Prisoner

by Jason Rezaian

  MY SITUATION SEEMED TO BE STABILIZING, NOT THAT IT PROVIDED MUCH HOPE. IN THE CORNER of our yard there was an old fountain covered in dirt with some gnarled plants sticking out. Roses started to bloom and I began, timidly at first, using a contraband knife an earlier resident had left behind, to cut one or two to take with me to my visits with Yegi that had just been reinstated. We were able to see each other on Tuesday mornings for an hour and were given sporadic conjugal visits when Islamic law stipulated that it couldn’t be ignored any longer. I wanted to do anything I could to manufacture some sense of normalcy and beauty during such an ugly time. I never got any blowback from the guards. By that point, despite whatever danger they were told I supposedly posed, they knew I was harmless.

  It was a tough high-wire act they were trying to pull off: hold me as a foreign hostage, but treat me as an Iranian prisoner.

  When she had been freed on bail Yegi was forced to sign a contract saying that she wouldn’t speak to the media, but threatening to publicize the denial of our religious rights as husband and wife, at a time when world leaders were beginning to take my detention seriously, was the only leverage she had over the court and IRGC, and she used it skillfully.

  When Yegi visited me at Evin Prison on March 14, 2015, she smiled in a way I had not seen since before our arrest nearly eight months earlier.

  “Muhammad Ali issued a statement calling for your release,” she said, beaming.

  Initially I thought she was just trying to lift my spirits. I had told her recently that I did not want to hear any more bad news about my situation, which looked hopeless.

  It was the day before my thirty-ninth birthday and I was at a low point, suffering from the weight of a long forced isolation, but once she convinced me that it was indeed true, I cried the happiest tears of my captivity and felt the strongest I had in months.

  It was a turning point for me. The public acknowledgment by Muhammad Ali, one of the most unifying figures in the world, that he believed I was innocent of any wrongdoing meant everything to me.

  And that blow had real impact.

  We were turning some kind of corner, but the road had so many twists and turns ahead. I didn’t know it yet, but the statement was part of the efforts by the other Ali in my life, my big brother, and his new and well-positioned friends in Washington, to draw attention to my plight.

  After the Greatest of All Time released the statement on my behalf, several of my prison guards told me they had heard about it, and some began to treat me differently—better, and with more respect. I like to think that his words made them doubt the forces who signed their paychecks.

  The next day in the cell, flipping through the channels, I chanced on a documentary about Muhammad Ali and his legal battle against being sent to fight in Vietnam. I knew people around Iran would be watching it and some of them would have heard about his statement in support of me. I am one of literally billions of people affected by the life and actions of Muhammad Ali.

  At the time, a domestic Iranian news agency wrote, “One of the most astounding moves by the U.S. government and Rezaian’s family was bringing the famed American boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who is very popular in Iran, into Jason’s freedom campaign. They used his popularity to influence Iranian public opinion.”

  There was an odd truth to this logic, but not the one they intended.

  I needed that shot of strength, as the legal part of my ordeal was just getting started.

  I DON’T THINK I’M RUINING THE ENDING BY TELLING YOU THAT IF YOU’RE PUT ON TRIAL IN A COURT that has “Revolutionary” in its name, you shouldn’t expect to win.

  Anyone living in Iran or covering it closely has some awareness of Abolqasem Salavati. He is a judge in Tehran at Branch 15 of Iran’s Revolutionary Court.

  Salavati, often called the “Judge of Death,” for his affection for sentencing people to death by hanging, was chosen to hear my case. Throughout my trial and the two preliminary meetings I had with him before the trial began, I was able to clarify that I, without the benefit of any legal training nor access to legal representation, seemed to know much more about the law than he did. All he knew was that whatever he decided, or was compelled to decide, was law. I tended to disagree and I let him know it, backing it up with arguments. Ours was a strange and strained relationship.

