Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (10 page)

In fact, as I got off the plane a few minutes later, I saw a hint of a different explanation. Khomeini did something that did not seem to come easily to him in public: he smiled. After fourteen years in exile, Khomeini was home again.

More than one million people were on the streets of Tehran to greet him. At the airport terminal, hundreds of men pushed and jostled, even trampled, each other for a chance to touch the ayatollah. At one point they pushed so hard against a locked glass partition, with me and hundreds of others on the other side, that I was terrified it would not hold.

In his first public statement, Khomeini assured the crowd that Islam would prevail over the monarchy and the corrupt values it had imported. “Final success will come when all the foreigners leave,” he announced. “I beg God to cut off the hand of foreigners and their helpers.” I was told years later that cutting off the hand of somebody was an Iranian expression that meant preventing interference or blocking access. But at the moment when Khomeini uttered those words, I stopped taking notes.

Then Khomeini left the airport in a blue Chevrolet Blazer and headed for Behesht-e Zahra cemetery to honor the “martyrs” killed over the years by the Shah’s secret police. The crowds swarmed over the motorcade, scrambled atop his car, and made the route impassable. He had to climb into an Iranian air force helicopter, made in America just like the Blazer and the Boeing 747. American technology was helping to bring him home again.

Meanwhile, there I was, trapped at the airport, a young American journalist on my first major foreign assignment, an Islamically correct scarf on my head, in one hand a portable typewriter, in the other an Adidas bag that contained a shortwave radio, a change of clothes, one hundred rolls of film for the
Newsweek
photographer on the ground, a guidebook to Iran, and $20,000 in cash. Alone, in a crush of frenzied Iranian men.

“Sadegh!” I called out to Ghotbzadeh, who had also been left behind. Ghotbzadeh, I knew, was a can-do revolutionary. When Air France would not accept Iranian currency to charter Khomeini’s plane, Ghotbzadeh flew to Germany to get hard currency, arriving at the office of a French middleman days later with a suitcase containing more than $100,000 in deutsche marks. During the first months of revolution, he would become the head of Iranian radio and television, using them as power centers to whip up anti-Western fervor and fanaticism, and then Foreign Minister, trying to explain to American television audiences why their diplomats were being held hostage.

Over time, Ghotbzadeh would become disillusioned with the revolutionary excesses and broken promises. Filled with ambition, he would turn against Khomeini, complaining bitterly that the principles of Islam were being ignored and that Khomeini’s men were destroying the nation. But Ghotbzadeh was a big talker, even on closely monitored international telephone lines, and Iran is a nation of good listeners. In 1982 a plot to overthrow Khomeini would be uncovered (at least that is what officials said), and in a closed courtroom Ghotbzadeh would be found guilty of treason. The old ayatollah, in turn, would do nothing to save the man he considered “like a son.” Khomeini had an extraordinary ability to conceal his emotions and to absorb emotional pain, members of his family told me. They said he had not cried when his own older son, Mustafa, died mysteriously in 1978. Later Khomeini said of his second son, “If they had taken my baby Ahmad, and killed him, I would not have said a word.”

Ghotbzadeh would be put before a firing squad and executed.

But on the day of Khomeini’s return, Ghotbzadeh was still in the ayatollah’s good graces, and he was my protector. He grabbed my arm and pushed me onto a bus full of Khomeini’s lay disciples. They were the remnants of the nationalist movement against the Shah, some very secular and others very religious, who had been educated in London and Paris and dressed in suits and ties. They would emerge within weeks as the core of Khomeini’s first government. They did not “cut off the hand” of the American in their midst or rail about the crimes of America. Rather, Persian style, they welcomed me, offered candies and boiled eggs in celebration, and pointed out the landmarks of the city.

On the streets of Tehran, many women were bareheaded, and I took off my head scarf. A handwritten cloth banner bore the words—in English—“Welcome to the journalists coming with the ayatollah.”

A few days later, a woman swathed in black spat out the word “whore” as I passed by, my head uncovered.

Welcome to Iran. Welcome to the revolution.

It took only ten days to make a revolution.

