by Robert Fisk
He is warming to his theme. “I never in my life made business just to make profit. We have a lot of problems just at the moment—they think I am like Adnan Kashoggi.” Iran-Contra dogs the weapons-dealers of Europe, unfairly so in their eyes because America’s arms entanglement with Iran was comparatively trivial, a small-scale business deal handled without professional advice or discretion, using dubious Iranian middlemen who real arms suppliers would never invite to their offices, let alone to their homes. The distinction between arms-dealer and middleman is not an easy one to make. In some cases—where the dealer’s own country imposes strict rules on weapons exports—the dealer becomes a middleman, passing on procurement lists to dealers in other nations with less scrupulous codes of arms-exporting conduct. When other nationals are brought in as financiers, the system becomes more complicated. When Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was setting up his arms-for-hostages deal with the Iranians, for example, the middleman was Manucher Ghorbanifar, playing the official role of “Iranian intermediary,” who arranged Robert McFarlane’s secret visit to Tehran in May 1986. Adnan Kashoggi, a Saudi, was the financier whose cash set the arms transfer into motion. The dealer (and supplier) was in this case the U.S. government—or Colonel North, depending on your point of view.
Dealers like to be close to their national government and Herr Mertins is no different. German cabinet ministers play on his private tennis courts and U.S. customs agents in Bonn refer to him, not entirely sympathetically, as the “Spider of Bonn.” In his immaculate works canteen, Mertins is greeted with affection by his employees—a true Andrew Undershaft, although he does not like the comparison—and he is immensely proud of his family, especially his new American daughter-in-law. “Mr. Fisk, you should take tea as it should be taken,” he announces at a family lunch in the company canteen. “With rum.” He sips for a long time at his apéritif. “Why do people say these stupid things about me? You know I have read all the books: the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran . . .” Later he asks rhetorically: “You know the trouble with Germany today? It has lost its nationalist sentiments.” I cringe.
Back in 1965, Herr Mertins sprang a surprise on several nations after the outbreak of the India–Pakistan war. The Americans embargoed arms supplies, although John Kenneth Galbraith, the former U.S. ambassador to India, later claimed that American weapons shipments had “caused the war.” Herr Mertins is still proud of his role in the affair. He had acted as middleman for the export of ninety American F-86 jet fighters to Pakistan under the guise of sending them to Iran. “We put Iranian transfers on the wings and they flew over Tehran in an air display and I was standing next to the Western ambassadors and I said: ‘See, these are the planes you claimed I had sent to Pakistan.’ But then the planes flew back to their Iranian air base and we changed their markings back to Pakistan again.” Herr Mertins slaps his right fist into his left hand. “You see? A case of pure German plastic science.”
But all this is a theatrical prelude to the real and current war. For in his office on this cold German mountainside, Herr Mertins—like his colleagues elsewhere in Germany and Austria—has a very shrewd idea of what is going on in the Iranian Ministry of Defence. The Iranians had become enamoured of cheap Soviet arms supplies after they signed an agreement with Moscow for the export of Iranian gas. “They bought a lot of Russian stuff—122-mm and 130-mm artillery and 12.7 and 14.5-mm anti-aircraft guns. They tried to get a lot of the same things from China— the Iranians were flying to Peking to discuss this—but China wants to be a ‘middle’ country. It doesn’t want to be up front. Then the Iranian armed forces became unhappy with the material they were getting.”
The story of the arms trade to Iran is both complex and fearful—and involves Israel as well as the West. One of Herr Mertins’s colleagues, a young man in a smart suit with excellent English, agreed to explain it, albeit anonymously. He brought into Mertins’s office a heavy file which he handed to me. I opened the blue-backed folder and there lay thousands of appeals for weapons from the Iranian government, for mortar tubes, gun sleeves, artillery ammunition and spare parts for American-made fighters. “The Russians were selling better equipment to the Iraqis than to the Iranians—and the Iranians knew it,” the man said. “That’s why the Iranians turned to the Israelis for help. The first Israeli plane to fly to Iran landed in Shiraz with 1,250 TOW missiles at $2,700 each. It was very expensive and it was old material, so the Iranians went to other countries. They were looking for 155-mm guns and approached the Voest-Canonen Company of Austria. They liked the 105-mm and 155-mm artillery that was produced in New York. The U.S. administration— Richard Perle, in fact—stopped this deal. So the Iranians became interested in a Helsinki company that was selling 60-mm, 81-mm and 120-mm mortars.
