John R. Bradley

JEDDAH — Has the BBC learned absolutely nothing from the Kelly inquiry?

It would appear not.

Even before the inquiry has finished deliberating, the news organization is up to its old tricks again, this time running a hugely contentious — and ultimately baseless — story on Saudi Arabia.

Again, the BBC based its story on only a single source, Saad Al-Faqih, a London-based Saudi opposition figure who is perhaps the most unreliable source for information on Saudi affairs in the world. The Saudi government was not even considered important enough to be quoted.

The BBC website credited the information to “Saudi police”. But anyone who has covered Saudi Arabia as a journalist for more than half an hour knows that “Saudi police” never reveal such information, especially to Western news organizations.

Phone calls started to come through from the Western media at the rate of one a minute. The Daily Telegraph told me they wanted to do a front-page splash. I told them I smelt a rat.

Al-Faqih has a vested interest in causing instability. He has a track record of spreading misinformation. And, as I recently wrote in The Independent, almost everything he says is “unsubstantiated, albeit entertaining, gossip.”

His main goal is to bring a regime to Saudi Arabia that would make the Taleban look like one of the most liberal the region has ever known. I have never understood why the Western media quotes him at such length. The Guardian is especially fond of his anti-House of Saud jibes. At the same time the Guardian thinks Saudi Arabia is too closed and repressive. But, Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker, if you are reading this: Isn’t this all a bit self-contradictory?

It was the “flagship” Today program on Radio 4 through which Al-Faqih’s false report — that a truck full of missiles smuggled in from Yemen had been found outside Jeddah — was apparently spread.

This was somehow linked by the BBC to British Airway’s decision to cancel flights to Saudi Arabia because a terrorist cell planned to down one of its planes. It all kind of made sense, until you looked for the evidence. And then, when you found that there wasn’t any, it suddenly made no sense at all.

Readers will remember that it was on the “flagship” Today program that BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan gave his now infamous report about how the Blair government “sexed up” a report justifying the war on Iraq.

Need one say more?

Amazingly, the British Foreign Office backed up Al-Faqih’s claims by issuing a transcript of a Saudi Radio broadcast on Aug. 26.

A researcher at Channel 4 News in Britain sent me a copy of the transcript, which had been forwarded to him by the Foreign Office. Even a cursory reading proves that its contents, rather than backing up what Al-Faqih said, in fact flatly contradicted all the claims he made.

The transcript issued by the Foreign Office, which in briefings yesterday backed the BBC’s claims, highlighted in red typeface what they said was the justification for the BBC story.

In fact, nowhere in the transcript was it mentioned that “missiles” were found on Aug. 26 outside Jeddah. It referred only to “RPGs” — rocket-propelled grenades — and they originated from Jizan.

Now, our dear journalistic colleagues on the Today program, please read the following sentences carefully: Jizan is near the Yemeni border. The Yemeni border is hundreds — repeat, hundreds — of kilometers south of Jeddah. Both cities start with the letter “J”. That’s about the only thing that links the two cities in this story.

Moreover, RPGs have been found on an almost weekly basis in the Kingdom as a result of an ongoing government crackdown on Islamists following the May 12 bombings in Riyadh.

If all that were not enough, while the BBC English-language website was reporting this “news” of a massive missile seizure, the BBC’s Arabic language service was reporting an official denial of the story by a “senior Saudi source”.

Things were going from the sublime to the ridiculous. I turned off my mobile phone. The best policy when it comes to such utter madness, when one finds oneself in the thick of things, is to go to sleep for a couple of hours. Sure enough, when I woke up Frank Gardener, the BBC’s “security correspondent”, had admitted that he had made a mistake.

And what a huge, huge mistake it was.

- Arab News Opinion 5 September 2003