Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (88 page)

On round-numbered anniversaries, most recently the twenty-fifth, the hostages are accustomed to being tracked down by local and national news reporters, and often when there are major events in Iran their insight and comments are sought. The surprising Iranian election in June 2005 of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president brought several of the former hostages back to the front pages. Some claim to remember the new Iranian leader as one of their former jailers and interrogators.

The Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line had taken part in a grand experiment that ought to be familiar to Americans. They were out to build a new world, a utopia, their own version of a “City on the Hill.” Their vision borrowed from both sides of the Cold War. They would blend American democracy with a Soviet-style state-run economy, a system they believed to be both revolutionary and ancient. In their view, the perfect society had been described centuries ago in the Koran. Inspired by the vision of Ali Shariati, one of the ideological fathers of their revolution, they were striving toward the umma, the perfect Muslim community, a classless, crimeless community infused with the “spirit of God.”

Twenty-five years on, what does the experiment look like?

Tehran today is a bland, teeming, gray-brown sprawl swimming in a miasma of smog and dust that coats everything with a patina of grit, especially in the summer, when you can literally taste the air. It is a remarkably colorless city, except for occasional patches of faded green, apparently the only color that pleases Allah. Spreading down the southern slopes of the towering brown Alborz Mountains, it is a metropolis of low, dense construction cut into irregular squares by busy streets and expressways with only occasional isolated patches of open space. There are a few tall buildings of ten stories or more, and here and there the onion dome of a mosque, but otherwise the architecture is singularly uninspired. Most of the structures are shaped like building blocks, sometimes elongated and stacked on end. There’s a lot of dirt-streaked prefab concrete. Trees and bushes are plentiful, but they tend to be stunted, pale, and hanging on for dear life. Streets are bordered on both sides by the open canals called jubes, which, in lieu of an underground water and sewer system, channel flowing water downhill to every corner of the city. The farther south one goes the more clogged the canals are with litter and garbage. The only large structure in the city that grabs your eye is the graceful Azadi monument, a towering concrete arch just outside the airport supported by four sweeping buttresses, which was designed and built in the time of the shah.

The city is choking in traffic, a galaxy of small cars rushing everywhere pell-mell. The good news is that apparently everyone in Iran can afford a car and gasoline, and they all seem impressively busy, all the time, judging by the hurry. A downside is that the city smells like the back end of an old bus. Road manners are mad in most Third World cities, but in Tehran recklessness rises to the level of a cultural statement. It is said that an Iranian dies every twenty-two minutes in an auto accident, which is an impossibly low figure. The truth must be closer to twenty-two seconds. Traffic signals are purely ornamental. Most intersections have flashing reds or yellows, but neither color has any discernible effect. Drivers in Tehran see only one color behind the wheel, a pure Islamic green. Rules of the road are strictly optional. I was sitting once in an outer office in Tehran where they had a picture book on the coffee table, a collection of “pretty” photographs of the city, a challenging concept. Most of the pictures were taken at night (which hides the dirt), and the one on the cover was a time-lapse aerial shot. In it, a divided three-lane highway bends through downtown forming two distinct rivers of light, one white, formed by headlamps, and the other red, formed by taillights. If you looked closely, however, there are thin, wavy red lines inside the white river. It is subtle, and you might dismiss it as some anomaly in the printing of the photograph, but no, these are the taillights of motorbikes braving the onslaught and driving the wrong way on the busy interstate. It is something hard to believe until you actually see it.

Efforts are under way to ease this madness. In recent years, Tehran has completed a modern subway system consisting of two wide tunnels that form a crooked X pattern under the city’s streets. The stops along this system—Taleghani Station is just outside the southeast corner of the former U.S. embassy—are amazingly wide, clean, well ventilated, and well lit, with smooth granite walls inlaid with decorative red stones. The underground offers a striking refuge from the madness at ground level. The enormous engineering and construction contract for this massive project went, of course, to the son of then-president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Tehranis are clearly thrilled to have it; the trains are jammed day and night.

