Here's to You, Lady Liberty

Here's to You, Lady Liberty

The Shakori Hills Grassroots Music Festival takes place every other year in the North Carolina town of Pittsboro, and in April 2015 I made plans to go there.  My idea was to spend three weeks touring North Carolina and four neighbouring states, drive the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway that links the Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks, and visit an Irish friend who I’d knocked about with in Leeds thirty years earlier but who had emigrated to live out there. He and his family were regulars at the music festival.

By March of that year, I had everything in place that I would need for the trip, including flights to and from Washington DC, a rental car, accommodation along the way and the electronic visa that all visiting aliens were required to purchase. I’d never really considered myself an alien before but that’s how Barack Obama’s government departments categorised me at the time. Making all the arrangements myself had required a lot of research, and had been very time consuming, but it had also significantly added to the excitement of the build up to the trip.

Slightly more than a fortnight before my departure date I was in my car driving between the homes of work clients, and half-listening to the Adrian Chiles programme on BBC Radio Five Live as I went. My ears pricked up to full-listening mode when he said ‘After the news I’m going to be talking to people who have had problems with their passports whilst entering the U.S.A.’

The news bulletin wasn’t very interesting but as Adrian’s discussion began I listened so intently that I was fifteen minutes late for the appointment with my next customer. The income from my work paid for my trips so I always put the clients first, but on this occasion I had to allow my normally on-the-dot timekeeping to slip slightly, and dear old Elsie understood and forgave when I eventually reached her door and explained all. For a woman who had always gone to Weymouth for her holidays she found my predicament rather exciting.

These problems, apparently, had been experienced by people who had stamps and visas from Middle Eastern countries in their passports. There was no specific rule that stated entry to the United States of America would be declined if the passport holder had a bit of Arabic script on their documents, but it was possible that if an airport immigration officer had a hangover, or an ingrowing toenail, or had had a row with his or her partner, or was just generally in a bad mood, they could identify marks of Middle Eastern officialdom as a security threat and insist that the visiting alien be sent home on the next available flight. Visitors had no right to contest either this or the choice of the return flight which they would have to pay for themselves, which was not necessarily with the airline that had taken them there and which may have been incredibly expensive.  

Around a dozen listeners phoned in to describe unpleasant experiences they’d had with surly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (these days affectionately known as I.C.E.) officers at U.S. airports. On the strength of the words Dubai or Muscat being stamped onto passport pages, important business trips had been known to be cancelled, holidays had been ruined, children anticipating meetings with Mickey and Minnie had been distraught, and credit cards had been unexpectedly hammered to finance emergency get-me-home missions. It was something that only affected a very small minority of travellers but nevertheless, it was a source of considerable anxiety.

My pulse raced as I remembered that in my passport I had a tourist entry visa issued by the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I’d visited the country on a cultural tour four years earlier and enjoyed every minute of it. But on other trips since then, a need for the visa to be scrutinised by all present had already caused delays as I passed through airport immigration checkpoints in Copenhagen, Bangkok and Lima. If Adrian Chiles’ listeners were to be believed, I would have little chance of getting out through the front doors of Dulles International Airport in Washington. I also had a Marrakech stamp but as Morocco had been suffering a chronic shortage of stamp pad ink at the time of my visit, it was barely legible.

For a couple of days I found it hard to concentrate on what I was doing and for a couple of nights I barely slept. I had no idea what to do but I knew that I couldn’t just ignore what I had heard on the radio. My nerves wouldn’t have coped with boarding a plane in England while the possibility existed of being sent straight home again upon landing in America. It would have been a waste of time, money, and precious days set aside for holidays, and it would have had my mind in bits in the days leading up to the departure date.

The problem was only a potential one and what I needed was clarification, so I decided to put an hour aside from my busy work schedule one afternoon and speak to somebody at the U.S. Embassy in London. I found a parking space in a quiet street near Victoria Park in Bath, I bought a takeaway coffee from a little café near the main road and, feeling as mentally prepared as I was ever likely to be, I called the number I had already stored in my phone. After twenty or thirty very long seconds an American woman’s accent answered abruptly. I briefly explained my situation and she said she would transfer my call to the relevant department. The phone then rang for what seemed like an eternity, and I was close to giving up when it was eventually picked up by a woman who introduced herself as Harper, which I assumed was her first name.

I explained my concern again but in greater detail, and Harper responded with, ‘Well the decision to admit you to our country lies ultimately with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at your point of entry.’

I explained that several countries I had visited in the past had asked in their visa application forms all the questions necessary for them to be able to decide if it was safe for them to issue a visa and let me in. Had there ever been a problem I would have known before leaving home, and before wasting time and money, but there never was a problem.

Harper sighed deeply and said ‘Yes, but this is the U.S.A. and we do things different.’

‘I’m a law-abiding citizen living in Britain, I have no desire to stay permanently in your country, and I’m certainly not a member of a terrorist organisation. The fact that I could be considered an undesirable on the grounds of just a previous trip’s stamp in my passport is ridiculous. I’d like to suggest that I travel to London to meet you, you can ask me all the questions you want, and then, if you are satisfied, perhaps you could give me some sort of document to present to your I.C.E. representatives at Washington airport to advise them accordingly. I understand you may charge a fee for this.’ To me this made perfect sense but on reflection I was being naïve in the face of stubborn bureaucracy.

