Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, Welcome to conversations. In twenty thirteen, a war correspondent,
Speaker 1: although he doesn't like the term, was detained in Cairo
Speaker 1: by the Egyptian authorities, subsequently put to trial in the
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, was convicted and sentenced to seven years in
Speaker 1: prison in an Egyptian jail. It's a well known case.
Speaker 1: Eventually Peter Grestor was released after lots of negotiation, diplomatic
Speaker 1: intervention and the like, and it became a really fascinating story. Subsequently,
Speaker 1: Peter wrote a book about it, The First Casualty, And
Speaker 1: now there's been a movie written about the story, and
Speaker 1: the book has been re released with additional information and
Speaker 1: chapters in it, called The Correspondent. Peter Grestor joins us, Peter,
Speaker 1: thank you for your time.
Speaker 2: How are you fantastic to be with you? Grant what a.
Speaker 1: Life you've had or are having? Can I say? But
Speaker 1: in terms of I don't know where to start. There's
Speaker 1: a movie about your time incarceration in the Egyptian prison.
Speaker 1: We'll get to that, of course. And that's a few
Speaker 1: to have a movie written about you or made about you.
Speaker 2: Well, it's weird at one level. I mean, I suppose
Speaker 2: we all play that game, you know who'd play you
Speaker 2: in a movie? And seeing that actually happen there's been
Speaker 2: a little bit bizarre. But I've also recognized that it's
Speaker 2: not a movie about me. It's a movie about a
Speaker 2: particular thing that happened to me. It's a movie about
Speaker 2: or it's an artistic interpretation of a story that I wrote,
Speaker 2: and so it feels like it's a couple of steps
Speaker 2: removed from from from me. I remember talking to the director,
Speaker 2: kriv Standers, who said that it's then he's not trying
Speaker 2: to do not trying to make a photograph. This is
Speaker 2: a painting. It's a kind of artistic rendering of that
Speaker 2: experience that I had, And in a way, I guess
Speaker 2: that makes it a lot easier to watch and see
Speaker 2: it for what it is, rather than try and get
Speaker 2: caught up with the idea that it's me on screen.
Speaker 1: Did you have any saying who was to play you?
Speaker 2: A little bit like I don't think i'd have ever
Speaker 2: really would go for Brad pitt Well. I was thinking, yeah,
Speaker 2: I was thinking thinking Chris Hamsworth, myself, Richard Rock.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to say, sir named Roxborough. He's
Speaker 1: a fine looking.
Speaker 2: Man, a fine looking man and a fantastic actor. Although
Speaker 2: I have to admit when I first heard that he
Speaker 2: was he was being considered for the part, I just
Speaker 2: couldn't get his most famous role out of my head,
Speaker 2: Clever Green, the lawyer in Rake. Clever Green is such
Speaker 2: a kind of rogue character, such a strong character that
Speaker 2: it was that and so strongly associated with Rocks that
Speaker 2: that I really couldn't imagine how Clever Green would survive
Speaker 2: prison in Egypt. But Rox did an absolutely brilliant job.
Speaker 2: In fact, quite a number of the critics have described
Speaker 2: his performance as career defining.
Speaker 1: We're going to get to Egypt, We're going to get
Speaker 1: to an incarceration, your subsequent release, and the work you're
Speaker 1: doing now. Of course, but the Bag story is interesting
Speaker 1: of Latvian descent, so was it mum and dad who
Speaker 1: immigrated it with.
Speaker 2: My father some half lat Fin. My dad was a
Speaker 2: first a Second World War immigrant, a refugee. He came
Speaker 2: out after the Russians invaded Latvia. They fled latvieir and
Speaker 2: went into refugee camps around Germany for a few years
Speaker 2: until after the war. My step grandfather, my real grandfather,
Speaker 2: my paternal grandfather was captured. He was drafted into the
Speaker 2: German army and captured by the Allies and ended up
Speaker 2: dying in an Allied pow camp. And so my grandmother
Speaker 2: then formed another relationship with my step grandfather, who came
Speaker 2: to Australia as a part of the migrant refuge refugee
Speaker 2: or migrant worker scheme and sponsored my grandmother's family to
Speaker 2: come out. And so that's how he wound up in Australia.
Speaker 1: What a story. Did your dad ever talk to you
Speaker 1: about his war time experiences?
Speaker 2: A lot? In fact, you know, I think Dad's refugee
Speaker 2: heritage fed a lot into us, into our DNA, in
Speaker 2: ways that I don't think I ever really appreciated until
Speaker 2: I spent I started working as a correspondent. He spoke
Speaker 2: a lot about his time in refugee camps. It's sort
Speaker 2: of informed the way that he sees the world, the
Speaker 2: way that he engages with the world, even down to
Speaker 2: very practical things like food. You know, refugees don't ever
Speaker 2: seem to waste any food. They never check anything out.
Speaker 2: You can find the moldiest piece of cheese at the
Speaker 2: back of the fridge and Dad will scrape off the
Speaker 2: mold and stick it on a slice of toast.
Speaker 1: Is he still with us?
Speaker 2: Oh, definitely, yep, very much. In fact, I was with
Speaker 2: my parents for Mother's Day. They're both kicking. My dad
Speaker 2: is eighty eight, is about to turn eighty nine.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, did your document? Did you document those experiences?
Speaker 2: Well, we've had a lot of conversations with them. I went,
Speaker 2: In fact, I went with mum and dad quite a
Speaker 2: few years ago to Latfeer to see my mum and
Speaker 2: dad's birthplace, and we followed my dad's path into Germany
Speaker 2: and we went and visited all of the refugee camp
Speaker 2: sites where he stayed, and he talked through it a lot.
