A State of Fear (4 page)

On one occasion after torture I was taken back to the corridor where I was ordered to lie down. I was exhausted. My feet were bleeding and I was completely unable to hold myself up. No sooner had the guards bundled me into a corner than a boot smashed into my back.

‘Leave me alone!’ I screamed. ‘Let me die!’

‘You son of a bitch!’ the guard yelled back. ‘You’re trying to identify me by looking underneath your blindfold! I’ll kill you!’

‘Why have you attacked me?’

I was too drained to even think. I knew this guard, and had suffered at his hands before. He was universally feared. As he was shouting at me, a religious figure who was one of the prison directors was passing by. He stepped in.

‘Haji Johary [the guard] has lost four of his children fighting the Great Satan [America],’ the director said. ‘Two of them in Kurdistan fighting the communists, the other two were just 14 and 16 when they gave their lives on the front against Iraq. Haji Johary himself continuously visits the front, where he is directing groups of Khomeini fedais. He lost his dearest brother during one such operation and was himself injured in an explosion.

‘We’re fighting America and Israel, and you
counter-revolutionaries
say that the Islamic Republic is importing guns and ammunition from them! Our great Imam and his children the Hezbollahis are fighting against American imperialism and Soviet atheists and communists and you accuse us of trading oil for guns with them! You had better open your eyes and ears. This war is not against Iraq but, as Imam Khomeini has said, against the superpowers and that is the secret of the holy war which is being supervised by the Imam on Allah’s behalf. That’s the important point that you unbelievers have missed.

‘Our brother Haji Johary is still carrying shrapnel fragments from the Iraqi missile that hit his bunker. It has affected his
mental balance. When he gets angry with you, he cannot control himself. Haji Johary is the ears and eyes of the great Khomeini here.’

I made no response and my wounds went untreated as normal. Like all of the political prisoners who populated the corridors, I made almost no contact with my neighbours. At most, you could glance under your blindfold at those lying either side of you, or count the feet of those passing by on their way to the showers or the bathroom. But trying to distinguish your comrades from the guards and torturers by their shoes was dangerous. Some guards would sneak up on us wearing black plastic prison sandals. At night, when there were fewer guards moving back and forth, it was a little easier to see comrades lying across from you.

If the hands and feet of the man next to you were not bruised or bleeding, you were suspicious. This mistrust was necessary as you had to identify those you could trust. An index of this was how many wounds they bore. This told you how resilient they had been under torture. A man with smooth hands had been no trouble for the torturer.

It did not take long for me to decide that I needed to keep my mind active. I organised court proceedings in my head, in which I was the defendant. Each day I would present a very strong clear defence of freedom, democracy and social justice, explaining my reasons for participating in political activity and my struggle against the Islamic Republic. I repeated these court proceedings and each time I made them longer, until I fell asleep. But before long the cries of someone being tortured, my own pain, or a kick from a guard, would wake me.

Another pastime was following beams of light shining underneath cell doors late at night or rays of the sun glimmering through the doors to the balcony. But these distractions could do nothing to alleviate the mental effects of imprisonment and there can be no surprise in learning that in my corridor alone,
some prisoners lost their minds completely. Their madness compounded the horror with their wailing, their banging of their heads against the walls, their tearing at their blindfolds, their cries for their mothers and fathers or their curses of Khomeini, God and Islam.

After about five months I was moved to what was called a solitary cell on the fourth floor. I pulled off my blindfold, expecting to find myself alone in a dark cell. But this three-by-three metre cell already contained more than 15 other prisoners. They sat, backs to the wall with their feet stretched out. After the soul-destroying isolation of the corridors, it almost felt like returning home to find a welcome party had been organised. But there were still drawbacks to life here. We frequently weren’t even given the chance to use the lavatory and we would have to use a plastic bag in the corner of the cell.

The inmates moved around to make room for me to sit and the introductions began. As I was clearly injured – the wounds on my feet were quite visible – I was given the best position. Once my back was propped up in a corner I was handed some blankets. I was given some biscuits that came from the families of prisoners who had been in the cell for over a year.

I was asked for my story and what I was charged with. I was wary in case there were any collaborators among my new cell mates. Some of them had not been tortured, though they were clearly shocked by my condition. I told them what I knew and I had some questions of my own. It emerged that ten of my cellmates were accused of membership of the Tudeh (Party of the Masses, a communist organisation). Five were there as a result of association with other left organisations: Rahe Kargar, Fedayeen Minority and Peykar (a Maoist organisation). There was also a young man from Kurdistan who was a former member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. He had been accused of infiltration and treason and had been in the cell for
around two years. He couldn’t have been more than 20 years old. His beard was long and matted, and his face so pale and grey that it appeared that there was no blood in his veins. I was told that he continued to protest his innocence with unshakeable faith in the regime. Like so many of us, he was being held indefinitely without trial. He constantly exercised in his corner of the cell and made little effort to interact with the rest of us.

