Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands

by Miles Morland

  The next day we would visit the stock exchange, a couple of companies and lunch with a banker at the Alwiyah Club, where I had last been in 1957. I wondered how businesses in Baghdad would compare with the hundreds of companies I had visited elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. And I wondered what the Alwiyah Club would be like, more than half a century since my previous visit.

  Waking up in the container was difficult with no natural light, so it was a shock to step outside at 8 a.m. and find myself in a cool-blue-sky Baghdad morning. After breakfast we were going to leave the Green Zone, with its high walls and gun towers, and go into Iraq proper: Baghdad, the Red Zone.

  I asked Bartle if we really needed Pistol Pete and his five Testosterone Tommies to accompany us. ‘Well, usually we cruise around with a driver in a little Toyota, and we’re fine. In four years we’ve only once come close to being blown up and that was when the car ahead of us was vapourised by a bomb on the airport road. But following the car bombings last week and with the elections coming up everyone’s edgy. The Sunnis and the Ba’athists will do their best to derail the election.’

  So at 9 a.m. our convoy of three cars crossed the muddy Tigris, which I had last seen fifty-three years before, when King Feisal II was on the throne, and arrived in Karada, the Kensington of Baghdad. Here there were people actually walking on the streets – not many of them, and almost as many Iraqi soldiers and policemen sitting on their brightly painted armoured cars – but life was going on. Half the shops were boarded up, and most trade was happening on the pavements, where boxes of air conditioners from Turkey and microwaves from Dubai were piled building-high. A few cafés had a few people in them, but there was none of the bustle and buzz of Cairo or Damascus. The buildings were as shabby as those of Lagos, but how nice it was to see life on the streets after the neutron-bomb emptiness of the Green Zone.

  We pulled up at the stock exchange. Our five bodyguards jumped out and deployed, backs to the vehicles, scanning the streets and waving their weapons in best Bruce Willis fashion. ‘Don’t touch the doors, don’t touch the doors,’ Pete screamed at us. Like five-year-olds we could only get out when Pete told us it was safe and we were let out. A half-hour stand-off then took place while our guards argued with the Iraqi stock exchange guards, who wouldn’t let them inside with guns.

  Finally we went in past a table-mounted machine gun pointed at our belly buttons by a smiling stock exchange doorman, who salaam alekhoumed us as his finger massaged the safety. Two de-gunned bodyguards accompanied us, sulking.

  We were welcomed by the ex-chairman of the exchange.

  The place was packed with old men gossiping in airport-style seats looking at display screens. I suspected that they were there for the gossip and the air conditioning more than the trading. The brokers sat yawning next door. I asked our broker about company accounts. ‘Mr Miles, you don’t understand. Accounts not important. Here you need information.’ He tapped his nose. ‘In Baghdad you must know what is going to happen before it is announced. That is how you make money.’

  I was delighted to find a market where it appeared that insider trading was still obligatory, but I was assured that insider trading was not tolerated and our friend would certainly never have anything to do with it.

  Lunch was with Mowafaq Mahmood, a courtly retired Iraqi businessman, at the Alwiyah Club. I remembered the Alwiyah as the Hurlingham Club of Baghdad. It was founded by the British in 1926 and hadn’t changed much since – apart from the fact that the last splash of paint had gone on in the 1970s. The rules remained strict. Just as in a London gentlemen’s club you had to leave your briefcase at the door and couldn’t get your phone out, at the Alwiyah you had to leave your bodyguard at the door and couldn’t get your pistol out.

  Lunch was interrupted by Muhammad, the club manager, who rushed up babbling. Pistol Pete, our cranium-creased bodyguard, had forced an entrance to the club so that he could guard us, saying to Muhammad, ‘Fuck you and your fucking club and fuck your fucking pisspot country.’ Muhammad became so emotional while telling us this that all the good ol’ Iraqi boys in the Members’ Bar of the Alwiyah put down their Johnnie Walkers to listen. He switched to Arabic so they could understand better. Zaab calmed the manager and returned ten minutes later having dealt with Pistol Pete.

