Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 701
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
i
“MurderinCairoilluminates a sinister, colourful, clandestine world.”
Tina Brown, bestselling author and former editor-in-chief of the NewYorker, VanityFairand Tatler
“A dazzling feat of investigative journalism that reads like a le Carré. Two reporters piece together, after fifty years, the murder of the Middle East correspondent on their own newspaper – and mine – David Holden. Their hunt for the truth, which evaded a massive search at the time, broke through those brick walls to reveal the dangerous and widespread connections between the intelligence agencies, the spies among us and the journalists they targeted. Little did we know how close they were.”
James Fox, author of White Mischief
“I learned so much that I didn’t know from this riveting page-turner of a book. It’s a fascinating take on a genuine mystery.”
Daniel Finkelstein, author of Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad and former executive editor of The Times ii
“Gripping. Gillman and Midolo’s hunt for the truth behind the complicated facade of David Holden’s murder reads better than any Cold War spy thriller.”
Claire Hubbard-Hall, author of Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence
“A wonderful story, superbly told. A true page-turner. Emblematic of an opaque world that is all but impossible for outsiders to penetrate. Enthralling, it deserves to be read.”
Bob Baer, former CIA officer and author of See No Evil
“If any mystery writer were to put this in a novel, it would hardly be believed. But page by page, a dramatic story of spies, murder and betrayal unfolds in this excellently researched and gripping book.”
Richard J. Aldrich, author of GCHQ ToJulietteGillmanandLorenzoTrimarchi
iii
iv
v
To Juliette Gillman and Lorenzo Trimarchivi
CONTENTS
ix
Foreword
‘Things are not what they seem on the surface. Dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper.’ That was the ethos – expressed in 2010 to former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger – that inspired Sir Harold Evans’s years as a newspaper editor at the Northern Echo, the Sunday Times and The Times and informed his second act in the US as the president and publisher of Random House, a bestselling author and a historian. His rigour was relentless, his curiosity insatiable and his contempt for slapdash sourcing or confirmation bias withering. In 2002, Harry’s peers voted him the greatest British newspaper editor of all time. It was an accolade of which my husband was extremely proud.
As editor of the Sunday Times in 1967, Harry reinfused its Insight investigative unit with new ambition, a cadre of brilliant truth seekers and a tenacious mission to take on the big, daunting stories that exposed cover-ups of human injustice, corporate greed, government malfeasance and a political establishment that rested too easily on assumptions of its own inscrutability. Freedom of information was an unwelcome concept and one that Harry was determined to embrace. One of his most celebrated scoops was Insight’s exposure of the Foreign Office’s knowledge that Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, its top Soviet spymaster, was in fact an unscrupulous double agent, whose decades-long betrayal of his country was even more damaging than xiipreviously known. After the global sensation it caused, Harry was told that Ian Fleming – former intelligence officer, creator of James Bond and longtime Sunday Times executive – said that the real Bonds ‘were pissed off at being revealed as a ship of fools’.
Harry’s unshakable commitment to the truth translated into his willingness to campaign – for years, if necessary – to expose the cover-ups and, just as important, to ensure that the reporting would lead to results, including the reform of laws. In his 2009 memoir My Paper Chase, he asserted: ‘No campaign should be ended until it had succeeded – or was proved wrong.’
As the 33-year-old editor of the Northern Echo in Darlington, Harry became consumed by the heartbreaking miscarriage of justice in the case of a young, barely literate Welshman, Timothy Evans, who was hanged in 1950 for the murder of his wife and baby daughter instead of the real perpetrator, serial killer John Reginald Christie, who lived in the flat downstairs. The Northern Echo’s posthumous campaign was so effective it contributed to Home Secretary Roy Jenkins’s epic decision to abolish the death penalty in the UK.
Harry’s longest and most acclaimed campaign was in the pages of the Sunday Times on behalf of the children born with horrific birth defects caused by the morning sickness drug thalidomide, manufactured by the German firm Chemie Grünenthal and distributed in the UK by the powerful Distillers (one of the paper’s biggest advertisers). More than 20,000 babies worldwide were born with serious birth defects long after the company had been warned of the dangers, but their families were offered a pittance in compensation. Harry launched a decade-long Insight crusade that found new ways every week to tell the human story as well as expose the true scale of the human pain of the scandal and the cynical support of commercial interests by politicians. In the face of corporate suppression and legal gag orders, Harry ultimately appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, saying he was prepared to go to prison if that was xiiithe price of publishing the truth. ‘It was a famous victory,’ former Insight journalist Clive Irving summed it up:
The government was obliged to pass a statutory reform that allowed reporting and comment in a civil case until a date was set for trial – a vital new freedom that other papers and media, who had in this case been notably less zealous than the Sunday Times, also came to enjoy.
But there was one story, very close to home, that Harry and his crack Sunday Times reporters were never able to solve. And it obsessed him to the end of his life. In his last years, he was still trying to seek out new leads that might shed light on the mystery of what happened to one of his own most valued reporters, David Holden, the Sunday Times’s chief foreign correspondent, who was murdered in Cairo on assignment when covering the peace talks between Israel and Egypt, ten years after the Six-Day War. Harry recalled in My Paper Chase how he first heard the news of Holden’s violent end.
