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From Our Own Correspondent
From Vietnam to Vatileaks: A Tribute to David Willey
00:28:47
Remembering the BBC correspondent who joined the organisation in 1964.
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Kay Dady
Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of the From Our Own Correspondent podcast with me, Kay Dady. In this episode, we're celebrating the work of the BBC's David Willey, who served as a foreign correspondent for more than half a century and who died recently aged 93. To commemorate his extraordinary life, we've put together a few of his most memorable dispatches for From Our Own Correspondent from for which he was a prolific writer. We begin with an interview that was recorded last year with the Today program's Anna Foster as part of the 70th anniversary celebration of From Our Own Correspondent in front of an audience in the BBC Radio Theatre. Here, David recounts some of his most memorable assignments from East Africa to China to Libya and the Vatican.
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Anna Foster
It probably makes sense to go all the way back to where the program first started, and that was on the 25th of September, 1955. And it was the brainchild of a BBC editor called Roger Lazar. Now, nobody, I'm told, ever said no to Roger. Now, at that time, the BBC had a grand total of 13 foreign correspondents. And one man who remembers well most actually of these last 70 years of the program and has written many, many fuchs in that time, is the BBC's former Rome correspondent, David Willey. And I caught up with David recently. We started talking about how at the grand age of 93, he is still writing for the program.
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David Willey
Yes, and with great pleasure, because I feel it's a great honor to have been one of the original people. I joined the BBC in strange circumstances. I'd been living in North Africa and they offered me a job as East Africa correspondent. But the job had a very strange title. It was East Africa Correspondent London. That is to say, I was to live in London, but to commute to East Africa, the three new British former colonies, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and collect material because the communications from Africa were so appalling in those days.
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Anna Foster
And once you'd got the hang of that, David, how did you then transmit or send in whatever way you had to do in those days, those words back to London to be broadcast?
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David Willey
It was really a question of using what means you could. And I used to go to the airport with my tape and try and find a traveler who would be met by a courier from the BBC. It was all very hit and miss.
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Anna Foster
The list of stories that you've covered over the years, David, it encompasses quite a sweep of history. Two future saints of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa. Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, Muammar Gaddafi in his tents General de Gaulle in Tahiti, Margaret Thatcher, Pavarotti. It is a remarkable list.
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David Willey
Well, when I look back, I did talk to a lot of people, and I found that there was no real substitute for original sources. This turned out to be very prescient in many cases, particularly, for example, when I visited China in 1965.
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Anna Foster
Let's hear more about that, because your fuchs from China were particularly striking because they really captured what a different world that was in those days. So let's listen to that one in particular, the China National Day celebrations in Beijing. And this was all part of you trying to unravel the politics of an unfamiliar world.
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David Willey
So on a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon in late September 1965, I found myself
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at a news conference followed by a
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reception in Beijing in the Great hall of the People, rubbing shoulders with the entire top Chinese nomenclature. I remember recognizing Chairman Mao's brilliant number two, Chou Enlai, an unforgettable face.
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And the burly Chen Yi, the powerful
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general who was acting Foreign minister, and Peng Chen, the mayor of Beijing, shortly to be purged as the Cultural Revolution surged ahead.
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Anna Foster
The place that I think most people will remember you, David, is in Italy and your time as Rome correspondent. And one of the big stories that you covered during those years was the very colorful life of Silvio Berlusconi.
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David Willey
Yes, I remember I was looking through an Italian magazine and I saw a picture of a rather ugly white marble tomb which Mr. Berlusconi, who in those days was on the crest of coming to power, had designed for himself and erected in his garden. And I thought, that's rather strange. This was a very well known Italian sculptor. So I rang up the sculptor and said, what an interesting thing to be asked to design the tomb of perhaps Italy's future Prime minister. And anyway, I flew up to Milan and he picked me up and he said, I have to see Berlusconi about the design of the tomb. And he took me into it. He it was an underground tomb in Berlusconi's garden, which I noticed had a big marble sarcophagus in the middle and 36 niches all the way round. So in the afternoon, when Berlusconi arrived and we sat on a swinging hammock with his children and his wife having a cup of tea, I asked him, I said, and who are all those niches for? And he said, oh, friends and colleagues. He was hoping to bury his leading directors of his company with him in his tomb. In the end, the tomb was banned by the authorities, but he always managed to get around the rules. And I believe he is now actually entombed in that very place in his former garden.