For a visiting American, Iran is like an inverse world. Bad is good and good is bad. In Tehran patriotic symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always as images of violence, evil, and defeat. The American flag is shown in the shape of a gun; a bald eagle is shown going down in flames. In the West we are bombarded with advertising images of youth, beauty, sex, and life; in Tehran the preponderance of advertising images celebrate death. There are murals everywhere honoring martyrs—primarily those who died in the eight-year Iran–Iraq War, in the 1980s, but also more recent Islamic martyrs, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2004. Billboards in the West often feature scantily dressed, provocatively posed teens, but in Tehran the gigantic wall murals tend to depict robed grandpas and grumpy-looking white-bearded clerics, especially common are the bespectacled face of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the more imposing, threatening visage of the late Imam Khomeini.

This inverse nature is pervasive. In August of 2004, when I left on one of my visits to Iran, a media blitz at home was trumpeting a more or less nonstop parade of American triumphs in the Olympic Games in Greece. When I arrived in Tehran, I was greeted with pleased accounts of American defeats. The Tehran Times reported an “anguished reaction” in Washington, D.C., over three losses by the U.S. men’s basketball team and its failure to win a gold medal (it won the bronze), and when American boxer Andre Ward advanced toward a gold medal, it ran the headline “Saves U.S. Team from Historic Failure.” Coverage of the Iraq War in Tehran’s newspapers cheers the savage insurgent violence there and portrays the Iraqi Shia Ayatollah Ali Sistani—not the American and British armies that actually toppled the tyrant Saddam Hussein—as the real force for democracy and independence.

And just when one seems to have the place in full inverse focus, there comes some wildly discordant note—such as the blocks-long open-air drug market in the center of Tehran, where dealers hawk Viagra, ecstasy, and opium at rock-bottom infidel prices. In this pious city where women are forced to cover their bodies and heads, even in stifling summer heat, it is common to see prostitutes—duly scarved and draped—freely patrolling the streets, sending with a slightly heavier application of makeup, flamboyant jewelry, and a few straying strands of hair the same message sent by spike heels and a G-string in Atlantic City.

Nowhere is the inverse nature of Iran more evident than in its memory of the gerogan-giri, the “hostage taking.” The different ways this event is remembered in Iran and in the United States illustrate how nations invent their own pasts, and how the simplification of history can create impossible gulfs between peoples. To Americans, for whom the incident has become little more than an embarrassing historical footnote, it was an unprovoked kidnapping carried out by a scruffy band of half-crazy Islamist zealots driven by a senseless hatred of all things American. It was a terrifying ordeal for the hostages and their families, fatal for eight of the would-be rescuers and some of the Iranians who had taken American money to spy, and a political disaster for Jimmy Carter—perhaps the single most important factor in making him a one-term president. It was a protracted public humiliation.

For many Iranians, however, the hostage crisis was an unalloyed triumph. From the earliest moments of the takeover, artists, poets, journalists, politicians, mullahs, and historians began wrapping it in the cloak of legend, shading the actual incident with historical and mystical significance. It remains for the true believers a keystone of the national mythology, the epic tale of a small group of devout young gerogan-girha who, armed only with prayer and purity of heart, stormed the fortress gates of the most evil, potent empire on the planet, faced down the infidels’ rifles and tear gas, and secured it without shedding a drop of blood, reclaiming the heart of Iran from the clutches of the devil himself. The poignant and poetic story continues, telling how these innocent servants of Allah treated their often crude and abusive captives with kindness and respect even as they pieced together shredded embassy documents to expose and thwart their plots to destroy the revolution and reinstate the criminal shah. And when the Great Satan dispatched its deadly commandos to slay these young heroes (this is the part that fires the blood of the faithful), Allah stirred haboobs in the desert to down the infidel helicopters and turn back the invaders. This is the story taught to schoolchildren who are bused in to see the “Great Aban 13th” exhibition, where they can measure the reality of the miracle for themselves by touching remains of the aircraft that Allah scorched while the innocent gerogan-girha slept.

