Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

by Hakakian, Roya

  Ghouls of a different kind were hounding Bruno Jost. His mere name invoked anger in many. In court, even some judges were growing restless with him. In their chambers one afternoon, one judge lost his patience with the prosecutor’s refusal to limit the scope of his accusations. They had gathered to discuss Jost’s refusal to drop the charges against Iran’s minister of intelligence. The assistant judge thundered at the uncompromising prosecutor:

  “What is it you want, Mr. Jost? Will anything ever be enough for you? You’ve got five men in custody. Lock them up and be done with it! Why can’t you?”

  His name was on the lips of furious imams at Friday prayers but except for guards, Jost hardly had any protectors. In the holy city of Qom, a wave of angry protestors had left the prayers chanting violent slogans against him. Yet, instead of issuing a statement in support of the prosecutor, Chancellor Kohl sent a conciliatory letter to Tehran expressing his regret for the religious sentiments that the investigation had injured.

  Guards never left Jost’s side, not even when he was home. So close they kept to him that on Christmas the Josts left gifts for them under the tree, and ate their holiday feast together with the giants who kept feeling for their guns whenever the room fell unusually silent.

  Too many forces beyond Jost’s reach tugged at the case. The deaths of four men in a Berlin restaurant one September night had spiraled into something far greater than each of their losses. It had become the pawn in many other games. In Germany, it had turned into the centerpiece of partisan politics. Parties used every misstep throughout the case to smear their rivals who, at the time, had been or were still in office. In Berlin, the hearings and investigations into the conduct of responsible local agencies were dragging on, dogging Berlin’s secretary of internal affairs, among several figures. Other federal probes into the handling of the case by various agencies and their officials, including Bernd Schmidbauer, had become just as endless as the trial itself.

  For all the troubles—scandals, inquiries, humiliations—for the loss of all the diplomatic gains—with Iran and with the rest of Europe and the United States—irate politicians directed their wrath at Jost and exacted their revenge by inventing rumors to smear the prosecutor’s reputation.

  “That fucking Bruno Jost,” a senior foreign ministry official said to the reporter Hufelschulte one night while nursing a glass of whiskey. “He’s set up a shadow government in Karlsruhe and is shitting on everything we, in Bonn, worked years for. Goddamn legal debutant picked Mykonos for his goddamn debut and doesn’t know when to call it quits and leave it to us. Do you know, by the way, that he’s depressed out of his wits? He’s on a cocktail of anti psychotic meds. Won’t be long before the judges get wind of it.”

  The rumors reached Jost’s boss, who called him to his office.

  “Are you in trouble? Is there anything bizarre going on, Mr. Jost, that you wish to tell me about?”

  Jost, even-tempered as ever, simply shrugged—nothing at all.

  But he did feel exhausted. The trial seemed as endless as the day it had started. Each time Jost thought the last testimony had ended, the team representing the accused produced a new witness. Each time he prepared to deliver his final argument, they presented a new document. There was little he could do against their ploys to prolong the trial. Besides, Judge Kubsch hardly ever rejected the chance to hear from a new witness or consider new discovery. Giving readily in to the unreasonable demands of the accused, Kubsch had been a riddle to many in the courtroom and was becoming one to Jost, too.

  But not to the court’s chief Persian translator and Jost’s trusted guide Zamankhan. He had learned about Judge Kubsch what no one else in the courtroom knew—a detail that in the hands of the trial’s enemies could prove fatal. He had stumbled upon it on a quiet February afternoon with the ringing of the doorbell.

  A young, willowy blonde woman stood at the door of his residence. The wariness on her face matched his and was reassuring to him. He buzzed her in. She had come for his services. She needed him to translate a file, but asked that he keep it in the strictest confidence. The emphasis seemed odd since the job appeared routine—the usual stack of official documents.

  “And you are?” he asked.

  The woman, flustered, introduced herself.

  “I’m . . . oh, dear me! I’m Ms. Kubsch.”

