Edward Snowden tweeted, “Iran’s shocking conviction of a journalist on secret evidence must not stand. #FreeJason.”
Noam Chomsky and two dozen other well-known academics published an open letter demanding my release and calling my trial a sham.
“No matter what you do to me,” I reminded Kazem every chance I got, “you can’t win.”
What could still make a difference, I believed, were individualized statements on my behalf by people who knew me. Testimonials. I didn’t have the right to call witnesses in the Revolutionary Court, but I knew there were people I had met all over the world who were ready to testify on my behalf.
Amber Thorsen, my first love and a lifelong friend, took it upon herself to tell people about me. She did so at work and on the Internet, and she wore a T-shirt—made for her by a friend—that she called her “human billboard” that read “Free Jason & Yegi” over “Change.org.”
Several friends in different parts of the world, unaware of each other and in solidarity with me, didn’t shave for months.
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO MEASURE THE IMPACT OF THIS OUTPOURING OF LOVE AND SUPPORT ON decision makers in Tehran, but I knew that it would matter in Washington and New York, where the conversation was being led in the media.
And more than that, hearing about all the ways I hadn’t been forgotten gave me much-needed periodic shots of hope. It renewed some of my lost faith in humanity and reminded me of one of the great things about Americans, born from the freedoms that have been endowed to us. This is one of those arguments that no Iranian nationalist or anti-American anywhere hell-bent on painting America as a force of no good will ever be able to win. American lives matter. (If enough people give a shit.)
I was not so naive as to think that the voice of the people was going to shake me out of Iran. Self-proclaimed experts are torn on the idea of how best to engage the Iranian regime on hostages they’ve taken. Some say it is essential to make as much noise publicly as possible, that the regime only responds to pressure. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that may be true.
Others believe that the regime in Tehran is concerned with its public image and for that reason anyone who attempts to sully its name any further risks raising its ire, which leads authorities to take capricious action. That everything is resolved in due time.
I would offer an alternative view. No authority in Iran acts—in this case takes a hostage—without seeking a reward. It would be giving them too much credit to think that at the point of abduction the power involved knows what it actually wants in return. It would also be a mistake to believe that other actors in the system will wholeheartedly support this action. No, there is a lot of internal debate over the merits of taking a hostage, the pros and the cons. The short- and long-term effects at home and abroad.
It would be yet another mistake to think that simply talking can help get hostages out. Reason with them and they’ll see the light, goes the thinking. Find a face-saving way to defuse an embarrassing situation. Here’s the thing: If you’re worried about saving face you don’t take hostages. Period.
All of these beliefs undercut a core value of Iranian mercantilism, which is the basis for its diplomacy. It’s the old tenet “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what can I get for it?”
Without testing the market and setting a price, Iranians won’t let something that’s fallen in their lap go. It just doesn’t work like that.
And when the value finally gets set, the initial price is going to be very high. So best to dig in, sit back with a smile on your face, enjoy many cups of tea, and realize you may not even end up buying a rug from this guy after a lot of back-and-forth. And if you don’t it’s not the end of the world. Although they’re each unique and made by hand, there will always be others.
Trading for rugs and hostages, in turns out, is pretty much one and the same.
It may have been reckless to want my perceived value to be raised. America knew I hadn’t done anything wrong and so did Iran. But without a significant campaign to raise awareness nothing was going to happen.
Call it a savvy acquisition or dumb luck, but the intelligence wing of the IRGC had this working for them throughout my imprisonment.
On the outside, my brother continued to crisscross the world. He made twenty trips to Washington in 2015. He was away from home for over two hundred nights that year. He met with heads of state, arms dealers, journalists, and diplomats. He was on regular phone calls with the Washington Post’s top brass to discuss progress. Extraction plans were floated but were later deemed too risky. There were discussions about running a Free Jason ad during the Super Bowl. Jeff Bezos worried that there was a real chance that I’d be executed.
While all of that was going on, it became crystal clear to me that I wasn’t coming home until Barack Obama decided I had to.
As the time dragged on, there were flurries of activity and then weeks, sometimes months of nothing. It was hard to decide which one was worse.
During the nothingness I just craved the presence of someone who could answer the endless questions running through my mind. I knew if such a person came along their replies would be utter bullshit, but by the spring of 2015 I was better equipped to interpret it.
On those days when there was action, though, I just wanted to be alone and not have to interact with the willfully ignorant and blatant hypocrites that were my captors and the structures that kept them employed.
Since Christmas Kazem and Borzou had been telling me that my trial would be starting “next week.” The feeling of anticipation and fear was excruciating.
On the one hand, I knew I was going to lose, and on the other I knew that until I lost there wasn’t even the slightest chance that I would be set free. You can call it Orwellian or a catch-22, but to me it was just a well-established fact that I wouldn’t be released until they hung a stiff sentence on me.
