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

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.* 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 US National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane from 25 to 28 May 1986 – a ridiculous but outrageously funny pastiche in which 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 from telephone calls 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 with a marzipan 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, October 3, 1986.’ The month was important, for Reagan had promised that all contact was broken off with the Iranians long before that date.

Not so, said Rafsanjani. The bible was sent long after the McFarlane mission. Only a month ago, he announced – he was talking about December 1986 – a US 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 ‘Steelhammer’ 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.*

Rafsanjani had only told Khomeini of the McFarlane – North visit after they had arrived in Tehran. Khomeini’s designated successor, Ayatollah Hossein 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 Huweizah 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 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.

As the Americans pushed in the United Nations for a worldwide arms embargo against Iran, Iranian government officials authorised a massive new weapons procurement programme. Hundreds of pages of documentation from the Iranian National Defence Industry Organisation (INDIO) shown to me by dealers in Germany and Austria listed urgent demands for thousands of TOW antitank missiles and air-to-air missiles for Iran’s F-14 aircraft. The Iranians were offering $20 million for one order of 155-mm gun barrels, demanding more than 200,000 shells at $350 a shell.

King Hussein of Jordan, frightened that what he called ‘my nightmare’ – the collapse of Iraq and an Iranian victory – might be close, hosted a secret meeting of Saddam Hussein and President Hafez el-Assad of Syria at a Jordanian airbase known only as ‘H4’ in the hope that Assad might be persuaded to abandon his alliance with Iran. Nine hours of talks between the Iraqi and Syrian dictators, whose mutual loathing was obvious to the king, produced nothing more than an arrangement that their foreign ministers should meet, but such was the king’s political stature that his failures always reflected well upon him. The worthiness of his endeavours always appeared more important than their results; was he not, after all, trying to bring about an end to the Gulf war by calling upon Arab leaders to unite?

Kuwait now accepted an offer by Reagan to re-flag its tankers with the Stars and Stripes. Washington decided to parade its new and provocative policy by escorting the huge 401,382-ton supertanker Bridgeton up the Gulf to Kuwait, a phenomenal story to cover, since television crews from all over the world were hiring helicopters in the United Arab Emirates to follow this mega-tanker to her destination. I flew into Dubai on 23 July 1987 on an MEA aircraft from Beirut and – true to form – the flight-deck crew invited me to sit in the cockpit. And from there, at 10,000 feet over the Gulf, I saw Bridgeton, putting half a knot onto her previously acknowledged top speed of 16½ knots while three diminutive American warships described 3-kilometre circles round her hulk. ‘Mother-hen surrounded by her chicks,’ I wrote scornfully in my notebook. The Americans closed to battle stations as they passed within range of Iran’s Silkworm missiles and the island of Abu Moussa, where Revolutionary Guards maintained a base.

It was a fiasco. South-east of Kuwait and still 200 kilometres from its destination, the Bridgeton struck a mine on her port side and the US naval escorts, anxious to avoid a similar fate to that of the Stark two months earlier, immediately slunk away in line behind the Bridgeton’s, stern for protection. On board the escorting missile destroyer USS Kidd, the captain ordered armed seamen to the bow of his vessel to destroy any suspicious objects in the water by rifle-fire. Iranian fishing boats had been in the area before the Bridgeton was hit, but there was no way of identifying the mine. This permitted the Iranian prime minister, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, to praise the ‘invisible hands’ which had proved the vulnerability of America’s ‘military expedition’. With her speed cut to a quarter and her port side number one compartment still taking water, the Bridgeton continued what was now a political rather than a commercial voyage towards Kuwait.

It transpired that the Americans had no minesweepers in the area, had not even bothered to look for mines in the 30-kilometre-wide channel where the tanker was struck, and now feared that their own warships were more vulnerable to mines than the vessels they were supposed to protect. Kuwaiti and American officials now sought to load the Bridgeton with crude oil, an overtly political act because, as one shipping agent asked contemptuously, ‘Who in their right mind would load his cargo onto a damaged ship?’ The sorry tale of military unpreparedness was only made worse when Captain Yonkers, the US naval officer in command of the three warships – the destroyer Kidd and two frigates – blandly admitted that he did not wish to sail back through the same sea lane because ‘one of the things I do not now have is the capability to defend my ships against mines’. This statement was compounded by Rear Admiral Harold J. Bernsen, who told reporters accompanying the convoy that ‘it may sound incongruous, but the fact is [that] a large ship, a non-warship such as the Bridgeton, is far less vulnerable to a mine than a warship … if you’ve got a big tanker that is very difficult to hurt with a single mine, you get in behind it. That’s the best defence and that’s exactly what we did.’ Such statements provoked an obvious question: if the US navy could not protect itself without hiding behind a civilian vessel, how could it claim to be maintaining freedom of navigation in the Gulf?

For newspaper reporters, this was again a frustrating story. From the shore, it was impossible to see the tanker fleets or their escorts. Only by being in the air could we have any idea of the immensity of the conflict. The Iran – Iraq war now stretched from the mountains of Kurdistan on the Turkish border all the way down to the coastline of Arabia, the land that once in part belonged to the Sherif Hussein of Mecca whom Lawrence had persuaded to join the Allied cause in the First World War. The question was overwhelming: how could we write about this panorama of fire and destruction if we could not see it? The television networks with their million-dollar budgets flew their own planes. They needed pictures. We did not. But during the Lebanese civil war, which was now in its thirteenth year, I had befriended many of the American network producers and crews, often carrying their film to Damascus or Cyprus for satelliting to the United States. And the American NBC network now happily allowed me to fly in their helicopter out of Dubai – provided I acted as an extra ‘spotter’ of ships in the heat-hazed sea lanes.

