David Holden, chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times, was murdered in Cairo in the early hours of December 7, 1977. He was killed from behind with a single 9mm bullet, precisely aimed down into his heart while he was in the front passenger seat of a car that had presumably picked him up on his arrival at Cairo airport. His body was found early next morning, lying composed on its back, his spectacles slightly askew, on a dusty street bordering the Al-Azhar University campus. In Murder in Cairo, Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo (henceforth G&M) try to unravel two mysteries. Who killed David Holden? Why?
Trying to solve a murder immediately after it has happened is hard enough. I know. As then-head of The Sunday Times investigative Insight team, I more or less ran the paper’s initial and fruitless effort; I figure in G&M’s narrative. Seeking to solve it 50 years later I regard as close to impossible. Most participants have died; the memories of those who remain will have faded or reshaped (I do not exempt my own).
Gillman was a valued colleague; Midolo is an industrious young reporter. (Fifty-or-so years ago, I would have brought him into Insight). They have done a prodigious amount of work and compiled a mountain of information, far too much of which they share. They frame the book as a narrative of their investigation. Even so, the 464 pages could usefully shed 100 pages or more.
G&M’s arresting conclusion is that Holden was gay, deeply in the closet, and worked for the KGB and possibly also the CIA, probably recruited by the man who might have been Holden’s first – and was likely his most enduring – lover, Leo Silberman. KGB? First things first. What evidence persuades G&M that Holden worked for the KGB? They offer only a twisted skein. It’s a report, secondhand, of a confession Holden supposedly made to Fred Halliday, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics for 20 years. Halliday was a prolific and well-regarded scholar with trenchant left-leaning analyses of Middle East politics. As he was dying of cancer in the summer of 2010, he phoned an old friend, Roger Hardy. Hardy, a long-time MidEast analyst with the BBC World Service, shared Halliday’s views on the baleful effects of western interventions in the region. Hardy told G&M that, in this phone call, the dying Halliday asserted that as he was struggling with his first book in the early 70s, a Marxist analysis of Saudi Arabia, Holden turned up to help.
He offered copious notes from his own researches for Farewell to Arabia, his book of a decade earlier. So indebted was Halliday that he titled his book Arabia Without Sultans in homage to Holden’s recent Greece Without Columns. Then, a few years later according to Halliday, Holden paid him another visit. Halliday’s dating was vague, but it points to the late 70s, when he was researching another book eventually titled Mercenaries in the Persian Gulf.
Halliday was startled by how much Holden knew and was willing to tell him about secret SAS operations in Yemen. Holden, he said, replied “We are in the same side, you know”, then claimed to be a Marxist and an agent for the KGB.
Why Halliday thought this important enough to warrant a death-bed revelation isn’t clear. Odder still is that Halliday had never mentioned this when Gillman interviewed him in 1990. What Halliday told Gillman then was a very different story: that a fellow academic PJ Vatikiotis, professor of politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies and author of a standard history of modern Egypt, relayed to Halliday what the head of Egyptian police had told him about Holden’s murder: “We did it. They asked us to do it. Holden was working for the KGB.” Why on earth didn’t Halliday, recounting this to Gillman, add surely the crucial point: Holden himself had told him that?
None of this tangle strikes me as a wholly solid basis for asserting Holden’s political allegiance. Further problems intrude. Holden’s supposed Marxist sympathies are rebutted by everything he wrote. His elegant reports reflected to advantage his 20-plus years as a roving foreign correspondent. But the opinions in his Sunday Times journalism were Establishment conservative. Which was what Frank Giles, then the paper’s foreign editor, would have wanted (though G&M do note, below, a few intemperate exceptions).
Nor do Holden’s two books, both excellent pieces of reporting, support this. Farewell to Arabia and Greece Without Columns were on topics lending themselves to Marxist analysis. It’s absent from both. And the KGB? G&M finally permit themselves to wonder “So what use… would Holden have been to the KGB”. Certainly not as an “agent of influence”. Holden’s four articles on Allende’s attempt at a Marxist regime in Chile in the early 70s were, G&M note, savagely critical. They observe that in Greece Without Columns, his lenient treatment of its 1967-74 military dictatorship accorded with American views. His 1963 report on Cuba under Castro recorded its descent into totalitarianism and the poverty he opined this had created, while, G&M point out, “downplaying the consequences of the stranglehold exerted by the US economic boycott”. G&M further point to Holden’s “unrestrained attack” in January 1972 on Patrice Lumumba, socialist prime minister of the Congolese Republic who threatened western mining interests. After Lumumba was overthrown, tortured and shot, Holden wrote he had been “cheated of the last moment of drama in a dramatic career”.
