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2025-03-23 | WebClipping | 2025-03-23 | https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-case-of-mistaken-identity-a-murder-in-cairo-and-a-decades-long/ | true |
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Opinion: A case of mistaken identity, a murder in Cairo, and a decades-long investigation into the death of a journalist
Peter Gillman is the author, with Emanuele Midolo, of Murder in Cairo: The Killing of David Holden*, from which the following article is adapted.*
A note from our editor-in-chief
A central tenet of successful journalism is making promises you then keep.
Murder in Cairo is the culmination of a near 50-year promise, to do all that journalism can offer to solve the murder of the foreign correspondent David Holden.
At first, the promise belonged to the investigative Insight team of The Sunday Times of London, which was then owned by the Thomson family, future proprietors of The Globe and Mail. These were colleagues of Mr. Holden, who was executed within hours of travelling to Cairo on assignment for peace talks between Egypt and Israel in December, 1977.
Mr. Holden’s editor at The Sunday Times, Sir Harold Evans, had ordered a team of investigative journalists to Egypt and the wider region immediately after the killing. No expense was to be spared but despite the determination, and months in the field, the bread crumbs of clues lay scattered.
I always count my lucky stars that I got to know Harry Evans. He was a long-time mentor of mine, and friend.
He taught me the Harry principles of investigative journalism. Readers will readily recognize that they live on in all the investigative work we do here at The Globe and Mail.
There are five principles – decide what the story is, resource it appropriately, be relentless in the pursuit, recognize the audience is only beginning to pay attention at precisely the time the newsroom is losing interest in the story, and always remember you may be wrong.
This granite bedrock explains how journalists commit to stories seemingly without end. And the road map removes all excuses when someone like Harry asks you to help with the story. Harry had included a chapter on the Holden killing in his memoirs My Paper Chase, in which he wrote about the unfinished business. The secrets, kept for nearly five decades.
Before Harry died in September, 2020, at the age of 92, we spent time on many occasions modelling what may have happened to Mr. Holden that fateful day.
I promised Harry I would stay on the story and help where I could. Harry had wanted to know where the rot lay, including in his own newsroom, where telexes belonging to the foreign department were going missing.
I spoke to a number of people in various countries, and knowing the CIA had a file on Mr. Holden, I asked one former CIA director point-blank during a visit to Washington if the CIA had arranged the assassination. “We don’t whack journalists,” came the reply.
In sharing this adapted excerpt, we combine the powerful forces of two generations. One who lived the tragedy, the other who inherited it. Peter Gillman went to the scene of the crime the week it happened and spent months penning the original investigative piece for The Sunday Times; Emanuele Midolo began working at The Sunday Times in 2020, but with a burning curiosity he joined forces with Mr. Gillman. Together they have produced (most of) the answers we have been waiting for. It is an astonishing act of tenacity.
The story is one of intrigue, bafflement and of spies both inside a newsroom and outside. The double and triple lives some of the characters convey makes the telling as riveting as any spy novel. But the one difference is rather than double-crossing duplicity, Murder in Cairo is a promise kept.
– David Walmsley, Editor-in-Chief
One evening in September, 1974, David Halton, a foreign-affairs correspondent for the CBC, arrived at Cairo International Airport on a flight from London. Mr. Halton, aged 34, with receding brown hair and dark-blue eyes, was working his well-trodden Middle East beat. He had covered the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war in 1967 and the death of Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. This was his fourth or fifth visit to Cairo in as many years and he knew the arrivals routine.
He joined the line of passengers for the visa and passport controls where his documents were checked and stamped. As he was walking toward the baggage reclaim area, he was stopped by two men wearing scruffy suits. They asked if he was David Halton – or so he thought. “Yes, I’m David Halton,” he replied.
The men introduced themselves as Egyptian press officials who would take him to his hotel. Mr. Halton was puzzled, as he had not informed the Egyptian authorities that he was coming. But it was late at night and, after a long day’s travelling, he could certainly use a lift.
“That’s very kind of you,” Mr. Halton told the pair, following them into the baggage area.
