That is exactly what the IRGC feared. Sanctions didn’t bother them until it hurt people’s purchasing power and then it became a problem that needed to be rooted out.
How I was catapulted into being the architect of that problem is another issue. Some will say it was because I was an American, working for a high-profile American media company. But more than that it was that I was using that platform to tell these stories. Explaining parts of Iranian life that Iranians didn’t see themselves. That really didn’t take much, just a fresh set of eyes.
But I couldn’t explain that to Kazem or Borzou. These guys were black and white. No-dimensional.
I told Borzou, “You are not very good at your job.”
He was expecting a joke, because I worked those in sometimes unexpectedly. “Why not?” I could see his eyes smiling, though his face and nose remained covered by his surgical mask. He was waiting for a punch line.
“You are completely unable to put yourself in anyone else’s shoes. That’s why you fail. That’s why the nuclear deal is happening even though you were sure your ‘dear leader’ would stop it.”
He was angry, but he knew I was right.
“J, when you get out of here we want to stay in touch with you. Would that be okay?”
“I don’t know. If America is as bad as you say it is and you guys are willing to lock me up for nothing, what will they do to me if they find out I’m talking to you?”
“We’ll make it easy for you. We have people everywhere. We can even have meetings in Washington.”
“And what would you want from me? What would I have to give you?”
“No, J, not like that. It would be win-win, as they say.” That was Rouhani and Zarif’s catchphrase for the nuclear negotiations. He knew I knew. “We would just like this kind of information you’re giving us now.”
“This isn’t information, it’s what’s going on right in front of us. Just watching your censored TV anyone can see what an unjust and ridiculous system this is. And un-Islamic.”
He didn’t want to change the subject. “You just give us a report from time to time. Maybe not for several years, but give us a report that will help us understand what’s happening. Or maybe we can give you a piece of information that you can pass on to your friends in America to help them make a decision.” He had overplayed his hand and now switched course and was baiting me.
“No, I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t work for you and I don’t work for them. I work for the Washington Post.”
“What’s the difference? It’s all the same thing.” He was frustrated. He only ever came to see me at the end of the day, when he must have been tired.
“Sure. I’ll do exactly the same thing for you. I will make reports for you and publish them in the Washington Post. My work is completely public and transparent.”
“Yes, that’s why it was so hard for us to find you.” Borzou nodded, remembering he was playing a part. “How will we know they are for us or if it’s information we want?”
“You’ll know,” I assured him. “You’ll know.”
Most of the time I felt as though I were dealing with second graders. Second graders who admittedly had a lot of power over my fate.
WITH THE TV ON IN THE BACKGROUND, I WAS ALWAYS WAITING FOR A GLIMPSE OF PEOPLE I knew. People from my real life. It wasn’t hard to find them. I knew the entire international press corps in Tehran and they would make appearances on my screen often as would other friends and colleagues when Iranian officials made trips abroad.
But during a report on torture at Guantánamo I saw a familiar face from a different part of my past.
It was Christopher Hitchens. It was a short clip of his being water-boarded. He had submitted himself to that so he could report on the torturous practice for Vanity Fair. It was in 2008. I had seen it before. A lot of images popped onto my Iranian TV screen during those months, but that one kept coming back whenever the subject of American torture resurfaced.
The juxtaposition was hard to swallow.
One of the world’s biggest critics of religion, dictatorship, and hypocrisy, and one of Salman Rushdie’s best friends and protectors when Ayatollah Khomeini famously declared a fatwa against the author in 1989—so one of the Islamic Republic’s ideological foes—posthumously became the face of Iranian propaganda’s anti-Guantánamo material.
It was one more way that my old life, my American one, reached me in Evin. Every time they aired that clip of Hitchens, and it was often, I was transported. I had no doubt that if he were still alive, he’d have been one of those fighting passionately for my freedom.
I don’t think I need to tell you how incredible it was to be twenty-three and in New York City and one of the very few straight male students at Eugene Lang College, part of the New School, an extremely open-minded liberal arts college in the West Village.
I lived in the East Village on Sixth Street between First and Second Avenues. Yes, the block that has all the Indian joints on it, one of which I lived above, and I still kind of smell like curry.
No one in the nineties talked about the New School or its illustrious history, but in the classroom I was certain I had the best teachers possible for me.
I took a course in the history of reggae music. The instructor was Herbie Miller, who had a seemingly endless list of stories about the biggest names in Jamaican music. It was a one-credit class that met on Monday nights during a very cold winter.
In the last session of the semester, as we listened to some of reggae’s essential songs and very old recordings of the Nyabinghi drumming that is at the heart of the music, another student asked Herbie why he was such an authority.
“Oh me, mon? I dabbled in da industry for a couple years,” he replied coolly, explaining that he had been Peter Tosh’s longtime manager and had traveled the world with some of reggae’s biggest acts.
It was just like that there.
I had a class in jazz culture with the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Margo Jefferson.
I wasn’t there to study music, but I was trying new things and stretching out my horizons.
