Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

  My latest dilemma, a light prelude of all that was to come, involved choosing a baby name. The government, it turned out, had long ago compiled a list of names it considered unsuitable for Iranian children. I hadn’t known such a list existed until I began throwing out suggestions like Alessandro and Luc, and Arash informed me that foreign names were categorically forbidden. “Isn’t there some way around this?” I asked. I had looked forward to picking a name with such excitement, only to find an entire world of possibilities now off limits.

  The names the regime forbade included those of Zoroastrian gods and goddesses, commanders of ancient Persian armies, and other such tainted figures linked to the country’s pre-Islamic past. The religious extremists who had purged that history from textbooks sought to build model Islamic citizens, preferably all with Muslim (and therefore Arabic) names. In the early years of the revolution, the authorities merged this ideological project with the need for masses of soldiers to fight in the war with Iraq. They encouraged families to have ten children and name them all after Islamic figures such as Mohammad, Ali, and Fatemeh. In time, they hoped, Iran would be cleansed of its shameful Persian history. Persian names like ours, Azadeh and Arash, were approved, but were considered inferior by the radical religious. The banning of some names, like Maneli (meaning Mermaid) or Veesta (Knowledge), seemed to have no rationale at all.

  European names, Arash said, were so utterly out of the question that no one even bothered trying to bribe the clerks at the local government records office to allow them. Like me, not everyone was aware of this in advance. An unsuspecting friend of ours had tried to register his newborn daughter as Juliette Farah (a choice negotiated with his Dutch wife) and was told this was “impossible.” After a frustrating back-and-forth during which only the word “impossible” was repeated, he finally asked the clerk, “Don’t you know that Juliette was Imam Reza’s mother?” This mocking invocation of a revered Shia saint was not appreciated, and my friend was asked to leave the building. His daughter ended up simply Farah.

  Along the way, other names found themselves on the forbidden list by dint of their association with political challenges facing the regime. Wishing to quell an uprising by ethnically Kurdish Iranians in the north, for example, the government banned Kurdish names. The ney player at our recent dinner party, an ethnic Kurd, told us his friends typically managed to secure Kurdish names for their children by bribing the clerk at the registry office.

  Fortunately, some time investigating the acceptable-name and banned-name lists revealed that the government had mellowed somewhat in recent years. A number of previously forbidden Persian names had been restored to acceptability, which explained why every few years there was a sudden profusion of antique-sounding names. After all, there was something edgy and rebellious in giving your baby a name that had until just recently been forbidden. I didn’t know yet whether the names we were considering were banned or not. I suggested we drop by the local registry office to check, but Arash reasoned that if they found the name was on the list they would likely remember us when we returned, and demand a bigger bribe. This seemed like a tactic more suited to bargaining for a silk rug at the Tehran bazaar (feigning indifference to secure the best price), but I agreed that it made sense not to draw attention to what might be a special case beforehand. As we debated the wisest course, it occurred to me how ironic it was that my own name, which only became popular on the eve of the revolution, means one who is free.

  One ordinary weekday afternoon, I sat drinking tepid coffee with an Iranian academic in the lobby of a Tehran hotel. We didn’t talk so much as whisper, all the while eyeing the felt-covered furniture around us, half expecting that a bearded agent would pop out from behind a fake plant or that the waiter would slip a listening device under the sugar bowl. Instead of what I had ostensibly scheduled the interview to discuss—how Iran could avoid a nuclear confrontation with the West—we talked about how we could avoid being labeled enemies of the state. “Do you think you’re followed?” he murmured, barely audible over the air-conditioning. I had to stop crunching on my butter cookie to hear him. “Hmm, maybe. But I don’t think so,” I said, wishing for a James Bond gadget-watch that would beep if I was under surveillance. The phone call from Mr. X after my meeting with Mr. Hashemi suggested I was being followed, but in the absence of other evidence I chose to believe I was not. My answer must not have been reassuring, because when it came time to leave, he avoided walking out with me. “I’ll just wrap up here,” he said, pretending to shuffle some papers with a wary smile.

