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

What none of the US embassy archives predicted was the brutality of the Iranian revolution, the extraordinary cruelty that manifested itself among the so-called judges and jurists who were predisposed to torture and kill out of whim rather than reflection. At the end of the eight-year Iran – Iraq war, this would meet its apogee in the mass hangings of thousands of opposition prisoners. But its characteristics were clearly evident within days of the Shah’s overthrow; and no one emphasised them more chillingly than the Chief Justice of the Islamic Courts, Hojatolislam Sadeq Khalkhali, the ‘Cat’, who had told me in December 1979 how he intended to ‘string up’ the Shah. When he said that, and despite his ferocious reputation, I thought at first it was a joke, a cliché, an idle remark. Of course, it was nothing of the sort.

The Revolutionary Guards sitting around Khalkhali when I first visited the Hojatolislam had all been wounded while fighting Kurdish rebels in the north-west of Iran. It was hot in the little room in Qom and the bespectacled divine was wearing only pyjamas and a white apron. ‘You are from The Times of London?’ he asked, glancing in my direction. ‘Well, look at these men.’ He paused and then began to giggle in a high-pitched voice. ‘The rebels did this. I will pull them out by the roots – I will kill all of them.’ In truth, Khalkhali did not look the part. He was a small man with a kindly smile – Islamic judges at that time all seemed to smile a lot – which he betrayed when making inappropriate jokes. Asked by a reporter two weeks earlier how he felt when the number of executions in Iran was decreasing, he replied with a chuckle: ‘I feel hungry.’ It would have been a serious mistake, however, to imagine that Iran’s most feared judge – the ‘wrath of God’ to his admirers – did not take his vocation seriously. ‘If an Islamic judge realises that someone is guilty of corruption on earth or of waging war against God,’ he said, ‘the judge will condemn the accused, even if he claims he is innocent. The most important thing in Islamic justice is the wisdom of the judge … Even if a man denies the charges against him, it means nothing if the judge decides otherwise.’ Hojatolislam Khalkhali naturally had no time for reporters who asked why so many Iranians were executed after the revolution. ‘The people who were executed were the principal retainers of the previous hated regime. They had exploited this nation. They had been responsible for killings, tortures and unlawful imprisonment. I am surprised that you ask such questions.’ Khalkhali displayed equally little patience when asked if his much-publicised determination to engineer the assassination of the ex-Shah accorded with the principles of Islamic justice. ‘We know that America will not return the Shah,’ he said – with, it had to be admitted, a remarkable sense of realism – ‘so we have to kill him – there is no other choice. If it was possible to bring him here and try him, we would kill him afterwards. But since we cannot try him – and since we are sure that he should be executed – we will kill him anyway. No one tried Mussolini. And who tried the Frenchmen who were executed for collaborating with Hitler’s soldiers in the Second World War?’

All the while he was talking, the Revolutionary Guards would massage their wounded limbs – or what was left of them – and exercise their artificial hands. The creaking and clacking of steel fingers punctuated the conversation as Khalkhali walked around the room, shoeless and sockless, or massaged his feet with his hands. How, I asked, did he personally feel when he sentenced a man to death? ‘I feel that I am doing my duty and what I am required to do by the Iranian people. That is why I have never been criticised by my people for these executions.’ But had he not refused to give Hoveyda or Nassiri, the ex-Savak boss, any right to appeal against his death sentence?

‘They did appeal,’ he replied. ‘And they asked the Imam and the court to forgive them. Many people came to me and asked me to forgive these people. But I was responsible to the Iranian nation and to God. I could not forgive Hoveyda and Nassiri. They destroyed the lives of 60,000 people.’ Khalkhali had, he claimed, ordered a commando squad to go to Panama where the Shah was now staying with his family in order to kill all of them. ‘I do not know if they have left Iran yet,’ he said, and then broke into that familiar chuckle as he ventured into Spanish. ‘They all have pistolas.’ Since the murder of the Shah’s nephew in Paris almost two weeks earlier, Interpol – and Khalkhali’s intended victims – were now paying a good deal of attention to the judge’s threats. And Khalkhali obligingly listed the targets of his hit squads. ‘We are looking for Sharif Emami [former prime minister], General Palizban, Hushang Ansari [former finance minister], Ardeshir Zahedi [former ambassador in Washington], Gholamali Oveisi [former martial law administrator], Gharabagi [former chief of staff in the Shah’s army], Farah [the ex-empress], Hojab Yazdani [a former banker], Valían [former minister of agriculture], Jamshid Amouzegar [former prime minister] and Shapour Bakhtiar [the Shah’s last prime minister, now living in Paris]. We also want the Shah and his brother and Ashraf [the Shah’s twin sister]. Wherever we can find these people, we will kill them.’