The two men retrieved his luggage, then escorted him past customs and through the swing doors that opened into the clammy Cairo night.
Mr. Halton was accustomed to heading to the row of regulated taxis to the left of the arrivals building. Instead, they steered him to a cluster of unmarked cars to the right. They opened the front passenger door of an ancient sedan and gestured that he should sit next to the driver, while the two officials occupied the rear seats.
As the car wove its way through Cairo’s notorious traffic, one of the officials asked Mr. Halton about his travel plans and how long he intended to stay in Egypt. He mentioned several unfamiliar names.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you are talking about,” Mr. Halton told them.
The official flashed a cryptic smile and replied that they had set up some of the meetings he had requested. Even more perplexed, Mr. Halton said that he not asked for any interviews to be arranged. He turned in his seat and asked the question that had been puzzling him ever since they had greeted him in the arrivals building:
“How did you know I was coming?”
It was the officials’ turn to look surprised.
“You are David Holden of The Sunday Times?” one asked.
Now Mr. Halton realized what had happened.
“Actually it’s David Halton, Hal-ton, not David Hol-den. I’m sorry but I think you’ve got the wrong person. I’m David Halton from CBC.”
The two Egyptians looked at each other in disbelief and whispered briefly in Arabic. Then one said, “We’re almost at the hotel, so we’ll drop you off.” The two men said nothing for the rest of the journey. There was a peremptory parting once they arrived at the hotel. Mr. Halton thanked them and the car sped away.
Mr. Halton thought little more of the episode. There was plenty in the Middle East to occupy him, as Egypt completed a shift of allegiance from the Soviet to the U.S. camp, then took part in initial moves toward a peace deal with Egypt’s former mortal enemy, Israel, mediated by the Americans.
Three years later, David Halton realized his unsettling encounter with the Egyptians could have had a very different ending.
On Dec. 6, 1977, David Holden, chief foreign correspondent of the London Sunday Times, arrived at Cairo airport on an unusually warm winter’s night. Aged 53, with slicked-back brown hair and china-blue eyes, he was making his last stop on a 10-day swing through the Middle East ahead of peace talks between Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Mr. Holden’s flight from Amman had been delayed and it was 11:15 p.m. by the time he was following the same journey through the arrivals building as David Halton three years before. He bought some Egyptian currency and purchased a visitor’s visa, then lined up at immigration control. After his documents had been checked and stamped, he retrieved his red Samsonite suitcase in the baggage hall, passed through Customs, and headed for the exit.
Somewhere along this journey, like David Halton, Mr. Holden was intercepted by one or more Egyptian officials. Once outside, he was escorted away from the official taxis to the left and toward the cars parked to the right. There he got into a battered Fiat that, it turned out, had been stolen and resprayed just 24 hours before. The car sped away, disappearing into the Cairo night.
Some six hours later, Mr. Holden’s body was found, dumped in the dirt beside a road a few miles from the airport. He had been shot through the heart with a single bullet fired from behind, clearly a professional hit. All identifying marks had been removed. The body was taken to the city morgue where it was identified as Mr. Holden’s three days later. This time the assassins had got their man.
As a reporter working at The Sunday Times, I was part of a team immediately dispatched to the Middle East to try to reconstruct Mr. Holden’s last journey. Beyond that, we aimed to answer two key questions: Who killed Mr. Holden? And why? Our attempt to do so lasted the best part of a year, and produced more questions than answers.
Our failure was to preoccupy me for the next four decades. And so four years ago I teamed up with a young Sunday Times journalist, Emanuele Midolo, to resume the quest. So what did we find? Why should the case still exert such a hold? And how does David Halton, whose uninvited ride in 1974 foreshadowed that of his near-namesake three years later, feel about his narrow escape today?
I hardly knew Mr. Holden. To me, he was remote and aloof, rarely mixing with his Sunday Times colleagues. He appeared every inch the professional journalist and writer, attracting epithets such as distinguished and accomplished. The son of a newspaper editor in England’s north-east, he studied at Cambridge, dabbled with acting, then rose through Britain’s journalistic establishment, working successively for The Times, The Guardian and Sunday Times. For his final trip he was reporting for both The Sunday Times and the New York Times, visiting Syria, Jordan, Israel and the occupied West Bank before his fatal flight to Cairo.
