It was from here that the mystic-militant order of the Assassins had emerged in 1090. Little remained of the original citadel, just a jagged gray rock slung low on the landscape. We reached it after passing through a village and crossing a nearly dry stream. As we climbed the citadel’s steps, I told Arash what a shame it was that he hadn’t read The Da Vinci Code yet. We’d made this stop at my behest: I was immersed in the novel and enthralled with the Templars and the Crusades. This fascination now filled my evenings, and I stayed up late reading books of Templar history and watching films like Kingdom of Heaven, which made the religious conflict at the heart of the Crusades seem like a page out of the day’s newspapers.
The Assassins’ story runs as a fascinating subplot through the history of those times. They were best known for striking poisoned daggers into the hearts of viziers, kings, and others they viewed as impious usurpers. Though the Assassins are notorious for targeting Crusaders, they directed most of their strikes against the Muslim elites—viziers and sultans who, in the Assassins’ eyes, had strayed from the true faith and condemned the doctrine of the Ismailis, the Islamic sect founded by Hassan-e Sabbah, to which they belonged. One reason the Assassin legend has endured throughout the ages, capturing even the modern imagination in novels like The Da Vinci Code, is the lore surrounding Alamut itself, their fabled castle-citadel. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, described breathlessly the “largest and most beautiful garden ever seen … [containing] palaces the most elegant that can be imagined and … conduits, flowing freely with wine and milk and honey and water.”
We ate our bread and cheese on the dusty steps, our conversation interspersed with contemplative silences. My eyes roamed across the distant valleys, and I thought about the Assassins. In reporting on Islamic militant groups and the Islamic Republic, inevitably I wrote and contributed to stories about the roots of violence in the Middle East. Did the Koran sanction assassination and suicide bombing? Did Shiism somehow make special allowances for the use of terror as a po liti cal weapon? Though the Assassins had disappeared in the thirteenth century, many journalists and Middle East experts drew a neat arc between the era of the Assassins and the present, arguing that modern militancy—manifested in groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hez bol lah, and even states like the Iranian Islamic Republic—descended from the Assassins. This was lazy logic, a shortcut way of explaining complex political problems. It did not help explain why the streets of Tehran today bore the names of famous assassins (from the man who killed Anwar Sadat, to an Iranian cleric who targeted secular statesmen and historians). Nor would it help one understand the motivations of men and women today who bombed shopping malls and buses. This had never been more evident to me as that afternoon, sitting amid the ruins of Alamut.
The uneven stone ledges and crumbling dirt slopes reaching up to the citadel’s peak evoked nothing of the castle’s twelfth-century splendor. But I could see the genius in the castle’s position: it afforded panoramic views of the snowcapped mountains in the distance and the mossy valleys below, but was neatly enclosed and made easily defensible by the rock’s steep face. As the afternoon grew cool, we began making our way down, our grapes still requiring transport to Arash’s family home in Lavasan.
Lavasan had previously been a village outside Tehran, but it was becoming a full-fledged town where middle-class and wealthy Iranians could escape the toxic pollution and traffic of the city. The house was built of red brick from Tabriz and was situated on acres of apricot, walnut, cherry, and willow orchards. The next day we would begin crushing the grapes, but that evening we sprawled out on the Persian-carpeted terrace, staring up at the stars in the summer sky and listening to the frogs croak. “Did you know eighty-six different varieties of grape grow in Iran?” Arash asked lazily, not really expecting a reply. Too worn out from the day’s journeys to play backgammon, explore the gardens, or undertake any of the other pursuits that usually filled our idle time in Lavasan, we drifted off to sleep outside, dreaming of castle strongholds, daggers at the bedsides of sultans, and other twelfth-century manifestations of what the mullah I had interviewed called “our historical compulsion to seek justice.”