Mertins regards the whole Iran-Contra scandal with scorn. “It is easy to understand the Iranians,” he says. “The Iraqis had Russian MiG-25 ‘Foxbat’ aircraft that were dropping bombs from a high level on Tehran. And it was highly embarrassing for the mullahs in Iran to have nothing which could shoot down the ‘Foxbat.’ So they needed air-to-air missiles for their F-14s. You have to understand their need and the way in which others will deliver to them—they will deliver to the Devil—no morals, no ethics. As for the Iranians, every Iranian with a letter of credit begins with the words: ‘I am a relative of Khomeini.’ ” The Americans, who used the Israelis for their first arms shipment to Iran, thought they had managed to combine weapons and ethics—were they not, after all, seeking the liberation of innocent U.S. citizens held captive in Lebanon?—although it is instructive to note that the American administration believed, according to the Tower Commission report, that the Iranians needed Hawk ground-to-air missiles to shoot down high-level reconnaissance aircraft being flown by Soviet pilots 65 kilometres into Iranian airspace from Russia. Herr Mertins had no such illusions. The Iranians wanted to shoot down Iraqis.
Yet the Iran-Contra transactions—2,086 TOW anti-tank missiles and a planeload of F-14 spare parts sold to Iran at a cost of $30 million—only placed in perspective the colossal international arms deals concluded with the public consent or private connivance of America’s friends and enemies. In his congressional testimony, McFarlane struggled to hide the identity of a Middle East country which agreed to place its name on an end-user certificate for arms sales. But arms-dealers working out of Germany were in 1987 paying $100,000 for Third World end-user certificates, the documentary “evidence” that is coldly obtained by weapons manufacturers to prove to their own governments that they possess a legal export contract. For somewhere between the international ordnance factories, the bureaucracy of export documentation and the human wound, there is a certain moral—or immoral—ambiguity.164 Undershaft boasted that he was not “one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments.” But diplomats do not share this comfortable sincerity. By 1987, American and Soviet officials were weekly bemoaning the human cost of the Iran–Iraq War as their own weapons continued to flow towards the battlefronts. European governments repeatedly emphasised their neutrality in the conflict, their earnest if unbusinesslike desire to see it speedily and fairly concluded.
But Iran, its military establishment supposedly boycotted by this outraged world, was currently spending $250 million a month on weapons. German and Austrian arms-dealers had no illusions about what this meant. They claimed that this money was spent with the active or passive assistance of the governments of the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Greece, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, Dubai, Syria, Libya, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Holland, Israel, Portugal, India and Saudi Arabia. They added Belgium as a “late joiner” to the club, with four shipments of arms from Antwerp to Bandar Abbas in 1986.
As the war entered its final year, the Iranians desperately tried to restructure their procurement effort. They had inherited more than 1,000 helicopters from the Shah, but when the war began only 250 Cobra gunships were operational. By 19
87, only 30 of them could still fly. More inventive than the Iraqis, the Iranians tried to improvise, ordering spare parts for American-made helicopters and fighter aircraft—exact copies of the U.S. originals that sanctions prevented Iran from obtaining—from local metalworkers in the bazaars. But there was too much sulphur in Iranian steel and they used the wrong metallurgy; the metal broke up under the strain of powered flight and Iran lost several pilots as their aircraft disintegrated in the air.
