“Salaam, J.” It was Borzou. I’d heard that voice twice before over the previous few days. Kazem had said his arrival meant that my story was coming to an end. He was the closer. I had no idea if that was true. “You are finally cooperating. We appreciate that. You’ll do what we say and hopefully, God willing, things will work out for you and your wife. You will say everything on camera.”
“What everything?”
“Everything we tell you to say. Don’t disappoint us.”
I was beyond fear by then and had moved on to hopelessness. I didn’t answer.
“Go enjoy some time with you wife. You do for us and we do for you. We aren’t false promisors.” And that was it.
Siamak led me through the short corridors of the prison offices and through a side door. I was greeted by a guard who used a metal-detecting wand to pat me down. We stepped through a door—I was outside again—and then I was led around the side of the building to another door.
“Take your shoes off,” Siamak told me.
I entered a room with a machine-made rug on the floor and a wooden coffee table surrounded by four green vinyl-covered chairs. In the corner was a smaller table with a telephone on it. The air conditioner was turned on low, so the temperature was pleasant. He placed the box of sweets on the table and handed me the bouquet.
Within moments I heard my wife’s voice and footsteps. She entered the room and began to cry. It took me a moment to be sure, but they were tears of happiness.
“What are these new clothes? Are they letting you go?”
“They took me shopping today,” was all I could answer.
Siamak left and we embraced for the first time since our capture. He called through the wall, “Please keep your hijab on and do not use this room for husband-and-wife activities. You are on camera.” We sat and held hands. I put an arm around her.
Yegi and I tried to catch up, but although we’d been away from each other except for a couple of brief and heavily monitored encounters, there wasn’t much new we had to share.
“Why did they take you shopping?” she asked.
“Taped confessions,” I told her.
“You’re going to do them?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Why are they doing this to us? We didn’t do anything.”
“I try not to ask myself that question.”
There was a knock on the door. It was Siamak. Our bizarro day kept getting weirder. He was carrying a large silver serving tray. On it were two small plates, each with a chicken leg quarter; another one with two pickle slices; and a small stack of the same paper-thin lavash bread they gave us for breakfast. He left us alone. It was exactly the same food we would have been given in our cells, but it was on plates.
Yegi ignored the food, just wanting to talk. We reminisced about a thousand experiences we had had in our five years together. The present circumstances, though, kept getting in the way.
“Why?” She wanted to know was this happening to us.
“I don’t know, baby, but someday we’re going to laugh about this. I promise. For now eat something.”
“I can’t. I’m not hungry,” she said.
“Really?” I said, and opened the box to show off the cakes.
“Oh my God. Those are ours?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Who’s going to eat all of that?” It truly was a lot of sugar for a couple of starving inmates.
“We are. Have one.” I put the box in front of her.
“So many choices.” It was true. We hadn’t been able to choose anything for the past two months.
We bit into the creamy sweets, a momentary escape from purgatory. Bliss. Life still existed. It was a tiny but important reminder that we had plenty to look forward to.
Moments later there was a knock at the door again.
“Miss Salehi.” It was Siamak. “It’s time to go.”
She left and I changed back into my prison clothes. I grabbed the nearly full box and put my blindfold on my forehead. I was going home with treasure. Not the one I wanted, but the only one I had then. How was I going to explain this to my cellmate, a guy I communicated with through a combination of single-word sentences and male grunts?
A guard led me back, past the airport-security-style wand-er. I entered our compound and called out, “Mirsani. Sweets,” handing him the box.
His eyes got very wide. It was about nine P.M. He was lying in our bedroom, watching TV.
THEY HAD A FULL SCRIPT FOR MY CONFESSION—AN ADAPTATION, REALLY, OF THEIR TRANSLATED and abridged version of my interrogations.
The case that they were trying to make against me was that, as a member of the American press writing what could only be perceived as neutral stories about Iran, I was attempting to soften American public opinion toward the Islamic Republic.
My “mission,” or “mizhan,” according to Kazem, was that by improving this image America would somehow infiltrate the Iranian system, fill the halls of power of the Islamic Republic with like-minded Iranians, and worse yet Iranian dual nationals, in the process gutting Iran of its revolutionary ideals. That part was ridiculous. But, since I understood completely that I had lost before I started, this seemed like a much better narrative to work against than the one that they had wanted me to cop to: that I was a CIA agent.
On the one hand it meant that I had an endless list of accomplices. Journalists, scholars, businessmen, westernized youth, unemployed dreamers, tech-savvy teenagers, and Iran’s current presidential administration and cabinet.
I would not be taken down for nothing all by myself, and if they wanted to they would have to go after countless others, too.
This wasn’t a strategy, but a way of defending myself when I had no other resources. Shift the blame, but in a way that it doesn’t hurt specific individuals.
The Islamic Republic was born on the premise that America is the Great Satan, but that enemy’s menace is distant and hard to touch. Even when sanctions were at their height, there weren’t American bombs being rained on Tehran or other cities.
