Last weekend I was in the North London suburb of Colindale. Almost at the end of the Edgeware branch of the Northern Line Colindale is a 90 minute ride by bus and underground from my home in Dulwich. I was there to use the ultra modern facilities in the 1957 brick structure of the British Library Newspaper section searching for scraps of journalism from my youth. In June1969 I had taken my embryonic journalism career to the North African shores of the Mediterranean and at the precocious age of 20 years assumed the mantle of Editor of the Tripoli Mirror, one of two English language newspapers in the Libyan capital, and carried with me letters of accreditation from the Observer’s venerable and academic Diplomatic Correspondent Robert Stephens.
I had traded these for a Libyan press card - a sort of mini-passport bearing the Sanussi Royal crest – by September 1 1969 when Muammer Gaddafi led his free officers movement in the bloodless coup d’etat that swept the ailing King Idris from power. John K. Cooley, the Christian Science Monitor Middle East
Correspondent wrote in his account of the Libyan Revolution “Desert Sandstorm” ( 1982, Holt Rinehart and Winston), “Virtually no western correspondents were in Libya on September 1”. Well I was there and the Observer had the only Tripoli by-line of any western newspaper for two weeks. When I visited Beirut regularly from Amman, Jordan, John Cooley and I became firm friends during the early 1970's.
This was my first foray into international reporting and I have to say, the young revolutionaries got me off to a flying start. In that first week I was given a pass allowing me freedom of movement during curfew yours by a young crinkle-aired captain at the Bab Al Aziziyah barracks – whom I later found out was Gaddafi’s right hand man, Abdul Salam Jalloud.
By the end of the month I had conducted the first interview by a western correspondent with revolutionary Libya’s first prime minister, the petroleum lawyer and jailed activist Dr. Mahmoud Suleiman al Maghrabi and early November I had the first interview by a western correspondent with a member of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council. Although he insisted on remaining anonymous, I soon found out the Captain was Abu Bakr Yunis Jaber, who today is a Major General and Minister of Defence. It was he who recently visited Russia and signed contracts woirth $1.8 million for military hardware.
Libya gave me my grounding in Middle East journalism from interviewing Yasser Arafat to crossing the Sahara to visit Toubou training camps of the Chad rebel movement led by Hissan Hibre.
My by-line in the Observer soon brought me similar freelance appointments from UPI, The Financial Times, Springer Foreign News Service, and the BBC. The connection I made with Yasser Arafat stood me in good stead when I moved onto my next posting in 1971 – Amman and a greater Middle East role for Springer and The Sunday Times, to whom I switched allegiance from The Observer.
After 40 years I no longer had the clippings of my first articles. But the British Library Newspapers section has a project to digitise British newspapers and on their computers I rapidly found the clippings and was able to printout photocopies of the pdf files of the articles for my scrapbook.
