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- [00:01]
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- [02:31]
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- [03:37]
Thomas Small
Most journalists begin their careers believing, at least a little, that the world makes sense and that if you shine enough light on it, things will improve. But what happens when history has other plans? How much of what we're living through is inevitable, and how much is shaped by the assumptions we all carried at the start? Paul Kenyon has spent the past three decades reporting from the fault lines of global politics. He infiltrated Iran's nuclear program, was swept up in Libya's Arab Spring revolution, confronted the paradox of war inside the prisons of Russian occupied Ukraine and closer to home in England, inadvertently found himself in the middle of a race riot. Along the way, he's been detained as a suspected spy, he's interrogated a dictator's son, and he's watched the promises of the post Cold War world steadily unravel. Here he recounts highlights from his storied career and opens up about the perils and pitfalls of 21st century journalism. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted Conversation with Paul Kenyon.
- [05:08]
Paul, hello. Thank you so much for coming onto Conflicted. I'm very grateful to you.
- [05:13]
Paul Kenyon
It's good to be here.
- [05:14]
Thomas Small
Now, you're here for two reasons, Paul. The first is to talk about your new podcast series, A Fellow Message Herd Stablemate, Two Nottingham Lads, which UK listeners can access on BBC Sounds and which is available everywhere else, wherever you get your podcasts. The second reason you're on the show today, Paul, is to talk about your remarkable career, which holds a lot of lessons I think for us here on Conflicted as we try to navigate and understand the world we're living in and the times we've been living through. But to start, let's talk about the new series because Paul man, I found two Nottingham lads thrilling, illuminating, dramatic. So I'd like to just jump right in and ask you to describe the series. In a way, it's what it says right on the tin. It's a story about two young men from Nottingham, but really it goes places nobody would expect.
- [06:13]
Paul Kenyon
So I was in Ukraine quite a lot and we're going to talk about that later, but I was there at the beginning of the full scale invasion in 2022 and this extraordinary video turned up where it was one British guy interrogating or interviewing another British guy. Now, the more I dug into it, the more I realised this was an extraordinary situation, which was that there were two British lads there, one who'd fought for Ukraine as part of the Ukrainian army, the other was on the side of the Russians. So he was described as a Russian propagandist. And the one who was fighting for Ukraine, called Aidan Aslan, he was eventually caught in Mariupol. So he's there at the siege of Mariupol. That's sort of the big moment that we all watched on social media where Mariupol's surrounded and they're all in the steelworks and it's an appalling situation. They're running out of food, they're running out of ammunition and they're given a choice. They either surrender or they try and run across about 160 km of enemy territory. Anyway, it ended up with Adan Aslan, the one who'd fought for the Ukrainian army, being captured by the Russians. He's taken into custody in Russian controlled Donetsk and at that point he's interrogated or interviewed, however you want to say it. And the person who walks through the door to do this to him is another British guy who just happens to be from exactly the same city, Nottingham, in the uk. So you have this extraordinary situation where there are two British guys sitting there in this small cell room somewhere in Donetsk, in a war that doesn't belong to either of them, one on the Russian side, one on the Ukrainian side. And I just thought, you know, if you did that, this is a bit of a cliche, but if you did that as a Hollywood film, people would say it's impossible. That never happened, they couldn't have met up. But it's this almost Tolstoy esque kind of sweep of A story about love, because they both fell in love to get there in the first place, in Ukraine with Ukrain love and war and death, all those really crucial moments in a good drama and someone's life totally, man.
- [08:19]
Thomas Small
It is very dramatic. And as I listened, rapped really to Two Nottingham Lads, once again, I was reminded of the remarkable course that history has taken over the past 30 years or so. So I'm 46, almost 47 years old, and if I put myself back in the headspace I was in, say, at the turn of the millennium and tried to remember what I assumed then would happen over the course of the next quarter century, I never would have guessed anything like what happened. And these two Nottingham dudes who both end up fighting on opposite sides in Eastern Ukraine is a symbol of this. So when you're living through an era of monumental global change, monumental and radically unexpected change, you're moving through that change in slow motion. You're experiencing it in real time. But sometimes podcasts like 2 Nottingham Lads Force you up and out of that slow mo speed and you get a glimpse of the larger trajectory. And really, Paul, your entire journalistic career has unfolded during that period in which we can all see now America's unipolar moment morphs into our nascent multipolar age. And so, you know, what I'm hoping is we can kind of do a whistle stop tour over some of the highlights from your career and you can tell us some of your firsthand experiences that I think do reveal a lot about the way in which we arrived where we are.
- [09:46]
Paul Kenyon
It's interesting, in Two Nottingham Lads, it goes right to the heart of what you're saying. You've got two British lads. One is on the side of defending and fighting for liberal democracy. The other has decided that he is supportive to some extent or another of an autocratic state being Putin's state and, you know, coming from the same city. The question is, how did two lads from similar types of backgrounds end up on completely polar opposite sides of this conflict in a war that isn't their own?
- [10:12]
Thomas Small
Totally.
- [10:13]
Paul Kenyon
That's quite important because it's not that they've just sat there at home and thought about it and argued with their friends in the pub. They were so inspired by their particular position, they fought for it. Well, one didn't fight, he's a propagandist. The other did fight. But, I mean, they put it into action.
- [10:29]
Thomas Small
Well, what about you, Paul? What about your background? Where do you come from? And really, this is a bit of a high level question. I Suppose. But when did you become aware that the world you were promised in the 90s, as I was promised of a smooth, liberal, internationalist sort of world of peace and prosperity? When did you become aware that that world was not gonna materialize?
- [10:51]
Paul Kenyon
I'm still not sure it won't. It's just taking longer than expected.
- [10:54]
Thomas Small
There you go. That's a great answer.
