Dedication
For my wife, my brother, and my mom . . . My heroes
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1. Arrest
2. Us / Our Life in Tehran
3. A New Way to Look at Iran
4. How I Met Yegi
5. Writing My Memoir
6. Circumstances Change with the Season
7. Life in Prison with Mirsani and a TV
8. Let’s Face It: I’m a Hostage
9. 2011
10. Waiting to Go on Trial
11. The Trial
12. Waiting Game
13. 2015 Comes and Goes
14. Is This the End?
15. It’s Time to Go
16. Freedom Honeymoon
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Arrest
It was a Tuesday afternoon in Tehran in the middle of Ramadan. My wife, Yeganeh, also a journalist, and I literally had our bags packed to leave for the United States. Her U.S. immigration papers had come through, and we had tickets for a flight that Friday night, with plans to travel to America and be away from work for a couple of months.
I had noticed, walking around town, that contrary to past years, some restaurants were open during daytime hours this Ramadan. I took it as a small sign of pragmatism on the part of the government. In the past fasting had been enforced and restaurants serving during daylight hours were fined or shuttered. Now they weren’t. Progress? Maybe.
So for the last piece I would work on for the Washington Post before leaving Iran for our extended break, I went to interview a guy who had an American-style diner in Tehran. It was the kind of story I loved doing. Food, and eating it, have always been a passion of mine and I had recently found ways to bring gastronomy into my coverage of Iran, but it was the incongruity of the various elements that attracted me. This sort of piece was my specialty.
In the middle of our conversation about serving chili dogs and sliders during Islam’s holiest month, around three o’clock in the afternoon, I got a frantic call from my wife.
“Somebody’s trying to destroy our lives,” she told me. “You need to come home now.”
I rushed home from the east to the west of the vast capital and when I got there, she was crying hysterically. She showed me an email she’d received, written in Farsi, which I couldn’t read.
Pay us 10,000,000 toman by tomorrow at 3:00 p.m., she translated, or we’ll expose you for the whore that you are.
It seemed so strange. It was obviously directed at her—they were making reference to her personally. It was from an email address we didn’t recognize. The amount they claimed they wanted was only about three thousand dollars.
“There are people trying to destroy us,” she said.
It wasn’t the only strange Internet activity we’d seen recently. A few days before, I’d gotten a phishing email that appeared to be from a photographer and dual Iranian and U.S. national I worked with frequently who did a lot of freelance work for the Washington Post and had become something of a semiofficial photographer for President Rouhani, traveling with him and his entourage extensively.
And just the day before, an Iranian source of mine who was very close to Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, had sent me a text saying that he had received an email from a Gmail account that “looked like yours but wasn’t yours, with a link. Be careful.”
These phishing emails had started appearing just before I went to Vienna, where I’d covered the latest round of the nuclear negotiations. I’d written a piece for the Post saying that the talks hadn’t come to a final agreement but were being extended for another six months—everyone knew that neither side wanted the diplomatic process to break down.
I called our friend Reza, who helped us with IT matters. I thought he’d be able to figure out what was going on by checking programs on our computers that I didn’t know about. He came to the apartment, and he looked at the activity of our Gmail accounts. Over the previous few hours, we discovered, both of our accounts had been accessed from a server in Russia, multiple times.
“Look, this could just be people trying to get financial information from you guys,” Reza said. He changed the passwords. I thought everything was fine at that point.
“We should just go to the airport and leave tonight,” Yegi said.
“This is not something that we should be overly concerned about,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen. You can go to Dubai and wait for me if you really want to, but I need to finish this Ramadan story.”
Around eight or eight thirty, we called two cabs, one for ourselves and one for Reza. Because gasoline is cheap in Iran, taxis are also inexpensive and readily available twenty-four hours a day. In every neighborhood, there are several taxi shops, so within a couple minutes, you can usually get a car.
Yegi and I were headed to a surprise party for her mom’s fifty-sixth birthday, a dinner at a cousin’s house. We were dressed casually, me in jeans and a pink shirt, Yegi in a beautiful, short blue dress I had just bought for her, and wearing makeup and jewelry.
The doorman called from downstairs when the taxis arrived. We took the elevator down with Reza four floors into the parking garage in the building’s basement, where cars arrive.
When the elevator door opened, there was a guy standing there with a gun pointed at me.
There was more than one guy, but I just remember the one with the gun. I was focused solely on him. He wore a gray suit and was very nondescript—shorter than me, with a gut, a comb-over, and a mustache. Straight out of central casting. His gun was a little revolver.
“Rezaian?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, startled.
He propped the elevator door open with his foot. I went to grab my cell phone—I don’t know who I thought I was going to call—but he knocked it out of my hand. It was a very frantic scene. He had a piece of paper that was a warrant for our arrests, although it was unclear which of the many competing seats of authority had ordered it. The men didn’t identify themselves. My Farsi was good, but not good enough in that moment to understand completely when he said that we were being arrested.
