My Travels with Iran's President Khatami

Mohammad Khatami was Iran's president from 1997 through 2005 and during that time as a political scientist specializing in Iran's foreign affairs I had the opportunity to accompany him on a number of his foreign travels - to Central Asia, Europe, UN in New York, and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was quite a learning experience for me to get a better understanding of how Iran conducted itself in the international arena, under a moderate President who initiated the program of "Dialogue Among Civilizations" at UN General Assembly, with which I collaborated as a consultant and travelled to many countries around the world to help set up inter-cultural dialogue events, including in the Baltic states. This was partly due to the fact that I published an article on inter-religious dialogue and clash of civilizations in a journal, Hamdard Islamicus, in 1999 and sent a copy to Iran's ambassador to UN along with a letter to Mr. Khatami urging him to initiate a UN resolution on Dialogue Among Civilizations, as an antidote to the sirens of clashing civilizations, championed at the time by Harvard University's Samuel Huntington. Fortunately, my advice was heeded and in his subsequent UN General Assembly speech Khatami invoked the concept that was embraced by the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who appointed one of his trusted aids, Giandomenico Picco, as the Special Envoy on Dialogue; Picco and I worked intensively together for over a year and travelled to several countries, including Finland and Lithuania, together. I was Picco's representative at a number of international conferences as well, including one in London, and I did a lot of fund raising for him through the Iranian high tech community in Silicon Valley. Khatami and his foreign minister, Kemal Kharazi, fully appreciated my noble efforts for the sake of world peace and I once interviewed Khatami on the subject of Dialogue Among Civilizations for the UN quarterly, UN Chronicle. Also, I helped Khatami's dialogue program by getting the head of Center on Global Dialogue in Cyprus, Mr. Alikhani, to donate thousands of books to the Dialouge library in Tehran and also to fund some dialogue activities, such as the world youth festival on dialogue in Vilnius, Lithuania, which I chaired in the Summer of 2000.

With respect to Khatami's foreign travels, I could probably fill a whole volume recounting my memories, but I will limit myself to the following brief observations. I once accompanied him to a Caspian Sea summit inTurkmenistan, where Putin and other heads of the five Caspian littoral states were gathering to discuss, among other things, the Caspian ownership and environmental issues. The former was a thorny issue as far as Iran was concerned and despite Tehran's quest to own 50 percent of the Caspian, the Russians and others insisted on 13 to 11 percent instead. Khatami was very reluctant to go to that summit and initially used the excuse of a backache to exit the airplane before departure and kept us waiting for several hours until he was convinced to return. He simply wanted to avoid signing an unpopular agreement on Caspian's division and used the same health excuse to minimize his presence at the summit, much to the chargin of President Putin who immediately afterward ordered a major naval exercise in the Caspian Sea, to send a signal to Iran and other lesser powers in the region. I had no official capacity in these travels and acted as presidential historian and political observer, occasionally sending dispatches to an Iranian website, Payvand.com, covering the diplomatic and political side of things.

I also accompanied Khatami in his official visits to Germany and Spain and each time had to deal with the host countries security forces who could not figure out what I was doing tagging along the Iranian delegation without having any formal position. A couple of times, I was interviewed by Voice of America during those trips and, in turn, this raised the suspicion of some hardliners in Iran that I was perhaps working for Uncle Sam. Of course that was rubbish and I never lost an iota of my inkling as an independent political scientist, who occasionally took issues with the government on rights issues President Khatami in essence concurred with my criticisms and one Summer even allowed me to join his presidential office, where I had daily gathering with his top aids and discussed foreign and domestic policies. Khatami's power was, however, limited, and he could do little with respect to the marco-policies set by the more hardline Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who viewed the whole Dialogue Among Civilizations initiative with suspicion, as a cover for an unwanted rapprochement with the West. As a result, Khatami was often involved in a delicate balancing act, such as when he sounded very hardline at one of his press conferences in New York, to the point that my friend, the late CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, who was sitting next to me at that room, walked out rather frustrated. I followed Wallace to the street and asked him if he wanted to do an interview with Khatami for "60 Minutes" and he said definitely not. But, another "60 Minutes" correspondent, Charlie Rose, was receptive and I was in the studio when Charlie interviewed Khatami and, immediately afterward, called me and thanked me for my assistance in faciliating that interview. I had recommended several ideas to Khatami for the interview and his ambassador to UN, Javad Zarif, infmormed me that Khatami appreciated my help and had incorporated my ideas in his UN speech as well; I confess I found that information rather gratifying.

This, in turn, brings me to the relaed subject of how Picco and I tried very hard to arrange a meeting of Khatami and President Bill Clinton at UN, which was spoiled at the last minute ldue to a leak to a conservative Tehran dialy. Time magazine subsequently ran a story about "UN diplomacy" quoting us on how we worked for a good couple of months to get Annan and Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State at the time, enrolled in that would be historic meeting -- that sadly did not happen. So we settled with a less significant gesture of Albright's attendence at Khatami's lecture on Dialouge at UN, a UNESCO event that featured a high-level panel chaired by Mr. Annan. Albright was, and still is, the only high US official who has formally apologized for US's role in the 1953 coup that overthrew a democratic government in Iran. To open a paranthesis here, I never liked Annan over his role in Rwanda debacle and shunned him at the reception afterward.

My final observation about Khatami for this writing is his Harvard visit, which I contributed by drafting his speech and even selecting the title of his talk with the help of a Harvard researcher, former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, with whom I had co-authored a book and some articles. But that visit was controvesial and the Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, and I debated it on a radio program and I also went on CNN's Headline News and debated the host, Glen Beck, who was convinced just like Romney that it was a mistake on Harvard's part to invite Khatami. I also wrote an oped in Boston Globe, titled "Governor is wrong on Khatami" citing his credits on dialogue and incremental opening of the Iranian theocratic system. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Khatami's speech at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard despite being on his short list of speaker's guests, since the Harvard administration, which I had taken to court over my civil rights violations years earlier and had banned me despite my wealth of Harvard publications, were unwilling to lift the ban for even one day. Khatami was upset at their decision and made sure that I was present at the dinner party thrown for him by one, Olga Davison, at her loverly home in Beacon Hill, even though that meant that my wealth of enemies at Harvard would boycott it because of me. "I told them, it is up to them, they don't want to come, don't come," Khatami whispered to me that evening,,smiling. Only then did I bother to tell him that since I had singlehandedly taken Harvard to trial and then to US Supreme Court a few years earlier, the reaction of those Harvard gentlemen was hardly surprising. He asked if I won in court and I replied, "no, I lost by one vote at US Supreme." A crucial one vote short! but making legal history nonetheless in an epic David and Goliath battle.

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