THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION
The Conquest of the Middle East
ROBERT FISK

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This revised eBook edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2005

Previously published in paperback by Harper Perennial in 2006

Copyright © Robert Fisk 2005, 2006

Quotation of Carl Sandburg’s ‘Grass’ taken from Chicago Poems, copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and renewed 1944 by Carl Sandburg, reproduced by permission of Harcourt Inc.

Quotation from W. B. Yeats’s ‘Lapiz Lazuli’ reproduced by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

Quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (edited and translated 1954 by Louis and Aylmer Maude) reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

Quotation from G. B. Shaw’s Major Barbara reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate.

Quotation from T. S. Eliot’s preface to The Dark Side of the Moon reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Robert Fisk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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The publishers have tried to trace and acknowledge copyright-holders,

but would be eager to rectify any omissions.

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Source ISBN: 9781841150086

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780007370405 Version: 2017-01-12

PRAISE

‘There is nobody in British journalism to match Robert Fisk. This book is his testament … His technique is well-honed: a vivid eyewitness account, unmatchable quotes and the killer detail that everyone else has missed’

Sunday Times

‘Brilliant … powerfully written. He has turned a slightly dubious and over-romanticised craft into an honourable vocation’

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY, Independent on Sunday

‘This book will make Robert Fisk an even greater star—deeply moving’

Literary Review

‘A remarkable book’

New Statesman

‘Fisk is one of the best-known reporters in the world … He interleaves political analysis, recent history and his own adventures with the real stories which concern him [and] writes with a marvellous resource of image and language. His investigative reporting is lethally painstaking’

NEAL ACHERSON, Independent

‘Part-memoir, all heart, this 1,328-page behemoth will delight Fisk’s fans, infuriate his foes and fascinate all’

DONALD MORRISON, Financial Times

‘A fierce indictment of Britain and the United States’

Sunday Telegraph

‘A mammoth and magisterial work, the definitive summation of what has gone wrong in the West’s foreign policies towards Arabia. It should be compulsory reading for those who aspire to lead’

Scottish Sunday Herald

‘It is a history book which journalists, politicians and academics will turn to again and again in the years ahead to grasp the details of the Middle East’

WILLIAM GRAHAM, Irish News

‘Fisk is a gifted writer and an accomplished storyteller … [readers] will enjoy the colorful narrative [and] the wealth of hard-won narrative detail accumulated over his decades of intrepid reporting’

Economist

‘Vivid, graphic, intense and very personal … this is a book of unquestionable importance’

Washington Post

DEDICATION

For Bill and Peggy, who taught me to love books and history

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

DEDICATION

LIST OF MAPS

PREFACE

1 ‘One of Our Brothers Had a Dream …’

2 ‘They Shoot Russians’

3 The Choirs of Kandahar

4 The Carpet-Weavers

5 The Path to War

6 ‘The Whirlwind War’

7 ‘War against War’ and the Fast Train to Paradise

8 Drinking the Poisoned Chalice

9 ‘Sentenced to Suffer Death’

10 The First Holocaust

11 Fifty Thousand Miles from Palestine

12 The Last Colonial War

13 The Girl and the Child and Love

14 ‘Anything to Wipe Out a Devil …’

15 Planet Damnation

16 Betrayal

17 The Land of Graves

18 The Plague

19 Now Thrive the Armourers …

20 Even to Kings, He Comes …

21 Why?

22 The Die Is Cast

23 Atomic Dog, Annihilator, Arsonist, Anthrax and Agamemnon

24 Into the Wilderness

KEEP READING

NOTES

FOOTNOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHRONOLOGY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

LIST OF MAPS

The Middle East |
Afghanistan |
Iran |
Iraq |
The Sykes-Picot Agreement |
The Iran—Iraq war |
The Armenian Genocide |
Israel/Palestine |
Algeria |
Saudi Arabia/Kuwait/Iraq |

All maps drawn by HLStudios, Long Hanborough, Oxford, except the Armenian Genocide, produced by the Armenian National Institute (ANI) (Washington DC) and the Nubarian Library (Paris). © ANI, English Edition Copyright 1998.

PREFACE

When I was a small boy, my father would take me each year around the battlefields of the First World War, the conflict that H. G. Wells called ‘the war to end all wars’. We would set off each summer in our Austin of England and bump along the potholed roads of the Somme, Ypres and Verdun. By the time I was fourteen, I could recite the names of all the offensives: Bapaume, Hill 60, High Wood, Passchendaele … I had seen all the graveyards and I had walked through all the overgrown trenches and touched the rusted helmets of British soldiers and the corroded German mortars in decaying museums. My father was a soldier of the Great War, fighting in the trenches of France because of a shot fired in a city he’d never heard of called Sarajevo. And when he died thirteen years ago at the age of ninety-three, I inherited his campaign medals. One of them depicts a winged victory and on the obverse side are engraved the words: ‘The Great War for Civilisation’.

To my father’s deep concern and my mother’s stoic acceptance, I have spent much of my life in wars. They, too, were fought ‘for civilisation’. In Afghanistan, I watched the Russians fighting for their ‘international duty’ in a conflict against ‘international terror’; their Afghan opponents, of course, were fighting against ‘communist aggression’ and for Allah. I reported from the front lines as the Iranians struggled through what they called the ‘Imposed War’ against Saddam Hussein – who dubbed his 1980 invasion of Iran the ‘Whirlwind War’. I’ve seen the Israelis twice invading Lebanon and then reinvading the Palestinian West Bank in order, so they claimed, to ‘purge the land of terrorism’. I was present as the Algerian military went to war with Islamists for the same ostensible reason, torturing and executing their prisoners with as much abandon as their enemies. Then in 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Americans sent their armies to the Gulf to liberate the emirate and impose a ‘New World Order’. After the 1991 war, I always wrote down the words ‘new world order’ in my notebook followed by a question mark. In Bosnia, I found Serbs fighting for what they called ‘Serb civilisation’ while their Muslim enemies fought and died for a fading multicultural dream and to save their own lives.

On a mountaintop in Afghanistan, I sat opposite Osama bin Laden in his tent as he uttered his first direct threat against the United States, pausing as I scribbled his words into my notebook by paraffin lamp. ‘God’ and ‘evil’ were what he talked to me about. I was flying over the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 – my plane turned round off Ireland following the attacks on the United States – and so less than three months later I was in Afghanistan, fleeing with the Taliban down a highway west of Kandahar as America bombed the ruins of a country already destroyed by war. I was in the United Nations General Assembly exactly a year after the attacks on America when George Bush talked about Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and prepared to invade Iraq. The first missiles of that invasion swept over my head in Baghdad.

The direct physical results of all these conflicts will remain – and should remain – in my memory until I die. I don’t need to read through my mountain of reporters’ notebooks to remember the Iranian soldiers on the troop train north to Tehran, holding towels and coughing up Saddam’s gas in gobs of blood and mucus as they read the Koran. I need none of my newspaper clippings to recall the father – after an American cluster-bomb attack on Iraq in 2003 – who held out to me what looked like half a crushed loaf of bread but which turned out to be half a crushed baby. Or the mass grave outside Nasiriyah in which I came across the remains of a leg with a steel tube inside and a plastic medical disc still attached to a stump of bone; Saddam’s murderers had taken their victim straight from the hospital where he had his hip replacement to his place of execution in the desert.

I don’t have nightmares about these things. But I remember. The head blasted off the body of a Kosovo Albanian refugee in an American air raid four years earlier, bearded and upright in a bright green field as if a medieval axeman has just cut him down. The corpse of a Kosovo farmer murdered by Serbs, his grave opened by the UN so that he re-emerges from the darkness, bloating in front of us, his belt tightening viciously round his stomach, twice the size of a normal man. The Iraqi soldier at Fao during the Iran – Iraq war who lay curled up like a child in the gun-pit beside me, black with death, a single gold wedding ring glittering on the third finger of his left hand, bright with sunlight and love for a woman who did not know she was a widow. Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could talk about ‘target-rich environments’ and ‘collateral damage’ – that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing – and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.

Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, ‘them’ and ‘us’, victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit. I know an editor who has wearied of hearing me say this, but how many editors have first-hand experience of war?

Ironically, it was a movie that propelled me into journalism. I was twelve years old when I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, a black and white 1940 creaky of patriotism and equally black humour in which Joel McCrea played an American reporter called John Jones – renamed Huntley Haverstock by his New York editor – who is sent in 1939 to cover the approaching war in Europe. He witnesses an assassination, chases Nazi spies in Holland, uncovers Germany’s top agent in London, is shot down in an airliner by a German pocket battleship and survives to scoop the world. He also wins the most gorgeous woman in the movie, clearly an added bonus for such an exciting profession. The film ends in the London Blitz with a radio announcer introducing Haverstock on the air. ‘We have as a guest tonight one of the soldiers of the press,’ he shouts amid the wail of air raid sirens, ‘… one of the little army of historians who are writing history from beside the cannon’s mouth …’

I never looked back. I read my father’s conservative Daily Telegraph from cover to cover, always the foreign reports, lying on the floor beside the fire as my mother pleaded with me to drink my cocoa and go to bed. At school I studied The Times each afternoon. I ploughed through Khrushchev’s entire speech denouncing Stalin’s reign of terror. I won the school Current Affairs prize and never – ever – could anyone shake me from my determination to be a foreign correspondent. When my father suggested I should study law or medicine, I walked from the room. When he asked a family friend what I should do, the friend asked me to imagine I was in a courtroom. Would I want to be the lawyer or the reporter on the press bench, he asked me. I said I would be the reporter and he told my father: ‘Robert is going to be a journalist.’ I wanted to be one of the ‘soldiers of the press’.

I joined the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, then the Sunday Express diary column, where I chased vicars who had run off with starlets. After three years, I begged The Times to hire me and they sent me to Northern Ireland to cover the vicious little conflict that had broken out in that legacy of British colonial rule. Five years later, I became one of those ‘soldiers’ of journalism, a foreign correspondent. I was on a beach at Porto Covo in Portugal in April of 1976 – on holiday from Lisbon where I was covering the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution – when the local postmistress shouted down the cliff that I had a letter to collect. It was from the paper’s foreign editor, Louis Heren. ‘I have some good news for you,’ he wrote. ‘Paul Martin has requested to be moved from the Middle East. His wife has had more than enough, and I don’t blame her. I am offering him the number two job in Paris, Richard Wigg Lisbon – and to you I offer the Middle East. Let me know if you want it … It would be a splendid opportunity for you, with good stories, lots of travel and sunshine …’ In Hitchcock’s thriller, Haverstock’s editor calls him to his office before sending him to the European war and asks him: ‘How would you like to cover the biggest story in the world today?’ Heren’s letter was less dramatic but it meant the same thing.

I was twenty-nine and I was being offered the Middle East – I wondered how King Feisal felt when he was ‘offered’ Iraq or how his brother Abdullah reacted to Winston Churchill’s ‘offer’ of Transjordan. Louis Heren was in the Churchillian mode himself, stubborn, eloquent, and an enjoyer of fine wines as well as himself a former Middle East correspondent. If the stories were ‘good’ in journalistic terms, however, they would also prove to be horrific, the travel dizzying, the ‘sunshine’ as cruel as a sword. And we journalists did not have the protection – or the claims to perfection – of kings. But now I could be one of ‘the little army of historians who are writing history from beside the cannon’s mouth’. How innocent, how naive I was. Yet innocence, if we can keep it, protects a journalist’s integrity. You have to fight to believe in it.

Unlike my father, I went to war as a witness rather than a combatant, an ever more infuriated bystander to be true, but at least I was not one of the impassioned, angry, sometimes demented men who made war. I worshipped the older reporters who had covered the Second World War and its aftermath: Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.

Being a Middle East correspondent is a slightly obscene profession to follow in such circumstances. If the soldiers I watched decided to leave the battlefield, they would – many of them – be shot for desertion, at least court-martialled. The civilians among whom I was to live and work were forced to stay on under bombardments, their families decimated by shellfire and air raids. As citizens of pariah countries, there would be no visas for them. But if I wanted to quit, if I grew sick of the horrors I saw, I could pack my bag and fly home Business Class, a glass of champagne in my hand, always supposing – unlike too many of my colleagues – that I hadn’t been killed. Which is why I cringe each time someone wants to psycho-babble about the ‘trauma’ of covering wars, the need to obtain ‘counselling’ for us well-paid scribes that we may be able to ‘come to terms’ with what we have seen. No counselling for the poor and huddled masses that were left to Iraq’s gas, Iran’s rockets, the cruelty of Serbia’s militias, the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the computerised death suffered by Iraqis during America’s 2003 invasion of their country.

I don’t like the definition ‘war correspondent’. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think ‘war correspondent’ smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism; it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire. Yet war is, paradoxically, a very powerful, unique experience for a journalist, an opportunity to indulge in the only vicarious excitement still free of charge. If you’ve seen the movies, why not experience the real thing? I fear that some of my colleagues have died this way, heading to war on the assumption that it’s still Hollywood, that the heroes don’t die, that you can’t get killed like the others, that they’ll all be Huntley Haverstocks with a scoop and the best girl. But you can get killed. In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.

When I first set out to write this book, I intended it to be a reporter’s chronicle of the Middle East over almost three decades. That is how I wrote my previous book, Pity the Nation, a first-person account of Lebanon’s civil war and two Israeli invasions.* But as I prowled through the shelves of papers in my library, more than 350,000 documents and notebooks and files, some written under fire in my own hand, some punched onto telegram paper by tired Arab telecommunications operators, many pounded out on the clacking telex machines we used before the Internet was invented, I realised that this was going to be more than a chronology of eyewitness reports.

My father, the old soldier of 1918, read my account of the Lebanon war but would not live to see this book. Yet he would always look into the past to understand the present. If only the world had not gone to war in 1914; if only we had not been so selfish in concluding the peace. We victors promised independence to the Arabs and support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Promises are meant to be kept. And so those promises – the Jews naturally thought that their homeland would be in all of Palestine – were betrayed, and the millions of Arabs and Jews of the Middle East are now condemned to live with the results.

In the Middle East, it sometimes feels as if no event in history has a finite end, a crossing point, a moment when we can say: ‘Stop – enough – this is where we will break free.’ I think I understand that time-warp. My father was born in the century before last. I was born in the first half of the last century. Here I am, I tell myself in 1980, watching the Soviet army invade Afghanistan, in 1982 cowering in the Iranian front line opposite Saddam’s legions, in 2003 observing the first American soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division cross the great bridge over the Tigris river. And yet the Battle of the Somme opened just thirty years before I was born. Bill Fisk was in the trenches of France three years after the Armenian genocide but only twenty-eight years before my birth. I would be born within six years of the Battle of Britain, just over a year after Hitler’s suicide. I saw the planes returning to Britain from Korea and remember my mother telling me in 1956 that I was lucky, that had I been older I would have been a British conscript invading Suez.

If I feel this personally, it is because I have witnessed events that, over the years, can only be defined as an arrogance of power. The Iranians used to call the United States the ‘centre of world arrogance’, and I would laugh at this, but I have begun to understand what it means. After the Allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father’s war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just 17 months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career – in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad – watching the peoples within those borders burn. America invaded Iraq not for Saddam Hussein’s mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – which had long ago been destroyed – but to change the map of the Middle East, much as my father’s generation had done more than eighty years earlier. Even as it took place, Bill Fisk’s war was helping to produce the century’s first genocide – that of a million and a half Armenians – laying the foundations for a second, that of the Jews of Europe.

This book is also about torture and executions. Perhaps our work as journalists does open the door of the occasional cell. Perhaps we do sometimes save a soul from the hangman’s noose. But over the years there has been a steadily growing deluge of letters – both to myself and to the editor of the Independent – in which readers, more thoughtful and more despairing than ever before, plead to know how they can make their voice heard when democratic governments seem no longer inclined to represent those who elected them. How, these readers ask, can they prevent a cruel world from poisoning the lives of their children? ‘How can I help them?’ a British woman living in Germany wrote to me after the Independent published a long article of mine about the raped Muslim women of Gacko in Bosnia – women who had received no international medical aid, no psychological help, no kindness two years after their violation.

I suppose, in the end, we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: ‘We didn’t know – no one told us.’ Amira Hass, the brilliant Israeli journalist on Ha’aretz newspaper whose reports on the occupied Palestinian territories have outshone anything written by non-Israeli reporters, discussed this with me more than two years ago. I was insisting that we had a vocation to write the first pages of history but she interrupted me. ‘No, Robert, you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Our job is to monitor the centres of power.’ And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority – all authority – especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.

But can we perform that task? This book will not provide an answer. My life as a journalist has been a great adventure. It still is. Yet looking through these pages after months of writing, I find they are filled with accounts of pain and injustice and horror, the sins of fathers visited upon their children. They are also about genocide. I used to argue, hopelessly I’m sure, that every reporter should carry a history book in his back pocket. In 1992, I was in Sarajevo and once, as Serb shells whiffled over my head, I stood upon the very paving stone upon which Gavrilo Princip stood as he fired the fatal shot that sent my father to the trenches of the First World War. And of course the shots were still being fired in Sarajevo in 1992. It was as if history was a gigantic echo chamber. That was the year in which my father died. This is therefore the story of his generation. And of mine.

Beirut, June 2005

CHAPTER ONE
‘One of Our Brothers Had a Dream …’

They combine a mad love of country with an equally mad indifference to life, their own as well as others. They are cunning, unscrupulous, inspired.

STEPHEN FISHER in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940)

I knew it would be like this. On 19 March 1997, outside the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad with its manicured lawns and pink roses, an Afghan holding a Kalashnikov rifle invited me to travel in a car out of town. The highway to Kabul that evening was no longer a road but a mass of rocks and crevasses above the roaring waters of a great river. A vast mountain chain towered above us. The Afghan smiled at me occasionally but did not talk. I knew what his smile was supposed to say. Trust me. But I didn’t. I smiled back the rictus of false friendship. Unless I saw a man I recognised – an Arab rather than an Afghan – I would watch this road for traps, checkpoints, gunmen who were there to no apparent purpose. Even inside the car, I could hear the river as it sloshed through gulleys and across wide shoals of grey stones and poured over the edge of cliffs. Trust Me steered the car carefully around the boulders and I admired the way his bare left foot eased the clutch of the vehicle up and down as a man might gently urge a horse to clamber over a rock.

A benevolent white dust covered the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared it the desolation took on a hard, unforgiving, dun-coloured uniformity. The track must have looked like this, I thought to myself, when Major-General William Elphinstone led his British army to disaster almost 150 years ago. The Afghans had annihilated one of the greatest armies of the British empire on this very stretch of road, and high above me were villages where old men still remembered the stories of great-grandfathers who had seen the English die in their thousands. The stones of Gandamak, they claim, were made black by the blood of the English dead. The year 1842 marked one of the greatest defeats of British arms. No wonder we preferred to forget the First Afghan War. But Afghans don’t forget. ‘Farangiano,’ the driver shouted and pointed down into the gorge and grinned at me. ‘Foreigners.’ ‘Angrezi.’ ‘English.’ ‘Jang.’ ‘War.’ Yes, I got the point. ‘Irlanda,’ I replied in Arabic. ‘Ana min Irlanda.’ I am from Ireland. Even if he understood me, it was a lie. Educated in Ireland I was, but in my pocket was a small black British passport in which His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs required in the name of Her Majesty that I should be allowed ‘to pass freely without let or hindrance’ on this perilous journey. A teenage Taliban had looked at my passport at Jalalabad airport two days earlier, a boy soldier of maybe fourteen who held the document upside down, stared at it and clucked his tongue and shook his head in disapproval.

It had grown dark and we were climbing, overtaking trucks and rows of camels, the beasts turning their heads towards our lights in the gloom. We careered past them and I could see the condensation of their breath floating over the road. Their huge feet were picking out the rocks with infinite care and their eyes, when they caught the light, looked like dolls’ eyes. Two hours later, we stopped on a stony hillside and, after a few minutes, a pick-up truck came bouncing down the rough shale of the mountain.

An Arab in Afghan clothes came towards the car. I recognised him at once from our last meeting in a ruined village. ‘I am sorry, Mr Robert, but I must give you the first search,’ he said, prowling through my camera bag and newspapers. And so we set off up the track that Osama bin Laden built during his jihad against the Russian army in the early 1980s, a terrifying, slithering, two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed the cold mountain. ‘When you believe in jihad, it is easy,’ he said, fighting with the steering wheel as stones scuttered from the tyres, tumbling down the precipice into the clouds below. From time to time, lights winked at us from far away in the darkness. ‘Our brothers are letting us know they see us,’ he said.

After an hour, two armed Arabs – one with his face covered in a kuffiah scarf, eyes peering at us through spectacles, holding an anti-tank rocket-launcher over his right shoulder – came screaming from behind two rocks. ‘Stop! Stop!’ As the brakes were jammed on, I almost hit my head on the windscreen. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ the bespectacled man said, putting down his rocket-launcher. He pulled a metal detector from the pocket of his combat jacket, the red light flicking over my body in another search. The road grew worse as we continued, the jeep skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights playing across the chasms on either side. ‘Toyota is good for jihad,’ my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising logo the Toyota company would probably forgo.

There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools. Osama bin Laden knew how to build his wartime roads; many an ammunition truck and tank had ground its way up here during the titanic struggle against the Russian army. Now the man who led those guerrillas – the first Arab fighter in the battle against Moscow – was back again in the mountains he knew. There were more Arab checkpoints, more shrieked orders to halt. One very tall man in combat uniform and wearing shades carefully patted my shoulders, body, legs and looked into my face. Salaam aleikum, I said. Peace be upon you. Every Arab I had ever met replied Aleikum salaam to this greeting. But not this one. There was something cold about this man. Osama bin Laden had invited me to meet him in Afghanistan, but this was a warrior without the minimum courtesy. He was a machine, checking out another machine.

It had not always been this way. Indeed, the first time I met Osama bin Laden, the way could not have been easier. Back in December 1993, I had been covering an Islamic summit in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum when a Saudi journalist friend of mine, Jamal Kashoggi, walked up to me in the lobby of my hotel. Kashoggi, a tall, slightly portly man in a long white dishdash robe, led me by the shoulder outside the hotel. ‘There is someone I think you should meet,’ he said. Kashoggi is a sincere believer – woe betide anyone who regards his round spectacles and roguish sense of humour as a sign of spiritual laxity – and I guessed at once to whom he was referring. Kashoggi had visited bin Laden in Afghanistan during his war against the Russian army. ‘He has never met a Western reporter before,’ he announced. ‘This will be interesting.’ Kashoggi was indulging in a little applied psychology. He wanted to know how bin Laden would respond to an infidel. So did I.

Bin Laden’s story was as instructive as it was epic. When the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi royal family – encouraged by the CIA – sought to provide the Afghans with an Arab legion, preferably led by a Saudi prince, who would lead a guerrilla force against the Russians. Not only would he disprove the popularly held and all too accurate belief that the Saudi leadership was effete and corrupt, he could re-establish the honourable tradition of the Gulf Arab warrior, heedless of his own life in defending the umma, the community of Islam. True to form, the Saudi princes declined this noble mission. Bin Laden, infuriated at both their cowardice and the humiliation of the Afghan Muslims at the hands of the Soviets, took their place and, with money and machinery from his own construction company, set off on his own personal jihad.

A billionaire businessman and himself a Saudi, albeit of humbler Yemeni descent, in the coming years he would be idolised by both Saudis and millions of other Arabs, the stuff of Arab schoolboy legend from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. Not since the British glorified Lawrence of Arabia had an adventurer been portrayed in so heroic, so influential a role. Egyptians, Saudis, Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Algerians, Syrians and Palestinians made their way to the Pakistani border city of Peshawar to fight alongside bin Laden. But when the Afghan mujahedin guerrillas and bin Laden’s Arab legion had driven the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Afghans turned upon each other with wolflike and tribal venom. Sickened by this perversion of Islam – original dissension within the umma led to the division of Sunni and Shia Muslims – bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.

But his journey of spiritual bitterness was not over. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he once more offered his services to the Saudi royal family. They did not need to invite the United States to protect the place of the two holiest shrines of Islam, he argued. Mecca and Medina, the cities in which the Prophet Mohamed received and recited God’s message, should only be defended by Muslims. Bin Laden would lead his ‘Afghans’, his Arab mujahedin, against the Iraqi army inside Kuwait and drive them from the emirate. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia preferred to put his trust in the Americans. So as the US 82nd Airborne Division arrived in the north-eastern Saudi city of Dhahran and deployed in the desert scarcely 400 miles from the city of Medina – the place of the Prophet’s refuge and of the first Islamic society – bin Laden abandoned the corruption of the House of Saud to bestow his generosity on another ‘Islamic Republic’: Sudan.

Our journey north from Khartoum lay though a landscape of white desert and ancient, unexplored pyramids, dark, squat Pharaonic tombs smaller than those of Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus at Giza. Though it was December, a sharp, superheated breeze moved across the desert, and when Kashoggi tired of the air conditioning and opened his window, it snapped at his Arab headdress. ‘The people like bin Laden here,’ he said, in much the way that one might comment approvingly of a dinner host. ‘He’s got his business here and his construction company and the government likes him. He helps the poor.’ I could understand all this. The Prophet Mohamed, orphaned at an early age, had been obsessed by the poor in sixth-century Arabia, and generosity to those who lived in poverty was one of the most attractive characteristics of Islam. Bin Laden’s progress from ‘holy’ warrior to public benefactor might allow him to walk in the Prophet’s footsteps. He had just completed building a new road from the Khartoum – Port Sudan highway to the tiny desert village of Almatig in northern Sudan, using the same bulldozers he had employed to construct the guerrilla trails of Afghanistan; many of his labourers were the same fighters who had been his comrades in the battle against the Soviet Union. The US State Department took a predictably less charitable view of bin Laden’s beneficence. It accused Sudan of being a ‘sponsor of international terrorism’ and bin Laden himself of operating ‘terrorist training camps’ in the Sudanese desert.

But when Kashoggi and I arrived in Almatig, there was Osama bin Laden in his gold-fringed robe, sitting beneath the canopy of a tent before a crowd of admiring villagers and guarded by the loyal Arab mujahedin who fought alongside him in Afghanistan. Bearded, silent figures – unarmed, but never more than a few yards from the man who recruited them, trained them and then dispatched them to destroy the Soviet army – they watched unsmiling as the Sudanese villagers lined up to thank the Saudi businessman who was about to complete the road linking their slums to Khartoum for the first time in history.

My first impression was of a shy man. With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, he would avert his eyes when the village leaders addressed him. He seemed ill-at-ease with gratitude, incapable of responding with a full smile when children in miniature chadors danced in front of him and preachers admired his wisdom. ‘We have been waiting for this road through all the revolutions in Sudan,’ a bearded sheikh announced. ‘We waited until we had given up on everybody – and then Osama bin Laden came along.’ I noticed how bin Laden, head still bowed, peered up at the old man, acknowledging his age but unhappy that he should be sitting at ease in front of him, a young man relaxing before his elders. He was even more unhappy at the sight of a Westerner standing a few feet away from him, and from time to time he would turn his head to look at me, not with malevolence but with grave suspicion.

Kashoggi put his arms around him. Bin Laden kissed him on both cheeks, one Muslim to another, both acknowledging the common danger they had endured together in Afghanistan. Jamal Kashoggi must have brought the foreigner for a reason. That is what bin Laden was thinking. For as Kashoggi spoke, bin Laden looked over his shoulder at me, occasionally nodding. ‘Robert, I want to introduce you to Sheikh Osama,’ Kashoggi half-shouted through children’s songs. Bin Laden was a tall man and he realised that this was an advantage when he shook hands with the English reporter. Salaam aleikum. His hands were firm, not strong, but, yes, he looked like a mountain man. The eyes searched your face. He was lean and had long fingers and a smile which – while it could never be described as kind – did not suggest villainy. He said we might talk, at the back of the tent where we could avoid the shouting of the children.

Looking back now, knowing what we know, understanding the monstrous beast-figure he would become in the collective imagination of the world, I search for some clue, the tiniest piece of evidence, that this man could inspire an act that would change the world for ever – or, more to the point, allow an American president to persuade his people that the world was changed for ever. Certainly his formal denial of ‘terrorism’ gave no hint. The Egyptian press was claiming that bin Laden had brought hundreds of his Arab fighters with him to Sudan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum was suggesting that some of the Arab ‘Afghans’ whom this Saudi entrepreneur had flown to Sudan were now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Bin Laden was well aware of this. ‘The rubbish of the media and embassies,’ he called it. ‘I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn’t possibly do this job.’

The ‘job’ was certainly ambitious: not just the Almatig connection but a brand-new highway stretching all the way from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of 1,200 kilometres on the old road, now shortened to 800 kilometres by the new bin Laden route that would turn the distance from the capital into a mere day’s journey. In a country that was despised by Saudi Arabia for its support of Saddam Hussein after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait almost as much as it was by the United States, bin Laden had turned the equipment of war to the construction of a pariah state. I did wonder why he could not have done the same to the blighted landscape of Afghanistan, but he refused at first to talk about his war, sitting at the back of the tent and cleaning his teeth with a piece of mishwak wood. But talk he eventually did about a war that he helped to win for the Afghans whom the Americans and the Saudis – and the Pakistanis – all supported against the Russians. He wanted to talk. He thought he was going to be interrogated about ‘terrorism’ and realised that he was being asked about Afghanistan and – despite all the reserve and suspicion he felt towards a foreigner – that he wished to explain how his experience there had shaped his life.

‘What I lived through in two years there,’ he said, ‘I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere. When the invasion of Afghanistan started, I was enraged and went there at once – I arrived within days, before the end of 1979, and I went on going back for nine years. I felt outraged that an injustice had been committed against the people of Afghanistan. It made me realise that people who take power in the world use their power under different names to subvert others and to force their opinions on them. Yes, I fought there, but my fellow Muslims did much more than I. Many of them died and I am still alive.’ The Russian invasion is often dated to January 1980, but the first Soviet special forces troops entered Kabul before Christmas of 1979 when they – or their Afghan satellites – killed the incumbent communist President Hafizullah Amin and established Babrak Karmal as their puppet in Kabul. Osama bin Laden had moved fast.

With his Iraqi engineer Mohamed Saad, who was now building the highway to Port Sudan, bin Laden blasted massive tunnels into the Zazai mountains of Pakhtia province for guerrilla hospitals and arms dumps, then cut a mujahedin dirt trail across Afghanistan to within 25 kilometres of Kabul, a remarkable feat of engineering that the Russians could never destroy. But what lessons had bin Laden drawn from the war against the Russians? He was wounded five times and 500 of his Arab fighters were killed in combat with the Soviets – their graves lie just inside the Afghan border at Torkham – and even bin Laden was not immortal, was he?

‘I was never afraid of death,’ he replied. ‘As Muslims, we believe that when we die, we go to heaven.’ He was no longer irritating his teeth with the piece of mishwak wood but talking slowly and continuously, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Before a battle, God sends us seqina – tranquillity. Once I was only thirty metres from the Russians and they were trying to capture me. I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep. This experience of seqina has been written about in our earliest books. I saw a 120-millimetre mortar shell land in front of me, but it did not blow up. Four more bombs were dropped from a Russian plane on our headquarters but they did not explode. We beat the Soviet Union. The Russians fled … My time in Afghanistan was the most important experience of my life.’

But what of the Arab mujahedin whom he took to Afghanistan – members of a guerrilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States to fight the Russians, and who were forgotten by their mentors when the war was over? Bin Laden seemed ready for the question. ‘Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help,’ he said. ‘When my mujahedin were victorious and the Russians were driven out, differences started so I returned to road construction in Taif and Abha. I brought back the equipment I had used to build tunnels and roads for the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Yes, I helped some of my comrades come here after the war.’ How many? Osama bin Laden shook his head. ‘I don’t want to say. But they are here with me now, they are working right here, building this road to Port Sudan.’

A month earlier, I had been on assignment in the Bosnian war and I told bin Laden that Bosnian Muslim fighters in the town of Travnik had mentioned his name to me. This awoke his interest. Each time I saw bin Laden, he was fascinated to hear not what his enemies thought of him but of what Muslim ulema and militants said of him. ‘I feel the same about Bosnia,’ he said. ‘But the situation there does not provide the same opportunities as Afghanistan. A small number of mujahedin have gone to fight in Bosnia-Hercegovina but the Croats won’t allow the mujahedin in through Croatia as the Pakistanis did with Afghanistan.’ But wasn’t it a bit of an anticlimax to be fighting for Islam and God in Afghanistan and end up road-building in Sudan? Bin Laden was now more studied in his use of words. ‘They like this work and so do I. This is a great project which we are achieving for the people here; it helps the Muslims and improves their lives.’

This was the moment when I noticed that other men, Sudanese who were very definitely not among bin Laden’s former comrades, had gathered to listen to our conversation. Bin Laden, of course, had been aware of their presence long before me. What did he think about the war in Algeria, I asked? But a man in a green suit calling himself Mohamed Moussa – he claimed to be Nigerian although he was a Sudanese government security agent – tapped me on the arm. ‘You have asked more than enough questions,’ he announced. So how about a picture? Bin Laden hesitated – something he rarely did – and I sensed that prudence was fighting with vanity. In the end, he stood on the new road in his gold-fringed robe and smiled wanly at my camera for two pictures, then raised his left hand like a president telling the press when their time was up. At which point Osama bin Laden went off to inspect his highway.

But what was the nature of the latest ‘Islamic Republic’ to capture bin Laden’s imagination? He maintained a home in Khartoum – he would keep a small apartment in the Saudi city of Jeddah until the Saudis themselves deprived him of his citizenship – and lived in Sudan with his four wives, one of them only a teenager. His bin Laden company – not to be confused with the larger construction business run by his cousins – was paid in Sudanese currency which was then used to purchase sesame, corn and sunflower seeds for export. Profits did not seem to be bin Laden’s top priority. Was Sudan?

Certainly it boasted another potential Islamic ‘monster’ for the West. Hassan Abdullah Turabi, the enemy of Western ‘tyranny’, a ‘devil’ according to the Egyptian newspapers, was supposedly the Ayatollah of Khartoum, the scholarly leader of the National Islamic Front which provided the nervous system for General Omar Bashir’s military government. Indeed, Bashir’s palace boasted the very staircase upon which General Charles Gordon had been cut down in 1885 by followers of Mohamed Ahmed ibn Abdullah, the Mahdi, who like bin Laden also demanded a return to Islamic ‘purity’. But when I went to talk to Turabi in his old English office, he sat birdlike on a chair, perched partly on his left leg that was hooked beneath him, his white robe adorned with a tiny patterned scarf, hands fluttering in front of a black beard that was now flecked with white. He it was who had organised the ‘Popular Arab and Islamic Conference’ which I had ostensibly arrived to cover, and within the vast conference centre in Khartoum I found gathered every shade of mutually hostile Islamist, Christian, nationalist and intégriste, all bound by Turabi’s plea of moderation. Shias, Sunnis, Arabs, non-Arabs, Yassir Arafat’s Fatah movement and all of his Arab enemies – Hamas, Hizballah, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, the FIS as they called themselves under their French acronym – the whole shebang, along with representatives of the Pakistan People’s Party, the an-Nahda party of Tunisia, Afghans of all persuasions and an envoy from Mohamed Aideed of Somalia who was himself ‘too busy to come’ – as a conference official discreetly put it – because he was being hunted by the American military in Mogadishu.

They represented every contradiction of the Arab world in a city whose British colonial architecture – of low-roofed arched villas amid bougainvillea, of tired, hot government offices and mouldering police stations – existed alongside equally dated revolutionary slogans. The waters of the Blue and White Niles joined here, the permanent way-station between the Arab world and tropical Africa, and Sudan’s transition through thirteen years of nationalist rule – the mahdiya – sixty years of British-dominated government from Cairo and almost forty years of fractious independence gave the country a debilitated, exhausted, unresolved identity. Was it Islamic – after independence, the umma party was run by the son and grandsons of the Mahdi – or did the military regimes that took over after 1969 mean that Sudan was for ever socialist?

Turabi was trying to act as intermediary between Arafat, who had just signed the Oslo accord with Israel, and his antagonists in the Arab world – which meant just about everybody – and might have been making an unsubtle attempt to wipe Sudan off Washington’s ‘state terrorism’ list by persuading Hamas and Islamic Jihad to support Arafat. ‘I personally know Arafat very well,’ Turabi insisted. ‘He is a close friend of mine. He was an Islamist once, you know, and then slowly moved into the Arab “club”… He spoke to me before he signed [the accord with Israel]. He came here to Sudan. And I am now putting his case to the others – not as something that is right, but as something of necessity. What could Arafat do? He ran out of money. His army stopped. There were the refugees, the 10,000 prisoners in Israeli jails. Even a municipality is better than nothing.’

But if ‘Palestine’ was to be a municipality, where did that leave the Arabs? In need, surely, of a leader who did not speak in this language of surrender; in need of a warrior leader, someone who had proved he could defeat a superpower. Was this not what the Mahdi had believed himself to be? Did the Mahdi not ask his fighters on the eve of their attack on Khartoum whether they would advance against General Gordon even if two-thirds of them should perish? But like almost every other Arab state, Sudan recreated itself in a looking glass for the benefit of its own leaders. Khartoum was the ‘capital city of virtues’, or so the large street banners claimed it to be that December. Sometimes the word ‘virtues’ was substituted with the word ‘values’, which was not quite the same thing.

But then nothing in Sudan was what it seemed. The railhead, broiling in the midday heat, did not suggest an Islamic Republic in the making. Nor did the squads of soldiers in jungle green drowsing in the shade of a broken station building while two big artillery pieces stood on a freight platform, waiting to be loaded onto a near-derelict train for the civil war in the south. Britain had long favoured the separate development of the Christian south of Sudan from which the Arabic language and Muslim religion were largely excluded – until independence, when London suddenly decided that Sudan’s territorial integrity was more important than the separate development which they had so long encouraged. The minority in the south rebelled and their insurrection was now the central and defining feature of Sudanese life.

The authorities in Khartoum would one day have to explain a detailed list of civil war atrocities which had been handed to the United Nations in 1993 and which were to form the subject of a UN report the following year. Eyewitness testimonies spoke of rape, pillage and murder in the southern province of Bahr al-Gazal as well as the continuing abduction of thousands of southern children on the capital’s streets. According to the documents, the most recent atrocities occurred the previous July when the Sudanese army drove a railway train loaded with locally hired militiamen through territory held by the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Under the orders of an officer referred to in the papers as Captain Ginat – commander of the People’s Defence Force camp in the town of Muglad in southern Kordofan and a member of the Sudanese government council in the southern city of Wo – the militias were let loose on Dinka tribal villages along the length of the railway, destroying every village to a depth of ten miles on each side of the track, killing the men, raping the women and stealing thousands of head of cattle. Evidence taken from tribesmen who fled the village without their families included details of the slaughter of a Christian wedding party of 300 people near the Lol river. The documents the UN had obtained also alleged that government troops, along with loyal tribal militias, massacred large numbers of southern Dinkas in a displaced persons’ camp at Meiran the previous February.

This was not, therefore, a country known for its justice or civil rights or liberty. True, delegates to the Islamic summit were encouraged to speak their minds. Mustafa Cerić, the Imam of Bosnia whose people were enduring a genocide at the hands of their Serb neighbours, was eloquent in his condemnation of the UN’s peacekeeping intervention in his country. I had met him in Sarajevo a year earlier when he had accused the West of imposing an arms embargo on Bosnian forces ‘solely because we are Muslims’, and his cynicism retained all its integrity in Khartoum. ‘You sent your English troops and we thank you for that,’ he told me. ‘But now you will not give us arms to defend ourselves against the Chetniks [Serbs] because you say this will spread the war and endanger the soldiers you sent to help us.’ Cerić was a man who could make others feel the need for humility.

Thus even Sudan’s summit had become a symbol of the humiliation of Muslims, of Arabs, of all the revolutionary Islamists and nationalists and generals who dominated the ‘modern’ Middle East. The Hizballah delegates from Lebanon took me aside one night to reveal the fragility of the regime. ‘We were invited to dinner on a boat on the Nile with Turabi,’ one of them told me. ‘We cruised up and down the river for a while and I noticed the government guards on both banks watching us. Then suddenly there was a burst of gunfire from a wedding party. We could hear the music of the wedding. But Turabi was so frightened that he hurled himself from the table onto the floor and stayed there for several minutes. This is not a stable place.’ Nor was the façade of free speech going to lift the blanket of isolation which the United States and its allies had thrown over Sudan, or protect its more notorious guests.

Two months after I met bin Laden, gunmen burst into his Khartoum home and tried to assassinate him. The Sudanese government suspected the potential killers were paid by the CIA. Clearly, this was no place for a latterday Mahdi. Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship later the same year. The Saudis and then the Americans demanded bin Laden’s extradition. Sudan meekly handed its other well-known fugitive, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez – ‘Carlos the Jackal’, who had seized eleven oil ministers at the Opec conference in Vienna in 1975 and organised an assault on the French embassy in The Hague – to the French. But ‘Carlos’ was a revolutionary gone to seed, a plump alcoholic now rotten enough to be betrayed. Bin Laden was in a different category. His followers were blamed for bomb explosions in Riyadh in November of 1995 and then at a US barracks at al-Khobar the following year which in all killed twenty-four Americans and two Indians. In early 1996, he was permitted to leave for the country of his choice – and that was bound to be the one refuge in which he had discovered so much about his own faith.

And so it was that one hot evening in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. ‘Mr Robert, a friend you met in Sudan wants to see you,’ said a voice in English but with an Arabic accent. I thought at first he meant Kashoggi, though I had first met Jamal in 1990, long before going to Khartoum. ‘No, no, Mr Robert, I mean the man you interviewed. Do you understand?’ Yes, I understood. And where could I meet this man? ‘The place where he is now,’ came the reply. I knew that bin Laden was rumoured to have returned to Afghanistan but there was no confirmation of this. So how do I reach him, I asked? ‘Go to Jalalabad – you will be contacted.’ I took the man’s number. He was in London.

So was the only Afghan embassy that would give me a visa. I was not in a hurry. It seemed to me that if the bin Ladens of this world wished to be interviewed, the Independent should not allow itself to be summoned to their presence. It was a journalistic risk. There were a thousand reporters who wanted to interview Osama bin Laden. But I thought he would hold more respect for a journalist who did not rush cravenly to him within hours of his request. I also had a more pressing concern. Although the secret services of the Middle East and Pakistan had acted for the CIA in helping the Afghan mujahedin against the Russians, many of them were now at war with bin Laden’s organisation, which they blamed for Islamist insurgencies in their own countries. Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia all now suspected bin Laden’s hand in their respective insurrections. What if the invitation was a trick, a set-up in which I would unwittingly lead the Egyptian police – or the infinitely corrupt Pakistani ISI, the ubiquitously named Interservices Intelligence organisation – to bin Laden? Even worse from my point of view, what if this was an attempt to lure a reporter who knew bin Laden to his death – and then blame the killing on Islamists? How many reporters would set off to interview bin Laden after that? So I called back the contact in London. Would he meet me at my hotel?

The receptionist at the Sheraton Belgravia called my room in the early evening. ‘There is a gentleman waiting for you in the lobby,’ he said. The Belgravia is the smallest Sheraton in the world, and if its prices don’t match that diminutive title, its wood-panelled, marble-floored lobby was as usual that evening the preserve of elderly tea-sipping ladies, waistcoated businessmen with silver hair slightly over the collar and elegantly dressed young women in black stockings. But when I reached the lobby, I noticed a man standing by the door. He was trying to look insignificant but he wore a huge beard, a long white Arab robe and plastic sandals over naked feet. Could this, perhaps, be bin Laden’s man?

He was. The man ran the London end of the ‘Committee of Advice and Reform’, a Saudi opposition group inspired by bin Laden which regularly issued long and tiresome tracts against the corruption of the Saudi royal family, and he dutifully sat down in the Belgravia lobby – to the astonishment of the elderly ladies – to explain the iniquitous behaviour of the House of Saud and the honourable nature of Osama bin Laden. I did not believe the man I was talking to was a violent personality. Indeed, within two years he would personally express to me his distress – and rupture – with bin Laden when the latter declared war on ‘Americans, “Crusaders” and Jews’. But in 1996, the Saudi hero of the Afghan war could do no wrong. ‘He is a sincere man, Mr Robert. He wants to talk to you. There is nothing to fear.’ This was the line I wanted to hear; whether I believed it was another matter. I told the man I would check into the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad.

The most convenient flight into eastern Afghanistan was from India, but Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight FG315 from New Delhi to Jalalabad was not the kind that carries an in-flight magazine. The female passengers were shrouded in the all-enveloping burqa, the cabin crew were mostly bearded and the cardboard packet of litchee juice was stained with mud. The chief steward walked to my seat, crouched in the aisle beside me and – as if revealing a long-held military secret – whispered into my ear that ‘We will be flying at 31,000 feet.’ If only we had. Approaching the old Soviet military airstrip at Jalalabad, the pilot made an almost 180-degree turn that sent the blood pumping into our feet, and touched down on the first inch of narrow tarmac – giving him just enough braking power to stop the jet a foot from the end of the runway. Given the rusting Soviet radar dishes and the wrecked, upended Antonov off the apron, I could understand why Jalalabad Arrivals lacked the amenities of Heathrow or JFK.

When I trudged through the heat with my bags, I found that the bullet-scarred terminal building was empty. No Immigration. No Customs. Not a single man with a rubber stamp. Just six young and bearded Afghans, four of them holding rifles, who stared at me with a mixture of tiredness and suspicion. No amount of cheery Salaam aleikums would elicit more than a muttering in Pushtu from the six men. After all, what was this alien, hatless creature doing here in Afghanistan with his brand-new camera-bag and his canvas hold-all of shirts and newspaper clippings? ‘Taxi?’ I asked them. And they looked away from me, back at the big blue and white aircraft which had jetted so dangerously into town as if it held the secret of my presence.

I hitched a ride with a French aid worker. They seemed to be everywhere. Jalalabad was a dusty brown city of mud-and-wood houses, unpaved earthen streets and ochre walls with the characteristic smell of charcoal and horse manure. There were donkeys and stallions and Indian-style ‘velo’ rickshaws and Victorian bicycles and the occasional clapboard shop-front, Dodge City transferred to the subcontinent. Khartoum had nothing on this. Two of Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s local guerrilla commanders had turned up for their haircut at the same time the previous month and shot dead the barber and a couple of other men before deciding who was first in the queue for his regular haircut. A third of all the children in Jalalabad hospitals were the victims of joy-shooting at weddings. It was a city ripe for Islamic discipline.

But it didn’t put the agencies off. There was SAVE and the World Food Programme, UNDP, Médecins Sans Frontières, Madera, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Emergency Field Unit, the Sandy Gall clinic for orphaned children, the Swedish Committee for Afghans, the UNHCR and a German agronomist agency; and they were only the first few offices signposted off the highway to Kabul. Seven years after the last Soviet troops had left Afghanistan, four years after the communist government of President Mohamed Najibullah had been overthrown, the Afghan mujahedin victors of the war were slaughtering each other in Kabul. So what was the point? Were the agencies here to assuage our guilt at abandoning the Afghan people once they had served their purpose in driving the Russians from their land? The United Nations had a force of just two soldiers observing the chaos in Afghanistan – a Swede and an Irishman, both of whom stayed at the old Spinghar Hotel.

The Spinghar is a relic of the Afghanistan hippy trail, a high-ceilinged hotel of the 1950s with large rose gardens and tall palm trees which, even in winter, bask in the warmth of the winds coming up from the valley of the Indus. But in the torment of the summer heat of 1996 – it is now mid-July – a roaring air conditioner plays Catch-22 with me: to cool my empty double room upstairs, I turn it on, but its tigerlike engine vibrates so loudly that sleep is impossible. So I switch it off. Yet when I turn to the only book beside my bed – Plain Tales from the Raj – the sweat runs down my arms and glues my fingers to the pages.

Then a rustle, a kind of faint, rasping sound, comes from the silent conditioner. I sit up and, five feet from my face, I see the dragon’s head of a giant lizard looking at me from the cooled bars of the machine. When I raise my hand, the head disappears for a moment. Then it is back, a miniature armoured brontosaurus face that is followed now by a long, rubbery torso, grey-green in the dim afternoon sunlight, and big sucking feet that grip the plastic air-conditioning vents. Like an old silent film, it moves in jerks. One moment, I see its head. Then at shutter’s speed, half its length of heavily-breathing rubberiness is out of the machine. A moment later, the whole half foot of creature is suspended on the curtain above my bed, swaying on the material, alien and disturbing, looking back at me over its fortresslike shoulder. What is it doing here? I ask myself. Then it scuttles out of sight into the drapery.

And of course, I switch on the air conditioner and swamp the room with a rush of ear-freezing cold air. And I curl up on the further bed and watch for movement at the top of the curtain rod. I am frightened of this thing and it is frightened of me. And only after half an hour do I realise that the bright screws on the curtain rail are its beady eyes. With rapt attention, we are watching each other. Are others watching me? I wake up next morning, exhausted, drenched in perspiration. The boy at the reception desk in a long shirt and a traditional pakul hat says that no one has called for me. Bin Laden has friends in Jalalabad, the tribal leaders know him, protect him, and even the man I met in London said that I should let ‘Engineer Mahmoud’ know that I have arrived in Afghanistan to see ‘Sheikh Osama’.

Engineer Mahmoud turns out to work for the city’s Drug Control and Development Unit in a back street of Jalalabad. I might have expected the purist bin Laden to be involved with the eradication of drugs. In 1996, Afghanistan was the world’s leading supplier of illicit opium, producing at least 2,200 metric tonnes of opium – about 80 per cent of western Europe’s heroin. Afghans are not immune. You can see them in the Jalalabad bazaar, young men with withered black arms and sunken eyes, the addicts returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan, still-living witnesses to the corruption of heroin. ‘It’s good for the Afghan people to see them,’ a Western aid official says coldly. ‘Now they can see the effect of all those poppy fields they grow – and if they are as Islamic as they claim they are, maybe they’ll stop producing opium.’ He smiles grimly. ‘Or maybe not.’

Probably not. The eastern Nangarhar province is now responsible for 80 per cent of the country’s poppy cultivation – for 64 per cent of western Europe’s heroin – and laboratories have now been transferred from Pakistan to a frontier strip inside Afghanistan, producing hundreds of kilos of heroin a day, fortified with anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles to withstand a military offensive. Local government officials in Jalalabad claim to have eradicated 30,000 hectares of opium and hashish fields over the past two years, but their efforts – brave enough given the firepower of the drug producers – seem as hopeless as the world’s attempts to find a solution to drug abuse.

In Engineer Mahmoud’s office, the problem is simple enough. A map on the wall depicts Nangarhar with a rash of red pimples along its eastern edge, a pox of opium fields and laboratories that are targets for Mahmoud’s armed commandos. ‘We have been eradicating hashish fields, using our weapons to force the farmers to plough up the land,’ he proclaims. ‘We are taking our own bulldozers to plough up some of the poppy fields. We take our guns and rockets with us and the farmers can do nothing to stop our work. Now our shura [council] has called the ulema to lecture the people on the evils of drug production, quoting from the Koran to support their words. And for the first time, we have been able to destroy hashish fields without using force.’ Mahmoud and his ten-strong staff have been heartened by the United Nations’ support for his project. On the open market in Jalalabad, the farmers were receiving a mere $140 for seven kilos of hashish, just over $250 for seven kilos of opium – around the same price they would have received for grain. So the UN provided wheat seeds for those farmers who transferred from drug production, on the grounds that they would make the same profits in the Jalalabad markets.

Only a few months earlier – and here is the strange geography that touched bin Laden’s contacts – Engineer Mahmoud visited Washington. ‘The US drugs prevention authorities took me to their new headquarters – you would not believe how big it is,’ he said. ‘It is half the size of Jalalabad city. And when I went inside, it is very luxurious and has many, many computers. They have all this money there – but none for us who are trying to stop the drug production.’ Engineer Mahmoud’s senior staff received just under $50 a month and his senior assistant, Shamsul Hag, claimed that the drugs unit had to buy 4,000 kilos of maize seed to distribute to farmers the previous month. But the western NGOs in Jalalabad had little time for all this. ‘Haji Qadir, the governor of Jalalabad, went to the UN drugs people in Islamabad,’ one of them said, ‘and told him: “Look, I have destroyed 20,000 hectares of opium fields – now you must help me because the people are waiting for your help.” But it was more complicated than this. Farmers who had never grown poppies began to plant them so they could get free maize seed in return for destroying the fields they had just planted.’ Other aid workers suspected that the farmers were rotating their crops between wheat and drugs each season, the opium sold in return for increased payments, and for weapons that were recently transported in boxes through the Pakistan railway station of Landi Kotal on the Peshawar steam train to the Afghan border.

Poppy cultivation had become an agribusiness and the dealers for the Afghan drug barons now had technical advisers who were visiting Nangarhar to advise on the crop and the product, paying in advance, and so concerned about the health of their workers that they had given them face-masks to wear in the opium factories. Some said they even offered health insurance. This was capitalism on a ruthlessly illegal scale. And when I asked a European UN official how the world could compete with it, he drew in his breath. ‘Legalise drugs!’ he roared. ‘Legalise the lot. It will be the end of the drug barons. They’ll go broke and kill each other. But of course the world will never accept that. So we’ll go on fighting a losing war.’

Engineer Mahmoud would only shrug his shoulders when I repeated this to him. What could he do? I raised the subject of ‘Sheikh Osama’ for the third time. The Sheikh wanted to see me, I repeated. I was not looking for him. I was in Jalalabad at the Sheikh’s request. He was looking for me. ‘So why do you ask me to look for him?’ Engineer Mahmoud asked with devastating logic. This was not a problem of language because Mahmoud spoke excellent English. It was a cocktail of comprehension mixed with several bottles of suspicion. Someone – I did not want to mention the man in London – had told me to contact Mahmoud, I said. Perhaps he could tell the Sheikh that I was at the Spinghar Hotel? Mahmoud looked at me pityingly. ‘What can I do?’ he asked.

I sent a message through the Swedish UN soldier – he was the UN’s sole radio operator as well as one of its only two soldiers in Afghanistan – and he connected me to the only person in the world I really trusted. There had been no contact, I said. Please call bin Laden’s man in London. Next day a radio transmission message arrived, relaying the man’s advice. ‘Tell Robert to make clear he is not there because of his own wish. He is only replying to the wish of our friend. He should make it clear to the Engineer that he is only accepting an invitation. The Engineer can confirm this with our friend … Make it very clear he was invited and did not go on his own. This is the fastest thing. Otherwise he has to wait.’ Back I went to Engineer Mahmoud. He was in good form. In fact he thought it immensely funny, outrageously humorous, that I was waiting for the Sheikh. It was fantastic, laughable, bizarre. Many cups of tea were served. And each time a visitor arrived – a drugs control worker, an official of the local governor, a mendicant with a son in prison on drugs offences – he would be regaled with the story of the bareheaded Englishman who thought he had been invited to Jalalabad and was now waiting and waiting at the Spinghar Hotel.

I returned to the Spinghar in the heat of midday and sat by the lawn in front of the building. I had hidden in the same hotel sixteen years earlier, after Leonid Brezhnev had sent the Soviet army into Afghanistan, when I had smuggled myself down to Jalalabad and watched the Russian armoured columns grinding past the front gates. Their helicopters had thundered over the building, heavy with rockets, and the windows had rattled as they fired their missiles into the Tora Bora mountain range to the north. Now the butterflies played around the batteries of pink roses and the gardeners put down their forks and hoses and unspread their prayer rugs on the grass. It looked a bit like paradise. I drank tea on the lawn and watched the sun moving – rapidly, the movement clear to the naked eye – past the fronds of the palm trees above me. It was 5 July, one of the hottest days of the year. I went to my room and slept.

‘Clack-clack-clack.’ It was as if someone was attacking my head with an ice-pick. ‘Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.’ Ever since I was a child, I had hated these moments; the violent tugging of sheets, the insistent knock on the bedroom door, the screeching voice of the prefect telling me to get up. But this was different. ‘CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.’ I sat up. Someone was banging a set of car keys against my bedroom window. ‘Misssster Robert,’ a voice whispered urgently. ‘Misssster Robert.’ He hissed the word ‘Mister’. Yes, yes, I’m here. ‘Please come downstairs, there is someone to see you.’ It registered only slowly that the man must have climbed the ancient fire escape to reach the window of my room. I dressed, grabbed a coat – I had a feeling we might travel in the night – and almost forgot my old Nikon. I walked as calmly as I could past the reception desk and out into the early afternoon heat.

The man wore a grubby, grey Afghan robe and a small round cotton hat but he was an Arab and he greeted me formally, holding my right hand in both of his. He smiled. He said his name was Mohamed, he was my guide. ‘To see the Sheikh?’ I asked. He smiled but said nothing. I was still worried about a trap. The guide’s name would be Mohamed, wouldn’t it? He would suggest an evening walk. I could hear the later eyewitness evidence. Yes, sir, we saw the English journalist. We saw him meet someone outside the hotel. There was no struggle. He left freely, of his own accord. He walked out of the hotel gates.

I did, too, and followed Mohamed all the way through the dust of Jalalabad’s main street until we arrived next to a group of gunmen in a pick-up truck in the ruins of an old Soviet army base, a place of broken armoured vehicles with a rusting red star on a shattered gateway. There were three men in Afghan hats in the back of the pick-up. One held a Kalashnikov rifle, another clutched a grenade-launcher along with six rockets tied together with Scotch tape. The third nursed a machine gun on his lap, complete with tripod and a belt of ammunition. ‘Mr Robert, these are our guards,’ the driver said quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to set off across the wilds of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province under a white-hot afternoon sun with three bearded guerrillas. A two-way radio hissed and crackled on the shoulder of the driver’s companion as another truckload of Afghan gunmen drove up behind us.

We were about to set off when Mohamed climbed back down from the pick-up along with the driver, walked to a shaded patch of grass and began to pray. For five minutes, the two men lay half-prostrate, facing the distant Kabul Gorge and, beyond that, a far more distant Mecca. We drove off along a broken highway and then turned onto a dirt track by an irrigation canal, the guns in the back of the truck bouncing on the floor, the guards’ eyes peering from behind their chequered scarves. We travelled like that for hours, past half-demolished mud villages and valleys and towering black rocks, a journey across the face of the moon.

Out of the grey heat, there loomed the ghosts of a terrible war, of communism’s last imperial gasp; the overgrown revetments of Soviet army firebases, artillery positions, upended, dust-covered guns and the carcass of a burned-out tank in which no one could have survived. Amid the furnace of the late afternoon, there emerged a whole blitzed town of ancient castellated mud fortresses, their walls shot through with machine-gun bullets and shells. Wild naked children were playing in the ruins. Just the other side of the phantom town, Mohamed’s driver took us off the track and began steering across shale and hard rock, the stones spitting beneath our wheels as we skirted kilometres of fields that were covered in yellow dust. ‘This is a gift from the Russians,’ Mohamed said. ‘You know why there are no people working this ground? Because the Russians sowed it with thousands of mines.’ And so we passed through the dead land.

Once, as the white sun was sliding into the mountains, we stopped for the gunmen on the back to pull watermelons from a field. They scampered back to the trucks and cut them up, the juice dripping through their fingers. By dusk, we had reached a series of cramped earthen villages, old men burning charcoal fires by the track, the shadow of women cowled in the Afghan burqa standing in the alleyways. There were more guerrillas, all bearded, grinning at Mohamed and the driver. It was night before we stopped, in an orchard where wooden sofas had been covered in army blankets piled with belts and webbing and where armed men emerged out of the darkness, all in Afghan clothes and soft woollen flat hats, some holding rifles, others machine guns. They were the Arab mujahedin, the Arab ‘Afghans’ denounced by the presidents and kings of half the Arab world and by the United States of America. Very soon, the world would know them as al-Qaeda.

They came from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait. Two of them wore spectacles, one said he was a doctor. A few of them shook hands in a rather solemn way and greeted me in Arabic. I knew that these men would give their lives for bin Laden, that they thought themselves spiritually pure in a corrupt world, that they were inspired and influenced by dreams which they persuaded themselves came from heaven. Mohamed beckoned me to follow him and we skirted a small river and jumped across a stream until, in the insect-filled darkness ahead, we could see a sputtering paraffin lamp. Beside it sat a tall, bearded man in Saudi robes. Osama bin Laden stood up, his two teenage sons, Omar and Saad, beside him. ‘Welcome to Afghanistan,’ he said.

He was now forty but looked much older than at our last meeting in the Sudanese desert late in 1993. Walking towards me, he towered over his companions, tall, slim, with new wrinkles around those narrow eyes. Leaner, his beard longer but slightly flecked with grey, he had a black waistcoat over his white robe and a red-chequered kuffiah on his head, and he seemed tired. When he asked after my health, I told him I had come a long way for this meeting. ‘So have I,’ he muttered. There was also an isolation about him, a detachment I had not noticed before, as if he had been inspecting his anger, examining the nature of his resentment; when he smiled, his gaze would move towards his sixteen-year-old son Omar – round eyes with dark brows and his own kuffiah – and then off into the hot darkness where his armed men were patrolling the fields. Others were gathering to listen to our conversation. We sat down on a straw mat and a glass of tea was placed beside me.

Just ten days ago, a truck bomb had torn down part of the US Air Force housing complex at al-Khobar in Dhahran, and we were speaking in the shadow of the deaths of the nineteen American soldiers killed there. US Secretary of State Warren Christopher had visited the ruins and predictably promised that America would not be ‘swayed by violence’, that the perpetrators would be hunted down. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who had since lapsed into a state of dementia, had foreseen the possibility of violence when American military forces arrived to ‘defend’ his kingdom in 1990. It was for this very reason that he had, on 6 August that year, extracted a promise from then President George Bush that all US troops would leave his country when the Iraqi threat ended. But the Americans had stayed, claiming that the continued existence of Saddam’s regime – which Bush had chosen not to destroy – still constituted a danger to the Gulf.

Osama bin Laden knew what he wanted to say. ‘Not long ago, I gave advice to the Americans to withdraw their troops from Saudi Arabia. Now let us give some advice to the governments of Britain and France to take their troops out – because what happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar showed that the people who did this have a deep understanding in choosing their targets. They hit their main enemy, which is the Americans. They killed no secondary enemies, nor their brothers in the army or the police in Saudi Arabia … I give this advice to the government of Britain.’ The Americans must leave Saudi Arabia, must leave the Gulf. The ‘evils’ of the Middle East arose from America’s attempt to take over the region and from its support for Israel. Saudi Arabia had been turned into ‘an American colony’.

Bin Laden was speaking slowly and with precision, an Egyptian taking notes in a large exercise book by the lamplight like a Middle Ages scribe. ‘This doesn’t mean declaring war against the West and Western people – but against the American regime which is against every American.’ I interrupted bin Laden. Unlike Arab regimes, I said, the people of the United States elected their government. They would say that their government represents them. He disregarded my comment. I hope he did. For in the years to come, his war would embrace the deaths of thousands of American civilians. ‘The explosion in al-Khobar did not come as a direct reaction to the American occupation,’ he said, ‘but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims, its support of Jews in Palestine and of the massacres of Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon – of Sabra and Chatila and Qana – and of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference.’

Bin Laden had thought this through. The massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist militia allies in 1982 and the slaughter by Israeli artillerymen of 106 Lebanese civilians in a UN camp at Qana less than three months before this meeting with bin Laden were proof to millions of Westerners, let alone Arabs, of Israeli brutality. President Clinton’s ‘anti-terrorism’ conference at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh was regarded by Arabs as a humiliation. Clinton had condemned the ‘terrorism’ of Hamas and the Lebanese Hizballah, but not the violence of Israel. So the bombers had struck in al-Khobar for the Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila, for Qana, for Clinton’s hypocrisy; this was bin Laden’s message. Not only were the Americans to be driven from the Gulf, there were historic wrongs to be avenged. His ‘advice’ to the Americans was a fearful threat that would be fulfilled in the years to come.

But what bin Laden really wanted to talk about was Saudi Arabia. Since our last meeting in Sudan, he said, the situation in the kingdom had grown worse. The ulema, the religious leaders, had declared in the mosques that the presence of American troops was not acceptable and the government took action against these ulema ‘on the advice of the Americans’. For bin Laden, the betrayal of the Saudi people began twenty-four years before his birth, when Abdul Aziz al-Saud proclaimed his kingdom in 1932. ‘The regime started under the flag of applying Islamic law and under this banner all the people of Saudi Arabia came to help the Saudi family take power. But Abdul Aziz did not apply Islamic law; the country was set up for his family. Then after the discovery of petroleum, the Saudi regime found another support – the money to make people rich and to give them the services and life they wanted and to make them satisfied.’

Bin Laden was picking away at his teeth with that familiar twig of mishwak wood, but history – or his version of it – was the basis of almost all his remarks. The Saudi royal family had promised sharia laws while at the same time allowing the United States ‘to Westernise Saudi Arabia and drain the economy’. He blamed the Saudi regime for spending $25 billion in support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran – Iraq war and a further $60 billion in support of the Western armies in the 1991 war against Iraq, ‘buying military equipment which is not needed or useful for the country, buying aircraft by credit’ while at the same time creating unemployment, high taxes and a bankrupt economy. But for bin Laden, the pivotal date was 1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. ‘When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the land of the two Holy places, there was a strong protest from the ulema and from students of sharia law all over the country against the interference of American troops. This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception. They were giving their support to nations which were fighting against Muslims. They helped the Yemeni communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and are helping Arafat’s regime fight Hamas. After it insulted and jailed the ulema eighteen months ago, the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy.’

The night wind moved through the darkened trees, ruffling the robes of the Arab fighters around us. Bin Laden spread his right hand and used his fingers to list the ‘mistakes’ of the Saudi monarchy. ‘At the same time, the financial crisis happened inside the kingdom and now all the people there suffer from this. Saudi merchants found their contracts were broken. The government owes them 340 billion Saudi rials, which is a very big amount; it represents 30 per cent of the national income inside the kingdom. Prices are going up and people have to pay more for electricity, water and fuel. Saudi farmers have not received money since 1992 – and those who get grants now receive them on government loans from banks. Education is deteriorating and people have to take their children from government schools and put them in private education, which is very expensive.’

Bin Laden paused to see if I had listened to his careful if frighteningly exclusive history lesson. ‘The Saudi people have remembered now what the ulema told them and they realise America is the main reason for their problems … the ordinary man knows that his country is the largest oil-producer in the world yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services. Now the people understand the speeches of the ulemas in the mosques – that our country has become an American colony. They act decisively with every action to kick the Americans out of Saudi Arabia. What happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar is clear evidence of the huge anger of Saudi people against America. The Saudis now know their real enemy is America.’ There was no doubting bin Laden’s argument. The overthrow of the Saudi regime and the eviction of US forces from the kingdom were one and the same for him. He was claiming that the real religious leadership of Saudi Arabia – among whom he clearly saw himself – was an inspiration to Saudis, that Saudis themselves would drive out the Americans, that Saudis – hitherto regarded as a rich and complacent people – might strike at the United States. Could this be true?

The air was clouding with insects. I was writing in my notebook with my right hand and swatting them away from my face and clothes with my left, big insects with wide wings and buglike creatures that would slap against my shirt and the pages of my notebook. I noticed that they were colliding with bin Laden’s white robe, even his face, as if they had somehow been alerted by the anger emanating from this man. He sometimes stopped speaking for all of sixty seconds – he was the first Arab figure I noticed doing this – in order to reflect upon his words. Most Arabs, faced with a reporter’s question, would say the first thing that came into their heads for fear that they would appear ignorant if they did not. Bin Laden was different. He was alarming because he was possessed of that quality which leads men to war: total self-conviction. In the years to come, I would see others manifest this dangerous characteristic – President George W. Bush and Tony Blair come to mind – but never the fatal self-resolve of Osama bin Laden.

There was a dark quality to his calculations. ‘If one kilogram of TNT exploded in a country in which nobody had heard an explosion in a hundred years,’ he said, ‘surely the exploding of 2,500 kilos of TNT at al-Khobar is clear evidence of the scale of the people’s anger against the Americans and of their ability to continue that resistance against the American occupation.’ Had I been a prophet, might I have thought more deeply about that fearful metaphor which bin Laden used, the one about the TNT? Was there not a country – a nation which knew no war within its borders for well over a hundred years – which could be struck with ‘evidence’ of a people’s anger, 2,500 times beyond anything it might imagine? But I was calculating more prosaic equations.

