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      in Movies

      C.I.A. Discloses Identity of Second Spy Involved in ‘Argo’ Operation

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      The movie about the daring mission to rescue American diplomats from Tehran portrayed a single C.I.A. officer sneaking into the Iranian capital. In reality, the agency sent two officers.In the midst of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A. began what came to be noted as one of the spy agency’s most successful publicly known operations: the rescue of six American diplomats who had escaped the overrun U.S. Embassy — using a fake movie as the cover story.“Argo,” the real-life 2012 movie about the C.I.A.’s fake movie, portrayed a single C.I.A. officer, Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck, sneaking into Tehran to rescue the American diplomats in a daring operation.But in reality, the agency sent two officers into Tehran. For the first time on Thursday, the C.I.A. is releasing the identity of that second officer, Ed Johnson, in the season finale of its new podcast, “The Langley Files.”Mr. Johnson, a linguist, accompanied Mr. Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, on the flight to Tehran to cajole the diplomats into adopting the cover story, that they were Canadians who were part of a crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie called “Argo.” The two then helped the diplomats with forged documents and escorted them through Iranian airport security to fly them home.Although Mr. Johnson’s name was classified, the C.I.A. had acknowledged a second officer had been involved. Mr. Mendez, who died in 2019, wrote about being accompanied by a second officer in his first book, but used a pseudonym, Julio. A painting that depicts a scene from the operation and hangs in the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters, shows a second officer sitting across from Mr. Mendez in Tehran as they forge stamps in Canadian passports. But the second officer’s identity is obscured, his back turned to the viewer.Ed Johnson, right, receiving the C.I.A.’s Intelligence Star from John N. McMahon, the agency’s deputy director for operations at the time, in a photo provided by Mr. Johnson’s family. Mr. Johnson was the long-unidentified second C.I.A. officer in the rescue of six American diplomats from Tehran.The agency began publicly talking about its role in rescuing the diplomats 26 years ago. On the agency’s 50th anniversary, in 1997, the C.I.A. declassified the operation, and allowed Mr. Mendez to tell his story, hoping to balance accounts of some of the agency’s ill-fated operations around the world with one that was a clear success.But until recently, Mr. Johnson preferred that his identity remain secret.“He was someone who spent his whole life doing things quietly and in the shadows, without any expectation of praise or public recognition,” said Walter Trosin, a C.I.A. spokesman and co-host of the agency’s podcast. “And he was very much happy to keep it that way. But it was his family that encouraged him, later in life, to tell his side of the story because they felt there would be value to the world in hearing it.”After Mr. Trosin heard Mr. Johnson and his family were visiting C.I.A. headquarters early this summer, he arranged to meet them. At the meeting, Mr. Trosin and his podcast co-host saw how much the C.I.A.’s recognition of Mr. Johnson’s work meant to his family and started looking for a way to tell the story on the podcast.Mr. Johnson, 80, was unavailable to discuss his career on the podcast or with The New York Times because of health issues. Undeterred, Mr. Trosin dived into the agency’s classified archives.Soon after dangerous operations, the C.I.A. often records secret interviews with the participants, to capture so-called lessons learned for its own, classified histories. In addition, for many storied officers, the C.I.A. records classified oral histories at the end of their careers. C.I.A. historians had done one such oral history with Mr. Johnson.“We found out there was this prior interview,” Mr. Trosin said. “And at least portions of which could be made public.”Thanks to the “Argo” movie, the C.I.A.’s role in the rescue of the diplomats, who were being sheltered by the Canadians, has become one of the agency’s best-known operations.The C.I.A. museum, which has a tendency to dwell on the agency’s failures, features a display on the operation. Among the artifacts is a copy of the script — or at least treatment — of the fake movie complete with the Hollywood-esque tagline “A Cosmic Conflagration.” Also displayed are the business cards of the fake production company used as part of the cover story and the concept art for the movie, which featured drawings from Jack Kirby, the celebrated comic book artist who helped create the Marvel universe.Like the painting, the museum display did not identify Mr. Johnson.A painting depicting a scene from the operation hanging in the C.I.A.’s headquarters shows a second officer sitting across from Tony Mendez as they forge stamps in Canadian passports while in Tehran but does not show his face.