The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

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In the grotty hotel in Ahwaz that night, I didn’t sleep. Mosquitoes came whining around my face and I ran out of bottled water, and the chicken I’d had for supper made me feel sick. ‘See you in the morning, Fisky,’ Labelle had said with a dark smile. Labelle was a New Yorker brought up in Arizona, a fast, tough agency man with a vocabulary of expletives for editorial fools, especially if they pestered him on the wire with childish queries about his reports. ‘How the fuck do I know if Saddam’s fucking son is fighting in this fucking war when I’m on the Iranian front line getting shelled by the fucking Iraqis?’ he was to ask me one day. ‘Sometimes I ask myself why I’m fucking working for this fucking news agency.’ But Labelle loved the AP and its deadlines and the way in which the wire bell would go ding-ding-ding-ding for a ‘bulletin’ story. ‘I imagine you know, Fisky, that old AK has bitten the dust at last,’ he told me over the phone in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini died. ‘I guess that means no more war.’

But on that hot and blasted morning in Ahwaz, after the mosquitoes and the sleepless night, I probably needed some of Labelle’s saturating humour. As the ministry minders called us to return to the airbase, he gave me one of his mirthless Steve McQueen smiles. ‘Well, Fisky, I’m told it’s a briefing at the usual bunker then a little mosey over the Shatt and a tourist visit to Fao. Lots of gunfire and corpses – should be right up your street.’ A few days earlier, a German correspondent had suffered a fatal heart attack during an Iraqi air raid on Fao. He and his colleagues had jumped for cover when the planes came in, but when they climbed back on to the truck on which they were travelling, the German had just stayed lying on the ground. The Iranians would later call him a ‘martyr’ of the ‘Imposed War’.

Labelle was right about the bunker. At the airbase, two Bell choppers with Iranian insignia on their fuselages were bouncing on the apron, their rotors snapping at the hot air, and into one of them we bundled, Labelle and I and maybe four other journalists and the usual crop of divines and, nose down, pitching in the wind, we swept over a date-palm plantation and flew, at high speed but only a few metres from the tree tops, towards that front line which all of us – save, I suppose, for our clerical brethren – had by now imagined as a triptych of hell. It was like a switchback, the way we cornered granaries and rose over broken electrical pylons and then fell into troughs of wind and sand and dust and turned like a buzzard over long military convoys that were moving down to the river. Labelle and I gazed down in a kind of wonderment. The sensation was so powerful, the act of flying in such circumstances such madness, that we were slipping into the same syndrome I had experienced at Dezful: To hell with the danger – just look at the war.

I saw the waters of the Shatt to our right – its paleness in the dawn light was breathtaking – and then, below us, coming up fast as if we were in a dive-bomber, a vast Iranian encampment of guns and mortars, earthworks and embrasures and tanks and armoured vehicles in the soggy desert, all swept by sand and smoke. The co-pilot, dressed in the beetle-like headset that the Americans supplied with their Bell helicopters, was scribbling something on a piece of paper as we made our final approach, the machine turning to settle next to a concrete bunker. The crewman was holding onto the machine with his right hand and scribbling with his left and I thought he must be writing an urgent message to the pilot until he turned to us and held up the paper with a grin. ‘We will kill Saddam,’ it said in English. Labelle and I looked at each other and Labelle put his mouth next to my ear. ‘Well, at least he knows what he fucking wants,’ he bellowed.

In the hot, noise-crushed air, I could see through the desert fog and rain that each dugout was decorated with a green banner bearing an Islamic exhortation. A middle-aged, slightly plump soldier ran to me smiling. ‘Death to England,’ he shouted and clasped my hand. ‘How are you? Do you want tea?’ Ali Mazinan’s bunker carried an instruction by the door, prohibiting the wearing of shoes. I walked in my socks across the woollen-blanketed floor as a 122-mm gun banged a shell casually towards Basra. A muezzin’s voice called for prayer. It was like one of my taped CBC reports. ‘Allah – BANG-akh -BANG-bar, ’ the voice sang amid the contentious gunfire. My map showed I was in what used to be a village called Nahr-e-Had.

Ali Mazinan clutched a wooden ruler in his right hand and pointed it lazily at the lower left-hand corner of a large laminated map, sealed to his dugout wall with minute pieces of Scotch tape. Mazinan wore a pair of thick spectacles with heavy black frames – they were at the time de rigueur for all self-respecting mullahs, Hizballah leaders, Revolutionary Guard officers and ministerial clerks – and was himself a Guard commander, one of the very men who captured Fao. ‘We won because we followed God’s orders,’ he said. I would be meeting Mazinan again; he was to become a symbol to me of rash and dangerous journalistic missions.

How much land had he captured? we asked. Mazinan took a step towards the map, raised the ruler in his right hand again and slapped the palm of his left hand generously over the Fao peninsula. He didn’t quite touch Kuwait but his index finger pointed towards Basra and his two middle fingers actually traversed the waterway, two fleshy pontoon bridges that spanned the Shatt above Abadan and gave the Iranians two quite mythical new bridgeheads into Iraqi territory. There was no talk of Iraqi counter-attacks. Instead, Mazinan’s ruler flicked towards the map and traced the pale green strips that ran down each side of the river bank. Both sides in the war produced dates, he said, and began a statistical analysis of their agricultural output. As he was speaking, the ministry men began to hand out dirty little plastic bags containing two tubes of liquid and an evil-looking syringe. ‘For nerve gas,’ one of them whispered in my ear, his finger poking the bottle with the green liquid. ‘For mustard gas,’ he said, indicating the bottle with the brown liquid. So here we were, kitted out with medical syringes for Saddam’s poison gas before landing in Fao, listening to the local military commander as he briefed us on Iraq’s 1979 date export production.

It is almost a relief to be told that we will now be taken to Fao. ‘Just think, Fisky,’ Labelle says wickedly. ‘In a short while, you’ll have your dateline – “From Robert Fisk, Iranian-occupied Fao.”’ Outside beneath the high bright sun, the sand swirls around our faces, swamping our clothes and eagerly working its way down our collars. There is a clap of sound and the rush of another artillery shell whooshing off towards Basra. I climb into the helicopter as if in a dream. It has a maximum safety load of eight but there are nineteen of us aboard, most of them clamouring mullahs. When I must do something utterly insane, I have discovered, an unidentifiable part of my brain takes over. There are no decisions to be taken, no choices to be made. My brain is now operating independently of me. It instructs me to sit beside the open starboard door of the helicopter gunship and I notice Labelle squatting beside me, notebook in hand. Notebook? I ask myself in my dream. He’s going to take notes on this suicide mission?

The growing rhythm of the rotor blades has a comforting effect, the gathering din slowly dampening the sound of the war. The crash of the artillery becomes a dull thump, the wind shears away from the blades, the first nudge off the ground and the sudden rise above the sand and it is the most normal thing in the world. We are immortal. Our helicopter moves round, faces east, then west then east again and then turns at 180 degrees to the ground, levels off and streaks between the artillery. And as we pass through the gun line – our door remains wide open because of the heat – there is a crack-crack-crack of sound and a long pink tulip of fire grow out of the gun muzzles, a barrage as beautiful as it is awesome. One of these big flowers moves inexorably past the starboard side of our chopper and for a moment I think I feel its heat. It hangs for a moment in the air, this magnificent blossom, until we overtake it and a line of palms curls beneath us and then the Shatt al-Arab, so close that the skids of the chopper are only a foot off the water.

