A TIME TO BETRAY (44 page)

Omid looked at me in disbelief. “That’s not a lie, Dad! I was going to let you and Mom know that I planned to propose to her, but I did not know if it was the right time to say anything.”

I smiled at him. “I think it is the perfect time, Son. Go in and talk to her about it.”

Omid came out of Somaya’s room a short while later, rushing past me in the hope that I wouldn’t notice his tears. He’d seen what we’d both been seeing for months now—that his mother seemed to be disappearing in front of us. The doctors had been optimistic, but what if they were wrong? What if I was rapidly running out of time to tell her what I needed to say and what she deserved to know?

I made up my mind in that moment. I was going to do it now. Hesitantly, I opened the door.

“Why aren’t you coming in?” Somaya said weakly when she saw me reluctant to enter the room. “I am still awake. Could you get me a glass of milk? I am a little hungry.”

I did so gladly. She hadn’t touched any food that day. A glass of
milk would bring her some strength. I arranged her pillows, and she sat on the bed sipping her food.

“All of a sudden I feel so much better. I am so glad Omid is here.” She stirred the drink with the straw I’d placed in it. “He told me that after my radiation is over, he wants to introduce us to Kelly’s parents.” She smiled and her eyes reflected the hope that her son, true to his name, always brought her.

“Somaya
jon,
you are an angel,” I said with a broken voice. I hesitated one last moment, then I added, “And … and I am so evil.”

She released the straw between her lips and her eyes widened. What did she think I was about to tell her?

“I know I should have confessed this to you long ago. But I need your forgiveness, Somaya. Please tell me you will forgive me.”

Somaya seemed to grow paler, if that was possible. I castigated myself for adding to her suffering. I should have been soothing her, not causing her more torment.

“Reza, what are you talking about?” she asked weakly.

I moved closer to her and held her hand in both of mine. “I was a
jasoos. …
”

She shook her head and looked at me in total confusion. Her half-open eyes had lost the glow that Omid had brought to her a few minutes ago. “You were what? … A spy?” She handed me the unfinished glass of milk, which had started shaking in her hand.

“I betrayed you; I betrayed my son, my parents, and grandparents. I betrayed my friends and my country. I am ashamed of what I have done to you.”

Somaya stayed quiet while I told her my life story. I told her about how Naser’s death erupted like a volcano deep inside me. I told her how Roya’s letter propelled me to become a betrayer to fight for all of the others like her. I told her how I contacted the CIA, how I invented stories about what I was doing in London, and how I’d played so many shameful and dangerous games with her. Rather than challenging the regime directly, I’d taken a coward’s route.

With this last admission, I sobbed. Somaya hadn’t said a word
through all of this. Now she pulled my head to her chest and started petting my hair. “Hush, Reza. Hush.” I couldn’t believe that I had put her in a position where she needed to comfort me when she was in so much need of comfort. This shamed me further.

“I betrayed you,” I said through my tears. “I lied to you and I deceived you.”

“Reza, don’t. Don’t do that to yourself. You are ripping your soul. You did nothing wrong.”

I sat up to face her. “But Somaya
jon,
I am a
jasoos,
a traitor! How could you ever forgive me?”

She pulled the blanket all the way to her neck and drew her body in. “All I know, Reza …” She was so weak that she was having trouble speaking. She took several long seconds before she continued. “You should not be ashamed of what you did for your country.”

This brought another sob from my heart. “Somaya
jon,
I love you so much. But I need to know if you can forgive me for all I have done to you.”

It was past midnight, and she looked incredibly tired. But still she found the strength to reach out to me. “Reza, I understand why you lied. It’s good to know that I did not waste my life living with a man who was a supporter of a brutal regime. Now I know why you behaved the way you did.” Her voice was fading, but she struggled to stay awake. “I wanted so badly for all those years to believe that you were not one of them, and now I know. I know you wanted to protect our son and me. Of course I forgive you. But promise me something. Don’t give up. Tell the world what you witnessed and what these criminals have done to us.”

