By Bill Berkeley and Nahid Siamdoust
When he first appeared on American television a generation ago, Mohsen Mirdamadi was a twenty-four-year-old engineering student at Tehran’s Polytechnic University, caught up in the fervor of Iran’s Islamist revolution. It was November 1979, barely two weeks into one of the longest and most painful peacetime ordeals in American history, what Americans came to know as the Iran Hostage Crisis.
On November 4 a mob of militant students, Mirdamadi among them, had stormed the American embassy in Tehran and taken hostage more than fifty of its diplomats, spies, and military personnel. They were bent, they said, on forcing the United States to extradite Iran’s reviled exiled shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to stand trial on criminal charges.
The images broadcast from Tehran that month would burn themselves into the American psyche: the parades of blindfolded hostages, the furious street mobs shouting “Death to America!,” the harangues of their glowering, black-turbaned leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, assailing America as “the mother of corruption itself.”
Mirdamadi was one of the organizers, a leader of the young militants who styled themselves the “Students Following the Imam’s Line.” Lean and intense, with earnest dark eyes and a boyish mop of thick black hair, he was interviewed by a young ABC News correspondent named Peter Jennings. “Those who remain in the embassy are spies,” Mirdamadi declared of the hostages that night, his voice calm and clear, his fresh young face fairly glowing in the unfamiliar klieg lights.
Jennings asked, “If the U.S. continues refusing to release the shah, and you continue refusing to allow the hostages to leave the embassy, are we simply at a dead end? Or is there any room for compromise?”
Mirdamadi replied, “We have not been in a business to make any compromises. We believe the shah is a criminal. As the imam said, a revolution has begun in Iran, bigger than the first one.” He added in solemn defiance, “We believe that in the long run, we will be able to show all the peoples of the world what the United States has been doing.” That was then. Here now is Mohsen Mirdamadi, forty-eight years old and shiny-bald, bespectacled, diminutive in a pale gray suit, with a white wisp of a beard and a paunch. It is March 2004. We are sitting in his office in downtown Tehran, just a couple of noisy, smoggy, densely congested blocks from the old American embassy compound, now a museum devoted to the “den of spies.” Its front wall is covered with ferocious murals denouncing America as the “Great Satan” and the “archvillain of nations.”
Mirdamadi, for his part, seems far removed from those fervent passions. He is a warm and gracious host, offering glasses of hot tea and plates of sugary cookies. He speaks deliberately, and listens attentively, affably engaged with his American visitor.
“You know, there is a difference between a revolutionary atmosphere and a normal atmosphere,” he recalls, shaking his head and rolling his eyes, a wry smile playing on his lips. “In a revolutionary atmosphere, you aren’t afraid of anything.”
It is hard to square the image of the fire-breathing, world-defying, avowedly Islamist “terrorist,” as Americans knew him then, with the course of his more recent career. Mirdamadi in middle age is a leading figure in Iran’s embattled reformist movement, including its independent press — in vehement opposition to the ruling mullahs in whose name he acted in his youth. As both a journalist and a politician, he has played a prominent role in the power struggle that has raised — and, more recently, dashed — the hopes of millions for a more open and democratic Iran.
As an elected member of Iran’s Majlis, or parliament, Mirdamadi for a time was the head of its national security and foreign affairs committee, advocating a normalization of relations with America. Just two months before our meeting in Tehran, he was among several thousand candidates who were disqualified from parliamentary elections by the hard-line Islamist Guardian Council, ostensibly for lacking sufficient Islamic credentials. In a speech broadcast live on state radio, Mirdamadi denounced the ruling clerics as “totalitarians.” He led a walkout of more than a hundred parliamentarians, discrediting the elections. “We have no choice but to resign,” he said at the time. “They want to cover the ugly body of dictatorship with the beautiful dress of democracy!”
