5 Chapter 5. In the Shah’s Shadow

I crossed into Iran from Turkey on two occasions, first in mid-July, the second time in late September. Both times were by bus. Both times were at the Gürbulak–Bazargan crossing. I remember the bus rumbling down into the dry wadi that straddled the border. The smell of diesel and dust hung over everything. The heat was intense. Suddenly, the bus drew to a halt. We sat. And sat. Nothing and no one moved. Basil Jay’s account of his family’s crossing by van two years earlier was eerily similar to my own:

For almost four hours we were pushed from pillar to post amid the most unbelievable disorganization, form filling, arranging insurances, carnets and a hundred and one other bits of paperwork. Eventually exhausted we drove through and into Iran. We camped just 20 miles over the border and attempted to clean off the thick layers of dust that lay over every imaginable surface of both ourselves and the vehicles.¹

Since the late 1960s, Gürbulak–Bazargan had become the major crossing for Westerners travelling east from Turkey. Before that time, travellers had another option: to breach the Iranian border by way of Iraq. This was the route taken by the Oxford-Cambridge crew in 1955–56; David Harvey and his companions in 1962–63; Henry Hamilton and Alastair Harper that same year; and Carol McLean and her friends two years later. At the time, Iraq was considered one of the Middle East’s most modern and westernized countries. However, a military coup in 1968 paved the way for Saddam Hussein to gradually gain power. While some travellers continued to follow the Iraq route into Iran, this route came to a final halt beginning in 1974 with the outbreak of war between the Iraqi state and its Kurdish minority and, finally, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88.

By whichever route one arrived, Iran’s main highways were generally good. Two exceptions were the eastern mountain passes in winter, which receive a large amount of snow and can be impassable, and many of the country’s roads and bridges in spring, when they often wash out. To these seasonal issues must be added two wholly human actions that might also complicate road travel, both noted by Basil Jay. First, when a vehicle broke down, which was “very frequent,” lorry and bus drivers would surround their vehicles, from about fifty yards back, with large rocks “spread into the middle of the road,” which were “designed to prevent vehicles (particularly at night) from driving into their unlit and immobile vehicles.” If an animal is killed in the road—goats, sheep, “even cattle”—villagers would immediately come out and “then proceed, still in the middle of the road, to skin, cut up and share the luckless carcass around their numbers.”²

Side excursions were possible, for example, visits to the northern region, the Elburz Mountains, and the resort towns of the Caspian Sea. Such trips were only a small diversion before travelling to Tehran, yet I chose to head straight to that great city.

Tehran, a 7,000-year-old city, was home to a little more than four million people in 1976. Some Western travellers have unhappy memories of Tehran, but I am not among them. Perhaps their impressions stemmed from spending little time in the city. Most Western travellers treated Tehran as a weigh-station for getting visas and such. This was unfair, as I have come to realize more over the years. Tehran was a very modern city in many respects. As Iran’s capital, it housed foreign embassies, international banks, and postal services. If required, visas could be obtained there, or vehicles could be repaired. While one traveller I interviewed questioned the cleanliness of a health clinic where she received a gamma globulin shot, the fact is that Tehran sported a good medical system.

My second stay in Tehran, in late September, was much shorter but no less memorable:

Half of the city stores are crammed with sinks, bathtubs, or toilets; the others are stereo shops or (on Ferdowsi Avenue) carpets. No one seems to eat sitting down. The sidewalks are filled with food stands. You can buy a banana or other fruit shakes for about 25 cents (2 rials). They are quenching and delicious.…

I met a thirty-year-old literature student from Tabriz with whom I had a spirited conversation first over Israel and the Arabs, then later a calm lecture from him on Persian authors. He wrote in my passport, in Arabic, a poem about Muhammed written by the Iranian poet Saadi Shirazi. He told me, too, the tale of why there are so many young men bearing on their backs cold water in metal tanks walking Iran’s city streets in summer—that, centuries before, many people had died at the hands of a cruel ruler who cut off the water supply to the people, so that now water is viewed as a public good.

