“Jason, this is not good. You are trying to be very clever, but the Great Judge is not satisfied. You are an espy and you must write ‘I did ’spionage and I am sorry for that.’”
One of the many traits that most English-speaking Iranians share is putting an “es” sound at the beginning of words that start with the letter “S,” so “street” becomes “estreet,” and then doing the opposite with words that actually do start with an “es” sound, so “especially” becomes “specially.”
Also, and inexplicably, “v” and “w” switch sounds, so “water” is “vater” and “Volkswagen” is “Wolksvagen.” I learned that through a lifetime with my dad, who always preferred European cars: Wolksvagens, Wolwos, and BMVs.
“Dear Kazem, I am very sorry for anything I might have done wrong, but I did not do ’spionage.”
“J, perhaps you don’t know what you did. Perhaps you were tricked. I understand this. It happens. But any rookie judge knows that you are an espy and this is ’spionage. You must accept your crimes. Then we can solve your problem. If not, you must be executed,” Kazem explained matter-of-factly. “This is the law.”
I was dealing with the most hardheaded and least sophisticated people I had ever encountered and they held the keys—literally and figuratively—to the rest of my life.
Kazem’s English had other lovable idiosyncrasies. Once, in giving me a lecture about the roots of the Islamic State, he referred to the terrorist network as Saudi Arabia and Israel’s “love child.” I almost told him that “bastard” fit the situation better but realized if I did that I would never hear him use the term “love child” again, and I was not about to give up that small joy.
I wanted him on my side. Of course we saw each other as enemies, but in keeping it cordial we both knew there might be something to be gained in our own quests—for me to get out, and for him to get something out of me.
“You have no idea what is happening in the world,” he told me in an early August interrogation session. “One of your greatest cities, Ferguson”—pronounced Fair-goo-sewn—“is on fire.”
He took real pleasure in American pain.
“Why do your police kill so many blacks?”
It was one of the stock questions asked of me again and again, as if I were the problem.
Of course I was. To my captors I was America.
But most of the interrogations were cruder, a rapid-fire succession of items pulled haphazardly from random emails.
“Who is Yu Darvish?”
“He’s a Major League Baseball player of Iranian origin.”
“You’re lying.”
“No I’m not.”
“Why did you bring baseball to Iran?”
“I didn’t. I just wrote a story about baseball being played here.”
“Why does it matter? This is not a real sport. No one loves it here.”
“The guys who play baseball do. They have a federation that existed since well before I ever came to Iran.”
He shut up and moved on. Apparently it wasn’t an angle worth pressing.
He handed me a printout of one of my emails that had a passage highlighted in yellow.
“Why did you go ‘radio silent’?”
“What?”
“You said it right there: ‘radio silent.’ J, any rookie policeman knows that this is espy language.”
“If I was an espy and this is espy language, why would I say something that notifies anyone reading that I am an espy?”
“This is part of your genius. You are espying in our view. It is very dangerous.”
“So maybe I’m such a big espy that I don’t even know it.”
“Yes, perhaps. That’s what some of us believe.”
“You guys will believe anything.”
“Come on, J. Give us some credit. We are the intelligence system of the Islamic Republic.”
Actually that wasn’t true. I had been taken and was being held by the intelligence wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, a self-declared intelligence agency run by the former commander of the Basij militia that sees the actual Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) as their main obstacle. The guys who had me were counterintelligence in the most literal sense: they were completely lacking in intellect. All lifelong Basij volunteers, they were the regime loyalists who grew up with guns and badges.
“I expected a lot more from you guys.”
When I told Kazem that it appeared he was doing little more than adding question marks to tidbits he picked out from my personal correspondences, each one harder than the last to respond to with a straight face, he shot back, “J, the American government closed your email account the moment we arrested you. If they hadn’t we would have much stronger evidence of your crimes.”
“That didn’t happen,” I said, knowing full well that if my brother knew of my arrest he would have figured out very quickly how to get my Gmail account suspended. I had given him a complete power of attorney to do literally anything on my behalf in the United States, the highest level of trust one can bestow on another private citizen. We don’t agree on everything, but that’s how confident I am in his commitment to doing the right thing. He’d started in the hours after our arrest, but I wouldn’t know that for weeks.
“We also have your phone records. All of the calls and text messages you’ve made,” Kazem told me.
I had heard reports of texts being used as evidence in court but wasn’t sure that was something that Iran could actually do. It turned out that all they had access to was a log of mobile-to-mobile communications.
“What is your relation to the Polish ambassador’s wife?” Kazem shouted, waving a stapled set of printouts one late afternoon. It was the third session that day. “Tell me right now of your relationship with the Polish ambassador’s wife or we will reveal your affair with her!”
It was the most preposterous accusation yet.
Two weeks into my detention I had already been accused of so many offenses it was hard to keep track.
