The Dubai Betrayal by Jeremy Burns

Author:Jeremy Burns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fiction Studio Books
Published: 2016-03-16T18:51:00+00:00

Chapter 29

30,000 feet above Norway

Arsalan Hosseini was still seething from his meeting. Though his suspicions were as strong as ever, he was no closer to confirming them than when he had left his office. Another brick wall, another slap in the face. And he, the president of the country! Though it was yet another secret thought he could never share aloud, sometimes he hated what Iran had become.

It was an important distinction. He loved everything Persian, and was ultimately faithful to his nation’s current geopolitical incarnation, despite his reservations about its present direction. Modern-day Iran was many times removed from Persia’s former grandeur and glory, the culture, ethnicity, language, and history that had built one of the world’s most creative and influential civilizations for millennia.

After being a beacon of innovation and prosperity in antiquity, the nation played a key role in the Islamic Golden Age, nurturing myriad scholars, poets, and scientists that helped to shape the modern world, all while Europeans were crawling around in the mud and slaughtering each other in an endless series of Dark Age wars. Through a series of caliphates and dynasties, the Shiite Muslim incarnation of Iran’s Medieval and Early Modern eras were shining days for which he often waxed nostalgic.

The encroaching West, of course, had been the catalyst for its downfall. From Tsarist Russia’s nineteenth-century conquering of much of Iran’s territories around the Caucacus Mountains to the overbearing influence of European colonialism throughout the region, Western powers had made their indelible mark on the once-great empire for more than a century before the greatest blow finally came.

Awash in the Cold War paranoia of anything that stank even remotely of communism, a joint CIA/MI6 conspiracy ousted the democratically elected president Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. The popular socialist-leaning politician had made moves to nationalize the country’s oil resources, but the Anglo-Persian Oil Company—the precursor to British Petroleum—rallied British special forces to bring him down. When their plot was discovered and Iran cut off all diplomatic ties with the UK, London got their allies across the pond to do the job for them. Once the CIA had effected the coup against Mossadegh, they installed the shah in his place. Despite the propaganda attacks against him and the eventual arrest that removed him from power, Mossadegh remained one of the most popular figures from Iranian history.

When the shah’s greed and corruption eventually became too much for his subjects, the Iranian Revolution broke out in the late seventies. The CIA’s role in Mossadegh’s removal played a key rallying point in the anti-US sentiment that swept the nation and resulted in the storming of the American embassy and the 444-day hostage crisis that shook the world and laid bare the deepening rift between the West and the Middle East.

But though the revolution ostensibly reinstated free elections and democratic rule to the people, the most important change was that the theocratic, pro-West shah was replaced by the theocratic anti-West supreme leader. And despite the power that technically resided in Hosseini’s office

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