Death Of A Freelancer
Profile
By Charlotte Alfred
Dec. 20, 2019
The wreckage was still smoldering when Christopher Allen reached the wheat fields where 298 people had fallen to their deaths. Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur had exploded in the air, scattering bodies and hunks of plastic and metal across miles of Ukrainian countryside.
Chris picked his way through the debris, trying to take in every detail. He was torn between recording everything and keeping his eyes firmly on the ground, trying not to step on body parts. Some bodies had lost skin or limbs. Others were still strapped into their seats. “They look as if they are manikins, twisted, turned and rearranged,” he scribbled in his notebook, “their limbs bent at impossible angles, their skin like dull yellow plastic.”
Weeks earlier, the 23-year-old had told his nervous family back in the U.S. that he was going to Ukraine to witness history in the making. He wanted to become a journalist and to get as close to his story as possible. On July 17, 2014, he found himself one hour’s drive away from the biggest news story in the world. The death of nearly 300 people from 10 countries put the six-month war between Ukrainian forces and Russian-supported separatists back in international headlines.
As the news broke, Chris messaged editors from his hostel in Donetsk, the capital of separatist-controlled east Ukraine. “I’ll be at the site of the crash tomorrow morning and can help with reporting if you’re interested,” he wrote to several people he’d been hoping to work for. “[I’m] in Ukraine indefinitely should you need contributions.”
Many didn’t reply, but a few were glad to hear from a freelancer already at the scene of the day’s top story. Roland Oliphant, a correspondent for the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, was trying to get there from Moscow. Local flights had been canceled and it would take him around 24 hours by train and taxi. He put Chris in touch with his editors.
When Chris reached the crash site, there were few English-speaking journalists there. It was raining, but the smell of kerosene lingered in the air. The contents of the passengers’ luggage were strewn across golden fields, now striped with burnt black scars. Chris inventoried the passengers’ belongings: a Donald Duck book, a “Lonely Planet” guide to Indonesia, swimming goggles, an “I Love Amsterdam” T-shirt. “You want to absorb it all, and it’s hard to do that with something that’s so horrifying,” Chris later told a friend. “But it’s important not to look away.”
Chris filed stories for The Telegraph and Mashable that day. Oliphant finally reached the site late at night. He and Chris shared a byline on the Telegraph article, but they never got a chance to meet. Oliphant was impressed by Chris’ writing. He felt awkward when people congratulated him on the piece afterward. It was really Chris’ story, he thought.
Chris returned to the crash site two days later. Foreign and local reporters were everywhere. Someone had rearranged the passengers’ belongings into neat piles to get a better picture. TV correspondents did their makeup and trampled over the debris to find the best backdrop for their broadcast. “We found a body, our first mission of the day!” one journalist said. “We’ll be out of here in a week,” another told Chris. He felt sick. This was not the sort of journalism he wanted to be part of.
Throughout that summer in Donetsk, Chris tried to get more journalism work — or at least the chance to contribute to news organizations from time to time as a freelancer or stringer. He started a blog about life in Donetsk and live-tweeted press conferences and reports of fighting in and around the city. “I have a lot of media following me on Twitter. Pretty sure that the information I disseminate makes me a free stringer,” he complained in a tweet. “FYI: I’m looking for a job. I can’t be privy to disaster everyday.”
One scorching summer day, Chris heard that Ukrainian shelling had killed civilians at a children’s playground. When he got there, photographers jostled to get the best photo of the blood-slicked asphalt. Chris followed them as they chased down more destruction — past shelled homes, a convoy of tanks, armed fighters yelling at them to stop taking photos.
“Seeing all this death, you’re conscious of how quickly a life can be taken, whether it’s the person walking across the playground during shelling, or the people who fell thousands of meters in a plane,” he told friends. “You quickly become conscious being here, in the middle of this conflict, that life is a really fragile thing.”
Christopher Allen reported in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. Who was looking out for him?
Earlier this year, Jeremy Bliss, one of Chris’ cousins, arrived at the former archives of The Guardian newspaper on a crisp London night. The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders was screening a film about Marie Colvin, a renowned war correspondent who died in a Syrian government airstrike in 2012.
The movie was painful for Jeremy to watch: Chris had been killed on a reporting trip 18 months earlier.
Jeremy, a debonair 32-year-old entrepreneur and filmmaker, had spent much of the time since urging the press to acknowledge his cousin’s death — and demanding officials investigate it.
After she died, Colvin’s life was celebrated in the Hollywood movie, a documentary and a best-selling biography. Few of the news organizations Chris had worked for even reported that he was killed.
Chris’ relatives struggled to reconcile his dedication to war reporting with the industry’s apparent indifference to his death. They were hurt when they heard rumblings from other journalists that Chris had been reckless. Unlike Colvin, Chris did not have high-profile supporters or prize-winning stories to explain why he took the risks he did. They wondered if that was why no one seemed to be pushing very hard for an investigation into how he was killed.
