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

But we don’t go in for ‘little eggs’ any more. More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies – and bigger egos – are involved in ‘regime change’ today. Maybe that’s why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily. The coup against Mossadeq was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War – and the last by the British. At least we never claimed Mossadeq had weapons of mass destruction. But the final word must go to the CIA’s man, Kermit Roosevelt. ‘If we are ever going to try something like this again,’ he wrote with great prescience, ‘we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want.’

The ‘sort of complacency’ which Woodhouse defined was based upon the security services which the Shah established after his return. Savak – Sazman-i Etelaat va Amjiniat-i Keshvar, the ‘National Information and Security Organisation’ – was to become the most notorious and the most murderous, its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions. A permanent secret US mission was attached to Savak headquarters. Methods of interrogation included – apart from the conventional electric wires attached to genitals, beating on the soles of the feet and nail extraction – rape and ‘cooking’, the latter a self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a bed of wire that was then electrified to become a red-hot toaster.* Mohamed Heikal, that greatest of Egyptian journalists, once editor of Al Ahram and former confidant of Nasser, has described how Savak filmed the torture of a young Iranian woman, how she was stripped naked and how cigarettes were then used to burn her nipples. According to Heikal, the film was later distributed by the CIA to other intelligence agencies working for American-supported regimes around the world including Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines. Colonel Nimatullah Nassiri, the man who had served Mossadeq with the Shah’s eviction order, controlled Savak for almost the last fifteen years of the monarch’s reign and employed up to 60,000 agents. At one point, it was believed that a third of the male population of Iran were in some way involved in Savak, either directly or as occasional paid or blackmailed informants. They included diplomats, civil servants, mullahs, actors, writers, oil executives, workers, peasants, the poor and the unemployed, a whole society corrupted by power and fear.

For the West, the Shah became our policeman, the wise ‘autocrat’ – never, of course, a dictator – who was a bastion against Soviet expansionism in south-west Asia, the guardian of our oil supplies, a would-be democrat – the ‘would’ more relevant than the ‘be’ – and a reformer dedicated to leading his people into a bright economic future. Over the next quarter-century, the international oil industry exported 24 billion barrels of oil out of Iran; and the ‘policeman of the Gulf’ was more important than ever now that the British were withdrawing from ‘east of Suez’. But the Shah’s rule was never as stable as his supporters would have the world believe. There was rioting against the regime throughout the 1960s and four hundred bombings between 1971 and 1975. In early 1963, Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly condemned the Shah’s rule. On 3 June, the day marking the martyrdom at Kerbala of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, he publicly denounced the Shah’s corruption and was promptly arrested and taken to Tehran. An outburst of popular anger confirmed Khomeini as a national opposition leader. Sixteen months later, on 4 November 1964, he delivered a speech in which he condemned a new law giving American forces immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed inside Iran. Henceforth, an American who murdered an Iranian could leave the country; an Iranian who murdered an Iranian could be hanged.* Next day, Khomeini was exiled to Turkey.

The Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ succeeded in alienating the middle classes by legislating for land reform and the clerics by increasing the secular nature of the regime, especially by giving electoral power to women. By 1977, less than two years before the Islamic revolution, the Shah was predicting that within ten years Iran would be as developed as western Europe, and shortly thereafter one of the five most powerful countries in the world. President Jimmy Carter’s US administration, burdened with a liberal desire to spread human rights across the globe but still anxious to maintain the Shah’s power, continued the American policy of supporting the reforms that were causing so much unrest among Iranians. Israeli leaders paid frequent visits to Iran – David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon all visited Tehran, often in secret. Iranian military officers travelled to Tel Aviv for talks with senior Israeli army officers. There were regular El Al flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran.

