by Jeff Nesbit
“What of the opposition government leaders from the Green Movement?” Majid asked. “What of Reza Razavi?”
His friend shook his head. “No one’s heard from Razavi. He hasn’t shown up on mVillage or on any of our boards.”
“So we don’t know?”
“No, we don’t.”
Majid pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He typed in his password, called up mVillage, and started to comb through the various bulletin boards now capable of transmitting text messages and videos to the many connected followers of the Green Movement in Iran.
The worldwide mVillage network was based on the simple SMS and MMS text message capability of mobile devices, and it allowed one person to communicate with many through databases. It was the only real way that anyone could now communicate from within Iran. The government had closed off all traffic beyond mVillage.
The government controlled all other media—including radio, television, newspapers, and the Internet—but it could not control the flow of text messages without shutting down the country’s entire cell phone network. And it was unwilling, at least for now, to take away people’s mobile devices. Majid and the others in his network used mVillage to send videos out to the world that otherwise might never see the light of day.
His friend was right. Reports were circulating wildly about the arrests, which appeared to be taking place at every campus involved in the student protests. But there was no word of Razavi, who’d run unsuccessfully for the presidency of Iran and was at the center of charges against the current president for committing fraud to hold power.
The government had been careful not to arrest Razavi in the past year. The Revolutionary Guards had spoken out against him publicly and had called on the ruling Guardian Council to arrest him and try him for treasonous acts. But, so far, Razavi had been allowed to move about Tehran and the country freely.
“So why?” Majid asked the group.
Several others stopped talking on their own cell phones long enough to join in the conversation.
“There are reports that security is tight around the Guards’ compounds,” said one. “They’ve got roads shut down. No one can get near them.”
“They’ve got Guards out in force near the government buildings too,” said another.
“I heard they doubled security forces at Evin as well last night,” someone else offered.
“But why?” Majid asked again.
“Something’s going on, that’s for sure,” his friend said. “And they don’t want anyone getting in their way or causing trouble right now.”
“It seems crazy,” Majid muttered. He checked the mVillage reports, but no one had offered any reasons for the mass arrests at the various locations. However, Majid knew it would only be a matter of time before reports and speculation would start to circulate. The government would denounce them, but it would not matter. Word would get out eventually.
“It is crazy,” his friend said. “But the Guards do everything with a heavy hand. And who will stop them?”
Majid considered the clerics at the other end of the student union. Word had apparently gone out to them as well, because now a half dozen congregated at their end. Majid knew they would eventually make their way over to the knot of students, forcing them to disperse.
Majid decided not to hang around for the inevitable. He knew where Reza Razavi lived—just a few blocks from campus. Perhaps, if he was lucky, he could see something for himself that he could report to the mVillage network.
Majid had actually met the visionary leader of mVillage, Nash Lee, twice in the past year at international student leader conferences. Nash Lee was an unassuming, soft-spoken leader of the non-profit NGO that had made mass communication possible even in the middle of totalitarian regimes. Nash returned e-mails and occasionally weighed in on the mVillage network he’d created. Majid was impressed by that.
“I have to go,” Majid said to his friend.
He waved to the group as he hurried out of the student union hall. Hustling around the corner, he looked quickly for his moped—affectionately called Sunny—that he always parked near the hall. An instant later, he was puttering at twenty-five miles an hour through the streets near Tehran University toward a side street his psych professor had once pointed out to him.
As he neared the street, Majid slowed down. The unmarked cars at one end had to be Guards. Without considering his own safety, Majid parked Sunny on another nearby side street and began to make his way behind the houses.
He slipped into the shadows behind a house and moved forward cautiously. As he’d suspected, there were more black cars and Guards on the street in front of Reza Razavi’s house.
Majid took the cell phone from his pocket and waited. He wondered what could possibly be triggering the events he was witnessing firsthand. The government was willing to go to great lengths to silence the opposition movement, but this reached another level—beyond anything he’d ever seen.
After the longest fifteen minutes of his life, he was rewarded. Four black Mercedes pulled up to the curb in front of Razavi’s home. Majid held up his cell phone and began to capture video of the scene. Sure enough, Razavi had been arrested. They led him to his home, gave him instructions, then closed the door.
Majid had captured the entire scene on his cell. He searched frantically through his contact numbers for Nash Lee’s personal mVillage address. He didn’t want to risk dumping the MMS video message into the mVillage network anonymously. There wasn’t time. Nash Lee would know what to do with the MMS message. He could bring it to the world’s attention much quicker.
Majid attached the video of Razavi’s arrest to an mVillage field, directed it to Nash Lee, and then typed in a short message:
Reza Razavi, the leader of Iran’s opposition who should rightly be president, has been arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. This video is of Razavi being placed under house arrest by the Guards.
Majid pressed SEND and hoped the MMS message would reach its destination safely. He wondered again what could possibly compel the Guards to close the net so quickly and forcefully on Razavi and other opposition leaders.
