Elaine Lennon is a film historian. She is the author of ChinaTowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne and is widely published in international film journals. She has a background in television production and film financing and was a lecturer for a decade in film studies and screenwriting at the School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology.

Pettibone

Richard Pettibone, Foreign Correspondent, 1938–2004
By a colleague who never quite believed him

Richard Pettibone, foreign correspondent, clubman, keeper of immaculate notebooks and even more immaculate fingernails, died quietly last Tuesday in a London flat that had never once looked as if anyone actually lived there. He was sixty-six, or sixty-eight, depending on which passport you consulted. He is survived by a trench coat that never wrinkled, a typewriter that never jammed, and a reputation that never explained itself.

Pettibone studied history at Cambridge, which in his case meant not so much reading it as rehearsing it. He liked dates, uniforms, and the comforting idea that all events could be footnoted. He arrived at Trinity in the late 1950s with a tie already knotted as if for inspection and left with a First and the vague air of a man who had learned something quite useful but was under strict instructions not to say what. His tutors remembered him as “formidably polite” and “oddly punctual,” adjectives rarely applied to historians then or since.

After Cambridge, he joined a national newspaper whose foreign desk prided itself on courage, curiosity, and the ability to expense whisky. Pettibone displayed all three, though the whisky never seemed to touch him. He was dispatched first to Cyprus, then to Aden, then -almost before he had unpacked – to Saigon. From there the pattern of his life established itself with bureaucratic elegance: where the fighting thickened, Pettibone appeared; where it ended, he vanished, usually two days before anyone else realized it was over.

His copy was clean, calm, and faintly antiseptic. While other correspondents filed prose soaked in sweat and panic, Pettibone sent paragraphs that read like minutes from a well-run committee meeting. “Heavy exchanges were reported overnight,” he would write, as if bullets had politely asked permission. Editors loved him. Subeditors adored him. Fellow correspondents were less certain.

It was not that he lacked courage. On the contrary, he possessed a kind of pre-approved bravery. Shelling never seemed to inconvenience him. Roadblocks parted. Visas appeared. When the rest of us slept in basements, he somehow found rooms with working lamps and reliable telephones. He always knew which colonel was worth speaking to and which rebel commander would be dead by morning. When asked how, he smiled and said, “One picks these things up.”

By the early 1970s, Pettibone had become a fixture of the world’s worst places. Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Cambodia, Ethiopia – he moved through them like a well-tailored ghost. He never grew a beard, never missed a deadline, never looked as if he’d slept badly. His shirts were ironed in circumstances that defeated steam itself. Once, in Beirut, a bomb exploded close enough to knock three of us flat. Pettibone dusted off his cuff, glanced at his watch, and said he would be late filing if the line did not come back within ten minutes. It did.

Rumours began, as they always do, among journalists who have nothing but time, alcohol, and suspicion. Pettibone, it was whispered, had friends in embassies that were not known for friendship. He crossed borders on days when borders were theoretically closed. He carried multiple currencies and never once had to borrow. His notebooks were written in a hand so neat it looked like code, though no one ever proved it was.

He denied everything with impeccable sincerity. “If I were a spy,” he once said over dinner in Nairobi, “do you really think I’d be this obvious?” This was considered by some to be a devastating argument and by others a confession.

The 1980s only deepened the mystery. Pettibone covered Central America with a serenity that unnerved both sides. Guerrillas trusted him. Generals trusted him. He drank bad coffee with priests, excellent whisky with arms dealers, and mineral water with men who never gave their names. He filed pieces that somehow offended no one and enlightened everyone, which is either the mark of genius or something much more suspicious.

At one point, during a particularly vicious phase of the Salvadoran conflict, a junior reporter asked Pettibone how he stayed so calm. Pettibone replied, “Perspective,” and then added, after a pause, “And very good grooming habits.” This last was not a joke. His grooming was legendary. In places where water was rationed and soap mythical, Pettibone’s hair retained a discreet shine. His shoes reflected light sources that did not exist. It was said – though never proven – that he once shaved during a curfew using bottled Perrier.

