Elaine Sciolino

New York Times Correspondent,

Author, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran

Thank you very much, Curtis, and thank you, Diane.  Thank you to the World Affairs Council for having me here this evening and a special thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Fathi.  Mr. Fathi is a guest tonight whose first cousin is the New York Times Special Correspondent in Tehran and who was my helpmate and partner throughout the process.   I also want to thank my dear friend, Nancy Hunt, for coming tonight.  We go back to being friends since we were fourteen.  So it’s nice to have somebody who’s going to smile and laugh at my jokes in the audience.

Diane mentioned my first encounter with Iran, which was Ayatollah Khomeini’s flight back to Tehran.  So I thought I’d start my remarks with that eventful flight.  It was even more dangerous than I thought it was at the time.  It turns out that the head of the Iranian Air Force actually had a plan to blow up the plane, and he took the plan to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter’s National Security Advisor, who took the plan to President Carter.  Now, President Carter wanted to have nothing to do with such an operation, but the Carter Administration did not tell the Iranians “No,” so history could have been very different.  The Ayatollah Khomeini might never have landed in Iran and one of the other people aboard, Peter Jennings, might never have been the star of ABC news.  

The Ayatollah did land and 140 journalists landed with him.  I sometimes think we were his first hostages.  I remember arriving in Tehran and there were probably 2 million people in the streets of Tehran gathered for the arrival of the Ayatollah.  He had been in exile for more than a decade and as we were driving down one of the main thoroughfares there was a big banner that was strung across one of the highways.  In four languages, Persian, Arabic, French and English, it said, “Welcome to the Journalists Traveling with the Ayatollah.”  So I said, “Oh, this won’t be so bad. They’re welcoming us.”  Well, a few weeks later we went with Ayatollah Khomeini to the Holy City of Qom where he had lived for many years, lived and taught, and we journalists were put on a flatbed truck in this procession with the Ayatollah.  These young men came around us and they were chanting something, so I said to one of my colleagues, “What are they saying?”  My colleague said, “They’re chanting ‘Where’s the BBC man?  We want to kill him.’”

Now, I tell this story because I think it captures two snapshots of Iran.  It captures the sense of never knowing exactly where you stand--and it is this sense of disequilibrium that I think is crucial to understanding this country.  This is a country of improvisers.  The revolution was an improvisation.  The Ayatollah Khomeini himself may have appeared to us as a very stern leader, a rigid leader who didn’t change his mind but he was an improviser.   Early in his career he said that women shouldn’t be able to vote, and yet when he led his revolution he needed women.  So he called women from their kitchens out to the streets, he called them from the universities and said, “Go out into the streets and demonstrate.”  He turned them into Islamic feminists, and when it came time to have a referendum for an Islamic republic, women were allowed to vote.  He also said that he would continue the Iran-Iraq war until victory, until Saddam Hussein was overthrown and an Islamic republic was established in neighboring Iraq.  Well, that didn’t happen, and one day Ayatollah Khomeini said he would drink the cup of poison and he suddenly ended the war.  

I think it’s important to understand this improvisatory nature of Iran and the Islamic republic because we tend to think of places like Iran as plotting strategy.  We, in Washington, like to think ten steps ahead and we have whole teams of people who do strategic thinking.  Some people think the Iranians invented chess, and I’ve heard people in Washington say, “The Iranians are great chess players; always plotting several steps ahead.”  I would say they’re more like players in a jazz band, kind of changing the rhythm and tempo as they go along.            In some ways I think it’s too bad that President Clinton is going to be leaving office in just a few weeks because, if you look at the instrument he plays, he plays the saxophone and if anybody could understand how to deal with Iran, President Clinton could.  

Iran is also not a totalitarian state.  It’s never been a closed country the way the former Soviet Union was or China is.  In fact, I look at it as this extraordinary laboratory where a great experiment is taking place with two volatile chemicals—Islam and democracy--and the rulers and the people haven’t quite figured out exactly what the right mix is.

When I think about Iran and when I’m asked about Iran I’m usually asked two questions and they revolve around two images: terrorists and veils.  I’m asked the question, “Aren’t you afraid when you go there?” and “Do you have to wear that black veil?”  The answer to those questions is usually “no” and “no.”  Sure, there have been times in Iran when I’ve been terrified and scared, and there have been times when I have put on that entire veil, the black chador that some women in Iran choose to wear, but I would say that those are not the overwhelming images when I think about the country.  Instead, I think of a country that has extraordinary people and extraordinary possibilities.

