He saw a trace of smoke floating out of the chimney of the house they’d been headed toward. “This way,” Françoise said. He offered his hand as they climbed over hard ground, up the hill. Reaching the house, the door sprang open without their knocking. Inside, a man in a tweed sport jacket with leather elbow patches stood smoking a pipe.
“Karim Nasir,” he said, extending a hand, and then leading them into a den. The walls were covered by bookcases.
They sat at a card table before a redbrick fireplace, and Weiseman studied the man whom Françoise had referred to as the professor. His hair was black and wet, as if he had just taken a shower. Horn-rimmed glasses perched on his eagle-beak nose. His chin slimmed to a point and was covered by a neat salt-and-pepper goatee.
“Did you see Seyyed?” he asked Françoise, but didn’t wait for her to answer. Nasir told them that he and Seyyed had gone to school together, had played soccer, had chased girls together. But Seyyed had then discovered he had a religious calling, a destiny to serve people. He was no revolutionary, though; you could reason with him.
Weiseman recalled the photo with Khomeini and asked about the mullahs, about their factions. Were there others like Seyyed? Could any of them be trusted?
“Let me explain,” Nasir said, stopping to fill a briar pipe and take several puffs. “The ulema hated Reza Shah,” he said, “the present shah’s father. But not because he was an autocrat. He ruled in the thirties, the age of dictators. He was convinced that a poor country needed reforms—made with a firm hand. And he had a perfect model nearby.”
“Of course,” Weiseman said. “Kemal Atatürk.”
“Exactly,” Nasir said. He explained how Reza Shah applied the Turkish model to Iran—army rule, imposing Western ways and dress, banning the veil, a secular public sphere—all of which had enraged the mullahs.
A door opened and a young man appeared, perhaps eighteen. “Baba,” he said, and kissed Nasir on both cheeks, then turned toward Françoise and pressed his hand to his heart. He sat beside her at the table.
“This is Selim Nasir,” Françoise said. “He is my assistant. He works here for Le Figaro.”
“And he is my son,” Nasir said. He continued with his briefing as if there had been no interruption. “Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is unlike his father in many ways,” he said, “but in the most important ways he is the same. He is secular. He rules by force and fear.” Nasir stopped to gauge Weiseman’s reaction. “You see, these autocrats are everything until they go, when all at once they become nothing. That is the important fact the others miss.”
“It won’t happen,” Selim blurted out. “The Americans won’t permit it.”
Over Selim’s shoulder, Weiseman spotted another framed photograph, of two teenagers on a soccer field—Karim Nasir and Seyyed. Well, then. Françoise was leading him to influential Iranians, but there were ties among them that he didn’t begin to understand. He turned to Nasir. “You said, ‘Until they go.’ Do you think the Shah will go now?”
“Very soon,” Nasir said. “The hatred and despair grows and grows. Soon the people will march up the mountain and surround the palace. They will risk everything. They’ll hound him till he flees, and—”
“The Imam will be our shield,” Selim interrupted, his face flushed with pride. “What will America do then? Will you be on the side of the people, Mister David?”
Weiseman knew that when that day came, SAVAK would be at the palace to meet the marchers, tanks against sticks and rocks. He realized the tanks would be made in the United States. He said nothing.
“My dear,” Nasir said softly to his son, “we’ll wait to see what our American friends do. Then we will decide.”
Selim’s chair scraped as he abruptly pushed it back and rushed out of the room. Apparently the Nasir family was as divided as the Iranian nation, Weiseman thought.
He glanced at Françoise, wondering why she had taken on young Selim as her local stringer. Françoise rose from her chair and followed the young man out the door.
“I was like that once,” Nasir said with a faraway look. “Reza Shah killed my father. And yet, a man must go on with his life…We can afford idealism only when we are young.”
Weiseman flinched at the mention of the death of Nasir’s father. It made him think of Johann and their near death in Berlin.
“And if the Shah goes?” he asked. “Professors never flourish in theocratic states. Not in Calvin’s Geneva or Savonarola’s Florence.