Late on Saturday 10 December, ‘the dreaded call came. The British embassy … had heard that on Wednesday, 7 December, the body of “an unknown European male” had been deposited in Cairo’s Kasr el Ainy mortuary.’ Bob Jobbins, the BBC Cairo correspondent who went to the mortuary three days later and identified Holden, ‘was struck by the lack of any obvious injury, save a small exit wound in his chest. “An apparent execution,” he presciently observed.’
Holden’s body had been found at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, nine hours after his arrival in Cairo. He lay on a sandy patch, littered with old newspapers, by the highway that ran beside the walls of Al-Azhar University. He was on his back, his feet neatly together. His expression was calm, his hair as sleek as ever. All marks that might suggest his identity or nationality had been removed, down to the maker’s label in his jacket.
Within hours, Harry dispatched six reporters to the Middle East xivand began peppering them with questions to answer: Who knew Holden was arriving on flight RJ 503 from Amman? Who else was on the plane with him? Could he have spotted a terrorist on board? Was he seen leaving the airport with anyone and by anyone he knew? Was the motive for his killing something to do with his private life? Or was the trigger his work? Was there something to suggest that he had been chosen as a high-profile target by Palestinian rejectionists or terrorists? Who had he seen in his swing through the Middle East? Had he alarmed somebody? Or had he perhaps been asked to carry to Cairo a message or document too sensitive for telex or telephone?
Potential clues did emerge. Holden – like so many at that time – turned out to have been hiding his true sexuality. He had sent a mysterious postcard to Jan – formerly James – Morris with the cryptic message: ‘In the Middle East, citadels still have their uses.’ But his murder was clearly a professional hit. And back at the Sunday Times office, there were mysteries too. Eight telexes about Holden’s changing travel plans had gone missing. Had the Sunday Times office been burgled or – more concerning – was there a mole inside the Sunday Times? The regretful conclusion Harry eventually reached was that Holden himself had been working in intelligence – but for whom, and why was he liquidated?
This compelling investigation by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo uncovers much that is new. Perhaps most significantly, it unpeels many more layers of the dark labyrinth in which the lives of journalists and spies were then so deeply interwoven and where Holden’s role seems fatally to be trapped in conflicts of identity, allegiance and personal beliefs.
Deeper, deeper… I only wish Harry, who died in 2020, was alive to read it.
Tina Brown
January 2025
Authors’ Note
This book is a work of non-fiction; all characters and events depicted in these pages are real. All dialogue in quote marks is based on contemporaneous notes and/or recordings. Although this book describes our activities during the original and new investigations, we have written it in the third person, for purposes of clarity. The observant reader may deduce that Peter Gillman was the lead author in the first part, Emanuele Midolo in the second. That is correct, but we discussed and agreed what each of us would write and then commented on the resulting text. The outcome is a collaborative manuscript to which we are pleased to put both our names.
Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo
January 2025, Londonxvi
Prologue
David Holden was in a foul mood. His flight from Amman to Cairo on the evening of 6 December 1977 had been held at the departure gate for ninety minutes as the pilot waited for an overdue group of American tourists. When they finally filed on board, one of them, Mrs Willivene Bonnette, stopped beside Holden, who was ensconced in a seat on the aisle. She told Holden she wanted to take the centre-row seat, but he refused to stand up to let her pass. Bonnette, a sturdy middle-aged woman from Clyde, Ohio, was forced to squeeze past him instead.
Holden, aged fifty-three, was the chief foreign correspondent of the London Sunday Times. With slicked-back brown hair and china-blue eyes, he was wearing a navy corduroy jacket with a black rollneck sweater, beige trousers and black Italian leather moccasin shoes. He was nearing the end of a hectic ten-day swing through the Middle East, covering prospective peace talks between Egypt and Israel, but he was not about to reveal that to Bonnette.
Flight RJ 503 finally took off at 9.45 p.m. Once it was in the air, Bonnette tried to strike up a conversation with Holden.
‘Why are you going to Cairo?’ she asked him.
‘On business,’ was all he would say.
Bonnette persevered. ‘We’re on a trip to the Holy Land.’ xviii
Holden showed a flicker of interest. ‘What sites are you going to visit in Egypt?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bonnette admitted.
‘That’s absurd,’ Holden snapped. At that point, Bonnette gave up trying to engage with him. She later said that she found him ‘sarcastic, surly and impatient’.
Just why Holden appeared so tetchy that evening, beyond the matter of the flight delay, was later to prove a central issue for a team of Sunday Times investigative journalists. Holden’s sour demeanour cannot have been improved by the drab supper of cold chicken salad and tinned peaches which the Royal Jordanian airline served its economy passengers. At the end of the meal – the last Holden would ever eat – he was handed a coffee, which he topped up from a hip flask he retrieved from inside his jacket. After drinking that, Holden refilled his cup from the flask and swallowed the contents neat.