Chris’ life “seemed cheap to those who used him for his words and then abandoned him,” Jeremy wrote in The New Statesman on the first anniversary of his cousin’s death. “It might be comforting to write that his life’s work brought meaning to his death, but that would be untrue. Instead, it only highlights the increasingly dangerous work of freelance reporters like Chris and the lack of care given them in these neglected conflicts by big media organizations.”
War reporting has always been dangerous, but today journalists are increasingly targeted for their work, whether in war zones or by their own governments. When they’re killed, their murders nearly always go unpunished.
At the same time, most media organizations now rely more on freelancers like Chris Allen, and less on staff correspondents like Marie Colvin, to gather international news. As news budgets shrink and foreign bureaus close, it is often cheaper and quicker to commission a freelance journalist than it is to send a staff reporter.
Freelance reporting is a competitive and tenuous career, and low pay makes it even more dangerous. Many freelancers can’t access expensive insurance, equipment and training courses. They may cut costs by using less-safe hotels and transport or by forgoing mental health support.
“There is often a rush to judgment when a journalist is killed in a war about whether he or she was being reckless, [and] young stringers get judged most of all because of assumptions about them,” said Oliphant, the Telegraph correspondent. “But we have to acknowledge that anyone who reports on war puts themself at risk — that’s how war gets reported. There is a responsibility to take care of those people.”
Chris grew up in a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia. His pacifist mother, Joyce, had left her tight-knit Armenian Orthodox community — the priest told her she asked too many questions. She later became a Presbyterian minister. Chris’ father, an intelligent, unassuming Brit named John, worked in inner-city schools.
The family found the neighborhood snobby and its pleasantries fake. Even their rowdy mutt was a local pariah — they once found a pet euthanasia flyer in their mailbox, with some of the passages highlighted.
The oldest of two boys, Chris hated school at first. Smart and stubborn, he would get in trouble for correcting his teachers. Joyce passionately defended her son’s refusal to conform. “You have done your son a terrible disservice,” a frustrated school counselor told Joyce when Chris was in second grade. “By encouraging this behavior, he will never learn how to take standardized tests.”
“I have encouraged Chris to think,” Joyce replied.
When it was time for Chris to start high school, his family sent him to a Quaker academy they really couldn’t afford. The school encouraged independence and debate, and Chris thrived. But when his dream college, the University of Pennsylvania, rejected him, he had no Plan B.
Chris found a last-minute place at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, hoping to use the U.K. as a base to travel the world. He stayed only a year. The unstructured British higher education system was isolating, the class system daunting and the food deep-fried. He returned to Philadelphia, spent a year at Temple University, and was finally accepted to Penn for his last two years of undergrad. Then he headed back across the Atlantic for a master’s degree in European history, with semesters in Paris, Oxford and Leiden in the Netherlands.
Chris had planned to continue studying for a Ph.D. But he began to see academia as out of touch with how quickly the world was changing.
In early 2014, pro-European protesters ousted Ukraine’s government in Kyiv. In the country’s east, Russian-speaking protesters called for autonomy from the capital. Soon, men wearing Russian military uniforms were spotted with local rebels. Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula that March.
A month later, Chris went to Donetsk for his spring break. He arrived just as separatist forces stormed the regional government headquarters, raised a Russian flag and declared a “people’s republic.”
“I left academia because I found it reductive and too far removed from the truth it was trying to capture,” he wrote in a letter that year. “I went to eastern Ukraine to feel history ... hoping that maybe journalism was the answer.”
He wasn’t enamored with the media industry. But he wanted to understand conflict and to write about it — to “get as close to the conflict as I could,” he explained later. “I believed that ... in a place where humanity is at its most exposed and raw, I might better understand something fundamental about the way the world works and the way history is made — about who people really are.”
On Joyce’s birthday in early April, Chris texted her a photo of an imposing gray government building in Donetsk that she recognized from the news. “Greetings from the top floor,” he wrote. “How the hell are you there?” she texted back. “I’m at a press conference,” he responded. “How the hell did you get into a press conference?” Joyce asked. “I showed my student ID,” Chris replied.
When he finished his master’s degree, Chris couldn’t wait to get back to east Ukraine. “If I’m ever going to be a war journalist, I have to actually be there,” he told a skeptical friend in July 2014. When MH17 was shot down later that month and Chris’ dispatches hit international news, his friend messaged him: “You were right that you have to be there. I’m proud of you.”
Known as the city of a million roses for its floral paths and parks, the separatist stronghold of Donetsk was besieged and under curfew. Chris noted there were few women on the streets but armed men everywhere: in restaurants and stores, racing through traffic lights in makeshift military vehicles. They were headed to fight Ukrainian forces and pro-Kyiv militias on the outskirts of the city.
That summer, Donetsk hosted a stream of foreign reporters with wildly differing levels of experience and clashing ideas about how to practice journalism. This was common in modern war zones, which cheap laptops, cellphones and air travel have opened to newcomers with little professional experience. Ukraine was particularly easy for Western journalists to reach. So foreign freelancers, who didn’t need a visa or official media accreditation to start reporting, poured in.
