completely reconnect. Hall, who is now a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., cites the breakup of “a good marriage” as one of the lasting consequences of the ordeal.
Among those who wrote books about their experiences was Morehead “Mike” Kennedy, who now makes a living as a writer and lecturer. His book,
Laingen is now retired from a long career in the foreign service. When he returned from Iran he was named vice president of the National Defense University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1987. He was executive director of the National Commission on the Public Service (the Volcker Commission) from 1987 until the commission completed its work in 1990. He became president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in 1991. He still frequently lectures on the hostage crisis. Victor Tomseth, his old roommate, served a variety of posts in the State Department, and was U.S. ambassador to Laos from 1993 to 1996. Mike Howland, who prowled the Iran Foreign Ministry nude, now runs his own security company in Virginia and is married to former hostage Joan Walsh.
Kevin Hermening became a financial adviser and formed his own firm in Wausau, Wisconsin. He’s still enjoying his free seats at Brewers baseball games. His mother, Barbara Timm, lives in Phoenix.
On round-numbered anniversaries, most recently the twenty-fifth, the hostages are accustomed to being tracked down by local and national news reporters, and often when there are major events in Iran their insight and comments are sought. The surprising Iranian election in June 2005 of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president brought several of the former hostages back to the front pages. Some claim to remember the new Iranian leader as one of their former jailers and interrogators.
The Land of BordBari
The Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line had taken part in a grand experiment that ought to be familiar to Americans. They were out to build a new world, a utopia, their own version of a “City on the Hill.” Their vision borrowed from both sides of the Cold War. They would blend American democracy with a Soviet-style state-run economy, a system they believed to be both revolutionary and ancient. In their view, the perfect society had been described centuries ago in the Koran. Inspired by the vision of Ali Shariati, one of the ideological fathers of their revolution, they were striving toward the
Twenty-five years on, what does the experiment look like?
Tehran today is a bland, teeming, gray-brown sprawl swimming in a miasma of smog and dust that coats everything with a patina of grit, especially in the summer, when you can literally taste the air. It is a remarkably colorless city, except for occasional patches of faded green, apparently the only color that pleases Allah. Spreading down the southern slopes of the towering brown Alborz Mountains, it is a metropolis of low, dense construction cut into irregular squares by busy streets and expressways with only occasional isolated patches of open space. There are a few tall buildings of ten stories or more, and here and there the onion dome of a mosque, but otherwise the architecture is singularly uninspired. Most of the structures are shaped like building blocks, sometimes elongated and stacked on end. There’s a lot of dirt-streaked prefab concrete. Trees and bushes are plentiful, but they tend to be stunted, pale, and hanging on for dear life. Streets are bordered on both sides by the open canals called jubes, which, in lieu of an underground water and sewer system, channel flowing water downhill to every corner of the city. The farther south one goes the more clogged the canals are with litter and garbage. The only large structure in the city that grabs your eye is the graceful Azadi monument, a towering concrete arch just outside the airport supported by four sweeping buttresses, which was designed and built in the time of the shah.
The city is choking in traffic, a galaxy of small cars rushing everywhere pell-mell. The good news is that apparently everyone in Iran can afford a car and gasoline, and they all seem impressively busy, all the time, judging by the hurry. A downside is that the city smells like the back end of an old bus. Road manners are mad in most Third World cities, but in Tehran recklessness rises to the level of a cultural statement. It is said that an Iranian dies every twenty-two minutes in an auto accident, which is an impossibly low figure. The truth must be closer to twenty-two seconds. Traffic signals are purely ornamental. Most intersections have flashing reds or yellows, but neither color has any discernible effect. Drivers in Tehran see only one color behind the wheel, a pure Islamic green. Rules of the road are strictly optional. I was sitting once in an outer office in Tehran where they had a picture book on the coffee table, a collection of “pretty” photographs of the city, a challenging concept. Most of the pictures were taken at night (which hides the dirt), and the one on the cover was a time-lapse aerial shot. In it, a divided three-lane highway bends through downtown forming two distinct rivers of light, one white, formed by headlamps, and the other red, formed by taillights. If you looked closely, however, there are thin, wavy red lines inside the white river. It is subtle, and you might dismiss it as some anomaly in the printing of the photograph, but no, these are the taillights of motorbikes braving the onslaught and driving the wrong way on the busy interstate. It is something hard to believe until you actually see it.
Efforts are under way to ease this madness. In recent years, Tehran has completed a modern subway system consisting of two wide tunnels that form a crooked X pattern under the city’s streets. The stops along this system—Taleghani Station is just outside the southeast corner of the former U.S. embassy— are amazingly wide, clean, well ventilated, and well lit, with smooth granite walls inlaid with decorative red stones. The underground offers a striking refuge from the madness at ground level. The enormous engineering and construction contract for this massive project went, of course, to the son of then-president Akbar Hashemi- Rafsanjani. Tehranis are clearly thrilled to have it; the trains are jammed day and night.
For a visiting American, Iran is like an inverse world. Bad is good and good is bad. In Tehran patriotic symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always as images of violence, evil, and defeat. The American flag is shown in the shape of a gun; a 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 in 2004. 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 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the more imposing, threatening visage of the late Imam Khomeini.
This inverse nature is pervasive. In August of 2004, when I left on one of my visits to Iran, a media blitz at home was trumpeting a more or less nonstop parade of American triumphs in the Olympic Games in Greece. When I arrived in Tehran, I was greeted with pleased accounts of American defeats. The
And just when one seems to have the place in full
