A Week in Ayatollahland
Carlson, Richard W.
"A Week in Ayatollahland" Iranian procurement teams approached low-level officials at the Ulbinsky Metallurgy Plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, in an attempt to purchase part of a stockpile of 600 kilograms of...
...It is reminiscent of hotels in the Soviet Union before the collapse of Communism: heavy plainclothes security, indolent service, and a general shabbiness...
...Instead the Thai government and the UN are using our funds to forcefully send our Hmong allies back to a dangerous fate in Laos...
...A few moments later the stewardess, like the other attendants on board clearly chosen for reasons other than perky good looks, came on the intercom and said, "On behalf of God the compassionate, welcome aboard...
...Who buys these things, I wondered...
...Corruption, by the accounts whispered to me, is wide and deep despite the mullahs' preaching about honesty and non-materialism...
...A long front-page story said the Million Man March in Washington "carried the message of the Islamic revolution to the U.S...
...In the doorways and lobby lounged the secret policemen...
...At the corner of a major intersection, a shop has been built as part of the wall...
...The airport was jammed when I arrived at 1:00 a.m...
...My last night in Tehran I wandered through the Esteghlall Grand Hotel...
...Actually, I don't think I saw any...
...They followed me into the bazaar...
...Adding to my frustration, the window of my room looked directly out on the Al-burz Mountains to the north...
...Over too university-level academic majors are outlawed to women—though not medicine: the mullahs want women doctors to treat women...
...There are lots of minibikes, motorcycles, and bicycles on the streets...
...They boarded a separate bus to the airplane...
...Streets and alleys are surprisingly clean and free of litter, although everything has a dingy look...
...The van took me across the tarmac to a building whose sign said, "Important Commercial People...
...They had been thoroughly rummaged...
...learned of the Iranian efforts, the Department of Energy hurriedly intervened to purchase the uranium and airlift it to the United States for safekeeping...
...After the closing reception, I left for the Mehrabad airport and a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, then home...
...Girls as young as five or six are required to wear thick polyester scarves over their heads and around their faces, even in all-girl schools, and even in the hottest weather...
...She was elaborately polite...
...Liquor, heavy cigarette smoking, video games, banned rock music, miniskirts, much lipstick, dancing, kissing, and even worse are supposedly common...
...It is considered the embodiment of Islamic architecture and has many impressive buildings...
...This was certainly a colorful spot...
...Women are not allowed to wear cosmetics, at least in theory, although I did notice light lipstick on a few women...
...We will begin serving drinks in a few minutes...
...Yet even though the ethics charges are dying as a legal matter, Bonior and the Democrats continue their personal attacks...
...Prior to Operation Sapphire, the U.S...
...A recent estimate of Iran's nuclear timetable by Michael Eisenstadt, a military affairs analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, paints an even starker picture...
...for check-in...
...He talked about his good friend, the well-known writer Saeidi Sirjani, who was probably tortured to death one year ago after he too refused to spy on his friends...
...What would the mullahs think of boozy Dick and zaftig Liz, who couldn't keep their hands off each other in public...
...Signs outside designated the place "The Center of Deceit" and "The U.S...
...A former interrogator for the Revolutionary Guards, in the central Iranian city of Shiraz, told British investigators of the brutal rapes of Iranian women and children being held for political and social transgressions...
...Floggings and beatings of women were commonplace...
...I watched a documentary, voiced over in Farsi...
...There are unpainted, cheesy looking concrete apartment buildings everywhere...
...Vang explained the extraordinarily high casualty rate: "When the Americans were in trouble, we Hmong made a path with our blood to save them...
...This is a country that is seriously into making points through propaganda...
...With direct purchases of weapons-grade material, Iran "might be able to bypass the most difficult step in acquiring a nuclear weapon—the production of fissile material —and go directly to weaponization...
...The Iranian government recently introduced a law that says, in effect, that anyone who "betrays the revolution" by giving information to foreigners that is harmful to Islam or its leadership shall be punished severely, including possible life imprisonment...
