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

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He was a gentle old man and a moderate among the divines in the city of Qom. But what did ‘moderate’ mean any more? Shariatmadari simply had no idea what was going on in the courts, and I’m sure he preferred not to find out. I still have the tapes of the old man’s excuses and – far more difficult to listen to – the recordings of the ‘trial’, of the lawyer shrieking ‘Liar!’ in Rustomi’s ear, of the condemned man trying to explain his military rules, of his brother’s tears outside the ‘court’. They carry an authentic, painful reality, of injustice by the many against the few. Khomeini’s ruling after Bazargan’s frantic visit to Qom did not spare the prisoners brought into the converted theatre. Executions started again the morning after I left Qom, and although the identity of the victims was not at first made clear, one of them was a former soldier in the Shah’s army. I knew his name.

There would be no counter-coups in this revolution, no ‘Operation Ajax’, no CIA men operating from within the US embassy to buy up the bazaaris. Indeed, very soon there would be no US embassy. The demands for the return of the Shah were being made not for his restoration but in order to put him on trial. Only when the head of the snake had been cut off would the revolution feel safe. Just as the Americans believed twenty-four years later that only the capture of Saddam Hussein would bring them tranquillity in Iraq, so Khomeini and his retinue were convinced that only the death of the Shah – preferably hanged as a criminal in Iran for ‘crimes against God’ – would free Iran from its corrupt past.* (#) In reality, the Shah was already dying from cancer. Many Iranians saw in his pathetic exile the true justice of God, his cancer the ultimate divine vengeance against one who had ‘sinned on earth’. The Shah’s gruesome odyssey through the hospitals of central America, New York City and, eventually, Cairo gave grim satisfaction to the mullahs who had already ordered his assassination.

Not long after his departure, I had sat at the feet of Hojatolislam Khalkhali, the ‘hanging judge’, as he listed those of the Shah’s family who had been sentenced to death in absentia. Around him sat a score or so of Revolutionary Guards who had been maimed in the revolutionary war against the Kurds of north-western Iran, each of them clacking his newly fitted artificial metal fingers, hands and feet as the prelate outlined the fate that so surely awaited his aristocratic enemies. Khalkhali it was who had sentenced a fourteen-year-old boy to death, who had approved of the stoning to death of women in Kermanshah, who earlier, in a mental asylum, would strangle cats in his prison cell. Gorbeh, the ‘Cat’, was what he was called. ‘The Shah will be strung up – he will be cut down and smashed,’ the Cat told me. ‘He is an instrument of Satan.’

In fact, the Shah was a poor substitute for the Devil, scarcely even the equal of Faustus; for he sold himself for the promise of worldly military power and seemingly everlasting American support. The chorus of harpies that pursued the Shah halfway around the world were the bickering, greedy surgeons, doctors and nurses who bombarded the dying man with pills, blood platelets and false hope, agents of darkness who only too well represented the technology of the world to whom the Shah had long ago sold his soul. His erstwhile friends from that world – King Hussein of Jordan, King Khaled of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan of Morocco, the Swiss, the Austrians, President Carter and Margaret Thatcher – either terminated his residence, turned him away or broke their promise to accept him when they realised the political cost. It was sobering to reflect that his only true friend – the only potentate to honour his word to Carter when the Americans wanted the old man to leave New York – was President Sadat of Egypt. President Torrijos of Panama – who gave temporary refuge to the Shah and who wanted to seduce Queen Farah but was swiftly given the brush-off by the Shahbanou – produced the pithiest obituary of the ‘Light of the Aryans’. ‘This is what happens (#) to a man squeezed by the great nations,’ he said. ‘After all the juice is gone, they throw him away.’

In the event, the Shah died in Cairo on 27 July 1980 and was lowered into a modest tomb in the al-Rifai mosque. Six years later, in the heat of summer, I went with an Iranian friend to look at his tomb. It was midday and there was only one guardian in the mosque, an old, silver-haired man who, for a pittance, promised to take us into the last resting place of the man who thought he was the spiritual descendant of Cyrus the Great. There was a single marble slab and, resting upon it, a handwritten poem declaring eternal faith in the Shah from a member of the Javidan guards. A spray of withered roses lay on the tomb. The old guardian wandered up to us and muttered ‘Baksheesh’. He settled for 50 piastres. In the end, it cost the equivalent of 40 cents to sit at the feet of the King of Kings.

The Islamic revolutionaries who now emerged behind Ayatollah Khomeini were oddly middle-class. Men like Sadeq Qotbzadeh, the head of the television service, later foreign minister – and later still, executed for allegedly plotting against the Ayatollah – were graduates of American universities. They spoke English with American accents, which meant that they could appear surprisingly at ease on the US television networks. Many, like the new deputy prime minister Amir Abbas Entezam, flaunted their un-proletarian origins. ‘I am proud that this has been a middle-class revolution,’ Entezam announced to me one day. He leaned forward in his chair and tapped his chest. ‘I’m proud of that,’ he repeated. By ministerial standards, his was a modest office with only two desks, a sofa, a clutter of chairs and a telephone that purred unanswered in the corner. It would have been difficult to find anyone more middle-class than Entezam, with his American education and well-travelled career as an engineer. Yet in his way, he was telling the truth. For while the physical power behind the revolution lay in those colossal street demonstrations by the urban poor and the Islamic revivalists, it was the middle class from the bazaar, the tens of thousands of merchants from the Middle East’s largest souk whom the Shah tried to tame with a system of guilds, that provided the economic backing for Khomeini’s return. It was this merchant class and its alliance with the mullahs that emerged as the critical combination of secular and religious opposition.

That is why Iran’s revolution had until now generally avoided the more traditional path of such events, the looting of the homes and property of the rich. That is why you could still take a taxi across Tehran and drive into the northern suburbs beneath the mountains to find that the luxury apartments and opulent town houses with their tree-shaded verandas and goldfish ponds had been left untouched. Accumulated wealth had not been appropriated by the state. By late March of 1979, however, this had begun to change. In the north of Iran, around the Caspian, factories were being taken over by workers – leftists had led the revolution east of Kurdistan and the mosque had never held sway there – and property was confiscated. The interim government appointed by Khomeini was receiving reports of further confiscations near Mashad and the pattern was beginning to spread to Tehran.

Just over a week earlier, Faribourz Attapour, one of the city’s most prolific and outspoken journalists, was told that his father had been arrested. It turned out that Attapour Senior, who owned a small estate on the Caspian coast, had walked into his local Tehran bank to cash a cheque and had been detained by the cashier, who thought that if his customer looked rich then he must indeed be wealthy – and that if he was indeed wealthy, then he must also be corrupt. Old Mr Attapour, who had been a soldier in the Imperial army but retired from military service twenty-seven years earlier, was seventy years old and deeply in debt. Nonetheless, he was collected from the bank by a heavily armed revolutionary komiteh and freighted off to the Qasr prison. At least, that is where Faribourz Attapour thought his father was being held.

No official statement had been issued by the komiteh and even the government could not gain access to the jail. There were now an estimated 8,000 prisoners inside – there had been around 2,000 at the time of the Shah – and it took the Red Cross several weeks to gain admission. So it was not surprising that Attapour was angry. ‘This revolution has deteriorated into petty vengeance and tyranny,’ he said. ‘It can only be compared to the Jacobin Terror of the French revolution. The merchants in the bazaar have more money than my father but they do not care about his fate. Nor do the so-called religious leaders. I spoke on the telephone to the local ayatollah from our area of the Caspian and he said that my father must be corrupt because he was rich. He would not even let me answer his accusation on the telephone. He just hung up.’

Attapour was daily expecting his own arrest, but three days after we spoke his journalistic voice was silenced when Tehran’s two English-language newspapers announced that they were suspending publication. The Tehran Journal, for which Attapour wrote, gave economic reasons for its closure but for weeks revolutionary komitehs had been denouncing the paper as ‘anti-Islamic’. Most of the staff had received anonymous phone calls threatening their lives. Attapour’s parallel with the French revolution – so much at variance with Edward Mortimer’s enthusiasm – was not lost on the most dogmatic of Iran’s new regime. Dr Salamatian, a political aide at the foreign ministry, found an agreeable comparison. There were fewer executions in Iran than in the French or Russian revolutions, he said. When I pointed out to him that there were no firing squads at all after the 1974 Portuguese revolution, he snapped back at me: ‘But in Portugal they were only getting rid of Caetano – we have been overthrowing more than two thousand years of monarchy.’ This was a curious response, since the idea that Persia had lived under a seamless monarchy for 2,300 years was a figment of the Shah’s imagination, a myth propagated to justify his authoritarian rule.

That this rule was authoritarian was one of the few common denominators among those who supported the revolution, for the Left in Iran already realised that the clerics were installing themselves in power. ‘Why condemn us for hunting down the Shah’s murderers?’ Salamatian asked. ‘In the West, you kept the Nazi Rudolf Hess in prison in Germany. We regard the agents of Savak as Nazi-type criminals. You in the West put Nazis on trial. Why shouldn’t we put our Nazis on trial?’