“Ah, yes,” Nasir said. “It’s true. We are skeptical and we challenge the self-righteous. Mullahs offer certainty and demand submission to doctrine.”
“Then, it will be worse for you than it has been under the Shah.”
Nasir shrugged and extended his hands in the eternal gesture of doubt.
“Worse?” Françoise said to Weiseman. She had returned with Selim at her side. “No, it’s the same. Shahs and mullahs have doctrines, but they’re never much more than rationalizations for keeping or gaining power. I told you that before you left Paris.”
Weiseman nodded. Yes, all autocrats shared a lust for power, for control, but he knew instinctively that there were differences among them that mattered hugely. So why was she here? To help him? Perhaps. But no doubt also to steer him toward Gramont’s goals.
Selim’s taut facial muscles went slack. “It drives us crazy,” he said. His hands coiled into two tight fists. “What kind of life will there ever be for us?”
Nasir said, “It will be the way it always is. The strong will do what they can, the weak will do what they must. Will America have any more time for Iran?”
“Of course,” Weiseman assured them and realized that he was pursing his lips, a nervous habit he had developed long ago.
But it was true. It was why he was here, after all, seeking to forge a network to keep Iran in America’s camp, knowing that Karim Nasir and many others would soon rely on him to save them from the storms brewing around them.
* * *
—
BACK AT THE hotel, he walked her down the corridor to her room. She inclined her head toward the room, gave him a taut smile, and then stepped inside.
His first two days already had revealed how tough it would be to get the job done. Yes, she was alluring…but better not to get distracted.
He went to his own room, took off his jacket and tie, sat at the desk to clear his mind and reduce his thoughts to paper, to inform Trevor as to what he had learned. It was his habit to do so promptly, in order not to lose important insights. He would add his assessments of Ayatollah Seyyed and Karim Nasir to those of Ronald Sims, taking his first steps toward building a network for a post-Shah Iran.
But the memory of Françoise d’Antou’s scent remained with him. She was a puzzle: seductive one moment, businesslike the next; a beautiful Western journalist, nevertheless, able to call on ayatollahs in a country where women were cloaked from head to toe; and linked to a man who served the Nazis in World War II, and yet was welcomed with her into the parlor of a French count.
He shook his head and focused on Iran. On Seyyed.
In all his missions for Trevor, there had been an unexpected driving figure, one who brought what the philosopher Henri Bergson termed an élan vital to his cause, as well as high risk. Weiseman asked himself, was Seyyed such a man? If so, he wondered why Françoise—especially if she was working for Gramont—had led him to Seyyed? Was this part of a double game she was playing?
He took up his pen. It was time to expand his network. He’d contact the Israeli agent Trevor had recommended to him as well as the opposition figures who could lead him to plausible alternative leaders. His thoughts returned to the meeting with Seyyed, interrupted by the arrival of Hanif. Why was the Shah’s single most important man, the head of SAVAK, calling on an ayatollah? Especially this ayatollah?
Well then, Hanif should be his next port of call. The man must know everyone and everything that was going on here. At the very least, David Weiseman would need to know what to l
ook out for, to gauge Hanif’s purposes, and if possible neutralize him as a threat to his mission.
The phone rang. It was Trevor, telling him that the president would be celebrating New Year’s Eve with the Shah and that he should be available.
“Of course, Justin.” Then, “Justin, we need to talk.”
“Of course, David. When I get to Tehran with the president. Oh, by the way, I’m hearing things. Best be wary with the lady.”
Trevor rang off, the click of the phone accentuating the warning.
5
HANIF
FRANÇOISE WAS GONE the next morning—on a business trip she had said, location undisclosed. The meetings she had arranged with Seyyed and Karim Nasir were valuable, but Weiseman knew now it was time for him to assemble his own assets to carry out his mission.
He had been in Tehran less than a week, but he could already discern the trapdoors that threatened to swallow his operation. The society was split between the regime supporters who received special favors and the silent majority cowed by SAVAK torture and intimidation. Here was the perennial danger faced by autocratic rule: once the aura of invincibility surrounding the regime was punctured, the country would fall into chaos. There would be a power vacuum at the top, leaving the perfect seedbed for the radical Islamists. A reign of terror would follow the revolution the way it had in France, two hundred years before. It was always the same. He’d lived through it himself as a child, when bakers and butchers donned armbands and paraded the streets with their chests puffed out.
