It was during the first days of that trip that I was contacted by the Washington Post and asked if I would be interested in their correspondent job in Tehran. In one of my interviews I was asked if I could put my opinions aside and write news. Of course I could. I never reported anything that wasn’t accurate. How could I say no to the platform that the Post would provide?
One of my references, a DC-based Iran analyst who was a regular source, likes to recount the call he had with the editor who hired me.
“Why do you think Jason is the best person for the job?” asked the editor.
As my source tells it, he laughed and replied, “For a lot of reasons, Jason is the only person for the job.”
And that was probably true. There was no one else available in Iran at that moment who could write for a major English-language publication and no one working outside that would have been granted a working visa for the Washington Post. I was a journeyman, but one who could complete a sentence and whom the authorities in Tehran already knew.
My first editor, Griff Witte, and I visited the press officer at Iran’s permanent mission at the United Nations to formally request permission for me to be the Post’s Tehran correspondent. Over tea the bureaucrat said, “I don’t always agree with Mr. Jason’s work, but he is fair. And as Mr. Jason will tell you, Iran is a pluralistic society and we welcome rigorous debate.”
Leaving that meeting Griff and I shared a laugh over the “pluralistic” line. But we walked away confident I would get that permission.
When Yegi and I returned to Tehran that spring it was to the beginnings of a new stage in our lives together. Within a few weeks I was filing stories for the Post. I had a real paycheck every month—the biggest one of my life—and could claim expenses.
More than that, Iranian officialdom treated me differently now, too, giving me access to cover more prominent events.
Suddenly Yegi and I, back from a reinvigorating break that solidified our relationship even further, made up a very big part of America’s news coverage of Iran, she with Bloomberg and I with the Post. We took it as a heavy responsibility, but also an incredible opportunity.
I finally felt that I was living up to some of the life expectations I had set for myself. It had taken a while to get there, but this was it.
In November, feeling established and stabilized, I made plans to visit Yegi’s parents. This was a technicality. By then they knew me, but in Iran’s family-oriented and strictly guarded social hierarchy I was still an “outsider” or “no one” to them. Farsi, for all its ritualized politeness and reputation for being deeply poetic, can also be incredibly unsentimental when it wants to be. I knew that well.
Armed with sweets and flowers on a rainy November Tuesday night, I made the trip across town by taxi alone, without the traditional male chaperone who would accompany a prospective groom—a break from tradition. At thirty-six I felt, really for the first time in my life, like a grown man.
I arrived and presented the small gifts and we sat for tea. Everyone there—Yegi, her parents, and her older sister—knew what was happening, but no one let on that they did. Finally I asked if she and her father would join me in their sitting room. I wanted to discuss the future with them.
We sat down, he with a pad of yellow paper and pen, prepared for the occasion. We quickly entered into a more in-depth conversation about my finances than I’ve ever had with anyone—Yegi’s dad is an accountant, but more than that he’s an Iranian dad—and came to some agreements about what he expected of me as his youngest daughter’s future provider. Once the parameters were set we both—he and I—signed. I’m not sure if it was a legally binding contract, but given what I now know of Iran’s legal system, I’m guessing it could have been.
It sounds more uncomfortable than it actually was. Within twenty minutes Yegi and I were engaged.
As we planned our wedding for the spring of 2013, politics inevitably crept into our personal life. Early June would be the next presidential election in Iran and we needed to leave enough time to fit in a honeymoon before the campaign season heated up. That was my only condition.
Quietly there were concerns over the fate of Western journalists should a hardline candidate win. We were bracing ourselves for the possibility that our lives might take a drastic turn, doing all the preparations for Yegi’s green card application so we would be ready to leave if we found ourselves out of work.
We made arrangements to hold the wedding in a “garden” on the outskirts of Tehran. People who want to have a mixed-gender wedding party with dancing and the opportunity for women to let their hair down have to seek out such venues.
There is a thriving industry of wedding planners who have access to sites where, for whatever reason—usually the potential for steep financial rewards—the owner is ready to take the legal risk of hosting an event where a multitude of Iranian laws will inevitably be broken. When we visited the property, which was inside a maze of industrial alleys, it was in the frost of late February and I was skeptical that it could be transformed into a fairy-tale wedding venue. But I was underestimating the power of spring.
As we planned our wedding several of my American friends were ready to fly to the other side of the world, despite their families’ warnings, to take part in our nuptials. Yegi and I went about asking for permission to have American guests at our wedding in a completely transparent way.
“Perhaps after the election,” we were told by the foreign ministry. “It is too sensitive a time. No one wants to take responsibility for American tourists at the wedding of an American correspondent to an Iranian one.”
But we knew better than to be overly disappointed. Living with letdowns is a skill essential for surviving life in Iran.
On April 19, 2013, the show went on, minus the presence of many people who should have been involved and in front of a few who went to great lengths to be a part of our special day. My mom had arrived a week in advance to help with preparations. My big brother Ali came alone, leaving his family back in California. He trekked all the way from the other side of the world and stayed for less than two and a half days. “I wouldn’t miss it, Jason,” he told me; I knew that this was the only thing that would possibly bring him to Iran. “I’m happy to see you so happy,” he said.