Speaker 2: And Dad has himself written the story of the flight
Speaker 2: from Latvieer in a book that keeps getting added. I
Speaker 2: think he's up to a dender number nine at the moment.
Speaker 1: Was he hurt or heard? That's of course it was hurt.
Speaker 1: But was he scarred by what happened to his dad?
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. I'm not sure if scarred is the
Speaker 2: right word for it. I think I think heavily influenced
Speaker 2: formed by it.
Speaker 1: He died in an Allied prison camp. We're used to
Speaker 1: the other experience where we were in Japanese were German ones.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It is interesting, isn't it. But I think I
Speaker 2: guess that's you know, we we I think we think
Speaker 2: of the Allies has been always been the good guys
Speaker 2: in this stuff. I think that's just a function of war.
Speaker 2: And I think my father recognized that. I don't think
Speaker 2: he you know, he saw it. I don't think he
Speaker 2: holds the Allies responsible for it. I think it was
Speaker 2: just one of those things, one of the tragedies that
Speaker 2: happened in war, happened in so many places on all sides.
Speaker 2: You know. I think he's more formed by the whole
Speaker 2: war experience, the refugee experience, than specifically his father's death.
Speaker 1: What did he do when he came to a stranger.
Speaker 2: So he went and studied architecture, became an architect, and
Speaker 2: many years yeah, working as an architect. One of the
Speaker 2: things that my grandmother was really forceful about when it
Speaker 2: came to her kids was education, education, education, and.
Speaker 1: Rubbed off on you too. I mean you were good
Speaker 1: at school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was pretty good at school. I was I
Speaker 2: was a bit of a bit of a nerd, I
Speaker 2: guess at school. I was never brilliant, but I certainly
Speaker 2: didn't seem to struggle too much.
Speaker 1: But you went to Uni. I'm just reading the bioh
Speaker 1: you did a business degree.
Speaker 2: It was it was a Bachelor of Business Communications. So
Speaker 2: it was actually journalism. It was a public relations, advertising
Speaker 2: and journalism. And I took to the journalism strand.
Speaker 1: And where did that lead? I mean, you came out
Speaker 1: of university with that degree. Where do you go?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well I went, So I went from there to
Speaker 2: to rural Sheperdon. I was a journalist with the local
Speaker 2: TV station, Victoria Sheppard, Victorian north Is Victoria.
Speaker 1: Did you grow up in Queensland?
Speaker 2: There was a job there. You know. I was always
Speaker 2: keen for for my first job. And I guess that's
Speaker 2: what the degree got me. It's got me that first
Speaker 2: job and in some respects, in some respects a lot
Speaker 2: of respects up until my students that that Shepherd and
Speaker 2: was where I learned to be a foreign correspondent.
Speaker 1: But Shepherd is a country Victorian town. The steeped in
Speaker 1: the sport. And did you have to absorb as rules footy?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I was your body dairy farming, fruit, fruit, fruit farming,
Speaker 2: all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that was look, it was.
Speaker 2: It was a It was a great experience because it
Speaker 2: taught me to work very quickly. It taught me to
Speaker 2: work independently. It taught me the importance of accuracy. You know,
Speaker 2: I guess one of the things in Capital City newsrooms
Speaker 2: is that you're often a little bit isolated from your audiences,
Speaker 2: whereas in a place like Shepherd And if you every
Speaker 2: you know, if you whenever you walk down the street
Speaker 2: the following day after a story, someone would tap you
Speaker 2: on your shoulder and pull you up for some factoid
Speaker 2: that you'd gotten wrong, some some name that you'd mispronounced
Speaker 2: and correct you very very quickly. So I was very
Speaker 2: close to the people that you're actually reporting for.
Speaker 1: Let's stay go from country Victoria to reporting in the
Speaker 1: world's hotspots. I mean, where did you what was the
Speaker 1: next quantum leap?
Speaker 2: From Victoria to Darwin? I worked for the ten networkers
Speaker 2: the ten Networks Northern Australia reporter for a year, not
Speaker 2: hell of a long time, and then from Darwin to
Speaker 2: Adelaide for about three years.
Speaker 1: How did you work for an Adelaide for.
Speaker 2: The ten network? It was just in the local and
Speaker 2: the state. The Capital City news room but I guess
Speaker 2: that was you asked about the quantum leap, you asked
Speaker 2: about the formative shift, and I guess it happened there
Speaker 2: because I was in Adelaide for about three years, and
Speaker 2: towards the end of three years, I remember starting to
Speaker 2: feel as though I was repeating the stories. You know,
Speaker 2: that I could take a script that i'd done twelve
Speaker 2: months previously and pretty much changed the names and the
Speaker 2: dates and refile the story that. But it just felt
Speaker 2: as though that there were kind of stories at routine
Speaker 2: that came up, whether it was fatal car accidents or
Speaker 2: industrial disputes or government local council politics, and I was
Speaker 2: starting to look for something new. And I remember reading
Speaker 2: a book called One Crowded Hour, a biography of a
Speaker 2: guy called Neil Davis, who was an extraordinary Australian cameraman
Speaker 2: who covered Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, Laos and
Speaker 2: Cambodia and so on, and Davis was became a bit
Speaker 2: of an icon for me. He was incredibly brave, He
Speaker 2: was wounded something like twenty three times. He saw more
Speaker 2: active combat than almost than most serving soldiers. It's not
Speaker 2: that I wanted to be on the front lines and
Speaker 2: wounded in while I was doing my job. But it
Speaker 2: struck me that Davis was at what a friend of
Speaker 2: mine once called the hinges of history pivotal moments, that
Speaker 2: he was passionate about the stories and the people that
Speaker 2: he was covering, and he showed extraordinary professionalism and having
Speaker 2: some wonderful adventures along the way, And I thought, well,
Speaker 2: that's actually what I want to do. And about that time,
Speaker 2: this was in around late ninety around early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety ninety one, when we had the famous recession
Speaker 2: that we had to have, the TEN network went into
Speaker 2: receivership to save money, they closed down the London bureau,
Speaker 2: and I had this sort of idea of being a
Speaker 2: foreign correspondent starting to develop in my mind, and I
Speaker 2: realized that you couldn't have really one of the main
Speaker 2: Australian networks without a London correspondent. So I marched into
Speaker 2: my boss's office and said, listen, if I quit, if
Speaker 2: I resigned my job here and take myself to London,
Speaker 2: would you guys use me as a stringer? And they
Speaker 2: said sure, why not. It wasn't going to cost them anything,
Speaker 2: It wasn't any major crisis for them. They knew my work,
Speaker 2: and so that's what I did.