And how could one argue with this when reporters like Derek Ive of the Associated Press had managed, very briefly, to look inside a Savak agent’s house just before the revolution was successful? He entered the building when a crowd stormed through the front door. ‘There was a fish-pond outside,’ he told me. ‘There were vases of flowers in the front hall. But downstairs there were cells. In each of them was a steel bed with straps and beneath it two domestic cookers. There were lowering devices on the bed frames so that the people strapped to them could be brought down onto the flames. In another cell, I found a machine with a contraption which held a human arm beneath a knife and next to it was a metal sheath into which a human hand could be fitted. At one end was a bacon slicer. They had been shaving off people’s hands.’ Ive found a pile of human arms in a corner and in a further cell he discovered pieces of a corpse floating in several inches of what appeared to be acid. Just before the Shah’s soldiers burst back into the rear of the building, he snatched some quick photographs of the torture apparatus.

After the revolution, we were able to meet some of the Shah’s top Savak agents. Sitting in Evin prison in their open-neck shirts, winter cardigans and corduroys, drawing nervously on American cigarettes, the eighteen prisoners looked nothing like the popular image of secret policemen. From the moment they were brought into the room – a dingy, rectangular office that doubled on occasions as a revolutionary court – these middle-aged, over-friendly men either smiled or just stared at us as government officials described them as criminals.

But they had disturbing and sometimes frightening stories to tell. Hassan Sana, the economic and security adviser to the deputy head of Savak, talked of British intelligence cooperation with the Shah, a friendly liaison which, he claimed, prompted British agents to pass to their Iranian counterparts information about Iranian students in Britain. Sana, a chainsmoker with dark glasses and an apparent passion for brightly coloured shirts, said that British assistance enabled Savak to watch or arrest students on their return to Tehran from London.

He spoke, too, of how Savak agents were flown from New York by the CIA for lessons in interrogation techniques at a secret American military base, a mysterious journey that took four hours flying across the United States in an aircraft with darkened windows. We had earlier toured the Savak interrogation centre in central Tehran, where former inmates described how they had been tortured. A black-tiled room with a concrete floor was all that remained of the chamber – almost identical to the one Ive had discovered – where prisoners were roasted on beds over gas burners. In Evin, for one terrible moment, Mohamed Sadafi – a Savak agent who had been a weightlifter – was confronted by a man whose daughter died in Sadafi’s personal custody.

‘You killed my daughter,’ the man shouted. ‘She was burned all over her flesh until she was paralysed. She was roasted.’ Sadafi glanced briefly at the man. ‘Your daughter hanged herself after seven months in custody,’ he replied quietly. The father said there was not even a sheet in the prison from which an inmate could hang herself. Yes there was, Sadafi said. He had himself seen the laundry bills at Evin.

Upon such horror the Shah’s regime was maintained, and upon such fearful scenes the revolution was fuelled. If there was a cause for surprise in Iran at this early stage of the new regime, it was not that the revolution had claimed so many victims among the Shah’s retinue but that it had claimed so few. But the revolution was unfinished. It was not going to end at that friendly bourgeois stage at which the Portuguese grew tired, nor was there any common ground between the new Islamic Republic and the people’s democracy that Iranian left-wing groups had been propagating. The Left was now more active – there were fire-fights in the streets every night – and the situation would only be exacerbated by Iran’s constantly worsening social conditions. Even Khomeini described the country as ‘a slum’.* (#)

The security authorities of the new Islamic state remained convinced, however, that some in the new government regarded the United States as a potential partner rather than the ‘Great Satan’ of the street demonstrations.

And they were right. After the US embassy was seized in November 1979 by the ‘Muslim Students following the Line of the Imam’, Iranian security men found tons of shredded US diplomatic correspondence (#) which they spent months reconstructing by laboriously pasting documents back together. The papers included an embarrassing quantity of material about Abbas Amir Entezam, the deputy prime minister, and his contacts with the US government. At first this was on a formal basis – the American embassy remained open after the revolution and US officials routinely met Iranian foreign ministry staff to arrange the repatriation of American military staff and civilians – and the embassy told Entezam in March 1979 that ‘the United States desires to normalize its relations with Iran at a steady pace’. Entezam replied, according to the documents, that ‘his government also wanted a good relationship with the United States … the prime minister, Bazargan … had recently expressed this sentiment publicly.’

Within a few days, however, Entezam was expressing his government’s desire to ‘share intelligence information with USG [US Government]’. The Americans had, incredibly, already given Entezam a ‘paper on Afghanistan’ – the Iranians were increasingly fearful that the Soviet Union might invade their eastern neighbour – but now Entezam explained that his government was more concerned about ‘internal security threats’. According to the US embassy report of a further meeting in May, Entezam said that ‘PGOI [Provisional Government of Iran] was concerned about possible meddling by Iraqis in Khuzestan province as well as activities of PLO and Libyans.’ Entezam said that ‘PGOI had information that George Habash [the leader of the Syrian-supported Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] had recently visited several Gulf countries … presumably with a view to causing trouble for Iran.’ The PLO’s office in the southern Iranian city of Ahwaz was also causing concern but ‘shaking his head, he [Entezam] said his government could do nothing about it … because it was Khomeini’s desire that it be opened.’

This was incendiary material. Here was Entezam – who only a few weeks earlier was boasting to me about the ‘middle-class’ nature of the revolution – discussing Iran’s security fears with the CIA; not only revealing his own intelligence information but expressing his exasperation with the most revered Islamic figure in the country for endangering that security. In June, Entezam was asking for US information on ‘Iraqi intentions towards Iran’. By this time, there had been frequent artillery exchanges across the Iran – Iraq border, and the US embassy chargé, ‘after remarking that he was not sure who cast the first stone … speculated on the possibility of the Iraqis attempting to create a “prickly hedge” along Iraq’s border with Iran à la one-time British policy on the Durand Line.’

Bruce Laingen, the American chargé, held further meetings with Entezam and within weeks Entezam – known in the US cable traffic by the rather unromantic code-name ‘SD/PLOD/1’ – was receiving direct visits from senior CIA officials. When he became an Iranian ambassador based in Sweden, Entezam was given an intelligence briefing by CIA agent George Cave, who was later to be a leading figure in the 1985–86 Contra scandal. In Tehran there had been further meetings between the CIA and Bazargan, Entezam and Ibrahim Yazdi, the Iranian foreign minister. Cave himself later visited Tehran and agreed with Entezam that there should be briefings – again, I quote the reconstructed documents – ‘every three to six months, with spot information being passed if particularly important. Entezam asked if there could be a contact in Tehran to exchange information on a regular basis. (Note: Cave was introduced as senior briefing officer from intelligence community. Term CIA was never used.)’

When the American embassy in Tehran was invaded after the Shah had been admitted to the United States, the explosive nature of Entezam’s CIA contacts was revealed in the shredded files that the young Iranian men and women were painstakingly pasting back together. Bazargan and Yazdi were discredited and Entezam arrested and put on trial for treason, barely escaping execution when he was given a life sentence in 1981. Entezam always maintained that he was a true revolutionary merely seeking to maintain relations with the Americans in the interests of Iran.

Massoumeh Ebtekar, among the principal ‘invaders’ of the embassy, saw it quite differently. ‘The CIA apparently believed (#) that it could manipulate any revolution or political establishment if it could successfully infiltrate its top ranks early on,’ she was to write. ‘In Iran, the agency was particularly intent on doing so. After all, it had plenty of past experience.’ According to Ebtekar, the ‘students of the Imam’ also found counterfeit identity cards and passports for CIA agents in the embassy, including stamps and seals for airport entry and exit visas in Europe and Asia, as well as 1,000 false Ghanaian passports. Other documents dealt with pro-monarchists ‘who were involved in terror killings’. But if another ‘Operation Ajax’ was ever considered in Washington, it surely died in November 1979.

Our own life in those early weeks of the Islamic Republic was not without its humour. As long as Iran kept to the system of free visas operating under the Shah, we could enter and leave Iran as often as we wished – I even flew to Dublin for a weekend break, leaving Tehran on a Friday morning, returning by Monday night – and only slowly did the regime’s new laws affect us. For months, at the Intercontinental Hotel in Tehran – later renamed Laleh, ‘Rose’, after the symbol of revolution – we could still drink vodka with blinis. But the ban on alcohol was quickly imposed. I still possess a memorable note from the Tehran hotel management pushed under my door on 21 March 1979. ‘Due to the limited supply of alcoholic beverages in the country and the unexpected [sic] in the mark-ups in the price of these itesm [sic],’ it said, ‘the management has no alternative but to a 20% increase. Thank you.’ Not long afterwards, a revolutionary komiteh invited journalists to watch the destruction of the remaining stocks of Satanic alcohol in the hotel’s cellars. As film cameras whirred, gunmen hurled Pol Roger champagne bottles into the bottom of the empty swimming pool, along with the finest French wines and upended boxes of Gordon’s gin. From the two-foot-deep field of glass at the bottom of the pool, the stench of alcohol permeated the hotel for days afterwards. A South Korean restaurant continued to elude the authorities, its staff burying cases of German beer in their garden. Clients had to wait for ten minutes until each beer can arrived at their table covered in earth.

