“You, Mister American.” He spoke in Oxford-accented English.
“Yes?”
“I’m Hashemi.”
“I’m David.”
“Do you understand what’s happening here?” the man asked.
“Tell me.”
“I work as a local manager of the port, for Anglo-American Petroleum. My company takes a ninety percent profit on the oil we lift from Iranian soil and the Persian Gulf.”
“I see.”
“Do you see? England and America are exploiting Iranian resources. I work to fatten the bellies of the fat cats—you say that?”
Weiseman nodded. “Yes, we say that.”
“The Shah permits this, as his father did before him. They get paid off and deposit their vast wealth into Zurich bank accounts. Our people get screwed.”
“And you, Hashemi? Are you well paid?”
“Yes. You see, I’m Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s nephew.”
“I see. So…are you paid enough to stay bought?”
“What did you have in mind, Mister American?”
* * *
—
HE FOUND THE SAVAK defector, in a bulky sky-blue sweater, nursing a beer in a sordid bar near the port. The three day growth of straggly black beard and brown peasant cap over his forehead failed to mask the terror in his eyes and the tension that gripped his lean body. When Weiseman took a seat, the man said, “I came the long way to avoid a trail. I didn’t spot any watchers, but you never know.”
He’s right, Weiseman thought. All right, get to it.
“You’re to walk over to the port, Jafar, only fifty yards from here. There’s a speedboat waiting; the logo is DANCE PARTY. You’ll be taken across the strait to Iraq, then up to Basra. A man named Christopher will take it from there.”
Jafar’s eyes darted about him, trusting no one. “Christopher?”
“He’s one of ours.”
“And then?”
“Then they’ll work it out. You’ll stay in Basra till things cool down here.”
Jafar’s face was lined with suspicion. Weiseman could only imagine what was going though his mind. The mullahs would take over Iran; he’d never come back. His family would be arrested for his defection; Trita, his saintly brother, would be banished to Evin Prison…
Yes, Weiseman thought. It could all happen. Something worse almost had happened to him in Germany.
Jafar downed his beer in a single gulp and ordered a shot of whiskey. “Fortitude,” he said with a grimace. He downed that, too, then said, “Watch after Trita,” and tugged his cap further down over his eyes. He pulled a duffel bag over his right shoulder, the kind navy men around the port area were carrying. He stood and seemed to measure the distance to the port, then straightened up, braced himself, and strode away without another word.
Weiseman watched him dodge his way forward, then saw a couple of men immediately materialize from either side of Jafar’s path and begin to tail him at fifty feet. Weiseman pushed the signal on his walkie-talkie, and a half dozen young men and women suddenly were in the path of the two tails, holding hands, pointing, as Jafar kept going. The tails pointed stubby-nosed revolvers at the kids and rushed by them, keeping Jafar in their sight but not yet closing in. Jafar turned and saw them. He charged forward, making straight for the boat. One of the tails pointed a revolver. Weiseman said, “Now” into his walkie-talkie, and a silent bullet blew the revolver away, tumbling toward the sea.
British and American security agents swiftly surrounded the two tails, disarmed and cuffed them to a link fence, blindfolded them, and quickly disappeared them.
A leap from the dock and Jafar was in the boat. It sped away, due west for Iraq.
Weiseman went to the bar, trembling, and downed a shot himself. A man next to him said, “We did our best, but you never know. There are lots of patrol boats out there.”
It was Hashemi, the man he met earlier at the other end of the port. He asked, “And if he makes it through the gates of hell, and into Saddam’s Iraq, what will become of him?”
“You’ll let me know,” Weiseman said.
“Of course, Mister American. I’ll keep an eye out for you. As agreed.”
* * *
—
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, exhausted from the blast of the 120-degree sun, Weiseman entered the Rex Cinema and took a seat in the balcony. There must have been hundreds of patrons, all Iranian—families opening picnic baskets in the theater, young couples making out. On the screen, newsreels showed the Shah, but instead of the feeble monarch Weiseman had just met in Tehran, here was an imposing leader wagging his index finger at his subjects, calling the shots.