CHAPTER 6
The View from Dubai
Not long after our wine-making adventure, sometime in August, something very peculiar happened. While visiting a well-known jewelry store on Jordan Street, I decided, on a whim, to buy my mother a ring. The purchase being unplanned, I did not have enough cash on me; like most stores in Iran, the shop did not accept credit cards. I asked them to hold the ring while I phoned my aunt to see if she had enough cash in the house. She did not, but said a close family friend had an errand to run near Jordan Street and could probably pick it up for me. The friend stopped at the jewelry store and purchased my ring, for which I promptly repaid him. The next day, the jeweler called him and asked him to return to the store. When asked why, the jeweler only said elliptically, “Some gentlemen would like to speak to you.” These “gentlemen” met him in the jeweler’s private office and introduced themselves as security agents. They began interrogating him as to the nature of our association; why was he buying me jewelry? He explained. They demanded to know how I could afford such expensive gifts. The ring was not, in point of fact, particularly expensive for someone who earned an American dollar salary. But the friend felt this was not a tactful thing to say, and instead noted that I had worked for many years and likely had savings I could draw upon. Wondering whether the agents had been Mr. X and his colleague, I asked the friend to describe them. His vague account could have applied to half the men in Iran under fifty, so there was no way to know for certain. I might have confronted Mr. X directly, but this could easily backfire. When it came to Mr. X, it was always a matter of staying one step ahead in the dance. If he had not been responsible, he would suggest trying to find out which security body had sent the agents, and perhaps he would report back that they belonged to the scary, shadowy intelligence branch of the judiciary. He might tell me that they were also monitoring me, and that I had best cooperate more fully with him, so that he could protect me against this more nefarious, independent security cell. All this might be absolutely true, or a pack of lies. I would have no way of knowing, but would be beholden to him nonetheless for acting on my behalf. By not telling him, I risked losing his protection against a sinister arm of another branch of government. But how meaningful was the protection of one questionable institution against another? Not very, I reasoned; probably I was better off saying nothing to Mr. X, and maintaining my current position in our fraught relationship. I deliberated telling Arash, and decided not to say anything to him, either. Unaccustomed to the creeping presence of state agents in his life, he would worry too much.
I called Mr. X the next day to discuss another matter.
“I thought you might like to know that I am being criticized by Iranian émigrés in Los Angeles for my latest article,” I told him.
Often my work inspired the squawks and condemnation of Iranian exiles in California, mainly those who were badly out of touch with daily life in Iran and ascribed their own beliefs to a distant people with other concerns. These armchair revolutionaries believed, for example, that Iranians should rise up immediately and overthrow the mullah regime (they would applaud from Beverly Hills), reinstall the Pahlavi monarchy, and embrace the United States. When my reporting intruded on these fantasies, when I wrote about how the United States had lost political capital in Iran after the botched invasion of Iraq, they sniped that I had become an apologist for the authorities, a traitor. They had castigated me on Persian radio call-in shows, and in person at lectures. Many of them despised Shirin khanoum, the country’s only Nobel laureate, for pursuing change within the confines of the regime. This made her a great nuisance to them, as a symbol of peaceful change from within. Her vast popularity hindered their calls for a U.S. military ousting of the mullahs. Our association had further blackened me in their estimation. My mother had friends among these out-of-touch mo
narchists, and they often called her to complain about my stories. I used these grievances to boost my position with Mr. X. It was important that he and his superiors realize that while my reporting might appear insulting or unwelcome from their vantage, it registered among some as regime propaganda.
“That is very interesting. What has been said?” Tales of my persecution at the hands of the L.A. exiles always fascinated Mr. X. He liked to hear about how they reconciled their black-and-white views of the government’s repressiveness with its tolerance for my critical stories and a book that disparaged its rule. “Did they ask how you can come and go, even after the publication of your book?”
Though Mr. X appeared to enjoy these exchanges, even seemed to appreciate the fact that tolerating me enhanced the government’s image abroad, I could not measure whether I was seeing signs of his private opinion or a reflection of the government’s practicality. Despite his job as a security agent, Mr. X seemed to view Iranian society with level-headed reason. He had fought in the Iran-Iraq War, and like many veterans had experienced firsthand the government’s fickleness and the hollowness of its ideology. The regime embraced the soldiers who fought in the war, as long as it required their sacrifice, glorifying martyrdom and the “sacred defense” of nation. But as memories of the conflict faded, so too did the regime’s dedication to its veterans. The special privileges they had once enjoyed throughout the system, from loans, to government posts, to special access to university, slowly dried up. Their loyalty to the state faded, a sense of betrayal set in, and many became fiercely critical, able to see the regime’s failings with special acuity. Often I noticed such perceptiveness in Mr. X’s conversation, when he derided the bureaucratic inefficiency of government offices and the corruption that had grown rampant throughout the system.
