It’s two decades since the BBC correspondent was shot and paralysed by al-Qaeda gunmen — after dedicating years to understanding the Arab world. He tells Matt Rudd he’s still waiting for justice.
Twenty years ago this week, Frank Gardner was relaxing by the pool at the InterContinental hotel in Riyadh with his cameraman, Simon Cumbers. They had spent the previous week reporting on a series of brutal al-Qaeda attacks in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province and had decided they had everything they needed. When a producer from Newsnight called and asked them to stay on for a couple more days, Gardner declined. “It’s not safe here,” he told them. “We’re flying home tomorrow.”
But when a hotel receptionist came out and said that two men from the ministry of information wanted to show the BBC team around the city, they thought, why not? “We looked at each other and decided it couldn’t hurt to get a bit more b-roll,” Gardner tells me. “We thought these guys knew what they were doing, but they didn’t. They took us to an area that was far more dangerous than they realised and with no armed escort. It wasn’t a conspiracy, it was a cock-up.”
The area the minders drove them to was Al-Suwaidi, 20 minutes’ drive south of the hotel and a known hotbed of Islamist fundamentalism. A year earlier, when the Saudi government published a list of its 26 most wanted terrorists, more than half of them had links to this conservative suburb. It was “our bad luck”, Gardner says, that six of al-Qaeda’s core members happened to be driving past in a van as he and Cumbers filmed a walking piece to camera.
The details of what happened next are of course still with him. The first man to get out of the van approached Gardner, smiling, and said “Assalaamu aleikum”. Peace be upon you. Then he drew a gun and started firing. As more men joined the attack, the two government minders fled. Cumbers ran in one direction, Gardner in another, until a bullet shattered his femur and he fell to the ground. He lay helpless as one of the terrorists walked up and emptied his gun into him.
Cumbers, 36, was shot in the head and died instantly. Somehow Gardner not only survived six bullets — and eleven bullet holes — but also remained conscious throughout his ordeal. Initial reports suggested he’d been saved from a final head shot when his attacker noticed he was carrying a miniature Quran. “Was I, hell!” Gardner curses angrily when I ask. “They only found the Quran when they’d finished shooting and they were searching through my pockets.”
Once the terrorists had made their escape, the police turned up to cordon off “ghoulish” onlookers. Only when Gardner’s screams of pain forced them to act did some of those police finally bundle him into a car and drive him to the nearest hospital.
Until that afternoon Gardner had been living the foreign correspondent’s dream. As an Arabic speaker with years of experience in the region he had quickly become the BBC’s go-to man in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In 2002 his boss had suggested a job title change from Middle East correspondent to war on terror correspondent, which, sensibly, Gardner rejected. “It wouldn’t fit on the screen and it’s a stupid expression anyway, like having a war on air,” he says.
Instead he became the BBC’s first security correspondent, reporting without fear or favour from the many flashpoints of the early Noughties. Frontline news gathering is and always has been “addictive, like a drug”, but on June 6, 2004, Frank Gardner the storyteller became the story himself.
Two decades on, I’ve invited him to retell that story over afternoon tea at the Wallace Collection, a few streets west of BBC HQ in central London. He approaches our table in his wheelchair and immediately looks concerned. I’m sitting on a cushioned bench with my back to the wall. We’ve removed the chair facing me so he can wheel right in. But here’s the problem: years in the Territorial Army and even more in BBC safety briefings have taught him about sightlines. He would prefer to face any potential threats — or, indeed, anyone who recognises him off the news and wants to say hello.
Selflessly I suggest we swap, but the flash of worry is quickly subdued by his very English affability. “It’s absolutely fine,” he says as he turns our table 45 degrees and asks for jasmine tea. If there is an incursion, he’ll catch it out of the corner of his eye.
