The World

Houses of Solomon and Bush, Bourbon, Pahlavi and Castro

WILD BEASTS AND LIONS: THE ASSADS OF DAMASCUS

On 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur – holiest day in the Jewish calendar – Egyptian and Syrian troops attacked Israel across the Suez and Golan, taking the Israelis by surprise, despite warnings from their agent in the Egyptian president’s office.^* Two new leaders, in Egypt and Syria, had changed the Arab response to Israel: one would prove a peacemaker of courage and pay for it with his life; the other founded a gangster dynasty that would cost his country the lives of many.

The change of the guard had started with the biggest funeral in world history. On 28 September 1970, Nasser, only fifty-two, died of a heart attack with his vice-president and fellow Free Officer Anwar Sadat at his bedside. As over ten million Egyptians mourned him, King Hussein sobbed for the man who had almost killed him, but he was himself fighting for survival against the PLO under Arafat, who tried to kill him and convert Jordan into its base. Hussein was aided by Israel, Arafat by Syria, until a ceasefire was brokered by Nasser.

There had only been one Nasser, but there were several pretenders to his throne. The new contenders paraded their credentials at the funeral. The first mourner, sobbing ostentatiously, was the twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Muammar Qaddafi, a good-looking Libyan Bedouin who had been trained in Britain, where he played football in Hyde Park and promenaded down Piccadilly in Arab robes. He had worshipped Nasser and founded his own Free Officers, who in 1969 deposed King Idris. Promoting himself to colonel and president, Qaddafi rushed to Cairo. ‘A nice boy,’ Nasser had thought, ‘but terribly naive.’ He was much worse than naive.^*

A more formidable contender was also at the funeral: a tall, slim Syrian defence minister, General Hafez al-Assad, fair-haired with a bulging forehead. Just after the funeral, Assad withdrew Syrian forces from Jordan, helping to save Hussein; and then on 12 November 1970 he seized power in Damascus.

Assad was one of eleven children from a tough clan of Alawites, the sect that lived around Latakia on the coast, traditionally opposed to the Sunnis in Damascus. His grandfather had been nicknamed al-Wahhish – Wild Beast – and his father, Ali, champion of independent Alawite Latakia, took the name al-Assad – Lion – and Hafez became the Sphinx of Damascus.

He had hoped to become a doctor but instead qualified as a pilot, trained in Egypt and the USSR, before joining the nationalist Baathists, who in March 1963 seized power. He delivered the air force. Navigating fissiparous Baathist feuding, in 1964 he was promoted to air force chief while his brother Rifaat created a praetorian Baathist unit. In 1966, an Alawite faction under the leftist Salah Jadid seized power, appointing Assad defence minister. But the Assad brothers rejected internal revolution to confront Israel.

Assad promoted Alawites and Assads to run Syria. His brother Rifaat commanded his guards, the Defence Companies. Himself long married to Anisa Makhlouf, who was mother of five children, Hafez promoted her brother to run his security, the Mukhabarat; her nephew became the family’s financier. Rifaat was married to Salma Makhlouf, a cousin of Anisa.

Hafez and Anisa’s favourite son, Bassel, was eight when his father became president. ‘We saw father at home but he was so busy that three days could go by without us exchanging a word with him,’ Bassel later told his father’s biographer. ‘We never had breakfast or dinner together, and I don’t remember ever having lunch together as a family.’ Yet film footage records family holidays: ‘As a family, we used to spend a day or two in Latakia in the summer, but then too he used to work in the office and we didn’t get to see much of him.’ For the moment, Hafez’s brother, Rifaat, was his heir.

As soon as he was president, Assad flew to Moscow to ask Brezhnev to rearm Syria – in return for the Tartous naval base. Brezhnev agreed. The Assads would be Moscow’s Arab ally into the 2020s.

The last candidate to be Nasser’s heir was the most overlooked: his Egyptian successor Sadat. But the poor farmer’s son quickly won popularity by toning down the vicious secret police and expelling Soviet advisers, and he had a plan to humble Israel that coincided with Assad’s ambitions. Assad quickly learned that Sadat too was planning a war: they met secretly and planned a surprise attack, though they concealed their ultimate aims: the refreshing and courageous Sadat was positioning himself to negotiate peace; the irredeemably radical Assad was aiming to eliminate the Zionist entity. Sadat consulted the Saudi king Faisal, the second of Abdulaziz’s sons to reign, who was overseeing the kingdom’s astonishing oil wealth and supervising improvements at the Holy Sites by his friend the builder Muhammad bin Laden. Faisal sent detachments to fight with the Egyptians, but he also believed the Arabs had never used the oil weapon. Now was the time.

As the Arabs trained for war, the Israelis cultivated close relations with a local friend, the shah, who admired the state, supplying its oil, buying its weapons and welcoming its leaders to Teheran. The shah was at his apogee.

On 12 October 1971, the shah held the party of the century to celebrate 2,500 years of Iran’s Great Civilization.

IMPERIAL PEACOCKS: THE SATANIC FEAST AND THE ANGEL

The shah linked his own achievements to an unbroken line stretching back to pre-Islamic Persia. Oil revenues funded his status as the hegemon of the Gulf, aided by his close relationship with Nixon, while he outplayed Iraq by backing Kurdish rebels.

‘Cyrus! Great King, King of Kings, you immortal hero of history,’ intoned the shah portentously at the opening ceremony before the tomb of Cyrus. ‘Today as in your day, Persia bears the message of liberty and love of mankind in a troubled world.’ But he also warned his enemies: ‘We are vigilant and will remain so.’

The shah welcomed 600 guests – including the US vice-president Agnew, the Soviet president Podgorny, Hussein of Jordan, Prince Philip and his daughter Princess Anne, and Emperor Haile Selassie – to Persepolis, where they stayed in a specially built Golden City of luxurious circular tents, marked with the insignia of the Cyrus Cylinder and lined with Persian carpets woven with the face of each potentate. As 50,000 specially imported songbirds trilled, the guests of honour ate a feast, prepared by Maxim’s of Paris and featuring paon à l’impériale (imperial peacock) and 330 pounds of caviar, off Limoges plates, at a 230-foot table, lubricated by 2,500 bottles of Dom Pérignon champagne, 1,000 bottles of Bordeaux and 1,000 bottles of Burgundy, then they watched thousands of Iranian troops dressed in newly fashioned uniforms play Iranian heroes from Darius and Khosrow to Qajars and Pahlavis.

Yet there was disquiet: the songbirds dropped out of the sky, dead from the heat, there was a fight between French and Swiss waiters, Princess Anne murmured that she never wanted to eat peacock again. Farah hated ‘these ghastly celebrations’, later admitting the party had outraged religious Iranians ‘without our being really aware of it’. ‘Should I serve heads of state bread and radishes instead?’ asked the shah. In his Iraqi exile, Ayatollah Khomeini raged against that ‘Satanic feast’.

The shah had been spoiled by success. ‘For twenty-seven years, I’ve been at the centre of international affairs,’ he told Alam; ‘it’s hardly surprising I should be blessed with foresight.’ He still had a sense of humour, teasing his mother about her sex life with Reza Shah.

Yet Alam ‘noticed alarming changes’: rigidity and arrogance. ‘The Iranian people love me,’ he said ‘and will never forsake me.’ In February 1971, the shah made the self-congratulatory declaration that ‘Iran’s leadership of the Middle East is acknowledged across the world.’ Unsurprisingly he functioned in a conspiratorial world, convinced America was run by ‘an organization working in secret powerful enough to dispose of the Kennedys and anyone else who gets in its way’. He believed he was protected by a murderous providence: ‘I’ve learned by experience a tragic end awaits anyone who crosses swords with me: Nasser’s no more; John and Robert Kennedy died by assassins, their brother Edward disgraced, Khrushchev toppled …’

In October 1967, he had promoted himself to shahanshah – king of kings. Yet Alam begged him to liberalize the autocracy. When Farah suggested elections, he mocked her: ‘You’re becoming quite the revolutionary yourself. I’d like to see you run this country …’ The shah micromanaged SAVAK: 2,000 political prisoners were arrested and tortured. ‘Sophisticated societies have efficient systems of interrogation,’ he later explained. ‘In cases of betrayal of one’s country, anything goes.’

Even his love life spun out of control: ‘A girl named Gilda,’ wrote Alam, ‘is spreading rumours around Teheran that His Majesty is head over heels in love with her.’ Gilda was ‘a beauty but vain and ruthlessly ambitious’.

‘Bloody woman,’ said the shah. ‘I met her a few times … The rumours are getting close to the Queen.’ Farah’s mother then threatened him with divorce ‘to the effect that her daughter had not become accustomed to luxury’.

‘Crap,’ said the shah. ‘After much debate,’ wrote Alam, ‘we agreed the bloody girl Gilda must be found a husband.’ But the shah still lived for his ‘visits’: ‘I passed on a letter addressed to His Majesty by a charming young creature,’ recorded Alam. ‘He was greatly flattered,’ until Empress Farah came to ask what they were talking about.

‘Affairs of state,’ replied the shah with a straight face.

In March 1972, the shah entertained a secret female visitor who was there to discuss affairs of state. The seventy-three-year-old Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister, a tough Zionist veteran (née Golda Mabovich in Kyiv) whom Ben-Gurion had predictably called ‘the only man in my cabinet’, found much in common with the shah, and together they backed the Kurds against Iraq.

Golda Meir was now receiving warnings of war from an extraordinary agent right at the centre of Egyptian power. Sadat promoted Nasser’s son-in-law Dr Ashraf Marwan, married to Mona Nasser, to be his chief adviser on foreign affairs. Yet a month later, in December, Marwan met a Mossad agent at London’s Royal Lancaster Hotel to offer his services to Israel. Mossad called him the Angel. His motives were family bitterness, frustrated ambition and conspiratorial glee. Now he began to warn that Sadat was planning a surprise attack. The intelligence was compelling, but Sadat twice delayed the war, undermining Marwan’s credibility.

Meir had focused on the rising terrorism against Israel. On 6 September 1972, Palestinian terrorists seized eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The terrorists were members of Black September, a unit formed by Arafat to hit Israel after King Hussein’s defeat of the PLO in September 1970. At least one hostage was castrated; all eleven Israelis and nine terrorists were killed when the West German rescue attempt ended in a catastrophic shootout. Two days later Meir formed Committee X to direct Operation Wrath of God to assassinate the twenty leaders behind Black September: in October, as the assassinations started, the Angel’s warnings became urgent.

Sadat and Assad met in Alexandria and summoned King Hussein, concealing the imminence of the planned assault but inviting him to join. On 25 September 1973, the king flew to Tel Aviv and warned Golda that the Syrians would attack. ‘Are they going to war without the Egyptians?’ she asked.

‘They’ll cooperate,’ replied the Hashemite. It sounded like a trap. Golda and Dayan believed the Arabs would never dare attack so soon after 1967.

On 6 October, the Arab armies caught Israel by surprise, pushing back Israeli forces from the Suez Canal and storming Israeli positions on Golan. Their air forces hit their targets, their hand-held Soviet Sagger missiles crippled Israeli armour, their anti-aircraft missiles brought down Israeli planes. The Syrians broke through Israeli positions; in desperate fighting, a few Israeli tanks just held the Syrians. But the Egyptians, with different aims, halted and dug in, letting Israeli throw everything at the Syrians.

By 8 October, Dayan was so downhearted he told Golda that Israel was in peril, asking, ‘Is it the end of the Third Temple?’ – his coded way of suggesting they might need to use nuclear weapons (code: Temple). Meir ordered the arming of thirteen tactical devices. Meir desperately asked Nixon for military supplies; Sadat and Assad requested more weapons from Brezhnev; both airlifted weapons to their proxies. But the worst was over: on the 9th the Syrians retreated. On the 11th, Israeli tanks counter-attacked and broke through, heading towards Damascus. On the 15th, Israeli forces crossed the Canal into Egypt and surrounded Sadat’s Third Army. Suddenly Cairo was imperilled. Sadat panicked, appealing to Nixon and Brezhnev, together or separately, to send soldiers to stop the Israelis, who kept advancing.

On the evening of 24 October, Brezhnev told Nixon, ‘I will say it straight that if you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter, we’d face the necessity to consider taking appropriate steps unilaterally.’ Brezhnev dispatched airborne divisions towards Egypt. Kissinger rushed to the White House. ‘What’s going to stop them,’ he asked, ‘flying in paratroopers? Shall I wake the president?’ But the soused president had passed out, ‘distraught’ about the growing clamour for his impeachment. Kissinger, now secretary of state, asked Sadat to withdraw his request for Soviet and American intervention and reassured Brezhnev, but he moved nuclear readiness to DEFCON 3. Brezhnev was shaken. Sadat withdrew his request; Brezhnev sent a conciliatory message as Kissinger shuttled between the combatants, finding Meir a ‘preposterous woman’, Assad surly and Sadat admirable. Assad and Sadat had both won respect but used it differently. Assad had moved to extend Syrian power into Lebanon, position himself as chief enemy of Israel and found a dynasty. As for Sadat, Kissinger thought he ‘had the wisdom and courage of the statesman and occasionally the insight of a prophet’. Now he would risk everything to make peace.^*

King Faisal now unsheathed the oil weapon, orchestrating an OPEC price rise and production cut. The ensuing oil crisis threatened to break the west. American vulnerability meant that in future it would fight to maintain access to oil. As for the Saudis, price rises showered Croesan wealth on the family as they embraced the double life of Wahhabi puritans at home and decadent sybarites abroad, splurging on yachts, palaces and call girls as well as monumental modernization and new armaments, much of the latter fixed by the son of Abdulaziz’s doctor, Adnan Khashoggi, a globe-trotting playboy nicknamed the Pirate whose commissions made him the ‘richest man in the world’. The House of Saud had joined the arbiters of the world, just as the House of Solomon was disintegrating.