Mr. X was the final link in a chain that included the head of domestic security and the minister of intelligence. My attempts to describe him and the nature of our interactions to Arash had made me realize how much about Mr. X still eluded me. Though in his effect on my life it was only he who mattered, he represented more than just one agent’s opinion. Sorting through his allusions, his vague administrative language, his metaphors, to deduce what that opinion actually was, though, was often beyond me. On some days, Mr. X seemed to me a prudent, insightful functionary, trying to nudge a dictatorship toward openness. On other days, he seemed a narrow-minded bully.
Perhaps it was a touch morbid to follow the deathbed vicissitudes of a perfect stranger with such avidity, but Akbar Ganji was a dissident on hunger strike and would have appreciated the attention—or so we told ourselves. Over two months had passed since he had launched his strike in late May, in protest against his imprisonment.
“How is Ganji?” my friend Lily asked most afternoons, as we quietly sipped tea in her book-lined living room. Often I had updates: today he refused his intravenous feeding tube; his doctors are warning his kidneys will fail within the week; the state hospital has threatened to operate on his arthritic knee. These developments cast a pall over that summer, especially because it seemed we were the only ones who cared, or, for that matter, who knew. Independent newspapers had been tacitly warned to avoid coverage of Ganji and his hunger strike. But I suspected that even had that not been the case, few Iranians would have paid much attention, so disenchanted were they with poli tics, the reform movement, and its symbols.
Shirin khanoum was serving as Ganji’s lawyer, and as we met frequently to complete her book, her anxiety about his condition infected me until I, too, began to feel that his health somehow embodied that of the nation. As the country’s most important political prisoner, Ganji had served five years and three months of the six-year sentence he received in 2000, his punishment for articles linking powerful officials to the murders of dozens of intellectuals in the mid- to late 1990s. I met him once, back in 2000, before he went to prison, and we were mobbed on the street in Haft-e Tir Square, for in those days, back when Iranians cared about politics, Ganji was like a pop star. His book on the murders, whose title might be translated as Dark House of Ghosts, was a best-seller, and its success profoundly shook the Islamic Republic, in a manner not unlike the Watergate scandal.
Ganji was a repentant former revolutionary; his conversion into a modern-day democrat was an intellectual journey to which most Iranians, who once had supported the revolution but had been disappointed by its slide into authoritarianism, could relate. Despite having spent the last five years languishing in prison, Ganji had kept himself at the intellectual and tactical forefront of the drive for change. He published a taboo-shattering book calling for a full separation of mosque and state, and was the first to declare publicly that Islamic reform was yesterday’s debate, that the reign of the ayatollahs must give way to representative democracy. The establishment, of course, detested him, for he was the most legitimate voice to call the entire system into question.
The letter he released that week from his sickbed, relayed over the Internet, had shocked me with its boldness. “Mr. Khamenei must go,” it read, evoking memories of the last time an opposition figure uttered such a call, back when the Ayatollah Khomeini from his distant exile in Paris declared “The Shah must go!” That same week, the authorities transferred Ganji to a state hospital, where they proclaimed they would operate on his arthritic knee, despite the wishes of his family. Given his badly emaciated state, and the certain wish of the establishment to do away with him, it seemed plausible he might die of “complications” in surgery. Two days prior, Shirin khanoum had attempted to visit him in the hospital, and a hard-line newspaper accused her of conspiring to kill him (her own client!) to stain the reputation of the Islamic Republic.
I saw her just after the newspaper story came out, and in the nervous tension of those days I noticed again the physical toll her work was taking on her. The stress had drained her face of all its color, exacerbated her high blood pressure, and caused pinched nerves in her neck and wrists. Some afternoons, as she whispered into her cell phone and disappeared into her office with colleagues, she seemed almost to wither under the force of her worries, as though the ugliness of what she confronted each day was somehow collapsing her diminutive frame.
