Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (22 page)

Glossary

Agha.
Mister (Persian)

Baba or Babayee.
Father (Persian)

Iman Ali.
The cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad and the first iman of the Shiite Muslims
.

Jaan.
Dear (Persian)

Kaak.
Brother (Kurdish)

Maadar.
Mother (Persian)

Majles.
Parliament (Persian)

Maman.
Mother. Originally French, the term is popularly used by Iranians

Mola.
Beloved mentor (Persian)

Moosh mooshak.
Little mouse (Persian)

Peshmarga.
Freedom fighter (Kurdish)

Characters

The Victims

Noori Dehkordi
—Murder victim and organizer of the meeting at the Mykonos restaurant; an opponent of Iran’s regime and supporter of the Kurds

Sadegh Sharafkandi
—Mykonos murder victim, nicknamed “The Doctor”; chairman of Iran’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan (DPKI), 1989–1992

Fattah Abdoli
—Mykonos murder victim, DPKI deputy

Homayoun Ardalan
—Mykonos murder victim, DPKI deputy

Parviz Dastmalchi
—Survivor; author and close friend of Noori, and the most outspoken survivor of the Mykonos assassinations

Mehdi Ebrahimzadeh
—Survivor; leading political activist

Aziz Ghaffari
—Survivor; owner of the Mykonos restaurant

Shohreh Badii Dehkordi
—Widow of Noori Dehkordi; political activist

Sara Dehkordi
—Daughter of Noori and Shohreh Dehkordi

Salomeh Dastmalchi
—Daughter of Parviz Dastmalchi

The Perpetrators

Abdulrahman Bani-Hashemi
—Leader of the terror team, still at large

Abbas Rhayel
—Terror team’s second assassin, friend to Yousef

Yousef Amin
—Terror team’s watchman

Kazem Darabi
—Coordinator and financier of the operation; member of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence

Attaullah Ayad
—Member of the terror team

The Key German Players

Alexander von Stahl
—Germany’s Chief Federal Prosecutor, 1990–1993

Bruno Jost
—Federal Prosecutor for the Mykonos case, 1992–1997

Hans Joachim Ehrig
—Lead Attorney for the victims, 1992–1997

Otto Schily
—Attorney and Former Interior Minister

Klaus Kinkel
—Foreign Minister 1992–1998

Helmut Kohl
—Chancellor 1982–1998

Frithjof Kubsch
—Chief Judge presiding over the Mykonos trial from 1992–1997

Judge Jurgen Zastrow
—One of the Mykonos trial’s five judges

Judge Alban
—Chief Judge Kubsch’s deputy

Gregor Gysi
—Attorney and member of the Bundestag

Wolfgang Wieland
—Attorney for the victims 1992–1997

Bernd Schmidbauer
—Federal Intelligence Chief 1991–1998

Klaus Grunewald
—Middle East Director, Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution

The Iranian Regime

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
—President 1989–1997

Hussein Moussavian
—Ambassador to Bonn 1990–1997

Ali Akbar Velayati
—Foreign Minister 1981–1997

Ayatollah Ali Khamanei
—Supreme Leader 1989–present

Abulhassan Banisadr
—President 1980–1982

Miscellaneous Characters

Abulghassem Farhad Messbahi
or
Witness C

Renata Kakir
—Resident of Prager Street and trial witness

Abdulrahman Ghassemlou
—Popular leader of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, assassinated in Vienna in 1989

Hadi Khorsandi
—Exiled Iranian satirist against whom Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1980

Hamid Nowzari
—Political activist

Abulghassem Zamankhan
—The trial’s chief Persian interpreter

Norbert Siegmund
—Young journalist who worked with Parviz to uncover the truth of Mykonos

Josef Hufelschulte
—Journalist for FOCUS

Note on Sources

In 2005, when I first began to look into the story of the Mykonos assassinations, I quickly learned that sifting through the urban legend and the truth would be a monumental task. Therefore, establishing a timeline of events and the arc of the narrative alone became my first goal. To that end, I conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the following individuals, among others:

Jalil Azadikhah, Shohreh Badi’i-Dehkordi, Bob Baer, Abolhassan Banisadr, Mehran Barati, Minu Barati, Nasrin Bassiri, Roya Boroumand, Fred Burton, Chief-in-charge of Hall 700 at Berlin’s Moabit Court, Parviz Dastmalchi, Salomeh Dastmalshi, Sara Dehkordi, Wilhelm Dietl, Rudolf Dolzer, Mehdi
Ebrahimzadeh, Hans Joachim Ehrig, Ali Ferdowsi, Owen Fiss, Dieter Grimm, Ashraf Golpaygani, Alexander Jost, Angela Jost, Barbara Jost, Bruno Jost, Hadi Khorsandi, Werner Kolhoff, Martin Kubsch, John Langbein, Abolghassem Messbahi, Hamid Nowzari, Owner of Ms. Saigon (formerly known as the Mykonos Restaurant), Mehran Payandeh, Ahmad Rafat, Habib Rahiab, Ewald Riethmüller, Kambiz Rousta, Hamid Sadr, Sahraoui, Ali Sajjadi, Bahman Sarayi- Moghadam, Mohsen Sazegara, Norbert Siegmund, Rudolf Steinberg, David Unger, Sandra Volck, Alexander von Stahl, R. James Woolsey, Abolghassem Zamankhan.

The reporting of the following journalists proved to be invaluable to my work:

Wilhelm Dietl and Josef Hufelschulte in
Die Focus
; Sigrid Avaresh and Werner Kolhoff in
Berliner Zeitung
; Rudiger Scheidges in
Der Taagespiegel
; Norbert Siegmund and Susanne Opalka in
SFB
and
ZDF
for local and national television broadcasts; and Dorothea Jung in
Deutschland Radio
. The publications
Suddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Der Bild,
and
Die Welt
also helped fill in certain gaps in my knowledge of the story.

It came to me as a great surprise to find that because of the distinct nature of the German legal system, no trial transcripts existed for this case. However, as journalists and members of the victims’ families were allowed to take notes during the proceedings, I was able to glean aspects of the
experience through the private journals of Shohreh Dehkordi. The daily filings of Hamid Nowzari and his collagborators and a few other Iranian journalists in the following Persian publications were similarly illuminating:

Abolhassan Banisadr, Ed.
Enghelab Eslami; Biweekly
(Paris);
Mujahed,
the Publication of Iran’s People’s Mujahedin; Parviz Ghelichkhani, Ed.
Arash Quarterly
(Paris);
Kurdistan,
the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan’s Monthly;
Kar,
Publication of Sazman-e Etehad-e Fadayian;
Iran, Terror, Sarkoob,
the Publication of the Committee Against Terror’s (Berlin, Paris).

Researching a case as lengthy and complex as this should have taken years. But because I had access to the Archives for Iranian Research and Documents and the Archives of the Iranian Political Refugee Association in Berlin, where nearly everything ever written on the case is meticulously gathered and organized, the work took only months. I owe much to the archives and the many volumes that Parviz Dastmalchi diligently printed between 1992–1998. The following is a listing of those and several of my other key primary soures:

The Attorney General of the Federal Court. Anklageschrift [Indictment]. 17 May 1993.

Dastmalchi, Parviz.
The Mykonos Documents: September 1992–April 1997.
Berlin: Azad Press, 1997.

Dastmalchi, Parviz.
The Fall: Mykonos IV.
Berlin: Azad Press, 1994.

Dastmalchi, Parviz.
Governmental Terrorism in the Islamic Republic of Iran
. Berlin: Azad Press, 1995.

Dastmalchi, Parviz.
Democracy and Law.
Berlin: Azad Press, 1996.

Dastmalchi, Parviz.
The Text of the Mykonos Judgment
. Berlin: Azad Press, 2000.

Khodagholi, Abbas, Hamid Nowzari, and Mehran Paydande, Eds.
The Criminal System: The Mykonos Documents
. Berlin: Nima Books, 2000.

Khodagholi, Abbas, Hamid Nowzari, and Mehran Paydande.
There’s Still a Judge in Berlin: Mykonos Murder and Process.
Berlin: Nima Books, 2000.

Kubsch, F.
The Mykonos-Judgment
. Edited by Hans-Joachim Ehrig. Berlin: Archive for Research and Documentation Iran- Berlin and Association of Iranian Refugees (Berlin), 1999.

Siegmund, Norbert.
The Mykonos Process.
Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2001.

Selected Articles and Bibliography

“Historic Figures: Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–1989).” BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/khomeini_ayatollah.shtml

“The Mystic Who Lit the Fires of Hatred.”
Time
. 7 January 1980.

