The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran Read Online Free PDF

name of the sort that intelligence officers seem to favor. Both held thick files in their laps.
    “You wrote this article,” the younger man said, opening his file and looking over some pages, “and you didn’t have a press pass.”
    “What article?” I asked.
    “About your trip here eight months ago. The nuclear conference.” He sucked air audibly, biting the tip of his tongue with his front teeth at the end of every sentence—an annoying tic. The article he was referring to was one I had written for Foreign Policy magazine, on an international “nuclear conference” that the government had held the prior year to trumpet nuclear advances and to reaffirm that those advances were for peaceful purposes. The conference had been boring, a show of propaganda, and very little of my long article was about the conference itself.
    “I did have a press pass,” I said. “The Foreign Ministry issued it to me at the conference, and I was with the media in the press box.”
    “The Foreign Ministry does not issue press passes,” he snarled. “You know that.” Hiss.
    “I don’t,” I said. “The Iranian mission to the UN told me that Icould pick up my press pass at the conference, and I did, the morning I arrived.”
    “I just told you the Foreign Ministry has nothing to do with press credentials.” Again, hiss.
    “Well, that’s not my fault—I live in New York, and I have to go through them to get credentials.”
    “Just because you have an Iranian passport doesn’t mean you can come here and write whatever you want when you leave—”
    The older man gestured for him to stop and picked up a paper from his own file. “Listen,” he said, “here you refer to the president as being a part of a ‘circus.’ Why do you make fun of the president of the country? And you even once translated for him at the UN!” He sounded almost hurt. I had indeed translated for Ahmadinejad at the UN, but I wondered if my interrogator understood that it was for a cover story for The New York Observer in 2006, complete with unflattering caricatures of the easily caricatured president, and not an expression of admiration or support for the president. This interrogator was softer-spoken, clearly the “good cop” to the other’s “bad cop,” but in truth it was really more a case of “bad cop, worse cop,” and like much else in Iran, the concept had lost something in translation.
    He was referring to a piece I had written a few months before, about Ahmadinejad’s 2010 trip to attend the UN General Assembly, in which I had called the yearly presence of the Iranian president in New York, along with the attendant publicity, the “Ahmadinejad circus.” Since exile Iranians sometimes likened Ahmadinejad to a chimp, and since cartoons on opposition Web sites lampooned him as such, I could see why the Intelligence Ministry was sensitive to the word circus . I patiently explained that it wasn’t a reference to the president himself, and that in English it wasn’t necessarily pejorative. He seemed unconvinced.
    “Here in your second book,” said the worse cop, “you insult the president again.” He read aloud a paragraph in Farsi.
    “That’s not my translation,” I said. “I don’t read or write Farsi well enough to write in the language. My book is in English.”
    “That what I expected you to say,” he snorted. “Typical response—avoid responsibility by saying you wrote in English, or it wasn’t you, that it was your editor who made you write it.”
    “It wasn’t my editor,” I said, “but it’s true that I wrote the book in English. Do you have the English copy?”
    He clearly didn’t, but instead of saying so, he sucked air rapidly through his teeth and shifted his weight.
    The bad cop took over. For the next three hours we went back and forth, as the bad cop and the worse cop accused me of “unpatriotic” writing at best and seditious acts at worst. Almost everything I had written in the past seemed to be