the best jobs.” “Yes,” another agreed. “They’re worse than the Jews…” Rakoczy laughed to himself. He enjoyed his job very much, enjoyed working with university students - always a fertile field - enjoyed being a teacher. But that’s what I am, he thought contentedly, a professor of terrorism, of power and the seizing of power. Perhaps I’m more like a farmer: I plant the seed, nurture it, guard it, and harvest it, working all hours and all seasons as a farmer must. Some years are good and some bad but every year a little further forward, a little more experienced, a little wiser about the land, ever more patient - spring summer autumn winter - always the same farm, Iran, always with the same aim: at best for Iran to become Russian soil, at worst a Russian satellite to protect the sacred motherland of Russia. With our foot on the Strait of Hormuz…
Ah, he thought, an unearthly, consuming religious glow pervading him, if I could give Iran to Mother Russia my life will not have been lived in vain. The West deserves to lose, particularly the Americans. They’re such fools, so egocentric, but most of all so stupid. It’s inconceivable this Carter doesn’t see the value of Hormuz in general and Iran in particular and what a catastrophe to the West their loss will be. But there it is; for all practical purposes he’s given us Iran. Rakoczy remembered the shock wave of disbelief that had soared to the very top when their innermost contacts in Washington had whispered that Carter was going to forsake the Shah. Ah, what an ally Carter has been to us. If I believed in God I’d pray: God is Great, God is Great, protect our best ally, President Peanut, and let him win a second term! With him in for a second term we’ll own America and so rule the world! God is Great, God is… Abruptly he felt chilled. He had been pretending to be Muslim for so long that sometimes his cover overcame his real self, and he began to question and have doubts.
Am I still Igor Mzytryk, captain KGB, married to my darling Delaurah, my oh so beautiful Armenian, who’s waiting in Tbilisi for me to come home? Is she at home, she who oh so secretly believes in God - the God of the Christians that is the same as the God of the Muslims and of the Jews? God. God who has a thousand names. Is there a God?
There is no God, he told himself like a litany, and put that thought back into its compartment and concentrated on the riot to be.
Around them tension was growing nicely among the massed students, angry cries raging back and forth: “We didn’t spill our blood for mullahs to take all the power! Unite, brothers and sisters! Unite under the Tudeh banners…”
“Down with the Tudeh! Unite for the holy Islamic-Marxist cause, we mujhadin spilled our blood and we are the martyrs of Imam Ali, Lord of the Martyrs, and Lenin…”
“Down with the mullahs and Khomeini, archtraitor to Iran…” Vast cheers greeted this shout and others took it up, then gradually, again the dominating voice was: “Unite, brothers and sisters, unite to the real leaders of the revolution, the Tudeh, unite to protect th - ” Rakoczy watched the crowd critically. It was still in pieces, formless, not yet a mob that could be directed and used as a weapon. Some bystanders, Islamics, watched and listened with varying degrees of contempt or rage. The few moderates shook then-heads and walked away, leaving the stage to the vast majority who were deeply committed and anti-Khomeini. Around them the buildings were tall, and brick, the university built by Reza Shah in the thirties. Five years ago Rakoczy had spent a few terms here pretending to be an Azerbaijani though the Tudeh knew him as Dimitri Yazernov and that he had been sent - continuing a pattern - to organize university cells. Since its beginning the university was always a place of dissension, anti-Shah, although Mohammed Shah, more than any monarch in Persia’s history, had lavishly supported education. The Tehran students had been the vanguard of the rebellion, long before Khomeini had become the coalescing core.
Without Khomeini, we’d never’ve succeeded, he thought. Khomeini was the flame around which we could all cluster and unite to tip the Shah off the throne and the U.S. out. He’s not senile or a bigot as many say but a ruthless leader with a dangerously clear plan, a dangerously great charisma, and dangerously huge power among the Shi’ites - so now it’s time he joined the god that never was.
Rakoczy laughed suddenly. “What is it?” Farmad asked.
“I was just thinking what Khomeini and all the mullahs will say when they discover there’s no god and never was a god - there’s no heaven, no hell, no houris, and it’s all a myth.”
