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Sarah Palin: the ice queen

October 26, 2008
Investigation
 

She looked like an ordinary ‘hockey mom’ thrust into the national spotlight. But in her Alaskan homeland, there are people who know the ambition and ferocity of Sarah Palin. We learn about the woman who would be America’s vice-president

Small-town America does not come much more remote than Wasilla. Thousands of miles from Washington, DC, and close to the Arctic Circle, almost on the other side of the world, this is on one of the furthest-flung frontiers of the USA. Cabin and porch homes here ring icy lakes encircled by snow-capped peaks. By British standards, Wasilla – population 9,780 – would count as little more than a village. But here in Alaska it awards itself city status, and by the yardstick of this vast and sparsely populated state, it is. In most distant communities like this, ambitions tend to remain modest. But Sarah Palin always planned on being a winner, one of Wasilla’s big fish. It is unlikely she ever thought her journey would take her much beyond the state border. Yet in little more than 10 days from now, the self-styled “hockey mom” could find herself planning the decor of an office in the White House – a beat away from being the leader of the free world.

At the end of a garden path in Wasilla is a wilderness cabin home like many others here, with a set of antlers adorning the front porch or nailed to a tree painted with the name of the occupants. But like Palin, who spent part of her youth in this house, her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, have gone further than most Alaskans.

To the side of their path, by the front door, stands a mountain of moose and caribou antlers that towers above visitors’ heads, built from the bleached “racks” of countless “field-dressed” wildlife. It is a reminder that the Heaths are proud and enthusiastic hunters, and a clue to how high their daughter set her sights.

The day Senator John McCain hijacked the election agenda by announcing an unknown outsider as his running mate, television crews and journalists descended on Wasilla to find out who America might be about to elect as vice-president. But as the global financial crisis bit and the election merry-go-round moved on to other pressing concerns, so did much of the media circus, leaving behind a community that had hardly broken ranks. A few talked ad nauseam, either to criticise or to praise Palin. But the quiet ones who really knew her kept their counsel, out of either loyalty or fear that she would be back in Wasilla after the election, looking for payback. Then, after weeks of quiet, doors slowly began to open. People began to speak to me about the Sarah Palin they know well – or too well.

Quite extraordinarily, Chuck Heath and his wife, Sally, take me into their home, where few but the most favourably disposed local newspapermen have recently been welcome. Seeing me shudder slightly at the stack of antlers, and concerned perhaps that the excessive display may colour my judgment, Chuck explains that he and his family did not shoot “every” animal in the pile: “Some of ’em were killed by wolves.”

Alaska is not a place for the faint-hearted. This becomes clearer when I settle at the counter of the family’s open-plan kitchen, where Palin must have listened so intently to her father’s hunting and fishing stories after she had accompanied him on his forays into the wild. Chuck perches on a stool by my side, in a baggy hooded sweatshirt, while his wife, in a girlish pink gingham blouse, busies herself making chocolate puddings, and the couple reminisce about Palin’s childhood.

“It’s a different breed of person who ends up here in Alaska,” says Chuck, a retired science teacher and sports coach who brought his young family from Idaho to “the Last Frontier” state when Sarah, the third of four children, was two months old. “People here tend to be more adventurous.” He describes how he would regularly take his children ice-fishing and hiking in temperatures of -20C to -30C in winter, and how in the summer he would take them on long runs in the early morning. The whole family would often compete in 5- or 10-kilometre races. Sarah and her father ran marathons. “Sarah got a lot of stern discipline from me and a lot of love, devotion and faith from her mom. I wasn’t mean to her, but I’d push her a lot in sport and outdoor activities. I taught her to believe she could do anything in the world she wanted to do if she put her mind to it,” he says, slapping the counter top triumphantly.

“We didn’t expect it to go this far, that’s for sure,” his wife chimes in. There is a hint of surprise and bewilderment in her voice, as if she fears her daughter’s ambition has taken her to, or beyond, her limit – an impression strengthened when she admits to being “dumbfounded, absolutely floored” on hearing that her daughter was McCain’s surprise pick as running mate.

It is a testament to the secrecy and speed with which McCain broke with expectations to pick 44-year-old Palin for the Republican ticket that not even her parents were in the loop – as they surely would have been if the process of choosing had been anything more than a last-minute gamble to wrest the headlines away from his rival, Barack Obama.

Chuck simply laughs, shrugs his shoulders good-naturedly and continues telling stories about his daughter’s childhood. For Palin, school days often began with a moose hunt, long before the bell went for first lesson. Her father would take her along before school started, “for safety reasons, because I didn’t want to go alone”. While stuffed animal heads and skins, including those of several bears, line nearly every wall of the Heath household, he claims that for his family, as for most others in the area struggling financially at the time, the purpose of hunting was to put food on the table.

He tells a story about driving Palin to school one day when he was planning to teach a lesson on animal dissection. “I handed her a pair of moose eyes and told her to hold ’em real quick. She didn’t want to, but she did it,” he says, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “She wasn’t into the killing. But she’d always help me field-dress the moose. When you shoot a 1,200lb animal, one person can’t do that alone.” Chuck patiently explains that by “field-dressing” he means “gut ’n’ cut”. I must still be looking a little confused because he expands: “Y’know, throwing the legs around, pulling it apart, skinning it and cuttin’ it up into 100lb chunks.” He then pushes home the point that while his daughter would “carry a gun and shoot a few caribou, killing wasn’t her priority”.

Maybe not. But by the time she had become a high-school student, she had clearly developed a killer instinct that would become even more apparent when she entered politics aged only 28, first as city councillor, then as two-term mayor of Wasilla. While much of the media coverage has portrayed Palin as a maverick “softball” candidate lacking the experience to deal with high office, there are people here in her home town who know her well and suggest much more worrying traits than inexperience and unpredictability. There is a high body count of people who have dared to disagree with Sarah Palin, shown a reluctance to do her bidding or, in her eyes, failed to support her wholeheartedly – among them some who say they too have been hunted, carved up and cast aside along her path to power. These people warn, as do even her closest friends and family, that in Palin’s eyes there are no grey areas, no room for doubt. There is only right or wrong, black or white, “good or evil”. Her father Chuck’s word for it is “stubborn”. One of her friends calls her “dogged”. If Palin believes something to be true, it is – no amount of evidence to the contrary will sway her, and everybody else had better believe it too.

The possibility of a person with such firm and, as I discover, sometimes extreme convictions, coupled with a fighting righteousness, coming so close to ultimate power is sobering even for some hardy Alaskan souls. To understand why, you need to wait patiently for Palin’s Wasilla to welcome you into its world.

Talk to most Alaskans and the size of their state – more than twice that of Texas – will soon crop up in conversation. Many readily reel off statistics to awe “outsiders”, as all non-Alaskans are called. Alaska, the 49th state, joined the union just 50 years ago. Its citizens pride themselves on being independent and tough. Palin’s husband, Todd, for instance, was once an Independent Alaska activist wishing to cede from the US.

Living in such a hostile environment of ferociously low temperatures and little daylight in winter – with many communities, including the capital, Juneau, only accessible by sea or air – leads to a mentality summed up for me by the pastor at the Wasilla Bible Church that Palin regularly attends. He says living in Alaska at best forces one to embrace challenge and, at worst, “fosters arrogant self-reliance”.

These days, sprawling Wasilla is less than an hour’s drive north of Anchorage on a new highway. But when Palin grew up here it was, in the words of one of her childhood friends, “a rustic, backwoods kind of place” with little more than a petrol station, a dry-goods store and a huddle of log cabins at its core. So when Palin captained her high-school basketball team, the Wasilla Warriors, to victory in the 1982 junior state championship, seeing off teams from many larger metropolitan areas – even competing with a fractured ankle – it was cause for a big community celebration. The team came home to a heroes’ welcome. The event is central to Palin’s sense of self. It was perhaps the first time she tasted the limelight and the tingle of power that comes from being the centre of attention, the leader of the pack. These days she boasts on the campaign trail that everything she needs to know about leadership – and perhaps her need for the spotlight too – she learnt on that basketball court.

One man who has known Palin since she was eight and is still among her closest mentors is Curt Menard, currently borough mayor of the Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) valley in which Wasilla sits. The Menard and Palin/Heath families are firm friends, and I am greeted at Curt’s front door by the dog that he and his wife gave Palin as a puppy – since returned to them, on the grounds she now has no time to look after him. “Winning that basketball championship was huge,” says Menard, who broadcast live commentary for a local radio station that Wasilla residents called “cabin radio”. Competing teams from that time dubbed Palin “Sarah Barracuda” because of her talent for elbowing aside the opposition. The nickname stuck. “At the time, we thought it was a compliment,” says Michelle Carney, another member of the team. “It wasn’t until she started playing politics that people began using it as a negative.”

All the girls on the team went on to gain a college degree, says Carney. “That was very unusual for a small town in those days. All of us learnt to have very high expectations after that.” But while her team-mates went into fields such as teaching, accountancy and police work, Palin had her sights set on more public recognition. Her ambition was to become a sport commentator and television presenter. She had the looks. To help finance her way through college, she started entering beauty competitions in her early twenties, aiming for the Miss America title. In 1984 the Miss Wasilla sash was slipped over a red ballgown she made herself. Next came the Miss Alaska pageant. Since becoming vice-presidential candidate, she has played down this chapter of her life, saying she found parading before judges in a swimsuit degrading. “They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts – I couldn’t believe it,” she told Vogue magazine, for which she posed last year.

But another of her childhood friends, who followed the same tiara trail, talks enthusiastically about how entering beauty contests gave them confidence. “You learnt real stage presence,” says Kristan Cole, now an estate agent and one of a small group of women with whom Palin goes target-shooting in Wasilla. “None of us were thrilled about putting on a swimsuit. But you have to understand, if you didn’t have other talents, you weren’t going to get anywhere.”

While Cole did a turn as a jazz dancer, Palin played the flute. All the girls were also required to make a speech to the judges and answer questions that Cole describes as “pretty challenging. It wasn’t like, ‘Gee, what’s your favourite colour?’ I remember, for instance, being asked who Yasser Arafat was. They expected us to know what was going on in the world”.

Palin’s father says that his daughter was an avid reader of newspapers from childhood. Cole says her friend’s favourite books were Old Yeller and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When I mention that Palin’s negligible foreign experience – she applied for her first passport last year, once elected governor of Alaska, to visit members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait – is a concern of those who believe her underqualified for the job of vice-president, Cole bridles and says this is “laughable”. “Those competitions taught you how to handle yourself in international settings,” she says primly. “They taught you how to sit down to a formal state dinner. You know, you learnt proper protocol, like which fork to eat with.” Her reply echoes the beauty-pageant-like answer Palin gave one interviewer asking about her international expertise: she said it stemmed from the fact that Putin flew through Alaskan airspace, and that from some parts of Alaska you could see Russia in the distance. There is an edge of pride in Cole’s voice as she mentions that she won the title of Miss Alaska in 1982 – Palin was joint runner-up two years later. Cole says she thinks Palin tried for the title again the following year, before adding loyally that when she watched her friend compete in the competition the first time, “I remember thinking she was going to be really successful. She had such charisma. I am certain,” she concludes, “she will be president of the United States one day.”

When I ask Curt Menard where Palin’s drive comes from, his insight strengthens an impression I gained at the start of dozens of interviews. The first thing her father, Chuck Heath, asked me was: “So what are you famous for?” He repeated the question several times before rummaging through a drawer to show me snapshots of a recent canal-boat holiday that he and his wife took in Wales. It’s just a jocular refrain. But I wonder then if being born the third of four siblings played some part in Palin’s determination to stand out from the crowd. “When children are a way down in the pack, they often want to excel, show they can move forward and get into Dad’s favour – especially girls,” says Menard. “On reflection, I think there was some of that going on with Sarah.”

In the years following Palin’s beauty-queen quest, “she bounced around a bit”, as Menard puts it. She attended five universities in six years before completing a journalism degree at the University of Idaho in 1987. She then worked for several months in Anchorage as a sports commentator before eloping with her high-school sweetheart, Todd, and starting a family. Four children followed in quick succession.

A son was named Track because of Palin’s love of sport. Two daughters, Bristol and Willow, were named after local creeks where the family fish. A third daughter, Piper, is named after the floatplane parked where the family now live on the shores of Lake Lucille in Wasilla. The fifth child is a son born earlier this year with Down’s syndrome, called Trig, meaning “strength” in the Yu’pik Inuit language of Todd’s family.

In the midst of raising her children, Palin was approached in 1992 to stand for the Wasilla city council by businessmen looking for someone to represent “the younger crowd”. She took to politics like a swan princess. “She developed a taste for it pretty quick,” says Nick Carney, the council member who took her from door to door introducing her to voters. “She was very good at getting people to vote for her. She would tell them anything she thought they wanted to hear.” Laura Chase, who was Palin’s mayoral campaign manager four years later, expands “She has this way of talking to you that makes you think you are the only person on the planet. She’s like a chameleon. She knows what people want her to be.” Carney, who no longer lives in Wasilla, was one of the first to fall victim to what he, Chase and others see as a pattern of betrayal of those who helped her up the ladder. “As soon as you cross her, she is vicious and writes you off as the enemy. She can’t stand dissent. She believes she is right about everything,” says Carney, who crossed swords with her early on. Chase was another casualty, followed by a series of dismissals and resignations, including those of Wasilla’s police chief, public-works director, city planner, museum director and chief librarian.

