Obituary

Michael Elkins

BBC correspondent renowned for the integrity of his reporting from Israel

To a whole, earlier generation of BBC listeners, the journalist and broadcaster Michael Elkins, who has died aged 84, was the voice from Jerusalem. And what a voice. The timbre was gravelly, the accent one-hundred-percent American. More un-BBC you could not be. He was known worldwide. Arabists loathed him, less for the way he reported events than for the bad news - as they saw it - that he was always bringing. Yet this Zionist American Jew was always his own man. He stayed eternally independent. He had a powerful sense of justice.

Elkins scooped the world in the six-day war of June 1967. In those days, he was a stringer for the BBC, for the CBS radio network and for the magazine Newsweek. It was the third Arab-Israeli war. President Nasser of Egypt, along with the Syrians and Jordanians, had grievously miscalculated. Elkins, on day one, reported an Israeli victory. He had bumped into a politician he knew, who directed him post-haste to the war-room. The Arab air forces had been destroyed on the ground.

Israel's military censors held up his copy. Elkins proposed a deal. When you release the story, he told them, give me priority. They played ball. Our correspondent put the electrifying news out to the BBC and CBS. The BBC aired his report, though nervously because he was on his own. CBS watched the wires, waiting for confirmation of the Elkins dispatch. None came. They panicked, and sent him a terse one-liner - "You alone with Israeli victory. You'd better be right." He was, but he did not forgive CBS for doubting him.

That autumn, he visited New York and called on CBS. He was garlanded for his scoop, hailed for his journalism. "Get lost," he snarled, unforgiving, "I resign."

He told me once that CBS had then "offered him the earth" to stay as their correspondent, but he had refused. "Well done," I enthused, praising his probity. Elkins looked at me. "I have to tell you something, David," he said. "If Newsweek had not already given me the earth, I would have been sorely tempted." That was Elkins - tough-minded, but never stupid.

There was another famous BBC occasion in 1982. This time Elkins, for once, got the story wrong. The Israeli army had invaded Lebanon and surrounded Beirut. When the Phalangist militia belonging to their Lebanese allies, the Maronite Christians, began a brutal massacre of Palestinians and other Muslims in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, Israeli troops simply looked the other way.

Back in Jerusalem, Elkins was, at first, misled by Israeli sources. His BBC report was inaccurate. I was in Beirut at that time. I heard the comments of French correspondents in my hotel. "Did you hear Elkins this evening? Dégotant. Disgusting."

The next morning, Elkins was on the World Service again. He had been duped, his voice was bristling with anger, his underlining of Israeli complicity now trenchant. By chance, I overheard the same French group again, this time at the breakfast table. "Did you hear Elkins this morning? Mon Dieu. Epatant," they cried. "Fantastic."

He was indeed a phenomenon, a man of parts. Born to European immigrants to the United States, he grew up in New York, and was top of the class in almost everything at school, especially English - he had an inspiring teacher. Then, as a youngster, he fell in with hoodlums, but later went west to join his elder brother, Saul, a Hollywood producer.

There, Elkins the film script-writer and trade-union organiser was born. Over the years, he scripted more than 30 Hollywood B-movies. His work as a union representative got him blacklisted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, who accused him (falsely) of being a communist. He was no communist, but was certainly an active anti-fascist before the second world war, a supporter of the International Brigades in republican Spain.

With the war, Elkins was recruited into a shadowy, clandestine world. He joined the OSS, America's Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, led by General "Wild Bill" Donovan. He was dispatched on murky missions behind enemy lines in Europe. Heaven knows what these involved. Certainly, he was with US troops when the Dachau death camp was liberated. And it was with this experience, encountering skeletal Holocaust survivors, that Elkins rediscovered his own Jewish roots.

In his book, Forged In Fury, published in 1971, Elkins wrote of a secret Jewish organisation, some 50-strong, called DIN, formed in Europe in 1945 to assassinate "the killers of Jews" - former Nazis, SS men, camp staff and others who had slipped away unpunished into civilian life. DIN was shortlived but deadly. Elkins changed names, places and dates to protect those of whom he wrote. One DIN member he describes, Arnie Berg, an American, bears a remarkable resemblance to the author himself.

A couple of years after the war, Elkins was introduced in New York to Teddy Kollek, later to be mayor of Jerusalem. Kollek was masterminding illegal shipments of arms to the Jewish Haganah in Palestine. With his OSS experience, Elkins was soon on board. When he found the FBI on his tail, he and his wife, Martha, decamped in a hurry to the new-born state of Israel. It was 1948.

After living for a year on a kibbutz, he took up documentary film-making, before getting into journalism, first with CBS and Newsweek, then, in 1965, with the BBC. In 1982, aged 65, his BBC days were over. He never regretted them.

Eight years later, he joined the Jerusalem Report, a new English-language magazine, as ombudsman and editor of its letters pages. As they themselves would tell you, he was "a walking history of modern Israel . . . our moral conscience and moral compass . . . a man who embodied the courtesy and integrity of a bygone age, and thereby challenged us to strive for those values". Michael Elkins was working with them full-time until his death.

He is survived by his son Jonathan, and his longtime companion Ruth Tzur.

Michael Elkins, journalist, born January 22 1917; died March 10 2001

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