Tehran 25 years on - Among the Hostage-Takers.

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Another of my damn Atlantic Monthly articles! Again, I can only excerpt - and I believe you have to pay to see the article - but here it is: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200412/bowden.

I find this so interesting that I had to post it - even if nobody reads it - and I will try to give you a flavour of the article:

Among the Hostage-Takers

Twenty-five years ago in Tehran a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and took hostage the entire American diplomatic mission?igniting a fifteen-month international crisis whose impact is reverberating still. Now, for the first time, many of the leading hostage-takers speak candidly about their actions?which a surprising number deeply regret
by Mark Bowden

.....

Nowadays the grand old U.S. embassy in Tehran looks forlorn, like a hostage left behind and long forgotten. A solid battleship of an office building in orange brick, two stories high and more than a block long, it was once the symbol of America's formidable presence in Iran. Today it still stands in the heart of the capital, facing a wide, busy thoroughfare called Taleghani Avenue, at the front of a leafy twenty-seven-acre oasis, a rare haven from the noisy hustle of this city of more than 12 million. Long ago dubbed the "Den of Spies" by Islamic radicals, the old embassy building is now garishly covered with anti-American graffiti, banners, and propaganda displays to remind people of the nation's undying disdain for its once favorite ally. The embassy compound is home to the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit that reports to the black-turbaned clerics of Iran's authoritarian mullahocracy, and to the basij, Islamic brownshirts, the civilian goon squads that turn out en masse and at a moment's notice to demonstrate on behalf of the regime and to help put down those who engage in public displays of dissent and "immorality," such as women whose scarves do not fully cover their hair, or young people who hold hands. The former embassy itself serves as an anti-American museum, with a grim, ugly permanent display called "The Great Aban 13th Exhibition," commemorating one of the most important dates on the modern Iranian calendar. Aban 13 corresponds to November 4, the date on which, twenty-five years ago, scores of Iranian students scaled the compound walls and took hostage the entire U.S. diplomatic mission, setting off a tense fifteen-month standoff between the United States and Iran. It was one of the founding events of the Islamic Republic, and its geopolitical repercussions are still being felt throughout the world.

The old embassy is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of national defiance, which defined for the world the glorious 1979 revolution, a kind of Iranian counterpart to America's Boston Tea Party?but more central and significant. Yet in the four times I went to the embassy during trips to Iran in the past year, it was empty of visitors. A bookstore just outside the entrance, which was once known for selling anti-American literature and reprints of the thousands of secret embassy documents seized in the takeover (the infamous "spy den documents"), was vacant when I first saw it in December, its racks empty, but nine months later appeared ready to reopen as a bookstore for children. The slogans and spiteful artwork that had been spray-painted on the embassy's brick outer walls by angry crowds during the tumultuous hostage crisis had faded?including an image of the Statue of Liberty with its face portrayed as a death mask and a sign in English that said "DEATH TO THE USA."

Even the guardhouse on the southeast corner, where visitors enter, was in shambles. Two friendly, unshaven Revolutionary Guards stood behind the counter in a small, marble-veneered reception area that looked like a frat house on Sunday morning, with battered furniture, an old swivel chair leaning precariously on its stem with cushion stuffing hanging out, dirt caked on the floors and walls, and muddy boot prints everywhere. I pointed quizzically at a boot print on the ceiling, and asked my guide and interpreter, Ramin, to tell the guards that as an American citizen, I protested these abuses of what could arguably be called U.S. property...........

......In Tehran patriotic symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always wrenched into images of violence, evil, and defeat. The American flag is shown in the shape of a gun; the bald eagle is shown going down in flames. In the West we are bombarded with advertising images of youth, beauty, sex, and life; in Tehran the preponderance of advertising images celebrate death. There are murals everywhere honoring martyrs?primarily those who died in the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, in the 1980s, but also more recent Islamic martyrs, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in Gaza earlier this year. Billboards in the West often feature scantily dressed, provocatively posed teens, but in Tehran the gigantic wall murals tend to depict robed grandpas and grumpy-looking white-bearded clerics?especially common are the bespectacled face of the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the more imposing, threatening visage of the late Imam, Ruhollah Khomeini, the major force behind the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, and the father of Iran's theocratic state..........