The flight landed in Cairo at 11 p.m. The passengers, including the forty-one American Holy Land tourists, were ferried by bus to the airport terminal. Once inside, Holden walked briskly through the echoing stone corridors to the arrivals hall. Holden had last visited Egypt five years before, but he knew the routine. First, as required by Egypt’s visitor regulations, he purchased some Egyptian currency, cashing traveller’s cheques to the value of $200 at the Royal Bank of Egypt desk and receiving 200 Egyptian pounds in notes plus a handful of coins in exchange. He completed a form for a temporary visitor’s visa, curiously entering ‘writer’ rather than ‘journalist’ in the space asking his profession – a detail that was later to attract attention. He passed through immigration control and joined the cluster of passengers waiting for their baggage. When his venerable red Samsonite case slid into sight on the luggage belt, he retrieved it and headed for the customs area, passing unhindered through the ‘nothing to declare’ channel. xix
The route to the exit lay along yet another corridor and through a pair of swing doors. Beyond, a double line of crash barriers funnelled arriving passengers into the throng of people waiting to meet their friends or relatives, with a pair of policemen, revolvers on their belts, on hand to help clear a way through. Another few steps led to the pavement outside.
It was a warm night, around twenty degrees, with an arid tang of dust lingering from the sandstorm which had swept through Cairo the previous day. The pavement was lit by the glare of the illuminated blue lettering above the door, showing the single word ‘Arrival’ with its Arabic version alongside. A short distance to the left was a line of taxis, waiting to take passengers on the half-hour journey into central Cairo for a metered fare of around £3, plus tip. Before a taxi set off, a policeman would log the details – registration plate, departure time, destination – in a notebook, a measure intended to prevent passengers from being robbed or hijacked.
In a darkened area to the right, barely visible among intermittent pools of light, was a cluster of battered pirate taxis offering a bone-shaking, cut-price ride into Cairo but without the security of being logged by the police; their drivers had secured this privileged position near the arrivals exit by bribing the selfsame airport police. As passengers emerged from the terminal, the pirate drivers would walk alongside them and offer to take them into the city centre for around £2, substantially undercutting the official rate.
It is known for certain that Holden did not take an official taxi. It is far more likely that he was escorted to the shadowy area to the right of the terminal, where he boarded a battered Fiat that resembled one of the pirate taxis.
Then David Holden disappeared into the Cairo night. xx
PART ONE
‘Things are not what they seem on the surface.
Dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper.’
Harold Evans2
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 42 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, 5which 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 6gathered 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 7in 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 afterwards, 8Evans left the office for the five-minute journey to a nearby apartment which was rented for overnight stays. He was still settling in when, as he later remarked, ‘the dreaded call came’.
Earlier that day, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Bob Jobbins, had been called to the mortuary in Cairo where the bodies of accident victims were deposited. Jobbins drove there from his office accompanied by an Egyptian journalist, Fuad al Gawhary, the Cairo correspondent, or ‘stringer’, of the Sunday Times. Al Gawhary was among the journalists enlisted by the newspaper in the search for Holden, and he had placed calls to his contacts in the Cairo police and security services. That morning one of them had called back with the news that the body of a European man had been taken to the mortuary three days earlier.
Al Gawhary had never met Holden; so he in turn called Jobbins. Jobbins had met Holden just once, some seven years before, when they spent a frustrating week together in Tripoli, trying – and failing – to obtain an interview with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. Jobbins considered that was enough to enable him to identify Holden, if indeed his body was now in the mortuary.
More than forty-five years on, details of Jobbins’s visit were imprinted in his memory. The mortuary adjoined Cairo’s Kasr el Ainy Hospital, a run-down building close to the west bank of the Nile. Jobbins and al Gawhary were shown into a tiled room, poorly lit and reeking of disinfectant, where a series of giant refrigerated drawers lined the walls. The mortuary superintendent, a middle-aged Egyptian wearing a clinician’s apron, pulled open one of the drawers, which was green on the outside, steel-lined on the inside. Jobbins saw a man’s body covered in a white sheet, which the superintendent lifted back to reveal his face.
At first, Jobbins felt sure it was Holden. Then, in a moment of self-doubt, he hesitated. Aware of the responsibility he was assuming, he asked himself: ‘Could it be someone else?’ He silently answered his 9own question: ‘No, it’s David.’ Jobbins repeated his answer, this time aloud, to al Gawhary, who translated it for the superintendent.
Jobbins looked at the body again. The mortuary embalmer had done his work well. Holden had rosy cheeks, his hair had been parted and his face was set in a parodic semblance of repose. Jobbins thought how peaceful he looked but could not help comparing his inert figure with the sociable companion he had spent a week with holed up in Libya.
Questions were already racing through Jobbins’s mind. Before he could voice them, the superintendent pulled the sheet further down. Holden was wearing a singlet which the superintendent lifted to reveal a small, neat wound below his left nipple – together with a bullet which was now caught up in the folds of the singlet.
