[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

[Via Ambassador Hakimi]

Reflection-6
The Greatest Gift to Our future is The Connection to Our Past.

By H. Hakimi

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The Human Touch

Part 1

Baghdad Beckons

In early sixties at the end of my assignment as First Secretary to our Embassy in Belgrade, the capital of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, I returned to Tehran. Upon my arrival to the Foreign Office, my superior assigned me as Deputy Chief of the Passport and Visa Departments.

The person in charge of the Passport Department being a weak person virtually obliged me acted as the head of the Department; he was afraid of his own shadow. Not wanting to take any chances, he was quite happy to delegate the running of the department to me.

In addition to the routine administration tasks, I had to represent the Passport & Visa Departments outside the Foreign Office and was responsible for all liaisons with other governmental departments, such as the Passport & Visa Departments of Police, the Tourist Organizations, The Security Organization (Savak), Frontier Guard (Marz Bani), the Second Department of the General Staff, and so on. I made many friends due to my boldness and willingness to make decisions.

The wife of General Hassan Pakravan, Fatemeh Pakravan was heading the Tourist Department, attached to the Prime Minister’s Office, as a deputy Prime Minister. She was at the time an energetic, dedicated lady whose aim was to promote Iran as a tourist destination. We therefore did our best to reduce the unnecessary visa paper work to a minimum. Any foreigner who was interested to pay a visit to our country had to under go filling up to five pages of irrelevant questions in three copies, attached with his/her photograph. After a lot of haggling, we managed to reduce this paper work to only one page that our representatives abroad did not even need to send it to Tehran. I became a trusted colleague of
Ms. Pakravan.

I was very happy to be back home in Teheran and quite happy with my job also. I had no wish to change my situation for some time. However, one day – mid 1963 - without any prior warning I was summoned to attend the office of the Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs, my old Ambassador in Belgrade Ansari, at once. He told me that he was urgently assigning me to Baghdad and I had to take up my new assignment without delay; meaning I had to prepare to leave within a few days. I tried in vain to remind him of an earlier promise: “But sir, while in Belgrade you said you would assign me to United Nations as part of my career development. Now you are sending me to Baghdad?!”


For The Complete 27 Pages Document