The news that Mr. Holden’s body had been found and identified caused consternation when it reached The Sunday Times late on Saturday, Dec. 10. Among the most distressed was its legendary editor, Harold Evans, who had lost correspondents before and felt a burden of responsibility on his shoulders. He also had a newspaper to prepare. The next day’s issue carried a front page report with the headline: Sunday Times man found shot dead in Egypt.
Mr. Evans called me that day and asked me to go to Jordan’s capital, Amman; other journalists were sent to Cairo, Jerusalem and Beirut. We spent a week scrutinizing Mr. Holden’s movements during his last trip, compiling a list of press conferences and meetings he’d attended, and interviews he’d conducted.
We were left with some puzzling gaps and anomalies, as when he appeared to be in two places at the same time. We pondered the meaning of a postcard Mr. Holden sent from Jerusalem to his long-time friend, the writer Jan Morris, the day before he died. It showed a fortress in Jerusalem’s Old City, with Mr. Holden’s note: “In the Middle East, citadels still have their uses.”
At the end of that first week, The Sunday Times published a summary of our findings under the headline: Who Killed David Holden? After a break over Christmas, we continued our inquiries into the New Year. Among our interviewees was David Halton, who had been in Cairo when Mr. Holden was killed. He told us about his alarming near-miss in 1974; he was uncertain whether it had been in August or September, before plumping for the latter.
We considered a range of motives for the killing: a robbery gone wrong; an act of terrorism; a fatal love tryst; revenge by Israel for a devastating Sunday Times article published six months before that revealed the systematic torture of Palestinian detainees. But one thing was crystal clear: Someone had badly wanted Mr. Holden dead. The killers had used three cars, all stolen, the first on Nov. 18, when Mr. Holden was still arranging his trip, the second and third just 24 hours before he arrived, indicating that they knew his travel plans. Two of the cars had been resprayed. Mr. Holden had been killed in one of the cars, his suitcase and typewriter were found in another, and the killers made their getaway in a third.
We had an uneasy sense that we were venturing into deep and murky waters – and this was strengthened when I returned to the Middle East in January with a colleague, John Barry. We went to Lebanon where we met officials from the Palestine Liberation Organization at its Beirut headquarters to ask, in the politest possible manner, whether it had murdered Mr. Holden. The PLO denied doing so, citing two grounds: It had a policy of not killing journalists; and, following our revelations of Israel’s torture of Palestinian detainees, it considered The Sunday Times a friend.
We were back at our hotel when we received devastating news: A thief at The Sunday Times was stealing printouts of our messages, known as telexes, which described our findings and travel plans. On checking back, the newspaper found that a number of Mr. Holden’s telexes had also been stolen, suggesting that this was how the killers learned his travel plans. At The Sunday Times, anxiety bordering on paranoia reigned. Entry into the office building was all too easy, with minimal security checks. But a thief would still need to have known where to locate the messages. The alternative, even more troubling, was that someone on the staff was in collusion with the killers: In other words, it had been an inside job.
John Barry and I completed our trip without mishap. The Sunday Times mounted a sting to try to catch the telex thief, which failed. It was then that Harold Evans asked us to broaden our inquiries, “no expense spared,” to encompass Mr. Holden’s whole life. Over the next six months, as we compiled Mr. Holden’s biography, curiosities and questions emerged. There appeared to have been an attempt by MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence agency, to recruit Mr. Holden while he was at Cambridge; and his swift rise at The Times suggested he was assisted by friends in high places. He had some kind of relationship with the CIA, which had taken a close interest in his movements during his final trip. We were intrigued when we learned that Mr. Holden was gay and had spent 10 years in a secret relationship with an academic named Leo Silberman, who, we discovered, had lied about his credentials and, as a young man, had strong leftist beliefs.
