Jeremy Bowen - War Stories

Jeremy Bowen was born in Cardiff in 1960. He attended University College London and Johns Hopkins University in Italy and the USA before joining the BBC as a news trainee in 1984. He became a foreign correspondent in 1987, covering major conflicts in the Middle East, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Chechnya, Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo. From 1995 to 2000 he was the BBCs Middle East Correspondent, winning awards from television festivals in New York and Monte Carlo as well as a Best Breaking News report from the Royal Television Society on the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. After two years presenting Breakfast, BBC1s morning news programme, as well as major history documentaries, he was given a roving brief as a Special Correspondent before being appointed BBC Middle East Editor in 2005. He lives in London.

Praise for Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East :

Bowen tells the story as it deserves to be told: as a thriller, the more compelling for being true . Bowen writes like a television reporter talks succinctly, precisely, unsentimentally but the style and structure allow him to pile cliff-hanger upon cliff-hanger. Even though we know how it ends, it is gripping stuff, full of meticulously disinterred detail and acutely sketched personalities . timely and engrossing Time Out

Fine research . impeccably accurate . Jeremy Bowen has performed a service by reminding us how we got here. In the true traditions of journalism, he has done his best to tell us exactly how it happened Guardian

[Bowen] reveals a compelling yarn behind the myths . Perhaps SixDays can help us both remember and heal Independent

[A] fast-paced history . Bowen provides an hour-by-hour narrative of the war, which is surely the most gripping military tale since the fall of France in the Second World War Daily Telegraph

Gripping . You emerge from the book feeling you have been as close an observer of a war as you are ever likely to be Literary Review

Bowens meticulous account, a mosaic of private stories, control room debates and battlefield vignettes, makes a convincing case Sunday Times

Unflinching . Bowens straightforward style is backed up by meticulous research . with Bowens wide research lending both balance and authority to his conclusions Catholic Times

Bowen writes with a journalists verve Jewish Chronicle

Jeremy Bowen is a war reporter for whom contentment begins when bullets fly . Bowen knows the Middle East. For five years he was the BBCs main correspondent there . That kind of experience has taught him that simple judgments of right and wrong, good and evil, are never possible . Bowen tells the story of the war with an hour-by-hour account of each of the six days. What comes across is a sense of tragic inevitability Scotland on Sunday

A splendidly woven story book . Although [Bowen] is an admirably dispassionate and meticulous historian, he is an even better story teller . This is a piece of humane and honest writing which should be on the shelves of anyone with a serious interest in the conflict, and on the bedside table of anyone who wants a great, fast read Contemporary Review

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd in 2006

This edition first published by Pocket Books, 2007

An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

A CBS COMPANY

Copyright 2006 by Jeremy Bowen

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

The right of Jeremy Bowen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 13: 978-0-7434-4968-7

ISBN 10: 0-7434-4968-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-1474-8

PICTURE CREDITS

All pictures from the authors private collection except: Reuters:

Lyric from Crazy by Seal Perfect Songs Ltd.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks

For

Abed Takkoush

Tihomir Tunukovi

Rory Peck

Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora

Kurt Schork

Kerem Lawton

Julio Fuentes

Terry Lloyd

Gaby Rado

Kaveh Golestan

Paul Moran

Mazen Dana

Simon Cumbers

Paul Douglas

James Brolan

and all the others

Beirut, 23 May 2000

A t seven oclock on the morning that he was killed Abed Takkoush parked his Mercedes outside the Riviera hotel on the Corniche, the wide road that runs along the seafront in west Beirut. The Riviera has a fine view of the Mediterranean and its clients around the pool have a fine view of each other. Some people call it Silicone Beach because so many inflated breasts, pouting lips and lifted bottoms are on display around the pool, broiling steadily in the Levantine midday sun. But the sunbeds were still being laid out when Abed arrived to pick me up for the drive down to the south. The Israelis were ending an occupation of southern Lebanon that had lasted twenty-two years and Abed and I were going to wave them off. Once the BBCs cameraman Malek Kanaan had arrived, we set off down the coastal highway.

Abed was fifty-three. He had wiry black hair, going a bit grey in places, and lived with his wife and three sons in an apartment in Hamra in the centre of Beirut. He had dark, watchful eyes that could scowl or smile. Abed laughed a lot, and liked to boast about his driving. He said one of his other clients called him Schumacher. Yes, just like Michael Schumacher, hed say, as he accelerated into a gap in the traffic, except Schumacher drives on empty roads. Let him try it in Lebanon! Other times Abed would drive silently, holding a cigarette with his yellow fingers, brooding. His sister was blown to pieces by a shell that exploded in a car park in west Beirut, during the so-called war of liberation that the Christian politician and general, Michel Aoun, launched against the Syrians in 1989. They only found about half of her.

Abeds business card said he was a driver and producer. That meant he was the quintessential local fixer, the kind of person that foreign correspondents around the world need more than anyone else. He knew everyone, from the bearded and serious men at the offices of the Islamic resistance, Hezbollah, in the southern suburbs of the city, to the head waiters at the best fish restaurants. He was a taxi driver when the civil war started in 1975. The American television network NBC hired him, and because they shared a bureau with the BBC he started working with the British too, and never looked back. He used to carry a sheaf of old press identity cards in the glove box of his car, like campaign medals. In the photo on his first NBC card, he looked very young: not bad-looking, innocent about war. But he learned very fast, as everyone in Beirut had to do at that time, and his colleagues learned to trust him.

Malek, the cameraman, was a teenager when the Lebanese civil war started. He turned to television news after spending time as a gunman in one of the militias. He chose the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a strange decision for a Lebanese Shia Muslim. But it was the international section, Jeremy. The East German girls were beautiful . Later on, his revolutionary credentials earned him a scholarship to study in East Berlin, where his lack of ideological purity got him into trouble with the authorities. And me, I was forty years old, in my fifth year as the BBCs Middle East Correspondent, and my twelfth war.