City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

AUTHOR’S NOTE

It was Black Friday 1978 when my mother, brother and I landed in Mehrabad airport in Tehran to join my father for a new life. Martial law had been announced and the military had opened fire on an anti-Shah protest, killing and injuring dozens of demonstrators. It was the first time the authorities had reacted to a protest with such force. It was the start of the revolution; it was the beginning of the end of Iran as we knew it. It was an inauspicious day to be returning to the country of my birth.

My memories of this time are vivid: the dancing and the street parties when the Shah finally left; the jubilant mood that filled the city; men and even children carrying guns stolen from the national armoury, now adorned with flowers poking from the barrels. Yet the streets felt safe, and the majority of Tehranis were united in a way they never had been before. It was a time of hope.
I was only a child, but I soon sensed a change in the atmosphere: the streets became quiet, adults started whispering. Standing on our balcony, we would watch the night sky streaked red by tracer rounds. I remember evenings when we sat in silence and darkness in our flat as armed groups roamed outside our front door, firing their guns.
Nine months later we were on a plane back to London. My father stayed behind for another four months, awaiting the acceptance of his resignation from the navy. He had not wanted to flee his country and sever ties with the land he loved.
My mother and father had met ten years earlier at a party in Earls Court. He was being trained by the British Navy at the time. The minute he saw her, he fell in love. Like me, my mother was born in Tehran but grew up in London. Her father moved his family there in 1960 in self-imposed exile. My grandfather was a military man and during Mossadegh’s term as Prime Minister, one of his jobs was to be head of army radio. He had been ordered by the Ministry of War to broadcast propaganda about Mohammad Reza Shah, who was in exile in Italy. My grand-father refused; he believed that the army was there to serve the people and should not interfere in politics. Mohammad Reza Shah soon returned when Mossadegh was ousted in a CIA- and British-backed coup. Word reached the
Shah of my grandfather’s defiance and he was repeatedly passed over for promotion. A brilliant polymath renowned for his honesty, he worked his way up the ranks through his abilities rather than bribery, connections and loyalty to the regime, as was so often the way. When he was finally made a general, it was too late for him. He was tired of the sycophants and the corruption – it was said that no one dared to lie to the former king, Reza Shah, and no one dared to tell the truth to his son and successor, Mohammad Reza Shah. He was also keen to give his children a British education. He left Iran and vowed never to return.
My grandfather’s cousin, Hassan Ali Mansour, tried many times to persuade him to come back, but he would not be swayed. Mansour was appointed Prime Minister in 1964 and during the White Revolution he implemented the controversial and much-loathed ‘capitulation’ law. The law gave US citizens accused of crimes immunity from prosecution in Iran. Mansour told my grandfather that he himself had been forced to capitulate to the US’s demands; he had accepted the US’s terms in return for a loan of 200 million US dollars, money which the country desperately needed. But in the eyes of most Iranians, he had sold his country and the interests of his people to interfering imperialist powers. The capitulation law turned out to be a seminal moment in the country’s modern history. It was condemned by a little-known cleric called Ayatollah Khomeini, who also denounced the Shah and the United States. Khomeini was promptly sent into exile where he used the capitulation law as one of the rallying cries against the Shah. And so the rumblings of a revolution began. Just over two months after Khomeini was exiled, Mansour was assassinated. His killer was a seventeen-year-old who worked with two accomplices, members of the fundamentalist Fadayeen-e Islam group. All three were executed.
Twenty-six years after leaving Tehran, I went back to live there. Although I knew little of my family history, I had an overwhelming need to reconnect with my roots. It also seemed to be the perfect place to launch my career as a journalist.
It was the summer of 2004, when I was the Tehran corres-pondent for The Times, that the idea of this book first came about. My press card had been revoked by Ershad, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. This would occasionally happen to journalists living in Tehran. You would never be told what you had done to piss them off, but this time a particularly friendly official told me straight. ‘Miss Navai, you covered a notorious human rights case and you wrote about people laughing at mullahs. You know they don’t like attention on human rights. And as for jokes about mullahs…’ At this point the official
started to laugh. He told me to sit tight and give it a few months, while they ‘taught me a lesson’. At least I would have some respite from the periodic secret interrogation sessions with intelligence officers that I had come to dread, and which the Ministry claimed were not carried out by their people.
I knew immediately what I would do. I had written a feature about a school run by a charity for street kids in Shoosh, south Tehran. I was so moved by the children’s stories I wanted to help in some way.
I was asked to teach English in a school in the back alleys of Nasser Khosrow Street in the heart of downtown Tehran. The pupils here were paperless Afghans, gypsies and the illegitimate children of prostitutes; none of them had the right to an education. I loved my group of Afghan children, the most hard-working kids I have ever met. They fitted school and homework around paid work, toiling on building sites, in factories and shops. One of their favourite sessions was when I took my friend Angus to school; I had asked them to prepare a list of questions to ask the Ingilisi. Predictably, they were all about his romantic life. Angus happily answered. He was a hit.
Around the same time, I met a prostitute at a methadone clinic off Shoosh Street. Her once beautiful face had been pockmarked and clawed at by drugs and disease, but her intense green eyes still served to pull in the punters. We started meeting once a week for a tea. As I was an outsider yet still a Tehrani she could talk freely to me without feeling judged; our conversations were never guarded or censored. She took me around her stomping ground, among the pimps and the dealers, the madams and the working girls, through the crumbling alleys and needle-strewn parks where she hung out. Sometimes she would be too high to speak much; she had a serious heroin addiction and had just found out she was HIV-positive.
I was inhabiting two very different worlds. I would return home to north Tehran, telling my friends – born and bred Tehranis – of life in the south of the city, only a few miles away. They listened in wonder, as though I was talking about a different country. And yet we were all connected by one single long road
– Vali Asr.
The more time I spent with people like the characters in these pages, the more I realized we were connected by so much more than that one street. We faced the same frustrations and limitations of life in the Islamic Republic: irrespective of class, wealth or profession, we were all required to hide aspects of our true selves.
When Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, he appointed a new minister to
Ershad. His name was Mohammad-Hossein Saffar Harandi – his uncle was one of the boys who had killed my grandfather’s cousin, Hassan Ali Mansour.
I never stopped going to south Tehran, even when my press card was reinstated. Over the years, more people shared their secrets with me and I discovered more dark corners of Tehran. The stories I heard painted a very different picture from the one I saw reflected in the news, with all its twisted political intrigues. I hope they make for a more honest, intimate and true portrait of the city that I love. This city of lies.