At first the government the Shah had left behind vowed to fight any attempt by Khomeini to form a government. Long columns of Chieftain and Scorpion tanks and military vehicles, heavy-duty trucks and jeeps fixed with machine guns were ordered into the streets, where they shot at followers of Khomeini who tried to stop them. But the ayatollah paid no attention to the warnings. He appointed a provisional government. He called on the army to join him and assured Iran’s religious and ethnic minorities that an Islamic Republic would allow them to live in peace.

Within days, millions of marchers were on the streets, protesting against the Shah’s government. Then, on Friday night, February 9, 1979, a massive crowd attacked the Doshan Tapeh Air Base outside Tehran and seized its guns and ammunition. The Shah’s Imperial Guard fired back at air force cadets and civilian technicians loyal to Khomeini. The battle lasted throughout the next day, and as word of it spread, thousands of Khomeini’s supporters built flimsy makeshift barricades throughout the capital. They lined up old cars, timber, garbage bags, tires, boulders, pieces of metal and concrete, even their living room furniture.

Khomeini threatened all-out war. And the Shah’s army cracked.

Army tanks came at dawn on Sunday. But the Shah’s troops wound up battling each other. So did gangs of ragtag soldiers whose uniforms—or partial uniforms—gave no clue to their real allegiance. Young soldiers loyal to Khomeini stuck carnations into their rifle muzzles and refused to fight as they rode by in flatbed trucks waving Khomeini’s portrait. By the end of the day, the army had declared its neutrality and ordered its troops to their barracks. The caretaker government collapsed. At least five hundred people were killed.

I drove around the streets of Tehran that day in a red Mercedes that belonged to my interpreter, a young British-educated Iranian woman of Indian descent named Nindi. We didn’t talk to anyone. There was too much to watch, as the Old Regime’s formidable, Western-equipped military went over to the ayatollah’s side. At one point the radio called for professional wire cutters to bring their equipment to the prisons to help set the inmates free.

Amid the chaos, the Mercedes didn’t seem out of place, even with all the tanks and the trucks filled with young men carrying weapons. Nindi wore jeans and a sweater; I wore the same Missoni dress I had worn to interview Khomeini in France three months before. Neither of us wore head scarves.

In graduate school, I had studied European history and even after signing on with
Newsweek
was researching a doctoral dissertation on Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a French journalist and utopian who wrote about daily life at the time of the French Revolution. In the roiling streets of Tehran that day, I realized I’d probably never finish that dissertation.

It was a time of telephone death threats and random shoot-outs, a time when Americans were blamed for the crimes of the Old Regime and anti-Americanism ran high. Many of the foreign journalists were veterans of the Vietnam War. But some American journalists were so terrified of the shooting and the tear gas that they hid their passports and concealed their identities. One of my colleagues, a veteran of both Vietnam and Beirut, pretended to be French. He took to wearing a beret and a press pass from the Elysée Palace in Paris and refused to speak to his colleagues in any language but French.

One day a dozen militiamen came tearing through the Inter-Continental, shooting out windows, pounding on the doors, and looking for spies.
The New York Times
correspondents used the mattresses from their beds to cover the windows. I sat in the bathtub in my room until the shooting was over. Another day a mob of gunmen invaded the American embassy. It was liberated within a few hours, but not before three people, including two of the invaders and an embassy waiter, were killed. The embassy staff managed to destroy its most secret files and $500,000 worth of sensitive communications equipment, and burn hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

One night my close friend David Burnett, the photographer for
Time,
and I were stopped as we were leaving a restaurant. Two self-appointed “Islamic guards” carrying G-3 rifles pointed their weapons at us. “You have been drinking alcohol,” one said.

“No, no, there wasn’t any,” I lied.

“Breathe,” he replied.

We breathed into his face, in the first of many Breathalyzer tests I would have to take at gunpoint. They let us go and then went into the restaurant to smash some bottles.

