The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

Kandahar’s earthly, political protests had little effect. Shopkeepers had closed down the bazaar for more than two weeks but a squad of Afghan soldiers forced its reopening by threatening to smash stores whose owners did not obey their orders. Afghan troops could be found chain-smoking in their trucks beside the Khalkisherif Mosque. But the five rebel groups operating south of Kandahar had united and the otherwise obedient mullahs had told the city’s Muslim population that they should be ‘aware of events’ – an over-discreet but nonetheless unprecedented reference to the Soviet invasion.

And over the past few days, a series of poorly printed posters had made their appearance on the walls of the reopened bazaar. ‘The people are asleep,’ one of them admonished. ‘Why do you not wake up?’ Another, addressed to Soviet troops, asked simply: ‘Sons of Lenin – what are you doing here?’ Yet the poster addressed to the Russians was written in Pushtu – a language with which Soviet troops were unlikely to be familiar – and five days earlier the people of Kandahar had watched from those same balconies and rooftops as a column of tanks, tracked armoured vehicles and trucks drove through their city. The first tank was seen just after nine in the evening and the tail of the convoy only left Kandahar at four in the morning. Most of this Soviet convoy ended up along the road to Spinboldak on the Pakistan border.

In Kandahar, food prices had doubled, inflation had cut into wages. Meat and rice prices in the city had risen by 80 per cent and eggs 100 per cent. A shopkeeper, an educated man in his fifties who combined a European sweater and jacket with traditional Afghan baggy trousers and turban, claimed that Karmal’s government could not survive if it was unable to control food prices. ‘Every day the government says that food prices are coming down,’ he said. ‘Every day we are told things are getting better thanks to the cooperation of the Soviet Union. But it is not true.’ The man lapsed into obscenities. ‘Do you realise that the government cannot even control the roads? Fuck them. They only hold on to the cities.’

This I already knew. And the journey back to Kabul, 450 kilometres across lagoons of snow and deserts held by marauding rebels, was evidence of the terrible future that Afghanistan would be forced to endure. From the windows of my bus I saw, 8 kilometres from the road, an entire village on fire, the flames golden against the mountain snows, while the highway was sometimes in the hands of gunmen – several, I noticed, were wearing Arab kuffiah scarves – or truckloads of cringing Afghan soldiers. The Russian troops were moving up the side roads now, spreading their army across the plains, driving imperiously into the smallest villages.

At one intersection, a Soviet patrol was parked, the soldiers in their BMB armoured vehicles watching us with routine disinterest, already counting their mission as something normal. This was now their land, their inheritance, dangerous, to be true, but a part of their life, a duty to be done. But their mission was as hopeless as it was illusory. ‘Even if they kill a million of us,’ an Afghan bazaari was to say to me later in Kabul, ‘there are a million more of us ready to die. We never allow people to stay in our country.’ Both statements were true.

Only days after I left Kabul, Afghan troops and security men brutally suppressed a mass demonstration against the Soviet invasion, shooting down hundreds of protesters, including women students, in the streets of the capital. Well over a million Afghans would be killed in the war against the Russians over the next nine years, at least 4 million would be wounded and 6 million driven out of the country as refugees – even before the Afghan war entered its further tragedy of civil conflict between the mujahedin, Taliban rule and subsequent American bombardment. What that suffering meant we would only discover later. The most efficient killers were the armies of landmines sown across the mountains and fields of Afghanistan by the Soviets. The war would cost the Russians, it has been estimated, around $35 billion – $2.5 billion worth of Russian aircraft were lost in one year alone – and the Americans claimed to have spent $10 billion on the conflict. Saudi Arabia, on its own admission in 1986, spent $525 million in just two years on Afghan opposition parties and their Arab supporters. Pakistani sources would later say that three to four thousand Arab fighters were in action in Afghanistan at any one time throughout the war and that as many as 25,000 Arabs saw service in the fighting. Yet in the end, once the Russian bear had burned its paws and the Soviet Union was on its way to perdition, the Americans and their Arab and Pakistani suppliers abandoned Afghanistan to its fate and ignored the thousands of Arabs who had fought there. Nor did any Saudi prince risk his life for the Afghans, nor any Arab leader ever dare to go to war for his fellow Muslims there, nor did Yassir Arafat, who understood the meaning of dispossession, ever criticise the army of occupation that was to lay waste the Muslim lands between the Amu Darya and the Durand Line. Only Bin Laden and his men represented the Arabs.