And the middle classes so beloved of Entezam continued to entertain. One evening I was invited to dinner at a villa of marble stone floors and tasteless pseudo-baroque paintings in north Tehran where a young couple entertained several Iranian writers and myself with poetry-reading and a meal of pre-revolutionary abundance, along with obligatory glasses of home-made vodka. I was intrigued by the attractive hostess because she was rumoured to have been one of the Shah’s last mistresses. Whenever the Shah wished to make love to a woman, it was said, she would be invited to a side door of his palace, would spend two hours with him in a discreet salon and – before leaving – would be presented with a Labrador puppy dog as a token of the King of Kings’ affection. Given the grotesque reputation of the man, I often wondered why Tehran was not populated with hundreds of stray Labradors. I had dismissed all such thoughts when the dinner ended and I was saying goodbye to my hosts. It was at this moment that the kitchen door burst open and something vast and furry catapulted into me, to the consternation of the couple. I looked up to see the friendly face of a golden Labrador, looking at me as if it had spent all evening waiting to make my acquaintance.

Just what life for the Shah was like emerged when the new information ministry, rejoicing in the name of the ‘Ministry for Islamic Guidance’, asked us to take a look at the Niavaran Palace in north Tehran. If Richard the Third really did offer his kingdom for a horse, then the Shah of Iran paid for his freedom with a clutch of palaces, a heap of priceless Persian carpets, a Marc Chagall sketch, a 22-carat gold seventeenth-century model of a Chinese slave ship, a two-storey library, a set of pianos that would send a music college into ecstasy and two solid gold telephones.

Standing beneath the silver birches on the windy lawn of the Niavaran, an Iranian government official made one of the more historic sales of the century sound like nothing but a momentary hiccup in the progress of the revolution – which was what it would turn out to be. ‘We will put the contents up for auction,’ he announced. ‘Then the palaces will be turned into museums.’ So we were left to watch a turbaned mullah and two men armed with G-3 automatic rifles as they pulled and tugged a 30-foot-square handwoven crimson and gold Isfahan rug across the inlaid wooden floor of the Shah’s drawing room. Oriental princesses, plumed birds and exotic beasts of prey were tangled through the arabesque embroideries and each carpet was neatly tagged with an inventory number: proof that while the revolution might have its ups and downs, Iran’s new rulers had a head for efficiency. In the previous few weeks, the Shah’s carpets had reportedly raised $15 million.

One had to admit that the Shah had the most dreadful taste in furniture. French baroque chairs nestled against glass and steel tables while the most grotesque urns – mutated by some silversmith’s black magic into ugly peahens – sat upon desks of delicately carved and mosaic-encrusted wood. Walls of cut glass with a powdering of dust upon them suggested a British cinema of the 1930s. This was how the Shah and his wife left their palace in January 1979 when they set off for a ‘holiday’ and eternal exile.

Fate does not usually vouchsafe to ordinary folk the right to roam around a Shah’s gilded palace, and strange things happen when mere mortals are let loose among such opulence. When the international press were invited into what Abolhassan Sadeq of the guidance ministry sarcastically called ‘the Shah’s slum’, there were scenes befitting the Ostrogoth descent on Rome. We tripped over piles of carpets and surged into the great library to discover what the Shah read in his spare time. There were leather-bound volumes of Voltaire, Verlaine, Flaubert, Plutarch, Shakespeare and Charles de Gaulle. The entire works of Winston Churchill rested against Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner – a work the Shah might have found suitable reading on his long journey of exile – and biographies of Mahatma Gandhi. My People by Abba Eban, the former Israeli foreign minister – in fact, his book was partly written by an editor of Commentary magazine – lay on a lowly shelf with the author’s handwritten dedication to ‘His Imperial Majesty, the Shah of Shahs’. On another rack were the Goebbels Diaries.

In the Shah’s personal office, the guards could scarce restrain us from dialling a line on the golden telephones. On a balcony above the living room, a youth with a rifle over his shoulder watched with an expression of perceptible concern while I played an execrable two-finger version of Bach’s Air on a G String on a harpsichord presented to the Shah by King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola of the Belgians. Souvenir-hunters would be able to bid for the toys that once belonged to Princess Leila, the Shah’s eight-year-old daughter. Miniature aircraft and toy bears lay near a cupboard not far from her four-poster bed. On a sideboard, there was a photograph of the American president’s family with a handwritten greeting: ‘With best wishes, Rosalynn and Amy Carter’. A blackboard carried Leila’s first efforts at writing in chalk the European version of Arabic numerals. In the Shah’s study, the desk calendar still registered 16 January, the day on which the monarch left his realm. In the golden ashtray I found five dusty cigarette ends, testimony to the last depressed hours of imperial rule.

We had been taken earlier to the slums of south Tehran in a heavy-handed though quite effective effort by the guidance ministry to point up the different lifestyles of the Shah and his people. Children played upon the earth floor of No. 94 Gord Najhin Place and women carried their washing over open drains. Tehran’s slums were less poverty-en crusted than Cairo’s tenements and the Shah’s palace was modest by Saudi standards. But we got the point – even if the smell of sewage did mix oddly with the expensive perfumes of the ministry girls.

There was much that was odd about Tehran. The sheer normality of the great, dirty, traffic-clogged city was more astounding than the crisis in Iranian-American relations. For all the talk of fanatical mobs and economic chaos, I could still catch the Number 20 bus – a green-painted Leyland double-decker – into the centre of town, go shopping for French clothes in expensive stores or call in for a snack at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Iranians weaned on the American way of life could no longer buy Skippy peanut butter or Kraft cheese spread at the Forshagh Bozorg department store and, in keeping with Khomeini’s views on the general appearance of women, French and American cosmetics had been banned. Tehran was not an attractive city by either Western or oriental standards. Its square blocks and the architectural poverty of the shop façades built in the 1960s gave the place a sterile, curiously east European air. Even Tehranis, however, were still having problems with their city’s political geography, for nearly every main street in the capital had undergone an identity change in accordance with revolutionary instructions. Thus Pahlavi Street disappeared to become Dr Hossein Fatimi Street, named after Mossadeq’s foreign minister, who was executed two months after ‘Operation Ajax’.* (#)

The Reuters news agency bureau in Tehran became a place of spiritual repair. When I first pushed open the door, I found its bureau chief, Harvey Morris, surrounded by clouds of thick cigarette smoke with an open bottle of Scotch on his desk and a look of pained surprise on his face. With his Mark Twain moustache and unruly hair, Harvey found the revolution as outrageous as it was brave, as farcical as it was cruel. He had to protect his staff from the komitehs, keep his Iranian freelancers out of prison and soft-soap the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. And it was the ministry that was causing him his latest crisis. ‘They’ve told me they want to know the history of the Reuters news agency,’ he announced with a frown. ‘So the great and the good at my London office have just sent me a tome about our esteemed founder, Paul Julius, Freiherr von Reuter, to give to the ministry. But it turns out that the good baron built half the bloody railways in this country and the Reuter Concession of 1872 granted British subjects a monopoly over the entire economic and financial resources of Iran. Christ! How can I tell the arseholes at the ministry that the founder of our news agency was worse than the fucking Shah?’

I saw his point. But Harvey was a smart guy, his laid-back, tired appearance a disguise behind which lay an able, humorous and sometimes a wicked mind. I would drop by to punch my copy on his wire machine each evening and tell him what I’d learned from my day’s street reporting or my travels outside Tehran. He would tip me off on press conferences or scandals – like the one in which television head Qotbzadeh ordered his secretary to photocopy a bunch of official papers in which she had found a letter from his French mistress. The letter was duplicated a thousand times. My hotel phone would sometimes ring in the morning with a call from Harvey. ‘Fisky, you might just like to know that Khalkhali’s lads have topped another bunch of folk for being “corrupt on earth”.’ Or, more frequently, he’d announce that there was ‘a demonstration outside the American embassy – better you than me!’

It is strange that the seizure of the US embassy and its aftermath should have become so tedious an assignment for journalists. After all, it was to lead to an abortive US military rescue mission and, ultimately, the destruction of Carter’s presidency. It created a burning sense of humiliation within subsequent US administrations that led America into a series of political and military disasters in the Middle East. Most of the US diplomats and other American hostages remained captive for 444 days; they were only freed after the US and Iranian governments agreed a series of complex economic and banking arrangements, at which point the captives were taken to Mehrabad airport and escorted out of Iran by Algerian commandos.

Perhaps it was the impossible equation which the embassy occupation represented. The Americans were no more going to hand the Shah back to Iranian ‘justice’ than the Iranians were going to release their captives until Washington had been sufficiently humbled. Removing the Shah from his New York hospital bed and dumping him in Panama was not going to satisfy the revolutionaries in Tehran. And so each day we would watch the tens of thousands of demonstrators, students, armed guards and members of Muslim organisations streaming past the embassy – now officially referred to as the ‘US Nest of Spies’ – hurling to heaven their demand for the Shah’s immediate return and condemning President Jimmy Carter as a ‘warmonger’. They became familiar to the point of monotony. Their cry of ‘Down with the Carter, Down with the Shah’ would be taken up for six or seven minutes, interspersed with ‘Yankee go home’. Hamburger stands, beetroot-juice sellers and postcard stalls cluttered the roadside.

The crowds were strategically placed to catch the television cameras, and journalists were allowed – indeed, encouraged – to approach the embassy and stare through the black wrought-iron gates. The hostages locked in the main embassy buildings – the men with their hands tied – could not be seen, although students had spray-painted slogans on the roof of the reception block. Just inside the forecourt, they now erected a painting 5 metres high, a symbolic work inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of US marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima in 1945; in this case, however, Muslim revolutionaries had replaced the marines and they were struggling to raise a green Islamic flag, one end of which had miraculously turned into a hand strangling the Stars and Stripes. The occupation had thus become theatre, complete with painted scenery. It was more than this. It was a carnival.