  The name shook the translator. For a moment, his gaze froze on her face—distinctly round, just like the judge’s, whose features he began to trace upon the young woman’s face. Silence overtook them until she broke it.

  “My father thinks you’re the best at the job and didn’t want me to go to anyone else. He said I must see you. He’s a bit, how shall I put it, concerned. You see, my husband is, like you, Iranian.”

  He quickly returned his attention to the file once more. Among the pages were old deeds to a home in Tehran, other properties, a birth certificate, and several school diplomas. As he shuffled through them, the gravity of what was in his hands dawned on him. The chief judge’s son-in-law had fled Iran, like the victims in the judge’s court room. Her anxiety was suddenly his. If the news were to leak of Kubsch’s ties to an Iranian, especially to one who was on the wrong side of the regime in Tehran, the attorneys for the accused would find what they had been stalling for—a reason to call for a mistrial. The end would be even farther from reach.

  That afternoon, the translator became the keeper of Judge Kubsch’s secret. The chief judge was no longer the unreadable, unreachable caped figure but a man with a predicament much like his own. Zamankhan had long known and befriended Noori, and yet, at the start of the trial, he severed all ties with Noori’s family and other expatriates lest his objectivity be doubted by the court. To become the trial’s most meticulous translator was the best he could do for Noori. To help the widow, he would keep his distance from her and those in the community who wished to pry into the court’s business through him hoping, in turn, to earn the trust of the police, the investigators, and the prosecutor. It seemed to him that Judge Kubsch had made a similar choice. To protect those dear to him, he would serve the court in an unimpeachable manner to earn the trust of those who were most likely to doubt his objectivity.

  The prolonged trial was not without advantages. The attorneys for the accused relied on time to stonewall the prosecution’s efforts. But time brought Jost unexpected gifts. The first of those gifts, though not yet the greatest, came in January 1996.

  On his way to the canteen during a lunch break, Hamid ran into the prosecutor. The two greeted each other. Jost, without slowing his steps, cheerfully announced, “The Iranians in the audience can expect a bonbon from me this afternoon.”

  “Really, Mr. Jost? I’m thrilled. Can you say . . .” Hamid called out, hoping to stop Jost long enough to hear more. But he only smiled and rushed past.

  At lunch, Ehrig confirmed the news, though he, too, did not know any more. The two devoured their meals and hurried out of the canteen, promising the waitstaff a thorough update at the next meal. Ehrig offered Hamid a pearl of legal wisdom.

  “Given the stakes, if the defense can make this last an eternity, they will. But it could backfire. In a case as big as this, surprises are always to be expected. Time may work just as much against them as it does in their favor. They might end up shooting themselves in the foot by dragging it on.”

  That afternoon, Bruno Jost asked to present a document from the counterterrorism unit of the BfV, the federal office for the protection of the constitution. Soon after he took charge of the case in September 1992, he sent inquiries to all the relevant agencies. At the time, the BfV had forwarded a key document. Portions had been declassified, and the rest was blacked out to protect its source. By December 1995 the safety of the source was no longer a concern. Therefore, the BfV had released the full text to the federal prosecutor’s office.

  Jost was granted permission to present.

  “I wish to enter this document as evidence because it directly substantiates the assertion in th
e indictment regarding state-sponsored terrorism and Mr. Darabi’s role as the coordinator of the operation. If I may read only a few lines.

  A special unit called the Committee for Special Operations, in tandem with the Ministry of Intelligence, was involved in the murder of the Kurdish leaders in Berlin on September 17, 1992. The unit has long been hounding members of Iran’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan and is directly responsible for the 1989 assassination of Abdulrahman Ghassemlou in Vienna.”

  The judges issued a subpoena for the BfV’s director, whose appearance on the witness stand inflamed Darabi.

  “Nothing! You’ve got nothing on me,” he shouted in German. “All accusations! Nothing but accusations! If you got anything, even one thing, show it right here. But you got nothing!”

