Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

by Hakakian, Roya

  “According to source C, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the assassinations of some five hundred Iranians, mostly opposition members, but also artists, comedians . . . you name it! A few of these folks were killed while he was living. After his death, the Committee for Special Operations took over to finish off the rest. The killers are always highly rewarded. I’ve got thirteen names of individuals who have committed crimes in Europe or elsewhere, returned to Iran, and are now in government as ministers and legislators. Such is the nature of the men the world community wants to do diplomacy with.”

  The attorneys for the accused did not challenge Banisadr, who had proved affecting and knowledgeable—not wishing to prolong his presence in court. Instead, they hoped to undo his testimony by challenging his sources. At the end of the second day of testimony, they requested that the sources themselves be subpoenaed so the court could hear directly from them. Judge Kubsch turned to the witness. Banisadr contemplated the matter for a few moments, then said that if the judge would guarantee anonymity, his best source would testify in a closed court. The judge assured the former president by citing all the previous cases where his court had made such provisions for special witnesses.

  At recess, Banisadr handed a tightly folded piece of paper to Judge Kubsch, who passed it to Bruno Jost. Jost unfolded it to find a single name, the password to the mystery called C.

  • • •

  It was not difficult to establish the bona fides of a defector as high ranking as Messbahi. German intelligence agencies had monitored him for years. What preyed on the mind of the prosecutor, who had shepherded the case for four years, was whether he could rely on Messbahi as a witness. Dealing with defectors was a dubious affair. Jost could not be certain that the sudden escape of such a senior operative was not another ploy designed by Minister Fallahian to infiltrate the trial. He knew enough key witnesses who had undone years of judicial work by changing their testimony on the stand. Truth was not what Jost feared. He feared only deception—falling prey to a scheme and discovering only too late that the witness had been a pawn. Jost would not gamble his reputation or the case over the fairy tale of a witness who could lead him to an even greater victory. His ambitions had never surpassed his reason.

  But also for the sake of the case, he could not help hoping Messbahi was true. He wished for some evidence to show Messbahi would be a reliable witness, for a sign, however small, to prove he was no longer loyal to the same bosses.

  Truckicide, in the vernacular of Iranian intelligence operatives, is the act or instance of killing the enemy, i.e., an opposition member, singer, writer, or any unpleasant element, by any of various heavy motor vehicles designed for carrying or pulling loads.

  18

  “Hadi Khorsandi walks because of me. He breathes because of me. I’m the reason he’s alive,” Messbahi told the former president—his voice tinged with a passion that survived the poor long-distance transmission between Islamabad and Paris. The revelation came in response to the former president’s toughest and most frank question.

  “What’s to prove that you, Mr. Messbahi, aren’t another killer just like all the rest of them at the ministry?”

  The story Messbahi told was the best defense of his innocence. In summer 1984, when he was the intelligence chief posted in Western Europe, a visitor from Tehran came to see him. The man had come to personally deliver a missive engraved with the imprint of the Ayatollah’s ring. It read:

  In the name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful

  Because of insulting the prophet of Islam, blessed be he and all his kin, Hadi Khorsandi must hereby be executed.

  Stamped: Ruhollah Khomeini

  The letter stunned Messbahi. He did not lift his eyes from the page, lest they betray his disgust to its messenger. He was a fan of Khorsandi’s, Iran’s foremost humorist. A mostly apolitical satirist under the Shah, Khorsaudi had been radicalized by the rise of the Ayatollah to power, sparing neither the mullahs nor their opposition, or the servile press that aired their propaganda. He had lived in exile since 1981 and had dedicated himself to deriding the clergy, whose talk of God, piety, good and evil, and the inner workings of heaven and hell had become a boundless reservoir of material to him. Islam was his new muse, and the Prophet Muhammad the subject of his creative obsession. From his London apartment, he channeled his bitterness into scathing parodies on Shiism—into poems, essays, cartoons, and short stories—that he wrote, edited, and printed in his own weekly, Asghar Agha. A close associate of the Ayatollah’s spotted one particular joke mocking the Prophet Muhammad and brought it to the Ayatollah’s attention. Thus had come the fatwa. There had been other assassinations in Europe, but Messbahi had never been asked to oversee them. This particular fatwa was an exception. Perhaps it was a test.