Speaker 1: Peter Grest is my guest, folks. His book is called
Speaker 1: The Correspondent. The movie starring Richard Rochburt is also out
Speaker 1: at the moment, called The Correspondent, based on Peter's life
Speaker 1: back shortly, Welcome back, everybody. My guest is Peter Grest
Speaker 1: talking about his book called The Correspondent, and that's the
Speaker 1: story of his well, his life as a journalist, but
Speaker 1: specifically I suppose where he was detained and trialed and
Speaker 1: put the trial and incarcerated in Egypt. But I get
Speaker 1: lost in the in the early days, and I didn't
Speaker 1: realize Peter was in Adelaide for three years, then goes
Speaker 1: off to London. But can I just persist on the Oudelaide?
Speaker 1: Do you have any memories of Adelaide?
Speaker 2: Of course I loved Adelaide.
Speaker 1: Did you have a footy team you're barried for?
Speaker 2: I had to be the Crows, didn't it did?
Speaker 1: Then you've got a choice now unfortunate. Oh yeah, not
Speaker 1: not unfortunately but fortunately. But so if you go to London,
Speaker 1: what was that like?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was, it was. It was a really formative experience,
Speaker 2: I guess you know, I started, I started doing some
Speaker 2: work for the ten network, but in the end it
Speaker 2: didn't really amount to a huge amount. I started doing
Speaker 2: some other freelancing around some news organizations, Reuter's w what
Speaker 2: was then WTN Worldwide Television News, and a little bit
Speaker 2: for the BBC World's BBC World Tv. And then I'm
Speaker 2: you're going to love this. I met a girl in
Speaker 2: a pub in London who took me off to Bosnia
Speaker 2: during the war in Yugoslavia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how did she do that?
Speaker 2: Well, she was this gorgeous, flamehaired Irish girl who I
Speaker 2: saw dancing on a table and yeah, yeah, it certainly did.
Speaker 2: And I was a bit namored, and I started chatting
Speaker 2: her up and you know, got her phone number. But
Speaker 2: she told me that she was One of the things
Speaker 2: that she said was that she was about to go
Speaker 2: on this on a pilgrimage to a place called Magagori,
Speaker 2: which was in in the place in the region of
Speaker 2: Bosni called herzeg Bosna, which was a Croat control part
Speaker 2: of Bosnia, and Magagori was this place where Catholic pilgrims
Speaker 2: went from basically from the nineteen seventies through there were
Speaker 2: these visions of the Virgin Mary that started appearing there
Speaker 2: in front of a bunch of kids, and it became
Speaker 2: it developed a reputation for miracles and miraculous visions and
Speaker 2: healings and so on amongst the Catholic community. And Kathy
Speaker 2: Heggerty that was this girl's name, you know, said she
Speaker 2: was about to go on this pilgrimage and I thought
Speaker 2: it was an extraordinary story, the idea of these pilgrims
Speaker 2: going into the middle of a war zone. And she said, well,
Speaker 2: why don't you come? And I laughed it off, but
Speaker 2: I told the story to two friends of mine, one
Speaker 2: who worked for The Australian and the other who worked
Speaker 2: for ABC Radio, and within two days I got messages
Speaker 2: from the foreign editors of both saying, look, for God's sake,
Speaker 2: you're thinking at all of going to Yugoslavia. Let us know,
Speaker 2: because are really in the market for freelance stories. I thought, well,
Speaker 2: it's a no brainer, isn't it. There's a story and
Speaker 2: the clients and there's the girl.
Speaker 1: No, I'm jumping ahead now, but what happened to Kathy
Speaker 1: in the air.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she went off. She actually became became a nun.
Speaker 2: The Catholic nun and not kidding. Yeah, so that was
Speaker 2: never going to really be a that relationship. But she
Speaker 2: actually she also wrote to me in prison once and
Speaker 2: I replied to her. Yeah, I replied to her and said, listen,
Speaker 2: you realize that you're the reason I'm here.
Speaker 1: Wasn't here? Was it as horrific as it was later reported?
Speaker 1: I mean, there was all sorts of it.
Speaker 2: It was pretty horrific. I mean I was. I was
Speaker 2: really working around the fringes. I spent a bit of
Speaker 2: time in Sarajevo and worked across other parts of Bosnia
Speaker 2: at the time, you know, I was. I was. I
Speaker 2: was green as grass then. I had no no experience
Speaker 2: of of war zones. I didn't know how to operate.
Speaker 2: I had no equipment, no training. It was really, even
Speaker 2: though diving in the deep end, I was still just
Speaker 2: doggy paddling around close to the edges.
Speaker 1: Did you have to fund yourself when you Yeah?
Speaker 2: I did, and I knew I was going to lose
Speaker 2: money on it, but I also figured that the opportunity
Speaker 2: was too good, was too good to pass up. It
Speaker 2: was just something that seemed quite obvious to me. I
Speaker 2: was never not going to go if I had that
Speaker 2: that I had that invitation.