Like all absolute monarchs, the Shah constantly reinvented himself. In 1971, he invited world leaders to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his rule at a massive birthday bash in the ancient city of Persepolis, the capital of the Persian empire under Darius the First. The city would become ‘the centre of gravity of the world’ and everyone and almost everything – from Imelda Marcos to US Vice-President Spiro Agnew, from King Hussein of Jordan to the fine wines and furnishings in the vast ‘Big Top’ tent beside the ruins – was imported from abroad. The Shah was to be worshipped as spiritual heir to the empire of Cyrus the Great, whose rule included a landmass stretching to the Mediterranean, later extended to Egypt and east to the Indus river. Alexander the Great had conquered Persepolis in 330 BC and, so legend would have it, ordered its destruction at the request of a courtesan. For the Shah’s ‘birthday’, Iranian troops were dressed up as Medes and Persians, Safavids and Kajars and Parthians. All that was missing was any reference to the Prophet Mohamed and the Muslim invasions that brought Islam to Persia. But that was the point. The Shah was presenting himself not as a Muslim but as the kingly inheritor of pre-Islamic Persia. Khomeini naturally condemned the whole binge as obscene.

This act of self-aggrandisement counted for nothing when the end came. Indeed, the very detritus of the banquet was effortlessly turned by the Ayatollah’s regime into a symbol of emptiness. When the Shah, long exiled, was undergoing surgery in New York, I travelled down to Persepolis from Tehran and found his special tent, still standing beside the ruins of the city. I even lowered myself into his solid gold bath and turned on the solid gold taps. There was no water in them.

Nor did the Shah have Cyrus’s blood in his veins. He had no such illustrious lineage – the Pahlavi dynasty was only founded in 1925 – although there was a very firm blood tide that linked the various shahs of Iranian history. The Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski has most eloquently conveyed the horrors of the eighteenth-century monarch Aga Mohamed Khan, who ordered the population of the city of Kerman to be murdered or blinded because they had sheltered the previous Shah. So the king’s praetorian guard ‘line up the inhabitants, slice off the heads of the adults, gouge out the eyes of the children … Later, processions of blinded children leave the city …’

The Shah was finally persuaded by the Americans to allow the International Red Cross into Iran’s prisons in 1977; they were allowed to see more than three thousand ‘security detainees’ – political prisoners – in eighteen different jails. They recorded that the inmates had been beaten, burned with cigarettes and chemicals, tortured with electrodes, raped, sodomised with bottles and boiling eggs. Interrogators forced electric cables into the uterus of female prisoners. The Red Cross report named 124 prisoners who had died under torture. A year later, the Shah told the Sunday Times that on human rights ‘we have no lessons to learn from anybody’.

When the Islamic revolution eventually overflowed Iran, we would often wonder at the Iranian capacity for both cruelty and sensitivity, for sudden anger and immense, long and exhausting intellectual application. In a country of violent history, its public squares were filled with statues of poets – Ferdowsi, Hafiz, Saadi – rather than conquerors, although the Shah and his father naturally occupied some substantial plinths. An Arab politician once compared Iranian persistence in adversity to the country’s craft of carpet-weaving. ‘Imagine that one carpet, worked on by scores of people, takes about ten years to complete. A people who spend years in manufacturing just a single carpet will wait many more years to achieve victory in war. Do not take lightly the patience and perseverance of the Iranians …’

And so it was to be. Khomeini moved his exile from Turkey to the Shia holy city of Najaf in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where he became outspoken in his support of the Palestinians. On clandestine tapes, his sermons were now circulated across Iran. Saddam Hussein had secured an agreement with the Shah that settled their mutual border along the centre of the Shatt al-Arab river on the Gulf and which also smothered the Kurdish insurrection in the north of Iraq, a betrayal at which both US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Shah connived. When the Shah was unable to stanch the cassette sermons, Saddam was enjoined to deport Khomeini. This time he settled in Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, where he was assured of the constant, almost fawning admiration of the international press, an institution for which he was later to show his contempt.

When the political earthquake eventually struck Iran, The Times was enduring a long industrial closure. It is the fate of journalists to be in the right place at the right time and, more frequently, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But to be in the right place without a newspaper to write for was journalistic hell. When I should have been reporting the martyrdom of tens of thousands of Iranians at the hands of the Shah’s Javidan Guards – the ‘Immortals’ – I was resigning from the National Union of Journalists who were, for all kinds of worthy socialist reasons, opposing the paper’s philanthropic owner Lord Thomson in his dispute with his printers over new technology; the union ultimately trussed up The Times for sale to Rupert Murdoch. But the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came to my rescue with a request for me to cover the Iranian revolution for a half-hour radio documentary. I packed the big tape recorder that CBC gave its reporters in those days – this was long before digitalisation – and a bag of cassettes and a notebook in case I could find a newspaper to print my reports.

