Hi, everyone, Welcome to conversations. In twenty thirteen, a war correspondent, although he doesn't like the term, was detained in Cairo by the Egyptian authorities, subsequently put to trial in the twenty fourteen, was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison in an Egyptian jail. It's a well known case. Eventually Peter Grestor was released after lots of negotiation, diplomatic
intervention and the like, and it became a really fascinating story. Subsequently, Peter wrote a book about it, The First Casualty, And now there's been a movie written about the story, and the book has been re released with additional information and chapters in it, called The Correspondent. Peter Grestor joins us, Peter, thank you for your time.
How are you fantastic to be with you? Grant what a.
Life you've had or are having? Can I say? But in terms of I don't know where to start. There's a movie about your time incarceration in the Egyptian prison. We'll get to that, of course. And that's a few to have a movie written about you or made about you.
Well, it's weird at one level. I mean, I suppose we all play that game, you know who'd play you in a movie? And seeing that actually happen there's been a little bit bizarre. But I've also recognized that it's not a movie about me. It's a movie about a particular thing that happened to me. It's a movie about or it's an artistic interpretation of a story that I wrote, and so it feels like it's a couple of steps
removed from from from me. I remember talking to the director, kriv Standers, who said that it's then he's not trying to do not trying to make a photograph. This is a painting. It's a kind of artistic rendering of that experience that I had, And in a way, I guess that makes it a lot easier to watch and see it for what it is, rather than try and get caught up with the idea that it's me on screen.
Did you have any saying who was to play you?
A little bit like I don't think i'd have ever really would go for Brad pitt Well. I was thinking, yeah, I was thinking thinking Chris Hamsworth, myself, Richard Rock.
I don't know how to say, sir named Roxborough. He's a fine looking.
Man, a fine looking man and a fantastic actor. Although I have to admit when I first heard that he was he was being considered for the part, I just couldn't get his most famous role out of my head, Clever Green, the lawyer in Rake. Clever Green is such a kind of rogue character, such a strong character that it was that and so strongly associated with Rocks that that I really couldn't imagine how Clever Green would survive prison in Egypt. But Rox did an absolutely brilliant job.
In fact, quite a number of the critics have described his performance as career defining.
We're going to get to Egypt, We're going to get to an incarceration, your subsequent release, and the work you're doing now. Of course, but the Bag story is interesting of Latvian descent, so was it mum and dad who immigrated it with.
My father some half lat Fin. My dad was a first a Second World War immigrant, a refugee. He came out after the Russians invaded Latvia. They fled latvieir and went into refugee camps around Germany for a few years until after the war. My step grandfather, my real grandfather, my paternal grandfather was captured. He was drafted into the German army and captured by the Allies and ended up
dying in an Allied pow camp. And so my grandmother then formed another relationship with my step grandfather, who came to Australia as a part of the migrant refuge refugee or migrant worker scheme and sponsored my grandmother's family to come out. And so that's how he wound up in Australia.
What a story. Did your dad ever talk to you about his war time experiences?
A lot? In fact, you know, I think Dad's refugee heritage fed a lot into us, into our DNA, in ways that I don't think I ever really appreciated until I spent I started working as a correspondent. He spoke a lot about his time in refugee camps. It's sort of informed the way that he sees the world, the way that he engages with the world, even down to very practical things like food. You know, refugees don't ever seem to waste any food. They never check anything out.
You can find the moldiest piece of cheese at the back of the fridge and Dad will scrape off the mold and stick it on a slice of toast.
Is he still with us?
Oh, definitely, yep, very much. In fact, I was with my parents for Mother's Day. They're both kicking. My dad is eighty eight, is about to turn eighty nine.
Wow. Yeah, did your document? Did you document those experiences?
Well, we've had a lot of conversations with them. I went, In fact, I went with mum and dad quite a few years ago to Latfeer to see my mum and dad's birthplace, and we followed my dad's path into Germany and we went and visited all of the refugee camp sites where he stayed, and he talked through it a lot. And Dad has himself written the story of the flight from Latvieer in a book that keeps getting added. I think he's up to a dender number nine at the moment.
