Iason Athanasiadis explores America's quixotic and sometimes clumsy attempts to engineer non-violent regime change by promoting democracy in Iran.
Anahita was standing outside the McDonald's on Istanbul's bus-choked Taksim Square in the shimmering early morning sunlight, shaking her long tresses into the summer breeze. She had just arrived on a flight from Tehran, and a few hours later, she would board another aeroplane to her eventual destination: a clandestine conference for prominent dissident Iranian exiles in Prague.
The wind in her hair was a novel feeling for Anahita; in Iran, the law dictates that women must wear Islamic head-coverings in all public places. A committed feminist in her early 40s, Anahita had resisted the social pressure to get married by her mid-20s and, bucking traditional mores, she lived alone in an apartment set back from a busy motorway in east Tehran and poured all her energies into the student-dominated movement clamouring for women's rights.
In 2007, she endured a short stay in Section 209, the high-security ward inside Tehran's Evin Prison reserved for political prisoners; her crime was participating in a street demonstration broken up by the chador-clad, baton-wielding women of the Ministry of Interior's all-female police unit.
Anahita was released from prison without appearing in court, but an interrogator warned her that her case remained open. (Some names have been changed to protect Iranian sources.) Back on the streets of Tehran, her mobile phone produced strange sounds. Though she forfeited activism, her arrest raised her international profile. A discreet invitation was forwarded to her through a European contact in Tehran, making her the only activist from inside Iran to attend the Prague meeting. Anahita knew that if her presence was discovered by her government, she would likely be arrested and charged with espionage.
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