  My case was taking place inside a very small ideological vacuum, one that I knew would not be impacted by whatever I did or said. Plea or no plea, I was guilty and the sentence was already written. All my team, which consisted of my wife, my mother, and local lawyers, could do was get as much information as possible outside of that bubble. The further away from the inside it got, the more absurd it would appear. Proving my innocence to the world, and thus continuing to receive support from far and wide, was the only defense available to me.

  Farcical institutions require cartoonish figures to front them and Salavati fit the bill perfectly.

  Not a lawyer with a polished educational pedigree. Not someone who had particularly well-known revolutionary bona fides. Not even a cleric. Just a scary-looking guy who most people agreed had been a janitor at some point, and now held the key to the courtroom where Iran’s most high-profile cases—especially ones that involved foreigners—were tried.

  MINE WAS A CASE OF THE HIGHEST CRIMES AND ONLY SALAVATI WAS EXPERIENCED ENOUGH TO hear it, the narrative went. He could be a punch line to every tasteless joke about all that is wrong with the Islamic Republic.

  Salavati, it turned out, was the judge in the case of every single captive in Evin 2A, including both of my cellmates.

  “He’s a butcher,” Yadoallah had said.

  “He’s that evil?” I asked, scared.

  “No,” he guffawed. “Like a butcher everything is done by weight. He hands out sentences by the kilo.” That assessment stayed with me in the months that I waited to finally be called before this mythical figure.

  I was feeling stronger. I was spending time in the gym, walking for hours in circles in our yard, reading, and my sporadic access to calories kept my weight down.

  More than anything, though, it helped that the intensity around efforts to get me out was undoubtedly picking up, rising to a climax at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, 2015. I didn’t see it, but this is what Obama said right after he finished his annual stand-up routine.

  “Now that I got that off my chest—you know, investigative journalism, explanatory journalism, journalism that exposes corruption and justice, gives voice to the different and the marginalized, the voiceless—that’s power. It’s a privilege. It’s as important to America’s trajectory, to our values, our ideals, than anything that we could do in elected office,” Obama said.

  “We remember the journalists unjustly imprisoned around the world, including our own Jason Rezaian. For nine months, Jason has been imprisoned in Tehran for nothing more than writing about the hopes and the fears of the Iranian people, carrying their stories to the readers of the Washington Post, in an effort to bridge our common humanity. As was already mentioned, Jason’s brother, Ali, is here tonight and I have told him personally, we will not rest until we bring him home to his family safe and sound.”

  Obama wasn’t really given a choice that night. He had to talk about me.

  My brother, the Washington Post, and WilmerHale, the law firm they hired to help build a case against Iran, along with the community of organizations fighting for journalists’ protection and many of my colleagues, had made sure of that. Besides writing op-eds and mentioning me in their remarks, many of them distributed and wore #FREEJASON pins.

  The lift I got from hearing about it continued the wave of confidence that Muhammad Ali had inspired a few weeks earlier. I needed it as we entered into a new season of my ordeal.

  A couple of days later, back on U.S. soil, where he’s always most comfortable, Zarif was at it again, talking to David Ignatius, this time at NYU, just a few blocks away from the New School and my old stomping grounds.

&nbs
p; “Mr. Minister, I want to ask you one more question. And it’s a personal one, because it involves my colleague Jason Rezaian, who has been imprisoned in Iran on charges of espionage that his family, his newspaper, and now the U.S. government, in the voice of President Obama last Saturday, say are false,” Ignatius began. “In the spirit of the moment, we’re talking about momentous agreements, in the spirit of what President Obama’s called mutual interest and mutual respect, wouldn’t this be a good time for the release of my colleague Jason?” Ignatius asked.

