True Spies Debriefs: Stephen Davis on Flight 149
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Hello, this is Matt and McKinley from History Dispatches. We are the father-son duo bringing you the weird, the wild, the wacky, and the craziest tales from across time. From the Ice Bowl to the Great Heathen Army and the head of Oliver Cromwell. The same head they kept on a pike for three years? Yep, all here on History Dispatches. New episodes every weekday. Find out more at historydispatches.com or wherever you get your podcast app.

Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back to our new assignment, True Spies Debrief.

In August of 1990, a British Airways 747 departed from London's Heathrow Airport and landed in Kuwait. There, its passengers were swiftly captured by Iraqi soldiers and held hostage, used as so-called human shields. Iraq had invaded the country hours before the flight was due to arrive...

So why had the plane landed? What did the British government know about the invasion? And what truths might it have deliberately withheld? True Spies producer Morgan Childs put these questions to Stephen Davis, author of the book The Secret History of Flight 149, recently adapted into the documentary Flight 149, Hostage of War. Stephen has spent the past 30 years seeking answers to these questions.

And what he says he's uncovered in the process is nothing short of extraordinary. Stephen, I would like to start with the revelations that came from the British government just a few years ago in November of 2021.

Can you tell us why Liz Truss, who at the time was the UK's foreign secretary, issued an apology? The background to this is that when British Airways Flight 149 landed in Kuwait, as the airport was surrounded by Iraqi tanks, the British government put out this story that the invasion had started after the plane had landed.

And about a month after it landed, Mrs Thatcher made a statement in the House of Commons, the then Prime Minister, and she said the plane landed, the crew got off, the new crew got on, it was refuelled, and this happened before the invasion. If you see on the video, she turns to her back benches to emphasise the point, before the invasion. That was a complete lie. So when Liz Truss spoke, she had to tell Parliament that

secretly had suppressed for 30 years, which was that the invasion started when the plane was more than an hour's flying time from Kuwait.

plenty of time to turn the plane around. So that was a significant moment in the really long and convoluted history of the story. So I think maybe we should go back a little bit. For those of us who don't really remember the early days of the Gulf War, could you sort of set the scene for us? What was taking place in the days leading up to August of 1990?

Yeah, the summer of 1990. So Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, was threatening Kuwait and spent the summer threatening to invade. The dispute inevitably was about oil. There was an oil field, which was half in Kuwait and half in Iraq. And Saddam decided the Kuwaitis were stealing his oil there.

So he issued repeated threats that he was going to invade Kuwait. The CIA did an analysis, and one of the things that I found out from my investigation for my book, The Secret History of Flight 149, was that the CIA had issued a specific warning in July that the Iraqis were going to invade Kuwait.

So let me take you to the morning of August 1, 1990. Heathrow Airport, a British Airways flight 149 is due to take off. Its destination is Madras and Kuala Lumpur, but it had a refueling stop in Kuwait. Now many of the passengers when they got to the airport had heard the BBC that morning

reporting that Iraqi troops were gathered on the border of Kuwait. When the crew got there, they assumed that they would be diverted. They assumed they wouldn't be landing in Kuwait to refuel. They were very shocked and surprised to find out that Kuwait was still their refueling stop. So British Airways Flight 149 said on the runway there was a two-hour delay

allegedly to do with the air conditioning unit malfunctioning. During the delay, all the other passengers were on board. A group of young men arrived at the last minute. They got on the front of the plane. They walked right through the plane to the back of the plane and sat down. Now, many of the passengers looked at them and thought, "Who are these people? They look like soldiers."

That added to the general nervousness of the situation. Anyway, finally the plane takes off and it heads off to Kuwait. And it landed in the early hours of the next morning. The Iraqis had invaded. There were already tanks at the airport. When the plane landed, the door was opened. Clive Earthy, the chief purser, opened the door.

