A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  PERSIA 1944–1946

  After a week at No.1 Personnel Dispatch Centre West Kirby in August 1944 Bunting was posted to Headquarters Royal Air Force Middle East Cairo on 22 August. He travelled to Persia on 8 September and joined the Combined Intelligence Centre in Baghdad, Iraq, on 29 September, though he continued to be based in Iran.

  Bunting loved Persia, ‘one of the most civilized countries in the world’81 and Isfahan, the former capital of Persia, was his favourite city of all. By the time he left in 1946, after his first posting, he had trained a new generation of diplomatic Arabists: ‘Got them on Shia theology, present position of darvish orders, family tree of the Qajar dynasty, detailed history of oil concessions, etc … And the Tribal Map of Persia, the first thing of its kind … There is no other Tribal map so detailed & careful, at least outside India.’82

  Although the Middle East theatre was recognised as the key to victory for both the Allies and the Nazis, access to the rich oilfields being the strategic imperative, when Bunting arrived in Persia in September 1944 the British had been running a distinctly unimpressive intelligence operation in the region for five years, with four major stations, at Jerusalem, Aden, Cairo and Baghdad. In December 1939 John Shelley had been sent out to strengthen the Secret Intelligence Service’s presence in the region, one of his key objectives being to establish a full SIS station in Teheran. At that point British agents in Iran, mainly British businessmen, were run from the Baghdad station, but businessmen were seen to be compromised by their desire to do nothing to offend the Iranian authorities that might affect their businesses, particularly running agents from Iran into the USSR. Shelley proposed that SIS should open permanent stations in Baghdad and in Tabriz in the north.83 He spent a few months setting up the Teheran station which began operations in April 1940 and conspicuously failed to cover itself in glory:

  The first full-time representative, whose instructions were to concentrate on the Caucasus and South Russia, stayed barely a year, by which time little progress had been made in penetrating the Soviet Union. In April 1940 London asked Tehran to look into the possibilities of using as agents smugglers working across the Soviet-Iranian frontier. Evidently nothing resulted, for in January 1941 the Army Section at Head Office noted that the Soviet Central Asian Military District was ‘a veritable “black spot” to us as 83000 [Teheran] has so far failed to obtain a single item of military information from this area’. It was hoped, however, that matters might improve as an additional officer had been sent out at the end of 1940 specifically to concentrate on Soviet military information.84

  Persia was neutral at the outbreak of the Second World War. Ruled in authoritarian style by Reza Shah since 1925, Persia had imposed Western dress on its reluctant subjects but was not aligned to any particular Western faction. The culture, nevertheless, was pro-German and the Persian press was relentlessly anti-British.85 Reza Shah was convinced that Iran was in some way special to Hitler as the home of the historic Aryans. As early as 1936 Hitler’s cabinet had formally exempted Iranians from the Nuremberg Racial laws because they were ‘pure-blooded Aryans’,86 a calculated political move that suggests that Germany foresaw the role that Iran might play in the coming conflict. After the war had begun the Germans promised Reza Shah that they would return oil rich Bahrain to Iran when they won.87 Once the Soviet Union signed the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact with Germany the two sides worked closely to foment rebellion in Iran. In May 1941, according to Abbas Milani, the British Embassy in Teheran started to develop strategies to deal with the likelihood of a German or Russian occupation of northern Iran: ‘In August 1941, the British Embassy reported that Germans had been “planning a coup” in Iran. Nazis had also found willing allies in leaders of the Qashgai tribes who not only helped hide two of Nazi Germany’s spymasters – Berthold Schulze-Holthus and Franz Mayer – in their midst, but declared themselves ready to help a massive uprising in favour of Germany.’88

  In 1941 a new head of station had been appointed in Teheran. The new man, Wilfrid Hindle, stayed in post until the end of 1942 but the ability of Teheran to ruffle feathers elsewhere in the security and military establishment was undiminished by his arrival. In August 1941 Iran was occupied by British and Soviet troops as fears of an Axis invasion of the country grew, and it appears that during this time intelligence took a back seat locally as the security situation required urgent stabilisation. By the time Bunting arrived, then, British intelligence in the region was at best patchy. Bunting told what is perhaps his longest war story in 1978:

