The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran

by Majd, Hooman

  I rose from my chair and followed him a short distance, out of earshot of the rest of the party, wondering how he knew my name. Could it be that the hotel’s shabbiness masked a level of customer service more common at Claridge’s or the Ritz? Certainly not. So what could he possibly want?

  “Mr. Majd,” the doorman repeated. “I advise you not to hang around the Americans very much.”

  I was a little shocked, immediately realizing that he was an informer, presumably for the Ministry of Intelligence but perhaps for one of the other intelligence services. “Well, I’m here with them, working. I can’t exactly avoid them.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s better that you don’t associate with them.”

  “That’s not possible—we’re traveling together,” I repeated, “and I’m here to work with them.”

  “Friendly advice, that’s all.” He nodded, then turned away. Friendly advice indeed, from a Tehran hotel doorman, no less.

  “I’ll try,” I said to his back, “but I wonder if you could answer a question no one else at the hotel seems to be able to.”

  “What is it?” he said, stopping.

  “Why are all the electrical outlets in the hotel British-style ones?” I asked. “I mean, no traveler brings British plugs to Iran. British plugs.”

  “We have converters.”

  “I know, but why are the outlets three-pronged to begin with?” I couldn’t resist making the dig, partly because of my anger and frustration with the authorities but also because I wanted to throw something at them that they couldn’t defend. Iranians in general and the revolutionaries in particular hate the British government more than any other.

  He shook his head and returned to his station at the door, probably aware that I was needling him but refusing to acknowledge it.

  It was Friday, the Sabbath, and my meeting with my interrogators was still a full day away. I wondered what I should do, knowing that I was being watched in the hotel, and that my movements outside would probably also be monitored. Since the NBC crew were allowed only to conduct the interview with Jalili—which had by now been rescheduled for Saturday morning—and had no authority to work anywhere else in the city, they were going to stay at the hotel all day. I decided to go out and visit friends.

  Getting around sprawling and densely populated Tehran, with its paralyzing traffic and lack of order, is a feat even on daytime Fridays, and I spent much of the day, and into the evening, in taxis. Pollution, which only goes from bad to worse in Tehran, was headache-inducing that winter, due to an inversion layer common in cities surrounded by mountains, but was the throbbing in my temples due solely to the fumes and caustic air, or was the prospect of an interrogation by infamously ill-tempered intelligence officials the following morning causing my brain to object? That morning I had spoken to Ali Khatami, former president Mohammad Khatami’s brother and chief of staff, and I planned to meet him and our mutual friend Sadegh Kharrazi, another former official, later in the evening. That visit, I was sure, would be duly recorded as a mark against me by the intelligence community—Ali and Sadegh were notoriously liberal reformists. But Ali was also a relative, I reasoned, so they couldn’t possibly be too disturbed by my seeing him and Sadegh, who was untouchable due to his incongruously close relationship, familial and otherwise, with the Supreme Leader.

  When I told them that I had been summoned, Sadegh gave me a knowing smile. “Welcome to Iran,” he said. “This isn’t Switzerland.” No kidding, I thought. Ali wanted me to call him as soon as my interrogation was over, to be sure that everything was okay, and I told him I would. I also told him I didn’t think, under the circumstances, that it would be wise for me to pay ex-president Khatami a visit on this short trip, either for him or for me. Ali agreed, and I wondered whether he was more worried about me or his brother. I suspect it was both.

  The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the overseer of all cultural activities in the Islamic Republic (and always known to Iranians simply as Ershad, or “guidance”), including news media activities, keeps its foreign media offices on Eighth Street and Ghaem Magham, across from the Tehran Clinic, a famous hospital in central Tehran. I had made many visits to Ershad in the past, but today for the first time the Tehran Clinic’s proximity struck me as convenient in case of a serious medical emergency following a summons to the ministry. From the taxi window I looked out at the bustle of the city, wondering how ordinary Tehranis could appear to be so completely unconcerned with what Iran had become since the elections of 2009: a police state behind a veneer of freedom—“Islamic” freedom, that is—that the regime claimed to offer its citizens. A police state had long existed in Iran, of course, but now it had taken on a malicious and bellicose form unseen or felt since the early 1990s.