...A taxi driver makes somewhere between $8 and $12 a day...
...I ambled down a series of green marble hallways into the reception rooms, done up in lots of brass and glass and inlaid with sparkling lights...
...Iwandered around outside the old U.S...
...The surrounding wall is peeling and battered...
...Finding highly enriched uranium, and in such large quantities, at a plant previously believed to be engaged in low-level enrichment was quite a shock," one official said...
...They wore stained suits and collarless shirts buttoned up at the neck...
...I retreated to the waiting room...
...Body searches are groping and thorough...
...What trees there are, in the center dividers for instance, are stunted and dusty...
...78 February 199 6 The American Spectator...
...I was driven to my hotel...
...It sells bound copies of classified State Department and CIA documents seized when the embassy was overrun and Americans were taken hostage in November 1979...
...The steps were polished marble...
...After the ouster of the Shah, the civil rights of women were eradicated...
...An Iranian man in a rumpled suit was standing next to a van at the bottom of the gangway and asked if I was "Mr...
...Have you noticed that the women don't smile here...
...The floors were black marble, covered with an aqua carpet...
...They gave off an air of cruelty and stupidity...
...The operation was made public in November 1994, just as the last shipment was being flown into the U.S...
...BY RICHARD W. CARLSON 34 February 1996 • The American Spectator was no toilet paper...
...They were buried in earth with their heads exposed...
...On one of the tables was a stack of English-language Tehran Times...
...He died while being questioned "under house arrest...
...The mullahs enforce a kind of apartheid designed to keep men and women separate (women must sit in the back of a bus, or in a separate section in a public library...
...Someone said to me that the SAVAK under the Shah was more efficient, because its members were smarter, but the leaders of this government believe that "quantity makes up for quality...
...a physician might make more but not necessarily much more...
...Eventually he was brought before a mullah and sentenced for his recalcitrance...
...Some of the furniture was red and purple RICHARD W. CARLSON is president and chief executive officer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...The Muslim government apparently leaves them alone, though some Christian clergymen have been jailed or harassed...
...I looked around and saw who she meant by "they"—the plainclothes police who followed us everywhere, and were now staring at and discussing us...
...I met with the former journalist at his small apartment in Tehran...
...In fact, they still refer to it that way...
...In one, I looked at a women's gold pin...
...They were then stoned to death by a crowd...
...04$ 'WEFK AYATOLLAHLAND he Mehrabad airport in Tehran was crowded when I arrived shortly after 1:0o a.m...
...Speaking to reporters at the National Press Club on January 5, 1995—only weeks after Operation Sapphire was announced—Defense Secretary William Perry acknowledged that if Tehranwere able to obtain a large amount of highly enriched uranium or plutonium from the former Soviet Union, "five years is on the high end" of how long it would probably take Iran to produce a bomb...
...One of their lead ayatollahs gave a speech to a huge crowd in the city of Babol, saying that "masses of black men chanted Allah-o-akbar on the Washington Mall and around the Capitol...
...I kept hearing rumors of parties, held by middle-class teenagers and middle-class adults in Tehran, where Islamic puritanism goes right out the window, albeit the window has black-out curtains on it...
...The few women were buttoned up tight in their sweltering raincoats, chadors pulled around their heads...
...Even the young girls were dressed similarly, in black or gray, and seemed dour and humorless...
...Lots of rich Iranians seems to be the answer, many of them in the higher levels of government...
...The former writer said earlier that he would have some friends join us at lunch, journalists who had suffered as he had...
...I went off to the men's room...
...There A chance visitor to Iran finds an eerie mix of Soviet-style paranoia and Islamic-brand misogyny...
...These people, myfriend said, are not to be trifled with...
...I tried to look stupid as well as arrogant, as if I were visiting from France...
...embassy in downtown Tehran...
...They will get us for this," she said...
...He said the massive gathering was in opposition to the Clinton government, which he called a "hegemonic regime in disgrace...
