Chapter 7 “Build It for the Eye of God” The American Colony, Mission, and Place after 1965

The Northern Tier

The American colony in Tehran was a manifestation of the US government’s “northern tier” strategy in the Cold War. The regional strategy of containment called for the United States to link Iran with neighboring allies along the northern tier of the Middle East to contain the Soviet Union at its southern border.¹² However, the logic of divide and contain required a reinforcing and, at times, countervailing “logic of affiliation” that was articulated through “the ideal of US-Asian integration.” To borrow from the scholar Christina Klein, “Containment and integration constituted the two ideological foundations of postwar foreign policy,” with implications for the United States and Iran.¹³ While Iran was on the front lines of the US strategy of containment, there were opportunities for interaction between Americans and Iranians—in the United States and in Iran—when the two countries were allies during the Cold War. The members of the Del Be Del network, for example, supported the ends of containment through the means of integration while living and working in downtown Tehran alongside their Iranian friends and colleagues. In contrast to the Del Be Del network’s place in Iran, the ends and means of the post-1965 American colony in Tehran was containment. In addition to being a manifestation of the US government’s northern tier strategy, the post-1965 American colony was segregated from the socio-affective worlds of the city. The northern tier, then, was also a descriptor of the post-1965 American colony in North Tehran.

The American colony’s physical migration from downtown Tehran to the northern tier was evident on maps of the late Pahlavi period.¹⁴ In October 1953, two months after the anti-Mosaddeq coup, the US aid mission made a map of Tehran that covered roughly ten square miles. It ran from the University of Tehran in the west to Community School in the east, and from a complex of Iranian government buildings in the south to the US embassy in the north. In addition to the Presbyterian Mission’s properties, most US installations, international offices, and Iranian government buildings were downtown in the 1950s.¹⁵ Iranian maps for tourists covered more ground but also focused on the city’s core in the 1950s and 1960s. The Sahab Geographic and Drafting Institute produced maps that identified Iranian government buildings and foreign embassies, but also travel agencies and hotels, banks and bookstores, mosques and museums, and other points of interest.¹⁶ In the 1970s, maps of Tehran became elongated, with most running more than twelve miles from the railway station in the south to the neighborhoods of Shemiran and Niavaran in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. Many of the institutions that were once downtown had, by this point, relocated to North Tehran.¹⁷ The maps of the late Pahlavi period provide visual evidence of the American colony’s growth and its migration to Tehran’s northern tier.

The American colony’s growth was incremental in the 1960s but exponential in the 1970s. The population stood at between five thousand and six thousand in 1970, not much different than a decade earlier. But it doubled to eleven thousand in 1973 as the oil boom began and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi used petrodollars to hire US defense contractors and financial speculators to aid his military buildup and modernization push. While Tehran had, for decades, hosted US missions, Americans were, in the 1970s, also living in the southwestern oil fields and in cities such as Shiraz and Isfahan. The impetus for the colony’s national reach was clear to the US Defense Department: “The increase in size and changes in the distribution of Americans in Iran result from a 1972 Presidential decision,” a reference to the so-called blank check that Richard Nixon offered the shah to purchase US military equipment in exchange for policing the Persian Gulf. Of the seventeen thousand Americans in Iran in 1975, there were 11,400—or 68 percent—doing defense-related work. The Defense Department was responsible for 3,300 of them, 1,100 of whom were in uniform, while the rest were civilian employees and dependents. The “largest” group consisted of 2,700 civilian contractors and their 5,400 dependents.¹⁸ The major growth occurred after 1976.¹⁹ Thereafter, more Americans were in Iran than at any other point in history, with the population surpassing the previous record of thirty thousand set during the Second World War. When the last US ambassador reported to duty in 1977–78, there were more than forty thousand Americans in Iran. When one considers unofficial and uncounted Americans, estimates of a fifty thousand–strong colony by decade’s end were not off the mark.²⁰

In the era of the northern tier, missionaries were in the minority in the American colony. After the Presbyterian Mission closed in 1965, some American Presbyterians rebranded themselves as fraternal workers and stayed in Iran to work with the Evangelical Church and former missionary institutions such as Community School. However, in 1974, there were only fifteen Americans in Iran on the payroll of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA).²¹ According to the US embassy in Tehran’s records, in 1977 there were only two hundred American missionaries from any denomination in Iran.²² Most of them came from conservative Protestant denominations and Christian organizations. Most significant was the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. “There are other missionaries here but they do not teach nor preach even the doctrine of salvation,” one of the first American Pentecostals in Iran wrote about the Presbyterians they met in the country. “I am sorry to say they are teaching Modernism and a social gospel.” In 1965, with the Presbyterians closing shop, the so-called Philadelphia Assembly in Tehran joined the General Council of the Assemblies of God, which in turn sent more missionaries to work with Iranian pastors such as Haik Hovespian-Mehr.²³ The Southern Baptist Convention also sent representatives to Iran after 1965, and the Baptist George Braswell worked at the old Alborz Foundation. In 1971, the Baptists opened their own English-speaking church in Tehran. As the scholar Philip Hopkins wrote, its congregation was “contrary to the older, more ecumenical Community Church that was operated by Presbyterians and attended by the United States Ambassador.”²⁴ There were differences between mainline missionaries and conservative evangelicals, but individuals such as Braswell were accepted into the Del Be Del family.²⁵