The fall of the Shah was an epic. His downfall had about it something of a medieval morality play, even ancient tragedy. It might have qualified as Greek if the Shah had been a truly great man who fell from grace through a single flaw. But he was not a great man and his sins were many. Hubris was perhaps his greatest crime, although the Iranians saw things somewhat differently. Yet they sensed this mythic element in their revolution even before the King of Kings piloted his personal Boeing airliner out of Mehrabad airport for the last time on 16 January 1979.

One of the most impressive of the revolutionary posters depicted the Shah in his full regalia, crown toppling from his balding head, hurtling towards the everlasting bonfire as the avenging Ayatollah swept above him on wings of gold. If ever a Middle Eastern potentate was so frequently portrayed as the Devil, surely never in Islamic art did a living human – Khomeini – so closely resemble the form of the Deity. Tramping through the snow-swamped streets of Tehran, I was stopped by a schoolboy outside the gates of Tehran University who wanted, for a few riyals, to sell me a remarkable example of post-revolutionary graphic art. It was a cardboard face-mask of the Shah, his jowls slack and diseased, his crown kept in place only by two massive black horns. Push out the detachable cardboard eyes, place the mask over your own face and you could peer through the Devil’s own image at the black chadors and serious-faced young men of central Tehran. The effect was curious; whenever a stroller purchased a mask – whenever I held it to my own face in the street – the young men would cry Marg ba Shah – ‘Death to the Shah’ – with a special intensity. It was as if the cardboard actually assumed the substance of the man; the Devil made flesh.

Khomeini had already returned from Paris, and his Islamic revolution initially seduced the more liberal of our journalistic brethren. Edward Mortimer, an equally beached Times journalist – a leader-writer on the paper and a fellow of All Souls, he was also a close friend – caught this false romanticism in its most embarrassing form in an article in the Spectator in which he favourably compared the revolution to both the 1789 fall of the Bastille and the 1917 overthrow of the Tsar. To Mortimer, Charles Fox’s welcome to the French revolution – ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! And how much the best!’ – seemed ‘entirely apposite’ in the Tehran household among whom he was listening to revolutionary songs broadcast from the newly captured headquarters of Iranian National Radio. The events in Iran, Mortimer wrote, ‘are a genuine popular revolution in the fullest sense of the word: the most genuine, probably, since 1917 anywhere in the world, perhaps more genuinely popular than the Bolshevik revolution was, and quite possibly … no less far-reaching in its implications for the rest of the world … Khomeini has himself defied religious conservatism, and is therefore most unlikely to want to impose it on the rest of society.’

Now this was a journalism of awesome – one might even say suicidal – bravery. While I could not disagree with Edward’s remarks on the far-reaching implications of the Iranian revolution, his trust in Khomeini’s liberal intentions was born of faith rather than experience. Mossadeq’s downfall had demonstrated that only a revolution founded upon the blood of its enemies – as well as the blood of its own martyrs – would survive in Iran. Savak had been blamed for the cinema fire in Abadan in August 1978 in which 419 Iranians were burned alive; the Shah, his enemies claimed, wanted Muslim revolutionaries to be accused of the massacre. Each period of mourning had been followed by ever-larger protest demonstrations and ever-greater slaughter. Street marches in Tehran were more than a million strong. Revolutionary literature still claims that the Shah’s army killed 4,000 demonstrators in Jaleh Square in Tehran on 8 September. When Ayatollah Khomeini arrived back in Iran from Paris – the French, who had provided the wine for the Shah at Persepolis, provided Khomeini with the aircraft to fly him home – he was at once taken by helicopter to the cemetery of Behesht-i-Zahra. Four days later, on 5 February 1979, he announced a provisional government headed by Mehdi Bazargan. Iran might still become a democracy, but it would also be a necrocracy: government of, by and for the dead.