“Don’t make any noise,” the man with the gun ordered us. “We’re going back to the apartment.”
I had no idea what was happening. I’d never seen anything like this before. It was so jarring. The man with the gun and his cohorts took all three of us back upstairs.
I put the key in the lock and opened our front door, fumbling and shaking the whole time.
Little by little, many more agents arrived. They separated Yegi, Reza, and me, sitting us on opposite sides of our apartment. Most of them wore surgical masks to hide their identities. Several had video cameras and were filming everything.
They ripped our home apart—ransacked our place. They went through everything. They even cut open tea bags. I don’t know what they were looking for. Later, we were told, it was “microchips” they were after.
I didn’t know what this was about, but I thought the only “evidence” that could potentially be used against us was a storage locker we kept full of liquor in our apartment’s garage. We had a good stash: twenty bottles of hard liquor, ten or fifteen bottles of wine, and a hundred fifty bottles of beer. Two bottles or two hundred bottles, I knew it didn’t really make a difference—it was the same crime. We had to lose the key.
“Booze. Flush,” I said to Yegi, using words that, even if the agents spoke English, they probably wouldn’t understand.
Yegi is smarter than I am. She figured it out, and she had the storage key on her key chain. She told the guard that she
needed to use the toilet, and she was able to do it and tell me with her eyes that she had flushed the key.
When they asked us if we had storage, Yegi said, “No, the landlord uses the storage.” This is common in Iran, and they accepted her white lie; also common.
We sighed with relief.
More people showed up, agents filling the seventeen hundred square feet of our two-bedroom apartment—the big living room with a terrace, the kitchen, the bedroom we’d converted into an office because we both worked from home. The agents walked over our hardwood floors covered with antique rugs.
They confiscated all of our electronic equipment and told us to put our cell phones and laptops on the dining room table.
“Give us all the codes for accessing your devices, email, and Facebook.”
I thought, I have absolutely nothing to hide. So we did as we were told.
As more agents showed up, one female guard arrived in the full Islamic covering known as a chador, which means “tent” and is aptly named. She took Yegi into our bedroom and forced her to open our safe. The only things in it were a few thousand dollars and euros in cash, our identification and passports, Yegi’s jewelry, her sealed U.S. immigration documents, and powers of attorney giving me the right to liquidate our family’s Iranian assets.
After a torturous hour and a half, they walked us out of our apartment, put us back in the elevator, and took us outside through the garage. We lived in a neighborhood comprised of high-rise apartment buildings built by American and Israeli construction companies in the 1970s—the best-built buildings in Tehran—and known for being a more westernized, less outwardly religious neighborhood. It happened, also, to be in the west of the city.
The three of us were surrounded by several people that were clearly not from that part of town—several of them with surgical masks on and the one woman in full Islamic covering—and stood out at eight thirty on a weeknight in Ramadan. There were a lot of people coming and going. We had to walk by neighbors. People in Tehran have seen this kind of thing before. They know not to get involved.
We were led to an unmarked white van with tinted windows that also had curtains over them. They handed each of us a blindfold and told us to put it on. They took my glasses. I see very poorly without them; my vision gets blurry and doubled.
They cuffed my hands in front of me; they didn’t put handcuffs on Yegi and Reza. The only other time I’d ever been handcuffed before was when I had been cast as an extra in a History Channel production in which I played a member of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq whom Saddam Hussein had executed.
“Don’t talk,” they told us.
A guard sat next to me and asked, “Are the cuffs too tight?”
I thought, You see this in the movies all the time. When they ask a question like that, if the suspect says yes, then the cop tightens them even more.
I said, “No, they’re not that bad.”
“No, no,” he said, “if they’re too tight, I can loosen them a little bit. This is not Guantánamo.” And he took the key and loosened them, and I sat there with my hands loosely restrained. And I thought, This can’t be that big a deal.
We drove for a short time. When we got out of the van, still cuffed and blindfolded, I told Yegi in English to get in touch with a fairly powerful distant relative of mine if she got out first. I assumed she’d be free within an hour. I thought, We just need to nip this in the bud as soon as possible. If whoever I know can intervene, it will all blow over. After that, we were separated.
2
Us / Our Life in Tehran
At that moment Yegi and I had been married just fifteen months. I was thirty-eight years old and there was still a lifetime of things my wife didn’t know about me. I had habits and pet peeves; things I was afraid of, others I wanted to try. Funny stories that I hadn’t told her yet. The sorts of discoveries that all couples make during their first years living together. But my having a secret identity as a high-level intelligence operative wasn’t among these.
I knew she didn’t believe I did, but I also knew that both of us had just been thrown into a situation that had immediately changed everything we had understood about our lives.