- [10:57]
Paul Kenyon
Bit of hope. Yeah. I still do have hope. I mean, I think that my journalistic career, I was born in the north of England, and I wanted to be a journalist and I wanted to be an investigative journalist, and I wanted to hold people to account. Governments, people, dictators. And I worked for a long time for the BBC, which, as we know, means that sometimes it's a little bit difficult or uneasy for me to have an opinion, because at the BBC you're not supposed to have an opinion. So you're really going to have to drag this from me. But I think that what actually happened was that I started doing more and more foreign stuff for the BBC, making documentaries, going abroad an awful lot. And one of the countries that quite early on was on my radar was Libya, and it was Gaddafi's Libya. And I think one of the things that drew me there, and this is gonna sound phenomenally superficial, it was the fact it was difficult to get in. And as a journalist, if something's difficult to get to, you want to be there and be one of the first. So I spent a lot of time pushing the Libyan authorities under Gaddafi to allow me into their country, which finally I did. But, you know, that feeling, I want to be there. Cause everybody says it's impossible. You ain't going to be able to do it.
- [12:06]
Thomas Small
I want to talk about your time in Libya, but first I want to talk about Iran. You know, if you could take us back to 2005. You were with the BBC and you accompanied UN inspectors to sensitive Iranian nuclear sites, including Natanz, one of the sites that was bombed back in June during the 12 Day War. However, back then, Iran's nuclear program was hardly on anyone's radar. Yet people in the know knew that they were working hard to develop their own nuclear deterrent. And already the international community was mobilizing to stop, or at least to control it. So you were there in Iran in 2005 visiting nuclear facilities.
- [12:50]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, I mean, when I look back now, it's pretty reckless, actually. And we first of all got invited in after a great deal of pressure, and we were told that we could go and do a series of interviews with the blessing of the authorities in Iran. And we got there and we interviewed the Vice President. He did the whole interview in Farsi. I had a translator, which bought him a lot of time. It meant every time I asked a question, there'd be a long explanation from the translator, then he'd respond. We went backwards and forwards like this for a considerable period of time. At the end, I remember he said, how was that, Mr. Kenyon? Did you enjoy your interview? He spoke perfect English. And I realized then that I'd kind of been played in the sense that he was just. He needed the time to think about some of these questions. He wanted to hear where I was coming from, from what kind of position the BBC was going to take on this. And it was about their hidden nuclear program. So at the end of it, he said he was very polite. We all drank tea together, we shook hands, we left and we got a call literally on the way down to the car park to pick up our vehicle, which said, so he's given you an interview and that's it. You have no more interviews in Iran. You're welcome to stay for the week if you like, but you won't be doing any more. You've come here, you've got your interview with the Vice President. Get lost effectively. And we looked at each other. I was the producer, reporter, kind of in charge. Quite young really, to be in that position with a cameraman and a local fixer. I was furious. And I said, you know, we've come all this way. There is no way that we're just going home. And there's no way I'm gonna sit here twiddling my thumbs, going to the sauna in the hotel and just resting for a bit. So what we did was I said, we know where these alleged nuclear facilities are. One of them's in Natanz, another was in Isfahan. There was one in Tehran near a military bas. So we said, let's just do it. Let's go and see if we can secretly film them. So we set off, without any escort from the Iranian authorities, into the wilds of Iran without permissions. I remember when we turned up in Isfahan, I went into a tiny little record shop, an old fashioned record shop, and I was just fascinated just to see what kind of music people were listening to. They had old Beatles records and things. It was great. And I looked round and I saw this guy and he was standing next to me and had a little plaster, like a butterfly plaster over his nose, which is kind of unusual. And I realized that I'd seen exactly the same guy in our hotel in Tehran, and now he was in Esfahan, many hundreds of miles away. So we were being followed. We got to the hotel. As we walked into the reception, somebody came over to me, a young woman, and said, can I just tell you that a car came into the car park behind you. You've been followed in. You're under surveillance. So we were followed in Iran, and obviously that shouldn't be a surprise. That's what they're going to do. But we managed. We got to Natanz, and I remember driving past Natanz quite late in the evening, and it was snowing, freezing February time. And we had a van with curtains in it, and we managed to film some of the Natanz facility as we went by. So we got what we wanted. But, you know, what you're saying is important. We were there at the same time as the nuclear inspectors, the international inspectors, and they were very helpful with us. What really blew my mind was that they were absolutely certain at the time that Iran had a far greater and more advanced nuclear program than they were letting on to the rest of the world, even though they were supposed to be being monitored by international agencies. So they had it then, and they were very, very close to having something that was usable. So that was the thrust of our story. What have Iran got in terms of nuclear weapons and what have they. What are they pretending they have? And what do the international authorities think they've got scientifically?
- [16:37]
Thomas Small
That's really interesting. Those nuclear scientists then were fairly convinced that Iran's nuclear program was more advanced than people knew. And that's really interesting because, you know, UN nuclear inspections are inherently political, though they kind of pretend not to be. So I'm wondering, did you get a sense that the inspectors were worried about this situation more maybe than they could publicly admit?
- [17:02]
Paul Kenyon
I think that's true. And casting my mind back, we spent a lot of time with them, and one particular, very senior one at the time in Iran, and he was, yeah, I'm not exaggerating. He was extremely worried. You're in a situation where Iran is saying, we don't have anything other than for domestic energy use. And then they would go in and they would come back with chemical traces of what was uranium that was enriched to a level far, far greater than the Iranian regime had ever said. So there was a deceit. There was no doubt there was a deceit. The inspectors just had to try and understand or discover, because the Iranians were covering it up at the time, how far down the path of nuclear Weapons. The Iranian regime had gone. So it was worrying, you know, do you give them the benefit of the doubt? Do you say, look, we have to welcome them into the international community and we're doing everything we can to try and do this peacefully and to nurture them along the path towards nuclear energy. Or do you say, look, we're finding evidence, scientific evidence. They've gone far further. But even when you get to that point, how do you stop them? They would say it was their right to continue doing that.