Westerners who came to know Iranians almost invariably found them gracious, kind, and polite but also reserved and fiercely proud. Many travellers, however, viewed the city as emotionally cold and overcrowded. The chaotic state of traffic was a particular source of both amusement and shock. In the words of James Truman, “Driving etiquette in Tehran is modeled after the chariot race in Ben-Hur.”³ New concrete buildings were sprouting up everywhere. A pall of dust seemed to hang perpetually over the city.

Tehran, by the 1970s, was a very westernized city. Margot Miller recalled spending a week in Tehran in 1972. One night, some Iranians took her and some friends to a disco. “We ate pizza and drank beer,” she says. “Everyone was dressed to the nines. The women were beautifully turned out in high heels, jewellery, and silk scarves.”

But not all Western travellers enthused over the city’s modernization. Brenda Grant wrote in her diary, “It seems they’ve lost the good parts of eastern cultures and picked up the busy, bustling parts of the Western world.” In my notes, I similarly described Tehran as “offensive to the spirit; loud cars and money grabbling. It’s as if the worst aspects of Western cities were transported here.”

I see now how I and many others who made the journey too often took an observer’s stance, laden with preconceptions that focused on the exotic or simply made unfair comparisons to our own culture, without really getting inside the lives of the people in Tehran or other places. The result are descriptions I sometimes wrote that now seem often thin and doubtful. It is a lesson learned regrettably late.

In retrospect, I think some of the negative impressions Westerners held of Tehran were also the result of the relatively small area in which we stayed, a stretch of avenue known as Amir Kabir. The avenue was named after Mirza Taqi Khan Farahani (1807–52), who is better known as Amir Kabir. He was an influential Persian politician (premier) who attempted to reform the country’s administration and was assassinated for his efforts.⁴ Lacking entirely its namesake’s illustrious status, the avenue was instead the repository of all sorts of motor parts—tires, radiators, timing chains, etc.—for every type of vehicle, including mopeds. But the avenue also featured a host of cheap accommodations: the Goodyear Guest House, the Youth Hostel Ferdosi, and—most famously—the Amir Kabir Hotel. Second only to Istanbul’s Pudding Shop in notoriety for Western travellers, the Amir Kabir Hotel became a central place of information-sharing and money transactions.

I stayed at the Amir Kabir in July and tried to get accommodation once again in September on my second trip, but the hotel was full due to Ramadan. To make things worse, the bus I had taken from Maku, just across the border, had lost my small travel bag. Two very long days passed before it finally arrived.

That first night, I slept curled up on some canvas in the corner of an alleyway near the Amir Kabir. My “room” the next night was a cot on the roof of the youth hostel. It was a blessing, as the city was baked in intense summer heat. “It was very pleasant and warm,” I wrote, “watching the sort of dusty clouds that swept in so low that you could almost suck in the dirt and blow it away again.”

But, for all its penthouse appeal, the roof did not feel particularly safe for anyone used to the security of walls. I was pleased to finally get a room at the Amir Kabir the next night. I described the hotel as a “tourist rattrap and fleabag”—hardly an idiosyncratic assessment. Terming it the “traveller ghetto,” David Tomory provides an accurate description of the Amir Kabir as “a concrete U with balconies and walkways, the hotel itself occupying the second and third floors,” while the first floor housed “a tyre emporium whose merchandise had overflowed into the U and the surrounding streets, so that the Amir Kabir was lapped by a sea of tyres.”⁵

For sixty rials—a little under a dollar at the time—travellers could get a single mattress and one dirty sheet in a dormitory room with multiple beds. An oil heater occupied the centre of the room. “For breakfast,” said Bruce Finch, “you would shout down and they would bring eggs and chips to your room.” At the end of the hall was a toilet.⁶ Arthur remembered the Amir Kabir as the only hotel in the countries he visited where the proprietors took one’s passport and locked it up for you.

Like many travellers, I found a ready market for my jeans: a young man in the tire shop purchased them. As in other countries, Marlboro cigarettes and Johnny Walker were also in high demand. A thriving black market also existed for money exchanges. (Jay describes changing money at “unbelievably good rates” in Mashhad’s bazaar, adding that the currencies were “probably either stolen, or counterfeit.”⁷)

Simply “being” in a place can be an education. My two stays at the Amir Kabir taught me much about Iran’s politics. By talking and observing, I learned of the seething anger that would soon bring down the Shah’s regime. I had a rudimentary knowledge of Iran and other countries in the region before travelling, but speaking to people gave me a deeper understanding of Iran’s recent political history. My journey through Iran and the countries that followed provided important material lessons regarding the interplay of states and social forces. I owe much of my later career as a political sociologist to those lessons.