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesBut C.I.A. officials said Mr. Johnson, an expert in languages and extracting people from tricky places, was invaluable to the operation.At the time of the hostage crisis, Mr. Johnson was based in Europe, focusing his Cold War work on learning how to get in and out of countries that were not always hospitable to Americans.When Iranian revolutionaries overran the American Embassy and took 52 diplomats hostage, six Americans working in the consular office escaped. They eventually ended up under the protection of Kenneth D. Taylor, Canada’s ambassador to Iran, and the C.I.A. began working on a plan to sneak them out of the country.Mr. Mendez, who had worked with Hollywood experts to hone his tradecraft, came up with the plan to use a fake movie, which he named “Argo” after the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the ancient Greek heroes who had undertaken the arduous mission to retrieve the Golden Fleece.While some C.I.A. extraction operations at the time used single officers, the agency decided that for the rescue of the six diplomats, two officers would be needed, said Brent Geary, a C.I.A. historian who has studied the agency’s history in Iran.Mr. Johnson was fluent in French, German, Spanish and Arabic. He did not, however, speak Persian, the predominant language in Iran.Dr. Geary said the agency had Persian speakers, but could not risk sending in someone who might be known to current or former Iranian officials. The belief was also that someone fluent in the local language could draw questions, and what was critical to the mission was having people with Mr. Mendez’s and Mr. Johnson’s skill sets.“They had trained to get in and out of tight spots,” Dr. Geary said.Even without Persian, Mr. Johnson’s languages came into use. Soon after arriving, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson mistakenly ended up at the Swedish Embassy, across the street from the U.S. Embassy, which was occupied by the Iranian revolutionaries.Tony Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, was played by Ben Affleck in “Argo.”Mark Makela/Corbis, via Getty ImagesOutside the embassy, Mr. Johnson discovered that both he and the Iranian guard spoke German, and the two began talking. The guard then hailed a taxi and wrote the address of the Canadian Embassy on a piece of paper and sent the two fake movie producers off.“I have to thank the Iranians for being the beacon who got us to the right place,” Mr. Johnson said in his oral history.In the “Argo” movie, Mr. Affleck, portraying Mr. Mendez, is shown swiping Iranian forms that were needed to enter and exit the country. But in reality, it was Mr. Johnson who performed the sleight of hand to steal the documents. (Mr. Affleck did not respond to a request to comment.)In his oral history, Mr. Johnson said the “biggest thing” was to persuade the diplomats that they could pull off the movie team cover story.“These are rookies,” Mr. Johnson recalled in the recorded session. “They were people who were not trained to lie to authorities. They weren’t trained to be clandestine, elusive.”But Mr. Johnson recounted that the six diplomats pulled it off, putting aside their nervousness and adopting the persona of a happy-go-lucky film crew.The climax of the real movie — spoiler alert for a film that has been out for more than a decade — involves Iranian government officials reacting skeptically to the cover story, then realizing the “film crew” were American diplomats and chasing the plane down the runway. None of which happened.In reality, there was simply one last security check as the group left the departure lounge.“A couple of young Iranians, they’re patting people down as they went through,” Mr. Johnson recalled, noting that the diplomats were leaning into their parts, cracking jokes as they approached the checkpoint.With that, the diplomats, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson were through the last checks. In the oral history, Mr. Johnson recalled boarding and seeing the plane’s name painted on the side. It was named Aargau, and Mr. Johnson thought to himself, “What the hell?”“After a bit, I forget when, I picked up The Herald Tribune and did the crossword puzzle,” Mr. Johnson said. “And one of the one of the clues was Jason’s companions … Jason and the Argonauts.”In the C.I.A. podcast, Mr. Trosin said the name of the plane and the crossword were simply coincidences.“To be clear,” Mr. Trosin said, “this is not C.I.A. officers with excess free time just planting clues.” More