On 12 September 1974, at his Jubilee Palace, the eighty-one-year-old Emperor Haile Selassie was amazed to confront a posse of young radical officers: what were they doing in his apartment? They told him he was under arrest. He did not believe them.

DID KING DAVID RETIRE? THE NEGUS AND MAJOR MENGISTU

When the emperor returned from the shah’s party, he faced a continuing war against Eritrean rebels in the north and Somalians in the south, while a famine raged in Wollo and Tigray in the north-east. The superpowers played proxies in the Horn of Africa: Moscow backed Siad Barre of Somalia, whom it armed to attack Ethiopia, which was supported in turn by Washington; Eritrean rebels, trained by China, attacked from the east. The emperor was losing his grip at home. When a loyal nobleman asked him to retire, he replied, ‘Tell me, did King David retire?’ Challenged by a female journalist, he shouted, ‘Democracy! Republic! What do these words mean? Illusions, illusions,’ before stalking out, grumbling, ‘Who’s this woman? Enough, go away.’ But the illusions were his.

As 50,000 starved, the negus denied the famine: ‘Everything is under control.’ His ally, the shah, offered help, but ‘He refused,’ noted Alam, ‘denying anyone was suffering or even that there was a drought.’ The emperor’s delusions reminded him of the shah: ‘Inevitably one thinks of the parallels.’

Students protested; young officers conspired. In February 1974, after riots in Addis, Haile Selassie addressed the nation on television, calming the demonstrators, but his rule was subsiding rather than collapsing as generals, students, NCOs and Marxists planned a takeover. General Aman Andom, who had been sacked by the emperor, assumed leadership of a Provisional Military Administrative Council (nicknamed the Derg) to which each rebel unit sent three delegates.

On 12 September, the Derg easily took control of the Jubilee Palace and arrested the emperor, now a wizened old man, who was bizarrely conveyed in a VW Beetle to the military barracks – ‘What? In here?’ murmured the emperor at the sight of the car – before being imprisoned in the Grand Palace. Technically the rebels recognized the crown prince, abroad for medical treatment, as ‘emperor-designate’, but then appointed General Aman as first president. Aman had been the mentor of a young soldier of poor background who would emerge as leader. Mengistu Haile Mariam, now thirty-seven, had been sent to join the Derg by his commander, who wanted to get rid of a troublemaker. Instead the troublemaker took over the country. He had been trained in the USA but had suffered racism there. At home, this dwarfish servant’s son burned with hatred for the racism of the imperial elite. ‘In this country, some aristocratic families automatically categorize persons with dark skin, thick lips, and kinky hair as barias – slaves,’ he told the Derg. ‘Let it be clear to everybody that I’ll soon make these imbeciles crawl and grind corn!’ Now a convert to Marxism, he remained behind the scenes, but started to organize the Derg and push for Leninist revolution, encouraging the crushing of opposition within the military. In October, the killing started. Aristocrats and generals were arrested. When Mengistu’s old patron, General Aman, resisted, he was denounced and killed in a shootout. In March 1975, Mengistu proposed that Derg leaders should be elected by secret ballot, and he emerged as joint vice-chairman with another major Atnafu Abate. For two years, the two majors Mengistu and Atnafu ruled Ethiopia.

In November 1974, after mass arrests of the elite, Mengistu proposed the execution of sixty princes, generals and aristocrats. The Derg approved. Mengistu arrived to interrogate the emperor, accusing him of stealing $14 billion: ‘Where would I get this money? And for what?’ he replied. ‘To live in exile? We have experienced exile …’ Living alone, cared for by his butler, the ex-monarch looked out of the window and wept. ‘Oh Ethiopia, do you ever harbour ill towards me?’ He was right to sense peril.

On 27 August 1975, Mengistu lingered outside his bedroom. The butler was sent away. Mengistu and three others chloroformed the old emperor, then suffocated him. ‘We tried our best to save him,’ lied Mengistu later, ‘but we could not keep him.’ Mengistu buried the last Lion of Judah under a slab outside the latrines in the palace yard.

With the Soviets challenging America in Africa, Kissinger ran foreign policy as Nixon faced impeachment. ‘People have got to know,’ Nixon said on television, ‘whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.’

His main enemy could not believe it: ‘Nixon’s in a difficult position,’ said Brezhnev, chatting to Castro, ‘but we think he’ll get himself out of the problem. He has Kissinger, that cunning guy, he’ll help him.’ Castro hated the president – ‘Nixon’s a son of a bitch,’ he said – but Brezhnev was so sympathetic he wrote to Nixon: ‘We see how tendentiously and shamelessly your opponents manipulate this or that … I can’t say it all. I think you understand everything the way I want you to understand it.’ Brezhnev never sent the letter, but Nixon, losing even Republican support in Congress, faced imminent impeachment. On the night before he resigned, he asked Kissinger to kneel and pray.

On 9 August 1974, he resigned: ‘Sometimes I’ve succeeded, sometimes I’ve failed, but always I’ve taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood …”’

BROTHER NO. 1 AND THE GANG OF FOUR

Watching from Beijing, the ageing Mao sympathized with Nixon, musing on the fall of emperors. Yet he was disappointed by the results of his American detente, grumbling to Kim Il-sung that Kissinger (secretary of state for the new President Ford) was ‘a bad man’ who had used China to seduce Moscow. He needed to protect his revolution but time was short; his henchmen Kang Sheng and Zhou Enlai were dying of cancer; Lin was dead; but he had his wife, ‘the scorpion’ Jiang Qing. He promoted her and her epigones, whom he nicknamed the Gang of Four. Of these he favoured a suave Shanghai security guard turned Red Guard leader, the thirty-seven-year-old Wang Hongwen, whom he appointed vice-chairman, his heir apparent.

Yet even Mao realized that the Gang lacked the authority to rule China, so he brought back Deng Xiaoping – Little Cannon – to command the army. As Mao, diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, started to wither and choke, he still micromanaged the leadership, refusing to allow Zhou any surgery for his cancer. The dying Zhou pressured Mao into appointing Deng first vice-premier, something Mao resented.^*

Mao waited his moment to again unleash the Scorpion while celebrating the triumph of another of his vicious protégés, Pol Pot, bizarrely backed by ex-king Sihanouk.

On 17 April 1975, the young fighters of the Khmer Rouge, wearing black pyjamas and red scarves, emerged out of the jungle to occupy the elegant and Frenchified capital Phnom Penh, which resembled a sinking ship as the Americans choppered out, the government fled and the last premier was beheaded. The Khmer Rouge – only 68,000 of them – immediately ordered the capital’s 370,000 people to leave within three days. On 23 April, Pol Pot arrived in a deserted Phnom Penh.

Pol Pot, forty-five years old, ascetic, soft-spoken and neurotic, a fan of French poetry, was ‘very likeable, really nice, friendly’, recalled a comrade, ‘very sensible’. Formed by years of clandestine life in the jungles, ‘he’d never blame you or scold you’, usually holding a fan like the Buddhist monks who had taught him, yet he was a micromanaging fanatic obsessed with a vision of radical revolution to outpace even his patron Mao. General secretary of the Party since 1963, Pol led a tiny cabal of fanatical teachers so secretive that he rarely used a name, usually just Brother No. 1 or Brother No. 87, and so tight-knit that he and Brother No. 3, his old friend from Paris, Ieng Sary, were married to sisters Khieu Thirith and Khieu Ponnary, privileged daughters of a judge, whom they met at their private lycée before the sisters departed to study Shakespeare at the Sorbonne. Their Paris friend, another teacher Son Sen – Brother No. 89 – ran the secret police the Santebal (Peacekeepers) while his teacher wife ran education. This sixsome of homicidal pedagogues dominated Angkar – the Organization, the faceless government. Together, aided by the veteran intellectual Khieu Samphan, No. 4, they planned to forge ‘a precious model for humanity’ by murdering all educated and privileged classes, emptying the capitalistic cities and forcing Cambodians to return to a pre-industrial classless society in a Year Zero of Democratic Kampuchea. ‘We’ll burn the old grass,’ said Pol, ‘and the new will grow.’ Two and a half million people trekked out of the cities, 20,000 died or were killed on the way, with executions starting immediately.

Yet the new head of state was a sacred king descended from four centuries of monarchs: Sihanouk broadcast from Beijing to tell the peasants to support the Khmer Rouge. Earlier he had trekked into the jungle to meet Pol Pot, his ego tickled, his suspicions disarmed by Brother No. 1’s calm humility. Sihanouk returned to Phnom Penh to the royal palace; Pol Pot lived for a while in the Silver Pagoda where the leadership held its meetings, then moved to the old State Bank Building, codenamed K-1. As he orchestrated Year Zero, ‘bad elements’ were told, ‘To keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.’ Then, to save ammunition, they were beaten to death with cudgels. Children were removed from families. Son Sen supervised the slaughter with ‘a schoolmasterish eye for detail’, his Santebal torturing and killing thousands at their headquarters, a converted school codenamed S-21, and at 150 lesser killing centres. The Khmer Rouge sometimes ate the livers of victims, used unborn foetuses as talismans and buried bodies as fertilizer. Over a million were executed; 2.5 million died in all.

Sihanouk defended Democratic Kampuchea publicly. The Khmer Rouge’s brutality was known even before they took Phnom Penh, but in this Faustian compact Sihanouk embraced a benumbed strategic ignorance to ensure his survival and as part of his manoeuvrings to oust the myrmidons when he got the chance. Taken on a rural tour by No. 4 Khieu Sampan he saw what was happening, but it was too late. He tried to resign but was kept under house arrest. He had colluded not just in the slaughter of his people – 33 per cent of males died – but in that of his own family: five of his own children were liquidated. The pressure was punishing even for Angkar. Paranoiac stress drove Pol’s wife insane, until she was finally incapacitated with schizophrenia. Phnom Penh was the first of America’s toppling dominos; next, on 30 April 1975, Saigon fell to the Viet Cong; on 23 August, Vientiane, capital of the kingdom of Laos, fell to the Communist Pathet Lao, its last king worked to death in prison camps.

After unleashing the Killing Fields, Pol flew to meet Mao, who praised Year Zero: ‘One blow and no more classes … a splendid achievement’. But, just as Stalin had lectured him, he lectured No. 1. ‘You’re right. Have you made mistakes? Certainly you have. Do rectification.’ Pol privately disdained both Khrushchev and Mao; the latter’s revolution ‘has faded and is wavering’ unlike ‘the brilliant red’ of his own. But Mao’s warning was shrewd. Pol Pot aggravated the pro-Soviet Vietnamese, who fresh from their defeat of America would tolerate no lessons from their own former province.

Soon after meeting Pol, in January 1976, Mao’s elegant premier Zhou Enlai died. The Helmsman himself could barely move or speak without the interpretation of his nurses, but was still acute and vigilant. When students used Zhou’s funeral to protest, he dismissed Deng, again, but placed Little Cannon under house arrest, specifying that he was not to be harmed. After planning to crown his wife’s acolyte, Wang Hongwen, one of the Gang, he surprised everyone by choosing Hua Guofeng, governor of his home province, whom he had met when he inspected the shrine at his birthplace. His nurses read him Sima Guang’s history and, as he sank, Jiang Qing barged in, massaging his limbs, giving orders to doctors. But the master of the deathbed does not always inherit the kingdom.

THE CRUSADER AND THE PRINCE: EUROPEAN TYRANTS AND DEMOCRATS

As Mao listened to the histories of the emperors and toyed with his heirs, a European monarch was arranging his own succession. On 30 October 1975 Francisco Franco, now eighty-two, fell into a coma. He saw himself as a ruler in the tradition of Ferdinand and Isabella and Philip II, so only a king could succeed a Franco. It helped that he had no son, just a daughter Carmen. He planned a royal succession of the Bourbons, the ancient French Capet family that had ruled Spain from 1714 until the revolution of 1931, balancing both branches along with his own Movimiento Nacional.

The count of Barcelona, son of the last king, had asked Franco if his sons could study in Spain. Franco agreed. In 1956, the two princes, the elder son Alfonso and Juan, were fooling around with what they assumed was an unloaded pistol. Juan pointed it at Alfonso and pulled the trigger. It was loaded, and the prince was killed. ‘Say you didn’t do it on purpose?’ screamed their father. As he toyed with the two branches of the Bourbons, Franco took an interest in the handsome Juan, who, advised by his father, promised the generalissimo to respect his authoritarian vision.

