Night in Tehran

by Kaplan, Philip

  “Yes, I know,” Trevor said. “Gramont phoned.”

  Had Françoise told him? How had she known?

  “Anything new?” Weiseman asked.

  He heard the slight cough Trevor retreated to when covering up with him.

  “Nothing you wouldn’t know, David.”

  * * *

  —

  AS SIMS SUGGESTED, Weiseman met General Mehdi in a safe house on a side street not far from army headquarters. Sims had been right. The man was as old as Methuselah, with a full head of stark white hair, cheeks dry as parchment, hooded eyes that harbored countless secrets. He walked curved over a steel cane, but when he stood still he forced his body to unbend, to the straight posture of a commanding general. Now he sat with his hands in his lap. “I was there,” he said to Weiseman. “Did Sims tell you?”

  “He said you would tell me, General. He said no one knew the details as well as you.”

  The general drew a long cigar from a humidor, lit it carefully, and watched the smoke rise in circles that obscured his face. “It’s true,” he said. “No one except Hanif.”

  Weiseman waited for the general to summon his recollections and continue at his own pace.

  “Of course,” he seemed to assure himself. “We did it.”

  “Of course,” Weiseman said. “Together,” willing to share the credit or blame.

  “No, no, young man,” pointing at his chest. “We! We Iranians. All those folktales about Ajax. About Kim Roosevelt and the British.” The hooded eyes opened wide a moment; he slapped his thigh and chortled, as if seeing Americans and Brits bollocksing it up. “Absurd.”

  “Tell me about it, sir.”

  The general puffed on his cigar as if to stir his memory, then smiled.

  “Your Mr. Roosevelt was everywhere, shoring up our shah, paying thugs, even bringing in the communists to demonstrate against Mossadeq.” A snort. “But it was, you say, a sideway?”

  “Sideshow?”

  “Yes. That’s it. Sideshow. We were in a serious economic mess. After Mossadeq nationalized Anglo-Iranian Oil, there was an embargo against us. Our middle classes were all worried. The businessmen. Even the professors disliked Mossadeq—he was so arrogant.”

  The old man leaned forward and shook his head. “We had to step in.” He cupped his gnarled fingers around his mouth, then whispered, “There will be another coup in Ankara. Soon.” He nodded emphatically. “Colonel Yilmaz told me, in strict confidence.”

  A maid came in and poured them cups of tea with hot milk, then vanished.

  “So, General. 1953. You stepped in.”

  The general puffed on his cigar, ignoring the white tea. He nodded. “Of course, Kim kept busy. CIA wanted to get Mossadeq out and replace him with General Zahedi.” Mehdi let loose a belly laugh. “Kim got the Shah to sign a decree dismissing Mossadeq, the old dreamer. It was to be served on him August 15. Yes, I’ll never forget that date.”

  And then, another outburst of laughter. “The commander who was to deliver the message got arrested. Kim’s plan was”—the eyes popped open—“kaput!”

  Weiseman joined the general’s laughter, and soon the two of them were roaring with glee at the way self-important officials invariably fouled up. And then, the general’s memory kindled, on he went, unprompted by Weiseman. The Shah decided to take a little holiday in Rome. The Americans didn’t have a backup plan. The Iranian military stepped in. “But it was the clergy that sold out Mossadeq. The ayatollahs preferred a conservative and vacillating shah to Mossadeq with all his radical plans. The clerics saved the Shah in order to remove him.”

  “Then, it wasn’t America that pulled off Ajax? That’s just a myth?”

  Amazing, Weiseman thought. But if true, why not once more?

  Get the military to do it again, and this time a competent general could be raised up.

  Mehdi seemed to read his mind. He fingered his cigar. “Kim tried,” he said. “Ajax was his child, but we adopted it. We did it ourselves, and everybody gave Kim the credit.”

  He paused. “You have to work with our local people, David.” Weiseman hadn’t even needed to ask. Mehdi gave him the names of two generals. “They’ll expect your call.”

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT THE HOTEL, Weiseman tried to put it together, to find the kernel of truth in the old general’s ramblings.

