CHAPTER NINETEEN
LADY BRITOMART: There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.
UNDERSHAFT (determinedly): No: none of that. You must keep the true faith of an armourer . . . To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes . . .
—George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara, Act III
JUST BEFORE I ENTER the 24,000-square-foot exhibition centre close to Abu Dhabi airport, I receive an elaborate invitation on vellum parchment. “Under the patronage of His Highness Lt. General Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed al Nahyan,” it says, “it is the pleasure of His Highness Sheikh Falah Bin Zayed al Nahyan, Chairman of Ghantout Racing and Polo Club, to cordially invite you for The Final of the Idex Al Basti Polo Tournament at 7.30pm followed by dinner . . . Formal Dress.” A few minutes after I have cleared the security gates, I am offered a fine Persian silk carpet—from Qom, I recall—and, at a mercifully smaller price, a set of Arab brass cooking utensils and coffee pots. There are tea stands and flowers, purple and gold and green in the early spring heat. The Arabs wear their white robes with dignity, the Western visitors dark blue suits and ties, their wives, bright, tightfitting dresses, often with those slightly silly racing hats that come with purple stalks and fake blooms on top. Several of the ladies drop off to look at the jewellery shop with its gold bangles and rings. One of Sheikh Mohamed’s military pipe bands plays English and Scottish marches. Smartly attired Indian and Pakistani workers labour to erect Arab tents before the midday sun reaches its height.
What was it George Bernard Shaw’s armourer, Andrew Undershaft, told his daughter in Major Barbara when she visited his massive arms factory at Perivale St. Andrews? “Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification . . . they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness.” And he was right. Polo, silk carpets, coffee pots, flowers, a highlander’s lament and tea and jewellery while the natives protect pink faces from the oriental sun. It is as civilised as fine art; which is what the sale of weapons has become for the world’s armourers.
For behind the tents and trinket shops and the pipe band in this vast compound in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, there lay on display some of the most sophisticated and most lethal ordnance ever made by man, so new you could smell the fresh paint gleaming in the sun, so clean, so artistically bold in their design that you might never guess their purpose. And each time I wandered over to examine a French missile, a German tank, an American Hellfire rocket, a British armoured vehicle, a Dutch self-propelled gun, a shelf of Italian pistols, a Russian automatic rifle, a South African army video-screen of crimson explosions, up would come a charming gentleman in another of those dark blue suits, a merchant of death brandishing a file of glossy, expensively produced brochures, offering a powerful handshake and another cup of tea.
Occasionally, they were a bit portly—selling death on a large scale means a lot of hospitality—and often they carried a small purple or blue flower in their button hole. Ballistics was their fascination. “As the day warms up, a bullet flies faster,” a cheerful Australian confided to me. “In the evening, the air grows heavier and the bullet goes more slowly.” Smiling field marshals and jolly generals from across the Arab world drifted through the arms pavilions, peering through sniper rifles, clambering like schoolchildren onto howitzers and tanks, running their hands repeatedly along the sleek missile tubes, masturbating the instruments of death.
I have to admit a grim fascination of my own in all this, a professional interest. It is the spring of 2001. For twenty-five years now, the crudest and most fabulously designed bullets, rockets, missiles, tank shells, artillery rounds and grenades have been hurled in my direction by some of the nastiest and most “moral” armies on earth. Israelis with American Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, Syrians with Russian T-72 tanks, RAF pilots with American cluster bombs, Afghan mujahedin with Russian AK-47 rifles, Russians with Hind helicopter gunships, Iraqis and Azerbaijanis with Russian-manufactured Scud rockets and Iranians with U.S.-made sniper rifles and Americans with Boeing fighter-bombers and battleships whose shells were the size of Volkswagens: they have all sent their produce swishing in my direction. Even as I walk between the immaculate stands of this exhibition, the tinnitus hisses viciously in my ears from that Iraqi 155-mm gun that so seriously damaged my hearing back in 1980. In a quarter of a century, I’ve seen thousands of corpses—women and children as well as men—blasted, shredded, eviscerated, disembowelled, beheaded, lobotomised, castrated and otherwise annihilated by the multi-billion-dollar arms industry. Almost all of them were Muslims. This is a symbol of our triumph over the Middle East in Abu Dhabi this hot March day of 2001, our ability to kill Muslims—and to help Muslims kill other Muslims—with our weapons. They have no weapons that can touch us. Not yet. Not for another six months.
I regularly prowled the arms bazaars of the Middle East, seeking an answer to the same old questions. Who are the men who produce this vile equipment? How can they justify their trade? How will the victims respond to this pulverisation of their lives? What language can compass science and death and capital gains on such a scale? For there is, I was to discover in Abu Dhabi, an integral, frightening correlation between linguistics and guns, between grammar and rockets. It’s all about words. Thus I circle the arms-sellers’ pavilions with a large canvas bag and a kleptomaniac’s desire to hoard every brochure, pamphlet, book and magazine from Americans, Russians, British, Chinese, French, Swedes, Dutch, Italians, Jordanians and Iranians, squirrelling away thousands of pages of the stuff. “Take some more,” a Pakistani arms technician shouts to me as I scoop cardboard cutouts of general-purpose bombs and ship-borne missiles into my bag. And back in my tiny hotel room, I rifle through the lot.
The Russians are the mildest in their language. “You will feel protected by our smart weapons’ shield,” promises Russia’s KEP Instrument Design Bureau. Uralvagoncavod’s latest T-90 tank—the descendant of all those old Warsaw Pact T-55 clunkers—is advertised simply as “the Best.” The State Enterprise Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant’s anti-aircraft missiles give an “awesome punch” to their buyers. The British are smoother. Vickers Defence Systems are trying to flog the new Challenger 2E, “optimised to represent the best balance of fightability, firepower and mobility . . . its ability to deliver combat effectiveness . . . has been proven . . .” Well yes, I recall. The earlier Challenger 2 was used by our chaps in the Gulf. And the Challengers fired, I remember, depleted uranium munitions. “Proven” indeed.
Australian Defence Industries—by a bizarre arms globalisation, they are now part of the French manufacturer Thales—are selling a “live fire defence training system” which includes “a ruggedised portable unit.” This is taken right to the battlefield so that soldiers can practise shooting computerised human beings in between killing real ones. “Target movers”—a real favourite of mine, these—were “able to respond to programmable functions, including ‘appear on command’ . . . ‘fall when hit,’ ‘reappear after hit,’ ‘hold up to accept and count automatic fire’ and ‘bob’”—to “cycle up and down as desired until hit.” A huge Australian later demonstrates this fearful little toy for me. The computerised dead on the screen are obliging. They really do pop up when I ask them to. I kill them. Then they are resurrected so that I can shoot them again and again, cycling up and down as desired.
The Italians like their verbal trumpets. Beretta firearms provide “quality without compromise,” “experience, innovation, respect for tradition . . . the Beretta tradition of excellence.” The compact size and “potent calibres” of Beretta’s new 9000 S-TYPE F pistols are “developed to deserve your trust.” Benelli, which like Beretta makes hunting guns, promotes its animal killer as “black, aggressive, highly technological.” Benelli’s pump-action shotgun is described as “gutsy in character.” Finland’s Sako 75 hunting gun manufacturers boast that their designers have been asked a simple question: “What would you do if given the resources to design the rifle of your dreams, the new ultimate rifle for the new millennium?” And later, of course, just a few months later, I will look at this question again and wonder what Osama bin Laden would have said—or did say—if or when he was asked to design the weapon of his dreams, the new ultimate weapon for the new millennium.
“Excellence” crops up again and again in the brochures. Oshkosh of Wilmington manufactures military trucks with “a tradition of excellence,” the company’s produce “grounded in history, focused on another century . . .” Then comes Boeing’s Apache Longbow attack helicopter. “It’s easy to talk about performance,” their ad runs. “Only Apache Longbow delivers.” The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company are among the few to let the cat out of the bag. “True respect,” their advertising brags, “can only be earned by making superior weapons systems. Only by owning them.”
In 1905, Shaw’s Andrew Undershaft said exactly that. Asked whether he would choose honour, justice, truth, love and mercy, or money and gunpowder, Undershaft replies: “Money and gunpowder; for without enough of both, you cannot afford the others.” After a while, I begin to feel a little sick. There is something infinitely sad and impotent about the frightful language of the merchants of death, their circumlocutions and macho words balanced by the qualities the weapons are designed to eliminate, their admission that guns mean power, the final definition of “excellence.” But worse is to come.
Bofors (from peace-loving, Nobel-awarding Sweden) is a “provider of technologies for a safer future . . . reliable and innovative.” Pakistan Ordnance Factories make ammunition “chiselled to perfection.” Mowag (from peace-loving, cuckoo-clock Switzerland) manufactures a Piranha III armoured personnel carrier with a “family concept for many mission role variants.” But Lockheed Martin of Dallas scoops them all with a “winning portfolio” of missiles and bombers; the “timeless” F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter; new target-acquisition systems that are “the brains and brawn” of Lockheed’s Apache helicopters; the F-22 Raptor, “a new breed of superfighter” that will “dominate the skies” and bring “unequalled capability” to U.S. fighter pilots; the Javelin “fire-and-forget” missile that will give “maximum gunner survivability”; and the new multiple-launch rocket system that the Iraqis, in their terror, called “steel rain” in 1991—Lockheed actually quotes the Iraqis—and which gives its users a “shoot and scoot” capability. “Shoot and scoot” was General Norman Schwarzkopf’s sneering description of the supposedly cowardly Iraqi Scud missile gunners—no reminder of that here.
And so the glossy magazines pile up on my bedroom floor. It is a linguistic journey into a fantasy world. Half the words used by the arms-sellers—protection, reliability, optimisation, excellence, family, history, respect, trust, timelessness and perfection—invoked human virtues, even the achievements of the spirit. The other half—punch, gutsy, performance, experience, potency, fightability, brawn and breed—were words of naked aggression, a hopelessly infantile male sexuality to prove that might is right. The Americans named their weapons—the Apache helicopter, the Arrowhead navigation system, the Kiowa multiple launch platform, the Hawkeye infrared sensors—after a Native American population that their nation had laid waste. Or the Western manufacturers called them raptors or piranhas. The only thing they didn’t mention was death.
Perhaps amnesia has something to do with it. At an arms fair in Dubai on 12 November 1993, I spent three hours watching guests—European ladies in gowns and miniskirts along with government agents and Arab potentates— passing the Hughes missile stand where a photograph showed an American Ticonderoga-class warship firing a missile into the sky. It was an identical missile, fired by a Ticonderoga-class anti-air warfare cruiser equipped with a “combat-proven” Aegis “battle management” system—the USSVincennes, equipped with that very same Aegis system—that brought down the Iranian Airbus on 3 July 1988, killing all 290 passengers and crew. No mention of that at the pavilion, of course. I still have my notes of my brief conversation at the stand with Bruce Fields of Hughes International Programme Development. “Yes, it was one of our standard missiles,” he said. “I didn’t want them to use any photographs of a Ticonderoga-class ship in our publicity this week. It was only when I got here that I saw this picture on our wall. Fortunately, we’re not passing it out with our publicity.” I watched a trail of smiling dignitaries, thoughtful Arab defence ministry officials and U.S. defence attachés inspecting the hardware, and finally—threading his way between British fighter-bombers and Royal Navy missiles—our very own Charles, Prince of Wales.
There were flowers everywhere, as if this were a wedding rather than an arms bazaar. Roses, lilies, birds of paradise, chrysanthemums, all potted neatly between the missiles. But the brightest flower to be seen in Dubai was as artificial as it was ironic; the blood-red poppy of Flanders. Did the captains of British aviation industry, the British ambassador and consuls—did Prince Charles himself, who wore a poppy on the lapel of his grey suit—grasp this paradox?
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place . . .
When he wrote those lines during the second battle of Ypres in 1915, the Canadian doctor John McCrae could not have known the use to which those Flanders poppies would be put more than seventy years later. For a week in Dubai that November of 1993, those red poppies could be seen dancing on the breasts of men as they admired the latest in “Combat Support Weapons,” Apaches, Pumas, Harriers, Lynxes, F-18s and the new Mirage 2000.
Even the Honoured Dead didn’t get a look in at Abu Dhabi eight years later. Save for that brief, fearful mention of “steel rain,” the extinction of life did not exist. Talk about “kill factors” referred only to the killing of machines, of tanks and ships. Even “war” is a banned word. It’s defence. As in Ministry of Defence. As in “International Defence Exhibition” (Idex), which is what the whole Abu Dhabi jamboree was called. There was one odd moment when, at the arms fair’s opening press conference in the compound, I asked Sultan Suwaidi, the Idex director, why the United Arab Emirates—a peaceful, small but wealthy Muslim country—was running an arms bazaar for weapons that might be used to kill fellow Muslims. There was a long, meaningful pause, during which Sultan Suwaidi looked intently at me. “These equipments are not in any way the creators of wars or the decision-makers of the wars,” he said. “It is the strategy of countries which decide whether to use these equipments against Muslims or others. In no way are we here provoking or supporting wars or offensive actions . . . We are a peaceful country. Our boss [the ruler of the Emirates] is known as one of the most peaceful leaders in the world.”
