from tehran to langley
WURMSER, DAVID
From Tehran to Langley A Remarkable Book by a Pseudonymous Agent By David Wurmser Know Thine Enemy is the engrossing autobiographical account of a CIA agent's journey into Iran. A creature of the...
...But Shirley's CIA is stale, mediocre, unimaginative, an institution immune to reflections on the consequences of policy and actions...
...The bureaucracy is so riddled with deceit and self-delusion that it cannot possibly evaluate its own performance...
...Stacks of primary-source material remain unopened because almost nobody understands the language of the country...
...The foreign-policy and intelligence sector of the United States has become inaccessible and confusing to most Americans, dominated as it is by an establishment of experts...
...This idea feeds into the everyday Iranian spirit of paranoid victimhood Shirley captures brilliantly...
...As he watched, and then entered, Iran, Shirley became a witness to the death of another of the David Wurmser is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...The Iran he sees is an oil-rich country that still burns dung for heat...
...He describes Iran as like an onion—telling because onions have many layers but no single core...
...Iran has become an exhausted, thoroughly depressed, fatigued, and self-pitying nation that dreams of revenge against its rulers...
...And Know Thine Enemy is an invaluable book, all the more so because it is an extraordinary entertainment...
...as Shirley explains, it was not only a political upheaval, but a coup inside the world of Shiite Islam...
...Khomeini sought as much to upend the traditional Shiite leadership (such as placing grand ayatollah Shariat-Madari under house arrest) as he sought to suppress lay society...
...The central change that concerns Shirley is, of course, the revolution of 1979, which ushered in the age of the Shiite mullahs—anti-American, anti-Western, anti-modern...
...Know Thine Enemy is, at its core, a brutally honest analysis of Iran, its Islamic revolution, the CIA, and the foreign-policy establishment that deals with the Middle East...
...and the doubt-ridden terror and giddy relief of an adventurer in far over his head...
...As a result, Shirley tells us, they are looking toward the United States to help them out and destroy the mullahs...
...defectors and spies whisking through Istanbul's dangerous construction-plagued streets...
...the mundane but ever-dangerous world of border smuggling...
...As quickly and solidly as Iran became a religious totalitarian state in 1979, it may now just as quickly separate church from state...
...But while Shirley may have the eye of an artist, he has the mind of a shrewd analyst of politics...
...He slides gracefully among languishing Iranian consulates in vibrant European capitals...
...This inaccessibility has generated a mystique of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence that has fed the bizarre notion of an all-powerful Central Intelligence Agency that is secretly running American life...
...The mullahs rule a country that despises them...
...With Shiite clerics discredited even among still-religious Shiites, Iran has become a religious vacuum open to powerful influences from across the border...
...Khomeini's revolution is dead...
...He writes of Iran almost as would a poet who spent his life romanticizing love and suddenly encounters the female form unclothed for the first time—with alternating joy, confusion, ambivalence, and terror...
...Shirley travels like a spy, but sees like a romantic...
...Change comes in Iran rapidly and thoroughly...
...Yet Iranians find it difficult to jettison the revolution because their shame will not allow them to admit it was a mistake...
...Iran is a country of revolutions almost from time immemorial...
...Its director of operations brags that he hasn't finished a book in four years...
...Shirley is not writing only about Iran, but about Washington...
...the chilling world of the mutilated but still unmercifully alive "death-wish" Iranians who gave their body parts or loved ones to a revolution long gone sour...
...Bereft of a core, Iran changes its outward behavior as radically as it changes its outer layer...
...an ancient and rich culture whose revolution against the West was spawned by intellectuals educated in the West...
...given America's unimaginable might in their eyes, only an American desire for the status quo allows the status quo to continue...
...20th century's terrifying attempts to transform man along utopian lines— this one based on an ancient religion but strangely modern all the same...
...The West is on the road to victory and dual rollback of both the Iranian and Iraqi revolutions, if only the West's policymakers understood this and pressed their emerging victory...
...what you see now may suddenly disappear without a trace...
...Shirley's insider indictment (he retired from the agency last year) is invaluable in helping to explain the almost comic quality of the CIA's failures these past few years...
...In Shirley's view, the very Western ideas the Iranian revolution sought to overturn are now themselves laying siege to the revolution...
...But that revolution has also been misunderstood...
...A creature of the CIA who had spent years studying Iran as closely as a human being could without actually touching its soil, "Edward Shirley" takes a dangerous journey into its heart...
...That "if" is the second theme of Know Thine Enemy—there is an opportunity to change things for the better in Iran, but our government is ill suited and ill prepared to make it happen...
...And here is the ironic twist: As long as the mullahs survive, the Iranians will believe that they are still in power because the United States wants them in power...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 44
