The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
Cold Store in Bandar Abbas. The Pentagon’s clinical details of the last flight of Iran Air IR655 on 3 July 1988 cannot reflect the appalling human dimension of the charnel house in which I am standing, where three-year-old Leila Behbahani lies in her cheap, chipboard coffin. She was a very little girl and she still wears the small green dress and white pinafore in which she died three days ago when the United States Navy missile struck the Iranian Airbus over the Gulf, killing Leila and her 289 fellow passengers. She was pulled from the water only minutes after the explosion and she looks as if she has fallen asleep, her left wrist decorated with two bright gold bangles, her feet still in white socks and tiny black shoes. Her name is scrawled in crayon on the coffin lid that is propped up beside her. Her equally small brother – a dark-set, handsome boy with very short black hair – lies a few inches from her, cradled inside another plywood coffin.
Only the ice in their hair proves that they are awaiting burial. The central cold storage hall of the fruit depot is strewn with the same pale wooden coffins. ‘Yugoslav,’ it says on one. ‘Still unknown’ on another. In a corner, a middle-aged man is peering at some corpses. He recognises three members of his own family – two he cannot find – and an Iranian in a pair of jeans trundles into the hall with three more coffins piled haphazardly on a trolley. There are fifty-eight intact corpses here, fringed by a row of human remains so terrible that they could only be described with accuracy in a doctor’s report or a medical journal. Limbs, torsos, heads – eyes open-lie half-folded in blankets and plastic sheets. Iranian Pasdaran, normally the most voluble of revolutionaries, are reduced to silence. ‘Come, you are a lady,’ one says to a female reporter. ‘Come and see this woman who was killed.’ There is tampering in a coffin and a woman’s face, pale with wet hair, emerges through the plastic sheets.
Yet if this might seem in Western eyes a gesture of bad taste, an intrusion into grief, there is no avoiding some terrible conclusions: that so many of the dead – sixty-six – were children, that some of the coffins are so very small, that one twenty-year-old girl lies in the same wooden box as her year-old baby. Fatima Faidazaida was found in the sea three hours after the Americans shot down the plane, still clutching her child to her breast; which is why the baby, Zoleila-Ashan, is beside her now. ‘That is why we put them in together,’ an Iranian official says quietly. ‘We found them together so they must stay together.’
I come across another middle-aged man clutching a handkerchief to his face, walking unsteadily through the cold store, looking for his relatives. Several corpses he rejects; though terribly disfigured by the blast of the two American navy missiles that destroyed the aircraft, the bodies are clearly unknown to him. Only later does he discover his sister and brother-in-law beneath some plastic and kneel to touch their faces gently, weeping as he does so. Just a few hours ago, President Reagan has stated publicly that he has apologised enough for killing all these innocent people. His expressions of regret, he tells the world, are ‘sufficient’.
It is extraordinary here in the boiling southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas how the official explanations of condolence, sorrow and self-absolution in Washington seem both hollow and opportunistic. What in Washington is called a ‘tragedy’ – as if some natural disaster overwhelmed these dead airline passengers around me – seems in Bandar Abbas to be an outrage. In the United States, it was possible for newspaper editors to suggest that the Airbus might have been on a suicide mission, that the pilot was deliberately trying to crash his passenger-packed airliner into the American frigate that shot it down. Even my own paper, The Times, has disgracefully made the same claim. But in Bandar Abbas, where the pilot’s friends and colleagues have spoken openly to me without official prompting, these suggestions are offensive, obscene. An entire family of sixteen Iranians were on the Airbus, travelling to a wedding in Dubai, the children in their wedding clothes. They are still dressed in the same bright, joyful colours in the coffins in the cold store as Reagan sends a letter to Congress announcing that he now regards the matter of the Airbus destruction as ‘closed’.
We walk in churchlike silence down the aisles of the dead, Westerners with no excuses, cameramen filming the dead in long-shot for audiences who will not be able to accept – to ‘cope’ – with the reality of what the US navy has just done. Only those passengers obliging enough to have died without obvious wounds, or who were lucky enough to have been killed without their faces being disfigured by the explosion of the two Standard missiles fired at their plane by the USS Vincennes, would be honoured with photographs in Western newspapers. Our response was predictable: we didn’t mean to do it; the destruction of the airliner was a mistake. But it was Iran’s fault.
I can remember so well that phone call from The Times. I am holidaying in Ireland that bright warm summer Sunday, and I have spent the morning in Dublin, talking to John Grigg, the historian who will be writing volume VI of the history of The Times from 1966 to 1981, during which Rupert Murdoch took over the paper. Over coffee, I recall for Grigg my four years as a correspondent in Northern Ireland and – although it falls outside his volume – the infamous story of the ‘Hitler diaries’. Murdoch had been bamboozled into serialising these totally fictitious papers – supposedly the Nazi Fïhrer’s ravings on Chamberlain, his mistress Eva Braun, et al. *
‘I’m sure you know what’s happened,’ the duty desk editor says from London. ‘The editor wants to know how soon can you get to the Gulf.’ Every reporter hates that moment. What had ‘happened’? I hadn’t listened to the news that morning. Sometimes it is possible to bluff this out, to reply vaguely and then hurriedly tune to the radio news to find out what I am supposed to know. This was not one of those occasions. ‘The Americans have shot down an Iranian passenger jet over the Gulf,’ came the voice over the phone. ‘The American ship was called Vincennes and it fired two heat-seeking missiles at the aircraft … They say it was a mistake.’ Well, they would, wouldn’t they? I mean, the Americans could hardly claim that the airliner was packed with ‘terrorists’. Or could they? Sure enough, the Pentagon was already suggesting that the pilot might have been trying to fly his plane into the American warship. The American ship’s captain would travel to Bahrain to explain how he had fired at a civilian plane.
This was just the sort of ‘tragedy’ I had predicted in my dispatch to The Times from the Gulf in May 1987, an American warship panicked into believing that a civil airliner was an attacking jet. What was it the Broadsword’s lieutenant commander had told me that sweltering night as his British radar operators were checking the transponder numbers over the Gulf? ‘If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you’ve got to be bloody careful.’ But this was not a private jet. This was a packed airliner which had been blasted out of the sky. I flew to Paris with Lara Marlowe, who would write a brilliant, scathing dispatch for the International Herald Tribune on the slaughter. Harvey Morris, now of the Independent, was at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, dragging on his usual cigarettes. ‘Now they’ve really copped it,’ he said, without explaining who ‘they’ might be. The Iranians or the Americans? We would soon find out. We took the Emirates flight to Dubai – the nearest non-Iranian city to the scene of the mass aerial killing.
It was an eight-hour flight, hot and stuffy and crowded. In front of me sat a reporter for a London radio station, writing feverishly into his notebook. He was, he said, drafting his first report so that he could go on air the moment our flight landed next morning. And what, I couldn’t help asking – since he had not even arrived in Dubai to make a single inquiry – would be the thrust of this dispatch? ‘The danger of the Iranians using suicide boats to take revenge on the Americans,’ he said. He readily admitted he was making this story up on the plane, but said he also planned to write a report suggesting that the Iranians would try to assassinate the captain of the Vincennes. When I asked if he shouldn’t also be questioning American naval competency, he replied that ‘We might be challenged on that story’. Already the machinery was turning. The Americans who had destroyed the passenger jet were the potential victims; the real victims – all of them dead – were the aggressors.
Iran Air flight IR655, piloted by Captain Mohsen Rezaian, had taken off from Bandar Abbas on a scheduled passenger flight to Dubai with 290 passengers. The Americans, as usual, got their version out first, although it would change many times