And much to his shock and surprise, there was a uniformed British officer there. And he said, you're late. I need those people. And the people he referred to were the people at the back of the plane. So they got off. And interestingly enough, that group disappeared in a city surrounded by Iraqi troops, never to be seen again by any of the other passengers. All of the passengers and crew disappeared.

were taken hostage by the Iraqis and used as human shields. And that was the start of this terrible story for them, followed by a long and detailed cover-up by the British Airways and the British government.

Yes, and one thing that you mention in the book and have reiterated many places is that there's this idea that, in fact, these hostages were on some sort of nice hotel holiday for a few days, and that's the part of the story that seems to continue to circulate, and you're trying to correct the record. Absolutely. I think it's a lesson. Spin doctors know that the first version of the story is often the one that's believed.

So British government pretty soon got out the message in the early days, oh, yes, it's terrible that they landed in a war zone, but don't worry, they're having a sort of extended holiday. They're sipping cocktails by the pool in the sunshine in luxury hotels. It's all okay. It's going to be all okay. And ironically enough, that was true for a few days because the Iraqis were shocked by

that British Airways Flight 149 had landed and they had been handed all of these people to use as potential pawns. The other planes due to land that morning were turned away. A Kuwaiti Airlines plane, which was coming in, got a message, there's an emergency here, divert to Bahrain, which was the alternative airport. So there was this tremendous spin coming out

that nothing much was happening. And I was on the news desk of the Independent on Sunday in London, and I got a call from a contact. And he said, look, you shouldn't look into this. You should investigate this. What they're saying about this plane isn't true. And, you know, Morgan, that was the start of my investigation, which if you think about it, 35 years is

well over half my life. But yeah, so the spin stuck. So that even after these people came back from what was a terrible ordeal, and no doubt we'll get around to discussing this, that friends would meet them and say, oh, you were a hostage, weren't you? Oh, you got out okay, nothing much happened. It was all good, wasn't it? Which is just an outrageous perversion of the truth.

Yeah, reading your book and thinking about from the perspective of a journalist, I can't imagine for your sake the emotional challenge of reporting this story because it's one horror after another. It is. And I just got a message, by the way, from a couple of people who had seen early previews of the documentary, Flight 149, Hostage of War, and actually were in tears, really,

at listening to the testimony of the passengers, the thing that has driven me on all these years and actually made me quite angry was not only were they lied to about why they were there and why they were delivered into the hands of Saddam Hussein, but they were denied even the

people's knowledge of what happened to them and lives were ruined. We're talking about a group who were subject to rapes, other sexual assaults, mock executions, near starvation conditions and I would sit in rooms with these people even decades later. I remember sitting with one passenger, Barry Manners, who had been

subject to horrendous experience, including having an Iraqi intelligence officer point a gun at his head and say, "What? I'm going to shoot you now." And during the conversation, this is decades later, Barry started to shake as he remembered the ordeal. I mean, he still suffers from PTSD.

People would be in living rooms and people would suddenly break down in tears at the memory. And obviously, I had particularly delicate conversations with one of the rape victims who very bravely decided to come forward and tell his story.

So, yeah, that's what's kept me going. I mean, as a journalist, as an investigative reporter, obviously exposing government lies and corporate lies is part of my job. But I also feel a particular responsibility for people to understand this horrendous story. This was one of the largest hostage takings in history. They suffered terrible things and it was all covered up.

The plane that landed in Kuwait was ultimately destroyed. And among the other shocking parts of your book is the allegation that that happened at the request of the United States. I should say that it's also widely believed that it was destroyed by Iraqi forces. Can you tell me what you believe happened according to your reporting? It's very interesting. One of the symbols of the Gulf War

was a photograph which went around the world of the destroyed wing of British Airways 149 on the runway at Kuwait, having not moved from when it landed. And the story that circulated was the Iraqis had destroyed it. I always thought that was very odd.

Because what was known is when the Iraqis left Kuwait, they looted the place. They took literally everything they could. They took, you know, the taps. They took the light bulbs. They took everything. Why would they not take this prized British Airways 747, which had been basically gifted to them? What I later found out is it hadn't been destroyed by the Iraqis at all.

