Children of Paradise (65 page)

• • •

A
YATOLLAH
M
ONTAZERI DIED
in his sleep some five months later, on December 19. The Green Movement would pour forth to mourn him from Tehran to Qom, Najafabad to Zanjan, meeting the Basij and riot police even inside of mosques, in its last major confrontations, the largest and most violent since June 20.

The grand ayatollah’s mourning period coincided with Ashura. But the security forces of the Islamic Republic were well past worrying about any injunctions against violence on the holiest of all Shiite holy days. Amateur videos showed them running over protesters with police vehicles, and eyewitnesses alleged that they opened fire into crowds. Demonstrators, inflamed, assailed security agents and set police property on fire. Hundreds of demonstrators—by some reports well over a thousand—disappeared into Iran’s prisons that day, and hospitals reported scores of head injuries and gunshot wounds. Ali Habibi Mousavi, nephew of the presidential candidate and a forty-three-year-old father of two, was not even protesting but was shot in the chest in Tehran. He was one of thirty-seven people one official news source reported killed on Ashura. There would be no consensus on this figure and little reliable reporting on the day’s events, due to a heavy pall of censorship. Of the protest videos posted to YouTube, one showed university students chanting, “
Montazeri, you are finally free.”

  SEVENTEEN  

T
HE
E
ND OF THE
D
IRTY
W
ARS OF
I
NTELLECTUALS

The pliable, the satellites, the soul slaves, the camp-followers of any big movement, do not suffice a dictator. Never will he be content until the free, the few independents, have become his toadies and his serfs; and, in order to make his doctrine universal, he arranges for the state to brand nonconformity as a crime.

—
S
TEFAN
Z
WEIG,
The Right to Heresy

P
AYAM
F
AZLINEJAD,
the young man who had come to Shahram and Roozbeh seemingly suicidal and alone, and almost certainly to entrap them, had hardened by now into a fully established propagandist for the hardline judiciary. He worked for Fars, the news agency of the Revolutionary Guard, and
Kayhan
, the newspaper associated with the Supreme Leader.

It was in
Kayhan
that Fazlinejad published
an explosive five-part series in early June 2009. His treatise was called “Mohammad Khatami’s Mission for a Velvet Coup d’État,” and it purported to lay bare an elaborate international plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic using a nefarious force called
“civil society.” The current unrest, by Payam’s telling, had long been planned as the endgame of this Western conspiracy.

Fazlinejad used the reformists’ own language against them. From grains of truth, he nurtured whole orchards of fantasy: scholarly exchanges became clandestine meetings with Western philosophers who were really covert operatives; theories about the development of civil society became plots to surround and upend the revolutionary state. Curiously, Fazlinejad proceeded from the assumption that civil institutions, independent media, and voter participation would inevitably empower secularizing forces, and so these things were inherently subversive and had to be blocked. Authoritarianism, by these lights, was the very essence of the regime, and authoritarian measures were the only means for protecting it.

Fazlinejad traced the “velvet coup” plot to the CIA and MI6, acting through think tanks in the United States, Britain, and Germany. As far back as 1988, these foreign elements, together with Iranian expatriate royalists and Zionists, had unleashed the
Kiyan
Circle and the Center for Strategic Research to do their bidding inside Iran. Abdolkarim Soroush was charged with priming the intellectual field for secularism, while Hossein Bashiriyeh would formulate a political strategy under the guise of “political development.” They had recruited a circle of political operatives including Saeed Hajjarian, Mostafa Tajzadeh, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Mohsen Kadivar, and, of course, Mohammad Khatami, who was to spearhead the operation.

Once the conspirators had installed Khatami in power, they held elections for city and local councils, supposedly in order to create “participatory democracy” and a “culture of civil society,” but in fact as a scheme to confiscate local resources and “spread secularism at all social and cultural levels.” Then, at Bashiriyeh’s alleged insistence, the reformist interior ministry set aside a budget to finance “civil institutions,” or NGOs, that would become a subversive social force capable of overthrowing the regime.

For reasons Fazlinejad did not specify, however, the reformist project foundered in 2001. The CIA, concerned, supposedly dispatched its agent, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, to Iran “to assess the
conditions of the American project of ‘transition to democracy.’”
Habermas did, in fact, travel to Iran in 2002 at the invitation of the reformists. His lectures attracted staggeringly large crowds, and Iranians engaged him in lively discussions about the place of religion in the public sphere. In Fazlinejad’s version, Habermas came to deliver directives to Kadivar, Hajjarian, and others. He advised the reformists to build democratic institutions, working particularly within universities and political parties, and to “prepare for a civil struggle.” Of course the reformist operatives did his bidding. But the reformists lost the city councils in 2003 and the parliament in 2004, plunging their “civil society” project into disarray.

That was when the West dispatched its next “security and intelligence theorist.” The late American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, Fazlinejad wrote, “is known as the greatest American philosopher, but he is in fact one of the oldest leaders of covert operations of the CIA in the field of thought, who joined the CIA in its managing staff for a project known as ‘dirty wars of intellectuals’ in the 1950s.” (In fact, Rorty was a graduate student at Yale in the 1950s, writing a dissertation called “The Concept of Potentiality.”) When Rorty visited Tehran in June 2004, Fazlinejad contended, he told the reformists to jettison their local debates and concerns. They would achieve their goals only with “complete dependence on American traditions and following the philosophy of pragmatism.” Like Habermas, Rorty suggested organizing “democratic institutions” that could be unleashed at the moment of crisis in order to establish American democracy.

