by Hooman Majd
Whoever they had come to see wasn’t in his office either, so they took turns sitting down on the two remaining chairs, dialing their phones every few seconds. Every now and then one would look at me and nod his head again, and I would nod back. I caught the eye of one who was standing long enough for him to feel obliged to follow the nod with a word or two, and he quickly said, “Mokhlessam,” or “I’m your devoted friend,” a common enough pleasantry in conversational Farsi that would have in the past been a little too informal, too “street,” despite how it sounds in English, to hear in a government office. “Chakeram,” I replied in my best Tehrani accent, smiling and bowing my head. “I’m your obedient servant.” Even more “street,” but the correct retort in the Persian tradition of ta’arouf, a defining Persian characteristic that includes the practice, often infuriating, of small talk, or frustratingly and sometimes incomprehensible back-and-forth niceties uttered in any social encounter. Ta’arouf can be a long-winded prelude to what is actually the matter at hand, whether the matter be a serious negotiation or just ordering dinner, or it can, as in this case, be insincere but well-intentioned politesse. I wondered if he noticed my “missing” cuff button. His phone rang with an incongruous little dance number, the kind of ring tone only Finnish or Chinese designers—and, it seems, also many Iranians—would think appropriate for grown men’s telephones, and he stepped outside to take the call.
The guard dialed a number again on his phone and gestured to me with the handset. “It’s ringing,” he said, holding the receiver in the air. I stood up and took it. Mr. Javanfekr, it appeared, was in his office and ready to receive me. I handed the receiver back to the guard, who, distracted by the other men and now a television crew that had just shown up, took it and nodded his head a few times, gesturing for me to go through the metal detector. “The building on the left,” he said, noticing my inquisitive look. I left the four men and the television crew, almost all chatting away on cell phones, and made my way to the next building. Another guard, seated at a desk and infinitely more bored than the last, looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Mr. Javanfekr,” I said.
“That door over there,” he replied, pointing to an office on the ground floor. I hesitated for a moment before realizing that no one would be escorting me, and then I walked straight into Javanfekr’s office.
Ali Akbar Javanfekr has the unenviable job of being President Ahmadinejad’s top press adviser, as well as his most senior official spokesman. He doesn’t work in the presidential press office, and doesn’t sully his days with routine and tedious requests, or with the details of the president’s press schedule. But from his large office with views of the towering pine trees in the compound, he ponders the big picture—public diplomacy, if you will, for a boss who seems to have little comprehension of the concept. He is also the president’s chief propaganda adviser, which is a concept his boss does have a natural instinct for. A little-known figure in Iranian politics (like many of the president’s other top advisers, who wisely, it seems, prefer to stay in the shadow of a president who demands top billing everywhere he goes), he is someone who issues statements only rarely and only on very serious matters, such as his denial that the British servicemen and service-woman who endured thirteen days of captivity in the spring of 2007 were in any way tortured and, in a clever propagandist moment, his announcement that they were free to tell their stories to the Iranian press after they were barred from doing so in England by the British government.5
Mr. Javanfekr is a slight man with a standard-issue Ahmadinejad government haircut—thick short black hair parted to one side and partially covering the forehead—and the obligatory, but in his case quite full and quite white, beard. He was examining some faxes when I stepped into his office, but he turned and greeted me in a soft voice. “Please,” he said, “have a seat.” In Iranian offices, one is never asked if one would like tea or coffee or any other beverage: it is assumed one will drink tea, and usually within seconds the office tea man will arrive with a fresh glass and a bowl of sugar cubes.
