Hey, you're listening to Rough Translation from NPR.

I'm Gregory Warner.

I'm jumping back into your feed today to bring you an episode of Through Line, NPR's

History Podcast, produced right down the hall here, and this is actually their third

episode about Iran, and this one looks at the life of Kassam Suleimani, the Iranian military

leader who was assassinated last month in a drone strike in Baghdad, and whose death continues

to reshape the Middle East.

We wanted to air this episode, well, first because it's full of voices and perspectives

that we rarely hear on Iran, but also because it made me think about an experience I had visiting

Iran as a journalist years ago.

This was before I was on staff at NPR.

I was freelancing in Afghanistan, and so I flew from Kabul, not to the capital to Iran,

but to a smaller city in the east, and then I traveled by land to the capital.

And because of this uncommon route, or maybe because of some oversight by Iranian bureaucrats

I never found out, for the two days it took me to get to the capital, I ended up being

in the country without a government-minder.

And this experience of being an American in Iran, apparently unmonetored, was to discover

how willing people were to show me a side of themselves that they might have had to hide

from a neighbor.

Like I remember this one time, a shopkeeper, I guess he heard my accent, he went into

the back room and returned very happily with two tea cups of moonshine.

The punishment for alcohol consumption in Iran, I looked it up later, it is technically

...