Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (8 page)

Chapter Thirteen

It was February 2010, close to Ambrose’s thirty-fourth birthday, and he was at a private shooting range in Bangkok. He leaned forward with a good wide stance and gently pulled the trigger on his .44, allowing the discharge to “surprise” him the way those marines had taught him in Baghdad. If he were surprised, they’d claimed, he wouldn’t flinch when the round went off. His sharp eyes saw a new hole open in his paper target seventy feet away.

Squeeze.
Blam
. Another hole.

Squeeze.
Blam
. Another hole.

Squeeze. Empty. Retrieve the target.

As the paper target raced forward on its track next to him, his guest at the shooting range emptied his third full magazine clip for an AR-15. That classic American assault rifle had been designed to kill Vietnamese guerillas with a 5.56x45mm round that mushroomed wickedly outward on impact. Per its design, Ambrose figured that Taimur Abdurrahman al-Duqmi had killed a couple dozen Viet Cong singlehanded. Too bad America hadn’t let Omani diplomats fight in the Tet Offensive.

As Ambrose took off his noise dampening earmuffs and lit a cigarette, the ambassador for the Sultanate of Oman finished his barrage and cracked a massive smile. He took off his own mufflers then retrieved his target. Nothing survived except for the very top of the paper, above the target’s silhouetted head. Ambrose supposed that meant the Omani had reduced his opponent to nothing but a war scalp. Ambrose checked his own silhouette. He’d used a modest eleven round clip and scored eight good hits, with seven in the torso and one right through his enemy’s forehead. A ninth round had blown apart his enemy’s right shoulder. Two were lost in the fog of war, but nine out of eleven was good enough for light practice on a Sunday, he figured.

Taimur laughed. “God be praised, Ambrose—here I thought I’d done well. You shoot like Clint Eastwood.”

Ambrose shrugged and said, “Different styles, Ambassador. Yours definitely works too.”

“Aye, maybe you’re correct. I haven’t shot one of these things in years, ever since my father would drive us children into the desert and scream until we’d blown two hundred empty Coca-Cola bottles apart.” He held the rifle sideways and appreciated its dark length for a moment. “And God only knows why that’s the sort of thing I’d miss. My father was a viper.”

“Home is home,” Ambrose replied.

“Aye, correct again. Thank you for this, truly. I still don’t know how you made this happen,” the Omani diplomat said.

Ambrose blew smoke out his nose then said, “The U.S. military does joint training with the Thai Royal Army all the time, so they give our forces access to facilities like this. The marines at the American embassy go here weekly for target practice. I’ve always gotten along with marines, so they give me the passcode for the building and don’t mind if I use it once in a while.”

Taimur put away his gun in Ambrose’s black duffel bag, then took a nearby rag and wiped his hands off. He’d removed the flowing brown Omani robes befitting a nobleman of his rank before hopping into Ambrose’s diplomatic-issue Range Rover. Taimur said, “Ah, and what if the Thais caught you in here?”

“They haven’t yet, and here’s hoping they don’t for the next six weeks, until my leave is up.”

The Omani ambassador smiled again and pressed, “God willing. And how much more trouble would you be in if the Thais caught you here with an Arab-looking foreigner like me, who doesn’t have American embassy credentials?”

Ambrose finished putting away his own gun, then zipped the duffel bag tight and slung it over his shoulder. “Seven out of ten. Maybe an eight, depending on the Thai,” he said as he headed up the stairs, out of the basement shooting range. Taimur remembered to turn out the lights after them.

Bangkok, like most Asian megacities, had no downtown. That meant there was no way to avoid traffic, and not even a good way to predict the difference between gridlocked and physically impenetrable, once a driver got on the road. So Ambrose and the Omani ambassador had a lot of time to kill as they inched their way down the implacable multilane grind of Sathon Tai Boulevard towards the unassuming embassy of Oman, where the ambassador would claim he’d just gotten back from a spa retreat. He’d donned his robes and was adjusting his turban in the car’s rearview window, trying to look like a man who had done sordid things with Thai massage girls, instead of a man who had gotten in touch with his inner Rambo on a restricted military shooting range.

Ambrose cleared his throat and said, “Taimur, friend, I know we’ve got another hour in this car together before traffic gets even close to your embassy, but I should ask now before I forget: did you have any luck with that thing I asked you about?”

