Night in Tehran

by Kaplan, Philip

  It didn’t compute. Françoise had led him to Jubril, who set up the contact and the Islamists agreed to it. Jubril was a radical, but surely not this radical. Why would they kidnap an American diplomat?

  Surely Françoise hadn’t set him up?

  He started drilling Iranian names. It was an old trick: when under duress, discipline yourself by exercising your mind. He hated being tied up. He moved, trying to get comfortable. One of the thugs slapped him, hard. He felt his adrenaline, rising. Cool down, he warned himself.

  The motion of the car finally lulled him to sleep. After an hour, it might have been two, the car swerved off the highway, bounded down a dirt path, and slowed to a stop. He smelled manure; someone must have finally opened a window.

  The doors opened. He felt very much on his own.

  * * *

  —

  INSIDE WHAT HE assumed was a farmhouse, they led him to a chair at a table. He seemed to be in a kitchen, and the aroma of coffee and fresh bread revived him. He thought he smelled farm butter.

  A man quietly entered the room. “Untie him, take off that hood,” he said in a gentle voice. “We’re not barbarians.”

  The rope was removed from his wrists, then the hood, and his captors were gone. Weiseman rubbed his eyes. The quiet man was short and thin, with a trimmed, gray beard. He wore a black suit, white shirt buttoned at the neck, no tie, and black slippers with a satiny finish.

  “There was no need to bind you,” the man said. “I apologize. Everyone is high-strung.”

  “Where is Pierre?”

  “He is not here. Perhaps I’m the one you wanted to speak to. Pierre made the connection, that’s all.”

  The man spoke American English, almost without accent.

  “Where in the United States were you born?”

  “I was born in Tehran, but I’ve lived in America for many years. In Austin.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Yes, Mr. Weiseman. Iranians have names, like Americans.”

  The Iranian got up and poured him coffee, then gestured to the bread and butter on the wooden table. He took a tin of sardines from a shelf, opened it, and placed it on the table, took a seat facing Weiseman. “My name is Ali Amin,” he said. “I’m a professor of history at the University of Texas. Now, please, you’re my guest, have something to eat.”

  Weiseman was hungry; it had been a long time since he’d eaten. He watched Ali Amin cover a slice of brown bread with the sardines, and did the same.

  “Of course you’re free to go whenever you wish,” Amin said.” We’ll drive you back to Tehran. This time you’ll be treated correctly.”

  Weiseman took a bite of the bread. “We’re here now. I appreciate your hospitality. Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

  Amin gave him a quizzical look. “Are you sure your government will allow you to talk to us? We’ve tried before, you know. We’ve always been rebuffed.”

  “When you say ‘we,’ Mr. Amin, who do you mean?”

  Amin got up to refill the coffee. His posture was a bit bent over—perhaps, Weiseman thought, from seeking to serve both Iranian and American masters. Despite his outwardly calm demeanor, Amin appeared tense to Weiseman, high-strung.

  His ruminations were abruptly interrupted by a thought. Could he be one of ours?

  Trevor would certainly love to plant one of ours among the mullahs.

  “Our group opposes the Shah,” Amin spoke again. “We’re banned by the Shah, so your embassy shuns us.”

  Yes, Weiseman recalled. So Klein told me.

  “But, of course, you do more than express your opinions,” he said.

  Amin waved a hand at that. “You asked to see us, didn’t you?”

  Weiseman changed his tack. “The murder of the Iranian student. Shirin—”

  “Please, Mr. Weiseman, the Ayatollah is a holy man. We never—”

  “Mr. Amin, we’ve read the Ayatollah’s statements. His words are inflammatory, violent, viciously anti-American, the kind of things that turn a man or woman into a suicide bomber.”

  Weiseman had regained his confidence; the food helped, and being free of the bonds. Amin wanted this meeting, too, he thought, or at least someone wanted contact with the United States.

  Amin started to reply, then seemed to think better of it.

  “Yes?” Weiseman prompted.