And when I went off to talk to the men who were in Abu Dhabi to turn a dollar on all these “equipments,” they were as innocent, as squeaky clean, as nice a bunch of middle-class family men as you could meet. You have to be polite, of course. They know all the arguments. Some of them have seen Major Barbara and smile bleakly when I mention Andrew Undershaft. At the Vickers pavilion stands Derek Turnbull from Blyth in Northumberland, watching a scale model of the Challenger 2E tank moving eternally round and round on a plastic stand. Ask him if he ever thinks about what all these weapons do to human beings and his response is immediate. “Anyone who says ‘no’ is a liar. Any civilised person who works in this business knows what the purposes are. But we’re more hidebound that anyone else. Large exports like this are strictly controlled by the British government. If we sat down with a map of the world in front of us and blanked out the countries we can’t sell to, there’s not much left . . .” The British government—and Vickers and Mr. Turnbull—was, it seems, following the advice of Shaw’s Lady Britomart, to “sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.”
But then Mr. Turnbull added a strange remark. “You have to remember that a tank is to kill tanks, not people,” he said. “That’s the purpose of it.” Now Derek Turnbull is an intelligent as well as a friendly man. Is he really satisfied with a comment like that? Aren’t there humans—some mothers’ sons—inside the tank when it is “killed”? Does he really think they survive when a British shell chews its way through the armour? Turnbull has two children: Stephen, who is sixteen and studying sound engineering, and fourteen-year-old Craig, “who would probably make a good journalist.” And Blyth, where the Turnbulls have their home, is by chance the town in which I first worked as a reporter—for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle—and where I first saw the body of a murder victim, shot dead by a friend, so far as I remember, with a German or Italian pistol.
Turnbull thinks about my question for a bit. He talks about the detachment that comes with military information technology. “Everyone comes to terms with it in their own way,” he says. “Most people talk about the engineering and the technology. It is mentioned from time to time.” The “it,” of course, is the infliction of death; although at no point does he use the word. Then it turns out that he was in Saudi Arabia for Vickers during the 1991 Gulf War, and that although he was not a soldier, he arrived at the infamous “Road of Death” south of Basra within two days of the mass slaughter of fleeing Iraqis by American and British pilots, looking down upon the killing fields—in which fleeing women also died—from the Mutla Ridge.
Turnbull is thoughtful when he talks about this, reflecting upon his own reactions at the time, an armaments man looking at the end result of all his technology. “It was horrendous. But in a funny sort of way, I didn’t have the reaction I’d expected. You see, we’d driven up through Kuwait, and we’d driven through all the oil wells that had been set alight by the Iraqis. It was the most awful thing I’d ever seen. And by the time I’d gone through all this awful devastation, I wasn’t too shocked by the damage at Mutla.” We were silent for a while. The damage at Mutla was human as well as material. I remembered the Iraqi soldier I found squashed flat in the sand, his whole body just an inch thick. The burning oilfields were awesome; but human death was surely something different. Turnbull—and it must be said that he seemed to enjoy my questions—then turned into the archetypal arms salesman. “Look, Robert,” he said. “If the world was full of nice human beings who did civilised things, we wouldn’t need all this kit.”
A few feet away—and this shows just how entangled armies and salesmen have become—was a British soldier, thirty-one-year-old tank crewman Sergeant Ashley Franks, a man who had driven, armed and commanded the Challenger but who missed the Gulf War. “I was in Northern Ireland,” he admits. “My tank went to the Gulf, but I didn’t. Shame, really.” But then his little lecture on the Challenger improvements—how Vickers must love this military assistance, I thought— begins to sound like the publicity manuals back in my hotel room. “The 2E has a different, upgraded power-pack; Challenger 2 was 1,200 horse-power but 2E is 1,500 horse-power. For a desert scenario, the extra horse-power is a must. Challenger 2 is lovely if you’ve never driven 2E. The other enhancement is that when Challenger 2 was in production, we were very limited in our thermal sighting system. Challenger 2E has independent thermal sightings for the gunner. With the battle management system, if one vehicle is laser-targeted, everyone knows that an enemy vehicle is targeting a tank. The battle-group commander also has at his disposal the same system. The beauty of it is that . . . another vehicle can take it [the enemy tank] on . . .” The British army sergeant’s language was now so familiar. “Power-pack,” “lovely,” “enhancement,” “independent,” “beauty.” It was as if Sergeant Franks was trying to sell me a new sports car—which in a sense I suppose he was.
As he talked, the model tank twisted on its plastic axis and I could see, with all the clarity of a defence attaché, the commander of the new 2E pushing through the desert at speed—I’d sat atop a Challenger 2 in Saudi Arabia, doing just that, only days before the Gulf War—and I could understand the confidence of Sergeant Franks and his mates as their tank came under fire. But then I also recalled how Britain sold Chieftain tanks to the Shah of Iran and how, after his overthrow in 1979, the Islamic Republic used those same Chieftains against Iraq; and I could never shake off the vivid memory of climbing inside that Chieftain captured by the Iraqis in 1980, of turning my head to the right to find the skeletal remains of its Iranian gunner sitting in the seat beside me. He might have been Sergeant Franks’s age. The British government had approved the Chieftains’ sale to Iran. They ended up in the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini’s soldiers—and then in Saddam’s.
But arms fairs are about buying, not dying. A few metres from Turnbull and Franks, I come across two handsome female Ukrainian army students brandishing their new diplomas in front of some nonplussed Arabs. Maria Verenis and Julia Bartashova were the very model of a modern major publicity campaign—Ukraine was selling tanks—while over in the American pavilion, an even more startling figure was making her way past the Winchester rifle stand. Ramona Doll was advertising body armour in a skin-tight, thigh-clutching steel blouse and trousers, complete with handgun and far too much lipstick. Not the flip side, but the very embodiment of all that macho rubbish in the missile brochures.
Lieutenant General Mustafa Tlass would have appreciated her. I discovered Syria’s long-standing minister of defence being escorted around the Jordanian military pavilion by young King Abdullah of Jordan, the son of Britain’s late friend (and British arms purchaser), Plucky Little King Hussein. Tlass, peering into armoured vehicles and guns with still a bit of room left on his tunic for more medals, once declared his love for Gina Lollobrigida and wrote a poem in her honour. If only his soldiers on parade, he wrote to her in verse, could hold missiles that turned into tulips of love. But Syria’s SAM-6 missiles gathered rust and went the way of all munitions. The Americans drained their old M-48 tanks of oil and dumped them into the sea off Florida to form a coral reef. The Czechs used their T-55 tank barrels to make lamp-posts. Undershaft’s Salvation Army daughter Barbara would have approved.
But the weapon that had long haunted my imagination—and that will come to be the villain of this chapter—is called Hellfire, an anti-armour weapon used for years by the Israelis in Lebanon and, more recently, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It was a Hellfire I, fired by an American-made Israeli Apache, which was targeted into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996, killing four children and two women on board. It was the remains of the improved Hellfire II that I found in a partially destroyed civilian home in the Christian village of Beit Jalla in the Israeli-occupied West Bank the previous November, fired at Palestinians by the Israelis after Palestinian gunmen shot at the Jewish settlement of Gilo—partly built on land seized from the Palestinians of Beit Jalla. The Hellfire occupied pride of place on the Lockheed Martin stand and sixty-nine-year-old Vice President John Hurst was its expert. He said he hadn’t heard about the ambulance. Nor the houses of Beit Jalla. Lockheed’s top men in Israel, it turned out, were sometimes Israelis. Nettie Johnson—who admitted her company had omitted Israel from its clients in the official list handed out to the Arabs in Abu Dhabi—expressed her unease at all the talk about Israel.
But about Hellfire, John Hurst sounded like a proud father. Rockwell had won the competition for the Hellfire air-to-ground missile in the Seventies but Hughes beat them on the Maverick programme. There was a whole history of the Hellfire, its succession to the TOW, Lockheed Martin’s development of a low-cost laser-seeker, the F-model (“a quick fix for reactive armour”), joint production between Lockheed (80 per cent) and Boeing (20 per cent) and now Lockheed’s 100 per cent production and the sale of Hellfire II to Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Egypt . . . The U.S. government had to approve the buyer. This is history as arms manufacturers like to tell it, stripped of politics and death, full of percentages and development costs and deals.
But Hurst had read Major Barbara—he mentioned Undershaft’s name before I did—and when I insisted on talking about the morality (or immorality) of his work, he had a “mission statement” all his own. On reflection, I think it was a creed. He wanted me to understand. “I’ve had great debates,” he said. “On a religious basis, too. Before this, I was the development director of Pershing II. I had the responsibility of selling Pershing II to the U.S. forces as well as other countries such as Germany which bought Pershing 1A.” He pauses here to see if I understand the implications; selling Pershing was selling nuclear war. There was a moral code, Hurst said. It was about “arming other countries to fight their own wars rather than sending our own soldiers to do it for them.”
But he wanted to go further than that; so I sat in the Lockheed pavilion as John Hurst, forty-five years with Lockheed, outshafted Undershaft. “From a religious point of view, I’m a very strong Christian. I’m Episcopalian. You can look through the entire New Testament and you won’t find anything on defending yourself by zapping the other guy.” Yes, he acknowledged, there was a reference in Saint Paul to putting on “the armour of God.” But the Old Testament, that was something different. “There’s plenty there that says God wants us to defend ourselves against those that will strike us down. In the New Testament, it says the Lord wants us to preach His gospel—and we can’t very well do that if we’re dead. That’s not an aggressive posture . . . the guy that wants to hurt me has to think twice . . . the Lord wants us to defend ourselves and arm ourselves so that we can spread His Word.”
This sounded less like morality than the Crusades, the exegesis of an armed missionary. Yes, Hurst is a family man, married to Letitia with four kids. His first son, John, quit his job at Marriott hotels, fell in love with a Budapest girl and married her; William is a marketing manager for Marriott in Orlando with two daughters; Byron is working on navy programmes for a consultancy company in Washington, D.C.; Carol is a schoolteacher with kids of her own. And of course I ask again. Children? Weapons? Death? “You have to think it through,” Hurst replies. “I knew people in the Pershing programme who quit the company. They couldn’t even think about nuclear warfare. You have to look at it from a strategic planner’s point of view—better Pershings in your backyard than an SS-20 on your roof. That’s what Alexander Haig said back then. And the Russians didn’t fire their SS-20s.”
But death? I ask again. Death? “Right or wrong, I never associate it with what I’m doing. If I see a bomb go off and legs flying off, I never say to myself, ‘I could have been the cause of that.’ Because we’re trying to prevent that. Sometimes some ‘wacko’ wants to torch something . . . When a guy like [Saddam] Hussein pulls the plug like that, we have no recourse . . . [we say] ‘Here’s what happens when you do that—don’t do it again!’ ”
But while the armourers peddled the linguistics of power, beauty, excellence, protection, reliability, potency and brawn, the gospel preached at Abu Dhabi had nothing to do with John Hurst’s god. It was ultimately about fear and threats: the fear of Iraq and Iran, the threat of Saddamite aggression, the constant, reiterated warnings that these gentle, soft, sandy, unspeakably wealthy Arab Gulf oil states must arm and rearm to defend themselves against chemical, biological or nuclear attack. This grim and entirely false scenario, of course, was to become wearily familiar eighteen months later when President Bush and Prime Minister Blair used exactly the same demons to propel us to war. But in Abu Dhabi in March 2001 they were introduced for entirely commercial gain: to terrify “our friends” in the Gulf, to persuade them that only by purchasing billions of dollars of weaponry could they be safe. In retrospect, these tactics were a dress rehearsal for the reuse of the same inaccurate material to justify our invasion of Iraq in 2003.
How this gospel was defined—and preached—was all too evident in the large, air-conditioned hall on the other side of the arms bazaar. The “Gulf Defence Conference” was the place to learn about threats. On the very first day, there was Neil Patrick of the Royal United Services Institute, lecturing his audience about “countries of concern in the Gulf.” We heard all about Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile capability, Iraq’s potential capability to reconstruct mobile missile-launchers. “So what happens . . . when Iran goes nuclear?” the Arabs were asked.
Mr. Patrick’s offerings were hedged with conditional clauses. But the message was clear enough. “The important thing is building a coalition with Gulf Arabs . . . building a coalition with the Americans and the European allies . . .” Osama bin Laden—“not by any means a one-man operator”—was a threat, along with criminals in the former Soviet Union and Russia’s possible transfer of high-tech weaponry to Iran.162 Across the Abu Dhabi arms bazaar, the warnings were pursued more crudely. At the British Aerospace stand (“BAE Systems provide you with the total package, tailored to your needs”), a massive video-production demonstrated how British military know-how could end a border dispute. The warring parties in this absurd film were “Orange” (the aggressor) and “Blue” (the victim), whose territory—and here was the clue—contained “oil and gas reserves in the border area.” Which of course meant Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and the Emirates. The only power sharing a common border with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia was Iraq. So colour Saddam orange. Handed out to Arab visitors to the fair, Western military journals carried a parallel theme. “Now is the time for the Persian Gulf States to get serious about their collective security,” thundered Gannett’s Defense News of Springfield, Virginia. Threats to the area “underscore the importance of bolstering defensive systems across the Middle East’s soft underbelly, the Arabian peninsula . . . in the absence of greater cooperation, their security situation grows more tenuous by the day.”
