Flying low

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, June 21-22, 2014 

Common sense suggests that a book about Flight MH370 produced so soon after the plane’s disappearance is unlikely to be any good. One fears, too, that anything less than a good book will be an exercise in bad taste. There are people for whom the mystery is also a tragedy, of a terribly ongoing kind. Their distress does not oblige writers to fall silent, of course, but it commands respect. If you’re going to write a book about this case, you’d better do a decent job. 

Into this daunting terrain saunters the Anglo-American writer Nigel Cawthorne. I admit I’d never heard of Cawthorne before I took delivery of this book, but how bad could he be? The back cover says nothing about him except that he is “prolific” – a slightly ominous way of describing a writer. On the web, the signs get more ominous still. It turns out that Cawthorne’s oeuvre, which is indeed uncommonly large, contains such titles as Amorous Antics of Old England and Sex Lives of the Famous Gays. 

Still, one was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. One stopped bothering around the middle of page three, where Cawthorne offers his shambolic first account of the moment when MH370 lost contact with the ground – the key moment, that is to say, of the whole affair. We know that the flight made its final radio transmission to Malaysian air traffic control at 1.19am. Cawthorne gets that part right. From there, things get a bit garbled: 

Around a minute later, the transponder that identifies the aircraft to air traffic control via ground radar was switched off. It was last seen on radar at 1.30am (17.30 GMT) 140 miles (225km) northeast of Kota Bharu, at the northern tip of Malaysia, around the point where the South China Sea meets the Gulf of Thailand. Then MH370 lost contact with Subang air traffic control one minute before it entered airspace controlled by Vietnam. 

We’d all be prolific, if we let ourselves write paragraphs like that. The alert reader will wonder, for starters, how the plane showed up on air-traffic radar at 1.30 if the transponder ceased functioning at 1.20. Is 1.30 a misprint for 1.20? Or is Cawthorne suddenly talking about a different kind of radar? If he is, it would have been nice of him to say so, if not mandatory. “Then MH370 lost contact with Subang air traffic control …” Does “then” mean after 1.30? Yes, if the word is understood in its time-honoured sense. But Cawthorne has already indicated that the plane “lost contact” at either 1.19 or 1.20, depending on how one interprets that typically imprecise phrase. Or are we supposed to conclude that Subang air traffic control, which Cawthorne hasn’t previously mentioned, is somehow a different entity from Malaysian air traffic control? 

The facts of this case are baffling enough by themselves. We don’t need sloppy prose adding to the confusion. Cawthorne writes so poorly that it is simply beyond his powers to construct a coherent account of the ten minutes that make the case so intriguing. The truth, which has been carefully established by more scrupulous minds than his, is that the plane was last tracked by air-traffic radar at 1.21am, at which point the transponder was, by definition, still working. Then, almost at the very moment the plane entered Vietnamese airspace, the transponder stopped functioning. To say that it was “switched off”, as Cawthorne repeatedly does, is to assume too much. Conceivably it was knocked out by a fire or malfunction. But certainly the timing raises the suspicion that somebody on board disabled it for sinister reasons. About ten minutes later the plane made a sharp left turn, close to a U-turn, and flew back over Malaysia. We know this because various military radars tracked its course over the next several hours. 

Cawthorne declines to give you all this information in one place. Remarkably, he is still straightening out the basics almost a hundred pages later. “It seems that, after [its] last transmission, the plane had veered off to the west,” he reveals on page 93, on the off chance anyone is still reading. At such moments you could be forgiven for thinking his book has no structure at all. In fact it has one, but it’s the most harebrained structure imaginable for this kind of book. Roughly speaking, Cawthorne winds the clock back to day one and retells the story from the beginning, providing you with only the information available at the time, even when that information has since proved to be wrong. Because it took a while for the world to learn the plane turned around, Cawthorne takes a while to confirm it. He seems to have drafted his book in real time, as events unfolded, without bothering to go back and correct the early stuff in light of later developments. No doubt this made the book easy to write, but it makes it horrible to read. 

Thus Cawthorne reports, on page three, that the flight’s final radio transmission to Malaysia consisted of the words “All right, good night.” We then hear about all the “speculation” that this “somewhat casual” sign-off sparked. Not until page 206 does Cawthorne get around to mentioning what the world has known for a good while now: nobody ever uttered that phrase in the first place. “Curiously, it was now revealed that whoever on Flight MH370 signed off that night, they did not use the casual ‘All right, good night’ that had at first aroused suspicion, but the more formal ‘Good Night Malaysian Three Seven Zero.’” 

