The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
vessel and out into the open river. But they caught a ladder on the darkened port side and climbed aboard.
Snow first encountered members of the Filipino crew who appeared ‘terrified of the apparition’ of the television reporter in black wet suit and flippers. But it was only when he met a surprised but otherwise exuberant Captain Dyke that Snow discovered he had not been expected for another three hours. Ships worked to GMT, not to local time, in their ports of call, and Iraqi time was three hours ahead of GMT. Had Snow and his Iraqi major turned up at half-past midnight according to Iraqi clocks – 9.30 p.m. GMT – the illuminated starboard side of the ship would have faced Iraq.
Snow, the major and Dyke agreed that twenty-three of the ship’s crew would head for the shoreline in a lifeboat at 3.30 a.m. and we watched Snow’s rubber boat moving silently back across the river towards us. So we all sat through the long hours of darkness, watching the Al-Tanin’s riding lights reflecting on the fast-moving water as the big ship at last turned on the tide, and seeing – behind the vessel – the fires of Abadan. Distant guns bellowed in the night as the mosquitoes clustered round us for greedy company. At one point, Snow looked at me. ‘One does feel this tremendous sense of responsibility,’ he said. I was wondering how the Prince of Wales would pronounce that – the phrase was pure Prince Charles – when two red torch flashes sparkled from the ship’s deck. ’Operation Pear’ had begun. Snow sent two lamp flashes back. A hydraulic winch – painfully loud over the river’s silence – hummed away, followed by a harsh, metallic banging. The gate to the lifeboat had jammed. We could see the crew waiting on deck to disembark and we shared their feelings as the tell-tale hammer-blows echoed over the river towards the Iranians.
Then the lifeboat was down, its gunwales dipping towards us, carving ripples of water which the Iranians really should have seen. But when the boat thumped into the mud of our riverbank at 4 a.m., even the Iraqi frogmen lost their edge of fearful expectation as an English girl appeared on the slippery deck and asked: ‘Will someone help me ashore?’ It was one of those quintessential moments so dear to Anglo-Saxons. The British were cheating danger again, landing on a tropical shore under a quarter moon with the possibility of a shell blowing them all to pieces and three young women to protect. And so delighted were we to see the little lifeboat that we tugged its crew onto the river bank with enough noise to awaken every dozing Iranian on the other side. The Iraqi naval men grinned with happiness.
Thirteen crewmen had remained behind to guard their ship, and true to the traditions of what we thought then was a post-colonial world, only seven of the twenty-three crew who were rescued were actually British. The rest were a tough but cheerful group of Filipinos, small men with laughing eyes who hooted with joy when, with the British, we tugged them ashore and pushed them unceremoniously into an Iraqi army entrenchment behind us. Many of the Filipinos handed up to me their duty-free treasures, radios and television sets and – in one case – a washing machine which I dumped in the mud. They were hastily led off by Iraqi troops into the forest.
The first officer expressed his concern for those crewmen left aboard, the engineer announced that he would take a long holiday. Teresa Hancock, a crewman’s bride from Stoke-on-Trent, had been honeymooning aboard and had celebrated her twenty-first birthday on the Shatt al-Arab three days earlier with a small party. But if ever there was a happy story, this was it. The Iraqi navy had acquitted itself with some glory – performing a genuinely humanitarian act with courage and professionalism – and ‘Snowy’ got his scoop. Indeed, Snow announced that he would henceforth be known as Al-Thalaj – Arabic for ‘snow’. As for ‘our Major’, we went to thank him later and found him in his air-conditioned office, sipping yoghurt and grinning from ear to ear, knowing full well that he had – in the tradition of Sir Francis Drake – singed the Ayatollah’s beard.
