Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (19 page)

“Tell us, Hamid
agha,
what should we expect tomorrow?” Banisadr asked, pausing after the first spoonful.

(
Mr. Hamid,
mused the addressee. The president’s title for him was a tender blend of formality and affection for his choice of the first name.) Banisadr was to testify at the trial the next day. Those few hours were all they had to prepare him for the witness stand. It was Hamid’s only chance to turn a man, by nature a pundit, into a compelling witness—a feat no one thought possible.

The meal proved a catalyst. What a hungry man with a dry mouth and a nagging stomach might have interpreted as criticism simply seemed a friend’s wise counsel to a satisfied man, whose senses were filled with the fragrance of herbs, the happy hue of saffron, and the taste of a lamb so succulent that its consumption was, the guests agreed, gastronomic therapy.

“You see, Mr. Banisadr, these Germans have a thing for facts . . .” Hamid began. He had the unusual talent of mangling his own potentially offensive sentences, which always forced the other to articulate them for him and feel charitable in return. He meandered for some time, praising the virtues of brevity as if he were dispensing tips to a convention of grammarians. At last, he began recounting the testimonies of other exiles, who had only befuddled the judges. Pouring a ladle of creamy cucumber and yogurt on the guest’s plate, he smoothed over the roughest matters, till it was the president who concluded that the courtroom was not a forum for punditry. By the end, all Hamid had to say explicitly was a warning about the chief defendant, Darabi, who was certain to do what he could to provoke Banisadr and undermine his testimony.

The next morning, the trial was back in the headlines again. Nicknames for Abulhassan Banisadr abounded. Berliners, stunned by the high security surrounding the witness, were eager to hear from the “best protected man in the city,” to whom some referred as “Abulhassan Trotsky.” The forthcoming testimony of a former president who had turned against his own government made the public curious at first. But curiosity spiraled into sensation when Iran’s ambassador to
Germany issued a statement demanding that Germany extradite Banisadr on charges of hijacking. The ambassador was referring to the airplane Banisadr had used to defect. In a television interview, he assailed Bruno Jost’s indictment as a list of empty accusations.

“No German government official would ever believe a single one of the prosecutor’s statements.”

Flashing a confident smile, he went further.

“The judges are sure to vote in Iran’s favor. I’m certain of this because I’m certain of our own innocence,” the full-cheeked ambassador said, staring into the cameras. Then, dispensing with diplomatic decorum, he assumed the tone of a concerned sheriff.

“I repeat the words of our Majles leader from last week. ‘The murders in Berlin are undoubtedly the work of the Americans, and we will not rest until the killers of the Kurdish leaders have been brought to justice.’”

Among serious reporters, the race to the former president for an exclusive interview was on. At times like this, the desire to gain access to a subject overrides all other considerations. Memories fade. Old wounds heal. Past grievances become bygones. At just such a time, Norbert dialed Parviz’s number after many months, hoping he could deliver Banisadr to his studio.

“Oh, dear Norbert, don’t you worry! Let me work on it and get back to you,” Parviz replied in a gay voice, which, to Norbert’s ear, was dangerously tinged with mischief. To think that Parviz was going to work on his behalf once again
brought him no comfort. Still, it was time to give trust another chance.

On the steps of the courthouse, Parviz caught up with Banisadr. The two had begun to correspond since the murders. Parviz praised Banisadr over and over.

“Your testimony will be smashing. No two ways about it. You must be heard as much as possible as long as you’re here in Berlin.”

“But the police say I ought not to give any interviews for the sake of my own safety.”

“Nonsense! It’s the German administration that’s trying to keep you under wraps to appease Tehran. Your safety’s got nothing to do with it,” Parviz answered, adding to the former president’s suspicions.

The thought of anyone wishing to silence him angered the former president, who greatly respected the outspoken survivor. He said, “You’ve lived here long enough to know these Germans. It’s unconscionable what you say. I’ve never put up with duplicity, be it from the mullahs or their Western bedfellows. Let’s get on with the interviews then. I’ll talk to any journalist you trust.”