Without taking even a second to consider my suggestion Harper bounced back with, ‘That’s not the way it works. That would be undermining the authority of local agents.’

‘So what do you suggest I do to get round this problem?’ I then asked.

‘Grab yourself a brand-new passport that ain’t got that A-rab writing in it and you’ll be cool to go,’ she replied.

Iranians aren’t A-rabs, or even Arabs. They’re Persians. There’s a big difference but I didn’t mention this as I was trying hard to stay on the good side of her, if she had one. At this point I was still looking forward to going to the Shakori Hills Festival with my mate Dave, even though my enthusiasm was beginning to dwindle.

What I did say was ‘Do you really think if I was a troublemaker or a terrorist I would have gone through all the bother of applying for an Iranian visa and that I would dare to continue to show it to people when travelling? Do you think, as I do, that there’s a weak link in your security arrangements if all a person needs to do to remove suspicion from their name is to apply for a new passport? And why wasn’t I asked about what countries I had visited before I paid for my U.S. electronic visa?’

She answered my questions with a question. ‘You said the word terrorist, not me. And why do you have a visa for I-ran?’

‘I went there for a holiday in 2011.’

‘Oh my god! You can’t be serious!’ She was genuinely and unnecessarily shocked, but that’s what propaganda and brainwashing do to a person.

‘Iran is a modern country with a rich culture, incredible archaeology and very friendly people. It was a wonderful trip.’ I didn’t say anything about the country’s dodgy human rights record, but neither did I mention the fact that the human rights situation in the U.S.A. was far from ideal.

‘Oh you Brits! I love your sense of humour,’ she laughed.

‘I’m not British. I’m Irish,’ I corrected her.

‘British. Irish. It’s all the same’.

Appalled by her rudeness, arrogance and ignorance, I closed with, ‘I’ve had enough. You can stick your crappy country. I’ll go to Russia instead!’ before ending the call. It was the first time in my life that I had hung up on someone to finish a telephone conversation.

I was shaking. I went back to the little café by the main road and bought another coffee which I drank whilst sitting on a park bench in the warm spring sunshine. In my head I went over the conversation I’d had with horrible Harper several times before starting to calm down. Then suddenly something clicked and I felt totally at ease with myself. I was no longer going to America. The complexity of the trip’s logistics was washed away along with the uncertainty over the outcome of the immigration procedure at Washington airport.

I would cancel everything (which I did the next day) and arrange another holiday. The way I was feeling at the time, three weeks in Victoria Park would have done me, but that was a ridiculous notion that would wear off within minutes of me finishing my coffee, and I needed a bit of the culture shock that I had found and cherished on most of my previous trips.

I couldn’t go to Russia because I already knew that the visa application process would have taken weeks and success wasn’t guaranteed. I’d only suggested that I’d go there in the hope that it would leave Harper feeling as annoyed as I was. I had to sort something in a hurry. I had a fortnight to find a replacement holiday. Being the only person within my self-employed business it had taken a lot of effort to re-arrange work so that I could have those three weeks away, and it would have taken the same effort again to cancel the time off.

When in a fix, turn to EasyJet! That had been my traveller’s motto for several years. So late in the evening I put on my sunglasses to combat the bright orange of the airline’s website colour scheme and I had a good old root around.

‘Bulgaria is beautiful! Fly with us to Sofia for the price of a theatre ticket!’ the page suggested, and I promptly booked my flights along with a rented car and low-cost, traditional-style accommodation in three different places that I’d never heard of before. Although I’d organised it myself it was going to be a mystery tour. I knew nothing about the country hidden away in a corner of South East Europe and could imagine it had little more than concrete and cabbage to offer.

I went, and it was beautiful. Three months later I went again, discovered other parts of the country and found it even more beautiful, and friendly and cheap and oozing with history and culture, and good healthy food. Within six months of my first visit I had bought a renovated old farmhouse in a village near to Veliko Tarnovo (the medieval capital) and a further six months after that I had retired, packed up (or given away) all of my belongings in England, and gone to live full-time and permanently in Bulgaria. And I’m still here!

A year after that awful phone conversation I got a new passport simply because the expiry date on the old one was approaching. I’d already been to the United States several times before so I wasn’t too bothered about not going back, and events that have taken place since then have caused what little desire that might have existed for a return trip to completely evaporate.

I would have loved to have known what Harper would have thought if she had ever discovered how my story panned out. I’m sure she wouldn’t know the difference between Bulgaria and Russia. Sometimes I’m tempted to call her again just to thank her. Without her I may never have found this happiness in my new life, though I should add that I’d already been thinking about emigrating to somewhere or other for quite some time before our phone lines crossed.

And as I write this in March 2026, although I can’t condone the ruthless brutality of their government, when I think of all those lovely people I met in Iran fifteen years ago, my heart is broken by the news of the horrific situation that the country currently finds itself in.

Image: My tourist entry visa for the Islamic Republic of Iran. With this in my passport I was permitted to stay in the country for seventeen days in the three months between 22-06-1390 and 21-09-1390 (seventeen days which corresponded with part of October 2015 on my Gregorian calendar). The bold writing to the left of the number 6009716 and down a bit is my name, Terence Mullan, written in Farsi. When I’m a successful author I hope to be able to quickly scribble that as my autograph on book signing tours.