In vain did the Kuwait deputy chief of staff, Major General Fahad Ahmad al-Amir, tell delegates that Israel remained a threat to the Arabs, that “the security situation in the Gulf and the security situation in the Arab–Israeli conflict are linked.” Hopeless was his plea that “if we want to create a paradigm of peace in the Gulf region, we must have a paradigm of peace in Palestine.” Pointless was his warning that the fate of Jerusalem lay close to every Arab heart. The Emirates arms bazaar organisers had ignored the faxed appeals from Israeli arms manufacturers to exhibit in Abu Dhabi. But free copies of Jane’s Intelligence Review handed out to the arms boys contained an article with all the usual myths about the Arab–Israeli dispute. The illegal Jewish settlement built on Arab land at Har Homa was referred to only as a “disputed . . . project” (its Arab name of Jebel abu Ghoneim was omitted), the occupied Palestinian West Bank was given its Israeli name of Judaea and Samaria, while the latest death toll of 450 in the latest intifada failed to add that the vast majority of these victims were Palestinian Arabs. The article was written by David Eshel, a “defence analyst” who just happened to be a former Israeli army officer.
Yes, what was being preached at Abu Dhabi was the new George W. Bush doctrine: the threat comes from war criminal Saddam Hussein, not from peace-loving Israel. The Arabs need to defend themselves—quickly; a policy that necessitates the wholesale milking of the Arab Gulf’s wealth, the Arab squandering of billions of dollars on Western arms to protect the Gulf from the wreckage of Iraq and the chaos of Iran. The statistics told it all. In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab military spending came to $92 billion. Since 1997, the Emirates alone had signed contracts worth more than $11 billion, adding 112 aircraft to their arsenal, comprising 80 F-16s from Lockheed Martin and 32 French Mirage 2000-9s. The figures are staggering, revolting. Between 1991 and 1993, the United States Military Training Mission was administering more than $31 billion in Saudi arms procurements from Washington and $27 billion in new U.S. acquisitions. The Saudi air force already possessed 72 American F-15 fighter-bombers, 114 British Tornadoes, 80 F-5s and 167 Boeing F-15s. At Idex, 800 exhibitors from forty-two countries displayed their weapons. The Russian military pavilion contained fifty Russian military enterprises selling tanks, armoured vehicles, surface-to-air missiles and warships. Incredibly, Philippe Roger, the French armament directorate’s international relations director, announced in Abu Dhabi that “while [Gulf] governments could consider using the higher receipts [from oil] for servicing their debt, we believe that higher allocations could go for defence-related spending . . .”
And if the Arab people—as opposed to their rulers—objected to this insanity, there was even available, at the arms bazaar, the means to end their protest. South Africa’s Swartklip Products was advertising smoke generators for “large scale clearance operations,” a 37-mm baton round that “neutralises a rioter by delivering a hefty, non-lethal punch,” a smoke round to fire into buildings, and a 12-gauge shotgun baton to provide an “accurate means of disabling selected activists.”
In despair, I walked to the Russian pavilion. And it was here that I met him. Indeed, I could scarcely believe that a name so notorious in all the world’s wars and atrocities, so redolent of insurgency and revolution, so frequently used in battle dispatches that the very word has become a cliché of war reporting, really bore corporeal form—other than that of the AK-47, the most famous rifle in the world. This was the rifle I had seen in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Serbia. This was the rifle I had held in my hands on that frozen Soviet army convoy to Kabul when we came under attack from the Afghan mujahedin twenty-one years ago. It was a sign of Russian times that to sell their tanks and MiGs, they had enlisted the help of the eighty-one-year-old inventor of that most iconic of weapons and freighted him all the way here to Abu Dhabi.
I found him sitting in a small room, Mikhail Kalashnikov himself, a small, squat man with grey, coiffed hair and quite a few gold teeth, hands unsteady but Siberian eyes alert as a wolf, still wearing his two Hero of Socialist Labour medals. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that you should change your faith?” a Saudi army major had asked him a few years earlier. “By Christian standards, you are a great sinner. You are responsible for thousands, even tens of thousands, of deaths around the globe. They’ve long prepared a place for you in hell.” But, said the major, Kalashnikov was a true Muslim. “And when the time of your earthly existence is over, Allah will welcome you as a hero . . . Allah’s mercy is limitless.”
At least, that’s how Mikhail Kalashnikov tells the story. And he is at least one of the very few arms-sellers to have experienced war. Born in November 1919, he was one of eighteen children of whom only six survived, a Soviet T-38 tank commander in 1941, wounded in the shoulder and back when a German shell smashed part of the tank’s armour into his body. “I was in hospital and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Automat Kalashnikova—the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov—AK—and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947.”
The AK-47, the battle rifle of the Warsaw Pact, became the symbol of revolution—Palestinian, Angolan, Vietnamese, Algerian, Afghan, Hizballah. And I asked old Mikhail Kalashnikov how he could justify all this blood, all those corpses torn to bits by his invention. He had been asked before. “You see, all these feelings come about because one side wants to liberate itself with arms. But in my opinion it is good that prevails. You may live to see the day when good prevails— it will be after I am dead. But the time will come when my weapons will be no more used or necessary.”
This was incredible, preposterous. The AK-47 has mythic status. Kalashnikov admits this. “When I met the Mozambique minister of defence, he presented me with his country’s national banner which carries the image of a Kalashnikov sub-machine gun. And he told me that when all the liberation soldiers went home to their villages, they named their sons ‘Kalash.’ I think this is an honour, not just a military success. It’s a success in life when people are named after me, after Mikhail Kalashnikov.” Even the Lebanese Hizballah have included the AK-47 on their Islamic banner—the rifle forms the “l” of “Allah” in the Arabic script. There was no point in asking the old man what his children thought of him. His fiftyseven -year-old son Viktor is a small-arms designer and was part of the Russian delegation to Abu Dhabi.
So we embarked down the Russian version of a familiar moral track. “My aim was to protect the borders of my motherland,” Kalashnikov tells me. “It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov became very well known in the world, that it was used in many troubled places. I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the weapons designers. Man is born to protect his family, his children, his wife. But I want you to know that apart from armaments, I have written three books in which I try to educate our youth to show respect for their families, for old people, for history . . .”
He was now in nostalgic mode. “I lived at a time when we all wanted to be of benefit to our [Soviet] state. To some extent, the state took care of its heroes and designers . . . In the village where I was born, according to a special decree, a monument was erected to me, twice my height. In the city of Ishevsk where I live, there is now a Kalashnikov museum with a section dedicated to my life—and this was erected in my lifetime!” No, Mikhail Kalashnikov tells me, he is not rich, he has little money. “I would have made good use of this money if I had it. But there are some qualities which may be more important. President Putin called me on my birthday the other day. No other president would telephone an arms designer. And these things are very important for me.” And God? I asked. What would God say of Mikhail Kalashnikov? “We were educated in such a way that I am probably an atheist,” he replied. “But something exists . . .”
There was only one other place to seek an answer. I walked over to a small stand hidden away in the corner of one of the farthest pavilions, where brown-painted models of mobile-launched rockets lay on a shelf. This was the Iranian arms bazaar. Their missiles were called “Dawn” or “Morning Sunrise,” although one caught my eye, a big V-2-look-alike 125-kilometre-range monster produced by the S. B. Industrial Group of Tehran, called the Nazeat. It’s a Persian word meaning “Horror of Death.” Yes, Iran—the only nation in all of the world’s arms market to tell the true purpose of a weapon—had actually named a missile after the extinction of life. Did the answer to all my questions, I wondered, lie here?
These missiles were not for sale, I was solemnly informed by Morteza Khosravi. They were only to show Iran’s “capabilities”—although in the year 2000, Iran had sold $31 million worth of “defence” products to Asia and Africa. Khosravi, a young man from the Iranian Ministry of Defence with a small beard and an intense expression and a family that lost its own “martyrs” in the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, explained carefully—he took half a minute to reflect on each question before replying—that “the defence equipment in our production lines belongs to all Islamic nations—we are here to establish a joint cooperation with them.” But, he swiftly added, Iran sold only according to strict rules, under the UN’s Export Control Act. Once more, Lady Britomart had come to the rescue. In any case, more than 60 per cent of Iran’s military capacity had been switched to civilian production.
I knew all this. What I wanted to hear about was the immorality of arms production. Morteza Khosravi seemed puzzled. Was it not perfectly clear? “There are two main purposes for the production of weapons,” he said. “Some provide them for aggression, others for self-defence. The latter is the case for our country; we produce weapons only for self-defence and for the protective policy of our government. We have had a peaceful state but others have invaded us—we had the eight years ‘Imposed War.’ The only policy of our troops at that time was to defend their borders and their country. We always had a policy of defending ourselves.” There was another long pause. Then Khosravi uttered the mantra of every arms-seller. “It is a fact that each human being must defend himself.”
I had heard this from Derek Turnbull, from Mikhail Kalashnikov, from John Hurst. If only the world was full of nice human beings who did civilised things. The Lord wants us to defend ourselves. Man is born to protect his family. Protection, respect, trust, history, timelessness. It seemed useless to listen to these words any more. They were unstoppable, unarguable, impossible. Now thrive the armourers indeed. The merchants of death sell death in the form of protection, killing as defence, as God’s will, human destiny, patriotic duty. The bills—human and financial—come later. And we poor humans are the “target movers,” frightened folk to fleece with talk of threats and aggression. The threat is inside ourselves, of course, as we travel through the world. It is our task to “cycle up and down as desired until hit.”
THUS FEEL THE PALESTINIANS. Scarcely a month after my conversation with John Hurst, I was in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Lockheed Martin of Florida and the Federal Laboratories of Pennsylvania had made quite a contribution to life in the local municipality. Or—in the case of Lockheed—death. I found that pieces of Hellfire missile were stored in sacks in the civil defence headquarters as evidence of eighteen-year-old Osama Khorabi’s violent death. The Hellfire had exploded in his living room, killing him instantly, less than two months earlier. The missile engine, fuel pipe and shreds of the wiring system had been sorted into plastic bags by ambulance-drivers and paramedics, alongside shrapnel from dozens of U.S.-made fuses for shells fired by Israeli tanks into Beit Jalla, in the attack on the Palestinian Christian village that Jim Hurst said he hadn’t heard about. The Palestinians could read the evidence of the weapons’ American origin but were unable to identify the actual missiles and shells that were used. “We are humanitarian workers,” one of the ambulance-drivers said to me one rainy Saturday morning as I trawled through a bag of iron missile parts and shrapnel in his Bethlehem office. “We are not scientists.”
The use of American armaments against Arabs by Israel has been one of the most provocative sources of anger in the Middle East, and the narrative of their use is almost as important as the political conflict between Israel and its enemies. For it is one thing to know that Washington claims to be a “neutral partner” in Middle East peace negotiations while supporting one side—Israel—in all its demands; it is quite another when the armaments Israel employs to enforce its will—weapons that kill and tear apart Arabs—carry the engraved evidence of their manufacture in the United States. Even the CS gas cartridges fired by Israelis at Palestinians in Bethlehem are American-made. Palestinians claimed—with good reason—that the gas has caused serious breathing difficulties among children after the rounds were fired at stone-throwing children near Rachel’s tomb. The cartridges and gas canisters are labelled “Federal Laboratories, Saltsburg, Pennsylvania 15681” and are stated on the metal to be “long range projectiles 150 yards.” The rounds, according to the U.S. manufacturers’ instructions I read on the side, contain “tear gas which is highly irritating to eyes, nose, skin and respiratory system . . . If exposed, do not rub eyes, seek medical assistance immediately.”163
Throughout early 2001, Israeli tank crews routinely aimed shells at Beit Jalla when Palestinian gunmen fired Kalashnikov rifles—yes, the invention of cheerful eighty-one-year-old Hero of Socialist Labour Mikhail Kalashnikov—from the village of Beit Jalla at the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Gilo, and most of these tank rounds carried U.S. fuses. All were coded: “FUZE P18D M549AC0914H014 014” (in some cases the last digit read “5”). One of these shells killed Dr. Harald Fischer, a German citizen living in Beit Jalla, in November 2000.