At these words, Parviz held up his mobile telephone and dialed a number. Norbert answered. Switching from Persian to German, he told Norbert that he was standing beside the one he had been looking for. Norbert asked Parviz to interpret a few questions. When the conversation ended, Norbert, overcome with dread, stopped Parviz.

“Wait! This man next to you, whose answers you translated . . . tell me again, was he
really
who I think it was? Banisadr in the flesh? Right? I mean, you wouldn’t—”

“Ah, Norbert! May you someday absolve me! I swear on my Salomeh’s life, this was Banisadr himself. Go in peace!”

After many empty weeks, the benches in Hall 700 were once again overflowing with reporters and spectators. Many witnesses had taken the stand thus far, but no one nearly as notable as the former president, once the face of the regime he was about to testify against. The exiles sat taller that day, already boasting that his testimony would vindicate and affirm them.

Judge Kubsch, aware of the tension in the room and anticipating the day’s pitfalls, excused all other translators and asked that only Zamankhan interpret. Then he called Banisadr to the stand. The preliminaries had barely begun and already Darabi appeared restless.

“Could you state your profession for the record?” Judge Kubsch addressed the witness.

“I’m the editor in chief of the magazine
Islamic Revolution in Exile
. Prior to this, I was Iran’s president, but was removed from office in a coup d’état.”

Darabi banged on his bench and roared in German, “Coup? What coup? You lie. You weren’t removed. You fled.”

“Shhh!” several in the audience sounded in return.

“Shut your mouths! I’m talking to him. He says there was a coup when there was none,” Darabi turned in fury to the audience.

“Put a lid on it!” another shot back.

“Motherfuckers, I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to him.” He pointed to the witness while he looked at the audience.

Banisadr kept his gaze on the judge, appearing calm.

Sharing the bulletproof cage with Darabi, Rhayel, who had remained stoic throughout the trial, joined the fray. He, too, began grunting the few expletives in Persian he had learned in prison. Four years of trial had done nothing to soften the stony silence of the two defendants before the judges, or diminish their smugness before the audience. They were on their feet, bellowing at the spectators, confident that they would not be outdone as they never had been throughout the trial.

Judge Kubsch silenced the court and returned his attention to the witness, asking him to explain what he meant by a coup.

Darabi, who had barely returned to his seat, shot up again and addressed the chief judge in German.

“He can’t explain because there was no coup.”

The audience hushed him again. He glared at them, reverting to Persian.

“Shut your shit-holes while I talk!”

That day there were others in the benches who had traveled far to hear the former president, others who were less familiar with the exiles’ code of courtroom conduct and less patient with the rowdy pair. One of them got up unexpectedly, pointed to Darabi, and hollered, “The long dick of a donkey up your mother’s cunt!”

Darabi, dumbstruck, simply dropped to his seat. To the astonishment of those who had observed him for months, he never spoke another vulgar word for the rest of that day, or the trial.

“Mr. Banisadr, who do you think is responsible for the assassinations at the Mykonos restaurant on September 17, 1992?” The chief judge asked what he had not asked any other witness since the early days of the trial.

The question was what Banisadr had flown from Paris to Berlin to answer. He leaned back in his chair. The trepidation of the opening moments disappeared from his expression as he began to articulate the driving conviction of his life.

“If Ayatollah Khomeini had been alive, I’d say he’d ordered it, because when he was alive, he personally issued and signed such orders. But since his death, there’s a small group of elite who call themselves the Committee for Special Operations. They review and order these assassinations inside and outside Iran.”

A hush fell over the hall. One of the attorneys rose to his feet but the judge motioned him to wait. The witness, too, aware of the gravity of the moment, paused to ask if he could read from a statement he had prepared. Judge Kubsch nodded an affirmative.