....On November 4, 1979, a well-organized core group of about sixty Iranian university students scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy compound, seized the embassy building, and bound and blindfolded about sixty Americans, including the embassy's top foreign-service and CIA officers, military liaisons, administrators, clerks, secretaries, and a detachment of Marine guards. The invaders, calling themselves Students Following the Imam's Line, demanded that their despised Shah, who had been forced to flee the country nine months earlier and had just been admitted to the United States for cancer treatment, be returned immediately to face revolutionary justice. Hundreds of his former associates had already been executed or thrown in jail. President Jimmy Carter refused the demand, and the subsequent fifteen-month standoff became one of the signature international crises of modern times. It left a lot of Americans feeling helpless and enraged, while imbuing Iranians, many of whom blamed the United States for the Shah's inarguable despotism, with a new sense of strength and national purpose.......

......The different ways this event is remembered in America and in Iran illustrate how nations invent their own pasts, and how the simplification of history can create impossible gulfs between peoples. To Americans, the hostage crisis was an unprovoked, inexcusable crime, carried out by a scruffy band of half-crazy Islamist zealots driven by a senseless hatred of all things American. It was a terrifying ordeal for the hostages and their families, fatal for eight of the would-be rescuers, and a political disaster for Jimmy Carter?perhaps the single most important factor in making him a one-term President. In the United States it was a protracted, very public humiliation, made worse by breathless lead-story coverage in newspapers and on television, which began newscasts with a daily reminder of the predicament ("DAY 54: AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE"). It was America's first modern encounter with hostile Islamists, and the first time Americans heard their country called "the Great Satan."

For many Iranians, however, the hostage crisis was a glorious triumph. Embossed with florid Shia mysticism, the episode has taken on the force of national myth?an epic story of a small group of devout young gerogan-girha (hostage-takers) who, armed with only prayer and purity of heart, stormed the gates of the most evil, potent empire on the planet, booted out the American devils, and secured the success of the mullahs' revolution. It is a poignant and poetic tale of how these innocent servants of the Imam treated their often crude and abusive captives with kindness and respect even as they pieced together shredded embassy documents to expose and thwart America's plots to destroy the revolution and reinstate the Shah. And when the Great Satan dispatched its deadly commandos to slay these young heroes (this is the part that fires the blood of the faithful), Allah stirred dust storms to down the infidel helicopters and turn back the invaders. This is the story taught to schoolchildren who are bused in to see the Great Aban 13th Exhibition and to touch the remains of the helicopters that Allah scorched while the innocent gerogan-girha slept.........

(Reporter is writing a book - attempting for it to be from both sides - and sought out the hostage-takers)

.......What I discovered was a group of graying politicians and intellectuals with a broad range of views about the event. How they felt about the gerogan-giri tended to define where they stood on Iran's wide political spectrum. Some remain true believers and have prospered in the mullahocracy they helped create, and even as they acknowledge that the embassy seizure permanently stained their nation in the eyes of the world, they defend it as necessary and just. They see the problems of modern Iran as growing pains, and are heartened by the upsurge in Islamist fundamentalism around the world. Some of these true believers refused to speak to an American reporter, who they suspected would misunderstand or distort their words. Other gerogan-girha are clearly ambivalent about what they did, weighing the pride and satisfaction of their youthful defiance against a more mature understanding of world politics. These people tend to stay in the shadows, afraid of getting in trouble or of drawing attention to themselves. But a surprising number of gerogan-girha, constituting a third group, are outspokenly embarrassed by their role and regard their actions as a monumental mistake?a criminal act that disrupted not just the lives of the American hostages but ultimately the life of their own country, which has found itself ever since in a downward spiral of economic, political, and social isolation......

.....Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, a ringleader of the takeover who has become a reform politician and newspaperman, is emphatic in his assessment: "Hostage-taking is not an acceptable action under international norms and standards. The hostages underwent severe emotional difficulties. Prolonging it affected both countries in a negative way. The chaos caused such tension between Iran and the United States that even now, after two decades, no one knows how to resolve it.".....

...the episode Americans remember as the "hostage crisis" was not supposed to involve the prolonged detention of hostages. The students who seized the embassy believed that they were participating in a conventional protest?not unlike those at U.S. colleges a decade before, when rebellious American students occupied campus buildings. The young Iranians envisioned having to subdue and confine members of the American mission for perhaps a day or two, but they had no intention of holding them for any length of time. They made no preparations for doing so......

