The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran
Page 7
Despite the similarities of the vehicles and their random placement in the queue, which could not possibly be the same as it was when they dropped off the boys in the morning, the children fly out of the yard and rush to their cars blindly, the conductor only making sure that motorcycles snaking their way through the traffic don’t run them over, and pile into the taxis that are often shared by three or four families—without a glance at the drivers, who all look the same anyway in their short Ahmadinejad haircuts, three-day-old beard growth, and short-sleeved dress shirts. Within fifteen minutes the school is quiet; the conductor, his surprisingly gentle manner with the unruly boys no longer on display, is on his own motorbike, looking like a giant on a toy tricycle, and is heading home; and the street is back to its normal, relatively calm state of a constant stream of cars and motorbikes zooming by the house.
The noise from the school, early in the morning and louder in midafternoon, didn’t particularly bother me or Karri, perhaps because our own son now provides plenty of immature vocal accompaniment to our daily auditory experience. But the charm of the scene, which so vividly illustrates the ability of Tehranis to make order out of chaos, has eluded childless Khosro, whose life is still centered on the street of his childhood, and who forever has to put up with the din of traffic that barely existed even in his recent memory. He complained about it all the time, and even more about those infernal two-wheeled machines called motor in Iran, and still more about what the country, and his city, had come to. It was an early taste for Karri of the ever-griping Iranian, who incongruously laments change while rejecting traditions he or she views as backward (sheep’s milk yogurt, just for one example) and while deploring the persistence of the class structure that was the norm in Khosro’s childhood. “No one would ride a motor when I was young,” Khosro told Karri haughtily, “for doing so was awfully lower class.” Savagery and charm are in the eye of the beholder on this once-elegant street of mansions and homes and once-peaceful gardens, behind now mostly crumbling walls.
4
THE BIG SULK
Ghahr. Ghahr, ghahr, ta roozeh ghiamat, ghahr. “Sulk, sulk, until the day of reckoning, sulk.” And boy, do Iranians know how to sulk. Sulking is a high art among them, and they do not limit it to personal relationships or dysfunctional families, as much of the world came to understand in the spring of 2011, when the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the bête noir of Western leaders, went on a public sulk for eleven days. He did so soon after we arrived for our stay in Iran, and naturally it was the only talk of the town, in a society as obsessed with the dynamics of its internal politics as it is with enforcing social behavior. Ahmadinejad, like virtually every Iranian politician before him, had indulged in minor sulks before, but this time he went all out, in a power play that he must have known he was destined to lose. But then, Iranian sulking isn’t always about seeking immediate rewards, as we Iranians knew. And Ahmadinejad, the loser in this very Persian game of sulking, may have ultimately gotten what he really wanted out of his little episode.
What transpired to bring about the sulk was this: sometime in early 2011 (at the start of the Persian year), Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie—the bête noir (everybody in Iran seems to be a bête noir of sorts, whether to a domestic audience or an international one) of other conservatives for his unorthodox views on Islam, social attitudes, and Iran-centric nationalistic sentiments—discovered that the Intelligence Ministry had been bugging his office. (Why was that a big surprise to him? many Iranians wondered. What did he think had been going on in the last thirty years of the paranoid, sometimes schizophrenic, Islamic Republic?) The deputy minister who informed him of this was an Ahmadinejad loyalist, while the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, was a cleric, in effect appointed by the Supreme Leader and therefore loyal to no one but him. As the vali-e-faqih, or supreme jurisprudent, the Supreme Leader’s title leaves no room for interpretation, even by a rascally president. So when Moslehi discovered that a deputy had been giving information to the Ahmadinejad camp, he fired him. Mashaie, incensed, called Moslehi and told him that he could not fire the deputy and in fact should himself resign immediately, per the president’s order.