He stared at a decoded cable he’d received from Trevor. The National Security Council in Washington was debating options—national security cabinet officials looking for political cover. Weiseman knew the NSC debate was diplomatic Kabuki; their options had everything to do with Washington politics and nothing to do with the realities he was encountering in Iran. The cable was classic Trevor: a prompt to cut through the morass and solve the problem before Washington politicians or bureaucrats made it worse.
His father had taught him to resist the temptation of perfection. Survival required compromise, Johann said. Even a partial and imperfect victory was worth having. He had imbibed this philosophy on the small farm in Springfield, Illinois, where they had emigrated from Germany. The good Lutherans who lived nearby believed that redemption was gained through faith. David and his father had seen too much to rely on faith alone. Sometimes you had to make hard choices.
* * *
—
HOSEIN HANIF RECEIVED him in a private residence secluded in a grove of linden trees in North Tehran, not far from the Niavaran Palace. Weiseman found him examining an illuminated globe in a walnut frame. He was tall, muscular, erect as an oak, with a high forehead, white hair cut close to his scalp, and a tight white moustache. He wore a well-tailored, double-breasted white suit and monochromatic blue tie. He evoked the understated power expected of the director general of the Iranian National Security and Information Organization—known by its Persian acronym, SAVAK.
Hanif’s readiness to welcome him to what appeared to be his private residence was a favorable omen. The SAVAK chief showed him to an easy chair and offered chilled papaya juice. He said the Shah was looking forward to the president’s visit. He took a cigarette from a silver case, a Chesterfield, inserted it into an ivory cigarette holder, drew deeply, and exhaled.
“I have known Reza Shah since he, himself, was a lad,” Hanif said. “Now, that was a man. He ruled this country with an iron hand. And when he was deposed by Britain,” Hanif confided, “Reza Shah directed me to look after his son and to guide him in his work.”
Hanif expelled the smoke from his cigarette in a circle that rose as if on command toward the high ceiling. “I was there, you know, concealed in the stone tower of the palace that day in 1941 when Sir Reader Bullard came and took away His Majesty, dismissing him as if he were a servant of a minor English manor house rather than the ruler of a great civilization.”
Hanif recounted the story with palpable anger, the event constituting a trauma he was unlikely ever to forget or forgive. Weiseman felt he was beginning to understand something of Hanif’s power and purpose: his life was not just about commanding the forces of SAVAK. His was a sacred call to preserve the Pahlavi dynasty founded by Reza Shah, to keep the young shah out of trouble, and to guide him as a ruler—to be the indispensable right-hand man.
It had taken some time, Hanif conceded, flicking his ashes neatly into a lacquer ashtray. The young shah was shy, unsure of his mission, always looking over his shoulder at the past, wondering what his father would have done. Hanif remained by his side, gently leading, teaching him how to keep foreigners from intruding, how to control the mullahs and the radical nationalists who would destroy the monarchy and Iranian state if allowed to do so. When the crisis came in 1953, he was the one who advised the young shah to take a Roman holiday while Hanif sorted things out with friends and counterparts in the CIA and MI6. “Operation Ajax,” he said with relish. “Mossadeq was placed under house arrest for years; he never bothered us again.”
Yes, Weiseman thought, but Mossadeq now was a dead martyr who haunted the regime.
Hanif stubbed out the cigarette, cleaned his ivory cigarette holder and carefully restored it to a small mahogany box. When the Shah returned from Rome, he told Weiseman, order was restored. “Young Mohammad Reza suddenly found his vocation. Before my eyes stood a shah, almost as if Reza Shah had returned. Ruthless as a king must be to control our Iranian state.”
“And you were there with him,” Weiseman said, encouraging him.
“Indeed,” Hanif said. “Iran, you see, had become endangered, and it takes a strong hand to save us from those who would seize our ancient culture. America would not want to see its Iranian ally ruled from the mosque.” His eyebrows raised, soliciting confirmation. “Would it?”