“People accuse Sarah Palin of hanging onto the coat-tails of others to get where she wants. But that’s not true,” says Chase. “She doesn’t need to hang onto their coat-tails. She will have taken the coats off their backs and walked across their bodies to get where she’s going, and once she gets there she will surround herself with yes people. She doesn’t like to have people smarter than her around.” Such stinging criticism can’t be dismissed as small-town bitterness and envy. What they say is a recurring theme among those who have worked with her over the years.

On the campaign trail, Palin touts her achievements as mayor and chief executive of Wasilla as the seedbed of her political experience. While supporters cite new businesses, roads, a sewage system and a sports hall as her local legacy, critics say that she increased the city’s debt to $22m before she left office in 2002. The sports hall was built on land the city did not have clear title to, and has been the subject of litigation ever since. “Sarah is a results person, not a process person, and that sometimes upsets people,” says another long-term friend and the one-time deputy mayor, Judith Patrick. But it was during a short stint as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, after failing to secure a US Senate seat, that Palin really made her political mark. Noticing senior commission staff using office computers to do work for the Republican party, and granting favours to companies they were supposed to be regulating, she reported them for a violation of ethics. Her reputation as a whistleblower and political maverick willing to take on the party’s “good ol’ boys” was hatched. She then used this stab at the Establishment to campaign on a clean-government platform and become governor of Alaska in 2006.

Despite record popularity ratings, in part due to her decision to hand out bumper cheques to voters as a dividend from Alaskan oil profits, her administration was soon mired in controversy – not least because of her habit of firing those who crossed her or her family. The difficulty she has in separating the personal from the professional is highlighted by a recent investigation into allegations that she abused her office as governor to further a personal vendetta. The probe found she unlawfully pressured Alaska’s top public-safety official to sack a state trooper involved in a messy divorce with her younger sister, Molly. After refusing to bow to the pressure, the official was fired. The “Troopergate” inquiry also found that Todd Palin, Alaska’s self-styled “first dude”, involved himself in state politics to such an extent that he amounted to a “shadow governor”.

“Sarah believes she is above the law,” says the president of Alaska’s State Senate, Lyda Green, a lifelong Republican who was a friend of Palin until they fell out over the style in which Palin began to run the state. When legislators wanted to discuss state matters with the governor, the difficulty they had in tracking her down led some to wear “Sarah Is Missing” badges on their lapels.

“What is important for people to understand is that, once elected, Sarah Palin has little use for the legislature,” says Green. “If people don’t agree with her, she brands them as the enemy and does what she wants anyway. No one should underestimate her ambition.”

That this makes her a “maverick” of the sort that McCain likes to be seen as, Green and others doubt. As election day has drawn nearer, even McCain has shown signs of frustration with Palin. He has tried to distance himself from her tirades against Obama that have drawn cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” from the crowds. If McCain loses this election, he could find he is the latest in a long line of those “field-dressed” by Palin: she could use their joint run for the White House to launch her own bid for the presidency one day.

Much of what I hear about Palin, from people who have known her for years, makes more sense after I meet the man once called the “most hated liberal in the valley” by Wasilla’s newspaper The Frontiersman, after he wrote a book encouraging tolerance of homosexuality. Howard Bess is a Baptist minister who now lives in nearby Palmer. We meet in a busy diner on the road between Palmer and Wasilla, the part of the Mat-Su valley some call “Alaska’s Bible belt” because of its large number of evangelical churches. The grey-haired priest catalogues the battles he fought with Palin when she was mayor of Wasilla, not only on gay rights but on abortion – she opposes it even in cases of rape or incest – and on censorship. The row over whether Palin tried to ban a list of books from her library has surfaced repeatedly during her run for the vice-presidency. She argues that she was simply asking a hypothetical question when she inquired of the chief librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, what the procedure would be for removing “socially objectionable” books from the shelves. After Emmons stood her ground and said that such censorship would not be accepted, she was fired. She was later reinstated after a public outcry, but has since left Wasilla to work in a library several hundred miles away and, like other government employees I approach who fear that speaking out could cost them their jobs (a not-unreasonable concern given the governor’s track record), she refuses to talk about what happened.

But Howard Bess swears such a list did exist, and that his book was on it. “Sarah Palin entered politics in the middle of a fierce culture war here in the valley,” he says. At the heart of it was abortion – she is said to have picketed a hospital that carried out terminations. Gun control was an issue too: she campaigned for the right of gun-owners to carry concealed weapons. “Sarah Palin’s world is divided into the whitest of white and blackest of black. If she thinks she is right about something, she will wage all-out war, and her history shows she is always at war with someone,” says Bess. “Her mental structure is little different than that of an Islamic fundamentalist. The churches she attends are understood by some to have an apocalyptic view of the future, and believe she will be the leader of a new world order when Jesus returns.”

The Wasilla Assembly of God Pentecostal church, which Palin attended for nearly 20 years and where worshippers “speak in tongues” when overcome by the Holy Spirit, has become particularly sensitive to media scrutiny since the appearance of a three-year-old video showing Palin being blessed there against the evils of witchcraft. Its senior pastor, Ed Kalnins, tells me he has been instructed not to talk to the press until after the presidential election, and warns me not to talk to any members of the congregation about Palin. On my way out of the church, I notice a leaflet promising “Deliverance from PMS”, explaining how premenstrual problems are the work of Satan.

While happy to talk about the Alaskan psyche, pastor Larry Kroon of the Wasilla Bible Church, which Palin now attends with her family, also refused to discuss her beliefs. But some of them are a matter of record. She has campaigned for creationism to be taught alongside evolution in schools. She has also said she does not believe global warming is man-made or driven by pollution. She supports drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has sued the federal government to block a listing of polar bears as an endangered species. She also allows big-game hunters in Alaska to shoot wolves and bears from low-flying planes.

“Some people may try to demonise Sarah Palin, and that is unfair. She is a true believer.

She is on a mission,” Bess sums up in a more conciliatory tone. That, of course, is precisely why McCain picked her. As the influential conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has said, “Palin equals guns, babies, Jesus” – the holy trinity of the Republican Christian right.

From the moment Palin stepped onto the stage at the Republican convention in St Paul on September 3 and delivered her “pit bull in lipstick” speech, she electrified the presidential race. “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick!” she hollered in her folksy western twang – playing up an image of herself as a future “mother of the nation” prepared to fiercely defend her brood.When she lined up four of her children behind her on stage, including her unmarried 17-year-old daughter – whose pregnancy, along with Palin’s Down’s-syndrome son, she has used to trumpet her pro-life stance – questions were asked about how protective she is of her own. Despite claims that she consulted her family before accepting McCain’s offer of the vice-presidential nomination six days earlier, it later emerged that they were only told after the decision was made, and had little time to adjust to the prospect of being thrust into the limelight.

In the weeks that followed, Palin appeared to throw the Democrats severely off-kilter.

Obama made the blunder of picking up on her convention rallying cry by sniping: “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” His comment spawned a rash of demonstrations in which women sported pig masks painted with lipstick to show support for his opponent’s running mate. Polls swung towards McCain.

For a while there was a cross-party, quasi-feminist celebration of Palin. Commentators fell over themselves to hail her as a breath of fresh air. Then came the series of television interviews in which she floundered. It was in one of these that she said Putin flying through Alaskan airspace counted as foreign-policy experience. The fiasco led some respected right-wing commentators and staunch Republicans to demand that she step aside for the sake of the party. One said: “She makes George W Bush sound like Cicero.”

The gibberish she spoke in interviews became instant fodder for late-night comedy shows, including a brilliant and widely broadcast satire by Tina Fey – particularly alarming for the McCain camp, as it simply repeated verbatim one of Palin’s incoherent answers on the economy. When Wall Street went into meltdown, many floating voters, especially those in the white working class with jobs, homes and retirement plans on the line, swung back to Obama. Following her mauling by the media, some rallied to defend her as a plucky outsider who had been exploited and then eaten alive by the powerhouse elite. This highlights the source of much of her appeal. At a time when disillusion with Washington and Wall Street is at a high, it is precisely because Palin is perceived as representing “Joe Six-Pack” that many will vote for her and McCain on November 4.

Nowhere was this more evident than at the Tailgaters Sports Bar & Grill in Wasilla on the night that Palin’s debate in St Louis with her rival Joe Biden was broadcast on television. It was a home-town crowd, but the room fell silent every time she delivered her populist soundbites peppered with “doggone it” and “you betcha!”, slamming the “toxic mess” wrought by corporate America. Yet when Biden, a silver-tongued US senator and Washington insider for more than 30 years, gave his more measured answers, diners jeered “Blah, blah, blah” and turned to talk among themselves. It was during one of these noisy interludes that I learnt more than I really wanted to know about life in Wasilla, when a young woman leant across and gave me a tip on how to skin a willow ptarmigan – Alaska’s state bird – without a knife. Perhaps because I mentioned being taught how to fire a 20-gauge shotgun in Palin’s shooting club, I now learnt that stepping on the bird’s wings, yanking its legs backwards and twisting its head ensures “the breast falls into your hands like butter”.

Within minutes of the end of the debate, Palin was taking to another stage in St Louis to soak up the applause of the Republican faithful. Standing directly behind her on the podium were her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. Sally could be seen beaming and chanting “USA! USA!” in unison with the crowd. Chuck, tie askew, looked more stagestruck and unsure what to do. Then his daughter turned, gave him a broad smile and he gave her the thumbs-up.

Whatever happens in next month’s presidential elections, Sarah Palin has, for the moment at least, found a new answer to her father’s catchphrase: “So what are you famous for?”.

On the trail of Gilad Shalit, the lost soldier

September 14, 2008
Investigation
 

Two years ago, the 19-year-old Israeli conscript Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Palestinians. He has since become a pawn in the Middle East conflict. But where is he hidden? Christine Toomey goes to the Gaza Strip in search of the answer. Photographs: Heidi Levine

The dusty strip of land where the shy Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped at dawn on June 25, 2006, is a desolate place. To one side is a kibbutz called Kerem Shalom, or Vineyard of Peace. But there is nothing peaceful about this southernmost corner of Israel’s border with Egypt and Gaza.

Tall concrete crash barriers, lookout posts and razor wire surround the kibbutz, and beyond them army watchtowers loom close to barricades fencing in the Gaza Strip. One of the watchtowers is still scorched by explosives used by the Palestinians in the daring kidnap. As we stand taking in this scene, a convoy of armoured Jeeps career towards us, and Israeli soldiers pulling on flak jackets leap out, telling us to leave immediately, that the area is subject to sniper fire.

With the intense afternoon sun bleaching the landscape, it is hard to imagine the half-light in which the cross-border raid took place. A surveillance camera captured grainy images of Shalit being bundled by gunmen towards an opening cut in the fence surrounding the vast open prison that Gaza has become. They had entered Israel undetected, burrowing an underground tunnel more than half a kilometre long through sand and clay beneath the fence and exiting behind Israeli military lines.

Armed with anti-tank missiles, grenades and automatic rifles, the assailants killed two Israeli soldiers and seriously injured four more.

The only trace of Shalit, a tank gunner, was part of his bloody uniform found close to the tank in which he was patrolling the border area. From this it was determined that the 19-year-old had been wounded in the attack, though the extent of his injuries is still unknown.

More than two years on, Shalit’s awkward smile continues to appear regularly in the pages of the Israeli press. His kidnap sparked a new chapter of war in the never-ending Middle East conflict. And his continuing captivity is seared into the consciousness of both sides: the Israelis, who seek his release, and the Palestinians, who see him as a bargaining chip to secure freedom for hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jails, many of them women and children. The fate of the young conscript, and the possibility of a prisoner exchange to free him, has been the focus of intense, if intermittent, diplomacy. While Egypt has been acting as mediator, France and the EU are making demands for more progress (the Shalits hold dual French/Israeli nationality).

But apart from the release of three brief letters, undoubtedly dictated by his captors, and a stilted audio tape in which Shalit says he needs a prolonged stay in hospital, little is known about him. Some question whether he is still alive since the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, two Israeli soldiers captured by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia within weeks of Shalit’s kidnapping, were returned recently in exchange for five Hezbollah militants, including a notorious triple murderer.

The continuing uncertainty is damaging the morale of young conscripts like Shalit in a small country that relies for its security on every teenager signing up for national service. In an effort to bolster the spirits of new recruits who wanted to know what was being done to secure his release, Israel’s chief of staff, Lt Gen Gabi Ashkenazi, confidently stated on August 4: “We are making every effort to make sure Gilad Shalit returns home as soon as possible. We know Gilad is alive; we know where he is held and by whom.”

