Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (21 page)

Standing in her living room, far away from Berlin, Angela Jost stared at the television set, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her son had been excused from class by a teacher who broke the news to him in the middle of a lesson. He held his mother’s hand, high on pride.

That afternoon, following the recommendation of German intelligence officials, the five judges who had presided over the trial were moved to an undisclosed location under heavy security. They were each given a room at a small inn far away from Berlin. After a few hours in their rooms, one of the younger judges ventured into town with two bodyguards to look for a restaurant where they could celebrate the final day of the most grueling trial of their careers. Some time passed before the adventurous judge returned to the inn to report to his colleagues.

“I’ve found the most charming spot. A cozy café nearby, where we could certainly eat and have a few drinks. But I doubt anyone would dare go there.”

When another judge asked why, he said, “Because it’s called Mykonos.”

In April 1997, in a long overdue act of protest against the Iranian government’s terror campaign throughout Europe, Germany requested the removal of the Iranian ambassador and fourteen of his employees who worked in the intelligence section of the embassy. Subsequently, all EU member countries recalled their ambassadors and shut down their embassies in Tehran. European diplomatic ties with Tehran were severed for less than six months, but the result of this brief break was astounding. It brought Iran’s assassinations against the exiles to a halt in Western Europe. The Ayatollah’s list of five hundred never was completed. Not a bomb had been dropped on Tehran, and no blood had been shed. The historic triumph came on the heels of justice. A unified and resolute West finally stood against Tehran. The judgment from Mykonos, and Europe’s rally behind it, remains the most crippling blow ever delivered to the sinister men who snuffed out the lives of the best and the brightest of their nation.

Epilogue

In the final year of the Mykonos proceedings, Judge Kubsch was diagnosed with leukemia. But because he did not wish to delay or compromise the trial, he refused to begin treatment until after the court had issued its judgment. During the long days of treatment his assistant Judge Alban dutifully delivered twenty-page installments of the judgment to the hospital for the ailing colleague to review and revise. The final text, over one hundred thousand words in length, was released to the attorneys in December 1998.

A copy of the judgment made its way to Hamid’s desk. He reprinted the document as a book with a prologue by Ehrig. A few days after its publication, Judge Alban called
Hamid. From prison, Darabi had called the judge to ask for his own copy. But the legal edition, being an unwieldy format, was not suitable for non-scholarly readers. The judge had told the prisoner that his “enemies” had published the same document as a regular book and offered to send him that version instead.

Before Judge Alban had completed his conversation with Hamid, Judge Kubsch came on the line and asked, “How did you ever get a copy of the judgment? It’s not for the public, you know, only for our own internal use.”

Hamid laughed and said, “It came in the mail, your honor.”

“In which mail?”

“The same mail of good fortune that delivered you to us refugees here in Berlin, your honor.”

“My dear sir, as a judge I’m obligated to tell you that what you’ve done is illegal. And now that I have, could you kindly forward a copy to my office? I’ll put my deputy on to make the arrangements.”

Judge Alban returned again to give Hamid a forwarding address, and asked for a clean copy, one without any markings or notes in the margins. Then he added, “Please, remember to give us a bank account to deposit the fee for the book.”

Hamid rushed to say, “But judge, you must not even mention money! This is a token of our gratitude, a small gift from us to you.”

Judge Alban laughed and said, “You hopeless oriental! I’m a judge. If I don’t pay you, I’d be in hot water!”

The defendants appealed the judgment and the case was referred to the Federal High Court. Hoping to influence the appeals process, Tehran arrested a German businessman on charges of rape and issued a death sentence for him. Bonn did not balk. In 1998, after a year’s consideration, the federal court upheld Kubsch’s judgment. True to his reputation, he proved “unappealable” once more.