It was also a mistake to believe that this represented a falsehood. Individual Iranians expressed their contempt for the Shah all too eloquently – and all too often in American accents. ‘You wanna know why we want the damned Shah?’ a student at Tehran’s Polytechnic University asked me. ‘Well, I tell you – it’s ’cos that man stole fifty billion dollars from Iran.’ An Iranian air force private wandered up to join our conversation. ‘That bastard staged the biggest heist in history,’ he said. The airman’s accent sounded like east side New York, and it said more about Iran’s relationship with America than any amount of political rhetoric. Never before, it seemed, had so many revolutionaries lived, worked or been educated in the country which they now held responsible for so much of their past suffering.* (#)

During the Shah’s rule, there were sometimes half a million Iranians in the United States. Many were at American universities or colleges; some were escaping from the Shah’s regime. Many thousands were undergoing military training; one of the perks available to Iranian army officers was a regular free trip to New York on an Iranian air force jet. Dr Ibrahim Yazdi, who had just resigned as foreign minister, worked for seventeen years as a doctor in America, associating with Iranian students opposed to the Shah. Dr Mustafa Chamran, who had been appointed assistant prime minister in July 1979 and was to die a ‘martyr’ in the Iran – Iraq war, helped set up the Islamic Students Association in America in 1962, together with Yazdi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh, now the acting minister of ‘national guidance’.

An Iranian girl who had studied journalism in New York – who had experienced, as she put it, the fruits of American democracy – demanded to know why Americans were prepared to support the Shah’s regime when it had opposed individual freedom and dissent. ‘In the United States, we learned all about liberty and the freedom to say what we wanted to say. Yet America went on propping up the Shah and forcing him to squander Iran’s wealth on arms. Why did it do that? Why was America a democracy at home and a dictator abroad?’ There was, of course, a contradiction here. The fact that President Carter, whose campaign for human rights was well known in Iran, should have continued to honour America’s political commitment to the Shah before the revolution – in however tentative a way – was regarded as hypocrisy. Yet the Carter administration was opposed to the anti-democratic nature of the Shah’s regime and, within the limits of diplomacy, Carter had urged the Iranian monarch to liberalise his country.

Iranians argued that this was too ambiguous a position to respect, and it was difficult to read some of Carter’s statements during the last months of the Shah’s rule without sensing a certain naivety in the American president. In November 1978, for example, Carter was describing the Shah as ‘a friend, a loyal ally’; he would say only that criticism of the Shah’s police state was ‘sometimes perhaps justified’, adding that he did not know the ‘details’ of the criticism. Yet Iranian condemnation often seemed directed at the actions of previous American administrations: at the Eisenhower or Kennedy or Nixon governments. The students, when they shouted abuse about Carter, appeared to be voicing sentiments they once felt about the policies of Henry Kissinger, who had so powerful a role (as US Secretary of State) when they themselves worked and lived in the United States. Comparatively few had any experience of the Carter administration – except for the knowledge that Carter refused to deport the Shah to Iran. Few of the students outside the embassy gave much thought to the long-term outcome of the embassy occupation, to the possibility that it might result in the election of Ronald Reagan, who would take a much less tolerant interest in world affairs and show a much greater enthusiasm for Iran’s external enemies.

Iranian reaction to the smaller ‘Satanic’ powers was almost quixotic. At the British embassy, still daubed with paint from earlier demonstrations, a crowd arrived to express its satisfaction that Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, had not been given asylum in the United Kingdom. When the same demonstrators reached the French embassy – the country in which Bakhtiar had been given temporary residence – they expressed their appreciation at the sanctuary France had given Ayatollah Khomeini before the revolution.

But no political démarche could unscramble the US embassy siege. The Europeans, the Papal Nuncio, Sean McBride – a founder of Amnesty International – seventy-five ambassadors representing the entire diplomatic corps in Tehran: all found their appeals ignored. The ambassadors could not even visit Bruce Laingen, who was in the Iranian foreign ministry when the embassy was taken and remained there until his release in 1981. Ayatollah Khomeini sternly informed the Pope that ‘Jesus Christ would have punished the Shah.’ Iranian television broke into a showing of The Third Man to announce that Iran was halting its daily supply of 600,000 barrels of oil to the United States – a rather hurried response to the decision already taken by the Carter administration to suspend oil imports from Iran. On 14 November, Iran announced the withdrawal of $12 billion of government reserves from American banks and Carter promptly froze Iranian funds in the United States. Each new step reinforced the power of the theocracy governing Iran and reduced the influence of the leftists.

Half a million students gathered near Tehran University on 15 November in support of the Fedayeen, the left-wing guerrilla movement which was now illegal in Iran and which had not supported the embassy takeover. But inside the campus of Tehran University I found Mehdi Bazargan at Friday prayers, sitting in a grey sweater, cross-legged on the ground, and listening to Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the head of the committee of experts who had just written the new Islamic constitution for Iran. He was telling his audience that ‘the will of the Iranian people was behind the occupation’ of the embassy. Yazdi sat next to Bazargan, who had just resigned because the embassy siege had undermined his government. Article 5 of Montazeri’s new constitution stated that a religious leader with majority support – ‘a just, pious, enlightened, courageous and sagacious person’ – would become guardian of the nation. It was obvious that this arduous, not to say spiritually wearying, role would be given to none other than Ayatollah Khomeini.

In this new theocracy, there was going to be no place for the communist Tudeh party. After the overthrow of Mossadeq in 1953, the Shah had executed some of its leaders; others fled the country. Soon it would be the party’s fate to be crushed all over again, this time by Khomeini. But in the winter of 1979, it was still officially supporting the Ayatollah – even if Nouredin Kianouri’s office walls were the only ones in Tehran without a picture of the Imam. There was a copper-plate portrait of Lenin above the stairs and the secretary-general of Tudeh frowned when I asked him why the Ayatollah was not staring stiffly down upon his desk.

‘The cult of personality does not exist here in Iran,’ I was told. ‘We are not like the English, who have a picture of the Queen hanging in every room.’ Kianouri laughed rather too much at this joke, aware that the parallel was somewhat inexact. He was a precise, faintly humorous man whose balding head, large eyes and bushy grey moustache made him look like a character from a great French novel, but the political language of this former professor – Tehran University and the East Berlin Academy of Architecture – had more in common with Pravda than with Zola. Tudeh was involved in ‘the radical struggle against imperialism’ and ‘the struggle for the reorganisation of social life, especially for the oppressed strata of society’. The party wanted a ‘popular democracy’, not the bourgeois variety so popular in the West. And in so far as it was possible, Tudeh, Iran’s oldest political party, wanted the same things as Ayatollah Khomeini. This was the theory and Kianouri held to it bravely. The truth was that Tudeh’s views on the new Iran were almost exactly the same as those of the Soviet Union – which, for the moment, was in favour of the Ayatollah.

‘We have criticised the establishment,’ Kianouri said. ‘We have made criticism over the position of liberty in the state and about the rights of women. We have criticised Islamic fanaticism – we are against the non-progressive ideas of those conservative elements. But for us, the positive side of Ayatollah Khomeini is so important that the so-called negative side means nothing. We think he is an obstacle to fanaticism: he is more progressive than other elements.’ I interrupted Kianouri. Three months ago, I said, Khomeini condemned Hafizullah Amin’s Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan for struggling against Muslim rebels. Did this not represent a divergence of opinion? ‘That was three months ago,’ Kianouri replied. ‘But now the Ayatollah’s outlook is different. He has new information on the situation there.’

Was the Ayatollah therefore mistaken? ‘I did not use the word “mistaken”,’ Kianouri corrected me. ‘I said only that the outlook of the Ayatollah has changed and he now knows that the Muslim counter-revolutionary movement is a tool of American CIA agents.’ Wasn’t this a Soviet voice that was talking to me? Wasn’t Tudeh, as its critics had claimed, just a mouthpiece for the Soviet Union? ‘This is not true. Cheap critics once accused Victor Hugo of being an English spy, and great figures have been called foreign agents because this is the form of insult used against the forces combating imperialism. Tudeh is not the official voice of the Soviet Union.’

In my Times report of the interview, I suggested that the Ayatollah might soon accept less benignly the little criticisms of the Tudeh. All I got wrong was the time frame. It would be 1983, at the height of the Iran – Iraq war, before Khomeini turned his ‘progressive’ attention to the party which wanted ‘popular democracy’. When Vladimir Kuzichkin, a Soviet KGB major stationed in Tehran, defected to Britain in 1982, he handed over a list of Soviet agents operating in Iran – a list that was then shared with the authorities in Iran. More than a thousand Tudeh members were arrested, including Kianouri, who was quickly prevailed upon to admit that the party had been ‘guilty of treason and espionage for the Soviet Union’. Kianouri appeared on Iranian television to say that he had maintained contact with Soviet agents since 1945 and that members of his party had been delivering top-secret military and political documents to the Soviet embassy in Tehran. Eighteen Soviet diplomats were expelled. Kianouri and his wife Mariam Firouz were sent to Evin prison for ten years; he died soon after his release. It was the end of the Left in Iran.