I sit up and squint out of the pilot’s window. I can see a smudge on the horizon, a black rime across the paleness of the river and a series of broken needles that stand out on the far shoreline. The water is travelling below us at more than a hundred miles an hour. We are the fastest water-skiers in the world, the rotors biting through the heat, sweeping across this great expanse of river; we are safe in our cocoon, angels who can never fall from heaven, who can only marvel and try to remember that we are only human. We fly through the smoke of two burning oil tanks and then Labelle bangs me on my foot with his fist and points to a mountain of mud and filth that the helicopter is now circling and onto which it gingerly, almost carelessly, sets down. ‘Go, go, go!’ the pilot shouts and we jump out into the great wet mass of shell-churned liquid clay that tears off our shoes when we try to move and which sucks at our feet and prevents us even moving clear of the blades when the chopper whups back into the air and leaves us in a kind of noisy silence, Labelle and I trying to hold our trousers up, the mullahs’ robes caked with muck and then, as the chopper turns fly-like in the sky, we feel the ground shaking.

It is vibrating as surely as if there is a minor earthquake, a steady movement of the soil beneath our feet. Smoke drifts across the mud and the shell-broken cranes of Fao port – the ‘needles’ I had seen on the horizon – and the litter of burned-out Iraqi armour. Labelle and I struggle through the mire with the mullahs and an ascetic young man who turns out – of course – to be from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. We can hear the incoming shells now, a continuous rumble that makes no distinction between one explosion and the next, as if we have pitched up next to a roller-skating rink on which mad children roar endlessly over wooden boards. When we get to the quayside, littered with bits of mouldering bodies and hunks of crane and unexploded shells, Labelle comes staggering towards me, his feet caked in the glue-like mud. We are both exhausted, gasping for breath. ‘Well, Fisky,’ he wheezes grimly. ‘You’ve got your fucking dateline!’ And he shoots me the Steve McQueen grin.

We walk a mile down the waterfront. There are burned oil storage tanks and captured artillery pieces; the earth and concrete are pulverised and there are Iraqi bodies lying in the muck. One soldier has lost his head, another his arms. Both were hit by grenades. Labelle and I find a basin of sand and cement near one of the cranes and shout to the man from the ministry. But as we walk to sit down in the dirt, I see another body in a gun-pit, a young man in the foetal position, curled up like a child, already blackening with death but with a wedding ring on his finger. I am mesmerised by the ring. On this hot, golden morning, it glitters and sparkles with freshness and life. He has black hair and is around twenty-five years old. Or should that be ‘was’? Do we stop the clock when death surprises us? Do we say, as Binyon wrote, that ‘they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’? Age may not weary them nor the years condemn, but their humanity is quickly taken from their remains by the swiftness of corruption and the jolly old sun. I look again at the ring. An arranged marriage or a love match? Where was he from, this soldier-corpse? A Sunni or a Shia or a Christian or a Kurd? And his wife. He could not be more than three days dead. Somewhere to the north of us, his wife is waking the children, making breakfast, glancing at her husband’s photograph on the wall, unaware that she is already a widow and that her husband’s wedding ring, so bright with love for her on this glorious morning, embraces a dead finger.

The man from the ministry is full of false confidence. No need to worry about air raids: the Iranian air force has put up fighter cover above Fao to protect the visiting foreign correspondents. Labelle and I look at each other. This is a whopper. No Iranian pilot is going to waste his time protecting the khabanagoran – the ‘journalists’ – when his army is under such intense Iraqi fire to the north. A plane flies over at high altitude and the ministry man points up into the scalding heavens. ‘There you see, just like I said.’ Labelle and I know a Mig when we see one. It’s Iraqi.

Coughing and bouncing on the muck, there then arrived a captured Iraqi army truck, into which we climbed. The second helicopter had brought another group of reporters from Nahr-e-Had who came slogging over the mud. It was tourism time. I could hardly recognise the Fao I’d driven through – in almost equal fear – five and a half years earlier. I could just remember the Iraqi army barracks that now had a banner floating over its entrance, reading ‘Islam means victory’. The city was occupied by thousands of Revolutionary Guards. They waved at us, held up Korans and smiled and offered tea amid the ruins. The very name of Fao had acquired a kind of religious significance. ‘You will see there are no Iraqis left here,’ a young Pasdar officer told us, and he was as good as his word. The mud – ‘Somme-like mud’ as I was to write melodramatically in my dispatch that night – consumed Fao, its roads, its gun emplacements, the base of its burning oil tanks, the dull grey and pale brown uniforms of the Iranian fighters, gradually absorbing the Iraqi bodies spread-eagled across the town. One Iraqi soldier had been cut neatly in half by a shell, the two parts of his body falling one on top of the other beside a tank. He, too, had a wedding ring. The Iraqi defences – 3-metre-high sandbag emplacements – stood along the northern end of Fao, their undamaged machine guns still fixed in their embrasures. Was it Iraqi indolence that allowed the Iranians to sweep through the city with so little opposition, even capturing an entire missile battery on the coast? Some of the mud-walled houses still stood, but much of the city had been destroyed. The Iranians displayed several Iraqi 155-mm guns which they were now using to shell the Basra road.

An elderly, grey-bearded man emerged from a ruined house on cue. Jang ba piruzi, he shrieked. War till victory, the same old chorus. The rain poured out of the low clouds above Fao, sleeking the old man’s face. He wore a ragged red cloth round his forehead and waved a stick over his head. Members of Iran’s ‘War Propaganda Department’ had suddenly emerged from the bowels of a factory and turned to their foreign visitors in delight. ‘See – this is one of our volunteers. He wants to die for Islam in fighting Saddam.’ An old jeep pulled up alongside the man, a rusty loudspeaker on top. Jang ba piruzi, the machine crackled and the old man jumped up and down in the mud. Behind him, red flames rippled across the base of a burning oil storage depot where the Iraqis were shelling the Iranian lines.

Up the road there was now a curtain of fire and a wall of black smoke. From here came that drumbeat of sound, that seismic tremor which we had felt when we landed. The Iranians appeared to be nonchalant, almost childishly mischievous about their victory. On the back of our old Iraqi truck – we all noted the head-high bullet hole through the back of the driver’s cab – an Iranian officer stood with a megaphone and pointed across the torrid Khor Abdullah Strait towards the Kuwaiti island of Bubiyan. ‘Kuwait is on your left,’ he shouted. This was one of the reasons we had been brought to Fao. Here we were, inside Iraq with the Iranians, looking at the Arab country that was one of Iraq’s two principal arms suppliers.

Bubiyan is 130 square kilometres of swamp and mud-banks, but a small Kuwaiti guard force was stationed there and the symbolism was obvious. ‘We hope Kuwait remains responsible during this conflict,’ the officer shouted again. Many of the newly dug Iranian gun-pits along the road to Um Qasr – a port still in Iraqi hands – had been newly equipped with artillery pointed directly across the narrow strait towards Kuwait. In the ghost town of Fao, the bodies would soon have to be buried if the wind and sand did not reach them first. On a vacant lot, there lay the wreckage of an Iraqi Mig, half buried in the liquid sand, its pilot’s head poking from the smashed cockpit. A dead soldier was sitting next to the plane, as if preparing for our arrival.

