The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(26)
Najwa glanced around her office, in her mind already planning her trip. Precious real estate in the Secretariat Building was allocated along strict principles: media from Western countries, especially those that dug deep into UN corruption, such as the New York Times, the Times of London, and the Financial Times, were granted miserly cubicles, often with no windows. Media from the developing world were given spacious offices, none more coveted than that of the Al-Jazeera bureau. Najwa and her team had three large, bright rooms. The main space was used by Najwa, the second by Maria, and the third housed an editing suite.
The white walls were decorated with framed photographs of stills from Najwa’s coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings. Each staffer had a teak and steel height-adjustable workstation, with a mesh-backed office chair sprouting levers and buttons that demanded a degree in engineering to adjust. A brushed steel coffee machine stood in one corner, while the facing wall was covered with four flat LED television screens. A shelf was filled with a clutter of prizes that Najwa and her team had won for their reporting.
Najwa turned over the SCI newsletter and began to write on the back.
Thursday evening. Off-record, deep background conversation with Riyad Bakri. Bakri says death of Schneidermann reminded him of case of Abbas Velavi.
Why?
Bakri v. interested in Yael Azoulay—has he heard the rumors from the Palestinian delegation? What is Jaesh al-Arbaeen?
Najwa opened up the anonymizing software that allowed her to connect to the Internet through an encrypted virtual private network. The VPN masked her computer’s IP address, the unique identifying number assigned to each device that connects to the Internet, then routed the connection through a series of encrypted servers around the world. In theory, she was now untraceable. She then opened her browser, which was set to Start Page, a free private search engine. Unlike other search engines, Start Page did not record any details of searches. Nor did it use cookies, those tiny bundles of data that identified users and marked when they logged into particular websites. The VPN and Start Page should, she hoped, be enough to secure her connection. All of Al-Jazeera’s staff took special precautions to keep their communications as private as possible. Whether or not Bakri worked for the Saudi Mukhabarat, the UN building was home to hundreds of spies—including, she suspected, a number of her colleagues.
Najwa typed in “Abbas Velavi” into Start Page’s search box. The screen instantly filled with links to news stories and articles.
She pulled up a story from the New York Times a year ago:
IRANIAN OPPOSITION FIGURE FOUND DEAD
By SAMI BOUSTANI
A leading figure in the Iranian opposition was found dead at home in his apartment in midtown Manhattan, police said Monday.
Abbas Velavi, 47, likely died of a massive heart attack, law enforcement sources said. The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office will determine the cause of death as the investigation continues.
Mr. Velavi, who had lived in the United States since the mid-1980s, was known as an outspoken opponent of the Iranian regime. Opposition-supporting websites claimed that he had been murdered.
The United States and Iran have no diplomatic relations, although Iran maintains a mission to the United Nations in New York. Calls and emails to Iran’s mission to the United Nations went unanswered.
The remainder of the article detailed Velavi’s life as an opposition activist and previous threats against him. She flicked through the other links. There was little more factual material. Sami had written a short follow-up story reporting that the medical examiner had carried out an autopsy and determined that Velavi had died of natural causes. There was some shaky video footage on YouTube of a small demonstration by Iranian dissidents opposite the UN staff entrance on the corner of First Avenue and East Forty-Second Street. The protestors were holding up signs claiming that Velavi had been murdered. After that, the story had faded away from the mainstream media.
What interested Najwa was a video interview with Velavi’s widow on an Iranian opposition website. She played the clip again.
The camera showed a woman in her fifties, with short gray hair. Her face was deeply lined, but her voice was determined. The footage of was reasonable quality, but the frame wobbled slightly as though it had been filmed on a mobile phone.
“What do you think happened to your husband?” asked a disembodied voice.
“He was murdered.”
“The autopsy said he died of a heart attack.”
The woman snorted derisively. “He was perfectly healthy. He had just had his annual check-up. Why would he have a heart attack and die, out of nowhere? It was the visitor.”
“Tell me about the visitor.”
“He was here, sitting where you are. He said his name was Parvez. He had joined the opposition in Tehran and wanted to make contact here. But Abbas was suspicious of him. He was too smooth. Too confident. Abbas asked him some questions about people in Tehran. The visitor said he knew them.”
“And?”
“They didn’t exist. Abbas invented them.”
“What else do you remember?”
“The visitor was bald. He had a neat beard and wore fine black leather gloves. He did not take them off all the time he was here. He said he had a skin condition.”
The woman’s voice cracked and she began to cry. “He killed my husband. I know it. A woman knows who killed her husband.”
Najwa added “who is the visitor?” on the back of the SCI newsletter. Had Velavi been murdered? It was certainly possible. Tehran had long arms, great expertise, and no compunction about disposing of inconvenient enemies. But like every foreign intelligence service, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence would be very wary of conducting an assassination on American soil. They would make certain not to leave any tracks, for fear of blowback, which meant that if Velavi had been murdered, a lot of time and planning had gone into his killing. Why?