Shirley, Edward. Know Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey Into Revolutionary Iran.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. ISBN 0-374-18219-1
Edwin Shirley developed a fascination
with Iran and ancient Persia in his teenage years and it has stayed with
him through his college years, his nine years with the CIA, a career writing
for a number of respected US magazines, and up until his return from Iran
to Turkey in a secret compartment of a truck (at which point he briefly
expressed an understandable fondness for Turkey). Here, he tells of his
private, unofficial and unannounced trip from the Turkish border to Tehran
via Tabriz and back. He spent many hours in the cramped and uncomfortable
secret compartment where he had a lot of time to reflect on what he knew
of the country, what he had learned of it, and what he had learned about
himself.
The book starts as he is about to cross
the Turkish border with Iran in the truck of a pseudonymous Hosein. The
crossing procedure takes four hours and he uses the time to explain how
he came to this point in his life. His first contact with the Iranian "man
on the street" was when he dealt with many disaffected Iranians, often
former Revolutionary Guards or soldiers, and a few women, often young widows,
when he operated under the cover of the visa section of the US consulate
in Istanbul. He befriended many of these people to glean information from
them. In the cases of some of the women he also prevented them from falling
into prostitution, a common fate for refugee women in Turkey. In return
for information, he tried to put the best possible spin on their visa applications.
Some of these people were talked into going back to Iran to supply information.
His epithet among the Iranians was "the Angel" indicating that
he must have been reasonably successful at getting their visa applications
approved.
He uses one of his cases, a one-legged
former Pasdaran he calls "Ahmad" to show how he developed relationships
with these people as he looked for recruits. Ahmad is also our introduction
to Shirley's understanding of Iranians. It is a complex view that doesn't
change that much in the course of the book. It is well-grounded in extensive
study of the history of the country and of Islam. It is perhaps here that
he makes his only significant misstep. I asked an Iranian friend to read
the book and he was impressed by the depth of Shirley's knowledge and understanding
of Iran, but he found that his understanding of the relationships between
the sexes amongst the revolutionary youth of Khomeini's Iran was too Americanocentric,
perhaps too simply carnal. It is as if he has understood the pleasure of
the relationship, but not the ecstasy.
The second chapter is a step backwards
in time. In it he tells of the one occasion on which he entered an Iranian
consulate in Germany. He had tried to obtain a visa to enter Iran, but was
turned down. The chapter is about the conversation he had with a polite
but inquisitive and persistent Iranian business man. On the surface, they
talk about his interest in Iran, but below that Shirley is trying to control
the conversation the way he was trained to do so as a case officer with
a source. It is a fascinating example of applied psychology and is perhaps
a unique case of such a conversation being described in so much detail.
The remaining chapters cover events
on the road and the narrative is chronological. Shirley is tense, and has
the good sense to be worried about the consequences for himself and his
helpers should he be caught. The mullahs are not likely to be gentle with
a former CIA officer in the country without permission. Discretion is the
better part of valor, and although he does finally spend a few hours in
Tehran, he leaves as quickly as possible.
The bulk of the book covers the trip
to Tehran. As they roll through Iran, Shirley and Hosein pass the time in
sometimes intense discussion on life, the universe and everything and we
learn a lot about what matters to an average working Iranian. Some of the
places they pass give rise to a passage about historical events that help
shaped Iran over the centuries and that are unknown to most of us. A prolonged
conversation with Ahmad's sister helps us to understand the position of
women in Iran and the difficulties that her generation faces after so many
of its men were fed to Iraqi cannon. Over a glass of tea with friends of
Ahmad in Tabriz we get an impression of how Iranians look at the US from
behind the ritualized anti-American chants and so on. The reader learns
much about the daily life of the average Iranian, and of how it has so much
in common with the struggles of daily life throughout the world. It is a
world far removed from revolutionary fervor, but it is not one devoid of
pride in the success of the Islamic Revolution.
Shirley was not there on behalf of
any intelligence agency, that much seems clear, but intelligence does play
an important part as one of the sub-topics of the book. Particularly, it
deals with two dilemmas with solutions that Shirley did not like and that
played roles in his decision to leave the CIA. One revolved around the question
of whether the case officer should be a generalist or a specialist, and
the other was around the problem of freedom of action of case officers.
The
competent generalist case officer, it is argued, who is given the right
questions to ask can deal well enough with sources in any part of the world.
Shirley argues that a specialist who really knows the people he is dealing
with and understands what makes them tick can be a much more effective case
officer, even though his utility is limited to only one or a few countries.
The CIA has always required case officers to have field experience outside
their main area of expertise to obtain promotion, and this certainly has
its merits, but it also has its drawbacks. The specialist argument also
has merits and drawbacks, although they are almost exactly opposite to those
of the generalist argument. As it is, the generalist is the order of the
day. The generalist may be able to function well enough if given freedom
of action.
This brings us to the second problem:
top-down management is too often the case and just about every question
has to be sent up the chain of command and the decision made far from the
action has to be acted on, no matter how poor it may seem in the field.
Shirley quotes one senior officer as liking case officers in their 30's
with a mortgage and a couple of children because the are in no position
to do anything except follow orders. This may be good for the senior officer,
but is it good for US intelligence?
One question never really gets answered:
why did Shirley really take such an outrageous journey? Was he trying to
prove a point to his top-down generalist detractors in the CIA? Is he just
an incurable romantic adventurer? Was he looking for some excitement or
just curious?
This book stands at a nexus of several
genres: the explorer as adventurer in an exotic or hostile land like Sir
Richard Burton's Pilgrimage to Mecca or Doughty's Arabia Deserta;
the travelogue as social commentary like Pond's examination of the Soviet
Union in From the Yaroslavsky Station; the Bildungsroman, a polemic,
and the memoirs of an intelligence officer. The result is rich in information,
insight, and opinions. His differences of opinion with senior officers are
about important points that need to be aired and discussed. Any one of the
chapters may be worth the price of the book for the observations it gives
us on a country that has become a mystery to so many in the west.
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