Was he hurt or heard? That's of course it was hurt. But was he scarred by what happened to his dad?
I'm not sure. I'm not sure if scarred is the right word for it. I think I think heavily influenced formed by it.
He died in an Allied prison camp. We're used to the other experience where we were in Japanese were German ones.
Yeah. It is interesting, isn't it. But I think I guess that's you know, we we I think we think of the Allies has been always been the good guys in this stuff. I think that's just a function of war. And I think my father recognized that. I don't think he you know, he saw it. I don't think he holds the Allies responsible for it. I think it was just one of those things, one of the tragedies that happened in war, happened in so many places on all sides.
You know. I think he's more formed by the whole war experience, the refugee experience, than specifically his father's death.
What did he do when he came to a stranger.
So he went and studied architecture, became an architect, and many years yeah, working as an architect. One of the things that my grandmother was really forceful about when it came to her kids was education, education, education, and.
Rubbed off on you too. I mean you were good at school.
Yeah, I was pretty good at school. I was I was a bit of a bit of a nerd, I guess at school. I was never brilliant, but I certainly didn't seem to struggle too much.
But you went to Uni. I'm just reading the bioh you did a business degree.
It was it was a Bachelor of Business Communications. So it was actually journalism. It was a public relations, advertising and journalism. And I took to the journalism strand.
And where did that lead? I mean, you came out of university with that degree. Where do you go?
Yeah? Well I went, So I went from there to to rural Sheperdon. I was a journalist with the local TV station, Victoria Sheppard, Victorian north Is Victoria.
Did you grow up in Queensland?
There was a job there. You know. I was always keen for for my first job. And I guess that's what the degree got me. It's got me that first job and in some respects, in some respects a lot of respects up until my students that that Shepherd and was where I learned to be a foreign correspondent.
But Shepherd is a country Victorian town. The steeped in the sport. And did you have to absorb as rules footy?
Yeah? I was your body dairy farming, fruit, fruit, fruit farming, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that was look, it was. It was a It was a great experience because it taught me to work very quickly. It taught me to
work independently. It taught me the importance of accuracy. You know, I guess one of the things in Capital City newsrooms is that you're often a little bit isolated from your audiences, whereas in a place like Shepherd And if you every you know, if you whenever you walk down the street the following day after a story, someone would tap you on your shoulder and pull you up for some factoid that you'd gotten wrong, some some name that you'd mispronounced
and correct you very very quickly. So I was very close to the people that you're actually reporting for.
Let's stay go from country Victoria to reporting in the world's hotspots. I mean, where did you what was the next quantum leap?
From Victoria to Darwin? I worked for the ten networkers the ten Networks Northern Australia reporter for a year, not hell of a long time, and then from Darwin to Adelaide for about three years.
How did you work for an Adelaide for.
The ten network? It was just in the local and the state. The Capital City news room but I guess that was you asked about the quantum leap, you asked about the formative shift, and I guess it happened there because I was in Adelaide for about three years, and towards the end of three years, I remember starting to feel as though I was repeating the stories. You know, that I could take a script that i'd done twelve months previously and pretty much changed the names and the
dates and refile the story that. But it just felt as though that there were kind of stories at routine that came up, whether it was fatal car accidents or industrial disputes or government local council politics, and I was
starting to look for something new. And I remember reading a book called One Crowded Hour, a biography of a guy called Neil Davis, who was an extraordinary Australian cameraman who covered Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, Laos and Cambodia and so on, and Davis was became a bit of an icon for me. He was incredibly brave, He was wounded something like twenty three times. He saw more active combat than almost than most serving soldiers. It's not that I wanted to be on the front lines and
wounded in while I was doing my job. But it struck me that Davis was at what a friend of mine once called the hinges of history pivotal moments, that he was passionate about the stories and the people that he was covering, and he showed extraordinary professionalism and having some wonderful adventures along the way, And I thought, well,
that's actually what I want to do. And about that time, this was in around late ninety around early nineteen nineties, nineteen ninety ninety one, when we had the famous recession that we had to have, the TEN network went into receivership to save money, they closed down the London bureau, and I had this sort of idea of being a foreign correspondent starting to develop in my mind, and I realized that you couldn't have really one of the main
Australian networks without a London correspondent. So I marched into my boss's office and said, listen, if I quit, if I resigned my job here and take myself to London, would you guys use me as a stringer? And they said sure, why not. It wasn't going to cost them anything, It wasn't any major crisis for them. They knew my work, and so that's what I did.