When looking at the cityscape of Tehran one sees that it is littered with unfinished construction jobs. Half-completed eyesores that gather dust over decades. They make up for it with what they consider their judicial efficiency. It’s very rare that a trial does not end. “Justice,” the Koran dictates, must be served.
By the time my trial began on May 25, 2014, I already knew that it was a date to look forward to, an obstacle that had to be overcome.
My captors argued that I was attempting—through my reporting—to change American behavior toward Iran and that this was my crime. If so, guilty as charged. Perhaps. Everyone was beginning to see that the case they were making against me would be a very hard one to sell in court if I decided to defend myself.
But on the surface that is what this case was all about. Take a guy who is, with some level of empathy toward Iran, describing in plain English the various elements of the Islamic Republic’s ethos to an audience that for decades decided it did not want to or could not understand it. It was too much for hardline ideologues to comprehend, which means it was impossible for them to accept. If you can’t own it, control it, or understand it you must destroy it. That was the attitude I found myself up against.
And when it came time for my day in court I wondered if the judge’s understanding of the world and the nuances that flourish naturally in the light of day would have a wider range of colors than that of my interrogators. But it became very obvious very quickly that my judge, Abolqasem Salavati, was, without exaggeration, one of the dumbest people I have ever encountered.
As usual, in our last meeting before my trial started Yegi had some good intelligence and knew my first session was coming in a matter of days. “You will go to court and you will fight,” she commanded. “There is no pleading guilty.”
I nodded.
“Answer the judge’s questions completely, and in each case add that ‘this act is not a crime,’ but keep your answers short. Less is more.” My wife’s English was excellent when we met, but I’ll take some credit for her expert use of American idioms. I felt lucky and proud to have her as my only link to the world.
Those were my only marching orders.
11
The Trial
May 25, 2015
TRIAL SESSION 1
On the day of the first trial session I was told at eight A.M. to come to my cell’s gate. Despite the heads-up from Yegi that the trial would be starting that week, I’d had no way of verifying it.
I put on my silver Adidas sweat suit. I knew from previous excursions outside the prison walls that they would force me to put on my prison clothes, to brand me in the public’s eyes as a criminal, so I hid in our toilet stall to waste time until the guard started yelling that I was late.
When they took me to the warden’s office someone called out that I needed to change my clothes, but I just kept saying, “My expert said I could wear whatever I want.”
That wasn’t true. Kazem would never say that. But I kept saying it anyway. The warden, whom I rarely saw, said there was no time, and I claimed my first tiny victory: the freedom to wear my own clothes.
That day it was the same routine as I had been through every other time I left the prison. I was blindfolded and put in the back of an ambulance with curtained tinted windows.
After a couple of minutes on the freeway, I was allowed to remove the blindfold. I recognized all the guys along for the ride, including the driver, that jovial prick.
When we arrived at Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court, we entered through a back gate. Normally anyone who was packing heat had to relinquish their arms when entering a government building—anyone, that is, except the IRGC. But the Revolutionary Court was an exception, and there was a minor argument at the front gate between my chaperones and the court’s security people.
I had learned that these guys adored their guns and forcing them to hand them over was the most emasculating thing that could be done to them. I loved watching it happen.
It turned out that it didn’t matter what I was wearing, because no members of the press or the public were allowed to see me. I knew from writing about other cases that journalists—domestic and foreign ones—gathered in front of the court on major trial days to catch a glimpse of defendants. Are they in the prison clothes? How much weight have they lost? Any visible bruises or scars? As much as I hated the idea of being the focus of such a spectacle, there was nothing more that I wanted right then than to be seen by my local colleagues. This could be any one of you, I longed to tell them.
We parked in the back of the building and I realized that there were two other cars along with us. Every time I left Evin I had an entourage of at least ten armed clowns guarding me.
At the main gate buses filled with dozens of inmates waiting to be tried were unloading. Most of the passengers were supposed drug offenders, shackled together and marched into the building single file. Even with the deck stacked against me I knew I was in far better shape than those guys. Officially, Iran’s judiciary carried out 977 executions in 2015.
I paced a little but couldn’t go far, and then I was led up the stairs into an office building that looked exactly like every other center of Islamic Republic bureaucracy. Long hallways with fluorescent lights, lots of closed doors with people hopelessly waiting outside them. Signs extolling the virtues of the hijab and others threatening women who didn’t wear one properly. I had wasted so many hours in this sort of bureaucratic office over the years—trying to get my military exemption (which is sold to citizens born or raised abroad whenever the Islamic Republic needs cash), or my press pass, or my dad’s death certified—where nothing ever happens according to official procedure. I knew this place.
I told my guards that I wanted to go to the bathroom before being taken into the courtroom and we wound around the large off-white hallways, passing nothing but closed doors until we found a men’s room. One of them accompanied me in and stood by the door of the stall while I did my business.
