Everybody Loves the Assassins

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Outside Magazine October 2002

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Everybody Loves the Assassins
Set loose in the land that invented terrorism ten centuries ago, Tim Cahill finds crumbling castles, legends of hash-smoking hit men, and Iranians who won't stop being nice. You call this the axis of evil?

By Tim Cahill

SO THERE'S THIS IRANIAN farmer, a great big strapping bodybuilder guy who lives in a tiny village high in the Elburz Mountains, and he's working out in a makeshift gym, hoisting homemade weights made from five-gallon jerry cans filled with cement. I'm the first American Parviz Kiai has ever met, and he wants to shake my hand, despite the fact that my mission in Iran is to visit the castles of the Assassins, a radical Islamic sect that was, arguably, the first terrorist group in history. This is an endeavor some think unlikely to redound to Iran's acclaim or glory.

No matter. Parviz motions to the wall of his gym, where there are several photos taped up on the adobe. Affixed highest is the grim and glowering countenance of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose death in 1989 is mourned each year on an official national holiday called The Heart-Rending Departure of the Great Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Below the defunct ayatollah are dozens of photos clipped from American muscle magazines: huge, freakish steroidal monsters festooned with enormous and appalling dirigibles of muscles. It was, I thought, a wall of dueling Great Satans, an arresting graphic representation of Iran's current identity crisis. It's true that angry demonstrators in Iran's capital, Tehran, had just been out in the street chanting "Death to America." On the other hand, this is the same city that held a candlelight vigil after the September 11 attacks to express its sympathy and support for America. It's the same nation that has voted overwhelmingly for political and economic reform in the past two presidential elections. But it's also a place with a theocratic government that President Bush says is part of an "axis of evil," a place where—according to a U.S. National Security Council spokesman—"hard-line unaccountable elements...facilitated the movement of Al Qaeda terrorists escaping from Afghanistan," and where "an unelected few...have used terrorism as an instrument of policy."



	Iran with a human face: wrestler Parviz Kiai flexes for his fan club. (Rob Howard)

It was the Assassins who pioneered the concept of terrorism as an instrument of policy back between the 11th and 13th centuries. Murdering prominent officials and clerics, of course, was nothing new. People have been whacking kings and emperors since the dawn of recorded history. But early-day assassination had usually been a one-time deal: a Brutus and some conspirators taking out a Caesar. The Assassins repeatedly and systematically killed their enemies with guile and stealth, striking them inside their own strongholds, and used the threat of imminent assassination to bend officials to their will.

In fact, the English word assassin is rooted in the name of the sect, and the Assassins, or so the legends would have us believe, committed their murders under the influence of hashish. They were called hashishiyyin, the Arabic word for hash smokers. The cannabis suggestion invariably generates skepticism among the ranks of those who have inhaled. Ruthless killers, honed to razor-sharp perfection, taking big hits off the bong? Kind of hard to picture.

It was Marco Polo who told their story best. His version of the Assassin legend goes like this:

The leader of the sect—the Old Man of the Mountain—"caused a certain valley between two mountains to be enclosed," and this area he turned into a garden, with every variety of fruit, runnels of milk and honey and wine, not to mention "the most beautiful damsels in the world." The Old Man, Marco Polo insists, fashioned the garden after the Islamic version of paradise, and "no man was allowed to enter the Garden save those whom he intended to be his Ashishin."

Young men who became inductees were drugged during a meal, then fell into a deep sleep, and woke in the garden, "where the ladies and damsels dallied with them to their hearts' content." Drugged again, a young man woke this time in front of the Old Man of the Mountain, who would say, "'Go thou and slay So and So; and when thou returnest my angels shall bear thee to paradise.'" That is, they'd get to live in the garden. And if the young man were to die in the assassination attempt, he'd end up in the other, heavenly paradise anyway. It was a



	A grizzled mule driver from Garmrud. (Rob Howard)

kind of win-win situation for the medieval dagger-toting terrorist. "And in this manner," Marco Polo states, "the Old One got his people to murder any one whom he desired to get rid of."

This is a great story, lacking only historical veracity. It is more likely, as Bernard Lewis suggests in his 1967 book The Assassins, that orthodox Muslims, writing about a sect they found heretical, used the Arabic word hashishiyyin specifically because it was a term of popular abuse meant to ridicule people who behaved in an outrageous manner.

The story of the Assassins has always fascinated me, and I said as much on my Iranian visa application. There wasn't much time to wonder if the mention of Assassins might prejudice my case, because the visa came through almost immediately, and I left for Iran a day later, before anyone could change his mind.

Abbas Jafari met me and photographer Rob "the Duck" Howard at the Tehran airport. Abbas, 40, was a guide and climbing pal of some American mountaineers who had helped make the introduction. He wasn't physically imposing, not at first. He may have been five inches over five feet tall, and I doubt he weighed more than 135 pounds. But his hands were big and scarred, like a rock climber's, and his wrists and forearms were huge. There was something about the guy.

"He's a badass," Rob said.

Little did we know.

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