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      in Television

      The Iron Sheik, Villainous Hall of Fame Wrestler, Is Dead

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      Khosrow Vaziri drew on his Iranian heritage to create a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain and became one of the most memorable heels in wrestling history.The Iron Sheik, a Hall of Fame wrestler who became a villainous star in the 1980s, facing off against Hulk Hogan and teaming up with a wrestler who claimed to represent the Soviet Union, died in his sleep early Wednesday morning at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was either 81 (according to his passport) or 80 (according to him).The death was confirmed by his managers, Page and Jian Magen, who said they did not know the cause.Foreign-style heels are a time-honored tradition in professional wrestling, and the Iron Sheik, whose legal name was Khosrow Vaziri, became one of the most recognizable of them all.The Sheik drew loosely on his Iranian heritage to build a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain. He wore a thick mustache, boots with curled toes, and kaffiyeh, Middle Eastern head scarves — which are not generally worn in Iran.At the height of the Sheik’s infamy, and in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, he often stomped into the ring waving an Iranian flag emblazoned with the face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, to take on stereotypically American wrestlers.The Sheik’s signature move was the camel clutch, in which he sat on an opponent’s back, locked his fingers beneath the other wrestler’s chin and pulled up. His unfortunate opponent’s spine seemed to bend like a drawn bow.In 1983 the Sheik defeated Bob Backlund to win the World Wrestling Federation championship. But his time with the title was short.About a month later, on Jan. 23, 1984, the Sheik defended his title against Hulk Hogan, then a relatively new face in the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE), in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden.The match seemed to be going the Sheik’s way, and he trapped Hogan in a camel clutch. But Hogan stood up with the Sheik on his back and slammed him into a corner pylon.The Sheik flopped to the mat. Hogan launched off the ropes, leaped into a leg drop on the Sheik and then pinned him. It was the first of Hogan’s six WWE championships and the beginning of Hulkamania.The defeat continued to sting even decades later, the Sheik, very much in character, told WWE in an interview in 2014.“Hulk Hogan, only thing he had was luck,” he said. “I have one bad night, I lost my belt.”Sgt. Slaughter was a regular opponent for the Sheik, who lost a major match to him at Madison Square Garden later in 1984.The next year the Sheik teamed up with Nikolai Volkoff, a heel supposedly wrestling for the Soviet Union (he was actually from Croatia), and went on to win the World Tag Team Championship at the inaugural Wrestlemania.The Sheik also dialed up his character’s anti-American rhetoric. He often snatched the microphone from an announcer and shouted “Iran No. 1! Russia No. 1!”Then he would glare at the audience, shout “U.S.A.!” and spit on the ground.The audience reaction could be so vicious that despite his ferociousness in the ring, the Sheik sometimes feared for his safety.Keith Elliot Greenberg, a wrestling historian and writer, said in a phone interview that he thought fans sometimes believed the Sheik’s character too much.“The reality was he was actually a very loyal American, and was grateful to the United States for the opportunities it afforded him,” Mr. Greenberg said.The Iron Sheik in action against Chavo Guerrero in the 1980s.George Napolitano/MediaPunch, via Associated PressHossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri was born in Damghan, a town about 200 miles east of Tehran. His birth date appeared as March 15, 1942, on his passport, but he was not certain that it was accurate and celebrated his birthday on Sept. 9. His parents, Ghassem and Maryam Vaziri, owned a farm that grew pistachios, grapes and other crops.When he was a boy, his family moved to Tehran and opened a wrestling gym where some of Iran’s foremost wrestlers trained. He grew up immersed in the sport.Vaziri became a talented wrestler, and his prominence helped him secure a job as a bodyguard for the family of the shah of Iran. But after the Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler Gholamreza Takhti died under mysterious circumstances in 1968, perhaps for displeasing the shah, Vaziri left Iran for the United States and settled in Minneapolis.He wrestled with an amateur club in Minnesota, winning an Amateur Athletic Union Greco-Roman wrestling tournament in 1971, and served as an assistant coach for the U.S. Olympic team in 1972 and 1976 before making the transition to full-time professional wrestling.Vaziri trained under Verne Gagne, the promoter of the American Wrestling Association. The idea for the Iron Sheik came from Mary Gagne, Verne’s wife, Mr. Greenberg said, though Vaziri experimented with other versions of the character over the years.In 1975 he married Caryl Peterson, who survives him. He is also survived by their daughters, Nicole and Tanya; a sister; and five grandchildren.During the 1980s the Sheik started using drugs and drinking heavily. In 1987 he and Hacksaw Jim Duggan — a babyface, as good-guy wrestlers are known — were arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike after police officers found cocaine and marijuana in their car.The Sheik appeared in a match as an ally of Sgt. Slaughter’s in 1991, and in 1997 he managed another wrestler, the Sultan. But his professional career mostly dried up as his drug use accelerated in the 1990s. He struggled with substance abuse for a long time, but according to an article Mr. Greenberg wrote for Bleacher Report in 2013, he had more recently been able to stay off drugs, except for an occasional beer.In 2003 his daughter Marissa, 27, was killed by her boyfriend, Charles Reynolds. Vaziri said that he contemplated attacking Mr. Reynolds with a razor blade in court, Mr. Greenberg wrote, but that his family kept him from doing it. Mr. Reynolds was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2016.In 2005 the Iron Sheik was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.Beginning in the early 2000s, the Sheik brought a less inhibited version of his character to Howard Stern’s radio show to rant about different wrestlers. He threatened to sodomize rivals like Hogan and used homophobic slurs to describe the Ultimate Warrior.In more recent years the Sheik’s diatribes appeared on social media. His managers often posted profanity-laced messages in all capital letters on a Twitter account that has nearly 650,000 followers. A recent one just said “HOGAN,” preceded by an expletive.But, the Sheik allowed in 2014, things were more civil when he met Hogan outside the ring.“Nobody talk bad about the past,” he said. “I get along with him.”Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