In 1962, Franco invited Prince Juan and his wife to move into the Zarzuela Palace; seven years later, he asked Juan to swear loyalty to the Movimiento Nacional and declared him the heir, advising him to take the name Juan Carlos. Franco had another condition: the prince must raise his daughter Carmen to duchess. Juan agreed. Courtiers warned Franco that the prince was a secret liberal and louche libertine, but Juan Carlos treated Franco like an old king; the Caudillo trusted him. In 1968, the dictator, ageing and controlled by his daughter and her husband, handed over Spain’s last possession, tiny Equatorial Guinea, to Macías Nguema, a Fang witchdoctor’s son, who had seen his father murder his brother before being bludgeoned to death by a Spanish colonial official; his mother committed suicide; and he himself was mentally ill, a drug user, who had sought treatment in Spanish mental hospitals. At a meeting in Madrid to discuss the country’s future, he claimed that Hitler had meant to liberate Africa but had conquered the wrong continent. He often lost his thoughts during speeches, which voters interpreted as charming feyness, but soon after winning the first presidential election, he threw his foreign minister out of a window and embarked on a reign of terror of astonishing intensity. Seeing himself as the Unique Miracle and glorified with the motto ‘No other God than Macías Nguema’, he organized mass executions of around 50,000 victims, sometimes drowned out by loud English pop music. He kept the entire treasury in suitcases in his house, looting the tiny oil-rich country and killing or exiling a third of the population. Equatorial Guinea was so tiny that Nguema ruled with the help of his family, who were the only people strong enough to destroy him.^*

The Spanish succession went more smoothly. On 20 November 1975, Franco died, and Juan Carlos succeeded him as king, promising ‘I swear to God and on the holy Gospels to … remain loyal to the principles of the Movimiento Nacional’ and making the dictator’s daughter Carmen the duchess of Franco.

No monarch in Europe had enjoyed such power since 1918. Far from being a Francoist, the thirty-seven-year-old Juan Carlos, a compulsive hunter of big game and blonde women, was a democrat. For six years, he carefully guided Spain to democracy, sacking the Francoist premier, appointing in his place an ex-Francoist turned democrat, Adolfo Suárez, who in June 1977 won the first real elections for forty years. Suárez’s new constitution converted Juan Carlos into a constitutional monarch. But the king’s achievement would be tested: in November 1978, a military coup – Operation Galaxia – was foiled, but the officers, believing that Juan Carlos could be controlled, planned another putsch to restore the dictatorship.

In India, it was Indira Gandhi who launched a coup.

INDIRA AND SON

The world’s biggest democracy was becoming a hereditary dynasty: Indira Gandhi now promoted her favourite son, Sanjay, for the third generation of Nehrus.^*

While her elder son Rajiv was a serene Indian Airlines pilot with an Italian wife, Indira adored her haughty second son Sanjay, an impulsive, spoilt and authoritarian princeling with a will to power that equalled Indira’s own. A playboy who raced cars and piloted planes, he wanted to be an Indian industrialist, founding a car factory that survived on government favours. Indira worried about him and was fascinated by him. ‘Rajiv has a job,’ she wrote, ‘but Sanjay doesn’t … He’s so like I was at that age – rough edges and all – that my heart aches for the suffering he may have to bear.’

Indira’s imperious style, the rise of Sanjay, Congress’s corruption and the oil crisis provoked strikes and riots in the country. By 1975, all these crises had converged. Court cases exposed the seamy cash payments of Indira’s henchmen and used technicalities to challenge her own election victory. Morbid and suspicious, trusting no one, seeing a ‘deep and widespread conspiracy … forces of disintegration … in full play’, Indira now overtrusted Sanjay, to whom this ice-cold potentate wrote preposterous ditties: ‘Sanjay, ferocious being / … Whose judgements almost always bite.’

In June 1975, a legal challenge citing electoral corruption invalidated her election. Sanjay warned her of a ‘conspiracy’ and told her not to resign. ‘You know the state the country was in,’ she said. ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t been there to lead it? I was the only one who could, you know.’

On 25 June, Indira declared an emergency ‘to bring about a situation of calmness and stability’. Using old British legislation kept in force by India’s Constituent Assembly, Indira arrested opponents and censored the press, comparing India to a sick child and herself to its mother: ‘However dear a child may be, if the doctor prescribed pills, they have to be administered … When a child suffers, the mother suffers too.’ Her own child, Sanjay, who had disdained ‘lily-livered’ Indians who ‘lacked guts’, downplayed democracy: ‘Future generations won’t remember us by how many elections we had, but by the progress we made.’ Sanjay boasted of his power – his mother ‘obviously listens to my views, she listened to them when I was five’ – and launched a twenty-five-point programme of radical reforms to fight poverty, clear slums and control the rise in population. Indira promoted him to leader of Congress Youth and overlord of Delhi. He revelled in his power, living right next to Indira and constantly with her. They sneered at democracy, which ‘only throws up the mediocre person’.

Their arrogance led to abuse: fortunes were made in property development; 140,000 were arrested including 40,000 Sikhs; the same fate befell all opposition leaders. Sanjay oversaw a sterilization campaign to reduce the population: 8.3 million men underwent vasectomies, some of them by force, with the result that many died of infections. ‘Indira is India and India is Indira,’ declared her Congress courtiers, in ‘a form of oriental excess to which I pay no attention’. But Sanjay’s antics undermined her. ‘Those who attack Sanjay attack me,’ she said. ‘He isn’t a thinker, he’s a doer.’ Yet Sanjay was loathed. When Indira ended the emergency and called an election in March 1977, she was defeated so badly that she lost her own seat in the Lok Sabha – lower house – while Sanjay failed to win one. Soon afterwards she and then Sanjay were arrested. Indira and son were surely finished – just as Mao’s wife soared.

On 9 September 1976, just after midnight, attended by his nurse-girlfriends, his wife Jiang Qing and nonentity heir Hua, Mao died. The Gang of Four controlled the Party. Jiang Qing demanded that she succeed Mao as chairman.

LITTLE CANNON, THE EIGHT IMMORTALS AND THE SCORPION’S GANG

Hua Guofeng, now chairman and premier, was alarmed; so were Mao’s veteran henchmen, who secretly contacted Little Cannon, Deng, under house arrest in the leadership compound, Zhongnanhai. While Jiang suspected a conspiracy, Deng and her enemies planned a coup, recruiting the Central Guards, Unit 8341, the praetorians. On 6 October, Hua invited some of the Gang to discuss a new volume of Mao’s works. Two were arrested as they arrived; Mao’s nephew was nabbed in Manchuria; the vice-chairman Wang Hongwen resisted arrest, killing two guards; then Unit 8341 surrounded Jiang’s mansion on Fisherman’s Terrace and arrested her.

Hua had the top jobs but power flows fluidly to authority, not to office: unlike water, it always flows upstream. Deng held court at home, yet he held no office. Six months later, the seventy-three-year-old Little Cannon, as vice-chairman and chief of staff, took command, making decisions that would change the world: Mao, he decreed, was ‘seven parts good, three parts bad’, but the mistakes would be blamed on the Gang of Four, who were put on trial, Jiang Qing sentenced to death.^* But his titanic decision was to open Chinese markets while maintaining the Party’s monopoly of power. ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat’s black or white; if it catches mice, it’s a good cat.’ The cat was good. His reforms, he said, were China’s ‘second revolution’.^* He recalled his old ally, Xi Zhongxun, in disgrace for sixteen years, only just out of prison, whom he appointed to run Guangzhou (Canton). Xi proposed an innovation: a trading region. ‘Let’s call them special zones,’ agreed Deng, adding a phrase from the Long March: ‘You have to find a way in, to fight a bloody path out.’ Xi Zhongxun’s son Jinping, who had spent years among the peasantry, returned to join the children of the elite – the princelings – who were aware that they would one day help rule China. Xi’s special economic zones would power China’s economic explosion. But in foreign policy ‘We should act calmly. Don’t be impatient.’ Britain watched anxiously: the lease on Hong Kong would run out in 1997. Here too Deng was flexible, conceding ‘one country, two systems’ while saying that China would ‘hide its capabilities and bide its time’.

Jovial, peppery, diminutive, foul-mouthed, the Little Cannon was now the Paramount Leader. Deng soon gave up most of his positions, deciding everything during meetings at home with veterans – known as the Eight Immortals after eight heroes of Chinese mythology – smoking, playing chess and expectorating into a spittoon, while his youngest daughter Deng Rong took notes. In world affairs, he advised, ‘Observe calmly, secure our position.’ The west was charmed by Deng^* but, impatient for a thaw, Chinese students hoped for pluralism. Little Cannon was flexible about ideology and economics but never about power: that still came from the barrel of a gun.

In November 1975, the last empire, Portugal, suddenly withdrew from Africa, as a new foreign power arrived: the Cubans.

CASTRO’S AFRICA

Castro’s anti-colonial war was an almost symmetrical inversion of history, the irony of which he appreciated: as the son of a Spanish colonialist, he dispatched his overwhelmingly black army to fight US-backed forces all over Africa. Cuba, he said, was ‘repaying Africa for the slave trade’. He regarded Africa as ‘the weakest link in the imperialist chain’ and was willing to impose Marxism – a European ideological antidote to European empire – on the continent. His intervention was jump-started by a coup in Lisbon: in April 1974, a cabal of captains, weary of domestic oppression and African wars, seized power. Their Carnation Revolution, establishing democracy in Portugal, ended five centuries of empire and thirteen years of colonial wars – but accelerated a bloody scramble for Angola.

On 11 November 1975, Agostinho Neto, Marxist leader of the MPLA liberation movement, a Lisbon-trained doctor and son of a Methodist pastor, declared Angolan independence and seized the capital Luanda just as two rival anti-Communist factions occupied other parts of the country. Neto, married to a Portuguese, was a veteran revolutionary who had met Castro and Che in Havana and been regularly imprisoned by Salazar, while continuing to practise medicine. After the colonial wars under Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship and centuries of Portuguese predation, the war was brutal. Neto executed any opposition, declaring a one-party Soviet-style state, and appealed to Moscow and Havana for help. ‘We accepted the challenge,’ said Castro, who pointedly called it Operation Carlota after an enslaved female who, ‘in 1843, led one of many risings against the stigmas of slavery and gave her life’. The Americans backed the other factions, and their covert ally, South Africa, occupied South West Africa and then invaded Angola. Thirty-six thousand Cubans were rushed to prevent the fall of Luanda, soon boosted to 55,000. ‘Few times in history,’ boasted Castro, who flew in to visit the front, ‘has a war – the most terrible heart-rending human action imaginable – been accompanied by such a degree of humanity on the part of the victors.’ Cuban troops, he added, were there for fifteen years. As late as spring 1988, some 40,000 Cuban, Communist Angolan and Namibian troops defeated Angolan rebels and their South African allies at Cuito Cuanavale, the largest modern battle in African history. Over 300,000 Cuban troops served in the country.

Angola became the ferocious front line in a proxy war raging across southern Africa from ocean to ocean. In the west, Castro backed insurgents in South West Africa; in the east, in Portugal’s other colony, Mozambique, Samora Machel, a well-off farmer’s son whose grandfather had fought for the last Gaza king, declared independence, backed by Castro and fighting counter-revolutionaries backed by South Africa. After centuries of Portuguese rule, and forty years of ferocious right-wing dictatorship, Machel nationalized property, tortured opponents in ‘re-education centres’ and executed 30,000 class enemies. In the centre, the 270,000 white Rhodesians defied British plans to grant independence to six million Africans. Backed by apartheid South Africa, the Rhodesians fought against the overwhelmingly black majority,^* who were claiming independence decades after most of Africa for the country they called Zimbabwe in honour of the ruined thirteenth-century city.

In early 1977, Castro received requests for help from Mengistu in Ethiopia, and sent 16,000 troops. ‘We felt obliged to help the Ethiopians,’ he said, ‘and do our bit.’ Soon after the suffocating of Haile Selassie, Ethiopia started to disintegrate: insurgents in Tigray and Eritrea intensified their rebellions at the centre. The revolution consumed its children. ‘We’ll tackle our enemies that come face to face with us,’ said Mengistu, ‘and we won’t be stabbed in the back. We’ll arm the comrades and avenge the blood of our comrades double and triple fold.’ Mengistu and Atnafu drew pistols on each other in meetings as their rivalry simmered. On 3 February 1977, Mengistu carried out a purge of the Standing Committee of the Derg, pulling out a machine gun and personally mowing down his comrades, killing fifty-eight Derg officers. He was then elected chairman and emerged as dictator, basing his Terror – Qey Shibir – on that of Lenin in 1918. Brezhnev and Castro were impressed. ‘Mengistu strikes me as a quiet, honest and convinced leader,’ Castro concluded. ‘He’s an intellectual personality who showed his wisdom on 3 February … He had the rightists arrested and shot.’ His rival Atnafu had been out of town on 3 February, but he was executed later that year.

‘We want to assure you, Comrade Brezhnev,’ said Mengistu on a visit to the Kremlin, ‘we’ll sacrifice everything for the revolution.’ This was not hyperbole. ‘Death to counter-revolutionaries,’ he cried at a rally, dementedly smashing bottles of red fluid. But his Terror was also an imperial fight-back: ‘We fought them when they sought to dismember the nation.’ Mengistu was responsible for 750,000 deaths. But the Somalians were advancing towards Harar in eastern Ethiopia; in Tigray, a talented scholar called Meles Zenawi, just twenty-two, who had won the top Haile Selassie prize at the best school in Addis, founded the Marxist–Leninist League of Tigray that bizarrely supported Enver Hoxha in Albania against all the great powers; in Eritrea, a Marxist fanatic, Isaias ‘Isu’ Afwerki, trained in Beijing, was armed by China. Soviet Ethiopia was in jeopardy; Castro airlifted more troops.