The feature film was a Persian love story, and Weiseman felt himself dozing off. He snapped himself awake once…a second time…then let himself go and drifted away. A half hour later a tap on his arm woke him up. “I came as soon as I could; there are police all over the street,” Karim said in a husky whisper.
Weiseman roused himself, sat up, and looked around at all the surrounding faces absorbed in the screen before reaching into his jacket and handing the envelope to Karim. It contained a forged French passport with his son’s photograph in it, and a paper giving the name of a man who would come to Evin and take Selim to Paris. Alain de Rose had seen to that with a testy call to Hanif: “He’s a young man, and he works for Le Figaro; it wouldn’t do to cause an incident.”
Karim stuffed it all back into the envelope looking stunned. “I owe you my life,” he blurted out before trying to embrace Weiseman.
Weiseman shoved him back and shushed him, throwing a look around them to remind him where they were. The faces around them still seemed intent on the screen. “Go now,” he hissed. “We’ll speak again, back in Tehran.”
Weiseman leaned back to watch the film and put sufficient time between their departures. The rhythm of the Farsi language promptly lulled him back to sleep.
He awoke to the smell of smoke. Patrons were in the aisle, muscling each other to get out. A man in a suit came on the stage and screamed at the top of his lungs. Fire! Get out! Get out!
Weiseman leapt up and looked all round, trying to gauge how to make his way through the mass of human beings desperate to escape. A curtain was ablaze; the crowded theater was already like a tomb.
An elderly lady collapsed in front of him. He stooped to help her, and someone ran up his back, stomping him to the ground. He grimaced in pain but took the woman’s hand. There was no pulse. He put his ear to her chest and heard nothing. She was dead.
He forced himself up, pushing aside a large woman who pressed on top of him, flailing with tight fists. He was frightened now; he realized that he could die in this theater.
Squaring his shoulders, he pushed, shoved, and gouged his way toward the exit like the others seeking to survive. A metal exit door was locked. He pushed again and again on the metal bar that should have opened it, but it wouldn’t budge.
The fire darted to a curtain nearby. All the walls were covered with curtains, and one by one they were igniting. The heat was intense. A chemical smell burned his nostrils while his skin prickled with the heat. Weiseman thought everyone in the theater would be asphyxiated before being burned to ashes. Old people were collapsing to the ground, children were screaming. Death was all around.
He banged on the metal door and screamed for someone outside to open it. The smoke and fire were a wall now, creeping forward, closing the space behind them, and forcing the crowd forward against the impenetrable door.
You cannot die! Weiseman commanded himself.
Summoning his strength, he charged the door like the Stanford halfback he had once been, slammed into it, then pulled back and slammed into it again. Pain shot from his back shoulder down his right side. The flames were very near now, and the bitter, poisonous smoke was suffocating. Some other men joined him, ramming the door with their shoulders, kicking it, until Weiseman raced forward one more time, and this time the door gave way. He fell forward and kept hi
s wits enough to roll to one side to avoid being trampled by the hordes tumbling out after him.
A voice came over a megaphone, in frantic Farsi. Get away! Hurry! Now! Now!
He forced himself up, staggered across the street, and ducked behind a low brick wall. Turning toward the theater, he saw people stumble through the open doorway, and then the building collapsed in a conflagration of smoke and flames and a thunderous rumble. Everyone was screaming inside a thick dark cloud of smoke and debris.
Half-conscious, he told himself: Get out of here.
People were running everywhere, toward the Rex Cinema and away from it. He dragged himself away through the chaos as fast as he could, his right side—his shoulder, back, and leg—throbbing painfully.
