Then They Came For Me (7 page)

I knew Paola understood my exhilaration. When we’d met, at a lecture about the Middle East conflict in a London journalists’ club in March 2007, I was on my way to Iraq to produce two documentaries about the ethnic conflict in that country for Channel 4 and the BBC. At the time, a number of journalists had been kidnapped or murdered and it was a dangerous assignment. But Paola knew that I would be careful and shared my excitement about the trip.

Now, pumped up by the excitement and emotion of that moment in Poonak, I told Paola, “I feel like I’m witnessing history. I can’t wait to show you everything I’ve been recording here.” I had been out for sixteen hours by then, but I didn’t notice my exhaustion. Like many Iranians, I, too, was intoxicated by the prospect of change; I, too, lent my voice to the chant heard throughout Poonak that night: “Ahmadinejad, bye-bye! Dictator, bye-bye!”

Davood finally drove me home at around two
A.M.
, and as I prepared for sleep, I knew that whatever the outcome of the election—a Mousavi victory, an Ahmadinejad resurgence, a second round of voting—something had changed in Iran over the course of this campaign. Iranians from unexpected quarters had started to express themselves, and the leaders of the Islamic Republic now faced the uncomfortable reality that the people were demanding to be listened to.

As I tried to sleep, I envisioned an Iran free of men who
think that to be true Muslims they need a master controlling every aspect of their lives. I knew that Mousavi was not a leader who would bring about a profound change to the country, but getting rid of Ahmadinejad, the man who had disgraced the country and imperiled its well-being for four years, was a start.

I came out of the shower the next day to the sound of my mother panicking in the kitchen. “Mazi, Mazi!” she cried out. I ran out of the bathroom to see what the problem was and found her staring open-mouthed out the window. Outside, Davood sat idly on his motorbike, waiting for me. I had asked him to pick me up at ten
A.M.
, and he was right on time.

“Everyone knows that motorcycle drivers are just mad,” my mother said. “The only people crazier than them are their passengers.” Even though I had taken almost twenty trips to Iraq to report on the war, I don’t think I’d ever seen her as worried for me as she was at that moment.

Losing her husband, elder son, and daughter in such a short period meant that my mother worried about me more than ever. As I got ready to go, Moloojoon followed me around the apartment, reminding me about the fatal accidents caused by motorcycles.

I kissed her good-bye. “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s just giving me a short ride to a friend’s office.” I knew she knew that I was lying, but we had an understanding. She trusted my judgment.

I said hello to Davood and jumped onto the motorbike behind him. He had apparently done some research overnight.

“I Googled you,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid of making all
these films and writing all these reports about this government?”

“Not really. I try to be careful and not to step on their tails,” I answered, using a Persian expression, as Davood headed the wrong way down a one-way street. “I’m frankly more worried that your driving will get me into trouble.”

Davood didn’t laugh. “I noticed a couple of people waiting for us in a Peugeot when we went to see your friend in Robat Karim yesterday,” he said. “There was another car parked toward the end of your street today. They followed us, but I think we lost them. I wasn’t sure at first, so I didn’t mention it.”

I thought he was just being paranoid. “Right, Davood. As if you need a reason to drive like this,” I said.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Maziar. I’ll take care of you,” he assured me.

Davood and I spent the morning visiting a few more Mousavi and Ahmadinejad campaign offices around the city, and when we were done, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, I paid him for the whole day and told him he could go home. As much as I liked and trusted Davood, I couldn’t take him to my next appointment.

I was going to see Amir, a friend of mine who’d previously worked for the Ministry of Interior, which is in charge of elections in Iran. Now in his early sixties, Amir had joined Khomeini’s movement in 1963, when he was just sixteen years old. Over the course of the last fifty years, he had come to know some of the highest-ranking members of the Iranian government, and he understood the inner workings of the system as well as anyone in the country. The information Amir gave me over the years had hardly included state secrets, but despite the amazing morass of the Islamic system, he had a great ability to connect the dots and somehow make sense of the nonsensical behaviors of the regime.

