The Enemy Within

The two officers climbed aboard, and the bodyguards, still moving by the numbers, ran to join them. Once the last pair of Special Forces soldiers scrambled inside the troop compartment, the pilot lifted off, using full torque to get the Hucy moving as quickly as possible.

Buffeted by high winds, the helicopter raced north toward Tehran at two hundred kilometers an hour.

Taleh sat motionless, watching the ruined factory shrink and fall away behind him. His thoughts mirrored the bleak, bomb-shattered landscape below.

In the mid-1970s Amir Taleh had been a junior officer, freshly commissioned and serving under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Those had been difficult times for any Iranian of conscience, especially for one in the Anny.

Driven by the impulse to regain Iran’s place as the Middle East’s leading power, the Shah had embarked on a series of massive projects to modernise, to Westernize, his nation. There had been progress. Schools, hospitals, and factories sprouted across an ancient, once-impoverished landscape. But the price had been high. Precious traditions, customs, and religious beliefs had been ground underfoot in the central government’s rush to ape the West.

Ironically, the rapid oil price hikes engineered by OPEC only made matters worse. The gushing flood of petrodollars had intensified corruption; always a way of life for many in the Pahlavi court. Billions had been squandered on extravagances and on ill-conceived public works. Through it all, rampaging inflation made life harder and harder for the vast majority of Iranians.

Stung by the first stirrings of mass dissent, the Shah’s gov ernmenthad reacted badly, handing over more and more power to the dreaded secret police, the SAVAK.

Taleh remembered the ever-present SAVAK informers all too well. At the Tehran officers’ academy, one of his classmates had disappeared one night. No one was sure of the young man’s crime certainly, Taleh had never seen him commit any treasonous offence. His friends had dared not ask his fate, and even his family had never been told what had happened to him. The SAVAK operated as a law unto itself.

After receiving his lieutenant’s commission, Taleh had been fortunate. He’d been sent to the United States, one of the many talented junior officers selected for further military training by the Shah’s patron country. The long, difficult months spent in Infantry Offficers’ Basic and Ranger School had taught him much. He’d come to know and respect many of his instructors and his fellow students. They were tough, dedicated men soldiers to the core.

He had felt less admiration for America as a whole. Outside its military, American society seemed strangely lacking somehow sadly incomplete. Its people were often spiritless, overly materialistic, and selfish. Taleh suspected it was because they had no unifying faith no common bond to give them strength.

Despite that, Taleh had learned what he could, and he had learned it quickly and well. Then he had returned home to find a country in chaos.

AVAK excesses had at last sparked the very unrest the Shah so feared. Confronted by mass demonstrations and riots, Iran’s ruler turned to a reluctant Army, ordering it to impose martial law, to crush its own people at gunpoint.

Taleh grimaced. Those were ugly memories. He could still see the broken, bleeding bodies in his mind’s eye. Hundreds had died in the street fighting: idealistic students, devout, gray-bearded clerics, and chador-clad women. Even children had been caught in the cross fire. But at least none of them had died at his hands.

He could still recall the look of mingled anger, pity, and understanding that had crossed his commander’s face when AmirTaleh one of the officer corps’ rising stars had refused to obey any order to fire on the crowds. There had been a blood price to pay for such defiance, of course.

Taleh shifted slightly, still conscious of the old scars across his back. He’d been arrested immediately and taken to a secret SAVAK prison. There he had endured countless beatings, countless acts of cruelty and torture. But he had survived. Scourged by men, he had grown ever more steadfast in his faith.

As God had willed.

When the Shah finally fell from power, he waited for his freedom. He waited in vain. The Islamic Revolution, which should have been his salvation, simply replaced one set of jailers with another. To the mullahs, Taleh’s refusal to obey the Shah’s martial-law orders meant nothing. In their eyes, his military training in America had “Westernized” him beyond redemption. They saw him and the other young officers like him as “a threat to the Islamic society” they planned to build.

And so the faqih, the Islamic judges who now ruled Iran, had ordered the armed forces “purified.” Hundreds of fieldgrade and general officers were executed. Others escaped to the West and into a dreary, inglorious exile.