Ten minutes down the road he saw a small hotel on a side street. He went in and paid for two nights in advance. In a tiny room, he took a hot bath and went to bed. When he awoke, stiff and sore, he made his way to the lobby where there was a TV. The smoke was still rising from the charred ruins of the Rex Cinema. Estimates were that more than four hundred people had died inside.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, the regime claimed that the fire was the work of Islamic fundamentalists who had attacked the cinema as a symbol of Western values. General Hanif reported that Khomeini’s henchmen had used arson repeatedly in recent months, burning down over two dozen theaters and hundreds of private compaies. Later, opposition leaders blamed the SAVAK policy of locking theater doors from the outside for security purposes. Western telecasts noted that the fire department had been suspiciously slow in responding to the alarm.
Other reports noted that the Rex was not frequented by Westerners—except in this instance, it had been, by an American diplomat, no less, whose photo was flashed around the world.
Hanif, Weiseman thought.
The phone rang in Weiseman’s nondescript hotel room in Abadan. Trevor was calling from CIA headquarters. It wasn’t the first time Justin had found him when he was in trouble.
Trevor said, “Lyman Palmer is demanding that you be pulled out of Iran. He’s cabled the State Department inspector general. He wants your head on a platter.”
Weiseman sat crammed into a tiny bathtub, nursing his lower back in the piping hot bath water. “I’ll leave the country tomorrow morning, Justin. Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”
“Why would you do that, David?”
“Palmer—”
“Oh, don’t worry about Palmer; it’s his mission. And it’s his fault.”
“He went to the inspector general? Justin, I’m not going to fight our own people. I’m ready to resign.”
Trevor chuckled. “Really, David, isn’t that rather melodramatic? The IG is my creature. Rollie Atkins—you remember him, our administrative counselor in Prague.”
Trevor owns us all, Weiseman thought. Always has, as long as I’ve known him.
“Justin, this country is ready to go up in flames, like the Rex.”
“Of course it is. Ramadan ends soon. You’re going to stay in Iran, keep doing what you’re doing. Be back to Tehran by Labor Day. That’s when the real fire will break out.”
The phone clicked and Trevor was gone.
Weiseman fell back into his fugue state; he couldn’t get the memory of the fire out of his mind—ordinary people out for a film, incinerated in a raging fire. He asked himself whether the fire had been meant for him. Was it a lethal lesson from Hanif for messing with his men at the dock—an auto-da-fé arranged by mullahs to dispose of an interfering American heretic? The fire had been set, he was certain, the exits deliberately locked. Who wanted to turn a theater full of innocent Iranians into a funeral pyre?
Weiseman turned the hot water back on in the tub and slid back down into it. He felt the shock of unremitting heat, then closed his eyes and was pulled back to the Rex, seeing flames consume the theater and the Iranian people.
19
AJAX TWO
THE END OF Ramadan fell on September 4, Labor Day in America. Two weeks had passed since the fire, and Weiseman was in his hotel in Tehran nursing his back. Messages arrived from the palace, funneled through Daud, but he didn’t reply. And he stayed away from the embassy where he was persona non grata.
Debate still raged in the news media over who set the fire that destroyed the Rex and killed nearly five hundred Iranians. There were stories about the mysterious American. It was reliably known, one paper said, that he was pressuring the Shah to abdicate and that he had met with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Another said he had cast an evil spell over the monarch and was manipulating him like a new Rasputin. There was no agreement about what he might have been doing inside the Rex Cinema, except that he had not been there to watch the movie.
An “impeccable source” provided a photo of this foreign devil conversing with General Hosein Hanif under a black headline demanding to know “Who is this Weiseman?” An editorial in a paper sympathetic to the ayatollahs said he was CIA and suggested a resemblance to Kim Roosevelt, who had returned the Shah to his throne in 1953.
Lyman Palmer, asked about the American by reporters, said laconically that Weiseman had no connection to the American embassy. “He’s some kind of shadowy operative,” Palmer added, and he gave a noncommittal smile when asked if that meant CIA.
Trevor told Weiseman that the dig from Palmer had raised his standing with Carter.
With his steadily improving Farsi, picked up from Yasmine and the streets of Iran, Weiseman followed the Shah’s doings on TV. He appeared to be guided by caprice—one day presenting new reforms that enraged the ayatollahs, the next announcing arrests of dissidents.