How we experience another country is a product not only of the preconceptions we bring with us, though this is important, but also a matter of timing. Like many countries after 1945, Iran tried to escape the West’s domineering influence, especially that of Britain, which controlled the country’s oil industry, and the United States. In 1951, the Iranian Parliament overwhelmingly elected a staunch nationalist, Mohammad Mosaddegh, as the country’s new prime minister, who promptly nationalized that industry. As Mosaddegh’s power grew, tensions developed between him and the Shah, who was relegated to the role of a figurehead. But the UK’s MI6 and the US’s CIA staged a coup in August 1953 that overthrew Mosaddegh’s government and returned the Shah to power.⁸

Years later, Mosaddegh’s overthrow still rankled many Iranians, who viewed the Shah as a puppet of Western imperialism. In 1963, the Shah introduced a series of modernizing social and economic reforms meant to appeal to urban, Western-trained liberals, as well as oil companies and Western governments.⁹

Many Western travellers immediately after 1953 and later were generally sympathetic to the Shah and his regime. Tim Slessor’s account of the Oxford-Cambridge expedition of 1955–56 disparaged the “stagnant traces of Mossadeq,” who was “still regarded as a national hero, albeit a misguided one.”¹⁰ Cycling through the Iranian countryside in 1963, in the immediate aftermath of the Shah’s land reforms, Dervla Murphy spoke to peasants who had suddenly become landowners. “They genuinely love their Shah,” she noted, “—and would you blame them!”¹¹ Henry Hamilton, who journeyed through the region in 1962, held a similarly benign view: “There was agricultural reform going on. The women could wear short skirts and go to university. There was prosperity and everyone was quite friendly, though Mashhad was a little more conservative. But it really didn’t look too bad.”

Attending a theatre in Tehran in 1972, Bruce Finch remembered that the audience stood for the playing of Iran’s national anthem as the movie began. Finch “didn’t notice any anti-Western feeling at the time or any religious fervour,” although he added, “Now I was talking mostly of course to people of my own age group, probably a more educated group.”

Only months earlier, Iran celebrated the 2,500th anniversary of the State of Iran and the Persian Empire. The main event, full of pomp and ceremony, was held at the ancient site of Persepolis, where King Darius had first erected a palace in the fifth century BCE before Alexander the Great levelled it in 330 BCE. Now it was restored.

The celebration was meant to legitimate the Shah’s rule but was based on a wholly manufactured historical claim. The sham cost an estimated US$22 million and was decried by critics as a bald and ultimately failed effort by the Shah “to inflate his own faltering regime with the grandeur of history.”¹²

The Peacock Throne was in serious trouble, as I learned. Discontent was rising across several social groups: displaced farmers, urban workers, conservative clerics, intellectuals, students. Each group might have its own reason to be angry, but nationalism and anger with the West was the unifying element.

Leaving the Amir Kabir Hotel, I walked every day past shop windows filled with the newest appliances and televisions, designer apparel, Mercedes-Benz cars, and more. The streets of Tehran dripped with wealth, the product of burgeoning oil revenues following the 1973 OPEC crisis. But these things remained beyond reach for most Iranians, especially as inflation was surging. I remember vividly seeing farmers beating helplessly at the dry and unyielding fields with simple implements. James Hooley and his wife recalled a heartbreaking moment in 1975 when, over dinner, an Iranian couple offered them their infant as “it would have no life” in their own country.

But the emerging crisis was not only economic. It was also cultural and political. For many, the intensified commercialization of Iranian life symbolized the country’s subordination to the American empire. To the outside world, the Shah’s regime appeared as a modernizing liberal democracy in the Western mould. Iranians knew better, although the political, military, and economic elites were quite happy.

