Night in Tehran

by Kaplan, Philip

  “David,” Yasmine said, breaking into his trance. “They want to know what you’re going to do.”

  “What we are going to do?” he repeated. Pulling his thoughts together, he told them what he’d need from their network, whom they could recruit, how they could spread their influence. He would help arrange safe houses, teach them codes to maintain contact, provide simple communication equipment—walkie-talkies to start. Trevor could get some to him through Foster. These young people knew the country and brought to their cause passion and readiness to sacrifice. With the material assistance he could provide, and the network of Alana’s and Mahmoud’s followers, they could keep the Shah’s men and the mullahs off balance while he sought to keep everyone from Hanif to Seyyed in the tent, and to identify potential successors and the foreign support necessary to back a new regime.

  Above all, he needed to ensure that he had Trevor’s support. Trevor had warned him once, “Your principal enemies will be those of your own household,” meaning Washington. Weiseman hadn’t forgotten that. It would be Trevor’s task to make sure that the White House didn’t pull the plug on him for domestic political reasons that would then forever remain opaque.

  Sirens screamed from the TV, interrupting their planning. Cameras panned to SAVAK units leaping out of their vehicles and rushing toward an orderly line of mullahs. Warnings blared from megaphones. The police brandished their batons. The marchers moved slowly but relentlessly toward the police units.

  Shots cracked, like hammers hitting a block of wood. As Weiseman and the others stared, horrified at the TV, mullahs and novices, older men and young students, fell, wounded or killed. Blood channeled through the holy streets of Qom.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS TIME to leave the dormitory, establish a safe base, and set things in motion. He asked Foster, the American embassy minister, to call the Intercon on his behalf, thinking it was best to hide in plain view. “Good idea,” Foster replied, “I’ll take care of it.”

  When he returned to the hotel, Daud greeted him at the front door, bowing and scraping as if the earlier incident had never happened. Apparently, the little opportunist had been impressed by the call from the embassy. And through him, no doubt, Hanif would now learn about his return to the hotel. Good. It was time to follow up with the SAVAK chief.

  “Our best room,” Daud said, and a team of bellmen carried his one bag and escorted him, anxious to see to his every comfort. When he reached into his wallet to tip them, they backed out the door, bowing, hands to heart. “Oh, no, Your Honor, we couldn’t accept, please, do not insist…”

  He remembered what Johann had taught him: beware of false flattery, even while doling it out to others.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE HIGHLY polished walnut table of his hotel suite was a crystal vase with white orchids next to Beluga caviar with all the accompaniments and a bottle of Chablis. The red light was blinking on the phone. Weiseman dialed for the operator, and Daud picked up.

  “A call for you, Excellency. General Hanif.”

  Before Weiseman could say anything, he was holding for Hosein Hanif. He wondered whether the call would be followed by a team of SAVAK agents escorting him to Mehrabad and out of the country, or worse, to Evin. But no, Hanif was cordial. Hard men compartmentalize their duties; it was as if he had nothing to do with the repression in the square.

  “I’m glad we had that chat at my residence, Weiseman. There is someone you need to meet. Colonel Mustafa Yilmaz. He’s the Turkish military attaché.”

  “I would like to meet Colonel Yilmaz,” Weiseman said, “and to stay in touch with you.”

  “Oh, yes, we’ll be in touch,” said Hanif. Weiseman heard the hacking cough of a longtime smoker. Then Hanif said, “Good that you’re back in the Intercon. It makes it easier for us to look out for you.”

  A slight rephrasing, Weiseman knew, would have been more accurate: It makes it easier for us to keep an eye on you.

  * * *

  —

  THE BATTERED PONTIAC clattered past a truck on the highway that ran through the city. Alana’s scarf slipped back and her hair spilled onto her forehead. From the front passenger seat, Mahmoud cursed a passing car, then touched his forehead. “I’m sorry, Mister David, sometimes my head gets hot. With the 40-40, there is so much death.” Mahmoud slapped the dashboard. “The US is giving SAVAK tear gas to disable demonstrators. There are signs at Tehran University warning students to behave. BEHAVE! OR YOU’LL CHOKE ON AMERICAN GAS.”

