David Holden (1924–1977) was a writer, journalist, and broadcaster, best known as a journalist specialising in Middle-Eastern affairs, who was murdered in Cairo.
Born in Sunderland (Tyne and Wear), Northeast England, he was educated at Great Ayton Friends' School in North Yorkshire, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (USA).
After a three-year stint as a schoolteacher in Scotland, he worked as a professional actor, then returned to North America, where he wandered as an odd-job man in the US and Mexico. In 1955 he was recruited as an assistant correspondent in Washington by The Times (London) and was transferred the following year to the Middle East to cover the political and diplomatic crisis following the joint invasion of Egypt by Israel, France, and Britain.
As Middle East Correspondent for The Times, he travelled throughout the Arab World during the next four years, then was named roving correspondent. In 1961 he joined The Guardian with the same wide brief and in 1965 became Chief Foreign Correspondent of The Sunday Times.
Holden wrote not only newspaper pieces, but also books—his Farewell to Arabia (1966) and Greece Without Columns (1972) the helped confirm his reputation for eurocentrism and racism.
He began working on a third book, The House of Saud, about the Saudi royal family, in 1976. Before he could finish it however, he was mysteriously killed, and the book had to be completed later by two other Middle-Eastern specialists, Richard Johns and James Buchan, both then with the Financial Times.
The murder of David Holden took place in Cairo, Egypt, early in the morning of 7 December 1977. There are several theories about the crime, none of which has been reliably confirmed.
Holden had initially flown into Cairo several days earlier to cover the radical diplomatic moves then being initiated by Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, making a separate peace with Israel, which since 1967 had occupied the Egyptian province of Sinai. He was thus alienating himself from the rest of the Arab world.
Sadat then closed the cultural centres of the USSR, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. These melodramatic moves were part of the prelude to his own newly conceived Mena House Conference, to be convened in Cairo from 14 December onward, which would bring Israeli officials and their multitudinous entourages, including security personnel, officially into an Arab country for the first time.
Since nothing much was happening in Cairo as yet that required his physical presence, Holden decided to pay a quick visit to Israel, which still had no diplomatic or commercial relations with any Arab country. For this purpose he therefore flew to Amman. As Time magazine reported: "Holden told friends in Amman that he was going to make a detour to Jerusalem on his way [back] to Cairo. 'Haven't been there for years,' he said. 'I guess they consider me public enemy No. 1'."
Holden was joking, though it is true that Israeli officials considered him pro-Arab because of his sensitive reporting on the plight of Palestinians. Holden entered and left Israel overland by way of the Allenby Bridge, the only practical inland portal of entry from the rest of the Middle East. Meanwhile Sadat had expelled the Syrian, Libyan, Algerian, and South Yemeni ambassadors.
Holden returned to Cairo shortly after midnight on 7 December. After clearing passport control and passing out of the baggage hall, he was seen meeting three people whom he apparently knew, two young men and a young woman, with whom he left the airport. A quarter of an hour or so later, according to the best evidence, he was shot once through the heart from behind and his body was dumped.
After he failed to contact his home office as agreed from the hotel where he had booked to stay, the Sunday Times raised the alarm. Found beside a road near a building site not far from the airport, “stripped of all means of identification”, his body had been taken to the Cairo morgue, where it was finally discovered and claimed on 10 December.
The car in which the killing took place was found abandoned in another part of the city. It had been stolen, a fact that, with other details, indicates that the murder was not only premeditated and unprompted by hope of gain, but had also been carried out by technically skilled experts who had arranged local support in advance.
The crime could therefore be presumed to be the work of an intelligence agency. This conclusion was likewise reached by the Egyptian police. The primary suspect in his murder, not surprisingly, was Mossad, the Israeli intelligence bureau, which maintains many agents in Cairo on both a permanent and casual basis and has successfully carried out scores of similarly Russian-style assassinations in other countries, typically using female agents in lethal roles.
Three motives were clearly possible: a) Holden might have discovered something during his brief visit to Israel that it was thought prudent to keep concealed; or, more likely, b) his death was thought to serve as a means of intimidating other journalists deemed to be pro-Palestinian. Certainly such journalists were alarmed at the time. But it was also possible c) that Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, who had been trapped by Sadat's showmanship into agreeing to send a delegation to a conference of which he loathed not only the aims, but also the very conception, had therefore arranged the crime to suggest that Egyptian security was inadequate.
The Egyptian authorities took the case very seriously, no doubt because the timing—the eve of a conference that their president regarded as vital—was so awkward. The investigation was thus overseen personally by Mamdouh Salem, the Prime Minister himself, who had previously served as Minister of the Interior and thus knew quite well how such matters should be handled.
The Egyptians, however, found themselves in a dilemma: to have produced any conclusive evidence at all against Mossad would have jeopardised the forthcoming conference, which was the Egyptian president's current pet project. If any such evidence had surfaced, it might therefore well have been deliberately suppressed. An obscure counter-allegation to the effect that the perpetrators must have been Palestinians attempting to derail the conference beforehand was generally dismissed as ridiculous, since Holden's death had only a negative relevance to their interests, to the Mena House Conference itself, where they were in any case not represented, or to its eventual outcome.
A secondary suspect was Egyptian intelligence, on the theory that Holden might have been mistaken for another British journalist, David Hirst, who had recently been expelled from Egypt and blacklisted by the Egyptian government for his negative commentary on the Sadat regime. A black-listed journalist, however, would never have been admitted into Egypt in the first place.
A tertiary candidate was Saudi intelligence, on the presumption that there might be something harmful to the Saud family in the manuscript for House of Saud, but of course Holden had left the manuscript safely stowed with his wife in England. When Holden's book on the Saud family was finally published, moreover, it was found to be thorough and just, but also quite harmless. There has thus in fact never been any evidence of any kind that might suggest Saudi involvement, which is rendered additionally unlikely by the participation of a woman.
Ultimately even the CIA and MI6 were suspect. In any case, the Sunday Times carried on an investigation that lasted exactly one year (January–December 1978) and failed to reach any firm conclusion. No report was ever published.