The Great War for Civilisation (214 page)

29
It was typical of the bureaucracy of U.S. security that American journalists arriving back at JFK airport in New York from Tehran with the published volumes containing the embassy documents found the books seized by U.S. Customs on the grounds that they contained “restricted” government papers. What the people of Tehran could buy on the street for 15 rials a copy was forbidden to the people of America.

30
There seemed no end to these revelations. Among the last of the documents released by the government were secret papers inexplicably abandoned in the Iranian eastern desert on 24 April 1980, when the Americans aborted their attempt to rescue the embassy hostages after a C-130 and a U.S. helicopter crashed into each other, killing eight U.S. servicemen. The documents, produced in book form by the Iranians—complete with fearful pictures of the fire-scorched bodies of some of the dead Americans—included dozens of high-altitude and satellite photographs of Tehran, emergency Iranian landing fields, maps, coordinates and codewords which the rescuers were to use in their transmissions to the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz.

31
By the time he died of heart disease and cancer in 2003, Khalkhali was thought to have sent at least 8,000 men and women to the gallows and the firing squad.

32
This was believed to be the first time in living memory that Muslims had been stoned to death in the Middle East after a court hearing. Stoning was a common village punishment in Iran and other Islamic countries for hundreds of years, and in the nineteenth century, members of the minority Bahai sect were killed with stones in Shiraz and Tehran. But they died at the hands of mobs, not after a judicial trial. Prostitutes were stoned to death long before the time of the Prophet Mohamed and the Bible describes how Jesus Christ tried to stop the practice.

33
I was taping Khalkhali's prison tour for CBC radio, and on the cassette in my archives it is still possible to hear the Hojatolislam's lips smacking over his ice-cream as he discusses the finer points of stoning.

34
The full flavour of the somewhat portentous statement released in English by the Pars News Agency on 16 December is best conveyed in the following extract: “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful and the Islamic nation of Iran—the Great Satan, the United States, this origin of corruption of West [
sic
], after being defeated by our great nation, is trying to give asylum to its corrupt servant, the runaway Shah, and to prevent justice being implemented . . . In order to free itself from its great political deadlock and befool its nation, the U.S. has embarked on a futile effort and has sent the criminal Mohamed Reza out of the U.S. and has delivered to its poppet [
sic
] Panama. We herebye [
sic
] announce that to reveal the treacherous plots by the criminal U.S. and to punish it, the spy hostages will be tried.”

35
Grandson of Genghis Khan who destroyed Baghdad in 1258 as part of the Mongol campaign to subdue the Islamic world.

36
For seventy years, Samuel Martin's gravestone stood in the British war cemetery in Basra with the following inscription: “In Memory of Private Samuel Martin 24384, 8th Bn., Cheshire Regiment who died on Sunday 9 April 1916. Private Martin, son of George and Sarah Martin, of the Beech Tree Inn, Barnton, Northwich, Cheshire.” In the gales of shellfire that swept over Basra during the 1980–88 war with Iran, the cemetery was destroyed and looted and many of the gravestones shattered beyond repair. When I visited the cemetery in the chaotic months that followed the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, I found wild dogs roaming the broken headstones and even the brass fittings of the central memorial stolen.

37
Lawrence made no mention of his confident assertion to a cabinet committee two years earlier that “in Irak the Arabs expect the British to keep control.”

38
The Germans had no more success in Iraq than any other Western powers over the past century. They flew 24 Heinkels and Messerschmitts into Mosul but lost their top Luftwaffe liaison officer in a dogfight over Baghdad. Only when Iraqi resistance to British forces was collapsing did Hitler issue his Military Directive No. 30 on the Middle East. “The
Arab liberation movement
in the Middle East is our natural ally against England,” it announced. “In this connection the rising in Iraq has special importance . . .”

