by Larry Bond
Buffeted by high winds, the helicopter raced north toward Tehran at two hundred kilometers an hour.
Taleh sat motionless, watching the ruined factory shrink and fall away behind him. His thoughts mirrored the bleak, bomb-shattered landscape below.
In the mid-1970s Amir Taleh had been a junior officer, freshly commissioned and serving under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Those had been difficult times for any Iranian of conscience, especially for one in the Army.
Driven by the impulse to regain Iran’s place as the Middle East’s leading power, the Shah had embarked on a series of massive projects to modernize, to Westernize, his nation. There had been progress. Schools, hospitals, and factories sprouted across an ancient, once-impoverished landscape. But the price had been high. Precious traditions, customs, and religious beliefs had been ground underfoot in the central government’s rush to ape the West.
Ironically, the rapid oil price hikes engineered by OPEC only made matters worse. The gushing flood of petrodollars had intensified corruption, always a way of life for many in the Pahlavi court. Billions had been squandered on extravagances and on ill-conceived public works. Through it all, rampaging inflation made life harder and harder for the vast majority of Iranians.
Stung by the first stirrings of mass dissent, the Shah’s government had reacted badly, handing over more and more power to the dreaded secret police, the SAVAK.
Taleh remembered the ever-present SAVAK informers all too well. At the Tehran officers’ academy, one of his classmates had disappeared one night. No one was sure of the young man’s crime—certainly, Taleh had never seen him commit any treasonous offense. His friends had dared not ask his fate, and even his family had never been told what had happened to him. The SAVAK operated as a law unto itself.
After receiving his lieutenant’s commission, Taleh had been fortunate. He’d been sent to the United States, one of the many talented junior officers selected for further military training by the Shah’s patron country. The long, difficult months spent in Infantry Officers’ Basic and Ranger School had taught him much. He’d come to know and respect many of his instructors and his fellow students. They were tough, dedicated men—soldiers to the core.
He had felt less admiration for America as a whole. Outside its military, American society seemed strangely lacking—somehow sadly incomplete. Its people were often spiritless, overly materialistic, and selfish. Taleh suspected it was because they had no unifying faith—no common bond to give them strength.
Despite that, Taleh had learned what he could, and he had learned it quickly and well. Then he had returned home to find a country in chaos.
SAVAK excesses had at last sparked the very unrest the Shah so feared. Confronted by mass demonstrations and riots, Iran’s ruler turned to a reluctant Army, ordering it to impose martial law, to crush its own people at gunpoint.
Taleh grimaced. Those were ugly memories. He could still see the broken, bleeding bodies in his mind’s eye. Hundreds had died in the street fighting: idealistic students, devout, gray-bearded clerics, and chador-clad women. Even children had been caught in the cross fire. But at least none of them had died at his hands.
He could still recall the look of mingled anger, pity, and understanding that had crossed his commander’s face when Amir Taleh—one of the officer corps’ rising stars—had refused to obey any order to fire on the crowds. There had been a blood price to pay for such defiance, of course.
Taleh shifted slightly, still conscious of the old scars across his back. He’d been arrested immediately and taken to a secret SAVAK prison. There he had endured countless beatings, countless acts of cruelty and torture. But he had survived. Scourged by men, he had grown ever more steadfast in his faith.
As God had willed.
When the Shah finally fell from power, he waited for his freedom. He waited in vain. The Islamic Revolution, which should have been his salvation, simply replaced one set of jailers with another. To the mullahs, Taleh’s refusal to obey the Shah’s martial-law orders meant nothing. In their eyes, his military training in America had “Westernized” him beyond redemption. They saw him and the other young officers like him as “a threat to the Islamic society” they planned to build.
And so the faqih, the Islamic judges who now ruled Iran, had ordered the armed forces “purified.” Hundreds of field-grade and general officers were executed. Others escaped to the West and into a dreary, inglorious exile.
