by Robert Fisk
And what, the world’s press wanted to know, did the two prisoners think of Ayatollah Khomeini? The major mistranslated the question thus: “Now that things have gone so badly for you, what do you think of Khomeini?” The first prisoner replied that “opinion” of the Ayatollah would not be the same after the war. But the wounded man glanced quickly at us and said that “if Ayatollah Khomeini brought on a war between two Muslim countries, this was wrong.” The conditional clause in this reply was lost on the Iraqi major who then happily ordered the removal of the prisoners.
The Iraqi army, it seemed, would go to any lengths to display proof of victory and it spent a further hour showing off Iranian hardware captured in Khorramshahr. There was an American-made anti-tank launcher—made by the Hughes Aircraft Company and coded DAA-HOI-70-C-0525—a clutch of Soviet-made armoured vehicles and an American personnel carrier on which the Iraqis had spray-painted their own definitive and revealing slogan for the day. “Captured,” it said, “from the racist Persian Asians.” Captured armour was to become a wearying part of the now increasingly government-controlled coverage of the war.
They bussed us up to Amara, 160 kilometres north of Basra and only 50 kilometres from the Iranian border, to show us twenty Chieftain tanks seized on the central front around Ahwaz, a fraction of the 800 Chieftains that Britain had sold to the Shah. Some had been hit by shells or grenades but we clambered onto them. A partly damaged hulk was lying in a field with its hatch open, and in I climbed to sit in the driver’s seat. A pouch on the wall to my left still contained the British Ministry of Defence tank manual—marked “Restricted” and coded WO 14557-1—although how the Iranian crews were supposed to translate the English was a mystery. I had sat there for a minute when it occurred to me that the crew probably did not survive their encounter with the Iraqis and I turned my head slowly to the gunner’s seat to my right. And there, sure enough, lay the grisly remains of the poor young Iranian who had gone into battle a few days ago, a carbonised skeleton with the burned tatters of his uniform hanging to his bones like little black flags, the skull still bearing the faint remains of flesh.
But the Iraqis could not conceal their own losses. North of Basra I came across an orange-and-white taxi standing at a petrol station, the driver talking to the garage hand, not even bothering to glance at the long wooden box on top of his vehicle. Coffins in Iraq are usually carried on the roofs of cars, and all that was different in this case was that an Iraqi flag was wrapped around the box. A soldier was going home for burial.
According to the Baathist Al-Thawra, there had been only two Iraqi soldiers killed in the previous twenty-four hours, which meant that I had—quite by chance—come across 50 per cent of the previous day’s fatalities. But there were four other taxis on the same road, all heading north with their gloomy cargoes, the red, white and black banner with its three stars flapping on the rooftop coffins. We did not see these cars in the early days of the war, nor the scores of military ambulances that now clogged the roads. On just one day in the first week of October alone, the army brought 480 bodies to the military hospital mortuary in Baghdad. If these corpses came from just the central sector of the battle front, then the daily toll of dead could be as high as 600 or 700. Even the Iraqi press was now extolling the glory that soldiers achieved when “sacrificing” themselves in battle, and Saddam Hussein, visiting wounded civilians in Kirkuk on 12 October, described their injuries as “medals of honour.”
Iraqi television’s lavish coverage of the conflict—the “Whirlwind War” theme music had now been dropped—was filled with tanks and guns and smashed Iranian aircraft, but there were no photographs of the dead of either side. When the station entertained its viewers with Gary Cooper in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the authorities clumsily excised a sequence showing the bodies of Spanish Republican troops lying on a road. Later the Iraqis would show Iranian corpses in large and savage detail.
Among the other British reporters in Basra was Jon Snow of ITN, whose courage and humour made him an excellent colleague in time of great danger but who could never in his life have imagined the drama into which he would be propelled in mid-October 1980. “Snowy,” whose imitations of Prince Charles should have earned him a place in vaudeville,52 was regularly reporting to camera from the bank of the Shatt al-Arab south of Basra. However, watching his dispatches in London was the owner of the Silverline shipping company, who had been desperately searching for six weeks for the location of his British-captained 22,000-ton soya bean oil carrier Al-Tanin.