  And then Zarif, this green-card-holding, U.S.-law-degree-wielding sonofabitch of a foreign minister of a sovereign state, understanding full well how slander in the United States of America works, said:

  “Well, as I told you in Munich and I’m telling you again, that I hope that no one—nobody will be lingering in prison, including a lot of Iranians who committed no crime across the world but are waiting in prison to be extradited to the United States for violating U.S. sanctions, which are illegal anyway. One of them died in the Philippines in prison. So I’m not trying to make it quid pro quo, but I’m just saying that, of course—I mean, the Washington Post has a much better publicity campaign about Jason than we have about people who are lingering in prisons in Southeast Asia as well, who committed no crime. Unfortunately, your friend and my friend, Jason, is accused of a very serious offense. And I hope that he’s cleared in the court. But he will have to face a court. He’s an Iranian citizen.”

  Jason Rezaian, your friend and mine. That’s probably what they’ll put on my tombstone.

  As much as this back-and-forth angered me in ways that blurred my vision, I was still able to see that it was creating buzz. Even the Iranian propaganda machine wanted to make sense of what the struggle over me really meant.

  The very next day I was watching Press TV and one of my favorite shows, Face to Face, came on. The basic premise is the same as that of every Sunday morning newsmaker show: a one-on-one interview, but in this case almost always a minor official or visiting foreigner to Tehran, with the channel’s director of news, the clownlike Hamid Reza Emadi. On this particular episode, he was talking with Elham Aminzadeh, President Rouhani’s assistant for citizen’s rights.

  “If the United States realized one of its nationals is in trouble in another country or one of its nationals is coming under any kind of restrictions by another country, the government comes to that person’s help. And even we have seen that if an American national gets killed anywhere in the world the U.S. government takes an official position. Or if an American national gets jailed in another country, like this person Jason Rezaian, who is in jail in Iran being investigated for things that the Iranian judiciary is probing right now, the U.S. government takes an official position. We don’t see that much support for Iranian citizens on the part of the Iranian government. Why do you think that is so?” Emadi asked, in one of the many instances where a regime devotee unknowingly undermined his own position by asking a poorly formulated question.

  “This is the weakness, actually, of our organs to implement diplomatic protections of nationals, Iranian nationals abroad,” was the only feeble, albeit honest, answer that Aminzadeh could muster.

  I remembered the one question that Iranians with no read on the outside world would invariably ask me and other dual nationals. Usually a taxi driver or a college kid. “Which one is better, America or Iran?” It was an uninformed question that felt impossible to answer. “Both of them have their pros and cons,” had been my stock reply for years.

  But now I had the undeniable answer.

  The person chosen to represent the rights of Iranian citizens, appearing on Iran’s international propaganda channel, was admitting to me, probably the only person in the world watching and one of the few whom it mattered to, that Americans have rights in the world and Iranians don’t and that her government couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about it.

  By then I had a prison routine. I was on a kind of autopilot, doing time—“drinking cold water” as they say in Farsi—with no end in sight. I had the gym and my books, and there was no new reason for my captors to cause me any fresh suffering, so they mostly left me alone.

  Tuesday mornings had become the centerpiece of my rituals. I was led blindfolded by a guard out of my cell, down the open-air corridor that flanked it, up a flight of brick stairs, and into a short indoor hallway past the warden’s office.

  Sometimes someone would talk to me. “Mr. J, how are you this morning?” If it was quiet they would be friendly. “You’re still here?” It was the sickly passive-aggressive and uniquely Iranian way of expressing oneself in an uncomfortable situation.

  The awkwardness of walking blindfolded never goes away and sometimes I would bump into a wall if a guard wasn’t guiding me, at which point I would call out, “My human rights! What about my human rights?” Everyone would laugh.

  For several months I refused to shave.

  “What’s up with the ISIS beard, J?” someone would ask.

  “I’m in mourning,” I’d reply, deadpan. Shias go unshaven when they grieve.

  “What are you mourning?” they asked.

  “Justice in the Islamic Republic.”

  They’d just let it go.

  I had been there long enough that the prison staff was used to me. Everyone knew the score by then. I was, like so many former residents, just waiting to be leveraged.