But it was his journalism that got him into real trouble. Until two years ago, Mirdamadi was publisher of a leading reformist newspaper, Norouz. The independent press in Tehran has been the preeminent mouthpiece of the reformist movement, promoting accountable government and the rule of law in a campaign that was perhaps the most promising and, for a time at least, politically popular pro-democracy movement in the Muslim Middle East. A surprising number of former hostage-takers have been among its most prominent editors and writers.
Hojatolislam Mousavi-Khoeiniha, for instance, often described as the “spiritual mentor” of the hostage-takers as well as their link to Ayatollah Khomeini, founded the leading reformist daily Salam in the early 1990s; its editor in chief was Abbas Abdi, one of the four original conspirators in the embassy seizure. Another leader of the hostage-takers, Sa’eed Hajjarian, sometimes called the “brain of reforms,” edited the crusading reformist daily Sobh-e-Emrouz. Yet another leading hostage-taker, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, edited the reformist daily Hambastegi.
The students who seized the hostages were, like Mirdamadi, mostly in their late teens and early twenties when they burst into the embassy in 1979, triggering a crisis that would cost Jimmy Carter his presidency, consolidate a radical theocracy’s hold on power in Iran, precipitate the Iran-Iraq war, facilitate the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and end only after 444 days, at the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.
Some of these former hostage-takers have expressed remorse over the embassy seizure. Others say their evolution from revolutionary to reformer is, as one put it, “the natural outcome of the takeover.” Nearly all of them, meanwhile, have faced jail and physical violence at the hands of the regime they helped to bring to power. This includes Mirdamadi, who in July 2002 was sentenced to six months in prison by Iran’s hard-line judiciary, accused of libel, subversion, and “insulting senior officials.” Norouz was shut down.
Most Americans remember them only as bearded and black-veiled fanatics. But the surprising, seemingly counterintuitive evolution of these former hostage-takers into some of the most prominent and courageous journalists in Iran offers a window into the complexities of the country’s turbulent recent history — and into its continuing estrangement from the United States. At a time when this neighbor of Iraq and Afghanistan, one-third of President Bush’s Axis of Evil, is on the brink of entering the nuclear club, and at a time when there is much ominous talk of a coming “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, the remarkable trajectory of this handful of Iranian journalists, who years ago embodied our worst fears of such a clash, underlines how inadequate these vast abstractions are. It suggests that our understanding of matters like “fundamentalism,” “Islamism,” even “terrorism” may be more superficial than is commonly known.
You can do a Google search for Mohsen Mirdamadi and find, near the top of a long list, an Iranian press account of a violent assault he survived last December. Chanting, fist-waving thugs from the state-aligned Hezbollah (Party of God) militia attacked him on stage as he gave a speech in the desert city of Yazd. They beat him with fists and clubs. The on-line report includes close-up photographs — his bruised and bloodied face, his ripped shirt, his smashed eyeglasses — from the hospital where he was treated. Iran has a long tradition of reformist politics intertwined with journalism running up against authoritarian power — and being crushed. It dates back to a short-lived constitutional movement that was put down a century ago to, more recently, a brief flowering of independent journalism after World War II that helped propel the elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq to power, before he was infamously ousted in 1953 in a CIA-backed coup that reinstalled the shah.
The revolution of 1979 gave rise to an array of competing newspapers and journals stridently aligned with rival political factions. But once Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamists consolidated their control, and throughout Iran’s bitter eight-year war with Iraq, the press was tightly controlled. It flowered again in the early 1990s, when Mohammad Khatami, the reformist leader, served as minister of culture and Islamic guidance, and especially after Khatami’s surprising election as president in 1997. Pro-reform journals turned drab Tehran street corners over to colorful newspaper kiosks, sagging under the weight of dozens of dailies.
But recurrent waves of repression have made press freedom a crucial issue in the struggle for power in Iran. More than 120 pro-reform newspapers and journals have been closed by the mullah-controlled judiciary in recent years. Fourteen journalists are currently in jail.