Bin Laden had asked me – a routine of every Palestinian under occupation – if Europeans did not resist occupation during the Second World War. I told him no Europeans would accept this argument over Saudi Arabia – because the Nazis killed millions of Europeans yet the Americans had never murdered a single Saudi. Such a parallel was historically and morally wrong. Bin Laden did not agree. ‘We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together … We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon … When sixty Jews are killed inside Palestine’ – he was talking about Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel – ‘all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children did not receive the same reaction.’ It was bin Laden’s first reference to Iraq and to the UN sanctions which were to result, according to UN officials themselves, in the death of more than half a million children. ‘Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam,’ bin Laden said. ‘We as Muslims do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future.’ It was the first time I heard him use the word ‘crusade’.

But it was neither the first – nor the last – time that bin Laden would distance himself from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Much good would it do him. Five years later, the United States would launch an invasion of Iraq that would be partly justified by the regime’s ‘support’ for a man who so detested it. But these were not the only words which bin Laden uttered that night to which I should have paid greater attention. For at one point, he placed his right hand on his chest. ‘I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against all Muslims everywhere,’ he said. ‘Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans.’

For some time, there had been a steadily growing thunderstorm to the east of bin Laden’s camp and we could see the bright orange flash of lightning over the mountains on the Pakistan border. But bin Laden thought this might be artillery fire, the continuation of the inter-mujahedin battles that had damaged his spirit after the anti-Soviet war. He was growing uneasy. He broke off his conversation to pray. Then on the straw mat, several young and armed men served dinner – plates of yoghurt and cheese and Afghan nan bread and more tea. Bin Laden sat between his sons, silent, eyes on his food. Occasionally he would ask me questions. What would be the reaction of the British Labour Party to his demand that British troops must leave Saudi Arabia? Was the Labour opposition leader Tony Blair important? I cannot, alas, remember my reply. Bin Laden said that three of his wives would soon arrive in Afghanistan to join him. I could see the tents where they would be living if I wished, just outside Jalalabad, ‘humble tents’ for his family. He told an Egyptian holding a rifle to take me to the encampment next day.

Then he pointed at me. ‘I am astonished at the British government,’ he said suddenly. ‘They sent a letter to me through their embassy in Khartoum before I left Sudan, saying I would not be welcome in the United Kingdom. But I did not ask to go to Britain. So why did they send me this letter? The letter said: “If you come to Britain, you will not be admitted.” The letter gave the Saudi press the opportunity of claiming that I had asked for political asylum in Britain – which is not true.’ I believed bin Laden. Afghanistan was the only country left to him after his five-and-a-half-year exile in Sudan. He agreed. ‘The safest place in the world for me is Afghanistan.’ It was the only place, I repeated, in which he could campaign against the Saudi government. Bin Laden and several of his Arab fighters burst into laughter. ‘There are other places,’ he replied. Did he mean Tajikistan? I asked. Or Uzbekistan? Kazakhstan? ‘There are several places where we have friends and close brothers – we can find refuge and safety in them.’

I told bin Laden he was already a hunted man. ‘Danger is a part of our life,’ he snapped back. ‘Do you realise that we spent ten years fighting against the Russians and the KGB? … When we were fighting the Russians here in Afghanistan, 10,000 Saudis came here to fight over a period of ten years. There were three flights every week from Jeddah to Islamabad and every flight was filled with Saudis coming to fight …’ But, I suggested uncharitably, didn’t the Americans support the mujahedin against the Soviets? Bin Laden responded at once. ‘We were never at any time friends of the Americans. We knew that the Americans support the Jews in Palestine and that they are our enemies. Most of the weapons that came to Afghanistan were paid for by the Saudis on the orders of the Americans since Turki al-Faisal [the head of Saudi external intelligence] and the CIA were working together.’

Bin Laden was now alert, almost agitated. There was something he needed to say. ‘Let me tell you this. Last week, I received an envoy from the Saudi embassy in Islamabad. Yes, he came here to Afghanistan to see me. The government of Saudi Arabia, of course, they want to give the people here a different message, that I should be handed over. But in truth they wanted to speak directly to me. They wanted to ask me to go back to Saudi Arabia. I said I would speak to them only under one condition – that Sheikh Sulieman al-Owda, the ulema, is present. They have locked up Sheikh Sulieman for speaking out against the corrupt regime. Without his freedom, negotiation is not possible. I have had no reply from them till now.’

Was it this revelation that made bin Laden nervous? He began talking to his men about amniya, security, and repeatedly looked towards those flashes in the sky. Now the thunder did sound like gunfire. I tried to ask one more question. What kind of Islamic state would bin Laden wish to see? Would thieves and murderers still have their hands or heads cut off in his Islamic sharia state, just as they do in Saudi Arabia today? There came an unsatisfactory reply. ‘Islam is a complete religion for every detail of life. If a man is a real Muslim and commits a crime, he can only be happy if he is justly punished. This is not cruelty. The origin of these punishments comes from God through the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him.’

Dissident Osama bin Laden may be, but moderate never. I asked permission to take his photograph, and while he debated this with his companions I scribbled into my notebook the words I would use in the last paragraph of my report on our meeting: ‘Osama bin Laden believes he now represents the most formidable enemy of the Saudi regime and of the American presence in the Gulf. Both are probably right to regard him as such.’ I was underestimating the man.

Yes, he said, I could take his picture. I opened my camera and allowed his armed guards to watch me as I threaded a film into the spool. I told them I refused to use a flash because it flattened the image of a human face and asked them to bring the paraffin lamp closer. The Egyptian scribe held it a foot from bin Laden’s face. I told him to bring it closer still, to within three inches, and I physically had to guide his arm until the light brightened and shadowed bin Laden’s features. Then without warning, bin Laden moved his head back and the faintest smile moved over his face, along with that self-conviction and that ghost of vanity which I found so disturbing. He called his sons Omar and Saad and they sat beside him as I took more pictures and bin Laden turned into the proud father, the family man, the Arab at home.

Then his anxiety returned. The thunder was continuous now and it was mixed with the patter of rifle fire. I should go, he urged, and I realised that what he meant was that he must go, that it was time for him to return to the fastness of Afghanistan. When we shook hands, he was already looking for the guards who would take him away. Mohamed and my driver and just two of the armed men who had brought me to these damp, insect-hungry fields turned up to drive me back to the Spinghar Hotel, a journey that proved to be full of menace. Driving across river bridges and road intersections, we were repeatedly stopped by armed men from the Afghan factions that were fighting for control of Kabul. One would crouch on the roadway in front of our vehicle, screaming at us, pointing his rifle at the windscreen, his companion sidling out of the darkness to check our driver’s identity and wave us through. ‘Afghanistan very difficult place,’ Mohamed remarked.

It would be difficult for bin Laden’s family, too. Next morning, the Egyptian turned up at the Spinghar Hotel to take me to the grass encampment in which the families of the returning Arab ‘Afghans’ would live. It was vulnerable enough. Only a few strands of barbed wire separated it from the open countryside and the three tents for bin Laden’s wives, pitched close to one another, were insufferably hot. Three latrines had been dug at the back, in one of which floated a dead frog. ‘They will be living here among us,’ the Egyptian said. ‘These are ladies who are used to living in comfort.’ But his fears centred on the apparent presence of three Egyptian security men who had been driving close to the camp in a green pick-up truck. ‘We know who they are and we have the number of their vehicle. A few days ago, they stopped beside my son and asked him: “We know you are Abdullah and we know who your father is. Where is bin Laden?” Then they asked him why I was in Afghanistan.’

Another of the Arab men in the camp disputed bin Laden’s assertion that this was only one of several Muslim countries in which he could find refuge. ‘There is no other country left for Mr bin Laden,’ he said politely. ‘When he was in Sudan, the Saudis wanted to capture him with the help of Yemenis. We know that the French government tried to persuade the Sudanese to hand him over to them because the Sudanese had given them the South American.’ (This was ‘Carlos the Jackal’.) ‘The Americans were pressing the French to get hold of bin Laden in Sudan. An Arab group which was paid by the Saudis tried to kill him and they shot at him but bin Laden’s guards fired back and two of the men were wounded. The same people also tried to murder Turabi.’ The Egyptian listened to this in silence. ‘Yes, the country is very dangerous,’ he said. ‘The Americans are trying to block the route to Afghanistan for the Arabs. I prefer the mountains. I feel safer there. This place is semi-Beirut.’

Not for long. Within nine months, I would be back in a transformed, still more sinister Afghanistan, its people governed with a harsh and ignorant piety that even bin Laden could not have imagined. Again, there had come the telephone call to Beirut, the invitation to see ‘our friend’, the delay – quite deliberate on my part – before setting off yet again for Jalalabad. This time, the journey was a combination of farce and incredulity. There were no more flights from Delhi so I flew first to the emirate of Dubai. ‘Fly to Jalalabad?’ my Indian travel agent there asked me. ‘You have to contact “Magic Carpet”.’ He was right. ‘Magic Carpet Travel’ – in a movie, the name would never have got past the screenplay writers* – was run by a Lebanese who told me to turn up at 8.30 next morning at the heat-bleached old airport in the neighbouring and much poorer emirate of Sharjah, to which Ariana Afghan airlines had now been sent in disgrace. Sharjah played host to a flock of pariah airlines that flew from the Gulf to Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Tajikistan and a number of obscure Iranian cities. My plane to Jalalabad was the same old Boeing 727, but now in a state of much-reduced circumstances, cruelly converted into a freight carrier.

The crew were all Afghans – bushy-bearded to a man, since the Taliban had just taken over Afghanistan and ordered men to stop shaving – and did their best to make me comfortable in the lone and grubby passenger seat at the front. ‘Safety vest under seat,’ was written behind the lavatory. There was no vest. And the toilet was running with faeces, a fearful stench drifting over the cargo of ball-bearings and textiles behind me. On take-off, a narrow tide of vile-smelling liquid washed out of the lavatory and ran down the centre of the aircraft. ‘Don’t worry, you’re in safe hands,’ one of the crew insisted as we climbed through the turbulence, introducing me to a giant of a man with a black and white beard who kept grinding his teeth and wringing his hands on a damp cloth. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is our senior flight maintenance engineer.’ Over the Spinghar Mountains, the engineer at last sniffed the smell from the toilet, entered the tiny cubicle with a ratchet and attacked the plumbing. By the time we landed at the old airstrip at Jalalabad, I was ready to contemplate the overland journey home.

The immigration officer, a teenager with a Kalashnikov, was so illiterate that he drew a square and a circle in my upside-down passport because he couldn’t write his own name. The airline crew offered me a lift on their bus into Jalalabad, the same dusty frontier town I remembered from the previous July but this time with half its population missing. There were no women. Just occasionally I would catch sight of them, cowled and burqa-ed in their shrouds, sometimes holding the hands of tiny children. The campus gates of Nangarhar University were chained shut, the pathways covered in grass, the dormitories dripping rain water. ‘The Taliban say they will reopen the university this week,’ the post office clerk told me. ‘But what’s the point? All the teachers have left. The women can no longer be educated. It’s back to Year Zero.’

Not quite, of course. For the first time in years, there was no shooting in Jalalabad. The guns had been collected by the Taliban – only to go up in smoke a few days later in a devastating explosion that almost killed me – but there was a kind of law that had been imposed on this angry, tribal society. Humanitarian workers could travel around the town at night – which may be why some of them argued that they could ‘do business’ with the Taliban and had no right to interfere in ‘traditional culture’. Robberies were almost unknown. While prices were rising, at least there were now vegetables and meat in the market.

The Taliban had finally vanquished twelve of the fifteen venal Afghan mujahedin militias in all but the far north-eastern corner of the country and imposed their own stark legitimacy on its people. It was a purist, Sunni Wahhabi faith whose interpretation of sharia law recalled the most draconian of early Christian prelates. Head-chopping, hand-chopping and a totally misogynist perspective were easy to associate with the Taliban’s hostility towards all forms of enjoyment. The Spinghar Hotel used to boast an old American television set that had now been hidden in a garden shed for fear of destruction. Television sets, like videotapes and thieves, tended to end up hanging from trees. ‘What do you expect?’ the gardener asked me near the ruins of the old royal winter palace in Jalalabad. ‘The Taliban came from the refugee camps. They are giving us only what they had.’ And it dawned on me then that the new laws of Afghanistan – so anachronistic and brutal to us, and to educated Afghans – were less an attempt at religious revival than a continuation of life in the vast dirt camps in which so many millions of Afghans had gathered on the borders of their country when the Soviets invaded sixteen years before.

The Taliban gunmen had grown up as refugees in these diseased camps in Pakistan. Their first sixteen years of life were passed in blind poverty, deprived of all education and entertainment, imposing their own deadly punishments, their mothers and sisters kept in subservience as the men decided how to fight their foreign oppressors on the other side of the border, their only diversion a detailed and obsessive reading of the Koran – the one and true path in a world in which no other could be contemplated. The Taliban had arrived not to rebuild a country they did not remember, but to rebuild their refugee camps on a larger scale. Hence there was to be no education. No television. Women must stay at home, just as they stayed in their tents in Peshawar. Thus it was to be at the airport when I eventually left; another immigration officer now, perhaps only fifteen, was wearing make-up on his face – he, like many Algerians who fought in Afghanistan, was convinced the Prophet wore kohl around his eyes in Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era. He refused to stamp my passport because I had no exit visa – even though exit visas did not exist in Jalalabad. But I had broken a greater rule. I wasn’t wearing a beard. The boy pointed at my chin and shook his head in admonition, a child-schoolmaster who knew wickedness when he saw it and directed me towards the old plane on the runway with contempt.

On the lawn of the Spinghar Hotel, two children approached me, one a fourteen-year-old with a pile of exercise books. In one of the books, in poor English, was a hand-written grammar test. ‘Insert the cerrect [sic] voice,’ it demanded: ‘“He … going home.” Insert: “had”/“was”/“will”.’ I gently inserted ‘was’ and corrected ‘cerrect’. Was this the new education of the Afghan poor? But at least the boys were being taught a foreign language at their pitiful school. The smaller child even had a Persian grammar which told – inevitably – of the life of the Prophet Mohamed. But girl pupils there were none. One afternoon during the same dreary days of waiting, when I was sitting on the porch drinking tea, a woman in a pale blue burqa walked slowly up the driveway muttering to herself. She turned left into the gardens but made a detour towards me. She was moaning, her voice rising and falling like a seagull, weeping and sobbing. She obviously wanted the foreigner to hear this most sombre of protests. Then she entered the rose garden.

Did we care? At that very moment, officials of the Union Oil Co. of California Asian Oil Pipeline Project – UNOCAL – were negotiating with the Taliban to secure rights for a pipeline to carry gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan; in September 1996, the US State Department announced that it would open diplomatic relations with the Taliban, only to retract the statement later. Among UNOCAL’s employees were Zalmay Khalilzad – five years later, he would be appointed President George W. Bush’s special envoy to ‘liberated’ Afghanistan – and a Pushtun leader called Hamid Karzai. No wonder Afghans adopted an attitude of suspicion towards the United States. America’s allies originally supported bin Laden against the Russians. Then the United States turned bin Laden into their Public Enemy Number One – a post that was admittedly difficult to retain in the Pentagon wheel of fortune, since new monsters were constantly being discovered by Washington, often in inverse proportion to its ability to capture the old ones. Now the Taliban were being courted. But for how long? Could bin Laden, an Arab whose political goals were infinitely more ambitious than the Taliban’s, maintain the integrity of his exile alongside men who wished only to repress their own people? Would the Taliban protect bin Laden any more courageously than the failed Islamic Republic of Sudan?

On the mountainside, the machine continued his search of the machine. There was a cold moon now and, when the mist did not conceal its light, I could see the tall man’s tight lips and the sunken hollows of his cheeks beneath his shades. On the frozen mountainside, he opened the school satchel that I always carry in rough countries and fingered through my passport, press cards, notebooks, the pile of old Lebanese and Gulf newspapers inside. He took my Nikon camera from its bag. He flicked open the back, checked the auto-drive and then knelt on the stones by my camera-bag and opened each plastic carton of film. Then he put them all neatly back into the bag, snapped the camera shut, switched off the auto-drive and handed me the bag. Shukran, I said. Again, no reply. He turned to the driver and nodded and we drove on up the ice track. We were now at 5,000 feet. More lights flashed until we turned a corner past a massive boulder and there before us in the moonlight lay a small valley. There was grass and trees and a stream of unfrozen water that curled through it and a clutch of tents under a cliff. Two men approached. There were more formal Arab greetings, my right hand in both of theirs. Trust us. That was always the intention of these greetings. An Algerian who spoke fluent French and an Egyptian, they invited me to tour this little valley.

We washed our hands in the stream and walked over the stiff grass towards a dark gash in the cliff face above us. As my eyes became accustomed to the light, I could make out a vast rectangle in the side of the mountain, a 6-metres-high air-raid shelter cut into the living rock by bin Laden’s men during the Russian war. ‘It was for a hospital,’ the Egyptian said. ‘We brought our mujahedin wounded here and they were safe from any Russian plane. No one could bomb us. We were safe.’ I walked into this man-made cave, the Algerian holding a torch, until I could hear my own crunching footsteps echoing softly from the depths of the tunnel. When we emerged, the moon was almost dazzling, the valley bathed in its white light, another little paradise of trees and water and mountain peaks.

The tent I was taken to was military issue, a khaki tarpaulin roped to iron stakes, a flap as an entrance, a set of stained mattresses on the floor. There was tea in a large steel pot and I sat with the Egyptian and Algerian and with three other men who had entered the tent with Kalashnikovs. We waited for perhaps half an hour, the Algerian slowly acknowledging under my questioning that he was a member of the ‘Islamic resistance’ to the Algerian military regime. I spoke of my own visits to Algeria, the ability of the Islamists to fight on in the mountains and the bled – the countryside – against the government troops, much as the Algerian FLN had done against the French army in the 1954–62 war of independence. The Algerian liked this comparison – I had intended that he should – and I made no mention of my suspicion that he belonged to the Islamic Armed Group, the GIA, which was blamed by the government for the massacres of throat-cutting and dismemberment that had stained the last four years of Algeria’s history.

There was a sudden scratching of voices outside the tent, thin and urgent like the soundtrack of an old movie. Then the flap snapped up and bin Laden walked in, dressed in a turban and green robes. I stood up, half bent under the canvas, and we shook hands, both of us forced by the tarpaulin that touched our heads to greet each other like Ottoman pashas, bowed and looking up into the other’s face. Again, he looked tired, and I had noticed a slight limp when he walked into the tent. His beard was greyer, his face thinner than I remembered it. Yet he was all smiles, almost jovial, placing the rifle which he had carried into the tent on the mattress to his left, insisting on more tea for his guest. For several seconds he looked at the ground. Then he looked at me with an even bigger smile, beneficent and, I thought at once, very disturbing.

‘Mr Robert,’ he began, and he looked around at the other men in combat jackets and soft brown hats who had crowded into the tent. ‘Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed that you came to us one day on a horse, that you had a beard and that you were a spiritual person. You wore a robe like us. This means you are a true Muslim.’

This was terrifying. It was one of the most fearful moments of my life. I understood bin Laden’s meaning a split second before each of his words. Dream. Horse. Beard. Spiritual. Robe. Muslim. The other men in the tent were all nodding and looking at me, some smiling, others silently staring at the Englishman who had appeared in the dream of the ‘brother’. I was appalled. It was both a trap and an invitation, and the most dangerous moment to be among the most dangerous men in the world. I could not reject the ‘dream’ lest I suggest bin Laden was lying. Yet I could not accept its meaning without myself lying, without suggesting that what was clearly intended of me – that I should accept this ‘dream’ as a prophecy and a divine instruction – might be fulfilled. For this man – and these men – to trust me, a foreigner, to come to them without prejudice – for them to regard me as honest – that was one thing. But to imagine that I would join them in their struggle, that I would become one with them, was beyond any possibility. The coven was waiting for a reply.

Was I imagining this? Could this not be just an elaborate, rhetorical way of expressing traditional respect towards a visitor? Was this not merely the attempt of a Muslim – many Westerners in the Middle East have experienced this – to gain an adherent to the faith? Was bin Laden really trying – let us be frank – to recruit me? I feared he was. And I immediately understood what this might mean. A Westerner, a white man from England, a journalist on a respectable newspaper – not a British convert to Islam of Arab or Asian origin – would be a catch indeed. He would go unsuspected, he could become a government official, join an army, even – as I would contemplate just over four years later – learn to fly an airliner. I had to get out of this, quickly, and I was trying to find an intellectual escape tunnel, working so hard in digging it that my brain was on fire.

‘Sheikh Osama,’ I began, even before I had decided on my next words. ‘Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim.’ There was silence in the tent. ‘I am a journalist.’ No one could dispute that. ‘And the job of a journalist is to tell the truth.’ No one would want to dispute that. ‘And that is what I intend to do in my life – to tell the truth.’ Bin Laden was watching me like a hawk. And he understood. I was declining the offer. In front of his men, it was now bin Laden’s turn to withdraw, to cover his retreat gracefully. ‘If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim,’ he said. The men in the tent in their combat jackets and beards all nodded at this sagacity. Bin Laden smiled. I was saved. As the old cliché goes, I ‘breathed again’. No deal.

Perhaps it was out of the need to curtail this episode, to cover his embarrassment at this little failure, that bin Laden suddenly and melodramatically noticed the school satchel lying beside my camera and the Lebanese newspapers partially visible inside. He seized upon them. He must read them at once. And in front of us all, he clambered across the tent with the papers in his hand to where the paraffin lamp was hissing in the corner. And there, for half an hour, ignoring almost all of us, he read his way through the Arabic press, sometimes summoning the Egyptian to read an article, at others showing a paper to one of the other gunmen in the tent. Was this really, I began to wonder, the centre of ‘world terror’? Listening to the spokesman at the US State Department, reading the editorials in the New York Times or the Washington Post, I might have been forgiven for believing that bin Laden ran his ‘terror network’ from a state-of-the-art bunker of computers and digitalised battle plans, flicking a switch to instruct his followers to assault another Western target. But this man seemed divorced from the outside world. Did he not have a radio? A television? Why, he didn’t even know – he told me so himself after reading the papers – that the foreign minister of Iran, Ali Akbar Velayati, had visited Saudi Arabia, his own country, for the first time in more than three years.

When he returned to his place in the corner of the tent, bin Laden was businesslike. He warned the Americans of a renewed onslaught against their forces in Saudi Arabia. ‘We are still at the beginning of military action against them,’ he said. ‘But we have removed the psychological obstacle against fighting the Americans … This is the first time in fourteen centuries that the two holy shrines are occupied by non-Islamic forces …’ He insisted that the Americans were in the Gulf for oil and embarked on a modern history of the region to prove this.

‘Brezhnev wanted to reach the Hormuz Strait across Afghanistan for this reason, but by the grace of Allah and the jihad he was not only defeated in Afghanistan but was finished here. We carried our weapons on our shoulders here for ten years, and we and the sons of the Islamic world are prepared to carry weapons for the rest of our lives. But despite this, oil is not the direct impetus for the Americans occupying the region – they obtained oil at attractive prices before their invasion. There are other reasons, primarily the American-Zionist alliance, which is filled with fear at the power of Islam and of the land of Mecca and Medina. It fears that an Islamic renaissance will drown Israel. We are convinced that we shall kill the Jews in Palestine. We are convinced that with Allah’s help, we shall triumph against the American forces. It’s only a matter of numbers and time. For them to claim that they are protecting Arabia from Iraq is untrue – the whole issue of Saddam is a trick.’

There was something new getting loose here. Condemning Israel was standard fare for any Arab nationalist, let alone a man who believed he was participating in an Islamic jihad. But bin Laden was now combining America and Israel as a single country – ‘For us,’ he said later, ‘there is no difference between the American and Israeli governments or between the American and Israeli soldiers’ – and was talking of Jews, rather than Israeli soldiers, as his targets. How soon before all Westerners, all those from ‘Crusader nations’, were added to the list? He took no credit for the bombings in Riyadh and al-Khobar but praised the four men who had been accused of setting off the explosions, two of whom he admitted he had met. ‘I view those who did these bombings with great respect,’ he said. ‘I consider it a great act and a major honour in which I missed the opportunity of participating.’ But bin Laden was also anxious to show the support for his cause which he claimed was now growing in Pakistan. He produced newspaper clippings recording the sermons of Pakistani clerics who had condemned America’s presence in Saudi Arabia and then thrust into my hands two large coloured photographs of graffiti spray-painted on walls in Karachi.

In red paint, one said: ‘American Forces, get out of the Gulf – The United Militant Ulemas’. Another, painted in brown, announced that ‘America is the biggest enemy of the Muslim world’. A large poster that bin Laden handed to me appeared to be from the same hand with similar anti-American sentiment uttered by mawlawi – religious scholars – in the Pakistani city of Lahore. As for the Taliban and their new, oppressive regime, bin Laden had little option but to be pragmatic. ‘All Islamic countries are my country,’ he said. ‘We believe that the Taliban are sincere in their attempts to enforce Islamic sharia law. We saw the situation before they came and afterwards and have noticed a great difference and an obvious improvement.’

But when he returned to his most important struggle – against the United States – bin Laden seemed possessed. When he spoke of this, his followers in the tent hung upon his every word as if he was a messiah. He had, he said, sent faxes to King Fahd and all main departments of the Saudi government, informing them of his determination to pursue a holy struggle against the United States. He even claimed that some members of the Saudi royal family supported him, along with officers in the security services – a claim I later discovered to be true. But declaring war by fax was a new innovation and there was an eccentricity about bin Laden’s perspective on American politics. At one point, he suggested in all seriousness that rising taxes in America would push many states to secede from the Union, an idea that might appeal to some state governors even if it was hardly in the world of reality.

But this was a mere distraction from a far more serious threat. ‘We think that our struggle against America will be much simpler than that against the Soviet Union,’ bin Laden said. ‘I will tell you something for the first time. Some of our mujahedin who fought in Afghanistan participated in operations against the Americans in Somalia and they were surprised at the collapse in American military morale. We regard America as a paper tiger.’ This was a strategic error of some scale. The American retreat from its state-building mission in Somalia under President Clinton was not going to be repeated if a Republican president came to power, especially if the United States was under attack. True, over the years, the same loss of will might creep back into American military policy – Iraq would see to that – but Washington, whatever bin Laden might think, was going to be a far more serious adversary than Moscow. Yet he persisted. And I shall always remember Osama bin Laden’s last words to me that night on the bare mountain: ‘Mr Robert,’ he said, ‘from this mountain upon which you are sitting, we broke the Russian army and we destroyed the Soviet Union. And I pray to God that he will permit us to turn the United States into a shadow of itself.’

I sat in silence, thinking about these words as bin Laden discussed my journey back to Jalalabad with his guards. He was concerned that the Taliban – despite their ‘sincerity’ – might object to his dispatching a foreigner through their checkpoints after dark, and so I was invited to pass the night in bin Laden’s mountain camp. I was permitted to take just three photographs of him, this time by the light of the Toyota which was driven to the tent with its headlights shining through the canvas to illuminate bin Laden’s face. He sat in front of me, expressionless, a stone figure, and in the pictures I developed in Beirut three days later he was a purple and yellow ghost. He said goodbye without much ceremony, a brief handshake and a nod, and vanished from the tent, and I lay down on the mattress with my coat over me to keep warm. The men with their guns sitting around slept there too, while others armed with rifles and rocket-launchers patrolled the low ridges around the camp.

In the years to come, I would wonder who they were. Was the Egyptian Mohamed Atta among those young men in the tent? Or Abdul Aziz Alomari? Or any other of the nineteen men whose names we would all come to know just over four years later? I cannot remember their faces now, cowled as they were, many of them, in their scarves.

Exhaustion and cold kept me awake. ‘A shadow of itself’ was the expression that kept repeating itself to me. What did bin Laden and these dedicated, ruthless men have in store for us? I recall the next few hours like a freeze-frame film; waking so cold there was ice in my hair, slithering back down the mountain trail in the Toyota with one of the Algerian gunmen in the back telling me that if we were in Algeria he would cut my throat but that he was under bin Laden’s orders to protect me and thus would give his life for me. The three men in the back and my driver stopped the jeep on the broken-up Kabul – Jalalabad highway to say their dawn fajr prayers. Beside the broad estuary of the Kabul river, they spread their mats and knelt as the sun rose over the mountains. Far to the north-east, I could see the heights of the Hindu Kush glimmering a pale white under an equally pale blue sky, touching the border of China that nuzzled into the wreckage of a land that was to endure yet more suffering in the coming years. Hills and rocks and water and ancient trees and old mountains, this was the world before the age of man.

And I remember driving back with bin Laden’s men into Jalalabad past the barracks where the Taliban stored their captured arms and, just a few minutes later, hearing the entire store – of shells, anti-tank rockets, Stinger missiles, explosives and mines – exploding in an earthquake that shook the trees in the laneway outside the Spinghar Hotel and sprinkled us with tiny pieces of metal and torn pages from American manuals instructing ‘users’ on how to aim missiles at aircraft. More than ninety civilians were ripped to bits by the accidental explosion – did a Taliban throw the butt of a cigarette, a lonely and unique item of enjoyment, into the ammunition? – and then the Algerian walked up to me in tears and told me that his best friend had just perished in the explosion. Bin Laden’s men, I noted, can also cry.

But most of all I remember the first minutes after our departure from bin Laden’s camp. It was still dark when I caught sight of a great light in the mountains to the north. For a while I thought it was the headlights of another vehicle, another security signal from the camp guards to our departing Toyota. But it hung there for many minutes and I began to realise that it was burning above the mountains and carried a faintly incandescent trail. The men in the vehicle were watching it too. ‘It is Halle’s comet,’ one of them said. He was wrong. It was a newly discovered comet, noticed for the first time only two years earlier by Americans Alan Hale and Tom Bopp, but I could see how Hale – Bopp had become Halley to these Arab men in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was soaring above us now, trailing a golden tail, a sublime power moving at 70,000 kilometres an hour through the heavens.

So we stopped the Toyota and climbed out to watch the fireball as it blazed through the darkness above us, the al-Qaeda men and the Englishman, all filled with awe at this spectacular, wondrous apparition of cosmic energy, unseen for more than 4,000 years. ‘Mr Robert, do you know what they say when a comet like this is seen?’ It was the Algerian, standing next to me now, both of us craning our necks up towards the sky. ‘It means that there is going to be a great war.’ And so we watched the fire blaze through the pageant of stars and illuminate the firmament above us.

CHAPTER TWO
‘They Shoot Russians’

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘The Young British Soldier’

Less than six months before the outbreak of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page book of imperial adventure, Tom Graham, V.C., A Tale of the Afghan War. ‘Presented to Willie By his Mother’ is written in thick pencil inside the front cover. ‘Date Sat. 24th January 1914, for another’. ‘Willie’ would have been almost fifteen years old. Only after my father’s death in 1992 did I inherit this book, with its handsome, engraved hardboard cover embossed with a British Victoria Cross – ‘For Valour’, it says on the medal – and, on the spine, a soldier in red coat and peaked white tropical hat with a rifle in his hands. I never found out the meaning of the cryptic reference ‘for another’. But years later, I read the book. An adventure by William Johnston and published in 1900 by Thomas Nelson and Sons, it tells the story of the son of a mine-owner who grows up in the northern English port of Seaton and, forced to leave school and become an apprentice clerk because of his father’s sudden impoverishment, joins the British army under-age. Tom Graham is posted to a British unit at Buttevant in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland – he even kisses the Blarney Stone, conferring upon himself the supposed powers of persuasive eloquence contained in that much blessed rock – and then travels to India and to the Second Afghan War, where he is gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant in a Highland regiment. As he stands at his late father’s grave in the local churchyard before leaving for the army, Tom vows that he will lead ‘a pure, clean, and upright life’.

The story is typical of my father’s generation, a rip-roaring, racist story of British heroism and Muslim savagery. But reading it, I was struck by some remarkable parallels. My own father, Bill Fisk – the ‘Willie’ of the dedication almost a century ago – was also taken from school in a northern English port because his father Edward was no longer able to support him. He too became an apprentice clerk, in Birkenhead. In the few notes he wrote before his death, Bill recalled that he had tried to join the British army under-age; he travelled to Fulwood Barracks in Preston to join the Royal Field Artillery on 15 August 1914, eleven days after the start of the First World War and almost exactly six months after his mother Margaret gave him Tom Graham. Successful in enlisting two years later, Bill Fisk, too, was sent to a battalion of the Cheshire Regiment in Cork in Ireland, not long after the 1916 Easter Rising. There is even a pale photograph of my father in my archives, kissing the Blarney Stone. Two years later, in France, my father was gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. Was he consciously following the life of the fictional Tom Graham?

The rest of the novel is a disturbing tale of colour prejudice, xenophobia and outright anti-Muslim hatred during the Second Afghan War. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Russian rivalry and suspicion had naturally focused upon Afghanistan, whose unmarked frontiers had become the indistinct front lines between imperial Russia and the British Indian Raj. The principal victims of the ‘Great Game’, as British diplomats injudiciously referred to the successive conflicts in Afghanistan – there was indeed something characteristically childish about the jealousy between Russia and Britain – were, of course, the Afghans. Their landlocked box of deserts and soaring mountains and dark green valleys had for centuries been both a cultural meeting point – between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East – and a battlefield.* A decision by the Afghan king Shir Ali Khan, the third son of Afghanistan’s first king, Dost Mohamed, to receive a Russian mission in Kabul after his re-accession in 1868 led directly to what the British were to call the Second Afghan War. The First Afghan War had led to the annihilation of the British army in the Kabul Gorge in 1842, in the same dark crevasse through which I drove at night on my visit to Osama bin Laden in 1997. At the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879, Shir Ali’s son Yaqub Khan agreed to allow a permanent British embassy to be established in Kabul, but within four months the British envoy and his staff were murdered in their diplomatic compound. The British army was sent back to Afghanistan.

In Bill Fisk’s novel, Tom Graham goes with them. In the bazaar in Peshawar – now in Pakistan, then in India – Graham encounters Pathan tribesmen, ‘a villainous lot … most of the fanatics wore the close-fitting skull-cap which gives such a diabolical aspect to its wearer’. Within days, Graham is fighting the same tribesmen at Peiwar Kotal, driving his bayonet ‘up to the nozzle’ into the chest of an Afghan, a ‘swarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate’. In the Kurrum Valley, Graham and his ‘chums’ – a word my father used about his comrades in the First World War – fight off ‘infuriated tribesmen, drunk with the lust of plunder’. When General Sir Frederick Roberts – later Lord Roberts of Kandahar – agrees to meet a local tribal leader, the man arrives with ‘as wild a looking band of rascals as could be imagined’. The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, ‘their bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by these fiends in human form’. When the leader of the Afghans deemed responsible for the murder of the British envoy is brought for execution, ‘a thrill of satisfaction’ goes through the ranks of Graham’s comrades as the condemned man faces the gallows.

Afghans are thus a ‘villainous lot’, ‘fanatics’, ‘rascals’, ‘fiends in human form’, meat for British bayonets – or ‘toasting forks’ as the narrative cheerfully calls them. It gets worse. A British artillery officer urges his men to fire at close-packed Afghan tribesmen with the words ‘that will scatter the flies’. The text becomes not only racist but anti-Islamic. ‘Boy readers,’ the author pontificates, ‘may not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878–80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out of the unfortunate Britisher the higher his summit of bliss in Paradise.’ After Tom Graham is wounded in Kabul, the Afghans – in the words of his Irish-born army doctor – have become ‘murtherin villains, the black niggers’.

When the British suffer defeat at the battle of Maiwand, on a grey desert west of Kandahar, an officer orders his men to ‘have your bayonets ready, and wait for the niggers’. There is no reference in the book to the young Afghan woman, Malalei, who – seeing the Afghans briefly retreating – tore her veil from her head and led a charge against her enemies, only to be cut down by British bullets. That, of course, is part of Afghan – not British – history. When victory is finally claimed by the British at Kandahar, Tom Graham wins his Victoria Cross.

From ‘villains’ to ‘flies’ and ‘niggers’ in one hundred pages, it’s not difficult to see how easily my father’s world of ‘pure, clean and upright’ Britons bestialised its enemies. Though there are a few references to the ‘boldness’ of Afghan tribesmen – and just one to their ‘courage’ – no attempt is made to explain their actions. They are evil, hate-filled, anxious to prove their Muslim faith by ‘cutting pieces out of the unfortunate Britisher’. The notion that Afghans do not want foreigners invading and occupying their country simply does not exist in the story.

If official British accounts of Afghanistan were not so prejudiced, they nevertheless maintained the oversimplified and supremacist view of the Afghans that Johnston used to such effect in his novel. An account of life in Kabul between 1836 and 1838 by Lt. Col. Sir Alexander Burnes of the East India Company – published a year before the massacre of the British army in 1842 – gives a sensitive portrayal of the generosity of tribal leaders and demonstrates a genuine interest in Afghan customs and social life. But by the end of the century, the official Imperial Gazetteer of India chooses to describe the animals of Afghanistan before it reports on its people, who are ‘handsome and athletic … inured to bloodshed from childhood … treacherous and passionate in revenge … ignorant of everything connected with their religion beyond its most elementary doctrines …’

Among the young Britons who accompanied the army to Kabul in 1879 – a real Briton, this time – was a 29-year-old civil servant, Henry Mortimer Durand, who had been appointed political secretary to General Roberts. In horror, he read the general’s proclamation to the people of Kabul, declaring the murder of the British mission diplomats ‘a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people’. The followers of Yaqub Khan, General Roberts declared, would not escape and their ‘punishment should be such as will be felt and remembered … all persons convicted of bearing a part in [the murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts’. It was an old, Victorian, version of the warning that an American president would give to the Afghans 122 years later.

Durand, a humane and intelligent man, confronted Roberts over his proclamation. ‘It seemed to me so utterly wrong in tone and in matter that I determined to do my utmost to overthrow it … the stilted language, and the absurd affectation of preaching historical morality to the Afghans, all our troubles with whom began by our own abominable injustice, made the paper to my mind most dangerous for the General’s reputation.’ Roberts ameliorated the text, not entirely to Durand’s satisfaction. He thought it merely ‘a little less objectionable’.

Yet Durand sent a letter to his biographer’s sister, Ella Sykes, which provided gruesome evidence that Tom Graham contained all too real descriptions of Afghan cruelty. ‘During the action in the Chardeh valley on the 12th of Dec.r 1879,’ he wrote almost sixteen years after the event, ‘two Squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives … I saw it all …’ But Durand was well aware that the Afghans were not the ‘fiends in human form’ of popular fiction. In 1893, he describes the Afghan army commander, Ghulam Hyder, as an inquisitive and generous man.

Today we talked about the size of London, and how it was supplied with food … about religious prejudices, the hatred of Sunnis and Shias, the Reformation and the Inquisition, the Musselman [sic] and Christian stories of Christ’s life and death, the Spanish Armada, Napoleon and his wars, about which Ghulam Hyder knew a good deal, the manners of the Somalis, tiger shooting …

Durand had been sent to negotiate with the Afghan king, Abdur Rahman – a cousin of Shir Ali – over the southern border of his country, to secure an agreed frontier between British India and Afghanistan. Durand’s brother Edward had already helped to delineate the country’s northern frontier with Russia – during which the Russians sent a force of Cossacks to attack Afghan troops on the Kushk river – and Mortimer Durand found the king deeply unsympathetic to his northern neighbour. According to Durand’s notes, Abdur Rahman announced that

unless you drive me into enmity, I am your friend for my life. And why? The Russians want to attack India. You do not want to attack Russian Turkmenistan. Therefore the Russians want to come through my country and you do not. People say I would join with them to attack you. If I did and they won, would they leave my country? Never. I should be their slave and I hate them.

Eighty-six years later, the Russians would find out what this meant.

I saw them first, those Russians, standing beside their T-72 tanks next to the runways at Kabul airport, fleece-lined jackets below white-pink faces with thick grey fur hats bearing the red star and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. The condensation of their breath hung so thickly in the air in front of their mouths that I looked for cartoon quotations in the bubbles. On the trucks parked beside the highway into the city, they wore the steel helmets so familiar from every Second World War documentary, the green metal casks with ripples over the ears, rifles in gloved hands, narrowed eyes searching the Afghans unflinchingly. They drew heavily and quickly on cigarettes, a little grey smog over each checkpoint. So these were the descendants of the men of Stalingrad and Kursk, the heroes of Rostov and Leningrad and Berlin. On the tarmac of the airport, there were at least seventy of the older T-62s. The snow lay thickly over the tanks, icing sugar on cakes of iron, enough to break the teeth of any Afghan ‘terrorist’.

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, but when I arrived two weeks later their armour was still barrelling down through the slush from the Amu Darya river, the Oxus of antiquity, which Durand’s brother Edward had agreed with the Russians should be the northern frontier of this frost-covered land. Save for a few isolated cities, the Soviet army appeared to have crushed all resistance. Along the highways south and east of Kabul, Russian military encampments protected by dozens of tanks and heavy artillery controlled the arteries between the rebellious provinces of south-eastern Afghanistan. An ‘intervention’, Leonid Brezhnev had called his invasion, peace-loving assistance to the popular socialist government of the newly installed Afghan president Babrak Karmal.

‘In all my life, I have never seen so many tanks,’ my old Swedish radio colleague from Cairo, Lars Gunnar Erlandsen, said when we met. Lars Gunnar was a serious Swede, a thatch of blond hair above piercing blue eyes and vast spectacles. ‘And never in my life do I ever want to see so many tanks again,’ he said. ‘It is beyond imagination.’ There were now five complete Soviet divisions in Afghanistan; the 105th Airborne Division based on Kabul, the 66th Motorised Rifle Brigade in Herat, the 357th Motorised Rifles in Kandahar, the 16th Motorised Rifles in the three northern provinces of Badakhshan, Takhar and Samangan and the 306th Motorised Division in Kabul with the Soviet paratroopers. There were already 60,000 Soviet troops in the country, vast numbers of them digging slit trenches beside the main roads. This was invasion on a massive scale, a superpower demonstration of military will, the sclerotic Brezhnev – Red Army political commissar on the Ukrainian front in 1943, he would die within three years – now flexing his impotent old frame for the last time.

But Russia’s final imperial adventure had all the awesome fury of Britain’s Afghan wars. In the previous week alone, Soviet Antonov-22 transport aircraft had made 4,000 separate flights into the capital. Every three minutes, squadrons of Mig-25s would race up from the frozen runways of Kabul airport and turn in the white sunshine towards the mountains to the east and there would follow, like dungeon doors slamming deep beneath our feet, a series of massive explosions far across the landscape. Soviet troops stood on the towering heights of the Kabul Gorge. I was Middle East correspondent of The Times of London, the paper whose nineteenth-century war correspondent William Howard Russell – a student of Trinity College, Dublin, as I was to be – won his spurs in the 1854–55 Anglo-Russian war in the Crimea. We were all Tom Grahams now.

I think that’s how many of us felt that gleaming, iced winter. I was already exhausted. I lived in Beirut, where the Lebanese civil war had sucked in one Israeli army and would soon consume another. Only three weeks before, I had left post-revolutionary Iran, where America had just lost its very own ‘policeman of the Gulf’, Shah Mohamed Pahlavi, in favour of that most powerful of Islamic leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Within nine months, I would be running for my life under shellfire with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army as it invaded the Islamic Republic. America had already ‘lost’ Iran. Now it was in the process of ‘losing’ Afghanistan – or at least watching that country’s last pitiful claim to national independence melting into the Kremlin’s embrace. Or so it looked to us at the time. The Russians wanted a warm-water port, just as General Roberts had feared in 1878. If they could reach the Gulf coast – Kandahar is 650 kilometres from the Gulf of Oman – then after a swift incursion through Iranian or Pakistani Baluchistan, Soviet forces would stand only 300 kilometres from the Arabian peninsula. That, at least, was the received wisdom, the fount of a thousand editorials. The Russians are coming. That the Soviet Union was dying, that the Soviet government was undertaking this extraordinary expedition through panic – through fear that the collapse of a communist ally in Afghanistan might set off a chain reaction among the Soviet Muslim republics – was not yet apparent, although within days I would see the very evidence that proved the Kremlin might be correct.

Indeed, many of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan came from those very Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia whose loyalties so concerned Brezhnev. In Kabul, Soviet troops from the Turkoman region were conversing easily with local Afghan commanders. The high-cheekboned Asiatic features of some soldiers often suggested that their military units had been drawn from the Mongolian region. In Kabul and the villages immediately surrounding the city, no open hostility was shown towards the Soviet invaders in the daylight hours; so many Russian units had been moved into the snow-covered countryside that Afghan troops had been withdrawn to protect the capital. But at night, the Soviets were pulled back towards Kabul and unconfirmed reports already spoke of ten Russian dead in two weeks, two of them beaten to death with clubs. In Jalalabad, 65 kilometres by road from the Pakistan border, thunderous night-time explosions bore witness to the continued struggle between Afghan tribesmen and Soviet troops.

For the next two months, we few journalists who managed to enter Afghanistan were witness to the start of a fearful tragedy, one that would last for more than a quarter of a century and would cost at least a million and a half innocent lives, a war that would eventually reach out and strike at the heart, not of Russia but of America. How could we have known? How could we have guessed that while an Islamic revolution had enveloped Iran, a far more powerful spiritual force was being nursed and suckled here amid the snows of early January 1980? Again, the evidence was there, for those of us who chose to seek it out, who realised that the narrative of history laid down by our masters – be they of the Moscow or the Washington persuasion – was essentially short-term, false and ultimately self-defeating. Perhaps we were too naive, too ill-prepared for events on such a scale. Who could grasp in so short a time the implications of this essentially imperial story, this latest adventure in the ‘Great Game’? We were young, most of us who managed to scramble into Afghanistan that January. I was thirty-five, most of my colleagues were younger, and journalism is not only an imprecise science but a fatiguing one whose practice involves almost as much bureaucracy as it does fact-gathering. I had spent Christmas in Ireland and returned to wartime Beirut on 3 January to prepare for my onward assignment to cover the continuing revolution in Iran. But no event could compare to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

For a journalist, nothing can beat that moment when a great story beckons, when history really is being made and when a foreign editor tells you to go for it. I remember one hot day in Beirut when gunmen had hijacked a Lufthansa passenger jet to Dubai. I could get there in four hours, I told London. ‘Go. Go. Go,’ they messaged back. But this was drama on an infinitely greater scale, an epic if we could be there to report it. The Soviet army was pouring into Afghanistan, and from their homes and offices in London, New York, Delhi, Moscow, my colleagues were all trying to find a way there. Beirut was comparatively close but it was still three thousand kilometres west of Kabul. And it was a surreal experience to drive through West Beirut’s civil war gunfire to the ticketing office of Middle East Airlines to seek the help of a Lebanese airline that now had only twelve elderly Boeing 707s and three jumbos to its name. Under the old travel rules, Afghanistan issued visas to all British citizens on arrival. But we had to work on the principle that with the country now a satellite of the Soviet Union, those regulations – a remnant of the days when Kabul happily lay astride the hashish tourist trail to India – would have been abandoned.

Richard Wigg, our India correspondent, was in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, Michael Binyon was in Moscow. The Lebanese airline had conceived of a plan to get me into Afghanistan, an ingenious plot that I sent through to London on the ancient telex machines in the Beirut Associated Press bureau, which regularly misspelled our copy. ‘Friends in ticketing section at MiddlehEast [sic] Airlines … have suggested we might try following: I buy single ticket to Kabul and travel in on Ariana [Afghan Airlines] flight that terminates in Kabul,’ I wrote. ‘This means that even if I get bounced, I will probably earn myself twelve hours or so in the city … because my flight will have terminated in Afghanistan and I can’t be put [sic] back on it … At the very worst, I would get bounced and could buy a ticket to Pakistan then head for Peshawar … Grateful reply soonest so I can get MEA ticket people to work early tomorrow (Fri) morning.’ London replied within the hour. ‘Please go ahead with single ticket Kabul plan,’ the foreign desk messaged. I was already back at the MEA office when The Times sent another note. ‘Binyon advises that Afghan embassies around [sic] the world have been instructed to issue visus [sic] which might make things easier.’

This was astonishing. The Russians wanted us there. Their ‘fraternal support’ for the new Karmal government – and the supposedly hideous nature of his predecessor’s regime – was to be publicised. The Russians were coming to liberate Afghanistan. This was obviously the story the Kremlin was concocting. For several years, I had – in addition to my employment by The Times – been reporting for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I liked radio, I liked CBC’s courage in letting their reporters speak their minds, in letting me go into battle with a tape recorder to ‘tell it like it is’, to report the blood and stench of wars and my own disgust at human conflict. Sue Hickey came on the telex from CBC’s London office. ‘Good luck keep ur eyes open in the back of ur head,’ she wrote. I promised her an Afghan silk scarf – bribery knows no bounds in radio journalism. ‘What is the Russian for “Help I surrender where is the Brit Embassy?’” I asked. ‘The Russian for help is “pomog”,’ Sue responded in her telex shorthand. ‘So there u shud not hv any trouble bi bi.’

Ariana had a flight from Frankfurt to Kabul early on Sunday morning. Then it was cancelled. Then it was rescheduled and cancelled again. It would fly from Rome. It would fly from Geneva. No, it would fly from Istanbul. When I reached Turkey on MEA, the snow was piled round the Istanbul terminal and ‘Delayed’ was posted beside the Kabul flight designator. There was no fuel for heating in Istanbul so I huddled in my coat on a broken plastic seat with all the books and clippings I had grabbed from my files in Beirut. My teeth were chattering and I wore my gloves as I turned the pages. We journalists do this far too much, boning up on history before the next plane leaves, cramming our heads with dates and presidents, one eye on the Third Afghan War, the other on the check-in desk. I pulled out my map of Afghanistan, green and yellow to the west where the deserts imprison Kandahar, brown in the centre as the mountains shoulder their way towards Kabul, a big purple and white bruise to the north-east where the Hindu Kush separates Pakistan, India, China and the Soviet Union.

The border between British India and Afghanistan was finally laid across the tribal lands in 1893, from the Khyber Pass, south-west to the desert town of Chaman (now in Pakistan), a dustbowl frontier post at the base of a great desert of sand and grey mountains a hundred kilometres from Kandahar. These ‘lines in the sand’, of course, were set down by Sir Mortimer Durand and recognised by the great powers. For the people living on each side of the lines, who were typically given no say in the matter, the borders were meaningless. The Pathans in the south-west of Afghanistan found that the frontier cut right through their tribal and ethnic homeland. Of course they did; for the borders were supposed to protect Britain and Russia from each other, not to ease the life or identity of Afghan tribesmen who considered themselves neither Afghans nor Indians – nor, later, Pakistani – but Pushtun-speaking Pathans who believed they lived in a place called Pushtunistan, which lay on both sides of what would become known as the Durand Line.

The end of the First World War, during which Afghanistan remained neutral, left a declining British Raj to the south and an ambitious new Soviet Communist nation to the north. King Amanullah began a small-scale insurrection against the British in 1919 – henceforth to be known as the Third Afghan War – which the British won militarily but which the Afghans won politically. They would now control their own foreign affairs and have real independence from Britain. But this was no guarantee of stability.*

Reform and regression marked Afghanistan’s subsequent history. My collection of newspaper cuttings included a 1978 report from the Guardian, which recalled how the Soviets had spent £350 million to build the Salang road tunnel through the mountains north of Kabul; it took ten years and cost £200 million a mile. ‘Why should they spend £350 million on a little-used roadway across the Hindu Kush?’ the writer asked. ‘Surely not just for the lorry-loads of raisins that toil up the pass each day. The answer is no. The Salang Tunnel was built to enable Russian convoys … to cross from the cities and army bases of Uzbekhistan all the way over to the Khyber and to Pakistan …’

A nation of peasants relied upon tribal and religious tradition while only Marxists could provide political initiative. Mohamed Daoud’s violent overthrow in 1978 led to a series of ever harsher Marxist regimes led by Nur Mohamed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, their opposing Parcham (‘Banner’) and Khalq (‘People’) parties cruelly executing their rivals. Rebellion broke out in rural areas of Afghanistan and the army, increasingly mutinous despite its Soviet advisers, began to disintegrate. Taraki died of an ‘undisclosed illness’ – almost certainly murdered by Amin’s henchmen – and then, in December 1979, Amin in turn was shot dead. An entire Afghan army unit had already handed over its weapons to rebels in Wardak and there is some evidence that it was Amin himself who asked for Soviet military intervention to save his government. Soviet special forces were arriving at Afghan airbases on 17 December, five days after Brezhnev made his decision to invade, and it is possible that Amin was killed by mistake when his bodyguards first saw Soviet troops around his palace.

A quarter of a century later, in Moscow, I would meet a former Soviet military intelligence officer who arrived in Kabul with Russian forces before the official invasion. ‘Amin was shot and we tried to save him,’ he told me. ‘Our medical officers tried to save him. More than that I will not tell you.’ It is certainly true that the Soviet officer in charge of the coup, General Viktor Paputin, shortly afterwards committed suicide. On 27 December, however, it was announced that the increasingly repressive Amin had been ‘executed’. Babrak Karmal, a socialist lawyer and a Parcham party man who had earlier taken refuge in Moscow, was now installed in Kabul by the Soviets. He had been a deputy prime minister – along with Amin – under Taraki; now he was the Trojan horse through whom the Soviets could protest that Afghanistan had been ‘freed’ from Amin’s tyranny.

It was below zero in Istanbul’s Atatürk airport. There was frost on the inside of the windows. I padded off to the empty check-in desk. There was a pamphlet lying there, a brochure from the Afghan Tourist Organisation. ‘Say “Afghanistan” and you think of the friendliest country,’ it said on the back. ‘Say “Ariana” and you’ve thought of the friendliest way of getting there.’ But the Afghan Tourist Organisation had not survived the purges. A thick black crayon had been drawn through the first page in a vain attempt to erase the name of ‘the Head of State of the Republic of Afghanistan Mr Mohamed Daoud’. The word ‘Democratic’ – an essential adjective in the title of every undemocratic regime – had been penned in above the country’s name and all references to the former royal family pasted over. Local tourist officials who had served Daoud and since disappeared suffered the same paper fate.

But the brand-new Ariana DC-10 arrived in Istanbul before dawn, its Afghan crew still flying with the American McDonell Douglas technicians who had taught them to fly the aircraft. It was a bumpy, cold flight down to Tehran, the flight’s last stop before Kabul. The Afghan crew ate their breakfast in First Class before serving the passengers; the ‘friendliest way’ of getting to Afghanistan. At Tehran Mehrabad airport, three Iranian Revolutionary Guards boarded and ordered two middle-aged men off the plane. They went, heads bowed, in fear. The Afghan crew would not reveal who they were. At dawn we took off for Kabul.

Afghanistan was cloaked in snow, its mountain ravines clotted white and black with rock. From 10,000 feet, I could see tiny Soviet helicopters turning the corners of the great gorges south of Kabul, fireflies dragging a brown trail in their wake. The airport was now a military base, the streets of the capital a parking lot for Soviet armour; and these were not just Russian conscripts. The new ASU 85 infantry fighting vehicle belonged only to the Soviet Union’s top divisions. Many of the soldiers held the newest version of the Kalashnikov rifle, the AKS 74. North of the city, the 105th Airborne Division had quite literally dug a maze of trenches – miles in length – across the plateau beneath the mountains. From a distance, they looked like soldiers standing along the front lines of the Western Front in those old sepia photographs which my father had taken sixty-two years earlier. Their commanders must have been hoping that this was the only obvious parallel between the two military campaigns.

When the Russians stopped my taxi, they stared at my passport, frowning. What was an Englishman doing in Kabul? At the Intercontinental Hotel, on a low hill above the city, there was no such puzzlement. The Afghan reception staff were all smiles, discreetly moving their eyes towards the plain-clothes Afghan cops lounging on the foyer sofas so that guests would know when to lower their voices. The intensity with which men from the Khad – the Khedamat-e Etelaat-e Dawlati or ‘State Information Services’ – would watch us was fortunately only matched by their inability to speak much English. There was a snug little bar filled with bottles of Polish vodka and Czech beer and a large window against which the snow had sprawled thickly. The bedrooms were warm and the balconies a spy’s delight; from mine, Room 127, I could look out across all of Kabul, at the ancient Bala Hissar fort – one of the fictional Tom Graham’s last battles was fought there – and the airport. I could count the Soviet jets taking off into the afternoon sun and the explosions echoing down from the Hindu Kush and then the aircraft again as they glided back down to the runways.

In wars, I only travel with those I trust. Reporters who panic don’t get second chances. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times had talked his way up from the Khyber Pass through Jalalabad. He was already in the old telecommunications office down town, watching with an evil glint in his eye as the operator soldered the letter ‘w’ back onto its iron stem inside the telex machine. Gavin Hewitt, a 29-year-old BBC television reporter, arrived with Steve Morris and Mike Viney, the smartest crew I’ve ever worked with, and a battered camera – these were the days of real film with its wonderful colour definition, now lost to the technology of videotape – and Geoff Hale. They were also the days of real crews when a soundman – in this case Morris – and a film editor, Hale, accompanied a reporter into the field. Hewitt had shrewdly found a beat-up old yellow Peugeot taxi, its front and back windows draped in plastic flowers and other artificial foliage behind which we thought we could hide when driving past Soviet or Afghan military checkpoints. For $100 a day, its driver, a certain Mr Samadali, was ready to break all the rules and drive us out of Kabul.

So on the bright, white morning of 9 January 1980 we set out in our ramshackle Peugeot to watch the invasion of Afghanistan. We headed east towards the Kabul Gorge, deep into the crevasse at the foot of the Spinghar mountains. The Soviet army was making its way down to Jalalabad and we threaded our way between their great T-72s and their armoured vehicles, each machine blasting hot, black smoke onto the snow from its exhausts. And beside the highway, the Afghan men watched, their faces tight against the cold, their eyes taking in every detail of every vehicle. They looked on without emotion as the wind tugged at their orange and green shawls and gowns. The snow spread across the road and drifted at their feet. It was two degrees below zero but they had come out to watch the Soviet army convoy hum past on the great road east to the Khyber Pass.

The Russian crews, their fur hats pulled down low over their foreheads, glanced down at the Afghans and smiled occasionally as their carriers splashed through the slush and ice on the mud-packed road. A kilometre further on, Soviet military police in canvas-topped jeeps waved them into a larger convoy in which more tanks and tracked armour on transporter lorries raced along the Jalalabad highway. They were in a hurry. The generals in Kabul wanted these men at the border with Pakistan – along the Durand Line – as fast as they could travel. Secure the country. Tell Moscow that the Soviet army was now in control. We drove alongside them for 16 kilometres, our car jammed between tanks and transporters and jeeps, the young Russian soldiers watching us from beneath their furs and steel helmets as the snow blew across us. Every kilometre, troops of the Afghan army stood on guard beside the dual carriageway and 8 kilometres out of Kabul the convoy passed through a Russian checkpoint, two Soviet soldiers standing to attention on each side of the road in long splayed coats of dark green.

The further we went, the safer we felt. We knew we were heading into danger; we were well aware that the Russians had already been attacked around Jalalabad. But once we had cleared the first suspicious police checkpoint in the suburbs of Kabul – we were, Hewitt fraudulently claimed with schoolboy innocence, merely touring the city – the next military post waved us nonchalantly through amid the convoys. If we had been allowed to leave Kabul, then we must have been given permission to be on this highway. That, at least, was what the Soviet and Afghan soldiers beside the road obviously thought. Who, after all, would countermand such permission? Thank God, we said, for police states. Our greatest concern was the speed we were forced to travel. The Russians moved fast, even their tank transporters overtaking each other at 80 kilometres per hour in the semi-blizzard, sometimes forcing civilian traffic to use the other carriageway, at one point almost crushing our diminutive taxi between a lorry and a tank.

All morning there had been rumours of a new battle at Jalalabad between the Russians and Afghan tribesmen. They were pushing armour out towards the city of Herat, close to the Iranian border, and back up towards Salang where a convoy had just been attacked. What the Soviets were representing as a move against ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ in Afghanistan was clearly taking longer to complete than expected. The American contention that 85,000 Soviet troops had now entered the country from Tashkent and Moscow appeared to be correct. There could have been a hundred thousand.

Packed into Mr Samadali’s cramped Peugeot, we were recording history. Steve and Geoff sat in the back with Mike sandwiched between them, hugging the camera between his knees as Gavin and I watched the Soviet troops on their trucks. The moment we knew that no one was looking at us, I’d shout ‘Go!’ and Gavin – he was, after all, the boss of our little operation – cried ‘Picture!’ At this point, he and I would reach out and tear apart the curtain of plastic flowers and greenery, Mike would bring up the camera – the lens literally brushing the sides of our necks in the front – and start shooting through the windscreen. Every frame counted. This was the biggest Soviet military operation since the Second World War and Mike’s film would not only be shown across the world but stored in the archives for ever. The grey snow, the green of the Soviet armour, the dark silhouettes of the Afghans lining the highway, these were the colours and images that would portray the start of this invasion. A glance from a Russian soldier, too long a stare from a military policeman, and Gavin and I would cry ‘Down!’, Mike would bury his camera between his legs and we would let the artificial foliage flop back across the inside of the windscreen. ‘Don’t let’s be greedy,’ Gavin kept telling his crew. We all agreed. If we kept our cool, if we didn’t become overconfident – if we were prepared to lose a beautiful shot in order to film again another day – then we’d get the story.

Above the village of Sarobi, we stopped the car. Afghanistan’s landscape is breathtaking in the most literal sense of the word. Up here, the sun had burned the snow off the astonishingly light green mountain grass and we could see for up to 50 kilometres east to the Khyber Pass, to the suburbs of Jalalabad, bathed in mists. For the descent to the Valley of the Indus was like walking from a snowstorm into a sauna. Hold your hand out of the window and you could actually feel the air grow warmer. Gavin was literally bouncing on his toes as he stood by the road, looking across the panorama of ridges and mountain chains. Far to the north we could even make out the purple-white snows on the top of the Pamirs. We were that close to China. And we felt, we young men, on the top of the world.

The tragedy of this epic had not yet gripped us. How could I have known that seventeen years later I would be standing on this very same stretch of road as Osama bin Laden’s gunmen prayed beneath that fiery comet? How could I know, as I stood with Gavin on that hillside, that bin Laden himself, only twenty-two years old, was at that moment only a few miles from us, in the very same mountain chain, urging his young Arab fighters to join their Muslim brothers at war with the Russians?

We were halfway down the narrow, precipitous road through the Kabul Gorge when a car came towards us, flashing its headlights and skidding to a halt. The driver, unshaven and turbaned, knew only that there was ‘trouble’ further on down the pass. He raised his hands in a gesture of ignorance and fear and then, having vouchsafed this vague intelligence, he drove off behind us at speed. In the mountains of Afghanistan, you do not take such warnings lightly. We all knew what happened to General Elphinstone’s British army in this very gorge in 1842. So when we drove gingerly on down the road, we watched the rocks above us where the snowline ended and the crags gave cover for an ambush. We carried on like this for 15 kilometres without meeting another car until we reached the little village of Sarobi, where a group of decrepit old buses and a taxi stood parked beside a barber’s shop. There was an Afghan policeman standing in the road who referred in equally indistinct terms to an ‘ambush’ ahead. The road had been blocked, he said. So beside the highway, with the mountains towering above us and the Kabul river carrying the melted snows in a thrashing torrent down the ravine below, we drank hot sweet tea until two Russian tanks came round the corner followed by two lorryloads of Afghan soldiers.

The tanks swept past to the south, their tracks cutting into the tarmac, the radio operators staring straight ahead. The soldiers, each holding a Kalashnikov rifle, gave two cheers as they passed through Sarobi but received no reply. We followed them further down the pass, out of the snowline and into the hot plains where the sub-zero temperatures and ice of the mountains were replaced by dust and orange groves beside the road. A lorryload of soldiers suddenly pulled across the highway and we heard gunfire up in the cliffs. We watched the soldiers scrambling up the rocks until we lost sight of them amid the boulders, figures from an old portrait of imperial hostilities in the Khyber. But we drove on behind the Russian tanks into the plain, and round a bend we came to a checkpoint and the site of the ambush.

For 400 metres, the trees that lined the road had been cut down. There were troops there now and two Russian armoured personnel carriers had already come up from Jalalabad and cleared most of the road. Tribesmen had fired out of the trees when the first civilian cars had stopped at the roadblock before dawn. They killed two people and wounded nine others, one in the back and chest. There was still a litter of glass across the highway but no one knew whether the tribesmen were bandits or whether they had mistaken the cars for Russian military vehicles in the dark. There was an old man by the road who thought he knew the answer. The men who carried out the ambush, he told us, were ‘mujahedin’, ‘holy warriors’. Gavin looked at me. We hadn’t heard that word in Afghanistan before.

It was a reminder that the Soviet-backed authorities in Afghanistan could not even secure the main highway to Pakistan, although we noticed that the Afghan army was still allowed to play an important role in operations. The soldiers who checked our papers through the pass and manned the small concrete forts beside the gorge were all Afghans. Some of the tanks parked in the mountains outside Jalalabad were Afghan too, and only the Afghan army patrolled the city in daylight. Not a Russian was to be seen along the tree-lined, shady streets of this pretty town where horse-drawn carriages rattled with colonial grace over dirt roads, where shoeless peasant boys beat donkeys loaded with grain down to the little market. But the scene was deceptive and Jalalabad provided an important indicator to what was happening in other, remoter, towns in Afghanistan.

For despite the delightful serenity of the place, Pathan tribesmen in their thousands were shooting nightly at Afghan troops in the countryside outside Jalalabad. In the past six days, explosions had rumbled over the town at night and two large bombs had twice destroyed the electric grid and transformers carrying power into Jalalabad, whose population had had no electricity for five days. The curfew had been extended from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. And during those hours of night, the Soviet army had been moving heavy armour through the town. There were now 1,400 Russian troops with T-54 tanks and tracked vehicles quartered in the old Afghan army barracks 5 kilometres east of Jalalabad on the road to Pakistan. If the Afghan army could not keep the peace, it seemed that the Russians were preparing to step in and pacify the countryside.

We drove back to Kabul before dusk and tried to visit the Russian-built military hospital. Through the iron fences, we could see soldiers with their arms in slings, walking with the aid of sticks or crutches. More ominously, a turboprop Aeroflot aircraft was parked at a remote corner of Kabul airport and when we drove close to it, we could make out a Russian military ambulance next to a loading ramp at the front of the fuselage. In the years to come, the Russians would give a nickname to the aircraft that flew their dead home from Afghanistan: the ‘Black Tulip’. Within eight years, the Russians would lose 14,263 combatants dead and missing, and bring home 49,985 wounded.

In the years to come, Gavin and I would remember our journeys out of Kabul in 1980 as a great adventure. We were a hunting party, off for an exciting day in the quest for images. We adopted the elderly Russian-built grain silo outside Kabul as a symbol of the Soviet Union’s gift to the world – it represented, we thought, about a millionth of the Soviet Union’s ‘gifts’. ‘There was an innocence about our world,’ Gavin would recall more than twenty years later. ‘The grain silo was somehow typical. The more crumbling its presence, the more true our images were to their art form.’ Travelling with his crew, I became almost as possessive of their filmed report – as anxious to see them get a scoop a day for the BBC – as Gavin himself. For his part, Gavin wanted to ensure that I sent my reports for The Times safely out of Kabul each day. Our enthusiasm to help each other was not just journalistic camaraderie. Gavin was one of the only television reporters to reach Afghanistan and his dramatic film dispatches were shaping the world’s perception of the Soviet invasion. William Rees-Mogg, the editor of The Times, and my foreign news editor, Ivan Barnes, watched all Gavin’s reports, though they often took forty-eight hours to reach the screen. There were no satellite ‘feeds’ in Kabul and we were forbidden to bring satellite dishes into the country. So Geoff Hale was hand-carrying cans of film out to London, commuting back and forth from Kabul every two days, a 13,500-kilometre round trip at least three times a week. Gavin found that his own editors were reading my reports every day in The Times and eagerly waited for the pictures which they knew he would have – since Gavin had told them we travelled together. And his filmed reports were feeding my own editor’s hunger for news from Afghanistan. We were two parasites, we used to claim, living off each other’s work.

My own copy was reaching The Times in less expensive but almost equally exhausting form. The Intercontinental staff were instructed by the Afghan state security police not to allow journalists to send their reports over the hotel telex. I was thus reduced to sending messages to Ivan Barnes and to my foreign editor, Louis Heren, indicating how I planned to get my dispatch to London. Our New York and Washington bureaus were trying to call me by phone; so was Binyon in Moscow. But in all the weeks I spent in Kabul, I never received a single telephone call from anyone. Instead, I would wake up at four each morning and type up five copies of my story for The Times. I would give one copy to the Reuters news agency, which sent an Indian staffer to Delhi almost every day. I gave another copy to Reuters’ Pakistani staffer who regularly flew to Peshawar and Islamabad. From there, they were asked to punch out my text and – since the paper subscribed to the news agency – send it to London. Another copy went to anyone travelling to the Soviet Union in the hope they would contact Binyon in Moscow. A fourth carbon went to Geoff for his regular flights to Britain.