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Anna Foster
And I think that whole story shows David the importance of building relationships. In fact, everything that you've mentioned in our conversation really shows the importance of building relationships and bonds with people to uncover those stories.
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David Willey
I remember it began for me in the Vatican shortly after the election of Pope John Paul ii. I found out that it was possible as a journalist in Rome to travel with him on his plane. And I did this. We went to over 50 different journeys all over the world. We had very interesting conversations. There was a lot of scrambling about on the Pope's plane. I remember sitting, having breakfast once and coming sitting down next to me. I didn't have my socks on. He didn't seem to worry.
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Kay Dady
David Willey there, reminiscing on his many years of reporting with Anna Foster. In this first dispatch from the Fuch archive is a report from David dating back to May 1970. He was in Vietnam reporting on the war just as nationwide student walkouts began in the US protesting President Nixon's expansion of the war. With the conflict Running for some 15 years at this point, David finds morale among US troops, especially those on the front line, was severely faltering soldiers.
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David Willey
Morale is difficult to analyze, especially here in Vietnam. Wars are different now. The old vocabulary words like bravery, discipline, morale don't meet the problem in the Vietnam War. You mostly don't need brave men. You need efficient ones able to handle highly sophisticated instruments of transport and death. And the standard length of service In Vietnam is one year for most of the 400,000 odd Americans still out here. The best morale builder of all is that you can actually count the days to going home. But there are tremendous contrasts. Many of the soldiers have an easy time with their nightly cinemas, good food and modern plumbing. Many are better off than they would be in the States. But when you leave the big bases and maintenance areas and get out into the wilds, and then it's different. There you meet the real soldiers, the men of the infantry and the air cavalry units. There are about 80,000 men, less than a fifth of the total US army in Vietnam, who really meet the enemy close up, killing and getting killed. They're young, mostly drafted men, graduates, college dropouts. Their nickname is Grunts from the way the soldier grunts as he shoulders his heavy pack. They spend most of their time out in the wild forest near the frontiers where the enemy is always infiltrating. They may be out for as long as a Whole month at a time. And when they return, it's not to a camp with cinema shows and hot showers, but to a so called fire base with gun pits and holes in the ground to sleep in. And their chance of getting killed or wounded is very high. Maybe one in three, maybe even higher. That's the sector where morale is under pressure. It's such a chancy business, this patrolling. You can go for months and meet nothing. And then three times in one week you meet some awful ambush or firefight. The man next to you goes down yelling with a leg blown off. The platoon commander's bleeding to death against a tree. It's over in 15 minutes. But it's sheer nightmare. And it may come again tomorrow night when you get back from all that, back to camp. The re enlistment sergeant is waiting for a little chat. He can get you out of all that, he says, if you're ready to sign on for a longer spell in the army. Get you a cushier job. In this infantryman's life, the great thing is to come safe home, to keep your ass covered, as the soldiers call it. There's a vast gap between, on the one side, the junior officers, NCOs and men, and on the other, the higher ranks, the career officers, the so called lifers. It's the lifers who believe in conventional discipline, but the men who stay out in the forests beating the bush, as they call it. They're all, including lieutenants, on Christian name terms and no formality except that everyone does what he has to do. I never thought about morale, said one young lieutenant. The life certainly changes you a lot. Luxury to me is staying in a forest clearing for one whole afternoon without having to move on. A drink from a cold stream's a gift from heaven. A bed to sleep on. Unimaginable. What about pot smoking? Platoon commanders confirmed to me that there is. A lot goes on, but there'd be big trouble, they said, if some idiot smoked just before going on patrol. It brings on enormous thirst and for a while dulls perception, which is fatal. Most of the young men I spoke to thought the army was badly run and the war a great mess. But that's not bad. Morale. They wouldn't run away. It's a case of old soldiers doing what can't be got out of doing their duty. And again in the old tradition, their main contempt is for the overweight sergeants. Back at the base, the generals talk of kill ratios. Their only respect is for each other and for the enemy who kills and dies like they do. Along the forest trails. And they know too that when they get back to the States, there's no one to talk to about what they've been through. No one who wants to listen.