Before getting married we had dated for four years—no small feat in Iran, where it is technically against the law to have a relationship out of wedlock. During that time Yegi’s eyes had been opened to many new ideas. Before even meeting me she had studied English translation and had earned a master’s degree. Then she spent several years as an international news reporter. She traveled more than any middle-class Iranian twentysomething could imagine, getting as far as America, and came back again. But through all of that she lived at home with her parents—sharing a bedroom with her older sister—until the day we were married.
I had accepted the responsibility of providing her with a good life, although I always suspected that she might become a more successful breadwinner than I ever could. She was smarter, more ambitious, and younger. She had just turned thirty a few weeks before.
Here we were, at the outset of our life together, moving in all the right directions. Three days away from coming back to the U.S. to claim her green card so we could begin the bicontinental, bipolar life we envisioned for ourselves.
All of that was being taken from us. She already realized it. But I didn’t.
IT’S BEEN WIDELY AND ERRONEOUSLY REPORTED THAT I MOVED TO IRAN IN 2008 BECAUSE OF A love affair with my ancestral homeland. It’s the sort of detail that seeps into an ongoing news story often enough that it becomes fact. In this case, though, I have the opportunity and responsibility to set the record straight.
Yes, it was out of attraction that I finally—after years of brushing up against it and later longer, drawn-out encounters—moved in with Iran. But this wasn’t an unconditional thing. It was definitely not meant to be. I had to put in a lot of effort to make it work.
Iran was the slightly less polished, funnier sister with real depth who never dated much in school. Iran wasn’t flashy and sexy on the surface. Iran’s not France or Japan. But it’s not like it’s hard to love either. It’s just Iran.
The spell it cast on me was slow to come on but ultimately very powerful. It can be a hard place—look at the dry and rocky landscape or Tehran’s pollution—that is capable of incredible tenderness. Some of the softest people you’d ever want to meet. Don’t be confused by reports from visitors who have nothing but love and admiration for Iran, though. They only went for a visit and never tried to accomplish anything there.
You don’t get to know it all at once. It reveals itself in pieces and that, too, can be part of an elaborate scheme to win you over. Don’t buy it. In the end Iran will disappoint you if you let it. At least that’s what I would tell friends and visitors who seemed to be falling too hard.
And sometimes I had to tell myself, too.
It’s fair to say that my relationship with Iran is complicated, but I didn’t move there in 2008. It was 2009, and there’s a big difference.
If part of what you empathized with me about was that I was locked up abroad in some faraway land, I have to set that straight now, too. I was imprisoned in what had become, over five years of living there, the city I called home.
It would never be my “hometown,” because that’s San Rafael, California, but Tehran was the place that, with all my faculties and the resources available to me, I chose, for better or worse. That’s important. It was my choice. No one sent me there.
When the world financial markets were collapsing and I decided that sticking it out in the Persian rug business would lead to personal financial—and perhaps actual—suicide, there was no second thought about where I would go.
I had made up my mind that I would be starting fresh in Iran. I’d just turned thirty-three. It was my Jesus Year.
While a lot of my friends were starting to have kids, I’m sure most of them thought I was a little crazy. Although a few were definitely envious. “I’m going global,” I told them.
; I knew, though, that given the circumstances, mine and the world’s, going to Iran to take a stab at a career as a correspondent made more sense than any of my other possible choices. It was literally the only thing for me to do. I saw it clearly, although the path was fraught with obstacles.
I had a unique service to provide that very few others could or would. It was my own niche market, and in true entrepreneurial spirit, I decided to take that love and turn it into a career. It was my version of that very American can-do attitude.
I went to Iran so you don’t have to!
As with any new enterprise, the early days were lean, and staying afloat in an unfamiliar game became my main goal. There was absolutely no good reason other than my own lack of fear—or was it lack of awareness, perhaps?—that for nearly five years I would be the lone American reporting on a permanent basis from Tehran, but that’s exactly what happened.
In that part of the world, where permission is required to work as a journalist, I was one in a growing trend of reporters with deep foreign roots doing a reverse migration, half-knowingly putting ourselves in very precarious, and at the same time very essential, positions. Increasingly, it’s people like me who bring you the news from the world’s furthest-flung places, especially the ones run by Muslim authoritarians. Barack Obama had just been elected and moving to Iran felt to me to be the most American thing I could do.
THE TRUTH IS THAT NOTHING WAS PERFECT FOR YEGI AND ME, ALTHOUGH WE COULD MEASURE progress in our careers and in our future together.
After we’d been a couple for less than two years, in the spring of 2011 she was offered a job as Bloomberg’s Tehran correspondent. This was an unprecedented achievement for a young native Iranian journalist and she rose to the occasion. For years in Tehran’s government offices she was known simply as “Ms. Bloomberg.”
In the spring of 2012 Yegi and I went to the U.S. for a visit. I wanted her to see America and meet my family. Our relationship was getting to the stage where there was a solid foundation in place and the building blocks were starting to take on a structure.
Prisoner Page 1
