The Great War for Civilisation (26 page)

But no political démarche could unscramble the U.S. embassy siege. The Europeans, the Papal Nuncio, Sean MacBride—a founder of Amnesty International—seventy-five ambassadors representing the entire diplomatic corps in Tehran: all found their appeals ignored. The ambassadors could not even visit Bruce Laingen, who was in the Iranian Foreign Ministry when the embassy was taken and remained there until his release in 1981. Ayatollah Khomeini sternly informed the Pope that “Jesus Christ would have punished the Shah.” Iranian television broke into a showing of
The Third Man
to announce that Iran was halting its daily supply of 600,000 barrels of oil to the United States—a rather hurried response to the decision already taken by the Carter administration to suspend oil imports from Iran. On 14 November, Iran announced the withdrawal of $12 billion of government reserves from American banks and Carter promptly froze Iranian funds in the United States. Each new step reinforced the power of the theocracy governing Iran and reduced the influence of the leftists.

Half a million students gathered near Tehran University on 15 November in support of the Fedayeen, the left-wing guerrilla movement which was now illegal in Iran and which had not supported the embassy takeover. But inside the campus of Tehran University I found Mehdi Bazargan at Friday prayers, sitting in a grey sweater, cross-legged on the ground, and listening to Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the head of the committee of experts who had just written the new Islamic constitution for Iran. He was telling his audience that “the will of the Iranian people was behind the occupation” of the embassy. Yazdi sat next to Bazargan, who had just resigned because the embassy siege had undermined his government. Article 5 of Montazeri's new constitution stated that a religious leader with majority support—“a just, pious, enlightened, courageous and sagacious person”— would become guardian of the nation. It was obvious that this arduous, not to say spiritually wearying role, would be given to none other than Ayatollah Khomeini.

In this new theocracy, there was going to be no place for the communist Tudeh party. After the overthrow of Mossadeq in 1953, the Shah had executed some of its leaders; others fled the country. Soon it would be the party's fate to be crushed all over again, this time by Khomeini. But in the winter of 1979, it was still officially supporting the Ayatollah—even if Nouredin Kianouri's office walls were the only ones in Tehran without a picture of the Imam. There was a copper-plate portrait of Lenin above the stairs and the secretary-general of Tudeh frowned when I asked him why the Ayatollah was not staring stiffly down upon his desk.

“The cult of personality does not exist here in Iran,” I was told. “We are not like the English, who have a picture of the Queen hanging in every room.” Kianouri laughed rather too much at this joke, aware that the parallel was somewhat inexact. He was a precise, faintly humorous man whose balding head, large eyes and bushy grey moustache made him look like a character from a great French novel, but the political language of this former professor—Tehran University and the East Berlin Academy of Architecture—had more in common with
Pravda
than with Zola. Tudeh was involved in “the radical struggle against imperialism” and “the struggle for the reorganisation of social life, especially for the oppressed strata of society.” The party wanted a “popular democracy,” not the bourgeois variety so popular in the West. And in so far as it was possible, Tudeh, Iran's oldest political party, wanted the same things as Ayatollah Khomeini. This was the theory and Kianouri held to it bravely. The truth was that Tudeh's views on the new Iran were almost exactly the same as those of the Soviet Union—which, for the moment, was in favour of the Ayatollah.

“We have criticised the establishment,” Kianouri said. “We have made criticism over the position of liberty in the state and about the rights of women. We have criticised Islamic fanaticism—we are against the non-progressive ideas of those conservative elements. But for us, the positive side of Ayatollah Khomeini is so important that the so-called negative side means nothing. We think he is an obstacle to fanaticism: he is more progressive than other elements.” I interrupted Kianouri. Three months ago, I said, Khomeini condemned Hafizullah Amin's Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan for struggling against Muslim rebels. Did this not represent a divergence of opinion? “That was three months ago,” Kianouri replied. “But now the Ayatollah's outlook is different. He has new information on the situation there.”