Peter Grest is my guest, folks. His book is called The Correspondent. The movie starring Richard Rochburt is also out at the moment, called The Correspondent, based on Peter's life back shortly, Welcome back, everybody. My guest is Peter Grest talking about his book called The Correspondent, and that's the story of his well, his life as a journalist, but specifically I suppose where he was detained and trialed and
put the trial and incarcerated in Egypt. But I get lost in the in the early days, and I didn't realize Peter was in Adelaide for three years, then goes off to London. But can I just persist on the Oudelaide? Do you have any memories of Adelaide?
Of course I loved Adelaide.
Did you have a footy team you're barried for?
I had to be the Crows, didn't it did?
Then you've got a choice now unfortunate. Oh yeah, not not unfortunately but fortunately. But so if you go to London, what was that like?
Yeah, it was, it was. It was a really formative experience, I guess you know, I started, I started doing some work for the ten network, but in the end it didn't really amount to a huge amount. I started doing some other freelancing around some news organizations, Reuter's w what was then WTN Worldwide Television News, and a little bit for the BBC World's BBC World Tv. And then I'm you're going to love this. I met a girl in a pub in London who took me off to Bosnia during the war in Yugoslavia.
Yeah, how did she do that?
Well, she was this gorgeous, flamehaired Irish girl who I saw dancing on a table and yeah, yeah, it certainly did. And I was a bit namored, and I started chatting
her up and you know, got her phone number. But she told me that she was One of the things that she said was that she was about to go on this on a pilgrimage to a place called Magagori, which was in in the place in the region of Bosni called herzeg Bosna, which was a Croat control part of Bosnia, and Magagori was this place where Catholic pilgrims went from basically from the nineteen seventies through there were these visions of the Virgin Mary that started appearing there
in front of a bunch of kids, and it became it developed a reputation for miracles and miraculous visions and healings and so on amongst the Catholic community. And Kathy Heggerty that was this girl's name, you know, said she was about to go on this pilgrimage and I thought it was an extraordinary story, the idea of these pilgrims going into the middle of a war zone. And she said, well,
why don't you come? And I laughed it off, but I told the story to two friends of mine, one who worked for The Australian and the other who worked for ABC Radio, and within two days I got messages from the foreign editors of both saying, look, for God's sake, you're thinking at all of going to Yugoslavia. Let us know, because are really in the market for freelance stories. I thought, well, it's a no brainer, isn't it. There's a story and the clients and there's the girl.
No, I'm jumping ahead now, but what happened to Kathy in the air.
Yeah, she went off. She actually became became a nun. The Catholic nun and not kidding. Yeah, so that was never going to really be a that relationship. But she actually she also wrote to me in prison once and I replied to her. Yeah, I replied to her and said, listen, you realize that you're the reason I'm here.
Wasn't here? Was it as horrific as it was later reported? I mean, there was all sorts of it.
It was pretty horrific. I mean I was. I was really working around the fringes. I spent a bit of time in Sarajevo and worked across other parts of Bosnia at the time, you know, I was. I was. I was green as grass then. I had no no experience of of war zones. I didn't know how to operate. I had no equipment, no training. It was really, even though diving in the deep end, I was still just doggy paddling around close to the edges.
Did you have to fund yourself when you Yeah?
I did, and I knew I was going to lose money on it, but I also figured that the opportunity was too good, was too good to pass up. It was just something that seemed quite obvious to me. I was never not going to go if I had that that I had that invitation.