We spent three hours waiting for our helicopter back to the east bank of the Shatt, Labelle and I sitting once more in our basin of sand with the dead soldier and his wedding ring a few metres away. We also discovered, as Labelle walked through the pieces of broken steel and body parts, puffing on his dozens of cigarettes – part of his charm was that he was a cigarette-smoking asthmatic – that there was a large unexploded bomb lying in the mud near us. ‘It has been defused,’ the ministry man lied. Labelle looked at it scornfully and lit another cigarette. ‘Fisky, it ain’t going to explode,’ he muttered and began to laugh. Only one chopper came back for us. There was a shameful race through the mud by reporters and mullahs to find a place aboard and, as Labelle heaved me above the skids and behind the co-pilot, I saw some desperate soul’s boot placed on the shoulder of a mullah, shoving at the scrabbling cleric until he fell backwards into the mud. Then we took off, back across the rippling waters of the Shatt, right over the army base at Nahr-e-Had and on to Ahwaz and the grotty hotel and the Ahwaz post office where there were no phone lines to London. So I called Tony Alloway in Tehran and dictated my report to him and he told me that The Times foreign desk had a message for me: the paper was full tonight – would my story hold till tomorrow?

The Iranians had occupied about 300 square kilometres of Iraqi territory south of Basra – their own claim of 800 square kilometres included territorial waters – and they would hold this land for almost two more years until Major-General Maher Abdul Rashed – whose 3rd Army Corps had gassed the Iranians in their thousands outside Basra in early 1985 – battered his way back into the city in April 1988. But how did the Iranians capture Fao in the first place? They said it was a mystery known unto God, but years after the war I met the young Iranian war hero – a helicopter pilot – who had swum the Shatt al-Arab at night to reconnoitre the city when it was still under Iraqi control. He had devised an extraordinary plan: to place giant oil pipes beneath the river until they formed an underwater ‘bridge’ upon which the Iranian trucks and fighters and artillery could cross with only their feet and the wheels of their vehicles under water. Thus the Iraqi defenders had seen, in the darkness, an Iranian ghost army walking and driving on the very surface of the water, crying ‘God is Great’ as they stormed ashore. And how did Major-General Rashed retake Fao? ‘The Iraqis are strangely reluctant to explain how they staged last Sunday’s attack,’ the Observer’s correspondent wrote on 24 April 1988. The Iraqis used their usual prosaic means; they drenched Fao in poison gas – as US Lieutenant Rick Francona would note indifferently when he toured the battlefield with the Iraqis afterwards. The writer of the Observer report, who had been invited by the Iraqis to enter ‘liberated’ Fao, was Farzad Bazoft. He had just two more years of his life to enjoy. Then Saddam hanged him.

Our train back to Tehran contained the usual carriages of suffering, half troop train, half hospital train, although mercifully without the victims of poison gas. The soldiers were all young – many were only fifteen or sixteen – and they sat in the second-class compartments, their hair shaved, eating folded squares of nan bread or sleeping on each other’s shoulders, still in the faded yellow fatigues in which Iran’s peasant soldiery were dressed. The wounded clumped on sticks down the swaying corridors, back and forth through the carriages, as if their exertion would relieve their pain.

One boy with cropped hair moved with an agonised face, grunting each time he put his weight on his crutches, staring accusingly at the compartments as if his comrades had personally brought about his ordeal. A youth in khaki trousers with an arm and hand wrapped in bandages sat disconsolately on a box by the carriage door, his back to the open window, hurling bottle caps over his shoulder into the desert north of Ahwaz, giggling to himself in a disturbing, fitful way.

It was a slow train that laboured for seventeen hours up from the Shatt al-Arab battle front, through the great mountains to the plains of Qom, a tired train carrying tired men home from a tired war. When darkness came, some of them left their crammed compartments and slept in the filthy corridors, so that I had to clamber over blankets and boots and backpacks and webbing to reach the broken buffet car with its chicken wings and tea and faded, blue-tinted photographs of the bearded man whom the soldiers had suffered for. They were kind, sad men, muttering ‘hallo’ from their chipped formica dinner tables and waiting for an acknowledgement before they smiled. ‘Jang good?’ one asked pathetically in the corridor. Was war ‘good’? ‘Saddam finished,’ came another darkened voice. ‘Welcome to Iran.’

A hundred kilometres north of Ahwaz, we had stopped at Shushtar, and on a windy platform Labelle and I fell into conversation with a civil engineer who tried to grasp the distance that separated him from his own countrymen. ‘I do not understand these people who say they want to die. I never knew people like this. These people say that if Khomeini wants them to die, they will die. What can you say to these people?’

The train pulled out of Shushtar late, its diesel engine roaring. And then, quite suddenly, our train climbed into a narrow valley and through the open window there were sheer-faced mountains with white peaks and ice glistening on the rock face, frozen rivers and stars. Just briefly, as we wound round a remote village, I saw a man and a woman standing on the roof of their home looking at us. His arm lay round her shoulders and she had no veil and her hair hung loosely over her shoulders. An ominous ridge – Zard Kho, a soldier said it was called, ‘Yellow Mountain’ – towered over our train as it wormed its way through tunnels and along the river bends so tightly that you could see the locomotive’s lamp far to the right as it illuminated the boulders and the dark torrents beneath. Here was a land for which these young men might be prepared to die. But for the man in the faded photograph in the buffet car? Yet the soldiers rarely looked out of the windows. A few read magazines, others smoked with their eyes closed, one read a tiny Koran, mouthing the words in silence.

There was an Ahwaz man on the train, a merchant going up to Tehran for a day, a round-faced, tubby figure who bemoaned his economic prospects but said that, yes, he was better off since the revolution because his family had become more religious. What did he think of the war? The man pondered this for a while, staring out at the moonlit waterfalls of the Bala Rud river, an innocent stream which – like most of the soldiers on the train – would eventually make its way down to the mud of the Shatt al-Arab. ‘I think the Americans are behind it,’ he said from the gloom of the corridor. ‘The great powers want us to be weak but we will win the war.’ And the price? I asked him. The train heaved itself through a station with a white nameplate that announced a village called Tchamsangar. The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the compartments of slumbering young men. ‘They will pay the price,’ he said. Then he looked out at the stars and mountains and ice, and he added: ‘We will all pay the price. We can afford it.’

Who would have believed that the United States would be flying anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran? I should have done. Back in Lebanon, I had been trying, through the help of an Iranian intermediary, to secure the release of my colleague Terry Anderson, who had been held hostage by a satellite group of the Shia Muslim Hizballah movement for more than a year. Anderson was the Associated Press bureau chief in Beirut and my best friend in the city; his apartment was in the same building as mine and we had travelled together on many hair-raising assignments.* (#) The Iranians had started by demanding that I discover the whereabouts of three of their citizens taken hostage in Lebanon in 1982. But when I met with the Iranian intermediary at a Beirut restaurant in late May 1986, he bluntly told me that ‘his [Anderson’s] people are in Tehran’. I did not take this seriously. Only five years after the release of the US embassy hostages in Tehran, no US officials would travel to Iran.

I was wrong; doubly so. For quite by chance, I had stumbled onto the first evidence of the arms-for-hostages Iran – contra scandal in September 1985 when – passing through Cyprus en route from Cairo to Beirut – an old friend who worked in air traffic control at Larnaca airport tipped me off that a mysterious aircraft flying from Tabriz in northern Iran had been reported missing after it had passed over Turkey and suddenly turned south. My contact told me that Tel Aviv officials had personally telephoned the Cypriot air traffic controllers to confirm that the DC-8 cargo jet was safe on the ground at Ben Gurion airport after suffering ‘electrical failures’.