- [18:10]
Thomas Small
Well, at the moment, you know, Iran is in the headlines because once again, the government is violently cracking down on protesters there. You, in a way, had the distinct honor of being at the receiving end of the Iranian state, because during your time in Iran, if I'm not mistaken, you were actually detained by the security services and accused of being a spy.
- [18:34]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, I mean, I laugh now because at the time it was frightening. And I sort of got a sense that it was going to happen because we'd. I knew we'd been followed. We'd been to so many different nuclear sites by that stage. We copied a lot of our raw material that we'd filmed from a TV set onto a mini camera that we had various other things. And I remember going to the BBC offices in Tehran and saying, hey, look, we've got this secret footage of Natanz and some other places. Will you look after it for us in case we're arrested on the way out? They wouldn't even let us into the building. They shut the door and said, never come back here. This is my BBC colleagues, because they said, if you come here, you're poisoning what's happening with the BBC's presence in Iran, which I absolutely understand they wanted nothing to do with it. So we felt a bit left out in the cold. Anyway, as we are leaving with all our raw material of the secret nuclear bases. We got into the airport in Tehran and I remember I saw these guys running towards us and I said to my researcher, I said, they're coming for us. And he said, God, you're so paranoid. And I said, no, no, they're definitely coming for us. And they ran over and it was like a film. These guys wearing black suits and white shirts, very, very smart. They ran over, out of lots of different doorways, shouting, BBC. And all pointing at us. Lots of people just froze, stopped what they were doing. They grabbed and they took us into this sort of labyrinth of rooms in the airport. I remember they managed to get our. They got our cases. I remember them opening our cases and just Throwing all our possessions around the room as they were talking to us. And I also remember this extraordinary thing where I had my fixer translator sitting next to me. They would ask me a question in Farsi. It came through the translator, and I still hadn't learned my lesson. I thought, well, they don't speak any English. I mean, I'm doing it all through the translator. And I said, I remember the translator. They want to know where you were on Monday morning and what you were doing, blah, blah, blah. And it was the day we were in Natanz. And I said, what should we tell them? Should we just say that we went to those coffee bars in central Tehran? And he said, paul, Paul. So at the end. But, you know, even then, I remember I smoked a little bit at the time. I remember reaching for a cigarette and I couldn't light it because my hand was shaking so much.
- [20:48]
Thomas Small
Well, Paul, I was gonna say, like, I have gone through airport security with camera crews in Middle Eastern countries. And so I. The paranoia, that's really. When everything is, you know, the klaxon is going off in your head and you know at any moment something's gonna happen. Now, the worst never happened to me, but you are explaining exactly what I feared might happen.
- [21:08]
Paul Kenyon
So there's me, I'm just going on in English. And then at the end, the guy said through the translator, we're gonna take your phones off you. You can make one phone call, which I made to the British Embassy. I spoke to the British ambassador. He was quite a young guy. And remember, he said, the most important thing, Paul, is that you try and stay in the airport. You do not let them take you to Evan Prison. If you end up. We will lose contact with you. You will just disappear into the system. Things become extremely difficult. So, you know, just resist leaving the airport, which is, you know, that's not easy to resist leaving the airport.
- [21:40]
Thomas Small
No.
- [21:41]
Paul Kenyon
And then at the end, when they took our phones off us, I said to the translator, how are we going to. We can't even communicate anymore. This doesn't make any sense. They're taking our phones off us and they're telling you, you've got to leave the room. But nobody here speaks English. And the lead interrogator, I remember, he sat back in his chair and he said, Mr. Kenyon, we all speak English here. Oh, no. And I remember he did this. He did this kind of Dracula laugh. He went, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And I remember that all his sort of apparatus, everybody joined in. They were all laughing. And it's A kind of awkward moment because I had to laugh along. So I ended up going, oh, yeah, fantastic. What a great. What a great wheeze. I mean, there was. I've got to admit, there's some naivety there, isn't there? I'm telling them the full story.
- [22:26]
Thomas Small
Did you manage to stay in the airport? Were you whisked off? Not to ev. Please tell me you won't.
- [22:31]
Paul Kenyon
No, no, no. We were whisked off to earth in prison. I mean. But that was the fear at the time. They took us to the hotel that we'd been staying in. And they put a guard outside the hotel. And my recollection is there was one outside my room. We were just told to stay there until they'd watched all our footage from the tapes. And they'd made a lot of phone calls. And I remember saying, you won't be able to watch that footage because unfortunately for you, it's un. A particular type of tape which you will definitely not have the viewing facilities for in Tehran. There's only two or three viewing facilities for this. And they. They tend to be in Germany and Britain. And he said, oh, it's okay. We. We will get the. We will import the. The equipment we need from Germany. And they did do so. They were that serious about watching the footage, they. They got it in from Germany. And the reason, when you first asked me about this, I mean, we ended up staying there, I think, for an extra two days. They took all our rushes, as we call film, raw film. But I remember this is a strange little anecdote. And it tells you something, really, about the level of surveillance on the streets of Iran in just a very small way. But it tells you something, which is that when we were in Esfahan, I remember doing a bit of filming on a corner quite surreptitiously. And I remember some local guy coming over to me and saying, where are you from? And it annoys me that people are trying to interfere. I need to get on. And he's kind of tapping on their shoulder and saying, where are you from? And he looked like a sort of local. Just a local guy. So eventually, because I didn't want to get into a conversation by speaking English and having to chat about where I was from, I said, from Germany. From Germany. Cause that would shut it down. And I thought he'd leave me alone, he wandered off. Later, when we'd been taken in the airport and put under interrogation, later, when they read out the list of charges, I always remember charge number nine on the charge sheet was posing as a German tourist, you know, so number one was spying.