  “Hush your mouth!” someone in the audience shouted in Persian.

  “The motherfuckers are here again. Don’t you shits know by now you’re no match for me?” he shouted, also in Persian.

  No response came. The silence emboldened Darabi, as it always had throughout the trial. Each time they failed to match his belligerence, he grew more vulgar.

  “Spineless sons of bitches! I’ll get your sissy asses. You wait and see!”

  Judge Kubsch called the court to order and the witness began. As Darabi had promised, he offered very little. Citing German national interests, he refused to answer the court’s most critical questions. Yet the document, whose authenticity he validated, removed any doubts that had lingered about Minister Fallahian’s role in the murders.

  The BfV document paved the way for Bruno Jost to do what he had long hoped to—reach beyond the underlings in custody to implicate the masterminds. He charged the minister with murder. In a separate filing in the federal court, he requested an arrest warrant to be issued for Ali Fallahian. Never before had any European prosecutor dared go as far.

  Obtaining the BfV document was a triumph. But its blessings were mixed for Shohreh. It proved what she had known the day she buried Noori—that greater powers had ordered the killings. It was the affirmation, the vindication, she had waited four years to have.

  But it also revived the rumors about the mole, the infiltrator who had betrayed the meeting at Mykonos. Its revelations credited “a highly reliable source who had been in touch with and present at the restaurant that night.” Aziz’s testimony, albeit damning, had not proved his guilt and so the mystery had lived on. The old suspicions returned, this time surrounding Noori. They deepened her rift with the community, compounding her solitude. The seven bullets that struck Noori evoked more suspicion than sympathy in some. The killers must have been determined to silence him, to make sure he’d not walk away alive and talk, or they’d have never wasted so many bullets on him.

  But her ties with the expatriates were coming undone even before this. Her presence was discomfiting to most of them. Always dressed in black, she stood in their way of forgetting their sadness and shame—their collective history and the troubled country they had left behind. No one shunned her, but they seldom included her in their midst. On the rare occasions their paths crossed, they regarded her with pity, or so it appeared to her, in whom grief manifested itself in unattainable expectations of old friends. She felt more at ease with Germans. At work, her superiors were generous with extended leaves, and colleagues, whom she had never imagined depending on, divided the tasks she would leave undone.

  And her love for Noori still flourished despite the years, the pain, even her own resolve to move beyond him. His wisdom had proved enduring, his foresight keener than anyone else’s. In the aftermath of the Gulf War and the declaration of the no-fl y zone over northern Iraq, Noori’s predictions had come true. The Kurdish homeland he believed was inevitable had almost formed. His lucidity in articulating the plight of the Kurds in interview after interview—his breadth of knowledge about their predicament, his humility especially—illuminated him more brightly now than ever before. She wondered whether to remind Sara of it—who hardly spoke to her—or let her choose to cope by remembering or forgetting as she wished.

  Sara had remained steadfast to her father’s memory. Her mother could not see that what ignited her daughter’s rage was love. Sara could not break the spell of silence between them, tell her mother what would have allayed her anxieties. She longed to be easy around Shohreh again, but she could not say to her mother what was on her feverish mind. She composed and recomposed the unspoken sentences, which always began, “Maman, do you ever see Baba?”

  The question was bound to make her mother anxious, but it was how the imaginary conversation always began, though Sara knew her mother would ask what she meant by see. She would compel Shohreh to say that her father was dead and no one could see him, which in turn would offend her. The two rarely spoke and when they did they often circled each other like a pair of tigers, each on the verge of assault—one filled with fury, the other with concern.

  Neither mother nor daughter knew of the other’s growing devotion to Noori’s beloved apparition, something that would have strengthened their bond. The talk Sara would not have with her mother always ended the same way—with the secret she could barely keep in her small chest. Someone comes into my room in the mornings, not always, but very early whenever it happens. I think it’s Baba. I used to be scared, but not any more. But he disappears as soon as I open my eyes. I know it’s him because the room always feels wonderful after.

