Letters to My Torturer

by Houshang Asadi

When I return to my senses, I am back in my cell. It takes a while before I recall what happened. The cell light is off. So it must be day. I am cold. The shivering begins again. My whole body is aching. I sit up with difficulty. My need for the bathroom is horrific. I stand up with difficulty. My head is spinning. I touch the wall for balance. I manage to pull out the IV line. My hands have swollen and are aching badly. I try to look out through the hole in the cardboard. I bang on the door. The shepherd guard arrives immediately. He gently grasps me under my arms and lays me back down on the bed. He goes out and comes back with a bowl filled with warm water.

  “Rub your hands and feet.”

  I look down. The bandages have been removed. Warm water – what pleasure. I rub my feet. The shepherd guard is squatting beside me: “Why are they doing this to you?”

  I have no idea. I shake my head.

  “Bathroom ...”

  “You are not allowed to leave your cell. Do your business here. You know how.”

  The shepherd guard laughs and leaves. I do my business into the bowl. I am all ears for the door. I fear you might turn up, Brother Hamid. But no. There’s nothing. I push the bowl aside and stretch out.

  There is the sound of knocking from the left wall, behind which is cell number fourteen. Someone is doing Morse code. I am not familiar with Morse code. Randomly, I knock on the wall. Again, there’s an answering knock in Morse code. Again, I knock on the wall, willy-nilly.

  Who’s in that cell? What does he want to say?

  During the Shah’s time, when the prisoners used Morse code, they also kept an ear out for the guard. The knocking is bound to be heard in the silence of the block. But no guard comes. Then there is silence. I don’t know how much time passes before I hear the shuffling of slippers and I jump up with the speed of lightning. You are coming for me, Brother Hamid. But no, the door to the next cell opens. I hear whispers. I force myself to stand up. I go to the door; I place my ear against the door. I can’t hear anything. I try to adjust the cardboard on the door and then I notice that there are some tiny holes in it. I put on my glasses. I look through the holes and see you, for the first time, Brother Hamid. How young you are and how thin. You have made the prisoner in cell fourteen lean against the wall. He is blindfolded. You don’t even reach his shoulders. He is saying something and you are listening. And this image stays with me for eternity. I turn away and stretch myself out on the bed.

  The sound of shuffling slippers arrives later that night. The door opens. It’s your voice: “Get out!”

  I first put on the blindfold. You grab me under my arm and help me reach the bathroom. You tell me to leave the door open. You also help me back to my cell. When the door closes, I find a piece of screwed-up paper on the floor. I open it. It’s a tiny instruction grid for Morse code. The light is still on. I hear the sound of tapping on the cell wall. I work out the meaning from the grid:

  C ... o ... m ... r ... a ... d ... e

  Comrade in resistance ...

  Had I not seen you with the cellmate next door, the phrase would have meant something very different to me. But I realize that this is another way of extracting information. That night, I remain silent. The next day I respond in Morse. I have no secrets; I say what I have already said in the interrogation. Two days later, when someone else is put into that cell, the Morse code stops. Much later, I see the report of the Morse code episode in an envelope in my file.

  The cell door opens: “Who’s Houshang?”

  I put on my blindfold. I hang onto the end of the stick and set off. I sense that someone is accompanying us. We go to the room downstairs. The guard makes me sit on the bed. Suddenly, I collapse. I shiver. I feel sick. All the pain is returning in waves. I am about to stand up almost against my will when a hand is placed on my shoulder, making me sit down. It’s you, Brother Hamid. You must have observed all my movements. I say in a shaky voice: “Hello.”

  You answer kindly: “Hello, good boy.”

  Then you start walking. I can see your military trousers from underneath the blindfold, I am watching you walk up and down and your words are being carved into my brain one by one: “We really had no idea that Mr Khamenei liked you that much, Mr Asadi. If he finds out that we have punished you, he will certainly be upset. But our problem is that we don’t know whether what you have written about him is true or a bunch of lies. It had better not be lies. But if it’s true, it will change everything.”

