Yvonne Ridley, former journalist with The Northern Echo, tells Chris Webber about being a prisoner of the Taliban and reveals, exclusively, how her release was nearly scuppered by a diplomatic error.

FRIGHTENED, hungry, filled with longing for her daughter, Yvonne Ridley at last began to believe that this was, truly, the greatest journey of her life. A journey to freedom.

As the border to Pakistan drew ever closer that night back in early October, the Sunday Express journalist, a mother incarcerated for ten days by one of the world's most reviled regimes, craved the moment of release.

Yet she knew her life was still in danger, her fate in the hands of these violent, fanatical men who came from a different world to the one she knew as a successful County Durham woman, secure in the safe, rich West.

At last she crossed over the Thorkhum border at the foot of the Khyber Pass and it seemed her ordeal was over. Then, at the very moment of release, a heart-stopping set-back. The 43-year-old had known the young Taliban diplomat by her side was under strict instructions. He was to release the reporter to the British. He was to make contact with the British Embassy in Pakistan and leave. And yet nobody from the British Foreign Office was there.

"It was down to the Pakistani Government to salvage the situation," says Yvonne. "They came and they took me. But at that moment I could have cried. I thought, 'what the hell have I done that my own country couldn't even meet me?'

"Besides anything else, it was a highly dangerous area. Suppose I had just been left there? I might not have survived. I know the French reporter who had to be released was met by his country's representatives and when two Americans Christians who had been captured were released, they had phone calls from President Bush and were invited to the White House. But they jeopardised my release."

The incident is just one of a number of revelations in her book, In The Hands Of The Taliban, out today. It is one that the Foreign Office declined to comment upon until they had a copy of the book themselves. But a spokesman did say that everything that could be done to help Yvonne had been done.

But this is strangely at odds with another claim in Yvonne's book.

She claims western intelligence services tried to have her killed while she was being held hostage.

Yvonne believes either M16 or the CIA wanted to make her a martyr to help justify the bombing campaign and win public support for the war on terrorism.

She claimed that her flats in Pakistan and London were searched and false documents and information about her past were sent to Kabul, showing she was as spy.

She believes the aim of leaking this information was to mislead her captors about her identity and get them to kill her. She even claims that the start of bombing, hours before she was due to be released, was an attempt to have her killed in reprisals.

Whatever the process of release, at that moment the only thing that mattered for Yvonne was her freedom. Freedom and her daughter Daisy, a daughter who had her ninth birthday during her mother's imprisonment.

Yvonne, who hails from the Stanley area, described the moment when, days later, she met up with Daisy in her Lake District boarding school. "I gave The Express the slip in the end," says Yvonne. "There was pressure for pictures of my reunion with Daisy but I thought it should be a very private thing. I had a word with the headteacher and sneaked in and went to her dorm. Then she saw me and ran at me. There were arms and legs everywhere and we just hugged. There were a couple of little sobs then. I asked her if she was angry with me. She said no, but how could I have been so silly to go without my passport. I got a bit of a telling off!"

Yvonne then had a very public reunion with her mother and father, Joyce and Allan, of West Pelton, County Durham. She had already learned of her mother's popularity across Britain as she gave briefings to the massed media over the garden fence every morning. "They called her a 'national institution'," laughs Yvonne, "which was excellent. She did a very good job keeping me, her daughter, in the limelight to keep the pressure on. I'm very proud of her."

Yvonne was hurt, though, by the criticism of her in the newspapers. Fellow journalists had accused her of foolhardy recklessness. The arguments against her said she was nave, an inexperienced war reporter who charged in where a more clued-up journalist would have known not to. She had made life immeasurably harder for the coalition against the Taliban, they said. No mother should have risked her life while leaving a small child at home. Finally, she was even charged with forgetting about the two guides who had taken her into the heart of Afghanistan to talk to ordinary people.

"I was stung at first all right," she said. "But then, after about four or five days, I met an Afghan woman in the street in London. She shook my hand. She said 'I was ashamed to say I was an Afghan, but you have stuck up for the Afghans and told how they really are'. That was followed up by a lot of other refugees and that's what really counts.

"It's amazing how many female columnists suddenly turned on me, calling me reckless. In fact, I was just 20 minutes from the border when I was caught. If I hadn't have been on that donkey and dropped my equipment I would have made it. I would have walked the last 20 minutes, written my human interest piece and no one would have batted an eyelid. As it was, I dealt with the Taliban as best I could. I doubt these columnists, for whom breaking a nail or doing the housework is a big event, would have been able to do the same.

"Then there were the sanctimonious broadsheets who said I had forgotten my two guides. I had told the Taliban they had nothing to do with me as we had agreed and we were working quietly behind the scenes on their behalf. I simply was not able to talk about them. In fact, they have been released since the fall of the Taliban began."

As we speak, Yvonne is interrupted by the bleep of her mobile phone. It is an anti-war protestor asking her to speak at a rally. Yvonne, no pacifist, has become involved in the anti-war movement. She believes the campaign against the Taliban will merely replace one vicious regime with another, making life even harder for the millions of downtrodden Afghans, all the while making Osama bin Laden a hero to religious fanatics in the region.

Fundamentally, she is a humanitarian who speaks with a passion for the ordinary, often starving, Afghans. It is a passion which, almost unbelievably to those who have not met the woman, is causing her to go back. "I will retrace my footsteps next month," she says adamantly, "and try to tell the story of the people there. Naturally, my mother and father are dead set against it, but I would expect nothing less."

Yvonne was back home with her family this week, but, now the might of the Taliban is falling, it will surely not be long before she is back in Afghanistan.

l In The Hands Of The Taliban by Yvonne Ridley (Robson, £6.99