The Great War for Civilisation (54 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Drinking the Poisoned Chalice

... the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

—W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

IT IS A LONG WAY FROM WASHINGTON to the Mossan Food and Fruit Cold Store in Bandar Abbas. The Pentagon's clinical details of the last flight of Iran Air IR655 on 3 July 1988 cannot reflect the appalling human dimension of the charnel house in which I am standing, where three-year-old Leila Behbahani lies in her cheap, chipboard coffin. She was a very little girl and she still wears the small green dress and white pinafore in which she died three days ago when the United States Navy missile struck the Iranian Airbus over the Gulf, killing Leila and her 289 fellow passengers. She was pulled from the water only minutes after the explosion and she looks as if she has fallen asleep, her left wrist decorated with two bright gold bangles, her feet still in white socks and tiny black shoes. Her name is scrawled in crayon on the coffin lid that is propped up beside her. Her equally small brother—a dark-set, handsome boy with very short black hair—lies a few inches from her, cradled inside another plywood coffin.

Only the ice in their hair proves that they are awaiting burial. The central cold storage hall of the fruit depot is strewn with the same pale wooden coffins. “Yugoslav,” it says on one. “Still unknown” on another. In a corner, a middle-aged man is peering at some corpses. He recognises three members of his own family— two he cannot find—and an Iranian in a pair of jeans trundles into the hall with three more coffins piled haphazardly on a trolley. There are fifty-eight intact corpses here, fringed by a row of human remains so terrible that they could only be described with accuracy in a doctor's report or a medical journal. Limbs, torsos, heads—eyes open—lie half-folded in blankets and plastic sheets. Iranian Pasdaran, normally the most voluble of revolutionaries, are reduced to silence. “Come, you are a lady,” one says to a female reporter. “Come and see this woman who was killed.” There is tampering in a coffin and a woman's face, pale with wet hair, emerges through the plastic sheets.

Yet if this might seem in Western eyes a gesture of bad taste, an intrusion into grief, there is no avoiding some terrible conclusions: that so many of the dead— sixty-six—were children, that some of the coffins are so very small, that one twenty-year-old girl lies in the same wooden box as her year-old baby. Fatima Faidazaida was found in the sea three hours after the Americans shot down the plane, still clutching her child to her breast; which is why the baby, Zoleila-Ashan, is beside her now. “That is why we put them in together,” an Iranian official says quietly. “We found them together so they must stay together.”

I come across another middle-aged man clutching a handkerchief to his face, walking unsteadily through the cold store, looking for his relatives. Several corpses he rejects; though terribly disfigured by the blast of the two American navy missiles that destroyed the aircraft, the bodies are clearly unknown to him. Only later does he discover his sister and brother-in-law beneath some plastic and kneel to touch their faces gently, weeping as he does so. Just a few hours ago, President Reagan has stated publicly that he has apologised enough for killing all these innocent people. His expressions of regret, he tells the world, are “sufficient.”

It is extraordinary here in the boiling southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas how the official explanations of condolence, sorrow and self-absolution in Washington seem both hollow and opportunistic. What in Washington is called a “tragedy”—as if some natural disaster overwhelmed these dead airline passengers around me—seems in Bandar Abbas to be an outrage. In the United States, it was possible for newspaper editors to suggest that the Airbus might have been on a suicide mission, that the pilot was deliberately trying to crash his passenger-packed airliner into the American frigate that shot it down. Even my own paper,
The
Times
, has disgracefully made the same claim. But in Bandar Abbas, where the pilot's friends and colleagues have spoken openly to me without official prompting, these suggestions are offensive, obscene. An entire family of sixteen Iranians were on the Airbus, travelling to a wedding in Dubai, the children in their wedding clothes. They are still dressed in the same bright, joyful colours in the coffins in the cold store as Reagan sends a letter to Congress announcing that he now regards the matter of the Airbus destruction as “closed.”

