The Disciple

by Stephen Coonts

  I was tempted to tell him, “Bad break,” but stifled myself.

  It was all over in less than eight seconds and I was trotting on. I glanced back. Both of them were writhing on the sidewalk, with a couple of bystanders staring at me.

  Running in the megalopolis of Tehran was an adventure. Not so much the running, but crossing the streets.

  Like most cities in the third world, Tehran had grown exponentially as the population exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The dearth of contraceptives meant large families, the medicine men used just enough modern medicine to keep more of the kids alive, and rural peasants moved to town looking for a job. Today Tehran and its sprawling suburbs contained somewhere between fifteen and twenty million people, about one-fifth of the Irani an population. The population explosion meant the Iranian economy needed to create eight hundred thousand new jobs a year, and that wasn’t happening.

  The streets, avenues and boulevards, all built for one-fifth the amount of traffic they were carrying, were clogged. Gridlock was the proper description of morning and evening rush hour. Road rage was endemic. Many of the drivers and motorcyclists regarded a pedestrian, especially one moving quickly, as a sporting challenge. Crossing the street became an exercise in terror.

  There was heavy air pollution, too, so bad it made Los Angeles’ smog seem like an unattainable dream. It seared the lungs, burned the eyes and limited visibility on windless days to no more than two miles.

  Today, as usual, I managed to get back to the hotel in one piece, with more close calls in my logbook.

  After a shower, I dressed and walked the three blocks to the Swiss embassy annex, a small building just down the street from the real Swiss embassy. Although America and Iran had not resumed diplomatic relations since the takeover of the American embassy in 1979, the United States had recently opened an American Interests Section in the Swiss embassy annex. Of course, my little corner was in the basement.

  The room was small and divided by a waist-high temporary wall, the bottom of which was plywood nailed to two-by-fours and the top of which was latticework. The whole thing was painted a hideous brown. In the wall were two windows, one for me and one for my colleague, Frank Caldwell.

  Here Frank and I took applications from Iranians asking for visas to visit America. We also were supposed to interview folks who wanted to permanently immigrate to the good ol’ U.S. of A., but since our government was worried that jihadists might slip through, they had declared a moratorium on immigration requests. Consequently we took only tourist visa applications, none of which the State Department would approve unless we were absolutely sure the tourist would indeed come flying home to this mud-hut Islamic paradise when his vacation was over.

  I probably should pause to introduce myself. My name is Tommy Carmellini, and although I was stuck here in this basement four hours a day interviewing Iranians who desperately needed a vacation in the heart of the infidel empire, the United States, I didn’t work for the Department of State. Nope. I was a CIA operative. I was pretending to be a State visa guy while I tried to steal the deepest secrets of the mullahs. So far I hadn’t found any secrets to steal, deep or shallow. I had, however, met a lot of Iranians with fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, nephews and children safely lodged in America whom they wanted to visit; see before they died, either the host or the visitor, and renew those precious family ties; then, you betcha, come on home.

  “Hello,” I said in English to the one-legged man who seated himself before me. He had been waiting upstairs since the annex opened. He had a crutch, no artificial leg. He was maybe forty-five, with a big mustache and grizzled jowls.

  “Hello,” he said back, also in English, and passed me his form.

  I looked at it. His name was Abdullaziz Nasr Qomi. I didn’t recognize the name of his village, so I asked him about it in Farsi, or Persian. I attended a crash course to learn the language before I came over here-but more on that later.

  His face brightened a little as he told me about his village, a little place near Takab, which I knew was west of Tehran and up toward the big lake, Urmia.

  I listened to him talk, getting most of it despite his regional accent. I glanced at his hands and saw they were heavily callused. This guy wasn’t a bureaucrat or apparatchik.

  He worked in construction, Qomi said, was a day laborer. He paused and then said heavily, “I want to go to America.” Since we were praying over a tourist visa application, he added, “For a visit.”