It was only in November of 1979 that I sat at last before Khomeini. Long ago, when Britain had an empire, the Times correspondent would have the ear of statesmen and warlords. Shahs and princes would demand to be interviewed. But a new empire now guaranteed that it was the American television anchormen, the boys from the New York Times and the journalists who played the role of mouthpiece for the State Department who got the interviews. The best I could do was to ‘piggyback’, to team up with the men from the new pax Americana whom the Ayatollahs – who sniffed power as acutely as any politicians – wanted to talk to. So I travelled to Qom with two American television networks whose reporters – as opposed to their employers – I greatly admired, John Hart and Peter Jennings. It took courage for an American to report the Iranian revolution with compassion and fairness, and I had many times travelled with Hart in Tehran. ‘I think we can let young Bob come with us, don’t you, Peter?’ Hart noisily asked Jennings as I stood beside him. ‘I mean, he’s not going to get in our way and it always feels good to help out the poor old Brits. Anyway, I’m sure young Bob will be grateful to America!’ The sarcasm was forced, but he well understood my lowly status in the ranks of scribes.

It was a bright winter Sunday morning as we approached Qom, its blue-tiled domes and golden minarets twinkling in the light. I often thought that this was what our own European cities must have looked like in the Middle Ages, a sudden sprouting of spires and towers above a hill or along a valley. Before you reached the car repair shops and the lock-up garages and the acres of slums, Qom appeared mystical across the desert. We didn’t need to call it a ‘holy’ city in our reports; after the miles of grey, gritty dunes, it was a miracle of light and power. You could understand how pilgrims, after days in the harshness of rock and gravel and powdered sand, would behold the cupolas and the reflected gold on the horizon and renew their faith. Allahu akbar. From every loudspeaker in the city, floating down upon every courtyard, came the same exhortation. Once, on a parched summer midday, I had arrived in Qom to interview one of its clerics, and a Muslim student – a Briton, by chance, who had converted to Islam – offered me chilled water in a glittering bronze bowl. Outside the window, as I put my lips to the bowl, a pink jacaranda tree swayed in the breeze. It was like pouring life into myself. No wonder Khomeini had decided to return to Qom. This was the city from which he had first assaulted the Shah. Here were born and here died the revolution’s first martyrs. They said he lived a humble life and they were right. I was shown Khomeini’s bedroom, a rough carpet on the floor, a mattress, a pillow, a glass for his morning yoghurt.

It was an interesting phenomenon, this oriental desire to show the poverty of their leaders. In Cairo, members of the underground Jemaa Islamiya would delight in showing me the slums in which they spent their lives. Bin Laden had ordered his men to show me the tents in which his wives would live. Now Khomeini’s guards were opening the door of the old man’s bedroom. No palaces for the Imam; because, as I quickly realised, he built his palaces of people. His faithful, the adoration on the faces of the dozens of men who pushed and shoved and squeezed and kicked their way into the small audience room with its bare white walls, these were the foundations and the walls of his spiritual mansion. They were his servants and his loyal warriors, his protectors and his praetorian guards. God must protect our Imam. And their devotion grew as Khomeini proclaimed that, no, he was their servant and, more to the point, he was the servant of God.

I didn’t see him come into the room although there was a cry of near-hysteria from the crowd as he entered. I glimpsed him for just a moment, advancing at the speed of a cat, a small whirlwind of black robes, his black sayed’s turban moving between the heads, and then he was sitting in front of me, cross-legged on a small blue and white patterned carpet, unsmiling, grave, almost glowering, his eyes cast down. I have always responded badly at such moments. When I first saw Yassir Arafat – admittedly, he was no Khomeini – I was mesmerised by his eyes. What big eyes you have, I wanted to say. When I first met Hafez el-Assad of Syria, I was captivated by the absolute flatness of the back of his head, so straight I could have set a ruler against it without a crack showing. I spent an evening at dinner with King Hussein, perpetually astonished at how small he was, irritated that I couldn’t get him to stop playing with the box of cigarettes that lay on the table between us. And now here was one of the titans of the twentieth century, whose name would be in every history book for a thousand years, the scourge of America, the Savonarola of Tehran, the ‘twelfth’ Imam, an apostle of Islam. And I searched his face and noted the two small spots on his cheek and the vast fluffy eyebrows, the bags under his eyes, the neat white beard, his right hand lying on his knee, his left arm buried in his robe.

But his eyes. I could not see his eyes. His head was bowed, as if he did not see us, as if he had not noticed the Westerners in front of him, even though we were the symbol – for the poor, sweating, shoving men in the room – of his international power and fame. We were the foreign consuls arriving at the oriental court, waiting to hear the word of the oracle. Qotbzadeh sat on Khomeini’s right, gazing obsequiously at the man who would later condemn him to death, his head leaning towards the Ayatollah, anxious not to miss a single word. He, after all, would be the interpreter. So what of the embassy hostages? we wanted to know. Khomeini knew we would ask this. He understood the networks. His last, cynical remarks about newspapers in the final days of his life showed that he understood us journalists as well.

‘They will be tried,’ he said. ‘They will be tried – and those found guilty of espionage will submit to the verdict of the court.’ Khomeini knew – and, more to the point, we knew – that since the revolution, everyone found guilty of spying had been sentenced to death. Then came what I always called the ‘slippery floor’ technique, the sudden disavowal of what might otherwise appear to be a closed matter. ‘It would be appropriate to say,’ the Ayatollah continued, ‘that as long as they stay here, they are under the banner of Islam and cannot be harmed … but obviously as long as this matter continues, they will remain here – and until the Shah is returned to our country, they may be tried.’ The extradition of the Shah to Iran, Khomeini had decided, must dominate every aspect of the country’s foreign policy. Of course, Hart and Jennings talked about international law, about the respect that should be paid to all embassies. The question was translated sotto voce by Qotbzadeh. Khomeini’s reply was quiet but he had a harsh voice, like gravel on marble. It was President Carter who had broken international law by maintaining ‘spies’ in Tehran. Diplomatic immunity did not extend to spies.

He thought for a long time before each reply – here, he had something in common with bin Laden, although the two men would have little reason to share more than their divided Islamic inheritance – and only when he used the word ‘espionage’ did his voice lose its monotone and rise in anger. ‘Diplomats in any country are supposed to do diplomatic work. They are not supposed to commit crimes and carry out espionage … If they carry out espionage then they are no longer diplomats. Our people have taken a certain number of spies and according to our laws they should be tried and punished … Even if the Shah is returned, the release of the hostages will be a kind gesture on our part.’

I still searched for the eyes. And at that moment, I realised he was staring at a point on the floor, at a single bright emanation, a ray of sunshine that was beaming through the high, dirty windows and was forming a circle of light on the carpet. His head was bent towards it as if the light itself held some inspiration. The left arm remained concealed in his gown. Was he watching this sun-point for some theological reason? Did it give focus to his mind? Or was he bored, tired of our Western questions, with selfish demands for information about a few dozen American lives when thousands of Iranians had been cut down in the revolution?

Yet he had clearly decided what to say to us long in advance of the interview. He would already have known that three of the Americans were to be released five hours later, two black members of the embassy’s US Marine guard contingent and a woman, Kathy Gross. But Khomeini simply came back, again and again, to the same argument. Rather like the US television networks, he seemed to be obsessed by only one theme: retribution. He was not going to preach to us, to speak to us of God or history – or, indeed, his place in it. ‘Carter has done something against international law – someone has committed a crime and that criminal should be sent back to this country to be tried.’ His voice went on purging us. ‘As long as Carter does not respect international laws, these spies cannot be returned.’ Then he sprang up, a creature who had lost all interest in us, and the heap of men in the front rows collapsed over each other in the excitement of his departure. One of our drivers stepped forward – our own translator bent towards Khomeini and whispered that it would be the greatest moment in the driver’s existence on earth if he could shake the Ayatollah’s hand – and our driver held the Imam’s right hand and kissed it and when he raised his head, tears streamed down his cheek. And Khomeini had gone.* (#)

This was not just an anticlimax. This was bathos. When one of the freed US Marines, Sergeant Dell Maple, announced that night that the Iranian Revolution had been ‘a good thing’, it was almost as interesting. And from that moment, I decided to read Khomeini, to read every speech he made – heavens above, the Islamic guidance ministry flooded us with his words – to see what had captured the hearts of so many millions of Iranians. And slowly, I understood. He talked in the language of ordinary people, without complexity, not in the language of religious exegesis, but as if he had been talking to the man sitting beside him. No, although he would not have known who Osama bin Laden was in 1979 – the Saudi would not leave for Afghanistan for another month – Khomeini knew all too well of the dangers that the Saudi Wahhabi Sunni faith posed for the Shiite as well as the Western world. In his famous ‘Last Message’ just before his death, when he had probably heard the name of bin Laden, Khomeini inveighed against ‘the anti-Koranic ideas (#) propagating the baseless and superstitious cult of Wahhabism’.

And he knew how to argue against those American conservatives who claimed – and still claim – that Islam is a religion of backwardness and isolation. ‘Sometimes with explicit but crude argument it is claimed that the laws of 1,400 years ago cannot efficiently administer the modern world,’ he wrote.

