Guests of the Ayatollah

It wasn’t always easy or pleasant. Most were shockingly ill-informed and uneducated, and if they were abusive or arrogant it was easy to dislike them. Others he felt sorry for. He believed they were being manipulated for reasons they couldn’t begin to understand. He recognized certain types of young Iranians from his years of teaching in Shiraz. They were confused kids living in a bizarre society that for reasons of religion or tradition closed off most of the usual avenues of growth and self-improvement. It produced young people who were restless and ignorant, ripe for a demagogue, and in Khomeini they had found their man.

There was one young guard, a teenager, who spoke with such a pronounced Turkish accent that Limbert could tell he was from a provincial town in the Azerbaijan region. Clearly the most thrilling, important thing this young man had ever been asked to do was guard these American devils, and his excitement and anxiety were both evident. Limbert asked him at one point, “What part of Azerbaijan are you from?” The young man was shocked that his captive knew this about him. Afraid that he would be chastised for giving information to a hostage, but too polite to refuse an answer, he wrote down the name of his village on a piece of paper and handed it over. Limbert counted such small interactions as victories.

The captive diplomat had first visited Iran in 1962 as a young man stirred by the rhetoric of President Kennedy. A recent Harvard graduate, he had wanted to help less fortunate people and he wanted to travel, explore, and learn. Some of the guards told him that the only other Americans they had met were Peace Corps volunteers like himself, teaching in secondary schools in small towns. Several even said how much they had respected these teachers. It made Limbert want to laugh. These were, in effect, his students. This wasn’t how things were supposed to have turned out. But, then, he had never seen things accurately through Iranian eyes. How unprepared he had been to teach children in a culture and language entirely foreign to him! But if it had been difficult for him, then what must it have been like for his students? How patient they had been with him! If Kennedy had expected the Peace Corps experience would build political and cultural bridges to the Third World, he had underestimated the complexity of such a task. A bridge requires firm foundations on both sides of a divide. The Iranians he met and worked with had no desire to build a bridge to the United States. They were perfectly capable of liking and admiring him and the other volunteers personally, but they were distrustful and increasingly angry with the American government, its values, and its policies. He remembered listening to the radio in the summer of 1965 as President Johnson announced his decision to send more troops to Vietnam and then to bomb Hanoi. Many of his Iranian friends had been angry about that then, but it had never interfered with their warm feelings toward him. He was an American, yes, but he was first and foremost himself, a caring, decent young man, someone in love with all things Persian, a human being trying to do the right thing with his life. The personal and the political ran on separate tracks. It took something like a revolution to push these two tracks together, to make Iranians take out their anger with the U.S. government on individual Americans—which is what had so dramatically happened here. Afire with their new political power and visions of remaking the world, all their stored antipathy and resentment had demonized him. It was shocking, and yet when he had reflected on it more he concluded that it was something he should have seen coming a long time ago.

Things had taken a turn for the worse when he was in Shiraz finishing work on his Ph.D. in the late sixties. At first he recognized the usual undercurrent of anti-Americanism in his students and colleagues, but still it rarely surfaced, and it didn’t color their appreciation of him. By that time Limbert was fluent in Farsi. He was, in effect, the ideal Peace Corps graduate, an American who had fully blended with his host country. He had met and married Parvaneh; they were at that point as much Iranian as American. He considered Shiraz as much his home as any place in America. The college where he taught had a contract with the University of Pennsylvania and was becoming an international English-language university, with faculty from all over the world. It was as cosmopolitan as the student body was provincial. Most of Limbert’s students came from small towns and cities that were religious and very conservative, and the values he confronted on campus and in the classroom clashed sharply with his own. Some of the students, a few, threw off their past and embraced the newer Western world, but other students—looking back now he realized it was most of them—rejected the secular, tolerant, gender-equal ways of their professors. One of his pupils, a good student, was killed when a bomb he was making with some of his friends in the dormitory had blown up prematurely.