Another question I’m asked is, “Why should we care about Iran?  We’ve gotten along without Iran and without diplomatic relations with Iran for over two decades and we did just fine.  We’ve even fought the Persian Gulf War and we didn’t have Iran as our ally.”  Well, I would say that there are a number of reasons why we should care.  On the crassest level there are economic reasons.  Iran is the second-largest oil producer in OPEC, and you just have to look at oil prices today, gas prices and our heating oil costs this winter to see just why that matters.  Iran is the only country that borders the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, and you cannot change geography.  It’s also a potential market for American goods.  Much of Iran’s infrastructure is still American, much of its oil industry and its airline industry.  You can’t fly in Iran without flying on a Boeing jet that was bought before the Revolution.  

On a geo-political level, Iran is one of our last enemies.  We in the United States don’t have very many enemies anymore, but we do have Iran.  If you look at the plan of Governor George Bush, he would like to spend upwards of tens of billions of dollars to build a national missile defense.  Why?  Because there is a concern that North Korean, Iraq or Iran could develop nuclear weapons that might actually hit U. S. territory, according to those who believe in this system.  Iran is also in a dangerous neighborhood.  People ask me all the time, “Why is Iran trying to build ballistic missiles or building up its military?”  Why, look at where it is.  It’s got Pakistan on its right, to the east.  Where did Pakistan test its nuclear weapon?  It tested it on Iran’s eastern border.  [Iran has] a seven hundred mile border with Iraq, and Iraq is still a mortal enemy of Iran and  determined to rebuild its military.  It has three former Soviet republics to the north, it has Afghanistan to the other side--with which it nearly went to war in 1998--and it has the Persian Gulf monarchies to the south that have cordial, but certainly not really close, relations with Iran.  

But I would say that the real reason, the main reason, we should care about Iran has nothing to do with oil or politics.  It has to do with people.  Iran’s biggest resource, its greatest resource, is not its oil.  It’s its people.  I have never been to a country with a more hospitable, resourceful people with an extraordinary affinity for Americans.  You know, many Iranians are not looking for any apologies from the United States.  They’re looking for visas.

Iran today is involved in what I call an extraordinary guerilla battle to see who is going to reign supreme, and there are a series of guerilla battle fields in which this struggle between Islam and democracy are taking place.  Iran is the world’s only modern theocracy, and what is going on literally has never been done before.  We have never before seen this kind of clash between religion and democratic principles.  

Let’s look at some of these battlefields.  The press is one of these battlefields and after President Khatami was elected on a reformist platform in 1997 hundreds of newspapers and magazines were opened.  It was just a brilliant creative explosion of journalism that was dazzling.  You picked up the newspapers in the morning and you couldn’t believe you were reading some of these things.  Well, what happened?  The press became a threat to the strict interpretation of Islam that has reigned for years in the Islamic Republic, so in April most of the reformist newspapers were shut down and from the outside the closure of newspapers is a real sign that the country is becoming anti-democratic.

 But not all of them were shut down, and this is the key to understanding Iran: when you close a door, there’s always a window you can open up.  I was just in Iran a few weeks ago and I went to the home of a reformist cleric.  Now, this is a man who was a mid-ranking cleric.  He had just come out of prison; he had spent 18 months in prison.  Why was he in prison?  For insulting the regime.  Here, an actual cleric who was one of them, one of the clerics, had insulted the leadership and had suggested that the reign of the Islamic Republic was as repressive as the reign as Shah.  So we’re sitting in his living room and he’s talking with just as much boldness to me, a New York Times correspondent, and I’m thinking, “Do you really want to say all of these things to the New York Times?”  I wanted to save him from himself the telephone rang and it was a telephone call from a man named Akbar Ganji, a reformist newspaper man who was in Evin prison.  I don’t know how he got access to a telephone in Evin prison.  He was calling his friend to tell him how excited he was because he, Ganji, had just published an article against the regime in a reformist newspaper in some obscure eastern part of Iran that nobody had ever heard of.  But the fact is there was a newspaper that was still able to publish and still able to publish reformist articles.  

The parliament is another battlefield.  Last spring a reformist parliament was voted in.  Seventy percent of Iran’s parliamentarians are reformists, and yet parliament appears to be such a threat to the Islamic republic that the spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, banned the parliament from considering a very repressive press law. I have never seen Iranians of all walks of life, of all classes, of all levels of education, so upset at this tragedy, at this travesty that was truly an anti-democratic act.  

