Koppel on Discovery

Iranians Speak

Life Inside the Axis of Evil

Ted Koppel and his crew met Iranians of all types — young, old, religious, academic, artistic — and they found that Americans would probably be surprised to see what life is like inside the "Axis of Evil." Since you won't be heading to Iran anytime soon, let us introduce you to some of the people they met.

Who: Bike Kids
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Associate producer Imtiyaz Delawala met these teenagers and watched as they did tricks on their American-made bikes and skates.

Who: Newsha Tavakolian and Borna Alikhani
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Newsha Tavakolian, 25, is an award-winning Iranian photographer who traveled with the film crew to document Ted's trip.

Who: Dr. Ibrahim Yazdi
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Dr. Ibrahim Yazdi is an advocate for greater democracy within Iran. He was a student leader at Tehran University and supporter of Mohammad Mossadegh during the 1950s. He believes the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Mossadegh and America's subsequent support of the Shah subverted the will of the Iranian people.

After the Islamic Revolution, Yazdi became foreign minister and was a frequent Koppel guest on ABC's Nightline. Now, he is an ardent opponent of the clerical system and believes that the clergy have corrupted religion through politics and that Islam is no longer central to Iranian life. In its place is a rising nationalism fueled by the nuclear issue and encouraged by the ruling clerics as a means to rally the masses.

He predicts that the public's disappointment will lead to further political change, with women's activism and discontent among youth as driving forces.

Who: Maziar Bahari
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This young Iranian filmmaker's documentaries focus on aspects of the Islamic Republic that officials don't usually highlight: heroin addiction, prostitution and violent crime, among others.

Working within the confines set down by the regime, he's been able to delicately chronicle the society's underbelly. His documentary And Along Came A Spider, which aired on Cinemax in 2004, tells the story of an Iranian man who became a folk hero to some for leading a double life, working and living with his family by day and luring and killing prostitutes by night.

Bahari is currently working on two projects. The first film is an examination of the 1953 coup with survivors of that era talking for the first time. The other is a profile of a Tehran madam.

The son of an engineer and teacher, Bahari left Iran in 1986 to study at McGill University in Montreal, returning in the late 1990s when Khatami was elected. He also serves as a stringer for Newsweek in Iran.

Who: Massoumeh Ebtekar
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Massoumeh Ebtekar served as chief interpreter and spokeswoman for the students who took 52 Americans hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Dubbed "Sister Mary" by the press because her heavy head scarf resembled a nun's habit, Ebtekar gave almost nightly interviews during the standoff, denouncing the hostages as spies and accusing the U.S. of committing crimes (she was also known as "Screaming Mary" for her vocal outbursts and lectures to hostages, who particularly disliked her among the hostage-takers).

Then just a 19-year-old freshman at Polytechnic University in Tehran, she became the public voice of the student takeover because she spoke English better than others in the group since she had lived in suburban Philadelphia as a child and had attended American schools.

She acknowledged her part in the U.S. Embassy takeover in 1998, after she was named by President Khatami as Iran's first female vice president since the revolution. As one of six vice presidents, she served as the head of the Department of the Environment from 1997-2005, and now runs Tehran's Center for Peace and the Environment.

While some of the hostage-takers today regret their roles in the events at the embassy, Ebtekar still defends their actions and regards the takeover as a success for the Islamic Republic. And she still defends the Iranian system, claiming that while more work needs to be done, Iran does have a democratic system with substantive debate in the press and Parliament.

Who: Rahim Bathaei
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Rahim Bathaei served as a guide and interpreter for the film crew throughout their trip. He was an early supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini and also fought against Iraq for four years as a member of the Revolutionary Guard.

Who: Nasser Hadian
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Nasser Hadian is a political science professor at Tehran University. A keen political observer, he is regularly quoted on his views of Iran in major media outlets.

Hadian is one of President Ahmadinejad's childhood friends and a current political opponent (he favored Rafsanjani in the 2005 election). He says Ahmadinejad was one of the smartest students growing up and describes him now as ''self-confident, committed and absolutely incorruptible.''

He also says the president is modern in his thinking while still being very religious, and someone who is very set in his views. He says Ahmadinejad has gained support among religious conservatives and urban and rural poor by showing that he wants to fight the powerful, whether domestic or international. Hadian believes the public will turn on Ahmadinejad if he does not improve daily life as he promised during his presidential campaign.

Hadian has also suggested several political positions on the nuclear crisis, ranging from no nuclear energy ever, to the immediate acquisition of nuclear bombs. He believes a consensus is emerging in the middle: "no" to bombs, but "yes" to nuclear processing on Iranian soil.

Who: Ayatollah Mahdi Hadavi Tehrani
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Nicknamed "Ayatollah dotcom," Ayatollah Hadavi is a young, media-savvy, English-speaking cleric.

In the late 1970s, Hadavi was an electronic engineering student. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, he began specializing in Islamic philosophy and law, becoming one of Iran's 350 ayatollahs in only 10 years of study.

The 40-year-old is now a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at the Islamic Seminary in Qom, the center of religious learning in Iran, where he teaches Shia interpretations of Sharia law to some of the 40,000 who travel to Qom for religious studies.

Hadavi is conservative on some issues -- for example, he believes women should cover themselves in public and their main duties are with the family. But he is fairly moderate as well, describing himself as "an activist for religious dialogue" who sees the Internet as "a useful technology for good conversation and dialogue among different civilizations" and a way to combat what he describes as "evil forces" who "seek clashes among religions."

Who: Reza Ahmadian
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Reza Ahmadian is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. He joined the army at 16 and then became a prisoner of war in Iraq for more than seven years. Ahmadian is now an English teacher in the city of Isfahan.

Who: Fernaz Seyfi
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Fernaz Seyfi has been blogging on feminist issues since 2003. She currently writes only in Farsi. Blogs By Iranians indexes blogs written in English by Iranians living both inside and outside the country.

Who: Saeed Laylaz
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Saeed Laylaz is a Tehran-based economist and newspaper columnist.