  “We’re going to win. You must know that. Americans wait too long, they dangle their puppets until they can no longer dance for them.” Amin paused, apparently searching for a word. “Steam. Americans run out of steam; they don’t feel the rhythm of history. In China, Cuba, Vietnam—you wait till it’s too late.”

  Weiseman got up and walked to the window. It was storming outside; the cold drizzle had become a heavy spring rain pounding on the isolated farmhouse. There were no other buildings to be seen, only fields of wheat that bent over in the wind. The ride back in this weather would be treacherous.

  “Well, this American has waited too long this time,” he said to Amin’s reflection in the window.

  Amin chuckled. “Yes, the roads will be muddy,” he said. “If you wish, you can stay here. There’s a spare bedroom; you’ll have your privacy. You are my guest.”

  Weiseman stared out at the storm. He recoiled at the thought of the thugs driving him. Besides, he’d come this far.

  “I suppose there’s not much choice. And we can talk.”

  Ali Amin smiled shyly. “Yes, we can talk…if you wish…”

  * * *

  —

  HE’D BEEN ASLEEP for two hours when the thunder woke him. It was pitch-black outside, except when lightening crackled in the sky. Too tense to sleep, he threw off the blankets. The door handle turned easily and he walked down a dark corridor to the front room.

  Amin was sitting in a plump chair under a dim light fixture. “What are you reading?” Weiseman asked.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, thank you, until the storm woke me.”

  “This book, it’s our holy scriptures, the Koran. You know it?”

  “I’ve heard that your ayatollah wants to revive the caliphate.”

  Amin carefully placed the book down on a side table, removed a prayer shawl from his neck, kissed it, and laid it by the Koran. He looked curiously at Weiseman.

  “Iran is a small country, Mr. Weiseman,” he said, spreading his arms as if referring to the walls that surrounded him. “We’ve been ruled by the British, and the Shah is your puppet. Your CIA takes our oil and tells him what to do. The United States of America is the most powerful country on earth. How could we set ourselves against America?”

  How indeed? Weiseman wondered. If the Shah fell, was an accommodation with the mullahs possible? And what would that lead to?

  Amin sat there stolidly, then got up and gazed out the window. “The storm is letting up,” he said. “You’ll want to go soon.”

  “That’s all you have to say? That the storm is letting up?”

  Amin came back and sat across from him. “All right. Muslims have been divided for centuries. Shia and Sunnis, Arabs and Persians.”

  “And factions among your own people?”

  “Of course. Americans will never understand us. My Texas neighbors go to church on Sunday, then leave their religion in the pews and go about their lives all week long. For us, the Prophet is always with us. Misery as well. You resolve your differences through open debate and elections, both of which the Shah bans. You have your first amendment, we have SAVAK. I’ve been a guest in the Shah’s Evin Prison, the first circle of hell. I know what torture and terror mean.”

  There was a twitching in Ali Amin’s right cheek. He seemed not to realize it.

  “If the Shah were to go,” Weiseman asked, “what would be the Ayatollah’s role?”

  “The Ayatollah, God protect him, is seventy-five years old. He was in Evin; now he’s in exile among the infidels, in Iraq. He’s a mystic. He could not govern.”

  Could not? Weisema
n wondered at the word.

  “He would go to our holy city of Qom,” Amin went on, “to pray. He’d be revered as a saint.”

  “Then who would govern?” Weiseman asked, wondering again why they had put him with this particular representative. “What would be your policies?”

  Amin leaned across the table, a little man suddenly come to life. “We would dismantle the Shah’s dictatorship. We would dissolve the SAVAK and release all political prisoners. We’d establish a new constitutional democracy. We’d be America’s good friend in the Middle East.”

  “And we’d embrace you,” Weiseman said, equally ridiculously, watching the little man’s eyebrows rise in disbelief. He wondered if Amin actually believed what he was saying. Was he a true believer who never lets facts get in the way of his ideology? More likely, he was naïve, or being used. Or, was it all taarof? That he expected Weiseman to grasp a message the direct opposite of the words he uttered.

  Yes, perhaps that was it.

