The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (32 page)

Karri agreed that it was odd, but she was not convinced that I was therefore clear of any danger. “They gave him an Iranian passport,
they let him in, they let him stay at his grandmother’s for two weeks, and then they arrest him?” she said. “Something is wrong with that picture, and it means it can happen to anyone.” (Hekmati was subsequently sentenced to death, but in mid-2012 his sentence was overturned. He is, however, as of this writing, still in jail.)

I did receive a call one day in October from someone at the Supreme National Security Council relating to my journalism, asking if I would write an essay refuting an op-ed by John Bolton (former U.S. ambassador to the UN) that appeared in
The Guardian
, on the alleged 2011 Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

Fuck you
was my first reaction, although I didn’t voice it. “I don’t have a press pass,” I said instead.

That could be arranged, the caller assured me.

“Well,” I said, “I can’t really do this.”

He was unperturbed, and perhaps my tone hadn’t reflected the
fuck you
one I wanted it to. “How about placing an anonymous piece in the paper, then?” he asked.

You’ve got to be kidding me
, I thought. After depriving me of work all this time, they now wanted me to be in their service? But I politely extricated myself from the call and from any obligation, insisting that I was in Iran not to work but to spend time with my family. It probably became another mark against me.

On another occasion I received a call from a newspaperman I didn’t know who worked for a conservative but anti-Ahmadinejad paper. I have no idea how he got my number. The call concerned Fareed Zakaria, who had just left Tehran after interviewing Ahmadinejad; I had had dinner with the CNN journalist at his hotel the night before his meeting with the president. Ahmadinejad’s rivals, in government and in the media, were having a field day, criticizing him for agreeing to the CNN interview and criticizing his administration for allowing Fareed a visa in the first place. Fareed had sympathized
with the Green Movement and had been a harsh critic of the regime for its crackdown on protesters, but the conservatives didn’t care that much about his views. Rather, his visit and his interview were ammunition that they could use against a president they had come to despise, mostly for his defiance of the Supreme Leader, his big sulk, and his dismissive attitude toward anyone, ayatollahs included, who excoriated him.

The caller seemed to know that I had seen Fareed and, curiously, wanted to know what hotel he had stayed in. “I’ve called all the major hotels in town where foreigners stay,” he said, “and no one has a record of him.”

I replied that I couldn’t divulge that information, and that if he had any questions, he should ask the Culture Ministry, which had approved the trip, or ask Fareed himself, via e-mail to his Web site.

“I won’t quote you,” he said, finally getting to the point, “but I want to know if the interview was Zakaria’s idea or the president’s.”

I’d rather not be quoted, even anonymously, I told him, aware that either or both of our phones were being listened to by someone else, pro-or anti-Ahmadinejad, it didn’t matter.

As a relative of Khatami, I was already known to be a supporter of reform and of the Green Movement, but the last thing I needed was to get caught up in the conservative infighting that was going on all year, in the politics of divide and conquer that the Supreme Leader seemed to have decided would ensure his supremacy. Ahmadinejad’s sulk; the conservatives’ attack on him and his allies for that insubordination and for his refusal to share any power with them; the Leader’s refusal to let them impeach him but his quiet encouragement of attacks against him—all were elements of a drama that it was best to avoid participating in at all costs. Already too many actors in that drama had ended up in jail, or been harassed by one or another security agency—and these were actors who had supported (or remained silent over) the crackdown on the reformists. The annus horribilis of the political elite that began with a potentially fatal—not only
to the protagonists Ahmadinejad and Khamenei but to the system itself—clash between two competing powers was eating away at the core of the revolution: the regime’s thirty-year-long unity of purpose. Infighting and palace intrigue had long been a staple of Iran’s political culture, all the way back to the ancients, but like everything else Persian, it had mostly been kept private and hidden from the public until now. Perhaps Khatami’s hope that the political culture would change was coming true after all, though not through any willful act by the regime.

