The Heart of Me

 I just watched a film starring Helena Bonham-Carter called "The Heart of Me" about a star-crossed love affair, betrayal, family interference and tragedies of war, things which I know very well from personal experiences.

 The male lead in the film was killed during the German bombing of London during World War 2. He was outside mid-day in the middle of a street strewn with debris from bombed buildings and there were policemen in tin hats doing their job of shepherding humans under cover. 

It was the tin hats which set me off tonight, thinking about the small collection of military paraphenalia which I brought you over the course of years and visits to you in London, Bahrain and Fort Leavenworth. One of those things was a tin hat from a former British officer's collection of WWII items he'd acquired. The man who gave it to me, now deceased, was a neighbor who lived in a flat in Dalmeny Court on Duke Street, St. James's, where I'd rented a flat while studying at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies just a 20-minute walk away.

From the U.S., I'd brought you a soldier's helmet from the Vietnam war which was from my father's collections. 

More importantly, I brought you a 3-stemmed pink glass lamp made from a giant brass shell casing from WWII which had been turned into an exquisite piece of art with a crescent moon and a woman who looked as if the artist was imprinting a Greek-goddess with a flowing gown. The casing was reported to have come from an important naval ship based in Hawaii during the war.

I'd spent the wages of a whole summer's work to buy it for you just before I left Seattle and brought it to London when I moved there in the late 1970s for graduate studies at SOAS. I had it packed and crated again in London, in Mayfair actually, by a helpful business acquaintance of your family, Mr. Moore, in late September 1980 days before I embarked on my final trip to Bahrain just a few days after Saddam Hussein attacked Iran.

Major Johnson, who designated himself as your private secretary, collected it from me and said he would see that you received it. It needed cleaning and he said he'd designate "an Indian chap" for that task. 

I suggested that it may need rewiring due to electrical current differences between the U.S. and Bahrain. My suggestion was interpreted by the good major as a hint that some "delicate wiring" may have taken place in transit at some point. I told him that I'd imagined it in a war room such as I'd seen in films with a green-felted pool or snooker table covered with maps and toy-sized military hardware and men gathered around it re-fighting WWII as you and other chaps did at Command and General Staff School in Fort Leavenworth.

You never had the kindness to acknowledge my gift to you, but you should know now, if you ever did, that every gift I gave to you was from the heart of me, starting from the biggest gift a woman has to give the man she loves.

Hindsight

Hindsight becomes even more clear with age, but photos and diaries plus education and interest provide not only clarity, but understanding, an important aid in writing a memoir.

It doesn't surprise me at my age to discover documentation appearing to show that various intelligence agencies, both British and American, had an interest in our relationship from the onset when we were teenagers of 15 and 16 to the last meeting at your office in the Ministry of Defense over 15 years later.

It did surprise me to identify some of those involved over 50 years after the fact, and I'm not referring to your uncles, whose sources you were well aware of.

Fake Coups, Phony Coups and Fictional Terrorist Operations

Past references have been made to the so-called 1981 Coup in Bahrain by many, including by newspapers, magazines and published scholars. Wikipedia has an entry. All that I have read paint the blame on Iran, which became the boogeyman after the 1979 revolution proved that a government in the Persian Gulf could be changed by the will of its people.

Of course, as you and the good Major are aware, I had and have an entirely different view from that which has prevailed in the public discourse. I discussed the event -- shortly after it occurred -- with the Major in a personal conversation at a famous and favored Chinese restaurant in Mayfair. He was rather surprised that I was aware of it, as the details of the event were, shall we say, reiterated? Those details had been closely held by those involved. Surprise!

I've been calling it the Fake Coup or the Phony Coup, here and elsewhere in public, for a good number of years while busy with daily life far away from what had been planned for me. The Fake Coup been a mere footnote in my written and unpublished work until last November. Now I'm dealing with a housing emergency and have to delay for a month or so finishing that lengthy project for publication.

However, today Google provided a translation of an important Saudi blogger's post which caught my eye and inspired this post. The translation is much more accurate and picturesque than "Fake Coup" or "Phony Coup" could ever be. Since the Interior Ministries of many countries in the world include the both police and all sorts of internal security services, it is typically Interior Ministry personnel who carry out fictional terrorist operations. The example cited today was such an operation in Tunisia carried out by the Interior Ministry, supported by Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., to justify repression during the so-called Arab Spring and deposing of Ben Ali.

Isn't that a beautiful term? "Fictional Terrorist Operations." I could just say it again and again. It better describes a fake and phony coup. If I could write a poem or song in Arabic, which I can't, but if I could, I would write one repeating that word and finding lovely rhymes to accentuate the irony.

It would be no surprise that the family ruling a small island country like Bahrain would use the services of both Interior and Defense ministries in 1981, along with a wee bit of help from some special friends, to carry out a fictional terrorist operation. The surprise is that a detailed and well-wrought cover-up worked, so far, but apparently you were unaware of the identities of all the special friends.