- [24:28]
Thomas Small
It's an interesting crime, posing as a
- [24:30]
Paul Kenyon
German, as an unconvincing German tourist.
- [24:34]
Thomas Small
Well, Paul, I say you got off easy. I mean, I know journalists who actually did go to Evan prison, and you could have had a much worse experience than you did. Now, let's flash forward to 2011, to Libya. You said you were in Libya now in 2011, the Arab Spring is in full swing. You were there again for the BBC, for Panorama, reporting on the protests which, you know, we now know were on the verge of turning into a truly brutal civil war. When you arrived, what was your angle on events in Libya? Did you expect some kind of smooth transition away from Gaddafi's strongman regime and towards something more liberal, more democratic? Or were you already aware that this could become quite hairy?
- [25:22]
Paul Kenyon
God, that's such a good question. Because it makes me question when I arrive in a country, what I think is going to happen and whether or not there's any bias in my reporting. Bias is a strong word, but I go in there with an agenda and I suppose, you know, it's unavoidable that coming from the uk, you go to Libya at that point in the Arab Spring, it's not an agenda, but it's a hope that some kind of liberal democracy will prevail so something will come out of it that is more attuned to what I'm familiar with and what I think is fair and right.
- [25:55]
Thomas Small
A hope or maybe a belief that liberal democracy is somehow easily constructed in a country like Libya. Like, all we gotta do is remove the bad guy and democracy will flourish. I mean, it's embarrassing to say, but that was kind of the way Westerners thought back then. Like, you know, it was more or less a straightforward question. The only obstacle to liberal democracy are these dictators. Get rid of them and everything will.
- [26:19]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think nearly all the journalists who went in at the time, we were so excited that it was going to be end of this dictator. The more I think about it, I am slightly uncomfortable with the level of excitement I'd got because I'd spent quite a bit of time there during Gaddafi and I'd seen the result of some of the abuses. And I knew Libya reasonably well and I knew the restrictions and I knew about the human rights abuses. I knew about the thousands of political prisoners they had in the jails there and about massacres they'd committed. And I also knew, funnily enough, because I've written about Gaddafi That Gaddafi started off as a huge hope at the liberation movements. You know, this was a guy who was an anti colonial. Oh, yeah, he was a great hope. He was gonna be a superstar. You know, he could have been a man whose face was on T shirts like Che Guevara.
- [27:07]
Thomas Small
Oh, yeah, that's another kind of egg on your face moment for a lot of, like Western naive people. You know, when you go back to all of those hopes from the 70s that these great third worldist liberators were gonna usher in a new era, and it didn't turn out that way.
- [27:22]
Paul Kenyon
No, you're absolutely right. And Gaddafi, there was a lot of hope about him. And then we know all the different corners that he turned. But we got in there and I was there very early on in 2011, and I remember that we couldn't get in through the airport at that point. And I remember we drove in, we got to Egypt, we flew into Cairo, we drove across, therefore, the eastern border of Libya into Benghazi and eventually made it to trip. Yeah, I think you're right. On a political level, the excitement there, I've got to tell you, funnily enough, there's an interesting point there in Benghazi. I remember I was quite emotional and I remember thinking, all these people around me, and this is what he does, you know, reporting on the spot from big events like this. You see people's faces and you see the hope and you see the hope of change, of such dramatic change. This isn't the difference between, you know, a liberal and a conservative government. This is epic, seismic change through society which will utterly transform their lives out of fear and one would hope into normality and peace with a capital P. So I'm standing there in the middle of Benghazi, and I remember. This sounds crazy, but I remember a lot of people on horseback came in and they were cantering down the street and they were the rebels, they're anti Gaddafi. People were cheering them as they came in and they had sort of military fatigues and they had guns on their back and some of them were firing into the air.
- [28:45]
Thomas Small
What a romance that is. Gosh.
- [28:48]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah. And I remember thinking I could join these people. What would happen if I joined them? I thought I was so. This is crazy, but I was so motivated. I thought I was just thinking through what it would be like to. And I thought, what would be wrong with this? What they're doing is undeniably good. They're coming in to overthrow a terribly evil dictator. I could be on horseback charging along with a big Flag saying, come on,
- [29:11]
Thomas Small
I'm such a British man, honestly. So you're having dreams of Lawrence of Arabic, be a Paul of Sahara there.
- [29:19]
Paul Kenyon
I know it is a bit like that. It is a bit. And you know that colonial thing that you mentioned, it's absolutely true. I mean, I've written books about British colonialism and the aftermath in Africa. As we got into Libya, I remember we were driving across the desert and every little town and village, I was thinking what had happened here during the Second World War? Familiar names, you know, what the Italians had done there and what the Brits had done there. And you. Do you think this is, you know, you're part of an historic moment, Although just observing from the sidelines and you start trying to trace it back into things that are more familiar, like colonialism. And I'm not obviously a pro colonialist, but you do think in comparison. In comparison with what Gaddafi was doing in his latter years, maybe it was better.
- [29:59]
Thomas Small
Absolutely. I mean, I often wonder what. What might have happened if. If the British experiment in colonialism in certain parts of the world had lasted just a bit longer.
- [30:08]
Paul Kenyon
Maybe a lot longer. You mean a lot longer?