At other times they contend that Islam is a reactionary religion that opposes any new ideas and manifestations of civilisation and that, at present, no one can remain aloof to world civilisation … In fiendish yet foolish propaganda jargon, they claim the sanctity of Islam and maintain that divine religions have the nobler task of purging egos, of inviting people to ascetism, monkhood … This is nothing but an inane accusation … Science and industry are very much emphasised in the Koran and Islam … These ignorant individuals must realise that the Holy Koran and the traditions of the Prophet of Islam contain more lessons, decrees and commands on the rule of government and politics than they do on any other issue …

Harvey Morris was full of admiration for Khomeini when I arrived at his office to file my dispatch that night in November 1979. ‘You’ve got to hand it to the old boy,’ he said, drawing on another cigarette. ‘He knew how to handle you lot. Yes, our “AK” knows exactly how to handle the kind of wankers we send down to interview him. Doesn’t waste his time on serious theological stuff that we wouldn’t understand; just goes straight to the point and gives us our bloody headlines.’ In his own cynical way, Harvey respected Khomeini. The Ayatollah knew how to talk to us and he knew how to talk to Iranians. And when they read out his ‘Last Message’ after his death in 1989, Khomeini’s words were humility itself. ‘I need your prayers and I beseech Almighty God’s pardon and forgiveness for my inadequacies and my faults,’ he wrote. ‘I hope the nation, too, will forgive my shortcomings and failings … Know that the departure of one servant shall not leave a scratch on the steel shield that is the nation.’

You could understand how Khomeini’s followers were persuaded by his sanctity into an almost crude obeisance. I remember the way Qotbzadeh talked to me about him, his voice softening into an almost feminine purr as he tried to convince me that the Ayatollah’s annoyance at the slow pace of the revolution did not imply any change of character. ‘The man is as holy as he was, as honest as he has ever been, as determined as he always was, and as pure as he has ever been.’ This was the man whose execution Khomeini would approve. What Qotbzadeh thought in front of the firing squad we shall never know.

‘So, back to the “den of iniquity”, eh, Bob?’ Harvey had asked when I came panting into the Reuters office to file. The cigarette smoke was thicker than usual. There was another whisky bottle on the desk. ‘What’s it like to be back in the “centre of vice and Saturnalia”?’ Harvey was right, of course. ‘Saturnalia’ really was one of Khomeini’s favourite expressions. And it was easy to mock the Iranian revolution, its eternal sermonising, the endless, unalterable integrity of its quarrel, its childlike self-confidence. Yet there was a perseverance about this revolution, an assiduousness that could be used to extraordinary effect once a target had been clearly identified. Nothing could have symbolised this dedication more than the reconstitution of the thousands of shredded US diplomatic papers which the Iranians found when they sacked the American embassy.

A woman ‘follower of the Imam’ was later to describe how an engineering student called Javad concluded that the shreds of each document must have fallen close together, and could thus be restored in their original form:

He was a study in concentration: (#) bearded, thin, nervous and intense. These qualities, combined with his strong command of English, his mathematical mind and his enthusiasm, made him a natural for the job … One afternoon he took a handful of shreds from the barrel, laid them on a sheet of white paper and began grouping them on the basis of their qualities … After five hours we had only been able to reconstruct 20–30 per cent of the two documents. The next day I visited the document centre with a group of sisters. ‘Come and see. With God’s help, with faith and a bit of effort we can accomplish the impossible,’ he said, with a smile.

A team of twenty students was gathered to work on the papers. A flat board was fitted with elastic bands to hold the shreds in place. They could reconstruct five to ten documents a week. They were the carpet-weavers, carefully, almost lovingly re-threading their tapestry. Iranian carpets are filled with flowers and birds, the recreation of a garden in the desert; they are intended to give life amid sand and heat, to create eternal meadows amid a wasteland. The Iranians who worked for months on those shredded papers were creating their own unique carpet, one that exposed the past and was transformed into a living history book amid the arid propaganda of the revolution. High-school students and disabled war veterans were enlisted to work on this carpet of papers. It would take them six years to complete, three thousand pages containing 2,300 documents, all eventually contained in 85 volumes.* (#)

Night after night, as each edition was published, I pored over these remarkable documents, a living archive of secret contemporary history from 1972 to the chaos of post-revolutionary Iran by the nation that was now threatening military action against Iran. Here was Ambassador William Sullivan in September 1978, contemptuously referring to ‘the extremist coalition of fanatic Moslems led by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iraq (which has reportedly been penetrated and is assisted by a variety of terrorist, crypto-communist, and other far left elements)…’ or listening to the Shah as he ‘persists in saying that he sees the Soviet hand in all the demonstrations and disturbances that have taken place’. Some of the diplomatic analyses were just plain wrong. ‘Such figures as Ayatollahs Khomeini and Shariatmadari … have little chance of capitalizing on their wide following to win control of the government for themselves,’ one secret cable confides.

Other documents were deeply incriminating. Robert R. Bowie, deputy director for national foreign assessment at the CIA, thanks Sullivan on 14 December 1978 for hosting a cocktail party that enabled him to meet the Shah and ‘to have some less formal conversations with several Iranian military and SAVAK people’. A memorandum of the same date from the US consulate in Isfahan records a conversation with Ibrahim Peshavar, the local director of Iranian television, in which Peshavar is asked ‘if it was true that his teams had covered demonstration [sic] toppling the Shah’s statues, and had provided it to security forces for investigation. He said that it was covered, that NIRT [National Iranian Radio and Television] had decided not to run it on television, and that such films are routinely shared with “other government agencies”. He … asked that I not spread the word.’

Among the reconstituted files was a 47-page CIA booklet marked ‘Secret’ and dated March 1979 – written after the revolution but still, incredibly, kept in the embassy archives – on the internal structure of Israel’s ‘Foreign Intelligence and Security Services’. Israeli efforts to break the Arab ‘ring’ encircling Israel, it said, had led to:

a formal trilateral liaison called the Trident organisation … established by Mossad with Turkey’s National Security Service (TNSS) and Iran’s National Organisation for Intelligence and Security (Savak)… The Trident organisation involves continuing intelligence exchange plus semmiannual [sic] meetings at the chief of staff level … The main purpose of the Israeli relationship with Iran was the development of a pro-Israel and anti-Arab policy on the part of Iranian officials. Mossad has engaged in joint operations with Savak over the years since the late 1950s. Mossad aided Savak activities and supported the Kurds in Iraq. The Israelis also regularly transmitted to the Iranians intelligence reports on Egypt’s activities in the Arab countries, trends and developments in Iraq, and communist activities affecting Iran.

Some of the internal American memoranda showed a considerable grasp of political events and an understanding of Iran’s culture – even if this wisdom was not acceptable back in Washington. George Lambrakis sent a memo to the State Department on 2 February 1979, pointing out that:

Iranian govt spokesmen have for a long time peddled the charge that Khomeini’s followers are for the most part crypto communists or leftists of Marxist stripe … to a considerable extent it is based on a fable that communists have been infiltrated as youths into the religious schools and now constitute the mullahs and other organizers of the religious movement …

Westernization in Iran achieved a status and legitimacy under the two Pahlavi monarchs which has practically wiped out memories of the Islamic past for large numbers of people who went to school in the westernized Iranian school system and did their higher studies for the most part abroad … the Pahlavi Shahs have sought to brand the Islamic establishment as an ignorant reactionary remnant of the past which is fast becoming obsolete. Steps were taken to render this a self-fulfilling prophecy. The govt has made efforts to cut off the mullahs from direct financial support by the people … Nevertheless it has become obvious that Islam is deeply embedded in the lives of the vast majority of the Iranian people. In its Shiite format it has over the years become strongly identified with Iranian nationalism … The Pahlavis attempted to supplant this ancient nationalism with a modern version based on a return to traditions, legends and glories of the pre-Islamic past …

An embassy assessment of Iranian society in 1978 reads like an account of Iraqi society before the fall of Saddam in 2003 – would that the Americans had read it before their invasion of Iraq – and ends with conclusions that Khomeini could only agree with:

There is much in Iranian history to predispose both the ruler and the ruled to exercise and to expect authoritarian behaviour. There exists no tradition of the orderly transfer of authority, there has been no real experience with democratic forms … There is in Iran … an established tradition of a strong ruler at the head of an authoritarian government, and of general obeisance to any authority that manifests its will with force. The experience of the current Shah, for example, superficially suggests that political stability in Iran is best assured by authoritarian government, and that periods of the greatest political unrest arise when the ruler … shares authority, as during the Mossadeq crisis of 1951–53, or attempts to introduce additional freedoms, as with the liberalization programme of the mid-1970s … The inability of Iranian society to accommodate successfully to these social changes stems in large part from the long-standing and pervasive influence of religion and religious leaders … Shia Islam is not merely a religion; rather it is an all encompassing religious, economic, legal, social, and intellectual system that controls all aspects of life, and the sect’s leaders, unlike their counterparts in Sunni Islam, are believed to be completing God’s revelations on earth.