  “I swear to God it’s true, Brother Hamid.”

  “God? So you believe in God? Never mind. Take the paper and write a letter to Mr Khamenei. We will give him the letter. If he confirms ...”

  You fall silent. You must be watching my movements and waiting for my answer. To be honest, I am happy. Very happy. I nod my head in agreement. You give me a pile of paper and a biro.

  “Write the letter on a separate sheet.”

  And you laugh: “Of course you are not going to write about lovey-dovey stuff to Aqa. And for us, write about the trip to the Soviet Union. I want every detail. I really don’t want to have to bring you back down here.”

  Then you grip my sleeve and make me stand up. You walk with me to the room upstairs. You gently pat me on my back: “Knock on the door when you have finished writing the letter.”

  Chapter 12

  Defending Khomeini in the Heart of Moscow

  I lifted my glass and shouted: “Viva Khomeini!”

  And the foreign journalists had all laughed at me. I went out for a walk. The domes of the famous St Basil’s Cathedral emerged in the distance on Red Square. Postnik Yakovlev built this amazing church on the order of Ivan the Terrible. When work on the cathedral was complete, Ivan ordered that its architect be blinded, to prevent him from creating a similar building for anyone else. The terrible tsar and the great artist are now both long dead. The church’s colourful cupolas face Lenin’s mausoleum, a reminder of the end of another era of notorious oppression. Like Iran, Russia has long been a breeding ground for oppression, in the name of the king and the crown, the church and the cleric, and the people.

  “Stop writing. That’s enough.”

  It’s not you, Brother Hamid, giving me this order. It’s my wife’s worried voice, repeating the doctor’s orders. I collapsed again yesterday. The French doctor arrived immediately. He examined me again, and again pronounced: “There is no physical cause or problem.”

  My wife explained that I had been revisiting the torture chamber in my mind, and the doctor had insisted that I stop writing.

  But I must write. I must finish writing this.

  Moscow, winter/summer 1980

  “Come in, KGB agent!”

  It was like a game. Mansour Taraji, who died while I was writing this book, would keep repeating it, and we would quickly turn into a lane to lose any KGB agents who might be following us. It was winter 1980. Winter in the Moscow sense of the word – with people iceskating on the frozen surface of the Volga River.

  We had reached Moscow in the evening. A black car had been sent to meet us and was waiting for us at the bottom of the airplane steps. An exceptionally good-looking Russian man who, unlike the one we saw in Kabul, had a diplomat’s face and manner of dressing, came to receive us. We got into the car and for the first and last time in my life, I left the airport without being searched. The car passed through the large and frozen Leninsky Boulevard and delivered us to the Rossiya Hotel, a hotel reserved for foreign guests. We rested and then at eight o’clock in the evening joined our host, who spoke Farsi fairly well, in the restaurant.

  A special dish of cow’s tongue in aspic and a few glasses of Russia’s famous vodka kept us warm and cheerful until the early hours of the morning. Mansour told our host that we had come to interview Gromyko. He said that this would probably be impossible but he would do his best to arrange it. He left after we had arranged a meeting for the next day to visit the Kremlin and Lenin’s mummified body.

  After he left, we walked out into the street, watchful for the KGB agents
that Mansour was convinced were tailing us. Scenarios from the espionage films that were so popular during the Cold War and which, in my view, played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet Union, kept playing in my mind. We reached the wide Leninsky Boulevard. The domes of the famous St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square could be seen in the distance. We walked towards the square, and passed two guards who looked at us in astonishment. Except for a boy and a girl who were locked in a loving embrace, Red Square was empty. Greater and more silent than anything I could have imagined.