Despite points of continuity with the earlier period, the securitization of US-Iran relations radically altered the demographics of the American colony in Tehran’s northern tier during the 1970s. Gordon Winkler, a public affairs officer in Tehran, explained the phenomenon to Ambassador Richard Helms in the mid-1970s. In the previous decade, most Americans in Iran “were people with some overseas experience,” and they “did not appear to be an area of major public relations concern.” Whatever their faults, missionaries were pious people who did not drink, smoke, fight, and womanize. However misguided their mission, the Presbyterians and their compatriots in the pre-1965 American colony cared for and were interested in Iran; they were missionaries, academics, aid workers, diplomats, and businesspeople, often with graduate degrees and knowledge of the Persian language. Their colony was “an international lot and there were not too many at the blue collar level.” By contrast, the security-oriented and transactional relationship of the 1970s brought a rough-and-tumble crowd into Iranian cities. Many of the “new American arrivals” were culturally insensitive “novices in overseas living,” and, worst of all, they included a “cadre of young enlisted men making passes at Persian women and getting into saloon fights.” In this atmosphere, it seemed as if “two alien groups … are rubbing against each other,” and Winkler recommended that it was “time to pull in our neck.” This was unlikely to happen, in which case there were important questions to ask about the American colony: “How big will it be? Where will it be? What kind of individuals will make it up? What kinds of housing, schools, churches, and other facilities will they need?”²⁶

It was too conspicuous to be downtown, so North Tehran became host of the American colony in the 1970s. The northward migration of the decade was part of a trend among the Iranian elite and others with ties to the Pahlavi government, as undeveloped land was being opened, used for public services, and sold for private use. During his last two decades, the shah spent most of his time in the new and magnificent palace compounds, at Niavaran and Saadabad, in North Tehran. This removed him geographically and culturally from Tehran and its people. Toward the end of the shah’s reign, government technocrats and urban planners envisioned a new city center in North Tehran called Shahestan.²⁷ The scholar Talinn Grigor explained that the shah’s ideal city “was designed to represent the king’s rule,” undercut potential challengers, and otherwise “reinforced the vertical axis of social promotion.”²⁸ While the American colony’s move to Tehran’s northern tier was related to these Iranian trends, it was also an example of the segregated, suburban living seen in the United States.²⁹

This was a departure from the Del Be Del experience in Iran. US newspapers reported that, in the 1970s, “the only Iranians that most Americans meet are their maids,” whose labor was often exploited. Many of these Americans did not actually want to be in Iran, so they avoided the public. Contributing to the colony’s physical and emotional seclusion was the US embassy’s determination that “the old city is unsafe for Americans,” and its decision to bar all diplomatic and military personnel from living south of its location on Takht-e Jamshid Avenue, which in the mid-1970s was considered “the dividing line between old and new Tehran.” Some wives of US servicemen, who often had a difficult time adjusting, “never left the Gulf District Army Base in Saltanatabad,” opting to “hide from the country in which they live” and “recreate” the “familiar atmosphere of Middle America” in the Middle East.³⁰

Americans were the most numerous and notorious, but they might have been half of the approximately one hundred thousand farangis living throughout Iran in the late 1970s. “For the most part,” a newsman wrote, “the foreigners lived an enclave existence, as isolated as possible from the teeming, sweltering frustrations of Tehran.” The enclaves in Tehran, whether American or European, were scattered across the city’s northern tier, “in the tree-shaded suburbs near the shah’s Naivaran [sic] Palace or in pleasant neighborhoods like Saltanatabad in northeast Tehran.” In Saltanatabad, in particular, foreign nationals “had their own schools, their own Little League baseball teams, their own clubs with cozy bars that could have been in London or Los Angeles.”³¹ Saltanatabad was known for its old fortress, and the “mirror hall” in the prison complex where Mohammad Mosaddeq’s trial took place.³² Now it hosted the foreign colony.

Most of the former institutions of the Presbyterian Mission also moved to North Tehran. The English-language Community Church began the 1960s by meeting in the Presbyterian Mission chapel on Central Compound, but by decade’s end it relocated to Saltanatabad to cater to the American colony.³³ Robert Pryor was the preacher at Community Church during the 1970s, and at the end of the decade some six hundred people were attending weekly worship services.³⁴ As the city expanded, churchgoers in Tehran liked the northern location because there was “plenty of room to park and no serious traffic jams.” The missionary Clement Scott explained to his friends and family back home that, “as in the USA almost everybody comes in his own car.” Unlike the United States in the mid-1970s, however, “there is no gas shortage here.”³⁵ Damavand College—Iran Bethel’s successor—eventually moved to Lashgarak, a neighborhood in the far northeast. In the early 1970s, Frances Mecca Gray and her associates “spent countless hours tramping over virgin soil around Tehran trying to locate a new campus.”³⁶ Similar to other institutions, such as Iranzamin, Damavand moved to North Tehran, where a few years earlier “there were only a few sheep,” according to one missionary. As it was under development, the northern tier was, in contrast to downtown, “a bleak and lonely place, and at night you can hear the jackals.”³⁷

What began with Washington’s “northern tier” containment strategy ended with the construction of an American colony in North Tehran. If Iran’s mountains were conceived in the early Cold War as lines of defense against a Soviet drive toward the Persian Gulf, the slopes of the Alborz were, in the decade of détente and global integration, home to one of the largest American colonies that ever existed outside of the United States. As Ambassador William Sullivan reported in December 1978, with a month to go before the fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty:

The U.S. government, in displaying its steadfastness for the shah and its hope for his survival, has only one tangible manifestation of that policy in this country, and that is the American community. Because this community is large and conspicious [sic], it is watched very closely by all elements of the political spectrum.³⁸

Dawa

At the height of the US-Iran alliance during the Cold War, many Iranians saw Pahlavi tyranny and US imperialism as interconnected phenomena that became manifest in Tehran’s northern tier. While Iran’s revolutionary movement was intellectually diverse, this section examines the ways in which Shia clerics and anticolonial writers articulated a countermission to the Pahlavi mamuriyat that, in its religious frame, was understood as dawa.³⁹ During the 1960s and 1970s, their countermission informed a revolutionary movement that, in 1979, overthrew the Pahlavi Dynasty and uprooted the American colony from Iran.

