Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino

entered the room, Khomeini was already seated cross-legged on the floor, his hands folded in his lap, next to a fireplace and leaning against the wall. I was positioned a safe fifteen feet away. He didn’t shake my hand. He didn’t even stand to greet me. Ghotbzadeh did the translating. During the forty-five-minute interview, Khomeini smiled only once, when his young grandson ran into the room and jumped into his lap, prompting the ayatollah to warmly embrace him. And I caught the ayatollah looking at me at one point. We probably viewed each other in the same way: as a curiosity. I was, after all, the first woman and the first American to interview him.
    Khomeini mumbled in Persian in a barely audible monotone. He accused the Shah of destroying the economy, giving away the country’s oil to the industrial powers, reducing agricultural production to provide a market for American goods, subjecting the military to foreign leadership, massacring thousands of dissenters, and destroying freedom of expression. He didn’t seem to believe he would go back to Iran, at least not for a while. But that didn’t mean he wanted to stay in France. Khomeini stayed in the village, determined not to be tainted by what he believed was the corrupting influence of Western culture. His goal was to stay in France only as long as it took to find a Muslim country closer to home. Syria was one possibility, Algeria another. The Shah would have to be out of power before he would try to return home, he said.
    In other words, Khomeini didn’t have a master plan for the future. Rather, with the help of his aides, he improvised. Day by day, ideas were formulated, assignments were given, committees were appointed. His answers about what his government might look like evaporated into an Islamic mist as he called himself the symbol of the people. “I talk their language, I listen to their needs; I cry for them,” he told me.
    I interviewed Khomeini again—for a shorter time—just a few weeks later, when the fall of the Shah seemed imminent. This time, Khomeini was more than just a media curiosity. Once again Ghotbzadeh did the translating.
    “What will your role be in a future Islamic Republic?” I asked.
    “I will not have any position in the future government,” Khomeini said. “I will not be the President or the Prime Minister. I will be some sort of supervisor of their activities. I will give them guidance. If I see some deviation or mistake, I will remind them how to correct it.”
    “So would you describe yourself as the future strongman of Iran, the ultimate power?”
    “You may assume so.”
    I asked him again to explain precisely how the new system would work. He became irritated. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe the answer wasn’t part of the prepared script. Maybe he was getting fed up with the spoon-feeding by his advisers. “I’ve already answered your question,” he said sharply.
    And with those words, he stood up and left the room.
    To some outsiders, Khomeini seemed a throwback to Iran’s medieval past. But the truth is that he embraced the use of modern technology in order to get his message out. A red-brick garage attached to one of the two houses rented by Khomeini was turned into a communications center. Heated by a small space heater, lit with a single light bulb, the garage became the duplicating room, where students made hundreds of cassette tapes of the ayatollah’s pronouncements. From the house they were transmitted by telephone to Iran’s thousands of mosques and then to the bazaars—the two ready-made networks for spreading revolution. Once on the streets of Iran, Khomeini’s message resonated with a population that had grown disenchanted with the rule of the Shah.
    A king survives as long as he is successful, an Iranian saying goes. In other words, everyone loves a winner. And the Shah had come to look like a loser. Part of the problem was that the fifty-year-old Pahlavi dynasty did not have deep roots. It was