So slowly you develop as a authentic wal correspondent. I looked at the places you've served in, like Bosnia, South Africa, Afghanistan, Somalia and Nairobi. The one place that really fascinated me was mom Besser. I've been fascinated with mom bess Ever that Warren Zevon's song about rolling the Headless Gunner. He met him at a bar in mom Besser. Can you tell me about mom Besser.
I loved my partner at the time. I was an ecologist who ran a nature reserve near Mombassa, and I was working for the BBC then and the BBC was happy to have me as a freelance And when you're working for the BBC as a freelance correspondent, it doesn't really matter where you live, as long as you're close to an airport and you can get to wherever you need to be. And it's absolutely it's an incredible town.
It's one of those wonderful, exotic, ancient trading towns where you have the intersection of Arab traders and Swahili communities, coastal African communities and Indian communities all coming together in this extraordinary melting pot. It's a beautiful town in this sort of rough, rugged, messy, chaotic African kind of way.
Is it safe.
It looked like anyway, I guess. I remember someone when I first went to Africa, probably the best piece of advice I ever had was from someone who said, listen. Africa is not for beginners. You need to you need to keep your eyes open. But as long as you keep your eyes open and you're willing to not just keep your eyes open, but your ears open, you're willing to listen and communicate and talk to people, then you can operate safely.
But were you still a beginner then no.
By then I'd had quite a few years. I've been to Afghanistan, of course previously, and then I had five years in Latin America, working across Mexico and Chilean Argentina, and you know, in the interim. I was back in Afghanistan after nine to eleven for the war the top of the Taliban, and so I've been around a fair bit. I was also in Iraq during the post nine to eleven conflicts, so I knew I knew how to operate.
Intrigues me with people like yourself have got such a history of reporting from war zones. How do you settle down?
Now?
Do you settle down? Do you have a private life, GiB what do How do you establish relationships?
Yeah, well I've got a stream of relationships behind me and probably a few of my exes would say I don't do that very well, look settling down. It's interesting. My one x remember said to me that the after Egypt, in fact, she felt that the greater trauma was not so much having to go through Egypt, but having to give up my old life as a correspondent, that that was the harder thing to manage, and actually thinks she's probably right.
Well, how did you end up in Egypt? Tell us how you ended up in Egypt?
So I've been working for Al Jazeera. I left the BBC in two thousand and eleven after I made a film for Panorama on Somalia and Al Jazeera offered me a role as there East Africa correspondent and I was based in Nairobi when in twenty thirteen, towards the end of twenty thirteen, they needed someone to cover the bureau in Cairo, just over the Christmas New Year period. They wanted me just to basically go up and treade water,
just to keep the stories ticking over. There'd been an ongoing political crisis between supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who had formed the first democratically elected government in the middle of twenty twelve, and it had been forced out of power in a coup in the middle of twenty thirteen, and so by the time that I was asked to go up to Cairo at the end of twenty thirteen, there was a lot of political turmoil, ongoing street protests
between the Brotherhood supporters and supporters of the military installed regime. And the job was really just, as I said, to keep the stories ticking over while they were a little bit short staffed over that Christmas New Year period. So the government would announce the new interim government, would announce some changes to the constitution. We'd pick up the phone and call the opposition to get their response, and that, of course happened to be the Brotherhood. Then you'd find
a political analyst to make sense of it all. It was. It was vanilla journalism, nothing particularly dramatic.
When you say al Jazeero, I mean you explained it in your book, but we always associate Al Jazeero with sympathizers to the Muslim Muslim Islamic endeavors. Put it if I can put it that.