Our friends from Paris, Charley and Marie, and my old friend Mathias, Charley’s cousin, all came, too.
The presence of the five of them was enough to make it real for me.
I’m not much of a dancer, but I didn’t sit down that night. Yegi came home with me to the apartment we’d rented for the first time and we started our life.
A few weeks later Hassan Rouhani, a regime loyalist who was dubbed a “moderate” for his pragmatic promises to lift Iran out from under the weight of sanctions by engaging more diplomatically with the world, won a resounding election victory.
Instead of having to think about a possible exit strategy we were suddenly in the place everyone wanted to be. Iran announced it was open for all kinds of business. Everyone welcome. People were coming to me, and the ones I contacted were eager to connect. Suddenly an email with the subject “Greetings from Tehran!” was guaranteed a response.
During those months our home became a landing pad for many foreign visitors. Our apartment in Tehran’s Shahrak e Gharb—literally “West Village”—was a large two-bedroom flat with a balcony on the third floor of a pre-revolutionary luxury high-rise, making it a sought-after address for people in the know.
Unlike the majority of nonnative expats we paid our rent in rials, the local currency, one of the many perks of marrying a local. Most foreigners, whether they were diplomats, journalists, or executives of large companies, were forced into paying exorbitant rents in dollars. In cash. Our rent for a seventeen-hundred-square-foot flat was the equivalent of about $800 per month.
We took regular international trips, and when you’re in the Middle East a lot of the world is not that far away. Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Istanbul, Pari
s. And on nearly every one of them we’d work in a layover of a couple of days in Dubai—I had earned good frequent-flier status on Emirates—to shop for all the items that sanctions made it hard, or too expensive, to find in Tehran. Halogen lightbulbs, coffee, cheese and chocolate, high-quality underpants, and Christmas ornaments.
I hired a woman who also cooked and cleaned for another journalist friend. She came to our place twice a week for six hours, on Sundays cooking for the rest of the week and on Tuesdays to clean. I paid her the equivalent of about twenty dollars per day. My shirts were always ironed for the first time in my life, so Yegi was happy, too. Locals said I paid her too much. European diplomats I knew paid their help sixty euros a day, and theirs didn’t cook.
I never argued with the naysayers, though. If you’re a foreigner in Iran local people will always tell you they can get you a better deal. In my experience listening to such “friends” invariably had hidden costs. To the extent that I could, I tried to cut out the middleman, unless I could figure out a way to be the middleman, which, in Iran’s middleman economy, is who you want to be.
Ours was one of the most classically Persian-decorated homes I’d been to in Iran, putting it in stark contrast with the majority of places we’d go. Most urban Iranians have, for reasons beyond me, shunned everything natively available for Chinese rip-offs of what I imagine went in the homes of gaudy nineteenth-century low-level French nobility. Lots of uncomfortable-looking chairs. And crystal.
What do you get the Iranian bride that’s got everything? A crystal donkey.
I had seen the crystal version of just about anything you can imagine.
But our place was different. The parquet floors were covered with antique Persian rugs I had repatriated from my family’s California supply. We found a local craftsman who lovingly refurbished old wooden chests and tables, touching them up with classical-style miniature paintings. Some of our serving trays dated back to the nineteenth-century Qajar era.
On the surface I ran the risk of being confused for a modern-day Persian T. S. Eliot type, trying tragically too hard (and unsuccessfully) to go native. People who know us, though, will vouch for the fact that we weren’t going for pretension. We just wanted our home, for guest and occupant alike, to be a place where people felt comfortable and welcome.
For us it was a sanctuary. Against all sorts of odds, my life was stable and where I wanted it to be. And that happened to be in Tehran.
I ventured out into the city less and less. I almost stopped going to press conferences entirely. Why should I be bothered? They were played live on television, and even when I made the long trek into the seat of government offices, far down in old Tehran, officials almost never allowed a foreign journalist to ask a question.
I saved my energy to do real reporting on stories and people that required some depth and connection.
Pollution in the west of the city was thankfully less than in the heart of Tehran’s mayhem. Our building had twenty-four-hour security, at the gate and the front desk; parking; and underground storage space for each apartment. We used ours to store our ample liquor supply, collected from diplomat friends who generously understood the restrictions the rest of us had to live with.
We were living a life that others envied. Yegi and I both had jobs that paid us in dollars, putting us in a high earning bracket. Life was good.
I WAS BEING LED, BLINDFOLDED, THROUGH CORRIDORS AND FINALLY INTO AN AIR-CONDITIONED room. At the door I was instructed to take my shoes off—in Iran, it is customary to take one’s shoes off indoors. Two men, whom I couldn’t see, sat me down in a vinyl chair.
There were a lot of other people in the room. I could hear whispers, and people pacing, and prayer beads being thumbed. I could smell the competing body odors of different men.
After a few minutes, a male voice addressed me.
