by Mark Colvin
The CIA had run the 1953 coup that brought down the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. It did so hand-in-glove with the British Secret Intelligence Service (the SIS), at the request of the British Government, because Mossadeq was proposing to nationalise Iran’s oil industry. That was a resource the British, in the form of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later to become British Petroleum and now known as BP, had controlled since before World War I. They were determined not to let go of it, and democracy was the price Iran had to pay.
The Shah had painted himself throughout his reign as a moderniser and a seculariser, but he was certainly not a democrat. Starting in the early 1960s, the Shah had introduced what he called the ‘White Revolution’: he distributed some government-owned land to the poor, and brought in voting and education rights for women. And in a country where most were then still peasants, he introduced a ‘Literacy Corps’ aimed at getting education out into the countryside, rather than confining it to the major cities.
For this, he was much celebrated in the Western press, culminating in a near orgy of media coverage in 1971 when Shah Reza Pahlavi, in reality the son of an army private who had used thuggery to gain the throne, threw himself a gigantic party at the ancient city of Persepolis, attended by scores of crowned heads, presidents and prime ministers, all housed in a fabulously luxurious tent city, and culminating in a five-and-a-half-hour banquet beginning with quails’ eggs stuffed with the finest Iranian caviar and washed down with vintage pink champagne.
This celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire was intended to give to the world a sense of immense continuity—a royal family with antecedents stretching back two and a half millennia—and to Iranians themselves a sense of pride that the world was recognising the significance of their place in it. For many in the West, it was indeed an indication of a prosperous nation whose visionary leader had lifted it out of the Third World, liberated its women, and created a modern society fit for the twentieth century. But most ordinary Iranians could see the flip side: not only the vast extravagance of a $150 million party but the everyday expense of being governed by a dictator, albeit one on a Peacock Throne. They knew about the billions of dollars spent on US fighter jets and other sophisticated armaments, the corruption (and resistance to criticism) of the Shah’s own court, and—the darkest underside—the activities of the Shah’s secret service, SAVAK.
Even to those who knew little about Iran, SAVAK, with its practices of disappearing people, torturing and murdering political opposition, and sending even the clergy into exile, was notorious. It was often mentioned in the same breath as apartheid South Africa’s brutal intelligence service BOSS, and was believed to share training and techniques with it, as well as the CIA. For Iranians, particularly those with an interest in freedom of expression or political opposition, SAVAK meant the fear of the 3 a.m. door-knock, the family member taken away and either never seen again alive or eventually returned broken.
So as well as a newly prosperous but small middle class, there was also in Iran a rising generation of well-educated young people who wanted if not revolution, then at least a transition to democracy. The Shah, however, cocooned in wealth and privilege, and in the certain knowledge that the USA saw him as a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union, saw no reason to give it to them.
And as for the things the West saw as progress, there was a powerful group that saw them as exactly the opposite. They were the fundamentalist Shi’a Muslims—by far the majority religion in Iran—who eventually coalesced around Ayatollah Khomeini, whom the Shah had exiled to Paris.
Khomeini saw the Literacy Corps not as progress but a threat to the virtual monopoly on education through madrasas that the mullahs had established in the countryside: a threat, in other words, to the system of education based on memorising the Koran. And, the Ayatollah thought, women’s suffrage was not a liberation at all but a way ‘to corrupt our chaste women’. As for the schools and universities where photos of the day show smiling young women bareheaded and wearing Western skirts and dresses, they too were anathema to the Ayatollah and his followers. He excoriated them in sermons which were taped in Paris, smuggled back into Iran, and, in those pre-internet days, dubbed onto hundreds of cassettes and distributed among the people.
Promising a government based ‘on the will of the people as expressed by universal suffrage’, Khomeini flew back to Tehran in January 1979. With threats being transmitted from the ground that the Iranian Air Force would shoot the plane down, and after years of exile, the Ayatollah was asked what he felt. ‘Nothing,’ he replied.