  They didn’t have a backup plan. Was that just an old man concocting tales of Iranian derring-do, or was it the inside story of how the CIA failed? What did it say about pulling off his mission, about keeping the mullahs out of power, about whether the ayatollahs might rule more pragmatically than they preached? What did it say about the Shah’s generals and middle-class Iranians who should find Khomeini more repugnant than Mossadeq? He thought of Seyyed and wondered, What did it say about a worldly mullah who had his doubts about Ruhollah Khomeini?

  Or was Mehdi’s entertaining tale woven of whole cloth? It had been Ronald Sims who sent him to meet Mehdi, to learn the real details. Had it simply been to whitewash the British role? He had asked General Mehdi what role the British played in Ajax. After another laugh, the old man said, “They held your coat. It’s the way they operate. Drop a few clues, step back, and let the other fellow supply the boot.”

  The boot! It was almost funny. The phone interrupted his thoughts.

  It was Françoise, from Baghdad. Finally. There were things he needed to know. She would stop in Beirut the following Wednesday. Could he possibly meet her there?

  15

  BEIRUT

  THE TAXI SWERVED around the Mediterranean cornice, and Weiseman gripped the strap above his head. At the waterfront Long Beach Club, bikini-clad European women reclined on chaise lounges while, across the road, pastel pink buildings pockmarked by bullet holes hovered over Muslim women walking along hot sidewalks clad in black from head to toe.

  The taxi windows were open and Beirut was stifling. The AC was out, the driver explained. Soon it would be Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year, the “hot month,” when the faithful fasted from sunrise to sunset.

  A traffic light seemed to leap up before them. The taxi driver slammed on his brakes and muttered a mélange of French and Arabic words. “Oú allons nous?” he asked for the third time.

  “La Cathédrale,” Weiseman repeated, wondering why Françoise had chosen to meet him there.

  The glaze of the morning sun slanted around the high-rise hotels, bearing down on the city, producing a flimsy veil of gossamer. Weiseman felt the bath of humidity on his brow and under his shirt. On his way to a meeting whose purpose was unclear, he recalled Trevor’s maxim: Diplomacy is chess played by gentlemen who understand the rules. And if the other fellow isn’t a gent? Weiseman had asked. If he smashes his fist on the board and throws over all the pieces?

  “Then you deal with it,” Trevor had replied.

  Weiseman knew that the sectarian civil war which began in Lebanon in 1975 was a warning. It was tearing apart Lebanese cities—the same thing might happen in Iran if Khomeini were permitted to take over, or if the Shah were allowed to stay on and rob Iranians of hope.

  Weiseman continued to be struck by the ironies of his situation. Jimmy Carter was the world’s most powerful man, and he loathed the Shah. Carter would never forgive himself for his false tribute to the Shah that New Year’s Eve in Tehran, yet he could no more abandon Mohammad Reza Pahlavi than bring Richard Nixon back from his post-Watergate exile in New Jersey. So he handed off Iran to Trevor, who passed it on to Weiseman. But when the Shah called for help, Carter would probably bite his tongue and save the Shah again.

  Out the window, Weiseman saw an attractive European woman walk by and thought of Françoise. Memory was a tyrant, giving him only fragments, air bubbles that left him searching for more.

  Happiness. How did it compare with playing a role in the great events of your time? Once he would have been sure that being at the center of things was what it was all about. Now, thinking of all the compromises
, the cynical sellouts, the ways he might be betrayed, he wasn’t so sure. Could it all be a great con? He still wondered. Was Françoise only Gramont’s bait?

  Enough, he told himself. There was a job to do. If she was playing him like a pawn for Gramont, he knew how to pretend, to use her as Trevor would wish him to do. He had learned from the master.

  The cab stopped. He looked up at the spires of Beirut’s main cathedral, paid the driver in Lebanese lire, and walked into the cathedral, to the middle pew where Laurent Gramont was kneeling in prayer.

  * * *

  —

  GRAMONT WORE AN open sky-blue shirt with a bright polka-dot green ascot, a boulevardier able to enter any door in Paris. The outfit lent him the look of Charles Boyer, the French heartthrob of the forties. Gramont had the charm of an actor all right, but also the cunning of a snake. A French Trevor.

