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The Western Viewdetained along with my crew and thatour passports had been confiscated.The state department representativesaid there was really nothing he coulddo because we don’t have diplomaticrelations, and said, “You know it isfive in the morning here?” Gee—sorry to bother you. I did ask him toplease make sure that he took downmy name and make a note that Iwas being held along with my crew(in case we were never heard fromagain!). He said, “OK.” I later askeda senior state department official whosaw all the daily cables and traffic ifhe every saw that mentioned, and hesaid, “No, nothing.”By the end of day two, we werebeing told the situation was seriousand we had been taping illegally andthat the situation would have to belooked at by yet another official. Wewere told that we would again haveto come back the next day for ourpassports.At this point, I took a chance—a bigchance since I am a woman and didn’treally know how it would play. In mybest voice of indignation, I called theofficer a liar. I told him that they hadnot been honest, that we had beentold for two days that we would begiven our passports and allowed toleave, and they had continually liedto us. I told him that we had to leavethe country.That little tirade at least madethem stay later to deal with the bureaucracyof finding the right man tosee the tape. To be honest, I am notsure what happened behind the scenesafter that, but I know that two hourslater, passport in hands, tape foreverin Iranian hands, we left Tehran onthe next flight out, and were veryhappy we did.While the situation was uncomfortableat the time, I had nearly forgottenit until I read about Roxana Saberi,whose situation is clearly far moreserious. I hope she will get more helpfrom the state department (through theSwiss, I expect) than we did. I happento be traveling with Secretary of StateHillary Clinton in the Mideast now.Her spokesman said, “We’re lookinginto it.” The Human Lessons: They Lie at the Core ofReporting in Iran‘When we work in countries without press freedoms, we scarcely know thepressures on the people we encounter, the complexities of their motivations, thedimensions of their fears.’BY LAURA SECORBefore I left for Tehran in June2005, Alireza Haghighi, a formerIranian official in exile in Canada,told me he was sure a conservativehard liner would win that month’spresidential election. Haghighi wasalmost entirely alone in that opinion.The outgoing president, MohammadKhatami, was a mild-mannered reformist.Former President Ali AkbarHashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatic insiderrunning on a reformist platform,was far and away the favorite in theAmerican press, which confidentlyoffered up interviews with Rafsanjaniabout his future administration.What made Haghighi think that Iranwas moving in a more conservativedirection?“Go to a mosque in south Tehran,”he implored me. “Talk to young peoplethere. You’ll see.”American reporters are typicallygranted only short visas to workin Iran, with limited access to thecountry outside the capital. There isa lot we miss for lack of contact withrural Iranians, and even in Tehran, asprawling city of 14 million, there isalways the danger of sequestering oneselfin too familiar a world. Haghighi,who grew up in a poor neighborhoodin the south of Shiraz, complainedthat American reporters gravitatedtoward the glitz of the capital city’snorthern heights, where they foundIranians who resembled themselvesand expressed the political views theywanted to hear.Seeking New ConversationsTo the city’s south, the urban workingclass, hard hit by the country’seconomic troubles, shares crowdedquarters with recent migrants from thevillages. This population is culturallyconservative and religiously devout.In every way, the young people herehave less freedom and privacy thantheir peers in the city’s north: Theyshare cramped apartments with theirparents, they don’t have cars, and theirdress code and sexual behavior areheavily policed, both by their familiesand by the state.As a woman, I could not mix easilyat a mosque in this part of town,but my translator had another idea.We would go to the Bahman CulturalCenter, a complex in south Tehran thatprovided a library, swimming pool, artmuseum, park and other amenities topoor urban youth. Under the shah, theneighborhood had been a squalid anddangerous wasteland of brothels andNieman Reports | Summer 2009 35