The courts are another battlefield where this struggle between Islam and democracy is playing out.  I just want to tell the story of a trial that I covered once.  It was the mayor of Tehran, who did extraordinary things.  He bulldozed terrible neighborhoods and built high-rises and starting taxing people (Iranians hate to pay taxes), but he cut corners and so he was put on trial for corruption and embezzlement.  The judge was not only the judge in this court, but was also the prosecutor and the jury.  The rulers made a big mistake.  They let this trial be televised.  It was the first political trial in Iran’s history ever to be televised, and it was just like the O.J. trial was here in the United States.  It was less what the verdict was going to be than watching this extraordinary process on television.  Parents kept their kids up until 2 or 3 in the morning to watch this trial, which was a civics lesson on T.V.

Karbaschi, the mayor, was very clever.  He’d been trained as a cleric himself, so he had some of the tools of the person who was judging him.  He would go to court in the morning and he would start reciting the Koran in Arabic, and the judge would say, “Excuse me, Mr. Mayor, this isn’t the time for prayers,” and the mayor would say “But, sir, it’s always the time for prayers,” and the judge would say, “Not in my court room.”  And this was all on television, so people could see that the judge, wearing a turban, didn’t want to pray whereas the person on trial wanted to pray.  Karbaschi also opened up a can of worms when he started talking about a subject that had never been discussed publicly before—torture.  He told the judge that some of his deputy mayors had confessed to certain crimes but they had done it under duress.  They’d been tortured.  Never before had Iranians heard publicly this kind of discussion about torture.  They had heard it from their loved ones who had spent time in prison, they had heard stories, but here was the mayor of Tehran saying it on national television.   National TV was so important to the mayor that there was one of his appearances which conflicted with a World Cup soccer match—this was 1998, and the soccer matches were in France and Iran was in the World Cup so he convinced the court to change his court appearance so that people could watch the World Cup Soccer and then he would appear the next night so he’d get maximum audience.  

He also basically ran the city from prison, a little bit like Chicago used to be run in the old days.  He had a couple of cell phones, he used to order take-out food in, and he kept contact with his deputy mayors from his prison cell--which proves my point that improvisation is key to understanding Iran.  

I was talking about television--I want to tell you just a little bit about television in Iran.  You know, we are always told that Ayatollah Khameini the supreme leader, runs television and, indeed, on the news side there is not room for improvisation. In all of the speeches of the clerics all of the Friday prayers, all of the debates that are televised, you don’t get the full news if you watch Iranian television.  But the entertainment side is different. Somehow somebody let in all of these wild producers, and there’re putting on shows like very American-style soap operas that every night lay bare some of the most serious problems confronting Iranian society. So you can watch soap operas in Tehran and see played out issues like polygamy, divorce, suicide, unemployment, poverty, and the lack of places in university for young people.  

Another battlefield is the streets, and I look at the streets as a wonderful way to get a sense of what’s going on in Iran.  I mean, on one level every day you have women fighting on the streets for the right to wear what they want.  This is very difficult for us to understand, and my Iranian women friends always criticize me for writing too much about dress.   But you know, if you have to cover your head and wear something long in 110-degree weather, whether you are an eighty-year old grandmother or a ten-year old girl, then dress is important.  I look at the dress issue as a matter of choice.  Women are questioning more and more what they have to wear.  You know, it is very interesting, in the beginning of the revolution you didn’t have to cover your head.  I have pictures of me standing out in front of the American embassy with everyone screaming and I’m dressed, you know, in blue jeans and a safari jacket, but that changed early in the revolution or in about 1982.  Since then every woman has to wear a head scarf at the very least and long loose clothing.  

So what are women starting to do?   They’re starting to dye their hair the most bizarre colors in the world.  Some young women have been arrested for crossing-dressing, teenagers for cutting off all their hair and dressing as boys.  I once even saw a young woman with a shaved head who was trying to get away without wearing a headscarf, because in the Koran you’re supposed to cover your hair but it doesn’t say anything about covering your head.  I went to Iran a couple of years ago with a tour of Americans and these were, you know, the women on this tour were tough cookies.  Most of them were retired and after about the third day of having to wear this head scarf they rebelled and they started wearing hats.  So, I decided that, look, if they can wear hats I can wear hats so I wore a hat and it’s kind of my one woman’s revolution against the scarf.  

On a more serious note though, the streets are being used for demonstrations that could turn very dangerous.  I was in Iran in the summer of 1999 when there were riots in 24 Iranian cities.  They were sparked by the closure of a reformist newspaper.  There was tear gas used, people were killed. There were thugs on the street, armed thugs, vigilantes of unknown origin. They controlled the streets.  There were chants against Ayatollah Khameini, the spiritual leader.  It’s the first time I’ve ever heard chants like that.  And there were other chants that may predict what the future is going to be like.  There was one chant that I remember that went something like this, “The clerics have become God and the people have become poor.”