By 2002, Mohsen Mirdamadi’s Norouz was the one paper where outspoken reformists like Mirdamadi himself, Abbas Abdi, Mohammad Reza Khatami, and Behzad Nabavi — all leading figures in the embassy seizure — were still publishing their views. It was the voice of the reformist Mosharekat party.
In early 2002 Norouz began publishing a series of articles addressing one of the most sensitive political issues in Iran: whether the country should reopen relations with the United States. Relations with the “Great Satan” have been suspended ever since the hostage crisis, with harsh economic consequences for Iran. In one article, Mirdamadi himself suggested a meeting between members of Iran’s parliament and members of the U.S. Congress.
To suggest such talks in Iran is officially beyond the pale, and the regime’s powerful judiciary, the main antagonist of the independent press, soon ordered Norouz closed. Remarkably, on the same day Norouz put the report of its impending demise on its own front page — the closure itself would await an appeal — Mirdamadi broke a scoop on an inside page, reporting “behind-the-curtain negotiations with Americans,” involving associates of the regime who regularly engage in stridently anti-American rhetoric. Meanwhile, even as Mirdamadi’s libel and subversion conviction was on appeal, Norouz continued to publish provocative commentary, chiefly that of the former hostage-taker Abbas Abdi.
Abdi, like Mirdamadi, had been one of the original conspirators in the embassy seizure. He served in the Intelligence Ministry throughout the war with Iraq, but then fell out with the regime. In the early 1990s he became an influential columnist and editor of the leading reform daily Salam.
In 1993 Abdi’s first cautious columns appealing for democracy and the rule of law brought him nine months in solitary confinement. In 1998 Abdi’s name appeared on a “death list” of reformers targeted by the Intelligence Ministry, mostly writers and scholars, disclosed by a defector from the ministry. Five on the list were killed. Abdi, now forty-eight, thick-set and balding, has said that his transition to democratic values has been less a matter of repudiating his past than of learning from it. “To understand us, you have to think of us as mammals who never lived out of water before 1979, and who are only now learning to walk on dry land,” he told John F. Burns of The New York Times in 1999. “For Americans, freedom is an everyday commodity, but for us, under the shah’s dictatorship, it was something unknown. So when we took the embassy, we acted on the basis of what we knew, and that was despotism. Today we have chosen a different course, based on what we learned from the past twenty years.”
In Norouz two years ago, while the paper’s survival hung in the balance, Abdi published an open letter to the by-then embattled President Khatami, questioning his viability in Iran’s convoluted power structure. Iran’s constitution, which was drafted shortly before the hostage affair, invests nominal authority in an elected president and parliament while real power is in the hands of unaccountable clerics, who can dismiss candidates and laws in the name of “Islam,” and who control the coercive instruments of the judiciary, the Army, and Revolutionary Guard, as well as allied militias and gangs.
Abdi called his letter to President Khatami “Bone in the Wound,” referring to an Iranian proverb about something that aggravates an injury. In the letter, Abdi challenged him to withdraw from government rather than lend legitimacy to a lawless regime:
You have chosen a policy of accommodation. Aren’t you aware that those sitting so tightly on the horses of power will not tolerate anyone beside them? . . . You had two paths to choose — either formulate a new policy or exit this position of responsibility that leaves you no means to exercise [authority]. Instead you have continued your uncertain position, a situation that does not benefit the country. Until when must there be a bone in the wound, and this situation continue? President Khatami, where do you stand?
Two weeks later the judiciary upheld its verdict, finding Mirdamadi guilty of “seventeen cases of anti-regime propaganda, insulting leaders, publishing lies, encouraging hooligans to undermine public order, propagating moral decadence.” Norouz was finally closed. Mirdamadi’s six-month prison sentence is still on appeal, but he is banned for four years from any press activity.
