It took weeks for it to set in that solitary is the essence of psychological torture. It’s designed to confuse, which, when intended to induce weakness or compliance or to gain information or leverage by force, is the epitome of torture. It’s why the use of solitary in interrogations is often grounds for throwing out a case. Under no circumstances is long-term solitary confinement justified. There is nothing just about it.
But as you’re living through it, the thought of how unfair your current predicament is is only an abstract concept designed to help you pass away the hours. There is nothing that can speed up that time, and your captors know it. To a certain degree, you will break. Everyone does. The key is to not give away the farm—or at least convince them you aren’t—in the process.
The fear and constant sense of heightened anxiety creep up on you quickly. It’s not easy, but maintaining a sense of humor becomes essential for survival. Besides making it just a little easier to cope, laughter and the knowledge that you can still muster a little mirth, and elicit even more from those around you, provide perspective.
It’s the self-doubt, though. That’s the killer.
Cracking jokes—oftentimes to an audience of one: me—became my only way to combat it.
Having a sense of mortality is a good thing, and as time passed I developed a system-override mechanism that told me, “Hey, pal, you’re gonna die. Just not in here.”
But permanent damage had already been done. I wasn’t the same person who had been dragged in seven weeks earlier.
My body was a different one. I had lost so much weight. In all honesty, I was glad to lose it, but I was suffering from new ailments. Headaches, eye infections, pains in my groin. All of it attributable to the prolonged stress of that epoch of deprivation.
Worse than that, though, I didn’t fully recognize the guy inside my head. I was perpetually scared of what came next. But also becoming resigned to it.
I remembered a conversation I once had with an Iranian journalist friend who moved to Berkeley after spending his fair share of time in Evin. “If you ever get arrested in Iran there are two things to remember. The food isn’t that bad and you will get out.” It had become a mantra.
Then, very suddenly, my life in Evin took its biggest turn, on September 10, 2014. Kazem told me at the end of an interrogation that I would be coming out of solitary into a shared cell. I was apprehensive. Is he lying? If not, who are they going to stick with me? Will he be a mole? Is it going to be worse than being alone? I had no answers, and it didn’t really matter, because I had no choices either.
At around eight P.M. a guard came to my cell’s door and told me it was time to go.
I had my possessions in hand: a couple of blankets, my Koran, and my toothbrush; it felt like I was moving across the Atlantic when he told me to put on my blindfold. Where we would have turned right to go to the prison infirmary, we turned left.
We walked through a short corridor that I could feel was brightly lit, then outdoors again, and stopped a few steps away under a small entryway. “You can uncover your eyes,” a new voice told me. He was a guy in his forties, sturdier than any of the other guards I’d seen and better dressed, with very thick glasses. After a minute or so another prisoner arrived with the same guard who brought me. He was nervous and emotional.
The guard spoke to him condescendingly, but the guy obviously couldn’t understand Farsi. That much was clear. The new guard, the one in the thick glasses, said a couple of things to him in his language and the prisoner lit up.
“Tell him that everything is going to be all right. I’m better than Seyed,” I told the bilingual guard, using the term for a decendant of the prophet Mohammad that was used to describe anyone on the prison staff. “I’m his new brother.”
The guard led us into the new building. Like nearly every part of Evin that I was ever allowed to see, it was too bright. There were four doors on the left side of a long hallway. All except the second one were closed. Near the main door there was a step up that led to a kitchenette that was equipped with some empty and dusty cabinets, a dorm-sized fridge, a sink, and a drying rack, but nothing to put in them.
At the end of the hallway, past all the closed doors, was a vinyl-covered door on the opposite side of the hallway. It was open slightly, but I had been conditioned by those last seven weeks not to touch it. The guard pushed it open and said, “We’ll come and unlock it in the morning, but we close it every day around this time.”
We looked out at a narrow backyard that was about twenty feet across. There were some trees and through them we could see patches of night sky. My new friend and I were bewildered but looked at each other and smiled approval at our improved digs.
We had both just come out of solitary confinement and because he didn’t speak any Farsi he was scared. Fair enough. So was I, but it didn’t take geniuses to know that this was a big step up.
When I took stock of him I wondered if I looked as bad as he did: frail, hunched over, atrophied. I guessed that I did.
He was missing the top half of his right index finger, but judging from the look of it and how he maneuvered that hand, this was something that had happened many years ago. It would be a long time before I asked him how he’d lost it.
They’d let me out of solitary because they were changing tactics. I couldn’t see enough to know why yet, but it was obvious.
By then the rounds of nuclear negotiations were happening more regularly. My brother, the Washington Post, and the legal team they had hired were working around the clock to try to bring me home.
Once I was out of solitary my world felt so big. I could hear the freeway nearby, and the mixed-gender laughter from Evin Darake, a small neighborhood of restaurants by a pleasant stream just beyond the prison wall. Yegi and I had been there with friends at a popular place called SPU the night before our arrest.