...The hostage-takers' immediate goal was to put pressure on the provisional government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan.....

....The opportunity for radical change appeared to be slipping away. So extremists fanned fears of an American-led countercoup, and portrayed as treason all contacts between the provisional government and the United States?which were mostly over such practical matters as recovering the $6 billion the Shah had deposited in U.S. banks and obtaining needed parts for the Iranian air force's American-built F-16s.....

.......Khomeini was not?as many Americans always assumed?informed about the takeover in advance, and by the time it was presented to him it was already a fait accompli, and hugely popular. Hundreds of thousands of gleeful Iranians celebrated in the streets around the embassy night and day, burning Carter in effigy and chanting "Death to America!" Khomeini had little choice but to embrace the brash gerogan-girha, and to officially anoint them national heroes. In a development never foreseen or even hoped for by the student leaders, Bazargan's government resigned two days after the takeover, and the revolution tilted permanently into the arms of the mullahs......

....They (the students) were trying to build a utopia, their own version of "a city upon a hill." They were striving toward umma, a perfect, classless, crimeless Muslim community infused with the "spirit of God."....

....The gerogan-girha (hostage takers) live in the ruins of their dream. As they've grown gray-haired and plump, the fame and admiration they once enjoyed have faded like the graffiti at the Den of Spies. Those who despise the current regime now regret their role in bringing a small circle of wealthy, authoritarian clerics to power. And more than anything they blame the hostage crisis for a litany of problems and setbacks that have befallen their country in the past quarter of a century. Iran's loss of ties to the United States after the embassy seizure prompted Saddam Hussein to invade in 1980 (when the hostages were still being held). In the ensuing war Iran lost more than half a million young men. Iran's status as an outlaw nation has had a stifling effect on its chances for an economic turnaround.......

....Some of the gerogan-girha have gone into exile and taken up arms against the religious rulers; others have been harassed, denounced, beaten, or imprisoned for advocating democratic changes. In some cases they have been persecuted by their former colleagues. "None of us in the revolution believed Iran would ever have an autocratic regime again," Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leader of the gerogan-girha who is today a controversial reform politician, told a Knight Ridder correspondent earlier this year. "Yet here we are."....

....Asgharzadeh is the most prominent of the gerogan-girha who have turned against the mullahocracy. With the advantage of hindsight, he now sees the embassy takeover as a mistake?one that has had a disastrous long-term impact on his country. He chose his words carefully (to denounce the takeover is, in a sense, to debunk one of the founding myths of the regime), but his feelings about the episode were clear. "We failed in enforcing it the way it was meant to be," he said. "We lost control of events very quickly?within twenty-four hours! Unfortunately, things got out of hand and took their own course. The initial hours were quite pleasant for us, because [the protest] had a clear purpose and justification. But once the event got out of its student mold and turned into a hostage-taking, it became a long, drawn-out, and corrosive phenomenon.".....

(The students initially lost control)

..."American hostages were not supposed to be paraded blindfolded in front of the press," he told me. "The blindfolding was done only for security reasons; in order to control the hostages we used strips of cloth to blindfold them. Unfortunately, our humane objectives were really distorted. We objected strongly to this behavior, and the people who did this were reprimanded, but the damage had been done. These things did happen, even though we tried very hard to prevent the operation from being manipulated and abused by political groups and factions." Asgharzadeh and his fellow students eventually chased the other political groups out of the compound and locked the gates......

....The thing began to take on a life of its own. With the provisional government in tatters, the United States had no one with whom to negotiate a solution, and the students, locked inside the embassy compound with their hostages, unprepared for a drawn-out ordeal and with no plan for ending it, watched the great storm swirling outside the embassy walls, and began to see themselves as captives too......

.....Abbas Abdi, another gerogan-girha leader who became a journalist, has been jailed repeatedly for criticizing the regime, and for advocating renewed talks with the United States. He spent eight months in solitary confinement in 1993, and is today serving a four-and-a-half-year term in the notorious Evin Prison?where some of his former hostages were kept?for publishing poll results showing that 74 percent of Iranians favored renewing ties with the United States. The newspaper for which he served as editor in chief, Salam, was banned in the late 1990s, and several years ago Abdi got in trouble with the government when he attended a much publicized meeting in Paris with one of his hostages, Barry Rosen, the embassy's public-affairs officer, in an attempt to begin what Abdi described as a "healing process." But the meeting of the two men fell well short of a warm and fuzzy reunion. Rosen condemned the seizure of the hostages, and Abdi refused to apologize for the action. Indeed, Abdi's old captives feel little sympathy for his plight. One of them, Dave Roeder, a retired Air Force colonel, told me, "It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.".....

