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

In my Times report of the interview, I suggested that the Ayatollah might soon accept less benignly the little criticisms of the Tudeh. All I got wrong was the time frame. It would be 1983, at the height of the Iran – Iraq war, before Khomeini turned his ‘progressive’ attention to the party which wanted ‘popular democracy’. When Vladimir Kuzichkin, a Soviet KGB major stationed in Tehran, defected to Britain in 1982, he handed over a list of Soviet agents operating in Iran – a list that was then shared with the authorities in Iran. More than a thousand Tudeh members were arrested, including Kianouri, who was quickly prevailed upon to admit that the party had been ‘guilty of treason and espionage for the Soviet Union’. Kianouri appeared on Iranian television to say that he had maintained contact with Soviet agents since 1945 and that members of his party had been delivering top-secret military and political documents to the Soviet embassy in Tehran. Eighteen Soviet diplomats were expelled. Kianouri and his wife Mariam Firouz were sent to Evin prison for ten years; he died soon after his release. It was the end of the Left in Iran.

It was only in November of 1979 that I sat at last before Khomeini. Long ago, when Britain had an empire, the Times correspondent would have the ear of statesmen and warlords. Shahs and princes would demand to be interviewed. But a new empire now guaranteed that it was the American television anchormen, the boys from the New York Times and the journalists who played the role of mouthpiece for the State Department who got the interviews. The best I could do was to ‘piggyback’, to team up with the men from the new pax Americana whom the Ayatollahs – who sniffed power as acutely as any politicians – wanted to talk to. So I travelled to Qom with two American television networks whose reporters – as opposed to their employers – I greatly admired, John Hart and Peter Jennings. It took courage for an American to report the Iranian revolution with compassion and fairness, and I had many times travelled with Hart in Tehran. ‘I think we can let young Bob come with us, don’t you, Peter?’ Hart noisily asked Jennings as I stood beside him. ‘I mean, he’s not going to get in our way and it always feels good to help out the poor old Brits. Anyway, I’m sure young Bob will be grateful to America!’ The sarcasm was forced, but he well understood my lowly status in the ranks of scribes.

It was a bright winter Sunday morning as we approached Qom, its blue-tiled domes and golden minarets twinkling in the light. I often thought that this was what our own European cities must have looked like in the Middle Ages, a sudden sprouting of spires and towers above a hill or along a valley. Before you reached the car repair shops and the lock-up garages and the acres of slums, Qom appeared mystical across the desert. We didn’t need to call it a ‘holy’ city in our reports; after the miles of grey, gritty dunes, it was a miracle of light and power. You could understand how pilgrims, after days in the harshness of rock and gravel and powdered sand, would behold the cupolas and the reflected gold on the horizon and renew their faith. Allahu akbar. From every loudspeaker in the city, floating down upon every courtyard, came the same exhortation. Once, on a parched summer midday, I had arrived in Qom to interview one of its clerics, and a Muslim student – a Briton, by chance, who had converted to Islam – offered me chilled water in a glittering bronze bowl. Outside the window, as I put my lips to the bowl, a pink jacaranda tree swayed in the breeze. It was like pouring life into myself. No wonder Khomeini had decided to return to Qom. This was the city from which he had first assaulted the Shah. Here were born and here died the revolution’s first martyrs. They said he lived a humble life and they were right. I was shown Khomeini’s bedroom, a rough carpet on the floor, a mattress, a pillow, a glass for his morning yoghurt.

It was an interesting phenomenon, this oriental desire to show the poverty of their leaders. In Cairo, members of the underground Jemaa Islamiya would delight in showing me the slums in which they spent their lives. Bin Laden had ordered his men to show me the tents in which his wives would live. Now Khomeini’s guards were opening the door of the old man’s bedroom. No palaces for the Imam; because, as I quickly realised, he built his palaces of people. His faithful, the adoration on the faces of the dozens of men who pushed and shoved and squeezed and kicked their way into the small audience room with its bare white walls, these were the foundations and the walls of his spiritual mansion. They were his servants and his loyal warriors, his protectors and his praetorian guards. God must protect our Imam. And their devotion grew as Khomeini proclaimed that, no, he was their servant and, more to the point, he was the servant of God.

