The Great War for Civilisation (27 page)

I still searched for the eyes. And at that moment, I realised he was staring at a point on the floor, at a single bright emanation, a ray of sunshine that was beaming through the high, dirty windows and was forming a circle of light on the carpet. His head was bent towards it as if the light itself held some inspiration. The left arm remained concealed in his gown. Was he watching this sun-point for some theological reason? Did it give focus to his mind? Or was he bored, tired of our Western questions, with selfish demands for information about a few dozen American lives when thousands of Iranians had been cut down in the revolution?

Yet he had clearly decided what to say to us long in advance of the interview. He would already have known that three of the Americans were to be released five hours later, two black members of the embassy's U.S. Marine guard contingent and a woman, Kathy Gross. But Khomeini simply came back, again and again, to the same argument. Rather like the U.S. television networks, he seemed to be obsessed by only one theme: retribution. He was not going to preach to us, to speak to us of God or history—or, indeed, his place in it. “Carter has done something against international law—someone has committed a crime and that criminal should be sent back to this country to be tried.” His voice went on purging us. “As long as Carter does not respect international laws, these spies cannot be returned.” Then he sprang up, a creature who had lost all interest in us, and the heap of men in the front rows collapsed over each other in the excitement of his departure. One of our drivers stepped forward—our own translator bent towards Khomeini and whispered that it would be the greatest moment in the driver's existence on earth if he could shake the Ayatollah's hand—and our driver held the Imam's right hand and kissed it and when he raised his head, tears streamed down his cheek. And Khomeini had gone.
²⁸

This was not just an anticlimax. This was bathos. When one of the freed U.S. Marines, Sergeant Ladell Maples, announced that night that the Iranian Revolution had been “a good thing,” it was almost as interesting. And from that moment, I decided to read Khomeini, to read every speech he made—heavens above, the Islamic Guidance Ministry flooded us with his words—to see what had captured the hearts of so many millions of Iranians. And slowly, I understood. He talked in the language of ordinary people, without complexity, not in the language of religious exegesis, but as if he had been talking to the man sitting beside him. No, although he would not have known who Osama bin Laden was in 1979—the Saudi would not leave for Afghanistan for another month—Khomeini knew all too well of the dangers that the Saudi Wahhabi Sunni faith posed for the Shiite as well as the Western world. In his famous “Last Message” just before his death, when he had probably heard the name of bin Laden, Khomeini inveighed against “the anti-Koranic ideas propagating the baseless and superstitious cult of Wahhabism.”

And he knew how to argue against those American conservatives who claimed—and still claim—that Islam is a religion of backwardness and isolation. “Sometimes with explicit but crude argument it is claimed that the laws of 1,400 years ago cannot efficiently administer the modern world,” he wrote.

At other times they contend that Islam is a reactionary religion that opposes any new ideas and manifestations of civilisation and that, at present, no one can remain aloof to world civilisation . . . In fiendish yet foolish propaganda jargon, they claim the sanctity of Islam and maintain that divine religions have the nobler task of purging egos, of inviting people to ascetism, monkhood . . . This is nothing but an inane accusation . . . Science and industry are very much emphasised in the Koran and Islam . . . These ignorant individuals must realise that the Holy Koran and the traditions of the Prophet of Islam contain more lessons, decrees and commands on the rule of government and politics than they do on any other issue . . .

Harvey Morris was full of admiration for Khomeini when I arrived at his office to file my dispatch that night in November 1979. “You've got to hand it to the old boy,” he said, drawing on another cigarette. “He knew how to handle you lot. Yes, our ‘AK' knows exactly how to handle the kind of wankers we send down to interview him. Doesn't waste his time on serious theological stuff that we wouldn't understand; just goes straight to the point and gives us our bloody headlines.” In his own cynical way, Harvey respected Khomeini. The Ayatollah knew how to talk to us and he knew how to talk to Iranians. And when they read out his “Last Message” after his death in 1989, Khomeini's words were humility itself. “I need your prayers and I beseech Almighty God's pardon and forgiveness for my inadequacies and my faults,” he wrote. “I hope the nation, too, will forgive my shortcomings and failings . . . Know that the departure of one servant shall not leave a scratch on the steel shield that is the nation.”

