TEHRAN

The young Revolutionary Guardsman, in his light tan uniform, was all smiles. “I had longed to see a real American,” he said, extending a hand.

We were standing near the shrine to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the man who inspired the Islamic Revolution whose defense is the mission of the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

“And, what do you think?”

“On the surface, great,” Mohammad Piri, 21, said. “But your government has done things that make me pessimistic.”

Thirty years of noncommunication create a lot of mistrust. The mistaken U.S. shooting down in 1988 of an Iran Air Airbus, killing 290 people, is often cited. Conspiracy theories abound. That the radical Sunni Taliban was an American creation designed to discomfort Shiite Iran is a near universal conviction.