Although this essay reached profoundly inaccurate conclusions – ‘we do not foresee any likely circumstances in which a government controlled by religious leaders would come to power,’ its authors wrote – other contemporary documents could display remarkable shrewdness. John Washburn would write on 18 September 1978 that ‘the Shah’s repression of religion in Iran has made Shiism’s predominant groups dogmatic and conservative in the course of defending themselves, just as Roman Catholicism has become in Communist countries.’ As long ago as 1972, the then ambassador, Richard Helms, formerly head of the CIA, received a long ‘secret’ memo on the Iranian ‘character’ which suggested that Iran’s repeated national humiliations had ‘engrained in the Iranian personality very marked negative characteristics’ but ‘under foreign occupation (Arabs, Mongols, Turks) or manipulation (British, Russians), Iranians preserved their sense of nationhood through their culture … and their self-respect in cloistered and concealed private lives … The world outside was justifiably seen as hostile.’

But it was the more prosaic efforts of US diplomats that probably got closer to the truth. A note from US consulates in Iran on 21 November 1978 reported public opinion outside Tehran. ‘Why, it is being asked, does Iran need F-14s when villagers less than five kilometres from Shiraz’s Tadayon Air Force Base … still live without running water or electricity?’* (#)

What none of the US embassy archives predicted was the brutality of the Iranian revolution, the extraordinary cruelty that manifested itself among the so-called judges and jurists who were predisposed to torture and kill out of whim rather than reflection. At the end of the eight-year Iran – Iraq war, this would meet its apogee in the mass hangings of thousands of opposition prisoners. But its characteristics were clearly evident within days of the Shah’s overthrow; and no one emphasised them more chillingly than the Chief Justice of the Islamic Courts, Hojatolislam Sadeq Khalkhali, the ‘Cat’, who had told me in December 1979 how he intended to ‘string up’ the Shah. When he said that, and despite his ferocious reputation, I thought at first it was a joke, a cliché, an idle remark. Of course, it was nothing of the sort.

The Revolutionary Guards sitting around Khalkhali when I first visited the Hojatolislam had all been wounded while fighting Kurdish rebels in the north-west of Iran. It was hot in the little room in Qom and the bespectacled divine was wearing only pyjamas and a white apron. ‘You are from The Times of London?’ he asked, glancing in my direction. ‘Well, look at these men.’ He paused and then began to giggle in a high-pitched voice. ‘The rebels did this. I will pull them out by the roots – I will kill all of them.’ In truth, Khalkhali did not look the part. He was a small man with a kindly smile – Islamic judges at that time all seemed to smile a lot – which he betrayed when making inappropriate jokes. Asked by a reporter two weeks earlier how he felt when the number of executions in Iran was decreasing, he replied with a chuckle: ‘I feel hungry.’ It would have been a serious mistake, however, to imagine that Iran’s most feared judge – the ‘wrath of God’ to his admirers – did not take his vocation seriously. ‘If an Islamic judge realises that someone is guilty of corruption on earth or of waging war against God,’ he said, ‘the judge will condemn the accused, even if he claims he is innocent. The most important thing in Islamic justice is the wisdom of the judge … Even if a man denies the charges against him, it means nothing if the judge decides otherwise.’ Hojatolislam Khalkhali naturally had no time for reporters who asked why so many Iranians were executed after the revolution. ‘The people who were executed were the principal retainers of the previous hated regime. They had exploited this nation. They had been responsible for killings, tortures and unlawful imprisonment. I am surprised that you ask such questions.’ Khalkhali displayed equally little patience when asked if his much-publicised determination to engineer the assassination of the ex-Shah accorded with the principles of Islamic justice. ‘We know that America will not return the Shah,’ he said – with, it had to be admitted, a remarkable sense of realism – ‘so we have to kill him – there is no other choice. If it was possible to bring him here and try him, we would kill him afterwards. But since we cannot try him – and since we are sure that he should be executed – we will kill him anyway. No one tried Mussolini. And who tried the Frenchmen who were executed for collaborating with Hitler’s soldiers in the Second World War?’

All the while he was talking, the Revolutionary Guards would massage their wounded limbs – or what was left of them – and exercise their artificial hands. The creaking and clacking of steel fingers punctuated the conversation as Khalkhali walked around the room, shoeless and sockless, or massaged his feet with his hands. How, I asked, did he personally feel when he sentenced a man to death? ‘I feel that I am doing my duty and what I am required to do by the Iranian people. That is why I have never been criticised by my people for these executions.’ But had he not refused to give Hoveyda or Nassiri, the ex-Savak boss, any right to appeal against his death sentence?

‘They did appeal,’ he replied. ‘And they asked the Imam and the court to forgive them. Many people came to me and asked me to forgive these people. But I was responsible to the Iranian nation and to God. I could not forgive Hoveyda and Nassiri. They destroyed the lives of 60,000 people.’ Khalkhali had, he claimed, ordered a commando squad to go to Panama where the Shah was now staying with his family in order to kill all of them. ‘I do not know if they have left Iran yet,’ he said, and then broke into that familiar chuckle as he ventured into Spanish. ‘They all have pistolas.’ Since the murder of the Shah’s nephew in Paris almost two weeks earlier, Interpol – and Khalkhali’s intended victims – were now paying a good deal of attention to the judge’s threats. And Khalkhali obligingly listed the targets of his hit squads. ‘We are looking for Sharif Emami [former prime minister], General Palizban, Hushang Ansari [former finance minister], Ardeshir Zahedi [former ambassador in Washington], Gholamali Oveisi [former martial law administrator], Gharabagi [former chief of staff in the Shah’s army], Farah [the ex-empress], Hojab Yazdani [a former banker], Valían [former minister of agriculture], Jamshid Amouzegar [former prime minister] and Shapour Bakhtiar [the Shah’s last prime minister, now living in Paris]. We also want the Shah and his brother and Ashraf [the Shah’s twin sister]. Wherever we can find these people, we will kill them.’

Khalkhali was unashamed at publicly naming his own ‘hit list’, and he was perfectly serious; more than a decade later, I would meet the head of the Iranian hit squad sent to Paris to murder Bakhtiar. So was Khalkhali really the ‘wrath of God’? I asked. ‘I grew up in poverty and therefore I can understand poor people. I know all about the previous regime. I have read books about politics. The Imam ordered me to be the Islamic judge and I have done the job perfectly. That’s why none of the Shah’s agents in Iran has escaped my hands.’* (#)

It would be seven months before I saw Khalkhali again. His monstrous reputation had not been sullied by a temporary fall in the number of executions. By July 1980, his wrath was falling on new and more fruitful pastures. He stood now, this formidable judicial luminary, in the sunny courtyard of Qasr prison, brandishing a miniature pink plastic spoon, smacking his lips noisily and tucking into a large cardboard tub of vanilla ice-cream. For a man who had just ordered the first public execution in Tehran for fifteen years, he was in an excellent frame of mind.

Five days earlier, a gruesome new precedent had been set when four people – two of them middle-aged married women – were stoned to death in the southern Iranian city of Kerman. All had been condemned for sexual offences by one of Khalkhali’s revolutionary courts, and within hours the condemned had been dressed in white cloth, buried up to their chests in the ground and bombarded with rocks as large as a man’s fist. In a characteristic and typically unnecessary comment, the court later stated that all four had died of ‘brain damage’. The women were condemned for being ‘involved in prostitution’ and for ‘deceiving young girls’. One of the men was convicted of homosexuality and adultery, and the other for allegedly raping a ten-year-old girl. Before execution, the four were ritually bathed and shrouded, a ceremonial white hood being placed over their heads. Local clergymen had visited the condemned and chosen the stones for the execution, varying in size between one and six inches in diameter. It took the two women and two men fifteen minutes to die.* (#)

‘I don’t know if I approve of stoning,’ Sadeq Khalkhali said, flashing a grin at us journalists and at a group of startled diplomats who had also been invited to the Qasr prison. ‘But in the Koran, it is mentioned that those who commit adultery should be killed by stoning.’ The Hojatolislam dug his little spoon into the melting white ice-cream, oblivious to the bare-headed prisoners who trudged past behind him, heaving barrels loaded with cauldrons of vegetable soup. ‘We approve of anything the Koran says. What is the difference between killing people with stones and killing them with bullets? But throwing stones certainly teaches people a lesson.’ Khalkhali modestly disowned responsibility for the Kerman stonings – his bearded public relations man informed us that a man called Fahin Kermani had taken this weighty decision – but he agreed that he had ordered some fresh executions that morning. Seven men had been lined up at one end of Jamshid Street at five o’clock and shot down by a firing squad while a large crowd gawked from a distance. Many of those who died had been convicted of drug offences, and it was in his role as chief of the Iranian anti-narcotics squad that the Hojatolislam had welcomed us to Qasr prison to view his latest haul of contraband.

One could only be impressed. Khalkhali had piled it up in the prison mosque, a magnificent frescoed edifice with a cupola of red and blue tiles, now filled with tons of opium, kilogram sacks of heroin, large sticky slabs of hashish, stolen refrigerators, ornately carved backgammon boards, a 2½– metre wall of cigarettes – here I thought briefly of Harvey Morris in his Reuters ‘saturnalia’ – thousands of bubble pipes, carpets, knives, automatic rifles and rows of champagne bottles (Krug 1972). The beautiful mosque literally reeked of hashish as Khalkhali made a triumphal tour of his loot, pushing his way past 20 tons of opium and at least 100 kilograms of heroin, each neatly packed into clean white sacks. It was inevitable that he would be asked whether the revolutionary courts were dealing enthusiastically enough with drug-dealers, and equally inevitable that the Hojatolislam would evince a broad smile – directed at the diplomats – before replying. ‘If we did what others wanted us to do, we would have to kill many people – which in my opinion is simply impossible,’ he said. ‘Things could end up in a crisis. If we were going to kill everyone who had five grams of heroin, we would have to kill five thousand people – and that would be difficult.’ In fairness, it should be added that the Ayatollah had made a fair start. In the past seven weeks, his courts had summarily dispatched 176 men and women to the firing squads for narcotics offences, many of them sentenced by Khalkhali himself in the innocuous tree-shaded concrete building 300 metres from the little mosque.

