by Mark Colvin
Hedley: Oh … Well, what are conditions like in your hotel room?
Sloan: A little cramped, but I’m not being mistreated.
That’s pretty much how you started to feel after a few days in the Intercon. It wasn’t just the long hours spent writing or hunched over a tape recorder editing radio stories, then dismantling the phone and using alligator clips to transmit your audio down the phone line. It was also the waiting.
In the era of mobile phones, satellite phones, Skype, Twitter, Facebook and the rest, it’s probably useful to describe how we did international journalism back then. The indispensable tool of my trade was the Nagra Mark 4 tape recorder. A marvel of Swiss engineering, it weighed about 8 kilograms with batteries, and you carried it over your shoulder. Colleagues from the time often grumble that the Nagra has kept more physiotherapists and back surgeons in business than any other piece of equipment outside the mining and construction industries.
The Nagra was as tough as it was heavy: years later, I saw one run over by President Mikhail Gorbachev’s armoured limousine on the road outside the Soviet embassy in Paris. An outraged French TV sound recordist turned on the machine only to find it still working: bent out of shape, yes, but still working.
The reason you used the Nagra was that it really did work. Its technology ensured that, unlike some other reel-to-reel recorders, the tape always moved through the mechanism at the same speed. That meant no ‘wow’ or ‘flutter’ when the machine was being used in a moving vehicle or at walking speed (there was no real question of running with that much weight on your shoulder), or when the batteries ran down. So you could reliably use a clapperboard to synch your Nagra with a film camera—an Arriflex with its equally consistent speed of 24 frames per second. Ultimately, sound and vision could be remarried on the plates of a Steenbeck editing machine. In fact, the rushes had to be synched, shot by shot, before editing could even begin.
For radio, the Nagra also had an editing block, on which you used a razor blade and quarter-inch sticky tape to cut your story together. Again, you knew that whatever the state of the batteries (a row of no fewer than twelve big D-cells), the tape would flow past the magnetic play heads at the right speed.
Equally, the era of the laptop computer was still a few years away. Everything I wrote in Tehran, I wrote on a typewriter, two-fingered (I’d never learned to touch-type), but usually extremely fast. Corrections you made by hand or with Tipp-Ex, unless you decided you’d got the whole thing in the wrong order, in which case you often just had to type it all again. Cut-and-paste back then was not a word-processing metaphor—you used real scissors and real paste.
But once you finished your radio story, you still had to file it, and that meant getting a phone line good enough to send it down with sufficient audio quality to put it to air. That was when the waiting started. There was no direct international dialling in 1980: you had to go through international exchanges. But first, you had to go through the hotel exchange.
Ben Affleck’s film Argo is set just a month before my arrival in Tehran, and it contains some good stuff—most of it in the first half—but much of the rest has elements of the ridiculous for anyone who was there at the time. And of those elements, none is more ridiculous than the plot point, as the closing crescendo builds, in which an Iranian agent tries to verify a piece of evidence by dialling direct from an ordinary office telephone at Tehran’s airport to a film producer’s office in Los Angeles. There simply was no way of doing that back then. You had to go through several operators—in my case, a hotel operator, then a Tehran international exchange operator, then an operator at the Sydney International Exchange.
Looking back now, I’m fairly sure that every experienced journalist in that hotel was regularly bribing the Intercon’s operators to get them faster access to international calls. I was such a greenhorn that I had no idea. I would regularly wait six to eight hours, being told that my name had moved up the list and the call would come through ‘soon, soon’, to get put through to my colleagues on the desk in London, let alone Radio News or Current Affairs in Sydney.