.....If anyone at the time had a clearer vision of what the embassy takeover's full consequences might be, it was Muhammad Mousavi Khoeiniha, the black-bearded young cleric to whom the students took their plan in October of 1979. Khoeiniha was a well-known spiritual leader whose sermons in the Jobbestan Mosque, in northern Tehran, drew hundreds of radicals. When the students decided to invade the U.S. embassy, they sought out Khoeiniha in hopes of winning advance approval from Khomeini, with whom the young cleric had close ties. To their surprise Khoeiniha?without consulting Khomeini?immediately gave them his blessing, and thus established himself as the key clerical figure behind the gerogan-girha. Khoeiniha told me in an interview in Tehran in August that he had chosen not to ask the Imam's permission because "I did not think it was appropriate to involve him in some action being contemplated by a group of students."

Khoeiniha scoffed at the suggestion that his motive might also have been to force the issue; clearly, asking permission would have set off a furious round of backstage negotiations, which might have aborted the whole idea. But seizing the embassy would stir up popular support and put Khomeini on the spot, compelling him to either make the highly unpopular choice of backing the provisional government?which would have been duty-bound to evict the trespassing students?or go for the practical, post facto option of throwing his powerful support behind them. It was a clever and fateful piece of political engineering by Khoeiniha......

.... n the nine months between the fall of the Shah's regime and the takeover of the embassy, Iranian fundamentalists increasingly saw even routine contact between Bazargan's provisional government and U.S. officials, both in Tehran and abroad, as part of a CIA plot to undermine Khomeini, derail the Islamic revolution, and restore the Shah to power. Their fears were not irrational. The CIA had done something very similar in 1953, when its station chief, Kermit Roosevelt, orchestrated the collapse of an elected government under Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq, and put the Shah on the throne. These actions had shaped the next quarter century of Iranian life. When the United States decided to admit the ailing exiled Shah for medical treatment, in late October of 1979, the students saw history repeating itself.

But they were wrong....the American spy presence in Iran was at a pitifully low ebb. Only three CIA officers were in the country.....

.....After the revolution the CIA seemed to be largely groping for some understanding of the new regime taking shape in Tehran. Not that the Agency lacked bad intentions. Down the road it was hoping to at least nudge the revolution in a pro-American direction. A top-secret cable to the CIA director, Stansfield Turner, taken from Ahern's desk on the day of the takeover (he had neglected to shred it), summarized the station chief's goals and accomplishments.

You asked me to comment at some point about our prospects for influencing the course of events. Only marginally, I would say, until the military recovers, and that is a process we can do almost nothing to affect. What we can do, and I am now working on, is to identify and prepare to support the potential leaders of a coalition of westernized political liberals, moderate religious figures, and (when they begin to emerge) western-oriented military leaders.

Hardly the stuff of a countercoup. Still, the gerogan-girha did their best to paint the documents they seized as proof of their darkest suspicions, and to this day most of them insist that the embassy seizure did thwart active plots against the revolution......

....After the hostage crisis ended, with the release of the Americans, Hashemi and several of the other Revolutionary Guard participants went on to found the new regime's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Today it is the country's much feared and omnipresent central spy agency, which answers not to the President or the Majlis but to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the years after the embassy takeover Hashemi's ministry conducted the vicious purges that broke the back of domestic opposition to mullah rule, and hunted down and assassinated enemies of the revolution overseas.....

....Just days after this conversation, during a stopover in London on my way home, I turned on the TV in my hotel room and was startled to see Ebtekar's tightly wrapped face. She was being interviewed by a CNN announcer on a split screen with Iran's newly anointed Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer, a feminist, and a human-rights activist. Ebtekar was talking about how proud everyone in Iran was of Ebadi, even though Ebadi is widely known as a determined critic of the regime?indeed, her award was a symbolic blow against the government's repressive policies.