It was actually bombed and destroyed by the US Air Force. And here's the interesting twist. Because the plane was destroyed by the US Air Force, British Airways got a huge insurance payout, £7 million in 1990 money. So if you think about it, the plane was destroyed by our side, as it were.

BA gets an insurance payout while also fighting to give any compensation to its passengers. I think that's another outrage of the story. So take us back to how Margaret Thatcher and other British government officials in particular were communicating to the public about what was going on as this was unfolding in 1990. Yes, so you remember that there was a whole consuming process of George Bush

and Thatcher assembling this grand coalition for months at a time to eventually take back Kuwait from the Iraqis, you know, the war, the first Gulf War, which is not well remembered now. When I lecture my students on things, they barely remember the 2003 one, never mind the 1991. But the hostages were a real problem for them.

They did not want the hostages to interfere with their war plans. And remember that not only the passengers and crew of BA 149, but crew on the ground and Western citizens living in Kuwait had all been taken hostage. They had been scattered all over Kuwait and Iraq.

at places that Saddam thought the Allies would bomb when the war finally came. That's where the phrase human shields come from. They are with the original human shields. Saddam thought if he brought Westerners there, that the Allies wouldn't bomb. And some of the people in captivity had the horrendous experience of listening. They were able to listen to Mrs. Thatcher on the BBC World Service.

and she was asked, will the fact that these people are hostages and they prevent you bombing these places? And she said, oh, no, no. So during their captivity, not only were they threatened by the Iraqis, they thought if they got through that, they would probably be killed by their own side bombing. So the hostages were a real problem for the West. There were American hostages there.

British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, lots of European. And they had a tendency to want to downplay the hostages' plight so that the public weren't too worried about the hostages. They were concentrating on the war plans. The Iraqis, meanwhile, had this amazing propaganda operation called Guest News, where Saddam would turn up

and speak to the hostages and say how well everything's going and are you being nicely treated. And there's an infamous image of him patting a little boy called Stuart Lockwood on the head, which went around the world.

So it was a problem for the West, and Thatcher and the British government dealt with this by lying. As I said, she made a statement to Parliament in which everything she said about that flight was untrue, and she knew it to be untrue at the time. And that was their way of deflecting attention from the hostages.

Tell me a little bit about your sourcing. I understand, of course, you've had 30 years to piece this story together, and I know that it has come together in some ways rather quickly. Some of the details were there to be mined early on, and some have just fallen into place more recently. But when we speak about what Thatcher and others in British government know about

understand that very few records have reached your fingertips. I'd like to hear a little bit about how you've been able to describe what Thatcher allegedly knew or did not know.

Yeah, so we have, I put lots of Freedom of Information Act requests. We had the trust statement, which eventually corrected Thatcher. But my reporting, of course, concentrated on who were this mystery team on board? Who were these men on board? Where did they go? What did they do? Why were they there? And I have done a lot of reporting and developed intelligence and special forces contacts.

I've done a lot of news reporting and documentary reporting. So eventually I found somebody who introduced me to somebody else, who introduced me to somebody else. So the way these things are, I ended up in Hereford, which is the home of the British SAS, Special Air Service, Special Forces, and eventually found the contacts I needed. And it turns out this group of young men

were from an outfit which is known in the business as the increment. The increment is essentially, to put it in a sort of populist terms, a black ops, deniable operation. They get together some special forces soldiers, some intelligence officers, and they send them on missions which, if they go wrong, the government can deny they ever happened.

And this was one of those missions on BA 149. They were there, by the way, to keep an eye on the movement of Saddam Hussein's troops in Kuwait. The big fear of the West after he invaded Kuwait was

was that he would go on and invade Saudi Arabia and seize the Saudi oil fields, in which case this bloodthirsty dictator would control about 40% of the world's oil supply. So that was the great fear. So this team were put into places all over Kuwait to observe and report back on the movement of troops.

So I spoke to them. I developed my contacts. We were absolutely 100%. We made a documentary for New Zealand television. Years later, my first attempt to produce a book on this was deliberately sabotaged by misinformation and where they were kind of feeding me false information that if I had published, I would...

looked like somebody who didn't have real sources. And they being who exactly? Well, basically the UK government, the intelligence services. You know, they sent me a thing about the mission and it looked a secret document and it looked real.

