Exit Wound (14 page)

45

We hit some turbulence as we crossed the Persian Gulf, some rough stuff that toppled the Iranian businessman in the seat next to me headlong into my lap and prompted the lads in the row behind us to grab their Korans and start asking the all-merciful one to give the pilot a helping hand.

I manhandled the Iranian back into his all-too-narrow economy-class seat and got busy with Kettle’s crib-sheets – as you do when you’re off to work not knowing anything about the subject.

I knew all too well that if the Revolutionary Guards really wanted to grill me on what I ought to know after five years as a defence journalist, I’d be seriously in the shit – unless they were prepared to let me ask the audience or, better still, phone a friend.

The Iranian nuclear issue had demonstrated just how keen they were to stand on their own two feet and trade punches with the big boys. The list of countries suspected of helping Tehran with its reactors, enrichment sites and isotope separation plants was a long one. There wasn’t much point in building a nuclear bomb if you didn’t have the means to deliver it and the mullahs had been hard at work on that front too.

In 1985, they’d secretly funded North Korea to develop a long-range version of the Scud missile that Saddam had fired at Tel Aviv during the 1991 Gulf War. In exchange for the cash, North Korea gave Iran full access to the technology. Iran had had a long-range version of the Scud by the early nineties, but they had needed something even bigger. By 1998, with a lot of help from the Russians, the North Koreans and some key pieces of Chinese kit, they’d had the Shahab-3, capable of lobbing a 1,000-kilo warhead 1,300 kilometres – far enough not only to hit Israel but also Ankara, capital of NATO-aligned Turkey.

In spite of UN sanctions against companies in Russia, China and North Korea, the missile-building technology had continued to flow into Iran. By 2008, the Shahab-3’s range had increased to 2,000 kilometres, enough to threaten much of southern Europe. As Kettle had said, when it came to developing hardware, these guys had it in their blood. They weren’t just a bunch of goatherds who’d wandered out of the desert.

What the Iranians had achieved with their nuclear- and ballistic-missile programmes they’d repeated across other parts of their defence industry. The US had even given them a helping hand. In 1985, Oliver North had hopped on a plane to Tehran and cut a covert deal to supply spare parts for Iranian HAWK and TOW missile systems via Israeli intermediaries in return for a good few suitcases full of readies and the release of US hostages in Lebanon. The cash helped fund another illegal CIA operation – against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scandal worked its way into the press the following year. If Julian’s intel was right, it was what had given Altun his first taste of international power and money-broking. He’d been one of the young bloods in the background, learning everything he could – not only from his Iranian bosses, but from the Pentagon as well.

Once the Iranians had worked out how to build spare parts for their inventory of US fighter jets and missiles, they’d then set about creating their own platforms. Within the past five years they’d unveiled their own domestically produced combat aircraft, helicopters, tanks and submarines. These lads really were the region’s superpower.

I glanced at the guy now slobbering away happily in the next-door seat, and tried to square what I saw with what I read. I decided that whatever shortcomings he might have on the etiquette front, these people were on a roll.

I picked up the M3C file again and started to leaf through it.

The conglomerate’s breadth of capabilities was huge. It was literally a one-stop shop for any weapon you could think of.

In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s state-owned weapons industry had been made up of multiple companies, many of which were competing against each other for the same business at home and abroad. This state of affairs clearly made no sense at all, but had continued – for almost two decades – until a couple of years ago when an ex-KGB oligarch who’d developed interests right across the sector had persuaded his government to put the nation’s entire missile industry under one roof. His roof, naturally.

Even the Russian state media, which almost always toed the party line, had cried foul. Not that it had made any difference. Every oligarch knew his continued wellbeing depended on two things: where he happened to be sitting when the Soviet Union reverted to good old Mother Russia; and who he happened to know in the corridors of power.

Like most of his oligarch mates, this particular boy had been in the right place at the right time in 1991 – so much so that after the initial flurry of interest in the deal, the Russian media gave him and his business projects a wide berth. There wasn’t even a name check or picture of him.

M3C had offices in Moscow and production facilities along the river Volga between Moscow and Rybinsk. It also had its own weapons proving ground, a closed-off area inside a military training ground the size of Wales, to the east of a place called Vologda, about five hundred K to the north-east.

My next-door neighbour started to fart like a trooper. I reached up and adjusted the air-conditioner.

PART FIVE

46

The Airbus’s first encounter with the Imam Khomeini International Airport runway wasn’t its last – it continued to bounce for several hundred metres before the pilot slammed on the reverse thrust. The fun and games were all lost on my neighbour. He jolted awake with a final snort, shot to his feet before the plane had even turned off the runway and started rummaging around in the overhead locker.

