My Prison, My Home
Haleh Esfandiari

One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran

To Mutti, Haleh, Hayedeh, and Shaul

Freedom is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie, and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram nothing drops from your pale-blue eyes.

—JOSEPH BRODSKY, “A PART OF SPEECH”

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1. The “Robbery”

2. An Iranian Childhood

3. A Career Interrupted

4. The Interrogation

5. “Things Will Get Worse”

6. The Lull

7. The Arrest

8. Evin Prison

9. The Release

10. Freedom

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

ALSO BY HALEH ESFANDIARI

Copyright

About the Publisher

1. THE “ROBBERY”

THE EARLY HOURS OF DECEMBER 30, 2006, began for me like any day when I would depart Tehran for the United States. I had come back to Iran, as I did two or three times a year, to visit my ninety-three-year-old mother. The doorbell rang at one a.m. It was Mr. Modarress, the taxi driver I used whenever I was in Iran, to take me to the airport. My mother held up a Quran for me to kiss and walk under for blessing and good luck; from a jug, she poured water on the hallway floor outside the apartment, as is customary in Iran to ensure a voyager a safe, prosperous journey.

Mother had stopped coming to visit us in the States after suffering a stroke two years earlier, although she could manage the shorter trip to Vienna, where my sister, Hayedeh, lived. Hayedeh came to Tehran once a year, on my mother’s birthday. I came more often, and always made it a point to spend Christmas with Mother in Tehran, returning to Washington, D.C., to be with my family for New Year’s Day. On this night, Mother and I sat up together, waiting for the driver. We talked about my childhood in Tehran; as well as my daughter, Haleh; my grandchildren, Ariana and Karenna, ages six and four; and my husband, Shaul. Mother was very fond of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I always saved these stories for the last few hours, to keep her mind away from my leaving.

Mother—“Mutti” as we called her in the German tradition—had come to Iran as a twenty-three-year-old bride in the late 1930s. She had met and fallen in love with my father while at the University of Vienna, where he was studying for his doctorate in botany. In more than fifty-five years of marriage, she had never fallen out of love. When my father died in 1995, she chose to remain in Iran, wishing to be buried next to him.

On this night, Mutti was on edge. “If you were only in Austria already!” she said. “I will feel better when you call me from Vienna Airport.” I tried to sound upbeat. “I will see you in three months,” I replied. I never prolonged our good-byes. They were too difficult for her. I kissed her face one last time, smoothed her gray hair, and walked down the stairs.

As I got into Mr. Modarress’s beat-up Peykan, the most common passenger car in Iran, I saw my mother looking down at me and waving from an upstairs window. She had removed her shawl, and I could see the beige cashmere sweater I had given her. Her last words to the driver had been “Call me when Khanum Doktor [Madame Doctor] is gone.” Ever since I had received my Ph.D. in 1964, my proud mother always referred to me as “Frau Doktor” when she spoke of me to Europeans, and “Khanum Doktor” when she spoke to Iranians.

It was a cold, clear Tehran night. The haze from factory smokestacks and car exhaust pipes that shrouds the city by day had dissipated. The street was quiet. No one else was out—not even at the revolutionary magistrate’s court at the end of the street, where I often saw people escorted in wearing handcuffs. My mother’s street was usually packed with parked cars and shoppers by eight a.m. Residents blocked their small driveways with huge flowerpots to stop non-residents from stealing their parking spaces. Only when evening fell did Street No. 18 revert back to its residents.

I checked again that I had my passport, plane ticket, and other documents, and settled into the backseat, only mildly apprehensive, as I always was when leaving Iran. Under President Ahmadinejad, who had been elected a little over a year before, the security services had cracked down on writers and academics. We all knew of newspaper closures and arrests. The well-known intellectual and political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo had been arrested at the airport on his way to Europe, and spent four months at Evin Prison, where he was coerced into saying he had unknowingly acted against the interests of state security. But Jahanbegloo was interested in politically charged ideas, such as democratic transitions. My work as the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., on the other hand, merely involved organizing talks and conferences on Middle Eastern issues, and hardly merited the attention of the Iranian authorities.

In the car, Modarress was not his usual talkative self. He drove in silence. He was also going slowly. Usually, he acted like everyone else in Tehran’s frantic, everything-goes traffic, weaving in and out of the lanes as if he were on a racetrack. Now he seemed preoccupied—with monetary or family problems, I assumed. He is getting old, I thought. He doesn’t like driving at night anymore. The day before, he had made all sorts of excuses not to drive me to the airport. His mother-in-law was sick, he said; he might have to go to the provinces, to Tabriz. But my mother insisted. “You are the only driver I trust to take Khanum Doktor to the airport,” she told him and in the end he came.

We were almost at the exit ramp to Yadegar-e Imam Highway, the road that would take us to the airport, when I first noticed the dark green Peugeot sedan that had pulled alongside us. The driver was motioning for us to stop. When we didn’t, the Peugeot began to force us off the road. I had called my mother earlier to wish her good night; we had hung up, but I was still holding the cell phone in my hand, unsure what was happening, thinking that perhaps we had a flat tire. I had barely made out the Peugeot’s four occupants before our car was pushed onto the shoulder, blocked off by the Peugeot, its doors inches away from the hood of our car.

Three men, large knives strapped to their hips, jumped out of the car. They all seemed to be wearing identical, olive drab outfits. One, a tall, burly man with a crude Persian accent, ordered Modarress to switch off the motor, open the trunk, and hand him the car keys. Even in the dark, I could make out an ugly, pockmarked, unshaven face. He took my suitcase. Another disheveled man snatched my carry-on bag from the front passenger seat. The third got into the backseat beside me. In the semidarkness he looked sinister. Slivers of light glinted on his rimless eyeglasses and bald head. Astonishingly, he was grinning as he examined the contents of my handbag. “Take everything, but leave my passport and plane ticket,” I managed to say. “I am traveling tonight.”

He paid no heed. Still grinning, he took both my American and Iranian passports, my plane ticket, and my purse. He inched his way closer to me and thrust his hand into my coat pockets. The ridiculous thought crossed my mind that, in the Islamic Republic, strange men were not allowed to sit next to or look at women they did not know, let alone search their coat pockets. I pleaded again for my passport and plane ticket but to no avail. I kept praying for a passing car to stop. None did.

I heard Modarress’s voice outside the car, followed by the trunk being slammed shut. The burly man, who clearly was in charge, reappeared at my window. “Did you find everything?” he asked the man sitting beside me. The man nodded. “Okay. Let’s move.” I heard him order Modarress to sit behind the wheel and put his head down, then change his mind and order him to lie down on the front seat. Modarress meekly complied. “If you raise your head, I will break your neck; I will beat you to death. I will kill you,” he told him. He ordered me to get on the floor. “There is no room,” I said, eyeing the narrow space between the front and the back seats. “Get down, you bitch,” he said, “or I will smash your skull; I will kill you. Do as you are told.” In minute, they were gone. As I raised my head, I noticed that the license plate on the Peugeot was splattered with mud—I couldn’t read a single number.

Modarress raised his head from the seat. “We were robbed,” he said. His voice was shaky. “We have to report this to the highway police.”

“We don’t have a phone,” I said. My cell phone had been taken, along with my purse and baggage. Modarress said they hadn’t taken his cell phone—a much-prized possession in Tehran. They hadn’t taken his wallet, either. Or my Cartier wristwatch. Or the necklace I was wearing.

The highway police told Modarress that we should stay put and wait for them. I used Modarress’s cell phone to call my mother. “How quickly you got to the airport,” she said. I told her what had happened and quickly added, “But I’m not harmed, nor is Modarress.” All her life, my mother had experienced severe coughing attacks when she was upset. As I held the phone to my ear, I could hear her hard, uneven breathing and the inevitable coughing fit that followed. I tried to reassure her. “Who cares about the lost bags?” I said. “I am alive and they didn’t harm me.”

LIKE A REFUGEE

Although I was frightened and disconcerted, my mind was also focused on practical matters. I asked my mother to phone my sister, Hayedeh, in Vienna and my husband, Shaul, in Potomac, Maryland, outside Washington, to tell them what had happened. I also asked her to call my travel agent and have him cancel my ticket.

I got out of the car and stood by the side of the road, staring down the dark, empty highway. I was buffeted by conflicting emotions. I was grateful I hadn’t been kidnapped, injured, or killed. Like every other visitor to Tehran, I had heard of people being abducted from their cars or homes and held for ransom; I had heard of the armed robberies, which had increased in recent years. I had also read of Iranians being beaten up and thrown, half-dead, into alleys—the ugly handiwork, it was thought, of the secret police. But I was still in one piece. I had not been knifed by my assailants. They had not hit me, broken my jaw. I was grateful to be alive.

But I had lost all of my belongings and money. Worse, I had lost my Iranian identification cards and my Iranian and American passports. I dreaded the many days of red tape and bureaucracy that I knew lay ahead. I felt like a refugee from some war-torn country, without papers, without proof of identity, unable to travel. Despite my wool coat with its fur collar, I was cold and numb. I was astonished that not one of the cars that drove by stopped to offer help, but prostitution is rampant in and around Tehran. They probably think I am one of them, I thought ruefully, standing on a highway in the middle of the night.

I was startled when two men emerged from behind the bushes along the island dividing the highway. They, too, seemed to be wearing olive drab outfits. They spoke quietly to Modarress. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they left. I asked Modarress who they were. “They are members of the highway patrol,” he said. I thought it strange that their outfits were seemingly identical to those of the men who had just robbed us. Besides, I had never heard of a highway patrol appearing on foot. I said as much to Modarress. He did not reply.

It took an hour for a police car to show up. Two officers, neat and businesslike in their uniforms, motioned for us to get into the back of the police car. I had been standing on the highway with Modarress as we waited for the police, not wishing to sit in our car after the robbery. I was now grateful to be out of the cold, but Modarress, mindful of Iranian protocol, preferred to stand outside and answer the officers’ questions through the window. As we gave a detailed account of the robbery, the policemen shook their heads, as if in disbelief. They exchanged glances when Modarress described the make and color of the car and the clothes our assailants were wearing, but they continued to take notes and said nothing. They asked for and wrote down the usual particulars: my name, address, date of birth, place of birth, ID number, contents of suitcase, carry-on bag, and purse. They had me sign the completed report, gave me a copy, and told me to take it to the police station at Shahrak-e Gharb, a seven-minute car ride from Mutti’s apartment. I didn’t know how we were going to get to the police station or home, since Modarress had surrendered his car keys during the robbery. But Modarress said he kept a spare key in the car, and we drove off.

At two-thirty in the morning, the police station had an abandoned look to it. A sleepy guard registered our names and took away Modarress’s cell phone. The sole officer on duty seemed uninterested in our story. “There is no one here,” he said, sweeping his arm across the empty room, as if we needed convincing. “Go home and report back first thing in the morning.”