Bonn, too, arrested an Iranian on charges of espionage. The arrest became the occasion for a happy reunion. Bruno Jost was assigned to the case, and Judge Kubsch presided over the trial, and Hamid and company went on to permanently keep their night shifts in order to attend the trial in daytime. The room, too, was the same Hall 700. Throughout this trial, Judge Kubsch appeared wan and exhausted, yet he carried on. In late December 1999, Hamid ran into him on his way to the men’s room and wished the judge a “happy and healthy new year.” Kubsch smiled in return and said that “happy” could prove true but he doubted “healthy” was ahead for him. He died the following October. His death came weeks before the retirement he had long promised his wife would be spent vacationing and taking the trips he had postponed for decades.

In 2004, a group of Iranian exiles, spearheaded by Hamid, filed a request with the Berlin city hall to install a memorial plaque at the site of the restaurant. Yet another long battle between Berlin and the Iranian embassy ensued. At the end, the permission for the plaque was granted. Erected on four stubby legs on the sidewalk of 2a Prager Street, the plaque, inscribed in red, reads:

Here, at the site of the former Mykonos Restaurant, on Septembr 17, 1992, the prominent representatives of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi, Fattah Abdoli, Homayoun Ardalan, and the Berliner politician, Noori Dehkordi, were murdered by powers in Tehran. They died in the battle for freedom and human rights.

The restaurant has since undergone several incarnations. Despite all the resurfacing, remodeling, and change of supervision, the food and the ambience remain reminiscent of its Mykonos years—remarkably mediocre. It last was a Vietnamese place called Miss Saigon, which shut down in 2010.

Fourteen years since the trial ended, the case remains open. The lead assassin was never apprehended. Bani- Hashemi, who flew out of Germany that same night, remains at large.

Of the five men in custody, Atris, was released after serving three years but was rearrested soon thereafter on new charges, and eventually fled Germany. After completing his sentence of ten years, Yousef Amin was deported to Lebanon.

Kazem Darabi was regularly visited by his devoted wife in prison, where he managed to father another child. In 2007, after having served fifteen years, his appeal was granted and he was returned to Iran in December. He received a hero’s welcome at Tehran’s airport, where he vowed to the flock of reporters to write the full account of his innocence in a forthcoming book. Darabi’s codefendant Abbas Rhayel was also granted appeal and deported to Lebanon at the same time.

Iran’s ambassador to Germany during the Mykonos years, Moussavian, who had insisted that the allegations against Tehran “were a joke” and that Iran would never violate human rights or participate in an extra-judicial killing, had his own falling out with the regime. In 2007, he published a book about Iranian-German relations based on his years as the ambassador. Within a week after its release, he, charged with espionage, was jailed. The book was banned and was confiscated from bookstores throughout the country. Yet a copy of it lingers on the shelves of a little-known Iranian-American writer, somewhere deep in the Connecticut woods.

The minister Ali Fallahian resigned from his post as the chief of intelligence in 1997. An arrest warrant was issued by the Interpol for his involvement in the 1994 bombings of the Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Today, he is a member of the Assembly of Experts of Leadership, which oversees the selection of the Supreme Leader. Those named in the judgment are still in power. Former foreign minister Velayati is the special foreign affairs envoy to the office of Supreme Leader, in effect performing the role of a shadow foreign minister. Former president Rafsanjani is both the head of the Expediency Council—which wields legislative powers—and the head of Assembly of Experts of Leadership. The Revolutionary Guards chief remains the most powerful figure in the country.

Two years after calling on Messbahi in Tehran to warn him of a plot for his murder and urge him to leave the country, the deputy minister of intelligence Saeed Emami was
arrested on charges of espionage. He died in custody in 1999 under mysterious circumstances.

Messbahi entered the German witness protection program after testifying in court in 1996. He lives somewhere in relative safety on planet Earth. He still follows the events of Iran very closely and runs his own underground think tank from his nameless bunker. In January 2007, the aforementioned writer sat with him for three consecutive days and lent an ear to his ordeal.