There is a huge mural in north Tehran, covering an entire side of a multistory building, celebrating the “martyrdom” of a Lebanese man who was killed by a bomb explosion in London in 1989. Iranians believe the bomb was intended for Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, the novel that prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa ordering Rushdie’s murder. The mural is typical of huge propaganda murals throughout Iran. Amid background images of a mosque and a Koran, and a shadow image of Ayatollah Khomeini, flowing Persian script quotes the imam: “The duty for all the Muslim people is to kill Salman Rushdie.” Iranian hard-liners unveiled it in 1998, soon after President Khatami declared that the fatwa against Rushdie was no longer in force. The mural was intended to discredit Khatami.
The existence of this officially sanctioned, prominently displayed mural hailing murder in response to “blasphemy” is a fair indication of the stock regime loyalists place in free expression. The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders calls Iran “the Middle East’s largest prison for journalists.” It is a characterization that underlines not just the risks involved in independent journalism here but the unparalleled number of journalists who are nevertheless willing to take those risks. (Not all the journalists who have run afoul of the regime are local. An Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, Zahra Kazemi, was arrested in Tehran last year and allegedly beaten to death while in custody.)
Iranian journalists, with former hostage-takers among their leading ranks, have engaged in high-stakes investigative reporting that has had a significant impact. In 1999 and 2000, for instance, several papers, including two edited by former hostage-takers, published explosive investigative articles exposing death squads in the country’s main intelligence agency, responsible for assassinating prominent reform-minded intellectuals in 1998, in what came to be known as the “chain murders.” Reporters were jailed and the papers were shut down. But the killings stopped, and the intelligence agency came under President Khatami’s control.
Among the editors behind those investigative stories was Sa’eed Hajjarian, a key architect of Khatami’s election as president in 1997 and the reform coalition’s parliamentary victory in February 2000. Hajjarian was also the editor of the crusading reform newspaper Sobh-e-Emrouz. A month after those 2000 elections, in downtown Tehran, Hajjarian was shot in the face and critically wounded. His attacker was a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative who remains at large. The motives for this attack were never established, but Hajjarian’s journalism surely must be among them. Sobh-e-Emrouz had done as much as any other publication to expose the darkness at the heart of Islamist rule.
We met Hajjarian last summer in the bare-walled sitting room of the headquarters of Mirdamadi’s political party, Mosharekat, on the second floor of a cement-block office building on a sooty side street typical of Tehran’s notoriously bleak architectural landscape. Hajjarian in his youth had been a key figure in the hostage crisis. He was a recent engineering graduate at the time and a mentor to the younger “Students Following the Imam’s Line.” He used to give lectures to students and hostages alike on the embassy grounds, explicating the writings of Ali Shari’ati, an Islamist leftist-revolutionary ideologue and mystic. What Americans saw as exotic Islamist “fundamentalism” in Iran concealed a kaleidoscopic brew of leftism, rightism, populism, nationalism, utopianism, messianism, fascism, and not least, gangsterism. Unity lasted only as long as the war with Iraq. Hajjarian would serve as deputy minister of intelligence throughout the war, but then he fell out of favor with what he saw as a “rightist” regime. He began writing anonymously for Salam and, later, editing Sobh-e-Emrouz.
Four years after the attempt on his life, Hajjarian walks unsteadily and struggles at times to get the words out. But his mind seems sharp, and in the course of a couple of hours of spirited discussion, he surveyed what he characterized as a lamentable history of twentieth-century revolutions, from Mao to Trotsky to liberation theology in Latin America. With regard to Iran’s own revolution, he conceded with a gentle laugh, “messianism has really high goals but lacks the means to achieve them.”
The evolution of Sa’eed Hajjarian and his former comrades is remarkable, but it is a morally complicated story. Many of the former hostage-takers who now spearhead Iran’s reformist movement were instrumental in the foundation and strengthening of the repressive regime they now oppose. Hajjarian’s past in particular raises difficult questions. His success in exposing the crimes of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry would appear to derive at least in part from his own personal experience as a key operative in that agency, in which he was director of counterintelligence. Many Iranians we spoke to have suggested that Hajjarian and his ilk are not so much crusading journalists or enlightened democrats as they are ambitious politicians, some with blood on their hands and power agendas of their own.