I am sitting in the airy living room of Shalit’s home in Israel’s northern hills bordering Lebanon when his father, Noam, receives a phone call about what Ashkenazi has just said. A glower of frustration clouds the engineer’s face. “I don’t think it’s something serious, nothing new,” he says as he hangs up the phone. Towards the end of our meeting, however, he confesses: “The army is not keeping us informed about what is going on. The person handling all negotiations is a former secret-service officer who doesn’t believe he has to give us any information.” When I tell him I am leaving for Gaza the next day in search of clues to the fate of his son, he tells me not to go: “It’s too dangerous.” Shalit’s mother remains a silent presence in the house as we speak.

To travel into the Gaza Strip is to enter into a heart of darkness in the Middle East. The pain and hatred of those I will meet there does little to inspire hope of a happy outcome to the hostage situation. The raw power-mongering of Palestinian politicians and the militant factions I encounter is matched by the cold calculations of Israel’s leaders, who have worked out the exact price they are prepared to pay to secure Shalit’s release. In the face of this cynical standoff, Shalit’s family is left in agonising limbo.

Passing through the Erez checkpoint from Israel into Gaza is to move from relative prosperity and order to dire poverty and chaos. The first sight that greets you is the twisted metal and rubble of what was once a bustling industrial estate, razed to the ground by the Israeli military in one of many bombardments of the area since Shalit was kidnapped. More than 1,000 Gazans have been killed by Israeli security forces since his abduction.

Nearly every building on the northern outskirts of Gaza City is pockmarked with bullet holes or scorched by Israeli shellfire. But pressing deeper into the city, traces of a different, internal conflict emerge.

After Ashkenazi raised hopes that Shalit might be freed, the government swiftly rowed backwards, stating that all the chief of staff meant was that Shalit was being held in Gaza by Hamas. To say that Hamas controls Shalit’s fate is to state the obvious, as it now exercises almost absolute power in Gaza. A year ago Hamas staged a virtual coup there, seizing power from its rival, Fatah, with whom it had agreed to share power after winning a parliamentary majority in 2006. But even this one fact is far from simple.

In the days after Shalit was seized, three different armed factions claimed they had been jointly involved in the kidnapping: the al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas), the Popular Resistance Committees (which include members of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad) and a previously unknown group calling itself the Army of Islam. Loosely linked to Al-Qaeda, the Army of Islam, which gained notoriety for the kidnapping of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston, is regarded by many as the private army of the infamous Doghmush clan, who are sometimes referred to as “the Sopranos of Gaza City” for their involvement in organised crime.

One of my first meetings in Gaza is with Mahmoud Zahar, the militant hardliner and co-founder of Hamas. Zahar is the real power behind the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, and the one person who might be expected to deliver answers about Shalit. But the stooped 63-year-old surgeon is the first of many brick walls I come up against in Gaza. Like nearly all of those I speak to, he will not confirm where we are to meet until minutes before the meeting. He fears being targeted not only by Israeli missiles – which have homed in on the precise whereabouts of many Palestinian leaders, killing them in lightning air strikes – but also by gunmen from Fatah and by the Doghmush clan.

Zahar’s heavily guarded base is in the heart of Doghmush territory, in the Sabra neighbourhood to the south of Gaza City. At first we are due to meet him as he finishes midday prayers at a mosque there. Gunmen standing guard outside the mosque say he is too afraid of sniper fire to worship there – though he later denies this. A call then comes telling us to go to his home, where we are instructed to sit on plastic chairs outside the front door to await his arrival. It seems an unlikely place to meet if he is worried about being targeted: the entrance is overlooked by tall, apparently empty, bullet-scarred buildings with broken windows – perfect sniper perches.

But when he eventually arrives, Zahar doesn’t linger long. “Nobody from the political or military wing of Hamas knows where Shalit is,” he says, disingenuously, sitting by my side in a starched safari suit. “Only the small group who kidnapped him know. They are very secretive.”

He says he has no idea of the conditions in which Shalit is being held, only that they must be better than those of the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners whose release Hamas is demanding for his safe return. Before we are ushered out, Zahar allows us into the basement of his spacious three-storey house, where he has built a shrine to two sons killed in Israeli air strikes in the past five years.

Before meeting others in the armed factions responsible for Shalit’s kidnapping, I try talking to more moderate Hamas politicians.

Dr Ahmed Yousef, one of Hamas’s top political advisers, is a suave academic much more comfortable than Zahar with media contact.

As we sit talking in his sweltering office, he boasts of his role as a consultant to the American thriller-writer Tom Clancy on subjects related to terrorism. But on the subject of Shalit, Yousef, too, is tight-lipped.

“The Israelis have Gaza under such a high level of surveillance, they can smell what we’re eating,” he says, “so nobody will talk about Shalit. It puts them in great danger if they do.”

Then he adds: “I don’t recommend you go around asking too many questions about Shalit. People get suspicious.” I was warned before coming to Gaza that I might be regarded as a spy.

“You have to understand the people in Gaza,” Yousef continues. “They can’t see why the world is so concerned about one Israeli soldier captured by freedom fighters resisting occupation when nobody takes any notice of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held illegally.”

Yousef’s argument ignores the fact that hostage-taking is a war crime. But it underlines Palestinians’ grievance about prisoners held in Israeli jails. There are some 9,000 Palestinians in prison in Israel, many held without charge or trial on “administrative detention orders” that are often renewed for months or years. After Shalit’s capture, dozens of democratically elected Hamas politicians, including a third of the Palestinian cabinet, were arrested; 45 are still in detention.

While Zahar and Yousef are reluctant to discuss Shalit, members of the Doghmush clan are happy to brag about how well he is being treated. I meet them in a garage of one of the many buildings the clan owns in the Sabra district. Abu Khatab Doghmush, a 51-year-old clan elder, is sitting with family on a sofa pushed against a wall. As I take a seat with my interpreter, I notice a bullet on the floor in front of me.

Abu Khatab insists that the Army of Islam is not holding Shalit. “The only faction that controls his life now is the Qassam Brigades,” he says, his heavy gold watch flapping against his wrist. “But I can tell you that Shalit is living in a paradise. Our religion of Islam demands that we look after prisoners even more than we do our own people.” He rejects speculation that Shalit is locked deep in an underground cell booby-trapped with explosives: “He’s not being kept in a closed room all the time – this would not be healthy. He can go out and take fresh air.”

Abu Khatab then makes an extraordinary claim: “Every year a party is held to celebrate his birthday. Yes, there is a cake and candles, music, everything.” Shalit, born on August 28, 1986, has now spent three birthdays in captivity.

The claim that Shalit is being well treated is repeated by everyone I meet. His plea that he needs hospitalisation is dismissed by Abu Khatab. “No, it is I who require hospitalisation,” he says, kicking off his plastic sandal to reveal a foot eaten away by gangrene. He then lifts his shirt to show a festering wound from recent stomach surgery. “We have no medicines in our hospitals. Look at how we are forced to live. We blame the western media for siding with Israel,” he says, growing increasingly agitated. It is time to leave.

That night, as we drive south towards Rafah, where it is thought most likely that Shalit is being held, a squad of heavily camouflaged al-Qassam soldiers appear out of nowhere and march along the road towards us, chanting praise to Allah. As Heidi, the photographer, leaps out to start taking pictures, our driver tells me not to move from the car and goes after her. The soldiers quickly disappear into provisional barracks nearby.

Over the days that follow, repeated attempts to talk to the al-Qassam Brigades are rejected. Again and again I am referred back to Hamas political leaders such as Zahar as the only ones able to speak about Shalit. With Zahar and others claiming only al-Qassam knows anything, the circle of professed ignorance and denial is closed.

In my search for clues to what happened to Shalit after he was smuggled into Gaza, I then seek out the families of the two Palestinian gunmen killed in the operation.

Ahlam Farwana is the mother of Mohammed Farwana, a 21-year-old university student recruited to take part in the attack by the Army of Islam. She sits on a plastic chair sunk in the sand outside her daughter’s house close to the sea in the village of Qarrash. When I ask what happened to her son, she shakes her head and cries. “The first I heard of what he was involved in was when people started arriving at my house, early on the morning he died, asking if I had heard the news,” she says. “I was in shock. I had absolutely no idea. Even my brothers said, ‘Is it really your son who has done this – the calm one, the good one?’ Nobody could believe it.

“The day before the operation he was looking after an injured bird in his bedroom. He was so gentle. When men from the Army of Islam came to tell me my son was a martyr, I refused to meet them. I was very angry they had wasted my son’s life. I told them never to return, and they didn’t.”

But as we sit talking, I am unaware that behind us, on one of the balconies of the house, a man is listening to us closely. The more questions I ask, the more uneasy he apparently becomes, until he picks up his mobile and starts making calls. “We should leave now,” our driver whispers urgently. As we drive away, he mutters that the man’s Taliban-style clothing, long hair and beard mark him out as a member of the Army of Islam. When I hear that, little of what Ahlam Farwana had to say seems of much relevance.

Pressing on further south to Rafah, I arrange to meet the spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, or PRC, which co-ordinated Shalit’s kidnap. Again we are not told of the meeting place until minutes before it is confirmed: a screened-off section of a restaurant, the owner of which is deaf and dumb.

When Abu Mujahed arrives, I am taken aback. We have spent time watching young PRC recruits training – all wear black balaclavas and carry AK-47s. But 24-year-old Abu Mujahed wears a beige suit and brown shirt, a look that would not be out of place in a cheesy video on an Arabic music channel. He has come straight from his brother’s wedding, he says, before explaining in clear English (he is studying multimedia technology at university) precisely how a prisoner exchange should work.

“After the Israelis free the first 100 Palestinian prisoners, Shalit would be moved to Egypt. Once he’s in Egypt, the Israelis would have to free 1,000 more of our brothers and sisters before he is released. We were very close to agreeing a deal a year ago, then the Israelis stopped negotiations. We were amazed that they were prepared to go back to zero. It is the Israelis who are putting obstacles in the way of an agreement.

“If we do not see some results soon, we will be forced to close the file,” he concludes ominously.

When I ask how much he knows about Shalit’s whereabouts and the conditions he is kept in, Abu Mujahed repeats the mantra that he is being treated well, “according to our religion”. Only a small group know where Shalit is held, he claims, and they communicate by means of dead letter drops, mobile phones being too easy to track.

Our next meeting in Rafah – with the family of Hamed Rantisi, the second gunman killed in the kidnapping – sends a shiver down the spine, revealing the depth of hatred felt by those Palestinians who want to see Israel wiped from the map. Like 80% of Gaza, the Rantisis live below the poverty line: when Mariam, Hamed’s mother, opens the fridge, it contains nothing. Mariam, her husband, their five surviving sons and their families exist on handouts of just 1,500 shekels (about £230) a month paid to the families of those “martyred” (killed) or injured in clashes with Israelis.

“I don’t know or care where Shalit is,” Mariam snarls. “All I know is that he is alive and my son is dead, and they won’t even give me his body. Hamas made a mistake allowing messages to be passed from Shalit to his family. They should have made them conditional on my son’s body being returned to me. If I had my way, I would kill Shalit. We are a family of fighters. I hope all my sons become martyrs to liberate Palestine.”

After we leave the Rantisi family’s squalid home, another PRC loyalist, Issa, agrees to take us to the site of Shalit’s abduction, on the other side of the Israel-Gaza border.

Issa knows so many details of the kidnapping that I ask if he was involved. He denies it, but says the operation took six months to plan and was masterminded by the PRC commander Jamal Abu Samhadana, who was killed in an Israeli air strike two weeks before Shalit was seized.

There has been much criticism of Israeli intelligence for failing to stop the attack, despite having picked up information several days earlier that an operation in the area was imminent. Israeli ignorance of where the soldier was taken after the kidnap can be judged by Palestinian claims that collaborators were caught sifting through the household rubbish of doctors in the Rafah area who might have treated Shalit for his wounds and discarded bloody dressings.

None of those I meet in Gaza or later in Israel give any indication that Israeli intelligence officials know where Shalit is being held now – not surprising, since Gaza, a narrow strip of land just 25 miles long, with a population of 1.4m squeezed into a maze of towns and refugee camps, is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. And even if his whereabouts were known, it is widely accepted that any military exercise to free Shalit would put his life in too much danger.

Israel pulled its settlers out of Gaza in 2005, but it still controls who goes in and out of the territory. Since Rafah airport was destroyed by Israeli bombardment, the only way Palestinians can get out of Gaza is via a series of checkpoints controlled by Israel, or one controlled by Egypt. But the checkpoints are almost constantly closed in the face of continuing Palestinian rocket attacks on nearby Israeli towns; they remained closed even during a ceasefire this summer. People cannot leave Gaza to work, and desperately needed goods cannot enter.

To circumvent these restrictions, a burgeoning network of tunnels has been dug beneath Gaza’s border with Egypt. Once clandestine, they now mushroom openly on the outskirts of Rafah, their entrances surrounded by plastic sheeting like giant beach windbreaks. Shalit may already have been smuggled out of Gaza into Egypt along one of these tunnels.

) ) ) ) )

The greatest fear for Shalit is that he will turn into another Ron Arad. Arad was a lieutenant-colonel in the Israeli air force who, more than 20 years ago, parachuted out of his damaged fighter jet on a bombing mission over Lebanon and was captured by the Lebanese Shi’ite Amal militia. When two years of negotiations for his release as part of a prisoner swap failed, and his usefulness to his captors as a bargaining tool dwindled, there were reports that he was “sold” to Iran, but his true fate has never been established.

