EIGHT

THE CHAIN MURDERS

and the sights that rush in suddenly

turn seeing into a horrid thing,

even as they increase the temptation to look

over the expanse of this landscape dotted by white oaks,

or mummies

or faces of crystalline ice

or bodies of crystal salt,

all tugging at your eye to transform them.

—Mohammad Mokhtari, “From the Other Half”

WHEN SHAHRAM RAFIZADEH WAS NINE, his mother died, the revolution came, and he discovered poetry. Heavyset, mournful, with tight brown curls and warm, weary eyes, Shahram was the sixth of seven children born to a rice huller in a village called Shaft, in the northern Iranian province of Gilan. He shared sleeping quarters with his father and all his siblings, under a roof made of galvanized iron; at the crack of dawn, he got up to practice sports and recite poetry while his family begged him for a moment’s sleep.

Shahram was not sure he believed in God. His mother, while she lived, had prayed, but like many working-class people in their part of the country, the family leaned to the secular left. His father was poor but proud and law-abiding. Shahram wanted a bicycle. His father found a man willing to sell one for a price he could afford. But as he and Shahram wheeled the bike away, Shahram’s father remembered that he hadn’t collected a receipt. They went back to the seller, who said he couldn’t provide one. So, to Shahram’s distress, his father gave the man back the bicycle.

He spent his mornings alone. His older siblings were in school, his father at work, his younger brother Bahram at his grandmother’s. His fourth-grade class met only in the afternoons. One of his older brothers, cleaning the attic, found two things he thought Shahram might use. One was an old space heater, the other a moldering volume of poetry that included selections from, and essays about, each of the great Persian poets, including Khayyám, Hafez, Mowlana, and Saadi. The binding was disintegrating. Shahram’s brother stitched it together by hand and gave the volume to Shahram.

The space heater was missing a plug. Shahram connected its naked wires to the 220-volt wall supply the next morning. A fierce electrical shock knocked him to the ground. One of his sisters found him unconscious when she came home from school in the afternoon. He thought he was lucky he hadn’t died.

The brother who gave him the heater and the poetry book was an active Marxist and an avid reader. When Shahram was younger, this brother had insisted that he read and write book reports before he could go out to play. Shahram, desperate to play, had read The Little Black Fish and other stories by Samad Behrangi. A teacher had given him a book he loved more, an obscure and haunting little story called Where Are You, Hasanak?

Published in 1970 and written in verse by one Mohammad Parnian, the story opened with a heavy snow falling on a prosperous village. The village people were frightened and retreated to their homes. But a little boy named Hasanak was determined to bring the sun back from behind the clouds. He led an army of children to the mountains, over the protests of their parents. There are wolves in the mountains, the adults objected, and snow. You will freeze to death up there. But Hasanak led the children on.

Halfway up the mountain, the wolves attacked. Hasanak knew that he and the other children had only so much time before the cold would set into their very bones. So he told the others to stay and fight the wolves while he continued upward to retrieve the sun.

Alone now and undaunted, Hasanak ascended into ever thinner, ever more frigid air, his young body wracked with cold and surely dying. Nevertheless he reached the summit. There he found the sun, sleeping.

“Sun!” he called. “Sun! Wake up!”

The sun awoke to the sound of Hasanak’s voice. It rose, casting warmth and light again over the village, and over the other villages, near and far, and over the icy mountain. But when the sun looked down, far below, on the mountain’s peak, it could see the frozen, lifeless body of young Hasanak.

Forever after, in the ears of the other children and in the rocks of the mountain, Hasanak’s voice still sounded.

“I will go and I will remove the snow,” it said.

“I will go and I will sweep the clouds.

“I will open the way in the dark clouds.

“And in the end I will find the sun.

“Whoever wants the sun

“Get up and follow me!”

• • •

AFTER THE ELECTRICAL SHOCK that didn’t kill him, Shahram left the heater aside for the poetry book, where for the first time he discovered the masters of Persian literature. He read the book to himself and he read it aloud, at the top of his voice. The poems issued from a place of emotion that was never totally submerged from Shahram’s conscious life. He began to write. He showed the poems to his older brother, who told him they were extraordinary and that Shahram might become a poet.