I flew out of Kabul on a little Pakistani prop aircraft that bucked in the air pockets over the Hindu Kush and dropped me into the basking, bakery-hot airport at Peshawar from which Francis Gary Powers had set off twenty years earlier in his doomed U-2 intelligence plane over the Soviet Union. I was light-headed, overwhelmed to have watched history and survived, possessed of a schoolboy immaturity. Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent had nothing on this.* At my hotel, a message from my foreign news editor Ivan Barnes told me I had won an award for my reporting on the Iranian revolution. ‘Have a very big drink on me tonight …’ he telexed. The editor announced a $1,000 bonus. A letter was to arrive with congratulations from my old soldier father. ‘Well done Fella,’ he wrote. I could not sleep.

Next morning, I indulged my innocence by riding the old British steam train back up the Khyber Pass, to take one last look at Afghanistan before I returned to Beirut. Engine-driver Mohamed Selim Khan, a brisk and mustachioed Pathan with a topi on his head and eighteen years’ experience with Pakistan State Railways under his arm, wiped his oil-cloth over the firebox of his sixty-year-old steam engine, knowingly tapped the lubricator – a Wakefield patent made in London EC4 – and eased loco Number 2511 out of Peshawar’s hot and smoky station. Every schoolboy would have loved SGS Class No. 2511, and so did I. She had six driving wheels, a smokestack with a lid like a teapot, a rusting boiler under constant repair, a squadron of gaskets that leaked steam and a footplate that reeked of oil, smoke and freshly brewed tea. She made a noise like thunder and I clung like a child to the fittings of Mr Khan’s footplate.

The Ministry of Defence in Islamabad paid for the upkeep of the 60 kilometres of track – they might need it one day, to take their own army up to Landi Kotal if those Russian convoys spilled over the border – but its subsidy allowed us to hammer our way up the one-in-three gradient, the steepest in the world, black smoke boxing us into more than thirty tunnels that line the route, a thin, shrieking whistle sending buffaloes, goats, sheep, children and old men off the track. At 3,000 feet, No. 2511 performed so sharp a turn above so sheer a ridge of boulders high above a spinning river that Mr Khan and I grasped the iron doors of the cab to stop ourselves falling out. So we steamed into Landi Kotal from Jamrud Fort, our loco fuming in the sharp high-altitude breeze.

And when I jumped down from the footplate and crunched my way across the gravel of the permanent way, there were the pale blue mountains of Afghanistan shimmering to the north and west, sun-soaked and cold and angry and familiar and dangerous. I looked at them with attachment now, as one always does a dark land from which one has emerged alive. Up there, with Gavin and his crew, I had reached the top of the world. Never could I have imagined what we had given birth to in Afghanistan, nor what it held in store for that same world in twenty-one years’ time. Nor the pain it was to hold for me.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Carpet-Weavers

… the Men who for their desperate ends

Had plucked up mercy by the roots were glad

Of this new enemy. Tyrants, strong before

In devilish pleas, were ten times stronger now,

And thus beset with foes on every side,

The goaded Land waxed mad; the crimes of few

Spread into madness of the many, blasts

From hell came sanctified like airs from heaven;

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude, 1805,

Book Tenth

Christopher Montague Woodhouse was asking himself if he had helped to create the Islamic revolution in Iran. He was an old man now, but you could see the energy that still gripped him, a tall, dignified, brave and ruthless 79-year-old. It was snowing that morning in Oxford in 1997, but he had come to the gate of his retirement home to greet me, his handshake a vice. He sat ramrod-straight in his library with the mind of a young man, answering my questions with the exactness of a Greek scholar, each sentence carefully crafted. He had been Britain’s senior secret agent in ‘Operation Boot’ in 1953, the overthrow of Iran’s only democratic prime minister, Mohamed Mossadeq. It was ‘Monty’ Woodhouse who helped to bring the Shah of Iran back from exile, along with his colleagues in the CIA, who set in motion a quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, ‘Light of the Aryans’, would obediently rule Iran – repressively, savagely, corruptly and in imperious isolation – on our behalf. Woodhouse was a reminder that The Plot – the international conspiracy, moamara in Arabic – was not always the product of Middle East imagination. Woodhouse was in the last years of a life in which he had been a guerrilla fighter in Greece, a Tory MP and a much honoured Greek linguist and academic. Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was now dead; Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Tehran, his boss Allen Dulles, Robin Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian brothers who organised the coup, Mossadeq himself and the last Shah of Iran. ‘Monty’ was the last survivor.