You could understand how Khomeini's followers were persuaded by his sanctity into an almost crude obeisance. I remember the way Qotbzadeh talked to me about him, his voice softening into an almost feminine purr as he tried to convince me that the Ayatollah's annoyance at the slow pace of the revolution did not imply any change of character. “The man is as holy as he was, as honest as he has ever been, as determined as he always was, and as pure as he has ever been.” This was the man whose execution Khomeini would approve. What Qotbzadeh thought in front of the firing squad we shall never know.

“So, back to the ‘den of iniquity,' eh, Bob?” Harvey had asked when I came panting into the Reuters office to file. The cigarette smoke was thicker than usual. There was another whisky bottle on the desk. “What's it like to be back in the ‘centre of vice and Saturnalia'?” Harvey was right, of course. “Saturnalia” really was one of Khomeini's favourite expressions. And it was easy to mock the Iranian revolution, its eternal sermonising, the endless, unalterable integrity of its quarrel, its childlike self-confidence. Yet there was a perseverance about this revolution, an assiduousness that could be used to extraordinary effect once a target had been clearly identified. Nothing could have symbolised this dedication more than the reconstitution of the thousands of shredded U.S. diplomatic papers which the Iranians found when they sacked the American embassy.

A woman “follower of the Imam” was later to describe how an engineering student called Javad concluded that the shreds of each document must have fallen close together, and could thus be restored in their original form:

He was a study in concentration: bearded, thin, nervous and intense. These qualities, combined with his strong command of English, his mathematical mind and his enthusiasm, made him a natural for the job . . . One afternoon he took a handful of shreds from the barrel, laid them on a sheet of white paper and began grouping them on the basis of their qualities . . . After five hours we had only been able to reconstruct 20–30 per cent of the two documents. The next day I visited the document centre with a group of sisters. “Come and see. With God's help, with faith and a bit of effort we can accomplish the impossible,” he said, with a smile.

A team of twenty students was gathered to work on the papers. A flat board was fitted with elastic bands to hold the shreds in place. They could reconstruct five to ten documents a week. They were the carpet-weavers, carefully, almost lovingly re-threading their tapestry. Iranian carpets are filled with flowers and birds, the recreation of a garden in the desert; they are intended to give life amid sand and heat, to create eternal meadows amid a wasteland. The Iranians who worked for months on those shredded papers were creating their own unique carpet, one that exposed the past and was transformed into a living history book amid the arid propaganda of the revolution. High-school students and disabled war veterans were enlisted to work on this carpet of papers. It would take them six years to complete, 3,000 pages containing 2,300 documents, all eventually contained in 85 volumes.
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Night after night, as each edition was published, I pored over these remarkable documents, a living archive of secret contemporary history from 1972 to the chaos of post-revolutionary Iran by the nation that was now threatening military action against Iran. Here was Ambassador William Sullivan in September 1978, contemptuously referring to “the extremist coalition of fanatic Moslems led by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iraq (which has reportedly been penetrated and is assisted by a variety of terrorist, crypto-communist, and other far left elements) . . . ” or listening to the Shah as he “persists in saying that he sees the Soviet hand in all the demonstrations and disturbances that have taken place.” Some of the diplomatic analyses were just plain wrong. “Such figures as Ayatollahs Khomeini and Shariatmadari . . . have little chance of capitalizing on their wide following to win control of the government for themselves,” one secret cable confides.