  During the war I captured, for instance, a very famous German spy and I was asked, what should we do with him? I said, send him to Australia, he’ll make a damn good immigrant, and this was accepted by the English government and the Australian government. Unfortunately our treaty with the Russians obliged us to send him back to Germany. But he escaped – we probably arranged for him to escape. That’s the way we dealt with spies. Of course, when he was captured and being sent for interrogation and he asked me what was going to happen to him, I said, ‘Of course we usually hang spies.’ But nobody ever had the slightest intention of doing that sort of thing to him.

  But I captured an American girl once. She was a silly bloody girl. It’s true that she had done extraordinary things, but always by the folly of other people, not because of her own cleverness. She came from Chicago and imagined that she could be like Mata Hari. She went off to Mexico City. She had no papers, so they chucked her straight out. She managed to get into Brazil and then into Argentina – still with no papers. Then she got to South Africa, where she managed to become the mistress of a British official. She at last got some information and she sent it to the Japanese – it wasn’t very much. Then she went, with the help of the British official, to India. She couldn’t do very much in India, so she arrived in Persia where she had the brazen cheek to go and make herself the mistress of an intelligence officer in the South of Persia and he sent her up to Tehran finally where she became the mistress of a man in the Embassy. I still hadn’t heard of her yet, you see. Then one of my Russian colleagues in Isfahan said: ‘There’s a queer specimen coming down here this weekend. You’d better look into her.’ I began making enquiries and we had her letters looked at and so on and here she was in constant correspondence with the Japanese to try and do down the United States. I’m sure it was purely a matter of silly girl vanity, you see, nothing more. But I caught her, as she’d obviously got to be stopped, and I sent her back to Tehran. My impression was, since we always treated all these people with extreme gentleness, that nothing much could happen to her. She’d get a spanking and go back to Chicago. But in fact we handed her over to the Americans and I was told that three days afterward they shot her. That’s the way they behaved. We were absolutely frightened of them.89

  Typically Bunting offered this insight into his war experience to illustrate the treatment of Pound by the American authorities after the war, rather than as an interesting story in itself.

  Teheran was a tiny station and Bunting was in the thick of it. Iran was not a negligible theatre, however. Russian intelligence had probably exaggerated the threat of an Axis invasion but the Joint Intelligence Sub-committee believed that in the summer of 1941 the number of German nationals in Iran had reached five thousand, and that they constituted ‘a very highly developed German Fifth Column’ with well-advanced plans to exert pressure on the Iranian government.90 The Iranian government continued to protest that its position was scrupulously neutral, but Italian intelligence gave a strong indication that Germany was talking to Teheran about the possibility of expanding Iranian territory in the event of a collapse of the Soviet Union and that, in any event, Teheran was strongly predisposed to Germany and would throw off the mask of neutrality as soon as German troops appeared in the Caucasus. The joint Soviet and British occupation was a way of getting the Allied retaliation in first. The primary objective was to ensure the expulsion of the German Fifth Column but protection of the oil fields and refineries and pressur
e on the Iranian government to adopt Allied-friendly policies weren’t far behind.91 German desperation for oil meant that an attack on Iraq and Iran was regarded as inevitable by 1941, although there was consensus that a complete Russian collapse was a prerequisite.