Speaker 1: So slowly you develop as a authentic wal correspondent. I
Speaker 1: looked at the places you've served in, like Bosnia, South Africa, Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: Somalia and Nairobi. The one place that really fascinated me
Speaker 1: was mom Besser. I've been fascinated with mom bess Ever
Speaker 1: that Warren Zevon's song about rolling the Headless Gunner. He
Speaker 1: met him at a bar in mom Besser. Can you
Speaker 1: tell me about mom Besser.
Speaker 2: I loved my partner at the time. I was an
Speaker 2: ecologist who ran a nature reserve near Mombassa, and I
Speaker 2: was working for the BBC then and the BBC was
Speaker 2: happy to have me as a freelance And when you're
Speaker 2: working for the BBC as a freelance correspondent, it doesn't
Speaker 2: really matter where you live, as long as you're close
Speaker 2: to an airport and you can get to wherever you
Speaker 2: need to be. And it's absolutely it's an incredible town.
Speaker 2: It's one of those wonderful, exotic, ancient trading towns where
Speaker 2: you have the intersection of Arab traders and Swahili communities,
Speaker 2: coastal African communities and Indian communities all coming together in
Speaker 2: this extraordinary melting pot. It's a beautiful town in this
Speaker 2: sort of rough, rugged, messy, chaotic African kind of way.
Speaker 1: Is it safe.
Speaker 2: It looked like anyway, I guess. I remember someone when
Speaker 2: I first went to Africa, probably the best piece of
Speaker 2: advice I ever had was from someone who said, listen.
Speaker 2: Africa is not for beginners. You need to you need
Speaker 2: to keep your eyes open. But as long as you
Speaker 2: keep your eyes open and you're willing to not just
Speaker 2: keep your eyes open, but your ears open, you're willing
Speaker 2: to listen and communicate and talk to people, then you
Speaker 2: can operate safely.
Speaker 1: But were you still a beginner then no.
Speaker 2: By then I'd had quite a few years. I've been
Speaker 2: to Afghanistan, of course previously, and then I had five
Speaker 2: years in Latin America, working across Mexico and Chilean Argentina,
Speaker 2: and you know, in the interim. I was back in
Speaker 2: Afghanistan after nine to eleven for the war the top
Speaker 2: of the Taliban, and so I've been around a fair bit.
Speaker 2: I was also in Iraq during the post nine to
Speaker 2: eleven conflicts, so I knew I knew how to operate.
Speaker 1: Intrigues me with people like yourself have got such a
Speaker 1: history of reporting from war zones. How do you settle down?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: Do you settle down? Do you have a private life,
Speaker 1: GiB what do How do you establish relationships?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I've got a stream of relationships behind me
Speaker 2: and probably a few of my exes would say I
Speaker 2: don't do that very well, look settling down. It's interesting.
Speaker 2: My one x remember said to me that the after Egypt,
Speaker 2: in fact, she felt that the greater trauma was not
Speaker 2: so much having to go through Egypt, but having to
Speaker 2: give up my old life as a correspondent, that that
Speaker 2: was the harder thing to manage, and actually thinks she's
Speaker 2: probably right.
Speaker 1: Well, how did you end up in Egypt? Tell us
Speaker 1: how you ended up in Egypt?
Speaker 2: So I've been working for Al Jazeera. I left the
Speaker 2: BBC in two thousand and eleven after I made a
Speaker 2: film for Panorama on Somalia and Al Jazeera offered me
Speaker 2: a role as there East Africa correspondent and I was
Speaker 2: based in Nairobi when in twenty thirteen, towards the end
Speaker 2: of twenty thirteen, they needed someone to cover the bureau
Speaker 2: in Cairo, just over the Christmas New Year period. They
Speaker 2: wanted me just to basically go up and treade water,
Speaker 2: just to keep the stories ticking over. There'd been an
Speaker 2: ongoing political crisis between supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who
Speaker 2: had formed the first democratically elected government in the middle
Speaker 2: of twenty twelve, and it had been forced out of
Speaker 2: power in a coup in the middle of twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: and so by the time that I was asked to
Speaker 2: go up to Cairo at the end of twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: there was a lot of political turmoil, ongoing street protests
Speaker 2: between the Brotherhood supporters and supporters of the military installed regime.
Speaker 2: And the job was really just, as I said, to
Speaker 2: keep the stories ticking over while they were a little
Speaker 2: bit short staffed over that Christmas New Year period. So
Speaker 2: the government would announce the new interim government, would announce
Speaker 2: some changes to the constitution. We'd pick up the phone
Speaker 2: and call the opposition to get their response, and that,
Speaker 2: of course happened to be the Brotherhood. Then you'd find
Speaker 2: a political analyst to make sense of it all. It was.
Speaker 2: It was vanilla journalism, nothing particularly dramatic.
Speaker 1: When you say al Jazeero, I mean you explained it
Speaker 1: in your book, but we always associate Al Jazeero with
Speaker 1: sympathizers to the Muslim Muslim Islamic endeavors. Put it if
Speaker 1: I can put it that.
Speaker 2: Way, yeah, I don't think that's I don't think that's
Speaker 2: fair or accurate. Al Jazeera. So Al Jazeera was set
Speaker 2: up by the Katari government after the BBC Arabic Service
Speaker 2: collapsed and the Qataris saw the value of the soft power,
Speaker 2: the soft influence that world cer that the Arabic Service
Speaker 2: gave to the BBC, and they saw a big void
Speaker 2: in Arabic language media in that kind of area, and
Speaker 2: so the Kataris set up Al Jazeera and using a
Speaker 2: lot of former BBC staffers to create that kind of
Speaker 2: that kind of service. Now, I always felt that they
Speaker 2: were doing it for window dressing. It was to present
Speaker 2: Qatar as a kind of much more democratic, open minded
Speaker 2: political force than it actually was culturally and politically. But
Speaker 2: as long as they didn't mess with my journalism, as
Speaker 2: long as they allowed us to operate freely and independently,
Speaker 2: then I was okay with that. And that's really how
Speaker 2: it worked. There was never any kind of political agenda,
Speaker 2: There was never any kind of pro Islamic Muslim Brotherhood agenda.
