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

There were more than six hundred men – no women – in the audience and most of them were talking of that morning’s execution, although it was difficult to understand why the event should have occasioned any excitement. There had been no acquittals in the revolutionary courts and the only punishment handed out had been death. The crowd had come to watch the prisoner, to see if he cried or pleaded for life or walked defiantly to the firing squad, to watch the mighty fallen. George Bernard Shaw once claimed that if Christians were thrown to the lions in the Royal Albert Hall in London there would be a packed house each night. These excited men in the audience must have been wearing the same faces as the mobs that gathered before the guillotine during the French revolution.

You could see why death would be the only possible sentence as soon as Rustomi’s trial started. An Islamic priest in long brown robes and a civilian lawyer appointed by the mosque walked onto the stage of the converted theatre and announced that they were to act as prosecuting counsel and judges. Rustomi did not even glance at them. They sat at two iron desks and behind them, fixed on to a starlike design of strip lights, was a crude oil painting of Ayatollah Khomeini. There was no doubt under whose authority this court was sitting.

The mullah made a brief address to the crowd, stating that the trial would be held according to the rules of the Koran, and that the prisoner should be allowed to reply to the charges against him. The mullah was a tall, distinguished man with a long white beard and a kind, honest face. The civilian lawyer looked angry and vindictive, and said something abusive to Rustomi before he sat down. The mullah waved a sheaf of papers in his hand; a series of written testaments by witnesses to anti-Shah demonstrations, each claiming that Rustomi had ordered his company of soldiers to fire at civilians.

One by one, the witnesses were called from the audience to give their evidence – a process occasionally interrupted by shouting at the back of the theatre where more men were pushing their way through the doors and fighting for places in the court. Rustomi pulled his chair up to the mullah’s desk and listened. The first witness was a young man with his shoulder in plaster and the second witness limped onto the stage. They had seen Rustomi order his men to fire at the demonstrators, they claimed, and a third man ran onto the stage and yelled that Rustomi had broken through the door of a mosque and killed a boy hiding in the shrine. There was much discussion of dates and street names – there was, in fact, a genuine if chaotic attempt to define the events surrounding the shooting – before Rustomi stood up.

The crowd bayed at him and for several seconds the mullah did nothing. Rustomi looked down at us with an uncomprehending expression. He wanted to talk. Yes, he said, he had ordered his men to disperse the demonstrators, but he had told them to fire into the air. If anyone had been hit, it must have been a ricochet. There was a momentary silence in the court before another man, scarcely twenty years old, clambered onto the stage and pointed at Rustomi. ‘You’re lying, you bastard,’ he screamed, before the judge ordered him off.

Rustomi fought his corner against obviously impossible odds. He had no defence counsel. He admitted that on another date, he had indeed fired his rifle into a crowd of people who were demanding the overthrow of the Shah. He had questioned the orders to open fire, he said, over his two-way radio, but his major had threatened him with a court martial if he did not obey. At this, an old man in the theatre leapt to his feet. ‘The Holy Koran does not allow any man to take that attitude,’ he shouted. ‘If a Muslim kills another Muslim in those circumstances he is not true to his religion.’ The old man went on and on, abusing Rustomi, and the mullah with the wise, kindly face nodded in an agreeable fashion and allowed the abuse to continue. Rustomi seemed on the verge of tears.

Then the civilian lawyer walked round and shouted ‘Liar!’ in the prisoner’s ear. For a dreadful moment I was reminded of those scratched archive films of the Nazi People’s Court trying the plotters against Hitler’s life in 1944 when Judge Roland Freisler swore at the defendants. At the end of the first day in Qom, the civilian lawyer walked over to me smiling. ‘It’s a fair trial we’re giving him,’ he said. ‘As you can see, we allow Rustomi to answer the charges.’ The court resumed next morning, and Rustomi watched unhappily as two members of his own riot squad condemned him as a murderer. Another soldier did bravely step forward to defend the prisoner, but he was ordered to shut up after being accused of muddling the date of the incident.