  Messbahi, however devious or flawed, was not a killer. No matter how high he rose in the ranks of spookery, he was, and would always remain, his father’s son. Years ago, when the old man learned of his son’s profession, he issued an ultimatum to him.

  “I’d have much rather you’d chosen a different line of work. But if this is what you must do, I tell you now: you can wash away every stain but blood. If your hands are ever stained with the blood of another, I won’t call you son again.”

  To the envoy who had delivered the letter, Messbahi showed no signs of trepidation. Did Messbahi need men, money, weapons, or whatever else the operation might require? the envoy inquired. Messbahi only thanked him and said that he had all he needed. All, he had repeated emphatically, as he thought of the one thing he did not have, the one thing the envoy could never supply him—the will to kill.

  Since Messbahi could not openly disobey his orders, he devised a scheme to execute and botch the operation at the same time. First, he assembled a hit squad made up of several Algerian Islamists, for whom he translated the fatwa from its original Persian into French. Then he invented a code name to use instead of the satirist’s real name, in conversation and correspondence (the code was Harandi, the name of Iran’s chess champion, whom Khorsandi greatly admired). In the days that followed, they monitored the satirist and took photos of him, his neighborhood, and his residence. They studied him long enough to learn his daily routines, including the time of day he left his apartment to take a solitary stroll every morning.

  One day before the operation, Messbahi sent a message to the envoy in Tehran.

  “The celebration is set for tomorrow.”

  The response came. “Celebrate away! Have a good time!”

  The same day, he traveled to Vienna to distance himself from what was to come. There, hours before the attack, he walked into an indistinct phone booth and made an anonymous call to British intelligence.

  “Tomorrow, around six o’clock in the morning, two heavyset Algerians will walk along the avenue where the Iranian exile Khorsandi lives. They plan to kill him when he leaves his home for a stroll at eight.”

  The British acted on the tip and ordered the Khorsandis to vacate their residence. Shortly thereafter, the men who fit Messbahi’s description began to prowl the block. By eight o’clock they had been arrested.

  Jost, who had already heard the British account of that attempt was pleased to find that it corroborated the defector’s story to the former president. Indeed, an anonymous call had led to the arrest of seven men and their cache of weapons. Jost told Banisadr of his wish to speak with the defector. He would do everything in his power to ensure his safety if he were to testify in court. He would appear as a secret witness in a closed session, or could enter into a witness protection program if he testified openly. Getting him to Berlin, he regretted to admit, was beyond his legal reach.

  • • •

  One September morning, many weeks and two dozen hotels later, Messbahi checked out of his room in Islamabad for the last time. He was headed for Karachi. After several grueling inquisitions, former president Banisadr had finally judged Messbahi genuine and resolved to help him. At last, he was leaving with the essentials he did no
t have when he had first entered Pakistan: a passport and a visa to Europe—two things the former president arranged in exchange for his testimony at the trial in Berlin.

  For the moment, he was a Swede, the proof of which he patted in his shirt pocket every few minutes. His photo had been forged in a Swedish passport above another’s name. Through years of living undercover, Messbahi had come to think of names as seasons and he was always prepared for their inevitable change. He relished each new title and treasured his cache of identification cards. Still, his new passport was an oddity. Above the strange name, his own recent photo seemed even stranger. He marveled at it as if it belonged to someone else. For most of his adult life, his face had been eclipsed by a full black beard, giving him a coarse and unfeeling appearance. What the beard had not covered, his oversized black-framed glasses had. But in Pakistan, he dispensed with the glasses and shaved his face clean. His once massive portrait shrank into an almost diminutive one, exposing a beauty mark he had nearly forgotten on his left cheek. Suddenly, the former senior intelligence agent looked almost sweet, like a freshly picked fruit en route to the airport to be shipped to more agreeable climates.

  • • •

  The customs officer at the Karachi airport flipped through the pages of the dubious passport. Then, looking Messbahi up and down several times, he asked with a bureaucratic grimace, “When did you come to Pakistan?”