But I had no intention of becoming an unintended victim of political upheaval, let alone a wholesale change in the culture. The fact was, I did know whose idea the interview was, for Fareed had told me that the president had specifically asked for him, and him personally, to come to Tehran to interview him, in what appeared to be an effort at public relations; he wanted to counter the notion that he was weak and no longer relevant, and he wanted to revel in the spotlight of the international media, something that he had craved from the beginning of his presidency and now sensed he might be in danger of losing. The anti-Ahmadinejad crowd sensed it, too, but I didn’t want to be the person who confirmed it for them. Ahmadinejad still had allies in the Intelligence Ministry and in the Revolutionary Guards, and pissing them off was a far bigger risk for me and my family than the other potentially political acts I regularly undertook, such as visiting Khatami, dining with foreign ambassadors, and accompanying reform politicians in their think tanks.

Indeed, while Karri brushed up on her Farsi at the Dehkhoda Institute, I would often head down to the offices of Iranian Diplomacy—assuming our baby-sitter showed up; it was a sort of political think tank, an NGO, and an influential Web site all rolled into one. These were afternoons when both of us would be liberated from the not entirely unpleasant chore of keeping Khash constantly amused, and also from the constant companionship with each other that living in Tehran, both unemployed, had somehow imposed on
us. Karri mostly enjoyed her Farsi lessons at the famous school—where various foreign diplomats, some Iranophile foreign students, and a handful of Iranian Americans registered to learn the language as taught by a stern, unforgiving taskmistresses—particularly once she became accustomed to the teacher’s style. The woman actually had Karri in tears the first day of class after berating her for unpreparedness: it was Karri’s fortieth birthday, a difficult enough occasion for anyone, and more so away from friends and family; and she was taken aback, after witnessing
ta’arouf
and Iranian hospitality so often, by the style of Persian teaching, which is rather more Victorian than progressive. But after that it was all business; the teacher, perhaps shocked by Karri’s initial reaction, became more courteous, and Karri looked forward to learning more Farsi.

Meanwhile, I looked forward to spending an uninterrupted afternoon at one of Iran’s only independent political and media organizations. It’s a reform-oriented one, staffed by former government officials from the Rafsanjani and Khatami administrations who somehow have escaped the ignominy of a prison term while maintaining a fierce opposition to the Ahmadinejad government, and are even critical of the regime itself at times, albeit in subtle ways. Presided over by my friend Sadegh Kharrazi, the gregarious former deputy foreign minister, ambassador, nuclear negotiator, war veteran, and fanatical nationalist, the center brings together analysts and political figures (none associated with Ahmadinejad except for a professor at Tehran University, a classmate and friend of the president) for monthly conferences and the occasional off-the-record briefing. I had no doubt that among its dozens of employees there were spies or informants, perhaps unwilling, working with the Intelligence Ministry and probably the Revolutionary Guards, too, and the offices were probably bugged; harsh criticism of Iranian policy under Ahmadinejad was voiced, to be sure, but apart from that only a strong defense of the nation and its rights and even assertions of loyalty to the system. And
no one is more loyal to the nation, to the revolution, and to the ideals it once promised than Kharrazi, who—despite his unwavering support of Khatami, whom he sees as an adviser every week—is also loyal to the Supreme Leader, whose son is married to one of Kharrazi’s sisters, and whom he also sees regularly. It makes Kharrazi a rather unique figure in Iranian politics: enormously influential across the political spectrum, a reformist and democrat at heart, but true to the entrenched political culture of the country, a pragmatic operator who believes that the nation, its security, and its interests always trump politics. He is not pragmatic enough, though, to fully conceal his pure contempt for Ahmadinejad and his government.

The conferences at Iranian Diplomacy, which always begin with an invocation from the Koran, played on an iPhone placed in front of a microphone, are mostly concerned with foreign policy, and the invited speakers are experts in the field or former government officials. The views expressed and the debates that follow are summarized and distributed via nicely printed full-color booklets as well as on the Web. Foreigners, particularly diplomats stationed in Iran, are eager to attend or to meet with the staff and their associates, but none are ever invited, indicative of the Iranian paranoia that surrounds contact with anyone the state believes might be hostile to it—essentially, anyone foreign.