We had known each other for nine years, ever since The Times sent me to investigate the secret wartime history of former UN secretary-general and ex-Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim in Bosnia.* Woodhouse, along with the brilliant British scholar Gerald Fleming, had relentlessly pursued the former Austrian intelligence officer in the German army for personal as well as moral reasons; Waldheim’s initial ‘W’ appeared below the interrogation summary of one of Woodhouse’s Special Operations Executive officers who was captured in Yugoslavia and later executed by the Gestapo. Woodhouse was a man who lived first in the shadows – in the wartime Balkans and Tehran – and then as a member of parliament, and I wanted to know, before he died, why Britain and the United States, the ‘West’ – why we – had chosen to destroy Iran’s only secular democracy.

Woodhouse looked at me with his penetrating, unwavering eyes. ‘I’ve sometimes been told that I was responsible for opening the doors for the Ayatollah – for Khomeini and the others,’ he said. ‘But it’s quite remarkable that a quarter of a century elapsed between Operation Boot and the fall of the Shah. In the end it was Khomeini who came out on top – but not until years later. I suppose that some better use could have been made of the time that elapsed.’ I was astonished. The coup against Mossadeq, the return of the Shah, was, in Woodhouse’s mind, a holding operation, a postponement of history. There was also the little matter of the AIOC, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – later British Petroleum – which Mossadeq had just nationalised. You could tell from the way he spoke, the urgent movement of his hands, that this had been one of the most exciting moments of Woodhouse’s life. The return of the young Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi was the ultimate goal. It cost a couple of million pounds, a planeload of weapons and perhaps five thousand lives. And twenty-five years later, it all turned to dust.

The Americans called their plot ‘Operation Ajax’, which must at least have appealed to the scholar in Woodhouse, even if its classical origins did not invoke success; Ajax was second only to Achilles in bravery, but he killed himself in a fit of madness, a fate the Americans would like to have visited upon Mossadeq. It was, in any case, a long way from later and more ambitious campaigns of ‘regime change’ in the Middle East, and a few neo-conservatives in the Pentagon in 2003 might have dusted off the archives of the early Fifties to see how to topple Middle East leaders before embarking on ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. But then Operation Boot/Ajax – though it was undeniably about oil – was never intended to change the map of the Middle East, let alone bring ‘democracy’ to Iran. ‘Democracy’, in the shape of the popular and somewhat effete Mossadeq, was the one thing Washington and London were not interested in cultivating. This was to be regime change on the cheap.

The project had not attracted President Truman, but when Eisenhower arrived at the White House in 1953, America was already fearful that Mossadeq would hand his country over to the Soviets. The CIA end of the operation was run by the splendidly named Kermit Roosevelt – grandson of the buccaneering ex-president Theodore – and his victim was the very opposite of Saddam Hussein. ‘No nation goes anywhere under the shadow of dictatorship,’ Mossadeq once said – words that might have come from President George W. Bush’s speechwriters half a century later. But one thing Mossadeq did have in common with the later dictator of Iraq; he was the victim of a long campaign of personal abuse by his international opponents. They talked about his ‘yellow’ face, of how his nose was always running; the French writer Gérard de Villiers described Mossadeq as ‘a pint-sized trouble-maker’ with the ‘agility of a goat’. On his death, the New York Times would claim that he ‘held cabinet meetings while propped up in bed by three pillows and nourished by transfusions of American blood plasma’. True, Mossadeq, an aristocrat with a European education, had a habit of dressing in pink pyjamas and of bursting into tears in parliament. But he appears to have been a genuine democrat – he had been a renowned diplomat and parliamentarian – whose condemnation of the Shah’s tyranny and refusal to sanction further oil concessions gave his National Front coalition mass popular support. When Woodhouse arrived in Tehran – officially, he was the British embassy’s ‘information officer’ – Iran was already on the brink of catastrophe. Negotiations had broken down with the AIOC, whose officials, Woodhouse admitted, were ‘boring, pig-headed and tiresome’. The British ambassador was, according to Woodhouse, ‘a dispirited bachelor dominated by his widowed sister’ and his opposite number an American business tycoon who was being rewarded for his donations to the Democratic Party.*