“Do you know why you are here, Mr. Jason?”
“No,” I said, turning my head in the direction of his voice.
“You’re the head of the American CIA station in Tehran,” he said. He never raised his voice, but he was accusatory: “We know it. And you have a choice. Tell us everything, and you’ll go home. You’ll get on that flight to the United States on Friday as planned, but you’ll be starting a new life working for the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic.” The offer was absurd in its directness and so I didn’t think he was completely serious.
“If not, you must change your clothes. When you put the prison clothes on it’s not clear how long you’re going to be here. The odds are you will spend the rest of your life as our guest. You’ll never get out of here. So tell us everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. “I’m just a journalist. You’ve made a mistake. This is all wrong. I’m just a journalist.”
“Just a journalist has no value to me,” said the voice.
I was trying to rationalize with somebody whose logic was very different from my own. He had his position and he wasn’t deviating from it.
The voice started throwing out names of well-known Iranians and Americans, people I knew, people from the news, and people I’d never heard of. “What’s your relationship with John Kerry? What’s your relationship with Obama?”
“I’ve never met either of them,” I said, which was true. The idea that I knew the top officials of the United States was ridiculous. Everything I said, though, just seemed to make the hole I was in deeper.
I tried to talk my way out of it. I explained to him that the work that I did was for the Washington Post. I explained that I was permitted to work in this country. I said this was just a misunderstanding. I told him to call the press ministry. They had literally just reissued a one-year extension of my press credential that morning for Christ’s sake.
“You’re a spy. We have all of the proof. And you just need to tell us,” the voice said calmly. “Everything.”
“If you have proof, why do I need to tell you everything?” I asked.
“We need to know that you’re reliable. That we can trust you to cooperate,” he told me.
“I’m not reliable,” I said. “I don’t work for America and I’m not going to work for you. I work for the Washington Post.”
There was a pause, and he began talking again as if he were reading from a secret memo.
“‘Alan Eyre,’” the voice said. “‘Avocado. T-shirt.’ What does it mean?”
I thought, Okay, I can explain all of this.
Alan Eyre was a diplomat who happened to be the State Department’s highest-ranking Farsi speaker, and for that reason alone the Iranian regime regarded him with suspicion. He had been based in Dubai for years, which is where I first met him. I had just run into him the week before at the nuclear talks in Vienna.
In 2010 I’d launched a project on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, about why there were no avocados grown in Iran. Of all of the many things I had seen in Iran over the years, the most troubling was one thing that I didn’t see. There were no avocados to be had inside the Islamic Republic. So at a time when it was too risky to cover the day-to-day politics, Iran’s lack of avocados became an obsession I had to get to the bottom of.
Where was the guacamole?
The Iranian Avocado Quest was an attempt to make a point. The very simple fact that the beloved avocado was almost unknown in Iran proved the first part of my argument: that Iran was cut off from the world, even in benign ways. The project would help explain part of the issue: what stands in the way of building a bridge, even a seemingly frivolous one.
Many folks took it as a joke, but that’s sometimes the best way to get people thinking about a new subject. I ended my project pitch with a plea:
“I think the time is now for the American people to connect more closely to Iranian society however they can. And I’m offering a bridge to do just that. Hope you join me for the ride. I will bring the avocado to Iran, but I can’t do it without your support. The future of Persian guacamole is in your hands.”
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sp; In return for each $20 pledge to help me start an avocado farm, if successful in fund-raising, I would distribute T-shirts to funders. Including Alan Eyre. The thought of my avocado project made him laugh and he’d wanted to pitch in a few bucks when I had seen him once in Dubai. He was, he said, in it for the T-shirt. It didn’t matter; the project failed to reach its funding goal.
“It was a joke project that failed,” I said from beneath the blindfold. “There’s been a misunderstanding.”
“No, there’s no mistake, Mr. Jason. It means,” the voice answered his own question, “you are the head of CIA operations in Iran. This is our proof that you are what we say you are.”
“This is ridiculous.” I was still trying to make light of the situation. Something I had done a million times before in my life and it almost always worked.
“Perhaps, but if you’re just a journalist, why would you have contact with Alan Eyre?”
“I interview and sometimes communicate with people, including officials. This is a normal part of the job.”
I tried to further explain Kickstarter and the significance—or lack thereof—of avocados, but blindfolded and under duress in Farsi, and speaking to an unknown audience, I had reached the limit of my capabilities. This went on for a few minutes.
They brought Yegi into the room. She was crying, obviously struggling.
“Jason, what’s going on?” she asked. “They’ve changed me into prison clothes. Why are you not in prison clothes?”
“This is all going to finish soon, baby,” I told her. “Just be calm.”
“Have you done anything wrong? They’re saying terrible things about you,” she said clearly but tearfully. “Jason, just tell me you’re not a spy.”
“Of course I’m not a spy,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I love you.” She wasn’t in the room for more than two minutes. And then they took her away, and there was no more sound.
“Mr. Jason, you still have the opportunity to tell us everything right now,” the voice said.
Prisoner Page 2