“The Connection: An Exclusive Look at How Iran Hunts Down Its Opponents Abroad.”
Time
. 21 March 1994.

Afshari, Reza.
Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism
. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Bunegart, Luther. Memorandum to Press: On Being Dismissed by Yousef Amin as Counsel. 25 November 1993.

Clawson, Patrick. “Europe’s ‘Critical Dialog’ with Iran: Pressure for Change.”
PolicyWatch
242(9 April 1997).

Farhand, Mansour. “Iran Wants to Assassinate Me. Why?”
New York Times
. 8 December 1993.

Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany. Summary of Facts. 13 November 1992.

Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany. Final Report. 22 August 1993.

Frase, S. J. and T. Weigend. “German Criminal Justice as a Guide to American Law Reform: Similar Problems, Better Solutions?”
Boston College International and Comparative Law Review
18:2 (1995).

Grünewald, Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Memorandum to Chief Federal Prosecutor’s Office of the Federal High Court. 22 April 1993.

Haass, R. and M. L. O’Sullivan, Eds.
Honey and Vinegar: Incentives, Sanctions, and Foreign Policy.
Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000.

Hufelschulte, Josef. “Mullahs Want to Take Revenge on Bonn.”
Focus Magazine.
18 January 1993.

Jost, Bruno, Senior Public Prosecutor. Federal Criminal Police Offi ce of Germany.
Preliminary Investigation of Ali Fallahian for Murder Among Other Things
. 4 December 1995.

Khorsandi, Hadi.
The Ayatollah and I
. London: Readers International, 1987.

Khorsandi, Shappi.
A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English
. London: Ebury Press, 2009.

Kinzer, Stephen. “Trial Begins in Berlin for Iranian Charged in Dissident’s Death.”
New York Times
. 29 October 1993.

Koohi-Kamali, Fereshteh. “Nationalism in Iranian Kurdistan.” In
The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview,
edited by Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Stefan Sperl, 171–192. London: Routledge, 1992.

Langbein, John.
Comparative Criminal Procedure: Germany.
Eagan, MN: West Group, 1977.

Lazariev, M. S., Mahvi, S. K., Hasratian, M. A., and Zhigalina, U. E.,
Kurdistan’s History
. Moscow: Forough Books, 1999.

Markham, James M. “Bonn May Balk at Extraditing Terror Suspect.”
New York Times
. 17 January 1987.

Matin-Asgari, Afshin.
Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah
. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2001.

McDowall, David.
The Kurds: A Nation Denied
. Austin, TX: Minority Rights Publications, 1992.

Menashri, David.“Khomeini’s Policy toward Ethnic and Religious Minorities.” In
Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State in the Middle East,
edited by Milton J. Esman and Itamar
Rabinovich, 216–217. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Mussavian, S. H.
Challenges of the Iran-West Relations: Analysis of Iran-Germany Relations
. Tehran: Center for Strategic Studies, 2006.

Norton, Augustus Richard.
Hezbollah: A Short History
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Pilz, Peter.
Eskorte nach Teheran: Der Ősterreichische Rechtsstaat und die Kurdenmorde
. Vienna: Ibera & Molden, 1997.

Sancton, Thomas. “Iran’s State of Terror.”
Time
. 11 November 1996.

Schmitt, Michael N. “State-Sponsored Assassination in International and Domestic Law”
Yale Journal of International Law
17 (1992).

Shahrooz, Kaveh. “With Revolutionary Rage and Rancor: A Preliminary Report on the 1988 Massacre of Iran’s Political Prisioners.”
Harvard Human Rights Journal
20 (2007).

Shamlou, Ahmad.
Fresh Air: Book of Poems
. Tehran: Morvarid Publishers, 1958.

Tyler, Patrick E. “Iranian Seen as Victim of Assassination Plan.”
The Washington Post
. 9 September 1989.

U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
Report of the Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary
Executions, Transparency and the Imposition of the Death Penalty
. New York. March 2006.

Walsh, James. “Iran’s Smoking Gun.”
Time
. 21 April 1997.

Wolst, Federal High Court Judge. Haftbefehl, Der Minister für Nachrichtendienste und Sicherheitsangelegenheiten der Islamischen Republik Iran Ali Falahijan [Arrest Warrant, for Ali Falahian, the Minister of Intelligence and Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Falahian]. 14 March 1996. Die Agenten schlafen nur.
Der Spiegel
. 25 March 1996.