The superintendent spoke to al Gawhary, who translated again for Jobbins’s benefit. ‘He says this is the exit wound,’ al Gawhary reported. ‘And this is the bullet which killed him. The entry wound is in his back. He would have died at once.’
Jobbins was struck by two aspects of what he had seen and heard. First, the bullet that killed Holden was a small calibre, possibly a 9mm. Second, this looked like a professional hit, suggesting that Holden was the victim of an execution. After returning to his office, Jobbins telephoned the press attaché at the British Embassy in Cairo. It was the Foreign Office which in turn telephoned the Sunday Times in London shortly before 10 p.m. The call was answered by McCrystal, who heard the stark message: Holden’s body had been found. McCrystal then made the fateful call to Evans.
The shock, Evans later wrote, was ‘profound’. For the moment, professionalism kicked in. The front page of the next morning’s newspaper was redesigned and the news of Holden’s death was posted at the top under the headline: ‘Sunday Times man found shot in Egypt’. It was illustrated with a photo of Holden looking up at the camera from beneath a furrowed brow, with a quizzical half-smile 10on his lips: ‘eminent and admired’, read the caption. Meanwhile, a distressed Evans asked the senior editors still at the office to call the journalists who had been assisting in the search during the week.
One was Gillman, who was at home when the telephone rang. It was the features editor, John Barry, who told him that Holden’s body had been found in Cairo, adding some details which Jobbins had acquired. Holden had apparently been shot soon after he arrived at Cairo Airport on 6 December. His body had been stripped of all means of identification and dumped in the dirt beside a road near the airport, where it had been found on the morning of Wednesday 7 December. Barry told Gillman that the newspaper was still formulating its plans for covering Holden’s death, but he should expect a call from Evans in the morning.
After a fitful night at the apartment, Evans swung into action. Baffled and concerned though he was, his journalistic instincts took over. He began calling some of his most experienced reporters, requesting them to travel to the Middle East to reconstruct Holden’s last week and look for answers as to why he was killed. Barry and McCrystal would go to Cairo, Gillman and his Insight colleague Paul Eddy to Amman. The veteran reporter Antony Terry would go to Israel, while Helena Cobban, a correspondent based in Beirut, would cover Lebanon.
When Evans called Gillman, he told him that he and Eddy should establish, in as much detail as possible, how Holden had spent his three days in Jordan before flying to Cairo on 6 December. Gillman reminded Evans that he had visited Jordan several times already that year and had contacts he was sure would help. Evans said that was good to hear.
‘Watch out for Mossad,’ Evans added. ‘They’re the best intelligence agency in the world.’
Gillman was only too aware of the implications of Evans’s warning. Six months before, the Sunday Times had published a lengthy 11and meticulously researched article which concluded that Israel’s security service habitually tortured Palestinian prisoners. The report was unprecedented in the British media for its criticism of Israel, whose President termed it ‘the single most damaging article’ published about Israel since its creation in 1948. Israel was nothing if not vengeful in taking reprisals against those it deemed its enemies. If that was the case now, Holden was the victim of a mistake. The Israeli press had mistakenly named Holden as one of the authors of the article. The two principal reporters who conducted the investigation were in fact Gillman and his colleague Eddy. This raised one immediate question: if they tried to follow Holden’s footsteps on his final Middle East trip, would they walk into the same trap? 12
Chapter 2
The Warning
Emanuele Midolo did not notice him at first. The man was sitting, alone, at a table a few metres away. The first thing Midolo saw were his sunglasses. It was early afternoon and the sky was covered by a thin haze. There was no need for shades, he thought, even by the swimming pool where they were sitting. The man wore a white polo shirt and blue jeans. He had two mobile phones on the table, one on top of the other. His brown hair was parted in the middle and neatly combed. Clean shaven, he looked like a young Arab version of Sylvester Stallone. Despite the sunglasses, he could see that the man had his eyes set on him. He was not eating or drinking, and he sat very still, his head not moving. The only thing he seemed to be doing was staring. For the first time since arriving in Cairo, Midolo felt uneasy. It was September 2023 and Midolo, thirty-five, a reporter at The Times and the Sunday Times in London, was in Egypt to investigate a murder that had happened there more than four decades earlier.
He decided to take a photograph of the man and send it to his writing partner, Peter Gillman, who was forty-five years his senior and had been Midolo’s age when he was first assigned to the case. Holding his phone low and close to the table, as if he were reading a message, Midolo managed to take a clear shot of the man – he 14could even see his eyes looking at him beneath the glasses. But as soon as he had done that, the man signalled to a waiter. Midolo panicked. Did he see him taking the photo? The man spoke to the waiter who, to Midolo’s relief, soon returned with a shisha, from which the man started pulling white puffs of smoke. Was he going crazy? Imagining it all?
