By Christopher Dickey | Newsweek Web Exclusive:
Hossein Derakhshan, the liberal former Iranian blogger and progenitor of Iran’s online community, is thought to be aiding the government’s crackdown.

A central figure in what is supposed to be a vast international conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian regime has been officially invisible until now. The information he provided has been key to the confabulations presented in the Stalinesque show-trials in Tehran. An American scholar, a British embassy employee, a prominent economist, and leading members of former Iranian governments have been given long jail sentences. A young French researcher now languishes under house arrest in her country’s Tehran embassy, and Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari passed four grueling months, mostly in solitary confinement, before finally he was released. All because of their alleged roles in the surreal narrative presented by the regime. Yet the key witness is described by the lead prosecutor only as “this arrested spy, whose name we do not mention out of security considerations.”

Credibility problems are the more likely reason. In truth, we know who this guy is, and he’s not the kind of character that even the hallucinatory conspiracy theorists of Tehran should want to build a case around. The regime’s description of the so-called spy’s travels, contacts, and opinions make it unmistakably clear that he’s the mercurial, maddening Hossein Derakhshan, a.k.a. Hoder, a.k.a. The Blogfather. He is the man who started the Persian-language explosion on the Web in the earlier part of this decade that led directly to the blogging, texting, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube phenomenon that helped bring huge protests into Iran’s streets last June and get the protesters’ message to the outside world. Yet without Derakhshan—or at least without what he’s alleged to have said and what he previously posted on the Web—the Iranian regime, even by its own lights, would not have much of a story to tell.

When the trial of some 110 defendants began on August 1, the Tehran Aide to the Deputy Revolutionary Attorney General Abdor-Reza Mojtaba, as the prosecutor is called, laid out the ostensible plot against the government in great detail. Hostile powers supposedly conspired with former members of the Iranian government and members of the press to create a “velvet revolution” aimed at overthrowing the current Iranian regime just as “color revolutions” overthrew governments in Ukraine and Georgia.

There was no real popular discontent. No. The reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was “beautiful and glorious,” said Mojtaba, while the alien plot to discredit it was utterly nefarious. And to bolster his argument, he had several defendants who had been held incommunicado for weeks “confess” that they might have played a role in the great conspiracy, even if they didn’t know it at the time.

But it’s the testimony of the unseen “spy” that really pulled the prosecution’s narrative together. He was quoted talking about travels from Holland to Boston to Israel over the past few years, touching base with major figures who promote nonviolent resistance to dictatorships around the world.

Since the spy’s itinerary and Derakhshan’s were precisely the same (he even posted Tel Aviv as one of his 10 favorite cities on his Facebook page), there was speculation from the start that he might be the mystery witness. Reporters Without Borders raised the issue tentatively from day one of the trial. But the circumstances leave no real room for doubt about his identity. When I checked with several of those named by the prosecution as people the so-called spy contacted, they said Derakhshan is the man. What is not so clear is whether he was spying against the regime, or for it, or, indeed, at all.

A Canadian-Iranian citizen, Derakhshan disappeared into the clutches of the security services in Tehran in early November 2008. But even before that, many of his erstwhile apostles had come to believe he’d gone over to the dark side, joining forces with those opposing freedom rather than building it. (More on that later.) Not until almost a year after his arrest did his family make any effort to speak out and demand his release. It is not clear whether they thought his cooperation with the regime would result in his liberation (most prisoners do cooperate one way or another, and Derakhshan may well have been tortured), or whether they thought they had connections that might help, or whether they were simply respecting Derakhshan’s expressed wish to let Iranian justice run its course when he thought that justice might treat him leniently. But now they are calling on the Canadian government to try to help, and even people who have been attacked by him are saying that, until Derakhshan is allowed out to tell his own story, we are not going to begin to get close to the truth.

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