The engine of the Lockheed Hellfire missile that struck Osama Khorabi’s home in February 2001 carried the coding “189 761334987 DMW90E003007” and its “Lot” number—the batch of missiles from which it came—was 481. On a small steel tube at the top of the missile engine was written the code “12903 9225158 MFR-5S443.” A small, heavy, cylindrical dome which appears to come from the same projectile was labelled “Battery Thermal” and carried the code “P/N 10217556 E-W62, Lot No. EPH-2111, Date of MFR [manufacture] 08776, MFG Code 81855.” The codes are followed by the initials “U.S.” Other missile parts include damaged fragments of a hinged fin and a mass of wiring. The missile attack, according to the Israelis, was a “pre-emptive strike” against the village, although Mr. Khorabi was no militant and his only ambition was to join the Beit Jalla theatre project. The Israelis used Apache helicopters to fire their missiles into Beit Jalla on at least six occasions—including the one on which Mr. Khorabi was killed—and the Apaches are made by Lockheed at their massive arms plant at Orlando, Florida, home of the Hellfire I and II missiles. U.S. manufacturers routinely refuse to accept any blame for the bloody consequences of their weapons’ use. I found that the Pennsylvania gas cartridges used by the Israelis in Bethlehem actually carried an official disclaimer. “Federal Laboratories,” it said on the cartridge, “will assume no responsibility for the misuse of this device.”
The world arms market, immoral and deceitful and murderous as it is, is nonetheless a beast that clamours for both publicity and secrecy. It needs to sell just as much as it needs to conceal, to make its billions from the Arabs while at the same time avoiding any mention of the blood and brains that will be splashed upon the sand as a result. The French arms conglomerates Giat and Dassault, along with Lockheed Martin, all have local headquarters in gleaming office blocks in Abu Dhabi. And the middlemen—the Arabs and Israelis and Germans and Americans and Britons who negotiate between manufacturers and buyers—also have a strange inclination to court the press, to reveal their more sinister characteristics, to boast of their ruthlessness, of their necessity in an immoral world. I sometimes think they want to use journalists as confessionals.
Perhaps for this reason, I have spent years, collectively, investigating the ways in which we—the Americans, the Europeans (including the Russians), the “West” in the most generous definition of the word—have produced the instruments of death for those who live in the Middle East. Never once did we reflect upon how Arab Muslims might respond to this extraordinary, wicked trade in arms, how they might attempt to revenge themselves upon us—not in their own lands but in ours. During the Lebanese civil war, I tried hard to connect the victim with the killer, sometimes travelling across Beirut to seek out the sniper or the gunner who had blown a man or woman to pieces. Once, in East Beirut, I confronted the Christian Phalangist militiaman who, I am sure, fired the mortar shell that killed a young woman in a West Beirut street. He refused to talk to me. So I searched for the arms-dealers who made these killings possible. More than anything, I sought to confront the arms-makers with the total and inescapable proof that their particular weapon had slaughtered the innocent. It was a journey that was to take me tens of thousands of kilometres over ten years—to the Gulf, Iran, Palestine, Israel, to Germany, Austria and to the United States. It was a woeful, depressing assignment, for the more I learned, the more profoundly hopeless did the Middle East’s tragedy appear to be. To have venal Western nations peddling their lethal products to the Muslim world and Israel was one thing; to watch those same Middle East nations pleading and whining and squandering their wealth to purchase those same weapons, quite another.
One cold late winter’s day in 1987, as Iran’s terrible war with Iraq was entering its final, most apocalyptic stage, I arrived at the railway station at Cologne in Germany to meet a dealer who knew far too much about that most costly of Middle East conflicts. He was a plump, bespectacled arms-merchant who had many times acted as a conduit between the U.S. government and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. He sat in his office with a broad smile, insisting that he must remain anonymous lest I wished to be responsible for his assassination. So was it true, I asked him, that he had given the CIA’s intelligence on the Iranian army to the Iraqi government? He laughed—so long, so deeply, perhaps for more than thirty seconds—before he admitted all. “Mr. Fisk, I will tell you this. At the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon. And there I was handed the very latest U.S. satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun River, the tank revetments—thousands of them—all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very grateful—verygrateful!”
The Germans seem to have a penchant for playing these treacherous games. For months in the mid- to late Eighties, I investigated the Middle East arms trade and often I found myself back in that place of Europe’s dark past, trailing through snow-covered valleys in Germany’s great trains, my bag stuffed with notebooks and files containing Iran’s entire weapons procurement demands for 1987, 1988 and beyond—into uncounted years of warfare against Iraq that would be foreshortened in just twelve months” time.
In the frost of 1987, one of these long trains carries me into Königswinter, a chauffeur with a well-heated limousine waiting for me at the station to take me to the Schloss in which the “Spider of Bonn” helps to change the military map of the Middle East. Gerhard Mertins smokes long, fat Cuban cigars and looks like an arms-dealer, a part that is played to perfection because it is real. There are no doubts, no lack of confidence, no moral ambiguities as he walks into the study of his Königswinter office, the snow falling heavily and comfortably outside the window. “I love this kind of weather, don’t you?” he asks, brushing the flakes from his jacket.
The telephone rings and Herr Mertins speaks intently into the receiver. “We have to know the needs of your generals,” he says impatiently. Then he replaces the receiver with an indulgent chuckle. He makes a great appearance of being candid. “That was the Greek Cypriot army. They are interested in new anti-aircraft guns and mines for their harbours. Mark my words, something is cooking in the island of Cyprus.” He laughs again, a man-in-the-know, unshocked by the iniquities of war. When I ask Herr Mertins to whom he sells guns, he almost coughs at the indignity I have cast upon him. “I think, if you will forgive me, that this is a very naive question.”
He puffs heavily on his cigar and then moves his arm forward and uses it to describe an elliptical, almost aerobatic circle in front of him. “Let me tell you frankly, I am on the Arab horse. Why not? You know, I have principles. I do not do this for profit. Yes, things are said about me—in Mexico, the paper Excelsior said I was a Nazi, an SS man, a friend of Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon.’ I have never met this man. But they felt they had to deport me from Mexico.” Herr Mertins maintains offices in Jeddah and Riyadh—he needs no visa to travel to Saudi Arabia—and he shows me a snapshot of himself standing next to long-robed Gulf sheikhs. He mourns the old Beirut, the city destroyed in the civil war that is still scissoring Lebanon to pieces, with the special melancholy of the rich. “I have such fond memories of the Lucullus restaurant. It is destroyed? That is too bad. A beautiful city, so sad.” Beirut was destroyed by weapons—by bombs and mines and artillery fire and fighter-bombers and bullets—but no hint of this damages Herr Mertins’s memories.
He is warming to his theme. “I never in my life made business just to make profit. We have a lot of problems just at the moment—they think I am like Adnan Kashoggi.” Iran-Contra dogs the weapons-dealers of Europe, unfairly so in their eyes because America’s arms entanglement with Iran was comparatively trivial, a small-scale business deal handled without professional advice or discretion, using dubious Iranian middlemen who real arms suppliers would never invite to their offices, let alone to their homes. The distinction between arms-dealer and middleman is not an easy one to make. In some cases—where the dealer’s own country imposes strict rules on weapons exports—the dealer becomes a middleman, passing on procurement lists to dealers in other nations with less scrupulous codes of arms-exporting conduct. When other nationals are brought in as financiers, the system becomes more complicated. When Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was setting up his arms-for-hostages deal with the Iranians, for example, the middleman was Manucher Ghorbanifar, playing the official role of “Iranian intermediary,” who arranged Robert McFarlane’s secret visit to Tehran in May 1986. Adnan Kashoggi, a Saudi, was the financier whose cash set the arms transfer into motion. The dealer (and supplier) was in this case the U.S. government—or Colonel North, depending on your point of view.
Dealers like to be close to their national government and Herr Mertins is no different. German cabinet ministers play on his private tennis courts and U.S. customs agents in Bonn refer to him, not entirely sympathetically, as the “Spider of Bonn.” In his immaculate works canteen, Mertins is greeted with affection by his employees—a true Andrew Undershaft, although he does not like the comparison—and he is immensely proud of his family, especially his new American daughter-in-law. “Mr. Fisk, you should take tea as it should be taken,” he announces at a family lunch in the company canteen. “With rum.” He sips for a long time at his apéritif. “Why do people say these stupid things about me? You know I have read all the books: the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran . . .” Later he asks rhetorically: “You know the trouble with Germany today? It has lost its nationalist sentiments.” I cringe.
Back in 1965, Herr Mertins sprang a surprise on several nations after the outbreak of the India–Pakistan war. The Americans embargoed arms supplies, although John Kenneth Galbraith, the former U.S. ambassador to India, later claimed that American weapons shipments had “caused the war.” Herr Mertins is still proud of his role in the affair. He had acted as middleman for the export of ninety American F-86 jet fighters to Pakistan under the guise of sending them to Iran. “We put Iranian transfers on the wings and they flew over Tehran in an air display and I was standing next to the Western ambassadors and I said: ‘See, these are the planes you claimed I had sent to Pakistan.’ But then the planes flew back to their Iranian air base and we changed their markings back to Pakistan again.” Herr Mertins slaps his right fist into his left hand. “You see? A case of pure German plastic science.”
But all this is a theatrical prelude to the real and current war. For in his office on this cold German mountainside, Herr Mertins—like his colleagues elsewhere in Germany and Austria—has a very shrewd idea of what is going on in the Iranian Ministry of Defence. The Iranians had become enamoured of cheap Soviet arms supplies after they signed an agreement with Moscow for the export of Iranian gas. “They bought a lot of Russian stuff—122-mm and 130-mm artillery and 12.7 and 14.5-mm anti-aircraft guns. They tried to get a lot of the same things from China— the Iranians were flying to Peking to discuss this—but China wants to be a ‘middle’ country. It doesn’t want to be up front. Then the Iranian armed forces became unhappy with the material they were getting.”
The story of the arms trade to Iran is both complex and fearful—and involves Israel as well as the West. One of Herr Mertins’s colleagues, a young man in a smart suit with excellent English, agreed to explain it, albeit anonymously. He brought into Mertins’s office a heavy file which he handed to me. I opened the blue-backed folder and there lay thousands of appeals for weapons from the Iranian government, for mortar tubes, gun sleeves, artillery ammunition and spare parts for American-made fighters. “The Russians were selling better equipment to the Iraqis than to the Iranians—and the Iranians knew it,” the man said. “That’s why the Iranians turned to the Israelis for help. The first Israeli plane to fly to Iran landed in Shiraz with 1,250 TOW missiles at $2,700 each. It was very expensive and it was old material, so the Iranians went to other countries. They were looking for 155-mm guns and approached the Voest-Canonen Company of Austria. They liked the 105-mm and 155-mm artillery that was produced in New York. The U.S. administration— Richard Perle, in fact—stopped this deal. So the Iranians became interested in a Helsinki company that was selling 60-mm, 81-mm and 120-mm mortars.
Mertins regards the whole Iran-Contra scandal with scorn. “It is easy to understand the Iranians,” he says. “The Iraqis had Russian MiG-25 ‘Foxbat’ aircraft that were dropping bombs from a high level on Tehran. And it was highly embarrassing for the mullahs in Iran to have nothing which could shoot down the ‘Foxbat.’ So they needed air-to-air missiles for their F-14s. You have to understand their need and the way in which others will deliver to them—they will deliver to the Devil—no morals, no ethics. As for the Iranians, every Iranian with a letter of credit begins with the words: ‘I am a relative of Khomeini.’ ” The Americans, who used the Israelis for their first arms shipment to Iran, thought they had managed to combine weapons and ethics—were they not, after all, seeking the liberation of innocent U.S. citizens held captive in Lebanon?—although it is instructive to note that the American administration believed, according to the Tower Commission report, that the Iranians needed Hawk ground-to-air missiles to shoot down high-level reconnaissance aircraft being flown by Soviet pilots 65 kilometres into Iranian airspace from Russia. Herr Mertins had no such illusions. The Iranians wanted to shoot down Iraqis.
Yet the Iran-Contra transactions—2,086 TOW anti-tank missiles and a planeload of F-14 spare parts sold to Iran at a cost of $30 million—only placed in perspective the colossal international arms deals concluded with the public consent or private connivance of America’s friends and enemies. In his congressional testimony, McFarlane struggled to hide the identity of a Middle East country which agreed to place its name on an end-user certificate for arms sales. But arms-dealers working out of Germany were in 1987 paying $100,000 for Third World end-user certificates, the documentary “evidence” that is coldly obtained by weapons manufacturers to prove to their own governments that they possess a legal export contract. For somewhere between the international ordnance factories, the bureaucracy of export documentation and the human wound, there is a certain moral—or immoral—ambiguity.164 Undershaft boasted that he was not “one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments.” But diplomats do not share this comfortable sincerity. By 1987, American and Soviet officials were weekly bemoaning the human cost of the Iran–Iraq War as their own weapons continued to flow towards the battlefronts. European governments repeatedly emphasised their neutrality in the conflict, their earnest if unbusinesslike desire to see it speedily and fairly concluded.
But Iran, its military establishment supposedly boycotted by this outraged world, was currently spending $250 million a month on weapons. German and Austrian arms-dealers had no illusions about what this meant. They claimed that this money was spent with the active or passive assistance of the governments of the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Greece, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, Dubai, Syria, Libya, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Holland, Israel, Portugal, India and Saudi Arabia. They added Belgium as a “late joiner” to the club, with four shipments of arms from Antwerp to Bandar Abbas in 1986.