Taimur’s slender face and alert eyes beamed amusedly. “Come off it, Ambrose. We both know this entire afternoon has been a quid pro quo, with you sneaking me into that shooting range and me getting you the documents you requested,” he said.

Ambrose looked at all of his mirrors, searching for a tail that he couldn’t imagine actually existing, before responding, “So you found something, then?”

Taimur nodded and looked through his navy blue Bulgari calf skin suitcase. He pulled out a sealed manila courier’s envelope and sat it on Ambrose’s lap. He said, “Aye, my Iranian friend found me what you asked for, although you referring to it as ‘something’ seems a bit generous. If I’d known that’s all you wanted, I would’ve told you to bribe an Iranian embassy clerk yourself. Even an American could have walked out with that stuff.”

Traffic was at a standstill, so Ambrose opened the envelope with a crisp slash of his long thumbnail across the flap. “Value’s in the eye of the buyer, not the seller,” he responded.

The Omani snorted. “And the Syrians say that an ignorant person is his own enemy.”

“And the Indonesians say a smart man is a humble man.”

“You’re not humble.”

Ambrose smiled as he opened the folder and pulled out a stack of fifty-odd sheets of paper, each containing the printed image of a child in black and white. Every one of them was a boy wearing a headband with the words “God is great” emblazoned across it, dressed in military fatigues and holding an AK-47.

The Khomeini regime took those photos of each child who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, referring to them as “martyrdom portraits” depicting brave young zealots only moments before they would sacrifice themselves to defend holy Iran against the godless armies of Saddam Hussein. Many of the boys wore keys hanging from their necks. The ayatollahs tossed those keys out like candy before battles, telling children they would open the gates to paradise. There were thousands of such photos in existence, although maybe only one in ten child soldiers had been able to sit for a photograph before adults forced them to run screaming into battle as human minesweepers. In most portraits Ambrose had seen, the children weren’t even entrusted with real guns. Those boys would have shared a wooden rifle between photo shoots, then rushed into the warzone unarmed.

Ambrose paid attention to the typed biographical notes at the corner of each picture, giving the date, place, and name of the subject. He said, “All photos taken from the Iranian Southern Command, all dating between 1984 and 1988, all last names starting with ‘M.’ Good work, Taimur.”

Taimur said something in response, but Ambrose didn’t hear it. He was too busy flipping through the photos, which were arranged alphabetically according to the Arabic-Farsi alphabet.
Maghadi, Mahdavi, Mahmoudieh, Mazanderani,
he murmured to himself as he flipped.

They all looked the same, with the same vacant look in their eyes. It wasn’t the emptiness you’d see in the eyes of an idiot or a fanatic. Those boys all had the glassy, unbelieving eyes of children who couldn’t fathom what in the hell their adults were up to. They all looked like they’d heard the sales pitch about keys to paradise, but didn’t see how to square that circle by putting on a headband, holding a fake gun, and staring into a camera.

Only one boy’s eyes had filled that disbelieving empty place, and they belonged to Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi. His eyes weren’t glassy and his gun sure as hell didn’t look wooden. Mashhadi’s smooth face had the calm, stark gravity of a desert under a summer sun, ready to obliterate anything that gazed upon its sere majesty. His picture wasn’t hastily taken before any battle, either. In his picture, Mashhadi stood with one oversized boot atop the dead body of an Iraqi soldier still clinging to his own AK-47. The boy looked nothing like a child soldier, but rather a British hunter during the occupation of India, posing next to a slaughtered tiger. The picture dated from 1986, making Jamsheed Mashhadi fourteen years old when it was taken. Ambrose already saw an entire world of darkness spinning inside Mashhadi’s young eyes.

Taimur interjected, “Sorry, I don’t know how that one got in there. That isn’t a child soldier, is it?”

Ambrose whispered, “He might have been, once. Not by 1986 though.”

The Omani ambassador shifted like his seatbelt had grown too tight. “That’s all you were looking for, isn’t it? That one picture of an Iranian soldier. Why?” he asked.

Ambrose lit a cigarette and rolled down his window, spilling all of the sheltering AC out of his Range Rover and trading it for the filthy heat of Bangkok. He answered, “Because I don’t have any real hobbies, Taimur. I just have obsessions.”

