How to send stories by carrier pigeon, when to run when you are under fire and the best way to brush off tweets were amongst titbits of information from Alan Cowell’s discussion of his new book ‘The Paris Correspondent.’

Cowell has long been a correspondent with the New York Times, and before that worked for Reuters. This is his third book.

In discussion with Charles Glass, freelance writer and former chief Middle East correspondent with ABC News in Beirut, Cowell says that reporting and producing news has changed for good. The book’s two male protagonists grapple with the fast pace of this change in the news industry. Cowell reads an excerpt:

“News men and newswomen were going down with the ships on which they had once sailed the kindly oceans of expense account lunches, five-star hotels and mortal peril. Print, that great, gorgeous messy alchemy of ink and hot type and whirring reals of paper and working stiffs in stained overalls was expiring, but not quite finished.”

And as Cowell suggests, there is no reason not to reminisce a little about how things used to be:

“I remember in N’Djamena I was doing an interview with [President] Goukouni Oueddei… you had to go across the river to Cameroon to be able to find a phone… and on the bar there, there was a direct dial telephone… located next to an ice bucket where there was always a fresh bottle of champagne…”

“And there was also a curfew… and you had to be poled across the Chari River in a dugout canoe. And I remember saying to President Oueddei, “I’m sorry I’m going to have to cut this short because I have to catch the last pirogue before curfew.”

Those times have gone, says Cowell:

“If you say ‘Is that a more pleasant way of earning a living than slaving over a computer screen all day trying to bat off tweets like mosquitoes?’ Then yes, sure. But we can’t turn the clock back and what we have to do now is… bringing the standards and the values that have always made newspapers sell, into this new era.”

It was in Zimbabwe reporting shortly before independence, that Cowel was able to hone his carrier pigeon sending techniques. With no way to send his stories back he was given a huddle of “cooing carrier pigeons” by the last white mayor of Bulawayo and the last editor of the Bulawayo chronicle.

“…we didn’t know exactly how we were supposed to cope with them and he said look, Sid said “you hold the birds legs between those fingers, you put your thumb over the neck, you give it a little kiss and whisper something nice to it, then you loft it up to the air… And you write the story on a 30 packet of Madison cigarettes – there was a small bit of tissue paper inside and you could write 400 words of spidery script on it.

It is hard to avoid the feeling that news has definitely changed.

Join us at the Frontline Club for an evening with Alan Cowell as he discusses his latest novel and the real life stories that inspired it with broadcaster, journalist and writer Charles Glass.

A long-time correspondent for the New York Times in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell previously worked at Reuters, achieving the distinction of being the last correspondent to date to file by carrier pigeon.

Now heading the New York Times web-based breaking news operation in Paris, it is the shift from print to digital news that provides the backdrop to The Paris Correspondent, his second novel.

The book follows Ed Clancy and Joe Shelby, both reporters for The Paris Star, an English-language newspaper based in French capital. Having survived reporting from war-torn countries they now find themselves under attack from something very different to enemy fire: the Internet and 24-hour news cycle.

With:

Alan Cowell, a senior correspondent for The New York Times based in Paris. He is also the author of A Walking Guide: A Novel and The Terminal Spy: The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko.

Charles Glass, a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau and was chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since then, he has been a freelance writer, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.

Cowell has dome something better. His meticulously researched opus – The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder – The First Act of Nuclear Terrorism and the New Cold War – fully justifies its sub-title, which is perhaps the more important part of the story. “Who?” is partly answered in the evidence piled up against Litvinenko’s erstwhile colleague Andrei Lugovoi, whom the British authorities have tried, unsuccessfully, to have extradited from Moscow .
 
Cowell’s summing up of the forensic investigation which proved Litvinenko was poisoned with a minute trace of the isotope Polonium-210, sprayed into a teapot is worthy of “CSI”. It also makes clear how close the authorities came to NOT finding the  murder weapon. Polonium only showed up when a secret facility tested Litvinenko’s final urine sample.

“If the (British)  Ministry of Defence scientists had not run the extremely unusual tests when they did”, Cowell writes. “it is conceivable that the nature of the poisoning would have remained a mystery, as Litvinenko’s killers surely intended it to be…” His description of the poison at work is chilling: “…the isotope tore relentlessly through his bone marrow and his organs, destroying the immune system. The lethal dose measured a tiny fraction of a microgram…This was no ordinary murder.” Rhe “no ordinary” aspect takes thia book to another level, an artful  melding of  “who?” with “why?”

The inescapable conclusion is that the other half of  “who” is the then president, now prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Cowell connects him to the “Why?” with a deft weaving of the role of the Russian oligarchs, especially Litvinenko’s one-time employer and Putin’s enemy Boris Berezovsky and their power struggles with the Kremlin and the Russian security service, the FSB.

Meticulous reporting, using intelligence sources and participants in the affair, shines a light into the usually opaque world of Russian policy. To restore Russia ‘s place as a world power Putin could not tolerate dissent from regional governments, troublesome members the Duma (parliament), journalists (twenty mysteriously killed, including Anna  Politkovskaya) or dissidents like Litvinenko railing from ostensibly safe exile. “Putin,” Cowell writes, “restored what the Russians call the ‘vertical’ power structure, whose apex is the Kremlin.”

The Terminal Spy sums up: “The death of Litvinenko would come to be seen as the defining moment of the Putin presidency. Putin sought to restore Moscow ‘s greatness. The death of Litvinenko ensured that Russia ‘s reputation as a land to be feared for the worst of reasons was revived for all the world to see.” Given that the book was written well before the latest clashes in Georgia, the observation is prescient to say the least.

Reviewed by Allen Pizzey, roving correspondent for CBS News, based in Rome. The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder – The First Act of Nuclear Terrorism and the New Cold War by Alan Cowell published by Doubleday, £16.99.