Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (12 page)

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Ballot boxes are very good for the human being, provided that the human being is a carpenter and has a large order for making them.

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

On the morning of October 7, 1993, Bruno Jost received a call from Commissioner von Trek. The most major figure in the case, “the main asset,” in the investigative vernacular, whom they had long wanted to question, was in Germany. He had quietly flown to Bonn for a confidential two-day visit. Since the visitor was unlikely to cooperate with them, the commissioner had sought permission from his chief to briefly detain him. The permission for the arrest was too politically costly to be granted, Jost and von Trek knew. But the old colleagues, despite their graying hair, had held on to certain relics of youth, especially the love of mischief and adventurism. Even if the “asset” was beyond their reach, the
least they could do was to unsettle him, if only momentarily, by the chase.

Jost cleared his schedule for the day and camped at his desk. The two men, who had vowed to remain friends in retirement, would wait till noon for the unlikely approval. Had there been the slightest mistrust between them, daring to make so bold a move would have never occurred to them. But ambition, vernal in nature, thrives on warmth, which they had in abundance between them.

That morning, the reporter Josef Hufelschulte received a fax, whose contents, in journalistic venacular, amounted to a scoop. He reviewed the document, then immediately did what a savvy reporter would—called his sources to weigh in on his find.

“Hey, Parviz! It’s Hufelschulte,” the reporter greeted, then, quickly dispensing with pleasantries, asked, “What am I to make of Fallahian’s visit?”

“Fallahian? As in the intelligence minister?” Parviz asked, clearly startled by the news.

Hufelschulte elaborated: Ali Fallahian, whose ministry had been named in the federal prosecutor’s indictment, was in Germany. The visit would have been a secret, if a copy of the minister’s itinerary had not been leaked to Hufelschulte. The itinerary, telexed to several agencies—the interior ministry and the border police among others—had been intercepted by an ally of the reporter at one of the agencies.

“He flew into Frankfurt on Iran Air flight seven-twenty-one at eleven-thirty yesterday morning,” Hufelschulte recited the
highlights, “went downtown, and then later in the day was off to Bonn to the chancellor’s mansion for a seven o’clock dinner. This morning, he’s visiting his German counterpart, Bernd Schmidbauer, at eleven.”

Exile cultivates the archivist in its most wistful subjects. Since the murders, the penchant had become a passion in Parviz. His first concern was to obtain a copy of the itinerary, which Hufelschulte promised to send him.

“But why’s he here? Is he meeting with the exiles?” the reporter asked.

“He’d meet us for sure, but only if we rendezvous at the morgue, and only with our corpses. Bah! If he’s really here, three weeks before the trial begins, he’s here for one reason and one reason alone, and that’s to stop the trial.”

To have his suspicions confirmed strengthened the reporter’s resolve. The next call he made was to the chancellery’s office of the intelligence chief, Bernd Schmidbauer. He introduced himself to the aide who took the call and bluntly asked if she could arrange an interview with Minister Fallahian prior to his return to Iran. Caught off guard, the aide denied the minister’s presence at the chancellery, which prompted Hufelschulte to recite from the itinerary. The flustered aid placed him on hold, only to return and say that she could not comment on the matter, and hung up.

At eleven in the morning, Bernd Schmidbauer welcomed Minister Fallahian to a small meeting with only a handful of attendees, having dispensed with reception ceremonies lest they compromise the confidentiality of the visit.
Schmidbauer suspected why Fallahian was there. He had foreseen such a day and tried to avert it long ago. He was an advocate of improving relations with Iran, but he was also intelligence chief, and thus privy to the full extent of Tehran’s notorious acts. In July 1992, during a private meeting with senior Iranian officials, he had issued this warning.

“You must make me one promise! Iran cannot commit an assassination on Germany’s soil. That would place an insurmountable hurdle in the way of our efforts on your country’s behalf, especially the Critical Dialogue initiative.”

The members of the mission had given their word. But like all things that perish in transit, the promise, too, withered upon touchdown in Tehran.

