Read The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran for Free Online

That paranoia brought it a big step closer from being an authoritarian state that made a good pretense of allowing some political discourse to being a complete dictatorship that brooked no dissent whatsoever. I walked out the door, said goodbye to Shiravi—who looked extremely uncomfortable standing outside his door, glass of tea still in his hand—and left the building.
    I walked for a while, still wondering if coming back to Iran—with my family—would be a good idea. I believed the intelligence officers when they said it wouldn’t be a problem, but they were warning me, too: if I overstepped my bounds—and who knew exactly what those bounds were?—I would be in trouble. Yet this was Iran, thirty-twoyears after a successful revolution and two years after an arguably unsuccessful one, and not much was new in terms of the ambiguities, the unknowns, and the maddeningly contradictory behavior of government officials. It was still an Iran I could recognize. I believed, as I had for many years, that despite the brutality, the arrests, and the crackdown on civil liberties as well as the press, powerful figures within Iran were working to advance a more democratic future. Perhaps naïvely, I wanted to be hopeful, rather than—like many of my compatriots who had become apathetic after the Green Movement, even toward the Arab Spring evolving in their own backyard—resigned to the fact that Iran’s destiny was to forever be in the grip of tyranny. I was coming back, even if it could end up being my last trip.
    The NBC crew was interviewing Jalili, so I was in no hurry to get back to the hotel. But since I had been given permission to visit the Tehran reactor, I did need to contact them and find out if and when they were going. No sooner had I gotten into a taxi than my phone rang. It was NBC’s Tehran bureau chief, telling me they had finished their interview and were to go to the reactor the next morning. That meant we’d have to change flights. I said I had been told I could go with them and would see them later at the hotel.
    Fifteen minutes later I received a call from an “unknown” caller, who had to be a government official, as no one else is allowed to block his or her number from caller ID recognition in Iran. “Mr. Majd?”
    “Yes?” The caller did not introduce himself.
    “You are not permitted to visit the Tehran nuclear reactor.”
    “But I was just told I could,” I protested.
    “No, you may not.”
    “If you say so,” I said, “but the gentlemen I spoke to this morning specifically said it would be all right—”
    “I just told you no,” said the man, sounding a little angry. “Just go and visit friends and family, and then go home. Why not just have a good time in Tehran?”
    I shook my head as I hung up. What kind of country was this, where you couldn’t even trust the intelligence officers interrogating you to say what is permitted and what is not? Had they intentionally been fucking with my mind, or had they been overruled afterward? Did someone really suspect that I might be a spy, and that the nuclear reactor—built in the 1970s by Americans, actually—was just too sensitive a location to allow me a peek? Gee , I thought, when did I become so damn important?
    There was no question of my staying an extra day now, nor even of spending much time with NBC, so I had the afternoon and early evening to visit a friend or two and then head to the airport for the long trip back to New York. If I couldn’t trust the intelligence officers on the subject of the reactor visit, I wondered, could I trust that I’d be allowed to board my flight in the wee hours of the morning? But they had admonished me to not miss my flight, so after saying my goodbyes at the hotel later that day, I went to visit a friend before heading to the airport.
    Snow began falling as dusk arrived, and by the time I was driven to the airport, it had turned into a veritable blizzard. Cars and buses made no allowance for