Boy From Foggy Bottom

“Boy From Foggy Bottom” by L. E. Indianer

Seeking adventure over their summer vacation, Florida teenagers Jonathan Roth and his friend Adam travel to Iran in 1979, to visit Adam’s grandparents. As they tour historic sites in Shiraz and Persepolis, they learn that the Ayatollah is trying to erase decades of modernization that occurred under the Shah.
In Shiraz, at the beautiful palace and Garden of Paradise, they encounter the mysterious Rafi, an Iranian who spoke English, and seemed to be watching them. When the two young men explore the ruins of Persepolis, they meet two charming girls, including the lovely Polly, whose fathers work at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Invited to tour the embassy by Polly, they pass Iranian student protesters shouting anti-US and anti-Israeli slogans. Once inside the embassy, they are suddenly ordered to leave by Polly’s father, who senses impending danger from the angry mob. Making their escape through a back door, Jonathan is forced to use his Tai Kwon Do skills in a fight with two Iranian assailants. Once again, the mysterious Rafi appears and drives the boys and Polly to a secret clinic where Adam is treated for injuries suffered in the fight.
Jonathan finds that his fight with the two Iranians, also captured on TV, forces him to go into hiding.
Rafi reveals his CIA identity, and on assignment to Iran. He helps Jon escape by crossing the snowy, rugged mountains into Turkey, killing several members of the secret police in the process.
Jon returns to Florida where he finishes high school at age16. Polly and her mother move back to their home to Washington, DC She does not realize that it will be 450 days before she will see her father again, being one of 52 hostages taken prisoner, in what became known as the Iran Hostage Crisis.
When Jonathan becomes a student at Georgetown University, he renews his relationship with Polly. The two marry after her father is released from Iran. Jonathan’s ambition to go into business comes soon while in college. Ted Silber, a former Holocaust survivor, and the owner of two units in the Maryland Wholesale Produce Market, becomes his mentor. The business is successful, as Jonathan and Polly, over time, buy the two units, and expand these into 52 units, and blessed with two children.
But Jonathan is unable to forget his Iranian experience with Rafi, who became a good friend. He questions Rafi about the possibility of becoming a CIA covert agent as well as a businessman. Rafi informs him that this is indeed possible and agrees to mentor him into the agency. Over the years, Jon and Rafi work together on several dangerous missions. Ted informs Jon about his experience in a Nazi concentration camp, and the beatings he and others received from a sadistic guard, Gerhold Habich. Jon and Rafi eventually search in Germany, and the United States, for this Nazi monster.
Years later, Jon couldn’t imagine a more ideal life than working with Poly to build a family business and being able to give back to his country as a covert agent. Near the end of their careers, Jon said to Rafi, “Even though you and the agency took only one percent of my time, it gave me that extra challenge I needed…mentally and physically.”