By some standards, Taleh was lucky. He was simply left in prison to rot—a captive languishing without trial and without a sentence. But just as a war against his own people had proved his downfall, so a war against an ancient enemy restored his fortunes.
When Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi legions stormed across the frontier, Iran’s purged, “pure” Army proved itself incapable and inept. In desperation, the Islamic Republic combed through its prison camps to find the veteran soldiers it needed to fight and win. It had found Amir Taleh.
Throughout the eight-year-war, he had fought two enemies: the Iraqis and many inside the Republic’s own governing circles. In a way, the mullahs were right. He had been Westernized, at least in the sense that he had accepted the Western idea that tactics and military reality were not affected by revolutionary doctrine. Competence and sound planning mattered more on the modern battlefield than blind courage.
He’d proven that, in battle. Starting out in command of a company, promotion had come quickly to him, a combination of survival and skill. First an infantry battalion, then a Special Forces battalion. He’d spent more time in combat than almost any Iranian officer now alive—much of it behind Iraqi lines. His decorations, grudgingly awarded, marked him as Iran’s top soldier.
Those decorations had also saved him from falling into the hands of the Pasdaran, the fanatical Revolutionary Guards. Products of the Revolution, the Pasdaran’s leaders viewed all Regular Army officers as potential traitors—or more dangerous still, as potential rivals for power within the Republic. For them Taleh was a walking nightmare: a decorated hero, a victorious leader, and a devout Muslim who ignored their authority. They’d never been able to touch him.
He frowned. Of course, he had never been able to touch them either. To his utter frustration, he had been forced to watch them send thousands of devout young volunteers to futile deaths in foolish frontal assaults, unable to speak out. The Revolutionary Guards had no grasp of tactics. They did not understand their enemy. Wrapped in a cloak of ideology, they never evaluated their actions against the brutal test of reality. Worse yet, the men at the top had never made the sacrifices they demanded so casually of others.
Since the end of the war, Taleh had devoted himself to rebuilding Iran’s Regular Army. Despite continuing opposition from the Pasdaran and other radicals, he’d risen steadily in rank, climbing to the very top of his profession. He had never married. Surrounded by enemies as he was, a wife and children would have been little more than a point of weakness, a constant vulnerability. No, his soldiers were his only family.
Kazemi’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Five minutes, General.”
He could see Tehran now. A thin haze of smoke still hung over the skyline, almost twenty-four hours after the attack. Fires were still burning out of control in some parts of the city, spreading outward from the gutted shells of the Majles, the Parliament building, and the Defense Ministry. One bright spot in all this was the destruction of Pasdaran headquarters, but the capital had suffered more in one day than it had in the entire eight years of war with Iraq.
The American missiles had killed hundreds, and hundreds more were in hospitals all over the north of Iran. Most of those killed were government workers, technicians, military officers, or officials. Every ruling body except the Council of Guardians had suffered some loss.
The American message was clear. Payment for the dead in California had been returned tenfold, and much of his nation’s military power had been savaged. And to what end? Was this worth it? Taleh shook his head, still
staring out across the city flowing by below him.
Despite years of support from Tehran, HizbAllah and the other groups had done nothing to improve the strategic position of Iran or of Islam itself. Though occasionally stung by their random bombings, hijackings, and hostage-taking, the United States and its allies were still able to maintain their hold on the Middle East—playing one Islamic country off against another.
The helicopter settled heavily onto a makeshift landing pad set up near the office building he’d selected as the Defense Ministry’s temporary quarters. Several staff officers were visible through the swirling dust, anxiously awaiting his return.
As soon as the rotors slowed, Taleh was out, favoring his leg but moving as quickly as he could. The Defense Council meeting was still four days off, but there were preparations to make.
Somewhere in the air over Tehran, he’d made his decision. This waste and destruction must never be allowed to happen again.
