DUBAI AFTER COMPLETING MY WORK IN IRAN

   On May 19, 2020 at 10AM, I had one meeting with the President of National Iranian Oil Company NIOC, His Excellency Mehdi Mirmoezi in the HQ of NIOC in Tehran. This was a filmed interview which took one hour. Directly after this meeting, I proceeded to my second meeting in NIOC with His Excellency Mohammad Mohaddes, Director General for all seismic operations in Iranian waters. He also was responsible for announcing new search blocks on the Iranian side, to foreign oil companies. This meeting was completed around noon, whereupon I was speedily driven by my Iranian driver to the Mehrabad Airport. Less than forty minutes later, I was on my way to Dubai. During the past three years, or so, I had managed to held talks with about one hundred dignitaries.

   I had singlehandedly managed to visit almost the entire Iranian establishment from the President Khatamis Office, the Ministry of Oil, the Mustasafan and Janbazan Foundation – today the Mustasafan Organization for Islamic Revolution, Petropars, the Foreign Ministry, the Khomeini Institute and many more. I had been weeks on Kish Island, following two seminars and made sure that I bumped into important Iranians. And off course, like with anything else I did in the Islamic republic, it was a success! And today was Sunday, and I was gliding through the air in one of Emirates newest wide body planes; my mind packed with information’s gathered on many levels and under various circumstances.

   I arrived in Dubai in January 1998. The LeMeridien in Airport Road became our working hub. I lived there for weeks and months at the time, filing reports back to Norway about the ongoing seismic operations that took place in the Persian Gulf on the Iranian side.

   LeMeridien was a good hotel, and it gave me access to the sister hotel LeMeridien out at Jumeirah beach. Some days after returning from Tehran in May, a woman I did not know started to greet me with a big smile and great friendliness in the hotel. She seemed to be exactly where I was at certain times, “Hello Mr. Dahle”, and “How are you today, Mr. Dahle?”. I nodded and answered her, and that was that. I had a creeping feeling that she was chatting me up. As if she was trying to bond with me.

   The one evening, around 6PM, in the first week of June, the phone rang in my room. I took it, and it was that woman. “Hello, Mr. Dahle, how are you”. And so on. After the initial pleasantries, she questioned me, “Any secrets Mr. Dahle?” At that moment all the nice talks, rolling with eyes and big smiles became one coherent image, she was an intelligence officer! I was still attached to Iran, our work in the gulf was not yet completed, and there were ongoing meetings in Tehran between Iran and Norway. For my part, I had a new meeting with His Excellency Hussein Adeli, Deputy foreign Minister for Economic Affairs, next year. So, we were not finished with Iran.

The woman had never presented herself to me by name, shown me an ID card or told me anything about herself. I simply did not new her. She could be anyone from anywhere. But, most likely, the way I saw it, she was an operative of the United States.

   I felt awkward! I had to assume that all parties were listening in on this line, even friends of the Islamic republic. I had no choice, and I said to her, “No secrets!”, and put down the phone. She got nothing! If the United States wanted something from me, let’s say the Iran Office inside the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, they could have approached me and invited me for a cup of tea and a cake. Just like all the other people in the Middle East would do. And all the people I had met with in Tehran had done.

There wasn’t a meeting in Iran without tea and a cake. But, not from the American side. They were effective, fast and skilled. In their own way. But she lacked one thing, she could not – what we say in the sales business – close! She didn’t get the order; she was not capable to get to the important information that I had on Iran. She thought that she could use the drill she had learned back home here in Dubai, with me, Mr. Careful, and she was dead wrong.

Not only was she wrong, she blamed me for her incompetence. Already the next day, the whole mood in the hotel was changed to a negative. Out at Jumeirah I was seriously provoked by one of the staffs and I complained to the head of security. But he just sat there and smiled at me.

   If I had talked on that phone that evening, my fate in Iran would have been sealed. I could have been thrown into the Evin Prison, or worse, hung from a mobile crane. But that didn’t seem to have bothered the ever-smiling American speaking woman at all. She burned me, and I would have been left imprisoned in Evin. The intelligence operation that I had witnessed was a catastrophe for the United States: immature people, not very skilled, effective but with little empathy, and zero capability to close the deal. But it should get much worse!

   In August I went to Los Angeles. I was seriously harassed at the British Airways lounge were plain-cloth police stood silently waiting to collect me! Nice! This was now a US/British common operation and the United States had turned on the heat. For one week I stayed at Hilton Airport Hotel near LA center. The Avid editing course I attended was at Moviola Education N. Mansfield Ave. Hollywood. There I was seriously harassed by one person, while a group of men in black dress stood together in the yard and watched silently. I was harassed in my hotel, in Hollywood on the streets, and on the entire stretch back from LA to London Heathrow.

In the plane, two men kept it going with loud talk for ten hours. I was the last man out and I said to the purser who stood next to my seat, “I haven’t slept for a second, the two men kept me awake!” Whereupon he briskly responded, “So you don’t get along with the passengers?” It was all very creepy. Why? Because this mediocre representative of the United States intelligence in Dubai had not known how to treat me. To paraphrase the Norwegian Play Wright Henrik Ibsen, “The United Sates should, instead of criticizing everybody else, myself included, look into itself first! The United States owe me an apology here!

LeMeridien Hotel Airport Road Dubai: "Any secrets Mr. Dahle?"

Attachments to the E Mail of 17.1.2020

Meeting at the MJF HQ in Tehran

Moviola Education Los Angeles