John Kampfner :: author, broadcaster & commentator

My greatest mistake
The Independent, 7th September 2004

I can still see the article, 18 years on. It was on the back page of Pravda. I was the trainee, on my first overseas posting. I was also the only correspondent on duty that morning in our little Reuters office, which was hardly surprising given that there were only three of us left and we were all working long hours. Our full contingent was five, but two colleagues had a few months earlier been expelled in a tit-for-tat ‘spy’ row after Margaret Thatcher had kicked a couple of Tass journalists out of London. This was a time, to coin Lenin’s phrase, of two steps forward and one step back. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, had achieved remarkable changes. Then came the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, news of which had reached the West well before it was reluctantly confirmed by the Soviet authorities.

As the world looked on in horror, reporters in Moscow were all on edge, under pressure to find out more. That is where my howler came in. Our affable if excitable Armenian assistant pointed me to information in Pravda that suggested the scope of the accident was bigger than had been revealed. The piece named a number of villages and towns potentially affected. I quickly bashed out an alert reporting that a second exclusion zone had been declared. The markets went wild. Governments went wild. HQ congratulated me on outsmarting our rivals. We counted the minutes before the other agencies caught up. The trouble was – they didn’t. My stomach began to churn. I re-read the piece and realised I had got it wrong. Some of the towns involved were already in the existing exclusion zone. The zone had been enlarged in places, but basically it was not a story. As soon as I got hold of my boss (these were the days before mobiles and I couldn’t find him at home) we knew we had to kill the story. Reuters always prided itself on double and treble checking, especially stories as sensitive as this. I was truly in the doghouse. That was May 1986. I think they would have sent me home, if only the office had not been so short staffed. I’m pleased they didn’t.

This article first appeared in The Independent and may not be reproduced without permission.