“Here’s a summary of everything I know about this case. This information leads me to believe that the assassinations at the Mykonos restaurant were ordered by the highest-ranking members of Iran’s leadership. My assertion is based on the word of three separate sources, inside and outside of Iran. I’ve learned
that the point man to oversee this operation was handpicked by the intelligence minister, Ali Fallahian. I’ve also learned that the lead assassin, named Bani-Hashemi, who shot the victims with a machine gun and fled Germany on a plane that same night, came to Berlin via Poland in early September and executed the plan with the help of Mr. Darabi. He is a tall and hefty fellow, in his mid- to late thirties, with light brown eyes. He is soft-spoken but wears a grim expression on his face.”

Yousef interjected, “Judge, just so I know, please tell me is ‘grim expression’ a fact or an analysis?”

The courtroom, intently focused on Banisadr, disregarded him.

When the statement ended, the judges and the attorneys began.

“How do you know these things, Mr. Banisadr?”

“From the three sources I mentioned.”

“Who and where are these sources?”

“I can’t divulge their names. One is in Iran and the other two are out of the country. My third source used to be one of the highest-ranking intelligence officers in the ministry but he has recently defected.”

“So, for the sake of clarity in this courtroom, may we give them a name just so we can follow your argument?”

Banisadr looked at Judge Kubsch and, seeing him nod, he assented. The three sources were thus anointed: the one inside the country would be called A, the second, B, and the third, the defector, C.

A new question followed.

“Tell us what you know about the involvement of Iran’s leadership in this operation.”

“According to source C, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the assassinations of some five hundred Iranians, mostly opposition members, but also artists, comedians . . . you name it! A few of these folks were killed while he was living. After his death, the Committee for Special Operations took over to finish off the rest. The killers are always highly rewarded. I’ve got thirteen names of individuals who have committed crimes in Europe or elsewhere, returned to Iran, and are now in government as ministers and legislators. Such is the nature of the men the world community wants to do diplomacy with.”

The attorneys for the accused did not challenge Banisadr, who had proved affecting and knowledgeable—not wishing to prolong his presence in court. Instead, they hoped to undo his testimony by challenging his sources. At the end of the second day of testimony, they requested that the sources themselves be subpoenaed so the court could hear directly from them. Judge Kubsch turned to the witness. Banisadr contemplated the matter for a few moments, then said that if the judge would guarantee anonymity, his best source would testify in a closed court. The judge assured the former president by citing all the previous cases where his court had made such provisions for special witnesses.

At recess, Banisadr handed a tightly folded piece of paper to Judge Kubsch, who passed it to Bruno Jost. Jost unfolded it to find a single name, the password to the mystery called C.

• • •

It was not difficult to establish the bona fides of a defector as high ranking as Messbahi. German intelligence agencies had monitored him for years. What preyed on the mind of the prosecutor, who had shepherded the case for four years, was whether he could rely on Messbahi as a witness. Dealing with defectors was a dubious affair. Jost could not be certain that the sudden escape of such a senior operative was not another ploy designed by Minister Fallahian to infiltrate the trial. He knew enough key witnesses who had undone years of judicial work by changing their testimony on the stand. Truth was not what Jost feared. He feared only deception—falling prey to a scheme and discovering only too late that the witness had been a pawn. Jost would not gamble his reputation or the case over the fairy tale of a witness who could lead him to an even greater victory. His ambitions had never surpassed his reason.

But also for the sake of the case, he could not help hoping Messbahi was true. He wished for some evidence to show Messbahi would be a reliable witness, for a sign, however small, to prove he was no longer loyal to the same bosses.

Truckicide, in the vernacular of Iranian intelligence operatives, is the act or instance of killing the enemy, i.e., an opposition member, singer, writer, or any unpleasant element, by any of various heavy motor vehicles designed for carrying or pulling loads.

18

“Hadi Khorsandi walks because of me. He breathes because of me. I’m the reason he’s alive,” Messbahi told the former president—his voice tinged with a passion that survived the poor long-distance transmission between Islamabad and Paris. The revelation came in response to the former president’s toughest and most frank question.

“What’s to prove that you, Mr. Messbahi, aren’t another killer just like all the rest of them at the ministry?”

