Children of Paradise (28 page)

• • •

P
RESIDENT
K
HATAMI
faced a stark challenge. If he could not credibly answer the outcry against the murder of Iranian dissidents, his pledge to expand freedom of speech and the rule of law would prove empty from the start. On the other hand, if he could shine a light into the darkest recesses of the security establishment, not only would he prove to his constituency that deep reform was possible, but he would demonstrate to the hard-liners that the reformists were a force to be reckoned with.

In December 1998, Khatami announced that he had formed a commission to investigate the murders. Hardly anyone expected results. The Islamic Republic was not known for policing its own abuses. But defectors came forward from within the intelligence ministry, and they linked their former colleagues to the Forouhar murders. Khatami used this evidence to force the intelligence ministry to announce its culpability. To the shock and amazement of Iranians, intelligence minister Dorri-Najafabadi, who had been forced on Khatami by the Supreme Leader, resigned in disgrace, to be replaced by the head of Khatami’s commission.

The intelligence ministry announced that a band of about thirty rogue agents, under the leadership of a former deputy intelligence minister named Saeed Emami, were responsible for the extrajudicial killings of Iranian dissidents both within Iran and abroad. Emami and his agents were carted off to prison in February 1999. Four months later, Emami allegedly committed suicide in prison by swallowing hair removal powder.

Khatami rode high on the success of his investigation. Never before had the state taken responsibility for the killing of dissidents. Never had anyone been disciplined for such actions. Never had a president exercised power over the security apparatus, using little more than the weight of public opinion and of a comparatively free press. President Khatami showed what a muscular movement for reform was capable of.

But he also demonstrated its limits. The purging of “rogue elements” from the intelligence ministry, followed by the convenient suicide of the man in charge of those elements, left many questions unanswered. Was a deputy intelligence minister really able to carry out such a far-reaching international assassination program—claiming more than one hundred victims—without orders to do so from above? From how high up the chain of command would such a program have been authorized? By Ali Fallahian, the intelligence minister under President Rafsanjani? By Rafsanjani himself? By the Supreme Leader, Khamenei? Were there clerics, like those in the Haghani Circle, who gave this project their blessing—who maybe even issued fatwas condemning the victims to their deaths? Some hardline officials now claimed that Emami and his henchmen were acting at the
behest of foreign malefactors.
They released a videotape in which Emami’s wife confirmed this under torture so severe that one of her kidneys had failed.

• • •

W
RITING IN THE NEWSPAPER
Sobh-e Emrouz
, Akbar Ganji pressed these questions relentlessly on the president and his reformist government.
Sobh-e Emrouz
was not just any newspaper. It belonged to Saeed Hajjarian, the reformist strategist from the Center for Strategic Research who had once been an intelligence ministry official. Hajjarian had reportedly tried to block Emami’s hire during the Mousavi era. Surely he knew a thing or two about the ministry’s inner workings.

As for Ganji, he was not just any writer. He was a born gadfly, intellectually spry, physically courageous, and irremediably radical, whether as a Revolutionary Guardsman in the 1980s or as a liberal agitator now. To the reformists, Ganji would prove a potent but exasperating ally. He could not be counted on to play for the team; he was one of its most daring thinkers and most uncompromising critics.

When Saeed Emami was arrested, Ganji applauded Khatami but did not let up. “
Directing everyone’s eyes toward the intelligence ministry is an optical illusion,” he wrote. “The ill-minded bloodsuckers in the field of thought and politics must be identified regardless of their guise or position.”

This was not just a matter of exacting vengeance on the perpetrators of crime. There was, Ganji insisted, an “ideology of violence” at large in the country, and it was the government’s moral duty to uproot it. Iranian religious leaders, he added, could not keep silent lest they imply their own complicity. Rather, right-minded clerics must not allow the assassins “to set up the market stall of murder and crime in the realm of religiousness or to raise the flag of terror on religion’s dome.”

When Saeed Emami died in prison, it was Ganji who publicly questioned the official line that the death was a suicide.
Ganji wrote in
Sobh-e Emrouz
of his own experience in solitary confinement. A guard looked in
on him every half hour; he was allowed to bathe just once a week, for only five minutes, in full view of a guard. How, he asked, could so important a prisoner as Saeed Emami have been left alone with a poisonous substance for long enough to kill himself? Would someone be charged with negligence for allowing this to happen, or would the government launch an investigation into the circumstances of Emami’s death?

Ganji’s articles found a hungry readership. They would be collected in a bestselling volume titled
The Dungeon of Ghosts
. In it, he traced the links among the members of the Haghani Circle and showed that these clerics, Fallahian and Dorri-Najafabadi among them, had controlled the intelligence ministry from the start. He alleged that a death squad convened secret meetings where its “gray eminence” issued fatwas calling for the murder of specific enemies. Ansar-e Hezbollah, Ganji claimed, answered to these same clerics. Some of what Ganji wrote was speculation infused with high drama and the language of a B movie. His cast of characters included a “red-robed eminence” and someone called “Master Key.” But his argument was also ruthlessly logical, and he did not desist from pressing responsibility past Saeed Emami up the chain. He fingered Fallahian, Mesbah-Yazdi, and finally Rafsanjani.

Later, Ganji would say he knew exactly what he was doing. He was shaking the foundation of the regime by exposing its hidden projects, its deepest corruption. Khamenei, he understood, had moved to contain the damage by conceding only four murders—the Forouhars, Mokhtari, and Pouyandeh—and limiting responsibility to Emami and his henchmen. But responsibility, he knew, was far more widely shared, both horizontally and vertically, as well as further back in time. Ganji was clearly angling for Rafsanjani. Later he would say he thought he could trace responsibility all the way up to Khamenei. But for that he would have needed Khatami to endorse his effort—not to purge the intelligence ministry, as he had done, effectively declaring victory and closing the file.