In any other interviewee I’d chalk this up to excessive paranoia — or reading and writing too many spy stories. He has, after all, just published his fourth novel, Invasion, featuring Luke Carlton, a latter-day James Bond risking life and limb in Taiwan for king and country. In this case Gardner’s caution seems entirely understandable — he is now apologising at the sight of a three-tier cake stand. “You’ll forgive me, Matt, if I don’t finish it all,” he says. “Ever since half my guts were shot away I have a pathetic appetite.”
For the first 48 hours after the attack doctors in Riyadh fought just to keep him alive. His principal memories now of the days after he came out of his coma are of immense pain, roiling anger and fear. “I was nervous that the guys who shot me were going to come back,” he admits. “They were going to find out which hospital I was in and come to finish me off. That sort of thing had happened before.” His wife, Amanda, flew out from London. “There was a guy posted outside my door but my wife said that every time she turned up he was fast asleep. There wasn’t proper security.
“I was also very shaken up. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I’ve invested all my student years and all my adult life in trying to understand this region, learn its language, study the Quran, show respect for it and explain it to global audiences and this is what I get? Six bullets? That doesn’t seem like a fair exchange.’ "
After three long weeks doctors judged him stable enough to fly home without dying and he was medivacked to Luton. He was then taken by helicopter to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, where the trauma surgeon Frank Cross was waiting. “I don’t think he fancied my chances,” Gardner says. A misdiagnosis or a miscommunication had led Cross and his team to believe that less than a metre of Gardner’s small bowel had survived. Adult humans have seven metres of these “squiggly bits” and you need at least one metre to sustain yourself nutritionally. Gardner was put on total parenteral nutrition (TPN) — a grimly utilitarian last line in feeding someone without intestines.
“It was a hole in my chest with a drip inserted every night hooking up to a bag of gunk specially prepared in a warehouse in Surrey,” he says. “That then got infected inside my chest and, four months after being shot, I went downhill really fast. I was pretty close to death.” Again.
Gardner remembers a particular moment sitting alone in a room at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore when the extent of his life-changing injuries threatened to overwhelm him. Damage to his spinal cord nerves had stolen his mobility and the TPN meant he would never be able to travel or live with much independence — this intrepid journalist, this active father (his daughters were five and six years old at the time) was facing a life incarcerated by his injuries. He was 42.
How, then, is the 62-year-old Frank Gardner sitting before me today — and happily tucking into his second scone — quite so full of the joys of life? Only four years ago, in his autobiographical documentary Being Frank, the tone was less positive. “I see my life in two halves,” he told viewers. “The Frank that travelled the world unhindered and the Frank that came after.” Now, though, an afternoon in his engaged and energetic company is positively uplifting.
“If 2024 Frank could tell 2004 Frank this is what you’re going to look like now,” he says, looking down at his body, “that this is how your life will be, you know, with a lovely partner, happy children, still living the dream, I would have thought, OK, if that’s the light at the end of this tunnel, you can get through this.”
Two things seem to have helped him come back from the despair he felt in that rehab room. First, when surgeons decided that his internal organs had had long enough to “settle” and opened him up again six months after the attack, they found more of his bowels had survived than first thought. No need for a lifetime of chest-feeding drips — he now has a stoma connected via his stomach. It is prone to belching at unexpected moments, which is why you might catch him coughing suddenly on the News at 10, but he can eat and drink and, crucially, manage the apparatus himself. His ability to travel — and work — has survived. “Alhamdulilah! — praise be to God,” he says, smiling. “I’m as healthy now as I’ve ever been.”
Second, with the encouragement of Amanda he made a conscious decision not to let his anger consume him. He wouldn’t, he decided in that room in Stanmore, throw the baby out with the bathwater. “I’d already had years of positive experiences in the Middle East,” he says. “There are so many natural acts of kindness that I’ve witnessed and there’s a fantastic community spirit. It’s something they do really well. In some of our societies here in Britain we do it less well.”
