Gillman / Midolo Murder in Cairo

The Killing of David Holden
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78590-999-3
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

On a warm night in December 1977, David Holden, chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, landed in Cairo to report on crucial peace talks between Egypt and Israel, an epochal moment in global politics. Shortly after dawn, his body was found dumped on a dusty roadside. He had been shot with a single bullet through the heart. Who killed Holden and why? These were the questions pursued for a year by the newspaper's Insight team, overseen by legendary editor Harold Evans. Before he died in 2020, Evans said that their failure to solve the case was the biggest regret of his long career. Now, a member of the original Insight team has joined forces with a young investigative journalist from today's Sunday Times to resume the quest. Their search leads them into a world of intrigue and betrayal, exposing the fatal crossovers between journalism and spying. Meticulously researched and grippingly told, Murder in Cairo reveals the truth of one of the most enigmatic cold case mysteries of the past fifty years.

Peter Gillman is an author and journalist who first wrote for the Sunday Times in 1965. He spent fifteen years on its staff, five as a member of its Insight investigative team, and he frequently reported from the Middle East. He has written a dozen books, many co-authored with his wife, Leni. Their biography of the Everest pioneer George Mallory, The Wildest Dream, won the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature in 2000 and their book Extreme Eiger won the Book of the Year prize from the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild in 2016. They live in south London and have two children and four grandchildren.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gillman, Peter

Midolo, Emanuele

Leseproben

Chapter 1

The Vanishing of David Holden

The last time anyone at the Sunday Times had heard from David Holden was three days before. On Saturday 3 December 1977, he sent a report from Amman, Jordan’s capital, about prospects for peace in the Middle East. He had been dispatched to the region ahead of a nine-day conference in Cairo, organised by the Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat. Journalism is said to provide the first draft of history, and it was already clear that this was an epochal moment, signalling the first rapprochement between Israel and its embattled Arab neighbours since Israel’s fire-and-brimstone birth twenty-nine years before. In mid-November, Sadat had made a historic three-day visit to the country, the first ever by an Arab leader, implicitly recognising its right to exist. The geopolitical forces swirling around these events were immense, so it was appropriate for the Sunday Times to send its chief foreign correspondent to the Middle East.

Holden had spent a busy week researching his story, visiting Damascus and Amman where he met political leaders and diplomats and attended press conferences given by President Assad of Syria and King Hussein of Jordan. He started writing his report at the Reuters news agency office in Amman on the evening of 2 December, returning the next morning to complete it and transmit it to the newspaper. Some 2,000 words long, it was an accomplished and cautiously optimistic review of how the region was responding to the talks between Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin. Holden’s piece was allocated to the top of page ten of the 4 December issue under the headline: ‘Peace may break out after all’.

In an accompanying message to the newspaper’s foreign desk on Saturday 3 December, Holden had outlined his travel plans: on Sunday he would travel to the occupied Palestinian West Bank and then Israel, crossing from Jordan via the Allenby Bridge. Holden would spend two nights in Jerusalem and then, on 6 December, would return across the Allenby Bridge into Jordan in time to catch the evening flight from Amman to Cairo.

At first, his editors were not unduly concerned at having no word from Holden. Journalists on overseas trips were expected to stay in contact with the foreign desk, both to enable the newspaper to plan the week’s edition and to monitor their movements and check on their safety. The correspondents often found this a time-consuming distraction, given the difficulties they faced in communicating with their London office. They had two main methods of doing so. One was by telex, which meant typing a message on their portable manual typewriter and asking a hotel to transmit it, usually handing it to the telex operator with a financial sweetener to ensure it went to the top of the pile of messages waiting to be keyed. The other was to book a telephone call at the hotel, which could take hours to be placed. So Holden’s silence was not considered troubling, at least for the time being.

His plans were, however, an important item at the scheduled news conference on Wednesday morning. The meetings were led by the editor, Harold Evans. By then, Evans had been in post for ten years, building the newspaper’s reputation for independent journalism with a succession of dramatic investigations and revelations, which included exposing the MI6/KGB double agent Harold ‘Kim’ Philby and the fight to establish the truth about the pregnancy drug thalidomide, which caused severe birth defects, and to obtain compensation for its victims.

