Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (89 page)

It is a clever despotism, a combination of full oppression leavened with an appreciation for appearances. Iran’s leaders have learned from the mistakes of past dictators. Stalin and Mao were brutal and unapologetic; they saw communism as the wave of the future and were molding a so-called new man. Those who opposed or disagreed were dealt with summarily. Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq next door for decades through sheer terror, was unapologetically in business for himself and his family. The mullahocracy is kinder and gentler. Iran is the land of bordbari, or “toleration.” If you are not a true believer, or even if you are but you disagree with official policy, you are tolerated by the regime provided you don’t make too much trouble. Indeed, certain kinds of criticism from certain quarters, so long as it does not deal with religion or politics, are duly licensed and authorized and are “well tolerated.”

Bordbari is something the government takes seriously, as with the case of a literary scholar who sought to publish a Farsi translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The story was told to me by an Iranian friend, and is so delicious that it must be apocryphal, but it illustrates a point. A censor predictably objected to some of the steamier passages in the novel, which offended Islamic moral standards. The scholar refused to cut the passages. “The book is a classic,” he told the censor. “I refuse to publish it with pieces cut out.” He was prepared to leave it at that but the censor persisted. “This is a great book, let’s find a solution,” he said. The scholar then proposed publishing the objectionable passages, exactly as Joyce wrote them, in English. But the censor objected again, saying that too many Iranians could read English. It was decided that the sexy bits would be printed in Italian, an oddly appropriate solution that I suspect would have especially amused the novel’s famously multilingual author.

Flexibility and compromise make this system palatable for the educated upper middle class, and nurtures hope among the more liberal-minded that real change will eventually come. Meanwhile, they cope by getting out. Iranians are free to travel, if they can afford it. Many well-to-do citizens spend large portions of their year overseas, free of petty religious dictates, and when they return home they live in relatively unharassed enclaves on the mountain slopes at the north side of the city. Inside shopping malls and food courts in this part of town the only obvious difference with the West is the reduced number and variety of retail shops. The same products and brand names—clothing, electronics, sporting goods—line the shelves. The women in these places turn hijab into a fashion statement. They wear sheer, colorful head scarves and sleek, clinging roupoosh, or “manteaus,” that mock the intent of vice laws. In one popular food court I observed a rainbow of lovely roupoosh in pink, white, orange, turquoise, and powder blue. The merchants pay a reshveh to the local morality thugs to keep them at bay, but if a camera crew records such excesses, perhaps catching pictures of couples actually holding hands, then the Basij in their “Mobile Units of God’s Vengeance” descend with long sticks and fines and restore Islamic order. This usually lasts for just a few weeks, when divine vigilance relaxes and, for the usual fee, standards are allowed to quietly slip again.

There is a similar pattern to bordbari on a larger scale. Near the end of his two-term presidency, Rafsanjani was permitted to loosen the political bonds countrywide in 1996, when the ruling mullahs decided to allow the relatively liberal Mohammed Khatami to run for president with a slate of reform-minded Majlis candidates. By all accounts, the balloting was allowed to proceed unmolested; Iran held an honest election. It produced a walloping landslide for Khatami and reform, and the newly elected legislators and president felt emboldened enough to seek real change. There was a brief blossoming of free speech and debate, opposition newspapers sprang up, and Iran began to smell the prospect of real freedom. There was heady talk of Iran “evolving” peacefully toward democracy. Khatami encoded the hopes of many in legislation that would have freed Iran’s law-makers from the veto power of the Guardians Council.

The mullahs stopped that fast. Ayatollah Khamenei vetoed the legislation, which provoked some rioting on college campuses in 2003 and some spontaneous heretical pro-American displays, but such outbursts were quickly subdued. Early in 2005, the Guardians Council simply crossed all reform candidates off the ballot. The conservatives were back in the saddle. The elevation of the blunt true believer Ahmadinejad, who as of this writing had called the Holocaust a myth and urged the destruction of Israel, has for a time stripped the kindly mask from the face of the regime.

