Children of Paradise (66 page)

According to the indictment, the spy spelled out for the prosecution the complex structure of the conspiracy Fazlinejad had sketched. The conspirators included the Open Society Institute, the Rockefeller Institute, the Ford Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Freedom House, the Council on Foreign Relations, the German Council on
Foreign Relations, and the Centre for the Study of Democracy (run by John Keane) in England. The Dutch foundation Hivos had propped up the women’s movement, while the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University supported Iranian bloggers.

Not surprisingly, the prosecution fastened onto the work of Gene Sharp, an elderly American theorist of nonviolent struggle whose pamphlet on civil resistance to dictatorship had been found at the scene of “velvet” revolutions around the world. According to the indictment, those revolutions, too, had been the work of American operatives. In Iran, the deputy prosecutor alleged darkly, more than 100 of the 198 steps laid forth in Sharp’s manual had already been executed. The models for Iran were, according to the alleged spy, Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. The inclusion of Croatia, which had no such revolution, betrayed either the source’s or the prosecutor’s indifferent grasp of world events.

The supposed spy asserted that velvet coups always proceed according to a single plan. Preparations begin about two years before a presidential election. The foreign conspirators select their candidate. Then “they heavily invest in him, such that supporters of the candidate begin to educate people via networks similar to business models such as the pyramid scheme (which are a proven way of attracting supporters in campaigns).” If their candidate loses, they allege fraud, demanding that new elections be held with foreign observers. The presence of foreign observers, the indictment implied, assured the chosen candidate’s victory.

Iran’s network of collaborators, according to the indictment, included Shadi Sadr and Shirin Ebadi; the New York–based human rights researcher Hadi Ghaemi, who had worked for the “Zionist organization” Human Rights Watch; and the former student activist Ali Afshari, now in exile. Of course the most important intellectual operative was Abdolkarim Soroush, whose job was to undermine Iran’s resistance to Westernization by attacking the sacred pillars of the Islamic Republic, like
velayat-e faqih
and the unity of religion and politics.

Soroush and other religious intellectuals “slowly targeted the cultural
foundations of the Revolution and began destroying them,” the deputy prosecutor alleged. “From that time, their intellectual discussions were marked by inept training and intellectual tyranny—something that they kept secret.” Once the intellectual groundwork was laid, the conspirators were to build institutions in the form of NGOs. Then they would link those institutions into a network.

The role of the reformist political parties was particularly nefarious. Mosharekat’s platform had the audacity to depict the Islamic Republic as despotic and antidemocratic, and to urge that reformists seek positions within every elected institution, from the parliament and the city councils to the Assembly of Experts. The indictment cited a line in the platform that read, “So that the democratic segment of the leadership will be able to use the crises that threaten the whole political system in favor of solidifying democracy and gaining more bargaining power,” and then asked, presumably rhetorically, “Can this sentence be deemed to be anything other than treason?” The prosecution also cited unnamed sources claiming that Mosharekat chapters in Isfahan and Arak had polled their members about whether they would give up the Supreme Leader to the Americans if the Americans invaded.

From here it was a short leap to the conclusion that a cynical and perfidious plot had unfolded around the tenth presidential election. Quoting heavily from the prison confessions of the men gathered in the courtroom, particularly Abtahi and Tajzadeh, the deputy prosecutor alleged that the conspirators knew full well that there was no fraud, but that they had planned before the vote to erode the public’s trust in the electoral system. To that end, the prosecutor alleged, the reformists had forged a letter from interior ministry officials raising concerns before election day. The prosecutor quoted Tajzadeh as stating in prison that his own figures tracked with the official ones the night of the election: “I never said that cheating had taken place. The allegations they make have nothing to do with me and I was not involved, but of course my party has issued a statement and I should also be punished.”