  “In late March.”

  “So where’s your entry stamp?”

  “Gracious! Is it not there?”

  The officer cast a knowing glance at him and shook his head. He leafed through the pages again and asked a second question.

  “So where’s the rest of you?”

  “What do you mean?” Messbahi asked with a smile.

  “It says in here you’re 176 centimeters tall,” the officer said, looking down at him. He knitted his brows and asked, his voice full of sarcasm, “Pray tell, are you 176 centimeters?”

  Messbahi, who stood at only 164 centimeters, reached into his pocket and, keeping his breezy tone, apologized.

  “What was I thinking? Of course, it’s here. Right here!”

  He pulled out two one-thousand-rupee bills and slipped them into the officer’s hand. The officer dropped his gaze at the notes. Then, seeming unmoved, he ordered, “Arrest him!”

  An underling walked up to Messbahi. Dressed in an ill-fitting uniform, he pointed to a chair. Messbahi plopped into it. For the next few minutes, the elder kept examining the passport while the younger stood guard over the implausible Swede. Messbahi, growing anxious, reached into his pocket once again. This time he pulled out a much heftier wad in a silver clip. He extended it, a sum of $2,550, to the younger officer, who passed it to his superior. He scanned the wad and resumed.

  “Is this all you’ve got?”

  “Search me all you want. This is everything.”

  “Five thousand is what will get you past this border.”

  Messbahi raised his hand, asking permission to get out of his chair. He leaned into him and whispered in a tone of resignation.

  “You see, brother, this is what I’ve got. Either you want it or you don’t. You can demand a million, but I don’t have a single coin left on me. Take this, or take me into custody.”

  The officer disappeared into a room. His underling watched over Messbahi, who had begun muttering a prayer under his breath. The boarding call for his flight was blaring through the terminal when the superior reappeared. He waved the detainee to approach him and asked in a murmur, “If this is all you’ve got, how are you going to make it out of the airport when you get there?”

  “I always put my trust in Imam Ali. He’ll see me through,” replied Messbahi and went on praying, more audibly than before.

  “You, Shiia?” The officer smiled a genuine smile for the first time.

  Messbahi nodded without interrupting his prayer. The officer pulled a fifty-dollar bill from the bundle and tucked it into the fold of the passport, which now bore an exit stamp. Pressing it into Messbahi’s hand, he whispered in his ear, “Godspeed, brother!”

  • • •

  By early fall, Witness C was no longer the intangible object of the court’s curiosity. Before stunned spectators, Agent Messbahi, the most senior intelligence operative ever to defect from Iran’s ministry of intelligence, took the stand in several sessions from October till the following February. Known to foreign and secret service officials alike, he was the kind of witness the prosecutors dream of. He was so credible that even Iran’s embassy in Bonn could only turn over a few minor embezzlement charges against him. Though his testimony came on the heels of dozens of other witnesses, he mesmerized the court with his knowledge. Each of his measured and unsentimental responses, full of byzantine details about the characters and their circumstances, gave his statements an arresting authenticity. What so many exiles had pleaded before the judges to no avail, what President Banisadr had tried to convince the court of through the force of his celebrity, Messbahi methodically reasoned like a mathematician, yet without abstraction. So intensely focused was the exacting witness on the stand that he frequently needed to take a break. His head pounded with the pressure he put himself under to remember, and to do so with precision.

  Even the defendants, especially Darabi, in whose address book Messbahi’s phone number had been found, hung their heads in disbelief and kept mum. As for Hamid, Shohreh, and Parviz, they, too, were silent, though a mischievous glance or two betrayed the happy clamor within them. The testimony of the defector lifted them. With tangible facts, the witness filled in the outlines of what they had long intuited. He gave them the unforgettable image of the truth, in one exchange above all.

  “Mr. Messbahi, you say that the Committee for Special Operations orders and oversees assassinations. Could you say who they are?” Judge Kubsch asked.

  “It’s a small group made up of the Supreme Leader, the president, the foreign minister, the minister of intelligence, and the chief of the Revolutionary Guards.”