When the mullah called a break for lunch, a man of about thirty walked up to me outside the theatre. He was watched suspiciously by a group of Islamic Guards, gunmen wearing the distinctive green armband that showed they were appointed by the mosque. It turned out to be Rustomi’s brother, and he was a frightened man. There was no way we could talk there on the pavement, so we walked down a street together, followed by the gunmen from the court. ‘Do you think this is a fair trial?’ he asked. ‘My brother has no defence counsel. They told him to find one if he wants, but I have been to Tehran to the committee of lawyers, and I’ve spoken to twenty lawyers. Not one of them will take his case. This court has killed every prisoner it has tried.’ There was a sad pause while the man tried to stop himself weeping. ‘My brother has a little boy. He has told the other children at his school that he will kill himself if the court kills his father.’ Then we said goodbye and Rustomi’s brother walked off, the gunmen mincing after him. That same afternoon, I asked Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, one of Khomeini’s closest advisers, why Rustomi was allowed no defence counsel. The white-bearded Ayatollah sat cross-legged on rich ornamental carpets. ‘A prisoner at an Islamic court should be allowed a lawyer to defend him,’ he said. ‘I do not know what is going on at this trial at Qom – I do not know the circumstances of this trial. I do not know the answer to your question.’

He was a gentle old man and a moderate among the divines in the city of Qom. But what did ‘moderate’ mean any more? Shariatmadari simply had no idea what was going on in the courts, and I’m sure he preferred not to find out. I still have the tapes of the old man’s excuses and – far more difficult to listen to – the recordings of the ‘trial’, of the lawyer shrieking ‘Liar!’ in Rustomi’s ear, of the condemned man trying to explain his military rules, of his brother’s tears outside the ‘court’. They carry an authentic, painful reality, of injustice by the many against the few. Khomeini’s ruling after Bazargan’s frantic visit to Qom did not spare the prisoners brought into the converted theatre. Executions started again the morning after I left Qom, and although the identity of the victims was not at first made clear, one of them was a former soldier in the Shah’s army. I knew his name.

There would be no counter-coups in this revolution, no ‘Operation Ajax’, no CIA men operating from within the US embassy to buy up the bazaaris. Indeed, very soon there would be no US embassy. The demands for the return of the Shah were being made not for his restoration but in order to put him on trial. Only when the head of the snake had been cut off would the revolution feel safe. Just as the Americans believed twenty-four years later that only the capture of Saddam Hussein would bring them tranquillity in Iraq, so Khomeini and his retinue were convinced that only the death of the Shah – preferably hanged as a criminal in Iran for ‘crimes against God’ – would free Iran from its corrupt past.* In reality, the Shah was already dying from cancer. Many Iranians saw in his pathetic exile the true justice of God, his cancer the ultimate divine vengeance against one who had ‘sinned on earth’. The Shah’s gruesome odyssey through the hospitals of central America, New York City and, eventually, Cairo gave grim satisfaction to the mullahs who had already ordered his assassination.

Not long after his departure, I had sat at the feet of Hojatolislam Khalkhali, the ‘hanging judge’, as he listed those of the Shah’s family who had been sentenced to death in absentia. Around him sat a score or so of Revolutionary Guards who had been maimed in the revolutionary war against the Kurds of north-western Iran, each of them clacking his newly fitted artificial metal fingers, hands and feet as the prelate outlined the fate that so surely awaited his aristocratic enemies. Khalkhali it was who had sentenced a fourteen-year-old boy to death, who had approved of the stoning to death of women in Kermanshah, who earlier, in a mental asylum, would strangle cats in his prison cell. Gorbeh, the ‘Cat’, was what he was called. ‘The Shah will be strung up – he will be cut down and smashed,’ the Cat told me. ‘He is an instrument of Satan.’

In fact, the Shah was a poor substitute for the Devil, scarcely even the equal of Faustus; for he sold himself for the promise of worldly military power and seemingly everlasting American support. The chorus of harpies that pursued the Shah halfway around the world were the bickering, greedy surgeons, doctors and nurses who bombarded the dying man with pills, blood platelets and false hope, agents of darkness who only too well represented the technology of the world to whom the Shah had long ago sold his soul. His erstwhile friends from that world – King Hussein of Jordan, King Khaled of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan of Morocco, the Swiss, the Austrians, President Carter and Margaret Thatcher – either terminated his residence, turned him away or broke their promise to accept him when they realised the political cost. It was sobering to reflect that his only true friend – the only potentate to honour his word to Carter when the Americans wanted the old man to leave New York – was President Sadat of Egypt. President Torrijos of Panama – who gave temporary refuge to the Shah and who wanted to seduce Queen Farah but was swiftly given the brush-off by the Shahbanou – produced the pithiest obituary of the ‘Light of the Aryans’. ‘This is what happens to a man squeezed by the great nations,’ he said. ‘After all the juice is gone, they throw him away.’

