/ 26 November 2007

‘I wasn’t brave enough’

The night Alan Johnston was taken hostage in Gaza, the kidnappers' leader told him he would one day go free. "And," the masked figure in robes told the BBC reporter, "you will write a book about it, and get married." On July 4, 114 days later, to Johnston's inexpressible relief, the first of these three predictions came true. And now, possibly to his slight surprise, the second is coming true too.

The night Alan Johnston was taken hostage in Gaza, the kidnappers’ leader told him he would one day go free. “And,” the masked figure in robes told the BBC reporter, “you will write a book about it, and get married.” On July 4, 114 days later, to Johnston’s inexpressible relief, the first of these three predictions came true. And now, possibly to his slight surprise, the second is coming true too.

November 23 saw the publication of Kidnapped: And Other Dispatches, an account of his incarceration at the hands of the Islamic Army, and he seems still unaccustomed to finding himself the centre, not the conduit, of the story.

“This is an infinitely more public role than I’m comfortable with. It’s harder for me to argue that now, because obviously this book is coming out. But in the end I am a journalist, I go to those places to try and explain what’s happening there, and when this publisher said ‘we’d like to put some of your work in this book’ I did say yes. So on it goes. But I am genuinely uncomfortable with this degree of attention.”

In captivity he used to have vivid dreams about being in a London hotel restaurant, discussing his kidnap. Gradually the restaurant would begin to feel unreal and he’d realise he couldn’t get out, and then he’d wake and find himself still locked in a room in Gaza. We met in a London hotel restaurant, to discuss his kidnap, and so familiar is his face now that I almost had a sense of déjà vu too. He looks less drawn than in those first euphoric images of him walking to freedom, and more calm. “This whole post-kidnap period has been very, very strange. I mean, my mum told me they’d projected my head on to Battersea power station. I mean, I used to think of myself as the correspondent Obscuristan, and when you’ve been in solitary confinement, and my big old head’s being projected like Stalin — well, it’s just the strangest thing. And there have been some very strange moments. The other day this chap got chatting to me on a train, and he said, you know, if I were a betting man I’d have put 50 quid on you not making it.” What did Johnston say? He grins ruefully. “I just said, ‘well in your position I’d have done something similar’.”

He would have on the night he was taken hostage. He had given thought to the possibility of being kidnapped. “And I always knew I’d spend the first few hours trying to work out, are they one of these angry little clans with a problem that can be resolved by next Thursday, or is it going to be the Jihadi guys? And if it was going to be the Jihadi guys, then it would be the worst thing. I fell asleep towards midnight [on the first night of his captivity] thinking, well still no Jihadis have showed up. But then I was woken up, and in came this Jihadi guy. He looked like he’d put the order in for somebody just like me to be taken, and now he was coming almost to see what he’d got. And from the moment I saw him it was clear what it was about. And then I just knew I was in the worst kind of trouble.”

As he came to terms with the fact that he might be there for a very long time, he feared he might simply be forgotten, for he knew the British government would never trade Muslim prisoners for his release. “And anyone in that situation feels very alone, as if the world’s going to move on without you. The isolation of it is intense and you feel lost and that sense of being buried alive. And if a deal isn’t coming, then you think the world’s going to go, well that’s it then.”

After 17 days he was given a radio and discovered the worldwide campaign to secure his release. During the following four months he heard reports of his execution, was forced one night to wear a suicide bomber’s vest, and once was told by his captors that he would be killed. He approached it as a psychological battle and describes marshalling the most extraordinary mental control.

“The only thing I could control was my state of mind. From early on I started thinking, one day this is going to end and you’re going to need to look back, so try not to let yourself down, try to hold it together and take each moment and hour and day as calmly as you can. There were countless mental devices, but one of them was that I almost had in my mind’s eye a meter for the anxiety, like one of those things you get on a recording machine, and I could see it going up and I thought, you’ve got to work it down, to will it down to acceptable levels.

“And I felt there were a lot of rational, logical things that I could genuinely be grateful for. It wasn’t Iraq. And I hadn’t been killed and I wasn’t being tortured.”

His main guard was a brooding, volatile character who would occasionally let Johnston watch TV with him, but often seemed on the brink of violence. Yet when I suggest the guard sounded closer to the edge than Johnston, at once he is the scrupulously even-handed BBC man. “Oh that would be unfair on him.”

Did he hate his guards? “I felt if I gave way to hating these guys, that’s a hugely powerful emotion to release into your head, and it’s not about control. I don’t really hate very easily. It seemed much, much more important to regard them as a problem, just a cold, rational problem. So you try and figure them out, and what they might do next, and if there was any way I might be able to influence them. I always felt the best I could do was try and create a picture of myself in their minds as someone who was just a reasonable bloke.”

He thought about escaping, but never tried and worried about that. “I wasn’t brave enough. I did worry, because there were times when I listened on the radio and there were all these people doing so much, and I thought all it takes is for you to shove that guy when he comes in and you’re out of here. And then you could take your whole fate into your hands. It could be, you know, a dazzling response to your crisis, you’d free yourself. But shoving him would be to introduce violence to the game. I’m the least violent guy I know, and he’s an urban guerrilla, half my age and twice as strong.” And besides, he says, he probably wouldn’t have got very far. “You can’t have a Westerner imprisoned at the top of the stairs without everyone in the building being on board.”

Johnston saw a psychologist for two hours the day after his release, and has seen him once more, but thinks he emerged in a reasonably strong state of mind. He seems to embody classic BBC qualities of perspective and self-effacement, and the capacity for empathy evident in his work sustained him psychologically. When I suggest this, he winces at the idea of “bigging yourself up” and keeps stressing that he wasn’t always strong enough to control his bleaker thoughts. “It was a continual effort. Always. But I kept on thinking that in the great stories of human incarceration, yours of being locked in a room in Gaza where they don’t give you a hard time, and you’re reasonably fed, isn’t so bad. That was a large part of the business of thinking, come on, this is embarrassing if you can’t cope with this.

“I did think about Paris Hilton a bit when she was sent to jail,” he mentions, smiling. “It was all on the World Service. She got told to be under house arrest in some mansion in Malibu, and I couldn’t help thinking she was getting the better end of the stick in this situation. But all convicts around the world have a certain sense of solidarity, and when I heard she was going back to prison I was kind of outraged.”

As we’re talking, the fire alarm is tested. Johnston grins. “So organised, isn’t it! It’s just so organised here. Not like Gaza.” He shakes his head in wonderment, and there is something almost wistful in his expression. Johnston joined the BBC in 1991, reported from many trouble spots and had been in Gaza for three years. He hasn’t been back, and when he returns to work in January it will be to a desk job.

“The night I heard there were claims I’d been executed, I had this sense that my whole way of life had pushed me further than could be borne, and I needed to think really hard about where I lived and how I worked. I thought about really domestic things. It’s so tedious I can hardly bear to say it, but you know I thought about DIY. I thought I’d spend a bit of cash on the flat, and live more comfortably.”

He always used to think of Britain as dull. “I needed to go to more intense places. But for the first time, I’m just happy to be here.” And what of the kidnapper’s final prediction? He shrugs. “Well, I’m still single. Just because you get kidnapped doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to going to meet the right woman, I don’t suppose.” — Â