Javanfekr sat down beside me on an ugly leatherette couch; he was dressed in navy blue trousers, a white shirt, and a navy cardigan, and with his soft voice and quiet, gentle demeanor he appeared more as a college professor than a top aide to someone who has been likened to, at least in some of the Western media, Hitler. I couldn’t help but notice his footwear: he was wearing the ubiquitous plastic sandals that are found by the doors of Iranian homes (for the vast majority of Iranians remove their shoes before entering a house) but not often in offices, and certainly not in important government offices. But Mr. Javanfekr was clearly comfortable in them, as comfortable as the tea man was in his identical pair when he entered the room with a tray balanced on one upturned palm of an outstretched arm. The office tea man, only one rung above a janitor on the personnel ladder, was dressed just like his boss, save the cardigan, and it struck me that the more socialist aspects of the Islamic Republic, indeed Islam itself, were on full view in this quiet and shabby corner office at the heart of the republic’s power center. The Islamic Revolution had promised, in 1979, to do away with class and more particularly with any royalist, taghouti (which implies class structure) trappings in government and society, and in Javanfekr’s office at least, it had succeeded. It was not theater; Javanfekr did not strike me as one to affect a style, as it were, nor was I someone, say, a foreigner, whom the presidential office wished to impress with its overt dismissal of both Western and sometimes Persian pomp and airs. No, Javanfekr and his tea man were simply comfortable with who they were; a generation ago upper-class Iranians would have called them both dahati, “peasants,” for their appearance. Today some Iranians still do, both inside the country and in exile, and usually with an air of absolute disgust. But it just doesn’t matter anymore.
What I wanted to know most from the president’s top media adviser was who among the top echelon of government officials had thought, other than Ahmadinejad himself, that organizing a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran (held in the winter of 2006 to wide ridicule mainly outside, but also to some extent inside, Iran) had been a good idea. At least in terms of how the media would see it. Iranians, particularly those who haven’t traveled much outside the country and no matter what their level of education, have very little knowledge, if any, of the Holocaust. Contemporary European and American history is not taught much in schools, films and documentaries on the Holocaust rarely make it to Iran, and books on the Holocaust are rarely translated. It was and is still generally accepted by most Iranians that something very bad happened to European Jews under the Third Reich, but because it didn’t affect or have anything to do with Iran, not even Iranian Jews, who were mostly unaffected by World War II, the Holocaust was rarely thought about by Iranians until their president decided to make it an issue of great import.
Javanfekr was frozen by the question. He stared at me for a very long time, not angrily, but more with a bewildered look in his eyes. I was impressed that he didn’t want to repeat the standard government line, or a denial of Holocaust denial; perhaps he just didn’t have an answer that he thought would satisfy me. An Iranian who lives in New York might not, he may have reasoned, understand the subtleties and nuances in his president’s pronouncements and actions.
I thought of Fuad, my Jewish-Iranian friend from Los Angeles who had explained to me his perspective on Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial with no small measure of admiration for what he saw as the finest example of Persian ta’arouf one-upmanship. Ahmadinejad, Fuad reasoned, had in effect said to the Europeans (and, in a letter, to Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany) that he couldn’t believe that Europeans had been or could be such monsters (and this at a time when Iran was being portrayed as monstrous). “You’re not monsters,” Ahmadinejad was saying. “Surely not? Surely you’re a great civilization,” a sentiment that could only compel the Europeans, and particularly the Germans, to respond in effect, “No, no, no, we were. We really were monsters. The very worst kind.” And by furt
her asking why Israel had had to be created by them, he was essentially getting the Europeans to admit that they were entirely capable of genocide again. It didn’t matter, Fuad suggested, that Europeans by and large didn’t squirm, for Iranians and Arabs got the message, if only subconsciously. The Westernized and West-worshipping Middle Easterners whom Ahmadinejad loathes with the same passion as Khomeini did could hear the civilization they so admire shout, loud and clear, “Yes, yes, we committed the very worst genocide in history. Only a few years ago, and who knows, we could do it again.” And Ahmadinejad must have, Fuad said, derived enormous satisfaction in hearing Europeans indignantly insist that their fathers were mass murderers. But Javanfekr was unwilling or unable to explain the thought process behind a Holocaust conference in Tehran, and maybe Fuad had been too generous in his reading of Ahmadinejad’s intentions.