Islamic dawa and Christian mission have many similarities. As the scholar David Kerr wrote, “Christianity and Islam have in common the fact that … they are missionary religions.” Like the New Testament’s Great Commission, the Arabic word dawa means “call,” and refers to a “commandment” in the Quran for Muslims “to call men unto the path of Allah.” However, “mission” is a “centrifugal action of ‘sending’ ” while dawa tends toward a “centripetal action of ‘calling into.’ ” Dawa is also different from jihad, which has multiple meanings—external and internal, coercive and consensual—but is often misunderstood in terms of violent projections toward non-Muslims. By contrast, “external” dawa can be “an invitation” that is consensual if it takes seriously the Quranic mandate of “no compulsion/coercion in religion.” In the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian Islamists engaged with the wider world, but the priority was “internal” dawa, meaning “the purification of the Muslim community,” or at least the Iranian Shias. The issue in the 1970s was that the American colony in Iran was so large and conspicuous that it became the focal point of Islamists who sought to “purify” their religious and national communities. There are, as historians and missiologists have acknowledged, “positive and negative models of interaction between Muslims and Christians.” But in the context of US-Iran relations in the late Pahlavi era, the record of the Christian-Muslim encounter was, by and large, a negative one.⁴⁰

While not necessarily hostile toward Christianity or Christians, Shia clerics in Iran were traditionally antimissionary and contested American evangelicals as agents of cultural imperialism. Examples abound in the Presbyterian archives from before the 1953 coup. Three decades earlier, in 1923, Mohammad Mosaddeq, who was then the foreign minister, summoned Samuel Martin Jordan to his office to discuss a property dispute over Alborz College, which was then under construction. Local Shia leaders did not want an evangelical Christian college in the middle of Tehran, and a cleric in the Majles took the matter to court and forwarded his concerns about the foreigners to the appropriate government minister. The missionaries complained that, “as soon as the present plaintiffs … learned that we were asserting a right to the property and were starting to build a wall around it, they daily interfered with our laborers and strove to drive them off.” In the short-term, “this interference was stopped by securing uniformed employees of the British Legation.” Then the Presbyterian Mission secured the support of Arthur Millspaugh, then in Tehran, to back their threat: “If it [the legal decision] was against the college then the American Government would hold the Persian Government [accountable] for all damages.” The Ministry of Justice ruled in favor of the Americans, and construction went forward at Alborz College.⁴¹

Presbyterian archives indicate that evangelical print culture was just as irritating to the Shia ulama as were missionary schools. William Wysham was in charge of the Presbyterian Mission’s literature program during the reign of the first Pahlavi shah, and, in the mid-1930s, “the mollahs made the most of the new nationalism” in an attempt to roll back his work and in other ways “bear down” on American evangelicals. Wysham’s literature program, like Jordan’s school, was challenged in the courts. And like Jordan, Wysham relied on Alborz College alumni and other “top brass” in the Iranian government, along with the US State Department, to evade “fanatical Moslem” judges. In most of his “brushes with the law” in Iran, Wysham “managed to emerge unscathed.”⁴² However, he and other evangelicals continued to feel the “pressure of the ecclesiastics” between 1941 and 1953.⁴³ It was only after the 1953 coup that direct threats stopped materializing, and when Pahlavi courts, lawmakers, and diplomats protected the rights of Americans to live and work in Iran. Despite the continued complaints of Islamic “censors” in the government, a legal “milestone” was reached in 1954 when an Iranian court upheld the Presbyterian Mission’s right to publish Christian material, including a church magazine titled Light of the World [Nur-e Alam], so long as it was for Christians and not “against Islam.”⁴⁴

In addition to evidence from the Presbyterian archives, the research of other scholars in Persian-language source material underscores the antagonistic place of Christian missionaries in the evolution of dawa in mid-twentieth-century Iran. As the scholar Isabel Stümpel-Hatami found, “The manifold activities deployed by occidental missionaries … did not prosper without provoking the deep concern and the protest of the religious class.” Her research uncovered a source, published in the Shia religious city of Qom in the 1960s, which complained of “the Christian propaganda in schools and hospitals.” The source also criticized evangelical enterprises in radio and literature, specifically “the attacks launched by the American Dr. John Elder, member of the American Mission in Iran, who has published several books.”⁴⁵ Whether in Iran or the United States, the reputation of Americans such as John Elder and William Miller preceded them in clerical circles in Qom as they wrote Christian apologetics directed toward Iranian Muslims.⁴⁶ The scholar Sasan Tavassoli found similar Persian-language evidence on the contentious relationship between evangelicalism and dawa. One source, an anti-Christian polemic published in Qom and widely circulated after 1979, featured prerevolutionary essays written “mostly in response to the challenges of Iranian Protestant churches and the publications of Western missionaries in Iran.” Elder and Miller would have recognized this text as an Islamic apologetic, aiming to refute the foundational principles of other religions to reify one’s own. The book’s authors said as much, pitting theirs against the “glossy publications of Christian missionary propagandas.” The book opened by claiming that, theologically, “the Evangelical (Presbyterian) church of Tehran … wants to drag people to the darkness of the medieval days.” In a global context, the church’s very existence was said to signify “the black days of colonialism.”⁴⁷

Such views were not isolated to the mosque, and after 1953 laypeople contributed to a revolutionary discourse that, while not necessarily anti-American, was antimissionary. Simin Daneshvar, Iran’s preeminent female author, studied at a British missionary school in Iran and in the United States as a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University. While not anti-American, Daneshvar was critical of Christian evangelicals and foreign powers for intruding in Iran. This was seen in her first novel, Savushun, published in the late 1960s and set in British-occupied Shiraz during the Second World War. In the novel, “Khanom Hakim,” a female British medical missionary, pushed Christianity on expecting mothers and other patients as they awaited medical care. She also lectured Iranians about Christianity as British military officials peppered maps of Iran with “colored markers” and otherwise “chopped it up.” The missionaries and soldiers worked hand-in-glove, and, in the novel, they converted the Iranian protagonists’ adopted son, Kolu, who came to believe he was “Christ’s lost lamb.” This was the goal all along. “Really,” Daneshvar asked in the narrator’s voice, “why [else] would a midwife, surgeon, and missionary show up in a place like this?”⁴⁸ In novels set later in the Pahlavi period, the dominant foreign power was the United States, with one set of characters bombing the car of a US cultural worker. The ideological infiltration of Iran through missionaries and cultural workers was as problematic to Daneshvar as its material transformation through US military and economic advisory teams. The scholar Razi Ahmad’s analysis of Daneshvar’s multiple novels found that characters associated with foreigners and the Pahlavis tended to be alienated from their Iranian Muslim neighbors. Ahmad also located the articulation of a countermission critical of the United States but not intolerant of it, rooted in the nationalism of Mohammad Mosaddeq—whose overthrow Daneshvar witnessed—but also in Shia Islam.⁴⁹ Not all articulations of countermission were as discerning as Daneshvar’s, whose general sentiment was neither beholden to religion nor directed against an essentialized “West.”⁵⁰