2012

September

Sunday & Monday

Chapter Fourteen

The howling winds that circled all twenty thousand feet of Mount Damavand rocked the black Audi as it hugged the curves of the narrow mountain road that overlooked northern Tehran. It shouldn’t have been taking the turns so fast, and in fact its driver didn’t want to, but Qasem Soleimani didn’t have time to waste, and he had very little sympathy for his driver’s opinions to the contrary. He only had to say “drive” and let his natural air of quiet menace do the rest.

General Qasem Soleimani served the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the elite military entity that defended the holy cause of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. His duties began in 1979, when the legendary Imam Khomeini returned from exile to overthrow the corrupt and brutal shah of Iran. Young men like Soleimani rose up from their jobs as petty laborers to engage in urban warfare until the dying shah fled the country and Khomeini was victorious. Then they rose again when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980. He claimed that Iraqi troops would occupy Tehran within a month. He was mistaken, although it would take eight years and thousands of lives before the Iraqis learned it.

Youths like Soleimani entered that war as boys, and came out as men made of iron. They were sick of combat, but they also no longer feared it; the western world had used Saddam Hussein as a stooge to stop Imam Khomeini’s revolution, and they had failed. So the Revolution survived, and now Soleimani’s duty would not end until all of humanity surrendered to the will of the Hidden Imam, the coming messiah of Shiite Muslims. That didn’t mean Soleimani was a religious man, however. Like all Iranian leaders he
had
to be a bit religious, but that’s not what drove him. He loved the game, and Shiite zeal was one of the rules for the team that Soleimani played on.

Soleimani played his part by leading the Guard’s foreign operations division, a self-contained organization called the Quds Force that had a unique mission: not just to defend the Revolution, but to export it. Under Soleimani, they had done so with lethal precision across the Middle East and beyond. Synagogue bombings in Argentina, assassinated diplomats in Bangkok, the rise of Shiite militias in Lebanon and Iraq—all of them were the work of the Quds Force. All of them were attacks on the hated Israeli dogs and the Great American Satan that propped Israel up. He read on the internet that some CIA fool had called him “the most powerful operative in the Middle East.” Qasem Soleimani found the idea charming, even if it was just typical American melodrama. If he was powerful, though, it came down to following two maxims: be political enough to guard your back at home, and stay in the shadows abroad.

But now world events were forcing him out of the shadows, and he didn’t like it one damn bit. Quds Force strategy relied on two prongs: the lethal Hezbollah movement in tiny Lebanon and the pro-Iranian government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Hezbollah was now the most powerful organization in Lebanon, and had even fought Israel to a standstill in 2006. Despite their small size, Iran had spent years training their partisans into the world’s most effective guerrillas. As Soleimani had once heard another hysterical American say, Hezbollah punched above its weight.

But Syria was a different story. Bashar al-Assad was a weak man who couldn’t hold together the dictatorship his father had built, and all of his enemies sensed it. The man had two jobs, and two jobs only: accept enough Iranian money to prop up his pathetic excuse for a dictatorship, and make sure Iran had an open pipeline to Hezbollah in Lebanon, where Quds Force could actually do some damage.

Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad had understood the deal, and kept up his end of it. His weakling son could not. Bashar had let small pro-reform riots in Damascus, the Syrian capital, blossom into a full-fledged civil war. Now foreign interlopers from Saudi Arabia, Europe, Turkey, and America had armed rebel groups to topple Assad’s government. Losing Syria meant the end of Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah, and therefore the destruction of one of its greatest assets in the shadow war against Israel. The only things that could stop that from happening were Russia and Iran. Vladimir Putin sold weapons openly to Assad’s government and gave the fool a bit of diplomatic coverage, but that left Iran to do the real work: embedding Quds Force military advisers and supplying Hezbollah deployments to help Assad win his war on the ground.

So Soleimani’s job was clear: he couldn’t lose Syria. Hezbollah was more than ready to help him, thank God. They needed the friendly government in Damascus even more than Iran did, so they had no problem wading through rivers of blood while that idiot Assad hid in his palace in Damascus. With enough weaponry, Soleimani suspected that the disciplined fighters of Hezbollah might be able to win the ground war outright. If they couldn’t, Soleimani would send in divisions of his own goddamned troops if need be. He
would not
lose Syria.