  “Are these ad hoc meetings or do they take place regularly?”

  “They are quite a ritual, convening relatively regularly and always in the same place.”

  “Where?”

  “In one of the former Shah’s residences, called the Turquoise Palace.”

  Tehran was reeling from the groundbreaking testimony. At a Friday prayer, President Rafsanjani threatened to expose what he claimed to be a “secret dossier” on Germany.

  “We’ll file a complaint against companies like Siemens for not completing work on our nuclear plant. And that will just be the beginning.”

  The head of Iran’s judiciary issued a statement accusing Germany of violating the international rules of neutrality. Iran’s foreign minister, in one of several press appearances, assailed their ally.

  “We stand ready to sign a contract worth twenty-five billion with the Germans, if only they could stop letting themselves be manipulated by the Israelis and the Americans. What more could the Germans want? We’ve given them a foothold in the Gulf, Central Asia, and the Middle East against the Americans and in return, they put on this Mykonos mockery.”

  Germany’s ambassador to Tehran was summoned to the foreign ministry and warned that his administration would be held accountable for the accusations the federal prosecutor had mounted against Iran’s leadership. Angry pro-Tehran protesters swarmed the gates of the German embassy demanding an apology, threatening to bring on what other irate protesters had at the American embassy twenty years earlier. The residence of the German cultural attaché was raided by members of the Revolutionary Guards at a dinner in honor of several prominent Iranian writers and intellectuals. The Guards charged in, took films of the alcoholic beverages on the tables, rounded up the guests, and hauled them away to prison on charges of “illegal contacts with foreign elements.”

  Other arrests and detentions followed as the trial’s final days loomed. Tehran had abandoned secret attempts at subverting the trial. In desper
ation, the regime had resorted to blatant brutality against German citizens working in Iran or secular writers and intellectuals. A German businessman was charged with rape and put on death row. The editor in chief of a popular literary monthly, en route to Germany, was snatched on the tarmac by Fallahian’s men, while for weeks Tehran accused Bonn of his kidnapping. Still, the court’s work continued.

  On February 14, 1997, the trial’s closing procedures began. The charges against Aziz were dropped, as his guilt had not been proven to the court beyond the shadow of doubt. The attorneys for the accused once again asked to postpone the closing until they had received a draft of the federal prosecutor’s final statement. This time, Jost did not wait for Judge Kubsch. He announced with uncharacteristic firmness that he would not turn a single page over to anyone at any cost, and returned, with a resolute countenance, to his seat, surprising the court, even himself, with the outburst, which had been four years in the making.

  For the next three days, the prosecution presented its closing statement. Citing the testimony of Messbahi, the prose cutor implicated Iran’s leadership. When Jost rested, one of the attorneys for the accused attempted a rebuttal by offering to present yet several new witnesses, but Darabi interrupted. He rose to his feet and spoke, this time with a somber tone.

  “No! I don’t want anyone to make any statements for me. I’ll make my own statement. Let’s face it, I’m the one who’s been used.”

  Requesting the help of the best translator in court Darabi, with Zamankhan at his side, drafted a twenty-seven-page letter in his own defense. For the first time, defeat tinged the defendant’s voice. For the first time, he alluded to his own bad fortune, to having been used as a pawn. To those who had waited years to hear from him, used was itself a confession. He painted himself as an unknowing party to a crime others had committed.

  “I didn’t know what I was getting into when I first got involved with these men here. I knew nothing of what they had planned. Imagine a friend asking for the key to your car, saying he wants to go to the post office to pick up a big heavy parcel. Then you hear on the evening news that this friend has used your car to rob a bank. Are you to blame for the robbery if all you had done was to lend your car for what you thought was a good deed? This is my problem! First, the prosecutor built a case against me based on the lies of Yousef Amin. Then the members of the opposition in this audience poisoned this court against me. That fellow,” he pointed at Hamid, “over there, and all sorts of others, with their television friends and CNN crews and former presidents in tow, used this opportunity to trash me just because I’m ideologically opposed to them. But my being ideologically different from them doesn’t make me a murderer.”