Kate, Marshall’s wife, wanting to maintain a normal routine for the three children, drove around stacks of burning tires three times a week at five in the morning to reach the Ice Palace for Steve’s hockey practice. “By that time, all the revolutionaries are asleep,” was her logic.
The Church family lived near a mosque where anti-Shah crowds would assemble after the nine p.m. curfew. They could hear the rising level of their voices until the sound of powerful engines and clanking tracks of Chieftain tanks overwhelmed the chanting and the shouting of demonstrators. One night, a letter addressed to Marshall that had been slipped under the door carried a death threat against the Church family: “Leave Iran by 1 December or we will kill your family,” was the message. Kate and Marshall moved the three children from the front bedrooms, whose curtains were most vulnerable to firebombs, as had been proven in an attack on a German businessman’s house down the street a week before, to the master bedroom that had no windows. In the day, life limped along in a semblance of normalcy, and people walked around the sandbag shooting positions left behind by the militias for the next night.
The American ambassador, dubbed “Candide” by Marshall, after Voltaire’s protagonist “all is for the best in the best of worlds,” would allow his political section to transmit only positive analyses to Washington:
The bank that was closed a month ago by a fire has reopened; the Shah has everything under control and this minor unrest will soon be quelled; the militias will go back to their classrooms and everyone will live happily ever after. What revolution?
It had taken the ambassador ten days to approve Marshall’s request to carry a weapon. His memorandum asking for authorization to use lower profile civilian license plates on his car to avoid the “shoot-me-I’m-a spy” diplomatic plates was still buried in Candide’s In-Box.
* **
Marshall turned the radio off and the rhythms of “Copacabana,” at least as ubiquitous during this revolutionary season as Khomeini’s propaganda cassettes brought clandestinely from Paris. He pulled the car over to pick up Abdelhak al Fassi, a tall, balding man with café au lait colored skin.
“Al hamdu’llah for this revolution,” the Moroccan intelligence officer said. “It thins out the traffic.”
Marshall sped away and turned right onto a street that led to the Sha-in-Sha expressway, a main artery linking Tehran’s northern suburbs to the downtown. To run agents in Tehran, car meetings had offered sufficient security in the past. However, because political turbulence had spilled out onto the streets, Marshall planned to rent a safe house for this operation. It was on his list but he hadn’t had time.
“What are the Arab countries telling the Shah?” Marshall asked after reviewing the cover for the meeting in case they were arrested, basic tradecraft from Spying 101. “Which ones are supporting the mullahs?”
“As you can guess, the kingdoms, Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are pledging support to the Shah,” al Fassi said. “But the PLO sees the turmoil as an opportunity. It’s putting its money on Khomeini. Arafat’s ‘Force 17’—his personal Mamluks and assassins—are training the ayatollah’s guard force in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. If Khomeini is successful in overthrowing the Shah, Arafat will have a powerful friend.”
“Does the Shah have the guts to take control? The last time, in 1953, he skipped out, left the country. Is the Shah asking for sanctuary?”
Church glanced at al Fassi, whom he had recruited for his excellent contacts in the Iranian military establishment and with the Arab embassies in Tehran. Although Marshall wasn’t absolutely certain that Al Fassi hadn’t reported the contact to his superiors in Rabat, his information was being read at the highest levels of the U.S. Government, but Marshall had to admit, with no discernible effect on U.S. policy. Al Fassi had already sent his family home to Morocco and had urged Marshall to do the same.
Turning his eyes back to the front, Marshall let his question hang. A roadblock loomed ahead. He immediately regretted having waited for authorization to change the plates on his car. He slowed down and looked in the rearview mirror, but it was too late to turn around. The back door was closed; another roadblock had materialized a hundred yards back.
In Iran’s extremely xenophobic and spy-conscious atmosphere, getting caught was not an option. Any official American was ipso facto a spy, and one meeting with an Arab diplomat on a quiet road at dusk was a sinister international plot. He would wind up first in Evin prison and then be at the center of a media blitz proving the Great Satan’s duplicity.
One of the men at the roadblock held a long gun over his head with both hands signaling for them to stop. Marshall brought his vehicle to ten yards of the oil barrels barring the road, just as he had practiced during the “crash and bang” driving course that had been part of his basic CIA training many years ago. Then, however, the training roadblocks consisted of two cars hood to hood. He wondered if the barrels were full.
He pressed down on the clutch with his left foot, put the car in first gear, and waited. Although he had managed to avoid them so far, he knew that these ad-hoc controls were sprouting up all over the city as the Shah’s uniformed army and police became less visible. Five days earlier, when Marshall had set up this meeting, he had not calculated that the roadblocks would
