A dissident's epic escape from iran to the u.s.

After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the watercourse that marked Iran's border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Batebi, an irani dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunshot from border guards, passed him to a new team of shadowy human smugglers.

At the age of 31, after about eight years in irani prisons, subjected to anguish and twice taken to the gallows tree and fitted with a noose, Batebi had fled.

But in Iraq, his former captors had one more cooling message for him. Not long after his reaching in Erbil in March, the new cellular telephone provided by UN functionary rang. Batebi was shocked to hear the familiar voice of the chief inquisitor at one of Iran's notorious prisons.

"We know where you are," the inquisitor said. "You must turn yourself in."

alternatively, Batebi, one of Iran's best-known dissidents, received permission to enter the United States. He arrived on June 24.

In several lengthy interviews, Batebi provided an unusual window on Iran under its opinion clerics. His disaffection began at age 9, when he witnessed a lifelessly stoning. He rose to fame in 1999, appearance on the cover of The economic expert magazine retention the damn T-shirt of a chap student demonstrator - an image he first saw when a judge slapped it earlier him and declared: "You have signed your own death sentence."

Finally, after a decennary of political combat, he reluctantly decided to wantonness Iran for an uncertain exile.

Batebi's flight has prompted a fit of denouncement in Iran's controlled news media, which have accused him of defrauding creditors and suggested that he had long been in conference with the United States and State of Israel, claims that human rights groups dismiss as crude propaganda.

While some details of Batebi's biography, his treatment in Iran and his escape could not be independently confirmed, he provided a video he took during his journey, and independent advocates vouched for much of his account.

He knows he has arrived during a time of tension between Iran and the United States, and he said he did not want his story to heighten the conflict. Wary of being viewed as a pawn of U.S. Policy, he said that the United States played no role in his departure from Iran, an assertion that U.S. Officials confirmed.

The United States did give him permission to enter the country "out of concern for his safety," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council. He said Batebi attended a courtesy meeting with NSC staff members on Friday.

Despite Batebi's soft-spoken Farsi, translated by Lily Mazahery, an Iranian-American lawyer who is helping him resettle, his contempt for Iran's rulers is palpable. But he does not want a violent revolution.

"No one with a healthy brain wants a revolution without a plan for what comes after," he said. "That's what happened in 1979."

Batebi may have inherited his jaundiced view of his country's leaders. After the Islamic revolution of 1979, his father, a customs bureaucrat who had fallen out of favor with the shah's regime, declined to join the Revolutionary Guards. His mother, a first-grade teacher, taught him and his younger brother and sister a mild, Golden Rule Islam that had little in common with the ayatollahs' harsh theology.

His own awakening began in the fourth grade, when his teacher, fed up with the distortions of an official history textbook, burst out: "Go out and read other things to try to get the truth."

"The teacher probably doesn't even remember," Batebi said. "But he changed the course of my life."

A few weeks later came the stoning. Though forbidden by his mother, he slipped out of the house to see the commotion near his school. He saw a man, accused of adultery, buried to the waist, his head covered with a sack that turned red as Revolutionary Guards hurled chunks of concrete.

A mullah standing atop a wall gave the orders, and an ambivalent crowd of neighbors looked on.

"I was utterly shocked," he recalled. "My hands and legs were shaking." Afterward, he suffered from nightmares.

Years later, he would witness public hangings and dismemberments. "But nothing had the impact of that stoning," he said. "I thought, This can't be Islam."

At the University of Tehran in the mid-1990s, Batebi embraced his photojournalism studies and made two dozen short films with existentialist themes. He also joined in student protests, getting arrested three times. In fervent late-night discussions, he recalled, one admired model was the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

The demonstrations exploded in 1999 in what would become known as 18 Tir, as July 8 is known by the Iranian calendar. In a wave of protests that threatened the 20-year-old regime, hundreds of students demonstrated against the closing of a newspaper, Salam. Batebi, busy making his senior thesis film about drug addiction, stumbled upon the demonstrators and joined in.