Mark Laity

Mark Laity is a former BBC Defense Analyst/Specialist and later became NATO spokesman. Since January 2004 Laity has been 'Special Adviser on Strategic Communications to NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe(SACEUR), as well as a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Defence Studies at [[King's College London]].'

• Prior to that he was for nearly four years, Deputy Spokesman and Personal Adviser to the then Secretary General of NATO, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen.
• From May 2000 until April 2001 he spent almost a year as acting NATO spokesman.
• In May 2001 he was sent by the Secretary General to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Initially, he worked as an adviser to President Trajkovski - a mark of the close personal co-operation and friendship between the Secretary General and the President.
• Then in September, as the deployment of Task Force Harvest raised NATO's media profile, he became the civilian spokesman... Operation Essential Harvest.
• He was also media adviser to Major General Gunnar Lange, the operational commander and Senior Military Representative.
• He remained spokesman for the handover to Task Force Fox, before returning to his normal duties in Brussels, where he has oversight of NATO's media operations in the Balkans
• Laity joined NATO after 11 years as the BBC's Defence Correspondent from 1989, covering all aspects of British and international defence, including extensive experience of frontline reporting, notably in the Balkans. He covered most major conflicts of the nineties, but particularly the break-up of Yugoslavia. Between 1992 and 1998 he regularly reported from the frontline in Bosnia and Croatia, during much of the worst of the fighting. He also reported from Albania and Kosovo. In 1999 he covered the air campaign from Nato HQ in Brussels, before reporting from Kosovo itself after KFOR entered.
• Laity was born in Truro, Cornwall, and has a BA(hons) and MA from the University of York.

Views on Laity

Andrew Gilligan describes his former colleague:

The BBC is a funny organization; it is of course a state broadcaster, and... it has got some fantastic journalists – some very good journalists – it also has a minority of distinctly average journalists who see their job as simply going to press conferences and reporting what is said at such press conferences or other such forums, and who deeply dislike original stories or muck racking journalism. They genuinely feel that it is not the BBC's remit. I remember a guy called Mark Latey who was a defense correspondent when I arrived in 1999, and of course he was deeply unhappy at the fact that the Today [Program] had taken on someone like me because I was a defense expert as well, and he wouldn't get those all important two-ways on Today anymore. He was very unhappy at that, but he was also unhappy about my approaches to journalism. I wrote a story early on Today where I used the phrase "the BBC has learned...", and he rang me up and said, "the BBC does not learn..." And later on, in the end, he went off to become a PR person for NATO. He turned up in Macedonia where I was doing a story, and very quickly he became known as the "mission creep". And he always thought that I had coined that nickname for him – I didn't actually. So, there are people like that...