Khalkhali was unashamed at publicly naming his own ‘hit list’, and he was perfectly serious; more than a decade later, I would meet the head of the Iranian hit squad sent to Paris to murder Bakhtiar. So was Khalkhali really the ‘wrath of God’? I asked. ‘I grew up in poverty and therefore I can understand poor people. I know all about the previous regime. I have read books about politics. The Imam ordered me to be the Islamic judge and I have done the job perfectly. That’s why none of the Shah’s agents in Iran has escaped my hands.’*

It would be seven months before I saw Khalkhali again. His monstrous reputation had not been sullied by a temporary fall in the number of executions. By July 1980, his wrath was falling on new and more fruitful pastures. He stood now, this formidable judicial luminary, in the sunny courtyard of Qasr prison, brandishing a miniature pink plastic spoon, smacking his lips noisily and tucking into a large cardboard tub of vanilla ice-cream. For a man who had just ordered the first public execution in Tehran for fifteen years, he was in an excellent frame of mind.

Five days earlier, a gruesome new precedent had been set when four people – two of them middle-aged married women – were stoned to death in the southern Iranian city of Kerman. All had been condemned for sexual offences by one of Khalkhali’s revolutionary courts, and within hours the condemned had been dressed in white cloth, buried up to their chests in the ground and bombarded with rocks as large as a man’s fist. In a characteristic and typically unnecessary comment, the court later stated that all four had died of ‘brain damage’. The women were condemned for being ‘involved in prostitution’ and for ‘deceiving young girls’. One of the men was convicted of homosexuality and adultery, and the other for allegedly raping a ten-year-old girl. Before execution, the four were ritually bathed and shrouded, a ceremonial white hood being placed over their heads. Local clergymen had visited the condemned and chosen the stones for the execution, varying in size between one and six inches in diameter. It took the two women and two men fifteen minutes to die.*

‘I don’t know if I approve of stoning,’ Sadeq Khalkhali said, flashing a grin at us journalists and at a group of startled diplomats who had also been invited to the Qasr prison. ‘But in the Koran, it is mentioned that those who commit adultery should be killed by stoning.’ The Hojatolislam dug his little spoon into the melting white ice-cream, oblivious to the bare-headed prisoners who trudged past behind him, heaving barrels loaded with cauldrons of vegetable soup. ‘We approve of anything the Koran says. What is the difference between killing people with stones and killing them with bullets? But throwing stones certainly teaches people a lesson.’ Khalkhali modestly disowned responsibility for the Kerman stonings – his bearded public relations man informed us that a man called Fahin Kermani had taken this weighty decision – but he agreed that he had ordered some fresh executions that morning. Seven men had been lined up at one end of Jamshid Street at five o’clock and shot down by a firing squad while a large crowd gawked from a distance. Many of those who died had been convicted of drug offences, and it was in his role as chief of the Iranian anti-narcotics squad that the Hojatolislam had welcomed us to Qasr prison to view his latest haul of contraband.

One could only be impressed. Khalkhali had piled it up in the prison mosque, a magnificent frescoed edifice with a cupola of red and blue tiles, now filled with tons of opium, kilogram sacks of heroin, large sticky slabs of hashish, stolen refrigerators, ornately carved backgammon boards, a 2½– metre wall of cigarettes – here I thought briefly of Harvey Morris in his Reuters ‘saturnalia’ – thousands of bubble pipes, carpets, knives, automatic rifles and rows of champagne bottles (Krug 1972). The beautiful mosque literally reeked of hashish as Khalkhali made a triumphal tour of his loot, pushing his way past 20 tons of opium and at least 100 kilograms of heroin, each neatly packed into clean white sacks. It was inevitable that he would be asked whether the revolutionary courts were dealing enthusiastically enough with drug-dealers, and equally inevitable that the Hojatolislam would evince a broad smile – directed at the diplomats – before replying. ‘If we did what others wanted us to do, we would have to kill many people – which in my opinion is simply impossible,’ he said. ‘Things could end up in a crisis. If we were going to kill everyone who had five grams of heroin, we would have to kill five thousand people – and that would be difficult.’ In fairness, it should be added that the Ayatollah had made a fair start. In the past seven weeks, his courts had summarily dispatched 176 men and women to the firing squads for narcotics offences, many of them sentenced by Khalkhali himself in the innocuous tree-shaded concrete building 300 metres from the little mosque.

