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

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 US 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 indisciplined 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 US warship crews in the Gulf, all the evidence that US 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 US 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 under-funded 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.

The Iranians, after all, had a motive. The destruction of the Iranian passenger jet, whatever Washington’s excuses, was a terrible deed. But would someone so wickedly plot revenge? I was in Paris when the BBC announced that a Pan Am jet had crashed over Lockerbie. This time it was 270 dead, including eleven on the ground. I didn’t need to imagine the corpses – I had seen them in July – and not for a moment did I doubt the reason. There were the usual conspiracy theories: a cover-up CIA drug-busting scheme that had gone crazily wrong, messing with the evidence by American agents after the crash. And Iranian revenge for the Airbus killings.

In the United States, this was a favourite theory. The news shows repeated the video – taken by a US navy team – of the Vincennes firing its missiles on 3 July. Captain Rogers saw the film again, writing later that he ‘felt a knot in my stomach and wondered if it was ever going to stop’. The parallel was relevant but had no moral equivalence. The annihilation of the Airbus had been a shameful mass killing but Lockerbie was murder. In Beirut, an old acquaintance with terrifying contacts in the hostage world calmly said to me: ‘It’s [Ahmed] Jibril and the Iranians.’ Jibril was head of the Damascus-based ‘Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command’. Diplomatic correspondents in Washington and London – always the stalking horses for government accusations – began to finger the Iranians, the PFLP-GC, the Syrians. In Tehran, people would look at me with some intensity when I mentioned Lockerbie. They never claimed it. Yet they never expressed their horror. But of course, after the Airbus slaughter, that would have been asking a bit much.

In Beirut, the PFLP-GC became known, briefly, as ‘the Lockerbie boys’. I didn’t count much on that. But then, more than two years later, a strange thing happened. Jibril held a press conference in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, initially to talk about the release by Libya of French and Belgian hostages seized from a boat in the Mediterranean. But that was not what was on his mind. ‘I’m not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing,’ he suddenly blurted out. ‘They are trying to get me with a kangaroo court.’ There was no court then. And no one had officially accused Jibril of Lockerbie. But scarcely nine months later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the diplomatic correspondents no longer believed in the Syrian – PFLP-GC – Iranian connection. Now it was Libya that was behind Lockerbie. Iran was the enemy of the bestial Saddam, and Syria was sending its tanks to serve alongside the Western armies in the Gulf. Jibril’s men faded from the screen. So did the only country with a conceivable motive: Iran.

In the aftermath of the shooting down of the Airbus, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who was intended to be Khomeini’s successor, said that he was ‘sure that if the Imam orders, all the revolutionary forces and resistance cells, both inside and outside the country, will unleash their wrath on US financial, political, economic and military interests.’ But the Vincennes attack finally convinced most of the Iranian leadership that the United States had joined the war on Iraq’s side. The Americans had destroyed Iran’s oil platforms, eliminated the Iranian navy and were now, it seemed, determined to use missiles against Iran’s passenger planes, all of which had previously been targets for Saddam Hussein. Iran’s economy was collapsing and, so Rafsanjani warned Khomeini, even the resupply of Iran’s vast armies was impossible. There could be no more Iranian offensives against Iraq, Khomeini was told by the country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Mohsen Rezai, until 1993. So to protect the Islamic revolution – to ensure its survival – Khomeini accepted UN Security Council resolution 598 and a ceasefire to take effect on 22 July 1988, ‘in the interests of security and on the basis of justice’. For the old man, it was a personal as well as a military catastrophe. ‘Woe upon me that I am still alive,’ he concluded bleakly, ‘and have drunk the poisoned chalice of the resolution.’

But worse was to come. Seven days after Khomeini’s 18 July acceptance of the UN resolution, the Mujahedin-e-Qalq’s ‘National Liberation Army’ swept across the Iranian border in Iraqi-supplied tanks and armour to overthrow the Khomeini regime. It was the ultimate treachery and the Iranians fought back against their invaders – who were, of course, themselves Iranians – with fury; across Iran, the government’s secret police began the wholesale liquidation of the Muhajedin’s supporters. The Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji, many of whom felt betrayed by the ending of the war, turned upon the Mujahedin, summarily hanging their captured militiamen in Bakhtaran, Kangavar and Islam Abad. Now thousands of Mujahedin militants and their supporters in jails all over Iran – many of whom had long ago been tried and sentenced to many years of imprisonment – were to be re-tried and hanged.

‘We ask the Leader to deal harshly with murderers and as soon as possible, rid the people of their presence,’ Resalat newspaper pleaded. Ayatollah Musavi Ardebili, the head of the supreme court, gave a Freisler-like speech at Friday prayers in Tehran. The monafeqin – the ‘hypocrites’ – he said, ‘don’t know that people see them as less than animals. People are so angry with them; the judiciary is under extreme pressure of public opinion … people say they should all be executed … We will judge them ten at a time, twenty at a time, bring a file, take away a file: I regret that they say a fifth have been destroyed. I wish they all were destroyed …’ ‘Hypocrites’ was a word that embraced the idea of heresy or apostasy rather than mere double standards. To be one of the monafeqin was a capital offence.

Even before the war had ended, Iran’s prison population was re-interrogated and divided into those who still recognised the resistance to the Islamic Republic and those who had repented – the tavvab – and between those who prayed and those who refused to pray. At some point, Khomeini ordered that political prisoners should be liquidated en masse. Although this order was kept secret, we know that Ayatollah Montazeri, Khomeini’s chosen successor, protested vehemently against the massacres, an act that ensured his dismissal as the future Imam. ‘… As to your order to execute the hypocrites in prison,’ Montazeri wrote in a private letter to Khomeini, ‘the nation is prepared to accept the execution if those arrested [are] in relation to recent events [i.e. the Iraqi-backed Mujahedin invasion]… But the execution of those already in prison … would be interpreted as vindictiveness and revenge.’

In some prisons, inmates were lined up on opposite sides of a corridor, one line to be returned to their cells after ‘repenting’, the other taken straight to a mass gallows. On 30 July, Revolutionary Guards at Evin began their executions with Mujahid women prisoners. The hangings went on for several days. Male communist prisoners were hanged at the mosque in Evin. ‘When [they] are taken to the Hosseinieh to be hanged,’ an ex-prisoner testified, ‘some [are] crying, some swearing and all shivering but hiding their shivering. Some smile hopelessly … a number of the guards vie with each other to do the hanging so as to score more piety. A few are upset by seeing so many corpses. Some prisoners fight and are savagely beaten. The execution is swift.’ The bodies of the hanging men were paraded in front of female prisoners to break their spirit. In Tehran alone, an Iran-based human rights group published the names of 1,345 victims of the ‘national disaster’.

Exile magazines opposed to the regime would, years later, publish terrifying eyewitness accounts of the prison hangings. Up to 8,000 inmates may have been put to death in the summer of 1988, perhaps 10,000. Secret executions were followed by burials in secret graves. A former female prisoner

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