A year after Mr. Holden’s killing, following a third visit to the Middle East and two to the United States, I wrote a 30,000-word internal report summarizing our findings. I contended that the killers were most likely the Egyptians themselves, on the grounds that they – in the shape of their notorious secret service, the Mukhabarat – were by far the best-placed to conduct such a complex operation. As for the motive, I discarded our previous theories and argued that Mr. Holden must have been involved with “one or more” intelligence bodies; in short, he was a spy. The “or more” could have been the decisive element, if Mr. Holden was thought by one set of spooks to have betrayed them to another. The price of treason, I concluded, was death.
My report was intended in the first instance for Harold Evans’s eyes only. But speculative as it was, nothing from it could be published, as The Sunday Times had been closed in a battle with the all-powerful British print unions over the introduction of new printing technology. The newspaper eventually reappeared, but in 1981 it was sold to Rupert Murdoch and Mr. Evans departed – as did I, to pursue a freelance career. But I retained my interest in the Holden case, staying in touch with a secret U.S. State Department source. The case preyed on Harold Evans too, and when I last met him in 2020 – by then he was Sir Harold – he told me that the newspaper’s failure to crack the case was the biggest regret of his career.
Sir Harold died in September that year. The next day I received a phone call from Emanuele Midolo. An Italian working in Britain, and known as Manu, he had attended an investigative journalism course of mine in which I described the Holden case as the one that got away. I remembered him as talented and dedicated so when he proposed that we try to see the story through together, I agreed. As well as my own investment in the case, we would be making good Sir Harold’s desire to solve the mystery.
I felt that we formed a complementary partnership. Approaching 80, I was the old-school reporter, accustomed to pavement pounding and door-knocking, from a time without computers, mobile phones or the internet. Manu, in his 30s, was the new-age Sunday Times reporter adept at the skills of the digital era. He scoured my old internal report for leads that would previously have been out of reach. We located a precious few survivors from Mr. Holden’s era to see what they could tell us, despite their advanced age and fading memories. Over the next four years, we assembled a case that addressed the questions I had posed in my 1978 report.
One finding which endorsed my feelings was that no one really seemed to know Mr. Holden. A BBC producer called him “a charming enigma.” We supposed that Jan Morris, who had known him since the 1950s, would have some clues but even she called him “opaque and elusive.” We learned more about his early career as an actor, which seemed suited to someone living out concealment and deceit.
A new discovery concerned the milieu in which Mr. Holden became a reporter, where there was a frequent crossover between the worlds of journalism and espionage. I had glimpsed this before but was taken aback when I learned its full extent. The foreign editor of The Sunday Times until 1960 was none other than Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and a Second World War intelligence chief who enlisted many of his wartime colleagues to work on the newspaper while doubling as spies. One spectacular example was John Slade-Baker, who in the 1950s was posted to Cairo where he simultaneously trained as journalist and MI6 agent. In 1956, as the Suez Canal crisis deepened, Slade-Baker even acted as a diplomatic go-between, relaying messages from Nasser to the British government and vice versa. Another was Tony Terry, who worked on the initial inquiries into Mr. Holden’s death in 1977. A third was Donald McCormick, who became a foreign desk manager and was there in 1977 and 1978.
Much later we came to suspect that Mr. McCormick was the telex thief. We learned that a telex operator had described Mr. McCormick coming into the wire room around the time Mr. Holden was killed and asking for copies of all incoming telexes relating to the Holden inquiry. The operator knew that Mr. McCormick was one of Fleming’s intelligence recruits, and what he said led us to suppose that MI6 had wanted to track Mr. Holden’s movements, and ours, for reasons that remained unclear.
As foreign editor, Fleming had clearly felt no embarrassment about these dual roles, which raised questions about Mr. Holden’s swift rise at The Times. For instance, he had been posted to Washington within three months of being taken on as a trainee in 1954. The man who hired him had also hired the notorious British double agent Kim Philby at the Economist when MI6 was looking for somewhere to put him out to pasture.
