Frank Garbely (born 10 November 1947) is a Swiss independent journalist, non-fiction writer, author and director of documentary films. He is one of Switzerland's best known investigative journalists and has uncovered numerous scandals in his home country as well as abroad.
Life and career
Early life
Garbely spent the first decade of his life in his birth-place of Reckingen, a Catholic-dominated village in Goms, the uppermost part of the River Rhône valley between its source and Brig in the German-speaking part of the Swiss canton of Valais. As the child of poor peasant he was used to tending to his parents' cattle and goats.Garbely recollects in a biographical interview from 2018 that already as a primary-school pupil he was fascinated by news and reportages, especially from radio broadcasting. This was in contrast with the preachings of the priest who would regularly denounce the local news agent.
At the age of about eleven years, Garbely had to spend six months for health reasons in Montana, a village in the French-speaking part of Valais. This experience opened his horizon and mind beyond the valley of Goms and made him decide to leave his home-village. Hence, he wrote a letter to the director of the ("College of the Holy Spirit"), then as now the only German-language college in the canton of Valais, and after passing an entrance exam was allowed to attend the former jesuit school.
As a college student in the town of Brig, Garbely got further politicized and entered the public stage following the protests of 1968. He became particularly active against Catholicism, which strongly dominated the political and social life in Valais at the time. In early 1969, the daily newspapers Walliser Bote and Walliser Volksfreund published an opinion piece by Garbely in which he advocated for co-determination for students. Shortly afterwards, he was invited to debate the issue on a public panel with members of the National Council, the Council of States and the . In that discussion he criticised that school education in the canton was fundamentally limited to Christian views.
In June 1969, Garbely and the then 83-year-old , who was one of the founders of the socialist movement in the Upper Valais, published a jointly written essay with the provocative title "Orgasmus" in the youth magazine Reflex. They used it to call out Catholic conservatism in the canton and to advocate for freedom of speech. Garbely later called Reflex the original seedbed for spreading progressive ideas in the Upper Valais.
University studies and early career in print media
After taking Matura and graduating from college in 1970 Garbely started studying sociology, ethnology and journalism at the University of Zurich. He continued on occasions to write for newspapers in his home-canton of Valais, especially opinion pieces for Walliser Bote and Walliser Volksfreund.
In late 1971, Garbely became one of the co-founders of the new social movement Kritisches Oberwallis – KO ("Critical Upper Valais") and represented it in public debates. Another co-founder was Peter Bodenmann, who would go on to become a member of the National Council for the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP) and SP-president. In 1973, the group founded the magazine – RA ("Red Anneliese"). The name is a play on words, since the Anneliese was supposed to deliver analysis rather than news. The first issues were produced by Garbely and his wife with other students from Valais in Zurich during weekends.
After finishing his university studies, which he partly spent at the University of Geneva, in 1976 Garbely became the correspondent of the social-liberal tabloid Die Tat ("The Deed") in Romandy, the French-speaking Western part of Switzerland. It was published by the cooperative federation of Migros, Switzerland's largest retail company, since 1935 in various forms. However, when the Migros-management fired editor-in-chief Roger Schawinski because of his left-wing editorial policy in September 1978 and the staff protested by going on strike, the company stopped publishing the paper altogether.
Garbely subsequently started working as a freelance journalist. Still at the end of 1978 he caused major headlines in his home canton with a series of articles in the Journal du Valais about fascist activities in Valais. Right-wing extremists reacted aggressively in their editorial reactions and even threatened physical violence on Garbely.
At the beginning of 1980, Garbely became the first journalist to be employed by the Rote Anneliese as an editor in a paid full-time job. The aim of his hiring was the journalistic professionalisation of the magazine. However, Garbely left the job already at the end of the same year following a conflict with co-founder Bodenmann about the separation of journalism and party politics in the editorial policy. While he kept on contributing to the Rote Anneliese, he focused during the 1980s on writing as a freelance journalist for various print outlets of Swiss media, amongst them:
Berner Zeitung, Construire, , L'Illustré, Journal du Valais, , Schweizer Illustrierte, SonntagsBlick, Tages-Anzeiger Magazin, Tribune de Lausanne / Le Matin, Die Weltwoche, Wir Brückenbauer and Die Wochenzeitung (WOZ)
In addition, he occasionally published stories in the Austrian news magazine Profil and the West German weekly Stern.
