Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran

by Bryce Adams

  The man gave a paternal head shake and said, “I also wouldn’t talk about drinking alcohol when Khamenei’s people come for another try at the camera. So if you love living in France and playing piano so much, why ruin it by becoming a traitor? Why spout bile about the Revolution to godless foreigners?”

  “I didn’t. It was after my seventh concert, in Lyons. By then I was well-known, so they filmed the concert and convinced me to do an audience interview after the show. Some woman asked me about my experience during the Revolution. That’s all.”

  “You said the Revolution was a mistake. You said that the war with Saddam Hussein was a mistake.”

  Jamsheed shook his head weakly. “I said mistakes were made while Khomeini led us. I told them those mistakes made the Iranian people suffer.”

  The man leaned in. “What manner of mistakes?” he asked.

  Jamsheed felt his rattling breath sneak out through his semi-clenched teeth. He’d been careless with this man so far, just because he didn’t immediately start off screaming like the other jailers.

  Jamsheed answered anyway. “I didn’t elaborate. My French wasn’t good enough to go into details.”

  “Elaborate with me.”

  Jamsheed felt the visitor’s eyes on him even while he looked down at his own ruined hand. He knew that those eyes weren’t unpinning him until he gave a satisfactory answer.

  Jamsheed said, “Khomeini…never should have ended the war. Not while Saddam Hussein was still alive.”

  The man countered, “He only consented to the ceasefire after his advisors told him that we could not win. America had fully rearmed the infidels by 1988, and Saddam Hussein was poised to reinvade Iran with a chemical arsenal. Do you really think Imam Khomeini had a choice?”

  Jamsheed balled his left hand into a fist, ignoring the pain that shot up his arm. “He could have chosen not to betray me. He could have chosen to honor the sacrifices I made by letting me finish the war that he started,” he growled.

  “Saddam started the war. Iran defended itself then counterattacked to neutrali—”

  “Khomeini started my war when he ordered me out of my schoolyard to become a minesweeper. He and his clerics pushed me forward, telling me that I was fighting for God and holy Iran. Then what did they do? They rolled over onto their bellies as soon as the war went badly for them, like whipped dogs. Then they told us to just go home. As if I could ever expect to see my parents again, and not look at them like meat about to be shredded by enemy artillery. As if they could look at me and see their child again, instead of a skinny half-grown man with dead, killer’s eyes…” he trailed off, his voice cracking.

  The officer nodded his head, processing what he’d heard. Nothing in his body language seemed dismissive. After thinking for a moment, he replied, “So you hate the clerics because they left our enemies alive before the Revolution was complete, keeping in mind that Imam Khomeini was a cleric, and you still love him, and he commanded the Revolution.”

  Jamsheed had never been able to describe his ambivalence so succinctly. This man understood him, even if he was only needling Jamsheed for a confession.

  “Yes.”

  “And you do not blame the soldiers who advised Khomeini to end the war?”

  “At least the soldiers came to their conclusion through fighting. At least they meant it when they went to war, and didn’t send people to die in their place while they grew fat and rich in Tehran,” Jamsheed answered.

  The man murmured, “Yes, we did mean it.” He looked at Jamsheed and placed his hand on his own heart. “We never fought that war to kill our own children. I cursed that policy when Imam Khomeini began using it, but then again we were very desperate, and we will never know whether it was necessary, because what happened happened. I cried whenever we deployed children.”

  Jamsheed tried to move away from the man on the floor next to him, but it was no use. He didn’t have the fine muscle control to do it casually, and he didn’t feel like flopping aside like a caught fish.

  “Who are you?”

  The man kept his hand on his heart and answered, “I am Colonel Qasem Soleimani, soon to be General Qasem Soleimani, of the Revolutionary Guard. My promotion stems from a recent reassignment to a new unit. Have you ever heard of Quds Force?”

  “No.”