As the war entered its final year, the Iranians desperately tried to restructure their procurement effort. They had inherited more than 1,000 helicopters from the Shah, but when the war began only 250 Cobra gunships were operational. By 1987, only 30 of them could still fly. More inventive than the Iraqis, the Iranians tried to improvise, ordering spare parts for American-made helicopters and fighter aircraft—exact copies of the U.S. originals that sanctions prevented Iran from obtaining—from local metalworkers in the bazaars. But there was too much sulphur in Iranian steel and they used the wrong metallurgy; the metal broke up under the strain of powered flight and Iran lost several pilots as their aircraft disintegrated in the air.
The Iranians also possessed detailed lists of foreign arms shipments to Iraq, an equally extraordinary tribute to the mercantile abilities of the world’s arms manufacturers. A selection of Iraqi purchases gives something of the flavour of these lists: battle-tank armour from the UK (1983), six Super-Etendard fighter-bombers from France (October 1983), SS-12 missiles from the Soviet Union (May 1984), multiple rocket-launchers from Brazil (June 1984), 500-pound cluster bombs from Chile (flown out of Santiago aboard an Iraqi Airways 747 in 1984). On 25 September 1985, Dassault announced the sale of 24 Mirage F-1 jet fighters to Iraq, the delivery to begin within eighteen months. Some of these weapons systems were sold under “existing arms contracts”—Moscow’s favourite phrase for a continuation of shipments to a lucrative buyer like Iraq—on the grounds that the credibility of the vendor nation would be damaged if they reneged on a signed agreement just because their client had later invaded someone else’s country. Other deals carried that special dog-tag that ensured innocence on the part of the vendor.
In 1986, for example, the British Plessey company agreed to a $388 million deal to supply radar to Iran, equipment that would—so the British were promised— be used on Iran’s frontier with Russian-occupied Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Asked how the British government could be sure that the radar would not be used on Iran’s western front—in military operations against Iraq—an official of the Ministry of Defence in London told me that “we have diplomats in Tehran who can go out and check these things.” But this was untrue. Britain’s diplomatic presence in Iran was confined to an “interests” section of the Swedish embassy; when I enquired in Tehran about the freedom of movement of British officials in Iran, I discovered that the Iranians were so restrictive that they had just refused a senior diplomat’s request to visit the Caspian Sea—a non-military area—for a holiday weekend.
It was as if there was an understanding in such matters, an unspoken commitment by all sides not to pry into the personal affairs of arms-dealers or their buyers, or into the weapons empire which needs secrecy in order to create demand, war in order to stimulate growth. The modern-day Undershafts will talk only of their competitors’ markets and mistakes. They will disclose only their rivals’ bids. It is a droll world of paper and procurement lists, forwarded by largely anonymous officials in ministries of defence—always defence—whose spelling is sometimes as deplorable as their handwriting.
A ten-page Iranian wartime procurement list handed to Austrian dealers and subsequently passed on to me demands specific spare parts for Soviet-made tanks, from grid frames to “third and fourth inversing glued lenses in frame,” from telescopic sights to headlights, from range-finders to turret motors. Yet the ordnance officer spelled “second” as “secound,” “circuit-breaker” as “dirduit-breaker,” “bottle” as “bottel.” It is a shabby document, with the column listing the quantity of required spare parts mistakenly filled into the unit number column, then crudely crossed out afterwards.
Broken down into the literal nuts and bolts of weaponry, there is an innocuous quality about such lists, as if Middle Eastern wars are fought through procurement agencies or manufacturers rather than by angry nations and frightened killer-soldiers. During my inquiries, I saw hundreds of such documents emanating from Iran, sometimes bearing the letterhead of the Iranian Armed Forces Headquarters in Tehran, at other times—when the broker acting for the Iranians wished to remain secret—typed anonymously, if imperfectly, on plain paper. In this way, tank tracks and gun barrels and McDonnell–Douglas spare parts become, quite literally, the liquid assets of big business or a source of international barter; you can exchange guns for money or oil or military favours—or even hostages. There is nothing exclusive about this. Long before President Reagan agreed to trade missiles for captives, Syria was funnelling weapons to Iran in return for shipments of cheap and sometimes free oil. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was only just restrained from selling German tanks to Saudi Arabia under an oil barter deal which, with falling oil prices, would have cost Germany more than it normally paid for oil.
War, too, throws up its own special barters. When in the first months of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 his forces captured dozens of British-built Chieftain tanks—often undamaged—from their enemy, they not unnaturally wished to reuse them against Iran. But they were unable to operate or maintain such sophisticated armour. So the tanks were transported to Jordan where, officially belonging to the Jordanian armed forces, they were repaired and overhauled by British technicians. At least one British arms manufacturer believes the tanks were then secretly returned to Baghdad for use in the Iraqi war effort, but Israeli military specialists later concluded that they remained in Jordan—as part payment for King Hussein’s generosity in allowing Iraq to ship its Soviet weapons supplies through the Jordanian port of Aqaba.
For their part, the British authorities maintain a special discretion about arms sales, dutifully issuing lists of annual military exports under armoured fighting vehicles, tanks, artillery, side-arms, revolvers, bombs and gun barrels. But unlike other export details, the British lists fail to specify to which countries the weapons have been sold. The Department of Trade and Industry refuses to discuss the individual applications of arms companies for export licences.165
In July 1991, four years after my inquiries into the Middle East arms trade began, the same British Department of Trade and Industry was expressing its confidence that there was a “reasonable and legitimate” explanation for export licences—listed in a House of Commons committee report—for the shipment to Iraq of raw materials for chemical weapons. The exports—some of which continued until 5 August 1990, three days after Saddam Hussein had invaded yet another Muslim nation, Kuwait—included two chemicals which, mixed together, formed mustard gas. During Iraq’s war with Iran, Britain had exported more than $200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components for mustard gas, to Baghdad in 1988, another $50,000 worth the following year. Thionyl chloride, the other component, was also sent to Iraq in 1988 and 1989 at a price of only $26,000. Government officials anxious to avoid the obvious truth—that Britain was partly responsible for providing Saddam with weapons of mass destruction—hastily pointed out that the chemical had civilian uses. It could be used, they said, in the making of ink for ballpoint pens and fabric dyes. This was the same government department that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for “weapons of mass destruction.”
The same House of Commons report stated that Britain had also exported small quantities of uranium and plutonium as well as military and communications equipment to Iraq. Included on the list were artillery fire control systems, armoured vehicles and decoders and encryption devices. Also on the list was zirconium, which has nuclear weapons applications. Ministry guidelines, the DTI insisted in all seriousness, “prevent the export of lethal weapons or equipment that would significantly enhance the military capacity of either country [Iraq or Iran].” The ministry was “absolutely confident” that all the goods sold to Iraq fitted this description.
With such dishonesty—with such malfeasance—how can the obscene trade in arms to the Middle East ever be halted? Note how the British government had been “absolutely confident” that the exports of mustard gas chemicals, armour and secret communications equipment could not “enhance” Iraq’s military “capacity.” This was a truth containing a very substantial sliver of glass. If it was not going to “enhance” Iraq’s military capacity, this British equipment was most surely intended to restore its military capability after the substantial losses in Iraqi materiel during the eight-year war with Iran—just in time for Saddam’s next act of aggression, against Kuwait.
Note, too, how the dual-use excuse for weapons exports was, within a matter of months, turned on its head as a means to deprive Iraqis of basic social needs. Just as in 1988 and 1989 a chemical used for mustard gas could be exported to Iraq since it could also be used in ballpoint ink, so—once UN sanctions were imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait—school pencils could not be exported to Iraq because the graphite in the pencils had dual military use. For the same reason, we would refuse to allow the Iraqis to import vital equipment for the repairing of oil wells, sewage plants and water-treatment facilities.
This kind of cynicism was reflected among the arms-traders. There is little honour among some of them, as Hamilton Spence, the managing director of Interarms of Manchester, a real home-grown British arms-supplier, discovered when he travelled to Beirut in 1980, at the height of the civil war, to sell M-16 rifles— legally—to the Lebanese government army in the company of Jim Davis of Colt firearms. “We sat down in a room to speak to the commander of the army, General Khoury,” he said. “Then when the tenders were being opened, we found three other men there, a West German, a Lebanese and a man of unknown nationality. All three of them then produced false cards representing them as ‘Colt’ agents. So we jumped up, pointed at them and shouted: ‘These people are imposters.’ ”
Two years later, just after the massacre of Palestinians by Israeli-supported Phalangist militiamen, Spence was watching Israeli troops unearthing PLO arms supplies from tunnels beneath the Palestinian camps in West Beirut. “There were our own ‘Interarms’ markings on some of the boxes,” Spence claimed. “They were all fake. Someone had been using our name.” Like Mertins, Spence was scornful of the American arms deal with Iran. “The CIA have a unique ability to get everything screwed up,” he said. Yet Spence’s boss, Sam Cummings, the chairman and principal shareholder in Interarms, had himself worked for the CIA. He described the arms business as “founded on human folly,” a trade in which all weapons are defensive and all spare parts non-lethal.
Yet Spence displayed contempt for those who would attack him as a merchant of death. “I was at a party some time ago and a young girl came up to me and accused me of selling weapons for people to kill each other. I said: ‘Nonsense. You’re paying taxes, you are paying part of your salary every month to pay for nuclear weapons. How can you accuse me?’ ” Spence did not feel ashamed. He and Cummings had as their company motto “ Esse quam videri”—“To be, rather than to seem to be”—and their Manchester workshops stood next to a fine, grey-stone Victorian church, the gods of love and war in intimate relationship with each other. “Not quite,” Spence told me. “The church was built to commemorate the battle of Waterloo.” He might also have added that while Interarms remained open for business, the church had been closed down some years before.
Israel’s own arms industry could be forgiven for adopting Cummings’s company motto for its own role in the Middle East arms market—although its attempts at secrecy are often as serious as a strip-tease artist’s attempts at modesty. Companies that produce the Merkava tank and have become masters of upgrading and transforming outdated munitions need to advertise themselves as much as they need to maintain their privacy. Glossy Israeli military magazines have extolled the virtues of battlefield surveillance radar, towed assault bridges, tank-fire control systems, aircraft bomb-ejection racks and the mini-Uzi sub-machine gun.
By the mid-Eighties, the Israeli electronics manufacturer Tadiran had moved into electronic warfare technology with the development of a frequency-hopping VHF radio system. Elbit Computers was advertising its weapons delivery and navigation systems. Israeli Military Industries—its weapons “subjected to the extensive operational testing of actual combat”—employed 14,000 workers and exported to the United States and several NATO countries. Israel even began buying, quite legally, avionics systems from the United States, upgrading them, installing them on Israeli aircraft and then sharing the newly modernised equipment and new technical knowledge with the Americans. In this way, Israeli technology turned up in U.S. equipment sold to Saudi Arabia, a country whose American arms imports are always opposed by Israel’s lobby in Washington and— usually—by the Israeli government.
Much less legal, however, was a secret operation—much of it still undisclosed in Israel itself—in which Israeli military technicians were sent to Beijing throughout the mid-Eighties to re-fit and modernise hundreds of Soviet-made tanks and heavy artillery for the Chinese People’s Army. The Israeli personnel, many of them working for commercial weapons companies inside Israel, flew to Beijing with the tacit permission of the Israeli government, upgrading the Russian tanks with new fire-control systems, laser range-finders and—in some cases—new guns, many of which contained sensitive instruments of American manufacture. Israeli technicians flew to Beijing via Copenhagen and Bangkok—always using Scandinavian Airlines and choosing the one route to China which passed over friendly territory all the way. They worked in three-month shifts in Chinese ordnance depots, their equipment sent by sea from the Israeli port of Eilat.
Although I wrote extensively about this illicit trade in The Times in May 1987, only the Associated Press followed up the story. Neither the Pentagon nor the White House would make any comment, working on the assumption that American journalists would not touch so sensitive a subject without “confirmation” from U.S. authorities—confirmation they were not prepared to give. Their assumption was correct. Only when the CIA informed the Senate Government Affairs Committee in October 1993 that Israel had been providing China for over a decade with “several billion dollars’ ” worth of advanced military technology did the story become kosher for U.S. journalists. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, then admitted that Israel had sold arms to China.
