Letters to My Torturer

by Houshang Asadi

  After lunch, we all started joking. The Intelligence Service had set this up, right?

  Curious about her, I telephoned the Farsi desk of the BBC World Service and asked for her. A voice said: “She’s not here. Can I take a message?”

  “Yes. Will you please ask her to call me back?”

  I gave my hotel number, but I didn’t hear from her.

  And now, the photographs are here. On the arm of the chair in the interrogation room. The photographs that had been taken with the press guys, which I have kept to this day. I didn’t have a picture of the table we all sat round, but you did, Brother Hamid. Where had it come from? Then and now, I have no answer.

  There was also a picture of us entering the BBC building. Then a photograph inside Buckingham Palace with our young British guide.

  What the pictures were telling me was that I had to confess to something. Just at that moment, the sound of shuffling slippers approached and you arrived, Brother Hamid.

  “Right. Have you made up your mind?”

  I said: “Yes. Yes.”

  You said: “Have you forgotten? Woof, woof.”

  I said: “Woof, woof.”

  You said: “Don’t talk. Write.”

  You put the sheaf of papers and the biro on the arm of the chair. The paper was spotlessly white, but within a few minutes it had turned into one of the foulest documents in history. My hands were swollen so I couldn’t hold the biro properly, with my thumb and two fingers. With difficulty I rearranged the biro, gripping it in my fist, and in an illegible handwriting that sprawled across the pages, I wrote: “I am a spy for the British.”

  You picked up the paper. No, you lapped it up. You asked: “With whom did you arrange meetings in Tehran?”

  My head was spinning with dizziness. What kind of British people could I have arranged a meeting with? I blurted out, against my will: “The British ambassador.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  This one was tougher than the first. I recalled the streets around the British winter residence in the centre of Tehran, and again I blurted out recklessly: “Naderi Cafe.”

  From behind the chair, you hit my head hard with the pile of papers.

  “You are a much more seasoned agent than we had anticipated.”

  Chapter 7

  How I became a Spy for MI6

  I now understand why you were so keen on foreign embassies. When I had my heart attack, I was near the British Embassy in Paris. I was on my way to the embassy to get a visa. I dragged myself forward, passing Madeleine Church, and then collapsed in front of the British Embassy. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. If I’d had my file with me, I could have shown it to the British Embassy staff so they would realize that I had been their “spy” from some time way back before the glorious Islamic revolution. Maybe, knowing that, they wouldn’t have made me wait three years for my visa.

  And this letter is about how I turned into a spy under the onslaught of your lashes. It’s about a group of young journalists pictured laughing in a photograph. And I have been singled out to be the spy.

  My seventh letter to you, dear, lovely Brother Hamid, is full of love and heartfelt emotions. Do you remember? The day I became a British spy was wintry and romantic. Even the pigeons were cooing happily. We were on our way back from the treatment room when you started going on about poor Oriana Fallaci once again. This time you were talking about her love for a Greek guerrilla fighter. You didn’t even know his name. You had modified the love story of Alexandros Panagoulis and Oriana to suit your own purpose. You said that Oriana had been ordered to fall in love with him by the CIA. You were saying that true love is not like that. It’s about purity and kindness from the beginning to the end.

  London, early autumn 1977

  It’s a rare day of love mixed with interrogation. You ask me out of the blue: “Have you ever really fallen in love, Houshang?”

  For the first time, you call me by my first name. Up until now I have been “useless wimp” or “little lion”. I have just finished writing, “voluntarily”, that I am a spy.

  Fear is making me shiver in the wintry cold. This question hints at my wife. I am sure that you would like to leave the world of espionage and make enquiries about the people in my life. I prefer to be silent. As if reading my thoughts, you say: “By the way, good news. We have not brought in your wife. If you carry on being reasonable, there will be no need to bring her in. What would happen to her poor mother, right?”

  You are telling me between the lines that you already know everything. Then you ask: “Your marriage wasn’t an arranged one, was it?”30

  I answer: “No. My wife rejected me for years but, unfortunately, she said yes a year after the revolution.”

  “Why unfortunately? Didn’t you two love each other?”

  “Of course. But I am leaving and she will have to remain all by herself.”

  “Leaving? Nah, not that quickly. To start with, the cells in here are full of spies and putchists. Do you want me to give you a tour?”

  We pass the courtyard. You make me stand in the sun. A telephone is ringing in the distance. I can feel the sounds and warmth of life. You ask me: “Were you in love with someone else before you met your wife? Did you have a relationship with someone else?”

  The questions have a sour taste. I am worried that I will also be expected to confess to sexual perversions.

  I say: “I had normal friendships with people at university, but not the kind you are referring to. When I was very young, I was in love with my cousin but she got married.”

  “What about the people at Kayhan?”

  “Nothing. Only my wife.”

  We walk up the stairs. Enter the room. You leave and return immediately. You put something on the table.

  “Pull up your blindfold.”66

  I pull it up. There is a recording device in front of me.

  “Listen to some songs while I am away.”

  And you leave. I put on my glasses. Astonished, I switch on the recording device. Initially there’s radio noise and then the BBC’s evening programme is announced and I hear the familiar voice of a woman. Yes. That’s Sonia’s voice.