A tear ran across her face. “You are not a coward, Reza. You are not,” she whispered before she closed her eyes.

Omid had been very close with his grandfather when he lived in England. Unfortunately, once we moved to America, their only contact was over the phone or on the rare vacation visit to London. We
were finally able to convince Moheb Khan to move to Los Angeles, though, and Omid spent as much time with him as he could when he was home from college. They became even closer during the 2008 presidential election, which was interesting because they supported different candidates. Omid loved Barack Obama, while Moheb Khan found the policies of the Republican Party more to his liking and therefore backed John McCain.

“Omid
jon,
Senator McCain is who we need now,” Moheb Khan said decisively during one of their many debates on the subject. “He can get rid of the mullahs in Iran. And if he solves that problem, he will bring peace to the entire Middle East.” He had seen Lebanon, his homeland, devastated in the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war, and he believed this resulted directly from the mullahs arming Hezbollah and promoting the destruction of Israel.

“Grandpa, Obama is a breath of fresh air. After years of war and radical foreign policy, we need to show the world that we are a compassionate people. That’s the only way we’ll regain respect and authority. We need a united world to fight the religious fanatics. Obama can provide the hope to achieve that.”

At this point, my father-in-law would shake his head. “Those words are nothing but fancy talk.
Change. Hope.
We need a powerful and experienced leader. This Ahmadinejad is not the kind of human to negotiate with. He is demented.”

Omid would grow more animated in his response. “
Hope
is not just a fancy word. Hope can bring the whole world together. The Iranians inside the country
need
hope. And they definitely need change.”

I stayed on the sidelines for most of these conversations. I had my opinions, but I didn’t want to impose them on my son or his grandfather because I found their debate so stirring, and I didn’t want to tilt the discussion in either direction. It still amazed me how people who loved each other in America could disagree so vociferously without fear of consequence. It brought me back to the Fridays of my childhood with Agha Joon and Davood. I found exchanges of
this sort inspiring, and whenever I heard them I prayed that people in Iran would be free to engage in them again before too long.

“‘Hope’
is
a strong word, Moheb Khan,” I said, allowing myself to butt in only this much. “Certainly we can all attest to that.”

Somaya knew more than anybody else in that room how powerful that word was. With the hope she had, she overcame the battle of her life and had been cancer-free for three years. As this debate continued, she sat next to Kelly and put her hand on her daughter-in-law’s stomach to see if she could feel her grandchild moving. With her health, the nearness of her family now that Omid and Kelly were renting a place close to our home, and her son’s baby on the way, Somaya was the very manifestation of hope.

Moheb Khan and Omid kept trading opinions throughout the election season. At the same time, I shared my thoughts with the rest of the world by writing articles in various media outlets in which I spoke about the relationship between the American election and the mullahs’ aspirations for an Islamic conquest of the world. Of course, I used a pseudonym—one separate from the names we’d taken when we came to America—to protect my identity. After I confessed to Somaya, we agreed that it would be safest to keep this secret between the two of us for the rest of our lives. But, as I had promised her, I was telling the world what I’d witnessed. The simple fact was that the West had a tremendous influence on the policies of Iran—despite what the mullahs might say—and I knew the next American president would have a chance to give the young people of my homeland their first real glimpse of freedom. Regardless of which candidate won, I prayed that he would not repeat the mistakes his predecessors had made of trying to appease the regime. When Barack Obama won the election on the same day that our grandson, Arya, was born, I saw this as a very positive sign.

Still, as much as our own household radiated optimism, Iran continued to face dark times. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran, was a closed-minded radical Islamist. He’d been vaulted into power by the same clerics who’d so completely
undermined former president Khatami in his attempts to bring reform: the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, and Ayatollah Jannati, the true believers of
Mahdaviat
who awaited the coming of Mahdi, the twelfth Shiite Imam, who would rule the world before the end times. Before becoming the president, Ahmadinejad, then mayor of Tehran, had secretly instructed the city council to build a road especially for Mahdi that led to the mosque of Jamkaran. Once he became president, Ahmadinejad allocated millions of dollars to enhance the mosque for the reappearance of Mahdi from the adjacent well where the president and other zealots believe the twelfth Imam is in hiding.