And I showed it to some contacts and they said, yes, that's the real deal. But I realized at the last minute that a couple of dates had been changed. So if I had used that in my reporting, I would have been discredited. The story would have been discredited and probably died a death. So but I kept at it and I got more and more sources and we discovered some startling new information.

In my book, I reveal that the captain of British Airways Flight 149, Richard Bruniette, was in fact a asset for MI6, British intelligence. So gradually with the accumulation of records, I finally got my secret history of Flight 149 out and

And then we have worked on this amazing documentary which tells the passengers stories which premiered at South by Southwest.

in Austin and is just about to be broadcast on Sky TV in the UK. So to clarify, the British government still denies the involvement of the increment and they have indeed apologized and now admit that they were aware that an invasion had begun when Flight 149 landed.

What does British government say, if anything, that it knew? Okay. The denials are very interesting because there's a history of what I might call non-denial denials here, you know, from Watergate, the famous non-denial denial. They don't comment on the increment. They don't comment on intelligence operations. They've been very careful of their phrases here.

They say things like there's a legal case, they're being sued by the passengers and crew of 149. And in their defense, they say no military or military intelligence team on board. But the increment is neither.

It's a kind of blurred line of responsibilities. That's where the deniability comes on. So they have issued what they would tell you a denial, but they're not really denials. They have apologized, but BA and the government are fighting the court case essentially on the grounds they shouldn't take responsibility for what happened.

And the firm that are suing on behalf of the passengers and crew, who I am going to be a witness in the case, they have an opinion from senior lawyers that they have a strong case. So that's going to be going through the courts this year and probably next.

And what did your reporting uncover about what was made of the intelligence that was allegedly gathered by the increment? Yes, it's very interesting. A lot of people we know all too well about the WMD fiasco in the 2003 war, the weapons of mass destruction. Ironically enough, in 1990, Saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction programs. But there was also a tremendous...

actually rather disgraceful misuse of the intelligence there. As I said, this team was on the ground to report on whether the Iraqis looked like they were going to go on and invade Saudi Arabia and seize the oil fields in northern Saudi Arabia, at which point Saddam Hussein controls like 40% of the world's oil supply.

The secret team from 149 were on the ground to observe the movement of Iraqi troops. They reported back that they didn't look at all like they were going to invade Saudi Arabia. They were taking up defensive positions, you know, building tank berms, defending against an invasion. In the meantime, Schwarzkopf and Cheney fly to Saudi and convince the king that

to allow American troops on Saudi soil on the grounds they were about to be invaded. And a Saudi prince, horrified by this, because he wanted to use an army of holy warriors, as he called them, to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, swore revenge. And this man was Osama bin Laden. So not only did this have the consequences of 1990,

and the Gulf War and what flowed from that. But as we know, bin Laden's revenge mission ended up, well, changing the course of history.

And what about the, speaking of legal cases, what can we expect, what can the passengers of this flight expect in the coming months and years? I know that this works differently on a case-by-case basis according to the country of origin of these passengers. I understand that in France, some of them have already received compensation. Yeah, what was interesting about this is the scales of justice were really...

unbalanced here. In France, the passengers sued British Airways. They won at every stage. British Airways lost at every stage. The French Supreme Court finally threw out BA's appeal, and the French passengers deservedly got huge amounts of compensation. In Texas, the

A lawyer called, amazing lawyer called Bill Newman, who I interviewed, sued on behalf of American passengers. And rather than let it go to court in front of a Texas jury, British Airways secretly settled and paid out compensation. But in Britain, they fought the case all the way to the House of Lords to refuse to pay the British passengers compensation.

