Frank Gardner: 'I was shot by al-Qaeda terrorists in 2004 - the pain is still horrific'

Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, talks about his regrets at being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the publication of his latest novel. Hannah Stephenson reports.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner has, until recently, been living out of hotels and staying with friends after the lift to his top-floor apartment broke weeks ago, leaving him unable to access his home because he is, as he calls it, “wheelchair-based”.

“It is endlessly frustrating being wheelchair-based. I don’t like the expression ‘wheelchair-bound’ because I ski, scuba-dive and drive, so I’m not wheelchair-bound.

"But it is frustrating because there are so many things that I can’t do because of the wheelchair.”

Now the lifts are working again, he’s back in his London flat, which offers a magnificent view of the Thames, but says he’s going to have to move out for practical reasons.

On the rare occasions he managed to get back to restock on clothes when the lift wasn’t working, someone had to carry him up and down the stairs.

“We’re going to have to move out of this place, which is a shame because the view is stunning. I’m not going to give that up easily, and my daughters just love this place. I’ve lived here 20 years.”

The award-winning journalist, a Middle East expert who continues to report on domestic and international security, defence and terrorism, was part paralysed in 2004 when he and his cameraman Simon Cumbers were ambushed by al-Qaeda terrorists in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Cumbers was killed, with Gardner shot six times and left for dead.

After 14 surgical operations, he returned to active news reporting within a year, but today says that he still endures horrific pain from the spinal injuries he suffered, leaving him paralysed from the knees down and with a stoma bag, such was the damage to his intestines.

“I have very annoying pain in my left leg. It’s a kind of sciatic pain from my injuries and nothing seems to work, no drugs, surgery, nothing has worked.

"Talking to you now, it’s not too bad but sometimes it feels like somebody is taking a mallet to the inside of my knee.

“Sometimes it’s like I’ve been kicked in the shin and I have to almost freeze and tense my muscles to try and distract from the pain. It only lasts about three to five seconds, but it’s pretty annoying.”

Looking back at that day that changed his life, Gardner and his cameraman were in Riyadh and had joined two Saudi government minders who wanted to show the BBC team around the area but unwittingly took them to a really dangerous location, with no armed escort.

Six of al-Qaeda’s core members were driving past when they saw Gardner and Cumbers doing a piece to camera – and the shooting began. Later, police turned up and took Gardner to hospital.

“My biggest frustration of all is that the Saudis welched on their promise to pay compensation. I cannot forgive them for that,” he says now.

“They did a wonderful job of rescuing me. I had first class medical attention in Saudi. But their ambassador promised compensation because it was their stupid government minders that led us into this trap.

"It was a cock-up, not a conspiracy – they were incompetent.”

“I never got a penny,” he continues. “And that would have made life so much easier – and still could.”

Gardner, 65 , who has lived spasmodically in Egypt, Bahrain and explored many parts of Saudi Arabia, continues with his BBC job, but has also found time to write a series of page-turning topical thrillers involving MI6 operative Luke Carlton.

His fifth, Ballistic, finds one of Russia’s most advanced nuclear submarines beneath Arctic waters carrying something that could change the world forever.

The plot involves Carlton helping a Russian spy who knows about the submarine to escape across the border into Finland, teaming up with a tough female Finnish special forces officer.

Gardner manages to weave in a huge amount of background fact into his fictional page-turner.

“With all my novels, I try to anchor them in reality,” he says. “I find the milieu in which I do my day job as security correspondent endlessly fascinating and I meet very interesting people who, in some cases, are privy to all sorts of information that they’re never going to share with me.

"But you have a feel for what their lives must be like operating in the shadows, whether they are special forces or spooks or counter-terrorism police or whatever.”

He uses his vast knowledge to keep his settings authentic and spoke to retired officers with extensive naval experience to fill him in on submarine life and strategies.

Carlton is not 007, but the world in which he surrounds himself has a touch of that.

Is Gardner living through him vicariously?

“A little bit,” he says smiling. “I don’t pretend that I am him because for a start he’s not in a wheelchair and secondly, more importantly, I was never Special Forces and he was 12 years a Royal Marine, the last four in the Special Boat Service.”

Gardner, who divorced his wife Amanda in 2019 after 22 years of marriage and is now in another relationship, won’t discuss his private life – although he stresses that the divorce was amicable and he is frequently in touch with his ex-wife.

He acknowledges that his job affected family life, being sent at no notice across the globe, never knowing how long he’d be away.

He does have regrets, especially taking that fateful trip in Riyadh.

Away from the world of conflict and terrorism, Gardner has taken up nature photography, venturing to India to see tigers, kayaking around icebergs in Antarctica to look at humpback whales – and would love to see polar bears and walruses in the Svalbard and jaguars in Brazil.

Might he move from security correspondent to wildlife documentary maker?

“Sir David Attenborough is irreplaceable,” he states plainly, “but if hypothetically somebody was to offer me a similar role, I would be very tempted.”

Ballistic by Frank Gardner is published by Bantam, £20.