On another evening, my taxi driver for the day got so scared by random shooting that he left me behind. I hitched a ride with two affable young engineers who had joined Iran’s general strike months before. They were now guerrillas, and they showed off the hand grenades, revolvers, and rifles hidden under the front seats. At a roadblock the next evening, I asked the young guerrilla who had stopped me to please point the muzzle of his gun in the air. To reassure me, he motioned that the safety catch was on, pointed the rifle straight at my belly and pulled the trigger several times to prove it wouldn’t fire. He laughed. I wrote the lead sentence of my obituary in my head.

And then, within days, the free-form chaos that had gripped the streets of Tehran ended. The old man who had sat under the apple tree in France had prevailed.

Once he seized power, Khomeini was free to reveal himself. He spoke directly to his people and made clear what his government would be: an Islamic Republic, nothing else. But Khomeini also seemed to be making it up as he went along. He had said many times that he had no interest in any political position himself. Instead, he became an authoritative, authoritarian father figure. His rule would be that of the
Velayat-e faghih,
the “rule of the Islamic jurist.” The principle, as stated in Iran’s newly adopted Constitution, made the revolution’s leader an all-powerful religious guide or Supreme Leader who would have ultimate authority in the absence of the infant twelfth Imam. Supreme Leader turned out to be a much more powerful position than any other.

Perhaps, in retrospect, it should have been clear. In 1970, Khomeini had lectured on religion and political law to students at the Shiite Center in Najaf in Iraq, and these lectures were later published as a book,
Islamic Government.
“Since Islamic government is government of law, it is the religious expert and no one else who should occupy himself with the affairs of government,” he said. “There is no room for opinions and feelings in the Islamic Government system.”

Yet the creation of Iran’s revolutionary government was haphazard, said Ibrahim Yazdi, one of Khomeini’s lieutenants. Yazdi recalled years later that when he handed Khomeini a political framework titled
Islamic Government,
Khomeini crossed out the word “Government” and replaced it with the word “Republic.” He wanted a state governed by Islamic principles, but not a system that looked like it was dominated by one person: that might recall a monarchy. His ambivalence laid the groundwork for the political dilemma that would confront Iran a generation later.

“Revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao Zedong once said. “It cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly.” Iran’s revolution was no more a dinner party than China’s. The terror came quickly. The revolution brought hunger for “revolutionary justice” with swift show trials without lawyers.

One cold night in February 1979, women covered in black and wielding butcher knives and meat cleavers surged around the two-story schoolhouse where Khomeini had made his headquarters. They screamed for the execution of the Shah’s generals. “We want to kill!” they cried. “Bring out the murderers.” Inside the schoolhouse, four of the Shah’s top generals were seated around a large table for interrogations. Journalists were invited to ask questions. Yazdi, who played the role of Grand Inquisitor, translated their answers. A firing squad executed the generals on the roof of the building that night.

Every day I opened the newspapers to find photos documenting the hangings and shootings of drug dealers, prostitutes, officials of the Old Regime, Kurdish and Arab rebels, and all those who could be considered “counterrevolutionaries.”

In the newspapers there seemed to be a certain delight in showing close-ups of corpses, strings of people hanging from makeshift gallows, blindfolded men tied to posts. It also seemed as if no one was in control. Some killings were carried out by clerics and guerrilla groups not directed by Khomeini. He often seemed passive in the face of them, unwilling to stop what many Iranians felt was a natural and necessary bloodletting. One of the first generals to be executed was General Rabii, the air force commander who had gone to Brzezinski with the plan to shoot down Khomeini’s plane.

Yet Khomeini seemed to have at least one standard for judging events: their usefulness in consolidating his power. When hundreds of zealots seized the U.S. Embassy and the dozens of Americans inside it on November 4, 1979, the hostage-takers assumed it would be an anti-American sit-in lasting a few days at most. Even Ayatollah Khomeini’s initial instinct was to liberate the embassy. “Who are they? Go and kick them out,” Khomeini said of the militants to Yazdi, then the Foreign Minister, in the first hours of the occupation. But, as Yazdi recalled later, Khomeini changed his mind after he saw the masses of enthusiastic demonstrators in front of the embassy. Realizing that this was a chance to galvanize new fervor, he announced that the captors had launched “the second revolution, greater than the first.”