Cawthorne is the Agatha Christie of non-fiction. He likes a good red herring. Before he’s cleared up that one, he throws out this one: “Adding to the mystery came news that the pilot’s sign-off, ‘All right, good night,’ came after the automatic transmission equipment had been disabled.” This troubling news was indeed delivered by the Malaysian prime minister on March 15. But like a lot of announcements made in those early days, it turned out to be incorrect. You’d think Cawthorne, if he’s going to regurgitate such sensational misinformation, would have the courtesy to tell you straight away that it’s untrue. But he doesn’t seem to think that’s his job. 

Over the past three months, the world’s better journalists have painstakingly sharpened our understanding of the MH370 story. In May, Four Corners did an exemplary job of crafting the established facts into a clear narrative. On Wikipedia, the collective mind maintains a thorough and ongoing summary of things as they stand, complete with footnotes. Cawthorne undoes everybody’s good work by retrieving every obsolete and discredited non-fact from the trash, slapping the whole lot between covers, and letting you puzzle out the truth for yourself. You might as well go out to your garage, dig out the last three months’ worth of newspapers, and re-read all the MH370 stories in chronological order. 

At least the newspaper stories were largely to the point. Cawthorne endlessly digresses about any historical plane disaster that bears a passing resemblance, if that, to the case of MH370. No doubt much of this information would seem pertinent, if delivered by a better writer. But Cawthorne has a passion for useless detail. He has an excruciating habit of providing distance data in both miles and kilometres, and sometimes in nautical miles as well, at moments when even one measurement would seem superfluous. “At that point,” he writes about a plane whose fate may or may not have prefigured that of MH370, “the aircraft’s ground speed was 107 knots (124 mph or 198 km/h), and it was descending at 10,912ft (3,326m) per minute …” The lay reader does not require this many numerals – and who is this book for, if not for the lay reader? What we need is a writer who will digest the technical stuff on our behalf, then give us a lucid picture of what’s going on at any given moment. 

Instead Cawthorne clogs his pages with a blizzard of irrelevant integers. He quotes all monetary values in both Pounds and US dollars. He gives you Greenwich Mean Time as well as local time. When a quoted source makes mention of a mobile phone, Cawthorne handily informs you, in brackets, that this is the same thing as a cellphone. He writes like a desperate student who will throw in any detail or anecdote to flesh out the word-length of an essay. Any man who can call the MH370 mystery an “enduring” one doesn’t care about what he says – he is just using words to fill up space. 

In the information age, only a small portion of the information we’re strafed with turns out to be accurate. On the 24-hour news channels we get the unedifying spectacle of the news in its half-formed state, as if we’re backstage at a sausage factory. It becomes hard to get a proper grip on what’s happened, because we’re too busy being told what’s happening now, right this minute. In America, CNN’s incessant and fevered coverage of the MH370 mystery became notorious for its fatuity. It reached its nadir when one anchor wondered aloud, on air, why nobody had seriously considered the possibility that the “supernatural power of God” was responsible for the whole thing. 

Cawthorne doesn’t throw that scrap of tripe into his information gumbo, but he throws in just about everything else. What is the point of writing a book if you’re just going to reproduce the hectic, slapdash, on-the-fly atmosphere of the worst kind of 24-hour news show? Ah, but the point of a book like this is to be out, to be there – to have an eye-catching cover and be present in the stores. Next time you’re in one, buy any book other than this. I guarantee you it won’t be worse.

Beyond the Pale

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, May 10-11, 2014

A few weeks ago I went to the beach, and needed something to read on the sand. It would have made professional sense to take along this new book about Ivan Milat, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to let the man's spectre desecrate the dunes. There are certain thoughts you don’t want to have while surrounded by sunlight, clean air, and happy young people. Milat is the man who, after murdering his victims, liked to reposition their bodies so as to put extra bullets into their skulls from different angles. Why would you want to read about that on a beach? 

Why indeed would you want to read about it anywhere? No doubt there is an element of voyeurism in our taste for true-crime books. But the genre can be reassuringly moral, too. The foul transgressions of a man like Milat remind you, in a roundabout way, that there really is such a thing as common decency after all. We know, of course, that these days it is no longer cool to trust our gut feelings about the existence of evil. We know that certain murderers had abusive childhoods, while others have political or religious grievances that we need to attend to. But crimes like Milat’s go so far beyond the pale that nobody sane can fail to call them monstrous. These days we can’t agree about much, but we can agree about that. Even Milat himself seems to understand this, in his primitive way. To this day he feebly protests that he was framed. Even he knows, at some level, that the things he did were unspeakable, and that nobody human would admit to doing them. 

