The Disciple

I went straight to the embassy, set up the portable telephone booth and called Jake Grafton on the satellite phone.

The secret police pounded on the door at two in the morning. Ghasem opened it, and six of them came storming in. MOIS officers took Ghasem and his roommate, Mustafa Abtahi, to separate cars in the front of the building to question them while two officers remained behind to search every square inch of the apartment.

“The manuscript. We want it. Where is it?”

“What manuscript?”

“Don’t take us for fools. The manuscript that Professor Murad wrote. We know you have it. Where have you hidden it?”

And so it went. Ghasem stuck to his story. He knew nothing about a manuscript, had never seen it, had talked to no one about it.

While he was telling the officers these lies, Ghasem was wondering what Mustafa Abtahi was saying. After all, the manuscript had been in the apartment and Abtahi had probably seen it. He might not have known what it was, but he had probably seen the bundle of paper tied up with strings.

So it went. After forty minutes of this, the officers who had been questioning Ghasem went to question Mustafa, and the officers who had been grilling Mustafa came to question Ghasem. Fortunately they didn’t start pounding on the two men. That would come some night in the future.

Then, suddenly, the interrogation was over. The men upstairs came down, the officers shoved the suspects out of the cars, and the six of them drove away.

Ghasem and Mustafa watched the cars disappear, stood for a moment trying to calm down, then went back upstairs. Their apartment was trashed. Everything movable was piled in the middle of the floor.

They worked for an hour putting things back together, then lay down on their mattresses and tried to sleep. Ghasem didn’t mention the manuscript. Nor did Mustafa. Both men knew that if either had acknowledged the past presence of a manuscript, they would right now be on their way to prison. Neither of them had, so no discussion was needed.

Ghasem picked me up on a street corner in downtown Tehran. I had been followed from the hotel and worked hard getting clean. Went to the bazaar, went into and out of four buildings, caught a taxi, abandoned it at a light and caught another. There had been at least four of them on foot with two cars carrying backup guys.

They were really serious about following me, and I was worried. Why now? Did they know that I was talking to Ghasem?

Lots of questions, and no answers. Every day I spent with Ghasem and managed to telephone Jake Grafton was gold. I was convinced he was telling me the truth, yet so far I didn’t have anything that would convince the skeptics back in the States, who had been burned once too often.

As I dodged Iranian agents, I wondered why everyone had decided to lie to the CIA. Seemed like a good idea to me, but still… everyone?

Pollution this morning was terrible, so bad I couldn’t even see the Alborz Mountains to the north. Ghasem glided by in an older BMW, right on time. He circled the block while I watched to see if anyone was following him. Apparently not. Of course, if they had a beacon on his car they wouldn’t need to follow him.

The second time he stopped, and I climbed in. We were on our way. He started to speak, and I held up my hand. From my backpack I removed a radio receiver. I used it to carefully pace through all the possible frequencies I thought a beacon might be on. Then I tried to check to see if there were bugs in the car transmitting.

Again, apparently not.

“Okay,” I told Ghasem. “We’re clean, I think.”

Ghasem nodded and checked his rearview mirror again. He, too, was worried. When you turn spy, you have a lot to worry about. “Ahmadinejad gave the order a couple of days ago to put warheads in production,” he said. “Today you will see them being manufactured.”

My mouth made a little round O.

“Ahmadinejad had two goals for the nuclear program,” Ghasem continued as we rode along, “and they have both been met. He wanted to put it underground, and he wanted it under military control. Nuclear weapons production is housed in the Hormuz Tu

“How about testing one, just to see if it’ll go bang?”

He shrugged. “Ahmadinejad elected not to test a warhead, so the warheads will go into the missiles, which have been programmed and are ready to launch.”

We talked about missiles for a bit, and when we had exhausted that subject, Ghasem said, “The leadership has also constructed a hardened city for themselves under the Abbas Abad district of Tehran. The entrance is through a religious center, the Mosalla Prayer Grounds. The chosen can get to it quickly from Parliament and the government ministries. This bunker is built to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear device.”

Fortunately I had photographed the blueprints of all of these bunkers and sent them by burst transmission to a satellite, which re-sent them to NSA.

“I always wondered,” I mused aloud, “who the fortunate souls will be: those aboveground who die immediately, or the bunker rats who crawl out, eventually, into a nuclear wasteland?”

“That is a question,” Ghasem acknowledged.

“Where are the operational missiles kept?”

Ghasem gri

“You thought I might not be?”

“The regime has some very clever officers.”

“I was wondering if you were one,” I said, eyeing him.

Ghasem flashed that grin again. “The missiles are spotted all over western and southern Iran. They occasionally move during the night by transport, going from one hardened storage site to another. There are twenty-five sites. Unfortunately, to launch one, it must be pulled from its storage site, which is like a railroad tu

“How quickly is rather quickly?”

“Twenty to thirty minutes.”

“How many operational missiles are there?”

“Hundreds. Perhaps as many as nine hundred-I do not know the exact number. It changes weekly.”

“But the regime will have only a dozen warheads?”

“At first. Over time that number will increase to at least a hundred. The technicians will go to the various storage sites throughout the country to install the new warheads. The missiles will not be moved.”

“Targeting for the missiles-how does that work? Are they preprogrammed, and how long does it take to change a target?”

“The guidance systems are preprogrammed on the ballistic missiles, the Ghadars. Those programs are complex and changing them involves computers. The task requires technical experts and takes hours. The cruise missiles are also preprogrammed, but a good technician can change the target in perhaps half an hour, if he has all the correct targeting data, such as its position and distance and so forth. Still, the easiest way to target the nuclear warheads is to simply install them on preprogrammed missiles, all of which have been checked by the ministry’s experts. That way we don’t have to rely on technicians in the field, who might make errors.”

My mouth was dry, yet my palms were sweating. We were in the suburbs when I had Ghasem pull over and stop. I heaved my breakfast, then climbed back into the car. Amazingly, I felt better.

“Have you seen a target list?” I asked. “Or a list of missiles that will get the warheads?”

“No.”

Ghasem was looking at me, cool as snow in January. “Are you okay?” he said.