The ten Tudeh members had been captured through information given by their own leadership. General secretary Nooredin Kianoori announced the dissolution of the party on his own arrest and told members to give themselves up. Many did hand themselves over to Islamic prosecutors in Evin, Komiteh, or elsewhere. The party surrendered its membership lists with details of its structure throughout the country. In my cell the former Tudeh members had consensus on three points. Firstly, that the war with Iraq had been imposed on the regime by an imperialist conspiracy. Secondly, the regime was genuinely anti-imperialist. And thirdly, that it enjoyed mass popular support.

None of these ten men had been tortured… not yet, at least. They were mostly middle-class university students or professionals and I listened to their stories with great interest. Parvis used to work for an Iranian television station; Adel Zahmatkesh was a fourth-year dental student at the university of Tehran and had been Kianoori’s personal chauffeur for a time; another student, Mohsen, had been in his fourth year on an engineering degree; Shafagh was a doctor who told me that he had run a successful practice before he was arrested.

Parvis was adamant in his support for the regime’s war against Iraq, its genocidal policy against the Kurds, and the annihilation of left wing opposition – which stuck me as bizarre, since he himself was a victim of this. ‘If Imam Khomeini’s line is really a revolutionary one, why is it that the Islamic regime has arrested hundreds of thousands of the
democratic and revolutionary forces, and killed and destroyed tens of thousands of them?’ I asked.

‘You people deserve what you get!’ said Parvis. ‘You have risen up against a popular revolutionary and anti-imperialist regime which is also an ally of the Soviet Union. Your politics does not support our people or any revolutionary cause – it only serves the interests of American imperialism.’ We hunched together for such discussions, speaking in hushed voices. Our exchanges became sharper rather than louder and other cellmates shuffled closer to hear. Tudeh members supported Parvis with their contributions. The others listened too, nodding and grunting as we spoke. They were more hesitant about expressing their own opinions, perhaps because they were more conscious of the danger we were in. The pro-Khomeini Tudeh members were, after all, an unknown quantity.

‘What about the genocide against minorities: the Kurds, the Bah’ais? The suppression of freedom and civil liberties? The subjugation of women under the veil?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘who are those women who came out and demonstrated against the Islamic government? Prostitutes, monarchists and those who sought sexual self-gratification. As for the Kurds and the Baha’is, the leaderships of these movements are part of the American imperialist conspiracy against the Islamic regime. The suppression of civil liberties is only a problem for a handful of intellectuals. The workers and peasants in the factories and fields throughout the country are concerned with improving their condition. The Islamic revolution works for their well-being. You oppositionalists are frustrating this process.’

I had heard these arguments before. Some of the academic staff at the university of Tehran who belonged to the Fedayeen Majority had replied in exactly the same way. Not even the brutality of this regime shook them out of their fantasy. ‘How can a regime that has obtained weapons from America and Israel
and their allies for use in the war with Iraq and the civil war against the democratic forces be described as a revolutionary regime?’ I said.

‘The Chinese received US aid against Japan in World War II. That did not make China counter-revolutionary.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but how can the regime be improving material conditions? It has wiped out the workers’ councils which arose from the revolutionary overthrow of the Shah. Millions of hectares of land were liberated when the Shah was overthrown. Now they are being confiscated by the Pasdars and given back to feudal landlords.’

He answered, ‘The Islamic shoras [people’s councils] are the revolutionary answer to independent organisations. Anyway, they were being used as counter-revolutionary bases against the Islamic regime by the left. The Islamic regime will develop its own land reform programme which will lead to the orderly handing over of land to the peasants.’ I ended our discussion. I could not yet trust everyone in the cell and, more importantly, I could tell that there was no way that he would see reality.

Adel, the dental student, was a young man with tremendous energy and vitality. By contrast with Parvis his own defence of the regime had become more qualified since his arrest. He was the one on whose shoulders I stood to look out of the window when we went to the bathroom. Now I knew where we were being held. I would have been more wary of this offer had it come from any other prisoner. None of the other Tudeh prisoners would have taken a risk like that.

Adel maintained a good relationship with all other
left-leaning
prisoners. His dental training came to good use too and he was always willing to examine the teeth of other prisoners, irrespective of their politics. A passionate figure, he participated in unified prison resistance movements and was killed in a mass execution of political prisoners in 1989. Parvis, on the other hand, refused to take part, even when other Tudeh members
were involved. I later learned from some of the prisoners that served with him in Evin that he had been accused of co-operating with prison officials. I saw him again in another prison in 1987 and was warned to keep well clear. But we shared a history and I tried to maintain a cordial relationship. Whether he actually co-operated with the authorities or not, he also went to the gallows in 1989.

