Chance and chutzpah
How a young Tribune correspondent told the world about the coronation of a new king of Afghanistan
In the following excerpt adapted for the Tribune by Ken Cuthbertson from his 2015 book “A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century” (McGillQueen’s University Press), the biographer details foreign correspondent William Shirer’s chance 1930 meetings with the king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Nadir Shah, and his son, Mohammed Zahir Khan, Afghanistan’s crown prince.
In the first week of early October 1930, the Chicago Tribune’s “man” in India was in Bombay preparing for the ocean voyage home when a chance encounter with a young Afghan man prompted him to change his travel plans. The 26-year-old, Chicago-born William L. Shirer was at a diplomatic party and there he met Mohammed Zahir Khan, the 16-year-old crown prince of Afghanistan.
A member of the Pashtun tribe, the teen spoke no Western language other than French. As a result, none of the other journalists at the gathering, most of whom were British, could talk with him. However, Shirer spoke French, and so he and the prince struck up a conversation about their mutual experiences in Paris. The young man then revealed that two days hence he was leaving for Kabul, the Afghan capital, where he planned to attend the coronation of his father as the new king of Afghanistan, a land few Americans at that time had heard of, much less visited. Shirer, ever hungry for an exclusive, smelled an opportunity.
The crown prince’s father, Mohammad Nādir Shah — also known as Nādir Khan — had seized power in 1929 and then moved to formalize his rule. When Shirer asked the prince if he could tag along with him on the trip to Kabul and attend the coronation, the young Kahn agreed, although he had pegged Shirer as being an American spy or a government agent who could help influence Washington to look favorably on the new Afghan regime. As the new king himself would later tell Shirer, “(America) is the one great country in the world which has no political interests in Afghanistan. If we can establish commercial relations with you, why not diplomatic relations? Perhaps you can mention this in Washington. I have no one there to do it.” In the 1930s, the few Afghans who had traveled to the west had no more knowledge of the United States than Americans had of Afghanistan.
There was yet another reason the Afghan prince was willing to befriend Shirer: He was eager to thumb his nose at the British, who had relinquished control over Afghanistan’s affairs in 1919. India’s colonial overlords maintained tight control over traffic through the Khyber Pass, the famous north-south land route between Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent. The British had allowed no foreign journalists to visit Afghanistan for more than two years. To skirt this travel ban, the young prince included Shirer in his “official party.”
Shirer joined the prince and his party on Oct. 8 when they boarded the Frontier Express train in Bombay bound for Peshawar. That city, the bustling capital of the northwest frontier, was the southern terminus of the camel caravans — the kafilahs, some of them several miles long — that since time immemorial had carried trade goods through the Khyber Pass.
From Peshawar, the prince’s entourage set off for Kabul in a decidedly more modern caravan made up of four automobiles and a baggage truck. As expected, the British soldiers manning the checkpoint at the southern end of the Khyber Pass tried to turn Shirer away; the British were well aware of and disapproved of his reporting on Mahatma Gandhi and of recent events in India. However, when the prince insisted his American “guest” be allowed entry, the British officer in charge had no choice but to comply.
All along the pass’s 30 miles of serpentine, rock-strewn roadway, the prince’s party came under sporadic rifle fire from hostile tribesmen who sniped at them from atop mountain ridges. On the Afghan side of the border, the prince’s caravan rendezvoused with a ragtag, but fierce-looking, contingent of Afghan troops who escorted them the rest of the way on the three-day journey to Kabul. Awaiting the prince and his party in the capital was a throng of jubilant Pashtun tribesmen and the prince’s uncle, the new prime minister. Shirer would recall how as the motorcade proceeded to the royal palace for a reception, he suddenly lost his appetite for the tea and sweets. Nādir Khan was still settling scores with his enemies, and the evidence of this was on display for all to see. “My stomach had turned a little at the sight in the great central bazaar … (of ) a dozen bodies dangling stiffly from ropes that stretched down from the roof of the dome, the heads turned slightly … a gruesome grin on the waxen faces, the hands still tied,” Shirer would write.
