The story mattered to me, but not as much as my life and liberty did. So I left and went to the closest place possible: Dubai.
I was crashing on the couch of my friend Lara Setrakian, a young and accomplished American television reporter who also covered Iran. We’d met two years earlier and had become fast friends. She had made it clear her door was always open and I took her up on it.
One afternoon Lara asked me to be ready to accompany her to a hotel on Dubai’s Sheik Zayed Road. She was going to interview a guy who had been billed as an Iranian opposition figure and who Lara wasn’t sure would be able to speak English. She might need some translation help.
We went up to his hotel suite. He was about my age and, as quickly became clear, liked to talk. His English was good enough for him to explain that his role in the resistance, as he saw it, was to go on Farsi-language channels and encourage his fellow Iranians—though he hadn’t visited Iran in over a decade—to join the street protests against their oppressive state. I had seen plenty of people like him before and was unmoved.
As Lara and I began to wrap up our conversation, realizing there was little reason for us stay, the guy made a last-ditch effort to keep us in the room.
“I haven’t been to Iran for years, but two of my cousins are in town and they have been active in the protests. They will be back shortly if you would like to talk to them.”
Lara and I had already sunk plenty of time into this goose chase so we figured, why not? He poured us each another Chivas and we waited.
It wasn’t long before the door opened and a bunch of branded shopping bags entered the suite accompanied by three young Iranian women: two with fair complexions and lacking any kind of discernible energy, and one whose skin seemed to glow from being in the desert sun’s rays. That vitamin D exposure seemed to nourish her spirit, too. From the moment she entered the room she took over everything for me.
Her name was Yeganeh, meaning “unique.”
Yeganeh sat on the edge of the bed and jumped right into the conversation. She was the only one of the three who spoke English and obviously enjoyed the opportunity to practice with natives. I learned later that we were the first Americans she’d ever met.
Lara asked her questions about the street protests back home in Tehran. Yeganeh got angry, sad, and excited when she talked. She was totally alive and I was mesmerized. I had been instantly attracted to many women before, but the idea of love at first sight seemed ridiculous to me until that moment. I’ve never doubted it since.
At some point I beckoned Yeganeh from her perch on the corner of the massive bed to come sit next to me on the couch.
Too often in my past I had been shy about revealing an attraction, and I was deathly afraid that this would be one of those moments. She had told us all about her reasons for protesting, about her mother’s anxiety and her father’s encouragement, his feeling that her generation could correct the mistakes of his and the haphazard handling of the revolution. We talked and talked. Nothing else existed during that time.
I asked her for her email address and I gave her mine. I made her promise to contact me—for strictly professional reasons, of course—the next day, her last before going home to Tehran.
Lara and I got up to leave the room, but I didn’t want the moment to end. I lingered, and Yegi and I shared an awkward laugh and even more awkward extended handshake.
When we finally exited to the hotel hallway, the door closing behind us, Lara looked at me. “Whoa,” she said, “you’re going to marry that girl.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I might.”
It wasn’t until dusk on the following day that I got a call on my old and very basic Nokia 3110. It was the cousin. I picked it up assuming he wanted me to try to include him in one of Lara’s reports. Instead, he invited me to a club with Yegi and the other girls.
I didn’t even have to think.
“Sure. What time and where?”
“Come back to my hotel in two hours.”
When I arrived, he was sitting with a glass of whiskey in his hand, legs dangled in the pool.
Yeganeh was in the water. I sat down on the end of one of the lounge chairs. Dubai in July is one of the hottest places on earth. When she finally got out of the pool it was dark. I handed her a towel and she patted herself dry. I stared and smiled, not even trying to hide my attention to her every detail.
“I need to get ready. I’ll be right back,” she said, leaving me with her cousin by the pool.
An hour and a half later she and her sister came back.
“Ready?” she asked. “Let’s go.”
We piled into the backseat of a car that belonged to the cousin’s friend, who was driving. He rode shotgun and the two sisters and I sat in the back, Yeganeh sandwiched between her sister and me.
I was feeling bold, and after a couple of minutes in the car I put my hand on Yeganeh’s and she grabbed it playfully, and never let go.
In the throbbing club, we found the only spot to sit in the whole place, a narrow and high-backed velour love seat. It was loud, but we could hear each other if we got close.
When the night ended any doubt about whether I would return to Iran vanished. I may not have had a job, but I had a reason. I was in love.
While the street protests raged on in Tehran I weighed the risks of returning. Like most of the correspondents who had been working there I had been told to leave. The rounding up and imprisoning of journalists, dual nationals, and even embassy workers had been enough to keep me away initially, but now the long twice-daily phone calls to Yegi back in Tehran were boosting my confidence. Or at least obscuring my concerns.
I didn’t do anything wrong, so I have nothing to fear going back, I told myself, never confident that that even mattered.
I called the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, “Ershad” for short.
The male receptionist answered the phone. “Salaam, it’s Jason calling, may I speak with the ladies?” There were three women who for years were my main point of contact with Iranian officialdom.