  The next morning we went to Lenin’s mausoleum. As usual, there was a long queue in front of the tomb. Our Russian companion took us to the head of the queue, pulled out a card, and we were immediately ushered in. Our walk past Lenin didn’t take more than a few seconds and didn’t trigger any emotion in me. Later on, while I was in prison, I watched footage of his statue being pulled down, and in exile, I watched a documentary about his mummification. On both occasions I recalled that moment, and asked myself: “What calibre of man was he?”

  From there we went to the Kremlin Palace. We passed through a tall, medieval-looking gateway, visited Lenin’s office and left.

  That night, the same Russian took us to the Bolshoi Theatre. I saw smartly dressed men, and women drenched in perfume and wearing revealing evening dresses hand over expensive fur coats to the cloakroom attendants before entering the hall. The scene reminded me of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. We had front row seats and watched an astonishing adaptation of Don Quixote. That is the most beautiful memory of my first visit to the Soviet Union.

  The next day, we received news of Gromyko’s adamant refusal to be interviewed, and we took the first flight back to Tehran, flying via Delhi.

  My wife and Rahman were waiting for me at the airport. After hugging and kissing each other on the cheeks, Rahman immediately warned me that the situation had worsened while I was away. He listened with keen interest to my report about Afghanistan and the situation there, as did Kianuri the following day. A few days later I went to visit Khamenei, who appeared almost indifferent while he listened to me, and was not interested in hearing Babrak Karmal’s message.

  I want to stop right here, after only a few lines about that trip. I haven’t done anything illegal, and besides, all this is already known to one of the country’s highest officials. Even though I am now weak and my body is broken into pieces, I’m terrified of describing an incident that might be used in building a court case against me.

  When we were in Afghanistan, they were in the process of replacing their ambassadors. Hafizullah Amin’s government had appointed most of them and therefore they were seen as opponents of the new regime. One of them was the then Afghan ambassador to Tehran who, if I am not mistaken, had given an interview in which he had criticized the Soviets’ presence in his country. He had not returned to Afghanistan after the change of government, but had fled to the West. While I was in Afghanistan, it had been arranged that his replacement would call me upon his arrival in Iran.

  One spring day in 1980, there was a phone call for me in the Mardom office. It was the new ambassador. After informing Kianuri and getting his agreement, we arranged a meeting and I went to the Afghan Embassy. The ambassador was a very young man, and looked like the rest of the Parchami men. We agreed to remain in contact so that he could pass news and information about Afghanistan to me for the paper.

  At our final meeting, he agreed to meet with a Party representative. The meeting was to take place at the Taryani Cafe, which was close to the embassy. In order to ensure that the two men identified each other correctly, I was supposed to sit at an adjacent table. On the agreed date, I entered the cafe slightly earlier than planned. I sat down, and opened my newspaper. Habibullah Foroughian,54 the Party’s representative, arrived exactly on time and sat down near me. The ambassador arrived a little bit later and joined Foroughian. They shook hands and started a conversation of which I didn’t hear a single word. Since I had done what I came to do, I asked for the bill. While I was paying, I noticed a man entering the cafe. He looked very familiar. I wracked my brain and quickly recalled a Moshtarek guard from the Shah’s time. He carefully looked around the cafe, left and then returned with another man.

  It was being said at the time that although Savak had been disbanded the year before, Savak’s anti-communist faction had been left untouched, and was cooperating with the Islamic Republic. There was no doubt that the meeting was being watched. I didn’t leave, and instead waited until the meeting was over. The ambassador left and a bit later, Foroughian stood up and walked quickly past me to the door, with some men hurrying after him. I followed to see what would happen. At the first traffic crossing, Foroughian rushed up to a shared taxi stop, and ignoring the etiquette of the queue, jumped into the waiting taxi, taking the last empty seat in the car. By the time the men tailing him reached the car and grabbed hold of the door handle, it had already set off. They were too late.

  On my way to get a taxi back to the Mardom office so I could fill Kianuri in. I spotted the agent from Moshtarek Prison in a phone box. He was dialling a number. I stopped and listened. When the line was connected, he said: “He escaped.”

