The Tehran Initiative

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “What do you think?” David asked.

  “I don’t know,” Zalinsky replied. “It’s too early.”

  “But you don’t think it’s actually al Qaeda or the Brotherhood, at least not by themselves, do you?” David pressed.

  “We don’t have enough data yet.”

  “Jack, come on; this is Iran. This is being directed by the Twelfth Imam. It’s got their fingerprints all over it. The timing? The targets? The weapons? The fact that the attack happened so soon after the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist in Hamadan?”

  “Why would Iran pick a fight with us now?” Zalinsky countered. “With Israel, sure. But why hit us, our city, our leader? Why take such a risk when doing so could push the White House into going to war with Iran? It doesn’t make sense. It’s not rational.”

  “Based on whose perspective?” David asked. “Look, Jack, do you really believe the president is ever going to go to war with Iran? You hear what he’s telling the director behind the scenes. You know he doesn’t have the Pentagon developing a serious plan. You saw the advance text of the speech for the Sadat Center. He’s dreaming of peace. He still thinks he can negotiate with Iran. Now he thinks he might be able to talk with the Twelfth Imam. He barely mentioned Iran in the State of the Union address. He’s not signaling to the country that he’s about to get tough with Iran. Meanwhile, he’s cutting the defense budget in the name of deficit reduction. He’s pulling forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody believes he’s going to launch a war with Iran, least of all the Iranians.”

  “But don’t you think an assassination attempt by Iran could change the calculus, push a reluctant warrior onto a war footing after all?”

  “Not if the hit worked,” David said. “Or even if it was close.”

  “Look, David, the whole reason you’re in this thing is because the president gets it. He’s listening to the director. He’s listening to us. He signed the directive authorizing the use of ‘all means necessary’ to stop Iran’s weapons program. He’s giving us everything we asked for. Your job isn’t to make policy. Your job is executing it. Don’t forget that.”

  The line was silent for a few moments.

  “Now, you need to get back here tonight,” Zalinsky said.

  “I can’t,” David replied.

  “You have to.”

  “Jack, my mom is dying.”

  “I know, and I’m very sorry. You know how far back I go with your parents. But—”

  “No, Jack, you don’t understand,” David interrupted. “My mom slipped into a coma less than an hour ago. The doctors say she hasn’t got much time left. They don’t think she’s going to make it through the week. And my dad’s a mess. I can’t leave them. Not now.”

  “What about Azad?”

  “He’s AWOL.”

  “Then what about Saeed?”

  “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Look, David, your president was nearly assassinated in the last hour, and the Middle East is about to explode.”

  “I get it, Jack; I do. But I need more time.”

  “There is no more time.”

  “You said the president wanted to meet with us tomorrow at noon. Why can’t I fly down there tomorrow morning? I already have the ticket. That’s what my father’s expecting. Please, Jack. I need this favor.”

  “I’m sorry, David. I understand your situation, but your country is under attack. The meeting with the president is off. Honestly, I can’t even tell you at the moment if the president is alive, much less capable of a briefing. But Director Allen is ordering all of the Near East Division to be here tonight—no exceptions. He’s pushing for us to go hard after al Qaeda, and we’ve got a team drafting new options on that front. But he’s also terrified that the Israelis are going to use this assassination attempt against Naphtali to order a first strike against Iran. He wants options. He said he wants to ‘take the gloves off.’”

  David could see there was no point arguing any longer, but the pressure on him was excruciating. He was tempted to offer his resignation right then and there, but with his country under attack, that felt like a betrayal.

  “Look, David,” Zalinsky continued when David didn’t respond, “you’ve been doing amazing work. You’ve given us a new set of targets in Iran. You’ve given us a bunch of new leads. But we don’t have much time. Eva and I have some ideas, but there are gaps only you can fill.”

  Zalinsky paused for a moment, and David wondered how their colleague, Eva Fischer, was faring with her in-depth interrogations of Dr. Najjar Malik, the senior Iranian nuclear scientist whom David had helped smuggle out of Iran and into the United States along with his family. Malik was critical to the Agency’s ability to truly understand Tehran’s capabilities and intentions.

  Zalinsky cleared his throat. “Believe me, if there was another way, any other way, I wouldn’t ask you to do this. But this is why I recruited you in the first place. I think your parents would understand.”

  David wasn’t buying it. “You’re wrong, Jack. There’s nothing about this my father will understand. He’s watching the love of his life slip away from him forever. He won’t eat. He’s not taking his own medication. I’m worried he might harm himself. My brothers aren’t here. Besides, I can’t possibly get a flight to DC tonight. It’s Syracuse, not Munich.”

  “There’s already an Agency plane en route,” Zalinsky said. “It will touch down in less than an hour. There’ll be a car waiting for you when you arrive. Come to my office the moment you get in. I’ve got to go. I’ve got the director calling on the other line.”

  With that, the call went dead.