  I arrived a few minutes before nine, and I was indeed expected. The guards in the lobby took my Iranian national ID card and told me to go upstairs to the journalists’ office. So even the guards—who normally would ask with suspicion what I was there for and whom I wanted to see—knew I had been summoned. Were they intelligence ministry informers, too? I took the stairs to the second floor and stepped into the office I had visited on previous trips to obtain my press passes. The young male secretary was also expecting me, it seemed, and politely asked me to take a seat. Tea arrived out of nowhere.

  After about half an hour, the deputy head of the foreign reporters’ bureau, the gentle and ever polite Mohammad Shiravi, walked in and said hello. Holding a glass of tea himself and wearing an Ahmadinejad-style windbreaker, he wandered in and out of the reception area looking a bit uncomfortable, then finally told me that I should wait in his office. I had known Shiravi to be a liberal—by Islamic Republic standards—and I wondered if his choice of jacket had shielded him from the purges at the ministry after the 2009 elections and the appointment of the president’s arch-conservative ally Mohammad Hosseini to the post of minister. (Mohammad Javad Aghajari, Shiravi’s immediate boss and the man ultimately responsible for foreign correspondent activity in Iran, was a reliable conservative with no suspicious liberal leanings.)

  I followed Shiravi into his office and sat down on a sofa. He left, closing the door firmly behind him. Again, a glass of tea appeared, this time with a plate of biscuits. He was not going to be the one to interview me, and whoever was had to be important enough in the intelligence services to kick him out of his own office. I waited another fifteen or twenty minutes, staring at the large jug of ice water on the coffee table before me: large drops formed on its outside surface in the overheated room, trickled slowly down the side, and plunged into the saucer under the jug. Sweat.

  The door opened and two men walked in, an older one with a full beard and a younger one almost clean-shaven, both wearing badly mismatched gray jackets and trousers that seemed to be the uniform of choice for government employees below the rank of minister (and sometimes minister, too, depending on how much he wanted to associate himself with the downtrodden of society). I rose to shake their hands and noticed the younger one had a deformity on one hand. Injured in the Iran-Iraq War? I wondered automatically. Nah—he was too young to have fought. They sat down in armchairs across from me without introducing themselves, not even with a fake name like Mohammadi or some other commonplace but very Islamic name of the sort that intelligence officers seem to favor. Both held thick files in their laps.

  “You wrote this article,” the younger man said, opening his file and looking over some pages, “and you didn’t have a press pass.”

  “What article?” I asked.

  “About your trip here eight months ago. The nuclear conference.” He sucked air audibly, biting the tip of his tongue with his front teeth at the end of every sentence—an annoying tic. The article he was referring to was one I had written for Foreign Policy magazine, on an international “nuclear conference” that the government had held the prior year to trumpet nuclear advances and to reaffirm that those advances were for peaceful purposes. The conference had been boring, a show of prop
aganda, and very little of my long article was about the conference itself.

  “I did have a press pass,” I said. “The Foreign Ministry issued it to me at the conference, and I was with the media in the press box.”

  “The Foreign Ministry does not issue press passes,” he snarled. “You know that.” Hiss.

  “I don’t,” I said. “The Iranian mission to the UN told me that I could pick up my press pass at the conference, and I did, the morning I arrived.”

  “I just told you the Foreign Ministry has nothing to do with press credentials.” Again, hiss.

  “Well, that’s not my fault—I live in New York, and I have to go through them to get credentials.”