Coming out I could see turnstiles and security gates in front of me and realized it was the court’s front entrance. Blocked from entering, behind the gates were my mom and Yegi. I threw my hands in the air and shouted, “I love you, Mom! I love you, baby!”
This caught my guards by surprise and the driver muffled my mouth with his hands. I didn’t resist, but neither did I slow my stride. I knew it was the right move. At once I represented strength and love to my mom and wife, and they had a small but impactful image of suppression and abuse that they could relay to others. Not only was Jason Rezaian not allowed any contact with his lawyer, his mother and wife were barred entry to the court and he wasn’t even allowed to speak to them. Another detail that could be included in a story of my first day in court.
My heart began to race. This was a new chapter in my saga. I was scared of the coming barrage of questions, but I was confident. By taking me out of the prison walls and expanding the sphere that my case inhabited, the IRGC was loosening their control over the situation and increasing the variables at play, providing me with a hint of influence for the first time since my arrest.
My guards were pissed by my emotional outburst.
“You don’t speak to anyone without our permission. In fact, you only speak to us or the judge. No one else. Got it?” the driver said. He had driven me every time I left the prison: to buy clothes at the high-end men’s shop for the purpose of my completely optional forced confessions, to the few perfunctory doctor’s appointments at an IRGC hospital when I had serious health problems and was told I was completely healthy, and to the lone meeting with my attorney two months before the trial started, where he was in the room the entire time.
He was in his late forties, had a belly, employed a comb-over to disguise the deep recession currently taking place on his hairline, wore stylish eyeglasses and colorful shirts. He seemed happy. I hated him passionately. I had since that first encounter.
“I was just telling my wife and mother that I love them. Is that a crime, too?” I asked.
“They are your wife and mother. They know you love them. You don’t need to scream it in the Revolutionary Court. If that happens again we will have a problem. Understood?”
“No problem,” I replied. Resisting their orders would do nothing except cause me greater discomfort.
They walked me to the actual courtroom. Along the way we passed three twentysomething guys dressed in faded jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers. Wearing the clothes of today’s global youth, they could have been from anywhere. They recognized me and whispered to each other. One of them smiled. I just nodded.
The guards sat me in the courtroom and left the door open to the hallway. Within a minute the three walked by, ducking their heads in and giving me the thumbs-up. I smiled. The walls were cracking. Even parts of the Iranian public were on my side. Yegi had told me so, but this was the first time I could see it. I felt my back straighten and my confidence swell.
I learned later that those three young men were musicians who faced charges of distributing underground music. They lost their trials and started serving three-year sentences in June 2016.
One of the guards slammed the door shut.
I looked around and besides the emblem of Iran’s judiciary—to me always a farcically sinister-looking take on the international symbol of justice: a balanced scale with a sword dividing it down the middle—the courtroom looked like a waiting room in any Islamic Republic bureaucratic office and probably was used as one on days when court was out of session.
The chamber began to fill up with a lot of people whom I didn’t recognize. The only ones I had ever seen before were my lawyer; the prosecutor; the court clerks, each of whom came to greet me personally; and my transporters. Behind me there were at least twenty other people, all of them men with facial hair of varying lengths.
Next to the judge’s elevated bench were two television cameras pointed directly at me.
When Salavati entered the chamber, I asked if I could approach the bench. I stuck out my hand and he shook it. Nodding his head toward the cameras he said, “Look at what a headache yo
u’ve made for me.”
“Headache for you? I have been in prison for a year for doing absolutely nothing and the whole world knows it,” I reminded him. “Hajjagha, you have the power to end this whole story now and send me home.” I knew that was only partly—though officially—true, but I said it anyway. He didn’t respond and I was led gently by the arm, by the bailiff, to my seat.
Salavati brought the room to order and read from a script what I was accused of, the case number, and a standard explanation of everyone present’s responsibilities and my rights; the requisite song and dance to give the proceedings an air of being official if not authentic.
One of the clerks rose and read a passage from the Koran. That, it seemed, was his only job. I learned later it was the passage that is always read for people destined for the gallows, the fate of traitors. It’s designed to intimidate, but I don’t speak Arabic.
When he was finished Salavati then began to read the charges against me, but I interrupted him.
To this point, despite threatening to execute me multiple times, the “Hanging Judge” had been completely cordial in our short series of interactions, but now the courtroom was full and the cameras were on.
“Your Honor, before we begin I would like to make a couple of requests and ask a few questions with your permission,” I said. “If I have that right,” I added in for good measure.
“But make it quick.”
“I would like to request that I be given the opportunity to be released on bail.”
“Denied.”
“I would like to know who all of these people in the room are,” I said, motioning mostly to the people behind me.
“You want to know who they are? Why does it matter?”
“I was told this was a classified session. It looks very crowded.”
“Don’t worry, they all belong here. They are with us.”
Prisoner Page 18