After a triumphant progress across Africa visiting Neto and Mengistu, Castro flew on to Moscow to join Brezhnev celebrating yet another success: Communists had seized power in Afghanistan.

Shah Zahir, son of the founding monarch of the dynasty, had successfully navigated the Cold War as Soviets and Americans bid to back Afghan projects, but he was much closer to the Soviets: Kabul had been Khrushchev’s first South Asian visit. The KGB funded a Communist Party that was divided between Pashtun-and Farsi-speaking factions just as the shah’s reforms sparked an Islamicist movement. In 1973, the shah was overthrown by his cousin and long-serving premier, Prince Daoud, who was supported by the Communists. But his reforms disappointed while his claims of Pashtunistan in Pakistan led its premier Bhutto to start funding Islamists through his secret service ISI. When Brezhnev complained about American interference in Afghanistan, Daoud defied him and started arresting Communists.

In April 1978 Communist troops stormed the palace and machine-gunned Daoud and family, including women and children, tossing them into a mass grave. Nur Muhammad Taraki – a veteran writer of Afghan socialist-realist novels who combined bon vivant womanizing with fanatical Marxism – took control and proclaimed himself ‘the Genius of the East’. He grew so overconfident and out of touch that he boasted to the KGB, ‘Come back in a year – the mosques will be empty!’

Brezhnev regarded Taraki as a fellow Leninist and backed his programme of secular education, land reform and female rights – much of it not dissimilar to what the Americans would try to impose after 9/11. But their radical reforms alienated the conservative Afghans, while the Pashtun faction started murdering their moderate Tajik rivals. The Soviets advised them to stop killing each other, yet ‘They continue to execute people who disagree with them,’ said Soviet premier Kosygin. As mujahedin (Islamicist guerrillas) launched an anti-Communist jihad, Taraki begged for Soviet troops and massacred any opposition, his premier Hafizullah Amin killing around 30,000 in the first eighteen months. Then in September 1979 Amin arrested Taraki and, claiming that Brezhnev had given him permission, had the old man strangled. Brezhnev was upset; the countryside seethed with jihadis; the Russians were losing control and the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, had an old-fashioned solution – poison.

Brezhnev, now seventy-two, had just suffered a stroke, but his fellow geriatrics in the Kremlin leadership felt no need to retire him in a system as sclerotic as his arteries. His decline was quick. Sickly and addicted to sleeping pills, drinking heavily, Brezhnev struggled to control his family, his daughter Galina smuggling Siberian diamonds and brazenly having affairs with gangsters and lion tamers. The horizon of this world potentate shrank. Often Brezhnev was alone all day: ‘16 May 1976. Went nowhere. No one called. I called no one. In the morning I had my hair cut, shaved and washed my hair. Walked a bit. Watched Central Army [football team] lose to Spartak. The lads played well.’ But the diaries reveal who was rising. ‘Yu. Andropov phoned. He came. We talked.’ Andropov supplied sedatives for him. More importantly, they discussed what to do with the murderous Afghans.

THE SPYMASTER: ANDROPOV AND HIS PROTéGé GORBACHEV

‘A committee’s been set up,’ Andropov wrote to Brezhnev, ‘to liquidate Amin.’ The KGB had a department – the Camera – dedicated to poisons. Andropov infiltrated into Amin’s kitchens an Azeri assassin, codenamed Patience, trained as a cook.

Andropov had a vision to reform the Soviet Union. As ambassador in Budapest he had orchestrated the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and then, appointed KGB chairman in 1967, he had supervised the invasion of Czechoslovakia, as well as the new repressions against dissidents and Jewish refuseniks, devising the use of psychiatric hospitals to ‘destroy dissent in all its forms’. Implacable, teetotal and incorruptible, Andropov was a Dostoevskian inquisitor who knew everything about everyone. Interviewing a subordinate who said, ‘Let me tell you about myself,’ Andropov replied, ‘What makes you think you know more about yourself than I do?’ But Andropov had a family secret: he had been brought up by a stepfather and had worked on Volga barges, a perfect proletarian background, but he was actually the son of a Jewish jeweller, Karl Fainshtein, killed in an anti-German riot during the First World War and his wife Evgenia – a fact he concealed in order to join the Communist Party in 1937. His secret Jewishness did not discourage his persecution of Jewish dissidents.

Abroad, Andropov disdained the corruption and weakness of western democracies and pursued sophisticated programmes of disinformation that are the real origins of today’s ‘fake news’. This diehard Leninist, who loved detective novels and jazz, believed that harsh measures were required while the dictatorship reformed itself. He realized that the Soviet state, increasingly interlinked with the world economy, needed to change. Its military expenditure – 15 per cent of its GNP – was not outrageous for a superpower. In 1977, its new West Siberian oil field made it the world’s biggest producer. Yet it was overdependent on oil profits, which it spent on importing grain instead of western technology, and on subsidising Cuba and other vassals, which Andropov called ‘vulgar robbery’. ‘The task is to work out a system of logistical, economic and moral steps,’ he said, ‘that would encourage renovation of equipment and managers.’ He foresaw the peril presented by Lenin’s structure of fifteen ‘independent’ republics. ‘Let’s get rid of the national partition,’ he said. ‘Draw me a new map of the USSR.’

‘In twenty years,’ he said in 1975, ‘we’ll be able to allow ourselves what the west allows itself now, freedom of opinion and information, diversity in society and art.’ But he believed that political power must remain the monopoly of the Communist Party. Like Deng in China, he envisaged a rising economic freedom but steely political control. He was ‘the most dangerous’, noted a reformer, Alexander Yakovlev, ‘because he was the most smart’.

Andropov had recently befriended an energetic new Party leader in Stavropol whom he visited for holidays, hikes and singalongs of songs forbidden by his own KGB: Mikhail Gorbachev. The upcoming Gorbachev praised Brezhnev and did what was necessary to rise. But he and his auburn-haired wife Raisa, both children of families killed by Stalin, were appalled by the inertia of Brezhnev.

Andropov guided the rise of Gorbachev, who knew that the system was failing. Gorbachev found a kindred spirit in the tough but intelligent Georgian Party chief, Eduard Shevardnadze, blue-eyed with a plume of white hair, who walking along the Black Sea beach suddenly said to him, ‘You know, everything is rotten.’ In 1978, Brezhnev, prompted by Andropov, promoted Gorbachev to the Politburo in Moscow. ‘Do we really need this?’ asked Raisa.

‘We can’t go on,’ replied Gorbachev, ‘living like this.’

In the Kremlin, he was amazed to see the general secretary fall asleep in Politburo meetings. The leadership functioned like ‘a scene from Gogol’. Gorbachev complained to Andropov, who replied that ‘the stability of Party, country and even the world’ required they ‘support Leonid’.

Further down, in the lower ranks of the KGB, Andropov fostered an esprit of knightly loyalty. In 1969, he promoted a new cult of the secret policeman, the Chekist, backing a TV mini-series Seventeen Moments of Spring featuring a Soviet super-spy, Colonel Isayev, who penetrates Nazi headquarters using the name Stierlitz.^* It worked. Stierlitz became a Soviet hero. Brezhnev so loved the series he changed the timing of Central Committee meetings to watch it, and it inspired many – including a Leningrad law student named Vladimir Putin – to join the KGB. Putin hero-worshiped Andropov and wanted to be Stierlitz. ‘My notion of the KGB,’ he remembered, ‘came from romantic spy stories.’

In 1975, Putin joined the KGB at the age of twenty-three, working in both counter-intelligence and internal surveillance. Later he was trained at the Yuri Andropov Institute. His background was conventional. He had grown up in the impoverished, leaky apartments of a decaying Leningrad block, running with street children, but his mother, Maria, forty-one at his birth, had lost a baby in the Siege and cossetted him with the special attention that can sometimes endow a child with great self-confidence. Vladimir – known as Vova – was rescued by the kindness of a Jewish neighbour who fed him while his parents worked, and by his sports training as a karate fighter. But he had a deeper secret-police connection: his grandfather Spiridon had worked in the NKVD service staff, cooking for both Lenin and Stalin; his father had served with NKVD units in the war.

Now the poisoning of the Afghan tyrant proved more difficult than Andropov had hoped: Brezhnev and the Politburo agonized over what to do. Andropov initially advised restraint. Let poison do its work. But if intervention became necessary, surely it would be quick and easy.

In August 1978 the shah of Iran was telephoned by his neighbouring potentate, Saddam Hussein, Iraqi vice-president, who asked if he would approve the killing of that troublesome Iranian exile in Iraq, Ayatollah Khomeini. Saddam explained that Khomeini was making trouble among Iraqi Shiites. Saddam could kill him or exile him. Which would the shah choose?

IMAM, SHAH AND SADDAM

By now even the shah’s courtiers were suggesting reform. In June 1974, Alam asked him, ‘How can we expect people to go without bread when we’re telling them we’re in the midst of a golden age?’ The shah ‘seemed thoroughly taken aback and ordered me to set up a committee’. Yet the shah’s gambit to make Iran the hegemon of the Gulf and break up Iraq was working. He had backed a bloody Kurdish insurgency, led by the latest warlord of the Barzani family, which forced the Iraqis to recognize their autonomy.^* But the emergent leader of Iraq – Saddam Hussein – feared that the loss of Kurdistan would break the country up.

The shah and Alam regarded Saddam as a ‘slim, handsome young man of considerable intelligence’. Born in the town of Tikrit, he had not been spoiled by an admiring mother nor had he clashed with an aggressive father. Instead his father had died after his birth and his mother Sabha had collapsed, sending the child to be raised in Baghdad by her brother, Khairallah Talfah, a radical Arab nationalist. Khairallah introduced the boy to the Baathist Party, which in 1963 seized power in both Iraq and Syria, though it was soon crippled by feuds and purges. ‘The Baathists,’ said Khrushchev, watching the killings, ‘borrowed their methods from Hitler.’ Saddam earned kudos with the attempted assassination of an Iraqi president and fled to Egypt, but in 1968 he returned when his cousin General Ahmed al-Bakr, who was in turn married to Uncle Talfah’s sister, seized power in the latest spasm of Baathist faction fighting, appointing Saddam as secret police supremo.

When Saddam married his uncle’s daughter, Sajida, a teacher, he placed himself at the centre of a tiny clan, soon joined by his uncle’s son and his half-brothers. As the shah spent billions on American armaments, Saddam, vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command, cultivated Moscow. In April 1972, Baghdad signed a treaty with the Soviets, while Saddam became close to the KGB spy Yevgeny Primakov – sometimes codenamed Maxim though his real name was Finkelstein (he was Jewish) – who admired in the Iraqi a ‘firmness that often turned into cruelty, a strong will bordering on implacable stubbornness’. Al-Bakr fell ill just as the shah’s Kurdish rebels threatened to detach northern Iraq. Saddam was not strong enough to stop them; he had to negotiate.

At a meeting in Algiers in March 1975, the shah pulled off a coup when Saddam conceded Iranian control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway in return for abandoning the Kurds. Success discourages reform, and the shah was triumphant. By July the following year, Alam was desperate: ‘We claim to have brought Iran to the verge of a Great Civilization, yet it’s hit by power cuts and we can’t even guarantee water in the capital …’ The shah denied it all: ‘The only thing wrong with the economy is the extraordinary rate at which it’s growing.’

Power is corrosive; the shah had been playing the game since 1941, almost forty years. ‘There’s no firm hand on the tiller,’ warned Alam, ‘the captain is overworked.’ Meanwhile, ‘The People want more than material progress, they demand justice, social harmony, a voice in political affairs. I’m gravely apprehensive.’ But by January 1977 vast revenues had been frittered away. ‘We’re broke,’ said the shah to Alam.

One of the shah’s Swedish lovers got food poisoning, but when the court minister sent the royal doctor he went to Alam’s ‘French girlfriend’ instead. ‘His Majesty nearly wept with laughter.’ But Iranians were not laughing. Millions of peasants had poured into the cities where, anchorless and impoverished, neglected by venal elites, they turned to traditional mullahs and listened to tapes smuggled in from Ayatollah Khomeini in Najaf that called the shah ‘the American serpent whose head must be smashed with a stone’. Now Saddam offered the shah the head of Khomeini: the king of kings rejected the offer. Saddam expelled the ayatollah.

Khomeini sought refuge in Paris. The French president Giscard d’Estaing consulted the shah, who did not object. In October, Khomeini settled in Neauphle-le-Château, a Parisian suburb. His media appearances, sitting berobed under an apple tree, the antithesis of the gold-braided flash of the shah, were managed by an alliance of educated liberals, Shiite moderates and leftist revolutionaries, trained by the PLO in Lebanon. Each believed they controlled the old man. None did.