When Shahram was eleven, in 1981, Bani-Sadr was president and the Revolutionary Guard fought the Mojahedin-e Khalq in city streets. Shahram knew a boy in Shaft who had joined the Mojahedin. The boy was fatherless, very tall, and very poor, and he read a great many books. He’d survived the street clashes and fled for a time, but then he returned to Shaft to see his mother. Shahram was sitting at home when he heard a gunshot. He and his family ran toward the young Mojahed’s home, which they found surrounded by Revolutionary Guardsmen. Shahram recognized one guardsman, another neighborhood boy. That boy turned his gun on Shahram and his family. “If anyone steps forward,” he said, “I will shoot.”

The tall, poor young Mojahed had been praying in his mother’s home when a guardsman lurking at his window shot him in the forehead. The assailants then entered the house and decapitated the corpse. Shahram saw them drag his neighbor’s headless body into a car. It was a ghastly thing to see. He opposed the Islamic Republic because his brother and his brother’s friends were Marxists. But from that moment he opposed it from his gut.

Shahram lost his teen years in teen fashion. After finishing his first two years of high school in one, he grew lax in his studies and even forgot poetry to prowl the streets of Rasht, the capital of his province, with friends, eyes fixed to the distant and intermittent glimmer of passing excitement. One day something unexpected came. It was the spring of 1988, and Shahram, seventeen years old, had moved to Rasht. He was walking with his friends when he saw a woman on the street who stirred in him something he had not felt for any girl he had known. Her name was Bita, and she lived just a few blocks from him.

Shahram got her phone number. But Iranian tradition required introductions to be made by families and engagements arranged among parents. Dating was neither legal under the Islamic Republic nor acceptable to traditional families who prized female honor. So Shahram would dial Bita’s number from a pay phone, hanging up when her aunt, her mother, or her other family members answered. Finally, Bita picked up. Shahram told her that he loved her. After that they had secret phone conversations. Sometimes they arranged to meet at the movies. They couldn’t walk down the street together for fear of being apprehended by the Basij for immoral behavior, and equally for fear of Bita’s family. It was 1991 when at last they married. Shahram felt something inside him spring to life. He began to write poetry again, and to read.

Shahram’s older brother had settled in Tehran, where his work as a typesetter brought him into contact with poets and writers. He showed Shahram’s poems to some of those writers, who began corresponding with him, offering him their views on his work. Shahram exchanged letters with Ali Babachahi, the craggy-faced, wild-haired editor of Adineh, Iran’s most prominent secular literary magazine. Newly married, his confidence rolling high, Shahram moved with his wife to Tehran in 1992.

A friend in Rasht, the editor of a cultural magazine there, asked Shahram a favor. Since he was in Tehran, could he approach the secular poet and writer Mohammad Mokhtari for an article? the friend inquired. Shahram had never met Mokhtari, who was a well-known figure in Iranian letters. But he did as his friend asked, securing the article from the famous writer with a phone call.

Mokhtari invited Shahram to join him at a gathering at a friend’s house. It was a generous gesture from a literary eminence to a striving poet of twenty-two. Shahram felt his age acutely at the gathering. But when Mokhtari heard Shahram speak, he must have sensed in the portly, soft-eyed young man from Shaft a quality of mind kindred to his own. In front of all his friends, Mokhtari walked up to Shahram and planted a kiss on his forehead.

• • •

MOHAMMAD MOKHTARI was not a person to chew bubble gum at a gathering. But the last time Shahram saw him, on Monday, November 30, 1998, at a gathering of writers, Mokhtari was chewing gum. Now Shahram was stuck with that detail, insignificant and unforgettable.

The writers at the gathering mulled over their shock at terrible news. Nine days earlier Dariush Forouhar and his wife, Parvaneh, had been murdered and dismembered in their home. The Forouhars were secular nationalists. Dariush, seventy at the time of his death, had been a minister in Bazargan’s government, an activist for more than forty years. He and Parvaneh had criticized the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. On November 22, 1998, their bodies were found riddled with stab wounds. The killers had reportedly stabbed Dariush eleven times and Parvaneh, twenty-four, twisting the knife 180 degrees at each entry. They turned Dariush’s mutilated body to face Mecca. At the time of the murders, the Farouhar home was under surveillance by the intelligence ministry. No criminal could have entered unseen. The couple had entertained dinner guests that night, and the family’s lawyer would recount with some certainty that these guests committed the crime, tying Dariush to the chair where he sat talking with them in his study and surprising Parvaneh as she got ready for bed.