Way, yeah, I don't think that's I don't think that's fair or accurate. Al Jazeera. So Al Jazeera was set up by the Katari government after the BBC Arabic Service collapsed and the Qataris saw the value of the soft power, the soft influence that world cer that the Arabic Service gave to the BBC, and they saw a big void in Arabic language media in that kind of area, and so the Kataris set up Al Jazeera and using a lot of former BBC staffers to create that kind of
that kind of service. Now, I always felt that they were doing it for window dressing. It was to present Qatar as a kind of much more democratic, open minded political force than it actually was culturally and politically. But as long as they didn't mess with my journalism, as long as they allowed us to operate freely and independently, then I was okay with that. And that's really how
it worked. There was never any kind of political agenda, There was never any kind of pro Islamic Muslim Brotherhood agenda. There was simply an agenda to try and cover the region as best we could. And I guess in the same way that if you work for the BBC, you tend to get an Anglo centric view of the world. If you're based out of Doha, then you tend to
get to kind of Islamic worldview of the world. That's not to say that it's necessarily biased, but it's just that there is a greater emphasis on those parts of the world, and Al Jazeira liked to present itself as taking a kind of global South view rather than an Islamic extremist view. I certainly never gave any preference to or lent towards, and I was never asked to favor any kind of Islamists or Islamic view that that's just not the way that they operated.
Getting the first interview with some of bim Laden after nine to eleven probably.
Well, yes, but you could argue, and I felt that that was I mean, that was definitely using their networks to do that. But my view was that we actually needed to hear from the guy that was accused of launching nine to eleven attacks that even if you disagreed as I did, as hundreds of millions of people around the world would have done if you disagreed with him, we still needed to understand the political ideology that drove
that drove him and his supporters. I think that, and that's why I would always argue that as journalists and we have a responsibility to cover all parties into these kinds of conflicts and robustly interview them, you know, don't they don't give any but at the same time understand what it is that drives them. I you know, when I when I covered Somalia, we went to great lengths to try and understand Al Shabab, to talk to them and get their understanding of why they did what they did.
That doesn't mean condoning it, but it does mean because I don't believe that you can ever resolve these conflicts unless you're really able to understand what it is that drives your enemies.
You know, I suppose CNN would have jumped to the chance to interview him too.
I guess I'm pretty sure most of his organizations would have jumped.
Peter Grestor is my guest, Folks, He's about to be arrested and incarcerated in Cairo. Back after the break. Welcome back to conversations, everybody, for just tuned in. We're chatting with Peter Grestor now is a renowned or ex foreign correspondent, famous one because he was arrest to, jailed and incarcerated
in Cairo. Subsequently wrote a book about it called The First Casualty, which has been added to and been re released as The Correspondent, and it now is the basis of a film starring Which at Roxburgh, who plays Peter's role. So you've got a book to have a lookout for and a movie to go and see. But Peter joins us, Actually, where are we speaking to you? Peter? Where do you live these days?
I'm in Brisbane these days.
Is that home? Is that it forever?
I'd never say forever the time being at least, yeah, this is home. I've been now in Brisbane longer than I think I've ever been at any other place since I left home when I was plenty. So yeah, for the time being, this is it.
Okay. So there's famous scenes. You're in your hotel room in Cairo, there's a knock on the door and these men burst in. They don't identify themselves. They started rummaging through your stuff. What's going through your mind?
Well, who are these guys and what the hell is going on? You know? They, as you said, they ransacked the room. They grabbed all of my gear, my notebooks, my computer gear, my cameras, my courting equipment, you know, stuffed it all into these evidence bags, and marched me off into a room that was being used by the
police and started asking questions. We initially thought, look, this is just this is someone screwed up, you know, they've misread the warrants and that was for a guy called Peter Greystone, perhaps, or someone had mistranslated something that we'd
broadcast and they were a bit upset about it. Or they were just generally trying to rattle the cage a bit, and you know, there'd be a few phone calls and it'll all be over in a matter of hours, perhaps a night in the cells, but that would be about it.
But that wasn't it.
No, it wasn't it. Now we're detained. I weren't told of any charges. It was pretty obvious that they were police. We eventually learned their Interior Ministry Police, which is the kind of secret police I guess fairly hardcore guys. And a few days later I went in for an interrogation with the National Intelligence Directorate. I guess the Egyptian equivalent of Asia, only a little bit more, a little bit
more hardcore. There I discovered the charges We've been accused of aading and a betting, a terrorist organization, being members of a terrorist organization, financing terrorism, broadcasting false news with intent to undermine national security, some pretty pretty serious charges.