And suddenly, there on the screen behind Snow’s shoulder, he spotted his missing vessel, still afloat but obviously in the middle of a battle. The Foreign Office could do nothing to help, so the owner immediately asked Snow to be his official shipping agent in Basra and telexed his new appointment to him for the benefit of the Iraqi authorities. There were fifty-six souls aboard, nine of them British, and they had only one way of contacting the outside world; among the dozens of ships marooned in the city’s harbour was a vessel captained by a Norwegian who was in daily contact with the Al-Tanin and who confirmed to Snow that the trapped captain and his crew were anxious to be rescued.
Snow decided to enlist the help of the Iraqi military and swim out to the ship at night to arrange the rescue of the crew. But neither the navy nor the Iraqi authorities in Basra could provide him with anything but a tourist map of the all-important waterway for which Saddam had partly gone to war. This, of course, was Snow’s exclusive story—a “spectacular” if he brought it off, a human and political tragedy for the crew, Snow and ITN if it ended in disaster—but he told me privately of his difficulty in obtaining a map of the river. “Now listen, Fisky, old boy, if you can find a decent map, I’ll let you come along,” he said. I immediately remembered my grandfather Edward, first mate on the Cutty Sark, and all that I had read about the merchant marine. Every ship’s master, I knew, was required to carry detailed charts of the harbours and waterways he used. So I hunted down a profusely bearded Baltic sea-captain whose freighter lay alongside in Basra docks, and he agreed to lend me his old British Admiralty survey of the Shatt al-Arab. This magnificent document—a work of oceanographic art as much as technical competence—was duly photocopied and presented to the frogmen of the Iraqi navy.
All the elements of high adventure were in place: the Al-Tanin ’s captain with the splendidly nautical name of Dyke, who thought up the rescue mission in the first place; Jack Simmons, the British consular official with a round face and small rimless spectacles who arrived unannounced in Basra but could get no help from the Iraqis. There was even a handsome major in the Iraqi navy, a grey-haired, quiet man who gallantly risked his life for the crew of the British ship. He never gave us his name, so Snow always referred to him warmly as “our Major.” Then there was thirty-three-year-old Snow, his crew—cameraman Chris Squires and soundman Nigel Thompson—and Fisk, who would come to regard this as the last journalistic Boy’s Own Paper story of his life. The rest of my reporting would be about tragedy.
The Al-Tanin had moored in the Shatt five weeks earlier to unload its cargo of cooking oil by lighter. But when the war began, it found itself—like all the other big ships in the river—trapped between two armies; machine-gun and rifle fire raked the waterway and on several days the crew watched low-level rockets skim the surface of the river around the Al-Tanin’s hull. Captain Dyke talked to Snow over the Norwegian captain’s radio and suggested Snow should try a rescue attempt on 15 October. This would be “Operation Pear”; if it failed or was postponed, Snow could try again on 16 October when the rescue would become “Operation Apple.” “Our Major,” however, wanted to visit Dyke aboard the Al-Tanin to discuss the escape. Dyke agreed to what he called a “fibre ascent”—assuming any Iranian listeners to his conversation would not know this meant a rope—if they swam out to his ship.
At nine o’clock at night on 15 October, therefore, a strange band wound its way through the soggy, waterlogged plantation of an island on the Shatt
al-Arab— not far from Um al-Rassas, from which Pierre Bayle and myself had made our own escape just a few days earlier. The major and two of his frogmen, Snow—in black wet suit with flippers in hand—Squires, Thompson and I. We must have made a remarkable spectacle, clopping along through the darkness of the tropical island to the stretch of river where we knew the Al-Tanin was at anchor, dragging with us a rubber boat for Snow’s rescue attempt. In the darkness, we slipped off mud tracks into evil-smelling lagoons, slithered into long-forgotten dykes and lumbered over creaking, rotten bridges. Once, when we set the abandoned village dogs barking, Iranian snipers opened up on the plantation and for more than a minute we listened to the bullets whining around us at hip height as the Iranians tried to guess where the intruders were.
