By Kira Cluff
James Chapman remembers three Iranian roommates who took to Provo as if it were a slice of home.
His roommates left their home country on the recommendation of BYU professors who had tucked themselves into the hills of Iran''s capital city on a three-year assignment for progress.
Max Berryessa, an emeritus professor of education who served in Tehran, can still smell the gunpowder, see the wreckage of mob violence and feel the thrill of the cross-cultural understanding he discovered during his stay across the street from the office of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq.
Although 50 years have passed since these men visited Iran as part of a U.S. government program, Iranian students'' cries for democracy in the streets of Tehran continue to spark memories for a small group of BYU alumni and emeritus faculty.
American-Iranian relations have crumbled to a state of tense hostility since the 1950s.
In President Bush''s 2002 State of the Union address, the president referred to Iran as a member of an 'axis of evil,' saying, 'Iran aggressively pursues these weapons (of mass destruction) and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people''s hope for freedom.'
Perhaps ironically, it was an American president who helped nudge Iran into the 20th century.
'I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life,' said former President Harry Truman in the fourth point of his 1949 inaugural address. 'Only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people.'
Iran was one of the first countries to join the international experimental Point Four program to advance Third World countries.
Stanley Andrews, director of the Point Four program in 1952 and 1953, said Truman was riding the coattails of a Roosevelt initiative to import raw materials from underdeveloped nations.
America''s raw materials were stretched to the breaking point when Japanese forces overran the Pacific and Germans flooded Europe during World War II. Roosevelt turned to Latin America for help.
'It was not very long until he discovered sick people couldn''t do very much mining of tin and all that sort of thing,' Andrews said in an oral history interview given on Oct. 31, 1970. 'Uneducated people were even worse to deal with.'
Eight years and almost $10 million later, Truman had the framework of a humanitarian aid program he hoped would halt the spread of communism.
'When he made the speech, the State Department was caught flat-footed,' Andrews said. 'They didn''t have the faintest idea in terms of a program or anything else.'
The U.S. foreign aid project that leaped from the text of Truman''s speech and squeaked through Congress promised to provide technological skills and equipment to poor nations and encourage international investments to further stimulate these smaller economies.
To do so, the State Department exported university professors to countries where they could coach native professionals and educators.
Truman''s Point Four program would eventually educate students from 29 countries about health, sanitation, agriculture, education and irrigation.
The first countries to benefit from the program were those that could tap valuable raw materials - products like crude oil that could hit the world market as immediately salable merchandise.
While Roosevelt was working with Latin America to procure raw materials for the United States, BYU President Franklin Harris took a leave from his position to serve the Shah of Iran as an agricultural technical adviser.
In 1950, the U.S. State Department asked Harris to return to Iran to direct the first official Point Four program. Harris, then president of Utah State University, retired, flew to Tehran and spent two years setting up the program before Foreign Service employees took over.
Harris made arrangements with BYU, the University of Utah and Utah State University to send technicians to Iran. From 1951 to 1964, the Utah contract technicians worked with Foreign Service employees throughout Iran.
Utah State worked with Karadj Agricultural College. BYU signed a contract with the Teachers College at the University of Tehran.
The teams of technicians taught hundreds of Iranians in Tehran and the surrounding areas and arranged for Iranian students to travel to Utah to study. Over a period of 13 years, four teams from BYU left to serve in Tehran.
Max Berryessa started teaching at BYU''s College of Education in 1948. When BYU''s Harris contracted with the federal government to participate in Iran''s Point Four program, Berryessa was one of five BYU professors to arrive in Tehran in the fall of 1951.
Berryessa remembers a newly impoverished country.
'The problem was Britain had already milked Iran of the proceeds of their oil industry,' Berryessa said. 'The Iranian government was well aware of it. They were receiving much of their financial assistance from the oil. They could see that England was getting a major share.'
In the last months of 1949, Iran finally had had enough and expelled the British interest from their rigs.
Utah''s Point Four teams entered the country during the economic difficulties that followed the collapse of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
Faith in Western intervention was at an all-time low, and members of the team were always aware of the bitter undercurrents that occasionally spilled into life at the Point Four compound.
Berryessa said he saw several crudely painted signs reading, 'Dirty Yankees - Go Home!' during his three-year stay.
Thieves broke into three of the five team members'' houses, taking freshly pressed suits, Persian carpets, glassware and, on one particular night, a pair of eyeglasses.
However, the faculty and students who came from Utah to the Iranian desert were determined to exert their best efforts to help, Barryessa said.
'The program helped them in a critical time that was a foundation that''s carried them over to better times,' said Erlend Peterson, BYU''s associate international vice president.
Peterson''s father, Dean Peterson, was President Harris'' administrative assistant when Erlend and his two sisters were young.
While Peterson''s father served in Tehran, he watched the desert blossom.
Agricultural professors helped the Iranians plant a new crop of wheat bred to grow in desert climes that upped the previous eight-kernel-per-head ratio to 32.