I didn’t see him come into the room although there was a cry of near-hysteria from the crowd as he entered. I glimpsed him for just a moment, advancing at the speed of a cat, a small whirlwind of black robes, his black sayed’s turban moving between the heads, and then he was sitting in front of me, cross-legged on a small blue and white patterned carpet, unsmiling, grave, almost glowering, his eyes cast down. I have always responded badly at such moments. When I first saw Yassir Arafat – admittedly, he was no Khomeini – I was mesmerised by his eyes. What big eyes you have, I wanted to say. When I first met Hafez el-Assad of Syria, I was captivated by the absolute flatness of the back of his head, so straight I could have set a ruler against it without a crack showing. I spent an evening at dinner with King Hussein, perpetually astonished at how small he was, irritated that I couldn’t get him to stop playing with the box of cigarettes that lay on the table between us. And now here was one of the titans of the twentieth century, whose name would be in every history book for a thousand years, the scourge of America, the Savonarola of Tehran, the ‘twelfth’ Imam, an apostle of Islam. And I searched his face and noted the two small spots on his cheek and the vast fluffy eyebrows, the bags under his eyes, the neat white beard, his right hand lying on his knee, his left arm buried in his robe.

But his eyes. I could not see his eyes. His head was bowed, as if he did not see us, as if he had not noticed the Westerners in front of him, even though we were the symbol – for the poor, sweating, shoving men in the room – of his international power and fame. We were the foreign consuls arriving at the oriental court, waiting to hear the word of the oracle. Qotbzadeh sat on Khomeini’s right, gazing obsequiously at the man who would later condemn him to death, his head leaning towards the Ayatollah, anxious not to miss a single word. He, after all, would be the interpreter. So what of the embassy hostages? we wanted to know. Khomeini knew we would ask this. He understood the networks. His last, cynical remarks about newspapers in the final days of his life showed that he understood us journalists as well.

‘They will be tried,’ he said. ‘They will be tried – and those found guilty of espionage will submit to the verdict of the court.’ Khomeini knew – and, more to the point, we knew – that since the revolution, everyone found guilty of spying had been sentenced to death. Then came what I always called the ‘slippery floor’ technique, the sudden disavowal of what might otherwise appear to be a closed matter. ‘It would be appropriate to say,’ the Ayatollah continued, ‘that as long as they stay here, they are under the banner of Islam and cannot be harmed … but obviously as long as this matter continues, they will remain here – and until the Shah is returned to our country, they may be tried.’ The extradition of the Shah to Iran, Khomeini had decided, must dominate every aspect of the country’s foreign policy. Of course, Hart and Jennings talked about international law, about the respect that should be paid to all embassies. The question was translated sotto voce by Qotbzadeh. Khomeini’s reply was quiet but he had a harsh voice, like gravel on marble. It was President Carter who had broken international law by maintaining ‘spies’ in Tehran. Diplomatic immunity did not extend to spies.

He thought for a long time before each reply – here, he had something in common with bin Laden, although the two men would have little reason to share more than their divided Islamic inheritance – and only when he used the word ‘espionage’ did his voice lose its monotone and rise in anger. ‘Diplomats in any country are supposed to do diplomatic work. They are not supposed to commit crimes and carry out espionage … If they carry out espionage then they are no longer diplomats. Our people have taken a certain number of spies and according to our laws they should be tried and punished … Even if the Shah is returned, the release of the hostages will be a kind gesture on our part.’

I still searched for the eyes. And at that moment, I realised he was staring at a point on the floor, at a single bright emanation, a ray of sunshine that was beaming through the high, dirty windows and was forming a circle of light on the carpet. His head was bent towards it as if the light itself held some inspiration. The left arm remained concealed in his gown. Was he watching this sun-point for some theological reason? Did it give focus to his mind? Or was he bored, tired of our Western questions, with selfish demands for information about a few dozen American lives when thousands of Iranians had been cut down in the revolution?