  And at exactly that moment you enter, as if you have been standing right behind me the whole time. You pick up the tape recorder and take me to the room downstairs. You put me on the bed. An ominous voice rises from the device and I don’t know whether this is a mistake or something that has been done intentionally: “Karbala, Karbala ... We are on our way ...”

  I am made to bark: “Woof, woof.”

  I bark. You laugh. You sit down beside me.

  “Woof, woof, and fuck you. I want to remind you of a love story. Her brother was one of the Fedayeen31 guys. He was arrested during a mission and later died under torture. He wasn’t the first Jewish communist. Your editor-in-chief, in his capacity as a CIA agent, brought her in to Kayhan. The chain’s links have yet to be connected. Your friendship became solid very quickly. There were even rumours that you were planning to get married. But then there was a change of plan. She moved to Her Majesty’s office and then joined the BBC. And you married someone else.”

  You were talking about Sonia, Brother Hamid. You hand me a pile of papers.

  “By the way, we might be old fashioned, yes, but we are not stupid. No spy would meet with the British ambassador at Naderi Cafe. There are quieter places. We know exactly where you were recruited.”

  You stand up.

  “Let’s see whether you can do this by the time I come back.”

  Once again I hear the ominous voice coming from the recording device. Loud. Coarse. It is replacing the whip. My mind starts working. Well, she is not in Iran anyway, and there is no danger threatening her. And I? Well, I am supposed to be a British spy. The first line of the script is written: “She recruited me for MI6.”

  When, in my messy handwriting, I confessed to being a British spy, I reassured myself that though I’d told a lie, my suffering would soon be over. I ha
dn’t realized that I’d just walked into a real intelligence trap. It’s an old saying in Iran that when the poisonous knife of the interrogator is on the prisoner’s throat, the lower the head falls, the deeper the cut.

  The first confession is the most important one.

  Incidentally, why does one assume that the interrogator has no sensitivity for the arts, no knowledge of literature, and doesn’t understand love? Does he hate humanity? Maybe he does and that’s because he is made to whip you, to handcuff you, to hang you from the ceiling, and make you eat your own shit, and in so doing he wipes from your brain the meaning of love, flowers, hope – the whole world. Once, during the Shah’s time, my interrogator was crying his heart out because his father had just died. He was in the same room where people were being beaten, and forced to repent, or in your words, where you break them and extract information from them. I couldn’t believe that an interrogator could have a father. That he could be capable of crying. That he could have a heart. Even now, I have no idea why your talk about the arts and defending the Persian script appears revolutionary to me. But it is true. The interrogator too is a human being, with a heart. He goes to a kebab shop after torturing someone and stuffs himself with kebab and onions. He burps. When he goes home at night, he hugs his children. If he is pious and holy like you, he says “Bismillah”32 before penetrating his wife.

  I am reminded of the book Death is my Trade, by Robert Merle, in which the camp guard would hold a glass of red wine in his hand and stand by the window while listening to Mozart. And inhaling the smell of a thousand burning bodies that were being turned into ashes in the ovens of the Holocaust only a few metres away from him. What about you?

  The first confession takes away your defence shield. You are standing naked, face to face with your interrogator, whom you can’t see. The interrogator in the employment of an atheist authoritarian regime is a bureaucrat. He has no personal issues with you. He is working for an administration that has employed him. He wants information. That’s all. Once you give him information, he leaves you in peace.

  But the interrogator in the employment of an ideological authoritarian regime is either himself ideological or, even worse, pretends to be ideological. He views you as a personal enemy. Usually he comes from the lower classes of society and sees in you someone who has had every privilege, or he worries that you, rather than he, will take the advantage under the new government. His ideology is intensely coloured by class consciousness. So he tries to break you. To empty you of your self. To prove that his ideology is superior. You are his personal rival, political enemy and ideological nemesis. Sooner or later, he has to break you, be it before your first or your last confession. He takes more pleasure in accusing and defaming you than in killing you. But to the bureaucrat interrogator you are simply an opponent. A human opponent. Saqi,33 a famous interrogator and torturer during the Shah’s time, was pleased when a prisoner put up resistance and proved himself a worthy opponent. He belittled those who gave in and praised individuals who were steadfast.

  For the Islamic regime’s interrogator, who is a carbon copy of the Stalinist interrogator, the prisoner was not a human being. He was dirtier than a dog. He wouldn’t touch the prisoner so as not to pollute himself. He would order you to bark “woof, woof” like a dog and then demand information.

  He would keep repeating his deep attachment to religion. That he had performed his ablution. He would not drink water without God’s agreement and Sharia permission. Each lash was considered a religious punishment. If he turned out to be wrong, he would have to answer in the world hereafter. He is not ready to risk his fate in the hereafter for worldly fortunes.

  He is very patriotic. The likes of you are serving the enemy but he’s given up his life to saving his country and to protecting the revolution from being stolen by the impure. In the religious worldview, in which everything seems to be traced back to the lower parts of the body, you are dirty and he is sacrosanct. He is pure and you are contaminated. He relies on spiritual help, you on material stuff. And such peculiarities have made him a hero and you a useless wimp, less than a fart.