Two days earlier, another writer and critic of the regime had gone for a jog and never returned. Majid Sharif was an acolyte of Shariati’s and an editor of his posthumous books. He had also translated Nietzsche and Derrida into Persian. Tehran police found his body by the side of the road on November 24. Pirouz Davani, a leftist activist, had disappeared back in August. His body was never found.

Didn’t Mokhtari feel something was wrong with the Forouhar story? Shahram asked him. The train of death, Shahram said, had begun to roll.

That Saturday was a holiday. But Shahram, who wrote for the cultural section of a newspaper, was at work putting together Sunday’s edition when a friend called to tell him that Mokhtari had vanished. The friend, an editor, had assigned Mokhtari an article, and when he’d gone to pick it up from him at the appointed time, Mokhtari was nowhere to be found.

He’d been missing since he left home on Thursday evening at five o’clock to buy lightbulbs and milk, Mokhtari’s wife told Shahram when he called. The family was waiting until after the holiday to alert the media. But Shahram urged them to move faster. His brother Bahram swiftly placed a newspaper story under the headline “Where Is Mohammad Mokhtari?” So began a fearful week in Shahram’s life.

Shahram worked at the newspaper and at a publishing house called Tarh-e No, associated with the reformists, particularly Akbar Ganji. The religious intellectuals who gathered around Tarh-e No were afraid. Shahram could feel it. There was, as he would later put it, no feeling or smell that Mokhtari had been arrested. His disappearance was quiet and, for that reason, more ominous. In three or four days’ time, Mokhtari’s son identified the poet’s body at the morgue.

That very night, Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh went missing. Pouyandeh was a friend of Mokhtari’s, a writer and translator who was just then finishing a Persian translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He was found strangled in Shahriar, to the south and west of Tehran.

• • •

FROM THE TESTIMONY OF MOKHTARI’S KILLERS, Shahram would later reconstruct the final hours of his friend and mentor’s life. He committed this chronology to memory, as though its painful recitation could project Shahram’s presence backward, so that Mokhtari would have died in loving company instead of terror and solitude.

Mokhtari had gone to a store on Jordan Boulevard, near his home in North Tehran, to buy milk and lightbulbs. He did not know that as many as eight assailants followed him there in two cars, one a Peugeot and the other a taxi. When he started home, some men emerged from one of the cars and showed him a summons. They told him he was under arrest and to get in the car. For hours they drove him in circles around the north of Tehran. The plan was to murder him in the office the intelligence ministry maintained in Behesht-e Zahra, the enormous graveyard south of Tehran; but the operation was a secret one, and while the head of intelligence at Behesht-e Zahra knew about it, his underlings did not. The assassins were to wait until the building was empty.

Under cover of night, they ferried Mohammad Mokhtari through the necropolis, into the intelligence building, to a room where terrible things were known to happen. They laid him on his stomach and looped a length of rope around his neck. Men sat on his back and held his feet. One put a foot on his neck and pulled the rope. They put a cloth under his mouth to catch the blood. From experience, they knew how to tell when a man was dead by the change in color under his fingernails. When Mokhtari no longer struggled or breathed, when his nail beds were gray, they put him in the trunk of the Peugeot and drove to the back of the Rey Cement Factory in southeastern Tehran. There they emptied Mokhtari’s pockets and dumped his body.

Mohammad Mokhtari’s wife watched, with a group of friends and family members, as her husband’s coffin was loaded into a hearse. Then she stepped forward. She placed a pen in his coffin. She said, “I see him off with his weapon.”

• • •

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, Iran’s literary elite issued largely from the secular left. After the revolution, when the secular left was hunted and silenced where it was not exterminated, Iranian poets and writers retreated into private life. To write in the old literary style was to invite censorship, imprisonment, exile. Mohammad Mokhtari, secretary of the Iranian Writers Association in 1981, served a two-year prison sentence in 1982. The Writers Association was banned. A new literature, coaxed from the revolution’s doctrinaire cadres, praised the imams and retold religious narratives. The secular writers spent a decade in deep and perilous estrangement. Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, a novelist and playwright who had risen from poverty into the old elite, would later say that he lived permanently with the sense of a dagger at his back. No mainstream political figure or institution existed to defend the secular writer. The strictures of the constitution did not protect him.

