“Bring me whatever Orwell we have at home and any history.”
She brought me some of my own clothes, too: a silver Adidas sweat suit, a pair of green New Balance sneakers, and some T-shirts, including one from her own collection: an oversized airbrushed one of Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.
Drinking a cup of coffee and wearing my own clothes, I realized, quietly, that these slivers of normality could help me fool myself into being a little less in prison. That might become essential to surviving.
Efforts to spring me from Evin had begun as soon as it was clear that Yegi and I had been arrested. By the time I met Kazem for the first time the Washington Post had hired Bob Kimmitt—a lawyer at a DC firm called WilmerHale who had conducted negotiations with Iranians in the past and worked to bring home others detained there, including Maziar Bahari—to represent it in their quest to get my freedom. My brother had engaged with Iran experts, some of them self-proclaimed and others with actual bona fides, and had taken the most important step of having my Gmail account suspended. The damage there had already been done, but likely in the most rudimentary of ways, and it became clear to me, within the first weeks, that my captors had had very limited access to my communications; it started and then abruptly ended. If this was all they were working off of, I thought, then this couldn’t go on for very long.
The debate inside my family about whether or not my mom should travel to Iran began to heat up once Yegi was released from prison in early October 2014. She was adamant that my mom should come immediately, that her presence would be a net positive and that the authorities in Iran were less likely to do more lasting harm to me with an American mother—who happened to be an Iranian citizen, and therefore had the right to come and go as she pleased—in town.
Ali’s concern was that if Mom came to Iran she wouldn’t be allowed to leave. Yegi and I, independently and later together, thought that it was highly unlikely that the Iranian authorities would give her any problems, but we understood the concern and their logic.
With my mom living in Istanbul at the time, my brother in Marin County, my employers in Washington, and Yegi and I being held captive in Tehran, the challenge was to get everyone reading from the same playbook.
Everyone wanted the same thing: to get me out of prison. But the path to that looked significantly different from each individual vantage point.
Once she was set free, I reminded Yegi of our shared goal, and assured her that my mom and brother would be doing everything within the bounds of their power and what they thought was right to help win our release. I was sure of it.
7
Life in Prison with Mirsani and a TV
It turns out Mirsani lost his finger as an infant, sticking it into a machine that he shouldn’t have. After many months together I still never learned what kind of machine it was, which should tell you how limited our communication was.
What I did know was that he was forty-one years old. He was from Jolfa, a city in the Republic of Azerbaijan that borders an Iranian city of the same name. He imported consumer goods from Iran, where they were cheaper. Candy bars, rice, and diapers, which everyone in that part of the world calls “Pampers.”
I tried to teach him some English and as you do if you’re not a teacher you start with the things around you.
“Star,” I said, pointing to the night sky.
“Star.”
“Good. Clouds.”
“Clowvs.”
“Pretty good. Moon.”
“Myoon.”
“Moooon.”
“Myoooon.”
He taught me Azeri words as well, and I assume I sounded just as funny to him.
He had some sort of problem with his ears that affected his hearing. Azeris, or “Turks” as they are referred to in Iran, often speak very loud and because of his hearing issues Mirsani spoke even louder. I never knew whether he was angry or just animated, but in all the time we were together we never fought. Not once.
Part of that was probably because we had a TV in our cell. The great pacifier. He could watch TV more than anyone I’ve ever met, which is incredible since he never understood completely what was happening on the screen.
I tried to stay in shape by walking laps—hundreds, I called them, because I did them in sets—in our concrete yard, and once they allowed me books I poured myself into those. The best mental escape.
But Mirsani didn’t read. “Bad for my eyes,” I understood he was telling me.
We learned a lot about each other without really having a common language. He had a wife and three kids. The oldest was already in her twenties. Mirsani had been a sniper in the Azerbaijani army during its war with neighboring Armenia, which I could never wrap my head around, because he was right handed and missing the essential part of that trigger finger. He sniped lefty, it turned out. I’m still not sure how Azerbaijan did in that war.
We had already figured out that we had one very important trait in common: our appetite, which had atrophied along with our muscles while in solitary.
In prison, especially if you have no idea how long you’ll be there, your aim isn’t to kill time, it’s to conquer it. Days naturally turn into segments. Routine—never my strong suit—had become everything. No surprises in the day, thank you very much.
As on the outside, the best time waster is a television, but what we had from the moment we stepped out of solitary wasn’t just any kind of TV; it was the full package of Iran’s state broadcaster in all its propagandistic, idiosyncratic, copyright-skirting, America-hating, America-obsessed, anti-Semitic, self-unaware, nationalistic, narcissistic, sexist, Shia glory.
It was horrible, but we quickly learned to be conscious consumers of the tripe. We had to, because it was our only source of information and diversion, and from the moment Mirsani woke up in the morning, it was turned on.
In those early days we filled ourselves on movies. The night we moved into our new room we quickly worked through the available channels. We came upon the early moments of Enter the Dragon dubbed into Farsi. I knew what I was looking at and so did Mirsani. “Ahhh. Bruce Lee,” he said. “Good.”
