But when I first started going to Iran, food and the other great elements about actually being in the country were my little secret, which always blew my mind. It wasn’t as though Iran was an unknown country. It had had a very defined sense of itself for over 2,500 years when I finally arrived in 2001. And it’s not small. At 80 million inhabitants, it’s among the larger populations on earth. Couple that with a well-documented brain drain that has led to the flight of millions of Iranians in recent decades and one might wonder why there aren’t more Persian restaurants in the world’s great cities.
I call it my secret, but I was, from my earliest interactions, doing everything in my power to uncover Iran by covering Iran. Later this would be spun into a sinister narrative that had me exposing elements of public life in an attempt to find an Achilles’ heel. Iran was the Death Star and I was R2-D2.
To tell you the truth, though, I wasn’t getting much traction. Before moving to Iran I had been a fixer for many reporters. And more than that, I’d consulted with producers and correspondents ahead of their reporting trips to Iran.
In 2007, at thirty-one, with no consistent work and struck by Anthony Bourdain’s curiosity, I did something I did often those years: I sent a cold email, not expecting a response. In it I suggested that the show’s producers and Bourdain consider doing an episode in Iran, and I gave a list of reasons why—some cultural and culinary highlights, a weird food or two to try, because he still did that on every episode then—and why I was the guy, the only guy, to help them do it.
Weeks later I got a response. “Not only is Tony interested in doing an Iran show,” an associate producer wrote me, “he has been for years.” They wanted to know more.
Over the next few months in phone calls and emails I plotted a shoot with the associate producer, what it would look like, where we might go, how to get permissions. I had had plenty of these discussions before and knew that few of them actually panned out. Talking about a project and getting paid to plan one, I learned, are two very different things.
Finally I got a call from the show’s executive producers at Zero Point Zero, No Reservations’ production company, who wanted to meet me.
I headed to New York to visit their Tribeca offices and we talked about what might be possible and what definitely wasn’t. They were interested and enthusiastic but not overly optimistic. I couldn’t know if that was because of me or because of Iran, but I guessed it was the latter. The conversation continued moving in the right direction, until I got news that the network’s insurance company wouldn’t provide coverage for an Iran shoot.
For years afterward I’d get periodic messages from that original producer about his desire to come to Iran. A curiosity I helped pique.
But I put my foodie dreams on hold. Until the Rouhani election, when everything that I had waited for a more opportune time to pursue seemed feasible. In the spring of 2014 there was a buffet of Iran culinary journalism in the works. I just didn’t realize that within weeks it would be my goose that was cooked.
That Iran has one of the most developed culinary traditions in the world and a people who can be violently hospitable—“a murderous generosity,” Bourdain called it—but lacks a decent restaurant culture is one more of the incongruities that makes Iran so endearingly hard to understand.
But juxtapose this against what one finds if they’re lucky enough to end up in an Iranian home. Dishes lovingly prepared for hours from unwritten recipes, passed down from grandmother to granddaughter to daughter, and repeat. Tables with an overflowing abundance of colorful rice—no one eats more rice than Iranians, except maybe Sri Lankans—each one with a different tahdig, literally “bottom of the pot,” a piece of bread, or a layer of potatoes, or sometimes as simple as some rice infused with yogurt and saffron, that becomes golden brown under the heavenly mound of buttered rice, protecting it from burning, simultaneously becoming the most fought-over item of the spread when the pot is flipped over and magically appears.
At that time I was thinking a lot about the power of food and of sharing it. I was laying the groundwork for a possible pivot away from news, which I still loved. I was hopeful, though, that the biggest news issues propping up America’s long enmity with Iran were getting resolved. I envisioned a diminishing need for the sort of coverage newspapers traditionally provide. The status quo on Iran reporting was changing.
As I thought about what would come next, I never thought about moving to report from another country, but in all honesty I was also getting tired of being in Iran all the time.
Yegi and I talked often about what we wanted from the future.
Running specialized tours of Iran, especially culinary ones, seemed like a great recipe for cultivating the life we wanted. If nothing else was certain, Iran’s popularity as a destination among global travelers was on the rise and what they wanted from those experiences was one more element of the Iran-U.S. problem that I understood better than anyone else.
People wanted to touch, feel, and taste Iran. Very few of the local tour operators were in that game. Either they were too connected with the state security apparatus to veer from the prescribed and tired itineraries or they were too afraid of it. Regardless of the reason, when people visited Iran, if they passed through my hands, for a lunch or a tea or a trip to the rug bazaar, they invariably walked away a little fuller than the other guy.
I could see the brochures in my mind: “Visit Iran. It’s not that bad.” They read.
AS I PIECED TOGETHER THE PREVIOUS SEVERAL YEARS, THERE WAS NOTHING THAT WARRANTED my being thrown in solitary, and yet there I was.
From the earliest moments in my cell it seemed like a joke. The culmination of all the bad prison movies I’d ever seen. The disorientation of not being able to open the door yourself sets in quickly.