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Kay Dady
David Willey's reflections on the war in Vietnam in 1970. Another of David's frequent deployments was to North Africa, in particular Libya, during the era of the West's volatile relationship with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. David first traveled there in the early 1960s, several years prior to Gaddafi taking power in 1969. Here in the dispatch from 2009, he reports on the 40th anniversary celebration marking the former leader's military coup.
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David Willey
It could stand comparison with any Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood production. A lavish one night seafront spectacle costing millions and ending with an apocalyptic firework display in the steamy heat of an African summer night. Imagine a monster Bedouin tent, the sort that the nomadic Libyan tribesmen from whom Colonel Gaddafi claims descent call home during their journeys through the unending desert wastes of the Sahara. The Colonel still likes to take a tent with him to stay in when he travels abroad. A sort of home from home and a useful place for meeting and greeting foreign dignitaries. The flaps of the plastic and steel mock up megatent opened to reveal a stage larger than that of La Scala Opera House in Milan or the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. A cast of nearly a thousand dancers, acrobats, actors on stilts and scores of galloping white robed Bedouin horsemen recreated the history of this huge country during a three hour sound, light and laser extravaganza. All this against a running backdrop of films of the resistance movement against the often brutal Italian colonial occupation during the early years of the last century and of the achievements of Colonel Gaddafi's 1969 revolution. It all ended at three in the morning in a pan of praise for African unity, with a voiceover giving a roll call of all the countries of Africa. The the image of the Lockerbie bomber, recently returned on compassionate grounds from a Scottish prison to Libya, had also flickered very briefly before our eyes when I first visited Tripoli seven years before Colonel Gaddafi took over, Libya was officially designated the poorest country in the world. A desert kingdom whose sole national resource was selling for scrap the twisted metal relics of the Bitter Desert war of the 1940s, the war material abandoned by the Allied and German armies. After battling it out back and forth along the shores of North Africa, Italy's colonial adventure had collapsed with dire results for the local population. There wasn't a single qualified Libyan doctor when the country first attained independence under King Idris, later forced into exile by Gaddafi. Although I was unaware of it at that time, international oil companies had just struck some of the world's largest oil and natural gas reserves here. It meant unimaginable future oil wealth for this country of endless desert and a tiny population concentrated for the most part along a narrow, semi fertile coastal strip. Oil that's the real backdrop to this week's mega show on the Tripoli waterfront, not the scratchy cinematic record of past colonial indignities that I saw projected on the mega screen. The sometimes eccentric and unpredictable leader has, as it were, come in from the cold, with Libyans assuming key posts this autumn at the United nations and taking their place at international negotiating tables now that Colonel Gaddafi has foresworn the nuclear option and become internationally respectable. Center stage are the contracts for the first future exploitation of Libya's oil wealth by the powerful foreign companies that alone have the know how to extract liquid
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gold from the desert.
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You have to be perhaps a bit colourblind to understand what's really going on behind the scenes in Libya today. Let me explain. Italy, the former colonial power and Libya, her former colony, have been engaged in a small but telling emotional spat this week over national colours. The daredevil Italian Air force close formation aerobatic team invited to scream overhead during Gaddafi's military anniversary parade, trailed the red, white and green national colors of Italy. The Libyans had insisted that only green vapor trails would be acceptable to local sensitivities, but at the last minute they backed down and that the Italians sprayed the sky red, white and green. Yet if you look at the official pictures of the flypast on the Libyan website, you'll see only green vapor trails. The picture's been doctored to conform with Gaddafi land's brave new world, which is seen only through the idiosyncratic leader's green tinted spectacles.