The fifth was for a much more devious operation, one which – and still today I marvel that it worked – involved the Pakistani conductor of the daily old wooden bus that bumped down from Kabul to Jalalabad and on to Peshawar in Pakistan, where local hotel staff were standing ready to telex my pages to London. I set the scheme up on my third morning in Kabul. I had noticed the Peshawar bus on the highway south of the capital and learned that it left Kabul each morning at 6.30. I liked Ali, the conductor, an immensely cheerful Pathan with a green scarf and a round Afghan hat and a smile of massive pure white teeth who spoke enough English to understand both my humour and my cynicism. ‘Mr Robert, if this hurts the Russians, I will carry your report to the very door of the Intercontinental Hotel in Peshawar. You give me money to pay their operators and when you leave Afghanistan, you will go to Peshawar with me and pay the telex bills. Trust me.’

All my life in the Middle East, people have ordered me to trust them. And almost always I did and they were worthy of that trust. Ali received $50 a day, every day, to take my typed dispatch to Peshawar. The operators received $40 a day to telex it to London. Even in the worst blizzards down the Kabul Gorge, Ali’s ancient bus made it through the snowdrifts and the Russian checkpoints. Sometimes I travelled with him as far as Jalalabad. The Afghan army had been told to stop journalists roaming the country in cars but they never thought to check the bus. So I would sit on the steps with Ali as we puttered and rocked down the Kabul Gorge, feeling the warmth of the countryside as we descended into the Indus valley. I would stay at the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad, spend the morning driving into the rural villages in a motorised rickshaw – a cloth-covered cabin mounted on the back of a motorcycle – to investigate the results of the overnight fighting between the Russians and the mujahedin and then pick up Ali’s return bus to Kabul in the afternoon. Ali never lost a single report. Only when I received a telegram from The Times did I realise how well he did his job. ‘MANY THANKS … FILES STOP TUESDAY’S LEAD PAPER<WEDNESDAYS CONVOYS FRONT PAGE STOP.’ When journalists have to smuggle their dispatches out of a country, they traditionally call the carrier a ‘pigeon’. Ali was the best pigeon The Times ever had, his old bus its finest transport. And when one night, in the bar of the Kabul Intercontinental, a reporter from the Daily Mail admitted he had received a telegram from his editors in London with the angry demand ‘Does Fisk have cleft stick?’ I added $100 to Ali’s next payment.

Slowly, Gavin and I enlarged our area of operations. Two hundred kilometres west of Kabul lay the thousand-year-old city of Ghazni, clustering round the giant battlements of a Turkish fort destroyed by the British in the First Afghan War, a settlement on the road to Kandahar which was successively destroyed by Arab invaders in 869 and again by Genghis Khan in 1221. The Soviet army, we were told, had not yet reached Ghazni, so we took the highway south past the big Soviet guns that ringed Kabul and a European face beneath a Cossack-style hat waved us, unsmiling, through the last Russian checkpoint. Gavin and I were working our plastic foliage routine, pulling aside the ghastly purple and blue artificial flowers whenever a Soviet tank obligingly crossed our path so that Mike could run another two or three feet of film. At the tiny, windy village of Saydabad, 70 kilometres down the road, more Russian tanks were dug in beside the highway, their barrels pointing west, dwarfing the poor mud and wattle huts in which the villagers lived. There was a bridge guarded by four soldiers with bayonets fixed and then there was just an empty, unprotected road of ice and drifting snow that stretched down towards the provinces of Paktia and Ghazni.

The old city, when Gavin and his crew and I turned up in Mr Samadali’s Peugeot, looked like a scene from a medieval painting, walled ramparts set against the snow-smothered peaks of the Safid Kuh mountains and pale blue skies that distorted all perspective. Indeed, there were no Russians, just a series of Afghan army lorries that trundled every half-hour or so down from the north to the Ghazni barracks, their red Afghan insignia a doubtful protection against attack by rebel tribesmen, their scruffily dressed drivers peering nervously from the cab. The Afghan army, notionally loyal to its new president and his Soviet allies, theoretically controlled the countryside, although it was clear the moment we entered Ghazni that some form of unofficial ceasefire existed between the local soldiers and the Pathan tribesmen. Afghan troops in sheepskin cloaks and vests – Ghazni is famous for the manufacture of embroidered Pustin coats – were wandering the narrow, mud streets, looking for provisions beneath their turreted, crumbling barracks.

Almost a thousand years ago, Mahmud of Ghazni imposed his rule over most of Afghanistan, devastated north-west India and established an Islamic empire that consolidated Sunni Muslim power over thousands of square miles. Ghazni became one of the great cities of the Persian world whose 400 resident poets included the great Ferdowsi. But the city was now a mockery of its glorious past. Some of the battlements had long ago collapsed and ice had cracked the ancient walls in the sub-zero temperatures. Isolated from the outside world, its inhabitants were suspicious of strangers, a dangerous and understandable obsession that had reached a new intensity now that reports of the Soviet invasion had reached the city.

We had scarcely parked our car when a tall man with a long grey moustache approached us. ‘Are you Russian?’ he asked, and a group of Pathans in blue and white headdress began to gather around the car. We told them we were English and for a minute or so there were a few friendly smiles. Gavin and I were to develop our own special smile for these people, a big, warm smile of delight to hide our dark concern. How good to see you. What a wonderful country. My God, how you must hate those Russians. All of us knew how quickly things could go wrong. It was only a few months since a group of Soviet civilian construction workers and their wives had decided to visit the blue-tiled Masjid Jami mosque in Herat – a place of worship since the time of Zoroaster – only to be seized by a crowd and knifed to death. Several of the Russians were skinned alive. Only the previous day, though I did not know it then, The Times had published a photograph of two blindfolded men in the hands of Afghan rebels. They were high-school teachers detained in the city of Farah, 300 kilometres west of Kandahar, and the man on the right of the picture had already been executed as a communist.

Mr Samadali needed oil for his Peugeot, and from a cluttered, dirty, concrete-floored shop an old man produced a can of motor oil. Horses and carts and donkeys staggering under sacks of grain slithered through the slush and mud and then someone muttered ‘Khar’ and the smiles all faded. Khar means ‘donkey’ and though apparently humorous on first hearing, it is a term of disgust and hatred when used about foreigners. ‘They are calling you “khar”,’ Mr Samadali said desperately. ‘They cannot tell the difference between Englishmen and Russians. They do not want foreigners here. You must go.’ A larger group of Pathans had now arrived and stood in a line along a raised wooden pavement beside the street. There were no guns in their hands, although two had long knives in their belts. A middle-aged man came up to us. ‘Leave here now,’ he said urgently. ‘Don’t stop for anyone. If you are stopped by people on the road, drive through them. You are foreigners and they will think you are Russians and kill you. They will find out who you are afterwards.’ We left Ghazni at speed. Were we really in danger? More than twenty-one years later, I would confront an almost identical group of angry Afghans and, almost at the cost of my life, I would discover just what it meant to incur their fury.

Frightening off strangers was one thing. Fighting a well-equipped modern army would be quite another. On the road north again, we noticed, high on the hillsides and deep in the snow, a series of metal turrets with gun barrels poking from them. The Russians had already taken physical control of the highway even though they did not stand beside the road. Soviet tanks had been parachuted into the mountains north of Kabul and the artillery outside Ghazni had also been dropped from the air. Our plastic foliage twitched aside as we cleared the windscreen for Mike. We were becoming experts. Indeed, it was Gavin’s contention that the Russians would inevitably learn about our stage-prop jungle and assume that all modern movies were produced like this, that a new generation of Soviet film-makers would insist on shooting all future productions through car windows stuffed with artificial purple flowers.

And there was plenty more to film in Afghanistan. Even before we arrived, the Karmal government had attempted to slink back into popular support by freeing Amin’s political prisoners. But when the city prison in Kabul was opened, thousands of men and women arrived to greet their loved ones and began throwing stones at the young Soviet troopers around the walls. No one doubted that the previous regime was detested by the population; the newly installed Karmal officials lost no time in letting us know of their hatred. This, after all, was why we had been given visas to come to Afghanistan. In Peshawar, rebel groups had claimed that the Afghan army would fight the Russian invaders, but the 7th and 8th Afghan Divisions in Kabul, both of which were equipped with Soviet tanks, never fired a shot against Russian armour. Their Soviet advisers had seen to that.

Four days later, however, the government’s propaganda went disastrously wrong. Thousands of Afghans – relatives of inmates, many of them in long cloaks and turbans – gathered this time outside the Polecharkhi prison, a grim fortress of high stone walls, barbed wire, jail blocks and torture cells, to witness the official release of 118 political prisoners. But enraged that so few had been freed, the crowd burst through an Afghan army cordon and broke open the iron gates. We ran into the prison with them, a Russian soldier next to me almost thrown off his feet. He stared, transfixed by the sight as men and women – the latter in the all-covering burqa – began shouting ‘Allahu akbar’, ‘God is Great’,* through the outer compound and began to climb over the steel gates of the main prison blocks. Gavin and I looked at each other in wonderment. This was a religious as much as it was a political protest. On the roof of a barracks, a young Soviet officer, his Kalashnikov rifle pointing at the crowd, began shouting in Russian that there were only eight people left inside the prison. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times was in the yard in his big Russian greatcoat. He was based in Moscow and spoke good Russian and he turned to me with his usual irredeemable smirk. ‘That guy may claim there are only eight men left,’ he said. ‘I suspect we’re going to find out he’s lying.’

For a moment, the crowd paused as the officer swung his rifle barrel in their direction, then heeded him no more and surged on through the second newly broken gate. Hopelessly outnumbered, the soldier lowered his weapon. Hundreds of other prisoners’ relatives now smashed the windows of the cell blocks with rocks and used steel pipes to break in the doors of the first building. Three prisoners were suddenly led into the winter sunlight by their liberators, middle-aged men in rags, thin and frail and dazed and blinking at the snow and ice-covered walls. A young man came up to me in the prison as crowds began to break in the roof of a second concrete cell block. ‘We want Russians to go,’ he said in English. ‘We want independent Afghanistan, we want families released. My brother and father are here somewhere.’

I squeezed into the cell block with the mob, and there were certainly more than the eight prisoners to which the Russian officer referred. Blankets had been laid on the stone floor by the inmates as their only protection against the extreme cold. There was a musty, stale smell in the tiny, airless cells. Across the compound, other prisoners waved through the bars of windows, screaming at the crowd to release them. One man in baggy peasant trousers bashed open a hatch in the metal roof of a cell and slid inside, shouting to his friends to follow him. I climbed through a window in the end of the same cell block and was confronted by at least twenty men, sitting on the floor amid chains and straw, eyes wide with horror and relief. One held out his hand to me. It was so thin I felt only his bones. His cheeks were sunken and blue, his teeth missing, his open chest covered in scars. And all this while, the Russian soldiers and the Afghan guards stood watching, unable to control the thousands of men and women, aware that any public bloodletting would cause irreparable damage to the Karmal regime. Some of the crowd abused the Russians, and one youth who said he was from Paktia province screamed at me that ‘Russians are bombing and killing in south Afghanistan’.

But the most notable phenomenon about this amazing prison break-in were the Islamic chants from the crowds. Several men shouted for an Islamic revolution, something the Russians had long feared in Afghanistan and in their own Muslim republics. Many of the youths looking for their relatives came from rural areas to the south of Kabul, where tribal rebellion had been growing for at least fourteen months. Altogether, the government had released more than 2,000 political prisoners in the previous three weeks – it was Babrak Karmal’s first act as president – but the decision had the unintended effect of reminding the crowds of how many thousands of political prisoners were not being released, inmates who had long ago been executed under Amin.

Only in the early afternoon did Soviet soldiers form a line inside the main gate of Polecharkhi with rifles lowered, apparently to prevent the hundreds of men and women from leaving. Conor pulled his greatcoat round him, hands in pockets, the very model of a modern KGB major-general, and walked straight up to the nearest officer in the line of troops. ‘Dos vidanya,’ he said in Russian. The officer and another soldier snapped smartly to attention and we walked out of the jail.*

That same day, Babrak Karmal held his first press conference, a dismal affair in which the new Soviet-installed president – the son of a high-ranking Pushtun army officer, a heavily built man with a prominent nose, high cheekbones and greying hair with the manners of a nightclub bouncer – denounced his socialist predecessor as a criminal and insisted that his country was no client kingdom of the Soviet Union. This was a little hard to take when the main door of the Chelstoon Palace – in which this miserable performance was taking place – was guarded by a Soviet soldier with a red star on his hat, when a Russian tracked armoured vehicle stood in the grounds and when a Soviet anti-aircraft gun crew waited in the snow beside their weapons a hundred metres from the building. So when Babrak Karmal told us that ‘the only thing brighter than sunshine is the honest friendship of the Soviet Union’, one could only regard it as a uniquely optimistic, if not Olympian, view of a world that Dr Faustus would have recognised.

Even the Afghan officials clustered beside Karmal, however, must have wished for the presence of some subtle Mephistopheles to soften the rhetoric as the president’s press conference descended into an angry and occasionally abusive shouting match. The questions that the Western journalists put to Karmal were often more interesting than his replies, but highlights of the affair had to include the following statements by Moscow’s new man: that not one Soviet soldier had been killed or wounded since the Russian military ‘intervention’ began; that the size of the ‘very limited Soviet contingent’ sent to Afghanistan had been grossly exaggerated by the ‘imperialist Western press’; that the Soviet Union had supported the ‘brutal regime’ of the late Hafizullah Amin because ‘the Soviet Union would never interfere in the internal affairs of any country’; and, finally, that Soviet troops would leave Afghanistan ‘at the moment that the aggressive policy of the United States – in compliance with the Beijing leadership and the provocation of the reactionary circles of Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – is eliminated’.

The full flavour of the press conference, however, could only be captured by quoting extracts. Martyn Lewis of ITN, for example, wanted to know about Karmal’s election to the presidency after his predecessor had been overthrown in a coup.

LEWIS: ‘I wonder, could you tell us when and under what circumstances you were elected and – if that election was truly democratic – why is it that Russian troops had to help you to power?’

KARMAL: ‘Mr Representative of British imperialism, the imperialism that three times blatantly invaded Afghanistan, you got a rightful and deserved answer from the people of Afghanistan.’

This exchange was followed by a burst of clapping from Afghan officials and Soviet correspondents. Only after this excursion into three Afghan wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did Karmal reply to Lewis, telling him that during the Amin regime ‘an overwhelming majority of the principal members of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan’ had elected him president.* We had, of course, expected no less of Karmal, and his courageous – some might say foolhardy – assertion that ‘a true non-alignment for Afghanistan can be obtained with the material and moral help of the Soviet Union’ accurately reflected Moscow’s point of view.

The new man was once a bitter opponent within the PDP of Nur Mohamed Taraki, the assassinated president whose ‘martyrdom’ Karmal now blamed on the CIA, and Gavin Hewitt experienced first-hand what it was like to be on the receiving end of the new dictator’s anger. For when Gavin commented mildly that ‘there doesn’t seem to be much support for you or the Russians in Afghanistan’, Karmal drew in his breath and bellowed the first response that came into his head. ‘Mr Correspondent of the BBC – the most famous propaganda liar in the world!’ he roared. That was all. The room collapsed in applause from the satraps around Karmal and uncontrollable laughter from journalists. ‘Well,’ I told Gavin, ‘old Babrak can’t be that bad a guy – at least he got you down to a “T”.’ Gavin shot me a sidelong grin. ‘Just wait, Fiskers,’ he muttered. And he was right. Within hours, Karmal’s absurd reply had gone round the world, proving that Moscow’s new man in Kabul was just another factotum with a single message.

But it was a clear sign that our presence in Afghanistan would not be tolerated indefinitely. This was made clear to me some days later when three members of the Khad secret police turned up at the reception desk at the Intercontinental to see me. They all wore leather coats – de rigueur for plain-clothes cops in Soviet satellite countries – and they were not smiling. One of them, a small man with a thin moustache and a whining voice, held out a piece of paper. ‘We have come to see you about this,’ he snapped. I took the paper from him, a telegram bearing the stamp of the Afghan PTT office. And as I read the contents, I swallowed several times, the kind of guilty swallow that criminals make in movies when confronted with evidence of some awesome crime. ‘URGENT, BOB FISK GUEST INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL KABUL,’ it Said. ‘ANY POSSIBILITY OF GETTING TWO MINUTE UPDATE RE SOVIET MILITARY BUILDUP IN AFGHANISTAN FOR SUNDAY MORNING THIS WEEK? LOVE SUE HICKEY.’ I drew in my breath. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I shouted. How could Sue in the London office of CBC have sent such a telegram? For days, I had been sending tapes to CBC, describing the atmosphere of fear and danger in Afghanistan, and here was Sue sending me an open telegram requesting details of Soviet military deployment in a state run by pro-Moscow communists. It was, I suspected, part of a very old problem. Somewhere between reporters and their offices in faraway London or New York there exists a wall of gentle disbelief, an absolute fascination with the reporter’s dispatch from the war zone but an unconscious conviction that it is all part of some vast Hollywood production, that the tape or the film – though obviously not fraudulent – is really a massive theatrical production, that the Russian army was performing for us, the world’s press, that the Khad – always referred to in news reports as the ‘dreaded’ secret police – was somehow not that dreadful after all, indeed might be present in Afghanistan to give just a little more excitement to our stories.

I looked at the little man from Khad. He was looking at me with a kind of excitement in his face. He was one of the few who could speak passable English. And he had caught his man. The Western spy had been found with incontrovertible proof of his espionage activities, a request for military information about the Soviet army. ‘What does this mean?’ the little man asked softly. Oh yes, indeed. What did this mean? I needed time to think. So I burst into laughter. I put my head back and positively gusted laughter around the lobby of the hotel until even the receptionists turned to find out the cause of the joke. And I noticed one of the cops grinning. He wanted in on the joke, too. I slowly let my laughter subside and shook my head wearily. ‘Look, this lady wants me to report for a radio show called Sunday Morning in Canada,’ I said. ‘There is no “Soviet military buildup” – we all know that because President Karmal told us that only a “very limited Soviet contingent” has come to Afghanistan. This lady obviously doesn’t know that. I have to clear up this ridiculous situation and report the truth. I’m sorry you’ve been bothered with such a silly message – and I can certainly understand why you were worried about it.’ And I laughed again. Even the little cop smiled sheepishly. I offered him back the incriminating telegram. ‘No – you keep it,’ he snapped. And he wagged his finger in my face. ‘We know, you know,’ he said. I’m sorry, I asked, what did he know? But the lads from the Khad had turned their backs and walked away. Thank you, Sue. Weeks later, we dined out on the story – and she paid for the meal.

Yet it was all too easy to turn the Soviet occupation into a one-dimensional drama, of brutal Russian invaders and plucky Afghan guerrillas, a kind of flip-side version of the fictional Tom Graham’s Second Afghan War. A succession of pro-Soviet dictators had ruled Afghanistan with cruelty, with socialist cant and pious economic plans, but also through tribal alliances. The Pathans and the Hazaras – who were Shia Muslims – and the Tajiks and the Ghilzais and the Durranis and the Uzbeks could be manipulated by the government in Kabul. It could bestow power on a leader prepared to control his town on behalf of the communist authorities but could withhold funds and support from anyone who did not. Prison, torture and execution were not the only way to ensure political compliance. But among the tribes, deep within the deserts and valleys of Afghanistan, the same communist governments had been trying to cajole and then force upon these rural societies a modern educational system in which girls as well as boys would go to school, at which young women did not have to wear the veil, in which science and literature would be taught alongside Islam. Twenty-one years later, an American president would ostentatiously claim that these were among his own objectives in Afghanistan.

And I remember one excursion out of Jalalabad in those early days of the Soviet invasion. I had heard that a schoolhouse had been burned down in a village 25 kilometres from the city and set off in an exhaust-fuming Russian-built taxi to find out if this was true. It was, but there was much worse. Beside the gutted school there hung from a tree a piece of blackened meat, twisting gently in the breeze. One of the villagers, urging my driver to take me from the village, told us that this was all that was left of the headmaster. They had also hanged and burned his schoolteacher wife. The couple’s sin: to comply with government rules that girls and boys should be taught in the same classroom. And what about those Pakistanis and Egyptians and Saudis who were, according to Karmal, supporting the ‘terrorists’? Even in Jalalabad, I heard that Arabs had been seen in the countryside outside the city, although – typical of our innocence at that time – I regarded these stories as untrue. How could Egyptians and Saudis have found their way here? And why Saudis? But when I heard my colleagues – especially American journalists – referring to the resistance as ‘freedom fighters’, I felt something going astray. Guerrillas, maybe. Even fighters. But ‘freedom’ fighters? What kind of ‘freedom’ were they planning to bestow upon Afghanistan?

Of their bravery, there was no doubt. And within three weeks of the Soviet invasion came the first signs of a unified Muslim political opposition to the Karmal government and its Russian supporters. The few diplomats left in Kabul called them ‘night letters’. Crudely printed on cheap paper, the declarations and manifestos were thrown into embassy compounds and pushed between consular fences during the hours of curfew, their message usually surmounted by a drawing of the Koran. The most recent of them – and it was now mid-January of 1980 – purported to come from the ‘United Muslim Warriors of Afghanistan’ and bore the badge of the Islamic Afghan Front, one of four groups which had been fighting in the south of the country.

From the opened pages of the Koran, there sprouted three rifles. The letter denounced the regime for ‘inhuman crimes’ and condemned Soviet troops in the country for ‘treating Afghans like slaves’. Muslims, it said, ‘will not give up fighting or guerrilla attacks until our last breath … the proud and aggressive troops of the Russian power have no idea of the rights and human dignity of the people of Afghanistan.’ The letter predicted the death of Karmal and three of his cabinet ministers, referring to the president as ‘Khargal’, a play on words in Persian which means ‘thief of work’. The first man to be condemned was Asadullah Sawari, a member of the Afghan praesidium who was Taraki’s secret police chief, widely credited with ordering the torture of thousands of Taraki’s opponents. Others on the death list included Shah Jan Mozdooryar, a former interior minister who was now Karmal’s transport minister.

The ‘night letter’ also included specific allegations that the Soviet army was ‘committing acts which are intolerable to our people’, adding that Russian soldiers had kidnapped women and girls working in a bakery in the Darlaman suburb of Kabul and returned them next morning after keeping them for the night. A similar incident, the letter stated, had occurred in the suburb of Khaire Khana, ‘an act of aggression against the dignity of Muslim families’. When I investigated these claims, bakery workers in Darlaman told me that women workers who normally bake bread for Afghan soldiers had refused to work for Soviet troops and that the Russians had consequently taken the women from the bakery and forced them to bake bread elsewhere. But they were unclear about the treatment the women had received and were too frightened to say more. The authors of the letter said that Muslims would eventually overthrow Karmal and judiciously added that they would then refuse to honour any foreign contracts made with his government.* Then they added, hopelessly and perhaps a little pathetically, that their statements should be broadcast over the BBC at 8.45 p.m. ‘without censorship’.

Still Gavin and I ventured out most days with Steve, Geoff, Mike and the faithful Mr Samadali. We were halfway up the Salang Pass, 130 kilometres north of Kabul, on 12 January when our car skidded on the ice and a young Russian paratrooper from the 105th Airborne Division ran down the road, waving his automatic rifle at us and shouting in Russian. He had been wounded in the right hand and blood was seeping from the bullet-hole through his makeshift bandage and staining the sleeve of his battledress. He was only a teenager, with fair hair and blue eyes and a face that showed fear. He had clearly never before been under fire. Beside us, a Soviet army transport lorry, its rear section blown to pieces by a mine, lay upended in a ditch. There were two tracked armoured carriers just up the road and a Russian paratroop captain ran towards us to join his colleague.

‘Who are you?’ he asked in English. He was dark-haired and tired, dressed in a crumpled tunic, a hammer-and-sickle buckle on his belt. We told him we were correspondents but the younger soldier was too absorbed with the pain from his wound. He re-applied the safety catch on his rifle, then lifted up his hand for our inspection. He raised it with difficulty and pointed to a snow-covered mountain above us where a Russian military helicopter was slowly circling the peak. ‘They shoot Russians,’ he said. He was incredulous. No one knew how many Russians the guerrillas had shot, although a villager a mile further south insisted with undisguised relish that his compatriots had killed hundreds.

But the ambush had been carefully planned. The mine had exploded at the same time as a charge had blown up beneath a bridge on the main highway. So for almost twenty-four hours, half of a Russian convoy en route to Kabul from the Soviet frontier was marooned in the snow at an altitude of more than 7,000 feet. Russian engineers had made temporary repairs and we watched as the Soviet trucks made their way down from the mountains, slithering on the slush and packed ice: 156 tracked armoured vehicles, eight-wheel personnel carriers and 300 lorryloads of petrol, ammunition, food and tents. The drivers looked exhausted. The irony, of course, was that the Russians had built this paved highway through the 11,900-foot pass as a symbol of mutual cooperation between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan – and for the Soviet military convoys that were now streaming south under daily attack. That night, the US State Department claimed that 1,200 Russian soldiers had been killed. It seemed an exaggeration. But the bloody-minded villager may have been right about the hundreds dead. A ‘very limited contingent’, indeed.

Karmal’s government held a ‘day of mourning’ for those killed by ‘the butcher Amin’. The British embassy even lowered its flag to half-mast. But only a few hundred people turned up at the yellow-painted Polekheshti Bridge Mosque to pray for their souls, and they were for the most part well-dressed PDP functionaries. Four young men who arrived at the mosque in northern Kabul and attempted to avoid the signing ceremony were reminded of their party duties by a soldier with a bayonet fixed to his rifle. They signed the book. The rest of Kabul maintained the uneasy tenor of its new life. The bazaars were open as usual and the street sellers with their sweetmeats and oils continued to trade beside the ice-covered Kabul river. In the old city, a Western television crew was stoned by a crowd after being mistaken for Russians.

Kabul had an almost bored air of normality that winter as it sat in its icy basin in the mountains, its wood smoke drifting up into the pale blue sky. The first thing all of us noticed in the sky was an army of kites – large box kites, triangular and rectangular kites and small paper affairs, painted in blues and reds and often illustrated with a large and friendly human eye. No one seemed to know why the Afghans were so obsessed with kites, although there was a poetic quality to the way in which the children – doll-like creatures with narrow Chinese features, swaddled in coats and embroidered capes – watched their kites hanging in the frozen air, those great paper eyes with their long eyelashes floating towards the mountains.

Gavin and I once asked Mr Samadali to take us to the zoo. Inside the gate, a rusting sign marked ‘vultures’ led to some of the nastiest birds on earth, skeletal rather than scrawny. Past the hog-pit, a trek through deep snow brought us to the polar bear cages. But the cage doors were open and the bears were missing. Even more disquieting was the silent group of turbaned men who followed us around the zebra park, apparently under the illusion we were Russians. It must have been the only zoo in the world where the visitors were potentially more dangerous than the animals. We even managed to find Afghanistan’s only railway locomotive, a big early twentieth-century steam engine bought by King Amanullah from a German manufacturer. It sat forlorn and rusting near a ruined palace, its pistons congealed together and guarded by policemen who snatched at our cameras when we tried to take a picture of this old loco – a doubly absurd event since there is not a single railway line in all of Afghanistan.

Perhaps by way of compensation, the truck-drivers of Afghanistan had turned their lorries into masterpieces of Afghan pop art, every square inch of bodywork covered in paintings and multicoloured designs. Afghan lorry art possessed a history all its own, created in 1945 when metal sheeting was added to the woodwork of long-distance trucks; the panels were turned into canvases by artists in Kabul and later Kandahar. Lorry-owners paid large sums to these painters – the more intricate the decoration, the more honoured the owner became – and the art was copied from Christmas cards, calendars, comics and mosques. Tarzan and the Horse of Imam Ali could be seen side by side with parrots, mountains, helicopters and flowers. Three-panelled rail-boards on Bedford trucks provided perfect triptychs. A French author once asked a lorry-owner why he painted his coachwork and received the reply that ‘it is a garden, for the road is long’.

Inevitably, Karmal tried to appease the mujahedin, seeking a ceasefire in rural areas through a series of secret meetings between government mediators and tribal leaders in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. A PDP statement announced that it would ‘begin friendly negotiations with … national democratic progressives and Islamic circles [sic] and organisations’. This new approach, intriguing though doomed, was accompanied by a desperate effort on the part of the government to persuade itself that it was acquiring international legitimacy. Kabul newspapers carried the scarcely surprising news that favourable reactions to the new regime had come from Syria, Kampuchea and India as well as the Soviet Union and its east European satellites. In a long letter to Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Islamic Revolution in Iran the previous year had so frightened the Soviets, Karmal criticised the adverse Iranian response to his coup – it had been condemned by Iranian religious leaders – and sought to assure the Ayatollah that the murder of Muslim tribesmen in Afghanistan had been brought to an end with Amin’s overthrow. ‘My Government will never allow anybody to use our soil as a base against the Islamic revolution in Iran and against the interest of the fraternal Iranian people,’ he wrote. ‘We expect our Iranian brothers to take an identical stance.’

Iran, needless to say, was in no mood to comply. Within days of the Soviet invasion, the foreign ministry in Tehran had stated that ‘Afghanistan is a Muslim country and … the military intervention of the government of the Soviet Union in the neighbouring country of our co-religionists is considered a hostile measure … against all the Muslims of the world.’ Within months – and aware that the United States was sending aid to the guerrillas – Iran would be planning its own military assistance programme for the insurgents. By July, Sadeq Qotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister, was telling me that he hoped his country would give weapons to the rebels if the Soviet Union did not withdraw its army. ‘Some proposal [to this effect] has been given to the Revolutionary Council,’ he told me in Tehran. ‘… Just as we were against the American military intervention in Vietnam, we think exactly the same way about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan … The Soviet Union claims that they have come to Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan government. The Americans were in Vietnam at the request of the Vietnamese government.’ But at this stage, Karmal had more pressing problems than Iran.

Desperate to maintain the loyalty of the Afghan army – we heard reports that only 60 per cent of the force was now following orders – Karmal even made an appeal to their patriotism, promising increased attention to their ‘material needs’. These ‘heroic officers, patriotic cadets and valiant soldiers’ were urged to ‘defend the freedom, honour and security of your people … with high hopes for a bright future.’ ‘Material needs’ clearly meant back pay. The fact that such an appeal had to be made at all said much about the low morale of the Afghan army. No sooner had he tried to appease his soldiers than Karmal turned to the Islamists who had for so long opposed the communist regimes in Kabul. He announced that he would change the Afghan flag to reintroduce green, the colour of Islam so rashly deleted from the national banner by Taraki, to the fury of the clergy. At the same time – and Karmal had an almost unique ability to destroy each new political initiative with an unpopular counter-measure – he warned that his government would treat ‘terrorists, gangsters, murderers and highwaymen’ with ‘revolutionary decisiveness’.

For ‘terrorists’, read ‘guerrillas’ or – as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come – ‘freedom fighters’. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always ‘terrorists’. In the seventeenth century, governments used ‘heretic’ in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience. Karmal’s policy was simple: you are either with us or against us. For decades, I have listened to this dangerous equation, uttered by capitalist and communist, presidents and prime ministers, generals and intelligence officers and, of course, newspaper editors.

In Afghanistan there were no such formulaic retreats. In my cosy room at the Intercontinental, each night I would spread out a map. What new journey could be made across this iced plateau before the Russians threw us out? With this in mind, I realised that the full extent of the Russian invasion might be gauged from the Soviet border. If I could reach Mazar-e-Sharif, far to the north on the Amu Darya river, I would be close to the frontier of the Soviet Union and could watch their great convoys entering the country. I packed a soft Afghan hat and a brown, green-fringed shawl I’d bought in the bazaar, along with enough dollars to pay for several nights in a Mazar hotel, and set off before dawn to the cold but already crowded bus station in central Kabul.

The Afghans waiting for the bus to Mazar were friendly enough. When I said I was English, there were smiles and several young men shook my hand. Others watched me with the same suspicion as the three Khad men at the Intercontinental. There were women in burqas who sat in silence in the back of the wooden vehicle. I pulled my Afghan hat low over my forehead and threw my shawl over my shoulder. Cowled in cigarette smoke from the passengers, I took a seat on the right-hand side of the bus because the soldiers on checkpoint duty always approached from the left. It worked. The bus growled up the highway towards Salang as the first sun shone bleakly over the snow plains. Gavin and I had now driven this road so many times that, despite its dangers, the highway was familiar, almost friendly. On the right was the big Soviet base north of Kabul airport. Here was the Afghan checkpoint outside Charikar. This was where the young Russian soldier had shown us the wound in his hand. Soldiers at the Afghan checkpoints were too cold to come aboard and look at the passengers. When Soviet soldiers made a cursory inspection, I curled up in my seat with my shawl round my face. Three hours later, the bus pulled over to the side of the highway just short of the Salang Tunnel. There were Russian armoured vehicles parked a few metres away and a clutch of soldiers with blue eyes and brown hair poking from beneath their fur hats. That’s when things went wrong.

A Soviet officer approached the bus from the right-hand side and his eyes met mine. Then a man inside the bus – an Afghan with another thin moustache – pointed at me. He marched down the aisle, stood next to my seat and raised his finger, pointing it straight at my face. Betrayed. That was the word that went through my mind. I had watched this scene in a dozen movies. So, no doubt, had the informer. This man must have been working for the Afghan secret police, saw me climb aboard in Kabul and waited until we reached this heavily guarded checkpoint to give me away. Another young Afghan jumped from the bus, walked down the right side of the vehicle and then he too pointed at me through the window. Doubly betrayed. We were a hundred miles from Kabul. If I had cleared this last major barrage, I would have been through the tunnel and on to Mazar.

The Russian officer beckoned me to leave the bus. I noticed a badge of Lenin on his lapel. Lenin appeared to be glowering, eyes fixed on some distant Bolshevik dream that I would be forbidden to enter. ‘Passport,’ the soldier said indifferently. It was like the ghastly telegram Sue Hickey had sent me, further proof of my dastardly role in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the covers of British passports were black, and the gold coat of arms of the United Kingdom positively gleamed back at the Russian. He studied it closely. I half expected him to ask me for the meaning of ‘Dieu et mon droit’ or, worse still, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. He flicked it open, looked at the face of the bespectacled, tousled-haired Englishman on the third page and then at the word ‘occupation’. The word ‘journalist’ does not obtain many visas in the Middle East, and so the British Passport Office had been obliging enough to write ‘representative’ in the space provided. The Russian, who could read about as much Latin script as I could Cyrillic, tapped his finger on the word and asked in painfully good English: ‘What do you “represent”?’ A newspaper, I owned up. ‘Ah, correspondent.’ And he gave me a big knowing smile. I was led to a small communications hut in the snow from which emerged a half-naked paratroop captain wearing shades. Captain Viktor from Tashkent showed no animosity when he was told I was a journalist, and his men gathered round me, anxious to talk in faltering but by no means poor English. There was a grunting from the engine of my bus and I saw it leaving the checkpoint for the tunnel without me, my betrayer staring at me hatefully from a rear window.

Private Tebin from the Estonian city of Tallinn – if he survived Afghanistan, I assume he is now a proud citizen of the European Union, happily flourishing his new passport at British immigration desks – repeatedly described how dangerous the mountains had become now that rebels were shooting daily at Soviet troops. Captain Viktor wanted to know why I had chosen to be a journalist. But what emerged most strongly was that all these soldiers were fascinated by pop music. Lieutenant Nikolai from Tashkent interrupted at one point to ask: ‘Is it true that Paul McCartney has been arrested in Tokyo?’ And he put his extended hands together as if he had been handcuffed. Why had McCartney been arrested? he wanted to know. I asked him where he had heard the Beatles’ music and two other men chorused at once: ‘On the “Voice of America” radio.’

I was smiling now. Not because the Russians were friendly – each had studied my passport and all were now calling me ‘Robert’ as if I was a comrade-in-arms rather than the citizen of an enemy power – but because these Soviet soldiers with their overt interest in Western music did not represent the iron warriors of Stalingrad. They seemed like any Western soldiers: naive, cheerful in front of strangers, trusting me because I was – and here in the Afghan snows, of course, the fact was accentuated – a fellow European. They seemed genuinely apologetic that they could not allow me to continue my journey but they stopped a bus travelling in the opposite direction. ‘To Kabul!’ Captain Viktor announced. I refused. The people on that bus had seen me talking to the Russians. They would assume I was a Russian. No amount of assurances that I was British would satisfy them. I doubted if I would ever reach Kabul, at least not alive.

So Lieutenant Nikolai flagged down a passing Russian military truck at the back of a convoy and put me aboard. He held out his hand. ‘Dos vidanya,’ he said. ‘Goodbye – and give my love to Linda McCartney.’ And so I found myself travelling down the Hindu Kush on Soviet army convoy number 58 from Tashkent to Kabul. This was incredible. No Western journalist had been able to talk to the Soviet troops invading Afghanistan, let alone ride on their convoys, and here I was, sitting next to an armed Russian soldier as he drove his truckload of food and ammunition to Kabul, allowed to watch this vast military deployment from a Soviet army vehicle. This was better than Mazar.

As we began our descent of the gorge, the Russian driver beside me pulled his kitbag from behind his seat, opened the straps and offered me an orange. ‘Please, you look up,’ he said. ‘Look at the top of the hills.’ With near disbelief, I realised what was happening. While he was wrestling the wheel of his lorry on the ice, I was being asked to watch the mountain tops for gunmen. The orange was my pay for helping him out. Slowly, we began to fall behind the convoy. The soldier now hauled his rifle from the back of the cab and laid it between us on the seat. ‘Now you watch right of road,’ he said. ‘Tell if you see people.’ I did as I was told, as much for my safety as his. Our truck had a blue-painted interior with the word Kama engraved over the dashboard. It was one of the lorries built with American assistance at the Kama River factory in the Soviet Union, and I wondered what President Carter would have thought if he knew the uses to which his country’s technology was now being put. The driver had plastered his cab with Christmas cards.

At the bottom of the pass we found his convoy, and an officer – tall, with intelligent, unnaturally pale green eyes, khaki trousers tucked into heavy army boots – came to the door on my side of the truck. ‘You are English,’ he said with a smile. ‘I am Major Yuri. Come to the front with me.’ And so we trekked through the deep slush to the front of the column where a Soviet tank was trying to manoeuvre up the pass in the opposite direction. ‘It’s a T-62,’ he said, pointing to the sleeve halfway down the tank’s gun barrel. I thought it prudent not to tell him that I had already recognised the classification.

And I had to admit that Major Yuri seemed a professional soldier, clearly admired by his men – they were all told to shake my hand – and, in the crisis in which we would shortly find ourselves, behaved calmly and efficiently. With fractious Afghan soldiers, whom he seemed privately to distrust, he was unfailingly courteous. When five Afghan soldiers turned up beside the convoy to complain that Russian troops had been waving rifles in their direction, Major Yuri spoke to them as an equal, taking off his gloves and shaking each by the hand until they beamed with pleasure. But he was also a party man.

What, he asked, did I think of Mrs Thatcher? I explained that people in Britain held different views about our prime minister – I wisely forbore to give my own – but that they were permitted to hold these views freely. I said that President Carter was not the bad man he was depicted as in the Moscow press. Major Yuri listened in silence. So what did he think about President Brezhnev? I was grinning now. I knew what he had to say. So did he. He shook his head with a smile. ‘I believe,’ he said slowly, ‘that Comrade Brezhnev is a very good man.’ Major Yuri was well-read. He knew his Tolstoy and admired the music of Shostakovich, especially his Leningrad symphony. But when I asked if he had read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, he shook his head and tapped his revolver holster. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is for Solzhenitsyn.’

I squeezed into Major Yuri’s truck, his driver and I on the outside seats, Yuri in the middle; and so we set off for Kabul. ‘England a good country?’ he asked. ‘Better than Afghanistan?’ No, Major Yuri did not want to be in Afghanistan, he admitted. He wanted to be at home in Kazakhstan with his wife and nine-year-old daughter and planned to take a return convoy back to them in three days’ time. He had spent thirteen of his thirty years in the army, had not enough money to buy a car and could never travel abroad because he was an officer. It was his way of telling me that life in the Soviet Union was hard, that his life was not easy, that perhaps Comrade Brezhnev was not that good a man. Had not Brezhnev sent him here in the first place? When I asked questions he could not answer, he smiled in silent acknowledgement that he would have liked to be able to do so.

Amid a massive army, there is always a false sense of comfort. Even Major Yuri, his pale eyes constantly scanning the snowfields on each side of us, seemed to possess a dangerous self-confidence. True, the Afghans were attacking the Russians. But who could stop this leviathan, these armoured centipedes that were now creeping across the snows and mountains of Afghanistan? When we stopped at an Afghan checkpoint and the soldiers there could speak no Russian, Major Yuri called back for one of his Soviet Tajik officers to translate. As he did so, the major pointed at the Tajik and said, ‘Muslim.’ Yes, I understood. There were Muslims in the Soviet Union. In fact there were rather a lot of Muslims in the Soviet Union. And that, surely, was partly what this whole invasion was about.

The snow was blurring the windscreen of our truck, almost too fast for the wipers to clear it away, but through the side windows we could see the snowfields stretching away for miles. It was now mid-afternoon and we were grinding along at no more than 25 kilometres an hour, keeping the speed of the slowest truck, a long vulnerable snake of food, bedding, heavy ammunition, mixed in with tanks and carriers, 147 lorries in all, locked onto the main highway, a narrow vein of ice-cloaked tarmac that set every Soviet soldier up as a target for the ‘terrorists’ of Afghanistan. Or so it seemed to the men on Convoy 58. And to me.

Yet we were surprised when the first shots cracked out around us. We were just north of Charikar. And the rounds passed between our truck and the lorry in front, filling the air pockets behind them with little explosions, whizzing off into the frosted orchards to our left. ‘Out!’ Major Yuri shouted. He wanted his soldiers defending themselves in the snow, not trapped in their cabs. I fell into the muck and slush beside the road. The Russians around me were throwing themselves from their trucks. There was more shooting and, far in front of us, in a fog of snow and sleet, there were screams. A curl of blue smoke rose into the air from our right. The bullets kept sweeping over us and one pinged into a driver’s cab. All around me, the Soviet soldiers were lying in the drifts. Major Yuri shouted something at the men closest to him and there was a series of sharp reports as their Kalashnikovs kicked into their shoulders. Could they see what they were shooting at?

A silence fell over the landscape. Some figures moved, far away to our left, next to a dead tree. Yuri was staring at the orchard. ‘They are shooting from there,’ he said in English. He gave me a penetrating glance. This was no longer to be soldiers’ small-talk. I listened to the crackle of the radios, the shouts of officers interrupting each other, the soldiers in the snow looking over their shoulders. Major Yuri had taken off his fur hat; his brown hair was receding and he looked older than his thirty years. ‘Watch this, Robert,’ he said, pulling from his battledress a long tube containing a flare. We stood together in the snow, the slush above our knees, as he tugged at a cord that hung beneath the tube. There was a small explosion, a powerful smell of cordite and a smoke trail that soared high up into the sky. It was watched by the dozen soldiers closest to us, each of whom knew that our lives might depend on that rocket.

The smoke trail had passed a thousand feet in height when it burst into a shower of stars and within fifty seconds a Soviet Air Force Mig jet swept over us at low level, dipping its wings. A minute later, a tracked personnel carrier bearing the number 368 came thrashing through the snow with two of its crew leaning from their hatches and slid to a halt beside Major Yuri’s truck. The radio crackled and he listened in silence for a few moments then held up four fingers towards me. ‘They have killed four Russians in the convoy ahead,’ he said.

We stood on the road, backed up behind the first convoy. One row of soldiers was ordered to move two hundred metres further into the fields. Major Yuri told his men they could open their rations. The Tajik soldier who had translated for the major offered me food and I followed him to his lorry. It was decorated with Islamic pictures, quotations from the Koran, curiously interspersed with photographs of Bolshoi ballet dancers. I sat next to the truck with two soldiers beside me. We had dried biscuits and large hunks of raw pork; the only way I could eat the pork was to hold on to the fur and rip at the salted fat with my teeth. Each soldier was given three oranges, and sardines in a tin that contained about 10 per cent sardines and 90 per cent oil. Every few minutes, Major Yuri would pace the roadway and talk over the radio telephone, and when eventually we did move away with our armoured escorts scattered through the column, he seemed unsure of our exact location on the highway. Could he, he asked, borrow my map? And it was suddenly clear to me that this long convoy did not carry with it a single map of Afghanistan.

There was little evidence of the ambushed convoy in front save for the feet of a dead man being hurriedly pushed into a Soviet army van near Charikar and a great swath of crimson and pink slush that spread for several yards down one side of the road. The highway grew more icy at sundown, but we drove faster. As we journeyed on into the night, the headlights of our 147 trucks running like diamonds over the snow behind us, I was gently handed a Kalashnikov rifle with a full clip of ammunition. A soldier snapped off the safety catch and told me to watch through the window. I had no desire to hold this gun, even less to shoot at Afghan guerrillas, but if we were attacked again – if the Afghans had come right up to the truck as they had done many times on these convoys – they would assume I was a Russian. They would not ask all members of the National Union of Journalists to stand aside before gunning down the soldiers.

I have never since held a weapon in wartime and I hope I never shall again. I have always cursed the journalists who wear military costumes and don helmets and play soldiers with a gun at their hip, greying over the line between reporter and combatant, making our lives ever more dangerous as armies and militias come to regard us as an extension of their enemies, a potential combatant, a military target. But I had not volunteered to travel with the Soviet army. I was not – as that repulsive expression would have it in later wars – ‘embedded’. I was as much their prisoner as their guest. As the weeks went by, Afghans learned to climb aboard the Soviet convoy lorries after dark and knife their occupants. I knew that my taking a rifle – even though I never used it – would produce a reaction from the great and the good in journalism, and it seemed better to admit the reality than to delete this from the narrative.* If I was riding shotgun for the Soviet army, then that was the truth of it.

Three times we passed through towns where villagers and peasants lined the roadside to watch us pass. And of course, it was an eerie, unprecedented experience to sit with a rifle on my lap in a Soviet military column next to armed and uniformed Russian troops and to watch those Afghans – most of them in turbans, long shawls and rubber shoes – staring at us with contempt and disgust. One man in a blue coat stood on the tailboard of an Afghan lorry and watched me with narrowed eyes. It was the nearest I had seen to a look of hatred. He shouted something that was lost in the roar of our convoy.

Major Yuri seemed unperturbed. As we drove through Qarabagh, I told him I didn’t think the Afghans liked the Russians. It was beginning to snow heavily again. The major did not take his eyes from the road. ‘The Afghans are cunning people,’ he said without obvious malice, and then fell silent. We were still sliding along the road to Kabul when I turned to Major Yuri again. So why was the Soviet army in Afghanistan, I asked him? The major thought about this for about a minute and gave me a smile. ‘If you read Pravda,’ he said, ‘you will find that Comrade Leonid Brezhnev has answered this question.’ Major Yuri was a party man to the end.*

In Kabul, the doors were closing. All American journalists were expelled from the country. An Afghan politburo statement denounced British and other European reporters for ‘mudslinging’. The secret police had paid Mr Samadali a visit. Gavin was waiting for me, grim-faced, in the lobby. ‘They told him they’d take his children from him if he took us outside Kabul again,’ he said. We found Mr Samadali in the hotel taxi line-up next day, smiling apologetically and almost in tears. My visa was about to expire but I had a plan. If I travelled in Ali’s bus all the way to Peshawar in Pakistan, I might be able to turn round and drive back across the Afghan border on the Khyber Pass before the Kabul government stopped issuing visas to British journalists. There was more chance that officials at a land frontier post would let me back into Afghanistan than the policemen at the airport in Kabul.

So I took the bus back down the Kabul Gorge, this time staying aboard as we passed through Jalalabad. It was an odd feeling to cross the Durand Line and to find myself in a Pakistan that felt free, almost democratic, after the tension and dangers of Afghanistan. I admired the great plumes on the headdress of the soldiers of the Khyber Rifles on the Pakistani side of the border, the first symbol of the old British raj, a regiment formed 101 years before, still ensconced at Fort Shagai with old English silver and a visitor’s book that went back to the viceroys.

But of course, it was an illusion. President General Mohamed Zia ul-Haq ran an increasingly Islamic dictatorship in which maiming and whipping had become official state punishments. He ruled by martial law and had hanged his only rival, the former president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, less than a year earlier, in April 1979. And of course, he responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with publicly expressed fears that the Russian army planned to drive on into Pakistan. The United States immediately sent millions of dollars of weapons to the Pakistani dictator, who suddenly became a vital American ‘asset’ in the war against communism.

But in Ali’s wooden bus, it seemed like freedom. And as we descended the splendour of the Khyber Pass, there around me were the relics of the old British regiments who had fought on this ground for more than a century and a half, often against the Pathan ghazi fighters with their primitive jezail rifles. ‘A weird, uncanny place … a deadly valley,’ a British writer called it in 1897, and there on the great rocks that slid past Ali’s bus were the regimental crests of the 40th Foot, the Leicestershires, the Dorsetshires, the Cheshires – Bill Fisk’s regiment before he was sent to France in 1918 – and the 54th Sikh Frontier Force, each with its motto and dates of service. The paint was flaking off the ornamental crest of the 2nd Battalion, the Baluch Regiment, and the South Lancs and the Prince of Wales’ Volunteers had long ago lost their colours. Pathan tribesmen, Muslims to a man of course, had smashed part of the insignia of a Hindi regiment whose crest included a proud peacock. Graffiti covered the plaque of the 17th Leicestershires (1878–9). The only refurbished memorial belonged to Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides, a mainly Pathan unit whose eccentric commander insisted that they be clothed in khaki rather than scarlet and one of whose Indian members probably inspired Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Gunga Din’. The lettering had been newly painted, the stone washed clean of graffiti.

Peshawar was a great heaving city of smog, exhaust, flaming jacaranda trees, vast lawns and barracks. In the dingy Intercontinental there, I found a clutch of telex operators, all enriched by The Times and now further rewarded for their loyalty in sending my reports to London. This was not just generosity on my part; if I could re-enter Afghanistan, they would be my future lifeline to the paper. So would Ali. We sat on the lawn of the hotel, taking tea raj-style with a large china pot and a plate of scones and a fleet of huge birds that swooped from the trees to snatch at our cakes. ‘The Russians are not going to leave, Mr Robert,’ Ali assured me. ‘I fear this war will last a long time. That is why the Arabs are here.’ Arabs? Again, I hear about Arabs. No, Ali didn’t know where they were in Peshawar but an office had been opened in the city. General Zia had ordered Pakistan’s embassies across the Muslim world to issue visas to anyone who wished to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

A clutch of telexes was waiting for me at reception. The Times had safely received every paragraph I had written.* I bought the London papers and drank them down as greedily as any gin and tonic. The doorman wore a massive imperial scarlet cummerbund, and on the wall by the telex room I found Kipling’s public school lament for his dead countrymen – from ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ – framed by the Pakistani hotel manager:

A scrimmage in a border station –

A canter down some dark defile –

Two thousand pounds of education

Drops to a ten-rupee jezail –

CHAPTER THREE
The Choirs of Kandahar

No one spoke of hatred of the Russians, as the feeling experienced … from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, for they did not regard dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures …

LEO TOLSTOY, Haji Murat

The ghosts of British rule seemed to haunt Peshawar. In the bookshops, I found a hundred reprints of gazetteers and English memoirs. Sir Robert Warburton’s Eighteen Years in the Khyber stood next to Woosnam Mills’s yarns; ‘Noble conduct of our sepoys’, ‘Immolation of 21 Sikhs’ and ‘How British officers die’. Further volumes recalled the exploits of Sir Bindon Blood, one of whose young subalterns, Winston Churchill, was himself ambushed by Pathans in the Malakand hills to the north of Peshawar.* Not only ghosts frequented Peshawar. Unlike the Russian occupiers of Afghanistan, the British could not take their dead home; and on the edge of Peshawar, there still lay an old British cemetery whose elaborate tombstones of florid, overconfident prose told the story of empire.

Take Major Robert Roy Adams of Her Majesty’s Indian Staff Corps, formerly deputy commissioner of the Punjab. He lay now beside the Khyber Road, a canyon of traffic and protesting donkeys whose din vibrated against the cemetery wall. According to the inscription on his grave, Major Adams was called to Peshawar ‘as an officer of rare capacity for a frontier. Wise, just and courageous, in all things faithful, he came only to die at his post, struck down by the hand of an assassin.’ He was killed on 22 January 1865, but there are no clues as to why he was murdered. Nor are there any explanations on the other gravestones. In 1897, for example, John Sperrin Ross met a similar fate, ‘assassinated by a fanatic in Peshawar City on Jubilee Day’. A few feet from Ross’s grave lay Bandsman Charles Leighton of the First Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, ‘assassinated by a Ghazi at this station on Good Friday’. Perhaps politics was left behind at death, although it was impossible to avoid the similarity between these outraged headstones and the language of the Soviet government. The great-grandsons of the Afghan tribesmen who killed the British were now condemned by the Kremlin as ‘fanatics’ – or terrorists – by Radio Moscow. One empire, it seemed, spoke much like another.

To be fair, the British did place their dead in some historical context. Beneath a squad of rosewood trees with their bazaar of tropical birds lay Privates Hayes, Macleod, Savage and Dawes, who ‘died at Peshawar during the frontier disturbances 1897–98’. Not far away was Lieutenant Bishop, ‘killed in action at Shubkudder in an engagement with the hill tribes, 1863’. He was aged twenty-two. Lieutenant John Lindley Godley of the 24th Rifle Brigade, temporarily attached to the 266th Machine Gun Company, met the same end at Kacha Garhi in 1919.

There were other graves, of course, innocent mounds with tiny headstones that contained the inevitable victims of every empire’s domesticity. ‘Beatrice Ann, one year and 11 months, only child of Bandmaster and Mrs. A. Pilkington’ lay in the children’s cemetery with ‘Barbara, two years, daughter of Staff Sergeant and Mrs. P. Walker’. She died three days before Christmas in 1928. Some of the children died too young to have names. There were young men, too, who succumbed to the heat and to disease. Private Tidey of the First Sussex died from ‘heatstroke’ and Private Williams of ‘enteric fever’. E. A. Samuels of the Bengal Civil Service succumbed to ‘fever contracted in Afghanistan’. Matron Mary Hall of Queen Alexander’s Military Nursing Service – whose duties in Salonika and Mesopotamia presumably included the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey as well as the British invasion of Iraq in 1917 – died ‘on active service’.

There were a few unexpected tombs. The Very Rev. Courtney Peverley was there, administrator apostolic of Kashmir and Kafiristan, who clearly worked hard because beyond the British headstones were new places of interment for Peshawar’s still extant Christian community, paper crosses and pink flags draped in tribal fashion beside the freshly dug graves. Many imperial graves exhibit a faith that would be understood by any Muslim, the favourite from the Book of Revelation: ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’ And there was a Gaelic cross on top of the remains of Lieutenant Walter Irvine of the North West Frontier Police ‘who lost his life in the Nagoman River when leading the Peshawar Vale Hunt of which he was Master’. No Soviet soldier would earn so romantic a memorial. On the graves of the Russian soldiers now dying just north of this cemetery, it would be coldly recorded only that they died performing their ‘international duty’.

The local CIA agent already had a shrewd idea what this meant. He was a thin, over-talkative man who held a nominal post in the US consulate down the road from the Peshawar Intercontinental and who hosted parties of immense tedium at his villa. He had the habit of showing, over and over again, a comedy film about the Vietnam war. Those were the days when I still talked to spooks, and when I called by one evening, he was entertaining a group of around a dozen journalists and showing each of them a Soviet identity card. ‘Nice-looking young guy,’ he said of the pinched face of the man in the black and white photograph. ‘A pilot, shot down, the mujahedin got his papers. What a way to go, a great tragedy that a young guy should die like that.’ I didn’t think much of the CIA man’s crocodile tears but I was impressed by the words ‘shot down’. With what? Did the guerrillas have ground-to-air missiles? And if so, who supplied them – the Americans, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, or those mysterious Arabs? I had seen thousands of Russians but I had yet to see an armed guerrilla close up in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t have to wait long.

Ali’s bus returned to the border one warm afternoon and I walked back across the Durand Line to a small grubby booth on the Afghan side of the frontier. The border guard looked at my passport and thumbed through the pages. Then he stopped and scrutinised one of the document’s used pages. As usual, I had written ‘representative’ on my immigration card. But the thin man clucked his tongue. ‘Journalist,’ he said. ‘Go back to Pakistan.’ How did he know? There were visas to Arab countries in the passport which identified me as a journalist, but the Afghan official would not know Arabic, would have no idea that sahafa meant ‘journalist’. A group of men shoved past me and I walked back to Ali. How did they know? Ali looked through my passport and found the page that gave me away. A visa to post-revolutionary Iran was marked with the word khabanagor – Persian for ‘journalist’ – and Persian, or Dari, was one of the languages of Afghanistan. Damn.

I took a taxi back to Peshawar and sent a message to The Times: ‘Scuppered.’ But next day Ali was back at the hotel. ‘Mr Robert, we try again.’ What’s the point? I asked him. ‘We try,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’ I didn’t understand, but I repacked my bags and boarded his friendly wooden bus and set off once more for the border. This was beginning to feel like a real-life version of Carry On up the Khyber, but Ali was strangely confident I would be successful. I sat back in the afternoon sun as the bus moaned its way up the hairpin bends. There’s an odd, unnerving sensation about trying to cross a border without the consent of the authorities. Gavin and I had experienced this at almost every checkpoint we came across in Afghanistan. Would they let us through or turn us round or arrest us? I suppose it was a throwback to all those war films set in German-occupied Europe in which resistance heroes and heroines had to talk their way past Nazi guards. The Afghan border police were not quite up to Wehrmacht standards – and we were no heroes – but it wasn’t difficult to feel a mixture of excitement and dread when we arrived once more at the grotty little booth on the Afghan side of the frontier.

Yet before I had a chance to stand up, Ali was at my seat. ‘Give me your passport,’ he said. ‘And give me $50.’ He vanished with the money. And ten minutes later, he was back with a broad smile. ‘I will take you to Jalalabad,’ he said, handing me back my newly stamped passport. ‘Give me another $50 because I had to give your money away to a poor man.’ The Russians had invaded but they couldn’t beat that most efficacious, that most corrupt of all institutions between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal: The Bribe. I was so happy, I was laughing. I was singing to myself, all the way to Jalalabad. I’d even arranged with Ali that he would stop by at the Spinghar Hotel each morning to take my reports down to Peshawar – and come back in the afternoon with any messages that The Times sent to me via Pakistan. I could meanwhile snuggle down in the Spinghar and stay out of sight of the authorities.

I need not have worried. Every night, the rebels drew closer to Jalalabad. Four days earlier they had blown up a bridge outside the town and that very first night, after dark, they opened fire on an Afghan patrol from the plantation behind the hotel. Hour after hour, I lay in bed, listening to machine guns pummelling away in the orange orchards, sending the tropical birds screaming into the night sky. But it was a Ruritanian affair because, just after the call for morning prayers, Jalalabad would wake up as if the battles had been fought in a dream and reassume its role as a dusty frontier town, its bazaar touting poor-quality Pakistan cloth and local vegetables while the Afghan soldiers ostensibly guarding the market place nodded in fatigue over their ancient – and British – Lee Enfield rifles. I would take a rickshaw out of town to look at a damaged tank or a burned-out government office, type up my report of the fighting for the paper, and at mid-morning Ali would arrive with the ‘down’ bus – Peshawar being 4,700 feet lower than Kabul – to pick up my report.

The teashops, the chaikhana stalls on the main street, were filled with truck-drivers, many of them from Kandahar, and they all spoke of the increasing resistance across the country. South of Kandahar, one man told me, villagers had stopped some Russian construction engineers and killed them all with knives. I could believe it. For however brave the mujahedin might be – and their courage was without question – their savagery was a fact. I didn’t need the fictional Tom Graham or Durand’s account of the fate of the 7th Lancers to realise this. ‘We will take Jalalabad,’ a young man told me over tea one morning. ‘The Russians here are finished.’ A teenage student, holding his father’s hunting falcon on his wrist – editors love these touches, but there it was, a real live bird of prey anchored to the boy’s arm with a chain – boldly stated that ‘the mujahedin will take Jalalabad tonight or tomorrow.’ I admired his optimism but not his military analysis.

Yet their views were also to be found within the Afghan army. Lunching in a dirty restaurant near the post office, I found an off-duty soldier at the next table, eating a badly cooked chicken with an unfamiliar knife and fork. ‘We do not want to fight the mujahedin – why should we?’ he asked. ‘The army used to have local soldiers here but they went over to the mujahedin and so the government drafted us in from Herat and from places in the north of Afghanistan. But we do not want to fight with these people. The mujahedin are Muslims and we do not shoot at them. If they attack some building, we shoot into the air.’ The young man complained bitterly that his commanding officer refused to give him leave to see his family in Herat, 750 kilometres away near the Iranian border, and in his anger the soldier threw the knife and fork onto the table and tore savagely at the chicken with his hands, the grease dribbling down his fingers. ‘Jalalabad is finished,’ he said.

Again, untrue. That very morning, the Afghan air force made a very noisy attempt to intimidate the population by flying four of the local airbase’s ageing Mig-17s at low level over the city. They thundered just above the main boulevard, the palm trees vibrating with the sound of jet engines, and left in their wake a silence broken only by the curses of men trying to control bolting, terrified horses. The big Soviet Mi-25 helicopters were now taking off from Jalalabad’s tiny airport each morning and racing over the town to machine-gun villages in the Tora Bora mountains. While I was shopping in the market they would fly only a few feet above the rooftops, and when I looked up I could see the pilot and the gunner and the rockets attached to pods beneath the machine, a big, bright red star on the hull, fringed with gold. Such naked displays of power were surely counterproductive. But it occurred to me that these tactics must be intended to deprive the guerrillas of sufficient time to use their ground-to-air missiles. American helicopter pilots were to adopt precisely the same tactics to avoid missiles in Iraq twenty-three years later.

If there was a military accommodation between the Afghan army and the mujahedin, however, the insurgents knew how to hurt the government. They had now burned down most of the schools in the surrounding villages on the grounds that they were centres of atheism and communism. They had murdered the schoolteachers, and several villagers in Jalalabad told me that children were accidentally killed by the same bullets that ended the lives of their teachers. The mujahedin were thus not universally loved and their habit of ambushing civilian traffic on the road west – two weeks earlier they had murdered a West German lorry-driver – had not added much glory to their name. And the mujahedin lived in the villages – which is where the Russians attacked them. On 2 February, I watched as four helicopter gunships raced through the semi-darkness to attack the village of Kama and, seconds later, saw a series of bubbles of flame glowing in the darkness.

Each morning at eight o’clock, the tea-shop owners would tell the strange Englishman what had been destroyed in the overnight battles and I would set off in my rickshaw to the scene. Early one morning, I arrived at a bridge which had been mined during the night. It lay on the Kabul road and the crater had halted all Soviet troop movements between Jalalabad and the capital, much to the excitement of the crowd which had gathered to inspect the damage.

Then one of them walked up to me. ‘Shuravi?’ he asked. I was appalled. Shuravi meant ‘Russian’. If he thought I was Russian, I was a dead man. ‘Inglistan, Inglistan,’ I bellowed at him with a big smile. The man nodded and went back to the crowd with this news. But after a minute, another man stepped up to me, speaking a little English. ‘From where are you – London?’ he asked. I agreed, for I doubted if the people of Nangarhar would have much knowledge of East Farleigh on the banks of the Medway river in Kent. He returned to the crowd with this news. A few seconds later, he was back again. ‘They say,’ he told me, ‘that London is occupied by the Shuravi.’ I didn’t like this at all. If London was occupied by the Soviet army, then I could only be here with Russian permission – so I was a collaborator. ‘No, no,’ I positively shouted. ‘Inglistan is free, free, free. We would fight the Russians if they came.’ I hoped that the man’s translation of this back into Pushtu would be more accurate than the crowd’s knowledge of political geography. But after listening to this further item of news, they broke into smiles and positively cheered Britain’s supposed heroism. ‘They thank you because your country is fighting the Russians,’ the man said.

It was only as the rickshaw bumped me back to Jalalabad that I understood what had happened. To these Afghan peasants, Kabul – only a hundred kilometres up the highway – was a faraway city which most of them had never visited. London was just another faraway city and it was therefore quite logical that they should suppose the Shuravi were also patrolling Trafalgar Square. I returned to Jalalabad exhausted and sat down on a lumpy sofa in a chaikhana close to the Spinghar Hotel. The cushions had been badly piled beneath a pale brown shawl and I was about to rearrange them when the tea-shop owner arrived with his head on one side and his hands clutched together. ‘Mister – please!’ He looked at the sofa and then at me. ‘A family brought an old man to the town for a funeral but their cart broke down and they have gone to repair it and then they will return for the dead man.’ I stood up in remorse. He put his hand on my arm as if it was he who had been sitting on the dead. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said. The sorrow was mine, I insisted. Which is why, I suppose, he placed a chair next to the covered corpse and served me my morning cup of tea.

At night now, the local cops and party leaders were turning up at the Spinghar to sleep, arriving before the 8 p.m. curfew, anxious men in faded brown clothes and dark glasses who ascended to their first-floor lounge for tea before bed. They would be followed by younger men holding automatic rifles that would clink in an unsettling way against the banisters. The party men sometimes invited me to join their meals and, in good English, would ask me if I thought the Soviet army would obey President Carter’s deadline for a military withdrawal. They were understandably obsessed with the deadly minutiae of party rivalry in Kabul and with the confession of a certain Lieutenant Mohamed Iqbal, who had admitted to participating in the murder of the ‘martyr’ President Nur Mohamed Taraki. Iqbal said that he and two other members of the Afghan palace guard had been ordered to kill Taraki by the ‘butcher’ Amin and had seized the unfortunate man, tied him up, laid him on a bed and then suffocated him by stuffing a pillow over his face. The three then dug the president’s grave, covering it with metal sheets from a sign-writer’s shop.

The party men were so friendly that they invited me to meet the governor of Jalalabad, a middle-aged man with a round face, closely cropped grey hair and an old-fashioned pair of heavily framed spectacles. Mohamed Ziarad, a former export manager at Afghanistan’s national wool company, could scarcely cope with the morning visitors to his office. The chief of police was there with an account of the damage from the overnight fighting; the local Afghan army commander, snapping to attention in a tunic two sizes too small for him, presented an intimidatingly large pile of incident reports. A noisy crowd of farmers poured into the room with compensation claims. Every minute, the telephone rang with further reports of sabotage from the villages, although it was sometimes difficult for Mr Ziarad to hear the callers because of the throb of helicopter gunships hovering over the trees beyond the bay window. It had been a bad night.

Not that the governor of Jalalabad let these things overwhelm him. ‘There is no reason to overdramatise these events,’ he said, as if the nightly gun battles had been a part of everyone’s daily life for years. He sipped tea as he signed the reports, joking with an army lieutenant and ordering the removal of an old beggar who had forced his way into the room to shout for money. ‘All revolutions are the same,’ he said. ‘We defend the revolution, we talk, we fight, we speak against our enemies and our enemies try to start a counter-revolution and so we defend ourselves against them. But we will win.’

If Mr Ziarad seemed a trifle philosophical – almost whimsical, I thought – in his attitude towards Afghanistan’s socialist revolution, it was as well to remember that he was no party man. Somehow, he had avoided membership of both the Parcham and the Khalq; his only concession to the revolution was an imposing but slightly bent silver scale model of a Mig jet fighter that perched precariously on one end of his desk. He admitted that the insurgents were causing problems. ‘We cannot stop them shooting in the country. We cannot stop them blowing up the electric cables and the gas and setting off bombs at night. It is true that they are trying to capture Jalalabad and they are getting closer to the city. But they cannot succeed.’