So the Milat story is not entirely sordid. In the end, justice was done. Milat was identified and captured because members of the public, including a number of civic-minded petty criminals, inundated the police force with tips. He had his day in court, where his lawyers had their chance to insult the victims’ families with a laughable defence. And now he's in prison, where he spends his time either hunger-striking or swallowing razor blades, as part of an ongoing campaign to draw attention to his imagined innocence. 

Clive Small, the now-retired NSW police detective who headed the task force that brought Milat to justice, is these days a true-crime author. He has excellent qualifications to write about the Milat case, but whether the case needs to be written about again is another question. The Sins of the Brother, by Mark Whittaker and the late Les Kennedy, will surely never be surpassed as the definitive work about Milat. First published in 1998, the book was an impeccably researched and all-too-chilling evocation of the Milat milieu, and still ranks as one of the finest true-crime works ever written. 

In Whittaker and Kennedy’s book, Clive Small came across as a diligent and decent but rather bureaucratic figure. Small’s own book doesn’t do a lot to alter this image, and indeed doesn’t seek to. Small usefully reminds us that catching a killer like Milat, and assembling a brief of evidence that will firmly put him away, is nothing if not a bureaucratic operation. Fiction makes us want detectives who are intriguing as well as effective – we expect dark and brooding obsessives, possibly from Scandinavia, who possess near-psychic insight into the minds of their wicked nemeses. Small, less romantically, portrays himself as the leader of a hard-working team, an efficient delegator, a crack information manager. If Milat's crimes were a deranged exercise in passion run amok, the offender was found and taken down by the cool, patient, impassive work of collective reason. 

Small was appointed to head the investigation in 1993, after the bodies of missing young backpackers started turning up in the Belanglo State Forest, which lies just off the Hume Highway between Sydney and Canberra. When an organised search of the forest recovered further remains, bringing the total of victims to seven, Small publicly confirmed that he was looking for a serial killer. 

At that point the investigation entered a phase of laborious data-sifting. A public hotline generated thousands of leads, all of which had to be evaluated. Buried in that pile of information was the tip that would eventually give Small his breakthrough. A young Englishman named Paul Onions had phoned the hotline to report a terrifying encounter he’d had while hitching along the Hume Highway in 1990. Onions had been picked up by a man who called himself Bill. Near the Belanglo turnoff Bill had pulled over, reached under his seat, and produced a handgun and some rope. Wisely, Onions made an instant decision to flee. Dodging pistol-shots from his rear, he flagged down a passing car. Onions recalled that “Bill” had sported a Merv Hughes-style moustache – and poor Merv has been associated with the case ever since. 

The Onions evidence would prove vital, in time; and he would ultimately identify his assailant as Ivan Milat. But the significance of the "Bill" encounter only became clear after other leads implicating Milat had surfaced from the pile. One of Ivan’s brothers had raised the suspicions of his co-workers by making weirdly well-informed comments about the backpacker murders at work. Another brother had supplied police with a decidedly iffy-sounding witness statement. Finally, and decisively, investigators learned that Ivan had stood trial for abduction and rape back in 1971. He had been acquitted, somehow; but the crime had been all too real, and in retrospect it looked eerily like a dry run for the backpacker murderers. 

Small seemed to have his man, then. But really his job was only half done. Before arresting Milat, he had to ensure he would be convicted at trial – a trickier challenge than we now might think. At the Belanglo crime scenes, most of the biological evidence had long since degraded. Shell casings and bullets were recovered, but they would be useless as evidence unless police found the weapons that fired them. Small’s fear was that Milat, if tipped off to his imminent arrest, might ditch his guns and any other items that linked him to the crimes. In the end he didn’t, and the police recovered from Milat's home an immense trove of damning evidence, including clothes and cameras and sleeping bags that the killer had souvenired from his victims. As dangerous as it was to keep them, Milat couldn’t bear the thought of relinquishing his trophies. 