  “Just because you have an Iranian passport doesn’t mean you can come here and write whatever you want when you leave—”

  The older man gestured for him to stop and picked up a paper from his own file. “Listen,” he said, “here you refer to the president as being a part of a ‘circus.’ Why do you make fun of the president of the country? And you even once translated for him at the UN!” He sounded almost hurt. I had indeed translated for Ahmadinejad at the UN, but I wondered if my interrogator understood that it was for a cover story for The New York Observer in 2006, complete with unflattering caricatures of the easily caricatured president, and not an expression of admiration or support for the president. This interrogator was softer-spoken, clearly the “good cop” to the other’s “bad cop,” but in truth it was really more a case of “bad cop, worse cop,” and like much else in Iran, the concept had lost something in translation.

  He was referring to a piece I had written a few months before, about Ahmadinejad’s 2010 trip to attend the UN General Assembly, in which I had called the yearly presence of the Iranian president in New York, along with the attendant publicity, the “Ahmadinejad circus.” Since exile Iranians sometimes likened Ahmadinejad to a chimp, and since cartoons on opposition Web sites lampooned him as such, I could see why the Intelligence Ministry was sensitive to the word circus. I patiently explained that it wasn’t a reference to the president himself, and that in English it wasn’t necessarily pejorative. He seemed unconvinced.

  “Here in your second book,” said the worse cop, “you insult the president again.” He read aloud a paragraph in Farsi.

  “That’s not my translation,” I said. “I don’t read or write Farsi well enough to write in the language. My book is in English.”

  “That what I expected you to say,” he snorted. “Typical response—avoid responsibility by saying you wrote in English, or it wasn’t you, that it was your editor who made you write it.”

  “It wasn’t my editor,” I said, “but it’s true that I wrote the book in English. Do you have the English copy?”

  He clearly didn’t, but instead of saying so, he sucked air rapidly through his teeth and shifted his weight.

  The bad cop took over. For the next three hours we went back and forth, as the bad cop and the worse cop accused me of “unpatriotic” writing at best and seditious acts at worst. Almost everything I had written in the past seemed to be at their fingertips; each would pull a sheet out of his file and wave it in the air as if it were a piece of evidence being presented to a judge. I kept glancing at the sweating jug of water, wanting to pour some for myself but refraining from doing so, not wanting the two men to think I was nervous. In my mind, I praised the power of American antiperspirants.

  “You Iranians who live abroad think you can say anything, unconcerned with our national security, don’t you?” the worse cop said toward the end. “Have you changed your mind now?”

  “About what?” I asked, careful to say it politely.

  “About your writing!” He was almost shouting.

  “Well, um,” I replied, “I change my mind frequently about things as I learn something new, yes. But I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Oh, so a ‘journalist’ can change his mind? Really?” He said the word journalist mockingly, as if he really wanted to say spy.

  “Well, yes,” I said.

  He merely grunted, unconvinced.

  When they finally closed their files, I knew we were almost at the end of the interrogation, and besides, it was past lunchtime and no one in Iran, not even secret policemen on a mission, will miss their lunch.

  “Who have you seen while you’ve been here?” asked the worse cop, leaning back and hissing through his teeth again.

  “My friends Khosro Etemadi [an old college friend whom I often stay with in Iran] and Mr. Kharrazi [a former diplomat and powerful, albeit reformist, political figure].” I don’t know why I didn’t mention Ali Khatami—I suppose I thought the name Khatami might send them into convulsions—and I was a little surprised that they didn’t bring it up themselves.

  “Which Mr. Kharrazi?”

  “Sadegh.”

  He curled his lips, but didn’t say anything. He wasn’t going to disparage a man close to the Supreme Leader, no matter what his opinion of him was. “And when are you leaving?”

  “Tonight. Actually, the flight leaves after midnight, so technically tomorrow.”

  “Don’t miss your flight,” he said firmly.

  “So this NBC crew you came with,” said the bad cop. “They are interviewing Dr. Jalili?”

  “Yes, and hoping that they can visit the Tehran nuclear reactor.”

  “And you want to go with them?”

  “Yes, I do, but if it’s not possible, then I won’t. I’ll just see friends and family.”