It was through his commitment to stories such as these that Evans won his journalists’ loyalty and respect. They became accustomed to the way he would tilt his head and fix them with his compelling blue eyes as he quizzed them about their evidence and their sources. Approaching fifty, with a shock of neatly parted brown hair, he spoke in quietly persuasive tones, revealing only a trace of his Manchester accent. His most prized quality, once he was satisfied a story was sound, was the trust he placed in his journalists, particularly when the newspaper published controversial subjects and the inevitable rows broke.

The reporters also valued his readiness to agree to their proposals to undertake potentially dangerous assignments, although here Evans was the subject of conflicting instincts. One was to protect his journalists’ safety. The other was to allow them to do what they wanted. It was profoundly wearing, he once said, ‘trying and failing’ to restrain his journalists when they wanted to report from the world’s conflict zones and front lines. He was distraught when the writer Nick Tomalin was killed by a Syrian missile during the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, questioning both others and himself as to whether more could have been done to protect Tomalin. Two years later, the reporter Jon Swain was captured by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and only narrowly survived – a story later told in the film The Killing Fields. On that occasion, Evans later observed, Swain had ignored the newspaper’s instructions to leave Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge approached, illustrating the difficulties of reining in his journalists and the anxieties they subjected him to. Those anxieties were about to return.

At 11 a.m. that Wednesday, the newspaper’s section editors gathered in Evans’s office on the sixth floor of the Sunday Times’ building in Gray’s Inn Road, half a mile north of the traditional newspaper milieu of Fleet Street. The home news editor, Derrik Mercer, was usually the first to pitch his stories, followed by the foreign editor, Peter Wilsher, or his deputy, Cal McCrystal. By the standards of Fleet Street, where bullying and profane language were rampant, these morning meetings were civilised affairs. It was nonetheless an uncomfortable moment for the foreign desk pair when Evans asked what Holden intended to write that week. They told Evans that Holden had planned to visit the occupied Palestinian West Bank to test reactions to the prospective peace deal between Israel and Egypt. But they had no information beyond that and were still waiting to hear from him.

At first, the foreign desk assumed that Holden had been preoccupied with his travel arrangements and may even have arrived in Cairo a day later than planned. But when they returned to the Sunday Times office on Thursday morning to discover there was no overnight message from him, their concern mounted and they embarked on a search. So far as they knew, Holden had been planning to stay at one of two hotels: the Cairo Hilton or the Cairo Méridien. They found that he had not checked in at either hotel; nor had he contacted the Cairo office of the Reuters international press agency – a vital calling point for journalists anxious to secure their lines of communication.

Throughout Thursday, the search continued with increasing urgency. The foreign staff called the British Embassies in Amman and Cairo, but they had no news of him. The foreign desk located several British journalists whose paths had crossed with Holden’s during his trip, but none had any useful information. They enlisted other journalists at the Sunday Times office, among them Peter Gillman, a member of the Insight investigative team, who had made several trips to the Middle East that year. Gillman called a contact in Jerusalem who offered to visit the taxi rank where drivers plied the run to and from Amman via the Allenby Bridge. Holden had presumably taken a taxi for his return to Amman on 6 December, but none of the drivers remembered carrying him that day.

By Friday, it was clear that something was seriously amiss. The Sunday Times had managed to establish the bare essentials: yes, Holden had been recorded crossing the Allenby Bridge and yes, he had taken flight RJ 503 to Egypt, although it had been unable to confirm any of his arrival details in Cairo. Otherwise it had nothing. The foreign desk speculated that Holden was following up a story so sensitive that he deemed it unwise to contact the office. On Saturday, as response after response to its inquiries came back negative, it abandoned the theory. Then came a new hope, when the British Embassy in Amman suggested that Holden could have been detained at Cairo Airport because his cholera certificate was out of date – a member of the embassy staff had been held incommunicado at the airport for three days for exactly that reason. The deputy foreign editor, McCrystal, believed that within a few hours, a ‘tired and exasperated’ Holden would telephone from Cairo with just such an explanation.

Meanwhile, preparations for that week’s edition continued. As a hands-on editor, Evans could usually be found in the newspaper’s composing room. Amid the sweet smell of printing ink and the clatter of metal type, stories were being cut to fit the available space and headlines rewritten, with the printers lifting and trimming slabs of metal type to the journalists’ instructions. The first edition went to press at 5 p.m. – a deadline timed to accommodate the afternoon’s football results – with a front-page lead about how the UK’s Labour government was teaming up with trade union leaders to launch a propaganda assault on the neo-Nazi National Front, which was gaining ground among working-class voters. There was a largely unchanged second edition at around 9 p.m. Shortly...