As recently as two months ago, images of Arad saturated the Israeli media again when Hezbollah handed over two photographs of him in captivity and fragments of a diary he wrote, along with the bodies of Goldwasser and Regev. One photo showed Arad in pyjamas, bearded, hollow-eyed and clearly injured. It haunted the Israeli psyche and reinforced the feeling that politicians had not done enough to bring the airman home.

In a country founded on self-preservation and the principle that “never again” will its people be held captive, failure to deliver one of its sons or daughters from the hands of the enemy is among the gravest political sins. Though never publicly acknowledged, a directive called the “Hannibal procedure” is thought to operate still within the Israeli military. It rules that soldiers may subject kidnappers attempting to abduct one of their own to the fire power needed to kill them, even if it endangers the life of the soldier in question. “Better a dead Israeli soldier than a captured one” is the thinking behind the secret order, the logic being that the Israeli public copes better with its soldiers dying than being held hostage.

The prospect of Shalit being passed from the hands of Hamas militants – over whom their political masters exert control – to more ruthless and unpredictable extremists with unclear aims is a scenario that frightens his family. As long as Shalit’s current captors see him as a precious bargaining chip – as part of a prisoner exchange and also as a deterrent to Israel’s reinvasion of Gaza – his safety seems assured.

The danger lies in negotiations between Israel and Hamas breaking down. To find out how near this is to happening, I talk to a retired intelligence officer close to the Israeli negotiating team. We meet in a cafe in a small town north of Tel Aviv.

The chilling clarity of the Israeli position only emerges at the end of a lengthy conversation. “We have named our price – 450 prisoners in exchange for Shalit. If they don’t want to pay it, so be it,” says the former intelligence officer, drawing the interview to a close.

For the previous hour he has spoken about the difficulties of dealing with Hamas – condemned internationally as a terrorist organisation – and how hard it is for the Israeli public to accept the release of convicted murderers as part of any prisoner exchange, as is being demanded.

But less than two weeks after we meet, the political games the country’s leaders are playing behind the scenes – and the way these make Shalit’s position ever more precarious – are exposed. With the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, embroiled in corruption scandals and close to resigning, the cabinet desperately seeks to regain high ground by announcing that 199 Palestinian prisoners will be released imminently. The move is meant as a goodwill gesture to bolster the embattled Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, based on the West Bank, and to breathe new life into the peace process. It is also meant to send a message that diplomacy, not violence, is the way to win concessions.

Since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip last year, the moderate Abbas, Yasser Arafat’s heir as leader of Fatah, has been increasingly sidelined. The release of the prisoners, including two of the longest-serving convicted murderers in Israeli jails, was intended to boost Abbas and Fatah and to deepen Palestinian divisions by pulling the rug out from under Hamas. Most of those freed were members of Fatah; none were Hamas supporters, none from Gaza.

Hamas reacted instantly by threatening Shalit. “If the stubbornness continues,” warned Abu Obeida of the al-Qassam Brigades, “the enemy should consider Gilad Shalit as Ron Arad No 2.”

) ) ) ) )

Noam Shalit is not a man to show his feelings. He holds his emotions coiled tight and, after two years of family anguish, always appears ready to spring into action at the slightest indication that he can influence negotiations to secure his son’s release. During my journey through Gaza,

I discover that behind the scenes he has tried to establish direct contact with those connected to the kidnapping. Several people I speak to say he has called them. Even as Olmert’s reign draws to a close, Noam continues to hold meetings with the prime minister, with his possible successors and with international diplomats. But Noam’s impotence in exerting influence on the key players seems to be reflected in his faraway stare.

The second time we meet, in a Tel Aviv hotel, I struggle to decide whether to tell him about the yearly birthday party, with cake and candles and music. Three weeks later, his son will spend his 22nd birthday in captivity. On his 20th birthday his family released 2,000 balloons at the site of his kidnapping, with messages attached calling for his release. This year there are no such plans. Thinking this claim that his son is being well treated might be a crumb of comfort, I do mention the party. But as Noam Shalit winces, I realise I have made a cruel mistake.

“Time is against Gilad,” he says. “They say the state is doing its utmost to bring him back, but in terms of results – there are no results.

“Gilad is not much of a talker. He’s very shy and introverted. His passion is following football and basketball on TV. He wanted to serve in a tank unit like his cousin, though he could have joined a non-combat unit because his health profile is borderline.” (Gilad has problems with his eyesight and his back.)

Asked how he thinks his son is coping with captivity, Noam replies: “We hope he is strong. But he was very young when he was kidnapped. How can we know? How can anyone know how they would react in such a situation?”.

Next Sunday, a rally will be held in central London followed by an event at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, to highlight the plight of hostages worldwide, especially Gilad Shalit (www.walkingforgilad.co.uk )

9,000 in prison in Israel

Imad Taqatqa, 15, is one of an estimated 9,000 Palestinians – including about 70 women and more than 300 children – being held in Israeli jails. His parents, Rihab and Sami, hope he will be released as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit. Imad, who is awaiting trial on charges of throwing a Molotov cocktail, was shot in the foot and arrested close to a Jewish settlement near his home outside Hebron, in the occupied West Bank. Of the hundreds of Palestinian children imprisoned in Israel, about half are behind bars for throwing stones.

Christine Toomey: my hilltop home in Le Marche

August 10, 2008

Finding an unexploded shell in the bedroom was only the first of many surprises for Christine Toomey when she set about renovating a hilltop townhouse in central Italy

At first, the good-humoured poliziotto showed only mild interest in the second world war shell I found perched on a shelf in one of the upstairs rooms of my newly acquired home in Le Marche. Striking a pose in his knee-high black boots, tight trousers and shiny white belt, he held it up for me to photograph before tucking it nonchalantly under one arm and taking it away for disposal. Given the many things that could go wrong when buying property in Italy, this seemed nothing more than a minor hiccup.

Within the hour, he was back, looking flustered and cradling the shell, a great deal more cautiously this time, in both hands. “Scusi signora, but we can’t allow this to be taken out of your house,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.” Then he hotfooted it back upstairs and placed the shell gingerly – prone this time, and in a box – back on the shelf. I discovered afterwards that he had been told he should not have touched it in the first place.

A few minutes later, the wail of a police siren could be heard approaching at speed, then two more policemen in even more dashing uniforms – one with the epaulettes and braided cap of an ispettore capo, or chief inspector – hurried up the narrow lane to my house. “This matter requires the attention of experts, signora,” said he of the braided cap as he ushered me politely out of my house. Minutes later, it was sealed with crime-scene tapes wound around the door handles. There was talk of evacuating residents close by. In the end, a carabiniere was posted to keep a nightly vigil outside my house until the experts arrived.

It was to be a long wait – during which I had plenty of time to ponder whether it had been such a good idea to mention the shell to my neighbour, who had helpfully offered to call the local police station for advice.

I had not initially planned to buy a house in town at all. Like many Britons who buy in Italy, my dream had been of a renovation project in the country. For years, when taking my daughter to visit her Italian grandparents in a busy town in Umbria, I had trekked along dirt tracks to look at what were little more than piles of stones in the countryside. Then, after a visit in which I had to negotiate the car back along miles of precarious mud path, the patient friend who was accompanying me suggested that I might want to restore a townhouse instead.

Since I would be overseeing the works from London, during snatched weekends and holidays taken in between reporting from far-flung places for this newspaper, I realised she was right. It was the gentler pace of Italian life I wanted to savour when I could. And what better way to do this than in the heart of a small community?

Slowly, I started to venture further afield. It was then I discovered Le Marche, one of the most beautiful regions of central Italy, and in particular the string of medieval hill towns that circle the stunning Monti Sibillini National Park, perched on the spine of the Apennines. This was an area of fierce fighting and partisan strongholds during the second world war – hence the old ordnance I found in the house, which I bought in the summer of 2004.

I returned to London and, over the weeks that followed, received regular telephone updates from the chief inspector. It was nearly a month before an army bomb-disposal squad arrived from Rome to resolve the problem. On the day of their operation, an ambulance was placed on standby in the main square, together with officers from the three branches of the Italian police forces.

The army team confirmed that the shell was still live. They identified it as an old German “rocket” with a firing range of more than half a mile and a double-trigger mechanism – making it doubly unstable, I was told later, as it deteriorated with age. It contained half a kilo of TNT. Placing it in a metal case lined with sand, they drove it to an isolated field, buried it and detonated it by remote control. The explosion left a crater more than 20ft wide.

Just whose idea it was to keep a shell as a household memento remains a mystery. I asked to see the police and army reports. Copies of their faxes marked “urgentissimo”, together with a local newspaper article about una signora inglese and the “quick-thinking police” who had averted disaster, revealed few clues.

The last permanent occupant of the property, I was told, was a priest who had lived there at the turn of the last century. During the course of the restoration, I was to find both touching and intriguing time capsules from this period: crates full of letters written to him by his father, sister and a brother, who had emigrated to America; journals handwritten in immaculate script; books from a different age, including one promoting priestly celibacy, called The Limits of Sexual Morals; and wooden cabinets full of religious statues and ecclesiastical paraphernalia.

The house was full of other surprises, too. When I bought it, for about £80,000 at the then more favourable euro exchange rate, it required a complete overhaul. Spacious – about 250 square metres, set over three floors – it had no electricity or plumbing to speak of, needed a new roof and just about everything else. In the course of knocking through walls and opening up rooms to let in light, however, I found old beams, arches and stonework, some of it dating from the Middle Ages, hidden by false panelling. Underneath the plasterwork of one of the domed bedroom ceilings were fine coloured stencils.

There were less welcome surprises, including the disappearance of the former ballet dancer turned architect on whose advice I relied in the early days – he left me grappling with contractors who doubled their prices overnight. Then there was the weather. The fact that one of the neighbouring towns is a ski resort should have alerted me to the heavy snowfalls in winter, but I had viewed in spring and bought in summer.

Over the years, I have come to love the dramatic change in seasons in the Monti Sibillini. Throughout most of the year, I enjoy the rare privilege (for a townhouse) of a large sunny garden with a towering palm, mature walnut, laurel and fruit trees, and church bells echoing across the rooftops. On summer mornings, I can swim in the Adriatic, a 45-minute drive away, before exploring the area, with its year-round calendar of festivals: wine, truffles, theatre, music. At Christmas and New Year, I have an open fire, while snow blankets the mountains, of which my house has spectacular views.

Most of all, though, it is the warmth of the local people – more low-key than their flamboyant neighbours in Umbria and Tuscany – that sold me on Le Marche. One lesson I learnt from my experience with “the bomb”, however, is to be more circumspect when asking them for help. Especially when it comes to mentioning other discoveries made in the house during its restoration.

In addition to my other finds, I came across, tucked away in the attic, two large, rolled-up oval oil paintings, so dirty they were almost black. I brought them back to London to be cleaned and delicate portrayals of saints, angels and the Virgin Mary emerged from the grime. I am told they date from the late 17th to early 18th century, and am intrigued. What if they turn out to have been stolen? I might find crime-scene tape wound around the handles of my house again.

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Quotas for women on the board: do they work?

June 8, 2008
Investigation
 

All across Europe companies have been told to put more women in the driving seat, or be penalised. The ruling has been a huge success — but what does it say about sexual equality? Photographs by Lars Bech

Ansgar Gabrielsen’s voice echoes across the lobby of Norway’s Stortinget parliament as he shouts to a passing female politician.

“Am I a feminist?” he booms, letting out a deep rumbling laugh.

“You are!” teases the woman, who is wearing a red jacket and is in too much of a hurry to stop and discuss what he’s done to earn her approval.

“Really, I’m not,” Gabrielsen insists conspiratorially, lowering his voice and leaning closer to me as if he is sharing a confidence that he would rather not broadcast.

“You could say that I’m the opposite – a man, a conservative and I come from Mandal,” he explains, as if his place of birth disqualifies him from being a champion of women’s rights. Mandal is a small town in the far south of Norway, which is the country’s Bible belt, and Gabrielsen is a Pentecostal Christian, a bearish man, a former government minister and an archetypal alpha-male businessman.

But we are sitting in the Stortinget to discuss what Gabrielsen calls the “shock bombing” of Norway. As he tells it, the explosive formula was cooked up during a secret meeting, just six months into his job as minister for trade and industry, in association with one of the country’s most senior political correspondents. Gabrielsen had bumped into Alf Bjarne Johnsen of Norway’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, Verdens Gang (“The Way of the World”), or VG, in February 2002, and on the spur of the moment, he offered the veteran journalist the biggest story of his career if he would come to his office to meet with him within the hour.

The next day the people of Norway woke up to front-page headlines that rocked the nation: tycoons blanched, boardrooms rumbled and Gabrielsen’s fellow cabinet colleagues gasped in surprise and shock – he hadn’t deemed it necessary to include the government in his plans.