Then came the Rafsanjani years, and with them Kiyan and the Center for Strategic Research. The religious intellectuals, including Soroush, Kadivar, Ganji, Hajjarian, and many others, had not been nurtured within the country’s old intellectual milieu. They were lower-middle-class, traditional people whose intellectual prominence came, sui generis, with the revolution. They spoke the language of religion and revolution. It was a language riven with contradictions, Shahram felt, starting even with Shariati: religious intellectuals could never quite reconcile Islam with the revolutionary drive for self-determination and free will. But because the reformists were insiders—so it seemed—they could issue bold, provocative calls for political freedom at far less cost than the secular intellectuals. The religious intellectuals were closer to the system. Some were even among its architects. They imagined they would be tolerated.

Some of these new religious intellectuals believed they could go so far as to declaim the injustice, even the impiety, of the theocracy and call for the separation of mosque and state. In a 1992 lecture, the former premier, Mehdi Bazargan, made what looked for all the world like a plea for secularism. Kiyan printed an elaboration of that lecture a year later. “Wherever religion and government (even ideology and state) are merged and put in the hands of one ruler,” Bazargan wrote in the Kiyan piece, “people are deprived of freedom of opinion and the will to manage their affairs. It is always religion that loses, not government.” Indeed, he wrote, Iranians “have seen such a face of Islam and Muslimness, of those who claim to act in the name of religion and government . . . that they have come to doubt their own religious beliefs and knowledge.” Kiyan’s editors prefaced Bazargan’s contribution with an apology to the former prime minister for his mistreatment at the hands of Islamic radicals, among whom were some of the Kiyan Circle’s own number: “Now that the fervor has subsided and fiery radicalism is over, and also the direction of social developments has become evident, many are now trying to ask for his forgiveness, especially the young generation who attacked his policies.”

The secular intellectuals observed with cautious excitement the slow shift of the reformist intellectuals toward a nearly secular vision of the state. Their situation was infinitely more precarious than that of the reformists. Still, the religious dissidents had helped create breathing room for their secular peers. Taking advantage of the more liberal issuance of publishing licenses in the first years of Rafsanjani’s presidency, secular-minded editors began founding magazines, including Adineh. There the secular writers began to publish again. And they began to reencounter one another at clandestine gatherings they called “consensus meetings.” When Shahram Rafizadeh moved to Tehran, this was the circle of writers he entered.

For their part, the religious intellectuals extended a tentative hand to their secular peers. The gesture was not without self-interest. The inclusion of the old literary elite in the reformists’ circles would prove the sincerity of their call for tolerance and free speech while also burnishing their literary bona fides, since the secular writers were still the culture’s standard-bearers of taste. The secular intellectuals, meanwhile, understood that the country had changed and that they could no longer speak for its high culture without recognizing and including some of their religious peers. They opened their consensus meetings to a handful of human rights and women’s rights activists from the religious reformist camp.

The intellectuals shared one agenda above all, and that was to widen the space for free speech under the Islamic Republic. In October of 1994, 134 Iranian intellectuals issued an open letter. They called it “We Are the Writers!” It was a call for reactivating the defunct Iranian Writers Association and for an end to censorship. The signatories declared:

We are the writers! This means that we express and publish our emotions, imagination, ideas, and research in different forms. It is our natural, social, and civil right that our written work—be it poetry or novel, play or scenario, research or critique—as well as our translations of other writers of the world, reach our audiences without any interference and impediment. No individual or institution, under any circumstance, has the right to hinder this process. . . .

The rest of the petition underscored the signatories’ benign intent. Their purpose was not political, they asserted, whatever the government or any other political force wished to project onto them. They wanted only to establish a collective presence as writers in order to secure a space for free expression. If political forces inside or outside the country endorsed their call, the writers could not be held responsible. Still, “defending the human and civil rights of any writer, whatever the circumstances, is the duty and obligation of all writers.”

Among the letter’s signatories were Mohammad Mokhtari, Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh, and other victims of what would come to be known as the chain murders, or serial killings.