There was solidarity between the other four leftists in my cell. They, like me, strongly opposed the regime. None of them could have been described as middle class and they had all been tortured. Taregh, one of the two Fedayeen Minority members, was a high school student and only 16 years old. He was the most energetic of the four. Morad, the other Fedayeen, was a school teacher arrested after being informed on by Islamic students – ‘the ears and eyes of Khomeini’. Ahmed was a worker from a factory in Karaj, an industrial city about 40 miles outside Tehran. He had been arrested as a result of a strike in his factory and was a member of Peykar. The fourth, Kaveh, was a member of Rahe Kargar and had been arrested due to his political work at a car plant. All kept their distance from their Tudeh cellmates.

Open political arguments were dangerous, but I couldn’t stop myself from chipping in with references to the defeat of the 1979 revolution or to the nature of the regime. Yet there was little point. Everyone had very set positions in order to protect themselves.

T
hese days, as I stare up at the ceiling, unable to sleep because of constant nagging pains from my injuries, I sometimes ask myself how the hell I got into such a mess. My answer starts with the stories of Iran’s own tragedies. It was once Britain’s unofficial colony. During the 19th century it was strategically important but took on a new importance with oil. When BP moved in, the British government was not far behind. They began to buy off the backward tribal chiefs and destabilise the democratic government introduced after 1907.

In 1920 the British played a key part in installing Reza Shah as dictator – a man who had a nasty little habit of cutting out the tongues of those who criticised him openly – but he started paying court to the Nazis. While I was growing up in the early 1950s, the British were at it again. This time, under a Labour government, they didn’t like a democratically-elected government wanting a fairer share of the oil riches.

Everyone in our family was kept informed about what was going on by my grandfather. He would come home each evening
with a basket of food in one hand and a copy of the nationalist paper
Shouresh
(Rebellion) in the other. We would sit and listen to him reading the latest court intrigues. I sat close, keen to hear every word. In the paper I saw and liked a cartoon of Churchill, complete with dicky bow and tails, dancing cheek to cheek with the Shah’s twin sister, Ashraf. The editor, Karimpur Shirazi, hammered the political point of the cartoon with an editorial raging against the monarchy’s collaboration with imperialism, and in particular BP.

My father was a carpenter who left home around half past five every morning to work in a factory two miles away that produced doors and windows. I was the first born and, when I was six, I went to help my father at his work. I used to hold the end of the planks as my father fed them through the machines. He called me his right hand. The noise and smells, hustle and bustle of the workshop were captivating. I was very happy, playing with the piles of fine sawdust on the factory floor. It was official: I was a grown-up.

We used to get home at about six in in the evening, where our evening meal would be waiting. But not everyone was happy. When I was ten, my grandparents decided to have it out with my father and told him I was out of control and needed to go to school. In truth, when I watched my friends carrying their books to and from school, I did feel jealous. Even at that young age I knew that, without any real education, I faced a bleak future. My father could not read or write a word, even his own name. He agreed that education was essential if I was to avoid his fate and so I started school, albeit as a late developer. I realised from the outset that this was my only life-raft; the penalty for failure was to finish up like my father.

My mother was born in 1927, some two decades after the proclamation of the universal right to secular education. Nevertheless, like my father, she never learnt to read and
write. She was married at 11 and was 12 when I was born. By 20 she had given birth to no less than six children. She was dead by 35, totally exhausted by the birth of her tenth child. She was always a distant figure to me, having yet more children, suckling one baby from the breast, breaking ice during the freezing winter to get water to wash clothes for the others. She never had any opportunity to get to know any of us – that was the way things were in a society that saw child brides as perfectly normal. Her own mother died in her
mid-40s
of a heart attack while she was washing clothes by hand. The cycle went on, unfortunately. My sisters never had any education to speak of and Khomeini went on to ‘turn back the clock’ so women could be buried up to the neck and stoned to death for such crimes as adultery.

The years after World War II were a golden age by comparison. Ideas of all kinds were allowed to flourish. Britain had been seriously weakened and its grip on Iran had slackened. The introduction of Soviet troops in the north had inspired many and rocked the ruling class. The country was ripe for change. My grandfather was a simple working man who made quilts for a living – for the Shah’s court – but rather than being a sycophantic flunkey, he somehow knew who his real friends and enemies were. Like millions of others, we were all strong supporters of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who was democratically elected in 1951.

He was overturned in 1953 with the help of the CIA and Britain’s MI5. My family’s favourite newspaper editor, Karimpur Shirazi, was murdered in prison and his charred remains displayed on posters to ensure that everyone got the message. Richard Nixon, the new vice president of the United States, came over to review the handiwork of the leaders of the new regime. He condemned Mossadegh as a communist and told the Shah that, ‘the coup would establish an island of stability in the turbulent waters of the Persian Gulf.’

