This is the complete story of what exactly happened on 26 November 2008 when a bunch of terrorists attacked Mumbai. Commissioned by Channel 4, UK, award-winning filmmaker Dan Reed gets access to some highly classified never-seen-or-heard-before material. Terror in Mumbai tells the story of what happened when 10 Muslim gunmen held one of the world’s busiest cities hostage; killing and wounding hundreds of people while holding India’s crack security forces a More..t bay. MOB held Dan Reed hostage who revealed how he managed to make a definitive documentary about a tragic event that was made a complete mess by over-zealous Indian media and a clueless establishment. Read the transcript and be part of the big discussion hosted by CMYK bookstore in Delhi on 25 November 2009 (details below).
MOB: How did you bag this assignment to do a documentary on 26/11? Were you a frequent traveller to Mumbai? When you came to India after the attacks to document them, did you see any change in people’s psyche?
DAN: This was my first time in India. I had always been wary of that backpacking, gap-year India experience that so many of my school and university friends had done – they always said the same things when they returned, and in fact I don’t really like being a tourist anywhere, so I never went. But I liked the idea of modern India – Mumbai in particular – because it had this image of a modern, frontier city, with a new urban identity all of its own. An ancient country with its vast depth of ingrained culture taking elements of the modern world and making out of them a new, original and uniquely Indian reality – that was worth a trip! And now, a couple of weeks after 26/11, I was in London editing a two-hour crime drama for the BBC when the phone rang and it was Eamonn Matthews – a highly-respected executive producer who had an excellent relationship with Channel 4 – and had persuaded them that they needed a documentary on 26/11.
Eamonn phoned me because he had seen Terror in Moscow – an award-winning documentary I had made in 2003 for Channel 4 and HBO on the 58-hour siege of a Moscow theatre. The entire audience, including many families with children, the orchestra and the cast, were taken hostage by a gang of Chechen rebels, amongst whom were a number of “black widows” – veiled women wearing suicide bomb-belts. Russian special forces flooded the auditorium with sleeping gas and managed to kill all the terrorists, but (and this is typical of Russia) nobody had thought to organise medical help for the hostages. Severely weakened by the long siege and the effects of the secret gas, many of them swallowed their tongues or choked to death on their own vomit as they were being carried out of the theatre, or dumped – literally – on the floors of city buses. What was unusual and striking about Terror in Moscow was that I had obtained a video tape recorded by the gunmen themselves inside the theatre, showing the terrorists joking and chatting cheerfully, the silent veiled “black widows” sitting grimly amongst the hostages, some of whom stood in a long queue to relieve themselves in the orchestra pit, which was ankle-deep in excrement and urine. The tape had been recovered by the Russian secret services and happily found its way into my hands. I also obtained haunting, clandestine camera footage of the Russian assault on the building and of the hostages being brought out, laid carelessly on their backs, dozens and dozens of them dying needlessly right there on the steps of the theatre. This was defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, happening on camera in front of our very eyes. More than 140 hostages died in the Moscow siege.
As the producer and director of Terror in Moscow I guess Eamonn considered me a good candidate for Terror in Mumbai and I said yes, based on a gut feeling and very little else, which may sound odd but it’s the truth. I knew only one person in India, an old college medic friend of mine working in Dharavi. Not a single element of the film was in place – no footage, no contacts, nothing. I knew from hearsay that India would be a complex and difficult place to work – even tougher than Russia. I also knew that the very things which make a country tricky and frustrating to work in often present hidden opportunities – and so it turned out in India, and even more so than I thought possible!!____________________MOB: Where were you during the attacks and how closely were you following it? Were you following the Indian media reports? What did you make of it?
DAN: I was putting in long hours with my editor finishing off a two-hour episode of the police drama Waking the Dead for the BBC. I kept an eye on the TV coverage of 26/11 but it seemed very fragmented and made little sense journalistically. There was quite evidently a lot more to the story than was being related on the international media channels, and even before anyone approached me to make this doco, there were a whole stack of unanswered questions in the back of my mind.____________________MOB: When you first landed here, did you have any leads to follow?