  Back home in the Green Zone, after taking a short siesta in my container, where I was lulled to sleep by the music of machine guns from the embassy firing range, we dined in the dining container with Mazim, owner of the hotel. During dinner we talked. The one thing everyone agreed on was that the Americans had been broadly welcomed when they arrived in Baghdad in 2003. If, said Mazim, they had put a provisional Iraqi government in place with the US providing support and assistance, it might just have worked. But the Iraqis woke up and found they had been occupied. The Yankee liberators had become humiliating American occupiers.

  Talk of American occupiers reminded me of visiting Babylon over fifty years earlier, when I had been in Baghdad with Tom. Babylon was then just being dug up, the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens arid sites in the desert, starved of water since the Euphrates changed its course 3,000 years earlier. More recently Saddam had decided that Babylon, the city of Nebuchadnezzar, would make a fitting monument to Saddam the Great, so he set teams to work ‘rebuilding’ it. Work began to create a modern Babylon on top of the painstakingly excavated old city. Bricks were fired stamped with the legend, ‘This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq,’ but before work could really get going the invasion of 2003 put an end to construction.

  The ‘son of Nebuchadnezzar’ was replaced in Babylon by the delegate of Dubya, General James T. Conway of the 1st US Marine Expeditionary Force. It took him only a matter of weeks to build Camp Alpha, a US military base, right on top of Babylon, parts of which were levelled to the ground by US Marine bulldozers to make a helicopter base and a parking lot for equipment. Tanks crushed 3,000-year-old roads of ancient bricks, and a number of walls and gates were knocked down to permit military vehicles to pass.

  I asked Bartle what he, as an American, thought of this.

  ‘Miles, you know, I betcha Conway thought that Babylon was just somewhere in the Bible.’ He went on to tell me that while General Conway was flattening Babylon, Bartle had been the first and only Western journalist to be embedded into Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, usually portrayed as being the most homicidal of the Shi’a militias. The Mahdi Army wanted its story to be known in the West and agreed he could spend six weeks with them. This resulted in two long articles by Bartle in the New York Times and longer ones elsewhere.

  Bartle later learned from his interpreter that while he was calmly tucking into his evening rice the conversation around him had once gone like this:

  Mahdi soldier (in Arabic): ‘This Bartr Boo must be a spy. When shall we kill him?’

  Bartle to interpreter: ‘What’s the guy saying?’

  Interpreter to Bartle: ‘He say that Chelsea won today.’

  Bartle: ‘Good. What about the Red Sox?’

  Interpreter in Arabic to soldier: ‘Mr Bartr no spy. Is independent reporter.’

  Mahdi soldier: ‘He Christian dog. Shall we shoot him now or cut his balls off first?’

  Interpreter to Bartle: ‘He say the Red Sox lost.’

  Bartle: ‘Damn.’

  Bartle knew nothing of this debate until his interpreter told him two years later.

  Next day we sacked Pistol Pete and the TTs for general lack of humour. To replace them we acquired the Baghdad Bazooka Boys, eight moonlighting Iraqi soldiers in two pickup trucks. These were hired from the retinue of Mr Chalabi, the man whom the Americans unsuccessfully tried to impose on Iraq as prime minister, who had since become their strong critic. He was, as was everyone, a cheek-kissing friend of Zaab’s.

  Mounted on the back of each truck was the finest ordnance that Mr Chalabi’s deep pockets could buy, a machine gun manned by a uniformed Iraqi in balaclava, helmet with built-in telescopic sig
hts and the obligatory wrap-around Ray-Bans. The gunner sat in a swivelling chair constantly rotating and pointing his gun at anything with two legs. Next to him in the armoured post on top of the pickup were two other guards with automatic pistols and assault rifles. One truck went in front of our armoured vehicle, the other tail-gunned us. Everyone wore balaclavas, helmets and black wool gloves. Who would have thought that 1980s IRA fashions would have taken such root in Baghdad?