Consider the polemic of her partner, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, known for popularizing the concept of Gharbzadegi, or “Westoxication.” In a book of that title, he wrote that Iranians had been “routed” by Europe and America, “unable to preserve our own historicocultural character in the face of the machine and its fateful onslaught.” It was not just the industrial “machine” that created gross global power asymmetries. Al-e Ahmad argued that “the ‘West’ began calling us … the ‘East’ just when it arose from its medieval hibernation,” and he saw continuity rather than change in this intercivilizational dynamic over the next millennium. “First it came in the garb of pilgrims to the Christian holy places … and then in the armor of the crusaders.” The pilgrims and crusaders were followed by other Europeans and later Americans, sometimes “in the dress of merchants,” often “under cover of cannon,” and always claiming to be “heaven-sent” as “apostles for ‘civilization.’ ” If the discourse of civilization was a “gentlemen’s hammer” and the nail was “settlement,” or “colonization,” then “the vanguard of colonialism is the Christian missionary.” In the modern era, this process was “necessarily concerned with cities,” where evangelicals built their churches and used “every sort of chicanery” to grow their congregations and spread the Gospel. Al-e Ahmad wrote in the early 1960s, at the peak of decolonization, that colonialism would be “uprooted” from Africa and Asia when “each trade mission is boarded up” and “a church likewise closes.”⁵¹ Al-e Ahmad’s polemic was in line with other left-wing critiques of US empire that became more pronounced during the Vietnam War, but it was unforgiving and, when compared with Daneshvar’s cosmopolitanism, quite “nativist.”⁵²

So, too, were the views of Ayatollah Khomeini, who defined dawa within the broader matrix of “Khomeinism.”⁵³ His ideology was laced with anti-Western and anti-Semitic views, claiming that Jews “first established anti-Islamic propaganda” before “they were joined by other groups, who were in certain respects more satanic than they.” The Europeans and Americans were among these “new groups,” which “began their imperialist penetration of the Muslim countries” during the modern period. Interestingly, Khomeini did not take as seriously as Daneshvar and Al-e Ahmad the ideological convictions of Christian evangelicals, “for the imperialists really have no religious belief” and are instead driven by “materialistic ambitions and … political power.” To this reading, a unified Islamic community—“the historical movement of Islam”—was the chief threat to imperialist designs. Whether Khomeini considered the “preachers they planted,” the “agents they employed,” or the “orientalists who work in the service of the imperialist states,” they all “pooled their energies in an effort to distort the principles of Islam.” Khomeini unraveled this alleged conspiracy for readers in the introduction to his tract on “Islamic government.” The “plans” of “the masters of this ruling class of ours” began when “they opened a school in a certain place, and we overlooked the matter and said nothing.” Allowing this, Khomeini charged of Iran’s rulers, was “negligent.” The result was that “now, as you can observe, these schools have multiplied, and their missionaries have gone out into the provinces and villages, turning our children into Christians or unbelievers.” For these and other reasons, Khomeini deemed it his “prophetic mission” to become Iran’s supreme leader. He invoked the language of dawa to instruct his followers: “Know that it is your duty to establish an Islamic government.”⁵⁴ Khomeini’s mission—and his concept of the velayat-e faqih, or “mandate of the jurist,” which was later enshrined in the Islamic Republic’s constitution—was defined in opposition to the Pahlavis and the place that Americans had carved out for themselves in Iran.⁵⁵

With few exceptions, Islamist dawa was carried out through the same means as Christian mission. There were mosques instead of churches, and the leaders of those mosques cooperated with merchants, soldiers, intellectuals, and other groups whose projects dovetailed with their mission. Khomeini’s circle, the Shia ulama, and advocates of dawa more broadly, managed networks of schools, took seriously modern notions of socioeconomic development and the welfare state, and ran community centers and cultural organizations with local and global reach.⁵⁶ In other words, Iranian Islamists used the same means as American evangelicals but to different ends. This was on display for the world to see during the Iranian Revolution.

Revolution

At the height of the Iranian Revolution, from fall 1978 to spring 1979, the schools and churches of the old Presbyterian Mission maintained a tenuous hold on their place in Tehran. Beginning in September, the evacuation of foreigners began, the American colony shrank in size, martial law set in, and revolutionary violence swept through the city. The Pahlavi Dynasty was overthrown in January 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in February, and, in March, Iranians established an Islamic Republic.⁵⁷ In spring 1979, despite the dangers and uncertainties, some American Presbyterian missionaries were still in Tehran, and some former Presbyterian Mission institutions, such as Community School, were still in operation. The same was true of the Evangelical Church, and Iranian Christians anxiously awaited what the Islamic Republic had in store for them. The letters and memories of Presbyterian missionaries reveal how the Del Be Del family weathered the critical stage of the Iranian Revolution.