The “illegal gatherings” that followed the vote were part of the plan,
the indictment claimed, and they had been organized by the defendants, including the ones who were arrested well before any protest took place. Also preplanned was the dissemination to foreign media of photographs and videos that seemed to show a brutal crackdown on unarmed demonstrators. The prosecution stated: “Among the pictures and videos there are many scenes of distraught faces from inside the country, suggesting to viewers that the agitators are the people of Iran who have come to the streets in protest of the elections.”

Fortunately, Iran’s security forces had intercepted the terrorists that the Americans had dispatched to plant bombs at polling stations, the prosecution alleged. But chaos was widespread. Conspirators built homemade grenades and then dressed up in pilfered Revolutionary Guard uniforms to detonate them. Famous human rights lawyers were hiding stashes of weapons and drugs in their offices. Daftar Tahkim and other treasonous elements among the students attacked their own dormitories in order to elicit popular sympathy. For the victims of those raids, the prosecutor shed the most audacious of crocodile tears: “A review of the reports and statistics of the beaten and injured lying on hospital beds reveals that the planners and agents of this disruption and sedition project were willing to sacrifice the innocent lives of the children of this land in order to achieve their goals.”

• • •

T
HE ALLEGED SPY WHOSE ACCOUNT
was the basis for the indictment was an ambitious young blogger who had undergone a curious series of transformations. Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian émigré living in Canada during Ahmadinejad’s first term, was a hustling self-promoter who peppered the American media with submissions and often credited himself with introducing blogging to Iran. In early posts he identified himself as an atheist and openly advocated a secular government for Iran. His friends and colleagues in the West remember him as a hard-living bon vivant motivated above all by a desire for fame.

Derakhshan would later explain that he’d embraced reformism under Khatami as a form of teenage rebellion; he came from a wealthy conservative
family close to the regime. He would claim that after he emigrated to Canada, his experience of Western capitalism and his revulsion for the neoconservative foreign policy of United States president George W. Bush alarmed him into rejecting reform. Iranian reformists, he concluded, were giving aid and comfort to the neocons. They’d been corrupted by Enlightenment rationality. He embraced postcolonial theory and the work of Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. His former friends and colleagues suspected him of rather more sinister motives when he embraced a hardline defense of the Islamic Republic and began writing in praise of Ahmadinejad, parroting official talking points and denouncing reformists and human rights advocates.

Derakhshan’s revised political commitments were still not clear when, in a brash and ill-considered publicity stunt, he traveled to Israel in early 2006 and again in 2007, publicly defying the Iranian ban on such travel. He called it a mission of freelance diplomacy. He’d hoped to influence Israeli public opinion against a war with Iran, he’d claim, and by doing so, to influence American foreign policy as well. He basked in a fleeting limelight and posed for photographs in the streets of Tel Aviv wearing an “I 
Tehran” T-shirt.

Upon his return to Iran in 2008, Derakhshan was taken into custody. His interrogators didn’t trust his conversion any more than his former friends among the reformists did. They figured he was trying to infiltrate the Iranian regime on behalf of Mossad or the CIA. He’d later claim that, returning as a loyal subject who chose to submit to the law of his country, he expected to serve three years for his violation of the travel ban. Instead, he was eventually dealt two death sentences and a nearly twenty-year prison term. He was, he said, like a soldier mistakenly bombarded by his own air force. (Khamenei would pardon him in late 2014.)

Derakhshan would later insist, perhaps self-servingly, that when it came to the words attributed to him in the indictment of the reformist leadership, he’d been grievously used. They were taken from an analysis he was asked to write in December 2008, explaining how the ideas and actions of the reformists served imperial interests. He had never meant to outline a
CIA-directed plot or to speak authoritatively as a witness to one. In any case, at the time of his writing, the election was still six months away and Mousavi had not even announced his candidacy.