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Kay Dady
David Willey reporting in 2009. Over several decades, David famously cultivated relationships in one of the most impenetrable communities, that of the Vatican City. He covered five papacies and as he highlighted in his conversation with Anna Foster, this often took him across the world. In this next Dispatch, recorded in 2012, David wrote about the trial of Pope Benedict's former butler, who was later convicted of stealing hundreds of documents from the Pope's office. The so called Vatileak scandal led to the publication of letters revealing complaints about cronyism, corruption, corruption and nepotism at the highest level of the Catholic Church and marked the most serious security breach of the Vatican in living memory. This Dispatch shows the rare insight and access David had to the inner workings of the Vatican.
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David Willey
Reporting on the Vatican demands the skills of a criminologist or a china watcher, and a considerable knowledge of the arcane world and professional jargon of the men who run the more than 1 billion strong Catholic Church, the world's oldest, oldest international organization. There are very few chinks in the curtain of secrecy and professional clerical discretion surrounding the workings of the Holy See. But I've had two recent exclusive glimpses of Vatican City at work. First, in the city's criminal court, and second, at an annual private party organized by the papal police. The tiny Vatican City, the world's smallest sovereign state, a high walled enclave situated in the heart of the Italian capital, is policed by two entirely separate security forces. First, the Pope's Swiss Guard. Recruited solely from among Swiss nationals who've completed their military service, Swiss mercenary soldiers had a deserved reputation for toughness and loyalty among European courts. For centuries, they fought and died for their monarch, the Pope. When Rome was sacked by the troops of the Emperor Charles V In 1527, the French court also had its Gare de Suisse, who died protecting their king, Louis XVI, when revolution broke out in Paris in 1789. But the few remaining courts of Europe no longer employ foreign mercenaries. Only the Pope still has his Swiss Guards. Then there's the Vatican Gendarmerie. This is a military unit of about 130 men, staffed almost entirely by former Italian state police officers. It's responsible for security, internal traffic control, border control and criminal investigations. It also has a firefighting section in case there's a blaze inside Vatican territory, and a tiny anti terrorist section whose members wear balaclava masks and are armed with Kalashnikovs. I saw them on parade for the first time last year. Normally, there's little crime to report inside Vatican City, apart from the prosecution of pickpockets who infiltrate the hordes of tourists and pilgrims attending Masses or visiting the Vatican museums. I was told by one of the cleaners inside St. Peter's Basilica that after the congregation attending midnight mass at Christmas or Easter has gone home, the marble floor is strewn with pilgrims, wallets emptied and then jettisoned by thieves. The Vatican gendarmes discarded their colorful and elaborate ceremonial uniforms three decades ago. They now wear pillbox peaked hats and smart blue police uniforms with epaulettes. And once a year, on the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, they march up and down with their band in front of their clerical paymasters at a private ceremony at the back of St. Peter's Basilica, just around the corner from the 19th century courthouse where the Pope's butler has been on trial. The governor of Vatican City state pays tribute to their efforts for protecting the person of the Pope, whether inside his pocket handkerchief domain or when he crosses into Italian territory or travels overseas. Then there's a buffet reception and fireworks inside the Vatican Gardens where the police band plays Arrivederci Roma or old Glenn Miller favourites while guests enjoy risotto offered by the German car manufacturer who builds the Popemobile. This year's police party, however, took place in a more muted atmosphere than usual. The remote calm usually surrounding the Pope and his aides has been shattered by the embarrassing revelations in the Vatican City courtroom of the butler who rose above his modest station in life. As a result of what the butler heard and saw at the Pope's dinner table, he dared to violate not only the laws of the Vatican City state, but but also the secrets of the inner sanctum of the Church's administrative headquarters, the Holy See. He publicly suggested that the Catholic Church is going off the rails, as he put it, and that Pope Benedict may not be fully informed about what's going on around him. 200 Catholic bishops from around the world arrive in Rome this weekend to take part in a three week Vatican Synod to discuss how the Church should combat creeping secularism in formerly Catholic Europe. Many are asking themselves the same questions that the Pope's butler asked himself as he listened in to the conversation around the Pope's table while pouring the wine and serving food. The question that his trial failed to address is did the lone butler have accomplices in breaching Vatican security? Are there many more senior people who work inside Vatican headquarters and in the Catholic Church worldwide who may be equally dissatisfied with the way the Church is being run?