Was the Ayatollah therefore mistaken? “I did not use the word ‘mistaken,' ” Kianouri corrected me. “I said only that the outlook of the Ayatollah has changed and he now knows that the Muslim counter-revolutionary movement is a tool of American CIA agents.” Wasn't this a Soviet voice that was talking to me? Wasn't Tudeh, as its critics had claimed, just a mouthpiece for the Soviet Union? “This is not true. Cheap critics once accused Victor Hugo of being an English spy, and great figures have been called foreign agents because this is the form of insult used against the forces combating imperialism. Tudeh is not the official voice of the Soviet Union.”

In my
Times
report of the interview, I suggested that the Ayatollah might soon accept less benignly the little criticisms of the Tudeh. All I got wrong was the time frame. It would be 1983, at the height of the Iran–Iraq War, before Khomeini turned his “progressive” attention to the party which wanted “popular democracy.” When Vladimir Kuzichkin, a Soviet KGB major stationed in Tehran, defected to Britain in 1982, he handed over a list of Soviet agents operating in Iran—a list that was then shared with the authorities in Iran. More than a thousand Tudeh members were arrested, including Kianouri, who was quickly prevailed upon to admit that the party had been “guilty of treason and espionage for the Soviet Union.” Kianouri appeared on Iranian television to say that he had maintained contact with Soviet agents since 1945 and that members of his party had been delivering top-secret military and political documents to the Soviet embassy in Tehran. Eighteen Soviet diplomats were expelled. Kianouri and his wife Mariam Firouz were sent to Evin prison for ten years; he died soon after his release. It was the end of the Left in Iran.

It was only in November of 1979 that I sat at last before Khomeini. Long ago, when Britain had an empire, the
Times
correspondent would have the ear of statesmen and warlords. Shahs and princes would demand to be interviewed. But a new empire now guaranteed that it was the American television anchormen, the boys from
The New York Times
and the journalists who played the role of mouthpiece for the State Department who got the interviews. The best I could do was to “piggyback,” to team up with the men from the new
pax Americana
whom the Ayatollahs—who sniffed power as acutely as any politicians—wanted to talk to. So I travelled to Qom with two American television networks whose reporters

—as opposed to their employers—I greatly admired, John Hart and Peter Jennings. It took courage for an American to report the Iranian revolution with compassion and fairness, and I had many times travelled with Hart in Tehran. “I think we can let young Bob come with us, don't you, Peter?” Hart noisily asked Jennings as I stood beside him. “I mean, he's not going to get in our way and it always feels good to help out the poor old Brits. Anyway, I'm sure young Bob will be grateful to America!” The sarcasm was forced, but he well understood my lowly status in the ranks of scribes.

It was a bright winter Sunday morning as we approached Qom, its blue-tiled domes and golden minarets twinkling in the light. I often thought that this was what our own European cities must have looked like in the Middle Ages, a sudden sprouting of spires and towers above a hill or along a valley. Before you reached the car repair shops and the lock-up garages and the acres of slums, Qom appeared mystical across the desert. We didn't need to call it a “holy” city in our reports; after the miles of grey, gritty dunes, it was a miracle of light and power. You could understand how pilgrims, after days in the harshness of rock and gravel and powdered sand, would behold the cupolas and the reflected gold on the horizon and renew their faith.
Allahu akbar
. From every loudspeaker in the city, floating down upon every courtyard, came the same exhortation. Once, on a parched summer midday, I had arrived in Qom to interview one of its clerics, and a Muslim student—a Briton, by chance, who had converted to Islam—offered me chilled water in a glittering bronze bowl. Outside the window, as I put my lips to the bowl, a pink jacaranda tree swayed in the breeze. It was like pouring life into myself. No wonder Khomeini had decided to return to Qom. This was the city from which he had first assaulted the Shah. Here were born and here died the revolution's first martyrs. They said he lived a humble life and they were right. I was shown Khomeini's bedroom, a rough carpet on the floor, a mattress, a pillow, a glass for his morning yoghurt.