At least forty warships from the United States, France, the Soviet Union and Britain were now moving into station in the Gulf and the waters of the Gulf of Oman outside Hormuz; America would have the largest fleet – twenty-four vessels, with 15,000 men aboard – including the battleship Missouri. The superlatives came with them; it was one of the biggest naval armadas since the Korean war and very definitely the largest US fleet to assemble since Vietnam. They would all be guaranteeing the ‘freedom’ of Gulf waters for ‘our Arab friends’ – and thus, by extension, Iraq – but they would do nothing to protect Iran’s shipping. It was scarcely surprising that the Iranians should announce their own ‘Operation Martyrdom’ naval manoeuvres off the Iranian coast with the warning that ‘the Islamic Republic will not be responsible for possible incidents against foreign planes and warships passing through the region.’

From my seat in NBC’s chopper, I now had an aerial platform from which to observe the epic scale of the conflict. Off Dubai, we flew at almost mast height between a hundred tankers and gas carriers, moored across miles of sea, big creamy beasts, some of them, alongside dowdy freighters and rust-streaked tubs packed with cranes and haulage equipment. True, they were under orders to wait for a rise in the spot price of oil rather than to delay their voyages because of Iran’s naval threats. But such was the blistering heat across the Gulf that we often blundered into warships in the haze without seeing them. ‘This is US warship. Request you remain two nautical miles from US warships. Over.’ The voice on the radio had a clipped, matter-of-fact east coast accent but retained its unnecessary anonymity. ‘US warship. Roger. Out.’

When we saw them spread across 6 kilometres of gentle swell – three tankers in V-shaped formation, the four warships at equidistant points around them – they looked set for a naval regatta rather than a hazardous voyage up the Gulf. The foreign tankers lying across the ocean around them, some with steam up, others riding the tides for their masters’ orders, were somehow familiar, faint echoes of those great convoys that set off through the Western Approaches forty-six years earlier. Three new American-registered ships – Gas King, Sea Isle City and Ocean City – were unremarkable symbols of Washington’s political determination in the Gulf; ill-painted, a touch of rust on their hulls, the American flag not yet tied to their stern. The US warships Kidd, Fox and Valley Forge lay line astern and abeam of them, a further American vessel standing picket. There was an element of theatre about it all, this neat little configuration of high-riding empty tankers and their grey escorts, lying in the hot sea, actors awaiting the curtain to rise upon their own farce or tragedy.

There was a small but sudden bright, golden light on the deck of the Valley Forge and an illumination rocket moved gracefully up over the sea then drifted untidily back towards the waves. ‘This is US warship,’ the voice came back into our headsets, louder and more clipped. ‘You are inside two nautical miles. Request you clear. Over.’ Coming up at us from the Valley Forge now was a big anti-submarine helicopter, an SH 603 whose remarkable ascent was assisted by two oversize engines. It came alongside, its crew staring at us from behind their shades, a lone hand in the cavernous interior gesturing slowly in a direction away from the ships. Around nine in the morning, a sleeker warship with a long, flat funnel and Exocet missile launchers on her decks sailed slowly across the rear of the American convoy, a British frigate of the Armilla patrol, HMS Active keeping the sort of discreet distance from America’s latest political gamble that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher would have approved of, at least one nautical mile from the nearest American ship.

Iran’s anger was growing.* Its Revolutionary Guards began assaulting unescorted merchant ships with rocket-propelled grenades, approaching them on power boats from small Iranian islands in the Gulf and then opening fire at close range. All this time, the margins of error grew wider. In mid-August, an American fighter aircraft over the Gulf fired two rockets at an Iranian ‘plane’ that turned out to be nothing more threatening than a heat ‘band’ in the atmosphere. Two weeks later, the Kuwaitis fired a ground-to-air missile at a low-flying cloud because humidity had transformed the vapour into the image of an approaching jet aircraft on their radar screens.

Crowds ransacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran but the ‘spontaneous’ demonstration in protest at the Mecca deaths included some very professional locksmiths who stole $40,000 in cash from the embassy vault. In an effort to damage Iran’s economy, the Saudis threatened oil price cuts, although this was a self-defeating weapon. Iraq, like Iran, relied upon its oil exports to help fund its war and, with scarcely any foreign currency reserves, Baghdad now owed $60 billion in foreign debts. Kuwait, one of Iraq’s principal financial supporters, would see the $17 million in profits which it had obtained from its additional oil exports since the US re-flagging of its tankers disappear overnight. The Arabs therefore remained as vulnerable financially as they often believed themselves to be militarily.

And now more mines were discovered in the Gulf. One exploded against the supertanker Texaco Caribbean off Fujairah in the Gulf of Oman, far outside the Arabian Gulf. The explosion ripped a hole in her number three tank large enough to drive through in a family car. There was more condemnation of Iran, but very little mention of the fact that the ship was carrying not Kuwaiti exports but Iranian crude oil from the offshore terminal at Larak. Like the Iraqi missile attack on the Stark – the assault that brought Washington to a frenzy of anger against Iran – now the Iranians were supposedly mining their own supertankers, again displaying that cold contempt for world peace of which they had always been accused. Sure enough, within two days, a British Foreign Office minister was talking of Tehran’s ‘very irrational regime’.