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.
伊朗和以色列之间的为期12天的战争可能并没有改变伊斯兰共和国的不透明统治，但确实使一些新事物在德黑兰看到了。但是，短暂的是，一个城市中的一个城市长期以来一直通过隐藏和奇观的层次统治。
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.
我仍然记得在伦敦和纽约度过了二十年之后，1998年返回德黑兰。当飞机下降时，我将额头压到窗户上，看到我出生的城市散布在我身下，巨大而陌生。自从我上次看到它以来，它不仅乘以大小，而且在身份方面倍增。德黑兰不再只是伊朗的首都。现在，这是伊斯兰共和国的跳动之心，这是世界上第一个完全实现的神权政治，这是一场革命的产物，它产生了更多的自由或物质繁荣，而是更少。
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.
在1990年代后期的几个月中，我出于工作和个人原因返回。当我徘徊在这座城市时，我感到奇怪和谨慎的归属感。我搬进了北部一个安静的中上层阶级社区 - 富裕，有序，生活。我的邻居是专业人士：工程师，医生，艺术家，中层官僚。大多数是世俗的，或私下观察到的宗教。他们讨厌该政权的虔诚。在他们的家中，他们喝酒，举办了混合性别聚会（在伊斯兰共和国是非法的），并听取了被禁止的音乐。私人空间是庇护所，是安静的阻力区域。但是对于伊朗人来说，他们是明显城市的一部分 - 德黑兰大多数人都看到了。
From the October 1906 issue: New York after Paris
从1906年10月的发行中：巴黎之后的纽约
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.
那个可见的城市比我预期的更现代，更充满活力。公园和花园，波斯美化天才的遗产，散布在整个城市，尤其是在北部。与纽约不同的是，在天黑后我永远不会进入中央公园，德黑兰的公园已经深夜了：家人在野餐，孩子们玩耍，夫妻俩在温暖的夏季空中漫步。街道很干净，光线充足，并且（旁边）井井有条。德黑兰用活性脉动。
At first, it was easy to believe that this was the whole of the city’s life. I soon learned otherwise.
起初，很容易相信这是整个城市的生活。我很快就学会了。
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.
在1999年夏天，在我对德黑兰的第二次返回访问中，我第一次遇到了我现在认为是无形的城市：一个隐藏的控制基础设施，秘密的空间层面是在可见的墨水痕迹之下的秘密空间。
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.
那7月，学生抗议关闭一家改良主义者的报纸，这是一些敢于公开批评硬线文书机构的商店之一。来自德黑兰大学的学生涌入街头，要求更大的开放和问责制。这是自革命以来政权的第一个严重政治挑战，反应迅速而残酷。防暴警察，便衣代理商和准军事民兵Basij的成员袭击了宿舍。抗议者被殴打，被捕，消失了。据报道，伊斯兰革命卫队的负责人威胁要罢免改良主义者总统穆罕默德·哈塔米（Mohammad Khatami）。这个城市充满焦虑。
Students protesting in Tehran in July, 1999 (Kaveh Kazemi / Getty)
1999年7月在德黑兰抗议的学生（Kaveh Kazemi / Getty）
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.
一个下午，我在一个主要的市中心广场上熟人，喝着新鲜的石榴汁，看着活动不断发展。在我们周围，人们围绕普通生活和政治破裂之间陷入困境，好奇。一名小巴在附近拉起，一半已经装满了被捕的示威者。我犯了一个错误，看上去太久了。片刻之内，我被手臂拉动，被推入内部，蒙住眼睛并开车。
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.
那天晚上，那些曾经在那个小巴的人被关押在首都的一个军事大院（未标记，未命名）中。事实证明，我目睹了绑架的婚姻，为情报部的一个边缘化的改革派工作。即使有了他的联系，他也花了几天的时间以及高级军官的干预来定位我们。最终，我们被释放到他的上司，后者将我们带到他的办公室，这是我经过数十次的建筑物的三楼。它似乎一直是一个安静的学术研究所。我现在了解到这是一个阵线：由情报部裁定为历史研究中心的办公室。
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.
那是我第一次进入隐形城市 - 德黑兰没有出现在地图或官方登记处。它与普通的人平行，但完全分开：嵌入未标记的建筑物中，通过后门和侧小巷进入，由有假名的男人组成，毫无疑问和礼貌。这是政权的城市，隐藏在朴素的视线中。
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.
每个城市都有其秘密。但是在德黑兰，秘密并不是偶然的，它们是结构性的。在第一次被捕之后，在随后的几年中，我开始了解这座看不见的城市的真正广泛程度。
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.
其中的某些部分是您所谓的“明显看不见的”：德黑兰的每个人都知道埃文监狱，栖息在Alborz Foothills的边缘，其名称以恐惧和辞职。但是几乎没有人知道里面会发生什么。
Read: Iran has become a prison
阅读：伊朗已成为监狱
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.
我在那里度过了很长时间的政治犯，因我在民主和公民社会方面的工作而被拘留。我被孤独地被关押 - 每天23个小时在一个小的白色牢房里，但对于我的狱卒和审讯者而言。每周一次，我被允许进行家庭访问。我的妻子巴哈尔（Bahar）和我们2岁的女儿哈斯蒂（Hasti）会在一个像接待室一样安排的房间里见到我 - 纸浆，沙发，一两个盆栽植物或两个植物，以及相同的摄影机谨慎地嵌入墙壁。在监视下的正常表现。埃文（Evin）是政权的控制剧院，它精心亮着和昏暗。
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.