FEBRUARY 10
Tehran
General Mansur Rafizaden sat in the back of his speeding black Mercedes sedan, angrily contemplating the upcoming meeting. By rights the Supreme Defense Council should have been gathering at his headquarters, not at those of the Army. He scowled. That cunning fox Amir Taleh was growing bolder in his efforts to steal power away from the Islamic Republic’s true and tested guardians.
For more than a decade, Rafizaden had led the Basij, the People’s Militia. He and his officers had mobilized tens of thousands of teenagers into hastily trained battalions for service in the war with Iraq. Many had died in that service, but since their deaths assured them all a place in Paradise, he was sure they had gone gladly.
Now he found himself suddenly thrust into command of the whole Pasdaran, a promotion earned when American warheads decimated the upper ranks of the Revolutionary Guards. Though new to his post, he took his responsibilities most seriously and he had no intention of surrendering his organization’s hard-won powers to Taleh or any other tainted soldier.
Rafizaden began considering plans to humble his rivals. A guardian of the Revolution had to be energetic. He couldn’t wait for threats to appear. He had to find those who were dangerous and crush them long before they could become a threat. Well, Taleh and his fellows were clearly dangerous.
While he sat deep in thought, his black Mercedes sedan raced through northern Tehran, escorted by two jeeps—one leading, the other trailing. Each jeep was filled with teenage Basij soldiers carrying a collection of assault rifles and submachine guns. During the more violent days of the Revolution, and during the war with Iraq, such escorts had been a necessity. Now they were viewed as almost a formality, and positions in the jeeps were given out as honors to favored soldiers.
The ambush took them all by surprise.
Just as the Pasdaran convoy passed one intersection, an Army truck suddenly roared out onto the street behind them. Before the men in the rear jeep could react, the truck braked hard and turned sideways, blocking the street to any other traffic. At the same instant a panel van pulled out across the convoy’s path. The van’s driver scrambled out of his vehicle on the passenger side, diving out of sight.
Even as the surprised Basij troopers readied their weapons, rifle and machine-gun fire rained down on the two jeeps from several second-story windows. Hundreds of rounds ricocheted off pavement and metal and tore the guards to pieces in seconds.
Both escort jeeps, their drivers killed by the fusillade, spun out of control and crashed into the buildings lining the street. The Mercedes, armored against small-arms fire, tried to steer around the abandoned panel van, bouncing up and over the curb in a desperate bid to escape the trap.
An antitank rocket slammed into the sedan’s windshield and exploded, spewing white-hot glass and metal fragments across the driver and a bodyguard in the front seat. Rafizaden and an aide in the back ducked down and were spared the worst of the blast. The move bought them only moments of life.
A second rocket ripped the Mercedes’ roof open, showering both the Pasdaran commander and the younger officer with lethal splinters. Then the first RPG gunner, hurriedly reloading, fired again. This third warhead streaked downward and exploded deep inside the vehicle, turning it into a shapeless pyre.
Defense Ministry, Tehran
General Amir Taleh supervised the last-minute arrangements for the Supreme Defense Council meeting personally.
It was a sign of the mullahs’ confusion that they were unable to prevent him from hosting the gathering here on his own ground. Like the armed forces, their ranks had been thinned by the American missile strikes. Many of the ruling faction’s top men were dead—buried beneath the rubble of the Parliament building and other official ministries. Power had been lost and gained, and political alignments were in flux.
Taleh stood near the door to the conference room, watching his nervous aides hurriedly arranging the maps and other briefing materials he’d ordered prepared. This was to be a critical meeting, one that would change the course of the Islamic Revolution, possibly even deciding its ultimate success or failure, and along with it the survival of Iran as a state. It was clear that changes were needed. Taleh understood that, even if the faqih did not.
Captain Kazemi appeared at the door to the meeting room, quietly waiting to be noticed. Taleh nodded to him, and the young officer strode over to the general, doing his best to look calm.
“Sir, we’ve just heard from the police. There’s been an attack on General Rafizaden’s car. He’s dead.”