  8

  Thick, dark clouds were rolling in.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance, and lightning strikes were getting closer. The winds were picking up, and David could feel the temperature dropping steadily. Another storm was approaching, and it wasn’t safe to stay on the roof. But David couldn’t bear the thought of going back inside and telling his father he was leaving.

  He knew the Agency had invested heavily in his training. He knew that Zalinsky and Murray and Director Allen were counting on him to do everything possible to protect the people and interests of the United States from all threats, foreign and domestic, and particularly from the regime in Iran. What’s more, he had taken an oath. He had given his word to his country.

  But now his parents needed him to stay. He didn’t want to disappoint them—particularly his father—yet again. They deserved better.

  And then there was Marseille. It already felt like a lifetime ago, but he had eaten breakfast with her that very morning, after so many years, after so much history, and he still couldn’t quite believe it. Just seeing her come into the restaurant all bundled up against the late-winter chill with her red scarf and turtleneck sweater had stirred up emotions he had long tried to suppress. When he closed his eyes, he could vividly picture her, looking more like a graduate student than the elementary school teacher she had become. She had endured so much pain in the years since he had seen her last. Yet with those large green eyes and that dark brown hair pulled back in a loose braid, Marseille was more beautiful than he’d remembered or imagined, and he missed her already. It embarrassed him to admit such a thing, if only to himself, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted to talk to her again. He wanted to hear her voice. She’d invited him out to Portland, and he wanted to go. To see her again. To spend some real time with her. To see if something was possible between them. There had been a warmth in her eyes and a tenderness in her embrace that had surprised him. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t find out for certain who she really was now and what she really wanted.

  There was no time, of course, to ponder any of this, certainly not on the roof of Upstate University Hospital. But the notion of going back to his mother’s room, pulling his father aside, and telling him there was an “emergency at work” and that he needed to leave town immediately made him physically ill. What fictional emergency could he poss
ibly concoct in the next two minutes that would persuade his father he really had to leave at a time like this?

  David knew he was stalling, but he wasn’t sure what to do next. He stared down at his phone and was tempted to call Marseille, just for a moment, just to make sure she had gotten back to Portland okay. If she seemed eager—or even simply willing—to talk a little longer, well, that would be good too. And maybe a sign. At least she would know how he felt right now. She would know what to say to him. After all, she hadn’t lost only one parent; she’d lost two.

  David thought better of it and abruptly put the phone away. This was not the time or the place. He had to stay focused. He glanced at his watch and winced. He needed to be at Hancock Field in less than an hour, and he still needed to get back to his parents’ house to pack.

  He headed back downstairs. As he approached his mother’s room, he could see his father sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth in an almost-hypnotic rhythm. He wasn’t crying anymore. He was just sitting there, staring at his beloved wife, who lay in her bed motionless and hooked up to all kinds of life-support systems. The entire scene was hard to bear, but it was the vacant look in his father’s eyes that pained David most of all.

  His parents had been married for more than three decades, and they were inseparable. It seemed like nearly every kid David had grown up with had divorced parents. But throughout all of his own trials and mistakes and disappointments growing up, one thing he had always been able to count on was the deep and abiding love of his parents. Mohammad Shirazi had been born in 1952, just a year before Nasreen Vali, in adjacent towns. They had both grown up in Iran under the Shah. Theirs had been an arranged marriage, but their parents loved them and had chosen carefully and wisely. Mohammad and Nasreen had spoken their vows in the early seventies and escaped from Iran together during the Islamic Revolution of 1979, losing all of their material possessions, including a thriving medical practice, in the process. When they’d arrived in the US, they’d had to rebuild their lives from scratch, but they had done so without complaining. Mohammad had studied hard to get his American license to practice cardiology. The couple had made friends, bought a home, raised three sons, put them all through college, and lived the American dream without a handout from anyone. They were proud of that. They had done it themselves. They had done it together. They were more in love today, David was certain, than ever before, and it was clear his father couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

  Would she be lost forever? Would they ever see her again? None of them had ever taken religion seriously. Though born Shia Muslims, David’s parents had always prided themselves on their rejection of Islam. Now his mother was about to find out the truth about heaven and hell. David suddenly felt cold and scared in a way he’d never felt before. He was staring into the abyss, without a single answer, without a single shred of hope.

  Abruptly he realized his decision had become clear. He could no longer lie to his father. Whatever the consequences, David was going to tell him the truth. Not all of it. He would not betray state secrets or operational security. But his father had to know that his son worked for the Agency. He had to know David was fighting against the great evil that had driven them from their beloved land of Persia in the first place, the very evil that had cost them so dearly before and might very well cost them even more. He had to know why his son was leaving tonight. David wasn’t sure his father would believe him, but he needed to try.

  “Hey, Dad,” he whispered, poking his head in the door, “can I talk to you about something?”

  * * *

  Tehran, Iran

  Tehran was eight and a half hours ahead of central New York.