Speaker 2: There was simply an agenda to try and cover the
Speaker 2: region as best we could. And I guess in the
Speaker 2: same way that if you work for the BBC, you
Speaker 2: tend to get an Anglo centric view of the world.
Speaker 2: If you're based out of Doha, then you tend to
Speaker 2: get to kind of Islamic worldview of the world. That's
Speaker 2: not to say that it's necessarily biased, but it's just
Speaker 2: that there is a greater emphasis on those parts of
Speaker 2: the world, and Al Jazeira liked to present itself as
Speaker 2: taking a kind of global South view rather than an
Speaker 2: Islamic extremist view. I certainly never gave any preference to
Speaker 2: or lent towards, and I was never asked to favor
Speaker 2: any kind of Islamists or Islamic view that that's just
Speaker 2: not the way that they operated.
Speaker 1: Getting the first interview with some of bim Laden after
Speaker 1: nine to eleven probably.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, but you could argue, and I felt that
Speaker 2: that was I mean, that was definitely using their networks
Speaker 2: to do that. But my view was that we actually
Speaker 2: needed to hear from the guy that was accused of
Speaker 2: launching nine to eleven attacks that even if you disagreed
Speaker 2: as I did, as hundreds of millions of people around
Speaker 2: the world would have done if you disagreed with him,
Speaker 2: we still needed to understand the political ideology that drove
Speaker 2: that drove him and his supporters. I think that, and
Speaker 2: that's why I would always argue that as journalists and
Speaker 2: we have a responsibility to cover all parties into these
Speaker 2: kinds of conflicts and robustly interview them, you know, don't
Speaker 2: they don't give any but at the same time understand
Speaker 2: what it is that drives them. I you know, when
Speaker 2: I when I covered Somalia, we went to great lengths
Speaker 2: to try and understand Al Shabab, to talk to them
Speaker 2: and get their understanding of why they did what they did.
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean condoning it, but it does mean because
Speaker 2: I don't believe that you can ever resolve these conflicts
Speaker 2: unless you're really able to understand what it is that
Speaker 2: drives your enemies.
Speaker 1: You know, I suppose CNN would have jumped to the
Speaker 1: chance to interview him too.
Speaker 2: I guess I'm pretty sure most of his organizations would
Speaker 2: have jumped.
Speaker 1: Peter Grestor is my guest, Folks, He's about to be
Speaker 1: arrested and incarcerated in Cairo. Back after the break. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to conversations, everybody, for just tuned in. We're chatting
Speaker 1: with Peter Grestor now is a renowned or ex foreign correspondent,
Speaker 1: famous one because he was arrest to, jailed and incarcerated
Speaker 1: in Cairo. Subsequently wrote a book about it called The
Speaker 1: First Casualty, which has been added to and been re
Speaker 1: released as The Correspondent, and it now is the basis
Speaker 1: of a film starring Which at Roxburgh, who plays Peter's role.
Speaker 1: So you've got a book to have a lookout for
Speaker 1: and a movie to go and see. But Peter joins us, Actually,
Speaker 1: where are we speaking to you? Peter? Where do you
Speaker 1: live these days?
Speaker 2: I'm in Brisbane these days.
Speaker 1: Is that home? Is that it forever?
Speaker 2: I'd never say forever the time being at least, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is home. I've been now in Brisbane longer than
Speaker 2: I think I've ever been at any other place since
Speaker 2: I left home when I was plenty. So yeah, for
Speaker 2: the time being, this is it.
Speaker 1: Okay. So there's famous scenes. You're in your hotel room
Speaker 1: in Cairo, there's a knock on the door and these
Speaker 1: men burst in. They don't identify themselves. They started rummaging
Speaker 1: through your stuff. What's going through your mind?
Speaker 2: Well, who are these guys and what the hell is
Speaker 2: going on? You know? They, as you said, they ransacked
Speaker 2: the room. They grabbed all of my gear, my notebooks,
Speaker 2: my computer gear, my cameras, my courting equipment, you know,
Speaker 2: stuffed it all into these evidence bags, and marched me
Speaker 2: off into a room that was being used by the
Speaker 2: police and started asking questions. We initially thought, look, this
Speaker 2: is just this is someone screwed up, you know, they've
Speaker 2: misread the warrants and that was for a guy called
Speaker 2: Peter Greystone, perhaps, or someone had mistranslated something that we'd
Speaker 2: broadcast and they were a bit upset about it. Or
Speaker 2: they were just generally trying to rattle the cage a bit,
Speaker 2: and you know, there'd be a few phone calls and
Speaker 2: it'll all be over in a matter of hours, perhaps
Speaker 2: a night in the cells, but that would be about it.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't it.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't it. Now we're detained. I weren't told
Speaker 2: of any charges. It was pretty obvious that they were police.
Speaker 2: We eventually learned their Interior Ministry Police, which is the
Speaker 2: kind of secret police I guess fairly hardcore guys. And
Speaker 2: a few days later I went in for an interrogation
Speaker 2: with the National Intelligence Directorate. I guess the Egyptian equivalent
Speaker 2: of Asia, only a little bit more, a little bit
Speaker 2: more hardcore. There I discovered the charges We've been accused
Speaker 2: of aading and a betting, a terrorist organization, being members
Speaker 2: of a terrorist organization, financing terrorism, broadcasting false news with
Speaker 2: intent to undermine national security, some pretty pretty serious charges.
