I knew that if the implementation happened and I remained behind bars there might be a brief uproar about my not getting out, but that it would pass quickly enough.
A few days before Christmas on one of those calls home Yegi told me, “Your wish about 2015 isn’t going to come true, but it will soon after. In January.”
YEGI HAD A SOURCE, SOMEONE WHO WORKED IN THE SUPREME LEADER’S OFFICE, WHO WOULD periodically send messages out of the blue through a third party, providing information that turned out to be surprisingly accurate. Usually it was to warn her of an impending court appearance or some demand Iran was making from the U.S. as part of any deal that would include me.
This time was different, though. Now he was explaining different scenarios of a release that had come close to happening in the previous months, only to fall apart.
According to him the issue of Bob Levinson had been a point of contention throughout the negotiations. Initially Levinson—or a complete accounting of what had happened to him—was to be a part of the deal, but the Rouhani administration decided there was no political value at that time in acknowledging, after eight years, that, yes, Iran had been responsible for his disappearance. They considered Levinson’s capture an issue of the Ahmadinejad years and not theirs to solve.
I was to be released with Amir Hekmati, the former marine captured while visiting his grandmother, and Saeed Abedini, a pastor and naturalized U.S. citizen who had been arrested multiple times for converting Muslims to Christianity.
The source told Yegi that I would definitely be out by January, that my release was just a matter of time. Perhaps only hours. Of course there was no way to verify any of it, but her extreme confidence was all that mattered.
I had been dancing on a razor’s edge for seventeen months, but never more so than I was then. I thought I could see a light at the end of the tunnel, but also a sealing of my fate. I focused, to the extent that I could, on reading and exercise, withdrawing into routine, knowing that was the safest bet.
My hopes had been up so many times that I refused to get excited, but it did make sense. As much sense as anything had since we were locked up. I needed something to hold on to. The signs were all pointing in that direction. Why else hadn’t they issued a verdict in my case after four months?
CHRISTMAS STARTED LIKE EVERY OTHER MORNING. I MADE A COFFEE AND DID A COUPLE OF hundreds.
“Sixty-two, get cleaned up,” a guard called from the other side of our wall. “You have an extra visit today.”
“Are you sure?” I was confused. I had been told not to even request a Christmas visit, that one would be denied. There was a new warden and he didn’t believe in making non-Islamic concessions. I hadn’t felt like dealing with a rejection so I’d just let it pass.
“Isn’t today Christmas Eid?” the guard asked, using the Islamic term for a religious celebration.
“Yes it is.”
“Then, yes, I’m sure.”
“With my family?” I had learned by then to keep my questions very simple.
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“No. Later.” He paused. “Says here you can have lunch with them.”
Does this mean I’m leaving soon? Or staying longer? Does it even mean anything at all? So many signs to try to interpret and they had all become hard for me to read.
I finished a total of four hundreds, knowing I’d eat well that day. It was the first time in my adult life that I was actively trying to maintain my figure; it was all I had to show for being in prison.
I showered and dressed in my prison pajamas. The new warden had also decided that it was mandatory for us to wear prison clothes to our family visits, apparently to humiliate us as much as possible.
A guard led me through the narrow halls of the ward’s offices, a path I had walked hopelessly so many times. But I blocked that from my mind. Today was festive. I could put myself in that space for a few hours. I knew I could.
I entered the room and waited. This was the routine. The only variation being that either Mom and Yegi got there first, or I did. With all the geopolitical complexity of the moment we had been swept up in, this was how basic our family life had become.
When they entered the room it felt like Christmas. They brought gifts and a feast.
I didn’t want to eat yet, but I wanted to know what was there. It was dark turkey meat and eggplant, a combination I had never seen, and rice with a bread tahdig, the coveted crunchy golden-brown layer on the bottom of a pot of Iranian rice.
They were also able to bring some much-needed fresh clothes. There was a thin zip-up hoodie, a fresh T-shirt, and some clean socks.
There was also a brand-new pair of Adidas cross trainers. When I did the math I realized that, in the just over a year since Yegi was allowed to bring me the first pair of shoes, I had walked the length of the continental United States and then some, and the soles were starting to disintegrate.
And they brought me books.
In the spirit of the day, I was thankful.
Mom and I told Yegi about past Christmases. Where we had been different years, family traditions, and the songs. My dad, I explained, liked “Deck the Halls” so much that besides “God is great,” the most often heard sounds from his mouth were probably “Fa la la la la, la la la la.”
I tried to stay present with the two most important people in my life, but I slipped into contemplation. It happens when your life is inverted and so much of your daily activity exists alone, in your mind.
I remembered a visit I’d made to the old U.S. embassy in Tehran on a reporting trip. There was a display that showed the hostages around a Christmas tree, and the description talked about the compassion of the Islamic Republic toward the captured spies.