All the lights were on in my mother’s apartment in the otherwise dark building. The caretaker let me in. I sent Modarress home and told him to come back at seven a.m. He said he would go back to the scene of the robbery to look for my Iranian passport and papers, since it was quite common for thieves to take the money and valuables from a purse and throw everything else on the side of the road. He thought they would keep the American passport.

In the apartment, my mother was fully dressed, waiting for me. We embraced and repeated, more than once, that the important thing was that I was safe. I called Shaul and Hayedeh. I still thought this was a simple robbery, and Shaul agreed with me.

It was nearly dawn. Mother took two pills and went to bed. I collapsed on a sofa and dozed off in a fitful sleep.

GETTING A NEW PASSPORT

Over the next three days, I went about the tedious business of getting my life back in order and replacing my stolen passport. Since I was familiar with Iranian bureaucracy, I began contacting friends, trying to find people who could intercede on my behalf to cut through the delays and red tape. My first call the morning after the robbery was to my cousin Farhad. “How’s Vienna?” he asked. I told him I was still in Tehran. “Has something happened to Mutti?” he replied. I told him about the robbery. He was suddenly quiet. “I’ll come over right away.”

Farhad is several years younger than me. We grew up in adjacent houses. He had lost his father at a young age, and my father had watched over and mentored him. He was now the man of the family, shouldering responsibility for its elderly women: his own mother, Mutti, and another widowed aunt. Farhad was soft-spoken and gentle, courteous to a fault. But there was also a firm, steely quality to him, and he knew his way around Iranian bureaucracy. I dreaded making the rounds of government offices alone. Farhad ran his own small engineering firm, and I disliked taking him away from his work, but my mother insisted. “You need a man by your side,” she said. “I know this country better than you do.” I swallowed my feminist pride and asked him to accompany me.

Farhad arrived with his son, Kami. Only twenty-five, Kami was as gentle and soft-spoken as his father, but he was tall and well built, towering over everyone else. His height alone will intimidate everyone, I thought optimistically.

Our first stop, once Modarress joined us, was the neighborhood police station. At eight in the morning, the station was crowded and noisy. Men and women were there reporting burglaries, family disputes, and thefts of cell phones. Police officers walked in with men who had been arrested in a drug bust. A mother was desperately looking for her son, who had disappeared two days earlier. We made our rounds, from desk to desk, clerk to clerk. I had to repeat over and over the details of the robbery, fill out forms, secure signatures and official stamps. Farhad, having heard my story half a dozen times, was anxious to move along. Modarress, who usually took the lead when I needed to get things done in Tehran, uncharacteristically stayed in the background, restlessly shifting from foot to foot. We needed the signature of the police chief, but he was on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, and his deputy had not yet come in. More waiting. The deputy finally arrived, read the report, remarked nonchalantly that “such things happen,” signed the papers, and sent us to the revolutionary magistrate’s court on my mother’s street to have the police report certified.

On the way to the court, Modarress, who was following us in his own car, rang Farhad on his cell phone to say he was having a problem with his brakes and couldn’t stay with us. That proved to be the last I saw or heard from our “loyal” driver except for a brief visit to my mother’s apartment to collect his fee for our ill-fated journey to the airport. After that, he disappeared.

The two entrances to the revolutionary magistrate’s court were separated by a curtain, denoting one side for men and the other for women. Farhad and I located the presiding judge. He wore pants and an open-necked shirt and jacket. Not a cleric, I noted to myself—no robe. A neatly trimmed beard—no stubble. He was polite and well-spoken—not rude. He offered me a seat, signed the papers, advised my cousin to make copies of everything, and sent us on our way. He, too, seemed to think he was dealing with a simple robbery.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where I needed to go for a letter of authorization before my new passport could be issued, was housed in the former headquarters of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The era when the British had exercised considerable power and influence in Iran was long gone. The street names around the building were also long gone. In a frenzy of post-revolutionary fervor, the names of Tehran’s main avenues, great squares and parks, even nondescript side streets had been renamed to celebrate the revolution and its heroes. Shah Reza Avenue, named after the founder of the former ruling dynasty, was now Enqelab, or the Avenue of the Revolution. Kakh, or Palace Avenue, had become Palestine Avenue. And Roosevelt Avenue, named for the American president, had been changed to Mofattah, memorializing a clerical leader and martyr of the revolution.

We headed downtown to the ministry through the chaotic traffic. Hundreds of cars—some of them the expensive BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, and Audis of Tehran’s newly rich class, but mostly older cars, belching smoke from their tailpipes—competed with buses, motorcycles, cyclists, and pedestrians for the same space. Traffic lights changed color dutifully but went largely unheeded. Cars crept into blocked intersections, bringing traffic to a standstill. People shouted at one another, and occasional fistfights broke out between exasperated drivers. Policemen stood by, refusing to get involved, not even pretending to direct the traffic.

The passport bureau at the ministry was in a large, airy room. Five male clerks, in sweaters over open-necked shirts, with stubble on their cheeks, sat behind five desks. They shuffled about in slipper-like sandals, open at the back. Stubble and slippers, I came to learn over the coming weeks and months, were the hallmarks of the Islamic Republic. The outward scruffiness mirrored an inner reality: unhurried, sloppy in dress and in the performance of their duties, these men demanded as little of themselves as the bureaucracy demanded of them.

One of the clerks was expecting us. My countless phone calls to Shaul had borne fruit. Shaul had called a friend, Hadi, a professor of politics at the University of Tehran, who was currently a visiting scholar at the Wilson Center. Hadi had good contacts at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, D.C., the office that handled Iranian consular affairs in the absence of full diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The clerk had in hand a fax from the interests section certifying that my stolen Iranian passport had been issued in Washington and providing the relevant passport details. The Foreign Ministry could now provide the authorization letter I needed. The clerk ordered tea and got down to work. By the time we were done with the formalities and the passport bureau chief had affixed his signature to the documents, it was past one o’clock in the afternoon—too late to get to the main passport office, which was already closed. But at least we had the name of the director, and that would give us an entrée the next day. “You’ll have your new passport in two or three days,” the clerk told me. I was elated.

Back at my mother’s place, I called my travel agent and reserved a flight for Wednesday, three days away. I telephoned Shaul and told him to expect me. Many people had called my mother when they learned of the robbery, one of whom had even heard that I had been robbed, beaten, and hospitalized. A couple of close friends came by that evening. Like me, they had no reason to suspect anything other than that I had simply been the unfortunate victim of a robbery. They shook their heads in sympathy, remarked on the growing insecurity in the city, commiserated on the loss of my passports and papers, and assured me that it would all be behind me in a few days. Only my childhood friend Ferry and his wife were skeptical. “This was no ordinary robbery,” Ferry’s wife said. “It seems political to us.” “Nonsense,” I responded. “It was a robbery, pure and simple.”

THE PASSPORT OFFICE

The next day, a Sunday, we went to the passport office on Sattar Khan Avenue in west Tehran. Farhad and I entered separately through the men’s and women’s checkpoints, divided by the usual tatty curtain. The female guard on my side of the curtain conducted a superficial search of my purse and let me through. She was friendly and smiling. In the first decade after the revolution, smiles on the faces of mid-level civil servants were rare, deemed a sign of frivolousness, unseemly in an Islamic state. Thanks to President Khatami, who was elected on a reformist platform in 1997 and spent two four-year terms fighting the hard-liners, the scowls of government officials were no longer de rigueur. (Tehran’s wits referred to Khatami as Seyyed-e Khandan, the smiling cleric, a play on words in Persian that denoted both his sunny visage and his relative ineffectiveness.) During Khatami’s presidency, university students—men and women—mixed more freely; women fought for and secured more freedom in matters of dress; color returned to clothing on the streets; young girls moved about the city with hair showing beneath their headscarves, their nails polished, a touch of lipstick on their lips. I realized how miraculous it was, two years into Ahmadinejad’s far more restrictive presidency, that in a government office I was still encountering a smiling face.

Farhad and I headed straight for the director’s office, past the queues of people waiting to hand in or pick up forms. We ended up in a large room, where, we were told, the final approval for a new passport would be issued. On the wall, as in all government offices, were pictures of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini; the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; and President Ahmadinejad. Three women, one in a black chador, two wearing the ample scarf known as a maghna’eh—which covers the forehead, hair, and ears; fits tightly under the chin; then drapes over the shoulders and upper back and chest—sat behind desks. The lone man in the room, obviously in charge, sat at his own desk, at some distance from the women. We carried our growing file from desk to desk. There was more signing, registering, paper shuffling, and waiting. Finally, the man in charge called my name and handed me two letters. I was to take one back to the Foreign Ministry and one to “the President’s Bureau.” Each of these two offices, in turn, had to give me letters approving my application for a new passport. “Once you get these letters, you should expect to wait at least two weeks before your passport can be issued,” he said.

I was shattered. I had been told it would only take three days. But far more important, I knew that “the President’s Bureau” was a euphemism for the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. I was familiar with the ministry’s fearsome reputation. It was responsible for internal security, and was the regime’s political watchdog, its secret police. It harassed intellectuals, journalists, and even the mildest of dissidents; it made arrests. It had been responsible for disappearances, even assassinations. Still, I convinced myself this merely meant more forms and interviews and, certainly, more delays.

I was directed to see a Mr. Torabi in the same building. Farhad and I went downstairs, found the office marked President’s Bureau, entered rooms which turned out to be quite well furnished, and asked for Mr. Torabi. I do not know if this was his real name or a fictitious one, as was often the case with Intelligence Ministry officials I later encountered. Mr. Torabi was not there. When I went in the following day, he was not there, either. “You just missed him. He won’t be back till Wednesday,” I was told. I felt that I was being sent after black beans, as the Persian expression goes—being given the runaround.

At home, I canceled my airline reservation and once again telephoned Shaul. “There will be a two-week delay,” I told him. “We have to find someone who can expedite things.” In Iran, contacts—and money—are crucial in situations like mine. Shaul promised to make phone calls. Over the next four months, I would make, cancel, and remake these same airline reservations several times, each one a marker on the barometer of my rising, and then dashed, hopes.

A BLEAK NEW YEAR’S EVE

I had expected to spend New Year’s Eve with my husband and our family in Washington; I was now spending it with Mutti in Tehran. My mother loves festive occasions: birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s, the Iranian new year festival, Nowruz. As a child I learned to love these chances to bring people together, to enjoy the company of family and friends, to laugh and tell stories, and, like Mutti, I was punctilious about observing them. In our household, failure to telephone a relative on a birthday or to mark a celebration was a serious matter. Shaul often teased me about the importance I attached to such gestures. Although Mother and I decided to stay home, I wanted to make New Year’s Eve as joyful for her as possible.