Here is where it got complicated. Under the Iranian constitution, the president is in charge of the cabinet, which includes the intelligence minister. But this is the Islamic Republic and not Switzerland, as I have been reminded, and when it comes to the Intelligence, Interior, and Foreign Ministries, he is only nominally in charge. Ahmadinejad had already infuriated the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, by firing the foreign minister without permission a few months prior—presenting it as a fait accompli that the Supreme Leader had no choice but to go along with, given that he had so forcefully backed Ahmadinejad in the disputed 2009 elections and couldn’t really be seen to publicly disagree with the man whose election he had deemed a “divine” decision. This time, however—perhaps because enough time had passed since the elections and the wave of protests that followed, or perhaps because Khamenei felt he had to put the president in his place, if only to avoid setting a dangerous precedent where a president might presume he really is in charge—the Supreme Leader reinstated Moslehi as intelligence minister, telling him to continue to work as if nothing had transpired.
An uncomfortable situation for all concerned, to say the least: ghahr, ghahr, ta roozeh ghiamat, ghahr. Ahmadinejad then did what any self-respecting Iranian would do when given offense: he sulked. He had no choice, really. He couldn’t disobey the Supreme Leader, who isn’t called Supreme for nothing. He also couldn’t bow down and admit he’d been wrong, which would mean weakening himself in the eyes of his supporters as well as the general public, whom he had been desperate to woo since the Green Movement protests of 2009 showed how unpopular he was among a segment of society—upper-middle-class Iranians—with powerful economic interests and matching bank accounts. So he retreated to his home, refused to go to work or to attend cabinet meetings, and declined to comment or to talk to anyone about the affair. Sort of like the “I want to spend more time with my family” line that Western politicians peddle when they’re retiring, or being forced to retire, from public life—which Ahmadinejad also claimed later, along with exhaustion, as his excuse. Except Ahmadinejad did talk to Ayatollah Jannati, the hard-line octogenarian mullah, a close confidant of the Supreme Leader and someone whom the Iranian secular class mocks not only for his too-often-preposterous views on everything from true Islamic values to the healthy state of democracy in Iran, but also for his capacity to have looked the same age for some thirty years now. Jannati, a onetime supporter of the president, was undoubtedly hoping to remind Ahmadinejad that he held a subservient role in Iranian politics, and Ahmadinejad was undoubtedly hoping to persuade, or threaten, the clerical leadership that he was not to be messed with. According to sources close to Jannati, and to text messages subsequently leaked to the cell phones of Iran’s inquiring minds (in Iran every tidbit of political intrigue somehow makes the round of cell phones, forwarded and reforwarded by everyone almost as fast as a tweet in the West), Ahmadinejad had whined in his meeting, complaining that he should be allowed to have his say over the Supreme Leader because in the 2009 elections he would have received 35 million votes instead of 25 million if it hadn’t been for the Supreme Leader’s support, which he claimed degraded his standing among voters. Voters in Iran famously ignored the Supreme Leader’s wishes in the elections of 1997 and 2001, which former president Khatami won in landslides, but no one had up until now suggested that one could win in a landslide if not for the Leader’s support. But this was Ahmadinejad, who is either as delusional as some people believe, or a cunning operator who knows how to cajole, needle, and threaten his opponents into submission. Telling Jannati (which was the same as telling Khamenei) that the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution cost him votes was about as big a fuck you to him—the Supreme Leader, that is—as anyone has dared to utter in the entire history of the republic. This fact was not lost on the po
pulation: Ahmadinejad’s popularity actually grew because of his sulk and the insults, spoken and unspoken, that he had hurled at the Supreme Leader. The nezam, the system or regime, then came down harshly on Ahmadinejad through the state-controlled media, and even some reformists or people who had joined or sympathized with the Green Movement expressed to me a certain satisfaction that the pugnacious little president had challenged the emperor, not on the fact that he had no clothes, but on the notion of what exactly their so-called democracy was supposed to be. Okay, also on the fact that that the emperor had no clothes, or that his clothes were getting a little musty.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knew, of course, that he wouldn’t win in an outright battle with the Supreme Leader and the old men who wielded real power in Iran. Despite having its first lay president in a generation, Iran was still controlled by the mosque, and its byzantine and even Orwellian political structure that laid ultimate authority at the feet of one ayatollah remained unchanged. Yes, that system’s separation of powers in theory means that the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative branches are independent, and Islamic Iran has other layers too—importantly, the Guardian Council, a body consisting of six clerics directly appointed by the Supreme Leader and six jurists charged with interpreting the constitution, who have the power to veto any legislation passed by the parliament, or Majles. There are also two other bodies: the Expediency Discernment Council, an assembly appointed by the Supreme Leader that is charged with settling disputes between the Majles and the Guardian Council, and the Assembly of Experts, a directly elected body of senior clerics, mostly in their old age, who are charged with choosing Supreme Leaders and monitoring their performance—a Shia politburo, if you will, but one that has always remained loyal to the Supreme Leader and endorsed his policies.