  “We are a young organization within the Guard. I will serve as its second-in-command, and maybe someday as its commander. My job entails using any and all means to kill the enemies of Iran, wherever they may hide.” He smiled. “Based on what you told me, it seems like Quds Force will complete the mission you claim the ayatollahs left undone.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I’ve spent a month vetting you. Because my plans call for a handsome international jetsetter who knows how to make bombs.”

  “The Revolutionary Guard fights for the ayatollahs. The last time I did that, they betrayed me,” Jamsheed gestured towards the video camera, “Now they’re betraying me again. I figure I’ll keep resisting the confession until they get fed up and strangle me with a piano wire. It’s a better fate than serving them again like a beaten dog that keeps slinking back to its master.”

  Soleimani leaned forward until their noses almost touched. He said, “Then forget the ayatollahs. Fight for me, and help me complete the Revolution that the men in black robes left unfinished.” He wrapped a hand around Jamsheed’s filthy hair. “I promise you, Jamsheed Mashhadi, become my weapon and you will never have to fear betrayal again. Stop hiding from what you are, and help me avenge all that the enemy has taken from us. Join me, and let us make them bleed.”

  Men in uniforms signed important-looking papers in duplicate, and those papers paroled Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi within three hours of meeting Qasem Soleimani. It was May 22, 1991. He left the gates of Evin alone, hobbling like a cripple, but a black sedan picked him up at the corner. In the blank space on his prisoner release form, the warden of Evin had written “rehabilitated” in red ink.

  Six weeks later, Jamsheed left Iran to begin a three month concert tour of select venues in France, Germany, and Great Britain. None of the Europeans found it odd that he requested tours of power plants, train stations, and hospitals in his spare time.

  Chapter Five

  It was early 2005. Ambrose Hayes had never hated anything as much as he hated the Green Zone in Baghdad. It didn’t matter that he’d weaseled his way into sole occupancy of a five thousand square foot villa overlooking the Tigris River, or that he worked shirtless in his boxers on a veranda previously used by relatives of Saddam Hussein. Nowhere on earth had less of a soul than the heart of the Coalition Provisional Authority, otherwise known as “the Occupation” to people who didn’t lie for a living.

  He thought this as he sat on the veranda in the heat of the afternoon, smoking a genuine Camel Filter that Halliburton had proudly imported all the way from North Carolina. He tapped some ash into the empty Budweiser bottle next to him, which sat precariously atop a list of seized Iraqi communiques dating back to the 1990s. Those communiques were juicy, because they depicted a time when American sanctions had reduced Saddam to his wiliest, most animal self. People better than Ambrose had given him several boxes worth of those documents on the theory that they’d unlock whatever the hell the ex-Baathists were up to in Baghdad, since U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer kicked them out of all government positions and practically forced them into joining anti-Occupation militias.

  He’d translated all of the documents in five nights, then pretended he was still working on the project three weeks later. The State Department was just another set of cubes and field offices, like any big corporation, and like any other big corporation, it never paid to look like the guy who worked the quickest. Those fuckers ended up working fifteen hour days, or worse; sometimes they got promoted.

  A black Escalade pulled into the turnaround of his villa, clunking as its armored frame rolled over the remains of faded white speed bumps. That would be Carlisle. John Carl
isle was a black guy from somewhere in Ohio who Ambrose always pitied a little, because he was smart, honest, and still never escaped the unspoken stigma of being a “diversity hire” who the Bushies brought to Baghdad purely because he was a black Republican. It didn’t help any that he was in a branch of USAID that handled “logistics.” That just meant he spent all day driving around the ten square miles of Saddam’s old fortress running errands for people. Casting the Occupation’s only black Republican as an errand boy probably wasn’t a message anyone had meant to send, but the Occupation had a way of twisting truths to suit its own ends, regardless of the Occupiers’ intentions.

  “Ahlan wa Sahlan, ya John!” Ambrose said in overly formal Arabic, wishing his visitor welcome.

  “Wa Ahlan, ya Seyyidi!” John yelled back to Ambrose on his veranda, thanking Ambrose for his greeting and calling him “boss” on top of it. It was all of the Arabic that Carlisle spoke, but Ambrose had hope for the man yet.