I walked to the fancy new grocery store a block from my mother’s apartment and bought salmon and caviar. We set the table with a beautiful tablecloth and Mother’s best Rosenthal china, which she kept in a special cupboard in her apartment. Dinner, however, turned out to be a somber affair. Unease hovered over the table. Both my mother and I sensed that the normal order of our lives had been interrupted. Just how very deeply it had been disrupted, neither of us even dimly understood.

The next day I went with Kami to take care of my cell phone, which was now in the hands of my assailants. In Iran, you can buy a cell phone at a variety of stores, but a number has to be purchased from the government phone company. The number is encoded on a chip that is installed in the phone. I had to cancel my old cell phone number and purchase a new one. At the telephone company office, I handed over a batch of documents to a clerk: my “deed” of ownership, the barely legible Xerox copy of my birth certificate as proof of identity, and the police report, duly notarized by the revolutionary magistrate’s court, attesting that my cell phone had been stolen. But here, too, bureaucracy was alive and well. They could cancel my old telephone number, I was told, but they could issue me a new number only if I produced a picture ID—the original, not a Xerox copy. I repeated the obvious: my ID card had been stolen; it would be months before I could obtain a new one. The clerk shrugged. It was not his concern. I’ll be home in two weeks, anyway, I told myself as I left empty-handed.

Finally, on Wednesday, I saw Torabi, the man in the Intelligence Ministry’s “President’s Bureau,” having called the day before to make sure he would be there. He went over the robbery with me again and asked me a few more questions. “Why don’t you step outside and wait for my colleague, Mr. Ja’fari. He wants to talk to you,” he said. I waited in the reception room. After about half an hour, the door behind me opened and a man asked me to come in.

Ja’fari was sitting at a table behind a laptop. He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official—“Tell me again about the robbery”—and faceless bureaucrat—“Date of birth? Identity card number?” He appeared to be reading the questions from his laptop. At first he asked questions and simply nodded at my answers. Then he handed me a sheaf of blank paper, repeated the same questions and posed many others in writing, and instructed me to write down my replies.

Yet, still, I was only slightly uneasy: the attention of the Intelligence Ministry was never welcome, but I had been assured by friends that clearance by the ministry for lost passport applications was routine. Asking for my responses in writing cast the interview in a more serious light, but most of the information was ordinary enough: name, family name, husband’s name, children, employer, salary. A few of the questions seemed unnecessarily intrusive: occupation and employer of husband, daughter, son-in-law, sister, brother. Ja’fari seemed overly interested in the details of my Wilson Center salary: amount, deductions for federal and state taxes and for Social Security and retirement, the biweekly method of payment. Concerned lest my salary, when converted into Iranian, rials seem to him exorbitant, I made all this as convoluted as possible. (Later, on the day of my release, when I saw Ja’fari’s shiny, silver-gray Peugeot, I concluded that I need not have worried. The Intelligence Ministry took very good care of its own.)

I found it odd that Ja’fari wanted the names and ages of my granddaughters, as well as a list of the people I saw regularly in Washington. I came to understand only much later that, in the style of the now-defunct East German secret police, the Stasi, the Iranian secret police collected masses of information, no matter how insignificant or useless, on everyone who happened to attract their attention. As with the Stasi, such information contributed nothing to national security, but fat dossiers were regarded as proof of “thoroughness” and helped inflate the self-regard of the intelligence officers. When Ja’fari asked me if I was married to a Jew, an alarm bell should have gone off, but it didn’t. I failed to catch the implied menace in the question. He has never met a Muslim woman who married a Jew, I thought. Trying to strike a friendly tone, I even offered to show Ja’fari around if he ever came to Washington. Notwithstanding a very few friends’ skeptical attitudes, I still believed I was the victim of an ordinary robbery and this was routine clearance before a new passport could be issued.

Ja’fari ended the interview around noon. I went home, never expecting to see him again. I assumed that my passport would be issued in a few days. But when I picked up the phone in my mother’s apartment the next day, it was Ja’fari at the other end of the line. He instructed me to appear Saturday morning, this time at an Intelligence Ministry office. Mr. Ja’fari, which may or may not have been his real name, was to become my constant but unwelcome “companion” in the weeks and months ahead—an unshakable and controlling presence throughout a terrifying interrogation that would stretch out over the next eight months, nearly four of them spent in solitary confinement at Evin Prison.

2. AN IRANIAN CHILDHOOD

I WAS BORN MARCH 3, 1940, in Tehran. My mother is Viennese and my father is from Kerman, in eastern Iran. Father came from an old established landed family, many of whose members also served in the government. My paternal great-grandfather, Vakil ol-Molk-e-Dovvom, was the governor of Kerman in the 1870s, and my grandfather Raf’at Dowleh was vice governor of the province before becoming a member of parliament. My paternal grandmother came from a clerical family; her brother was the highest-ranking cleric in Kerman. On the European side, my maternal grandfather, who died in World War I, owned a hotel in Marienbad, in Czechoslovakia, and my mother’s older brother was a cloth merchant in Prague.

For the first six years of my life I lived in Karaj, twenty-five miles from Tehran, where my father was a professor of botany at the College of Agriculture.

My father couldn’t have chosen a better place than Karaj to ease his Austrian bride into Iran, which in the 1930s remained traditional and offered few amenities. The college was a small, closed community, with a river and beautifully landscaped wooded areas. The faculty lived either in two-story houses or bungalows separated by hedges. In the summer, the gardeners sprinkled water over the college’s unpaved streets to help settle the dust and cool the air.

By the time I was born, Mother had spent two years in Iran. She had thrown herself wholeheartedly into the culture and customs of her adopted country. But she ran a European household, and we spoke German at home and followed European customs. The stories she told were of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. I learned Persian stories from my nanny, who doubled as cook and housekeeper.

I loved the garden for its small streams, square ponds, flower beds, rose gardens and old trees, especially the catalpa, poplar, pine, and plane trees. With my nanny in tow, I would play hopscotch in the walkways of the garden and games of hide-and-seek with other children. This was paradise, I thought; but every time I said as much to my nanny, she would scold me, take me by the hand, and make me rinse my mouth to wash away my “blasphemous” words.

It didn’t take long for my outgoing mother to make friends with a number of the professors and their families. The members of the faculty were mostly European-educated and could converse with her in German or in French. Mother had an affinity for those who spoke her native language.

The Schricker family, headed by Hans Shricker, an Austrian forestry specialist, lived next door to us and their eldest son, Adalbert, married my father’s sister, Touran. Mother had lost both her parents at a relatively young age and was raised by her sisters in Vienna. The Schrickers became her surrogate parents. Mr. Schricker, a skilled carpenter, built a bassinet when my mother was pregnant with me, and once I was born, Mrs. Schricker showed Mother how to bathe a newborn, and how to diaper and dress me. Under Mrs. Schricker’s tutelage, Mother sewed and knitted clothes for me, since ready-made children’s clothing was a rarity in those days. Mrs. Schricker—warm, loving, practical, and down-to-earth—eased the pain of living away from home.

Unlike traditional Persian homes, our garden didn’t have a wall around it, but pine trees served to shield it from the street. We had a large living room and a dining room, several bedrooms, and a bathroom with a bathtub and a Persian-style toilet, basically a basin sunk in the floor.

In the evenings Mother and Father would sit in the living room and listen to the radio, while I would play in a corner with my toys. My parents’ friends, especially the Schrickers, would come over to listen to the European news broadcasts. Hitler had invaded Russia in June 1941, and one flank of the German’s three-pronged attack was aimed at the oilfields of the Caucasus on Iran’s border. In Karaj they all worried that the German army would overrun the Caucasus and advance into Iran.

The Allies were already concerned about German influence in Iran. Once Hitler invaded Russia, they desperately needed Iran’s overland routes to supply the hard-pressed Russian army. Unable to persuade a proud and stubborn Reza Shah—the military officer who seized power in 1921, sent the Qajar dynasty packing, and founded a new dynasty in 1925—to abandon Iran’s state of neutrality and join the Allied cause, Russia and Britain invaded Iran in August 1941, the Russians from the north, the British from the south. When Russian troops appeared at Karaj, Father remained at his teaching post in the College of Agriculture, but he sent Mother and me to Tehran, to my grandparents’ house. I was happy to be reunited with my older stepbrother, Siamack, who was going to school in Tehran and already living with my grandmother.

MY GRANDPARENTS

By the time I was born, my grandparents were living near the University of Tehran. They had moved to Tehran from Kerman when my grandfather was elected to parliament.

My grandmother’s home was another world, utterly different from our European household, where we spoke German, followed strict rules, sat around the table to have our meals, and ate Austrian food—schnitzel, boiled meat, soup, roast potatoes, and creamed spinach. Grandmother—Khanum Jan as we called her—ran a traditional Persian household. While my grandfather, who passed away just four years later, when I was five, was no longer the wealthy man he had been (his extensive land holdings had been seized under the previous reign), there was a great deal of coming and going, with visitors from their hometown constantly bringing the best dates and Kerman’s distinctive sweets and pastries. At any given time, the cook would prepare meals for ten or more people. My favorite place was the kitchen, which was dark and smoky from the woodstove, and where the cook would often slip me a spoonful of white rice from the cooking pot. I loved the rice, the aash, a thick soup made of greens; the white cheese and walnuts, yogurt, and the fresh sangak flat bread from the corner bakery that came with every meal.

At home, Mother had been so worried we would get typhoid she insisted on cooking all the fruits and vegetables. At my grandparents’, I was free from all the don’ts I heard at home. We ate sitting crossedlegged around a rectangular tablecloth spread on the floor. Mother sat on a chair at a small table set up just for her.

The house had a large garden with a pond where the household, including my grandmother, made their ablutions before each of the five daily prayers. The garden was divided into four large triangular flower beds. In each, a persimmon tree or a pomegranate tree stood among the flowers, rosebushes, and forsythias. The walls of the garden were thick with grapevines. In the fall, Grandmother would have a servant climb up a ladder and put a small sack around each cluster of grapes so that they would keep, even as the cold weather set in. Before the first frost she would have the sacks removed and the grapes picked. That way, she always had grapes to serve out of season.

The servants’ rooms and the outhouse were at the far end of the garden. There were two toilets in the house, but Grandmother was too old fashioned to let anyone use them. Peddlers came to my grandmother’s door every morning with donkey loads of melons, string beans, cucumbers, and fruit. Then there was the itinerant purveyor of shahr-e farang, or “the wonders of Europe,” which consisted of a copper viewing box on four legs topped with minarets and bells. For a few rials, we could look into the darkened box and view moving images of exotic places and people. The shahr-e farang man offered a running commentary as the pictures galloped across the tiny screen. “Oh, see the queen of England majestically sitting on her throne, her crown on her head,” he would say in a singsong voice and in rhyming couplets. “Now see the fierce tiger of Africa and the lion, king of the jungle.”

