It’s Our Turn to Eat

2 An Unexpected Guest

‘If you're walking in the savannah and a lion attacks, climb a thorn tree and wait there for a while.’

Kamba proverb

He came bearing toxic material. A nervous tremor scurried along my spine as he explained that he had done the unthinkable, wiring himself for sound in classic police informer style, taping the self-incriminating conversations of the ministers who were supposed to be his trusted workmates. The explosive contents of those recordings had been systematically downloaded onto his computer, which now sat quietly in my spare bedroom. ‘It might be an idea,’ he said, ‘for me to find a third party to take the computer while I work out what I'm going to do.’

Suddenly, I was plunged into an unfamiliar world – of covering my tracks, watching what I said. In this world of subterfuge, even the simplest procedure grew vastly complex. Sitting at my computer, John wasted no time in typing out his resignation letter. He drafted it slowly and carefully. While he did not want to give anything away that might constrain his actions later on, he was also determined to make it clear to the careful reader – and he knew State House, the intelligence services and the media would be analysing every word – that he was not leaving happy in the knowledge of a job well done. There would be no ‘spending more time with my family’ clichés. The circumstances of his resignation alone, announced on a one-way trip into exile, must at this stage do the rest for him, sending a damning message about the true nature of the NARC regime.

He was in a hurry to cross that Rubicon; the letter needed to be faxed immediately to State House. But whose fax machine to use? If I used my own, his location would immediately be revealed. My parents' fax would be no better – given my family's unusual surname, it would immediately lead anyone with half a brain back to me. Nearby Camden Town was full of little newsagents willing to fax documents for customers. But in my experience, most were run by sulky Asian shopkeepers who had no truck with international calls. In any case, a Camden Town telephone number would once again point Kenyan investigators in my general direction. In the end, despairing of getting it right, I walked into an independent bookshop I regularly patronised and asked the owner – a laid-back, gently humorous man who had done me many favours over the years in return for my loyal custom – to fax the letter, hoping he wouldn't notice its recipient (‘President's Office, State House, Nairobi’) as it passed through his hands. He was a Jewish émigré's son. His father had fled the Nazis and saved himself from the concentration camps; I told myself he should understand about life lived under the radar.

The resignation was splashed across the front pages of Kenya's newspapers in three-inch capitals the next day, the only topic of conversation on the FM radio stations, morning chat shows and Kenyan websites. ‘STATE HOUSE SHOULD BE CONDEMNED NOW! PARLIAMENT SHOULD BE CLOSED! TAXPAYERS, STOP PAYING YOUR TAXES, IMMEDIATELY!’ ran one typical blogger's entry. The one that followed quietly summarised the national feeling: ‘Shit.’ Even the international media ran hard with the story, realising this was an event likely to damage relations between the Kenyan government and its new-found foreign friends. After only two years in his post, the living, breathing symbol of Kibaki's good intentions had thrown in the towel, the shining white knight had fallen off his horse. Who could remember a similar event in African, let alone Kenyan history? Permanent secretaries never surrendered their jobs, they were either ignominiously sacked or, if they were lucky, allowed to present token resignations. Had John resigned in Nairobi, it would already have been remarkable. The fact that he had chosen to do so from self-imposed exile – indicating he believed his life would be in danger if he stayed in Kenya – made it one of the hottest African stories of the year. In Britain's House of Commons, a Labour MP tabled a private member's motion expressing his ‘deep concern’, while the missions of the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Japan and Switzerland called in a joint statement for Kibaki to take swift action to restore his government's credibility.

In the days that followed, the Kenyan government mounted a quiet manhunt. As Special Branch descended on John's house in Nairobi – ‘It was just like the old days,’ a friend who lives in the same district later told me, ‘with police cars drawing up in the night, neighbours woken, dogs barking’ – staff at the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place scoured London. They checked the addresses of John's known friends, people he had grown up and gone to school with. Nothing. They canvassed the roads around Victoria Station, an area of cheap lodgings patronised by Africans who can't afford the top hotels. No luck. No one thought to check the home of Michela Wrong, former Africa correspondent of the Financial Times.

