Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (2 page)

Chapter Two

The Iraqi soldier had his callused hands wrapped around Jamsheed’s throat. It was 1986, and the boy was convinced he was about to die. He didn’t feel like that was going to make him a martyr. He wasn’t some silly twelve year old anymore; he was fourteen, and he’d seen how real martyrs died. They died in blood and fire with the name of God on their lips. They weren’t strangled to death by Iraqis with bad breath in muddy trenches outside of Basra.

The man said something to him in Arabic, but Jamsheed didn’t register it. He was too busy looking at the wild, burning terror in his executioner’s eyes. The Iraqi was more afraid than Jamsheed was. The detached part of Jamsheed’s mind, the part that had accepted death, observed that this was appropriate. After all, even if Jamsheed didn’t die a martyr, he would die with a golden key around his neck that promised him entry into paradise. Not so with the Iraqi, whose only possible reward for killing the fourteen year old enemy would be living another day in fear of Saddam Hussein.

Another voice screamed out in Arabic, full of splintering terror that cut through the sounds of battle:

Gas!

Gas!

The Iraqi paused in shock. Jamsheed, who was already dead, punched his opponent in the neck. The Iraqi gasped and grabbed at his trachea, freeing Jamsheed. Jamsheed punched him in the neck again. Attacking a bigger man from a prone position didn’t give him much leverage, so this time Jamsheed curled his knuckles into a thin knife edge when he struck. A fellow martyr had told Jamsheed that worked.

It did. The Iraqi stumbled backwards on his knees and Jamsheed kicked up to his feet. He’d grown since his war began, and he now had the reflexes of a budding athlete. He used that strength and speed to close the distance with his adversary while the man still gasped.

Jamsheed grabbed the Iraqi by the back of his head, then smashed his knee into the middle of the man’s face. The Iraqi fell backwards and Jamsheed followed him. He stomped on the man’s sternum until he heard a
crack
, then he gave two more stomps until the man stopped moving.

He was hyperventilating and had tears running down his face. Those stopped when he heard the cry of
gas!
float through the trenches one more time. He peered over the trench and saw a faint tremble to the air. Something was disrupting the natural flow of the dust and smoke that accompanied the warzone of Basra. It was another chemical in the air, invisible unless it needed to interact with other airborne particulate. Then it shimmered slightly, like raindrops rolling off spotless glass. Old Jamsheed was a connoisseur of his poisonous gases.
Sarin. Heavy and invisible means sarin
, he thought to himself.

Jamsheed wasted no time. He grabbed his opponent’s neck, where the man wore a black and white checkered
keffiyeh
scarf common to Iraqi Arabs. Jamsheed ripped in off, dropped his own pants, and urinated on the scarf. He hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since that morning, so fighting in the desert had rendered his urine yellow and stinking. It didn’t matter to him. All he needed was some liquid to soak the cloth. Sarin entered mainly through the respiratory orifices. As long as he insulated his mouth, nose, and eyes with something semi-impermeable, like liquid-soaked cloth, he could wait out the cloud, God willing, with only minimal exposure through his hands and scalp. Jamsheed would have laughed if someone suggested that he wait a moment and try to find a water canteen. Sarin loved people who said things that stupid. It would eat them all day.

He pulled up his pants and grabbed the
keffiyeh
. Squeezing the excess moisture from the scarf, he hunkered down in his trench and wrapped the urine-soaked rag around his face. He breathed through his mouth to avoid the stink, mindful that he needed to breathe lightly to conserve his oxygen. He didn’t pray to God. He prayed to that urine-soaked scarf. He begged that it keep him safe, that he might survive to kill Iran’s enemies for just one more day.

When he thoughts of Iran’s enemies, he no longer pictured Saddam Hussein in his black beret. He pictured a middle aged white man in a suit wearing glasses, shaking Saddam’s hand. That man’s name was Rumsfeld. He served another old white man named Reagan. Reagan was an American.

