She believed that once I was milked for information, my case would be closed and I would be sent home. She advised me to keep a low profile, not to talk to the press, and not to go public, since this would only provoke the Intelligence Ministry. She promised to check with the passport office regarding my case, and we parted. I never heard from her again, except for a message assuring me (wrongly) that I would not be arrested and my case would be wrapped up in a matter of days, rather than weeks.
The second lawyer had been a member of the revolutionary courts and was now in private practice. He had handled political cases like mine, and his contacts in the judiciary and revolutionary courts were reputed to be good. He listened to my account of the robbery and the interrogation and concluded that my case was being handled at the highest levels of the Intelligence Ministry, possibly by the minister himself. He promised to inquire about my file. He assured me that there remained fair-minded judges who would throw out a case based on unfounded charges. I also never heard from him. I assumed that, like some of my friends, he had been warned off once he started making inquiries.
I tried to make the best of my time, despite the grueling uncertainty of not knowing what the ministry was planning next. I had, of course, already applied for a replacement Iranian birth certificate and identity card, but knew processing would take months. My Iranian passport remained hostage to the whims of my interrogators, but I hoped to get my “stolen” American passport replaced. A few days after the robbery I had gone to the Swiss embassy in Tehran to report the theft and request a new passport. (The Swiss embassy represents American interests in Iran.) I was told that replacing an American passport would take several weeks, and having been denied a meeting with the ambassador or his deputy, I concluded the visit to the Swiss embassy was nothing but an exercise in futility.
Now I turned to Shaul and the Wilson Center for my American passport. Joseph Gildenhorn, the chairman of the board of the Wilson Center, spoke to former secretary of state Colin Powell, who called the State Department. The Wilson Center found in its files a stock photograph that could be cropped to serve as a passport photo, and the State Department arranged for a passport to be issued in record time. Within three weeks of the robbery I had an American passport, but we left it with the State Department, fearing that once in my hands in Tehran, the passport could be seized again.
I had always thought of my dual Iranian-American nationality as an accurate reflection of the two worlds and two cultures between which I shuttled, and my two passports as a token of the globalized world in which we lived. But now that I was trapped in Tehran, things looked different. I had two passports; but one had been seized and I could not use the other. My adopted country and the country of my birth were engaged in a dangerous, undeclared war; and I, and many others like me, were caught in their cross fire.
IRAN AND AMERICA
It was not always this way. For decades, Iran and America had enjoyed excellent relations. The shah had allied Iran closely with the United States and the West after his accession to the throne in 1941. A succession of American presidents had supported the shah. When the Soviet Union and Britain occupied Iran in World War II, the United States joined them in using Iran’s overland routes to supply Russia against Hitler’s armies. Yet while history taught the shah to be suspicious of British and Soviet intentions, he looked to the United States to protect Iran and to ensure withdrawal of British and Russian forces once Hitler was defeated. During the cold war, the shah relied on the United States to support him against what appeared to be a threatening Soviet Union, with its 1,200-mile shared border with Iran, its historical designs on Iranian territory, and its Communist ideology.
In 1953, during Iran’s oil nationalization crisis, when Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh soared in popularity and the shah nearly lost his throne, a coup hatched by the CIA and British intelligence restored his rule. Over the next two decades the United States and Europe became Iran’s principal trading partners. Western companies operated Iran’s petroleum industry and were the almost exclusive purchasers of its oil. Iran’s military was trained and supplied by the United States. Ties remained close in other fields. By the 1970s, tens of thousands of Iranians were studying at American universities. President Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, chose to celebrate New Year’s Eve in 1977 with the shah and the queen in Tehran, and Carter toasted the shah’s Iran as an island of stability in a turbulent region.
For the United States, the shah was an ally against the Soviet Union during the cold war, a partner in ensuring Persian Gulf security in the 1970s, and a reliable source of oil. Iran provided a substantial market for American weaponry and industrial and commercial goods. For the shah, the close relationship he developed with America was a mixed blessing. America provided him with great power patronage, access to weaponry and technology, diplomatic support, and, when he needed it, an additional level of security. But the shah never overcame the stigma of having been restored to power in 1953 in a CIA-engineered coup, and with segments of the Iranian population, the alliance with the United States was not popular.
In these years, the shah also developed close if not always publicly acknowledged relations with Israel. The wave of revolutions that swept the Arab world in the 1950s and early 1960s toppled monarchies in Egypt, Iraq, and Libya. In this clutch of Arab states, military officers embracing a heady ideology of Arab and pan-Arab nationalism and socialism came to power. They pursued policies hostile to Israel, the West, and the region’s remaining monarchies, and turned to the Soviet Union for military and economic assistance. Israel and Iran seemed natural allies against this wave of Arab radicalism. The Iranians were not Arabs, and an age-old sense of difference reinforced these divergent political orientations. The shah admired the deadly effectiveness of Israel’s military. The two countries shared intelligence; Iran supplied Israel with oil; trade, never very large, expanded; and Israeli companies carried out agricultural projects in Iran.