Here Mr Ziarad drew a diagram on a paper on his desk. It showed a small circle, representing Jalalabad, and a series of arrows pointing towards the circle which indicated the rebel attacks. Then he pencilled in a series of arrows which moved outwards from Jalalabad. ‘These,’ he said proudly, ‘are the counter-attacks which we are going to make. We have been through this kind of thing before and always we achieve the same result. When the enemy gets closer to the centre of Jalalabad, they are more closely bunched together and our forces can shoot them more easily and then we make counter-attacks and drive them off.’ What a strange phenomenon is the drug of hope. I was to hear this explanation from countless governors and soldiers across the Middle East over the coming quarter of a century – Westerners as well as Muslims – all insisting that things were getting worse because they were getting better, that the worse things were, the better they would become.

Mr Ziarad claimed that only three Afghan soldiers had been killed in the past week’s fighting around the city and – given the unspoken truce between the army and the mujahedin – the governor’s statistics were probably correct. He did deny, however, that there were any Soviet troops in Jalalabad – only a handful of Russian agricultural advisers and teachers were here, he said – which did not take account of the thousand Soviet soldiers in the barracks east of the town. He was not concerned about the Russian presence in his country. ‘It is the bandit groups that are the problem and the dispossessed landlords who had their land taken from them by our Decree Number Six and they are assisted by students of imperialism. These people are trained in camps in Pakistan. They are taught by the imperialists to shoot and throw grenades and set off mines.’

The governor still visited the nearest villages during daylight, in the company of three soldiers, to inspect the progress of land reform and Jalalabad’s newly created irrigation scheme. But he understood why the reforms had created animosity. ‘We tried to make sure that all men and women had equal rights and the same education,’ he said. ‘But we have two societies in our country, one in the cities and one in the villages. The city people accept equal rights but the villages are more traditional. Sometimes we have moved too quickly. It takes time to arrive at the goals of our revolution.’

Mr Ziarad’s last words, as we walked from his office, were drowned by the roar of four more Soviet helicopter gunships that raced across the bazaar, sending clouds of dust swirling into the air beside the single-storey mud-walled houses. He asked me if I would like to use his car to travel back to my hotel. In view of the angry faces of the Afghans watching the helicopters, I decided that the governor of Jalalabad had made the kind of offer it was safer to refuse. But the cops at the Spinghar were getting nosy, wanting to know how long I was staying in Jalalabad and why I didn’t go to Kabul. It was time to let Jalalabad ‘cool down’. As Gavin always said, don’t get greedy.*

It was the Russians who were getting greedy. Hundreds of extra troops were now being flown into Kabul in a fleet of Antonov transport aircraft along with new amphibious BMB armoured vehicles. In some barracks, Russian and Afghan soldiers had been merged into new infantry units, presumably to stiffen Afghan army morale. New Afghan army trucks carried Afghan forces but Soviet drivers. There were more Karmal speeches, the latest of which attacked what he called ‘murderers, terrorists, bandits, subversive elements, robbers, traitors and hirelings’. That he should, well over a month after the Soviet invasion, be appealing for ‘volunteer resistance groups’ to guard roads, bridges and convoys – against the much more powerful and genuine ‘resistance’, of course – demonstrated just how serious the problem of the insurgents had become and how large an area of Afghanistan they now effectively controlled.

The Russians could neither wipe out the guerrillas nor give hope to Afghan villagers that their presence would improve their lives. Large areas of Afghanistan were cut off from government-subsidised food and the Soviets were flying planeloads of grain – even tractors – into Kabul while one of their generals appeared at the Bagram airbase to claim that only ‘terrorist remnants’ remained in the mountains. ‘Remnants’ – bakoyaye in Dari – became the vogue word for the insurgents on Afghan radio. But to ‘reform’ Afghanistan under these circumstances was impossible. The government were losing. It was only a matter of time. And the more the government said they were winning, the fewer people believed them. In the lobby of the Intercontinental, a Polish diplomat told me that he thought the Russians would need at least 200,000 troops to win their war.*

Karmal’s men had effectively closed down the capital’s mosques as a centre of resistance. When I found the speaker of the Polekheshti Mosque in the centre of Kabul, a small man with a thin sallow face whose features betrayed his anxiety and who refused even to give his name, he declined to answer even the mildest questions about the welfare of his people. He arrived one minute before morning prayers, walking quickly across the ice-encrusted forecourt in his tightly wound silk turban and golden cap and leaving immediately his devotions were completed. When I walked towards him, he immediately glanced over his right shoulder. And when I presented him with a list of questions in Pushtu – what was the role of Islam in Afghanistan since December, I asked him? – he waved the paper in the frozen air in a gesture of hopelessness.

‘Your questions are all political,’ he yelped at me. ‘One of your questions is asking if the people are happy with the new regime of Babrak Karmal. I will answer no questions about him. I do not represent the people. I will answer only religious questions.’ It was predictable. As khatib of the Polekheshti, he had only to interpret the Koran, not to deliver sermons on the morality of his government. Since the khatibs had all been appointed by the revolutionary governments in the past two years, there was even less chance that he would unburden himself of any feelings about the Soviet Union’s invasion. A few days after Taraki’s coup in 1978, calls for a jihad were read out in Kabul’s mosques. Any political independence among the Sunni Muslim clergy had been wiped out within days when police raided all the city’s religious institutions and dispatched dissenting mullahs to the Polecharkhi prison, whence they never emerged. But brutal repression did not alone account for the lack of any serious political leadership within the clergy.

A decapitated church can scarcely give political guidance to its flock, but the history of Islam in Afghanistan suggested that there would be no messianic religious leader to guide the people into war against their enemies. Shia Muslims, whose tradition of self-sacrifice and emphasis on martyrdom had done so much to destroy the Shah’s regime, were a minority in Afghanistan. In the western city of Herat, 100 kilometres from the Iranian border, posters of Khomeini and Ayatollah Shariatadari could be found on the walls, but the Sunnis formed the majority community and there was a fundamental suspicion in Afghanistan of the kind of power exercised by the leading clergymen in Iran. Afghans would not pay national subservience to religious divines. Islam is a formalistic religion, and among Sunnis, the mosque prayer leaders had a bureaucratic function rather than a political vocation. The power of religious orthodoxy in Afghanistan was strong but not extreme, and the lack of any hierarchy among Sunnis prevented the mullahs from using their position to create political unity within the country. Besides, Islam was also a class-conscious religion in Kabul. The Polekheshti Mosque catered largely for the poor, while the military favoured the Blue Mosque and the remains of the country’s middle-class elite attended funerals at the two-tiered Do Sham Shira Mosque.

The monarchy, so long as it existed, provided a mosaic of unity that held the country more or less together. And although the last king was ostentatiously toasted in the chaikhana now that more ominous potentates had appeared in Kabul, the spendthrift rulers who once governed Afghanistan were never really popular. When the monarchy disappeared, the only common denominator was religion; it was identified with nationalism – as opposed to communism – which is why Karmal had reintroduced green into the colour of the national flag. All ministerial speeches, even by cabinet members known to be lifelong Marxists, now began with obsequious references to the Koran. The Afghan deputy prime minister had just visited Mazar to pray at the shrine of Hazarate Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed. But in Afghanistan – as in most rural countries – religion was regarded with deepest respect in the villages rather than in the towns and it was from the villages that the mujahedin came. Although it was a reactionary force – opposing the emancipation and equality of women and secular education – it focused the attention of the poor on the realities of politics in a way that had never happened before. It was not by chance that a joke made the rounds of Afghans in Kabul, that apart from the five traditional obligations of Islam, a sixth instruction must now be obeyed: every true Muslim should listen to the BBC. This would no longer be a joke, of course, if a new Islamic force emerged from within the resistance rather than the clergy.

So few journalists were now left in Afghanistan that no one paid much attention to the Times correspondent, who carried no cameras but still possessed a valid visa. In Kabul, I shopped for carpets in the bazaar among the off-duty Soviet soldiers who still felt safe walking along Chicken Street. The Russians bought souvenirs, beads and necklaces for wives and girlfriends, but the Tajik Soviet soldiers would go to the bookshops and buy copies of the Koran. I eventually purchased a 2-by-3-metre rug of crimson and gold that had been lying on the damp pavement. Mr Samadali, who was still free to drive us within the Kabul city limits, cast his critical eye on my rug, announced that I had paid far too much for it – it is a function of all taxi-drivers in south-west Asia to depress their foreign clients by assuring them they have been ripped off – and tied it to the roof of his car.

From Kabul, I now once more took Ali’s bus down to Jalalabad, planning to spend a night at the Spinghar before returning to Kabul. In the Jalalabad bazaar, I went searching for a satin bag in which to carry my massive carpet out of Afghanistan. After ensuring I knew the Pushtu for a satin bag – atlasi kahzora – I bought a large hessian sack, along with a set of postcards of Jalalabad under the monarchy, a gentle, soporific town of technicolor brilliance that was now lost for ever. I visited the Pakistani consulate in the town, whose staff – some of them at least – must already have been coordinating with the guerrillas. They spoke of Soviet fears that Jalalabad might partially fall to the rebels, that the highway to Kabul might be permanently cut. And the Pakistani diplomats did not seem at all unhappy at this prospect.

No sooner was I back at the Spinghar than the receptionist, in a state of considerable emotion, told me that the Russians were using helicopters to attack the village of Sorkh Rud, 20 kilometres to the west. I hired a rickshaw and within half an hour found myself in a township of dirt streets and mud-walled houses. I told the driver to wait on the main road and walked into the village. There was not a human to be seen, just the distant thump-thump sound of Soviet Mi-25 helicopters which I only occasionally saw as they flitted past the ends of the streets. A few dogs yelped near a stream of sewage. The sun was high and a blanket of heat moved on the breeze down the streets. So where was the attack that had so upset the hotel receptionist? I only just noticed the insect shape of a machine low in the white sky seconds before it fired. There was a sound like a hundred golf balls being hit by a club at the same time and bullets began to skitter up the walls of the houses, little puffs of brown clay jumping into the air as the rounds hit the buildings. One line of bullets came skipping down the street in my direction, and in panic I ran through an open door, across a large earthen courtyard and into the first house I could see.

I literally hurled myself through the entrance and landed on my side on an old carpet. Against the darkened wall opposite me sat an Afghan man with a greying beard and a clutch of children, open-mouthed with fear and, behind them, holding a black sheet over her head, a woman. I stared at them and tried to smile. They sat there in silence. I realised I had to assure them that I was not a Russian, that I was from Mrs Thatcher’s England, that I was a journalist. But would this family understand what England was? Or what a journalist was? I was out of breath, frightened, wondering how I came to be in such a dangerous place – so quickly, so thoughtlessly, so short a time after leaving the safety of the Spinghar Hotel.

I had enough wits to remember the Pushtu for journalist and to try to tell these poor people who I was. ‘Za di inglisi atlasi kahzora yem!’ I triumphantly announced. But the family stared at me with even greater concern. The man held his children closer to him and his wife made a whimpering sound. I smiled. They did not. Fear crackled over the family. Only slowly did I realise that I had not told them I was a journalist. Perhaps it was the carpet upon which I had landed in their home. Certainly it must have been my visit to the bazaar a few hours earlier. But with increasing horror, I realised that the dishevelled correspondent who had burst in upon their sacred home had introduced himself in Pushtu not as a reporter but with the imperishable statement: ‘I am an English satin bag.’

‘Correspondent, journalist,’ I now repeated in English and Pushtu. But the damage had been done. Not only was this Englishman dangerous, alien, an infidel intruder into the sanctity of an Afghan home. He was also insane. Of this, I had no doubt myself. Whenever we journalists find ourselves in great danger, there is always a voice that asks ‘Why?’ How on earth did we ever come to risk our life in this way? For the editor? For adventure? Or because we just didn’t think, didn’t calculate the risks, didn’t bother to reflect that our whole life, our education, our family, our loves and happiness, were now forfeit to chance and a few paragraphs. Sorkh Rud was the ‘border station’ into which Kipling’s British soldier cantered, the street outside this house his ‘dark defile’, the helicopter his enemy’s jezail. The cliché tells us that life is cheap. Untrue. Death is cheap. It is easy and terrible and utterly unfair.

I sat on the carpet for perhaps ten minutes, smiling idiotically at the cold-faced family opposite me until a little girl in a pink dress walked unsteadily across the floor towards me and smiled. I smiled back. I pointed at myself and said, ‘Robert.’ She repeated my name. I pointed to her. What was her name? She didn’t reply. Outside I heard a donkey clop past the gate and a man shouting. The sound of the helicopters had vanished. There was a wailing from far away, the sound of a woman in grief. I stood up and looked out of the door. Other people were walking down the street. It was like Jalalabad each daybreak, when the night of death turned magically into a day of toil and dust and blooming jacaranda trees. The war had washed over Sorkh Rud and now it had moved elsewhere. I turned to the family and thanked them for their unoffered protection. ‘Shukria,’ I said. Thank you. And very slowly the man with the beard bowed his head once and raised his right hand in farewell.

The rickshaw driver was waiting on the main road, fearful that I might have died, even more fearful, I thought, that I might not have survived to pay him. We puttered back to Jalalabad. That night the party leaders were back in the hotel with news that obviously disturbed them. The mujahedin had raided a student hostel of Jalalabad University, taken twenty girls from the building, and transported them to Tora Bora, where they were given money – a thousand afghanis, about $22 – and a black veil and told to end their studies. The same day, a Russian technical engineer had been sent to the suburbs of Jalalabad to mend an electric cable that had been repeatedly sabotaged. When he was at the top of a pylon, someone had shot him dead and his body hung in the wires 10 metres above the ground for several hours while men and women arrived to gaze at his corpse.

I would leave next day on the first bus back to Kabul, a luxury bus that left at dawn, long before Ali’s old vehicle ground into town. My visa had only another three days to run. The bus from Jalalabad was packed, not with the villagers and Pakistani businessmen who travelled on Ali’s charabanc, but with Afghan government students, Parcham party apparatchiks travelling back to Kabul University after vacation. Even before we had left the suburbs of the city, they were ordering everyone to pull the curtains so that no one could be seen and they craned their necks at every bend in the road to squint through the cracks in case an ambush lay ahead. I didn’t see how the curtains would help. A mystery bus would attract far more attention from the mujahedin than a vehicle with windows open and passengers asleep inside.

When we stopped 25 kilometres to the north to find the body of a dead man covered in a blanket being loaded onto a truck, the communist students gazed in silence and in horror. It was, according to a middle-aged Afghan on another bus, the corpse of a lorry-driver who had not stopped for the mujahedin. There were five buses bunched up together, all heading for Kabul, and they all stopped now at a chaikhana while their drivers debated whether to talk their way through the guerrilla roadblock up the road or turn back to Jalalabad. Two hours passed, the drivers unable to make up their minds, the young Afghan men ever more nervous. And with good reason. The mujahedin gave their prisoners only two options: they could join the resistance or face execution. Some of the Afghan boys were taking off their party badges. I could only feel sorry for them. Perhaps they joined Parcham for promotion at college or because their parents worked for the government. And for all the government’s brutality and its reliance on foreign invaders, its functionaries had been trying to create a secular, equal society in the villages around Jalalabad. It was not the government that was burning the schools and killing the teachers.

Another hour drifted by, the heat rising, the students ever more depressed, the drivers basking in the sun. In wartime, in any great danger, indecision is a narcotic. Then labouring up the highway came Ali’s wooden bus, the coat of arms of the North West Frontier Province proudly displayed on its flanks. ‘Why do you desert me?’ Ali wanted to know. He pointed to his charabanc. ‘Mr Robert, please come with us.’ So I took my usual seat on the right-hand side of his vehicle and the other buses moved out into the road like sheep behind us. ‘You are better with us, Mr Robert,’ Ali said. ‘You should not be with them.’ I soon realised why.

Round a bend just 5 kilometres up the highway, in a narrow valley of rocks and small pines, six tall and sun-burned mujahedin stood astride the road. A seventh was perched on a rock, lazily waving his arm up and down to tell us to stop. We had been told that they were poorly armed, that they only dared appear at dusk, that they were frightened of government retaliation. But here were the mujahedin in the hot midday sun in their turbans and Afghan shawls, each holding a brand-new Kalashnikov, controlling the traffic on one of Afghanistan’s most important highways. It was an audacious display of self-confidence and a fearful one for the students in the bus behind. There was no anxiety in Ali’s bus and a Pakistani passenger – a cloth merchant from Peshawar – was so bored that he began a long and tiresome discussion about Pakistan’s domestic politics.

Through the back window, however, I could see the students stepping off their bus onto the road. They stood there, heads lowered as if they were criminals, some trying to hide behind the others. Ali was chatting and joking with one of the guerrillas. The other drivers stood beside their buses expressionless. The gunmen were moving through the line of young Afghans. Some were ordered back on the bus. Others, white with fear, were told to form a line by the road. Three of them were tied up and blindfolded and taken, stumbling and falling, through the pine stands and towards the river that gurgled away to our right. We watched them until they and their captors had disappeared. The Pakistani cloth merchant clucked his tongue and shook his head. ‘Poor chaps,’ he said.

Ali climbed back aboard and announced that since this was a Pakistani bus, the mujahedin did not wish to trouble us. And as we drove away, a young guerrilla with a rose tied to his rifle waved vigorously at us through the window. At last I had seen them. Here were the ‘holy warriors’ whom the CIA was now adopting, the ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’ and ‘counter-revolutionary subversive elements’ as Karmal called them, the ‘remnants’ as the Soviet general blandly dismissed them, Mr Ziarad’s ‘students of imperialism’. But they didn’t look like ‘remnants’ to me. Their Kalashnikovs were the new AKS 74s that the Soviets had just brought into Afghanistan, and they were wearing new ammunition belts.

The Kabul Intercontinental was forlorn. Most Western journalists had been expelled or left. Gavin and his crew had gone. My visa would soon expire and there was no hope of acquiring another. In the hotel sales office, one of the female secretaries, Gina Nushin, pleaded with me to take her private mail out of the country. Nine months later, in Ireland, I would receive a cryptic note from her, thanking me for posting her letters; the stamp on the envelope depicted a smiling and avuncular President Taraki browsing through his morning papers. But a far more important letter had just reached Kabul, smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a Shia cleric who had been arrested after Taraki’s 1978 revolution and who was believed to have been murdered by the Afghan secret police. The mullah, whose name was Waez and who had enlisted the help of a sympathetic Soviet worker and an Afghan student at Moscow University to take his letter by hand to Kabul, told his family that he and hundreds of other Afghans were being held prisoner in the Russian city of Tula, 200 kilometres south of Moscow. Waez was honoured among Sunnis as well as Shias for his opposition to communist rule.

Rumours that thousands of Afghans were being secretly held in the Soviet Union – in violation of international law – had been circulating for more than a year. Many of the families whom I watched as they angrily stormed the Polecharkhi prison outside Kabul in January were looking for relatives who, it now appeared, might have been in Russia all along. According to the Waez letter, he and other Afghans jailed in Tula were referred to as ‘state prisoners’, although all were seized in Afghanistan. In 1979 the US ambassador to Kabul, Adolph Dubbs, had been murdered by gunmen who, intriguingly, had initially demanded Waez’s release in return for the diplomat’s life. Were the Soviets unwilling to free Waez because this would reveal how many Afghans were held captive in Tula?

I knew that Afghanistan’s government was forcing the last of us out of the country, but the door was still ajar and I thought there was a crack through which I might squeeze.* I made one last trip to Jalalabad with Ali, only to find my hotel the venue for a clandestine meeting between six senior Soviet officers and the Afghan interior minister, Saed Mohamed Gulabzoi, and his local officials, all anxious to prevent a full-scale siege of Jalalabad by the rebels. So dangerous was the highway that the Russians had to be flown down from Kabul by helicopter. I watched them arrive at the Spinghar, protected by security police in riot visors who erected belt-fed machine guns on tripods upon bar tables around the hotel’s rose gardens. There were now 3,000 Soviet troops outside the town.

And the destruction of the villages around Jalalabad was now under way. Alisingh and Alinghar outside Metarlam had been bombed by the Russians but a 40-kilometre journey into mujahedin-held territory in Laghman province showed that every school and government office in the villages had been burned by the rebels. Several villagers said that up to fifty women and children had been killed in Soviet air raids in the previous three days. An old man with an unshaven face kept repeating the word ‘napalm’, gesturing with his hands in a downwards, smothering motion. In one tiny village outside Metarlam, more than 200 men surrounded my taxi when they thought we were Russians.

The mujahedin were not without their humour. Two nights earlier, an Afghan truck-driver found a notice on the main road west. ‘In the name of God,’ it read, ‘this is for tanks.’ The driver journeyed on and promptly set off a landmine. An armed insurgent then turned up to demand that the lorry driver pay $350 for the explosives which he had just wasted. Far less amusing was a report from three independent sources in Jalalabad that a museum at Hadda containing a statue of Buddha – dating from at least the second century bc – had been destroyed, along with other priceless antiquities. What did this mean? And if the reports were true, what confidence could the world have that the giant 1500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan might not one day be similarly destroyed? On my way back to Kabul, the guerrillas were back on the road, twenty of them this time, and there were no longer any roses attached to their rifles.

I would, briefly, return to Afghanistan in the summer of 1980, flying in to Kabul with a tennis racket and an unbelievable claim to be a tourist. The Khad attached a cop to me this time and I was taken under escort to the Intercontinental where I paid him off in return for a taxi ride around the capital. The dust hung in layers of heat over Kabul and the Soviet soldiers were now on the defensive, escorting civilian cars in long armoured convoys across the highways of Afghanistan, their airbase at Bagram now flying bombing sorties against the mujahedin every three minutes. Soviets now occupied senior ‘advisory’ positions in all the Kabul ministries, their large black limousines gliding through the muggy streets of the city at midday, curtains pulled across the back windows and plain-clothes men peering from the front passenger seats. The occupants were not the large, bulky commissars of popular mythology but, for the most part, small, respectable men in glossy grey business suits, narrow, slightly unfashionable ties and hair thick with oil, family men from an autonomous republic with five-year plans to meet.

In the stifling summer, the Russian soldiers were wearing floppy, wide-brimmed sombreros and their trucks jammed the streets of Kabul. Their ‘limited intervention’ had spawned a spring offensive – that tactic beloved of all generals confronted by an armed insurrection – which had now turned into a full-scale military campaign. Helicopter gunships stood in rows five deep at Kabul airport. Four-engined Ilyushin transport aircraft en route to Tashkent turned all day over the city, trailing fuel exhaust as they banked sharply above the international airport to avoid ground-to-air missiles.

At the airport, the two faces of Afghanistan’s revolution could be seen within 800 metres of each other. Above the main terminal building, the faded outline of January’s triumphant greeting to Soviet troops could still be observed – ‘Welcome to the New Model Revolution’ – although the 1.5-metre-high letters had long ago been taken down and the sun had bleached the red paint a drab pink. Just across the airfield, at the eastern end of the main runway, lay the other symbol of Afghanistan’s revolutionary conflict: a Soviet SA-2 missile with a 130-kilogram warhead, a range of 50 kilometres and a maximum altitude of 50,000 feet; this was the same weapon used with devastating effect against US B-52 bombers over Hanoi in the Vietnam war. And Vietnam was the word that more and more Afghans were using to describe their own conflict. President Carter and Mrs Thatcher were urging the world to boycott the Olympics in Moscow.

Kabul’s schoolchildren were refusing to attend classes since hundreds of them were taken ill; rebels, according to the government, had put sulphur in the schools’ water supplies. A thousand children had been taken to the Aliabad hospital in one week alone. At night, gun battles crackled around the city as gunmen attacked Russian patrols and rival Parcham and Khalq party members assaulted each other. A doctor who was a member of President Karmal’s Parcham party was shot dead while visiting a patient at Bandeghazi – within the city limits – but the police could not discover whether he was killed by mujahedin or by Khalq agents. One of the cops assigned to me was a Khalq man who, in the privacy of the hotel elevator, suddenly burst out in anger: ‘It is bad here and I am sick. We want Soviet help – we need it. But if anyone stays longer than we want – anyone, and that includes the Soviet Union – we will shoot them.’

On 14 June, Karmal ordered the execution of thirteen former Khalq functionaries for ‘hatching conspiracies against the state’. Most were minor officials – Sidaq Alamyar, the ex-planning minister, for example, and Saeb Jan Sehrai, who was in charge of ‘border affairs’ – while the deputy prime minister, Asadullah Sawari, who was head of Taraki’s secret service, remained untouched. His name was on the death list of the ‘night letter’ pushed into diplomatic compounds four months earlier. I was lucky to have stolen forty-eight hours in Kabul, albeit under secret police surveillance. When I was taken back to Kabul airport for my flight out, an Aeroflot jet was standing on the apron, its fuselage evidence for Mrs Thatcher’s profound cynicism towards the Soviets.

The aircraft bore Aeroflot’s proud English-language slogan ‘Official Olympic Carrier’ on both sides of its fuselage but from its doors it was disgorging Soviet combat troops, young men – some with blond hair – carrying their rifles in the hot sun as they walked down the steps to the tarmac. They looked happy enough – one raised his arms towards the sun and said something that made his comrades laugh – although their chances of returning home in similar mood had decreased in recent weeks. More than 600 seriously wounded Soviet servicemen had been admitted to the Kabul military hospital, another four hundred to Soviet clinics near the bus station at Khai Khana; of these one thousand, two hundred had died – and this figure only included those who died of wounds, not those who were killed in combat. The dead were loaded in square wooden coffins aboard Antonov-12 aircraft and no one knew what they contained until a young Soviet soldier was seen saluting one of the boxes. Even the Khad secret policeman who followed me so assiduously agreed that the Soviet army was experiencing ‘very big trouble’.

But back in that chill February of 1980, I still had two days of precious, lonely freedom before my visa expired and I was forced to leave Afghanistan. I decided this time to be greedy, to try once more a long-distance bus ride, this time to a city whose people, so we were told in Kabul, had rediscovered their collective faith in confronting the invaders of their country: Kandahar.

I took the bus before dawn, from the same station I had set out from on my vain trip to Mazar, wearing the same Afghan hat and hunched under the same brown shawl. Men and women sat together – they all appeared to be families – and the moment I announced my nationality, I was deluged with apples, cheese, oranges and the big, flat, sagging nan bread that Afghans use as an envelope to contain their food. When I gently expressed my concern that there might be ‘bad’ people on the bus – the very word Khad usually had the effect of silencing any conversation for an hour – I was assured there were none. I would be safe. And so the passengers, with scarcely any English, gave me their silent protection on the fourteen-hour journey across the moonlike, frozen landscape to Kandahar.

It was an epic of a country at war. Our coach passed the wrecks of countless vehicles beside the road. Sixty-five kilometres west of Ghazni, the town from which Gavin and I and his crew had fled the previous month – it already felt another life ago – a convoy of civilian buses and trucks had just been ambushed. All of the vehicles were burning fiercely, sending columns of black smoke funnelling up from the snow-covered plains. Small, darkened mounds lay beside the buses, all that was left of some of their passengers. Soviet convoys passed us in the opposite direction, each vehicle carrying a Russian soldier standing in the back, pistol in hand. The Soviets were now too busy ensuring their own safety to worry about the civilians they had supposedly come to rescue from the ‘bandits’.

In one village, three Afghan soldiers, including an officer, boarded our bus and tried to arrest a postman who had deserted from the army. There was a brutal fist-fight between soldiers and passengers until two uniformed conscripts who were smoking hashish in the back seats walked down the aisle and literally kicked the officer out of the vehicle. So much for the morale of Karmal’s Afghan army. In another village, the passengers hissed at Soviet Tajik troops who were standing beside the barbed wire of a military depot. But the passenger behind tapped me urgently on the shoulder. ‘Look!’ he gasped, and pointed to his forehead. I looked at his face and could not understand. ‘Look!’ he said more urgently and placed his right hand flat on top of his head, as if it was a hat. Hat. Yes, there was something missing from the Soviet Tajik soldiers’ grey fur hats. They had removed the red star from their hats. They stood looking at us, darker-skinned than their Russian comrades, bereft now of the communist brotherhood in which they had grown up.

I should have understood at once. If Soviet troops in Afghanistan – Muslim Soviet soldiers – would remove the very symbol of their country, the badge that their fathers had worn so proudly in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945, then already the cancer of Afghanistan must have eaten deep into their souls. They had been sent to war against their Muslim co-religionists and had decided that they would not fight them. No more telling portent of the imminent collapse of empire could have confronted me in Afghanistan. Yet my trek across the snowlands was so vast, the dangers so great, my exhaustion so overwhelming that I merely jotted in my notebook the observation that the soldiers had ‘for some reason’ removed their hat-badges.

A few miles further on, an Afghan soldier could be seen standing in the desert, firing into the dusk with a sub-machine gun at an enemy he could not possibly have seen. When our bus stopped at a chaikhana in the frozen semi-darkness, an old man from the burned convoy we had passed told us that of the three hundred passengers taken from the buses, fifty were detained by more than a hundred armed rebels, all of them told – quite openly – that they would ‘probably’ be executed because they were party men. Each scene spoke for itself, a cameo of violence and government impotence that our frightened passengers clearly understood.

It was night when we entered Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, our bus gliding past the shrine in which lay the cloak of the Prophet Mohamed, circling a set of nineteenth-century cannon that had belonged to General Roberts’s army in the Second Afghan War. I was dirty and tired and checked into a seedy hotel in the old city, a place of cigarette smoke, sweat and overcooked meat. My bedroom was small, the sheets stained, the threadbare carpet smallpoxed with cigarette burns. But two big rust-encrusted doors led onto a tiny balcony from where I could see the moon and the stars which glistened across the winter sky.

I was lying on my bed when I first heard the sound. Allahu akbar. God is great. It was a thin, pitched wail. Allahu akbar. God is great. I looked at my watch. This was no fixed time for prayers. It was 9 o’clock. The curfew had just begun. Allahu akbar. Now the chant came from the next roof, scarcely 20 metres from my room, more a yodel than an appeal to the Almighty. I opened the door to the balcony. The cry was being carried on the air. A dozen, a hundred Allahu akbars, uncoordinated, overlaying each other, building upon a foundation of identical words, high-pitched and tenor, treble and childlike, an army of voices shouting from the rooftops of Kandahar. They swelled in volume, a thousand now, ten thousand, a choir that filled the heavens, that floated beneath the white moon and the stars, the music of the spheres.

I saw a family, a husband and wife and a clutch of children, all chanting, but their voices were lost in the pulse of sound that now covered the city. This extraordinary phenomenon was no mere protest, a lament at the loss of freedom. When the Prophet entered Mecca in the year 630 of the Christian era, he walked to the great black stone, the Kaaba, touched it with his stick and shouted in a strong voice that supreme invocation of Islam. Allahu akbar. His ten thousand followers chorused those same words and they were taken up by members of the Prophet’s own Qureishi tribe who had gathered on their roofs and balconies in Mecca. Now these same holy words were being chanted by another ten thousand voices, this time from the roofs and balconies of Kandahar. A Westerner – or a Russian – might interpret this as a semi-political demonstration, a symbolic event. But in reality, the choirs of Kandahar were an irresistible assertion of religious faith, the direct and deliberate repetition of one of the holiest moments of Islam. In the last year of his life, the Prophet had entered the newly purified shrine in Mecca and seven more times chanted Allahu akbar. In Kandahar, the voices were desperate but all-powerful, mesmeric, unending, deafening, an otherwise silent people recognising their unity in God. This was an unstoppable force, an assertion of religious identity that no Afghan satrap or Kremlin army could ultimately suppress.

Kandahar’s earthly, political protests had little effect. Shopkeepers had closed down the bazaar for more than two weeks but a squad of Afghan soldiers forced its reopening by threatening to smash stores whose owners did not obey their orders. Afghan troops could be found chain-smoking in their trucks beside the Khalkisherif Mosque. But the five rebel groups operating south of Kandahar had united and the otherwise obedient mullahs had told the city’s Muslim population that they should be ‘aware of events’ – an over-discreet but nonetheless unprecedented reference to the Soviet invasion.

And over the past few days, a series of poorly printed posters had made their appearance on the walls of the reopened bazaar. ‘The people are asleep,’ one of them admonished. ‘Why do you not wake up?’ Another, addressed to Soviet troops, asked simply: ‘Sons of Lenin – what are you doing here?’ Yet the poster addressed to the Russians was written in Pushtu – a language with which Soviet troops were unlikely to be familiar – and five days earlier the people of Kandahar had watched from those same balconies and rooftops as a column of tanks, tracked armoured vehicles and trucks drove through their city. The first tank was seen just after nine in the evening and the tail of the convoy only left Kandahar at four in the morning. Most of this Soviet convoy ended up along the road to Spinboldak on the Pakistan border.

In Kandahar, food prices had doubled, inflation had cut into wages. Meat and rice prices in the city had risen by 80 per cent and eggs 100 per cent. A shopkeeper, an educated man in his fifties who combined a European sweater and jacket with traditional Afghan baggy trousers and turban, claimed that Karmal’s government could not survive if it was unable to control food prices. ‘Every day the government says that food prices are coming down,’ he said. ‘Every day we are told things are getting better thanks to the cooperation of the Soviet Union. But it is not true.’ The man lapsed into obscenities. ‘Do you realise that the government cannot even control the roads? Fuck them. They only hold on to the cities.’

This I already knew. And the journey back to Kabul, 450 kilometres across lagoons of snow and deserts held by marauding rebels, was evidence of the terrible future that Afghanistan would be forced to endure. From the windows of my bus I saw, 8 kilometres from the road, an entire village on fire, the flames golden against the mountain snows, while the highway was sometimes in the hands of gunmen – several, I noticed, were wearing Arab kuffiah scarves – or truckloads of cringing Afghan soldiers. The Russian troops were moving up the side roads now, spreading their army across the plains, driving imperiously into the smallest villages.

At one intersection, a Soviet patrol was parked, the soldiers in their BMB armoured vehicles watching us with routine disinterest, already counting their mission as something normal. This was now their land, their inheritance, dangerous, to be true, but a part of their life, a duty to be done. But their mission was as hopeless as it was illusory. ‘Even if they kill a million of us,’ an Afghan bazaari was to say to me later in Kabul, ‘there are a million more of us ready to die. We never allow people to stay in our country.’ Both statements were true.

Only days after I left Kabul, Afghan troops and security men brutally suppressed a mass demonstration against the Soviet invasion, shooting down hundreds of protesters, including women students, in the streets of the capital. Well over a million Afghans would be killed in the war against the Russians over the next nine years, at least 4 million would be wounded and 6 million driven out of the country as refugees – even before the Afghan war entered its further tragedy of civil conflict between the mujahedin, Taliban rule and subsequent American bombardment. What that suffering meant we would only discover later. The most efficient killers were the armies of landmines sown across the mountains and fields of Afghanistan by the Soviets. The war would cost the Russians, it has been estimated, around $35 billion – $2.5 billion worth of Russian aircraft were lost in one year alone – and the Americans claimed to have spent $10 billion on the conflict. Saudi Arabia, on its own admission in 1986, spent $525 million in just two years on Afghan opposition parties and their Arab supporters. Pakistani sources would later say that three to four thousand Arab fighters were in action in Afghanistan at any one time throughout the war and that as many as 25,000 Arabs saw service in the fighting. Yet in the end, once the Russian bear had burned its paws and the Soviet Union was on its way to perdition, the Americans and their Arab and Pakistani suppliers abandoned Afghanistan to its fate and ignored the thousands of Arabs who had fought there. Nor did any Saudi prince risk his life for the Afghans, nor any Arab leader ever dare to go to war for his fellow Muslims there, nor did Yassir Arafat, who understood the meaning of dispossession, ever criticise the army of occupation that was to lay waste the Muslim lands between the Amu Darya and the Durand Line. Only Bin Laden and his men represented the Arabs.

I flew out of Kabul on a little Pakistani prop aircraft that bucked in the air pockets over the Hindu Kush and dropped me into the basking, bakery-hot airport at Peshawar from which Francis Gary Powers had set off twenty years earlier in his doomed U-2 intelligence plane over the Soviet Union. I was light-headed, overwhelmed to have watched history and survived, possessed of a schoolboy immaturity. Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent had nothing on this.* At my hotel, a message from my foreign news editor Ivan Barnes told me I had won an award for my reporting on the Iranian revolution. ‘Have a very big drink on me tonight …’ he telexed. The editor announced a $1,000 bonus. A letter was to arrive with congratulations from my old soldier father. ‘Well done Fella,’ he wrote. I could not sleep.

Next morning, I indulged my innocence by riding the old British steam train back up the Khyber Pass, to take one last look at Afghanistan before I returned to Beirut. Engine-driver Mohamed Selim Khan, a brisk and mustachioed Pathan with a topi on his head and eighteen years’ experience with Pakistan State Railways under his arm, wiped his oil-cloth over the firebox of his sixty-year-old steam engine, knowingly tapped the lubricator – a Wakefield patent made in London EC4 – and eased loco Number 2511 out of Peshawar’s hot and smoky station. Every schoolboy would have loved SGS Class No. 2511, and so did I. She had six driving wheels, a smokestack with a lid like a teapot, a rusting boiler under constant repair, a squadron of gaskets that leaked steam and a footplate that reeked of oil, smoke and freshly brewed tea. She made a noise like thunder and I clung like a child to the fittings of Mr Khan’s footplate.

The Ministry of Defence in Islamabad paid for the upkeep of the 60 kilometres of track – they might need it one day, to take their own army up to Landi Kotal if those Russian convoys spilled over the border – but its subsidy allowed us to hammer our way up the one-in-three gradient, the steepest in the world, black smoke boxing us into more than thirty tunnels that line the route, a thin, shrieking whistle sending buffaloes, goats, sheep, children and old men off the track. At 3,000 feet, No. 2511 performed so sharp a turn above so sheer a ridge of boulders high above a spinning river that Mr Khan and I grasped the iron doors of the cab to stop ourselves falling out. So we steamed into Landi Kotal from Jamrud Fort, our loco fuming in the sharp high-altitude breeze.

And when I jumped down from the footplate and crunched my way across the gravel of the permanent way, there were the pale blue mountains of Afghanistan shimmering to the north and west, sun-soaked and cold and angry and familiar and dangerous. I looked at them with attachment now, as one always does a dark land from which one has emerged alive. Up there, with Gavin and his crew, I had reached the top of the world. Never could I have imagined what we had given birth to in Afghanistan, nor what it held in store for that same world in twenty-one years’ time. Nor the pain it was to hold for me.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Carpet-Weavers

… the Men who for their desperate ends

Had plucked up mercy by the roots were glad

Of this new enemy. Tyrants, strong before

In devilish pleas, were ten times stronger now,

And thus beset with foes on every side,

The goaded Land waxed mad; the crimes of few

Spread into madness of the many, blasts

From hell came sanctified like airs from heaven;

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude, 1805,

Book Tenth

Christopher Montague Woodhouse was asking himself if he had helped to create the Islamic revolution in Iran. He was an old man now, but you could see the energy that still gripped him, a tall, dignified, brave and ruthless 79-year-old. It was snowing that morning in Oxford in 1997, but he had come to the gate of his retirement home to greet me, his handshake a vice. He sat ramrod-straight in his library with the mind of a young man, answering my questions with the exactness of a Greek scholar, each sentence carefully crafted. He had been Britain’s senior secret agent in ‘Operation Boot’ in 1953, the overthrow of Iran’s only democratic prime minister, Mohamed Mossadeq. It was ‘Monty’ Woodhouse who helped to bring the Shah of Iran back from exile, along with his colleagues in the CIA, who set in motion a quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, ‘Light of the Aryans’, would obediently rule Iran – repressively, savagely, corruptly and in imperious isolation – on our behalf. Woodhouse was a reminder that The Plot – the international conspiracy, moamara in Arabic – was not always the product of Middle East imagination. Woodhouse was in the last years of a life in which he had been a guerrilla fighter in Greece, a Tory MP and a much honoured Greek linguist and academic. Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was now dead; Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Tehran, his boss Allen Dulles, Robin Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian brothers who organised the coup, Mossadeq himself and the last Shah of Iran. ‘Monty’ was the last survivor.

We had known each other for nine years, ever since The Times sent me to investigate the secret wartime history of former UN secretary-general and ex-Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim in Bosnia.* Woodhouse, along with the brilliant British scholar Gerald Fleming, had relentlessly pursued the former Austrian intelligence officer in the German army for personal as well as moral reasons; Waldheim’s initial ‘W’ appeared below the interrogation summary of one of Woodhouse’s Special Operations Executive officers who was captured in Yugoslavia and later executed by the Gestapo. Woodhouse was a man who lived first in the shadows – in the wartime Balkans and Tehran – and then as a member of parliament, and I wanted to know, before he died, why Britain and the United States, the ‘West’ – why we – had chosen to destroy Iran’s only secular democracy.

Woodhouse looked at me with his penetrating, unwavering eyes. ‘I’ve sometimes been told that I was responsible for opening the doors for the Ayatollah – for Khomeini and the others,’ he said. ‘But it’s quite remarkable that a quarter of a century elapsed between Operation Boot and the fall of the Shah. In the end it was Khomeini who came out on top – but not until years later. I suppose that some better use could have been made of the time that elapsed.’ I was astonished. The coup against Mossadeq, the return of the Shah, was, in Woodhouse’s mind, a holding operation, a postponement of history. There was also the little matter of the AIOC, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – later British Petroleum – which Mossadeq had just nationalised. You could tell from the way he spoke, the urgent movement of his hands, that this had been one of the most exciting moments of Woodhouse’s life. The return of the young Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi was the ultimate goal. It cost a couple of million pounds, a planeload of weapons and perhaps five thousand lives. And twenty-five years later, it all turned to dust.

The Americans called their plot ‘Operation Ajax’, which must at least have appealed to the scholar in Woodhouse, even if its classical origins did not invoke success; Ajax was second only to Achilles in bravery, but he killed himself in a fit of madness, a fate the Americans would like to have visited upon Mossadeq. It was, in any case, a long way from later and more ambitious campaigns of ‘regime change’ in the Middle East, and a few neo-conservatives in the Pentagon in 2003 might have dusted off the archives of the early Fifties to see how to topple Middle East leaders before embarking on ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. But then Operation Boot/Ajax – though it was undeniably about oil – was never intended to change the map of the Middle East, let alone bring ‘democracy’ to Iran. ‘Democracy’, in the shape of the popular and somewhat effete Mossadeq, was the one thing Washington and London were not interested in cultivating. This was to be regime change on the cheap.

The project had not attracted President Truman, but when Eisenhower arrived at the White House in 1953, America was already fearful that Mossadeq would hand his country over to the Soviets. The CIA end of the operation was run by the splendidly named Kermit Roosevelt – grandson of the buccaneering ex-president Theodore – and his victim was the very opposite of Saddam Hussein. ‘No nation goes anywhere under the shadow of dictatorship,’ Mossadeq once said – words that might have come from President George W. Bush’s speechwriters half a century later. But one thing Mossadeq did have in common with the later dictator of Iraq; he was the victim of a long campaign of personal abuse by his international opponents. They talked about his ‘yellow’ face, of how his nose was always running; the French writer Gérard de Villiers described Mossadeq as ‘a pint-sized trouble-maker’ with the ‘agility of a goat’. On his death, the New York Times would claim that he ‘held cabinet meetings while propped up in bed by three pillows and nourished by transfusions of American blood plasma’. True, Mossadeq, an aristocrat with a European education, had a habit of dressing in pink pyjamas and of bursting into tears in parliament. But he appears to have been a genuine democrat – he had been a renowned diplomat and parliamentarian – whose condemnation of the Shah’s tyranny and refusal to sanction further oil concessions gave his National Front coalition mass popular support. When Woodhouse arrived in Tehran – officially, he was the British embassy’s ‘information officer’ – Iran was already on the brink of catastrophe. Negotiations had broken down with the AIOC, whose officials, Woodhouse admitted, were ‘boring, pig-headed and tiresome’. The British ambassador was, according to Woodhouse, ‘a dispirited bachelor dominated by his widowed sister’ and his opposite number an American business tycoon who was being rewarded for his donations to the Democratic Party.*

‘One of the first things I had to do was fly a planeload of guns into Iran,’ Woodhouse said. He travelled on the aircraft from the Iraqi airbase at Habbaniya – decades later, it would be one of Saddam Hussein’s fighter-bomber stations, and later still a barracks for America’s occupation army – and then bought millions of Iranian riyals, handing them over at a secret location to the Rashidian brothers. They were to be the organisers of the mobs who would stage the coup. The guns would be theirs, too – unless the Soviet Union invaded Iran, in which case they were to be used to fight the Russians.

‘We landed in Tehran after losing our way over the Zaghros mountains. They were mostly rifles and sten guns. We drove north in a truck, avoiding checkpoints by using by-roads. Getting stopped was the sort of thing one never thinks about. We buried the weapons – I think my underlings dug the holes. And for all I know those weapons are still hidden somewhere in northern Iran. It was all predicated on the assumption that war would break out with the Soviet Union. But let me clarify. When I was sent to Tehran, it was not for the purpose of political interference. In fact, political interference at the British embassy in Tehran was in the hands of a quite different personality, Robin Zaehner. He was very good company, very intelligent but very odd. His function was to get rid of Mossadeq. This only became my function when Zaehner despaired of it and left Tehran.’

In fact, Zaehner, later to become Professor of Eastern Religions at Oxford, had been involved in Britain’s disastrous attempt to raise a revolution in communist Albania, based in Malta, and later accused by American agents of betraying the operation – Woodhouse never believed this – and was now the principal liaison with the Shah. It was Zaehner who cultivated the Rashidian brothers, both of whom had worked against German influence in Iran during the Second World War. Iran was on the point of throwing the British embassy staff out of Tehran, so Woodhouse made contact with the CIA station chief in the city, Roger Goiran, ‘a really admirable colleague … he came from a French family, was bilingual, extremely intelligent and likeable and had a charming wife … an invaluable ally to me when Mossadeq was throwing us out’. Once back in London, Woodhouse took his plans to the Americans in Washington: the Rashidians, along with an organisation of disenchanted army and police officers, parliamentary deputies, mullahs, editors and mobs from the bazaar, all funded by Woodhouse’s money, would seize control of Tehran while tribal leaders would take over the big cities – with the weapons Woodhouse had buried.

Mossadeq rejected the last proposals for a settlement with the AIOC and threatened the Shah – who had already left Iran – and from that moment, his fate was obvious. Roosevelt travelled secretly to Tehran while Woodhouse met the Shah’s sister Ashraf in Switzerland in an attempt to persuade her brother to stay on the throne. The Shah himself received a secret emissary bent on the same purpose, a certain General H. Norman Schwarzkopf – father of the Norman Schwarzkopf who would lead US forces in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. The Shah went along with the wishes of his superpower allies. He issued a firman dismissing Mossadeq as prime minister, and when Mossadeq refused to obey and arrested Colonel Nimatullah Nassiri – who had brought the Shah’s order – the mobs whom Roosevelt and Woodhouse had bought duly appeared on the streets of Tehran.

Woodhouse was always unrepentant. ‘It was all Mossadeq’s fault. He was ordered by the Shah’s firman to leave. He called out his own thugs and he caused all the bloodbath. Our lot didn’t – they behaved according to plan. What if we’d done nothing? What would relations have been between Mossadeq and the mullahs? Things would only have got worse. There would have been no restoration of AIOC. And the Shah would have been overthrown immediately, instead of twenty-five years later.’*

In retirement, and still mourning his wife Davina who had died two years earlier, Woodhouse was now keeping his mind alert by translating into English a history of modern Greece by his old friend and fellow scholar, Panayotis Kanellopoulos.† It was easy to see him, a gentle old man who had just become the fifth Baron Terrington, as a romantic figure of history. Here, after all, was a man who knew Churchill and Eden and the top men in the CIA in Washington. But British agents who engineer coups can be remorseless, driven people. At one point in our conversation, Woodhouse talked about his own feelings. ‘I don’t want to be boastful,’ he said. ‘But never – neither in Athens during the German occupation nor in Tehran during this operation – was I afraid. I was never afraid of parachuting, even in the wrong place. I ought to have been, I realise. And when I look back on it, a shudder comes over me. I was always fascinated by the danger and fascinated by the discoveries that come out of being in danger.’

There was, I felt, a darker side to this resolve. In his autobiography, Woodhouse described how during his Second World War service in Greece, a gypsy was captured carrying an Italian pass and working for the Axis powers. With two Greek guerrilla leaders, Napoleon Zervas and Aris Veloukhiotis, Woodhouse formed a court martial. ‘The outcome was inevitable,’ he wrote. ‘We could not afford the manpower to guard a prisoner; we could not risk his escape. He was hanged in the village square.’

Did Woodhouse still think about this youth? I put this question to him gently, at the end of our conversation as the gale outside hurled snow at the window of his library. There was a long silence and Woodhouse shook his head very slowly. ‘It was terrible – I felt terrible. I still bring the scene back to me from time to time. He was a wretched youth. He didn’t say anything really – he was so shaken. He was a sort of halfwit. I was at the hanging. He was hanged from a tree. They simply pulled a chair from beneath his feet. I don’t think it took long for him to die, I don’t know exactly how long. We were only a hundred men or so – it was the early days of the occupation. If we had let him go, he would have told the Italians … He had been following us from village to village. After that, I told Zervas not to take any prisoners.’

Woodhouse, I suspect, viewed the Iranian coup with the same coldness of heart. He certainly had as little time for Ayatollah Abul Qassim Kashani as he did for Mossadeq. Kashani was Khomeini’s precursor, a divine – albeit of a slightly gentler kind – whose opposition to the British gave him nationalist credentials without making him an automatic ally of Mossadeq. Woodhouse was not impressed. Kashani, he said, was ‘a man no one really took seriously – he became a member of the Majlis [parliament], which was an odd thing for an ayatollah to do. He had no power base … Kashani was a loner. One didn’t think of him in terms of any mass movement. He was a nuisance, a troublemaker.’ Others thought differently. Kashani, it has been said, spoke for the ‘democracy of Islam’; he was a man ‘completely fearless, unscrupulous, completely free from self-interest … With these qualities he combines humility and ready access, kindness and humour, wide learning and popular eloquence.’* In November 1951, Kashani stated that ‘we don’t want any outside government interfering in our internal affairs … The United States should cease following British policy otherwise it will gain nothing but hatred and the loss of prestige in the world in general and in Iran in particular.’ Much the same warning would be given to Britain in the Middle East fifty-two years later when Tony Blair’s government followed American policy over Iraq.

Woodhouse was right in one way: after Mossadeq’s overthrow and subsequent trial – he was given a three-year jail sentence and died under house arrest ten years later – Kashani moved into obscurity. Woodhouse would record how the Ayatollah later sent a telegram of congratulations to the Shah on his return to Iran. But Mossadeq’s rule and the coup that ended Iran’s independence in 1953 would provide a bitter lesson to the revolutionaries of 1979. If the Shah was ever to be dethroned, there could be no flirtation with constitutional rights, no half-measures, no counter-revolutionaries left to restore Western power in Iran. A future revolution would embrace more than five thousand dead; it must be final, absolute – and unforgiving. The spies, the ancien régime, would have to be liquidated at once.

There were also lessons for the Americans and British, and for the Shah, had they chosen to pay attention. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States and Britain. The fall of Mossadeq, as James A. Bill has written, ‘began a new era of intervention and growing hostility to the United States among the awakened forces of Iranian nationalism’. Woodhouse was to become deeply depressed by Khomeini’s subsequent revolution. ‘I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once the Shah had been restored,’ he said. ‘Things were taken for granted too easily.’ After Mossadeq had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower administration to back the coup: ‘That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!’ he told the man from MI6.

But we don’t go in for ‘little eggs’ any more. More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies – and bigger egos – are involved in ‘regime change’ today. Maybe that’s why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily. The coup against Mossadeq was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War – and the last by the British. At least we never claimed Mossadeq had weapons of mass destruction. But the final word must go to the CIA’s man, Kermit Roosevelt. ‘If we are ever going to try something like this again,’ he wrote with great prescience, ‘we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want.’

The ‘sort of complacency’ which Woodhouse defined was based upon the security services which the Shah established after his return. Savak – Sazman-i Etelaat va Amjiniat-i Keshvar, the ‘National Information and Security Organisation’ – was to become the most notorious and the most murderous, its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions. A permanent secret US mission was attached to Savak headquarters. Methods of interrogation included – apart from the conventional electric wires attached to genitals, beating on the soles of the feet and nail extraction – rape and ‘cooking’, the latter a self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a bed of wire that was then electrified to become a red-hot toaster.* Mohamed Heikal, that greatest of Egyptian journalists, once editor of Al Ahram and former confidant of Nasser, has described how Savak filmed the torture of a young Iranian woman, how she was stripped naked and how cigarettes were then used to burn her nipples. According to Heikal, the film was later distributed by the CIA to other intelligence agencies working for American-supported regimes around the world including Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines. Colonel Nimatullah Nassiri, the man who had served Mossadeq with the Shah’s eviction order, controlled Savak for almost the last fifteen years of the monarch’s reign and employed up to 60,000 agents. At one point, it was believed that a third of the male population of Iran were in some way involved in Savak, either directly or as occasional paid or blackmailed informants. They included diplomats, civil servants, mullahs, actors, writers, oil executives, workers, peasants, the poor and the unemployed, a whole society corrupted by power and fear.

For the West, the Shah became our policeman, the wise ‘autocrat’ – never, of course, a dictator – who was a bastion against Soviet expansionism in south-west Asia, the guardian of our oil supplies, a would-be democrat – the ‘would’ more relevant than the ‘be’ – and a reformer dedicated to leading his people into a bright economic future. Over the next quarter-century, the international oil industry exported 24 billion barrels of oil out of Iran; and the ‘policeman of the Gulf’ was more important than ever now that the British were withdrawing from ‘east of Suez’. But the Shah’s rule was never as stable as his supporters would have the world believe. There was rioting against the regime throughout the 1960s and four hundred bombings between 1971 and 1975. In early 1963, Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly condemned the Shah’s rule. On 3 June, the day marking the martyrdom at Kerbala of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, he publicly denounced the Shah’s corruption and was promptly arrested and taken to Tehran. An outburst of popular anger confirmed Khomeini as a national opposition leader. Sixteen months later, on 4 November 1964, he delivered a speech in which he condemned a new law giving American forces immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed inside Iran. Henceforth, an American who murdered an Iranian could leave the country; an Iranian who murdered an Iranian could be hanged.* Next day, Khomeini was exiled to Turkey.

The Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ succeeded in alienating the middle classes by legislating for land reform and the clerics by increasing the secular nature of the regime, especially by giving electoral power to women. By 1977, less than two years before the Islamic revolution, the Shah was predicting that within ten years Iran would be as developed as western Europe, and shortly thereafter one of the five most powerful countries in the world. President Jimmy Carter’s US administration, burdened with a liberal desire to spread human rights across the globe but still anxious to maintain the Shah’s power, continued the American policy of supporting the reforms that were causing so much unrest among Iranians. Israeli leaders paid frequent visits to Iran – David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon all visited Tehran, often in secret. Iranian military officers travelled to Tel Aviv for talks with senior Israeli army officers. There were regular El Al flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran.

Like all absolute monarchs, the Shah constantly reinvented himself. In 1971, he invited world leaders to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his rule at a massive birthday bash in the ancient city of Persepolis, the capital of the Persian empire under Darius the First. The city would become ‘the centre of gravity of the world’ and everyone and almost everything – from Imelda Marcos to US Vice-President Spiro Agnew, from King Hussein of Jordan to the fine wines and furnishings in the vast ‘Big Top’ tent beside the ruins – was imported from abroad. The Shah was to be worshipped as spiritual heir to the empire of Cyrus the Great, whose rule included a landmass stretching to the Mediterranean, later extended to Egypt and east to the Indus river. Alexander the Great had conquered Persepolis in 330 BC and, so legend would have it, ordered its destruction at the request of a courtesan. For the Shah’s ‘birthday’, Iranian troops were dressed up as Medes and Persians, Safavids and Kajars and Parthians. All that was missing was any reference to the Prophet Mohamed and the Muslim invasions that brought Islam to Persia. But that was the point. The Shah was presenting himself not as a Muslim but as the kingly inheritor of pre-Islamic Persia. Khomeini naturally condemned the whole binge as obscene.

This act of self-aggrandisement counted for nothing when the end came. Indeed, the very detritus of the banquet was effortlessly turned by the Ayatollah’s regime into a symbol of emptiness. When the Shah, long exiled, was undergoing surgery in New York, I travelled down to Persepolis from Tehran and found his special tent, still standing beside the ruins of the city. I even lowered myself into his solid gold bath and turned on the solid gold taps. There was no water in them.

Nor did the Shah have Cyrus’s blood in his veins. He had no such illustrious lineage – the Pahlavi dynasty was only founded in 1925 – although there was a very firm blood tide that linked the various shahs of Iranian history. The Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski has most eloquently conveyed the horrors of the eighteenth-century monarch Aga Mohamed Khan, who ordered the population of the city of Kerman to be murdered or blinded because they had sheltered the previous Shah. So the king’s praetorian guard ‘line up the inhabitants, slice off the heads of the adults, gouge out the eyes of the children … Later, processions of blinded children leave the city …’

The Shah was finally persuaded by the Americans to allow the International Red Cross into Iran’s prisons in 1977; they were allowed to see more than three thousand ‘security detainees’ – political prisoners – in eighteen different jails. They recorded that the inmates had been beaten, burned with cigarettes and chemicals, tortured with electrodes, raped, sodomised with bottles and boiling eggs. Interrogators forced electric cables into the uterus of female prisoners. The Red Cross report named 124 prisoners who had died under torture. A year later, the Shah told the Sunday Times that on human rights ‘we have no lessons to learn from anybody’.

When the Islamic revolution eventually overflowed Iran, we would often wonder at the Iranian capacity for both cruelty and sensitivity, for sudden anger and immense, long and exhausting intellectual application. In a country of violent history, its public squares were filled with statues of poets – Ferdowsi, Hafiz, Saadi – rather than conquerors, although the Shah and his father naturally occupied some substantial plinths. An Arab politician once compared Iranian persistence in adversity to the country’s craft of carpet-weaving. ‘Imagine that one carpet, worked on by scores of people, takes about ten years to complete. A people who spend years in manufacturing just a single carpet will wait many more years to achieve victory in war. Do not take lightly the patience and perseverance of the Iranians …’

And so it was to be. Khomeini moved his exile from Turkey to the Shia holy city of Najaf in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where he became outspoken in his support of the Palestinians. On clandestine tapes, his sermons were now circulated across Iran. Saddam Hussein had secured an agreement with the Shah that settled their mutual border along the centre of the Shatt al-Arab river on the Gulf and which also smothered the Kurdish insurrection in the north of Iraq, a betrayal at which both US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Shah connived. When the Shah was unable to stanch the cassette sermons, Saddam was enjoined to deport Khomeini. This time he settled in Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, where he was assured of the constant, almost fawning admiration of the international press, an institution for which he was later to show his contempt.

When the political earthquake eventually struck Iran, The Times was enduring a long industrial closure. It is the fate of journalists to be in the right place at the right time and, more frequently, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But to be in the right place without a newspaper to write for was journalistic hell. When I should have been reporting the martyrdom of tens of thousands of Iranians at the hands of the Shah’s Javidan Guards – the ‘Immortals’ – I was resigning from the National Union of Journalists who were, for all kinds of worthy socialist reasons, opposing the paper’s philanthropic owner Lord Thomson in his dispute with his printers over new technology; the union ultimately trussed up The Times for sale to Rupert Murdoch. But the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came to my rescue with a request for me to cover the Iranian revolution for a half-hour radio documentary. I packed the big tape recorder that CBC gave its reporters in those days – this was long before digitalisation – and a bag of cassettes and a notebook in case I could find a newspaper to print my reports.

The fall of the Shah was an epic. His downfall had about it something of a medieval morality play, even ancient tragedy. It might have qualified as Greek if the Shah had been a truly great man who fell from grace through a single flaw. But he was not a great man and his sins were many. Hubris was perhaps his greatest crime, although the Iranians saw things somewhat differently. Yet they sensed this mythic element in their revolution even before the King of Kings piloted his personal Boeing airliner out of Mehrabad airport for the last time on 16 January 1979.

One of the most impressive of the revolutionary posters depicted the Shah in his full regalia, crown toppling from his balding head, hurtling towards the everlasting bonfire as the avenging Ayatollah swept above him on wings of gold. If ever a Middle Eastern potentate was so frequently portrayed as the Devil, surely never in Islamic art did a living human – Khomeini – so closely resemble the form of the Deity. Tramping through the snow-swamped streets of Tehran, I was stopped by a schoolboy outside the gates of Tehran University who wanted, for a few riyals, to sell me a remarkable example of post-revolutionary graphic art. It was a cardboard face-mask of the Shah, his jowls slack and diseased, his crown kept in place only by two massive black horns. Push out the detachable cardboard eyes, place the mask over your own face and you could peer through the Devil’s own image at the black chadors and serious-faced young men of central Tehran. The effect was curious; whenever a stroller purchased a mask – whenever I held it to my own face in the street – the young men would cry Marg ba Shah – ‘Death to the Shah’ – with a special intensity. It was as if the cardboard actually assumed the substance of the man; the Devil made flesh.

Khomeini had already returned from Paris, and his Islamic revolution initially seduced the more liberal of our journalistic brethren. Edward Mortimer, an equally beached Times journalist – a leader-writer on the paper and a fellow of All Souls, he was also a close friend – caught this false romanticism in its most embarrassing form in an article in the Spectator in which he favourably compared the revolution to both the 1789 fall of the Bastille and the 1917 overthrow of the Tsar. To Mortimer, Charles Fox’s welcome to the French revolution – ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! And how much the best!’ – seemed ‘entirely apposite’ in the Tehran household among whom he was listening to revolutionary songs broadcast from the newly captured headquarters of Iranian National Radio. The events in Iran, Mortimer wrote, ‘are a genuine popular revolution in the fullest sense of the word: the most genuine, probably, since 1917 anywhere in the world, perhaps more genuinely popular than the Bolshevik revolution was, and quite possibly … no less far-reaching in its implications for the rest of the world … Khomeini has himself defied religious conservatism, and is therefore most unlikely to want to impose it on the rest of society.’

Now this was a journalism of awesome – one might even say suicidal – bravery. While I could not disagree with Edward’s remarks on the far-reaching implications of the Iranian revolution, his trust in Khomeini’s liberal intentions was born of faith rather than experience. Mossadeq’s downfall had demonstrated that only a revolution founded upon the blood of its enemies – as well as the blood of its own martyrs – would survive in Iran. Savak had been blamed for the cinema fire in Abadan in August 1978 in which 419 Iranians were burned alive; the Shah, his enemies claimed, wanted Muslim revolutionaries to be accused of the massacre. Each period of mourning had been followed by ever-larger protest demonstrations and ever-greater slaughter. Street marches in Tehran were more than a million strong. Revolutionary literature still claims that the Shah’s army killed 4,000 demonstrators in Jaleh Square in Tehran on 8 September. When Ayatollah Khomeini arrived back in Iran from Paris – the French, who had provided the wine for the Shah at Persepolis, provided Khomeini with the aircraft to fly him home – he was at once taken by helicopter to the cemetery of Behesht-i-Zahra. Four days later, on 5 February 1979, he announced a provisional government headed by Mehdi Bazargan. Iran might still become a democracy, but it would also be a necrocracy: government of, by and for the dead.

And once the martyrs of the revolution had been honoured, it was time for the Shah’s men to pay the price. Each morning in Tehran I would wake to a newspaper front page of condemned men, of Savak interrogators slumping before firing squads or twisting from gallows. By 9 March, there had been forty death sentences handed down by revolutionary courts. None of his 60,000 agents could save Nimatollah Nassiri, the head of Savak; grey-haired, naked and diminutive, he lay on a mortuary stretcher, a hole through the right side of his chest. This was the same Nassiri who had brought the Shah’s firman to Mossadeq to resign in 1953, the same Nassiri who had arranged the visits of Ben Gurion, Dayan and Rabin to Tehran. General Jaffar Qoli Sadri, Tehran’s chief of police – once head of the notorious Komiteh prison – was executed, along with Colonel Nasser Ghavami, the head of the Tehran bazaar police station, and a man accused of being one of Savak’s most savage torturers at Qasr prison, Captain Qassem Jahanpanar. All three had been sentenced in the evening and executed within twelve hours.

Many who faced the firing squad that March were found guilty of shooting at demonstrators during the great anti-Shah marches. On 11 March, Lieutenant Ahmed Bahadori was shot for killing protesters in Hamadan. In Abadan, four more ex-policemen were executed for killing a nineteen-year-old youth during demonstrations. On 13 March, revolutionary courts sent another thirteen men accused of being censors and secret police agents to the firing squad. Among them were Mahmoud Jaafarian, the Sorbonne-educated head of the Iranian National News Agency, and former television director Parviz Nikkah. Before his death, 56-year-old Jaafarian would say only that ‘I hope when I die my family and my countrymen will live in freedom.’ Nikkah was believed to be the journalist who wrote the inflammatory article against Khomeini that provoked the first bloody religious riots in the holy city of Qom in 1978. One newspaper carried photographs of all eleven with their names written on cardboard around their necks. Jaafarian stares without hope at the camera. Nikkah looks angrily to the right. The eyes of one ex-secret policeman are directed at the floor. In their minds, they must already be dead. Kayhan published two pictures of former Qom police officer Agha Hosseini. In one, he is tied to a ladder, his eyes covered in a white cloth, his mouth open and his teeth gritted as he prepares to receive the first bullets. In the other, his knees have buckled and he sags against the ladder.

Mehdi Bazargan appeared on television, condemning the kangaroo trials as a disgrace to ‘a wonderful revolution of religious and human values’. Bazargan was angered in April when he heard that the Shah’s former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda had been taken from his prison – in which the Shah had confined him in a last attempt to curry favour with the revolution before fleeing the country himself – and charged with ‘corruption on earth’ and ‘a battle against God’. Only hours before Hoveyda was to go before a firing squad, Bazargan drove at speed to Qom to speak to Khomeini, who immediately set new rules for revolutionary courts. To no avail.

Hoveyda, an intellectual, urbane man whose interests included Bach, Oscar Wilde and James Bond and whose contempt for the corruption surrounding the Shah had earned him the trust of statesmen and diplomats – but not of ordinary Iranians – had been brought to the revolutionary court from his bed at Qasr prison just before midnight, bleary-eyed and pleading that ‘my doctor has given me a sedative and I can hardly talk, let alone defend myself properly’. But he knew what was coming. ‘If your orders are for me to get condemned, then I have nothing more to say. The life of an individual is not worth much against the life of a whole nation.’ What does a ‘battle against God’ mean, Hoveyda asked the court? If it meant that he was a member of the ‘system’, then up to 700,000 people had worked in the Shah’s civil service. ‘I had a share in this system – call it the regime of a battle against God if you so wish – and so did you and all the others,’ he told the court. He wanted time to gather evidence in his defence. ‘My hand is unstained both by blood and money,’ he pleaded. ‘… You have brought me here as prime minister while five prime ministers have left the country. Couldn’t I also be walking on the Champs Elysées or in the streets of New York?’ He had no control over Savak, he said. ‘In all Savak papers, if you find a single document showing that the prime minister had any role in the organisation, then I shall say no more in my defence.’ Hoveyda turned to the reporters in the audience. ‘What’s the news?’ he asked them. ‘I haven’t seen any papers or heard the radio for some time.’

Hoveyda was eventually sentenced to death as a ‘doer of mischief on earth’. Immediately after the sentence, Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, the ‘hanging judge’ of the revolution, disconnected the telephones in the prison, locked the doors, and had Hoveyda dragged into the prison yard, tied to a stake and shot. ‘The first bullets hit him in the neck but did not kill him,’ William Shawcross wrote in his gripping account of the Shah’s last days. ‘He was ordered by his executioner, a mullah, to hold up his head. The next bullet hit him in the head and he died.’ Paris Match was to carry a photograph of his corpse with a grinning gunman looking at it. Alongside, the magazine carried a picture of the exiled royal family swimming on Paradise Island. Put not your trust in Shahs.

In those early days of the revolution, Iran was in too much anarchy for the new authorities to control journalists. Revolutionary Guards on the roads would send foreign reporters back to Tehran, but they never thought to look for us on the trains. And with a student card – I was using my free time during the stoppage at The Times to take a PhD in politics at Trinity College, Dublin – I bought an all-rail card that allowed me to travel across Iran by train. They were long revolutionary trains, the windows smashed, portraits of Khomeini and poster tulips – symbols of martyrdom – plastered over the rolling stock, their restaurant cars serving chicken, rice and tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Unable to write for my own newspaper, I sent a long letter to Ivan Barnes, the foreign news editor, to describe Iran’s unfinished revolution. The Shah’s acolytes, I told him, had usually been insufferably arrogant.