  And Brother Hamid, you were so showy with your heroism. Several times when you strung me up, you asked me: “Can you take it?”

  What answer did I have? I who had no pretence or dream of heroism. Until a month ago, I had seen myself as your ally, because that was the Party’s line. We were fighting side by side against Americanled global imperialism. The “era” of capitalism was on the wane, and the sun of socialism was shining on the horizon.

  I would be silent. And you, with a voice filled with pride, would say: “I can take it for forty-eight hours. The brothers, whose faith is even stronger, can go for longer.”

  And you were not only a hero but also a true lover. Our kind of love was fake, and was for the sake of lust.

  I discovered this on those “days of kindness”, which were a thousand times more dangerous than the days of whipping and hanging handcuffed from the ceiling. Those days when you would personally take me to the treatment room. You would make sure the bandages on my feet were replaced with new ones. When the guard/doctor finished his task, you would ask solicitously: “Need anything else, little lion?”

  And you would pat me on my back. My endless toothache would not leave me but I was afraid to mention this. The fear of dentists had forever taken root in me. I am still frightened. Even now, when the needle filled with anaesthetic begins to pierce my gum and I close my eyes, I am all ears for the door. I fear someone might enter and take me away. Yes Brother Hamid, I’d rather be, as you say, a spoiled brat or as your guard says, a fart, than be a hero the way you are.

  You return very quickly, Brother Hamid. The outline of the plot has pleased you. The doomsday scenario is being prepared. It won’t put anyone in danger. It just shows that the British have influence inside the Tudeh Party. Once again you become kind, very gentle.

  You make me promises.

  You say that I have been a victim of the Tudeh Party. You say that I am no longer filthy and can serve my country. You tell me that the doors of Islamic compassion are open to me. You are not taking me back to my cell. You are personally accompanying me to the shower room. I can stay there as long as I want. You whisper to me that you are going to discuss my case with Mr Khamenei. You tell me that I will now be allowed to receive visitors. But you take me to the room downstairs, where I know that I will have to bark. You put me on the bed. I had assumed that we had finished, but then you say: “Collect your thoughts. This is just the beginning.”

  Chapter 8

  Bakhtiar’s Le Monde, Khomeini’s Sandals of Despotism

  There is a photograph of my wife, taken in Nouvelle le Chateau, that is exactly the kind of image Khomeini desired for Iran: a woman wrapped up in black, lost in a sea of men. When my wife returned from an interview with Khomeini in Nouvelle le Chateau, she cried and told me: “The boots of despotism are about to be replaced by the sandals of despotism.”

  And we journalists in Tehran were arguing with Shahpour Bakhtiar, and digging our own graves in the process.

  Tehran and Nouvelle le Chateau, winter 1979

  I got married in 1978. The black and white photographs of my wedding are the best evidence of your government’s crimes. The majority of the people in the photographs have either been imprisoned, executed, or forced to leave their country. Rahman Hatefi, who never usually appeared in photographs, but is in one from our wedding, is one of them. A year later, our people took part in a revolution, and you stole the revolution from them, Brother Hamid.

  It was winter 1979. Tehran was unusually warm and sunny. Crude political slogans were shouted openly on the streets. Iran’s last king, hovering in a helicopter above the massed people, cried and asked his companions: “What have I done to deserve this?”

  Prior to leaving the country, the Shah had appointed a new prime minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, the head of The Iran National Front.34 My wife, who was a political journalist and therefore
covered the National Front, was in regular contact with Shahpour Bakhtiar, and informed us that he was intending to invite the people in charge of the press to a meeting.

  When his invitation arrived, the Writers and Journalists’ Syndicate debated the matter, and the syndicate’s leadership agreed to send a delegation to attend the meeting to hear what he had to say. We also agreed that we would only restart the printing presses when the military men had left the newspaper offices and we had been given complete freedom of the press. Hidden behind this very specific and rigid condition was the majority view of Bakhtiar and his position. We saw him to be protecting the Shah’s interests and blocking the revolution. A revolution which, ironically, would destroy everybody in that assembly of professional Iranian journalists.

  The editors-in-chief of Kayhan, Ayandegan and Etalaat, the three largest Iranian newspapers, as well as representatives of the Writers and Journalists’ Syndicate attended the meeting. The majority of them were leftists.

  Bakhtiar arrived slightly later than the rest of us, he was measured and slightly angry. He confirmed he had taken up the post of prime minister. He claimed he wanted a free Iran with independent journalists. However, we didn’t believe him. I asked: “Which independent newspaper would you like us to follow the example of?”

  “Le Monde.”

  Bakhtiar had studied in France, like the majority of Iranian statesmen who belonged to the first generation of post-constitutional revolution. A heated discussion took place about which category of newspaper Le Monde represented. Eventually, the syndicate announced its two conditions and Bakhtiar agreed to both of them and left the meeting.

  I followed him and as he was about to enter a side room I blocked his path and introduced myself: “Deputy editor-in-chief of Kayhan and a member of the Iranian Writers’ Association.”