...He gave up and waved back, laughing and smiling...
...The scene then dissolved to the inside of a prison, and the camera traveled from cell to cell while the woman announcer talked in a gloomy tone...
...In Iran international flights land in the middle of the night...
...The cans were unopened...
...I grabbed her hands and kissed both her cheeks...
...Nahid Larami and Zahra Fat'hi were both condemned in the town square of Langrouf, in northern Iran...
...Now in his sixties, he spent time in prison...
...The security men's English was limited to "no problem," intoned repeatedly...
...They all needed a shave...
...This was once the famous Tehran Hilton, where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor cavorted for the world's press twenty-five years ago...
...Many are never heard from again...
...The motorbikes and motorcycles ride on the sidewalks at slow speed and also drive regularly the wrong way on one-way streets...
...It is twenty-four stories high, and was run by Hyatt before being expropriated by the Iranians...
...Asia Watch (Continuedfrom page 59) tions and Human Rights Subcommittee, has introduced legislation to defund the CPA (which is requesting $30 million this year) if refugees are involuntarily returned to regimes from which they escaped...
...We were just lucky...
...The embassy compound is large and runs along for blocks...
...They seemed to be popping up like mushrooms in their cheap suits and their scru Don Johnson beards, carrying walkie-talkies in one hand and working "worry beads" in the other...
...But at least Iran Air got him to Isfahan on time— and definitely very sober...
...I changed rooms at one point because the air conditioner kept failing and I would wake up bathed in sweat...
...Although it was elaborate, off-white marble walls and floors and green marble sinks, there were no toilets or urinals...
...on board an Air Force C-5 transport jet...
...cli4 Politics (Continued from page 57) whip obsessed with Newt...
...While he hastens to add that it is impossible to know for certain just how far Iran really is from the bomb, it is this very uncertainty surrounding Iran's ability to become a world-class menace overnight that is the most chilling of all...
...My guide in Isfahan pronounced Arab as "A-rab," just like Jimmy Carter used to do...
...A shoeshine boy makes Sa-3 a day on average (the word "boy" is misleading as most pracThe American Spectator • February 1996 titioners are quite elderly...
...Isfahan was long the capital of this country, and so prosperous it was known, at least to its egocentric residents, as "half of the world...
...knots of seedy men with hard eyes...
...A former journalist told me that he pays 5o0 a visit to his doctor, which is pretty standard...
...Rickety wooden guard towers have been added to it by the Iranians...
...He was arrested and charged with drug smuggling, homosexuality, and treason, a common triple whammy...
...Had Iran succeeded in purchasing this material, it could have become a nuclear power virtually overnight...
...Carlson...
...Another child-soldier from the war, Vang Kai, tells of how his unit of 100 men and boys rescued two American pilots in 1968...
...An air of rudeness, hostility, and aggression permeates...
...An interesting anomaly in a country where so many people are poor and to which the stream of wealthy visitors is thin, is the very expensive jewelry for sale in many shops...
...Police routinely stop women and demand identification to prove whether they are married...
...She tied a scarf tightly around her head before we left the plane, as did every other woman aboard, so as to ward off trouble from the authorities...
...I lit a candle and said a prayer for my beloved...
...Pictures of the spiritual leader, Rafsanjani, and his two running-dog mullahs abound...
...My friend then reminded me of the 24-year-old woman in Isfahan —Roya Ansari — who had acid poured in her eyes and was blinded after she infuriated Revolutionary Guards by flinging off her veil in a public display of contempt for them...
...Getting caught with liquor is a very serious offense...
...It was shaped like a swan, heavy with diamonds, and very nicely made...
...In the House debate on the Smith bill, Rep...
...The recent discovery in Europe of plutonium and enriched uranium smuggled out of the former Soviet Union raises the possibility that the diversion of fissile material may in fact have already occurred," Eisenstadt says...
...They were capped with snow...
...It was vinegary, but I pretended otherwise...
...An Australian who wandered away from a tour in Tehran told me he was stopped and searched on the street by plainclothes men...