• • •

P
AYAM
F
AZLINEJAD’S
K
AYHAN
TREATISE
was hallucinatory and, as John Keane would note in response, potentially libelous, with its claims of treasonous conspiracy. That its author had himself quite possibly come by his hardline views in prison added a layer of pathos to its balefulness. The fact that its themes also animated the prosecution’s official indictment of the reformist leadership suggested that these were not narratives devised solely of opportunity or expedience. They spoke to a presentiment, among the hard-liners, that was deep-seated and not entirely irrational.

Even paranoids, it’s often said, have enemies, and that was certainly true of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Perhaps the security establishment wished for so simple an enemy as a foreign power pulling marionette strings among the dissident factions and civic activists of Iran. Surely, if it were possible to bring down the Islamic Republic by holding seminars and sending checks to reformist politicians and civil society groups, Washington would have eagerly done so. But the ethos of Iranian independence from foreign powers ran deep, and it was not solely the property of conservatives. When the administration of George W. Bush set aside money for the Iranian opposition, the Iranian opposition, aghast, refused it. The Islamic Republic never supplied a shred of evidence, apart from forced confessions, to the contrary.

What the Islamic Republic feared was already inside it. Iran’s reform movement had indeed borrowed from Weber, Habermas, and Rorty, but its ideology was self-taught, as authentic an outgrowth of the revolution as Ansar-e Hezbollah. Far from being guided by foreign masterminds, the reformist theorists grappled publicly and contentiously with the strategic conundrums Iran’s unique political system had placed in their path. The West had neither philosophers nor spymasters so capable of navigating that labyrinth, or so invested in the outcome, as men like Mostafa Tajzadeh and Saeed Hajjarian.

These men, and others like them, had presumed that their Islamic Republic was dynamic and responsive, capable of shedding its autocratic elements. Khamenei had a different view of what was essential and what was not.

The language of the second indictment—for there would be five show trials and five indictments—was in some ways starker than the first in its revelation of the regime’s self-definition. Among the nefarious aims of foreigners were “exposing cases of violations of human rights,” training reporters “towards the end of gathering information and analysis,” and “creating websites and training for holding elections and presenting full information on the 2009 electoral candidates.” After the election, American agents were further guilty of providing software and servers that allowed Iranians to get around Internet filters imposed by their government. The listener was apparently meant to consider it self-evident that the true national interest, protected by the regime, lay in censoring the press, filtering the Internet, concealing human rights abuses, and obfuscating the electoral process.

• • •

F
OR ANOTHER YEAR AND A HALF
, Mir Hossein Mousavi would not be silenced. In statements regularly released to his followers, the former prime minister drew ever more sharply and eloquently into focus. He was not a creature of the reform movement, with its sociological jargon and its bitter experience in power. Mousavi’s language was simple and spiritual, morally decent and frankly nostalgic. He spoke of Ayatollah Khomeini as of a lost father whose wisdom gleamed all the more brightly as the father’s image receded behind the son’s. Everything that was good and just in the Islamic Republic, and in Mousavi himself, originated with the imam. No matter that the opposite was probably also true. The revolution’s best intentions had gone astray, and everyone knew it.

For Mousavi, the Green Movement’s objective was to reclaim that lost purity. In this, rhetorically and emotionally, he echoed Shariati, who in the 1970s exhorted Iranians to reclaim a past that had never existed and to
“return” to an aspirational self. “
We demand the Islamic Republic, not a word more, and not a word less,” Mousavi said in late September, echoing Khomeini’s words from the time of the revolution. He resurrected a Khomeini who respected the results of elections even when they didn’t go his way. “
It’s okay, let them take Isfahan,” Khomeini had said with a smile when his desired candidate lost that city. Mousavi’s Khomeini urged honesty on politicians and held the public in high regard: “
Never do anything that you can’t explain to the people,” he admonished the heads of the three branches of government when they were forced to reveal the Iran-Contra dealings. The country’s founding father had been desecrated, first by foreigners who misunderstood him, but second and just as gravely by hard-liners who imagined Khomeini an advocate of the oppression they had wrought.