The shah discounted the threat, calling his opposition ‘a few corrupt scoundrels’; SAVAK continued arresting and torturing suspects. But the trouble with a one-man regime is that it depends on the survival of one man: the shah, feeling exhausted, was secretly diagnosed with lymph cancer, while his trustee Alam was himself dying of cancer. Treated with steroids, depressed and passive, Shah Mohammad vacillated. He ignored the start of regular demonstrations and fundamentalist attacks. Then in August 1978 a fire at the Rex Cinema in Abadan, started with petrol, incinerated 420 people – the doors were found to be locked. It was a provocation by Islamic terrorists, and it worked: SAVAK was blamed, and the protests snowballed.

The sick shah lost the will to fight, refusing to shoot protesters. But he consulted his ally, America, where the backlash after Watergate had washed into the White House an inexperienced, sanctimonious and toothsome Democrat, Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia. Carter was the anti-Kissinger, but his mere presence weakened American power. He signalled that he did not support the shah, while Khomeini’s envoys confided that the ayatollah would never threaten US oil. As millions seethed in the streets, the shah was astonished by the American betrayal and struggled to find anyone who would become premier; as his army wilted, his monarchy crumbled like rotten wood. On 8 September 1978, security forces fired on mass protests, killing around 100: Black Friday provided martyrs and momentum.

On 16 January 1979, the Shah, frail, pale, yet straight and dignified, boarded his plane as a young officer fell to his knees to kiss his hand, and Farah, sedated, wept silently. The shah flew to Egypt where Sadat welcomed him. Two weeks later, on 1 February, Khomeini took off from Paris on a plane filled with his leftist advisers and American news journalists who asked him how he felt. ‘Hichi’ – Nothing – he replied, rejecting American sentimentality and instead expressing the mystical grandeur of God. Six million people – one of the largest crowds ever – almost crushed him as his convoy drove to the Martyr’s Cemetery, where he had to be rescued by a military helicopter. ‘I will decide the government,’ he told the crowds. ‘I will punch this [provisional] government in the teeth.’ The decisive moment came fast: his secular allies had arranged for him to stay in the Refah girls’ school, but the next morning the mullahs, allies and former pupils, burst in and conveyed Khomeini, now hailed as the infallible imam, to their headquarters.

Although he appointed a moderate Islamicist as premier, he had tricked the leftists, the moderates and the Americans: Khomeini delegated power to a Council of the Islamic Revolution, where many of his pupils, men who had been in and out of prison for years, joined the inner circle: one of them, a forty-year-old Najad clergyman called Ali Khamenei, trusted by Khomeini, organized a new army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. These two – first Khomeini, then Ali Khamenei – would rule Iran as imams into the 2020s.

Khomeini’s real nature was revealed at once as his supporters won shootouts with the Imperial Guard and arrested all the generals and ministers. These they brought to the Refah school, where the chief revolutionary judge, Sadeq Khalkhali, a plump, murderous giggler, a Khomeini disciple since 1955 and long-time leader of the Fadayan-e Islam, shot them on the roof. When he received a phone call asking him to delay the execution of the shah’s long-time premier, he asked them to wait and then personally shot him before returning – ‘Sorry, the sentence’s already been carried out.’ Later he boasted, ‘I killed over 500 criminals close to the royal family … I feel no regret,’ except that the shah had escaped. In October, the shah arrived for medical treatment in America, inspiring a ‘Death to America’ campaign: 400 students stormed America’s Teheran embassy. They took sixty-six Americans hostage, backed by Khomeini, who used the episode to remove the moderates and impose his unique theocracy: the Supreme Leader – by the Law of the Guardian – was an absolute sacred monarch, superior to an elected president and assembly.

Humiliated, Carter dispatched commandos in Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages, but the choppers crashed in a sandstorm, killing eight soldiers, whose wizened bodies became props in a macabre Iranian show. ‘Who crushed Mr Carter’s helicopters?’ asked Khomeini. ‘We did? The sands did! These sands are agents of God. Let them try again.’ They did not. American commanders-in-chief require the laurels of victory: Carter was tainted with defeat and misfortune, but he did nurture the first Arab–Israeli peace treaty.

On 19 November 1977, Sadat, confident after his early successes against Israel, had courageously flown to Jerusalem.

JJ OF GHANA AND SADAT IN JERUSALEM

Sadat told the Knesset: ‘Let’s put an end to war.’ His Israeli host, Menachem Begin, a dour Polish-born nationalist who had used terrorism to undermine the British Mandate, had overturned thirty years of Labour government, winning the votes of the neglected Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries. Begin returned Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace that outraged the rest of the Islamic world. In March 1979, when the deal was signed in Washington, Assad of Syria and Qaddafi of Libya denounced Sadat’s betrayal along with Imam Khomeini.

Khomeini’s first foreign visitor was Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, who had trained many Iranian radicals in his Soviet-funded Lebanese camps. Faith is contagious and fungible: the revolution of 1979 changed the world as much as those of 1789 and 1917. Secular westerners saw Khomeini as a spectre from the obscurantist, intolerant past. Actually, he was the future. Khomeini’s ambitions were pan-Islamic, unbounded by Shiism or Iranian history, embracing the secular Palestinians (‘Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine’) as well as Sunnis. Khomeini had been inspired by the Egyptian Sunni, Qutb, hanged by Nasser; now Qutb’s followers were inspired by him. President Sadat had granted asylum to his friend the dying deposed shah, who moved from America to Panama, pursued by Khomeini’s agents demanding his murder or extradition. When he died in Cairo, Sadat buried him in al-Rifai Mosque beside Ismail the Magnificent and Farouk. Sadat’s peace with Israel and loyalty to the shah aroused Islamicist hatred.

In Pakistan, on 4 April 1979, the elected former prime minister Bhutto was hanged on the orders of the Islamicist general who had deposed him. The chief of staff, General Muhammad Zia, had in July 1977 deposed Bhutto, whose high-handed autocracy and manoeuvres between socialism, Islam and the feudal lords, not to speak of the murder of his opponents, had alienated all sides. Bhutto himself had appointed Zia and encouraged the brisk, moustachioed British-trained officer to promote Islam in the army, but the general loathed him, later trying him for murder. Now the Shiite Iranian revolution encouraged the Sunni Zia to Islamicize Pakistan and impose sharia law.

Khomeini’s influence was powerful, but he faced a present threat: he despised Saddam Hussein and called for the destruction of the ‘godless Baathists’. Saddam despised him back.

On 22 July 1979, Saddam Hussein, newly minted president of Iraq, puffing on a cigar, strolled on stage at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council to launch a purge, videotaped and later shown throughout the country. After Sadat’s peace with Israel, President al-Bakr had proposed a union with Assad, his fellow Baathist in Syria: al-Bakr would be president, Assad his deputy, and Saddam would lose his position. Saddam therefore undermined the deal. This led to a schism with Assad of Syria, who instead made an alliance with Iran, an alliance that would ensure the survival of his dynasty into the 2020s.

After finessing al-Bakr’s retirement, Saddam emerged from the shadows, a half-educated radical whose easy rise, ingenious cruelty and sycophantic court convinced him of a providential destiny to be a new Saladin and Nasser, Nebuchadnezzar and Stalin rolled into one. On taking the presidency, he arrested his enemies and tortured them to incriminate others in ‘the Syrian plot’.

Now on stage, he presided over the naming of ‘brothers who betrayed us’ in the audience with the insouciance of a diabolical game-show compere. As they were named, Saddam shouted ‘Get out!’ and the cameras showed suited Mukhabarat agents escorting them out of the room as the survivors displayed their loyalty by cheering, shouting and hailing Saddam. When it was over, Saddam and his henchmen wept, dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs, and later led the survivors down into the cellars where they were given pistols and forced to shoot some of the prisoners; others were reprieved and forced to kill more.

Khomeini and Saddam were not the only leaders who sought to use murder to cleanse their nations. On 26 June 1979, a thirty-two-year-old Ghanaian flight sergeant, Jerry Rawlings, set up a line of stakes on the beach in Accra, Ghana, and invited the press to a macabre spectacle. ‘There were six stakes, each with a rope dangling from it,’ recalled a journalist. ‘Sandbags were piled behind each stake.’ Then an ambulance drew up. ‘The door was flung open’ and out stepped two ex-presidents, Generals Akuffo and Afrifa, and four top officers. ‘A sudden hush fell on the teeming spectators’ as the men were tied to the stakes. ‘Hardly anyone saw the firing squad enter the tents, all attention was on the condemned officers …’

Son of an Ewe mother and a Scottish pharmacist from Galloway, ‘JJ’ Rawlings was a flashy, tall pilot disgusted by the venality and incompetence of the military and civilian rulers who had followed Nkrumah. But, recently married to Nana and with three children, he kept failing his officer examinations and was about to be dismissed from the military. Capricious and impetuous, Rawlings joined a secret organization, the Free Africa officers, planning coups across the continent.

His own coup was devised by him and his best friend from Accra’s famous British-style Prince of Wales boarding school, Major ‘JC’ Kojo Boakye Djan; as boys they had rebelled against the English headmaster. In May 1979, Rawlings burst in on his friend: ‘JC, let’s go for a drink.’

Over cocktails at the Continental Hotel, Rawlings suddenly declared, ‘JC, we’re ready to take over.’

‘You and who?’ asked JC.

‘I’ve got a lot of boys,’ said JJ. JC warned him against it. ‘You temporize too much,’ warned JJ, ‘you risk being seen as a coward.’

The coup was a disaster. Rawling and his ‘boys’ were captured, and were facing execution. ‘The options were clear,’ said JC. ‘We had to release Rawlings before he was executed.’

On 4 June 1979, JC stormed the prison and liberated Rawlings; they then seized the Castle and overthrew General Akuffo. Setting up an Armed Forces Revolutionary Committee, Flight Sergeant Rawlings declared ‘a house-cleaning exercise’, arresting three ex-presidents and five generals. The first shootings were in private, but on the beach in Accra crowds were gathered.

‘There was no audible order to fire,’ recalled the journalist. ‘Just a sudden: ko.ko.ko. I could see the blood soaking through …’ Years later, Rawlings reflected that it was ‘very painful and regrettable, but there was no other way out’. A hit list of 300 was compiled and all were killed, before Rawlings amazed everyone by letting a free election take place, won by a respectable diplomat and Nkrumahite, Dr Hilla Limann. Rawlings returned to the barracks, but after two years of weak, corrupt rule, on 31 December 1981 he retook the Castle. ‘Fellow Ghanaians,’ he announced, ‘this isn’t a coup. I ask for nothing less than a revolution … Nothing will be done from the Castle without the consent of the people.’

Rawlings presided over the revenge killing of three judges who had dared to challenge his repressions during his first rule. Faced with an outcry, Rawlings arrested his own junta henchman and had him shot. Meanwhile he ruined the economy with Marxist nationalizations, encouraged by his allies Castro and Qaddafi. Rawlings resembled many of the pro-Soviet tyrants in Africa, but he was not one of them: ultimately this maverick would surprise everyone.

Back in the Gulf, Saddam and Khomeini had long hated each other. Saddam had almost had Khomeini assassinated; instead he killed the Shiite ayatollah al-Sadr. The Iraqis had long resented Iranian superiority and the shah’s power: Saddam’s surrogate father Uncle Talfah had written a pamphlet, Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies. Now Saddam flew down to Riyadh to get Saudi support. Khomeini detested the Saudis, whom he had mocked as ‘the camel-grazers of Riyadh and the barbarians of Najd’. Fahd, Saudi crown prince and son of Abdulaziz, promised Saddam a billion dollars a month. The Americans greenlighted the war; so did Brezhnev, who had just taken a fatal decision.

OPERATION 333 IN KABUL

Operation Storm-333 was the most successful commando mission of modern times. At 19.15 on 27 December 1979, more than a thousand Soviet commandos, disguised in Afghan uniforms, stormed the Tajbeg Palace ten miles outside Kabul, to liquidate the Afghan general secretary Hafizullah Amin, whose radical policies and murderous purges, admiration for Stalin, and American education, alarmed the Soviets. Brezhnev’s senile elation was disturbing: he tangoed with typists and waitresses, but in public he could not finish a sentence, becoming a national joke. But the omnipotent geriatrics agonized about Amin. ‘Under no circumstances,’ said Andropov, ‘can we lose Afghanistan.’

The generals had warned against invasion. Privately Gorbachev thought it ‘a fateful mistake’, but on 12 December Andropov won the argument. As troops were mustered, Amin had moved out of the Presidential Palace to the heavily defended Tajbeg. Andropov’s Agent Patience was now Amin’s chef. If he could kill Amin, an Afghan invasion could be avoided.

On 13 December, Agent Patience poisoned Amin, but his nephew ate most of the poisoned food and had to be flown to Moscow and treated with an antidote. Then a sniper tried to shoot him but could not get close. Andropov ordered a quick surgical strike to liquidate Amin and pacify the country. On 25 December, Soviet forces started arriving with Amin’s approval. On the 27th, just hours before Storm-333, Amin presided over a banquet where he was poisoned again: he and his guests were all ill. Amin went into a coma but his Coca-Cola addiction diffused the poison and a Russian doctor, unbriefed by the KGB, revived him. Once news reached the hit squad that Amin was alive, 700 commandos led by twenty-five assassins of the Thunder unit of Alpha Group along with KGB and GRU contingents backed by 700 paratroopers and Spetsnaz operators stormed the palace, defended by 1,500 troops, who fought back.

