A Forced Landing in Iran… What Could Go Wrong?

I’m gonna send your mind rooting through the Way Back Machine of your memory: The 1980s. Tom Wolfe. The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

If you read that novel or saw the movie, you might recall that it begins with a wrong turn onto a wrong street that sends the protagonist and his mistress into a less-than-safe neighborhood…a chance mistake that leads to a series of events that brings about all manner of problems. 

Which is what I’m getting at here—the notion that randomness invades our life more often than we realize, and that while most of that randomness is noise that means nothing, on some occasions it means everything. 

Maybe you saw this story last week: A FlyDubai jet traveling from Tashkent, Uzbekistan to Dubai had an onboard health crisis—the captain became ill—that necessitated an emergency landing in Shiraz, Iran. No big deal really. 

Except for one fact… 

On board was a 19-year-old woman…who also happened to be in the Israeli army. An army that presents an existential threat to Iran. Two countries who despise one another more than pretty much any other pair of countries I can think of. 

Imagine you’re that young soldier and you hear the crew announce that the plane must make an emergency landing in Iran. You know her brain was frantically playing out “what if” scenarios. Would she be taken captive and used as bait/leverage in the political theater that is the Iran/Israel psycho-drama? 

Ultimately, nothing happened…because she had a handy tool with her (more on that in a moment). But a commentator on Twitter noted that he’d been on a plane several years back that also needed to make an emergency landing in Iran. Security forces swept through the plane, checking every passenger’s passport. 

No big deal…until a soldier reached him, saw the passport, and immediately yelled out “Amrikoti!” 

American! 

Everyone around him stared. 

In that same situation, I’d likely have started sweating and nervously ruined my Levi’s. 

He was held back and processed last after an hour or so of waiting—an hour, I have to think, that passed as though it were a decade. 

Both these anecdotes touch on a theme I have been pushing hot and heavy over the last many weeks: the benefits of second citizenship and a second passport. 

I know the stories I’ve shared have at times seemed disconnected from what most Americans experience when traveling. I told the story of my Ukrainian/Russian wife becoming a pariah overnight in parts of Europe because of the war and her having a Russian passport for reasons beyond her control. Or the story of Vladimir Putin’s (rumored) goddaughter fleeing Russia by sneaking across the Belarus/Lithuania border on an Israeli passport. And now this Israeli soldier accidentally finding herself in the territory of her country’s mortal enemy. 

Thing is, such events happen all time. Randomness, while random, is not rare. Randomness is common. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve landed in countries where “red, white, and blue” stoke much hatred and loathing among many people: Pakistan, Russia, Tunisia, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, among others. 

I enjoyed each of those countries. Some I loved (I’m looking at you, Lebanon). But I’d be putting on a front if I told you I wasn’t slightly worried as the landing approached. In the back of mind, I wondered: “What if?” 

Americans have been kidnapped. Some have been killed. And simply because they were traveling on a U.S. passport. 

Sure, you can avoid those risks by avoiding risky countries. 

Yet what defines a risky country today? What’s to stop an extremist from hijacking a tour bus in London and singling out certain nationalities to make a political or religious point? 

Or Paris? 

Or Jakarta? 

Or wherever? 

Randomness. 

Wrong place, wrong time. 

Not your fault. 

Nevertheless, here you are in a situation where your little blue passport stamped with “United States of America” on the cover is a huge liability. 

The ability to pull out a non-U.S. passport from a new place like Ireland, Portugal, Uruguay, and others could very well be a lifesaver.  

Indeed, that Israeli soldier, who is a native of Uzbekistan and who also carried a Russian passport, spoke only in Russian to the Iranians and used her Russian passport, not her Israeli passport, to escape detection. 

I don’t mean to scare you with this dispatch and warn you away from travel. Seeing the world and experiencing new cultures and geographies and food is one of life’s premier joys. 

I simply want to acknowledge that randomness happens, and that one day you’re visiting Uzbekistan on vacation, and the next day your plane is diverted to a country that would just as soon see you dead. 

So, while an American passport offers some of the greatest travel freedoms in the world, a second passport, to me, is the purest form of lifestyle freedom that exists. 

While we can’t avoid life’s random events, we can be prepared when they strike. You just never know when a wrong turn might change the trajectory of your life.