Other agriculture professors helped the Iranian people breed larger and healthier poultry and cattle. Sanitation professors helped build sewage systems that brought fresh water into the villages instead of the gutter water the citizens used to drink and bathe.
During the University of Utah''s two-year contract with the director of Point Four Health, professionals stepped up health practices and promoted sanitary restrictions.
Dean Peterson personally constructed programs to boost education and help the Iranian people establish new schools.
During their stay, the Point Four teams upgraded and reinforced existing primary and secondary education programs and started a National Teachers College known as Daneshsaraye Ali.
'The people he (Dean Peterson) dealt with were very open, eager people that wanted to learn,' Erlend Peterson said. 'We thought it was an excellent program that would help people help themselves. It wasn''t a giveaway program.'
At 8 a.m. on Aug. 22, 1953, the American embassy called the Point Four compound in Tehran where the Utah teams had established offices and ordered all of the employees to evacuate to the hills. An angry mob was heading in their direction.
Iran''s Shah planned to depose Prime Minister Mossadeq in a coup d''etat led by General Fazlollah Zahedi.
The approaching mob was headed for Mossadeq''s home and headquarters, a compound neighboring the Point Four offices.
Berryessa said he and the rest of the team packed themselves and their families into vehicles parked at the back of the compound and headed for the hills of Tehran.
After three days without news, Dean Peterson and Berryessa decided to return to the city.
When the two arrived in town, noisy street celebrations and ebullient civilians warmly welcomed them. Berryessa remembered it as a surprising reversal from the previous anti-Western undercurrents.
'We learned later that the scuttlebutt around said the American CIA had somehow overcome the Communist Party,' Berryessa said. 'We went back to our office and found there was nothing left. Not the carpets, the desks, the files, the records - nothing.'
The remnants of vehicles littered the courtyard of the Point Four compound - charred black skeletons without wheels, doors or upholstery.
When Berryessa finally reached his office, he found a gutted space empty of everything he''d accumulated over the previous two and a half years.
Berryessa''s second floor office overlooked the prime minister''s home and provided an ideal crow''s-nest for snipers. When Berryessa walked into the bathroom of his office, he found mounds of shell casings and walls pocked with bullet holes.
The only thing from the Point Four compound to survive the attack was a battered safe where the office accounts were kept.
After the revolt, American dependants were sent out of the country. Peterson and Berryessa were separated from their families for a little more than six months while they finished their work in Tehran.
While those scenes of violence and devastation remain burned into Berryessa''s memories of his time in Tehran, the team members never lost sight of their determination to help the Iranian people.
The Point Four program outlived the coup and was so successful it later became part of the Agency For International Development.
In the proceeding years, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would expand the branch in Tehran, established by the first team in 1959 for visiting members, to an official mission with an office downtown. Dean Farnsworth, the first president of the Iran Tehran Mission, returned to Tehran in 1975, years after he entered the city to teach English and library science with the Point Four program.
'There weren''t very many converts in Iran,' Farnsworth said. 'Most of the families they taught were from an accumulation of referrals from visitors centers around the world. It was mostly an opportunity to teach English.'
Total membership in Iran reached almost 200 members. The branches mostly represented families of civilians and military personnel associated with the U.S. government. Ward members adjusted their worship to coincide with that of Muslims in the area, attending church on Friday and moving Fast Sunday to the first Friday of the Iranian month, making it about 10 days earlier than Fast Sundays in the United States.
The branch remained in operation for more than 20 years until the Shah was deposed for the returning Ayatollah in 1979.
Because the American professors were so well received in Tehran, some Iranian college students traveled to Utah during that 30-year period to study at the universities of the professors who they came to respect and admire.
For the Iranian students, the topography, climate and compatible agricultural processes of Utah created a haven very much like their homeland.
'The culture at BYU mirrored sufficiently their own culture; it seemed compatible for them,' said Dallas Burnett, former dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communications.
BYU alumnus James E. Chapman, 71, a resident of south Salt Lake City, remembers his three Iranian roommates who had come to the country to study on Point Four scholarships.
'We didn''t communicate on a religious basis,' Chapman said. 'We were too far apart, but they were very considerate.'
Chapman and his Iranian roommates played endless games of Show and Tell, swapping stories of their travel, rotating an endless variety of native dishes and chuckling over cultural differences.
'They loved Utah,' Chapman said. 'They made the comparisons with the lakes and the creeks and the mountains. All three of them just loved the Mormons on campus.'
Chapman eventually finished his degree in sociology and moved on to pursue his graduate studies, but he never forgot the time he spent with his Iranian roommates. The current discord between Tehran and Washington, D.C., has brought the memories back.
'I have been following this every day for quite a while,' Chapman said. 'There''s no reason in the world to attack them on any level. It''s got me all riled up. They''re educated, work in offices, drive cars and have children.
'Wouldn''t it be wonderful if there was a connection between those who were here in the Point Four program and those who are rioting in the streets of Tehran for democracy.'