Khalkhali tried hard not to look like an ogre; he repeatedly denied that he was any such thing. His small, plump frame, grey beard and twinkling eyes give him a fatherly appearance, the kind of man who might have been more at home at the fireside in carpet slippers with the family cat purring beside him – just so long as the family cat survived. He joked frequently with us as he made his round of the mosque, good-naturedly poking his finger into the sacks of opium that lay beneath the main cupola. Every minute or so, a young man in a pale green shirt with a pistol tucked into his trousers would clamber onto a pile of heroin bags and scream ‘God is Great’ at the top of his lungs, a refrain that would be taken up and echoed around the mosque.

‘If you look at me, you don’t see an inner struggle written all over my face,’ Khalkhali remarked as he emerged into the sunshine. ‘But I am actually a revolutionary person. I am chasing agents everywhere – in France, England and America. That is a fact. I am chasing them everywhere.’ He claimed a ‘200 per cent success’ in stamping out drug-running in Iran and an 80 per cent victory in preventing international drug-trafficking – which was why the diplomats had been invited to the Qasr prison to listen to the judge. He claimed that an intercontinental mafia was operating a drugs ring from Pakistan, Burma and Thailand, and described how a member of the ex-Shah’s family allegedly used a private aircraft to fly drugs from Afghanistan to a small airfield outside Tehran. The captured opium, he said, might be used by the government for medical purposes. The hashish and heroin would be burned.

The Hojatolislam strode briskly from the courtyard towards a wire fence, but as he did so, something very strange happened. Dozens of black-veiled women – the wives and sisters of the very men whom the Ayatollah would soon be sentencing – ran across a lawn towards him, clutching babies and crying, ‘Hail to Khalkhali.’ The Hojatolislam affected not to notice them as the soldiers held them at bay, and he pushed his way through a gate in the fence. For a few moments, he talked of holding a formal press conference before entering his tiny courthouse. But then a policeman walked over to us and told us that the judge had become ‘angry’. Sensing that a Hojatolislam’s fury could embrace a journalist or two, we brought this most extraordinary public event to a hurried conclusion. We fled.* (#)

For Westerners, Khalkhali represented a special danger. If the American hostages in the embassy were to be tried by an Islamic court, what if Khalkhali was let loose on them? All Khomeini’s promises of protection could be reinterpreted now that the embassy documents were being slowly put back together to reveal that the Iranian claims of a ‘spy nest’ in Tehran were not entirely without foundation. Thus when the Shah moved from the United States to Panama – a journey of which the Iranians were forewarned by three Western diplomats acting at Washington’s request – the ‘Students of the Imam’ put out a statement repeating the promise to ‘try’ the Americans.† (#) In the end, of course, there was no trial.

Inevitably, the Iranians lost their patience with the foreign journalists in Tehran. The day after the ‘trial’ statement, Abolhassan Sadeq walked into the Iranian Ministry of Islamic Guidance with the troubled expression of a headmaster forced at last to deal with a persistently unruly class. Harvey Morris, shrouded in his usual smoke haze – mercifully for him, it was to be at least a decade before Iran would ban smoking in government buildings – knew what was coming. ‘Well, Fisky, we’ll see who’s going to get the order of the boot today,’ he murmured. The ministry contained an underground auditorium that looked uncomfortably like a school hall and there we waited to hear the worst. Sadeq, the school director, took his place at a desk on a small raised podium and stared down at us severely. We all knew that an expulsion or two was in the air.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began – Harvey always liked the ‘gentlemen’ bit – ‘I want to share with you a bit of agony we are going through with regard to the foreign media. With great displeasure, we are expelling the entire Time magazine crew from Iran.’ It mattered little that the ‘entire’ staff of Time in the country numbered just two. This was not how Sadeq saw things. There were over three hundred foreign journalists in Iran from more than thirty countries, he said, but Time had gone too far. He flourished a clutch of front covers from the offending organ, one of which carried an unflattering portrait of Khomeini.

‘Since the problem of hostages came up,’ Sadeq said, waving the latest issue of Time in his hand, ‘this has done nothing but arouse the hatred of the American people. The front covers have been like a hammer on the brain. The magazine has created some very irrational reaction on behalf of the American people.’ Time was not the only news organisation to feel Iranian wrath. Eight days earlier, Alex Eftyvoulos, a correspondent for the Associated Press – a bearded part-Russian Cypriot who looked like Rasputin – had been expelled for allegedly distorting news of rioting in the Azerbaijani provincial capital of Tabriz. Even the British had fallen foul of Iranian anger. In early December, Enayat Ettehad of Iranian television had been watching BBC News in a London hotel and was angered by a report on the hostages in which Keith Graves described in unpleasant detail how their hands were bound with rope and how they were forbidden to speak to each other or receive news from the outside world. I wasn’t surprised. Over the next two and a half decades, Graves would infuriate the Taliban, the Israeli army, the US government, the IRA, the British army, NATO, the Egyptians, the PLO, the Hizballah, the Syrians, the Turks and even the Cypriots – the latter an astonishing achievement even for a man of Graves’s abrasiveness – and survive them all. But the BBC was made to pay for it. Ettehad instructed Iranian television to refuse BBC crews any further use of satellite facilities. The BBC was forced to ship all their film unprocessed by air to London, where it usually arrived a day late. It was clear, however, that Ettehad was far more upset by the BBC’s Persian language radio service, and Sadeq brandished a sheaf of papers above his head – complaints, he said, about the Persian service from ‘all over Iran’.

Sadeq was confident about his broadsides. He loudly referred to the fact that one of the two Time correspondents had once worked for the CIA. ‘Yet still I let him into Iran.’ He was referring to Bruce van Voorst, who worked as a CIA research officer in the late 1950s but who now said that he had severed all links with the agency – whose own activities in the country were now, thanks to the embassy documents, a national Iranian obsession. The American CBS network was in trouble for comparing the students in the embassy to the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the ABC network for a State Department analysis ‘that would make any Iranian look like an idiot’. But there was a pettiness about the government’s response to overseas coverage, a gut reaction that sprang from patriotic anger rather than forethought. Sadeq, who in argument was given to drawing unhappy parallels with events in American history, unconsciously revealed this when he reminded us that ‘in 1834, Colonel Travis defended the Alamo against the Mexican army and when he was told to surrender he replied with gunfire. He stood up for his principles. And that is what Iran is doing today.’ I heard Harvey Morris sigh. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought Travis lost the battle of the bloody Alamo.’

The revolution was a tempest and we were all trapped in its vortex. We interviewed Khomeini, we watched the epic demonstrations, we watched America writhing in impotence. US warships entered the Gulf. Khomeini called for an army of tens of thousands of schoolboy volunteers to defend Iran. I travelled back from Iranian Kurdistan on a bus whose passengers spent an hour watching a weapons education programme on the coach’s specially installed television: how to strip and reassemble an automatic rifle, how to pull a grenade pin, how to master the mechanism of a heavy machine gun. I swayed at the back of the fast-moving bus as the audience sat in silent attention. And today, I thought, we have naming of parts.

But I was seeking some other way of reporting Iran, away from the events which were so obstinately staged for our benefit, especially for American television reporters. I was in Harvey’s office, staring at the stained map of Iran on his wall, when I had an idea. What if I closed my eyes and stuck a pin into the map and then travelled to the point I had marked and asked the people there about the revolution? ‘Close your eyes and I’ll give you a pin,’ Harvey announced. ‘And I bet you stick it in bloody Afghanistan.’ He produced the pin, I closed my eyes, stabbed at the map and then opened my eyes again. The little sliver of silver had landed in the ‘h’ of a village called Kahak, south-west of the city of Qazvin. I set off at dawn next morning.

Kahak was the sort of place no one ever goes to visit. It lay, a rectangle of mud and clay single-storey houses, at the end of a dirt road with only a gaggle of children and a dung-heap picked over by fat chickens to welcome a stranger. Through the dust and the heat haze to the north, the Alborz mountains ran along the horizon, forming the lower lip of the Caspian Sea basin. Foreigners never saw Kahak, except perhaps the passengers on the night train to the Soviet frontier as it skirted the village orchards. Even then, it was doubtful if they would notice anything. Kahak was so small that its 950 inhabitants could not even support a mosque of their own.

A prematurely ageing man of sixty-four with a slick of perspiration running down his face from beneath his turban and a shirt front covered in dirt had to travel up from Qom to minister to the faithful. But he was a man capable of extraordinary energy as he walked nimbly around the heaps of manure and puddles of gilded, foetid water, talking about the village in a possessive, slightly rhetorical, almost sermonising way, his voice rising and falling in the cadences of a formal speech rather than a conversation. What had the revolution done for these people, I asked, and Sheikh Ibrahim Zaude pointed to the hard, unwatered land beyond the mud huts, a desert of grey, unyielding earth.