What the VG front-page story said, under the banner headline “Sick and Tired of the Old Men’s Club!”, was basically this: women would be wearing the trousers in future. The story listed the country’s leading companies with only men at the top of them. Out of 611 companies, 470 did not have one female board member. Little more than 6% of all the board positions were occupied by women.

Gabrielsen, the paper reported, was not just about to lift the glass lid on the meritocracy – he was smashing it with his meaty government fist and with all the force of the law.

Hundreds of men would be gradually removed from their positions as company directors and replaced by women. A new global record in business management would be achieved by making sure that 40% of all boardroom positions in companies listed on the Oslo stock exchange would be held by women within five years. If companies did not comply, the minister warned, he would introduce legislation and they would be prosecuted.

His cabinet colleagues, the then-prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik and his centre-right coalition government, even Gabrielsen’s own Conservative party, must have choked on their breakfast bran. The ebullient minister had consulted none of them beforehand.

“If I had told them before, the initiative would have been killed by one committee after another,” he says. “No, I had to employ terrorist tactics. Sometimes you have to create an earthquake, a tsunami, to get things to change,” he says, laughing at his own daring. “If a left-wing feminist had come out with something like that it would have been dismissed as just another scream in the night,” he continues. “But because I said it, I knew that people would take notice.”

The fallout was instant. Business leaders and employers warned of dire consequences: a decrease in company competence, plunging shareholder confidence and a flight of foreign capital were just the immediate pinstripe reactions. Little short of financial Armageddon was forecast – the prospect of high heels kicking the chairs from under the men who dominated boardrooms would create economic meltdown.

But Gabrielsen had his finger on Norway’s pulse. The public mood in this traditionally liberal society didn’t just warm to the plan, it embraced it with a passion. Bondevik’s coalition government had no choice but to bow to public opinion and back the proposal. It decreed that state-owned enterprises would have just one year to meet the target, the deadline being January 2003. Private companies were given a period of grace of two years – until July 2005 – to increase the number of women on boards

to near parity with men. To reinforce the message, a draconian measure was held over their heads. If companies failed to meet this target, they would face closure.

By the government’s deadline of 2005, the percentage of women on company boards had quadrupled to 24%, which was still short of the target of 40%, so legislation was drafted. Companies had until January of this year to get their houses in order – or else.

This spring the government announced full compliance, even in the most intransigent sectors of banking and financial services. Between 560 and 600 women had been voted onto company boards. Hundreds of male board members were axed, although a small number of companies complied merely by expanding the size of their boards to avoid losing male directors.

It is now six years since Gabrielsen’s “shock bombing”, and the sky has not fallen in as predicted on this Scandinavian country, which is ranked year after year by the United Nations as the best place in the world to live, and last year was ranked the most peaceful by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It is too early to assess the real impact on the bottom line of the companies affected. The evidence that does exist, however, suggests that Gabrielsen’s plan had merit

beyond the politics of equality. A survey of the colleagues of women newly appointed to board positions showed that most of them have significantly higher educational and professional qualifications than many of the male colleagues they replaced, or sit next to. The women are not only brighter, they are younger, and the majority have distinguished themselves in a wide variety of other professional careers before being appointed to company boards.

This, says Gabrielsen, was exactly what he intended. He was not driven by ideology aimed at creating equality between the sexes, he says, despite accusations that the quota law was created by “fetishists of diversity”. The boardroom revolution he ushered in was inspired by studies in the United States showing that the more women there are at the top of a company, the better it performs. The move also made sound national economic sense.

“What’s the point in pouring a fortune into educating girls, and then watching them exceed boys at almost every level, if, when it comes to appointing business leaders in top companies, these are drawn from just half the population – friends who have been recruited on fishing and hunting trips or from within a small circle of acquaintances?” he says. “It’s all about tapping into valuable under-utilised resources.”

) ) ) ) )

Sceptics will argue that such a social and business revolution could only be achieved in traditionally egalitarian societies such as those within Scandinavian countries – and especially in oil-rich Norway with a welfare system offering generous support for working women.Norway is not typical of most countries. Until the discovery of huge gas and oil deposits in the North Sea in the 1960s, it was one of the poorest countries in Europe – a nation of farmers and fishermen. With husbands so often away at sea, Norwegian women became heads of the family, so equality between the sexes is deeply ingrained.

Women have long matched men in politics too. After Gro Harlem Brundtland became the country’s first female prime minister in 1981, 8 out of her 18 cabinet ministers were women. Every cabinet since has maintained roughly the same balance. The country has also enforced the 40% quota on all public committees for more than 20 years, and the internal rules of nearly all its political parties require an equal mix of men and women on electoral lists.

Now, as one of the world’s leading oil exporters, Norway registers an enormous budget surplus every year. This funds a generous welfare state for its small population of 4.7m, with benefits that are the envy of working parents everywhere. Free childcare is widely available. Maternity leave on full pay lasts a year – fathers get six weeks “papa leave” – and women are allowed to return home for one or two hours in the middle of a working day to breast-feed.

The Gabrielsen initiative was already pushing on an open door – but would it work elsewhere? Cue Spain. It has also now passed a similar law. Companies must give 4 out of 10 board positions to women within seven years. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right government is moving in the same direction, the first step being a “voluntary charter” committed to gender equality, and the Netherlands is pledging the same commitment to putting women in charge at the top.

And it’s not just in business that the barriers are being stormed by women. The move in traditional Spain was dismissed by many as another political ploy by the country’s wily socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, to curry favour with the electorate. But his female-friendly initiatives have caught the national mood. He recently unveiled a new cabinet with more female than male ministers – including a heavily pregnant minister of defence.

The British cabinet fields just 6 women to 16 men and, though public opinion might favour action to address the imbalance, the evidence suggests that it is women themselves who might oppose it. When David Cameron suggested this year that he would operate a quota of women cabinet ministers to address the gender imbalance, some of the most vehement objections came from female colleagues. The former Conservative minister Ann Widdecombe said she would be “grossly insulted” if she were given a front-bench position on those terms. She is by no means alone in her opposition.

As far as many women are concerned, the idea that they might be chosen for any job on the basis of gender alone is galling.

“There is no appetite for quotas here,” says Jacey Graham, co-director of a FTSE-100 cross-company mentoring programme for women and the author of a recently published book on women in boardrooms in Britain. “There is an appetite to facilitate talented women coming through, but they must be seen to compete on the same terms as male colleagues.”

It is a view shared by business leaders.

“I agree completely that we don’t have enough women on boards, but I think the problem is much more deep-seated than that – it is that companies are not ensuring sufficient numbers of women are coming through their structures into senior management and executive positions from which they can break through the glass ceiling and into boardrooms,” says Sir Richard Evans, chairman of United Utilities. “The biggest assets of most businesses are their human capital, so what on earth can the argument be for not treating all those assets in the same way?

“But getting the best out of all the human capital begins in schools and universities, at the stage of careers advice and, later, advancement in the workplace. A big culture change is required to tackle that, and I do not necessarily believe changing the law changes people’s attitudes.”

Anna Dugdale, board director of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and one of the few female financial advisers to a big NHS teaching trust, goes further: “I think a quota law would be the worst thing possible for women. You would never know if you were there on your own merit or owing to some legal requirement.”

But back in Norway, the “tokenism or talent” debate has already been consigned to history. Women just picked up the baton and ran with it.

) ) ) ) )

Benja Stig Fagerland is a figure straight out of Norse mythology. Over 6ft tall, she is a beautiful blonde who projects strength and intellect. A Dane who moved to Norway 16 years ago, she has been in the forefront of the female raiding parties who have stormed and conquered the male strongholds of the old order.

The 37-year-old economist with two degrees, an MBA, and three daughters aged 7, 4 and 1, penned an impassioned letter to one of Norway’s leading business magazines after Gabrielsen’s bombshell. It didn’t matter whether you were for or against quotas, she said. That argument was irrelevant and outdated. What was needed was more women in positions of power. In fact, Stig Fagerland had always been against quotas.

“I was young. I was clever. I was competitive and I believed I could do whatever I wanted to do without anybody’s help,” she says, sipping a large mug of coffee in her immaculate home in Oslo’s exclusive residential enclave of Nesoya.

She had been working for a business-software company and, together with a group of friends, had set up a network of young executives in their late-twenties and early-thirties called Raw Material. “We were like the winning team, a little arrogant, and determined to fight the old Scandinavian attitude of Janteloven – never believing you are better than anyone else. We wanted to get to the top.” But when her first daughter was born she realised that it was not just a question of relying on talent. “I began to see it was not that easy,” she says, “that was not how the world worked.” In fact, a survey commissioned by the British government in 2007 found mothers face more discrimination at work in this country than any other group.

After her letter was published, Stig Fagerland was contacted by Norway’s equivalent of the Confederation of British Industry, the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise or NHO, and asked to spearhead the drive to get more women onto company boards. Since the NHO is one of Norway’s most traditional and conservative organisations, long opposed to the idea of quotas for women, she hesitated before accepting the challenge, afraid that the appointment might be little more than window dressing. Once in the post, however, she set up a project called Female Future, and invited companies to go “pearl diving” for women within their ranks who had talent that had not been fully utilised by the firm and whose potential could be nurtured, an initiative that made the issue of quotas redundant.

“This was an extremely important exercise as it got companies to focus on talent regardless of gender,” says Stig Fagerland, who now runs her own consultancy company that is aimed at empowering talent. Once these “pearls” were identified, they were put forward by their companies for training by Female Future. She believes that she also identified a key obstacle women face in rising through the ranks: “They don’t sell themselves in the same way men do.”

Part of the training programme she ran for the next two years involved teaching women how to do just that. “If you bump into your CEO in a lift and he asks you who you are, you need to be able to sum yourself up in 20 seconds; be honest, not over-modest,” she says. The project also set up a database of experienced businesswomen, which companies could tap into when looking for potential board members. “They could no longer claim that female candidates for these top positions didn’t exist just because they didn’t meet them in their private male clubs. We listed hundreds of strong, keen women who wanted these positions of responsibility.”

Of the 600 businesswomen who have taken part in the programme since it started, 300 now occupy board positions. “As an employer’s organisation, although we wanted more women in senior positions, we were against the quota law from day one, believing such decisions were entirely up to shareholders,” says Sigrun Vageng, an executive director of the NHO. “We thought that the threat of closing companies if they did not comply was quite ridiculous. But now we have to acknowledge that it is only because of the law and the public debate it provoked that real change has happened.”

“There’s no going back,” says Kjell Erik Oie, the country’s state secretary for equality and children. “We’ve realised it’s good for business.”

Like Gabrielsen, he refers to American research showing companies with the most women in top positions return higher profits than those with the least number of female directors. One study last year by the influential New York think-tank Catalyst, which ranked hundreds of Fortune-500 companies by the percentage of women on the board, found the top quarter outperformed those in the bottom quarter with a 53% higher return on equity. While another 2007 report, by the international management consultants McKinsey, looked at 89 top European companies and found those where women were most strongly represented on both the board and at senior-management level outperformed others in their sector in return on equity and stock-price growth.

Some argue that this is because those companies with a less traditionally male boardroom are more likely to be innovative and forward-looking. That, says Oie, is precisely the point. But are Norway’s top tycoons convinced about this?

) ) ) ) )

The man in the photograph Verdens Gang chose to illustrate the front-page story of Gabrielsen’s attack on “The Old Men’s Club” is a hard-nosed former fisherman turned billionaire. Kjell Inge Rokke is sometimes referred to as Norway’s Donald Trump. He once famously said his education was in “the university of the gutters”. After leaving school he went to work on long-distance trawlers in Alaska before returning to Norway, buying and restructuring companies and then rising to take control of the country’s leading industrial conglomerate. Aker is Norway’s largest private employer, with more than 27,000 employees in 35 countries and annual revenue in excess of £6 billion. It is the parent company for eight stock-exchange-listed firms in the traditionally male bastions of oil-drilling, shipbuilding and construction. Until 2004, Aker had no women on its board of directors, and in the words of one of its former presidents, it was a “club”, selecting new board members on the basis of “you put me on yours and I’ll put you on mine”.

When the 40% quota was proposed, Rokke opposed it, saying such decisions should be left solely to shareholders. Just how much things have changed since then is spread before me when I visit the company’s headquarters on the banks of an Oslo fjord.

Fanned out on the table are pictures of the current board members in both Aker and its subsidiary companies; out of 48 directors there are now 20 women. Yet this is clearly uncomfortable territory for Aker’s executive vice-president Geir Arne Drangeid. He is tense when we meet to talk about the conglomerate’s boardroom transformations. I’m at a loss to understand why until he concludes our meeting with the aside that he hopes the reason he was not re-elected recently for the board of one of Aker’s subsidiary companies was to make way for a woman.

Talking later to one of the Aker’s most senior former board directors, Kjeld Rimberg, the extent of the company’s initial opposition to the move becomes clear. “The view was that it was a political manoeuvre to pay lip service to feminists and had nothing whatsoever to do with the way companies were run,” he comments.

Seeing the writing was already on the wall, Rimberg says he told Rokke not to hesitate in asking him to stand aside in favour of a woman –which his boss promptly did.