As Chris arrived in early July, the information war in Ukraine was heating up. Russian media portrayed the Ukrainian revolution as a foreign plot, painting the new government and its allies as fascists persecuting Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population.
Chris initially spent time with a group of freelancers in Donetsk who viewed mainstream Western coverage as anti-Russian and independent freelance journalism as a necessary antidote. Some of them later became prominent Western supporters of the separatists and regulars on Russian state TV, including American Patrick Lancaster and Briton Graham Phillips.
Chris soon grew skeptical of his friends’ professed independence. He was furious when one spoke to a pro-Kremlin website after he and Lancaster were detained by the Ukrainian army. The website hadn’t been interested when Russian-backed separatists detained Chris the week before.
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Each side in Ukraine blamed the other for downing MH17. A Dutch-led international investigation later found Russian-backed separatists to be responsible.
“It is very difficult to make money after research, transport, and translation costs are deducted, thus placing a financial barrier to accessing the truth.”
In mid-August, Chris tweeted The Guardian’s account of Russian military vehicles crossing into east Ukraine and was attacked by people who saw a Western media conspiracy against Russia. “I’m working here in part because I don’t believe in established media,” he responded. “Interesting news though. Decide the truth for yourself.”
The problem with international coverage of Ukraine was not the existence of an anti-Russia conspiracy, Chris realized, but the fact that cash-starved media outlets had so few reporters on the ground. So they relied on the same few wire services like Reuters, which narrowed the range of stories told, or turned to low-paid freelancers, whose work was limited by the difficulty in covering their expenses.
“It’s much cheaper for the media to pay freelancers a bit of money for an interview or a short article than have a salaried employee on the spot, but this doesn’t make for responsible journalism,” Chris wrote in a blog post he drafted but never published. “It is very difficult to make money after research, transport, and translation costs are deducted, thus placing a financial barrier to accessing the truth.”
Most correspondents seemed to barely acknowledge freelancers, so Chris was grateful when Al Jazeera correspondent Nazanine Moshiri, whom he met outside Donetsk that summer, encouraged him and connected him to colleagues.
“He had no journalistic experience, but was trying so hard to understand the story in depth and get published,” said Moshiri, who now works for the United Nations in East Africa. “He was an excellent reporter, really brave, but taking a lot of risks on his own without proper security or resources.”
Back in Pennsylvania, Chris’ mom oscillated between her fear for her son’s safety and her conviction that she must support his chosen path. She called a close friend who’d been a copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer for two decades.
“I want to be clear on this: Do you want me to try to help him, or do you want to try to get him to come home?” Pat Hughes asked Joyce.
Joyce paused. “Help him,” she said.
Hughes’ husband, Sam, was a senior editor at the Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine for the University of Pennsylvania. Chris needed a freelance contract in order to arrange to embed with the Donbas Battalion, a volunteer militia fighting against separatist forces in east Ukraine. Sam Hughes assigned the story. “Please don’t take ANY risks on our behalf!” he wrote to Chris.
Embedding with troops is a widely used but controversial part of war reporting. It’s often the only way to get to a front line, but critics caution that journalists on long embeds may start to identify too closely with the soldiers they’re covering. This tension applies outside war zones, too: You need to get close enough to your story to fully understand it, but not so close that you lose perspective. For freelance journalists, these ethical balancing acts can be even harder to navigate without established editors and colleagues they can trust.
Chris traveled with the Donbas Battalion from their makeshift barracks in an elementary school to the trenches outside Ilovaisk, where one of the fiercest battles of the war was raging that summer. As the fighters cleaned and stored their weapons each night, Chris did the same with his helmet, bulletproof vest, camera and notebook.
“We all believe in our luck here; otherwise, how could we bear this place? Everything is decided by centimeters, by seconds. We are all targets; a press badge can’t protect me from an explosion.”
One night, as the men got ready to attack a separatist checkpoint, one of them handed Chris a weapon. “I only shoot this,” Chris responded, pointing to his camera. But eventually he took the gun and fired it into the distance. He was immediately overwhelmed with regret. It was an unforgivable lapse in judgment, he berated himself in his journal. Now he felt implicated in the war, not just an observer.
The battalion decided to pull back the next day, after an advance unit was killed by snipers. “We all believe in our luck here; otherwise, how could we bear this place?” Chris wrote. “Everything is decided by centimeters, by seconds. We are all targets; a press badge can’t protect me from an explosion.”
On his last night with the battalion, morbid thoughts filled Chris’ mind: “Will the end come quickly? Will I be conscious of the moment I pass from life to death? Will I realize that it is coming?”
Before they left, pro-Kyiv fighters dragged a bound and bruised separatist before an angry crowd of their fellow militiamen. A soldier ran a knife across the prisoner’s throat and wrapped a rope around his neck. Another fighter shoved Chris out of the way and forced him to delete his photos. Chris didn’t see what happened next.
