THE pictures on the office wall were all of autumn landscapes, the dry leaves matched by the thin, reedy tones of the ageing former revolutionary behind the desk.

“I’m not in a position to advise the youth on reform,” he said yesterday when asked what wisdom he had for Iran’s young electorate before presidential elections next Friday. “They should go and find out for themselves.”

Few would recognise Abbas Abdi, 49, as the leader of the students who stormed the American Embassy in Tehran in October 1979. High on the hope of a new Iran after the Shah’s deposition, the students from the capital’s Amir Kabir university caused an international crisis by holding US staff at the embassy hostage for 444 days.

But most revolutions destroy their own vanguard, and Iran’s was little different. Mr Abdi was released from jail a month ago. It was his second term in the capital’s Evin prison, where he served 2½ years, much of it in solitary confinement.

His freedom is at the whim of the regime, so his caution comes as little surprise. “I’m free only so long as they don’t send me back,” Mr Abdi said.

The former hostage taker was incarcerated for an ironic crime. As a latter-day architect of reform and critic of the regime, his polling company published results suggesting that 74 per cent of Tehranis favoured dialogue with the US.

He failed to defend himself, allegedly under duress, when he was tried for espionage in 2002. “I did not defend myself and I cannot tell you the reason now,” he said. “But polling wasn’t the reason I was sent to prison. It was just an appearance.”

Mohsen Mirdamadi, 50, was one of Mr Abdi’s comrades in the embassy seizure, an ad hoc operation designed to prevent a US-backed counter-revolution. He went on to serve as a Revolutionary Guard for two years during the war with Iraq.

“We thought we had established a democratic system with freedom of speech,” he said. “No one felt that we would move towards a new dictatorship. But now our freedom is sacrificed. Many of those students are still my closest friends and think like me. The hardliners of today weren’t even at the forefront as we were.”

So what have the revolution’s expectations translated into, 26 years on? A country with the second-largest natural gas reserves outside Russia and 7 per cent of the world’s oil, Iran suffers chronic unemployment, economic malaise and corruption. While the Iranian regime’s dictatorship is in no way comparable with that of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, civil liberties and human rights suffer at the whim of the leadership’s small, entrenched cartel.

Private political debate among the citizenry may be freer and more sophisticated than under the Shah, but the regime does not hesitate to close critical newspapers, imprisons outspoken journalists and breaks up peaceful demonstrations by force.

The situation is typified by Akbar Ganji, another former Revolutionary Guard turned reformist journalist, who was jailed in 2000 after naming dissidents allegedly murdered during the presidency of Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the present favourite election candidate. Mr Ganji was temporarily released from jail last week but has disappeared.

Karim Sadjadpour, representative for the International Crisis Group in Tehran, said of the regime: “Ideologically it is bankrupt. People don’t believe the leadership and they don’t feel they live in a country where there is a representative democracy . . . They have no allegiance with the revolution. The gulf will only increase with the coming years.”

Former revolutionaries and foreign diplomats agree that the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which cost Iran 500,000 lives, allowed the revolution to be hijacked and diverted, handing the regime the chance to dispose of dissidents and critics behind the call for national unity.

Mr Mirdamadi said: “Everything became overshadowed by the war. Everything was affected by it. Then, only one year after it ended, Khomeini died. His influence could have brought groups together but his death left us a vacuum of such a personality.”

The political aftermath has caused such disillusion that a large proportion of the electorate seems certain to boycott next week’s vote.

There are eight candidates, chosen by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the unelected Supreme Leader, and his 12-strong Council of Guardians. Of the eight, four of them are hardliners. Only one is a reformist. The winner will draw a Cabinet from a parliament already refined by the Council of Guardians.

Reform is unlikely to have any significant leeway in Iran just yet. Foreign observers and Iranians suggest that the combination of disillusionment, fear, war-weariness and a lack of viable political alternative has eroded the chance of a new revolution. Meanwhile, veterans do not even enjoy their revolution nostalgia.

One said: “My friends and I sit around at night talking about the violent protests of 1979.

“We say, ‘Hey, you remember when you started fighting with the police or did such and such in this street or that? Yeah, you idiot, look where it got us’.”

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