Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

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 issueof 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.