Speaker 1: And all that based on the fact that you had
Speaker 1: there had been a coupe the Democratic democratically elected party,
Speaker 1: had been ousted, and had they been listed at that
Speaker 1: stage as a terrorist organization.
Speaker 2: Not formally listed. At that point, they'd been a accused
Speaker 2: of being involved in acts of terror. I felt that
Speaker 2: that was as much a political thing, a political acts,
Speaker 2: as anything else. There was no evidence that we'd seen
Speaker 2: the government had presented to to suggest that the Brotherhood
Speaker 2: was in fact behind acts of terror, you know, at
Speaker 2: that point they were just allegations. Look, this is one
Speaker 2: of those things quarante that I never really believed that
Speaker 2: it was about that they seriously thought we were involved
Speaker 2: in terrorism.
Speaker 1: You know, So that was there a showcase trial, were
Speaker 1: they making an example of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so, so as far as I could tell.
Speaker 2: So if there was, there was obviously a narrative about
Speaker 2: Al Jazeera's supposed or the Katari influence in Egypt. The
Speaker 2: Kataris had been fairly strong supporters of the Brotherhood because
Speaker 2: Al Jazeera was a Katari run organization. Therefore, they felt
Speaker 2: that we must be somehow colluding with the Brotherhood. But
Speaker 2: because I'd only just arrived, and because we were doing
Speaker 2: what I considered to be very vanilla journalism, and because
Speaker 2: there was zero evidence, I mean, I mean, I just wasn't.
Speaker 2: I had no connections with the Brotherhood whatsoever. I didn't
Speaker 2: speak Arabic, I didn't have any networks with the Brotherhood.
Speaker 2: You know, it just didn't. It just wasn't a reality.
Speaker 2: We certainly hadn't been financing the Brotherhood of Terrorism. We'd
Speaker 2: been paying nobody. But I had some cash with me
Speaker 2: that we were using to pay the hotel bills and
Speaker 2: pay for drivers and that sort of stuff, but nothing
Speaker 2: more than that. And so I felt that, in fact,
Speaker 2: it really didn't have anything to do with the Brotherhood
Speaker 2: or Qatari influence. It's that they wanted to make an
Speaker 2: example of us. They wanted to send a message to
Speaker 2: all journalists, whether they were local or foreigners. But they
Speaker 2: came after us because we were politically convenient, because we
Speaker 2: we we fitted that that narrative that was that was
Speaker 2: that was fairly cheap and easy for them. But it
Speaker 2: wasn't about it wasn't about that. It was it was
Speaker 2: really just about sending a message.
Speaker 1: So I guess you're thinking this is all going to
Speaker 1: go away once you once you, you know, maybe the
Speaker 1: embassy can get involved, the Australian embassy or the British
Speaker 1: embassy or whoever. But then you find yourself in a
Speaker 1: in a court room and I guess they speak Arabic.
Speaker 1: Was conducting in Arabic, wasn't?
Speaker 2: Yeah, completely in Arabic? Yeah, yeah. But I had a
Speaker 2: I had a quarter pointed interpreter. Initially I was very
Speaker 2: very suspicious of him. I really did trust him. But
Speaker 2: both of my colleagues, Baha and family, spoke very very
Speaker 2: good English, and they could also listen into what the
Speaker 2: interpreter was saying, and they reassured me that the translation
Speaker 2: was pretty solid, and so yeah, it was, it was,
Speaker 2: but it was still a confronting experience and it was
Speaker 2: not like the judicial process that that were he used to,
Speaker 2: you know, the idea of due process, the idea of
Speaker 2: this trial, none of that was really it was really
Speaker 2: really hung together. That the trial ran six months. You know,
Speaker 2: there were all sorts of bizarre witnesses, bizarre treatment of evidence.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that, the bizarre witnesses.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we had we had investigator who said
Speaker 2: that we were involved in meetings but with the book,
Speaker 2: was them Brotherhood at the Marriott hotel where we were staying,
Speaker 2: which was just patently untrue. I'd never ever met anybody,
Speaker 2: certainly not from the Muslim Brotherhood in the hotel. We
Speaker 2: were very, very careful to make sure that there was
Speaker 2: there was real distance between ourselves and any of our contacts.
Speaker 2: And of course we had contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood,
Speaker 2: as did every other journalist in Cairo at the time.
Speaker 2: They were the most significant political force in the country, having,
Speaker 2: as he said, just formed the previous government, and so
Speaker 2: there was nothing editorial or professionally wrong with having relationships,
Speaker 2: having contact with the Brotherhood, and certainly there was nothing
Speaker 2: that we'd published that would ever count as terrorist ideology. Again,
Speaker 2: we were very careful not to publish anything that would
Speaker 2: be seen as insightful citing. It was just it was weird.
Speaker 1: So the moment of truth comes when the judgment is
Speaker 1: about to be handed down, and just stand and listen
Speaker 1: and this moment of drama and what's going through your
Speaker 1: mind and what's your reaction.
Speaker 2: When well, we initially, because we gamed it out beforehand,
Speaker 2: anybody who saw the coverage of the trial would have
Speaker 2: recognized that there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever to substantiate
Speaker 2: even the thinnest of the allegations against us. But we thought, well,
Speaker 2: surely they've got to acquit us, because the trial had
Speaker 2: been so closely watched so heavily reported that anything less
Speaker 2: than an acquittal would be really embarrassing for the judicial system.