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      in Theater

      Sanaz Toossi on Her Pulitzer: ‘This Signals to Iranians Our Stories Matter’

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      The 31-year-old playwright received the honor for her first produced play, “English,” about a language test-prep class in Iran.Sanaz Toossi had just cleared security at the San Francisco airport when her cellphone rang at midday Monday. It was her agent, telling the 31-year-old playwright she had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for “English,” her first produced play.Toossi, who had written the play as a graduate school thesis project at New York University, was in disbelief. “I asked, ‘Are you sure?’ And when she said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Could you please just double-check?’”The prize was real, and as Toossi boarded the plane home to Los Angeles, her phone began buzzing with congratulatory messages not only from around the United States, but also from Iran, where her parents were born and where the play is set.“English,” which Off Broadway’s Obie Awards recently named the best new American play, is a moving, and periodically comedic, drama about a small group of adults in Karaj, Iran — the city where Toossi’s mother is from — preparing to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The Pulitzers called it “a quietly powerful play,” and said of the characters that “family separations and travel restrictions drive them to learn a new language that may alter their identities and also represent a new life.”The play was originally scheduled to be staged at the Roundabout Underground in 2020 but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic; it instead had a first production last year at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, co-produced by Roundabout. It has since been staged in Boston, Washington, Toronto, Montreal and Berkeley, Calif., with productions planned in Atlanta, western Massachusetts, Seattle, Chicago and Minneapolis. (Toossi was in the Bay Area this week to attend the closing performance at Berkeley Repertory Theater.)The Pulitzers called “English,” about a small group of adults in Karaj, Iran, “a quietly powerful play.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesToossi, who was born and raised in Orange County, Calif., spoke Farsi with her family at home and English outside the home, and she visited Iran regularly while growing up. In a telephone interview on Tuesday, she talked about “English” and the Pulitzer win. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did the idea for “English” come to you?I guess I wrote this play out of rage for the anti-immigrant rhetoric that was, and is, so pervasive in this country. I’m so grateful that my parents were able to immigrate to this country and make something better for both themselves and for me. They worked their asses off, and they created beauty where there was none, and it wounded me to see them and myself spoken of like we didn’t belong here.What is the play about?It’s about the pain of being misunderstood, and how language and identity are interwoven.You are a writer, and you wrote a play about language. What did you learn about words?I feel incredibly insecure about both my English and Farsi speaking abilities — I feel like I know 50 percent of each language, and I feel like I’m always bombing job interviews because the words never come to me in the way that I want them to come to me. This play was, of course, so much about my parents and immigrants and hoping that we can extend grace to people who are trying to express themselves in a language they didn’t grow up speaking, but I think it was also a reminder to be kind to myself.What is it like to watch the play with audiences who are, presumably, mostly not Iranian Americans?It’s light torture to watch your play with an audience around you. I just watch them watch the play. I remember in New York when we did it, it was hard to feel like we were getting the wrong kinds of laughs some nights. But I also have been really moved by the non-Iranian audiences who have come to see the play and have found themselves in it. That’s what you ask of an audience, and that’s beautiful.As the play is done around the country, you are creating more work for Iranian American performers. Was that a motivation?I grew up watching media in which I was incredibly frustrated by our representation and the roles being offered to us. I know so many actors in our community, and they’re so incredibly talented, and to feel like their talents were not put to good use was frustrating. I wanted to work with them, and I wanted to give them roles that they loved. It was really important to me to make this play funny, because I didn’t want to shut our actors out of big laughs.In previous interviews you’ve talked about a fear of being pigeonholed.I don’t know if that fear will ever dissipate. I feel so proud to be Iranian, and to be able to tell these stories, and I just remain hopeful that when I turn in a commission that’s not about Iran, that it will be equally exciting.You do some television work. Are you a member of the Writers Guild of America? Are you on strike?I am on strike. I was on the picket line last week. I’m incredibly proud to be a W.G.A. member. I love theater — theater is my first love, and my biggest love — but I can’t make a living in theater. If I could, I would give my whole self to the theater. But the W.G.A. meant I had health insurance during Covid and I make my rent. I’ll be on the picket line this week too, and for however long it takes. For so many playwrights, that’s how we subsidize our theater making.What’s next for you?This year I had to ask myself if what we do is important. The people of Iran are in the midst of a woman-led revolution, and they’re putting their lives on the line. I wonder who I would be if we’d never left, and I wonder if I would let my roosari [head scarf] fall back, knowing it could mean my life. But I do really, really believe theater is important — I have been changed by theater, and theater has imagined better futures for me when I have failed in imagination. So I don’t know what’s next, but I just hope that in this year of so much pain and bloodshed, I hope this signals to Iranians that our stories matter and we’re being heard. And one day soon, I hope we get to do this play in Iran. More

