Scattering Chaff by Bob Bergen

Author:Bob Bergen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Canada, Military History, Kosovo
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Published: 2019-02-07T19:20:52+00:00

8

A Blanket of Secrecy

The first live interview that a journalist conducted with a pilot in Aviano came a week into the bombing campaign on April 2. The CBC’s Neil Macdonald was able to interview a pilot on the condition that his face was not shown. It wasn’t the best story Macdonald ever had done.

He said precious little. He had all the insignia taken off his uniform. We weren’t allowed to shoot his face so, as he was speaking, we shot him sort of clasping and unclasping his hands. It’s a visual gimmick, I mean you’ve got to shoot something, the guy’s talking. We had to agree that we wouldn’t identify him. I wasn’t too crazy about that really. I don’t like doing that.1

Macdonald explained why:

The CBC really frowns on hidden or silhouetted interviews as they are called. If somebody’s talking, the public, the viewer has a right to see who it is. God knows who they’re putting out in front of the camera, you know. I’m sure the military’s very honest but there are organizations that are less than honest in their public dealings with the media. We like to see faces. We like to see the people we’re talking to, but we had no choice. We were there; it was a condition for the interview. It came very late, I mean we had to do it very quickly—sort of in a field, as I recall—this fellow came out in a jumpsuit without any insignia on it and they presented him and said: “OK, go ahead.” He wasn’t, you know, the best talker in the world, I mean the guy’s a pilot, he’s got a job to do. I don’t expect them to be orators, but it was precious little.2

Macdonald was looking for information about the kinds of missions Canadians were flying, what kind of opposition they were encountering, and whether they were hitting their targets. Instead, the pilot talked about the nervousness of flying into combat, seeing a Dutch warplane shoot down a MiG on the first night’s mission, and his belief that when he took out targets, it was buildings or jets that were neutralized, not people.3

Also, on April 2, journalists attending the daily technical briefing in Ottawa finally talked to a pilot in Aviano on a speaker phone for ten minutes. He was asked in both English and French by CTV and Radio-Canada if he would identify himself, and both times he refused. When asked whether he was sensitive to news reports that the pilots had missed targets and if that was affecting morale, he replied that weather affected some missions. “That does not change the morale at all on the pilots and, no, they don’t follow what’s going on or the way it’s reported in the news media.”4 The interviews turned to the pilot’s feelings about being in battle and how it differed from his training. He talked about the first time he entered enemy territory and was targeted by an enemy MiG that was shot down by a Dutch warplane.

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