In Yazd’s historic old city is the splendid Jameh Mosque, where a rather bizarre but delightful ritual can be witnessed on Friday mornings. The tradition is for an unmarried woman to climb up to the top of one of the mosque’s towering minarets wearing a weird sort of padlocked hijab, and then to toss the key to this down into the courtyard below. The aim is then for a man, any man, to pick it up, at which point the woman will make her way down and let the lucky fellow unlock her. The next bit I really like—they then go off and have cakes and candy together and possibly get married. I visited the mosque but alas it wasn’t Friday, so I missed out on getting any free cakes or candy.
Despite my wanting to spend some time with the brothers today, their studies got in the way again, so I met up with Verity instead and after visiting the Jameh Mosque together, we set off for the bazaar in search of a suitable present that I could buy Reza and Ashkan’s mother as a thank-you for her hospitality.
I had some hard bargaining on my hands after setting my heart on a big decorative plate with an attractive peacock design. I must have been losing my touch, because I couldn’t get the trader to drop his price one iota. Whilst attempting to cut the deal, I noticed an identical dish in the stall opposite, so headed there after negotiations broke down. The crafty salesman from the first stall yelled something to his buddy opposite, and as a result, he wouldn’t drop his price either. About four stalls down, it happened again, this time with both of them yelling something to the third stall owner, and presumably it wasn’t to give me a good deal. I’d made the mistake of really setting my heart on the thing, and in the end I coughed up the full amount.
We took it easy for the rest of the day, strolling around visiting teahouses and other bazaar stalls and enjoying each other’s company. When Reza and Ashkan were due back from college, Verity and I swapped e-mail addresses and wished each other well. After a fond farewell, I headed to the brothers’ house to present their mother with the plate. She was over the moon with it and laid on a special meal for my last evening with them of burgers, gherkins, soft bread, grapes, and watery, salted cucumber. It was absolutely delicious.
My train left around two in the morning, but as was typical of Iranian hospitality, Reza insisted that I would not be getting a taxi to the station, and he would be taking me instead. Like the night before, I stayed up with him and Ashkan drinking Nescafé and chatting away as best we could. I got to ask them both about their political views, which were almost identical to Pedram’s and the lads’ from Tehran. Bush, bin Laden, and prime minister Tony B-Liar came in for significant criticism and were lumped together and described as terrorists. I told them I agreed.
I left for the train station with Reza and arrived there at about one forty-five. Rather bizarrely, there was a group of four people enthusiastically playing badminton at this hour in a small court opposite. God knows where they got the energy. Reza and I took a seat in the station a few places down from a Western-looking female traveler. Reza turned to me, and in a voice definitely loud enough for the poor woman to hear asked, “Is she attractive? Is she good or is she bad?”
I cringed, but what could I say other than, “She is good.” I hoped she didn’t speak English.
The train was late and when it finally pulled up, I was looking forward to getting some much-needed sleep. Reza and I parted with hugs and promises to keep in touch. I climbed on board just before the train pulled off. Inside, it wasn’t quite the first class Roger Moore affair I’d rather unrealistically been hoping for, but was instead a bit on the rickety side with cramped cabins sleeping six apiece. As I walked down the corridor, I was amazed to find people still awake. In one cabin, an inconsiderate individual was reading a newspaper with all the lights on, whilst the rest of the cabin tried to sleep. I checked the number on the door and was relieved to find it wasn’t where I’d be spending the night. Even worse was a couple of cabins down, where some idiot was listening to music—not with headphones as you might imagine but on a stereo with speakers for all to hear. Lucky this wasn’t where I’d be sleeping either; if it had been then the man’s sound system would have become better acquainted with an open window. I located my cabin, which thankfully was at the end of the carriage and far away from this one-man disco.
On quietly opening the door, I discovered five people asleep, with the only available bed being a top bunk. It was just the spot I would have chosen had I been the first one in there, and I quickly scaled the small ladder. After storing my luggage in an already packed luggage bin, I lay back with a big smile on my face. I really liked the novelty of being in a bunk bed on a train rocking gently back and forth whilst traveling through a vast desert. It seemed very civilized and was far superior to an uncomfortable night bus where you sat upright.
The only downside was a small, lit orange lightbulb that had no switch to turn it off. It shone directly on my face. I decided to cover it up and saw the perfect thing for the job. Crammed in the luggage section was one of the train company’s empty zip-up plastic cases used to hold the pillows, sheets, etc., which were supplied for the bunk beds. I managed to wedge half of this in the luggage compartment above the light, so that the other half flopped down and neatly enclosed the bulb. It worked perfectly. The cabin was now in near darkness, and moments later I was asleep.
