Buying the Night Flight (34 page)

He rambled that day, his eyes flashed. And when I asked him about the infamous "Law of Shame" which he had just put through and which allowed him in effect to imprison any of his enemies (or friends, for that matter) who criticized him, he looked at me, a strange glitter in his eyes. He proceeded to give a most preposterous explanation, which came out of his love for movies.

"Did you see the film on the love affair between Clark Gable and Carole Lombard?" he asked me. By chance, yes, I had. "Well, you remember in that film how, because they were not married, Hollywood prosecuted them under this morals law and they could not perform in Hollywood." I nodded. "That is what I have in mind," he said. When I heard that, I knew that something was indeed wrong with our hero, Anwar Sadat.

And when he was killed that October a year and a half later, Sadat was probably killed because he had rounded up, indiscriminately, sixteen hundred of his real and imagined enemies. A certain paranoia and desperation had overtaken him. Was this the destiny of peacemakers?

As I roamed around the Middle East in those years, I had better and better luck with "leader interviews." And there was always something interesting, or quirky, or odd, or funny, about them even when I quietly made a fool of myself. In 1969, when 1 interviewed President Gaafer Nimiery of the Sudan, it was my first year in the area and he was so new to power that we had not even been shown any pictures of him.

The day of the interview two of us waited outside, and finally Nimiery's secretary came out and said, "I am very sorry, but the president will not be able to see you today." We sighed, again, at the ways of the world. "But the head of the cabinet will see you," he went on.

In a while we were ushered into an enormous office and at the end there sat an attractive, copper-skinned man sitting at an imposing desk. We began asking questions, and I would say, "Does President Nimiery think that ... ?"

And he would invariably answer, "President Nimiery thinks that... "

After several exchanges of this caliber and genre, the other journalist with me punched me not so carefully in the ribs, and whispered loudly, "That is Nimiery." How was I to know? I ask you. Besides, I suspect from his demeanor that he rather liked the idea of referring to himself in the third person and thought it quite an appropriate term of reference.

***

Then in the spring of 1973 I applied in Cairo for a visa to Iraq. Since this country of Nebuchadnezzar and the doomed ancient cities of Babylon and Ur and the great empires of the past was the most closed in the Middle East -- and indeed probably in the world -- I did not have any extravagant hopes. But I always exercised a kind of "scorched earth" policy regarding getting visas and attempting to cover whole areas. To my amazement the visa came through and I found myself approaching Baghdad from Beirut.

The first morning I was there, I did not rush over to the Ministry of Information, for I was well aware that letting them know you were there only gave them a head start on getting the bodyguards out to follow you. I did stroll in about eleven, knowing that by then they would be looking for me anyway. To my amazement three heads bounced to attention in the little office, and one gentleman said, with obvious and even ominous joy, "You're here."

Those few journalists who had ever gotten in in the past had never seen anybody and had constantly been harassed by the oppressive, clandestine, brutal Iraqi Ba'athist regime. To my surprise, that very first day I had four interviews, and all with important people like the head of the Communist Party. While not knowing exactly what was going on, I naturally soon became enchanted with the entree I was getting.

That Friday, while using the Moslem sabbath to visit the ruins of Babylon, I suggested innocently, "Why don't we stop at Kerbela on the way back from Babylon?"

The young man in the ministry, who had been so helpful up until then, turned several colors and gulped several gulps. "You don't really want to see Kerbela?" he declared hopefully.

I nodded. "Why not?" I said. "I understand it's very pretty."

Then, to show how shame falls by the wayside when a journalist gets even the suggestion of a go-ahead, I added, "And I'd like to see Saddam Hussein, too."

I thought the poor man would sink into spasms.

Saddam Hussein, the mysterious underground strongman of Iraq, was someone whom no one ever saw. He was the toughest of the tough, the most brutal of the brutal, also the best economic developer and the single most mysterious and unknown leader in the Middle East, in the most closed and unknown land. To my surprise my guide said only, "Let's see.... " The wonderful hesitation hung pregnant in the air.