...Apparently, "Important Commercial Person" service is for coming in, not for going out...
...1 sfahan is about a one-hour plane ride from Tehran...
...They all needed a shave...
...Bonior's only "supporting evidence" is the GOPAC documents already found to be worthless in making a case against Gingrich...
...You are not allowed to touch women publicly under any circumstances...
...Moreover, even if efforts to defund the CPA make it through the Senate and House Conference Committee, President Clinton has promised to veto the legislation...
...For men, flogging is the punishment...
...said a woman friend from Pakistan that night...
...and green and some of it was orange and pink...
...said a Westerner...
...I yelled back in loud French, grinning and waving as I thought a tourist might, and took his picture too, twice...
...She and I ran into each other at a reception...
...Their height was just enough so that their eyes and stern expressions hit the interior of the vehicle at face level from each side...
...The Azadi Grand Hotel ("Grand" is a stretch) is on the outskirts of Tehran along the Chamran Expressway, about fifteen minutes from the airport...
...There are "park and ride" lots alongside the expressway to pick up bus passengers...
...36 February 1996 • The American Spectator A Week in Ayatollahland (Continued from page 36) Once we were airborne, the pilot sent this greeting over the loudspeaker: "In the name of Allah, the magnificent and most compassionate, this is your captain speaking...
...My seat-mate was a businesswoman from Singapore...
...It showed a group of unhappy men sitting in front of a mullah, apparently being sentenced...
...They wore stained suits and collarless shirts buttoned up at the neck...
...Records in the intensive care unit of Mashhad's Qaem Hospital indicated that nearly all of the burned were women...
...Leaving Iran is a hassle...
...Gingrich knows they are doing him no damage, and he also knows that every day the Dems spend gnawing on his leg is a day not spent making a case for themselves...
...Bonior filed five ethics charges against Gingrich based on the FEC documents, but they are simple retreads of already discredited charges...
...Fifty-nine people in this province alone committed suicide that year by setting themselves on fire...
...I was stopped at a checkpoint in a taxicab and there were two lighted, ten-foot-high and five-foot-wide paintings of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Rafsanjani on either side of the narrow road...
...Sirjani compounded this mistake by writing mildly critical essays about the government...
...A suffering Englishman standing nearby said presciently, "Think of how happy we'll be when the wheels are up...
...At about 3:3o a.m...
...In February 1994 Marc Kaufman documented in the Philadelphia Inquirer a deceitful campaign by entrenched State Department and UNHCR personnel to discredit Hmong American leaders and Hmong refugees—and to manipulate Congressional investigations...
...It was a warm and sunny day...
...These "basement parties" are said to last as long as twenty-four hours...
...The sidewalks in front of the embassy were packed with men talking and smoking, wearing shorts or jeans or colored jackets or sweatshirts...
...Women were moved to a separate line for security after the ticket counter check-in, and then into a curtained area to be searched...
...On the wall was a chrome hose about three feet long with an adjustable nozzle on the end...
...The air conditioning is erratic and unreliable...
...In 1993, 2,53o women in Khorassn Province succeeded in committing suicide after being condemned or ostracized for "moral crimes," according to the report...
...Women in black robes and chadors brought tea, coffee, and sweets...
...A few months ago a human rights report by the British Parliament presented examples of the torture and execution of women who violate the rules of the mullahs...
...There are approximately Soo rooms in the Azadi and the windows are all sealed and can't be opened for fresh air...
...Welcome to Flight 159 to Isfahan...
...The charge against them was "vice and adultery...
...I flew there early one morning on Iran Air...
...Ben Gilman declared, "The United Nations will not allow our Hmong allies living in camps in Thailand, and eligible under United States law to migrate here, to leave the camps...
...She didn't mean booze...
...A government secretary might make the equivalent of $25 a week...
...We should not support the shameful forced repatriation of allies who fought on our side during the Vietnam war...
...Iranian law demands the death penalty for adultery for women (adultery means having sex with anyone not your spouse, regardless if one or both parties is unmarried...