What passed between Bernd Schmidbauer and Ali Fallahian that morning would remain a mystery for months to come. Only after severe scrutiny, and the costliest scandal of Schmidbauer’s career, were the minutes of the meeting released. In it Fallahian, cryptically referred to only as “F,” had come to make a bargain with Bonn.

. . . F said that Iran has helped Germany a great deal. For instance, Iran pressured the Hamadi clan to release the German hostages held in Lebanon. To return the favor, the consulting minister [Bernd Schmidbauer] should help with an upcoming criminal trial in Berlin in which Iran is wrongly accused. F asked: How do you plan to stop this trial from starting?

The consulting minister rejected the idea of meddling in the legal proceedings. He said: Berlin’s courts are in the hands of the justice ministry and function independently of other government bodies. There is no room or possibility for deal making. We can help you by trying to minimize the political costs of the trial, and our best hope is for Tehran to never conduct such an operation in Germany or Europe.

The Iranian side consistently tried to put the Berlin trial back on the table. Both the consulting minister and his adviser rejected the idea each time. F’s request to provide the defendants with diplomatic immunity was also rejected. After repeated references to Iran’s past aid to Germany, F presented a list of other offers if only the Mykonos trial could be on the table. The consulting minister once again rejected any deals or exchanges that would have to be based on the trial. He said that he had no such powers and could not represent Germany in the way the minister expected him to.

The words “no such powers” had inflamed the minister, who expected that Germany’s highest-ranking intelligence official to be perfectly capable, if he so willed, of putting an end to any trial. Time and again, Ali Fallahian had crossed the boundaries of military life into civilian, from religious life into political—sometimes remaining in both capacities at once. He therefore believed his European equals to be capable of doing the same. Born and raised in Isfahan, a city
renowned for cunning peddlers, Ali Fallahian had expected to haggle, but walk away with a deal. With the final rejection, the minister’s youthful features—his childlike gap-toothed grin and dark, bushy beard that reached the periphery of his eye sockets—could no longer hide his fury. A man of medium height and a robust and hefty demeanor, the minister rose from his seat and strode out, clearly incensed, his clerical robe flaring in the wind of his rushing feet.

Bruno Jost spent part of that morning reviewing his file on Minister Fallahian. As a judge, Fallahian had presided over summary trials and ordered the executions of hundreds of political prisoners who had fallen under his Sharia rule, earning him the title of “butcher.” What implicated him in the September 17 murders—the employment of numerous interlocutors, like Darabi, by his ministry notwithstanding—was the vow he had made in a television interview, nine days before the Berlin murders.

We have a special unit to take down the opposition. We’ve identified their central committees, neutralized and arrested them. At the moment, we have no opposition inside the country. They’ve all been forced to flee. But overseas, we keep them under surveillance. We’ve infiltrated their ranks and watch them constantly. We’ve dealt and continue to deal decisive blows to them within our borders and beyond. For example, we have seriously paralyzed the Democratic Party of Kurdistan and are not yet done with them.

Some of the most incriminating details had been proudly offered by the minister himself. Passages from Fallahian’s own autobiography glorified what others would have agonized to bury. In the effusive prose of an adolescent, he had mapped out his brutal origins. Born in 1949 and raised in a religious family, the minister, referring to himself in the third person, wrote of his first encounter with Islam.

The heat of faith began to sizzle in his chest and consume him so early on that he had to seek a remedy, which he found in the heat of love he felt in the company of masters such as Navab Safavi.

The innocent lovesick impression of the line lifted instantly when Jost learned that Navab Safavi had been the founder of Iran’s Islamic Brotherhood, the group responsible for several assassinations in the 1950s.

To call Fallahian a counterpart of Schmidbauer or other European intelligence chiefs was not wrong but it was misleading. In the early years after the 1979 revolution, he had been the Ayatollah’s Proteus and had morphed into whatever his master had needed.

