by Robert Fisk
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.
Although this essay reached profoundly inaccurate conclusions—“we do not foresee any likely circumstances in which a government controlled by religious leaders would come to power,” its authors wrote—other contemporary documents could display remarkable shrewdness. John Washburn would write on 18 September 1978 that “the Shah’s repression of religion in Iran has made Shiism’s predominant groups dogmatic and conservative in the course of defending themselves, just as Roman Catholicism has become in Communist countries.” As long ago as 1972, the then ambassador, Richard Helms, formerly head of the CIA, received a long “secret” memo on the Iranian “character” which suggested that Iran’s repeated national humiliations had “engrained in the Iranian personality very marked negative characteristics” but “under foreign occupation (Arabs, Mongols, Turks) or manipulation (British, Russians), Iranians preserved their sense of nationhood through their culture . . . and their self-respect in cloistered and concealed private lives . . . The world outside was justifiably seen as hostile.”
But it was the more prosaic efforts of U.S. diplomats that probably got closer to the truth. A note from U.S. consulates in Iran on 21 November 1978 reported public opinion outside Tehran. “Why, it is being asked, does Iran need F-14s when villagers less than five kilometres from Shiraz’s Tadayon Air Force Base . . . still live without running water or electricity?”30
What none of the U.S. embassy archives predicted was the brutality of the Iranian revolution, the extraordinary cruelty that manifested itself among the so-called judges and jurists who were predisposed to torture and kill out of whim rather than reflection. At the end of the eight-year Iran–Iraq War, this would meet its apogee in the mass hangings of thousands of opposition prisoners. But its characteristics were clearly evident within days of the Shah’s overthrow; and no one emphasised them more chillingly than Chief Justice Khalkhali, who had told me in December 1979 how he intended to “string up” the Shah. When he said that, and despite his ferocious reputation, I thought at first it was a joke, a cliché, an idle remark. Of course, it was nothing of the sort.
The Revolutionary Guards sitting around Khalkhali when I first visited the Hojatolislam had all been wounded while fighting Kurdish rebels in the north-west of Iran. It was hot in the little room in Qom and the bespectacled divine was wearing only pyjamas and a white apron. “You are from The Times of London?” he asked, glancing in my direction. “Well, look at these men.” He paused and then began to giggle in a high-pitched voice. “The rebels did this. I will pull them out by the roots—I will kill all of them.” In truth, Khalkhali did not look the part. He was a small man with a kindly smile—Islamic judges at that time all seemed to smile a lot—which he betrayed when making inappropriate jokes. Asked by a reporter two weeks earlier how he felt when the number of executions in Iran was decreasing, he replied with a chuckle: “I feel hungry.” It would have been a serious mistake, however, to imagine that Iran’s most feared judge—the “wrath of God” to his admirers—did not take his vocation seriously. “If an Islamic judge realises that someone is guilty of corruption on earth or of waging war against God,” he said, “the
judge will condemn the accused, even if he claims he is innocent. The most important thing in Islamic justice is the wisdom of the judge . . . Even if a man denies the charges against him, it means nothing if the judge decides otherwise.” Hojatolislam Khalkhali naturally had no time for reporters who asked why so many Iranians were executed after the revolution. “The people who were executed were the principal retainers of the previous hated regime. They had exploited this nation. They had been responsible for killings, tortures and unlawful imprisonment. I am surprised that you ask such questions.” Khalkhali displayed equally little patience when asked if his much-publicised determination to engineer the assassination of the ex-Shah accorded with the principles of Islamic justice. “We know that America will not return the Shah,” he said—with, it had to be admitted, a remarkable sense of realism—“so we have to kill him—there is no other choice. If it was possible to bring him here and try him, we would kill him afterwards. But since we cannot try him—and since we are sure that he should be executed—we will kill him anyway. No one tried Mussolini. And who tried the Frenchmen who were executed for collaborating with Hitler’s soldiers in the Second World War?”
All the while he was talking, the Revolutionary Guards would massage their wounded limbs—or what was left of them—and exercise their artificial hands. The creaking and clacking of steel fingers punctuated the conversation as Khalkhali walked around the room, shoeless and sockless, or massaged his feet with his hands. How, I asked, did he personally feel when he sentenced a man to death? “I feel that I am doing my duty and what I am required to do by the Iranian people. That is why I have never been criticised by my people for these executions.” But had he not refused to give Hoveyda or Nassiri, the ex-Savak boss, any right to appeal against his death sentence?
“They did appeal,” he replied. “And they asked the Imam and the court to forgive them. Many people came to me and asked me to forgive these people. But I was responsible to the Iranian nation and to God. I could not forgive Hoveyda and Nassiri. They destroyed the lives of sixty thousand people.” Khalkhali had, he claimed, ordered a commando squad to go to Panama where the Shah was now staying with his family in order to kill all of them. “I do not know if they have left Iran yet,” he said, and then broke into that familiar chuckle as he ventured into Spanish. “They all have pistolas.” Since the murder of the Shah’s nephew in Paris almost two weeks earlier, Interpol—and Khalkhali’s intended victims—were now paying a good deal of attention to the judge’s threats. And Khalkhali obligingly listed the targets of his hit squads. “We are looking for Sharif-Emami [former prime minister], General Palizban, Hushang Ansari [former finance minister], Ardeshir Zahedi [former ambassador in Washington], Gholam Ali Oveissi [former martial law administrator], Gharabagi [former chief of staff in the Shah’s army], Farah [the ex-empress], Hojabr Yazdani [a former banker], Valian [former minister of agriculture], Jamshid Amouzegar [former prime minister] and Shapour Bakhtiar [the Shah’s last prime minister, now living in Paris]. We also want the Shah and his brother and Ashraf [the Shah’s twin sister]. Wherever we can find these people, we will kill them.”
