Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (8 page)

But empires do not last. In 330
B.C.
, Alexander the Great conquered Persia, bringing the imperial age to a close. Centuries later, though, even after many other waves of conquest and foreign domination, Iranians feel passionately that they are a separate, special people. One of the reasons I feel the Iranian system works as well as it does is that Iranians have such a strong sense of a distinct national identity. Whoever they are and wherever they go, they want to speak Persian, read Persian poetry, eat Persian food, and debate Iranian politics.

RULE TWELVE: IRANIANS LIKE AMERICANS.
Iranians view America as a land of demons and dreams, of unlimited power and unlimited promise.

Officially, America is Iran’s worst enemy. Among its “crimes”: fomenting a military coup in 1953 that restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne; bolstering him with billions of dollars in arms sales over the next quarter-century; tilting toward Iraq in the war against Iran; failing to resolve financial disputes dating from the hostage crisis; weakening the Islamic Republic with economic sanctions.

In February 1982 I toured the war-ravaged Iranian city of Dezful with Iranian officials eager to show how they had recaptured the city from Iraq a few months before. My Iranian guide pointed out a vast yard where a pregnant Iranian woman had been killed by a Soviet-made missile. After she was killed the neighbors came out and chanted, “Death to America,” the guide said.

“If she was killed by a Soviet missile, why didn’t they shout ‘Death to Moscow’?” I asked.

“Because it is America who benefits by the war,” he replied.

In other words, if you’re America, you never win.

At the same time, the United States remains a fantasy Promised Land for many Iranians, the land of
Baywatch
and billionaires and an easy life in Los Angeles, where hundreds of thousands of Iranians have settled. Many Iranians, even those on very limited incomes, own illegal satellite dishes that give them instant access to American television. Even without satellite dishes, I have picked up CNN in Bushehr on the Persian Gulf because Dubai is so close. I once asked an eighteen-year-old middle-class high school student who had never traveled outside Iran how he came to speak such colloquial English and he replied, “CNN.”

American CDs, videos, and computer programs are pirated and sold on the streets for a fraction of their price in the United States. E-mail is more widely available in Iran than in many other Middle Eastern countries. A friend once bought software on the black market for $10 that would have cost $1,500 in the United States.

Even after Bill Clinton imposed an economic embargo on Iran in May 1995, American goods did not disappear. They just got more expensive. Under Iranian customs regulations, Iranians entering the country are allowed to bring in one appliance, which has led to a lively importation of refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers. During a visit to the holy city of Qom I found a shop selling knockoffs of Wrangler blue jeans just down the street from the main shrine, one of Iran’s holiest sites.

Almost every Iranian I have ever met has a relative living in the United States. And even those Iranians who rail most about American policy seem to genuinely like Americans. At the height of the American embassy seizure in 1979 and 1980, the same Iranian demonstrators who chanted angry slogans about the “den of spies” in the mornings followed me down Ferdowsi Avenue in the afternoons asking me to help them get visas or contact their relatives in Los Angeles or Dallas.

I saw that love-hate attitude again years later on a slow-moving German-made ferry on a 110 degree day in the middle of the Persian Gulf. In Iranian eyes, one of the worst American “crimes” was committed in July 1988, a month before the end of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq. An American naval cruiser, the USS
Vincennes,
had mistaken an Iran Air civilian airliner for a hostile military aircraft and shot it down as it flew over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. Every year since, the Iranians have ferried families of the victims and journalists to a ceremony at the point twenty-five miles into the Persian Gulf where the plane hit the water.

I went along one year, and a group of young women in chadors, whose relatives died in the crash, discovered that I was an American. But instead of venting anger, they shyly touched me and wanted to have their pictures taken with me. I was the first American they had ever met, and they were endlessly curious. Did I like Iran? What did I think of the coverings that women have to wear in the breathtaking heat? They thrust pages from their notebooks and pieces of Kleenex at me. They wanted my autograph.