Garbely also soon ventured beyond the genre of print journalism into radio production, especially for the Swiss Radio: Radio of the German and Romansh Switzerland (SR DRS), a public broadcaster. In 1983, he published his first radio documentary with the title "Saxon 53". The piece, which the daily Thuner Tagblatt called «perfectly produced», told the story of a popular uprising in Valais which took place in 1953. Some 4.000 peasants and their families had assembled in the village of Saxon to protest against the decision of the Federal Council to permit the importing of fruits from Italy. The event escalated into an open revolt when some of the farmers set train wagons on fire to block the railway line that linked Paris and Milan. He followed up with an audio reportage about Karl Dellberg, who was known as "The Lion of Valais" and whom he had frequently interviewed during the final decade of Dellberg's life. WIth another radio production about the history of the Swiss intelligence agencies he further grew his status as a top-researcher on espionage affairs. Altogether, he earned himself a reputation during those years as being "one of the foremost experts on illegal drug trade and arms trafficking in Switzerland."
Role in the Barschel affair 1987
On 10 October 1987 Garbely and photographer Angelo Guarino from the Keystone photo agency went to Geneva International Airport upon the request of a former TAT-colleague who then worked at the Stern magazine in Hamburg. Garbely's mission was to confirm the arrival of Uwe Barschel, a West German top-politician of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He had been forced to resign as Minister-President of the state of Schleswig-Holstein a week earlier follwong accusations about a "dirty tricks" election scandal. But when Garbely addressed Barschel in German, the disgraced politician replied in English, pretending not to understand German and denying his identity. The very last photographs of Barschel, when he was still alive, were taken during this brief encounter. Garbely's subsequent attempt to follow Barschel's taxi cab in another taxi cab failed.
Shortly afterward Garbely confirmed on behalf of a team from Stern, which was en route to Geneva, that Barschel had checked into the five-star luxury hotel Beau Rivage. When Stern-reporter found Barschel dead in his hotel room the next day, he called Garbely on the telephone and asked him to come to the hotel. Upon arrival in the hotel lobby, Garbely clandestinely received from his Stern-colleagues their photo film rolls. They included the controversial picture which Knauer had taken of Barschel's clothed body in the full bathtub and which was soon to become one of the most iconic images in West Germany's history. Those film rolls provided the only reliable photos from the scene, since the camera used by the Genevan police investigators delivered under mysterious circumstances only flawed pictures.
Writing for the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, Garbely subsequently gave evidence that Barschel had falsely claimed in his handwritten notes to have cruised around Geneva Airport a few times, since the airported is located directly at the border with France and crossing the Swiss-French checkpoints was not permitted for taxi drivers. With regard to Barschel's note about having taken a stroll close to the airport with the mysterious Robert Roloff, who could allegedly have been a witness to his defence, Garbely argued that this claim was impossible considering the evident check-in at the Beau Rivage.
In Uwe Boll's movie ("Barschel – Murder in Geneva?"), released in 1993, Garbely was played by actor in the scene at the airport.
When Heinrich Wille became the chief prosecutor in Lübeck in 1994, the investigation into Barschel's death gained new momentum and Garbely went to the Northern German city to testify in court about his activities regarding the affair. Wille later wrote in his book Der Mord, der keiner sein durfte ("The Murder which was not allowed to be") that he alerted Garbely on that occasion about his suspicion that the journalist Günther Prütting, with whom Garbely had collaborated in 1988 for a story published in the Hamburger Morgenpost about possible indications towards murder, may exploit Garbely to extract information from the private detective Jean-Jacques Griessen, who had died under mysterious circumstances himself while investigating Barschel's death. Garbely stated in an interview from 2018, without mentioning specific names, that the German colleague spied on him and then 'sent the invoices for his services to the German agent, who had a false Swiss passport and stayed in the hotel nextdoor".
Twenty years after Barschel's mysterious death, Garbely produced his own documentary film about the affair, focusing on the investigation by Griessen as well as on the findings by , a retired professor of toxicology at the University of Zurich. While it was aired in Switzerland by the public broadcaster Télévision Suisse Romande, German TV networks declined to do so.
Career in TV journalism
Garbely's growing reputation as an investigative journalist raised the interest of the Schweizer Fernsehen – SF ("Swiss Television"), the public broadcaster for German-speaking Switzerland. When the SF-director of the editorial department for documentary films, Otto C. Honegger, wanted to take over a story from Garbely about a cigarette and drug smuggler from Basel, Garbely insisted on being included in the film shooting to protect his sources. Thus he started working in 1988 as a freelancer for the SF-flagship programme "" ("Panoramic View").
At the same time, Garbely continued to publish his reportages in a variety of print media outlets. In one outstanding instance he wrote a story in early 1989 for the SonntagsZeitung that the Federal prosecutor's office had received an explosive report about large-scale money laundering. The office then had Garbely's phone bugged for two months to identify his source. It informed him about the surveillance operation only one and a half years later.
In 1990, Garbely and his colleague Pascal Auchlin published the book Umfeld eines Skandals ("Environment of a Scandal"), which was based on court records and police files. It illustrated how the lax policies of Swiss prosecutors and police made the country a favoured place for international organised crime. In the 1990 bestseller list of the it was number four in the nonfiction section.