And it was kind of ended on a technicality that under the Warsaw convention, which governs airline tickets, basically the court said the airline's responsibility ended when the passengers got off the plane, which struck me as being crazy because if an airline flies you into a dangerous situation, surely that should be your responsibility. So now, um,

McHugh jury is suing for compensation on the basis that they knew ought to have known what was going to happen or knew what was going to happen and are therefore responsible for the passengers suffering and pain. And as I said, it'll be fought. It'll probably be an epic battle.

You know, the passengers, they deserve compensation, but that's not mostly what they want. It was put to me really very well by Paul Dieppe, who Paul was a senior consultant doctor when he was on the flight. While he was in captivity, his father died. He only learned about it as he was released. As he said to me, it kind of changed his life.

He never felt able to properly practice medicine again. When I asked him a few years ago about what he really wanted, and I think this sums up what the passengers generally say, he said, look, I just want them to knock on my door and say, here's what we did. Here's what really happened. And we're sorry. Mm hmm.

So from your perspective, you've written a book. That book became a podcast. Now there's a documentary. You've spent so long at work on this story. What do you think is the best outcome of all of this renewed attention to Flight 149? First off, I would like, regardless of the outcome of the court case, for everybody to know how these people suffered.

what a horrendous experience it was. I think that's really important. They denied the agency of people knowing about their suffering. Morgan, the government, just a year after it happened, back in 1991, commissioned a report, their own report into war crimes.

It documented 3,500 war crimes against citizens of allied countries, the 149ers and others. No sooner had that report been complete than they suppressed it for 30 years. So first and foremost, I want people to understand this was a terrible, terrible incident which wrecked people's lives.

that a Jennifer Chappell who was 12 years old when she was on the plane who celebrated her 13th birthday, her life was ruined. I talked to Jennifer recently. She's still in counseling. She's had numerous suicide attempts. She lost her trust about everything. She's never been able to hold a proper job. So I want people to know about the suffering and understand what really happened on BA 149. Secondly, of course,

They absolutely deserve to win this case and get compensation. Now, I don't think the government will ever admit to these deniable omissions. But even without that, the government and BA could apologize and pay up, in my view. That would be a good result.

You mentioned that you received disinformation from the British government. I'd like to hear more about your experience as a reporter on this particular story. Of course, you're not the only journalist that we've spoken to who's been met or viewed unfavorably.

by the british government tim tate comes to mind as somebody who's appeared on this program and he jumped through quite a number of hoops in trying to tell the full story of peter wright and the spycatcher saga which i know that you also reported on talk a little bit about how your work on this subject has has been received yeah it's i i have a lot of experience in in being uh being uh

harassed by the British government actually. I did reporting on an SAS mission where they went to court to try and stop my program coming out. They tried to stop my interview with an MI6 officer called Richard Tomlinson. And on this also, don't underestimate, I don't underestimate the power of governments to try and screw you up and trying to suppress information.

As I said, it was extraordinary that somebody went to the trouble of producing a really detailed after-action report of what happened on BA149. Allegedly, the testimony of one of the secret team on board sent it to me, and I show it to experts, and they say, yes, that's real. I nearly wrote a piece about it, but at the last moment,

I woke up at 2 o'clock in the morning, something about it was bugging me. And when I went to check the dates on the end of when these people allegedly got in and out, were wrong by two weeks. Just a small detail. But you can imagine if I'd done a piece, I think I was doing a piece for The Guardian at the time, I would have done the piece.

somebody would have said, oh, here's the document, can't be true because of these dates. I would have been discredited and the story probably would have died. It was a very sinister but efficient means of trying to discredit me. But I'm pretty determined, really. And in which time I felt like giving up, I would think about these people who I'd sat in the living rooms of.

I think about Margaret Hearn who was held in a piece of metal, what do you call it, container under the sluice gates of a dam. And people who were taken out in the middle of the night, you know, if you were in the hands of the Bathurst who were the hardliners, one group, they took them out in the middle of the night into the desert. They got them out.

They gave them shovels. They made them dig a big trench, their grave. They made them sit down in front of it. They stood behind them. And these people were praying. They thought it was their end. And they heard a click, click. And then the soldiers were laughing. It was part of their psychological torture. So every time I thought about those things, I thought, well, no matter how much opposition I get, I'm going to keep going because I want justice for these people.