In addition to being one of my most trusted sources, Amir was also, despite our age difference, one of my best friends. His
brother had worked for my father’s company in the shah’s time and had spoken often of my father. “My brother used to say that Mr. Bahari was the best boss he had ever had,” Amir said. “I had an immense respect for your father. He was not religious in a traditional sense, but his honesty and his big heart made him one of the most religious people I know.”

To me, Amir represented moderation, and the idea that there were decent people in the system, people who were working to change it peacefully from within, gave me hope. Amir abhorred Ahmadinejad, whom he regarded as a misfit, a low-ranking former local governor and Revolutionary Guard who had somehow managed to become the president. But Amir ultimately blamed Khamenei for Ahmadinejad’s rise to power. “It’s amazing how people can be deceived by flattery,” Amir had said to me not long after Ahmadinejad was first elected. “The relationship between Mr. Khamenei and this man is like a landowner and a serf.”

Amir had held an important position during the presidency of Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, a pro-reform president who believed in a more open and democratic interpretation of Islam. In 2005, when Ahmadinejad was elected president, he forced the resignation of many high-ranking government officials. Amir left the Ministry of Interior, but he had retained very good contacts inside Ahmadinejad’s government.

Two weeks earlier, Amir had shown me a secret poll conducted by the Ministry of Intelligence—the country’s equivalent of the CIA and the FBI in one—in the capitals of all of Iran’s thirty-one provinces. The poll demonstrated that Mousavi was well ahead of Ahmadinejad and predicted that Mousavi would win the election with sixteen to eighteen million votes to Ahmadinejad’s six to eight million. Surveys are not usually accurate or reliable in Iran. People don’t trust the pollsters, and many Iranians are afraid that by expressing their opinion they can get into trouble. But because Ahmadinejad’s own intelligence officials
had conducted the poll, I found it to be trustworthy and had written an article about it for
Newsweek
.

Amir’s office was large and mostly unfurnished and, like the offices of most Iranian reformists, it had a temporary feel about it, as if he was prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. His desktop was empty, except for one yellow file and a few photographs, and the only decoration on the walls was a large framed poster of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, a marvel of Persian architecture in the city of Isfahan. The dust on the frame showed that it had been there for a long time, and that it had been neglected. When I walked in that morning, I smelled the sweet scent of
gaz
, which may be one of the most delicious confections in the world (and one of the main causes of cavities in Iran). One of Amir’s relatives owned a pastry shop in Isfahan, and every now and then he sent Amir some
gaz
, which always put him in a good mood. But that day, the
gaz
didn’t seem to be having the desired effect. Amir was worried and agitated. He rested his head on his left hand and scratched his chin nervously as he talked to me.

I barely had time to get out my notebook and pen before he launched into an explanation of what he expected would happen with the election: if there was no vote rigging, Mousavi would win the majority of votes, and the election. But, he explained, that was a very big if.

Amir noted that Ahmadinejad seemed to have been preparing himself for this election—and the potential for defeat—for a long time, mostly by appointing the right people to key political positions, especially in the Ministry of Interior. For Ahmadinejad, the right people usually meant members of a new, more inexperienced, and therefore more malleable generation of the Revolutionary Guards, men who had not fought in the Iran-Iraq War. “Men who have experienced war will never support this idiot’s bellicose rhetoric,” Amir said. “War heroes hate war and know it can only cause mayhem and destruction. It is
this new adventurous and corrupt generation of the Guards who act as the foot soldiers of Mr. Khamenei and support Ahmadinejad’s extremism.”

The Revolutionary Guards had been continually expanding its power, and redefining itself, since the organization’s inception in 1979 as a military force. After Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Iran in September 1980, many young men joined the Revolutionary Guards, wanting to defend their country. During the war, the Guards’ power expanded into other areas. While the official Iranian army mostly carried out its military duties, the Guards started import-export companies and built industries. After the November 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, the United States and its allies imposed economic and military sanctions against Iran. The Guards obtained illegal arms from the international arms black market and developed its own engineering organization to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed by the Iraqis. Its leaders started a new front in the regime’s war against the West and Israel, by training Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Under Ruhollah Khomeini, the Guards practically had free rein. By the time the cease-fire between Iran and Iraq was signed in 1988, the Guards had become one of the mightiest institutions in Iran.

