13: Chapter 13 Agent Suicide

On the seventh day, the blonde agent bit off his own tongue.

It was not suicide. It was an extreme measure to refuse to speak—after biting off his tongue, even if he wanted to talk, he would not be able to speak clearly.

This ruthlessness made Reza hold him in higher regard.

"Treat his wounds," Reza said to Hassan. "Then send him to Pakistan as well. A cripple who has bitten off his tongue has no utility value to the CIA, and letting him go won't pose a threat."

"Your Highness, letting two live captives go, could it—"

"Keeping two lives is more cost-effective than leaving two corpses. Living people can talk—even if they say nothing, the mere fact of 'returning alive from Iran' will be enough to sow suspicion within the CIA. They will wonder if these two have been turned. Suspicion is the best weapon."

Hassan thought for a moment and nodded.

Reza spent three days organizing and digesting the intelligence obtained from the interrogation.

Then, he did two things.

The first: internal cleansing.

According to the clues provided by Andrews, there were CIA informants in both the Khuzestan Province Police Department and the Provincial Oil Administration. Although the specific individuals were unknown, the scope had been narrowed down to these two departments.

Reza did not conduct a high-profile purge—that would have alerted the enemy.

He used a smarter method.

He leaked six different pieces of false intelligence to six "suspects" in the Provincial Police Department and the Provincial Oil Administration, respectively. Each piece of false intelligence contained a unique "marker detail"—for example, telling Person A "I built an arsenal in Area A," telling Person B "I stored weapons in Area B," and so on.

Then, he waited to see which piece of false intelligence the CIA would "take the bait" on.

If the CIA sent people to scout Area A, then the leaker was Person A. If they went to Area B, it was Person B.

This is called "sting operation," or in more professional terms, a "canary trap."

It was a basic skill in intelligence warfare. In his past life, when working on security reviews in the military-industrial system, Chen Feng had used it no fewer than twenty times.

Two weeks later, the results were in.

The informant in the Provincial Police Department was the secretary to Deputy Director Farhad—a clerk in his early thirties, with plain looks, who had worked at the Provincial Police Department for five years. The price offered by the CIA was three hundred dollars a month and the promise of a US visa.

There was no bite on the hook from the Provincial Oil Administration. It was possible that the informant just happened not to be among the six people Reza had targeted, or perhaps the CIA had not yet taken action based on the intelligence from the Provincial Oil Administration.

Reza dealt with that secretary—not by killing him, but by having Hassan find someone to transfer him to a grassroots police position in Iran's most remote Sistan and Baluchestan Province. Publicly, it was called a "normal personnel transfer," but in reality, he was kicked to a godforsaken place where even the CIA couldn't be bothered to go.

Killing a person would raise alarms. Transferring a person, no one would care.

The second thing was even bigger.

Reza began to lay out his "public opinion weapon."

The CIA document seized from the ambush on the stormy night—the secret agreement between King Pahlavi and the United States—was locked away in the safest safe in the Governors Mansion.

This document could not be used yet.

The timing was wrong.

In 1976 Iran, although King Pahlavi was unpopular, the foundation of his rule was still intact—the military was loyal, SAVAK was operating normally, and the United States was providing full support. Releasing this document at this point in time would have limited effect—the King could easily characterize it as "forged" and then use SAVAK to arrest everyone who spread it.

But 1978 would be different.

The history of his past life told Reza that 1978 was the "ignition point" of the situation in Iran—nationwide strikes, demonstrations, and riots would erupt in concentration that year, and the foundation of King Pahlavi's rule would begin to loosen. Releasing this document at that juncture would be like pouring gasoline on dry firewood.

Therefore, this document had to be hidden for two years.

Two years later, it would become the final nail to bury the Pahlavi Dynasty.

But during these two years, Reza would not be idle.

He needed to do something more important—establish his own "underground network" within Iran.

Not a military network—that already had a rudimentary form in Khuzestan Province.

But a political network.

An underground organization that could cover Iran's major cities, infiltrate mosques and universities, and simultaneously connect merchants and workers.

This organization had to be sufficiently covert so as not to be discovered by SAVAK; it had to be sufficiently extensive to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets at critical moments; and it had to be sufficiently flexible to deal with both Ayatollah Khomeini's religious forces and the secular left-wing forces simultaneously.

In his past life, Ayatollah Khomeini spent fifteen years to build such a network.

Reza gave himself a deadline—two years.

Because he had things that Ayatollah Khomeini did not: money, precise intelligence, and an ultimate trump card that Ayatollah Khomeini would never guess—

He knew the future.