As the days in our new quarters began to pile up, I woke in the middle of the night sometimes, unable to get back to sleep. Somewhere in the distance I could hear a loud wordless call, and then moments later from another direction an identical response. What was that? I wondered. Night guards? Some kind of game? I never figured it out.
Massive sycamore trees shaded the entire area around our walled-in compound. Their leaves began to fall soon after we moved in—it was fall—giving us a new task. “Keeping the yard clean is one of the privileges of living in a suite,” we were told. We didn’t care, because it gave us something to do.
But every privilege comes with a price.
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT NOTHING COMES FOR FREE ON SEPTEMBER 11. I CONTINUED TO BE terrorized.
The day after my move I was taken to the place I dreaded most, the big room where I had been brought on the first night. And I was blindfolded. I knew that meant another dead-end encounter with the Great Judge.
“You have not cooperated, Jason, this is a problem for you. You will go to court soon and you will receive a twenty-five-year sentence. This is the minimum. Others believe it will be more. Kazem, what is your opinion?” He was speaking from across the room directly in front of me.
“Execution,” Kazem said calmly, sitting next to me.
“You do have a chance to go home, but it depends on you.” He paused. “How is it being out of solitary? Are you more comfortable?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I brought you out of there and I can put you back. But I want you to go home. Your value, though, is very low right now and that is a problem for me. No one seems to care. Which is very surprising. Not the United States government. Not the Washington Post. Not even your family. You are forgotten. But we want to bring you back.”
By then my mom and brother had made televised appeals for my release, one of them alongside Anthony Bourdain, who was on board from the first days after our arrest. The Washington Post was working frantically, in public and behind the scenes, to secure our freedom. I was already a “point of negotiation” in the now-regular talks being held about Iran’s nuclear program, according to Secreta
ry of State John Kerry. But I couldn’t see any of that.
After more than fifty days, this was a clear acknowledgment from my captors that I was being held as leverage.
“You will do something for me and I will do something for you.”
I listened, knowing I was in a bad spot.
“To raise your value I need to film you. To show them that you are alive and that we know you are a U.S. spy.”
“But we all know that that is not true. And America knows that better than anyone.”
“We know that you have been tricked. That you didn’t know of your crimes. But, Jason, they are still your crimes. Even if you were being controlled from above.” I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded so dumb.
“Whatever. So what do I have to do?”
“We will buy you some new clothes, because thanks to God you have lost some weight,” he began. That was true.
“I’m pretty sure that didn’t have anything to do with God. I thank you for that.” Everyone laughed.
“And you would like to see your wife more. I can make that possible.”
I knew he could but doubted he would.
“We need her to feel better before you go home. We are responsible for your health.”
“So now what do I do?” I asked.
“Whatever we tell you.”
“And once I finish with that I will leave?”
“God is great.” Never the answer you want to hear from these guys. It means either “I don’t know” or “no” and without the benefit of seeing into his eyes I couldn’t guess which one it was.
Whether this was the plan from the beginning or something they’d come up with based on the bigger-than-expected international public outcry, I was now part of Iran’s long history of American hostages and I knew it.
Late the next afternoon Kazem returned, and it was as though he was a different person entirely. His demeanor and facial expressions were completely different. Friendly.
Several days later the door to my new home opened.
“Come on, J,” Kazem said in his Wanda voice, “we’re going out.”
He led me back to a room behind the doctor’s office where there was a small area curtained off. He instructed me to take off my blindfold once I was on the other side of the partition.
I was in a changing room, and on a small rack various pieces of clothing hung, including my own. At least I’m not the only one, I thought.
On the floor were shoes, and I recognized the pair of brown slip-on Eccos that I wore the night of my arrest, amid the others. I had struggled to get them on my feet before because they were brand-new and hadn’t loosened yet. Now, like my clothes, they had plenty of wiggle room. I knew I looked ridiculous in this outfit that I had to hold tightly to keep it from falling off me, even with my belt on. One of my socks was missing and they gave me a black one to wear with my own brown one.
But I was in my own clothes for the first time since being taken and I felt sort of normal, which is probably why I forgot to put my blindfold on as I exited the dressing room.
“Na, na, na!” A chorus broke out. “Blindfold.”
“Sorry. Okay, okay.” It was an awkward situation.
“Come on,” Kazem said, leading me out of the building toward the concrete path that was the way out. We got into a car, which I could tell was more compact than the vans I had been transported in thus far. Maybe that was a good sign.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Shopping,” Kazem said. “The Great Judge is a man of his word.”
It was almost two months into my ordeal. The whole thing was so bizarre already, but this was taking it to new heights.
This time they sat me in the back of a passenger car, a black Peugeot 206, one of the most popular car models in Tehran. Yegi and her sister shared one for years before we got married. The “206,” as they were universally known, was considered a cut above the Iranian-made Peykan and the Kia Pride, which long dominated Iran’s roads. They sat me in the middle, sandwiched between Kazem and a guy I didn’t know. Driving was the usual driver, and riding shotgun was a good-looking guy named Ali who obviously lifted a lot of weights.
