Night in Tehran
Copyright © Philip Kaplan, 2020
All rights reserved
First Melville House Printing: November 2020
Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
Melville House UK
Suite 2000
16/18 Woodford Road
London E7 0HA
Book design by Richard Oriolo
mhpbooks.com
@melvillehouse
ISBN 9781612198507
Ebook ISBN 9781612198514
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932927
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
For Barbara
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1: Paris
2: Passage to Iran
3: Two Tehrans
4: Priest & Professor
5: Hanif
6: New Year’s Eve
7: Moharram
8: Doing the 40-40
9: The Great Game
10: Mossad’s Man
11: Palmer & The Shah
12: A Visit
13: Reaching the Radicals
14: Race Against Time
15: Beirut
16: The Sheikh
17: Ramadan
18: Fire in the Theater
19: Ajax Two
20: Massacre
21: Nauphle-Le-Château
22: Wasteland
23: Launching the Operation
24: Villa Schreiber
25: Fast Forward
26: Islamic Republic
27: The Flying Dutchman
28: Reign of Terror
29: After the Wall
30: Retribution
31: Lone Wolf
32: Desert One
33: Dash to the Finish
34: No Prints
35: Morning in America
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
1
PARIS
A FOGGY MORNING IN the Place de la Concorde.
Poking above the rooftops of the left bank of the Seine, a blinking red light was all that could be seen of the Eiffel Tower. David Weiseman shook the drizzle from his overcoat, and then dodged through the cars streaming into the great square. He hustled past the Hotel de Crillon and across to Avenue Gabriel. Get on with it, he told himself.
He strode past the US embassy, casting only a quick glance at the tough-looking French flics twirling police batons, staring down nosy American tourists. A clap of thunder hastened his step. Ten minutes later he crossed the ornate Pont Alexander III, homage to the Russian Tsar who supported the Holy Alliance that endured for a hundred years, until the guns of the First World War shattered a century of post-Napoleonic peace in Europe.
Diplomacy rarely if ever succeeded like that.
Across the Seine, he took in the Quai d’Orsay, said to be the home of the French mandarins who considered themselves masters of the stylized international ballet known as diplomacy. This fine art meant staying on one’s toes, sustaining the process, never letting it break down. But it did break down, Weiseman knew, remembering Berlin…the Gruenewald…every twenty years or so in Europe, leading to the two world wars of the twentieth century.
And so he saw things differently, reminding himself diplomacy wasn’t just about process, or compromise. It was about persuading the other country that it was in their interest to do what you wanted them to do. Trevor said Gramont, the man Weiseman was on his way to meet, could be trusted. Well, he didn’t quite say that. Trevor—Weisman’s boss, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency—didn’t trust anyone. He said Laurent Gramont was important, the door into the French elites.
At the Foreign Ministry, a young woman in outsized amber glasses led him to the secretary general’s office. Gramont was with an aide, giving instructions. He held himself tall and straight in a perfectly tailored, double-breasted gray suit with a subtle dark stripe, a silver tie with a pearl tie tack, matching cufflinks on his white shirt. His hair was a richly toned silver gray. He was a French Trevor, knowing and discreet, no doubt ready to be ruthless.
“Monsieur Weiseman, quel plaisir.”
Gramont’s inner office was a gorgeous Empire spectacle, separated from the outer world by mauve, silk drapes. The gilt inlaid desk was devoid of any papers. A revolving globe stood to the right. Europe on top, France in the middle.
Weiseman gestured toward it. “Still the center of civilization, I see.”
Gramont allowed the kind of half smile that also reminded Weiseman of Trevor. “It’s our mission,” he said. “But please, have a seat.” He lifted the phone, whispered, “Deux cafés.”
“Justin Trevor suggested I see you first. I’ll be—”
“Yes, of course. I know your role. Justin called me from Washington.”
I need you to find me someone to replace the Shah, to run the country for us. A general, a cutthroat, a cleric. But our man. Our entire position in the Middle East depends on it.