‘One of the first things I had to do was fly a planeload of guns into Iran,’ Woodhouse said. He travelled on the aircraft from the Iraqi airbase at Habbaniya – decades later, it would be one of Saddam Hussein’s fighter-bomber stations, and later still a barracks for America’s occupation army – and then bought millions of Iranian riyals, handing them over at a secret location to the Rashidian brothers. They were to be the organisers of the mobs who would stage the coup. The guns would be theirs, too – unless the Soviet Union invaded Iran, in which case they were to be used to fight the Russians.

‘We landed in Tehran after losing our way over the Zaghros mountains. They were mostly rifles and sten guns. We drove north in a truck, avoiding checkpoints by using by-roads. Getting stopped was the sort of thing one never thinks about. We buried the weapons – I think my underlings dug the holes. And for all I know those weapons are still hidden somewhere in northern Iran. It was all predicated on the assumption that war would break out with the Soviet Union. But let me clarify. When I was sent to Tehran, it was not for the purpose of political interference. In fact, political interference at the British embassy in Tehran was in the hands of a quite different personality, Robin Zaehner. He was very good company, very intelligent but very odd. His function was to get rid of Mossadeq. This only became my function when Zaehner despaired of it and left Tehran.’

In fact, Zaehner, later to become Professor of Eastern Religions at Oxford, had been involved in Britain’s disastrous attempt to raise a revolution in communist Albania, based in Malta, and later accused by American agents of betraying the operation – Woodhouse never believed this – and was now the principal liaison with the Shah. It was Zaehner who cultivated the Rashidian brothers, both of whom had worked against German influence in Iran during the Second World War. Iran was on the point of throwing the British embassy staff out of Tehran, so Woodhouse made contact with the CIA station chief in the city, Roger Goiran, ‘a really admirable colleague … he came from a French family, was bilingual, extremely intelligent and likeable and had a charming wife … an invaluable ally to me when Mossadeq was throwing us out’. Once back in London, Woodhouse took his plans to the Americans in Washington: the Rashidians, along with an organisation of disenchanted army and police officers, parliamentary deputies, mullahs, editors and mobs from the bazaar, all funded by Woodhouse’s money, would seize control of Tehran while tribal leaders would take over the big cities – with the weapons Woodhouse had buried.

Mossadeq rejected the last proposals for a settlement with the AIOC and threatened the Shah – who had already left Iran – and from that moment, his fate was obvious. Roosevelt travelled secretly to Tehran while Woodhouse met the Shah’s sister Ashraf in Switzerland in an attempt to persuade her brother to stay on the throne. The Shah himself received a secret emissary bent on the same purpose, a certain General H. Norman Schwarzkopf – father of the Norman Schwarzkopf who would lead US forces in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. The Shah went along with the wishes of his superpower allies. He issued a firman dismissing Mossadeq as prime minister, and when Mossadeq refused to obey and arrested Colonel Nimatullah Nassiri – who had brought the Shah’s order – the mobs whom Roosevelt and Woodhouse had bought duly appeared on the streets of Tehran.

Woodhouse was always unrepentant. ‘It was all Mossadeq’s fault. He was ordered by the Shah’s firman to leave. He called out his own thugs and he caused all the bloodbath. Our lot didn’t – they behaved according to plan. What if we’d done nothing? What would relations have been between Mossadeq and the mullahs? Things would only have got worse. There would have been no restoration of AIOC. And the Shah would have been overthrown immediately, instead of twenty-five years later.’*