We walk in churchlike silence down the aisles of the dead, Westerners with no excuses, cameramen filming the dead in long-shot for audiences who will not be able to accept—to “cope”—with the reality of what the U.S. Navy has just done. Only those passengers obliging enough to have died without obvious wounds, or who were lucky enough to have been killed without their faces being disfigured by the explosion of the two Standard missiles fired at their plane by the USS
Vincennes
, would be honoured with photographs in Western newspapers. Our response was predictable: we didn't mean to do it; the destruction of the airliner was a mistake. But it was Iran's fault.

I can remember so well that phone call from
The Times
. I am holidaying in Ireland that bright warm summer Sunday, and I have spent the morning in Dublin, talking to John Grigg, the historian who will be writing volume VI of the history of
The Times
from 1966 to 1981, during which Rupert Murdoch took over the paper. Over coffee, I recall for Grigg my four years as a correspondent in Northern Ireland and—although it falls outside his volume—the infamous story of the “Hitler diaries.” Murdoch had been bamboozled into serialising these totally fictitious papers—supposedly the Nazi Führer's ravings on Chamberlain, his mistress Eva Braun,
et al
.
⁶⁴

“I'm sure you know what's happened,” the duty desk editor says from London. “The editor wants to know how soon can you get to the Gulf.” Every reporter hates that moment. What had “happened”? I hadn't listened to the news that morning. Sometimes it is possible to bluff this out, to reply vaguely and then hurriedly tune to the radio news to find out what I am supposed to know. This was not one of those occasions. “The Americans have shot down an Iranian passenger jet over the Gulf,” came the voice over the phone. “The American ship was called
Vincennes
and it fired two heat-seeking missiles at the aircraft . . . They say it was a mistake.” Well, they would, wouldn't they? I mean, the Americans could hardly claim that the airliner was packed with “terrorists.” Or could they? Sure enough, the Pentagon was already suggesting that the pilot might have been trying to fly his plane into the American warship. The American ship's captain would travel to Bahrain to explain how he had fired at a civilian plane.

This was just the sort of “tragedy” I had predicted in my dispatch to
The Times
from the Gulf in May 1987, an American warship panicked into believing that a civil airliner was an attacking jet. What was it the
Broadsword
's lieutenant commander had told me that sweltering night as his British radar operators were checking the transponder numbers over the Gulf? “If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you've got to be bloody careful.” But this was not a private jet. This was a packed airliner which had been blasted out of the sky. I flew to Paris with Lara Marlowe, who would write a brilliant, scathing dispatch for the
International Herald Tribune
on the slaughter. Harvey Morris, now of
The Independent
, was at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, dragging on his usual cigarettes. “Now they've really copped it,” he said, without explaining who “they” might be. The Iranians or the Americans? We would soon find out. We took the Emirates flight to Dubai—the nearest non-Iranian city to the scene of the mass aerial killing.

It was an eight-hour flight, hot and stuffy and crowded. In front of me sat a reporter for a London radio station, writing feverishly into his notebook. He was, he said, drafting his first report so that he could go on air the moment our flight landed next morning. And what, I couldn't help asking—since he had not even arrived in Dubai to make a single inquiry—would be the thrust of this dispatch? “The danger of the Iranians using suicide boats to take revenge on the Americans,” he said. He readily admitted he was making this story up on the plane, but said he also planned to write a report suggesting that the Iranians would try to assassinate the captain of the
Vincennes
. When I asked if he shouldn't also be questioning American naval competency, he replied, “We might be challenged on that story.” Already the machinery was turning. The Americans who had destroyed the passenger jet were the potential victims; the real victims—all of them dead—were the aggressors.

Iran Air flight IR655, piloted by Captain Mohsen Rezaian, had taken off from Bandar Abbas on a scheduled passenger flight to Dubai with 290 passengers. The Americans, as usual, got their version out first, although it would change many times over the coming days. We were told that the Iranian Airbus was not on a normal flight path, then that its pilot failed to respond to warnings from the Aegis-class cruiser USS
Vincennes
, then that the plane was diving towards the American warship and that its identification transponder was not working. Captain Will Rogers the Third, the captain of the
Vincennes
, believed—according to the Pentagon—that he was under attack by an Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft. But the American story began to crumble when the Italian navy and another American warship, the frigate
Sides
, confirmed that the plane was climbing—not diving to attack—at the time of the missile strike.