I like to tell Iranians that I am American. The information lights up their faces. For years, I also wore as a badge of honor the fact that I was on the plane that brought Ayatollah Khomeini from France in February 1979. It opened doors. And then one day it began to work only occasionally. I told someone I had been on Khomeini’s plane.

“So it was your fault,” he said.

C H A P T E R   T H R E E

The Improvised Revolution

The Sovereign, The Pivot of the Universe, The Sultan, His AuspiciousMajesty, His Royal Majesty, The King of Kings, The Royal Possessor ofKingdoms, His Majesty the Shadow of Allah, The Khaghan.

— THE HISTORICAL TITLES OF THE SHAH OF IRAN

The Jewish agent . . . The American snake . . . The idiot boy.

— DESCRIPTIONS OF THE SHAH BY AYATOLLAH
  RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

F
OR THE AYATOLLAH
with the fierce eyes, it was a midnight flight to paradise. He would lead his people in an earthly revolution. Or he would die a martyr with a ticket to heaven.

For me, it was an adventure of terror and excitement. I was flying on a plane that might be shot down. I was riding the biggest story of my life. I was also beginning a twenty-year odyssey through Iran.

At 1:00
A.M.
on February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, forty-seven of his closest followers, an all-male, all-volunteer crew, and 141 journalists boarded a chartered Air France Boeing 747 jet in Paris for the five-hour flight to Tehran. The plane took off even though it did not have permission from Tehran to land. It flew half empty so that Air France could carry spare fuel in case the plane had to head back to Paris. The ayatollah left his wife behind. On his orders, no Iranian women or children were on board. It was too risky. The only other woman I can recall being on the flight was my friend Carole Jerome from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In a sense we journalists were the ayatollah’s first hostages. In fact, we probably made the plane a lot safer. Carrying representatives of foreign networks, magazines, newspapers, and wire services, it was less likely to be shot down.

There was nothing ceremonial about the day of the departure. Journalists stood for hours in the damp bitter cold of Khomeini’s French garden, waiting for their plane tickets. His aides taped on apple trees handwritten lists of different news organizations that had made the cut. Journalists went from tree to tree with flashlights, cigarette lighters, and lit matches looking for their names. After I found mine, a young Iranian took five one-hundred-dollar bills from me and handed me a ticket. Even then, I didn’t believe the plane would take off.

On the half-filled plane, Khomeini and his entourage settled into first class; the journalists were sent to coach. There was no alcohol on board. I was required to hide my hair under a scarf.

Khomeini seemed comfortable, even serene, during the flight. Shortly after takeoff, he climbed the circular stairs to the first-class lounge and turned it into a place of prayer and rest. Dressed in a white nightshirt and skullcap, he knelt on an Air France blanket, said his prayers, and fell asleep easily on the floor.

I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking, how in the world did I get here? I wasn’t an expert on the Middle East. In graduate school I had studied eighteenth-century French history and my only exposure to things Persian was reading Montesquieu’s
Persian Letters,
a dialogue in which two imaginary Persians traveling in France send home their critical observations. The social satire was all about France and not at all about Iran.

The only time I had gone to the Middle East was to cover a royal wedding. As a junior correspondent for
Newsweek
in Paris, I went to Jordan in June 1978 to cover the wedding of King Hussein to Lisa Halaby, now known as Queen Noor. A week later, I was in Beirut covering the aftermath of a massacre during Lebanon’s long civil war.

But I wasn’t yet a war correspondent. On returning to Paris, I wrote about things European: the fall of the dollar, the boom in escargot farming, the deaths of two Popes. My colleague Arnaud de Borchgrave was the Graham Greene–like figure who covered wars for a living. A permanently tanned, Belgian-born count, Arnaud got up before dawn, read eighteen newspapers a day, and kept an office and a full-time secretary in the Paris bureau even though he lived in Geneva. Yet this once, I was the one on the plane.