  There was a marked change in the news coverage of the trial. The focus of the press shifted from the defendants in Berlin to their suspected commanders. Article after article trailed the bloody footprints of the killers around the globe until they reached Tehran, where Bruno Jost’s shadow had fallen over Minister Fallahian.

  On March 14, the federal high court granted the prosecutor’s request. An arrest warrant was issued for Iran’s intelligence minister. The warrant surpassed the exiles’ greatest hopes. The trial’s most ambitious victims—Parviz and Shohreh—were satisfied; its most discriminating observers, such as Hamid, were similarly content. Judge Kubsch asked Bruno Jost to submit to his court all the material he had submitted to the federal court, and set an end date for the trial: June 25, 1996. He instructed the prosecutor and the attorneys on both sides to prepare their closing arguments.

  No sooner had the judge made his announcement than Bernd Schmidbauer relayed a request to postpone the closing date. A letter from Tehran had reached his office, offering two new witnesses. Bruno Jost, enraged by the move, called it an outright sabotage. Ehrig went even further and called it organized legal vandalism. Yet Judge Kubsch granted the motion and called off the closing till the court had heard from the new witnesses.

  The end had slipped away once more. The witnesses were in Tehran. To find, train, and dispatch a team to them was an infinite ordeal. Yet again, Tehran had stonewalled the court and, as the exiles saw it, Judge Kubsch had conceded. In their despair, Ehrig’s pearl of wisdom eluded everyone: In a case as big as this, surprises are always to be expected. Time may work just as in their favor as against them.

  17

  Nietzsche’s famous Thus Spoke Zarathustra finally cleared the censors at the ministry of culture when its title was changed to Thus Spoke the Ayatollah.

  —Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

  Far away from Berlin, on a March day in 1996, Tehran was as it always is before Nowrouz, the Iranian New Year marking the arrival of spring. The news—good or bad—goes unheeded, and newspapers remain unfolded. The streets teem with passersby bearing bags full of holiday purchases. Joy adds a lilt to the peddlers’ calls as they drop portions of steaming boiled beets into paper cones. The police, seasonably mellow, turn a blind eye to undocumented sellers. Sidewalks become temporary bazaars for special holiday goods—the pyramids of unshelled walnuts, mounds of ole-aster, trays of wheat sprouts, rows of goldfish in glass bowls. Housewives sniff the simmering pots of wheat germ for the traditional spread called “haft seen,” or lift the gills of the whitefish to find the freshest
for the dinner of fish and herb rice. Husbands squeeze crates of pansies and bouquets of pussy willow into the overflowing trunks of their cars. Haji Firooz, the Persian Santa, dressed in red, with black-painted face, sings tunes and shakes his tambourine at intersections. The crowds linger until midnight for the half-off sale of unsold goods. By dawn, the ground is strewn with trash in the wake of the shoppers’ rampage. In the early morning light, budding leaves dabbed in dew glisten on the bare branches like emerald shards and the snowcapped peaks of the Alborz Mountains in the north shine majestically. The intoxicating scent of spring, what well- traveled Tehranis call “the best air anywhere,” lulls the city.

  On just such a day, a black Mercedes pulled in front of a two-story home on Koohestan 9 in the city’s most affluent district. That brief stop, only a few minutes, changed the fate of the Mykonos trial in a way no one could have fathomed.

  Minister Fallahian’s deputy emerged from the car. A full-cheeked man with an unruly beard and a receding hairline, he rang the bell of apartment #10 and whispered his name into the intercom: Emami.

  The door was buzzed open but the deputy slid his foot in to keep it ajar and rang again.

  “Can’t come up. Come down a minute!”

  Moments later, a shorter, stouter version of him was standing at the threshold. The smile on the shorter man’s face quickly vanished for he could see the deputy’s look of distress.

  “I don’t have much time and neither do you. You must pack and get out now,” the deputy said.