• • •

THE PHRASE “SERIAL KILLINGS” was apt. Like a serial killer, the assassins had a type. They mostly bypassed the religious intellectuals, targeting secular writers, translators, and intellectuals, many of them not even all that well known. Like serial killers, they had signature methods: strangulation, heart attacks brought on by potassium injection, the occasional florid slaughter as in the case of the Forouhars. The victims disappeared on their way to work, appointments, errands. Their corpses were found days later. The murders were cold-blooded and systematic, and they had gone on for nearly a decade before Mohammad Mokhtari was killed. The 1998 killings incurred a crisis because there were so many of them in such a short time; because their similarities were obvious; and because they happened in the first year of Khatami’s presidency, when Iranians had reason to expect that the state was growing more tolerant rather than less.

From the Islamic Republic’s very inception, powerful forces existed beneath the surface of the state, beyond the reach of the elected government and its ministers. Now they issued from the intelligence ministry, which was the most secretive arm of a security apparatus linked to the Supreme Leader. By some later accounts, the violence could be traced past its executors in the intelligence ministry to its ideological progenitors, a circle of hardline clerics who had footholds in the Guardian Council, intelligence ministry, and judiciary. These clerics were called the Haghani Circle, after the seminary where they’d been trained under the tutelage of Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who believed it was the duty of the righteous to physically eliminate those with whom they disagreed. “Killing hypocrites does not require a court order, as it is a duty imposed by the sharia on all genuine Muslims,” Mesbah-Yazdi would declare in 1999, in the midst of the controversy over the serial killings. “The order of Islam is to throw them down from a high mountain and kill them outright.”

Something about “We Are the Writers!” must have touched a nerve in the most violent defenders of velayat-e faqih. The resurfacing of the secular literary elite after its long banishment was a threat to the new cultural order. And the specter of an alliance among religious and secular intellectuals was intolerable, particularly as the religious intellectuals began ever more explicitly to question velayat-e faqih. An appeal to the authority and charisma of Ayatollah Khomeini used to suffice to end such discussions. But with the advent of religious intellectualism in the 1990s and the increasing popularity of Western-style social science, reasoned debate faced off against calls for obedience or revolutionary rectitude. An unbridgeable divide had opened within Iran’s intellectual and power elite—between those, like Mesbah-Yazdi and the Haghani Circle, who believed that the authority of the Leader was absolute and infallible, and those who expected it to be conditioned upon logical consistency and some degree of popular sovereignty.

By killing off the secular intellectuals, who had no foothold within the power structure and no legal recourse, perhaps the shadowy forces in the security establishment believed they were simply doing their divine duty. Maybe they thought they could liquidate the country’s pre-revolutionary literary culture in all its wrongheadedness. Maybe they also understood that their political adversaries, the reformists, were, for now, beyond their reach, as they had not explicitly breached the constitution; but that by targeting the secular thinkers, they could draw a sharp red line and send the reformists a warning that there they, too, should fear to tread.

The religious intellectuals did not edge away. To the contrary, Soroush joined his voice with Bazargan’s in the same issue of Kiyan and elsewhere, arguing that theocracy did violence not only to the rights of man but to the dignity of religion. When Bazargan died in 1995, his memorial service was held at Hosseiniyeh Ershad, the birthplace of Iran’s revolutionary Islamism. There, at the very lectern Shariati once inflamed, Soroush declared: “[A] society in which religion becomes the tool of oppression and humans are crushed and deprived is more sinister than a society without religion, where the oppressor does not commit his criminal acts in the name of God and does not attribute them to religion.”

Iran’s secular intellectual elite had become the quarry of a merciless apparatus of death. By some tallies, from 1990 to 1998, more than eighty secular Iranian writers and intellectuals died in like fashion: abducted, disappeared, found dead. A former aide to Shariati, Hossein Barazandeh, was suffocated in Mashhad in January 1995. Ahmad Mir Alaei, a writer and translator in Isfahan, died under suspicious circumstances in October 1995. Ahmad Tafazzoli, a writer and translator, was found dead with his skull smashed in Tehran in January 1996. Ebrahim Zalzadeh, an editor and publisher whose fax machine was used to distribute “We Are the Writers!” was abducted in February 1997 and found stabbed to death in March. Six former political prisoners were separately abducted and found dead in Mashhad in 1996. Former prime minister Mossadegh’s granddaughter was stabbed to death in April 1998. In September 1998, in the city of Kerman, Hamid Hajizadeh, a teacher and poet, was stabbed to death in his bed, along with his nine-year-old son.