The story Messbahi told was the best defense of his innocence. In summer 1984, when he was the intelligence chief posted in Western Europe, a visitor from Tehran came to see him. The man had come to personally deliver a missive engraved with the imprint of the Ayatollah’s ring. It read:

In the name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful

Because of insulting the prophet of Islam, blessed be he and all his kin, Hadi Khorsandi must hereby be executed.

Stamped: Ruhollah Khomeini

The letter stunned Messbahi. He did not lift his eyes from the page, lest they betray his disgust to its messenger. He was a fan of Khorsandi’s, Iran’s foremost humorist. A mostly apolitical satirist under the Shah, Khorsaudi had been radicalized by the rise of the Ayatollah to power, sparing neither the mullahs nor their opposition, or the servile press that aired their propaganda. He had lived in exile since 1981 and had dedicated himself to deriding the clergy, whose talk of God, piety, good and evil, and the inner workings of heaven and hell had become a boundless reservoir of material to him. Islam was his new muse, and the Prophet Muhammad the subject of his creative obsession. From his London apartment, he channeled his bitterness into scathing parodies on Shiism—into poems, essays, cartoons, and short stories—that he wrote, edited, and printed in his own weekly,
Asghar Agha
. A close associate of the Ayatollah’s spotted one particular joke mocking the Prophet Muhammad and brought it to the Ayatollah’s attention. Thus had come the fatwa. There had been other assassinations in Europe, but Messbahi had never been asked to oversee them. This particular fatwa was an exception. Perhaps it was a test.

Messbahi, however devious or flawed, was not a killer.
No matter how high he rose in the ranks of spookery, he was, and would always remain, his father’s son. Years ago, when the old man learned of his son’s profession, he issued an ultimatum to him.

“I’d have much rather you’d chosen a different line of work. But if this is what you must do, I tell you now: you can wash away every stain but blood. If your hands are ever stained with the blood of another, I won’t call you
son
again.”

To the envoy who had delivered the letter, Messbahi showed no signs of trepidation. Did Messbahi need men, money, weapons, or whatever else the operation might require? the envoy inquired. Messbahi only thanked him and said that he had all he needed.
All,
he had repeated emphatically, as he thought of the one thing he did not have, the one thing the envoy could never supply him—the will to kill.

Since Messbahi could not openly disobey his orders, he devised a scheme to execute and botch the operation at the same time. First, he assembled a hit squad made up of several Algerian Islamists, for whom he translated the fatwa from its original Persian into French. Then he invented a code name to use instead of the satirist’s real name, in conversation and correspondence (the code was Harandi, the name of Iran’s chess champion, whom Khorsandi greatly admired). In the days that followed, they monitored the satirist and took photos of him, his neighborhood, and his residence. They studied him long enough to learn his daily routines, including the time of day he left his apartment to take a solitary stroll every morning.

One day before the operation, Messbahi sent a message to the envoy in Tehran.

“The celebration is set for tomorrow.”

The response came. “Celebrate away! Have a good time!”

The same day, he traveled to Vienna to distance himself from what was to come. There, hours before the attack, he walked into an indistinct phone booth and made an anonymous call to British intelligence.

“Tomorrow, around six o’clock in the morning, two heavyset Algerians will walk along the avenue where the Iranian exile Khorsandi lives. They plan to kill him when he leaves his home for a stroll at eight.”

The British acted on the tip and ordered the Khorsandis to vacate their residence. Shortly thereafter, the men who fit Messbahi’s description began to prowl the block. By eight o’clock they had been arrested.

Jost, who had already heard the British account of that attempt was pleased to find that it corroborated the defector’s story to the former president. Indeed, an anonymous call had led to the arrest of seven men and their cache of weapons. Jost told Banisadr of his wish to speak with the defector. He would do everything in his power to ensure his safety if he were to testify in court. He would appear as a secret witness in a closed session, or could enter into a witness protection program if he testified openly. Getting him to Berlin, he regretted to admit, was beyond his legal reach.

