From Part One Navigating the Islamic Republic chapter one: Getting There, Getting In TAXI DRIVER: I really shouldn''t be driving you into Tehran without an order from the Imam. I could get my hands chopped off. ROBERT REDFURN: Well, I appreciate your accepting a bribe. I really do. TAXI DRIVER: It''s been a while. We don''t get too many Westerners in town anymore. The only Americans we''ve seen in months are the liars and demons of the U.S.
press. You hail from the Great Satan yourself, right? ROBERT REDFURN: Uh, right. New York, actually. TAXI DRIVER: I can always tell. How long you been working for the C.I.A.' -- DOONESBURY COMIC STRIP, MAY 30, 1980, IN THE MIDST OF THE HOSTAGE CRISIS Persia is a country made for wandering onward.
-- VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, PASSENGER TO TEHERAN I have never liked flying into Iran in the middle of the night. But after too many trips to count, I now have the drill down pat. It isn''t easy to get there from the United States. Tehran is 6,337 miles from Washington, D.C., and no American carrier flies there. American economic sanctions, the absence of diplomatic relations, and common sense in the face of official Iranian hostility toward the United States preclude that. Lufthansa is the most efficient way in: a seven-and-a-half hour overnight flight from Dulles to Frankfurt, a six-hour stay in a day room at the airport hotel, and a five-hour overnight flight that arrives at an ungodly hour in Tehran.
Some people I know do the second leg on Iran Air, which is cheaper and whose aging American Boeing 747s are surprisingly safe. But Iran Air requires women to cover their hair with head scarves and serves no alcoholic beverages. I prefer to stave off the restrictions of the Islamic Republic as long as I can. For security reasons, Lufthansa often changes the gate for Flight 600 to Tehran without explanation. The boarding pass lists one gate; the overhead monitor doesn''t list the gate at all. The actual gate is usually somewhere else, sometimes in an isolated area down an escalator that is inaccessible to the duty-free shops and the luggage carts. After unloading its passengers in Tehran, the Lufthansa plane loads new passengers and heads straight back to Frankfurt. The airline considers it too much of a hassle, and too dangerous, to stay overnight in Iran.
A German businessman, a non-Muslim, was once sent to death row after being convicted of having sex with an unmarried Iranian Muslim woman, although his sentence was later reversed and he was sent home. Even on Lufthansa, the metamorphosis begins before the plane lands. The liquor bottles are quickly stored and the Lufthansa playing cards collected. Passengers are given a warning to leave behind the miniature bottles of Jack Daniel''s and Stolichnaya. A second warning is reserved for female passengers. "By the decree of the government of Iran, all female passengers are required to have their heads covered," the steward announces. "For your own interest we ask you to put on a scarf before leaving the aircraft." The dance of the veil begins.
The women cover their heads and bodies. A woman sitting across the aisle in khaki pants, a low-cut black top, heavy gold necklace, gold bangle bracelets, big hair, and blood-red lips puts on a trench coat and a good knockoff of a Hermès scarf. A woman on the other side of me wraps herself in a black chador. I reach into my carry-on for a long, solid-colored, textured cotton scarf that doesn''t need to be tied under my chin. Mehrabad International Airport was once state-of-the-art, a showpiece of the Shah''s campaign to transform Iran into one of the world''s most modern and prosperous countries. Even today, despite the worn runways, the airport functions fairly well. Planes arrive and leave remarkably close to their scheduled times. There are Western as well as Eastern toilets.
A twenty-four-hour prayer room welcomes the pious. A twenty-four-hour restaurant serves tea and pastries. A duty-free shop sells cheap souvenirs, flowery carpets, and good but not cheap caviar. In 1998 the airport opened a huge new waiting hall with fancy tiles, a carpet shop, and a small bookstore that sells books like Facial Yoga: No More Wrinkles. The giant government-protected Foundation for the Oppressed and War Veterans has a piece of the action. It runs a shop called Shahed (Witness) that sells televisions, VCRs, telephones, even refrigerators at prices below those in the shops in Tehran. There is nothing revolutionary about the airport lounge for Commercially Important Persons, my immediate destination upon arrival at Mehrabad. Access depends on money, not on gender, age, nationality, sacrifice in the war with Iraq, or revolutionary credentials.