Other documents were deeply incriminating. Robert R. Bowie, deputy director for national foreign assessment at the CIA, thanks Sullivan on 14 December 1978 for hosting a cocktail party that enabled him to meet the Shah and “to have some less formal conversations with several Iranian military and SAVAK people.” A memorandum of the same date from the U.S. consulate in Isfahan records a conversation with Ibrahim Peshavar, the local director of Iranian television, in which Peshavar is asked “if it was true that his teams had covered demonstration [
sic
] toppling the Shah's statues, and had provided it to security forces for investigation. He said that it was covered, that NIRT [National Iranian Radio and Television] had decided not to run it on television, and that such films are routinely shared with ‘other government agencies.' He . . . asked that I not spread the word.”

Among the reconstituted files was a 47-page CIA booklet marked “Secret” and dated March 1979—written after the revolution but still, incredibly, kept in the embassy archives—on the internal structure of Israel's “Foreign Intelligence and Security Services.” Israeli efforts to break the Arab “ring” encircling Israel, it said, had led to:

a formal trilateral liaison called the Trident organisation . . . established by Mossad with Turkey's National Security Service (TNSS) and Iran's National Organisation for Intelligence and Security (Savak) . . . The Trident organisation involves continuing intelligence exchange plus semmiannual [
sic
] meetings at the chief of staff level . . . The main purpose of the Israeli relationship with Iran was the development of a pro-Israel and anti-Arab policy on the part of Iranian officials. Mossad has engaged in joint operations with Savak over the years since the late 1950s. Mossad aided Savak activities and supported the Kurds in Iraq. The Israelis also regularly transmitted to the Iranians intelligence reports on Egypt's activities in the Arab countries, trends and developments in Iraq, and communist activities affecting Iran.

Some of the internal American memoranda showed a considerable grasp of political events and an understanding of Iran's culture—even if this wisdom was not acceptable back in Washington. George Lambrakis sent a memo to the State Department on 2 February 1979, pointing out that:

Iranian govt spokesmen have for a long time peddled the charge that Khomeini's followers are for the most part crypto communists or leftists of Marxist stripe . . . to a considerable extent it is based on a fable that communists have been infiltrated as youths into the religious schools and now constitute the mullahs and other organizers of the religious movement . . .

Westernization in Iran achieved a status and legitimacy under the two Pahlavi monarchs which has practically wiped out memories of the Islamic past for large numbers of people who went to school in the westernized Iranian school system and did their higher studies for the most part abroad . . . the Pahlavi Shahs have sought to brand the Islamic establishment as an ignorant reactionary remnant of the past which is fast becoming obsolete. Steps were taken to render this a self-fulfilling prophecy. The govt has made efforts to cut off the mullahs from direct financial support by the people . . . Nevertheless it has become obvious that Islam is deeply embedded in the lives of the vast majority of the Iranian people. In its Shiite format it has over the years become strongly identified with Iranian nationalism . . . The Pahlavis attempted to supplant this ancient nationalism with a modern version based on a return to traditions, legends and glories of the pre-Islamic past . . .

An embassy assessment of Iranian society in 1978 reads like an account of Iraqi society before the fall of Saddam in 2003—would that the Americans had read it before their invasion of Iraq—and ends with conclusions that Khomeini could only agree with:

There is much in Iranian history to predispose both the ruler and the ruled to exercise and to expect authoritarian behaviour. There exists no tradition of the orderly transfer of authority, there has been no real experience with democratic forms . . . There is in Iran . . . an established tradition of a strong ruler at the head of an authoritarian government, and of general obeisance to any authority that manifests its will with force. The experience of the current Shah, for example, superficially suggests that political stability in Iran is best assured by authoritarian government, and that periods of the greatest political unrest arise when the ruler . . . shares authority, as during the Mossadeq crisis of 1951–53, or attempts to introduce additional freedoms, as with the liberalization programme of the mid-1970s . . . The inability of Iranian society to accommodate successfully to these social changes stems in large part from the long-standing and pervasive influence of religion and religious leaders . . . Shia Islam is not merely a religion; rather it is an all encompassing religious, economic, legal, social, and intellectual system that controls all aspects of life, and the sect's leaders, unlike their counterparts in Sunni Islam, are believed to be completing God's revelations on earth.