By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 31, 2006; C01
TEHRAN -- More than "Hassan" or "Yusuf" or even "David Theodore Belfield," the name that appeared on the wanted posters after he killed a man, the pseudonym that suggests just how long Daoud Salahuddin has been on the lam in Iran is the one on his Yahoo e-mail account: David Janssen.
Janssen played "The Fugitive" in the television series that was famous more than a generation before there was a blockbuster movie. A younger man would have written "Harrison Ford."
"In many ways I'm like Rip van Winkle," said Salahuddin, 54. "I just woke up after 20 years."
In other ways, however, he's uniquely up to date. Salahuddin, the name Belfield took after converting to Islam at age 18, fled to Iran after gunning down an Iranian political dissident in the front hall of a Bethesda home on July 21, 1980. By his own account, he carried out the assassination at the behest of the Islamic republic's government -- which, in later years, also solicited him to assassinate Saddam Hussein.
He fought the Russians in Afghanistan, ferried messages to Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi and witnessed at ground level the 1991 U.S. bombing of Baghdad, where he traded life stories with Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, he drew double takes when he showed up in "Kandahar," an award-winning art film that acquainted curious Americans with Afghanistan, the country they were preparing to invade.
Reared in middle-class Long Island, Salahuddin has spent half his life in the mesh of religion, politics and intrigue that Washington finds itself struggling to negotiate -- and many ordinary Americans struggle simply to understand.
"No, I'm not old enough to be the Zelig of political Islam," Salahuddin said during a series of interviews in Tehran and at his apartment on its outskirts. "But I've been some places."
He does not rule out going to more. As the Bush administration keeps alive the option of using military force against Iran over its nuclear program, the fugitive offers a reminder of this country's capacity for the asymmetrical warfare it pioneered.
"They aren't into that anymore. They haven't been for a long time," said Salahuddin, quickly adding: "Oh, if they get hit, all bets are off. If they get hit, it opens up a Pandora's box.
"When you think about it," he said, "these guys will do anything."
Still a Wanted ManWhat Salahuddin did was buy a postal uniform, hide a 9mm pistol under a package and knock on the door of a man who formerly worked for the shah of Iran. He shot Ali Akbar Tabatabai at the request of the government that had replaced the monarchy, an Islamic republic that Salahuddin, like many others, then regarded as the best hope of realizing the ideal laid out in the Koran, which weds governance with faith.
The Koran's model, so different from the modern traditions of the secular West, unites an array of movements under the broad heading of "political Islam." What divides them are sharp differences over what an Islamic government should look like and what means are acceptable in pursuing it.
"For me, the thing about killing people is clear, and that is you do not take the lives of innocents," Salahuddin said. He left untouched the young man who answered the door in Bethesda, and himself was unmolested as he fled to New York, then Montreal, then Geneva. There he knocked on the door of Said Ramadan, the mentor who, while sharing a house in the District with Salahuddin five summers earlier, had channeled both his quest for spiritual meaning and his rage over the situation of black Americans.
Ramadan was the most trusted aide of Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian who founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Formed in 1928 to oppose colonial rulers and the secular governments they put in place across the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood created modern political Islam. For Salahuddin, that means uniting Muslims in the equality and compassion -- brotherhood -- that stands at the heart of the faith.
Salahuddin said Ramadan embraced him and said: "Anybody can kill somebody; no big deal. You could have done so much more. They have misused you. You have wasted yourself."
Five days later, Salahuddin arrived in Tehran. Intelligence agents with Uzis carried him to a safe house in a powder-blue Cadillac Seville. He met Revolutionary Guards who would become ambassadors to Russia and China, and the men who would form Iran's new intelligence ministry.
Salahuddin was indicted by a federal grand jury in the District in 1981, along with three other area men, for conspiring to kill Tabatabai. The other three men went to trial that year. Two were convicted and one was acquitted.
The charges against Salahuddin remain. "There is no statute of limitations on murder," said Debbie Weierman, an FBI spokeswoman. "The FBI and the U.S. government are still interested in apprehending Mr. Salahuddin and bringing him to justice."
Tabatabai's twin brother, M.R. Tabatabai, still lives in Bethesda. Although the United States does not have an extradition treaty with Iran, Tabatabai said he still holds out hope that Salahuddin will be tried: "I think justice should be done. This man killed my brother. I would like to see him tried, or give the names of the people who supported him and gave him access, who are still living here. It's very important."
After reaching Iran and spending months in hiding, Salahuddin got work from the English-speaker who had served as spokeswoman for the students who held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. They overran the U.S. Embassy the same day Salahuddin and five others commandeered the Statue of Liberty to unfurl banners against the shah. She made him an editor at the government's premier English-language newspaper, Kayhan International.
Three years later, an intelligence official picked up Salahuddin as he left work. As they drove around Tehran, he laid out a proposal for the fugitive to hijack a plane from the state airlines of either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, countries supporting Iraq in the war against Iran.
