There are two conditions British foreign correspondents must meet before they can consider themselves old hands. The first is having one’s work savaged by John Pilger; the second is spending time inside a cell somewhere abroad, preferably somewhere exotic and hot.
It so happens that it was during a trip to sultry Venezuela that I came of age as a reporter and achieved the rare double. Not only did Mr Pilger describe my television work as a ‘one of the worst, most distorted pieces of journalism I have ever seen’, but I was also locked up, ordered to strip to my underpants, accused by a military prosecutor of espionage and threatened with over 30 years in a Venezuelan jail.
The editor kindly acceded to a long-cherished whimsy of mine and headlined this piece ‘My Venezuelan jail hell’. In fact, it wasn’t hellish at all; being stripped to my cojones in Caracas proved a good deal more pleasant than the verbal abuse from Mr Pilger once my clothes were back on.
My alleged crime was to have ‘broken in’ to a Venezuelan military base to spy on secret operations undertaken by the Bolivarian Socialist Republic, but in journalistic terms it was far worse than that.
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