Chris tried to return to the front lines and rejoin the Donbas Battalion in the following weeks, but he kept getting stopped at checkpoints. On one attempt in late August 2014, he was hauled off to a separatist jail outside Donetsk.
That night in jail ended up saving his life, Chris told his parents. It stopped him from reaching the Donbas Battalion, which was by then surrounded by separatist forces that — according to Kyiv — were heavily reinforced by troops from Russia.
On Aug. 29, the Donbas Battalion fighters retreated from Ilovaisk, believing they would be able to evacuate safely. Instead, they came under heavy fire. More than 360 fighters were killed and hundreds more were captured.
Chris went back to Brussels to write the feature for the Penn Gazette, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the men he’d been in the trenches with. Franko, a Ukranian American volunteer, had been killed. A Georgian nicknamed Stranik (“the wanderer”) was missing, believed to be in Russian custody. “Now I’m left with the cold insincerity and boredom of our tidy bourgeois world, a facade pasted atop the fucked up,” Chris wrote in his notebook.
He wrote a letter to American war correspondent Michael Herr, whose book “Dispatches” had brought the Vietnam War to life in the late 1970s.
“The newspapers don’t want the whole truth — the complex narrative, the interplay of people and forces on the ground,” Chris wrote. “People don’t want it either. … It’s why I can’t tell them about how beautiful the war can be, how much I loved the front. And when I do, it’s why they can’t hear.”
“Maybe I’m telling it wrong.”
In early 2015, a few months after Chris’ 24th birthday, he was embedded with the Donbas Battalion when it handed over a position to another nationalist militia, the Azov Battalion. They arrived in newer trucks and smarter uniforms, and generally looked more put-together, Chris thought. He arranged to embed with them a few weeks later.
The far-right Azov Battalion openly welcomed foreign fighters, attracting a stream of European volunteers and some Americans. At the battalion’s makeshift base in a former holiday resort, Chris met up with 30-year-old British volunteer Chris Garrett, known as Swampy, with whom he’d been chatting online. Swampy had joined Azov after seeing a Facebook post seeking people with de-mining experience; he had previously cleared land mines in Myanmar. He seemed less enthusiastic about the battalion’s far-right politics than the others.
“Swampy wants to convince the world we’re not Nazis, but we are all Nazis,” Steve, a Finnish volunteer who’d fought with the French Foreign Legion, told Chris as the fighters headed out to lay mines in the dark. Chris was appalled by some of the men’s lust for killing and their white supremacist views. But the foreign soldiers made for a compelling story, and because they spoke English, it was a story he could finally immerse himself in.
Chris befriended the fighters and could be defensive on their behalf. He wrote to New York Times correspondent Andrew Kramer that summer, objecting to his description of the Azov Battalion as “openly neo-Nazi” and pitching him a story on their “spectrum of ideological perspectives.”
Chris had few assignments during his first year as a freelancer, but his relationships with foreign fighters did eventually lead to breakthroughs. He gathered reams of material and dreamed of turning it into a book. And by mid-2015, he was finally getting commissioned to write features for major media outlets: Al Jazeera, Vice and Diplomatic Courier magazine. Even so, he was barely scraping by. He was paying his expenses upfront, leaving him short when publication was delayed or he couldn’t get enough work. And he was determined not to burden his parents with repaying his student loans.
Chris fell ill with viral meningitis and went to Brussels to recover. He moved into a dusty squat and worked on his articles about the foreign fighters. “It is only through intimate relationships with subjects that we can understand them completely,” he wrote in his notebook. “They’ve got to trust you with their truth.”
But he also wondered whether he’d crossed a line, from observer to participant. He looked for guidance in books he loved, like Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” in which a cynical British correspondent in Vietnam hides behind the detachment of the profession but gradually becomes more involved in the war.
“Now I was falling into my own story: a character in a cast I had written about; an actor in a historical set-piece that I had come to record, not to shape,” Chris wrote in his notebook that summer, reflecting on his relationships with the militiamen. “I came to get close to history; now I want to enter it.”
That summer in Brussels, Chris received an email from Jeremy Bliss: “I’m afraid this is a little out of the blue but are you the same Chris who is the son of John and grandson of Aubrey and Pauline? If so, it turns out we are cousins.”
Jeremy’s and Chris’ grandparents were siblings who became estranged. Jeremy had been searching for Chris’ family for years and recently found a clue: an address for Chris’ aunt on a relative’s death certificate.
“How strange and cool to go from having a super small family to a rather big one,” Chris emailed Jeremy. They made plans to meet in Paris at the end of the summer. Jeremy took Chris to a rooftop bar to show off his new war-reporter cousin to his actor, filmmaker and artist friends. “This is not my world,” Chris thought. But the cousins started messaging regularly, thrashing out their career paths and bantering about dating.
The night Chris returned from meeting Jeremy in Paris, he went on a Tinder date. It was late so he met Helena Boeykens by a fountain in Brussels to drink a bottle of wine. Helena was a Belgian student of Slavic studies. They talked about “War and Peace” and he regaled her with stories of being captured by separatists. A few weeks later, Chris went back to Ukraine and Helena left for an exchange program in Warsaw. She didn’t expect to see him again.