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Kay Dady
And finally, David wasn't just known for the enviable network of contacts he built in the Vatican, but also the relationships he forged in Italian politics through decades of fastidious reporting from Italy. Among those he got to know was the media tycoon and four time Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. When Mr. Berlusconi died in 2023, David recalled a day he spent with the billionaire businessman at his private estate just north of Milan just after he became Prime Minister for the first time.
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David Willey
I first saw a blurry photograph of Silvio's mega tomb in a popular Italian magazine. I rang up the sculptor to ask if I could get a close look at what seemed to me to be a bizarre hundred ton monument, an abstract work of art which he had been commissioned to create, entitled the Vault of Heaven. I flew to Milan. It was 1994, and Mr. Berlusconi had just become Italy's prime Minister for the first time. We entered the large manicured gardens surrounding the villa, where wild deer wandered picturesquely through part of the park, and suddenly came upon the white marble monument gleaming in the sunlight. The part of the monumental tomb above ground seemed to represent no specifically Christian theme. Lots of circles and triangles, perhaps Masonic in origin, I thought. Then we descended a wide stairway to enter the underground burial chamber. It was clearly inspired by the tombs that the ancient Etruscans used to build 3,000 years ago. And it reminded me of my visit to the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. A narrow access corridor had sculptures on the walls depicting some objects that the deceased might need in the afterlife, including, I remember, a telephone, a ball of string and some fruit. The burial chamber itself had a massive pink granite sarcophagus in the center. Around the walls were 36 small niches linked by a chain design for family and friends, the sculptor explained later. Mr. Berlusconi himself arrived in a swirl of dust by helicopter, fresh from a cabinet meeting in Rome. He invited us to take tea with him after he had rested. His second wife, Veronica, the one who later divorced him for consorting with underage girls, and their two young children, joined us as we discussed some minor adjustments to the tomb with its creator. I asked him about those with whom he wanted to share his new tomb. Oh, my family, he explained. And, er, collaborators. Collaboratori in Italian, meaning business partners. He left their identity deliberately vague. He was clearly proud of his tomb, however, and he said he often took VIP visitors to see it. One of them was the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Fast forward 10 years, and Mr. Berlusconi suddenly discovered that according to an Italian law dating back to Napoleonic times, it's illegal to bury anyone in your garden. As he was now once again Prime Minister, he simply changed the law, making an exception for himself. And so he continued throughout his life. Although investigated many times for alleged crimes of corruption and false accounting, Mr. Berlusconi escaped conviction through impunity. Law was that he skilfully manoeuvred through parliament. He frequently maintained that he had been the victim of a vendetta by left wing judges and prosecutors. Although he was finally convicted on one charge of corruption, his sentence for that was commuted to a few hours of community service, which he carried out with his usual winning smile. Silvio Bellusconi had been in and out of hospital for some time suffering from blood cancer. But his death sparked off some very strong feelings here among both his supporters and his detractors. He was given a magnificent state funeral at public expense amid clouds of swirling incense in Milan's towering Gothic cathedral. Flags on government buildings all over Italy were ordered to be flown at half mast. Pope Francis sent from his own hospital bed a personal message of condolence to the family. The guest list at the funeral included Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni and the entire political establishment. Many Italians, however, weren't very happy at this outpouring of emotion on the demise of a man who was so often accused of corrupting the animus of his country and helping to make lying and cheating respectable. The rector of one university resisted and refused to lower the national flag as instructed. The legacy of Silvio Berlusconi is perceived in many countries as an influential precursor of the populist political leaders who've taken over in many parts of the world with his virtual monopoly over commercial television in Italy, he was his own spin doctor and a past master at adjusting the past to his own interpretation. He always maintained that he had been Italy's most successful prime Minister since unification 150 years ago. But today's realities perhaps suggest otherwise.
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Kay Dady
That brings us to the end of this special episode of from our own correspondent, remembering the veteran BBC correspondent David Willey, who has died aged 93. We'll be back again on Saturday morning, bringing you the latest stories from around the world. Thank you for listening.