I awoke to the dawn’s soft pink light lazily filtering through the cabin’s curtains. I didn’t want to miss out on some potentially awesome scenery, so I roused myself and went to investigate in the corridor. Out the window lay mile upon mile of wavy sandy desert accentuated by the light of the low morning sun, which transformed great swathes of sand into carpets of sparkling tiny jewels. Despite its beauty, to fully appreciate the view, I first needed a warm caffeinated beverage to stir me to life again.
I found a guard at the end of the carriage who was sipping a cup of tea and sitting next to a big warming urn—this seemed promising. I made a polite request for chay but the guard shook his head. I didn’t know if it was his private supply or if he just didn’t want to sell me a cup. I asked again and gestured as if inquiring which way I needed to go to get one. He shook his head again then tried to zip up the same type of case I’d used to cover the lightbulb in my cabin the night before. He struggled with the zip, so I helped out and held the bag together while he did it up. He owed me one now, so again I said, “chay” and gestured to the urn. He nodded this time and poured me a cup. I thanked him and went back to my magical desert.
We arrived by midmorning in Tehran, where I would have most of the day to kill before my connecting train to Tabriz this evening. I considered calling Leyla or Pedram but decided against it in the interests of some much-needed time alone. One place I wanted to see in Tehran, which I’d not seen on my first trip here, was the former U.S. embassy, now renamed and known officially as the U.S. Den of Espionage.
Outside the train station was total and utter chaos. I took my life in my hands and negotiated a crossing to the other side of the main road where there was a nice little park. I sat down and looked at my guidebook’s map of Tehran and the location of the Den of Espionage.
As I was many miles away yet, I flagged down a shared taxi, which already contained a passenger and was heading in roughly the right direction. I rode shotgun and consulted my map as we swerved through the traffic. I disembarked at what I thought was the correct spot but was unsure since the layout of the street was slightly different to how it was depicted on my guidebook’s map. To confirm it was the right place, I stood purposefully with a perplexed expression on my face, in the hope that someone would come to my assistance. Now I could do this in London and probably not receive any help for a week or two, but in Iran it was a different story altogether. With impeccable timing, no more than twenty seconds later, a smartly dressed man in his sixties, who spoke perfect English, stopped and with a warm smile asked predictably, “Can I help you?” He confirmed for me that I was in the right place and wished me a pleasant stay in Iran.
It was a bit of a walk to the famed U.S. Den of Espionage, which was a huge sprawling complex currently occupied by the Iranian military. It was surrounded by high walls, some of which were decorated with the murals mentioned in my guidebook. One depicted the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a face, and another had written on it, WHEN THE U.S. PRAISES US, WE SHOULD MOURN. But apart from these, I wasn’t particularly impressed and had seen far more colorful and artistic propaganda murals elsewhere in the city. My guidebook referred to a mural depicting the shooting down of Iranian civilian aircraft Flight 655 by the American naval vessel USS Vincennes and the resulting death of its 290 civilian passengers, including sixty-six children. I had a good look for it but couldn’t find the mural, which had presumably been painted over.
The attack on the Iranian jetliner occurred in 1988 toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War, and caused huge international outrage. The United States had claimed that the aircraft was outside the commercial jet flight corridor, flying at only 7,000 feet, and on a descent toward the navy vessel. A month later, however, U.S. authorities admitted that the airbus had been within a recognized commercial flight path and that the Iranian jet was flying at 12,000 feet and not descending. In a sensitive move which no doubt went far toward appeasing the Iranian victims’ families, all the crew of the USS Vincennes were commended and awarded combat action ribbons. The air-warfare coordinator, Lieutenant Commander Lustig, was awarded the Commendation Medal for, incredibly, “heroic achievement,” and the vessel’s Captain was bestowed the prestigious Legion of Merit medal.
Vice President George H. W. Bush famously stated a month after the event, “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what it has done. I don’t care what the facts are.”
But, of course, there is far more bad blood between Iran and America than this incident alone, and a lot of it can be traced back to the building I stood in front of now. It was from a bunker beneath the U.S. embassy that CIA agents orchestrated the 1953 coup that ousted popular democratic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the Shah as dictator. It was also largely from the U.S. embassy that the next quarter of a century’s support and influence over the Shah was orchestrated. In 1976, Amnesty International noted that Iran, under the U.S. backed and installed Shah, had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”
When the Shah was eventually toppled, the U.S. embassy was stormed by students who feared a repeat of the 1953 coup by the Americans. The students held fifty-two of the embassy’s diplomatic staff captive, setting off the Iranian hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days.