And all that based on the fact that you had there had been a coupe the Democratic democratically elected party, had been ousted, and had they been listed at that stage as a terrorist organization.
Not formally listed. At that point, they'd been a accused of being involved in acts of terror. I felt that that was as much a political thing, a political acts, as anything else. There was no evidence that we'd seen the government had presented to to suggest that the Brotherhood was in fact behind acts of terror, you know, at
that point they were just allegations. Look, this is one of those things quarante that I never really believed that it was about that they seriously thought we were involved in terrorism.
You know, So that was there a showcase trial, were they making an example of you.
Yeah, I think so, so as far as I could tell. So if there was, there was obviously a narrative about Al Jazeera's supposed or the Katari influence in Egypt. The Kataris had been fairly strong supporters of the Brotherhood because Al Jazeera was a Katari run organization. Therefore, they felt
that we must be somehow colluding with the Brotherhood. But because I'd only just arrived, and because we were doing what I considered to be very vanilla journalism, and because there was zero evidence, I mean, I mean, I just wasn't. I had no connections with the Brotherhood whatsoever. I didn't speak Arabic, I didn't have any networks with the Brotherhood. You know, it just didn't. It just wasn't a reality. We certainly hadn't been financing the Brotherhood of Terrorism. We'd
been paying nobody. But I had some cash with me that we were using to pay the hotel bills and pay for drivers and that sort of stuff, but nothing more than that. And so I felt that, in fact, it really didn't have anything to do with the Brotherhood or Qatari influence. It's that they wanted to make an example of us. They wanted to send a message to
all journalists, whether they were local or foreigners. But they came after us because we were politically convenient, because we we we fitted that that narrative that was that was that was fairly cheap and easy for them. But it wasn't about it wasn't about that. It was it was really just about sending a message.
So I guess you're thinking this is all going to go away once you once you, you know, maybe the embassy can get involved, the Australian embassy or the British embassy or whoever. But then you find yourself in a in a court room and I guess they speak Arabic. Was conducting in Arabic, wasn't?
Yeah, completely in Arabic? Yeah, yeah. But I had a I had a quarter pointed interpreter. Initially I was very
very suspicious of him. I really did trust him. But both of my colleagues, Baha and family, spoke very very good English, and they could also listen into what the interpreter was saying, and they reassured me that the translation was pretty solid, and so yeah, it was, it was, but it was still a confronting experience and it was not like the judicial process that that were he used to, you know, the idea of due process, the idea of this trial, none of that was really it was really
really hung together. That the trial ran six months. You know, there were all sorts of bizarre witnesses, bizarre treatment of evidence.
What do you mean by that, the bizarre witnesses.
Well, you know, we had we had investigator who said that we were involved in meetings but with the book, was them Brotherhood at the Marriott hotel where we were staying, which was just patently untrue. I'd never ever met anybody, certainly not from the Muslim Brotherhood in the hotel. We were very, very careful to make sure that there was there was real distance between ourselves and any of our contacts.
And of course we had contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood, as did every other journalist in Cairo at the time. They were the most significant political force in the country, having, as he said, just formed the previous government, and so there was nothing editorial or professionally wrong with having relationships, having contact with the Brotherhood, and certainly there was nothing
that we'd published that would ever count as terrorist ideology. Again, we were very careful not to publish anything that would be seen as insightful citing. It was just it was weird.
So the moment of truth comes when the judgment is about to be handed down, and just stand and listen and this moment of drama and what's going through your mind and what's your reaction.
When well, we initially, because we gamed it out beforehand, anybody who saw the coverage of the trial would have recognized that there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever to substantiate even the thinnest of the allegations against us. But we thought, well, surely they've got to acquit us, because the trial had been so closely watched so heavily reported that anything less than an acquittal would be really embarrassing for the judicial system.
