Kidnapped!

Argentina was never a placid sort of place.

But my father, Ronald Grove, was well used to its turbulent ways. At 64, he had lived in Buenos Aires for over a quarter of a century, as head of the Vestey family’s huge meat-packing business.

So he was not unduly concerned when a visit by ex-President Perón early in 1972, after a 17-year exile in Madrid, stirred up a surge of activity by left-wing urban guerrilla groups.

He did know he might be on their hit list, especially as he’d recently had to lay off hundreds of workers. Even so, back in London, where I was a leader-writer on the Evening Standard, I was startled when my father offhandedly mentioned that he was now varying his route to work and had a weekday bodyguard with a .22 pistol.

I wrote back sounding like a worried parent: ‘Things are getting dangerous. A .22 pistol is only one up from a peashooter. Shouldn’t you and Mum be thinking of getting out?’

It was the middle of the night when the phone woke me. I can’t remember who was calling because at the word ‘kidnap’ I went into shock.

It was probably Lord Vestey himself, my father’s boss, the young but thankfully level-headed Sam (then 31), allegedly known at Eton as ‘Spam’ thanks to the family’s meat fortune.

‘Your father … on his way to golf … alive and well, but…’ I scarcely needed to listen. This was just as I’d feared. The call ended on a reassuring note: the company would do whatever was necessary to get Ronnie released. But there was also a chilling instruction: I must not talk to the press. It was vital to keep the matter from the Argentine authorities.

This was a bit of a tall order for an ambitious young hack. On the Tube on my way into work, I could see that nearly all the papers led with the story.

‘British business chief kidnapped by guerrillas in Buenos Aires’ was the headline in the Times that morning, 11th December 1972.

My own paper, the Evening Standard, would surely splash on it later in the day. And here was I, with a unique inside track on the story, forbidden from talking to Fleet Street colleagues. Of course, I knew this was right.

The guerrillas were emphatic that if the police got involved, Señor Grove would be killed. This was no idle threat. Only months earlier, a kidnapped Fiat executive, Oberdan Sallustro, had been murdered by his captors when the police came too close. They shot four bullets into him.

But, still, it was hard giving no- comment answers to the reporters, who were phoning me at all hours. My editor at the Standard, Charles Wintour, was understanding. There was no pressure on me to contribute to the paper’s coverage. Anyway, without much help from me, the news desk produced a decent feature. Underneath the photograph of my parents, my mother was described (she would have been thrilled) as ‘ex-actress Lesley Burton’. The last time she’d appeared on a West End stage was 35 years before (in Housemaster by Ian Hay, which ran for 662 performances –Mum’s glory days).

Meantime, somewhere in a Buenos Aires suburb, in a stifling, strip-lit cellar,

Ronald and Lesley Grove in the Evening Standard, where Trevor Grove worked at the time of the 1972 kidnap eight feet square, the ceiling just three inches above his head, my father had been coming to terms with his predicament. His first note to my mother was dated the evening of his capture. I have it in front of me now, written in a firm hand on rough paper, though I don’t know how or when it reached her.

He describes his ‘people’s prison’. There was a bed at one end in a wire cage, which they promised not to close if he behaved himself. ‘I quickly promised.’

That first night, and every night, one of the guards slept on the floor beside him. In the morning, he did exercises and cleaned his cell. ‘Washed at the basin and had to pot myself in front of the girl guard – not so pleasant but she took no notice,’ he wrote, with admirable sangfroid. ‘Afterwards we played canasta on my bed.’

With his captors’ permission, he began keeping a diary. ‘These young people are all masked in capuchas, hoods with eyeholes; so I can’t tell their ages, but I put them around 18–30. They are very polite – completely dedicated to their socialist views. I spent most of yesterday listening to their arguments, one at a time. Very intense…’

Back in London, I carried on working, a distraction from the leaden fear inside me. This was more than a decade before such truly awful kidnappings as those of Terry Waite, Brian Keenan and John McCarthy in Lebanon: they spent years in captivity, while fellow hostages were killed. Even so, I thought grimly of the ordeal of Geoffrey Jackson, the British ambassador to Uruguay, who’d spent eight months in the hands of Tupamaro guerrillas the previous year.

The particular horror for relatives of a kidnap victim is that they are helpless onlookers, and they want only one outcome, at any cost. It was said the kidnappers were demanding a ransom of a million dollars – six million in today’s money.

During the days and nights that followed, my father was kept abreast of negotiations. He had to nominate colleagues who would be instructed how and where to deliver the ransom – two to make decoy runs, the third to hand over the actual cash. My father was deeply unhappy about putting them in such danger. But that is what these brave men did.

The guerrillas were triumphant. Their hostage was blindfolded and manhandled up the ladder, and then carried to a small truck. After an hour’s drive, they stopped. The senior guard, the man whom the others called El Flaco (the thin one) – and whom my father had come to like during their long conversations in the cell – led him from the vehicle.

‘He told me it was 9.30pm,’ my father later recalled, ‘that I was in the district of Matanza and that within two blocks I would come to a paved road where I could catch a taxi. I asked for some money. He gave me 20 pesos.

‘He told me to take off my blindfold and walk forward 30 paces without looking back. Before leaving me, El Flaco clapped me on the back and said, ‘Adiós Go with God. Be proud of the way you have comported yourself. We have nothing against you personally.’

It was 1am on Wednesday 20th December when he reached the embassy in Buenos Aires. In the afternoon, there was a press conference, though by that time in London, which was four hours ahead, the Evening Standard had already scooped the world: ‘Kidnapped Briton is released for Christmas!’

How much his employers had paid to bring about that happy outcome was never disclosed. But the success of the hostage-takers was not lost on ordinary criminals: over the next few years, dozens of businessmen were kidnapped in Argentina, for ever larger ransoms.

Years later, I asked my friend Andrew Graham-Yooll, the courageous news editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the Dirty War, 1976–83, when the generals were in charge, what might have become of my father’s kidnappers. Dad was especially anxious to know whether El Flaco could have survived the junta’s purges.

Andrew made enquiries. A senior guerrillero, he was told, who could well have been involved in the Grove kidnap, had been captured and become one of the disappeared. He had almost certainly been executed in the military’s favourite fashion – flown out across the River Plate, drugged, stripped and dropped into the sea.

Trevor Grove’s No One Taught Me to Tango: Memories of Anglo-Argentina is published by Black Spring (£20)