Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

by Hakakian, Roya

  What he learned from the Austrians broadened Jost’s under standing of the history behind the murders. Tehran had less to fear in the Doctor, who was neither as popular nor as charismatic as his predecessor. But by 1992 there was more to fear in regional developments—in Kuwait, which the Americans had invaded, and in northern Iraq where the Kurds were finally given autonomy. Tehran’s motive was a mystery as long as Jost believed the Kurds were a lone, powerless minority. But since the Gulf War, the Kurds were no longer alone. They were a minority backed by America, Iran’s archenemy, whose influence threatened to deepen and spread among the neighboring Kurds.

  Jost returned home with a radically different assessment of Iran than the one Foreign Minister Genscher had. To the diplomat, the new Tehran had appeared on the brink of moderation. To the prosecutor, all that was new about Tehran was its mask of moderation. Doubts no longer plagued him. He had uncovered the motive, and solved the case. Yet he found no relief in all these discoveries. He had only traded doubt for anxiety. He thought about the near future, a time when he would make his findings public. Could an irate Tehran strike against his family? He considered the dangers he might be exposing his children to. The fallout from the trial ahead would hardly be contained within the courtroom. It was bound to reach into his home, and so he needed Angela’s consent to continue on.

  “Do the right thing, Bruno. Do what your conscience tells you to do,” she said, simply and elegantly, without a moment’s hesitation.

  Her swift response shook Jost, forcing him to make the very arguments he had expected her to make: Their privacy would be lost. They would live under siege for the foreseeable future, with bodyguards following them at every step. They might have to go into hiding. But she did not flinch. She shrugged and said that she knew he would never be content quitting or giving the case less than his all. She knew living with the burden of his cowardice would crush them just as mortally as the dangers his valor might bring upon them.

  Angela was the one to prepare their children for the sudden changes that swept through their household. A watch post was built on the sidewalk of their residence, and two guards monitored the house at all hours. Two other guards in plain clothes shadowed Jost outside of home. The reinforcements to the Jost house became the talk of the neighborhood. Rumors began to spread about a surveillance camera lodged in their mailbox, and about the house itself being only a facade hiding the family living in a single room underground. Eight-year-old Alex thrived on the intrigue of his father’s new case, but the teenage Barbara dreaded it. Angela, who was not the brooding kind, consoled her daughter by promising not Bruno’s safety, but his happiness.

  “He’ll be a better father if he does what he loves to do.”

  The inconveniences of life with Bruno were, after all, rooted in the very qualities Angela loved in him—above all his single-minded dedication to the objects of his passion. She drew strength from his clarity of purpose, as if nothing could ever blur his view of the truth. He could be contemplative, but never equivocal. She had learned that about him at seventeen when they first met on a field trip. Two days after they had declared their love to each other, he found out that Angela had yet to break the news of their relationship to the young Frenchman she had been dating. He briefly perused her German-French dictionary and jotted a few words on a piece of paper. Then he went looking for his rival. Finding him, Jost pointed to Angela, and said, “C’est finis.”

  When the young man seemed puzzled, Jost grabbed Angela’s hand and, reverting to German, said, “She’s with me now, see? You may be on your way! Au revoir!”

  Four years later, after she completed her degree in French literature and he had entered law school, they were married.

  Despite his newfound certainty about the case, Jost could show no sign of it publicly. The office of the chief federal prosecutor was in Bonn’s grip. No interviews were to be granted, no statements to be issued without submitting them to the justice ministry for clearance first. For the moment, Jost did not mind the tyranny; he had an indictment to draft. The flurry of inquiries was certain to sweep him up with the start of the trial. Until then, he reveled in the imposed silence. He had always done his best work in quiet.

  To Parviz, however, silence was an insult. Any day that ended without a mention of his murdered friends in the news was another nail in their coffins. The passing of several weeks without a single statement from the federal prosecutor alarmed him. Years of activism had taught Parviz many lessons—above all that justice was a debt to wrest from powerful men who thrived in silence. Clamor was essential, effective, and, most importantly, inexpensive. Such was his state of mind just before he committed one of the great betrayals of his life.

  In the early days after the murders, an inexperienced reporter from the Bild, a popular tabloid, had approached Parviz. He had cringed upon hearing the name of the publication, but the reporter’s eyes, gleaming with enthusiasm, his obvious hunger for a serious story, had disarmed Parviz. The Bild was Europe’s best-selling paper and had a large circulation worldwide. An article in the Bild would thrust the case into the scope of a whole new audience. So had gone the inner reasoning that led him to keep the reporter’s contacts.

  But reaching a wider audience was hardly what drove Parviz to call the tabloid reporter. It was desperation. The nationwide broadcast Norbert had promised was still days away. The waiting gnawed at him. He worried that it might have to yield to other breaking news. The fresh round of rumors about who had infiltrated the dinner at the Mykonos were now directed at him and Noori, and it added to his restlessness. He had to retaliate, ruthlessly if need be. He believed that the waters of the tragedy he had experienced were deep enough to wash away all his past and the forthcoming sins he had begun contemplating.