- [30:10]
Thomas Small
Well, no, I just. Just to embed certain forms of state structure a little bit more deeply. I don't know. I mean, I. I'm open to. To at least speculating about those subjects. Now, you reported from both sides of the Libyan conflict. And, you know, however naive and romantic you were going into it, in the end, Libya became a quagmire. Like in other places. It saw intervention by Gulf states, by Turkey, in addition, of course, to NATO and then Russia. The battlefield became a huge proxy war. And so Libya became really an early preview of that more fragmented global system that we now live in. But there you are on the ground, and it says here in my notes that at one point you actually confronted one of Colonel Gaddafi's sons, Assadi Gaddafi. Now, this character is fascinating. He was a member of, like, the Libyan national football team, even though his skills as a footballer, I think, are open to question. Maybe his dad pulled a few strings.
- [31:10]
Paul Kenyon
I think so.
- [31:10]
Thomas Small
But by 2011, he was something like a commander in the Libyan special forces. And you're confronting him. Tell us that story.
- [31:19]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, Saadi Gaddafi, you're absolutely right. He played for the Libyan national team and he'd also played for an Italian Premiership team as well. It is just worth mentioning, when he played for the Italian team, my recollection is that he was brought on as a substitute and then he was substituted. So that's quite an unusual Occurrence because he was so bad. And then to make things worse, he failed a drugs test immediately after the match. So anyway, apart from all that, what
- [31:45]
Thomas Small
a reminder of that weird time when Gaddafi was sort of semi rehabilitated and had been brought into the family of nations basically to convince him not to have a nuclear program.
- [31:56]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, yes.
- [31:57]
Thomas Small
And he also was like the gendarme for Europe, protecting Europe from untrammeled migration from sub Saharan Africa.
- [32:04]
Paul Kenyon
Absolutely.
- [32:05]
Thomas Small
And in that regard he had these close relations with Italy. It's so weird. A reminder of how bizarre the world was before the Arab Spring.
- [32:12]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, well, I remember Saadi Qaddafi had given orders to in Benghazi, which he was running at the time. And we'd spoken to loads of former Gaddafi soldiers who said the orders to kill civilians, to shoot at unarmed civilians came from Saudi Gaddafi. So by the time we got to Tripoli, I remember Sadi Gaddafi had an American PR woman with long blonde hair and a very good dress sense, a very attractive woman. And it seemed so odd to me that this was his person. This was his, the person you had to go through to get to Sadi Gaddafi. And I remember she was floating around the hotels where the journalists were. And I remember the wi setter look, you know, there's some talk if Gaddafi goes, which is looking increasingly likely at that moment, Saadi might be the one who takes over. So we'd really like to do an interview with Saadi can tell us what his hopes and dreams are and also about the possibility of having a kind of western leaning region within Libya where alcohol's allowed and gambling and you know, full on capitalism. So eventually she said, yeah, yeah, he's agreed. And I said, listen, to make things easier for Saudi Gaddafi, why don't we, we know that he's got some pet lions. Would it make sense to make him feel more comfortable if we interviewed him with his pet lions?
- [33:28]
Thomas Small
What a smooth operator you are, Paul. Flattery, manipulating, trying to get that shot.
- [33:34]
Paul Kenyon
And we got, yeah, and of course we got him. She said, yeah, he's into that. And he. So it works well for us because we have the son of a dictator with his pet lions and it works well for him. He bizarrely wanted to feed his pet lions with chickens and things. So we interviewed him. Of course, you know those interviews, you're not gonna get a lot from them. He's outside or behind the camera were all his gunmen standing there. So you can't rile him too much. But that was right in that moment of flux about he could or his Brother Saif could have been the ones who took over. Which comes to an important point, and I was thinking about this earlier, which is that if Gaddafi hadn't gone at that point, he was setting up Saif to take over, and it would have been the family who continued and would have potentially still been in control today. And when we talk about Western intervention in places like Iran, as you have to ask yourself in Libya, for instance, we know more people have been killed since Gaddafi than during Gaddafi. But what would have happened if you allow him to continue? He continues, he hands the reins on to the next generation and on and on and on. At some stage, I would say we have a moral responsibility to try and do something about it.
- [34:41]
Thomas Small
It's interesting, you know, who knows? These are big questions. Once again, these questions are being raised about Iran. Now, Paul, I wish I could say that you were able to leave the conflicts of the Middle east behind when returned home to London, but no, as everyone knows, the world is global and the west is multicultural. And so what happens in the Middle east doesn't stay in the Middle East. And so in 2018, again for the BBC, you produced a program called Back Home from ISIS, telling the stories of British citizens who had traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State. And you know, there were a lot of potential subjects because according to a UK parliament briefing, around 900 British people made that journey and 40% returned. So that's like 400 or so jihadists now living in England. So you made this show Back Home from isis, so I guess you must have had an insight into that subculture within Britain. What surprised you most?
- [35:55]
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- [36:31]
Paul Kenyon
It's a really good portal looking back into how things have changed in the way, the language that we use and the references people can make and about extremism. I remember speaking to young Muslim lads in Manchester who were part of a circle where some of them were going out to fight. And I remember talking to them, doing an interview for the BBC and we spent some time with them and I said to them, would you go out and fight against British troops in Iraq or Western troops anywhere in the theater of the Middle East. It was really hard to get them to commit. And one of them said, eventually I would go out and fight for Islam if it was my brother who was under threat. And I said, your brother? What do you mean by your brother? And he said, I think you know what I mean by my brother. Now you and I know what he meant. He meant my brother as in fellow Muslim. Yeah, fellow Muslim. And I remember the BBC saying after the interview, they were saying, no, no, he just meant his brother. And I said, you're kidding me. He doesn't mean that. He doesn't. And they said, no, no, it's very. He was being quite narrow. He said, if a member of his family. And I said, no, no, no. When he says brother, he definitely means something a lot broader than that.
- [37:42]
Thomas Small
I think probably you're right, though.
