“When a young Saudi came up and said ‘Salaam alaikum—Peace be upon you’ and pulled out a pistol and shot me, that was a pretty bad moment.” The understatement in this is striking: Frank Gardner’s body was ravaged by six bullets from Al-Qaeda terrorists in June 2004, leaving him on the brink of death and partly paralysed in the legs. For a man who had been enthralled by the Middle East from a young age, and devoted his life to learning its language, exploring its lands and reporting its news, this left Gardner with a profound sense of betrayal.
“We’d come in peace. We were journalists and we were there to do a peaceful job,” he reflects as we sit together in Broadcasting House. His distinctive voice, crisp and elegant, is marked by a total absence of self-pity. “It took me a while to sort out in my head the difference between the people who had done this, and the rest of Saudi society and the Middle East.”
Yet his love for the region remained undimmed. A deluge of passionately sympathetic letters from Muslims all over the world played a large role in his emotional healing process, and he is at pains to “steer people away from the stereotypical view that the whole Middle East is up in flames, which it isn’t”.
The touchpaper of Gardner’s fascination with the Middle East was first lit at the age of 16 when he met Sir Wilfred Thesiger, a friend of his mother. Gardner was spellbound by the black and white photographs the explorer had taken of “camel trains receding into the dunes, of these haggard faces, of camel saddles and gourds and daggers.” His voice fills with boyish excitement as he describes this “window into another world”, which inspired him to read Arabic and Islamic Studies at Exeter University. Accustomed to travelling—the son of two diplomats, he lived in The Hague as a child—his degree took him on a “completely formative year” abroad to Egypt, where he stayed with a family in Cairo. He found it thrilling to be “living in a completely functioning medieval Islamic city”, where he could sketch the architecture, climb crumbling minarets and learn the language properly—“it’s just so singsong, so lively, so fun.”
He paints a vivid vignette of a laundryman in a cobbled backstreet “taking a swig from a bottle of water and spraying it out through his teeth in a fine mist to moisten the pair of trousers he was ironing”. Indeed, anecdotal treasures are strewn across the sands of our whole conversation, from his “horrendous” take-off from the deck of the USS Nimitz in a “diabolical device” called a COD—“you feel like you’re in a coffin and you know that you’re about to be catapulted off the deck”—to his alarming discovery after pretending to be a doctor to get accommodation in a Sudanese hospital. “In the morning I woke up and there were these buzzards and vultures wheeling above me—it was actually the morgue and there were people in white sheets there.”
After graduating, Gardner worked as an investment banker in the Middle East for nine years. This was a fascinating time, which, by his own admission, involved doing little actual banking. “It was all about opening doors, having late night meetings with sheikhs and merchants and getting to know them, and then I would bring in the real bankers from Hong Kong and London.” So what prompted his leap from this lucrative career to the uncertain world of broadcast journalism? “I was over-promoted to director back in London,” he recalls modestly. “I was bored stiff, and if you’re bored you’re not going to be good at it.”
Gardner took on an unpaid attachment to BBC World, where his extensive knowledge of the Middle East proved invaluable. His intrepid spirit was now given free rein: he purchased a video camera, which “allowed me to go off to places like Iran, Oman, the UAE, and shoot my own features, entirely self-taught, which I would then sell.” He became the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent based in Cairo, and was in the region for 9/11. He recounts with a mischievous laugh how he took advantage of his official placement on Blair’s plane tour in order to gain access as a journalist to Saudi Arabia. “Having got in, I then said ‘Bye, see you!’ and I disappeared off the radar for two weeks.”
His subsequent undercover reporting from Buraydah—“the spiritual heartland of Al-Qaeda”—attests to his fiercely daring nature; indeed, he demonstrates not a flicker of fear when describing his “fascinating” time in 2003 at the Shkin Firebase. “It was right hard up on the Pakistan border and was getting rocketed every night by the Taliban.”
It is not hard to see why Gardner commands such respect. His job is to analyse global security issues, often terror-related—so does he think that terrorism is the greatest threat faced by the West? “No I don’t. I really don’t,” he stresses. “First of all, I disagreed with what David Cameron said about a year ago, that ISIS represents an existential threat to us. No, it doesn’t. They haven’t got ICBMs. A country that has ICBMs does, in theory, represent an existential threat.”
But what of the Trump presidency and its implications for Muslims and the Middle East? We are speaking before the inauguration, and his response is measured. “We have got to distinguish President-Elect Trump from President Trump and judge him on his actions. People say things in campaigns for effect that they won’t necessarily put into practice.” Yet it is undeniable that Trump will play into the hands of terrorists.
“I have no doubt that extremists like ISIS will prey on every single comment they can wherever they see the opportunity to portray President Trump as being in some way representative of the West, of America. They will use that as a recruiting card. They definitely wanted him as President, he’s a much easier hate figure for them than someone like Obama.”
Gardner wears his prodigious intellect lightly, cautioning me against “hyperbole” when I refer to the monumental success of his debut novel, the spy thriller Crisis. Set largely in Columbia, a country that fascinates him—“Columbia is to Latin America as I see Egypt to the Middle East; it’s my gateway, my passageway in”—it follows the adventures of an MI6 agent seeking to foil a terror plot. Having written two bestselling memoirs, Gardner “wanted to have a bit of fun with this” and is now in the final stages of penning a sequel.
Gardner is captivating company, and from skiing to photography, and birdwatching to exploring remote corners of the world, there seems to be no end to his talents. He has refused to let his injuries hold him back and has always grabbed life by the scruff of the neck. With that characteristic stoicism, he reflects on his attackers. “I’m not into bitterness and vengeance. Do I forgive them? Absolutely not.”