Israel’s ability to upgrade Soviet military hardware was well established. Israeli technicians revolutionised a process to “Westernise” T-54 and T-55 battle tanks after capturing hundreds of them in wars with the Russian-equipped Arab armies. The Israelis replace the tank’s 100-mm cannon with 105-mm guns and add their own fire-control system, which enables the gun to remain pointed at its target in rough country. Thermal sleeves were fitted to tank barrels to prevent heat warp while other innovations allowed tank commanders to predict weather conditions.166
Israel was also exporting hardware to Latin America, to the Somoza regime and then to the Contras in Nicaragua,167 to apartheid South Africa and to Pinochet’s Chile. But what infuriated the Americans was that the Chinese were receiving U.S. technology for their tanks via Israel—technology that was specifically banned from export to communist countries, including China. More critical still was the arrival of some of these same upgraded Russian tanks in Iran, purchased by Iranian arms-buyers while on extended visits to Beijing. Israel could not have been unaware of these deals—Iran operated a daily flight to Beijing during the eight-year war with Iraq, specifically to gain access to the Chinese arms market. The U.S. authorities only realised that the Israelis had been using U.S. instruments during the Beijing operations when a visiting Egyptian arms delegation inspected a newly modernised Russian T-62 tank, only to find U.S. and Israeli technology— with instructions in both English and Hebrew—inside.
The guerrilla armies of the Middle East—particularly in Lebanon during the county’s 1975–90 civil war—sought arms in less ambitious ways. The Hizballah in Lebanon acquired their Katyusha and anti-tank rockets from Iran via Syria—a spectacularly successful alliance, since it used low-grade weaponry ultimately to drive Israel’s occupation army and its Lebanese surrogates from southern Lebanon in May 2000. The Christian Phalangists acquired weapons, including wire-guided missiles, from Israel and from South Africa, the latter provoking a government inquiry in Johannesburg after the end of the apartheid regime.168
IT WAS INEVITABLE, I suppose, that Lebanon, the land in which I have lived for half my life, should eventually provide me with that one unique and terrible connection which I had sought for so long to understand, between the armourers and their ultimate victims, between the respectable weapons manufacturers and the innocents whom their weapons kill. For many years in the Middle East, I had pondered the morality of those who made the guns that killed the people around me. What long-dead Soviet worker in Stalin’s or Khrushchev’s Russia had manufactured the Katyusha rocket to be fired, decades later, by the Palestinians and the Hizballah at the Israelis—either inside Israel or against Israel’s occupation troops in southern Lebanon? What technician in the United States had put together the cluster bombs that Israel rained down on civilian areas of West Beirut in 1982?
What manufacturer, what developers—decent, patriotic, God-fearing Americans, no doubt—had built the Hellfire missile which an Israeli pilot fired into a Lebanese ambulance on 13 April 1996, killing two women and four children? Five years later, in Abu Dhabi, John Hurst of Lockheed would tell me he had no knowledge of this frightful little bloodbath. But then Mikhail Kalashnikov told me he felt no regrets about the carnage caused by the rifle he had designed; he had invented the AK-47 not to kill the innocent but to protect his country—the refrain of every armourer.
Yet the events of 13 April 1996 would allow me to challenge this mantra, to take the evidence of savagery back to the men in the United States who created the instrument of death for six poor Lebanese civilians whose only guilt lay in their nationality, in the location of their dirt-poor village and in the cynicism of the conflict which had been fought in that part of their country for twenty-one years. In all, 150,000 men, women and children were killed in the Lebanese civil war, tens of thousands of them victims of American munitions. These six civilians were to die long after that war had officially ended—victims of a constantly renewable conflict between Israel’s occupation army and the Lebanese Hizballah guerrillas who eventually drove their enemies out of almost all of Lebanon.169 In the months to come, I would interview all the survivors, all the witnesses—UN soldiers and Lebanese civilians—and the American arms manufacturers involved in this dreadful affair, which I still regard as a crime against humanity.
The Lebanese Shia Muslim village of Mansouri lay scarcely 8 kilometres from the Lebanese–Israeli frontier, and all that morning of Saturday, 13 April, the Israelis had shelled the area. Thirty-two-year-old Fadila al-Oglah had spent the night with her aunt Nowkal, cowering in the barn close to the villagers’ donkeys and cows. But that Saturday she came out of hiding because there was no more bread in the village and the Israeli artillery rounds were now landing between the grimy concrete houses. Abbas Jiha, a farmer who acted as volunteer ambulance-driver for the Shia Muslim village, had spent the night with his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Mona, their three small daughters—Zeinab, Hanin and baby Mariam—and their six-year-old son, Mehdi, in the family’s one-room hut above an olive grove, listening to the threats broadcast by the Voice of Hope radio station which was run by Israel in the 10 per cent of Lebanese territory it occupied north of its border. “The Israelis kept saying over the radio that the people of the villages must flee their homes,” Abbas Jiha recalled for me. “They named Mansouri as one of those villages. They were telling us to escape. They were saying that they wouldn’t attack the cars that were leaving the villages. And when I opened the door, I saw that the shelling was coming into Mansouri.”
Across all of southern Lebanon on that spring morning, towering clouds of black and grey smoke drifted towards the Mediterranean as thousands of Israeli shells poured into the hill villages. The sky was alive with the sound of supersonic F-16 fighter-bombers, while several hundred metres above the hamlets and laneways hovered the latest and most ferocious addition to Israel’s armoury—the American-made Apache helicopters whose firepower had proved so deadly to the retreating Iraqi army in Kuwait five years before. Just four days earlier, a fourteen-year-old Lebanese boy had been torn to pieces by a booby-trap bomb disguised as a rock near the village of Bradchit; the pro-Iranian Hizballah militia, accusing Israel of responsibility, sought revenge by firing Katyusha rockets across the border into Israel, wounding several civilians. In response, Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres—vainly seeking re-election by portraying himself as a soldier-statesman at war with Hizballah “terrorism”—ordered the mass bombardment of southern Lebanon from the air, sea and land.170
The United States meekly called for both sides to “exercise restraint” but publicly sympathised with Israel. The Hizballah, according to the U.S. State Department, were ultimately to blame for the death of all those civilians—there were to be almost 200 within the next three weeks—killed by Israeli fire. Although Washington was—as usual—officially neutral, the Lebanese found it difficult to dissociate their latest war from the United States. The Voice of Hope radio station ordering them to flee their homes was partly funded by right-wing American evangelists. The 155-mm artillery shells hissing over their villages were made in America. So were the F-16 jets and the Apache helicopters hovering like wasps in the pale blue skies above them. Even the name chosen by Shimon Peres for Israel’s latest adventure in Lebanon—“Operation Grapes of Wrath”—appeared to be influenced by America. If it did not come from the Book of Deuteronomy, then it was inspired by Julia Ward Howe’s nineteenth-century “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—where the Lord is seen “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”—or by the best-selling novel of the American writer John Steinbeck, who once described Arabs as “the dirtiest people in the world and among the smelliest.”
The fruits of the operation could already be seen in Mansouri. Shortly after dawn on 13 April, a shell had struck a house on the edge of the village, wounding Abdulaziz Mohsen, a twenty-three-year-old farmer and former Lebanese army conscript. Despite the gunfire, Abbas Jiha ran from his home to ask for the keys of the Mansouri ambulance from the village mukhtar, or mayor. The battered, white-painted Volvo—a gift to the people of Mansouri from villagers who had made money after emigrating to West Africa—had two empty stretchers lying on the back floor and Jiha pushed Mohsen into the vehicle, setting off through the shellfire to the city of Tyre, up the Mediterranean coast to the north-west. There he bought sacks of flat Arabic bread for the marooned villagers of Mansouri. He arrived back by nine in the morning, and was handing out the bread when another shell hit a laneway, wounding a two-month-old baby called Ali Modehi. Back drove Abbas Jiha once more in the old village ambulance, its blue light flashing on the roof, until he had safely delivered Ali to the Tyre hospital. He bought yet more bread for the families of Mansouri, then set off again for the village.
As he did so, Najla Abujahjah, a young Reuters camerawoman, was on an equally dangerous mission, driving through the foothills east of Mansouri in an attempt to film the Israeli air attacks for the British news agency. Unwilling to leave the battlezone, Abujahjah—a resourceful and brave woman who would never forget the terrible event she was shortly to witness—headed west to a road near Mansouri where she caught sight of two more Apaches that appeared to be watching something, “almost stationary in the sky but moving a few metres backwards and then a few metres forwards.”
Abbas Jiha was now back in the centre of Mansouri, enveloped in a scene of mass panic. “Many people had already fled their homes but a few were left, including my own family, and the shells were falling all over the place. A jet came and dropped a bomb on the edge of the village. So I said the people could get into the ambulance and I’d take them to safety. I got Mona and our children.” Abbas Jiha said that just as he put nine-year-old Zeinab, five-year-old Hanin and two-month-old Mariam, along with their brother Mehdi, into the back of the ambulance, he saw two helicopters. “They were low and the pilots seemed to be watching us,” he told me.
Fadila al-Oglah bought two bags of bread from Abbas but was herself now fearful of the planes. “Although the Israelis said we would not be attacked if we fled our houses, the Apaches were strafing the roads with bullets, and shells were bursting around our homes,” she was to tell me later. “My brothers had left in a pick-up and other people had escaped in farm tractors. My parents told me: ‘Leave and follow your brothers.’ I went down to the village to look for another pick-up but then I saw Abbas Jiha driving the village ambulance with his wife and family inside. I asked if he would take me and he said: ‘No problem.’”
By the time Abbas Jiha left Mansouri, he had thirteen terrified passengers crammed into the vehicle. There was his wife, Mona, and their four children, Fadila and her aunt Nowkal, Mohamed Hisham, a window repairman, and five members of the al-Khaled family—twenty-two-year-old Nadia, who was Nowkal’s daughter, and her four nieces, Sahar, aged three, Aida, seven, Huda, eleven, and thirteen-year-old Manar. Abbas and Mohamed Hisham, the only male adults, sat in the front of the ambulance along with six-year-old Mehdi; the rest sat pressed together in the back. “Can you imagine what it was like with fourteen people in the vehicle?” Fadila asked me when I interviewed her later. Abbas Jiha remembers that part of the village was now on fire, the smoke curling over the fields. “We left in a convoy of tractors and cars and headed for Amriyeh where there was a UN post with Fijian soldiers on the main coast road to Tyre. The shells were falling all round us in the fields.”
Najla Abujahjah was herself now standing in front of the Fijian position—UN Checkpoint 123—taking still pictures of refugee traffic on the road, her friend holding her video-camera. “There were two helicopters in the sky, watching the checkpoint,” she told me. “I was worried about those helicopters, about what they were doing there. I saw an ambulance coming down the road and thought it must have wounded on board but then I saw it was full of women and children. There was another car moving in the opposite direction and the ambulance driver was waving with his hand, telling it to turn back.” The videotape record of those moments shows the ambulance passing the unmanned UN checkpoint—the Fijian soldiers were not on the road, but in their protective bunkers—and Abbas Jiha’s hand appears at the window of his vehicle, urging the other car to stop.
It was then that Abbas Jiha heard the women in the back of his ambulance shouting at him. “One of them was crying out to me: ‘The helicopter is coming close to us—it’s chasing us.’ I looked out of the window and I could see the Apache getting closer. I told them all: ‘Don’t be afraid—just say Allahu akbar, God is Great, and the name of the Imam Ali.’ I had told them not to be afraid but I was very frightened.”
Najla Abujahjah saw the same helicopter. “It was getting lower and nearer, and I’ve learnt that this means the pilot is going to fire. I felt he was going to fire a missile but I didn’t imagine the target would be so close to me. I heard a sound like ‘puff-puff,’ a very small sound. And I saw a missile flying from the Apache with a trail of smoke behind it.” In fact, the Israeli helicopter pilot fired two missiles; one was later discovered unexploded beside a neighbouring mosque, its steel cylinder, fins and nameplate still intact. Najla Abujahjah’s videotape recorded what happened to the other rocket. Milliseconds after the ambulance cleared UN Checkpoint 123, the missile exploded through the back door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it 20 metres through the air into the living room of a house.
All Fadila al-Oglah could remember was “a great heat in my face, like a blazing fire. Somehow I was outside the ambulance and I found a big barrel of water and started to wash my face from the heat. It was all I could think of, despite the screaming and smoke, this terrible heat. It was as if someone was holding a flame in front of my eyes.”
Abbas Jiha was to recall how he hurled himself from the door of the ambulance just before it crashed into the house. “I was terrified. I couldn’t believe it. It was the end of my world. I knew what must have happened to my family.” Najla Abujahjah, trembling with fear, was now videotaping the terrible aftermath of the Israeli missile attack. Her tape shows Abbas Jiha, wounded in the head and foot, standing in the road beside one of his dead daughters, weeping and shrieking “God is Great” up into the sky, towards the helicopter. “I raised my fists to the pilot and cried out: ‘My God, my God, my family has gone.’”