It helped too that in the wake of the attack he was “deluged” by letters and emails from well-wishing people including many Muslims — from Riyadh, from Jeddah, from Indonesia, from Bradford. “These people were appalled. Some of the Saudi messages were pretty severe, saying they hoped the perpetrators would burn in hell.”
Take a cursory glance at his childhood and it becomes obvious why Gardner would be drawn to other places and other cultures. His father, Robert, was a diplomat, expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1951 after being shot at while snooping around a prohibited military area. When I ask if he was a spook, he looks surprised. “Something like that,” he says, glancing at my tape recorder. I tell him that’s what it says on his Wikipedia page and he relaxes again. “I hadn’t realised,” he says.
His mother, Grace, studied modern languages at Cambridge and, in the late 1940s, became only the third woman to join the Foreign Office. “You can only imagine what the FO was like back then, pre-Suez,” he says. “She would have encountered so much patronising misogyny from all those Bufton-Tuftons.” She too was posted across the Iron Curtain to Budapest and Gardner’s bedtime stories were full of reminiscences of his mother’s adventures — “like the time she went camping with her MI6 flatmate on the Dalmatian coast and all they had between them was a tent, a bottle of wine and a pistol”. He describes his mother as a huge influence, both as a linguist and in the way she “overcame obstacles and saw things through”.
Gardner was born in London but when he was six the family moved to the Hague. At the age of eight — “far too young” — he watched as his parents drove away from his new prep school, St Ronan’s in Kent (also the alma mater of the Queen’s late brother, Mark Shand, and the Cambridge Five double agent Donald Maclean, but don’t read anything into that).
“For years I was told boarding school was the making of a man but, no, it’s just not right, not that young,” he says. “I’ve never forgotten the sense of abandonment I felt that September.” There was, at least, no abuse at St Ronan’s. “Forgive the phraseology,” he says with a wry smile, “but I think I dodged a bullet. At least at that stage of my life.”
To Marlborough next on a partial scholarship — “we couldn’t have afforded it otherwise” — where in his A-level history lessons he was taught none of the impartiality he would one day need for his BBC career. The supply teacher was a Serb nationalist who would later “pop up in Bosnia as Radovan Karadzic’s spokesman — he was a fanatic and had no place at that school”.
At 16 Gardner met the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who told him there was nothing left to explore in Arabia. Gardner didn’t listen. He read Arabic at Exeter, moving to Egypt in his third year to live with a local family. Instead of lectures he attended local markets and learnt the intricacies of the language and backgammon. It was then that his unbreakable love affair with the Middle East began.
He did his exploring differently to Thesiger, though. He became an investment banker, starting in the dealing room — “it was pure Wolf of Wall Street, down the boozer on Bishopsgate at midday for pink champagne, then people rolling back half-cut to make bad trades”. By the early Nineties he was living the yuppie life at Flemings investment bank in Bahrain — first-class flights, fancy restaurants, a speedboat budget. Where he differed from all the other yuppies was at the weekends. Instead of yacht parties he’d hop on a plane to random corners of the Arab peninsula — he had the Saudi airline timetable on his desk. “People think Saudi Arabia is all the same,” he says. “It’s not. It’s got black, arid, stark mountains in the north, oases in the east, dunes in the centre I would trek for hours, days through the mountains meeting tribesmen still wearing flowers in their hair.”
When he resigned to pursue a career in journalism his parents thought he was mad and his colleagues thought he would be back, but he’d had enough of banking. “There’s no product,” he says. “You’re dealing in numbers. You’re dealing in abstracts. It’s intangible.” On work experience and unpaid, things became tangible quite quickly. He made it onto the air at BBC World in his first fortnight because something happened between Yemen and Eritrea, and of course he’d been to those places. Then, after two years in the BBC newsroom, he decided to move to Dubai. “That was scary,” he says, “because Amanda was pregnant with our first child and I had absolutely no guarantee of income or work.” The gamble quickly paid off. He was doing the job he loved in the region he loved.