I was a Bahá’í, because one of my alleged “deputies,” a low-level producer at CNN, with whom I’d emailed but never met, once published a story about the persecuted religious minority that has long been a target of the mullahs.
Later I was accused of being a sympathizer with the Mojahedin-e-Khalq Organization, referred to interchangeably as the MKO and MEK, an opposition group that is widely reviled in Iran for taking up arms on the side of Saddam Hussein during Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s.
The evidence there, oddly, was a 2011 opinion piece in which I argued that the group should stay on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations for assassinations they had carried out in the past. In it I wrote that the people of Iran considered the cultish resistance group so traitorous that many adopted the semiofficial name given to it by the Islamic Republic, which is “the Hypocrites.”
My membership to an email LISTSERV became a major problem. The Gulf2000 list is administered by Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor and Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor. Its members are a collection of scholars, researchers, journalists, and diplomats, probably including Iranian ones. To my captors it was a message board for spies, with over a thousand people receiving top secret and publicly transmitted documents every day, which were usually just links to newspaper articles.
Based on a photograph found on my wife’s computer of her and some female friends on their way to a party, one of them wearing a red sash around her neck, I was accused of fomenting a feminist revolution, because as Kazem very seriously pointed out, “everybody knows that red is the symbol of international feminism.”
They even went as far as to bring a Farsi translation of the Book of Mormon—the religious scripture, not the musical—that I had supposedly commissioned. “We found it on your computer.”
“No you didn’t,” I replied.
Finally one day in his unintentionally hilarious English Kazem asked me if I was “Joe-ish.”
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Knowing exactly what he meant, I played dumb anyway.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Joe-ish,” Kazem repeated. “A follower of the prophets Abraham and Moses.”
I considered making a joke about the many Bar Mitzvahs I attended as an eighth grader but thought better of it. That, too, would almost certainly be added to my long list of crimes against the Islamic Republic.
I was of course, though, an agent of Israel, because I was once asked in an email by a Danish friend, who was doing a master’s at Columbia Journalism School, about the public perception in Iran of repeated military threats against Tehran by the Israeli right.
I answered that I thought neither the Iranian public nor the state took Israeli rhetoric as a serious threat of attack, and that the mounting sanctions on Iran’s economy amounted to an act of war in the public consciousness.
Obviously that friend was a spy because his family name is Rasmussen (Rass-moo-sen in Kazem’s accent) and he must have been the former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and if he wasn’t actually him, he must have been related to him. “Do you have any idea how common the name Rasmussen is in Denmark?” I asked my interrogators.
Didn’t matter. It ended up being one of the main charges against me, a topic I was questioned about for days on end.
This simple exchange became the basis of a charge of espionage for the enemy state of Israel—an offense punishable by hanging—although, as I pointed out in the interrogation room and later in court, everything I had said was the public position of Iran’s supreme leader, and therefore the entire Iranian political establishment and its state media.
I was actually doing them a favor by disseminating the state line, but was accused of organizing and conducting a survey that provided “man on the street,” or what they referred to as “public square,” information to the enemy. Another crime so grave that Iran doesn’t even have laws to prosecute it.
I was reminded time and again that the charges against me were incredibly serious. While that was very true, that didn’t mean they could be taken seriously.
With each new accusation I provided the best answer I could, which was either “That is not a crime” or “I have no idea what you’re asking me,” written on a sheet of lined paper with the judiciary’s insignia on it, then signed and stamped with a green-inked imprint of my right index finger, for good measure.
“The Great Judge is not satisfied,” Kazem would say. “Write again, and this time no ‘I believe’ or ‘perhaps.’ You must accept your crimes.”
I tried not to falter and instead just kept bobbing and weaving.
“Jason, you have spent a lot of time in Dubai, we know that,” Kazem told me during an interrogation. “We know about everything that happens there.”
I wondered what he was angling at, but I couldn’t guess.
“Come on, Jason, we know about you,” he prodded. “You live a dirty life.”
Look who’s talking, I thought. “Tell me what you think you know about Dubai and me.”
“In Dubai there are hotels. And at those hotels there are swimming pools. We know all about it,” he said as if he had me cornered.
“Yes, that’s very true. There are hotels in Dubai and most of them having swimming pools.”
“But we also know about what happens at those swimming pools. There are men and women swimming together.” He was getting excited now. “And there is alcohol.”
“Very true,” I confirmed.
“And what else, Jason? You know. I know you know, I have been there with you.”
I was starting to think maybe he had been.
“The beds next to the pools. Why are there beds next to the pools?”
“Umm, so people can get a suntan?”
We both laughed for a second.
“For sex, Jason!” Kazem proclaimed. “They drink alcohol, swim, and have sex. We know all about it.”
“I’ve never been to that hotel, but if I ever get back to Dubai can you give me the name of it?”
If they kill my sarcasm, the terrorists will have won.