Abbas found his son Mehdi alive. Then he saw two-month-old Mariam lying 3 metres from the ambulance. “All her body had holes through it. Her head was full of metal.” Najla saw women and children “coming out of the back of the ambulance, cowering and screaming and hiding. One man threw himself into the orchard then came out holding two children by the arms. One was a little girl who was wounded and barefoot but she was still trying to put her scarf back on. I saw a girl lying on the road with blood coming out of the top of her head. The driver was crying out: ‘My children have died, God have mercy on us.’ I saw another girl— she was Manar—and she had blood all over her, and she kept saying: ‘My sister’s head has exploded.’ ”
Still fearful that the helicopter would fire again—the pilot had clearly seen that his target was an ambulance—Najla Abujahjah ran towards the house to find a scene which she has said will torment her for the rest of her life. “I couldn’t get the doors open because the vehicle was wedged in the room. But there were three children inside who were clearly in the last seconds of their life. It was as if they were entombed. One of them—she was Hanin—collapsed on the broken window frame, her blood running in streams down the outside of the vehicle. In her last seconds she tried to look at me but she couldn’t because dust covered her face. Another little girl was sitting in the lap of a dead woman, wailing and crying ‘Aunty, Aunty.’ There was a third girl who had her face covered in blood; she was sitting up, turning her head from side to side. Another had a terrible wound to her head and neck and she collapsed.” As the children died one by one in front of her, Najla Abujahjah heard a strange scraping sound. “The missile had set off the windscreen wipers and they were going back and forth against the broken glass, making this terrible noise. It will haunt me for the rest of my days.”
Abbas Jiha, overwhelmed with grief, was tearing at the ambulance with his bare hands, along with UN Fijian troops from the checkpoint. “I could see Hanin’s back—she was cut through with holes like a mosquito net,” he recalled. “Then I found my wife Mona. She was so terribly wounded, I couldn’t recognise her face. I had lost her and three of my children.” Mona Jiha, nine-year-old Zeinab, fiveyear-old Hanin and the two-month-old baby, Mariam, were all dead. So was sixty-year-old Nawkal and her eleven-year-old niece Huda. The Israeli helicopter remained in the sky over UN Checkpoint 123 for another five minutes. Then it flew away.
Within hours, the Israelis admitted they had targeted the ambulance but made two claims: that the vehicle was owned by a Hizballah member—which was untrue—and that it was destroyed because it had been carrying a Hizballah guerrilla—likewise untrue. “If other individuals in the vehicle were hit during the attack,” an Israeli spokesman said, “they had been used by the Hizballah as a cover for Hizballah activities.” There were no apologies. Yet international law demands the safeguarding of civilian lives even in the presence of “individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians,” and the claim that the vehicle had been targeted because it was believed to be owned by the Hizballah was in some ways even more outrageous. How, the survivors asked themselves, could it be justifiable for the Israelis to slaughter the occupants of an ambulance just because they didn’t like the suspected owner of the vehicle? And what kind of missile, they also asked, could home in on an ambulance, blasting it 20 metres through the air? If the Apache helicopter was American—as it most certainly was—who made the rocket that killed Nowkal, Mona and the four children, Zeinab, Hanin, Mariam and Huda?
For days after the killing, the smashed ambulance lay in the wreckage of the house into which it had been blasted on 13 April. I passed it myself each day as I drove the frightening coast road south of Tyre, two Apache helicopters watching my movements as they did all vehicles on the highway. Within a week, the bloodbath at Qana, in which 109 Lebanese civilian refugees were massacred by Israeli artillery, had eclipsed this particular horror, eventually bringing “Operation Grapes of Wrath” to an ignominious end—and failing to win Shimon Peres’s election. But there were many other incidents during the Israeli bombardment which bore a remarkable similarity to the ambulance attack. Close to the Jiyeh power station, south of Beirut, for example, another Israeli helicopter pilot had fired a missile at a car, killing a young woman who had just bought a sandwich from a local café. In West Beirut on 16 April, a missile decapitated a two-year-old girl. Two days later, yet another helicopter-fired missile was targeted at a block of apartments at Nabatieh, killing a family of nine, including a two-day-old baby.
What were these terrible weapons that were now being used so promiscuously in Lebanon? Who sold them to the Israelis? And—if it was an American company which had manufactured the missile—what conditions were attached to its sale? In the village of Mansouri, Abbas Jiha spent months ruminating upon this same question. “How would the people who made this missile feel if their children were killed as mine were?” he asked me. “These things are meant to be used against armies, not civilians.” Fadila al-Oglah was more resigned. “The Americans will keep giving these weapons to the Israelis whatever we say,” she remarked to me one day in the same draughty two-room house she had fled a year before. “They don’t care about us. We will continue to suffer.” Which was perfectly true.
Shortly after the bombardment ended, however, UN ordnance officers searching through the wreckage of the ambulance found an intriguing clue to the missile’s identity. Among fragments of shrapnel and twisted steel, a young UN liaison officer—Captain Mikael Lindval of the Swedish army—discovered a hunk of metal bearing most of a coded nameplate. It had come to rest a few inches from the bloodstained window frame where Hanin had died, and contained the logo “AGM 114C” and a manufacturer’s number, “04939.” There was also an intriguing single letter, “M.” Lindval knew AGM stood for “Air-to-Ground Missile,” and the 114C coding identified the 1.6-metre projectile as a Hellfire anti-armour missile, jointly manufactured by Rockwell International and Martin Marietta. Rockwell—now taken over by Boeing—had its missile headquarters, according toJane’s Defence Weekly, at Satellite Boulevard, Duluth, in Georgia, about thirty minutes’ drive from Atlanta. Martin Marietta, now part of Lockheed, was making missles in Orlando, Florida. Those who made the missile that killed four Lebanese children and two women now had an address.
I even found the manufacturer’s advertisement for the Hellfire. “All for One and One for All,” it said in the publicity literature. Could ever Alexandre Dumas’ reputation have been so traduced? What did the rallying cry of the Three Musketeers have to do with this weapon? But there was a far more important question. Now that I had identified them, how would the missile manufacturers respond to the bloodbath inside the Mansouri ambulance?
Lindval duly handed over to me the fragment containing the codes. They were scratched and in some cases illegible, but they included a National Stock Number in a 42-34 digit sequence, “141001-1920293.” The second section of the sequence—“01”—would prove to be of vital importance. The missile’s Lot No. was “MG188J315534.” Then the Fijians found the second, unexploded Hellfire missile almost totally buried beside the mosque. On the undamaged fuselage, the codings were complete and it was thus possible to reconstruct some of the missing figures on the projectile which had exploded inside the ambulance.171
Somehow, I had to get the coded missile part to America, to present it to the makers. The first question was how to get this piece of shrapnel—the vital and only proof that the ambulance had been hit by a Hellfire—from Lebanon to the United States. There were no direct flights. It was not difficult to get it aboard an international flight from Lebanon to France. Sympathetic officials at Beirut airport and in the airline brought the missile part on board my Air France flight to Paris. But explaining to American security men that I wanted to carry it all the way to Washington was going to end in journalistic disaster. I consulted the Paris station manager of another European airline. “Don’t think about hand-carrying it, Bob,” he told me, fondling the jagged metal fragment containing the Hellfire codes. “They’ll pick up explosive traces on your hands, let alone the stuff you’d be carrying in your bag.” I could see what he meant. And I could imagine the headline: “British reporter found with missile part on flight to Washington . . .” I could even guess the reporter’s by-line beneath the headline.
The hunks of shrapnel were now no more a rocket than a piece of broken china constituted a plate, but the very word “missile” would cause palpitations to any U.S. agent in the aftermath of the recent TWA disaster off New York; in five years’ time, the whole exercise would have been impossible. In the end, Amnesty International—well aware of the ambulance killings in Lebanon—agreed to airfreight the missile parts from Paris to their Washington office. A few days later, I flew Air France to the United States; I can remember my sense of excitement as my aircraft stopped over briefly in New York. I stood with the French crew on the steps of the plane in the early afternoon, looking towards the distant skyscrapers and the tall grey towers of the World Trade Center on the warm horizon. Now at last I could confront the armourers with the consequences of their profession.
In Washington, I picked up the Hellfire fragment in the heart of the capital whose alliance with Israel allows neither criticism not restraint. I wasn’t going to take a local flight and get caught on the metal detectors at Washington’s Ronald Reagan airport, so the Crescent, a railroad train en route to New Orleans, would take me through the night down to Georgia, where Bob Algarotti of Boeing had agreed to meet me to discuss the Hellfire at the very home of the missile. He wanted to explain its advantages, its combat-proven abilities, to a reporter who— he wrongly assumed—wanted to write a puff piece about the missile’s accuracy.
Washington, that late spring day, was beautiful. The Capitol and the great government buildings looked like ancient Rome. And when I awoke the next bright morning in my sleeping car heading south, the neat little American towns looked like they were on a Hollywood set. The soft green countryside and the clapboard houses sailed past the window of my carriage. How neat those little gardens were with their flowers and children’s swings. Was I only 6,000 miles away from Lebanon—or on a different planet? There were Episcopalian churches and smart Georgian courthouses and towns called Cornelia and Magnolia Acres flicking past, and a gunstore—in a land where every man and woman has the right to bear arms—called Lock, Stock and Barrel. And so many flagstaffs that dawn morning I could see from my carriage window. And so many red, white and blue American flags snapping proudly from them. There hadn’t been a war in these parts, I thought, for 130 years.
I climbed down at Gainesville station, where a taxi man with one surviving tooth took me down Interstate 85 to the Old Peachtree Road exit. We passed a sign saying Duluth and then Satellite Boulevard and then, less than 3 miles further on, we turned into a campus of discreet two-storey buildings hidden behind tall trees and manicured lawns. “Boeing Defense and Space Group,” it said on the sign at the gate.
It was to be a disturbing afternoon. A tiny, green-painted model of the Hellfire stood on a shelf of the room in which Bob Algarotti of Boeing introduced me to two executives intimately involved in the production of the missile. They were highly intelligent men; both were former serving officers in Vietnam and both would later request anonymity—for their security, it seemed, although their concern about Boeing’s reaction to the interview appeared to outweigh any fear of Hizballah or “terrorism.”
I explained that I was interested in writing about the abilities of the Hellfire— but also about its specific use in the Middle East. The executive to my right— whom I shall call the Colonel, for that was his rank in Vietnam—produced a glossy brochure that detailed the evolution of the Hellfire modular missile system, and placed it on the table between us. Page 2 carried a series of small illustrated cross-sections of the rocket and, following the dates 1982–89, a coding of AGM 114A, B, C. The piece of shrapnel—which, unbeknown to the Boeing men, was in my camera bag—was marked AGM 114C. So the missile that killed Abbas Jiha’s family, Nowkal and her niece was at least seven years old.
The Colonel listed the countries which had purchased either an early or later, improved, category of the Hellfire. First on the list was Israel with both categories—“they take soldiering pretty seriously,” the Colonel said admiringly, a remark I decided to let go for the moment—but Egypt, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates were also included. Sweden and Norway had purchased an anti-ship version of the Hellfire. The British had category two. It was a popular product and the Colonel was keen to explain why. “It’s probably the most precise anti-armour weapon in the world,” he said. “You can fire it through a basketball hoop at five miles and it would do it every time.” So the women and children in the ambulance, I thought to myself, had stood no chance.
I understood at once what this meant. The Boeing men were promoting the accuracy of their weapons as part of their humanitarian pitch: the more accurate the Hellfire, the less chance civilians would be killed by it. The problem came when the weapon was specifically aimed at a civilian target—as it had been by the Israelis in Lebanon—when the very precision of the missile ensured that civilians would be killed. So I asked what checks Boeing carried out on the use to which the Hellfire had been put by the nations that purchased it. They read the papers, both executives said. I asked about Israel. “We do not get information from the Israelis about what they’ve done,” one of the men replied. “They don’t give much information.”
It was time to produce the missile fragment. And as I knelt to extract it from my camera bag, I felt the electricity in the air behind me. I turned round and laid the shard of iron which had helped to kill the Lebanese in the centre of the table. I told all three men the date of its use, the location, the appalling results and Israel’s explanation. The Colonel picked it up, turning it in his hand and muttering something about how it might be too small a fragment to identify. This was absurd. He could read the codes on the metal from the missile. He understood what they meant better than I did. His colleague to my left said nothing, stared at the fragment and looked at me. Bob Algarotti, the public relations man, picked it up, glanced at his colleagues, and said quietly: “Yeah, well, it’s a Hellfire, we all know that.”
Then he said: “I’m getting a little uncomfortable.” But the Colonel was angry. “This is so far off base, it’s ridiculous,” he said. I begged to disagree. These men manufactured this missile. Did they not bear some responsibility for its use—at least to ensure that it was used responsibly by their clients? Was reading about its use in the newspapers enough? Was that the extent of their interest or care? There then followed some very uncomfortable minutes. Algarotti complained that you couldn’t blame a knife-maker if someone used the knife to murder someone else. Yes, I said, but this was not a knife. The Hellfire was an anti-personnel weapon. “It’s not!” the Colonel replied angrily. “It’s an anti-armour weapon.” And then there was silence—because, of course, if the missile was an anti-armour weapon, it most surely was not an anti-ambulance weapon.