The Iranians also possessed detailed lists of foreign arms shipments to Iraq, an equally extraordinary tribute to the mercantile abilities of the world’s arms manufacturers. A selection of Iraqi purchases gives something of the flavour of these lists: battle-tank armour from the UK (1983), six Super-Etendard fighter-bombers from France (October 1983), SS-12 missiles from the Soviet Union (May 1984), multiple rocket-launchers from Brazil (June 1984), 500-pound cluster bombs from Chile (flown out of Santiago aboard an Iraqi Airways 747 in 1984). On 25 September 1985, Dassault announced the sale of 24 Mirage F-1 jet fighters to Iraq, the delivery to begin within eighteen months. Some of these weapons systems were sold under “existing arms contracts”—Moscow’s favourite phrase for a continuation of shipments to a lucrative buyer like Iraq—on the grounds that the credibility of the vendor nation would be damaged if they reneged on a signed agreement just because their client had later invaded someone else’s country. Other deals carried that special dog-tag that ensured innocence on the part of the vendor.
In 1986, for example, the British Plessey company agreed to a $388 million deal to supply radar to Iran, equipment that would—so the British were promised— be used on Iran’s frontier with Russian-occupied Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Asked how the British government could be sure that the radar would not be used on Iran’s western front—in military operations against Iraq—an official of the Ministry of Defence in London told me that “we have diplomats in Tehran who can go out and check these things.” But this was untrue. Britain’s diplomatic presence in Iran was confined to an “interests” section of the Swedish embassy; when I enquired in Tehran about the freedom of movement of British officials in Iran, I discovered that the Iranians were so restrictive that they had just refused a senior diplomat’s request to visit the Caspian Sea—a non-military area—for a holiday weekend.
It was as if there was an understanding in such matters, an unspoken commitment by all sides not to pry into the personal affairs of arms-dealers or their buyers, or into the weapons empire which needs secrecy in order to create demand, war in order to stimulate growth. The modern-day Undershafts will talk only of their competitors’ markets and mistakes. They will disclose only their rivals’ bids. It is a droll world of paper and procurement lists, forwarded by largely anonymous officials in ministries of defence—always defence—whose spelling is sometimes as deplorable as their handwriting.
A ten-page Iranian wartime procurement list handed to Austrian dealers and subsequently passed on to me demands specific spare parts for Soviet-made tanks, from grid frames to “third and fourth inversing glued lenses in frame,” from telescopic sights to headlights, from range-finders to turret motors. Yet the ordnance officer spelled “second” as “secound,” “circuit-breaker” as “dirduit-breaker,” “bottle” as “bottel.” It is a shabby document, with the column listing the quantity of required spare parts mistakenly filled into the unit number column, then crudely crossed out afterwards.
Broken down into the literal nuts and bolts of weaponry, there is an innocuous quality about such lists, as if Middle Eastern wars are fought through procurement agencies or manufacturers rather than by angry nations and frightened killer-soldiers. During my inquiries, I saw hundreds of such documents emanating from Iran, sometimes bearing the letterhead of the Iranian Armed Forces Headquarters in Tehran, at other times—when the broker acting for the Iranians wished to remain secret—typed anonymously, if imperfectly, on plain paper. In this way, tank tracks and gun barrels and McDonnell–Douglas spare parts become, quite literally, the liquid assets of big business or a source of international barter; you can exchange guns for money or oil or military favours—or even hostages. There is nothing exclusive about this. Long before President Reagan agreed to trade missiles for captives, Syria was funnelling weapons to Iran in return for shipments of cheap and sometimes free oil. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was only just restrained from selling German tanks to Saudi Arabia under an oil barter deal which, with falling oil prices, would have cost Germany more than it normally paid for oil.