只有在我在2010年发行之后，无形城市的全部拓扑才开始向我展示自己 - 左右，然后一次。像爱丽丝（Alice）一样，我被带入了它的通道。我不再在埃文（Evin），但我从来没有完全自由。我一直在监视中，召集会议，到处搬到另一个地方。控制的结构在表面上是平凡的。我会以假装的休闲性告知，“快来，收拾行装，走吧，走吧”，很快发现自己坐在一辆未标记的汽车上，或者在受虐摩托车的后面，被他们称为“安全的房子”，当然对我来说不是安全的，但却避免了视野。
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.
这些地方嵌入了完美的普通建筑中：公寓大楼，办公楼，中距离酒店。他们的门没有任何迹象，或者误导了迹象：对于旅行社，翻译局，一个小型智囊团。有一次，我被飞往另一个城市，被登上标准的商务酒店，并导致了一个房间，该房间已改建为工作室（灯光，相机，背景），在那里，政治被拘留者被带到记录“自白”。另一次，我被带到德黑兰北部的后排小巷，沿着狭窄的楼梯飞行，进入一个不起眼的公寓，一名情报人员在桌子后面等着，准备恢复我们的对话。
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.
无形的城市在地下延伸，隐喻地从字面上看，也不总是从字面上看。在发现哈马斯在加沙以下的广泛加固隧道网络（长达350英里）之后，近一半是纽约市地铁系统的一半，并在伊朗的广泛支持下建造，我忍不住想象着用自己的网络来想象德黑兰。也许不是隧道，而是耳语的频道：作为监视节点，学校和部委与线人在一起的清真寺，整个办公室都为安全状态服务。城市表面下方的隐藏循环系统。
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.
无形城市中的所有事物并不是险恶的。有些时刻模糊了威胁与文明之间的界限。有一次，我的一位审讯者，一个有不协调的举止的男人，在参加会议的路上停下来买了冷饮。在一个小咖啡馆里，他选择了一张桌子，看不见监视摄像头。“拉下你的帽子，”他喃喃道。协议的手势？偏执狂？还是一些奇怪的护理表现？我仍然不知道。
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.
无形的城市不仅是一个地方。这是一种心理状况，是一种以不确定性和编码意识在空间中移动的方式。这是一个拥有自己的逻辑，规则和仪式的替代世界，总是在普通生活之城的表面下方呼吸。
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.
2016年1月，即伊朗和美国签署了被称为联合综合行动计划的核协议几天后，我站在德黑兰的伊玛目霍梅尼国际机场，手持护照，等待登上我的航班。感觉就像是结束的：将近六年的监视，逮捕，禁闭和有条件释放。我终于离开了。
My phone rang.
我的电话响了。
“Look to your left.”
“向左看。”
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.
他在那里：一个更有礼貌的人之一，是由监督我案件的情报官员组成的。他总是让我感到深思熟虑，几乎同情。我从来没有学到他的真名。那天，穿着朴实的衣服，他是明确的，他整洁，无胶的蓝绿色衬衫在他的深色羊毛外套上窥视。他点了点头，示意我跟随。
Read: Iran is not a ‘normal’ country
阅读：伊朗不是一个“正常”国家
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.
我们通过狭窄的侧面走廊走过护照控制的障碍，进入了一个长而低光的房间，身穿制服的机场警察坐在航站楼。当我们过去时，一名军官半劳斯阻止了我们 - 然后犹豫，认识到我的护送。他坐下。
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.”
我们回到了终端的公共场所，在安全壁垒的另一侧，通常不允许乘客越过。在那儿，另一个男人在板凳上等待：我在半官方控制下遇到的最高级安全官员。他告诉我他已经来个人监督我的出发。“我希望，”他均匀地说，“你不会再背叛你的国家。”
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.
就像那样，我回到了可见的城市，滚下跑道，抬起，抬起头，看着我自己的眼睛上一次可能是我的眼睛。
Tehran following an Israeli airstrike, June 15, 2025. (Getty)
德黑兰在2025年6月15日以色列空袭之后。（Getty）
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.
从某种意义上说，在伊朗历史的过去30年中，它的压制和叛乱，其窒息和希望的闪烁 - 可以理解为这两个领域之间的连续冲突：可见的普通生活之一，也是无形的革命力量。
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.
一位德黑兰到处都是公寓和公园，晚间野餐和公共汽车，笑声，祈祷和失望 - 在奥古斯丁的意义上，“人类之城”充满了矛盾和恩典。另一个是在监视和威胁中被掩盖的，它是根据意识形态的确定性和恐惧来塑造的，这不是一个公民而不是公民的城市，而是为他们的上帝的意愿而组织的。
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.
Read: A cease-fire without a conclusion
阅读：没有结论的停火
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.
根据定义，无形的城市旨在保持看不见。但是在过去的几周中，以色列在德黑兰及其周围的空袭使得不可能忽略。无论人们认为他们的合法性或策略如何，罢工都阐明了人们长期以来否认的事物：军事，情报和武器基础设施嵌入了城市和国家的平民结构中。炸弹是耀斑，简要介绍了隐藏的力量建筑。
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.
在那些闪光灯中，人们可以瞥见一个平行的德黑兰：IRGC指挥官在住宅公寓里睡着了；核工程师在整个城市谨慎行动；嵌套在不描述的办公大楼内的武器库。这些人中有许多人知道他们可能会被猎杀，很少在同一公寓里睡两次。他们从建筑物到建筑物，邻里到附近，在毫无戒心的邻居中静静地穿过，借来的房屋中的阴影。
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.
几秒钟以来，看不见的城市被可见了：不隐喻，而是具有可怕的字面意义。然后，火球退出，阴影重吸收了光。最小的人回来了。
