From Act II, Chapter 2
Early this morning, before everyone boarded the buses for the Orange Bowl, the man behind all of Miami's sound and fury sat at a table in the Intercontinental's lobby. His name's Vahid Majidi, the FBI's assistant director for the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. He's a chemist, most recently chief chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the FBI's representative to the IND Steering Group that Rolf chairs.
He's also the highest-ranking Muslim at the bureau--and among the highest ranking in the U.S. government--which has an astonishing paucity of followers of Islam in its upper reaches. Majidi came to America as a high school student in 1979, when his parents fled during the fall of the Shah. He went to colleges in America, taught chemistry at a few, and now heads the FBI's efforts in the most contentious area of America's relations with the Muslim world. his daughter, a precocious ten-year-old, recently asked him if he thought this was "ironic."
"So I say to her, how do you mean?" he said, recounting the conversation.
"Well, you being born in Iran and now running the WMD program."
"I said, 'To be honest with you, I never thought about it that way. For the past ten years, I was helping to make nuclear weapons. Now I have to make sure we stop them.' "
Not much on irony, that Majidi. He understands, though, how convenient it would be for him to act as an emissary from America to the Muslim world. But it rubs him wrong: he's a scientist and wants to be judged as such, in the classic émigré model. The compromise is that he's recently started to speak to groups of scientists in Muslim countries, talking the lingua franca of science. Bin Laden has been openly recruiting physicists and chemists, even some biologists, too, and there's evidence that anti-American sentiment and nationalist feeling inside Islamic countries--or simply among many Muslims who believe they are being attacked by the West--have nudged Muslim scientists and Muslim radicals toward each other. Indeed, some of those whom Majidi meets of late hold extreme beliefs. But, he said, "those ideologies drive the ultimate application, not the initial discovery." He engages them because they're colleagues, and all scientists love talking science.
"If there is a fundamentalist view," he acknowledged, "it doesn't really matter what I would say. It wouldn't change instantaneously. You have to have a dialogue over a very long period of time. The only way you can chip away at established lines of thinking, established fundamental views, is by a long-term dialogue. And chip at those things a little at a time."
In the meantime, the "markets" remain active. . . .
Vahid Majidi is the head of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate and the highest-ranking Muslim in U.S. law enforcement. As a scientist, a law enforcement official, and a Muslim born in Iran, Majidi offers a unique perspective on harrowing nexus of jihadist fervor and nuclear weapons.