Gramont sat perfectly still, a modern day Renaissance prince, a Machiavelli waiting to grant a trivial favor. Like Trevor. What exactly is their relationship? Weiseman wondered.
“You and Justin go back a long way.”
“Oh yes, one could say that. We were in Moscow together, as ambassadors, before he went to Prague. He told me about his promising young protégé during the Prague Spring, an idealist who stood his ground, made him reconsider his own positions. Not easy to do with Justin. So it seems you’re un homme serieux, someone we can work with.”
“Well then, has there been any progress on the New Year’s Eve incident?”
“Ah, yes, the ritual executions. Quite grisly—in bed, nude, their throats were slit. The man was an anti-Shah exile, a bazaari, a businessman who came to Paris when things got hot.”
Weiseman took that in without comment. Gramont had been calm in relating the barbaric acts, but it was obvious that the French were concerned Iranian infighting in France might spread.
He asked, “Who did it? What do your services think?”
“Tiens, tiens, it’s a bit of a puzzle. The woman was a relative of Empress Farah. Fabulously wealthy. The word was that she liked to play.”
“A puzzle indeed,” Weiseman said, wanting him to get to the point.
Gramont turned his head ever so slightly, his Adam’s apple bobbing a bit, a trait Weiseman had noticed before among high French dignataries. “Perhaps a political assassination by SAVAK,” Gramont suggested.
Weiseman shook his head, recalling what Trevor told him. “The Shah’s security service? In Paris? Well, the French would say that, wouldn’t they. The Shah’s our man. The French are betting he’ll be gone soon, so they pin it on SAVAK and wait to displace our influence in Iran.”
“I see. Of course it’s not just a police matter,” he said. “Something political.”
“Oh, yes. With the Middle East it’s always political. In France we have bitter memories of the Algerian war, of blasts in our Metro stations. That was just twenty years ago. Our Muslim community has been quiet since then, but I have no illusions. New Year’s Eve and then the Sorbonne killing of that young woman. Suicide bombings are quite possible.”
“And?”
“We monitor the Iranian factions. They could wage a jihad against each other in Paris.”
Ah.
The door opened and a man in a white starched jacket with gold epaulettes came in bearing two white china cups and saucers and two tiny glasses of water on a silver tray. Gramont’s little finger rose ever s
o slightly as he drank down the espresso. “It won’t be easy,” he said morosely, “what Justin is asking you to do. You’ll rather stand out on the streets of Tehran. Of course, you’ll be monitored from the day you arrive. By SAVAK, and by the others.”
No doubt your people, too, and mine, thought Weiseman.
The phone rang and Gramont spoke softly into it, switching to an indecipherable Breton dialect. Weiseman looked around the office. There was a watercolor that looked like a Monet. He got up to examine a gold plaque on a nearby walnut table. The dedication was to Le Comte Laurent Gramont from former President Charles de Gaulle. Royalty then. And next to it was a facsimile of the ribbons in Gramont’s suit lapel: Le Croix de Guerre.
Gramont hung up the phone. He was sure, he said, that there was much he could offer a colleague of Justin Trevor’s as it affected matters in Iran. He would be honored to put his new American friend in touch with the right people. And then, smooth as silk, “Please, call me Laurent. You’ll come to dinner at my home on Saturday. We have to do our work quietly, under the radar, as Justin would say.”
* * *
—
SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS WAS A short walk away, through the tangle of narrow streets and alleys that flowed up from the Seine, between seventeenth-century buildings once occupied by French royals, by the noble facade of the École des Beaux Arts, on to the medieval church.
On the boulevard, a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, slightly stooped, was walking his dachshund, urging him on whenever he fell into a stubborn crouch, refusing to take another step. A young couple went by, holding hands, fingers linked, engrossed in each other. A beggar in baggy pants limped toward Weiseman, his cane tapping on the cobblestones, holding out his beret. Weiseman dropped in a franc and watched the withered old man hold it up, bite on it, then bow theatrically, sweeping the cap before him like some character in Molière.