Snow packaged his film and gave it to me to take to Kuwait, where a private jet had been hired by America’s NBC to take both their own and ITN’s news film to Amman for satelliting to New York and London. As the Learjet soared into the air, the purser offered me smoked salmon sandwiches and a glass of champagne. From Amman I filed the story of the Al-Tanin to The Times. Then I sank into the deepest bed of the Intercontinental Hotel and woke to find a telex with a nudge-in-the-ribs question from the foreign desk in London: ‘Why you no swam shark-infested Shatt al-Arab river?’
But here the sweet stories must end. By the end of October, the Iraqis – realising that they were bogged down in the deserts of Iran with no more chance of a swift victory – were firing ground-to-ground missiles at Iranian cities. Early in the month, 180 civilians were killed in Dezful when the Iraqis fired a rocket into the marketplace. On 26 October, at least another hundred civilians were killed when the Iraqis fired seven Russian Frog-7 missiles at Dezful. The War of the Cities had begun, a calculated attempt to depopulate Iran’s largest towns and cities through terror.
The outbreak of war in Iran had been greeted even by some of the theocratic regime’s opponents with expressions of outrage and patriotism. Thousands of middle-class women donated millions of dollars’ worth of their jewellery to Iran’s ‘war chest’. Captive in the Iranian foreign ministry, US chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen ‘knew something was happening when I heard a loudspeaker outside the foreign ministry playing American marching tunes – which the Iranians used on military occasions. I heard later that the Iraqis used them too. That night, there were anti-aircraft guns being used and the sky was full of tracer. They never seemed to hit anything. In fact, when we heard the air-raid sirens, we used to relax because we knew that the Iraqi planes had already been, bombed and flown away.’
The Iranians, like Saddam, had to fight internal as well as external enemies during the war, knowing that groups like the Mujahedin-e-Qalq had the active support of the Iraqi regime. The strange death of the Iranian defence minister Mustafa Chamran on the battle front has never been fully explained. But there could be no doubt what happened when, just before 9 p.m. on 28 June 1981, a 60-pound bomb exploded at a meeting of the ruling Islamic Republican Party in Tehran, tearing apart seventy-one party leaders as they were listening to a speech by Ayatollah Mohamed Beheshti, chief justice of the supreme court, secretary of the Revolutionary Council, head of the IRP and a potential successor to Khomeini. When the bomb destroyed the iron beams of the building and 40-centimetre-thick columns were pulverised by the blast, the roof thundered down onto the victims. Among them were four cabinet ministers, six deputy ministers and twenty-seven members of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis.
Beheshti, who died with them, was an intriguing personality, his thin face, pointed grey beard and thick German accent – a remnant of his days as a resident Shiite priest in Germany – giving him the appearance of a clever eighteenth-century conspirator. When I met him in 1980, I noted that he employed ‘a unique mixture of intellectual authority and gentle wistfulness which makes him sound – and look – like a combination of Cardinal Richelieu and Sir Alec Guinness’. He had for months been intriguing against President Bani-Sadr, although the date of the latter’s removal gave Beheshti little time for satisfaction: he was murdered a week later.
He was a man with enemies, unmoved by Iran’s growing plague of executions. ‘Don’t you see,’ he explained to me with some irritation, ‘that there have been very few people sentenced to death because of their failures in the [Shah’s] ministries. Those people who have been sentenced to death are in a different category – they are opium or heroin dealers.’ This was palpably untrue. Most of the executions were for political reasons. ‘When you study the history of revolutions,’ Beheshti said, ‘you will find that there are always problems. This is normal. When people here say they are unhappy, it is because they have not experienced a revolution before. There are problems – but they will be solved.’ Beheshti’s loss was the most serious the revolution suffered – until the death of Khomeini in 1989 – because he had designed the IRP along the lines of the Soviet Communist Party, capable of binding various revolutionary movements under a single leader.
By coincidence, the bloodbath on 28 June cost the same number of lives – seventy-two – as were lost at the battle of Kerbala in 680 by Imam Hossein, his family and supporters, a fact that Khomeini was quick to point out. Saddam and America, he concluded, had struck again through the Mujahedin-e-Qalq.