  As I rode home from my interview, I remembered with sadness how relaxed such meetings used to be only a few years earlier. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly when the authorities had begun asserting an increasingly heavy presence in our lives. Although President Ahmad inejad was now openly reviled throughout the regime’s bureaucracy, his influence had strangely grown, as though in inverse proportion to the regard of those supposedly in power, as well as to the quality of his performance. The wife of his chief of staff published a book declaring his presidency a miracle, a reflection of his own controversial habit of ascribing divine qualities to his rule. Shortly after its publication, the book mysteriously disappeared from bookstores. Did the authorities disapprove, or were they trying to protect the president? That the senior ayatollahs in Qom frowned on this stoking of lay religiosity made the book a liability to him. In the end, no one knew. The political sands of the Islamic regime were shifting as noiselessly as ever, and it was unclear to whose advantage and in what form they would settle. What was evident, however, was that the regime faced a new menace that had it frightened to its very core: the threat of the United States plotting its overthrow.

  Earlier that year, the Bush administration had launched a $75 million program tacitly aimed at changing the Iranian regime. Although its planners did not discuss the program in such explicit language, preferring vague terms such as “advancement of democracy,” the end of the Islamic Republic (or its transformation into a moderate, normal state, which was pretty much the same thing) was quite clearly their goal. Promoted through an array of measures—expanded broadcasting into the country, funding for NGOs, and the promotion of cultural exchanges—the democracy fund was intended to foster resistance to the government. With such support for the opposition, it was hoped, the clerical regime would collapse from within, taking care of what had become one of America’s largest problems in the Middle East. The average Iranian, at least the average city dweller with satellite television, was made aware of this by Persian-language news broadcasts from abroad.

  Since the Bush administration’s removal of Iran’s most dangerous enemies (the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq), Tehran had naturally emerged with more influence in the region than ever before. The prospect of Iran becoming a major political power in the Middle East unnerved Washington. The Bush administration could have responded by bombing the country or by engaging it diplomatically. Unable to countenance either option, Washington chose instead to foist its problem onto the people of Iran.

  In the short months that had passed since the launching of the U.S. democracy fund, the Iranian regime, relieved to discover that its paranoia about the Great Satan was well founded, had reacted with predictable severity. It set out to systematically crush any tie, however legitimate, unthreatening, or frail, between Iranians and the West through an expansive campaign of harassment that targeted even its own officials. It began arresting scholars on trumped-up charges of plot ting a “velvet revolution,” rounding up activists for allegedly receiving money from abroad, and labeling writers (and even one sculptor) as subversive. Suddenly people such as me, whose careers involved contact between Iran and the West, found themselves vulnerable to harassment, facing the threat of prison for activities previously considered benign.

  Many Iranians tried to communicate to the administration in Washington that the campaign had swiftly achieved the opposite of its stated objective—that activists and scholars,
the people who were toiling in their respective fields to make Iran a more open society, were being targeted as a result. The Bush administration was unmoved, and one official answered that dictatorships needed no excuse to crackdown. Although this wasn’t untrue, anyone who had dealt with Iran in the past decade knew the regime was skittish, and that this sustained and exceptionally severe round of repression had been provoked by what became known as the notorious $75 million.

  My tense meeting with the academic was just one example of how my life now began to constrict, taking on the flavor of a Cold War spy novel. Obsessed with the American plot, the regime began considering everyone (more than usual) agents or lackeys of the West. I say “more than usual” because Iranians have believed for generations in a British (or American) plot to destroy their country, a fantasy so pervasive that it inspired the best-loved Iranian novel of the twentieth century, My Uncle Napoleon. Like most Iranian children, both inside the country and in the diaspora, I grew up watching the television serial based on the novel. The Islamic regime banned the serial, but we had just recently bought the complete series on DVD from a sidewalk film vendor and watched an episode each evening. With farcical humor, My Uncle Napoleon captures the real legacy of western interference in Iran’s politics: a chronic, irrational suspicion of foreign manipulation. Even many educated Iranians believe that their leaders are secretly directed by the Americans and British. The character of Uncle Napoleon illustrates how such paranoia debilitates Iranians, deterring them from taking responsibility for the state of their country.