Behind the façade of liberal democracy lay an authoritarian regime propped up by American arms. Its chief instrument was the Shah’s American-trained secret police, SAVAK. In conversation one day with an American who had lived in Iran for some time, I was told of a prison in Tehran built in 1972 primarily to hold the Shah’s political opponents, but Westerners arrested on drug charges were liable to end up there as well. That building was the notorious Evin Prison.¹³

The Iranian state intensified its policy of suppression after 1973. In 1976, the same year I travelled to Iran, an Amnesty International report noted it had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”¹⁴

Watching the Shah and the Queen, Farah (Diba) Pahlavi, pass by in a parade car in Isfahan in 1977, David Pearson and Bess Blackwell recalled that the crowd was neither celebratory nor hostile, just silent, even pensive. There was no sense of reverence, let alone love, only curiosity.

But Jean (a pseudonym) recalled something darker in 1975: fear. She remembered talking with university students on a beach somewhere who were terrified of discussing even mildly political questions. “You had to walk miles away, down the beach,” she said, “so you could make sure no one was listening.” Travelling through the country in 1976, Bruce Shore similarly sensed an atmosphere of anxiety and depression gripping the Iranian people, a feeling that things were “off balance” and that the weight of events was shifting in a dangerous way.

My strongest memory is of the Iranian youths who worked at the Amir Kabir Hotel and the tire shop below. They were angry. They loved rock and roll music and jeans but hated America and the West generally. After I returned to Canada in February 1977, I repeatedly told people that a revolution was brewing in Iran—even as American state department officials and military advisers continued to insist that the Shah’s regime was in no danger of collapse.

Early in 1978, protests broke out across Iran. A Polish journalist, Rzyard Kapuściński, described a massive march in Tehran as “a human river, broad and boiling, flowing endlessly, rolling through the main street from dawn till dusk. A flood, a violent flood that in a moment will engulf and drown everything.”¹⁵ Beyond seeking to overthrow the Shah, however, the protestors initially lacked a shared objective. The protests were an expression of inchoate nationalism and hatred of the regime. Although Shia clerics wielded enormous power, and many segments of Iranian society—especially in the rural countryside—were staunchly religious, much of the urban population was young, increasingly secularized, and liberal (or Marxist). In short, the eventual outcome of events as they unfolded was not at first clear.

Years later, I met Helga, a German-born woman sitting at a small table in Istanbul’s Pudding Shop who told me of how she had hidden in her room at the Amir Kabir Hotel in December 1978 as mass protests broke out all across the country and angry crowds thronged the streets below. Afraid to leave, Helga at last got a car ride to Mashhad and then a ride with some engineers to Afghanistan, another country soon to explode in turmoil.

In mid-January 1979, the Shah—now terminally ill with cancer—left Iran at the behest of his new prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar. At the start of February, the prominent Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran after more than fourteen years in exile. Khomeini quickly became the revolution’s leader, against which opposition—including the Iranian military—melted away. The Islamic Republic had been born.

The Iranian Revolution ended overland travel between Turkey and India. The route was no longer safe or even possible. The number of tourists entering Iran in 1979 was officially zero, and that number has remained paltry. More than forty years later, the revolution’s tragic legacy endures.

In the years since, I have sometimes wondered how many of the frustrated and angry young men I saw at the Amir Kabir and clustered in the tire shop below were among those marching in the streets and besieging the American embassy. Probably many. And how many would also soon lose their lives in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), which the United States encouraged through the sale of arms to Saddam Hussein in the first of many acts of revenge. Sadly, I suspect, some also.

There are two main overland routes heading east from Tehran if one’s goal is to eventually get to India. The first is more circuitous, but more interesting. It leads south to the Holy City of Qom, then on to ancient Isfahan. From there, a traveller might journey southeast to Kerman and Bam, with perhaps a side trip to Persepolis, before enduring the seemingly endless salt deserts of southern Iran on the way to the town of Zahedan and the nearby Pakistan border. Regrettably, I did not take that route.

Instead, I took the second, more conventional, easterly route to the city of Mashhad, home to the Shrine of Iman Reza and of the poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi, or simply Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh. In contrast to Tehran, Mashhad seemed spotlessly clean and orderly, and devoid too of the roiling anger I had sensed in the capital. But its beauty held only a passing allure. Its mosques were almost too perfect, and I left after a few days, bound for Afghanistan via the Taybad–Islam Qala border crossing. I had been there once before, in late July, travelling by local bus. This time, I crossed in a minibus in the company of three other Westerners—two Irishmen and a Brit—whom I had met in Mashhad.