Where did Holden’s true allegiances lie?
These so clearly suggest views that accord with America’s rather than, one presumes, the KGB’s that even G&M are driven to wonder if “Holden was at pains to demonstrate right-wing credentials precisely in order to conceal his true allegiance”. Here we come to G&M’s fundamental problems. There are several. They provide zero evidence of Holden’s supposed “true allegiance”. By the end of the book, they simply assert: “Holden was leftwing, but not an extremist like Silberman.” To repeat, they provide zero evidence that Holden had left-wing political sympathies, still less allegiances. Similarly, they assert that Silberman recruited Holden to the KGB, but they provide no evidence Silberman worked for the KGB, still less that he recruited Holden.
Those aside, what theories do G&M consider about Holden’s murder? Political revenge? Was the killing designed to disrupt the Egypt-Israel peace process, then just getting under way? Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat had taken the courageous (ultimately fatal) risk of going to Jerusalem between November 19 and 21,1977 and proclaiming he wanted peace. An Israeli deputation was coming to begin peace talks in Cairo on December 14. A “rejectionist front” of disapproving Arab leaders met on December 2-5 in Libya. Holden’s industrious 10-day trip through the non-Gulf Arab states had been to assess the prospects for Sadat’s initiative. Cairo – with an interview with Sadat lined up – was to be his last stop.
Holden’s final 2,000-word dispatch to The Sunday Times, filed on December 3 from Jordan, was an optimistic “peace may break out after all”, dismissing the “disintegrating quality” of that “rejectionist front”. When Holden arrived in Cairo, was he killed by “rejectionist front” adherents there to disrupt or at least overshadow this Israeli deputation? G&M buy into this:
“The killing was an execution and was intended to be recognisable as such…” But G&M also record the US Embassy in Cairo’s report on the murder: “If it had been political murder, police assume perpetrators would have claimed credit or given some public signals at this time.”
In reality, Holden’s killing was so unremarked that, when a colleague and I went to Cairo’s Kasr-al Ainy morgue to confirm the identity of his corpse, I recall the attendant saying – as we stepped around a body on the floor – they were so overcrowded that they would normally have consigned this unidentified European male to a mass grave in another few days. Holden would have vanished. So much for sending a message.
Other theories G&M consider: Israeli revenge? The Sunday Times had published back in June a devastating report on Israel’s torture of Palestinians. An Israeli publication had named Holden, mistakenly, as one of its authors. This, The Sunday Times immediately denied: Gillman was actually the principal reporter. But did Israel kill Holden as revenge? G&M acknowledge there is zero evidence for this. (They don’t mention an earlier Sunday Times report I well recall on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners. That brought passionate denials, complaints to the Press Council, a deputation to the newspaper, demands to confront the reporters – the standard Israeli responses, some way short of murder.)
Mistaken identity? One of our theories at the time, of course. Who could have been the intended victim? One name stood out: David Hirst, The Guardian’s MidEast correspondent based in Beirut. Hirst had caused a stir with extensive reporting on the high life and corruption enveloping Jehan Sadat, wife of the Egyptian president. This was widely reported as enraging Sadat. A recent account of MidEast politics in those years calls Sadat “emotional and serially impulsive”. Could he have ordered Hirst to be killed if he ever came to Cairo?
We consulted Hirst. He thought that all too likely. He is now nearly 90 and I happen to know he still believes it. When he had last arrived in Cairo, he told us – coming from Rome, thus side-stepping Egyptian monitoring of paperwork on flights from Beirut – the Cairo security cops had tried to prevent him leaving. Hirst believes he owes his survival to two facts. He had arrived in a press party accompanying David Owen, the British foreign secretary of the day, and another of that group, Bob Fisk of the BBC, had insisted that if Hirst had to stay, so would he. One assumes the British politician would have intervened if necessary.
G&M reject this notion of mistaken identity – as did Harry Evans in My Paper Chase. Why? Because, they say, the killers must have known they had Holden in their car. Why? Because Holden had been driven from Cairo airport about midnight, but his time of death was between 3.00 and 5.00 next morning. As his killers drove Holden around, he would have had ample time to prove his identity.
This is nonsense. When the BBC’s Bob Jobbins and Reuters’ Fuad al Gawhary came to the morgue to identify Holden, his corpse had been in a chilled drawer for three days – far too late for his body temperature, even had it been taken, to indicate time of death. Nor do I recall hearing in Cairo that 3am to 5am window. I have no idea from whom it came.
