The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  One boy with cropped hair moved with an agonised face, grunting each time he put his weight on his crutches, staring accusingly at the compartments as if his comrades had personally brought about his ordeal. A youth in khaki trousers with an arm and hand wrapped in bandages sat disconsolately on a box by the carriage door, his back to the open window, hurling bottle caps over his shoulder into the desert north of Ahwaz, giggling to himself in a disturbing, fitful way.

  It was a slow train that laboured for seventeen hours up from the Shatt al-Arab battle front, through the great mountains to the plains of Qom, a tired train carrying tired men home from a tired war. When darkness came, some of them left their crammed compartments and slept in the filthy corridors, so that I had to clamber over blankets and boots and backpacks and webbing to reach the broken buffet car with its chicken wings and tea and faded, blue-tinted photographs of the bearded man whom the soldiers had suffered for. They were kind, sad men, muttering “hallo” from their chipped Formica dinner tables and waiting for an acknowledgement before they smiled. “Jang good?” one asked pathetically in the corridor. Was war “good”? “Saddam finished,” came another darkened voice. “Welcome to Iran.”

  A hundred kilometres north of Ahwaz, we had stopped at Shushtar, and on a windy platform Labelle and I fell into conversation with a civil engineer who tried to grasp the distance that separated him from his own countrymen. “I do not understand these people who say they want to die. I never knew people like this. These people say that if Khomeini wants them to die, they will die. What can you say to these people?”

  The train pulled out of Shushtar late, its diesel engine roaring. And then, quite suddenly, our train climbed into a narrow valley and through the open window there were sheer-faced mountains with white peaks and ice glistening on the rock face, frozen rivers and stars. Just briefly, as we wound round a remote village, I saw a man and a woman standing on the roof of their home looking at us. His arm lay round her shoulders and she had no veil and her hair hung loosely over her shoulders. An ominous ridge— Zard Kho, a soldier said it was called, “Yellow Mountain”—towered over our train as it wormed its way through tunnels and along the river bends so tightly that you could see the locomotive’s lamp far to the right as it illuminated the boulders and the dark torrents beneath. Here was a land for which these young men might be prepared to die. But for the man in the faded photograph in the buffet car? Yet the soldiers rarely looked out of the windows. A few read magazines, others smoked with their eyes closed, one read a tiny Koran, mouthing the words in silence.

  There was an Ahwaz man on the train, a merchant going up to Tehran for a day, a round-faced, tubby figure who bemoaned his economic prospects but said that, yes, he was better off since the revolution because his family had become more religious. What did he think of the war? The man pondered this for a while, staring out at the moonlit waterfalls of the Bala Rud River, an innocent stream which— like most of the soldiers on the train—would eventually make its way down to the mud of the Shatt al-Arab. “I think the Americans are behind it,” he said from the gloom of the corridor. “The great powers want us to be weak but we will win the war.” And the price? I asked him. The train heaved itself through a station with a white nameplate that announced a village called Tchamsangar. The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the compartments of slumbering young men. “They will pay the price,” he said. Then he looked out at the stars and mountains and ice, and he added: “We will all pay the price. We can afford it.”

  Who would have believed that the United States would be flying anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran? I should have done. Back in Lebanon, I had been trying, through the help of an Iranian intermediary, to secure the release of my colleague Terry Anderson, who had been held hostage by a satellite group of the Shia Muslim Hizballah movement for about a year. Anderson was the Associated Press bureau chief in Beirut and my best friend in the city; his apartment was in the same building as mine and we had travelled together on many hair-raising assignments.58 The Iranians had started by demanding that I discover the whereabouts of three of their citizens taken hostage in Lebanon in 1982. But when I met with the Iranian intermediary at a Beirut restaurant in late May 1986, he bluntly told me that “his [Anderson’s] people are in Tehran.” I did not take this seriously. Only five years after the release of the U.S. embassy hostages in Tehran, no U.S. officials would travel to Iran.

  I was wrong; doubly so. For quite by chance, I had stumbled onto the first evidence of the arms-for-hostages Iran–Contra scandal in September 1985 when— passing through Cyprus en route from Cairo to Beirut—an old friend who worked in air traffic control at Larnaca Airport tipped me off that a mysterious aircraft flying from Tabriz in northern Iran had been reported missing after it had passed over Turkey and suddenly turned south. My contact told me that Tel Aviv officials had personally telephoned the Cypriot air traffic controllers to confirm that the DC-8 cargo jet was safe on the ground at Ben Gurion airport after suffering “electrical failures.”