Roughly six months into the crisis, America’s elite Special Forces launched a rescue operation to free the hostages, but things didn’t go according to plan. Former U.S. Special Forces soldier Richard Marcinko, who was tasked with forming a diversionary mission (ultimately rejected) that was set to coincide with the actual rescue operation, states in his autobiography, Rogue Warrior, that the rescue, “fucked up beyond all repair… . [W]e’d just failed in an operation that had been almost half a year in the planning and billions in the funding… . [F]rom the top down, it had been one humongous goatfuck. One big waste.”
The basic plan had been to first fly a fleet of helicopters to a secret landing strip and refueling point in the Iranian Dasht-e Kavir desert north of Yazd. Here the choppers would refuel and transport the American Special Forces to a mountain hideaway near Tehran. Operatives on the ground would then meet and infiltrate with them into Tehran by truck. Once there, they would storm the embassy, kill all the students, release all the hostages, and escape in the helicopters, which would land in a nearby soccer stadium.
It didn’t quite work out like that. On the way there, two of the choppers got lost in sandstorms and a mechanical failure took out a third. The secret landing strip in the Dasht-e Kavir desert wasn’t particularly secret; a bus full of forty-five Iranian civilians drove past the Americans. The civilians were detained and the suggestion to murder them in cold blood was forwarded by Marcinko who describes the incident in the aforementioned book.
“What should we do with the Iranians from the bus?” somebody at desert one asked General Vaught in Egypt. I answered for him. “Kill the sons of bitches.” My colleagues looked at me incredulously. “Just kidding,” I told them. I wasn’t kidding at all.
Further insight into the mentality of this charming man is gained in the same book when he states, “War was great!” What a lowlife.
After the civilians arrived in the bus, an Iranian oil tanker rolled up and joined the party. This, perhaps a little unwisely, was blown up, sending flames hundreds of feet into the clear desert sky. The mission was aborted soon after, but things went from bad to worse when a collision between aircraft occurred during the withdrawal. The resulting fireball destroyed most of the helicopters and refueling craft parked on the ground. Eight aircraft were lost and the same number of American soldiers killed. Many more were horribly injured. Several of the dead were left behind.
The spectacular failure of the mission, along with the fact that the hostages had still not been released, eventually cost president Jimmy Carter the upcoming U.S. election against Ronald Reagan. Within minutes of Reagan being sworn into office the American hostages were released from the embassy.
The embassy was a sobering place.
After staring at the “Den” for a while, I headed across the road to a little café where I ordered a cool drink, which the friendly café owner offered to me for free. Considering I was in a massive city and there were loads of customers behind me, I assumed it wasn’t a serious offer but a ta’arof one. I refused three times but the guy was adamant, so I sat down and enjoyed my free drink. Iran is the only place I’ve visited where complete strangers will give you something for free simply for being a foreigner.
I thanked the owner and headed for the subway not far off down the street, which would then take me to the train station. The subway was clean, modern, spacious, and generally far nicer than London’s grimy, decrepit Tube system. It was also far cheaper and a ticket cost me the equivalent of about ten cents. I now learnt that the strict separation of the genders observed on buses and the like is completely abandoned on the Tehran metro, where it is every man and woman for themselves. The metro was so delightfully air conditioned that I could have stayed there far longer than my journey’s time—not something a sane person would willingly do in London’s chokingly hot nonair-conned Tube in summer.
One group of people who actually make a habit of spending long periods of time on London’s Tube are, amazingly, members of Mensa (according to my father). Although the Mensans are supposedly those with a super-high IQ, like my old man, what the jolly Mensans do is periodically take over a subway car on the Circle Line, where they then hold a proper party complete with music, food, booze, paper hats, and party games, as they travel endlessly around London. In circles. All night. How very intellectual.
When I stepped out of the Tehran metro, it was like walking into an oven. By the time I got to the station, I was hot, tired, and ready to crash out just as soon as my train came in. The lack of sleep from the night before and today’s wanderings had caught up with me. I was pleasantly surprised when the train arrived, as it was much nicer and more spacious than the one I’d caught from Yazd, having cabins that slept four, not six. I said a quick polite “Salaam” to my fellow passengers, then without further ado pulled down one of the cabin’s upper bunk beds and passed out.