  There can be little doubt that British security operations in the Middle East were a shambles during the war. The official history of the security services of the time points to an impossibly confusing chain of command in the region. The Security Service in London failed consistently to co-ordinate activity with the Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) organisation, which was itself part of a separate body called Middle East Intelligence (MEIC). The problem was compounded by the fact that Iraq and Persia were handled by another organisation, Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq and Persia (CICI), which arose from the fact that for most of the war there were two commands in the Middle East, Middle East (MEF) in Cairo, and Persia and Iraq (PAIC) which was headquartered in Baghdad. There were many more layers in the swirling hierarchy of responsibility and command, but these alone are sufficient to demonstrate that Bunting was operating in impossible circumstances.92

  You wouldn’t recognise the old bum

  After the war the deployment of British intelligence services overseas was directed specifically towards those countries that were deemed particularly vulnerable to the influence of Communism. In the Middle East, according to Keith Jeffery’s definitive history of the service, ‘beyond sizeable stations in Istanbul, Cairo and Jerusalem, SIS was pretty thinly spread, and tackling Communism in Iraq and Iran largely depended on liaison services’.93

  Bunting, by now Vice-Consul in Isfahan, having been promoted to Acting Flight Lieutenant in November 1944, wrote to Zukofsky on 21 April 1945:

  my taste for variety has certainly been gratified in this war. I have been on almost every British front worth being on except Dunkirk, travelled through every rank from Aircraftsman First Class to Squadron-Leader (equals Major, to forestall your question), seen huge chunks of the world that I wouldn’t otherwise have visited, been sailor, balloon-man, drill instructor, interpreter, truck driver in the desert, intelligence officer of several kinds, operations officer to a busy fighter squadron, recorder of the doings of nomadic tribes, labour manager, and now consul in a more or less crucial post.94

  He was well placed. He described his situation to Karl Drerup:

  I am sure you would like Isfahan. My lawn is studded with bright flowers, just like a Persian brocade … I have a nice Persian house built around a garden, and another garden opening from it, where there are fruit trees, and where I keep my five alarming watch-dogs. Beyond, there is a brook, and then more gardens – Isfahan is so full of gardens that from a little distance you would think the minarets rose straight out of a forest … We go hunting – lie behind piles of stones near the snow on the mountains while the beaters surround and drive an enormous area of country, and the animals appear all of a sudden, and they may be deer or moufflon or ibex, or they may be a wolf, leopard or bear.95

  Bunting was quickly well-connected in the region. He told Drerup that he had to know

  everybody of any influence in the whole of Central Persia – officials, rich men, tribal chiefs, soldiers – and I spend a fair amount of time travelling about the mountains and deserts in an old Ford as far as it will take me, and then on a horse or on foot. I not only see wonderful places and picturesque people, I get a good view of mens motives, a much more varied view than is possible at home; and I step at will, as it were, from the present into the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages into the age of the Nomads, and back again.96

  Bunting was, once again, at the heart of the action. ‘By some unlucky chance,’ he told Zukofsky,

  since the day I took over here, the centre of tension in Western Asia has been Isfahan, and my reports have had to be long, and I know that many were copied for the Ambassador and at least one went straight by plane to the Prime Minister. Not reports which I enjoyed writing, those. I have the impression that the situation in Persia, which has been kept dark for so far, is going to be made public soon, and though I don’t suppose there will be any details given, you may be able to read between the lines of eventual newspaper reports what a strenuous time I’ve had.97

  He quickly befriended General Abbas Garzan in Isfahan. Garzan, he wrote to Dorothy Pound, was a

  queer and charming character: a good soldier, an honest official, with a sense of humour equal to anything that could possibly turn up, and no respect for snobbery or convention. He married a girl straight out of the local brothel, to the horror of the wives of his staff, and she was a kind and admirable woman. I helped him catch a gang of arms smugglers, and he helped me to the extent of making me almost (though not quite) free to use Persian military intelligence. And I think it must have been he who told Colonel Shivrani to lend me a cavalry horse and groom … for the whole time I remained in Isfahan.98

  He recognised the sudden change in his fortunes:

  The missionaries and bankers treat me with respect and keep away from me. The Persian officials are good fellows … and they and the landlords and the chiefs of the Bakhtiari tribe regale me with mounds of rice, acres of mutton steaks, and gallons of vodka at shooting parties, garden parties, receptions, dances and just plain parties without a label. Even the service, the niggardly old Air Force, provides me with a car and a house and four excellent servants, and pays for my drinks and cigarettes, and the Persian army lends me a horse and groom. I keep five large dogs and two sentries in and out of my garden, and altogether you wouldn’t recognise the old bum in his present surroundings.99