At that time I was mercifully ignorant of the fact that the Shi'a Moslem shrine at Kerbala, the home of the Shi'a Moslems and the place where the brutal and sanguinary ceremonies of self-flagellation take place every year during the exotic holy days of Muharram, is like Mecca. It is closed -- but utterly closed -- to non-Moslems and to Westerners. In my ignorance I had asked to visit the very symbol of religious and cultural paranoia and hatred of the "other." And the amazing thing was that it worked!

The next day they informed me that, yes, I could go to Kerbala, if I would wear the long black
abaya
of the Arab woman. I would. And it was not until my guide and I stood inside the giant mosque, with its tiny pieces of mirrors sparkling like a thousand candles and the gold trimming everywhere shimmering like sea waves in the sunlight, that I suddenly realized we were not supposed to "be there." Luckily, the Iraqis had sent with us the Kerbala police chief, an enormous man who must have weighed approximately three hundred pounds! The pilgrims, showing in their slanted eyes or golden skin their homelands as far away as Mongolia or Pakistan, looked at me with unbridled hostility as I tried to hide the shock of blond hair on top with my
abaya.
That sunny afternoon in the Great Mosque of Kerbala I saw the real roots of Arab unity, for these people had come from everywhere in Central Asia, all to worship together.

Five days later I also saw Saddam Hussein, and without my
abaya.
Indeed, I became the first American ever to lay eyes on this important man -- afterward the American diplomats were dying to hear what the world's great terrorist leader was like!

No man in khakis, no Arafat in Arab headdress and olive drabs, Saddam Hussein was tall, dark, and erect, with beautiful black hair, a neat mustache, and eyes that were hooded much like the Arab falcons. He was as properly dressed as a French count at court. Indeed, he was wearing a perfectly tailored pinstriped suit, a white silk shirt, and a silk tie. He came forward toward me, his hand outstretched. Against the background of the gilded rooms of the palace of the kings, the last one of which was dragged through the streets until he died when the revolution occurred in 1958, the image was perfect. But it was certainly not that of the underground terrorist, which was the image he wanted to leave behind and which was what this interview was all about!

We talked for a full four hours, an odd pair, this man whom the Western world had never seen and the foreign correspondent from the South Side of Chicago. He kept looking at me and repeating, "Don't hesitate, ask me anything you want."

So I asked him about his years as a terrorist for the Ba'athist Party before it came to power under him in 1962. He answered, "Some times you have to do things for your party that you would not do yourself."

He was trying so hard to be, or to appear, open and frank. But all of my questions evoked only hooded responses--as hooded as those handsome but chilled eyes. After several hours, out of desperation I fished about in my mind for still another question. "When did you join the Ba'athist Party?" I asked, thinking to myself, "What a foolish question."

And now his entire demeanor and mien changed. All the friendliness, so carefully constructed to go with the gilded room, dropped away. He looked at me now with open and unmasked hostility. "I don't remember," he said.

He didn't remember the watershed event of his life? I puzzled over this for a long time. Why should that utterly innocuous question have affected him when nothing else did? Years later a knowing psychiatrist said to me, "But of course -- that was the moment he became a terrorist."

Before I left, I found out what it was that had provided me with these great strokes of luck. Iraq, that spring of 1973, had reached a turning point. Only weeks before, they had finally settled their old problem over the British-owned petroleum; they in effect nationalized it, but in agreement with the British. Saddam in those days wanted to turn toward the West, or at least to be open to it. My presence and newspapers presented a small vehicle that could serve that purpose -- and it was only by chance that the timing served mine.

***

We all have our favorite political-leader interviews, and countries, and historic experiences, and I have to admit that mine was with a perhaps unlikely leader, Sulton Qabus, in the remote and exotic sultanate of Oman, at the bottom of Saudi Arabia where the shimmering turquoise blue of the Indian Ocean meets the strategic opening to the Persian Gulf.