“I did not take it personally. I consider myself lucky to have been invited to the party for 20 years,” says the former head of Norway’s state railway system. “After all, men have been protecting their power for years and years, and there are a lot of stupid and incompetent men on company boards.” It might have been because he was talking to me on the phone from a beach in the south of France that Rimberg finishes our conversation by saying that he is now feeling “quite relaxed” about the new law.

Among the women Aker has recruited to its board are two former government ministers: Kristin Krohn Devold and Hanne Harlem, sister of the country’s one-time prime minister. When Devold was defence minister, she says she was used to chauvinistic treatment on government trips abroad; in Italy it was assumed she was an assistant and she was asked if her group would like coffee. “But if women can hold positions in the most important boardroom in any country, its cabinet,” she says, “then they can certainly contribute to the running of a company.”

Women are more intuitive and sensitive to potential problems such as divided interests in boardrooms, says Devold. Hanne Harlem, a former justice minister, agrees with this sentiment and goes further: “Women are much clearer when it comes to ethical issues. They are not afraid to ask awkward questions.”

This is something Kaci Kullman Five, one-time senior executive at Aker – also a former trade minister and current member of the Norwegian Nobel committee – knows only too well. She was briefly acting head of Norway’s giant state-run oil company Statoil in 2003, after its chief executive was forced to resign in a scandal over alleged bribery in its dealings with Iran. “Women are better at working as part of a team and listen more than men, who tend to stick to positions for the sake of their pride,” says Kullman Five, who sits on five company boards.

The growing number of women who now sit on a wide variety of boards brings accusations that, just like men, senior businesswomen are now creating their own exclusive “club”.

It’s almost taboo to admit this openly, says Stig Fagerland, but what is happening in some cases is that older women are pulling up the ladder behind them and leaving younger talent behind.

“I tell young women now to ‘Watch out for the long-stockings!’ ” she laughs. “There will always be plenty of things that women need to fight for, even here in Norway, like equal wages. But I feel more like a relay runner now, ready to pass the baton on to my daughters one day.”

Bobby Fischer’s final manoeuvre

April 20, 2008
Investigation
 

Bobby Fischer was a genius, a recluse and a political outcast. Our correspondent examines the controversial life and legacy of one of the world’s greatest chess players, whose last move has sparked a vicious wrangle over his fortune

Snow fell so heavily on the morning of January 21 that the priest feared he might not make it to the remote country church in time. So secretive were arrangements for the funeral, even he had not been told about its location until a few hours before; a small chapel in southwest Iceland, where a grave had been dug overnight without the knowledge, or permission, of its minister.

But as Jakob Rolland struggled along the road to that tiny cemetery, he rehearsed the address he would give to the five people waiting beside the coffin, brought there under cover of darkness. He would compare the genius of the man he was burying to that of Mozart and Jesus Christ.

“Like them he was buried with few present,” the diminutive Frenchman said, “and like them he had an intelligence that could see what others could not even begin to understand.”

It was a tribute that might grate on those alienated by the man he was laying to rest: Bobby Fischer, arguably the greatest (and most controversial) chess player of all time.

Fischer was best known for his defeat of Boris Spassky in 1972 – it was a chess match like no other. Yet in his final years he became notorious more for his virulent anti-Semitism and attacks on the US; he was both American and Jewish.

To many Fischer had long ago become a crazy recluse, a cracked wild man of the north; an image shored up by sightings of the dishevelled 64-year-old shuffling round the streets of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, where he lived out his last years in exile after the US revoked his passport. Having been once hailed as an all-American hero, he became an international outcast. So much so that when an ugly row between potential heirs to his estate erupted after his death, the news was greeted with gloating satisfaction by those who had turned their backs on him.

According to the few friends he had left, the only person Fischer believed would benefit from his fortune of more than £1.5m was his longtime Japanese companion Miyoko Watai, a chess grandmaster herself. Under Icelandic law, the estate of a person with no children automatically passes to their spouse, unless a will states otherwise – and Fischer had not made one.

Apart from the priest, Watai was the only person to speak at his graveside. After listening to Rolland deliver his few words, the softly spoken 63-year-old stood in the morning twilight whispering the Buddhist prayer for the dead, before trudging away through the snow in the company of the man who had cared for Fischer to the end, his friend Gardar Sverrisson, who was there with his wife and grown-up children.

It was Sverrisson who made the arrangements for Fischer’s funeral. The church at Laugardaelir, near the southern town of Selfoss, was originally built on farmland belonging to his wife’s family. For that reason he seems to have felt no need to inform its minister in advance that a grave was to be dug there. While Watai flew back and forth every few months from Tokyo, where she edits a chess magazine, to be by Fischer’s side, Sverrisson was his constant companion. He was one of the few who knew Watai and Fischer had married.

He also knew that as soon as his friend died, there would be a fight for his fortune. Within hours of Fischer’s death from kidney disease, on January 17, Sverrisson received a call from the chess champion’s ex-brother-in-law, Russell Targ, the former husband of Fischer’s late sister, Joan, whom Fischer never forgave for leaving her. Targ was not calling to commiserate, but to make it clear he would be flying to Reykjavik to secure the interests of his two sons, Fischer’s nephews.

Unsurprisingly, the clandestine burial caused an outcry. Not only was Targ furious at missing it; so too were many of Sverrisson’s countrymen. Despite the controversy that surrounded Fischer in his later years, it was acknowledged by many that he had put Reykjavik on the map. So electrifying was the 1972 championship that 40 films and TV documentaries and 150 books – including the bestseller Bobby Fischer Goes to War and the upcoming film of the same name – have been made about it. In recognition of this, some had wanted Fischer buried in a historic cemetery in the capital. There his grave would have become a tourist attraction – something Fischer would have loathed.

Little surprise, then, that Rolland describes the discreet funeral as the chess champion’s “final checkmate”. “Bobby Fischer played his last move very well,” he says. “He finally got what he wanted, peace and quiet.” But now it seems the funeral might not be allowed to be his final move. There is talk of Fischer’s body being exhumed.

In addition to the claim on Fischer’s estate by Watai and Targ, a third party has now stepped forward demanding a cut of his fortune. She is the mother of a seven-year-old Filipina girl, Jinky, who she says is Fischer’s daughter. In the Machiavellian world of international chess, some believe Jinky’s mother, Marilyn Young, a 29-year-old management-studies student, is being encouraged to pursue her claim by those whom Fischer ostracised. But Young’s lawyer, the Filipino chess grandmaster Samuel Estimo, says she is so confident of her claim she will pursue it to the point of requesting a DNA test be carried out on her daughter and Fischer’s corpse.

Those few people who have remained loyal to Fischer are horrified at this prospect. In stark contrast to the perception of him as a deranged, often greedy and bigoted recluse, the picture they paint is of a far more complex character deserving of greater understanding than he ever received.

As Fischer’s health failed during his final years, and he fell out one by one with those he once counted as friends, he sought the company of just three men – Sverrisson, the Icelandic chess grandmaster Fridrik Olafsson and Magnus Skulason. Skulason, also a chess player, is more significantly a psychiatrist, who spent hours by Fischer’s bedside talking about a wide range of subjects, including the grandmaster’s past.

It is easy to see why Fischer, prone to paranoia, trusted Skulason. He is a kind and sensitive man. Underneath a pile of documents he gives me about Fischer, I find pages of poetry photocopied “to help me rest” after our long interview. But the psychiatrist is also used to plumbing the depths of the most tortured psyches. He is head of Iceland’s hospital for the criminally insane. His insights into what drove Fischer are telling.

Bending low over the desk of his private clinic in Reykjavik, Skulason jabs his thumb repeatedly into his forehead as he struggles to decide what he can and can’t tell me about what he discussed with Fischer, though he stresses he was a friend, not a patient. “I never asked him questions about himself, you must understand. He became very irritated if you did that,” Skulason begins tentatively. “But he once asked me about the origins of psychiatric illness. I think he realised there was something missing in himself. In a way he was searching like a young boy, still trying to understand himself and the world.”

Some have speculated that if Fischer had been born today he might be diagnosed as suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, because of his difficulty in socialising, his tendency to sudden outbursts, and also his phenomenal recall; he could repeat lengthy conversations in Icelandic without understanding the language. Skulason does not agree with this, but stresses that he did find it hard to form emotional bonds with others.

When they talked, he says, Fischer often showed interest in the meaning of dreams. “He told me he kept having the same dream. But he never wanted to talk about it. It seemed memories were trying to come out,” says the psychiatrist.

“I don’t believe Bobby was badly treated as a boy. But he was lonely. He missed having a father, and his mother was often outside the home.”

Born Robert James Fischer in Chicago on March 9, 1943, he never knew the man listed on his birth certificate as his father: a German biophysicist and communist named Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, who divorced his mother, Regina, when he was two. But declassified FBI documents suggest Fischer’s real father was Dr Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian-born physicist with whom Regina began an affair in 1942 and who paid for some of Fischer’s schooling. The FBI had kept Regina, of Polish-Jewish origin, under surveillance for decades as a result of her own communist sympathies.

Apart from this help from Nemenyi, however, Regina raised her son and his sister, Joan, alone. They struggled financially. After moving briefly to LA and Phoenix, they settled in Brooklyn in 1948. When Fischer was six, his sister, then 11, bought him a plastic chess set and together they learnt to play. By 13 Fischer was US junior champion, by 14 US champion, a title he would win eight times, and by 15 the world’s youngest grandmaster. With an IQ said to be higher than Einstein’s, he was hailed as remarkable talent. But even at this age, it was clear that his extraordinary ability was matched by an unpredictable and increasingly demanding personality.

At 16 he dropped out of school. Then he asked his mother and sister to move out of their Brooklyn apartment so that he could live alone. Visitors noticed he slept in all three beds in the flat in rotation, keeping a different chessboard with a game in play beside each. Though Regina encouraged her son’s chess career, it was only one of many causes she championed. A committed pacifist, she once spent months walking across Europe in an anti-war demonstration.

The lack of any strong parental presence meant Fischer’s sense of identity and basic feelings of trust never developed fully, says Skulason: “Without basic trust, a person relies far too much on such primitive defences as building walls, blaming others and projecting negative feelings onto them.” Fischer himself once said of his aggression: “Those who don’t have fathers become like wolves.”

Fridrik Olafsson, who first met 15-year-old Fischer at an international chess championship in Slovenia, tells an unsettling story about how, at breakfast one morning, Fischer took his knife and started slicing up wasps crawling across the table, saying: “That’s how I’m going to squeeze my opponents.” In the years that followed, Fischer did not just defeat opponents; he crushed them. By the time of the 1972 world championship, he was described as “the most individualistic, intransigent, uncommunicative, uncooperative, solitary… champion in the world”. But also “the strongest player who ever lived”.

He had also gained a reputation for being money-grabbing. As well as moaning about his chair, the lighting and the whirring noise of TV cameras in Reykjavik, Fischer complained that the prize money of $125,000 was not enough. Spassky had taken home just $1,400 when he won the world title three years before. But Fischer would not agree to play in Iceland until the British financier and chess fan Jim Slater, of Slater Walker Securities, upped the winning pot to $250,000. Skulason and others believe it was not the money that was important to him, rather that the size of the prize made Fischer feel valued. After winning the 1972 championship, he would turn down far larger sums offered to tempt him out of seclusion to defend his title; the Shah of Iran once offered him $2m, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines $3m and a millionaire in Spain $4m if the matches were played in their countries.

But it seemed his fear of losing was too great. When Fischer returned to New York from Reykjavik, he was given a hero’s welcome and handed the keys to the city. After that he shunned the limelight, moving to California for a while and leaving $5m-worth of unsigned endorsement contracts on his lawyer’s desk.

The international chess community tracked his subsequent decline like the path of a dying comet. After refusing to defend his world title in a dispute over match rules, he lost it by default in 1975 to Anatoly Karpov. It was then only a matter of time before his anger overwhelmed his brilliance. In California he became involved with an oddball fundamentalist cult, was arrested on suspicion of armed robbery – a result of mistaken identity – and subsequently became lost in his own world, dressing like a hobo and drifting from one seedy hotel to another.

The next, and last, time he would step onto the world stage to dazzle enthusiasts with flashes of his old talent was at a controversial rematch against Spassky in Belgrade in 1992. Ignoring threats of 10 years’ imprisonment and a hefty fine from the US government because of a UN trade embargo against the former Yugoslavia, he beat Spassky again and received $3.5m. But a warrant for his arrest was also issued by the US. He would remain a wanted man in his country of birth until the day he died; a source of anguish, says Skulason, and the likely reason for his Uncle Sam-bashing. Fischer had gone to Belgrade because he needed the money. It is what remains of it that now constitutes his disputed estate.

For more than a decade following this last match in Belgrade, Fischer roamed restlessly around central Europe and the Far East. He spent much of his time in Budapest and visiting Watai in Japan. But he also lived for a while in the Philippines. Periodically, journalists seeking interviews would smoke him out and he would agree – if the interviews were broadcast live. He would then use the airtime to launch vicious diatribes against the US, Israel and the Jews. It was his outburst following the 9/11 attacks in New York that finally tipped the balance.