What struck me at these gatherings was both the high level of sophistication of Iranian officials and their overreliance on facts and figures, statistics and history—an empirical approach taught and emphasized in Iranian schools and universities—at the expense of more theoretical analysis and imaginative thinking. It explained to me, a little, why Iranian politicians are rarely truly innovative, and why Iranian diplomats, despite their skills, have made very little progress in relations with the outside world in the thirty-plus years since the Islamic Revolution. For instance, at a conference on the Persian Gulf (a favorite topic of xenophobe Iranians), the former
commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Navy during Khatami’s presidency, Hossein Alaie, displayed impressively thorough knowledge of U.S. warships, their missions in that body of water, and even the first and last names of every commander of every U.S. Navy ship in the region. The information, while impressive, was not particularly revealing or even relevant.

It has always been this way in Iran, since before the time of the ayatollahs and Islamic-approved curricula: know the facts, but don’t present opinions that might conflict with any shah-or state-approved message. And since it has also always been impossible for anyone to know exactly what might offend at any given time, leaders have most often kept their opinions to themselves. Ahmadinejad is a glaring exception, and his fall from grace over the year, perhaps even leading to future legal entanglements (as his imprisoned aides have discovered since we left Iran), may serve to deter others.

But it’s not just terror that keeps Iranians from expressing their opinions or engaging in creative thought; it’s the paradoxical nature of Persian culture. While creative thinking abounds in Iran, it is often kept close to the chest for fear of not just political repercussions but ridicule. Hence a culture that reveres poetry above all tends to disdain artistic endeavors as impractical; the great Persian poets are quoted every day, and their contributions to math, science, and medicine are almost equally heralded, but no consideration is given to the idea that perhaps it was their creative thinking that led to advances in science in the glory years of the Persian empires—advances that Iranians boast of but that have ceased, leaving Iranians at a loss to explain why.

Alaie’s Revolutionary Guards do not report to the president. Rather, they report directly to the Supreme Leader and are supposed to be, according to the constitution, removed from politics. But those Guard commanders who served during Khatami’s reformist years appear to have been influenced by his philosophy of what an Islamic democracy should look like—a society that allows independent
thought and criticism and that sees no conflict in that with Islam. As such, Alaie’s more creative thinking, which was not on display at the conference but which he exposed months later in a newspaper article, got him into hot water with the authorities, and his house was besieged by Basij protesters. He crossed a red line, apparently, by seeming to compare the political situation in Iran today with that preceding the fall of the shah, warning the authorities, and therefore the Supreme Leader himself, against making the mistakes that the shah made in creating an oppressive atmosphere that was ripe for revolution.

Alaie was forced to apologize for his impudence, explaining, of course, that he had been misunderstood. Yeah,
right
, just misunderstood. The fact that many Iranians, pro-and antiregime, privately agreed with him (
privately
being the operative word)—a regime stalwart who lived in a secure compound of senior Revolutionary Guard commanders—mattered little to the state.

Alaie’s ill treatment made me think back to the time of the shah, and how things have changed and how they have stayed the same. One of my uncles, a deputy prime minister in the 1970s, had once given an interview expressing himself on a matter of foreign policy that the shah didn’t like. The problem was not the opinion itself, which was mostly in line with the shah’s and the regime’s, but the fact that he had dared express an opinion at all. He was summarily fired and declared persona non grata by the regime, but his house wasn’t surrounded by thugs, nor was he or his family threatened, as Alaie and his were.
Plus ça change
, in the political culture of Iran.

That said, the range of opinions expressed in Iran under the Islamic regime is much broader than it was under the shah, and there are far more competing political factions today, all state-approved of course, but crossing certain red lines can result in much worse than a “you’ll never work in this town again” reaction from the state, as presidential candidates Mousavi and Karroubi sadly discovered after serving their beloved regime for thirty years.