2. 'We don’t give a fuck about your immunity'

The dangers of getting a drink in Iran

Of the small band of expats in Tehran, most worked for the embassies, since there were few foreign businesses and just a handful of us correspondents. The senior diplomats had very serious responsibilities — nuclear talks, hostage negotiations, etc. But Tehran was also a great place for a first-time posting, the sort of job that an ambitious young diplo could secure with minimal competition and that looked impressive on a resume. Most gave the impression of having been very well-behaved during their upbringing, and Iran was their first taste of freedom. The atmosphere at their parties was like entering a nerdy frat house where everyone’s drinks had been spiked.

I went to one in my first weeks in Tehran, in the upmarket neighbourhood of Elahieh, where entrances were often flanked by 20-foot Ionic columns. The kitchen table was awash with booze. Alcohol is illegal everywhere in Iran, so this was a wondrous sight. Having not yet secured myself a dealer, I had spent my first weeks in an enforced detox. Diplomats were given annual shipments of anything they wanted from home, placed in containers that even the Iranian customs were not permitted to search, so their residences tended to have crate upon crate of expensive liquor piled up in spare bedrooms.

There had been problems lately, however. Two tonnes of vodka destined for the Russian embassy had been held up at Imam Khomeini Airport for a year, a Belgian diplomat said as he served me a gin and tonic. Apparently, the Iranians had taken to x-raying the boxes to check if they contained liquid. Some embassies had reported the arrival of containers full of smashed bottles, looking suspiciously as if they had been dropped a couple of metres in the customs warehouse.

Later, I secured myself a dealer. I would text “Ali” on Telegram and he responded with photos and prices for various whiskies, vodkas and wines. They were very expensive, but within a couple of hours, he would show up at my door clutching two clinking garbage bags. He even had a card machine and provided a receipt. It was widely understood that this trade was controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, along with much of the illicit economy.

It was a good sign if the bottles were dusty or sandy — it meant they had travelled over the mountains on the Turkish border or via the beaches of southern Iran. You didn’t want anything that originated in Iran. I once gave a neighbour some bottles of a wine called Pinvert that I had yet to try. When I saw him next, he looked unwell.

“I’ve been on the toilet for three days,” he said. “I don’t think you should drink any of that Pinvert you gave me.”

A few weeks later a report on the Iranian news wires said Tehran police had busted a bootlegging gang who were producing and distributing grape juice mixed with medical alcohol, and bottling it with labels from foreign brands. The picture showed a huge pile of Pinvert bottles.

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At the party in Elahieh, a Swiss political officer told me there were increasing concerns about raids, especially after an intervention by Basijis on a high-class gathering in northern Tehran involving Western ambassadors and some well-known Iranian society figures. The Basij are an enormous volunteer brigade overseen by the supreme leader and Revolutionary Guards; essentially religious Brown Shirts, many of them poor kids who had been raised to believe that the fellow Iranians they assaulted were infiltrators on the payroll of foreign governments. As in any such organisation, it attracted a mix of honest zealots, out-and-out goons and opportunists (one former member later told me he joined so he could get out of trouble whenever he was caught drinking), as well as plenty who were just going along with the crowd. They offered the regime deniability for its more outrageous activities — beating protesters to death; storming foreign embassies — and enjoyed a dangerous level of impunity in return.

You had to hand it to the Basij: they were equal opportunity thugs, unimpressed by social and international conventions. When they raided the high-society party, the Australian ambassador had refused to get off the phone, so one of the Basijis simply grabbed it out of his hand, pushed his arm up behind his back and shoved him against the wall. The newly arrived Japanese ambassador could not believe what he was seeing. Everyone was released in the end, but their phones had been confiscated for the duration of the raid and later people started to notice their Google Maps location would occasionally switch to some position out in the desert.

The hosts of the party, a famous gallery owner and his wife, were less fortunate . The judiciary said they found 18,000 litres of booze in a storeroom underneath their swimming pool. The Swiss diplomat telling me this story said the real reason for the raid was to seize their house, “probably worth more than $10 million”.

I refilled my drink and went out on the balcony where some business people were talking about the hell of finalising deals in Iran. It was an optimistic moment for Iranian trade — the nuclear deal had just come into force and hundreds of delegations from Europe and Asia were flooding into the Islamic Republic looking to capitalise on the lifting of sanctions. But they were unprepared for the Iranian negotiating style.

A French lawyer was bemoaning her efforts to broker an agreement between Renault and a local firm: “Everything takes ten times longer than it needs to, because the person you are negotiating with is never the real person you are negotiating with,” she said. “They fight over every footnote as if the pride of the Persian race was at stake, and when you think it’s all finally settled and they’ve even signed the contract, they come back that evening and say they need to start again from the beginning.”

“No one negotiates harder than the Iranians,” agreed someone from a major German firm. “They always leave blood on the table.” A guy from British American Tobacco shrugged: the Islamic Republic hated Britain and America, he said, but it loved smoking.

A band struck up in the main room — a bunch of locals playing Chuck Berry and swing classics. They were much better than I would have expected from a live band in Iran, considering the dearth of gigging opportunities, but later I found out they had grown up in Canada. The singer’s father was a famous environmentalist and academic. Some months later, he was arrested as a spy and died mysteriously in his prison cell.