  “How’d you lose your leg?”

  “The war with Iraq. I was in the Martyrs Brigade. I stepped on a mine. I was ready to die, ready to go straight to Paradise, but I didn’t. I am still here, with only one leg.”

  “Must be difficult for a one-legged man to make a living in Iran.”

  He didn’t reply to that, merely lowered his head.

  I confess, I liked the guy. Qomi was tough, and he’d obviously been through the mill and survived. I have little sympathy for victims, but I really like survivors. My ambition is to be one myself.

  “You married?” I asked, then glanced at the form. He had marked NO.

  He still had his head down.

  “Whom do you know in America?” I asked, not waiting for an answer. “Who are you going to visit?”

  He started telling me about his cousin who finished concrete in Queens. As he talked I sat back and glanced around, at Frank Caldwell, who was interviewing a weeping woman in a chador, and at this dingy, damp little room.

  I recalled the day that Jake Grafton called me in, told me he wanted me to do an intensive course in the Persian language, then go to Iran. Three months later, I got the language completion certificate, written in English and Farsi; I was ready to trade insults with Cyrus the Great. I reported back to Grafton at the Company headquarters in Langley.

  Jake Grafton was a retired naval officer, an attack pilot, retired as a two-star, and for years he had been the go-to guy when… shall we say, “situations” developed and the politicians or Pentagon brass needed some serious help with their hot chestnuts. Finally they gave him a job in the Company. He was smart and tough as shoe leather, and if he was ever afraid, it never showed. In addition, he was a genuine nice guy, but I don’t think he wanted anyone in the agency to know that. Believe me, this outfit operated on the theory that nice guys finish last. In the spy game, they often did, so maybe Grafton was the exception that proved the rule.

  Me? Of course I’m a nice guy-my mother would sign an affidavit to that effect. However, there is a lot she doesn’t know. In fact, she is in the dark about 99.9 percent of the stuff I do. She knows that I live in suburban Maryland; she sends me birthday and Christmas cards. I think she knows that I work for the agency, but maybe not. I might have lied about that. She didn’t mention it during my last visit, so I didn’t either.

  The sad fact is I tell a lot of lies. Most of them are professional, in the line of duty, so to speak, but every now and then a personal lie slips out. Maybe it’s habit; the darn things pop out before I can stop them, more smirches on my character. Perhaps it’s just my criminal mind. Whatever, I’m still a nice guy, and you can take that to the bank.

  One April Tuesday a few days after I finished the language course, we were settled in Grafton’s office talking about the state of the planet and the people on it, just covering the ground, so to speak, when he said, “I want you to go to Iran next week. You’ll be attached to the American Interests Section as a visa officer.”

  I nodded. I’m not the swiftest guy you ever met, but after doing the language course, I had an inkling this was coming. I had hoped it would come later, much later, but my luck doesn’t run that way. Persia, which is presently the Islamic Republic of Iran, complete with mullahs, religious facists, holy warriors and throat-slitters, plus tens of millions of folks just trying to pay their bills and stay alive. Am I lucky or what?

  Grafton’s desk phone buzzed and he got it. “Yes.”

  He listened a moment, then hung up. “I hav
e to go to a meeting,” he said as he unlocked his safe, which was beside his desk. He pulled the safe door open and handed me a sheet of paper from the gloomy interior.

  “Here’s the access codes to the file I want you to read. Look it over, then come back to see me.”

  I went to the converted broom closet the Company so blithely labels my office and shoved aside the mountain of read-and-initial crap that had accumulated on my desk during my absence and I hadn’t had time yet to go through. I fired up my desk computer.

  The Company is trying to go digital, but very carefully. The last thing on earth anyone in the building wants is a hacker getting into our files. Or worse, a foreign intelligence service. Still, the advantages of going digital are so attractive that we are trying.

  Three or four screens into the file, my hands started to sweat. Then my forehead. I had to take off my sports coat and hang it over the back of my chair.