He had no warning he was about to die
My memory aside, is it remotely likely that Holden would have acquiesced in being driven around for three hours? He would surely have put up a fight. Evans says that the autopsy finally performed in London “indicated that he had put up a fight, possibly that his wrists had been tied”. Not so. Professor David Cameron of London Hospital did find bruises on Holden’s left knuckles and right thumb, plus a bruise on his left elbow. Those might indicate a fight, he said, though modest marks scarcely indicating a man fighting for his life. They could equally have happened, Cameron said, as Holden was lifted from the car and arranged on the Cairo roadside. Cameron made no mention of signs that Holden’s wrists had been tied.
In reality, Holden’s countenance was so placid that the cops who saw his body beside the road momentarily thought he must be asleep or drugged. I recall interior minister Nabawi Ismail – a veteran cop – remarking on this repose. Holden, he said, had no warning he was about to die. Occam’s Razor rules: simplest is likeliest. Holden, suspecting nothing, was shot shortly after he got into that car.
OK, murdered by whom? G&M’s impressively compiled chronology points to a possible answer. The Egyptian authorities – from the Cairo police up to the interior ministry – initially pursued a standard murder investigation with great vigour. (I recall being told the cops split into teams, each looking at different aspects of the killing.) “The killing,” they told us, “was a very skilful and premeditated operation.” But when Gillman and a colleague returned to Cairo a few months later, three senior security department officials told them flatly that Holden’s death had been the work of terrorists. The goal had been to embarrass the security services on the eve of the Sadat/Israel peace conference. Holden had not been a target, merely an opportunity.
The British Embassy was spun a more elaborate version. David Blatherwick, head of chancery (and later ambassador), was told that these terrorists were either a group of Communists or a group composed of Arabs and Europeans. No such group was ever identified, let alone arrested. The simplest explanation for this volte-face? Holden had been killed by an Egyptian squad of such clout that, when the cops/security officials belatedly learned this, investigations were shut down and this cover story of terrorists was concocted.
That accords with what Muhamed Hassanein Heikal told me at the time. Heikal was vastly well-informed. Rising as the closest confidant of President Nasser, Heikal had been editor-in-chief of the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram for almost 20 years. But his relationship with Nasser’s successor Sadat was rocky. Heikal so disapproved of Sadat’s opening to Israel in 1974 – the events Holden arrived in Cairo to cover – that Sadat ultimately jailed him for a while for “treasonous activities”.
So what Heikal told me a couple of months after Holden’s death took courage. Swearing me to secrecy, he said it had indeed been mistaken identity. Holden had been mistaken for David Hirst. Sadat had ordered Hirst’s assassination if he ever came to Cairo. In Arabic script, the names Hirst and Holden look much alike. Someone in Cairo had most probably misread the airline’s list of incoming passengers.
Why did Heikal tell me? Well, he owed me, and he had reason to trust my discretion. I had saved him from significant embarrassment by quietly correcting multiple errors in his account of the 1973 Yom Kippur/Ramadan War when I edited a long extract for The Sunday Times. He then asked me to collaborate on another book. We had become friends.
I relayed Heikal’s story to Harry, of course. He refers to it in My Paper Chase: “One well placed but very frightened informant confided that he knew Sadat had sent an assassination team to the airport and swore us to secrecy.” Evans rejects this: “The crucial difficulty was that David Holden was clearly the intended target.” How so? Primarily because Evans points to that supposed 3am-5am window – which, to repeat, is wrong.
Heikal knew he was taking a risk even pointing to what he knew. When Michael Adams, a veteran BBC correspondent on the MidEast beat, waylaid Heikal, a longtime friend, in a Cairo hotel sometime in the 90s and asked who had killed Holden, Heikal said only “We did” before a lift door safely closed on him. G&M also report what Heikal said as long as 15 years later to a young American reporter when she asked about Holden’s death: “I beg you not to pursue this case.” It was “a state matter”, he told her, and “a case that is closed and can never be reopened”. He added: “I liked David Holden very much, but he was much more than a journalist.” Hinting, presumably, at what Vatikiotis had relayed to Halliday: the Egyptian alibi that Holden had been killed because he was a KGB agent.
So to the basic truth. Track back into the story of Holden’s alleged KGB connection: you find it originated with the Egyptians finally acknowledging that they had killed him, but advancing an explanation that didn’t implicate their president.
Then the files started to go missing
The mystery of the thefts: there was another reason Harry Evans rejected the theory of mistaken identity. We discovered, during our initial investigations into Holden’s death, that what Harry calls “a substantial number” of telexes were missing from our foreign department files. Most related to our investigations, but some from earlier, including telexes relating to Holden’s trip.