I found that this arrogance had disappeared with the revolution. I was treated with courtesy and kindness almost everywhere I went and found Iranians much more aware of the implications of world events than … the inhabitants of Arab countries. There was a straightforward quality about Iranians in the country as well as the towns that I couldn’t help admiring. They were thirsting to talk about anything. The only trouble I had was on the train to Qum [sic] when a gang of Islamic Guards (green armbands and M-16 rifles) opened the compartment door and saw me recording a cassette with train sounds. I was immediately accused of being a CIA spy (what else?) but explained that I was a journalist working for Canadian radio. The interpreter, a leftist student who travelled with me everywhere … repeated the same thing and they relaxed a bit. I had been told in Tehran to always say Deroot do Khomeini, marg ba Shah! to anyone nasty (‘Long live Khomeini, death to the Shah!’). I said my piece, at which the Khomeini guards all raised their right fists in the air and shouted their approval. Then they all shook hands with me with giant smiles and tramped off down the train to torment someone in another compartment.

From the desert to the north, Qom stands like an island of distant gold, the cupolas of its mosques and its plump, generous minarets an oasis of beauty at dawn. Like the spires of a medieval English university, its ancient centre appears to reach up to heaven. But my train pulled in after dark, the suburbs thick with exhaust and dust and vast crowds, dark-jacketed, bearded men and black-veiled women moving like a tide towards a grim red-brick building surrounded by big, muscular men with automatic rifles. My leftist student friend turned to me. ‘There is a trial,’ he shouted. ‘They are trying one of the Shah’s men.’ I dumped my bag in a hotel crammed between shops opposite the Friday Mosque, pulled out my old clunker of a tape recorder and ran back to what was already called the ‘court’.

Warrant Officer Rustomi of the Shah’s Imperial Army sat on a metal-framed chair on the stage of the revolutionary court, his hands clasped in front of him and his gaze fixed on the wooden floor of the converted theatre where he was now on trial. He was a middle-aged man and wore an untidy grey-brown beard. He had long ago been stripped of his artillery regiment uniform, and he appeared in court in a creased green anorak and a pair of dirty jeans, a crumpled figure relieved only by the snappy pair of built-up French shoes on his feet. He looked for all the world like a bored defendant awaiting judgement for a minor traffic offence rather than a man who was waiting only for the legal niceties – if ‘legal’ was the right word – of a death sentence. He was accused of killing anti-Shah demonstrators.

The Islamic court in Qom had dispatched its fifth victim to the firing squad only six hours earlier. He was a local policeman accused of killing demonstrators in the revolution, the man who had appeared on the newspaper front page, tied to the ladder, gritting his teeth in front of the firing squad. Someone had cruelly shown the newspaper to Rustomi; maybe it was the inevitability of his sentence that made him so calm, sitting up there on the platform above us. Every few minutes he would take a packet of American cigarettes out of his pocket, and a gunman with a rifle – yes, an American rifle – slung over his shoulder would step over to him obligingly with a match. Rustomi dragged heavily on the cigarettes and glanced occasionally over towards us with a kind of lifelessness in his eyes.

There were more than six hundred men – no women – in the audience and most of them were talking of that morning’s execution, although it was difficult to understand why the event should have occasioned any excitement. There had been no acquittals in the revolutionary courts and the only punishment handed out had been death. The crowd had come to watch the prisoner, to see if he cried or pleaded for life or walked defiantly to the firing squad, to watch the mighty fallen. George Bernard Shaw once claimed that if Christians were thrown to the lions in the Royal Albert Hall in London there would be a packed house each night. These excited men in the audience must have been wearing the same faces as the mobs that gathered before the guillotine during the French revolution.

You could see why death would be the only possible sentence as soon as Rustomi’s trial started. An Islamic priest in long brown robes and a civilian lawyer appointed by the mosque walked onto the stage of the converted theatre and announced that they were to act as prosecuting counsel and judges. Rustomi did not even glance at them. They sat at two iron desks and behind them, fixed on to a starlike design of strip lights, was a crude oil painting of Ayatollah Khomeini. There was no doubt under whose authority this court was sitting.

The mullah made a brief address to the crowd, stating that the trial would be held according to the rules of the Koran, and that the prisoner should be allowed to reply to the charges against him. The mullah was a tall, distinguished man with a long white beard and a kind, honest face. The civilian lawyer looked angry and vindictive, and said something abusive to Rustomi before he sat down. The mullah waved a sheaf of papers in his hand; a series of written testaments by witnesses to anti-Shah demonstrations, each claiming that Rustomi had ordered his company of soldiers to fire at civilians.

One by one, the witnesses were called from the audience to give their evidence – a process occasionally interrupted by shouting at the back of the theatre where more men were pushing their way through the doors and fighting for places in the court. Rustomi pulled his chair up to the mullah’s desk and listened. The first witness was a young man with his shoulder in plaster and the second witness limped onto the stage. They had seen Rustomi order his men to fire at the demonstrators, they claimed, and a third man ran onto the stage and yelled that Rustomi had broken through the door of a mosque and killed a boy hiding in the shrine. There was much discussion of dates and street names – there was, in fact, a genuine if chaotic attempt to define the events surrounding the shooting – before Rustomi stood up.

The crowd bayed at him and for several seconds the mullah did nothing. Rustomi looked down at us with an uncomprehending expression. He wanted to talk. Yes, he said, he had ordered his men to disperse the demonstrators, but he had told them to fire into the air. If anyone had been hit, it must have been a ricochet. There was a momentary silence in the court before another man, scarcely twenty years old, clambered onto the stage and pointed at Rustomi. ‘You’re lying, you bastard,’ he screamed, before the judge ordered him off.

Rustomi fought his corner against obviously impossible odds. He had no defence counsel. He admitted that on another date, he had indeed fired his rifle into a crowd of people who were demanding the overthrow of the Shah. He had questioned the orders to open fire, he said, over his two-way radio, but his major had threatened him with a court martial if he did not obey. At this, an old man in the theatre leapt to his feet. ‘The Holy Koran does not allow any man to take that attitude,’ he shouted. ‘If a Muslim kills another Muslim in those circumstances he is not true to his religion.’ The old man went on and on, abusing Rustomi, and the mullah with the wise, kindly face nodded in an agreeable fashion and allowed the abuse to continue. Rustomi seemed on the verge of tears.

Then the civilian lawyer walked round and shouted ‘Liar!’ in the prisoner’s ear. For a dreadful moment I was reminded of those scratched archive films of the Nazi People’s Court trying the plotters against Hitler’s life in 1944 when Judge Roland Freisler swore at the defendants. At the end of the first day in Qom, the civilian lawyer walked over to me smiling. ‘It’s a fair trial we’re giving him,’ he said. ‘As you can see, we allow Rustomi to answer the charges.’ The court resumed next morning, and Rustomi watched unhappily as two members of his own riot squad condemned him as a murderer. Another soldier did bravely step forward to defend the prisoner, but he was ordered to shut up after being accused of muddling the date of the incident.

When the mullah called a break for lunch, a man of about thirty walked up to me outside the theatre. He was watched suspiciously by a group of Islamic Guards, gunmen wearing the distinctive green armband that showed they were appointed by the mosque. It turned out to be Rustomi’s brother, and he was a frightened man. There was no way we could talk there on the pavement, so we walked down a street together, followed by the gunmen from the court. ‘Do you think this is a fair trial?’ he asked. ‘My brother has no defence counsel. They told him to find one if he wants, but I have been to Tehran to the committee of lawyers, and I’ve spoken to twenty lawyers. Not one of them will take his case. This court has killed every prisoner it has tried.’ There was a sad pause while the man tried to stop himself weeping. ‘My brother has a little boy. He has told the other children at his school that he will kill himself if the court kills his father.’ Then we said goodbye and Rustomi’s brother walked off, the gunmen mincing after him. That same afternoon, I asked Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, one of Khomeini’s closest advisers, why Rustomi was allowed no defence counsel. The white-bearded Ayatollah sat cross-legged on rich ornamental carpets. ‘A prisoner at an Islamic court should be allowed a lawyer to defend him,’ he said. ‘I do not know what is going on at this trial at Qom – I do not know the circumstances of this trial. I do not know the answer to your question.’

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.

‘The villagers own everything on both sides of the road,’ he said. ‘But they do not know how much land they have.’ The heat shimmered and danced on the dried-up irrigation ditches: there were no deeds of ownership, no papers and no legal covenants in Kahak now that the landlords had gone. Just when the landlords did depart was something that bothered Sheikh Zaude. ‘In the past regime,’ he explained, ‘there were two big landowners – Habib Sardai and Ibrahim Solehi. The villagers lived in very bad conditions. Some of them were so poor that they owed many debts but Sardai and Solehi came here and took their grain in payment. I remember seeing these villagers going to other villages to buy back their own grain at high prices. So the people had to borrow money for this and then pay interest on the loans.’ More than a dozen villagers gathered round me as Sheikh Zaude talked on. They were poor people, most of them Turkish in origin with high, shiny cheekbones. Their grey jackets were torn and their trousers frayed where the rubble and thorns in the fields had scratched them. They wore cheap plastic sandals. There was only one girl with them, a thirteen-year-old with dark hair who had wrapped herself shroud-like in a pink and grey chador.

‘Then things improved for us,’ Sheikh Zaude said. ‘Sardai and Solehi left with the land reforms.’ There was no perceptible change in the mullah’s face. He had been asked about that year’s Islamic revolution but he was talking about the Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ seventeen years earlier when the monarch’s reform laws ostensibly curtailed the power of the big landowners. Private holdings were redistributed and landowners could retain only one village. Poor farmers were thereby brought into the economy, although most labourers and farm workers remained untouched. Kahak, it was clear, did not entirely benefit from the Shah’s ‘revolution’. ‘There were good things for us in the reforms,’ Sheikh Zaude said. ‘The number of sheep owned by the villagers went up from two thousand to three thousand. But the village itself, instead of being owned by two men, was now run by the government agent, a man called Darude Gilani, a capitalist from Qazvin. He was a bad man and he collected rent by demanding half of the villagers’ crops.’

There was an old man with an unshaven chin and a cataract in his left eye who now walked to the front of the villagers. From his grubby yellow shirt and broken shoes, I could not have imagined that Aziz Mahmoudi was the village headman and the largest farmer. He looked at the mullah for a moment and said, very slowly: ‘Darude Gilani is in Qazvin prison now.’ Mahmoudi walked across the village square, followed by a small throng of schoolchildren. He pointed to a crumbling, fortified mud house with two storeys, a sign of opulence amid such hardship. ‘That is where Solehi used to live,’ he said, gesturing to the broken windows. ‘Now Gilani is gone too. He will not come back.’ There was no reason why Gilani would return, even if he was released from prison. For on the first day of the revolution the previous February, when the villagers saw the imperial army surrendering in Tehran on the screen of a small black and white television set, they walked down to the fields that Gilani still owned on each side of the railway line. There they planted their own barley as a symbol that the revolution had arrived in Kahak.

Above the blackboard in the village’s tiny clay-walled schoolhouse was a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. It depicted the Imam bending over the bars of a jail while behind him thousands of Iranian prisoners wait patiently for their freedom. One after another, the boys in the seventh-grade class stood up and recited their admiration for Khomeini. Jalol Mahmoudi was twelve but talked about corruption in the Shah’s regime, Ali Mahmoudi, who at fourteen was head of class, launched into a long speech about the Imam’s kindness to children. ‘I am very pleased with the Ayatollah because in the past regime I was not taught well – now there are three extra classes and we can stay at school longer.’ Master Ali might be expected to receive a firm clout round the back of the head from his colleagues for such schoolboy enthusiasm. But the other children remained silent until asked to speak. And I knew that if I had visited this same village in the aftermath of the 1953 coup against Mossadeq in which ‘Monty’ Woodhouse had played so prominent a part, I would have heard the fathers of these same children talking about the corruption of Mossadeq and the Shah’s kindness to children.

Karim Khalaj was a teacher in his late forties and he said little as we sat in the staff room. He poured cups of tea from a large silver urn and sweetened it by drinking the tea sip by sip and nibbling lumps of sugar at the same time. Outside, we walked across the dusty fields towards the railway line. He was briefly imprisoned in the Shah’s time. He was fired from his job for complaining about a government teacher’s bribery.

The wind was picking up and the trees in the orchard were moving. A far belt of smog moved down the horizon. Somewhere near Kahak, more than a quarter of a century earlier, ‘Monty’ Woodhouse must have buried his guns. Did any of the villagers support the Shah? I asked Khalaj. ‘None,’ he said firmly. ‘At least I never knew any who did.’ Savak never came to the village. It was too small to capture anyone’s attention. So whose picture hung above the blackboard in class seven before the Ayatollah returned to Iran? Mr Khalaj shrugged. ‘They had to put a picture there. Of course, it was the Shah’s.’

CHAPTER FIVE
The Path to War

In March 1917, 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment carefully peeled a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It was a turning point in his life. He had survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 250 kilometres from its capital of Constantinople. He had then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate and enduring the ‘grim battle’ for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens’s attention was Maude’s official ‘Proclamation’ to the people of Baghdad, printed in both English and Arabic.

That same 11 by 18 inch poster – now framed in black and gold – hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this chapter. Long ago, it was stained with damp – ‘foxed’, as booksellers say – which may have been Dickens’s perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times, witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall eighty-six years later, ‘to having travelled in his knapsack for a length of time’. She called it ‘his precious document’ and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy, of the false promises of the world’s greatest empire, commitments and good intentions and words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens’s death. They read now like a funeral dirge:

PROCLAMATION

… Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Hulagu* your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers … and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile … But you, people of Baghdad … are not to understand that it is the wish of the British government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals … It is the hope and desire of the British people … that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth … Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain … so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.

(sd.) F. S. Maude, Lieutenant General,

Commanding the British Forces in Iraq

Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army – which included Arab soldiers – in Mesopotamia. My father Bill was originally in the Cheshire Regiment but was serving in Ireland the year Charles Dickens entered Baghdad, and would be sent to the Western Front in 1918. Dickens had a longer war. He ‘spoke, often & admirably’, his daughter Hilda would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at fifty-five had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion. But Munro’s leadership did not save Dickens’s married sister’s nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers ‘my father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his “nephew”. I don’t know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years.’*

The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than eighty years later, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan sent me an amused letter along with a series of twelve very old postcards which were printed by the Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms, another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him, others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, a building shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by ‘local [Arab] notables’ that ‘we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition’. But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters and ended in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle. The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of UN sanctions that followed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait when spare parts for pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague at the Independent, Patrick Cockburn, found ‘tombstones … still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed … a quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage.’ In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign.

Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets

gaped emptily, the shops were mostly closed … In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia coffins and half mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town (three hundred people were dying of it every day) the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves … There was no longer any life in the town …

The British held out wildly optimistic hopes for a ‘new’ Iraq that would be regenerated by Western enterprise, not unlike America’s own pipedreams of 2003. ‘There is no doubt,’ The Sphere told its readers in 1915, ‘that with the aid of European science and energy it can again become the garden of Asia … and under British rule everything may be hoped.’

The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army, but who ‘always entertained friendly ideas towards the English’, found that in prison in India they were ‘insulted and humiliated in every way’. These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand over Iraq to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz – to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of ‘independence’ for the Arab world if it fought alongside the Allies against the Turks – on the grounds that ‘some of the Holy Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia’.

British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia – the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that – and that ‘clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end’ – which was not how General Maude expressed Britain’s ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917. Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that ‘taking Mesopotamia … means spending millions in irrigation and development …’ Once they were installed in Baghdad, the British decided that Iraq would be governed and reconstructed by a ‘Council’, formed partly of British advisers ‘and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants’. Later, they thought they would like ‘a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives’.

The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became ‘oriental secretary’ to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion. ‘… The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased … they can’t conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it.’ Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude’s proclamation eleven months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told – which, of course, they were not – that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name and which was in fact written by Sir Mark Sykes, the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with François Georges Picot for French and British control over much of the postwar Middle East.

By September of 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain’s plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. ‘I imagine,’ the Times correspondent wrote on 23 September, ‘that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination … from the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration.’

Within six months, Britain was fighting an insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. ‘Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression. What would happen if we withdrew?’ Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to ‘anarchy and confusion’. By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on ‘local political agitation, originated outside Iraq’, suggesting that Syria might be involved. For Syria 1920, read America’s claim that Syria was supporting the insurrection in 2004. Arnold Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq, took a predictable line. ‘We cannot maintain our position … by a policy of conciliation of extremists,’ he wrote. ‘Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money … We must be prepared … to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions.’

There was fighting in the Shiite town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The authorities demanded ‘the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot’ and the leading Shiite divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house. Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a British target. ‘Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out,’ a political officer wrote. The British now realised that they had made one major political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq: the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. Wilson put it all down not to nationalism but ‘anarchy plus fanaticism’. All the precedents were there. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi in 1920, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2004. For Badr in 1920, read Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004. For ‘anarchy and fanaticism’ in 1920, read ‘Saddam remnants’ and al-Qaeda in 2004.

Another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed an officer, Colonel Gerald Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad. The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted ‘heavy punishment’ on the tribe. The location of this battle is today known as Khan Dhari; in 2003 it would be the scene of the first killing of an American occupation soldier by a roadside bomb. In desperation, the British needed ‘to complete the façade of the Arab government’. And so, with Churchill’s enthusiastic support, the British were to give the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Feisal, the son of Sherif Husain, a consolation prize for the man whom the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria. ‘How much longer,’ The Times asked on 7 August 1920, ‘are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?’

The British suffered 450 dead in the Iraqi insurgency and more than 1,500 wounded. In that same summer of 1920, T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – estimated that the British had killed ‘about ten thousand Arabs in this rising. We cannot hope to maintain such an average …’* Henceforth, the British government – deprived of reconstruction funds by an international recession and confronted by an increasingly unwilling soldiery, which had fought during the 1914–18 war and was waiting for demobilisation – would rely on air power to impose its wishes.

The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill’s support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen. So urgent was the government’s need for modern bombers in the Middle East that, rather than freighting aircraft to the region by sea, it set up a ramshackle and highly dangerous transit system in which RAF crews flew their often un-airworthy bombers from Europe; at least eight pilots lost their lives in crashes and 30 per cent of the bombers were lost en route. In Iraq, Churchill urged the use of mustard gas, which had already been employed against Shia rebels in 1920. He wrote to Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, that ‘you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment upon recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them.’

Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, later Marshal of the Royal Air Force and the man who perfected the firestorm destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other great German cities in the Second World War, was employed to refine the bombing of Iraqi insurgents. The RAF found, he wrote much later, ‘that by burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we’d warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt, and they soon stopped their raiding and looting …’ This was what, in its emasculation of the English language, the Pentagon would now call ‘war lite’. But the bombing was not as surgical as Harris’s official biographer would suggest. In 1924, he had admitted that ‘they [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.’

Lawrence remarked in a 1920 letter to the Observer that ‘these risings take a regular course. There is a preliminary Arab success, then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats.’ This same description entirely fits American military operations in Iraq in 2004, once the occupying powers and their puppet government lost control of most of Iraq. But Lawrence had, as a prominent member of the T. E. Lawrence Society put it, a maddening habit of being sardonic or even humorous about serious matters which was one of his less attractive traits. ‘It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions,’ he wrote in the same letter. ‘Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shooting down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly …’

In a less unpleasant mood, however, Lawrence spoke with remarkable common sense about the Iraqi occupation. ‘The Arabs rebelled against the Turks during the war not because the Turk Government was notably bad,’ he wrote in a letter to The Times the same year, ‘but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects … but to win a show of their own. Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom.’

Far more prescient was an article Lawrence published in the Sunday Times in August 1920 in words that might have been directed to British prime minister Tony Blair eighty-four years later:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows … We are today not far from a disaster.

Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers in Iraq that he resigned his post as Senior Air Staff Officer Iraq because he could no longer ‘maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb’. He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen, and after the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Suleimaniya, Charlton ‘knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally.’ It was to be a policy followed with enthusiasm by the United States generations later.

The same false promises of a welcoming populace were made to the British and Americans, the same grand rhetoric about a new and democratic Iraq, the same explosive rebellion among Iraqis – in the very same towns and cities – the identical ‘Council of Ministers’ and the very same collapse of the occupation power, all followed historical precedent. Unable to crush the insurgency, the Americans turned to the use of promiscuous air assault, just as the British did before them: the destruction of homes in ‘dissident’ villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons were allegedly concealed, the slaughter by air strike of ‘terrorists’ near the Syrian border – who turned out to be members of a wedding party. Much the same policy of air bombing was adopted in the already abandoned democracy of post-2001 Afghanistan.

As for the British soldiers of the 1920s, we couldn’t ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East eighty years ago. So we buried them in the North Wall Cemetery in Baghdad where they still lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties, opposite the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy. Among them is the mausoleum of General Maude, who died in Baghdad within eight months of his victory because he chose to drink unboiled milk: a stone sarcophagus with the one word ‘MAUDE’ carved on its lid. When I visited the cemetery to inspect it in the summer of 2004, the Iraqi guarding the graves warned me to spend no more than five minutes at the tomb lest I be kidnapped.

Feisal, third son of the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, was proclaimed constitutional monarch by a ‘Council of Ministers’ in Baghdad on 11 July 1922 and a referendum gave him a laughably impossible 96 per cent of the vote, a statistic that would become wearingly familiar in the Arab world over the next eighty years. As a Sunni Muslim and a monarch from a Gulf tribe, he was neither an Iraqi nor a member of Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority. It was our first betrayal of the Shias of Iraq. There would be two more within the next hundred years. Henceforth, Mesopotamia would be known as Iraq, but its creation brought neither peace nor happiness to its people. An Anglo-Iraqi treaty guaranteeing the special interests of Britain was signed in the face of nationalist opposition; in 1930, a second agreement provided for a twenty-five-year Anglo-Iraqi alliance with RAF bases at Shuaiba and Habbaniya. Iraqi nationalist anger was particularly stirred by Britain’s continued support for a Jewish state in its other mandate of Palestine. Tribal revolts and a 1936 coup d’état created further instability and – after a further coup in 1941 brought the pro-German government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to power – Britain reinvaded Iraq all over again, fighting off Luftwaffe attacks launched from Vichy Syria and Lebanon – and occupying Basra and Baghdad.* British forces paused outside the capital to allow the regent, the Emir Abdullah, to be first to enter Baghdad, a delay that allowed partisans of Rashid Ali to murder at least 150 of the city’s substantial Jewish community and burn and loot thousands of properties. Five of the coup leaders were hanged and many others imprisoned; one of the latter was Khairallah Tulfa, whose four-year-old nephew, Saddam Hussein, would always remember the anti-British nationalism of his uncle. The German plan for a second Arab revolt, this time pro-Axis and supported by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini – whose journey to Berlin will be told later in our story – came to nothing.

But Iraq remained an inherently weak state, young King Feisal the Second having no nationalist credentials – since he was anyway not an Iraqi – and since the government was still led by a group of former Arab Ottoman officials like Nuri es-Said, who contrived to be prime minister fourteen times before his most bloody demise. On 14 July 1958, Iraqi forces under Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qassim stormed the royal palace. Es-Said was shot down after trying to escape Baghdad dressed as a woman. Feisal, the regent and the rest of the royal family were surrounded by soldiers and machine-gunned to death after trying to flee the burning palace. Qassim’s new military regime enraged the United States. Not only did Qassim take Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad pact but he threatened to invade Kuwait. He also failed to quell a mass Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq and was eventually brought down by another coup in February 1963, this one largely organised by the Baath party – but with the active assistance of the CIA. Qassim was taken to the radio station in Baghdad and murdered. His bullet-riddled body was then shown on television, propped up on a chair as a soldier laughingly kicked its legs.

The Baath had been founded in Syria in 1941 – inspired, ironically, by Britain’s re-invasion of Iraq – as a secular, pan-Arab movement intended to lift the burden of guilt and humiliation which had lain across the Arab world for so many generations. During the centuries of Ottoman rule, Arabs had suffered famine and a steady loss of intellectual power. Education had declined over the years and many millions of Arabs never learned to read and write. Baath means ‘rebirth’, and although its Syrian Christian founder, Michel Aflaq, was himself a graduate of the Sorbonne – and wore an outsize fez – it had a natural base among the poor, the villages and tribes and, of course, within the army. Saddam Hussein was an early adherent, and among the first Baathists to try to kill Qassim; his subsequent flight across Iraq, his own extraction of a bullet in his leg with a razor-blade, and his swim to freedom across the Tigris river – at almost exactly the same location where American Special Forces were to find him in 2003 – was to become an official Saddam legend.

Despite splits within the Baath, Saddam Hussein emerged as vice-chairman of the party’s Regional Command Council after a further coup in 1968. He would remain nominally the second most powerful man in Iraq until 16 July 1979, when President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam’s cousin, retired. There followed the infamous dinner party at the presidential palace at which Saddam invited his own party cadres to denounce themselves. The execution of his Baathist colleagues began within days.

As Saddam slowly took control of Iraq, the Kurdish insurrection began again in the north and President Sadat of Egypt, by his journey to Jerusalem in November 1977, took the most populous Arab country out of the Arab – Israeli conflict. The Camp David agreement made this final. So it was that Saddam would preside over what the Iraqis immediately called the ‘Confrontation Front Summit’ in Baghdad. This involved turning the Iraqi capital – however briefly – into the centre of the Arab world, giving Saddam exposure on the eve of his takeover from President al-Bakr. A vast tent was erected behind the summit palace, five hundred journalists were flown into Iraq from around the world – all telephone calls made by them would be free as well as bugged – and housed in hotels many miles from Baghdad, trucked to a ‘press centre’ where they would be forbidden any contact with delegates and watched by posses of young men wearing white socks. We knew they were policemen because each wore a sign on his lapel that said ‘Tourism’.

The latter was supposed to occupy much of our time, and I have an imperishable memory of a long bus journey down to Qurnah, just north of Basra, to view the Garden of Eden. Our bus eventually drew up next to a bridge where a fetid river flowed slowly between treeless banks of grey sand beneath a dun-coloured sky. One of the cops put his left hand on my arm and pointed with the other at this miserable scene, proudly uttering his only touristic announcement of the day: ‘And this, Mr Robert, is the Garden of Eden.’

Before the summit, a lot of Arab leaders were forced to pretend to be friends in the face of ‘the traitor Sadat’. President Assad was persuaded to forget the brutal schism between his country’s Baath party and that of al-Bakr and Saddam. The Syrians announced that Assad and al-Bakr would discuss ‘a common front against the mad Zionist attack against our region and the capitulationist, unilateral reconciliation of the Egyptian regime with Israel’. Once in Baghdad, Assad, who had maintained an entire army division on his eastern border in case Iraq invaded – he already had 33,000 Syrian troops deployed in Lebanon – and al-Bakr talked in ‘an atmosphere of deep understanding’, according to the Syrian government newspaper Tishrin. Unity in diversity. King Hussein of Jordan would have to travel to the city in which the Hashemite monarchy had been exterminated only twenty years earlier. Baath party officials were sent to the overgrown royal cemetery in Baghdad to scythe down the long grass around the graves of the Hashemites in case the king wanted to visit them. Even Abu Nidal, the head of the cruellest of Palestinian hit-squads, was packed off to Tikrit lest his presence in Baghdad offend the PLO leader, Yassir Arafat.

And so they all gathered, old al-Bakr and the young Saddam and Arafat and Hussein and Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Reporters were banned from the conference chamber but photographers were allowed to view these men much in the way that visitors are permitted to see the embalmed body of Lenin. Masquerading as part of Michael Cole’s BBC television crew, I walked into the chamber and shuffled along the rows of princes and presidents who sat in waxworks attitudes of concern and apprehension, past Arafat, who repeatedly and embarrassingly gave a thumbs-up to the cameras, past a frowning King Hussein and a glowering Saddam. I watched the future Iraqi leader carefully, and when his eyes briefly met mine I noted a kind of contempt in them, something supercilious. This was not, I thought, a man who had much faith in conferences.

And he was right. The Saudis made sure that they didn’t anger the United States, and after three days of deliberation the Arab mountain gave forth a mouse. Egypt would be put under an economic boycott – just like Israel – and a committee would be dispatched to Cairo to try to persuade Sadat to renounce Camp David. To sweeten the deal, they were to offer him $7 billion annually for the next ten years to support Egypt’s bankrupt economy. The unenviable task of leading this forlorn delegation to Cairo fell, rather sadly, to Selim el-Hoss, the prime minister of Lebanon whose own war-battered country was then more deeply divided than the Arab world itself. Sadat snubbed them all, refusing to meet the ministers. The money was a bribe, he accurately announced, and ‘all the millions in the world cannot buy the will of Egypt’.

The nature of the Iraqi regime was no secret, nor was its ruthlessness. The British had already become involved in a trade dispute with the government in 1978 after Iraqi agents in London murdered Abdul Razzak al-Nayef, a former Iraqi prime minister who had been condemned to death by the Baghdad authorities. A British businessman, a representative of Wimpey’s, had been languishing for a month in Baghdad’s central prison without any charges, and a British diplomat, Richard Drew, was dragged from his car in the city and beaten up, apparently by plain-clothes police.

But the search for ‘spies’ within the body politic of Iraq had been established eleven years earlier, and to understand the self-hatred which this engendered in the regime – and Saddam’s role in the purges – it is essential to go back to the record of its early days. After I first saw Saddam in Baghdad, I began to build up a file on him back home in Beirut. I went back to the Lebanese newspaper archives; Beirut was under nightly civil war bombardment but its journalists still maintained their files. And there, as so often happened in the grubby newspaper libraries of Lebanon, a chilling pattern began to emerge. At its congress in November 1968, the Baath party, according to the Baghdad newspaper Al-Jumhouriya, had made ‘the liquidation of spy networks’ a national aspiration; and the following month, the newly installed Baath party discovered a ‘conspiracy’ to overthrow its rule. It accused eighty-four people of being involved, including the former prime minister, Dr Abdul Rahman Bazzaz, and his former defence minister, Major General Abdul Aziz Uquili. The charges of spying, a Lebanese newspaper reported at the time, ‘were levelled in the course of statements made in a special Baghdad radio and television programme by two of the accused, an ex-soldier from the southern port of Basra and a lawyer from Baghdad.’ The interview was personally conducted, according to the Beirut press, ‘by Saddam Tikriti, secretary general of the Iraqi leadership of the ruling Baath party’. According to the same newspaper, ‘the interview was introduced by a recording of the part of the speech delivered by President al-Bakr in Baghdad on December 5th [1968] where he said “there shall no longer be a place on Iraqi soil for spies”.’

The slaughter began within six weeks. At dawn on 27 January 1969, fourteen Iraqis, nine of them Jews, were publicly hanged after a three-man court had convicted them of spying for Israel. They claimed that Izra Naji Zilkha, a 51-year-old Jewish merchant from Basra, was the leader of the ‘espionage ring’. Even as the men were hanging in Liberation Square in Baghdad and in Basra, a new trial began in Baghdad involving thirty-five more Iraqis, thirteen of them Jews. Only hours before the January hangings, the Baath – of which the forty-year-old ‘Saddam Tikriti’ was just now, according to the Lebanese press, ‘the real authority’ – organised a demonstration at which thousands of Iraqis were marched to the square to watch the public executions and hear a government statement which announced that the party was ‘determined to fulfil its promise to the people for the elimination of spies’. The Baghdad Observer later carried an interview with the revolutionary court president, Colonel Ali Hadi Witwet, who said that the court reached its verdicts regardless of the defendants’ religion, adding that seven Jews had been acquitted. When the next batch of ‘spies’ were executed on 20 February, all eight condemned men were Muslims. As usual, their conviction had been secret, although the night before their execution Baghdad radio broadcast what it claimed was a recording of the hearing. The condemned men had been accused of collecting information about Iraqi troop deployment. Their leader, Warrant Officer Najat Kazem Khourshid, was one of the eight, although his ‘trial’ was not broadcast. Baghdad radio later told its listeners that ‘the Iraqi people expressed their condemnation of the spies.’

By May 1969, the Baathist failure to suppress the Kurdish rebellion had led to the arrest of a hundred more Iraqis, including twenty-four who had served in the previous regime. One of these was the lord mayor of Baghdad, Midhat al-Haj Sirri, who was accused of leading a CIA intelligence network. Former ministers arrested included Ismail Khairallah, Fouad Rikabi, Rashid Musleh, Siddik Shansal and Shukri Saleh Zaki. The Baath leadership sought the ‘people’s’ opinion. Delegates to a meeting of farmers’ trade unions roared their support when President al-Bakr declared that he was determined to ‘chop off the heads of the traitors’. The lord mayor was duly brought to the Baghdad television studios to ‘confess’ his role as a CIA agent while another defendant, Dr Yussef al-Mimar – an ex-director general of the ministry of agrarian reform – broke down and implicated former senior ministers in the defection of Mounir Rufa, an Iraqi air force pilot who had flown his Mig-21 fighter-bomber to Israel three years earlier.

Al-Mimar also claimed that he was recruited into the CIA by an Iraqi businessman in Beirut in 1964, and ordered by a CIA front company masquerading as investment brokers first to open an investment business in Libya and then to secure an invitation to Baghdad for President Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury, Robert Anderson. How much of this ‘confession’ bore any relation to the truth it is impossible to know. Four Iraqi civilians – Taleb Abdullah al-Saleh, Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, Abdul Jalil Mahawi and Abdul Razzak Dahab – had been hanged the previous month for spying for the CIA. On 15 May 1969, the Baathist regime hanged another ten men after one of them, Abdul Hadi Bachari, had appeared in a television ‘confession’. They were accused of working for both Israel and the United States and included an army sergeant and an air force lieutenant.

In June, for the first time, a convicted ‘spy’ told Iraqi television he had worked for British intelligence. Named as Zaki Abdul Wahab, a legal adviser to the Iraqi businessman in Beirut, he was accused in the Baghdad press of being ‘a British-American agent’. By July, another eighty prominent Iraqis were on trial for espionage. They were merely the prelude to thousands of hangings, almost all for ‘subversion’ and ‘spying’. Eleven years later, when Saddam Hussein was confirmed in power, Iraqi hangmen were dispatching victims to the gallows at the rate of a hundred every six weeks. In 1980, Amnesty International reported the recent executions of 257 people.

In 1979 came Saddam’s own arrest of five of the twenty-one members of his revolutionary command council, accusing all of them of espionage for Syria, whose president had visited Baghdad only two years earlier for those talks of ‘deep understanding’ with al-Bakr. The revolutionary court condemned the five men to death without appeal, and the very next morning, Saddam Hussein and several of his senior advisers went to the central prison and personally executed them. Saddam himself used his service revolver to blow out one of the victims’ brains.

In those early days of the regime, the names of newly executed Iraqis would be read on state television every afternoon at 4 p.m. An old Iraqi friend of mine would recall for me in 2003 how her relatives were imprisoned and how, each afternoon, she would dose herself with morphine before sitting down in front of the television screen. ‘I don’t know how I survived those broadcasts,’ she said. ‘The man who read the names had a thin face and sharp eyes and he read them out in a very harsh way. His name was Mohamed al-Sahhaf.’ This was the same Mohamed al-Sahhaf who, grey-haired and humorous, was minister of information during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, the ‘Comical Ali’ who provoked President George W. Bush to laugh at his claims that US forces had not reached Baghdad when their tanks were crossing the Tigris river. From brutal apparatchik to friendly buffoon in just thirty years. He was later to record his memories for Al-Arabia satellite television – without recalling his days as spokesman for the hangman of Baghdad.

So what lay behind this ferocious passion for executions that Saddam manifested, this controlled cruelty that became part of the regime’s existence?* I once asked this of Mohamed Heikal, as we sat on the lawn of his farm in the Nile Delta, wildly coloured birds cawing from the palm trees and a servant producing chilled beer in delicate mugs of blue glass.

‘I will tell you a story, Robert,’ he began. Heikal’s stories were always brilliant. With Heikal, you had to remain silent throughout. His recollections were a theatrical performance as well as a feat of memory, his hands raised before his face when he wished to express shock, eyebrows arching towards heaven, Havana cigar brandished towards me if he thought I was not paying sufficient attention; they were stories that usually had a sting in the tail.† Heikal knew Saddam Hussein – in fact, he knew almost every Arab leader and was probably treated with greater deference than most of them – but he had no illusions about the Baath party.

‘On my first visit to Baghdad after the takeover of power, I met the minister of planning. He was a very nice, urbane, cultured man whom I immediately liked. When I returned to Iraq some time later, I asked to see him again. But each time I asked a minister where he was, I would be sidestepped. “You must ask the president this question when you meet him,” they would say. Every time I asked to see the minister of planning, it was the same reply. So when I came to see Saddam, I asked him if I could meet the minister of planning again. Saddam just looked at me. Why did I want to see him? he asked me. I said he seemed a very intelligent and decent man. Saddam looked at me very seriously and said: “We scissored his neck!” I was taken aback. Why? I asked. What had he done wrong? Had Saddam any proof of wrongdoing? “We don’t need proof,” Saddam replied. “This isn’t a white revolution in Iraq. This is a red revolution. Suspicion is enough.” I was speechless. Oh yes, and Robert, that blue beer mug you are drinking from – it was given to me personally as a gift by Saddam Hussein. It is Iraqi glass.’ I put down the beer.

I am in Tehran now, in 1997, in a cheap hotel in the centre of the city and, later, at a cosy restaurant that serves jugs of cold drinking yoghurt, and sitting opposite me is Dr Hussain Shahristani, holder of a doctorate in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto and formerly chief scientific adviser to Saddam’s Iraqi Atomic Energy Organisation, a Shia Muslim married to a Canadian with three children. His story is so frightening, so eloquent, so moving and so terrible that it deserves to be told in full, in his own words, without a journalist’s interruptions. The next pages therefore belong to Dr Shahristani:

In 1979, there was a backlash by the regime in Iraq because of activists in the Shia community. By the summer, the regime had started large-scale executions and mass arrests. I voiced my concern about human rights at atomic energy meetings. I knew I was very crucial to their atomic energy programme – I thought that they would not arrest me for voicing my concern. I wanted Saddam to know what I said. I was wrong. A little earlier, the regime had arrested and executed one of my cousins, Ala Shahristani – he was on his honeymoon and had only been married for fourteen days. He was not associated with any party. He was arrested in the street and taken away and his wife and sister were brought to the torture chamber to see him. They had given him a hideous torture. They had filled him with gas through his rectum and then beaten him. They threatened his young wife in front of him and then they banged his head into the wall, so hard that the wall was shaking. Then they killed him.

By this time, Saddam was president and he came to see us and he told us that he was going to redirect us at the Atomic Energy Organisation, that we were going to work on what he called ‘strategic projects’. Until July 1979, we had been involved on purely peaceful applications of atomic energy. I and my colleague, Dr Ziad Jaafar, were Saddam’s two advisers; we were reputable, internationally trained scientists. We were also close friends. I discussed this with him. I said: ‘If Saddam wants military applications, no way am I going to continue with this organisation.’

At that time, we didn’t take it seriously because we knew Iraq had limitations. I assumed I would be just thrown out of the organisation. They came to the Atomic Energy Organisation when I was talking to the board of directors on December 4th 1979. They said: ‘Could we have a word with Dr Hussain?’ As I stepped outside, they put handcuffs on me, shoved me into a car and took me to the security headquarters in Baghdad. At security headquarters, they took me in to the director of security, Dr Fadel Baraq, who was later executed by Saddam. He said that some people who had been arrested and brought to the headquarters had given my name. I denied any involvement in political parties, I said I was a practising Muslim but that I had never taken part in subversive activities.

Then they brought me to a man I knew, Jawad Zoubeidi, a building contractor. He had been so badly tortured, I hardly recognised him. Jawad said: ‘I know Dr Hussain. He comes to the mosque and takes part in our religious activities.’ For them, ‘religious activities’ meant anti-government activities. They said to me: ‘Better tell us all or you’ll regret it.’ Then they took me to the torture chamber in the basement. They blindfolded me and pushed me down the stairs into the chamber. It was a big room. My hands were tied behind my back and I was pulled up into the air by my hands. After five minutes, the pain was so severe in the shoulders that it was unbearable. Then they gave me shocks on sensitive parts of my body. By the end of the beating you are naked. There were shocks on my genitals and other parts of my body.

After fifteen minutes they came to me and said: ‘Sign.’ I was in a very cold sweat. They know you’ll faint. They brought me down and gave me a short rest. I fell asleep for a few minutes. But this went on day and night, day and night. It went on for twenty-two days and nights. Four of them did it, in shifts. Baraq, who had a PhD in military psychology from Moscow, was standing there. At one point, he said: ‘Look, Dr Hussain, I’ll tell you what your problem is – you think you are smart enough and we are stupid. You may be smart in your own field but we know what we are doing. Just tell us what you know and get this over.’

I knew Saddam. He knew me. But this could happen to me. I remember once, Saddam said to me: ‘You are a scientist. I am a politician. I will tell you what politics is about. I make a decision. I tell someone else the opposite. Then I do something which surprises even myself.’

The torture techniques in Baghdad were routine and varied in severity. The electric shocks could be everywhere. But sometimes they would burn people on the genitals and go on burning until they were completely burned off. They did the same with toes. They sometimes beat people with iron on the stomach or the chest. But with me, they were very careful not to leave any sign on me. I saw one man and they had used an iron on his stomach. They used drills and made holes in bones, arms and legs. I saw an officer, Naqib Hamid, and they dissolved his feet in acid. There was another torture where they would put sulphuric acid in a tub. They would take a man and start by dissolving his hands. Once, the founder of the Dawa party,* Abdul Saheb Khail, was totally dissolved. Baraq said to me: ‘Have you heard about Khail – there is where we dissolved him.’

In the final stages of torture, they have a table with an electrical saw. They can saw off a hand or a foot. The majority talk. The people who have refused to talk are exceptional. Adnan Salman, a head of the Dawa, refused to talk. He was brought in – I saw him – and by that time they had a lot of confessions by other men who had been tortured. Adnan Salman was a teacher. Adnan knew – he was prepared. He told them: ‘My name is Adnan Salman. I am in charge of the Dawa party and none of these people are responsible for our activities. These will be my last words to you. You will never extract a single word from me.’ They brought three doctors and told them that if Adnan died under torture they would be executed. He didn’t utter a single word. Sometimes you would hear the doctors, so scared because they could not bring him back from unconsciousness. I was in another torture room and could hear everything. I was in Abu Ghraib prison when I heard Adnan had been executed. He had not died under torture.

One prisoner told me he was seventeen and was the youngest prisoner and so they made him sweep the corridors of the internal security headquarters every morning at seven o’clock. He saw a peasant woman from the south with tattoos, he said, a woman from the marshes with a girl of ten and a boy of about six. She was carrying a baby in her arms. The prisoner told me that as he was sweeping, an officer came and told the woman: ‘Tell me where your husband is – very bad things can happen.’ She said: ‘Look, my husband takes great pride in the honour of his woman. If he knew I was here, he would have turned himself in.’ The officer took out his pistol and held the daughter up by the braids of her hair and put a bullet into her head. The woman didn’t know what was happening. Then he put a bullet into the boy’s head. The woman was going crazy. He took the youngest boy by the legs and smashed the baby’s brain on a wall. You can imagine the woman. The officer told the young prisoner to bring the rubbish trolley and put the three children in it, on top of the garbage, and ordered the woman to sit on the bodies. He took the trolley out and left it. The officer had got into the habit of getting rid of people who were worthless.

I was taken to the revolutionary court. Mussalam al-Jabouri was the judge and there were two generals on each side of him. They asked me my name and if I had anything to say. The charges were that I was a ‘Zionist stooge’, an ‘Israeli spy’ and ‘working with the Americans’ and ‘a collaborator with the Iranians’. They realised I wasn’t a member of the Dawa party. The court handed down a sentence they had decided before I was taken there – life imprisonment. My own defence lawyer called for my execution. He had only a written statement to make: ‘This person has closed the doors of mercy – give him the severest penalty.’ I said to the court: ‘This Iraqi state which you are governing, we established it with our blood. My father was sentenced by the British, as for me I am president of the Palestinian Association in Toronto. A person with this background cannot be an Israeli agent.’ The lawyer said: ‘So you are a Russian spy.’ I said: ‘I have a family tree – from the Prophet Mohamed’s time, peace be upon him.’

I was taken to Abu Ghraib prison and put in a small cell with forty people inside. By the time I left in May, 1980, we were sixty people to a cell. I worked out that there were three death sentences for every prison sentence. So when a thousand people went to Abu Ghraib, that meant there were three thousand executions. That May, they took me to the Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters and now the torture was much worse. In the previous torture centre, they were allowed a 10 per cent death rate. Here they were allowed 100 per cent. The head was Barzan Tikriti, the head of Saddam’s human rights delegation to Geneva. Dr Ziad Jaafar was brought there because he told Saddam that the nuclear programme couldn’t continue without me, without Dr Shahristani. He said that Iraq needed Shahristani the chemist. Saddam took this as a threat. Jaafar was never shown to me. They tortured twenty people to death in front of him. So he agreed to return to work.

Then one day they came and shaved me and showered me, brought me new pyjamas, blindfolded me, put cologne on me, put me in a car and took me to a room in what looked like a palace. There was a bedroom, sitting room, videos, a television … Then one day Barzan Tikriti came with Abdul-Razak al-Hashimi – he was to be Iraqi ambassador to France during the Kuwaiti occupation in 1990. He was a Baathist, a very silly man with a PhD in geology from the United States. He was the vice-president of the Atomic Energy Organisation and he stood by the door like a guard. I just sat there, lying down, both my hands completely paralysed. A man arrived. He said: ‘You don’t know me but we know you well. Saddam was extremely hurt when he heard you had been arrested – he was very angry with the intelligence people. He knows about your scientific achievements. He would like you to go back to your work at the Atomic Energy Organisation.’ I said: ‘I am too weak after what I have been through.’ He said: ‘We need an atomic bomb.’ Barzan Tikriti then said: ‘We need an atomic bomb because this will give us a long arm to reshape the map of the Middle East. We know you are the man to help us with this.’ I told him that all my research was published in papers, that I had done no research on military weapons. ‘I am the wrong person for the task you are looking for,’ I said. He replied: ‘I know what you can do – and any person who is not willing to serve his country is not worthy to be alive.’

I was sure I would be executed. I said: ‘I agree with you that it is a man’s duty to serve his country but what you are asking me to do is not a service to my country.’ He replied: ‘Dr Hussain, so long as we agree that a man must serve his country, the rest is detail. You should rest now because you are very tired.’ After this, I was kept in several palaces over a number of months. They brought my wife to see me, once at a palace that had been the home of Adnan Hamdan, a member of the revolutionary command council who had been executed by Saddam. But they realised I wouldn’t work for them and I was sent back to Abu Ghraib. I spent eight years there. I wasn’t allowed books, newspapers, radio or any contact with any human being.

I knew I was doing the right thing. I never regretted the stand I took. I slept on the concrete floor of my cell, under an army blanket that was full of lice. There was a tap and a bucket for a toilet. I got one plate of food every day, usually stew without meat in it. I suffered from severe back pains from sleeping on the concrete. I made up mathematical puzzles and solved them. I thought about the people who had accepted the regime, who could have fought it when it was weak and did not. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I had done the right thing. I knew that my family would understand the reasons for it. I wished Bernice would take the kids and leave the country. That would have been much easier for me. She said that as long as I was alive, she would never leave the country.

Hussain Shahristani eventually escaped from Abu Ghraib during an American air raid in February 1990 after friends helped him disguise himself as an Iraqi intelligence officer, and he made his way via Suleimaniya to Iran. Bernice remembered a visit to her husband in prison when she could not recognise his face. ‘I could only recognise his clothes,’ she said. ‘But I knew it was him because I saw a tear running down his cheek.’

Just two months after Dr Shahristani’s mind-numbing transfer from Abu Ghraib prison to the palace in 1980, Saddam decided to deny what he had already admitted to Shahristani the previous year: his plan to possess nuclear weapons. I watched this typical Saddam performance, staged on 21 July 1980, in front of hundreds of journalists – myself among them – in the hall of Iraq’s highly undemocratic national assembly. Perhaps the chamber was just too big, because when he entered, the first impression was of a tiny man in an overlarge double-breasted jacket, a rather simple soul with a bright tie and a glossy jacket. He began not with the cheery wave adopted by so many Arab leaders but with a long, slightly stilted salute, like a private soldier desperately ill at ease among generals. But when Saddam spoke, the microphone – deliberately, no doubt – pitched his voice up into Big Brother volume, so that he boomed at us, his sarcasm and his anger coming across with venom rather than passion. You could imagine what it was like to be denounced before the revolutionary command council.

With an autocrat’s indignation that anyone should believe Iraq wanted to build an atom bomb – but with the suggestion that the Arabs were perfectly capable of doing so if they chose – he denied that his country was planning to produce nuclear weapons. He also condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and US military involvement in the Gulf, sneered at the Syrian Baathist leadership, accused British businessmen of bribery and belittled accurate reports of Kurdish unrest in Iraq. ‘We have no programme concerning the manufacture of the atomic bomb,’ he said. ‘We have no such programme for the Israelis to thwart … we want to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes.’

His argument was artful. ‘A few years ago, Zionists in Europe used to spread the news that the Arabs were backward people, that they did not understand technology and were in need of a protector. The Arabs, the Zionists said, could do nothing but ride camels, cry over the ruins of their houses and sleep in tents. Two years ago, the Zionists and their supporters came up with a declaration that Iraq was about to produce the atom bomb. But how could a people who only knew how to ride camels produce an atom bomb?’ Iraq had signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but no one asked if the Israelis were making atom bombs at their nuclear centre at Dimona in the Negev desert. ‘Arab nations are on the threshold of a new age and will succeed in using atomic energy. Millions of Arabs will be able to use this advanced technology.’ Saddam kept using the word ‘binary’ over and over again, as if Iraq had just split the atom.

His statements were laced with references to the ‘Arab nation’, and the ghost of Gamal Abdel Nasser – whose name he invoked on at least three occasions – was clearly intended to visit the proceedings. Regarding his own regime as an example of the purest pan-Arab philosophy, he clearly saw himself as the aspiring leader of the Arab world. But he could not resist, just briefly, hinting at the truth. ‘Whoever wants to be our enemy,’ he shouted at one point, ‘can expect us as an enemy to be totally different in the very near future.’ He had made his point: if the Arabs were able to use advanced nuclear technology in the near future and if Israel’s enemy was going to be ‘totally different’, this could only mean that he was planning to possess nuclear weapons. It was no secret that Iraq’s Osirak reactor was expected to be commissioned in just five months’ time.

Then came Iran. He believed, he said, in the right of the Iranian people to self-determination, but ‘Khomeini has become a murderer in his own country.’ At one point, Saddam began to speak of the 35,000 Iraqi Shiites of Iranian origin whom he had just expelled from Iraq – he did not mention the figure, nor the fact that many of them held Iraqi passports – and he suddenly ended in mid-sentence. ‘We have expelled a few people of Iranian origin or people who do not belong to Iraq,’ he began. ‘But now, if they want to come back …’ And there he suddenly ended his remark. It was an oblique but ominous warning of the punishment Saddam intended to visit upon Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

His press conference went on long into the night and into the early hours of the next morning. He spoke without notes and, although he would not regard the comparison as flattering, he often improvised his speech as he went along in much the same way that President Sadat of Egypt used to do. I noted in my report to The Times next day that ‘when the president smiled – which he did only rarely – he was greeted by bursts of applause from fellow ministers and Baath party officials.’ When several of us were close to Saddam after his speech, he offered his hand to us. In my notes, I recorded that it was ‘soft and damp’.

Two years later, Richard Pim, who had been head of Winston Churchill’s prime ministerial Map Room at Downing Street during the Second World War, used exactly the same words – ‘soft and damp’ – when he described to me his experience of shaking hands in Moscow with Josef Stalin, upon whom Saddam consciously modelled himself. It was one of Stalin’s biographers who noted in 2004 that in the 1970s Saddam had dutifully visited all of Stalin’s fifteen scenic seaside villas on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia, some of them Tsarist palaces; these were presumably the inspiration for the vast imperial – and largely useless – palaces which Saddam built for himself all over Iraq.*

For the West, however, Saddam was a new Shah in the making. That, I suspected, was what his press conference was all about. He would be a Shah for us and a Nasser for the Arabs. His personality cult was already being constructed. He was a new version of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, it was said in Baghdad – he would soon become a far more disturbing version of an ancient Arab warrior – and his face now appeared across the country, in Kurdish dress, in Arab kuffiah, in business suit, digging trenches in guerrilla uniform, revolver tucked Arafat-style into his trouser belt, on dinar banknotes. He was, a local poet grovellingly wrote, ‘the perfume of Iraq, its dates, its estuary of the two rivers, its coast and waters, its sword, its shield, the eagle whose grandeur dazzles the heavens. Since there was an Iraq, you were its awaited and promised one.’

Saddam had already developed the habit of casually calling on Iraqis in their homes to ask if they were happy – they always were, of course – and my colleague Tony Clifton of Newsweek was himself a witness to this kind of Saddamite aberration. During an interview with the president, Clifton rashly asked if Saddam was never worried about being assassinated. ‘The interpreter went ashen-grey with fear and there was a long silence,’ Clifton was to recall. ‘I think Saddam knew some English and understood the question. Then the interpreter said something to him and Saddam roared with laughter and clapped me on the shoulder. He didn’t stop laughing, but he said to me: “Leave this room now! Go out onto the street! Go and ask anyone in Iraq: Do you love Saddam?” And he went on laughing. And all the people in the room burst out laughing. Of course, you couldn’t really do that, could you? You couldn’t go up to Iraqis and ask them that. They were going to tell you that they loved him.’*

Saddam had inherited the same tribal and religious matrix as the British when they occupied Iraq in 1917. The largest community, the Shia, were largely excluded from power but constituted a permanent threat to the Sunni-dominated Baath party. Not only were their magnificent golden shrines at Najaf and Kerbala potent symbols of the great division in Islamic society, but they represented a far larger majority in Iran. Just so long as the Shah ruled Iraq’s eastern neighbour, its religious power could be checked. But if the Shah was deposed, then the Baathists would be the first to understand the threat which the Shia of both countries represented.

Shiites have disputed the leadership of Islam since the eighth-century murder of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed, at Najaf and believe that Ali’s descendants, the Imams, are the lawful successors of Mohamed. Their fascination with martyrdom and death would, if made manifest in modern war, create a threat for any enemy. The Sunnis, adherents of the sunnah (practice) of Mohamed, became commercially powerful from their close association with the Mamelukes and the Ottoman Turks. In many ways, Sunni power came to be founded on Shia poverty; in Iraq, Saddam was going to make sure that this remained the case. This disparity, however, would always be exacerbated – as it was in the largely Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia – by an extraordinary geographic coincidence: almost all the oil of the Middle East lies beneath lands where Shia Muslims live. In southern Iraq, in the north-east of Saudi Arabia and, of course, in Iran, Shiites predominate among the population.

Saddam tolerated the Shah once he withdrew his support for the Kurdish insurgency in the north – the Kurds, like the Shia, were regularly betrayed by both the West and Iraq’s neighbours – and agreed that the Iraqi-Iranian frontier should run down the centre of the Shatt al-Arab river. He had been prepared to allow Ayatollah Khomeini to remain in residence in Najaf where he had moved after his expulsion from Iran. The prelate was forbidden from undertaking any political activity, a prohibition that Khomeini predictably ignored. He gave his followers cassettes on which he expressed his revulsion for the Shah, his determination to lead an Islamic revolution and his support for the Palestinian cause. One of his closest supporters in Najaf was Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi – later to be the Iranian ambassador to Syria who sent Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon in 1982 – who was imprisoned three times by the Iraqi authorities.* Khomeini’s theological ambassador was Ayatollah Sayed Mohamed Bakr Sadr, one of the most influential and intellectual of the Shia clergy in Najaf, who had written a number of highly respected works on Islamic economy and education.

But he also advocated an Islamic revolution in Iraq, relying – like Hussain Shahristani – on his own political importance to protect him from destruction. Once Khomeini was expelled by Saddam – to Turkey and ultimately to Paris – Bakr Sadr was in mortal danger. With an Islamic revolution under way in Iran, Saddam would have no qualms about silencing Khomeini’s right-hand man in Najaf, let alone his followers. They were to suffer first. Bakr Sadr, sick at his home, was arrested and imprisoned in Baghdad – only to be released after widespread demonstrations against the regime in Najaf. The Baath then announced the existence of the armed opposition Dawa party and pounced on Bakr Sadr’s supporters. The Iranians were later to list the first martyrs of ‘the Islamic Revolution of Iraq’ as Hojatolislam Sheikh Aref Basari, Hojatolislam Sayed Azizeddin Ghapanchi, Hojatolislam Sayed Emaddedin Tabatabai Tabrizi, Professor Hussain Jaloukhan and Professor Nouri Towmeh. The Baath decided to crush the influence of the Shia theological schools in Najaf by introducing new laws forcing all teachers to join the party. Bakr Sadr then announced that the mere joining of the Baath was ‘prohibited by Islamic laws’. This determined his fate – although it was a fate that Saddam was at first unwilling to reveal.

For months, reports of Bakr Sadr’s execution circulated abroad – Amnesty International recorded them – but there was no confirmation from the regime. Only when I asked to visit Najaf in 1980 did a Baath party official tell the truth, albeit in the usual ruthless Baathist manner. It was a blindingly hot day – 23 July – when I arrived at the office of the portly Baathist governor of Najaf, Misban Khadi, a senior party member and personal confidant of Saddam. Just before lunchtime on this lunchless Ramadan day, as the thermometer touched 130 degrees, the admission came. Had Ayatollah Bakr Sadr been executed? I asked.

‘I do not know an Ayatollah Bakr Sadr,’ Khadi said. ‘But I do know a Mohamed Bakr Sadr. He was executed because he was a traitor and plotted against Iraq and maintained relations with Khomeini. He was a member of the Dawa party. He was a criminal and a spy and had a relationship with not just Khomeini but with the CIA as well. The authorities gave his body back to his relatives – for burial in Wadi Salam. The family have not been harmed. They are still in Najaf.’

I remember how, as Khadi spoke, the air conditioner hissed on one side of the room. He spoke softly and I leaned towards him to hear his words. This was enough to send a tingle down the spine of any listener. Khomeini’s lack of respect for his former protectors now smouldered at the heart of the Baathist regime that once did so much to help him. ‘Khomeini speaks about crowds of people flocking to see Bakr Sadr in his absence,’ Khadi said softly. ‘But in court that man admitted that he spied. He was hanged just over five months ago. But these are small things to ask me about. We execute anybody who is a traitor in Iraq. Why do reporters ask unimportant questions like this? Why don’t you ask me about the development projects in Najaf?’

This was a bleak, dismissive epitaph for the man who accompanied Khomeini into fourteen years of exile. Wadi Salam – the Valley of Peace – is the cemetery where so many millions of Shiites wish to be buried, within a few hundred metres of the golden shrine of the Imam Ali. The family were permitted to give him a traditional Muslim funeral and he now lay in a narrow tomb amid the hundreds of thousands of tightly packed, hump-shaped graves whose swaddled occupants believe that their proximity to Ali’s last resting place will secure the personal intercession of the long-dead holy warrior on the day of resurrection. But there was another grave beside that of Bakr Sadr, and it was a more junior Baath party official who took some delight in expanding the governor’s brutal story.

‘We hanged his sister, too,’ he said. ‘They were both dressed in white shrouds for their hanging. Bint Huda was hanged around the same time. I didn’t see the actual hanging but I saw Bakr Sadr hanging outside the Abu Ghraib prison afterwards. They hanged him in public. He was in religious robes but with a white cloth over him and he was not wearing his turban. Later they took him down and put him in a wooden box and tied it to the roof of a car. Then he was taken back to Najaf. Why do you ask about him? He was a bad man.’

The history of the Baath party in Iraq might be written in the blood of ulemas and their families and the demise of the Shia clergy was to become a fearful theme over the coming years. Already, Imam Moussa Sadr, the leader of the Shia community in Lebanon and a relative of Bakr Sadr, had disappeared while on a visit to Libya in August of 1978. A tall, bearded man who was born in Qom and who looked younger than his fifty years, Moussa Sadr had been invited to Libya to observe the ninth anniversary celebrations of Colonel Ghadafi’s revolution. All he would talk of in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, one Lebanese newspaper reported, was the situation in Iran. Had the Shah’s Savak secret police seized Moussa Sadr? Had Ghadafi ‘disappeared’ him for Saddam? He was supposed to have boarded Alitalia Flight 881 to Rome on 31 August, on his way back to Beirut. His baggage turned up on the carousel at Fiumicino airport – but neither Moussa Sadr nor the Lebanese journalist travelling with him were on the plane. Many Shiites in Lebanon still believe that their Imam will return. Others are today trying to bring criminal charges against Ghadafi. Moussa Sadr, who founded the Amal – Hope – movement in Lebanon, was never seen again.

In Najaf, the Shiites were cowed. No one openly mentioned Bakr Sadr’s name in the ancient dusty city with its glorious mosque, built around the solid silver casket of the Prophet’s son-in-law, who was also his cousin. One stall-holder shrugged his shoulders at me with exaggerated ignorance when I mentioned Bakr Sadr. The banners in the streets of Najaf that boiling July all praised Saddam’s generosity – each slogan had been personally devised by local shopkeepers, an information ministry functionary insisted – and in one road there hung a small red flag bearing the words: ‘May the regime of Khomeini, the liar and traitor, fall to pieces.’

The elderly Grand Ayatollah Abulqassem al-Khoi, the rightful heir to the Shiite leadership in Najaf but a man who believed that the people should render unto God the things that are God’s and unto Saddam the things that are recognisably Baathist, had lacked the necessary influence to smother the unrest – just as he would fail to control the mobs during the southern Iraqi uprising in 1991. There were to be no interviews with the old man. But the governor was quite prepared to take me to the house in which Khomeini had once lived. A single-storey terraced building with walls of flaking blue paint, it stood in a laneway suitably named Sharia al-Rasoul – the Street of the Prophet – in the southern suburbs of Najaf.

They tell you that the house has a varnished wooden front door and this is true; but the midday heat was so harsh that it sucked all colour from the landscape. The heat smothered us in the shade and ambushed us in fiery gusts from unsuspecting alleyways until all I could see was a monochrome of streets and shuttered houses, the fragile negative of a city dedicated to the linked identities of worship and death. Ayatollah Khomeini must have loved it here.

But the city was changing. The roads had been resurfaced, a construction project had erased one of Khomeini’s old ‘safe’ houses from the face of the earth, and Iraq’s government was doing its best to ensure that the Shia now lacked nothing in this most holy of cities; new factories were being built to the north, more than a hundred new schools – complete with Baath party teachers – had been completed, together with a network of health centres, hotels and apartment blocks. The city’s beaming governor drove me through the drained and sweltering streets in his white Mercedes, pointing his pudgy finger towards the bazaar.

‘I know everyone here,’ Misban Khadi said. ‘I love these people and they always express their true feelings to me.’ Behind us, a trail of police escort cars purred through the heat. Khadi, though a Shiite, did not come from Najaf but from the neighouring province of Diyala. He came to the Imam Ali mosque every day, he claimed, and gestured towards a banner erected over the mosaics of the shrine. It was from a recent speech by Saddam. ‘We are doubly happy at the presence here of our great father Ali,’ it said. ‘Because he is one of the Muslim leaders, because he is the son-in-law of the Prophet – and because he is an Arab.’

Baathist officials made this point repeatedly. All the Iraqis of Iranian origin had already been expelled from Najaf – ‘if only you had telephoned me yesterday,’ Khadi said irritatingly, ‘I could have given you the figures’ – and the message that Shia Islam is a product of the Arab rather than the Persian world constantly reiterated. Had not Saddam personally donated a set of gold-encrusted gates to the Najaf shrine, each costing no less than $100,000? The governor stalked into the bazaar across the road. Because it was Ramadan, the shutters were down, so hot they burned your skin if you touched them. But a perfume stall was still open and Khadi placed his mighty frame on a vulnerable bench while the talkative salesman poured his over-scented warm oils into glass vials.

‘Ask him if he enjoys living in Najaf,’ the governor barked, but when I asked the salesman instead if he remembered Khomeini, his eyes flickered across the faces of the nearest officials. ‘We all remember Khomeini,’ he said carefully. ‘He was here for fourteen years. Every day, he went to pray at the mosque and all the people of Najaf crowded round him, thousands of them, to protect him – we thought the Shah would send his Savak police to kill him so we stood round Khomeini at the shrine.’ There was a moment’s silence as the perfume seller’s critical faculties – or lack of them – were assessed by his little audience.

‘But here’s a little boy who would like to tell you his view of Khomeini,’ said the governor, and an urchin in a grubby yellow abaya shrieked ‘Khomeini is a traitor’ with a vacant smile. All the officials acclaimed this statement as the true feelings of the people of Najaf. Khadi had never met Khomeini but confidently asserted that the Imam had been a CIA agent, that even Grand Ayatollah Abolqassem al-Khoi of Najaf had sent a telegram to Qom, blaming Khomeini for killing the Muslim Kurds of northern Iran. Al-Khoi may have done that – his fellow teacher, Ayatollah Sahib al-Hakim, had been executed by the regime – but this did not spare his family. In 1994, just two years after al-Khoi’s death, his courageous 36-year-old son Taghi was killed when his car mysteriously crashed into an unlit articulated lorry on the highway outside Kerbala. He had been a constant critic of Saddam’s persecution of the Shia and told friends in London the previous year that he was likely to die at Saddam’s hands. At the demand of the authorities, his burial – and that of his six-year-old nephew who died with him – went without the usual rituals.

Four years later, Ayatollah Sheikh Murtada al-Burujirdi, one of Najaf’s most prominent scholars and jurists, a student of the elder al-Khoi and another Iranian-born cleric, was assassinated as he walked home after evening prayers at the shrine of Ali. He had been beaten up the previous year and had escaped another murder attempt when a hand grenade was thrown at him. Al-Burujirdi had refused government demands that he no longer lead prayers at the shrine. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the principal marja al-taqlid – in literal Arabic, ‘source of emulation’ – was still under house arrest and the Baathists were promoting the more pliable Sayed Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, cousin of the executed Sadiq. But Sadiq al-Sadr himself was assassinated by gunmen in Najaf nine months later after he had issued a fatwa calling on Shiites to attend their Friday prayers despite the government’s objection to large crowds. Al-Khoi’s son Youssef – Taghi’s brother – blamed the Baathists, and rioting broke out in the Shia slums of Saddam City in Baghdad. But the history of Shia resistance did not end with the fall of Saddam. It was Sadiq al-Sadr’s son Muqtada who would lead an insurrection against America’s occupation of Iraq five years later, in 2004, bringing US tanks onto the same Najaf streets through which Saddam’s armour had once moved and provoking gun battles across Sadr City, the former Saddam City whose population had renamed it after the executed Bakr Sadr.

These were just the most prominent of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who would be murdered during Saddam’s twenty-four-year rule. Kurds and communists and Shia Muslims would feel the harshest of the regime’s punishments. My Iraqi files from the late Seventies and early Eighties are filled with ill-printed circulars from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, from Iraqi trade unions and tiny opposition groups, naming thousands of executed men and women. As I thumb through them now, I come across the PUK’s magazine The Spark, an issue dated October 1977, complaining that its partisans have been jointly surrounded by forces of Baathist Iraq and the Shah’s Iran in the northern Iraqi village of Halabja, detailing the vast numbers of villages from which the Kurdish inhabitants had been deported, and the execution, assassination or torturing to death of 400 PUK members. Another PUK leaflet, dated 10 December 1977, reports the deportation of 300,000 Kurds to the south of Iraq. Yet another dreadful list, from a communist group, contains the names of 37 Iraqi workers executed or ‘disappeared’ in 1982 and 1983. Omer Kadir, worker in the tobacco factory at Suleimaniya – ‘tortured to death’; Ali Hussein, oil worker from Kirkuk -‘executed’; Majeed Sherhan, peasant from Hilla – ‘executed’; Saddam Muher, civil servant from Basra – ‘executed’… The dead include blacksmiths, builders, printers, post office workers, electricians and factory hands. No one was safe.