- [37:44]
Paul Kenyon
The interesting thing was, though, that it took a long time to draw that out of them, and they were very reserved about it. And now I would say, you can correct me if I'm wrong, you know, more about this area. But I would say that it's not unusual for people to walk, to protest and march down the street saying that they would do that today. It wouldn't be unusual to have people in protest in the center of London saying that quite openly, that kind of thing, that they would go and fight. Then he was seen as something that they really wouldn't dare say. So I'm just saying, have the goalpost shifted to the point where it is now perfectly acceptable within certain circles to say that. Well, his fear at the time was that he would be arrested just for saying that people don't have that fear these days. And actually, funnily enough, that was around about the same time, as you'll remember, the fundamentalist preacher Abu Hamzah was in front of the court for alleged terrorism offenses. And, you know, the key charge against him at the time was the possession at the. The Islamic Encyclopedia of Jihad. You know, there are journalists who have that book. That's what he got convicted of. In the end, nothing else stood. Everything else they didn't get enough evidence for. But my point about Abu Hamza is at the time, what he was saying on the street and what the security services and the government here found so objectionable and potentially illegal are things that it would be pretty normal for people to say during protests in the center of London. Now that things have moved to a point where, yeah, that was potentially criminal at the time. It no longer is. And people would Certainly say that kind of thing on social media, or it
- [39:15]
Thomas Small
is, I suppose, on paper, still criminal. The question is if it's as policed as before. It seems like often the police are focusing on other threats to national security, if that's the right way to put it. Paul, as you were producing back home from isis, what surprised you most? I mean, you were there intimately exploring the effects these ISIS recruits had on their families, who must have had to cope with this in some way. You were exploring the way in which this recruitment to isis, this traveling to fight in Syria fractured British communities or maybe compelled certain communities to rally round and present a united front to the outside world. Not to mention, you know, trying to keep others from following in their older brothers and sisters footsteps.
- [40:00]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, I mean, the whole thing was quite surprising to me in the sense that we tended to be talking to what people at the time were calling jihadi brides. And so we were finding people whose husbands or partners had gone to fight and had either been killed or their location was unknown. I suppose what surprised me was just the normality of their lives in the uk, that they, the wives. This is that we had perfectly normal conversations. They had children who went to local schools. They were, from my perspective, enjoying the freedom of British society and everything it offers. But on the other hand, they wanted to bring it down indirectly what we stand for, not British society, but our values. And it really hit me quite hard and quite deep just trying to understand that paradox. I suppose, again, something you're more familiar with.
- [40:52]
Thomas Small
Well, it is hard to understand. You know, I can't say I do understand it, but I'm, you know, I'm a kind of, of pretty middle of the road, fence sitting, kind of vaguely conservative guy. You know, I, I've never quite understood why so many people get so angry at the prevailing norms. You know, I think, you know, there are things to criticize about it, there are things that can be improved, but like some people are really fired up against what they call the west and all this stuff, especially young people. And maybe that's the point. Maybe young people, young men especially, are a bit, little bit crazy, I don't know. And we all grow up and mellow out now. Paul, somehow this topic of British ISIS fighters overlaps with ongoing debates and controversies over immigration. It's a hot potato subject, but no, I would love to hear your views on it. You were generous enough to appear on Conflicted's special series commemorating the anniversary of the 77 bombings, where you narrated your experience among the protests in Southport following the Stabbing there in summer 2024, which led to some of the worst racial riots, hostilities since like the 70s and 80s. So, Paul, how do you navigate the thorny issue of mass migration, multiculturalism, integration versus alienation? I know it's not an easy black and white subject. I mean, at least it shouldn't be.
- [42:21]
Paul Kenyon
I think, I think what struck me is that we remember there were two sides there effectively in Southport and those demonstrations in that very hot summer. And there were. We decided that we would start the day on the side, if you like, being with the groups that were the so called far right. I don't have any sympathy for their views at all personally, but I do think that they have to be represented. And all the other journalists were with, with the so called decent left, liberal leaning, democratic, et cetera, et cetera. It was extraordinary what happened because I think the entire nation's press completely misreported what actually happened, which raises some intriguing questions. So I know because we with the far right, that actually within that group there were grandmothers eating Marks and Spencer's picnics, There were lots of sort of what we would call middle class young people who were trying to have debates about various things, perfectly civilized way. There was a kind of a little nasty group of people wearing balaclavas who were going around trying to cause trouble. But I would say the majority of people there were fairly decent folk who had proper, justifiable concerns about the way the country was being run. At some point, and this will intrigue you. So at some point what actually happened is that in the middle of their small demonstration, you would call it, or grouping, gathering a whole load of people who represented the other side. So the anti fascists, which is obviously something that I would be in favour, down, they came down the street, allowed down the street by the police and the two sides squared up. And I remember the anti fascists came down, some of them are carrying hammer and sickle flags and old Russian flags. What the hell?
- [44:05]
Thomas Small
Wow.
- [44:06]
Paul Kenyon
They think that represents freedom. I mean, I was so taken about. It's an old Jeremy Corbyn thing. You can still justifiably be on the side of the former Soviet Union. So they're coming down with former Soviet Union flags, hammer and sickle flags, as I say. And I remember the two sides square, they were shouting, Nazi scum. Nazi scum. And I remember thinking, there's plenty of people here who are not that. All they're doing is wanting to debate immigration. And they probably got different views from what a lot of people who are normal BBC viewers and listeners would have, but you can't ignore them, it's important. And I remember it was from where I was standing the first missiles that came over, which were beer glasses, plastic ones, but they were still beer glasses, came over from the anti fascists, they were coming down. And then of course, no surprise at all, the so called far right, certain people started running around, responding, gathering the troops and then there were a lot of confrontations and then the decent working class mums and dads, grannies, granddads, whatever from the so called far right disappeared off because they were so alarmed by it and their positions were taken by some groups of really nasty young lads.