• • •

One September morning, many weeks and two dozen hotels later, Messbahi checked out of his room in Islamabad for the last time. He was headed for Karachi. After several grueling inquisitions, former president Banisadr had finally judged Messbahi genuine and resolved to help him. At last, he was leaving with the essentials he did not have when he had first entered Pakistan: a passport and a visa to Europe—two things the former president arranged in exchange for his testimony at the trial in Berlin.

For the moment, he was a Swede, the proof of which he patted in his shirt pocket every few minutes. His photo had been forged in a Swedish passport above another’s name. Through years of living undercover, Messbahi had come to think of names as seasons and he was always prepared for their inevitable change. He relished each new title and treasured his cache of identification cards. Still, his new passport was an oddity. Above the strange name, his own recent photo seemed even stranger. He marveled at it as if it belonged to someone else. For most of his adult life, his face had been eclipsed by a full black beard, giving him a coarse and unfeeling appearance. What the beard had not covered, his oversized black-framed glasses had. But in Pakistan, he dispensed with the glasses and shaved his face clean. His once massive portrait shrank into an almost diminutive one, exposing a beauty mark he had nearly forgotten on his left cheek. Suddenly, the former senior intelligence agent looked almost sweet, like a freshly picked fruit en route to the airport to be shipped to more agreeable climates.

• • •

The customs officer at the Karachi airport flipped through the pages of the dubious passport. Then, looking Messbahi up and down several times, he asked with a bureaucratic grimace, “When did you come to Pakistan?”

“In late March.”

“So where’s your entry stamp?”

“Gracious! Is it not there?”

The officer cast a knowing glance at him and shook his head. He leafed through the pages again and asked a second question.

“So where’s the rest of you?”

“What do you mean?” Messbahi asked with a smile.

“It says in here you’re 176 centimeters tall,” the officer said, looking down at him. He knitted his brows and asked, his voice full of sarcasm, “Pray tell, are you 176 centimeters?”

Messbahi, who stood at only 164 centimeters, reached into his pocket and, keeping his breezy tone, apologized.

“What was I thinking? Of course, it’s here. Right here!”

He pulled out two one-thousand-rupee bills and slipped them into the officer’s hand. The officer dropped his gaze at the notes. Then, seeming unmoved, he ordered, “Arrest him!”

An underling walked up to Messbahi. Dressed in an ill-fitting uniform, he pointed to a chair. Messbahi plopped into it. For the next few minutes, the elder kept examining the passport while the younger stood guard over the implausible Swede. Messbahi, growing anxious, reached into his pocket once again. This time he pulled out a much heftier wad in a silver clip. He extended it, a sum of $2,550, to the younger
officer, who passed it to his superior. He scanned the wad and resumed.

“Is this all you’ve got?”

“Search me all you want. This is everything.”

“Five thousand is what will get you past this border.”

Messbahi raised his hand, asking permission to get out of his chair. He leaned into him and whispered in a tone of resignation.

“You see, brother, this is what I’ve got. Either you want it or you don’t. You can demand a million, but I don’t have a single coin left on me. Take this, or take me into custody.”

The officer disappeared into a room. His underling watched over Messbahi, who had begun muttering a prayer under his breath. The boarding call for his flight was blaring through the terminal when the superior reappeared. He waved the detainee to approach him and asked in a murmur, “If this is all you’ve got, how are you going to make it out of the airport when you get there?”

“I always put my trust in Imam Ali. He’ll see me through,” replied Messbahi and went on praying, more audibly than before.

“You, Shiia?” The officer smiled a genuine smile for the first time.

Messbahi nodded without interrupting his prayer. The officer pulled a fifty-dollar bill from the bundle and tucked it into the fold of the passport, which now bore an exit stamp. Pressing it into Messbahi’s hand, he whispered in his ear, “Godspeed, brother!”