He was not naturally prone to paranoia, but there had been many signs – and warnings too. People he had contacted did not want to meet him, nor even speak to him over the phone. Local fixers had refused to help. The Times’s Middle Eastern correspondent, who had been banned from Egypt years earlier after he had conducted investigations of the current regime, told him he was likely to be followed at all times. ‘They assume that every British journalist, and especially from The Times, is MI6,’ he told him. ‘So you are going to be watched.’
One Western journalist based in Egypt, who had previously investigated the same story, had sounded particularly paranoid. She had first agreed to meet but urged: ‘Do remember that you need to be super careful, yes?’ As Midolo’s visit approached, she back-tracked, saying she was not sure she would be able to meet him after all. ‘People here are not going to help you with this, sorry to say.’
The day before flying to Cairo, he messaged her again, using an encrypted app.
‘I’m going to take a pass on this,’ she replied. ‘Good luck, but it’s just not the right time for these kinds of inquiries.’
Midolo chose not to press her, but the wording left him wondering what she meant. The day before leaving London, he had received another warning, this time from a colleague at the paper who was known in the office to be close to MI6. ‘I’ve been talking to “a friend in the Foreign Office” (as they call themselves) and need to pass on a rather important message about your proposed inquiries in Egypt,’ the colleague texted him. 15
When Midolo called, the colleague relayed his conversation with the ‘friend’: ‘Do not pursue any kind of obvious snooping around. Every second person is an informer. You have no idea, the control… it’s all around. It’s still a police state, don’t ever forget that.’
The colleague went on to explain that the ‘friend’ had run a number of operations in Egypt but that he only ever did that ‘from outside’. If ever he went to Egypt, he was extremely careful. ‘He just looked at things and didn’t ask too many questions,’ the colleague said. ‘They’re watching foreigners. They’re pretty jumpy there, particularly after the story with the poor Italian.’ He was referring to Giulio Regeni, a young journalist and Cambridge PhD student who had been abducted, tortured and murdered in Egypt in 2016. But Regeni’s murder was different. It had happened under the current regime, after General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi had seized power in a military coup d’état in 2013, overthrowing the first-ever democratically elected government in the country. The Egyptian intelligence services were suspected of having a hand in the killing of the Italian journalist, therefore putting General Sisi under international pressure.
Holden had been murdered almost half a century before. At first, it felt like a different time and place, where the past was another country. Holden had died in an era when, in the midst of the Cold War, the two great powers of the US and the USSR were jostling for dominance in a turbulent region. For a luminous moment, after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, that world seemed to have ended. The CIA was not busy plotting coups and toppling regimes in faraway places, while the KGB was no longer assassinating dissidents at home and abroad. There was relative peace in the Middle East and the Prime Minister of Israel and the leader of Palestine were shaking hands on the lawn of the White House.
But now, the old days had returned. The CIA and the new Russian secret service were as active as ever and at each other’s throats again. The Middle East was on fire and Israel and Palestine were 16locked in an all-out war. It was Holden’s world. The same world that had killed him and dumped him on the side of a desert road. Midolo was in Cairo to find out, once and for all, who had done it and why.
The Times had taken things seriously enough to arrange safety measures for him. For starters, the phone Midolo had used to take the man’s picture was not his phone. It was a ‘burner’ phone given to him by the newspaper. Before his trip, he sat down with Chris Kemp, the paper’s head of safety and security, and told him about the story he was working on. Kemp explained that with the latest monitoring technology, courtesy of China, the authorities in Egypt could hack into his phone remotely. They could listen in on his calls, read his texts, steal his passwords and even turn on his microphone to eavesdrop on him. The burner phone would be equipped with a software, called Lookout, to shield it from any of these cybersecurity threats and alert him if anyone was trying to hack their way in.
Sitting on the terrace of the Four Seasons Hotel in the Garden City quarter in West Cairo, Midolo was glad he did not have his personal phone with him, full of details of the Holden case. That was the only thing he was glad about. To be warned about state surveillance was one thing; to have that crawling feeling on his skin was another altogether. The staring contest with the man was still on. Midolo had finished his lunch but decided to stay at the table until his watcher left. After a while, the man stood up, paid and walked away, this time not even glancing at him.
Feeling the tension ease, Midolo sipped from his glass and realised his hand was shaking. He waited a few more minutes then headed towards the exit. The man was there too and was about to get into a lift. Midolo slowed down, hoping the doors would close, but the man placed a hand over the sensor and kept them open. Midolo had no choice but to get in. As the doors closed on him, all he could think was: ‘What am I doing here?’
Chapter 3
Into Deep Waters
Peter Gillman was packing. He did not know how long he would be in Amman – at a guess, a week to ten days, taking him close to Christmas. Strewn out beside his travel-worn suitcase was a range of clothing that he hoped would cover all eventualities. One item stood ready: his portable typewriter, in its case labelled ‘Peter Gillman Sunday Times London England’.
Gillman enjoyed the challenge, the thrill, of overseas reporting: step off the plane, negotiate the passport checks, find your bearings at the airport exit, rely on a mix of procedure and wit to see you through. But this was no ordinary assignment. He had hardly known Holden, other than as a face he occasionally glimpsed in the Sunday Times office. Even so, the fact remained that a journalist had been killed. For the sake of other journalists, for the sake of journalism itself, the murderers had to be found, the reason revealed.