The others laughed too. One didn’t. Ibrahim Kyabi. There was no laughter left in him, just the wish for revenge. When he had gone home yesterday afternoon he had discovered his house in turmoil, his mother prostrate in tears, his brothers and sisters in anguish. The news had just arrived that his engineer father had been murdered by Islamic Guards outside his IranOil HQ at Ahwaz and that his body had been left to the vultures. “For what?” he had screamed.
“For - for crimes against Islam,” his uncle, Dewar Kyabi, who had brought home the terrible news, said through his own tears. “That’s what they told us - his murderers. They were from Abadan, fanatics, illiterates mostly, and they told us that he was an American quisling, that for years he had cooperated with the enemies of Islam, allowing and helping them to steal our oil, th - ”
“Lies, all lies,” Ibrahim had shouted at him. “Father was anti-Shah, a patriot - a Believer! Who were those dogs? Who? I will bum them and their fathers. What were their names?”
“It was the Will of God, Ibrahim, that they did it. Insha’Allah! Oh, my poor brother! The Will of God…” “There is no God!”
The others had stared at him, shocked. This was the first time Ibrahim had articulated a thought that had been building for many years, nurtured by student friends returning from overseas, friends at the university, fed by some of the teachers who had never said this openly, merely encouraging them to question anything and everything.
“Insha’Allah is for fools,” he had said, “a curse of superstition for fools to hide under!”
“You mustn’t say that, my son!” his mother had cried out, frightened. “Go to the mosque, beg God’s forgiveness - that your father is dead is the Will of God, nothing more. Go to the mosque.”
“I will,” he had said, but in his heart he knew his life had changed - no God could have allowed this to happen. “Who were those men, Uncle? Describe them.”
“They were just ordinary, Ibrahim, as I already told you, younger than you, most of them - there was no leader or mullah with them, though there was one in the foreigners’ helicopter that came from Bandar Delam. But my poor brother died cursing Khomeini; if only he hadn’t come back by the foreigners’ helicopters, if only… but then, Insha’Allah, they were waiting for him anyway.”
“There was a mullah in the helicopter?”
“Yes, yes, there was.”
“You will go to the mosque, Ibrahim?” his mother had asked him again. “Yes,” he had said, the first lie he had ever told her. It had taken him no time to find the university Tudeh leaders and Dimitri Yazernov, to swear allegiance, to get a machine gun, and, most of all, to ask them to find the name of the mullah in the helicopter of Bandar Delam. And now he stood there waiting, wanting vengeance, his soul crying out against the outrage committed against his father in the name of the false god. “Dimitri, let’s begin!” he said, his fury whipped by the shouting of the crowd. “We must wait, Ibrahim,” Rakoczy said gently, very pleased to have the youth with them. “Don’t forget the mob is a means to an end - remember the plan!” When he had told it to them an hour ago they had been tunned. “Raid the American embassy?”
“Yes,” he had said calmly, “a quick raid, in and out, tomorrow or the next day. Tonight the rally will become a mob. The embassy’s hardly a mile and a half away. It will be easy to send the mob rampaging that way as an experiment. What more perfect cover could we have for a raid than a riot? We let the enemy mujhadin and fedayeen go against Islamics and kill each other off while we take the initiative. Tonight we plant more seeds. Tomorrow or the next day we’ll raid the U.S. embassy.”
“But it’s impossible, Dimitri, impossible!”
“It’s easy. Just a raid, not an attempt at a takeover, that will come later. A raid will be unexpected, it’s simple to execute. You can easily grab the embassy for an hour, hold the ambassador and everyone captive for an hour or so while you sack it. Americans do not have the will to resist. That’s the key to them! Here are the plans of the buildings and the numbers of marines and I will be there to help. Your coup will be immense - it will hit world headlines and totally embarrass Bazargan and Khomeini, and even more the Americans. Don’t forget who the real enemy is and that now you have to act fast to grab the initiative from Khomeini. …”
It had been easy to convince them. It will be easy to create the diversion, he thought. And it’ll be easy to go straight to the CIA basement office and radio room, blow the safe, and empty it of all documents and cipher books, then up the back stairs to the second landing, turn left, into the third room on the left, the ambassador’s bedroom,