When the revolution began, Community School was, unlike the many international institutions that moved to North Tehran, located in a volatile downtown space. Prior to 1978, “community relations” between the school and the neighborhood had been “uniformly good for years.” That changed when anti-shah protests erupted in Tehran on February 19, 1978, and demonstrators spray-painted the exterior walls of the school compound with phrases such as “down with the shah” and “go home Americans.”⁵⁸ Community School was located just off Jaleh Avenue, and on September 8, 1978, the revolution came to the neighborhood square. A former teacher remembered the scene at Jaleh Square on “Black Friday.” Merilie Robertson saw “30 buses … full of soldiers … going into Tehran,” and “there were some really big, terrible things that happened right after that.” The massacre was traumatic, and “some of our teachers were actually in the crossfire of shooting.”⁵⁹ The missionary Paul Seto worked at Central Compound and wrote to the United States on September 11 about the fallout: “As you may know, there has been considerable violence near Community School.” The proximity of the school to the events on Black Friday “caused some parents to keep their children at home” and other students to transfer to the Tehran-American School. The early murmurs of revolution necessitated a temporary “pause,” but there was soon “a resumption of normal school activities.”⁶⁰

The downsizing of the American colony began with the voluntary evacuations of US nationals from Iran between September 1978 and February 1979. After Black Friday, most Americans were under no illusion of security.⁶¹ “Outwardly things are quiet again since the imposition of the military government,” the missionary Sherman Fung wrote on November 19, but “the demonstrations started to have foreigners as the target.” That meant that “Americans began getting phone calls and printed notices urging them to leave.” In this environment, the US embassy in Tehran and Americans elsewhere in the city were “concerned enough about the possible turn of events” to begin “laying down plans for emergency situations.” In a revolution, those situations came when least expected. Fung wrote about how his wife and children “had frightening experiences” when their school bus got caught in the middle of an anti-shah, pro-Khomeini demonstration, and all foreigners hid for fear of their safety. Fung’s wife was an Iranian Armenian, which created complications for her and their binational children. For those reasons, their exit plan was “to go out when the going is good.” Fung knew that “the situation will probably not get better, but wors[e],” and the “current rumour has it that Ashoura, Dec. 11th, a deep mourning day, will be D-day.”⁶²

In late 1978, the Del Be Del mainstays Walter Groves and William Miller wrote to each other about the unfolding events. In the 1970s, Groves was involved with Damavand College and frequented Tehran. To his estimation, “the situation in Iran … has become so alarming” and “anti-Americanism appears to be quite rampant.” The senior Iran hands, both of whom had spent decades in the country, agreed that the events of fall 1978 were “the worst thing of its kind in my experience with Iran.”⁶³ Groves also knew that December was a turning point, and that the shah’s government “will have to get through Moharram.” With the Shia holy month and its holidays approaching, Groves worried that the shah’s days were numbered. But he did not expect the Pahlavi Dynasty to fall. He predicted that the shah would “abdicate in favor of the Crown Prince.” After all, “That is what happened in his own case in 1941.”⁶⁴ But 1979 was not 1941; it was a revolution. On February 11, 1979, two months after Moharram and the massive demonstrations on the holiday of Ashura, the transfer of power was complete.

While the US government’s Tehran-American School closed for good at the end of the fall 1978 semester, Community School and its progeny, Richard Irvine’s Iranzamin, remained open.⁶⁵ From Christmas 1978 through the end of January 1979, Community School “carried on in a limited way, meeting in private homes,” or “satellite schools.” In February “all returned to Jaleh.”⁶⁶ Well, not everyone. Headmaster John Magagna sent out notices in early 1979 through the US Foreign Service to update his teaching staff, many of whom were waiting out the storm outside of Iran. On January 18, 1979, he announced that Community School employees could choose not to return “without fine or prejudice,” and with benefits to facilitate a safe trip back to the United States.⁶⁷ Despite these precautions, Community School reopened for the winter session. On the morning of February 12, 1979, with the previous night’s guns silent after the remnants of the Pahlavi military were defeated by revolutionary forces, the US embassy in Tehran checked in on the situation at Community School, and “school officials said all were well.”⁶⁸ The spring 1979 semester appears to have been a vibrant one at the school.⁶⁹

If all was temporarily well at Community School, the situation was in flux within the Evangelical Church of Iran. In 1979, between Khomeini’s return on February 1 and the referendum of March 30–31, Iran’s religious minorities labored to transition from monarchy to republic. Iranian Jews, for example, met with Khomeini on multiple occasions, and they, according to the historian Lior Sternfeld, “established ground rules” between the Abrahamic faiths.⁷⁰ Whatever the case for Iranian Jews, the early months of 1979 confronted Iran’s polyglot Christian community with a range of challenges, choices, and changes. Some Iranian Christians greeted Khomeini at Tehran’s airport in February 1979, and others voted in the national referendum in March in favor of establishing the Islamic Republic. The Iranian Anglican Bishop, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, arguably the most prominent Christian in the country, voted for the Islamic Republic. However, he qualified the vote with a note asking the new government to respect the “human rights” of all Iranian Christians, including Persian-speaking converts such as himself. It was not clear, as the scholar Marcin Rzepka wrote, “when the Protestant Christians realised—if they ever really did—that politicised Islam offered them nothing more than a limited space to exist.”⁷¹ Their American partners were more clear-eyed. On March 31, as Iranians voted, Groves speculated that ethnolinguistic Christians would fare better than Muslim converts to Christianity in the Islamic Republic. According to Groves, converts such as Dehqani-Tafti were “in ‘deep’ trouble,” but Armenians and Assyrians, evangelical or not, were “in a good position since they are not ‘apostates.’ ”⁷²

In revolutionary Iran, the ethnolinguistic divisions of the Evangelical Church served cross-purposes. In the context of church-mission relations, distinctions between Armenians, Assyrians, and Persians allotted them the cultural and administrative autonomy that the groups wanted from each other and from the Americans. After 1965, with independence from the Presbyterian Mission, the Evangelical Church of Iran was reorganized. The church, since its creation in the 1930s, had three geographically based presbyteries. But those were disbanded for ethnolinguistic ones, which meant that, in the 1970s, Armenians, Assyrians, and Persians ran their own presbyteries, and each sent representatives to the Evangelical Church of Iran’s Synod.⁷³

