55: Chapter 52 Black September

September 8, 1978, Ahvaz.

Five days after Najjari left, news arrived from Tehran—people had died at Jaleh Square.

When Karimi's telegram arrived at three in the afternoon, Reza was on the phone with Iskandari, discussing procurement channels for the second batch of fuel propellant raw materials. The telegram was brought in; he glanced at it, told them to set it aside, and only picked it up to read carefully after finishing the call.

The telegram was brief: "This morning at Jaleh Square in Tehran, the military opened fire on the protesting crowd. The death toll is unknown, estimated to be over a hundred. Many streets in the city are blocked, and SAVAK is on full alert."

Reza put down the telegram and wrote one word in his notebook: "Soon."

This was the historical Black Friday.

In the original timeline, the gunfire that day completely severed the last shred of possibility for compromise between the moderate reformists and the monarchy—before that, some still believed Pahlavi would concede; after that, everyone knew the regime had only two paths left: either kill all the opposition or collapse itself.

And given the actual state of the Pahlavi regime at the time, it had neither the capability to kill everyone nor the political will to hold out until the end, so there was only one outcome.

Reza knew what would happen over the next three months.

In October, a wave of nationwide strikes began to spread; oil workers, postal workers, railway workers, one group after another, and the government's daily operations began to face significant obstructions.

In November, Pahlavi gave a televised speech admitting that he had "made mistakes in the past." In the political logic of strongman rule, this statement was equivalent to declaring that he had lost too much blood, because once a strongman admits fault, half of their deterrent power vanishes, and the fence-sitters will immediately start looking for a new side to align with.

In December, the scale of the crowds in the streets would exceed the limits of any suppression tactics.

He had nearly four months of preparation time.

But four months is very short.

The cards he held now were: a governorship of a province, two newly established worker relationships, a wavering SAVAK director, an unfinished underground workshop, and a batch of missile prototypes that had not yet completed full testing.

What these cards would develop into after four months depended on how accurately he took every step from here on out.

Reza took out the deep blue notebook specifically used for strategic deduction, turned to a new page, and wrote a line at the top: "The final window before the revolution—four things that must be completed."

Then he listed four items below:

1. Ensure the oil workers in Khuzestan can act in an orderly manner at critical moments, rather than rioting out of control.

2. Ensure the workshop completes full ground testing of the Persian-1 Type B by the end of the year, meeting the basic conditions for combat deployment.

3. Establish direct communication channels for the Reza faction within the revolutionary forces, bypassing the Ayatollah Khomeini system.

4. Deal with Miller.

After writing the fourth item, he paused, did not cross it out, nor did he change it, just leaving it there.

Miller was a variable hanging over his head.

As the deputy station chief of the CIA in Tehran, he held surveillance files on political figures across Iran. After the Abadan fire, Reza judged that the Tehran headquarters had upgraded the attention level on his activities—from "occasional notice" to "active tracking."

Once it entered the active tracking phase, every one of his subsequent actions would be recorded, analyzed, and reported by Miller's intelligence network.

Before the revolution truly broke out, he could not let Miller obtain any substantive evidence sufficient for Washington to intervene directly.

But dealing with Miller was not a simple matter of physical elimination; killing a CIA deputy station chief would immediately trigger a higher level of intervention, which would be shooting himself in the foot.

The way to handle it was to divert his attention elsewhere, or to cause his information to suffer from systematic misjudgment.

Reza added three characters under the fourth item: "Not kill."

On September 10, Reza proactively sent a letter to Miller.

It was not a phone call, but a letter, written in English, with formal yet cordial wording. He said he was recently purchasing a batch of office equipment for the Governors Mansion and had heard that a certain model of American typewriter had second-hand units available in Tehran. He asked if Miller could help inquire about the channels, and if convenient, they could have a meal and talk in detail next time he came to Tehran.

At the end of the letter, he attached a small "by the way": he said he had recently been reviewing oil production archives in the province and found that the records of several foreign technical aid payments from the early seventies were unclear. He didn't know if it was an accounting oversight or something else, and planned to verify it with the relevant departments at the National Oil Company next time he went to the capital.

On the surface, this letter was about asking for a typewriter; in reality, it was throwing a blindfold in front of Miller—letting him chase that "unclear" oil aid payment. It was a real historical issue involving several real officials, enough to keep Miller's intelligence analysts busy for quite a while. Moreover, the conclusion from chasing it would be: "This prince is investigating corruption accounts and is a political opportunist wanting to rise by fighting corruption"—this judgment was not wrong, but incomplete. Having only this judgment would cause the CIA to develop a systematic underestimation on key issues.

After reading the letter, Hassan was silent for a while and said: "This letter... is a bit like fishing."

"It is fishing," Reza said. "The bait is real, the hook is hidden."

On September 15, Fatima sent an encrypted telegram from the workshop; the content was only two lines:

"Type B No. 7 propulsion test completed, range reached the lower limit of preset indicators. There is something that needs to be discussed in person, not suitable for telegram."

After reading it, Reza set off for the workshop the next day.

The workshop was about 120 kilometers southeast of Khuzestan Province. On the surface, it was an abandoned phosphate mine site, operating under the guise of an agricultural irrigation equipment repair station. The actual underground work area had been expanded to nearly 2,000 square meters, divided into three isolated functional areas: material processing area, assembly and testing area, and storage area.

Fatima was waiting for him in the assembly and testing area, with a stack of blueprints and a small metal component on the table.

She had lost a bit more weight over these three months, and there was obvious fatigue under her eyes, but her gaze still had that glow it got when staring at data.

"Come look at this." She pushed the metal component over. "The gyroscope component for the guidance cabin, the third reworked version, made by Iskandari's team."