The View from Here

In 1982, the first American journalist admitted to Iran after the hostage crisis interviewed a prickly Ali Khamenei—before he became an ayatollah. His death in a U.S.-Israeli airstrike brought the encounter rushing back

By Elaine Sciolino

When I met Ali Khamenei, he was not yet an ayatollah and by no means destined to be Iran’s supreme leader. It was February 1982. He was the country’s newly elected president, and I was a foreign correspondent for Newsweek—the first American journalist, and the first female one, to interview him. We sat across from each other in a dim room in downtown Tehran. He refused to look me in the eye.

I had previously interviewed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in exile in a Paris suburb in 1978, before he led the revolution and became supreme leader. The two men could not have been more different. Khomeini gave hundreds of interviews to the media about overthrowing the U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; Khamenei seemed uncomfortable being questioned at all.