Just then a blow struck the back of Majid’s head. The pain was sudden, and vicious. Rough hands ripped the cell phone from his hand even as he tumbled to the ground.
He didn’t black out immediately from the pain. He lay dazed for a few moments—just long enough to see two men in Guards’ uniforms glance at the cell phone, then at him.
Even as Majid began to lose consciousness, he knew he’d soon be on his way to Evin Prison. He hoped his message had somehow gotten out to mVillage.
02
SHIRAZ, IRAN
The small drone wasn’t impressive. It was dull gray, bore no markings, and had a blunt nose with a cloudy cover on top that partially masked its complex inner workings. The drone’s smallish engine had been created to push it up a few thousand feet beyond the ordinary range of Iran’s old, makeshift air-defense system, which had been pieced together with systems and parts from Russia, China, and North Korea.
The drone had only one mission, which it had performed dutifully for a little more than a year with no results whatsoever. Every evening, under the cover of darkness, its handlers launched it from a secure, little-known base at the western edge of Iraq. The drone made its way toward the heavens efficiently—engines whirring quietly as it climbed—then up and over Iran’s countryside toward a destination near the University of Shiraz.
There were several other drones like this one—all experimental, all built in the past year and deployed in other parts of Iraq. Iran’s air force knew of their existence and tracked them when they could. But Iran’s leadership was convinced that they were harmless observers, of no consequence. They carried no weapons, and no surveillance system could be seen.
But in fact, the drones did have a surveillance system of sorts. They’d been engineered with a highly sophisticated system of infrared laser-light technology through a fledgling
company launched by engineering students at Princeton University in the U.S. The company had created a suite of products around quantum cascade lasers that emit infrared light invisible to the human eye.
The American military defense research effort, among others, had given the company a grant to develop a very specific quantum cascade laser capability—one that could detect trace amounts of uranium hexafluoride through background noise at any given time. If tens of thousands of centrifuges were creating highly enriched uranium at a covert site underground and started to ramp up production of this HEU, it would create an early warning that Iran was beginning to develop enough for a nuclear weapon.
The company founded at Princeton had created its capability in a very short period of time. The drone making its way toward the lower earth atmosphere above Iran was equipped with that quantum cascade laser array and had the ability to sweep the air above a specific site that American satellites had under surveillance through a shared arrangement with Israel’s defense forces.
Most of the intelligence experts thought Iran would cross over from a peaceful nuclear program to a weapons program at some point. What they hoped was that drones such as this—or human inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency who visited known nuclear sites in Iran on a regular basis—would see the telltale signs of an effort to create such highly enriched uranium early enough in the process to give diplomats at least a few months’ time to do something about it.
The leadership in the U.S. believed it could work with Russia, China, and others in the event that such highly enriched uranium was ever detected. Even though Iran was bringing thousands of centrifuges online at a rapid pace, the many U.S. intelligence officials who had made a career of tracking Iran’s nuclear activities knew that it would take months—not weeks—to enrich enough uranium for one bomb. And once that process started, the U.S. was very confident it could surround Iran with enough economic and diplomatic force to make sure the country backed down and stopped the enrichment.
But the little drone had no such illusions. It had a mission—one that had nothing to do with diplomacy or predictions. It swept the atmosphere for trace elements of uranium hexafluoride and dutifully recorded its findings—whatever they were. Its sensitivity was now in the parts per trillion, and it could detect almost anything in a mix of gases in the atmosphere.
In recent months, since the leadership changes in both Israel and the U.S., there had been disagreements about the drone’s mission at the highest levels of both governments. The drones had begun their missions in the last year of the previous U.S. administration, in cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Now, with different administrations in both countries, much had changed—and the drone was at the heart of several contentious discussions about what could be done from Iraq.
For the time being, the drone carried out its mission. It would do so until the day arrived that it was either no longer needed or someone, somewhere, said it could no longer carry out its assigned duty high over Iran. The particular site this drone visited on a regular basis—next door to a highly secure missile plant run by the Revolutionary Guards near Shiraz—had shown no signs whatsoever of HEU activity during the entire time of its mission.
The U.S. felt it was a waste of time to monitor this particular site, which had once been involved in Iran’s nascent nuclear program prior to 2003. But when Iran announced in 2003 that it was shutting down its nuclear program, this particular site near Shiraz had been closed. When Iran later announced that it was re-starting its nuclear power program—for peaceful purposes—this site near Shiraz did not come back online. Only sites at Bushehr, Natanz, Arak, and two others were active.
Israel, however, felt differently. It suspected Iran had created at least one or more massive, underground facilities with just one thing in mind—to house tens of thousands of centrifuges that could, in a matter of weeks, enrich enough uranium to create a nuclear weapon. How that weapon was delivered—and the warhead it carried—was another matter entirely.
