Prisoner

by Jason Rezaian

  “You will go on President Rouhani’s plane with him to New York,” Kazem said with certainty. For over a year Rouhani had done everything he could to distance himself from my case, refusing ever to even say my name publicly. He was about as likely to fill his plane with transgender prostitutes—of which Iran has many—to prove the Islamic Republic’s progressiveness as he was to give me a lift back to America.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I told Kazem. “Maybe when pigs fly.”

  “What?” he asked, smiling as he formed the forbidden and impossible image in his mind.

  “It’s a proverb.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means that what you’re saying sounds like bullshit.”

  “But, J, this is very true. You must be happy. God is helping you.”

  “We’ll see,” I told him. “Swear to God?”

  “Yes, swear to God this is the plan.” He paused. “Right now.”

  Motherfucker.

  As the days passed and it became obvious that the judge had no intention of following the Iranian law that mandated him to announce a verdict within a week of the final court session, the media machine working on my behalf pushed itself into an even higher gear.

  When a farcical closed-door trial is ongoing and being publicized in an antagonistic foreign capital, it’s easier to keep the flame of disgust blazing, but when the news actually stops and there are no more reasons for reporters to show up at the courthouse steps, that fire dwindles to a flicker atop a pile of smoldering embers that needs poking.

  Between my brother, the Washington Post, and the legal team, they were not going to let the flames die.

  It was in those weeks and months that followed the trial that I was elevated into the latest symbol of America’s ongoing battle of ideas with Iran.

  It’s a strange feeling when your life becomes emblematic to both sides in a tug-of-war. It usually happens to people of much greater stature than me. Or after you’re dead. The only comparison that seemed to fit was Elián González.

  But as 2015 began to wind down and the implementation of the nuclear deal, which would end decades of sanctions and free up billions of dollars of Iranian assets, approached, the quest to bring me home intensified.

  The Washington Post editorial board wrote about my prolonged detention and Iran’s propaganda campaign against me on November 24, 2015, “What could explain this welter of misinformation? Possibly Rezaian is being dangled by the regime as bait for a prisoner exchange. Maybe he is a pawn in a power struggle between the hardline judiciary and the government of President Hassan Rouhani.

  “We don’t pretend to know. What ought to be clear is that Iran is subjecting an American citizen and respected journalist to extraordinarily cruel and arbitrary treatment—and that it is doing so with impunity.”

  A few days later that was followed by a statement from the Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, who wrote, “This police state behavior shows that Iran has absolutely no respect for laws, even its own, and exhibits a flagrant disregard for basic human rights.”

  Fred met with every foreign leader—including Shinzo Abe and Matteo Renzi—that visited the newsroom during my imprisonment, lobbying them to press my case with Iranian officials.

  He also made multiple visits to the White House, where he met with Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough.

  “Denis, with all due respect, the president isn’t doing enough to bring our guy home,” Fred told McDonough.

  “What more do you want us to do?”

  “The president can’t even pronounce our guy’s name.”

  “Well, how do you pronounce it, Fred?”

  “It’s like ‘Ryan’ with an ‘is’ in the middle. Ruh-zy-un.”

  “That helps.”

  Obama still never got it right.

  Zarif and Rouhani, though, knew how to pronounce it. They were forced to hear my name so often that it’s little wonder that they treated the subject of me with such open contempt.

  ON SEPTEMBER 16 KHAMENEI, THE SUPREME LEADER, GAVE WHAT BECAME KNOWN AS HIS SPEECH on influence and infiltration, or what could just as easily be called “the product of Jason and Kazem’s collective imagination in the interrogation room.”

  I watched in mixed horror and excitement as Iran’s highest power read line after line of bullshit that was the essence of my interrogation and the “case” that the IRGC, through its moron agents, built against me.

  “An economic and security influence are of course dangerous and have heavy consequences, but a political and cultural influence is a much larger danger and everyone must be careful,” Khamenei said.

  I had never done anything that was intended to bring about the downfall of the Islamic Republic. My personal hope was that Iran would someday become an open society. But to my captors this was my biggest crime. And it didn’t matter that I wasn’t doing anything tangible toward that end. Just my being there to document what was happening was criminal enough.

  In his speech Khamenei also warned that the enemy sought influence over Iranian decision makers so that decisions would be made based on the desires of foreign countries.

  I couldn’t believe it. These lines of the speech were pulled, almost verbatim, from my interrogations. The hard-liners, and their leadership, were even dumber than I thought.

  It was a moment of great concern for me. I wasn’t sure what would happen next, only that I would become the poster boy for this new propaganda line, which is exactly what happened.

  Soon a group of local journalists I had never met, let alone ever heard of, were arrested and accused of being part of my network of influence, on my payroll in fact. Years later some of them are still in prison.

  I felt that my life and identity were no longer my own; they had become just caricatures.

  The inmates in the political ward of Evin, including another American hostage, Amir Hekmati, laughed when the details of the case against me were aired. When I was finally revealed as Iran’s biggest problem of all, they agreed it could not have looked more ridiculous.

