For three months my view of the outside world was confined to what I could see through a cell window. My knowledge of the Falklands conflict was gained from Argentine news and current affairs programmes, which I watched on TV in the prison refectory and, occasionally, from broadcasts on the BBC World Service.
The saga began in mid-Atlantic on a Ministry of Defence plane on which I was travelling to cover a Nato meeting in Colorado with the then Defence Secretary, John Nott. The MoD's chief press officer, Ian McDonald, was known for an idiosyncratic habit which we did not always appreciate. He would tap English literature for appropriate quotations that would come in useful for sphinx-like answers to our questions. So a reply, 'Hamlet, Act One, Scene Two, Line 215' would turn out to be Hamlet on the Ghost: 'But answer made it none'.
It was McDonald's proud boast that he never once used the phrase, 'No comment'. But on the RAF flight from Britain he was in a more helpful mood, though still playful. 'Ask him about Georgia,' he whispered mischievously as Nott was about to make his way to the back of the plane to talk to the correspondents.
Blank looks all round. Georgia? Which Georgia? Georgia USA? Soviet Georgia? Unknown to us, radio messages were whizzing between the VC10 and the MoD. A group of scrap metal merchants had landed on the British Antarctic island of South Georgia and raised the Argentine flag. It was the precursor to a full-scale invasion of the Falklands. But I am afraid that my colleagues and I failed to capitalise on McDonald's hint and missed the scoop.
When, on 2 April 1982, Argentine forces landed on the Falklands, the first reaction of the British media was to send reporters to Argentina. As I was still in the US I was dispatched to Buenos Aires, where, having failed to obtain one scoop I decided to try to make amends by becoming the first British journalist to reach the Argentine-occupied Falklands. The war had not yet started. Margaret Thatcher had dispatched a task force, but it would take weeks to sail to the South Atlantic. The prevailing view was that there would be a diplomatic solution before it got there. The success of the invasion had come as a great relief to the Argentine dictator, General Leopoldo Galtieri, who had seized power the previous December only to be faced with large-scale civil unrest as a result of a devastating economic crisis. The atmosphere in Buenos Aires was one of euphoria. Government ads on TV extolled 'the recovery of our islands', with the slogan 'unification is very easy'.
So officials were in confident mood at a party in the presidential palace. Galtieri's press secretary waved his arms expansively and replied, 'Anywhere you like', when I asked him where I was allowed to travel in the country. Three of us - Observer photographer Tony Prime, Simon Winchester of the Sunday Times and I - headed south towards the air bases strung along the Argentine coast.
After reaching Ushuaia, on the Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego, the most southerly town in the world, and having had no success in finding a pilot willing to fly us to the Falklands, we decided to return to Buenos Aires. We were in the departure lounge when we were approached by a naval officer accompanied by armed marines. He ordered us into a private room. We refused to go. An argument ensued which ended with the officer uttering the cliched expression: 'For you the war is over.'
Indeed it was. Ushuaia is now a tourist destination, but at that time, despite the magnificent mountain scenery, it was said that only the bad, the sad and the mad travelled so far south. The prison in Ushuaia was small. There were cells for 26 prisoners, mostly shared, off a single corridor. On the first evening we were isolated from the other prisoners. When the three of us were allowed out of our cell to exercise on our own, a cell door opened and shut quickly and three apples rolled towards us.
We soon discovered that other prisoners harboured no dislike of the British, and saw the Falklands War as a conflict between governments, not peoples. Through the cell window, I could see the runway of the airbase and watched Skyhawks taking off to attack the British.
I learnt that we were in the custody of the navy. The judge was a former naval officer and the head of the prison was a marine officer, Captain Juan Carlos Grieco. He would jokingly prod his finger towards the three of us in turn, and say: '0-0-7'. But I was only too aware that, during Argentina's 'dirty war', naval intelligence had been responsible for most of the disappearances of left-wing so-called subversives. We were placed in separate cells and every day one of us would be driven to the judge's office for questioning. The system consisted of an investigation by the judge in the presence of prosecution and defence lawyers. Suspicion was focused on my notebooks, in which I had made notes about Argentine troop and air movements I had seen.
My justification was that everything I wrote had been intended for publication and that I had not trespassed on military territory. The judge announced there was a case to answer and our status changed from 'suspected' to 'being processed'. We were told the process would be lengthy.
The three of us were now in one cell, eight feet by six. During the day our cell door was unlocked. The conditions were harsh, but not at all brutal. The food was sometimes edible, though I found chicken's necks particularly disgusting. Cutlery was banned because of frequent fights and everyone had to eat with their fingers. There was a shower of sorts. You undressed and stood beneath an old tuna fish can with holes in it attached to the ceiling, waiting for ice cold water to drip through. The soap was a rough powder which you rubbed on to your body.
The blackest day was 2 May, when the General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine, with the loss of 368 lives. I knew something had happened when I heard 'glug-glug' noises and cheering from the cells of the Chilean prisoners, who never made any secret of their pro-British sympathies.
Prison officers pushed us against a wall and stripped the cell of luxuries we had managed to accumulate, including books and our precious radio. In their naivety, the Argentines at first thought that my shortwave radio was some sort of espionage communications equipment and a photograph of it appeared in the local newspapers. Eventually, the judge realised it was harmless and it was returned. Reception of the BBC World Service was impossible during the day, but around 2am it was boosted by a relay station on Ascension Island.
The only mistake the BBC made was to use a Spanish-speaking announcer with a Mexican accent, which was widely ridiculed by the Argentines. The prison guards were curious to know what the BBC was saying about the war. Usually, their first question in the morning was, 'What does the BBC say?' - although as it was usually bad news from their point of view, they pretended not to believe it.
In the evenings I would sometimes watch Argentine television in the dining room, where there was a black-and-white set. For most of the conflict the bulletins were pure fantasy. If one added up the number of Sea Harriers they claimed to have shot down they exceeded by several times the total possessed by the RAF. They also claimed to have sunk the British aircraft carrier Invincible, a claim I believed for several days because the BBC radio reporter Brian Hanrahan suddenly signed off his reports as being 'in the South Atlantic' instead of on the Invincible, where he had been based. It later turned out that he had been visiting other ships in the fleet.
Newspapers and magazines portrayed British troops as mercenaries, on the grounds that they had joined up for money, and Argentine troops as patriots - even though most were conscripts.
Towards the end of the war, television dropped its wild claims and began to imitate the BBC for accuracy. The last bulletins consisted of detailed explanations of why the Argentines had lost. My main concern became the fear of being lynched by a mob. I thought I had good reason to be afraid after the Belgrano. The cruiser had left from Ushuaia on its final journey, carrying more than 1,000 men, and the bodies recovered from the sea were brought back to Ushuaia and unloaded below our window.
On 14 June white flags were raised above the Argentine trenches and the war was over. Eventually bail was agreed. After 77 nights in prison came an eight-hour overnight flight to Buenos Aires in a chartered plane sent by the Argentine government and an onward flight to London. The experience has left me with a lingering sense of unease at being in small rooms with closed doors.