  The driver swiveled in his seat and extended his hand in greeting. “Shapour is my brother,” Alana said.

  Weiseman briefly gripped Shapour’s outstretched hand. “Better watch the road,” he added.

  Lumbering along the highway, the Pontiac suddenly swerved to the center of the road, barely avoiding a pothole big enough to swallow it up, just missing an oil tanker truck carrying the lifeblood of the Iranian economy coming the other way. It started to rain, and the downpour beat so hard on the Pontiac that he imagined they might be swept away. Horns blared in the wet night.

  Another sound joined in: the adhan, rising everywhere in the city. “We’re near the central mosque now,” Alana said.

  They passed by the modernistic Azadi Tower, the Freedom Tower. After twenty minutes, they reached South Tehran. The Pontiac thundered up an alley.

  “We’re here,” Shapour said. “And please, call me Sammy. I prefer it.”

  * * *

  —

  SAMMY GOT OUT of the car and approached a soldier patrolling nearby. Sammy gave him the high sign, then handed him an envelope. The soldier opened it, pocketed the bills inside, and then handed the envelope back to Sammy. The soldier tossed his cigarette butt onto the ground, and a small boy dashed over, snatched it up, and fled the alley. Sammy handed the soldier another cigarette from his own pack. They shook hands and Sammy swaggered toward the car, strutting like the mayor of the shabby slum, letting Weiseman know he had set things up.

  “Let’s go,” Alana said. She led the way into the dull gray-brick school, down a dark corridor and across a modern well-lit basketball court, into an auditorium. A student assembly was listening to a speaker dressed in a Western suit and tie. The sight of the students brought to mind the boy Weiseman had helped escape from the soccer field; he decided he needed to see how the youngster was doing; that was important, something he must do. Maybe Sammy could help him find the boy.

  They walked across the back of the auditorium and out, into another unlit corridor, then entered a classroom where one dim light bulb barely illuminated the faces around a scratchy pine table. “You asked whether we could do more than make phone calls,” Alana said. “We’re going to tell you.”

  He peered across the table and saw a half dozen young people, barely twenty years old, burning with passion and commitment. They wanted the Shah out of Iran but didn’t know how to make it happen. They wanted Weiseman to show them.

  “Fires are burning a mile from here,” Mahmoud said. “Khomeini’s priests got some thugs to torch one of the Shah’s palaces.” He stepped out of the room.

  Had Mahmoud already infiltrated the mullah command center? Weiseman wondered.

  Instead, he asked, “And SAVAK?”

  “They’re rounding up suspects,” Alana said. “But the wrong people—students who are no threat to the regime.”

  “The mullahs are the threat now,” someone down the table called out. Good, thought Weiseman. Perhaps there’s hope for this network.

  “Hanif wants to go after them,” the voice added, “but the Shah is holding him back. Pahlavi is afraid to confront the ayatollahs.”

  “He’d better be,” a young woman’s voice replied from behind a niqab.

  Weiseman was mesmerized by the eyes peering out at him from the two slits in her black niqab. He knew this was a different culture, but he couldn’t comprehend how a woman, or any human being, would consent to being imprisoned that way.

  The y
oung woman sat up and adjusted her niqab; she seemed uncomfortable. Weiseman thought he detected red lipstick from the slight opening for her mouth. She took a cigarette from her purse and he reached across the table to light it. “Thank you,” she said in an accented English, and then told Weiseman of her life. Her mother married a German banker close to young Mohammad Reza during Hitler’s war. He bought oil at bargain basement prices and traded it at a huge profit. “He played the young shah for a fool.” She puffed two times, tiny drags on the cigarette, and exhaled the smoke, then shrugged. When the war ended, Mohammad Reza summoned her father. “He said, ‘You don’t swindle a king.’ ”

  The woman adjusted her niqab again. “The Shah ordered my father’s execution. General Hanif personally shot him. My mother died in an asylum a year later.”