Why should someone want Holden dead so badly that he was lured into a car and executed some hours later, his body unceremoniously dumped in the dirt beside a road? What did the manner of his execution say about his killer’s motives? Hovering over all of this was Evans’s warning about Mossad, with the implication that Holden could have been the wrong target, leaving open the question of whether Israel would strike again. 18
Gillman, thirty-five, with owlish glasses and dark curly hair that was beginning to recede, had been writing for the Sunday Times for twelve years. He started as a freelancer on its weekend colour magazine, specialising in long-form features and developing a niche in true-crime reporting. Then he joined the magazine staff and, in 1973, graduated to the news desk of the newspaper where his beat included covering the Troubles, the lethal inter-communal strife between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland that raged for much of the decade. A year or so later, his career took a step up when he met Evans in the office lift. Evans clapped him on the shoulders and asked him to join the newspaper’s Insight team, its renowned investigative unit, which was then being revitalised. Gillman hardly had time to ask any questions by the time the lift reached its destination but thought it politic to agree.
A second recruit for the Insight team was Paul Eddy, who had joined the Sunday Times in 1971. It was a tight-knit pairing, referred to sometimes as ‘Giddy’ or ‘the twins’, and they had complementary backgrounds. Gillman, from suburban south London, went to Dulwich College and Oxford University; Eddy, from Leamington in the Midlands, left school at fifteen and performed stints in local papers and news agencies before setting up his own agency in the West Midlands. After working for the Sunday Mirror and the Associated Press bureau in Athens, he started part-time shifts at the Sunday Times, where his talent was spotted and he was taken on the staff. A lean figure, always well-dressed, he was known for his inordinate consumption of both cigarettes and coffee, which helped sustain him during the long Friday-night writing stints that Insight required, often lasting through to the Saturday afternoon deadline as well. ‘I don’t mind if I kill myself early, so long as I can live the life I want,’ Eddy would say to people who warned him about his lifestyle.
Gillman and Eddy began their investigation of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners in April 1977. They spent three weeks 19working undercover in Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza, interviewing forty-four Palestinians who had been arrested and interrogated. They described interrogations that included beatings, sexual abuse, electric shocks, being held in tiny cells with serrated floors where they were unable to stand up and other methods amounting to torture. Their four-page report was published on 1 June. It was headlined ‘Israel and Torture’ and unequivocally concluded that Israel’s security service, Shin Bet, routinely and systematically deployed brutality and torture against Palestinian prisoners.
The report was greeted with a furore. On one side were those who felt that Israel had held the British media in its thrall for far too long, exempting its practices as an occupying power from scrutiny. Others contended that the article was antisemitic and that the Sunday Times had been corrupted by Middle East money. Prime Minister Begin delivered his statement that it was the most damaging article ever published about Israel to a meeting of senior British Jewry. The Israeli Embassy delivered a purported rebuttal to the article which the Sunday Times published on 3 July and which the Insight team demolished, point by point, the following week. In the US, President Carter raised the report in a meeting with Begin, telling him that all such interrogation methods should stop.
It was in this period that Holden was named in the Israeli press as one of the authors of the piece. The Sunday Times did publish a correction, naming Gillman and Eddy instead. But maybe the belief that Holden was involved had stuck? Or perhaps the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times was still judged a suitable target? Either way, Gillman knew he should take heed of Evans’s warning, which he coupled with another he had received in Amman just three months before. Gillman had been conducting further inquiries in the aftermath of the Insight report, with the discreet assistance of the chief Jordan delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jean Courvoisier. ‘Mr Gillman,’ Courvoisier 20had urged, ‘I caution you with all seriousness against ever going to Israel again. You would be in the greatest danger if you did.’
Gillman had absolutely no plans to visit Israel on this trip. But the warnings served as an intimation that shadowy and ruthless forces were involved in Holden’s killing, Israeli or otherwise. So how was he to conduct himself on such an assignment? The closest comparison for Gillman lay in his reporting from Northern Ireland, where he had covered both sides in the conflict, as well as the British Army. In internecine conflicts such as that, where suspicion of betrayal and double-dealing could be fatal, the overriding principle for journalists was to be open and above board in all they did. It followed that they should decline any invitations to become an informant for the British intelligence and security services, as Gillman did when propositioned by Peter Imbert, then a senior Special Branch officer who specialised in Northern Ireland. If those were the rules for operating in Northern Ireland, what were they for inquiring into a journalist’s murder in the Middle East? What were the pitfalls and dangers? Other than Evans’s warning, Gillman had been given no guidance by the Sunday Times, which presumably assumed that he was sensible and experienced enough to work these things out for himself.
‘How are you getting on?’ Gillman’s wife Leni had come into the room.
‘It’s going well,’ Gillman told her. ‘All under control.’
