Robert Fisk, my ex-husband, was the best journalist of his generation

I had the honor of being married to Robert Fisk for 12 years. In my opinion he was the best journalist of his generation.

The word “controversial” has featured prominently in the news and obituaries since the death of Robert Fisk.

I don’t like the word, because it seems to imply that Robert’s immense achievements are in doubt. If Robert was controversial, it was because he refused to settle. In nearly half a century as a journalist, which saw him win numerous press awards and publish six books, he never followed the pack. His judgments were intuitive, quick and, in my experience, invariably correct. He couldn’t be intimidated by the criticism. He never got on the bandwagon.

Robert’s first rule was to go there, to be a witness, even if it meant risking his life. He despised journalists who covered wars from hotel rooms.

I had the honor of being married to Robert Fisk for 12 years. Between 1988 and 2003, we worked together on most of the big news from the Middle East and the Balkans. In my opinion, he was the best journalist of his generation, one of the best of all time. No one did journalism with greater courage, dedication, determination and intelligence than Robert.

When Robert covered the NATO bombing of Serbia from Belgrade in 1999, he was accused of supporting Slobodan Milosevic. When he opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq four years later, his enemies said he was a puppet of Saddam Hussein. His coverage of the Syrian civil war since 2011 infuriated those who claimed he was an apologist for Bashar al-Assad.

Robert did not praise or support any of these dictators.

Many in Europe and the United States idealized the Syrian rebels at the beginning of the war. Robert had a more nuanced view. He was proven right when many of the rebels joined jihadist movements.

Robert’s first rule was to go there, to be a witness, even if it meant risking his life. He scorned the cliches, journalists who covered the Middle East from afar, regurgitated the line smuggled by governments and diplomats, covered wars from hotel rooms. Above all, he condemned journalists who did not care about the people they wrote about.

Robert never accepted the official version. Instinctively he sided with the underdog. He gave a voice to people who had none. That’s what made him a great journalist

Robert refused to choose sides. He knew that there are executioners and victims on both sides of every civil war. The British public school, a difficult relationship with his father, and the years he spent covering the riots in Northern Ireland imbued him with a deep distrust of authority. He never accepted the official version. Instinctively he sided with the underdog. He gave voice to people who had none. That is what made him a great journalist.

As a child, Robert saw Alfred Hitchcock’s foreign correspondent, in which an American reporter becomes entangled with Nazi agents in pre-World War II Europe. He credited the story of the intrepid reporter who triumphs over evil and gets the girl to make him want to be a journalist.

With self-deprecating humor, Robert sometimes referred to himself as Scoop Fisk. The tragedies of the modern Middle East were so great that, more obscurely, he joked that he was a correspondent for mass graves.

As a young journalist in Paris, I followed Robert’s award-winning coverage of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the London Times. We met the following year, when I was on a reporting trip to Damascus for CBS News.

The Israeli invasion culminated in the massacre of at least 1,000 Palestinians by Christian militiamen allied with Israel in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Robert was obsessed with this image, from his report, published in the Faber Book of Reportage:

“To the right of us was what appeared to be a small barricade of cement and mud. But as we got closer, we found a visible human elbow on the surface. A large stone turned out to be part of a torso. It was as if the bodies had been washed up on the side of the road, as they had in fact done. An excavator, with an empty driver’s seat, was guilty at the end of the street “

Life with Robert was often heartbreaking and exhausting. It was never boring. Our first three summers together were interrupted by the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes in 1988, the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

When Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down, we ran to Dubai. We spent the whole night driving to various Gulf ports in the vain hope of chartering a boat to Bandar Abbas, where the wreckage and the bodies of most of the 290 victims had been taken. As we were walking through the hotel lobby the next morning, someone yelled, “The Iranians are taking a press plane to Bandar Abbas.”

The corpses were lined up on the floor of a cold store, next to piles of body parts: limbs to limbs, organs to organs. The Iranians then took the journalists to the local hotel for a kebab lunch, which many of us declined. It was before mobile phones. We had no way of introducing ourselves.

“Come with me,” Robert whispered. We sneak into the switchboard operator’s cubicle behind the reception desk. Robert gave the operator the phone number for the London Times copy office with a pleading look. He dictated most of a front page story, mentally composing it as he went along, before someone disconnected him. His rivals were furious.

I witnessed a furious telephone discussion between Robert and his foreign editor, the beginning of the end of his long relationship with the London Times.

That night, the Iranians flew dozens of Western journalists who had made the trip to Bandar Abbas back to Dubai. By the end of our 48 hour excursion, most of us were exhausted.

While others slept, Robert slipped through the cockpit door and took the passenger seat. We were in the first Iranian plane to repeat the trajectory of the doomed flight. The pilot told him, in perfect English, how the transponder worked and why the American warship had not been able to communicate with the civilian aircraft.

The Americans had panicked, the pilot concluded. Back in Dubai, Robert did more interviews that strengthened that thesis. Subsequent investigations showed that he was right. But the Murdoch-owned newspaper wanted speculation about a civilian plane on a kamikaze mission.

I witnessed a furious telephone discussion between Robert and his foreign editor, the beginning of the end of his long relationship with the London Times. When Robert announced the following year that he was leaving for the London Independent, the editor of the Times invited him to an expensive restaurant in Paris. “You are simply Fisk of the Times,” said the editor. Robert was courteous, but firm.

Those who criticize Israel, including Robert, are often unfairly labeled as anti-Semitic. He traveled to Auschwitz in an effort to understand the carnage he witnessed in the Middle East. His masterpiece, Pity the Nation, begins with an evocation of the Holocaust. He repeatedly told the Arabs that yes, the Holocaust really did happen. Yes, it really was six million.

When the Oslo peace accords were signed between Israel and the Palestinians in September 1993, we ran to Jerusalem, where we shared a meal with my editors at Time magazine. They believed that peace had broken out and were exalted.

“Have you read the fine print?” Robert asked. The Israelis had more than 200 lawyers working on the agreement. Yasser Arafat and Ahmed Qurei were practically alone. “This can’t work,” predicted Robert. “The Palestinians will be blamed for it.” Once again, he was right.

Robert and I were with Irish Unifil officers in southern Lebanon when the Israeli army bombed the Fiji battalion headquarters, where hundreds of Shiite Muslim civilians were taking refuge during an Israeli assault in April 1996. We arrived within minutes at a scene of absolute horror. Several of the survivors spoke of hearing and seeing an Israeli drone over their heads at the time of the bombing.

A Unifil officer, who was not Irish, leaked a videotape of the drone to Robert. It showed that the Israelis could have seen the massacre from the air as it occurred. His report made front-page headlines.

Robert never did drop a story. He returned to Cana, and then to the scene of a 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo, to piece together the life stories of those who perished.

This week, those of us who love Robert tried to smile through our tears. Her dear friend Olivia O’Leary attended her funeral on Monday. He told me this anecdote, told by a former foreign editor of the London Times: During the oil tanker war in the Persian Gulf in the 1980s, Robert was annoyed that a report for which he had risked his life was buried in the part bottom of an inside page. “I don’t mind dying for the Times,” he telexed London. “But could you please be on the cover?”

Robert was eager to return to Beirut in October, but was persuaded to wait until the pandemic subsided. When he was hospitalized at St Vincent’s on October 30, Robert asked his wife Nelofer to tell his editor that he would be archiving the following week.

Robert often asked people if they believed in the afterlife. He said it as a joke, to break the ice. If there were an afterlife, he promised, he would be the first journalist to file from there. I almost hope to read your report at any time.