So, at least for now, reports from this particular drone’s mission were shared jointly with the IDF and the American military establishment. This particular drone’s report had become monotonous in its lack of findings—so much so that the U.S. analyst assigned to monitor its reports on a regular basis had long ago begun to take them for granted.
Tonight, though, was different. The quantum cascade laser engineered into the drone swept the atmosphere—and hit something. The infrared light detected not only a few parts per billion of uranium hexafluoride—it detected amounts at something like one hundred times that level. This wasn’t background noise. This was the telltale trace of a facility that, overnight, had gone into mass production. Nothing else would explain uranium hexafluoride at those levels. Unless it was an anomaly, something had clearly happened on the ground—or underground—at this site near Shiraz. It was the telltale signature of a decision by Iran’s leaders to sprint to the nuclear finish line.
When the report of the drone’s mission came across the desk of the IDF analyst assigned to it, he stared at it for almost a minute. It was merely a computer printout, with numbers and graphs. But it didn’t take a genius to understand what it meant. At those levels, someone had just started a massive effort to enrich uranium. There could be no doubt. It was, quite clearly, a smoking gun.
The IDF officer composed himself, then delivered his report to his superior officer. Step by step, the findings from the little drone’s mission made its way up the chain of command. Eventually, it landed on the desk of the chief deputy at the Mossad, a retired IDF general who’d been put in place a few months ago by the leadership in Israel.
It was time for him to make the call he’d always hoped to avoid. But numbers and findings such as this could only mean one thing: Iran had made its decision and had set its covert enrichment process in motion in a very large way. The deputy head of the Mossad—a man whose name was publicly identified by just one initial—pulled the telephone number for the White House from his electronic rolodex.
He’d decided that, in the event of such a call, there was really only one person to contact first on the American side. The American president’s chief of staff had once offered to volunteer for IDF. He was, more so than any other senior official in the administration, the most sympathetic to Israel and its isolation in the world community. Even if the U.S. and Israeli sides disagreed on Iran’s intent, he knew the American president’s chief of staff would at least assure that everyone would take the report quite seriously.
What happened after that was hard to predict. But he knew his duty, and he made the call. Others above his pay grade would make their own decisions, for their own reasons.
03
AIDA PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMP
BETHLEHEM, ISRAEL
Dr. Elizabeth Thompson always considered it a blessing to visit Aida. She especially loved the sculpture of a large key over one of the entrances to the Palestinian refugee camp just north of Bethlehem. That key was a constant reminder to Aida’s refugees that, someday, they hoped to win back their homes and a free country of their own.
The founder of the Aida camp liked to talk of a “beautiful resistance” to Israel’s settlements in East Jerusalem outside the Green Line. That was one of the things Dr. Thompson liked about Aida. Unlike other Palestinian refugee camps, the thousands of residents in Aida resisted by building things of beauty with virtually no money or resources.
Children acted and danced at the Al Rowwad Children’s Theater in the heart of the refugee camp. There was hope, not despair, at the theater. The women of Aida took part in sewing, aerobics, and yoga classes. They had computer labs and a library. Aida was one of the few truly peaceful enclaves of Palestinian refugees. Even the Pope had visited Aida.
Yet just a few blocks away stood the ugly retaining wall that surrounded Aida and separated the Palestinian refugee camp from both Bethlehem and East Jerusalem. Those who did not have proper Israeli passes, or yellow Israeli l
icense tags, could not travel freely south to Bethlehem or north into East Jerusalem.
Off to the north, the people of Aida could see rooftops and parts of the two Israeli settlements—Gilo and Har Homa—that had been at the heart of an international conflict over Israel’s insistence that it had the right to build anywhere it wished in East Jerusalem. But they could not easily reach either settlement unless they were willing to wait for hours at the one checkpoint that left Aida.
International Christian visitors had an easier time visiting Bethlehem—several hundred yards south of the camp—than the residents of Aida. It was one of the terrible ironies that bothered Elizabeth immensely when she made her rounds.
Dr. Thompson ran one of the few international Christian relief organizations, World Without Borders, that provided food, medical supplies, books, and equipment to the dozens of Palestinian refugee camps that had sprung up in East Jerusalem and on either side of the Jordan River. She traveled the West Bank extensively to keep track of supply chains and operations.
Aida was small enough that she knew every one of the residents, and they knew her.
Elizabeth climbed down from the beat-up, open-air jeep she’d used to travel the West Bank and Jordan for years.
“Dr. Thompson!” exclaimed the director of the Al Rowwad theater, Shira Dagher, a moment later.
“It’s so good to see you, my friend. It has been too long!” Elizabeth took several long, purposeful strides toward the opening to the theater, where her friend was leaning up against the new pink and orange doorway that her NGO had helped build.
Shira Dagher was an elderly Arabic woman who now had six grandchildren living in different parts of Aida, all of them direct descendants of those who’d lived there before East Jerusalem had come under Israel’s control. She was a permanent fixture in Aida. She knew everyone—and everything. She embraced Elizabeth with no hesitation as a trusted friend.