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I was eager to know what was happening inside the courtroom. I would later learn that the reality was far more absurd than anything I could have imagined. The “trial” was the first in a series of show trials that the Islamic government would stage after the election. A number of sources told me that the trials were produced on Khamenei’s direct orders, meant to show the strength of the regime and disgrace the reformist leaders who were paraded in front of the press in their prison uniforms.

The scene was something out of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Stalin himself had staged similar show trials, in which a couple dozen high-ranking former Communist Party officials were put on trial for treason and allegedly planning to assassinate Comrade Stalin. The difference was that the culprits in Stalin’s courts had clear, albeit fabricated, charges against them; the incrimination procedure was thorough. In Khamenei’s version, the charges could be anything from possession of a satellite television, to throwing stones at the Revolutionary Guards, to being in contact with the CIA. The Guards had collected more than a hundred prisoners of different backgrounds and political affiliations under the same roof. There were former ministers and parliamentarians, as well as a number of young kids who had done nothing more than attend a demonstration. It seemed as if everyone had been arrested for the same reason: to show the widespread nature of the fetneh—the sedition, as Khamenei called the postelection demonstrations. But there was not enough time to try each prisoner, leaving the prosecutor to read a long statement that sounded like the same propaganda and nonsense the Iranian people had heard too many times before.

I realized that I was not going to be tried on that day. I was part of the post-trial show. The Revolutionary Guards had decided to stage a press conference with four supposed leaders of the velvet revolution: Mohammad Atrianfar, a former security official and deputy minister of interior who had also been in charge of a number of reformist newspapers that had been shut down; Mohammad Ali Abtahi; Kian Tajbakhsh; and me. Tajbakhsh and I were told to sit in the courtroom as Abtahi and Atrianfar were taken behind a podium for the press conference.

It was difficult for me to watch Abtahi and Atrianfar during their press conference. I had interviewed each of them several times. Once jovial and chubby, Abtahi looked defeated and broken. He was less than half of his previous size. With a lifeless expression in his eyes, he made scathing comments about Mousavi and Khatami, and explained why the reformists had failed to gain widespread popular support and so had had to stage a velvet revolution. Abtahi’s basic point was that the reformists did not understand how much Iranians admired Khamenei and, as a result of this miscalculation, devised misguided strategies to gain people’s votes before the election or overturn the results after the election.

Atrianfar took a different approach: he spent a significant amount of time praising Khamenei’s greatness. A clever type who knew how to switch sides, Atrianfar understood that all tyrants are susceptible to flattery, and so he compared Khamenei to Imam Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad and one of the most revered figures of Shia Islam. Atrianfar then likened himself to an enemy of the imam who later joined Imam Hossein’s army.

My turn was to come after lunch. We ate chicken kebabs and drank doogh, a salty yogurt drink similar to lassi, inside the courtroom. Rosewater told me to look down during lunch. He then gave me his drink, saying he had to watch his blood pressure. “Names, Mazi, names,” he reminded me. Before the interview, Tajbakhsh and I were given dress shirts to change into.

I knew what I had to do. Watching Atrianfar’s shameless praise of Khamenei had convinced me that I should follow him, and instead of naming names, as Rosewater wanted me to, I would offer my apologies to the supreme leader and repeat the paranoid but general theories Haj Agha, Rosewater’s