So Ahmadinejad wouldn’t be able to fire the minister of intelligence if the Supreme Leader decided it was against “expediency”—the exact word used by hard-line conservatives to defend the Leader’s blatant, direct, and public interference in the affairs of an administration that in the past had only ever been subtle, indirect, and private with the full and confidential compliance of the presidents. But Ahmadinejad was going to gain something from the sulk, for as much as Khamenei was unwilling to tolerate a president going rogue, Ahmadinejad knew that he also couldn’t tolerate another political upheaval, which would likely come to pass if the sulk turned into a resignation or if Parliament impeached him as a result of his challenge to the Leader. Impeachment—which Sadegh Kharrazi, a close associate of the Supreme Leader, related by marriage even, who is also a staunch reformist (the Supreme Leader has never completely disassociated himself from reformists), once told me would occur if Ahmadinejad won the 2009 elections and strayed one inch from his designated operating sphere—was essentially out of the picture if the president came out of his sulk.
More important, his most trusted aide, the spied-upon Mashaie, whom he had been prevented from appointing vice president in 2009 by Khamenei and who after two years of withering attacks against him was now in danger of being arrested for, among other things, sorcery and leading a “deviant” current in Iranian politics, would gain a certain immunity from actual prosecution whenever Ahmadinejad deigned to return to work. Ahmadinejad had planned his sulk and knew the cards he was holding. Many observers, both in Iran and in the West, thought that Mashaie, whose daughter is married to Ahmadinejad’s son, wouldn’t survive and that Ahmadinejad, even if he survived himself, would have to sacrifice his in-law to remain in his post. But as in almost every media analysis of Iranian politics, either Ahmadinejad’s wile was underestimated or Iran was simply misread.
While there was no question that the Iranian president had been weakened by losing the support of many hard-line politicians and clerics, he crucially had strengthened himself against what Kharrazi had once predicted, and he had saved his most trusted aide from the ignominy of sharing a prison compound with Iranian reformists and even ordinary civil protesters—people he had, indirectly at a minimum, helped put in shackles over the last two years.
The big sulk was big news all over the world, which continued to take a keen interest in anything Iran-related, nuclear or otherwise. Iranians in Tehran had mixed reactions, ranging from schadenfreude (on the part of those who despised Ahmadinejad and who reveled now as the cocky president seemed to be on the slope to political irrelevance or worse) to sudden support (on the part of those who hated the man he challenged even more than they hated him). But life in Iran went on as usual: despite Iranians’ preoccupation with politics, as entertaining as they can often be in Tehran, the episode brought neither the government nor the people to a halt. Not even a pause. As Khosro likes to remark whenever a scandal, an uprising (as in the Green Movement), a putsch, or anything else excites the media: “Absolutely nothing will happen.” And he’s often right.
Karri’s immediate concern during the big sulk was finding an apartment for us to move into, in a neighborhood that had a better supply of oxygen, and perhaps a more constant supply of natural, if not organic, foods. But as we focused on our future, I was also pulled into the past, reminded of the sulk that my own father had employed years ago as a foreign service officer, when I was a freshman in college.
My father was a career diplomat, having joined the Foreign Ministry with a law degree before I was born, at a time when it had only a few hundred employees, few of them actually fluent in foreign languages, and not many embassies abroad. In the early 1970s, he was assigned as DCM, deputy chief of mission, to Washington, D.C., to work under the ambassador, Ardeshir Zahedi, who was a close confidant of the shah. (Zahedi was once married to the shah’s daughter and fathered the king’s only grandchild while the shah was alive. He was the son of a general who had been instrumental in returning the shah to his throne in the CIA-sponsored 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq.) It was a prestige post, to be sure, but my father probably didn’t know what he was getting himself into, or didn’t imagine the complications that would arise from working with both Zahedi and the foreign minister, Abbas-Ali Khalatbari. The two men didn’t speak to each other—their own form of sulking. Zahedi had been the foreign minister prior to Khalatbari’s appointment, at a time when he famously didn’t speak to the prime minister, Abbas Hoveyda, either.