Mehdi Aminzadeh, a prominent young leader of today’s generation of university students, who has been jailed four times since 2000 and badly tortured, takes a jaded view of these former hostage-takers. “It was because of the hostage affair that the decades that followed were as repressive as they were,” he says.
We asked Hajjarian about the terrible abuses that occurred when he was a senior official in counterintelligence. He replied: “What we went through was a war. War is a different reality.” It was not the hostage-taking that led to the consolidation of a despotic regime, he argues, but the ruinous eight-year conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, as well as a brutal guerrilla campaign by the Marxist Mujahedin-Khalq, which murdered hundreds, including scores of senior officials, in the early 1980s. The regime, in turn, executed thousands of suspected guerrillas. “War has its own economics and its own values,” Hajjarian told us. “It doesn’t go hand in hand with democracy.”
The career of the former Salam publisher Hojatolislam Mousavi Khoeiniha, the spiritual adviser to the students throughout the embassy seizure and their liaison to Ayatollah Khomeini, provides another illustration of the ambiguous backgrounds and motives of the reform journalists in Iran. In 1985 he was appointed prosecutor general for the whole country, at a time of widespread arrests, torture, and summary executions of political dissidents. He fell out with ruling clerics in the early 1990s.
Khoeiniha went on to become the publisher of Salam. In July 1999 Salam published details of a secret report about a plan by hard-liners in the Intelligence Ministry to further restrict the pro-reform press. Immediately afterward Salam was closed, and Khoeiniha was banned from any press activity. The shutdown touched off the widespread student unrest of July 1999.
Regarding the hostage affair, Khoeiniha has written:
Do the American people realize that today the leaders of the reform movement in Iran are the same individuals who captured the former United States embassy? Have they considered that the supporters of this reform movement see it as the continuation of the revolution that toppled the imperial regime in 1979? Should the implications of this fact not lead to a change in the way these university students have been judged from 1979 through to the present?
The “implications of this fact” are not at all clear to many Iranians, let alone the former hostages. Although the motives for the embassy seizure are more understandable than many Americans appreciate — fear of another American-backed coup was not unreasonable at the time, given the infamous events of 1953 — the duration of the hostages’ ordeal and the consequences for Iran itself were deplorable.
John Limbert, a former hostage who was a political officer in the embassy in 1979, and who would spend nine months in solitary confinement, put it this way: “What they did to their own country and society was much worse than what they did to us. They helped today’s ruling clique gain their grip on power. They helped to ensure that mob rule and the chants of the goon squad triumphed.”
We asked Mohsen Mirdamadi what he had to say about the many accounts former hostages have given of mistreatment in captivity: beatings, threats, isolation, and fear. “No, No, No, I don’t think those things happened,” Mirdamadi replied. “It is possible that there was a personal clash, but I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it!”
None of these reformist journalists, alas, have directed their investigative resources to establishing the truth of the American charges of abuse.
And now, nearly twenty-five years after the hostage crisis, there has been just one meeting between a former hostage and one of the former hostage-takers. Barry Rosen was the embassy’s press attaché in 1979 when he was seized at gunpoint, blindfolded, beaten, subjected to a mock execution, and locked away incommunicado for months. In 1998, in Paris, Rosen participated in a little-noticed reconciliation with Abbas Abdi, author of the “Bone in the Wound” letter in Norouz.
“I was really interested in reconciliation,” Rosen told us. “I feel very strongly that the U.S. played a disgusting role in Iran.”
The meeting with Abdi occurred at Unesco’s headquarters in Paris. “It was like we were old friends,” Rosen recalled. “He was very pensive and quiet. Very kind and considerate. Very thoughtful. And the people around him were the funniest group. I loved them.” Rosen brought his wife and daughter with him. His daughter had been an infant when her father was taken hostage. “I said, ‘This is my daughter. Remember that she could have grown up without a father.’”
