ITV News team through this chaos.
I am a very nervous correspondent, wondering whether I will hear the burst of machine gun fire I expect any moment to finish us. Or whether I’ll be dead before the sound of the bullets reaches me.
But my team is top rate: cameraman Rob Bowles, editor Patrick O’Ryan-Roeder, our security man Garry Curtis and two very brave local drivers.
We believe we’re heading to a safe haven for the night. But, we’re about to hand ourselves over to the regime of Colonel Gaddafi, to check into a gilded prison.
We’ve been told the Rixos Hotel, home throughout the crisis to the world’s media, has been liberated. We’ve been promised this by two separate sources. Unfortunately, their source is the same man … and he is wrong.
At the hotel’s grand entrance, we’re greeted by two impressive sights. The portrait, intact, of a haughty Gaddafi adorning a reception.
And then, a group of journalists, moving like dazed extras in the final reel of a disaster movie, who mistake us for a force come to free them. “Can you get me a ticket to Paris?” one asks me.
Within moments, a group of gun-toting regime fighters turns up. There will be no tickets to Paris, or to anywhere, for the hotel’s inmates.
This was the dispiriting climax to several days of great excitement and great fear as we witnessed and, as this ITV News series says, reported history.
We’d followed the rebels’ advance into the capital. I’d seen fighters shot in front of me. We were trapped for a while at the front line and came under mortar fire.
I learned, as we fled the scene lying flat on the back of a speeding truck, the difference between the sound of outgoing gunfire and the whizz of bullets flying just above our heads.
Then, disaster. As we drove down a tree-lined road parallel to the battle, I remember seeing ahead that one, a blackened stump, was still burning.
At the precise moment we passed, it toppled, smashing the windscreen of our pick-up and then bouncing over the roof.
On the back of the truck, as ever and by choice, as if leading us into battle, had stood our fixer. A Mancunian Libyan named Essam. An enthusiast for the uprising, our only Arabic speaker, and an integral part of the team.
Now he lay motionless. For a horrifying moment, we were convinced he was dead. But Garry, a trained medic, found breath in his body. His helmet had saved his life.
Still, the injuries were significant. We spent the rest of the morning finding a field hospital. ITN arranged safe passage back to the UK.
But by now the story had raced ahead of us. The rebels had reached the capital. That night, we felt under huge pressure to follow them into Tripoli.
So after much discussion and against the initial judgment of more experienced members of the team – and with two new cars and two young drivers from the village that had been at our base – we set off into the darkness.
We reached Green Square as the victory party ended. When I look back on the report we filed, I can see I share some of the joy and optimism of the moment. I think – or at least hope – it’s all over.
But it wasn’t. We were warned that regime soldiers were coming. We needed to find somewhere to spend the night.
I woke the next morning in the Rixos to the oppressive reality of the catastrophic blunder I’d made to put the team into the hands of the regime.
Up to that point, even at the front line, if in doubt, we could get out. In the hotel, we felt trapped like rats.
There followed two or three surreal days. The battle for Tripoli raged around us. A round came through our window. We worked, we reported, we filed stories. It helped keep our minds off recurring and uncomfortable questions.
What happens when the rebels come?
Is this where the regime will make its last stand?
What will they do to the hostages? Release us, or kill us?
Escape seemed the best option. Our first attempt didn’t go well. We loaded up our cars with a simple plan to style it out down the hotel’s wide driveway.
But we were stopped and then held at gunpoint by a very twitchy group of young regime loyalists. They were armed with AK47s. They shouted and pointed their guns at us. A lot. Then they took our passports. Worse, they accused us of being Israeli spies.
These were anxious hours, in which our fate seemed to depend on the whims of a gang of jumpy teenagers. And yet, after a while, inexplicably, they seemed to lose interest in us. I don’t know why.
Eventually, we headed back to our rooms. There, I retrieved from my bag a tube of toothpaste that had Hebrew writing on the side. I put it above in the ceiling tiles. It might still be there.
For the next attempt to bust out – a plan hatched by Rob and Patrick – we abandoned the cars and headed for a fire door at the rear of the hotel. We ran as fast as middle-aged men in flak jackets can across tennis courts and then shimmied over a low wall.
A van was passing. We flagged it down. The driver took us in – and then to our horror, headed straight to the sound of fierce battle close by. He stopped only when he came to a bullet-ridden car slewed across the lane ahead. A corpse lay next to it.
The moment of liberation was sweet but undramatic. A U-turn, a short drive, at pace, down the wrong side of the highway, and then a turn into an area held by rebels. A call to the news desk in London that we were out and safe. There was one last act to return to the hotel for our two drivers. More than anyone, their lives had been in peril.
If they’d been caught by our guards, as two young men from an opposition town helping “foreign spies” … we could all work out the likely consequences. Patrick and Garry went back to the Rixos and arrived just as the real Red Crescent turned up.
What happened to our captors, I never found out. The siege of the Rixos ended peacefully, and a couple of days later, I was heading out of Libya with a story to tell my wife. It is not a story of journalistic triumph but is one of survival; of disaster, just about averted.
Perhaps it’s the same for Libya. Gaddafi was tracked down and butchered. But the uprising did not result in the kind of future that the West had promised.
Today, it is divided between two rival governments and is best known as a key jumping-off point for migrants headed to Europe.
All this is fresh in my mind as I watch Iran and wonder about the laws of unintended consequences and whether the world has already stepped over one of those invisible borders between triumph and disaster.
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John Ray is a Correspondent for ITV News. He was formerly Africa Correspondent, Middle East Correspondent and was the first Western TV journalist to report from inside Syria’s borders at the start of the war.
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