Remember the time you were stuck in an elevator for a couple of minutes or locked out of the house until the locksmith could get there? That feeling of weakness and fear about what will happen? It’s like that for hours on end. Then days. Then weeks.
In solitary nothing happens. Well, almost nothing.
But then the notches you carve on the wall, in rows of four with diagonal lines through them, begin to add up. It’s impossible to wrap your head around: three, seven, nineteen, thirty-six . . .
But you find mechanisms to cope. And if you’re lucky you learn to quiet your mind, just a little, and live softly. It’s not really submission. Don’t do that. It’s closer to an acceptance. You’re being carried down a river and your odds of survival do not increase if you try to swim upstream. To the extent that it’s possible, just go with it.
In solitary all manner of experience gets relived, because you are close to death. Not physically, but in terms of the very limited options available to you. Not hellacious, more like purgatory. It becomes a time to take stock.
I want kids, my mind kept telling me, starting sometime on the second day, which was strange since I had spent the entirety of my first thirty-eight years resisting the idea of procreation.
In the quiet of solitary thoughts can form. Ideas that take hold. And these can come in extremes: very real-feeling paranoia about the fate you might suffer, or delusions of grandeur about all the wonderful things that will happen if and when you ever get out. I did my best to avoid both and instead tried to plan—realistically—for the life I tried to convince myself would follow my imaginary release.
Having children, something Yegi and I had decided we definitely did not plan on doing, was suddenly front and center for me. I thought about her a lot, because whenever I imagine parenthood it’s always as the daddy of an über-intelligent, extremely kind, witty, and cute little girl.
It was through this latest life plan that I began to know Iran, as a home, was over for us. There was no way I was going to be able to grow a family with Yegi in a society that is segregated along gender lines and systematically intolerant in so many other ways.
Soon I drifted to other thoughts, but this one always came back
in my darkest hours. It was the promise of goodness in a murky future. It wouldn’t take me long, though, to wander to things far beyond my control. I felt incredible guilt over the combination of worry and helplessness my mom and brother must have been going through, again.
They don’t deserve this, I thought.
And I wondered how my in-laws would be coping with the situation. They had lived their entire lives in Iran. They knew the score. As the parents of three girls, one of them severely disabled and requiring constant care, they were the type of people who did whatever they could to stay out of trouble. All of their fears about their youngest daughter’s marrying a foreigner, and a journalist at that, were coming true. Or at least that’s what my mind told me.
All I really wanted to do, though, was see my wife. Hold her. And tell her I wanted to have kids with her.
Most of the time I just searched frantically for a clue as to why this was happening. I thought about everything that I had done up until that point, scanning for anything that could have led to our arrest.
THE FIRST TIME I MET HIM, I COULD ONLY HEAR HIS VOICE. I WAS BLINDFOLDED, WHICH WAS THE rule whenever I was not in my cell.
He spoke better English than I expected anyone there would and had a deep, breathy voice which immediately reminded me (and always will) of Wanda, the gender-bending character Jamie Foxx played on In Living Color—which consisted primarily of his wearing a blond wig and lipstick—who was constantly threatening to “rock your world.”
In our initial encounter, before all the questions began, he claimed that he was chosen by the judiciary to defend me. “I am your attorney, chosen by the Great Judge,” he said. I couldn’t see him, but that was obviously a lie.
“If you’re my attorney, why I am blindfolded?”
“It is for your protection.”
“What does that mean?”
“The charges against you are very serious and you must tell me everything if you want to leave this place.”
“What charges?”
“’Spionage,” he said. “You are an espy. We know that. You will leave as soon as you like. Everything is up to you.”
“I would like to leave now.”
He was not actually my lawyer, he explained, but rather my interrogator, or as he referred to himself, my “expert.”
“You must tell me about the avocado. This is code, we know that, but for what?”
If this is really about a Kickstarter project, these guys are dumber, are more paranoid, and have fewer real security problems than I ever thought possible.
“I’m sorry for saying so, but you’re just making a mistake,” I told him.
“No!” he said, slamming something against the wall close behind my head. My shoulders tensed and never really loosened. “We know it, and it will be much better for you if you tell us yourself than if we discover it.”
From his voice, I assumed Kazem was a big guy, powerful. In time he would go on to become the perpetual good cop in group interrogations. But that voice. It made him sound so intimidating.
“We must execute you, Jason. You don’t give us any choice. We prefer to let you live, but you refuse to cooperate.”
On the fourth day, though, in yet another dead-end interrogation, fear and desperation mounting, I had a flash of inspiration. Something about our initial rapport made me think he might be responsive to affection, so I gave it a shot. Actually, I said . . .
“Right now you’re my only friend in the world.”
“I’m your friend?” he asked. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
There was a long pause. I had no idea what was coming.
“Take off your blindfold and turn around.”
I did what I was told to do, cautiously, and faced him for the first time. It was just the two of us in a sparse room. There were two plastic chairs and a single table against the wall I had just been facing. He quickly rearranged the furniture so that we sat across from each other.