I stared out of the window. The Imam Khomeini International Airport had been built to commemorate the mastermind of 1979’s Islamic Revolution. The blurb in the seat pocket in front of me said it had opened officially in May 2004 and was designed to take over from Mehrabad as Tehran’s main airport for foreign air travel. Mehrabad, in the meantime, had been designated as Tehran’s principal domestic airport. Gripping stuff. Kettle would have been on the edge of his seat.

From my brief sweep of our surroundings as the plane trundled along the taxiway it was clear that IKIA was only half finished, whatever it said on the tin. Much of it was still a building site. Diggers tore along the perimeter fence, sending up clouds of dust behind them. Men with hod-loads of bricks over their shoulders stared at the plane as it bumped past them. The skeletons of half-completed buildings rose from the dirt on either side of the runway.

Beyond the fence, I could see nothing but scrub and rubble. Nobody was ever going to contest the building of another runway here; it might only have been twenty miles south of Tehran, but in reality it was in the middle of nowhere.

In the distance, half hidden by shit kicked up by the construction work, were rows of military transport aircraft – a hallmark of the developing-world welcome. There, among them, parked in front of a modern, single-storey building, was a gleaming white Dassault Falcon 7X.

As soon as the aircraft rocked to a stop, everybody sprang to their feet to follow the example of my farting friend, who was already elbowing his way down the aisle and powering up his mobile. I waited until the plane was three-quarters empty before I got out of my seat and pulled down my day-sack.

As soon as I stepped off the jetway into the terminal I could see big brother was watching me. There were CCTV cameras everywhere. I tucked behind a group of passengers from my flight and scanned the faces coming the other way. All I got back was a shed-load of gawping from suspicious-looking Iranians. I hadn’t seen a Westerner since we’d stopped off at Dubai.

The inside of the terminal was as modern as anything I’d ever been in. My Timberlands squeaked on the polished marble as I followed the signs in Farsi and English to Immigration.

The military presence was low-key until I got to Passport Control. Iranians and Arabs were directed one way; I was sent the other. I followed a roped-off walkway until eventually I ended up facing a stern-looking woman in her twenties seated in a glass booth. It was flanked by two AKs, each with a green-uniformed squaddie firmly attached. I glanced over my shoulder. The welcome was exclusively for me. I knew the best way to deal with situations like this was to look intimidated. People in booths like to wield power over others. It makes them feel good.

The woman adjusted the arms of her thick black specs beneath her thick black head covering and beckoned me towards her. ‘Passport.’

I handed it over. Now I was closer I could see her face was more Cindy Crawford than Ugly Betty. She had smooth skin, a small, slightly upturned nose, and gleaming white, perfectly uniform teeth. She looked so perfect she could have been chiselled. And, coming from Tehran, she might very well have been. More plastic-surgery and sex-change operations were performed here than in LA or Bangkok – another useless nugget I’d picked up among the stuff I’d learnt last night from Julian’s int pack.

She looked up from my passport. No smile, just disdain. ‘Your business, Mr Manley?’

First trick question. She was already holding my passport: the London media visa stated exactly what I was here for.

‘I’m here for IranEx – the aerospace and defence exhibition. I’m a journalist.’

She seemed to take it in her stride. She slid the passport under a scanner and stared into space while her computer crunched away at the data.

The two AK-holders glared at me as if I was George W himself. But that was OK: they got as much bullshit fed to them about us as we did about them. I just carried on playing dumb, not getting too smart, and looking a little bit scared.

Bang, bang.

I glanced down. She was stamping my passport.

‘Enjoy your stay in the Islamic Republic. Now I need your fingerprints.’ She pointed to a small box covered with a green rag. They used the same system in the US: place a finger on the glass tray and she’d take a picture. The only difference here was the absence of wipes, just the same bit of rag for everyone.

47

Like Iran’s defence industry, my little light reading in Tufnell Park last night had told me, its internal security apparatus shouldn’t be underestimated. Not much was known about Tehran’s counter-intelligence set-up, but what was, wasn’t good. No single organization appeared to have complete control. That was good to hear: it meant there were gaps in the system. The problem was, I didn’t know where the gaps were.

There were three groups I had to worry about. The first was MoIS, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or Vevak, as it was known in Farsi. It had around fifteen thousand full-time members all doing their meanest for the Republic. It had lost some of its powers in the 1990s following a scandal in which a truckload of Iranian dissidents, mainly Sunni Kurds, had ended up very dead – a fact that made even the lapdog Iranian press sit up and complain. Perhaps it had occurred to them that they might be next in the queue. To show it was still on the side of the people, the Iranian government drummed up some charges against what it called ‘rogue elements’ in Vevak and, after some ritual bloodletting, everybody went away happy. Except the rogue elements. They’d ended up facing Mecca, but six feet under.