‘The Soviets will save us,’ said Amin as Andropov’s commandos blasted their way in.

‘They are the Soviets,’ replied his adjutant.

‘It’s all true,’ said Amin. Once inside the palace, the assassins slaughtered Amin and virtually his entire family, his wife and son aged eleven and 350 guards; a daughter was wounded but survived. The parquet floors were awash with blood. A pro-Soviet president Karmal was installed; 80,000 troops with 1,500 tanks seized the cities, soon rising to 125,000; and at its peak over 600,000 personnel were drawn into the war. The invasion sparked a growing insurgency by around 250,000 mujahedin under tribal and religious leaders,^* backed first by Pakistan, then by the CIA and the Saudis.

Afghanistan provided perfect cover for Saddam. On 22 September 1980, he invaded Iran, calling it ‘Saddam’s Qadisiyya’, referring to the 638 Arab defeat of the Persians. Yet Saddam failed to destroy Khomeini; on the contrary, the Arab attack rallied Islamic zealotry and Iranian nationalism behind the imam, saving the regime. Thousands of Iranians volunteered to wear the red bandannas of martyrdom and were sent over the top of the trenches, often unarmed except for the key to the gates of heaven, in human waves that halted the Iraqi advance. As Khomeini executed Marxists and liberal ‘traitors’ in massive numbers, he rushed 200,000 recruits to his new army, the Revolutionary Guards. America and Russia lavished military aid on the Iraqi dictator. ‘It’s a pity,’ said Kissinger, ‘both sides can’t lose.’ The war would last ten years and kill a million young men – a forgotten catastrophe that encouraged Khomeini to consolidate his theocracy and Saddam to take more risks, funded by the Saudis.

King Fahd, fourth of Abdulaziz’s sons to be king, reacted to the Iranian challenge – and an attack by Islamicist rebels on the Mecca shrine – by tightening religious observance in the kingdom, changing his title to Guardian of the Two Sanctuaries and funding a Wahhabi campaign across the Arab world to confront Khomeini in a battle of faith that intensified a competition of fanaticism. His brother Salman, the intelligent, wilful, irascible governor of Riyadh (later king in the 2020s),^* who often punished the impertinent with a slap across the face, took over the funding of Islamic charities – channelling the money to fund the Afghans – and the small coterie of Saudis who went to fight for them.

Osama bin Laden, now twenty-two, was one of the fifty-six children of the king’s builder, Muhammad bin Laden, a Yemenite who had started as a porter in Jeddah, then in 1930 won the favour of Abdulaziz and befriended Faisal, rebuilding Mecca and Medina for the Saudis. The family were experts at cultivating not only the royal family but also American grandees.

Muhammad bin Laden educated most of his children in Britain or the USA: his heir Salem was at a British boarding school. When his father died in a plane crash, Salem bin Laden built on his relationship with Faisal but also bought houses in Florida and became friends with a useful patrician family. In April 1979, he invested in the oil start-up of George W. Bush, the swaggering and hard-drinking son of an upper-class politician, George H. W. Bush, who was planning to run for president.

POPPY, OSAMA AND W

Tall, reedy-voiced and preppy, inarticulate and bereft of ‘the vision thing’, George senior suffered from the clash between his upper-class decency and his voracious ambition. A scion of the type of American family that owned its own ‘family compound’, the Bushes were descended from English blacksmiths, teachers and prospectors; they were radical abolitionists and supporters of female suffrage but also members of an east coast business elite. George’s grandfather Samuel, son of an Episcopalian vicar, made money by managing a steel company that manufactured parts for the Gilded Age robber baron E. H. Harriman. His son, Prescott, worked at the Harriman Brothers investment bank and married the daughter of the bank boss George Herbert Walker. From Walker the Bushes inherited their Maine compound, Kennebunkport, where like other WASPs they embraced the double hell of spartan domestic arrangements and cold outdoor sports.

Nicknamed Skin for his skinniness and Poppy after his grandfather Pop Walker, Bush followed his father to Yale and into the posh Skull and Bones drinking society, then married an indomitable daughter of a successful publisher, Barbara Pierce, descended from one of the first Massachusetts settlers. Soon after his marriage, George joined the air force and survived being shot down by the Japanese in 1944. Moving to Houston, he made money in oil while he and Barbara had six children. Heartbroken by losing a daughter to leukaemia, they indulged their eldest son, George W. – known as W – who grew up as a raffish cross between booted Texas princeling and Yalie Bonesman. It was he who got the bin Ladens to back his business.

George senior had followed his father into politics, and Nixon rewarded his loyalty with the ambassadorship in Beijing; Ford made him CIA director. More networker than meteor, Bush wrote thank-you notes to every person he met. Now he was ready to run for president. Meanwhile W was making money in oil and had invested in the Texas Rangers baseball team, but he was drinking heavily, and was arrested for Drinking under the Influence. W’s marriage to Laura Welch, a virtuous librarian, led him to change his life: he gave up alcohol and embraced God, sobriety and politics. Not only was Laura ‘elegant and beautiful, [she was] willing to put up with my rough edges’, he said. ‘And I must confess she’s smoothed them off.’ W moved from the Episcopalians to Laura’s evangelical United Methodists.

That other princeling, Osama bin Laden, six foot four, striking and charismatic, embraced the ideas of Sayyid Qutb, and attended the lectures of his brother in Jeddah. Above all, he believed that only holy war against godless European infidels – Soviets, Americans, Zionists – and the restoration of sharia law would return Islam to its ancient and pure origins. Having inherited $25 million from his father, he left college without graduating and, backed by King Fahd and Prince Salman, travelled to Pakistan where, aided by the ISI, he used his fortune to gather around 2,000 Arab fighters for the struggle against the Russians. While he was in Peshawar, he met a bespectacled multilingual Egyptian surgeon, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, aged thirty, a member of a terrorist faction, Islamic Jihad, also keen to organize Afghan resistance. Al-Zawahiri would become his doctor, adviser and successor, but for now he returned to Cairo, where his comrades were planning to murder President Sadat.

In September 1981, Sadat ordered mass arrests of jihadists, Muslim Brothers and intellectuals, even Copts, but he missed a network of conspirators within the army command. They infiltrated a platoon led by a jihadist lieutenant named Islambouli into a parade of artillery and tanks to celebrate Sadat’s 1973 war against Israel. On 6 October, as Sadat took the salute of fighter jets, Islambouli seized one of the army trucks taking part in the review while his posse, with grenades hidden in their helmets, jogged towards the stand. Thinking they were part of the review, Sadat stood and saluted, whereupon they threw grenades and opened up on the president, hitting him in the chest. As all hell broke loose, Islambouli climbed on to the stand and emptied his magazine into the prone president – the best Egyptian leader since Mehmed Ali. The vice-president Hosni Mubarak was wounded, but he succeeded to the presidency, ruling Egypt for thirty years, maintaining the Israeli peace and surviving an assassination attempt by Islambouli’s brother. The assassins were executed – and Dr al-Zawahiri was arrested. When he was released, he rejoined Osama bin Laden in Pakistan fighting the Soviets. Together they founded a jihadi terror organization, the Base – al-Qaeda.

Sadat was not the only one facing a jihadi challenge, but Assad dealt with his differently: on 2 February 1982, his howitzers started to bombard his own city of Hama.

Assad, ruling a small country with a centralized Soviet-style economy, had created a greater Syria by intervening in Lebanon. Beirut was famed for its decadent charms and weak state, its domination by Maronite Christians resented by a downtrodden Shia minority recently empowered by a ferocious militia, Hezbollah – Party of God – funded by Khomeini. Its collapse was exacerbated by two other players – a Druze warlord, Walid Jumblatt, a pistol-packing playboy spouting Marx from the back of his Harley-Davidson, and Arafat’s PLO, which had built its own fiefdom and helped spark a civil war. In 1976, Assad sent in troops to staunch the bloodletting, while his brother Rifaat and other princelings made fortunes there. But Assad’s secular dictatorship, suppression of Islamicists and Alawite heresy infuriated the Muslim Brotherhood.

In June 1980, as Islamicist disturbances hit Hama, Homs and Idlib, jihadists tried to kill Assad; in response, on 27 June his brother Rifaat slaughtered a thousand Muslim Brotherhood prisoners at Tadmur (Palmyra) prison and assassinated their leaders. In February 1982, after Sadat’s assassination, the brothers decided to liquidate the Islamicist problem: Rifaat surrounded the insurgency’s centre, Hama, with 12,000 Defence Company troops and attacked with helicopters and howitzers, then stormed the city with tanks, possibly using gas, killing around 40,000 people.

The Assad brothers carefully monitored their Lebanon province, which the PLO was using as a base for attacking Israel. The brothers loathed Arafat and undermined him by championing their own Palestinian factions, but their attacks on Israel drew the Jewish state into the imbroglio. On 6 June 1982, Menachem Begin, inspired by his swaggering defence minister, Ariel Sharon, a veteran general, hero of the 1973 war, ordered an invasion to expel the PLO; as Syrian and Israeli pilots duelled overhead, the Israelis besieged Beirut. In August, Arafat and the PLO were forced out of Lebanon, and an Israeli ally, the Christian Bachir Gemayel, was elected president.

The Israelis had occupied half of Lebanon and their ally was president, but their successes provoked a reaction that turned their triumphs to ashes: the Assads ordered the assassination of President Gemayel. Furious Christian militias slaughtered Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, watched by Israeli forces, while Hezbollah launched a murderous bombing campaign against the Israelis. Begin fell into depression; Sharon was sacked and condemned; and the Assads’ Shiite ally Hezbollah gradually took over Lebanon, with disastrous consequences.

The Assads had restored their influence in Syria. Then in November 1983 Hafez had a heart attack. Rifaat bid for power, attempting a coup in March 1984, but Hafez recovered, foiled Rifaat, dismissed him from command of the Defence Companies, ‘promoted’ him to vice-president and exiled him. He now turned to his eldest son, Bassel. The Assads were not to be troubled by Islamicists for another twenty-five years.

As the Assads were crushing jihad in Syria, the Americans ironically were investing in holy war in Afghanistan.

MAGGIE AND INDIRA

A new US president, Ronald Reagan, rejected Nixon’s detente with the Soviets and saw an opportunity to hit the ‘empire’ in Afghanistan. Elected at the age of sixty-nine, Reagan shaped a more theatrical, majestic and military presidency. Born in Illinois, a debonair yet folksy son of a boozy, sometimes violent salesman and sunny mother who ‘always expected to find the best in people and often did’, he became a radio announcer, film star, union official and then Californian governor, whose mellifluous voice, athletic figure, instinctive lightness, cowboy swagger, Christian wholesomeness and anti-Communism restored faith and confidence after the Manichaean contrasts of Nixon and Carter. Nicknamed Gipper after a football player he portrayed in a movie, Reagan combined his breezy western appeal with the uptight east coast aristocrat George Bush, who became his vice-president.^* No one could equal his wisecracking suaveness under pressure. Soon after taking office,^* he was shot by a lunatic but managed to joke to his wife, Nancy, ‘Sorry, honey, I forgot to duck.’ In the ensuing crisis, Bush won his trust by not exploiting his temporary incapacity.

Once the Iranian hostages had returned, Reagan deployed American power to confront what he called the Soviet ‘evil empire’ on all fronts, from Angola and central America to space, where he promised a fantastical high-tech Strategic Defence Initiative which alarmed the Soviets – even though it did not yet work. While Reagan appeared placid, his swashbuckling lieutenants were recklessly cynical in their shenanigans, his presidency almost destroyed by their illegal plot to pay for the release of the Iranian hostages and fund anti-Communist guerrillas in Nicaragua, selling Israeli weapons to Iranian ayatollahs in one phantasmagoric conspiracy. Yet nothing seemed to touch the schmaltzy, slick-feathered president who had restored American confidence in their ‘city on a hill’.

Afghanistan quickly proved a quagmire for the Soviets, who struggled to defeat the mujahedin insurgents in the rough Afghan terrain. In the Panjir Valley, the Soviets launched nine offensives, but rarely controlled more than the main cities. Carter had started Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, but Reagan expanded it, spending $3 billion to bleed the Soviets while challenging them all over the world. The Americans romanticized these ‘freedom fighters’, thinking they shared their anti-Communism; but the jihadists detested any infidel intruders. The money was channelled through President Zia’s ISI, which favoured jihadist groups as an insurance that Afghanistan would never fall under Indian influence.

‘We are neither pro-Russia nor pro-America,’ said Indira Gandhi, back in power and watching the Afghan war. ‘Just pro-India.’ She ruled with her son Sanjay, now MP and general secretary of Congress, and clearly her heir. But on 23 June 1980 he took out an aeroplane from the Delhi Flying Club; looping the loop over his office, his chappal shoes became entangled with the pedals and the plane crashed. Indira rushed to the scene and saw his mutilated body; it took doctors three hours to reconstruct it so that it could be displayed. Her sangfroid was invincible: when a relative wept, Indira said, ‘Now now, puphi, we don’t cry.’