Chapter Three

A single bead of sweat scored its way down the middle of Jamsheed’s nose. It had started at the pronounced divot between his eyebrows, then gathered speed as it raced down his straight, well-proportioned nose. People said he would be handsome someday. Most of those people were dead by 1988, when Jamsheed sat cross-legged on the packed ground of a former helicopter landing pad east of al-Majnoon Island in southern Iraq. They hadn’t seen a helicopter there in months. Jamsheed and the other survivors of Southern Command didn’t expect to see one again.

The bead of sweat didn’t bother him even as it dangled from his nose like a salty stalactite. He could shut things out when he needed to, so the sweat didn’t matter; all that mattered was the live grenade in his hand. A dead man had shown him how to extract the blasting powder from its core, then use that powder to make new explosives devices. Jamsheed was sixteen years old, and he’d done the move on ten separate occasions. Failure meant killing himself and anyone around him, but there were no excuses by that point of the war. Saddam Hussein had definitively repulsed Iran’s strike towards Baghdad, and that meant God’s warriors were now on the defensive, even if they still occupied Iraqi territory like the outskirts of al-Majnoon.

Rumor had it that Saddam was massing two hundred thousand men north of Basra, freshly outfitted with American artillery and French fighter jets. The Iranians were going to be cut apart, if they maintained a massed formation. So Southern Command had decided that in the morning, the Iranian army would disperse into the swamps surrounding al-Majnoon and the other wild places in oceanfront Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers emptied into the Persian Gulf. Before they dispersed, it was Jamsheed’s job to make sure the guerrillas each had as much explosive powder as possible, to be refashioned into improvised explosive devices by individual cells.

Nobody believed Iran could repulse their advance, or even that her soldiers could survive in anything other than a handful of units.

He finished emptying one grenade by dumping its granulated innards into an upturned soldier’s helmet. Some of the grains stuck to patches of half-dried blood on the helmet’s interior. There had been an Iraqi flag stamped on the outside of the helmet, but now that flag was only a puncture wound indicating where Jamsheed’s knife had found its owner’s skull.

Jamsheed tossed the empty grenade over his shoulder. The thing tried to detonate, but without any explosive agent it just clicked like a grasshopper and lay silent, still full of glistening tungsten shrapnel made in Youngstown, Ohio. One grenade down, nineteen to go.

“Jamsheed,” A voice said behind him.

Jamsheed didn’t notice. He was too busy with grenade number two, preparing to open it. He reckoned that whoever was speaking had about a thirty percent chance of regretting it within the next couple seconds.

“Jamsheed,” the voice repeated, as Jamsheed twisted the grenade open and immobilized its striking mechanism with the same motion. It would’ve been impossible to describe how he did it, because his hands were too fast for most eyes to follow.

The sixteen year-old didn’t turn around until the grenade was emptied into the dead Iraqi’s helmet.

“Yes?” He asked.

The intruder was a thin man in his late twenties with bloodshot eyes that stuck too far out of his emaciated face. He had the slight forehead divot of a man who prayed until his forehead scraped the ground, like Jamsheed used to. When the war began, a man like that wouldn’t have made more than corporal. Now, he had the stars of a second lieutenant on the shoulder of his threadbare jacket.

He replied, “If you’re Jamsheed Mashhadi, stop. The war is over.”

Jamsheed nodded, picked up a third grenade, then opened it up while staring at the haggard, bug-eyed lieutenant. The man croaked as Jamsheed shoved his own finger between the stirrup and striker mechanism that should have made the grenade detonate immediately.

Jamsheed felt his finger start to bleed, but didn’t break eye contact with the lieutenant. Jamsheed’s nostrils flared as his blood-slickened forefinger and thumb gripped the striking stirrup, then bent it backwards at a ninety degree angle so the grenade’s clockwork organs could never complete their motion. Explosive powder got into the cut on his finger, but he barely felt the sulfurous material burn into his open wound.

The lieutenant’s eyes were too watery and agape to hide his fear. He whispered, “Jamsheed, Imam Khomeini accepted the UN’s ceasefire proposal. The war is over.”