In fact the only way to get in is with cash -- $50 to be precise, which represents a month''s salary for an average civil servant. CIP, as the service is called, is a trip back in time. An airport official meets me on the tarmac, escorts me by car to a special area on the far side of the airport, and deposits me in a marble-floored lounge with recessed lighting and comfortable sofas. Waiters serve tea, cold drinks, and cream-filled pastries. Instrumental medleys from American musicals are interrupted by the predawn call to prayer. An English-speaking customs official takes my passport for stamping; a baggage handler fetches my luggage. The authorities justify the service on the grounds that it brings in hard currency and encourages foreign business executives to feel comfortable coming to Iran. A photo of Ayatollah Khomeini stares down at me from the wall of the CIP lounge.
He led a nation in revolution to rid Iran of places just like this. The revolution was supposed to empower and embolden the oppressed masses and make them independent of the dollar-carrying foreigner. It was supposed to disinfect the country of "Westoxication." The existence of the CIP lounge illustrates that things didn''t work out as planned. There was a time when going in and out of the country was enough to make me want to stay home. The baggage handlers and customs officials did not speak English; the passport control officers spoke barely enough to get by. It could take three hours to get through the checkpoints. I once counted three checkpoints for people entering the country -- each representing different centers of power -- and nine for people leaving.
But it was the invasion of my privacy that got me most angry. Customs officers have dumped the contents of my suitcases on the floor, run their fingers through jars of face cream and leafed through books and manila folders of news clippings. Body searches -- always by female guards in black chadors -- could be rough and much too intrusive. Iranians sometimes still suffer some of these indignities. Western magazines used to be what customs officials were after. Even a copy of Newsweek could cause problems. Then it was contraband CDs, cassettes, and videotapes. Bertrand Vannier, a French journalist for Radio France, and I once flew in on the same plane from Rome, and the customs officers confiscated his radio (which might pick up Revolutionary Guards communications) and his deck of playing cards (gambling is forbidden in Islam).
Bertrand was given a receipt for both and told to retrieve them on his way out of the country. He was stunned that upon his departure, two weeks later, he was given back his goods. Today customs checks for foreigners are rare. The last thing potential foreign investors want to deal with at 3:00 A.M. is a search of their suitcases. Even huge anti-American banners and looming portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini that once dominated the airport have been taken down, replaced by modest-sized photographs of Khomeini and his pale successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The only sign I continue to find offensive is one in yellow neon in the domestic terminal that reads, in English, "In future Islam will destroy Satanic sovereignty of the West.
" Hadi Salimi, my friend and my regular driver, is always at the airport to meet me. Iranians can be rather formal, and it has never occurred to me to address him as anything other than "Mr." By day he has a full-time job maintaining a chemistry lab. After twenty years'' service, his monthly salary is the equivalent of $50. But he can earn $50 a day, sometimes $75 -- in dollars -- by driving foreign visitors. It is only when I see Mr. Salimi, smiling, in his jacket and knitted cap, that I feel that I have safely arrived. Then, as we speed down the highway toward downtown, Tehran hardly seems like a worthy destination.
It is a perfectly dreadful city that grew out of a barren brown plain, without even the saving grace of a storied past. "In the Middle Ages it was a savage place where people lived in holes," wrote Roger Stevens in his classic book on Iran, The Land of the Great Sophy. Tehran, he added, was "an obscure, ill-favored provincial town." It became the capital quite by accident. As dynasties changed over the centuries, Susa, Ctesiphon, Isfahan, Hamadan, Shiraz, Qazvin, Rey, Tabriz, Persepolis, and Mashad all served as capitals. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Agha Mohammad, a Persian king of the Qajar dynasty, moved his court to Tehran because it was close to his native province of Mazandaran on the Caspian Sea, and to his tribal allies there. Only then did Tehran flourish, and were lavish palaces built. Unlike the great ancient capitals of Baghdad or Cairo, Tehran has no river to bathe and cool it, to bring trade and commerce.
Initially,.