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      in Music

      ‘Baraye,’ the Anthem of Iran’s Protest Movement, Is Honored With a Grammy

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      He was a relatively unknown young pop singer who had been eliminated in the final round of Iran’s version of “American Idol.” Then he wrote a protest song. On Sunday, he won a Grammy Award.Shervin Hajipour, 25, won in a new special merit category recognizing a song for social change for his hit “Baraye.” The song has become the anthem of protests that have swept through Iran in recent months, evoking grief, anger, hope and a yearning for change.The first lady of the United States, Jill Biden, introduced the award. “A song can unite, inspire and ultimately change the world,” she said. “Baraye,” she added, was “a powerful and poetic call for freedom and women’s rights” that continues to resonate across the world.And as Hajipour’s image and song played on two screens, she reiterated the bedrock slogan of Iran’s uprising: “For Women, Life, Freedom.”“Congratulations Shervin, and thank you for your song,” she said. Hajipour lives in Iran and did not respond to a request for comment. “We won,” he posted on Instagram after the award was given. A video circulated on social media that seemed to capture the moment when Mr. Hajipour, surrounded by friends and watching the ceremony on television, heard his name announced as the winner. He appeared stunned as friends screamed, cheered and hugged him. “My God, my God, I can’t believe it,” said one of his friends, according to the video.He was arrested by the intelligence ministry shortly after his song went viral in September, generating some 40 million views — close to 87 million people live in Iran — in 48 hours. He is currently out on bail and awaiting trial, and has made only one short video message since his release.“I wrote this song in solidarity with the people who are critical of the situation like many of our artists who reacted,” said Hajipour in the video message, from early October.In late September, protests erupted across Iran as tens of thousands of people, led by women and girls, demanded liberation from the Islamic Republic’s theocracy. The protests were set off by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who had been in the custody of the morality police on the allegation of violating hijab rules.Iranians tweeted their reasons for protesting using the hashtag #baraye (or “#for”). Hajipour wove those tweets into lyrics, naming his song after the hashtag. He composed and recorded the song from his bedroom in his parents’ house in the coastal city of Babolsar.As Iranians shared the reasons they were protesting via tweets, Hajipour wove some of them into his verses:“For embarrassment due to being penniless; For yearning for an ordinary life; For the child laborer and his dreams; For this dictatorial economy; For this polluted air; For this forced paradise; For jailed intellectuals; For all the empty slogans”For the past five months, everywhere Iranians congregated inside and outside the country, be it protests, funerals, celebrations, hikes, concerts, malls, cafes, university campuses, high schools or traffic jams, they blasted the song and sang the lyrics in unison:“For the feeling of peace; For the sunrise after long dark nights; For the stress and insomnia pills; For man, motherland, prosperity; For the girl who wished she was born a boy; For woman, life, freedom…For Freedom.”The Grammy will raise the song’s profile even more.“‘Baraye’ winning a Grammy sends the message to Iranians that the world has heard them and is acknowledging their freedom struggle,” said Nahid Siamdoust, the author of “Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran.” “It is awarding their protest anthem with the highest musical honor.”Siamdoust, who is also an assistant professor of media and Middle East studies at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while music has played an important political role in Iran since the constitutional revolution a century ago, no song compared to “Baraye” in terms of reach and impact. “Music can travel and traverse homes and communities and spread sentiment in a way that few other means can achieve,” she said.In a 2019 documentary short about his musical journey that recently aired on BBC Persian, Mr. Hajipour said that he began training as a classical violinist at the age of 8, started composing music at 12. He also said he has a college degree in economics but works as a professional musician, composing music for clients and recording his own songs.He said that his passion was creating music that broke form and that he drew inspiration from the pain and suffering he experienced and witnessed.“My biggest pain and my biggest problems have turned into my best work. And they will do so in the future as well,” he said in the documentary in what turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.While Hajipour was in detention, “Baraye” disappeared from his Instagram page. Iranians mobilized, posting and reposting the song. “For Shervin” trended on Twitter with demands of his release.“Shervin is an extremely talented, innocent and shy young man,” said a prominent Iranian singer, Mohammad Esfahani, who had met him when he was a contestant on the television show.The Recording Academy said it was “deeply moved” by the overwhelming number of submissions for “Baraye,” which received over 95,000 of the 115,000 submissions for the new category. The award was proposed by academy members and determined by the Grammys’ blue ribbon committee, a panel of music experts, and ratified by the Recording Academy’s board of trustees.“Baraye” became the vehicle through which people around the world displayed their solidarity to Iranians. Scores of musicians have covered the song, including Coldplay and Jon Batiste. The German electronic artist Jan Blomqvist remixed it as a dance tune. The designer Jean Paul Gaultier used it as a soundtrack as models walked the runway last month at his show during Paris fashion week, and Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, played it in the background in a message to the girls and women of Iran.The lyrics have been translated and performed in various genres: jazz and opera in English, metal in Germany, choir by French school children and pop in Swedish among others. It has also inspired a number of dance performances, including in Israel. Some artists around the world have covered it verbatim in Persian, including one in Ukraine who said she sang it to highlight the plight of the Iranian people.Hajipour’s Grammy win stirred pride among many Iranians online after the award was announced.“God, I am crying from joy,” a Twitter user named Melody posted about Hajipour’s victory.“A song about the most basic rights of a human, the most simple wishes of an Iranian,” an Iranian journalist, Farzad Nikghadam, tweeted. “A nation crying for gender equality and freedom.”In the documentary, Hajipour spoke about the importance of music. “The biggest miracle in my life has been music,” he said. “I would like to be successful and to be able to make a living with music that comes from my heart.” More