Khalkhali was unashamed at publicly naming his own “hit list,” and he was perfectly serious; more than a decade later, I would meet the head of the Iranian hit squad sent to Paris to murder Bakhtiar. So was Khalkhali really the “wrath of God”? I asked. “I grew up in poverty and therefore I can understand poor people. I know all about the previous regime. I have read books about politics. The Imam ordered me to be the Islamic judge and I have done the job perfectly. That’s why none of the Shah’s agents in Iran has escaped my hands.”31
It would be seven months before I saw Khalkhali again. His monstrous reputation had not been sullied by a temporary fall in the number of executions. By July 1980, his wrath was falling on new and more fruitful pastures. He stood now, this formidable judicial luminary, in the sunny courtyard of Qasr prison, brandishing a miniature pink plastic spoon, smacking his lips noisily and tucking into a large cardboard tub of vanilla ice-cream. For a man who had just ordered the first public execution in Tehran for fifteen years, he was in an excellent frame of mind.
Five days earlier, a gruesome new precedent had been set when four people— two of them middle-aged married women—were stoned to death in the southern Iranian city of Kerman. All had been condemned for sexual offences by one of Khalkhali’s revolutionary courts, and within hours the condemned had been dressed in white cloth, buried up to their chests in the ground and bombarded with rocks as large as a man’s fist. In a characteristic and typically unnecessary comment, the court later stated that all four had died of “brain damage.” The women were condemned for being “involved in prostitution” and for “deceiving young girls.” One of the men was convicted of homosexuality and adultery, and the other for allegedly raping a ten-year-old girl. Before execution, the four were ritually bathed and shrouded, a ceremonial white hood being placed over their heads. Local clergymen had visited the condemned and chosen the stones for the execution, varying in size between one and six inches in diameter. It took the two women and two men fifteen minutes to die.32
“I don’t know if I approve of stoning,” Sadeq Khalkhali said, flashing a grin at us journalists and at a group of startled diplomats who had also been invited to the Qasr prison. “But in the Koran, it is mentioned that those who commit adultery should be killed by stoning.” The Hojatolislam dug his little spoon into the melting white ice-cream, oblivious to the bare-headed prisoners who trudged past behind him, heaving barrels loaded with cauldrons of vegetable soup. “We approve of anything the Koran says. What is the difference between killing people with stones and killing them with bullets? But throwing stones certainly teaches people a lesson.” Khalkhali modestly disowned responsibility for the Kerman stonings—his bearded public relations man informed us that a man called Fahin Kermani had taken this weighty decision—but he agreed that he had ordered some fresh executions that morning. Seven men had been lined up at one end of Jamshid Street at five o’clock and shot down by a firing squad while a large crowd gawked from a distance. Many of those who died had been convicted of drug offences, and it was in his role as chief of the Iranian anti-narcotics squad that the Hojatolislam had welcomed us to Qasr prison to view his latest haul of contraband.
One could only be impressed. Khalkhali had piled it up in the prison mosque, a magnificent frescoed edifice with a cupola of red and blue tiles, now filled with tons of opium, kilogram sacks of heroin, large sticky slabs of hashish, stolen refrigerators, ornately carved backgammon boards, a 2½-metre wall of cigarettes—here I thought briefly of Harvey Morris in his Reuters “saturnalia”— thousands of bubble pipes, carpets, knives, automatic rifles and rows of champagne bottles (Krug 1972). The beautiful mosque literally reeked of hashish as Khalkhali made a triumphal tour of his loot, pushing his way past 20 tons of opium and at least 100 kilograms of heroin, each neatly packed into clean white sacks. It was inevitable that he would be asked whether the revolutionary courts were dealing enthusiastically enough with drug-dealers, and equally inevitable that the Hojatolislam would evince a broad smile—directed at the diplomats—before replying. “If we did what others wanted us to do, we would have to kill many people—which in my opinion is simply impossible,” he said. “Things could end up in a crisis. If we were going to kill everyone who had five grams of heroin, we would have to kill five thousand people—and that would be difficult.” In fairness, it should be added that the Ayatollah had made a fair start. In the past seven weeks, his courts had summarily dispatched 176 men and women to the firing squads for narcotics offences, many of them sentenced by Khalkhali himself in the innocuous tree-shaded concrete building 300 metres from the little mosque.
Khalkhali tried hard not to look like an ogre; he repeatedly denied that he was any such thing. His small, plump frame, grey beard and twinkling eyes give him a fatherly appearance, the kind of man who might have been more at home at the fireside in carpet slippers with the
family cat purring beside him—just so long as the family cat survived. He joked frequently with us as he made his round of the mosque, good-naturedly poking his finger into the sacks of opium that lay beneath the main cupola. Every minute or so, a young man in a pale green shirt with a pistol tucked into his trousers would clamber onto a pile of heroin bags and scream “God is Great” at the top of his lungs, a refrain that would be taken up and echoed around the mosque.
“If you look at me, you don’t see an inner struggle written all over my face,” Khalkhali remarked as he emerged into the sunshine. “But I am actually a revolutionary person. I am chasing agents everywhere—in France, England and America. That is a fact. I am chasing them everywhere.” He claimed a “200 per cent success” in stamping out drug-running in Iran and an 80 per cent victory in preventing international drug-trafficking—which was why the diplomats had been invited to the Qasr prison to listen to the judge. He claimed that an intercontinental mafia was operating a drug ring from Pakistan, Burma and Thailand, and described how a member of the ex-Shah’s family allegedly used a private aircraft to fly drugs from Afghanistan to a small airfield outside Tehran. The captured opium, he said, might be used by the government for medical purposes. The hashish and heroin would be burned.