  Hamid Hosseini, Iran’s Supreme Leader and Grand Ayatollah, finished his early-morning prayers. He had been caught off guard by Javad Nouri’s predawn call informing him of the Twelfth Imam’s sudden and unexpected decision to visit Beirut rather than return directly to Iran. But who was he to question the Lord of the Age?

  Hosseini asked Allah to bless every detail of the Mahdi’s trip, to give him safety and success, and to give him the infinite wisdom needed to build the Caliphate longed for by a billion Muslims. Then he rose to his feet, left the small mosque in the palace without saying a word, made the short walk with his bodyguards back to his enormous corner office, and shut the door behind him. He planned to stay in seclusion for the next several hours.

  Pulling out an unmarked folder, he began reviewing the latest assessment from his chief of intelligence. The good news was that Iranian scientists had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and now had a small but significant stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) ranging from 95 to 98 percent purity. As a result of such efforts, design teams had finally completed building nine nuclear warheads and had tested one just two weeks previously.

  Hosseini was not a physicist, and he skimmed over much of the technical detail contained in the report. But the bottom line was clear enough. The warhead had worked perfectly. The blast yield had been extraordinary. The design they had bought years before from A. Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, had been a good investment after all. They weren’t ready to attach any of the warheads to the high-speed ballistic missiles they had built themselves or bought from the North Koreans. Indeed, the report indicated the team still felt they were many months away from perfecting a missile delivery system. But that was okay. For now, Hosseini concluded, he had what he needed. What’s more, the report promised him that within roughly another three weeks, six more warheads would be built and ready for use.

  Not all the news was good, however.

  For starters, Dr. Mohammed Saddaji, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, was dead, killed by a car bomb in Hamadan just days before. Saddaji’s death was a huge blow to the weapons program. The pioneer of Iran’s clandestine Bomb-making program, Saddaji was nearly irreplaceable. It was still unclear to Hosseini how Saddaji’s activities had been discovered by whoever had assassinated him. He had held the fairly innocuous title of deputy director of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran and had ostensibly been in charge of day-to-day operations at the Bushehr reactor, the nuclear power plant located near the Persian Gulf that was about to go online that spring after years of delays and technical complications.

  Most of Hosseini’s closest advisors were convinced that the Israelis were responsible for Saddaji’s death. The charge made for good propaganda, and the Supreme Leader encouraged them to feed those rumors to the blogosphere and the Western media. But Hosseini had a source he trusted who told him it was the Egyptians who had murdered Saddaji. What’s more, the source indicated that the order for the hit had come directly from President Abdel Ramzy. Was it true? He had no idea. How could Ramzy have found out? It did not matter. All that mattered to Hosseini was retribution, and now he had taken it.

  But there was more bad news. Saddaji’s death, the nuclear test beneath Alvand Mountain, near Hamadan, and the subsequent earthquake in the area had drawn unwanted attention. Now Hosseini’s intelligence chief believed that Facility 278, Iran’s top-secret nuclear weapons development complex, located forty kilometers west of Hamadan and built into the side of the 11,000-foot mountain, had been compromised. The site was surely being watched twenty-four hours a day by spy satellites from nearly every country possessing such technology, and most definitely the Americans and the Zionists. This was a huge problem, the report in Hosseini’s hands noted, because most of the warheads were still being housed there—not all, but most. They needed to be moved fast and without international detection. They needed to be moved into position to be used, in accordance with the Mahdi’s explicit instructions. But how?

  * * *

  Syracuse, New York

  The stunned look on his father’s face pained David.

  He hadn’t wanted to hurt his father or add to his many burdens. He hoped he had done the right thing. But as the two men sat together in silence, David’s anxieties began to grow. Was it anger he detected in his father? Disappoin
tment? Resentment? The man was hard to read.

  One thing was clear: Dr. Shirazi clearly believed his son’s story, even if David had left out a few key elements. David hadn’t shared with his father the fact that Jack Zalinsky had been the one to recruit him to join the CIA, nor that Zalinsky had been responsible for his training. He hadn’t revealed any of the operational details of his life in the CIA, like the fact that his apartment in Munich was just a front or that the name most people knew him by these days was Reza Tabrizi.

  “So how long have you been in the CIA?” Dr. Shirazi asked.

  “A few years,” David said. “I’m not allowed to say exactly.”

  “And you think Iran is behind the attack in New York today?”

  “I don’t have proof, Dad, but yes, that’s where I think the trail of evidence will eventually lead.”

  “So you’re going back into Iran tonight?”

  “Well, no, not exactly. I’m flying to DC tonight to meet my colleagues at Langley and compare notes and develop a plan. And then we’ll see.”

  “But they’re probably going to send you back into Iran?”

  David nodded, his stomach in knots, and there was another long, uncomfortable pause.

  “Dad, I’m not even sure I should stay with the Agency.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m thinking of stepping down.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to be with you and Mom. I want to help you, not leave you all alone. And honestly, I’m not sure whether I really—”