Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [86]
“We would like you to tell us how and why the agency told you to interview Khatami,” Rosewater explained.
I was exasperated. “But which agency, sir?” I asked.
Rosewater slowly approached me. “What’s in this cup?” he asked.
“Blood,” I answered.
“Do you think I cannot make you bleed more?” I didn’t answer. “Answer me. I asked you: DO YOU THINK I CANNOT MAKE YOU BLEED MORE?!” he screamed.
“Yes, sir,” I conceded. “You can.”
“So do what I’m telling you to do.” He tapped gently on my shoulder. “The Koran says: the hypocrites are even worse than the infidels. We have a chief hypocrite in this country, and that is Khatami. You brought up the dirty idea of vote rigging with Khatami one month before the election, Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater said. Khamenei had called the reformists’ claim that the election was fraudulent “a great sin.” I could see that my having reported on the possibility of election fraud infuriated Rosewater. “This is very interesting, since at the time, no one else was talking about the possibility.” This wasn’t true, of course. Since Ahmadinejad’s first presidential election, in 2005, the idea that he would rig the 2009 vote had been widely discussed. I wanted to remind Rosewater of this, but I remained quiet. “We simply want you to tell us how the agency came up with the rumor of vote rigging, and how you guided Khatami to answer your question about vote rigging,” Rosewater said.
“But Mr. Khatami says in the interview the votes will not be rigged,” I pointed out. Khatami had told me it was impossible, given the system of checks and balances in place. I braced myself for another blow to my head, but it didn’t come.
“I know that,” Rosewater replied. “But he let you ask that question and allowed you to publish it. We both know that in a Q&A, the question is often more important than the answer. Now, we’re just getting started. Let’s talk about Mehdi Karroubi.” He let out an exaggerated laugh. “Karroubi is a joke. A moron!”
Look who’s talking, I thought.
Karroubi was known as the old man of reformism. While Mousavi was regarded as the gentle face of reformism, Karroubi was famous for his bluntness. After Ahmadinejad’s first victory in 2005, in an open letter published in the reformist press, Karroubi accused the supreme leader’s son Mojtaba Khamenei of vote rigging. In the letter, addressed to Ali Khamenei, Karroubi wrote that Khamenei’s son worked with the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards to tamper with the ballot boxes and raise the number of votes for Ahmadinejad. At the time, all my sources in different government ministries told me that Karroubi was right on target, but they also told me that this could not happen again. I did one of the first foreign press interviews with Karroubi in March 2008, for Newsweek. During the interview, he openly talked about his plans to topple Ahmadinejad in 2009.
“And you, Maziar, made Karroubi look like an intellectual by calling him ‘Iran’s organized reformer’!” Rosewater punctuated each word in the phrase I’d used as the title of my interview with a blow to my head. My migraine pain was so intense, I felt nearly ready to vomit. “You then went on to ask him, ‘Don’t you think those who rigged the last vote can do it again?’ ”
He took a deep breath. “La elaha ella Allah. There is no God but Allah. The things you’ve written make my blood boil. Why? Why did you want to corrupt our youth by instilling the idea of vote rigging in their heads? Why, Maziar?”
Before I could answer, Rosewater began to rail against certain clerics, those he believed were agents of the West. Chief among them were Grand Ayatollahs Hossein Ali Montazeri and Youssef Sanei, whose names he’d written on the paper. In 1988, after Khomeini ordered the massacre of thousands of members of the MKO and other groups, Ayatollah Montazeri spoke out against the