Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (4 page)

Eventually, the Rotisserie reopened, and on a recent trip I decided to go back. Mr. Rasouli, one of the chief waiters, met me at the door. “Miss Sciolino?” he asked in disbelief. I was half disguised in my head scarf and we were both a generation older than when we had last seen each other. But Mr. Rasouli had served me at the same table, night after night, during the first year of the revolution. If we had been in the United States or Europe, we probably would have embraced. But this was the Islamic Republic, and he did the most daring thing he could: he stuck out his right hand for a handshake. We shook and shook.

The restaurant had been redecorated, but the management tried to preserve the old flavor. The metal chargers with the Inter-Continental logo were retained, as were the ashtrays. Even the menu was the same as it had been twenty years before: onion soup, steak au poivre (minus the cognac), trout meunière, and crème caramel. I asked Mr. Rasouli for the wine list. We both laughed. I ordered a Coke, which Mr. Rasouli poured into an Inter-Continental wineglass.

Mr. Rasouli was balder and plumper. But he retained his broad smile. I asked him how life had treated him over the years. “Hard,” he said, simply. I waited for him to explain. “Life was great back then. The restaurant was full every night. I loved coming to work. Now I’m just counting the days until retirement.” But he didn’t want to spoil the moment of rediscovery. “I’ve lost all my hair!” he exclaimed, in mock horror.

After dinner Mr. Rasouli showed me where the redecorators had left the bullets embedded in the wood-paneled ceiling near the kitchen. “Remember, Miss Sciolino? We were standing right here when the shooting started. And the tear gas too.”

Another waiter led me to a hidden cupboard in a storage room off the dining room. It contained dusty Inter-Continental brandy snifters from the old days. “Just in case,” he whispered.

Ever since the beginning of the revolution, the Islamic Republic has tried with varying degrees of success to keep a leash on foreign and local journalists. I assume that the phone at my hotel, the cell phone I borrow or rent whenever I visit, and the local correspondent’s phone and e-mail are tapped. I assume that my comings and goings are watched, not all the time, but enough to build a pretty good dossier. There have been times when unmarked cars with two men in the front seat would plant themselves outside the homes of friends I was visiting. During one particularly tense period, two cars with two men each parked in front of the apartment building of a friend for a month. One night an apartment in the building was burglarized, and the local police questioned the men in the cars. They identified themselves as officials from the Intelligence Ministry and ordered the police off the scene.

Technically, visits to shrines, universities, ministries, cemeteries, museums, and all travel outside Tehran require written permission from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. Sometimes visits and appointments can be arranged privately; sometimes not. That means that whenever I visit Iran I stop by the ministry soon after I arrive. The ministry has an enormous portfolio. It funds, censors, and approves books and movies. It gives and takes away newspapers’ licenses. It distributes paper at subsidized prices to newspapers and journals. It runs conferences and exhibitions. It sponsors plays, concerts, and poetry readings.

I always bring chocolates for the women on the staff (lipsticks for the ones I am sure wear makeup). When he was the head of foreign press relations at the ministry, I would also bring books for Hosein Nosrat and for his deputy, Ali-Reza Shiravi. The trick with such officials is to persuade them to arrange the interviews I want. Sometimes permission to cover an event or take a trip is offered unexpectedly, and the opportunity has to be grabbed because the same one might not come around again for a long time. It is like eating New Jersey tomatoes in summer. You eat all you can because you won’t see them for another year.

To understand why Iran’s Islamic Republic endures, you have to meet Nosrat. This chain-smoking, fast-talking man in his forties is the best example of an Iranian bureaucrat. A former correspondent for the Islamic Republic News Agency, he had served as chief press aide at Iran’s United Nations mission from 1994 to 1997 before returning to Iran to head the office in charge of foreign media at the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. (He returned to the United Nations in late 1999.) I first got to know Nosrat in New York. But it was in the Ministry of Islamic Guidance back home that he forever made his mark. He rid the foreign press office of aides who demanded money from journalists in exchange for interview arrangements. Unlike his predecessor, Nosrat spoke good English, was available at all hours on a cell phone, and was on a first-name basis with the best journalists in the American press corps. He wielded considerable power over foreign journalists and could hold up their visa applications just by letting them sit in his in-box. In the summer of 1999, when the Islamic Republic suffered through the worst street violence in its twenty-year history, he waited out the troubles before he approved the dozens of pending visa requests.