  I could devote my evenings to dear Uncle Napoleon because, by September, I was scarcely working anymore. I still reported news stories on the nuclear crisis and domestic political squabbles, but I had to avoid sensitive subjects and I dropped altogether the myriad of projects and professional relationships that had once filled my time. I avoided meeting activists, and many avoided meeting with me. As a result, I could no longer tell you, or report on, how Iranians were challenging their government. All the people who once supplied me with such information—student dissidents, bloggers, women’s movement leaders—had been branded by the United States as potential agents of “peaceful” change, and in consequence were identified as security threats. The fear that our meeting—a western journalist with an activist—would be considered a plot was mutual. In August, the government banned the Center for the Defense of Human Rights, Shirin khanoum’s NGO, a clear message that it was no longer interested in putting up with her. When she called, I babbled about my dogs, anxious to hang up the phone.

  I stopped attending seminars and conferences in the United States, because the government had concluded that those were the venues where the velvet revolution was being planned. On my return, I would be forced to debrief Mr. X, and would need to mention that U.S. officials had been in the audience (the Iranian government might have had a watcher or an agent at such events, who could verify my account). I might as well have had a bull’s-eye painted on the back of my headscarf. I stopped appearing on western radio and television shows, because in the present climate I knew I would need to soften my analysis, and in that case I preferred to say nothing at all. I gave up meeting western diplomats, who were considered the local spy-masters. I used to help Iranian journalists who were applying to various fellowships or internship programs in the West, because I believed they would return to Iran and share such valuable experiences with their colleagues, bringing professionalism and global perspective to what was still a field full of propagandists. But no more. The minister of intelligence had recently accused the United States of exploiting Iranian journalists as part of its conspiracy, so editing someone’s application essay or tutoring in interview skills would be viewed as abetting espionage. Worst of all, perhaps, I had entirely given up advising the countless American individuals—documentary filmmakers, academics, aspiring journalists—who wanted to visit Iran and help change its bleak image in the United States. Cultural exchange broke down age-old misconceptions, but the practice was now being referred to as a Trojan horse.

  Unlike previous moments in Iran’s tense history with the West, the repressive climate showed no sign of easing; instead, it became clear that this would be the new Iranian reality for at least the duration of Ahmadinejad’s tenure. This was the second time I had moved to Iran as an adult with every intention of building a life here, and the second time that grand politics and the twists of Iranian-U.S. relations were undoing my purpose. Back in 2001, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and President Bush’s labeling of Iran as part of an “axis of evil,” I had been forced to leave when Mr. X made my reporting untenable by demanding to know the identities of my anonymous sources. I wondered whether most Americans had any idea how the actions of their government influenced the lives of those across the world. Iranians had a long, sophisticated tradition of conducting their own opposition to autocracy. When would Washington realize this, and allow Iranians to resist their tyrants in the manner of their own choosing?

  I discussed this and many similar matters one morning with the editor of Shargh, the most prominent independent newspaper still permitted to publish. A crew from Fox News sat morosely in his office, frustrated by their inability to find analysts willing to speak on camera. It was a terrible time for print journalists, and even worse for broadcasters, who had a tougher time reporting stories with anonymous sources. The telephone rang, and the editor uttered a few terse replies, then looked up and informed us all that the newspaper had just been banned. The Fox News crew did not hide their delight (they now had a story), but I could not have been more sad. Although Iranians were accustomed to having their favorite newspaper summarily shut down, Shargh was the last independent publication of real quality. Even in this intimidating media climate, it had been running powerful investigative features on various social ills, and editorials that challenged Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy. Among the reasons offered by the authorities for shutting down Shargh was that the newspaper had published an “insulting” cartoon, which depicted a black donkey facing off against a white knight on a chessboard.