What happened in the last couple of months is something that I like to call the big chill.  “Welcome to the journalists coming on the plane”.  Instead, I was detained for two hours at the airport and interrogated.  The origin of the difficulty evidently was that my colleague, Tom Freidman, the columnist for the New York Times, had written an opinion column that was entitled “Shah Khameini,” basically calling Ayatollah Khameini, the spiritual leader, the Shah, implying that he was as repressive as the Shah had been.  Well, there were articles in the conservative newspapers against the New York Times, and I happened to come in at the wrong time.  I had been warned that I might be detained at the airport, and so I asked one of my contacts, an Iranian official, I said “Will I just be expelled or is more dangerous than that?” He said, “No, you’ll just be expelled, you won’t be put into prison.”  And I said, “Well, I have a nonrefundable ticket.”  And he said, he said, “Oh, it’s worse than I thought.”  So I took the chance.   I said to him, “You know, I’m going to go in if the only problem is that they’ll expel me.”  And he said, “Have a safe trip.”   It was his way of saying “It’s okay.”  

So I went in, I was interrogated, and what finally dawned on me is that it was it was a very serious interrogation.  There was a Soviet-style interrogator, translator and note taker.  I finally understood what they wanted me to do: to say I was a writer of a book, but I was not a New York Times correspondent.  Because they kept saying to me over and over again, “You’re the author of a book.”  And I’d say, “yes” and they’d say, “You’re not a New York Times correspondent.”  And I’d say, “yes, I am.”  And it was to get me to say that I wouldn’t write any articles about my trip which, I obviously couldn’t agree to and after two hours I finally said to them, “Then expel me.”  You know, they kept saying to me “If you just cooperate with us it’ll be all right.”  And I’m thinking, “What’s wrong? The worst you can do is put me on a plane to Paris.”  I finally said to them, “Look, we’re not getting anywhere just expel me.”  And because I had called their bluff, they let me go.  But later in the day we got a telephone call from somebody, who did not identify himself, asking, “How did Mrs. Sciolino enjoy the interrogation?”  You know, just a little warning, just a sign of just watch yourself.  

I tell this story as a cautionary tale because I can leave in few days.  I leave the country and go on with my life but friends and colleagues of mine are under this kind of pressure every single day.  Some of my friends, journalist friends, are in jail.  Others have just lost their jobs.  When all the newspapers close, what happens to journalists?  Not being able to feed your children is a very powerful silencer.  You don’t have to go to prison to become mute.  

So how do I navigate in this country?  Well, over the years I’ve come up with my own set of rules or lessons.  I call them Sciolino’s Rules.  I just want to share a few of them.  One rule is, one thing I’ve discovered, is that everything meaningful in Iran seems to happen behind closed doors.  Iranians are not by nature confessional people; just look at the architecture.  In our homes, our gardens give out to the streets.  We put chairs on our front lawns.  We watch our neighbors come by.  In Iran gardens are closed in.  They’re closed behind gates.  What goes on in the home, even in the garden, is private.  We are confessional people.  If you look at our icons, our heroes, one of our heroes would be somebody like Jimmy Stewart.  You know, a tell-it-like-it-is, very transparent kind of guy.  Well, in Iran, somebody like Jimmy Stewart would be considered a chump.  You don’t reveal your private thoughts, particularly to outsiders.  Just look at the Iran-Contra affair.  It was perfectly okay for Iran to be buying weapons from the United States during the Iran-Iraq war when we were considered the enemy--as long as the deal stayed quiet.  As long as nobody knew about it.

Another one of my rules is that rules exist to be broken.  There’s no such thing as a fixed rule.  When I was in Iran in 1982, I was the first American journalist they invited in after the hostages had been released.  I was sort of a test case.  And I came in to interview then-President Khameini, who’s now the spiritual leader.  And I did my interview and I wrote my story and I left the country and the experiment worked.  A few weeks later they invited in a lot of American journalists.  So I came back in and it was supposed to be a trip to the front.  So I showed up at Ministry of Guidance and Culture that takes care of journalists and I said, “Okay, I’m here ready to go to the front.” And they said, “You’re back?  Didn’t you know we wrote about you?  You distorted our President’s words and you lied about the revolution, so we’re going to have to expel you.”  And I said, “Well, can’t I go to the front first?  You know, just let me go to the front, I won’t do anything else.”  And they said, “Well, you can’t go to the front anyway because women can’t go to the front.”  And I said, “But I just went to the front three weeks ago.”  And they said, “That was three weeks ago--the rules have changed.”  