In the winter, Grandmother would set up a traditional Persian korsi in her sitting room, which consisted of a low wooden table, measuring about four feet by four feet, placed over a charcoal brazier and covered with a large square quilt. Narrow mattresses were arranged around the quilt, and cushions were placed along the walls to lean against. On winter evenings, the family practically lived around the korsi, snuggling under the quilt to keep warm, eat, read, chat, play word games, recite poetry, and occasionally sleep. Grandmother always retired to her bed, but sometimes allowed the grandchildren to sleep under the korsi as a special treat. The servants had their own korsi, but it was off limits to the children.

Every Monday a mullah would come to the house and conduct a rowzeh-khani, a recital of religious martyrs’ tales. This was the only time we children were not allowed into the sitting room, when adult family members joined the mullah and the servants sat cross-legged by the entrance as he somberly recited the heart-rending tale of the martyrdom of brave Hossein, the Prophet’s grandson and the third Shi’ite imam, on the plains of Karbala in the seventh century.

My time with Khanum Jan helped shape my Iranian-Islamic identity. She read the Quran and explained religion to me as best she could. However, like many in my own and even in my father’s generation, I remained a secular Muslim. Father came of age during the reign of Reza Shah. The king regarded religion and the clergy as obstacles to his furious modernizing. He saw to it that the school curriculum glorified Iran’s pre-Islamic past, not its Islamic heritage. For my father and other Iranians like him, education abroad took care of the rest.

Khanum Jan, whom I loved dearly and who was the most important woman in my early life next to Mutti, was extremely tolerant, despite her religious upbringing. Generally speaking, she was broad-minded and receptive to modern changes—with one striking exception. When the veil was banned by government order in 1936, she stayed home for five years rather than go out into the street unveiled, a reaction not uncommon among women of her generation. The ban was another of Reza Shah’s Westernizing measures. He wanted to bring women into the public space, schools, and the workplace. But the abolition of the veil was a highly radical measure, shocking to traditional society and bitterly opposed by the clergy. One of the first steps taken by the Islamic Republic after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979 was to reimpose hijab, or Islamic dress, on women. But by then, the situation was reversed. Middle-class women now fought the imposition of the veil rather than its removal.

Despite my grandmother’s own protest, her progressive mind-set was evident in the fact that she let her daughters, my aunts, go to school and did not object that they went unveiled. And when I married Shaul in 1965, when marriages between Muslims and Jews were highly unusual, she gave me her blessing, along with a beautiful pair of pearl earrings.

I don’t recall ever seeing Khanum Jan in a black chador. Her personality was mirrored in the light colors she loved, and she often donned white, flowery chadors, allowing a bit of her hair to show beneath her headscarf. She was kind and welcoming to both her foreign-born daughter-in-law and son-in-law, and with her death in 1973, a piece of the cherished Iran of my childhood vanished along with her.

EUROPE

In December 1945, when I was almost six years old, Mother took me to Europe. She had not returned to Vienna since coming to Iran—Europe had been at war—and she had been longing to go back. Her youngest brother had died in the war and her two older sisters had moved to the United States. Her older brother, my uncle Max, was a successful merchant in Prague and she was eager to see him and her beloved Vienna again.

Father arranged for us to fly to Moscow on a plane that was taking Iran’s new ambassador to the USSR. From Moscow we were to take the train to Prague. For a child who had seen only Karaj and Tehran, taking an airplane, staying in a hotel, and traveling by train was a sensational experience. Yet all I remember of Moscow are the dreary, dark afternoons and the large, cavernous hotel. In the evening, Mother would take me downstairs to the near-deserted restaurant for dinner. There were always one or two couples on the dance floor, but they looked forlorn in the empty dining room. We would rush through dinner and hurry back to our room.

On the day of our departure for Prague, the Iranian ambassador arranged for his car to drive us from the hotel to the train station. A woman from the Russian Intourist Agency, who had made our arrangements, put us in a first-class compartment and gave us food for the long journey. There was none to be bought on the train. The conductor who checked our tickets told Mutti to keep the door of our compartment locked at all times. We were also given a small cooking lamp, which Mutti could use to warm our meals. I can’t remember how long the trip to Prague took, but I was glued to the window. Images from the journey remain etched in my memory: a desolate, gray landscape; burnt and demolished towns and villages; people lying huddled in the snow along the railway tracks; signs of hunger and illness evident even to a young child. At each stop, a mass of people rushed onto the train and banged on doors. I huddled against Mutti, crying in fear. At the Czech border, the conductor carried our suitcases to the crossing as we walked beside him in the snow. We were among the first passengers crossing here since 1940.

Prague, to my eyes, was a miracle of a city. My uncle Max picked us up at the train station. He was a tall, handsome, and very elegant man. He wore his hat tilted to one side, unlike my father, who wore his hat flat on his head. Uncle Max’s wife, Inka, was a beauty. They lived in an apartment of large rooms and high ceilings: there were Persian rugs on the floors, antique furniture, walls covered with paintings, closets full of very fine china. A plump maid in a neat black dress and white apron came every day. Mother, who did not believe in idleness, immediately enrolled me in the neighborhood school, where I learned to speak Czech. (I promptly forgot it once we returned to Tehran.)

Uncle Max took Mutti and me to the biggest toy store in Prague and bought me a fair, blue-eyed doll. I was bedazzled. I had never seen so many toys. After two hours Mutti and Uncle Max had to drag me out kicking and screaming.

The food in Prague was also a revelation. There was ham and salami and sausages for breakfast and fat-laced meat and different sauces for lunch and dinner. I loved the dumplings and the black bread covered with lard. Uncle Max even took us to Spiendelmuehl, a very posh winter resort in the mountains. I had never seen so much snow! A carriage drawn by two horses would take us from the hotel to the ski slopes. I learned how to sled, and Mother, elated to be back in Europe, skied the whole day.

Mutti was impatient to get to Vienna. Uncle Max tried to dissuade her or, at least, to prepare her for the devastation the city had endured from bombing during the war. But she was adamant. She wanted to visit her mother’s grave and look up some of her old friends. Finally, he bought us first-class train tickets and packed two suitcases full of food to take with us. Food was scarce in Vienna, and people could not be expected to share their meager rations with visitors or strangers.

The train departed in the evening. At first, Mutti and I were the sole occupants of the first-class compartment. Uncle Max warned Mutti not to accept any packages from strangers and not to engage in conversation with other passengers. A lot of counterfeit money, false documents, and contraband were being smuggled from Czechoslovakia into Austria.

We had been on the train for more than an hour when the door opened and a tall, well-dressed woman entered the cabin. She was wearing a mink coat and hat and leather boots; she carried a large leather bag. She sat across from us without exchanging a word. Mother continued to tell me stories in a very low voice. As we neared the Austrian border, the woman closed the curtain and turned off the lights. She needed to sleep, she told my mother. Suddenly the door of the compartment opened and three or four Austrian and Czech officers flipped on the light and asked to see our passports and our bags. They didn’t bother much with us, but they went through the woman’s suitcase and handbag, item by item. I started crying and clung to Mother, wishing again we had stayed in Uncle Max’s beautiful apartment; the woman scolded the officers for frightening a child.

The officers left with our passports, and one of them soon returned and handed Mutti our documents but told the woman to follow him. I remember her saying in German, “So eine Freschheit”—Such rudeness. As she bent down to put on her boots, she threw a small package at Mother’s feet and walked out. With a quick motion of her foot, Mother pushed the package under the woman’s seat. All this took place in the dark and in a split second. An hour later, the woman reappeared and without turning on the light asked Mother where her package was. Silently, Mutti pointed under the seat. She retrieved her bundle, took her suitcase and hat, and walked out of the cabin without a word. Uncle Max was livid when he heard the story. Had they searched the cabin, he said, the woman would have denied the package, most probably counterfeit money, was hers, and we would have been in serious trouble.

My father had arranged for us to stay with an Iranian friend of his, Ali Asghar Azizi, who had married into a well-to-do Austrian family. When Mother presented the Azizis with our two suitcases of food, Mrs. Azizi put the ring-shaped salami around her neck and danced across the kitchen with joy.

Yet Vienna turned out to be a journey into almost unbearable loss for Mother. I had never seen her this way, as if in mourning, the hurt written all over her face. Every day of our three-week visit, we would leave the house and take the tram into town. Holding me tightly by the hand, Mother would wander from street to street, from neighborhood to neighborhood, tears rolling down her cheeks. At every turn another piece of her heart would break. She would point at the ruin of a house or building: this was where she had lived as a child; this was where she had gone to school; this was the park where she played; the theater she attended. She kept on whispering, “Mein armes Oesterreich”—My poor Austria. We went in search of the building where Father had lived as a student and to the Faculty of Agriculture at Tuerkishenspark where he had gone to university.

We walked along the Stadtpark, where she and Father had danced the waltz, past the opera house and the very exclusive Sacher Hotel and Café Mozart. Vienna was an occupied city, divided into American, British, French, and Russian zones. One evening when we were going home, a group of Russian soldiers boarded the tram. An old man was sitting in the front, holding an empty tin in his hand. One soldier grabbed the tin, put it on his head, and ridiculed the old man. Even as a child I felt his shame and humiliation. Frightened, we got off at the next stop, ran to another street, and waited for an hour in a café before making our way back to the house.

Vienna was a wrenching three-week hiatus during what turned out to be an enchanted eight-month stay in Prague with Uncle Max. I saw beautiful shops, beautiful homes, and elegant hotels and restaurants. I saw my first puppet show and my first children’s play. Mother took me to the opera to see La Bohème and Madame Butterfly. I was given dazzling picture books and toys. I loved the food and the sweets. In the spring, when we boarded a train for Ankara, where a cousin of my father served as the Iranian ambassador, then another train to Baghdad, and finally a bus to Iran, we left my fairy-tale city behind.

TEHRAN

By the time we returned from Europe, Father had decided to leave the academic world of Karaj and to join the Ministry of Agriculture. I was almost seven years old. Between the time I was seven and eleven years of age, we moved three times, each time to a slightly larger apartment, but for me life was becoming increasingly restricted. I had no garden in which to play and run around, except when I went to Grandmother’s house or visited friends in Karaj. I was enrolled in Jeanne d’Arc, a Catholic school run by nuns. We followed a double curriculum—French in the morning and Persian in the afternoon. In the morning, I learned about the Alps and the Pyrenees, the river Seine and the river Loire. In the afternoon, I learned about the Zagros and Alborz mountains, the Zayandeh Rud River in Isfahan and the Karkheh River in Khuzistan.

