Britain and Iran

IT IS becoming clear that British diplomats had a very close shave in Iran when student members of a regime-controlled volunteer militia, the baseej, stormed two British Embassy compounds in Tehran on November 29th. The recently-appointed British ambassador to Iran, Dominick Chilcott, has given a remarkable interview to the BBC about what he and his staff went through on Tuesday, made somehow all the more chilling by Mr Chilcott's sober, matter-of-fact delivery. The world had already seen pictures of demonstrators crossing over the high, spike-topped brick wall of the main embassy compound in central Tehran, and images of vandalism inside the site (which is a bit like the campus of a British public school in feel, with a mixture of grand buildings and surprisingly homely cottages scattered around a walled park).

Today, we heard how the diplomats found themselves under physical attack, in a situation whose ground rules had abruptly changed from the familiar, almost theatrical protests that have long plagued the embassy in Tehran to something much more sinister. The full interview is to be broadcast on Newsnight in a while, but I saw long extracts while waiting at a BBC studio this afternoon to be interviewed about the euro crisis on a different news programme (a shorter extract is here). At one point, the BBC interviewer asks the ambassador if he thought that he and his staff were about to be taken hostage, in a repeat of the American embassy siege. I would not be telling the truth if I said it did not go through our minds, Mr Chilcott replied. The Iranian police were behaving so strangely, and failing to come to the assistance of the British diplomats, that they could not be sure how the whole protest was intended to end, he said. The embassy is very used to protests, and normally, indeed on every previous occasion, the local police have outnumbered the demonstrators. Mr Chilcott was too polite to say it, but there has in the past been something almost comically amateurish about many demonstrations.

I am no expert on Iran, but I did report from the country while working in Asia some years ago. I was working in China at the time, so was used to reporting in an opaque, complex dictatorship with secret police, travel restrictions on foreign reporters, heavy-handed surveillance and more sinister forms of spying, or so I fondly imagined. In Iran, what I found was a place that made China look as transparent as a pane of glass. Restrictions were ambiguous: someone who at first seemed to be wholly on the side of the state would turn out to be not so loyal in private. Those who seemed to be allies could not always be trusted. Middle class Tehranis seemed to be wary, even frightened of the controls that might snap shut on them in an instant. But there was nothing hermit-like about their lives. Private houses had illegal satellite TV on which CNN and the BBC played non-stop. Many divided their time between Iran and Europe, or were in contact with relatives in America. Catching an illegal taxi to the Chinese embassy (it's complicated), my driver got into a row with a uniformed policeman, and ended it by trying to run him over, gunning his engine as the officer ran backwards with his hands on the bonnet, hurling abuse. Nobody got arrested: a challenge to state power that would be pretty unthinkable in the Chinese capital. Yet in the shadows of an illegal demonstration, plain-clothes men in an unmarked car spooked other foreign reporters with more experience than me of Iran. A while before, I was told, such unidentified agents of some bit of the state apparatus had taken a western reporter into their car, beaten him badly (with special attention to his kidneys) and dumped him on the side of a highway miles out of town, leaving him to limp home. That did not happen in China: western journalists were harrassed, but never hurt, and you knew which agency was doing the harrassing.

Yet menace is sometimes matched by something like student cheek. The thoroughfare on which the British Embassy stands is named Bobby Sands Street, so that its postal address is a memorial to an IRA hunger-striker. A diplomat I knew in Asia who had worked at the British embassy would tell the story of student demonstrators who brought a portable sound system to one protest, but were thwarted when the small shopkeepers opposite the embassy got fed up with all the chanting and unplugged the PA system. After a moment, embassy guards heard a knock on the metal gates. They slid open the little hatch in the gate, and found the protest leader wanting to ask a question. My friend was called. Please can we plug our loudspeaker in to your power supply, the student leader asked. Startled by the request, my friend finally agreed to take the proffered plug and cable and see what he could do. He waited a while, then opened the hatch again. I'm so sorry, he fibbed to the student leader, our plugs are all the British three pin style, and yours won't fit. Oh, said the student, crestfallen. Another knock. Do you have a British flag we could burn? asked the student politely. No, said my friend, more brusquely this time, and slid the hatch shut.