But the pitfalls inherent in a life of deceit were swiftly becoming obvious to me. I'd had colleagues who had crossed the invisible line of journalistic neutrality and become part of their own story, giving succour to African asylum-seekers, paying their legal fees, sneaking money and papers across borders. But it had never happened to me. And, it turned out, I wasn't much good at this stuff. David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, a veteran of subterfuge, later told me that a cover story only works if prepared ahead of time, its structure and corroborative detail laid down well in advance. But I had had no time to prepare my ‘legend’. I was reacting on the hoof, and within hours, not days, I was tripping myself up.

The main problem was that I didn't want to mention John's presence over the telephone. I had always vaguely assumed that, whatever the British authorities might say in public, any intelligence service worthy of its name routinely bugs its small resident community of journalists, particularly in the wake of 9/11. British intelligence, I knew, had an information-sharing arrangement with its Kenyan counterpart. If asked by Kenyan intelligence to help track down a missing anti-corruption chief in London, would the Brits refuse? I wasn't counting on it. So how to explain to the various girlfriends of mine who rang, expecting an intimate natter, that this wasn't a good time for our usual gossip, without explaining why? They immediately sensed the awkwardness in my voice, and the less I divulged, the more curious they became. ‘Do you have someone there? Why are you being so secretive? What's going on?’ If I'd been listening in on those conversations, my limp ‘I'll explain later’ would immediately have alerted me to the fact that something had changed in the Wrong household.

I found myself in a similar predicament when John asked if I could book lodgings for a Kenyan contact passing through London who he needed to meet. Suspicious of everyone in these tense, early days, he preferred his visitor not to know where he was staying, which raised the awkward question of how to pay for the room. If the guest were to ask at reception who was covering his bill, my credit card details would give the game away. If I went to the bed and breakfast in person and paid cash, I risked making myself memorable by that very act. I rang my brother-in-law – same family, different name – and asked if he would mind charging a room in north London to his card. ‘Er, I could, but why can't you just pay for it yourself?’ ‘I can't explain why now, but there's a good reason,’ I muttered. ‘Well, if you're not going to tell me, I don't want to be any part of this,’ he said, turning unexpectedly priggish. The exchange made me scratch tentative plans to hand John's ‘hot’ computer to my in-laws for safekeeping. It was surprising how little you could get done, once frankness was ruled out.

And then there was the outright lying. The Kenyan government wasn't the only organisation trying to track John down. Even Kenyan bloggers momentarily turned amateur sleuths, swapping notes on their websites as to which London hotels had confirmed he wasn't a guest. There were calls from the BBC World Service, emails from Kenyan journalists who had caught a whisper of something in the air; an ambassador left cryptic messages on my answerphone, sending his best wishes to ‘our mutual friend’. Did I happen to know, the journalists asked with deceptive casualness, where they might get hold of John Githongo? It really was most urgent that they talk to him. He might be in possession of some very interesting information. As John pottered around in the background, doing his laundry and preparing his lunch – no macho African nonsense about him – I'd breezily debate his possible whereabouts and motivations with hacks I'd known for decades, hoping he wouldn't blow his cover by saying anything in that distinctive baritone.

In theory, I should have been pestering him for an interview myself. In fact, I held back. While I was clearly sitting on a fabulous story – Africa's Watergate, by the sound of it – sitting John down with a notebook and tape recorder would have felt like a cheap trick, his host joining the manhunt rather than offering the safe haven he clearly desperately needed. Perhaps a less noble instinct also lay behind my uncharacteristic discretion. In the world John had entered, it seemed, knowledge made you a marked man. Once I too knew whatever it was he'd learnt, maybe I would face the same predicament. I wasn't sure I was ready to catch that particular infection. So I mentally stored the nuggets of information that came my way, while allowing the overall picture to escape me. He talked of ministers, he mentioned a naval vessel, the words ‘Anglo Leasing’ came up repeatedly. But he never joined up the dots. I wondered, once or twice, what I would actually be able to say to the police if something sinister happened to him. I'd have no coherent tale to tell, and they would surely refuse to believe that an intelligent journalist, harbouring a political fugitive, had never bothered to fit the various pieces together.

