“Never touch your idols,” Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary, “for the gilding will stick to your fingers.” A few days ago, Roya Hakakian argued in The Atlantic that meeting your enemies is even less hygienic. Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, “Has Blood on His Hands,” the headline announced. Raisi had been asked to address the Council on Foreign Relations, and Hakakian wrote in a statement that the invitation was “a political baptism” for a depraved man. Previous Iranian presidents have included a Holocaust denier, but Raisi’s depravity crossed a line: Courts had determined that he ran a policy of mass killings of dissidents in the 1980s. “There is an important distinction between [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, who denies an evil,” she wrote, “and Raisi, who has committed one.”
I see things differently: The more odious the geopolitical figure, the more urgent the invitation. Like Hakakian, I am a member of CFR. And yesterday, I, along with a handful of others, attended the Raisi event.
The meeting was not on the record, so I cannot report anything said there. As a reporter whose entire purpose is to write for the public about what he learns, I have to fight the instinct to spit out the gag, which was a condition of my attendance. But even though I cannot report what was said, I can say with confidence that the audience at any gathering like that will come away knowing more, and reporting more competently, than if they had stayed home on principle. Even when the words spoken are off the record, as Raisi’s were, those who hear them will never write, think, or report about him the same way again. That will be to our readers’ benefit. And the more repressive, homicidal, and authoritarian the figure at the podium, the greater the value in hearing him speak. I doubt anyone considered the event a “baptism” or cleansing. Attendees I spoke with expressed skepticism and revulsion; none mistook this for a party in anyone’s honor.
At my first job, as a cub reporter for The Cambodia Daily, my editor sent me off to cover a speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen—not because Hun Sen was announcing something important (I could not be trusted with that), but because “he’s the fucking prime minister, and you never know what he’s going to say.” All by itself, that uncertainty made coverage compulsory—and Hun Sen was the strongman leader of a minor country, not a near-nuclear one with an assassination program and genocidal ambitions.
Raisi addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. His speech was covered heavily, and easily debunked in many of its particulars. At one point, the Israeli ambassador, Gilad Erdan, interrupted Raisi’s speech by parading around with a sign that read IRANIAN WOMEN DESERVE FREEDOM NOW. (Erdan was totally ignored by Raisi, then removed forcibly by UN staff.)
In a small group setting, such theatrics—or even just a persistent line of questioning—can actually produce interesting results. The Iranian president appears in public and even campaigns for office, in a sham election system where eligible candidates are groomed and selected by the Guardian Council, which in turn does the bidding of the Iranian supreme leader, who in turn is elected by no one, unless you count a single vote by God almighty. (Now there’s an election in need of monitoring.) Inside Iran, the opportunities for sustained, prosecutorial questioning of politicians of Raisi’s rank are few, and of course any Iranian responsible for such impertinence would put their freedom in jeopardy.
That leaves events such as CFR’s as the rare occasions to see how Iran’s leaders react to pressure, or indeed provocation. “Dialogue is reserved for those with whom we have disagreements,” Hakakian writes. But talking to coldhearted criminals, whether in public or private, can be illuminating. The great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci spent more than a week begging Raisi’s erstwhile boss, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, for an audience. He was a stern and charmless figure, used to being surrounded by obsequious religious students, and about as likely as a Pet Rock to have his mind changed by dialogue with Fallaci. Her irreverence, and his peevish but vigorous replies, remain among the great documents of Khomeini’s personality. She scoffed at Iran’s segregation of the sexes and forced veiling of women. “By the way,” she asked, “how do you swim in a chador?”
KHOMEINI: This is none of your business. Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it.
FALLACI: That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done. But tell me something. A woman such as I, who has always lived among men, showing her neck, her hair, her ears, who has been in war and slept in the front line in the field among soldiers, according to you, is she an immoral, bold and unproper woman?
KHOMEINI: Your conscience knows the answer.
Until a politician is pressed in this way—especially a politician who lives in a cocoon of sycophancy—it is impossible to know what he’s made of. Will the sight of an unveiled woman cause him to shriek in fear? End the conversation in disgust? Or will he be stolid and unmoved? In the answer is the difference between a murderous neurotic and a murderous sociopath. Puzzlingly, Khomeini reacted differently altogether, Fallaci reported. He laughed. His son Ahmad told her it was the first time he had seen his father react this way to anything.
At the UN, Raisi’s speech was littered with crackpot geopolitical claims, such as that the Islamic State “was created by the United States.” And it contained more sinister implications. He described Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force who was killed by an American missile in Baghdad in 2020, as a “martyr in the path of the freedom of the nations of the region.” (This is what “freedom” means to Raisi: rule by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Damascus.) Soleimani, a soldier, was allegedly on a military mission that threatened the lives of U.S. personnel in Iraq. “We will follow the implementation of justice” for his killing, Raisi said to the General Assembly, “through a fair court, until a definitive result is reached.” But he also suggested that the “fair court” would be at most a formality, because the culprits—former President Donald Trump, along with members of his administration—had already admitted guilt and “printed his name on the case.”
Raisi was a judge for years before he became Iran’s president, and to me, that line sounded like a death sentence pronounced in absentia against former U.S. officials. The words were chosen with care; I doubt We will execute Donald Trump would have been met with the same bored expressions worn by the delegates present for Raisi’s rather more subtle formulation. An in-person meeting is the only venue, public or private, in which to demand that he resolve ambiguity on this subject. He could add clarity and say that Iran is a civilized, modern country, and does not go around killing people. And even if he refused to answer—well, refusing to say, on direct invitation, We are not trying to kill Donald Trump (or Salman Rushdie, or Masih Alinejad) would itself be an answer, revelatory of Raisi’s character and of the regime he leads.
One might object that all of these supposed revelations are in fact common knowledge among anyone who has observed Iran closely over the past five decades. To the Iranian dissident activists holding signs and hooting insults at Raisi near the UN yesterday—I went out and spoke with them after the CFR event—the deaths of tens of thousands of their countrymen have already revealed plenty.
But the Islamic Republic of Iran has recently attempted to soften its public image, to say through implication what in previous times, before the discovery in Tehran of the darker arts of public relations, would have been said directly. To translate, detect, and expose these innuendoes takes constant refreshment of one’s sense of the people who say them. And for that, nothing beats sitting in their presence and talking.
The activists seem to think being in Raisi’s presence might beguile people into believing what he says or even developing fuzzy feelings toward his delegation. The attendees were polite. Raisi’s haters want anyone in his presence to address him with the same venom they would. Another strategy is to maintain just enough politeness to keep the subject speaking, ideally more than he wishes he had.
As I left the meeting with Raisi, a smiling Iranian official offered me an elegant tote, “a gift of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” I declined, and may have even recoiled involuntarily when I realized that I had nearly taken a goodie bag offered on behalf of a man who runs an assassination program. When I looked back on my way to the elevator, the official looked dejected, and I saw behind him a whole table of gifts, brought all the way from Tehran, and incapable of being given away in New York.