Javanfekr continued to stare at me with blank, almost glazed eyes behind his large, square 1970s-style glasses, unwilling or unable to tackle the subject. I felt a little sorry for him: perhaps it would have been much easier if I had been a foreigner. I changed the subject and we engaged in the kind of polite small talk and ta’arouf that lead nowhere and are one reason for the perpetual paralysis of Iran’s bloated bureaucracy: “I am at your disposal should you need anything” (he most certainly wasn’t), “Please call if you require anything” (please don’t, for if you do, I will have to lie and say I will help when in fact I’d much rather not), and, from my lips, “Thanks so much for giving up your valuable time” (he seemed to have nothing else to do, and no phone calls or messages interrupted our meeting), “You’ve been very kind and helpful” (when you essentially stared at me the whole time), and “Thank you for your hospitality” (you could at least have worn shoes).
I left Javanfekr’s office and headed back to the unrestricted section of Pasteur Avenue to hail a cab. I stopped in at the cell phone drop and handed over my token to the Guard, who reached behind him and handed me my phone. “Thanks very much,” I said, turning to leave.
“Excuse me,” he said politely. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.” I turned back to face him. He had the classic Revolutionary Guard look: a very close-cropped beard with severe lines demarcating where it was permissible to shave for a more professional appearance, that is, the upper cheeks and the lower neck. His cap was pushed back from his forehead, which I suppose gave him a friendlier air than one would expect of a guardian of the Islamic Revolution, one whose uniform’s insignia comprised a raised arm holding a Kalashnikov rifle (the same logo that Hezbollah, a creation of the Revolutionary Guards, uses). I wondered what he wanted.
“Where did you get that cell phone?” he asked. “Is it a Motorola?”
“Yes, it’s a Motorola, and I got it in New York.”
“New York? Wow.” He looked at me, as if trying to comprehend what a bearded Iranian who visits the president’s office was doing in New York. “Tell me,” he continued, “is it any good? Does it give antenna [Farsi for ‘work well’] in Iran? It’s very beautiful.”
“Yes, it gives good antenna,” I replied. “No problems at all. I think you can buy them here too.”
“Yeah, I think I’ve seen them in the shopwindows, but I don’t know anything about Motorolas.”
“They’re pretty good, very popular in the United States.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” I turned to leave.
“Thanks,” the Guard said. “Have a good day.”
“You too.” I left his little room and continued walking toward the main entrance to the presidential compound. I turned on my cell phone and stared at it, waiting for it to “give antenna.” I noticed from the corner of my eye various pedestrians heading in the direction I had come from, all of them staring at me, I felt. Was it the beard, the suit, and the phone? “Haj-Agha!” I heard a squeaky woman’s voice and looked up. “Haj-Agha, is this the president’s office?” She was enveloped in a black chador and holding it tightly with one hand by her mouth, but I could see that she was quite old. She had an accent, provincial, and I noticed that her chador was stained.
“Yes,” I said to her. “Straight ahead, keep going.”
“Is he there?” she asked. “I’m going to see the president.” She sounded determined and as if she wanted to give him an earful.
“I think so,” I replied.
“Thanks very much,” she said. She continued walking, her chador flapping with every step. I looked back and watched her for a moment. She walked past the cell phone Guard and disappeared into the first building I had visited earlier. I turned and walked out of the compound, wondering if she would be successful in her quest to deliver a message to her president, a president who had styled himself as a man of the people: a people represented by her, and by those who wear plastic slippers indoors.
Ahmadinejad’s “man of the people” image owes as much to his conservative, religious upbringing and his own philosophies as it does to his political mentor, the shadowy Mojtaba Hashemi-Samareh. Officially the “senior adviser to the president,” Hashemi-Samareh acts more as a cross between Iran’s Karl Rove and a president’s chief of staff, although his secretive nature would put Rove to shame. Clearly a ripe subject for an investigative report, or at least an in-depth profile, given that he accompanies the president on every trip and is a disciple of Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi (far and away the most hard-line of any cleric in Shia Islam and the dean of the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute in Qom), who publishes the archconservative weekly, Parto-Sokhan, Hashemi-Samareh has avoided the media glare mostly due to the fact that investigative reporting in Iran can sometimes lead to the curious disappearance of the reporter, particularly if the subject of an investigative report is an unwilling subject, has strong ties to the Revolutionary Guard Corps and to the intelligence services, and is known to have particularly frightening ideas about what comprises an ideal Islamic society. Check all three for Mr. Hashemi-Samareh. Like the president a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, he is believed to have served with Ahmadinejad during the Iran-Iraq war, although it seems impossible to verify this simple fact. It has also been said that Hashemi-Samareh is married to Ahmadinejad’s wife’s sister, although this too has oddly never been confirmed, or even brought up by the media. What is known is that he is a constant presence at the president’s side, in every cabinet meeting and during midday prayers at the office (and on every occasion when I met or saw Ahmadinejad in New York).