The point is important, because it gives us the biggest hint we have about Milat's motives. His crimes were about control. He had a high opinion of his personal worth, and proved his potency by subduing his innocent victims with the aid of rope, knives, and firearms. When they were dead, he defiled them posthumously by keeping and using their personal belongings, and giving some of them away as gifts. All of Milat’s known murders, Small points out, occurred just after he'd been abandoned by a sexual partner, or had otherwise lost the upper hand in his private life. 

Stressing Milat’s lust for power, Small rejects the hypothesis, first advanced by criminal profilers, that the murders were committed with the aid of a younger accomplice, possibly a family member. Ivan Milat, Small says, trusted nobody, certainly not to that extent. Small’s training compels him to avoid speculation and look to the evidence: and the fact remains that in every case where Milat left behind a living witness (the Paul Onions incident, the alleged 1971 rape, and a similar attempted abduction in 1977) he acted alone. 

Small’s old job, which he was unimpeachably good at, obliged him to keep his personal feelings under wraps. In his new job, which is to write about his old job, it wouldn't hurt him to show a bit more emotion. How did it feel, exactly, to be on the trail of a monster? Did Small lose sleep? Did he feel sick? Small is good on the hard facts, but his book is far skimpier when it comes to the personal stuff – the stuff that only he could have told us. 

He does, though, give us one scene that stands out for its vividness. Late in the book he describes a 2005 visit to the Goulburn Supermax prison, where he encounters the reduced figure of Milat. Grey-haired, stooped, scarred by the ravages of self-harm, Milat hails his old nemesis and utters a pro forma protestation of innocence. Small, with typical restraint, replies by giving Ivan a brief rundown of the evidence that makes a mockery of that claim. 

Here we have a reminder of what good and evil look like in the real world. The people who embody them aren’t as spectacular or as charismatic as we might imagine. They’re just people. Even in his dark heyday, Milat didn’t look like a monster, and didn’t even always behave like one. But he certainly did sometimes, and that was more than enough.

The man who couldn't stop

Most of us know the feeling, or think we do. We know what it’s like to go back for one last look at the gas burner we know isn’t on. Some of us, after filling the car, have a thing about double-checking the petrol cap. And who among us hasn’t wondered, just for a second, how it would feel to shout something offensive on a crowded street?

David Adam, author of The Man Who Couldn’t Stop, does not reject the popular notion that we are all a bit OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, he explains, begins with the kind of unwanted irrational thought that nearly all of us seem to have. But for most of us, such thoughts are fleeting rather than crippling. For most of us, one superfluous check of the stove will be enough. We can then forget about it and enjoy the rest of the evening. Imagine, though, not being able to forget about it. Imagine not being able to enjoy anything through the suffocating burden of the uninvited thought. “Imagine,” as Adam puts it, “that you can never turn it off.” That is OCD ... [read more]

The True Hooha

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, March 8-9, 2014

On March 12, 2013, James Clapper, Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, appeared before the US Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence. Asked whether America’s National Security Agency collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” Clapper responded: “No sir. Not wittingly.” This answer was unsurprising. If Clapper had said “yes”, he would have been admitting that his agency had conducted operations that violated the U.S. Constitution. 

 A 29-year-old NSA contractor named Edward Snowden was watching Clapper’s testimony with an especially keen eye. Snowden knew Clapper was lying; he knew the NSA had, in the decade since 9/11, vastly expanded its domestic data-gathering programs. Since December 2012, Snowden had been in touch with a Guardian columnist named Glenn Greenwald. Even as Clapper misled the Congress, Snowden was already stockpiling documents for the biggest intelligence spill since Bradley Manning’s WikiLeaks revelations. 

The Snowden Files, written by the Guardian journalist Luke Harding, reminds us that Snowden’s story is still a work in progress. His leaks are still being published, and the man himself remains in Russia, stuck in legal limbo. The drama remains tantalisingly incomplete. For the moment, Harding has written an absorbing on-the-fly history of its opening acts. 

On June 5, 2013, Snowden’s leaks began to appear in print. First came the revelation that the NSA was collecting the phone-call “metadata” of millions of customers of the American telecom Verizon. The Agency wasn’t recording the content of the conversations, but it was storing information about number-pairings, phone locations, and call durations. 

A day later it emerged that the NSA was gathering Internet data on an even larger scale. Under a program called Prism, the Agency accessed data stored by its Silicon Valley “partners” – among them Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft – in order to keep a record of their customers’ online activities, including their search histories and the contents of their emails. A subsequent leak revealed the Agency had also hacked directly into Google’s and Yahoo’s data cables in Britain. 