Shapour meanwhile reported to Weiseman that there had been a flurry of executions at Evin. Daud spoke to him of an “Action Plan” the ayatollahs planned to launch right after Ramadan.
Weiseman went out camouflaged in a ten-day beard and peered through dark sunglasses at a spreading sea of black chadors, black beards, and black turbans. Posters of the Shah and Farah were defaced with Nazi swastikas. The streets were chockablock with heavily armed SAVAK forces.
He thought he spotted the two men he had last seen chained to the link fence on the Abadan dock. He lost them in the crowds, but then, a chador appeared at his shoulder, whispered, “Mahmoud est en danger” and swept by.
He felt a chill of alarm. Mahmoud was his responsibility, and a vital part of his network.
He cabled Trevor. Iran was a balloon, pumped up almost to the limit and one tiny pinprick from bursting. He told the spymaster that he was going to revive Ajax Two.
* * *
—
RONALD SIMS TOOK him to meet the business executive, a tidy man in a well-cut suit who at least had the look of a prime minister: hair graying at the temples, a neat mustache, and a dignified manner that implied Oxford or Cambridge. London’s man, for sure.
When the man began speaking it was obvious he was a sober-minded businessman who saw that the Shah’s time was up. He was also a patriot. He said, “I won’t be the Shah’s last prime minister, Mr. Weiseman.”
“What about a new government?”
“Well, that’s another matter. Can you arrange that?”
Sims also brought him to the two Iranian generals he had mentioned, one after another. They, too, were wary, but interested. They knew how Reza Shah graduated from the barracks to the throne, stepping aside for his son at foreign insistence, but they also knew of Hanif’s expertise with the hangman’s noose. In the right circumstances, to serve the nation, perhaps, but well, not quite yet.
He returned to the Tehran Polo Club, and this time Mustafa Yilmaz selected a fine chestnut mare for him. Soon they were riding in rolling green fields. Yes, Yilmaz was sure the Shah’s Turkish friends would offer him refuge and hospitality when he departed, but not forever, mind you. Turkey had its own interests to consider, and Iran was a neighbor, an inescapable fact of life that would remain so after the Shah abdicated, whoever or whatever took his place.
Mahmoud and Alana secreted him to cells of Iranians desperate to see the Shah depart. He told them that the moment was near, but hedged about specifics. It wouldn’t do to commit himself and the United States when events were underway; nor did he wish to undermine confidence by admitting that he had no control over how it would happen or who would be the successor. He pressed these good folk of Tehran on what they would do to avoid a takeover by the mullahs.
Ah, he was always told, that comes later. One thing at a time. First, the Shah must go.
Over and over he explained patiently that, in politics, a vacuum is filled by the most determined force and that those who wait suffer the consequences. A fundamentalist regime would have little tolerance for those who later demanded a democratic government.
“We will adapt,” they said, deaf to his advice. Once the Shah was gone, everything would work out fine.
* * *
—
WEISEMAN WAS CONVINCED now that there were only two options to avoid a fundamentalist regime headed by Khomeini. Either Washington would join with the British, the Turks, and the Israelis to replace the Shah with a secular leader—shifting to an expedient general—or the United States would have to cut a deal with a moderate mullah, if there was such a figure.
He mulled it over. History was replete with clever clerics who had governed shrewdly. In France alone there were Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu as well as Talleyrand, the ideologically neutral turncoat who served as foreign minister to Louis XVI, then to Napoleon, and then again to Louis XVIII, before the defrocked priest expired along with the line of Bourbon kings. But here it would take a cleric ready and able to take on the ominous Ayatollah Khomeini, and one prepared to work with the Americans and sustain the alliance.
He went back down the alley near the palace to meet Moshe Regev. Sitting next to him was a slight bald man with large round glasses. Weiseman was surprised but managed to keep it to himself.
Night in Tehran Page 16