Between You and Me (17 page)

Even before the attack on our embassy, I had been making a strenuous effort to get back to Iran to interview the austere mystic who was the spiritual leader of the revolution. One of my producers, Barry Lando, was based in Paris and had built up contacts with anti-shah Iranian exiles who had lived there and were known to be close to the Ayatollah Khomeini. (In fact, they had been excellent sources for us when we were gathering information about SAVAK.) We reached out to them for help. But because I was perceived as having been sympathetic to the shah in our interviews, the word came back that 60 Minutes was—in the piquant phrase of one of Lando’s contacts—“as welcome in Iran as bacon in a synagogue.”

After the hostages were seized in early November, Lando renewed his pitch for an interview with the ayatollah. In light of the corrosive tirades he and his disciples had been directing at the U.S.

government, I had serious doubts that Khomeini would agree to be

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questioned on American television. Besides, that wasn’t the only story I had to deal with, so I flew to the West Coast to work on another assignment. Hence, I happened to be snooping around inside a toxic-waste dump in Stockton, California, when the call came through from Lando that the ayatollah had decided to grant our request. (I never did find out what suddenly made 60 Minutes kosher in that synagogue.) There was a stipulation: We had to come to Iran

“right away—instantly!”

I tore myself away from the charms of California’s toxic-waste problem and hightailed it to the San Francisco airport. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my passport with me, so, before boarding an over-the-North-Pole flight to London, I telephoned my New York secretary, Marikay Mead, and gave her a rather unusual assignment: to fly to London with my passport and the research material I had assembled on the hostage crisis. When I landed at Heathrow Airport, Marikay was there with the documents. (Such a maneuver could not be pulled off in today’s climate of tighter security and much more stringent restraints on the CBS budget.) I flew on to Tehran, where Lando and our camera crew were waiting for me, and the next morning we arrived in the holy city of Qum, where Khomeini had set up his headquarters. I was the first American reporter he had agreed to talk to since the hostages were seized two weeks earlier.

I soon discovered that when it came to interview protocol, the ayatollah was no shah. We had to submit our questions to his aides in advance, a condition we never would have agreed to if the circumstances had not been so extraordinary. Several of the questions were rejected as unacceptable, and even most of those that did pass muster did not elicit germane replies. He used the interview mainly as a forum for his simplistic platitudes and demands: “The shah is a

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criminal . . . Carter must return the shah . . . Un less he is returned, the hostages will not be freed . . . Islam protects the prisoners . . . Islam is humane . . .” That sort of thing.

Speaking through an interpreter, Khomeini uttered his pronouncements in a voice so toneless that it seemed almost robotic, and his manner was equally remote. Throughout our interview, which lasted over an hour, he generally avoided eye contact with me, preferring to stare straight ahead with his face locked in an impassive expression. Hardly ever did he glance in my direction or in any other way acknowledge my presence. Even though the interview was disappointing in many respects, it did give American viewers their first close-up look at the strange and forbidding enemy we were up against in Iran.

The one time the ayatollah did deign to observe me was when I brought up a remark that had been made about him by another Muslim leader. Here was how I put it to him:

“Imam, President Sadat of Egypt, a devoutly religious man, a Muslim, says that what you are doing now is—quote—‘a disgrace to Islam.’ And he calls you, Imam—forgive me, his words, not mine—‘a lunatic.’ ”

I obviously had not included that among the questions we submitted for advance approval, and I’ll never forget the look the interpreter gave me. It clearly said that if I expected him to translate that observation, then I had to be a lunatic. But I pressed him to do so, and he did after I pointed out that I had heard Sadat use those precise words on American television.

Khomeini looked straight at me, and I thought I detected a faint glint of curiosity in his eyes. He said in reply, “Sadat states he is a Muslim and we are not. He is not, for he compromises with the enemies of Islam. Sadat has united with our enemies.”

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After a pause, he added, “I demand that the Egyptian people try to overthrow him, just as we did with the shah.”

The ayatollah was actually the second Muslim leader that year to call for Sadat’s downfall—or worse—in an interview with me. Back in March, when Yasir Arafat had denounced Sadat as “a quisling, a traitor,” I reminded Arafat that in many countries the penalty for trea-son is death, and I asked, “If the Egyptians want to kill Sadat for being a traitor, you say okay?”

“Yes,” he replied.

Of course, that is what happened. In 1981 the world lost the most enlightened Arab leader of modern times when Anwar Sadat was shot and killed by Egyptian fundamentalists, who admitted they had been inspired by the Islamic uprising in Iran.

As tragic as Sadat’s death was, the overthrow of the shah had a far more devastating effect on future events. Throughout his long reign, the shah was viewed by Washington as an important and reli-able ally. We were aware that he was an autocrat and that his regime was in many ways a police state. But he was more responsive to Western values than most other leaders in the Middle East, and there was ample evidence to back up his claim that he was taking steps to mod-ernize Iran. Best of all, from Washington’s point of view, the shah was a militant anti-Communist, and that put him squarely on our side in the cold war. In a phrase used so often that it became a cliché, he was “our pillar of security in the Persian Gulf.”