Speaker 2: But then we thought, well, okay, some possibly they might
Speaker 2: need to convict us of something. But we've already spent
Speaker 2: six months in prison throughout the pre trial and the
Speaker 2: trial process. They could convict us of some administrative offense
Speaker 2: and give us six months time served and we'd be able,
Speaker 2: they get their conviction, we'd be allowed to go home,
Speaker 2: everybody is happy, and that would be the end of
Speaker 2: the matter. We thought that would be the most likely outcome.
Speaker 2: We thought possibly our convict us of something, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe give us an extra few weeks, maybe a month
Speaker 2: more in prison. In the end, when we were convicted
Speaker 2: and given seven year sentences, that was that was pretty devastating.
Speaker 2: That was a blow. That was I remember. I know
Speaker 2: that there was a lot of shouting in the court
Speaker 2: at that moment, huge amounts of drama. But all I
Speaker 2: remember in my head at the time of my ears
Speaker 2: ringing and those two words seven years, seven years, seven years,
Speaker 2: just going around around inside my head.
Speaker 1: Grestor is my guest, folks, we'll talk about that experience
Speaker 1: when we come back back shortly. Peter Grestor is my
Speaker 1: guest on conversations. If you just tuned in, he's been arrested, tried,
Speaker 1: and convicted in Cairo on terrorism charges given the fact
Speaker 1: that he worked for El Jazeira, a newspaper, no evidence whatsoever,
Speaker 1: but it was a Trump trumped up charge and the
Speaker 1: sentence was I don't know, obviously terribly andjust so you're
Speaker 1: standing in the court room, you've been in jail, you've
Speaker 1: been you've been in custody for six months, but you're
Speaker 1: now faced with the prospect of going to prison. For
Speaker 1: seven years in an Egyptian prison. What happens then? What's
Speaker 1: I know? You said your head was ringing with these
Speaker 1: two words seven years. What happens then?
Speaker 2: Well, and you've got to just got to rebalance your
Speaker 2: thinking at the time. At each stage, through the through
Speaker 2: the pre trial period, and during the trial itself, we
Speaker 2: always thought that this thing has to go away, that
Speaker 2: they've got to release this. They've got to see how
Speaker 2: ridiculous this is, how embarrassing it is. We're going to
Speaker 2: be released, you know, whether it's during the investigation I'll
Speaker 2: drop the charges, or during the early stage of the
Speaker 2: trial the judge had kicked the whole thing out, or
Speaker 2: at the end of it would be acquitted. And so
Speaker 2: I didn't. I never really psychologically geared my mind to
Speaker 2: a longer, a longer stretch. But when we had, when
Speaker 2: we had to confront seven years, that's when it really
Speaker 2: required a whole kind of rebalancing of rethinking of mine,
Speaker 2: of my mind, and a new approach to prison.
Speaker 1: What was it like in What were the conditions like?
Speaker 2: We were held in three separate prisons. The first was
Speaker 2: a period of solitary confinement, an isolation in a political
Speaker 2: wing of the Mentora with a lot of secular prisoners,
Speaker 2: pro democracy guys. The second prison was actually even more asteered.
Speaker 2: The three of us were held in the cell, but
Speaker 2: we're in the in a cell for three hours, for
Speaker 2: around twenty three hours a day, and allowed that only
Speaker 2: for one hour, and not allowed to socialize with any
Speaker 2: of the other prison inmates. And the other inmates were
Speaker 2: all leaders of the Brotherhood administration. And that was really tough.
Speaker 2: That was really tough going. We weren't beaten, we weren't
Speaker 2: abused physically abused. There were guards that would occasionally get
Speaker 2: a little bit rough with us, but you know, it
Speaker 2: was never, never what I considered to be torture.
Speaker 1: Look, eventually, eventually the negotiations and that you are really
Speaker 1: You mentioned Barack Obama's role in your adventure release you
Speaker 1: give a bit of a whack on the way through
Speaker 1: as well, But what role did he play?
Speaker 2: So yeah, what happened was early on I wrote a
Speaker 2: couple of letters that I smuggled out of prison describing
Speaker 2: what had happened to us, not as as not as
Speaker 2: a kind of response to anything we had done, but
Speaker 2: what would come to represent it was an attack on
Speaker 2: press freedom rather than an attack on anything, and he
Speaker 2: had supposed to allegations of criminal activity on our part,
Speaker 2: and that letter framed the campaign. It really energized I
Speaker 2: think literally thousands of journalists around the world to line
Speaker 2: up and support us. But it also made it Those
Speaker 2: letters made their way to Barack Obama's desk, and I
Speaker 2: know because I met him afterwards. He said that he'd
Speaker 2: seen the letters, he'd read them, and he'd made our
Speaker 2: case at the top of the agenda for any of
Speaker 2: their meetings with their Egyptian counterparts. He said, I raised
Speaker 2: your case every time I spoke to President Ceci and
Speaker 2: instructed all of their diplomats to make it the first
Speaker 2: point of any agenda. They didn't think that they would
Speaker 2: necessarily be able to get us out on their own,
Speaker 2: but it was all about adding to the pressure, adding
Speaker 2: adding to the price that the Egyptians were paying for
Speaker 2: keeping us in prison.
Speaker 1: But eventually negotiations are successful on the basis that you
Speaker 1: have retried back here in Australia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not sure negotiations so much. I mean,
Speaker 2: there was a constant pressure from all sorts of quarters.
Speaker 2: But yes, the kind of fiction or the conceit was
Speaker 2: that I'd be released to complete the judicial process. What
Speaker 2: happened was that we were convicted, got our sentences. For
Speaker 2: seven years, we'd appealed our conviction and won the appeal,
Speaker 2: the sentences were overturned and the retrial had been ordered.