Editors noticed that governments rarely complained about his reporting. When they did, it was politely. An ambassador might ring to say that Pettibone had been “most interesting” or “extremely balanced,” phrases that normally meant the opposite. Yet nothing ever came of it. Pettibone continued to be accredited, re-accredited, and invited to briefings that supposedly did not exist.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Pettibone was there, notebook in hand, describing history as it obligingly behaved itself. He wrote of the end of an era with the air of someone tidying up after a long, successful meeting. Younger reporters, wild-eyed and underpaid, stared at him with a mixture of awe and resentment. They came back from the rubble with PTSD and press cards that no longer worked. Pettibone came back with a tan and a clean expense sheet.

In the 1990s, he moved seamlessly to the Balkans. It was here that suspicion hardened into something like belief. He arrived early, left early, and always seemed to know when the shelling would start and when it would stop. Once, in Sarajevo, he suggested lunch somewhere “a little safer today.” The restaurant was hit an hour later. Pettibone was already filing.

Yet for all this, there was nothing in his work that could be pinned down. No ideological slant, no patriotic flourish, no tell-tale leaks. If he was a spy, he was a maddeningly discreet one. He gathered facts, not secrets. Or perhaps – said the more imaginative among us – he gathered secrets so efficiently that facts were all that remained.

Privately, Pettibone was courteous, reserved, and strangely unreadable. He never spoke of family. He had been married, briefly, to a woman no one ever met. He had no children, unless they were somewhere else under different names. His flat contained books arranged by region rather than subject, and not a single personal photograph. The only ornament was a small, tasteful globe, which he kept meticulously dusted.

He retired from active reporting shortly before the millennium, citing “the changing nature of conflict.” He took to writing long essays about memory, history, and the unreliability of witnesses. They were excellent, measured, and devoid of revelation. He declined invitations to memoir-writing festivals. “One must leave some things alone,” he said.

When he died, tributes poured in from editors, diplomats, and former colleagues. Words like “integrity,” “calm,” and “professionalism” appeared with suspicious regularity. No intelligence agency issued a denial, which was considered by some to be confirmation enough.

In the end, perhaps the truth is simpler. Perhaps Richard Pettibone was merely what he appeared to be: a man who liked order in a disordered world, who ironed his shirts because chaos was bad for morale, and who believed history should be observed, not joined. Or perhaps he was the most well-manicured spy of the twentieth century, filing immaculate copy by day and immaculate reports by night, serving Queen, country, and the correct use of a Windsor knot.

Either way, he leaves behind a profession slightly unsettled by his example. He showed us that it was possible to survive the world’s worst places without visible damage, provided one kept one’s shoes polished and one’s secrets – whatever they were – perfectly pressed.

In retirement, Pettibone did what all respectable former correspondents claim they will never do and immediately did: he wrote novels. They were billed as “fiction,” a term he pronounced with careful neutrality, and they arrived on editors’ desks with the punctuality of tax returns. The plots bore an uncanny resemblance to global events that had officially never happened, involving discreet men in sensible raincoats, European capitals viewed from hotel rooms, and crises defused minutes before catastrophe by someone who understood filing systems better than ideology. Reviewers compared him, inevitably, to Frederick Forsyth, though some noted that Pettibone’s prose was less excitable, as if even suspense should not raise its voice.

The novels sold extremely well. This was attributed to their “authentic detail,” a phrase that did a great deal of work. Pettibone knew exactly how long it took to clear customs with a false passport, which ministries leaked most reliably, and which forms of treachery could be arranged over lunch rather than dinner. His villains were efficient rather than flamboyant; his heroes were anonymous men who believed strongly in procedure. He insisted, when asked, that everything came from public sources and imagination. Readers, particularly those with public service pensions, were not convinced.

Most curious of all was the reaction from officialdom, which greeted these books with a silence so profound it bordered on reverence. No one threatened legal action. No one hinted at libel. Foreign rights were snapped up in countries Pettibone had once covered with suspicious calm. At literary festivals, retired generals queued patiently for signatures, thanking him for “getting it right.” Pettibone accepted their praise with his usual mild smile, signing each copy with a fountain pen of impeccable maintenance, and leaving the impression – entirely unprovable – that journalism had merely been his cover story all along.

The Telegraph, archived