‘Let me fold these up for you.’ Leni picked up a pair of shirts, straightened and folded them, then placed them neatly in her husband’s suitcase.
‘How long will you be away?’
‘Not sure,’ Gillman replied. ‘A week or so, at a guess.’
They had been married for fifteen years, Gillman a journalist for thirteen. Their parting the next morning was practised, a hug and a kiss, as they juggled their respective departures: hers to the nearby 21secondary school, attended by their two sons, where she worked as a teacher; his to Heathrow, where he was booked into Alia’s 10 a.m. flight to Amman.
By then, two of the Sunday Times’s most experienced journalists were already in Cairo, having flown there on 11 December: Cal McCrystal, from the newspaper’s foreign department, and John Barry, a former Insight editor. Another was dispatched to Israel: Tony Terry, who had been a reporter with the Sunday Times since the 1940s. The Sunday Times had also enlisted its experienced Beirut correspondent Helena Cobban, and Gillman’s Insight colleague Paul Eddy was due to follow him to Amman a day or so later. The work would be coordinated by the foreign department manager Steve Boyd, a dependable, good-humoured character who would also conduct further inquiries from London.
It was a commitment of resources that spoke of Evans’s determination to find out all he could about Holden’s murder. The journalists would follow what had become a tried-and-tested formula: gather every available scrap of information, assemble it into a coherent narrative and trust that the answers to the central question would become clear.
It fell to McCrystal and Barry to deal with the immediate aftermath of Holden’s murder in Cairo. McCrystal, forty-two, came from a Catholic family in Belfast. After working on the Belfast Telegraph, he joined the Sunday Times in 1964 and was appointed its crime reporter. He later moved to New York as the Sunday Times US editor. When he returned to London, he became the deputy foreign editor, playing a key role in running the foreign department and managing its correspondents. Balding, with an engaging smile, his softly spoken persona, with a hint of Irish speech rhythms, belied his determination as a journalist; he was also a superb writer.
Barry, aged thirty-five, joined the newspaper in the same year as McCrystal and, following a lengthy stint heading Insight, was now 22an editor in the features department. He had a disconcertingly young face, with piercing eyes; an Oxford drop-out, Evans later called him ‘a contrarian with a quicksilver mind’.
The pair’s primary aim, once they arrived in Cairo, was to piece together all they could of Holden’s plans and the circumstances of his death. Their mission swiftly expanded. They found themselves embroiled in the formalities and procedures entailed by the high-profile murder of a British citizen on Egyptian soil, liaising between the British Embassy and the Cairo police, as well as between the Cairo police and the authorities in Amman and London. They performed those duties against the ticking background of a deadline to write and transmit all their information to the Sunday Times in London in time for the major report the newspaper intended to publish the following Sunday.
Their work began as soon as they arrived at Cairo Airport on 11 December, following in Holden’s footsteps from five days before. Once outside the departure building, they found themselves, McCrystal later wrote, ‘in a swirling mass of people’ who included drivers of the official regulated taxis and those plying for trade with their gypsy cabs, parked diagonally to the right of the main airport exit. They took an official taxi to the Cairo Sheraton, where they were told that the hotel was overbooked and so they were required to share a room.
The next day, they paid their first visits to the British Embassy, finding its officials in a state of consternation at the murder of a British subject, and to the Cairo police, who asked them ‘urgently’ for a list of Holden’s possessions, so that they could identify any if they were found. At that early stage, Barry reported to London, the police had an open mind about the motives for the murder. ‘General point is that violent crime of that nature is so unusual here and missing hours are so mysterious that all possibilities should be borne in mind.’ 23
Both Barry and the Cairo police considered it vital to reconstruct Holden’s movements, from his arrival in Jordan via the Allenby Bridge from Israel on the morning of 6 December to him boarding the plane to Cairo that evening. Barry sent an urgent ‘brief ’ for Gillman to work on as soon as he arrived in Amman, written in the abbreviated cablese that reduced the word length and, consequently, the cost:
Start at bridge, get David’s entry records and fullest passport details of all those who came over with him. Trace him to Amman. We must get passenger list with again fullest details addresses etc. of all who travelled on flight. Any late bookings? Trace any phone calls from Intercontinental. Then him onto plane. Crucial details are first whether he was accompanied wittingly or otherwise and second whether anyone could have expected his arrival at that time in Cairo.
In London, Boyd forwarded Barry’s telex to the Amman Intercontinental Hotel, where Gillman was booked to stay. In reply to Barry’s query over who knew Holden was travelling to Cairo and when he expected to arrive, Boyd pointed out that his plans were known in the Sunday Times foreign department: Holden had been meticulous about informing it about his movements and the foreign department had been in touch with two Cairo hotels, the Hilton and the Méridien, which would also be aware that he was coming.