  From that point forward every time a prison guard or one of the interrogators would enter our cell compound or take me anywhere, I would tell them to not get too close and wash their hands after seeing me because “influence can be contagious.”

  Kazem was the only one who didn’t find it funny. Even he laughed, but it was the chuckle of someone who was smart enough to know that he was the butt of the joke. He and everyone like him had always been a laughingstock and would remain so as long as the Islamic Republic had a pulse. They had been duped the most of all, because they had succeeded even in pulling the wool over their own eyes.

  The discourse had taken a predictable turn, and as I often did while I was in prison, I wrote a headline in my head. One perfect for the day. But one that would never see the bold of print.

  “Iran Under the Influence.”

  Within a few hours “the influence” was being tied to rising addiction problems in the society, especially in big cities, where gangs of addicts had inhabited public parks. In the past no one dared touch these subjects publicly or in the media, but now reporting teams were in the parks talking to scared children and even to the addicts themselves.

  But I had bigger problems. What the hell did this mean for me? Was this another attempt to raise my perceived value or were they getting ready to do something more astounding and outlandish? Whatever the plan, I felt dangerously close to the epicenter. Iran’s political fault lines are hard to predict, and because of the locals’ shoddy building methods earthquakes in these parts usually have heavy casualties.

  Khamenei spoke about a cabal of people, foreign-based Iranians like me, working in concert to unravel the ideology of the Islamic regime. It didn’t take long for me to understand that this speech was a combination of the far-flung accusations of my interrogators mixed with my equally ridiculous responses to their probing questions.

  So that’s all this was. Create a new boogeyman. And the fact was that t
hey were so weak in their understanding of how the world works that they needed someone else to create the narrative for them.

  In fact, there was no cabal. No group of Iranian expats working in tandem with America to defuse Iran’s revolutionary ideology. There were only the factors that pointed to a very different path forward: Iran’s youth, their educated women, the decline of people’s relative prosperity and spending power because of sanctions and corruption, their desire for a better life, and the modern attitude that freedom in 2015 meant the freedom to consume like everyone else.

  I immediately internalized the vocabulary of the new speech, which, as it was designed to do, became the newest revolutionary catchphrase. It was called the “influence” or “infiltration” project.

  It was around this time that Kazem came to me one afternoon with a request. “Make the media stop talking about you, J.”

  I had to laugh. “You think even if I wanted to, that I have any power from here?”

  “You have the power to stop them. Please tell your mother and wife to tell your brother. And then it will stop.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “All this attention is very bad for your situation.”

  “Dear Kazem, my situation is already pretty bad.”

  13

  2015 Comes and Goes

  By the end of 2015 I’d grown accustomed to expertly flipping through the lineup of Iranian channels to land on programming relevant to me. Increasingly, after the nuclear deal was signed, that meant live coverage of Obama or Kerry.

  This time it was POTUS’s end-of-the-year press conference. I had obviously missed the very beginning, because he was already in the middle of a list of his 2015 highlights.

  “Around the world, from reaching the deal to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, to reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, to concluding a landmark trade agreement that will make sure that American workers and American businesses are operating on a level playing field and that we, rather than China or other countries, are setting the rules for global trade. We have shown what is possible when America leads.”

  I knew he wasn’t going to bring up me and the others still in prison in Iran, but I thought maybe someone would ask. I listened closely anyway, just to feel like a taxpayer for a few minutes.

  What has this guy ever done for me? I wondered. I voted for him. Hell, I even contributed to his campaign, I told the imaginary guy sitting next to me.

  Yeah, yeah, who didn’t? he shot back.

  I remembered a plan I had hatched in my leanest Rug Jones days, in the wake of Obama’s election win. I reached out to contacts in the Tehran bazaar about commissioning a run of several dozen Obama portrait rugs. You could get that done from any high-resolution photo. They send it up to Tabriz in Iran’s Azerbaijan province and it takes a couple of months, but what comes back is a phenomenal rendition, usually more real than the snapshot the weaver is working from. The problem was that the price they were quoting me was too high. The sharks wanted about $1,500 apiece, and I needed to make at least thirty of them. I would present one to the White House as a gift and sell the rest. Could have made a fortune on that. But they wouldn’t be ready in time for the inauguration. I let it go—because who knew how long the guy’s popularity would last?—but it was a good idea.

  Yeah, Obama and me. We’ve come a long way since then.

  I was suddenly very glad I hadn’t gotten those rugs made. I would have definitely kept at least one. Not exactly the kind of “evidence” that would have worked in my favor.

  Obama gave himself his end-of-the-year report card and answered questions about the budget just passed by Congress, terrorism, and his goals for the upcoming year. And then abruptly—maybe my colleagues in the room were ready for it, but I wasn’t—Obama said, “Okay, everybody, I got to get to Star Wars.”

  I paused, shook my head, and let out the same laugh I had so often as my time in Evin dragged on. The one that said “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  I’d like to see Star Wars today, too, Obama. Doesn’t matter, though, I thought. It’ll probably suck anyway.