But then we thought, well, okay, some possibly they might need to convict us of something. But we've already spent six months in prison throughout the pre trial and the trial process. They could convict us of some administrative offense and give us six months time served and we'd be able, they get their conviction, we'd be allowed to go home, everybody is happy, and that would be the end of the matter. We thought that would be the most likely outcome.
We thought possibly our convict us of something, you know, maybe give us an extra few weeks, maybe a month more in prison. In the end, when we were convicted and given seven year sentences, that was that was pretty devastating. That was a blow. That was I remember. I know that there was a lot of shouting in the court
at that moment, huge amounts of drama. But all I remember in my head at the time of my ears ringing and those two words seven years, seven years, seven years, just going around around inside my head.
Grestor is my guest, folks, we'll talk about that experience when we come back back shortly. Peter Grestor is my
guest on conversations. If you just tuned in, he's been arrested, tried, and convicted in Cairo on terrorism charges given the fact that he worked for El Jazeira, a newspaper, no evidence whatsoever, but it was a Trump trumped up charge and the sentence was I don't know, obviously terribly andjust so you're standing in the court room, you've been in jail, you've been you've been in custody for six months, but you're now faced with the prospect of going to prison. For
seven years in an Egyptian prison. What happens then? What's I know? You said your head was ringing with these two words seven years. What happens then?
Well, and you've got to just got to rebalance your thinking at the time. At each stage, through the through the pre trial period, and during the trial itself, we always thought that this thing has to go away, that they've got to release this. They've got to see how ridiculous this is, how embarrassing it is. We're going to be released, you know, whether it's during the investigation I'll drop the charges, or during the early stage of the trial the judge had kicked the whole thing out, or
at the end of it would be acquitted. And so I didn't. I never really psychologically geared my mind to a longer, a longer stretch. But when we had, when we had to confront seven years, that's when it really required a whole kind of rebalancing of rethinking of mine, of my mind, and a new approach to prison.
What was it like in What were the conditions like?
We were held in three separate prisons. The first was a period of solitary confinement, an isolation in a political wing of the Mentora with a lot of secular prisoners, pro democracy guys. The second prison was actually even more asteered. The three of us were held in the cell, but we're in the in a cell for three hours, for around twenty three hours a day, and allowed that only for one hour, and not allowed to socialize with any of the other prison inmates. And the other inmates were
all leaders of the Brotherhood administration. And that was really tough. That was really tough going. We weren't beaten, we weren't abused physically abused. There were guards that would occasionally get a little bit rough with us, but you know, it was never, never what I considered to be torture.
Look, eventually, eventually the negotiations and that you are really You mentioned Barack Obama's role in your adventure release you give a bit of a whack on the way through as well, But what role did he play?
So yeah, what happened was early on I wrote a couple of letters that I smuggled out of prison describing what had happened to us, not as as not as a kind of response to anything we had done, but what would come to represent it was an attack on press freedom rather than an attack on anything, and he had supposed to allegations of criminal activity on our part, and that letter framed the campaign. It really energized I think literally thousands of journalists around the world to line
up and support us. But it also made it Those letters made their way to Barack Obama's desk, and I know because I met him afterwards. He said that he'd seen the letters, he'd read them, and he'd made our case at the top of the agenda for any of their meetings with their Egyptian counterparts. He said, I raised your case every time I spoke to President Ceci and instructed all of their diplomats to make it the first
point of any agenda. They didn't think that they would necessarily be able to get us out on their own, but it was all about adding to the pressure, adding adding to the price that the Egyptians were paying for keeping us in prison.
But eventually negotiations are successful on the basis that you have retried back here in Australia.
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not sure negotiations so much. I mean, there was a constant pressure from all sorts of quarters. But yes, the kind of fiction or the conceit was that I'd be released to complete the judicial process. What happened was that we were convicted, got our sentences. For seven years, we'd appealed our conviction and won the appeal, the sentences were overturned and the retrial had been ordered.