We settled in to watch. There was an advertisement at the end of the film notifying us that it was Bruce Lee Week. After the despair of solitary it was the first thing we had to look forward to and we clung to it.
Next it was Jackie Chan Week, and I can report that I’ve now seen more Jackie Chan movies than I previously knew existed. Jackie Chan Week actually became Jackie Chan Month, and because many of his older films are short, they would often play two of them, back to back. We watched so much Jackie Chan that we started to joke that he was our third cellmate. And when Jackie Chan Month was over he would pop up for a visit often in the distinctive voice of the dubbing artist who did his movies.
A character would speak—Johnny Depp or Ryan Reynolds—and I would say with confidence, “Jackie.”
Mirsani would lean closer to the TV from his pile of blankets, because that was our only furniture, and listen for a moment. “Haa,” he’d confirm. “Jackie.”
We heard that voice a lot.
But more important than the entertainment value was the window on the world that the television provided. It was the first actual evidence I had that my captors were lying to me about everything.
They said the Washington Post was doing absolutely nothing on my behalf. Not even talking about me. I found it hard to believe, but what did I know? I was not a permanent employee of the Post then. I was, like most foreign correspondents today, a contractor, a permanently hired gun. But any fears I had of that detail weakening their resolve to work on my behalf disappeared on September 24, as I watched, with a half-open jaw, an exchange between Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani and the Post’s executive editor, Marty Baron, being replayed on Iran’s state television. They were talking about me.
In a conference room filled with reporters, some of whom I recognized, others whom I knew personally, my hope was validated.
�
�First of all I just want to take this opportunity to revisit the subject of our correspondent Jason Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh. I would like to say to you personally that we believe that he deserves his freedom and we ask the government of Iran to release him,” Marty began. “But I want to ask you how the Iranian government can justify imprisoning a good journalist. I think you know he’s a good journalist and a good person. And having him imprisoned for two months and interrogated for two months, how is that possible?”
Much of that initial hope, though, was immediately dashed with Rouhani’s smug and evasive response. To my knowledge they were his first public words about my case, and as he has to this day, Rouhani refused to say my name.
“I myself don’t have any judgment about a person being investigated by our judiciary.”
Years later Marty’s straightforward question remains unanswered.
Before prison, I never watched Iran’s local TV, but now it was my only option. Through consistent watching I gained insights into the regime I probably never would have otherwise, despite all the censorship, or maybe because of it.
What was considered interesting, what was omitted, and what had to be shown to get people to tune in to a domestic broadcast rather than a foreign-based satellite one? I was surprised—sometimes for depressing reasons—on a daily basis.
Every night at eleven P.M. a channel called Namayesh—loosely translated as “Showtime”—would play a Hollywood movie. It didn’t take long to recognize that the films were chosen for their themes portraying American power, and Western lifestyles generally, in a negative light.
It was the quintessential Islamic Republic trade-off: give the people what they actually want, but try to spoon-feed them an extra helping of ideology and rhetoric.
In addition to their choices, the handiwork of the state media regulators was one aspect of watching a movie that never got old. In a society where sex out of wedlock was not only a sin but a crime, not to mention the even more evil acts of homosexuality and alcohol consumption, I imagined the decision to show Hollywood films created job security for legions of censors.
And translators.
You want examples? There is no dating in Iranian films. No boyfriends and girlfriends. Any unwed people who have contact with one another are “fiancées.” When characters in a movie walk into a bar and order a “cold beer” in Iran it becomes a “cold soft drink.”
This can go to extreme lengths and means that a lot of films are cut into tiny versions of themselves. When Yegi and I were allowed to see each other one day I told her that I’d watched The Big Lebowski the night before. She was stunned, because we had watched that uncensored at home.
“How long was it?” she asked.
“About fifty minutes.”
No white Russians, no marijuana smoking, no urinating, no Bunny Lebowski. Just a couple of guys bowling and a Persian rug.
The Untouchables is another one that sticks out. The whole story line of bootlegging and prohibition was eliminated, turning Al Capone into little more than a murderous tax evader.
In Philadelphia, Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas’s characters were brothers.
In that cell, though, there were also movies that did exactly what I needed them to when they came on the screen. I’m thinking about Moneyball, which, on the surface, is an odd choice for Iranian television.
True, my last Tehran-bylined article before my arrest was an in-depth look at Iran’s budding baseball community—further proof of my supposed goal to usher American values into Iranian life—but let’s be serious, baseball wasn’t taking off to the extent that people wanted to watch movies about it. No, this was all about a love for Brad Pitt.
It was the first time I had seen one of his movies on Iranian TV and I was pleasantly surprised that he was one of the actors that got dubbed by the Jackie Chan guy. Billy Beane and Jackie Chan are forever linked in my heart.
How could I not breathe out a huge sigh while watching the recounting of an epic baseball story—the Oakland A’s twenty straight wins in 2002—while I sat in Iranian prison? If this can make it all the way to me, here, these bastards can never win.