Four days later she was back at her desk, but with Sanjay gone she turned to her eldest son Rajiv as heir. He was happily married to Antonia Maino, a pretty builder’s daughter from near Turin, who, knowing nothing of India, had worked as an au pair in England and then as a flight attendant, which was when she met Rajiv, a pilot. ‘As our eyes met, I could feel my heart pounding,’ she recalled. ‘Love at first sight.’ Taking the name Sonia, she worked as a picture restorer and quickly became Indira’s favourite. ‘I don’t know much about politics,’ Rajiv said. ‘But Mummy had to be helped.’

Soon afterwards in April 1981, Indira flew to London to discuss Afghanistan with another female leader.

‘People think it strange Mrs Gandhi and I got on so well personally,’ said Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister. Gandhi, pro-Soviet socialist, and Thatcher, anti-Communist conservative, were opposites, though they had much in common, both graduates of Somerville College, Oxford, both natural commanders in war and peace, women who had succeeded in male worlds. ‘I am in no sense a feminist,’ wrote Indira, ‘but I believe in women being able to do everything.’ Thatcher agreed: ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they?’ she said. ‘And I don’t blame them.’ When Thatcher said Indira ‘had this combination of things of being both very feminine but nevertheless capable of making very tough decisions’, she could have been talking about herself. And like Indira, it took a war to make her.

On 2 April 1982, Argentina, long ruled by military dictators who had killed or ‘disappeared’ thousands of leftists over recent decades, invaded and seized a distant British possession, the Falkland Islands. Within three days, Thatcher had mustered and dispatched a task force that sailed 8,000 miles to retake the islands. When an Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, sailed into what Thatcher had declared to be an exclusion zone, she ordered its sinking, a decision that removed the Argentine navy from the battle. On 21 May, British forces landed; on 14 June, the capital fell. The operation had been a risk. Before the war, her premiership had looked doomed. Instead she had pulled off every leader’s dream: a short, victorious war. Yet she was a born war leader. ‘You can’t retake islands I’m afraid without loss of life,’ she told a schoolboy interviewer (this author) in Downing Street soon afterwards. ‘We lost 255 lives in Falklands. The Russians shot down a Korean airliner and lost 269 lives in one act.’ The victory restored confidence in her vision of British exceptionalism: ‘I don’t believe you can be over-patriotic when you stand for a country that stands for honesty, integrity, freedom, justice.’

Thatcher, née Margaret Roberts, was a Grantham grocer’s daughter who graduated from Oxford as a chemist and became a barrister. Cleverer than most of her opponents, mastering her briefs and dominating her male colleagues and rivals, she was both a radical, favouring the brashness of self-made entrepreneurs, and socially conservative. Her operatically posh accent, her bouffant blonde hairstyle, her swinging handbag became props of her theatrical regality. She prided herself on her industry and energy, surviving on just four hours’ sleep a night. ‘I was born that way, I was trained that way,’ she told this author. ‘I’ve gone on acting that way … You must be born fairly fit and then you must train yourself to work extremely hard. I’d need to sleep a lot more than I do if I made a habit of more sleep.’ Long married to a whisky-snifting golf-playing retired company director, she, like Indira, shamelessly favoured a jackanapes son.

During the 1970s, Britain had joined the European Economic Community (later the European Union), but membership had not stopped a steep spiral of decline, as unemployment soared, overmighty trade unions bullied employers, who themselves were stuck in an obsolete culture, and Irish terrorists, the Provisional IRA, launched a murderous campaign, partly funded by Qaddafi. Elected in 1979, Thatcher confronted the unions, deregulated the stock market and promoted ‘self-reliance, initiative, hard work’, a new confidence in entrepreneurial energy and a patriotic view of Britain’s democratic and imperial past: ‘In this enormous empire we tried to take the best of our law and the best of our honesty to nations we administered. It wasn’t a bad record.’ But she never saw herself as Churchillian: ‘No one can see themselves as Churchill. That would be too arrogant and conceited for words … but he saw clearly, warned clearly, acted clearly, and I try to do the same.’ If Indira was her avatar as warrior-queen, Reagan was her geopolitical partner. Reagan and Thatcher performed on a political stage dominated by television, a media that would never have worked for earlier leaders: ‘I can’t remember Churchill ever doing a TV interview,’ mused Thatcher. She and Regan mastered the medium, henceforth essential for all leaders in all systems.^*

Closely allied to Reagan, Thatcher surveyed a world that appeared to be unchangeably divided between the Soviets and the Americans; it is easy to forget that Iberian democracy was new and that half of Europe was still ruled by Leninist dictators. On 23 February 1981, a conspiracy of 200 Spanish soldiers, led by a colonel, tried to halt Spain’s advance to democracy. They attacked the Cortes (parliament), seized hostages and fired shots while officers sent tanks on to the streets of other cities, in a bid to restore Francoist dictatorship in the name of the king. After eighteen hours, at 1.15 in the morning, Juan Carlos, wearing the uniform of a captain-general, addressed the nation: ‘The Crown won’t tolerate the interruption by force of the democratic process.’ It was ‘my decisive moment and I knew what to do’, he told the author.

In the east, the Communist dictatorships were grimly permanent and sometimes still capable of murderous terror. In December 1981, Enver Hoxha unleashed a terror against his own comrades that culminated in the deaths of the prime minister and two other ministers – all thanks to a love affair between two teenagers.

Regarding himself as the sole judge of Marxist virtue, Hoxha feuded first with his Yugoslav backer Tito, then denounced Khrushchev and embraced Mao before rejecting Deng’s reforms, making a cult out of his righteous isolation and building a network of 170,000 fortifications to repel capitalistic and heretical invaders. As cultists expressed loyalty with the Hoxhaist Salute – right fist to the heart – he supervised every detail of Albanian life, backed by the ferocious Sigurimi secret police. In August that year, Hoxha’s trusted henchman Mehmet Shehu, who had been premier for twenty-seven years, was visited by his son Skender, who told his father he was in love with a pretty volleyball player, Silva Turdiu. They were going to marry. ‘Oh dear, why did you get involved with them?’ asked the premier, knowing that Silva was related to a writer who had mocked Hoxha for secret homosexuality, not least with the line ‘Glory to your ass, oh dandy!’

After suffering a heart attack, Hoxha became distrustful of Shehu, suspecting him of planning the succession of his sons. Now Hoxha and his drear wife Nexhmije crossed the street of the Block to congratulate Shehu and his wife Fiqirete in the presence of the young couple, but the dictator was seething because his permission had not been sought. Eight days later, the engagement was cancelled. ‘I called Mehmet,’ wrote Hoxha on 11 September, ‘to ask about his son’s engagement to a family teeming with war criminals, some executed, some exiled. The city is buzzing with the news. Mehmet was fully cognizant of the fact. A grave political error.’

In the tiny cabal of the Block, Hoxha toyed with his premier and family. On 17 December, Shehu was attacked at the Politburo. ‘Reflect on the criticism,’ warned Hoxha. That night, Shehu wrote a long letter to him, reflecting on their struggle against the betrayal of the ‘Iago–Khrushchev plot’ – a mix of Marxist and Shakespearean jargon – and later was found shot in his bedroom. ‘You can say Mehmet died “accidentally”,’ Hoxha wrote. It is not known if Shehu killed himself or was liquidated, but Hoxha had his wife arrested and tortured, and his son Skender shot, along with the interior and health ministers.^*

Thatcher and Reagan knew little of these secret murders in tiny, impoverished Albania, but, alarmed by Soviet gains in Angola, Afghanistan and Nicaragua and by a build-up of Soviet nuclear weapons, they intensified the competition. Atop his decaying system, Andropov worried about strikes and protests in Poland and feared that the trigger-happy cowboy Reagan planned a pre-emptive nuclear strike. ‘The US is preparing for nuclear war,’ he warned in May 1981 as a succession battle raged around Brezhnev. Andropov faced competition from a geriatric mediocrity, Konstantin Chernenko, the Silent One, who had started as a Stalinist executioner before becoming Brezhnev’s deputy, trying, noticed Gorbachev, to ‘isolate Brezhnev from any direct contact’. But in July 1982 Brezhnev telephoned Andropov: ‘Why do you think I transferred you to the Central Committee apparatus? I put you there to lead … Why don’t you act?’ At the next Politburo, Andropov seized the chair, but he was already suffering kidney failure, undergoing regular dialysis. On 10 November, when Brezhnev died in his sleep, Andropov succeeded as the tension with America mounted.

On its way to the lying-in-state, Brezhnev’s body fell through the bottom of his coffin.

THE NEHRUVIANS: THIRD GENERATION

On 15 November 1982, at Brezhnev’s traditional kitsch funeral, attended by Castro, Assad, Mengistu and Indira Gandhi, the coffin-lowering mechanics failed and the coffin fell into the grave beside the Kremlin Wall with a loud crash that caused the assembled mourners led by Vice-President Bush to struggle to conceal their laughter. It was the sound of an empire dying. Yet a sinking power is more dangerous than a rising one, and it was now that the world came close to cataclysm.

The red imperium was as atrophied as the furry arteries of Brezhnev’s successors. Andropov, disturbed by Reagan’s deployment of Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe, believed that the US president was keen on ‘unleashing nuclear war’, a hankering that ‘isn’t just irresponsible, but insane’. As he monitored NATO exercises and the increase in encrypted communication between Reagan and Thatcher, he ordered heightened vigilance and instant counter-strike.

On the night of 31 August/1 September 1983, this trigger-happiness led Soviet defences to shoot down a South Korean airliner, killing 269. Andropov mocked his ‘blockhead generals’. At midnight on 26 September, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in Air Defence Forces, was on duty in a bunker near Moscow when he was informed by satellites that a missile was approaching; Petrov questioned this since a single missile seemed unlikely. Then the system identified four more missiles, still too little for a massive American attack. Petrov believed the new computers were unreliable. While he did not have the authority to launch a counter-strike, he had seven minutes to report a missile attack to Andropov, but the ruler was incommunicado on a dialysis machine.

Petrov delayed and did not report the missile: he was right. The computers were actually reacting to a rare synchronicity of sunlight and cloud. ‘I think that this,’ said Petrov, who was not rewarded since he had revealed technical failings in a Soviet system, ‘is the closest our country has come to accidental nuclear war.’ Weeks later, Andropov believed an Anglo-American exercise with tactical nuclear weapons codenamed Able Archer 83 might cover a real attack; the generals waited in their bunkers.

Thatcher and Reagan shared a vision even if their styles were very different. Thatcher was abrasive and haughty – the Soviets called her the Iron Lady, while the French president Mitterrand admired ‘the eyes of Caligula, the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. She was certainly unafraid of confrontations with supercilious colleagues, rioting unions or Irish terrorists. On 12 October 1984, while she was staying at the Grand Hotel in Brighton for the Conservative Party conference, the IRA tried to assassinate her, blowing up the hotel. Five were killed, but Thatcher reacted with the sangfroid she shared with Indira Gandhi.

‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ said Indira, a few days later on 30 October, when she faced increasingly alarming death threats from the Sikhs of Punjab, ‘if I live or die.’ The next day, wearing an orange sari, the prime minister kissed her granddaughter Priyanka, told her grandson Rahul to be brave when she died and walked from the family residence towards her office, approaching two of her Sikh bodyguards, who reached for their guns.

The Sikh challenge was played out in her own house. Her relationship with Sanjay’s feisty widow Maneka, twenty-five, swiftly deteriorated. Maneka, a Sikh general’s daughter who aspired to succeed her husband, defied Indira’s orders to refrain from politics; Indira threw her out of the house, telling her, ‘You’re not taking anything out apart from your clothes.’ As Maneka was leaving, the two women screamed at each other and Indira tried to keep hold of her baby grandson. ‘It’s alien to Indian culture to kick your daughter-in-law out,’ Maneka declared. Indira insulted Maneka’s Sikh family – ‘You came from a different background …’

The Sikhs – some of them campaigning for an independent Sikh homeland – had already led the opposition to Indira’s emergency. Now Indira, hoping to split the Sikh Akali Dal party, promoted a Sikh leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, but she had chosen an extremist and he quickly spun out of her control, arming his followers, demanding the creation of a Sikh state and fortifying the Akal Takht, the second most holy shrine of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, while sending gangs of killers to terrorize his enemies.

On 3 June 1984, Indira ordered the army to storm the complex. The ferocious fighting that followed destroyed the Akal Takht, killing 780 militants and 400 troops. Sikhs swore vengeance against Indira, who responded, ‘India has lived a long long time – thousands of years – and my sixty-six years hardly count …’

On the morning of 31 October, as Indira walked to her office, her bodyguard Sub-Inspector Beant Singh drew his pistol and shot her five times in the stomach before urging his colleague Constable Satwant Singh to join him. Satwant Singh fired twenty-five bullets from his Sten gun into the dying Indira. Sonia Gandhi was in the bath when she heard the shots, and for a moment thought they were Diwali fireworks. Then she ran out in her dressing gown, shouting ‘Mummy!’, and knelt over Indira. Beant and Satwant surrendered. ‘I’ve done what I had to do,’ said Beant. ‘You do what you want.’ The guards killed him and shot Satwant, who survived.