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “You can go with them.” The worse cop, the younger man, was turning into a veritable good cop now.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, why not?” He squinted at me as if he were sizing me up before a boxing match.

  “Okay.” I stood up as they did and shook their reluctant hands. “One other thing,” I said. “I won’t have any trouble at the airport—leaving, I mean—will I?”

  “No,” they both said, shaking their heads. “It’ll be taken care of,” added the now-good cop.

  “I’m coming back in a few weeks, with my American wife and child, for an extended stay,” I said. “I won’t have trouble at the airport then, or will I?”

  “Why should you have trouble?” asked the worse cop, with a sneer. “What are you coming for? To cause trouble? Or maybe to gather information?”

  “To spend time here with my family,” I said. “Not as a reporter.”

  “Then you won’t have any trouble,” he said. “Now, you won’t write about our little meeting here, will you? As a journalist?” he added. It wasn’t a question. “You won’t, because you want to come back with your wife and child.” He stared straight into my eyes.

  “No, I won’t write about it,” I lied.

  They left the room and closed the door, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what to do. My session had been remarkably mild, I thought, compared to what others had gone through, especially the political prisoners who had been interrogated at Evin, the notorious prison, in the aftermath of the 2009 elections. But the meeting still spoke to the extreme paranoia the regime felt since those elections. That paranoia brought it a big step closer from being an authoritarian state that made a good pretense of allowing some political discourse to being a complete dictatorship that brooked no dissent whatsoever. I walked out the door, said goodbye to Shiravi—who looked extremely uncomfortable standing outside his door, glass of tea still in his hand—and left the building.

  I walked for a while, still wondering if coming back to Iran—with my family—would be a good idea. I believed the intelligence officers when they said it wouldn’t be a problem, but they were warning me, too: if I overstepped my bounds—and who knew exactly what those bounds were?—I would be in trouble. Yet this was Iran, thirty-two years after a successful revolution and two years after an arguably unsuccessful one, and not much was new in terms of the ambiguities, the unknowns, and the maddeningly contradictory behavior of government officials. It was still an Iran
I could recognize. I believed, as I had for many years, that despite the brutality, the arrests, and the crackdown on civil liberties as well as the press, powerful figures within Iran were working to advance a more democratic future. Perhaps naïvely, I wanted to be hopeful, rather than—like many of my compatriots who had become apathetic after the Green Movement, even toward the Arab Spring evolving in their own backyard—resigned to the fact that Iran’s destiny was to forever be in the grip of tyranny. I was coming back, even if it could end up being my last trip.

  The NBC crew was interviewing Jalili, so I was in no hurry to get back to the hotel. But since I had been given permission to visit the Tehran reactor, I did need to contact them and find out if and when they were going. No sooner had I gotten into a taxi than my phone rang. It was NBC’s Tehran bureau chief, telling me they had finished their interview and were to go to the reactor the next morning. That meant we’d have to change flights. I said I had been told I could go with them and would see them later at the hotel.

  Fifteen minutes later I received a call from an “unknown” caller, who had to be a government official, as no one else is allowed to block his or her number from caller ID recognition in Iran. “Mr. Majd?”

  “Yes?” The caller did not introduce himself.

  “You are not permitted to visit the Tehran nuclear reactor.”

  “But I was just told I could,” I protested.

  “No, you may not.”

  “If you say so,” I said, “but the gentlemen I spoke to this morning specifically said it would be all right—”

  “I just told you no,” said the man, sounding a little angry. “Just go and visit friends and family, and then go home. Why not just have a good time in Tehran?”

  I shook my head as I hung up. What kind of country was this, where you couldn’t even trust the intelligence officers interrogating you to say what is permitted and what is not? Had they intentionally been fucking with my mind, or had they been overruled afterward? Did someone really suspect that I might be a spy, and that the nuclear reactor—built in the 1970s by Americans, actually—was just too sensitive a location to allow me a peek? Gee, I thought, when did I become so damn important?