Borders often elicit colourful stories. But stories about the Iran–Afghan border differed depending on the direction one was travelling. Entering Afghanistan was slow and at times comically bureaucratic, if largely unproblematic. Entering Iran, however, was slow, bureaucratic, and threatening—and, ever since the American-led crackdown on drugs entering Iran and Turkey, dangerous, if one was stupid enough to carry drugs.

Drugs were a relatively minor lure for travellers in the early 1960s. As Mark Godfrey recalled of his journey in 1962, “In Herat, I bought a chunk of hash, about half the size of a small chocolate bar, cost maybe twenty-five cents. I forgot about it and carried it home to the US”—“a sort of souvenir,” he added with a laugh.

John Wall, who travelled through India two years later, similarly reported that drug use was still a minority activity. He remembered a Frenchman with whom he shared a room in Kandahar who had smashed up his car and had lost his ATA carnet and now couldn’t leave without the car or else paying duty—although he had drugs to ease his pain. “He was in real trouble but was too happy to care,” Wall told me. “The hotel keeper would make him eat, then go through his wallet for the money. The hotel keeper knew he would eventually have to call the police.”

By the mid-1960s, however, drugs had moved out of the subterranean precincts of Western culture into the mainstream. Promoted by prominent writers, self-proclaimed philosophers, and musicians such as Alan Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and the Beatles, drugs merged seamlessly with the quest for enlightenment. By the early 1970s, the drug culture was flourishing all the way from California to Kathmandu, creating new markets for profit.

Emblematic of the symbiotic relationship between spirituality and capitalist enterprise was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group formed in southern California in the mid-1960s. Originally a commune dedicated to psychedelics and mysticism, the brotherhood swiftly evolved into a criminal operation engaged in the international smuggling of pot, hash, LSD, and cocaine. In his fascinating account of the organization, Nicholas Schou quotes information to the effect that, in the late 1960s, a kilogram of hashish cost $5 or $6 in Afghanistan (a price of roughly $2.27 per pound) but would fetch about $100 in California.¹⁶ And the profit margins kept rising. According to David Tomory, in the early 1970s, a pound of top-quality hashish was worth about $8 in Afghanistan but would sell in England for $400 and in California for $2,000.¹⁷

Given the money to be made and the relatively lax enforcement by state police forces around smuggling, drug trafficking went big time. As Robert explained, a member of southern California’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love inspired his first trip along the Hippie Trail. In 1970, he and a friend flew to Germany, where they purchased a new Volkswagen camper bus that they outfitted with driving lights and KONI racing shocks. After picking up a third friend in Amsterdam, the trio drove to Istanbul and onto Afghanistan and Pakistan with the single intent of buying hash to smuggle back for sale in the US. It was Robert’s first of many extended trips to Afghanistan to obtain drugs. His last trip was in 1979, six months before the Soviets invaded.

An American-led war on drugs, beginning in the late 1960s, impacted even occasional drug users in Turkey and Iran. It simply was not worth it. In Don Skelton’s words, “There were a lot of cops and the idea of going to jail was not attractive.” Steve Crawford was a lone exception: while spending a month in Kerman in 1972, he had his first experience smoking opium in a Persian opium den.

It was at the border, however, that the crackdown had its most obvious impact. Before this time, except for seasonal problems, border crossings generally went smoothly. Much of the traffic involved vehicles carrying goods or itinerant workers, whose papers might get a look, but buses carrying tourists got an easy pass. Richard Gregory accurately describes the Afghan trucks as “a riot of colour, the cabs heavily decorated and the body panels painted with colourful scenes.”¹⁸

Border crossings later became long, onerous, and fraught with fear, even for those not carrying drugs. Entering Iran from Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, Angela Ford recalled seeing glass cases containing seized objects used to smuggle drugs, displayed as warnings. Patrick Welland, who travelled in 1975, remembered seeing graphic pictures of executed drug smugglers covering the walls of the border’s customs building.