39
Mesopotamia had been the seat of kindly rulers, but it is not difficult to find precedents for cruelty. During the African slave revolt in Iraq from 869 to 883, the Caliph Moutaded failed to persuade a slave leader called Mohamed “Chemilah” to denounce his comrades. “Even if you have my flesh roasted,” Chemilah is said to have replied, “I will never reveal the name of the person in favour of whom I administered the oath and whom I recognise as an imam.” The caliph said that he would administer the punishment Chemilah had just designated. The unfortunate man was said to have been “skewered on a long iron rod which penetrated him from his anus to his mouth; he was kept like this over a huge fire until he died, heaping invective and curses on the caliph, who attended his torture.” Another version of his demise says that he was tied between three spears, placed over a fire and turned like a chicken “until his skin began to crackle.” Then he was tied to a gallows in Baghdad.

40
In The Sphinx and the Commissar, Heikal told of Nikita Khrushchev's reaction to his cigar-smoking. “Suddenly Khrushchev turned on me. ‘Are you a capitalist?' he demanded. ‘Why are you smoking a cigar?' ‘Because I like cigars,' I said. But Khrushchev seized my cigar and crushed it out in the ashtray. I protested. ‘A cigar is a capitalist object,' said Khrushchev . . . The next time I interviewed Khrushchev, in 1958, I left my cigar outside. Khrushchev asked me where it was. ‘I want to crush it again,' he said.”

41
See pp. 162ff.

42
Simon Sebag Montefiore found other parallels. Gori, Stalin's Georgian birthplace, was barely 800 kilometres north of Saddam's hometown of Tikrit. Both men were raised by strong, ambitious mothers, abused by their fathers; both were promoted by revered potentates whom they ultimately betrayed.

43
Impossible though it was to assess Iraqi public opinion under Saddam, I could speak to old Iraqi friends in their homes. In a feature article filed to
The Times
on 30 July 1980, I noted that many Iraqis “admitted even in private that stability under President Hussain [
sic
] is preferable to the social chaos that might occur if the freedoms of liberal western thought were suddenly introduced.” Twenty-four years later, their fears of anarchy proved all too real.

44
Mohtashemi was also imprisoned in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but told me years later that “none of this hindered or affected my beliefs or my determination and this made me even more resolute in my decision to fight and struggle against the United States of America, Israel and all the other proxy governments and states.”

45
Days before the siege, I had visited the embassy to request a visa to Iran and was asked to leave my second passport at the mission. After the fire, I had to send a message to Ivan Barnes from Beirut to say that I “think we have to assume my second passport now smouldering with the charred corpses in the embassy.” I decided I would use my first passport to acquire an Iranian visa from diplomats at Iran's embassy in Beirut “in the hope that they don't blow up too, making Fisky stateless” and—if no visa was forthcoming—that I would try to enter Iran without one.

46
My “utterly reprehensible” journalism at least had the merit of putting both sides' noses out of joint. In the summer of 1980, Tony Alloway, the
Times
stringer in Tehran, told Ivan Barnes, the foreign news editor, that he could not obtain accreditation for me in Tehran because Iranian officials “were extremely upset both by the arrival of Robert Fisk in Tehran without proper visa . . . and by the copy he filed and vowed never to let him in again.” The visa problem had been caused by the burning of my second passport in Iran's own embassy in London.

47
Many years later, Naccache would tell me that he and his gunmen—another Lebanese, two Iranians and a Palestinian—had “tried to attack Bakhtiar's apartment but we failed because the door was armoured. We just had little pistols. If you check the place, you don't know if it's armoured or not. There was a shootout with the French gendarmes who were guarding him. Two people were killed; I was wounded in the arm and thigh. No one saw this woman. The bullet went through her door and unfortunately hit the woman in the head. The shootout was with the policemen. When I was in hospital, the judge said there was a woman killed. I asked: What woman? I didn't understand. I said that's very bad. I felt very badly. We hadn't foreseen that at all. She was innocent but immediately I proposed, according to the principles of Islam, that funds should be paid to the victim's family in recompense, also to the family of the dead policeman.” Naccache said that he led his men to kill Bakhtiar because “I felt there was a danger of a repeat of the coup against Mossadeq. That's why we decided to attack Bakhtiar. He was the head of a plot to do a coup d'état against the revolution and come back to Iran . . . I had no personal feelings against Bakhtiar. It was purely political. It was not an attempted assassination. A sentence of death passed by the Iranian revolutionary tribunal is carried out as an execution.” According to Naccache, the proof of Bakhtiar's coup plot was furnished by an Iranian military officer who handed to the authorities the names of other officers involved with Bakhtiar; they were arrested and more than a hundred were executed.