Even before we reached the riverbank, we could see the Al-Tanin , her superstructure fully lit up, her riding lights agleam, just as Captain Dyke had promised they would be. The ship’s generators echoed through the hot palm forest and her bright orange funnel appeared surrealistically through the shadows of the tree trunks. Snow and the major were the first to see what was wrong. Dyke had told them to board his ship at 9:30 p.m. on the starboard side of the vessel, when the tide would have turned it towards the western, Iraqi bank of the river. He had illuminated the starboard hull for this reason. But it was the darkened port side of the Al-Tanin that faced us. Every Iranian could see the brightly-lit starboard of the ship right in front of the Iranian lines. Snow sat on the bank, squeezed into his flippers and stared at the ship. “Bugger!” he said. We all looked at Snow. He looked at the major. So did the frogmen. Snow would later come to regard the episode as “an act of unparalleled insanity.” Squires, Thompson and I were all profoundly grateful we would not be part of this shooting match.
Then Snow slid into the muddy waters, the major and the two other naval frogmen beside him, clambering into their rubber boat, pushing and paddling it out into the river. So strong was the current—the tide was now at its height—that it took them twenty minutes to travel the 200 metres to the ship and at one point, staring at them through binoculars, I could see they were in danger of being taken right past the vessel and out into the open river. But they caught a ladder on the darkened port side and climbed aboard.
Snow first encountered members of the Filipino crew who appeared “terrified of the apparition” of the television reporter in black wet suit and flippers. But it was only when he met a surprised but otherwise exuberant Captain Dyke that Snow discovered he had not been expected for another three hours. Ships worked to GMT, not to local time, in their ports of call, and Iraqi time was three hours ahead of GMT. Had Snow and his Iraqi major turned up at half-past midnight according to Iraqi clocks—9:30 p.m. GMT—the illuminated starboard side of the ship would have faced Iraq.
Snow, the major and Dyke agreed that twenty-three of the ship’s crew would head for the shoreline in a lifeboat at 3:30 a.m. and we watched Snow’s rubber boat moving silently back across the river towards us. So we all sat through the long hours of darkness, watching the Al-Tanin’s riding lights reflecting on the fast-moving water as the big ship at last turned on the tide, and seeing—behind the vessel—the fires of Abadan. Distant guns bellowed in the night as the mosquitoes clustered round us for greedy company. At one point, Snow looked at me. “One does feel this tremendous sense of responsibility,” he said. I was wondering how the Prince of Wales would pronounce that—the phrase was pure Prince Charles— when two red torch flashes sparkled from the ship’s deck. “Operation Pear” had begun. Snow sent two lamp flashes back. A hydraulic winch—painfully loud over the river’s silence—hummed away, followed by a harsh, metallic banging. The gate to the lifeboat had jammed. We could see the crew waiting on deck to disembark and we shared their feelings as the tell-tale hammer-blows echoed over the river towards the Iranians.
Then the lifeboat was down, its gunwales dipping towards us, carving ripples of water which the Iranians really should have seen. But when the boat thumped into the mud of our riverbank at 4 a.m., even the Iraqi frogmen lost their edge of fearful expectation as an English girl appeared on the slippery deck and asked: “Will someone help me ashore?” It was one of those quintessential moments so dear to Anglo-Saxons. The British were cheating danger again, landing on a tropical shore under a quarter moon with the possibility of a shell blowing them all to pieces and three young women to protect. And so delighted were we to see the little lifeboat that we tugged its crew onto the riverbank with enough noise to awaken every dozing Iranian on the other side. The Iraqi naval men grinned with happiness.
Thirteen crewmen had remained behind to guard their ship, and true to the traditions of what we thought then was a post-colonial world, only seven of the twenty-three crew who were rescued were actually British. The rest were a tough but cheerful group of Filipinos, small men with laughing eyes who hooted with joy when, with the British, we tugged them ashore and pushed them unceremoniously into an Iraqi army entrenchment behind us. Many of the Filipinos handed up to me their duty-free treasures, radios and television sets and—in one case—a washing machine which I dumped in the mud. They were hastily led off by Iraqi troops into the forest.