DAN: I’ll never forget my first taxi-ride in Mumbai! My college friend who lives in Bandra and does pioneering work reducing infant mortality in the Dharavi and Santa Cruz slums told me I could save money by getting a prepaid taxi from the airport instead of having a car and driver meet me (documentary budgets are always tight). Suddenly I was hurtling through the traffic in a go-cart driven by a gesticulating manic on some kind of speed-drug. Being fairly tall, I couldn’t sit up straight on the back seat so I was half-lying with my head half out of the window, breathing the dust and choking fumes and watching the city go by in a motion-blur while the driver hurled himself into the tiniest gaps in the traffic as though his life depended on it, and I was loving every second. That was how I fell in headlong love with Mumbai.
By the time I arrived in Mumbai, I had worked up a list of contacts by the simple expedient of reading all the articles I could find on the web, then calling up the journalists who’d written the interesting ones and trying to persuade them to take time out of their busy lives to have a coffee with me.____________________MOB:While documenting, were there any ethical questions that bothered you? Was censorship something you were concerned about? That’s something that bothers every Indian.
DAN: The main ethical question for me was: how can I dodge all the lies and the lazy half-truths of this important story, and show something true and valuable to my audience, take them on a compelling, scrupulously-researched journey into the new reality which dawned on 26/11? Much of what was written or broadcast about 26/11 was just plain wrong, inaccurate or fanciful. Even to find a starting point for my research was proving difficult. Every individual – even senior police officers – had a partial, fragmented view of what had happened during the attack. I was working in 6 languages, only one of which I understood (though I’d picked up a few Hindi expletives from Vikram Chandra’s excellent Sacred Games!). I was very worried about falling very short of my own ambitions for the story, and having nothing to show for the months of research I was putting in.
I was also mindful of the dangers of obtaining the sensitive, forbidden material – the Kasab tape, the hotel CCTV footage and the terrorists audio intercepts – but the public interest argument for broadcasting them was overwhelming, and I felt passionately about that. I don’t think the government were particularly interested or aware of what I was up to, they certainly never interfered, and gave me the permits I needed without too much difficulty. Although the Mumbai police seemed anxious, legally speaking there was no risk at all that a UK broadcast could impact on the legal process of the Kasab trial in Mumbai and of course it hasn’t.____________________MOB: What were some of the greatest hurdles you faced during making the documentary?
DAN: Where do I start? The traffic, mainly! Working till 2am, then being woken up by the street bustle outside my hotel at 5am. There was this one particular squawky koel bird in the huge dusty tree just outside my window who would launch into a tirade every morning at dawn: ”Wake up! wake up!” he whooped. “You’re not getting anywhere! You’re screwed, dude! Haha! Haha!”
I was completely on my own in Mumbai, an occasional phone call being my only contact with the office in UK. What I was trying to achieve often seemed impossible, not just to me but to everyone I spoke to. The sheer number of obstacles, and the loneliness, soon began to wear me down. But as we got closer to filming, I got a massive amount of support from my Indian colleagues, a small team of world-class pros. My cameraman was the supremely talented Mrinal Desai, who as 2nd unit Director of Photography shot many of the striking images in Slumdog Millionaire. Mrinal somehow combines the most sensitive visual flair with a terrifying iron discipline, all wrapped up in a wonderfully warm, gentle, witty personality. My sound recordist, Anita Kushwaha, whose outward calm and efficiency disguised a burning passion for her art and for our project, the quality of her recordings easily outclassing most of the UK and American sound men I’ve worked with. The junior team member was researcher Nandan Kini, a raw 21-year-old student recommended to me by Sky News who’d used him for two days during the 26/11 crisis. Nandan suddenly found himself in at the deep end, struggling to keep pace with the demands of a manic, hard-driving, and very anxious boss who wouldn’t take no (or, in the Indian context, “maybe”) for an answer. Yet Nandan’s quiet persistence and eye for detail was key to locating and persuading many of the victims. Often he had little more than the vaguest “third hut on the left after the paan-seller” kind of address. Yet he found them all. So I was blessed with a brilliant, dedicated team, and when I found myself flagging or demoralized – there were some terribly low points, when I seemed to be getting nowhere slowly and at great expense – their spirit and their commitment to nailing the 26/11 story helped me to carry on. Six weeks into my Mumbai trip, I had to return home to be with my mother whilst she had a cancer operation. Then I came back out for another six weeks to complete the research and film all the interviews and the 35mm landscape footage – a luxury made possible only by Mrinal’s filmi contacts.