Nosrat still thought of himself as a journalist, not a bureaucrat. He took pride in his work and considered himself an expert on American journalism. His spacious office featured a Sony television, a VCR, a new computer, a large conference table, and tourism posters that captured “Persia,” not “Islam.” A TV junkie, he didn’t watch Iranian television, but kept an eye on CNN all day long. He had spent so much time in the United States that many of his reference points were American. In 1998, Iranians were fixated on the televised trial of Gholam-Hosein Karbaschi, the mayor of Tehran, and Nosrat explained that “for us, it’s just like the O.J. trial was for you. You had to keep watching to see how it ended.” By contrast, he said, Iranians were not at all interested in the reruns of President Clinton’s impeachment hearings on local Iranian TV. “We already know the ending,” he said. “The only people watching are those who want to improve their English.” I wondered whether the clerical establishment would approve of the vocabulary they were learning.

Nosrat was industrious enough to secure funds to buy computers with Internet connections, and he reveled in showing me how he could call up
The New York Times
online. He devised a system of laminated press cards with photographs just like those of White House or Pentagon correspondents, except that for a woman to get an Iranian press card she has to pose for a photo wearing a head scarf.

Still, the ministry runs a dysfunctional system. The process of getting permission for an official interview or a trip is cumbersome. A secretary at the ministry has to type a formal request, get the requisite signatures, fax the letter to the person to be interviewed or the place to be visited, and wait for an official reply. The secretaries work only from eight-thirty in the morning until prayer time early in the afternoon.

Though some officials take my calls and make appointments without any formal authorization, others work through the ministry. Sometimes even private individuals with high profiles—the head of Iran’s Jewish community and the editor of a monthly women’s magazine, for example—required that the ministry arrange the appointments. It is a signal to the system that they are not meeting journalists secretly and have nothing to hide.

I like Nosrat because he levels with me. He doesn’t believe in the Iranian system of
taarof
in which flattery and false modesty are used to make the other person feel good and to preserve a degree of social harmony. He has seen too much
taarof
in his life, and life is too short.

An interview with the family of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader? “Impossible,” raged Nosrat. A visit to Evin Prison? “Don’t even bother to ask.” A trip to Baluchistan province? “Too sensitive.”

Sometimes I had to work around Nosrat, and in this effort, my best allies have been Iranian women, who are experts in finding ways around the constraints of the male-dominated system. Nosrat laughed out loud when I told him that for a story on the power women of Iran I wanted to be invited to the homes of the wife and daughters of Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who was then the President. When the women themselves invited me, he laughed even louder, as if to say, Okay, you got me.

For a while the ministry tried to assign minders to each visiting journalist, but the practice proved costly and inefficient. Eventually the ministry abandoned it—although from time to time Nosrat would suggest that I would get better access if I took along one of his aides. There was nothing preventing me from traveling throughout Iran on my own, without an official letter of introduction signed by Nosrat and stamped in green by the ministry. But Nosrat made clear that if I was to be stopped by local authorities and I didn’t have written permission, he would not lift a finger to help me—and would probably not issue me another visa.

Nosrat’s main priority was to try to keep journalists out of trouble. Once, when a strange-looking metal implement with wires that looked like a microphone was sent to my hotel room, he demanded that I deliver it to him immediately. It turned out to be a cell phone charger that could be plugged into the lighter of an automobile dashboard. (The owner of the cell phone I was renting had dropped it off without forewarning.)

Whenever I got into trouble, the first person I contacted was Nosrat. Like the time a policewoman came calling on me at my hotel in Sanandaj, the provincial capital of Kurdistan. I was summoned from my room to the lobby to find a dour middle-aged woman whose hands smelled of raw lamb. She was flipping through my passport, which I had been required to leave at the desk. She grumbled that her superiors had summoned her from her kitchen where she was making dinner. As she told me her story, she furiously recorded every page of my passport on sheets of plain white paper. Outside the hotel sat a large police van with two male policemen inside.