- [45:15]
Thomas Small
Yeah, the question is, why would this have been allowed to happen? Why was that other group, the ones, you know, holding the flags with the hammer and sickle, why were they allowed to confront the, until then, more or less peaceful gathering? I mean, and also why weren't there more journalists with that first gathering to begin with? Why did this happen? Paul, tell us, where is the bias here? Why is this happening?
- [45:38]
Paul Kenyon
Well, the first thing is the police from where I was standing allowed this to happen by saying we can't stand in the way of a march which is peaceful and fair and decent, which is the anti fascists, if they want to march through town, were going to allow them to. They knew very well they were walking down a street in the Docklands in Liverpool where they were going to end up face to face with this other group of protesters. That was absolutely inevitable and they didn't do anything about it that I could see. So that was allowed to happen. Second question, why were the journalists all with the anti fascist? Well, I think that we sort of know the answer to that in that, you know, most journalists are of a leftist center, liberal, democratic persuasion, which is, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, certainly not. Those are the facts. And that morning, the idea of going down and spending the morning with the so called far right probably wasn't very appealing to most people because also the far right do tend to say, we don't trust you, your mainstream media, get the hell out of here. We're all independent journalists ourselves, we only believe what we put on Twitter or X or whatever. So I understand it's a lot easier and safer and comfortable to start your day with the anti fascists. I absolutely understand that. But it did mean alarmingly when I heard these demonstrations reported through lots of mainstream media during the day, people were saying, the far right have started these riots in the center of Liverpool. The far right have done this, this and this. There was no mention of how it actually started. And I know I was there on the very front line with those so called far right. And that is not what happened. So it raises really interesting questions about how we report things in this country, what the audience wants to, what our motivation is for doing that, whether it's just a genuine honest error or whether there's something more to it.
- [47:23]
Thomas Small
Yeah. And in the end, it was such a combustible couple of weeks of protests. The right leaning, you know, elements within that protest did of course start behaving in ways that were very alarming.
- [47:34]
Paul Kenyon
Yep.
- [47:34]
Thomas Small
100%, you know, burning down or trying to burn down immigrant hotels and things. But, you know, you wonder, did it have to develop in that way? Is there a way as a culture to engage more, you know, ironically, in the first place with people who have these controversial, I suppose, but critical views about the way things are going without allowing it to snowball into this sort of unrest?
- [47:56]
Paul Kenyon
I think that's right. It's absolutely right. And so, and I think it's important that people know, obviously I didn't sympathise with anything they were saying. But apart from one principle, which is that nobody listens to us, which I think is true, why isn't it? Why are we not allowed to debate these things? They are. Which I think is true. You don't often hear voices like that on mainstream media. And I felt that they were a voiceless, though sizable minority within the community who feel as though they're not listened to. And I think there's something in there. I don't think they are listened to. I think we allow our own views of a completely open society with very generous migration into this country, which is something I support incidentally, but I think we always think that's the only way. That's the good way. Anybody who doesn't agree, we can't countenance and they frustrated and because they're not heard or represented as they see it, that that's part of the reason that this exploded.
- [48:50]
Thomas Small
Well, we've talked about Islamism, jihadism, we've talked about the Middle east, we've talked about the immigration controversy in Britain, in the West. But the breakdown in global order is of course not focused only on these things, far from it. We started this conversation talking about your new podcast, Two Nottingham Lads. And it is only your latest foray into Ukraine and its conflict with Russia. Russia, as you said in 2014, you were actually on the ground in Crimea as Russian forces conquered it. And you witnessed Russian troops taking over the Belbek Air Base in Sebastopol. Tell us about that.
- [49:33]
Paul Kenyon
It was at the point where I remember Putin was still saying, there aren't any Russian troops there. Do you remember? We were calling them the little. Or he would say the little green men. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember at some point he. If there are some Russian soldiers there, it's because they've gone on holiday. There's nothing organized. So I remember that we got to Sevastopol and to this air base. And I remember that we got there, we had a brilliant fixer who said, something's gonna happen. It's a really sensitive area. We got to Belbek. So there we are, waiting to see what happens. And I remember the commanding officer, the Ukrainians said were being surrounded by Russian troops. He called the journalists together. There were. There were probably 10, 15 of us in all, from all around the world. And he said, you've got a window of opportunity now, which I would give you about an hour. You either get out now and there's one road out, or in an hour's time, they will have completely surrounded us. You must take your choice about what you do. So, wow, it's a difficult situation, isn't it? Do you want to be surrounded by Russian troops? Obviously not. There was some debate in our team. It did get slightly heated. The conclusion was these are. You know, it's really difficult decisions to take, and the conclusion was that we would stay. So you're surrendering yourself to being surrounded by Russian troops.
- [50:46]
Thomas Small
Good journalistic courage there, Paul.
- [50:49]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I had various misgivings about it, but at the time, you're. You just think, this is extremely important, and how would I ever live with myself if I said, no, we scarpet at that point? So, you know, it's partly out of cowardice about what would happen afterwards if you did scarpet. So we stayed there and. And the Russians surrounded. And I remember we slept on a floor that night. And I remember the Ukrainians were saying, yeah, we are completely surrounded. And we went around the periphery of the Ukrainian camp. And I remember they were using. The Ukrainians were using all.303 rifles, which, you know, really old. I would say. I'm not an expert, but I would say from the 1970s and 80s and Little Tin hats to defend themselves. And I remember thinking, wow, this. The Russians are just going to walk in here when they. To want. Want. But anyway, the next day, the Ukrainians made a decision. So the army decided they were going to walk up the side of this hill and confront the Russians full on. And they were going to do it unarmed. This was the twist. They would go up unarmed, they would chant some Ukrainian nationalistic songs, and we walked with them and they were going to go to where the Russians, the Russian commanders were who were surrounding their base. So we marched up there with. And I remember it was a very cold morning, and I remember I was shaking, obviously, only from the cold, nothing else, of course. And we walked up there and I remember there was some incoming fire and the Russians were shooting and I. You don't know. In that moment, there's an awful lot of confusion and there were these cracks of gunfire. They were shooting over our heads. But you don't know at the time. You don't quine at what's gonna happen. Yeah. And I remember there was this extraordinary scene where. Where they carried on marching the Ukrainians, you know, really brave lads because they are unarmed and anything could have happened. It's a very unpredictable situation. But they walked up. So the two commanding officers, the Ukrainian and the Russian, ended up nose to nose, shouting and screaming at each other. It was amazing, really. Cause you had sort of east versus west here. The Ukrainians who want to be part of the west suddenly nose to nose with the people who are trying to take it away from them. And it was an amazing moment.
