The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Then there was the mystery of the transponder. On our Iranian flight, a green light glowed beside the co-pilot’s left knee, showing that it was sending out our identification into the dark night above the Gulf. Any warship down there on the moonlit sea would know who we were. Asadapur repeatedly told Dubai control— for the benefit of all listeners—that we were flight IR655 “with forty-four souls on board.” If the transponder was not working, the light would have been out. Asadapur said he would never take off without checking it. Hossein Pirouzi, the Bandar Abbas ground controller and airport manager on 3 July, told me he “assumed” Rezaian’s transponder was working. Rezaian would scarcely have taken off without ensuring that it was glowing that comforting green light. Pirouzi, a middle-aged man with a smart brown moustache, wavy hair and a thorough training in air-traffic control from London’s Heathrow Airport, said that he did not know a naval engagement was in progress at the time of Rezaian’s take-off. But as we were later to discover, there was no battle as such taking place. “The Americans broadcast warnings every time they see a speeding boat—they go on ‘red alert’ when they see every plane,” Pirouzi said. “The Americans have no right to be in the Gulf challenging our legitimate right to fly our air routes—so why should we reply to them?”

  His comment was devastating. If Pirouzi’s blithe assumption that the Americans would never fire at an Airbus was to be the basis of his air-traffic policy, how easy it was to understand why the U.S. naval crews, equally psyched up against the country which their president blamed for the Gulf War, should have panicked and fired at the first plane to approach their ship after they had engaged an Iranian patrol craft.

  Was it panic, as Newsweek was to suggest four years later, that caused the officers of the Vincennes to misread the information on their own radar screens, to see an aircraft descending which was clearly ascending, panic and the oppressive heat that cloaks the bodies and energies of all naval crews in the Gulf? Besides, was not Iran the enemy? Was not Iran a “terrorist state”? Was it not, in Reagan’s words, “a barbarous country”? Unknown to them, Captain Rezaian and his passengers over the Gulf were flying across a cultural and emotional chasm that separated America from Iran, a ravine so deep and so dangerous that its updraft blew an Iranian Airbus out of the sky.

  Nothing could have illustrated this more painfully than the American response to the Vincennes’s killing of 290 innocent civilians. Citizens of Vincennes, Indiana, were raising money for a monument—not to the dead Iranians, but to the ship that destroyed their lives.66 When the ship returned to its home base of San Diego, it was given a hero’s welcome. The men of the Vincennes were all awarded combat action ribbons. The air warfare coordinator, Commander Scott Lustig, won the navy’s Commendation Medal for “heroic achievement,” for the “ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire” that enabled him to “quickly and concisely complete the firing procedure.” Even Newsweek was constrained to describe this as “surreal.” Rogers retired honourably in 1991. Less than a year after the destruction of the Airbus, the captain’s wife, Sharon, was the target of a pipe-bomb which exploded beneath her Toyota van in San Diego. She was unharmed. Rogers was to write that the “centerpiece” of his book was formed by “the events of 3 July 1988 and 10 March 1989”—as if the bloodbath over the Gulf and the failed attempt on his wife’s life were comparable, a suggestion contained on the book’s cover, which described its contents as “a personal account of tragedy and terrorism.”

  In fairness, however, Rogers was to quote in full in his book a long and bitter handwritten letter which he received from Captain Rezaian’s brother Hossein. “He was turned into the powder at the mid-air by your barrage missile attack and perished along with so many other innocent lives aboard, without the slightest sin or guilt whatsoever,” Hossein Rezaian wrote.

  I was at the area of carnage the day after and unfortunately I saw the result of your barbarous crime and its magnitude. I used to be a Navy Commander myself and I had my college education in U.S. as my late brother did, but ever since the incredible downing I really felt ashamed of myself. I hated your Navy and ours. So that I even quit my job and I ruined my whole career . . . me and my family . . . could somehow bear the pain of tragedy if he [Mohsen] had died in an accident but this premeditated act is neither forgiveable nor forgettable . . . the U.S. government as the culprit in this horrendous incident, showed neither remorse nor compassion for the loss of innocent lives . . . Didn’t we really deserve a small gesture of sympathy? Did you have to say a pack of lies and contradictory statements about the incident in a bid to justify the case? . . . or it was the result of panic and inexperience. I do appreciate your prompt response.