Its influence expanded further after Khomeini’s death in 1989, when Ali Khamenei replaced him as the supreme leader of Iran and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became president. Rafsanjani believed that Iran had to be economically developed and Iranians prosperous before human rights and freedom of expression could be introduced into Iranian life. In the postwar chaos, many Guards members took advantage of this opportunity. Pushing the competition out through threats, intimidation, and brute force, the Guards’ main engineering company, Khatam ol Anbia (the Last Prophet), became Iran’s main industrial contractor, receiving many lucrative contracts in the infrastructure, oil, and petrochemical sectors.

After the war, many members of the Guards resigned and started their own import-export companies with branches outside of Iran. They used their connections inside the government to monopolize parts of the market. The corruption of former guardsmen became legendary as they threatened their competitors, avoided customs, and evaded duty taxes.

As the supreme leader, Khamenei chooses and dismisses each and every commander of the Guards. By selecting only people who are extremely loyal to him as commanders of the Guards, Khamenei tried to turn the Guards into his own private army. Yet many commanders resisted becoming slaves of Khamenei’s, and while they largely remained loyal to him, they also maintained a good relationship with other prominent members of the regime, such as Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami.

This caused a split within the Guards. After many reformists within the regime supported the student riot in 1999, Khamenei ordered the creation of a series of ideological courses, which they called Basirat, or Wisdom, for a selected group of younger members of the Guards. Basirat was more than an indoctrination process; it was also a filtering process for creating the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit, which eventually became the country’s main intelligence-gathering and security organization.

According to my friend Amir, the Guards’ intelligence unit had been instrumental in rigging the 2005 election, when Ahmadinejad became president. It was during the four years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency that the Guards had taken over many important economic centers of power in Iran, including the oil industry and the nuclear program. The Guards became Iran’s biggest industrialists, owning many front companies under different pretenses and names in Iran and abroad. There had been several reports of current and former members of the Guards setting up companies in Iran, Dubai, and Canada—which, on the surface, had no connection with the Guards—for the purpose
of laundering money for the Guards. In order to continue its monopoly over Iran’s economy, the Guards needed a friendly government in power. Amir said that Guards leaders were preparing to use every resource at their disposal to get Ahmadinejad reelected.

If elected, Mousavi would not be able to stop the Guards, but a transparent government, which he was promising to create, would no doubt interfere with the Guards’ control of Iran’s politics and economy.

Amir told me that after the 2005 election, one of the commanders of the Guards had asked that Amir and all his close associates be removed from the Ministry of Interior. “He knew that my team would never accept tampering with people’s votes,” Amir said. “So they fired all of us.”

The current Minister of Interior, Sadegh Mahsouli, took the cake when it came to corruption. A Guards commander in the 1980s, he had forced many people to sell their houses to him at a fraction of what they were worth. He and his Guards buddies then demolished those houses and built high-rises on the properties. Mahsouli had also taken millions of dollars in bribes from Kurdish and Shia Iraqi refugees who were forced, by Saddam Hussein’s government, to move to Iran in 1991, during the First Gulf War.

In March 2008, when Mahsouli was appointed minister, I decided to write an article about him, but after a few interviews, Amir warned me that I should be very careful about publishing my findings. “The Guards have become like a mafia,” he said at the time, looking me in the eye. “They have taken over the country and can easily eliminate you if they wish.”

I remembered Amir’s warning from more than a year ago as I watched him now, holding his chin with one hand and tapping nervously on his desk with the other. The sun was shining through the blinds, creating ominous lines on Amir’s face; he looked as if he were behind bars. “With Mahsouli in charge of
the elections, I’m beginning to fear that Ahmadinejad has almost guaranteed his reelection,” Amir said. “They have done their best to manipulate the public before the elections, and now they’re frightened that their plans may not work. Mahsouli is exploring different ways to rig the votes.”