“We treated them so well,” was a refrain I had heard for years. “We even let them celebrate Christmas.”
“Oh yeah?” I would respond. “What were their other four hundred forty-three days like?” Now I had my answer. Over five hundred of them.
That was what I was most angry about. Not just the guilt that the Iranian regime had pinned on me without giving me an opportunity to defend myself, but being barred from telling my version of events.
A lot of people, in fact, all over the world had decided they could speak on my behalf. I thought to myself that Christmas provided a sliver of a chance for me to speak directly—through my mom—to the outside world; no one else would be talking about our Christmas visit, and if anyone did, it would have been an Iranian official taking credit for giving my family and me this “gift” of time together. I wasn’t going to let happen.
For a year and a half every Iranian official who uttered my name lied about me, which is bad enough, but others, including Rouhani, refused to even say it.
All the comments about me made by Iranian officials bothered me tremendously, but it was Zarif’s that grated on me most, because he knew better. Since the previous Christmas Zarif had been taking credit for what he called a “humanitarian act” of arranging for my mother to be able to visit me in Evin.
For better or worse, my mom has been a citizen of Iran since the 1970s; she, like any other Iranian mother, had every right to regular visits with me in prison. Zarif knew that it was the only way, short of actually doing something to get me released, to shut people up when they asked about me. If he had taken the time to look he would have seen he was lying through his teeth. But this is an old tactic of chauvinistic authoritarian regimes who have convinced themselves they occupy a moral high ground. Learning to be willingly ignorant of realities obvious to everyone—or at least appearing to be is essential to the longevity of the system and its component parts.
I saw it in Kazem every day, and Salavati on the bench, although he was too dumb to understand it. But Zarif was different. He was the master. He had the full benefit of freedom of movement, a life lived in the United States, an American education, permanent resident status.
He had completely internalized O’Brien’s maxim—two
plus two is five—despite having had every advantage inconceivable to other Iranians, including a personal relationship with American power. He knew better and he still chose the Islamic Republic. Some people believe there’s something admirable in that, I’m just not sure what.
It wasn’t his chutzpah or negotiating skills that got the nuclear deal done, it was Zarif and his understanding of America. His attraction to it and revulsion for it. The eternal internal conflict of who you are originally, the essential parts that you’re born with, and all that you’re able to learn. Classic guilty-conscience stuff. But maybe I’m being too tough on Zarif. He was the key in successfully bridging the divide, even just for a minute. It was something no one else had ever pulled off.
But it was in his public comments about me that he blew his cover, to me at least. He knew better and he chose to stand on the wrong side of history, and not only that, lie about it to a world that also knew better. He lost any credibility he’d had. It was a very clear-cut situation where he and Rouhani could have said, “We don’t support the arrest and detention of this innocent journalist.” It was that simple.
The fact that he never had to say that, and continues to say I—and others still in Evin—committed any offenses has earned my personal ire. But that doesn’t really matter. I knew who he was when he got the job and never expected anything more from him.
On the other side of the world the story was being skewed in another direction entirely. True, it was in my favor.
Friends and colleagues in the journalistic community were quick to come to my defense, and that is forever appreciated, but it still wasn’t me talking.
I just wanted to say something. To communicate with those who knew me. It didn’t have to be poignant or desperate. I wanted people to know I was hopeful, was still the guy they remembered and could still laugh, even in the face of the absurd gravity of all the forces working against me.
As our family time together began to wane I had an idea.
“Mom, I want you to do something for me. When you leave I want you to send a message right away to the Post. There won’t be a lot of news today and someone will get back to you right away. You don’t need to run this through a committee, just do it.” What I meant was she didn’t need permission from my brother. He deserved to take the day off.
It was the first moment in many months that I could see a clear opportunity to get my own voice out to the world, add it to the call and response, the “tug-of-war,” as my captors themselves called it, over me.
And she got it pretty close to the mark.
“Jason wants all his colleagues at the Post, the advertising department, cartoonists, everyone, including the janitors, to know how very much he appreciates their efforts, support, and goodwill. He knows you all are working harder than any other entity to secure his release. And the knowledge of that is what gives him strength every day.”
We went over the key details several times until she had internalized it.
“Jason is sending his warmest nondenominational season’s greetings to everyone at the Post and wishes for a very happy and productive new year.”
14
Is This the End?
On the first Monday of 2016, Kazem and Borzou came to tell me that I was going to be released in a trade. Eighty-three days since the last time they’d come to see me—and told me the same thing—had gone by.
“Your friends in America are finally giving us what we want,” Borzou announced.
“What makes this time different?” I asked.
“It’s more official now,” Borzou said, immediately making me question the veracity of what he was saying.
What does that even mean? I wondered. I chalked it up to more harassment. I’d realized months ago that these clowns were responsible for pulling off my abduction, interrogation, and show trial, but not for getting what they wanted out of the misadventure.