Boyd had already traced a journalist who had met Holden in Amman on 2 December. Gavin Scott of Time magazine had lunched with Holden, together with Edward Mortimer of The Times and an American journalist, Joe Kraft. Boyd had one troubling item of conversation from Kraft to pass on. Holden had joked about returning to Cairo for the first time in years ‘and how he expected to be public enemy number one’. 24
Boyd also forwarded a list of Holden’s belongings which the Cairo police had requested via the British Embassy, meticulously documented by his wife Ruth. A dark blue corduroy suit made by Austin Reed. A pale blue/grey check suit from Burton’s. A dark green and brown check sports jacket made by Adeney and Boutroy, Sackville Street. For shoes, two pairs of moccasin-style shoes, one reddish brown made in Venice, the other a black Gucci type. Three knitted silk ties – one brown, one fawn, one blue – all made in Madrid. A black and white sponge bag containing a Gillette Techmatic razor and Acqua di Selva aftershave in a dark green flask.
The following morning, 13 December, McCrystal and Barry, accompanied by a British Embassy official, went to the Kasr el Ainy mortuary. Like Jobbins three days before, they found it musty with the smell of formaldehyde and so short of space that a corpse was lying on the floor because all the tables were occupied. The embassy official explained that the police had given them permission to view Holden’s body. When the mortuary attendant said he needed to see the authorisation in writing, McCrystal took the hint, handing over a few Egyptian pounds, which appeared to suffice.
Holden’s body was in a steel-lined drawer within a giant filing cabinet. At first, the attendant pulled it back far enough to reveal Holden’s face. ‘Recognition was not immediate,’ McCrystal subsequently noted. ‘He had lost a lot of blood and his face was very thin.’ His hair seemed to have thinned too and was very straggly. ‘The face was in repose, but we were first struck with the fact that it was only vaguely like the David we knew.’ The exit wound was clearly visible, close to his left nipple. The attendant turned the body on to its side, revealing the entry wound, with a slight ooze of blood. McCrystal and Barry felt more confident that this was Holden, and the matter was settled when the attendant pointed out a small, wart-like lump on the right side of his nose – a feature McCrystal remembered. The 25attendants appeared anxious to return Holden’s body into the filing cabinet, so McCrystal and Barry thanked them and left.
What they saw accorded with the police autopsy, which concluded that Holden had been shot once from behind by a 9mm automatic and at such close range that it left a scorch mark just below the left shoulder blade. As Jobbins had concluded three days before, it had to be a professional hit. McCrystal and Barry had little time to think through the implications, as they needed to obtain the documents required to secure clearance for Holden’s body to be released and returned to London.
McCrystal and Barry next visited the site where Holden’s body had been found on the morning of 7 December. It was on a roadside in Nasr City, a housing estate composed of monolithic blocks of flats which also contained Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. ‘Nasr City is notorious as a dumping ground for murder victims,’ McCrystal later wrote. ‘But the murder of foreigners is quite unusual in Cairo.’ The body, which was lying among sand and litter below a wall of the university, had been found by a medical student who informed the Nasr police station. The detective who arrived observed that the body had been carefully placed on the ground with arms at its side and feet out straight, an apparent indication that the killers wanted the body to be found that morning.
Barry and McCrystal were questioning some students at a nearby bus stop when two police cars drew up and several senior police officers climbed out. The two journalists were expecting to be reprimanded for doing their own detective work, but the police proved very welcoming. They included the head of criminal investigations in the Cairo police, General Ahmed Hassan, and the head of Cairo security, Brigadier Mustafa Kamal. Before long, still standing at the roadside, the group began discussing the murder and possible motives. 26
The police theories, as summarised in a telex by Barry, included ‘theft (no one believes it); political; and most private is hormonal’ – a coded reference to a possible sexual encounter, which Barry added ‘is just at rumour stage’. Under the political rubric, Holden could have been murdered by fanatical opponents of Sadat’s peace moves; or he knew something explosive and had been followed to Cairo. Finally, there was Israel, seeking revenge for the Insight torture articles. Here, Barry confided that this could have been ‘a joint job’ carried out by Israel and Egypt – which he diplomatically referred to as ‘our hosts’.
Hassan had some queries for Barry, starting with who knew Holden was coming to Cairo during his final trip. ‘Please assemble anything which will piece those days together,’ Barry told London. ‘We must rpt must trace exactly what he did who he saw etc. on West Bank, as well as tracing Amman.’
Hassan also asked about Holden’s spectacles. ‘Could London confirm that they were square with heavy black rims – and under what circumstances did he wear them? Did he wear them for reading, driving, writing, looking at maps? Did he wear them all the time, when he was tired or only for certain specified functions?’ Hassan wanted to know, Barry explained, because Holden was still wearing his glasses when his body was found.
There was a seemingly minor detail that the police had observed, namely that when Holden completed his visa form at Cairo Airport, he had given his occupation as ‘writer’, not ‘journalist’ – thus enabling him to bypass the Ministry of Information team waiting to escort journalists into the city. In addition, Hassan said, the police had checked the records at the airport and were almost certain that Holden had not taken an official taxi. Instead, Hassan believed, Holden had travelled from Amman with someone he knew or had met on the flight. This person was met at Cairo Airport by someone with a car, and Holden accepted a lift from them. In summary, 27