  Other times, if it was busy and there were interrogators or agents working other cases milling around, the attitude was colder. Conversations were carried on in hushed tones and the corridors smelled more strongly of unbathed Middle Eastern men. I hated those people, although I never saw any part of them besides their feet, usually wearing cheap rubber flip-flops, similar to the ones I was given to wear.

  The same guard who the day before might have been on a first-initial basis with me—and probably would be again an hour later—would say, “Sixty-two, pull your blindfold lower and keep your head down.”

  On Tuesday mornings, passing the office door, and in open air again, my excitement and anticipation would grow. This was my life. An hour, once a week, behind a glass window with my wife. I had absolutely nothing else to look forward to.

  Some weeks there was no news. Nothing. Other times it was bad: a hardline MP had called for my execution or my lawyer had been denied another request for rights that were legally available to me. I had gotten used to it by the spring of 2015. The fix was in and everyone had a role to play, including me. Mine was to survive.

  It was during a visit in early May 2015 when my mom made her first appearance behind that window.

  I hadn’t seen or spoken to her since the Christmas encounter. I was glad to see her but also felt more hopeless than ever. She’d returned to Tehran because my lawyer had advised that my trial would be starting “soon.” I didn’t believe that, but I knew that when Mom was in town there was a greater sense of urgency: more international news stories and more pressure on her from my captors to “get Obama and Kerry to do something.”

  “Everyone knows what an injustice this is,” she assured me. “We are working to get you out of here.”

  “Work harder,” I said with a sarcastic half grin that she knew better than anyone.

  There was so much I wanted to ask her, but as usual I forgot the most important questions. I wasn’t allowed to take anything, especially not written notes, with me to those weekly meetings. We talked about friends and family, and I tried to jog my memory but couldn’t.

  I was just looking for a positive sliver to latch on to even for a moment.

  “Hey, Mom, is it true that Muhammad Ali called for my release?” I asked her. I’d believed it when Yegi had told me that around my birthday, about two months earlier, but now it seemed so long ago that I might have imagined it.

  “Of course,” my mom replied in her animated way. “That was really something.”

  “Yeah.” I pondered it for a moment. “So you’re telling me I’ve got the two most influen
tial American Muslims on my side?”

  “Muhammad Ali and Congressman Keith Ellison?” she said.

  “No.” I paused and smirked. “The Champ and Obama.”

  I KNEW WHAT I DESPERATELY NEEDED WAS FOR THERE TO BE MORE COLOR TO THE STORY.

  Of course there was nothing I could actually do from inside and only a limited amount I could communicate to the outside world through my contact with Yegi and my mom.

  “Get people to say whatever they want about me as long as it’s true,” I commanded the two women in my life.

  My belief was that the public was drawn to compelling figures, making them even more attractive to the news business. With the reach of social media soaring, I believed that people could help drive the conversation. And the longer and more often I was talked about—and the more diverse the audience who heard about me—the more likely I would get home.

  As I knew from my very cursory readings of old online marketing books when I was still selling rugs, it’s important to keep your business in the public conversation, but it’s almost equally essential to maintain honesty and transparency while doing it. People smell a rat very quickly and once you’ve lost them it’s hard to get their trust back.

  “Write to everyone who knows me and ask them to post whatever they know about me on their Facebook pages,” was a command I gave to my mom during a meeting that summer.

  It may have sounded simple or even dumb, but I understood that in this age if everyday people don’t care, no one on the top will either. It’s easier than ever for normal people to make their concerns known.

  By then the outpouring of public support for my release—and against Iran’s egregious actions—had hit high decibel levels. More than half a million people had signed a petition on Change.org demanding my freedom. Well-recognized figures from politics, media, entertainment, and the scholarly community had all made very public calls for my release. Critics of the American system—the sort that the Islamic Republic considers their allies—were very publicly taking my side.