Unlike old-school wiretaps, the NSA’s bulk data-gathering programs didn’t discriminate. They collected everyone’s data by default, in apparent violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against searches conducted without “probable cause” and a particularised warrant. The NSA, Snowden believed, had hijacked the internet and turned it into a giant spying machine. “With this capacity,” he alleged, “the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting.” 

Leaks about the NSA’s overseas operations followed, including some awkward revelations about America’s – and Australia’s – eavesdropping on friendly nations. In the meantime Snowden, who never intended to stay anonymous, had outed himself as the whistleblower in a video interview posted on the Guardian's website. The interview took place in Hong Kong, where Snowden had fled in order to avoid extradition to the US. He subsequently flew to Russia, where the Putin regime granted him a one-year visa, which is due to expire on August 1, 2014. 

Who then is Edward Snowden? The youngster we meet in the book’s early pages is an unpromising figure: a high-school drop-out and tech geek who posts forum messages under the username TheTrueHOOHA. His youthful politics are tiresome, but not in the way you might expect. Far from being an Assange-style anarchist, Snowden has always leant to the Right. In his windy youth he railed against socialism, and restrictions on assault weapons, and respectable wages for McDonald’s workers, and the existence of a welfare safety-net. Later on, working at the NSA, he was known for keeping a copy of the US Constitution on his desk. In 2012 he contributed to the presidential campaign of the libertarian Ron Paul. 

When the Snowden movie gets made, there may be no Hollywood actor nerdy enough to tackle the central role, except perhaps for the kid who played McLovin. Snowden is every inch a child of the Internet age. Even after a three-month posting in Hawaii he still looked Vampire-pale, having exposed himself to no source of light except his computer screen. He is, or was, a devotee of the online game Tekken: “playing an everyman-warrior battling evil against the odds shaped his moral outlook, he later said.” When his Hong Kong lawyers raised the prospect of jail time, Snowden seemed unfazed – until they told him he would have no access to a computer or the web. Then he panicked. 

But when the pallid mariner began to tell his story, he had some disturbingly eloquent things to say about his special subject: privacy in the age of the web. “The internet is on principle a system that you reveal yourself to in order to fully enjoy,” he wrote to one journalist. “It is a TV that watches you. The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the internet, and governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.” It worried Snowden that the Government’s appetite for private data, and its capacity to archive it, were growing all the time. It worried him that he, as a mere contractor with a private firm, could easily go rogue and tap the wires of anyone, up to and including the President. It worried him that he knew all these things and the public didn’t. 

And what thinking person wouldn’t have been worried, in Snowden’s position? A troubling maxim emerges from this book. The more you know about computers, the more their power will tend to alarm you. Snowden knows an awful lot about them, and they terrify him. When a journalist turns up to interview him wielding a smartphone, Snowden flips out. The NSA, he explains, is more than capable of hacking such a device and using it as a microphone or geolocator.  When his lawyers come to visit him, Snowden insists that they surrender their phones and shut them in a fridge. It sounds like paranoia, until you reflect that Snowden, on this subject, knows exactly what he’s talking about. 

Most of us are addicted to the Internet without understanding much about the way it works. Snowden’s whistle-blast should snap us out of our sleepwalk. Now, you feel, might be a very good time to start talking seriously about our online privacy – now, while we still have some left. 

Beyond that, he raises other questions that require out attention. The gravest charge that’s been made against him is the accusation, levelled by John Kerry and others, that he has put American lives at risk, by tipping off terrorists to the NSA’s methods. 

But the NSA’s own methods represent a different kind of threat to American life, as Snowden has compelling argued. His leaks should make us re-examine an assumption that has gone largely unchallenged since 9/11. Why should national security be allowed to trump individual privacy? Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe an open society, if it is to remain an open society, can never fully secure itself against violent internal or external attack. Maybe the preservation of privacy is worth some risk. In the immediate wake of 9/11 it was hard to discuss such questions soberly. Snowden has dramatically returned them to the table. 

As a result, he might never see America again. If he were to return there now, he would risk receiving a prison sentence even steeper than the one handed to Bradley Manning, who got 35 years. Snowden sacrificed his whole future in an attempt to trigger an informed public debate about online privacy. The least we can do in return is have that debate. At the same time, we need to resist the idea that he is a traitor to his country. The best answer to that charge has already been provided by Snowden himself. “If I’m a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all my information to the American public … If they [the Government] see that as treason, I think people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy.”