COLUMN ONE : Disaster Offers Peek Into Iran : In a rare visit, Americans find an odd mixture of anti-U.S. slogans and friendly candor that reflects a continuing love-hate relationship.

As he talked, the man’s eyes rolled back into his head in dreamy, blissful reverie.

“Someday, an American ambassador will come back to Tehran,” he said. “His neck will be garlanded with flowers. He will drive his Cadillac from the airport to the American Embassy on a long Persian carpet. People will cheer him on the streets. Only one person will be needed to guard him.”

The conversation took place in a Tehran airline office. The English-speaking Iranian was a former employee of an American military contractor that supplied weapons to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s air force. He said he had an American wife who left him one day with barely a word of warning.

As the man struggled with his rusty English, it was clear that the broken marriage and the severed American involvement in Iran were mixed in his troubled mind.

“It is the American way,” he declared. “They wait, and when they make up their mind, they put both feet in one shoe, and that’s it. It’s over.”

Not far away, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard patrolled the rampart surrounding the former U.S. Embassy. Dark hair cut short as shadows, compact automatic weapons poised on their hips, they are protectors of what has become a shrine to American imperialism. The embassy had been a prison for American hostages for 444 days.

The walls of the embassy compound are covered with slogans: “The Superpower Right to Veto is Worse Than the Law of the Jungle” and “We Will Make America Face a Severe Defeat.” At one corner of the compound is a modern, glass-enclosed propaganda boutique: the Center for Publication of U.S. Espionage Documents.

More than 11 years after the Iranian revolution that overthrew the shah and nine years after the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis, the preoccupation with the United States continues in this intense and perplexing land.

The devastating earthquake that rocked Iran last week opened a crack in the wall that separates the Islamic Republic from the West. Hundreds of Western relief workers and journalists poured into the country, filling the hotels of the capital and visiting remote villages in the quake-affected area southwest of the Caspian Sea.

For Americans who had been locked out of Iran except for ceremonial occasions, such as the June 3 anniversary of the death of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, it was a rare opportunity to meet with the Iranian people.

The earthquake had the effect of suspending Iranian inhibitions about talking with foreigners. Reforms under the year-old administration of President Hashemi Rafsanjani have also softened anti-Western taboos here.

Diplomats based here say people have grown weary of sloganeering.

“We can’t feed the people slogans,” a deputy in the Iranian Parliament, the Majlis, complained in a recent public speech.

At first, East and West eyed each other warily. Western women cooked in the broiling heat and raged under the ankle-length robes and hejab head scarves required for all women under the fundamentalist regime. French television reporter Anne Gintzburger was accosted in a telephone booth and reprimanded by a civilian Islamic morality patrol when she exposed one ear to use the telephone receiver.

Newsweek magazine reporter Rod Nordland was warned that he would be arrested if he attempted to jog outside his Tehran hotel wearing running shorts and a tank top.

On the other side, Iranians fumed when French aid workers led their rescue dogs to public drinking fountains. Dogs are considered unclean in the strict Islamic society.

For the several dozen American reporters here, citizens of the “Great Satan,” the return to Iran was especially emotional and evocative.

From the hateful slogans painted on the walls of the U.S. Embassy to the evergreen-shaded north Tehran neighborhoods where thousands of American military advisers and contractors once lived in luxury, reminders of the 50 years of American influence here are omnipresent.

Fleets of pre-1978 Buicks, Chevrolet sedans and Blazer four-wheel drive vehicles still course Tehran’s broad avenues.

Former Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, some with the portrait of Col. Sanders--looking like a fuzzy, bearded American ayatollah and smiling through several coats of whitewash--still hawk drumsticks on key street corners.

The Hilton, the Hyatt and the Inter-Continental, all former American hotels, all renamed, still accept guests. But the large, handcrafted signs in each of their lobbies that say “Down With America” take some of the shine off the welcome.

Interviews with Iranian citizens from all strata of society, from the civilian crop-duster pilot in the ancient capital of Qazdin to gold merchants in Tehran’s covered bazaar, revealed a people willing to talk openly about the problems of their country.

For their part, the Iranians were just as curious about the Americans and about how Americans feel toward Iran.

“What do Americans think about the Iranian people? Iranian culture?” asked Mohammed Reza Kian, owner of a small shop in the Cheragh Bargh district of Tehran that sells spare parts for old Chrysler and Dodge trucks.