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran, was a real piece of work. Born in the provinces, his devout father changed the family name to Ahmadinejad, “virtuous race” or “Muhammad’s race,” when he moved to Tehran in search of a better life. Young Mahmoud studied mathematics at a private school, then went off to the university in 1975. By all accounts he was very devout. In any event, he fell in with the religious political movement, which was moving toward revolution against the shah. The head revolutionary was Ruhollah Khomeini, who preached a vision of a society led by zealous, uniquely qualified Islamic leaders who would control the “simple-hearted” lower classes. This Islamic Bolshevik went further: He believed that anyone who rejected his ideas, which one critic, Alireza Jafarzadeh, said were “dogmatic, rigid, feudalistic, medieval ideas contrary to the true teachings of Islam,” was not a Muslim. Like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the legion of tyrants who had slashed their way through history before him, Khomeini was an all-or-nothing guy. Ahmadinejad signed on early; he was one of the first to join the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps while at the University of Science and Technology.

  After the shah was routed in 1979, Ahmadinejad joined the Intelligence Unit of the IRGC, which Khomeini put together to defeat his political enemies following the collapse of the shah’s secret police service, the SAVAK. This Irani an version of Hitler’s Brownshirts operated with no constraints on their methods. Ahmadinejad was right in the middle of it. He was in Khomeini’s inner circle in those days and probably helped plan the takeover of the American embassy in November of 1979. There was some debate about whether he was in the first wave that scaled the walls, but he was definitely there shortly thereafter, in charge of the guards and watching the interrogation of American prisoners. He might even have been in charge of interrogations.

  There were a couple of photos in the file of Iranians mobbing the U.S. embassy. A figure in each had been circled and labeled as “possible.” I whipped out the magnifying glass that all good agency employees keep in their desk and studied the faces within the circles.

  Even after I had enlarged the circles as much as possible before they dissolved into individual pixels, I decided that I would have to take the experts’ word for it.

  I put the glass back in my desk and continued reading.

  In the years following the revolution, during Khomeini’s consolidation of power, Ahmadinejad was involved in the interrogation, torture and execution of enemies of the regime at the Evin prison, where he was known by the pseudonym of “Golpa,” among others. The interrogators tried to stay masked and change their noms de guerre regularly so that their victims wouldn’t know what they had told to whom. The prodemocracy political movement Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, supplied many of the victims.

  For his loyalty and ruthlessness, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became a senior commander in the Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC. The report I was reading said he had been a key figure in the formation of the Qods, a terrorist special forces unit that had been linked to assassinations in the Middle East and Europe. Ahmadinejad personally carried weapons across international borders to assassinate political foes, among them the Kurdish leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party in Iran. On occasion this young Iranian Stalin reported directly to and got his orders from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had sole and complete control of the Qods.

  I didn’t read the whole file. I scanned enough to realize that Ahmadinejad was involved in every aspect of the fundamentalist Islamic takeover of Iran. According to Jafarzadeh, he interrogated U.S. hostages, led the closure of universities, questioned and tortured political prisoners, engaged in battles on Iran’s western borders with Iraqi forces and conducted special assassination ops against the regime’s enemies in Europe and the Middle East.

  An unintended consequence of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was to give Khomeini and the Iranian mullahs a golden opportunity to exploit the chaos in post-Saddam Iraq in furtherance of their goal of installing an Islamic regime there and making it a satellite state. Saddam Hussein had a lot of faults, but he knew who his real enemies were.

  In the 1990s Ahmadinejad went into academia. Part-time, anyway. He was a zealot still trying to purify the universities, and founded Ansar-e Hezbollah (Followers of the Party of God), the members of which wore black clothes and hoods, sort of a Muslim Ku Klux Klan, and attacked student gatherings and demonstrations, beating up students and other opponents of the regime with chains, clubs, truncheons and knives. They could talk the talk, but when the chips were down, they were thugs.