“Certainly not.”
Weiseman recalled what Trevor had once told him: There’s no limit to the flattery men will accept. The more you give them, the more perceptive they think you are.
“I hope you won’t consider it presumptuous, General, but you bear a strong resemblance to Reza Shah himself. I believe he, too, was a general, before he ascended to the throne.”
Hanif sat silently taking that in. Weiseman waited, allowing the SAVAK chief to think that perhaps, one day, he could, with US support, succeed Mohammad Reza as the current Shah once succeeded his father.
A general, a cutthroat. Plant the seed, but make sure it never poisons the garden.
Hanif stiffened his martial posture. His face remained a mask, until the lines softened about his mouth. “Reza Shah was my mentor,” he said. “Do you know who his model was?” He paused. “Kemal Atatürk. I accompanied the Shah when he met the great man who dragged the polluted remains of the Ottoman Empire into the twentieth century. Reza Shah told me we were in the presence of a modernizer, a reformer who had cast out the ulema, and a leader who knew what had to be done to rouse a sleeping nation.” Hanif looked directly at Weiseman. “Atatürk and Reza Shah were gods.”
He led Weiseman to the window. “Later,” he said, “His Majesty sent me to Ankara, as defense attaché, to learn from Ataturk, his effendi.” He pointed across the lawns toward the Niavaran Palace. “Now, Mohammad Reza is never out of my sight.”
No doubt, Weiseman thought. It was said the father had intimidated Mohammad Reza with his stern discipline. Now Hanif was there, still the regent, keeping track of his charge.
“He’s lucky to have you so dedicated to him,” Weiseman said, and immediately felt the cold eyes searching him as intently as a thief cleaning out a safe.
Hanif seemed to draw himself up even straighter. “We exiled Khomeini, the way Kemal Atatürk removed the caliph. I guide Mohammad Reza, but, well, there still is much to be done. Our Mohammad Reza is running out of time.”
Hanif flexed his fingers, then cracked his knuckles. Weiseman braced himself for the message Hanif had summoned him to convey,
“Mr
. Weiseman, you must try to understand. We’re used to deception and betrayal, especially from the West. When a country is as dependent on another as we are on America, we study the tea leaves very closely. Your people give us assurances, but we sense hesitation, second thoughts…You say more than you mean.”
Hanif stared at the palace, deep in thought, then turned back to Weiseman. “My country is in crisis, Mr. Weiseman. The bazaari are withdrawing support. Our universities are riddled with troublemakers. There’s discontent in the barracks. The radical clergy is a lethal threat to His Majesty. His Majesty needs your president’s support. We need the arms we requested from the United States. We need public gestures of support. We need our ally to support us in all ways. Do you understand?”
Weiseman understood completely, feeling the blast of the rage and frustration expressed by every Mideast Muslim leader who had to deal with the inconstancy of an America pulled hither and yon by its global interests. Ally and protector one day, but the next—who knew? Leaving them dependent, fearful of reaping the whirlwind.
Hanif continued to speak in a confidential tone, taking the role of trusted ally sharing ideas about their mutual interests. “We know, of course, about the president’s commitment to human rights. And certainly, we agree with it.”
He poured Weiseman another glass of papaya juice. “You know the Shah is the great reformer of the entire Middle East. He and his father introduced female suffrage, land reform; they ended rural illiteracy. Those are genuine human rights, not just words. They are the results of the Shah’s great White Revolution, which will be completed in two years, in October 1979.”
“Of course,” Weiseman said. “And we support the Shah. But sometimes, openness and inclusion can bring even greater order. Trusting your own people can generate security.”
Hanif cracked his knuckles again, a clear sign of displeasure. “Yes,” he finally said. “Sometimes. In some countries. But if you compel the ruler of Iran to behave in the American way, to break with centuries of tradition, to violate the customs and expectations of his nation and its culture, and yes, the will of his people, you will destroy your ally and lose your influence. You will find yourself talking to ayatollahs. And they will not hear you.”
Night in Tehran Page 5