The full vitriol Fischer unleashed is unprintable. But the bottom line was that he described the attacks as “wonderful news”. Three years later, as he was about to board a plane in Tokyo, he was arrested on charges of travelling on a revoked US passport and tax evasion. He spent the next eight months in jail in Japan while the Americans sought his extradition. It was during this time in prison that Fischer obtained a special licence to marry Watai. Few appear to have known about the nuptials, one of the reasons for the ensuing row over his fortune.

Desperate at the prospect of being extradited, Fischer began calling old friends in Iceland for help. A committee of chess enthusiasts, the RJF committee, including Skulason, Sverrisson, Olafsson and Fischer’s former bodyguard and driver, Saemi Palsson, was formed to petition Iceland’s government to grant him exile. Despite fierce opposition from the US, the parliament voted unanimously to grant him full citizenship.

In March 2005, a scruffy-looking Fischer stepped off a plane in Iceland to the full glare of the media. But for the next 2½ years he virtually disappeared off the radar. Occasionally he would be spotted sloping along the streets of the capital in his baseball cap, eating in a hamburger joint called American Style and sitting reading in a bookshop called Bokin.

But the public left him alone. Far from being the lost shadow of a man he was often portrayed as, friends say he enjoyed being treated as an ordinary citizen. “Becoming so famous at such a young age had placed a tremendous burden on him. So many people had tried to make money out of him. He was glad to be rid of that,” says Skulason. Even in Iceland, anyone who vaunted their friendship with him and tried to profit from it, like his old bodyguard, Palsson, were banished from his inner circle. In the end it was Sverrisson and his family that Fischer spent most time with.

Tall and softly spoken, Sverrisson was once head of Iceland’s association for the disabled and understands life’s hardships. So does his wife, a nurse. The couple often took Fischer on long walks around Laugardaelir, the reason its churchyard was chosen for his burial. In the final months of his life, Fischer bought a flat three floors above Sverrisson’s on the outskirts of Reykjavik, and the 48-year-old would often alternate with his wife sleeping there so that Fischer was not alone.

From time to time Watai would come to stay. But with work in Tokyo, she never moved there. How she would have felt about the visit Fischer received in September 2005 from Marilyn Young and her daughter, Jinky, is uncertain, though she was in Iceland at the time. Young was certainly unhappy.

A stone’s throw from the Bokin bookshop where Fischer spent so much time is a shop selling oriental food. Young would go there to buy items she missed from home. The owner’s sister is the Philippine honorary consul, Priscilla Zanoria, whom Young contacted after arriving because she was homesick. “She was lonely and asked if she could stay with me for a few days,” says Zanoria.

Fischer had rented a small apartment for three months for Young, Jinky and the girl’s nanny. But Young felt so isolated that she left after just three weeks. “She was an innocent young woman,” says Zanoria. “She asked a lot of questions about Iceland, but she didn’t feel comfortable here. Her daughter was very lively. She kept talking about her daddy. She was very excited to see him. When Fischer came to see her, he was very sweet with her, holding her and playing with her.”

How Fischer came to know Young is unclear. Some say they met at a country club in Baguio City, the summer capital of the Philippines. Others that Fischer was a friend of Young’s parents and it was for their sake that he offered to support her baby financially when she fell pregnant after a relationship with someone else. Friends say Fischer loved children. “No-one talks about it, but Bobby often gave money to poor people when they needed it. I’m almost certain he was just a friend to this woman’s family,” says Skulason.

Young’s lawyer, Estimo, claims otherwise. He says Fischer lived for two years with her in Baguio City from August 2000 and that their child was born on May 21, 2001. Among the documents he says they will present to the Icelandic authorities to support this claim are the child’s birth certificate, her passport, signed photographs and postcards Fischer wrote to the girl, and copies of bank statements showing that he regularly sent her the equivalent of around £1,000 a month. Estimo says the last of these payments was made the month before Fischer died and that he would often send his daughter stuffed dolls and helicopters with the message “I hope you enjoy these nice toys, love Daddy.”

Although Estimo describes Young as a kind woman who would like the disagreement over Fischer’s estate settled amicably, what he goes on to say suggests the opposite is likely. Firstly he casts doubt on the legitimacy of Fischer’s marriage to Watai, saying the chess champion was stateless at the time of the ceremony. He then raises the spectre of ordering Fischer’s body be disinterred for DNA testing. “We are willing to go that far,” he says, then confirming that he is seeking precise information on the size of Fischer’s estate: “We have heard there are gold deposits and stockholdings and then there is the big film Bobby Fischer Goes to War being made. Jinky might want to claim royalties from that.”

Much of this is news to Watai’s urbane Icelandic lawyer, Arni Vilhjalmsson, who produces a copy of a marriage certificate showing Fischer and Watai were married in Tokyo on September 6, 2004. “This is published by the Japanese authorities and confirms they were married,” says Vilhjalmsson, who was also Fischer’s lawyer. Vilhjalmsson was trying to help the chess master resolve a dispute with the Swiss bank UBS, which had, without asking Fischer, transferred 3m Swiss francs (nearly £1.5m) he had deposited with it to an Icelandic bank after he was granted citizenship there. Fischer was convinced the move was part of a Jewish conspiracy against him and insisted the money be transferred back to Switzerland. This dispute was still going on when he died, one of the reasons the exact location and worth of all his assets is unclear.

In addition to the claims by Watai and Jinky, there are two other parties circling; the US government, seeking to recoup unpaid taxes, and Fischer’s nephews, Russell Targ’s two sons – on the basis that his marriage might not have been legal. According to Targ’s lawyer, Gudjon Olafur Jonsson, Icelandic law states that surviving relatives – Fischer’s mother and sister died – can make a claim on a person’s estate if that person dies intestate and is neither married nor has children. If the person is married with no children, the spouse inherits the entire estate; if married with children, the spouse inherits one third, the child or children two-thirds.

All parties now have until May 17 to file their claims with Iceland’s justice ministry, which could then rule that it is a matter for a district court to decide, or, ultimately, the supreme court.

Despite interpretations of Fischer’s secretive burial as the last convoluted twist in a life as complex as the manoeuvres he once executed on the chessboard, his friends say he would be deeply upset at the legal wrangles taking place.

They believe he had little idea he was so close to death, which might have been the reason he made no will. Even though he refused to be put on a dialysis machine for the treatment of a kidney disease and spent the last months of his life in and out of hospital. Shortly before he died he had been released from Reykjavik’s central clinic to recuperate at home.

It was here that Skulason saw him for the last time. The kindly psychiatrist would offer him grapes and goat’s milk, neither of which Fischer could keep down. “I had the feeling he wanted to talk more about himself,” says Skulason. But he did not then, nor ever again. The next morning Sverrisson rushed him to hospital, where he died.

The last words Fischer spoke to his friend were a poignant reminder of what he had perhaps missed most all his life and why he left behind such confusion. Suffering from severe pains in his legs, he asked Skulason to massage them a little, then whispered: “Nothing is as healing as the human touch.”

Cindy, John McCain’s trouble and strife

March 30, 2008
Investigation
 

Her husband is willing to take the weight of America on his shoulders. But is Cindy McCain secretly hoping he loses his bid for the White House?

Phoenix, Arizona. On the stretch of street where Cindy McCain grew up and, in the same house, raised her own family with the Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, tall, toned women in tight-fitting shorts jog along the sidewalk in the sunshine. Across the lawns of the spacious homes that trail away on either side, gardeners, mostly Mexicans, stoop low, snipping hedges and tending swimming pools.

The social lives of wives and mothers here revolve around husbands, children, pot-luck dinners and block parties. One has set up an e-mail alert system in the event of rare winter frosts in this desert-city suburb, so that neighbours can quickly pull protective covers over treasured flowers. But against this backdrop of pampered privilege, all is not necessarily what it seems. Family dramas are laundered in private, and rarely stain the manicured lives of neighbours – unless, that is, a husband decides to make a run for the White House. Then the world intrudes, poking its nose into the nooks and crannies of respectability in search of the sleepless nights endured in pursuit of such ambition.

Friends and neighbours close ranks around their own, throwing up stone walls to intrusive questions, questions that won’t go away about Cindy McCain and her life at 7110 North Central Avenue. They present an impenetrable and united front to protect the woman who may be America’s next first lady.

To flank it, and to understand the long and sometimes deeply troubled road that Cindy McCain has travelled to stand by her husband, immaculately dressed and accessorised with a pearly white smile, we need to return to a different era, to a time when America was not tarnished in the eyes of the world, to the star-spangled days of the American dream, when JFK was in the White House; a time when Cindy McCain was just a clever, beautiful girl known in the neighbourhood as Cindy Lou.

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In a society as transient as the United States, where the average family stays only five years in one home before moving on, the North Central Avenue area is unusual. For a street so close to the bustling office blocks of downtown Phoenix, one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, it has a strangely suburban feel. Originally an orange grove where developers built ranch-style homes so “upper-income residents” could keep horses, it still has a gravel bridle path running the length of the street. Families who live here tend not to move on quickly. So there are some here who still remember Cindy Lou as a girl.

Behind 7110 North Central Avenue, where she grew up, one elderly couple, John and Sally Auther, have lived in the same house for 50 years. They still recall Cindy Lou. “Her folks were somewhat protective of her. She was not a real outgoing type. She didn’t mix a lot with other kids in the neighbourhood when she was young; neither did her own children,” says Sally Auther.

One point on which everyone agrees is that Cindy Lou was the apple of her father’s eye. Born in 1954, she was the only child of Jim Hensley and his wife, Marguerite, known as “Smitty”. While Smitty was strict and reserved, Jim doted on his daughter and gave her the best of the privileged lifestyle the couple had earned. Neither came from wealthy backgrounds. They met in St Louis after the second world war and moved to Phoenix, borrowing $12,500 to buy the licence for a beer-distribution company. “Selling beer in the desert was a gold mine. They did pretty well for themselves,” Auther recalls. It’s an understatement. Hensley & Company, the third largest wholesaler of Anheuser-Busch beer in the US, is now a $300m-a-year business (which Cindy McCain took over when her father died in 2000). Even when she was growing up it was a thriving business. The Hensleys kept clydesdale horses, the large Budweiser mascot breed. Jim Hensley liked to ride and, when his daughter was old enough, he took her on long treks through Arizona to California and Mexico.

At 14, Cindy Lou was crowned the local rodeo queen. At 15, she transferred to Central High School in Phoenix – its motto was “America’s high school”. The retired principal, Cindy Lou’s former teacher David Silcox, explains. “It represented all that was good about America: opportunity for all, contributing to the common good, giving something back if you’ve been given gifts by birth. All that might sound a bit hokey, apple pie and hot dogs,” he says. “But it’s what we believed, and I still do.”

By the time Cindy Lou arrived at Central High in 1969, however, storm clouds had already darkened the American dream. JFK had been assassinated; his brother Bobby too. The civil-rights movement had been devastated by the murder of Martin Luther King Jr, and Richard Nixon was in the White House, sinking into the quagmire of the Vietnam war. But the only mention of that faraway conflict in the school yearbook of her freshman year is a reference to a “candy apple and chewing gum sale” held to raise money for children in South Vietnam. The book challenges students to follow the American poet Carl Sandburg’s plea “to gain recognition… have our faces noticed… [even though] such a position may not at all times be comfortable… Faces speak what words can never say”. These are poignant words now; Cindy McCain’s body language, as she stands smiling by her man on the campaign trail, sometimes suggests she is not happy at the idea of moving permanently into the limelight.

In high school, Silcox remembers Cindy Lou as “a motivated, diligent student, very involved in community-service activities like cleaning up city parks, helping the homeless and the elderly” – an altruistic streak that would thread through her life. While contemporaries recall “a pompom line girl”, a cheerleader, old school newspapers and yearbooks make no mention of this.

“Perhaps she was just a quiet kind of kid,” says Randi Turk, Central High’s dynamic English teacher, as together we leaf through the yearbook of her senior year. There she is, looking prim in a tailored trouser suit. While other students, shown fooling around in hippie hairbands and floral smocks, were voted “most congenial”, “most respected” and “most talkative”, Cindy Lou was voted “best dressed”. Contemporaries remember that while most girls bought their high-school prom dresses in the local store, her mother took her to Los Angeles to get hers.

By the time she left Central High in 1972, however, Vietnam had intruded. The yearbook is testimony to the generational turmoil the war provoked. It pictures a visiting congressman vowing that no amnesty would be granted to draft-dodgers, while a teacher is quoted as saying: “We’ve become the people that burn children.”

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For the four years that Cindy Lou was at Central High, the man who would become her husband was a prisoner of war in Hanoi. John McCain, a naval pilot, was shot down on a bombing mission over North Vietnam in 1967 and tortured so badly during the next 51/2 years in which he was held captive that he attempted suicide before being released after the 1973 Paris peace accords.

By then, Cindy Lou had gone to study education at the University of Southern California (USC), which one American reporter says McCain once quipped stood for “University for Spoiled Children”. But the path his wife chose after graduating with a master’s degree was not that of a brat. Returning to Phoenix, she followed the Central High ethos of “giving something back”, and went to work as a special-needs teacher in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of the city.