Khalkhali tried hard not to look like an ogre; he repeatedly denied that he was any such thing. His small, plump frame, grey beard and twinkling eyes give him a fatherly appearance, the kind of man who might have been more at home at the fireside in carpet slippers with the family cat purring beside him – just so long as the family cat survived. He joked frequently with us as he made his round of the mosque, good-naturedly poking his finger into the sacks of opium that lay beneath the main cupola. Every minute or so, a young man in a pale green shirt with a pistol tucked into his trousers would clamber onto a pile of heroin bags and scream ‘God is Great’ at the top of his lungs, a refrain that would be taken up and echoed around the mosque.

‘If you look at me, you don’t see an inner struggle written all over my face,’ Khalkhali remarked as he emerged into the sunshine. ‘But I am actually a revolutionary person. I am chasing agents everywhere – in France, England and America. That is a fact. I am chasing them everywhere.’ He claimed a ‘200 per cent success’ in stamping out drug-running in Iran and an 80 per cent victory in preventing international drug-trafficking – which was why the diplomats had been invited to the Qasr prison to listen to the judge. He claimed that an intercontinental mafia was operating a drugs ring from Pakistan, Burma and Thailand, and described how a member of the ex-Shah’s family allegedly used a private aircraft to fly drugs from Afghanistan to a small airfield outside Tehran. The captured opium, he said, might be used by the government for medical purposes. The hashish and heroin would be burned.

The Hojatolislam strode briskly from the courtyard towards a wire fence, but as he did so, something very strange happened. Dozens of black-veiled women – the wives and sisters of the very men whom the Ayatollah would soon be sentencing – ran across a lawn towards him, clutching babies and crying, ‘Hail to Khalkhali.’ The Hojatolislam affected not to notice them as the soldiers held them at bay, and he pushed his way through a gate in the fence. For a few moments, he talked of holding a formal press conference before entering his tiny courthouse. But then a policeman walked over to us and told us that the judge had become ‘angry’. Sensing that a Hojatolislam’s fury could embrace a journalist or two, we brought this most extraordinary public event to a hurried conclusion. We fled.*

For Westerners, Khalkhali represented a special danger. If the American hostages in the embassy were to be tried by an Islamic court, what if Khalkhali was let loose on them? All Khomeini’s promises of protection could be reinterpreted now that the embassy documents were being slowly put back together to reveal that the Iranian claims of a ‘spy nest’ in Tehran were not entirely without foundation. Thus when the Shah moved from the United States to Panama – a journey of which the Iranians were forewarned by three Western diplomats acting at Washington’s request – the ‘Students of the Imam’ put out a statement repeating the promise to ‘try’ the Americans.† In the end, of course, there was no trial.

Inevitably, the Iranians lost their patience with the foreign journalists in Tehran. The day after the ‘trial’ statement, Abolhassan Sadeq walked into the Iranian Ministry of Islamic Guidance with the troubled expression of a headmaster forced at last to deal with a persistently unruly class. Harvey Morris, shrouded in his usual smoke haze – mercifully for him, it was to be at least a decade before Iran would ban smoking in government buildings – knew what was coming. ‘Well, Fisky, we’ll see who’s going to get the order of the boot today,’ he murmured. The ministry contained an underground auditorium that looked uncomfortably like a school hall and there we waited to hear the worst. Sadeq, the school director, took his place at a desk on a small raised podium and stared down at us severely. We all knew that an expulsion or two was in the air.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began – Harvey always liked the ‘gentlemen’ bit – ‘I want to share with you a bit of agony we are going through with regard to the foreign media. With great displeasure, we are expelling the entire Time magazine crew from Iran.’ It mattered little that the ‘entire’ staff of Time in the country numbered just two. This was not how Sadeq saw things. There were over three hundred foreign journalists in Iran from more than thirty countries, he said, but Time had gone too far. He flourished a clutch of front covers from the offending organ, one of which carried an unflattering portrait of Khomeini.