In the event, the Shah died in Cairo on 27 July 1980 and was lowered into a modest tomb in the al-Rifai mosque. Six years later, in the heat of summer, I went with an Iranian friend to look at his tomb. It was midday and there was only one guardian in the mosque, an old, silver-haired man who, for a pittance, promised to take us into the last resting place of the man who thought he was the spiritual descendant of Cyrus the Great. There was a single marble slab and, resting upon it, a handwritten poem declaring eternal faith in the Shah from a member of the Javidan guards. A spray of withered roses lay on the tomb. The old guardian wandered up to us and muttered ‘Baksheesh’. He settled for 50 piastres. In the end, it cost the equivalent of 40 cents to sit at the feet of the King of Kings.

The Islamic revolutionaries who now emerged behind Ayatollah Khomeini were oddly middle-class. Men like Sadeq Qotbzadeh, the head of the television service, later foreign minister – and later still, executed for allegedly plotting against the Ayatollah – were graduates of American universities. They spoke English with American accents, which meant that they could appear surprisingly at ease on the US television networks. Many, like the new deputy prime minister Amir Abbas Entezam, flaunted their un-proletarian origins. ‘I am proud that this has been a middle-class revolution,’ Entezam announced to me one day. He leaned forward in his chair and tapped his chest. ‘I’m proud of that,’ he repeated. By ministerial standards, his was a modest office with only two desks, a sofa, a clutter of chairs and a telephone that purred unanswered in the corner. It would have been difficult to find anyone more middle-class than Entezam, with his American education and well-travelled career as an engineer. Yet in his way, he was telling the truth. For while the physical power behind the revolution lay in those colossal street demonstrations by the urban poor and the Islamic revivalists, it was the middle class from the bazaar, the tens of thousands of merchants from the Middle East’s largest souk whom the Shah tried to tame with a system of guilds, that provided the economic backing for Khomeini’s return. It was this merchant class and its alliance with the mullahs that emerged as the critical combination of secular and religious opposition.

That is why Iran’s revolution had until now generally avoided the more traditional path of such events, the looting of the homes and property of the rich. That is why you could still take a taxi across Tehran and drive into the northern suburbs beneath the mountains to find that the luxury apartments and opulent town houses with their tree-shaded verandas and goldfish ponds had been left untouched. Accumulated wealth had not been appropriated by the state. By late March of 1979, however, this had begun to change. In the north of Iran, around the Caspian, factories were being taken over by workers – leftists had led the revolution east of Kurdistan and the mosque had never held sway there – and property was confiscated. The interim government appointed by Khomeini was receiving reports of further confiscations near Mashad and the pattern was beginning to spread to Tehran.

Just over a week earlier, Faribourz Attapour, one of the city’s most prolific and outspoken journalists, was told that his father had been arrested. It turned out that Attapour Senior, who owned a small estate on the Caspian coast, had walked into his local Tehran bank to cash a cheque and had been detained by the cashier, who thought that if his customer looked rich then he must indeed be wealthy – and that if he was indeed wealthy, then he must also be corrupt. Old Mr Attapour, who had been a soldier in the Imperial army but retired from military service twenty-seven years earlier, was seventy years old and deeply in debt. Nonetheless, he was collected from the bank by a heavily armed revolutionary komiteh and freighted off to the Qasr prison. At least, that is where Faribourz Attapour thought his father was being held.

No official statement had been issued by the komiteh and even the government could not gain access to the jail. There were now an estimated 8,000 prisoners inside – there had been around 2,000 at the time of the Shah – and it took the Red Cross several weeks to gain admission. So it was not surprising that Attapour was angry. ‘This revolution has deteriorated into petty vengeance and tyranny,’ he said. ‘It can only be compared to the Jacobin Terror of the French revolution. The merchants in the bazaar have more money than my father but they do not care about his fate. Nor do the so-called religious leaders. I spoke on the telephone to the local ayatollah from our area of the Caspian and he said that my father must be corrupt because he was rich. He would not even let me answer his accusation on the telephone. He just hung up.’