I produced three official letters of introduction signed by Nosrat and stamped by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance: one to his counterpart in Kurdistan, one to the governor of the province, and one to the security police. Then I called Nosrat in Tehran from my cell phone. “Hi, Hosein,” I said. “I’m having a splendid time in Kurdistan. I’m sitting in the lobby with a lovely woman from the police. She has my passport and she’s so interested in me.”

Nosrat got it. “Oh, so it’s question-and-answer time,” he said. “Put her on the line.”

Nosrat took over. Eventually the woman handed back the passport and left.

When I got back to Tehran, Nosrat told me how he had made a series of phone calls to figure out why I had been questioned. He told me that I had been lucky; it was not the Intelligence Ministry, just the security police. But then he told me how a conspiracy theorist might view my trip: My arrival happened to coincide with the worst unrest since the early days of the revolution, unrest that was officially blamed on the United States. I then went to Shiraz (ostensibly to have lunch with an ayatollah) at a time when a group of Jews from Shiraz had been arrested and accused of spying. I went to the Caspian Sea (ostensibly to write about oil) but then took a side trip to Behshahr (ostensibly to look for old wooden doors with colored glass), a place that in the Old Regime had been a Cold War listening post full of American spies. Then I went to Kurdistan (ostensibly to soak up local color and buy carpets) just after Turkey had conducted cross-border raids into Iranian territory.

“Of course you were looking for trouble!” Nosrat joked.

Nosrat prided himself on his ability to find creative solutions to problems. He told me a story about how, as a journalist in Eastern Europe in 1981, he had beaten all the odds and cornered Lech Walesa, then the head of Poland’s Solidarity movement, in a hotel kitchen in Gdansk at eight in the morning. Walesa was in the middle ofbreakfast and had no choice but to give the Iranian wire service reporter an exclusive interview.

“I found him in a Gdansk chicken! I mean kitchen!” Nosrat told me.

Whenever I had a particularly challenging request of Nosrat after that, I referred to it as a Gdansk chicken. Not long ago I was having trouble getting a visa to enter the country and so I called Nosrat from Washington, hoping for some help with this particular Gdansk chicken.

“
Allo,
” the voice on the other line said.

“Mr. Nosrat?” I asked.

“He’s not here,” he said.

“Is there a way to reach him?”

“No, he’s sick,” he replied.

I recognized his voice. But I felt I had to play along.

“Oh, my,” I replied. “I’m calling from the United States.”

“He’s not going to be in the office for ten days.”

“Ten days!” I exclaimed. “How serious is it?”

“I don’t know.”

By this time I felt I had to identify myself. The jig was up.

“Hi, Elaine,” he said. “I recognize your voice.”

It turned out he was not really sick, just trying to avoid another foreign journalist calling about a visa. He promised to process my visa the next day. The visa didn’t come. I called again and again. Finally, I asked him how the Gdansk chicken was.

“Bad,” he replied. Visa approvals were temporarily out of his hands. The Ministry of Intelligence was now vetting journalists’ visa requests. My case eventually went all the way up to the President’s office, and the visa didn’t come through for another month. Security reasons, I was told later. In some quarters,
The New York Times
is still considered part of the international Zionist conspiracy.

Nosrat said he didn’t believe in such things. But he also has an incredibly thick skin. One day in the summer of 1998 he and I were sitting in his office listening to the radio as the Parliament debated whether or not to remove Abdollah Nouri from his job as Minister of the Interior. Nouri was a close ally of Mohammad Khatami, whose enemies saw an opportunity to hurt the President by removing one of his key lieutenants. Nouri had been expected to prevail. Instead, by a vote of 137–117, the Parliament voted to remove him. I expected Nosrat to curse the Parliament. I expected him to start working the phones. He did not. He lit a Marlboro. He threw back his head and laughed, a hearty laugh that said, Let’s move on.