It started with a tip-off.
Little did Stephen Davis realise, though, that phone call in August, 1990, would be the beginning of a 30-year investigation into one of the biggest government cover-ups in modern-day history — that eventually prompted an admission of such by short-lived British PM Liz Truss last year.
Davis, who’s coming to Queenstown this weekend to take part in the Queenstown Writers Festival, tells Mountain Scene he was, at the time, the news editor for the Independent on Sunday.
He’d been aware of British Airways Flight 149, which was the only plane to land in Kuwait, a war zone, on the night of August 2 that year.
‘‘The foreign office was put ting out this spin, saying, ‘oh, don’t worry about it, yes, it’s all a bit of a mistake, but they’re all in luxury hotels, sipping cocktails by the pool in the sunshine having a mini-holiday’.’’
That was true, he says, for the first two or three days.
But for the next four months the 367 passengers on board — primarily civilians, including women and children — from 15 different countries, including New Zealand, were held as hostages and used as human shields to deter offensive operations by opposing Coalition forces during the Gulf War.
A subsequent British government report — commissioned a year after and promptly suppressed — detailed ‘‘an absolute horror story’’ of torture, mock executions, sexual assaults and near-starvation conditions, Davis says.
That phone call was the beginning of an epic investigation which resulted in the publication of The Secret History of Flight 149 earlier this year.
It’s the second version of the book, originally titled Operation Trojan Horse, ‘‘sabotaged’’ by the British government about 15 years ago.
He’s been fuelled, largely, by anger on the passengers’ behalf.
‘‘If you think about it, these people were lied to twice over,’’ he says.
‘‘First off, they were lied to about why they were there — why their plane landed when all the others that night were turned away — but, secondly, they didn’t even have the acknowledgement of their suffering … because that was also suppressed.’’
Tomorrow, from 1pm till 2pm at Te Atamira, Davis will talk about investigative journalism and the decades-long investigation resulting in his book and podcast.
Prior to that, from 10am till noon, also at Te Atamira, he’ll hold an interactive workshop on misinformation and disinformation, identifying ‘fake news’ and how the internet’s being used to give false information, among other things.
While he developed a programme for the University of Otago and led some research into the issue, and wrote a column for The Listener, Davis says the work actually started years ago while teaching journo students in Australia.
‘‘I used to give them a test … to pick a famous person [and] write a mini-obituary, relying on research online, using only the things they were absolutely sure were actually true.’’
Each year the numbers failing that test increased, till it got to a 70% fail rate, because they couldn’t determine fiction from fact online.
He now spends time at various writers’ festivals and talking to students all over the country, particularly over 65s at the U3A, who are ‘‘smart people, but they don’t know how to identify reliable sources’’.
Davis contends the issue is not the legitimate question people have when they go online to research anything.
‘‘What happens, of course, is the algorithm starts pouring loads of crazy nonsense — it’s not the starting point, it’s the end point.’’
● Queenstown Writers Festival, today till Sunday, full programme and tickets, qtwritersfestival.nz