‘Since the problem of hostages came up,’ Sadeq said, waving the latest issue of Time in his hand, ‘this has done nothing but arouse the hatred of the American people. The front covers have been like a hammer on the brain. The magazine has created some very irrational reaction on behalf of the American people.’ Time was not the only news organisation to feel Iranian wrath. Eight days earlier, Alex Eftyvoulos, a correspondent for the Associated Press – a bearded part-Russian Cypriot who looked like Rasputin – had been expelled for allegedly distorting news of rioting in the Azerbaijani provincial capital of Tabriz. Even the British had fallen foul of Iranian anger. In early December, Enayat Ettehad of Iranian television had been watching BBC News in a London hotel and was angered by a report on the hostages in which Keith Graves described in unpleasant detail how their hands were bound with rope and how they were forbidden to speak to each other or receive news from the outside world. I wasn’t surprised. Over the next two and a half decades, Graves would infuriate the Taliban, the Israeli army, the US government, the IRA, the British army, NATO, the Egyptians, the PLO, the Hizballah, the Syrians, the Turks and even the Cypriots – the latter an astonishing achievement even for a man of Graves’s abrasiveness – and survive them all. But the BBC was made to pay for it. Ettehad instructed Iranian television to refuse BBC crews any further use of satellite facilities. The BBC was forced to ship all their film unprocessed by air to London, where it usually arrived a day late. It was clear, however, that Ettehad was far more upset by the BBC’s Persian language radio service, and Sadeq brandished a sheaf of papers above his head – complaints, he said, about the Persian service from ‘all over Iran’.

Sadeq was confident about his broadsides. He loudly referred to the fact that one of the two Time correspondents had once worked for the CIA. ‘Yet still I let him into Iran.’ He was referring to Bruce van Voorst, who worked as a CIA research officer in the late 1950s but who now said that he had severed all links with the agency – whose own activities in the country were now, thanks to the embassy documents, a national Iranian obsession. The American CBS network was in trouble for comparing the students in the embassy to the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the ABC network for a State Department analysis ‘that would make any Iranian look like an idiot’. But there was a pettiness about the government’s response to overseas coverage, a gut reaction that sprang from patriotic anger rather than forethought. Sadeq, who in argument was given to drawing unhappy parallels with events in American history, unconsciously revealed this when he reminded us that ‘in 1834, Colonel Travis defended the Alamo against the Mexican army and when he was told to surrender he replied with gunfire. He stood up for his principles. And that is what Iran is doing today.’ I heard Harvey Morris sigh. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought Travis lost the battle of the bloody Alamo.’

The revolution was a tempest and we were all trapped in its vortex. We interviewed Khomeini, we watched the epic demonstrations, we watched America writhing in impotence. US warships entered the Gulf. Khomeini called for an army of tens of thousands of schoolboy volunteers to defend Iran. I travelled back from Iranian Kurdistan on a bus whose passengers spent an hour watching a weapons education programme on the coach’s specially installed television: how to strip and reassemble an automatic rifle, how to pull a grenade pin, how to master the mechanism of a heavy machine gun. I swayed at the back of the fast-moving bus as the audience sat in silent attention. And today, I thought, we have naming of parts.

But I was seeking some other way of reporting Iran, away from the events which were so obstinately staged for our benefit, especially for American television reporters. I was in Harvey’s office, staring at the stained map of Iran on his wall, when I had an idea. What if I closed my eyes and stuck a pin into the map and then travelled to the point I had marked and asked the people there about the revolution? ‘Close your eyes and I’ll give you a pin,’ Harvey announced. ‘And I bet you stick it in bloody Afghanistan.’ He produced the pin, I closed my eyes, stabbed at the map and then opened my eyes again. The little sliver of silver had landed in the ‘h’ of a village called Kahak, south-west of the city of Qazvin. I set off at dawn next morning.

Kahak was the sort of place no one ever goes to visit. It lay, a rectangle of mud and clay single-storey houses, at the end of a dirt road with only a gaggle of children and a dung-heap picked over by fat chickens to welcome a stranger. Through the dust and the heat haze to the north, the Alborz mountains ran along the horizon, forming the lower lip of the Caspian Sea basin. Foreigners never saw Kahak, except perhaps the passengers on the night train to the Soviet frontier as it skirted the village orchards. Even then, it was doubtful if they would notice anything. Kahak was so small that its 950 inhabitants could not even support a mosque of their own.