I was put on hold and an ice-cream-truck version of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”—the theme song from the movie The Sting—accompanied my wait, as it had every time I called that office since I first applied for a press pass in 2003.
“Hello, Mr. Jason, how are you today?” a cheery voice said. “We miss you.”
“Well, I am okay, but I want to come back to Tehran and would like to know if it is safe for me to do that,” I said.
“Of course you can come. This is your home,” she said with typical Iranian hospitality. “But you cannot work. And it is not clear when we will give you permission again. So it is better if you don’t come.”
“I understand,” I told her. “So I will be coming back then.”
In the fall of 2009 I returned to Tehran after four months away. I didn’t have a plan, but there was a woman I had to get to know. Even though we had only spent a few hours in each other’s company, when I arrived, we were already together.
My relationship with Yegi very quickly became as serious as was possible in Iran’s difficult-to-navigate dating environment. Our time together was mostly spent in my apartment, which was, by all accounts, a dump. But we were happy.
I helped her get a job as a translator at Press TV, which is the Islamic Republic’s English-language propaganda network. We hated what they stood for but knew that it was the best job for a young local and nonnative English speaker in Tehran: international media was poaching from them and the salary was higher than anywhere else in town. Compared to the companies that hired young educated women like her as interns, using them for months as intellectual slave labor with no intention of compensating them, as all the while male management—usually contacts of the intern’s father—sexually harassed Iran’s best and brightest, Press TV was a huge step up.
I opened doors for her, but she was always in the driver’s seat. I mean I helped her find opportunities and sought her input on everyt
hing I did and I never once got behind the wheel of a car in Iran. Our relationship was an anomaly for anyone who took a moment to think about it, but it worked because we both got what we wanted. For Yegi it was permission to have some control and make decisions, and for me it was a strong and dedicated woman in my life. She would say I taught her a lot, but I was the one that was learning the most.
I KNEW OUR LIFE TOGETHER HAD BEEN TESTED ALREADY, AND THAT OUR BOND WAS STRONG, BUT WE hadn’t been through anything like this. I wondered if her prison routine was like mine.
The door opened rarely, but often enough that there was no ceremony that went along with it when it did. There were feedings, and a twenty-minute walk in the yard—straight lines, wall to wall, blindfolded, with your head down.
The most thrilling exits were when it was time to see the interrogator. It didn’t take long for that warm feeling of anticipation about impending human contact to develop, and when it did it was accompanied by a sinking acceptance that my life had been reduced to this.
It feels as though the interrogations are leading nowhere. If they have anything that looks like legitimate evidence of wrongdoing they haven’t produced it. They’re still telling me to “just admit it.” But admit what? I’m getting tired and detached. That’s the scary part. I can feel my grasp on reality loosening. The walls move sometimes in my cell. I know they’re not really moving, but it looks like they are. And I don’t have any news about my wife.
I never let my mind wander to what they might be doing to her. Well-documented cases of systematic rape by prison staff are part of the Islamic Republic’s ugly legacy.
It was three weeks in and I had been completely cut off from the world. My entire reality was the jarring ping-ponging between solitary cell and interrogation room. In the moments that I was being led from one to the other, out of doors, the prison guards spoke more freely; they talked to me in amiable tones.
“Why don’t you just cooperate? How long have you been here? I’ve seen guys much worse than you get out in forty-eight hours,” one confided, and then advised, “Just tell them what they want to hear.”
Sometimes even Kazem let down his guard, allowing me to enter into his own struggle with the seductive power of the American idea.
He asked me, “How much could someone with a job like mine earn in a good part of America?”
“It depends. I’m not sure how much your American colleagues make, and what do you mean by ‘a good part of America’?” I asked, just trying to keep a conversation that wasn’t directly about my supposed guilt alive.
“You know, just a normal policeman like me in a place where it is legal to own guns. A good place. Like Texas.”
I debated whether to make him feel hopeful or take a crap on his day, knowing that in this part of the world civil servants and law enforcement officers earned very little official pay.
“Oh, you would need about four thousand dollars per month,” I said, making up a number knowing full well it would sound astronomical to him.
“This is a lot,” he lamented.
“No, it’s nothing. Everyone in America earns this much. You didn’t think the right to have a gun comes free, did you? We must pay for that,” I said, talking down to him temporarily from an imaginary reservoir of exceptionalist American patriotism.
“Yes, I understand.” He clearly doesn’t. “If you are allowed to leave someday, can you get me a visa to go there?”
“It depends on how long you keep me as your guest,” I told him.
The informal conversations with the prison staff were exactly the same as the ones I would have on the outside with people I encountered all the time. I learned quickly that, despite hearing years of protestations to the contrary from locals who believed their ruling establishment was run by people who couldn’t possibly have shared the same values as them, my captors were just as Iranian as everyone else in this town.
Sometimes the janitors, the guys who saw everything that happened in the prison, were complicit but had nothing to do with it, would call out to me.
