The defrost option

Amongst journalists, foreign correspondents enjoy the same status as explorers amongst ordinary men. They disappear for weeks together to unheard-of places and come back with fascinating stories of exotic lands and interesting people. More than their work, they are sought after for the stories they can recount of their adventures.

And this is the real stuff""stories a journalist can tell his friends over a pitcher of beer but would not write or broadcast. In ten out of ten cases, the making of a story is more fascinating than the story itself. Gavin Hewitt's book is over 350 pages of just this kind of unadulterated fun.

Almost three decades of covering news for television took Hewitt to every troubled corner of the world""Kabul, Teheran, Baghdad, among others. The news reports he filed from there are well-known: Soviet troops marching into Kabul, US marines driving into Baghdad and so on. But what Hewitt reveals for the first time in his book is how he made those reports possible.

More often than not, success in journalism comes from being resourceful. The demands on the ready wit of a foreign correspondent are all the more great as he needs to move from one hot spot to the other at very short notice.

Some of the adventures Hewitt recounts""smuggling films out of Kabul, interviewing rebels in Communist Poland, filming dissident student leaders in China""are straight out of a thriller.

The book is a good insider's account of what goes into making television news for the world; what it takes to bring live pictures of air raids and tank assaults to your living room from remote battle fronts.

Hewitt's book also illustrates how war coverage has changed over time. In the age of television, a war correspondent's job has become far more demanding. It is no longer filing despatches from the officers' mess after a briefing by the commanding officer over gin and tonic. To film the bullets flying around, you have to be in the line of fire and try your best to dodge the bullets.

A television report is only as good as its images. To get the right picture at the right time, global news networks spare no effort, leave no stone unturned. The book gives an insight into the scale on which global news networks operate these days. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, there was a scramble among the leading networks to rush their TV crews to Ground Zero. The US had shut its air space fearing more attacks. Hewitt chartered an aircraft from Europe to Canada, and then drove in a stretch limousine to New York. Of course, he was amongst the first to get pictures of the massive rescue and search effort mounted after the twin towers had been brought down.

Yet, the most fascinating part of the book is the one dealing with how the US decided to take "embedded" journalists along during its last assault on Iraq. This was the first time an army was taking journalists along who could tell the world of Saddam Hussain's evil empire and his secret chemical weapons programme.

Hewitt, and several other journalists like him, had to undergo training at a US marine base before they were "embedded" in a US field formation that was to attack Iraq.

Regardless of the objective of the US authorities (there were murmurs that this was being done to get favourable television coverage as there was growing opposition at home to any attack on Baghdad), this gave Hewitt a chance to assess the war effort of the US forces and the morale of its soldiers. Most of them were amateurs who wanted the war to get over quickly so that they could go back home.

At the end, the Iraqi resistance was at best a formality. Of course, no trace of a chemical arsenal was ever found in the country.

Almost three decades ago, when Hewitt had started out as a rookie reporter, Graham Greene advised him to freeze his conscience, to put his "soul on ice". To Hewitt's credit, he did a fine job. More important, he decided to tell the untold story.

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A SOUL ON ICE
A LIFE IN NEWS

Gavin Hewitt
Pan Books
Pages: 353