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      in Movies

      Zar Amir Ebrahimi, an Iranian Exile, Channels Trauma in ‘Holy Spider’

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      Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who had to flee Iran after an intimate tape was leaked, has been transfixed by the protests erupting there as her film “Holy Spider” is released in the U.S.“I know that fear, I know that humiliation,” Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the winner of the best actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, said in a recent interview. “I know how men in Iran use their power to keep you quiet.”Ebrahimi is an Iranian exile who, in 2008, decided she had to flee after being subjected to a smear campaign based on her love life. Now, that experience and her role in the film “Holy Spider,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Oct. 28, have intersected with disarming intensity, as women in Iran burn their head scarves to protest the oppression of the Islamic Republic.The story of Rahimi, the fictional investigative journalist at the heart of “Holy Spider,” is one of female defiance in the face of male violence. Based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in the Iranian city of Mashhad, a religious center, the movie traces with unflinching, sometimes harrowing, intimacy Rahimi’s efforts to penetrate the world of men obfuscating Hanaei’s crimes.“We need to finish this story,” Ebrahimi said, her pale eyes burning, during the 75-minute interview in Paris. “This Islamic Republic has to end. Women today know their rights. They know what life and freedom of expression are. It will take time and blood, but there is no other way.”It took time and flexibility to make “Holy Spider,” which is directed by Ali Abbasi, an Iranian exile based in Copenhagen. Filming was impossible in Iran, given the government’s hostility to the project, and months of preparation in Turkey came to nothing when the Turkish authorities, apparently under pressure from Tehran, blocked the production. The young Iranian actress who was set to play Rahimi withdrew, abruptly overcome by fear of reprisal, just as filming was about to start in Jordan, according to Ebrahimi.“I got so angry with her,” said Ebrahimi, who was then the casting director for the movie. “And I think that night when I got so crazy, I’m pretty sure that Ali saw something in me.”So, in extremis, Ebrahimi, 41, who found fame in the early 2000s as a star of the Iranian TV soap opera “Narges,” took on the lead role. Given all of these obstacles, it is, Ebrahimi told me, “a miracle that we have it to screen.”In “Holy Spider,” Ebrahimi plays a journalist investigating a serial killer.UtopiaThe killer, played by Mehdi Bajestani, is based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei.UtopiaAbbasi, the film’s director, said he wanted to challenge the image of “the Islamic Republic and its leaders as some sort of theocratic, dry people who are very conservative.” At a deeper level, he suggested, “these people are obsessed with sexuality.” Iran is a country, he said, where the authorities “get some sort of pleasure out of humiliating women.”For the director, who visited Mashhad as part of his preparations for the movie, “there is a Lynchian undercurrent of fetishized suppressed sexuality in every aspect of the Islamic Republic.”His words brought to mind a meeting I had in the holy Iranian city of Qum in 2009. A mullah sat on a raised dais as he explained in measured terms the rationale of the Islamic Republic. Then the subject turned to women. How could any man not lose control, he suddenly frothed, if women’s hair and the curves of their bodies were allowed to be seen in public? This was the gateway to hell, he shouted.Ebrahimi’s life as an actor in Iran had fallen apart a few years before that meeting, when a video of lovemaking she said she had made with her boyfriend at the time was leaked by a friend, another actor, who somehow stole it when at their apartment. It became known as the “sex tape case,” and the hounding of Ebrahimi knew no bounds.“All these people were watching my naked body and just kept copying the video and selling it in the street,” she said. “And I had to lie every day and just say it was not me, and I can’t tell you how painful it all was. Not because I was ashamed of what I did, but because of the betrayal from my colleagues and this whole society.”The government set about finding every man with whom she had shaken hands, or been photographed, she said; every man she had ever kissed on the cheek. It was clear her career in Iran was over. She was about to confront her various accusers in court, facing a prison sentence and 97 lashes on the charge of having sexual relationships outside wedlock, when she decided to flee.Ebrahimi flew to Azerbaijan, she said, and later from there to Paris, where she has since built a life. She has not returned to Iran, where most of her family still lives, and became a French citizen in 2017.After fleeing Iran, Ebrahimi settled in Paris. She said she had not returned.