Yet he had clearly decided what to say to us long in advance of the interview. He would already have known that three of the Americans were to be released five hours later, two black members of the embassy’s US Marine guard contingent and a woman, Kathy Gross. But Khomeini simply came back, again and again, to the same argument. Rather like the US television networks, he seemed to be obsessed by only one theme: retribution. He was not going to preach to us, to speak to us of God or history – or, indeed, his place in it. ‘Carter has done something against international law – someone has committed a crime and that criminal should be sent back to this country to be tried.’ His voice went on purging us. ‘As long as Carter does not respect international laws, these spies cannot be returned.’ Then he sprang up, a creature who had lost all interest in us, and the heap of men in the front rows collapsed over each other in the excitement of his departure. One of our drivers stepped forward – our own translator bent towards Khomeini and whispered that it would be the greatest moment in the driver’s existence on earth if he could shake the Ayatollah’s hand – and our driver held the Imam’s right hand and kissed it and when he raised his head, tears streamed down his cheek. And Khomeini had gone.*

This was not just an anticlimax. This was bathos. When one of the freed US Marines, Sergeant Dell Maple, announced that night that the Iranian Revolution had been ‘a good thing’, it was almost as interesting. And from that moment, I decided to read Khomeini, to read every speech he made – heavens above, the Islamic guidance ministry flooded us with his words – to see what had captured the hearts of so many millions of Iranians. And slowly, I understood. He talked in the language of ordinary people, without complexity, not in the language of religious exegesis, but as if he had been talking to the man sitting beside him. No, although he would not have known who Osama bin Laden was in 1979 – the Saudi would not leave for Afghanistan for another month – Khomeini knew all too well of the dangers that the Saudi Wahhabi Sunni faith posed for the Shiite as well as the Western world. In his famous ‘Last Message’ just before his death, when he had probably heard the name of bin Laden, Khomeini inveighed against ‘the anti-Koranic ideas propagating the baseless and superstitious cult of Wahhabism’.

And he knew how to argue against those American conservatives who claimed – and still claim – that Islam is a religion of backwardness and isolation. ‘Sometimes with explicit but crude argument it is claimed that the laws of 1,400 years ago cannot efficiently administer the modern world,’ he wrote.

At other times they contend that Islam is a reactionary religion that opposes any new ideas and manifestations of civilisation and that, at present, no one can remain aloof to world civilisation … In fiendish yet foolish propaganda jargon, they claim the sanctity of Islam and maintain that divine religions have the nobler task of purging egos, of inviting people to ascetism, monkhood … This is nothing but an inane accusation … Science and industry are very much emphasised in the Koran and Islam … These ignorant individuals must realise that the Holy Koran and the traditions of the Prophet of Islam contain more lessons, decrees and commands on the rule of government and politics than they do on any other issue …

Harvey Morris was full of admiration for Khomeini when I arrived at his office to file my dispatch that night in November 1979. ‘You’ve got to hand it to the old boy,’ he said, drawing on another cigarette. ‘He knew how to handle you lot. Yes, our “AK” knows exactly how to handle the kind of wankers we send down to interview him. Doesn’t waste his time on serious theological stuff that we wouldn’t understand; just goes straight to the point and gives us our bloody headlines.’ In his own cynical way, Harvey respected Khomeini. The Ayatollah knew how to talk to us and he knew how to talk to Iranians. And when they read out his ‘Last Message’ after his death in 1989, Khomeini’s words were humility itself. ‘I need your prayers and I beseech Almighty God’s pardon and forgiveness for my inadequacies and my faults,’ he wrote. ‘I hope the nation, too, will forgive my shortcomings and failings … Know that the departure of one servant shall not leave a scratch on the steel shield that is the nation.’

You could understand how Khomeini’s followers were persuaded by his sanctity into an almost crude obeisance. I remember the way Qotbzadeh talked to me about him, his voice softening into an almost feminine purr as he tried to convince me that the Ayatollah’s annoyance at the slow pace of the revolution did not imply any change of character. ‘The man is as holy as he was, as honest as he has ever been, as determined as he always was, and as pure as he has ever been.’ This was the man whose execution Khomeini would approve. What Qotbzadeh thought in front of the firing squad we shall never know.