There was another incident that came to mind, and which now assumed more meaning. An American teacher had founded a modern dance troupe at the university. Male and female dancers in tights performed together in shows that were commonplace in the West. The troupe had performed for the queen when she was in Shiraz for an arts festival—the shah and his wife vigorously encouraged things modern and Western. After the royal performance, arrangements were made for the dance show to be performed for the student body. The same routines that elicited enthusiastic applause in the earlier show provoked a riot. The troupe was unable to finish. To most of the students, undraped female forms cavorting on stage with undraped males was an outrage. It was alien and unwelcome and they didn’t like it one bit. Limbert remembered the distress, confusion, and disbelief of the American woman who had started the troupe. She could not fathom how something as benign and beautiful as a dance could provoke such violent rejection.

These were the kinds of things entirely missed by American policy makers, who dealt only with the shah and assumed that anyone who disagreed with him was backward and would remain powerless, not worth their attention or concern. America tallied up the number of machine guns in the shah’s arsenal and felt comfortable but failed to consider that a machine gun is useless if the man behind it refuses to shoot. The undercurrent wasn’t visible to those who visited Iran for a few days or weeks. You saw it only when you immersed yourself in the country, as Limbert had, and even he had misjudged it.

There had been things about the shah he disliked, but he accepted the monarchy because historically Iran (or Persia) had been ruled by kings. He disdained the royal security policies, and he knew there was corruption at the highest levels of the regime, but like most of his Iranian family and friends he considered these things simply a fact of life in the Third World, something that required the slow progress of modernization to change. As the revolution demonstrated, however, sometimes change can come fast, and in an unexpected direction.

He still didn’t understand how it happened. Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve, when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill fed, and unhealthy, did not. Some blamed the revolution on Carter’s liberal policies; his insistence on human rights reforms in Iran had weakened the shah enough to make him vulnerable. Others blamed the administration’s hard-line policies, epitomized by Brzezinski, who had encouraged the shah to crack down more violently against protesters once the upheaval began, which proved to be too little too late, and which had only fueled the flames. Some blamed the shah for being timid and vacillating. Limbert knew that none of these explanations was sufficient. Iran had been long spoiling for change. There had been two major currents of opposition, the nationalists, who owed their loyalty historically to Mossadeq and who were divided between those who wanted a Western-style democracy and those who wanted to establish a Marxist-style state; and the Islamists, a new totalitarian strain rooted firmly in centuries of tradition, who wanted to return Iran to some dimly remembered utopian past where clerics ruled like philosopher kings. The shah had played these two currents off each other skillfully for years. The nationalists viewed an Islamist state in the same way the Western powers did, as a hopeless anachronism, a giant step backward in time. The shah was able to say to them, Look, you may not like me but I am your bulwark against these primitives who would undo all of the technological and social progress that we have made. The Islamists viewed the nationalists as infidels, heretics, and sellouts. But for some reason that Limbert didn’t fully understand, the two currents had abruptly joined in 1978. The mullahs had their own sophisticated mosque-based organization, but suddenly they had the support of otherwise secular civil servants and white-collar workers, who could shut down overnight government offices, banks, and even the military; one of the turning points of the revolution had been the support of thousands of mid-level military officers and technicians, who had short-circuited the shah’s response to the threat.

The postrevolutionary struggle was between the victors: the nationalists and the Islamists. They had united to throw out the shah but were now locked in a struggle to shape the new Iran. Limbert saw that he and his colleagues had become pawns in this struggle; they were being used by the fundamentalist mullahs to finish off their former nationalist allies and even moderate clerics who opposed a totalitarian theocracy. The simple black- and-white logic of religious rhetoric spoke powerfully to the young who, like Limbert’s own students a decade earlier, came from small-town, traditional backgrounds. Anti-Americanism was the right tool in this fight, because nationalists like Bazargan, although personally religious, shared Western democratic values. The goal of this new