The year that followed was tumultuous, and left in tatters the hopes of secular democrats that the new government would fulfil their hopes.
Some of this I knew when, in late March 1980, not long after my twenty-eighth birthday, I went to the Iranian embassy in London to apply for visas. Back in Sydney, the ABC’s federal news editor, a rumpled and kindly man named Bert Christie, who was in charge of foreign assignments, had finally let himself be persuaded that the time was right to allow someone from the London bureau to travel to a major story again: although with deep misgivings. The hostage story was simply too big to treat by recycling agency TV footage and freelancers’ radio contributions. It was now five months since waves of young revolutionaries had smashed into the huge US embassy compound in Tehran, overwhelming the Marines while the local Iranian police melted away. It was five months, too, since the relatively moderate provisional government of Mehdi Bazargan had collapsed, leaving the way free for Khomeini to appoint his own hand-picked Islamic followers into all the positions of state power. (Much good would it do them: in this atmosphere of revolutionary fervour, most of them would themselves be exiled, executed or assassinated within a decade.)
For some months, the Iranians had closely restricted the number of visas they issued. The world had seen footage of gallons of alcohol flowing down the gutters as mullahs smashed bottles in the streets, and of women forced to wear the veil. Perhaps now the Iranians believed things were stabilising a little, and they could afford to let more journalists in.
* * *
The Iranian embassy in London was a tall, imposing, white stucco building in Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park. Its stately façade was soon to become world-famous as pictures flashed around the world showing members of Britain’s SAS abseiling off the roof, the climax of an operation to free hostages held inside by a half-dozen gunmen, but that was weeks into the future. Besides, journalists entered through the far less gracious back entrance, into a dingy and windowless space where they were issued lengthy documents clearly only crudely modified from those issued by the Shah’s regime.
While sitting in this airless waiting room, having filled in all the forms in triplicate, I got talking to a journalist named Jon Snow, of ITN News, then the UK’s only commercial TV news service—nowadays Jon is the long-serving host of Britain’s Channel 4 News. An imposingly tall figure, he was, at thirty-three, also extremely clever and very experienced, and he was kind enough to tell me a bit about his visits to Iran since the revolution. The more he spoke, the more I became aware of the size of the task ahead. I had travelled abroad a lot in my life, including through China during the Cultural Revolution, but never as a journalist, only as a diplomat’s son. I’d seen my share of death and destruction covering train disasters and bushfires, but always in Australia. I’d never had a gun pointed at me or seen a shot fired in anger, let alone tried to make sense of what was then still an unresolved revolution with aspects of a civil war.
It became clear to me that this job was going to be very different from anything I’d ever done. It wasn’t just the language barrier, or the difficulties of long-distance communication in that pre-internet era. It was also the reality of working in an environment where half the population automatically assumed that any journalist, particularly any Western-looking journalist, was a spy or an agent of the Great Satan (America) or the Little Satan (Britain). And there was th
e problem of censorship: every piece of film flown out of Iran had to be processed in a Revolutionary Government laboratory and checked by a government censor. Every minute of videotape also had to go via the government satellite station, where vigilant censors hovered over every frame and every word.
Jon kindly gave me a lift back to the ABC, only three blocks from his own ITN office, and I went back to my desk far less complacent about the challenge ahead. Looking back now, though, I still have the sense of how unprepared I was for the maelstrom of the next few weeks.
Eventually the visas came through, and I went shopping for some warm-weather clothes now that I’d be getting out of chilly London. I stopped short of following in the footsteps of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot and buying cleft sticks and a collapsible canoe. But, acutely aware that I was still the man who had forgotten his passport on his first assignment just nine weeks before, I could not shake the sense that I was an innocent abroad. And I could not forget the memory of Tony Joyce, comatose in the hospital.
