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In many years of working with Kim Sengupta, I never came across anyone so fearless. He regarded it as his job, duty, calling, to report on the world’s conflicts, to go where others could not, or would not, and tell us how it was.
I worked with him as a reporter and he was a master story-getter, dogged in his pursuit, sometimes parking a morsel but not forgetting about it, returning to it later when the time was right.
Then, as editor, I soon got to appreciate which journalists were “high maintenance”, constantly and painfully seeking approval and reassurance. Even some of the paper’s “stars” would fall into this bracket. Kim, despite the places he went and what he put himself through, was most definitely not one of those. If he said he was going somewhere, he went, he saw, he reported and he left.
His quiet, understated and polite manner would quickly win people’s trust. He had an extraordinary knack for talking to anyone, be they high up or lowly, from ambassadors or generals to troopers to civilians – to those of an unspecified background (security services most probably) and extracting information from them. He had an unerring ability to put himself in their shoes, to understand their problems and fears.
I never knew him not to work – evenings, weekends, holidays, they did not apply where Kim was concerned.
No matter where he was, he was calm, matter of fact and analytical. I never saw him fazed; I didn’t hear him complain. He laid himself repeatedly on the line, yet not once to my knowledge did he ever ask for a pay rise – I don’t think it ever occurred to him.
He witnessed terrible events and while they must have affected him, outwardly he would move on to the next.
Often, his reporting was pointed and accusatory, none more so than during the chaotic evacuation of Kabul in 2021:
On that same day a young Hazara girl, around eight years old, a hand missing as a result of an IED (improvised explosive device) explosion, had asked me to try and find her mother. “I feel very scared, I have no one,” she said. We looked but failed to find her mother in the swelling crowd. A little later the girl wandered over to where the shrouded bodies had been laid out and fainted. One of them was of her mother.
Every single foreign journalist on the ground has received desperate pleas from those trying to get away; everyone has tried the best they could, getting out individuals and families with the help of sympathetic troops and officials who have shown patience and compassion.
The pleas for help have continued even after the airlifts are ending. They are from people we know well and those we do not know at all. As I write this there are phone calls from someone I met in Herat two weeks ago. “Please, please, please help, please get your government to help, they want to kill us,” said the man. He has reasons to be frightened.
There is a deep concern for our Afghan colleagues in the media. They have been the real heroes in covering this conflict. We, the foreign media, have come here over the years, done our stint, and then gone back.
That was typical Kim. Seeing courage in others and paying tribute to them, while disregarding praise for himself. It really was what he did, without fuss or fanfare.
I will never forget Alistair Dawber, then foreign editor, in 2012 coming into my office to tell me that Kim had gone missing in Aleppo. The Syrian civil war was raging and Kim had gone into the besieged city via its sewers. He was supposed to phone in every two hours and had not done so.
We waited another two. No sign. We called the Foreign Office to see if there were any reports from the ground, from special forces, of a Brit being injured or killed or kidnapped. Nothing.
I was bracing myself to break the news to his family when Alistair entered, his face wreathed in a smile. Kim was safe. His mobile phone battery had died. It was that banal.
When we caught up, he thought it funny how scared we’d been.
Kim really was one of a kind. We were blessed to have him as a colleague and friend, to receive his dispatches, and to be able to share in his deep, hard-won knowledge.