This permanent state of mass killing across Iraq was no secret in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the West was either silent or half-hearted in its condemnation. Saddam’s visit to France in 1975 and his public welcome by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, who bestowed upon the Iraqi leader ‘my esteem, my consideration, and my affection’, was merely the most flagrant example of our shameful relationship with the Iraqi regime. Within three years, agents at the Iraqi embassy in Paris would be fighting a gun battle with French police after their diplomats had been taken hostage by two Arab gunmen. A French police inspector was killed and another policeman wounded; the three Iraqi agents claimed diplomatic immunity and were allowed to fly to Baghdad on 2 August 1978, just two days after the killing. US export credits and chemicals and helicopters, French jets and German gas and British military hardware poured into Iraq for fifteen years. Iraq was already using gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers when Donald Rumsfeld made his notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad to shake Saddam’s hand and ask him for permission to reopen the US embassy. The first – and last – time I called on the consulate there, not long after Rumsfeld’s visit, one of its young CIA spooks brightly assured me that he wasn’t worried about car bombs because ‘we have complete faith in Iraqi security’.

Iraq’s vast literacy, public health, construction and communications projects were held up as proof that the Baathist government was essentially benign, or at least worthy of some respect. Again, my files contain many Western press articles that concentrate almost exclusively on Iraq’s social projects. In 1980, for example, a long report in the Middle East business magazine 8 Days, written with surely unconscious irony, begins: ‘Iraqis who fail to attend reading classes can be fined or sent to prison where literary classes are also compulsory. Such measures may seem harsh, but as Iraq enters its second year of a government drive to eliminate illiteracy, its results have won United Nations acclaim.’

In 1977, the now defunct Dublin Sunday Press ran an interview with former Irish minister for finance Charles Haughey in which the country’s human rights abuses simply went unrecorded. It was not difficult to see why. ‘An enormous potential market for Irish produce,’ it began, ‘including lamb, beef, dairy products and construction industry requirements was open in Iraq … Charles Haughey told me on his return from a week-long visit to that country.’ Haughey and his wife Maureen, it transpired, had been ‘the guest of the 9-year-old socialist Iraqi government’ so that he could inform himself ‘of the political and economic situation there and to help to promote better contact and better relations between Ireland and Iraq at political level’. Haughey, who had met ‘the Director General of the Ministry of Planning, Saddam Hussein’, added that ‘the principal political aspect of modern Iraq is the total determination of its leaders to use the wealth derived from their oil resources for the benefit of their people …’ The Baath party, the article helpfully informed its readers, ‘came to power in July 1968 without the shedding of one drop of blood’.

The British understood the Iraqi regime all too well. In 1980, gunmen from the ‘Political Organisation of the Arab People in Arabistan’ – the small south-western corner of Iran with a predominantly Arab population, which is called Khuzestan – had taken over the Iranian embassy in London; the siege ended when SAS men entered the building, capturing one of the men but killing another four and executing a fifth in cold blood before fire consumed the building.* Less than three months later, however, on 19 July 1980, I was astonished to be telephoned at my Baghdad hotel and invited by the Iraqi authorities to attend a press conference held by the very same Arab group which had invaded the embassy. Nasser Ahmed Nasser, a 31-year-old economics graduate from Tehran University, accused the British of ‘conspiring’ with Iran against the country’s Arabs and demanded the return to Iraq of the bodies of the five dead gunmen.

Nasser, a mustachioed man with dark glasses, a black shirt and carefully creased lounge trousers, spoke slowly and with obvious forethought when he outlined his group’s reaction to the killings. ‘We will take our vengeance,’ he said, ‘because now our second enemy is England.’ He claimed that he had been sentenced to death in absentia in Iran. But his arrival for the conference in the heavily upholstered interior of the Iraqi information ministry made it clear that the Baghdad government fully supported his cause and must have been behind the seizure of the embassy in London. A senior official of the ministry acted as interpreter thoughout Nasser’s resentful peroration against Britain and Iran.

The Arabs of Khuzestan had been seeking autonomy from Khomeini’s regime, and many Arab insurgents in the province had been executed or imprisoned, Nasser said. It was to demand the release of the jailed men that the gunmen had attacked the embassy in London. Nasser agreed that there was a ‘link’ between the insurgents and the Iraqi Baath party and we should have questioned him about this. ‘Iraq’s Arab Socialist Baath Party’s motto – one unified Arab nation – is a glorious motto and we are Arabs,’ he said. ‘We follow this motto.’ What did this mean? On reflection, we should have grasped its import: Saddam was preparing a little Sudetenland, another Danzig, a piece of Iran that he might justifiably wish to liberate in the near future.

But of course, we asked about the siege in London rather than the implications of Iraq’s support for the rebels. ‘When we went to the embassy in London, our aim was not to kill,’ Nasser said. ‘We were not terrorists. We selected the British government as our negotiator because Britain is a democratic country and we wanted to benefit from this democracy. The British knew – all the world knew – that we did not intend to kill anyone … But for six days, they did not answer our requests or publicise our demands. They cut off the telex and the telephone … They did not have to kill our youths – they could have taken them prisoner and put them on trial.’ Nasser blamed Sadeq Khalkhali, the Iranian judge, for the torture of Arabs in Khuzestan – ‘he employs torturers who break the legs and shoot the arms of prisoners before knifing them’ – and claimed that Arabs in the province had first accepted the Iranian revolution because ‘it came in the name of Islam’ but that they now wanted autonomy ‘just like the Kurds, Baluchis and Turks’. When we asked how the Arabs in the Iranian embassy had brought their weapons into Britain, Nasser replied: ‘How did the Palestinians get guns into Munich? How do Irish revolutionaries bring guns to Britain? We are able to do the same.’ Again, no one thought to ask if the guns reached Britain in the Iraqi diplomatic bag. Nasser himself came from the Iranian port of Khorramshahr, for which he used the Arab name ‘Al-Mohammorah’. So was al-Mohammorah going to be Danzig?

Britain, however, made no protest to Iraq over the siege – or over the extraordinary press conference so obviously arranged by the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It was an eloquent silence. Of course, there were those who questioned Britain’s cosy relationship with Iraq. There was an interesting exchange in the House of Lords in 1989 – a year after the end of the eight-year Iran – Iraq war and shortly after the arrest in Baghdad of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft and his friend, the British nurse Daphne Parish – when Lord Hylton asked how the British government ‘justify their action in guaranteeing new credits to Iraq of up to £250 million in view of that country’s detention of British subjects without trial, refusal to release prisoners of war following the ceasefire with Iran and its internal human rights record’. For the government, Lord Trefgarne replied that ‘the Iraqi Government are in no doubt of our concerns over the British detainee, Mrs Parish, and over Iraq’s human rights record … we are a major trading nation. I am afraid that we have to do business with a number of countries with whose policies we very often disagree … we do not sell arms to Iraq.’ Hylton’s response – that ‘while I appreciate that this country is a trading nation … is not the price that we are paying too high?’ – passed without further comment.

Bazoft, who was Iranian-born and held British identity papers but not citizenship, had visited the Iraqi town of Hilla in Parish’s car in a hunt for evidence that Iraq was producing chemical weapons. He was arrested as he tried to leave Baghdad airport, accused of spying and put on trial for his life, along with Parish. A month later, Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave was noting privately of Iraq that ‘I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly, nor can I think of any major market where the importance of diplomacy is so great on our commercial position. We must not allow it to go to the French, Germans, Japanese, Koreans, etcetera.’ He added that ‘a few more Bazofts or another bout of internal repression would make it more difficult’. Waldegrave’s words were written only months after Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds of Halabja. Geoffrey Howe, the deputy prime minister, decided to relax controls on the sale of arms to Iraq – but kept it secret because ‘it would look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.’

Bazoft was sentenced to death on 10 March 1990. The Observer attacked Saddam over the conviction – not, perhaps, a wise decision in the circumstances – and British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd offered to fly to Baghdad to meet the Iraqi president. Saddam, according to the Iraqi foreign ministry, ‘could not intervene while under political pressure’. But by then, a grim routine had begun, one of which my own research back in Beirut had made me painfully aware. Back in 1968, convicted Iraqi ‘spies’ would confess their guilt on television. Then they would be executed. In 1969, the lord mayor of Baghdad had confessed – on television – to ‘spying’ and he had been executed. And Bazoft had appeared on television, and confessed to spying – only later did his friends discover that he had been tortured with electricity during interrogation. In February 1969, before the execution of seven ‘spies’, Baghdad radio had announced that the Iraqi people ‘expressed their condemnation of the spies’ – they were then put to death. In May 1969, the farmers’ trade union delegates had applauded President al-Bakr’s decision to ‘chop off’ the heads of a CIA ‘spy ring’. They were duly hanged. Now, on one of his interminable visits to Iraqi minority groups, Saddam asked in front of a large group of Kurds if they believed that the ‘British spy’ should hang. Of course, they chorused that he should. It was the same old Baathist technique; get the people to make the decision – once they knew what it should be – and then obey the people’s will.

On the morning of 16 March 1990, Robin Kealy, a British diplomat in Baghdad, was informed that Bazoft was to be executed that day. He arrived at the Abu Ghraib prison to find the young man still unaware of his fate, still planning a personal appeal for his life to Saddam. It was Kealy’s mournful duty to tell Bazoft the truth. Kealy declined an invitation to be present at the hanging. Eight days later, four Heathrow luggage handlers heaved his coffin off a regular Iraqi Airways flight to London. No Foreign Office representative, relative or friend attended at the airport. The coffin was taken to a cargo shed to await burial. His friend Daphne ‘Dee’ Parish was given fifteen years. Bazoft’s last words to Kealy were: ‘Tell Dee I’m sorry.’

Throughout the early years of Saddam’s rule, there were journalists who told the truth about his regime while governments – for financial, trade and economic reasons – preferred to remain largely silent. Yet those of us who opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 were quickly accused of being Saddam’s ‘spokesmen’ or, in my case, ‘supporting the maintenance of the Baathist regime’ – this from, of all people, Richard Perle, one of the prime instigators of the whole disastrous war, whose friend Donald Rumsfeld was befriending Saddam in 1983. Two years after Rumsfeld’s initial approach to the Iraqi leader – followed up within months by a meeting with Tariq Aziz – I was reporting on Saddam’s gang-rape and torture in Iraqi prisons. On 31 July 1985, Wahbi Al-Qaraghuli, the Iraqi ambassador in London, complained to William Rees-Mogg, the Times editor, that:

Robert Fisk’s extremely one-sided article ignores the tremendous advances made by Iraq in the fields of social welfare, education, agricultural development, urban improvement and women’s suffrage; and he claims, without presenting any evidence to support such an accusation, that ‘Saddam himself imposes a truly terroristic regime on his own people.’ Especially outrageous is the statement that: ‘Suspected critics of the regime have been imprisoned at Abu Ghoraib [sic] jail and forced to watch their wives being gang-raped by Saddam’s security men. Some prisoners have had to witness their children being tortured in front of them.’ It is utterly reprehensible that some journalists are quite prepared, without any supporting corroboration, to repeat wild, unfounded allegations about countries such as Iraq …

‘Extremely one-sided’, ‘without presenting any evidence’, ‘outrageous’, ‘utterly reprehensible’, ‘wild, unfounded allegations’: these were the very same expressions used by the Americans and the British almost twenty years later about reports by myself or my colleagues which catalogued the illegal invasion of Iraq and its disastrous consequences. In February 1986, I was refused a visa to Baghdad on the grounds that ‘another visit by Mr Fisk to Iraq would lend undue credibility to his reports’. Indeed it would.*

So for all these years – until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – we in the West tolerated Saddam’s cruelty, his oppression and torture, his war crimes and mass murder. After all, we helped to create him. The CIA gave the locations of communist cadres to the first Baathist government, information that was used to arrest, torture and execute hundreds of Iraqi men. And the closer Saddam came to war with Iran, the greater his fear of his own Shia population, the more we helped him. In the pageant of hate figures that Western governments and journalists have helped to stage in the Middle East – peopled by Nasser, Ghadafi, Abu Nidal and, at one point, Yassir Arafat – Ayatollah Khomeini was our bogeyman of the early 1980s, the troublesome priest who wanted to Islamicise the world, whose stated intention was to spread his revolution. Saddam, far from being a dictator, thus became – on the Associated Press news wires, for example – a ‘strongman’. He was our bastion – and the Arab world’s bastion – against Islamic ‘extremism’. Even after the Israelis bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, our support for Saddam did not waver. Nor did we respond to Saddam’s clear intention of driving his country to war with Iran. The signs of an impending conflict were everywhere. Even Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, was helping stoke opposition to Khomeini from Iraq, as I discovered when I visited him in his wealthy – but dangerous – Paris exile in August 1980.

It had been the bright idea of Charles Douglas-Home, the foreign editor of The Times, to chase the remains of the Shah’s old regime. ‘I’m sure Bakhtiar’s up to something,’ Charlie said over the phone. ‘Besides, he knows a lot – and his daughter is stunningly beautiful!’ He was right on both counts, although Bakhtiar – so Francophile that he had joined the French army in the Second World War – looked more impressive in his photographs than he did in person. Newspaper pictures portrayed him as a robust man with full, expressive features, his eyes alight for the return of Iranian democracy. In reality, he was a small, thin man, his cheeks somewhat shrunken, his clothes slightly too large for him, a diminutive figure sitting on a huge sofa with seven heavily armed gendarmes outside to protect him.

Even in his Paris apartment, with the noise of the city’s traffic murmuring away outside and the poplar trees swaying in the breeze beyond the sitting-room window, you could feel the presence of the Iranian assassination squads that Tehran had ordered to kill Bakhtiar. When they had called less than two weeks earlier under the command of a 29-year-old Lebanese Islamist called Anis Naccache, they left behind a dead woman neighbour, a murdered French policeman and a bullet-smashed door handle, a souvenir of bright, jagged steel that lay beside the little table next to Bakhtiar’s feet.

This had not served to dampen Bakhtiar’s publicly expressed hatred of Khomeini or his theocratic regime. He admitted to me, uneasily and only after an hour, that he had twice visited Iraq to talk to officials of the Baath party – an institution that could hardly be said to practise the kind of liberal democracy Bakhtiar was advocating – and had broadcast over the clandestine radio that the Iraqis operated on their frontier with Iran, beaming in propaganda against the regime. ‘Why shouldn’t I go to Iraq?’ he asked. ‘I have been in Britain twice, I have been to Switzerland and Belgium. So I can go to Iraq. I contacted people there. I was invited to deal with the authorities there. I have a common point with the Iraqi government. They, like other Muslim countries, are against Khomeini by a large majority. It is possible to work together. This radio that is on the border with Iran is broadcasting what the Iranian people like to listen to. It has broadcast my statements on cassette. That is the only possible way when a dictatorship is established somewhere.’

Bakhtiar, like many Western statesmen, suffered from a Churchill complex, a desire to dress himself up in the shadow of history. ‘When Khomeini arrived in Iran, I said we had escaped from one dictatorship [the Shah’s] but had entered an even more awful one. Nobody believed me. Now, they have plenty to complain about but they do not have the courage to say it. So why do people talk about a coup d’état? I know that I have people on my side in the army … I remember when I was a student in Paris, there was an English leader by the name of Winston Churchill who saw the dangers of dictatorship. Other people were very relaxed about it all and wanted to do deals with Hitler. But Churchill told them they were on the point of extinction. In the same way I knew that Mr Khomeini could not do anything for Iran: he is a man who does not understand geography, history or the economy. He cannot be the leader of all those people in the twentieth century, because he is ignorant about the world.’

The Shah had died in a Cairo hospital six days before my interview with Bakhtiar, although he seemed quite unmoved at his former king’s departure. ‘The death of a person does not give me happiness. I am not the sort of man who dances in the streets because someone is dead and I am alive – I did not even do that when Hitler died. And God knows, I am an anti-fascist as you know yourself. The king was a sick man, a very sick man – and I think that even for him, death was a deliverance, morally and physically.’ What Bakhtiar wanted was a provisional government ‘which would go to Iran and which, under the 1906 constitution, would call for a constituent assembly, calmly and without emotion, and would study the different constitutions for Iran’.

Bakhtiar was already painfully out of touch with Iran, unaware that Khomeini’s revolution was irreversible, partly because it dealt so mercilessly with its enemies – who included Bakhtiar himself. Naccache and his Iranian hit squad had bungled the first attempt to kill him.* Just over eleven years later, on 9 August 1991, more killers arrived at Bakhtiar’s home. This time they cut his head off. Accused of helping the murderers, an Iranian businessman told the Paris assize court that Bakhtiar ‘killed 5,000 people during his thirty-three days in power. Secondly, he was planning a coup d’état in Iran … thirdly, he collaborated with Saddam Hussein during the Iran – Iraq war …’†

Just as Saddam was planning the destruction of the Iranian revolution, so Khomeini was calling for the overthrow of Saddam and the Baath, or the ‘Aflaqis’ as he quaintly called them after the name of the Syrian founder of the party. After learning of Bakr Sadr’s execution and that of his sister, Khomeini openly called for Saddam’s overthrow. ‘It would be strange,’ he wrote on 2 April 1980,

if the Islamic nations, especially the noble nation of Iraq, the tribes of the Tigris and Euphrates, the brave students of the universities and other young people turned a blind eye to this great calamity inflicted upon Islam and the household of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, and allowed the accursed Baath party to martyr their eminent personalities one after the other. It would be even more strange if the Iraqi army and other forces were tools in the hands of these criminals, assisting them in the eradication of Islam. I have no faith in the top-ranking officers of the Iraqi armed forces but I am not disappointed in the other officers, the non-commissioned officers or their soldiers. I expect them to either rise up bravely and overthrow this oppression as was the case in Iran or to flee the garrisons and barracks … I hope that God the Almighty will destroy the system of oppression of these criminals.

Oppression lay like a blanket over the Middle East in the early 1980s, in Iraq, in Iran, and in Afghanistan. And if the West was indifferent to the suffering of millions of Muslims, so, shamefully, were most of the Arab leaders. Arafat never dared to condemn the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan – Moscow was still the PLO’s most important ally – and the kings and princes and presidents of the Arab world, who knew better than their Western counterparts what was happening in Iraq, were silent about Saddam’s deportations and tortures and executions and genocidal killings. Most of them used variations of the same techniques on their own populations. In Syria, where the ‘German chair’ torture was used to break the backs of opposition militants, the bloodbath of the Hama uprising lay less than two years away.*

In Iran, the authorities turned brutally against members of the Bahai faith whose 2 million members regard Moses, Buddha, Christ and Mohamed as ‘divine educators’ and whose centre of worship – the tomb of a nineteenth-century Persian nobleman – lies outside Acre in present-day Israel. By 1983, Amnesty estimated that at least 170 Bahais had been executed for heresy among the 5,000 Iranians put to death since the revolution. Among them were ten young women, two of them teenagers, all hanged in Shiraz in June of 1983. At least two, Zarrin Muqimi and Shirin Dalvand, both in their twenties, were allowed to pray towards Acre before the hangmen tied their hands and led them to the gallows. All were accused of being ‘Zionist agents’. Evin prison began to fill with women, some members of the Iraqi-supported Mujahedin-e-Qalq – People’s Mujahedin – others merely arrested while watching political protests. They were ferociously beaten on the feet to make them confess to being counter-revolutionaries. On one night, 150 women were shot. At least forty of them were told to prepare themselves for execution by firing squad by writing their names on their right hands and left legs with felt-tip markers; the guards wanted to identify them afterwards and this was often difficult when ‘finishing shots’ to the head would make their faces unrecognisable. But Bahais were not the only victims.

Executions took place in all the major cities of Iran. In July 1980, for example, Iranian state radio reported fourteen executions in Shiraz, all carried out at eleven at night, including a retired major-general – for ‘making attacks on Muslims’ – a former police officer, an army major charged with beating prisoners, an Iranian Jew sentenced for running a ‘centre of fornication’ and seven others for alleged narcotics offences. One man, Habib Faili, was executed for ‘homosexual relations’. Two days earlier, Mehdi Qaheri and Haider Ali Qayur were shot by firing squad for ‘homosexual offences’ in Najafabad. Naturally, Sadeq Khalkhali presided over most of these ‘trials’.

Amnesty recorded the evidence of a female student imprisoned in Evin between September 1981 and March 1982 who was held in a cell containing 120 women, ranging from schoolgirls to the very old. The woman described how:

One night a young girl called Tahereh was brought straight from the courtroom to our cell. She had just been sentenced to death, and was confused and agitated. She didn’t seem to know why she was there. She settled down to sleep next to me, but at intervals she woke up with a start, terrified, and grasped me, asking if it were true that she really would be executed. I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, and reassure her that it wouldn’t happen, but at about 4 a.m. they came for her and she was taken away to be executed. She was sixteen years old.

A frightening nine-page pamphlet issued by the Iranian Ministry for Islamic Guidance – but carrying neither the ministry’s name nor that of its author – admitted that ‘some believe only murderers deserve capital punishment, but not those who are guilty of hundreds of other crimes … Weren’t the wicked acts of those upon whom [the] death penalty was inflicted tantamount to the spread … of corruption … The people have indirectly seconded the act of the revolutionary courts, because they realise the courts have acted in compliance with their wishes.’ The same booklet claimed that trials of senior officials of the Shah’s government had to be carried out swiftly lest ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements tried to rescue them from prison.

Khomeini raged, against the leftists and communists who dared to oppose his theocracy, and the Great Satan America and its Iraqi ally. Why did people oppose the death penalty, he asked. ‘… the trial of several young men … and the execution of a number of those who had revolted against Islam and the Islamic Republic and were sentenced to death, make you cry for humanity!’ The ‘colonial powers’ had frightened Muslims with their ‘satanic might and advancement’ – Khomeini’s prescient expression for the ‘shock and awe’ that US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld would call down on Iraq almost exactly twenty years later – and now communists were ‘ready to sacrifice [their] lives out of love of the party’ while the people of Afghanistan were ‘perishing under the Soviet regime’s cruelty’.

Here Khomeini was on safe ground. From Afghan exile groups and humanitarian organisations there came a flood of evidence that Soviet troops were now carrying out atrocities in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch was reporting by 1984 that it had become clear ‘that Soviet personnel have been taking an increasingly active role in the Afghan government’s oppression of its citizens. Soviet officers are not just serving as “advisors” to Afghan Khad agents who administer torture – routinely and savagely in detention centres and prisons; according to reports we received there are Soviets who participate directly in interrogation and torture.’ The same document provided appalling evidence of torture. A 21-year-old accused of distributing ‘night letters’ against the government was hung up by a belt until he almost strangled, beaten until his face was twice its normal size and had his hands crushed under a chair. ‘… mothers were forced to watch their infant babies being given electric shocks … Afghan men … were held in torture chambers where women were being sexually molested. A young woman who had been tortured in prison described how she and others had been forced to stand in water that had been treated in chemicals that made the skin come off their feet.’ After Afghans captured a Soviet army captain and three other soldiers in the town of Tashqurghan in April 1982, killed them, chopped up their bodies and threw them in a river, the brother of the officer took his unit – from the Soviet 122nd Brigade – to the town and slaughtered the entire population of around 2,000 people.

An exile publication of the Hezb Islami in Pakistan listed the murder in Afghanistan of twenty-six religious sheikhs, mawlawi and other leaders, often with their entire families, from Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Konar and Ghazni. The Soviets always claimed their village raids were targeted at insurgents, ‘terrorists’ or the ‘remnants’ of the dushman – ironically, they would use the Afghan Persian word for ‘enemy’ – but inevitably most of the victims would be civilians. It was a pattern to be repeated by US forces in Iraq almost a quarter of a century later. Photographs in exile magazines showed the victims of Soviet napalm attacks, their faces burned off by chemicals. One Soviet officer who launched his career amid the Afghan atrocities was General Pavel Grachev, later to be Russian defence minister. He it was who would earn the sobriquet ‘the Butcher of Grozny’, after forgetting the lessons of the Afghan war and the defeat of the Soviets by the mujahedin and Osama bin Laden’s Arab fighters, by launching the Chechnya war on Boris Yeltsin’s behalf and bragging that he could sort out the Chechens in a matter of hours. Wiser counsels had warned that he would unleash a ‘holy war’.

And now, across much of this landscape of horror in Muslim south-west Asia, an epic of bloodletting was about to begin as an obsessive, xenophobic and dictatorial nationalist and secular Arab regime prepared to destroy the Muslim revolutionary forces that were bent on its destruction. As long ago as October 1979, the documents found in the US embassy in Tehran would reveal, the Iranian government feared that the Iraqis were being encouraged to foment further rebellion among Iranian Kurds. Ibrahim Yazdi, the Iranian foreign minister, told American diplomats that ‘adequate assurances had been given to Sadam Husayn [sic] with regard to the Shia majority in Iraq’ to calm his fears of Shia nationalism; but ‘if Iraqi interference continued, Iran would have to consider agitating among the Iraqi Shia community.’ By November, the Americans were reporting that the Iraqi regime was convinced that Iran wished to pursue a claim to the Arab but largely Shia island of Bahrein, which Saddam Hussein had thought he might negotiate with Tehran after meeting Yazdi at a summit in Havana, but that the Iraqis now believed real power lay in ‘the Iranian religious establishment which is hostile to Iraq’.

Just how militarily powerful the two regimes were in 1980 obsessed both sides in the forthcoming struggle. Back in 1978, the Shah, boasting of his ‘very good relations’ with Saddam’s Iraq, claimed that Iraq had ‘more planes and tanks than Iran has’, even though Iran had acquired 80 F-14 Tomcats from the United States – to counter any strikes from the Soviet Union – which could counter Mig high reconnaissance and fighter aircraft. All the Iranian F-14 pilots had been trained in the United States. Before the Shah’s fall, according to one of the documents discovered in the US embassy in Tehran, America believed that:

Iran’s … military superiority over Iraq rests primarily on the strength of its Air Force, which has more high-performance aircraft, better pilot training … and ordnance such as laser-guided bombs and TV-guided missiles that are unavailable to Iraq. The Iranian navy also is far superior to that of Iraq; it could easily close the Gulf to Iraqi shipping … The two states’ ground forces are more nearly balanced, however, with each side possessing different advantages in terms of equipment and capable of incursions into the other’s territory. The disposition of ground forces and the greater mobility of Iraqi forces could in fact give Baghdad a substantial numerical advantage along the border during the initial stages of an attack.

This was an all-too-accurate prediction of what was to happen in September 1980 – and was presumably also known to Saddam Hussein and his generals in Iraq. They would have been comforted to know that, according to the same assessment, Iran’s reliance on US equipment meant that ‘if US support was withdrawn, the Iranian armed forces probably could not sustain full-scale hostilities for longer than two weeks’. But this was a woefully inaccurate forecast, which may have led Saddam to take the bloodiest gamble of his career.

The revolution had certainly emasculated part of the Iranian army. Every general had been retired – more than 300 of the Shah’s senior officers departed in three weeks – and conscription had been lowered from two years to one. As they prepared for a possible American invasion during the hostage siege, the Iranians desperately tried to rebuild their army to a pre-revolution complement of 280,000 men. But pitched battles in Kurdistan meant that every Iranian army unit had been involved in combat by the autumn of 1980. The Revolutionary Guards, who would provide the theological military muscle in any defence of Iran, were – or so I wrote in a dispatch to The Times from Tehran on 26 November 1979 – ‘zealous, overenthusiastic and inexperienced’, while the army’s firepower might have been considerably reduced. Its 1,600 tanks, including 800 British-made Chieftains and 600 American M-60s – all purchased by the Shah – sounded impressive, but the Chieftains, with their sophisticated firing mechanism, may have been down to half strength through lack of maintenance. The M-60s were easier to maintain. The new army was commanded by Major-General Hussain Shaker, who had been trained by the Americans at Fort Leavenworth.

The Islamic government in Tehran put more faith in its air force, mainly because air force cadets had played a leading role in fighting the imperial army during the revolution. In the days after the Shah’s fall, the air force was the only arm of the services permitted to appear in uniform outside its bases. But the F-14s were in need of US maintenance, and although pilots could still fly the older F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers, much of the US and British radar system had broken down and the US technicians who serviced it had long ago left Iran.*

For months in early 1980, there had been violent incidents along the Iran – Iraq border. Tony Alloway, our stringer in Tehran – increasingly isolated but still doggedly filing to us – was now reporting almost daily artillery duels between Iraqis and Iranians. In The Times on 10 April, he reported on tank as well as artillery fire across the border near Qasr-e Shirin. Sadeq Qotbzadeh, now the Iranian foreign minister, was quoted as saying that his government was ‘determined to overthrow the Iraqi Baathist Government headed by that United States agent Saddam Hussein’. On 9 April alone, 9,700 Iraqis of Iranian origin were forced across the border into Iran with another 16,000 soon to be deported. Four hundred of the new arrivals were businessmen who complained that they had been falsely invited to the commerce ministry in Baghdad and there stripped of their possessions, loaded onto lorries and sent to the frontier.

In April, I got a taste of what was to come when pro-Iranian militiamen in Beirut fought street battles with pro-Iraqi gunmen. At the American University Hospital, I counted fifty-five dead, some of them civilians, as armed men, bloodstained bandages round their faces and arms, were brought to the hospital on trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns. Clouds of smoke billowed up from the Bourj el-Barajneh Palestinian camp where six charred corpses were found inside an Iraqi Baath party office.

Often, the Iranians would complain that Iraqi aircraft had entered Iranian airspace; in early July 1980, Iraqi jets passed above Kermanshah province on two separate days, coming under fire from Iranian anti-aircraft guns. The pilots were presumably trying to locate Iran’s ground-to-air defence positions. On 3 July Kayhan newspaper in Tehran was reporting that the Iraqi regime had set up a ‘mercenary army’, led by an Iraqi officer, near Qasr-e Shirin. By August, regular artillery fire was directed across the border in both directions. Iranian claims that their villages were coming under constant attack were dismissed by Iraq as ‘falsehoods’. The Iraqi foreign ministry, however, listed twenty shooting incidents – against Iraqi villages and ships in the Shatt al-Arab around Basra – between 18 and 22 September. Ever afterwards, Saddam Hussein would claim that the Iran – Iraq war began on 4 September, by which time Iraq had complained of artillery firing at its border posts and neighbouring oil refineries on ninety-eight occasions. Iraq denounced Iran for violating the Shah’s 1975 agreement with Baghdad which set the two countries’ common frontier along the Shatt al-Arab, declaring the treaty ‘null and void’.

Although a major conflict seemed inevitable, the UN Security Council would not meet to discuss the hostilities until after the Iraqis invaded Iranian territory; Iraq had made strenuous efforts to prevent seven non-aligned members of the Council from going to the UN chamber. Had Iran not been a pariah state after its seizure of the US embassy, it could have obtained a favourable motion and vote. But in the end, UN Security Council Resolution 479 did not even call for a withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Iranian territory, but merely for a ceasefire – which would satisfy neither party. Iran was convinced that the whole world had now turned against its revolution and was supporting the act of aggression by Saddam.

Fathi Daoud Mouffak, a 28-year-old Iraqi military news cameraman, was to remember those days for the rest of his life. Almost a quarter of a century later, he was to recall for me in Baghdad how he set off one morning in September 1980 from the Iraqi ministry of defence towards a location near Qasr-e Shirin. ‘When we arrived we found our border checkpoints attacked and destroyed – and our Iraqi forces there were less than a brigade,’ he said. ‘We visited Qasr-e Shirin and Serbil Sahab. All our checkpoints there had been destroyed by artillery from the Iranians. We filmed this and we found many dead bodies, our martyrs, most of them border policemen. I had never seen so many dead before. Then we brought our films back to Baghdad.’ Across Iraq, Mouffak’s newsreel was shown on national Iraqi television under the title ‘Pictures from the Battle’. It provided a kind of psychological preparation for the Iraqi people, perhaps for Saddam himself. For on 22 September, on the first day of what the Iranians would call the ‘Imposed War’, Saddam’s legions with their thousands of tanks, armour and artillery swept across the frontier and into Iran on a 650-kilometre front.

CHAPTER SIX
‘The Whirlwind War’

GAS! GAS! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …

… If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues …

WILFRED OWEN, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’

Saddam Hussein called it ‘The Whirlwind War’. That’s why the Iraqis wanted us there. They were victorious before they had won, they were celebrating before they had achieved success. Saad Bazzaz at the Iraqi embassy in London couldn’t wait to issue my visa and, after flying from Beirut to London – Middle East journalism often involves vast round-trips of thousands of kilometres to facilitate a journey only a few hundred kilometres from the starting point – I was crammed into the visa office with Gavin Hewitt of the BBC and his crew and more radio and newspaper reporters than I have ever seen in a smoke-filled room before. We would fly to Kuwait. We would be taken from there across the Iraqi border to the war front at Basra. And so we were. In September 1980 we entered Basra at night in a fleet of Iraqi embassy cars from Kuwait city, the sky lit up by a thousand tracer shells. Jets moaned overhead and the lights had been turned off across the city, a blackout to protect all of us from the air raids.

‘Out of the cars,’ the Iraqis shouted, and we leapt from their limousines, crouched on the pavements, hands holding microphones up into the hot darkness as the frail Basra villas, illuminated by the thin moonlight around us, vibrated to the sound of anti-aircraft artillery. The tracer streaked upwards in curtains, golden lines that disappeared into the smoke drifting over Basra. Sirens bawled like crazed geriatrics and behind the din we could hear the whisper of Iranian jets. A great fire burned out of control far to the east, beyond the unseen Shatt al-Arab river. Gavin, with whom I had shared most of my adventures in Afghanistan that very same year, was standing, hands on hips, in the roadway. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he kept saying. ‘What a story!’ And it was. Never again would an ‘Arab army so welcome journalists to a battle front, give them so much freedom, encourage them to run and take cover and advance with their soldiers. In the steamy entrance of the Hamdan Hotel – the authorities had switched off power across Basra and the air conditioners were no longer working – the staff had turned on their battery-powered radios. There was a constant blowsy song, all trumpets and drums and men’s shouting voices. Al-harb al-khatifa, nachnu nurbah al-harb al-khatifa. ‘The whirlwind war, the whirlwind war, we shall win the whirlwind war,’ they kept chanting.

We stood on the steps, watching the spray of pink and golden bullets ascending into the dark clouds that scudded across Basra. Somewhere to the east of the city, through the palm groves on the eastern banks of the Shatt al-Arab and all the way to the north, Saddam’s army was moving eastwards through the night, into Iran, into the great deserts of Ahwaz, into the Kurdish mountains towards Mahabad. The Arab journalists who had accompanied us up from Basra were ecstatic. The Iraqis would win, the Iraqis would protect the Arab world from the threat of Iran’s revolution. Saddam was a strong man, a great man, a good man. They were confident of his victory – even more confident, perhaps, than Saddam himself.

Yet the orders to give us journalists the freedom of the battlefield must have come from Saddam. We could take taxis without the usual ‘minders’, all the way to the front if we wanted. The ministry of information would provide us with officials to escort us through road checkpoints if we wished. The Fao peninsula, that vulnerable spit of land south of Basra from which you can look eastwards across ‘the Shatt’ at the palm-fringed shore of Iran? No problem. But when we reached Fao, it was under constant Iranian shellfire and the two deep-sea oil terminals 30 kilometres off the coast, Al-Amaya and Al-Bakr – the latter, one of the most modern in the world, had been opened only four years earlier – were already seriously damaged by Iranian ground-to-ground missiles. The Iraqis had not been able to silence the Iranian guns.

By 29 September 1980, exactly a week after the Iraqi invasion, Iranian shells were landing around Fao at the rate of one every twenty-five seconds and it was unsafe even to drive along the river promenade. The windows and doors of houses in the city rattled as each round exploded, hissing over the bazaar and crashing beyond the oil storage depots. In revenge, the Iraqis had attacked the huge oil terminal at Abadan, and for more than an hour I sat near the river, watching 200-metre gouts of fire shooting into the air over Abadan, a ripple of flame that moved with frightening speed along the bank of the river beneath a canopy of black smoke. An Iraqi official crouched next to me, pointing out the Iranian positions on the other shore. So much for the claims on Iraqi radio that its army had ‘surrounded’ Abadan. In Basra, two Iranian Phantoms bombed a ship moored in the river, setting it on fire and splattering bullets along the waterfront walls, proof that the Iranian air force was still capable of daylight raids.

The Iraqis claimed to have shot down four Phantoms in five days, and the undamaged fuel tank of one aircraft – the American refuelling instructions still clearly readable on one canister in a local Baath party headquarters – was proof that their claim was at least partly true. The Iranians had damaged homes and schools in Fao – though their pilots could hardly be expected to distinguish between ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ targets during their high-speed low-level attacks.

Fao was almost deserted. I watched many of its inhabitants – part of the constant flow of millions of refugees which are part of Middle East history – driving north-west to Basra in a convoy of old wooden Chevrolet taxis, bedding piled on the roofs and chador-clad mothers and wives on the back seats, scarcely bothering to glance at the burning refineries of Abadan. They were Iraqi Shia Muslims and now they were under fire from their fellow Shias in Iran, another gift from Saddam.

Already I was beginning to realise that this war might not be so easy to win as the Iraqi authorities would have us believe. In Washington and London, the usual military ‘experts’ and fossilised ex-generals were holding forth on the high quality of the Iraqi army, the shambles of post-revolutionary Iran, the extraordinary firepower of Iraq’s largely Soviet equipped forces. But on 30 September, eight days after their invasion, the Iraqis could only claim that they were 15 kilometres from Khorramshahr – the old Abbasid harbour which was Iran’s largest port, and closer than ‘surrounded’ Abadan.

I crossed the river from Basra, trailing behind convoys of military trucks carrying bridge-building equipment – the Iraqis had yet to cross the Iranian Karun river north of Khorramshahr – and headed into the blistering, white desert towards the Iranian border post at Shalamcheh. I overtook dozens of T-62 tanks and Russian-made armour and trucks piled with soldiers, all of whom obligingly gave us two-finger victory signs. The air thumped with the sound of heavy artillery, and on a little hill in the desert I came across the wrecked Iranian frontier station, stopped the car and gingerly walked inside. I was in Iran, occupied Iran. No problem with visas now, I thought. It’s always an obscure thrill to enter a country with an invading army, knowing how furious all those pious little visa officers would be – those who kept me waiting for hours in boiling, tiny rooms, the perspiration crawling through my hair – if they could see me crossing their borders without their wretched, indecipherable stamps in my passport. Pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini had been ritually defaced on the walls of Shalamcheh frontier station and a large pile of handwritten ledgers were strewn over the floor.

I have a fascination for the documents that blow through the ruins of war, the pages of letters home and the bureaucracy of armies and the now useless instructions on how to fire ground-to-air missiles that flutter across the desert and cover the floors of roofless factories. These books were written in Persian and recorded the names and car numbers of Iraqis and Iranians crossing the border at Shalamcheh. The last entry was on 21 September 1980, just a day before the Iraqi invasion. So although the Iraqis claimed that the war began on 4 September, they had allowed travellers – including their own citizens – to transit the border quite routinely until the very eve of their invasion.

An American camera-crew had pulled up outside the wreckage of the building and were dutifully filming the desecrated pictures of Khomeini, their reporter already practising his ‘stand-upper’. ‘Iraq’s army smashed its way across the Iranian frontier more than a week ago and now stands poised outside the strategic cities of Khorramshahr and Abadan …’ Yes, cities were always ‘strategic’ – at least, they always were on television – and armies must always ‘smash’ through borders and stand ‘poised’ outside cities. It was as if there was only one script for each event. Soon, no doubt, the Iraqis would be ‘fighting their way’ towards Khorramshahr, or ‘poised’ to enter Khorramshahr, or ‘claiming victory’ over the Iranian defenders.

But who was I to talk? My CBC tape recorder hung over my shoulder and behind the border post stood a battery of Russian 155-mm guns, big beasts whose barrels pointed towards Khorramshahr and whose artillery captain walked up to us smiling and asked politely if we would like his guns to open fire. For a millisecond, for just that little fraction of temptation, I wanted to agree, to say yes, I would like them to fire, just the moment I had finished adjusting my microphone; and the captain was already turning to give the order to fire when a moral voice shouted at me – I had just imagined the tearing apart of an unknown body – and I ran after him and said, no, no, he should not fire, not for me, not under any circumstances.

But of course, I found a basin in the sand and sat down in it and leaned on the lip of the hole with my microphone on the edge and I waited as a desert gale blew over me and the sand caught in my hair and nose and ears and then, when the first artillery piece much later blasted a shell towards the Iranian lines, I switched on the recorder. I still have the cassette tape. The guns were dark against the sky as they bellowed away and I kept thinking of Wilfred Owen’s description of ‘the long black arm about to curse’. And there were twenty, thirty long black arms in front of me, more still behind the curtains of sand. And there, I recorded, unwittingly, my own future loss of hearing, 25 per cent of the hearing in my left ear which I would never recover. That very moment is recorded on the cassette:

We can see the gunnery officer just in front of us through this desert dust storm, feeding shells into the breeches of these big 155-mm Russian-made guns and preparing to cover their ears. The guns are so loud, they are leaving my ears singing afterwards – BANG – There’s another one just gone off, a great tongue of fire about 20 feet – BANG – in front of it – BANG – They’re going off all around me at the moment, an incredible sight, this heavy artillery firing right in the middle of a – BANG – there’s another one, right in the middle of this dusty, windswept desert.

I can still hear that gun’s distant echo in my ears as I write these words, a piercing tinnitus that can drive me crazy at night or when I’m tired or irritable or trying to listen to music or can’t hear someone talking to me at dinner.

I turned on Iraqi radio. Further Iranian territory was about to ‘fall’ and Iraqi generals were announcing a ‘last push’ into Khorramshahr. Five days ago, the inhabitants of Basra were content to listen to news of the Iraqi advance on television, but now traders and shopkeepers in the city chose to supplement their knowledge by asking foreign journalists for information about the war. No one thought Iranian shells would still be falling on Iraqi soil this long after the invasion.

That evening, we were invited to tour Basra District Hospital, a bleak building of tiles and pale blue paint, a barrack-like edifice whose uniformity was relieved only by the neat flower-beds outside, the energetic doctors and, more recently, by the ubiquitous presence of Dr Saadun Khalifa Al-Tikriti, Iraq’s deputy health minister. He was saluted and clapped on the back wherever he went, a short, friendly fellow with a mischievous smile and a large moustache. Everyone greeted Dr al-Tikriti with exaggerated warmth, and when the minister made a joke, gales of laughter swept down the marble corridors. Basra hospital had taken almost all the city’s five hundred wounded this past week but al-Tikriti had more than just his patients on his mind when he toured the wards. Foreign press correspondents were greeted with a short, sharp speech about the evils of civilian bombing, and the doctor stopped smiling and thumped his little fist on the table when he claimed that the Iranian air force deliberately killed Iraqi children.

He strode into a children’s ward, a long, curtained room where tiny, awe-struck faces peered from beneath swaths of bandages while silent mothers stared with peasant intensity at the white-coated doctors. ‘Take, for example, this little girl,’ said the good doctor, pausing for a moment beside a child with beautiful round brown eyes and curled black hair. ‘She is only three years old and she has lost a leg.’ With these words, al-Tikriti seized the sheets and swept them from the child to reveal that indeed her left leg was nothing but a bandaged stump. The little girl frowned in embarrassment at her sudden nakedness but al-Tikriti had already moved on, preceded by a uniformed militiaman. In civilian life, the militiaman was a hospital dresser but his camouflage jacket and holstered pistol provided a strange contrast to the hospital as he clumped around the beds, especially when we reached the end of the second children’s ward.

For there in a darkened corner lay a boy of five, swaddled in bandages, terribly burned by an Iranian incendiary bomb and clearly not far from death. There were plastic tubes in his nostrils and gauze around his chest and thighs, and his eyes were creased with pain and tears, the doors to a small private world of torment that we did not wish to imagine. The boy had turned his face towards his pillow, breathing heavily; so the militiaman moved forward, seized the little bandaged head and twisted it upwards for the inspection of the press. The child gasped with pain but when a journalist protested at this treatment, he was told that the militiaman was medically trained.

Dr al-Tikriti then briskly ushered us to the next bed and the child was left to suffer in grace, having supposedly proved a measure of Iranian iniquity that he would certainly never comprehend. An air raid siren growled and there was, far away, a smattering of anti-aircraft fire. There were other wards, of Bangladeshi seamen caught by strafing Iranian jets, thin men who scrabbled with embarrassment for their sheets when Dr al-Tikriti stripped the bedding from their naked bodies, a new generation of amputated, legless beggars for the streets of Dacca. There were oil workers caught in the cauldron of petroleum tank explosions, roasted faces staring at the ceiling, and for one terrible moment the doctors began to take off the bandage round a man’s face. Al-Tikriti smiled brightly. ‘Some of these people speak English,’ he said, gesturing at the huddles on the beds. ‘Why not ask them what happened?’

No one took up the offer but Iraq’s deputy health minister was already ushering his guests to the training hospital by the Shatt al-Arab, a six-storey block that looked more like a government ministry than a medical centre. Iranian cannon fire had punctured the fourth floor, wounding four patients, and the doctor claimed that this, too, was a deliberate attack, since the hospital had flown white flags with the red crescent on them. But the flags were only six foot square and the dark crescent painted upon the flat roof by the doctors merged with the colour of the concrete. Al-Tikriti pointed to the splashes of blood on the ceiling. ‘Arabs would never do this,’ he said. ‘They would never attack civilians.’ But as he was leaving the building, a battered, open-top truck drew up. There were two corpses in the back, half-covered by a dirty blanket, four bare brown feet poking from the bottom. The driver asked what he should do with the bodies but Dr al-Tikriti saw no journalists nearby. ‘Take them round the back,’ he told the driver.

The first commandos of the Iraqi army broke through to the west bank of the Karun river on the Shatt al-Arab at 12.23 Iraq time on the afternoon of 2 October, four small figures running along the Khorramshahr quayside past lines of burned-out and derailed trucks, bowling hand grenades down the dockside. I was able to watch them through Iraqi army binoculars from just 400 metres away, peering above sandbags in a crumbling mud hut while an Iraqi sniper beside me blasted away at the Iranian lines on the other side of the Karun river.

Pierre Bayle of Agence France-Presse was beside me, a tough, pragmatic man with a refusal to panic that must have come from his days as a French foreign legionnaire. ‘Not bad, not bad,’ he would mutter to me every time an Iraqi moved forward down the quayside. ‘These guys aren’t bad.’ It was an extraordinary sight, an infantry attack that might have come from one of those romanticised oil paintings of the Crimean war, one soldier running after another through the docks, throwing themselves behind sandbags when rockets exploded round them and then hurling grenades at the last Iranian position on the river bank. The Iranians fought back with machine guns and rockets. For over an hour, their bullets hissed and whizzed through the small island plantation on which we had taken refuge, smacking into the palm trees above us and clanging off the metal pontoon bridge that connected the island to the Iraqi mainland. Only hours earlier, the Iraqis had succeeded in crossing the Karun 4 kilometres upstream from the Shatt al-Arab, sending a tank section across the river and beginning – at last – the encirclement of the Iranians in Abadan. Iran’s own radio admitted that ‘enemy troops’ had ‘infiltrated’ north of the city.

The Karun river runs into the Shatt al-Arab at right angles and it was almost opposite this confluence – from the flat, plantation island of Um al-Rassas in the middle of the Shatt itself – that we finally watched the Iraqis take the riverfront. Behind them, Iraqi shells smashed into a group of abandoned Chieftain tanks, deserted by their Iranian crews when their retreat was cut off by the Karun. All morning and afternoon, the Iraqis fired shells into Abadan, an eerie, jet-like noise that howled right over our heads on the little island.

Shells travel too fast for the naked eye, but after some time I realised that their shadows moved over the river, flitting across the water and the little paddyfields, then dropping towards Abadan where terrific explosions marked their point of impact. I could not take my eyes off this weird phenomenon. As the projectiles reached their maximum altitude before dropping back to earth, the little shadows – small, ominous points of darkness that lay upon the river – would hover near us, as if a miniature cloud had settled on the water. Then the shadow would grow smaller and begin to move with frightening velocity towards the far shore and be lost in the sunlight.

On the other bank of the river, one of these shells set a big ship ablaze; a sheet of flame over 100 metres in height ran along its deck from bow to stern. Its centre was a circle of white intensity, so bright that I could feel my face burning and my eyes hurting as I stared at it. At times, the din of Iraqi artillery fire and the explosion of Iranian shells around our little mud hut was so intense that the Iraqi troops crouched behind the windows and alleyways of the abandoned village on the island could not make themselves heard. An army captain – the small gold medallion on his battledress proof of his Baath party membership – was fearful that his riflemen might shoot into their own troops on the far side of the river, and repeatedly gave orders that they should turn their fire further downstream. One Iraqi sniper, a tall man with a broad chest, big, beefy arms and a scar on his left cheek, walked into our shabby mud hut holding a long Soviet Dragunov rifle with telescopic sights. He grinned at us like a schoolboy, scratched his face, placed his weapon at the broken window and fired off two rounds at the Iranians. Whenever a shell landed near us, the palm trees outside shook and pieces of mud fell from the ceiling.

At last, it seemed, the Iraqis might be marrying up reality with their propaganda. If they could take Khorramshahr and Abadan and so control both banks of the Shatt al-Arab, they would have placed their physical control over the entire waterway – one of the ostensible reasons for the war. There were reports that the Iraqis were now making headway towards Dezful, 80 kilometres inside Iran, as well as Ahwaz, although claims that they had already captured the Ahwaz radio station were hard to believe. They had originally captured it twelve days earlier, but journalists later watched it blown to pieces by Iranian shells. And there was no denying the ferocity of Iran’s defence of Abadan. Even in Khorramshahr, they were still fighting, their snipers firing from the top of the quayside cranes.

The Iraqi soldiers in our hut had warned us of them as we were about to leave Um al-Rassas. Although they could not see us near the hut, the Iranians had a clear view over the top of the palm plantation once we arrived at the lonely iron bridge that linked the island to the western shore of the Shatt al-Arab. Pierre Bayle and I walked quickly between the trees, hearing the occasional snap of bullets but unworried until we reached the river’s edge. There again, I could see the shadow of the shells moving mysteriously across the water. ‘Robert, we are going to have to run,’ Bayle said, but I disagreed. Perhaps it was the bright sunlight, the heavenly green of the palms that made me believe – or wish to believe – that no one would disturb our retreat across the bridge.

I was wrong, of course. As soon as we set off across the narrow iron bridge, the bullets started to crack around us, many of them so close that I could feel the air displacement of their trajectory. I saw a line of spray travelling across the river towards us – I was running now, but I still had the dangerous, childish ability to reflect that this was just how it looked in Hollywood films, the little puffs of water stitching their way at speed towards the bridge. And then they were pinging into the ironwork, spitting around us, ricochets and aimed shots. I actually saw a square of metal flattened by a round a few inches from my face. I ran faster but was gripped by a kind of stasis, a feeling – most perilous of all – that this cannot be happening and that if it is, then perhaps I should accept whatever harm is to come to me. Within seconds, Bayle was beside me, taking the cassette recorder from me, screaming ‘Run, run’ in my left ear, physically pushing me from behind and then, when we neared the end of the bridge, grabbing me by the arm and jumping with me into the water of the Shatt al-Arab, the bullets still skitting around us. We waded the last metres to shore, scrambled up the bank and plunged into the palm grove as a cluster of mortar shells burst around the bridge, the shrapnel clanging off the iron.

Amid the trees, an Iraqi platoon was banging off mortars towards Khorramshahr. The sergeant beckoned to Pierre and myself, and there, amid his soldiers, we lay down exhausted in the dirt. One of his men brought us tea and I looked at Bayle and he just nodded at me. I thought at first that he was telling me how bad things had been, how closely we had escaped with our lives. Then I realised he was thinking what I was thinking: that Saddam had bitten off more than he could chew, that this might not be a whirlwind war at all but a long, gruelling war of aggression. When we returned to the Hamdan Hotel that afternoon, I typed up my story on the old telex machine, sent the tape laboriously through to London, went to my room and slept for fifteen hours. The smell of adventure was beginning to rub off.

So why did we go back for more? Why did I tell the Times foreign desk that although I was short of money, I would stay on in Basra? To be sure, I wanted to see a little bit more of this history I was so dangerously witnessing. If it was true that Saddam had grotesquely underestimated the effect of his aggression – and the Iranians were fighting back with great courage – then eventually the Iraqi army might heed Khomeini’s appeal and revolt. This could mean the end of Saddam’s regime or – the American and Arab nightmare – an Iranian occupation of Iraq and another Shiite Islamic Republic.

But war is also a vicarious, painful, attractive, unique experience for a journalist. Somehow that narcotic has to be burned off. If it’s not, the journalist may well die. We were young. I was fresh from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, already immersed in covering the Lebanese civil war and the effects of Israel’s first 1978 invasion. I had covered the Iranian revolution, the very crucible of this Iraq – Iran conflict. This was my war. Or so I felt as we set off each morning for the Iraqi front lines. And thus it was one burning morning along the Shatt al-Arab, this time with Gavin and his crew, that I almost died again. Once more, I was carrying CBC’s recording equipment and so – before writing these paragraphs – I have listened once more to that day’s tape; and I can hear myself, heart thumping, when I first began to understand how frightening war is.

Most of the ships on the far side of the river were now on fire, a pageant of destruction that lent itself to every camera. But again, we had to approach the river through the Iraqi lines and the Iranians now had men tied by ropes to the cranes along the opposite river bank who were holding rocket-propelled grenades as well as rifles. Here is the text of the audio-track that I was ad-libbing for CBC:

FISK: We’re walking through this deserted village now, there really doesn’t seem to be anybody here, just a few Iraqi soldiers on rooftops and we can’t see them. But there’s a lot of small-arms fire very near. Sound of gunfire, growing in intensity. Yes, the car’s just over there, Gavin.

HEWITT: Down here.

FISK: Yes, there they are. Sound of shooting, much closer this time. I’m beginning to wonder why I got into journalism. My heartbeats are breaking up my commentary. Going through the courtyard of what was obviously a school – there are school benches laid out here.

The sound of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade followed by a thunderous explosion that obliterates the commentary and breaks the audio control on the recorder.

FISK: Back over here, I think, round this way. Dozens of shots and the sound of Gavin, the BBC crew and Fisk running for their lives, gasping for breath. Just trying to get back to the car to get to safety. Ouch, that’s too near. I think they can see us wandering around. Let’s go! Let’s go! There’s …

HEWITT (to crew): Yah, c’mon, c’mon, we’re getting out of here. Can we go? Damn!

And then, listening to this tape, I hear us urging our Iraqi driver to leave, shouting at him to leave. ‘Go, just go!’ one of us screams at him in fury and, once we are moving away, I talk into the microphone, giving a message to George Lewinski and Sue Hickey in the CBC office in London:

George and Sue, I hope you’ve now listened to all that. Please, please, use as much as you can ’cos you can tell how dangerous it was. And please would you keep this cassette whatever happens – it’s a memory I want to remember for the rest of my life, sitting in my Irish cottage. Whatever you do, don’t throw it away!

The tape never made it. I gave it to our Iraqi taxi-driver in Basra to take across the border to send from Kuwait airport, but he was turned round at the frontier and arrived back four hours later outside our hotel, smiling ingratiatingly and holding my tape out of the driver’s window like a dead fish. I later transmitted it down a crackling phone line. Heaven knows what the Canadians made of it – although I was later told that a truck-driver in White Horse, Yukon, pulled over to a phone booth, dialled CBC in Toronto and asked: ‘Was that for real?’

In one sense, it was. The recording was the actual sound of four comparatively young men risking their lives for … Nothing? I’m not sure that would be true. By putting our lives on the line, we did, I suspect, give an authenticity to our work that also gave us a credibility when we came to challenge what governments – or other journalists – claimed to be true. This experience had proved to me beyond all doubt that Iraq was not going to ‘win’ this huge war. An Iranian artillery counter-attack was being sustained and, as I wrote that October – accurately but six years prematurely – ‘if this is carried to its logical conclusion, then it will not be Khorramshahr that is under shellfire from Iraqi guns but Basra that will be hit by shellfire from the Iranians.’

Across the Bailey bridge in Basra came now a steady stream of military ambulances. I ventured out to the border post at Shalamcheh again and there now were the Iraqi wounded, lying in the sand while an artillery battery beside them lobbed 155-mm shells across the border. An ambulance came bumping out of the desert and bounced to a halt in a sandy basin half surrounded by palm trees. They brought an infantryman out of it on a stretcher, pulled the blood-soaked bandages off his shoulder and laid him on a makeshift bed in the shade of the old police station. The man, shot by an Iranian sniper, was still in pain but he made no sound as three army medical orderlies fussed with drip-feed bags above him, the guns firing off a round every minute, a slamming explosion that shook the walls of the building and had the doctors wincing.

A second Iraqi casualty was brought out of the sands, a private from a tank crew who had been blasted from his vehicle, a severely shell-shocked soldier whose head lolled from side to side and whose knees buckled when his comrades carried him into the courtyard of the police station. The soldier with the shoulder wound moaned a little, and every time the big guns fired and the shells soared off towards Khorramshahr, the shell-shock victim rolled his eyes around, his arms flopping from side to side like a dummy with the stuffing knocked out of it.

The forward dressing station of the Iraqi army’s southern front was a grim little place and the long smears of dried blood on the floor were witness to the sacrifice the Iraqi army was having to make for ‘the whirlwind war’. The senior medical orderly was quite matter-of-fact about it. ‘This is an old building and the Iranians have it on all their maps,’ he said. ‘They will fire at it and there will be more casualties.’ He gave me a mirthless grin. Three minutes later, the Iranian shells began coming in, sending the Iraqi gunners jumping into their pits.

The driver of an army jeep on the Khorramshahr-Shalamcheh highway – supposedly safe and long secure in Iraqi hands – was burned to death when Iranian shells rained down on his convoy. Not one major Iranian city had fallen to Baghdad and, with the exception of Qasr-e Shirin to the north, all that the Iraqis had so far captured was 3,000 square kilometres of brown, waterless desert, a shabby landscape of rock and sand from which the Iranians very sensibly withdrew to fight on from the hills.

When Gavin Hewitt and I asked to visit the military hospital in Basra, we were given permission within two minutes and nobody tried to prevent us talking to the wounded soldiers inside. All the casualties told the same stories, of surprise attacks by Iranian helicopter gunships – the Cobras sold to the Shah by the Americans – and Phantom jets suddenly swooping from the east. A badly burned tank crewman described how he heard the sound of jet engines only a second before a rocket hit his tank, covering a quarter of his body in blazing petrol. A private in the Iraqi army’s transport command was blown from his jeep south of Ahwaz by a rocket fired from an Iranian helicopter; as he lay in the road, a Phantom appeared from the sun and bombed his colleagues who were staggering from the wrecked vehicle.

By 5 October, the Iraqis entered Khorramshahr at last, and we went with them. We found a burning, smashed city and just one old Arab Iranian – sole representative of the millions of Arabs of ‘Arabistan’ whom Saddam was seeking to ‘save’ – squatting on the stone floor of his mud home, a man with deep lines on his face and a white beard, brewing tea for an Iraqi soldier and ignoring the questions of strangers. He had been ‘liberated’. This, after all, was the city where the representative of the Iranian embassy siege gunmen in London came from, the city he called al-Mohammorah. This was to be Saddam’s Danzig, the desert beyond was his Sudetenland. The Iraqis were going to rescue the Arabs of Iran, but we could only walk down one main street of the city, a battered thoroughfare of broken telegraph poles and blackened, single-storey shops where tired Iraqi troops, their faces stained with mud, sat on doorsteps and talked under the cover of sheets of corrugated iron.

General Adnan Khairallah, the Iraqi defence minister and Saddam’s first cousin, had offered a ceasefire to the Iranians – to show Iraq’s ‘peaceful intentions’ in front of the world rather than any Iraqi desire to withdraw from Iranian territory – but six and a half hours after the unilateral truce came into effect, the Iranians opened fire on occupied Khorramshahr. We had been sitting in the courtyard of a broken villa near the Karun river, listening to a Colonel Ramseh of the Iraqi army – his eyes bloodshot, head hanging with fatigue – as he claimed that his troops had taken control of the city and its harbour, when shells showered down onto the houses and orchards around us.

‘Please go now because it is not safe,’ a brigadier pleaded as explosions began to crash around the bridge at the end of the street. An Iraqi commando was led through the gate, blood dribbling down his right cheek from a shrapnel wound. The Iraqi Special Forces soldiers – no longer laughing and making their familiar victory signs at journalists – sat round the edge of an empty fish pond and stared at us glumly. Iranian Revolutionary Guards were still holding out in the heavily damaged buildings on the western side of the Karun and they drove six Chieftain tanks past the central post office, firing shells at the nearest Iraqi command post until one of them was hit by a rocket. Running from the villa, I had just enough time to see an Iraqi tank, its barrel traversing wildly and its tracks thrashing through the rubbish along the street as it drove towards the centre of the city.

The Iraqis now had tanks positioned along the Khorramshahr waterfront. They must have entered the port very suddenly, for the docks were still strewn with empty goods wagons, half-empty crates and burning containers hanging from damaged cranes. From some of the containers, Iraqi soldiers were stealing the contents, making off with a bizarre combination of Suzuki motorcycles, footballs, Dutch cattle-feed and Chinese ping-pong bats.

The ships along the quayside had been under fire for days. The chief officer of the Yugoslav freighter Krasica leant over the after-deck of his bullet-flecked ship and grinned broadly. ‘Both sides shelled us all the time – for fifteen days,’ he shouted. ‘We sat down below, played cards and drank beer – what else could we do?’ It must have been bad, because the man did not even look eastwards along the waterfront where smoke poured from a burning ship. The Italian freighter Capriella had had its bridge, funnel and superstructure gutted by fire. The crew of another Italian vessel had quenched the fires of a first bombardment but then fled to a Korean freighter whose crew refused to let them aboard; they were eventually given sanctuary on a Greek ship. The Chinese Yung Chun had rocket and bullet holes in its hull. Further east, there were larger vessels, all burning furiously.

None of these ships would ever sail again. They would remain, charred wrecks along the harbour-side, for eight more years. But in Basra, the ninety big freighters moored along the quays, their crews still aboard and keeping steam up for a quick escape if a real ceasefire took hold, would still be rotting away at the harbour almost a quarter of a century later. It was a mournful development for a port city founded by the Caliph Omar Ibn Khattab in 638, a harbour occupied by the British in 1914 and 1941 and 2003. British mercantile interests had been here since 1643, and behind the city’s six stinking canals it was still possible to find the carved wooden façades and elaborate shutters of Ottoman houses. The Caliph Omar had decreed that no one should be permitted to cut down the city’s date palms, although thousands of them now stood, decapitated or blackened by fire in plantations ribbed by streams into which nineteenth-century steamships had long ago been secreted, rotting museums of industrial technology which were no doubt launched with appropriate triumph when they went down the slipways of Birkenhead and Belfast two generations earlier. In what the Basra tourist office, in a moment of unfortunate enthusiasm, dubbed ‘the Venice of the East’, it was still possible to come across the relics of empire. The Shatt al-Arab Hotel had been a staging post for the British Imperial Airways flying boats that would set down on the Shatt and deposit their passengers in a lounge still decorated with scale models of British-built ships.

Every day now, the Iraqis were learning that victory would not be theirs – not at least for weeks, maybe months, even years. The Iraqi army around Khorramshahr moved forward only 8 kilometres in ten days. In the city, an Iraqi army colonel in a paratrooper’s red beret and carrying a swagger stick agreed with us that the Iranians were still fighting hard. Even as he spoke, a young soldier covered in blood was carried past us, the wounded man screaming that he was dying. ‘We thought the Iranians would not fight,’ another officer said to me that day. ‘But now I believe they will fight on, whatever happens.’

Officially, no one would suggest such a thing. ‘You must come – you must come,’ a ministry of information minder shouted to us in the lobby of the Hamdan Hotel. ‘You must see the Iranian prisoners.’ It was to be the first display of prisoners by both sides in the war, a theatrical presentation that would eventually involve thousands of captured soldiers, a press ‘opportunity’ which was a gross breach of the Geneva Convention. But we went along that bright October morning to see what the Iranians looked like. ‘Animals in a cell’ was Gavin’s apt comment.*

They were sitting in the far corner of a concrete-walled barrack hut, a dishevelled group of dark-haired young men, some in bandages and all in the drab, uncreased khaki uniform of the Iranian army. Unshaved, the seventeen men gaped at the television cameras as they sat on the bare mattresses that had been their beds for the past three days. ‘You are not permitted to talk to them,’ an Iraqi army major announced, and the Iranians looked again at the lenses and microphones that were thrust expectantly towards them. Asked by a journalist if any of the prisoners spoke English, a young bearded man below the latticed window said that he spoke German but the major shut him up. ‘They were taken prisoner at Ahwaz and Mohammorah,’ the major said. ‘What more do you want to know?’

But the prisoners talked with their hands and faces. About half had been injured, their heads and arms in bandages. A thin young man by the wall slyly made a victory sign with his fingers. Five prisoners had been told to hold copies of a Baghdad newspaper that pictured Saddam Hussein on the front page, but they had folded the paper in such a way that the portrait was no longer visible. The Iranian soldier who spoke German smiled and nodded at us as we were herded from the barracks hut. Then the Iraqi major announced that two prisoners would talk to us if we promised to take no pictures. Two sad, drawn young men, one with his chest bandaged in plaster, were eventually led into a messroom where a picture of Saddam, a Gainsborough reproduction and a bunch of pink plastic flowers vied for space along the wall.

The two soldiers were seated on steel chairs in the centre of the room while government officials and the major stood round them in order to ‘translate’. The wounded prisoner clutched his hands nervously and began to shake. The major wagged his finger in front of the first soldier. ‘They are asking about your casualties,’ he said. The man shrugged and proclaimed his ignorance. ‘I am an Iranian soldier,’ he said quietly. Were the Iranian mullahs in charge of the Iranian army, journalists asked, and the major translated this question as: ‘Aren’t religious people influencing your officers?’ It was true, the prisoner said sullenly. ‘The spirit of our soldiers is not what it used to be.’

And what, the world’s press wanted to know, did the two prisoners think of Ayatollah Khomeini? The major mistranslated the question thus: ‘Now that things have gone so badly for you, what do you think of Khomeini?’ The first prisoner replied that ‘opinion’ of the Ayatollah would not be the same after the war. But the wounded man glanced quickly at us and said that ‘if Ayatollah Khomeini brought on a war between two Muslim countries, this was wrong.’ The conditional clause in this reply was lost on the Iraqi major who then happily ordered the removal of the prisoners.

The Iraqi army, it seemed, would go to any lengths to display proof of victory and it spent a further hour showing off Iranian hardware captured in Khorramshahr. There was an American-made anti-tank launcher – made by the Hughes aircraft company and coded DAA-HOI-70-C-0525 – a clutch of Soviet-made armoured vehicles and an American personnel carrier on which the Iraqis had spray-painted their own definitive and revealing slogan for the day. ‘Captured,’ it said, ‘from the racist Persian Asians.’ Captured armour was to become a wearying part of the now increasingly government-controlled coverage of the war.

They bussed us up to Amara, 160 kilometres north of Basra and only 50 kilometres from the Iranian border, to show us twenty Chieftain tanks seized on the central front around Ahwaz, a fraction of the 800 Chieftains that Britain had sold to the Shah. Some had been hit by shells or grenades but we clambered onto them. A partly damaged hulk was lying in a field with its hatch open, and in I climbed to sit in the driver’s seat. A pouch on the wall to my left still contained the British Ministry of Defence tank manual – marked ‘Restricted’ and coded WO 14557–1 – although how the Iranian crews were supposed to translate the English was a mystery. I had sat there for a minute when it occurred to me that the crew probably did not survive their encounter with the Iraqis and I turned my head slowly to the gunner’s seat to my right. And there, sure enough, lay the grisly remains of the poor young Iranian who had gone into battle a few days ago, a carbonised skeleton with the burned tatters of his uniform hanging to his bones like little black flags, the skull still bearing the faint remains of flesh.

But the Iraqis could not conceal their own losses. North of Basra I came across an orange and white taxi standing at a petrol station, the driver talking to the garage hand, not even bothering to glance at the long wooden box on top of his vehicle. Coffins in Iraq are usually carried on the roofs of cars, and all that was different in this case was that an Iraqi flag was wrapped around the box. A soldier was going home for burial.

According to the Baathist Al-Thawra, there had been only two Iraqi soldiers killed in the previous twenty-four hours, which meant that I had – quite by chance – come across 50 per cent of the previous day’s fatalities. But there were four other taxis on the same road, all heading north with their gloomy cargoes, the red, white and black banner with its three stars flapping on the rooftop coffins. We did not see these cars in the early days of the war, nor the scores of military ambulances that now clogged the roads. On just one day in the first week of October alone, the army brought 480 bodies to the military hospital mortuary in Baghdad. If these corpses came from just the central sector of the battle front, then the daily toll of dead could be as high as six or seven hundred. Even the Iraqi press was now extolling the glory that soldiers achieved when ‘sacrificing’ themselves in battle, and Saddam Hussein, visiting wounded civilians in Kirkuk on 12 October, described their injuries as ‘medals of honour’.