And once the martyrs of the revolution had been honoured, it was time for the Shah’s men to pay the price. Each morning in Tehran I would wake to a newspaper front page of condemned men, of Savak interrogators slumping before firing squads or twisting from gallows. By 9 March, there had been forty death sentences handed down by revolutionary courts. None of his 60,000 agents could save Nimatollah Nassiri, the head of Savak; grey-haired, naked and diminutive, he lay on a mortuary stretcher, a hole through the right side of his chest. This was the same Nassiri who had brought the Shah’s firman to Mossadeq to resign in 1953, the same Nassiri who had arranged the visits of Ben Gurion, Dayan and Rabin to Tehran. General Jaffar Qoli Sadri, Tehran’s chief of police – once head of the notorious Komiteh prison – was executed, along with Colonel Nasser Ghavami, the head of the Tehran bazaar police station, and a man accused of being one of Savak’s most savage torturers at Qasr prison, Captain Qassem Jahanpanar. All three had been sentenced in the evening and executed within twelve hours.

Many who faced the firing squad that March were found guilty of shooting at demonstrators during the great anti-Shah marches. On 11 March, Lieutenant Ahmed Bahadori was shot for killing protesters in Hamadan. In Abadan, four more ex-policemen were executed for killing a nineteen-year-old youth during demonstrations. On 13 March, revolutionary courts sent another thirteen men accused of being censors and secret police agents to the firing squad. Among them were Mahmoud Jaafarian, the Sorbonne-educated head of the Iranian National News Agency, and former television director Parviz Nikkah. Before his death, 56-year-old Jaafarian would say only that ‘I hope when I die my family and my countrymen will live in freedom.’ Nikkah was believed to be the journalist who wrote the inflammatory article against Khomeini that provoked the first bloody religious riots in the holy city of Qom in 1978. One newspaper carried photographs of all eleven with their names written on cardboard around their necks. Jaafarian stares without hope at the camera. Nikkah looks angrily to the right. The eyes of one ex-secret policeman are directed at the floor. In their minds, they must already be dead. Kayhan published two pictures of former Qom police officer Agha Hosseini. In one, he is tied to a ladder, his eyes covered in a white cloth, his mouth open and his teeth gritted as he prepares to receive the first bullets. In the other, his knees have buckled and he sags against the ladder.

Mehdi Bazargan appeared on television, condemning the kangaroo trials as a disgrace to ‘a wonderful revolution of religious and human values’. Bazargan was angered in April when he heard that the Shah’s former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda had been taken from his prison – in which the Shah had confined him in a last attempt to curry favour with the revolution before fleeing the country himself – and charged with ‘corruption on earth’ and ‘a battle against God’. Only hours before Hoveyda was to go before a firing squad, Bazargan drove at speed to Qom to speak to Khomeini, who immediately set new rules for revolutionary courts. To no avail.

Hoveyda, an intellectual, urbane man whose interests included Bach, Oscar Wilde and James Bond and whose contempt for the corruption surrounding the Shah had earned him the trust of statesmen and diplomats – but not of ordinary Iranians – had been brought to the revolutionary court from his bed at Qasr prison just before midnight, bleary-eyed and pleading that ‘my doctor has given me a sedative and I can hardly talk, let alone defend myself properly’. But he knew what was coming. ‘If your orders are for me to get condemned, then I have nothing more to say. The life of an individual is not worth much against the life of a whole nation.’ What does a ‘battle against God’ mean, Hoveyda asked the court? If it meant that he was a member of the ‘system’, then up to 700,000 people had worked in the Shah’s civil service. ‘I had a share in this system – call it the regime of a battle against God if you so wish – and so did you and all the others,’ he told the court. He wanted time to gather evidence in his defence. ‘My hand is unstained both by blood and money,’ he pleaded. ‘… You have brought me here as prime minister while five prime ministers have left the country. Couldn’t I also be walking on the Champs Elysées or in the streets of New York?’ He had no control over Savak, he said. ‘In all Savak papers, if you find a single document showing that the prime minister had any role in the organisation, then I shall say no more in my defence.’ Hoveyda turned to the reporters in the audience. ‘What’s the news?’ he asked them. ‘I haven’t seen any papers or heard the radio for some time.’