• • •

By early fall, Witness C was no longer the intangible object of the court’s curiosity. Before stunned spectators, Agent Messbahi, the most senior intelligence operative ever to defect from Iran’s ministry of intelligence, took the stand in several sessions from October till the following February. Known to foreign and secret service officials alike, he was the kind of witness the prosecutors dream of. He was so credible that even Iran’s embassy in Bonn could only turn over a few minor embezzlement charges against him. Though his testimony came on the heels of dozens of other witnesses, he mesmerized the court with his knowledge. Each of his measured and unsentimental responses, full of byzantine details about the characters and their circumstances, gave his statements an arresting authenticity. What so many exiles had pleaded before the judges to no avail, what President Banisadr had tried to convince the court of through the force of his celebrity, Messbahi methodically reasoned like a mathematician, yet without abstraction. So intensely focused was the exacting witness on the stand that he frequently needed to take a break. His head pounded with the pressure he put himself under to remember, and to do so with precision.

Even the defendants, especially Darabi, in whose address book Messbahi’s phone number had been found, hung their heads in disbelief and kept mum. As for Hamid, Shohreh, and Parviz, they, too, were silent, though a mischievous glance or two betrayed the happy clamor within them. The testimony of the defector lifted them. With tangible facts, the witness filled in the outlines of what they had long intuited. He gave them the unforgettable image of the truth, in one exchange above all.

“Mr. Messbahi, you say that the Committee for Special Operations orders and oversees assassinations. Could you say who they are?” Judge Kubsch asked.

“It’s a small group made up of the Supreme Leader, the president, the foreign minister, the minister of intelligence, and the chief of the Revolutionary Guards.”

“Are these ad hoc meetings or do they take place regularly?”

“They are quite a ritual, convening relatively regularly and always in the same place.”

“Where?”

“In one of the former Shah’s residences, called the Turquoise Palace.”

Tehran was reeling from the groundbreaking testimony. At a Friday prayer, President Rafsanjani threatened to expose what he claimed to be a “secret dossier” on Germany.

“We’ll file a complaint against companies like Siemens for not completing work on our nuclear plant. And that will just be the beginning.”

The head of Iran’s judiciary issued a statement accusing Germany of violating the international rules of neutrality. Iran’s foreign minister, in one of several press appearances, assailed their ally.

“We stand ready to sign a contract worth twenty-five billion with the Germans, if only they could stop letting themselves be manipulated by the Israelis and the Americans. What more could the Germans want? We’ve given them a foothold in the Gulf, Central Asia, and the Middle
East against the Americans and in return, they put on this Mykonos mockery.”

Germany’s ambassador to Tehran was summoned to the foreign ministry and warned that his administration would be held accountable for the accusations the federal prosecutor had mounted against Iran’s leadership. Angry pro-Tehran protesters swarmed the gates of the German embassy demanding an apology, threatening to bring on what other irate protesters had at the American embassy twenty years earlier. The residence of the German cultural attaché was raided by members of the Revolutionary Guards at a dinner in honor of several prominent Iranian writers and intellectuals. The Guards charged in, took films of the alcoholic beverages on the tables, rounded up the guests, and hauled them away to prison on charges of “illegal contacts with foreign elements.”

Other arrests and detentions followed as the trial’s final days loomed. Tehran had abandoned secret attempts at subverting the trial. In desperation, the regime had resorted to blatant brutality against German citizens working in Iran or secular writers and intellectuals. A German businessman was charged with rape and put on death row. The editor in chief of a popular literary monthly, en route to Germany, was snatched on the tarmac by Fallahian’s men, while for weeks Tehran accused Bonn of his kidnapping. Still, the court’s work continued.

On February 14, 1997, the trial’s closing procedures began. The charges against Aziz were dropped, as his guilt had not
been proven to the court beyond the shadow of doubt. The attorneys for the accused once again asked to postpone the closing until they had received a draft of the federal prosecutor’s final statement. This time, Jost did not wait for Judge Kubsch. He announced with uncharacteristic firmness that he would not turn a single page over to anyone at any cost, and returned, with a resolute countenance, to his seat, surprising the court, even himself, with the outburst, which had been four years in the making.