  And yet, how else was he to reach the radicals, Weiseman wondered. At least Amin knew something of America. This was a first step.

  “Will there be more murders in Paris? Will your assassins be unleashed in Tehran?”

  Amin shrugged. “I detest violence, but I don’t decide such things.”

  Weiseman understood that dodge well enough. Take my word for it, but my word doesn’t count.

  So what did this meeting amount to? Maybe an opening bid out in a remote place, unseen and unheard by others, deniable by both sides.

  As a diplomat, Weiseman had been taught to play it safe. Don’t make waves. But having escaped Germany long ago, he had learned that sometimes you had to act, to put yourself at risk. Nothing ever got done through timidity.

  “You asked me if I was able to meet with your people,” Weiseman said carefully, knowing he was embarking on a voyage that might come back to haunt him. “I can do that, discreetly. But I’d need to speak with someone with authority.”

  “I’ll inquire,” Amin said. “Then we shall wait and see.”

  “Not for long,” Weiseman said.

  It was a phrase that lingered in his mind on the slow journey back to Tehran.

  14

  RACE AGAINST TIME

  WEISEMAN DIDN’T SLEEP that night. Arriving in Tehran at midnight, he got up at 5:00 a.m., determined to set things in motion, to manipulate his assets and move Ajax Two ahead.

  He knew all too well from his childhood that often it was what you didn’t do that came back to haunt you, sometimes in blood. He’d have to work with the full array of knaves and naïfs, regional and European powers, and possible Iranian successors—pulling the strings, making sure they didn’t entangle him. He had no illusion of the difficulty of that. Or the danger. Or the compromises he’d need to make with his values.

  At 9:00 a.m., he received a call from Hanif saying that Jacques Schreiber was in town. His first thought was whether Françoise was with him. He still couldn’t reconcile it, the lovely woman and the predator. As well, he needed to know why she had led him to Jubril. Why the thugs?

  Hanif told him that Jacques had been meeting with Khomeini’s people and was now seeking an audience with the Shah. Hanif said he would tell Jacques the Shah was unavailable and would warn him to stay away from the mullahs.

  Weiseman wondered why Hanif was calling him at all? Was it some sort of warning? Did Hanif know about the meeting with Ali Amin? Had the Shah told Hanif what Weiseman had said about SAVAK?

  That evening, Alana came to the hotel with a parcel from Hannah—Xerox copies of order forms on Jacques’s letterhead: tear gas, stun guns, small arms. The customer was Hosein Hanif.

  Weiseman began to fear that the trip to Ankara had been a big con, arranged by Hanif to put him off the track while the Turks and Israelis lined up behind the Shah, and Hanif used Jacques Schreiber as a supplier of arms for the coming showdown. Yilmaz and Regev doubtless were playing their own games, pitting Hanif against the Shah, cooing pledges of loyalty to the Islamists, while hoping that Weiseman would find a way to avoid an Islamist Iran.

  Which was precisely what he was trying to do.

  Weiseman quickly scanned the parcel of arms orders—artillery, armored personnel carriers, lots of guns and ammunition—then secured them in in a safe.

  He went out into a piercing winter sun. There was no one he could fully trust, but he did need someone savvy, someone who knew Iran well and who shared his interests. He needed to call again on MI6’s man in Tehran.

  * * *

  —

  “WELL, YOU’RE QUITE RIGHT,” Ronald Sims said. “We’re in a race against time.”

  Sims had worked the Ajax project as an apprentice spy twenty-five years before. He had to know the details of how MI6 and CIA did their business after a rattled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi flew to Rome. The idea of sending the Shah off again brought a smile to Sims’s lips.

  Puffing on a Havana cigar, Sims seemed perfectly at home in the big Queen Anne chair in the safe house near the university. “Of course,” he said, “we don’t need to decide now whether he’ll return this time, or who else might get the throne. That comes later.”

  “Exactly,” Weiseman said, though they both knew this would be a one-way ticket.

