the time a friend of Liz’s had thoughtfully mailed her a DVD of A Mighty Heart, and he’d had to sit beside her in their apartment in Islamabad, watching Angelina Jolie convulsing with grief over the death of her journalist husband. Martin had given the movie four stars, and sent Liz’s friend an email that won him a place on her no-Christmas- cards-ever list.
They arrived at a slightly shabby terraced house and were admitted by a wary doorkeeper who insisted on patting them down and examining their phones and wallets. There were other men lurking inside the house, but, encouragingly, Martin had yet to see a single weapon.
Karim, the young man who’d spotted Martin taking pictures, handed the two guests over to a middle-aged man who introduced himself as Mehdi and offered them tea and halvaa; it would have been rude to refuse, and Martin was grateful for the sugar rush. They sat on the carpet, shoeless and cross-legged, while Mehdi chatted volubly with Behrouz and politely enquired about Martin’s health and family.
‘Hich zan nadaaram, hich bache nadaaram,’ Martin confessed: I have no wife, I have no children. Mehdi regarded him with a mixture of astonishment and pity.
‘Your parents?’ he asked in English.
‘They both died a few years ago.’ Mehdi couldn’t quite parse that, so Behrouz translated. Mehdi tssked and shook his head forlornly, momentarily as anxious and perplexed as if an orphaned child had turned up on his doorstep. But then he shifted his attention back to Behrouz and they started discussing football scores. There was a TV switched on in a corner of the room, tuned to IRIB’s Channel One, which was screening reruns of a popular historical miniseries, No Room to Turn. Martin had heard claims that the show – which featured a love story between an Iranian student and a Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Europe – was mere propaganda, portraying the endangered Jewish heroine sympathetically while caricaturing her Zionist relatives, but he’d yet to see enough of it to form his own opinion. In any case, it was a more enjoyable way to improve his Farsi than listening to Mehdi’s match post-mortems.
After almost an hour there was a flurry of activity in the adjoining room; Martin hadn’t heard the front door open, but apparently a small entourage had arrived, maybe through another entrance. Mehdi picked up the remote and turned down the volume on the TV. Martin managed to rise to his feet before Kourosh Ansari entered the room, alone.
Kourosh greeted Martin in English and Behrouz and Mehdi in Farsi. Martin said, ‘Please accept my condolences on your brother’s death.’
‘Thank you.’ Kourosh had deep hollows under his eyes, and a few days’ growth of beard set against a much longer moustache. ‘I heard him speak on a few occasions,’ Martin added. ‘He was impressive.’
Kourosh murmured agreement.
There was an awkward pause; Martin wasn’t sure whether it would be rude to get down to business immediately. He had never managed to get an interview with Dariush, and though that had rankled slightly, he’d understood why; the elder Ansari really hadn’t had any reason to court a foreign audience. All Martin knew about Kourosh was that he, too, had studied chemical engineering. He looked to be in his late thirties.
Mehdi invited everyone to sit, then went to fetch more tea. ‘Do you work in Abadan?’ Martin asked.
‘No, in Esfahan,’ Kourosh replied, ‘but my job there is finished. I will work for Hezb-e-Haalaa now.’
‘In what role?’
‘I have been chosen as provisional leader by the party’s executive council. At present, we face some logistical problems with holding an election for the position.’
‘I can appreciate that.’ It was a minor, and possibly short-lived miracle that mere membership of Hezb-e- Haalaa was not yet illegal. ‘So where do you see things going from here? The strike won’t be tolerated indefinitely.’
‘Of course not.’ Kourosh hesitated. ‘But I’m still hopeful that the government will give some ground. They want to look reasonable; they want to be seen to be reacting to the people’s anger. That’s why they had Jabari resign.’
‘But how much more ground can they give? What are you hoping for?’
‘A referendum within a year, to end the Guardian Council veto in time for the next presidential election.’
Martin said, ‘Is that realistic?’