There was nothing so quaint about this week's incursions. As Mr Chilcott makes clear in the BBC interview, this was an altogether more spiteful, sinister affair. First, the diplomatic police told the embassy there would be a protest at the main downtown embassy compound. The embassy duly put in place its well-honed procedures, sending home local Iranian staff and despatching non-core British staff and dependents to the embassy's second, 50-acre compound in the north of the city, known locally as Qolhak Garden. What the police neglected to say was that a second protest would hit Qolhak Garden without warning, and that officers would stand back and let the protestors make their way into the compound. Staff retreated to their "keeps", or strengthened safe areas inside embassy buildings, designed to hold out intruders just long enough for the police to arrive and rescue trapped diplomats. Except the police did not come to rescue them. Mr Chilcott described how a colleague made it to his keep, placed a heavy safe against the steel door, a bed against the safe, and then wedged himself against the bed. For 45 minutes protestors worked to smash their way in, finally destroying the entire door frame and getting inside. The keep did its job, he said, the Iranian police did not.

At the main embassy compound downtown, Mr Chilcott and his staff locked themselves in the secure top floor of their chancery building. They could hear demonstrators looting and smashing their way around other buildings, and trying to break into the chancery. Finally, they were able to enter a consular office and start a fire, sending enough smoke into the top floor safe area that the ambassador and his staff were forced to flee down a fire escape. By sheer good luck, by the time they reached the ground, the protestors had moved to another area, and the ambassador and staff were able to find a small party of Iranian police, who told them to hide in a remote building in the corner of the site, with the lights off.

This was the centre of the capital city, Mr Chilcott noted. If the police had wanted to stop this, they could have flooded the compound with officers and rescued the British. The police, and whoever was pulling the strings behind the attack, chose not to intervene for a long while. In the meantime, demonstrators matched acts the ambassador called spiteful: hacking and slashing at oil paintings of Queen Victoria and Edward VII in the main residence and smashing furniture. But this was not mindless violence, the ambassador pointed out. The student baseej took everything electronic they could find, from portable computers to hard drives and mobile telephones.

The violence had to be state-sponsored, Mr Chilcott ventured. But the bit of the Iranian machine that he dealt with day to day, the foreign ministry, seemed to be taken aback by the British response of pulling all its staff out of Iran and expelling all Iranian diplomats in London, closing both embassies (though not severing formal diplomatic relations).

"The risk is that certain people in the regime who liked the idea of confrontation, because they felt it would rally people to the flag, miscalculated how strong the response would be," Mr Chilcott told the BBC. "They probably didn't expect us to send home the Iranian embassy in London and, reading between the lines, you can see in the way they have responded to that move, some remorse in having provoked it. I think that might apply more generally too."

As mentioned in my last blog posting, France has led the way in offering European Union support, recalling its ambassador for consultations in Paris (in common with several other EU countries), and calling for a new sanction barring EU countries from buying Iranian oil. At a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Thursday there was much talk of solidarity, but no agreement on boycotting Iranian oil. Spain and Italy had grumbled at the level of diplomats in working groups that they would need more time to find alternative sources of energy. Greece, which is heavily reliant on Iranian oil because few other suppliers are willing to supply a country on the brink of bankruptcy, blocked a boycott. A report on the EUObserver news website quotes unnamed diplomats saying that some other countries were also hiding behind Greece, saying:

People don't say it out loud. But there is an understanding oil sanctions would hurt the EU rather than hitting Iran where it hurts and would make oil cheaper for China

In the British press, there has been some grumbling from right-wing outlets that Britain's response has been wimpish and demanding to know why we have not severed relations completely.

The sad truth, alas, is that not much has changed since the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, summed up the options for the outside world with great clarity. We can seek a negotiated settlement with Iran, Mr Sarkozy said, or we can face a disastrous choice: "the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.” That remains the basic calculation, and hawks need to be clear about the risks of bombing Iran, which could include retaliatory attacks on Israel, Saudi Arabia, NATO sites in Turkey and other targets, as well as a spiral of violence involving Iranian proxies in the region.

There is momentum for tougher sanctions in the EU, and some hope, it is argued, in the fact that China and Russia (who routinely block tough sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council) firmly condemned Tuesday's embassy attacks. 

Meanwhile, the pace of covert attacks on alleged Iranian nuclear sites, scientists and missile experts does seem to have stepped up, with talk of mysterious explosions and assassinations in Isfahan and elsewhere.

Not very much is certain about this week's attacks on British diplomats in Tehran, other than that they were swiftly endorsed by hardline politicians, and that some elements in the regime have an interest in confrontation. It cannot be certain how far the hardliners wished that confrontation to be taken this week, nor whether they may have miscalculated when it came to the British response, as Mr Chilcott says. What is quite certain is this: if the intention was to scare but not harm British diplomats, something could easily have gone badly wrong this Tuesday. Britain, and by extension all who fear an escalation of the Iranian crisis, had a narrow escape.