In August 1996, a group of about twenty secular writers, many of them signatories to “We Are the Writers!” chartered a bus to a literary festival in neighboring Armenia. In the middle of the night, they awoke to find the bus hurtling toward a cliff. The driver had released the hand brake, thrown himself out his door, and fled. A passenger lunged for the brakes and managed to stop the bus with its nose over the precipice, one of its tires about to churn the air. The writers were warned never to speak of the incident.

That same summer, security forces raided a dinner party at the home of the German cultural attaché. The writers and intellectuals in attendance were detained and interrogated. One of them was Faraj Sarkouhi, then the editor of Adineh and a signatory to “We Are the Writers!” In the two years that followed, Sarkouhi was repeatedly imprisoned and forced to confess to his part in a Western plot to undermine the Islamic Republic. Adineh, he was forced to say, was following an ideological script from the German government.

Throughout these years, Shahram’s friends in the Writers Association spoke often of a man, identified only as Hashemi, who summoned them for questioning at the ministry of intelligence or stopped them at the airport when they tried to go abroad. Later, Shahram would learn that Hashemi’s real name was Mehrdad Alikhani and that he was the intelligence official assigned to the poets and writers of the secular left. The purpose of this program was evidently liquidation.

Then came the late fall of 1998, when the Forouhars, Majid Sharif, Mohammad Mokhtari, and Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh all disappeared within three weeks of one another. Iranian writers and intellectuals understood that they were living under siege. Lists surfaced: columns of names that purported to enumerate the intellectuals who would now disappear. Hossein Bashiriyeh, the sociologist who had attracted a following at the Center for Strategic Research, turned up on some versions of that list. Although he fit and even exceeded the profile—a secular leftist intellectual with real influence on the thinking of Islamic reformists—he did not believe anyone would harm him. He considered himself too private a figure, a scholar disengaged from politics. Still, his wife put two locks on their door, and friends advised them to sleep elsewhere. Haunted writers roamed Iranian cities looking for couches to sleep on, startling at the sound of footsteps, packing their families off to provincial homesteads for safety’s sake. Some cut off contact with all but their closest friends and family. Others left the country to wait out the storm. The reformist press, which had just begun to flower under Khatami, clamored for resolution and justice, suggesting that the intelligence minister, Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, resign if he could not guarantee the safety of Iran’s intellectuals.

• • •

PRESIDENT KHATAMI faced a stark challenge. If he could not credibly answer the outcry against the murder of Iranian dissidents, his pledge to expand freedom of speech and the rule of law would prove empty from the start. On the other hand, if he could shine a light into the darkest recesses of the security establishment, not only would he prove to his constituency that deep reform was possible, but he would demonstrate to the hard-liners that the reformists were a force to be reckoned with.

In December 1998, Khatami announced that he had formed a commission to investigate the murders. Hardly anyone expected results. The Islamic Republic was not known for policing its own abuses. But defectors came forward from within the intelligence ministry, and they linked their former colleagues to the Forouhar murders. Khatami used this evidence to force the intelligence ministry to announce its culpability. To the shock and amazement of Iranians, intelligence minister Dorri-Najafabadi, who had been forced on Khatami by the Supreme Leader, resigned in disgrace, to be replaced by the head of Khatami’s commission.

The intelligence ministry announced that a band of about thirty rogue agents, under the leadership of a former deputy intelligence minister named Saeed Emami, were responsible for the extrajudicial killings of Iranian dissidents both within Iran and abroad. Emami and his agents were carted off to prison in February 1999. Four months later, Emami allegedly committed suicide in prison by swallowing hair removal powder.

Khatami rode high on the success of his investigation. Never before had the state taken responsibility for the killing of dissidents. Never had anyone been disciplined for such actions. Never had a president exercised power over the security apparatus, using little more than the weight of public opinion and of a comparatively free press. President Khatami showed what a muscular movement for reform was capable of.