Out on the street, I scanned black faces with a paranoid new attentiveness, trying to spot the undercover Kenyan agent attempting to blend in. But Camden has an awful lot of Africans living in it. From my new and wary perspective, almost everyone looked suspicious. At night I lay in bed, pondering how far the Kenyans might go. I was aware that I was thinking exactly like a character in a thousand Hollywood thrillers, but this fear was surely rooted in cold logic. I ticked off the various factors on my personal risk assessment. Did the material on John's computer have the potential to bring down a government? From the little he'd sketched out, yes. Were the reputations and livelihoods of Kenya's most powerful men – possibly the president himself – at stake? It seemed so. Did Kenya have a history of ruthless political assassination? Absolutely – I could reel off the names: Pio Pinto, Tom Mboya, J.M. Kariuki, Robert Ouko, Father Kaiser – and those were only the most notorious cases. Kenya had always been a venue for the well-timed car crash, the fatal robbery in which both gangster and high-profile victim conveniently lose their lives, the inquiry that drags on for decades and then sputters out without shedding any light on what had really happened.

Were the stakes this time high enough to be worth killing a man? Clearly, John believed so, otherwise he wouldn't have fled. So the only question that remained, from a selfish point of view, was whether the Kenyans would be foolhardy or desperate enough to try something on British soil. Which meant my flat. After triple-bolting my front door – I was glad now that I'd bought the most expensive lock on the market when I moved in – and slotting the chain into position, I'd fall asleep in the early hours, stressed and fraught. In my dreams, a huddle of burly figures in formless grey overcoats with blurred, dark, hatchet faces, battered their way in to shoot us both in our separate rooms.

In the morning, after a restless night, I'd wake feeling embarrassed by my melodramatic thought processes. If I was finding John's stay a bit of a psychological ordeal after only a few days, what must it be like for him? How had he endured the last few years, living with that anxiety day by day? Yet he seemed astonishingly cool. For the most part he ignored his collection of mobile phones as they constantly vibrated and shrilled. Occasionally he'd pick one up, disappearing into his room to hold a quiet, intense conversation in Gikuyu or Kiswahili. But usually he would just look at the display, check who was trying to make contact, then put the handset down. The one that rang with most persistence was his line to State House.

‘It's very interesting,’ he mused. ‘They haven't cut off my State House mobile phone. My safe in the office hasn't even been opened. And my secretary is still at her post.’

‘It's their way of telling you that you can still go back,’ I suggested. ‘They're saying,“It's not too late, the lines are still open.”’

Yet even by that stage, I had begun to recognise what constituted signs of stress in the Big Man. His booming, seemingly carefree laugh was the equivalent of most people's titter – a sign of tension, not relaxation. The more nervous he became, the more heartily he laughed. He wasn't sleeping well either – I gave him some of my sleeping pills when he mentioned the problem – and his mental fatigue was evident in his tendency to tell me the same things over and over again. His sentences were like ripples on the surface of a pool – they gave a hint of the thoughts churning obsessively in the depths below. I could guess what those might be: How on earth had it ever come to this? Was this the right path? Where did he go from here?

The best way of relieving the stress was exercise. John was the kind of dedicated workout enthusiast who knew which machine targeted exactly which muscle group. One of the first sorties we made from my flat was to tour the local area scouting out which gym had the best weight-training facilities. Working out – a three-hour process – was not just a hobby, he needed it, needed to feel the adrenalin coursing round his body if he was to stay focused and sane. Other men might have started working their way through my drinks cabinet, but my fridge filled up with cartons of fruit juice. John, iron-disciplined in this as in so many things, had turned teetotal during his time in State House, when he had noticed that winding down from a stressful week with a bottle of whisky had become a habit, and that the habit was becoming increasingly hard to break. It was typical of him that he wouldn't let himself slip back, not even now, when he had the best of excuses for needing the odd stiff drink.

His other recourse was religion. Having spent so much time in Britain, John had registered the scepticism, if not downright antagonism, of his European acquaintances when it came to matters religious. His Catholic faith was something he never talked about with his mzungu friends, I noticed, turning instead that side of himself with which they felt most at ease. Only the Virgin Mary medallion around his neck and the rosary ring on his finger – one metal bobble for each Hail Mary to be recited, removed only during weightlifting – gave the game away. But one of his last visits before leaving Nairobi had been to call in on the Consolata Shrine, where troubled minds went in search of solace. And in those fraught early weeks in London he did a lot of praying.

As he quietly came and went, reuniting with girlfriend Mary Muthumbi – an advertising executive who flew to London to see him – officially registering his presence with a Foreign Office that expressed only polite interest, a silent question mark was forming. Fleeing the country, in a way, had been the easy part. What, precisely, was he going to do next?