  Officially, however, the Israelis denied any knowledge of the aircraft—a sure sign that the plane was on a secret mission—and when the machine’s purported American owners claimed in Miami that they had sold the aircraft the previous month to a Nigerian company, my interest only grew. The DC-8, bearing the U.S. registration number N421AJ, had identified itself to air traffic controllers as belonging to “International Airlines.” The plane had originally filed a flight plan to Malaga in Spain, where a friendly airport official said that, although no DC-8 had been seen there, a Boeing 707—also claiming to belong to “International Airlines”—had touched down on 15 September from Tabriz and then taken off en route to another Iranian town which he said was called “Zal”—although no one was able to identify this location.

  Even when I first learned of these unorthodox flights, I should have been more suspicious. If Israel was sending or receiving freight aircraft to or from Iran, it was not exporting oranges or importing caviar. And as Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, Washington must have been involved. Had I connected this with the unexpected admission from my Iranian source that Anderson’s “people” were in Tehran, I might have “broken” the Iran–Contra story. But it was a low-circulation magazine in Beirut, Al-Shiraa, which did that and the rest—to use the veteran cliché—is history. A naive group of White House officials inspired by the gullible but handsome Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North—egged on by Israeli middlemen—persuaded President Reagan that American hostages in Beirut could be freed by Iran’s surrogate allies in the Hizballah in return for a large supply of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles and TOW anti-tank weapons to Iran. Part payment for these arms—which breached Washington’s arms embargo on Iran—would fund the right-wing Contra gunmen in Nicaragua whom Reagan and North so admired.

  I had first heard North’s name three months earlier when, travelling to Switzerland on an MEA flight out of Beirut, I found myself sitting next to Ahmed Chalabi, the senior financial adviser to Nabih Berri, the leader of the Shia Muslim Amal guerrilla movement in Beirut.59 Berri had just managed to arrange the release of the passengers and crew of a TWA airliner that had been hijacked to Lebanon and Chalabi repeatedly told me that Berri was worth supporting because “the alternative is Hizballah and that is too awful to contemplate.” We had only been in the air for twenty minutes when he said: “Robert, there’s someone I’d like you to meet in Washington. His name’s Oliver North.” A sixth sense, partly induced by my distrust of Chalabi, led me to decline his invitation. But Chalabi must have talked of me to North who—under a scheduled mid-1986 meeting in his diary with Chuck Lewis, an AP staffer in Washington—wrote with his usual flair for inaccuracy “Robert Fiske.” Some days later, Lewis called me in Beirut and asked if I would like to take a call from the colonel. I refused.

  North’s secret trip to Tehran with former U.S. national security adviser Robert McFarlane from 25 to 28 May 1986—a ridiculous but outrageously funny pastiche in whic
h the Americans failed to realise they were participating in a hostage bazaar—did grave damage to the Reagan presidency and to America’s relations with the Arab world. For a complete account of this folly, readers must turn to the Tower Commission report on the scandal; but for years afterwards, details of the clandestine weapons deals, in which “sterilised”—unmarked— Israeli aircraft flew missiles into Tabriz and Bandar Abbas airports, continued to emerge. Among the most revealing—because they demonstrate Iran’s desperation at the very moment when they had just captured Fao—were extracts of conversations between Oliver North in Frankfurt and an unnamed Iranian government adviser in late February 1986. Tapes of these calls were made available to America’s ABC television in October 1991, and appeared to have been recorded in Israel.

  At one point, North appeals for the release of an American hostage in Beirut prior to any further delivery of weapons. Through an interpreter, the Iranian replies: “We must get the Hawk missiles. We must get intelligence reports of Iraqi troops strength. Iran is being destroyed. We need those missiles.” At another point, North, trying to smother the reality of the guns-for-hostage arrangement, tells Iranian officials that “if your government can cause the humanitarian release of the Americans held in Beirut . . . ten hours immediately, ten hours immediately after they are released the airplane will land with the remaining Hawk missile parts.”