  From the visit the BKA agents had paid him, Parviz still had nine unpublished photos of the three leading suspects in the case. With nine exclusive photos he could strike a bargain with any reporter, especially a novice toiling at a tabloid with lesser standards of accuracy. He called the young reporter and offered him one of the photos.

  It all happened swiftly. The photo ran beside an article and interview with him in the next issue of the Bild. The reporter was showered with more praise and congratulatory messages than he had ever received in his career. For him and the paper, the piece was a coup, and it brought some highbrow colleagues to the tabloid reporter’s doorstep, probing him about his sources.

  “I’ve Parviz Dastmalchi to thank,” he told everyone, including Parviz.

  The success of the piece was immediately followed by a second and then a third installment on the Mykonos case, with “never before seen” photos accompanying each. For the fourth article, Parviz offered more than just another exclusive photo.

  “I have something else for you, something no one has yet reported,” Parviz said, then seductively asked if the reporter, whose confidence in Parviz was at a peak, could guarantee front-page coverage in exchange for the scoop.

  The reporter put Parviz on hold, but returned moments later with blessings from his editor. Buoyed by the promise, Parviz unfolded the piece of paper he had been keeping in his shirt pocket, and said, “Here are the results of the ballistic tests on the murder weapons found at the car dealership last September, the ones the police won’t disclose.”

  Parviz gave the full account of the weapons’ history and the reporter, at times speaking as if only to himself, fitted the pieces of information together, staggered by the enormity of what he was learning.

  “These weapons had been sold to the Iranian Royal Army in 1972. But who supplied the weapons to the hit squad is as important as who sold the weapons to the Iranian Royal Army to begin with, you see,” Parviz said, raising the curiosity of his eager listener.

  It was for this moment he had chosen the novice. What he subsequently did went against everything he had ever preached to his daughter. Yet he did not waver. “The weapons were sold to Iran by Germany,” he added.

  To force th
e hands of the German officials, Parviz calculated, one had to incriminate them. Naming Germany, instead of Spain, as the real supplier would goad the authorities into denying the accusation by coming forth with the truth.

  “Germany?” the reporter gasped at the other end. “Good God, Mr. Dastmalchi. What proof do you have for this?”

  Parviz quoted a highly positioned but anonymous source at the BKA. Then he wrote down the serial numbers of the weapons, their make and model, and the year they had been manufactured. At the bottom he wrote “sold to Iran by Germany” and faxed the hand-crafted document to the Bild.

  At dawn the following day, a howl—deep, wrenching, and protracted—shook Norbert’s apartment.

  “Nooo . . .”

  The clock radio had gone off and the half-conscious Norbert heard the weather report interrupted by a breaking story about the murders at Mykonos. He burst out of bed and switched on the television. Every broadcast was running the news of the ballistic tests according to the Bild’s most recent issue. Except it was Germany not Spain that was being named the original supplier.

  “Nooo!” Norbert wailed again as he dialed Parviz’s number. His howl was the sound of his broken trust.

  Parviz spent the early morning hours of that day in his office, unable to do much. Norbert’s angry words kept echoing in his mind. Maybe all his ploys had been paltry and quixotic. Maybe he had achieved nothing. Maybe the sum of all his efforts was a drop in an ocean whose tides ebbed and flowed to the whims of politicians. Maybe, as Norbert insisted through his screams, he was damaging the case by his rash acts. Or maybe, as some fellow exiles had rumored, he was using the assassination to promote himself. Whatever it was that moved him was beyond his control. He could not stop what he had begun. The need to wage war had become another physical urge like eating or keeping warm. He either warred or surrendered to fear, insomnia, and despair. It was how he warded off darkness. War was what he did to affirm, if only to himself, that he was innocent and alive.

  11

  Hollywood is making a film about Cyrus, so Westerners can learn how it took us 2,500 years to get from a great king to the mullahs of today.

  —Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

  It was one of the great ironies in the history of diplomacy: Tehran was overtly boasting about what Europe was trying to hide or amend on its behalf. In November 1992, the supreme leader doubled the reward for the murder of Salman Rushdie. In December, another opposition member was kidnapped and killed in Istanbul. Not long after, at a press conference, the interior minister said that the murdered dissidents in exile were getting their due and had only themselves to blame. Yet these events did not keep the euphoric European businessmen from the 1992 Tehran Trade Fair, nor did they stop conceited officials from holding their scheduled two-day summit of Critical Dialogue with Iran in Edinburgh that December.

  The next January, two more dissidents were murdered—one in a car bomb in Ankara, the other gunned down in Iraq. And in March, Bruno Jost circled in red three new spots on the world map—two in Pakistan and a third in Italy, each for a new assassination. In Washington, the secretary of state of the new Clinton administration called Tehran an “international outlaw,” yet Europe’s fervor would not be diminished. Against that backdrop, Jost was the lone investigator tracking the deadly epidemic his countrymen denied existed. At a time when Europe’s exports to Iran had reached a historic peak, the prosecutor’s gloomy news was unwelcome.