Apart from the fantasy, and aside from the heavy price the country continues to pay, the embassy takeover served an important purpose during revolutionary days. For those Iranians who were waiting for the Islamist fervor to die down and for the forces formerly allied with the United States to reassert themselves, it crushed any hope for a return to Western-style normalcy. The standoff and the allegations of American plotting purveyed by the students undermined every political faction in Iran except the Islamists and, as we have seen, carried them firmly into power. It also was a wildly popular assertion of national pride, a symbolic casting-off of colonial subservience and a reassertion of that nation’s greatness and distinction.

In this sense, the fairy tale of the gerogan-giri may still manage to stir a piece of the Persian soul, but many (if not most) Iranians today aren’t buying it. When I was posing before a Khomeini mural for a snapshot one afternoon in the winter of 2003, a young Iranian passerby asked me in English, “Why do you want a picture of that asshole?”

On arriving at the airport in Tehran, my American passport—unusual in Iran these days—provoked a grimace and an annoyed grunt from the customs agent. My traveling companion, the filmmaker David Keane, and I were both waved back into the waiting area while various officials argued spiritedly in Farsi over the correct protocol for ushering two vipers of iniquity across their borders. We sat while extra forms were prepared, inspected, signed, and stamped, and we were fingerprinted, every finger. Everyone was polite but we passed through customs hours after the rest of our flight had departed.

Traveling to Iran isn’t really hard, just expensive. Early in 2002 I applied for a visa to the Iranian UN mission in New York, then waited for months. When I learned that sometimes years are spent in limbo following this procedure, I sought other means. In Iran there is no such thing as a bribe, but happily there is something called reshveh, or a “success fee”—just as in Iranian banking there are karmozd, or “banking fees,” because usury is forbidden by the Koran. It turns out that in the right hands, a reshveh can generate a visa application within hours. The engineer of this miracle in our case was one Kamal Taheri, an oily gentleman with a great soft belly and perpetual week-old gray stubble who directs something called Reseneh Yar, the “Foreign Media Guide Centre.” For roughly five thousand dollars (Taheri will dicker), he will produce a perfectly valid visa and, to facilitate reporting in Iran, an able fixer and translator (who does all the actual work). On arrival, a few hundred dollars more is extracted for the mandatory “press pass,” a laminated photo ID decked with elaborate Farsi that is good for startling cops in rural Pennsylvania but which serves no purpose whatsoever in Iran; in my two trips, no one ever asked to see it. Taheri is a former mid-level intelligence ministry official with friends in high places, hence he gets to run this “business,” which has effectively privatized the ministry’s tradition of assigning a “minder” to visiting journalists. All our requests for interviews went through Taheri, and taped copies of them must be turned over to him. Privatization is a big deal right now in Iran, but it just serves as an excuse for flagrant cronyism. Taheri and a few smaller, less well connected rivals operate as gatekeepers and babysitters for all foreign journalists in Iran.

The country is governed in a way that differs fundamentally from any conventional Western power structure. Most hierarchies can be diagrammed in a pyramid; Iran’s is more like a string of prayer beads suspended vertically. The beads are of various sizes so that one’s rank in the descending row does not necessarily indicate one’s power. Nepotism and friendship count for a lot in Iran, and even if someone holds a relatively unimportant office, or none at all, he may wield disproportionate clout. Many areas of authority overlap. Plotting the overall design is a little like trying to trace the pattern on a Persian rug.

The use of the term “republic” is double-talk. The elected government is run by a small group of privileged clerics who decide what candidates and what laws are acceptable, who control the military and the secret police, and whatever else they wish, and who stifle dissent, beating up or locking up those they don’t like. The ruling clerics are led by Khamenei, who in the years since he made periodic visits to the hostages has become an avuncular old ayatollah with big glasses and the mandatory long white beard. He was appointed by an “assembly of experts” after the death of the Imam Khomeini in 1989 and, by all accounts, is comfortable seeing himself as the hand of Allah Himself in Iran. All laws and candidates for any public post must be approved by him and the Guardians Council, a twelve-member body of clerics and judges that he appoints. The elected government of Iran is a kind of toy democracy that serves at his pleasure. It consists of an elected president, currently the populist ultraconservative former mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad, the Majlis, and a judiciary. The mullahs tolerate just enough of a semblance of democracy and freedom to maintain the pretense of democracy.