‘So, back to the “den of iniquity”, eh, Bob?’ Harvey had asked when I came panting into the Reuters office to file. The cigarette smoke was thicker than usual. There was another whisky bottle on the desk. ‘What’s it like to be back in the “centre of vice and Saturnalia”?’ Harvey was right, of course. ‘Saturnalia’ really was one of Khomeini’s favourite expressions. And it was easy to mock the Iranian revolution, its eternal sermonising, the endless, unalterable integrity of its quarrel, its childlike self-confidence. Yet there was a perseverance about this revolution, an assiduousness that could be used to extraordinary effect once a target had been clearly identified. Nothing could have symbolised this dedication more than the reconstitution of the thousands of shredded US diplomatic papers which the Iranians found when they sacked the American embassy.

A woman ‘follower of the Imam’ was later to describe how an engineering student called Javad concluded that the shreds of each document must have fallen close together, and could thus be restored in their original form:

He was a study in concentration: bearded, thin, nervous and intense. These qualities, combined with his strong command of English, his mathematical mind and his enthusiasm, made him a natural for the job … One afternoon he took a handful of shreds from the barrel, laid them on a sheet of white paper and began grouping them on the basis of their qualities … After five hours we had only been able to reconstruct 20–30 per cent of the two documents. The next day I visited the document centre with a group of sisters. ‘Come and see. With God’s help, with faith and a bit of effort we can accomplish the impossible,’ he said, with a smile.

A team of twenty students was gathered to work on the papers. A flat board was fitted with elastic bands to hold the shreds in place. They could reconstruct five to ten documents a week. They were the carpet-weavers, carefully, almost lovingly re-threading their tapestry. Iranian carpets are filled with flowers and birds, the recreation of a garden in the desert; they are intended to give life amid sand and heat, to create eternal meadows amid a wasteland. The Iranians who worked for months on those shredded papers were creating their own unique carpet, one that exposed the past and was transformed into a living history book amid the arid propaganda of the revolution. High-school students and disabled war veterans were enlisted to work on this carpet of papers. It would take them six years to complete, three thousand pages containing 2,300 documents, all eventually contained in 85 volumes.*

Night after night, as each edition was published, I pored over these remarkable documents, a living archive of secret contemporary history from 1972 to the chaos of post-revolutionary Iran by the nation that was now threatening military action against Iran. Here was Ambassador William Sullivan in September 1978, contemptuously referring to ‘the extremist coalition of fanatic Moslems led by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iraq (which has reportedly been penetrated and is assisted by a variety of terrorist, crypto-communist, and other far left elements)…’ or listening to the Shah as he ‘persists in saying that he sees the Soviet hand in all the demonstrations and disturbances that have taken place’. Some of the diplomatic analyses were just plain wrong. ‘Such figures as Ayatollahs Khomeini and Shariatmadari … have little chance of capitalizing on their wide following to win control of the government for themselves,’ one secret cable confides.

Other documents were deeply incriminating. Robert R. Bowie, deputy director for national foreign assessment at the CIA, thanks Sullivan on 14 December 1978 for hosting a cocktail party that enabled him to meet the Shah and ‘to have some less formal conversations with several Iranian military and SAVAK people’. A memorandum of the same date from the US consulate in Isfahan records a conversation with Ibrahim Peshavar, the local director of Iranian television, in which Peshavar is asked ‘if it was true that his teams had covered demonstration [sic] toppling the Shah’s statues, and had provided it to security forces for investigation. He said that it was covered, that NIRT [National Iranian Radio and Television] had decided not to run it on television, and that such films are routinely shared with “other government agencies”. He … asked that I not spread the word.’

Among the reconstituted files was a 47-page CIA booklet marked ‘Secret’ and dated March 1979 – written after the revolution but still, incredibly, kept in the embassy archives – on the internal structure of Israel’s ‘Foreign Intelligence and Security Services’. Israeli efforts to break the Arab ‘ring’ encircling Israel, it said, had led to:

a formal trilateral liaison called the Trident organisation … established by Mossad with Turkey’s National Security Service (TNSS) and Iran’s National Organisation for Intelligence and Security (Savak)… The Trident organisation involves continuing intelligence exchange plus semmiannual [sic] meetings at the chief of staff level … The main purpose of the Israeli relationship with Iran was the development of a pro-Israel and anti-Arab policy on the part of Iranian officials. Mossad has engaged in joint operations with Savak over the years since the late 1950s. Mossad aided Savak activities and supported the Kurds in Iraq. The Israelis also regularly transmitted to the Iranians intelligence reports on Egypt’s activities in the Arab countries, trends and developments in Iraq, and communist activities affecting Iran.