As I walked down the stairs to leave 54 Portland Place for the airport, Ken Begg, the bureau chief, was standing on the landing with tears running down his face. I’d known Ken since 1974, when I was a cadet. ‘Take care mate, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, Ken. I’ll look after myself,’ I replied. It was only two years later, while reading a lengthy Sydney Morning Herald article by Peter Bowers, that I learned that Ken had had an almost identical conversation with Tony Joyce the day he left for Zambia.
I tend to look back on myself now and see a young idiot. Why was I not terrified on my first real assignment? Why was I not more aware of the situation I was flying into? My younger self answers back: ‘What more should I do? I’ve talked to colleagues who’ve been there. I’ve talked extensively to that Iran expert, Professor Fred Halliday, whose book I’ve also read. There is no internet, and there are no mobiles or satellite phones, you supercilious twenty-first-century geriatric. The only way really to find out is to go there.’
And so Les Seymour and I boarded a 747 at Heathrow, with the usual vast number of cases loaded with film gear and enough tape to last us a month or more, and many hours later landed in Revolutionary Iran.
Chapter 3
Drunk as Lords
WE LANDED IN Tehran early on a Friday morning. We were met as prearranged by a driver with a van—let’s call him Hadi—who would be our transport and in a limited sense our translator over the coming weeks: his English was good enough to understand directions but not for interpreting interviews. Hadi’s main subject of conversation was money, first expressed within minutes of the airport when we got stuck in a traffic jam and an ancient, toothless and clearly starving beggar knocked on the window. ‘Keep window shut, give him nothing,’ said Hadi. ‘Why not?’ Les asked. ‘Is good money,’ came the reply. ‘He is fine, no problem, does not need. Begging … is good money.’
I’d been counselled, if possible, always to hit the ground running on a foreign assignment. So I asked Hadi what was happening that morning and whether there was anything we could film on the way to the hotel. I thought he told me that Ayatollah Khomeini was preaching at Friday prayers, so I insisted we go there. This would be quite something: I believed that it had been some months since Khomeini had preached in public, and there was sure to be a large crowd. We got to the outdoor venue, and there were indeed some 50,000 people, but I had misheard: the Ayatollah preaching that day was Ali Khamenei. I felt somewhat deflated, but the pictures were good, and the crowd big and enthusiastic enough to report something, at least, about the state of the Islamic Revolution. I did a piece to camera and we filmed Khamenei, ramrod-straight in a long robe, holding his sermon in one hand and an AK-47 in the other, preaching hellfire and damnation to the enemies of Iran. The crowd chanted ‘Marg bar Am’rika’: Death to America.
Some in the crowd were hostile, though they tended to back away reassured when we said ‘Australia’. It was a strange atmosphere, one that would be repeated again and again in the days ahead: a noisy public demonstration of hatred and anger, followed by attempts to speak English and ask if it was easy to emigrate to Australia, questions about kangaroos and koalas. But there was no ambiguity about Khamenei himself. His face, like that of his leader, Khomeini, was hard and unyielding, his air of utter rectitude unshakeable, his simultaneous embrace of the gun and the Holy Book the clearest possible symbol of the marriage of religion and state power. Dark-haired and granite-faced, he looked nothing like the smiling, white-bearded figure who appears in the modern iconography of Revolutionary Iran—and at the time we certainly had no idea that this was the man who would inherit from Khomeini the position of Supreme Leader, in which he continues implacably to this day.
We got back into the van reasonably pleased. Now we just had to check into the hotel and work out how to file the story, which I recently saw for the first time in thirty-five years:
Piece to camera in front of massive crowd.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran depends for its momentum on regular expressions of unity—occasions like this one when thousands of people get together to reaffirm their religious and political commitment.
Shot of Khamenei, tilting down to his AK-47.
The independence of the new Islamic Republic is a key theme. The Ayatollahs attack the United States and President Carter. But their message is that Iran must also arm against other potential aggressors, such as the Soviet Union.
Crowd chants ‘Allah o Akbar, Allah o Akbar’.