  It was much to Rogers’s credit that he gave this letter so much prominence in his book. “Despite the diatribe,” he wrote, “the pain and grief pouring from this letter struck me hard. All of the sorrow and grief that had haunted me since July returned in force.” He had wanted, Rogers said, to reply but a naval public relations officer warned that return correspondence “could be used by the Iranian government as some sort of political lever.” Again, the Iranians were the bad guys. Hossein Rezaian’s letter was handed over to the U.S. Naval Intelligence Service. Who knows, maybe they read it.

  There certainly wouldn’t have been much to gain from reading my first report on the massacre. When a newspaper had been so loyal to a reporter as The Times had been to me over the past eighteen years—fighting off the British army in Northern Ireland, the Israelis and Palestinians, the American authorities and the Iranians and Iraqis whenever they complained about my reporting—there was a natural inclination to feel great trust in my editors. If my reports were cut, this was done for space reasons—I was usually given the chance to shorten my own dispatches—or because a breaking news story elsewhere in the world was forcing the paper’s night editors to change the pages after the first edition. But cuts were never made for political reasons.

  Murdoch had already bought The Times when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, but I reported without any censorship on Israel’s killing of up to 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians—most of them civilians—and the subsequent butchery of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Christian allies. The Israeli embassy had condemned my dispatches, as they did the reporting of any journalist who dared to suggest that Israel’s undisciplined army killed civilians as well as soldiers. But under Charles Douglas-Home’s editorship, no foreign correspondent was going to have his work changed out of fear or bias or prejudice. His deputy, Charles Wilson, was a tough ex-Royal Marine who could be a bully, but who did not mince his words about Israel or any other country which tried to impugn the integrity of the paper’s journalists. “What a bunch of fascists,” he roared when I had proved to him that an Israeli statement condemning my work was riddled with factual mistakes.

  Israelis are not fascists, but it was good to have a deputy editor who was unafraid of a reporter’s antagonists. After Douglas-Home’s death from cancer, Wilson became editor. He remained a bully but could also be immensely kind. To members of staff who suffered serious illness, he was a rock of strength and compassion. He wanted to be liked. He was immensely generous to me when, for personal reasons, I wanted to work for a year in Paris. But there was one afternoon in Beirut when I had filed a long and detailed investigative report on torture at Israel’s Khiam prison in southern Lebanon. About an hour after I had sent my story, a foreign desk staffer came on the telex to ask if I could not add a paragraph to the effect that allegations about torture of the kind I had described—beatings and electrical currents applied to the genitals—were typical of the propaganda put out by Israel’s enemies. I protested. I had United Nations evidence to support my investigation—all of which was subsequently confirmed in a compelling report by Amnesty International. In the end, I inserted a paragraph which only strengthened my dispatch: that while such allegations were often used against Israel, on this occasion there was no doubt that they were true.

 
; I had won this round, and thought no more about it. Then an article appeared on the centre page of The Times, which was usually reserved for comment or analysis. It purported to explain the difficulties of reporting the Middle East—the intimidation of journalists by “terrorists” being the salient argument—but then ended by remarking that anyone reporting from Beirut was “a bloodsucker.” I was reporting from Beirut. I was based in Beirut as Middle East correspondent—for The Times, for goodness’ sake. What did this mean? The foreign desk laughed it off. I did not. Was Wilson trying to “balance” my dispatches by allowing the enemies of honest reporting to abuse me in the paper? It seemed impossible. I don’t believe in conspiracies. Besides, I knew Wilson often did not read the centre page of The Times.