Officially, however, the Israelis denied any knowledge of the aircraft – a sure sign that the plane was on a secret mission – and when the machine’s purported American owners claimed in Miami that they had sold the aircraft the previous month to a Nigerian company, my interest only grew. The DC-8, bearing the US registration number N421AJ, had identified itself to air traffic controllers as belonging to ‘International Airlines’. The plane had originally filed a flight plan to Malaga in Spain, where a friendly airport official said that, although no DC-8 had been seen there, a Boeing 707 – also claiming to belong to ‘International Airlines’ – had touched down on 15 September from Tabriz and then taken off en route to another Iranian town which he said was called ‘Zal’ – although no one was able to identify this location.

Even when I first learned of these unorthodox flights, I should have been more suspicious. If Israel was sending or receiving freight aircraft to or from Iran, it was not exporting oranges or importing caviar. And as Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, Washington must have been involved. Had I connected this with the unexpected admission from my Iranian source that Anderson’s ‘people’ were in Tehran, I might have ‘broken’ the Iran – Contra story. But it was a low-circulation magazine in Beirut, Al-Shiraa, which did that and the rest – to use the veteran cliché – is history. A naive group of White House officials inspired by the gullible but handsome Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North – egged on by Israeli middlemen – persuaded President Reagan that American hostages in Beirut could be freed by Iran’s surrogate allies in the Hizballah in return for a large supply of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles and TOW antitank weapons to Iran. Part payment for these arms – which breached Washington’s arms embargo on Iran – would fund the right-wing Contra gunmen in Nicaragua whom Reagan and North so admired.

I had first heard North’s name three months earlier when, travelling to Switzerland on an MEA flight out of Beirut, I found myself sitting next to Ahmed Chalabi, the senior financial adviser to Nabih Berri, the leader of the Shia Muslim Amal guerrilla movement in Beirut.* (#) Berri had just managed to arrange the release of the passengers and crew of a TWA airliner that had been hijacked to Lebanon and Chalabi repeatedly told me that Berri was worth supporting because ‘the alternative is Hizballah and that is too awful to contemplate.’ We had only been in the air for twenty minutes when he said: ‘Robert, there’s someone I’d like you to meet in Washington. His name’s Oliver North.’ A sixth sense, partly induced by my distrust of Chalabi, led me to decline his invitation. But Chalabi must have talked of me to North who – under a scheduled mid-1986 meeting in his diary with Chuck Lewis, an AP staffer in Washington – wrote with his usual flair for inaccuracy ‘Robert Fiske’. Some days later, Lewis called me in Beirut and asked if I would like to take a call from the Colonel. I refused.

North’s secret trip to Tehran with former US National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane from 25 to 28 May 1986 – a ridiculous but outrageously funny pastiche in which the Americans failed to realise they were participating in a hostage bazaar – did grave damage to the Reagan presidency and to America’s relations with the Arab world. For a complete account of this folly, readers must turn to the Tower Commission report on the scandal; but for years afterwards, details of the clandestine weapons deals, in which ‘sterilised’ – unmarked – Israeli aircraft flew missiles into Tabriz and Bandar Abbas airports, continued to emerge. Among the most revealing – because they demonstrate Iran’s desperation at the very moment when they had just captured Fao – were extracts from telephone calls between Oliver North in Frankfurt and an unnamed Iranian government adviser in late February 1986. Tapes of these calls were made available to America’s ABC television in October 1991, and appeared to have been recorded in Israel.

At one point, North appeals for the release of an American hostage in Beirut prior to any further delivery of weapons. Through an interpreter, the Iranian replies: ‘We must get the Hawk missiles. We must get intelligence reports of Iraqi troops strength. Iran is being destroyed. We need those missiles.’ At another point, North, trying to smother the reality of the guns-for-hostage arrangement, tells Iranian officials that ‘if your government can cause the humanitarian release of the Americans held in Beirut … ten hours immediately, ten hours immediately after they are released the airplane will land with the remaining Hawk missile parts.’

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 years earlier.

A series of Iranian attacks on Kuwaiti-flagged ships prompted an offer of protection from the Soviet Union – which immediately provoked an almost identical proposal from President Reagan. Kuwait was now feeling the breath of war more closely. Iran’s Silkworm missiles, fired from Fao, were soon to be landing on Kuwaiti territory. One night, I lay in my bed in the Kuwait Meridien hotel, unable to grasp why the windows and doors were perpetually rattling until I realised that the detonation of the Iranian guns outside Basra was blasting across the head waters of the Gulf and vibrating throughout Kuwait city. Almost daily, Kuwaitis would find the corpses of Iranians drifting in on the tide from Fao on the other side of the seaway.

As the Americans pushed in the United Nations for a worldwide arms embargo against Iran, Iranian government officials authorised a massive new weapons procurement programme. Hundreds of pages of documentation from the Iranian National Defence Industry Organisation (INDIO) shown to me by dealers in Germany and Austria listed urgent demands for thousands of TOW antitank missiles and air-to-air missiles for Iran’s F-14 aircraft. The Iranians were offering $20 million for one order of 155-mm gun barrels, demanding more than 200,000 shells at $350 a shell.

King Hussein of Jordan, frightened that what he called ‘my nightmare’ – the collapse of Iraq and an Iranian victory – might be close, hosted a secret meeting of Saddam Hussein and President Hafez el-Assad of Syria at a Jordanian airbase known only as ‘H4’ in the hope that Assad might be persuaded to abandon his alliance with Iran. Nine hours of talks between the Iraqi and Syrian dictators, whose mutual loathing was obvious to the king, produced nothing more than an arrangement that their foreign ministers should meet, but such was the king’s political stature that his failures always reflected well upon him. The worthiness of his endeavours always appeared more important than their results; was he not, after all, trying to bring about an end to the Gulf war by calling upon Arab leaders to unite?

Kuwait now accepted an offer by Reagan to re-flag its tankers with the Stars and Stripes. Washington decided to parade its new and provocative policy by escorting the huge 401,382-ton supertanker Bridgeton up the Gulf to Kuwait, a phenomenal story to cover, since television crews from all over the world were hiring helicopters in the United Arab Emirates to follow this mega-tanker to her destination. I flew into Dubai on 23 July 1987 on an MEA aircraft from Beirut and – true to form – the flight-deck crew invited me to sit in the cockpit. And from there, at 10,000 feet over the Gulf, I saw Bridgeton, putting half a knot onto her previously acknowledged top speed of 16½ knots while three diminutive American warships described 3-kilometre circles round her hulk. ‘Mother-hen surrounded by her chicks,’ I wrote scornfully in my notebook. The Americans closed to battle stations as they passed within range of Iran’s Silkworm missiles and the island of Abu Moussa, where Revolutionary Guards maintained a base.

It was a fiasco. South-east of Kuwait and still 200 kilometres from its destination, the Bridgeton struck a mine on her port side and the US naval escorts, anxious to avoid a similar fate to that of the Stark two months earlier, immediately slunk away in line behind the Bridgeton’s, stern for protection. On board the escorting missile destroyer USS Kidd, the captain ordered armed seamen to the bow of his vessel to destroy any suspicious objects in the water by rifle-fire. Iranian fishing boats had been in the area before the Bridgeton was hit, but there was no way of identifying the mine. This permitted the Iranian prime minister, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, to praise the ‘invisible hands’ which had proved the vulnerability of America’s ‘military expedition’. With her speed cut to a quarter and her port side number one compartment still taking water, the Bridgeton continued what was now a political rather than a commercial voyage towards Kuwait.