Senior Criminal Commissioner, Tony von Trek, died suddenly of an aggressive tumor in the early 2000s. His loss was grieved by many of his colleagues, but most of all by Jost. The reporter Norbert Siegmund went on to receive a doctorate in political science. His thesis was entitled “The Mykonos Process.” He continues to work as a journalist. Josef Hufelschulte still reports for
Die Focus
.

The news of the judgment traveled the world. Inside Iran, several angry clerics made threats against Bruno Jost. As a result, the European Union issued a statement, calling “any threat against the federal prosecutor, the court, or Germany, a threat against all of Europe.”

In January 1998, one of Germany’s most popular magazines,
Die Zeit,
named Bruno Jost one of the Ten Most Important People of Germany, though neither the title nor his historic performance and valor throughout the trial earned him any more than personal satisfaction. He routinely subjected his new assistants to a tasting of Iranian cuisine, namely to Ghormeh Sabzi, at the local Persian restaurant, where he, alongside his family, mother, son-in-law to be, and their two
bodyguards, had celebrated the judgment of the case. He retired from his post as a senior federal prosecutor in spring 2009 and is contemplating taking up beekeeping.

The satirist Hadi Khorsandi has survived his fatwa. He has added standup to his repertoire, which he calls “Khorsandup.” For a blossoming actor in his early seventies, he does remarkably well onstage.

The restaurant owner Aziz Ghaffari moved to Iran, remarried, and refashioned himself yet again, this time as a pharmacy owner. He is the only survivor of that assassination to have ever returned to the country. The German daily
Der Tagesspiegel,
in a 1996 article, accused Aziz of having been a spy for Iran’s ministry of intelligence. He never disputed the paper’s charges, much less filed suit for defamation. Mystery still surrounds him, as do the endless speculations about who the mole might have been if not Aziz.

With the trial behind them, Sara and Shohreh Dehkordi moved into a new apartment where their living room windows open onto a quiet and wooded street. Shohreh went on to become a therapist, specializing in grief. Her dream is to someday meet the women who were widowed in 9/11 and create a support network for victims of terrorism. For the first time in years, she and Sara went to the site of the old Mykonos restaurant for the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the memorial plaque.

Sara is pursuing a doctoral degree in political science. She has followed in her father’s footsteps and become an activist, though she does not know why being among Iranians always brings on feelings of melancholy in her. From time to time,
she cheers herself by playing the old Bibi Blocksberg cassettes and listening to the tales of the beloved witch. She no longer believes that she ought to fight terrorists with guns, but is determined to fight them all the same. She lives on her own, in a studio apartment where an enormous poster of a smiling Nelson Mandela is tacked to the main door.

Today, more than two million Iranians live outside of Iran, one hundred and fifty thousand of them in Germany, of whom nearly ten thousand reside in Berlin. The latter are the refugees whom Hamid Nowzari continues to serve through his small refugee organization. As a token of remembrance of the historic experience, Hamid has kept his odd work hours of night shifts and weekends, ever ready to witness another trial. He and two colleagues went on to write two critical books on the subject of the Mykonos trials. He is also the main custodian at the Iranian Archives of Documents and Research, where this author spent many wintery days reading and feeding spadefuls to one of the few remaining coal-fired room heaters in all of Western Europe.

Parviz Dastmalchi went on to edit and publish collected essays and documents about the case, some of which he has dedicated to Bruno Jost and Frithjof Kubsch. When he finally called Bruno Jost to thank him for his work, Jost simply said, “I didn’t do what I did to please the Iranian opposition. I was only doing my job.”

In the interim years, he produced a dozen more books, bringing his total of edited, translated, and originally penned volumes to an impressive twenty-five. His translation of Karl
Popper’s writings was published in Iran in 2004 and was reprinted several times. Always looking for a new adventure, he openly traveled to Israel in November 2008, placing himself among the very few non-Jewish Iranians to ever dare make the trip.

Time Line