The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
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.)’
When the American embassy in Tehran was invaded after the Shah had been admitted to the United States, the explosive nature of Entezam’s CIA contacts was revealed in the shredded files that the young Iranian men and women were painstakingly pasting back together. Bazargan and Yazdi were discredited and Entezam arrested and put on trial for treason, barely escaping execution when he was given a life sentence in 1981. Entezam always maintained that he was a true revolutionary merely seeking to maintain relations with the Americans in the interests of Iran.
Massoumeh Ebtekar, among the principal ‘invaders’ of the embassy, saw it quite differently. ‘The CIA apparently believed that it could manipulate any revolution or political establishment if it could successfully infiltrate its top ranks early on,’ she was to write. ‘In Iran, the agency was particularly intent on doing so. After all, it had plenty of past experience.’ According to Ebtekar, the ‘students of the Imam’ also found counterfeit identity cards and passports for CIA agents in the embassy, including stamps and seals for airport entry and exit visas in Europe and Asia, as well as 1,000 false Ghanaian passports. Other documents dealt with pro-monarchists ‘who were involved in terror killings’. But if another ‘Operation Ajax’ was ever considered in Washington, it surely died in November 1979.
Our own life in those early weeks of the Islamic Republic was not without its humour. As long as Iran kept to the system of free visas operating under the Shah, we could enter and leave Iran as often as we wished – I even flew to Dublin for a weekend break, leaving Tehran on a Friday morning,