  In 2003 Ahmadinejad surfaced as mayor of Tehran, where he earned the nickname of the “Ira ni an Taliban.” In 2005, this social progressive launched his campaign for the presidency of the country. Since he had the backing of Khomeini’s successor, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the election was rigged, he won handily.

  I perused a few of his campaign speeches, in which he often waxed eloquent on the glory of martyrdom. “If we want to resolve today’s social problems,” he said, “we must return to the culture of martyrs.” Now there is a prescription for social peace.

  The election of 2009 was a farce. Three hours after the polls closed in a country three times larger than France, one without a single voting machine, Ahmadinejad was declared the winner with 63 percent of the vote. Apparently the ballots weren’t even counted.

  When I had had all I could stand, I logged off and turned off the computer.

  Just my luck. Jake Grafton was pointing me toward the biggest, most vicious shark in the sea. He hadn’t told me yet what he wanted me to do in Iran, and I could hardly wait.

  I surveyed my comfy little office, which I got to visit so seldom anymore. Why couldn’t I be in charge of something like… building passes?

  I went downstairs to the Starbucks concessionaire for a Caffé Mocha, bought an extra one for Grafton’s assistant, Robin, then strolled toward Grafton’s office.

  “Oh, thank you, Tommy,” Robin said with a huge grin when I presented her drink.

  I smiled back. After all, she might be the last normal person I’d get to smile at on planet Earth.

  With that happy thought ripping through my head, I went in to see Jake Grafton, who was back from his meeting.

  Grafton got right to it. “What do you think about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?”

  “A raghead Stalin.”

  “That isn’t a politically correct remark.”

  I shrugged. “There are a lot of assholes in this world. He seems to be in a special, small elite group at the very tip top of the heap.”

  “There are a couple of guys already in Iran that you’ll work with. They are illegals. You’ll be attached to the American Interests Section of the Swiss embassy and will be watched. Carefully watched.”

  I could feel the earth spinning under me.

  “What’s the mission?”

  “I don’t know just yet. Settle in, become a good, low-level career diplomat, and I’ll call you when we need you. You are going to be our ace in the hole.”

  “More like a deuce,” I muttered. I confess, I
knew he had something in mind for me or he wouldn’t have made these elaborate plans for my future. Trying to get a hint, I said, “One of these days you’ll call and tell me to steal Ahmadinejad’s underwear, while he’s wearing it.”

  Grafton didn’t smile or look annoyed. There was no reaction at all. He should have been playing poker in Vegas.

  The weeping of the chador-clad woman seated in front of Frank’s window brought me out of my reverie. She was a grandmother, she said, and her sons and their wives and grandchildren lived in the States. She wanted to join them, if only for a visit. Of course, she would never return to Iran, would be swallowed up in the churning sea of Middle Eastern immigrants in New York and never be heard from again.

  “The mullahs are finished in Iran,” Abdullaziz Nasr Qomi said. “Everyone hates them. They are rich, we are poor. All the oil money goes to the government and the mullahs, and none of it reaches us. The mullahs are living very well, though…” He continued, giving me his view of the world in which he lived.

  Frank was concentrating on the weeping woman. He looked as if he were ready to go through the little gate and put his arms around her shoulders. He was murmuring comforting words.

  He was very fluent in Farsi, could do all the dialects so well he could fool the natives. I certainly couldn’t. Frank was in his forties, a career case officer, and no doubt a damn good one. Only fluent speakers could read body language, the subtle hints given by intonation and hesitations, appreciate the choice of words, understand what was meant but not being said. Fluent speakers do better at sorting truth from lies. If only the Company had more guys and gals like Frank Caldwell!

  Yet he had spent six years in Istanbul at the embassy visa window, denying visas to Iranians and trying to recruit spies. Now he was in the heart of the beast, still at it. He reminded me of the guy in charge of the candy store who never, ever, said yes.