  I could make a phone call that day. No doubt about it, the phone calls were a lifeline. For everyone.

  Obviously for me it gave me a tiny four-minute window on the world. Most days there was no news, but sometimes there was. The calls came in spurts at first—it was never really clear when they would happen—but then, around the time my trial started, it was institutionalized: a four-minute call to Yegi’s parents’ house late Friday afternoon, and an eight-minute call to my mom’s cell phone on Sundays at around the same time.

  It was that Sunday call that tethered my mom to Tehran for many months, because everyone knew it would be cut if she wasn’t around to receive it for a couple of weeks. Although we didn’t feel like it at the time, we had too much firepower for the IRGC to completely have their way with us; they had to make it look like I was being treated fairly, especially when my mom was in the country.

  Yegi’s family and my mom would all gather together and wait to hear my voice, putting me on speaker. If I was late to call I knew she would panic, inconsolably—certain something terrible had been done to me—until the phone rang.

  One Friday afternoon it didn’t, because the pay phone system in Evin was out of order and wouldn’t be repaired until the following day. I told the sweet older guard who spoke Turkish and was missing two front teeth, the former maintenance guy, that there would be hell to pay.

  “Seyed, I realize it’s not your fault, but we have to do something. My wife cannot handle the anxiety.”

  “She knows where you are, and she herself knows how safe it is here,” was his response.

  I got angry, but not nearly as much as Mirsani did.

  “Please tell the shift manager to call my house, otherwise it will be bad for everyone,” I tried to warn him. “It will be on international television within hours that I have gone silent.” I didn’t tell him that I had advised my mom and Yegi to sound the media alarm any time their usual contact with me was cut, even for a day, so that the Post and others would be prepared to respond to any irregularities with a story. Keep my name in the news became my main mantra, along with Laugh every day.

  Some days I was more desperate, but I always tried to mask that when talking to Yegi. When she’d visit I could show some vulnerability, maybe even cry a little, because I also knew how to make her laugh again before the end of the visit. But four minutes on the phone, often when she was in mild hysterics due to my calling late, came with a higher degree of difficulty.

  I became a cheerleader and a master of slogans.

  “Baby, I want you to remember that one day we’re going to get out of this mess, and when we do we’re going to America. And before long you will be an Ameri-can, but one thing you’ll never be is an Ameri-can’t.” I actually said that. And it sorta worked.

  Other days the phone calls were tenderer. I knew people were listening, but I didn’t care. My wife and I, like many couples, had developed our own way of communicating, making up vocabulary and using words to signify meanings other than their literal ones. Even if they did understand, I didn’t care. I was expressing my love for my wife, and I was pretty sure it wouldn’t hurt these dipshits to learn a thing or two about romance.

  Conversations with my mom were more about giving marching orders, which I realize isn’t very nice, but I know my mom and knew that she could handle it.

  “Have you been in touch with the San Francisco Chronicle? Do they know I’m in here?”

  “Honey, the whole world knows you’re in there.” I only half believed her.

  We have momentum, don’t let it die.

  I was doing whatever I could to contribute creatively to my own freedom campaign. I had the time to think about those sorts of things.

  I felt some guilt that so much attention was being paid to me while there were other cases that weren’t receiving any. But another part of me, the one that looked out
at a horizon of walls, was not as conflicted.

  And it was obvious, to me and my family; my lawyers, whom I’d never met; and the U.S. and Iranian government officials doing the negotiating that if I got out the others would, too. If it wasn’t for the machine working tirelessly for my release, none of us would go home. Putting it in that light, I didn’t feel so bad.

  Mom would give me updates on her attempts to contact diplomats in Tehran; France; Italy and Slovenia (her ancestral homelands); and the Holy See (she had Catholic roots and I had spent two years at the Jesuit University of San Francisco). They were literally working any angle.

  “You just gotta shake me out of this tree, Mom.”

  She’d also give me other news. On one call I learned that my Golden State Warriors were going to the NBA Finals for the first time since the season just before my birth. I was initially dejected. How is it possible that I’m missing this? It turns out that you miss many milestones when you’re locked up.

  Just before Christmas 2015 I began to feel helpless. The implementation of the nuclear deal was coming within weeks and once that happened the moments and milestones, the opportunities for a very public exchange, would dry up. At this point, contrary to some previous cases, my detention had become so public that I would not get out of this quietly. That much was clear to everyone.

  I told Yegi that I wanted to see a glimpse of 2015 as a free man. It was still possible. I was sure of it. Or thought I was. I ran through all the possibilities over and over again. Leading up to the implementation of the nuclear deal there were so many meetings between Kerry and Zarif; surely they could work out a deal for my release.

  For me, as for so many Americans, the idea that Rouhani and Zarif had a mandate to shut down key elements of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, a program that they’d long claimed was a nonnegotiable right, but that they did not have the power to help free falsely imprisoned American citizens was and is unacceptable. A lazy lie that’s been repeated so often they have been convinced by a sort of Pavlovian reinforcement that their system’s despicable habit of taking hostages is invisible. It’s not.