French television reporter Jean-Francois Coulomb observed the Iranian-American dialogue from a bemused distance.

“For us Europeans,” he noted wryly, “it is only a question of diplomacy and business. For you Americans and Iranians, it is an old romance, full of love and hate.”

In an attempt to answer the question of the Chrysler-Dodge spare parts dealer, a visiting American journalist said Americans are offended by some of the rhetoric of the regime and by the Iranian involvement in the cases of American hostages held in Lebanon.

The Iranian nodded and reassured his American guest.

“When we say ‘Death to America,”’ he said, “we don’t mean it word for word. We are not against the American people. We know that they are human beings, just like us. But we are against the American government and its superpower diplomacy.”

Regarding the hostages in Lebanon, he charged that is the work of the Christian right wing in Lebanon, not the Iranian-backed Shiite Muslims.

Kian said he hopes relations open up between the United States and Iran. For one thing, he said, it has been hard to maintain his stock of parts for 1960-1978 Chryslers and Dodges.

“Most of them have to be smuggled in from Turkey and Dubai,” he explained, which often makes prices prohibitive. A set of ignition points for a 1970 Chrysler, for example, costs $200 at the official exchange rate. A new crankshaft for a Dodge truck goes for $3,000.

The young auto parts dealer, whose spotlessly clean shop is blessed by an Arabic sign praising “Allah the Merciful and Compassionate,” is an example of someone who still feels that the Islamic revolution has been a good thing for his country. He favors the more open policies of Rafsanjani, but he does not want to return to the old days as an American client state.

“More than anything else,” he said, “the government is afraid of losing its culture. For more than 50 years, Iran was under the influence of European and American culture. They are afraid that if there is too much contact, Iran will again come under the influence.”

Azar, a 35-year-old woman who declined to give her last name, works as a manager in a European business office in Tehran. She was raised in a privileged middle-class family, but in her student days at Tehran University, she was deeply involved in the movement to depose the shah, whom she saw as a cruel and corrupt ruler.

“We had no idea what would happen,” she recounts sadly, her dark brown eyes darting from under the shadow of her black chador cloak. She recently gave birth to her second child, a son. But even the birth has not brought her joy.

“I feel guilty,” she said. “It seems so selfish to bring a child into this society, where you can’t even feel safe in your own home.”

A few months ago, she recalled, she and some friends decided to have a small party to welcome their new European boss to Iran. The party was sedate, for married couples only. Four of the women at the party were pregnant.

“No one was even dancing,” she said. However, some alcoholic beverages were served.

About 10 p.m. there was a knock on the door. The local komiteh unit of the Islamic morals police rushed into the party. All the guests except the European were taken to the local camp of the Revolutionary Guard. Several of the Iranians were held for two days. The case is still open.

“I hate this regime,” Azar declared. “I hate it every morning when I have to put on my scarf.”

Except in rare conversations like this, it is difficult to gauge the emotion hidden under the black, head-to-ankle covering worn by the Iranian women. In Farsi, the Persian language, the word chador also means “tent.” But it is not hard to imagine a river of rage that must run under the folds of this fabric.

“If the revolution is ever going to end,” observed the wife of a Western diplomat here, “it will be the women who lead the way.”

At the huge covered bazaar in south Tehran, the gold merchants have a more pecuniary reason to oppose the regime. During the last days of the shah, the merchants were an important force in the revolution. Indeed, according to some historians, they were the critical factor that finally tipped the balance in favor of the antishah forces.

Today, some of them are singing a different tune. “Things were better under the shah,” said the owner of one of the several dozen gold jewelry shops in the huge market. “People had money then and weren’t afraid to spend it. Now, there is not even enough money to buy bread.”

A neighboring gold dealer who came into the shop to join the conversation displayed a plastic-covered, red-and-white card to show that he had a son who was killed in the eight-year war with Iraq. This gives him some extra status in the Islamic Republic as the father of a “martyr.”

“During the war,” he complained, “all of the money went for rockets and guns. I lost my only son. Now, look around the bazaar. It used to be crowded.”

The arched passageway in front of the shop was mostly empty, save for a few shrouded women shopping for wedding presents.

“There is only one solution,” said his friend, the other gold merchant. “When the big superpowers like America and West Germany want to change the government in Iran, they can do it.”