The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
The Americans received one hostage. The Iranians got millions of dollars’ worth of missiles and, as Ali Akbar Rafsanjani revealed with smug delight in Tehran, a cake with a marzipan key – baked in Tel Aviv, though the Iranians didn’t know this – a brace of Colt revolvers and a bible signed by Reagan. I was in Tehran for this latest piece of grotesquerie. Rafsanjani had invited us to a press conference on 28 January 1987, where we found him staring at a pile of photocopied documents, each one bearing a small, passport-size photograph of Robert McFarlane. Rafsanjani ostentatiously ignored the dozens of journalists standing around him. He motioned to an aide who spoke fluent English and ordered him to approach an American reporter. He did, and moments later the correspondent, on cue, asked Rafsanjani what evidence he had that McFarlane entered Iran on an Irish passport.
Immediately, Rafsanjani seized the photocopies and brandished them over his head, handing them out like a rug merchant offering free samples. There on the right-hand side was McFarlane’s mug-shot and the second page of what was clearly an Irish passport. ‘They forged them,’ Rafsanjani’s secretary muttered as his master leaned back in his armchair and chuckled, the curl of brown hair beneath his mullah’s turban giving him a sly, Bunteresque appearance. But one look at the photocopy convinced me this was no cheap forgery. I doubted very much if the CIA were capable of correctly spelling the colour of McFarlane’s hazel eyes in the Irish language – cnodhonna – or even of spelling the Irish for Dublin correctly, Baile Atha Cliath, although the fabrication of McFarlane’s fictional Irish name – ‘Sean Devlin’ – lacked imagination. At least they’d made him a Catholic. Immediately after Rafsanjani’s press conference had ended, I grabbed a taxi and raced with the photocopy to the Irish embassy, where the chargé, Noel Purcell-O’Byrne, sent it immediately to the Department for Foreign Affairs in Dublin. Far from being a forgery, McFarlane’s passport had been one of several recently stolen from the Irish embassy in Athens.
As for the bible, Rafsanjani positively beamed as he held it up to the multitude of journalists. The handwriting straggled across the page, the ‘g’s beginning with a flourish but the letters ‘o’ and ‘p’ curiously flattened, an elderly man’s handiwork carefully copied from St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. ‘And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith,’ it read, ‘preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying “All the nations shall be blessed in you”.’ But there could be no doubting the signature: ‘Ronald Reagan, October 3, 1986.’ The month was important, for Reagan had promised that all contact was broken off with the Iranians long before that date.
Not so, said Rafsanjani. The bible was sent long after the McFarlane mission. Only a month ago, he announced – he was talking about December 1986 – a US State Department official named Charles Dunbar had met Iranian arms dealers in Frankfurt in an attempt to open further discussions with the leadership in Tehran. Incredibly this was true, although Dunbar, who spoke Farsi, would later insist he had told an Iranian official in Frankfurt that arms could no longer be part of the relationship.
As for the bible, said Rafsanjani, the volume was ‘being studied from an intelligence point of view’, but ‘we had no ill-feeling when this bible was sent to us because he [Reagan] is a Christian and he believes in this religion and because we as Muslims believe in Jesus and the Bible. For him, it was a common point between us. We believe that this quotation in the Bible is one that invites people of all religions to unity.’ The Iranians had refused to accept the gift of revolvers, Rafsanjani said. As for the cake, it had been eaten by airport guards.
But if McFarlane was Sean Devlin, there appeared to have been several Oliver Norths. There was Oliver North the Patriot, whom McFarlane would describe as ‘an imaginative, aggressive, committed young officer’, Reagan’s personally approved ‘hero’. There was Oliver North the Man of God, the born-again Christian from the charismatic Episcopal Church of the Apostles who believed that the Lord had healed his wounds in Vietnam and who – in the words of one former associate at the National Security Council – ‘thought he was doing God’s work at the NSC’. There was Oliver North the Man of Action, able to work twenty-five hours in every twenty-four, dubbed ‘Steelhammer’ by Senator Dan Quayle’s buddy Robert Owen, firing off memos from his state-of-the-art crisis centre in the White House.
