The Invisible City of Tehran

The Atlantic

6 days ago

The 12-day war between Iran and Israel may not have transformed the opaque rule of the Islamic Republic, but it did make some things newly visible in Tehran. However briefly, a city within a city, long governed through layers of concealment and spectacle, lay exposed.
I still recall returning to Tehran in 1998, after more than two decades spent in London and New York. As the plane descended, I pressed my forehead to the window and saw the city of my birth splayed beneath me, vast and unfamiliar. It had multiplied since I had last seen it, not only in size but in identity. Tehran was no longer just the capital of Iran. It was now the beating heart of the Islamic Republic—the world's first fully realized theocracy, the product of a revolution that had yielded not more freedom or material prosperity, but less.
For several months in the late 1990s, I returned for both work and personal reasons. As I wandered the city, I felt a sense of both wonder and cautious belonging. I moved into a quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood in the north—unflashy, orderly, lived-in. My neighbors were professionals: engineers, doctors, artists, middle-tier bureaucrats. Most were secular, or observed religion privately and with restraint. They loathed the regime's imposed piety. Inside their homes, they drank wine, hosted mixed-gender gatherings (these were illegal in the Islamic Republic), and listened to banned music. Private spaces were sanctuaries, zones of quiet resistance. But for Iranians they were part, I came to understand, of the visible city—the Tehran most people saw, most of the time.
From the October 1906 issue: New York after Paris
That visible city was more modern, more vibrant than I had expected. Parks and flower gardens, legacies of Persian landscaping genius, were scattered across the city—especially in the north. Unlike in New York, where I would never have entered Central Park after dark, Tehran's parks were well populated late into the night: families picnicking, children playing, couples strolling in the warm summer air. The streets were clean, well lit, and—traffic aside—surprisingly orderly. Tehran pulsed with activity.
At first, it was easy to believe that this was the whole of the city's life. I soon learned otherwise.
In the summer of 1999, during my second return visit to Tehran, I had my first encounter with what I now think of as the invisible city: a hidden infrastructure of control, secret spaces layered beneath the visible ones like the traces of ink on a palimpsest.
That July, students protested the closure of a reformist newspaper—one of a few outlets that dared to openly criticize the hard-line clerical establishment. Students from Tehran University poured into the streets, demanding greater openness and accountability. This was the first serious political challenge to the regime since the revolution, and the response was swift and brutal. Riot police, plainclothes agents, and members of the Basij, a paramilitary militia, stormed the dormitories. Protesters were beaten, arrested, disappeared. The head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reportedly threatened to depose the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. The city vibrated with anxiety.
One afternoon, I was standing with a recent acquaintance at a major downtown square, sipping fresh pomegranate juice, watching events unfold. Around us, people milled about—nervous, curious, suspended between ordinary life and political rupture. A minibus pulled up nearby, already half filled with arrested demonstrators. I made the mistake of looking too long. Within moments, I was yanked by the arm, shoved inside, blindfolded, and driven off.
That night, those of us who had been in that minibus were held in a military compound—unmarked, unnamed—somewhere in the capital. My acquaintance who had witnessed the abduction, it turned out, worked for a marginalized reformist faction within the Ministry of Intelligence. Even with his connections, it took him several days and the intervention of senior military officers to locate us. We were eventually released into the custody of his superiors, who brought us to his office, on the third floor of a building I had passed dozens of times. It had always appeared to be a quiet academic institute. I now learned that this was a front: an office run by the Ministry of Intelligence, disguised as a historical-research center.
That was my first initiation into the invisible city—the Tehran that doesn't show up on maps or official registries. It runs parallel to the ordinary one, yet wholly apart: embedded in unmarked buildings, accessed through back doors and side alleys, staffed by men with fake names, unsmiling and polite. It was the regime's city, hidden in plain sight.
Every city has its secrets. But in Tehran, the secrets are not incidental—they are structural. After that first arrest, and in the years that followed, I began to understand just how extensive the invisible city really was.
Some parts of it were what you might call 'visibly invisible': Everyone in Tehran knows about Evin Prison, perched on the edge of the Alborz foothills, its name spoken with dread and resignation. But almost no one knows what happens inside.
I spent long months there as a political prisoner, detained for my work on democracy and civil society. I was held in solitary confinement—23 hours a day in a small white cell, alone but for my jailer and my interrogator. Once a week, I was permitted a family visit. My wife, Bahar, and our 2-year-old daughter, Hasti, would meet me in a room arranged like a reception lounge—carpeted, with sofas, a potted plant or two, and cameras discreetly embedded in the walls. A performance of normalcy, under surveillance. Evin was the regime's theater of control, which it carefully lit and dimmed.
Only after my release in 2010 did the full topology of the invisible city begin to reveal itself to me—slowly, then all at once. Like Alice through the looking glass, I was ushered ever deeper into its passageways. I was no longer in Evin, but I was never quite free; I remained under watch, summoned to meetings, moved from place to place. The architecture of control was mundane on the surface. I would be told, with feigned casualness, 'Come on, pack up, let's go,' and soon find myself in an unmarked car, or on the back of a battered motorbike, taken to what they called a 'safe house'—not safe for me, of course, but shielded from view.