A few minutes after we left the prison I was allowed to remove my blindfold—an Evin rule—and I recognized that we were in Pasdaran, one of Tehran’s upscale neighborhoods, a part of town I assumed I was more familiar with than my chaperones.
“What am I supposed to do if someone recognizes me?” I asked.
“Act normal,” Kazem said.
“And when they ask me about prison?”
“Tell them it’s not true.”
He was showing his ignorance of how reality works. I just nodded.
We pulled up to a branch of Hacoupian, a well-known Tehran men’s clothing chain. It looked as though they had called ahead, because the staff didn’t blink at the sight of me and eight chaperones, half of them in surgical masks, browsing the store.
“Stay away from anyone who looks like they could recognize you, and if you see anyone paying too much attention to you, tell one of us,” Kazem commanded. That sounded so ineffective, but I said, “Okay.”
The team naturally gravitated to what they expected—based probably on their own fantasies of taste—I would wear. Colorful and shiny suits, red shirts, a variety of bad ties.
“I don’t wear ties,” I made clear.
“But you’re American.” They were shocked. It was the same sense of wonder that Yegi’s uncle had expressed when I decided to go tie-less at our wedding. “All foreigners wear ties at weddings. I’ve seen it in many films,” her uncle said with authority. “This isn’t a movie,” I told him. He was upset, but when I reminded him that I was paying for the whole event he quickly got over it.
I walked around the store and picked out a couple of shirts and three pairs of pants, finally settling on a blue shirt with small white checks with the kind of slim cut that had never before been an option for me. The pants were light brown and too long.
“If we send them to the tailor it will take three days,” the shop clerk told us at checkout.
The team deliberated. Who will come back to get the pants? Do they have the budget to pay for tailoring? Is it even necessary?
“We have our own tailor,” Siamak finally said, handing over a debit card.
“Password?” the clerk asked, because in Iran you actually give the person running the card your PIN. Even these guys, who were supposed to be the nation’s last line of security.
“Wait, he needs a belt,” Kazem remembered. That was true.
They picked out a belt with an “H,” for “Hacoupian.” It was very appropriate, because it was the sort of accessory I would never think of picking out for myself.
We left the shop, my entourage and me, and they said we could take a little walk. We went up the street a couple hundred feet. It was the most I’d walked without being forced by a wall to turn in more than two months. It felt great to walk in the autumn air, in real shoes, in straight lines, even if I was being escorted by the same guys who had taken me captive and happened to be packing heat.
My life had taken so many twists already, I liked to believe that this was just one more of them, and it would soon be behind me. A good story to tell that would remind my friends back home that I was on a different kind of trajectory—one of them, but not really.
We stopped in front of a florist.
“Let’s go in,” Kazem said.
He can’t be serious, I thought. As he walked in I realized, He is.
“The Great Judge said you must buy flowers for your wife,” Kazem said. He had no idea how creepy that sounded.
“I don’t have any money,” I told him.
“We will put it on your account,” he promised.
We went down a flight of stairs and entered the basement-level shop. In the five years I’d lived in Tehran I’d bought more flowers than I had in my lifetime in America. Flowers and pastries. You don’t visit an Iranian’s home, e
specially for the first time, without one or the other. My guards gravitated toward the cheap stuff, and I went straight for the more expensive ones. “My wife likes tropical flowers,” I told them.
The florist put together a bouquet, handing me each flower to smell before he added it to the bunch. He was a gentle guy, in his fifties, sort of chatty. He wanted to talk about love and its power. I wasn’t in the mood to make small talk about subjects I understood but couldn’t touch right then, but I agreed with everything he said.
“Your heart is big,” he said to me. “I wish you and your wife many years of happiness and many children. They are life’s sweetener.”
“Yes, so I’m told.” We returned to street level, and a popular confectioner’s was right there.
“You must buy pastries for your wife.”
These dudes are unbelievable.
I knew it was an opportunity, though. She was starving and so was I. And so was my cellmate.
Again, they started choosing based on their tastes—a bunch of cakes filled with fruit jelly—before I stopped them. “My wife doesn’t like those, and neither do I.”
“Excuse us. Please choose what you like.”
I had the clerk fill a massive box. Two kilos; a completely normal and perhaps even small purchase by local standards, but much more than Yegi and I would be able to eat ourselves before they went bad. My stomach ached just looking at the sweetened cream atop the individual cakes, some of them filled with nuts, or chocolate, or simply more sweet cream.
And that was the end of the fairy-tale adventure.
“LET’S GO, J,” KAZEM SAID, POINTING THE WAY BACK TO THE 206.
We drove back to Evin on the highway, and when we got close I was instructed to put my blindfold back on. We wound through the prison compound, until the car stopped and I was told to stay put.
Someone got in.
Prisoner Page 9