Unfortunately, those divisions meant something different under the pressures of revolution and, by the end of 1979, in the new constitution of the Islamic Republic. Once in power, Khomeini’s government divided Iranian Christians, much like the Jewish community, into groups based on “their origins, connections, and the relationships that they maintained before the revolution.” The largest group consisted of ethnolinguistic Christians—Assyrians and Armenians, apostolic and evangelical alike. They represented the side of Christianity that was considered “a permanent component of Iranian history and culture.” Through the revolution, Armenians in Tehran wanted to keep it that way, insisting that their community was “quite different from the Western Christians.” This was, in part, an exercise in self-preservation. But when, in late 1979, the new Iranian constitution became the law of the land, Armenians and Assyrians secured some legal rights and protections, and they were guaranteed representation in the Majles, alongside Jews and Zoroastrians. By contrast, Iranian converts to Christianity—known within the Evangelical Church and the Iranian government as “Persian-speaking Christians”—were denied rights, protections, and representation. They were, like Iranian Jews with Zionist sympathies, considered “permanent strangers, a foreign element” facing discrimination from the state and alienation within their faith communities. As Marcin Rzepka concluded his analysis, “The way that the Christians were categorised in the constitution reflects how they were perceived” in the late Pahlavi period and during the revolution.⁷⁴

In this context, the American Presbyterians in Iran understood that they needed to tread carefully, and that the revolution would likely end their relationship with the Evangelical Church. After the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in 1965, the Evangelical Church was an independent institution, but American missionaries continued to work as partners of Iranian Christians to support their church. In 1979, the remaining American Presbyterians in Iran believed that “their presence is very important and they intend to stay until such time when they must leave.” However, they understood that the “implications of the revolutionary changes in Iran for the Christian community and to us must be seriously considered.”⁷⁵ According to another evangelical, Kenneth Thomas, “it is very important that the independence of the Iranian churches be recognized and maintained.” Thomas and his colleagues in Tehran discouraged diplomatic interventions in Washington on behalf of Iranian Christians because they worried that such action would do more harm than good to his friends’ well-being. The revolution’s impact on the perennial debate about church-mission relations was clear: “No more will there be ‘American’ or ‘United Presbyterian USA’ projects and institutions in Iran, and that is right and to be desired.”⁷⁶ As for the Del Be Del network, its future in Iran was uncertain.

Exodus

Some American Presbyterian missionaries stayed behind in Tehran between the summers of 1979 and 1980. The last group of Presbyterians to leave Iran, in July 1980, included three missionary couples: Paul and Selma Seto, Ashton “Tat” and Pat Stewart, and Kenneth and Margaret “Peggy” Thomas. Unlike previous years, they had few compatriots to keep them company. The prerevolutionary evacuations combined with postrevolutionary flight to shrink the American colony from more than forty thousand in fall 1978 to approximately one thousand shortly after the hostage-taking at the US embassy on November 4, 1979. The “vast majority” were Americans married to Iranians with children who were dual citizens of the United States and Iran. Between fifty and sixty diplomats were being held against their will in the US embassy, and twenty-five American journalists were, at the start of the hostage crisis, in the country to cover it. Another sixty Americans remained voluntarily, mostly educators and missionaries, with a few businesspeople attempting to get their affairs in order.⁷⁷ At the end of July 1980—the same month that Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi died from cancer in Egypt—the last American Presbyterians departed from Iran.

While some Americans heeded the warnings in late 1978, the exodus began in earnest in January and February 1979. American journalists wrote after the shah’s fall of the “convoys” of “haggard Americans,” many of them armed men, heading to a terminal at Tehran’s international airport that was still controlled by the US Air Force’s Military Airlift Command. Most of the convoys started in Saltanatabad at “the barbed-wire-fenced compound of the United States commissary in northeast Teheran.”⁷⁸ Another columnist wrote about how the “wave of America[n] emigration” meant that “many of the American-style suburban homes of north Tehran stand empty.” It was reported that “jars of peanut butter and other American delicacies languish unbought on the supermarket shelves,” and, outside, “weeds blow across the unwatered grass of the football field at the closed Tehran American School.”⁷⁹ In the business world, 350 companies were registered with the Iranian-American Chamber of Commerce in the late Pahlavi period, but in summer 1979 “less than half … now answer their phones.” More broadly, none of the five major North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers—the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, and West Germany—had more than one thousand of its nationals in Iran in summer 1979.⁸⁰

During that revolutionary summer, the foreign colony in Tehran consisted of students and teachers at international schools and shrunken embassy populations, and its existence was dependent on the whims of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. As Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and the Iranian Ministry of Education dealt with their Pahlavi inheritance, they maintained a confusing and “fluid policy on foreign language schools.” As of June 1979, Community School and Iranzamin planned to open in the fall, and each had a few hundred students preenrolled. Tehran’s small British school was open, but its administrators were “fairly certain that it will close at the end of the current term.” The German school in Tehran had “an oral assurance from the minister of education,” and the French school was watching the situation carefully. As to whether the international schools would open for the fall semester, “Today, we say yes, who knows tomorrow.” Complicating matters was the Ministry of Education’s new position on the segregation of men and women in schools. According to the US embassy: “No school to our knowledge has in writing permission to continue next year … on a co-ed basis although they may have assurances that they may continue and … believe they may continue.”⁸¹ Many with Community School were skeptical, but “barring further problems,” the plan was to open on September 1, 1979.⁸²