Attapour was daily expecting his own arrest, but three days after we spoke his journalistic voice was silenced when Tehran’s two English-language newspapers announced that they were suspending publication. The Tehran Journal, for which Attapour wrote, gave economic reasons for its closure but for weeks revolutionary komitehs had been denouncing the paper as ‘anti-Islamic’. Most of the staff had received anonymous phone calls threatening their lives. Attapour’s parallel with the French revolution – so much at variance with Edward Mortimer’s enthusiasm – was not lost on the most dogmatic of Iran’s new regime. Dr Salamatian, a political aide at the foreign ministry, found an agreeable comparison. There were fewer executions in Iran than in the French or Russian revolutions, he said. When I pointed out to him that there were no firing squads at all after the 1974 Portuguese revolution, he snapped back at me: ‘But in Portugal they were only getting rid of Caetano – we have been overthrowing more than two thousand years of monarchy.’ This was a curious response, since the idea that Persia had lived under a seamless monarchy for 2,300 years was a figment of the Shah’s imagination, a myth propagated to justify his authoritarian rule.

That this rule was authoritarian was one of the few common denominators among those who supported the revolution, for the Left in Iran already realised that the clerics were installing themselves in power. ‘Why condemn us for hunting down the Shah’s murderers?’ Salamatian asked. ‘In the West, you kept the Nazi Rudolf Hess in prison in Germany. We regard the agents of Savak as Nazi-type criminals. You in the West put Nazis on trial. Why shouldn’t we put our Nazis on trial?’

And how could one argue with this when reporters like Derek Ive of the Associated Press had managed, very briefly, to look inside a Savak agent’s house just before the revolution was successful? He entered the building when a crowd stormed through the front door. ‘There was a fish-pond outside,’ he told me. ‘There were vases of flowers in the front hall. But downstairs there were cells. In each of them was a steel bed with straps and beneath it two domestic cookers. There were lowering devices on the bed frames so that the people strapped to them could be brought down onto the flames. In another cell, I found a machine with a contraption which held a human arm beneath a knife and next to it was a metal sheath into which a human hand could be fitted. At one end was a bacon slicer. They had been shaving off people’s hands.’ Ive found a pile of human arms in a corner and in a further cell he discovered pieces of a corpse floating in several inches of what appeared to be acid. Just before the Shah’s soldiers burst back into the rear of the building, he snatched some quick photographs of the torture apparatus.

After the revolution, we were able to meet some of the Shah’s top Savak agents. Sitting in Evin prison in their open-neck shirts, winter cardigans and corduroys, drawing nervously on American cigarettes, the eighteen prisoners looked nothing like the popular image of secret policemen. From the moment they were brought into the room – a dingy, rectangular office that doubled on occasions as a revolutionary court – these middle-aged, over-friendly men either smiled or just stared at us as government officials described them as criminals.

But they had disturbing and sometimes frightening stories to tell. Hassan Sana, the economic and security adviser to the deputy head of Savak, talked of British intelligence cooperation with the Shah, a friendly liaison which, he claimed, prompted British agents to pass to their Iranian counterparts information about Iranian students in Britain. Sana, a chainsmoker with dark glasses and an apparent passion for brightly coloured shirts, said that British assistance enabled Savak to watch or arrest students on their return to Tehran from London.

He spoke, too, of how Savak agents were flown from New York by the CIA for lessons in interrogation techniques at a secret American military base, a mysterious journey that took four hours flying across the United States in an aircraft with darkened windows. We had earlier toured the Savak interrogation centre in central Tehran, where former inmates described how they had been tortured. A black-tiled room with a concrete floor was all that remained of the chamber – almost identical to the one Ive had discovered – where prisoners were roasted on beds over gas burners. In Evin, for one terrible moment, Mohamed Sadafi – a Savak agent who had been a weightlifter – was confronted by a man whose daughter died in Sadafi’s personal custody.