My last year at Jeanne d’Arc coincided with the struggle led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, then controlled by a British enterprise, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The nationalization campaign pitted Iran against both the powerful company and the even more powerful British government, which was the majority shareholder in AIOC. The entire country was caught up in the David-and-Goliath struggle. Political parties—Mossadegh’s own National Front; the Communist Tudeh Party; the ultranationalist Sumka Party, whose members, fascist-style, sported black shirts; the Toilers Party, headed by a politician from my family’s ancestral home, Kerman—vied for popularity and power, while their adherents in secondary schools and Tehran University clashed with one another on the streets. New, highly partisan newspapers appeared and were shut down. Mossadegh, hugely popular, made fiery speeches before massive crowds on the great square outside the houses of parliament.

Even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d’Arc. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out, and the oil industry in Iranian hands. Mossadegh was our hero, and we, like other students, took up the shout, “Ya marg, ya Mossadegh”—“Death or Mossadegh.” Politicians considered insufficiently ardent on the oil nationalization issue, including Mossadegh’s predecessor as prime minister, Ali Razmara, were assassinated. Razmara had signed an oil agreement with the despised British that ardent nationalists considered a sellout of Iranian interests; parliament rejected the agreement. His murder brought the mindless violence close to home. Razmara’s daughter was a student at Jeanne d’Arc, and on the day her father was found dead, the whole school poured out into the schoolyard in sympathy with our classmate. Even the strict nuns could not keep us in the classroom.

The AIOC was finally nationalized by an act of parliament in March 1951, ending in one stroke decades of British control of Iran’s most important industry. The country was jubilant. The Iranian government sent a team of officials to take over the oil company operations. It invited the majority of the British employees to stay on; but the British, in a huff and hoping to cripple the Iranian oil industry, pulled out their technicians and staff. The Iranian team was led by Mehdi Bazargan, a political colleague of Mossadegh, who nearly thirty years later was to become the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic. My father joined the team, seconded from the Ministry of Agriculture to head the oil company’s agricultural department. Mutti, Siamack, and I moved with Father to the city of Abadan, where two years later, my sister, Hayedeh, was born.

ABADAN

Abadan was the heart of Iran’s oil industry. At the time, the Abadan oil refinery was the largest in the world. The very air smelled of gas and oil; at night, from almost any vantage point, one could see the flames from the flared gas of the oil wells licking at the tall chimney that towered over the refinery. The oil industry was by far the city’s largest employer, and employees lived in oil company housing and socialized in oil company clubs. Abadan had also been, in many ways, a very British city. Thousands of Englishmen had worked for the AIOC and lived with their families in Abadan. There was Iranian staff, too, but with few exceptions the senior management and technical positions were held by Englishmen. The English and the Iranians worked together but led separate lives. The English lived in Braim; most of the Iranians lived in Bavardeh, a totally separate housing development. The English frequented the Gymkhana Club, the Iranians the Iran, Bavardeh, and Golestan clubs. The laborers, poorly paid Iranians despite AIOC’s high profits, lived mostly in shantytowns. Abadan had its own halabi-abad and hassir-abad, “tin town” and “straw-mat town,” named after the shacks made out of flattened oilcans or straw mats that were laid across scaffolding of sticks and wood.

When the oil industry was taken over and the British driven out, all these facilities were seized by the Iranian government. When we arrived in Abadan, we were assigned a house in the upscale Braim district.

Abadan had a different feel to it than Tehran or Karaj. I associated Tehran with the mountains and the plains that ran south and east to the Kavir Desert. The air was hot and dry in the summer, crisp and cold in winter. There was no hint of the sea, no touch of dampness in the air. Abadan, by contrast, was built on the Shatt al-Arab, the border river between Iran and Iraq, and abutted the Persian Gulf. It was a port city. There were palm and banana trees as well as lush bougainvilleas. The local people were dark-complexioned, seafaring. Most spoke Arabic and Persian with a pronounced Arabic accent.

But for a curious child, Abadan meant a recovery of freedom. Our house had a large garden surrounded by hedges. My parents joined the Boat Club, with its clubhouse on the riverbank built to resemble a boat, and the Golestan Club, within walking distance of the house. I could check out all the books I wanted from the club library. Mother didn’t read Persian, and Father was too busy to notice. At the age of thirteen I read Victor Hugo, Anatole France, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway in translation, as well as a great many Persian novels. It was in Abadan that I developed my love for literature.

Despite the long British presence, there were no bilingual schools in Abadan, and I attended the local Persian elementary school. I walked into the schoolyard on my first day and saw students crowded around a little boy, perhaps eight years old, lying on his back with his legs in the air. The assistant principal was caning the soles of his bare feet. I was horrified. Jeanne d’Arc had been strict, but punishment had meant sitting alone in a corner or being banished from the classroom.

Yet the oil company itself retained a strong British feel to it. Senior Iranian staff who had worked for the AIOC and studied in England often spoke English to one another. They sent their children to English boarding schools. At the card table, my parents’ new bridge partners referred to clubs, hearts, diamonds, and spades, rather than trèfle, coeur, carré, and pique, the French terms common among their friends in Tehran. Mutti arranged for me to take English lessons with a private tutor.

Since the summers in Abadan were very hot and humid, we would come to Tehran for a month, staying two weeks with my grandmother and two weeks with our extended family in villages in Arak, some two hundred miles northwest of Tehran. We rode donkeys and picked and ate fruits straight from the trees, and cucumbers from the long, straight rows of the cucumber beds. We wandered for hours in the fields and watched the villagers swinging their scythes and harvesting the wheat.

But politics intruded on our idyllic life in Arak and roiled the lives and opinions of our usually apolitical family. The British were determined to undo the oil industry’s nationalization, which had meant the loss of a valuable asset as well as a challenge to their imperial authority. They feared a precedent that would threaten their other holdings (indeed, President Nasser of Egypt would nationalize the Suez Canal five years later). In retaliation for the nationalization of the AIOC, the British had frozen Iran’s sterling assets, had successfully imposed a boycott on the sale of Iranian oil, and although we didn’t know it then, were secretly plotting to overthrow Mossadegh and persuade the United States to join them in the scheme. As a result of the oil boycott and assets freeze, the economy was suffering, business was slow, and imports had dwindled. Mossadegh was also locked in a struggle with the shah over power and constitutional authority; things seemed unstable as demonstrators took over the streets.

In the evenings, my relatives heatedly debated the situation. The family was divided, some loyal to Mossadegh and others to the shah; some enthusiastic about oil nationalization, others worried about the direction in which Mossadegh was taking the country: “He is allowing the left and the Communists too much power.” “No, he is the only politician who dared stand up to the British and defend Iran’s honor.” “Yes, but he is leading the country into anarchy.” So went the arguments, back and forth. I remember a younger cousin, an ardent supporter of Mossadegh, accusing his aunts and uncles of caring more about their villages than about Iran. For the two branches of the family, the Bayats and the Esfandiaris, the issues were especially fraught. Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative. His mother, Najm al-Saltaneh, a lion of a woman, was the second wife of my great-grandfather Vakil ol-Molk-e Dovvom and the grandmother of many Bayats. Mossadegh’s son, Gholam Hossein, and his wife, Malekeh, were close friends of my mother and father.

The family was proud that once again one of their own was now prime minister; and they both admired and were awed by Mossadegh’s crafty political maneuvering and the oratorical skills that turned him into a popular hero. But Mossadegh, irascible and headstrong, had also released radical forces. Workers were organizing and demanding higher wages. Talk of land reform was threatening to large landowners, including the Bayats and the Esfandiaris. The Tudeh, or Communist, Party was rising in popularity and influence. The endless political turmoil, strikes, and street demonstrations made members of the family nervous. Vigilante violence hit close to home. Brigadier General Mohammad Afshartous, Mossadegh’s police chief, who was kidnapped and murdered, had married into the Bayat family. Worried by the rising radicalism and violence, the Bayats sent a family delegation to visit Mossadegh and to beg him to curb the disorder. He heard them out but did nothing to assuage their anxieties.

Mossadegh was also challenging the shah’s authority, asserting the primacy of parliament and his prerogatives as prime minister. In July 1952, Mossadegh resigned when both he and the shah claimed the right to name the minister of war. After two days of pro-Mossadegh rioting, the shah stood down, and Mossadegh returned to office in triumph, more powerful than before. Members of the family were torn: they felt instinctive loyalty to their famous relative; some found attractive the idea championed by Mossadegh that authority should rest with the parliament and that the shah should reign and not rule. But they also feared for the stability of the throne and the long-term stability of the country; and Mossadegh’s seeming radicalism made them uneasy.

Affairs between Mossadegh and the shah, and Mossadegh and the British, came to a head in August 1953. Early that year, the British government succeeded in persuading the incoming Eisenhower administration to join their plan to overthrow Mossadegh. The CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) went to work. A reluctant shah was brought on board. Royalist officers in the army were won over; newspaper editors, members of parliament, and politicians were paid off; the cooperation of political operators who could mobilize the street crowds was secured.

The plot was set in motion in August, and after two days of seesaw battles on the streets, the royalist forces finally prevailed. The shah, who had left the country for Rome when the plot initially appeared to have failed, returned to Iran to reclaim his throne. During that turbulent week, I happened to have gone with my parents to the Caspian city of Rasht. We arrived at the very height of the crisis and saw the statue of the shah, which had dominated the main city square, lying on the ground, smashed to pieces. It had been pulled down from its pedestal by anti-royalist crowds. A few days later, after royalist forces had prevailed, someone had put the broken-off head of the shah’s statue back on its pedestal. There was the shah, albeit somewhat reduced in stature, gazing across the square again.

These momentous national events left the family with mixed feelings. They were devastated to see Mossadegh’s home ransacked, and the prime minister put on trial and jailed. But they were relieved that the threat of upheaval had been averted, and that Mossadegh’s immediate family had not been harassed. When we gathered in Arak during the summer of the following year, all talk of politics had come to an end and, at least to a child, life had returned to its normal, lazy rhythm.

3. A CAREER INTERRUPTED

I WOULD NOT COME INTO contact with such fierce political loyalties again until I attended university—in Vienna, at my mother’s insistence—five years later. Many of my fellow Iranian students were active in the opposition movement against the shah. The principal student organization, the Confederation of Iranian Students, was left of center rather than revolutionary, dedicated to the memory of Mossadegh and loyal to his political party, the National Front. But more radical currents, some Marxist, some Islamic, were already stirring among the students, and two decades of authoritarian rule in Iran would turn a future generation of students into outright revolutionaries.