Writers and artists must be licensed to work for any of the major news outlets, or for their work to be published or shown. A jury representing the ministries of information and culture weighs applicants and decides which pass political and religious muster. To be “authorized” supposedly means that you have the talent, the skills, and the experience to be taken seriously in your field, and to the extent that a broad range of journalism, literature, and art are tolerated, it lends credibility to the link between “authorized” and “qualified.” An unauthorized writer might even have some things published here or abroad and be tolerated for a time. Nothing might happen to him if the climate is right, or if he or she has important enough friends to be “well tolerated.” But if the climate changes, as it has recently, licensed publications live in daily fear of being shut down. In the current crackdown more than a hundred reform newspapers and magazines have been banned. Many formerly tolerated journalists are out of work. To attempt any unlicensed work means risking being hauled in to chat with a polished but unyielding middle-management Information Ministry zealot with the power to fire, arrest, torture, and even execute enemies of the state, although in the Land of Bordbari, such measures are no longer frequently required. Some writers are silenced by threats to keep their children from acceptance at universities, a critical path to future success.

Without a free press it is hard to know how most people feel about progress toward the umma. There are without doubt many true believers in Iran who see their nation as the seed of future worldwide salvation. David and I visited a small retail mall adjacent to Tehran University filled with shops selling pro-regime literature and Islamic fundamentalist knickknacks, cassette tapes of inspirational sermons and chants, and paintings of the familiar whitebeards and martyrs—the rough Iranian equivalent of Elvis portraits on black velvet. One of the merchants stepped out and handed us a small sample of what looked like holy cards, which they were, but of a different sort than I was familiar with. The Catholic holy cards I had seen often enough depicted saints and martyrs, but in romantic, classical paintings. These were grisly little battlefield snapshots, one showing a young martyr with half his head blown away, another with just a gory severed foot in a high-topped tennis shoe—“American” atrocities, we were assured.

Then again, later that day, when we stopped to buy cans of cold orange juice from a small store, the two men behind the counter asked our translator, Ramin, who we were. He told them we were American journalists.

“Why are they here?” one of the men asked.

“They are writing about the gerogan-giri,” Ramin said.

The men nodded appreciatively. Then one said, “Tell them that the thieves that did it are now in power, robbing all of us blind. Tell them we love America.”

Ramin passed this along and we thanked them for the kind words. Both men bowed, pressing their hands to their chests in a gesture of sincerity.

We Americans would like to believe that such sentiments are in the majority, and that, given time, Iranians will shrug off the smothering hold of religious dogma. But there is no way to tell. A determined tyranny can last for many lifetimes no matter how unpopular. I did note that on both flights out of Tehran (admittedly an affluent sample), all of the women aboard quickly shed head scarves and roupoosh the moment the plane left the ground.

The complicated role the hostage crisis plays in current Iranian politics was suggested after Ahmadinejad’s election in July 2005. News reports from the United States linked him to the embassy takeover. Former hostages Roeder, Scott, Daugherty, and several others claimed that they recognized the president-elect from still and moving pictures and named him as one of their captors. Roeder was particularly adamant, saying that Ahmadinejad was one of those who, in an effort to get him to talk, threatened to kidnap his disabled son in suburban Virginia and begin cutting off his fingers and toes. The diminutive, bearded former appointed mayor of Tehran promptly denied it, and members of the Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line, clearly encouraged by the regime, held press conferences to help him put distance between himself and the takeover.

The denial itself was revealing. There was a time in Iran when any association with the gerogan-giri would have been a tremendous boon to a politician. In the past, a politician might be expected to exaggerate his connection rather than downplay it. Instead, Ahmadinejad admitted, as I have reported in this book, that while he was one of the original five members of “Strengthen the Unity,” the student coalition led by Ibrahim Asgharzadeh that initiated the embassy takeover, he identified himself as one of the two members who preferred directing political action against the Soviet Union and who had backed away from the protest when he was voted down and the United States embassy became the target. He said he subsequently supported the takeover when Khomeini blessed it, which took place shortly after the embassy was seized, but denied personally invading the grounds or holding and interrogating hostages. An old photograph showing a bearded student resembling him was widely reprinted, but it’s impossible to tell if it is the same man. Without any doubt Ahmadinejad was one of the central players in the group that seized the embassy and held hostages.

