On a visit I made to Tehran last winter, while reporting my Profile of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most outspoken person I met, curiously, was not an Iranian reformist but a fellow-American, a Muslim convert named Hassan Abdulrahman.
I met Abdulrahman, né David Theodore Belfield, on a visit to the studios of Press TV, which is a government-owned English-language satellite television-news channel—Iran’s answer to Al Jazeera. It turned out that Belfield, who grew up in Bay Shore, Long Island, and who converted to Islam in 1969, at the age of eighteen, was the editor of Press TV’s Web site. (He is said to have resigned recently.) Belfield is also a U.S. fugitive, who has been wanted on murder charges since 1980, when, as a gesture of solidarity with diplomats working for the newly installed revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, he assassinated Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former Iranian diplomat living in Washington, D.C. (This was before the U.S. hostage crisis and the severing of relations between the U.S. and Iran. At the time, Belfield was working as a security guard at the Iran Interests Section in the Algerian Embassy.) After killing Tabatabai, he fled to Iran, where he has lived ever since.
In the intervening years, Abdulrahman has not shied away from publicity. He had previously given interviews to the Western media, including one with ABC’s “20/20” in 1995. In 2000, he appeared as an actor in the feature film “Kandahar,” by the accclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhamalbaf. He was also the subject of a 2003 article, by Ira Silverman, in The New Yorker, “An American Terrorist.” (His article refers to Belfield/Abdulrahman as Dawud Salahuddin, the name Belfield took upon converting to Islam.) In Silverman’s piece, Abdulrahman acknowledged having killed Tabatabai, but defended what he had done as an “act of war.” He was uncompromising about his criticism of U.S. foreign policy, but he alluded to disagreements with the Iranian revolution as well.
I met up with Abdulrahman in Tehran a couple of times. At one point, I observed that Ayatollah Khomeini was the one Iranian public figure who seemed untouchable, and whom no one ever criticized. I mentioned that I had visited Khomeini’s mausoleum in south Tehran, a vast complex that has been under construction for many years, and that I had been struck by its air of commercialization. I told him I had been shocked to find, inside the shrine, that Khomeini’s coffin was placed on view inside a glass box the size of a house, and that there was a slit in the glass through which admirers could throw money. As a result, the floor of the tomb was littered with Iranian riyals, which have Khomeini’s face printed on them. Outside the shrine, I had been approached by a Khomeini Foundation employee with a donation box, who asked if I wanted to “contribute.” I had then found, in the colonnaded recesses on either side of the main building, shops selling counterfeit Western DVDs, including “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Mr. Bean’s Holiday,” and one shop selling toy guns and key chains with heavily armed American-looking commandos.
Abdulrahman shook his head in dismay and told me that, after thirty years in Iran, he was not surprised by much. He paraphrased Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1968): “If you undertake a revolution and it is not taken for the sake of humanity, then you will end up imitating the people you succeed.” Abdulrahman said that, in his opinion, Khomeini had been uniquely gifted as a leader, but he does not think much of his successor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. “Khomeini could get away with whatever he wanted, because he was something else, but his wilayat-e-faquih“—literally, “the guardianship of the jurisconsult,” the term for Khomeini’s theoretical argument for clerical rule, which is derived from a Shiite interpretation of Islamic law—”has evolved into the concept of King of Kings. This is something that is laid out in Plato’s Republic, but you won’t find it in the Koran.”
He went on, scathingly:
I asked Abdulrahman what he thought about the ongoing standoff between Iran and the United States. “I don’t personally like Ali Khamenei,” he said, “but I appreciate his anti-Americanism, and if Israel attacks Iran all bets are off.” Such an attack “would not be a local thing—it would be catastrophic. The thing is that the Iranians will treat an Israeli attack as an American attack, and they will hit them in the region—in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, too”—wherever they are.
Unsolicited, Abdulrahman told me that he was planning to leave Iran. I asked him where he intended to go. He shook his head, laughing: “The first law of a fugitive is not to tell anyone where you’re headed.”