Khatami warned Ganji that he was pushing too far, too fast. Soon enough, other sorts of warnings reached Ganji, from less sympathetic lips.
His articles were heavily censored, cut down by as much as two-thirds before publication. “We had ten editors, not one,” he’d later remark. He started getting death threats by phone and fax.

During this time, Ganji was called once to the intelligence ministry and once to the military court. There he was told that if he continued writing, he would serve a minimum of fifteen years in prison. He knew his adventure would end there when he wrote an article called “Playing with Death.” He wrote that he felt himself engaged in a duel, likely at any moment to be killed. To interview sources, he had to go to unfamiliar places and meet with strangers. Any one of those meetings could have been a trap. But he continued to survive them and to publish his articles, each more censored than the last.

He was at last arrested in 2000. In 2001 he would be sentenced to ten years in prison and five years of internal exile. He was to become one of the Islamic Republic’s most formidable political prisoners, penning a radical manifesto against the theocracy and going on a fifty-day hunger strike that ended only when his doctors told him he was on the brink of irreversibly damaging his brain.

• • •

S
HAHRAM
R
AFIZADEH WAS NOT
as famous as Ganji, but he, too, tirelessly probed the chain murders in his writings. He suspected that reformist analysts traced the assassination program only as far back as the Rafsanjani administration, because before that, they and their friends in the Islamic Left were close to the center of power. But Shahram—twenty-eight years old and a part of no political faction—believed the program was as old as the Islamic Republic. He would link more than thirty killings, committed over a period of decades, with the ones in 1998. In a book called
Power Play: Ruhollah Hosseinian
, about the deputy minister of intelligence, Shahram also analyzed the public statements of those close to Saeed Emami to show how the Islamic Republic deliberately set forth conflicting narratives in order to obfuscate the truth.

As a result of his writings, Shahram became unemployable. He lost his job at the newspaper, where he’d edited culture pages dedicated to reintroducing Iranian readers to the secular poets and writers, and he lost his job at the publishing house, where he’d gotten to know some of the major reformist intellectuals. At times he couldn’t pay his rent. He sold his television and sent his wife and children to Rasht, to live with Bita’s father during the violent and tumultuous period between the chain murders and their prosecution. “They’re killing all my friends,” he told his wife’s family bleakly.

Mokhtari had believed in dialogue. He had been one of those who reached out to the reformists within the regime, even though he did not share their religious agenda. He had believed in peaceful coexistence, peaceful struggle. His murder had been a terrible mistake. Just ten days after his friend’s body was found, Shahram published an open letter. He called it “The Share of Poets: Solitude, Love, and Death.” He wrote that, in Iran, hope itself suffocated poets and writers.

After that, he began writing books, and he did not stop. He owed this to Mokhtari’s memory. But his life in Tehran had come loose. He was financially ruined, his family far away, his circle of writers scarred by violent loss. For four years he wrote books. Only one of three of them passed the censors to be published. In 2001 a friend told him that preparations were under way to launch a new reformist newspaper, called
Etemad
. Maybe there would be a job there for Shahram. The newspaper’s editor was more conservative than Shahram, but on their mutual friend’s advice, he took a chance on the young poet already known in journalism circles for his intelligent and fearless reporting. Shahram became the editor of
Etemad
’s literary page.

One day Shahram wandered over to where the political editors worked. A young deputy editor sat at a table strewn with papers. He could not have been more than twenty-two years old, slender and fine-featured, with his short black hair meticulously side-combed. He had delicate fingers and lucid brown eyes that seemed fixed to something clearer or more beautiful than what lay before him. He appeared to be hard at work, his head down. But when Shahram came near, the young editor said, “Hello, Mr. Rafizadeh.”

Shahram was startled.

“I know you,” the young editor explained. He introduced himself as Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, also from Rasht. Would Shahram care to write some political commentary for his section?

“How do you know I write political commentary?” Shahram asked warily.

“I have read your book,” said the young editor, “and I like the way you look at things.”

It would be some time before Shahram accepted the offer. By then, he and Roozbeh were friends. A shared melancholy brought them close, and soon financial hardship made them roommates. After work they would start for home, but mostly they walked together for the sake of walking, traversing the city in conversation or in a communion of silence, past the hour when traffic finally stilled. Sometimes on those walks Roozbeh would sing traditional folk songs for Shahram, his bright tenor ringing out through dusky streets.

The prospect of his arrest was never far from Shahram’s mind. He tried to make light of it. “I hope that if I’m ever arrested, they will arrest you as well,” he teased Roozbeh one night as they walked to Mellat Park in northeastern Tehran. “For just this one reason: You could sing for me in prison.”

  NINE  

T
HE
E
IGHTEENTH OF
T
IR

I
F THE
I
SLAMIC
R
EPUBLIC
was made for anybody, it was made for Ali Afshari. His family was loyal to the new regime and its charismatic leader, shielded from the violence of the revolutionary epoch in every particular. He was not affected by the restrictions on drinking, women’s dress, and mixing between the sexes, because he would have adhered to these rules in any case. Born in 1973, husky and bearded even in his twenties, he was devout in exactly the way the ruling clerics approved.

Ali Afshari’s father, Naghi, was a lay religious teacher and the publisher of a weekly magazine in the small city of Qazvin, just to the northwest of Tehran. As a boy, Ali nourished and shaped himself in his father’s extensive library, a cove of books that extended beyond the imaginations of his schoolteachers. Naghi and his wife were religious people, traditional and middle-class, loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini even when they had minor doubts about the actions of the revolutionary state.