Iran 5: Nervously Well-Treated

When I went to Iran at the invitation of the authorities there, I knew that a faction in the government welcomed my arrival. But I wondered whether that faction would be in the ascendant when I actually arrived and throughout my stay.  There were, and evidently still are, fiercely competing groups within the regime.  At that time, the relatively moderate Mohammad Khatami, a cleric, was serving as Iran’s fifth president, but the hardliners had recently managed to put his personally chosen friend, newly appointed as the mayor of Tehran, into prison on trumped up charges of corruption.  They were sending Khatami a very clear message.

So, among other things, although I might have been able to take my wife with me — and, overwhelmingly, prefer to do so — I didn’t even invite her on this trip.  I would have been sufficiently depressed had I ended up imprisoned in a country that was hostile to mine and without American diplomatic representation, but I would have been really angry with myself for putting my wife into such a situation and leaving our then small children without parents.  In retrospect, I rather regret that decision.  Everything went fine, and she would have loved the trip.  But prudence is a virtue.

Anyway, we were always accompanied by security personnel, ostensibly — and, perhaps, really — intended principally to protect us.

I recall the first evening of the trip.  We were brought to a formal dinner at which we were obliged to listen to one of the senior clerics — I can’t recall whether he was an ayatollah or not — drone on and on about Aristotelian metaphysics.  Thoroughly jet-lagged, I’m sure that I wasn’t the only foreigner in the audience to find the program interminable and almost unendurable.  At one point, I arose from my seat and went to stand in the back of the rather large banquet hall.  A Foreign Ministry official immediately came over to me and said, “Please sit down, sir.”  I replied that I was very tired, and that I needed to stand for a few minutes.  “I said ‘Please sit down, sir,'” he responded, in a forceful whisper.  I sat down.

But we were treated very well.  Every time we went out in the city, our little convoy had a police and military escort.  We never had to wait for a red light, because we were simply waved on through while ordinary citizens were obliged to wait.  I remember thinking that, in this respect at least, it would be really nice to be a third-world dictator.

When we were let off at Mehrabad Airport for our flight out of Iran, though, we were exposed to people who pretty clearly didn’t approve of our having been in Iran.  I was happy when we took off, and then when I was certain that we had left Iranian airspace.  Later, when I saw the film Argo, its last portion reminded me very powerfully of my own departure from Tehran.