I had reconnected with an old friend from childhood, Noah, also a student at Lang. Because of my circuitous educational journey, which had taken me to four colleges—my dad used to call me a Road Scholar, apparently unaware that that’s not how you spell it—I was a year behind Noah by the end of college.
He and I would meet up often for drinks. A few weeks before the fall 1999 semester he told me, “There’s a class you have to take. I wish I was still in school just for this.”
“What’s the story?” I asked. Noah had never led me astray.
“It’s a literature class”—honestly, not really my thing at the time—“but the professor is this guy who’s a writer I really like. He absolutely skewered Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama.”
As he was known to do, Christopher Hitchens shook my world.
The class was a comparative literature seminar that looked at U.S. and British authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The class met—after our first session in a fluorescent-lit windowless classroom—at Borgo Antico, an Italian joint around the corner on Thirteenth Street.
The deal was that everyone had to order something—either food or beverage—and that Hitchens bought the first round. Our assignments were to read works of our choosing by a specific author before the next week’s class and be prepared to discuss them.
One evening Hitchens didn’t name an author, and as he walked out someone asked whether we had any homework that week.
Not missing a beat he said, “No, there is no assignment this week, as I assume that, being the products of the American school system, you will all have read The Education of Henry Adams several times.”
After class I went straight to the nearby Strand bookstore and asked one of the clerks to help me find a used copy among their endless stacks of books.
“Any idea who wrote it?” I asked him.
�
�I’m not sure, but I think we’ll find it in fiction.”
After some futile searches we finally found it in the Americana section.
“Turns out Henry Adams wrote it,” he said, handing a lightly worn copy to me. We both laughed, acknowledging our shared ignorance.
It was one of those moments that sticks with you. I went home and wrote Hitchens a letter questioning my liberal private school education, which had skipped so many of the classics we were reading in his class. I handed it to him at the next meeting, saying, “I just decided to write this.”
I hadn’t thought of it as an assignment or an essay, but the following week he handed it back to me with an A− written on the top. That was the beginning of what became an important relationship in my life.
I loved Hitchens for his humor, intellect, and kindness. His very complete humanity, really. Being in his presence I always learned something new.
I read a lot about Cuba during those days and also Iran, where my dad had just begun returning once a year after not being able to visit his three sisters who still lived there since the revolution in 1979. It seemed as though Iran was turning a corner as they had just elected a reform-minded president, Mohammad Khatami, who signaled a desire to open up to the world, including the U.S.
As I went deeper I was more struck than ever by how one-dimensional and weak the news coverage of these two places, which held very different places in my heart and mind, was. Both sucked for the same reason.
I was mulling that over one day in 1999 as I read the foreign section of the New York Times. On the same page there were stories about the Castro regime in Cuba, and Khatami and Iran. I looked at them both. They weren’t long, but the language was similar. In both cases the writer painted these countries in much harsher tones than they would have used for nations with less adversarial relations with the U.S.
It gave me an idea, which I took to Hitchens.
All seniors were required to produce a thesis-length research paper to graduate. I asked him if he thought there was something of value in comparing U.S. news coverage of Iran and Cuba before and after their respective revolutions. He called it a “latent and absorbing polemic,” and I got to work.
We talked about our experiences in Cuba, he since the 1960s and me much more recently, and also our shared desire to visit Iran. He had been denied entry by both the shah’s and ayatollahs’ regimes. When I was finally able to go in 2001 Hitchens encouraged me to do whatever it took to report from there, and he continued to open as many doors as he could for me in the years that followed.
Just before moving to New York I had told my dad, vaguely, that I “wanted to write.”
“What do you think you’re going to write, and who the hell do you think will read it?” was his chortled response.
I finally had my answer. Well, to the first part, at least.
If it wasn’t for Hitchens, none of this would have ever happened, I told myself every once in a while, and not in an angry way.
I began to feel a little less alone. By the end of October my wife and I were allowed a short visit each week. As the weeks dragged on we discussed the need for more public exposure of my detention. Through its actions, Iran’s system makes clear that the value of a human life is very little; the only thing less valuable is a person’s time.
We decided that trying to get as much attention as possible on our case was the best course of action. I was effectively silenced in the prison, so all the work would have to be done outside.
I told her, soberly, that if we chose that path I would certainly be freed one day, but that it might mean that it would take much longer.
But at that moment we made the decision that we wouldn’t be able to live with a headline that read, “Rezaian Pleads Guilty; Sentence Commuted.”
8
Let’s Face It: I’m a Hostage
I had been in Evin for over ninety days when Yadoallah arrived. Mirsani and I thought we had been there for a long time. When Yadoallah informed us he’d already been in section 2A of Evin Prison for over two and a half years our hopes dropped and our worst fears were confirmed. We had been moved from solitary because we wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. They put us into a section of the prison for long-term residents who, for reasons never explained, could not mix with the general population. “It’s not safe for you there,” was the stock bullshit answer from the prison staff.