  Denial, like a shadow, had also spread over Moabit’s prison cell #404. Yousef Amin, too, had a lot he wished to recant. Rumors about his collaboration with the police were circulating among the inmates, who had begun tormenting him. The few calls he received were either threats or reports of threats his family had received. Yousef had survived several jail terms in Lebanon and nimbly slipped by immigration officials throughout Europe. But for the first time in his life, he found himself under assault with no way out. After twenty interrogation sessions, his inquisitors had simply disappeared. By March 1993 it was Yousef who demanded a meeting with them, promising to make new revelations. These, like the preceding confessions, came in several installments.

  “I’m here to tell you that everything I’ve said so far has been a lie. The truth is something I’m saving for the court and only the court,” Yousef said to his audience. They were startled by the dramatic shift in his speech and manners. When Jost asked why he seemed so distressed, Yousef burst into a litany of complaints.

  “I want to know why your police sent my family back to Lebanon.”

  Jost and the commissioner, von Trek, took turns explaining that they had done everything in their power to protect his family. In the end, the family had chosen to return on its own. Yet neither man could get through to Yousef, whose distress grew with their attempts to calm him.

  “I begged you to give my family an apartment. Six people cooped up in one room. Your police watching them like dogs. The Kurds and the Iranians weren’t enough? My family had to be afraid of your police, too! You are why they went back. If you so much as whistled, my family would have had a good life here. They told me they’d write me, and they haven’t. I’ve heard from nobody. Not you, not them. No one. I’d have had more visitors at my grave. I wrote a letter to the Lebanese embassy asking the ambassador to visit me here, and nothing! My lawyer hasn’t been around. He says he’s too busy reading what you’ve sent him.”

  Yousef’s predicament was particularly tragic because of his previous credulity. Before the murders, he had believed his friends who reassured him that Iran would quickly negotiate their release if they were captured. After the arrest, he had hoped to strike a bargain with Jost by telling the truth, confident of his own winning wit. Six months in prison had taught him a hard lesson about the absoluteness of Germany’s laws, the imperfect ubiquity of his patrons, and the limits of his own charm.

  “This is what you’ve done to me.”

  He made a gesture, which the stenographer recorded.

  Note to file: The prisoner placed his right fist in the joint of his left elbow and folded his forearm over it. According to the translator, the gesture is a vulgar one but, pertinent to this exchange, it means that the prisoner is in trouble.

  “It’s all over. You’ve done your worst. But I tell you now, everything I said before is wrong. Are you writing this down? Lies! I’m keeping the truth for the judge and the court. Oh, how my head hurts!”

  Note to file: The commissioner accompanied the prisoner to the washroom for a drink of water. When they returned, the prisoner refused to go on, demanding another interpreter. He contends that the current interpreter speaks a different dialect of Arabic.

  As Jost adjourned the meeting, Yousef pointed to the translator and shouted, “He’s working for the police. I know it. He’s a dirty pig!”

  Note to file: Other insults the prisoner used have been struck from the record.

  After denying his past confessions, Yousef tried to revise what he had previously said about the friends he had betrayed.

  “Here’s something else. Write it in your papers! Whatever happened, Darabi had nothing to do with it. He knew nothing. Darabi is a good man, nothing to do with anything bad. And also I’m not a member of the Hezbollah.”

  Jost challenged him. “Mr. Amin, you said yourself that you had joined the Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

  “I never said I’d anything to do with them. You keep squeezing me into Hezbollah.”

  The commissioner read from the transcripts of several witnesses who had spoken of Yousef’s membership in the group and his travels to Iran with his friend Rhayel for combat training.

  “So what?” Yousef shot back. “They say what they say. I say what I say. That’s all. I got nothing to do with Hezbollah. I’ve had no training. I’ve not even gone to school. What do you think I know? Nothing! I’m a nobody. You want me to sign something, okay, I will. You want me to say I’m Khomeini, fine! I’ll sign your papers and do what you say. I don’t need this. I need peace an
d quiet, not this. Not you. I’m sick. Can’t you see? Look at me! I’ve asked to go to the infirmary, but no one does anything . . . Iran! Keep saying Iran. I’m Lebanese. Got nothing to do with Iran.”

  “Why is it then that in your address book you have the phone number of the Iranian consulate in Berlin?”

  “Maybe someone gave me the number so someone there could help me. Is there such a number in my book? Is the number any good? Did you try to see if it really is the consulate’s number? You should, you know.”

  Jost paused and, instead of pressing the same point, he asked Yousef if he had been threatened.

  “It’s the police that has threatened me. I’ll say what I want to the judge. I’m a Muslim. I’m not afraid of threats. I’m only afraid of God.”

  “Mr. Amin, just to be sure, do you clearly understand what we mean here by the word pressure, or threaten? Perhaps your family in Lebanon has been threatened.”

  Yousef interrupted angrily. “Don’t start talking this way!”

  Note to file: At the time of the dictation of the last two questions, the accused asked that the question about the threat against his family be struck from the transcript. When his request was denied, he jumped out of his chair and broke into tears. He said that it cannot and must not appear in the transcribed protocol. He pleaded with everyone in the visiting room.