  The Bazooka Boys had wild grins on their faces and no regard for the rules of the road. We scorched down divided highways on the wrong side forcing oncoming cars into ditches; we drove headlong into blocked intersections and watched the stationary traffic part like the Red Sea for Moses at the wave of a black glove and the swivel of a machine gun. Policemen actually saluted. We spent the morning trying to locate different offices. Addresses meant nothing. We were told, ‘Wait by the statue and I will send a boy.’ Getting to our destinations involved driving over roundabouts and traffic islands, along pavements, shunting other cars out of the way, and finally coming to rest in front of the welcoming weaponry of our hosts’ door staff. Unlike with Pistol Pete and the TTs, the door staff welcomed the Bazooka Boys. Greetings were shouted, weapons admired and stroked, balaclavas doffed; and we were soon ushered into dark buildings where only a lunatic would take the lift.

  The meetings were all similar. We went up dark stairs to sit in unlit offices on tilting chairs with worn seats. Courteous Iraqis plied us with sweet black tea in tiny glasses and talked about the rebuilding of the country. Everyone was charming. The shares of all the companies seemed expensive relative to their current business, but, it was explained by all we met, were a steal valued on their bright future prospects. I did not ask who would be stealing from whom.

  We all agreed that the potential of Iraq was boundless. It had more oil than Saudi Arabia, the exploitation of which would provide money for the rebuilding of the country. We also all agreed that Iraq would end up in a sunny place. It was getting from the present to that place that required an act of belief.

  We made a trip to the Palestine Hotel, where I had been meant to stay. One of the three giant car bombs that had gone off in Baghdad a week earlier had been detonated between the Sheraton and the Palestine. The force of the bomb had destroyed a large part of the lower floors of both hotels together with many of their upper windows. Everywhere you had to pick your way through shattered glass and twisted metal. The general manager showed us around. Bartle and Zaab and a local partner were potentially interested in a scheme to rebuild and rebrand the Palestine, the site of which, right on the Tigris in the middle of downtown, was one of the best in Baghdad.

  ‘When will you be open to guests again?’ I asked the GM, looking around at the devastated entrance.

  He looked puzzled: ‘But we are open. Occupancy, I regret, is low, only 20 per cent.’

  We then did what I regard as the only truly risky thing I did in Baghdad. Forget roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices, snipers and suicide bombers; we did something insane. We took the lift to the top of the Palestine. The lift was twenty-seven years old and I doubted if the Schindler maintenance man had been to call since the turn of the century. We survived. The view from the eighteenth-floor Panorama Hall Bar, windows all blown in, the room a mess, took in the whole of Baghdad. It looked surprisingly normal apart from the presence everywhere of the white and grey concrete fortifications surrounding every building of size. And then we had to take the lift down again.

  One major pleasant surprise of Baghdad was the absence of American troops on the streets; by then they were billeted in giant bases outside Baghdad. Worse than the troops had been the hated mercenary contractors such as Blackwater. The parting act of the disastrous US viceroy, Paul Bremer, had been to give all foreign troops and contractors total immunity from Iraqi law. The US troops were under orders to be nice to the locals in the later days; the mercenaries never were. They despised the Iraqis and showed their contempt. Every Iraqi I spoke to had stories of Blackwater mercenaries breaking into houses, shooting suspects, violating women and wantonly destroying property.

  When the Americans were still on the streets, Iraqis were not allowed to get closer than within a hundred feet of a US vehicle; for an Iraqi car to attempt to overtake a US military or mercenary vehicle was literally fatal. Blackwater vehicles would fire lethal bursts at random cars that offended them. Even now that they were off the streets their malign presence was felt. We had stopped for a photo session by Saddam’s ten-storey-high crossed-swords monument. Overhead a Blackwater helicopter was screaming around at little more than treetop height in a deafening and threatening manner. ‘Some yee-hah from Texas showing off to a visiting biggie,’ said Zaab.

  I had an introduction to Michael Christie, Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad, so Zaab, Bartle, I and the Bazooka Boys went to visit him. Reuters inhabited three or four collapsing houses in a secure compound filled with other collapsing houses, which housed Associated Press, the BBC, Agence France-Presse, the Japanese press agency and a few others. Most of the time the expatriate journalists stayed in their compounds because getting around Baghdad was so difficult. Iraqi staffers were employed to do the legwork. One reason everyone reporting from Baghdad seemed to echo everyone else may have been that they all messed in together, with the chief entertainment being the compound parties, where duty-free booze was drunk and stories swapped.

