The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
English was a mystery. I had sat there for a minute when it occurred to me that the crew probably did not survive their encounter with the Iraqis and I turned my head slowly to the gunner’s seat to my right. And there, sure enough, lay the grisly remains of the poor young Iranian who had gone into battle a few days ago, a carbonised skeleton with the burned tatters of his uniform hanging to his bones like little black flags, the skull still bearing the faint remains of flesh.
But the Iraqis could not conceal their own losses. North of Basra I came across an orange and white taxi standing at a petrol station, the driver talking to the garage hand, not even bothering to glance at the long wooden box on top of his vehicle. Coffins in Iraq are usually carried on the roofs of cars, and all that was different in this case was that an Iraqi flag was wrapped around the box. A soldier was going home for burial.
According to the Baathist Al-Thawra, there had been only two Iraqi soldiers killed in the previous twenty-four hours, which meant that I had – quite by chance – come across 50 per cent of the previous day’s fatalities. But there were four other taxis on the same road, all heading north with their gloomy cargoes, the red, white and black banner with its three stars flapping on the rooftop coffins. We did not see these cars in the early days of the war, nor the scores of military ambulances that now clogged the roads. On just one day in the first week of October alone, the army brought 480 bodies to the military hospital mortuary in Baghdad. If these corpses came from just the central sector of the battle front, then the daily toll of dead could be as high as six or seven hundred. Even the Iraqi press was now extolling the glory that soldiers achieved when ‘sacrificing’ themselves in battle, and Saddam Hussein, visiting wounded civilians in Kirkuk on 12 October, described their injuries as ‘medals of honour’.
Iraqi television’s lavish coverage of the conflict – the ‘Whirlwind War’ theme music had now been dropped – was filled with tanks and guns and smashed Iranian aircraft, but there were no photographs of the dead of either side. When the station entertained its viewers with Gary Cooper in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the authorities clumsily excised a sequence showing the bodies of Spanish Republican troops lying on a road. Later the Iraqis would show Iranian corpses in large and savage detail.
Among the other British reporters in Basra was Jon Snow of ITN, whose courage and humour made him an excellent colleague in time of great danger but who could never in his life have imagined the drama into which he would be propelled in mid-October 1980. ‘Snowy’, whose imitations of Prince Charles should have earned him a place in vaudeville,* was regularly reporting to camera from the bank of the Shatt al-Arab south of Basra. However, watching his dispatches in London was the owner of the Silverline Shipping Company, who had been desperately searching for six weeks for the location of his British-captained 22,000-ton soya bean oil carrier Al-Tanin.
And suddenly, there on the screen behind Snow’s shoulder, he spotted his missing vessel, still afloat but obviously in the middle of a battle. The Foreign Office could do nothing to help, so the owner immediately asked Snow to be his official shipping agent in Basra and telexed his new appointment to him for the benefit of the Iraqi authorities. There were fifty-six souls aboard, nine of them British, and they had only one way of contacting the outside world; among the dozens of ships marooned in the city’s harbour was a vessel captained by a Norwegian who was in daily contact with the Al-Tanin and who confirmed to Snow that the trapped captain and his crew were anxious to be rescued.
Snow decided to enlist the help of the Iraqi military and swim out to the ship at night to arrange the rescue of the crew. But neither the navy nor the Iraqi authorities in Basra could provide him with anything but a tourist map of the all-important waterway for which Saddam had partly gone to war. This, of course, was Snow’s exclusive story – a ‘spectacular’ if he brought it off, a human and political tragedy for the crew, Snow and ITN if it ended in disaster – but he told me privately of his difficulty in obtaining a map of the river. ‘Now listen, Fisky, old boy, if you can find a decent map, I’ll let you come along,’ he said. I immediately remembered my grandfather Edward, first mate on the Cutty Sark, and all that I had read about the merchant marine. Every ship’s master, I knew, was required to carry detailed charts of the harbours and waterways he used. So I hunted down a profusely bearded Baltic sea-captain whose freighter lay alongside in Basra docks, and he agreed to lend me his old British Admiralty survey of the Shatt al-Arab. This magnificent document – a work of oceanographic art as much as technical competence – was duly photocopied and presented to the frogmen of the Iraqi navy.