  Compared with what was being said about the president in the halls of the regime’s own bureaucracy, the cartoon was tame. But Ahmadinejad was notorious for not caring about his establishment critics; he deliberately stoked their resentment, going so far as to toss Khatami and Rafsanjani out of their offices on the presidential compound (traditionally, as ex-officeholders they were permitted to keep their quarters). What he did fear was that his core supporters would eventually cease giving him the benefit of the doubt. They felt he was sincere, that he truly wished to tackle corruption and the rich establishment mullahs. The president reached out to his low-income constituents with emotional speeches, often spending days in the prov inces talking with ordinary people in the street. Their allegiance to him was likewise emotional, based on the “feeling” that he cared about justice and egalitarianism. Like all emotions not grounded in reality, it was thus prone to quick evaporation when other sentiments like frustration set in. In such a fragile environment, the last thing Ahmadinejad needed was to be portrayed as a black donkey. Sooner or later, his supporters might begin to ask themselves: If he is a donkey, then what am I?

  CHAPTER 15

  The Logic of Mr. X

  I can no longer recall on what pretext Mr. X convened our meeting one sunny, temperate afternoon in August. Perhaps he gave no reason at all; often, he just asked whether a given afternoon was convenient. He suggested we meet at Hotel Esteghlal, which had been a Royal Hilton before the revolution but now offered, like all the big government hotels, the surly, indifferent service of an overcrowded ministry. It was not typical of Mr. X to inform me of our meeting place so far in advance. Usually, he called an hour or so before the appointed time to disclose the location, thus adding to the sense of secrecy that surrounded these assignations. This uncharacteristic openness made me uneasy, and in the hours leading up to the meeting my unease grew into full-blown dread. I had a feeling he was
displeased, and that this small compromise on his part heralded a grave development of which I was still ignorant. I feared it meant that he was dispensing with me altogether, the same way you know a bad relationship is over, when one side no longer bothers to persecute the other.

  In the weeks that had passed since I broached Arash’s disapproval of our meeting place, I had consulted far and wide regarding my situation. Did I stand a chance of success in challenging Mr. X over such a matter? Shirin khanoum thought so. Others with previous experience in government agreed. Even the head of the government’s foreign press office, which ostensibly had final say over such matters, thought so. “Just explain your husband’s sensitivities, and without a doubt he will understand,” the director had assured me, twirling a Montblanc pen. I wondered if Mr. X knew about the director’s fondness for pens that cost more than his own monthly salary, and if so, whether this helped explain Mr. X’s hostility to the press office. With so many people discussing our meetings, it was evident they were not truly secret; Mr. X’s obsession with secrecy seemed more than ever simply a pretext to harass me.

  During our very first meeting in 2000, he had insisted that I never disclose our interactions to anyone. At the time, that had not surprised me; it seemed the obvious thing for a secret agent to say, and even as I mechanically agreed I knew I wouldn’t obey. Only later did I realize the stricture’s true purpose: to make it impossible to challenge Mr. X. Once, back when the reformists controlled government, an influential vice president had tried, at my request, to get Mr. X to treat me more gently. When I told Mr. X that the vice president disapproved of his manner, he ignored this indirect censure and instead badgered me for months about my disclosure of our meetings: “Ah. So this means you have revealed we are in contact. After you expressly agreed not to. What a pity, that you are so untrustworthy. How can we work with you, if we cannot trust you?” I argued that if our meetings were confidential for the sake of national security, a point he had previously made, then surely Iran’s vice president could be trusted. He found some cunning way to refute my logic, and for a very long time my “untrustworthiness” became a theme of our contact. It was after this exchange that I realized I was up against a professional deftly trained in psychological intimidation, and that I, an ordinary civilian, stood no hope of besting him in an argument. Only Mr. X’s own logic could defeat Mr. X. I found myself a coach—a friend who happened to be an intelligence agent for an Arab government—to train me in the art of counterinterrogation. This had helped considerably, but I was still no match for Mr. X’s most dishonorable techniques.