Chris texted Helena a few days later. Soon they were planning to meet halfway between Kyiv and Warsaw, in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. For three days, they drank coffee, climbed mountains and told each other about their childhoods.
It was such a peaceful weekend that it was hard to go back to the violent world of a front-line embed. Chris had spent so much time trying to understand the darker side of human nature that he was relieved to remember its opposite: “not only the ugliness we keep in our hearts, but the beauty as well,” he wrote. Sometimes he worried that these two sides of his life were irreconcilable.
Chris went to embed with another far-right Ukrainian militia, Right Sector, which had attracted several American recruits. These fighters didn’t hide the fact that they loved to kill and would travel the world to do so. They talked about going to Yemen or South Sudan next.
Chris felt uncomfortable around them and was relieved that he did. “To accept all this would be more discomforting than whatever discomfort I feel now,” he wrote in his journal. “I just hope that too much time here, disconnected from the normal, the sensible, the sane, the beautiful, will not color my soul forever.”
In 2016, Chris moved to Ukraine full-time. He got an apartment in central Kyiv with a Ukrainian friend he’d met during an embed with the Donbas Battalion who was now working as an anti-corruption advocate.
The apartment had no furniture and some windows were missing panes, but they loved the high ceilings and original wooden floors — and it was cheap. They hosted wandering journalists and off-duty fighters, who’d sometimes crash there for weeks.
Most of the volunteer battalions had been incorporated into Ukraine’s official security forces by then, so it was getting harder for Chris to arrange embeds. At the same time, editors’ interest in the Ukrainian conflict was waning, and Chris wanted to explore some new terrain.
“Being daring in one’s writing doesn’t have to just be about getting shot at,” Chris wrote in an email to a friend. “A real job feels a long way off but that’s ok, I’m not in a rush.”
He wrote about corruption and media freedom in Ukraine, and started researching stories on the country’s arts scene, post-traumatic stress disorder and the role of football hooligans in the conflict. His ideas piqued the interest of editors at major international publications, but many of them never made it into print.
His pitch to The Washington Post in 2014 fell through when his sources stopped cooperating. The newspaper then commissioned him to write a feature in 2015, but Chris grew frustrated with the lengthy editing process, eventually threatening to get a lawyer involved. The story was killed — canceled for a small fee. In 2016, a story for Vice fell through after he published a similar article in The Independent.
When an article for The Guardian was delayed for six weeks before it was killed, Chris worried he wouldn’t be able to sell it to other outlets because it had lost its news value. “This is like buying milk and then trying to return it after it’s already past its expiration date,” he complained to the editor. His friends and family looked on with a mixture of respect and horror as he built relationships with editors, only to end them acrimoniously.
He joined several organizations that advocate for freelance journalists. “At the moment, those without experience are left to enter both war zones and the media industry without any guidance or support,” Chris wrote in his application to join the board of the Frontline Freelance Register, a U.K.-based group. “In my experience, as much of the stress and difficulties of this work come from the media side as they do from the conflict.”
He took a job editing marketing material for a document management company. The work was boring but it paid his rent and allowed him to save money for reporting trips.
For all the hardships, Chris believed that freelancing gave people like him the freedom to produce some of the best journalism. “Conflict really deserves more than quick and superficial media coverage,” he said in a video recorded for an exhibition about the role of freelancers in covering war. “I feel a responsibility to do it correctly, so to be a freelancer and to have the space to do that is important.”
He tried to get sponsorship to bring a journalist safety course to Kyiv, but it never happened. He applied to go to Northern Ireland to do hostile environment training but was turned down — over 200 journalists had applied for 14 spaces.
Following Marie Colvin’s death, foreign freelance journalists started disappearing in Syria, prompting some soul-searching in the industry. In 2014, after Islamic State militants murdered American freelancers James Foley and Steven Sotloff, six organizations drafted a set of fundamental safety principles for freelancers. Some 100 media organizations have now signed on.
But those standards are still not consistently applied, and freelancers and local journalists often fall through the cracks. Sometimes an international media organization will contract out work to a local outlet that has laxer standards. Many reporters have to get their start with smaller outlets before larger outlets with better protections will commission them. Some media outlets just stop commissioning freelancers in war zones altogether but still may buy their stories after the reporter returns safely.
Earlier this year, the Frontline Freelance Register surveyed 383 freelance journalists working in dangerous environments. Their top concerns were financial: late payments, low fees and expenses not being paid upfront. Most of these reporters were between 30 and 50 years old but made under $20,000 per year. Nearly three-quarters said they had no insurance or emergency repatriation plans. Around two-thirds didn’t own protective equipment like bulletproof vests and helmets.
More than half had no safety training.
Chris loved reporting on Ukraine, but he was eager to get more experience. His first experiment with covering another conflict was a mixed success: In March 2016, The Independent published a dispatch he wrote from southeastern Turkey, but he returned to Ukraine deflated after Turkish police beat him up at a protest and his second commission fell through.
