The Foreign Service Journal, March 2015

28 MARCH 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL with our Iranian language teachers. I had never witnessed monopoly played this way: the rules became matters of mood and nuance. There were discussions about what number came up on the dice. Money and property would change hands mysteriously. A stodgy game became, in Iranians’ creative hands, unpredictable, and I began to suspect we were headed for unfamiliar territory that carried the promise of surprises. Our watchers may not have been aware that they have many predecessors who caught the same incurable infection: the British scholar E.G. Browne and the American scholar Richard Frye; the translator Dick Davis; the American political scientist Richard Cottam; the British writer Christopher de Bellaigue; the French geographer Bernard Hourcade; and the American writer Terrence O’Donnell. Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the American Foreign Service had sought to immunize itself from the Iran virus. The Service never produced Iran specialists. By accident or design, young officers such as Arnie Raphel learned Persian, served two or three years in Iran and, driven by their own intelligence and curiosity, picked up basic knowledge of Iranian history, culture and politics. After Iran, however, they were sent elsewhere, never to serve in the country again. The result, well-documented in studies such as Professor Jim Bill’s The Eagle and the Lion, was that the State Department had trained no cadre of Iran experts to fill senior positions either in Washington or Tehran. Bill has traced howmany Tehran embassy officers based their reporting on what they heard from a narrow circle of English-speaking, upper-class Iranians, most of whom were unaware of the realities of their own society. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: “Never have so many known so few who knew so little for so long.” Getting It Right (and Wrong) When our colleagues finally go back to serve in Iran, will we get it better? We will, if we can combine the enthusiasm and brains of the Iran watchers with a support system that supports. Such a systemwill need a cultural shift in the department in which our “Iranists,” wherever they are serving, can look forward to a reward- ing career track. Getting it right will require still another cultural shift, in which people with insight into Iran and into Washington policy issues read their colleagues’ reporting and respond to it. Two personal anecdotes illustrate the problem of support. In the early 2000s, while serving in Mauritania, I could read in my email unclassified reports on Iran from the consulate general in Dubai thanks to our embassy’s being on some collective address list. (Nouakchott had no classified email in those days.) The reports were full of exceptional insights, and I would send notes to the author praising his work and suggesting further questions to pursue. I later learned that my notes, from the remote West African coast, were almost the only response he received to his excellent messages. A decade later, when serving as deputy assistant secretary for Iran in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, I was reprimanded for sharing notes fromNational Security Council meetings on Iran with the watchers. I was told: “We must keep them [our colleagues] in the dark, lest we ourselves be excluded from the meetings.” For now, the question “What happens when we send American diplomatic personnel to Tehran?” remains hypothetical. But at some point, our people will go back to an interests section or a reopened embassy in Tehran, and diplo- mats from the Islamic Republic will return to Washington. As we are now seeing with Cuba, no estrangement lasts forever. And when for- mer enemies do begin to talk, they will soon Top: Downtown Tehran. Middle: Tochal telecabin, the world’s longest gondola at Tochal Complex recreation center north of Tehran. Bottom: One of the city’s numerous café restaurants. Courtesy of Mark Lijek Under the Turkmanchai Treaty, ending the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828, Russia reasserted its dominance in Persia. In addition to significant territorial concessions, Iran was forced to accept commercial treaties with Russia as Russia specified and lost rights to navigate the Caspian Sea and its coasts. Wikimedia Commons