Some of the internal American memoranda showed a considerable grasp of political events and an understanding of Iran’s culture – even if this wisdom was not acceptable back in Washington. George Lambrakis sent a memo to the State Department on 2 February 1979, pointing out that:

Iranian govt spokesmen have for a long time peddled the charge that Khomeini’s followers are for the most part crypto communists or leftists of Marxist stripe … to a considerable extent it is based on a fable that communists have been infiltrated as youths into the religious schools and now constitute the mullahs and other organizers of the religious movement …

Westernization in Iran achieved a status and legitimacy under the two Pahlavi monarchs which has practically wiped out memories of the Islamic past for large numbers of people who went to school in the westernized Iranian school system and did their higher studies for the most part abroad … the Pahlavi Shahs have sought to brand the Islamic establishment as an ignorant reactionary remnant of the past which is fast becoming obsolete. Steps were taken to render this a self-fulfilling prophecy. The govt has made efforts to cut off the mullahs from direct financial support by the people … Nevertheless it has become obvious that Islam is deeply embedded in the lives of the vast majority of the Iranian people. In its Shiite format it has over the years become strongly identified with Iranian nationalism … The Pahlavis attempted to supplant this ancient nationalism with a modern version based on a return to traditions, legends and glories of the pre-Islamic past …

An embassy assessment of Iranian society in 1978 reads like an account of Iraqi society before the fall of Saddam in 2003 – would that the Americans had read it before their invasion of Iraq – and ends with conclusions that Khomeini could only agree with:

There is much in Iranian history to predispose both the ruler and the ruled to exercise and to expect authoritarian behaviour. There exists no tradition of the orderly transfer of authority, there has been no real experience with democratic forms … There is in Iran … an established tradition of a strong ruler at the head of an authoritarian government, and of general obeisance to any authority that manifests its will with force. The experience of the current Shah, for example, superficially suggests that political stability in Iran is best assured by authoritarian government, and that periods of the greatest political unrest arise when the ruler … shares authority, as during the Mossadeq crisis of 1951–53, or attempts to introduce additional freedoms, as with the liberalization programme of the mid-1970s … The inability of Iranian society to accommodate successfully to these social changes stems in large part from the long-standing and pervasive influence of religion and religious leaders … Shia Islam is not merely a religion; rather it is an all encompassing religious, economic, legal, social, and intellectual system that controls all aspects of life, and the sect’s leaders, unlike their counterparts in Sunni Islam, are believed to be completing God’s revelations on earth.

Although this essay reached profoundly inaccurate conclusions – ‘we do not foresee any likely circumstances in which a government controlled by religious leaders would come to power,’ its authors wrote – other contemporary documents could display remarkable shrewdness. John Washburn would write on 18 September 1978 that ‘the Shah’s repression of religion in Iran has made Shiism’s predominant groups dogmatic and conservative in the course of defending themselves, just as Roman Catholicism has become in Communist countries.’ As long ago as 1972, the then ambassador, Richard Helms, formerly head of the CIA, received a long ‘secret’ memo on the Iranian ‘character’ which suggested that Iran’s repeated national humiliations had ‘engrained in the Iranian personality very marked negative characteristics’ but ‘under foreign occupation (Arabs, Mongols, Turks) or manipulation (British, Russians), Iranians preserved their sense of nationhood through their culture … and their self-respect in cloistered and concealed private lives … The world outside was justifiably seen as hostile.’

But it was the more prosaic efforts of US diplomats that probably got closer to the truth. A note from US consulates in Iran on 21 November 1978 reported public opinion outside Tehran. ‘Why, it is being asked, does Iran need F-14s when villagers less than five kilometres from Shiraz’s Tadayon Air Force Base … still live without running water or electricity?’*