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesIn recent weeks, as antigovernment protests have spread across Iran and more than 200 people have been killed, Ebrahimi has been transfixed. Watching a new generation resisting arrest and shouting, “I don’t want this hijab, what’s your problem with my hair?” has given her hope.“I saw these images of three actresses throwing away their hijabs, saying we don’t want to lie anymore, we don’t want to hide ourselves,” Ebrahimi said, “and I figure if they arrived at this point, the whole of society is kind of there.”At the same time, she says she knows that the guardians of the Islamic Republic will resist to the end. “The last foundation they have for the regime is women and imposing the hijab,” Ebrahimi said. “They believe if the hijab comes off, everything will be destroyed — the Islamic Republic will tumble down.”Ebrahimi said she felt a lot of emotion that her film was arriving in American theaters at the same time as the protests; it feels like “all these things are happening in the same direction,” she said.“We can’t be controlled by them anymore,” Ebrahimi said. “We can’t hide ourselves and play this game. We grew up learning how to lie. There are 84 million people in Iran, and they are 84 million actors. Lying, existing inside and outside. Lying inside to our parents that we didn’t meet someone outside, lying outside that we don’t party inside.”In making the film, Ebrahimi drew on these experiences of being humiliated by an oppressive government. Her trauma became a source of inspiration and resolve.Rahimi, determined to find the murderer who keeps dumping strangled women on the outskirts of town, and driven by the memory of how an overbearing male editor had abused her, encounters forms of male contempt and evasion.She meets a mullah who assures her that every effort is being made to solve the crimes, even as he hints that it may be God’s will that these female sinners be eliminated. She encounters various men who form a protective shield around the killer, admired in his community as a husband, father and war veteran. She confronts a police officer who comes to her hotel room and tries to seduce her, dangling the possibility of information for sex.“We worked on that scene with the policeman for two hours, and I saw that I could link my personal experience of life to this journalist,” Ebrahimi said. “She was living inside me, and you know, improvisation is an important part of Ali’s work. I came up with the idea of the memory of harassment by a colleague and editor as the motivating force for the journalist.”The film is about female defiance in the face of male violence. “Women today know their rights,” Ebrahimi said about Iran, where protests have erupted recently. “They know what life and freedom of expression are.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesEbrahimi, who received threats from the Islamic Republic soon after she won the award at Cannes, including an allusion by the culture ministry to the fate of the author Salman Rushdie, said that the impact of living in Iran “affects men, too. If they drink or not, if they read something or not — there is this continuous pressure to deceive.”Hanaei’s crimes were called the “spider killings” by local news media because of how he carried them out. He confessed to killing 16 women, and was executed in 2002. In “Holy Spider,” the character is played with psychological intricacy by Mehdi Bajestani. He is desperate to believe that he is doing God’s will, and that of the Islamic Republic, by killing prostitutes. The pressure on him grows. He snaps at his wife. He feels suspicion growing.“I think he’s kind of a victim of the whole society, of the whole mind-set,” Ebrahimi said.At one point, his wife surprises him at home after a murder. He hurriedly wraps the corpse in a carpet. His wife finds him tense and impenetrable; she coaxes him to have sex. On top of his wife, sweating, thrusting, he sees the foot of the strangled prostitute sticking out from the carpet.“He has something of what I call Travis Bickle syndrome,” Abbasi said, a reference to the hero of “Taxi Driver.” “Back from a war, in an existential black hole, missing the violence. And in that scene, sexual pleasure and violence juxtapose each other.”“It’s a movie about a serial killer,” Ebrahimi said, “but also about a serial-killer society. I know, because at some point, I got killed actually by each person in that society, except perhaps 10 percent who still had my back.”She continued: “I sometimes think, for an actress, I’m happy to have this much pain in my life, to have experienced this sex tape story. I put everything into the movie, all my life.”When at last Rahimi finds the killer by impersonating a prostitute, he asks her name.“Zahra,” she says, falsely.“This was pure improvisation,” Ebrahimi said. “It was not in the script. I said ‘Zahra,’ which is my real name, even if I don’t use it anymore.” More