- [52:55]
Thomas Small
You know, a few minutes ago you're in Lawrence of Arabia and now you're in, I don't know, like, I don't know, Fiddler on the Roof. I don't know what we're gonna call it. Some kind of Reds. You're just facing up against the Russian Empire now. You've just been facing, you know, tin pot dictator in the Middle East. Now you're facing up to a Russian dictator. How romantic.
- [53:14]
Paul Kenyon
Oh, well. What was also interesting is that the people who were on with the Ukrainian military as we marched up there were probably, I don't know how many journalists, about 10 left by that stage. So we marched up with them. On the other side, behind the Russian command were a group of Russian journalists. So we were kind of all squaring up to each other. It is kind of. It's a Cold War situation where they've also got their pet journalists who are standing behind them waiting, and they're kind of making signals at us. Not particularly friendly signals, but we all sort of acknowledge each other. We're all on different sides.
- [53:45]
Thomas Small
Well, I mean, certainly the Russian conquest of Crimea is really when post Cold War assumptions, you know, that borders are settled and that only the United States reflects, really was ever authorized to employ force on that scale, however hypocritical or whatever that seemed. But those post Cold War assumptions of permanent American hegemony over a stable, liberal international order took a major hit in Crimea and everything that's followed in eastern Ukraine. I mean, did you remain closely aware of events there, say, and in Kiev and Moscow as Russia's 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine inched ever closer?
- [54:28]
Paul Kenyon
Yeah, I did. And I got to Kiev just before the full scale invasion. So February 2022, I managed to persuade the BBC that as Putin's troops were lining up on the border in their many tens of thousands, that something was going to happen.
- [54:43]
Thomas Small
And I remember everyone was back then
- [54:45]
Paul Kenyon
saying, no, you're saying, no way. He's made a promise. I remember people saying, but Putin's just promised. He's just made a promise that he's never going to use them. And I really was thinking, everybody's gone completely mad. I mean, he's not going to have the humiliation of March all back in. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
- [55:02]
Thomas Small
I wonder if that Iranian security man that you saw in the, in the airport who went, ha ha ha ha. You thought I couldn't speak English. You know, these people make promises or present in a certain way, but my goodness, you can't take them on face value.
- [55:17]
Paul Kenyon
No, but do you remember everybody was saying, but Putin's made this promise, he's not going to.
- [55:21]
Thomas Small
I waste Paul. I didn't think it was going to happen either. I trusted, you know, I don't. I just trust what people say. They're supposed to be the experts after all.
- [55:30]
Paul Kenyon
And I remember on Radio 4, on the BBC, the nights before I went. Cause I persuaded the BBC, I said, it's gonna happen. They were saying, well, if you get there and you're. Nothing happens. And I said, well, there is a war going down on the eastern front, low key, been going on for the last however many years.
- [55:44]
Thomas Small
And that's the thing, nobody really even remembered war was ongoing. There was a war.
- [55:49]
Paul Kenyon
So I said, there will be something. We will get into the trenches. There will be drones, you will see some kind of confrontation if we spend a week or so. And it'll be low key, but it's important. I remember the BBC said, yeah, come on then, off you go, you can go. But the night before I went on Radio 4, I remember hearing an expert on Russia chuckling in exactly the way you've been imitating the old Dracula laugh. Ha, ha ha. It's never going to happen. I can't believe people are naive enough to think that President Putin would think about invading a sovereign state. And I remember all that and thinking, well, I think he is. And I'm maybe I don't know enough about this, but. But I'm off. So, yeah, we got there two days before it started and we were there at Hostomel Airport when the Russians arrived just north of Kyiv. It was a hairy situation, an uncomfortable situation, obviously, for the whole population of Ukraine. And we know what's happened since.
- [56:39]
Thomas Small
I mean, what an experience. Paul Kenyon, what a life you've had. You're a proper journalist.
- [56:44]
Paul Kenyon
I feel like this is my obituary. No, no, no, no, no, no.
- [56:48]
Thomas Small
This is one of those lifetime achievements awards that they give to people who feel they still have a career ahead of them, you know, and I'm sure you do. Thank you very much for coming onto Conflicted. Remember, dear listeners to check out Paul's new series two Nottingham Lads. It's excellent classic four star audio documentary. The best really of what audio documentary can be. It puts our little talking shop here on Conflicted to shame.
- [57:16]
Paul Kenyon
Come on, on, come on. I've really enjoyed it. You know, it's, as I said, it's very rare for a BBC journalist to be able to express themselves, so I fully enjoyed it.
- [57:26]
Thomas Small
Oh, well, we like people to express themselves here. Thank you so much, Paul, for coming on.
- [57:30]
Paul Kenyon
Cheers.
- [57:35]
Thomas Small
That was Paul Kenyon. Do check out Paul's new podcast series two Nottingham Lads. Look for the link in the Show Notes where you'll also find his social links. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q. And as with my co host Eamon Dean, check the show Notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message heard produced. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzie Andrews.
- [58:32]
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