  All right, Weiseman thought, bracing himself. Play the game.

  “David, mon vieux.” Gramont stood and led him along the nave of the church toward golden double doors, into a large office suitable for a cardinal, or an ambassador. Then came the bantering about nothing, the easy dropping of names, references to headlines about crises hither and yon, sly jokes, each man lightly putting down his own leader, laughing, reassuring his friend. Well, the banter implied, we diplomats are here now, ready to clean up after the politicians.

  Finally, they got to it.

  “You know about Khomeini,” Gramont said. “We’ll stuff him in a suburb for now, just outside Paris, where he can’t do any mischief, keep an eye on him. A kind of house arrest.”

  Weiseman said, “Why not leave him in Iraq with Saddam Hussain as his jailer? Saddam’s done a good job of that for sixteen years now.”

  Gramont folded his arms as if there was nothing more to say. “Iran is coming apart,” he finally added. “We told you that when you first arrived. Ask Moshe Regev. Jews know their enemies.”

  Sly…sly, just above the line. But the point was made. So, Trevor was right: the French intended to stage-manage replacement of the Shah with the ayatollahs and supplant American influence in Iran.

  And if Gramont was the chess master, did that mean Françoise was nothing more than his pawn? The thought dampened his spirit.

  “We don’t surrender to fundamentalists,” Weiseman said, sure that Gramont would register the reference to the French knuckling under to the Nazis in World War II.

  “Mon vieux,” Gramont drew out the two words sarcastically. “Wasn’t that below the belt? I’d rather say sauve qui peut. We’re diplomats; we do what we can, what we must. We deal with whatever, whomever is there. France will fight no Pyrrhic battles.”

  Gramont rose and led Weiseman back out of the opulent office, back along the pews toward the back of the church, pointing to the stained glass windows as they passed. He’d always loved them, he said, the abstraction of the design, mirroring the mysteries of life. No reliable patterns, haphazard events that defied understanding. It was why he relied on the church and—just to be safe, he acknowledged with a chuckle—on his intuition about people.

  “And Khomeini,” Weiseman said. “You really think you can work with him?”

  Gramont strolled on, pointing to a likeness of the Virgin. “Few of us are pure,” he said. “But we have those in our beloved country who would do anything for a price. Tu comprends?”

  Oh, yes, he got the reference to Jacques, another piece of the puzzle he couldn’t decrypt.

  They were at the front door of the cathedral. A priest strolled in, a yellow cord at the waist of his brown tunic. A blast of heat blew in from the street.

  “Ramadan is coming,” Gramont said. “It’s a bit like our Catholic Lent—long days followed by a burst of pent-up energy.”

  “You’re playing with fire, Laurent. The mullahs will use you and then toss you away.”

  “Qui sait? Peut-être le dèluge. When it rains, flowers bloom. Sometimes there are floods.”

  * * *

  —

  WEISEMAN WATCHED GRAMONT leave and turned back into the cathedral to find Françoise. She was wearing a white dress, arms bare, covered by an exquisite lattice shawl, inspecting the portrait of a saint being slaughtered by the devil, a testament to the civil war that was demolishing the harmony of the many faiths that once prevailed in pre–civil war Lebanon. Now it was a cauldron of religious and ethnic conflict that was about to claim Iran as its next victim.

  She turned and saw him. Her cheeks colored in an instant. Was it out of excitement at the sight of him or embarrassment at being caught in tawdry service for Laurent Gramont?

  She gave him chaste kisses on both cheeks and silently led him out of the cathedral to a black sports car, and they sped off into Beirut’s hot afternoon. The Phoenician Hotel came into view, but she parked the car along the seaside and said, “Let’s walk…fewer ears.”

  They strolled silently along the Mediterranean, past waves colliding with the shore. She seemed somewhere else. The furrow on her brow bespoke preoccupation, and his own concerns deepened. She had come here with Gramont to do his bidding, Weiseman thought; to convince Weiseman to accede to France’s will.