On Friday August 17, revolutionaries took over the campus of Community School.⁸³ Peter Seto, the son of missionaries and a former student, recalled that “the school was in a downtown community,” with city structures and “cramped building[s]” all around the compound, and one day, “the neighbors came over the wall and took over the school.” In Peter Seto’s narrative, his father, Paul, and his colleagues “conceded the property,” but they “lost all their security.”⁸⁴ It soon became clear to the faculty that, after the initial breach, “our school had been taken over by the Revolutionary Guard.” A bizarre series of events played out over the next few weeks as revolutionaries demanded a fifty-fifty split of the school’s office supplies, laboratory equipment, library books, and other loose items scattered about the property. As the teacher Merilie Robertson recalled, “We were able to take about half of our stuff up to the new school.” It was an uncomfortable situation because, during the weeks it took to relocate, “we were supervised by the Revolutionary Guard folks, and some of the teachers … in the school that was going to take over our facilities.”⁸⁵ The packing began around September 8 and was completed within a week.⁸⁶ On September 14, Robertson wrote: “I doubt if I’ll ever set foot in the old school again. We are definitely not welcome there. It seemed very strange to close the door on the chem lab for the last time.” In any case, there was a “new school occupying our old campus.”⁸⁷ It fell to Peggy Thomas, an American Presbyterian and the first female director of Community School since 1940, to manage the institution, which, during the 1979–80 academic year, held classes at a former German diplomatic residence in the Elahieh neighborhood of North Tehran.⁸⁸

Falling between two attacks on the US embassy in 1979—a failed one in February and the successful one in November—the fate of Community School was wrapped up with the power struggle between Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan’s civilian government and Khomeini’s Revolutionary Council.⁸⁹ US government records indicate that, at a meeting on the morning of August 18, officials with the Iranian Ministry of Education recognized Community School’s “right to function,” but beyond that there was “some confusion remaining within the ministry with regard to the future of the school.”⁹⁰ According to an April 1981 Presbyterian retrospective, “Letters from certain provisional government or revolutionary individuals … did give Community School temporary relief during the property crisis,” which ensued between the initial takeover and the eventual relocation. But, when push came to shove, the letters “had no decisive effect.” Presbyterian administrators claimed to possess a letter from Bazargan to Gholam Hossein Shokouhi, then the minister of education, that was copied and “leaked to a Community School employee.” It allegedly “stated that the person(s) involved in the property take-over should be punished.” But, again, “the letter was written at a time when neither official had … real power.” Shokouhi was replaced in late 1979 by Mohammad-Ali Rajai—a teacher, revolutionary administrator, and lay aid of Khomeini. The hard-line educationalists in the Revolutionary Council and Ministry of Education appear to have worked with allies in the city to take over the Community School campus. Rather than be reprimanded, as Bazargan suggested, in April 1981 “some of those persons are now in the highest positions in the present government.”⁹¹ The unspoken reference was to Rajai, who, after leaving the Ministry of Education, replaced Bazargan as prime minister and briefly served as president, along with his confidant, Mohammad-Javad Bahonar, who in spring 1981 was overseeing Khomeini’s cultural revolution as minister of education. Earlier, Rajai and Bahonar ran a chain of private schools to promote dawa among the youths of Tehran.⁹²

What happened at Community School in August 1979 set a precedent for what the Students Following the Line of the Imam did at the US embassy less than three months later on November 4, and it was part of a wave of nationalization that involved the confiscation of foreign properties and the intimidation of Iranian Christians.⁹³ Of all Iran’s Christian communities, the British-backed Anglican Church was hardest hit. The Iranian government nationalized all property owned by London’s Church Mission Society and its affiliates, and throughout the summer revolutionaries closed down its hospitals and other institutions in southern Iran, particularly Isfahan. On August 19, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the 1953 coup, revolutionaries stormed the church compound in Isfahan, ransacked offices, and searched the home of Bishop Dehqani-Tafti. The affiliation of the church with the British led to suspicion, confiscation, and, in some cases, violence. Back in Tehran, revolutionaries not only stormed Community School but additional evangelical Christian properties. On August 22, US diplomats in Tehran approached the Iranian foreign minister about the “harassment of [the] Christian community.” An American preacher who witnessed these events warned diplomats that the Iranian government was pursuing a policy of “administrative and financial strangulation” whose goal was “the repression of Christians and Christian organizations in Iran.”⁹⁴ The seizure of properties in August and the hostage-taking in November 1979 further eroded both the Christian and American presence in Iran.

At this point, the only reason that a half-dozen American Presbyterians remained in Iran was because the Bazargan government had, before the prime minister resigned in response to the hostage crisis, renewed their visas and work permits, which did not expire until July 1980.⁹⁵ In fact, on July 18, 1979, two Presbyterian missionaries, Tat and Pat Stewart, touched down in Tehran to begin their year-long assignment. Both were the children of missionaries, part of the Del Be Del community, and familiar with Iranian cultures and languages. Tat Stewart helped Robert Pryor close down Community Church and then took over in ministering to English-speaking Christians in Tehran. Some weeks, attendance was in the single digits at services, which were held at various locations around the city after the Iranian government closed the church in Saltanatabad. At the same time, the Stewarts attended the services of the Evangelical Church, and Tat was active with its youth group.⁹⁶ Reverend Stewart, later of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and founder of a Persian-language Christian ministry, has offered his own accounts of this transitory period in the history of Iranian Protestantism.⁹⁷ The Stewarts were the last workers that the UPCUSA ever deployed to Iran.

On August 3, 1980, the Los Angeles Times ran the headline: “700 years of missionary work in Iran ends” as “radical Islamic forces drive out all foreign Christian churches.”⁹⁸ Saint Paul’s Anglican Church in Tehran was stormed by armed revolutionaries, and Bishop Dehqani-Tafti fled to England after his son, Bahram, and a church colleague were murdered. The missions of the Seventh Day Adventists (American), Jehovah’s Witnesses (German and Swedish), and the Catholic Salesians (Italian) were also closed.⁹⁹ Then it was the Presbyterians’ turn. In late June 1980, Stewart and his colleagues held out hope that their paperwork would be renewed, but it was an unlikely prospect. In addition to what happened to their coreligionists, the Ministry of Education nationalized Iranzamin and Community School at the end of the 1979–80 academic year.¹⁰⁰ On July 23, 1980, the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of National Guidance asked the last three Presbyterian couples—the Stewarts, Setos, and Thomases—to leave the country by the end of the month.¹⁰¹

When given their marching orders, the Stewarts and their family turned to scripture to make sense of the situation. As if looking for a clue in a book of Hafez’s poetry, the family opened the Bible to the Old Testament book of Jeremiah.¹⁰² On a summer day in Tehran, they read of “the coming exile”:

Gather up your bundle from the ground, O you who live under siege! For thus says the Lord: I am going to sling out the inhabitants of the land at this time, and I will bring distress on them, so that they shall feel it.¹⁰³

On July 31, 1980, the Information Office of the UPCUSA put out a press release to announce the return “all remaining” fraternal workers from Iran.¹⁰⁴ Four days earlier, on July 27, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi died in exile in Egypt. Six months later, on January 20, 1981, the Iranian government released the remaining American hostages, thus ending an international crisis and an interconnected period in US-Iran relations.