It transpired that the Americans had no minesweepers in the area, had not even bothered to look for mines in the 30-kilometre-wide channel where the tanker was struck, and now feared that their own warships were more vulnerable to mines than the vessels they were supposed to protect. Kuwaiti and American officials now sought to load the Bridgeton with crude oil, an overtly political act because, as one shipping agent asked contemptuously, ‘Who in their right mind would load his cargo onto a damaged ship?’ The sorry tale of military unpreparedness was only made worse when Captain Yonkers, the US naval officer in command of the three warships – the destroyer Kidd and two frigates – blandly admitted that he did not wish to sail back through the same sea lane because ‘one of the things I do not now have is the capability to defend my ships against mines’. This statement was compounded by Rear Admiral Harold J. Bernsen, who told reporters accompanying the convoy that ‘it may sound incongruous, but the fact is [that] a large ship, a non-warship such as the Bridgeton, is far less vulnerable to a mine than a warship … if you’ve got a big tanker that is very difficult to hurt with a single mine, you get in behind it. That’s the best defence and that’s exactly what we did.’ Such statements provoked an obvious question: if the US navy could not protect itself without hiding behind a civilian vessel, how could it claim to be maintaining freedom of navigation in the Gulf?

For newspaper reporters, this was again a frustrating story. From the shore, it was impossible to see the tanker fleets or their escorts. Only by being in the air could we have any idea of the immensity of the conflict. The Iran – Iraq war now stretched from the mountains of Kurdistan on the Turkish border all the way down to the coastline of Arabia, the land that once in part belonged to the Sherif Hussein of Mecca whom Lawrence had persuaded to join the Allied cause in the First World War. The question was overwhelming: how could we write about this panorama of fire and destruction if we could not see it? The television networks with their million-dollar budgets flew their own planes. They needed pictures. We did not. But during the Lebanese civil war, which was now in its thirteenth year, I had befriended many of the American network producers and crews, often carrying their film to Damascus or Cyprus for satelliting to the United States. And the American NBC network now happily allowed me to fly in their helicopter out of Dubai – provided I acted as an extra ‘spotter’ of ships in the heat-hazed sea lanes.

At least forty warships from the United States, France, the Soviet Union and Britain were now moving into station in the Gulf and the waters of the Gulf of Oman outside Hormuz; America would have the largest fleet – twenty-four vessels, with 15,000 men aboard – including the battleship Missouri. The superlatives came with them; it was one of the biggest naval armadas since the Korean war and very definitely the largest US fleet to assemble since Vietnam. They would all be guaranteeing the ‘freedom’ of Gulf waters for ‘our Arab friends’ – and thus, by extension, Iraq – but they would do nothing to protect Iran’s shipping. It was scarcely surprising that the Iranians should announce their own ‘Operation Martyrdom’ naval manoeuvres off the Iranian coast with the warning that ‘the Islamic Republic will not be responsible for possible incidents against foreign planes and warships passing through the region.’

From my seat in NBC’s chopper, I now had an aerial platform from which to observe the epic scale of the conflict. Off Dubai, we flew at almost mast height between a hundred tankers and gas carriers, moored across miles of sea, big creamy beasts, some of them, alongside dowdy freighters and rust-streaked tubs packed with cranes and haulage equipment. True, they were under orders to wait for a rise in the spot price of oil rather than to delay their voyages because of Iran’s naval threats. But such was the blistering heat across the Gulf that we often blundered into warships in the haze without seeing them. ‘This is US warship. Request you remain two nautical miles from US warships. Over.’ The voice on the radio had a clipped, matter-of-fact east coast accent but retained its unnecessary anonymity. ‘US warship. Roger. Out.’

When we saw them spread across 6 kilometres of gentle swell – three tankers in V-shaped formation, the four warships at equidistant points around them – they looked set for a naval regatta rather than a hazardous voyage up the Gulf. The foreign tankers lying across the ocean around them, some with steam up, others riding the tides for their masters’ orders, were somehow familiar, faint echoes of those great convoys that set off through the Western Approaches forty-six years earlier. Three new American-registered ships – Gas King, Sea Isle City and Ocean City – were unremarkable symbols of Washington’s political determination in the Gulf; ill-painted, a touch of rust on their hulls, the American flag not yet tied to their stern. The US warships Kidd, Fox and Valley Forge lay line astern and abeam of them, a further American vessel standing picket. There was an element of theatre about it all, this neat little configuration of high-riding empty tankers and their grey escorts, lying in the hot sea, actors awaiting the curtain to rise upon their own farce or tragedy.

There was a small but sudden bright, golden light on the deck of the Valley Forge and an illumination rocket moved gracefully up over the sea then drifted untidily back towards the waves. ‘This is US warship,’ the voice came back into our headsets, louder and more clipped. ‘You are inside two nautical miles. Request you clear. Over.’ Coming up at us from the Valley Forge now was a big anti-submarine helicopter, an SH 603 whose remarkable ascent was assisted by two oversize engines. It came alongside, its crew staring at us from behind their shades, a lone hand in the cavernous interior gesturing slowly in a direction away from the ships. Around nine in the morning, a sleeker warship with a long, flat funnel and Exocet missile launchers on her decks sailed slowly across the rear of the American convoy, a British frigate of the Armilla patrol, HMS Active keeping the sort of discreet distance from America’s latest political gamble that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher would have approved of, at least one nautical mile from the nearest American ship.

Iran’s anger was growing.* (#) Its Revolutionary Guards began assaulting unescorted merchant ships with rocket-propelled grenades, approaching them on power boats from small Iranian islands in the Gulf and then opening fire at close range. All this time, the margins of error grew wider. In mid-August, an American fighter aircraft over the Gulf fired two rockets at an Iranian ‘plane’ that turned out to be nothing more threatening than a heat ‘band’ in the atmosphere. Two weeks later, the Kuwaitis fired a ground-to-air missile at a low-flying cloud because humidity had transformed the vapour into the image of an approaching jet aircraft on their radar screens.

Crowds ransacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran but the ‘spontaneous’ demonstration in protest at the Mecca deaths included some very professional locksmiths who stole $40,000 in cash from the embassy vault. In an effort to damage Iran’s economy, the Saudis threatened oil price cuts, although this was a self-defeating weapon. Iraq, like Iran, relied upon its oil exports to help fund its war and, with scarcely any foreign currency reserves, Baghdad now owed $60 billion in foreign debts. Kuwait, one of Iraq’s principal financial supporters, would see the $17 million in profits which it had obtained from its additional oil exports since the US re-flagging of its tankers disappear overnight. The Arabs therefore remained as vulnerable financially as they often believed themselves to be militarily.

And now more mines were discovered in the Gulf. One exploded against the supertanker Texaco Caribbean off Fujairah in the Gulf of Oman, far outside the Arabian Gulf. The explosion ripped a hole in her number three tank large enough to drive through in a family car. There was more condemnation of Iran, but very little mention of the fact that the ship was carrying not Kuwaiti exports but Iranian crude oil from the offshore terminal at Larak. Like the Iraqi missile attack on the Stark – the assault that brought Washington to a frenzy of anger against Iran – now the Iranians were supposedly mining their own supertankers, again displaying that cold contempt for world peace of which they had always been accused. Sure enough, within two days, a British Foreign Office minister was talking of Tehran’s ‘very irrational regime’.

