The Foreign Service Journal, May 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2022 51 Michael Zirinsky, emeritus professor of modern history at Boise State University, calls himself a “utility outfielder” who taught European and Middle Eastern history at Boise State from 1973 to 2012. Schooled in New York, Iran, Ohio, North Carolina and Washington, D.C., he has researched early 20th- century Western relations with the Middle East in archives in London, Paris, Washington, Philadelphia and Birmingham (U.K.). O n Friday, June 22, 1956, my suburban New York family arrived in Tehran. The next day my father began his Cold War job as counsel to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gulf District supervising construction contracts for Iran, Paki- stan and Afghanistan. In September I began ninth grade at the American Presbyterian Mission’s Community School. Soon afterward, an uncle sent me his old Rolleiflex camera, a present for my 14th birthday. As I readied it for use, my parents warned me strongly, “ Do not take pictures in public! ” They had heard that an American diplomat had been killed years earlier for doing so. Fast forward to 1979: The Iranian Revolution found me in Idaho, a newly minted Ph.D. teaching modern European and Middle Eastern history at Boise State. Although I had been trained as a Europe- anist, the revolution provoked me to inves- tigate U.S.-Iran relations. I arrived at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 26, 1981. That day I was attracted by a strange entry in the 1939 Foreign Relations of the United States regarding the killing in Tehran on July 18, 1924, of Vice Consul Robert W. Imbrie—that same diplomat. The Iranian government had objected to publication of some relevant documents, so “the Department reluctantly reached the conclusion that it would be best to defer publication [on Imbrie] until such time as the Iranian Government was in a position to give its consent.” (The department has never published the documents in FRUS.) Undeterred, I started with Imbrie’s personnel file. There I discovered that one of the many explanations suggested for his murder was that the crowd that beat him to death objected to his photographing a religious “shrine.”The archivists also pointed me to the Dulles papers at Princeton University and the Presbyte- rian archives in Philadelphia. Allen Dulles was chief of the State Department Near Eastern Affairs Division in 1924, andmost Ameri- cans in Iran then were Presbyterianmissionaries who for decades had operated schools and hospitals throughout northern Iran. The next day, as I began to connect this episode with my par- ents’ warning, I became aware of an exodus from the archives. The U.S. Embassy Tehran hostages were on their way fromAndrews Air Force Base to the White House! I joined the crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue. While we waited, a rumor swept through the throng: The buses were coming from the east, in the far lanes. As one, we flooded the near lanes, despite horrified efforts by police to keep us on the sidewalk. We all cheered the heroes of our national humiliation, then returned to work. But as I contemplated the Tehran crowd of July 1924, I realized I had just received a lesson: A crowd is more than a group of individuals. It can—as had the Paris crowd of July 14, 1789, and as had the crowd that killed Imbrie—take on a life of its own and do what no individual intends to do. On That Friday in July 1924 The bare outline of what happened that Friday in July 1924 seems clear. One of the nodes of anti-Baha’i violence, rife in Tehran that summer, was a saqqa-khaneh , a “fountain” where a Baha’i was said to have been struck blind when he failed to bless the Shia saints, then had his sight restored when he did so. Imbrie, accompanied by Melvin Seymour—an oilfield roughneck serving a one-year sentence in the consular prison for assaulting another American oil worker with a baseball bat—approached the fountain with a camera. Imbrie seems to have anticipated violence because he had armed his prisoner with a blackjack. Someone called out “Baha’is!” and the crowd attacked. Imbrie and Seymour ran away. They were caught and beaten. Extricated by the police, they were taken to a police hospital for treatment. There they were attacked again, the crowd augmented by soldiers from Reza Khan’s army whose barracks were nearby. Imbrie died of his wounds, including a saber slash to his head. Mrs. Imbrie believed Seymour survived because attackers relented at the sight of his naked body: “Certain physical appearances gave evidence that Seymour might be a Mohammedan.” A portrait of Robert W. Imbrie, 1924. U.S.LIBRARYOFCONGRESS