Under Iran's theologically inspired laws, women are not allowed to travel without permission from their husbands. The CNN announcer asked the Iranian Vice President how she could defend such a system.

If Ebtekar squirmed, it was only for a split second. She smiled and smoothly segued into a windy recitation of the gains women had made under Iran's Islamic regime......

...... So things have not worked out quite as the gerogan-girha planned. They have arrived in a new century with the varying perspectives of middle age. The righteous and successful see every step on their path as a correct one, and the righteous but disappointed still have an old enemy to blame. Those with misgivings concede the missteps of their youth, which they regret but cannot fully disown. They failed to create the world they dreamed of, but that is an old story. Some now accept the blame, or at least a big responsibility, for things they would like to change.

Still, even among those who now despair over the long-term consequences of the hostage crisis, I noticed a lift in mood when they talked about those stirring, intense, and dangerous days. No matter how it turned out for them, whether it made them proud or bitter, whether they feel they deserve international praise or scorn, for one long year they had the world's most powerful nation by the throat. At the center of the world's stage, for better or for worse, they danced a joyful and defiant dance.

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thanks for the article D...i can't help but wonder if this was a catalyst for other terrorists to become organized...and the beginning of our inability to cope with it (in terms of not being more vigilant and a failing foreign policy in the Middle East)

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Hmm - that or just a symptom of a rising force that the west had no knowledge or understanding of?

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The West -- and te US in particular -- has never come even close to understanding how people of the Middle East feel about American bullying tactics in the region. And it isn't just the aggressiveness that they find ill-mannered and rude. The average American's attitude that all people everywhere should find Hollywood movies, British rock and a diet of McDonald's burgers harmless and even attractive grates on the pious Muslim's nerves. They find us insulting, overbearing and slightly mad. Not nice people for a good Muslim to associate with.

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You know this from experience, MA?

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From people I have spoken to, yes. I visited Damscus in 1986 and found the Syrians both friendly and stand-offish to Americans at the same time. I worked with an Iranian colleague at the time of the obverthrow of the Shah and found his views regarding the American presence in the Near East similar. I also worked, more recently, with an Egyptian colleague, a Muslim. The world view of all of them was similar to what I've described.

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Interesting...

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I am doing heaps of reading about the whole middle east situation right now. Want to understand it better...

Have you seen my thread about Al Quaeda's hard disk, MA?

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And just on this day Iranian MPs pass a bill which could force the government to resume its uranium enrichment programme. This will be surely follow by sanctions and later probably war. No matter actually who will be the next US president.

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No, Deb, what thread is that?

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Here you go: http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=37650

'Tis a sad, forlorn little thread.

I don't get it, you know - everyone here (hyperbole) trumpets about Al Quaeda and Iran and what the hostage thing did and all that - but li'l threads giving a bit of a glimpse into what they actually think and such are of almost no interest.

Sigh - I think I must be very weird.

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Excerpts from an interview with the author of the article quoted above:

.....When you spoke to the hostage-takers, were you surprised that some of them are critical of the very regime they originally helped bring to power in Iran?

No, I wasn't really surprised. But then again, I think real courage always surprises you when you see it. These are people who are?at great personal risk? speaking out against the regime. I'm fifty-three years old, so I'm really a contemporary of the young people who seized the embassy in 1979, and I can look back on things I did in my twenties that I don't think I'd do today. Certainly you can see now that the system that they hoped to create in Iran, the government that they all envisioned in their naiveté, was this sort of perfect Muslim society. But in fact what they have grown up to live in now is a horrible, totalitarian, religious, fascist society. Frankly, it doesn't surprise me that they hate it, but it does surprise me a little bit that they are courageous enough to oppose it.

Do you think they're walking a fine line by defending taking the American embassy then but criticizing the mullahs in power today?

Yes, I think that they are. The mullahs who were involved in the plan to take over the embassy were manufacturing this myth of American evil, omnipresence, and omnipotence in Iran. That has become one of founding principles of the state, and it's really remarkable the extent to which Iran defines itself still?twenty-five years later?in opposition to the "Great Satan" of the United States. Clearly, anyone who would look back and speak critically of this "magnificent, founding event" in the history of Iran is running the risk of angering the regime and speaking heresy. Nevertheless, what you discover in Iran is that most people chafe under the dictates of the regime these days. My impression of the Iranians is that they're basically a freedom-loving people. I think they're just as unhappy being repressed by the mullahs as they were being repressed by the Shah.......

