Research as a foreign correspondent

Reporters in an area of extreme difficulty or danger often need assistance not just to research, but to survive. The people who will help you do that are the real unsung heroes of journalism. They are fixers, reporters’ sidekicks who translate, drive, have contacts, know whom to bribe, which roads to use and which to avoid, have cousins in visa offices, old school friends among insurgents, or brothers-in-law in the security service. Without them, many more reporters would be killed, and a lot of valuable stories would be missed.

They range from security service informants whose helpful pose disguises (often not very well) a desire to lead the reporter away from ‘inconvenient’ stories, and charlatans who crowd lobbies of hotels like the Pearl Continental in Peshawar, Pakistan offering their services to newly arrived western reporters, to sharp young journalists who will often act as ‘stringers’, or local correspondent after the big-time reporter has left. They are paid well by indigenous standards (Alpha Koromah, who assisted the London Evening Standard ’s Alex Renton in sierra Leone, was paid 75 times the pay of a private in the national army), but it’s a risky business. Those helping correspondents write stories that reflect badly on regimes can find themselves threatened, jailed (as was Khawar Mehdi Rizvi, who fixed for magazine L‘Express in Pakistan), or killed. In 2004, nine died in Iraq and six more world-wide. In places of extreme danger, like Baghdad, the fixer can indeed become the reporter, going onto the streets to collect information and quotes and bring them back to the correspondent safe in the Green Zone who will then write the story.

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The egos of foreign correspondents make many reluctant to give credit to those who help them, but some do, like the Independent ’s Robert Fisk and Ann Leslie of the Daily Mail. To reporters like her, fixers are not just people you hire, use, pay, and leave, but long-time colleagues. she stays in touch with them and their families long after she’s moved on, and, judging by her stories, it’s obvious they repay her loyalty handsomely. There was Mr Massamba, who obtained a whole book of vital phone numbers for her in Zaire so she could uncover the story of the corrupt Mobutu, a president worth £ 6 billion who built, among the direst poverty, a residence twice the size of Buckingham Palace; ‘Mr Zhou’ (not his real name), her brave guide in China, through whom she met survivors of the Tiananmen massacre; Igor Kuzmin in Moscow, who, when Leslie flew straight from her holiday in the swiss Alps to cover the attempted 1991 coup against Gorbachev, had sufficient pull with his old KGB colleagues to arrange her admission to Russia despite the lack of a visa; and Wiebke Reed, her fixer in East Berlin, in whose spluttering little red Wartburg, she crossed through Checkpoint Charlie on the night in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. Not for nothing did I dedicate my book The Great Reporters to fixers.

No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by competitive reporting; the cleverest secret agents of the police state are inferior to the plodding reporter of the democracy.

Harold Evans