  “Not too much later, though,” he added. “The Shah looks shaky. The French are ready to move. Hanif and the others are all laying plans. We could wait too long, and then—”

  Sims broke into a coughing spell; his pink cheeks now were all red. Weiseman rose to assist him, but a deep breath brought the British agent out of it. He went to a double-door cabinet where he stored his spirits, and poured them each a snifter of dry sherry. Sims tossed his down straight away, in a single swallow, and breathed deeply again.

  “Better,” he said.

  “Ajax,” Weiseman reminded him, and heard Sims cough again.

  “You know,” he said, “I convinced London to select another name for the operation. In Greek drama—Sophocles, I recall—Ajax was a buffoon who slaughtered a flock of sheep imagining them to be enemy warriors, then committed suicide.”

  “And you called it…”

  Sims stepped to a desk and unlocked it with a gold key attached to a chain affixed to his belt. He smiled and said, “Boot. We called it Boot, for what we were about to do to Mossadeq. So we could keep our man in place.”

  Our man. The Brits ousted the father, and now the son Mohammad Reza—“our man”—was about to get the boot as well.

  Sims pulled a two-page telephone/address list out of a yellow plastic folder. “These are the key people—military and intelligence circles, businessmen and intellectuals, politicians.” He picked up a felt pen and checked off several names. “Here are the ones you should see first. Yourself or your friends.” Right index finger raised. “Best not be too trusting.”

  The Brit stood and removed his jacket. He pushed back a few remaining strands of hair. Something about him with those spotted eyeglasses invited trust.

  “I’d start with a certain general; he’s called Mehdi. He’s getting on now. You’ll learn more about what happened in ‘53. And he’s still well connected with the present generals.”

  “Will you be coming with me?”

  “Oh, no, David. I don’t think so.” He refilled his glass of sherry and swallowed it down in a gulp again. “Too much history, too little power.”

  Weiseman cast his eye over the list. It was a gold mine of contacts. Apparently the special relationship remained in good working order, at least in Tehran.

  “You’ll have to get on with it,” Sims told him. “You’ll be the one upfront. We’ll work out the execution together, though. The plan.”

  “Of course,” Weiseman said, knowing he’d do no such thing.

  “Oh yes,” Sims said. An impish smile lit up his gray face. “Mustn’t tell Millicent; she’s devoted to the Shah and Farah.”

  * * *

  —

  WEISEMAN MADE THE ROUNDS, contacting the key names on Sims’s
list. He zeroed in on key business executives, army colonels and majors, and university activists to recruit the foot soldiers for his own network. The bottom-line message to all was the same: Give us an alternative to the Shah and Ayatollah. We’ll wait for your lead. And if you act, we’ll be there.

  He was cautious in exploiting their fears, restrained in validating their hatred of the Shah, careful not to press too hard. They were all at risk of ending up in Evin—as was he. Especially him, left as he was by Trevor to operate without a lifeline; he would get no more help from the American embassy than they would. So he offered hope and financial support, saying the time for action was coming soon. More often than not, it worked, and he recruited new assets.

  Throughout, he kept in touch with Hanif, telling him he was assessing the mood and scouting the political environment, while being careful to never report on individuals, and always being flattering—thus maintaining the SAVAK chief’s hope that Washington might back him after the Shah departed. It seemed to be enough, though Weiseman never failed to see the edge of suspicion in Hanif’s eyes.

  Meanwhile, Seyyed arranged for him to see a novice priest whom Mahmoud told him was alarmed by Khomeini’s fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism. Trita, not more than twenty-three years old, met him in the recesses of a seminary—his young hawklike face tense with fear, his lips pressed tightly together. He said SAVAK was on a rampage, filling the cells of Evin Prison with dissidents of all kinds. He said Hanif was after his brother, a SAVAK officer who was in hiding, gone to ground. Could Weiseman possibly help get his brother out of Iran?

  Weiseman thought Sims and MI6 could arrange it. But if Hanif found out? He thought then of his own escape from Germany…and he told the young priest he would try.

  It was time to reconnect with Trevor; he knew he mustn’t let that line of communication to his home base go cold. He phoned Trevor on the secure line, keeping his briefing on Ali Amin vague.