Iraqi television’s lavish coverage of the conflict – the ‘Whirlwind War’ theme music had now been dropped – was filled with tanks and guns and smashed Iranian aircraft, but there were no photographs of the dead of either side. When the station entertained its viewers with Gary Cooper in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the authorities clumsily excised a sequence showing the bodies of Spanish Republican troops lying on a road. Later the Iraqis would show Iranian corpses in large and savage detail.

Among the other British reporters in Basra was Jon Snow of ITN, whose courage and humour made him an excellent colleague in time of great danger but who could never in his life have imagined the drama into which he would be propelled in mid-October 1980. ‘Snowy’, whose imitations of Prince Charles should have earned him a place in vaudeville,* was regularly reporting to camera from the bank of the Shatt al-Arab south of Basra. However, watching his dispatches in London was the owner of the Silverline Shipping Company, who had been desperately searching for six weeks for the location of his British-captained 22,000-ton soya bean oil carrier Al-Tanin.

And suddenly, there on the screen behind Snow’s shoulder, he spotted his missing vessel, still afloat but obviously in the middle of a battle. The Foreign Office could do nothing to help, so the owner immediately asked Snow to be his official shipping agent in Basra and telexed his new appointment to him for the benefit of the Iraqi authorities. There were fifty-six souls aboard, nine of them British, and they had only one way of contacting the outside world; among the dozens of ships marooned in the city’s harbour was a vessel captained by a Norwegian who was in daily contact with the Al-Tanin and who confirmed to Snow that the trapped captain and his crew were anxious to be rescued.

Snow decided to enlist the help of the Iraqi military and swim out to the ship at night to arrange the rescue of the crew. But neither the navy nor the Iraqi authorities in Basra could provide him with anything but a tourist map of the all-important waterway for which Saddam had partly gone to war. This, of course, was Snow’s exclusive story – a ‘spectacular’ if he brought it off, a human and political tragedy for the crew, Snow and ITN if it ended in disaster – but he told me privately of his difficulty in obtaining a map of the river. ‘Now listen, Fisky, old boy, if you can find a decent map, I’ll let you come along,’ he said. I immediately remembered my grandfather Edward, first mate on the Cutty Sark, and all that I had read about the merchant marine. Every ship’s master, I knew, was required to carry detailed charts of the harbours and waterways he used. So I hunted down a profusely bearded Baltic sea-captain whose freighter lay alongside in Basra docks, and he agreed to lend me his old British Admiralty survey of the Shatt al-Arab. This magnificent document – a work of oceanographic art as much as technical competence – was duly photocopied and presented to the frogmen of the Iraqi navy.

All the elements of high adventure were in place: the Al-Tanin’s captain with the splendidly nautical name of Dyke, who thought up the rescue mission in the first place; Jack Simmons, the British consular official with a round face and small rimless spectacles who arrived unannounced in Basra but could get no help from the Iraqis. There was even a handsome major in the Iraqi navy, a grey-haired, quiet man who gallantly risked his life for the crew of the British ship. He never gave us his name, so Snow always referred to him warmly as ‘our Major’. Then there was 32-year-old Snow, his crew – cameraman Chris Squires and soundman Nigel Thompson – and Fisk, who would come to regard this as the last journalistic Boy’s Own Paper story of his life. The rest of my reporting would be about tragedy.

The Al-Tanin had moored in the Shatt five weeks earlier to unload its cargo of cooking oil by lighter. But when the war began, it found itself – like all the other big ships in the river – trapped between two armies; machine-gun and rifle fire raked the waterway and on several days the crew watched low-level rockets skim the surface of the river around the Al-Tanin’s hull. Captain Dyke talked to Snow over the Norwegian captain’s radio and suggested Snow should try a rescue attempt on 15 October. This would be ’Operation Pear’; if it failed or was postponed, Snow could try again on 16 October when the rescue would become ’Operation Apple’. ‘Our Major’, however, wanted to visit Dyke aboard the Al-Tanin to discuss the escape. Dyke agreed to what he called a ‘fibre ascent’ – assuming any Iranian listeners to his conversation would not know this meant a rope – if they swam out to his ship.

At nine o’clock at night on 15 October, therefore, a strange band wound its way through the soggy, waterlogged plantation of an island on the Shatt al-Arab – not far from Um al-Rassas, from which Pierre Bayle and I had made our own escape just a few days earlier. The major and two of his frogmen, Snow – in black wet suit with flippers in hand – Squires, Thompson and myself. We must have made a remarkable spectacle, clopping along through the darkness of the tropical island to the stretch of river where we knew the Al-Tanin was at anchor, dragging with us a rubber boat for Snow’s rescue attempt. In the darkness, we slipped off mud tracks into evil-smelling lagoons, slithered into long-forgotten dykes and lumbered over creaking, rotten bridges. Once, when we set the abandoned village dogs barking, Iranian snipers opened up on the plantation and for more than a minute we listened to the bullets whining around us at hip height as the Iranians tried to guess where the intruders were.

Even before we reached the river bank, we could see the Al-Tanin, her superstructure fully lit up, her riding lights agleam, just as Captain Dyke had promised they would be. The ship’s generators echoed through the hot palm forest and her bright orange funnel appeared surrealistically through the shadows of the tree trunks. Snow and the major were the first to see what was wrong. Dyke had told them to board his ship at 9.30 p.m. on the starboard side of the vessel, when the tide would have turned it towards the western, Iraqi bank of the river. He had illuminated the starboard hull for this reason. But it was the darkened port side of the Al-Tanin that faced us. Every Iranian could see the brightly-lit starboard of the ship right in front of the Iranian lines. Snow sat on the bank, squeezed into his flippers and stared at the ship. ‘Bugger!’ he said. We all looked at Snow. He looked at the major. So did the frogmen. Snow would later come to regard the episode as ‘an act of unparalleled insanity’. Squires, Thompson and I were all profoundly grateful we would not be part of this shooting match.

Then Snow slid into the muddy waters, the major and the two other naval frogmen beside him, clambering into their rubber boat, pushing and paddling it out into the river. So strong was the current – the tide was now at its height – that it took them twenty minutes to travel the 200 metres to the ship and at one point, staring at them through binoculars, I could see they were in danger of being taken right past the vessel and out into the open river. But they caught a ladder on the darkened port side and climbed aboard.

Snow first encountered members of the Filipino crew who appeared ‘terrified of the apparition’ of the television reporter in black wet suit and flippers. But it was only when he met a surprised but otherwise exuberant Captain Dyke that Snow discovered he had not been expected for another three hours. Ships worked to GMT, not to local time, in their ports of call, and Iraqi time was three hours ahead of GMT. Had Snow and his Iraqi major turned up at half-past midnight according to Iraqi clocks – 9.30 p.m. GMT – the illuminated starboard side of the ship would have faced Iraq.

Snow, the major and Dyke agreed that twenty-three of the ship’s crew would head for the shoreline in a lifeboat at 3.30 a.m. and we watched Snow’s rubber boat moving silently back across the river towards us. So we all sat through the long hours of darkness, watching the Al-Tanin’s riding lights reflecting on the fast-moving water as the big ship at last turned on the tide, and seeing – behind the vessel – the fires of Abadan. Distant guns bellowed in the night as the mosquitoes clustered round us for greedy company. At one point, Snow looked at me. ‘One does feel this tremendous sense of responsibility,’ he said. I was wondering how the Prince of Wales would pronounce that – the phrase was pure Prince Charles – when two red torch flashes sparkled from the ship’s deck. ’Operation Pear’ had begun. Snow sent two lamp flashes back. A hydraulic winch – painfully loud over the river’s silence – hummed away, followed by a harsh, metallic banging. The gate to the lifeboat had jammed. We could see the crew waiting on deck to disembark and we shared their feelings as the tell-tale hammer-blows echoed over the river towards the Iranians.

Then the lifeboat was down, its gunwales dipping towards us, carving ripples of water which the Iranians really should have seen. But when the boat thumped into the mud of our riverbank at 4 a.m., even the Iraqi frogmen lost their edge of fearful expectation as an English girl appeared on the slippery deck and asked: ‘Will someone help me ashore?’ It was one of those quintessential moments so dear to Anglo-Saxons. The British were cheating danger again, landing on a tropical shore under a quarter moon with the possibility of a shell blowing them all to pieces and three young women to protect. And so delighted were we to see the little lifeboat that we tugged its crew onto the river bank with enough noise to awaken every dozing Iranian on the other side. The Iraqi naval men grinned with happiness.

Thirteen crewmen had remained behind to guard their ship, and true to the traditions of what we thought then was a post-colonial world, only seven of the twenty-three crew who were rescued were actually British. The rest were a tough but cheerful group of Filipinos, small men with laughing eyes who hooted with joy when, with the British, we tugged them ashore and pushed them unceremoniously into an Iraqi army entrenchment behind us. Many of the Filipinos handed up to me their duty-free treasures, radios and television sets and – in one case – a washing machine which I dumped in the mud. They were hastily led off by Iraqi troops into the forest.

The first officer expressed his concern for those crewmen left aboard, the engineer announced that he would take a long holiday. Teresa Hancock, a crewman’s bride from Stoke-on-Trent, had been honeymooning aboard and had celebrated her twenty-first birthday on the Shatt al-Arab three days earlier with a small party. But if ever there was a happy story, this was it. The Iraqi navy had acquitted itself with some glory – performing a genuinely humanitarian act with courage and professionalism – and ‘Snowy’ got his scoop. Indeed, Snow announced that he would henceforth be known as Al-Thalaj – Arabic for ‘snow’. As for ‘our Major’, we went to thank him later and found him in his air-conditioned office, sipping yoghurt and grinning from ear to ear, knowing full well that he had – in the tradition of Sir Francis Drake – singed the Ayatollah’s beard.

Snow packaged his film and gave it to me to take to Kuwait, where a private jet had been hired by America’s NBC to take both their own and ITN’s news film to Amman for satelliting to New York and London. As the Learjet soared into the air, the purser offered me smoked salmon sandwiches and a glass of champagne. From Amman I filed the story of the Al-Tanin to The Times. Then I sank into the deepest bed of the Intercontinental Hotel and woke to find a telex with a nudge-in-the-ribs question from the foreign desk in London: ‘Why you no swam shark-infested Shatt al-Arab river?’

But here the sweet stories must end. By the end of October, the Iraqis – realising that they were bogged down in the deserts of Iran with no more chance of a swift victory – were firing ground-to-ground missiles at Iranian cities. Early in the month, 180 civilians were killed in Dezful when the Iraqis fired a rocket into the marketplace. On 26 October, at least another hundred civilians were killed when the Iraqis fired seven Russian Frog-7 missiles at Dezful. The War of the Cities had begun, a calculated attempt to depopulate Iran’s largest towns and cities through terror.

The outbreak of war in Iran had been greeted even by some of the theocratic regime’s opponents with expressions of outrage and patriotism. Thousands of middle-class women donated millions of dollars’ worth of their jewellery to Iran’s ‘war chest’. Captive in the Iranian foreign ministry, US chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen ‘knew something was happening when I heard a loudspeaker outside the foreign ministry playing American marching tunes – which the Iranians used on military occasions. I heard later that the Iraqis used them too. That night, there were anti-aircraft guns being used and the sky was full of tracer. They never seemed to hit anything. In fact, when we heard the air-raid sirens, we used to relax because we knew that the Iraqi planes had already been, bombed and flown away.’

The Iranians, like Saddam, had to fight internal as well as external enemies during the war, knowing that groups like the Mujahedin-e-Qalq had the active support of the Iraqi regime. The strange death of the Iranian defence minister Mustafa Chamran on the battle front has never been fully explained. But there could be no doubt what happened when, just before 9 p.m. on 28 June 1981, a 60-pound bomb exploded at a meeting of the ruling Islamic Republican Party in Tehran, tearing apart seventy-one party leaders as they were listening to a speech by Ayatollah Mohamed Beheshti, chief justice of the supreme court, secretary of the Revolutionary Council, head of the IRP and a potential successor to Khomeini. When the bomb destroyed the iron beams of the building and 40-centimetre-thick columns were pulverised by the blast, the roof thundered down onto the victims. Among them were four cabinet ministers, six deputy ministers and twenty-seven members of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis.

Beheshti, who died with them, was an intriguing personality, his thin face, pointed grey beard and thick German accent – a remnant of his days as a resident Shiite priest in Germany – giving him the appearance of a clever eighteenth-century conspirator. When I met him in 1980, I noted that he employed ‘a unique mixture of intellectual authority and gentle wistfulness which makes him sound – and look – like a combination of Cardinal Richelieu and Sir Alec Guinness’. He had for months been intriguing against President Bani-Sadr, although the date of the latter’s removal gave Beheshti little time for satisfaction: he was murdered a week later.

He was a man with enemies, unmoved by Iran’s growing plague of executions. ‘Don’t you see,’ he explained to me with some irritation, ‘that there have been very few people sentenced to death because of their failures in the [Shah’s] ministries. Those people who have been sentenced to death are in a different category – they are opium or heroin dealers.’ This was palpably untrue. Most of the executions were for political reasons. ‘When you study the history of revolutions,’ Beheshti said, ‘you will find that there are always problems. This is normal. When people here say they are unhappy, it is because they have not experienced a revolution before. There are problems – but they will be solved.’ Beheshti’s loss was the most serious the revolution suffered – until the death of Khomeini in 1989 – because he had designed the IRP along the lines of the Soviet Communist Party, capable of binding various revolutionary movements under a single leader.

By coincidence, the bloodbath on 28 June cost the same number of lives – seventy-two – as were lost at the battle of Kerbala in 680 by Imam Hossein, his family and supporters, a fact that Khomeini was quick to point out. Saddam and America, he concluded, had struck again through the Mujahedin-e-Qalq. ‘Suppose you were an inveterate enemy to the martyred Beheshti,’ Khomeini asked sarcastically, ‘… what enmity did you bear against the more than seventy innocent people, many of whom were among the best servants of society and among the most adamant enemies of the enemies of the nation?’ But on 5 August, Hassan Ayat, another influential Majlis deputy, was killed. On 30 August a second bomb killed President Mohamed Rajai, who had just replaced Bani-Sadr, and the new Iranian prime minister, Mohamed Javad Bahonar. The prosecutor general, Ayatollah Ali Quddusi, was murdered on 5 September and Khomeini’s personal representative in Tabriz, Ayatollah Asadollah Madani, six days later.

The regime hit back with ferocious repression. Schoolchildren and students figured prominently among the sixty executions a day. One estimate – that 10,000 suspects were hanged or shot – would equal the number of Iranians killed in the first six months of the war with Iraq. Just as Saddam was trying to destroy the Dawa party as a militant extension of Shia Islam, so Khomeini was trying to eliminate the Mujahedin-e-Qalq as a branch of the Iraqi Baath. This duality of enemies would force both sides in the war to take ever more ruthless steps to annihilate their antagonists on the battlefield as well as in their prisons and torture chambers.

When I visited Tehran in the spring of 1982 to make my own investigations into these mass executions, survivors of Evin prison spoke to me of 8,000 hangings and shootings, of fourteen-year-old Revolutionary Guards brutalised by their participation in the killings. Among the 15,000 prisoners who were spared and were now being released – partly, it seemed, because of Amnesty International’s repeated condemnation of Islamic ‘justice’ in Iran – several vouchsafed accounts of quite appalling savagery. At one point after the Beheshti, Rajai and Bahonar murders, inmates were told to demonstrate their repentance by hanging their friends. There were three stages in this purgation: they could actually strangle their fellow prisoners, they could cut them down from the gibbet – or they could merely load their corpses into coffins. Prisoners thus emerged from Evin with souls purified but blood on their hands. Islamic socialism was almost wiped out; only a few leftists escaped death, capable of shooting at Iran’s deputy foreign minister in April 1982. But the Mujahedin-e-Qalq was broken.

Saddam eventually claimed victory over Khorramshahr and the Iranians admitted they had ‘lost touch’ with their forces still in the city. Henceforth the Iranians would call it Khuninshahr – the ‘City of Blood’. The Iraqis never captured Abadan but Saddam invested tens of thousands of troops in Khorramshahr, and Iraq announced that it would become ‘another Stalingrad’. This was an early version of the ‘mother of all battles’ that Saddam always threatened but never fought. Fifteen months after the war began, the Iraqi army found that its supply lines were stretched too far and made a strategic decision to retreat, building a massive defensive line along its border with Iran and leaving behind it a carpet of destruction. Howeiza, with an Arabic-speaking population of 35,000, had been captured by the Iraqis on 28 September 1980, but when Iranian forces re-entered the empty town in May 1982 they found that it had been levelled; only two of its 1,900 buildings were still standing: a damaged mosque used as an observation post and a house that had been a command post. Even the trees had been uprooted. This is what the Israelis had done to the Syrian city of Kuneitra after the 1967 Middle East war. All of ‘Arabistan’ – Khuzestan – whose liberation had been another of Saddam’s war aims, was simply abandoned. The Iranians were winning. And Western journalists would now be welcomed in Iran as warmly as they once were in Iraq during the fictional ‘whirlwind war’.

Dezful was the first major Iraqi defeat. In a blinding sandstorm, 120,000 Iranian troops, Revolutionary Guards and Basiji (mobilised) volunteers plunged through the desert towards the Iraqi lines in late March 1981, taking 15,000 Iraqi soldiers prisoner, capturing 300 tanks and armoured vehicles and recovering 4,000 square kilometres of Iranian territory. When I reached the scene of the Iranian victory, an almost total silence enveloped the battlefield. There were wild roses beside the roads south of Dezful and giant ants scuttled over the desert floor. Iranian artillerymen sat beneath their anti-aircraft gun canopies, glancing occasionally at the empty sky. The smashed tanks of the Iraqi army’s 3rd Armoured Division, disembowelled by rocket fire, their armour peeled back as if by a can-opener, lay in the mid-afternoon heat, memorials already to what the dismissive Iranians insisted on calling Operation Obvious Victory’.

The silence of the desert indicated both the extent of Iran’s success and the extraordinary fact that with scarcely a shot fired in return, the Iranian army had halted its advance along a geometrically straight line about 65 kilometres in length. It stretched from a ridge of hills north-west of Dezful to the swamps of Sendel, where Iraqi tanks and armoured carriers lay axle-deep in mud, driven there in frustration and fear by Saddam’s retreating forces. The Iranians – at one point scarcely 5 kilometres from the Iraqi border – had effectively declared a halt to offensive action in the Dezful sector, forbidden to advance, on Khomeini’s orders, across the international frontier.

Colonel Beyrouz Suliemanjar of the Iranian 21st Infantry Division was quite specific when he spoke to us, baton in hand, in his dark underground command post beneath a ridge of low hills. According to the Imam’s guidance,’ he stated with military confidence, ‘we are not allowed to cross the border.’ He patted a blue, straggling river on his polythene-covered map. ‘Our troops could cross this last river but our Imam will not let them. Our strategic aim is to push the enemy troops back to their territory. But we will not cross the frontier.’ Whenever the colonel spoke – with apparent modesty – about the surprise attack on 22 March, his junior officers along with a mullah, standing at the back of the dugout, chorused, ‘God is great – Down with America – Down with the Soviet Union.’ No military briefing could ever have been quite like this.

Khomeini had already promised that his armies would not invade neighbouring countries. Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the Majlis speaker, had given his word that Iran ‘harbours no territorial ambition against Iraq’. All Iran wanted, according to Rafsanjani, was the satisfaction of four demands: the expulsion of Iraqi troops from all Iranian territory; ‘punishment of the aggressor’; compensation for war damage; and the return of war refugees to their homes. ‘Punishment of the aggressor’, the Iranians made clear, meant the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – something that neither the Arabs nor the Americans would permit. That the Iranians sought an end for Saddam every bit as bloody as that dealt out to the 4,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed at the battle of Dezful made this prospect even less likely.

The Iranians crammed John Kifner of the New York Times and myself into a Bell/Agusta helicopter gunship along with a bevy of mullahs – the pilots were trained in the United States, of course – and flew us across kilometre after kilometre of wreckage and corpses. A Cyclopean view of carnage, the whup-whup of the chopper blades, the sudden ground-hugging rush between hills and into wadis were so frightening that we placed superhuman faith in the pilot and thus became so confident that we almost enjoyed this flying madness. One pile of dead Iraqi soldiers had already been bulldozed into a mass grave – ‘Aggressor cemeteries’, the signs said above these muddy crypts – but others still lay out in the sun in their hundreds. Many lay where they fell, in dried-up river beds, their decomposition clearly visible from our helicopter. Several times, the pilot hovered over a pile of corpses as the odour of their putrefaction wafted into the machine, overpowering and sickening, the mullahs screeching ‘God is Great’ while Kifner and I held our breath. The dead were distended in the heat, bodies bloating through their shabby uniforms. We could see the Revolutionary Guards next to them, digging more mass graves for Saddam’s soldiers.

When we landed behind what had been the Iraqi front line – they ran like ant-hills, catacombed with dugouts and ammunition boxes – there was almost no sign of incoming shellfire, none of the traditional ‘softening up’ by heavy artillery that conventional armies employ. The Iraqi positions lay untouched, as if the occupants had been taken sleeping from their mattresses at night, leaving their trenches and revetments on display for the ghoulish visitors – us – who follow every war. The Iranians even invited us to enter the dugouts of their enemies. It was easy to see why. They were equipped with air conditioners, television sets, videos and cassette films and magazine photographs of young women. One officer maintained a fridge of beer, another had laid a Persian carpet on the concrete floor. This was Khomeini’s ‘saturnalia’ writ large. Saddam didn’t want his soldiers to revolt – as Khomeini had now repeatedly urged them to – so he gave them every comfort. But how could such a pampered army fight when the Iranians stormed towards them in their tens of thousands?

The Iranians had learned that opposing massed Iraqi armour with poorly maintained Chieftain tanks was suicidal – the wreckage of dozens of Chieftains destroyed in the initial battles outside Dezful more than a year earlier still littered the desert. At Ein Khoosh, I padded round the broken Iraqi tanks for more than an hour. I noticed one whose severed turret had been blown clean off the base of the vehicle, landing with its gun barrel intact beside a small field. Around the turret and the decapitated tank stood a cluster of Iranian troops and peasants, all holding handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses.

The dead crew were unrecognisable, burnt paper creatures from another planet who still lay in their positions, the gunner’s body crushed beneath the turret. A carpet of flies lay upon the scorched armour. An Iranian soldier looked to the sky and ran his hand briefly downwards over his short beard, a gesture of respect to God for the bloody victory that He had granted Iran over its enemies. But the tank itself had not been shelled to destruction – there was not a shell crater in the area, just a jagged hole in the armour near the turret plates. It had been destroyed by a hand-launched anti-tank rocket. In the desert, other Iraqi tanks had suffered an almost identical fate; they had ‘brewed up’ on the battlefield after one point-blank round.

It was clear that the Iranians had used scarcely any heavy artillery or tanks in their six-day battle. They simply poured men into the Iraqi lines and caught their enemies off guard. The Iranians had been experimenting with human-wave attacks. The Iraqi front line had been overwhelmed by thousands of young men holding only rocket-propelled grenades and rifles. ‘The West fought two world wars and gave us their military manuals,’ an Iranian officer smugly remarked to me. ‘Now we are going to write tactical manuals for the West to read.’ We noticed the lack of Iranian corpses in the desert, but could not help seeing from our helicopter small tyre tracks across the sand. Could these be the motorcycles of the boy soldiers we had heard about, the fourteen-year-olds and their brothers who were encouraged to wear the sword of martyrdom around their necks as they drove through the Iraqi minefields to clear them for the infantry, dressed in heavy winter coats so that their shredded bodies would be held together for burial in their home villages? Kifner and I asked to see the youngest survivors of the battle, and the Iranians immediately understood what we wanted.

Under shellfire, they took us to a new Iranian front line of earthen revetments on the Dusallok Heights and we ran down these trenches like any soldiers of the 1914–18 war. The Iran – Iraq conflict was increasingly coming to resemble the great mire of death that entombed so many hundreds of thousands on the Somme and at Verdun. The dugout in which we sought shelter was small and a thick dust hung in the air. There were weapons on the mud and wooden-framed walls – a captured Iraqi machine gun and an automatic rifle – and a few steel helmets piled in a corner. The light from the sandbagged doorway forced its way into the little bunker, defining the features of the boys inside in two-dimensional perspective, an Orpen sketch of impending death at the front. There was no monstrous anger of the guns, only a dull, occasional vibration to indicate that the Iraqis had not abandoned all their artillery when they retreated from Dezful.

There, however, the parallels ended. For the youngest soldier – who welcomed us like an excited schoolboy at the entrance – was only fourteen, his voice unbroken by either fear or manhood. The oldest among them was twenty-one, an Islamic volunteer from Iran’s ‘Reconstruction Crusade’, who expounded the principles of martyrdom to us as the guns boomed distantly away. Martyrdom, I was made to understand, was a much-discussed subject in this dugout because it was much witnessed.

Yes, said the fourteen-year-old, two of his friends from Kerman had died in the battle for Dezful – one his own age and one only a year older. He had cried, he said, when the authorities delayed his journey to the battle front. Cried? I asked. A child cries because he cannot die yet? Were we now to have baby-wars, not wars which killed babies – we had specialised in them throughout the twentieth century – but wars in which babies, boys with unbroken voices, went out to kill? The fourteen-year-old’s comments were incredible and genuine and terrifying at one and the same time, clearly unstaged, since we had only by chance chosen his dugout when we took cover from the shellfire outside.

There was no doubt which of these boy soldiers most clearly understood the ideology of martyrdom inside this claustrophobic bunker of sand and dirt. When I asked about the apparent willingness of Iranians to die in battle, the soldiers nodded towards a very young man, bearded and intense with a rifle in his hand, sitting cross-legged on a dirty rug by the entrance. In the West, he said, it was difficult – perhaps impossible – to understand Iran’s apparent obsession with martyrdom. So did he want to die in this war?

The young man spoke loudly, with almost monotone passion, preaching rather than answering our question. Hassan Qasqari, soldier of the volunteer Reconstruction Crusade, was a man whose faith went beyond such questions. ‘It is impossible for you in the West to understand,’ he said. ‘Martyrdom brings us closer to God. We do not seek death – but we regard death as a journey from one form of life to another, and to be martyred while opposing God’s enemies brings us closer to God. There are two phases to martyrdom: we approach God and we also remove the obstacles that exist between God and the people. Those who create obstacles for God in this world are the enemies of God.’

There was no doubt that he identified the Iraqis with these theologically hostile forces. Indeed, as if on cue from God rather than the army of Saddam Hussein, there was a loud rumble of artillery and Qasqari raised his index finger towards heaven. We waited to hear where the shell would fall, fearing that direct hit that all soldiers prefer not to think about. There was a loud explosion beyond the trench, just beyond the bunker, the vibration shaking the dugout. Then there was silence. I could not imagine this speech in an Iraqi dugout. For that matter, I could not have heard it in any other army. Perhaps a British or American military padre might talk of religion with this imagination. And then I realised that these Iranian boy soldiers were all ‘padres’; they were all priests, all preachers, all believers, all – now I understood the phrase – ‘followers of the Imam’. There was another pulsation of sound outside in the trench.

Qasqari seemed grateful for the shell-burst. ‘Our first duty,’ he proclaimed, ‘is to kill the enemy forces so that God’s order will be everywhere. Becoming a martyr is not a passive thing. Hossein, the third Imam, killed as many of his enemies as possible before he was martyred – so we must try to remain alive.’ If we could not understand this, Qasqari explained, it was because the European Renaissance had done away with religion, no longer paying attention to morality or ethics, concentrating only upon materialism. There was no stanching this monologue, no opportunity to transfuse this belief with arguments about humanity or love. ‘Europe and the West have confined these issues to the cover of churches,’ Qasqari said. ‘Western people are like fish in the water; they can only understand their immediate surroundings. They don’t care about spirituality.’

He bade us goodbye with no ill will, offering Kifner and me oranges as we left his dugout for the dangerous, bright sand outside. How should we say goodbye to them? We looked into their eyes, the eyes of children who were, in their way, already dead. They had started on their journey. The next shell landed a hundred metres behind us as we ran the length of the trench, a thunderous explosion of black and grey smoke that blew part of the roadway into the sky and frightened us, not so much for our peril but because it put martyrdom into a distinct and terrible perspective.

We returned to the jubilant city of Dezful just an hour before Saddam’s revenge came screaming out of the heavens, two massive blasts followed by towering columns of black smoke that spurted into the air from one of the poorest residential areas of the city. It was the tenth ground-to-ground missile attack on Dezful since the start of the war, and by the time I reached the impact point the images were as appalling as they were banal. A baby cut in half, a woman’s head in the rubble of her home, a series of arms and legs laid out beside each other next to a series of torsos in the hope that someone might be able to fit the correct limbs onto the right bodies. Hundreds of men dug through the crushed yellow bricks with their hands. Most Iranian homes in Dezful were built of these cheap, thin bricks, without concrete or structural support. They were made for destruction.

By early 1982, the Iranians were threatening to move across the border. Khomeini’s promises of non-aggression – that Iran would not violate Iraqi national territory – had given way to a new pragmatism. If by entering Iraq the war could be ended, then Iranian troops would do what Iraq had done in September 1980 and cross the international frontier. Khomeini spoke repeatedly of the suffering of Iraqi Shiites, releasing their century-old political frustrations. Would he any longer be satisfied with just the head of Saddam? He would surely want an Iraqi regime that was loyal to him, a vassal state of Iran, or so the Arabs began to fear.

It was not hard to fathom what this might involve. The largest community in Lebanon – though not a majority – was Shia. Syria was effectively ruled by the Alawites, a Shia sect in all but name. If Iraq was to fall to its own majority Shiites, there could be a Shia state from the Mediterranean to the borders of Afghanistan, with both oil and the waters of the two great rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates. With both Iranian and Iraqi oil, Khomeini could undercut OPEC and control world prices, let alone dominate the waters of the Gulf and the Arab peninsula. That, at least, was the nightmare of the Arabs and the Americans, one that Saddam was happy to promote. Now he was portraying himself as the defender of the Arab lands, his war with Iran the new Qadisiya, the battle in ad 636 in which the Arab leader Saad bin Ali Waqqas vanquished the far larger Persian army of Rustum. In Baghdad’s official discourse, the Iranians were now the ‘pagan Zoroastrians’.

In Basra, the Iraqis had displayed their seventeen Iranian POWs to us. Now the Iranians took us to meet their Iraqi POWs – all 15,000 of them. At Parandak prisoner-of-war camp in northern Iran, they sat cross-legged on a windy parade ground in lines a quarter of a mile deep, many of them with well-trimmed beards, all of them wearing around their necks a coloured portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. Their eyes moved in a way that only captivity can control, studying each other nervously and then staring at their prison guards, awed by the enormity of their surrender. When Iran’s army chief of staff, grey-haired and bespectacled, told them of Iraq’s iniquities, the Iraqis roared back: ‘Down with Saddam Hussein.’

This was not brainwashing in the normally accepted use of the word. It was scarcely indoctrination. But there could be no doubt what the Iranians were trying to do at Parandak: to make Saddam’s own soldiers more dangerous to his Baathist regime than the Iranian army that was fighting its way towards the Iraqi frontier. When Khomeini’s name was mentioned, it echoed over the massive parade ground, repeated by thousands of Iraqi soldiers who then knelt in prayer and homage to the Islamic faith that overthrew the Shah.

True, there were some dissidents among the Iraqi troops, men who still retained their political as well as their Islamic identity. At the far back of one line of older prisoners – captives now for more than a year – an Iraqi soldier shouted ‘Saddam is a very good man’, and a few of his comrades nodded in agreement. ‘The man did not say “Saddam” – he was greeting you with the word “Salaam”,’ explained an Iranian official with the confidence of mendacity. Several hundred prisoners refused to pray. ‘They had probably not washed before prayers,’ said the same official. ‘They had not been purified.’

From his residence in north Tehran, Khomeini had given specific instructions that Iraqi prisoners-of-war were to be well treated and given all the rights of captive soldiers. The POWs were visited by the International Red Cross, but they were also being lectured in Arabic each day by Iranian officers who explained to them that the United States, France, Britain and other Western nations had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1980 attack on Iran. There were, naturally, no contradictions from their vast audience. When the Iraqi prisoners knelt to pray, they took Khomeini’s portrait from around their necks, placed it upon the ground in front of them and rested their heads upon it. In the barracks, these men – including Iraqi paratroopers who arrived from the war front on the very day of our visit, still wearing their blue berets – were to be given weekly lessons by mullahs on the meaning of Islam. They were already receiving the daily Tehran newspaper Kayhan, specially printed in Arabic for their convenience.

When these prisoners eventually returned to Iraq, some of them, perhaps a goodly proportion, must have carried these lessons with them, an incubus for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – or an inspiration to oppose any other army that dared to take control of their country in the years to come. We were not told how many of these young Iraqi soldiers were Shiites and what percentage were Sunni.

The Iranians would not permit us to speak to the prisoners, although they produced more than a hundred captives – or ‘guests’ as they cloyingly called them – from Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Nigeria and Somalia, who had been taken among the Iraqi prisoners. A bearded Lebanese librarian from Zahle – a Christian town – claimed to have been forced to enlist while working in Baghdad. A Somali, Fawzi Hijazi, frightened but smiling, pleaded with me to tell his embassy of his presence. He had been a scholarship student at Baghdad University, he said, when he had been press-ganged into the Iraqi army. He had not been visited by the Red Cross. But at this point, an Iranian guard ordered him to stop speaking.

Now on our chaperoned visits to the Iranian front, we could see the country’s newly established self-confidence made manifest. The Revolutionary Guard Corps had become the spine of Iran’s military power, drawing on a huge pool of rural volunteers, the Basiji, the schoolboys and the elderly, the unemployed, even the sick. An official history of the Guard Corps was published in booklet form in Tehran during the war, claiming that it was ‘similar in many respects to the combatants of early Islam, in the days of the Holy Prophet … Among the important and prevalent common points of the two is … life according to an Islamic brotherhood; the story of the travellers and the followers. The travellers … migrated to the war fronts, and the followers … support their families in the cities during the war.’ An ‘important and popular activity’ of the Guards, the pamphlet said, was ‘the military, political, and ideological training of the Baseej [sic], in which the limitless ocean of our people are organised.’*

Both the ‘Guards’ and the ‘travellers’ were now in convoy towards the borders of Iraq, singing and chanting their desire to ‘liberate’ the Iraqi Shia holy cities. One trail of trucks, jeeps and tanks 5 kilometres long, which I overtook near the Iranian city of Susangerd, was loaded down with thousands of Basiji, almost all of them waving black and green banners with ‘Najaf’ and ‘Kufa’ written across them. Jang ta pirouzi, they shouted at me when I took their pictures. ‘War until victory.’ Another convoy was led by a tank with a placard tied above its gun muzzle, announcing that it was the ‘Kerbala Caravan’. These men, most of them, were going to their deaths in Iraq but they were doing so with an insouciance, a light-heartedness – a kind of brazen stubbornness – that was breathtaking.

I suppose the soldiers of the 1914 war had something of the same gaiety about them, the British who thought the war would be over by Christmas, the French who painted ‘Berlin’ on the side of their troop trains, the Germans who painted ‘Paris’ on theirs. In Frederic Manning’s semi-autobiographical Her Privates We, a unit of British soldiers marching through a French village at night during the First World War awakes the inhabitants:

… doors suddenly opened and light fell through the doorways, and voices asked them where they were going.

‘Somme! Somme!’ they shouted, as though it were a challenge.

‘Ah, no bon!’ came the kindly, pitying voices in reply … And that was an enemy to them, that little touch of gentleness and kindliness; it struck them with a hand harsher that death’s, and they sang louder, seeing only the white road before them …

No wonder that boy soldier on the Dusallok Heights had lectured me about spirituality and materialism. There comes a point, I suspect, in a soldier’s life when the inevitability of death becomes more pressing than the possibility of life.

Now the Arab leaders who had expressed such confidence in Saddam were fearful that he might lose the war they had so cheerfully supported. King Hussein of Jordan arrived hurriedly in Baghdad for talks with Saddam, speaking boldly of standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Iraqis but privately expressing his fears that their army would soon fall back even further, allowing the Iranians to enter Iraq. The Kuwaitis and Saudis bankrolled Saddam’s new armoury. Egyptian-made heavy artillery shells were sent by air to Iraq from Cairo, overflying Saudi airspace.*

But the Arabs were not alone in their fears that Iraq might collapse. The United States had been furnishing Iraq with satellite imagery of the Iranian battle lines since the first days of the war, and a steady stream of unofficial US ‘advisers’ had been visiting Baghdad ever since. When Mohamed Salam, a Lebanese staff correspondent for the American Associated Press news agency in Beirut, was posted to Iraq in 1983, ‘Donald Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to meet Saddam and I was treated like a king, like all the people connected to the Americans. The Iraqis couldn’t be more cooperative.’ At Muthanna, the old military airport in the centre of Baghdad, the Iraqis held an arms fair and ‘everyone was there, from the British to the South Koreans,’ he recalled. Around May 1985, a US military delegation travelled to Baghdad with twelve ranking officers, according to Salam. ‘The embassy wouldn’t talk about it. They stayed for three days and they came on a special Pan Am plane.’

At the time, Salam – we had both covered the Lebanese civil war together – could not travel unaccompanied in Iraq, but he told me in Baghdad at the time how the Americans were concentrating on Iraq. ‘The US is beginning to regard Iraq as its main card in the area … So far, Saddam has been successful in suppressing the communists, the Shiites and all the opposition. That suits the Americans quite well. King Hussein is useful in promoting Iraq to the West. But the US would not want Iraq to be a post-war regional power. Nothing is clear at the embassy here. There’s a USIS guy called Jim Bulloch, the deputy chief of mission is Ted Katouf and Dean Strong is their military affairs man. But they’re cut out of the loop of what the Pentagon is doing.’ Salam recalls now that he ‘saw satellite photos of the Iranian forces – I saw these pictures at the US interests section in Baghdad in 1984.’

Iraq’s 15 million population was now facing Iran’s 35 million, outnumbered on the battlefield itself almost five to one. Saddam’s army could not fight against these odds in open battle – Dezful was proof of that – so a new and merciless logic was adopted in Baghdad. Iraqi troops would dig in along the front lines, embed their thousands of tanks in the earth and use them as mass artillery to wipe out the human-wave attacks. But in 1984, through the swamps of Howeiza and the rivers that run through the land of the Marsh Arabs, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards led an attack – along dykes and using power-boats – deep into Iraq. At one point – the Iraqis only admitted this eight months later but Salam was to see the evidence with his own eyes – the Iranians pushed armour across the main eastern Baghdad – Basra highway at Qurnah. They had traversed the Tigris river and began destroying Iraqi tanks by firing at them from the highway bridges.

Baghdad’s response was as successful as it was devastatingly cruel. Because he was one of the only journalists to witness the result, the account of what happened next belongs to Mohamed Salam:

There had been a major battle at Azair, Sada and Baida in the Howeiza marshes south of Amara – the Iraqi commander was Major General Hisham Sabah al-Fakhry. He got the Iranians into a pocket in the marshes then the Iraqis built a big dam to the east of them. It was still early ’84. Al-Fakhry brought huge tanker trucks down and pumped fuel into the marshland and then fired incendiary shells into the water and started the biggest fire I’ve seen in my life. He burned and killed everything, the whole environment.

Then when the fire was out, he brought electrical generators and put huge cables into the marsh waters and electrified everything so that there was no source of life left in that place. When I was there, I needed to take a leak and walked over to an embankment and one of the soldiers said ‘Don’t piss in the water’ and pointed at the cables. He asked me: ‘Do you want to be a piss-martyr?’

Gutted bodies were floating everywhere, even women and children were among them – marsh people, people who knew what a toad was, people who’d lived among ducks and buffaloes and fished with spears, this civilisation was being wiped out. I saw about thirty women and children, all gutted open like fish, and many, many Iranians. The innocent had to die along with the living.

But petrol and electricity alone could not annihilate the invaders. In the battle of Qadisiya, Sardar and his fellow Arabs were astonished to see Rustum’s army advancing towards them on massive animals they had never before seen, beasts six times the size of a horse with vast bones protruding from each side of their noses, their feet so great that they sank into the sand. Sardar told his archers to fire their arrows – and his soldiers to throw their spears – into the eyes of the elephants; to this day, the Iraqis believe that this was the key to their victory. So what was to be Saddam’s weapon against the frightening hordes now moving into Iraq? What spear was poisoned enough for the ‘racist Persians’?

I am on an Iranian military hospital train, trundling through the night-time desert north of Ahwaz, returning from another trip to the front, eating chicken and rice and drinking warm cola in the restaurant car. It is 1983. Rumsfeld is shaking hands with Saddam, asking to reopen the US embassy. The train is slow, its un-oiled bogies shrieking on the curves, making heavy weather of the gradients, bumping over the unmaintained permanent way. Occasionally, a light moves slowly past the window, a distant village, no doubt with its own crop of martyrs. The man from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance is asleep, knowing that I cannot stray from a moving train.

But I cannot sleep and so I walk through the carriages. It is cold and the windows are shut against the night breeze off the desert but there is a strange, faint smell. At first I think it must be a deodorant, something to ameliorate the shitty stench of the blocked toilets at the end of each car. Then I pull open the connecting door of the next carriage and they are sitting in there by the dozen, the young soldiers and Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic, coughing softly into tissues and gauze cloths. Some are in open carriages, others crammed into compartments, all slowly dribbling blood and mucus from their mouths and noses. One young man – I thought he could be no more than eighteen – was holding the gauze against his face. It was already stained pink and yellow but in his left hand he was holding a Koran with a bright blue cover. From time to time, he laid the gauze on his knee and coughed and a new streak of red would run in a line from his nose and he would turn the page of the Koran with his right hand and put the cloth back to his face to sop up the new blood and then pick up the Koran to read again.

Carriage after carriage of them, they sit without talking, uncomplaining, accepting – so it seems – what has happened to them. Only after ten or fifteen minutes do I realise that the smell that bothered me is not deodorant. It’s a kind of sick perfume and the men are coughing it out of their lungs. I go to the windows of the carriages and start pulling them down, filling the corridors with the sharp night air. I don’t want to breathe into my lungs what is coming out of theirs. I don’t want to be gassed like them. I go on opening the windows but the soldiers don’t look at me. They are enduring a private hell into which, thank God, I cannot be admitted.

Iran’s own official history of the war says that Iraq first used chemical weapons against its combatants on 13 January 1981, killing seven Iranians. In 1982, the Iranians recorded eleven chemical attacks by Saddam’s army, in 1983, thirty-one. Dr Naser Jalali, a dermatologist and head of the dermatology ward at the Loqman al-Doleh Hospital in Tehran, examined a number of soldiers brought to the Iranian capital after a chemical weapons attack against Piranshahr and Tamarchin on 9 August 1983. ‘The injuries of those involved have been caused by exposure to toxic agents which have been released in the atmosphere in the forms of gas, liquid or powder,’ he said. ‘… the weapons of delivery had released a toxic chemical called “Nitrogen mustard” or “mustard gas”.’ At around 9.30 in the evening of 22 October 1983, between Marivan and Sultan, an Iraqi artillery shell exploded on the Iranian lines, giving off a smell of kerosene. Next morning, eleven Iranians – soldiers, Revolutionary Guards and Basiji – were afflicted with nausea, vomiting, burning of the eyes, blurred vision, itching, suffocation and coughing. Taken to a medical centre, they were found to have blisters all over their skin. Between 21 and 28 October, three Kurdish villages sympathetic to Iran came under chemical attack; an Iranian medical report stated that ‘many villagers of this Kurdish district, including women and children, were severely injured’. Between 28 December 1980 and 20 March 1984, the Iranian official history of the war lists sixty-three separate gas attacks by the Iraqis.

Yet the world did not react. Not since the gas attacks of the 1914–18 war had chemical weapons been used on such a scale, yet so great was the fear and loathing of Iran, so total the loyalty of the Arabs to Saddam Hussein, so absolute their support for him in preventing the spread of Khomeini’s revolution, that they were silent. The first reports of Saddam’s use of gas were never printed in the Arab press. In Europe and America, they were regarded as little more than Iranian propaganda, and America’s response was minimal. Only in March 1984 did Washington condemn Iraq for using poison gas – but even that criticism was mild. It was 1985 before the New York Times reported that ‘United States intelligence analysts have concluded that Iraq used chemical weapons in repelling Iran’s latest offensive in the Gulf War.’ True to that paper’s gutless style, even this report had to be attributed to those favourite sources of all American reporters – ’Administration officials’.

Preliminary evidence suggested that the Iraqis had been using bis(2-chloroethyl)sulphide, a blistering agent that damages all human tissues. The New York Times report continued in the same cowardly fashion: ‘Iran flew purported [sic] victims of the attacks to Austria and West Germany, where some doctors were quoted as saying [sic] the wounded showed signs of having been under attack by mustard gas …’ Four days earlier, US Secretary of State George Shultz had met the Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in Washington, but uttered no criticism of the chemical weapons attack. Despite the mass of evidence now available, my own paper, The Times of London, was still able to carry a photograph in March 1985 of an Iranian soldier in a London hospital covered in terrible skin blisters, with a caption saying only that he was suffering from ‘burns which Iran says [sic] were caused by chemical weapons’.

Mohamed Salam was again one of the few correspondents to obtain first-hand, almost lethal evidence of this latest poison gas attack. Again, he should tell his own awesome story:

I was invited with Zoran Dogramadjev of the Yugoslav Tanjug news agency to go down to Basra where there had been a major offensive by the Iranians. The 3rd Army Corps under Major General Maher Abdul Rashed was faced by this huge attack, totally overwhelming, so the only way of handling it was by mass killing. Rashed had crushed the Iranian offensive. There had been no flooding, no fire, no electricity. Zoran and I wandered around the desert where all this had happened and we came across hundreds and hundreds of dead Iranians, literally thousands of them, all dead. They were still holding their rifles – just think, thousands of them dead in their trenches, all still holding their Kalashnikovs. They had their little sacks of food supplies still on their backs – all the Iranians carried these little sacks of food. There were no bullet holes, no wounds – they were just dead.

We started counting – we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting. We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again. All the dead Iranians had blood on their mouths and beards, and their pants below the waist were all wet. They had all urinated in their pants. The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination of nerve gas and mustard gas. The nerve gas would paralyse their bodies so they would all piss in their pants and the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That’s why they spat blood.

We described all this in our reports, but we didn’t know what it was. We asked the Iraqi soldiers. They had been eating – tomatoes and cucumbers – but when they weren’t eating, they would wear gas masks. From that visit, I developed an infection in my sinus and went to see a friend of mine in Baghdad who was a doctor. He said: ‘This is what we call “front line infection” – I would advise you to leave Iraq immediately.’ I went to see Eileen and Gerry [Eileen Powell and Gerry Labelle, a husband-and-wife AP team in Nicosia] and they put me into the Cyprus Clinic. They gave me antibiotic injections.

But what I saw was a killing machine. Zoran and I, in the end, we thought we had seen about 4,700 Iranian bodies. You know, the things that happened in that war, you would need centuries to write about it.

Every evening at 6 p.m., the Iraqis would broadcast their official war communiqué for the day. I remember word for word what it said in early 1985: The waves of insects are attacking the eastern gates of the Arab Nation. But we have the pesticides to wipe them out.

So where did the ‘pesticides’ come from? Partly from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994 the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs of the US Senate produced a report, United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War. The ‘Persian Gulf War’ referred to the 1991 war and liberation of Kuwait, but its investigations went all the way back to the Iran – Iraq war – which was itself originally called the ‘Gulf War’ by the West until we participated in a Gulf war of our own and purloined the name. The committee’s report informed the US Congress about government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis – which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli (E. coli). The same report stated that ‘the United States provided the Government of Iraq with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile-system programs, including … chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans), chemical warfare filling equipment …’

In the summer of 1985, the Iraqi information ministry took Salam close to the Syrian border, where there was a quarry with the name Al-Qaem-ukashat. The government ‘minders’ told Salam it produced fertilisers. ‘There was an American engineer there from Texas,’ he was to recall.

I interviewed him and he said they were making fertilisers there. Actually, they were producing the mustard and nerve gas there. Many people in Iraq knew about this. There was a kind of artificial town next to it with a restaurant and chalets. The place was bombed by the Americans in the 1991 war. The regime people stayed there for a while immediately after the American invasion in 2003. But at the time they wanted us to write about this wonderful fertiliser plant. They laid on this big banquet with lots of wine and whiskey.

Hamid Kurdi Alipoor lies on his hospital bed in a semi-stupor, wheezing through cracked lips, his burned forehead artificially creased by his frown of pain. The nurse beside him – a girl in dark-framed spectacles wearing an equally black chador – pours water gently into his mouth from a plastic mug. The girl smiles at the young man as if she does not notice the dark skin hanging from his face or the livid pink burns around his throat. Something terrible has happened to him, but the Iranian doctors insist that I ask him to tell me his own story.

It is the same as that of many of the other 199 Iranian soldiers and Revolutionary Guards lying in torment in their beds in the Labbafinejad Medical Centre in Tehran. It is now February 1986. ‘I was in a shelter on the Iranian side of the Arvand [Shatt al-Arab] river,’ Alipoor says. ‘When the shell landed, I did not realise the Iraqis were firing gas. I could not see the chemical so I did not put my gas mask on. Then it was too late.’ He relaxes for a few moments, breathing heavily, the nurse holding out the cup to him again. How old is he? I ask. He looks at the girl when he replies. ‘Nineteen,’ he says.

Some of the other patients watch him from their beds, others are lying with their eyes congealed shut, a bowl of damp, pink swabs beside their pillows. They do not talk. All you can hear is the sound of harsh, laboured breathing. ‘The lungs are the real problem – we send them home when they improve and we can deal with the blood infections.’ Dr Faizullah Yazdani, one of the senior medical staff at the hospital, is a small man with huge eyebrows who radiates cheerfulness among all the pain. ‘But they come back to us with lung problems. They cough a lot. And some have been attacked with nerve gas as well as mustard gas.’

The Iranians very publicly flew some of their chemical warfare victims to London, Stockholm and Vienna for treatment, but Dr Yazdani’s wards are overflowing with patients. So far, only seven of the 400 he has received have died. He still hopes to send 200 home, although many will never recover. According to the doctors, the Iraqis use mustard and tabun gas and nerve gas on the Iranians; they renewed their chemical attacks on a large scale on 13 February. When the victims are badly affected, they drown in their own saliva. Those who survive are brought choking to the long hospital trains, successors to the train of gas victims on which I travelled three years earlier. Now these trains are running from Ahwaz every twenty-four hours. ‘You cannot see the gas so it’s often a terrible surprise,’ Dr Yazdani says. ‘The soldier will smell rotten vegetables then his eyes start to burn, he suffers headaches, he has difficulty seeing, then he starts crying, he coughs and wheezes.’

The pain is physically in the ward as the doctor takes me round bed after bed of blistered young men, their strangely contorted bodies swathed in yellow bandages. The blisters sometimes cover their bodies. They are yellow and pink, horribly soft and sometimes as large as basketballs, often breeding new bubbles of fragile, wobbling skin on top of them. In bed sixteen, I come across a doctor who is also a patient, a 34-year-old dermatologist from Tabriz called Hassan Sinafa who was working in a military hospital near the Shatt al-Arab on 13 January when a gas shell burst only 20 metres from him. I can tell he must have been wearing his gas mask at the time because it has left an area of unblemished skin tissue around his eyes and mouth, producing a cynical dark line around his forehead and cheeks. ‘There was nothing I could do,’ he says slowly, dosed in morphine. ‘I had my anti-gas clothes on but the shell was too close for them to protect me. I felt the burns and I knew what was happening.’

He smiles. He had been brought safely to Tehran but it was two days before he gave the doctors permission to telephone his wife, at home in Tabriz with his twenty-month-old daughter. What did she say when she arrived at his hospital bed and saw him? I ask. ‘She has not come,’ he replies. ‘I told her not to – I don’t want her or our baby seeing me like this.’

Throughout all these years, the Americans also continued to supply the Iraqis with battlefield intelligence so that they could prepare themselves for the mass Iranian attacks and defend themselves – as the US government knew – with poison gas. More than sixty officers of the US Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb-damage assessments. After the Iraqis retook the Fao peninsula from the Iranians in early 1988, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer, toured the battlefield with Iraqi officers and reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to secure their victory. The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Colonel Walter Lang, later told the New York Times that ‘the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern.’

The Iraqis had used gas to recapture Fao on 19 April 1988 – to the virtual indifference of the world. Just a month earlier, on 17 and 18 March, during Operation Anfal – anfal means ‘booty’ – the Iraqis had taken a terrible revenge on the Kurdish town of Halabja for allegedly collaborating with the Iranians during Iran’s brief Val Fajr 10 offensive in the area. For two days, Iraqi jets dropped gas, made from a hydrogen cyanide compound developed with the help of a German company, onto Halabja, killing more than 5,000 civilians. In Washington, the CIA – still supporting Saddam – sent out a deceitful briefing note to US embassies in the Middle East, stating that the gas might have been dropped by the Iranians.

Humanitarian organisations would, much later, draw their own frightening conclusions from this lie. ‘By any measure, the American record on Halabja is shameful,’ Joost Hilterman of Human Rights Watch was to say fifteen years afterwards. The US State Department ‘even instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.’ In the United States, Halabja was mentioned in 188 news stories in 1988, but in only twenty in 1989. By 2000, Halabja featured in only ten news stories in the American media. But then it was reheated by the George W. Bush administration as part justification for his forthcoming invasion of Iraq. Halabja was remembered by journalists 145 times in February 2003 alone. In common with Tony Blair and many other Western leaders, Bush repeatedly emphasised that Saddam ‘is a person who has gassed his own people’.

The possessive ‘his own’ was important. It emphasised the heinous nature of the crime – the victims were not just his enemies but his fellow Iraqis, though that might not be the Kurds’ point of view. But it also served to distance and to diminish Saddam’s earlier identical but numerically far greater crimes against the Iranians, who had lost many more of their citizens to the very same gases used at Halabja. And since we, the West, were servicing Saddam at the time of these war crimes – and still were at the time of Halabja – the gassing of the Kurds had to be set aside as a unique example of his beastliness.

More than a decade after Halabja, the United States accused Iran of trying to acquire chemical weapons, and it was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, in charge of Iranian forces during a large part of the Iran – Iraq war, who – as outgoing president of Iran – formally denied the American claim. ‘We have had such a malicious experience of the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis in the Imposed War that we would never wish to use or possess them,’ he said with unusual emotion in 1997. ‘At the time I was the sole commander of Iranian forces in the war. When we captured the Howeiza area, I witnessed such terrible scenes that I could never forget them. The people of Halabja cooperated with us after victory … Saddam had got away with using it on our people so he resorted to advanced chemical weapons which he then received from Germany and used these against those [Kurdish] people. These chemical substances were used and the people were harvested down on the ground. When you could smell this substance no one could survive. I saw terrible scenes there [in Halabja] and I hope this scene could never be repeated in any country.’

I am sitting on the floor of a tent in northern Iraq on 28 May 1991. Halabja was gassed three years ago. Around us, thousands of Kurdish refugees, victims of Saddam’s latest ethnic cleansing – the repression that followed our instigation and then betrayal of the post-Kuwait Iraqi uprising – are languishing amid squalor and disease under US military protection. The hillside is cold and streaks of snow still lie in the hollows around the tents, the air frozen, but thick with the thump of American Chinook helicopters transporting food and blankets to the refugee camp.

Zulaika Mustafa Ahmed is twenty-two and wears a white embroidered dress, a long skirt and a scarf over her dark hair. Her family are victims of the Anfal campaign during which perhaps 10,000 Kurds were murdered. Zulaika, married at the age of fourteen, was with her six children and her husband Moussa Issa Haji when the Anfal started and, like so many thousands of Kurds, they were obeying government instructions to report to their nearest town. ‘We were approaching Dahuk in our van when we were stopped by Iraqi soldiers,’ she says. ‘We were taken along with hundreds of other Kurds to Dahuk fort. They took us to the second floor where I saw Moussa being beaten with concrete blocks. I saw myself ten men who died after they were beaten with the blocks – I was standing only 6 metres away. Then they took them all away. I managed to speak to Moussa. I said to him: “Don’t be afraid, you are a man.” He answered: “Please, you have to take care of my children. If they kill me, it doesn’t matter.” What was I to say? They took him away and I have never seen him again. Sometimes I think I will never see my husband again – yes, sometimes I think this.’

Zulaika returned to her village of Baharqa. ‘It was some days later. We were used to the aircraft. I had left the village early with three of my children – the other three were with their grandfather – to go to the fields but I saw the two aircraft come low over Baharqa and drop bombs. There was a lot of smoke and it drifted towards us on the wind. It covered the land. We were hiding ourselves behind a small hill but we saw it coming towards us. The smoke had a nice smell, like medicine. Then my smallest children, Sarbas and Salah, started to cry. They started having diarrhoea but it didn’t stop. I couldn’t help them so I took them to the hospital in Irbil. The doctors were afraid. They gave them injections and medicine but it was no use. Both of them started to go black, as black as asphalt, and they both died nine or ten days later. The older child, when he died, he was vomiting his lungs. I buried them in the village cemetery. A lot of children died there. Now, if I go back there, I would not be able to find them.’

Zulaika says she will never marry again. How does she see her life, we ask. ‘I am living just to raise my children, that is all. In my dreams, I dream about my children who died. In one dream, I dream that my husband says to me: “You didn’t take care of the children as you promised. This is the reason why they died.”’

For some of the soldiers in the Iraqi army – the perpetrators, not the victims – the memory of those chemical attacks will also remain with them for ever. It is now July 2004, almost a quarter of a century after the start of the Iran – Iraq war, sixteen years since the Anfal operation against the Kurds. Under the occupation of the Americans and its puppet government, Baghdad has become the most dangerous city on earth. Suicide bombings, executions, kidnappings are the heartbeats of the city. But I arrive at the little market garden behind Palestine Street to buy a fir tree for the balcony of my hotel room, something to keep me sane in the broiling heat of midsummer Iraq. The garden is a place of flowers and undergrowth and pot plants and it is ruled over by Jawad, a 44-year-old with a sharp scar on his forehead, but who knows he lives in jenah. Jenah means ‘heaven’.

But Jawad, I quickly discover, has also lived in hell. When I ask about the scar, he tells me that a piece of Iranian shell cut into his head during a bombardment on the Penjwin mountain during the Iran – Iraq war. He was a radio operator and spent thirteen years in the Iraqi army. ‘I lost almost all my friends,’ he says, rubbing his hands together in a false gesture of dismissal. ‘What happened to us was quite terrible. And what happened to me. I can’t remember the name of one of my dead friends – because the shell fragment in my head took my memory away.’

Not all his memory, however. Jawad moves silently through the trees, only the trickle of water from a fountain and the back-cloth sound of Baghdad’s traffic disturbing his journey. A white ficus tree, perhaps? Very good for withstanding the heat. A green ficus tree? The only fir trees for sale are so deeply rooted, they would take an hour to dig up. All his life, Jawad has worked in the market garden, along with his father. The heat accentuates the smells so that the smallest rose is perfumed, white flowers turning into blossom.

Yes, Jawad survived the entire Iran – Iraq war. He loathed Saddam, he says, yet he fought for him for eight terrible years. ‘I was at Ahwaz, I was at the Karun river, in the Shamiran mountains, in the Anfal operation, at Penjwin. I was a conscript and then a reservist but I refused to become an officer in case I had to stay in the army longer.’ In my notebook, I put a line beside the word Anfal. Jawad had crossed the Iranian frontier in 1980. He had entered Khorramshahr and then, when Khorramshahr was surrounded, he had retreated out of the city at night.

‘I first noticed the gas being used east of Amara. Our artillery were firing gas shells into the Iranians. I couldn’t smell the gas but I soaked my scarf in water and held it to my nose. Because I was a radio operator, I had a lot of equipment round me that protected me from the gas. These were black days and we suffered a lot. After I was wounded, they insisted on sending me back to the front. I had a 35 per cent disability and still they sent me back to the war.’

Jawad manoeuvres a dark green potted plant onto the path, waving his hands at the birds that spring from the undergrowth. If heaven really is a warm and comfortable garden, then Jawad lives in it. And the Anfal operation? I ask. Did he see the effects with his own eyes? Jawad raises his hands in an imploring, helpless way.

‘We saw everything. Would you believe this, that when they started using the gas strange things happened? I saw the birds falling from the sky. I saw the little beans on the trees suddenly turning black. The leaves decayed in front of our eyes. I kept the towel round my face, just as I did near Amara.’

And bodies?

‘Yes, so many of them. All civilians. They lay around the villages and on the hillsides in clumps, as if streets of people had gathered at the same place to die. Some were scattered, but there were many women who held children in their arms and they all lay there dead. What could I do? I could say nothing. We soldiers were too frightened even to discuss it. We just saw so many dead. And we were silent.’

CHAPTER SEVEN
‘War against War’ and the Fast Train to Paradise

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

WILFRED OWEN, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’

In the hush of the curtained front room, the two former Iraqi pilots and the man who had been second-in-command of Saddam Hussein’s air force sat in front of me in silence. The pilots spoke the heavily accented French they had learned while training on their Mirage fighter-bombers at Cherbourg. I had asked them about the USS Stark. But why now? they wanted to know. Why, sixteen years after an Iraqi Mirage had fired two missiles at the American guided-missile frigate in the Gulf – incinerating thirty-seven of its crew – did I want to know why they had almost sunk the ship? Why not discuss the growing anarchy in Baghdad under American occupation? That very morning in 2003, a car bomb had exploded outside the gates of the American headquarters at Saddam’s former Republican palace.

All three men feared that I was a spy, that I was trying to identify the pilot who killed the young American seamen more than a decade and a half ago. Why else would I ask if he was still alive? I told them I would never betray any human being, that I was a journalist – not an intelligence officer – that I would no more hand them over to the Americans than I would hand Americans over to them. I knew that senior Iraqi air force personnel had all remained in contact with each other after the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, that they now constituted an air force without aircraft. But I also suspected, correctly, that many of these men were now involved in the anti-occupation insurgency. I tried to explain that this was the one Iraqi air force mission that changed the Middle East. Their colleague’s actions on 17 May 1987 had – through one of those grotesque double standards which only Washington seemed able to produce – brought Iran to its knees.

The ex-general looked at me for almost another minute without speaking. Then he gave what was almost a mundane operational report. ‘I saw him take off from Shaiba,’ he said. ‘It was a routine flight over the Gulf to hunt for Iranian ships. There was a “forbidden zone” from which we had excluded all ships and the Stark was in that zone. The pilot didn’t know the Americans were there. He knew he had to destroy any shipping in the area – that’s all. He saw a big ship on his radar screen and he fired his two missiles at it. He assumed it was Iranian. He never saw the actual target. We never make visual contact – that’s how the system works. Then he turned to come home.’

Seventy kilometres north-east of Qatar, the American Perry-class frigate’s radar had picked up the Iraqi Mirage F-1 as it flew low and slowly down the coast of Saudi Arabia towards Bahrain. But Captain Glenn Brindel and his crew were used to Iraqi jets flying over them. Iraqi aircraft, he was to tell journalists later, were ‘deemed friendly’. The green speck on the radar did not represent a threat. Because the Stark held a course almost directly towards the Iraqi Mirage, the frigate’s superstructure blocked the anti-missile sensors and the Phalanx anti-missile battery which had the ability to pick up an incoming missile and fire automatically. But the system had anyway been switched to manual to avoid shooting down the wrong aircraft in the crowded Gulf. The captain would later claim that the detection systems were also malfunctioning. At 10.09 p.m., Brindel ordered a radio message to be sent to the pilot: ‘Unknown aircraft, this is US navy warship on your 078 for twelve miles. Request you identify yourself.’ There was no reply. A minute later, the aircraft banked towards the north and rose to 5,000 feet. The crew in the Stark’s ‘combat information centre’ failed to identify the two Exocet missiles with their 352-lb warheads which had detached themselves from the Mirage and were now racing towards them.

It was a lookout who first saw the rocket skimming the surface of the water towards the ship and telephoned Brindel. Two seconds later, the Exocet punched into the Stark at 600 mph and exploded in the forward crew’s quarters, cremating several of the American seamen as they lay in their bunks. The second missile exploded thirty seconds later. More than a sixth of the frigate’s crew were to die in less than a minute after the first Exocet spewed 120 pounds of burning solid missile fuel into crew sleeping quarters. The warhead failed to explode but smashed through seven bulkheads before coming to rest against the starboard hull plating. The second missile sent a fireball through the crew’s quarters, its 3,500-degree burning fuel killing most of the thirty-seven victims, turning many of them to ash. The Stark filled with thick, toxic smoke, the temperature even in neighbouring compartments soaring to 1,500 degrees. Bunks, computers and bulkheads melted in the heat. One petty officer spent thirteen hours in a darkened magazine room spraying water on 36 missiles as a 2,000-degree fire raged only a bulkhead away. The ship burned for two days. Even after she was taken in tow, the fires kept reigniting.

Listing and flying the American flag at half-staff, the Stark was pulled towards Bahrain. Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger called the attack ‘indiscriminate’. The Iraqi pilot, he said, ‘apparently didn’t care enough to find out what ship he was shooting at’. But there America’s criticism of Iraq ended. Even before Saddam Hussein made his own unprecedented and contrite expression of remorse – and long before the US navy had begun its own three investigations into the attack – President Ronald Reagan decided to blame Iran. ‘We’ve never considered them hostile at all,’ he said of the Iraqis. ‘They’ve never been in any way hostile.’ The Gulf was an international waterway. ‘No country there has a right to try and close it off and take it for itself. And the villain in the piece is Iran. And so they’re delighted with what has just happened.’*

Listening to Reagan’s words, one might have thought that Iran had started the war by invading Iraq in 1980, that Iran had been using chemical weapons against Iraq, that Iran had initiated the maritime exclusion zone in 1984 which started the tanker war in the Gulf – of which the Stark was indirectly a victim. Iraq was responsible for each of these acts, but Iraq was deemed ‘friendly’. Only a few weeks before the near-sinking of the Stark, US undersecretary Richard Murphy had himself visited Baghdad and praised Iraq’s ‘bravery’ in withstanding Iran, spraying its enemies with poison gas now a definition of Iraqi courage for Mr Murphy. Reagan had rewarded the aggressor by accepting his excuses and referred to the nation that did not kill his countrymen as the ‘villain’. It was an interesting precedent. When Iraq almost sank an American frigate, Iran was to blame. When al-Qaeda attacked the United States fourteen years later, Iraq was to blame.

All that was left was for Saddam himself to offer his condolences to the families of the dead Americans. They were not long in coming. ‘Rest assured that the grief which you feel as a result of the loss of your sons is our grief, too,’ the Iraqi leader wrote in a letter to the families of the dead, dated 22 May and printed on the stationery of Iraq’s Washington embassy:

On the occasion of the funeral ceremony of the victims lost in the grievous and unintentional incident that has happened to the American frigate Stark, I would like to express to you … my condolences and feelings of grief. All the Iraqis and I feel most profoundly the sorrow of moments such as these. Since we have ourselves lost a great many of our dear ones in the war which has been raging now for seven years, while the Iranian government still persists in … rejecting our appeals and those of the international community for the establishment of a just and lasting peace.

Even now, Saddam had to add his own propaganda line, although it neatly dovetailed with Reagan’s own distorted view of the conflict. Iran’s ‘rejection’ of appeals from the ‘international community’ alluded to Iran’s refusal to accept UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions which failed to demand punishment for the ‘aggressor’ nation. White House spokesman Dan Howard also said Reagan’s vilification of Iran was because of its refusal ‘to go to the bargaining table’.* Shipping officials in the Gulf always suspected that the Iraqis made their night-time attack on the Stark in the hope that the United States would believe an Iranian aircraft tried to destroy the frigate and would therefore retaliate against Tehran. In the event, they didn’t need to waste their time with such conspiracy theories: America blamed Iran anyway. A few days later, Reagan called Iran ‘this barbarous country’.

