Local Faces

“There I was, being corrected on my knowledge of the Premier League transfer market by a man with a gun in a somalian cave...” ―

Cara Cummings meets the daredevil foreign correspondent from Dulwich.

Colin Freeman and I have been talking for ten minutes when we get to what happened in Iraq.

“The thing is - when you get shot in the arse, it's different to being shot somewhere glamorous like the arm or leg,” he muses. “People just think it’s funny you got hit in the bum. Even my mum.”

Is it polite to laugh about the punctured posterior of someone you’ve just met? Let’s hope so. Speaking to Freeman is like chatting with your favourite wayward uncle - one prone to jetting off somewhere unspeakably dangerous on a whim. The affable journalist and I are supposed to be discussing his latest book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. But swashbuckling stories from Freeman’s career come thick and fast - “I met an ex-tank commander driving a battered 1981 Nissan, noticed he spoke good English and hired him on the spot” - told with the rollocking charm of one of life’s eternal optimists. It’s like phoning Prince Phillip, God rest him, if HRH a) lived in Dulwich, b) once got kidnapped by his own bodyguards, and c) hadn’t just died.

You can feel sheer life radiating from the Sunday Telegraph’s former chief foreign correspondent. And what a life it’s been. Originally from Scotland, Freeman was working for the London Evening Standard when the Iraq war broke out in 2003.

“I thought - this is the biggest story of my generation, and I’m going to be stuck at home writing about roadworks,” Freeman remembers. “A colleague said, ‘Why don't you go and cover the war as a freelancer?’ I knew nothing about the Middle East, didn't speak Arabic and had no contacts - but that's what I did. Somehow, against the odds, it worked out.”

Although it very nearly didn’t. “I arrived in Iraq on the day the war ended, which isn’t great as a budding war reporter,” he deadpans. But Freeman landed at the right time - as most correspondents left, the rambunctious Scot was on the ground as the US-led military occupation unravelled.

“You could see the insurgency beginning to grow,” he recalls. “Barely a day went by without an assasination, or a car bombing. One half wrecked my hotel. I remember it was so cheap, the US military came to see if any bombers had stayed there as their last port of call!” he chuckles.

In fact, Freeman speaks so warmly of Iraq that the episode feels like a boisterous holiday camp, just with guns. Which brings us to that moment

in Basra.

Freeman had been covering a demonstration - “a cleric promised a bounty to any militaman who could capture a female British soldier and use her as a concubine,” he says casually - when he felt a loud bang. “There was a guy with a smoking gun. He pointed it at my translator’s head and I thought, ‘Uh oh - this doesn’t seem very apologetic...’

“Someone grabbed me and marched me into the big, fired up crowd. I noticed an Arabic crew filming. They thought they were going to get an exclusive of me being lynched.”

It was only after he’d been rescued by a militia leader that Freeman realised he’d been shot. “I thought it was just a minor cut, until my translator said: ‘Christ - you’ve got a bullet wound in your rear end!’

“I was carted off to a British army hospital and they said, “Yes, sir, you have a .22 bullet in your backside.’ Apparently your arse is the best place for it because it's all tissue, no muscle.

“Now there's just a very vague scar,” he reassures, “which my missus occasionally gets me to show people as a party piece.”

Post-Iraq, Freeman found himself covering an emerging frontline once again - this time in Somalia, as the piracy crisis began to hit headlines. Dispatched to investigate a spate of attacks on ships in the Gulf of Aden with Spanish photographer José Cendon, Freeman was en route to catch his flight home when bodyguards, hired to protect the duo, kidnapped them instead. He spent the next 40 days in captivity, his kidnappers demanding $3million - each - for his and Jose’s release.

“We were reasonably well treated, mostly,” Freeman says, sombre for the first time. “We weren’t physically harmed, although we got the impression we’d be tortured if the office didn’t pay up. People just need to intimate that they might hurt you to leave you terrified.”

Worse, though, was the boredom. “Staring at cave walls got old fairly quickly,” Freeman admits. “Time slows down; you lose the ability to daydream. That's when you think: what is this doing to my mental health?”

How did he cope? “You try to keep your morale up,” he says simply. “There’s no guilt in laughing. You have to, to keep yourself going. I mention it to people these days, of course, and you might as well say you've been abducted by aliens...”

After his release, Freeman followed the ongoing piracy crisis closely. He noticed a pattern: whilst hijacked ships belonging to big international firms would be ransomed out after a few months, some seemed to be stuck - for years at a time.

“These ships were mainly crewed by seamen from poorer countries and had owners without the money, or the specialist kidnap insurance, to pay a ransom,” he explains. “Crews faced horrendous conditions - getting tortured, becoming suicidal. People literally stuck between the worst of two worlds because of their owners' inability to pay. It was a terrible situation; these poor sailors had been left to rot.

“I was going up the wall after six weeks when I was kidnapped. What on earth must it be like to be held for that long?”

Freeman answers that question with Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, the incredible true story of how a retired British army officer launched a private mission to rescue long-term captives hijacked off the Somalian coast. Based on first-hand interviews, including with hostages themselves, it’s a gripping and superbly told tale full of Freeman’s signature flair. But why write it now?

“Despite living in a world where people are very aware of rights, that often stops when people take to sea,” Freeman says. “The plight of these guys was known to their governments, yet they fell through the cracks. 90% of world trade happens because of sailors on commercial vessels, but the world only ever hears about pirates when it's an American sea captain or somebody like me getting kidnapped. These people were the ones doing the bulk of the suffering.

“When I was kidnapped, it was because I’d gone to dangerous places of my own accord,” he continues. “I thrived on having that kick. The sailors in the book didn’t sign up for that: they were just trying to earn a living and ended up in hell.”

Today, you’re more likely to find Freeman doing the school run than donning a flak jacket - humour still very much intact. “Pirates are an obsession at my kids’ school, so I offered to do a talk,” he chuckles conspiratorially. “They haven’t got round to booking yet. Not sure my version is quite what they’re after…”

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is available

at all leading bookshops.

p The Albedo hostages enjoy a first meal of freedom after being picked up in the Somali bush (Omar Sheikh Ali) p From Kenya, the freed sailors of the Albedo send a thankyou note to Leslie Edwards (John Steed)