The Iranian border guards were renowned for their workman-like thoroughness in destroying anything that might carry drugs. Writing of his journey home to London in 1974, Richard Gregory remembers the “thorough going over” he received at the Iran border: “A customs man squeezed out my toothpaste tube, disappointed.”¹⁹ Writing of his own travel in 1974, Basil Jay describes “luggage, boxes, bags, etc. opened and carefully examined … the contents being emptied on the ground” and gear boxes being drained of oil “in an effort to find hashish or opium.”²⁰ That same year, Bill Fillmore saw border guards rip out the back seats of a vehicle. I was told of the spines of backpacks being broken in search of drugs hidden in the metal frame. If found with drugs, foreigners were likely to face a long prison sentence—or worse. Patrick Welland noted that two weeks before he crossed into Iran “a Frenchman and a German were reportedly shot for drug smuggling.”

In contrast, my crossing from Afghanistan into Iran on my way to Europe in August went smoothly. The tour bus I was on was thoroughly searched but proceeded after the customary wait of four hours. No mangled backpacks, no sacrifice of toothpaste.

Similarly, both my crossings into Afghanistan—in late July and again at the start of October—went smoothly. Ernest, however, recalled a near mishap that occurred in June 1976 at the Afghanistan border:

It was a desolate, desert frontier with a hut on each side and no electricity. Two barbed wire fences about 50 yards apart delineated the no man’s land in between. We pulled up on the Iran side as the sun was setting. Our bus driver, Mark, said the border was about to close and that to get stuck in the no man’s land overnight invited a serious risk of getting robbed or worse. But we got our passports stamped anyway and pressed on through the rapidly increasing darkness. On the Afghan side the gate was already closed and the customs officials were out the door of their hut and about to disappear. Mark called to them, and one came over as our desperation increased. As it turned out, Mark was well prepared for an eventuality like this with baksheesh, including bottles of Jack Daniel’s. The officials returned, opened the gate, and stamped our passports in the now dark hut as we held our flashlights.

A foolish gamble, no doubt, but a good story. Fortunately, my three travelling companions and I required no rescue. We crossed the border without any trouble and were soon on a minibus to Herat.

1. Basil Jay, 65 Days to Delhi: An Incredible Journey, 302.

2. Jay, 65 Days to Delhi, 334.

3. James Truman, “Gods, Kings, Mystics, and Mullahs,” 187.

4. Abbas Amanat, “The Downfall of Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir and the Problem of Ministerial Authority in Qajar Iran,” 577–78.

5. David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 48–49.

6. Rory MacLean, Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India, 84.

7. Jay, 65 Days to Delhi, 431.

8. Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East, 323–47. See also “Anglo-Persian Oil Company,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, accessed June 6, 2024, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/anglo-persian-oil-company.

9. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, 144–51.

10. Tim Slessor, First Overland: London-Singapore by Land Rover, 74. “Mossadeq” is one of several alternative spellings of Mosaddegh.

11. Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, 26.

12. For the expense figure, see Cyrus Kadivar, “We Are Awake,” The Iranian, January 25, 2002, https://iranian.com/CyrusKadivar/2002/January/2500/; Truman, “Gods, Kings, Mystics, and Mullahs,” 199–200.

13. Evin Prison remains in use today, repurposed to house “enemies” of the Islamic Republic. One of my colleagues—Kavous Sayed-Emami, a professor of sociology at Imam Sadiq University, in Tehran, whom I met in Lethbridge in 2017—was arrested in early 2018 and died in Evin Prison under mysterious circumstances only two days later. The prison continues to be used to hold, torture, and kill the regime’s opponents. See Sarah Reiger, “Iranian-Canadian Academic’s Death in Iran Prison a ‘Profound Tragedy,’ Says Alberta Prof,” CBC News, last updated February 11, 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kavous-seyed-emami-lethbridge-1.4530435.

14. Quoted in William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 71.

15. Quoted in Jason Burke, “False Optimism May Cloud What We See on the Streets of Tehran,” 46.

16. Nicholas Schou, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, 82.

17. Tomory, A Season in Heaven, 244.

18. Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Afghanistan” section.

19. Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “The Journey Home” section.

20. Jay, 65 Days to Delhi, 446–47.