Weiseman glanced across to the Café de Flore, where Sartre still held forth. During the war, many of the French intellectuals had taken care not to confront the Nazis, Weiseman knew. He himself had been a small child in Hitler’s Berlin, but he hadn’t forgotten what Johann had taught him about what it was like to live under a dictator. It’s why he became a diplomat, to engage and make sure the horror didn’t come again, didn’t swallow up other innocents.
He paused and thought of Trevor, how the new CIA director had surprised him the day after Jimmy Carter’s inauguration by plucking him out of the State Department and assigning him on detail as his personal agent to deal with the looming crisis in Iran, supposedly a reward for his work during the Prague Spring on his first Foreign Service assignment. There were others Trevor could have chosen—Mideast experts fluent in Farsi—but he had insisted on Weiseman, “because I trust you.”
Weiseman had no illusions about the game of espionage, or who would take the fall should things go wrong…as well they might.
He started up again, crossing the street, heading down Saint-Germain, turning left on Rue du Dragon, by the fast-food joints and oriental restaurants, He reflected on how Gramont could help him on Iran, on what Trevor had told him about Gramont’s game, on whether the French count could be trusted. In a doorway of a hôtel particulier, a woman in white platform shoes, a short red skirt, and a red beret tapped ashes of a cigarette against the building. She raised her eyebrows.
“Non, merci,” Weiseman said.
He picked up the pace and rounded the corner to Rue Grenelle, over to Boulevard Raspail. In less than five minutes he turned onto the Rue de Varenne, pushed on double doors, and entered an enclave, Rue Cité de Varenne, an upper-class oasis insulating its residents from the hurly-burly of the city—the sounds and smells, the stream of pedestrians, the blaring Klaxons of speeding taxis. He started down a dark path, past enclosed tennis courts. Overhead lights came on, illuminating four white town houses. Number 8 was at the end of the road. He stepped up to the door and pressed the bell. A barely audible chime sounded. A maid in a black dress and white apron opened the door. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Weiseman.”
* * *
—
A BRONZE EQUESTRIAN statue with a stern Roman gladiator guarded the stairwell. At the top of the stairs, Laurent Gramont, in a three-piece, black-tie ensemble, stood on a finely woven Persian carpet—a Tabriz, Weiseman thought, based on the cream-and-red ornamental patterns. The town house was a mélange of East and West. The walls were a beige silk decorated with a motif that looked like Louis XV, before the revolution, when aristos still ruled the roost in well-guarded enclaves. Behind Gramont, guests whispered under the chandelier he had seen from outside. It was a formal affair—black ties for men, women in long silk dresses.
Like Trevor, Weisman thought again, Gramont was tough, even ruthless when need be, but now the bon vivant. He followed his host into the salon, tasting his champagne. “This is David Weiseman,” Gramont announced, “en route to Tehran.” Heads nodded ever so slightly. A muscular man with a shock of gray hair approached, followed by an elegant woman, offered his hand and introduced his wife. He was the minister of defense. Next, a shipping magnate and a younger woman, not his wife. A professor at ENA, the elite French École National d’Administration, his wife a couturier. Across the room, Weiseman saw a tall man with a white Van Dyck beard and sunken cheekbones, yet deeply tanned for all that, with a tiny white mustache beneath a prominent nose. “Someone you will want to meet,” Gramont said, and he led Weismeman over there.
“Alain de Rose,” the man said. He looked a bit like James Angleton, the old paranoid CIA counterintelligence chief—chain-smoking, brushing ashes off his tux onto the superb Tabriz carpet. Sûreté was written all over him.
“Alain monitors the Proche Orient for our services,” Gramont confirmed. “The Near East from Egypt to Iran, the Saudis and Gulf emirates. And of course, Israel.”