What happened to the places where the Americans and Iranians of the Del Be Del network spent their time in downtown Tehran? While many Americans filed claims against the Islamic Republic of Iran in an international tribunal, the Presbyterians did not. Church administrators in the United States thought that they “should not get mixed up with US economic interests in Iran and with US claims before an international tribunal” because “it would be an embarrassment to the Church in Iran” and it would “have serious consequences for Christians … in Iran.” In 1981, evangelicals in the United States were concerned about “their brothers and sisters in Iran,” and they were “not prepared to see loss of life for the sake of compensation for property,” which, in any case, “was never intended for investment but for service.”¹⁰⁵

The nature of mission property holdings in Iran changed over time. Foreigners had a relatively free hand during the nineteenth century, but the first Pahlavi shah rolled back the “capitulations” during his reign. After the creation of the Evangelical Church in the 1930s, the relationship between it and the Presbyterian Mission began to change.¹⁰⁶ On June 1, 1951, “an agreement was signed concerning properties bought in Church Corporation name largely with Board funds,” whereby the property was transferred to the Anjoman-e Kelisa-ye Enjili Iran and “held in trust” by Iranian Christians for the Board of Foreign Missions.¹⁰⁷ Americans and Iranians interpreted this agreement differently, and tensions over institutional control flared up after the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in 1965.¹⁰⁸ The situation was reassessed after the dissolution of the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR) in 1972, but ambiguities remained, and there were often different terms for different properties.¹⁰⁹ There was a general state of confusion about who owned mission properties during the revolution of 1979 and its aftermath.

During the 1980s, Iranian Christians pressed American Presbyterians for recognition that they did, in fact, legally possess the former properties of the Presbyterian Mission. In December 1982, Tateos Michaelian, an Armenian, was the executive director of the Evangelical Church of Iran’s Synod. He wrote to Presbyterian administrators in New York to “suggest that you send us a document declaring that all properties in Iran belong to the Evangelical Church of Iran because they have been used from the beginning … for church purposes and ministries.” According to Michaelian, “This document will confirm and strengthen your former proclamation,” and “it will help us in dealing with our Government.”¹¹⁰ In March 1983, the UPCUSA’s lawyers recommended that the church issue a “quit claim” on its ten remaining properties in Iran, four of which were in Tehran. With the exception of the Garden of Evangelism, all were downtown. They included the Hospital Compound, where Community School was located for three decades; Jane Doolittle’s Iran Bethel, which at the end housed Damavand faculty; and Central Compound.¹¹¹ It was not until 1985, however, that American Presbyterians finally stepped back from Iranian affairs, declaring that “all real estate in Iran which has been registered in the name of the … American Mission … in reality have belonged to the Evangelical Church of Iran.” In the end, properties that were not confiscated by the Iranian government were American “gifts and offerings” for Iranian Christians.¹¹²

Life was difficult for evangelical Christians in the Islamic Republic in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Evangelical Church of Iran was always small, and after the revolution many of its members, especially Persian-speakers and converts from Islam, fled the country. Yet, Assyrians and Armenians continued to worship in Tehran, run their own churches, and evolve as faith communities.¹¹³ However, in the 1990s, some Iranian Christians who had felt a degree of security during the revolution became targets of persecution. This resulted in a murderous campaign in 1994 and the assassination of Tateos Michaelian and Haik Hovespian-Mehr, both of whom were Armenian evangelical ministers.¹¹⁴ While the Armenian and Assyrian evangelical churches survived as institutions, in 2012 Iranian authorities closed a Presbyterian church in Tehran and arrested its leaders for holding services in the Persian language and allegedly attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity.¹¹⁵

What about the Presbyterian Mission’s Central Compound? In the early twenty-first century, Saint Peter’s Evangelical Church was on the compound, and Iranian preservationists deemed it to have historic value. The church traced its genealogy to 1876, the year that Armenian evangelicals and the Presbyterian missionary James Bassett opened the first Protestant church in Tehran. The compound, which the Presbyterians acquired in the 1880s, was, in the 2010s, known as the “Tir Street Garden.”¹¹⁶

Tir Street was Central Compound’s third mailing address in its history. Prior to the Second World War, it was Qavam al-Saltaneh. That street name derived from the Qajar-era title meaning “support of the monarchy,” but it was also the name of an individual who served multiple times as prime minister in the early Pahlavi period.¹¹⁷ After the Tehran Conference of 1943, Qavam al-Saltaneh, which was near the Soviet Union’s embassy, changed its name to Stalin Avenue. In one of history’s ironies, the American evangelical enterprise during the Cold War was headquartered on a street named after the Soviet premier, which meant that Joseph Stalin’s name appeared on the official documentation of the Presbyterian Mission and the Evangelical Church for decades.¹¹⁸ Then came the Iranian Revolution of 1979, after which time there was no room for monarchical or communist references, let alone American ones, on Tehran’s street signs.¹¹⁹ Since the revolution, Central Compound’s mailing address has been “30th of Tir,” a reference to the date on the Persian calendar when a four-day standoff in July 1952 between the shah and Mohammad Mosaddeq ended with the prime minister being reinstated by a popular mandate in the streets of Tehran.¹²⁰ Whatever the name, Central Compound embodied all the paradoxes of the Del Be Del network’s errand to Iran, and its history sheds light on the afterlives of the Presbyterian Mission.