All the elements of high adventure were in place: the Al-Tanin’s captain with the splendidly nautical name of Dyke, who thought up the rescue mission in the first place; Jack Simmons, the British consular official with a round face and small rimless spectacles who arrived unannounced in Basra but could get no help from the Iraqis. There was even a handsome major in the Iraqi navy, a grey-haired, quiet man who gallantly risked his life for the crew of the British ship. He never gave us his name, so Snow always referred to him warmly as ‘our Major’. Then there was 32-year-old Snow, his crew – cameraman Chris Squires and soundman Nigel Thompson – and Fisk, who would come to regard this as the last journalistic Boy’s Own Paper story of his life. The rest of my reporting would be about tragedy.
The Al-Tanin had moored in the Shatt five weeks earlier to unload its cargo of cooking oil by lighter. But when the war began, it found itself – like all the other big ships in the river – trapped between two armies; machine-gun and rifle fire raked the waterway and on several days the crew watched low-level rockets skim the surface of the river around the Al-Tanin’s hull. Captain Dyke talked to Snow over the Norwegian captain’s radio and suggested Snow should try a rescue attempt on 15 October. This would be ’Operation Pear’; if it failed or was postponed, Snow could try again on 16 October when the rescue would become ’Operation Apple’. ‘Our Major’, however, wanted to visit Dyke aboard the Al-Tanin to discuss the escape. Dyke agreed to what he called a ‘fibre ascent’ – assuming any Iranian listeners to his conversation would not know this meant a rope – if they swam out to his ship.
At nine o’clock at night on 15 October, therefore, a strange band wound its way through the soggy, waterlogged plantation of an island on the Shatt al-Arab – not far from Um al-Rassas, from which Pierre Bayle and I had made our own escape just a few days earlier. The major and two of his frogmen, Snow – in black wet suit with flippers in hand – Squires, Thompson and myself. We must have made a remarkable spectacle, clopping along through the darkness of the tropical island to the stretch of river where we knew the Al-Tanin was at anchor, dragging with us a rubber boat for Snow’s rescue attempt. In the darkness, we slipped off mud tracks into evil-smelling lagoons, slithered into long-forgotten dykes and lumbered over creaking, rotten bridges. Once, when we set the abandoned village dogs barking, Iranian snipers opened up on the plantation and for more than a minute we listened to the bullets whining around us at hip height as the Iranians tried to guess where the intruders were.
Even before we reached the river bank, we could see the Al-Tanin, her superstructure fully lit up, her riding lights agleam, just as Captain Dyke had promised they would be. The ship’s generators echoed through the hot palm forest and her bright orange funnel appeared surrealistically through the shadows of the tree trunks. Snow and the major were the first to see what was wrong. Dyke had told them to board his ship at 9.30 p.m. on the starboard side of the vessel, when the tide would have turned it towards the western, Iraqi bank of the river. He had illuminated the starboard hull for this reason. But it was the darkened port side of the Al-Tanin that faced us. Every Iranian could see the brightly-lit starboard of the ship right in front of the Iranian lines. Snow sat on the bank, squeezed into his flippers and stared at the ship. ‘Bugger!’ he said. We all looked at Snow. He looked at the major. So did the frogmen. Snow would later come to regard the episode as ‘an act of unparalleled insanity’. Squires, Thompson and I were all profoundly grateful we would not be part of this shooting match.
Then Snow slid into the muddy waters, the major and the two other naval frogmen beside him, clambering into their rubber boat, pushing and paddling it out into the river. So strong was the current – the tide was now at its height – that it took them twenty minutes