Zahedi’s close relationship to the shah meant that he could get away with his silent treatment of those he deemed either rivals or beneath him, but my father was a friend of Khalatbari’s, the embassy in Washington was Iran’s most important, and the lack of dialogue between the ambassador and the foreign minister meant a highly stressful work environment for anyone trying to actually work. Sulks all around, but they didn’t matter, for the shah was the only person who counted back then, especially when it came to U.S.-Iran relations. Zahedi spoke regularly with the shah—he may in fact have been the only Iranian who could reliably get the monarch on the phone at will—and was a popular figure in Washington society for the lavish caviar-fueled parties he threw and for his own oozing charm, which snared the likes of Elizabeth Taylor into a short-lived tryst and attracted other Hollywood types, who my father cared little for, to the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue.
For a serious political officer like my father (who nonetheless enjoyed a good party as much as the next Iranian, and boy do we like our parties), working under such conditions at the Imperial Embassy in Washington, which I thought enormously fun and perfectly reasonable—in fact, a good reason to join the foreign service myself—soon became intolerable. His requests for relief, a transfer perhaps, were not taken seriously by the ministry, nor was his frustration appreciated much by Zahedi, who was far too busy socially and in frequent conversations with more important people, like the shah, for example. Zahedi had always been a virtuoso at romancing U.S. congressmen and Hollywood stars, all in the name of promoting Iran as the next best thing to ’53 Dom Perignon, Havana cigars, and the finest Iranian Beluga, which he generously served at his mansion on embassy row in truly obscene
amounts (and I mean kilos).
So my father did what only an Iranian with supreme confidence in his indispensable talents would do: he requested retirement. Mind you, he wasn’t even fifty yet, although he was eligible for retirement according to Foreign Ministry regulations. He made a convincing case to my mother and myself that he would indeed be happy as a retiree, but I think we both knew that he wouldn’t, and that his “retirement,” more precisely his sulk, would last only a short while.
Khalatbari, over the objections of Zahedi (who probably thought my father had taken leave of his senses, as my mother and I did—in the booming Iran of the 1970s no one voluntarily left a senior government job), agreed to let my father take a leave of absence in London, after it became clear that he wouldn’t take no for an answer unless something better than retirement was on offer. The foreign minister essentially agreed to a sulk for a time, away from Tehran, until a final determination could be made on whether to call my father’s bluff or to fold. Iranians don’t claim to have invented poker, unlike almost everything else good or interesting, but they do bet, call, bluff, and fold in their everyday lives. Every day.
My father’s sulk lasted less than a year. In a sign to his bosses in Tehran that his sulk was serious, he grew a beard—a big no-no in the government of the shah, who hated facial hair more than he hated monogamy. (The Islamic government to come would hate the lack of a beard more than it hated the shah. If Ahmadinejad had shaved during his eleven-day sulk, he might have been taken more seriously than he was, and he would have gained even more supporters among the secular elite, but it probably never crossed his mind.) In the end, Khalatbari lured my father back to Tehran with a senior post at the ministry, meant as a temporary sojourn before he would be named ambassador somewhere, but somewhere good, dammit, or another sulk. My mother and much younger sister didn’t even go to Tehran, thinking his appointment there would be very short-lived, or else he would return to London to sulk. My father spent his time between the ministry and a hotel, then was offered the ambassadorship to Tokyo, a prestigious post for Iranians if only because the shah rather fancied and placed great importance on countries that also had emperors whose subjects thought of them as gods. His four-year posting to Japan, which was interrupted by the Islamic Revolution two years later, however, may have contributed to his being deemed either persona non grata or persona-in-Evin-prison for a few years after the revolution.