But it wasn’t entirely about the ground war in Syria. In the shadows, America and Israel were using every trick in their arsenals to topple Assad’s government and install a friendly regime that could break the Lebanon-Syria-Iran axis that supported the Islamic Revolution’s leaders in Iran. That’s where Soleimani came in: if the CIA and Mossad decided to start playing around in Iran’s back yard, Quds Force would make them suffer for it.

Soleimani was returning from Iraq, where he had entrusted friendly Shiite militias with enough explosives and rocket propelled grenades to incinerate half of Sunni Baghdad if the Americans moved openly against Syria. By getting all of that weaponry into Iraq, then discreetly leaking this information to the CIA, Qasem Soleimani had ensured that America knew just how costly such a war against Syria would be, without actually goading America into action. So the Great Satan was deterred, for the moment.

But that still left Israel, and the thought of Israel undeterred worried Soleimani more than America, Turkey, and the Saudis combined—because the Israelis were as good as the Quds Force, and sometimes better. They knew that Syria was only one theater in the larger war to stop Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal, and the Israeli prime minister had openly stated that such a weapon would never exist. When Israel made a threat like that in 1967, it took the country six days to humble half of the Arab world. When they made that kind of threat in 1980, Israeli warplanes reduced Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons facility to a smoking hole in the ground. Iran was better prepared than any of those Arab sham-dictatorships, certainly, but that was no reason to underestimate the skill or ruthlessness that Israel could summon when it felt threatened.

So that was why Soleimani’s Audi sped up that mountain road overlooking posh northern Tehran. At the end of the road was a majestic old Swiss-style chateau, built by the deposed shah, where Iran’s ruling ayatollahs retreated to discuss strategy whenever things got serious. As his Audi pulled into the chateau turnaround, Soleimani reckoned that he hadn’t seen so armored sedans in one spot since 2003, right before the American invasion of Iraq. Soleimani was glad so many of the clerics were in attendance. It showed that he’d been successful in convincing them how dangerous the world had become for servants of the Hidden Imam.

Things got even more serious when Soleimani walked towards the massive chateau doors and a single black-robed man turned up to greet him. He had a small dent in his broad forehead from long hours spent with his head to the ground in prayer, and a big chunk removed from his left ear where an assassin had barely missed his eye. His name was Kareem Kermani, and he was the personal attendant of Ali Khamenei—Guardian of the Faithful, Master of the Revolution, and Supreme Leader of Iran. Kareem seldom showed up alone.

Kareem greeted him with full Iranian custom, kissing Soleimani on the cheek while shaking his hand. His had heavy bags under his eyes and stubble across the rest of his face. He whispered into Soleimani’s ear, “Master General, thank you for making this meeting possible. We feel it is high time that your Syrian concerns be addressed.”

Soleimani nodded formally and said, “You are most welcome, Master Kermani. Please, tell me however I may help.”

“You can come with me, now. The Supreme Leader will see you.”

* * *

Ali Khamenei, heir to the Imam Khomeini, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Guardian of the Islamic Republic of Iran, looked like an old black and silver cat. Every line on his face made him look like an indulgent grandfather, and the thickness of his glasses suggested decades spent reading good books while everyone else slept. His silver beard was immaculate, and the black turban on his head complimented it perfectly. His fingernails were clean, he wore no jewelry, and his black robes were simple wool.

That only told half the story, Soleimani knew. Beneath his simple robe, Khamenei would be wearing body armor, maybe even with a sidearm of his own. Khamenei’s right hand was likewise invisible beneath the black robes. He had survived an assassin’s bomb in the early days of the Revolution, at the price of a paralyzed right hand. Grandfatherly façade aside, Khamenei’s hidden hand told the true story: he was a survivor, and a revolutionary, and absolute ruler of seventy-five million Iranian souls. Sitting in a wood chair with finely carved arms, black robes billowing out around him, Khamenei made his job look easy. Some people were just good at what they did.

“Qasem, friend. Favor me, and take a seat.” Khameini’s voice was neutral: not reedy, not rumbling, not high, not low. It was easy to listen to him carefully.

Soleimani bowed before taking a wooden seat to the Supreme Leader’s left. Khamenei motioned for some tea, Kareem went running, and soon they both had little blue porcelain cups in their hand. It smelled good, and the steam wafting upward from the cups made Soleimani forget the cold mountain air outside the chateau.