Exactly how tenuous was the new king’s hold on power became clear a few days later when Shirer attended a luncheon the new king gave in his Bavarian-style palace at Paghman, the Afghan summer capital, which is located in the mountains a few miles north of Kabul. The meal on this day was interrupted by a horde of enemy tribesmen. They swept down on horseback from a nearby mountain ridge, firing their rifles as they came. With bullets flying in all directions, the Royal Guard held off the attackers long enough for Nādir Shah and his guests to escape. This was William Shirer’s first time under fire, and he later admitted that he was terrified.
Apart from that incident the Tribune’s man was in little real danger during his official stay in Afghanistan; suicide bombings, improvised roadside bombs, or the barbaric kidnappings and murders of foreign visitors by Islamic fundamentalists all were still years in the future. Physically, after enduring the heat of India, Shirer felt revived by the cool mountain air. However, conditions in Kabul still were less than comfortable.
Shirer stayed at the town’s only hotel, which he claimed was the shabbiest he ever encountered in all his years of travel as a foreign correspondent. However, the grand spectacle of the coronation ceremony and the subsequent celebrations more than made up for his physical discomforts. Shirer was the only Western journalist in Kabul, although a Swiss photographer-adventurer named Walter Bosshard and an Austrian writer named Harold Lech were also present.
The trio along with a handful of other foreign guests — representatives of the British, French, Russian and Turkish governments, as well as assorted businessmen who arrived in Kabul — viewed the celebrations. Shirer, clad in a dinner jacket he borrowed from a member of the French legation, joined the new king, his family, government officials and the foreign guests as they watched an epic coronation parade. More than 20,000 motley soldiers, some mounted, some walking barefoot, took part. A few of the marchers sported uniforms, most wore traditional Afghan robes, baggy trousers and turbans. There were scores of camels and even an elephant corps.
The spectacle was theater on an epic scale. Afterward, Shirer wrote a 3,000-word dispatch describing the parade and detailing Afghanistan’s political turmoil during the kingdom’s most recent political isolation. The story was any young newspaperman’s dream since it was an “exclusive.” But Shirer faced a major problem: conveying his story to Chicago, 7,000 miles away.
There was no response when the Kabul radiotelegraph operator attempted to contact Peshawar. Shirer suspected British sabotage, and he was probably correct. So he debated, albeit only briefly, the idea of radioing his scoop directly from Kabul to Chicago at the cost of a dollar per word. Given his employer’s concerns about expenses, Shirer feared that he would be fired if he did this. Another option was to accept the help of a secretary in the Soviet legation who had offered to cable the article to Chicago via Moscow; however, Shirer knew if he did so, the Soviet Union’s Tass news agency would steal his story. Having no other real choice, he waited patiently for the Peshawar radio operator to respond to his messages, and each day he shortened his article by several hundred words. Finally on the fourth day, word came back that the dispatch, now half its original length, had been received and had been forwarded on to London for transmission to Chicago.
The Tribune published Shirer’s article on Oct. 20, 1930, as a page one exclusive under the headline “Warrior Takes Afghan Throne Amid Glitter.” When the same article was reprinted in London by the Daily Telegraph, members of the Afghan legation in the British capital initially complained that the report was false. Like the rest of the world, they learned of the latest political developments in Kabul by reading Shirer’s dispatch.
Were he still alive, Shirer doubtless would be intrigued by recent events in Afghanistan, where times and faces have changed, but the nature of events there has not.
Shirer never again visited the country, but he was well aware that in 1933 Nāder Shah fell victim to an assassin and was succeeded on the throne by his son. Zahir Khan proved his political savvy by ruling his country until July 1973, when he was deposed in a Marxist coup that abolished the monarchy. This period marked a high point in Cold War intrigues in central Asia. The Soviet Union was intent on exerting control over the region, and when the Red Army invaded in 1979 — just as the British had done a century before — the seeds of more turmoil were planted. Afghanistan further descended into the chaos and bloodshed from which it is still struggling to free itself. Twenty years of American efforts — costing more than a trillion dollars in military and foreign aid, and more than 2,400 American lives — has changed little. Afghanistan remains a troubled, violent, failed state.