“I’m in a bit of a professional quandary,” Chris wrote to the foreign editor of The Independent, David Wastell. “The situation seems untenable for freelancers. Maybe the answer once was: keep pitching, but I’m no longer sure if that’s the answer because work is so difficult to find and even when submissions are accepted, remuneration is insignificant and publication is delayed.”
“I am afraid I don’t really have an answer to your quandary,” Wastell replied. “I don’t think the demand for quality reporting has really gone away, nor do I see how there can ever be a substitute for original reporting from on the ground. I just don’t know how we get people to pay for it in a way that will mean more money comes to people like you, at the sharp end.”
Two weeks after Chris’ article appeared in The Independent, the newspaper published its last print edition. Many staffers were laid off or quit, including Wastell.
Chris set his sights on Africa. “Syria and Iraq aren’t interesting to me, everybody is there. What can I add?” he wrote to a friend. “It’s more interesting to me to go to the places nobody is going.”
In late 2016, he applied for a Fulbright scholarship to do research in Nigeria, but he wasn’t selected. In the spring of 2017, Chris and a friend made a plan to go to Libya, but they had trouble getting visas. Chris looked into African countries where English was widely spoken and settled on going to South Sudan that summer.
After gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan was consumed by a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. By 2017, the small group of international journalists there were under heightened pressure from the government, which banned at least 20 foreigners from reporting in the country during the first six months of the year. Journalists were forced to report on the war from other East African capitals or by going directly into opposition-held territory to embed with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition.
Chris reached out to several journalists in the region for contacts and advice. Among them was Al Jazeera’s Catherine Wambua-Soi, who warned Chris that the situation on the ground was unpredictable.She had just left an opposition base in the southern province of Kajo Keji. Government troops tried to attack days later, a rebel official told her. The government briefly shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in South Sudan when her reporting came out.
As Chris started planning his trip, some of the American fighters he’d befriended in east Ukraine were arrested in South Sudan. Chris had been deeply unsettled when he first met Craig Lang in 2015. Lang, then 25 years old, had joined Right Sector after being dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army. He bragged of “hunting illegal immigrants” on the U.S.-Mexico border and spoke of “his detailed plan to kill his wife and her whole family with an expression which was so stoic so as to betray nothing but his complete lack of feeling,” Chris wrote in his journal.
“It would be fun to kill a few more people,” Lang told Chris, according to the journal.
But after spending time with Lang over the next two years, Chris grew sympathetic to him. He saw Lang as the product of an abusive childhood and traumatic experiences in the army. “For Lang, violence is the world’s modus operandi,” Chris wrote in a 2016 pitch for a profile of him. “Society should listen to these voices, because we had a hand in creating them.”
So when Lang and two other ex-U.S. military members disappeared in East Africa in June 2017, Chris scrambled to help find them. The Americans eventually turned up in a Kenyan jail. They had crossed from Kenya into South Sudan to join opposition forces, but quickly ran out of water and money and got lost. They were caught by government forces and deported.
His friends’ South Sudan fiasco didn’t seem to deter Chris. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing but he wouldn’t make the same mistake, Chris told a friend. He pressed ahead with his plans to embed with the rebels. He left his marketing job and agreed to meet the rebels’ spokesman, Lam Paul Gabriel, in Uganda two weeks later.
In Brussels, Helena helped him rush to vaccination appointments. Their relationship had survived the separations of the past two years and he’d introduced her to his parents that summer. Chris asked Helena if she’d come live with him in Ukraine when he got back from South Sudan.
Chris arrived in Uganda on Aug. 1. From Kampala, he sent his best friend in Pennsylvania, Eddie Luks, instructions about what to do if he was killed. He had reached out to a few publications about buying a piece. But he knew he had a better chance of selling a story upon his return.
A few days later, he crossed into Kajo Keji county in South Sudan.
Chris hoped to spend two months with the rebels, an extraordinary length of time for any journalist to embed with the group. It’s expensive — there’s little food, water or medicine in the area, so you need to bring your own supplies — and dangerous. But Chris was determined to get a story that had rarely been told.
He’d never been anywhere that looked like South Sudan, where communities — and life itself — seemed so fragile. The straw-roofed huts and dirt tracks looked like they could be swallowed up by the bush at any moment. As the rebels moved from village to village, Chris tried to make sense of the winding stories of the local elders, the chaotic marches of the fighters and the exhausting speeches of the rebel commanders.
After three weeks, he was tired and frustrated. The rebels were preparing to attack Kaya, a government-held town near the country’s border with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the date kept getting delayed.
“I thought relationships with the soldiers would be easy here because most people speak some English, but in fact, I’ve found it somehow more difficult than Ukraine,” Chris wrote in an unsent letter to Helena. “I think it is a combination of the ‘otherness’ that both me and the locals feel towards each other.”