Speaker 2: So it was in that gap when I was no
Speaker 2: longer a convicted terrorist, simply an accused prisoner, but before
Speaker 2: the retrial could begin, that I was taken out. And
Speaker 2: I think that was because it was a sort of
Speaker 2: politically opportune moment when I wasn't back in the moor,
Speaker 2: if you like, of the judicial process, and there was
Speaker 2: on a presidential decree to complete the judicial process back
Speaker 2: in Australia. But of course, as far as the Australians
Speaker 2: were concerned, there'd been no evidence that we'd been guilty
Speaker 2: of any criminal offense. They had no brief of evidence,
Speaker 2: there was no we hadn't as far as the Australians
Speaker 2: were concerned, there was no breach of any Australian law,
Speaker 2: and so there was no judicial process to complete.
Speaker 1: So he came home, evaded any judicial process. Ten years
Speaker 1: later and on the journalist anymore.
Speaker 2: No, no, Now, what happened, Well, it kind of overtook
Speaker 2: my life. I realized it was as tough as it was.
Speaker 2: I realized I couldn't really go back to that life.
Speaker 2: I'm still because when the retrial was ordered, when the
Speaker 2: retrial started, and they would remember there were my two
Speaker 2: colleagues Fami and Bahu were still in Cairo and who
Speaker 2: had to go through the retrial, but I was all
Speaker 2: so named as a defendant. And when that retrial ended,
Speaker 2: we were all reconvicted and given fresh sentences. Now they
Speaker 2: were eventually pardoned and released, but I haven't been pardoned,
Speaker 2: and so there is a conviction and a prison sentence
Speaker 2: still outstanding for me. There's a prison cell waiting for
Speaker 2: me in Egypt if I ever go.
Speaker 1: Back there, go out of a country which as an.
Speaker 2: Extradition treaty with Egypt, and there's one extradition treaty that
Speaker 2: covers the whole of the African Union from the Cape
Speaker 2: to Cairo, and so working in Sub Saharan Africa is
Speaker 2: a real problem. Any country in the Middle East carries
Speaker 2: a lot of risk for me, but they're also even
Speaker 2: traveling somewhere as benign as the United States is a
Speaker 2: real problem because I have to declare my terrorism conviction,
Speaker 2: even though it's bogus. But that means I can't travel
Speaker 2: at short notice. I have to go through a long
Speaker 2: process of applying for visas, and so it means it
Speaker 2: basically meant that that lie as a free ranging foreign
Speaker 2: correspondent wasn't going to work any longer. But I also
Speaker 2: felt that this issue of media freedom was something that
Speaker 2: I had a responsibility to continue to campaign for. I
Speaker 2: saw what happened to us not the reason I wrote
Speaker 2: the book, and was because I wanted to try and
Speaker 2: place our experience in a larger historical context. I didn't
Speaker 2: think it was just limited to a bunch of ourseholes
Speaker 2: who put us in prison in Egypt. I saw it
Speaker 2: as a kind of broader assault on journalism globally. That
Speaker 2: really began with nine to eleven, when George W. Bush
Speaker 2: announced the War on Terror. And what happened then was
Speaker 2: that Bush opened up the rhetoric of national security and
Speaker 2: created war over ideas over Isam's. I mean that war
Speaker 2: of ideas, the space where ideas are transmitted becomes a
Speaker 2: part of the battlefield quite literally, and so it governments
Speaker 2: the world over, whether it's American government or the Egyptian government.
Speaker 2: The Chinese or even the Australian government. We've seen governments
Speaker 2: using national security as an excuse to to lock up
Speaker 2: journalists or limit the work the journalists are able to do.
Speaker 2: And what happened to us in Egypt was a really visceral,
Speaker 2: personal example of that wider narrative.
Speaker 1: You make the point here in Australia that journalists have
Speaker 1: been detained for not trumped up terrorism charges, but for
Speaker 1: daring to question established order.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So back in twenty nineteen we saw the Australian
Speaker 2: Federal Police raide journalists from two news organizations looking for
Speaker 2: evidence of the sources that they'd used to stories that
Speaker 2: had been around national security but not breached national security.
Speaker 2: You know. One of them was the ABC, Right, the
Speaker 2: ABC had published what became known as the Afghan Files.
Speaker 2: This was evidence of war crimes by Australian special forces
Speaker 2: in Afghanistan. Now, the ABC did not publish any information
Speaker 2: that genuinely compromised national security. The evidence, well that the
Speaker 2: documents that they had were classified. They were classified reports
Speaker 2: field reports from special forces operations in Afghanistan. But the
Speaker 2: ABC hadn't revealed anything that had damaged security. They're very
Speaker 2: careful about how they handled it. So the story was
Speaker 2: crucially important for public interest, and I felt that using
Speaker 2: national security legislation to come after the journalists and their
Speaker 2: sources in that in that story was really dangerous because
Speaker 2: it allowed the government to cover up frankly outrageous human
Speaker 2: rights abuses. Were allegations of human rights abuses by Australian
Speaker 2: special forces, now allegations that have been I won't say substantiated,
Speaker 2: but have been repeated by the Brereton Inquiry into the
Speaker 2: conduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan. And so the idea
Speaker 2: that we could use security legislation to shut down that
Speaker 2: kind of reporting, I think is very, very dangerous. And
Speaker 2: that's another example of exactly the kind of thing I'm
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 1: We've come to the MP and I know people will
Speaker 1: want more. And if they want more, the book is
Speaker 1: it called The Correspondent, and the movie's out there. Peter,
Speaker 1: you don't quite look like Richard Rothbig if I can.
Speaker 2: Say, well, he had to have a haircut for the movie.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks so much, you're the best.
Speaker 2: Great to speak, Thank very much for having.
Speaker 1: Peter Grestor is my guest folk. The book is called
Speaker 1: The Correspondent. The movie is called The Correspondent. Thank you
Speaker 1: for joining us.