On the plane back from Kolkata, Rajiv was asked to become prime minister. ‘I have no interest,’ he replied. ‘Don’t bother me.’ But he was cooler by the time he joined Sonia at the Delhi hospital. She tried to persuade her husband not to accept the prime ministership. ‘They were hugging each other and he was kissing her forehead,’ telling her, ‘It’s my duty, I have to do it.’ Sonia said he would be killed. Rajiv replied that he ‘would be killed anyway’. Such is the grinding logic of hereditary power. Heir to a family whose leadership went back to his great-grandfather if not to the police chief of the last Mughal, Rajiv was the third generation of the Nehruvians to rule the world’s greatest democracy.

Thatcher flew to Delhi. As Hindu mobs chanted ‘Blood for blood’, Rajiv lit his mother’s pyre. On the night of the murder, Hindu mobs had poured into the streets of Delhi, searching for Sikhs: 8,000 were killed, a pogrom almost justified by Rajiv who, a few days later, reflected, ‘When a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.’ Thatcher attended the cremation: ‘She looked so small.’

At home, she and Reagan watched Moscow’s cadaverous succession. ‘How am I supposed to get any place with the Russians,’ quipped Reagan, ‘if they keep dying on me?’

On 9 February 1984, Andropov died of kidney failure, encouraging Gorbachev to succeed him. Gorbachev grieved. ‘We owed him everything,’ said Raisa. But the sclerotic cabal instead chose Brezhnev’s waxen sidekick Chernenko the Silent, who spent most of his reign in sepulchral silence in hospital while the Soviet Union itself was on life support. Its flaws – economic failure, global overreach, Afghan defeat, repression and inequality – were grave but not necessarily fatal. No one predicted what was about to happen.

As Chernenko declined, Gorbachev was invited to London by Thatcher, who was studying Russian history. The two admired each other. Thatcher challenged Gorbachev about the Soviet lack of enterprise and freedom and he debated with her. Thatcher was impressed with Gorbachev’s well-cut suit and Raisa’s fashion sense – ‘the sort of thing I might have worn myself’. Afterwards Thatcher flew to Washington to tell Reagan a new era was opening: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev.’

On 10 March 1985, Chernenko succumbed and Gorbachev became general secretary, promising glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). As he wrote in his notes, he also planned to ‘exit Afghanistan’ – slowly. ‘We’ll be out in two or three years,’ he said, ‘but the result mustn’t look like a shameful defeat as if after losing so many young men [13,000 Soviet troops] we just gave up.’ Everything about him was refreshing: charming, optimistic, indefatigable, Gorbachev smiled, his eyes sparkled and he listened to ordinary people. Even the birthmark on his forehead seemed a mark of honesty. But he was a devout Leninist, studying Lenin for lessons on how to reform a modern state in a global economy. The USSR was the world’s biggest oil producer, reaching its height in 1987 just as a glut sent prices falling and the Soviet economy into shock. Abroad, he knew he had to reduce Moscow’s global expenditure and at home attack ‘the dictatorship of the bureaucracy’. To challenge the supremacy of Lenin’s Party or the Soviet state was unthinkable. Yet his confidence was overwhelming: he felt he could do it all.

First he appointed an ally, the Georgian Party secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, as his foreign minister. ‘But I’m a Georgian,’ replied Shevardnadze, ‘not a diplomat.’ Nonetheless, Gorbachev liked his fierce intelligence and ‘Oriental affability’.

Gorbachev also summoned a strapping, ebullient reformer from the Urals to be Moscow Party secretary: Boris Yeltsin. Both men were fifty-four, both the children of parents arrested by Stalin, both hard-driving, proud and vain, both craved the limelight, both had climbed the Communist Party and been appointed regional leaders by Brezhnev, yet they were opposites. Almost teetotal, Gorbachev was austere, sometimes verbose and pompous, Yeltsin was wild, obsessive, social, exuberant – and an alcoholic. Gorbachev was a literature student married to an outspoken student of philosophy, Yeltsin was an athletic engineer, a volleyball and tennis player, married to a self-effacing engineer. Yeltsin was moreover a born leader, but also impulsive, volatile, unstable and (often) inebriated, a man of appetites on a Russian scale. As a child, he had blown off some fingers playing with a grenade; now he did the same in Gorbachev’s Politburo.

Almost immediately, Gorbachev’s glasnost was challenged. On 26 April 1986, the core in No. 4 nuclear reactor at Chernobyl melted down and exploded. The catastrophe was a symbol of imminent Soviet decay – just as America reached its apogee as the unipower and its technology changed the way families everywhere lived and thought.

* They were aided by contingents from allies: Castro sent 4,000 Cubans to aid the Syrians; Bhutto sent a squadron of Pakistani fighter jets, one of which shot down an Israeli plane.

* Qaddafi proposed a pan-Arabist merger with Egypt. Rich on oil revenues, he backed Palestinian and anti-western radicals, buying arms from Moscow. ‘Qaddafi’s just a boy … they have no idea about Lenin or socialism,’ said Brezhnev to Castro. ‘What they do have is a lot of money. Simultaneously he’s a fanatical Muslim.’ ‘My impression,’ replied Castro, ‘is that he’s crazy.’ Inflating himself in a cult of personality, preaching his own Marxist–Muslim ruminations in his Green Book, living in a luxurious Bedouin tent pitched at his military headquarters, protected by female bodyguards, he sought to conquer an empire in Chad and lead a pan-African union, having himself crowned king of kings. He backed IRA and Palestinian terrorists but also funded Nelson Mandela’s ANC in South Africa. He degenerated into a radical Arab Nero, organizing terrorist atrocities such as the Lockerbie plane explosion, while murdering dissidents, ravishing young girls and grooming his son al-Saif for the succession.

* As for the Angel, Marwan served in Sadat’s office until 1976, when he retired to make a fortune, playing roles in the takeover battles for Harrods and Chelsea Football Club. His espionage was revealed much later by retired Israeli agents. On 27 June 2007, Marwan was killed, impaled on railings beneath his fifth-floor apartment in London. Egyptian potentates and intelligence chiefs attended his funeral. ‘Marwan carried out patriotic acts,’ claimed President Mubarak, implying Marwan was a double agent who had misinformed Israel. Naturally his death was blamed on Mossad, but it is likely he was liquidated by Egyptian intelligence, alarmed that he was planning an autobiography.

* But Mao allowed some of the purged to be rehabilitated: one of those was the Xi family. In 1972, the premier Zhou Enlai, who had himself survived Mao’s terror only by slavish submission, orchestrated a family union for the purged Xi Zhongxun, who had not seen his son Jinping for a decade. It was still hard for the young Xi Jinping: he was rejected seven times when he applied to join the Communist Youth League, ten times when he applied to join the Party. But finally he enrolled to study engineering in Beijing. The hell of the Cultural Revolution was almost over for the family of the future ruler of twenty-first-century China.

* When his brother and nephew demanded money to pay the presidential guard, Nguema had them killed. The nephew’s brother, Teodoro Obiang, decided to kill Nguema before he was killed: he arrested and executed him. Obiang has ruled ever since, promoting to vice-president and heir apparent his son Teodorín, who spent his Californian university days living at the Beverly Hills Hotel and running a $100 million yacht. The country has been ruled by one family since 1968.

* Indira’s husband, the editor and politician Feroze Gandhi (no relation), had died ten years earlier. It was not easy being married to Indira Nehru. For twenty years, the couple had lived with her father, Nehru. Feroze often found himself ignored, murmuring, ‘Look at me! I’m husband to Indira Nehru.’ But as a parliamentarian he was one of the first anti-corruption crusaders, a critic of corporate scandals engineered by business houses of Kolkata connected to Nehru.

* Madame Mao was reprieved, then, diagnosed with cancer, released. Before she hanged herself at the hospital in 1991, she wrote: ‘Today the revolution’s been stolen by Deng’s revisionist clique … Chairman Mao exterminated Liu Shaoqi, but not Deng, unleashing endless evils … Chairman, your student and fighter is coming to see you!’

* At the same time Deng approved another way to make China richer by reducing the population: in 1980, he enforced a One-Child Policy banning families from having more than one child and forcing an astonishing 108 million women to be sterilized and 324 million to have intrauterine devices installed. But Chinese families wanted sons more than daughters, and they used abortion and infanticide to tip the gender balance, so that by 2009, there were thirty million more boys than girls. By the time the law was abolished in 2016, the Party believed it had reduced the population by 600 million people.

* Deng was just as suspicious of Russian perfidy as Mao, telling the Americans, ‘We believe the Soviets will launch a war.’ In Cambodia, the genocidal Pol Pot, the Chinese proxy who had been groomed by Deng, clashed with the Soviet ally, Vietnam, reflecting traditional nationalist rivalries. In December 1978, when Pol Pot expelled ethnic Vietnamese and probed his neighbours, the Vietnamese drove him back into the jungles, where he survived as an isolated warlord until 1998. Deng decided to teach Vietnam (and the USSR) ‘a lesson’: in February 1979, China attacked Vietnam, but its forces were humiliated. As for Cambodia, the Vietnamese later installed a former Khmer Rouge commander, Hun Sen, who became premier. In 1991, Sihanouk returned as ‘constitutional king’, abdicating in 2004 for his son Norodom Sihamoni; but Hun Sen’s harsh autocracy would endure for almost forty years. In 2022, Hun declared that his successor was to be his son.

* Its insurgents were themselves divided between tribal allegiances and superpower backers: the mainly Matabele ZAPU led by Joshua Nkomo was backed by Russia and Cuba; the ZANU – overwhelmingly Shona – led by Robert Mugabe, was backed by China. In 1980, Rhodesia became independent under a British-negotiated deal. Mugabe was elected prime minister and, aided by his secret-police chief Emmerson Mnangagwa, slaughtered 30,000 Nbedeles in massacres known as the Gukurahundi between 1983 and 1987. The killings won Mnangagwa the nickname Ngwena – Crocodile – and established Mugabe’s dictatorship, which ruinously endured until his overthrow in 2017. His successor was the Crocodile.

* Modern spies, part old-fashioned killers, part covert bureaucrats, symbolized the mystical power of surveillance and violence controlled by the modern bureaucratic states, celebrated in the genre of spy thrillers and movies. The British version was James Bond, a debonair and sadistic killer-seducer, created by a former British banking scion and security agent, Ian Fleming, whose creation dovetailed with his own aristocratic and sado-masochistic tastes. The most successful James Bond movie, Thunderball, released in 1965, appeared at the height of the Cold War.

* The Kurds’ leader was Mustafa Barzani, the latest of the dynasty to lead their struggle. The Barzanis were Sufi sheikhs and landowners from Sulaymaniyah (Iraq). After the disappointed promise of an independent Kurdistan, Sheikh Mahmud Barzani rebelled against the British and Hashemites in Iraq and in 1923 declared himself king of Kurdistan. He was captured in 1932, and the struggle was continued by young kinsmen, Sheikh Ahmed and his brother Mustafa. During the Second World War, Barzani was backed by Stalin to carve a Kurdish republic out of western Iran, but one of the terms of Yalta was Soviet withdrawal. The republic collapsed and Barzani escaped to the Soviet Union, returning to Iraq after the fall of the monarchy. In 1971, Saddam tried to kill him, so now aged seventy he launched a new insurgency. Once again, it looked as if Kurdistan was about to be born.

* One of these, a Pashtun mullah named Jalaluddin Haqqani, created a terrorist dynasty that would play a special role over the next forty years. Haqqani was the son of a chieftain. He had studied at the Haqqania seminary in Pakistan in the 1960s, funded by the ISI, and on his return adopted the named Haqqani.

* His son, Muhammad bin Salman – future ruler of Arabia – was born in 1985 in the middle of this campaign.

* But there was a dark side to Reagan’s sunlit America: in 1981, doctors started to treat a cluster of pneumonia and skin cancer cases among gay men and drug users. Initially fear and ignorance led to wild rumours about a ‘Gay Plague’, but doctors soon realized they were facing a new disease, AIDS, passed mainly by unprotected sex, particularly anal, by contaminated syringes and also from mother to child in pregnancy. In the next forty years, it killed thirty-six million people. Initially AIDS cut a swathe through the US and European gay communities, defining the 1980s as a time of desperate suffering. In southern Africa, it spread through the entire population, exacerbated by a stigma against using condoms, and even presidents encouraged irresponsible conspiracy theories and false cures that hugely increased the death toll: over fifteen million Africans died. Although preventative education is lowering infection rates and patients now usually survive thanks to retroviral drugs, in 2011 there were 23 million people living with AIDS in Africa, where each year 1.2 million die and 1.8 million are infected. Those rates are now improving.

* Sinatra, an old friend, now a Republican, sang at his Inaugural Gala. It was now too that the FBI finally broke the power of the Mafia’s Five Families, using new legislation, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, to link the bosses of the criminal conspiracies to their soldiers. The godfathers were sentenced to over 100 years in prison.

* After the interview by this author, Mrs Thatcher decided that the interview had been ‘cheeky’ and resolved to do no more schoolboy interviews.

* When this author visited Albania, the then premier Sali Berisha, who lived in Shehu’s old house in the Block, showed him the room where Shehu was shot. ‘We still don’t know,’ he said, ‘exactly what happened.’ Soon afterwards, on 11 April 1985, Hoxha died, succeeded by a chosen disciple. His original patron and later rival Marshal Tito had died in 1980 aged eighty-seven. Even in eastern Europe the guard was changing.