......How do the American hostages look back on their experience in Iran today?

I've spoken to most of them who are still alive, and there's a variety of ways that they feel, but they all feel bitter about the way they were treated and what happened to them in Iran. I have yet to find one who thinks there was any legitimate reason for them to be taken and held by these Iranians. They think they were dealt a tremendous injustice. Many of them are angry about the fact that the United States, in reaching the deal that ultimately led to their release, barred them from seeking any damages from Iran. At present those former hostages are pursuing a legal remedy to that in the U.S. courts, where they hope to get some sort of compensation from Iranian funds that were seized and held here in the United States after the embassy takeover. Some of the former hostages think that President Jimmy Carter should have reacted much more aggressively, even violently, to the takeover of the embassy. But most are grateful that he didn't, because they feel that if, for instance, the rescue attempt that Carter did try had gone through and made it to the embassy, some or maybe all of them wouldn't have made it out alive. So there are mixed feelings about the whole thing, but I think most of them feel a kind of gratitude toward Carter, even if they disagree with him politically, because he placed such a high importance on their safety and ultimately was able to get them back alive. .......

........You say in your article that the hostage-taking was America's first real exposure to Islamic fundamentalism, an event that seems tame in contrast to the violent terrorism carried out today. Do you think the hostage crisis holds any lessons for fighting terrorism today?

I think it just points up the difficulty of dealing with terrorism and hostage-taking, because they create such a dilemma. One of the things that I am coming to realize more and more is the importance of the role that the press plays in giving them a weight they don't have in the real world. I think that the hostage crisis in 1979 was, in a way, prolonged by the hyperbolic press coverage here in the United States, which made such a huge issue out of it. It might not have lasted as long as it did or become such a charged and symbolic event if it hadn't been placed at the center stage of everyone's perception of the world at that point. So I think it was blown way out of proportion then, and I think we as journalists ought to think hard about how we report on these acts of terror today and at least weigh the public interest in deciding how much emphasis to give to something like a hostage-taking.

What kind of effect does the hostage crisis have on American-Iranian relations today?

I think it remains the single greatest obstacle to any kind of normal relationship between our two countries. Iran continues to define itself as the home of anti-Americanism in the world and its rhetoric is perfectly hateful and very provocative. I think the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran was a defining event in the relationship?or lack of one?between our two countries. So any effort to improve relations between our countries now would have to involve arriving at a better understanding of what was happening between our two countries in 1979.

In your last cover story for The Atlantic, you wrote about torture and interrogation, concluding the piece with your own realizations about the relative morality of such tactics in various situations. In this article, you don't shy away from including yourself, either?vocally protesting the poor care of the embassy by its Iranian guards today, telling one Iranian that he's "crackers" for thinking the CIA engineered the hostage-taking, and openly sharing some of the anger the American hostages felt toward their captors. How have you become so comfortable having your own thoughts and actions as part of the story?

One of the things that I enjoy about my work for The Atlantic and the books that I write is that they give me much more latitude to think through the issues that I'm writing about, and I feel that I owe it to readers to let them know what I think at a certain point. I was raised in the very strict tradition of newspaper journalism, where for many years I wrote stories that I totally removed myself from, generally avoiding reaching any kind of conclusion about things. I think that one of the things I find more challenging about the work I'm doing now is that I don't let myself off the hook like that anymore. I don't enter into a story with a preconceived notion and I don't have any kind of overarching ideology or political affiliation, but what I do try to do is approach whatever the subject matter is as a well-educated layman who has the time to really investigate what it is I'm writing about. And that gives me the opportunity to really think things through. I try not to be oppressive about that or even let it completely shape the story that I'm telling, but by the same token I don't avoid trying to convey what I think and what I feel at the various stages of writing.

What has been the response from readers to including yourself in your work?

Well, mostly I find that people respond to it very favorably. Whether they agree or disagree with me, they find it refreshing, I think, that I don't write as though I don't belong in the same world as everyone else. I react to things that I learn and experience in the same way anyone else does, and so far no one's threatened to lynch me for having an opinion.

Did you get any sense from those you talked to in Iran that the United States' difficulties in occupying Iraq have emboldened the Iranian government? Are they fearful of the U.S. as a superpower?