The new president’s prompt disavowal was a tacit acknowledgment that the episode today comes with distinct political liabilities, both foreign and domestic. This despite the fact that many of those involved in the takeover have risen to the highest positions in Iran’s government. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the former president and losing candidate in the most recent election, were directly involved in endorsing the gerogan-giri and in supervising negotiations for its eventual end. Habibullah Bitaraf, Iran’s minister of energy, was one of the leaders of the takeover and lists his connection proudly on his Web site. Nilufar Ebtekar, the notorious spokesman for the students who has since changed her first name to Massoumeh, now serves as a vice president of Iran and minister for the environment. Her husband, Mohammad Hashemi, another of the primary architects of the takeover, rose to become deputy minister for information, Iran’s second most powerful intelligence official. Mohsen Mirdamadi was serving in the Majlis before he and other reformers were crossed off the ballots by the mullahs. Mohammed Reza Khatami, speaker of the Majlis and brother of Iran’s former two-term president, was one of the original planners of the takeover, and among other student leaders who have served in the Majlis are Asgharzadeh and the infamous guard and interrogator known to the hostages as “Gaptooth,” Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, who was primarily responsible for translating the seized documents and is the man who took a rubber hose to Ahern and Daugherty. Sheikh-ol-eslam reportedly blames the United States for his inability to pursue a career in diplomacy. It seems the only country that would accept him as ambassador was Syria. It may well be that America has had a hand in this, but pursuing a career in diplomacy after seizing and holding any diplomatic mission hostage for more than a year would be like trying to join an exclusive club after first urinating on its front steps.

We tried to approach Sheikh-ol-eslam through his brother, a psychiatrist, who reported back that there was no point in talking to American journalists. He said his brother believed that I could never comprehend the “mysticism” of the event, which is probably true.

Once celebrated as national heroes, the gerogan-girha are today viewed critically from both ends of Iran’s political spectrum. Those on the left, who want to topple the mullahs and create a true democracy, rightly blame the students for turning their revolutionary dreams into a religious autocracy. On the right, religious extremists attack the old students as opportunists and celebrate only the “pure” gerogan-girha who after the takeover heeded the imam’s call to the martyr brigades and perished with most of the rest of their generation in the war with Iraq. Conspiracy buffs on both sides suspect today that the gerogan-giri itself, which helped prompt the disastrous Iran–Iraq War and twenty-five years of international troubles for Iran, was a secret CIA plot, which makes the students either stooges or, at worst, American agents. To Americans this is laughable, but in Iran it is taken seriously by many, even well-educated people.

Reza Ghapour, a young fundamentalist “scholar” who recently compiled a book illustrating this theory of the takeover, told me with a straight face and strong voice that the CIA was responsible for installing and preserving the shah, for engineering his overthrow and secretly planning his return, for propping up the provisional government that followed the coup and fomenting the national unrest that ultimately undermined and toppled it, and for secretly engineering the seizure of the “den of spies” and keeping fifty-two Americans imprisoned for more than a year.

“Aren’t some of these things mutually contradictory?” I asked. “For instance, why would the CIA wish to foment trouble for a provisional government it was secretly supporting?”

Ghapour smiled sweetly.

“You must view the world through the lens of Islam to see the logic of these things,” he said.

I heard the same idea several times. Once from Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of Iran who was elected during the hostage crisis and who eventually fled to Paris—accused of being a CIA agent himself—where he lives today under protection of the French police. (His foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who had warned Hamilton Jordan that he was sticking out his neck by engaging in secret talks with America, was convicted of plotting against the state and executed in 1982.) Bani-Sadr is of the school that believes earth-shattering events generally do not happen spontaneously, and finds it hard to accept that a group of college students cooked up by themselves a protest with such profound consequences for Iran, not to mention his own life. “There needs to be a person who is the intermediary who receives the project and can transform that project into a revolutionary one that is passed on to the students,” he says, naming as his prime suspect Mohammad Mousavi Khoeniha, the relatively unknown cleric who served as the so-called spiritual adviser to the gerogan-girha. Bani-Sadr thinks Khoeniha was put up to it by the CIA.