A Human Touch Helps Thaw Relations Between U.S. and Iran

Slowly, if somewhat unsteadily, the last wall is coming down.

Two decades after the student takeover of the U.S. Embassy here ignited a deep and enduring animosity between former allies, Americans are back in Iran. Iranians are back in the United States. And Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s appeal for people-to-people exchanges has begun to bring down a barrier characterized as “the wall of mistrust.”

After an early round of symbolic exchanges involving wrestlers, Iranians and Americans are now dealing with substance: Last month alone, a dozen U.S. oil executives and experts traveled to this capital for a conference on the Caspian Sea oil rush, while a group of U.S. businessmen scouted the country for future investment opportunities.

At the same time, five Iranian journalists spent two weeks in Boston and New York as guests of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors, and six actresses and female directors from Iran engaged with U.S. counterparts and attended film festivals in New York and Chicago as guests of Search for Common Ground, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Distrust Is Still the Greatest Enemy

The numbers are still small. However, the change in atmospherics is substantial. That was evident during last month’s observance of the 19th anniversary of the embassy seizure, when a former spokesman for the captors, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, encouraged the former hostages to come back to Iran.

“Regarding relations with America, we must look to the future, not to the past,” he said. “Today, I invite all the hostages to return to Iran as our guests.”

However, the course of change is far from smooth. Recently, a small group of assailants shouting anti-American slogans threw rocks and broke windows of a bus carrying the visiting U.S. business executives, after a conservative newspaper published reports that they were U.S. government and CIA officials posing as tourists.

The government of Iran deplored the attack.

“Our policy is clear,” Khatami said last month. “It consists of easing relations with the outside world, and we will not allow lawbreakers or wrongdoers to harm interests of the regime.”

The target of the attack was as much Iran’s young reformist government as it was the Americans.

“This was an operation against U.S. spies and a warning to the officials who invited them,” said a statement from the Devotees of Islam, which claimed credit.

Yet participants in the exchange said they will not be deterred.

“It’s a shame, really, because we had a very interesting week in Iran,” said Christopher E. Cooper, who runs an investment firm called Cooperfund in Oak Ridge, Ill. “I think the people who met with us are more worried than the people who were attacked.”

Iranians willing to come to the United States have not been pelted with stones, but they have encountered verbal attacks from conservative politicians and newspapers opposed to a dialogue.

“We know there are some groups that are against any contact. What we’re trying to show is that it’s not dangerous to talk, and that the United States is not going to control our minds,” said Fereshteh Taerpour, a film producer, shortly before speaking recently to a standing-room crowd at the Lincoln Center Film Society.

On both sides of the divide, key figures remain wary.

In an address on the anniversary of the embassy seizure, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected the possibility of reestablishing formal relations between Tehran and Washington.

“The severing of relations with the United States has been to the 100% benefit of the Iranian people,” Khamenei said. “Our importance around the world and in the eyes of other peoples is based on our standing up to the United States.”

At the Caspian oil conference, an American analyst invited an Iranian to attend a conference in the United States next month, only to have the State Department turn down his visa. U.S. law still requires Iranians--including Olympic wrestlers, academics and filmmakers participating in White House-endorsed cultural exchanges--to be fingerprinted and have mug shots taken upon arrival.

Yet interest in tearing down the wall appears to be overcoming the campaign to keep it up.

A few days after Khamenei’s speech, U.S. experts and executives from Conoco Inc., Unocal Corp., Mobil Corp. and other oil companies assembled here to discuss how to tap the Caspian’s rich oil and gas resources. Some estimates predict that the Caspian could eventually account for as much as 6% of the world’s oil supply.

The Americans heard speeches by several Cabinet-level Iranian officials, including the U.S.-educated vice president for the environment, a woman who 19 years ago was a spokeswoman for captors of the U.S. Embassy.

She appealed for cooperation to protect the Caspian, where pollution and industrialization are endangering 23 species of fish. “The whole atmosphere was very welcoming,” said James Placke, a former U.S. diplomat now with Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Washington. “It was designed to be part of Iran’s effort to demonstrate that it is back in the community of nations in a conventional way.”

Impromptu exchanges on the sidelines may have a more lasting impact than the formal presentations inside conference halls.

“I really came to listen, meet people and make contacts for the future,” one oil industry executive said.

Among the visiting Iranian journalists, informal visits to American homes made a bigger impression than a trip to the United Nations.

“The biggest misconception we had was about the American family--ideas about the disintegration of families, and kids leaving home at young ages. But we saw that American life is also rich, and families are affectionate, principled and kind,” said Mojgan Jalali, an editor at Iran News.

Finding Common Concerns

In turn, the visitors tried to change prevailing U.S. images of Iranian women.

In New York, the six Iranian actresses, directors and producers all wore the head scarves of modest Islamic dress, which are required garb in Iranian movies, even in scenes inside homes where Iranian women normally can wear whatever they want. Women and men also do not touch in Iranian films because the sexes are not allowed to even shake hands if not related by blood or marriage.

But during lunch at the Directors Guild of America in New York, the Iranians argued that both restrictions enrich, rather than diminish, the craft of creative expression.

Niki Karimi said actresses use facial expressions, hand gestures and other moves, instead of their physiques, hairstyles or makeup, to develop their characters. Emotions are conveyed by looks and words rather than by touching.

The Iranian women also discussed issues of common concern with their American counterparts: finding strong female roles, budgets, distribution, and art films versus commercial productions.

The women’s trip was so successful that Search for Common Ground is now organizing a reciprocal visit to Iran for U.S. filmmakers in February.

“It’s not like the 1950s or 1960s, when few Americans had been to the Soviet Union and few Soviets had been to America. Here, there’s a long history of thousands of Americans and Iranians who have lived, studied and had friends in the other country,” said Roger Kangas of the International Research and Exchanges Board.

“The foundation is already well-established,” Kangas said. “It’s now just a matter of time, not interest.”