On Aug. 25, two photojournalists working for Reuters joined the group. The attack on Kaya was scheduled for the following morning. Chris was furious. He felt duped — he’d invested his savings into what he understood would be an exclusive story. How would he sell an article now that one of the biggest news agencies in the world had arrived? (Reuters has declined to allow the photojournalists to be interviewed about Chris, including for this story.)
He spoke with his parents in the U.S. “Come home, Chris,” Joyce urged him. “You’ve got the story: you know what they eat, how they live, about the wives they left behind.” “But it’s not the whole story, Mom,” Chris insisted. He texted Helena: “I’m in a tent and the rain is coming down hard and it reminds me of the times with you. We have so many good memories together, girl.”
Ahead of the attack, the fighters gathered in a field to sing war songs and dance. “The air pressure in the town seems to drop the day the attack is announced,” Chris wrote in his notebook. “The vacuum which once existed has been broken, but the spirit hasn’t yet rushed in to fill it.” The fighters handed out red headbands so they could identify each other on the battlefield. Chris wore one around his arm. Chris realized that each man had only 20 rounds of ammunition.
As daylight turned to darkness, Chris, the Reuters photojournalists and the rebels headed through the bush to Kaya. “We followed the silhouettes through the tall grass, down through the silent valleys with their heavy air and then up again where a cool breeze from the approaching storm made the grasses sway,” Chris wrote in his notebook that night. “It was silent except for the footsteps of 20 men. Dark, except for the moon, hidden now by clouds.”
The attack on Kaya lasted just 40 minutes. The rebels planned to seize more ammunition from government barracks, but they were empty and the fighters quickly ran out of bullets. Just before 7 a.m., Chris took his last photograph: fighters hurtling down a mud path lined with low concrete buildings.
The structures appeared to be abandoned, but they were not.
Government soldiers lying in wait opened fire. Five bullets hit Chris, including a fatal shot to the head.
In Brussels, Helena woke with a jolt at dawn. She checked her phone. Chris still hadn’t read her reply to his last message: “We have so many good memories and so many more to come.” Later that morning, she was out shopping when Lam Paul Gabriel called.
It was still nighttime in California, where Chris’ parents were staying. A few hours later, Joyce woke to see the missed calls from Helena and Gabriel. She opened her computer and found an email from the State Department: “please call this number immediately.”
“He is a white rebel,” a South Sudanese government spokesman declared the day after Chris was killed. There was no sign that Chris was a journalist, another official told reporters. He warned journalists not to travel with the rebels: “Anybody who comes attacking us with hostile forces will meet his fate.”
Chris was the 10th journalist and first foreign journalist to be killed in South Sudan since the country’s independence in 2011. He was 26.
The news initially caused panic and confusion among foreign reporters in the region, as most of them didn’t know who Chris was. Other journalists who were embedded with the rebels feared they would be targets. The two Reuters photojournalists, who had become separated from Chris during the raid, managed to get back to Uganda after wading through flooded streams and drinking from swamps.
In Ukraine, people who knew Chris were disturbed that he was being portrayed as anything other than a reporter. One friend, Ukrainian journalist Victoria Zhuhan, set up an online petition urging media organizations to confirm that Chris was a journalist. The petition gathered hundreds of signatures, but Chris’ death got only brief mentions from The Telegraph and Al Jazeera and was not reported by Vice and The Independent.
Chris’ family was devastated by headlines suggesting that Chris was a foreign fighter. Then, gruesome photos of his body circulated on South Sudanese websites, including some showing him stripped naked. Shortly after, Reuters published a photo with Chris’ lifeless face exposed. The image, taken during the handover of his body to U.S. diplomats, was republished by news organizations around the world. Jeremy Bliss and Chris’ brother frantically called editors requesting they take it down. (Reuters removed the picture later the same day.)
For two years now, Chris’ parents have appealed for an independent investigation into their son’s death. Was he targeted or caught in crossfire? Did his killers know he was a journalist?
They have received many conflicting accounts and few clear answers. The South Sudanese government eventually expressed regret for Chris’ death but said there was no need to investigate the killing because Chris had entered the country illegally.
Navigating the politics of pushing for an investigation has been exhausting for Joyce and John. Will speaking to journalists hurt or harm their case? Is quiet diplomacy or public campaigning more effective? Sometimes, they look at the scholarships and foundations in memory of other journalists who were killed and wonder if they’ve done enough.
“We don’t have teams of people to help,” John told me. “We don’t have the expertise.”
Joyce and John feel let down by British and American authorities, as well as the U.N. mission in South Sudan. They cannot understand why Reuters won’t allow its journalists to publicly clarify what happened the day Chris was killed. (“We wouldn’t comment on matters of staff security,” a Reuters spokesman said.) The most significant breakthroughs to date have come not from government officials or staff reporters at major news organizations but from freelance journalists, including Simona Foltyn, who investigated the rebels’ missteps in the Kaya raid, and Sam Mednick, who was told by government forces that they saw Chris taking photos before they opened fire in his direction.