Abdi told Rosen he had wanted to destroy the American stranglehold over Iran. “That was all he wanted,” Rosen recalls. “In the minds of Iranians, what is important today, what they want, is an open society. Today, Iranians have awakened more than anyone else in the Middle East to the concept of democracy.”
Rosen told Abdi about the cruelties he endured: the beatings, the mock execution. “He was surprised,” Rosen recalled. “He said, ‘Iranians don’t do such things.’ I said to him, ‘Guys, you did these things.’”
That night, before Abdi left for Tehran, there was a big public dinner in Paris. In his speech, Abdi spoke of the “tall wall of mistrust” between Iran and America. He said it would be a mistake to blame the embassy seizure alone, which he called “only another row of bricks in this tall wall . . . the foundation of which was put down in 1953 with the coup against the nationalist and democratically elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq.” He reminded his listeners that the U.S. sold billions of dollars worth of military equipment to the shah “while over 60 percent of Iranians were illiterate, and poverty and pestilence were clearly observable all over the country.” He said the students had expected the embassy seizure to last no more than a week, that the American government would agree to the students’ demand to extradite the shah because they had resorted to “nonviolent means in treating the American hostages.” But in a private meeting beforehand, Rosen says, Abdi apologized directly to Rosen and his wife, and to America.
Five years later, in November 2002, Abdi published the results of an opinion poll commissioned by the Majlis national security and foreign affairs committee, headed by Mirdamadi. It revealed that nearly 75 percent of Iranians favor dialogue with the American people. Abdi was jailed. The charges included “espionage,” based in part on his meeting with Rosen four years earlier. He would spend ten months in solitary confinement, and is still in prison.
Recently we met with Abdi’s daughter, Myriam Abdi, at their family apartment in Tehran. She is twenty-four, born in the second month of the hostage crisis — “the first child of a hostage-taker,” she says with a smile. At the time of our meeting, she was nine months pregnant, soon to give birth to Abbas Abdi’s first grandson. She said her father had been on four hunger strikes to protest his isolation. The most recent one lasted forty days.
Myriam Abdi said she believes the real reason for her father’s arrest was not the opinion poll or his meeting with Barry Rosen. Instead, she said, it was the “Bone in the Wound” letter in Norouz, which had raised fundamental doubts about President Khatami’s strategy of cooperation with the regime. “He said there is no use working within the system,” she explained. “This is when the rightists started being aggressive with him.” Abdi’s writing turned out to be prescient. In the two years since his arrest, Iran’s reform movement has seemed to be in retreat, maybe even a spent force. Last winter, when the clerical hard-liners disqualified more than two thousand mostly reformist candidates for parliament, they completed the marginalization of President Khatami.
The press reflects this trend. With Abdi and Akbar Ganji, two of Iran’s preeminent investigative journalists, in jail and Mirdamadi, Khoeiniha, and Hajjarian sidelined, one of the few pro-reform dailies still publishing is a year-old broadsheet called Shargh, edited by twenty-seven-year-old Mohammad Ghoochani. Shargh survives by carefully avoiding what Iranians call the “red lines”: any overt criticism of the ruling clerics, or of the judiciary. News-based Internet sites and blogs had provided a space for the country’s overwhelmingly youthful population to write beyond the red lines. But those sites too have now been invaded by state censors. In recent weeks, several online journalists have been arrested, and some are facing charges ranging from propagandizing against the regime to insulting religions sanctities.
The talk in Iran now is less about reforming the Islamic Republic than of a “post-Islamic” government, that is, a secular democracy. But how to achieve this in the face of a widely reviled but still powerful clerical regime is far from clear.
“When he wrote those things,” Myriam Abdi says of her father’s Norouz articles, “he was not questioning the Islamic Republic. But if you asked him today, he would say the system is not capable of reforms. Back then he did believe that religion and politics could form a state together. Not anymore. Now he does not believe that religion should be part of the state.”
And what does her father think of America now? “It’s a country like any other,” she replies. “Not the monster that it is in many people’s minds.”
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