The shah was not the pliant junior partner in the U.S.-Iranian alliance that his critics painted him to be. He had relied heavily on American support in the early years of his reign, when he was weak, inexperienced, fearful of Soviet intentions, and recovering from the scars inflicted by Mossadegh and the oil nationalization crisis. But he chafed at American tutelage and broke free of it as soon as the easing of international tensions and Iran’s growing financial independence allowed. He ignored the admonitions of President Nixon to lower oil prices, putting his country’s interests first, and was the principal architect of the decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to quadruple oil prices in 1973. Earlier, much to Washington’s consternation, he purchased from the Soviet Union the steel mill he could not obtain from the West, allowed the USSR to build a machine tools plant in Iran, supplied the Soviet Union with gas, and even bought light arms from the Russians. When the British announced their decision to withdraw their military forces from the Persian Gulf in 1971, he made sure three disputed islands he regarded as strategically important fell under Iranian control. He expanded Iran’s naval forces and embraced the idea that he would now serve as the guarantor of Persian Gulf security.
Nevertheless, the shah’s close alliance and identification with America and Israel did not sit well with his opponents, who tried to portray him as a lackey of the United States. Ayatollah Khomeini played on this theme with particular skill. In 1963, he chose one of the holiest mourning days in Shi’ite Islam to preach a sermon harshly critical of the shah’s policies and his close relations with Israel, warning the shah that the people would “throw you out of Iran.” His arrest led to severe riots in Tehran and other cities. The following year, he delivered a sermon attacking the status-of-forces agreement that Iran had signed with the United States. The agreement reminded Iranians of the humiliating nineteenth-century “capitulations,” which made all Europeans resident and working in Iran subject to their own consular courts rather than to the jurisdiction of Iranian courts. Khomeini described th
e SOFA as a document “for the enslavement of Iran.”
Sent into exile, first to Turkey, then, in 1965, to Iraq, Khomeini continued to depict the shah as subservient to American and Israeli interests, a theme he pursued during the year of protests and demonstrations in 1978 that led to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979. He and his supporters noted that America stood by the shah even as his troops were killing protesters on the streets of Iranian cities. By December 1978, the Carter administration, which had strongly supported the shah, concluded he could not survive. Khomeini’s lieutenants had already entered into discussions with American diplomats in Paris, hoping to persuade Washington to ease the shah out of office. Washington eventually did so, but when the revolution triumphed in February 1979, a strong strain of hostility to the United States remained part of the revolutionary ideology, and Khomeini used and encouraged it.
Even so, the Islamic Republic’s first prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, quietly sought to repair relations with Washington. But it was not to be. On November 4, 1979, just days after Bazargan met with U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in Algiers, students from Tehran’s universities seized the American embassy in Tehran and took more than sixty diplomats hostage. They wanted to sabotage normalization of relations between Iran and the United States, and they were protesting the U.S. decision to allow the shah, by now very ill from cancer, into the United States for medical treatment.
The embassy seizure proved a seminal event in the history of the revolution and in Iran-U.S. relations. Diplomatic relations were ruptured and remained unrepaired thirty years later. The images of blindfolded, handcuffed, and disheveled American diplomats paraded before television cameras were seared into the American conscience. In Iran, the embassy seizure was hugely popular. It gave the faltering revolution a new lease on life, strengthened the radicals, and weakened the moderates in the internal struggle for power. Khomeini, after wavering for a couple of days, came out in support of the students, recognizing that the students had managed to galvanize the population. He capitalized on the anti-American sentiment sweeping the country. He termed the United States “the great Satan” and the embassy itself “a den of spies,” labels that remained part of the revolutionary lexicon for three decades. Some of the hostages were released because they were women, African Americans, or ill. But fifty-two Americans spent 444 days in the embassy and makeshift places of incarceration. Their release was negotiated by the Carter administration, but in a final humiliating snub to the sitting president, the aircraft flying them out of Tehran was not allowed to leave until President Reagan was sworn in.
In the decade that followed, the estrangement between the two countries grew deeper. When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, the United States did not condemn the aggression and even took quiet satisfaction at seeing the Islamic Republic in dire straits. Initially, Washington hoped two unsavory regimes would simply wear each other down. But when the tide of the war turned in Iran’s favor and the Iraqi regime appeared threatened, the Reagan administration tilted toward Iraq. An Iranian victory over Iraq could destabilize the region and threaten America’s Arab allies in the Persian Gulf.
The administration took Iraq off the terrorism list, provided Saddam Hussein with economic aid, and allowed Iraq to purchase helicopters and high-tech equipment from the United States. It lent Iraq diplomatic support and supplied it with crucial military intelligence. It successfully pushed for an embargo on west European arms sales to Iran, but raised no objection to significant arms deliveries to Iraq. When Iraq used poison gas against Iranian forces, the Reagan administration issued a very mild reprimand. At one point during the war, the United States had information that Iraq was using chemical weapons on “a daily basis” against Iranian troops, yet Donald Rumsfeld was dispatched to Baghdad in December 1983 to lay the grounds for resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two countries. In 1987–88, the United States pushed for resolutions in the UN Security Council to end the fighting, but on terms favorable to Iraq.
