ABSTRACT
Hosein had promised me the crossing would be quick. He'd done it hundreds of times, he said, dozens with Iranians in my hiding spot. If people-smuggling went without a hitch from east to west, certainly going in the other direction should be no worse. And during winter the Iranian-Turkish frontier was frigid. Border guards and customs agents wouldn't want to inspect a truck for long. My Turkish friend Celal, an expert in Iranian-Turkish import-export, had assured me that on the border the Turks would be more difficult than the Persians. They searched for drugs and Kurds, while the Iranians sniffed only for ordinary contraband. And the drug trade went from Iran to Turkey, never in reverse. Kurdish separatists naturally could go both ways, but that was really a problem across frontiers farther south, where Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran form what many people—not only cartographers—call Kurdistan.
