Word: tehran
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...airport. If they were going to get me, this is where it would go down. In the end the files and flash drives came with me. I stepped through the stage one final time, the set design of my own making. Nothing happened. I made it through immigration in Tehran and carried myself through without incident all the way to Montreal. There, during my final layover en route to the United States, I was finally patted down. I watched the agent spread books and magazines pulled from my backpack out before me, a judicious collection of Islamic Revolutionary materials packed...
...days before leaving Tehran and three weeks after Iranian intelligence had come around looking for me, I was taking no chances. The notes, essays and photos on the protests I had been regularly sending back for publication would have to be sent to the States separately ... with my grandma. She had a flight to the U.S. one month after mine and, although the training manuals at Langley likely do not recommend it, I spent the better part of my final days in the Islamic Republic debating whether or not to convince my own grandmother to discreetly include a pair...
...fear, I started to write the script myself, a story more 80s screwball comedy than James Bond. I gave the regime the best and most powerful lines. I would have to settle for the part of the trickster, a rogue Br'er Rabbit racing through the streets of Tehran. For several weeks I went underground. I continued to send dispatches back to various publications and websites in the U.S. using a rotating set of email accounts registered under outrageous pseudonyms. On Facebook I took on an alias worthy of an old-school rapper. Certain that every word was being monitored...
...scrupulously measure every word and deed. Ordinary phone calls became exercises in awkward misdirection and elision, and everyday conversations came with a healthy dose of looking over our shoulders. These were habits that I would later find difficult to shake. The movie, it seemed, would not end in Tehran, would have no final scene. (See pictures of Iran's terror in plain clothes...
...wasn't like this before. In normal times, Iranians speak quite openly and publicly about politics and their government. Visitors to Tehran are regularly surprised by the level of candor and outright griping on the part of the citizenry. Taxi cabs in particular are hotbeds of sedition, roving confessional booths for those with grievances against the regime. With the crackdown ratcheting up by the day, such conversations became less common, taxi rides turned more subdued. Citizens fell back on the old Persian habits of evasion and mistrust. For all of the bravery witnessed in the gathering crowds, many us felt...