And then there was Oliver North the thug, drafting directives that authorised CIA operatives ‘to “neutralise” terrorists’, supporting ‘pre-emptive strikes’ against Arab states or leaders whom America thought responsible for such terrorism, supporting one gang of terrorists – the Contra ‘Freedom Fighters’ of Nicaragua – with the proceeds of a deal that would favour another gang of terrorists, those holding American hostages in Beirut. The Oliver North that the Middle East got was the thug.*
Rafsanjani had only told Khomeini of the McFarlane – North visit after they had arrived in Tehran. Khomeini’s designated successor, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, was kept in total ignorance – which he seemed to resent more than the actual arms shipments. When the Majlis debated the scandal, Khomeini complained that their collective voice sounded ‘harsher than that of Israel’. He wanted no Irangates in Tehran.
Covering the last years of the Iran – Iraq war, there were times when events moved so quickly that we could not grasp their meaning. And if we did, we took them at face value. However callously Saddam treated Iraqis, it was – because of the war – always possible to graft reasons of national security upon his cruelty. We knew, for example, that Saddam had completed a huge network of roads across 3,000 square kilometres of the Huweizah marshes and was cutting down all the reed bushes in the region – yet we assumed this was a security measure intended to protect Iraq from further Iranian attacks rather than a genocidal act against the Marsh Arabs themselves. Samir Ghattas succeeded in filing a report for the AP out of Baghdad – and there was no more repressive a capital for any journalist – in which he managed to hint to the world of the new campaign of genocide against the Kurds. His dispatch, on 5 October 1987, was carefully worded and partly attributed to Western diplomats – those anonymous spooks who use journalists as often as they are used by them – but anyone reading it knew that atrocities must be taking place. ‘Iraqi forces have destroyed hundreds of Kurdish villages in northern Iraq and resettled [sic] thousands of Kurds in a campaign against Iranian-backed guerrillas …’ he reported.
Again, it was Saddam’s struggle against Iran – the guerrillas were, of course, Kurdish – which was used to explain this war crime. Ghattas managed to finger Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid – ‘Chemical Ali’ as he was to become known – as the man responsible, and quoted an unnamed ambassador as saying that as many as 3,000 villages might have been razed. He wrote of the dynamiting and bulldozing of villages and, mentioning Kurdish claims that the Iraqis were using poison gas, added that Iraqi television had itself shown a post-air-raid film of ‘bodies of civilians strewn on the ruined streets’. Ghattas also noted that ‘most diplomats doubt there have been mass killings’ – a serious piece of misreporting by Baghdad’s diplomatic community.
In the Gulf, Saddam was now trying to end Iran’s oil-exporting capacity. In August 1986 the Iraqi air force devastated the Iranian oil-loading terminal at Sirri Island, destroying two supertankers, killing more than twenty seamen and forcing Iran to move its loading facilities to Larak Island in the choppy waters close to the Hormuz Strait. Almost at once, Iran’s oil exports fell from 1.6 to 1.2 million barrels a day. Further Iraqi attacks on Kharg Island, less than a hundred miles from the front lines outside Basra, wreaked such damage that eleven of the fourteen loading berths had been abandoned. By November, the Iraqis were using their Mirage jets to bomb Larak, secretly refuelling in Saudi Arabia en route to and from their target. A series of new Iraqi raids on Iranian cities took the lives of 112 people, according to Iran, which responded with a Scud missile attack on Baghdad that killed 48 civilians, including 17 women and 13 children. Iraq blamed Iran for the hijacking of an Iraqi Airways flight from Baghdad to Amman on 25 December, which ended when the aircraft crashed into the desert in Saudi Arabia after grenades exploded in the passenger cabin. Of the 106 passengers and crew, only 44 survived. That same day, the Iranians staged a landing on Um al-Rassas, the Shatt al-Arab island from which Pierre Bayle and I had made such a close-run escape more than six