  The Americans received one hostage. The Iranians got millions of dollars’ worth of missiles and, as Ali Akbar Rafsanjani revealed with smug delight in Tehran, a cake in the shape of a key—baked in Tel Aviv, though the Iranians didn’t know this—a brace of Colt revolvers and a Bible signed by Reagan. I was in Tehran for this latest piece of grotesquerie. Rafsanjani had invited us to a press conference on 28 January 1987, where we found him staring at a pile of photocopied documents, each one bearing a small, passport-size photograph of Robert McFarlane. Rafsanjani ostentatiously ignored the dozens of journalists standing around him. He motioned to an aide who spoke fluent English and ordered him to approach an American reporter. He did, and moments later the correspondent, on cue, asked Rafsanjani what evidence he had that McFarlane entered Iran on an Irish passport.

  Immediately, Rafsanjani seized the photocopies and brandished them over his head, handing them out like a rug merchant offering free samples. There on the right-hand side was McFarlane’s mug-shot and the second page of what was clearly an Irish passport. “They forged them,” Rafsanjani’s secretary muttered as his master leaned back in his armchair and chuckled, the curl of brown hair beneath his mullah’s turban giving him a sly, Bunteresque appearance. But one look at the photocopy convinced me this was no cheap forgery. I doubted very much if the CIA were capable of correctly spelling the colour of McFarlane’s hazel eyes in the Irish language—cnodhonna— or even of spelling the Irish for Dublin correctly, Baile Atha Cliath , although the fabrication of McFarlane’s fictional Irish name—“Sean Devlin”—lacked imagination. At least they’d made him a Catholic. Immediately after Rafsanjani’s press conference had ended, I grabbed a taxi and raced with the photocopy to the Irish embassy, where the chargé, Noel Purcell-O’Byrne, sent it immediately to the Department for Foreign Affairs in Dublin. Far from being a forgery, McFarlane’s passport had been one of several recently stolen from the Irish embassy in Athens.

  As for the Bible, Rafsanjani positively beamed as he held it up to the multitude of journalists. The handwriting straggled across the page, the “g”s beginning with a flourish but the letters “o” and “p” curiously flattened, an elderly man’s handiwork carefully copied from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith,” it read, “preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying ‘All the nations shall be blessed in you.’ ” But there could be no doubting the signature: “Ronald Reagan, Oct. 3, 1986.”

  The Bible was sent long after the McFarlane mission. And only a month ago, Rafsanjani announced—he was talking about December 1986—a U.S. State Department official named Charles Dunbar had met Iranian arms dealers in Frankfurt in an attempt to open further discussions with the leadership in Tehran. Incredibly this was true, although Dunbar, who spoke Farsi, would later insist he had told an Iranian official in Frankfurt that arms could no longer be part of the relationship.

  As for the Bible, said Rafsanjani, the volume was “being studied from an intelligence point of view,” but “we had no ill-feeling when this Bible was sent to us because he [Reagan] is a Christian and he believes in this religion and because we as Muslims believe in Jesus and the Bible. For him, it was a common point between us. We believe that this quotation in the Bible is one that invites people of all religions to unity.” The Iranians had refused to accept the gift of revolvers, Rafsanjani said. As for the cake, it had been eaten by airport guards.

  But if McFarlane was Sean Devlin, there appeared to have been several Oliver Norths. There was Oliver North the Patriot, whom McFarlane would describe as “an imaginative, aggressive, committed young officer,” Reagan’s personally approved “hero.” There was Oliver North the Man of God, the born-again Christian from the charismatic Episcopal Church of the Apostles who believed that the Lord had healed his wounds in Vietnam and who—in the words of one former associate at the National Security Council—“thought he was doing God’s work at the NSC.” There was Oliver North the Man of Action, able to work twenty-five hours in every twenty-four, dubbed “the Hammer” by Senator Dan Quayle’s buddy Robert Owen, firing off memos from his state-of-the-art crisis centre in the White House.