So it was in that gap when I was no longer a convicted terrorist, simply an accused prisoner, but before the retrial could begin, that I was taken out. And I think that was because it was a sort of politically opportune moment when I wasn't back in the moor, if you like, of the judicial process, and there was on a presidential decree to complete the judicial process back in Australia. But of course, as far as the Australians were concerned, there'd been no evidence that we'd been guilty
of any criminal offense. They had no brief of evidence, there was no we hadn't as far as the Australians were concerned, there was no breach of any Australian law, and so there was no judicial process to complete.
So he came home, evaded any judicial process. Ten years later and on the journalist anymore.
No, no, Now, what happened, Well, it kind of overtook my life. I realized it was as tough as it was. I realized I couldn't really go back to that life. I'm still because when the retrial was ordered, when the retrial started, and they would remember there were my two colleagues Fami and Bahu were still in Cairo and who had to go through the retrial, but I was all so named as a defendant. And when that retrial ended,
we were all reconvicted and given fresh sentences. Now they were eventually pardoned and released, but I haven't been pardoned, and so there is a conviction and a prison sentence still outstanding for me. There's a prison cell waiting for me in Egypt if I ever go.
Back there, go out of a country which as an.
Extradition treaty with Egypt, and there's one extradition treaty that covers the whole of the African Union from the Cape to Cairo, and so working in Sub Saharan Africa is a real problem. Any country in the Middle East carries a lot of risk for me, but they're also even traveling somewhere as benign as the United States is a real problem because I have to declare my terrorism conviction, even though it's bogus. But that means I can't travel
at short notice. I have to go through a long process of applying for visas, and so it means it basically meant that that lie as a free ranging foreign correspondent wasn't going to work any longer. But I also felt that this issue of media freedom was something that I had a responsibility to continue to campaign for. I saw what happened to us not the reason I wrote the book, and was because I wanted to try and
place our experience in a larger historical context. I didn't think it was just limited to a bunch of ourseholes who put us in prison in Egypt. I saw it as a kind of broader assault on journalism globally. That really began with nine to eleven, when George W. Bush announced the War on Terror. And what happened then was that Bush opened up the rhetoric of national security and
created war over ideas over Isam's. I mean that war of ideas, the space where ideas are transmitted becomes a part of the battlefield quite literally, and so it governments the world over, whether it's American government or the Egyptian government. The Chinese or even the Australian government. We've seen governments using national security as an excuse to to lock up journalists or limit the work the journalists are able to do.
And what happened to us in Egypt was a really visceral, personal example of that wider narrative.
You make the point here in Australia that journalists have been detained for not trumped up terrorism charges, but for daring to question established order.
Yeah. So back in twenty nineteen we saw the Australian Federal Police raide journalists from two news organizations looking for evidence of the sources that they'd used to stories that had been around national security but not breached national security. You know. One of them was the ABC, Right, the ABC had published what became known as the Afghan Files. This was evidence of war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. Now, the ABC did not publish any information
that genuinely compromised national security. The evidence, well that the documents that they had were classified. They were classified reports field reports from special forces operations in Afghanistan. But the ABC hadn't revealed anything that had damaged security. They're very
careful about how they handled it. So the story was crucially important for public interest, and I felt that using national security legislation to come after the journalists and their sources in that in that story was really dangerous because it allowed the government to cover up frankly outrageous human
rights abuses. Were allegations of human rights abuses by Australian special forces, now allegations that have been I won't say substantiated, but have been repeated by the Brereton Inquiry into the conduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan. And so the idea that we could use security legislation to shut down that kind of reporting, I think is very, very dangerous. And that's another example of exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.
We've come to the MP and I know people will want more. And if they want more, the book is it called The Correspondent, and the movie's out there. Peter, you don't quite look like Richard Rothbig if I can.
Say, well, he had to have a haircut for the movie.
Well, thanks so much, you're the best.
Great to speak, Thank very much for having.
Peter Grestor is my guest folk. The book is called The Correspondent. The movie is called The Correspondent. Thank you for joining us.