...a short, dirty-looking fellow walked up, glared, and handed me my passport...
...They are on the take, big time...
...Continued on page 78) You could feel them watching as you walked through the lobby...
...This happened because he had been repeatedly approached by the government to spy on journalist friends and associates, and he had refused...
...There was a sign outside a hotel that said, in large letters, "Down with U.S...
...A number of hovering plainclothes security men attempted to pacify me...
...The next scene was of a small mountain of liquor bottles and beer cans stacked on top of each other...
...I decided this was nicer than "Have a good day, and drive safely while you're in Cleveland...
...It seemed strange to see an Iranian television crew with a female sound technician dressed like a nun...
...As the flight approached the city of Isfahan, the pilot thanked all of us for flying Iran Air and closed by saying, "And God bless you...
...The economy in Iran is in bad shape...
...Meanwhile, brave allies like Yee Lee are forcibly returned to Laos...
...One of them asked for my passport and said she would get my bags...
...I let go of her hands...
...There are few new cars...
...Six hundred kilograms of this uranium is enough to fabricate between thirty and thirty-five bombs...
...Espionage Den...
...I took a picture of the store...
...There was simply an ovular hole in the floor in the center of each stall, with foot treads on either side...
...On my wife's birthday, I went to a Catholic church in the Armenian section of the city...
...Outside I recognized a couple of the secret policemen I'd seen in Tehran...
...But although the Smith Amendment passed, the Senate version of the foreign aid bill does not address the CPA flaws or the need to stop the forced repatriation of the Hmong...
...Iranian procurement teams approached low-level officials at the Ulbinsky Metallurgy Plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, in an attempt to purchase part of a stockpile of 600 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium secretly stored at the site...
...Now he is wondering what the United States will do to repay its debt...
...It is surrounded by smoggy skies, reminiscent of Los Angeles in the 196os...
...But they all backed away that morning, and there were four empty seats with place settings as we sat down to a hearty lunch of rice, grilled chicken, vegetables, and some homemade wine...
...My two bags sat on the lobby floor...
...One evening, as I was dressing for dinner, I noticed that the Iranians 35 0 0 0 have their own version of "Court TV...
...Unmarried pregnant women are commonly labeled "prostitutes" in Iran and have been executed for it...
...For women, it is stoning to death...
...Depending on the skills of Iran's nuclear physicists—many of whom were initially trained in the United States in the Iwo's — it could take Iran "several months or several years to manufacture a weapon," he believes...
...After waiting for more than two hours for my luggage and passport, I became aggressive and insistent...
...Roads are good to excellent, but choked in bumper-to-bumper traffic...
...He sat in his living room and showed me photos of the Shah and himself before the revolution in 1978...
...Even such a bill may not be enough to stop the repatriation, however...
...By carrying one of them as they ran from North Vietnamese fire, they saved the lives of both —but by the time the chopper came to evacuate the two Americans, sixty of the Hmong unit were dead...
...Tehran is an ugly city of at least 6.5 million people...
...There are a dozen or so other Christian churches in this city of 1.5 million...
...You could feel them watching as you walked through the lobby or waited for the elevator...
...Wouldn't you be humorless too...
...When the U.S...
...intelligence community had nb information to suggest that weapons-grade fuel was being produced at the Ust-Kamenogorsk plant...
...It was $12,000 U.S., said the shop owner, with little room for negotiation...
...She had a shawl pulled down over her head...
...Bonior—who owes his whip position to his mentor, former speaker Jim Wright— is continuing his effort to avenge Wright and the other two Democrats who fled Congress alongside him, Tony Coelho and Bill Gray, to avoid investigations of their finances...
...At the top I was greeted by an old woman in a black robe and chador on her head, who handed me a carnation...
...A soldier on the roof, a man in a dirty and torn uniform of thick brown wool, started shouting at me and waving his rifle...
...She never came back...
Vol. 29 • February 1996 • No. 2