Another one of my rules is that even seeing is not believing.  Journalists love transparency, they like clarity, they need sound bites.  I once did an interview with the brother of President Khatami who is a medical doctor and now has become the leading parliamentarian among the reformists.  But he wasn’t a politician then, he was just the Deputy Minister of Health.  We were having a lovely conversation, and along the way he told me some things he would recommend the United States do to improve relations.  And it was rather interesting, so I said, “Sir, I know you are not a politician but I’d really like to write these words of yours.  Would it be okay?”  And he said, “Be my guest, please.”  So I just wrote a very modest story, it’s what we call a shelf.  It’s the story that runs at the New York Times at the top of the page above the Bloomingdale’s ad.  It doesn’t get much attention.  And the next day I got a telephone call from Mr. Khatami saying, “I didn’t say those things.”  And I said, “But I had a tape recorder going.  Of course you said those things.”  And he said, “Even if I said those things you shouldn’t have written them.”  And then the next day there were articles in the press saying that the New York Times correspondent had distorted his words.  

Another one of my rules, or lessons, is that my stealth weapon in dealing with Iran is that I am a woman.  This may sound bizarre, but the thing about Iran is that its women are not shrinking violets.  They’re steel magnolias.  In Iran women work, they drive, they vote, they run for public office, they run businesses.  A woman in 1997 even tried to run for president.  I, as a woman, have access to 50 per cent of the population that my male colleagues don’t.  And what I find is that every woman has a story to tell.  You know, in Iran I’m not allowed to shake the hand of a man but any woman, women you’ve never met before in your life, will come up to you and kiss you.  I’ve even bonded with those women in chadors who frisk you bodily, sometime quite vigorously, as you are going though the airport control.  Because I whip out pictures of my kids and invariably they’re mothers and what joins us together, what binds us is that we’re all working mothers

Another one of my rules is that not only journalists have to watch their backs. Sometimes public figures in Iran have to watch their backs too. I once interviewed the wife of President Khatami and it was the first interview she had given to a Western journalist.  Halfway though the interview, she looked at the bouquet of flowers that was sitting between us on a table.  And this bouquet was a lovely bouquet of purple iris and yellow mums, but in the middle there was a single pink rose.  So she looked at the flowers and she paused in the middle of her conversation and she said, “There’s a microphone in the flowers.  Somebody is listening to our conversation.”  Now you won’t be surprised to learn that the official interpreter didn’t translate those remarks.  What I realized afterwards is that that microphone was not for me, I was just asking questions.  That microphone was there for her because she might reveal something about her husband that might be useful to somebody.  

Another rule is that Iranians love Americans.  This sounds like a cliché and I sort of took it for granted, but when I was there on the tour with Americans--and these were well-traveled Americans, they had been to bizarre places, the outer banks of Tajikistan and then Western China--I mean these were people who carried their own blood plasma and hypodermic needles.  And they told me that they were stunned at the hospitality that they experienced.  You can walk down the streets and Iranians will invite you home for dinner.  And that’s why I never say no to an invitation, which is another one of my rules.  

So where does this leave the United States? I like to describe Iran as the Bermuda Triangle of American foreign policy.  A lot of presidents have gone down trying to deal with Iran.  There was that one time when George Bush got a call one day and it was supposedly President Rafsanjani on the phone.  And he actually picked up the phone to talk to this guy to find out that he was an imposter.  The Iran hostage crisis probably helped Jimmy Carter to get defeated.  For those of you who remember those days, the hostages got released on Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day.  The Clinton administration is stuck with a policy of its own making.  It imposed unilateral sanctions in the spring of 1995 and has been trying to figure a way out of them ever since.  We have two presidential candidates who are going to, at least initially, whoever wins, take a much harder line against Iran.  

I wrote this book on Iran and I had a very difficult time figuring out a title.  In ending my remarks I just want to explain that, you know, this book is really twenty years of notebooks distilled into three hundred and some pages.  The problem was that there was not an image that captured the complexity of the country.  Then I went to Reza Shah’s Green Palace in Tehran and I saw a room that was probably half the size of the room that we’re in now, where the walls and the ceilings were covered with thousands and thousands of bits of mirrors, mirror mosaics.  It was a dazzling room.  It was as if this entire chandelier were just spread across the walls and the ceiling.  And at first I looked at these mirrors and this room and I found it inviting and dazzling and light-filled.  But then I tried to look at myself in the mirrors and I couldn’t see myself because the mirrors also pushed you away and distorted reality.  It’s this image I want to leave you with in thinking about Iran, and it’s why I called my book Persian Mirrors.

Thank you very much, and I would welcome your questions.