His career reached its climax after he left his post as the head of housing and sewage and became special prosecutor. In his appointment letter, the Ayatollah wrote, “Because your honor is familiar with the work of the counterrevolutionaries in every mask and every disguise, it is only fitting to put you in charge so that with the exercise of Islamic law you give evil its due.”

And due he gave, on numerous occasions, one of which was an assault against an opposition stronghold, where
he destroyed forty of their homes within twenty-four hours.

Noon had almost arrived. Jost put on his coat and prepared to leave. In his office Tony von Trek began to do the same. He put on his holster. It was all that appeared forbidding about the lanky and mild-mannered commissioner. In the pocket of his trench coat, he kept a pair of handcuffs. There had been no calls from his superior thus far, and so without objection from above he saw no obstacles to prevent the controversial arrest. But the phone rang. Bonn vehemently objected to his plan. The minister, after all, was a guest of the state.

Ali Fallahian slipped Jost’s grasp, but his visit did not remain a secret. Hufelschulte’s call upset the peace at the chancellery, where the efforts to contain the news were quickly replaced with ones to control its damage. By that afternoon, Bernd Schmidbauer was forced to hold a news conference. Every reporter posed a variation of the same question—the subject of the discussion with Fallahian. Flashing a politician’s insincere smile, Schmidbauer said the meeting had a “purely humanitarian nature.”

Asked if he thought Tehran had been the culprit behind the killings as the federal prosecutor alleged, he dismissed the allegation, saying “Those who know the facts would draw vastly different conclusions.”

Public opinion quickly turned against Schmidbauer for having accepted the visitors in the first place, though it would
be months before the damning evidence would emerge. The press, dubbing him “Minister 008,” mocked him for his clumsiness, for being the secret service chief who had failed to keep a simple visit secret. In 1992, the pained countenance of the survivors had compelled journalists to write about the case. By 1993, what compelled them was the look of duplicity on the faces of their own politicians. Schmidbauer had been a champion of the Critical Dialogue with Iran, and the German public, who well knew the burdens of a guilty national conscience, began to question both him and the enterprise. The trial was increasingly becoming a test of the nation’s integrity, and the headlines reflected it.

The Mykonos Trial Is a Trial of Germany’s Justice System.

Is Our Judiciary Truly Independent?

Are German Laws and Judges for Sale?

The domestic uproar inspired international criticism, including American and British demands for an investigation. Fellow journalists throughout Europe, buoyed by their German colleagues, began to revisit the “unsolved murders” of several other Iranian exiles across the continent. By late October of 1993, even New Yorkers were following the news of the minister’s “secret” visit in their daily papers.

Mr. Fallahian and Mr. Schmidbauer may have discussed a deal under which the accused killers now on trial in Berlin would be freed or given lenient treatment. In exchange, the Iranians were said to have offered to free
several Germans being held in Iran. Some accounts said Mr. Fallahian had also raised the possibility of releasing Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator believed to be held by pro-Iranian forces in Lebanon, and lifting the death sentence issued by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini and confirmed by the present Iranian Government against the novelist Salman Rushdie . . .

On Hans Joachim Ehrig’s desk, the pink stack of “While You Were Away” slips was piled high. The victims’ lead attorney was already consumed by the trial although it had not yet begun. Nothing in Ehrig’s lawyerly conduct or the nearly industrial appearance of his office betrayed the romantic beneath. Only those who had known him as an idealistic university student in the 1960s could see that with Mykonos, Ehrig had found the kind of case that had lured him into law in the first place.

For the reporters who had inundated him with requests, he struck a cool pose, which made his fierce statements all the more compelling: “This visit is a slap in the face of the investigators. It sullies Germany’s reputation in the eyes of the world,” he told a reporter at a press conference one day after the news of the secret visit broke. “It appears as if economic interests with Iran overshadow all other concerns against our own ethical values.”

“How should Bonn have reacted?”

The few sentences Ehrig offered were not only poignant. They were also visionary. In them, he concisely summarized the past and the potential future mistakes that those involved with
the case could be prone to make, and more. He also charted his own expectation for the course of the trial and beyond.