In the meantime, the power of the second mob, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Intelligence Branch, had increased. Much smaller than Vevak, the IRGC Intelligence Branch were fearsome in their loyalty to the state – they were the Iranian equivalent of the Gestapo, in effect, and swore death to the enemies of the Islamic Revolution. I decided to try to give them a wide berth.

Then there was the Basij Resistance Force, a volunteer army of around a million people, mostly old men, who had volunteered after completing their military service, or others too young to join the army. A bit like the Hitler Youth, I supposed.

The Basij had a history of martyr-style suicide attacks dating back to the Iran–Iraq war, which had claimed a million lives on both sides during the 1980s. These lads were the ultimate guided weapon. They’d run across enemy minefields to clear them, or load up with explosives and detonate themselves on top of an Iraqi tank or trench.

Like the Stasi in East Germany, the Basij were also the ‘eyes and ears’ of the revolution. Put a foot wrong or badmouth the government and, chances were, someone, somewhere would tell the Basij. The next thing you knew, the lynch mob would be at your door.

The police force comprised around forty thousand regulars under the control of the Ministry of the Interior, but compared to Vevak, the IRGC and the Basij, these guys were pushovers. And even though the mullahs appeared to view women with complete contempt, it didn’t stop them recruiting tens of thousands into the ranks of the secret police.

I wondered where Ms Perfect fitted into this picture. Perhaps the Tourist Board corps.

My bag was the only one left on the carousel by the time I reached the baggage hall. It didn’t look as if it had been tampered with, but of course it had. Otherwise they would have let me take it on board as hand luggage, as I’d planned to.

I walked out into the arrivals hall and spotted a tall guy in his early thirties, in a very shiny black leather jacket, holding up a placard. He had a neatly groomed goatee and was so thin his Adam’s apple looked as though it was fighting to get out of his neck. A pair of round, wire-framed glasses perched on the end of his incongruously bulbous nose. The scrawl on the placard read: ‘Jame Munley – travel from Dubai’.

48

Majid Forsheh was from the Ministry of Information. He’d been assigned to me at the personal behest of the minister, he proudly informed me, to attend to my every need for the duration of my stay in the Islamic Republic.

One look at Majid, with his white shirt buttoned all the way up and no tie – an evil Western invention – told me he wasn’t just here to help me on and off the buses. Everything about him reeked of security. But what had I expected? If it was an open secret that defence exhibitions were crawling with spooks, then it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to get a minder. But that was OK, because I had no choice. Getting what Julian wanted – and, more importantly, what I wanted – was what I was here for. I’d just have to work around him.

Majid insisted on carrying my case as we walked to his car. ‘Did you have a pleasant trip, Mr Munley?’

‘Why don’t you call me Jim?’ I gave him a five-hundred-watt smile. ‘Fantastic, mate. Great passengers, good food and first-rate in-flight entertainment. I’ll never be touching British Airways again.’

Majid beamed like a lottery winner. ‘And what do you think of our new Imam Khomeini International Airport?’

‘I think the Ayatollah would have approved. Beats our Terminal Five hands down.’

‘Yes, it is most impressive, is it not, Mr Munley?’

We’d established, then, that Majid didn’t do sarcasm – and that he didn’t like the name Jim. Maybe I should have kept it more formal.

We stopped by a Mercedes E-class that had pulled over in a bus lane. A guy in a short-sleeved white shirt – buttoned up, of course – had been pretending to read a newspaper as he sat behind the wheel. He awoke with a start when Majid sprang the boot and shot out to help with my bags long after the moment had passed. He was in his sixties and balding, but had forearms the size of logs and shoulder muscles that rippled under his shirt. Wrestling was a big thing here, and this old boy looked like he could still go a few rounds.

Majid sat in the passenger seat. I got in the back. The airport’s public-address system called the faithful to prayer just as the sun began to set over the distant mountains.

‘I expect you are tired, Mr Munley, so we will go straight to your hotel. You are booked into the Bandar, are you not? Three stars. A very nice hotel, very central. Your people chose well.’ I caught his smile in the rear-view mirror. ‘This is your first time in Iran?’

My first time, I acknowledged. But on the basis of what I’d seen so far, it certainly wouldn’t be my last.

He turned around and shook my hand. ‘Then welcome. I hope you will enjoy your stay here very much.’

The wrestler pulled out of the bus lane and almost ran into a taxi. There was a screech of brakes and a sudden whiff of bubbling rubber, then an angry exchange between the two drivers. But one glance at Majid and the other guy got right back into his box.

That told me just about everything I needed to know. I’d been placed very firmly in the tender loving care of the IRGC’s Intelligence Branch.