While I stayed clear of the student movement (my father having instilled in me both patriotism and caution about getting mixed up in politics), my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture. I studied journalism, philosophy, and art history, but I also attended poetry readings and literary debates. I heard Sviatoslav Richter play the piano and Yehudi Menuhin play the violin; I even heard a young and yet unknown Zubin Mehta conducting a student orchestra. I spent a summer in London improving my English, and traveled to East Berlin, Munich, Rome, Venice, Paris, and Geneva. Even if I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time, it was during these years that I came to appreciate the value of freedom of thought and expression, the right to travel and explore, and freedom from authoritarianism.

HOME, AGAIN

I returned to Tehran in the summer of 1964 and was hired by the publisher of Kayhan, the largest daily newspaper in the country. Since I knew French, English, and German as well as Persian, I was assigned to the foreign news desk. When the publisher, Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, known to everyone as “Doktor,” introduced me to my colleagues on the foreign news desk, I was met with skeptical stares. The foreign news veterans were all men in their early fifties, educated, but from modest backgrounds. Most of them, I later learned, were former Communists or had dabbled in left-wing ideologies popular among students and the new educated middle class in the postwar period. They had spent time in prison after the overthrow of Mossadegh, and some of them had been tortured. Times had changed, but they remained attached to their radical political beliefs.

I was twenty-four, the only woman on the foreign news desk, one of the very few in the entire newsroom. I was also from the wrong social class in their eyes, with a well-known family name and family members in senior positions in the civil service. These “enlightened radicals” clearly did not think a woman capable of doing their weighty work, and they were not comfortable having a woman in their midst. “Does this zaifeh—this weak one—understand anything?” an older reporter once sneered, using a traditional and derogatory term for women. With me around, the men had to watch their language and stop exchanging crude jokes and accounts of their escapades. The toilet in the building was for men only, meaning I simply could not go to the bathroom all day. At five-thirty in the morning, my colleagues would breakfast on a dish of sheep’s brains and sheep’s feet—a delicacy in Iran, but one whose sight and smell nauseated me. One or two of the men even topped off their breakfast with a glass of vodka. But my foreign language and translating skills were good, I was speedy, and gradually the men came to accept me. For a brief period, I even became the foreign news editor, and by the end of my decade at the paper, the environment had changed so dramatically that women were even given their own bathroom.

Kayhan was an afternoon paper, and except for major stories, the foreign news pages were put to bed relatively early. I arrived at work at five-thirty in the morning and worked until two-thirty in the afternoon. Depending on the volume of news, I sometimes stayed through the afternoons and evenings, as well.

The newspaper had no foreign correspondents of its own and relied on the wire agencies Reuters, the Associated Press, United Press International, and Agence France-Presse. We were still in the age of teleprinters, and dispatches came rattling through on long perforated sheets of paper. Every half hour someone would walk in with rolls of dispatches and give them to the translators. At noon, the mail boy would bring in newspapers flown in from Europe—the Herald Tribune, The Times of London, the Financial Times, Le Monde, Figaro. In August 1968, when Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, I remember huddling around the teleprinters as the dispatches rolled off the machines. Earlier that year, the new Czech leader, Alexander Dubček, had sought to loosen the hold of Soviet-style communism over the country. He had freed up the press, allowed non-Communist political parties to operate, and decentralized the economy. The “Prague Spring” seemed, for a moment, to herald a wave of change across the Soviet bloc. But what the Czechs welcomed the Russians feared, and that morning the news coming across the teleprinters was grim. More than 200,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops had fanned across the country. Dubček and his colleagues as well as Czech activists and intellectuals had been arrested. The Prague Spring was being snuffed out. Even my leftist colleagues were hard put to justify the invasion.

The staff of the foreign news desk served principally as translators. The editor selected the stories he wanted to run, and we translated them in longhand. They were then typed and edited, headlines were written, and the type was set.

Just before the presses rolled at noon, the censor from the government’s information office would show up with a list of stories that we were not allowed to run. The censor, Mahram Ali Khan, had held the job since the 1930s, and each day he went from newspaper office to newspaper office with the censor’s list. He checked all the pages and read all the major stories. Sometimes he ordered the removal of a name or a paragraph, sometimes a whole story. We were not allowed, for example, to report student demonstrations in other countries, lest our own university students get ideas. We were not allowed to repeat criticism of the shah from abroad. Fortunately, Mahram Ali Khan had a sense of humor. One day, before I joined Kayhan, the journalists took advantage of Mahram Ali Khan’s visit to the men’s room, locked him in, and pretended they could not open the door. They quietly reinserted the stories he had removed and went to press before they let him out.

Within six months, the publisher, Dr. Mesbahzadeh, decided I would be more useful as a reporter than as a translator. I began to cover visits to Iran by ministers, officials, and foreign heads of state. I also reported on trips abroad by the shah and other high officials. Shaul, who would become my husband a year later, worked for the English-language newspaper of the Kayhan publishing house.

We ran across each other in the newsroom but really “met” when both of us were covering the visit to Iran of Ethiopia’s emperor, Haile Selassie, who granted us an exclusive interview. At the end of the interview, after thanks and good-byes, I simply turned around and walked out, realizing only too late from the startled looks of Haile Selassie’s courtiers that I had committed a faux pas. You were not supposed to turn your back on the emperor. I met Haile Selassie once more in the late 1960s, when I covered the shah’s trip to Addis Ababa. The emperor recognized me. “I am indebted to you,” I said. “I met my future husband when interviewing you.”

“Well, and are you happy with your husband?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

I had taken to Shaul immediately. He was already a prominent journalist, covering all the major stories for his newspaper and writing for the Financial Times and the Economist. He had a sharp intellect, fierce integrity as a journalist, and was infectiously enthusiastic about newspaper work. Covering stories with him was always an adventure. We were both interested in Iranian politics; we both loved literature. When we first met, he was deeply into the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and he soon presented me with several of Brecht’s plays in the original German, which would not have been easy to locate in Tehran’s bookstores. He had studied in America and opened up to me a whole new world of American history, literature, and politics.

The decision to marry was not an easy one. We came from two different communities, and marriages between Jews and Muslims were extremely rare, virtually unheard of, in our two societies. Both Shaul’s family and mine were deeply unhappy. We were breaking all sorts of taboos, and, looking back, I am amazed at our audacity. But we were young and determined, and once we were married, I was warmly accepted into Shaul’s family and Shaul into mine. Shaul and Mutti grew especially close to each other.

Two years into our marriage, in 1966, Shaul decided he would like to return to Harvard, where he had gone to college, to study for an MA in Middle Eastern studies. He was covering the Middle East and wanted to study the region more seriously. Besides, he was unhappy with the creeping censorship of the press. We spent two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, basically exchanging our comfortable life as professional journalists for the more cramped circumstances of graduate students. Shaul’s scholarship hardly covered our expenses, especially once our daughter, Haleh, arrived.

Shaul received his MA in 1968, but student life continued for the next three years as Shaul pursued his PhD, in Iranian history, at Oxford University. I taught Persian while he completed his doctorate.

We returned to Iran and to our newspaper jobs in 1972. The Kayhan organization was enjoying a period of considerable success and expansion. Kayhan continued to be more “liberal” than Tehran’s other large-circulation daily, Ettela’at, but it was no longer the bold and risk-taking newspaper I had joined nearly a decade earlier. The weight of censorship had grown heavier, and the freedom to write and publish more restricted. Mesbahzadeh’s own liberal preferences remained in place, and as the publisher, he was always admirably protective of his editors and reporters. Pressured to fire journalists who had stepped on the censors’ toes, he continued to pay their salaries and brought them back to the newsroom at the first opportunity. He kept jobs open for colleagues who went to jail, took care of their families, and reemployed them once they were released. He allowed reporters who were banned by the shah’s secret police, SAVAK (the Persian acronym for Organization for State Security and Intelligence), to write for Kayhan under assumed names.

But the organization’s very success was a kind of vulnerability, since the financial stakes were now huge. The staff and employees numbered in the hundreds. “If we are closed down, who is going to pay all these people?” Mesbahzadeh once asked Shaul, who was insisting he stand up more aggressively to the censors. The government was a source of advertising revenue, and it set policies that could affect everything from Kayhan’s ability to purchase newsprint abroad to Mesbahzadeh’s considerable land holdings. Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter. Dr. Mesbahzadeh continued to allow his editors considerable autonomy, but the editors were being hounded daily by the censors.

In 1973, rumors circulated at Kayhan that Mesbahzadeh was under pressure from Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda to name his protégé, Amir Taheri, a Kayhan reporter, as editor of the newspaper. Taheri, who seemed all too willing in his reporting to do the prime minister’s bidding, was to replace the highly respected, independent-minded Mehdi Semsar. The rumor proved true. One morning Taheri’s appointment was announced to the staff. When he walked into the newsroom a few minutes later and took his seat behind the editor’s desk, one colleague and I gathered up our belongings and walked out of the newsroom and the building. We quit. I subsequently had a long meeting with Mesbahzadeh, who tried to convince me not to leave. Editors come and go, he said, but Kayhan will endure. I was not persuaded; and I have never regretted my decision. Leaving Kayhan was difficult for me. It was the country’s leading newspaper; I took pleasure in the work and in being part of the Kayhan family. Shaul and I needed both our salaries to make ends meet. But I am proud of having refused to work under a government-imposed editor who represented everything I disdained in a profession I loved.

AN UNREPENTANT FEMINIST

I had grown interested in women’s issues during my last years at Kayhan. When my friend Mahnaz Afkhami, the secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), invited me to join her team, I welcomed the opportunity to work with her.

The WOI, established in 1966, was the umbrella organization for almost all women’s groups and women’s activity in Iran. Mahnaz, a dynamic American-educated feminist, had taken over a dormant organization in 1970 and turned it into an effective instrument to promote women’s causes.

The struggle for women’s rights in Iran began in the late nineteenth century. Women took an active part in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, but the constitution that was wrested from Mozaffar al-Din Shah of the former Qajar dynasty did not give women the right to vote. A handful of women campaigned for women’s education, and established the first schools for girls in the early years of the twentieth century. Under Reza Shah, the government established a system of public elementary and secondary schools for girls as well as boys. When Tehran University, the country’s first modern university, was established in 1936, it admitted both men and women. Reza Shah had already ordered the abolition of the veil. He saw it as a symbol of Iran’s backwardness and a barrier to the education of women and their introduction into the workforce and society. The marriage age for girls was raised from nine to thirteen—a radical step at the time. Women entered the workforce, initially in the civil service.

This process continued under his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, much to the discomfort and sometimes the fierce opposition of traditional members of the clergy, who, for example, forced the government in 1962 to withdraw a modest proposal to allow women to vote in local council elections. In his commitment to the principle that traditional restrictions on women should be removed, the shah was encouraged by his wife, Queen Farah, and by his twin sister, Princess Ashraf. Women in Iran’s burgeoning and better-educated middle class pushed for change as well. Similar movements were under way in other countries of the region, including Egypt and Tunisia, but Iran was breaking new ground.