A prematurely ageing man of sixty-four with a slick of perspiration running down his face from beneath his turban and a shirt front covered in dirt had to travel up from Qom to minister to the faithful. But he was a man capable of extraordinary energy as he walked nimbly around the heaps of manure and puddles of gilded, foetid water, talking about the village in a possessive, slightly rhetorical, almost sermonising way, his voice rising and falling in the cadences of a formal speech rather than a conversation. What had the revolution done for these people, I asked, and Sheikh Ibrahim Zaude pointed to the hard, unwatered land beyond the mud huts, a desert of grey, unyielding earth.

‘The villagers own everything on both sides of the road,’ he said. ‘But they do not know how much land they have.’ The heat shimmered and danced on the dried-up irrigation ditches: there were no deeds of ownership, no papers and no legal covenants in Kahak now that the landlords had gone. Just when the landlords did depart was something that bothered Sheikh Zaude. ‘In the past regime,’ he explained, ‘there were two big landowners – Habib Sardai and Ibrahim Solehi. The villagers lived in very bad conditions. Some of them were so poor that they owed many debts but Sardai and Solehi came here and took their grain in payment. I remember seeing these villagers going to other villages to buy back their own grain at high prices. So the people had to borrow money for this and then pay interest on the loans.’ More than a dozen villagers gathered round me as Sheikh Zaude talked on. They were poor people, most of them Turkish in origin with high, shiny cheekbones. Their grey jackets were torn and their trousers frayed where the rubble and thorns in the fields had scratched them. They wore cheap plastic sandals. There was only one girl with them, a thirteen-year-old with dark hair who had wrapped herself shroud-like in a pink and grey chador.

‘Then things improved for us,’ Sheikh Zaude said. ‘Sardai and Solehi left with the land reforms.’ There was no perceptible change in the mullah’s face. He had been asked about that year’s Islamic revolution but he was talking about the Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ seventeen years earlier when the monarch’s reform laws ostensibly curtailed the power of the big landowners. Private holdings were redistributed and landowners could retain only one village. Poor farmers were thereby brought into the economy, although most labourers and farm workers remained untouched. Kahak, it was clear, did not entirely benefit from the Shah’s ‘revolution’. ‘There were good things for us in the reforms,’ Sheikh Zaude said. ‘The number of sheep owned by the villagers went up from two thousand to three thousand. But the village itself, instead of being owned by two men, was now run by the government agent, a man called Darude Gilani, a capitalist from Qazvin. He was a bad man and he collected rent by demanding half of the villagers’ crops.’

There was an old man with an unshaven chin and a cataract in his left eye who now walked to the front of the villagers. From his grubby yellow shirt and broken shoes, I could not have imagined that Aziz Mahmoudi was the village headman and the largest farmer. He looked at the mullah for a moment and said, very slowly: ‘Darude Gilani is in Qazvin prison now.’ Mahmoudi walked across the village square, followed by a small throng of schoolchildren. He pointed to a crumbling, fortified mud house with two storeys, a sign of opulence amid such hardship. ‘That is where Solehi used to live,’ he said, gesturing to the broken windows. ‘Now Gilani is gone too. He will not come back.’ There was no reason why Gilani would return, even if he was released from prison. For on the first day of the revolution the previous February, when the villagers saw the imperial army surrendering in Tehran on the screen of a small black and white television set, they walked down to the fields that Gilani still owned on each side of the railway line. There they planted their own barley as a symbol that the revolution had arrived in Kahak.

Above the blackboard in the village’s tiny clay-walled schoolhouse was a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. It depicted the Imam bending over the bars of a jail while behind him thousands of Iranian prisoners wait patiently for their freedom. One after another, the boys in the seventh-grade class stood up and recited their admiration for Khomeini. Jalol Mahmoudi was twelve but talked about corruption in the Shah’s regime, Ali Mahmoudi, who at fourteen was head of class, launched into a long speech about the Imam’s kindness to children. ‘I am very pleased with the Ayatollah because in the past regime I was not taught well – now there are three extra classes and we can stay at school longer.’ Master Ali might be expected to receive a firm clout round the back of the head from his colleagues for such schoolboy enthusiasm. But the other children remained silent until asked to speak. And I knew that if I had visited this same village in the aftermath of the 1953 coup against Mossadeq in which ‘Monty’ Woodhouse had played so prominent a part, I would have heard the fathers of these same children talking about the corruption of Mossadeq and the Shah’s kindness to children.