Sandy Gall, a veteran correspondent for Britain’s Independent Television News who covered with calm precision the globe’s major conflicts in the last half of the 20th century, died on Sunday at his home in Penshurst, a village in Kent, England. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Carlotta Gall, a reporter for The New York Times.
For nearly 50 years, Mr. Gall’s weary eyes and elongated features were ubiquitous on British television. As a war reporter in Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East, and for more than two decades as an imperturbable presenter on Independent Television’s popular “News at Ten,” he was in all the country’s living rooms.
He covered the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., and the arrival of U.S. Marines in Vietnam in 1965. He was one of the few journalists to see North Vietnamese tanks roll into Saigon in 1975, and he captured on film the early days of the Vietcong occupation; fleeing British diplomats left him the keys to the embassy club so he could use the pool. The queen decorated him, and Prince Charles wrote the preface to one of his books.
In his later years Mr. Gall became known as a specialist on Afghanistan. He trekked hundreds of miles to report on the anti-Soviet guerrillas, known as the mujahedeen, who fought to free their country from Russian control in the 1980s. He wrote six books on Afghanistan and founded a charity for disabled Afghans, drawn by the improbable pluck of the country’s people and by the rugged landscape, which reminded him of his native Scotland — “but without the whisky,” he liked to joke, ruefully.
He published his last book, “Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud,” a biography of the assassinated mujahedeen leader, whom he admired, when he was 93.
Mr. Gall covered conflicts and won scoops — he got the first footage of the retaking of Kuwait in the 1991 Persian Gulf war — but he was a war correspondent without swagger. He sought no personal glory from his exposure to danger.
“Unless you are a very odd person, you don’t enjoy combat as a journalist,” he told an interviewer for The Observer in 2012. “You are just there to tell a story. War is bloody dangerous — I know that.”
Brushes with death were frequent. In Afghanistan the mujahedeen, initially mistaking him for a Russian, wanted to kill him, a job Soviet bombing raids later came close to accomplishing. Stints in African jails — the Congo in 1960, Uganda in 1972 — taught him about the thin line between the living and the dead in that continent’s conflicts.
“We were taken to a small room crowded with about 10 drunken soldiers with guns and were told that we would be executed shortly,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 1968, recalling his arrest in Bakwanga in Congo’s breakaway Kasai province, eight years before. “Their officer threw soda water in my face, and we were ordered to strip and await execution.” United Nations officials intervened at the last moment, and Mr. Gall and his colleagues — he was then working for Reuters — were freed.
In Uganda in 1972, as President Idi Amin was expelling the country’s Indian immigrants, Mr. Gall was thrown into a cell immediately on landing. “Then I noticed the wall 10 feet to my right,” he wrote years later. “A line of bullet holes started about waist high and climbed at evenly spaced intervals to the top of the wall. My eyes went to the ceiling. It was splashed with blood.” That episode, too, ended in unexpected liberation, several days later.
He lunched with spies, dictators, rebel heroes and villainous coup leaders. Summoned to Pakistan after Gen. Zia ul-Haq’s coup in 1977 with a phone call from the general himself, Mr. Gall reacted with typical sang-froid. “I stared out the window, but for once the beauty of the garden failed to register,” he wrote in “News From the Front: A Television Reporter’s Life” (1994).
The veteran former Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randal, one of Mr. Gall’s last contemporaries from a golden age of foreign correspondence, recalled in an email that “for so many years and in so many dicey places, bumping into Sandy was a reunion ritual of shared risk and unflappable professional dedication.”
Mr. Gall had covered the Soviet Union’s repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising — he was there when the prime minister, Imre Nagy, was executed — and that left him with an abiding distrust of Russian motives and tactics. It was part of what drew him to Afghanistan to cover the unexpected success of ragged guerrillas against the overwhelmingly superior Soviet forces.
In the summer of 1982, he and a television crew walked for two weeks and 150 miles over Afghan desert and mountain to find Ahmad Shah Massoud, the besieged rebel leader, who was holed up in the remote Panjshir Valley. It would have been a taxing trip for a much younger man, but for Mr. Gall, then in his mid-50s, the payoff was worth it.
“We didn’t hear from him for three months,” his daughter Carlotta recalled. An hourlong documentary with rare footage of the Afghan struggle was the result.
Mr. Massoud had already “survived six major Russian offensives,” Mr. Gall wrote in his Massoud biography. “His resilience, intelligence and military skill in the face of relentless Soviet bombing and scorched-earth tactics were immediately evident.”
Mr. Gall “found, in this man young enough to be his son, a heroism that seems to have appealed to every fiber of his being,” the former government minister Rory Stewart wrote in the preface to “Afghan Napoleon.”
Other journalists penetrated behind Soviet lines, but “no other foreign journalist or traveler did so as many times, as far into the country, and stayed inside longer than Sandy,” Peter Tomsen, the former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, said by email.
Henderson Alexander Gall was born on Oct. 1, 1927, in Penang, in what is now Malaysia but was then a British colony, the only child of a Scottish rubber planter, Henderson Gall, and Jean (Begg) Gall. He was sent to Scotland at age 4 to live with relatives and attend Glenalmond College, a well-known Scottish public school.
He graduated from the University of Aberdeen with an M.A. in French and German in 1952, did national service with the Royal Air Force in Berlin, and joined Reuters in 1953. He was with the agency for 10 years, covering the Suez Crisis and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya among other events, before joining Independent Television News.
In 2010 The Daily Telegraph found Mr. Gall, who had retired from television a few years earlier, walking down a Kabul street, “itself an undertaking that no British soldier ever attempts alone.” His Afghanistan charity, Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal, which he ran with the help of his family, had fitted “at least” 20,000 people with artificial limbs, he told The Observer. The charity would close in 2020.
In 1958 Mr. Gall married Eleanor Smyth, whom he met when she was working in the British Legation in Budapest and he was covering the 1956 uprising; she died in 2018. In addition to his daughter Carlotta, he is survived by two other daughters, Michaela Gall and Fiona Gall-Bonhoure; a son, Alexander; four grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
“At an age when many of his contemporaries were preparing for retirement, Gall found in Afghanistan the central subject of the rest of his long life,” Mr. Stewart, himself the author of a notable book on Afghanistan, wrote in his preface to Mr. Gall’s.
The Taliban takeover in 2021 was a huge disappointment to Mr. Gall, his daughter Carlotta said in an interview. In the days when they were fighting the Soviets, she said, he had been “deeply moved by the Afghans who were so impoverished and fighting the superpowers.”
“They were fighting with nothing.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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