Saddam compared the American relatives of the Stark to the families of Iraqis killed during his aggression against Iran, thus turning the US navy personnel into the surrogate dead of his own atrocious war. Saddam’s plaintive call for a ‘just and lasting peace’ was almost Arafat-like in its banality. The final American abasement came when Washington dispatched a full-scale US navy inquiry team under Rear Admiral David Rodgers to Baghdad, where they were told they would not be permitted to question the Iraqi pilot who fired the two Exocet missiles; nor did the Iraqis agree with the Americans that the Stark was outside Iraq’s self-imposed ‘exclusion zone’ when it was hit. The Americans said the vessel was at least 10 nautical miles outside, Iraq claimed it was at least 20 nautical miles inside. Weinberger’s call to produce the Iraqi pilot was ignored. Captain Brindel of the Stark was relieved of his command, his weapons officer was reprimanded and left the navy, and his executive officer disciplined for ‘dereliction of duty’.

The Americans always assumed that the Iraqi pilot had been executed – hence Iraq’s refusal to produce him – but the ex-deputy commander of the Iraqi air force insisted to me in Baghdad that this was untrue. ‘I saw him a few months ago,’ he said. ‘Like me, he’s out of work. But he obeyed all our rules. We were fighting a cruel enemy. It was a mistake. We weren’t going to get rid of one of our senior pilots for the Americans. The Americans were inside our “forbidden zone”. We told them not to enter it again – and they obeyed.’

A visit by a group of US senators to the melted-down crew quarters on the Stark was sufficient to set them off in a spasm of rage at the one country that had nothing to do with the American deaths. Republican Senator John Warner, a former secretary of the US navy, described Iran as ‘a belligerent that knows no rules, no morals’. Senator John Glenn was reduced to abusing Iran as ‘the sponsor of terrorism and the hijacker of airliners’. Thus Saddam’s attack on the Stark was now bringing him untold benefits. Americans were talking as if they were themselves contemplating military action against Iran.

Reagan pretended that the Americans were in the Gulf as peacemakers. ‘Were a hostile power ever to dominate this strategic region and its resources,’ he explained, ‘it would become a chokepoint for freedom – that of our allies and our own … That is why we maintain a naval presence there. Our aim is to prevent, not to provoke, wider conflict, to save the many lives that further conflict would cost us …’ Most Americans knew, Reagan said, that ‘to retreat or withdraw would only repeat the improvident mistakes of the past and hand final victory to those who seek war, who make war’. The Iranians, needless to say – the victims of Iraq’s aggression – were those ‘who seek war, who make war’, not ‘friendly’ Iraq which had anyway been taken off the State Department’s list of ‘international terrorist countries’ in 1982, two years after its invasion of Iran and in the very year that Iran reported eleven Iraqi poison gas attacks against its forces. The truth was that the Stark – one of seven US warships in the Gulf – was sailing under false pretences.

Iraq had placed its ‘exclusion zone’ around Kharg Island in January 1984 because it was losing the land war it had initiated two years earlier; by attacking tankers lifting oil from Iran’s Kharg Island terminal, Saddam hoped to strangle his antagonist economically. His aircraft henceforth fired at ships of any nationality that were moving to and from Iranian ports. Iran retaliated by targeting vessels trading with Iraq through the Arab Gulf states. Iraq’s massive imports of arms for the war were transiting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, whose funding of Iraq’s war effort was close to $404 billion; any ship trading with either nation was now threatened with Iranian air attack. Between 18 April 1984 and 18 May 1987 – the day after the Stark was hit – 227 ships had been attacked in the Gulf, 137 of them by Iraq and 90 by Iran; several had been struck by missiles and repeatedly repaired, and of the 227 total, 153 were oil tankers. Between May 1981 and 18 May 1987, 211 merchant seamen, most of them foreigners, were killed on these ships, of which 98 were oil tankers; it was a tiny figure compared with the hundreds of thousands of combatants in the land war, but it internationalised the conflict – as both Iraq and Iran probably hoped that it would.

American warships were now ostensibly keeping the sea lanes open for international shipping, to prevent the Gulf becoming, in Reagan’s odd term, a ‘chokepoint’. But US vessels were not shielding Iranian tankers from Iraqi attack. Nor were they seeking to protect foreign oil tankers lifting Iranian oil for export at Kharg. America’s mission in the Gulf was to protect only one side’s ships – Iraq’s – in the sea lanes. Already the Americans were proposing to escort Kuwaiti-flagged tankers in the Gulf, which did not carry Iranian cargo. They carried Iraqi oil for export. Iraq might not be able to gain any victories in its land war with Iran, but with American help, as the Iranians realised at once, it could win the sea war. Reagan claimed that the United States was fighting ‘war against war’ in the Gulf. In fact, Washington was fighting a war against Iran.

Eleven days after the Stark was rocketed, the Iranians complained that a US warship in the Gulf had ‘threatened’ an Iran Air passenger jet flying from Shiraz to Doha, in Qatar, and ordered the pilot to alter course. My own investigation among Dubai air traffic controllers established that the American warning came from one of four naval vessels escorting a Kuwaiti-registered ship with a cargo of arms to Bahrain. ‘The incident provided just the sort of scenario for a … tragedy in the Gulf,’ I wrote in my dispatch to The Times that night. ‘Iran Air flies scheduled routes to both Doha, the capital of Qatar, and to the Gulf emirate of Dubai further east, regularly overflying the waters in which American … frigates patrol. Although the Iranians did not say so, the pilot probably flew unwittingly over a US naval unit which identified the plane as Iranian and ordered it to change course.’ The ‘tragedy’ was to come exactly fourteen months later.

There were plenty of portents. Not long after the Stark was hit, I spent a day and a night on Gulf patrol with HMS Broadsword. Accompanying British ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Reagan’s now famous chokepoint – the word ‘escort’ was never used by the British – and discouraging the attentions of the Iranians might have seemed a simple matter in the dry memoranda that their naval lordships used at the defence ministry in London. But inside the glow-worm interior of the Type-22 class destroyer, the radar monitors watched with feverish intensity for the transponder numbers of the civilian aircraft passing over Broadsword. ‘If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you’ve got to be bloody careful,’ one of them said.

At least the air conditioning was pumped into their little nest – for the computers, of course, not for them – but what afflicted most of the seamen in the Gulf was the heat. It burned the entire decks until they were, quite literally, too hot to walk on. British sailors stood on the edges of their shoes because of the scalding temperatures emerging from the steel. The depth-charge casings, the Bofors gun-aiming device, were too hot to touch. On the helicopter flight deck, the heat rose to 135 degrees, and only a thoughtless leading hand would have touched a spanner without putting his gloves on. It created a dull head, a desperate weariness, an awesome irritation with one’s fellow humans on the foredeck.

Inside the ship – and their lordships would have appreciated the cleanliness of Broadsword’s galleys and mess decks and bunks and short, fearful advertisements warning of the dangers of AIDS in Mombasa port – the heat shuffled through the vessel faster than the seamen. The officer’s mess was a cool 80 degrees. One glass of water and I was dripping. Open the first watertight door and I was ambushed by the heat, just as I was seven years earlier in the streets of Najaf. After the second door, I walked into a tropical smelter, the familiar grey monochrome sea sloshing below the deck. How can men work in this and remain rational? Or – more to the point – how could the Iraqis and Iranians fight in this sweltering air and remain sane?

‘There’s Sharjah airport,’ the radar officer said, and fixed the beam. ‘I’m listening to a plane landing now – commercial flight – but if I want to know about a specific plane, I ask for an IFF [identification, friend or foe?] and talk to Sharjah control.’ There were boards and charts and crayon marks on war-zone lines. The USS Reid – part of Reagan’s Gulf flotilla – had just cut across the Iraqi ‘exclusion zone’. So much for Stark’s insistence that it stayed outside. Two Soviet Natya-class minesweepers and a submarine depot ship were listed as outside the Hormuz Strait. Two British Hong Kong-registered ships were waiting for us on the return journey.

Night was no relief. At 4.15 a.m., Broadsword was in the Gulf of Oman, her engineers dragging a hawser from the support ship Orangeleaf riding alongside her, refuelling in the heat. The humidity cloaked us all. The deck was awash with condensation, the seamen’s faces crawling with perspiration. The sweat crept through my hair and trickled down my back. Our shirts were dark with moisture. It came to all men, even to Russians. Off Fujairah, Moscow’s contribution to the freedom of Gulf navigation – a depot ship and two minesweepers – nestled against each other on the warm tide, the Soviet sailors, glistening and half-naked on deck, waiting for the next inbound Kuwaiti tanker. Here was the principal reason why Reagan wanted to patrol the sea lanes, here was the real ‘hostile power’ that he feared might ‘dominate’ the Gulf. The two British freighters came alongside to be ‘accompanied’ by Broadsword.

On the bridge, an Indian radio operator could be heard pleading over VHF with an Iranian patrol ship. ‘We are only carrying dates,’ he said. ‘Only dates.’ The Iranian was 30 kilometres away. An Iranian P-3 reconnaissance aircraft answered. ‘Be aware,’ boomed the tannoy throughout Broadsword, ‘that yesterday the Iraqis launched an Exocet attack on a Maltese tanker carrying oil from Iran. We can therefore expect the Iranians to retaliate …’ A dog-day mist now swirled around the ship, leaving salt cakes across the flight deck. The two freighters were steaming beside us, an overheated version of every Second World War Atlantic convoy, because Broadsword, however unheroic in her humidity, was – like the American ships – a naval escort.

Back in 1984, when Iraq began this maritime conflict, the Gulf looked a lot simpler. The Arabs, protesting mightily at every attack by the Iranians and silent when the Iraqis struck at Iranian shipping, were almost as fearful of American involvement as they were of the Iranians. Saudi Arabia maintained a quiet relationship with Iran – just in case Iraq collapsed – while at the same time underwriting Saddam’s war. Ostensibly, the Arabs remained neutral -‘at war but skulking’, as Churchill unfairly remarked about the Irish in the Second World War – and offered refuge to any ship’s master who found himself under fire. Bahrain and Dubai would receive the crippled hulks of both sides’ aggression, profiting from the millions of dollars in repairs that their shipyards would make in reconstituting the ships. By 1987, eighteen had been hit twice, six had been attacked three times and two – Superior and Dena – had the distinction of being rocketed and repaired four times in four years. As early as May 1984 there was a floating junkyard of mortally wounded vessels off Bahrain.

They called it the ships’ graveyard and the term was cruelly appropriate. The great tankers that Iran and Iraq had destroyed were towed here in terminal condition, bleeding fuel oil into the warm, muddy brown waves in the very centre of the Gulf, a series of jagged holes in their scalded superstructure to show how they met their end. The Bahraini government even ran a patrol boat out to this maritime cemetery for journalists to understand what this war now represented. An Iranian Phantom hit the 29,000-ton Chemical Venture so accurately on 24 May that its missile plunged into the very centre of the bridge: there was a 12-metre sign there saying ‘No Smoking’ in the middle of the superstructure; the rocket took out the letters ‘S’ and ‘M’. The tanker crews along the Gulf were growing restive over the dangers; by the end of May, up to twenty-five ships were riding at anchor off the Emirates alone, waiting for instructions from their owners, and you only had to take a look at the ruin of the Al-Hoot to understand why. The 117,000-ton supertanker was listing with a hole the size of a London bus along her waterline where an Iraqi missile had exploded three weeks earlier. The superstructure had been twisted back and outwards over the stern and the crew’s quarters had simply melted down as if they were made of plastic rather than iron. The gash on the starboard side was so deep I could see daylight through it.

Just to the north lay the 178,000-ton Safina al-Arab, moving restlessly in the swell as a Swedish-registered tanker tried to take off the last of her crude oil. The stuff was everywhere, down the sides of the ship, across the water, turning even the foam on the waves dark. I could smell it from a mile away. The salvage crews – mostly Dutchmen – knew the risks but strolled the decks as if they were in harbour rather than sitting on bombs 115 kilometres out in the Gulf.

It was an isolated place.* On the map of the Middle East, the Gulf seemed just a crack in the land mass between the deserts of Arabia and southern Iran, but the seas could be rough and the horizon featureless save for the lonely and vulnerable tankers butting through the sirocco winds up to Ras Tanura and Kuwait. They had no convoys to sail in then, no protection from the air, and they crept in those days as close as they could to the southern shoreline. They passed us as we photographed the graveyard of their more unfortunate brethren, ill painted for the most part, plunging through the heat haze, targets of opportunity for either side in the upper reaches of the Gulf, depending on their masters and their ports of call.

The sea should have been polluted but it was alive with flying fish that landed on their tails, long yellow sea snakes that came up out of the green depths to look at us, and porpoises and even turtles. Big-beaked black cormorants effortlessly outflew our fast Bahraini patrol boat. The oil slicks came in thick, viscous patches and in long thin streaks that shredded their way up the pale blue water towards the wrecks. The only sign of President Reagan’s concern in those days was the discreet grey majesty of the USS Luce, a Seventh Fleet missile cruiser that lay all day off the Mina Salman channel outside Bahrain harbour, a picket boat filled with armed sailors slowly circling it to ward off unconventional attackers – an idea before its time, since the USS Cole would not be struck by suicide bombers in Aden for another decade. Besides, the radio traffic from the Luce, clearly audible on our own ship-to-shore radio, seemed mostly bound up with the complexities of bringing new video films aboard for the crew. A few hours later, a smaller US patrol craft moved into port and the Luce gently steamed off into the sweltering dusk, its in-house entertainment presumably updated.

But other American warships were – even then – playing the role of convoy escorts. This unofficial and unacknowledged protection was given no publicity in Washington, nor among the Arab states, coinciding with their own desire to keep the US navy over the horizon. Sometimes the escort was provided by the USS John Rodgers, a sleek, twin-funnelled missile cruiser that last defended American interests by bombarding the Chouf mountains of central Lebanon a year earlier. At other times, the USS Boone, a squat and rather cumbersome flat-topped missile carrier, came up by night from the Emirates and rested off Bahrain. Anyone who approached the warships by day – which we did, of course – would be confronted by a steel-helmeted US sailor manning a fixed heavy machine gun.

US air force cargo jets were already flying regularly into the airports of the Gulf states, carrying equipment so bulky that they were forced to deploy their giant C-48 droop-wing transports. These flights were being made to the countries that Reagan always called ‘our Arab friends’, a definition that no longer included Lebanon – from which US forces had been famously ‘redeployed to sea’ three months earlier, following the bombing of the Beirut marine barracks and the killing of 241 US servicemen – but which very definitely embraced the conservative oil states of the Gulf peninsula. If the Americans were to become strategically involved – as they would do three years later – then the Arab states would have to be portrayed, as I wrote in The Times in May 1984, ‘as the innocent party in the dispute: the Iranians, inevitably, will be the enemy’. And so it came to pass. Was it not Iranian aircraft, the Iranian regime and ultimately Iranian ideology that threatened the security of the area? Again, we would be expected to forget that Iraq began the war and that Iraq was the first to order its air force to attack oil tankers in the Gulf.

In the autumn of 1980, when it seemed certain to them that Khomeini’s regime would collapse in anarchy under the onslaught of the Iraqi army around Abadan, the Arab Gulf states – those very states which by 1984 were seeking UN censure of Iran for its air attacks on the shipping lanes – poured billions into Iraq’s war funds. But now that Iran’s Islamic Revolution had proved more tenacious than they thought, the Arabs were stapling their hopes to a worthless peace mission to Tehran and Riyadh by Syria, the one Arab country which very shrewdly decided at the beginning of the war that its Baathist enemies in Baghdad – rather than Khomeini’s mullahs – might prove to be the losers. The failure of the Arab Gulf states to draw the same conclusion had now led to a disjointed policy that was as impossible to follow as it would be to justify historically.

Sheikh Khalifa Sulman al-Khalifa, the Bahraini prime minister and brother of the emir, insisted to me in June of 1984 that Iraq did not start the war. ‘I believe that – Iraq likes to protect itself like any other nation …’ he said. ‘Of course, a war starts with something. You never know how far it will go on either side. First there is fire and fire depends on wind and the direction in which the wind blows. Sometimes people get carried away – they think they are strong.’ This was the nearest he came to criticism of Saddam. Now Bahrain – like the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council – was demanding a UN Security Council resolution that would condemn only Iran for air attacks in the Gulf. He was not in favour of US intervention. ‘There are ways of helping us and one of them is to stop the supply of arms to the fighting parties from Europe and from the Far East countries.’ And this, it has to be remembered, came from the prime minister of a country that was enthusiastically bankrolling Saddam’s aggression.

The Kuwaitis, who once denounced any foreign intervention on Gulf soil, had by November of 1983 reached the conclusion that the defence of the Strait of Hormuz was the responsibility of the countries that benefited from it – in other words, the West. Sheikh Ahmed al-Sabah, the foreign minister, was quoted in the Beirut newspaper An-Nahar as saying that the Gulf was an ‘international’ region in which he could not object to foreign intervention. Then on 27 May 1984 Kuwait’s ambassador to Washington was warning against American involvement because it might ‘prompt the Soviet Union to enter the area’. This was a strange observation to come from the only wealthy Gulf state to permit a Soviet embassy in its capital and the one country which had hoped Soviet goodwill could be used on behalf of the Gulf states at the UN Security Council.

The Saudis, on the other hand, were still fearful of any American presence in the Gulf. US bases on Gulf territory would run counter to the anti-Israeli campaign carried on by the sheikhdoms, while a prolonged American presence could quickly ignite the sort of fires that brought ruin upon the Americans and their client government in Lebanon. Reagan’s strategic cooperation agreement with Israel had not been forgotten in the Gulf – and Israel had added fuel to the Gulf War by supplying arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iranian enemy. This was long before Iran – contra, when the Americans used Israel to channel weapons to Tehran.

The Soviets, after watching the destruction of the communist Tudeh party in Iran, were sending massive new tank shipments to Iraq. The Israelis had provided large quantities of small arms and ammunition to the Iranians. So had the Syrians. The French were still supplying Exocet missiles to the Iraqis while the North Koreans sold Soviet rifles to Iran. The Americans had been quietly re-establishing their relations with Baghdad – at this point, they were still increasing their ‘interests section’ in the Belgian embassy in Baghdad – at the very moment when Saddam most needed the moral as well as the military support of a Western power. While George Bush was denouncing Iran’s ‘Oppressive regime’ in Pakistan, Saddam was reported to be hanging deserters by the roadside outside Baghdad.

On 29 May 1984 the first load of 400 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and launchers arrived by air in Saudi Arabia from the United States. President Khamenei of Iran sarcastically warned Washington that Iran would ‘resist and fight’ any US forces sent to the battle zone. ‘If the Americans are prepared to sink in the depths of the Persian Gulf waters for nothing, then let them come with their faith, motivation and divine power,’ he said. As for the Gulf Arabs, he warned: ‘You will be neutral in the war only if you do not provide Saddam with any assistance. But a neighbour who wants to deliver a blow at us is more dangerous than a stranger, and we should face that danger.’ Well aware that the Arabs were still giving huge financial support to Iraq, the oil-tanker crews took Khamenei’s threats seriously. Several vessels on the Kuwait run through the sea lanes north-west of Bahrain were now travelling by night for fear of Iranian air attack.

Covering this protracted war for a newspaper was an exhausting, often unrewarding business. The repetition of events, the Iraqi attacks on Kharg Island, the massing of hundreds of thousands of Iranian troops outside Basra, the constant appeals by both sides to the UN Security Council, the sinking of more oil tankers, had a numbing quality about it. Sometimes this titanic bloodbath was called the ‘forgotten war’ – even though at times it approached the carnage of the 1914–18 disaster. I dislike parallels with the two greatest conflicts of the twentieth century. Can we really say, for example, that Saddam’s decision to invade Iran in 1980 was a blunder on the scale of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, which led to the deaths of 20 million Russians – when perhaps only a million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s aggression? Certainly, by the time it ended, the Iran – Iraq bloodletting had lasted as long as the Vietnam war. And Saddam’s war was the longest conventional conflict of the last century, a struggle of such severity that the barrels of the Iranian army’s guns had to be replaced twelve times before it ended in 1988.

My visits to the battle fronts, and to Tehran and Baghdad, seemed to have a ‘story-so-far’ quality about them. Statistics lost their power to shock. In 1985 alone, Colonel Heikki Holma of the UN’s inspection team in Iran estimated that 4,500 Iranians had been killed or wounded by chemical weapons. In two years, there had been at least sixty major chemical attacks by Iraq. The casualty figures were obviously on a Somme-like scale – again, I found myself unwillingly using the parallels of my father’s war – but neither side would admit the extent of its own losses. By 1986 alone, a million had perished in the war, so it was said by the Western diplomats who rarely if ever visited the war front, 700,000 of them Iranian. The Iranians said that 500,000 Iraqis had been killed. There were – and here the figures could be partly confirmed by the International Red Cross – 100,000 Iraqi POWs in Iran and around 50,000 Iranian POWs in Iraq. Both sides were together spending around $1.5 billion a month on the war.

In Iran, the conflict had changed the mood of the theologians trying to conduct the battle with Iraq. Only a year earlier, there were daily reports of torture and mass rape coming out of the grey-walled confines of Evin prison. But in April 1985, Hojatolislam Ali Ladjevardi, the Tehran prosecutor, was dismissed from his post together with many of his murderous henchmen; executions were now carried out almost exclusively on common criminals rather than enemies of the state. ‘The executions have been toned down,’ an Iranian businessman put it with mild sarcasm. ‘Now they only kill murderers and narcotics men. The worst they do to a girl who offends Islamic law is to cut her hair off.’ There was a growing acquiescence – rather than acceptance – of the Khomeini regime that produced an irritable freedom of speech; shopkeepers, businessmen, Iranian journalists, even conservative religious families could complain about the government without fear that they would be betrayed to the Revolutionary Guards.

It was part of an illusion. The Islamic Republic had not suddenly become democratic; it had cut so deeply into its political enemies that there was no focus of opposition left. In 1984 at least 661 executions were believed to have been carried out in Tehran, a further 237 up to Ladjevardi’s dismissal. The figures were Amnesty International’s, but the Iranians themselves admitted to 197 judicial killings between March 1984 and April 1985, claiming that they were all for drug offences. The introduction of a machine specially designed by Iranian engineers to amputate fingers was proudly announced by Tehran newspapers, proving that the revolution was as anxious as ever to exact punishment on those who contravened its laws.

Such public freedom of expression as still existed could be found in the Majlis, the institution that so many critics had once predicted would provide only a rubber-stamp parliament for Khomeini’s decrees. There was a confrontation in parliament over a series of laws on land reform, trade and the budget. Conservative members led by Rafsanjani, the speaker, wanted to preserve the power of the clergy and the bazaaris, arguing for a liberal economy and no changes in land ownership. More radical members who claimed to follow ‘the line of the Imam’ were demanding full government control of trade, land distribution and a number of social reforms that sounded like socialism. The result was government paralysis. Landowners refused to till their fields lest their property became profitable and was taken away by the state.

Khomeini had a final veto over all legislation, but his chief function now was to be a presence; he was the patriarch, produced for the relatives of martyrs or, more rarely, for foreign diplomats, a figure of solidity but no movement, of image rather than content, a mirror to past victory and what had gone before rather than to the future. His last meeting with diplomats was typical. More than sixty ambassadors, chargés and first secretaries were crammed into a minuscule room at the Ayatollah’s residence and obliged to sit cross-legged on a slightly grubby carpet, a French embassy attaché suffering severe cramp as he perched on top of a Scandinavian chargé. In due course, Khomeini entered the room and delivered himself of a fifteen-minute speech in Farsi, without translation. ‘It didn’t matter what he said,’ one of the ambassadors remarked acidly. ‘The old man sat there on a sheet on a raised dais and he was making only one point: that the Shah had received his guests in regal magnificence in his palace but that he, Khomeini, would receive us in humble circumstances.’

But each night now, Khomeini was taken off to the bunkers beneath the Shah’s old palace at Niavaran, the only air-raid shelter in all Tehran, to protect him from the war that was now his enduring legacy. As the Iraqi fighter-bombers soared unmolested over the capital, tens of thousands of his people would flee into the mountains by road. While Khomeini still demanded the overthrow of Saddam, his mullahs appeared on national television, begging the people of Isfahan, Shiraz, Ahwaz, Dezful and Tehran itself to contribute food and clothing for their soldiers at the front. Individual home towns were asked to resupply front-line units that came from their areas. In the marshes of southern Iraq, the Iranian Basiji clung on amid the hot mud and Iraqi counter-attacks.

The Iranians were now freighting their 600-kilo ground-to-ground missiles up to a new base at Sarbullzaharb in Kurdistan where North Korean engineers calibrated them for the flight to Baghdad. When they knew the rocket was approaching its target just over fifteen minutes later, the Iranians would announce the impending strike over national radio. For reporters, this could have a weird journalistic effect. ‘I’d be sitting in the bureau in Baghdad when Nabila Megalli would come through on my telex from Bahrain where she’d been listening to the radio,’ Samir Ghattas, Mohamed Salam’s AP successor in Iraq, would recall. ‘She would say that the Iranians had just announced they’d fired a missile at Baghdad. I stayed on the telex line – we had no fax then – and the moment I heard the explosion in Baghdad, I’d write ‘Yes’. The Iraqis would pull the plug five minutes later. It took twenty minutes for the rocket to travel from the border to Baghdad.’

The Iraqi raids often provoked little more than a fantasy display of antiaircraft fire from the guns around Tehran. The pilots could not identify any targets now that the Iranians had acquired new German SEL aircraft warning radar and switched off the electricity. On 2 June 1985, however, two bombs dropped by an Iraqi high-altitude Ilyushin 28 exploded on a large civilian housing complex in the Gishe suburb of the city, collapsing five entire blocks of apartments. From my hotel window – from where I had been watching the lights of the distant bomber – I saw two huge flashes of crimson light and heard a terrific roar of sound, the detonation of the bombs becoming one with the sound of crashing buildings. Hitherto, the Iraqis had fired rockets onto Tehran, so this was a new precedent in the War of the Cities. At least 50 civilians were killed and another 150 wounded in the raid. When I arrived there, it was the usual story: the cheaply-made bricks of the walls had crumbled to dust and a four-storey building – home to sixteen families – had been blown to pieces by one of the bombs. A little girl in the block had been celebrating her birthday during the evening and many children were staying the night with her family when the bombs destroyed the girl’s home. Angry Iranians gathered at the site next morning and the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guards were forced to fire into the air to clear the road.

In all of March and April of 1985, there were thirteen air raids on Tehran. Now there were thirteen a week, sometimes three a night. Only one Iraqi jet had been shot down – during a daylight raid in March – when an Iranian F-14 intercepted it over the capital. The Iraqi plane crashed into the mountains above Tehran, its pilot still aboard. Yet the Iranians could be forgiven for believing that the world was against them. In July, Iraq began to take delivery of forty-five twenty-seater Bell helicopters from the United States, all capable of carrying troops along the war front. The Reagan administration said, in all seriousness, that the sale of the Super Transports did not breach the US arms embargo on the belligerents because ‘the helicopters are civilian’ and because the American government would ‘monitor’ their use. The sale had been negotiated over two years, during which the United States had been fully aware of Iraq’s use of poison gas and its ‘cleansing’ of the Kurds. I would later see eight of these same Bell helicopters near Amara – all in camouflage paint and standing on the tarmac at a military air base.

Yet still the martyrology of war could be used to send fresh blood to the front; the child soldiers of Iran, it seemed, would be forever dispatched to the trenches of Kerman and Ahwaz and Khorramshahr, each operation named Val Fajr – ‘Dawn’ – which, for a Muslim, also represents the dawn prayer. We had Val Fajr 1, all the way up to Val Fajr 8. I would walk down to the Friday prayers at Tehran University during the war and I would often see these miniature soldiers – every bit as young and as carefree of life and death as those I had met in the trenches outside Dezful. The inscription on the red bands round the little boys’ heads was quite uncompromising. ‘Yes, Khomeini, we are ready,’ it said. And the would-be martyrs, identically dressed in yellow jogging suits, banged their small fists against their chests with all the other worshippers, in time to the chants. This cerebral drumbeat – at least ten thousand hands clapping bodies every four seconds – pulsed out across the nation, as it did every Friday over the airwaves of Iranian radio and television. The audience was familiar, even if the faces changed from week to week: mullahs, wheelchair veterans of the war, the poor of south Tehran, the volunteer children and the Iraqi POWs, green-uniformed and trucked to the prayer ground to curse their own president.

Friday prayers in Tehran were a unique combination of religious emotion and foreign policy declaration, a kind of Billy Graham crusade and a weekly State of the Nation address rolled into one. A stranger – especially a Westerner – could be perplexed at what he saw, even disturbed. But he could not fail to be impressed. It was not the prayer-leader who acted as the centrepiece of this great theatre. Often this was Rafsanjani. He could discourse to his ten thousand audience on the origins of the revolution, superpower frustration in Lebanon and further Iranian military successes outside Basra. But this was almost a rambling affair. His hair curling from beneath his amami turban and his hand resting on an automatic rifle, Rafsanjani did not stir his audience to any heights of passion.

The congregation that June provided their own sense of unity, their voices rising and falling in cadence with a long chant in Farsi that attempted to integrate Islamic history with the struggle against Iraq, the little boys – some as young as ten – still banging their fists on their heads. Much Farsi verse rhymes and – by rhyming the English translation – these calls to war come across with an archaic, almost Victorian naivety:

We are ready to give our lives, we are ready to go,

And fight as at Kerbala against our foe.

Imam Hossein said those around him were the best;

Now you see with Khomeini we attest

That Hossein and those around him are with us.

In our way lies the honour of Islam

As we follow the word of our Imam.

There were some, the more youthful Basiji, who had already been chosen for martyrdom, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds kitted out in tiny bright camouflage uniforms. They stood on each side of Rafsanjani’s dais holding trays of toffees, each sweet wrapped in crimson cellophane. At a signal, they stepped among the rows of mullahs and war-wounded, the Revolutionary Guards in parka jackets and the elderly, unshaven, dark-suited men from south Tehran, and presented their trays of toffees. Each man carefully took a sweet without looking at the child in front of him, aware of the significance; for this was no interlude between prayers. It was a communion with doomed youth.

Then the boys walked soulfully back to their places on each side of the dais, hair cut short, large dark eyes occasionally turning shyly towards the mass of people. They were, the worshippers were told, aware of their mission. And they stood there, fidgeting sometimes, headbands slightly askew, but feet together at attention as any child might play at soldiers in his home. Rafsanjani made no reference to them. His message was more temporal and the formula was an old one. Iraq was losing many men at the front. It was also losing much territory. To save the land, it had to lose more men. To save the men, it had to lose more land. So Iraq was losing the war. In just one week, Rafsanjani said, Iraq had lost six more brigades. The worshippers chanted their thanks to their army at the front.

Friday prayers were broadcast through loudspeakers along those very trench lines opposite Basra, piped through loudspeakers so that the Iranian soldiers could hear these ten thousand voices above the shellfire. They called for revenge against Iraq for its air raids on Iranian cities. Rafsanjani added a pragmatic note. ‘If you want to make yourselves useful,’ he told his nationwide audience, ‘you can dig air-raid shelters at home.’ The young boys stood listlessly on either side of him, perhaps aware that their homes were no longer their immediate concern.

Yet still Iraq hoovered up Iranian prisoners – by the thousand now, just as the Iranians had done before – and ostentatiously presented them to the world’s press. Iraq opened a huge prison camp complex for its new POWs in the desert west of Baghdad, around the hot, largely Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, where there would be no Shia community to offer comfort and help should any of them escape. This was every man’s Stalag, complete with a jolly commandant called Major Ali who wanted to introduce us to his model prisoners. The Iranian inmates crowded round us when we arrived, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, still in their drab, desert-yellow uniforms, happy prisoners according to the senior Iranian officer at Ramadi, Anish Tusi. How could they be otherwise, the camp’s doctor asked? Why, look, they had schools, a library, a tuck shop, table tennis, basketball.

A portrait of Saddam Hussein smiled down benevolently upon them. ‘If you obey the camp rules, it will be better for you and for everybody else,’ a poster advised the prisoners in Farsi. ‘Obey the rules of the camp and the commander of the camp, and you will be treated as friends.’ Major Ali, smiling in the midday sun, gestured magnanimously towards the canteen. ‘Just see how well our prisoners eat,’ he said. We pushed inside a small hut where four Iranian Basiji – captured in the Howeiza marshes a year earlier – gently stirred two cauldrons of fish and roast chicken. ‘This camp is Ramadi Two,’ the jolly major said, ‘and all our camps at Ramadi are the same. The prisoners here are in such good conditions that they don’t feel the need to escape.’

A sharp eye detected an element of hyperbole. Ramadi One, for example, was surrounded by so much glistening barbed wire, 9 metres deep and 5 metres high, that there was scarcely room for the prisoners to lean out of their hut windows, let alone play basketball. Ramadi Three appeared to have none of those friendly tuck shops and prison libraries. Perhaps, too, the inmates of the other camps did not speak in quite such scathing tones of Ayatollah Khomeini. For the boy soldiers in Major Ali’s Ramadi Two condemned Khomeini’s regime with an enthusiasm that had the Baath party officials nodding sagely and the military police guards grinning with satisfaction.

Mohamed Ismaili, a twenty-year-old from Kerman, for example, admitted he had broadcast over Iraq’s Farsi-language radio, telling his parents on the air that ‘this war is not a holy war’. Ahmed Taki, who was only seventeen, was even more specific. A thin, shy youth with his head totally shaved, he was a Basij volunteer sent to the battle front a year ago. ‘I was in school when a mullah came to our class and told us we should fight in the battle against Iraq,’ he said. ‘I heard Khomeini say that all young people should go to the front. But now I know it is not a holy war.’ The stories were all similar, of schoolboys told that God would reward them if they died in battle, a spiritual inspiration that underwent a swift transition once they entered Ramadi Two.

For after uttering such statements, few of these Iranian prisoners could return home under the Khomeini regime, even if the war suddenly ended. Some of them admitted as much. The Iranians, of course, had persuaded hundreds of Iraqi POWs to speak with an identically heretical tongue about Saddam. Perhaps that is what both sides wanted: prisoners who could not go home.

Major Ali seemed unperturbed. ‘There are maybe sixty or seventy prisoners who still support Khomeini,’ he said. ‘That’s not many – a very small percentage. Sometimes they mention him at their prayers – we never interfere with their religion.’ But the major did interfere with their news. The POWs could listen only to the Farsi service of Iraqi radio and television – hardly an unbiased source of information on the war – and the only outside information they were permitted to receive were the letters sent to them by their families through the International Red Cross. ‘Come and see the barracks,’ the major insisted. We walked into a hut containing a hundred teenagers, all in that same pallid, greyish-yellow uniform. They stood barefoot on the army blankets that doubled as their beds and the moment an Iraqi army photographer raised his camera, half of them bowed their heads. Their identity concealed, perhaps they could one day go home.

Each military setback for Iraq provided an excuse to break the rules of war once more. Faced with human-wave attacks, there was gas. Faced with further losses, there was a sea war to be commenced against unarmed merchantmen. A new and amoral precedent was set in early 1986 – just after the Iranian capture of the Fao peninsula – when Iraq shot down an Iranian Fokker Friendship aircraft carrying forty-six civilians, including many members of the Majlis and the editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan, Sayad Hassan Shah-Cherghi.

The Iranians wanted to take journalists to Fao, but I for one refused to take the usual night-time C-130 Iranian military transport plane to the front. If the Iraqis were prepared to attack civilian aircraft, they would certainly shed no tears if they destroyed the international press as it travelled to witness Iraq’s latest humiliation. So we took the train again, back down to Ahwaz and the war I had been covering for five and a half years.

Fao had a special meaning for me. It was at Fao that I first saw the Iran – Iraq war with my own eyes. It lay on a spit of land at the bottom of the Shatt al-Arab river, from which the Iraqi army had shelled Abadan. In those days, the Iraqis planned to take the eastern bank of the river and secure it for all time for Iraq. They had not only failed to capture the eastern bank; now they had lost part of the western bank – they had lost the port of Fao itself to the Iranians. The next target for the Iranians would be the great port of Basra with its Shia Muslim population and its straight roads north-west to the holy Shia cities of Kerbala and Najaf. I would be reporting if not from Basra itself, at least from the city in which I started off in this war.

But I wasn’t happy. There were frequent allusions in Tehran to ‘setbacks’ in the Fao battle. Rafsanjani made a disturbing reference to Iran’s need to hold on to Fao, while announcing that there were no plans to advance on Basra – which was odd because, if this was true, why bother to capture Fao in the first place? The Tehran newspapers described how the Iranian forces in Fao were ‘consolidating’ their positions – always a sign that an army is in difficulties. Then when we arrived in Ahwaz and were taken to the nearest airbase for a helicopter ride to the front line, the two American-trained pilots packed the machine with journalists and mullahs – and then aborted the flight. There was too much wind on the river, one of them claimed. There was a bad weather forecast for the afternoon. A cleric arrived to order the men to fly. Gerry ‘G. G.’ Labelle of the Associated Press, with whom I had spent years in Beirut during the war, was sitting beside me on the floor of the chopper and we looked at each other with growing concern as the helicopter lifted off the apron, hovered 2 metres above the ground, turned to face due west – and then gently settled back onto the tarmac. Like so many journalists in time of war, we had been desperate to get to the front line – and even more desperate to find a reason to avoid going.*

Part of me – and part of Gerry – was of the ‘let’s-get-it-over-with’ persuasion. Hadn’t I sped around the Dezful war front on an identical Bell helicopter scarcely a year before? Didn’t John Kifner and I admit that we had enjoyed those heart-stopping, shirt-tearing, speed-gashing rides up the wadis and over those hundreds of burned-out tanks? Wasn’t that what being a foreign correspondent in war was all about? Going into battle and getting the story and arriving home safe and sound and knowing you wouldn’t have to go back next day? We climbed off the helicopter and I could see the relief on the pilots’ faces. If they hadn’t wanted to go, then there was something very, very wrong with this journey to Fao.

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.

In one incident – well known to the controllers but kept secret from the press – a US frigate had stationed itself off the Emirates coast and radio-challenged every civilian flight approaching Dubai International Airport. In desperation, the British duty controller at the airport called the US embassy in Abu Dhabi and told American diplomats to instruct the ship to move away because it was ‘a danger to civil aviation’. Civilian helicopter pilots off the coast had often complained that American warships challenged them on the wrong radio frequencies. The controllers in Dubai could hear some of the US navy’s traffic. ‘Robert, the Americans knew at once that they’d hit a passenger airliner,’ one of them told me quietly. ‘There was another American warship close by – we have its coding as FFG-14. Its crew reported seeing people falling at great speed out of the sky.’

I sat behind the Dubai control tower thinking about this. Yes, the passengers would all fall out of the sky like that, over a wide area, together, in clumps, in bits, from 10,000 feet it seemed. I could imagine the impact with the sea, the spouts of water, some of the passengers – no doubt – still fully conscious all the way down. Three days later, in the emergency Bandar Abbas mortuary, I would look at Fatima Faidazaida and realise with horror that she must have been alive as she fell from the heavens, clutching her baby as she tumbled and spilled out of the sky in the bright summer sun, her fellow passengers and chunks of the Airbus and burning fuel oil cascading around her. And she held on to her baby, knowing – could she have known? – that she must die.

From Dubai that Sunday night, I sent three reports to The Times, the longest dispatch a detailed account of the record of the US navy’s constant misidentification of civil aircraft over the Gulf and the near-panic that the air-traffic controllers had heard over the airwaves from the American warships. The Vincennes had claimed it was under attack by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in motor boats at the time it destroyed the airliner. I knew that US warships carried the timetables of civil airliners in their ‘combat information centres’ (CICs). Had Captain Rogers and his crew not had time to look at their copy? Iran Air flight IR655 flew to Dubai every day from Bandar Abbas. Why should it become a target on 3 July?

Captain Rogers himself said that he would have to live for ever with the burden of his own conscience at what he had done. Four years later, he would publish his own account of the destruction of the Airbus. *This would include a vivid description of an attack on the Vincennes by Iranian motor boats, the first alert of an aircraft taking off from Bandar Abbas – a military as well as civil airport – and the information that the aircraft was issuing two transponder codes, one used by passenger aircraft, the other a military code ‘known to have been used by Iranian F-14 fighters’. The plane was also being monitored by the frigate USS Sides, naval coding FFG-14 – this was the ship whose crew, according to the Dubai traffic controllers, would see bodies falling out of the sky.

Before the Airbus was 40 kilometres from his warship Rogers had sent a routinely worded warning – but addressed it to a fighter aircraft: ‘Iranian aircraft … fighter on course two-one-one, speed 360 knots, altitude 9,000 feet, this is USNWS [United States Navy warship] bearing two-zero-two from you, request you change course immediately to two-seven-zero, if you maintain current course you are standing into danger and subject to USN defensive measures …’ Rogers says he asked for further identification of the aircraft when it was 25 kilometres from his vessel. At 9.54 and 22 seconds in the morning, he launched his two missiles. Twenty-one seconds later, they exploded against Rezaian’s passenger jet, which vanished from the Vincennes’s radar screen. ‘The bridge reported seeing the flash of missile detonation through the haze,’ Rogers wrote. ‘There was a spontaneous cheer, a release of tension from the men.’ But crewmen on another US warship would moments later see a large wing of a commercial airliner, with an engine pod still attached, crashing into the sea.

Later investigation would reveal that staff of the CIC on the Sides correctly identified the Airbus’s commercial transponder code at virtually the same moment that Rogers fired. For Captain David Carlson, commanding the Sides, the destruction of the airliner ‘marked the horrifying climax to Captain Rogers’ aggressiveness, first seen just four weeks earlier’. On 2 June, two of Rogers’s colleagues had been disturbed by the way he sailed the Vincennes too close to an Iranian frigate that was carrying out a lawful though unprecedented search of a bulk carrier for war materiel bound for Iraq. On the day the Vincennes shot down the Airbus, Rogers had launched a helicopter that flew within 2 to 3 miles of an Iranian small craft – the rules stated that the chopper had to be no closer than 4 miles – and reportedly came under fire. Rogers began shooting at some small Iranian military boats; an act that disturbed Captain David Carlson on the Sides. ‘Why do you want an Aegis cruiser out there shooting up boats?’ he later asked in an interview with an ex-naval officer. ‘It wasn’t a smart thing to do. He was storming off with no plan …’ Rogers subsequently opened fire on Iranian boats inside their territorial waters. The Vincennes had already been nicknamed ‘Robocruiser’ by the crew of the Sides.

When Carlson first heard Rogers announcing to higher headquarters his intention to shoot down the aircraft approaching his cruiser, he says he was thunderstruck. ‘I said to the folks around me, “Why, what the hell is he doing?” I went through the drill again. F-14. He’s climbing. By now this damn thing is at about 7,000 feet …’ But Carlson thought that the Vincennes might have more information – and did not know that Rogers had been told, wrongly, that the aircraft was diving. Carlson regretted that he did not interrupt Rogers. When his own men realised the Airbus was commercial, ‘they were horrified’. The official US investigation report would later say that computer data and ‘reliable intelligence’ agreed that Captain Rezaian’s airliner ‘was on a normal commercial air traffic plan profile … on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas’. Newsweek magazine would carry out its own investigation, branding the official report ‘a pastiche of omissions, half-truths and outright deceptions’ and painting a dramatic picture of ‘an overeager captain, panicked crewmen and a cover-up …’ In Newsweek’s report, books had been sliding off the shelves in the Vincennes’s information centre as it manoeuvred prior to the missile launching; little chance, then, that anyone had an opportunity to look up a scheduled airline timetable.

But in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, the Americans stuck to the tale of total innocence. Vice President Bush appeared before the UN Security Council to say that the Vincennes had been rushing to the aid of a merchant ship under Iranian attack – which was totally untrue. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher described the destruction of the Iranian Airbus as ‘understandable’. The Iranian consul in Dubai had a point when he asked me later whether Mrs Thatcher would have considered it ‘understandable’ if an Iranian warship had shot down a British Airways airliner over the Gulf and then claimed that it was an accident because its captain thought it was under attack by a US jet. One key to the disaster lay in the American claims that a warning was sent to Captain Rezaian on both military and civilian wavelengths. Did Captain Rezaian hear these warnings? If not, why not?

The evidence of the aircraft’s destruction was laid out for journalists on a parade ground at Iranian naval headquarters in Bandar Abbas. Pieces of engine cowling, wings and flaps had been scored and burned by metal fragments; a jagged hunk of wing flap had a 12-centimetre hole punched through its centre. A section of the passenger cabin wall 3 metres square had been perforated by metal shards. Several of the bodies I saw had scarlet and red burns on their flesh; these passengers must have been sitting in the centre of the aircraft, close to the two engines onto which the Vincennes’s heat-seeking missiles would have locked. Lying beside this wreckage was the nosecone of the Airbus, escape chutes, electrical circuitry and oxygen systems. The explosions had been catastrophic.

Three days after the Airbus was destroyed, I flew from Bandar Abbas to Dubai aboard the first Iran Air plane to resume operations on the route. It was, of course, flight IR655. I sat in the cockpit of the Boeing 707 alongside Captain Rezaian’s former Airbus navigator. Captain Nasser, who had been flying with Rezaian until six weeks ago when he transferred to Boeings – an act that probably saved his life – had marked the point of Rezaian’s destruction on his charts and insisted that his friend, on other flights over the Gulf with him, had always replied when he heard challenges from the US navy. ‘He was a sensible, very professional man,’ he said. ‘He would never make a mistake or play games with the Americans. What the Americans did was very crude – they must have panicked.’ Suggestions that Rezaian was on a suicide mission, Nasser added, were ‘disgusting’. Rezaian had flown the Dubai route on at least twenty-five previous occasions and had been piloting Airbus aircraft for almost two and a half years. So what happened on that Sunday morning?

The answer was not difficult to discover. In our Boeing, Captain Asadapur, the pilot, had to communicate constantly with three traffic-control centres – Tehran, Bandar Abbas and Dubai – which he did in fluent English. While talking to them, he could neither send nor receive on the civilian 1215 radio band to which our Boeing was tuned – the same wavelength on which the Vincennes said it tried to warn Captain Rezaian. Climbing from 12,000 to 14,000 feet – not descending in an ‘attack mode’ as the Americans initially claimed – Rezaian would have been talking to Bandar Abbas when he was 50 kilometres out, when the first American missile blew off the port wing of his Airbus. Bandar Abbas ground control told me that Rezaian’s last message was that he was ‘climbing to one-four-zero’ (14,000 feet). If Rezaian could not hear the Americans on his civilian waveband, he was certainly not going to hear them on the military net, a challenge that was anyway intended for the non-existent F-14 which was supposed to be closing on the American cruiser.

Then there was the mystery of the transponder. On our Iranian flight, a green light glowed beside the co-pilot’s left knee, showing that it was sending out our identification into the dark night above the Gulf. Any warship down there on the moonlit sea would know who we were. Asadapur repeatedly told Dubai control – for the benefit of all listeners – that we were flight IR655 ‘with forty-four souls on board’. If the transponder was not working, the light would have been out. Asadapur said he would never take off without checking it. Hossein Pirouzi, the Bandar Abbas ground controller and airport manager on 3 July, told me he ‘assumed’ Rezaian’s transponder was working. Rezaian would scarcely have taken off without ensuring that it was glowing that comforting green light. Pirouzi, a middle-aged man with a smart brown moustache, wavy hair and a thorough training in air-traffic control from London’s Heathrow airport, said that he did not know a naval engagement was in progress at the time of Rezaian’s take-off. But as we were later to discover, there was no battle as such taking place. ‘The Americans broadcast warnings every time they see a speeding boat – they go on “red alert” when they see every plane,’ Pirouzi said. ‘The Americans have no right to be in the Gulf challenging our legitimate right to fly our air routes – so why should we reply to them?’

His comment was devastating. If Pirouzi’s blithe assumption that the Americans would never fire at an Airbus was to be the basis of his air-traffic policy, how easy it was to understand why the US naval crews, equally psyched up against the country which their president blamed for the Gulf war, should have panicked and fired at the first plane to approach their ship after they had engaged an Iranian patrol craft.

Was it panic, as Newsweek was to suggest four years later, that caused the officers of the Vincennes to misread the information on their own radar screens, to see an aircraft descending which was clearly ascending, panic and the oppressive heat that cloaks the bodies and energies of all naval crews in the Gulf? Besides, was not Iran the enemy? Was not Iran a ‘terrorist state’? Was it not, in Reagan’s words, ‘a barbarous country’? Unknown to them, Captain Rezaian and his passengers over the Gulf were flying across a cultural and emotional chasm that separated America from Iran, a ravine so deep and so dangerous that its updraft blew an Iranian Airbus out of the sky.

Nothing could have illustrated this more painfully than the American response to the Vincennes’s killing of 290 innocent civilians. Citizens of Vincennes, Indiana, were raising money for a monument – not to the dead Iranians, but to the ship that destroyed their lives. *When the ship returned to its home base of San Diego, it was given a hero’s welcome. The men of the Vincennes were all awarded combat action ribbons. The air warfare coordinator, Commander Scott Lustig, won the navy’s Commendation Medal for ‘heroic achievement’, for the ‘ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire’ that enabled him to ‘quickly and concisely complete the firing procedure’. Even Newsweek was constrained to describe this as ‘surreal’. Rogers retired honourably in 1991. Less than a year after the destruction of the Airbus, the captain’s wife Sharon was the target of a pipe-bomb which exploded beneath her Toyota van in San Diego. She was unharmed. Rogers was to write that the ‘centerpiece’ of his book was formed by ‘the events of 3 July 1988 and 10 March 1989’ – as if the bloodbath over the Gulf and the failed attempt on his wife’s life were comparable, a suggestion contained on the book’s cover, which described its contents as ‘a personal account of tragedy and terrorism’.

In fairness, however, Rogers was to quote in full in his book a long and bitter handwritten letter which he received from Captain Rezaian’s brother Hossein. ‘He was turned into the powder at the mid-air by your barrage missile attack and perished along with so many other innocent lives aboard, without the slightest sin or guilt whatsoever,’ Hossein Rezaian wrote.

I was at the area of carnage the day after and unfortunately I saw the result of your barbarous crime and its magnitude. I used to be a Navy Commander myself and I had my college education in U.S. as my late brother did, but ever since the incredible downing I really felt ashamed of myself. I hated your Navy and ours. So that I even quit my job and I ruined my whole career … me and my family … could somehow bear the pain of tragedy if he [Mohsen] had died in an accident but this premeditated act is neither forgiveable nor forgettable … the U.S. government as the culprit in this horrendous incident, showed neither remorse nor compassion for the loss of innocent lives … Didn’t we really deserve a small gesture of sympathy? Did you have to say a pack of lies and contradictory statements about the incident in a bid to justify the case? … or it was the result of panic and inexperience. I do appreciate your prompt response.

It was much to Rogers’s credit that he gave this letter so much prominence in his book. ‘Despite the diatribe,’ he wrote, ‘the pain and grief pouring from this letter struck me hard. All of the sorrow and grief that had haunted me since July returned in force.’ He had wanted, Rogers said, to reply but a naval public relations officer warned that return correspondence ‘could be used by the Iranian government as some sort of political lever’. Again, the Iranians were the bad guys. Hossein Rezaian’s letter was handed over to the US Naval Intelligence Service. Who knows, maybe they read it.

There certainly wouldn’t have been much to gain from reading my first report on the massacre. When a newspaper had been so loyal to a reporter as The Times had been to me over the past eighteen years – fighting off the British army in Northern Ireland, the Israelis and Palestinians, the American authorities and the Iranians and Iraqis whenever they complained about my reporting – there was a natural inclination to feel great trust in my editors. If my reports were cut, this was done for space reasons – I was usually given the chance to shorten my own dispatches – or because a breaking news story elsewhere in the world was forcing the paper’s night editors to change the pages after the first edition. But cuts were never made for political reasons.

Murdoch had already bought The Times when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, but I reported without any censorship on Israel’s killing of up to 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians – most of them civilians – and the subsequent butchery of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Christian allies. The Israeli embassy had condemned my dispatches, as they did the reporting of any journalist who dared to suggest that Israel’s indisciplined army killed civilians as well as soldiers. But under Charles Douglas-Home’s editorship, no foreign correspondent was going to have his work changed out of fear or bias or prejudice. His deputy, Charles Wilson, was a tough ex-Royal Marine who could be a bully, but who did not mince his words about Israel or any other country which tried to impugn the integrity of the paper’s journalists. ‘What a bunch of fascists,’ he roared when I had proved to him that an Israeli statement condemning my work was riddled with factual mistakes.

Israelis are not fascists, but it was good to have a deputy editor who was unafraid of a reporter’s antagonists. After Douglas-Home’s death from cancer, Wilson became editor. He remained a bully but could also be immensely kind. To members of staff who suffered serious illness, he was a rock of strength and compassion. He wanted to be liked. He was immensely generous to me when, for personal reasons, I wanted to work for a year in Paris. But there was one afternoon in Beirut when I had filed a long and detailed investigative report on torture at Israel’s Khiam prison in southern Lebanon. About an hour after I had sent my story, a foreign desk staffer came on the telex to ask if I could not add a paragraph to the effect that allegations about torture of the kind I had described – beatings and electrical currents applied to the genitals – were typical of the propaganda put out by Israel’s enemies. I protested. I had United Nations evidence to support my investigation – all of which was subsequently confirmed in a compelling report by Amnesty International. In the end, I inserted a paragraph which only strengthened my dispatch: that while such allegations were often used against Israel, on this occasion there was no doubt that they were true.

I had won this round, and thought no more about it. Then an article appeared on the centre page of The Times, which was usually reserved for comment or analysis. It purported to explain the difficulties of reporting the Middle East – the intimidation of journalists by ‘terrorists’ being the salient argument – but then ended by remarking that anyone reporting from Beirut was ‘a bloodsucker’. I was reporting from Beirut. I was based in Beirut as Middle East correspondent – for The Times, for goodness’ sake. What did this mean? The foreign desk laughed it off. I did not. Was Wilson trying to ‘balance’ my dispatches by allowing the enemies of honest reporting to abuse me in the paper? It seemed impossible. I don’t believe in conspiracies. Besides, I knew Wilson often did not read the centre page of The Times.

But it was a much more serious matter on 4 July 1988, when I discovered that my lead report for The Times – which I had been asked to write for the front page – was not appearing in the next day’s paper. All the investigative work on the panic and inefficiency of US warship crews in the Gulf, all the evidence that US personnel had been placing civilian airliners in peril for weeks – the long and detailed conversations with the Dubai air traffic controllers who had actually heard the radio traffic between US naval officers as the Vincennes was shooting down the Airbus – had been for nothing. If there had been any doubts about my report, they should have been raised with me on the evening I filed. But there had been silence. Two other routine dispatches – on Iran’s public reaction to the destruction of the plane and possible retaliation – were printed inside the paper.

Next morning, I spoke to Piers Ackerman on the foreign desk. He told me that my story had been dropped in the first edition for space reasons but that the later, reinserted and shortened version contained ‘the main points’. When I asked if cuts had been made for political reasons, he said: ‘My God, if I thought things had reached that stage, I would resign.’ I told him that if it transpired that the cuts were political, I would resign. The Times took days to reach the Gulf and I would be away in Iran, so I had no chance to read the paper for several days. When at last I did see the later editions, every element of my story that reflected negatively on the Americans had been taken out.

Journalists should not be prima donnas. We have to fight to prove the worth of our work. Neither editors nor readers are there for the greater good of journalists. But something very unethical had taken place here: my report on the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus had been, in every sense of the word, tampered with, changed and censored. Its meaning had been distorted by omission. The Americans, in my truncated report, had been exonerated as surely as they had been excused by Mrs Thatcher. This, I felt sure, was a result of Murdoch’s ownership of The Times. I did not believe that he personally became involved in individual newspaper stories – though this would happen – but rather that his ownership spread a culture of obedience and compliance throughout the paper, a feeling that Murdoch’s views – what Murdoch wanted – were ‘known’.

I had been very struck by the fact that the foreign desk staffer who had been so keen to add the ‘propaganda’ paragraph to my Khiam torture story was previously a very left-wing member of the National Union of Journalists – the very union which had done so much to undermine owner Lord Thomson’s faith in The Times and to truss up the paper for Murdoch to buy. A socialist lion had now turned into a News Corp mouse. I am neither a lion nor a mouse, but I can be a tough dog, and when I get a rope between my teeth I won’t let go until I shake it and tug it something rotten to see what lies at the other end. That, after all, is what journalists are supposed to do. Further enquiries to the foreign desk of the paper elicited ignorance. Wilson’s compliant foreign editor, George Brock, was unavailable to take my calls. Days had now passed since my original report was filed, the subs on that night were never on duty when I telephoned, Wilson had gone on holiday. But my concerns did not go away. It is one thing to have an article cut for space – or ‘trimmed’ or ‘shaved’ as the unpleasant foreign desk expression goes – but quite another to risk one’s life for a paper, only to find that the courage necessary to report wars is not in evidence among those whose task it is to print those reports. And so in the Gulf that steamy summer, I lost faith in The Times.

I decided I would try to join a brash, intelligent, brave, dangerously under-funded but independent new newspaper called – well, of course – The Independent. It would be months before I persuaded Andreas Whittam Smith, the editor and part-owner, to take me aboard, or to ‘draw rations’ as he was to put it, but within a year I would be reporting from the Middle East for a new editor, a new newspaper and new colleagues – although many of them would turn out to be fellow refugees from The Times.

Only after I had written to Wilson to tell him that I was resigning from The Times, however, did I learn that I had transferred my allegiance for the right reasons. Just after New Year of 1988, I received a call from one of the senior night editors on the paper. He wanted to talk to me about the Vincennes story:

At the Sunday 5 p.m. conference, I advised the editor that your story would make a ‘hamper’ [a large box across eight columns at the top of the front page]. Wilson said he wanted to see the story. It was about the incompetence of the crew of the Vincennes. I read it and said to myself: this is the clearest story I’ve yet read about what really happened. Later I saw the editor on the back bench. Wilson said to me: ‘Is this the story you’re talking about?’ I said it was. He said: ‘There’s nothing in it. There’s not a fact in it. I wouldn’t even run this gibberish.’ Wilson said it was bollocks, that it was ‘waffle’. I remember saying to Charlie: ‘Are you sure? This is a terrific story.’ I was shocked. I’ve looked up my diary for the night of July 3rd. It says: ‘Shambles, chaos on Gulf story. Brock rewrites Fisk.’

It didn’t run in the first edition, but in the second edition the story ran but with all the references to American incompetence cut out. I looked it up on the screen. George [Brock] had edited the story. He had taken out all those references. At the top, he had written a note, saying that ‘under no circumstances will the cuts made in this story be re-inserted.’ I wanted to resign. I considered resigning over this. I didn’t, and perhaps I should have done. I told Denis [Taylor] about this on the desk. He was disgusted. All the foreign desk knew about it. But none of them would do anything about it. They were frightened. Nobody told you about this. I thought: ‘Well, it might be better for the paper if Bob didn’t know.’ I thought you might resign if you knew.

On the day I filed the first Vincennes story, I had spoken to Piers Ackerman, asking him to pass on to the leader writers my advice that – whatever our editorial response to the disaster – we should not go along with the line that Mohsen Rezaian had been a suicide pilot, which would, I said, be rubbish. Ackerman said he passed on the message. But our editorial subsequently said that the plane might have been controlled by a ‘suicide’ pilot. This was totally untrue. And so was the thrust of my story, once it had appeared in bowdlerised form in the paper that same morning. Readers of The Times had been solemnly presented with a fraudulent version of the truth.

There are rarely consolation prizes for a journalist when a paper doesn’t run the real story, but Vincent Browne, the hard-headed editor of the Dublin Sunday Tribune, an old friend and colleague from Northern Ireland, had none of Wilson’s fears about events in the Gulf. He invited me to write the fruits of my investigations for his own paper. Half the next issue of the Tribune’s, front page carried a photograph of an American Aegis-class cruiser firing a missile into the sky; superimposed on the picture was the headline ‘What Really Happened’, with my full-page report inside. Which is how the people of County Mayo were allowed to read what subscribers to The Times of London could not.

It’s easy for a journalist to become self-important about his work, to claim that he or she alone is the bearer of truth, that editors must stand aside so that the bright light of a reporter’s genius may bathe the paper’s readers. It’s also tempting to allow one’s own journalistic arguments to take precedence over the ghastly tragedies which we are supposed to be reporting. We have to have a sense of proportion, some perspective in our work. What am I doing – what is Fisk doing, I can hear a hostile reviewer of this book ask – writing about the violent death of 290 innocent human beings and then taking up five pages to explain his petty rows with The Times?. The answer is simple. When we journalists fail to get across the reality of events to our readers, we have not only failed in our job; we have also become a party to the bloody events that we are supposed to be reporting. If we cannot tell the truth about the shooting down of a civilian airliner – because this will harm ‘our’ side in a war or because it will cast one of our ‘hate’ countries in the role of victim or because it might upset the owner of our newspaper – then we contribute to the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place. If we cannot blow the whistle on a navy that shoots civilians out of the sky, then we make future killings of the same kind as ‘understandable’ as Mrs Thatcher found this one. Delete the Americans’ panic and incompetence – all of which would be revealed in the months to come – and pretend an innocent pilot is a suicidal maniac, and it’s only a matter of time before we blow another airliner out of the sky. Journalism can be lethal.

But I also ask myself if, standing in that charnel house in Bandar Abbas, I did not see the genesis of another mass killing, five months later, this time over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. Within hours of the destruction of the Airbus on 3 July 1988, President Khamenei of Iran declared that Reagan and his administration were ‘criminals and murderers’. Tehran radio announced: ‘We will not leave the crimes of America unpunished.’ And it continued: ‘We will resist the plots of the Great Satan and avenge the blood of our martyrs from criminal mercenaries.’ I didn’t have much doubt what that would mean. Back in Beirut, I found no one who believed that the Vincennes had shot down the Iranian aircraft in error. I started to hear disjointed, disturbing remarks. Someone over dinner – a doctor who was a paragon of non-violence – speculated that a plane could be blown up by a bomb in the checked baggage of an aircraft. It was a few days before it dawned on me that if people were talking like this, then someone was trying to find out if it was possible.

The Iranians, after all, had a motive. The destruction of the Iranian passenger jet, whatever Washington’s excuses, was a terrible deed. But would someone so wickedly plot revenge? I was in Paris when the BBC announced that a Pan Am jet had crashed over Lockerbie. This time it was 270 dead, including eleven on the ground. I didn’t need to imagine the corpses – I had seen them in July – and not for a moment did I doubt the reason. There were the usual conspiracy theories: a cover-up CIA drug-busting scheme that had gone crazily wrong, messing with the evidence by American agents after the crash. And Iranian revenge for the Airbus killings.

In the United States, this was a favourite theory. The news shows repeated the video – taken by a US navy team – of the Vincennes firing its missiles on 3 July. Captain Rogers saw the film again, writing later that he ‘felt a knot in my stomach and wondered if it was ever going to stop’. The parallel was relevant but had no moral equivalence. The annihilation of the Airbus had been a shameful mass killing but Lockerbie was murder. In Beirut, an old acquaintance with terrifying contacts in the hostage world calmly said to me: ‘It’s [Ahmed] Jibril and the Iranians.’ Jibril was head of the Damascus-based ‘Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command’. Diplomatic correspondents in Washington and London – always the stalking horses for government accusations – began to finger the Iranians, the PFLP-GC, the Syrians. In Tehran, people would look at me with some intensity when I mentioned Lockerbie. They never claimed it. Yet they never expressed their horror. But of course, after the Airbus slaughter, that would have been asking a bit much.

In Beirut, the PFLP-GC became known, briefly, as ‘the Lockerbie boys’. I didn’t count much on that. But then, more than two years later, a strange thing happened. Jibril held a press conference in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, initially to talk about the release by Libya of French and Belgian hostages seized from a boat in the Mediterranean. But that was not what was on his mind. ‘I’m not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing,’ he suddenly blurted out. ‘They are trying to get me with a kangaroo court.’ There was no court then. And no one had officially accused Jibril of Lockerbie. But scarcely nine months later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the diplomatic correspondents no longer believed in the Syrian – PFLP-GC – Iranian connection. Now it was Libya that was behind Lockerbie. Iran was the enemy of the bestial Saddam, and Syria was sending its tanks to serve alongside the Western armies in the Gulf. Jibril’s men faded from the screen. So did the only country with a conceivable motive: Iran.

In the aftermath of the shooting down of the Airbus, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who was intended to be Khomeini’s successor, said that he was ‘sure that if the Imam orders, all the revolutionary forces and resistance cells, both inside and outside the country, will unleash their wrath on US financial, political, economic and military interests.’ But the Vincennes attack finally convinced most of the Iranian leadership that the United States had joined the war on Iraq’s side. The Americans had destroyed Iran’s oil platforms, eliminated the Iranian navy and were now, it seemed, determined to use missiles against Iran’s passenger planes, all of which had previously been targets for Saddam Hussein. Iran’s economy was collapsing and, so Rafsanjani warned Khomeini, even the resupply of Iran’s vast armies was impossible. There could be no more Iranian offensives against Iraq, Khomeini was told by the country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Mohsen Rezai, until 1993. So to protect the Islamic revolution – to ensure its survival – Khomeini accepted UN Security Council resolution 598 and a ceasefire to take effect on 22 July 1988, ‘in the interests of security and on the basis of justice’. For the old man, it was a personal as well as a military catastrophe. ‘Woe upon me that I am still alive,’ he concluded bleakly, ‘and have drunk the poisoned chalice of the resolution.’

But worse was to come. Seven days after Khomeini’s 18 July acceptance of the UN resolution, the Mujahedin-e-Qalq’s ‘National Liberation Army’ swept across the Iranian border in Iraqi-supplied tanks and armour to overthrow the Khomeini regime. It was the ultimate treachery and the Iranians fought back against their invaders – who were, of course, themselves Iranians – with fury; across Iran, the government’s secret police began the wholesale liquidation of the Muhajedin’s supporters. The Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji, many of whom felt betrayed by the ending of the war, turned upon the Mujahedin, summarily hanging their captured militiamen in Bakhtaran, Kangavar and Islam Abad. Now thousands of Mujahedin militants and their supporters in jails all over Iran – many of whom had long ago been tried and sentenced to many years of imprisonment – were to be re-tried and hanged.

‘We ask the Leader to deal harshly with murderers and as soon as possible, rid the people of their presence,’ Resalat newspaper pleaded. Ayatollah Musavi Ardebili, the head of the supreme court, gave a Freisler-like speech at Friday prayers in Tehran. The monafeqin – the ‘hypocrites’ – he said, ‘don’t know that people see them as less than animals. People are so angry with them; the judiciary is under extreme pressure of public opinion … people say they should all be executed … We will judge them ten at a time, twenty at a time, bring a file, take away a file: I regret that they say a fifth have been destroyed. I wish they all were destroyed …’ ‘Hypocrites’ was a word that embraced the idea of heresy or apostasy rather than mere double standards. To be one of the monafeqin was a capital offence.

Even before the war had ended, Iran’s prison population was re-interrogated and divided into those who still recognised the resistance to the Islamic Republic and those who had repented – the tavvab – and between those who prayed and those who refused to pray. At some point, Khomeini ordered that political prisoners should be liquidated en masse. Although this order was kept secret, we know that Ayatollah Montazeri, Khomeini’s chosen successor, protested vehemently against the massacres, an act that ensured his dismissal as the future Imam. ‘… As to your order to execute the hypocrites in prison,’ Montazeri wrote in a private letter to Khomeini, ‘the nation is prepared to accept the execution if those arrested [are] in relation to recent events [i.e. the Iraqi-backed Mujahedin invasion]… But the execution of those already in prison … would be interpreted as vindictiveness and revenge.’

In some prisons, inmates were lined up on opposite sides of a corridor, one line to be returned to their cells after ‘repenting’, the other taken straight to a mass gallows. On 30 July, Revolutionary Guards at Evin began their executions with Mujahid women prisoners. The hangings went on for several days. Male communist prisoners were hanged at the mosque in Evin. ‘When [they] are taken to the Hosseinieh to be hanged,’ an ex-prisoner testified, ‘some [are] crying, some swearing and all shivering but hiding their shivering. Some smile hopelessly … a number of the guards vie with each other to do the hanging so as to score more piety. A few are upset by seeing so many corpses. Some prisoners fight and are savagely beaten. The execution is swift.’ The bodies of the hanging men were paraded in front of female prisoners to break their spirit. In Tehran alone, an Iran-based human rights group published the names of 1,345 victims of the ‘national disaster’.

Exile magazines opposed to the regime would, years later, publish terrifying eyewitness accounts of the prison hangings. Up to 8,000 inmates may have been put to death in the summer of 1988, perhaps 10,000. Secret executions were followed by burials in secret graves. A former female prisoner

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