‘You killed my daughter,’ the man shouted. ‘She was burned all over her flesh until she was paralysed. She was roasted.’ Sadafi glanced briefly at the man. ‘Your daughter hanged herself after seven months in custody,’ he replied quietly. The father said there was not even a sheet in the prison from which an inmate could hang herself. Yes there was, Sadafi said. He had himself seen the laundry bills at Evin.

Upon such horror the Shah’s regime was maintained, and upon such fearful scenes the revolution was fuelled. If there was a cause for surprise in Iran at this early stage of the new regime, it was not that the revolution had claimed so many victims among the Shah’s retinue but that it had claimed so few. But the revolution was unfinished. It was not going to end at that friendly bourgeois stage at which the Portuguese grew tired, nor was there any common ground between the new Islamic Republic and the people’s democracy that Iranian left-wing groups had been propagating. The Left was now more active – there were fire-fights in the streets every night – and the situation would only be exacerbated by Iran’s constantly worsening social conditions. Even Khomeini described the country as ‘a slum’.*

The security authorities of the new Islamic state remained convinced, however, that some in the new government regarded the United States as a potential partner rather than the ‘Great Satan’ of the street demonstrations.

And they were right. After the US embassy was seized in November 1979 by the ‘Muslim Students following the Line of the Imam’, Iranian security men found tons of shredded US diplomatic correspondence which they spent months reconstructing by laboriously pasting documents back together. The papers included an embarrassing quantity of material about Abbas Amir Entezam, the deputy prime minister, and his contacts with the US government. At first this was on a formal basis – the American embassy remained open after the revolution and US officials routinely met Iranian foreign ministry staff to arrange the repatriation of American military staff and civilians – and the embassy told Entezam in March 1979 that ‘the United States desires to normalize its relations with Iran at a steady pace’. Entezam replied, according to the documents, that ‘his government also wanted a good relationship with the United States … the prime minister, Bazargan … had recently expressed this sentiment publicly.’

Within a few days, however, Entezam was expressing his government’s desire to ‘share intelligence information with USG [US Government]’. The Americans had, incredibly, already given Entezam a ‘paper on Afghanistan’ – the Iranians were increasingly fearful that the Soviet Union might invade their eastern neighbour – but now Entezam explained that his government was more concerned about ‘internal security threats’. According to the US embassy report of a further meeting in May, Entezam said that ‘PGOI [Provisional Government of Iran] was concerned about possible meddling by Iraqis in Khuzestan province as well as activities of PLO and Libyans.’ Entezam said that ‘PGOI had information that George Habash [the leader of the Syrian-supported Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] had recently visited several Gulf countries … presumably with a view to causing trouble for Iran.’ The PLO’s office in the southern Iranian city of Ahwaz was also causing concern but ‘shaking his head, he [Entezam] said his government could do nothing about it … because it was Khomeini’s desire that it be opened.’

This was incendiary material. Here was Entezam – who only a few weeks earlier was boasting to me about the ‘middle-class’ nature of the revolution – discussing Iran’s security fears with the CIA; not only revealing his own intelligence information but expressing his exasperation with the most revered Islamic figure in the country for endangering that security. In June, Entezam was asking for US information on ‘Iraqi intentions towards Iran’. By this time, there had been frequent artillery exchanges across the Iran – Iraq border, and the US embassy chargé, ‘after remarking that he was not sure who cast the first stone … speculated on the possibility of the Iraqis attempting to create a “prickly hedge” along Iraq’s border with Iran à la one-time British policy on the Durand Line.’

Bruce Laingen, the American chargé, held further meetings with Entezam and within weeks Entezam – known in the US cable traffic by the rather unromantic code-name ‘SD/PLOD/1’ – was receiving direct visits from senior CIA officials. When he became an Iranian ambassador based in Sweden, Entezam was given an intelligence briefing by CIA agent George Cave, who was later to be a leading figure in the 1985–86 Contra scandal. In Tehran there had been further meetings between the CIA and Bazargan, Entezam and Ibrahim Yazdi, the Iranian foreign minister. Cave himself later visited Tehran and agreed with Entezam that there should be briefings – again, I quote the reconstructed documents – ‘every three to six months, with spot information being passed if particularly important. Entezam asked if there could be a contact in Tehran to exchange information on a regular basis. (Note: Cave was introduced as senior briefing officer from intelligence community. Term CIA was never used.)’