  He hung up the phone and hurried off, looking worried. I went back to the office to tell Kianuri what had happened, but Foroughian had already told him everything. This was the incident that I was frightened of writing about. So I didn’t write it.

  That summer, the Olympic Games was to be held in Moscow. I had wanted to attend the Olympic Games ever since I learned to play football, and this seemed like an excellent opportunity to me. I talked to Rahman about it. A few days later Kianuri called me and said that my Olympic trip had been arranged. I would be attending the Olympics with a female reporter and Javid, a well-known footballer on the national team. On the day we were due to fly to Moscow, the Soviet National Olympic Committee made a last-minute change and announced that they could only accommodate two people, the female reporter and myself.

  The Olympic Games had started two or three days earlier. The giant Russian plane was completely full. At Larnaca, all the other passengers left the plane while we were kept on board, together with three heavily built men who must have been the plane’s security staff.

  At Moscow’s newly built airport, the highly polished floor reflected our steps. We handed over our passports to the official in charge. He carefully scrutinized them and said something in Russian. We responded that we didn’t understand Russian. I said this in English and my colleague in German. The official picked up the phone and made a call. A bit later, two men dressed in Red Army uniforms arrived. They separated us and asked us individually, one in English and the other in German, who we were and what we were up to. We explained that we were reporters for the Iranian Tudeh Party’s press and had arrived to cover the Olympics. Their attitude was unfriendly, and they left. Three security officials arrived, and again they asked us the same questions, separately. They wanted to know why we had arrived after the Games had already started. They asked to be shown the National Olympic Committee’s invitation letter and our Tudeh membership cards. We explained that the conditions in Iran had delayed our trip and for security reasons we had not been able to bring our membership documents with us.

  The three individuals, who were members of the Soviet Communist Party’s Youth Organization, took us with them and handed us over to three middle-aged men who officially interrogated us on behalf of the KGB. They asked the same questions in an angry and aggressive tone. They kept using telephones and walkie-talkies, speaking to each other and with some other party. There was clearly a problem, but we had no idea what it was. We were both getting angry, and protested that we were representatives of a “fraternal party”55 and should not be treated like this.

  Eventually they asked us to open our suitcases to be searched. The official in charge examined every single item in our suitcases very thoroughly. He pressed the buttons on my binoculars a few times. He opened my camera and removed the film. He
rubbed my shaving cream onto my hand and moistened it with his saliva until it started to foam. I could see out of the corner of my eye that they were pulling out my colleague’s underwear piece by piece, and that her face had turned red with anger.

  They took our money and counted it carefully before handing it back to us. After an hour or so, we were escorted to the exit surrounded by some security officials, and put on a bus. We were the only passengers, apart from an official and we didn’t know where we were being taken. When we reached Leninsky Boulevard, I realized that we were in the city centre. The bus stopped outside a large hotel. The official accompanying us handed us over to someone else. We passed through the hotel’s three checkpoints and found the Party’s representative in the Soviet Union waiting for us on the other side. He explained to us what had occurred. We had arrived at night and a number of days after the Games had started. The offices in charge of guests had been closed at the time and the entire Olympics committee had been off-duty. The security officials had looked everywhere for someone to verify our names but had not succeeded in finding anyone so they had decided to send us to prison for interrogation. The bus had been about to set off towards the prison when they had finally found a contact who had verified our identities.

  We took deep breaths in our luxurious rooms and then went down to the hotel’s glittering dining room for dinner.

  The menacing atmosphere of intense security aside, Moscow’s Olympic Games resembled an aristocratic party. The Soviets had done everything in their power to put a glorified image of their country on display.

  The tables were filled with food and dozens of women, dressed in the latest fashion, were on hand to serve the guests. However, I found it intriguing that the many waiters available attended the guests unwillingly and only after being called. None of them spoke any language apart from Russian. I also noticed them hiding bread, boiled eggs and cold meats under their uniforms.