“Thank you for seeing me, Master. It is good to see so many of your allies here as well,” Soleimani said deferentially.

Khamenei smiled and waved his good hand while replying, “When General Soleimani calls, the people answer. We trust you, Qasem. You are brave to a fault, cunning like Satan, and loyal to the end. Very loyal.”

Soleimani didn’t like how this was starting. “You give me too much credit, Master, but thank you nonetheless. I’d just say I suffer from a short man complex.” He drank some tea, tasting a hint of apricots and sea salt. “Kareem said you are here to discuss the deteriorating situation in Syria. May I ask whether we will discuss my proposals at some point?” He asked.

“We have already discussed your proposals. They were excellent, and have been adopted almost in their entirety,” the Supreme Leader said. Steam from the tea had fogged up Khamenei’s glasses. He set the cup down and rubbed the lenses against the hem of his robe. It was single crisp motion, so dexterous that Soleimani barely remembered that Khamenei had to do it all with one hand

“All—“

“Yes,” Khamenei put his glasses back on just as quickly, “all implemented, or close enough. Firstly, we agree with your assessment that Iraq has been effectively absorbed into Iran’s sphere of influence and is no longer the Revolution’s primary theater. That victory is largely yours, Qasem, and do not think we will forget it. Therefore, we also agree that Hezbollah should be armed with previously off-limit weaponry, to offset the Israeli Zionists. We also agree that Syria is becoming very dangerous, internationally speaking, and the risk of direct conflict with the Great Satan and the Zionists grows high. Likewise, we agree that if our current forces helping the Syrian army
do
openly fight Americans or Israelis, the blowback may spiral out of control.”

Khamenei took a sip of tea, quickly enough to avoid getting too much steam on his glasses. He rarely made the same mistake twice. He continued, “At least, the blowback will be too much to control right now, while the program is still so far from completion.”

There was only one
program
he could have been talking about: the nuclear reactor program hidden in a dozen hardened underground facilities across Iran. The nuclear reactor program that may or may not have been pursuing nuclear weapons. Soleimani rarely mentioned it; in fact, Khamenei himself was the only person who
could
mention it without raising suspicion. Even if he couldn’t say the word, Soleimani knew that’s what this was all about: Syria was a sideshow, a pissing match to see whether America and Israel had the will to stop Iran when it counted. If they acted in Syria, that would radically change Khamenei’s calculations for how they would treat Iran. And if they were silent on Syria…

“So we will not engage any Americans or Israelis openly, if they enter into Syria?” Soleimani asked.

The Supreme Leader nodded. “That was your recommendation, wasn’t it? No, we won’t take that chance. That means we’ll be keeping our involvement in the Syrian uprising to a manageable level: logistics, some advisers, maybe a spare platoon in rural areas. But we’ll keep boots off the ground wherever possible. I’ve spoken with Beirut, and Hezbollah is willing to do our fighting for us…for a price.”

“They’re served us well. Some reward may be in order,” Soleimani conceded.

Khamenei smiled, saying, “We give them hundreds of millions of dollars a year, offer them access to top-end Chinese and North Korean weaponry, and train their commanders in Iran itself. We owe them very little, but Hezbollah thinks otherwise, and that’s something we can live with so long as this war still needs winning.”

Soleimani poured them both some more tea, clearing his throat before he said, “What did you arrange for them, Master?”

“Syria is giving Hezbollah nerve gas,” Khamenei paused, looking Soleimani dead in the eye, “A direct Syria—Hezbollah transfer with no immediate Iranian involvement. Plausible deniability at its best.”

Soleimani breathed out hard. He was careful when he responded, “Master, I recommended giving them advanced radar equipment, and some stinger missiles we captured in Afghanistan. Giving them such notorious weaponry—“

“Does the job. Qasem,” Khamenei reached out his liver-spotted good hand, “I’m old. I have seen three decades of schemes and plots and wars. I am tired of half measures. You wanted Israel deterred, yes? So let’s actually deter them. Not with words, not with innuendo. Let’s deter the Zionists with the threat of Jewish children foaming at the mouth in Haifa. Let’s make them realize that there is no place for the Zionist experiment in this Godly age.”