  But it was a much more serious matter on 4 July 1988, when I discovered that my lead report for The Times—which I had been asked to write for the front page—was not appearing in the next day’s paper. All the investigative work on the panic and inefficiency of U.S. warship crews in the Gulf, all the evidence that U.S. personnel had been placing civilian airliners in peril for weeks—the long and detailed conversations with the Dubai air traffic controllers who had actually heard the radio traffic between U.S. naval officers as the Vincennes was shooting down the Airbus—had been for nothing. If there had been any doubts about my report, they should have been raised with me on the evening I filed. But there had been silence. Two other routine dispatches—on Iran’s public reaction to the destruction of the plane and possible retaliation—were printed inside the paper.

  Next morning, I spoke to Piers Ackerman on the foreign desk. He told me that my story had been dropped in the first edition for space reasons but that the later, reinserted and shortened version contained “the main points.” When I asked if cuts had been made for political reasons, he said: “My God, if I thought things had reached that stage, I would resign.” I told him that if it transpired that the cuts were political, I would resign. The Times took days to reach the Gulf and I would be away in Iran, so I had no chance to read the paper for several days. When at last I did see the later editions, every element of my story that reflected negatively on the Americans had been taken out.

  Journalists should not be prima donnas. We have to fight to prove the worth of our work. Neither editors nor readers are there for the greater good of journalists. But something very unethical had taken place here: my report on the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus had been, in every sense of the word, tampered with, changed and censored. Its meaning had been distorted by omission. The Americans, in my truncated report, had been exonerated as surely as they had been excused by Mrs. Thatcher. This, I felt sure, was a result of Murdoch’s ownership of The Times. I did not believe that he personally became involved in individual newspaper stories—though this would happen—but rather that his ownership spread a culture of obedience and compliance throughout the paper, a feeling that Murdoch’s views—what Murdoch wanted—were “known.”

  I had been very struck by the fact that the foreign desk staffer who had been so keen to add the “propaganda” paragraph to my Khiam torture story was previously a very left-wing member of the National Union of Journalists—the very union which had done so much to undermine owner Lord Thomson’s faith in The Times and to truss up the paper for Murdoch to buy. A socialist lion had now turned into a News Corp. mouse. I am neither a lion nor a mouse, but I can be a tough dog, and when I get a rope between my teeth I won’t let go until I shake it and tug it something rotten to see what lies at the other end. That, after all, is what journalists are supposed to do. Further enquiries to the foreign desk of the paper elicited ignorance. Wilson’s compliant foreign editor, George Brock, was unavailable to take my calls. Days had now passed since my original report was filed, the subs on that night were never on duty when I telephoned, Wilson had gone on holiday. But my concerns did not go away. It is one thing to have an article cut for space—or “trimmed” or “shaved” as the unpleasant foreign desk expression goes—but quite another to risk one’s life for a paper, only to find that the courage necessary to report wars is not in evidence among those whose task it is to print those reports. And so in the Gulf that steamy summer, I lost faith in The Times.

  I decided I would try to join a brash, intelligent, brave, dangerously underfunded but independent new newspaper called—well, of course— The Independent. It would be months before I persuaded Andreas Whittam Smith, the editor and part-owner, to take me aboard, or to “draw rations” as he was to put it, but within a year I would be reporting from the Middle East for a new editor, a new newspaper and new colleagues—although many of them would turn out to be fellow refugees from The Times.

  Only after I had written to Wilson to tell him that I was resigning from The Times, however, did I learn that I had transferred my allegiance for the right reasons. Just after New Year of 1988, I received a call from one of the senior night editors on the paper. He wanted to talk to me about the Vincennes story:

  At the Sunday 5 p.m. conference, I advised the editor that your story would make a “hamper” [a large box across eight columns at the top of the front page]. Wilson said he wanted to see the story. It was about the incompetence of the crew of the Vincennes. I read it and said to myself: this is the clearest story I’ve yet read about what really happened. Later I saw the editor on the back bench. Wilson said to me: “Is this the story you’re talking about?” I said it was. He said: “There’s nothing in it. There’s not a fact in it. I wouldn’t even run this gibberish.” Wilson said it was bollocks, that it was “waffle.” I remember saying to Charlie: “Are you sure? This is a terrific story.” I was shocked. I’ve looked up my diary for the night of July 3rd. It says: “Shambles, chaos on Gulf story. Brock rewrites Fisk.”