Hashemi-Samareh is a slight man, not unlike Ahmadinejad in stature, and has a disarmingly wide smile, almost a Cheshire (and not very Persian) cat grin that, given what is known about him, can send shivers down one’s spine. In the early 1990s, when he was sponsored by Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi for and quickly appointed to a critical job, director of placements, at the Foreign Ministry, he indeed sent shivers down the spines of not a few diplomats who were subjected to his tests for loyalty and Islamic virtue before they could secure a coveted overseas post. He even published a pamphlet at the Foreign Ministry, one that no one seems to have a copy of but every diplomat swears existed, titled “The Psychology of the Infidels,” which could have been subtitled “Forget Everything You Think You Know About How to Be an Exemplary Diplomat.” (A colleague, Saeed Jalili, who rose rapidly through the ranks after Ahmadinejad was elected, published a book titled The Foreign Policy of the Prophet [PBUH],*1 presumably also intended as a field guide for Iran’s budding diplomats.)
In his pamphlet Hashemi-Samareh apparently laid out the rules for Iranian diplomats’ dealings with foreigners overseas, the presumption being that every person an Iranian diplomat comes into contact with is a spy, and included sartorial advice that could have served as a warning of presidential shabbiness to come. In the antithesis of common notions of diplomatic style and sophistication, Hashemi-Samareh believed that Iranian diplomats’ trousers could not sport sharp creases, for if they did, it was surely a sign that the diplomats were neglecting their thrice
-daily obligatory prayers, which comprise repetitive standing, kneeling, and bowing gestures. For the same reason, he held that Iranian diplomats with polished, lace-up shoes (practically part of the global uniform of diplomacy) could not be counted upon as loyal to the Islamic Revolution, whereas loafers with a heavy crease on the heel, evidence that they’ve been used as male versions of mules for easy slipping on and off, should be preferred footwear. He didn’t need to remind his fellow foreign service officers that in Iran loafers such as he described, particularly if the heel was always left pushed down, were the choice of every laat, jahel, and dahati, the underclass of society.
Hashemi-Samareh hadn’t needed to worry about neckties by the time he achieved his position of power at the Foreign Ministry: Ayatollah Khomeini had, early on, decreed that the wearing of them was not only a sign of “West-toxification,” gharb-zadegi, one of the catchwords of the early years of the revolution, but even a nod to Christianity, for, viewed with an artistic eye, the tie could be said to make the sign of the cross. Naturally, no one in any position of power wished to be thought of as either West-toxified or, worse, nodding to Christ, so neckties rapidly disappeared from men’s wardrobes, or at least those of men who cared about their jobs. It is a little strange to now see film of Khomeini and his entourage in Paris plotting the Shah’s downfall, or photos and film of the very early days after the Shah’s ouster: other than the clerics who flocked to his side, some of Khomeini’s closest advisers wore ties and in some cases were clean shaven. Mehdi Bazargan, the first prime minister of the interim government, and Sadeq Ghotbzadeh, foreign minister for the first six months of the hostage crisis, easily come to mind. Of course Bazargan was quickly shunted aside, and Ghotbzadeh jailed and later executed for plotting against the revolution, though presumably not for wearing a tie. But Khomeini, or whoever brought the issue of ties to his attention—and given his apparent early disinterest in the matter, it is unlikely that he gave it much thought until it was brought to his attention for an opinion—understood that eliminating them from the government wardrobe would make a unique impression on the world: that Iran wouldn’t play by Western rules.