“Are you on some kind of crusade?” one of the executives asked. I said I thought this an unfortunate remark.172 Algarotti interrupted quietly to agree with me. We were dealing with the death of innocent people, I repeated, including children. What was I looking for? one of the men asked. For some sign of compassion from them, I replied. One of the men in the room said: “I, as a person—sure I have feelings, but as a Boeing company employee, all we do is make missiles.” I then agreed to lay down my pen while the three men discussed how they could frame some statement of their feelings. Both executives clearly felt deeply troubled about the events that I described; they were family men and wanted to express their horror at the deaths of innocents. But they didn’t want Boeing involved and— equally obviously—they were frightened of criticising Israel. During the afternoon, one man at Boeing would be heard to say twice—in identical words, I observed in my notebook—“Whatever you do, I don’t want you to quote me as saying anything critical of Israel’s policies.”
And here was the nub. These men, these armourers—so powerful, so overwhelmingly part of America’s defence system, so patriotic in their motives, so immutably part of the history of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam—were frightened of offending Israel, fearful that a mere word of criticism would damage or end their careers or send them careening off into a political crisis within the aerospace company so serious that their careers would be for ever ravaged. “Whatever you do . . .” the man had said.
Then one of the executives made up his mind. “Let me speak as a soldier, not as an employee of Boeing. No professional soldier is going to condone the killing of innocent people as targets. We’re trained to preserve the peace . . . of course, the Boeing company is troubled if its weapons are misused or targeted against, you know, innocent people. But we build weapons systems to U.S. requirements, we get permission to sell to many different countries . . . we don’t sell missiles that are intended for non-military targets . . .”
I pulled from my bag the photographs that Najla Abujahjah had taken of the victims. I laid them on the table, images of blood and torn limbs. The executive on my left looked through them with distaste. Then he said: “I don’t want these.” And he slid the pictures of the dead and wounded members of the Jiha family across the heavily polished tabletop. The Colonel looked at them and gently returned them to me. We parted with handshakes; and I felt oddly sad for these men. They were decent, hard-working, loyal employees of Rockwell—now Boeing—and they had been shocked by the story of the ambulance. They wanted to show their compassion—and did so, up to a point—but were desperately anxious to avoid any offence to Boeing or to Israel. I told them to keep the Hellfire missile fragment. I was returning it to them. And as I left the room, I heard a voice behind me say: “I don’t think we’ll put this one in the trophy room.”
And there my story might have ended. The Review section of the London Independenton Sunday published my detailed account of the Israeli attack on the ambulance and the long journey to the south of the United States to find the men who made it. On the front cover, the paper ran a coloured photograph of the missile fragment, showing in minute detail the codings that had survived the explosion. But two days later, I received a letter from a European missile technician. He wanted anonymity. He said he wanted “some focusing of Human Rights for these people” killed in the ambulance. Then he went on:
The vital piece of evidence, the missile fragment, says a lot more than you revealed . . . The NATO Stock Number is partially obliterated, but does give a vital clue. The NSN is made up of a 42-34 digit sequence . . . the two digit part is the Nation Code. Each NATO country . . . has an identifying nationality code—in this case, the “01” for the U.S.A is clearly visible. This shows that the weapon was originally supplied to U.S. forces . . . The Lot No. is the most significant. This would tell you exactly where and when it was made, and more importantly, where it was delivered . . . you will see that the first part of the Lot No. has been obliterated . . . It also appears to have been made by a chisel-like instrument . . . being pushed down on the plate; the other damage is all of a glancing/scraping nature. So who cut out the Lot No.? Israeli forces upon receipt of “illegally exported” U.S. weaponry? U.S. forces before delivery? . . . It is quite clear that this missile . . . was exported from U.S. government stocks and given to the Israelis covertly.
The writer ended with a warning, telling me that I should be careful what I said on the telephone about my missile inquiries, because “all satellite transmissions are monitored by the U.S. National Security Agency at Menwith near Harrogate . . .‘Compromising NATO Security’ would be the charge [against me] so please be discreet in your handling of this letter.”
Discreet I was. I messaged a friend in France and asked her to call the anonymous letter-writer. Minutes later she was on the line. “He called me back from a pay phone. He wants to meet you tomorrow for lunch at the Lutetia Hotel in Paris.” Next morning I boarded the first flight to Paris, the 8:05 from Beirut—the same plane I had flown with the missile fragment only a few days earlier. At Charles de Gaulle airport, I took a taxi to the 6ème arrondissement. This was an assignment, it seemed, that would turn me into the ancient mariner, the Hellfire missile my personal albatross.
The technician had arrived in Paris with his wife. He went straight to the point. “Mr. Fisk, that missile was never sold to the Israelis. The ‘01’ shows it was sold to the U.S. armed forces. And the ‘M’ proves it was sold to the U.S. Marine Corps.” Was he sure? He pulled from his pocket NATO’s entire arms coding list. Israel’s imported NATO weapons, for example, would carry the numerals “31.” Britain’s NATO coding is “99,” Italy “15.” But the nationality code for the United States was—suitably enough—“01.” Which was the code on the missile fragment. And “M” stood for the U.S. Marines. So how, in heaven’s name, did a Marine Corps missile come to be fired by the Israelis into an ambulance in southern Lebanon? I called my then editor, Andrew Marr. “Bob,” he said, “looks like you’ll be adding up some more air miles—get back to Washington.”
I did. I made a formal request to the Pentagon, giving them full details of the missile’s codes, asking them for “the exact provenance of this missile . . . did it pass through U.S. military hands and, if so, how did it find its way to the Israel Defence Forces? . . . What follow-up action was taken by the U.S. government after the April 13 attack?” I received no reply. Indeed, after more than thirty calls from me to the U.S. Defense Department and the State Department—faxing and hand-delivering not only the coding of this missile but the coding on the unexploded missile which had also been fired at the ambulance, from which we had established some of the figures scratched off the exploded rocket—not a single official American government spokesman, either at Defense or State, was prepared to give me any information. “Some questions come to us with a kind of jinx attached,” a Defense Department official told me during another vain call to his office. “Yours seems to have a jinx.”
But the U.S. Marines took a different view. When I faxed them details of the missile codings and the ambulance attack, I was immediately called back by a spokeswoman for the office of the Marine Corps Commandant. “We don’t like our missiles being used to attack kids,” she told me. “Where are you staying?” I waited next day at my hotel near Dupont Circle and at 5:30 a car arrived for me. It took me to a marine base outside Washington where seven men in civilian clothes were waiting to talk to me. We sat in the officers’ mess and they examined my photographs of the missile parts and told me—at last—the story of Hellfire No. MG188J315534.
It had been one of up to 300 shipped to the Gulf by the U.S. Marines in 1990 to be used against Saddam Hussein’s occupation army in Kuwait. Of these, 159 were fired at Iraqi forces—although the marines reported at the time that some of the Hellfires were hitting Iraqi vehicles but failing to explode on impact; just as the second missile which the Israeli pilot fired at the Lebanese ambulance failed to explode in 1996. But when the conflict was over, the marine officers told me, around 150 unused Hellfires—along with other ordnance—were dropped off at the Haifa munitions pier in Israel by a U.S. warship as part of a secret quid pro quo— a gift to Israel—for keeping out of the 1991 Gulf War when it was under Iraqi Scud missile attack.
I called up General Gus Pagonis, who was head of U.S. military logistics during the 1991 war against Iraq; he insisted to me that “everything we took off the ships [in Saudi Arabia] I put back aboard them en route to America.” But Pagonis—who was now head of logistics for the Sears Roebuck chain of department stores—added meaningfully that “I don’t know if the ships stopped anywhere on the way.” They did. After passing through the Suez Canal, the U.S. Navy put the Hellfires and other missiles ashore in northern Israel.173
If the missile had been sold to Israel, conditions on its use would have been attached. But this was a military transfer, straight from American stocks. The missile had been paid for by the marines but ultimately handed over to the Israelis, no questions asked, and—five years later—fired into the back of an ambulance. Thus did a U.S. Marine missile kill seven people in southern Lebanon.174
And there in Washington my journey might have ended were it not for a message from Bob Algarotti of Boeing. It was, to say the least, confusing. His people, he said, had been studying the missile fragment which I had left with them. They thought it had been made at the Orlando factory in Florida, by Lockheed Martin— at that time a rival company. But the story wasn’t that simple. The “Fed Log” number, partly damaged in the explosion, showed the figures to be 04939. “And that—at least the last four [digits]—definitely indicated it’s either got to be us or it’s got to be Martin Marietta then.” This hardly seemed conclusive. If it was either Rockwell (now Boeing) or Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin), which of them made this killer missile? The Hellfire that the Israelis fired into the ambulance had obviously been designed and developed by Boeing in Duluth. Now it seemed that the missile itself might have been put together by Lockheed. There was a lot of buck-passing going on here.
Boeing—whose headquarters in Seattle refused to add to what I’d been told in Duluth—said it had not contacted Lockheed Martin about my inquiry. But when I called Al Kamhi, Lockheed’s director of communications—who, by chance, was on a business trip to London—he knew exactly what I was investigating. “You talking about what you discussed with Rockwell?” he asked sharply. “. . . I mean, I have no way of knowing what missile that was. I have no way of knowing if that missile ever came from where you say it came from . . . They [Boeing] can be as convinced as they want to be . . . as far as I’m concerned, I’m not going to start looking at missile fragments from . . . Their origin is totally unknown—I’m just not going to do that.”
“Can I let you have them anyway?” I asked. And our conversation became almost surreal:
KAMHI: No, I won’t accept them.
FISK: You won’t accept them?
KAMHI: No.
FISK: Can you tell me why not, sir? . . . I mean, this involves the death of four children and two women in an ambulance.
KAMHI: I don’t know that that missile has anything to do with it . . . I mean, I can’t comment on something I have no information on.
FISK: Well, I’m offering you the information so that you can check on it, sir. Boeing does seem convinced that it was made by your people.
KAMHI: And I’m not sure I understand—if it was or if it wasn’t—what the point is.
I told Kamhi that I wanted to know the response of the company that manufactured the Hellfire to the events that took place when its missile was used. “I have no comment on what took place,” he replied. “I’m not even going to get into that arena . . . Our sales are made through foreign military sales . . . that’s the way it’s done, through the Pentagon.” I repeated that UN officers had found the missile in the ambulance, along with another Hellfire close by which had failed to explode. There was no doubt about their provenance. But our conversation continued in an even more bizarre manner.
KAMHI: Well, frankly, the missile has nothing to do with the manufacturer.
FISK: But you made it.
KAMHI: Well, we make a lot of things, too . . . our products are sold to allied nations.
FISK: Does that include Israel?
KAMHI: I presume if Israel has Hellfire, then they purchase the Hellfires through legal channels and through legal means.
FISK: But I mean, do you care about the use to which your missiles are put by those people to whom you sell them? I mean, this is a very important point, sir.
KAMHI: I’m sorry—I’m not going to dignify that question with a response. It’s a no-win question . . . I’m just not going to respond to that . . . the question you have asked is a “Have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife?” question. No matter how I respond to that question, we all of a sudden are the bad missile manufacturer. We make missiles. We make electronics systems. We make a variety of defence systems. And it is our hope that they’re never used . . . We don’t know that the missile was misused. A missile can miss . . .
I explained to Kamhi that the Israelis agreed the ambulance was the target. They should respond to it, he said. But then, when I suggested that the U.S. government was itself concerned about the use to which its country’s weaponry was put by clients, Kamhi changed his tone, though only fractionally. “We’re always concerned when someone is hurt,” he said. “As far as why the missile was used . . . there’s no way we can control or understand why . . . We don’t have any say in that . . . you know, every day over six hundred people are shot in America. Not once do I know that anyone has gone back and questioned the bullet-maker.”
And so it went on, Kamhi ever more irritated. He repeated he didn’t know if the ambulance was the intended target—and again I offered him my documentation with photographs of the missile part. “I can’t make the determination,” he replied impatiently. “I wasn’t the one pulling the trigger. Lockheed Martin was not the one that was there, firing the missile. Ultimately it has to come down to the responsibility of the user . . . It is not for us, the manufacturer, to go ahead and take action in a case like this.”
Kamhi’s replies were hopeless, pathetic. But their message was clear. If an American missile was fired into an ambulance, those who made it would fiercely deny any blame. It was for Israel to explain. And when it did—agreeing that against all the rules of war, the Hellfire had been deliberately fired into an ambulance—America was silent. The equation was complete. Israel, it seemed, could do what it wanted. And Lockheed had no intention of cooperating with our inquiry—not least, I suspect, because Lockheed was now a joint partner in missile development with the Israeli aeronautics company Raphael.
Al Kamhi agreed to let me drop off at his London hotel a packet of news reports on the ambulance killings, along with the missile codings and my photographs of the Hellfire fragment that I had left with Boeing. So the next day, I took the Channel tunnel train from Paris to London with my package. It travelled with me through the fresh spring countryside of Kent, through my own home town of Maidstone—it had been a long journey since I left the south Lebanese village of Mansouri—and to the Britannia Hotel in London where Al Kamhi was staying. He was not in his room, so I left the package with reception, receiving a promise that it would be handed to Mr. Kamhi the moment he came back to the hotel.
Three days later, the same package—opened but then resealed—arrived at The Independent’s foreign desk in London.
Returned to Sender.