The apparently united reaction to these pep-talks, however, conceals the real complexity of the situation.
Shots of people distributing propaganda leaflets in the crowd.
Also jostling for power and influence in Iran today are other less visible groups: the Tudeh, or Moscow-oriented communists, and the militant Mujahideen and Fedayeen.
Shots of bookstalls selling revolutionary literature.
Both these groups embrace a kind of Islamic Marxism, and the conservative Ayatollahs have accused some Mujahideen of being in league with the Soviet Union.
Shots of stall selling freshly squeezed orange juice.
A worsening of Iran’s economy can only strengthen the claims of these groups that the revolution under the present leadership is not working.
Shots of worshippers bowing, praying; pull out to wide shot of huge crowd.
As the sanctions bite harder, and the prospect of long-term shortages becomes a reality, the government has to fight harder for its own stability.
Piece to camera in front of shouting, jostling crowd.
These meetings aren’t only held to restore the faithful. They also strengthen the religious, Islamic content of what’s essentially a political revolution. And in the present climate, the alternative to that could be a shift in power towards more Marxist-oriented groups. In Tehran this is Mark Colvin for ABC National News.
* * *
My home for the next few weeks, the Intercontinental Hotel, was a tall concrete building on what had been Pahlavi Avenue when the Pahlavis had occupied the throne, but which had since been renamed Dr H Fatemi Avenue, after the brilliant young foreign minister the Shah had ordered executed by firing squad in the coup against Mossadeq of 1953. It stood out from the Tehran skyline for height rather than beauty: its chief design feature was the way it stuck out at the roofline in a twin diamond shape. Otherwise, inside and out, it was a fairly standard piece of 1960s architectural Brutalism: but it wasn’t for architectural merit that journalists stayed there.
There were a few foreign freelancers living in flats and houses around Tehran at the time, among them the ABC’s own stringer Roger Cooper, but for the fly-in-fly-out reporters the Intercon was where you stayed. Journalism was constrained by a lot of difficulties in those days, but the chief of them was communication. Before mobile phones or even faxes, you needed, above all, access to a telephone switchboard which would take messages for you and connect you to the international exchange. You also needed to be able to send messa
ges by teleprinter—the telex. And at that time in Tehran, you needed to be somewhere where, as a foreigner speaking no Farsi, you would be afforded some degree of protection.
Even at the Intercon, these things were hardly guaranteed. The previous year, the hotel had been attacked by left-wing militias, the siege only relieved after three days by Revolutionary Guards under Ayatollah Khomeini’s control. Ownership of the hotel itself was also the subject of a protracted legal dispute, with its American owners trying to hold on in face of a concerted attempt by the Revolutionary Government to nationalise the place. Supporters of the Ayatollah would eventually succeed in ousting the German general manager and all other foreign employees, but when we were there they were still battling on against increasingly heavy odds. The result was that the hotel had been largely cut off from its US parent group, financially and personally. Rumour had it that, no longer able to obtain supplies from the rest of the Intercontinental chain, they were increasingly feeding guests on the remaining contents of the freezers. For whatever reason, many of us complained of various minor stomach ailments: I certainly didn’t feel physically well for weeks.
There’s a Garry Trudeau Doonesbury cartoon from the time in which a regular character, the Reverend Sloan, is on the phone in what to me is quite obviously the Intercon: ‘Hello? Operator? I’m trying to get room service.’ ‘Sorry, sir. Everyone’s out fighting the Leftists today.’ In a subsequent strip, Trudeau’s ludicrously self-important TV journalist Roland Burton Hedley III is doing a long-distance Q&A with the Rev:
Hedley: This is Roland Hedley … only one man has been invited to see the hostages. He’s Reverend Scot Sloan, and I talked with him today. Reverend Sloan, what’s the condition of the hostages now?
Sloan: I have no idea. I’ve spent the last week waiting in my hotel room.