aka Ali

A few days after Khamenei’s declaration that further protests would mean bloodshed, Ali was talking to a friend on his cell phone near a protest (friends have told me to always turn off my phone and never be seen talking on it when passing near protests), telling him that nothing was really going on where he was walking. The friend told Ali he shouldn’t be using his phone, he was going to get in trouble. Ali told the friend there weren’t any cops in sight but sure enough, as soon as he hund up two plainclothes men grabbed him by either arm and told him Befarmaid, please get in the car. Do I know you? Ali asked, and one of them grinned and said We’ll get to know each other.

They took him to a mosque, where he was the only focus of dozens of Basijis hanging out there bored. They emptied his backpack on a table and all the Basijis looked on in awe had how better equipped he was than them (Ali is a boys scout-type technology geek, always coming prepared with a backpack full of gadgets). Ali was scheduled to begin working with the Army, doing some special tech project for them instead of his normal military service, and he told them so because he thought it would get him off the hook. He took out his laptop to show them a document verifying that he was working for the Army, making sure to turn it on in Safe Mode so none of the icons of his anti-filter etc software appeared. He searched the word “Army” but instead of his military service letter, the first thing that popped up was his standing grinning with a bunch of American soldiers holding up an American flag (I’ll ask the story behind that next time I see him; if I remember correctly he went to school in Texas).
This convinced them that he was actually a mole who’d infiltrated the Army, and he was taken to an unoccupied women’s bathroom of the mosque and blindfolded and manhandled. One of the girls in our group (he told this story to us at a cafe 2 nights ago) asked him if they’d done anything really horrible to him during his period in custody.
Well… he fidgeted for a minute… I’ll just say that there were some times when it wasn’t fun at all.
I think he would have been proud to tell us if he’d actually been tortured, though.

He was interrogated for the first time that evening, and then repeatedly by different arms of the intelligence services/military. The first question they asked him was How much money did they give you?
How much money did who give me? asked Ali.
How much money did they give you? They repeated.
Well, my mom gave me …, my father gave me …, my friend Mo lent me 500 Toman for a taxi ride the other day…
After expressing their disapproval at his sense of humor, they asked him again, this time specifically about how much money the FRENCH had given him.
I’ve never even met a French person, Ali said.
This was just a couple days after Clotide Reiss, the young French researcher, was arrested at Tehran airport, so I guess anti-French conspiracy theories were on everyone’s mind, but considering the photo with US soldiers they’d seen it would I think have made a lot more sense for them to have invented a story about him spying for the Americans than the French.

In the makeshift cells on either side of him were teenagers who bragged to him they’d been arrested respectively for beating up a Basiji and settling fire to a police car. As more arrestees were brought to the mosque, Ali was kept in separate from the others. When someone asked why, a guard replied Because he’s Intelligence.
Oh yeah. It was my proudest moment, said Ali. Intelligence. Ali, by the way, likes memorizing facts about hi tech weaponry and has a little CIA button on his backpack, which somehow they failed to notice as they were searching him.

Some of the guards were actually really nice. As Ali was being taken to be transferred between intelligence organizations, one of them kept saying Don’t worry, you’re our brother, even after you’re transferred we’ll make sure nothing happens to you. His first night in custody, still in holding at the mosque, one of the guards split his dinner with Ali. Maazarat ke mozahemet mishim, I’m sorry we’re bothering you/causing you trouble, the guard told him. No, no, I’m sorry to be causing all of you trouble, said Ali.
I laughed as Ali told this part of the story but he said seriously No, really, I was sorry. There were all these people who had to stay up all night in that mosque just because of me. And it was all over nothing.

When he was transferred to the Army, they told him that he shouldn’t have said anything at all to his initial interrogators, he should have just said he worked for the Army and insisted on being transferred to their custody immediately.
They looked on his cell phone’s call history and found that a couple weeks earlier, he’d received a call from Europe. They claimed. Fine then, he said, just check my records with the cell phone company, I can’t alter those records.
Ok, they said, but that will take a week or two.
After a couple days he was released.
Ali commented to me on how disappointed he was with the military and intelligence services, at how incompetent they were for all their bluster.

He went to basic training with the Revolutionary Guards (apparently he’s officially an employee of the regular Army but doing this project with the administratively completely separate Sepah—I’m a little hazy on the details) just a couple days after he was released, an experience that only cemented his view of their incompetence.

**By the way, the pants they’d issued to Ali were baggy and ugly, so instead of wearing them he decided to report the first day wearing US-military standard issue grey desert camo pants. When he showed up everyone else was wearing the Sepah uniform, and they all roared with laughter when they saw him. His nickname was American Soldier after that.

According to Ali most of the trainers were completely uneducated and incurious, and because the group Ali was trained with trained was composed only of men with bachelors degrees or better, the trainers couldn’t get away with BSing a legal or medical argument/point or misquoting the Quran. EG You guys are educated, one trainer swaggered, so OF COURSE you know that the internet was invented by the CIA and Microsoft is part of the CIA.
The recruits regularly talked back to their officers, and Ali said that he on occasion got into a yelling match with a Sepah colonel about US military capabilities. The colonel had been saying that Iran’s great strength was insurgency, and the US had only airpower but no experience with counter-insurgency. Are you kidding me? Ali said, maybe 10 years ago that was true but now their whole military has been trained around Iraq and Afghanistan.
Everybody in boot camp was talking politics (I want to ask him more about this later) and they had senior RG officers come to talk to their elite educated group about the protests. Some of those guys were actually very smart, Ali said, admitting that the Sepah had made mistakes and been the cause of some of the violence, but making convincing points about the protesters also bearing responsibility (which Ali, having himself been at the first protests at Azadi Square that turned violent after people attacked a Basij headquarters, agreed with) and the precedence of foreign involvement in Iranian domestic politics etc.

**Ali, by the way, doesn’t like Obama much as a personality, but completely approved of his hands-off handling of the Iranian protest movement after the election.

Now Ali is back in Tehran, working on this Army project for the next year before he can think of going abroad.