“Then you’re involved in the investigation,” Weiseman said casually. He knew the Paris social scene, the little tricks and moral pieties that enabled one to inquire without breaching the code of the French upper crust.
“Yes, of course.” De Rose’s voice was gruff, almost as if his larynx had been removed. “The Iranian girl at the Sorbonne. But it’s more than one assassination. We’ve got a sticky web of Iranians in Paris, fighting it out by proxy over what will happen when the Shah goes.”
Well, this is someone worth talking to, Weiseman thought.
“You expect the Shah to be deposed?”
De Rose shrugged. “Everyone goes at some point. Your president was forced to resign, to avoid impeachment.”
Weiseman nodded, recalling past encounters as a young diplomat with Nixon, that working dinner at San Clemente when the president was drunk, Nixon’s diplomatic mastery in dealing with Kremlin leaders.
“Yes, we’re all on short-term leases,” he conceded
Heels tapped. “Et enfin,” Gramont said. “Our hostess has appeared, finally.”
Weiseman turned to see a five-foot-ten woman in black silk; dark hair cut short, almost boyish; a rakishly tied belt that highlighted her narrow waist. This was Margot Gramont. She thanked him for the flowers he had sent along that afternoon, then introduced a lovely young woman in an emerald-green silk dress, with long, glossy, black hair. Yasmine de Rose was a student at the Sorbonne, and the daughter of Alain de Rose.
A tuxedoed waiter came up and whispered into Margo Gramont’s ear. “Dinner is served,” she said. “There is one more couple expected, but we may begin.”
Weiseman offered his arm to Yasmine de Rose and led her to her place, held her chair. She smiled shyly and gestured to the place marker with his name. “Asseyez vous, monsieur.”
He sat at the place next to her and took in her porcelain-like facial features, her two luminous dark eyes, the way she lowered them modestly. Is she Iranian? he wondered.
A fork tapped on a glass. Laurent Gramont welcomed his guests with words that flowed like the Seine.
The maid entered and announced, “Monsieur Schreiber et Madam
e d’Antou.”
The chunky man wore a tuxedo with a red bow tie and pocket square, red braces and cummerbund—gray-black hair was combed straight back and brilliantined flat against his skull. The woman was altogether different: in her early thirties, slim, a gold gown highlighting lustrous blond hair in a chignon with a jeweled clasp.
The host and hostess embraced the woman, then shook hands formally with the man. Laurent Gramont said, “We’re pleased to welcome dear Françoise once again to our home. And Jacques Schreiber. Just in time for dinner.”
* * *
—
A BLACK-TIE WAITER swept away the coquillage, a formidable array of prawns and scallops, clams and moules, oysters from Normandy. Seated between Yasmine de Rose and Françoise d’Antou, Weiseman chatted easily in French with each, aware of those across the table inspecting him. He asked Françoise what Jacques did, wondering, What is their relationship?
The waiter began to serve the grilled turbotin and to offer a sterling silver pitcher of hollandaise sauce. “Jacques is in the armaments business,” Françoise said.
“In the Middle East?”
“Oui. In Iran and Saudi, also in Libya.”
“And when he travels there…”
“He goes alone.”
“And you?”
“I’m a diplomatic correspondent for Le Figaro, specializing in Iran. I speak Farsi and go there often, and to Iraq.” She sipped the wine, the napkin caressed her lips. She caught his eye. “We’re not a couple. Vous comprenez?”
Her glass was empty and Weiseman signaled to the waiter, who came over and filled it with more white wine. He gestured toward Yasmine and the waiter filled her glass, too.
“You were in Tehran recently, Jacques,” Alain de Rose said from the center of the table. “How goes the Shah?”
“Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,” he said, “is America’s puppet.” Jacques Schreiber sliced into the turbotin. “All Tehran is waiting for him to fall. The factions are arming to the teeth.”
“Well, you would know, Jacques,” the ENA professor said. “You sell to all of them.”
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