  “Your father?” Weiseman said. “He was?”

  “German intelligence. He served Hitler the way most Iranians serve the Shah—”

  “No,” Weiseman interrupted. “I know about Hitler. They’re not comparable. Hitler and the Shah. Not remotely.”

  “Of course not. Not for Americans.” Her eyes were blazing through the eyelets. “And my father was a Nazi spy? Right? That’s what you’re thinking. But—”

  “I didn’t say that—”

  Silence swallowed the space between them. Then she said, “It’s all right, mister. Perhaps he was—of course he was—serving his country. But for me, it doesn’t matter. The Pahlavis have been pillaging this country for fifty years.” She paused. “Hanif and his men raped my mother before sending her to the asylum.”

  Weiseman took it all in and felt frozen. “I’m sorry,” was all he could muster.

  “Of course you are, but I know what you’re thinking. Will it be any better when we have the Ayatollah? The answer is no. Of course not. But it will be different.”

  Weiseman stared at all the young faces. “And that’s enough?” he asked her.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Well, he thought, that’s what we’re here for. “And what do you want of me?” he asked.

  The young woman glanced meaningfully at Alana, and Weiseman saw Alana nod. Two young women whose parents were victims of the ghastly treatment by the regime.

  “I want to help you destroy Pahlavi and Hanif.”

  Revenge, he thought, the most elemental of human emotions.

  “And how could you do that?”

  Alana said, “Hannah is the personal secretary of Hosein Hanif.”

  Jolted, Weiseman let it sink in, then realized with satisfaction: agents were already in place. Hannah was with Hanif; Mahmoud with the Sheikh and his hired killer, Montana; and, perhaps, Ayatollah Seyyed with Khomeini. Beyond that, Yasmine was acting for her father, and Françoise, Gramont’s agent in place, was reporting back channel to Alain de Rose.

  Mahmoud came back into the room. “There’s been another death. A mullah set himself on fire. The crowd stood around and watched him burn. The cycle has started again.”

  9

  THE GREAT GAME

  FORTY DAYS. WEISEMAN knew it was time to expand his assets. The network of young Iranians could lead him to local centrists who wanted an alternative to the Shah or the Ayatollah, but he knew the center was weak. Moderates were…moderate. They folded when faced with violence. And if they didn’t, they were crushed.

  But even the brave could be crushed: he was preoccupied with Hannah. The cultivated Hanif had already shot her German father and raped her Iranian mother; if she were found out, Hanif wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.

  To succeed, Weiseman knew that he needed more powerful forces who shared his strategic aim. That meant foreigners, countries who shared America’s interest in keeping the Mideast from blowing up. If it meant reviving the Great Game at the end of the twentieth century—with the United States taking over the role of Great Britain in the contest with Russia for control of the Mideast—well, that was better than an Islamist Iran that would threaten the entire region.

  Meanwhile, there was Hanif himself, stealthily plotting to succeed the Shah. Weiseman knew he had taken a risk in flattering Hanif and egging him on. He thought of Kipling’s warning: Don’t hustle the East!

  For the time being, though, he would have to keep the SAVAK chief on his side. The confrontation with him would come soon enough.

  The phone rang and he heard what he now knew was Hannah’s voice. “General Hanif is calling,” she said, and he pursed his lips.

  Hanif came on with that same faux cordial voice. “Mustafa Yilmaz, the Turkish military attaché, has agreed to see you. Tomorrow morning.” He paused, as if considering his next question. “Do you ride?”

  * * *

  —

  WEISEMAN FOUND YILMAZ sipping tea on the verandah of the Tehran Polo Club, clad in a houndstooth sport jacket and fedora, sporting a slick, black mustache: the complete Turkish gentleman. The only horses in sight were cantering lazily around a dirt track.

  The Turk recognized him at once. “We’re expected,” he said, not adding by whom, and moments later they were traveling in an olive green sedan. At Mehrabad, Yilmaz led Weiseman up the stairs of a fixed-wing, executive airplane with no identifying markings. The plane rose into the smoggy Persian sky. Yilmaz said, “There are briefing papers by your seat. You’ll excuse me, I have some things to attend to,” and he disappeared into the plane’s cockpit.