Two more mines were found by, of all people, an NBC crew. Steve O’Neil, flying low over the sea in our usual chopper, was looking through his view-finder when he glimpsed a large, spherical black shape disappearing past the helicopter’s left skid. He was only a few metres from the water, flying at more than 150 kilometres an hour, but the object was too sinister – too familiar from a dozen war movies – to be anything other than a mine. A few hours later and in almost identical circumstances, a CBS crew found another mine, black-painted like the first but weighted down by a chain. Chinese military technicians working with the Iranians reported that Iran had built a factory near the port of Bandar Abbas to upgrade the old mines they were buying, mines that were originally manufactured – a short pause for imperial reflection here – in Tsarist Russia.

In April, the American warship USS Samuel Bo Roberts was almost sunk when it struck a mine while on Gulf patrol. On 21 September, Rear Admiral Bernsen, the same officer who had meekly agreed that his ships were better off using supertankers for their own protection, decided that sonar-equipped ‘Seabat’ helicopters aboard the USS Jarrett – by historic chance, a sister ship of the Stark – should attack the Iranian naval vessel Iran Ajr after it was observed for thirty minutes laying mines in the Gulf 80 kilometres north-east of Bahrain. Reporters later taken aboard the 180-foot Iranian vessel – an unromantic nine-year-old Japanese roll-on-roll-off landing craft – saw ten large black-painted mines bearing the serial number ‘M08’ near the stern of the boat with a special slide attached to the deck so that the crew could launch them into the sea. Bullet holes riddled the deck, cabins and bridge structure, with trails of blood running along the galleyways. Three of the thirty-man Iranian crew were killed in the attack, two more were missing believed dead and another four wounded, two seriously. Rafsanjani said that the American claim of minelaying was ‘a lie’, but it clearly was not, and the Iranians finally retracted their assertion that the Iran Ajr was an innocent cargo vessel. Saddam Hussein now had the satisfaction of knowing that the United States had aligned itself with Iraq as an anti-Iranian belligerent.

The United States followed up on its success against the Iranian minelayer just over three weeks later with a naval strike against two Iranian oil platforms 130 kilometres east of Qatar. Four US guided missile destroyers firing 5-inch guns demolished the Rustum and Rakhsh platforms. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger called it a ‘measured response’ to an Iranian missile attack on an American-flagged tanker the previous week. All that initially came from the Iranians was a distant Iranian voice pleading over a crackling radio for a naval ceasefire so that wounded men could be evacuated from one of the burning rigs. The two platforms had been used as military bases by Revolutionary Guards, the Americans claimed. Tehran warned, not very credibly, that the United States would receive a crushing response from Iran.

Because these military actions involved the Western powers, little attention was paid to the far more serious casualties still being inflicted in the land war, even when the victims were clearly civilians. On 12 October, for instance, an Iranian ground-to-ground missile allegedly aimed at the Iraqi defence ministry in Baghdad struck the Martyrs Place Primary School, 20 kilometres from the ministry, as children were gathering for morning class. The explosion killed 29 children and wounded 228 other civilians, a hundred of them critically. Iraq had just recommenced the use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces outside Basra, but this did not prevent the Iraqis capitalising on what they immediately condemned as an example of Iranian ‘bestiality’.

Basra had come to define this last and savage stage of the war. For the Iranians, it remained the gateway to southern Iraq, the very roads to the shrines of Kerbala and Najaf and Kufa beckoning to the Iranian soldiers and Pasdaran who were still boxed into the powdered ruins of Fao. Iraq was still able to maintain an army of 650,000 men spread through seven brigades from Suleimaniya down to the front line outside Fao. Presidential guards and special forces made up 30,000 of these troops and the ‘popular army’ of conscripts and ‘volunteers’ at least 400,000. An ‘Arab army’ of 200,000, many of them Egyptians, constituted the rest of Iraq’s strength. But by early 1987 the Iranians had massed a force of 600,000 just opposite Basra. It seemed inevitable that Field Marshal Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, Prime Minister, Secretary General of the Regional Command of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and friend of America, would have to make another of his famous retreats.

And when the Iranians did break through in January 1987 and made their dash for Basra, they wanted to show us. At night, we were taken up behind the Iranian lines, our bus crunching through wadis as the skyline was lit by artillery fire, hour after hour of grinding through the dark amid thousands of troops moving up to the line, the same old approaching fear of death and wounds settling over us. Several years earlier, a ministry minder had led a Reuters reporter into a minefield. Both were blown to pieces. The Iranians proclaimed the Reuters man a ‘martyr’ and were only just prevented from sending his widow a glossy book of coloured photographs depicting other martyrs in various stages of dismemberment and putrefaction.

I spent the night on the sand floor of a deep, white-washed underground bunker. We were given juice and dooq – cold drinking yoghurt – and nan bread and cheese and tea, and I lay, as usual, sleepless beneath my blanket. Before six next morning, the Revolutionary Guards arrived to take us all to visit ‘the front’ and I climbed wearily up the steep steps towards the sun and heat and the roar of gunfire and the heavy crumping sound of incoming shells. Dezful was cinemascope. Fao was devastating. But this was an epic with a cast of thousands. Tanks and trucks and heavy guns were pouring westwards with hundreds of Iranian troops sitting on armour and lorries or marching alongside them. To my horror, I noticed that our escort would be none other than Ali Mazinan, the crazed and bespectacled Revolutionary Guards officer with an obsession about Iraqi date exports who had sent me off on the lunatic helicopter flight to Fao. He advanced towards me now with the warmest of smiles, embraced me in a grizzly-bear hug and kissed me on both cheeks. Never was Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ more necessary to a correspondent. Poetic faith was about the best there was to cling on to in the next few hours.

The Fish Lake was a stretch of desert north of the Karun river but west of Shalamcheh – the border post where I had been partially deafened by the Iraqi gun batteries shelling Khorramshahr more than six years earlier – but now Shalamcheh was back in Iranian hands and its vast army was moving towards the Shatt al-Arab river and the city of Basra. Once more, I was in ‘Iranian-occupied Iraq’, but in a desert that the Iraqis had flooded as they retreated. The Iranians were now advancing on a series of dykes above the waterlogged desert, under intense and constant shellfire from Iraqi artillery whose gunners quickly worked out their trajectories to hit the dykes.

The Iranians provided another army truck for the press, a Japanese open-top lorry with a pile of old steel helmets in one corner that we could wear when we reached the battlefield. Between earthworks and dugouts and lines of trenches we drove, the marching soldiery of the Islamic Republic walking beside us, grinning and making victory signs and holding up their rifles like conquering heroes. I suppose that’s what they were, the victims at last overcoming their aggressors, the winners – or so they thought – after so many years of pain and loss. Over to my left, as we climbed onto a plateau of rock and sand, I suddenly saw the shining white warheads and fuselages of a battery of Hawk missiles, gifts from Oliver North, along with the spare parts which had now turned them into a new and formidable air defence for the victorious Iranian army.