There was a hot tub on the roof where diplomatic relations were being explored. As I stepped out of the elevator, I saw a flash of half-naked man sprinting across the rooftop to projectile-vomit over the edge of the building with such force that it was only the quick reactions of a Belgian diplomat that kept him from tipping over the edge. I remarked to my new Swiss friend that this whole scene was a lot more debauched than I was expecting from my first days in the Islamic Republic. But he said this was nothing compared to earlier years. The real bacchanalia had been during the era of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when relations between Iran and the world were so atrocious that the diplomats had nothing to do but get wasted and join in orgies in north Tehran mansions. The Islamic Republic’s view of Westerners as a bunch of decadent drunkards was, it turned out, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The regime hardliners had also felt more in control back then, and didn’t feel the need to hassle foreigners and their bourgeois Iranian friends. The diplomats from that time had all played up their dangerous assignment in the Islamic Republic, the Swiss officer said, and used it to land cushy positions in New York, Paris or Berlin. “People who spent their whole time here taking drugs and going to orgies are now working senior positions at the UN,” he said, laughing.

We were not the only ones partying. From the edge of the roof I could hear heavy bass and the screams of happy drinkers drifting across from adjacent terraces, and Turkish pop blasting out from cars full of young people as they wound their way through the back-alleys of Elahieh. The enormous apartment blocks were all sealed off from the Islamic Republic by what looked like huge blast walls. Pavements were almost non-existent, of little use to a class of people that moved from the cocoon of their homes to the cocoon of their SUVs to the cocoon of luxury malls. I knew enough to know this was all pretty new — that the idea of multiple, loud parties happening at once in Tehran would have been unthinkable even a few years earlier. I knew, too, that these were the sounds of extreme privilege. A very different culture, with very different rules, still held sway in most of the country.

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Much later in my time in Iran, two close friends saw first hand how little the regime cared for diplomatic rules.

A pair of young Dutch and British diplomats attended a party in an apartment in north Tehran, far enough from the road that the DJ could barely be heard. They had been there about an hour when suddenly a girl came running in from the balcony, shouting that the cops were outside. There was the usual panic as the girls rushed to the cloakroom to throw on their outdoor outfits: headscarves, trousers and mantos (long coats). My friends, let’s call them Daphne and Bridget, decided they would answer the door so that it appear to be a foreigner’s home, pay the bribe of a few million tomans and the cops would go away. But when they heard the huge crash from downstairs, they realised this was not the usual petty shake-down. Suddenly the banging was at the front door, and they leapt back as around 20 men and women rushed in along with a full camera crew. The men were in civilian clothes and the women in strict chador, highly efficient and organised as they ordered everyone down on the ground.

In any other country, Daphne and Bridget’s diplomatic passports would have allowed them to walk free, but Iran does not play by those rules. “We don’t give a fuck about your immunity. You’re going to prison with the rest of them,” shouted one of the men as he snatched the passports out of their hands, speaking in fluent, American-accented English.

They were nonetheless treated less roughly than the Iranians and kept separately in the kitchen. But the camera was constantly shoved in their faces and questions barked at them: “Are you drunk? Did you bring alcohol? Why did you come to Iran? What is your mission here?” At first, they laughed, high on the adrenaline and telling themselves this would be a great story for the next diplomat party. But as time passed, and they were still not being released, and the questioning and tone grew increasingly aggressive, they started to panic.

The agents had taken everyone’s phone, but they had not noticed Daphne had a second mobile. Bridget distracted their guards with a hysterical screaming fit while Daphne called her boss, the Dutch ambassador. Just as he picked up, one of the agents spotted her through the window and rushed at her. She was able to shout that they were in trouble and gave their location before the phone was grabbed out of her hand.

They were held for hours in a bedroom, the camera still trained on them for long stints as the girls huddled together on the bed, terrified. They decided they needed to act. Bridget asked to go to the bathroom, taking one of the chadori agents with her, and since the remaining men were not allowed to touch women, Daphne ran past them to the living room. The chadori burst out of the bathroom and shoved Daphne up against the wall, her forearm against her throat. There followed a moment of utter strangeness: their faces inches apart, hearts racing, the young woman made a bid for some sort of psychopathic Stockholm Syndrome connection.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” the woman said. “I studied in California. We could have been friends. You just need to obey the rules of our country, that’s all.”

Daphne regained her composure. “What the hell made you want to leave California and come and do this for a job?” she said. The chadori’s veneer cracked immediately. “I’m asking the fucking questions,” she shouted.

Some time later, Daphne and Bridget decided they could wait no longer and just ran for the front door. A violent struggle ensued: the female agents dragging Daphne by the armpit until she lashed out with an elbow to the chest and broke free. Downstairs, one of the male agents was trying to shut the smashed gate before they could get through. Bridget grabbed it and slashed her hand open on broken glass. Both women managed to scramble out to the street, where they found a member of the diplomatic police — the Iranian force that is supposed to protect foreign embassy staff — just standing there with his arms folded, looking overwhelmed. Amid the blood, the endless screaming and shouting, now out in the quiet residential streets, the agents realised they had lost control of the situation and relented. It struck Daphne that none of the 20 people who had burst into that apartment had really been in charge. They were just thugs, as usual.

The diplomatic policeman finally clicked into gear and convinced the agents that they needed to return Daphne and Bridget’s passports and phones. There were a hundred messages on Daphne’s phone — the whole embassy was awake, as was their team back in The Hague and Iran’s ambassador to Holland. Eventually, an older Iranian officer appeared on the scene, took one look at the two shaking women and told the agents to release them.

Daphne was overcome with guilt at leaving 50 of their friends in the hands of these goons. She found out later they were taken to a prison and given the full humiliating experience: strip-searched, hosed down naked, forced to spread their arsecheeks, brutally interrogated for hours. Most were released a few days later, but the host spent a month in prison. He paid a financially crippling fine to win his release. He and his wife had their passports confiscated, and their plans to move to Holland, where they had already bought a house, were finished. His theatre career was finished, too.

“The worst thing is that my Iranian friends were completely unimpressed by my story,” Daphne told me later. “For me, this was the most traumatic thing that ever happened, but to them, it was completely normal. They just shrugged it off. This is what they have lived with all their lives.”