Saddam Hussein handed the ayatollahs a gift when he invaded Iran in 1980, setting off an eight-year war that the regime still leans on to justify its revolutionary rhetoric. The blood of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers and civilians was a small price to pay for Khomeini to secure the system’s reach for a generation.
The end of that war coincided with the purge of thousands of regime critics, mostly those accused of having ties to the MEK and Sunni Kurds, which served the purpose of solidifying support for the system or at least cultivating deep fear of it during peacetime.
In the late nineties the new evil was represented by President Khatami and his reform movement. As a mullah and a product of the system, he was easily brought into line, politically neutered in the process.
The specter that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cast on the Iranian system and society was harder to combat. He had been the hard-liners’ darling and they doubled down on him in the wake of his highly suspect 2009 reelection, only to be betrayed by him and his inner circle, who saw themselves as bigger than the institutions of the Islamic Republic and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Ahmadinejad and his cronies had emptied the country’s coffers, squandering in eight years oil revenues that amounted to more than all of the country’s petroleum income combined up until they took power. Their corruption was astounding even to Iranians well versed in living under rotten leaders, something they’ve known intimately for centuries.
When Hassan Rouhani was elected it was the promise of the removal of sanctions and a renewed cooperation with the rest of the world that swept him to a dominating victory. A return from isolation, it was clear, was what most Iranians wanted, not revolutionary slogans, material support for Palestinians, or a minimizing of foreign—mostly Western—influence in their lives. If anything it was more of the latter—as much as they could get their hands on—that most people craved.
The mystique of its modern delights
was the secret weapon America had used to seduce Iran, all the way to its top elected officials. International commerce, technology, foreign brands, and entertainment. Fun. These were the Islamic Republic’s true enemies and they had infiltrated every layer of the society.
I pointed out to my captors when they would air their ridiculous conspiracy theories that, “Even the supreme leader has a Twitter account,” although it wasn’t verified, as Rouhani and Zarif’s were.
This was the premise, or “plot,” that they had been dancing around for weeks but were too dumb to name. I fashioned it into a narrative for them. A true one that made perfect sense: it worked with their silly ideological worldview and was viewed, rightly, as completely outlandish by the entire world.
Writing it wasn’t difficult. Taking bits of floating information, tying it together with quotes and figures, and packaging it as a report on a trend, idea, or news. Isn’t that what we do? Helping the public make sense of nonsense?
It was an all-in gamble, but what did I have to lose? My wife and I were in prison. My mother and brother were on the other side of the world. I was careful not to implicate anyone else in any sort of actual wrongdoing or crime.
It was, in reality, the only idea I was able to come up with in my tiny vacuum-sealed world of solitary confinement and I stuck with it. The semi-insane machinations of a man being pushed toward lunacy.
I took great care in what I implied and stated clearly, “This is not an elaborate plot to undermine the Islamic Republic, but rather the direction that the world is moving. Ideology is over.”
What did I care? I was ruminating on massive questions of geopolitical and historical significance with an audience that had already decided I was public enemy number one.
“J, whether you say it or not, you’re guilty, so better just to say it,” Borzou reminded me.
Of doing what exactly, though, none of us were sure.
So I tried to hedge my bets. “I’m not an agent of anyone except the Washington Post,” I wrote. “I’m not the problem. I didn’t start it. I’m just tracking this phenomenon.”
“What do you think of public diplomacy?” Borzou asked me in the middle of the forced confession tapings.
“Why does it matter what I think? Engagement between individuals in different fields is an old practice that countries, including America and Iran, encourage to increase knowledge, share expertise, and reduce tension. It’s a policy that both Tehran and Washington are promoting right now.”
He shook his head and chuckled and then handed me a piece of paper. It was a printout from the State Department’s website.
As I glanced at it he read a Farsi translation of the same, but in a sinister-sounding tone.
“The mission of American public diplomacy is to support the achievement of U.S. foreign policy goals and objectives, advance national interests, and enhance national security by informing and influencing foreign publics and by expanding and strengthening the relationship between the people and government of the United States and citizens of the rest of the world.”
When he finished he stared at me over his surgical mask and paused for effect, as if I had been caught in the act.
“J, if this is not ’spionage, what is it?”
“What are you asking me for? All I know is that it’s perfectly legal. Anyone invited to Iran to take part in public diplomacy programs has been vetted before they come.”
But I was starting to see what was happening. They were trying to make the case that I was somehow the architect of a decades-old policy of outreach that had yielded such negative results for their plans that the IRGC felt they must shut it down.
In reality I had explored several projects, even writing proposals to bring Iranian journalists, including hardline ones, to the U.S. to do reports on positive inroads their countrymen had been making in American society. Another one would have brought Iranian tech students and young entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley to take part in startup seminars and provide them tools, training, and contacts they could bring home with them to Iran. Good projects.
Throughout the interrogations, I was completely honest about these activities. Even if my captors could not see them to be innocuous, I thought, it would also be difficult to publicly spin them in a negative light. But of course they could. It was what they did.