And then we were on the causeway, a long, narrow, crumbling embankment of sand surrounded by lagoons of water filled with still-burning Iraqi tanks, overturned missile launchers, half-submerged Iraqi personnel carriers and dozens of bodies, some with only their feet protruding above the mire. Far more fearful, however, were the whine and crash of incoming shells as the Iraqis directed their artillery onto the dykes. I squeezed the old Russian helmet the Iranians had given me onto my head. In front of us, an Iranian truck burst into pink fire, its occupants hurling themselves – some with flames curling round their bodies – into the water. The convoy backed up and our lorry came to a halt. We would hear the splosh in the water beside us as the next shell hit the lagoon, sending a plume of water into the sky, cascading us with mud and wet sand.

Ian Black of the Guardian, one of the sanest reporters with whom one could go to war, was sitting opposite me on the truck, looking at me meaningfully through his big spectacles. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is bloody dangerous.’ I agreed. Around us, on little hillocks amid the great green-blue lakes of water, Iranian gunners fired off 155-mm shells towards Basra, shouting their excitement, throwing their arms around each other. The young Iranian boys did not even bother to keep their helmets on amid the shellfire. They lounged around the earthworks of the captured Iraqi front lines, smoking cigarettes, hanging out their washing, waving good-naturedly at us as the Iraqi artillery rounds hissed overhead. The explosions even made them laugh. Was it contempt for death or merely their reaction to our fear?

Another big splosh and Black and I hunched our shoulders, and sure enough there was an eruption of water and earth behind me and a downpour of muck and brackish liquid descended on us. The shells came five at a time, zipping over the breakwaters. On a similar trip a few hours earlier, the British correspondent of US News and World Report had summed up his feelings under fire along the dykes with eloquent understatement. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that I could take more than a day of this.’ The road surface was only a few feet above the water but the causeway seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, a dwindling taper of sand that reached a horizon of fire and smoke. The strap of my helmet suddenly snapped and it slid off my head and bounced onto the floor of the truck. I picked it up and stuck it back on my head, holding it on with my left hand. But what was the point? If I was hit on the head, my fingers would be chopped off. Black was frowning. We were all concentrating. The idea of instant death was indeed a concentrating experience. And all the while, the army of boys and elderly volunteers and Revolutionary Guard commanders tramped past us in the sun as we ground slowly towards the battle front.

‘War till victory,’ they kept screaming at us from the mud. Would I never hear the end of this? And when we had driven for perhaps 3 kilometres along those earthworks and reached and passed Shalamcheh, the ghastly Mazinan suddenly appeared beside our truck, pointing in a demented way towards the north-west. ‘Basra,’ he kept shouting. ‘BASRA! BASRA! BASRA!’ Black and I peered through the smoke and flames and the waterspouts that were now rising eerily around us, volcanic eruptions that would carry the dark brown mud high into the sky, where it would hover for a second before collapsing on us. Black was looking at me again. A bit like The Cruel Sea, I said stupidly. ‘Much worse,’ he replied.

Mazinan was obsessed. ‘Come, come,’ he kept ordering us, and we crawled up to an embankment of mud that physically shook as the Iranians fired off their 155s from the waterlogged pits behind me. I peered over the lip and could see across an expanse of bright water the towers and factory buildings of Basra’s suburban industrial complex, grey on the horizon, silhouetted for the gunners by the morning sun. A mob of boys stood around us, all laughing. ‘Why be afraid?’ one asked. ‘Look, we are protected. Saddam will die.’

A few hours earlier, Saddam Hussein had declared that the causeway here would be turned into a ‘furnace’ – Black and I had a shrewd suspicion he meant what he said – in which the Iranians would perish. Yet this boy’s protection consisted of just one red bandanna wound tightly round his head upon which was inscribed in yellow God’s supposed invocation to destroy the Iraqi regime. Good God, said God, I remembered God saying in John Squire’s poem, ‘I’ve got my work cut out.’ Nor was the First World War a cliché here. With at least a million dead, the battle of Fish Lake was the Somme and Passchendaele rolled into one but with the sacrifice turned maniacally cheerful by Mazinan and his comrades. One small boy – perhaps thirteen or fourteen – was standing beside a dugout and looked at me and slowly took off his helmet and held a Koran against his heart and smiled. This was the ‘Kerbala 5’ offensive. And this boy, I was sure, believed he would soon be worshipping at the shrine of Imam Hossein. It was, in its way, a sight both deeply impressive and immensely sad. These young men believed they were immortal in the sight of God. They were not fearless so much as heedless – it was this that made them so unique and yet so vulnerable. They had found the key, they had discovered the mechanism of immortality. We had not. So he was brave and laughing, while I was frightened. I didn’t want to die.

The mudfields around us were littered with unexploded bombs, big, grey-finned sharklike beasts which had half-buried themselves in the soggy mass when the Iraqi air force vainly tried to halt ‘Kerbala 5’. ‘We are winning,’ a white banner proclaimed above a smashed dugout whose walls were built with empty ammunition boxes and shell cases. Who could doubt it? The Iraqis had five defensive lines before Basra and the Iranians had overrun the first three. The Iraqi T-72s that had been captured by the Iranians were being dug back into their own revetments but with the barrels traversed, firing now towards Basra.

Mazinan claimed – truthfully – that the Revolutionary Guards had won this battle, that the regular Iranian army provided only logistics and fire support, that Iraq had lost 15,000 dead and 35,000 wounded, that 550 tanks had been destroyed and more than a thousand armoured vehicles. But the Iranians, I unwisely protested, were still a long way from the centre of Basra. Mazinan’s eyes widened behind his giant spectacles. ‘Come,’ he said. And I was propelled by this idiotic giant – who was in reality rather too rational when it came to religious war – towards another vast embankment of mud. We struggled towards the top of it. And down the other side. It was the third Iraqi line and we were now in front of it. Bullets buzzed around us. I remember thinking how much they sounded like wasps, high-speed wasps, and I could hear them ‘put-putting’ into the mud behind me. Mazinan clutched my right arm and pointed towards the pillars of black smoke that hung like funeral curtains in front of us. ‘Do you see that building?’ he asked. And through the darkness I could just make out the outline of a low, rectangular block. ‘That,’ Mazinan cried, ‘is the Basra Sheraton Hotel!’

The Iranians were using their artillery at three times the Iraqi rate of fire, the muzzle flashes streaking out across the water. Still the boys and the bearded old men lounged along the causeway, sometimes playing taped religious music from loudspeakers. Back on the truck, Black and I looked at each other. Brent Sadler and a crew from ITN had been taken to view a pile of Iraqi bodies in a swamp churned up by shells. ‘Very dangerous but I’ve got no option,’ Sadler told me with just a twinkle of death in his eye. ‘It’s television – you know, we’ve got to have pictures.’ Sadler would survive, he always did. But Black wasn’t so sure. Nor was I. ‘We would like to go now,’ I hollered at Mazinan. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Go,’ Black shouted at him. ‘We want to go, go, go.’ Mazinan looked at us both with something worse than contempt. ‘Why?’ he roared. Because we are cowards. Go on, say it, Fisk. Because I am shaking with fear and want to survive and live and write my story and fly back to Tehran and go back to Beirut and invite a young woman to drink fine red wine on my balcony.

Mazinan nodded at the driver. Then he raised his right hand level with his face and closed and opened his fingers, the kind of wave one gives to a small child. Bye-bye, bye-bye, he said softly. He was mimicking the mother taking leave of her babies. And so our truck turned left off the dyke and chuntered down a long causeway towards the ruins of Khorramshahr.