The war inflicted enormous physical damage on Iran, cost over 200,000 lives, and left deep scars on the Iranian psyche. American support for Saddam Hussein was not easily forgotten by Iranians.
Iran responded by seeking to make trouble for America’s friends and to strengthen America’s enemies. It sought to destabilize Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, in a war aimed at uprooting the PLO’s strongholds in the country, Iran sent “volunteers” and Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa Valley to assist the Lebanese resistance. Iran was also instrumental in creating, then funding and equipping, the Shi’ite resistance movement, Hizbollah. It helped Hizbollah create a network of mosques, medical clinics, and schools for Lebanon’s Shi’ites. It also provided the movement’s military wing with money, training, and equipment. Hizbollah harassed Israeli forces and their surrogates in the buffer zone that Israel occupied in southern Lebanon. It took a number of Americans hostage. Both America and France had sent troops to Lebanon to maintain peace after the Israeli withdrawal. In October 1983 suicide bombers linked to Hizbollah drove trucks into the United States Marine compound near Beirut Airport, killing 241 Marines, and into the French military compound, killing 57.
The one exception to almost unmitigated Iran-American hostility in the Reagan years came during the mid-1980s, in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair. President Reagan was keen to secure the release of seven American hostages in Lebanon. Iran badly needed arms for its war with Iraq. Iranian intermediaries using Israeli contacts suggested an arms-for-hostages swap. The United States agreed and a clandestine but clumsily handled series of arms deliveries took place; 2,000 TOW antitank missiles and smaller amounts of HAWK surface-to-surface missiles and missile parts were sold to Iran. For some members of the Reagan administration, an added attraction of this arms-for-hostages deal was that money generated by the arms sales could secretly be funneled to the Contra guerrillas fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But, as an indication that the Iranians and Lebanese were feuding among themselves, only a few hostages were released while additional ones were taken. In November 1986, Iranian hard-liners opposed to any Iran-U.S. reconciliation leaked a few details of the deal to a Lebanese weekly. Exposure created an uproar in both Tehran and Washington. The arms deliveries abruptly stopped, and the Reagan administration reverted to a policy of steady support for the Iraqi war effort.
A “QUID WITHOUT THE ‘QUO’”: BUSH I
The end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988—when both countries, exhausted by a conflict neither could win, accepted a cease-fire in place—and the election as president of George H. W. Bush in the United States and of Hashemi-Rafsanjani in Iran the following year appeared to provide the opportunity for some understanding between the two countries. In Iran, Rafsanjani was focused on postwar reconstruction and was eager for foreign investment; he believed a deal could be struck between Tehran and Washington. The Bush administration was looking for ways to open a dialogue with Tehran. But while there was some reaching out, little was accomplished.
In remarks directed at the Iranians in his inaugural address in January 1989, Bush remarked that “goodwill begets goodwill,” indicating that Iranian help in obtaining the release of the remaining American hostages in Lebanon would be reciprocated. Rafsanjani helped secure the release of a number of American hostages, but there was no American quid pro quo. Still, when Saddam Hussein invaded, occupied, and annexed Kuwait in 1991 and President Bush led an international coalition to force him to withdraw, Iran effectively sided with America and its allies. It did not join the coalition, but it did not obstruct the war effort, either. Moreover, Saddam Hussein sent almost his entire fleet of fighter aircraft to Iran, somehow believing Iran would help him keep them secure from U.S. attack. Iran pretended the aircraft never arrived and held on to them, denying their use by Iraq during the fighting. Yet Tehran felt it was little rewarded for its good behavior.
In exchange for an American-sponsored S
ecurity Council resolution finally recognizing Iraq as the aggressor in the Iran-Iraq War, Iran secured the release of the remaining American hostages in Lebanon. But feelers from the American side never resulted in direct talks. Rafsanjani could not show sufficient dividends for his indirect engagement with the United States to overcome the opposition of hard-liners at home, who were unenthusiastic about a rapprochement with America. It did not help that Iran, hostile to Israel and concerned lest an Israeli-Syrian agreement would lure away Syria, its principal regional ally, opposed a new effort at Arab-Israeli peace launched by President Bush in 1991 in Madrid. A spate of killings of Iranian dissidents in Europe in the early 1990s persuaded the U. S. administration that the security services and those willing to resort to assassination were still setting the agenda in Tehran.
LOST OPPORTUNITIES: CLINTON AND KHATAMI
Rafsanjani, ever the optimistic deal maker, reached out to the United States during the first Clinton administration as well. In 1995 he offered a multibillion-dollar deal to the American oil company Conoco. It turned out to be an ill-timed gesture. Concern had been rising in the United States over Iran’s nuclear and long-range missile program. Members of Congress were calling for stronger economic sanctions against Iran. Israel’s friends were concerned about Iran’s active opposition to the Arab-Israeli peace process. President Clinton had been urging Russia and other countries not to transfer nuclear and missile technology to Iran. He had similarly urged Japan and the Europeans to curtail trade with Iran. He could hardly allow an American oil company to invest in developing Iran’s oil industry.
My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran Page 12