In the pre-mobile, pre-pager era, that meant you were trapped, staring at the ceiling, thinking how now you finally understood why rock stars trashed hotel rooms and threw items of furniture out of windows. Once I made a virtue out of this imprisonment by writing a piece for Correspondents Report about what I could see out of my hotel window: a family of desperately poor people who lived in a makeshift shelter on the roof of the building opposite; Tehran’s always appalling traffic; the smog. And a bleakly hilarious incident in which a small car with a sunroof cut off a large Jaguar in the street directly below. I saw the Jaguar driver jump out at the next traffic light, walk up to the Fiat Bambino driver who had so insulted him, reach through the open roof, grab the driver by the throat, haul him up and punch him in the face. I resolved to be very careful to avoid inducing Iranian road rage.
There were also unwelcome incidents in-house, although they at least alleviated the boredom while you waited for that all-important call to come through.
A few months before I arrived, the morals police had raided the Intercon and seized all the hotel’s alcohol—beer, wine and spirits—without exception. The mullahs had then destroyed it all, smashing bottles, opening cans, and letting it all pour down into the drains. ‘Hard-bitten journalists wept,’ one who’d been there told me with a lopsided grin. But the mullahs weren’t finished. Almost every day I spent in that dreary hotel room, each time at a different hour, there was a knock on the door. I’d open it and there would be a brown-gowned mullah, stony-faced, flanked by a couple of Revolutionary Guards brandishing Kalashnikovs, ready to shoulder past you and start the search. They were brutish, thorough and wordless, and they didn’t stop at a cursory look inside the fridge. They turned the mattress upside down, they looked behind the curtains, and they went through the bathroom cupboards, all in search of the demon drink.
Before my trip, I’d heard all the stories about the Revolutionary Government’s hatred of the bottle, and had been quite resigned to being a teetotaller for a few weeks. But some kind of innate, sheer bloody-mindedness demanded a response to these repeated and ill-mannered invasions. I bought a couple of six-packs of beer on the black market, unscrewed the air-conditioning grille directly above the room entrance, and made my stash in there. They never once even looked: a small victory but a satisfying one.
Another regular visitor was far more welcome: the black-market caviar salesman. He knocked on my door about three days after I got to the Intercon, keen to sell me a large tin of the best Oscietra—high-quality Iranian caviar from the southern Caspian Sea—for a mere five pounds sterling. I was dubious. I’d never remotely been able to afford caviar, had never even tasted the stuff. Would I like it? Was it worth the price? I tried it and was hooked … like a Caspian sturgeon. From then on I stopped ordering anything from room service except blinis, sour cream and lemons. There was more than one day in that hotel when I ate caviar for breakfast, lunch and dinner. On departure, I took a giant tub of the stuff—possibly a whole fifteen pounds’ worth—back to London with me. I gathered that I probably could have sold it in the UK to the right buyer for about a thousand quid, but I liked it too much not to eat it myself and share it with my friends. Caviar is the cocaine of seafood. And I’ve never been able to afford it since.
As in the USA in the 1920s, Iranian alcohol prohibition, while theoretically absolute, was never without its loopholes. In this case, the loophole consisted of a Korean restaurateur called Mr Kim, whose well-appointed teppanyaki restaurant, Les and I soon discovered, was where half the foreign press corps went in the evenings. You sat on high stools around a flat, horseshoe-shaped cooking surface heated to a sizzling temperature. Inside the horseshoe, a chef, juggling large knives and cleavers as though they were clubs in a cabaret act, sliced beef and fish very thin and cooked it very rare in front of you. It was wonderful, and at the current rates of exchange ludicrously affordable. There were nood
le soups and perfectly cooked vegetables, and always on the side the pungent spicy kimchi to flavour everything.
And there was beer, and whisky. Somehow Mr Kim, who appeared to speak only about twenty words of English and almost no Farsi, had done a deal with the local Revolutionary Committee whereby they would turn a blind eye to the alcohol—as long as he admitted no Iranians. That was fine with Mr Kim, who knew that thanks to the journalism crowd he could do a roaring trade every night without a single local entering his portals.
