MY GREATEST MISTAKE JOHN KAMPFNER, POLITICAL EDITOR, NEW STATESMAN
BY JOHN KAMPFNER
The Independent (London)
September 7, 2004, Tuesday
I CAN STILL see the article, 18 years on. It was on the back page
of Pravda. I was a trainee with Reuters, on my first overseas
posting. That morning I was the only correspondent on duty in our
office, which was hardly surprising given that there were only three
of us and we were all working long hours. Our full contingent was
five, but two colleagues had been expelled in a tit-for-tat “spy”
row after Margaret Thatcher had kicked a couple of Tass journalists
out of London.
This was a time, to coin Lenin’s phrase, of two steps forward and
one step back. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness,
had achieved remarkable changes. Then came the Chernobyl nuclear
disaster, news of which had reached the West well before it was
reluctantly confirmed by the Soviet authorities.
As the world looked on in horror, reporters in Moscow were under
pressure to find out more. That is where my howler came in. Our affable
if excitable Armenian assistant pointed me to information in Pravda
that suggested the scope of the accident was bigger than had been
revealed. The piece named a number of towns potentially affected. I
quickly bashed out an alert reporting that a second exclusion zone
had been declared. The markets went wild. Governments went wild. HQ
congratulated me on outsmarting our rivals. We counted the minutes
before the other agencies caught up. The trouble was – they didn’t.
My stomach began to churn. I re-read the piece and realised I had
got it wrong. Some of the towns involved were already in the existing
exclusion zone. The zone had been enlarged in places, but basically
it was not a story. As soon as I got hold of my boss (these were the
days before mobiles and I couldn’t find him at home) we knew we had
to kill the story. Reuters always prided itself on double and treble
checking, especially stories as sensitive as this. I was truly in the
doghouse. That was May 1986. I think they would have sent me home,
if only the office had not been so short-staffed.
John Kampfner is the author of Blair’s Wars’. He was a foreign
correspondent with Reuters and The Daily Telegraph’ and political
correspondent for the Financial Times’ and BBC