So the story changed again. The Pentagon now said that the plane's transponder might not have been giving out correct signals. Later, this was subtly changed; the transponder was identifying the Airbus A300B2 as a military aircraft, because the Iranians had earlier changed the coding when they used the same plane to take troops to the war front—and had forgotten to revert to the civilian code afterwards. Why the Iranians would have used the Airbus to conceal their troop movements from the Iraqis but blown their own cover by obligingly giving the aircraft a military identification that would reveal its true purpose was never explained by the Pentagon. The all-important issue was to justify the frightfulness of what had happened, to talk of the “tragedy” of the passenger jet's destruction. Tragedies are forgivable. The advantage for the Americans was that the Iranian side of the story would never be fully told—because those most intimately involved were all dead.

In Dubai, I went straight to the British air traffic controllers who had so often helped me during the “tanker war.” They had heard the radio traffic over the Gulf on that fatal Sunday morning—and their story was horrifying. For weeks, they told me, they had been appalled at the apparent lack of training and efficiency of U.S. naval personnel challenging civilian aircraft. The pilots of airliners on scheduled flights down the Gulf from Kuwait were being repeatedly and aggressively challenged by American warship crews who seemed not to know that they were cruising beneath established air lanes.

In one incident—well known to the controllers but kept secret from the press— a U.S. frigate had stationed itself off the Emirates coast and radio-challenged every civilian flight approaching Dubai International Airport. In desperation, the British duty controller at the airport called the U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi and told American diplomats to instruct the ship to move away because it was “a danger to civil aviation.” Civilian helicopter pilots off the coast had often complained that American warships challenged them on the wrong radio frequencies. The controllers in Dubai could hear some of the U.S. Navy's traffic. “Robert, the Americans knew at once that they'd hit a passenger airliner,” one of them told me quietly. “There was another American warship close by—we have its coding as FFG-14. Its crew reported seeing people falling at great speed out of the sky.”

I sat behind the Dubai control tower thinking about this. Yes, the passengers would all fall out of the sky like that, over a wide area, together, in clumps, in bits, from 10,000 feet it seemed. I could imagine the impact with the sea, the spouts of water, some of the passengers—no doubt—still fully conscious all the way down. Three days later, in the emergency Bandar Abbas mortuary, I would look at Fatima Faidazaida and realise with horror that she must have been alive as she fell from the heavens, clutching her baby as she tumbled and spilled out of the sky in the bright summer sun, her fellow passengers and chunks of the Airbus and burning fuel oil cascading around her. And she held on to her baby, knowing—could she have known?—that she must die.

From Dubai that Sunday night, I sent three reports to
The Times
, the longest dispatch a detailed account of the record of the U.S. Navy's constant misidentification of civil aircraft over the Gulf and the near-panic that the air-traffic controllers had heard over the airwaves from the American warships. The
Vincennes
had claimed it was under attack by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in motor boats at the time it destroyed the airliner. I knew that U.S. warships carried the timetables of civil airliners in their “combat information centres” (CICs). Had Captain Rogers and his crew not had time to look at their copy? Iran Air flight IR655 flew to Dubai every day from Bandar Abbas. Why should it become a target on 3 July?

Captain Rogers himself said that he would have to live for ever with the burden of his own conscience at what he had done. Four years later, he would publish his own account of the destruction of the Airbus.
⁶⁵
This would include a vivid description of an attack on the
Vincennes
by Iranian motor boats, the first alert of an aircraft taking off from Bandar Abbas—a military as well as civil airport—and the information that the aircraft was issuing two transponder codes, one used by passenger aircraft, the other a military code “known to have been used by Iranian F-14 fighters.” The plane was also being monitored by the frigate USS
Sides
, naval coding FFG-14—this was the ship whose crew, according to the Dubai traffic controllers, would see bodies falling out of the sky.