The first officer expressed his concern for those crewmen left aboard, the engineer announced that he would take a long holiday. Teresa Hancock, a crewman’s bride from Stoke-on-Trent, had been honeymooning aboard and had celebrated her twenty-first birthday on the Shatt al-Arab three days earlier with a small party. But if ever there was a happy story, this was it. The Iraqi navy had acquitted itself with some glory—performing a genuinely humanitarian act with courage and professionalism—and “Snowy” got his scoop. Indeed, Snow announced that he would henceforth be known as Al-Thalaj—Arabic for “snow.” As for “our Major,” we went to thank him later and found him in his air-conditioned office, sipping yoghurt and grinning from ear to ear, knowing full well that he had—in the tradition of Sir Francis Drake—singed the Ayatollah’s beard.
Snow packaged his film and gave it to me to take to Kuwait, where a private jet had been hired by America’s NBC to take both their own and ITN’s news film to Amman for satelliting to New York and London. As the Learjet soared into the air, the purser offered me smoked salmon sandwiches and a glass of champagne. From Amman I filed the story of the Al-Tanin to The Times. Then I sank into the deepest bed of the Intercontinental Hotel and woke to find a telex with a nudge-in-the-ribs question from the foreign desk in London: “Why you no swam shark-infested Shatt al-Arab river?”
But here the sweet stories must end. By the end of October, the Iraqis— realising that they were bogged down in the deserts of Iran with no more chance of a swift victory—were firing ground-to-ground missiles at Iranian cities. Early in the month, 180 civilians were killed in Dezful when the Iraqis fired a rocket into the marketplace. On 26 October, at least another hundred civilians were killed when the Iraqis fired seven Russian Frog-7 missiles at Dezful. The War of the Cities had begun, a calculated attempt to depopulate Iran’s largest towns and cities through terror.
The outbreak of war in Iran had been greeted even by some of the theocratic regime’s opponents with expressions of outrage and patriotism. Thousands of middle-class women donated millions of dollars’ worth of their jewellery to Iran’s “war chest.” Captive in the Iranian foreign ministry, U.S. chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen “knew something was happening when I heard a loudspeaker outside the foreign ministry playing American marching tunes—which the Iranians used on military occasions. I heard later that the Iraqis used them too. That night, there were anti-aircraft guns being used and the sky was full of tracer. They never seemed to hit anything. In fact, when we heard the air-raid sirens, we used to relax because we knew that the Iraqi planes had already been, bombed and flown away.”
The Iranians, like Saddam, had to fight internal as well as external enemies during the war, knowing that groups like the Mujahedin-e-Khalq had the active support of the Iraqi regime. The strange death of the Iranian defe
nce minister Mustafa Chamran on the battle front has never been fully explained. But there could be no doubt what happened when, just before 9 p.m. on 28 June 1981, a 60-pound bomb exploded at a meeting of the ruling Islamic Republican Party in Tehran, tearing apart seventy-one party leaders as they were listening to a speech by Ayatollah Mohamed Beheshti, chief justice of the supreme court, secretary of the Revolutionary Council, head of the IRP and a potential successor to Khomeini. When the bomb destroyed the iron beams of the building and 40-centimetre-thick columns were pulverised by the blast, the roof thundered down onto the victims. Among them were four cabinet ministers, six deputy ministers and twenty-seven members of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis.
Beheshti, who died with them, was an intriguing personality, his thin face, pointed grey beard and thick German accent—a remnant of his days as a resident Shiite priest in Germany—giving him the appearance of a clever eighteenth-century conspirator. When I met him in 1980, I noted that he employed “a unique mixture of intellectual authority and gentle wistfulness which makes him sound— and look—like a combination of Cardinal Richelieu and Sir Alec Guinness.” He had for months been intriguing against President Bani-Sadr, although the date of the latter’s formal removal gave Beheshti little time for satisfaction: he was murdered a week later.
He was a man with enemies, unmoved by Iran’s growing plague of executions. “Don’t you see,” he explained to me with some irritation, “that there have been very few people sentenced to death because of their failures in the [Shah’s] ministries. Those people who have been sentenced to death are in a different category—they are opium or heroin dealers.” This was palpably untrue. Most of the executions were for political reasons. “When you study the history of revolutions,” Beheshti said, “you will find that there are always problems. This is normal. When people here say they are unhappy, it is because they have not experienced a revolution before. There are problems—but they will be solved.” Beheshti’s loss was the most serious the revolution suffered—until the death of Khomeini in 1989— because he had designed the IRP along the lines of the Soviet Communist party, capable of binding various revolutionary movements under a single leader.