“Imam Khomeini would never surrender. It’s a trick so we can rebuild our army and counterattack.”

The lieutenant’s frightened expression commingled with something like pity. He said, “Jamsheed, we don’t have any army left. That’s what the Imam says. He’s listened to his generals and the other ayatollahs, and they’ve told him that we don’t have any army, or any money to rebuild one.” Tears ran down the man’s hollow cheeks and the papery, stubbly skin on his face pulled back even tighter. “Jamsheed, it’s over. There’s nothing left. God doesn’t want us to fight anymore, and he told Imam Khomeini to stop while holy Iran can still be saved.”

Jamsheed stood up with a fourth grenade in his hand. His cracking teenage voice hit a solid deep note as he rasped, “God said nothing. The ayatollahs are tricking Imam Khomeini. We still have soldiers, we still have the will to fight. No amount of black-robed cowards will change that with their sniveling.”

“
Jamsheed!
” The man screamed. The lieutenant was backing away from him so quickly that he fell backwards onto his pelvis with a scream. He tried to raise up a hand, but the deflated timbre of his voice said that his spirit was spent and ready to disperse, like the air in a popped balloon.

Jamsheed looked down at his own hand. In his anger he’d popped the pin on the fourth grenade. It was live, and he was holding it like a farmer would an apple.

It would be a good death, Jamsheed reckoned. God wouldn’t consider it a suicide, once he looked in Jamsheed’s heart and saw how deeply he wanted to erase his shame. God would forgive him because Jamsheed still had the gold key to paradise around his neck. He was already a martyr, just waiting for someone to tell God’s angels that he was coming.

Twelve seconds passed, then thirty, then a minute. The grenade didn’t go off. The powder must have been wet from all its time in that goddamned swamp. All of it must have been wet. All of it was useless.

He fell to his knees, chuckling, and no one tried to move him for a long time.

Chapter Four

Evin Prison was a darkling hell. Jamsheed didn’t know what year it was anymore. The Baseej militias, bearded street gangs paid by the ayatollahs to keep order in Tehran, had broken his jaw and half his ribs before turning him over to normal police. They got Jamsheed while he had been leaving Imam Khomeini Airport, fresh from a concert in Milan. When the Baseej came for him, Jamsheed hadn’t fought back. In the initial instant he’d restrained himself out of amusement; it had to be a mistake, and they wanted someone else coming off the plane. When the bearded goons with their soft skin and affected zeal started screaming
Jamsheed Mashhadi! Traitor Mashhadi!
He’d been too dumbfounded to retaliate, even as he thought about how to kill all of them with his bare hands.

So Jamsheed sat in Evin, crying a bit as every change in the weather made the fingertips on his left hand throb at the blackened cuticles where his fingernails should have been. Part of his mind remembered how they laughed while they tore the nails out, but those scraps of terror were nothing coherent.

He was going to die. But while the pain and hunger grew so great that they practically canceled each other out, a calm, enlightened sliver of himself made peace with his coming end.

He had found that slice of himself as a boy running through a particular minefield on the Iraqi border. He remembered a field of trampled wildflowers and swirling dust, and a thousand children like himself screaming with fury as they ran headlong into Iraqi artillery emplacements. The boy next to him stepped on a mine and disappeared with a puff of gore and yellow dirt. From inside his refuge, nothing really seemed so bad. Not even dying in the dark of a torturer’s cell.

The single overhead light was a bulb dangling from the end of an exposed wire. It came on with the reptilian hiss of an old filament igniting. Its brownish yellow incandescence was nothing, a mockery of electricity, but it still damn near blinded him. He gasped in surprise, feeling his out of shape lungs swell outward beneath his emaciated ribs.

Jamsheed’s sight returned to him in single vignettes of images. He was curled in the corner of a filthy room that had old brick walls covered in moss. With the exception of the sputtering bulb above him, there was no source of light in his cell. The only entrance into the room was a rusted metal door. Now that door was open, and a short man’s frame hovered in it.