Despite clerical opposition, women received the right to vote in 1963. The 1967 Family Protection Law, amended and expanded in 1975, restricted the ability of men to take more than one wife and to secure divorce on demand. It gave women the right to seek divorce, and strengthened women’s rights in child-custody cases. The marriage age for girls was raised from thirteen to fifteen, and then to eighteen. Women’s employment grew fairly rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, and the number of girls in schools and higher education expanded dramatically. Whereas women had made slow, steady progress in previous decades, the WOI accelerated this process, giving it direction and taking it into new fields.

During the period when I was involved with the organization, the WOI made working-class women its focus. It established branches and family welfare centers all over the country. These provided working-class women with literacy classes and vocational training, helping them earn a living independent of their husbands. It ran family-planning clinics; it provided women with legal advice; and guided them on their rights in child custody, divorce, and spousalabuse cases. It made inroads at establishing day-care centers for working-class women. It lobbied with the government and the private sector to open up more executive and managerial positions to women.

None of this was easy. Resistance to change and skepticism that it was necessary or practicable were widespread. Both phases of the family-protection law required patient negotiation with cabinet ministers and members of parliament. The endorsement or acquiescence of leading members of the clergy was crucial for new legislation affecting women. In 1967, the minister of justice journeyed to the shrine city of Najaf in Iraq, the center of Shi’ism’s most prestigious religious seminaries, to persuade Ayatollah Kho’i, then the highest ranking and most eminent clerical leader in the Shi’ite world, to lend his support to the new family-protection law.

My responsibilities as deputy director for international affairs included disseminating information about the WOI’s activities and sponsoring programs to educate both men and women on women’s issues. I traveled fairly widely inside the country. I found the women eager, but the men resistant. On one trip, for example, the driver of the car that was taking me to Qom was loud in his praise of the cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, then living in exile in Iraq, for his opposition to the 1962 attempt to extend limited suffrage to women. I was also responsible for the WOI’s relations with international organizations and women’s groups abroad, which enabled me to travel to China, Thailand, and the United States for meetings and international conferences, and I established links between Iran and the international women’s movement.

Just before I left the WOI in 1976 to accept a new position, I took part in drafting the National Plan of Action on the Improvement of the Status of Women in Iran. Approved by the cabinet, the plan called for the full integration of women into all aspects of social and economic life. It was, of course, a statement of goals that were yet to be accomplished, but it committed the government itself to work toward women’s equality in several areas.

The WOI was subsequently criticized for a strategy of change from above, for relying too much on official support, rather than organizing middle- and working-class women. But the criticism was misplaced. We were not in the business of organizing mass political movements, which would have been impossible in Iran at the time. As an activist organization, the WOI was in its infancy. Opposition, especially from the clergy, was considerable; and the support of the shah, his wife, and his sister was crucial if the government was to be persuaded to risk taking measures that challenged tradition. Much of the WOI’s work in the last decade before the revolution benefited working-class women far more than members of the elite. Elite women had education, were aware of their rights, knew how to get divorces, understood birth control, and could obtain employment. It was working-class women whose lives were changed the most by the WOI’s victories.

After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could. But even Ayatollah Khomeini and the clerics who had fiercely opposed the extension of suffrage to women in 1962 and 1963 realized they could not turn back this particular clock. They continued to allow women to vote. The new government, however, suspended the Family Protection Law, encouraged women in the civil service to take early retirement, and discouraged women in general from working. It barred women from judgeships and certain fields of higher education and specialization; lowered the marriage age for girls to nine (the age of puberty in Islam); tried to dictate what women wore; and segregated men and women in university classrooms, beaches, ski slopes, and public transportion. It even inserted clauses into the constitution defining the principal role of women as mothers and housewives.

Iranian women, young and old, from all classes, courageously resisted these measures. Young women fought the Islamic dress code, wearing loose headscarves rather than the chador or the maghan’eh, showing a bit of hair under their scarves, the bottoms of bluejeans underneath their robes, and a hint of lipstick on their lips. In this, they risked arrest, even lashings, but gradually won for themselves more freedom in matters of dress. Women voted in large numbers. Working-class and traditional women continued to be at the forefront of the struggle to reinstate the Family Protection Law. It was principally women from working- and lower-middle-class families who embraced opportunities for education, pushed for places in the universities, and demanded and seized opportunities for employment. That women fought back was partly the result of the revolutionary upheaval itself, which politicized society and, contrary to the intention of the clerics, thrust women into the public sphere. But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.

In 1975, I was thrust into the world of art and public culture when I accepted an offer to join the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, established under the sponsorship of the queen, which oversaw a number of major museums and cultural centers. The museums in my charge included the Carpet Museum of Tehran, the Tehran Museum of Ancient Iranian Ceramics and Glassware, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, and the Khorramabad Museum of Ancient Lurestan Bronzes. We were also running cultural centers in the capital, where we organized art exhibitions, art workshops, lectures, and seminars. I was only in my second year at the foundation when the clouds of revolution began to loom over the country.

REVOLUTION

In the 1960s and 1970s, Iran seemed to be prospering. The country was stable. The economy was booming, and while wealth distribution was uneven, Iranians in general were better fed and clothed. Increasing numbers of people had access to education as well as cars, refrigerators, TV sets, and other modern conveniences. The shah had managed his foreign relations well and, in a much-divided world, enjoyed good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as with China, India, and Pakistan, and Israel and the Arab states.

Yet political stability had been purchased at a price—repression. A growing educated middle class chafed at the lack of freedoms and input regarding how the country was run. The explosion in oil prices in 1973-74 dramatically boosted government revenues, but the rapid injection of that money into the economy led to inflation, rising food prices, and a real estate boom that pushed affordable housing out of reach for most ordinary families. Rural migrants crowded into the capital and other major cities in search of jobs and found themselves living in crowded shantytowns lacking electricity and piped water. For newcomers, life in Tehran, a messy, sprawling metropolis, meant a bewildering sense of cultural dislocation and a shock to traditional and religious sensibilities.

Since other avenues for the expression of discontent—political parties, trade unions, an independent press, professional associations—were suppressed or strictly controlled, people flocked to mosques, where clerics used a religious vocabulary to preach barely disguised condemnations of the state and its policies. When the shah responded to these murmurs of discontent by easing up on controls over speech and political activity, opposition elements quickly seized on the opening.

By 1977, for example, Tehran’s “poetry nights” at the German sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners. These letters circulated widely in Xerox form, even if they could not be published in the daily press. In January 1978, under government pressure, one of the two leading newspapers in the country published an article scurrilously attacking Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah’s principal opponent abroad. The article led to protests by seminary students and clashes with the authorities in the shrine city of Qom. Khomeini had risen to prominence in the early 1960s for his uncompromising denunciations of the shah’s policies. He rapidly achieved a name for himself.

His arrest in 1963 had led to widespread riots, shaking the government to its foundations. The following year, free again, Khomeini used a sermon to denounce the status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) Iran had signed with the United States. It gave American military personnel and their families in Iran immunity from prosecution in Iranian courts, and was hugely resented by politically inclined Iranians. He was sent into exile and eventually made his way to Najaf, in Iraq, where he took up teaching, attracting a wide circle of seminary students with his learning and his ability to give potent political meaning to traditional Islamic teachings. He continued his attacks on the shah’s regime, eventually describing monarchy as hateful to Islam and calling for the establishment of an Islamic republic under clerical leadership. In Iran, he gained a wide if not always public following and a clandestine network of clerical devotees who spread his message.

When demonstrations against the government broke out in January 1978, triggering further protests, Khomeini was well poised to seize control of the nascent opposition movement. In February, demonstrators in Tabriz went on a rampage, trashing government offices and the headquarters of the ruling party. They also attacked the symbols of “modernity”: nightclubs, cinema houses, liquor stores, and banks. The protests accelerated with astonishing speed. Six weeks later, similar riots erupted in half a dozen major cities. In September, over a hundred thousand joined in a protest march and communal prayers in Tehran. On Friday, September 8, after martial law had been declared in the capital, dozens were killed in clashes between protesters and troops. “Black Friday,” as it was instantly dubbed by the shah’s opponents, proved a watershed in the trajectory of the growing protest movement, which brought together varied political organizations and social classes: traditional and radical clerics, centrists from Mossadegh’s old National Front, Communists of the Tudeh Party, as well as men and women associated with underground guerrilla movements, civil servants hurt by inflation and stagnant salaries, intellectuals eager for more freedom, and shopkeepers and bazaar merchants chafing at government attempts to control prices.

Khomeini’s clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader. Charismatic, adept at a rhetoric that resonated powerfully with the public, rejecting every compromise, and unrelenting in his determination to unseat the shah, he transformed what began as a call for the restoration of constitutional guarantees into a call for revolution. He united this disparate collection of opposition groups behind one goal: the overthrow of the monarchy.

In the fall and early winter of 1978, the shah’s regime seemed to be unraveling before our eyes. Heavily armed troops appeared helpless to stop the mounting demonstrations and the imaginative forms of civil disobedience adopted by a thoroughly roused public. Civil servants went to work every day, but sat in their offices and did nothing, gradually bringing much of the government to a standstill. The mail could not be delivered, nor could imported goods be processed through customs. Oil-industry workers went on strike, reducing production to a trickle, which caused massive shortages of fuel and grounded truck transport. Factories shut down. Workers at Tehran’s major electric power plant turned off the city’s electric supply at will, plunging the capital into darkness. Schoolboys in Tehran stalled cars in the middle of major crossroads, snarling traffic and causing massive traffic jams. Tehranis took to their rooftops at night to cry out Allah-o-Akbar, God is Great, into the December night, as if calling on God to rid the country of the shah.

Many of our friends were caught up in the revolutionary fervor, somehow imagining that the regime could be overthrown, the shah replaced by Khomeini, and that their own lives—comfortable, privileged—would remain unchanged. “Let him go,” one of our friends said. “Anything will be better than the shah.” Shaul and I, and a small circle of our closest friends, however, witnessed these momentous events with mounting trepidation. A political earthquake was taking place. The future seemed full of uncertainties. Deep down, Shaul and I sensed that that our lives would never be the same again. Shaul returned from a trip to London in early November. I could not pick him up at the airport because martial law had been declared and a curfew was in force. He took a cab home. No one at the airport seemed to be in charge at passport control or customs, he said. Troops patrolled the nearly deserted night streets, but they were lackadaisical in enforcing the rules of martial law. Back home, Shaul silently took in the familiar objects of our living room and library—the books, the frames of Persian calligraphy on the walls, the glow of lamps on the sofas. He seemed moved by the sense of calm and order inside the house, compared with the rising chaos on the streets. I could read his thoughts from the look on his face. “Are we going to have to give all this up?” he finally asked.