  Weiseman opened the loose-leaf, three-ring binder and began to flip through a briefing on Turkey’s secular politics. First came a narrative of Kemal Atatürk’s ban on sultans and priests after World War I, which led to the end of Ottoman traditions; then an account of his successful propulsion of Turkey into the modern world following the First World War; finally a review of the dominant (and beneficent, of course) role of the army. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing on the military coups that had been precipitated by civilian governments that dared to innovate, nor was there any mention of recent reports that another coup could be imminent. The brief might well have been prepared by Hanif.

  It was easy to see how the Turks and Iranians got along. They were two moderate Muslim states run from the top, born of civilizations encrusted in longstanding legends. The Turks were mostly Sunni Muslims, the Iranians Shiite by way of a Zoroastrian past. But neither were Arab; and neither trusted their Arab neighbors.

  Weisman stared down at the uncultivated, sun-dried Iranian earth, where the essential crop was the magic black liquid that fueled Western manufacturing plants. Yilmaz reappeared, his jacket buttoned snuggly around his athletic frame. “We’ll be passing over Tabriz soon, before we enter Turkish airspace. There were riots in Tabriz on January 9. They will doubtless start again soon.”

  The small plane leveled off when it entered Turkey. Down below, Weiseman spotted men bent over with rudimentary plows and dray horses, working the land as their ancestors had done for centuries. They passed over small villages with dirt roads and a marked absence of commerce or the refinements of city life. The plane began a sharp turn and circled over Ankara’s international airport, then flew on for several minutes before diving rapidly and touching down at an air force base on the edge of the city.

  The door of the plane was drawn open and Weiseman followed Yilmaz past a flank of saluting airmen. A staff car awaited them, and a motorcycle escort whisked them through the sprawling capital, around the stalled parade of vintage autos spewing exhaust fumes into the leaden air of Anatolia. At midday, the pollution could be cut with a knife. The city seemed to Weiseman utterly without charm. Maybe that’s why Atatürk located the capital here in Ankara, far from the decadent distractions of Istanbul.

  A quarter hour later, the car pulled up under a large red Turkish flag with a white half crescent. They entered a redbrick block building where the floors were buffed to a brilliant sheen, matching the shoes of the four-star general who awaited them at the head of a highly polished conference table. The steel-gray hair of the commander of the Turkish general staff was combed straight back, as if
plastered to his skull. There were razor sharp creases in his gray uniform slacks. Next to him slouched a man in a wrinkled blue suit, squinting through sunglasses. “I’m Moshe Regev,” he said.

  Weiseman shook the firm hand of the Turkish general and the calloused one of the Mossad man, then took his seat at the table. Two slender, dark-haired young women in miniskirts appeared with Turkish coffee and biscuits, then vanished.

  There were no Englishmen present, no one from France.

  He certainly could not tell Françoise about Ankara.

  So, thought Weiseman, this was the Iranian-Turkish-Israeli alliance that Trevor had described as America’s security regime for the Arab Middle East.

  Now he’d see how he could put it to use.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS NO palaver. These were hard men with no time for diplomatic niceties. The Turkish general—the name tag on his blouse said Irmak—crisply set out the agenda. “We’re here to rearrange things in Iran,” he said. And then General Irmak made clear what he had in mind. “Our brother, Mohammad Reza, is mortally ill. We need to fill the vacuum before the ayatollahs take over. If that happens, our own Islamists may get ideas. You understand?”

  Weiseman nodded.

  “We need our own man,” Irmak said, as though he was taking his script from Justin Trevor. And perhaps he was. Had Hanif really arranged for this trip to Ankara to depose his shah, opening the place on the Peacock Throne for him to claim? Was Trevor in on the plot?

  But Irmak wasn’t finished. “This time, the powers around this table have to solve the problem. Hanif is too ambitious; he can’t be trusted.”