48
For years, the Iranian authorities openly accused Bakhtiar of planning a coup. A booklet published by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance in Tehran in 1981 stated that he had been “setting the scene for his 1953 style return to Iran. By this time the American administration probably was thinking of an American Iran without the Shah . . .”

49
See p. 814.

50
By 1987, the year before the Iran–Iraq War ended, the American government believed Iran had only five F-14s able to fly, along with just fifteen Phantoms.

51
We had to be careful with the freedom of reporting we were sometimes able to enjoy. Hewitt and his crew at one point hired a river boat to film on the Shatt al-Arab. Stopped by the Iraqi authorities, the boat's owner was taken away. “He will be punished,” a remorseful Hewitt was told. He was advised that any protest on the boatman's behalf would only make this unknown “punishment” worse.

52
He claimed, accurately, that the Prince of Wales would pronounce “thousands and thousands of pounds” as “thicends and thicends of pines” and was able to perform variants of regal accents in situations of enormous peril.

53
At first, according to
Al-Ahram
's military affairs correspondent, the Iraqis sent European arms agents to Cairo to purchase the munitions “because they did not want us to know we were dealing with them. But when they asked for Soviet heavy artillery ammunition . . . we knew it was the Iraqis. We told the Iraqis that we Egyptians are a proud people, a dignified people, we must have
respect
. The Iraqis had to come to us in person and they did. They got the shells and they received our combat experience.”

54
Far from gloating over the attack, the Iranian “war information headquarters” in Tehran called it a “serious and dangerous trap” laid by the Iraqis to draw Washington and Moscow into the war.

55
In an emotional interview in which he kept breaking into tears—to the consternation of his press secretary, Anne O'Leary—U.S. ambassador to Bahrain Sam Zakhem insisted to me that “we never before had reason to feel the Iraqis would attack an American ship . . . our people feel it was a mistake. We paid very dearly for that mistake because the nature of the American people is to give others the benefit of the doubt.” If the Soviet Union wished to prove its own good intentions in the Gulf, Zakhem said, it could “stop the flow of arms of the eastern bloc nations to Iran . . . It's Iran which has refused to come to the negotiating table.” So Iraq was “friendly”— and Iran had to be deprived of weapons to defend itself.

56
Foreign correspondents on assignment add datelines to their names so that readers immediately know from where they are reporting. Sending dispatches from the oceans of the world is more problematical. I dutifully—and accurately—gave my dateline in the Gulf as “51 degrees 40 mins E, 26 degrees 40 mins N.” The sub-editors of
The Times
changed this, with my permission, to “At Sea”—which pretty much summed up how most of us felt about the story.

57
James Cameron, one of my great journalistic heroes, describes precisely the same phenomenon in his brilliant account of the Korean War landing at Inchon in 1950. In the middle of the military landing craft heading for shore, he wrote, was “a wandering boat marked in great letters: ‘PRESS,' full of agitated and contending correspondents, all of us trying to give an impression of determination to land in Wave One, while seeking desperately to contrive some reputable method of being found in Wave Fifty.”

58
Anderson would be held in Lebanon for almost seven years. He has recounted his ordeal in
Den of Lions
(Hodder, 1994). The author's account of Anderson's captivity can be found in
Pity
the Nation
, pp. 584–627, 654–62.

59
Chalabi would be convicted in Amman in 1992 for a $60 million banking fraud—which he denied after fleeing Jordan in the trunk of a friend's car—and eleven years later, the same Chalabi, now leader of the CIA-funded Iraqi National Congress, was the Pentagon's choice as the post-Saddam leader of Iraq. He was unceremoniously dropped after a public opinion poll suggested that only 2 per cent of Iraqis supported him. By 2005, however, he had become a deputy prime minister of “new” Iraq.