  Carlisle held up a fat manila folder and waved it teasingly up at the skinny man in his boxers with a Camel drooping out of his mouth.

  Ambrose made an exaggerated mixture of headshake and hand waggle, like Iraqis did when disagreeing with someone, saying, “Tell your bosses no way. I’m not through with their last pile of intelligence yet.”

  Carlisle used the folder to shield his eyes as he looked up at Ambrose. He said, “Put those docs aside. These are fresh, and they’re top priority. I’ll just leave them down here for you. See if you can at least find a pair of pants before you come down to get them. Pretend somebody’s paying you six figures to be here along with free housing and a per diem.”

  Ambrose waved his hands across the horizon, where the Green Zone’s villas stretched out almost to the horizon, beyond which loomed the haze of wartime Baghdad. “My free housing is within RPG range of insurgents across the river, and the only place I can spend that per diem is in a Halliburton grocery store. Just leave the folder down there. I’ll get it in a second,” he barked.

  Carlisle didn’t respond. He just got back in his armored SUV and drove away, off on his next errand. Ambrose found the documents where he’d left them on the steps of the villa and took them inside.

  Ambrose thumbed through the folder as he walked up the sweeping curved staircase of his conquered villa, oblivious to the small gallery of baroque era European portraiture hanging on the red adobe wall beside him. The documents were all in Arabic, typed on a standard word processor and printed from a cheap desktop printer, based on the smudged ink he saw throughout. Smudging aside, he saw documents written by people with limited vocabularies peppered by unusually detailed phrases like “vector of attack,” and “theater of operations.”

  He frowned and said, “Fucking soldiers are the same everywhere,” since he’d concluded that these were operational documents written by ex-soldiers loyal to Saddam, now part of the insurgency. That meant the intelligence would be interesting in the right hands, but not, in his diplomat’s mind, a game changer.

  He was holding documents that might thwart two or three bomb attacks, and lead to a couple nighttime house raids capturing medium-value targets. Nothing in that folder would stop the insurgency, or even put much of a dent in it. For that, you either needed to somehow trick all of Iraq into loving its new conquerors, or to find the snake behind the insurgency and take its head off. The former was impossible, and the snake itself was more like a hydra: a dragon with many heads, and whenever you severed one, two more grew back in its place.

  Ambrose went to the mini-fridge in his seven hundred square foot bedroom with its white king-sized featherbed and took out another Budweiser. It was past noon, after all. Then he ran a cool bath and sank down into the red marble tub, ready to peruse more of these new documents that he’d already written off as bullshit.

  He sipped the beer, having that strange constricted pulse in his throat that comes of drinking something cold in a hot environment. The pages in the folder told him nothing he couldn’t already guess: insurgent militias made up of ex-soldiers had attacks planned on routes frequented by American trucks. Someone had snuck RPGs into an empty house in north Baghdad, and they were ready for dispersal to separate cells. It showed a degree of sophistication, but none of it was very interesting to a man like Ambrose, who, unlike the Bush apparatchiks around him, didn’t assume that Iraqis were stupid.

  The second half of the file amounted to supply requisitions from looted Iraqi army bases, along with some American equipment that had gone missing in trickles and streams ever since the Occupation began in April 2003. More tedium.

  Ambrose took another swig, then popped his neck and closed his eyes in the hopes that it would shake loose some cobwebs. He was doing it again; letting himself become bored by predictability before making sure he was looking at things that were actually so predictable.

  He tried to look at the last few pages of documents with fresh eyes, letting his lips move as his eyes scanned the pages word by word. Rockets…bullets…bomb making components. “Why would an insurgent write this shit down?” He asked himself aloud. He’d forgotten about the beer, and it was warm by the time he tried to take another swig, just like the bathtub that had gradually grown tepid to match the unholy combination of desert heat and tropical humidity that marred Baghdad afternoons.