But he also demonstrated its limits. The purging of “rogue elements” from the intelligence ministry, followed by the convenient suicide of the man in charge of those elements, left many questions unanswered. Was a deputy intelligence minister really able to carry out such a far-reaching international assassination program—claiming more than one hundred victims—without orders to do so from above? From how high up the chain of command would such a program have been authorized? By Ali Fallahian, the intelligence minister under President Rafsanjani? By Rafsanjani himself? By the Supreme Leader, Khamenei? Were there clerics, like those in the Haghani Circle, who gave this project their blessing—who maybe even issued fatwas condemning the victims to their deaths? Some hardline officials now claimed that Emami and his henchmen were acting at the behest of foreign malefactors. They released a videotape in which Emami’s wife confirmed this under torture so severe that one of her kidneys had failed.

• • •

WRITING IN THE NEWSPAPER Sobh-e Emrouz, Akbar Ganji pressed these questions relentlessly on the president and his reformist government. Sobh-e Emrouz was not just any newspaper. It belonged to Saeed Hajjarian, the reformist strategist from the Center for Strategic Research who had once been an intelligence ministry official. Hajjarian had reportedly tried to block Emami’s hire during the Mousavi era. Surely he knew a thing or two about the ministry’s inner workings.

As for Ganji, he was not just any writer. He was a born gadfly, intellectually spry, physically courageous, and irremediably radical, whether as a Revolutionary Guardsman in the 1980s or as a liberal agitator now. To the reformists, Ganji would prove a potent but exasperating ally. He could not be counted on to play for the team; he was one of its most daring thinkers and most uncompromising critics.

When Saeed Emami was arrested, Ganji applauded Khatami but did not let up. “Directing everyone’s eyes toward the intelligence ministry is an optical illusion,” he wrote. “The ill-minded bloodsuckers in the field of thought and politics must be identified regardless of their guise or position.”

This was not just a matter of exacting vengeance on the perpetrators of crime. There was, Ganji insisted, an “ideology of violence” at large in the country, and it was the government’s moral duty to uproot it. Iranian religious leaders, he added, could not keep silent lest they imply their own complicity. Rather, right-minded clerics must not allow the assassins “to set up the market stall of murder and crime in the realm of religiousness or to raise the flag of terror on religion’s dome.”

When Saeed Emami died in prison, it was Ganji who publicly questioned the official line that the death was a suicide. Ganji wrote in Sobh-e Emrouz of his own experience in solitary confinement. A guard looked in on him every half hour; he was allowed to bathe just once a week, for only five minutes, in full view of a guard. How, he asked, could so important a prisoner as Saeed Emami have been left alone with a poisonous substance for long enough to kill himself? Would someone be charged with negligence for allowing this to happen, or would the government launch an investigation into the circumstances of Emami’s death?

Ganji’s articles found a hungry readership. They would be collected in a bestselling volume titled The Dungeon of Ghosts. In it, he traced the links among the members of the Haghani Circle and showed that these clerics, Fallahian and Dorri-Najafabadi among them, had controlled the intelligence ministry from the start. He alleged that a death squad convened secret meetings where its “gray eminence” issued fatwas calling for the murder of specific enemies. Ansar-e Hezbollah, Ganji claimed, answered to these same clerics. Some of what Ganji wrote was speculation infused with high drama and the language of a B movie. His cast of characters included a “red-robed eminence” and someone called “Master Key.” But his argument was also ruthlessly logical, and he did not desist from pressing responsibility past Saeed Emami up the chain. He fingered Fallahian, Mesbah-Yazdi, and finally Rafsanjani.

Later, Ganji would say he knew exactly what he was doing. He was shaking the foundation of the regime by exposing its hidden projects, its deepest corruption. Khamenei, he understood, had moved to contain the damage by conceding only four murders—the Forouhars, Mokhtari, and Pouyandeh—and limiting responsibility to Emami and his henchmen. But responsibility, he knew, was far more widely shared, both horizontally and vertically, as well as further back in time. Ganji was clearly angling for Rafsanjani. Later he would say he thought he could trace responsibility all the way up to Khamenei. But for that he would have needed Khatami to endorse his effort—not to purge the intelligence ministry, as he had done, effectively declaring victory and closing the file.

Khatami warned Ganji that he was pushing too far, too fast. Soon enough, other sorts of warnings reached Ganji, from less sympathetic lips. His articles were heavily censored, cut down by as much as two-thirds before publication. “We had ten editors, not one,” he’d later remark. He started getting death threats by phone and fax.

