Read Online Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino - Free Book Online
Authors: Elaine Sciolino
Tags: Political History
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love or hatred toward the Shah, or for that matter, toward Ayatollah Khomeini himself. But they know what they want: more jobs and fewer constraints on their personal lives. They can vote at sixteen, and that makes them a threat to the power of the clerics who had promoted the anti-contraception policy in the first place.
RULE TEN: IRAN IS THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, SO DON’T LET YOUR GAURD DOWN. Iran’s Islamic Republic is not a police state, but it is not a liberty-loving democracy either, at least not yet. Nowhere has that been more evident since the dawn of the Islamic Republic than in its political use of terror outside the country.
In fact, probably the deepest fear of Iran among decision-makers in Washington and among the American people is that Iran might sponsor terrorism against American targets, either in the United States or abroad. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 was the first but not the only time the United States was targeted. Shiite terrorists (believed by American and Israeli intelligence to have acted with Iranian support) were responsible for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, in which 241 American servicemen died. In the 1980s, the holding of American and other Western hostages by Iranian-backed Shiite radicals in Lebanon culminated in the most embarrassing foreign policy scandal of the Reagan administration: the sale of weapons to Iran in violation of American policy and the illegal use of the profits to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Only some of the American hostages were freed as a result of the arms sales, but Iran eventually paid the captors between $1 million and $2 million to free each remaining hostage, according to American intelligence reports. Iran expected that economic and diplomatic rewards from the United States would follow, but by then the relationship was so sour that President George Bush decided against it, arguing that Iran should not be rewarded for doing something that should have been done years before.
Although Americans still fear that one day an Iranian bomb will blow up near the White House or on Wall Street, historically the most vulnerable targets of Iranian terrorism have been other Iranians. The attacks have tapered off in recent years, but opponents of the Islamic Republic anywhere in the world remain potential assassination targets.
One political assassination particularly affected me. For years, Abdol-Rahman Ghassemlou was the leader of Iran’s Kurdish autonomist movement. He spoke passable English and Russian and took money wherever he could find it. I first met Ghassemlou in August 1979, when a civil war was raging in Kurdistan and the new revolutionary government in Tehran had not yet suppressed it. For five days I traveled through Kurdistan with Ghassemlou and his pesh merga —ready-to-die guerrilla fighters—as he met with his commanders. We bounced along in a jeep that seemed to have lost its springs, and we slept on the floors of safe houses. On the fifth day, a group of Kurdish women drew a bath for me and washed my clothes. I was lent a Kurdish wedding costume with a sheer red veil and a black velvet vest trimmed with gold coins to wear until my clean clothes dried.
“Miss Sciolino,” Ghassemlou said when he saw me in full bridal regalia, “I think I’ll just call your editors at Newsweek and tell them you got lost somewhere in the rugged Kurdish hills.” We laughed. He sent me safely on my way the next day. I didn’t see him again.
One evening ten years later, Ghassemlou and two other Kurds were meeting with officials from Tehran in a borrowed apartment in Vienna to negotiate an autonomy agreement for the Iranian province of Kurdistan. The police later found Ghassemlou shot dead, his body propped up in an armchair, a baseball cap placed in his lap. His two associates were also killed. Austrian authorities assumed that the officials from Tehran were the
RULE TEN: IRAN IS THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, SO DON’T LET YOUR GAURD DOWN. Iran’s Islamic Republic is not a police state, but it is not a liberty-loving democracy either, at least not yet. Nowhere has that been more evident since the dawn of the Islamic Republic than in its political use of terror outside the country.
In fact, probably the deepest fear of Iran among decision-makers in Washington and among the American people is that Iran might sponsor terrorism against American targets, either in the United States or abroad. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 was the first but not the only time the United States was targeted. Shiite terrorists (believed by American and Israeli intelligence to have acted with Iranian support) were responsible for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, in which 241 American servicemen died. In the 1980s, the holding of American and other Western hostages by Iranian-backed Shiite radicals in Lebanon culminated in the most embarrassing foreign policy scandal of the Reagan administration: the sale of weapons to Iran in violation of American policy and the illegal use of the profits to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Only some of the American hostages were freed as a result of the arms sales, but Iran eventually paid the captors between $1 million and $2 million to free each remaining hostage, according to American intelligence reports. Iran expected that economic and diplomatic rewards from the United States would follow, but by then the relationship was so sour that President George Bush decided against it, arguing that Iran should not be rewarded for doing something that should have been done years before.
Although Americans still fear that one day an Iranian bomb will blow up near the White House or on Wall Street, historically the most vulnerable targets of Iranian terrorism have been other Iranians. The attacks have tapered off in recent years, but opponents of the Islamic Republic anywhere in the world remain potential assassination targets.
One political assassination particularly affected me. For years, Abdol-Rahman Ghassemlou was the leader of Iran’s Kurdish autonomist movement. He spoke passable English and Russian and took money wherever he could find it. I first met Ghassemlou in August 1979, when a civil war was raging in Kurdistan and the new revolutionary government in Tehran had not yet suppressed it. For five days I traveled through Kurdistan with Ghassemlou and his pesh merga —ready-to-die guerrilla fighters—as he met with his commanders. We bounced along in a jeep that seemed to have lost its springs, and we slept on the floors of safe houses. On the fifth day, a group of Kurdish women drew a bath for me and washed my clothes. I was lent a Kurdish wedding costume with a sheer red veil and a black velvet vest trimmed with gold coins to wear until my clean clothes dried.
“Miss Sciolino,” Ghassemlou said when he saw me in full bridal regalia, “I think I’ll just call your editors at Newsweek and tell them you got lost somewhere in the rugged Kurdish hills.” We laughed. He sent me safely on my way the next day. I didn’t see him again.
One evening ten years later, Ghassemlou and two other Kurds were meeting with officials from Tehran in a borrowed apartment in Vienna to negotiate an autonomy agreement for the Iranian province of Kurdistan. The police later found Ghassemlou shot dead, his body propped up in an armchair, a baseball cap placed in his lap. His two associates were also killed. Austrian authorities assumed that the officials from Tehran were the
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