Like others who think as he does, Ahmadinejad believes that many of the signs of Mahdi’s return have emerged. Known as hadiths, these signs include the invasion of Afghanistan, the bloodshed in Iraq, and the global economic meltdown. According to prophecy, the hadiths will grow increasingly furious as Mahdi’s return comes closer, including “persecution and injustice” engulfing the earth, “chaos and famine,” and “many wars.” The hadiths predict that “many will be killed and the rest will suffer hunger and lawlessness.” People like Ahmadinejad so completely believed that these conditions would hasten the return of the twelfth Imam that they were willing to foment universal war, chaos, and famine to bring it about.

After the 9/11 attacks and the fall of the Taliban, I decided that I needed to activate a handful of sources within Iran. The world seemed to hold the Islamic government blameless in the attacks, but I knew that the mullahs were likely to have had a hand in any act of terror directed toward America. My sources told me that the Guards were harboring Al Qaeda members and that Ahmad Vahidi had close contact with bin Laden’s organization. Back when I was working for the CIA, I’d reported on Vahidi, then chief intelligence officer of the Guards, who was involved in the U.S. Marine barracks bombing as well as many other terrorist acts, including the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 that earned
him an arrest warrant from an Argentinian judge and a red-alert listing on Interpol. By 2008, he was deputy defense minister (and he is now defense minister), overseeing Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs with only one goal in mind: to obtain the bomb. My sources also told me that the Guards were running multiple covert operations for their nuclear bomb project and that one was set in a secret underground facility west of the province of Mazandaran, a mountainous region in the north of Iran. This latest revelation was something of a tipping point for me when combined with what I’d learned on my own—I had become more vigilant about my surroundings and more aware of radical Islamist activity in the U.S. I realized that I needed to share what I had learned. Since I no longer had a handler, I called the CIA headquarters in Virginia to arrange a meeting with a local agent.

I had high hopes that the Obama administration would be tougher on the Islamic government of Iran, especially given what they knew about the regime’s nuclear activities. However, his first overture to the mullahs disappointed me. He sent greetings for the Persian New Year in which he urged better relations between America and Iran. He then repeated this in letters to Ayatollah Khamenei. To me, this was a sad case of not learning from history. Once again American politicians refused to see that the mullahs were not men of reason, and that their animosity toward America was rooted in the interpretation of a prophecy that called for the annihilation of the West and all non-Muslims. I knew the regime would see Obama’s entreaties as a sign of weakness, and that this would embolden them to take radical steps.

While I continued to hear from my contacts within Iran, I strove to stay focused on my family. The summer of 2009 was an idyllic time in our household. Somaya and I had fallen in love with our grandson. “Oh! He looks exactly like Omid,” Somaya would say every time she held Arya. Our home brightened with the presence of a new baby, and though we never discussed my sickbed confession
again, I think the baby helped heal any lingering wounds this confession might have caused. As summer began, Somaya told me that she would not go back to work the next fall. She wanted to stay home, where she could spend more time with her grandson when Omid and Kelly were at work. With Arya around, she would not miss the children at the elementary school.

I wish Iran could have experienced some of our joy that summer. Instead, it continued to serve as a source of heartbreak for all of us. Worldwide headlines blared the news that the people of my homeland were in the streets of Tehran protesting peacefully for the freedoms they felt the regime had stolen from them yet again. A presidential election very different from the Obama-McCain election had just taken place between Ahmadinejad and reformer Mir Hossein Mousavi. On the eve of the election, all signs pointed to a landslide victory by Mousavi. Interior ministry officials informed him that he was going to win and Ali Larijani, the speaker of the parliament, congratulated him. Then Guards commanders entered his headquarters to inform him that Ahmadinejad would be pronounced the winner the next day. They told Mousavi that he should not object to this as it was in the best interests of the Islamic Republic and that this outcome had the approval of the Supreme Leader.