As told to Callum Macdonald
On leaving his first case was to investigate Briton Derrick Gregory, who was facing death in Malaysia for drugs trafficking.
Unusually Gregory made a full confession, naming syndicate bosses never been revealed before. Andrew Drummond researched the story for Twenty Twenty Television and on a commission for Channel 4 went around the world with a crew to investigate the syndicate for the Channel 4 documentary -‘No Man Wants to Die’ , produced by Claudia Milne and Geoff Seed.
By the time film had got to edit, there was still one major syndicate boss the crew had been unable to get to. So he flew alone back to the United States to get affidavits from two drugs couriers in penitentiaries in Oklahoma and North Carolina. He took the story ‘Unmasked the drug baron who got away’ to Angela Gordon on the newsdesk of the Observer.
For the next few years he mixed the Observer with television, something the newspaper had no objection to, and even positively encouraged.
On assignment for the Observer Foreign Desk in Burma he went into Karen State to report on the killings and torture – carried about by the Burmese Army on the Karen ethnic minority.
Again with Twenty Twenty Television he went back to make a documentary, this time for BBC Everyman. Burma’s Forgotten War. (Producer George Case)
Then after covering the uprising in Rangoon in 1988 he went on to cover a blowpipe war in Sarawak, Princess Anne’s Royal Tour of Burma, Laos and Thailand, and stories of Australian colonialism on Christmas Island and the Cocos and Keeling islands. He then made another short film for Channel 4.
He presented the ‘The Ratpack’ for the Channel 4 ‘The Media Show’. He turned the cameras on the press for the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales (Lady Diana) to Thailand.
His visit to the Karen opened up more and more doors among the Burmese rebels and he was finally invited into meet Burmese heroin warlord Khun Sa at his base in Homong in the Shan States of Burma.
When Andrew Drummond returned to London the Observer Film Company was born. He went back to Thailand and Burma this time with his own crew to film ‘Lord of the Golden Triangle.
The film successfully launched the newspapers film company and as widely syndicated and broadcast almost simultaneously on ABC Australia’s ‘Four Corners’.
After the production and broadcast he took up an offer from Lyndel Marks, who was leaving CBS Sixty Minutes to join Fox TV Stations, which at the time was revolutionising American TV.
There as a Field Producer for ‘The Reporters’ and Associate Producer for ‘A Current Affair’ he helped open Fox TV Stations Europe office in Sky Television, London.
Also using knowledge gained from the Observer on a South American trip he set up ‘Hell on Earth’ a film on San Pedro di Lurigancho prison in Lima. He was also Field Producer on ‘ A Right Turn’, a film on the rise of neo-facism.
After less than a year however and with the closure of the segmented documentary show ‘The Reporters’ he decided to leave ‘the revolution’ and move back to Bangkok, initially as correspondent for the London Evening Standard.