*     *    *

Khomeini had slipped into France four months earlier on his Iranian passport. He had come from Iraq, where he had lived for thirteen years. The Shah first imprisoned Khomeini in 1963 after he opposed the Shah’s plan to redistribute land to the peasants, the granting of voting rights to women, and the shielding of American servicemen from criminal prosecution in Iranian courts. Then, after putting Khomeini under house arrest, the Shah expelled him. Khomeini settled briefly in Turkey, before making a new home in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. In the fall of 1978, with protests against his rule intensifying, the Shah asked Saddam Hussein to expel Khomeini as a way of diminishing the extraordinary influence he wielded from so close to home. Saddam Hussein obliged. Khomeini wanted to go to a Muslim country, but Kuwait refused him entry and France was willing to admit him without a visa. There was another attraction as well, according to Ibrahim Yazdi, one of Khomeini’s key aides, a naturalized citizen of the United States who had taught at a small college in Texas and who later became Foreign Minister. “Paris was a politicized city,” Yazdi said, with a large, potentially supportive Iranian community. So the ayatollah ended up in Paris.

His followers rented a small house in Neauphle-le-Château, a sleepy village in a picture-perfect valley twenty-five miles east of the French capital. They installed four telephones and two telex lines. French workmen dismantled the Western toilet and installed a more familiar Eastern one, which consisted of a low porcelain fixture over a hole in the floor that led to the plumbing. The Shah had no objection to Khomeini’s new place of residence. He calculated that it was better to have the old man in a Western country where his activities could be carefully monitored and where the Western press would see him up close and expose him for the backward man whom the Shah felt he was.

I was alone in the office in Paris late one night in October 1978 when a telex machine started clicking. The message was for Jonathan Randal, the intrepid correspondent for the
Washington Post,
whose parent company also owned
Newsweek.
Was there a story in the ayatollah’s arrival? his editors asked. At that time I didn’t know exactly what an ayatollah was. But when Jon offered to take me with him to meet an Iranian said to be close to the ayatollah that Saturday afternoon, I said yes. We met Sadegh Ghotbzadeh at a café in a shopping mall on the outskirts of Paris.

Ghotbzadeh was on his way to see the ayatollah, and offered to take Jon along. “Too bad you don’t have a head scarf,” Ghotbzadeh told me. “You could have come.” This was no time to protest that this was France, the country of individual freedom. A story was a story. I raced around the mall and I found a big black silk chiffon scarf with red flowers. It cost $75. We drove to Neauphle-le-Château, where we were invited to listen to Khomeini’s sermon—at a safe distance. I listed the scarf on my expense account under miscellaneous. I still wear it sometimes when I interview ayatollahs.

In those first few days, few supporters and almost no journalists visited Khomeini. Those supporters who did come brought along mattresses, rugs, sleeping bags, and even lawn chairs to make themselves comfortable. Some carried tape recorders to preserve the sermons or to send cassettes of them back home. Some slept in their cars, much to the annoyance of the neighbors.

When Khomeini appeared, as he did twice a day, his supporters shouted
Allahu Akbar
—“God is Great.” I saw the old man as a sideshow, a human interest story, a powerless figure who sat cross-legged on a carpet, facing Mecca, his hands open to the sky, under an apple tree in a French garden lush with rosebushes. His black bushy arched eyebrows and hooded eyes made him look as sinister as people in the West made him out to be.

Khomeini said that the Shah must go. He said it over and over, to thousands of Iranian pilgrims who came to pay court and to hundreds of foreign journalists hungry like me for a story. He spoke in riddles, mumbled as he talked, and didn’t smile. His followers lamented his situation—an exile, a transplanted Persian, having no access to a mosque. Eventually the Iranians rented a huge blue-and-white-striped tent, which they pitched on the lawn and called a mosque.

A large sign in English and Persian outside Khomeini’s headquarters proclaimed, “The ayatollah has no spokesman.” That really wasn’t so. Khomeini had a number of aides who talked in his name. For obvious reasons, my colleagues and I called the clerics “the turbans” and the Western-educated laymen “the neckties.” The neckties divided up the press corps and tried to convince us that Iran under an Islamic Republic would be a freedom-loving democracy wrapped in the precepts of the Koran.