It was an interesting phenomenon, this oriental desire to show the poverty of their leaders. In Cairo, members of the underground Jemaa Islamiya would delight in showing me the slums in which they spent their lives. Bin Laden had ordered his men to show me the tents in which his wives would live. Now Khomeini's guards were opening the door of the old man's bedroom. No palaces for the Imam; because, as I quickly realised, he built his palaces of people. His faithful, the adoration on the faces of the dozens of men who pushed and shoved and squeezed and kicked their way into the small audience room with its bare white walls, these were the foundations and the walls of his spiritual mansion. They were his servants and his loyal warriors, his protectors and his praetorian guards. God must protect our Imam. And their devotion grew as Khomeini proclaimed that, no, he was
their
servant and, more to the point, he was the servant of God.

I didn't see him come into the room although there was a cry of near-hysteria from the crowd as he entered. I glimpsed him for just a moment, advancing at the speed of a cat, a small whirlwind of black robes, his black
sayed
's turban moving between the heads, and then he was sitting in front of me, cross-legged on a small blue-and-white patterned carpet, unsmiling, grave, almost glowering, his eyes cast down. I have always responded badly at such moments. When I first saw Yassir Arafat—admittedly, he was no Khomeini—I was mesmerised by his eyes. What big eyes you have, I wanted to say. When I first met Hafez el-Assad of Syria, I was captivated by the absolute flatness of the back of his head, so straight I could have set a ruler against it without a crack showing. I spent an evening at dinner with King Hussein, perpetually astonished at how small he was, irritated that I couldn't get him to stop playing with the box of cigarettes that lay on the table between us. And now here was one of the titans of the twentieth century, whose name would be in every history book for a thousand years, the scourge of America, the Savonarola of Tehran, the “twelfth” Imam, an apostle of Islam. And I searched his face and noted the two small spots on his cheek and the vast fluffy eyebrows, the bags under his eyes, the neat white beard, his right hand lying on his knee, his left arm buried in his robe.

But his eyes. I could not see his eyes. His head was bowed, as if he did not see us, as if he had not noticed the Westerners in front of him, even though we were the symbol—for the poor, sweating, shoving men in the room—of his international power and fame. We were the foreign consuls arriving at the oriental court, waiting to hear the word of the oracle. Qotbzadeh sat on Khomeini's right, gazing obsequiously at the man who would later condemn him to death, his head leaning towards the Ayatollah, anxious not to miss a single word. He, after all, would be the interpreter. So what of the embassy hostages? we wanted to know. Khomeini knew we would ask this. He understood the networks. His last, cynical remarks about newspapers in the final days of his life showed that he understood us journalists as well.

“They will be tried,” he said. “They will be tried—and those found guilty of espionage will submit to the verdict of the court.” Khomeini knew—and, more to the point, we knew—that since the revolution, everyone found guilty of spying had been sentenced to death. Then came what I always called the “slippery floor” technique, the sudden disavowal of what might otherwise appear to be a closed matter. “It would be appropriate to say,” the Ayatollah continued, “that as long as they stay here, they are under the banner of Islam and cannot be harmed . . . but obviously as long as this matter continues, they will remain here—and until the Shah is returned to our country, they may be tried.” The extradition of the Shah to Iran, Khomeini had decided, must dominate every aspect of the country's foreign policy. Of course, Hart and Jennings talked about international law, about the respect that should be paid to all embassies. The question was translated
sotto voce
by Qotbzadeh. Khomeini's reply was quiet but he had a harsh voice, like gravel on marble. It was President Carter who had broken international law by maintaining “spies” in Tehran. Diplomatic immunity did not extend to spies.

He thought for a long time before each reply—here, he had something in common with bin Laden, although the two men would have little reason to share more than their divided Islamic inheritance—and only when he used the word “espionage” did his voice lose its monotone and rise in anger. “Diplomats in any country are supposed to do diplomatic work. They are not supposed to commit crimes and carry out espionage . . . If they carry out espionage then they are no longer diplomats. Our people have taken a certain number of spies and according to our laws they should be tried and punished . . . Even if the Shah
is
returned, the release of the hostages will be a kind gesture on our part.”