The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
give to the ministry. But it turns out that the good baron built half the bloody railways in this country and the Reuter Concession of 1872 granted British subjects a monopoly over the entire economic and financial resources of Iran. Christ! How can I tell the arseholes at the ministry that the founder of our news agency was worse than the fucking Shah?’
I saw his point. But Harvey was a smart guy, his laid-back, tired appearance a disguise behind which lay an able, humorous and sometimes a wicked mind. I would drop by to punch my copy on his wire machine each evening and tell him what I’d learned from my day’s street reporting or my travels outside Tehran. He would tip me off on press conferences or scandals – like the one in which television head Qotbzadeh ordered his secretary to photocopy a bunch of official papers in which she had found a letter from his French mistress. The letter was duplicated a thousand times. My hotel phone would sometimes ring in the morning with a call from Harvey. ‘Fisky, you might just like to know that Khalkhali’s lads have topped another bunch of folk for being “corrupt on earth”.’ Or, more frequently, he’d announce that there was ‘a demonstration outside the American embassy – better you than me!’
It is strange that the seizure of the US embassy and its aftermath should have become so tedious an assignment for journalists. After all, it was to lead to an abortive US military rescue mission and, ultimately, the destruction of Carter’s presidency. It created a burning sense of humiliation within subsequent US administrations that led America into a series of political and military disasters in the Middle East. Most of the US diplomats and other American hostages remained captive for 444 days; they were only freed after the US and Iranian governments agreed a series of complex economic and banking arrangements, at which point the captives were taken to Mehrabad airport and escorted out of Iran by Algerian commandos.
Perhaps it was the impossible equation which the embassy occupation represented. The Americans were no more going to hand the Shah back to Iranian ‘justice’ than the Iranians were going to release their captives until Washington had been sufficiently humbled. Removing the Shah from his New York hospital bed and dumping him in Panama was not going to satisfy the revolutionaries in Tehran. And so each day we would watch the tens of thousands of demonstrators, students, armed guards and members of Muslim organisations streaming past the embassy – now officially referred to as the ‘US Nest of Spies’ – hurling to heaven their demand for the Shah’s immediate return and condemning President Jimmy Carter as a ‘warmonger’. They became familiar to the point of monotony. Their cry of ‘Down with the Carter, Down with the Shah’ would be taken up for six or seven minutes, interspersed with ‘Yankee go home’. Hamburger stands, beetroot-juice sellers and postcard stalls cluttered the roadside.
The crowds were strategically placed to catch the television cameras, and journalists were allowed – indeed, encouraged – to approach the embassy and stare through the black wrought-iron gates. The hostages locked in the main embassy buildings – the men with their hands tied – could not be seen, although students had spray-painted slogans on the roof of the reception block. Just inside the forecourt, they now erected a painting 5 metres high, a symbolic work inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of US marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima in 1945; in this case, however, Muslim revolutionaries had replaced the marines and they were struggling to raise a green Islamic flag, one end of which had miraculously turned into a hand strangling the Stars and Stripes. The occupation had thus become theatre, complete with painted scenery. It was more than this. It was a carnival.
It was also a mistake to believe that this represented a falsehood. Individual Iranians expressed their contempt for the Shah all too eloquently – and all too often in American accents. ‘You wanna know why we want the damned Shah?’ a student at Tehran’s Polytechnic University asked me. ‘Well, I tell you – it’s ’cos that man stole fifty billion dollars from Iran.’ An Iranian air force private wandered up to join our conversation. ‘That bastard staged the biggest heist in history,’ he said. The airman’s accent sounded like east side New York, and it said more about Iran’s relationship with America than any amount of political rhetoric. Never before, it seemed, had so many revolutionaries lived, worked or been educated in the country which they now held responsible for so much of their past suffering.*
During the Shah’s rule, there were sometimes half a million Iranians in the United States. Many were at American universities or colleges; some were escaping from the Shah’s regime. Many thousands were undergoing military training; one of the perks available to Iranian army officers was a regular free trip to New York on an Iranian air force jet. Dr Ibrahim Yazdi, who had just resigned as foreign minister, worked for seventeen years as a doctor in America, associating with Iranian students opposed to the Shah. Dr Mustafa Chamran, who had been appointed assistant prime minister in July 1979 and was to die a ‘martyr’ in the Iran – Iraq war, helped set up the Islamic Students Association in America in 1962, together with Yazdi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh, now the acting minister of ‘national guidance’.
An Iranian girl who had studied journalism in New York – who had experienced, as she put it, the fruits of American democracy – demanded to know why Americans were prepared to support the Shah’s regime when it had opposed individual freedom and dissent. ‘In the United States, we learned all about liberty and the freedom to say what we wanted to say. Yet America went on propping up the Shah and forcing him to squander Iran’s wealth on arms. Why did it do that? Why was America a democracy at home and a dictator abroad?’ There was, of course, a contradiction here. The fact that President Carter, whose campaign for human rights was well known in Iran, should have continued to honour America’s political commitment to the Shah before the revolution – in however tentative a way – was regarded as hypocrisy. Yet the Carter administration was opposed to the anti-democratic nature of the Shah’s regime and, within the limits of diplomacy, Carter had urged the Iranian monarch to liberalise his country.
Iranians argued that this was too ambiguous a position to respect, and it was difficult to read some of Carter’s statements during the last months of the Shah’s rule without sensing a certain naivety in the American president. In November 1978, for example, Carter was describing the Shah as ‘a friend, a loyal ally’; he would say only that criticism of the Shah’s police state was ‘sometimes perhaps justified’, adding that he did not know the ‘details’ of the criticism. Yet Iranian condemnation often seemed directed at the actions of previous American administrations: at the Eisenhower or Kennedy or Nixon governments. The students, when they shouted abuse about Carter, appeared to be voicing sentiments they once felt about the policies of Henry Kissinger, who had so powerful a role (as US Secretary of State) when they themselves worked and lived in the United States. Comparatively few had any experience of the Carter administration – except for the knowledge that Carter refused to deport the Shah to Iran. Few of the students outside the embassy gave much thought to the long-term outcome of the embassy occupation, to the possibility that it might result in the election of Ronald Reagan, who would take a much less tolerant interest in world affairs and show a much greater enthusiasm for Iran’s external enemies.
Iranian reaction to the smaller ‘Satanic’ powers was almost quixotic. At the British embassy, still daubed with paint from earlier demonstrations, a crowd arrived to express its satisfaction that Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, had not been given asylum in the United Kingdom. When the same demonstrators reached the French embassy – the country in which Bakhtiar had been given temporary residence – they expressed their appreciation at the sanctuary France had given Ayatollah Khomeini before the revolution.
But no political démarche could unscramble the US embassy siege. The Europeans, the Papal Nuncio, Sean McBride – a founder of Amnesty International – seventy-five ambassadors representing the entire diplomatic corps in Tehran: all found their appeals ignored. The ambassadors could not even visit Bruce Laingen, who was in the Iranian foreign ministry when the embassy was taken and remained there until his release in 1981. Ayatollah Khomeini sternly informed the Pope that ‘Jesus Christ would have punished the Shah.’ Iranian television broke into a showing of The Third Man to announce that Iran was halting its daily supply of 600,000 barrels of oil to the United States – a rather hurried response to the decision already taken by the Carter administration to suspend oil