“They haven’t asked you anything about me, have they?” she asked, referring to the agents of the Ministry of Intelligence. Everyone in Iran whose profession made them relevant to the security-obsessed regime—professors, writers, translators, musicians, journalists, and people in a plethora of other seemingly benign trades—was preoccupied with the question of who might be disclosing information about them to the authorities. At times, this could produce an almost Soviet atmosphere that tainted friendships and families, making people distrust one another—which was, in all likelihood, the whole point.
In fact, Mr. X had asked me about Shirin during our last meeting.
“Yes,” I replied truthfully. “They wanted to know if you were scared.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them you seemed to be handling things very professionally.” It occurred to me that I had also told Mr. X that she didn’t scare easily. But now, sitting before her, I wondered whether she would have appreciated that; perhaps she would have preferred that I say she did not scare at all. At such moments, I resented the trickiness of working in such a political environment, where despite the best of intentions you were forced to compromise yourself.
Shirin’s nervousness, and the urgency with which she spoke of Ganji and the importance of his strike, touched me. It struck me how fortunate Iranians were to have such people struggling on their behalf, and how regrettable it was that they could not pay more attention. I decided to write about Ganji, an opinion piece that would let me talk about all these feelings with as much un-objective emotion as I wished. An editor at the Los Angeles Times, my old employer, agreed enthusiastically to the proposal.
I phoned Mr. X and told him I would be writing about Iran’s most important dissident. “Was this your own idea?” he asked. Mr.
X was always curious to know whether my stories, especially the provocative ones, were written on my own initiative or at an editor’s behest. I guessed the answers helped him decide what sort of journalist I was. Did I work innocently and independently, or was I the type of reporter who functioned in coordination with powerful people—who was used to leak damaging information about Iran and encouraged to write stories that exaggerated its radical image? His paranoia in this regard had in the past made me reluctant to break news, because I knew I would be asked how I had come across my information. On occasion, I had passed scoops to colleagues in New York or Washington, preferring to save myself the hassle with Mr. X.
“Yes, it was entirely mine.” I reminded him that I had reported on Ganji back in 2000, and that it was natural for journalists to follow the same subject over time.
“I see.”
“I’ll be noting that most people aren’t following news of his hunger strike,” I said. I figured this sad truth would comfort him: I wouldn’t be writing a story about thousands of Iranians rallying to the support of a would-be martyr for democracy.
“Is that what you have found?” He was silent for a moment, as though writing something down.
After we hung up, I sat down to write what I hoped would be a moving tribute to Ganji. The image of his emaciated frame had begun to haunt me.
A few days later, in the first week of August 2005, Ahmadinejad officially became president of Iran. His first official act was to select a cabinet. Of the twenty-one nominees he presented to parliament, several lacked any experience in government whatsoever, others were personal friends from the university where he had taught, and two had been implicated by human rights groups in political killings.
The evening the president announced his nominees, I arrived at Shirin khanoum’s office around dusk. We had dinner plans with her husband and Parastou Forouhar, the daughter of the slain dissidents Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar. In the fall of 1998, assassins working for the Intelligence Ministry had broken into the couple’s home and stabbed them to death. Parastou’s brother had come home and found the bodies of his parents, brutally chopped into pieces. Shirin khanoum had legally represented the family in court, though the judge, as so often happened in her trials, presided with all the indifference and political bias that characterized the Iranian judiciary That her parents’ killers would never be brought to justice was a reality that Parastou had accepted in the painful years that followed. But she knew that the very process of seeking resolution through the legal system, of needling the system into accountability, was meaningful in its own right: the trial had effectively ended the political careers of the senior officials implicated. Ever since, they had lurked in the shadows of public life, where both Shirin and Parastou had hoped they would remain. But that was not to be the case: Ahmadinejad’s nominee for minister of interior was the man suspected of ordering the killings and drawing up the list of other targets for assassination, which had included Shirin.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 10