“Why should I believe this when you’ve lied about everything?” I pointed out in my calmest voice.
“We have not lied at all. Everything we told you was the thruth.” Kazem and his colleagues had problems with English words starting in “tr.”
“Maybe you think so, but I see otherwise.”
“J, we’ve done everything for you,” Borzou started as if giving a report to someone who wasn’t involved. “None of our guests have ever had the rights you do.”
“I don’t have any rights. You’ve made that very clear.”
Like an old married couple my interrogators and I had been having the same fight for a very long time.
“You’re an athlete so we let you exercise. Look at you. We helped you get in the best shape of your life.” That was true. “Since you have a young wife, we give you legal meetings.” That’s the term for conjugal visits. That was also true, but only because Yegi was able to convince the judiciary that if we weren’t granted them she would expose so many of the other ways our rights were being denied. At its core Iran’s legal system actually believes it believes in some form of justice. That’s the only way such incredible corruptions of its own laws stand so freely, even against international outrage.
“Okay, Borzou, then let me see your face,” I told him. It was an agreement we’d made over a year earlier.
“The day that you leave, J,” he said, “that’s our deal.”
He was right. That was the deal. I decided right then that if and when Borzou showed me his face from behind the surgical mask I would start believing that I was being released. But not until then.
Still, I had other ways of testing their reliability.
It was January 4, 2016. And of course they told me there were some conditions for my release. First I had to ask for a pardon from the supreme leader. I resisted at first, mostly because I wanted to verify with my lawyer, via Yegi, that I wouldn’t somehow be giving away a right or acknowledging guilt. They also wanted me to sign away my right to ever sue Iran in any court anywhere in the world, which was a demand I’d expected would come whenever I was actually being set free. I began to formulate a protest, but instead just listened and did all the pushing back in my mind. I had learned by then that it was better to just keep my mouth shut.
“What do you think?” Kazem asked.
“I think you’re liars,” I told them.
“But what do you feel now that you know you will go home to your family? That everything we said was true?”
I chuckled. Usually that’s the best thing to do when you’re angry.
After a long pause I said, “I feel like Imam, peace be upon him.”
Kazem fancied himself a student of history, Borzou less so. On his arrival to Iran after fifteen years of exile abroad, Ayatollah Khomeini, known locally simply as Imam, “guide,” or “teacher,” was asked by a Western journalist what he felt. “Nothing,” was his only reply. I was equating myself to their most revered leader just for the hell of it.
Of course in my head I was bouncing off the walls, racing to figure out what was different about this from every other time they’d promised I’d be released.
We had heard so much bullshit that it was hard to put any stock in predictions or promises, although we desperately wanted to. The signs were there, though.
They gave me their version of events, telling me that in September a deal had been completed, but that America had backed out. Borzou was acting differently now, though, saying that it was a done deal although he would never trust America to follow through on any promise until it was implemented.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” I said. So far, in nearly a year and a half of lockup, I hadn’t seen anything yet.
They acknowledged that my skepticism was fair.
“I’m like the lying shepherd,” Kazem admitted.
“Is that like the boy who cried wolf?” I asked him.
“Yes, I know that one.” He smiled as his mind made a linguistic bridge. “It is the same.”
“If any of this is true,” I told them, “you will come tomorrow to my
weekly meeting with my wife and mother. And you’ll tell them the same thing.”
“Of course we will,” Kazem promised. I hadn’t seen him in three months. I was more angry with this person than I had been with anyone in my entire life. But whenever he made an appearance I knew there was activity around me. His presence, if nothing else, was always confirmation that I was still relevant.
“Why don’t you come around anymore?” I asked him.
“I’ve been very busy trying to solve your problem,” he said. I wanted to punch him so bad.
“Listen,” I told him, “if you’re lying about this you know you will go to hell, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “You should believe me, but I can’t force you.”
“Let me call my wife every day if I’m really leaving.” I was in no position to make demands, but I tried anyway.
“I have to get permission from the judge.”
“No you don’t. Everyone knows you can do whatever you want with me.”
We were walking the path back to my cell. I stopped at the pay phone just over our wall.
“Let’s call,” I said.
“Wait. I must get the permission.”
It was the strangest thing. His guard was starting to come down. He left me there by the phone and was back in less than two minutes.
“The judge agreed. You can call every day, but I have to be present.”
“Great.”
“Call now, we haven’t much time.” That was his go-to line.
I dialed Yegi’s parents’ house. She answered.
“Hi, baby,” I said when I heard her voice. This was routine by now, but it wasn’t a day that we usually had a call.
“What’s wrong? What happened? Why are you calling now?”
“I’m going to be able to call you every day now.”
“Why?”
“I just told Kazem that they had to let me and now I can.” It sounded ridiculous even saying it, knowing all the imaginary hoops we’d been forced to jump through to do anything for the past year and a half.
Prisoner Page 22