One particuarly galling obstacle was the reluctance of the wealthier victims – those trapped at the Taj and Oberoi – to come forward and tell their stories. There were a few brave exceptions, and I honour them for their contribution. But the majority of South-Mumbai-ites we approached – in stark contrast to the victims from the humbler regions of the city – seemed to see no point in bearing witness, no direct benefit to them in testifying to the world about the truth of what happened on 26/11. A number of these refuseniks have since been in touch, by the way, and expressed their regret at not having taken part. Maybe the Indian media is partly to blame – many South Mumbaikars viewed the media as dishonest and sensationalist, and contributing to it as an act of shameful self-publicising.
The railway-station victims, on the other hand, were much more open and hospitable, and understood the historic importance of giving their story in detail and as truthfully as possible. They were incredibly patient and kind, even after two hours sealed up with me and my crew in a tiny hut with the doors shut and the fans off (for better sound recording) in the heat of a Mumbai night, probing the most painful events of their lives, second by second, minute by minute. Their voices and the looks in their eyes at certain moments will stay with me for ever.____________________MOB: You managed access to some highly classified data that no one in India had access to. How come no Indian media got their hands on it?
DAN: Over the years I have found that being an outsider confers a strange advantage when approaching a seemingly impenetrable story. The first documentary I directed, in 1992, was about a notorious criminal gang in a South African township. I was a young white boy nosing around alone in an area where white people literally never set foot without the backing of a small army of policemen. Eventually, through steps and intermediaries, I found the bad guys, explained myself to them and soon got to know them very well, becoming a sort of persona grata amongst them. I spent a year filming everything they did – arms deals, drug deals, paying off policemen and prison officers, kangaroo courts and hostage-taking, the shocking, stark reality of their lives as outlaws. No one in South Africa had ever got this kind of access for a camera crew. The key was just persistence, an open mind, making friends with the right people, and above all believing (cheesy though it sounds) that you can do it – because as we all know if you believe it strongly enough, others will too. I certainly don’t think the Indian media was incompetent, but very, very few journalists I met had the rigorous high standards, the passion and the persistence necessary to do first-class work. I believe this situation has arisen because many newspapers and TV stations in India simply do not prioritise factual reporting and rigorous research. “Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?” is an attitude by no means confined to the Indian media, but it is certainly prevalent there. The majority of the 26/11 stories I checked out in the Indian press contained major inaccuracies or errors. But then there were a few journalists whose work was nothing short of brilliant and who helped me a great deal. Hussain Zaidi, the brilliant and fearless Asian Age bureau chief in Mumbai (and author of the outstanding Black Friday book), became a close associate of mine on this project and his shrewd assistance, inside knowledge and encouragement were vital to its success.
____________________MOB: Your documentary makes it clear that the terrorist handlers managed the entire situation from Pakistan while watching live TV reportage. Do you think media was partly to be blamed with the way the reportage was handled?
DAN: The terrorists’s handlers were able to watch real-time TV coverage of the commando assault from the comfort and safety of their office in Pakistan, and they were able to combine this information with the reconnaissance video and photo material they had, plus no doubt a street-map of Mumbai, to give the gunmen holed up inside Nariman House, the Taj and the Oberoi hotels a detailed operational picture. I don’t know how useful this actually was – there were an awful lot of muddled instructions. But clearly you can’t give the terrorists the gift of their own “eye in the sky” so TV coverage should quite legitimately be blacked-out during certain phases of the operation. This doesn’t mean stopping cameramen from filming (in a city like Mumbai or Moscow, they’ll always find a way round) but it does mean a ban on broadcasting the footage until after the crisis is over. That has got to be the right thing to do, to save lives – but it has to be regulated by an independent judge and mustn’t become an excuse for censorship.____________________MOB: Documentaries are almost extinct in India with no dedicated channels or screenings available to the general public. How do people like you get around that?