“It really doesn’t matter, though. It’s your hidden diplomacy that we’re concerned with,” Borzou explained solemnly.
“My what?” I asked, almost certain they were inventing a new term.
“We know that it’s your mission to make the negotiations succeed,” Borzou said matter-of-factly. “Now you just have to help us prove it.”
I stopped to ponder how stupid that sounded even in the vacuum.
I was completely exhausted by the end of my completely optional forced confession tapings. They had gone on for days, with retakes and a lot of bargaining. Kazem pushed to get me to say things that weren’t true; I resisted by saying things that didn’t implicate anyone in actual crimes. But who was I trying to fool? All this was just putting nails in my own coffin to speed up the arrival of the imaginary process of Iran and the U.S. negotiating over me. It was a Hail Mary pass from fourth and long. What I didn’t know was just how long it would take for the sides to return to huddle from their time-out.
But I got my jabs in. I repeatedly told my captors that, save for beheading me, there was absolutely no difference between their behavior and that of the Islamic State. They hated the comparison, but they knew it was apt. “Why can’t you just admit that I’m a hostage and nothing else? Say the word.”
They wouldn’t do it.
But everything leading up to the confessions and all that happened after was in line with the behavior of captors negotiating to free a hostage. “We have to do this to raise your value. You’re worthless right now. No one cares,” they kept telling me.
They made me read a letter to Obama in which I had to apologize to the people of Iran for contributing to their suffering caused by years of sanctions, say that I intended to overthrow the regime in Tehran by helping cultivate human bonds between our people, and ask him to do more to win my release.
It was humiliating, but not any more than any of the rest of it. I was tired, and I didn’t care. I just wanted my life back. But they just wanted me to keep performing.
“J, when we invited some of your friends here to ask them about you”—he meant interrogate them—“they told us you are a very good singer.”
“That’s not true. I like to sing, but I’m not a good singer.”
“You must sing for us.”
“Goddamn you.” Oddly, that’s not considered blasphemous in Iran. “All of you. I’ve acted enough for you already this week.”
“Come on. Just one. We’re all colleagues here,” Borzou said, repeating his catchphrase meant to imply that he and I were both covert agents.
I thought about my options. I had no idea whether my release might be imminent or very far off. I’d already folded and done the one thing they wanted me to do. I was as close as I’d ever been to saying “uncle.”
“Okay,” I told them, “but you have to stand up.”
They rose. All of them.
And I launched into a gloriously lonely rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
When I finished they clapped.
“What was that?” Borzou asked. “It was very lovely, especially when your voice cracked. Very emotional. So much feeling.” He was messing with me.
“That was the American national anthem,” I told them. “You guys better be careful, you just betrayed the Islamic Republic and paid the ultimate respect to the Great Satan. This is a very big crime.”
Of course, they were untouchable, or at least they were sure they were. Everyone laughed for a minute, including me. And then they led me back to my cell.
I SPENT THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS WONDERING WHEN THEY WOULD BROADCAST WHAT THEY CONSIDERED my confessions and how bad they’d look. One late
morning I was brought to the room where Yegi and I had enjoyed our dinner and pastries after my shopping trip several weeks earlier. I hoped she would be joining me there. When she walked in wearing her own clothes my heart sang, but then it sank. She had been released; that was very good news. I had not.
Once she’d started to acclimate to the new reality of being the wife of a convict, she set out to get me out, but also to do whatever she could to make me more comfortable. Understanding the conditions of prison, she knew well what I was missing.
It took weeks to get permission, but after much jostling she was able to bring me an initial care package. Home-cooked meals were off the table, but they allowed a small French press coffeemaker. She brought along two factory-sealed cans of Illy espresso, which we’d bought on our last trip to Dubai. Initially they said it was contraband.
“How do we know this is what you say it is?” the deputy warden asked me.
“Open it up and I’ll make you a cup.”
“But if you get sick it will be our responsibility. You will have to sign saying we are not responsible if you are poisoned.”
It was obvious there was no such document available to sign.
“Give it to me. I’ll sign it right now.” I wanted coffee that badly. It had been almost three months since my last cup, and the withdrawal headaches had passed unnoticed amid all the trauma of the first days in solitary. I knew access to a basic comfort of home would go a long way.
After several days they relented, and I had that small privilege.
YEGI ALSO WAS ABLE TO BRING ME SOME BOOKS. WE HAD A DECENT LIBRARY IN OUR HOME office, titles that I had collected over years of short visits back to the U.S., but her choices didn’t reflect the range of our collection. She brought The Power of Now, The Alchemist, and several others by Paulo Coelho that I knew I wouldn’t read.
“Thanks for these, but try to bring me a few more.”
“Like what?” She was trying to lift my spirits and transport me beyond the walls through self-help literature, and all I wanted was to feel some camaraderie with the people of the past and the injustices they survived.
Prisoner Page 10