  It didn’t run in the first edition, but in the second edition the story ran but with all the references to American incompetence cut out. I looked it up on the screen. George [Brock] had edited the story. He had taken out all those references. At the top, he had written a note, saying that “under no circumstances will the cuts made in this story be re-inserted.” I wanted to resign. I considered resigning over this. I didn’t, and perhaps I should have done. I told Denis [Taylor] about this on the desk. He was disgusted. All the foreign desk knew about it. But none of them would do anything about it. They were frightened. Nobody told you about this. I thought: “Well, it might be better for the paper if Bob didn’t know.” I thought you might resign if you knew.

  On the day I filed the first Vincennes story, I had spoken to Piers Ackerman, asking him to pass on to the leader writers my advice that—whatever our editorial response to the disaster—we should not go along with the line that Mohsen Rezaian had been a suicide pilot, which would, I said, be rubbish. Ackerman said he passed on the message. But our editorial subsequently said that the plane might have been controlled by a “suicide” pilot. This was totally untrue. And so was the thrust of my story, once it had appeared in bowdlerised form in the paper that same morning. Readers of The Times had been solemnly presented with a fraudulent version of the truth.

  There are rarely consolation prizes for a journalist when a paper doesn’t run the real story, but Vincent Browne, the hard-headed editor of the Dublin Sunday Tribune, an old friend and colleague from Northern Ireland, had none of Wilson’s fears about events in the Gulf. He invited me to write the fruits of my investigations for his own paper. Half the next issue of the Tribune’s front page carried a photograph of an American Aegis-class cruiser firing a missile into the sky; superimposed on the picture was the headline “What Really Happened,” with my full-page report inside. Which is how the people of County Mayo were allowed to read what subscribers to The Times of London could not.

  It’s easy for a journalist to become self-important about his work, to claim that he or she alone is the bearer of truth, that editors must stand aside so that the bright light of a reporter’s genius may bathe the paper’s readers. It’s also tempting to allow one’s own journalistic
arguments to take precedence over the ghastly tragedies which we are supposed to be reporting. We have to have a sense of proportion, some perspective in our work. What am I doing—what is Fisk doing, I can hear a hostile reviewer of this book ask—writing about the violent death of 290 innocent human beings and then taking up five pages to explain his petty rows with The Times ? The answer is simple. When we journalists fail to get across the reality of events to our readers, we have not only failed in our job; we have also become a party to the bloody events that we are supposed to be reporting. If we cannot tell the truth about the shooting down of a civilian airliner—because this will harm “our” side in a war or because it will cast one of our “hate” countries in the role of victim or because it might upset the owner of our newspaper—then we contribute to the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place. If we cannot blow the whistle on a navy that shoots civilians out of the sky, then we make future killings of the same kind as “understandable” as Mrs. Thatcher found this one. Delete the Americans’ panic and incompetence—all of which would be revealed in the months to come—and pretend an innocent pilot is a suicidal maniac, and it’s only a matter of time before we blow another airliner out of the sky. Journalism can be lethal.

  But I also ask myself if, standing in that charnel house in Bandar Abbas, I did not see the genesis of another mass killing, five months later, this time over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. Within hours of the destruction of the Airbus on 3 July 1988, President Khamenei of Iran declared that Reagan and his administration were “criminals and murderers.” Tehran radio announced: “We will not leave the crimes of America unpunished.” And it continued: “We will resist the plots of the Great Satan and avenge the blood of our martyrs from criminal mercenaries.” I didn’t have much doubt what that would mean. Back in Beirut, I found no one who believed that the Vincennes had shot down the Iranian aircraft in error. I started to hear disjointed, disturbing remarks. Someone over dinner—a doctor who was a paragon of non-violence—speculated that a plane could be blown up by a bomb in the checked baggage of an aircraft. It was a few days before it dawned on me that if people were talking like this, then someone was trying to find out if it was possible.