  I asked Michael about the risks of being a reporter in Iraq. ‘Reuters has lost seven people since the invasion,’ he said. ‘Good God,’ I said. ‘Roadside bombs?’ ‘No, all shot.’ ‘Don’t they have bodyguards?’ ‘All shot by Americans. Every one.’ ‘On purpose?’ ‘Who knows? The Americans say it’s easy to mistake a camera lens for a gun, but their vision equipment can read a watch at a hundred yards.’

  High point of our afternoon was tea with His Royal Highness Sherif Ali, pretender to the throne of Iraq. ‘Sherif’ means he is a direct descendant of the Prophet. In the Kassem revolution of 1958 King Faisal II and the royal family were butchered. Our man was the son of Faisal II’s uncle, the all-powerful but not all-popular regent, Abdul’illah, also murdered in the revolution. Our host had been out of the country at the time of the revolution or he too would have been butchered.

  Zaab was, of course, a buddy of the Sherif. The Hashemite family, of whose two branches Sherif Ali and the current King of Jordan were the heads, had been careless in the throne-keeping department. They’d lost three. The Hashemites started off as kings of most of Arabia including Mecca, but a warlord called Saud booted them out in the 1920s and attached his name to most of the Arabian peninsula. Churchill, annoyed at the loyal Brit-loving Hashemites being ousted by an unwashed Bedu, put one of the deposed king’s sons on the throne of a country he had just invented, Jordan, and the other, Feisal, on the throne of Syria. In the latter matter he had failed to consult the French, who thought they were ruling Syria, and Clemenceau in turn booted Feisal out of Syria, leaving Churchill, who was getting short of Arab thrones on which to seat members of the unlucky Hashemite family, to make him king of another country he had just invented, Iraq. So the ex-king of Syria woke up as King Feisal I of Iraq, the grandfather of the butchered Feisal II and great-grandfather of the man ushering us into his spacious villa on the banks of the Tigris, a villa which Saddam had built to house Yasser Arafat.

  Sherif Ali sat on a near-throne while we sat audience-style in front of him. He had one immaculately tailored leg languidly crossed over the other. He spoke melodious English and looked as if he were one of the better-dressed members of a St James’s Club, which for all I knew he was. The Sherif gave us the most objective overview of Iraqi politics I had had. Things were complicated. At the time of our meeting he, a Sunni and a descendant of the Prophet, was running for parliament as an MP on the ticket of the Shi’a SCIRI party. A Lebanese friend had said to me in Beirut a year earlier, ‘If you think you understand Lebanese politics, then they haven’t been properly explained to you.’ That wa
s even more true of Iraq.

  Talking to the Sherif, I was reminded how civilised most Iraqis are, particularly when compared to their Babylon-smashing Yankee occupiers. Iraq needed a government that could take decisions and get things done so that it could start to use the country’s potentially huge oil income to rebuild. Talking to the Sherif I almost believed that this was possible.

  30

  Doing the Hand Flap

  I have been back to India many times since the Morland family left it in 1949. And every time, as I leave the airport and smell the smell of India, something deep within me tingles and says, ‘This is my birth land.’ A few years ago I was idly surfing the Internet when I saw something that made my pulse gallop, something that would allow me to combine India with motorbiking: Extreme Bike Tours.

  A man called Zander Combe took small groups of bikers around India on Enfield Bullets. You could go either to the Himalayas, where, Zander’s website noted, he was hoping to get in the Guinness Book of Records for cooking the world’s highest prawn masala – although what the prawns would smell like after being carried to a Himalayan peak on an ancient motorbike I did not like to think – or you could do the South India Tour, starting in Cochin and finishing in Goa. For me India is about its people. There would be few people in the Himalayas and many in South India. It was an easy choice. I signed up. If I had known then what I know now I would have stayed at home. Well, perhaps. Driving in the wake of Zander through the towns, hills and jungles of southern India is the nearest thing I know to assisted suicide.

  A bare six weeks after finding Zander’s website, my diary cleared of grown-up London appointments, a Cochin taxi dropped Robert and me off at a tiny hotel in a back street. Robert had been a friend since Oxford. While still a happily married man, he did, at the occasional moment of stress, like to go a-biking.