Hoveyda was eventually sentenced to death as a ‘doer of mischief on earth’. Immediately after the sentence, Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, the ‘hanging judge’ of the revolution, disconnected the telephones in the prison, locked the doors, and had Hoveyda dragged into the prison yard, tied to a stake and shot. ‘The first bullets hit him in the neck but did not kill him,’ William Shawcross wrote in his gripping account of the Shah’s last days. ‘He was ordered by his executioner, a mullah, to hold up his head. The next bullet hit him in the head and he died.’ Paris Match was to carry a photograph of his corpse with a grinning gunman looking at it. Alongside, the magazine carried a picture of the exiled royal family swimming on Paradise Island. Put not your trust in Shahs.

In those early days of the revolution, Iran was in too much anarchy for the new authorities to control journalists. Revolutionary Guards on the roads would send foreign reporters back to Tehran, but they never thought to look for us on the trains. And with a student card – I was using my free time during the stoppage at The Times to take a PhD in politics at Trinity College, Dublin – I bought an all-rail card that allowed me to travel across Iran by train. They were long revolutionary trains, the windows smashed, portraits of Khomeini and poster tulips – symbols of martyrdom – plastered over the rolling stock, their restaurant cars serving chicken, rice and tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Unable to write for my own newspaper, I sent a long letter to Ivan Barnes, the foreign news editor, to describe Iran’s unfinished revolution. The Shah’s acolytes, I told him, had usually been insufferably arrogant.

I found that this arrogance had disappeared with the revolution. I was treated with courtesy and kindness almost everywhere I went and found Iranians much more aware of the implications of world events than … the inhabitants of Arab countries. There was a straightforward quality about Iranians in the country as well as the towns that I couldn’t help admiring. They were thirsting to talk about anything. The only trouble I had was on the train to Qum [sic] when a gang of Islamic Guards (green armbands and M-16 rifles) opened the compartment door and saw me recording a cassette with train sounds. I was immediately accused of being a CIA spy (what else?) but explained that I was a journalist working for Canadian radio. The interpreter, a leftist student who travelled with me everywhere … repeated the same thing and they relaxed a bit. I had been told in Tehran to always say Deroot do Khomeini, marg ba Shah! to anyone nasty (‘Long live Khomeini, death to the Shah!’). I said my piece, at which the Khomeini guards all raised their right fists in the air and shouted their approval. Then they all shook hands with me with giant smiles and tramped off down the train to torment someone in another compartment.

From the desert to the north, Qom stands like an island of distant gold, the cupolas of its mosques and its plump, generous minarets an oasis of beauty at dawn. Like the spires of a medieval English university, its ancient centre appears to reach up to heaven. But my train pulled in after dark, the suburbs thick with exhaust and dust and vast crowds, dark-jacketed, bearded men and black-veiled women moving like a tide towards a grim red-brick building surrounded by big, muscular men with automatic rifles. My leftist student friend turned to me. ‘There is a trial,’ he shouted. ‘They are trying one of the Shah’s men.’ I dumped my bag in a hotel crammed between shops opposite the Friday Mosque, pulled out my old clunker of a tape recorder and ran back to what was already called the ‘court’.

Warrant Officer Rustomi of the Shah’s Imperial Army sat on a metal-framed chair on the stage of the revolutionary court, his hands clasped in front of him and his gaze fixed on the wooden floor of the converted theatre where he was now on trial. He was a middle-aged man and wore an untidy grey-brown beard. He had long ago been stripped of his artillery regiment uniform, and he appeared in court in a creased green anorak and a pair of dirty jeans, a crumpled figure relieved only by the snappy pair of built-up French shoes on his feet. He looked for all the world like a bored defendant awaiting judgement for a minor traffic offence rather than a man who was waiting only for the legal niceties – if ‘legal’ was the right word – of a death sentence. He was accused of killing anti-Shah demonstrators.

The Islamic court in Qom had dispatched its fifth victim to the firing squad only six hours earlier. He was a local policeman accused of killing demonstrators in the revolution, the man who had appeared on the newspaper front page, tied to the ladder, gritting his teeth in front of the firing squad. Someone had cruelly shown the newspaper to Rustomi; maybe it was the inevitability of his sentence that made him so calm, sitting up there on the platform above us. Every few minutes he would take a packet of American cigarettes out of his pocket, and a gunman with a rifle – yes, an American rifle – slung over his shoulder would step over to him obligingly with a match. Rustomi dragged heavily on the cigarettes and glanced occasionally over towards us with a kind of lifelessness in his eyes.