“Hey, it’s Mister J,” one yelled from a distance. “Ask him how his dodool is.” For some reason, he wanted to know how my penis was doing, using the term schoolkids would.
“Ask him yourself,” the guard shot back. “He speaks Farsi.”
Not missing a beat, I responded in their direction from under the blindfold, “He’s not bad, but he and I both miss our wife.”
Everyone in earshot laughed.
Just maintain some semblance of humanity, I kept telling myself.
And then almost within seconds I’d be either back in my tiny cell until who knew when, or in an interrogation room about to be confronted with another printout of an innocuous email, highlighted in orange, which, according to Kazem, had already been translated and sent to the nameless, faceless Great Judge and his supposedly growing file against me.
Islamic justice my dodool.
IN MY CELL, I’D RUN OUT OF THINGS TO THINK ABOUT. GOD FORBID YOU HAD A CURIOUS MIND THAT asked questions, as I do. Not only was there no right to ask them—a commandment that had been drilled into my head starting with those maddening first days of state-sponsored disorientation—but everything I didn’t even realize was available to me at all hours of the day when I was free, with the exception of breath, had been robbed from me.
There’s no Google search in prison. I was stripped of my right to information. It quickly became the highest form of deprivation.
I know you want to read about what it’s like to be isolated in one of the world’s most infamous prisons, how someone survives that, but you don’t really want to know. It’s a hard experience, designed to dehumanize and disjoint the subject from reality, and guess what? It works.
If you haven’t spent significant time in prison you’ve missed one of the essential aspects of the human social experience. You’re lesser because of it. At least that’s what I kept telling an imaginary audience while I struggled through each day.
The world becomes a hybrid of the life in your memories turned fantasies, the one you used to inhabit, and this, the life you never imagined you’d be forced to endure.
Another thing you have in prison is nothing to do, so you think. Think about everything. You pull up conversations from every era of your life, sometimes with people who are long dead, and you conduct a reexamination of key decisions. Done in that sort of tight vacuum, such exercises are emotionally precarious.
Old friends, people you haven’t thought of in years, dumb shit you wish you never said and desperately want to take back.
I made a lot of mental lists. Places I’ve been and ones I’d like to visit. Favorite restaurants. The home-run kings in each league during the years of my childhood.
Sex came up often, probably because being detained in isolation brings one as close to mortality as anything that isn’t attacking your physical body can do. You replay a lifetime of sexual encounters—in retrospect there is no bad sex.
You think about every sex act you can remember and some you can’t. Sex you should have had and didn’t. Sex you had but realize you shouldn’t have. Actually, scratch that. In prison you realize that all sex between consenting adults is worth it. Sex that was real and some that was imagined, that came to you easily or that you had to earn.
It was sort of hard to avoid as a topic in the particular prison I was in, as so much of the interrogators’ worldviews were skewed by all the sex they weren’t having and deeply wanted to believe you were.
5
Writing My Memoir
The interrogation sessions were leading nowhere, it seemed. No one was satisfied. Not the Great Judge, not Kazem, and least of all, me. All they were trying to get me to do was the one thing that I refused to do: admit that I was knowingly or unknowingly spying for America.
Sure, I could have said something like “Because the Washington Post is the paper of record for the capital city of the U.S. and read by many people, including possibly government officia
ls, I was unknowingly providing legally gathered information from Iran to them through my public news stories.” But I wasn’t about to say “I was sent by the U.S. government to report sensitive and classified information from Iran under the guise of being a journalist.”
I guess they thought they would break me down to that point, and yes, a few times I got close, but the longer it drew on and the weaker I got, it just seemed too farcical. There was a total lack of consistency in everything that I was told. Yes, such a process is designed to confuse, but not to be utter nonsense. How could that be productive?
Well, it wasn’t.
During one session Kazem actually told me that my messy Gmail inbox was “a sign of my agility as an espy,” that I had been trained to keep it so disorganized. It was around that time that, even in the face of threats of execution by beheading—the supposed Koranic punishment for traitors—I started rolling my eyes.
I was afraid, no doubt, but more that they would run out of other options. So I did the best I could to cooperate, providing as much information as I could, and usually this took the form of explaining a worldview and life experience that was absolutely alien to them. It was exactly what they wanted, and ultimately, I suppose, what they needed.
But I couldn’t explain that to them. They were too dumb and one-dimensional to get it.
One evening the door to my cell opened. It was Kazem. It was the first time he had come inside the cell block to see me. I was worried, because inside prison one realizes quickly that surprises are rarely a good thing.
“Here is paper and pen,” Kazem said, handing me familiar tools. “Write everything about your life,” he told me.
“Like what?” I was not in a mood for guessing games.
“Everything that you think is important,” he answered. “From the beginning.”
“Why?”
“Many people think you should be executed. Including me. You must give us a reason not to. Although you have done very bad things, every man must have an opportunity to be saved. I should,” he said calmly, “no, I must try to save you.”
Prisoner Page 6