DAN: The extinction of documentary is also welladvanced in the UK, there’s simply no money around to finance the kind of high-risk, long-term projects that produce the best documentaries. Without HBO’s financial backing, we would never have been able to stay in India for as long as we needed, or achieve what we did. And even with their backing, it was a close call. It takes years, perhaps a decade, to develop the skill-base and the audience for documentaries – but the ability of a documentary maker to stay with a story for months rather than hours (as is the case all too often with news) is the key to a functioning democratic media. Without documentary, everything is news – and news just can’t provide the background and the context, or throw enough resources at a story to illuminate its hidden depths. I think my film is proof of that. Sadly, it looks as though TiMu (as we call it for short) will never be broadcast in India, because none of the channels are able to fork out the $50,000 or so to clear the embedded material and cover the routine errors-and-omissions insurance. All very dull, but a sad fact nonetheless, and the sales company is unable simply to subsidise such a major shortfall. Actually I’m hoping one of your wealthier readers will come up with the money and get “Terror in Mumbai” onto an Indian network and release it on DVD. It’s really tragic that it can’t be shown in the country where it was made and where so many people want to see it.
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MOB: You’ve also made a movie called Straightheads starring Gillian Anderson who plays a revenge seeking rape victim. What was that like?
DAN: Gillian was a total pro, as you might expect from someone who’d put in gruelling 6-day weeks on X-Files for nearly a decade. She’s also an intense, complex and fascinating woman, whose personality was strangely suited to the part I had written for her. The result is one of Gillian’s best performances of all time, maybe even the very best. Straightheads was my first piece of drama and there were many things I could have done better. I was somewhat overwhelmed, both as writer and director, by the sheer number and weight of producers, executive producers, script doctors and seemingly endless notes and re-drafts of the script, diluting its substance further and further. Inch by inch I Iost creative control of the project and Straightheads turned into something rather different than what I had envisaged when I wrote it – less complex, less lyrical, and as a consequence of that the extreme violence seems starker, less motivated. But Gillian and I have stayed good friends, and sooner or later we’ll make another movie together. Maybe in India! I’d love to come back and direct one in Mumbai.
____________________MOB: What kind of reactions have you been getting for the documentary? What’s the most common feedback?
DAN: The feedback from the UK media has been terrific. The word of mouth too has been overwhelmingly in praise of the film. The most striking thing for most viewers seems to be the way the audio intercepts reveal the vulnerability of the gunmen – their awe and astonishment at the luxury of the Taj as they prowl its corridors, for instance. There is also sheer astonishment the sheer casual cruelty of these haunting conversations between the young gunmen and their “uncles”.
The people at HBO, who are broadcasting it in the USA are expecting it to be very well received by the press, but of course we won’t know for sure until the previews come out. TiMu will be going out on HBO on November 19th at 8pm – tell your NRI friends! There’s a premiere screening in New York next week, hosted by the US Council on Foreign Relations,a prestigious independent foreign-policy body. Dr Henry Kissinger will be leading the discussion on stage after the screening – I wonder what that wily old fox will have to say.
I’m thrilled that Terror in Mumbai is being taken seriously by policy-makers, especially in the USA, where key decisions are currently being taken on the crisis which faces Pakistan. I feel I’ve had a the rare priviliege of being in the right place at the right time, with the right plan. That doesn’t happen very often…________________________________________________________________________________________CMYK invites you to be part of a discussion between former NSG Director General JK Dutt, who headed on-site operations in Mumbai during the attack, and Harinder Baweja, Editor, Investigations, Tehelka, and editor of the book 26/11 Mumbai Attacked.Where? CMYK Bookstore, 15-16 Mehar Chand market, Lodhi Road, New Delhi-3When? Wednesday, 25 November 2009, 5.30pmWhat? Free wine! RSVP: Pia Srinivasan 011-24641881This documentary is not hosted on MOB servers and is merely a link to another site. MOB is not liable for any copyright/broadcast rights infringement.
Tags: attacks Dan Reed first person account inside the Taj Kasab mumbai Mumbai 26/11 must-see short film Taj terror terror attacks terror in mumbai
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