The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (10 page)

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 population: 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.

He did eventually return to Islamic Iran to clear his name: he had to endure a sort of trial at the Foreign Ministry, rather than in the notorious revolutionary courts, at which he was only partially successful in establishing his innocence. He was accused of serving alcohol at the embassy while he was ambassador, which he openly admitted and which he pointed out was not illegal under the shah; and he was accused of having a close relationship with the nowhated shah, which wasn’t true and which he of course denied. After the revolution and the ransacking of the shah’s offices, zealous revolutionaries had amassed thousands of the shah’s personal papers related to affairs of state, and among them they had found handwritten notes signed by my father. He was surprised that his notes, which were addressed to his boss, the foreign minister, and not the shah, had ended up in the shah’s office and personal papers, but the reason was simple: the always honorable Khalatbari, rather than present my father’s opinions and positive findings to the shah as his own, something many if not most politicians would have done, had simply delivered my father’s messages directly to the shah in his weekly meetings. This was beyond the comprehension of the revolutionaries. Khalatbari was a career diplomat with no strong political leanings, but much to my father’s dismay and utter sadness, he had been executed days after the revolution. At the conclusion of his own trial, my father was fired, rather than retired, from the Foreign Ministry he had served and loved. And now my father could sulk again.