His visitor had a narrow, bearded face with guarded eyes that gave away little. His beard was just starting to gray, along with his hair and two naturally arched eyebrows that made him look suspicious of the universe at large. He wore a khaki military uniform covered in gilded medals, but Jamsheed didn’t recognize most of them. Jamsheed had left the military behind him, and after the desperate war with Iraq, Iran’s surviving soldiers had remade the army into a professional affair that Jamsheed barely recognized.

The man spoke in a subdued, earnest voice, “God, what have they done to you, Jamsheed?”

Jamsheed winced at the sound of his own name. It wasn’t good when they started by saying your name.

Jamsheed whispered, “Who…”

“You are Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi, born 1972 in Tehran. You fought with the Southern Command in the Basra theater for more than four years, and became the most decorated soldier in your age group. When the war ended, you were offered a permanent position with the army in exchange for your service. You would have officially mustered as a first lieutenant, with assurances you would be fast tracked into a command role, regardless of your age,” the man said, looking him over. Guarded or not, his eyes told Jamsheed things about his own body that he’d only suspected, and gave Jamsheed a sense of what had been done to him while he rotted in the dark. “You refused,” the man finished.

Jamsheed looked down, away from the flickering bulb that had burned his eyes like it was summer sunlight. He said, “I refused. I didn’t want…” He looked for the right word and couldn’t find it, but his insides insisted that he complete the thought, so he said, “I couldn’t do it. It was too much shock, and I was young, and I couldn’t stand leaving the war to go watch parades in a uniform.”

The earnest man chuckled and said, “You were honest. Most people wouldn’t admit that they grew to love the blood. I’m still ashamed to admit it.”

Jamsheed nodded, feeling the weight of his head and how weak his neck muscles had become. “I never loved the blood. I just hated the devils who made us fight, and I loved ending them.”

The man sat down on the ground next to Jamsheed. He didn’t seem to care that his carefully creased uniform slacks were pressing down into the dried filth of a prison cell made by Jamsheed and a hundred doomed souls before him. He said, “The shah’s secret police put my uncle in here, you know. He was no threat to the king, but men in black suits still came for him in the dead of night.”

Jamsheed mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s kind of you. He came back, though.” He looked Jamsheed dead in the eye and said, “He came back, but you won’t. Your international tour was too much of an embarrassment to Supreme Leader Khamenei and the other ayatollahs. Khamenei can’t afford to look weak, so he’s making examples of everyone he can. That especially includes war heroes who go abroad and say blasphemous things about the Revolution.”

The earnest man looked into the corner of the room furthest from Jamsheed. There, on a tripod, sat a video camera flanked by a single wooden chair.

“Have you given them a confession yet? Something about America and Israel and counter-Revolutionary activities?” The man asked.

“No. I keep messing up my lines.” Jamsheed tried to smile, feeling his sallow, malnourished skin stretched across his cheekbones and up to his sunken eye sockets. “Would Ali Khamenei believe me if I said I never meant to insult him?”

“I doubt it, Jamsheed. Now that they’ve put a camera in here with you, the ayatollahs won’t stop until they have a confession. You’d best decide how you want to approach that.”

Jamsheed looked at his trembling hands, remembering how fast and strong they had been when he was whole. He said, “I really did want to be a piano player. I keep telling them that, and nobody believes me. My grandfather showed me a little before the war, then after the war I took lessons and they called me a natural, so I kept playing around Tehran. A human rights lawyer from France was stationed in Tehran, and she heard about me. We had…something, and then she invited me to play a show in Paris. They loved me, so the lawyer and her friends got my visa extended. Have you been to France?”

The man replied, “No, sadly. These last few years my attentions have turned eastward. Unusual things are afoot in Afghanistan, even for that place. Did you enjoy it?”

Jamsheed smiled again, still looking at his hands, as he said, “France is how our poets describe ancient Persia. Gardens, art, music, the best food on earth. There are red wines in France that would make you cry if you tasted them.”

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.