I only wish people around the world could wrap their head around the fact that Iran, or the Islamic State, or fascists, or the Soviets, never once posed a threat to our way of life and probably never will. We have the ultimate soft weapon, Hollywood, and it’s one that no matter how hard they try, they can’t replicate. They don’t know how to be all things to all people the way we do. You can’t learn that; you either have it or you don’t.
But here I was revisiting one of my favorite sports moments—a game that I attended with my dad and a couple of high school friends—as it was dramatized and played back to me in my prison cell more than seven thousand miles away from where it happened, in the Coliseum in Oakland, over a decade later.
There was no one I could explain the significance of this to, but that didn’t matter. Hollywood touched me, just like it was touching people all over town. You can’t undo that with rhetoric, especially not if it’s about guys that died fourteen hundred years ago. As usual, Iran was fighting a losing battle.
Every time I would point this out to Kazem his response was, “Yes, but we have Islam,” and he meant it, or at least he thought he did.
He knew I was right, though. If he loved Will Smith so much that he wanted to be played by him in a movie that would probably never get made, what about the many millions of young Iranians who were already openly opposed to the regime and everything that came along with Islamic rule?
American culture could not be shut out. I felt it to my core one afternoon, when alone in the cell something incredible happened: the Lucasfilm logo came on the TV, and boom, the Star Wars crawl started. It was Episode IV: A New Hope. I made the jump to light speed—and in Farsi—back to the hyperspace of my childhood.
Mirsani, after taking in the first few moments, turned over and put his blindfold back on to nap. “This film is kids film,” he said, his way of saying a movie was too unbelievable to maintain his interest. Instead he gravitated toward more highbrow material.
He loved Mr. Bean, whom he, like the rest of the world, knew by name.
He loved violence and big guns. And he had seen plenty of movies. Sylvester Stallone was Rambo and Dolph Lundgren was Ivan Drago, the name of his Russian character in the later Cold War–era classic Rocky IV, in which he costarred opposite Rambo.
Citizens of former Soviet countries don’t really know much about the twentieth century. Same with present-day Iranians. Their version of events is a strange hybrid of the nationalist bits of their own official history spliced with the shinier Hollywood one.
Mirsani loved anything with Bruce Willis, but not as much as he loved Jason Statham; if there was ever a movie made about my ordeal, he reported, that’s who he wanted to play him in it. This was becoming a running theme.
We would laugh at particularly violent scenes, especially if they seemed excessively fake.
And watching prison movies in prison? We knew no greater joy. Any time solitary was mentioned we would feign sympathy. “One week? Awwww.”
We watched and we watched, and thankfully the television was never taken away from us.
I watched the news religiously. Propaganda media, when viewed critically, can be an incredibly revealing window into what a state apparatus is trying to accomplish. And when I realized that my fate was absolutely intertwined with the fears of a major part of the ruling establishment over the impending nuclear deal and new opening with the West, I started to wonder if they would ever be able to undo what they had started with my arrest.
In typical Iranian fashion their response to the increasingly incredulous reactions of the world to my arrest was to double down.
I felt like I was losing my mind trying to make sense of it all, and then one day as I watched the news on Iran’s state TV, they were doing a human interest story about a guy from Ohio (so much of Iran’s state television is connected to, and
often produced in, the Great Satan). He wanted to raise $10 on Kickstarter—See, it exists!—to make potato salad, and somehow, for some reason, he ended up getting $55,000 pledged to his project. So he threw a party and raised a bunch of money for charity. It was quintessentially American.
Sitting in Evin Prison, very far away from Ohio, from my wife, my mother, my brother, my colleagues, and my home, I felt a little envious. A little bitter. Not just because guacamole is so much better than potato salad. I could do little more than shake my head.
Sometimes I just threw myself into infomercials. I was struck by the fact that Iran had finally picked up on the concept. It seemed so out of place. I hadn’t seen one in many years. Or maybe it was because they were exactly the same in tone as the ones I remembered from the early nineties, selling the same crap. At this very moment, all over Iran, BluBlockers and the Club are enjoying a second life.
I noted it in an interrogation one day, when it was becoming clearer I wasn’t going anywhere and that nothing I said or did had any bearing on how long I might be stuck there.
“I understand you are afraid of America’s influence. The cultural invasion is very real.” I meant what I was saying but wasn’t implying I had anything to do with it. “But it’s too late. It started so long ago. Your advertisements are just like American ones. And do you know why? Because they work.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Kazem said, with something between indifference and lamentation.
“This isn’t my fault. I am not an advertiser. I don’t have any product to sell. I don’t approve what goes on your TV. Those are decisions made within your precious system. I’m nobody.”
“No, J. You are somebody. We are just not sure who yet.”
I remembered a hundred days walking around Tehran and all the signs of consumerism. It didn’t even make sense to call it Western anymore, because it was everywhere. Freedom today, I would tell anyone who asked, is not the concept we have in America and Europe of choosing our leaders and expressing ourselves however we please. It’s the freedom to buy stuff and to access entertainment. If you give Iranians—most people, actually—unfettered access to that while increasing their income, they will love you forever.
Prisoner Page 11