“All of a sudden this beautiful blondie shows up on campus and takes us all by surprise,” recalls the former principal of Agua Fria high school in Avondale, 75-year-old “Okay” Fulton. “The kids adored her. She was highly dedicated. She taught teenagers with Down’s syndrome and other disabilities. A lot of their parents were cotton farmers, some extremely poor, and she’d pay home visits to understand the kids’ problems better. She didn’t need to do that, any of it. Her dad had lots of money. But she was dynamic, dedicated, a happy young lady. She became an integral member of our staff.”

After just two years teaching at the school, however, Cindy Lou handed in her notice. On holiday in Honolulu with her parents in 1979 she met John McCain, then a navy liaison officer. Up until then, Cindy says, she had dated “very nice men from college”. But faced with a naval officer in dress whites, whom she describes as “intelligent, witty and thoughtful”, she was smitten. Having had such a strong bond with her father, she admits she wanted an older man. McCain was 18 years older – and married with three children. His first wife, Carol, had been disabled in a car accident while he was held prisoner in Vietnam. But within a year he had divorced Carol and married Cindy.

Realising his military career was never going to reach the heights of that of his father’s or grandfather’s, both naval admirals, McCain had his sights set on success in a different field: politics. With the help of Cindy Lou’s family fortune and Jim Hensley’s powerful contacts in Arizona, McCain moved to Phoenix, within a year was a congressman and, four years after that, a senator for Arizona. He soon developed a reputation as a political maverick – a trump card he is still playing in this presidential campaign with an electorate desperate for change.

But while McCain commuted back and forth to Washington, DC, Cindy refused to move with him. After suffering several miscarriages, she gave birth to three children: Meghan, 23, Jack, 21, and Jimmy, 19. The couple also adopted a daughter, Bridget, now 16. Cindy wanted her family to grow up in the same house with the same roots and values she had. “A lot of the time, what I saw with families [in Washington] was a pecking order among the kids: whose dad or mom did this, and how close they were to the president,” she once said. So instead the McCains spent $250,000 remodelling her parents’ home as a Mexican-style ranch house, which Cindy dubbed “La Bamba”. She went on to found a charity, American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT) in 1988, to provide mobile medical units to disaster-stricken areas around the world.

It was at this point that Cindy’s life took a dramatic turn. To the outside world the McCains appeared to be a family blessed with good fortune. But behind closed doors, the immaculate Cindy McCain was falling apart.

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The reporter I meet for coffee in a quiet corner of a downtown office block in Phoenix is edgy. The McCains have a troubled history with the Phoenix press and he prefers not to be identified. As he tells it, the McCains attempted a classic manipulation of the media to contain the damage caused by the drama that unfolded in Cindy’s life. But the McCains suffered a backlash in the papers as a result, and have had an uneasy relationship with local journalists ever since.

Sympathetic stories were spoon-fed to journalists in 1994. One of them began “she was a rich man’s daughter who became a politically powerful man’s wife. She had it all, including an insidious addiction to drugs that sapped the beauty from her life like a spider on a butterfly”. Cindy McCain, the story went, had “opened a remarkably ugly wound in her life” by admitting that for four years, beginning in 1989, she was addicted to powerful prescription painkillers. The addiction began after surgery to repair four ruptured discs failed to ease the pain. Her addiction was so overwhelming that she admitted locking herself in the bathroom to secretly pop four or five times the prescribed dosage each day, medication obtained from several doctors, each of whom she failed to tell that she was getting prescriptions elsewhere. Eventually she took to stealing the drugs from AVMT. This led to an investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which was tipped off by a disgruntled employee that there was a connection between the charity’s supply shortfall and Cindy McCain’s drug problem.

The addiction was exacerbated by the turmoil surrounding her husband’s involvement in a political scandal known as the Keating Five. In 1991, the US Senate investigated five senators accused of using their influence to protect the financier Charles Keating from a federal probe. Although McCain was later shown to have been among the least culpable of the five, he faced a Senate Ethics Committee investigation. As the family book-keeper, Cindy McCain became embroiled when she failed to produce personal cheques that had been used to repay Keating for the family’s use of the financier’s home in the Caribbean. “I was on the floor. I couldn’t deal with it,” she said at the time, admitting that the scandal strained her marriage.

Confronted by her parents in 1993 about the erratic behaviour that was a result of the drugs she was taking, Cindy said she went cold turkey and never touched the pills again.

A hysterectomy alleviated her back pain. She had managed to hide her addiction from her husband, she says, because he was away so often in Washington, DC. She only told him about it when the DEA came knocking with its investigation into her charity. “It was my secret. It kept building inside me until I was afraid I might burst. It was the darkest period in my life,” she said later. When McCain learnt the truth, he issued the statement: “I have no doubt that the inevitable ups and downs of my political career have been rough on her. She has my love and support and that of her entire family.” Publicly, both say the affair strengthened their marriage.

What did not emerge until after these first softball stories appeared was that the reason the McCains went public – though this was spun at the time as an attempt to help addicts in a similar situation seek treatment – was that the disgruntled former AVMT employee, after being sacked, had approached another Phoenix newspaper with the story of Cindy’s theft of drugs from the charity. That newspaper, the Phoenix New Times, was on the point of printing the story when the McCains called their own press conference to take the heat out of the scandal. The employee, Tom Gosinski, claimed he was fired because he knew too much. The McCains claimed he only went to the press after unsuccessfully trying to blackmail them in return for keeping quiet. But the damage was done: locally the press felt manipulated.

As a result of the DEA investigation, AVMT was closed down, and a doctor who worked for the charity and had filled out prescriptions for Cindy lost his licence to practise medicine, while she went into rehab for a few days and then started attending meetings of Narcotics Anonymous twice a week.

Six years later, when McCain made an unsuccessful bid to become the Republican party’s presidential candidate, the media revisited this story, as it has done again recently. But the 2000 election campaign for the candidacy had even more disturbing consequences for Cindy.

The South Carolina primary that year was described by one of McCain’s advisers as “the dirtiest race I’ve ever seen”. In an attempt to dissuade voters in the Deep South from voting for him, posters were anonymously distributed alleging McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. George Bush, who went on to win the candidacy and two terms in the White House, was believed by the McCain camp to have been behind the move. The couple were devastated. The posters referred to a baby from an orphanage in Bangladesh whom the McCains had cared for since she was 10 weeks old and later adopted. Personally handed to Cindy by Mother Teresa in 1991 during an AVMT mission in the country, the baby girl suffered from such a severely cleft palate that it was not believed she would survive unless she was taken out of the country for medical treatment.

“I really thought I was politically seasoned, with five or six congressional races under our belts at that point,” Cindy said afterwards. “But I did not have a clue – to involve my daughter was unconscionable. I was blown away by it.”

The prospect of her children being harmed again as a result of such dirty electioneering tactics made Cindy wary of her husband going on the campaign trail again, close friends say. Even she admits: “You can see the toe marks in the sand where I was brought on board. I was reluctant to get involved.” So just what did bring her on board McCain’s campaign?

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In a western suburb of Phoenix, I talk to one of Cindy’s closest friends, Sharon Harper, whose family has a weekend cabin adjoining the McCains’s in the red-rock country of Sedona, south of the Grand Canyon.

“Of all the things Cindy will say, No 1 is, ‘I want to be known as a great mother.’

That’s why she’s doing this,” says Harper. “She has two sons in the military now. Her youngest, Jimmy, was in Iraq until two weeks ago. She wants John to be this country’s next commander-in-chief. Not only for the sake of her own children but for every mother and father like her with sons and daughters in harm’s way.” Harper says that while the McCains’s son, a marine, was in Iraq, his mother kept a mobile phone strapped to her wrist so that she would never miss a telephone call from him. “As a mom, she was terrified when he was in Iraq,” says Harper. “She prayed every day and sent gifts.

But she kept it inside. It wasn’t until he came home that she allowed herself to cry.”

In the light of such maternal concern, it’s hard to see what comfort she might take from her husband’s talk of keeping US troops in Iraq for 100 years or more if necessary. The Iraq war is one of the hottest issues in the presidential campaign, and McCain is trading on his harrowing military experience to convince voters that he understands better than anyone what armed conflict is. While his statements on Iraq have caused alarm, as a badly tortured former PoW, his promise to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay detention camp immediately if he becomes president has been widely praised.

But given all the baggage of the Bush White House, he faces an uphill struggle to present himself as a man who will introduce other significant changes. Just how different his economic policies would be from those

of one of the least popular presidents since polling began, and one who has accrued one of the biggest budget deficits in US history, remains unclear. The one area where he does distance himself significantly from Bush is on environmental issues. McCain says he will make tackling climate change a priority, and that he will begin by enforcing legal limits on the emission of greenhouse gases. His children are reported to have pressured him on this when he called a family “summit” with Cindy before deciding to run for president.

Harper, a formidable businesswoman, is suddenly overcome when she contemplates the prospect of the McCains moving to Washington, DC. “To think about Senator McCain becoming president and how that affects his family, how a little girl from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh could end up living in the White House – well, it’s just beautiful,” she sighs.

When I ask where Cindy would find the steel to deal with the pressures of living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Harper says she believes that having grown up in “early Arizona” would give her the strength of character: “She wasn’t a rancher, but was part of that Old West culture – out in the open, with big skies, riding a horse. That does something to the inside of a person.”

Just four years ago, however, Cindy suffered a stroke, losing both her speech and partial use of the left side of her body. Another friend I speak to says it was because she stopped taking blood-pressure medication. After a period of physical therapy, she is said to have fully recovered and has since taken up her son’s love of “drifting” – a kind of motor racing that involves driving cars sideways – to improve her co-ordination. Speaking of her friend’s stamina, Harper stresses that, in addition to running a multi-million-dollar company, Cindy also still regularly travels to trouble spots all over the world through involvement with charities such as the anti-landmine Halo Trust and Operation Smile, which treats children with facial deformities.

Besides, the question of physical frailty is more of an issue when it comes to John McCain, now 71. If elected, he would be the oldest man to take up the presidency. Harper gamely rises to the challenge of discussing McCain’s age by telling an anecdote about how his 96-year-old mother recently flew to Paris to celebrate her birthday at Maxim’s restaurant and how, on an earlier trip to France, after being refused a rental car because of her advanced years, she went straight out and bought a car. “With those sort of genes, John has enough energy to serve four terms,” she laughs, before, to my mind, defeating her own argument by adding: “Besides, he’d only be a year or two older on entering the White House than the greatest president to have served this country, ever – Ronald Reagan.”

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All the time I am in Arizona, I am only too aware that the most compelling drama of this election is going on elsewhere. The week I trudge the streets of Phoenix is the week Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sit elbow to elbow in Austin, Texas, for a televised debate vying for the Democratic party’s nomination as presidential candidate. The encounter is electrifying. For days afterwards the television and newspapers are full of little else. After winning a series of successive primaries, Obama was generally agreed to have held the edge that night. Hillary had only come to life right at the end, when she was asked how she coped with crisis and answered, with a wry smile, that everyone in the nation knew she had had her “challenging moments” – meaning as first lady married to a philandering president. Less than two weeks later she was being dubbed the “Duracell bunny of US politics” after retaking the momentum, winning primaries in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, redrawing the battle lines for a protracted struggle for the nomination. Polls predict that McCain stands a better chance of winning in November if Hillary is chosen as the candidate.

But the same day as the Texas debate, The New York Times carries a report insinuating John McCain had had a romantic relationship with a female lobbyist. An ashen-faced McCain, with sombre-suited Cindy by his side, had called a hasty press conference early in the morning to deny the allegation and condemn the report as a smear campaign. Given the lack of evidence in the article, his complaint was widely held as justified. But there was an eerie echo of Hillary standing by her man as a clearly shaken Cindy stepped up to the microphone and declared: “I not only trust my husband, but know he would never do anything to not only disappoint our family but disappoint the people of America.”

A few nights later, I sit talking with two of Cindy’s contemporaries from Central High. They have generously invited me to dinner, but a steely edge enters the conversation when I bring up the subject of the New York Times report. “That’s such garbage. John and Cindy have a wonderful marriage,” one of my hosts insists, before adding: “We really have to wrap things up quickly now.” They don’t actually ask me to leave, but I get the message. As I gather my things, one of them says: “I hope you’re not going to go writing mean things about our Cindy.”

Granted, Cindy McCain is not standing for office. She has been thrust into the limelight because of her husband’s ambition. But in the event that voters decide next November that McCain’s age and experience outweigh the need for real change, she could find herself in Hillary’s shoes in the East Wing of the White House in January 2009. There she would have her own staff and undoubted influence over the next “leader of the free world”.

When I ask Harper what kind of a first lady Cindy would make, she loyally suggests her friend would combine the “elegance of Jackie Kennedy with the graciousness of Laura Bush. Cindy will be the same person she has always been. She is reserved and shy. But she is good one-on-one with people. She will reach out”.

But as I drive back along the palm-lined avenues of downtown Phoenix and try to imagine the personal wrench it would take for her to leave her lifetime home here for the scrutiny of Washington, DC, I can’t help feeling that in the depths of her soul, Cindy Lou Hensley McCain might privately hope it is a road she won’t have to travel.