Massacres and persecutions were a feature of this new ‘island of stability’, including the arrest of 500 Tudeh sympathisers in the officer corps, most of whom were executed. Everyone kept their heads down. I buried myself in my studies but stayed true to my allegiance to Mossadegh’s ideals, joining others to chant support for him during our 15-minute meal breaks, taking part in demonstrations, and distributing leaflets in support of his party, the National Front. There was no going back for me and I threw myself into the world of the political activist.

I was far to the right of the Tudeh party but I agreed to distribute their leaflets at the school. My luck ran out when, two months after the coup, a hostile teacher caught me and I was hauled before the military authorities and interned in an open air military camp in the centre of Tehran. I was badly beaten, once after my arrest and again after reaching the camp. My home was ransacked and the few books I had confiscated. My arrest even made the national news when they said that I had been arrested for failing to stand up in the cinema before a patriotic song for the Shah. I was eventually released after five months, but was barred from school for a year.

Years later I entered a military training college. The principal hauled me in and, after praising my grades, stated bluntly that I had no future in the armed forces as I would always be politically suspect. This had a devastating effect as my dream had been to work my way into the officer corps and to get rid of the Shah, opening the way back to democracy. But if I left now I would be required to pay back the entire cost of my education. I had to find a way to square the circle. Six months later, after I had passed all my examinations with distinction and moved to the officers training corps, I sneaked out of my barracks. My heart racing, I used a lamppost to clamber over the barbed wire perimeter.

After some time in hiding I was free to go to the University of Tehran. I passed the entrance examinations in five faculties
but I still didn’t feel safe. I qualified for a place at a foreign university, but was not granted a visa despite many applications. An exasperated official eventually whispered, ‘You might have passed our exams but you have failed Savak’s. Talk to them if you want to know.’

I finally got permission through my one and only contact with the intelligence services. My father was appalled at the astronomic costs of the US, but the family had a whip-round and, in 1961, I made my way to Wyoming. I took any job that would pay. My fellow students were convinced that I owned at least half a dozen oil wells in Iran and I gave them some cock and bull story about a delayed inheritance. College jobs and summer holiday work enabled me to pay my way to a degree at Brigham Young University in Utah. Initially, I studied petroleum engineering, but moved into economics. I did not forget the huge sacrifice the family had made and saved enough to send back $1,000.

After moving to New York I was able to combine my doctorate with covert campaigning against the Shah (I still have copies of my articles for
International
and the
American Militant,
credited to ‘Kaveh Ahangar’). By 1974, the year I returned home to Iran, I had established a reputation as a young tenured lecturer.

Savak had not forgotten me and were unimpressed by the name I had made for myself in the US. With the temperature rising at home I found myself in the firing line once again. But by this time I had learned to box more cleverly, despite regular and extended chats with the secret police who watched my every move. I was a man with a mission. In Tehran I was working at one tenth of the salary I had been offered in the private sector. But money was not important. The real agenda was making contacts and building up influence as the regime moved inexorably into crisis. I accepted invitations to lecture at provincial universities throughout Iran to learn more about the people of my
country, their problems and aspirations. It was also a useful method of familiarising myself with the geography of Iran as, after 12 years away, I was something of a stranger.

The 1953 coup had forced the left in Iran to reassess the future and take a long hard look at the nationalist politics of Mossadegh. Tudeh was discredited by failing to act to defend the gains made by the nationalisation movement. It then lost even more credibility when it appeared to subordinate itself to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, which was trying to gain an economic foothold in Iran.

Young people in Tudeh and the National Front found alternative models in both the Cuban struggle as personified by Che Guevara and in the Vietcong’s battle in Vietnam. Their revolutionary ideals led to the formation of a dizzying array of political and religious groups, determined to change the regime. The Fedayeen was one of these groups and they were set up in 1970. Out of this organisation emerged the Rahe Kargar, originally called the Prison Boys. These Marxists broke with the politics of Guevarism and identified the working class as the main agency of revolution. Other young people in the National Front and the religious movement formed the Mojahedin, committed to armed struggle and social change. They were linked with Islam and their secular equivalent was Peykar, a Maoist group with overtones of Marxism-Leninism. They considered Albania ‘the most progressive socialist state in the universe’.

I had moved on too, politically. I still had a soft spot for Dr Mossadegh but now leaned towards some kind of socialism rather than nationalism. Yet the Soviet Union had shown itself to be repressive and China’s Maoist quasi-religious dogma was equally unappetising. Vietnam had demonstrated that the Third World could buck the trend and Castro’s Cuba seemed to offer the way out of tyranny. The Shah made his last visit to Washington to see President Carter in 1977 and we all seethed
as he mouthed Nixon’s monstrous phrase about Iran being an ‘island of stability’. Could it be made to happen again? Could 1978 or 1979 be the year of another revolution… and more?