Yadoallah didn’t like the room we were in. He saw it as a step backward, because he had also lived in it for the first year after he came out of eight months in solitary. Then he had been moved downstairs to a larger room with a bigger and sunnier yard. It was all he talked about, until finally the warden agreed to move all three of us to that space.
On the morning of November 4 something strange happened. It’s a date that I’ll never forget. How could I?
Due to a difference in the number of days between the Islamic lunar calendar and the accurate one that the rest of the world—the world that has long understood and accepted that the Earth revolves around the sun—uses, November 4, 2014, happened to be both the anniversary of the 1979 invasion of the U.S. embassy—the Islamic Republic’s original hostage-taking act, and the basis for their trademark brand of crimes against humanity moving forward—and Ashura, the most important Shia holiday, the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the sect’s central hero.
Imam Hussein, a descendant of Muhammad, along with a band of several dozen fighters was slaughtered by a better-armed force of a thousand followers of the caliph Yazid. The day marks the beginning of the simple yet irreversible divide between Sunnis and Shias that most non-Muslims refuse to understand.
This, to Shias, is the moment that defines their worldview, the idea from which Iran’s theocracy draws whatever appeal it still possesses. It’s “us against the world” in the classic sense, and fourteen hundred years later all Iranians need to do is turn on the local news to hear that message repeated for them. And on that day more than any other.
The television was on when I woke up. The state broadcaster had two of its favorite annual flash points to cover on the same day. Will it be flag burning and death to America, or thousands of black-shrouded, chest-beating wailers in unison? No need to choose, we can have both at once. They’re both intended for the same audience.
I watched, disgusted but enthralled. Understanding this spectacle and others was always part of the reason I had come to Iran. I would have done anything to cover that day’s events. I’m sure I could have found an angle that would have turned the whole thing on its ear. In a way, it’s what I loved about the place. Better not to let myself go down that path so early in the day.
Before long a guard arrived.
“Sixty-two, let’s go,” he said, preoccupied with the mourning rituals like everyone else. We could hear the chants and prayers being repeated in the prison mosque, just on the other side of our tall wall. It was a day when most Iranians, Shia ones at least, put aside their differences.
The guard led me a few feet from our cell’s door into the open. Kazem was there.
“Salaam,” he said.
“Salaam. My condolences,” I said, knowing that it was the right greeting for the day. That he was dressed in all black, with several days of facial-hair growth, was a good reminder.
“And to you. You are Shia,” he pointed out.
“Well, I’m not Joe-ish,” I said, and he laughed. “Interrogations even on Ashura? That can’t be legal,” I said, surprised.
“No, no. The Great Judge thinks it will be good if you exercise. Twenty minutes every two days.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of this offer.
“It is a big sign that you are going home,” Kazem said. “You must be healthy.”
All things considered, that made perfect sense. After he’d failed to meet all the promised release cutoffs, here he was, ashamed, telling me that his superiors said I could work up a sweat. I wasn’t about to argue.
The gym was a small r
oom, obviously underground. There was a bench press, some weights, and a rickety-looking stationary bike, cross trainer, and treadmill. The room was lit by two exposed bulbs.
I pondered my options. I hadn’t spent time in a gym in years, and I was feeling extremely weak. Twenty minutes isn’t much, I thought as I mounted the cross trainer. It felt good to move my flabby muscles. I tired quickly, and I sweated. Way sooner than I wanted, the time was up.
The guard had a camcorder and recorded my exercising, documentation that I was being treated extremely well.
“We’ll bring you back the day after tomorrow,” the guard told me, leading me home.
I had turned some kind of corner. I watched old footage of the embassy takeover and the flag burning, and knew all the lies embedded in the official state narrative as well as the people responsible for taking the hostages. The symbolism of the day and the minor gesture mattered, I just didn’t know why yet. I was now an undisputed point on a long line. For the growing community of us—those foreign nationals taken captive by the regime—Iran’s revolution was actually the birth of the Hostage-Taking Republic of Iran.
The Iranian revolution culminated in 1979 with the founding of the Islamic Republic and the taking of the American embassy in Tehran, that 444-day episode that consumed the nation’s attention. Nearly four decades later Americans still know what “hostage crisis” is shorthand for, and to the small but growing diaspora community of Iranians living in the U.S. it was certainly a crisis.
I can’t say I remember that period well. I was three when it started and not even five when it ended, but it left a deep and indelible mark on our lives.
My dad had already lived in America for over twenty years. He was a citizen and a well-known member of the Marin County community. He was anything but fanatical. He embraced almost everyone he came in contact with, sometimes physically.
He had the thickest accent, and when people would invariably ask him where he was from his response was, “I’m Iranian by birth and I’m American by choice, and I’m proud of both.” Such a simple, honest, and maybe uniquely American attitude to have. One that some people—including very powerful ones in both his native land and his adopted one—have been trying to stamp out, unsuccessfully so far, since that time.
Prisoner Page 12
