I confess to an offense I committed some three decades ago. (This is was after 1974 just after I took over TNR.) I suppose it was a passive offense. But, in all truth, just before Christmas--just before two or three Christmases, actually--the Iranian ambassador to Washington sent me a big tin of caviar. A big tin of beluga caviar, as it happens. And I took it home to Cambridge, and we ate it with friends. What did I make of this gift? Actually a modest gift, when you remember that many Washington personages were invited and went, all expenses paid, to the lavish 2,500 anniversary fest of the Persian empire in Isfahan. I ponder now, knowing that the statute of limitations must be over, whether this "gratuity" was illegal. I had never met the ambassador, and I don't recall ever having met any of his staff. Not a one. No one ever asked me to do anything ever. Still, there must have been some intent behind the beluga. Be friendly to the shah, I suppose. Which, frankly, I was, uncoached. I happened to grasp how monstrous the Iranian clerics, in Iran and in exile, actually were. My reflexive liberal friends thought that the Ayatollah was a democrat, and what was coming was a democratic revolution. Oh, were they wrong. I still have stuck in my mind an idiotic op-ed piece in The New York Times (I think) by Princeton professor Richard Falk ushering in the new millennium. Of course, I didn't see how much headway the revolution of the pious had made. We ran a headline over the top of the cover page announcing an article about "The Shah's Well-Run Kingdom." Well, it wasn't well-run. The tides turned, and the Iranians got what they have now. Poor suckers. If he sent me a big tin or two or three, I suppose that Ambassador What's-His-Name sent them to many others. Jimmy Carter, who had actually fawned over the Shah with the benefit of more official intelligence than I had, was completely thrown by Pahlavi's successors, and he presided over the most humiliating diplomatic disaster since the Barbary Coast pirates. In any case, the beluga didn't help. But, as I read in this morning's Times in an article by Felicity Barringer, the distribution of beluga (and its slightly less luxus companion) made illegal a year ago by the United Nations agency administering the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species is now legal. Go out and buy it if you can afford it. Poof! No shortage, no danger. But there is a shortage and there is a danger. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was on the right side of this one.