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      Review: Iranian Female Composers Speak Indirectly to the Moment

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      Planned before anti-regime protests broke out in Iran, a concert centered on connectivity finds itself tied to the news of the day.From its founding in 2017, the Iranian Female Composers Association has found itself frequently tied to the news of the day.Niloufar Nourbakhsh, a composer and one of the association’s founders, wrote in liner notes for a recording of “Veiled,” her lyrical yet aggrieved 2019 work for the cellist Amanda Gookin, that, “personally as an Iranian woman, I carry a lot of anger with me.”That rage, Nourbakhsh specified when the recording was released in 2021, was informed by her own experiences, as well as the more general feeling of “growing up in a country that actively veils women’s presence through compulsory hijab or banning solo female singers from pursuing a professional career.”Still, when the musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the organization Composers Now drew up the program for an evening focused on the Iranian Female Composers Association at NYU Skirball on Saturday, few could have anticipated how specifically this concert would connect with the moment: Anti-regime protests in Iran were entering their fifth week, following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been held in the custody of the morality police, accused of improperly wearing a required head scarf.The association has posted statements of solidarity with the protesters on social media, and some of its composers have spoken directly about the events in interviews. But nothing was said from the stage on Saturday; after all, the connection between the group’s mission and the events in Iran spoke for itself. So too did the concert’s title, “Peyvand,” the Persian word for connectivity, a reminder of the connections among the featured composers in this revealing and essential evening.Nourbakhsh’s three-movement “C Ce See”— a commemoration of the contemporary music advocate Cecille (Cece) Wasserman — closed the program. And it employed a conceit reminiscent of the Fluxus movement, courtesy of a kinetic sculpture, by the artist Roxanne Nesbitt, that circled six instrumentalists and sometimes made sounds with them; picture small conical objects rotating, in Rube Goldberg fashion, among string players and percussionists, with all those elements connected by a long, single thread manipulated by the percussionist Ross Karre.In the first and second movements, the result of that string-on-string interference was often a hazy yet interdependent din. But at the end of the second movement, when the conductor, Steven Schick, dramatically cut the wires snaking through the string instruments (and into the rotating mini-sculptures), there was a sense of release. The short third movement — featuring scalar, zigzagging, independent parts for flute, vibraphone and strings — heralded a brief but hard-won freedom.Nourbakhsh’s music is something of a known quantity, not least because she is one of National Sawdust’s recent Hildegard Competition winners. Less so is Nina Barzegar, whose world premiere “Inexorable Passage” was thrilling in its fusion of experimental, extended-technique effects, as well as melodic and chordal inventions.Written for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the eight-minute “Inexorable Passage” felt packed, and moved along with momentum. The cello swerved in and out of mellifluous melody; each time its lines slid into heedless-sounding glissandos, you wondered if the center would hold. But Barzegar’s compositional command kept it together. (Trained as a pianist and composer at the University of Tehran, she’s now a doctoral candidate at University of California, Santa Cruz.)There isn’t much of Barzegar’s music on YouTube yet. But what’s there is promising — including a piano work “for slain protesters around the world,” and the spare (then galvanic) “Chronoception,” for the group Yarn/Wire.Also of note on Saturday were intimate, brief pieces by Nasim Khorassani and Golfam Khayam. A pair of untitled solo performances by Niloufar Shiri, on kamancheh (a small, bowed string instrument) were similarly transporting.If not everything else on the two-hour program achieved similar mastery, that was understandable; the artists here were on the younger side. But their music’s delivery, by the International Contemporary Ensemble, argued well for additional exposure, no matter the news cycle.PeyvandPerformed on Saturday at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. More