During this time, Ganji was called once to the intelligence ministry and once to the military court. There he was told that if he continued writing, he would serve a minimum of fifteen years in prison. He knew his adventure would end there when he wrote an article called “Playing with Death.” He wrote that he felt himself engaged in a duel, likely at any moment to be killed. To interview sources, he had to go to unfamiliar places and meet with strangers. Any one of those meetings could have been a trap. But he continued to survive them and to publish his articles, each more censored than the last.

He was at last arrested in 2000. In 2001 he would be sentenced to ten years in prison and five years of internal exile. He was to become one of the Islamic Republic’s most formidable political prisoners, penning a radical manifesto against the theocracy and going on a fifty-day hunger strike that ended only when his doctors told him he was on the brink of irreversibly damaging his brain.

• • •

SHAHRAM RAFIZADEH WAS NOT as famous as Ganji, but he, too, tirelessly probed the chain murders in his writings. He suspected that reformist analysts traced the assassination program only as far back as the Rafsanjani administration, because before that, they and their friends in the Islamic Left were close to the center of power. But Shahram—twenty-eight years old and a part of no political faction—believed the program was as old as the Islamic Republic. He would link more than thirty killings, committed over a period of decades, with the ones in 1998. In a book called Power Play: Ruhollah Hosseinian, about the deputy minister of intelligence, Shahram also analyzed the public statements of those close to Saeed Emami to show how the Islamic Republic deliberately set forth conflicting narratives in order to obfuscate the truth.

As a result of his writings, Shahram became unemployable. He lost his job at the newspaper, where he’d edited culture pages dedicated to reintroducing Iranian readers to the secular poets and writers, and he lost his job at the publishing house, where he’d gotten to know some of the major reformist intellectuals. At times he couldn’t pay his rent. He sold his television and sent his wife and children to Rasht, to live with Bita’s father during the violent and tumultuous period between the chain murders and their prosecution. “They’re killing all my friends,” he told his wife’s family bleakly.

Mokhtari had believed in dialogue. He had been one of those who reached out to the reformists within the regime, even though he did not share their religious agenda. He had believed in peaceful coexistence, peaceful struggle. His murder had been a terrible mistake. Just ten days after his friend’s body was found, Shahram published an open letter. He called it “The Share of Poets: Solitude, Love, and Death.” He wrote that, in Iran, hope itself suffocated poets and writers.

After that, he began writing books, and he did not stop. He owed this to Mokhtari’s memory. But his life in Tehran had come loose. He was financially ruined, his family far away, his circle of writers scarred by violent loss. For four years he wrote books. Only one of three of them passed the censors to be published. In 2001 a friend told him that preparations were under way to launch a new reformist newspaper, called Etemad. Maybe there would be a job there for Shahram. The newspaper’s editor was more conservative than Shahram, but on their mutual friend’s advice, he took a chance on the young poet already known in journalism circles for his intelligent and fearless reporting. Shahram became the editor of Etemad’s literary page.

One day Shahram wandered over to where the political editors worked. A young deputy editor sat at a table strewn with papers. He could not have been more than twenty-two years old, slender and fine-featured, with his short black hair meticulously side-combed. He had delicate fingers and lucid brown eyes that seemed fixed to something clearer or more beautiful than what lay before him. He appeared to be hard at work, his head down. But when Shahram came near, the young editor said, “Hello, Mr. Rafizadeh.”

Shahram was startled.

“I know you,” the young editor explained. He introduced himself as Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, also from Rasht. Would Shahram care to write some political commentary for his section?

“How do you know I write political commentary?” Shahram asked warily.

“I have read your book,” said the young editor, “and I like the way you look at things.”

It would be some time before Shahram accepted the offer. By then, he and Roozbeh were friends. A shared melancholy brought them close, and soon financial hardship made them roommates. After work they would start for home, but mostly they walked together for the sake of walking, traversing the city in conversation or in a communion of silence, past the hour when traffic finally stilled. Sometimes on those walks Roozbeh would sing traditional folk songs for Shahram, his bright tenor ringing out through dusky streets.

The prospect of his arrest was never far from Shahram’s mind. He tried to make light of it. “I hope that if I’m ever arrested, they will arrest you as well,” he teased Roozbeh one night as they walked to Mellat Park in northeastern Tehran. “For just this one reason: You could sing for me in prison.”