In May 2019, a team of high-profile British human rights lawyers took up Chris’ case. They argue that his killing and the distribution of degrading images of his body may be war crimes, and they’ve requested that the FBI investigate. “We’re faced with huge information gaps that you’d never expect to see in a case like this,” said attorney Caoilfhionn Gallagher. “All the detective work has been done by his family, journalists and lawyers — it is utterly unacceptable that we do not have state investigators looking into what happened to Chris.”
The muted response to Chris’ killing is particularly damaging in a country like South Sudan, where so many local reporters have been threatened, locked up or killed. “An investigation would send a signal that a journalist’s life is worth something,” said Angela Quintal, Africa coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists. “If people know they can get away with murder, it will continue to happen. If we can’t get justice for Chris Allen, how will we get justice for local journalists?”
“It’s clear that when nobody is held to account, it creates a new norm.”
The foreign freelancers still working in the region are worried, too. “Chris Allen’s death had a chilling effect on the journalism community here,” said Michael O’Hagan, a freelance correspondent covering East Africa. “It’s not as if people were not aware of the risks, but having a fatality really brought home the risks involved. ... It’s clear that when nobody is held to account, it creates a new norm.”
Sarah Giaziri, director of the Frontline Freelance Register, was dismayed to see reports of Chris’ death that portrayed him as a gung-ho novice. “It was a really unfair image of Chris,” said Giaziri, who had read his emails to her organization about freelancer safety. “We often tell young freelancers: Start with a low or medium conflict and build up your threshold. Chris was doing that in Ukraine.”
The implication that Chris acted recklessly by going to South Sudan without being commissioned by a media outlet is also unfair, Giaziri said. “Most freelancers go ‘on spec,’” she noted. “They speak to two or three clients who typically say, ‘That’s really interesting! We can’t commission you because it’s too risky, but let us know what you’ve got when you get somewhere safe.’ It’s on purpose, this arm’s-length distance.”
It’s too easy to hold up people like Marie Colvin as heroic and write off freelancers like Chris as reckless. Both made mistakes — all journalists do — and the difference between a learning experience and a fatal error often comes down to luck alone. Those mistakes were their own responsibility but also the responsibility of a struggling industry that constantly demands more for less — and fails to learn from past tragedies.
“You can say no story is worth someone’s life, but what about the people who are killed? Did they die for nothing?” Giaziri said. “It’s a fine line to tread: not making someone into a hero, but if it was an important story to tell, asking how it could have been done in a safe way. We don’t have these really harsh debriefings enough as an industry.”
How would Chris have reacted to his own death? His friend Victoria Zhuhan imagined him reading the headlines and yelling, “Well, at least the death of an American journalist made them remember there’s a civil war in South Sudan. I hate this hypocrisy!”
“I think part of him would say, ‘This is war.’ Anyone can be killed at any moment,” his childhood friend Eddie Luks said. “But if he was targeted for being a journalist, I think he would want to shed light on this injustice. ... In a sense, he is part of history now, so it would be really important for him to know it was being documented.”
Chris’ own stories were full of complicated people trying to pursue lives that had meaning, sometimes hurting others and themselves along the way. “Why did I come here?” he wrote in his journal in east Ukraine in 2015. “Many reasons I guess, but I don’t think I can hope to articulate them in a way which justifies my presence here, or the risks I’m willing to take, to an outsider.”
“Death’s a bloody serious affair,” he wrote, quoting Graham Greene. “Indeed it is. But once we choose a path which takes us down this road, the part we play is for real. This is no stage play, but a life lived fully conscious of the consequences which may come with our decisions. This is part of what it truly means to choose, and therefore to live.”
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Although Chris had sympathy for Craig Lang's past, he might have judged Lang’s future more harshly. In September 2019, Lang was named in a criminal complaint against a U.S. soldier who had discussed bombing a major news network. Lang was the accused soldier's mentor, the FBI said.
That same month, prosecutors charged Lang and another Right Sector volunteer from the U.S. with the 2018 murder of a couple in Florida. Lang is currently detained in Ukraine, facing extradition to the U.S. Lang, through his lawyer, declined to comment.
This story is based on the published work and private notes of Christopher Allen, including his notebooks from South Sudan, which were recovered after his death. Chris’ parents shared these personal documents with me. The story also draws from his correspondence with friends, family and colleagues, information from Reporters Without Borders (who are campaigning for an investigation into Chris' death), and dozens of interviews with people who knew and worked with Chris in the U.S., U.K., Brussels, Ukraine and East Africa.
HuffPost’s Rebecca Zisser used photos from Chris' family and Eddie Einbender-Luks, as well as Chris' journals, to create the art.
Correction: An earlier version of this story attributed the quote, “He is a white rebel,” to a South Sudanese army spokesman. It was a South Sudanese government spokesman.
Update: Language has been changed to clarify that Chris’ intended embed with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-In-Opposition was for an extraordinary length of time and to provide additional information about the rebels coming under attack after the Al Jazeera journalist’s embed.
Photo: Chris Allen
Photo taken by Chris Allen while in South Sudan
Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/HuffPost
Photo: Eddie Einbender-Luks
Photo: Eddie Einbender-Luks