David Leroy Hebditch

David Hebditch is an award-winning freelance author and documentary film-maker. Based in the UK, he has worked extensively throughout the world including the USA, the Soviet Union, China, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Scandinavia, Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan and most European countries. He writes books about sea-faring under the name Jack Lagan. After writing or editing eight books about emerging information systems, his first book for a general audience was on the smuggling of sensitive high technology to the Eastern Bloc (Techno-Bandits, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1983). In 1987 he was commissioned by Faber & Faber to write (with Nick Anning) the first-ever account of the rise of the modern global pornography industry (Porn Gold, 1988). David went on to write and direct factual television. In 1989 Channel 4 Dispatches commissioned him to research the growth of organised crime in the Soviet Union during the downfall of the communist régime. He went on to produce Moscow’s Mafia Millions which was broadcast in eleven countries. After a year filming under cover in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, his 1996 programme (Dealing with the Triads) describing the re-emergence of the Triads in mainland China won the biggest ever audience for BBC2’s current affairs series Assignment. Other productions have included Troubled Waters (Channel 4 Dispatches 1989), An Ambulance in Time (Channel 4 Dispatches, 1997), The Devil to Pay (Yorkshire Television Edit-V, 1996), and The Scam (Yorkshire Television Tonight, 1999). In 2001 he produced and directed Allies and Lies, an investigation into covert operations in Bosnia, for BBC2 Correspondent. From 2003 he worked as a producer/director for NRK Television, Norway on an international co-production about the looting of antiquities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Stealing History was first broadcast in September 2004. Subsequently David and his co-producer/director Ola Flyum won the 2005 Skup (Scoop) and ICIJ Awards for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting (also nominated for the Prix Europa). Between 2006 and 2016 he worked with Ola Flyum and Tore Buvarp (Fenris Films) to make Sarajevo Ricochet, A Town Betrayed and Taliban Oil for NRK and international distribution. David (with SAS veteran Ken Connor) wrote How to Stage a Military Coup for Greenhill Books, London (October 2005) and Skyhorse Publishing, New York (latest edition October 2017). Writing as Jack Lagan he has also authored two books about the history of seafaring: A B Sea: A Loose-footed Lexicon (Rowman & Littlefield/Sheridan House 2015) and The Barefoot Navigator: Navigating with the Skills of the Ancients (Bloomsbury/ACN 2006). (Nominated for the Mountbatten Prize.) The Barefoot Navigator was republished in a much-extended hardback format for a wider readership in September 2017. His latest book, Covert Radio Agents 1939-1945: Signals from behind enemy lines was published by Pen & Sword in February 2021.