In truth my romantic imagination had been fed by Oman -- "Muscat and Oman," they called it historically -- for many years. Until 1970 Oman had been the most backward country in the world. Ruled by the old sultan, a cruel curmudgeon who still kept slaves, who shot people for being outside the city walls after seven o'clock at night, and who forbade not only smoking and drinking but even sunglasses and bicycles, Oman was disintegrating. The most able young men were joining the Dhofar liberation movement, inspired by Marxists from nearby South Yemen. Moreover, the old sultan had kept his only son, the handsome, intelligent, languid-eyed Qabus, locked in a tower in the old mud palace in Salalah in the south for seven years! All this because Qabus had returned from Sandhurst with outrageous ideas about developing the country, which then had twelve miles of roads and no schools.

With the help of progressive Omanis and the British officers who advised the old sultan, Qabus moved in 1970 to overthrow his father: a dramatic and disturbing kind of political regicide. The cunning and ignorant old man went into exile, dying at Claridge's in London, where supposedly he might have discovered late in life that modern comforts are not so evil after all.

I kept hearing about what the young sultan was doing in Oman, but I couldn't get there -- they had to want you and invite you. Finally, through the help of some British advisers, I was invited in 1978. What I found was so much in tune with the values that I held dear, in terms of political leadership and rational development: tolerance, rationality, dignity.

By then the little jewel cities of Muscat, Muttra, and Ruwi, which are strung along a beautiful rocky coastline, were fairy-tale cities, with the finest architecture in the entire Middle East. Seven hundred Omanis were studying in universities overseas and virtually all the children were in school, including the girls. Modern roads and communication spanned the entire country. The sultan was moving slowly but appropriately toward the representation of all the people in bodies like a consultative council.

The second time I visited, in 1979, I actually met and interviewed the young sultan. Dressed in magnificent white and beige robes with the silver Omani khanjar dagger at his waist and a handsome turban on his head, the sultan seemed almost too perfect to believe. But he was most believable, most modest and charming, and most effective and open. I could even ask him about the ouster of his father, an event that deeply affected the sensitive young sultan. An imprint of sadness lingers about him even today.

"In the beginning," he told me as we sat in his handsome crimson office in his palace at Seeb, "it never entered my mind that I would eventually have to do what I did in the end. All the time I was thinking about how to go about it. I had thought about it carefully. Then, in 1969, the time suddenly came. It was the time when I saw no opportunity of my being asked to help -- and things were not going well at all. People were fed up. The country was emptying out as people went abroad. There was the war against us from South Yemen. It came very suddenly to my mind that I had to do some thing to save the situation."

It was very moving to me. But even more moving was the way he had led his little country, a seafaring empire two centuries ago, to the Omani "renaissance." Qabus's reign is rational and not ideological. It is concerned with helping the people rather than satisfying the leader. Most important perhaps, Oman is a country that builds upon its own ancient, tolerant traditions: an example to others in this increasingly intolerant, nationalistic, and xenophobic world.

Speaking, for instance, of the intolerant "Islamic revolution" about him, Qabus said to me, "We have thousands of years of history, and we are sure of ourselves. There are certain groups in our area that use religion today for other purposes which have nothing to do with religion. They use religion to get into a position from which they can play a destructive political role. Here? Oh, no, no. One of the blessed things is that from the beginning we did not mix things." He meant politics and religion; and indeed the predominant Ibadhi form of Islam in Oman was very tolerant and open and dramatically opposed to the fanatical "Shi'ite" form of Khomeini and Iran.

Oman, of course, strategically placed as it is, is of enormous importance to the West as well as to Europe and Japan, for it controls by its territory the opening to the Persian Gulf. And here we had a fine, rational, dedicated leader who was doing things for his own people and for the West. Indeed, he told me first, in my interview of 1979, how much he wanted the American presence and aid, though he wanted the troops only "on the horizon."