In a factory warehouse, a thousand Iraqi prisoners were paraded before us, including Brigadier General Jamal al-Bayoudi of the Iraqi 506th Corps, who described how the Pasdaran and the Basiji clawed their way through swaths of barbed wire 60 metres deep to reach their third line of defence.* (#) The Iraqis half-heartedly chanted curses against the very Iraqi leader for whom they had been fighting only a few days before. Several smiled at us when the guards were not looking. One of them muttered his name to me. ‘Please tell my family I am safe,’ he said softly. ‘Please tell them I did not die in the battle.’ A week later, I gave his name to the International Red Cross, who promised to relay his message to his parents.* (#)

I returned from the battle of Fish Lake with a sense of despair. That small boy holding the Koran to his chest believed – believed in a way that few Westerners, and I include myself, could any longer understand. He knew, with the conviction of his own life, that heaven awaited him. He would go straight there – the fast train, direct, no limbo, no delays – if he was lucky enough to be killed by the Iraqis. I began to think that life was not the only thing that could die in Iran. For there was, in some indefinable way, a death process within the state itself. In a nation that looked backwards rather than forwards, in which women were to be dressed in perpetual mourning, in which death was an achievement, in which children could reach their most heroic attainment only in self-sacrifice, it was as if the country was neutering itself, moving into a black experience that found its spiritual parallel in the mass slaughter of Cambodia rather than on the ancient battlefield of Kerbala.

I would spend days, perhaps weeks, of my life visiting the cemeteries of Iran’s war dead. Less than a year after the capture of Fao – the offensive that was supposed to lead Iran into Basra and then to Kerbala and Najaf – I was standing in the little cemetery of Imam Zadeh Ali Akbar on the cold slopes of the Alborz mountains at Chasar, where they had been preparing for the next Iranian offensive. The bulldozers had dug deep into the icy graveyard and there was now fresh ground – two football pitches in length – for the next crop of martyrs.

The thin, dark-faced cemetery keeper was quite blunt about it. ‘Every time there is a new Kerbala offensive, the martyrs arrive within days,’ he said. ‘We have three hundred already over there and twelve more last week. The graves of ordinary people we destroy after thirty years – there is nothing left – but our martyrs are different. They will lie here for a thousand years and more.’ His statistics told a far more apocalyptic story than might have appeared; for Chasar – distinguished only by an ancient, crumbling shrine – merely contained the war dead of one small suburb of north Tehran. Spread across the country, those 312 bodies become half a million, perhaps three-quarters of a million, perhaps far more. In the Behesht-i-Zahra cemetery outside the city, they lie in their tens of thousands.

They are nearly all young and they are honoured, publicly at least, with that mixture of grief and spiritual satisfaction so peculiar to Shia Islam. Take Ali Nasser Riarat. He was only twenty-one when he was killed at the battle of the Majnoon Marshes west of Howeiza in 1986; his photograph, pinned inside a glass-fronted steel box above his remains, shows him to have been a slim, good-looking youth with a brush moustache. His gravestone contains a message to his father Yussef, and to his mother:

Don’t cry mother, because I am happy. I am not dead. I remember all that you have done for me. You gave me milk and you wanted me to sacrifice my life for religion. Dear father, don’t cry and don’t beat yourself because you will be proud when you realise I am a martyr …

Several other inscriptions express similar sentiments. Even the flowers laid on the grave of a young soldier called Zaman near the cemetery-keeper’s hut carry such a declaration. ‘We congratulate you upon your martyrdom,’ it says, signed by ‘students and staff of the Tehran University of Science’. Could there really be such joy amid the graves of Chasar? Those cruel steel boxes above the dead contain fresh flowers and plastic doves and real steel-tipped bullets, but the snapshots show the young men who die in every war, laughing in gardens, standing with parents outside front doors, perched on mountain tops, holding field binoculars. Lutyens would have understood the waste of 25-year-old Sergeant Akbazadeh, who died in 1982 in Khorramshahr; of Mehdi Balouoch – a hand grenade carved on his gravestone – who was twenty-three when he was killed in Zakdan; of Mehrdrodi Nassiri, aged twenty-five, who was shot at Mehran in July of 1986. A 24-year-old who died outside Basra a few days before – perhaps in the same Battle of Fish Lake which I had witnessed – was pictured with his two little girls, one with her hair in a bow, curled up in his arms before he went to the front.

Was there no sense of waste? A man in his forties, bearded, unsmiling, shook his head. What of Owen’s question about doomed youth? What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ‘I only met one man who spoke like that,’ the Iranian said. ‘He was an old man in hospital. He had his legs and one arm blown off by a bomb near Ahwaz. He had lost an eye. The bomb had killed his wife and children, his sisters and his brothers. He said he thought Saddam and Khomeini were both out for what they could get and did not care about their people. But he was the only man I ever heard who said those things.’

Outside the chilly, intimate cemetery, there stood a shop selling books about martyrdom. Inside was a young Revolutionary Guard who had that day returned from the southern front. His name was Ali Khani. What did his parents feel when he was away? ‘I have three brothers as well as me at the front,’ he replied. ‘My mother and father know that if I am martyred, I will be still alive.’ But did his parents not wish him luck – not tell him to ‘take care’ when he left for the war? ‘No,’ he said, a slight smile emerging at such Western sentiment. ‘They believe it is God’s wish if I die.’ But would his parents not cry if he died? Ali Khani thought about this for a long time. ‘Yes, they would,’ he said at last. ‘And so did the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him, when his baby son Ibrahim died. But this is not a sign of weakness or lack of faith. It is a human thing.’

CHAPTER EIGHT (#)

Drinking the Poisoned Chalice (#)

It is a long way from Washington to the Mossan Food and Fruit 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 over the coming days. We were told that the Iranian Airbus was not on a normal flight path, then that its pilot failed to respond to warnings from the Aegis-class cruiser USS Vincennes, then that the plane was diving towards the American warship and that its identification transponder was not working. Captain Will Rogers the Third, the captain of the Vincennes, believed – according to the Pentagon – that he was under attack by an Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft. But the American story began to crumble when the Italian navy and another American warship, the frigate Sides, confirmed that the plane was climbing – not diving to attack – at the time of the missile strike.

So the story changed again. The Pentagon now said that the plane’s transponder might not have been giving out correct signals. Later, this was subtly changed; the transponder was identifying the Airbus A300B2 as a military aircraft, because the Iranians had earlier changed the coding when they used the same plane to take troops to the war front – and had forgotten to revert to the civilian code afterwards. Why the Iranians would have used the Airbus to conceal their troop movements from the Iraqis but blown their own cover by obligingly giving the aircraft a military identification that would reveal its true purpose was never explained by the Pentagon. The all-important issue was to justify the frightfulness of what had happened, to talk of the ‘tragedy’ of the passenger jet’s destruction. Tragedies are forgivable. The advantage for the Americans was that the Iranian side of the story would never be fully told – because those most intimately involved were all dead.

In Dubai, I went straight to the British air traffic controllers who had so often helped me during the ‘tanker war’. They had heard the radio traffic over the Gulf on that fatal Sunday morning – and their story was horrifying. For weeks, they told me, they had been appalled at the apparent lack of training and efficiency of US naval personnel challenging civilian aircraft. The pilots of airliners on scheduled flights down the Gulf from Kuwait were being repeatedly and aggressively challenged by American warship crews who seemed not to know that they were cruising beneath established air lanes.