  After a bit longer, the truth stared him in the face. They weren’t just requisitions, telling a militia what kind of inventory they had to kill with. He smiled and whispered, “No insurgent would ever write this down because you’re not from an insurgent, are you? You’re invoices. You’re receipts, telling somebody what they’re getting for their money.”

  Ambrose’s pale blue eyes took on a cold gleam that matched the tickle moving up his spine. He’d found something real: something to finally get at the hydra. If someone wanted receipts for weaponry bound for the insurgency, they represented interests that were more disciplined and methodical than any simple militia. Those type of receipts meant somebody’s military, and that meant a foreign power was showing its hand in Iraq. Everyone in the Green Zone knew that foreign governments were meddling in the Iraqi insurgency, but it was a bitch to prove it.

  He looked at the second to last page, and saw blue handwriting that filled the margins on both sides. The cursive Arabic lettering was beautiful, written by someone with more manual dexterity than Ambrose Hayes could ever hope to achieve. The words themselves got straight to the point:

  Explosives need more copper for molten cores. Do not skimp again. Quit holding me back. Sorcerer.

  The note was written in the Arabic alphabet, but it wasn’t written in the Arabic language. It was written in Farsi, which used the Arabic alphabet to write a language more closely related to Hindi and Sanskrit. Farsi was the national language of Iran, and Iraqi Arabs simply didn’t speak it…unless they had spent time in Iran, and that time included discussing things like the molten cores of explosives.

  Ambrose smiled like the Cheshire Cat as he finished his beer. Sorcerer was Iranian military, and Ambrose was on to him.

  Chapter Six

  It was fall, 2005. Ambrose had bags under his eyes. The bags could have told anyone about the sleepless nights he’d spent poring over maps of Baghdad despite not being able to leave the walled inanities of the Green Zone. He’d spent those nights making sure that each of the documents he’d acquired matched up with a physical location in the prefabricated suburb of southern Baghdad called Sadr City, previously called “Saddam City,” where the most implacable of Baghdad’s Shiite militiamen were meeting with the man he’d come to believe was Iran’s chief agent in Iraq.

  The State Department man sitting across his desk from Ambrose finished reading the terse, two page memo Ambrose had brought with him. Then he dropped the report, took a swig of Nescafe out of an ivory colored coffee mug, and set the mug down on top of the report.

  “You’ve been taking on extra work,” he said.

  Ambrose tried to look casual, but he felt the lie cross his face when h
is tired eyes didn’t squint properly to match his fake smile. “No, Chief. The Department is paying me well enough that I’m not hard up for overtime.”

  The man nodded and replied, “So you’re acquiring documents from other analysts across multiple agencies, re-translating them to come up with entirely new renderings of the original Arabic, compiling the data into memos for your superiors, and this isn’t extra work.”

  Ambrose knew he shook his head too fast in response. You weren’t supposed to look that eager when telling bureaucrats something radical. They were allergic to anything other than cool detachment. “No, Chief. What I’m doing is just value-added to what is already getting done. I’m putting a fresh pair of eyes on extant intelligence to chase down a couple leads that my own work has uncov—”

  “CIA says you’re trying to do their job. CIA says you’re making their Arabic analysts look bad, and they’re not sharing any more intelligence with State while you’re still in the picture.”

  Ambrose flared his nostrils and tried to keep the crazy out of his bloodshot eyes. “If CIA thinks I’m making them look bad, that’s because they know that none of their ‘analysts’ really speak Arabic. Let alone Farsi.”

  The man crossed his arms, looked into the distance, and smiled like a shark, if sharks could have molars emblazoned by bronze fillings. He spoke without looking at Ambrose, “You’re good, man. You passed the Foreign Service exam, right? The oral portion? The part where we make sure our would-be diplomats can actually be diplomatic?”

  Ambrose smiled back, hoping he’d won a convert. “I did well enough, Chief. And I don’t mean to say that CIA doesn’t have people who are good at Arabic. They’ve got the best, hands down…but they didn’t send them to Baghdad.”

  “How about the Farsi, then?”