Taleh’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
The staff clustered around Kazemi as he recounted the first reports flowing in: The convoy ferrying the new head of the Revolutionary Guards to the conference had been smashed in a swift, violent street ambush—wiped out by automatic-weapons fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The only clues to the crime were some pamphlets scattered over the scene. Written in Kirmanji, they demanded independence for Kurdistan.
Taleh sighed audibly, and inside, the knot of tension almost disappeared. “Very well, Captain. We’ll move the meeting back an hour. The Pasdaran will need some time to appoint new representatives.”
Kazemi asked, “Should we cancel the session altogether?”
Taleh shook his head. “No, Farhad, everyone else is already en route. Unless the Imam directs otherwise, we will meet.”
He glared at the rest of his staff. “There’s nothing we can do about Rafizaden. Everyone, back to your tasks.”
The cluster of officers and civilians dissolved. Taleh turned back to his aide. “Do the police have any clues to the assassins’ identity?”
Kazemi shook his head. “Nothing much. Nothing more than a description of well-armed men in civilian clothes. The entire attack was over in just a minute or two. They promised to send anything else they find to our intelligence office.”
Taleh allowed himself a small smile. “Good. Carry on, Farhad. You know your orders.”
The captain nodded crisply and hurried away.
The general also nodded, but inside, to himself. Over the next few weeks Kazemi would make sure that the Special Forces troops involved were transferred to other units in other provinces. As highly experienced soldiers they would be welcomed by their new commanders. At the same time, Taleh’s net of die-hard loyalists in the Army would grow.
That was a sideshow, though. The most important thing was that Rafizaden was dead, and the Pasdaran would be confused and leaderless.
Taleh looked at his watch. In a little more than two hours, the President, Prime Minister, the remnants of the Defense Ministry bureaucracy, the armed forces, and the Pasdaran would meet to decide on a response to this latest American attack. He now anticipated little serious resistance to his proposals. Though they were both mullahs, the President and the Prime Minister were also canny politicians, adept at setting their sails to ride out every shift in the Republic’s stormy factional politics. Neither man would choose to confront the man who led their nation’s armed forces—not without ass
ured backing from the Revolutionary Guards.
No, with the Pasdaran crippled, Amir Taleh would dictate Iran’s future course.
MARCH 4
Defense Ministry
Perched on a small settee outside Taleh’s private office, Hamid Pakpour waited in mounting dread. He mopped the sweat off his brow, cheeks, and neck with a large handkerchief, acutely aware that his nerves were stretched to the breaking point. Why had he been summoned here? What could the head of Iran’s military possibly want with him?
Certainly, he was a prominent merchant—and one of the richest men in all Iran. But he had always been very careful to stay out of politics. Just as he had always taken pains to make public his intense devotion to Islam and to the Revolution. Many in the government had received tangible proofs of his devotion—discreet gifts of land or marketable securities.
Could that be the reason? Pakpour wondered uneasily. Did the general want his own “assurances” of the merchant’s loyalty? He prayed fervently to God that was so. Anything else would be disastrous.
Only the blind and the deaf could not know that Taleh had emerged from the chaos of the past month as the power behind the President and the Parliament. Security duties once the exclusive province of the Revolutionary Guards were increasingly performed by Regular Army units. The Pasdaran was little more than a pale shadow of its former self. Its best men were being transferred to the Army. Many of the rest were simply being pensioned off. A few, the most radical, were said to be under lock and key—detained for certain unspecified offenses against the state.
“General Taleh will see you now. Come with me.”
Pakpour looked up to find an Army officer standing beside him. Sweating again, he rose hurriedly and followed the taller man into the next room.
Even for temporary quarters, Taleh’s office seemed spartan. Beyond a single desk and two chairs, there were no furnishings. Maps of Iran and its neighbors covered the walls. The general’s desk held nothing more than a phone, a blotter, and a personal computer.