“Friends must be able to sit and talk comfortably,” he said, but I wasn’t convinced.
He was slim, wore square steel-framed glasses. His hairline was receding and had the three-day stubble that is common among those who would have you believe they are believers. He was probably in his early thirties. Very typical working-class Iranian. My nemesis was hardly the goon I had been imagining.
The initial interrogation sessions were awkward, in part because I didn’t know the rules yet, the main one being that I didn’t have the right to ask any questions. A concept I would be reminded of every time I asked anything, whether it was about my case or if I could use the toilet.
Despite Kazem’s constant assurances that he was little more than a lowly cop doing his job and by no means a “top banana”—he actually said that, in English . . . often—I became convinced that he was indeed all-powerful. That he was calling the shots.
As frustrating as the circular sessions in those first days were, the hierarchy of the system holding me was not a concept I could even ponder. I was too busy thinking about the imaginary forces that must have been working so diligently to right this wrong, explaining to whoever needed to hear that this was a simple mistake. Family, friends, friends of the family, the press ministry, the Washington Post, the State Department. It’s just a waiting game, I thought.
But they get to work breaking you down from the very start. As with the carcass of a hunted creature, it’s easier to deal with pieces than the whole animal.
“No one is coming for you. The world now believes that you and your wife died in a car accident,” Kazem told me.
Well, that sounds plausible. The number of road deaths each year in Iran is astronomical. I’ve reported on it, I thought, but said, “No one will believe that.”
“Why not? You’ve been missing a week already and the story is over. Perhaps your mother is upset, but the U.S. government has said nothing. And neither has the Washington Post, but that is not surprising, since we know you never worked for them.”
I tried to hold my ground, but I was slipping.
After a couple of weeks I started to bend.
Interrogations are never long enough, I thought, realizing that holding such a view, even for a moment, was not a good sign.
A guard would open the door, calling out, “Sixty-two, get ready.” My prison code was 93-0-62, or just “Sixty-two” for short.
That was my cue to rise and put my blindfold on. During the earliest days there was a mix of anxiety and anticipation. Maybe it’s over, I’d tell myself.
But, no, it was just getting started.
A guard would lead me down a short corridor, and then out the door that opened onto our walled walking yard, and then out another door to an adjoining building.
He would have a sheet of paper that he and the interrogator would both sign as proof that all official procedures had been followed. “See,” sometimes they would tell me, “everything is recorded. This is all legal.” I had no way of proving otherwise. It had been made clear to me in word and deed that I had no rights, especially not the right to question what was happening.
Once in the interrogator’s possession I would be taken by the arm forcefully, but never painfully so, and led to one of the rooms. Kazem would sometimes put a hand on my midback and tell me, “Don’t slouch. Stand up straight.” Not in an intimidating way, but sort of like advice. It was as though he wanted me, as his adversary, to be tougher than I actually was.
Most of the rooms were big and open with plenty of space, but a few were tight, with mirrored divides for special sessions with “top bananas.” In those instances the blindfold always stayed on.
Usually it was just Kazem, but on some days there would be another guy, Maziar they called him, who was obviously obese, which I could hear through his difficulties breathing.
“I will tell Maziar you said he was fat,” Kazem joked. “He won’t like that, but it’s true. When we have pizza everyone has a half of one, but Maziar eats two by himself.” I tried to fe
ign a sense of camaraderie by giggling along.
But that’s a hard thing to fake, especially as Maziar’s primary role, as I came to understand it, was to threaten me with death or dismemberment.
To be fair though, there were carrots, too. “Tell us what we want to hear and your miserable life might be spared,” Maziar promised as I sat facing the wall, told to give a full accounting of my experience with anything having to do with France. “If you don’t I will cut off your right arm. Then leg.” His English was surprisingly good, with a better accent but less of a vocabulary than Kazem.
In the early days I couldn’t predict the course an interrogation session would take. The only thing that was clear was that their evidence was based on emails and their interpretation of ones that they deemed particularly damning. And this didn’t follow any set course, although patterns emerged. Hackers contracted by the authorities had gained access to my Gmail account through an unsophisticated phishing scam targeting me and several people I knew.
THROUGH ALL OF MY ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN THAT THE IRANIAN AVOCADO QUEST WAS NOT SOME shadowy CIA mission dubbed “Project Avocado,” one of the big sticking points for Kazem was the very concept of Kickstarter. He simply refused to acknowledge its existence. “Why would people give other people they don’t know money to try to accomplish meaningless things?” he kept asking in the accusatory and rhetorical tone particular to those underinformed and self-righteous ideologues that Iran continues to produce year after year.
“Alan Eyre sent you to Iran, Jason,” Kazem proclaimed. “The Great Judge can prove that.”
“Please tell the Great Judge to prove it,” I responded, but was growing tired of the childish process. They were just trying to wear me down, as if I were a proud bull who had been lanced enough times that he was beginning to stumble.
It went on like this for weeks. The bizarre leaps of logic they would make followed by my attempts to outwit them with my written answers.
Prisoner Page 4