As far as I could see, there were only two options. Option One: Leave government employment and keep quiet. Give the tapes and computer material – your insurance policy against assassination – to a British lawyer, along with firm instructions that should anything happen to you, they will be released to the press. Make these arrangements clear to those in power, and assure them you will never give another media interview in your life and will never go into politics. Work abroad, go into academia, get married to your long-suffering girlfriend and wait for the affair to die down. Eventually, maybe five years down the line, you will be able to return to Kenya, and while ordinary folk will look at you with a certain cynicism and think, ‘I wonder what he knew?’, most will respect your discretion and commonsense. No man can single-handedly transform a system, and you will be joining the ranks of former civil servants with clanking skeletons in their cupboards. Your conscience may occasionally trouble you, and you will have to acknowledge that you tried and failed. But you will have got your life back.

Option Two was bleaker, more dramatic, and fitted straight into that Hollywood thriller genre. Lance the boil, go public. Blow the government you once passionately believed in out of the water and say what you know. People who matter may hate you for all eternity. You may never be able to go home again, your family and friends may suffer by association, your colleagues may regard you as a traitor, but you will have done the right, the upstanding thing, and lived up to the principles that have governed your life. You will have shown the world that others may do as they please, but as far as you are concerned, ‘Africa’ and ‘corruption’ are not synonymous.

Most journalists, I suspected, would urge John to choose Option Two – it made for a fantastic story. I urged him to choose Option One. Those journalists would not have to live with the consequences. My old friend, it seemed to me, had already done his share, and his country's fate was not his burden to shoulder alone.

Initially, he'd planned a press conference. The speculation and allegations being published in the Kenyan press irked him, he said, and he felt he owed the Kenyan public an explanation. I quailed at the thought of the bun-fight that would follow.

‘If you're going to hold a press conference, you have to be absolutely clear in your mind what you're prepared to say. Are you going to spill the beans now? Are you ready to explain what actually happened?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Then don't do it. The most infuriating thing you can do to journalists is to hold a press conference and say nothing. It'll drive them crazy. They'll either force you into making admissions you don't intend or rip you to shreds for wasting their time.’

Another idea he considered, urged on him by the few friends in London who were gradually discovering his whereabouts, was to record an ‘in the event of my death’ videotape in which he named names and explained his departure. If he were killed, it would remain as devastating testimony. He toyed with the idea, but held off once again. Perhaps he was wary of creating such an incendiary tape – who could be trusted to keep such red-hot footage under wraps? But it was also a question of strategy. John's modus operandi, perfected over the years, was to painstakingly think through every eventuality, harvesting the insights of well connected insiders, visualising every possible scenario before moving to action. ‘I try and dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s. I do this excessively, it's been my style throughout. And then, when I move – BOOM!’ The approach slowed him down, but he needed to feel he had set his intellectual house in order. If he taped an interview so early on, he'd be skipping the methodical preparation of the ground that felt like a necessity.

A fortnight later, with the key questions unanswered, John moved out. He headed first to the home of Michael Holman, another British journalist whose friendship with him was as little known as my own, and then to a scruffy flat next to a north London fish-and-chip shop.

I didn't like to admit it, but his departure came as both anticlimax and relief. There was no denying that my brush with a man at the vortex of a major political crisis had provided me with a vicarious thrill. But there had been a few close shaves, close enough to make me uncomfortable. My parents' flat happened to be situated around the corner from the Kenyan High Commission. Once I'd caught a bus that stopped just outside the building and two Kenyan women employees, leaving for the day, had boarded after me. To my alarm, they had ridden all the way to my bus stop. These women, who would certainly know John in his official capacity and recognise him if they bumped into him on the street, lived in my local area. Another time, John had been using a local cyber café and a Kenyan customer had suddenly started chatting to him in Kiswahili. It was not clear whether he'd been recognised, or this was just a case of one East African being friendly to a fellow abroad. Had I been working for Kenyan intelligence, I would have simply toured all the London gyms with good weightlifting facilities, asking if a large black Kenyan had recently signed up. But John warned me that his emailing would be the activity that would eventually lead his pursuers to him. By analysing the emails he sent back to Nairobi, he said, it would be possible to eventually work out the geographical location of the terminals he'd used. Sure enough, a Kenyan newspaper editor who liked to show off the extent of his intelligence links would later drawl when I walked into his Nairobi office, ‘So I hear John Githongo has been holed up with Michela Wrong and Michael Holman in London.’