I think that they're not that fearful, because the fact that the United States has really gotten bogged down in Iraq reassures Iran that the Bush Administration is not about to invade. That would have been a fear if things had gone as smoothly as President Bush and some of his advisers had hoped initially. All Iranians are delighted to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but I felt while I was in Iran that there were a number of different reactions to the American invasion of Iraq. On the one hand, the official policy of the Iranian government would favor the creation of a Shia-dominated religious state in the mode of Iran. So in that sense, they're looking to people like Ayatollah Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr to pressure the United States into holding early elections that would lead to a Shia-dominated government. On the other hand, the average Iranian whom I spoke to was rooting for American success in Iraq, hoping that the Bush Administration can help Iraq set up a stable, Western-style democracy and by doing so create a great deal of pressure for reform in Iran. So ironically, some of conservative America's biggest supporters would be the Iranian men on the street who are rooting for American success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How do you think Iranians feel about Bush being reelected?

I think the man on the street in Iran is delighted. Because, as I've said, I think they're rooting for an ultimate American success in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Bush is perceived as a very tough-minded, consistent leader in Iran, and that plays well in that part of the world. The official reaction, I'm sure, is one of dismay. The regime in Iran would probably much prefer to have dealt with John Kerry than George Bush, so I suspect that they're disappointed.

Much of the news about Iran today deals with its nascent nuclear-weapons program. Did the hostage-takers have anything to say about Iran's nuclear program? How do you feel about it?

I haven't discussed the nuclear situation with any of the hostage-takers. What I personally think is that Iran, like every country, is going to act in its own best interest. And frankly, even though I think it's terrible that Iran could have a nuclear weapon, if I put myself in the shoes of an Iranian, I can understand completely why they would want that and why it is something that would be to their benefit. For one thing, they're basically surrounded right now by countries they regard as enemies, most of whom are nuclear powers: the United States is occupying Afghanistan and Iraq; they have Pakistan on their border; and Israel is within striking distance. So I think they feel entitled to the same measure of deterrence that, say, the United States felt it needed during the Cold War. It's also a matter of national pride?I think they feel that if they have the technology and engineering capability to make nuclear weapons, then why shouldn't they be able to, if other countries all over the world have done so? I understand it for all those reasons, as well as an additional one: if they do develop a nuclear-weapons program it would be a tremendous bargaining chip for them in dealing with the United States and the Western world. If America and Europe are serious about wanting Iran to remain free of nuclear weapons, then they would presumably have to give up something important in order to make Iran abandon those efforts. And I do think it would be a bad thing for the United States and the Western world if Iran were to possess nuclear weapons. Not because I think that in the short run we're at any risk of the Iranian government using such a weapon in a first strike, but because I think that based on the way I see Iran there is political instability in the future of that country, and there are very clearly fanatical Islamic factions within Iran who are quite supportive of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups who wouldn't hesitate to use these kinds of weapons. So I can foresee?without a great deal of stretching my imagination?Iran providing a nuclear device to a terrorist group who would use it against one of the "infidel" countries. I think it's a terrible problem, and one that the United States needs all the help it can get in addressing.

You said earlier that whatever kind of engagement comes up in the future between the U.S. and Iran, one of the first things that they would have to address up front is the hostage crisis. What would be the best way to deal with the hostage crisis in opening a relationship with Iran?

I think that the United States could take some steps to acknowledge how improper its involvement was in Iran in the early 1950s, when we effectively undermined a democratically elected government to install a monarchy. We basically did that to protect our interests in the country, which involved both geopolitics and oil. Acknowledging our historical wrongdoing in that region might go some way toward ameliorating the difficulties we still labor under with Iran. By the same token, Iran needs to acknowledge that the United States was not actively trying to overthrow the revolution in 1979; that the diplomats that they held hostage for more than a year were performing routine, everyday diplomacy; that seizing the embassy and holding the diplomatic mission hostage was a violation of every standard of international law; and that it was simply wrong. So I think that there's room for both sides in this discussion to acknowledge error and try to build something more respectful and more meaningful. If that can lead to ties between our two countries, that'd be a good thing. But I personally think the regime in Iran is a nightmare, and we can't be true to our democratic values and be in the least bit supportive of the theo-fascism that rules that country right now.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411u/int2004-11-09 (only you have to pay if you ar enot asubscriber)

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