  She nodded toward an outdoor café near a dock where European women took the rays of the sweltering Lebanese sun. He heard a quiet buzz of Latin languages—French and Italian, some Spanish, tourists out for a good time amidst the travails of the civil war. But this was Beirut, with its daily paradoxes and dangers. The proprietor of the café, a tall, bald, hawk-nosed man in a black T-shirt with a parrot decal, arrived unbidden with two cappuccinos, then left them alone.

  “You saw Khomeini,” he prompted.

  “Yes, in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. One is a fanatic, the other an assassin.”

  She took off her big round designer sunglasses and put them on the table, then put them back on, but not before he detected the dark circles under her eyes. She was putting something off, as if delaying the moment of truth.

  “The Ayatollah is in Najaf, Iraq’s holy city, proselytizing the Iraqi Shia,” she said. “Saddam has had enough of him. Laurent intends to bring him to Paris.”

  “I know,” he told her.

  She took that in silently, as if unsurprised. So she was clued into Gramont’s game.

  He held his silence, too, willing her to tell him the truth.

  “It’s only a stopover,” she finally said, “before he returns to Iran.”

  Well then, at least she had told him that.

  “You know, Trevor will be incensed with Gramont. They both agree the Shah has to go, but to replace him with Khomeini…that’s obscene.”

  He waited, asking himself, yet again where she fit into this game, whether Gramont had used her to pass messages to Khomeini and Saddam, to arrange it all, before Jacques would arrive with payment for the Iraqis and armaments for the Ayatollah.

  She shook her head and her lovely blond hair fell across her eyes.

  “They don’t know who they’re dealing with, what they’re getting into,” she said. “When I was in Baghdad, Saddam told me he had called the Shah and said it was time to dispose of Khomeini. He asked for the Shah’s agreement. The Shah told him no.”

  Astounding, Weiseman thought. And then, he had to ask.

  “Françoise, did Gramont prompt Saddam to make that call?”

  “I just don’t know,” she said. “It’s possible, of course, but Saddam didn’t say so.”

  Now her eyes were fixed on his. “Our people come up with these schemes because of their Cartesian intellectual training. We’re taught in our grandes écoles to devise theories and put them into action. We are absolutely certain about our conclusions but we lack grounding in experience, what Anglo-Saxons call the scientific method. Our arrogance is our shield.”

  She sipped thoughtfully on her cappuccino. “It goes deeper than you realize,” she finally said. “And I’m stuck, bound to Laurent Gramont and Jacques Schreiber.”

  She shuddered. Was it the sea air, or was it due to he
r personal prison? He took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders.

  But as he did so, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a rocket streak overhead. He whirled and saw it strike the Phoenician Hotel, sparking a fire in the heart of the city, shooting flames into the burnished orange sky. They were close enough to hear the screams of the victims, and they watched, aghast, as a man leapt out of the building to his death. On the beach below, bathers scattered.

  Weiseman grabbed her hand and they ran across the dock and down to the now empty beach, a safe distance away. From there they watched the column of smoke rising above the hotel. “The Paris of the Middle East is now a war zone,” she said. “It’s like the religious wars in Europe three hundred years ago. The Middle East is going to repeat Europe’s bloody history.”

  As they stared at the hotel, engulfed in flames, she told him her sister used to live here. Iréne was married to an engineer, a Lebanese Druze who was dedicated to bringing people together. One day a bomb landed on their house, a random event in which Iréne was killed, as were Abdul and their two small children. Françoise came for the funeral, her first time in the Middle East.

  There were no tears as she recounted this story. At first he thought it was because she was so self-controlled, but she told him no, all her tears had been shed long ago.

  Perhaps, he thought, that’s what made her so elusive, so hard to comprehend.

  A long moment passed as the flames leapt from the hotel like the Phoenix toward the fading sun and the waves of the Mediterranean Sea rushed against the nearby shore.

  “It will happen in Iran as well,” she finally said. “And in Iraq, when Saddam goes. All the rest. Once the rules of civilization fail, it’s a fast descent into hell.”

  He said, “Laurent—”

  “Le Comte Gramont,” she said snidely. “Alain de Rose opposed him. He doesn’t want France to capitulate to terror. He wants to stay close to America. Mais, comme tu vois…”