VAJA, the Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran, the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, had not had a single good reason for selecting Zahedan.
It had chosen the location over four years earlier following detailed orders and instructions that had come from the very highest levels of the Iranian government and had been relayed to VAJA by a man named Saloun Talabani who unusually had neither a military nor a government background. He was a scientist who appeared to be in charge of the entire covert project. But rather than finding one good reason, VAJA had actually come up with no less than five separate and entirely valid good reasons for choosing Zahedan.
First, the town was very close to Iran’s eastern border, and only about thirty miles due south of the triple border point between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. From the eastern edge of Zahedan to the Pakistani border the distance was even less, under twenty miles. Talabani had decided that, with the prevailing winds generally blowing from west to east, that provided an obvious safety margin should any airborne contaminants escape from the laboratory. It was also about as far to the east as it was possible to get whilst still remaining within the borders of Iran, which was important for an entirely different reason.
Second, although Zahedan was the capital of the region it wasn’t a very big place, but it was certainly large enough to conceal the laboratory where the bioweapon was being fabricated. The third, fourth and fifth factors were that the city had an airport, making access easy to the rest of Iran when required; it was the location of the Zahedan Medical University, meaning that specialist medical care and knowledge was available on site should the scientists need it and, finally, it was the closest suitable location to the port of Bandar Abbas and there was a decent road network between the two places. Access to the port was important because VAJA had been instructed from the start that the device the laboratory was producing would have to be transported by sea to its final destination, and the route out of Bandar Abbas was obvious and had allowed them to take advantage of a well-established but entirely illegal smuggling operation.
That part of the operation had in many ways been the easiest of all, simply a matter of assembling and briefing a team of men hand-picked from the ranks of VAJA enforcers a week earlier and then sending them down to Bandar Abbas to explain the facts of life to a group of roughly thirty of the more experienced and accomplished smugglers, the shooties. And the facts of life in this case – atypically bearing in mind the way that VAJA usually operated – were actually to the benefit of both the smugglers and VAJA itself.
The instructions the shooties had been given were clear and simple. For one night – Saturday – they were to forget their normal cargo of sheep and goats on the southbound leg that would see them arriving in Khasab shortly after sunrise on Sunday. Instead, each boat would carry a load of between two and four sealed steel drums each with a capacity of about fifty gallons, the load depending upon the size of their individual boat. Additionally, each boat would have an additional passenger – a VAJA officer – and a heavy-duty bag, both also to be deposited at Khasab. The vessels were not to be overloaded, and once they had reached Khasab the drums were to be unloaded in the harbour and left there to be collected. The VAJA officers were not going to pay the smugglers for the journey south, but they did undertake to ensure that their craft would not be intercepted on the return journey to Bandar Abbas, which was the leg upon which they expected to make the bulk of their profits. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but it was quite a good deal for the shooties, and much better than most of them had realistically expected when the men from VAJA had turned up.
The drums were heavy, clearly full of a substance of some sort, possibly a powder or a liquid rather than something solid, and each was labelled with a single stencilled word that meant nothing to any of the smugglers. The word was ‘ZEOLITE’ and apart from that the drums, which appeared to be brand-new, carried no other form of identification whatsoever, and certainly no indications that the contents were either fragile or dangerous. Despite the lack of signage, the VAJA officers verbally explained to the smugglers before they set off that if any of the drums arrived damaged, or didn’t arrive at all, the lives of all the smugglers, not just those crewing the boat on which the loss or damage had occurred, would be forfeit. And forfeit in as painful a way as the ranks of experienced and inventive torturers employed by the VAJA could devise.
No cargo handled by the smugglers had ever been treated with such absolute and elaborate respect, and by mid-morning on Sunday the last of the drums had been positioned in the designated spot in the harbour at Khasab to the clear satisfaction of the most senior VAJA officer, who had accompanied the shooties in the first boat to arrive that morning and had then remained in the Omani port to supervise the unloading of all of the vessels.
For their part, the smugglers who had participated in the operation ensured that their boats were loaded up with the most profitable items they had been able to source from the Omani wholesalers for the journey back to Iran. On that Sunday afternoon there was a certain degree of nervousness within the group as they waited for the approach of sunset and their usual departure time, because it was always possible that the VAJA officers were both treacherous and had been lying – that was the well-deserved reputation the organisation enjoyed in Iran, after all – and that when the boats approached Bandar Abbas they would be met by a barrage of heavy machine gun fire.
But in the event, nothing happened at all the following day and the shooties were able to unload their cargoes unmolested by anybody. That too was a part of the overall plan, because it wasn’t necessarily going to be the only time an operation being conducted by VAJA needed to make use of the abilities of the smugglers to run the gauntlet of the Strait. And keeping their word on this occasion meant that they would be more likely to find the shooties willing to cooperate the next time they needed to use them.
The smuggling community in Iran was small, tightly linked and had a long collective memory. Betrayal by any organisation was never going to be forgotten, or forgiven, and everybody knew that.