“But you have been there, Jason. It is where you met your wife.”
“Why are you talking about my wife?” I knew from experience that discussing another man’s wife is a red line that supposedly pious people have no right to cross.
“She is your biggest problem,” Kazem said.
“Fuck you.”
Kazem then explained the latest accusation, the one that got under my skin more than all the rest. It was the idiotic claim that Yegi’s and my marriage was a product of a CIA and MI6 arrangement that neither of us was aware of.
“Which one of you geniuses came up with that?”
“It is the Great Judge who believes your marriage is a plot,” Kazem explained.
“That is ridiculous. And offensive. I don’t know much about Islam, but I know you have no right to question my marriage. It’s a sin.”
“Yes, you are right, it is. But this is a matter of our national security,” Kazem rationalized.
“So that is more important than the word of God?”
“Our national interests are the word of God.”
What do you say to that?
“Write about meeting your wife. She will do the same. But if your stories do not match your situation will be much worse.”
“Fine.”
Again I got to writing. This time a more abridged version of this very real and sweet life event.
4
How I Met Yegi
When I moved to Iran, Barack Obama had been president for just a few months, the country was still reeling from the financial crisis, and moving to Iran to follow my dreams seemed to be the most logical thing I could do. With fifteen thousand dollars in cash that I had stashed away during the last chapter of my life, and doing my best to ignore some of the debt I’d racked up in the months leading up to it, I set out for Tehran, leaving behind my parents, my only brother, and his family, including my two nephews, Walker, who was four at the time, and Paxton, one year old. I knew I’d miss them all, but through experience I had learned an important lesson about family by then: if you have goals in life and want to avoid regret, time with loved ones is best measured in quality, not quantity.
Three weeks after closing shop in San Francisco I was in Tehran, covering the run-up to the 2009 Iranian presidential election, and I was ecstatic. I had several strings—freelance gigs—and I was watching what I could sense was a big story unfolding in front of me. Really, my first one.
During the day I would go to campaign events and press conferences, and at night I would join the carnival on Valiasr, Tehran’s main thoroughfare that cuts all the way through the capital for more than ten miles. They say it’s the Middle East’s longest street.
It divided the city into directions and classes. It was perpetually a mess of congestion and activity. And during those nights leading up to that fateful election, it was the scene of a two-week-long nightly street party, where supporters of the four candidates, and supporters of no candidate—voyeurs and frotteurs—gathered to mingle publicly.
By all estimations no one could remember seeing anything like it. Change was in the air and there was genuine excitement. After four years of the increasingly unpopular populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former mayor of Tehran who won in 2005 most probably because of low voter turnout—the breeding ground of electoral fraud and nationalism—and a collective rejection of Islamic Republic politics as usual, many Iranians had decided to give electoral participation one more shot.
The atmosphere was charged and the sides extremely polarized. Few other Western journalists had arrived yet, because foreign presidential campaigns aren’t news; elections are. The ones who had shown up didn’t have press credentials and were busy waiting at the ministry for permission to work.
But I was out on the street filing every day. In a story I wrote the day before the election I argued that the congenial atmosphere of the previous nights wasn’t
sustainable much longer. The live and uncensored one-on-one debates, unfathomable in previous elections and unrepeatable now, had inadvertently opened up a space for public criticism of the system that hadn’t existed before. It was as if Iran was momentarily acting like an open society.
That story got picked up by the International Herald Tribune and subsequently published by the New York Times. I didn’t realize it yet, but that was the beginning of one of the longest Iran reporting runs. From that day forward I was never without a gig. Well, not until July 22, 2014.
It was a rocky road filled with obstacles and challenges, both in the political climate and in my personal life. But somehow I stuck with it, trying, not so methodically, to round out the edges and fill in the color in the general understanding of Iran.
During that time I wrote news; features; cultural stories about art, tourism, food; and opinion pieces. I argued against sanctions. I wrote about everything. There were themes I knew were too granular for any eight-hundred-word news story, so I would fit them in where I could. Unpack the hundreds of articles I wrote from Iran between 2009 and 2014 and you’ll find plenty of useful information that previously went unmentioned in international news.
But there also were hiccups.
Several days after the election I received a phone call from a blocked number. In Iran that means the state security machine is calling you. I was told to come to an unmarked building in the bustling center of the city. When I arrived and knocked on the door the guard on the other side asked who I was there to see. When I told him I didn’t know, the door opened. Apparently I was in the right place.
In a ninety-minute interrogation with two unnamed intelligence officers I was told that, like other foreign reporters, I was no longer allowed to work and that I should leave the country.
I considered my options. I was having my first taste of journalistic success. I had just rented an apartment. I felt extricated from my old life. I didn’t want to leave.
But I was nervous. I knew the story of Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist who had been imprisoned for several months and released earlier that year, and Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek reporter who had just been arrested for covering the street protests.
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