These places were embedded in perfectly ordinary buildings: apartment complexes, office towers, mid-range hotels. Their doors bore no signs, or else misleading ones: for a travel agency, a translation bureau, a small think tank. Once, I was flown to another city, checked into a standard business hotel, and led to a room that had been converted into a studio—lights, cameras, a backdrop—where political detainees were brought to record 'confessions.' Another time, I was taken to a back alley in northern Tehran, up a narrow flight of stairs, and into an unremarkable flat where an intelligence officer waited behind a desk, ready to resume our conversations.
The invisible city extended underground, metaphorically if not always literally. After the discovery of Hamas's extensive network of reinforced tunnels beneath Gaza—more than 350 miles long, nearly half the length of the New York City subway system, and built with extensive support from Iran—I couldn't help but imagine Tehran with its own network. Not of tunnels perhaps, but of whispered channels: mosques that doubled as surveillance nodes, schools and ministries laced with informants, entire office blocks that served the security state. A hidden circulatory system beneath the city's surface.
Not everything in the invisible city was overtly sinister. Some moments blurred the line between menace and civility. Once, one of my interrogators, a man with an incongruously gentle demeanor, stopped to buy a cold drink on the way to a meeting. At a small café, he chose a table out of view of the surveillance camera. 'Pull your cap down,' he murmured. A gesture of protocol? Paranoia? Or some strange performance of care? I still don't know.
The invisible city was not merely a place. It was a psychological condition, a way of moving through space in uncertainty and coded awareness. It was an alternate world with its own logic, rules, and rituals, always one breath beneath the surface of the city of ordinary life.
In January 2016, a few days after Iran and the United States signed the nuclear deal that would become known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, I stood in Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport, passport in hand, waiting to board my flight. It felt like the end of something: almost six years of surveillance, arrest, confinement, and conditional release. I was finally leaving.
My phone rang.
'Look to your left.'
There he was: one of the more polite and composed of the intelligence officers who had overseen my case. He had always struck me as thoughtful, almost sympathetic. I never learned his real name. That day, in plain clothes, he was unmistakable, his neat, collarless teal shirt peeking above his dark wool coat. He nodded and gestured for me to follow.
We walked back past the passport-control barrier, through a narrow side corridor, into a long, low-lit room where uniformed airport police sat at terminals. As we passed, one officer half-rose to stop us—then hesitated, recognizing my escort. He sat back down.
We returned to the terminal's public spaces, on the other side of the security barriers, which passengers aren't normally allowed to cross back through. There, another man waited on a bench: the most senior security officer I had encountered during my months under semi-carceral control. He told me he had come to personally supervise my departure. 'I hope,' he said evenly, 'you won't betray your country again.'
Then he smiled.
And just like that, I was back in the visible city, rolling down the runway, lifting off, seeing Tehran with my own eyes for what was likely the last time.
In some sense, the past 30 years of Iran's history—its repressions and rebellions, its suffocations and flickers of hope—can be understood as the continuous conflict between these two realms: the visible one of ordinary life, and the invisible one of revolutionary power.
One Tehran is filled with apartments and parks, evening picnics and bus rides, laughter and prayer and disappointment—the 'city of man,' in Augustine's sense, full of contradictions and grace. The other is cloaked in surveillance and menace, shaped by ideological certainty and fear, a city not of citizens but of instruments, organized for the will of their God.
When the brave young women of the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement rose up in 2022, joined by young men willing to risk everything to stand beside them, they were demanding to live fully in a visible city: a city where women and girls could be present, not hidden, and where public space belonged to the living, not to the ghosts of revolution. The regime's response was immediate and categorical. It reasserted the dominance of its invisible, omnipresent apparatus with snipers, beatings, disappearances, and night raids.
The invisible city, by definition, was designed to remain unseen. But over the past few weeks, the Israeli air strikes in and around Tehran have made it impossible to ignore. Whatever one thinks of their legality or strategy, the strikes illuminated something long denied: a lattice of military, intelligence, and weapons infrastructure embedded in the civilian fabric of the city and the country. The bombs were flares briefly lighting up the hidden architecture of power.
In those flashes one could glimpse a parallel Tehran: IRGC commanders asleep in residential apartments; nuclear engineers moving discreetly across the city; weapons depots nested inside nondescript office blocks. Many of these men, knowing they might be hunted, rarely slept in the same apartment twice. They were shuttled from building to building, neighborhood to neighborhood, passing silently among unsuspecting neighbors, shadows in borrowed homes.
For a few seconds, the invisible city was visible: not metaphorically, but with terrible literalness. Then the fireballs receded and the shadows reabsorbed the light. The palimpsest was back.