It was there, I think, that I first met the local BBC stringer Alex Brodie, a tough, tenacious, energetic journalist who’d made his name covering the revolution, mainly for the World Service. His name will recur in this narrative, but for now I’ll just mention the night he and Les and I were the last people to leave Mr Kim’s, none of us remotely describable as sober, and for some reason we couldn’t get a taxi. After waiting an hour or more, during which we inhaled even more booze, we were starting to get a bit desperate, when Mr Kim himself offered to drive us home. We got in his extremely large and luxurious Mercedes, and he smilingly drove me and Les back to the Intercon before taking Alex back to his house-cum-office.
Drunk as lords in Revolutionary Tehran.
In the business of supplying foreigners with alcohol, prohibition or no prohibition, profits were clearly there to be had.
Chapter 4
We Are Corpses
IF THERE WERE aspects of life at the Intercontinental Hotel that made you feel somewhat imprisoned, the reality was that there were plenty of opportunities to get out and see what was going on.
Employees of the giant American network NBC had much of the floor above us, converted into offices and editing suites, and the BBC TV correspondents would meet them every morning to plan the day’s coverage. As a client of NBC and a longstanding international partner of the BBC, we were able to participate. This was fortunate, since there was so much going on in Tehran that one Australian correspondent accompanied by one cameraman could never have achieved much on their own. As it was, we were happy to contribute our eyes to a broader coverage, in exchange for the knowledge that we could use others’ material as freely as they used ours.
The Americans, especially, were far better resourced than anyone else. For them, the continuing imprisonment of the hostages was a huge story, leading the bulletins every night, with the news anchors beginning or ending each broadcast by announcing ‘Day X of the hostage crisis’. There was at least one producer for every on-screen reporter, and they had the money to employ a fleet of drivers and a large number of interpreters.
The story was of course much bigger than the US embassy where the hostages had now been held incommunicado for about five months. The invasion of the embassy was a rogue act: it had been run by student revolutionaries, apparently without direction from the government, although possibly with encouragement from the most radical among the Ayatollahs, who had no patience for anything but absolute power over the civil government. But after an initial period of uncertainty, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, in breach of every diplomatic convention and treaty, gave his blessing to what was essentially an act of terrorism—the takeover of a foreign embassy, by convention to be treated as foreign soil, and the brutal imprisonment of its employees. As such, the events of the last few months signalled a power struggle—a serious fracture in the Revolutionary Government and possible instability in the revolution itself.
There were mass rallies, liable at any time to turn into riots. There were bombings. Les and I went down to one of the town’s central squares one day to film the immediate aftermath of a car bomb that had gone off minutes before. There was blood and twisted metal everywhere: the worst thing I’d seen since I’d arrived at the Sydney Hilton on a night in 1976 after a bomb blew up a garbage truck, killing three people and injuring eleven. On another day, a couple of pedestrians were blown up by a homemade device—nowadays we’d call it an IED—concealed in an innocent-looking wash bag.
The economy was also a mess. I remember getting up at 2 a.m. one morning to go and film bread being made at a bakery. The government had fixed the price of bread, but inflation on the raw ingredients was so high that bakers were desperate. They were going to go out of business unless the price went up in the shops. And if that happened, it could mean bread riots. The elements of the government that wore suits wanted to do something practical to deal with the situation. The elements that wore robes and turbans, shall we say, wanted the revolution to be more pure, and had no truck at all with economic and other pragmatic solutions. It was they who now decided to flex their muscles, by cracking down on the opposition.
In late April 1980, I reported for AM on student riots that left hundreds injured and one person dead. Iran’s ruling Revolutionary Council had ordered the closure of groups and clubs across all universities, a move I assessed as deliberately setting up a head-on clash with the country’s left-wing groups. The groups in question were the Mujahideen and the Fedayeen, Islamic organisations which claimed a significant role in the success of the previous year’s revolution, but which the clergy accused of communist sympathies. And I noted that the clergy themselves commanded a formidable force called the Hezbollahi, a group of mostly illiterate youths with shaven heads who employed violence in the service of what they called the Party of God. But for the average Iranian, beneath the political infighting was a harsher reality, which I acknowledged in my report:
Meanwhile, this new political row is diverting attention from Iran’s drastically worsening economic situation. The country’s President, Mr Bani-Sadr, produced the simplest summing-up, predicting 100 per cent inflation unless something was done urgently. Mr Bani-Sadr said, ‘Economically speaking, we are corpses.’
‘Corpses.’ Even in the strongest political rhetoric, it doesn’t come much starker than that.
Bani-Sadr had been Ayatollah Khomeini’s pick for the presidency, but as well as being an Islamic revolutionary and having shared the Ayatollah’s Paris exile, the president was to some degree a pragmatist, one who had studied finance and economics at a high level, and actually written a textbook on Islamic economics. Bani-Sadr knew that the economy was plummeting, with predictable consequences. Every foreign journalist could have told you from personal observation what those consequences meant. With international sanctions starting to bite, and with the exchange rate of the rial fixed, prices were starting to rocket to such a degree that Weimar-style inflation could not be far away. Any Iranian with the sense and the wherewithal was trying to get money out of the country—or get their hands on foreign currency.
As it was, some journalists were pulling outrageous scams by changing most of their expense, accommodation and telecommunications money on the black market at prices many times the official rate, but charging their employers at the official rate. I heard about one Visnews producer who actually hired a crane just to get one top-shot of a massive demonstration, purely because he’d be able to make such a profit on the exchange-rate differential.
There were also canny old hands who’d brought wads of their own dollars or pounds so as to work the Iran Air scam. That was the system by which you went into the airline’s Tehran office with rials you’d bought on the black market for a fraction of their official value, and asked for two round-the-world first-class tickets. Iran Air was still trying hard to comply with the rules of the international airline organisation IATA, so when you got back to your office in London or New York and said you’d no longer be needing the tickets, they had no choice but to refund you the full value at the official exchange rate. Some people made illicit fortunes that way.
People who’ve had a revolution want more than the fall of the previous regime: they want their lives under the new government to be better, and the lives of Iranians were getting materially worse. Many of those who’d initially welcomed Khomeini and supported the fall of the Shah, particularly those who had hoped for a secular revolution, were now chafing.
There were also highly orga
nised, quasi-military political organisations which regarded themselves as having played key roles in the revolt, but now felt keenly the Ayatollahs’ determination to crush them. Les and I went to Tehran University to try to meet some of them. As I said in the report I subsequently filed for AM on 22 April, ‘On camera, we got silence: granted the anonymity of the tape recorder, people were more than willing to speak.’
Student: They had a cover-up here. They said that we want to do a Cultural Revolution in our universities. This is an internal matter OK, not for other nations, it’s not anybody’s goddamn business. And, and pre-judgement, false judgement, does not help us.
Me: But this is not …
Student: This is nothing, this is none of your business, this is an internal Iranian matter.
Me: Well don’t you think that the rest of the world has a right to be interested in what goes on here though?
Student: No! Are you interested in people, in human rights? Go to southern Lebanon.
At this point, we were told that if we left our camera in the car we could obtain an interview with one of the major political groups involved. We were led through a line of revolutionaries who were forming a barrier with arms linked. Then another line, then a third, to the front of the group’s headquarters. There, several hundred men and women were sitting quietly with their legs crossed. There were no signs of impending violence. We were led into what turned out to be the inner sanctum of a group associated with the Fedayeen, a Marxist-Leninist group who played a considerable part in the revolution against the Shah, but who the present government regards with deep suspicion. We had scarcely begun our interview with their spokesman when we heard the riot.
At this point on the tape, there’s a confused sound of shouting and chanting. I remember this as an extremely tense moment when we realised that we were in a locked room with high windows, too high to see through: we were trapped. It would be a few minutes before our shouts and banging on the doors were heard, and we could see what was going on.