In retirement, and still mourning his wife Davina who had died two years earlier, Woodhouse was now keeping his mind alert by translating into English a history of modern Greece by his old friend and fellow scholar, Panayotis Kanellopoulos.† It was easy to see him, a gentle old man who had just become the fifth Baron Terrington, as a romantic figure of history. Here, after all, was a man who knew Churchill and Eden and the top men in the CIA in Washington. But British agents who engineer coups can be remorseless, driven people. At one point in our conversation, Woodhouse talked about his own feelings. ‘I don’t want to be boastful,’ he said. ‘But never – neither in Athens during the German occupation nor in Tehran during this operation – was I afraid. I was never afraid of parachuting, even in the wrong place. I ought to have been, I realise. And when I look back on it, a shudder comes over me. I was always fascinated by the danger and fascinated by the discoveries that come out of being in danger.’

There was, I felt, a darker side to this resolve. In his autobiography, Woodhouse described how during his Second World War service in Greece, a gypsy was captured carrying an Italian pass and working for the Axis powers. With two Greek guerrilla leaders, Napoleon Zervas and Aris Veloukhiotis, Woodhouse formed a court martial. ‘The outcome was inevitable,’ he wrote. ‘We could not afford the manpower to guard a prisoner; we could not risk his escape. He was hanged in the village square.’

Did Woodhouse still think about this youth? I put this question to him gently, at the end of our conversation as the gale outside hurled snow at the window of his library. There was a long silence and Woodhouse shook his head very slowly. ‘It was terrible – I felt terrible. I still bring the scene back to me from time to time. He was a wretched youth. He didn’t say anything really – he was so shaken. He was a sort of halfwit. I was at the hanging. He was hanged from a tree. They simply pulled a chair from beneath his feet. I don’t think it took long for him to die, I don’t know exactly how long. We were only a hundred men or so – it was the early days of the occupation. If we had let him go, he would have told the Italians … He had been following us from village to village. After that, I told Zervas not to take any prisoners.’

Woodhouse, I suspect, viewed the Iranian coup with the same coldness of heart. He certainly had as little time for Ayatollah Abul Qassim Kashani as he did for Mossadeq. Kashani was Khomeini’s precursor, a divine – albeit of a slightly gentler kind – whose opposition to the British gave him nationalist credentials without making him an automatic ally of Mossadeq. Woodhouse was not impressed. Kashani, he said, was ‘a man no one really took seriously – he became a member of the Majlis [parliament], which was an odd thing for an ayatollah to do. He had no power base … Kashani was a loner. One didn’t think of him in terms of any mass movement. He was a nuisance, a troublemaker.’ Others thought differently. Kashani, it has been said, spoke for the ‘democracy of Islam’; he was a man ‘completely fearless, unscrupulous, completely free from self-interest … With these qualities he combines humility and ready access, kindness and humour, wide learning and popular eloquence.’* In November 1951, Kashani stated that ‘we don’t want any outside government interfering in our internal affairs … The United States should cease following British policy otherwise it will gain nothing but hatred and the loss of prestige in the world in general and in Iran in particular.’ Much the same warning would be given to Britain in the Middle East fifty-two years later when Tony Blair’s government followed American policy over Iraq.

Woodhouse was right in one way: after Mossadeq’s overthrow and subsequent trial – he was given a three-year jail sentence and died under house arrest ten years later – Kashani moved into obscurity. Woodhouse would record how the Ayatollah later sent a telegram of congratulations to the Shah on his return to Iran. But Mossadeq’s rule and the coup that ended Iran’s independence in 1953 would provide a bitter lesson to the revolutionaries of 1979. If the Shah was ever to be dethroned, there could be no flirtation with constitutional rights, no half-measures, no counter-revolutionaries left to restore Western power in Iran. A future revolution would embrace more than five thousand dead; it must be final, absolute – and unforgiving. The spies, the ancien régime, would have to be liquidated at once.

There were also lessons for the Americans and British, and for the Shah, had they chosen to pay attention. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States and Britain. The fall of Mossadeq, as James A. Bill has written, ‘began a new era of intervention and growing hostility to the United States among the awakened forces of Iranian nationalism’. Woodhouse was to become deeply depressed by Khomeini’s subsequent revolution. ‘I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once the Shah had been restored,’ he said. ‘Things were taken for granted too easily.’ After Mossadeq had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower administration to back the coup: ‘That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!’ he told the man from MI6.