Clerical and other opposition leaders called for massive protest rallies on December 10 and 11, to coincide with the days of religious mourning. The government banned the marches, and fear of violence and bloodshed was widespread. Shaul and I decided that, as a precaution, I should take our daughter Haleh to London for two weeks and wait things out. I left Tehran for London in early December. The exodus of the middle class had already begun, and the airport was jammed with Iranians and foreigners leaving the country. Panic was in the air. Still, I did not feel I was leaving Iran for good.

In London I waited anxiously for news. The regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation. Shaul and I spoke on the phone; repeatedly we postponed my return, our mood wildly gyrating between unrealistic hopes that things would calm down and mounting evidence that the regime was near collapse. My two-week stay stretched into three, then four and five weeks. The shah left Iran on January 16, never to come back; Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, 1979, greeted by a crowd of more than a million. Ten days later, with the army having declared its “neutrality,” people in Tehran rose up and overran government ministries, military barracks, police stations, and the radio and TV broadcasting centers. The monarchy had collapsed; an Islamic republic had taken its place.

Revolutions such as Iran’s are huge upheavals in the life of nations, overturning not only governments and institutions but the lives of every individual and family caught in the vortex. Both Shaul and I were deeply rooted in Iran. Everything we had built over a lifetime was there. On the other hand, the country was in turmoil. Armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime—many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist. Farrokhrou Parsa, the first woman cabinet minister in Iran and a former minister of education, was charged with “prostituting young girls,” placed in a sack, and executed by firing squad. Prime Minister Hoveyda, a friend of my parents whom I had known as a child, was given a summary trial and shot—in the middle of the night, on the rooftop or backstairs of a prison, it was reported. The Kayhan Organization, where Shaul worked, had been seized by the revolutionary government. Shaul had been offered a one-year visiting professorship at Princeton; reluctantly we decided that he would accept. Without admitting it to ourselves, we had agreed to leave Iran.

Shaul joined us in London in January 1980. He had managed to salvage a few of our belongings; but everything else—our home, property, careers, friends, family, the feel of the familiar—we left behind.

AMERICA

Shaul left London for Princeton in late January, and I followed in July, after Haleh finished school. Princeton was a quiet university town, very different from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Princeton campus was self-contained, and university life did not spill out into the small town very much. There were few coffee shops and fewer bookstores.

We lived for a year in a tiny two-story town house owned by the university, amid rented furniture and an assorted collection of dishes, cutlery, and kitchen appliances loaned by friends. Shaul had a one year contract, but we had no certainty of employment beyond that. The news out of Iran was uniformly grim. Disorder continued on the streets, on university campuses, and in government offices. I worried about my parents in Tehran, yet I felt helpless to do anything for them.

During my first week at Princeton I met Janina Issawi, whose husband, Charles, was a professor. Janina knew what it meant to be an exile. Polish by birth, she and her family had been rounded up by the Soviet army in World War II and sent to labor camps in Russia. Somehow, the family made it overland to Iran, then to Lebanon, where she studied at the American University of Beirut and met her future husband.

“Get yourself a house; put down some roots,” she told me, an easier proposition for Shaul than for myself, since he had attended boarding school outside of New York City as a teenager, as well as doing both his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard. Except for the eighteen months I spent in Cambridge in the mid-1960s, when I was preoccupied with a new baby, I did not know America. I had to get used to its sky, soil, and rhythms, to hearing English rather than Persian spoken around me. I had to start a new career. Yet I vowed to follow Janina’s sensible advice. We registered Haleh in school. We made a down payment on a house outside Princeton, got ourselves a secondhand car, planted our garden, and asked friends over. We began to put down roots, even though a bit of replanting from time to time proved inevitable.

Shaul taught at Princeton for two years and held fellowships at various research institutes for three, spending a year in North Carolina and another in Washington, D.C. This meant separation and long commutes. I started teaching Persian at the university, initially for only a couple of hours a week. Soon I was carrying a full teaching load. It was very satisfying work. I was eager to share my love of Persian language and literature with the students, and I formed strong bonds with many of them.

In 1985, Shaul was offered a professorship at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, not far from Washington. We moved again and purchased a house in Potomac, Maryland; but for the next few years I continued to teach at Princeton, and Shaul and I took turns commuting between Princeton and the Washington area.

In 1992, my teaching came to an end. I used two back-to-back fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center to write my book Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Based on interviews, the book profiled a number of Iranian women and the strategies by which they coped with the revolutionary upheaval in Iran. At the end of my Wilson Center fellowship, Robert Litwak, who directed the Division for International Studies, asked me to join his team on a parttime basis to start a small project on the Middle East. I plunged into my new task with energy. We began very modestly, but within a few years, the Middle East Program was one of the most active in the Washington area. We organized seminars, lectures, and conferences and invited speakers and participants from the Middle East, including Iran. I was pleased to be fostering dialogue between Iranians and Americans. I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, that such work could be construed as subversive by the country of my birth.

But as Ja’fari’s summons on that January morning reminded me, this was precisely the prospect I faced as I prepared for another round of interrogations at the Intelligence Ministry.

4. THE INTERROGATION

MR. JA’FARI HAD GIVEN ME an address in affluent north Tehran, off Africa Avenue. I realized when I stepped out of my taxi that this was a building I knew, even though I had never been inside. Before the revolution, it had been the home of a member of one of Iran’s leading industrial families. The house had been modeled after the Petit Trianon, the eighteenth-century palace Louis XV had built for his mistress Madame de Pompadour at Versailles, outside Paris. Expropriated by the new regime after the Islamic Revolution, it had been used for a time as a rehabilitation center for prostitutes. Rooms where the family had lived, raised children, and entertained their well-heeled guests were now a Ministry of Intelligence interrogation center. The walls around the garden were topped by barbed wire, naked and jagged against the blue Tehran sky.

The Intelligence Ministry has houses like these—anonymous, tucked away in residential areas—scattered about Tehran. The ministry, friends told me, even has rooms and suites in hotels, to keep an eye on foreign visitors and fellow Iranians. It was not uncommon, they said, to be summoned to a hotel for questioning.

I went not to the main gate of the “Petit Trianon” but, as instructed, to a side door, which had perhaps served as the servants’ entrance in the old days. A small sign by the door said only Passport Office—the kind of circumlocution beloved by the Intelligence Ministry, as if they wished to hide from Iranians and even from themselves the nature of their reprehensible business. Ministry of Intelligence offices in various government buildings were called “the President’s Bureaus.” My interrogator, Ja’fari, referred to himself and was known to others as the karshenas, “the specialist.” His superior didn’t have a name at all and was known simply as Hajj Agha, an honorific for a man who had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca.

I rang the bell. The door was opened by remote control. A young soldier in a glass cubicle set aside the book he was reading, took down my name and other particulars, carefully noted the time of my arrival, and pressed another buzzer to open a door to my right. I hardly knew what to anticipate.

I walked into a large, windowless waiting room. It was furnished with easy chairs and a sofa. In one corner a TV was broadcasting a program on some Iranian province; unread newspapers sat on a coffee table by the sofa. A man I took to be the receptionist sat behind a desk, on a slightly raised platform facing the door. To his right, a closed door led to what turned out to be a series of interrogation rooms. I went up to the receptionist (I realized only later he, too, was a senior intelligence officer) and gave Ja’fari’s name. He was untypically polite, even standing as I walked in the room. “Why does Mr. Ja’fari want to see you?” he asked. I explained what had happened to me on the night of December 30. He listened very carefully. “Everything will be okay,” he said. “But please answer the questions they will ask you truthfully.” I nodded.

He invited me to have a seat. I chose the brown sofa closest to the exit, despite knowing that the door was locked, and that I would leave only when they decided to let me go. I recalled the Persian saying: “Your coming is in your hands, but your leaving is in the hands of God.” In my case, leaving was in the hands of the Intelligence Ministry’s agents.

The room was warm. I removed my raincoat and sat in the black robe I was wearing over my pants and T-shirt. As usual, I was early, nervous that Tehran’s chaotic traffic would make me miss my appointment. I spent a desultory half hour waiting for Ja’fari, unable to concentrate enough to read the day’s headlines. The door opened, and a woman wrapped in a chador walked in. She went straight to the receptionist and in a loud voice said, “When will you let go of my brother? You have held him long enough. I have not seen him since you took him in. What are you doing to him?” My heart sank. The building, I thought, must have its own detention facility. I had heard reports that the Intelligence Ministry, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij paramilitary forces, and shadowy vigilante groups maintained their own detention centers all over the city.

The door opened again to let in a young man who seemed familiar with the place, as if he had been here on numerous occasions. He was soon summoned inside by a middle-aged man in a dark suit, sandals, and no tie. Through the now-open door behind the receptionist’s desk, I caught a glimpse of Ja’fari, carrying his laptop case on his shoulder, moving toward an interrogation room. My turn had come. The man behind the desk called my name, “Khanum Esfandiari”—Ms. Esfandiari—and directed me to the room Ja’fari now occupied.

MR. JA’FARI

I walked in through the open door and heard Ja’fari’s unmistakable voice: “Salaam”—Good morning. His salaam was curt, elided to one syllable. He was sitting behind a long desk; his laptop was already open before him and he was removing papers from an attaché case, which sat on the floor next to his chair. He asked me to tell him again what had happened on the night of the robbery. He had heard my account before and was probably trying to catch me in inconsistencies. Instead, I saw an opening. “I am very disturbed,” I said. “I need my passport. I want to rejoin my family.” Since I was a resident abroad, I insisted, they should be able to issue me a new passport in a few days. I also asked his help in retrieving my belongings. “The men who robbed me were rude; they threatened me. How can such a thing happen on the road to the airport?” I had by now reluctantly concluded that agents of the Intelligence Ministry had staged the “robbery.” Ja’fari’s summons had hardened my gnawing suspicion into certainty. I wanted Ja’fari to know that I suspected the truth.

Ja’fari was unmoved. “Where you live is of no importance. We don’t have first- and second-class citizens in the Islamic Republic.” The law, he noted, says an Iranian has to wait six months to replace a lost or stolen passport. “That is how long it will take.” As to my belongings, he referred me, as he had done before, to the agahi, the detective branch of the national police. I felt certain that Ja’fari and his colleagues had already combed through my belongings, dividing my clothes and knickknacks among their wives.

With the formalities over, Ja’fari began to question me in detail about my career in Iran before the revolution, including my years with Kayhan (this once relatively liberal newspaper had become the organ of the most hard-line elements in the Islamic Republic and a mouthpiece for the security services), with the Women’s Organization of Iran, and with the Shahbanou Farah Foundation.

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