  And then there was Oliver North the thug, drafting directives that authorised CIA operatives “to ‘neutralise’ terrorists,” supporting “pre-emptive strikes” against Arab states or leaders whom America thought responsible for such terrorism, supporting one gang of terrorists—the Contra “Freedom Fighters” of Nicaragua—with the proceeds of a deal that would favour another gang of terrorists, those holding American hostages in Beirut. The Oliver North that the Middle East got was the thug.60

  Rafsanjani had only told Khomeini of the McFarlane–North visit after they had arrived in Tehran. Khomeini’s designated successor, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, was kept in total ignorance—which he seemed to resent more than the actual arms shipments. When the Majlis debated the scandal, Khomeini complained that their collective voice sounded “harsher than that of Israel.” He wanted no Irangates in Tehran.

  Covering the last years of the Iran–Iraq War, there were times when events moved so quickly that we could not grasp their meaning. And if we did, we took them at face value. However callously Saddam treated Iraqis, it was—because of the war—always possible to graft reasons of national security upon his cruelty. We knew, for example, that Saddam had completed a huge network of roads across 3,000 square kilometres of the Howeiza marshes and was cutting down all the reed bushes in the region—yet we assumed this was a security measure intended to protect Iraq from further Iranian attacks rather than a genocidal act against the Marsh Arabs themselves. Samir Ghattas succeeded in filing a report for the AP out of Baghdad—and there was no more repressive a capital for any journalist—in which he managed to hint to the world of the new campaign of genocide against the Kurds. His dispatch, on 5 October 1987, was carefully worded and partly attributed to Western diplomats—those anonymous spooks who use journalists as often as they are used by them—but anyone reading it knew that atrocities must be taking place. “Iraqi forces have destroyed hundreds of Kurdish villages in northern Iraq and resettled [sic] thousands of Kurds in a campaign against Iranian-backed guerrillas . . .” he reported.

  Again, it was Saddam’s struggle against Iran—the guerrillas were, of course, Kurdish—which was used to explain this war crime. Ghattas managed to finger Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid—“Chemical Ali” as he was to become known—as the man responsible, and quoted an unnamed ambassador as saying that as many as 3,000 villages might have been razed. He wrote of the dynamiting and bulldozing of
villages and, mentioning Kurdish claims that the Iraqis were using poison gas, added that Iraqi television had itself shown a post-air-raid film of “bodies of civilians strewn on the ruined streets.” Ghattas also noted that “most diplomats doubt there have been mass killings”—a serious piece of misreporting by Baghdad’s diplomatic community.

  In the Gulf, Saddam was now trying to end Iran’s oil-exporting capacity. In August 1986 the Iraqi air force had devastated the Iranian oil-loading terminal at Sirri Island, destroying two supertankers, killing more than twenty seamen and forcing Iran to move its loading facilities to Larak Island in the choppy waters close to the Hormuz Strait. Almost at once, Iran’s oil exports fell from 1.6 to 1.2 million barrels a day. Further Iraqi attacks on Kharg Island, less than a hundred miles from the front lines outside Basra, wreaked such damage that eleven of the fourteen loading berths had been abandoned. By November, the Iraqis were using their Mirage jets to bomb Larak, secretly refuelling in Saudi Arabia en route to and from their target. A series of new Iraqi raids on Iranian cities took the lives of 112 people, according to Iran, which responded with a Scud missile attack on Baghdad that killed 48 civilians, including 17 women and 13 children. Iraq blamed Iran for the hijacking of an Iraqi Airways flight from Baghdad to Amman on 25 December, which ended when the aircraft crashed into the desert in Saudi Arabia after grenades exploded in the passenger cabin. Of the 106 passengers and crew, only 44 survived. That same day, the Iranians staged a landing on Um al-Rassas, the Shatt al-Arab island from which Pierre Bayle and I had made such a close-run escape more than six years earlier.

  A series of Iranian attacks on Kuwaiti-flagged ships prompted an offer of protection from the Soviet Union—which immediately provoked an almost identical proposal from President Reagan. Kuwait was now feeling the breath of war more closely. Iran’s Silkworm missiles, fired from Fao, were soon to be landing on Kuwaiti territory. One night, I lay in my bed in the Kuwait Meridien hotel, unable to grasp why the windows and doors were perpetually rattling until I realised that the detonation of the Iranian guns outside Basra was blasting across the head waters of the Gulf and vibrating throughout Kuwait city. Almost daily, Kuwaitis would find the corpses of Iranians drifting in on the tide from Fao on the other side of the seaway.