War, too, throws up its own special barters. When in the first months of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 his forces captured dozens of British-built Chieftain tanks—often undamaged—from their enemy, they not unnaturally wished to reuse them against Iran. But they were unable to operate or maintain such sophisticated armour. So the tanks were transported to Jordan where, officially belonging to the Jordanian armed forces, they were repaired and overhauled by British technicians. At least one British arms manufacturer believes the tanks were then secretly returned to Baghdad for use in the Iraqi war effort, but Israeli military specialists later concluded that they remained in Jordan—as part payment for King Hussein’s generosity in allowing Iraq to ship its Soviet weapons supplies through the Jordanian port of Aqaba.
For their part, the British authorities maintain a special discretion about arms sales, dutifully issuing lists of annual military exports under armoured fighting vehicles, tanks, artillery, side-arms, revolvers, bombs and gun barrels. But unlike other export details, the British lists fail to specify to which countries the weapons have been sold. The Department of Trade and Industry refuses to discuss the individual applications of arms companies for export licences.165
In July 1991, four years after my inquiries into the Middle East arms trade began, the same British Department of Trade and Industry was expressing its confidence that there was a “reasonable and legitimate” explanation for export licences—listed in a House of Commons committee report—for the shipment to Iraq of raw materials for chemical weapons. The exports—some of which continued until 5 August 1990, three days after Saddam Hussein had invaded yet another Muslim nation, Kuwait—included two chemicals which, mixed together, formed mustard gas. During Iraq’s war with Iran, Britain had exported more than $200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components for mustard gas, to Baghdad in 1988, another $50,000 worth the following year. Thionyl chloride, the other component, was also sent to Iraq in 1988 and 1989 at a price of only $26,000. Government officials anxious to avoid the obvious truth—that Britain was partly responsible for providing Saddam with weapons of mass destruction—hastily pointed out that the chemical had civilian uses. It could be used, they said, in the making of ink for ballpoint pens and fabric dyes. This was the same government department that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for “weapons of mass destruction.”
The same House of Commons report stated that Britain had also exported small quantities of uranium and plutonium as well as military and communications equipment to Iraq. Included on the list were artillery fire control systems, armoured vehicles and decoders and encryption devices. Also on the list was zirconium, which has nuclear weapons applications. Ministry guidelines, the DTI insisted in all seriousness, “prevent the export of lethal weapons or equipment that would significantly enhance the military capacity of either country [Iraq or Iran].” The ministry was “absolutely confident” that all the goods sold to Iraq fitted this description.
With such dishonesty—with such malfeasance—how can the obscene trade in arms to the Middle East ever be halted? Note how the British government had been “absolutely confident” that the exports of mustard gas chemicals, armour and secret communications equipment could not “enhance” Iraq’s military “capacity.” This was a truth containing a very substantial sliver of glass. If it was not going to “enhance” Iraq’s military capacity, this British equi
pment was most surely intended to restore its military capability after the substantial losses in Iraqi materiel during the eight-year war with Iran—just in time for Saddam’s next act of aggression, against Kuwait.
Note, too, how the dual-use excuse for weapons exports was, within a matter of months, turned on its head as a means to deprive Iraqis of basic social needs. Just as in 1988 and 1989 a chemical used for mustard gas could be exported to Iraq since it could also be used in ballpoint ink, so—once UN sanctions were imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait—school pencils could not be exported to Iraq because the graphite in the pencils had dual military use. For the same reason, we would refuse to allow the Iraqis to import vital equipment for the repairing of oil wells, sewage plants and water-treatment facilities.
This kind of cynicism was reflected among the arms-traders. There is little honour among some of them, as Hamilton Spence, the managing director of Interarms of Manchester, a real home-grown British arms-supplier, discovered when he travelled to Beirut in 1980, at the height of the civil war, to sell M-16 rifles— legally—to the Lebanese government army in the company of Jim Davis of Colt firearms. “We sat down in a room to speak to the commander of the army, General Khoury,” he said. “Then when the tenders were being opened, we found three other men there, a West German, a Lebanese and a man of unknown nationality. All three of them then produced false cards representing them as ‘Colt’ agents. So we jumped up, pointed at them and shouted: ‘These people are imposters.’ ”