We didn’t fully appreciate what a sturdy pillar he was until he was gone. The Muslim clerics who sparked the revolution in Iran transformed the country into an anti-Western theocracy, and a quarter century later, the fundamentalists were still in power and their Islamic regime was still a source of concern and anxiety to the United States and most of its allies. Iran was one of the menacing trio of na-

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tions that President George W. Bush denounced as an “axis of evil” in his State of the Union address in January 2002. (The other two were Iraq and North Korea.) The Bush administration was profoundly dis-turbed by growing evidence that Iran’s new nuclear energy program included the development of nuclear weapons. Even those allies who did not share Washington’s sense of alarm had to admit that an Iran armed with such weapons of mass destruction would pose a grave threat to international peace and stability. But the revolutionary changes within Iran were just part of the story, since the overthrow of the shah also set off an appalling chain of disruptions throughout the Persian Gulf region that have had dire and far-reaching consequences for the rest of the world.

In late 1979, just a few months after the shah was deposed, war broke out on Iran’s eastern border when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. Russian officials who were working in the Kremlin at the time would later say it was unlikely that Moscow would have given the green light to that military action if Afghanistan’s powerful neighbor had not been distracted by its internal upheaval. Among those who fought against the Soviet invaders (and were aided in their resistance by U.S. support) was a group of Muslim extremists known as the Taliban. The Russian occupation came to an end in 1989, and the Taliban eventually gained control of Afghanistan and set up a regime that was unusually cruel and despotic even by the harsh standards of the Middle East. In the mid-1990s, with the blessing of the Taliban, Afghanistan became a sanctuary for Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist group that had launched a jihad, or holy war, against the United States and its allies.

In the meantime, war had come into Iran from its western border. In 1980 the reigning tyrant in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, decided the time was ripe to exploit the post-shah turmoil in Iran, and thus

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began the eight-year war between those two Persian Gulf countries.

Thanks to the hostage crisis, the U.S. government regarded Iran as its number one enemy in the region, so we generously contributed weapons and other forms of military assistance to Iraq. By the time the Iraqi-Iranian War ended in 1988, Hussein had managed, with considerable help from Washington, to build a military force that ranked as the fourth most powerful army in the world.

In1990, Saddam Husseinordered that army to invade Kuwait, which led to Desert Storm, the first Americanwar against Iraq. The staging area for most of the offensive was Saudi Arabia, and that de-ployment infuriated Osama bin Laden, the fanatical leader of Al Qaeda. He would later proclaim that more thananything else, it was the presence of American infidels on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia—

the site of Mecca, the spiritual center of Islam—that transformed him and his followers into terrorists. Their apocalyptic rage propelled them ona path of destructionthat led, intime, to the catastrophic attacks in New York and WashingtononSeptember 11, 2001.

Since then we have been engaged in a war on terrorism, a war that has been fought mainly on the battlegrounds of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the region where the dreadful chain of events began with the Islamic revolution in Iran.

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M a rg a r e t S a n g e r

AND NOW FOR A CHANGE of pace as we move away from political leaders at home and abroad and turn our attention to icons who touched our lives and emotions in less conventional ways.

One such icon was Margaret Sanger, who was a guest on The Mike Wallace Interview in 1957. As the founding mother of the birth-control movement in America, she had a profound influence on the social and political forces that transformed the country in the twentieth century.

By the time I interviewed her, Sanger was seventy-eight and had been engaged in the cause that defined her life for over four decades.

Yet in 1914, the year she launched the campaign for birth control—a B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

term, incidentally, that Sanger herself coined—she was out of step not only with the power centers that governed America but also with most other feminists of that era, who felt that Sanger’s issue was a distraction from their primary objective, which was to repeal laws that prevented their gender from voting. Although Sanger supported the suffragettes, the misery she encountered during the years she worked as a nurse and midwife in the slums of New York City convinced her that women had a more urgent need than the right to vote. “No woman,” she wrote at the time, “can call herself free who does not have control over her own body.” As it turned out, it was Sanger’s crusade—

more than any other—that led, in time, to the sexual revolution and the larger struggle for equality that became the women’s movement.

It was an uphill battle. Sanger was jailed on eight separate occasions for her beliefs and acts of protest, and even after she succeeded in overturning laws that banned birth control, she still had to contend with her most implacable foe: the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

Her public disputes with the Church’s doctrinaire opposition to birth control were still raging when I interviewed her in the fall of ’57.

W A L L A C E : You have said often that originally, the opposition to birth control was in law, and you had to fight against that. Today your opposition stems mainly from where—from what source?

S A N G E R : I think the opposition is mainly from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

W A L L A C E : Of the hierarchy of the Church. You feel that the parishioners themselves, the laypeople of the Church, are not against it.

S A N G E R : They come to all of our clinics just the same as the non-Catholics do. Exactly the same.

W A L L A C E : Well, let’s look at the official Catholic opposition to

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birth control. I read now from a Church publication called The Question Box. In forbidding birth control, it says the following: “The immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children. When the marital relation is used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible (that is, by birth control) it is used unethically and unnaturally.” Now, what’s wrong with that position?

S A N G E R : It’s very wrong. It’s not normal, it’s— It has a wrong attitude toward marriage, toward love, toward the normal relationships between men and women.

W A L L A C E : Your feeling is what, then?

S A N G E R : My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases, is the very finest relationship. It has nothing to do with bearing a child. That’s secondary many, many times. . . .

W A L L A C E : According to the tenets of Catholicism, they rule that birth control violates a natural law, therefore birth control is a sin no matter who practices it. Certainly, you can take no issue with the natural law—

S A N G E R : Oh, I certainly do take issue with it, and I think it’s untrue and I think it’s unnatural. It’s an unnatural attitude to take.

How do they know? I mean, after all, they’re celibates. They don’t know love, they don’t know marriage, they know nothing about bringing up children nor any of the marriage problems of life, and yet they speak to people as if they were God.