But the conspirators saved their big guns for the fall of 2004. The Australian political theorist John Keane was, according to Fazlinejad, the “master key” and “the brain of the British MI6.” Keane, the author of a 1988 book called
Democracy and Civil Society
, was apparently the mastermind behind the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia and Poland. His book returned the term “civil society” to the lexicon of Western political philosophy after 130 years of disuse, and it reimagined civil society as “militant,” Fazlinejad revealed. Keane was also the agent of a secret $900 million CIA and MI6 project to infiltrate and subvert Shiite religious
institutions and communities in order to depoliticize the religion. The existence of this plan, Fazlinejad reported, was documented in a book called
A Plan to Divide and Desolate the Theology
, by a former CIA agent named Michael Brant. But this book seems to exist only in a blogpost in Urdu by one Liaquat Raza, who claimed that Brant was the “right hand of Bob Woodwards, CIA’s ex-chief [
sic
].”

Keane had visited Tehran in 2004. At the time, Fazlinejad asserted, Bashiriyeh and Soroush had just returned from an important meeting with former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz and “Pentagon Strategist” Francis Fukuyama (a political scientist at Johns Hopkins at the time), who apprised the Iranians of their role in “Polandising” Iran. Keane supposedly met with Hajjarian, instructing him in “soft subversion” and the latest “models of democratization.” Keane, too, allegedly advised the reformist government to subsidize NGOs, independent media, and civil institutions in order to challenge the regime and eventually bring it down in a velvet coup.

Fazlinejad implicated George Soros and the United States Congress in this plot, but not all the malefactors were American or British. According to Fazlinejad, a Dutch parliamentarian of Iranian extraction instructed Shirin Ebadi to hitch a feminist movement to the civil rights strategy. It was in accordance with the Dutch plan that Iranian feminists had launched the One Million Signatures campaign, “which was in a way openly in the service of producing and distributing naked prostitution in Iran.” (Fazlinejad thereafter identified it as “the campaign to spread prostitution.”)

The planning of the “green coup d’état project for the tenth presidential elections,” Fazlinejad assured the reader, was a matter of such layered complexity that he could not explain all its strategic and intelligence dimensions. But in the final phase, the reformists mobilized Mir Hossein Mousavi (“no one knew why he had been put in hiding for such a long time”), who concluded his “breathtaking election campaign” with a meeting with a British envoy, in which he declared the civil struggle about to begin.

On the finer points of civil struggle, Fazlinejad’s language turned convoluted and vague. The plan was for a defeated presidential candidate to
gin up a legitimacy crisis. The organized, trained agents of civil society would go into the streets with an agenda of “vandalism, terrorism and creating crisis,” and the tumult would be made to appear much more widespread than it truly was. In Iran, there was no social mass in the streets, Fazlinejad asserted, only a band of trained subversives, whose aim was to “paralyze the nervous system of the country,” leading to the collapse of the regime.

Mousavi, by Fazlinejad’s account, set the civil struggle phase in motion, but the key figure inside Iran was really Khatami. Fazlinejad provided an itinerary of Khatami’s international travels, which very suspiciously had the former president out of the country for much of the 2009 campaign season. Perhaps most suspiciously of all, Khatami had visited Tunisia at the very same time that United States president Barack Obama set foot in Egypt, which is also in North Africa. In a June 14, 2009, statement, Khatami had damningly “used terms such as demonstrations, civil protests seven times.”

• • •

T
HE
F
AZLINEJAD TREATISE
was but a foretaste of the judiciary’s case against the reformist leadership. On August 1, 2009, the televised trial of what appeared to be an auditorium full of defendants opened in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court. Rows of former high officials in prison pajamas, sallow-complected and hollow-eyed, flanked by men in uniform, listened first to the prosecutor’s twenty-five-page indictment and then to one another’s self-denunciations.

The deterioration of Mohammad Ali Abtahi’s physical appearance was perhaps the most dramatic. The once rotund and smiling cleric, now defrocked, seemed to have lost half his weight, and his face was drawn and haunted as well as sweaty and confused. But it was Saeed Hajjarian’s confession that brought the proceedings to a climax at once chilling and absurd.

Hajjarian was too ill to read, so a young Mosharekat member who was also an inmate was obliged to read
Hajjarian’s forced confession for him. Published by Fars News, the confession ran to six pages. In it, Hajjarian
renounced Max Weber’s theory of patrimonialism, which he now understood could not possibly apply to the Islamic Republic. Weber’s theory was meant to describe countries where “people are treated as subjects and deprived of all citizenship rights,” Hajjarian noted. Of course, this was not the case in Iran, the political theorist with the bullet in his spine conceded under duress.

The Islamic Republic was a revolutionary system, Hajjarian noted. Weber had nothing to say about that. The Iranian regime held elections, and it drew “legitimacy from the expectation of the return of the missing twelfth imam.” Weber accounted for none of these particulars, which meant that his schema was meaningless for Iran. Hajjarian, in his ignorance, had once “fallen blindly into the trap of these misguided theories.” Now he saw the light, and he apologized.

Hajjarian regretted, he continued, having uncritically disseminated the ideas of Western social scientists, including Max Weber. In the wake of the tenth presidential election, “we now know that many of these ideas were at the root of the protests that threatened national unity.” The ideas of Habermas and the American sociologist Talcott Parsons were particularly to blame. “Theories of the human sciences contain ideological weapons that can be converted into strategies and tactics and mustered against the country’s official ideology,” wrote Hajjarian apologetically.

• • •

T
HE INDICTMENT BY THE OFFICE
of the prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, linked dangerous Western ideas to a covert foreign plot, much as Fazlinejad’s essay had done. Read by Mortazavi’s deputy, it began with long quotations from the confession of a supposed spy held in custody, and arranged itself almost entirely around a narrative attributed to this source.