All of this, coupled with the apparent attempt to recruit Mr. Holden at Cambridge, led us to consider that he had been working for British intelligence. That was strengthened by Mr. Holden’s gift for being in the right place at the right time. Time and again he arrived at the location of impending crises or coups, from Suez in 1956 to the Greek colonels’ coup in 1967. Was that sheer journalistic acumen? Or was Mr. Holden receiving tipoffs from people who wanted their man in place?
Those questions became more pertinent when we learned of Mr. Holden’s further ability to leave at the right time, too. One example was related by the renowned photographer Sir Don McCullin, who was with Mr. Holden in Kampala, capital of Uganda, in September, 1972, when armed insurgents, supported by neighbouring Tanzania, mounted a coup against the notorious dictator Idi Amin. “On the Sunday night he fled,” Sir Don told us. “Everybody thought it was very weird. He went unannounced: gone.” That same night the photographer was thrown into Makindye military prison – “a notorious killing spot and with terrible hygiene. We had a harrowing time. We could have died.”
More than 50 years on, Sir Don remained aggrieved that Mr. Holden did not tip off his colleagues that it was time to leave. “A Tanzanian border guard was captured and brought to that prison. They beat him to death right in our cell, in front of us. It was the most dangerous moment of my life. I suppose I have to thank David Holden for that.”
Mr. Holden was also in Chile shortly before the coup that deposed President Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the CIA-favoured candidate Augusto Pinochet – this time leaving 24 hours before Allende died. That suggested that Mr. Holden had links with the CIA, strengthened by his astonishing attacks on leaders who were CIA enemies and targets. Abandoning his customary wry objectivity, Mr. Holden savaged both Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Chile’s Allende in articles for a periodical, Encounter, that proved to have been funded by the CIA.
We discovered that the CIA had taken a close interest in Mr. Holden’s movements during his last trip, using proxies to inquire about his travel plans. And from my covert State Department source I learned that the CIA had a secret station in East Jerusalem. It was near the Tower of David, also known as the citadel, which was depicted in the postcard Mr. Holden sent to Jan Morris, with his note that citadels still had their uses.
We eventually concluded that MI6’s probable interest in Mr. Holden had come to nothing; a relationship with the CIA was far more likely. None of this was necessarily enough to get Mr. Holden killed. But then came a new item to add to the mix: the KGB. In 1978 we had been keenly interested in Mr. Holden’s relationship with the academic Leo Silberman, who had falsely claimed to be an Oxford professor. Our further research showed us the extent of Mr. Silberman’s radical background – attending May Day demonstrations in London, working with the British Labour movement – which he had attempted to conceal. We also learned that both the CIA and the FBI held files on Mr. Silberman, describing him variously as “a smooth operator” and “glib, slick … creates impressions that are not true.” One document, heavily redacted, appeared to indicate that he was connected to the Soviet secret service, the KGB.
Then came Manu’s dramatic discovery of letters in Paris archives where Mr. Silberman described how during the 1930s he had recruited young people to the Soviet cause, using a mix of politics and sex. He also laid out his plans to infiltrate the British Labour Party. His motivation, he explained, was “the awareness and belief of the strength of our class, the greatness of our comrades and the thought of the army of revolutionaries in all our countries.”
We were now certain that Mr. Silberman was working for the KGB and had enlisted Mr. Holden in the early 1950s too.
We also learned of an apparent confession Mr. Holden had made in the 1970s to a Middle East academic, Fred Halliday, telling him candidly that he was working for the KGB. We could not understand why Mr. Holden would break his cover in such a way but it was another compelling piece in the mosaic we were assembling. Our belief that Mr. Holden had been working for the KGB was strengthened when we considered both who had conducted the killing – and its timing.
We had new evidence to confirm my previous speculation that the Egyptians had killed Mr. Holden: On two occasions a prominent Egyptian figure had said as much. He was Mohamed Heikal, a former minister and newspaper editor who had been close to both the Nasser and Sadat regimes, although he was later jailed by Mr. Sadat. In the 1990s, when asked by the British journalist Michael Adams who had killed Mr. Holden, he replied “We did.” He said the same to a U.S. reporter, adding: “I liked David very much, but he was much more than a journalist.”