Salahuddin demurred. The targets were remote, he said, and innocent people would be put at risk. A passenger might have a heart attack from the stress. "You got mothers and women and children and all that," he said. "Not my scene."
Another three years passed before he was approached about another job, he said: Smuggle a gun into a news conference and kill Saddam Hussein.
The fugitive laughed out loud. Salahuddin considered himself a soldier in the shadow war that had been running between Iran and its enemies for years. By his reasoning, Tabatabai fell on a battlefield where some combatants sit at desks. On his own initiative, Salahuddin had cased the homes of Henry Kissinger and Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA station chief who had engineered the 1953 coup that brought the shah to power.
"So when Mr. Bush says people hate us because of our freedom, that's not quite the case," he said. "It's a little more complicated."
Iraq had invaded Iran. But: "Whack Saddam Hussein? The Iraqis have been trying to kill Saddam Hussein for years, and I don't even know the language!"
Instead of Baghdad, he traveled to Libya with a message from Ramadan, who Salahuddin said saw value in Gaddafi "despite his quirkiness."
A few months later he entered Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation, twice collapsing trying to keep up with a ragtag Afghan force that covered almost 250 miles in 12 days. "Yeah, I was the only one with a pedometer." When they ran into an ambush, Salahuddin learned that air being parted by a passing bullet can be felt on the skin.
"Gives you a perspective on violence, I'll tell you that," he said. "I'd known already just how fragile the human body is. Think of your body as a watermelon falling out of the back of a car." During two years in Afghanistan, Salahuddin occasionally came across Arabs who had also joined the Afghan fighters. He said that with a few exceptions, such as a blond, blue-eyed veteran of Turkey's special forces, the foreign volunteers had only a marginal effect on the outcome. But he believed the outcome had a huge effect on them.
"Part of it is related to: These guys put themselves in front of the Red Army in Afghanistan and they saw it grind to a halt," Salahuddin said. "I don't think you can appreciate what that means to an Arab guy, who'd seen the Arab states crumble before Israel. That's pretty heady stuff."
Disappointed by IranOsama bin Laden built al-Qaeda with other veterans of Afghanistan. But the group locked onto the United States only after the Persian Gulf War, which Salahuddin watched from ground level as a correspondent for an Iranian state newspaper. Understood by the West as a necessary effort to roll back Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the conflict brought hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops onto land that is sacred to Muslims.
"When Saudi Arabia was taken under effective American control from September 1990, I knew that something spectacular was going to happen," Salahuddin said. "It was the first time since the time of Muhammad, since the 7th century, that the two holy places were occupied by an infidel. Because Mecca and Medina, those are the holiest of holies in Islam. And they already had Jerusalem, the other city mentioned in the Koran."
Bin Laden's 1996 decree, "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," laid the premise for attacks by a group that after 1998 officially regarded even American civilians as legitimate targets. To Salahuddin, the widening gyre of violence betrayed both logic and faith.
"They've got a bigger agenda. And for me, it's a misguided agenda," he said of al-Qaeda. "You can see fairly clearly there is a level of craziness in all that."
The notion of suicide strikes was not alien to him. "I've thought of that myself," he said. "There was a period in my life when I thought about operations that would likely leave me dead."
His gazed into the middle distance of a Tehran hotel room.
"Anybody who's prepared to die in that manner, he's either somehow very exalted or he's extremely depressed. Even to do that you need to be pretty estranged from a lot of stuff and pretty focused on what you're doing.
"But the enemy is not civilians," he added. "And when you start making tapes about it, that's somewhere else and I don't know where that is."
In the insurgent atrocities in Iraq, as in the attacks of Sept. 11, "I think there are elements of madness," Salahuddin said. "If they are Arabs and they are blowing up fellow Muslims, I'd have to say there's a very strong element of derangement and not religion involved. And frankly, there's nothing like a wrong interpretation of religion to form a basis for derangement."
Many of the extremists in Iraq, including the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, call themselves Salafists, Muslims who see the only pure faith as the kind practiced in the 7th century.
Salahuddin, on the other hand, said that when he did his wet work for Iran, he was serving a cause rooted in the present. He admired Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for standing up to a U.S. government that had waged a covert war against black activists and was clearly hostile to political Islam.
But except for the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, who Salahuddin said "exudes this sense of kindness, this sense of mercy very much what you read about Muhammad himself," the fugitive has been profoundly disappointed by Iran's theocracy.
"I've got nothing against religion and politics. They go together," he said. "But how they are combined is a very delicate business. In Iran, everything is power. Very little religion. And the spiritual dimension of the religious is diminishing under the weight of politics.
"The regime picked up a lot more from Stalin than it did from Muhammad."
He stopped working for the government in the early 1990s. He maintained a cordial relationship with old contacts in the intelligence ministry, which once pressed him to explain why he was spending hours each week with the North Korean ambassador. He explained he was teaching him English.
Now, he said in the pristine living room of a one-bedroom apartment he shares with his Iranian wife, "my days are empty."
Staff writer Tom Jackman in Washington contributed to this report.