I recall those thefts. In our mildly paranoid state after Holden’s murder, we found them deeply disquieting. As Harry recorded, we even enlisted the help of Scotland Yard’s surveillance outfit to secretly monitor our own wireroom. Zero result, and suddenly the thefts stopped. G&M and Harry take the thefts to prove Holden’s death involved an international conspiracy with tentacles in London. Perhaps so. My evolving view was that the Foreign
Office, more likely MI6, were sufficiently interested in Holden’s murder to keep track of what we were learning. My further guess was that the paper’s foreign manager, Donald McCormick – a veteran of Ian Fleming’s days, fairly openly contemptuous of the kids Harry had brought in – had kept them informed in the simplest way, handing over the telexes. Harry thought me “too cynical”, I recall, and continued to believe the thefts were evidence of an international conspiracy.
G&M also address a mystery evocative of Sherlock Holmes: the strange incident of the man who wasn’t Holden. David Halton was a young and able roving foreign correspondent for the Canadian network CBC. He came to Cairo twice in 1974, in August and September. On his September visit, he was surprised to be met by a couple of men who said they were from the ministry of information (or perhaps they said Cairo press centre). They had come to escort him to his hotel. Standard practice for incoming foreign press. As they drove, one said: “We have set up some of the meetings you have requested.” Halton replied: “I’m sorry, but I think you’ve got the wrong person.” “You are David Holden of The Sunday Times?” he was asked.
“No,” he said, “I’m David Halton from CBC.” After some Arabic muttering, he was told: “Well, we are almost at the hotel. We will drop you off.” Which they did.
Tantalising questions arise. So far as The Sunday Times knew, Holden’s last visit to Cairo had been in 1972. Could this incident, G&M wonder, mean that some group in Cairo had been lying in wait for Holden for years? If Halton hadn’t said who he was, would he have been killed?
A more basic question, surely, is why did those escorts believe Halton was Holden? Occam’s Razor once more. Holden’s contract with The Sunday Times committed him only to six months a year. The rest of the year he could write for whomever he chose. He wrote frequently for The New York Times and its magazine, but for other publications too. (Holden was close-mouthed to his Sunday Times colleagues. We would never have expected to learn of his freelance gigs.) Isn’t the simplest explanation that Holden was arriving in Cairo on some freelance job, for which he had, as he usually did, put in requests for several interviews? Certainly, 1974 was a big year in Egypt/Israel affairs. David Halton thought it worth two trips. Kissinger was finishing up a year of shuttle diplomacy. There was a lot for Holden to report and opine upon. No need to posit a vengeful conspiracy.
If Holden was a KGB agent, who recruited him? G&M nominate Leo Silberman. Silberman was an exotic, his background far from Holden’s sickly childhood in the northern port city of Sunderland, with his escape to college followed only by a numbing decade as a teacher. Silberman was from a wealthy German Jewish merchant family. He had been educated in Switzerland, going on to secure multiple degrees in South Africa. He was, G&M judge, “a man of undoubted academic brilliance, of multiple interests and notable achievements” – as multiple online obituaries catalogue. He was clearly a man of vast charm. He was also a promiscuous homosexual.
But KGB? In a notable find, G&M unearthed in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale a file of 73 letters Silberman wrote from 1935 to 1950 to another German émigré then living in Paris. G&M say “this correspondence is the closest to a full confession that Silberman had been a Communist fanatic, a Comintern spy, an all-round Soviet agent of influence”. By my reading, the letters are less portentous. They show that Silberman was a committed Communist from a young age (Silberman, recall, was born in 1915) who seduced young men into the Communist Party. But Comintern spy? Soviet agent of influence? The evidence simply isn’t there.
G&M do find a connection between Silberman and Michael Straight, the rich American who was a KGB agent and good friends with the famous Cambridge quartet: Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Philby. In his memoir, Straight records an encounter with Silberman in 1934, during which Silberman said to him: “I thought you were one of us.” G&M say this proves Silberman was a Communist as early as the 1930s. I own a copy of Straight’s memoir After Long Silence, so I checked. Silberman’s comment had nothing to do with politics. It came after Straight had rejected a homosexual pass. In that memoir, Straight does write about the numerous Soviet agents of his acquaintance. Silberman isn’t one of them.
Winding up. What to make of Holden’s murder? I still don’t know. How would I rate G&M’s investigation? I am impressed by their industry, but I conclude they have fallen into the classic trap of investigative journalism. They fell in love with their thesis and stretched to find anything to support it, rather than anything to challenge it.