So why would the Egyptians do this? The answer lay in the historic geopolitical shifts in the Middle East. Throughout the 1960s Egypt had been solidly in the Soviet camp. In the 1970s U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made it his mission to induce Egypt to switch sides, succeeding with a mix of power politics and bribes. The U.S. reopened its Cairo embassy in February, 1974, together with a new CIA station. As the respective intelligence heads struck up a close working relationship, the CIA provided Egypt with the latest intelligence and security technology.
My State Department source had told me that Egypt provided the CIA with the names of all known KGB agents, who were now nakedly exposed. The CIA already had suspicions about Mr. Holden, but the fact that he was also on its own books, effectively making him a double agent, meant that his fate was sealed. What exactly passed between the CIA and Egyptians remains uncertain. The Egyptians may have taken out Mr. Holden as favour to the CIA; or they did so on their own account, as an element in their cleansing of the past.
At the time of our original inquiry we knew very little of this, least of all about the CIA, and the political focus of our inquiries was on the peace moves between Egypt and Israel. Now, the timing of the CBC’s David Halton’s narrow escape became decisive. Mr. Holden’s last previous visit to Egypt was in 1972. The CIA were back in Cairo by spring 1974. Mr. Halton made his near-miss visit just a few months later. To the Egyptians, it must have appeared that Mr. Holden had arrived at a remarkably opportune moment. After learning of their mistake, they waited until he next appeared in their sights, in December, 1977.
I had first learned about Mr. Halton’s 1974 visit during our initial investigation. When we reached him at his home in Ottawa in 2022, our questions were far better informed. Mr. Halton reflected again on his narrow escape. “I’ve covered a lot of wars, as most foreign correspondents do,” he told us. Yet the near miss, on the road from Cairo airport to central Cairo, “was the most dangerous and most memorable moment in my career.”
[Open this photo in gallery:
Mr. Halton from his time as Senior Correspondent, Washington for CBC television. He retired in 2005.Supplied
Mr. Halton, while admitting that his memory for dates had become uncertain, had good reason to remember the assassination in December, 1977. He was in Israel in November when he heard that Mr. Sadat might be preparing to visit. He hurried to Cairo and secured an interview in which Mr. Sadat confirmed his plans. Sadly for Mr. Halton, he was unable to transmit his news and was scooped by another reporter. Mr. Halton was still in Cairo when he heard that Mr. Holden had been killed.
[Open this photo in gallery:
Mr. Holden on April 25, 1973.SUPPLIED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES
He did not know Mr. Holden personally, but was aware of his “giant reputation.” But by terrible mischance, a Canadian radio station made the confusion that had so nearly proved fatal before, reporting that the CBC’s David Halton had been “assassinated.”
Some of Mr. Halton’s relatives heard the report and called his wife to commiserate. Mr. Halton called her soon afterward, greeting her with the words: “Darling, it’s not me.” With some relish, he told us that he was able to use Mark Twain’s line about reports of his death being “greatly exaggerated.”
Talking to Mr. Halton, so celebrated in Canada, felt special. He was of my generation, like me born in Britain during the Second World War. He was enthralled by the Holden story and understood the hold our quest had exerted. It traversed a period, the Cold War, that we both knew and had come to seem a faraway country.
Now, as the political sands shift again, there are likely to be further casualties among those stranded by new allegiances. Mr. Halton was fascinated too by the wilderness of mirrors, as the intelligence world is referred to, where nothing is what it seems – and which now appears an apt metaphor for an era where truth is discarded in favour of belief. Mr. Halton had admired Mr. Holden for what he appeared to be, but then had to make a new evaluation on learning of his intelligence links.
I, too, had lost innocence during our search. But it felt a price worth paying, both to complete our quest, and to fulfill one of the last wishes of the greatest newspaper editor, Sir Harold Evans.
Editor’s note: (March 17, 2025): A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Menachem Begin as Israel's president in 1977. He was prime minister. This version has been updated.
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