The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
who understood the meaning of dispossession, ever criticise the army of occupation that was to lay waste the Muslim lands between the Amu Darya and the Durand Line. Only Bin Laden and his men represented the Arabs.
I flew out of Kabul on a little Pakistani prop aircraft that bucked in the air pockets over the Hindu Kush and dropped me into the basking, bakery-hot airport at Peshawar from which Francis Gary Powers had set off twenty years earlier in his doomed U-2 intelligence plane over the Soviet Union. I was light-headed, overwhelmed to have watched history and survived, possessed of a schoolboy immaturity. Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent had nothing on this.* At my hotel, a message from my foreign news editor Ivan Barnes told me I had won an award for my reporting on the Iranian revolution. ‘Have a very big drink on me tonight …’ he telexed. The editor announced a $1,000 bonus. A letter was to arrive with congratulations from my old soldier father. ‘Well done Fella,’ he wrote. I could not sleep.
Next morning, I indulged my innocence by riding the old British steam train back up the Khyber Pass, to take one last look at Afghanistan before I returned to Beirut. Engine-driver Mohamed Selim Khan, a brisk and mustachioed Pathan with a topi on his head and eighteen years’ experience with Pakistan State Railways under his arm, wiped his oil-cloth over the firebox of his sixty-year-old steam engine, knowingly tapped the lubricator – a Wakefield patent made in London EC4 – and eased loco Number 2511 out of Peshawar’s hot and smoky station. Every schoolboy would have loved SGS Class No. 2511, and so did I. She had six driving wheels, a smokestack with a lid like a teapot, a rusting boiler under constant repair, a squadron of gaskets that leaked steam and a footplate that reeked of oil, smoke and freshly brewed tea. She made a noise like thunder and I clung like a child to the fittings of Mr Khan’s footplate.
The Ministry of Defence in Islamabad paid for the upkeep of the 60 kilometres of track – they might need it one day, to take their own army up to Landi Kotal if those Russian convoys spilled over the border – but its subsidy allowed us to hammer our way up the one-in-three gradient, the steepest in the world, black smoke boxing us into more than thirty tunnels that line the route, a thin, shrieking whistle sending buffaloes, goats, sheep, children and old men off the track. At 3,000 feet, No. 2511 performed so sharp a turn above so sheer a ridge of boulders high above a spinning river that Mr Khan and I grasped the iron doors of the cab to stop ourselves falling out. So we steamed into Landi Kotal from Jamrud Fort, our loco fuming in the sharp high-altitude breeze.
And when I jumped down from the footplate and crunched my way across the gravel of the permanent way, there were the pale blue mountains of Afghanistan shimmering to the north and west, sun-soaked and cold and angry and familiar and dangerous. I looked at them with attachment now, as one always does a dark land from which one has emerged alive. Up there, with Gavin and his crew, I had reached the top of the world. Never could I have imagined what we had given birth to in Afghanistan, nor what it held in store for that same world in twenty-one years’ time. Nor the pain it was to hold for me.
… the Men who for their desperate ends
Had plucked up mercy by the roots were glad
Of this new enemy. Tyrants, strong before
In devilish pleas, were ten times stronger now,
And thus beset with foes on every side,
The goaded Land waxed mad; the crimes of few
Spread into madness of the many, blasts
From hell came sanctified like airs from heaven;
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude, 1805,
Book Tenth
Christopher Montague Woodhouse was asking himself if he had helped to create the Islamic revolution in Iran. He was an old man now, but you could see the energy that still gripped him, a tall, dignified, brave and ruthless 79-year-old. It was snowing that morning in Oxford in 1997, but he had come to the gate of his retirement home to greet me, his handshake a vice. He sat ramrod-straight in his library with the mind of a young man, answering my questions with the exactness of a Greek scholar, each sentence carefully crafted. He had been Britain’s senior secret agent in ‘Operation Boot’ in 1953, the overthrow of Iran’s only democratic prime minister, Mohamed Mossadeq. It was ‘Monty’ Woodhouse who helped to bring the Shah of Iran back from exile, along with his colleagues in the CIA, who set in motion a quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, ‘Light of the Aryans’, would obediently rule Iran – repressively, savagely, corruptly and in imperious isolation – on our behalf. Woodhouse was a reminder that The Plot – the international conspiracy, moamara in Arabic – was not always the product of Middle East imagination. Woodhouse was in the last years of a life in which he had been a guerrilla fighter in Greece, a Tory MP and a much honoured Greek linguist and academic. Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was now dead; Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Tehran, his boss Allen Dulles, Robin Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian brothers who organised the coup, Mossadeq himself and the last Shah of Iran. ‘Monty’ was the last survivor.
We had known each other for nine years, ever since The Times sent me to investigate the secret wartime history of former UN secretary-general and ex-Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim in Bosnia.* Woodhouse, along with the brilliant British scholar Gerald Fleming, had relentlessly pursued the former Austrian intelligence officer in the German army for personal as well as moral reasons; Waldheim’s initial ‘W’ appeared below the interrogation summary of one of Woodhouse’s Special Operations Executive officers who was captured in Yugoslavia and later executed by the Gestapo. Woodhouse was a man who lived first in the shadows – in the wartime Balkans and Tehran – and then as a member of parliament, and I wanted to know, before he died, why Britain and the United States, the ‘West’ – why we – had chosen to destroy Iran’s only secular democracy.
Woodhouse looked at me with his penetrating, unwavering eyes. ‘I’ve sometimes been told that I was responsible for opening the doors for the Ayatollah – for Khomeini and the others,’ he said. ‘But it’s quite remarkable that a quarter of a century elapsed between Operation Boot and the fall of the Shah. In the end it was Khomeini who came out on top – but not until years later. I suppose that some better use could have been made of the time that elapsed.’ I was astonished. The coup against Mossadeq, the return of the Shah, was, in Woodhouse’s mind, a holding operation, a postponement of history. There was also the little matter of the AIOC, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – later British Petroleum – which Mossadeq had just nationalised. You could tell from the way he spoke, the urgent movement of his hands, that this had been one of the most exciting moments of Woodhouse’s life. The return of the young Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi was the ultimate goal. It cost a couple of million pounds, a planeload of weapons and perhaps five thousand lives. And twenty-five years later, it all turned to dust.
The Americans called their plot ‘Operation Ajax’, which must at least have appealed to the scholar in Woodhouse, even if its classical origins did not invoke success; Ajax was second only to Achilles in bravery, but he killed himself in a fit of madness, a fate the Americans would like to have visited upon Mossadeq. It was, in any case, a long way from later and more ambitious campaigns of ‘regime change’ in the Middle East, and a few neo-conservatives in the Pentagon in 2003 might have dusted off the archives of the early Fifties to see how to topple Middle East leaders before embarking on ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. But then Operation Boot/Ajax – though it was undeniably about oil – was never intended to change the map of the Middle East, let alone bring ‘democracy’ to Iran. ‘Democracy’, in the shape of the popular and somewhat effete Mossadeq, was the one