The six men involved in the 2004 attack are now dead — four were killed in a shootout with a Saudi Swat team at a petrol station not long after the ambush, the fifth blew himself up on his way to an attack on the interior ministry. The last al-Qaeda operative involved that day was beheaded in a mass execution in Riyadh in 2016. I ask Gardner if that gives him a sense of closure. “No, I don’t think so,” he says after some thought. “It was so many years afterwards. And there is still something that niggles me — and it’s stopping me having full closure. The Saudi ambassador in London promised me compensation. Simon and I were supposed to be in their care but the minders ran away. I don’t blame them. Why should they lay down their lives for two foreigners? But we got shot, the government promised compensation and they never paid a penny. I’m so disappointed with that. It’s not the money — if it was a hundred pounds or a million, it doesn’t matter. It’s the principle. That would be closure.”
His irritation at the Saudis is not eased by the fact that he still lives in pain today. “Sometimes it’s like a persistent cramp all down the leg and I have to keep massaging it to distract,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s like a mallet to the knee and I’m juddering to cope.” He has tried every painkiller in the book and some not in the book, including cannabis, cannabinoids and cannabinol. None worked. Now he takes a pain blocker most nights. “It takes six hours to work, so I have to remember to take it early on, otherwise I wake at 2am and my leg’s on fire.”
Like his inspiring mother, though, he continues to overcome obstacles and see things through. Although he has returned to Riyadh and continues to report from the region, there are limitations to life in a wheelchair. He would, for example, have loved to have covered the Arab Spring in 2011 but accepted very quickly that wheelchairs, mass protests and tear gas don’t mix. And then there’s the lift at the BBC. Perhaps the most unbearable part of the Being Frank documentary was watching him wait for that lift. Due live on air in minutes, he watches as the lift opens to reveal it’s full and then closes again. None of his able-bodied colleagues gets out and offers to take the stairs. He waits some more. The doors open again. Full again. He waits some more. It was hard not to throw something at the television, so I ask if any of those colleagues, having seen themselves in the documentary, have since apologised. “No,” is his uncharacteristically pithy response.
His two daughters are now in their twenties and forging their own careers. Amanda is no longer his wife; their marriage downgraded to friendship after two decades. In unrelated and, he says, unexpected news, he is now four years into a relationship with Elizabeth Rizzini, the BBC weather presenter. He reports on Ukraine and Israel; she tells us if it will be sunny at the weekend. Her Instagram is full of cats: she was a judge for the National Cat of the Year competition in 2021. His X (formerly Twitter) feed is full of birds: he is the president of the British Trust for Ornithology. Is the cat-bird thing a problem? “Not at all,” he protests. “I like cats. We have a cat.” The reason his social media is so tit-heavy is because of the trolling when he posts about anything weightier. “I’m fed up with it,” he says. “I’ll post something on Ukraine or Gaza, but whatever you put you’re going to get idiotic stuff from both sides. I’ll report on it, I have to report on it, but I won’t put it on my Twitter feed.”
Our conversation moves on from birds to butterflies — he thinks someone may have discovered a new species in the North Downs — then skiing and scuba diving. He is a man with too many enthusiasms and not enough time. Besides the birds and the skis and the weight of world events, he now has his novels. He started writing fiction 10 years ago because the films were bad on a long flight to Los Angeles. What perhaps began as escapism or the joy of being able to make stuff up is now a bestselling series featuring a hunky MI6 agent fighting, at turns, Colombian drug lords, Iranian fanatics, Russian bioweapon scientists and the Chinese state. The publishers already want two more. But he has to go to Jerusalem next week and Estonia the week after. It’s a busy time, after all, to be a security correspondent. “When has it ever not been?” he asks, a twinkle in his eye.
- Invasion by Frank Gardner (Transworld)
Written by: Matt Rudd
© The Times of London