  Almost as soon as he arrived in Isfahan he tried to arrange for his daughter Bourtai, by now fourteen, to meet Omar Pound in Europe and travel with him to Persia. He wrote to Dorothy Pound in May 1947 that he was trying to persuade Marian to let Bourtai join him but she was ‘proving a hard nut to crack’. His new boss was Sir John le Rougetel, who had a daughter, Bridget, about Bourtai’s age. He liked le Rougetel already, although he later came to see le Rougetel as part of the problem of British engagement with the region rather than part of the solution.100 Marian cancelled the trip at the last minute, after Bourtai’s passage had been booked.101

  Even when discounted for Bunting’s proneness to exaggeration (or outright invention) his stories from Persia are still wonderful. He told Gael Turnbull, for instance, that when he was first in Persia

  one morning a man arrived at the door with a horse for him. Sent for his personal use by one of the Persian generals. Bunting had to apologise, that he could not ride. Then the message came back, ‘We will teach you!’ He attended the cavalry riding school, run by the acknowledged best cavalry teacher in the world. ‘The first day we started off bareback, riding facing backwards. The next day we were standing up on the horse. It went on like that. By the end of the week, we were getting off and on the horse while it galloped. To finish, we all rode to the top of a steep mountain, and back again. Coming down the horses were sliding most of the way on their rumps. But I learned to ride! …’ He saw two public hangings. One was of a doctor, who had murdered a lot of patients, for money. But he was away off at the edge of the crowd, and there really to keep an eye out for undercover agents. The other was a rebel who had been a ringleader in a conspiracy. He had helped to uncover the plot, and had to attend as the official British representative. ‘They did it from one of the city gates. Just drove a lorry underneath. He choked to death. It isn’t very pleasant at all.’102

  Gael Turnbull told Michael Shayer about how Bunting

  once slept with a Persian whore at the expense of His Majesty’s Government, to get information about the Russians … And Michael tells me of, at the Rutherfords, some talk of sexual morality and he tells of a visit to the head of the Shi‘a sect of Islam, in Iraq, on official business. A very saintly man, who has since become so venerated since his death. ‘He entertained me very well. A full set of courses, and wines, and coffees. And then he asked me, “Do you prefer gir
ls or boys?” It was only right he should.’ Apparently, too, he did enjoy that hospitality.103

  Bunting’s job in Isfahan was clearly dangerous, but danger was one of the few subjects that he never felt any compulsion to embellish. He played it down to Zukofsky:

  the Persian government insisted on providing me with a guard of soldiers (I was vice-consul and credited locally with the most hairraising anticommunist performances) which I found a nuisance. An English newspaper (Reynold’s) without even Tass to inspire it credited me with an attempt to burn down the city of Yazd and massacre the inhabitants … Sometimes the soldiers didn’t recognize me and I had trouble getting into my own house: and there was dismay when I fetched a Russian consul home to dinner. The danger (of me being assassinated) was, I think, imaginary, though they did have a shot at one of my colleagues (Communists did). I wore a pistol after dark for a week or two, out of deference to the Chief of Police.104

  He even played down the danger he caused to himself:

  I have just distinguished myself by smashing my car twice in one month, after never having had an accident of any sort in my life before. The first time I hit a mis-lighted lorry in the dark, the second a wheel came off when it was travelling at high speed on a very busy road, and though I failed to kill anyone, the car ultimately turned over and gave me a bang on the head which kept me dazed for three days. I fear the insurance agent has ceased to love me and will buy me no more free drinks.105

  Bunting’s appointment as Flight Lieutenant was confirmed on 16 January 1946 but by June he was on his way home with the rank of Acting Squadron Leader. He wrote to Zukofsky from a transit camp in Cairo: