by Mark Colvin
To exploit and intensify this new unity, a few days after the failed American hostage rescue, the Ayatollahs decided to mount a mass demonstration in celebration of their victory. We went to film it. I estimated—as did others—that there were at least half a million people there. My TV piece began like this:
Chanting crowd—pan across to piece to camera.
One of the most remarkable things about the Iranian Revolution is its incredible capacity for mass mobilisation. The revolution itself was marked by several demonstrations of a million or more, and it’s still possible to get hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people pouring into the centre of Tehran in buses, in cars and taxis, and on foot.
After a while, we had a fair bit in the can, and all had been well. Any potential anti-Americanism from the crowd towards us was usually diffused by the fact that we’d drawn a large kangaroo on the side of our camera, with the word ‘AUSTRALIA’ in English and Farsi. But everything we’d shot was at ground level, so there was no real sense of the actual magnitude of the crowd. There was a big Iranian television outside-broadcast truck, and its crew told Les he was welcome to stand on top of it to film a panoramic shot that would capture the scope of what’s probably the biggest demonstration I’ve ever covered.
My piece went on:
High shot from truck roof panning across vast crowd …
It’s this ability to demonstrate support by sheer weight of numbers that’s one of the keys to power in the country today. These huge demonstrations, however, also add considerably to the uncertainty and danger of life in post-revolutionary Iran.
Pick-up truck drives through crowd carrying young men, some armed with machine guns.
A mass of people this size may look united and purposeful at a distance, but on the ground it’s a shifting and volatile coalition of different and sometimes conflicting groups.
Marchers carrying Khomeini posters.
In this gathering there were liberal supporters of President Bani-Sadr, devout Muslims faithfully following the Mullahs’ line, groups of the derelict and unemployed seeking violence, and a sizeable element of the simply curious.
It was being visible on top of the truck that did it. Just as we decided we’d filmed enough and were trying to make our way out of the crowd, with me carrying the Nagra and Les the Arriflex, the attack began from behind. I felt a couple of punches to my shoulders and back, and saw teenagers running past after they’d hit me, but far more blows rained down on Les.
My script doesn’t fully capture the intense fear we felt at that moment, completely surrounded, separated from our driver, and a long, long way from the edge of the crowd.
Emotions run high. Anti-Americanism is often the strongest emotion of all, and when that happens there’s no discrimination exercised.
A group of youths, some as young as eleven or twelve, punched ABC cameraman Les Seymour several times in the back a few moments after he took these pictures. We were told they’d refused to believe we were not American. Only the arrival of armed Revolutionary Guards prevented further violence. Moments before, the crowd had been friendly and helpful.
The fact is that we may well have owed our lives to those Revolutionary Guards. We heard them first as a klaxon behind us, then looked back to see their big American pick-up truck ploughing towards us through the crowd, its front doors wide open and with an armed man balanced on each sill—it was like a bulldozer, scattering demonstrators as it came. Les and I both thought the guards were going to arrest us and lock us up, at best, but instead they scooped us into the truck and drove us to our van, well away from the mass of the crowd. They were friendly and business-like, and not for the first time I reflected on the duality of Iran: how you could meet deep hostility at one moment yet find it replaced by the greatest hospitality.
Les was feeling really sore. He went to the hospital, where a doctor told him he might have a broken pelvis and insisted he have an X-ray. He waited in a room full of women in chadors, before, as he told me later, the doctor put the pictures straight up on the light box to show him, in front of everyone. The trouble was, as I could see when he showed me the pictures, that there was inadequate shielding in the X-ray machine, so the pelvic images showed rather more than bone. Under the chadors, Les claimed, eyes were swivelling. The fact that he could laugh about it was in itself an indication that there was no fracture, but he was in pain, and for the next few days I concentrated on radio so he could get some rest.
Then, on 30 April, the focus decisively went off Tehran and onto another massive Iran story elsewhere—the takeover by an Iranian Arab separatist group of the country’s embassy in London. After what had happened to us, and with the London office covering events at the embassy in Princes Gate, Bert Christie, to whom I answered in Sydney, wanted to make a decision on whether to keep us in Iran or pull us out.
I already had a counterproposition. ‘Let’s go and cover an actual war’ was basically how BBC correspondent Alex Brodie had pitched it to me. ‘Let’s go to this place up in the north-west that’s trying to make itself independent of Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime.’
* * *
The self-declared Republic of Iranian Kurdistan was a place that did not exist in the eyes of the country’s central government, or those of the United Nations, or in the consciousness of most of the world. But it was a place that had been fighting for its life since the spring of the previous year—a place whose capital had been besieged and sacked by the Iranian Army, with its American equipment inherited from the Shah, but then retaken by ill-equipped Kurdish Peshmerga.
Alex’s friend and interpreter, Bahram Dehqani-Tafti, an Anglo-Iranian poet and teacher not long out of Oxford University, said he’d come with us and translate. We took a plane to Tabriz and drove towards Kurdistan with absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. Eventually we reached a ramshackle sort of border post, an oddity given that officially there was no border: how could there be, to a place that didn’t exist? The sergeant told us to go and see his major, and detailed a young recruit to sit in the car as we drove there. This kid sat between me and Bahram, with his rifle between his knees, idly picking his teeth with the sight at the end of the barrel. ‘Don’t look,’ said Bahram, ‘but he’s got the safety catch off.’ The next five minutes on a bumpy track were spent praying this hayseed wouldn’t blow his head off, because if he did we’d undoubtedly get the blame.
When we reached the major, Bahram somehow persuaded him to let us continue. Before dusk we were in Mahabad, the Kurdistan capital, a neatly laid-out town that bore few traces of the mighty battle to recapture it only a few months before. What I remember, after the near-anarchy of Tehran, was an aura of civil peace and military discipline: well-organised, neatly dressed Kurdish soldiers who knew how to handle their weapons. ‘A Kurd kills with one shot,’ one of them told me. ‘We have always been short of ammunition.’
In the days spent in Mahabad, we met the Kurds’ spiritual leader, Sheikh Ezzedine Husseini, a man who had always argued for a secular republic and insisted that clergy like himself had no business running a country. We also met their political leader, Dr Qassemlou, a grave, Sorbonne-educated democrat who spoke eight languages and had espoused Kurdish nationalism all his life.
Then we drove south, because that’s where the Iranian Army counterattack was coming from. We thought they were a long way off, south of Sanandaj, but halfway to Saqqez, a helicopter gunship rose over a bluff about 100 metres away, its heavy machine gun pointed straight at us. It hovered for what seemed like an hour but was probably a minute, then peeled away. Not long after, I was congratulating myself on my own coolness when we stopped, I got out of the car, and my knees literally gave way. I lay on the ground in a heap. Your body tells the truth about fear, even when you try to lie.
We got to Saqqez and debated whether to go on. There was a convoy leaving for Sanandaj straight away, and maybe not another till the next day. We’d had a conversation before leaving Tehran about safety and agreed that in the e
vent of debate, any one of us would have a veto. In this case, Alex and Bahram thought the convoy would be a good idea, I wasn’t sure, and Les, the veteran, said no. We took Les’ advice and decided to wait, sitting talking to local Kurdish leaders, drinking small cups of thick sweet coffee and smoking. We all still wondered if we’d made the wrong decision, if we should have just gone on in the convoy. Then a man, white-faced and shaking, came in and started talking to the chief. Translation: the remnants of the convoy we almost joined were on their way back.
We came out of the house as the convoy limped in. We filmed the damaged trucks that had survived, the survivors and the charred bodies of the dead. An air-to-ground rocket attack is an ugly thing.
I’ve seldom felt so remote from the rest of the world. The feeling didn’t dissipate when we got lost, in the dead of night, on the way back to Mahabad. We pulled into a hamlet and asked the way to the provincial capital. ‘I’ve heard of it,’ came the unhelpful reply. We found it the next morning.
In Mahabad, the Kurds were deeply concerned about the safety of our film, which I knew was enough for a 10–15-minute Weekend Magazine feature. They were sure—and everything we had seen confirmed this—that we would not be able to get it past the censors, or to smuggle it out of the country. The Iranians at that time were insisting on seizing all unexposed film and processing it, just in case, because others had used the ‘unexposed film trick’ before. But film is bulky, and we had about eight flat, round cans of it, each the size of a discus. How to get it out?
The Kurds had a solution: ‘One of our people will smuggle it across the mountains into Turkey.’ Alex and Bahram agreed that we’d be unable to get the film out any other way, but we were all concerned for the safety of the smuggler: we didn’t want a man to put his life on the line for our film. Yet the Kurds persuaded us that, within two weeks, the film would be delivered to the Qantas office in Istanbul. We gave them the cans and then headed back to Tabriz en route to the Iranian capital.
* * *
Late on the evening of 5 May, I was in a Tehran café with Alex and Bahram, the latter shaking slightly and clearly in a state of shock, with his girlfriend Elisabeth at his side. He had been in his top-floor flat when he’d heard a rattling at the door from the roof. Fortunately the door was chained and bolted, and it appeared the intruder went away. But he couldn’t be sure, and he’d rung Alex and arranged to meet.
Bahram had more reason to be fearful than most people. Although himself not notably religious, he was the son of the Anglican bishop in Iran, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti. The bishop had welcomed the revolution but had been rebuffed by Khomeini, and worse: clergy he was responsible for were arrested, the authorities confiscated the properties and equipment of the church’s charitable work, and his house was looted. Then, in late 1979, in Esfahan, two gunmen climbed over the wall surrounding the Dehqani-Tafti house and broke in. They got into the bedroom and started firing. The bishop’s wife, Margaret, tried to shield him, taking a bullet in the hand, but by some fortunate chance the rest of the shots missed. The couple kept the pillowcase they’d used that day, with its evidence of four bullet holes, when they went into exile in London.
The mullahs of Esfahan were not finished with the Dehqani-Taftis yet, though. They mounted a campaign, free of evidence, to accuse the bishop of stealing from and defrauding his parishioners. One lever they had was that Bahram was still in the country and unable to get an exit visa. So when Bahram said he thought someone was out to get him, we took it seriously.
We were telling Bahram to spend the next few nights away from his flat, and not to go to work at his day job teaching English, and he was being stoical and saying he would probably turn up for work, when all our eyes were drawn to the café’s television screen. It showed something extraordinary happening, live from London. Some black balaclava-clad figures were abseiling down from the Iranian embassy’s roof while others were clambering across its balconies. A bomb thrown through a window was detonated, men rushed in, and eleven minutes later, the six-day siege was over. The SAS is famous now, as famous as the US Delta Force or Navy SEALs, but that moment, beamed live around the world, was the first time most people, even in the UK, had ever heard of the ultra-secretive Hereford-based force.
It was an extraordinary event, but in the circumstances only a momentary diversion from the real human problem in our midst. I told Bahram he was welcome to stay in my room at the Intercon if he needed to, but he said he’d go to Alex’s house. I still had the audiotapes from Kurdistan: the Iranian censors never bothered with those, for some reason, so we knew that there was going to be no problem getting them out of the country. We agreed that the hotel was a safe-enough place, and made an appointment for Bahram to meet me there the following afternoon to do word-for-word translations, to supplement the running interpretation he’d done on the spot.
The next day, when Bahram was a couple of hours late, I started to worry. I called Alex, but he’d heard nothing. I went up to the NBC offices, where Bahram sometimes translated, and where they liked him, to ask if they’d heard anything. They hadn’t, but they sent a couple of drivers out to look. It was a few hours later, at dusk, that one of the drivers came back to say that Bahram’s corpse had been found slumped against an outer wall of Evin Prison. He had gone to his teaching job that morning after all. On his way to my hotel, thugs had forced him off the road, transferred him to their vehicle, and taken him to a piece of waste ground to die.
Bahram was a remarkable and exceptionally intelligent young man. He’d arrived at Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics the year I graduated, and we had a lot in common. We had all bonded under fire in Kurdistan, too: friendships form very quickly under those circumstances. His death left me in utter turmoil, especially coming so soon after that of Tony Joyce.
I wrote a story about him which became a tribute and an obituary. I pictured his death—correctly, I still believe—as a symbol of what had happened to the revolution as a whole: the betrayal of the young, secular and idealistic at the hands of the fanatical and ruthless. I still do not know if the ABC used it: if so, it’s lost. However, I was an ABC News appointee, and ABC Radio News and Current Affairs were almost at war in those days, so I occasionally found my best stuff capriciously dropped.
Somebody read it, though, and it was raw enough to ring alarm bells in Sydney. Bert Christie rang to say it was time to pull out, and Les and I now needed no persuading. As our plane left Iranian airspace, we each ordered a fuck-you gin and tonic, even though it was only just past breakfast time.
* * *
If I’ve devoted a lot of space to this first part of my life as a correspondent, it’s not only because of the deep personal effect it had on my life, the impressions it made, the scars it left behind, but also because it was, on a broader stage, an extraordinary and perhaps pivotal moment. If the students had not taken the hostages, and the Supreme Leader allowed them to continue, or if the desert raid, by some miracle, had succeeded, so much might have been different, in Iran and in the rest of the world.
In Iran, I still believe there was considerable fragility in the Ayatollahs’ regime. There was an outside chance of a second revolutionary upheaval. There was, indisputably, conflict between clerical hardliners and civilian pragmatists: a genuine power struggle which did not have to end with the triumph of the Velayat-e Faqih—Khomeini’s doctrine that the state must be governed by a Supreme Leader from the highest ranks of the clergy; that is, himself. Jimmy Carter’s failed raid shifted the balance definitively to the fundamentalists, and soon many on the pragmatic wing, including the president and foreign minister, would be in exile or dead. The idea of a ‘separation of powers’ between mosque and state was dead, for a generation at least.
In the USA, most historians agree, the hostage crisis was a pivotal factor in ending Carter’s presidency, and thus helping usher in the Reagan era. Economically, free-marketeers definitively defeated Keynesians, not only in America but throughout the Free World. Strate
gically, Reagan’s obduracy also forced the events that led to the end of the Soviet Union, so this was also a key turning point in the Cold War.
* * *
A few days after returning to London, I travelled to Hampshire for the wedding of my cousin Belinda. A splendid affair, it was held in Winchester Cathedral, with a lavish reception afterwards. There were men in morning suits and pearl-grey ties, and girls in beautiful dresses, and rivers of champagne. Belinda’s husband Tim sang with his band, the wonderfully named Dicky Hart and the Pacemakers. The English spring weather, which can be treacherous, was instead warm and clement. It should have been a delight, but in some sense most of me wasn’t there. I was back in Tehran.
When people asked me what I’d been doing, I’d start to tell them, and watch their eyes glaze over. You couldn’t blame them: why ruin a good party with tales of upheaval and bloodshed? And at the back of my mind was something else: a growing fear about the film we’d tried to smuggle out of Kurdistan. The courier had not yet arrived at the promised drop-off. I rang regularly to check, but weeks went by, then months, and it never turned up. Eventually I had to come to terms with the probability that a man had died in a vain attempt to get the truth about his largely forgotten people across the border, in order that I could tell his story. It weighed on me, and still does.
A new correspondent, Peter George, arrived in London, keen to cover a part of the world I had subconsciously come to want to avoid. I still had Africa, and parts of Europe when the Brussels correspondent was on leave or had his hands full. But I couldn’t face the Middle East again. It would be a decade before I would go back.