Kourosh ran a hand over his eyes. ‘I don’t know. But I think it’s the smallest thing that the people would treat as anything but an insult. How much Iranian history do you know?’
‘A little.’ Martin fervently hoped that he wasn’t about to be tested on the names of the Safavid kings.
‘Abadan was once controlled by the British, by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. They refused to share their profits fairly – they wouldn’t even give Iran the same deal as the Saudis received – but it was only a strike by the workers that gave the Majlis the courage it needed to nationalise the industry.’
‘A move that ultimately cost Mossadegh his job.’
‘Of course,’ Kourosh agreed. ‘Mr Churchill persuaded Mr Eisenhower that our Prime Minister was a dangerous socialist, and the CIA engineered their very first coup. But if they’d left him in place to rein in the Shah, we would not have had the mullahs taking power twenty-six years later.’
‘Perhaps,’ Martin replied. Mossadegh himself had been a far-from-perfect democrat, and the clerics of the time had had their own problems with him.
‘Now I’m afraid we’re facing the risk of more American meddling, ’ Kourosh said.
‘Really? Have they approached Hezb-e-Haalaa?’
Kourosh scowled. ‘Yes, but that’s old news; my brother told them to keep their distance a long time ago. But now they’re trying to start a new game. My friends in Iraq tell me there are plans to unleash the MEK and send them across the border.’
The MEK – the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the People’s Army of Iran – was a nationalist group formed in opposition to the Shah. Its members had been pushed aside by Islamists in the 1979 revolution and ended up in exile in Iraq. Accepting the hospitality of Saddam Hussein while he’d engaged in a long and bloody war against their homeland had not been the best PR move in history. Though they claimed to answer to a kind of parliament-in-exile, they now had very little support within Iran, and since the 2003 invasion most of them lived in Iraq, in a strange twilight state, somewhere between refugees and prisoners-of-war.
‘You think Washington would actually do that? Re-arm them and let them loose, just to make trouble?’ The Bush administration had funded several armed Iranian opposition groups – including the MEK, and a Baluchi terrorist group called Jondollah – in the hope of eliciting a bloody crackdown from the regime that would serve as the pretext for an all-out war, but Martin thought those programs had been flushed down the chute with the change of administration. ‘You must have heard Obama acknowledge the CIA’s role in the Mossadegh coup, in that speech in Cairo not long after he came to power? Reaching out to the Islamic world and announcing an end to American interventionism?’
Kourosh said, ‘I’m in no position to know if this plan has the President’s blessing, or if some other arm of government has taken the initiative without his knowledge. But I can tell you exactly what would happen if the MEK came across the border: first, the Iranian Army would wipe them out with very little trouble, and second, the Iranian people would unite under the present regime and the reformist movement would be back in the wilderness for another twenty years at least. Not Hezb-e-Haalaa, nor anybody else, would try to exploit the situation for their own benefit. We are not traitors, and we are not idiots.’
‘Isn’t the MEK still classified as a terrorist organisation by the Americans?’
‘Yes,’ Kourosh replied. ‘So of course they would do this quietly. That’s why I prefer not to be so quiet.’
Martin finally understood why he’d been plucked out of the crowd so eagerly; Kourosh wasn’t interested in raising his celebrity profile; what he needed was a story that would embarrass the Americans into thinking twice – or dragging their rogue elements back into line, if none of this was actually coming from the top. Brother of Slain Reformist Condemns US Backing for Terrorists would get picked up immediately from his own paper’s website and splashed all over the American broadsheets.
He said, ‘I can write part of this story, but I’ll need to get messages to my colleagues in Washington and Baghdad to follow up on your claims.’
‘How long are you staying in Abadan?’
Martin glanced at Mehdi, who said, ‘You are my guest here tonight.’
‘Thank you.’
Kourosh said, ‘When you’ve written whatever you need to send, pass it to Karim. We can get your email on a