KEY DATES IN IRAN’S RECENT HISTORY

1921 The building of Vali Asr begins Reza Pahlavi leads a military coup

Ahmad Shah, the last Qajar monarch, flees the country
1925 Reza Pahlavi crowns himself Reza Shah, replacing the Qajar dynasty with the Pahlavis
1935 Persia is renamed Iran
1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion forces Reza Shah to abdicate. This is after he refuses to get rid of his German advisers even though he has proclaimed Iran’s neutrality during the Second World War
Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Shah, takes over
1946 British and US troops are withdrawn from Iran. The United States assists Mohammad Reza Shah in removing Soviet troops
1951 Mohammad Mossadegh elected Prime Minister
Parliament votes to nationalize the oil industry, which was largely controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
Britain bans Iranian oil in a bid to hurt the economy 1953 Mohammad Reza Shah flees
A coup orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence ousts Mossadegh
Mohammad Reza Shah returns
1963 The Shah launches the White Revolution, a campaign to modernize the country, which includes land reform
1964 Khomeini sent into exile after speaking out against the Shah and the United States when the ‘capitulation’ law is passed by the Prime Minister, Hassan Ali Mansour
1965 Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansour is assassinated 1978 Anti-Shah protests lead to martial law
Dozens of protesters are killed and injured when troops open fire on a
demonstration in Jaleh Square; the day comes to be known as Black Friday
¹⁹⁷⁹ JAN Islamic Revolution
Shah and his family forced into exile
FEB Khomeini returns to Iran after fourteen years in exile Hundreds of supporters of the Shah are executed
NOV Islamic militants take fifty-two Americans hostage in the US embassy in Tehran, demanding the Shah is returned to Iran to face trial
1980 War with Iraq begins when Iraq invades Iran Shah dies of cancer in exile in Egypt
1981 Mojahedin uprising
American hostages are released after being held for 444 days Ali Khamenei elected President
1988 End of Iran–Iraq war
Mass executions of political prisoners 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini dies
Former President Ali Khamenei appointed Supreme Leader
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani elected President 1997 Mohammad Khatami elected President
2001 Mohammad Khatami re-elected President 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad elected President 2009 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad re-elected president
Mass protests contesting election results
2013 Hassan Rouhani elected President

GLOSSARY