I'm curious about your work as a campaigner against disinformation. The way that you put it to me before we started recording was that you're tasked with the challenge of uncovering actual conspiracies in a world where everything is turned into a conspiracy.

What can you tell me about the tension between being a truth teller and being somebody who's an advocate for media literacy in this day and age? Yeah, it's an excellent question. And it's a real challenge now for investigative journalists, I think.

A very substantial investigation I did into the sinking of the Ferry Estonia with some amazing Scandinavian journalists, which produced a five-part Discovery Channel documentary series. When I started reporting on that, I would constantly run into people who say, well, okay, that's just another conspiracy theory because there were so many conspiracy theories surrounding that incident.

And everything that happens now, within 10 minutes of anything happening in the world, as you know, social media is spreading the most amazing conspiracy theories. So it's a real challenge. I remember distinctly a lecture yesterday.

to some of my journalism students in which one of them said to me, very smart young woman said to me, well, Mr. Davis, you're an anti-conspiracy theorist man, but you're asking us to believe the conspiracy theory outlined in your book. What's the difference? So the way I put it to them is this. The difference is we human beings are very bad at keeping a secret.

If you and I were sitting in a room, Morgan, and I said, I've got this amazing secret and I tell you and don't tell anybody else, I pretty much guarantee you'd tell one other person and then they might tell one other person and so on and so forth. So in the case of the BA 149 story, there were fewer than 100 people who knew about what really happened and three of them have talked to me.

So the idea that these giant conspiracies, which involve thousands of people keeping an amazing secret can be real, falls on that fact that people are bad at keeping a secret. I found this wonderful research by a mathematics professor in England. And you know, this crazy moon landing theory, man didn't really land on the moon, Apollo 11 didn't happen. He calculated how many people

since 1965 would have had knowledge of this amazing conspiracy and had to have kept the secret for all these years. And he came up with 440,000 people. So that's the difference.

That's the difference. But it does make it difficult, because now the easiest thing in the world, in a world of government, in a world of conspiracy theories, and which shamefully some journalists have decided to be conspiracy theorists, the easiest thing in the world now for government and corporations to attack actual investigative reporting

is simply to say, oh, yeah, that Stephen Davis report, that's just another one of many conspiracy theories and get people to ignore it on that basis. So I think this is in all the years I've been investigative reporting, apart from the funding issue where people won't fund long term investigations anymore. That's the most challenging thing.

rise of the amazing conspiracy theories. And does the success of your reporting on this subject hearten you in some way when you think about the future of investigative work like what you've been doing?

It's nice that there are still people out there who are willing to run and tackle investigations. Yes. Um, the documentary, um, which by the way, the, um, the director Jenny Ash has done a superb job on it because she's told the whole story without narration, but with people, I mean, I'm in it and the passenger and it's simply eyewitness accounts, which is a fantastically powerful way to, to do it. Um,

Yes, it's encouraging. I mean, the BBC still do proper investigations, the New York Times do, but you also have the financial issue. Being an investigative reporter, you might tackle a story and spend months on it and end up being not what you thought it was. There might be no story, so the investment goes nowhere. That's always been a bit of an issue. But

I kind of think to myself, in a world where we really have a great deal of trouble telling truth from untruth, and when AI comes along, it'll be even worse. Maybe people will start turning to a few trusted sources with actual track records of proper reporting.

and they might thrive. I go through periods, Morgan. Sometimes I listen to the news each day and all the craziness and I'm just depressed. And I said to somebody the other day, I've been a reporter since I was 16 years old. I'm certainly glad I'm not starting up now. I think I lived through a period where it was a tremendous thing to do. I think it's going to be more difficult to do in the future.

Thank you so much for tuning in for The Debrief. We hope you enjoyed this conversation between Stephen Davis and True Spies producer Morgan Childs. More Debriefs are available exclusively to Spyscape Plus subscribers. You'll also be able to access other premium series like The Resume-Off Files, our ambitious retelling of Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes.

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