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PART ONE

The Tunnel at the End

of the Light

Chapter One

“Are you sure you’re pregnant?” I had asked as I leaned down to kiss Paola’s stomach. “Maybe it’s something you ate.”

Her voice sounded tired as she walked me to the door. “Just get back home as soon as you can,” she said. She had had more than enough of my traveling. I had spent the last several weeks in Iran, reporting on the upcoming presidential elections for Newsweek and producing a film for the BBC, and now, after just a week in London, I was heading back again. Her patience for my silly jokes was running thin. We gave each other a long kiss good-bye, and when I finally pulled away from her, her eyes were full of tears.

In the taxi from our flat in north London to Heathrow Airport, I couldn’t ignore the pangs of guilt I felt for leaving Paola alone again. I had promised her I’d be with her during her pregnancy, but in the five months since she’d found out she was carrying our first child, I’d already broken that promise twice. As much as I wanted to be with Paola in London, reading the pregnancy books piled near our bed, I knew that I had to get back to Iran to report on the historic elections just days away. I needed to witness for myself the choice my nation was about to make. There was so much at stake. There were four candidates in total, but two of them—Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaei—didn’t stand a chance. The main battle was between the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his chief opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

I believed that the reckless policies of President Ahmadinejad’s government were ruining Iran. His economic mismanagement had caused high rates of inflation and unemployment, and his irresponsible rhetoric had created far too many enemies. But even more disturbing was that by the end of his first four-year term as president, and with the well-known support of Ayatollah Khamenei, the country was well on its way to becoming a dictatorship.

A former member of the Revolutionary Guards himself, Ahmadinejad had bestowed on the Guards a dangerous amount of power. When the organization was created, in 1979, the Guards was mostly a voluntary force with very few resources, led by guerrilla fighters who had been active against the shah. In the years immediately following the revolution, the Guards had effectively become the new government’s trusted army and police force, tasked with crushing the groups they deemed anti-revolutionary. But in the thirty years since—and most notably under Ahmadinejad’s presidency—the Guards’ political power had grown to such a degree that it surpassed that of the Shia religious leaders who had been ruling Iran for years. In addition to operating ever more effectively as a military force, the Guards had also gained control of much of Iran’s economy and, most alarmingly, had taken over the nation’s nuclear program. In fact, by the time of the June 2009 presidential election, it appeared that Ahmadinejad and the Guards, with Khamenei’s blessing, were trying to tighten their grip on the country and return Iran to the claustrophobic days of the 1980s, where any voice of dissent would be brutally suppressed.

According to the Iranian Constitution, the supreme leader makes the final decision about all affairs of the state. The president, as the head of the executive branch, is in charge of the day-to-day running of the country. Even though the president has to listen to the supreme leader’s directives, a strong president—one who has the support of the public and knows how to manipulate the loopholes in the system—can attain a level of independence that allows him to challenge the supreme leader.

From 1989, when Ali Khamenei became the supreme leader, until Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005, Khamenei had two strong presidents: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. At times, they harshly, albeit privately, disagreed with him, so in order to keep the public’s support, Khamenei tolerated these differences of opinion and did not speak out publicly